Amazon’s fall hardware event / Google’s Search On / Code Conference 2021

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Alex Cranz discuss all the product announced at Amazon's fall devices event, as well as Google's Search On fall event. Verge senior reporter Alex Heath joins the show to discuss news that came out of the interviews at Code Conference. Further reading: Amazon’s fall hardware event 2021: rumors, news, and announcements Amazon’s race to create the disappearing computer Here’s the deluge of announcements from Amazon’s fall devices event Say hello to Astro, Alexa on wheels Amazon’s Astro cannot fetch your beer Amazon Astro is ‘terrible’ and will ‘throw itself down’ stairs, developers reportedly claim Amazon’s automotive efforts appear to be taking a pit stop Don’t be fooled — Amazon’s Astro isn’t a home robot, it’s a camera on wheels Remember when beta testing was free? Amazon’s new Echo Show 15 is meant to hang on your wall Amazon’s AZ2 CPU knows your face Amazon Glow is a video chat gadget with built-in games to keep kids engaged Amazon announces new wearable and services to try to make you fitter Amazon’s new Ring Alarm Pro combines a security system with an Eero router Blink’s first doorbell is finally released, four years later Ring Video Doorbells are finally getting package alerts Amazon takes on Nest with a $59.99 smart thermostat Google’s Search On fall 2021 event: news and announcements Google Search’s next phase: context is king Google expands shopping searches with Lens and in-store inventory checks Google Maps is making it easier to see wildfires and tree coverage Google Lens will soon search for words and images combined Google is using AI to help users explore the topics they’re searching for — here’s how Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos: ‘you cannot sue your way to the Moon Elon Musk: ‘we probably don’t need’ NDAs for Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ beta USB-C cables are getting new, confusing logos for faster 240W charging standard Nintendo categorically denies that a 4K Switch Pro is in development ‘Rife with sexism’: employees of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin describe ‘toxic’ workplace culture 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?

  Hey everybody. Before we start the Vergecast, Dieter and I want to tell you about two very cool things. The first is that we are holding our 10-year anniversary event in New York City on October 22nd and 23rd. It is called On the Verge and it's going to be very cool. And the second is that at On the Verge, Dieter

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:20Nilay Patel?

  My man, is going to premiere his very first documentary. It's called Springboard: The Secret History of the First Real Smartphone. Dieter, what is it about?

• 0:31Speaker 01

  It's about a little company called Handspring that time has almost forgot and how they struggled to make what I consider the first real smartphone, which I'm sure many Symbian people are mad at me about. But it's an exciting story because this is a company that year after year, month after month, almost became as big as Apple is today, but just got held back by just crazy, crazy stuff.

• 0:53Nilay Patel?

  Dieter finally made a documentary about a device that runs Palma OS. We're all very proud of him.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  You have to watch it though, because then if you do, I get to make the one about WebOS later.

• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  We're premiering this at our party. It's actually going to be a documentary premiere. We're going to have some other stuff around it. Dieter tells me there's a museum in the works. It's going to be great. This is going to be the highlight of our entire event. We're super pumped about it. There's all sorts of other stuff happening at this event. It's been amazing to watch this team put it together. It's our 10-year birthday party and we wanted it to be about The Verge and more importantly, about The Verge's audience. You know, we just came back from the Code Conference, which we're going to talk about in the Vergecast today. Code Conference is all about billionaires and CEOs. Our event is about you. And so we wanted it to feel more about us and our audience. So we're going to obviously have a big opening night party with a DJ group called The Stickmen, who perform in LED light suits.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Very exciting.

• 1:47Nilay Patel?

  There's a video on our website in the post. Watch it. It's going to be so cool. We have an indie game arcade. We have experimental art installations, including, obviously, we've got to have some Instagram moments. We're going to have some Instagram moments. We have a creator showcase on the roof of the event venue, where we're going to have creators come and do talks and demos about what they're making with technology, which is the most Verge thing that we can think of. And of course, we're not going to not have interviews. So we'll have a main stage of programming. We're going to have a live Vergecast with some Vergecast All-Stars and alums from Verge history. We're hoping to break some news with some people from tech companies. We have a lot of ideas. It's going to be a great two days. We're premiering Dieter's Springboard documentary. We have all these experiences for you to have with us. We'd love for you to come.

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  You can get tickets right now. You can go to voxmediaevents.com/OnTheVerge. Use promo code URGE2VERGE, you get a discount. Oh, my God. That's the promo code. Is that true? It's true. You get a $50 discount if you use the promo code URGE2VERGE. voxmediaevents.com/OnTheVerge, October 22nd, 23rd. We would absolutely love to see you. Okay, let's do the Verchess.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:27Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the 5G revolution, sponsored by the Solero 5G. I actually forgot to put this on our list. I gotta put this on our list. Anyway, I'm Eli, your friend. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  I'm saving it for the podcast.

• 4:43Nilay Patel?

  Very good, very good. Alex Krantz is here.

• 4:45Alex Cranz?

  I'm the Carrot 5G.

• 4:47Nilay Patel?

  Wow, very good.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  This is a very deep cut.

• 4:51Alex Cranz?

  This is a dad joke from a mom, non-mom.

• 4:54Nilay Patel?

  Look, we have a lot to talk about. Dieter and I actually saw each other for the first time in over a year and a half, I think, at the Code Conference this week.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  I gotta tell you, when you're gonna see your very, very good friend for the first time after a year and a half, try and do it in a context where there aren't literally dozens of billionaires also vying for his attention.

• 5:13Nilay Patel?

  It was weird. We're gonna talk about code. Alex Heath is gonna join the show a little later. We're gonna talk about code. But yeah, seeing a lot of people for the first time in an environment where we were in a hotel in Beverly Hills, but not allowed to leave the hotel.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  That's where you wanna be.

• 5:27Alex Cranz?

  Just trapped in a hotel.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  Trapped in a hotel with billionaires. Very strange. It was great to see Dieter, it was great to see Alex, Stacey, a bunch of other Verge friends and alumni, and billionaires, just an endless string of billionaires.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  But can I just start? Can I? I'm gonna start with Dish Network. There was an Amazon event. We have all the stuff to talk about, but can I just start with Dish Network?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  We're gonna start with the important news.

• 5:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:47Alex Cranz?

  The important stuff.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 5:49Nilay Patel?

  So, as you know, T-Mobile bought Sprint and as part of this deal, which reduced the number of wireless carriers in America, the Trump administration manufactured a sale of assets to Dish Network. They actually brokered the sale.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  This was a Trump administration special, by the way. They tried to do the same shit with TikTok, which we're gonna talk about later, anyway.

• 6:08Nilay Patel?

  We are gonna talk about that later.

• 6:09Alex Cranz?

  Because they're dealmakers.

• 6:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like the Trump's head of the antitrust division of the DOJ was like, "I know how to fix this." And then he, he like negotiated this deal where Dish Network would become a new competitive wireless network. So we'd still have four.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if you've looked around, this has not yet occurred.

• 6:29Alex Cranz?

  I'm holding out hope.

• 6:30Nilay Patel?

  Dish has a website for a new network called Project Genafivesys with a five in the place. Genafivesys. So very confusing. And yet, and they own Boost Network. And yesterday, they announced their first phone for Boost. Yeah. It's called the Solero 5G. It's spelled with a C. Imagine the word celery and then put an O on the end. That's what you got here. It's a custom phone. It's a custom low end phone for Boost customers. Boost, by the way, still runs some T-bubbles network with a deal to run an 18T's network. So at no point is any of this happening on a competitive fourth network.

• 7:07Nilay Patel?

  But if you wish to buy a Solero 5G that is now available to you, and this is the glorious wireless competition promised to us by the Trump administration.

• 7:16Alex Cranz?

  If you buy one, tell us how it goes with like peanut butter and raisins.

• 7:20Nilay Patel?

  Here's my, I think it should be the name of a car in GTA V. It looks like an old Toyota Supra with the big wing.

• 7:26Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 7:27Nilay Patel?

  See what I'm saying? All right. There was actual news. Let's start with Amazon. They announced 45 things.

• 7:33Alex Cranz?

  Everything.

• 7:34Nilay Patel?

  Always. Actually, slower year, only 45, not like 66. They finally brought together some of their divisions to make products together. We should talk about that. Just, you know, the usual stuff, like what if Alexa in a square, Alexa in a circle, triangle Alexa? You ever thought about like, still their strategy, just

• 7:52Alex Cranz?

  Shapes.

• 7:53Nilay Patel?

  throwing stuff at the wall to see what happens. So we got to start with this robot. Alex, what is going on with this robot?

• 7:59Alex Cranz?

  You know, it's, I mean, you could call it a robot. You could also call it a camera on wheels.

• 8:04Nilay Patel?

  It's called the Astro.

• 8:05Alex Cranz?

  It's called the Astro. Honestly, I think it's kind of cool. I think it's terrible. I probably wouldn't buy one, but I also think it's really, really cool. And if one fell into my lap, I would use it.

• 8:15Nilay Patel?

  What is it?

• 8:16Alex Cranz?

  And so it's a robot that like goes around your house and it's got little cameras on it. You could talk to it. It's basically Alexa on a robot. That's like dog size and it's going to roll around your house and like it can, if there's, you know, alerts around your house, you can go check on them. You can control it from your phone, like a little remote control robot. You can like talk to it and ask it to play music and follow you around. And it's got cup holders.

• 8:42Nilay Patel?

  And it has, it has a screen that looks at you.

• 8:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it has a whole screen, like its whole face is a screen and it looks like.

• 8:47Nilay Patel?

  And the screen is a face. The face is a screen and the screen is, it mostly shows a face.

• 8:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, exactly. And it like, it's kind of like they, they took one of the old shows and stuck it on some wheels.

• 8:58Nilay Patel?

  Right. Is this at its, at its core, this is an echo show on a Roomba with no vacuum.

• 9:03Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 9:04Alex Cranz?

  And cup holders. Don't forget the cup holders.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  And a periscope that like can rise up to look at things. So before we get any further, I just need to say that Amazon insists that they didn't name this after Astro the dog from Jetsons. And I don't believe them. Number one, number two, Astro was a real dog. Rosie was the robot. So they're confused on multiple levels.

• 9:31Alex Cranz?

  Well, I couldn't have called it Rosie because it can't like clean or do any of the things Rosie did.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Oh God.

• 9:36Nilay Patel?

  Also the horrible gender politics of the Jetsons robot.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Oh, you, are you suggesting that Amazon has got bad gender politics with its digital assistants? Oh, that would be completely new for them.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  Didn't they add a male voice to Alexa finally?

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that they, they stopped gendering the voices at that time, but they were like three years behind everybody else.

• 9:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. By the way, Alex, you haven't been here for this, but for a long time, every episode of the Rich Cast, we would remind people not to gender robots.

• 10:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Nilay Patel?

  Because it was just like real bad. Amazon was like, no, Alexa's a lady.

• 10:08Alex Cranz?

  She's just a little lady we've trapped into a tube and you talk to her.

• 10:12Nilay Patel?

  But they, they've backed off of this idea. Here, okay, here's my question about this. I'm like looking at the car coverage. I'm watching their videos. Robots are supposed to do things, right?

• 10:22Alex Cranz?

  Right. I think that's kind of the problem of Astro is that to a certain extent, it's just a rolling version of that ring drone that we're going to talk about in a little bit. Right? Like it's just surveillance on wheels that can sometimes, that can play music for you if you want. And theoretically you could control it and send, put a drink in it and send it to somebody else in your house. And they can take the drink out of it. But I think they have big aspirations, right? They have these really big aspirations.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  So what are their aspirations is you're going to be able to buy like accessory kits for it. So they described a scenario to me wherein you give this to your aging parents or grandparents and. And then it toodles around the house and keeps an eye on them, make sure they're on the move and hanging out, whatever. The thing also will quote unquote, hang out. It like learns your family's patterns and learns when it should be around and when it should go away.

• 11:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  But you're going to be able to buy like an accessory kit, for example, a blood pressure monitor. So like you, it'll like instead of, you'll take the cup holders out. And then you'll, it'll be like the blood pressure detector on it with the cuff. And then when it's time, it'll like roll up to dad and it'll call you and you'll be like, dad, check your blood pressure. And have like, okay. And then he'll attach the cuff that's attached to the robot to check his blood pressure. And then everyone will do a little dance. I don't know. That's, that's part of their plan.

• 11:40Alex Cranz?

  I don't know. I talked to my parents after, after this came out because they're both, they're like in their seventies. They're baby boomers, right? Like they're the generation that this is kind of built for. And I was like, if I bought you a robot that would follow you around and remind you to take your medication, would you use it? And they were both like, I would hit it with a bat.

• 11:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I just, I can't. Dieter, I will give you, if one year from now, market for a chat audience, I know one of you will. Someone's got a Google sheet open already. If one year from now, there is a blood pressure accessory for this version of Astro, I will, I will give you $100. Like it's just not going to happen. And I, that use case, I get it. I get where it's coming from. Right? And we saw it in, in particular, we saw it in Japan first. We actually covered a bunch of these, like as a population gets older, the market for elder tech booms, we've covered at CES. Like there's already markets where that is, it's just happening. And now it's happening to the US market. And so you have this idea of like, this robot will help old people.

• 12:41Nilay Patel?

  And that is great. And you like sketch out the scenario where you're like helping them do their, like whatever. And then you back that down to reality, which is a Roomba without a vacuum with an echo on it. And you're like, hold up. Like, how will it take the blood? Like, even if the hardware, the blood pressure cuff hardware, because there is a lot of connected blood pressure cuff hardware, even if you get that to work, and you figure out which of the myriad USB C specs you need to support on both sides of that chain to connect the things, is the, is the, like, Alexa OS gonna support hooks to a provider? Is there, are you gonna have a database? Is the database secure? Who owns the database? Like, none of that is operable.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Oh, no, but see, it's all handled by the ambient AI, ambient UI in the cloud, which we could talk about in a minute, because I did talk to Dave Limb. But like, I just want to point out that we have moved from what's a computer to what's a photo to what's a robot. So like, the march of technology has progressed.

• 13:39Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm gonna stop you. This is not a robot. I don't think it's a robot.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  What makes it not a robot?

• 13:43Nilay Patel?

  I think making something move around does not make it a robot.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:47Nilay Patel?

  It needs to have a utility. It needs to automate some task for you.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Oh, so it needs to interact with the physical world in a way other than moving around in it, is what you're saying? That's what, that's what defines a robot?

• 13:57Nilay Patel?

  No, it needs to automate a task for you. So like, you know, we did, I did that episode of Decoder with Kevin Roos about robotic process automation, where like,

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  a very smart KVM switch uses Excel for accountants around the world, and then those accountants, I don't know, hopefully get some other skills. That's, I think that's a robot. There are software robots in this world, right? They're doing a thing for you. They're able to manipulate something on your behalf. This is like, it just toodles around?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  It sets alarms.

• 14:26Nilay Patel?

  It sets, and it's set two at once?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah. That's like Alexa's superpower compared to every other digital assistant.

• 14:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know, man. That's, that's all I'm saying. Like, I buy that we should have some argument about what a robot is and it isn't. But even by the barest definition, this thing is not. It's just, it's an RC car with an Alexa mounted to it.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  But it moves around on its own and potentially, you know, like, hey, man, when it gets to some stairs, it may or may not fall down them.

• 14:52Nilay Patel?

  So we should talk, do you want to, do you want to talk about this doc, Dieter? This is from Motherboard, which is doing excellent work all the time.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  So they got a bunch of developer documents from like people working on this thing internally. And the TLDR is it's a disaster. It can't do stair detection and so it'll just like tumble down them. Uh, and just, uh, it sounded like it was an unmitigated disaster, which by the way, that lines up with, uh, the reporting ahead of the event from Mark Gurman, who suggested that this thing might not have been ready to be released this past week. Who knows? Amazon, by the way, very aggressive, uh, this week in, on multiple fronts in pushing back on negative stories. They shot us a note that said that this report was inaccurate. And they also suggested that all of these developer reports about it being an unmitigated disaster were old.

• 15:42Alex Cranz?

  Well, the, the sources at, at Motherboard were like not current employees, right?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Sure. But I mean, I don't know, uh, how long did it take Roomba to go from like unable to stop bouncing into walls into, you know, like getting trapped by furniture? I mean, Roomba just this year added the don't roll over dog shit mode. So that just like, you know, drags it all over your house, right? It took them a decade to get there. You know, how long for, uh, Amazon to get there? I don't know.

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  I would say Roomba is like, uh, somewhat famously slow.

• 16:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:14Nilay Patel?

  Right. They're like cheaper competitors that are doing more sensing. But Roomba has like the brand name. I just love like this line from the stock. It would throw it, throw itself downstairs if presented with the opportunity.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Same.

• 16:30Nilay Patel?

  It's not, it often throws itself downstairs. It's if it sees stairs.

• 16:34Alex Cranz?

  It's going for it.

• 16:35Nilay Patel?

  Goodbye.

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  This is the only way to know with all of this Amazon stuff, we can only know when it comes out. Yeah. And this thing is announced to kind of not come out. The Ring drone was announced last year. It's a year later, it's not out. These events often, on the one hand, they're like, we shoved a chip in a microwave and we made a $60 microwave that will destroy the microwave industry. And Alexa can make it beep or whatever. And you go like, okay, I get it. Like, two great tastes that no one thought of putting together. There was no Echo Auto stuff at this one, right? And they released it and it was like, the Echo Auto was like in your car, it was Alexa in your car. And no one could figure out what it was for. Yeah.

• 17:21Nilay Patel?

  Like, you don't often set timers while driving.

• 17:26Nilay Patel?

  You're often in range of clocks. And they just kind of like, didn't update it, they haven't talked about it. The Echo Link, remember they made all that Sonos stuff? Oh, yeah, yeah. None of that stuff is updated, barely even talked about anymore. Like, Amazon sometimes releases the stuff, they sometimes announce it. They announced, remember, delivery drones?

• 17:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:43Nilay Patel?

  Anyone gotten a drone delivery?

• 17:45Alex Cranz?

  I remember that the final episode of, what was it, Parks and Recreation? Was like, in, set now, I think. And they're like, oh, yes, here's our Amazon drones, flying in with our packages.

• 17:55Nilay Patel?

  Every day. Who's not getting a drone delivery? Primary, that's what it's called. I just think Amazon announces about half of the stuff to make you think that they're way ahead of the curve.

• 18:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:04Nilay Patel?

  With some fanciful ideas about elder care and blah, blah, blah. And then the other half of the stuff is extraordinarily iterative updates to the things people are buying. And they, there's just like, a concept car element to this, they won't cop to.

• 18:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. They were ahead of the curve once, right? Like, they did the initial Echo, and that was honestly ahead of the curve. Right? Like, that, that kind of changed things, that introduced this whole new category of things. And everything after feels like they're just kind of trying to chase that one success.

• 18:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, what if we put an Echo in a thermostat?

• 18:36Alex Cranz?

  What if we put it in a remote control car and stick a cute face on it? And have it follow you around?

• 18:41Nilay Patel?

  It'd be awesome if this was like an actual RC car with an Echo on it and they had like build it the way it did when I was a teen. So I don't know, we'll see what happens with Astro. We, we have more reporting to come. Dieter, did they say when it was going to come out?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Uh, fall and invite only is the, the key thing there.

• 18:57Nilay Patel?

  So next fall invite only.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, uh, no, I think this fall.

• 19:00Alex Cranz?

  It's supposed to be this fall.

• 19:01Nilay Patel?

  Fall is over.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Well, no, fall doesn't end until December 21st. And I, we know this from all the rumors about the Apple Watch. Everyone, when Apple says it's coming this fall, everyone immediately checks the calendar to be like, okay, when does fall technically end? And now we know.

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, well, Q3 is over is what I would say.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, that's true.

• 19:17Nilay Patel?

  That's how I think of the year.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Not all of us are financial analysts.

• 19:23Nilay Patel?

  Poisoned by my career. All right. Then that's a bunch of other stuff. There's an Echo show 15.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  This I'm excited about.

• 19:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, it's cool. It's a 15 inch display. It's got, it's on the wall. It's, it's got a camera so you can, you know, chat whatever the, the Amazon equivalent of FaceTime is with family and friends. And it's got a whole new chip in it, the, the AZ2, which is supposed to be able to better recognize faces. So it should better recognize your face when you're using it. And it feels a little like, I think if you're one of those people that's using Amazon to talk to family and friends, this is probably a good thing. I think if you're not one of those people, this makes no sense for you to own.

• 20:05Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I like the idea of a picture frame that hangs on the wall.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  That is why it makes, that and the idea that maybe they'll actually make the screen useful for something other than showing weather and ads for Amazon things and like completely useless news updates.

• 20:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The picture of this, by the way, is very funny. Just go look at the picture. It's a giant screen on a wall. And then because Amazon does not have any services, the widgets that they've chosen to display in their own marketing material are the most mundane things I've ever seen in my entire life. Imagine that you have a giant screen on your wall. It's huge.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  I'm doing it. I'm imagining it. I've pulled over in my car.

• 20:42Nilay Patel?

  You have a 15 inch 1080p display in your wall.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. By the way, can, can we just talk about how like, we're talking about a 15 inch 1080p display as quote unquote huge. I just want, okay.

• 20:53Alex Cranz?

  It's tiny.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Well, have you seen TVs lately?

• 20:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, just like a giant echo on your wall compared to everything else. Here's what Amazon is like. Here's what the people are gonna rev up for. A recipe for fresh berry yogurt parfait.

• 21:09Nilay Patel?

  Your calendar of which one entire like, there's like a list, like a, like a agenda view and then like the actual month view. In case you forgot what day it is, then there's a shopping list that says asparagus, eggs, how cornel and blueberries. The blueberries presumably for the berry parfait that you're making.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:26Nilay Patel?

  Then there's like three, it's just three smart home switches, like the lights. And then there's a sticky note that just says, good luck with the pitch.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:36Nilay Patel?

  And I'm like, why would I put any of this on the wall? Like what, at what point throughout the day, I'm like, oh shit, do I need asparagus? And I glanced at the wall, I'm like, yes.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:46Alex Cranz?

  Do I need to think about parfait?

• 21:47Nilay Patel?

  It's what it, what it is not, is a photo, which is like the thing you want to hang on the wall. And then Dan, because Dan is a enormous smart home nerd, immediately said, hey, why, why can I see the cord of this display? Cause they're just hanging down.

• 22:02Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 22:03Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, yeah, that's, that's how we're gonna show it to you. And he asked if the cord was rated for in-wall use. So you could mount it behind the thing or run it to an outlet and they're like, uh, we'll get back to you.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Their, their marketing materials don't seem to show the cord.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  This one picture has the cord.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  There's, there's others where they were not. There's others where the cord is missing and it's like, huh.

• 22:23Alex Cranz?

  They just use a heel brush.

• 22:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Content aware fill on the cord. That's a button.

• 22:31Nilay Patel?

  I think all of Amazon's Echo ambitions are they're hitting the wall of their services not being any good.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, it's not just their services, it's, it's their platform. So this Echo Show 15, I'm very excited about because we currently have an iPad in our kitchen and my partner, disclosure, actually, I don't need to disclose who she works for right now, has threatened to get one of those microwaves that has an Android tablet on it because we would like to have our own recipes easily available. And the thing you can't do on this Echo is, you know, run apps. You can run Amazon widgets from developers that have bothered to make a widget for the Echo Show ecosystem. But you know, sorry to the 13 of you who have done this, there's just not enough of them. And you know, you can't make a smart home dashboard out of it. You like that interface is not great.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  You can't get your own recipes on it unless you go through their web browser, which if you've ever tried to use a web browser on a show device, no, thank you. And then like I was saying, like your photos are meh. So like, not only are there, their services not quite there, like their app platforms such as it is, is not quite there. And this gets to the question of like, what exactly is Amazon's ecosystem? What's its platform? What's its operating system? And what can it do and who is it for? And what it can do and who it's for seems to be, you know, what it can do is get you to buy more gadgets. And who it's for are for the companies that make those gadgets. All of which is a great service to them, but not necessarily to us.

• 24:01Nilay Patel?

  I think they thought their, their platform was like Alexa skills and smart home stuff. And to some extent, they are correct. To some much more realistic extent, that never happened. Right. Right. Like the smart home stuff has happened and that is legitimately fun and cool. But the idea that you're going to spend your days talking to Alexa that mediates your relationship to some other thing. And you have a, a voice relationship with the New York Times app or whatever is like not true. It just hasn't happened for them. So then the devices, they've added screens to the devices, which is smart. Because looking at things is also useful. And I don't think either Google or Amazon have done a good job with the screens they have.

• 24:43Nilay Patel?

  But the one reason we have Google Home devices in our house instead of Alexa devices is because Google Photos is great.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Right. Well, it was great. They haven't been doing a great job of it the past year, I would say.

• 24:53Nilay Patel?

  Google Photos continues to relentlessly exist.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  That is exactly, it is very relentlessly existing for the last few months.

• 25:01Nilay Patel?

  But it's the one to use, right? And there's many, right? It was free. They killed all the competitors and now the competitors are dead. So they're charging for it. Like a whole corner of conversation there, but it works. It's on our phones. It's uploading the photos automatically. It's sorting them. It's doing AI. It has a consumer grade interface. Amazon Photos is like, remember Windows 3.1?

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Well, would you like to use it? Because like Amazon Photos is not an updated or care for product. It's not doing as much as Google does. And there's no way you would use it, right? Like, Google Home has a lock-in to Google Photos in like a real way.

• 25:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  So we have Google Home devices.

• 25:42Alex Cranz?

  I think it was Dieter and I had talked about this before, like with Luna. A lot of this is just Amazon wants to be in spaces. It doesn't care if it's good or not because it's so big that it doesn't have to be. Like, it can just exist and people are gonna be like, yeah, all right. That's cheap. I'm on Amazon. I'm not gonna research everywhere else. I'll get it.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:01Alex Cranz?

  And, and, and like so much of the strategy for, for its smart home stuff nowadays is less about like making really usable stuff and just being like, yeah, all right, I'll be there. This is a space I could exist in because I'm huge. I'm Amazon.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  So here's the thing. Here's, here's how I see what's going on here. Amazon saw that the smart home was relatively ignored by the rest of big tech. They didn't know quite what to do. And they got a win with the Echo. And so they have flooded, literally flooded the zone. The zone is your house and they flooded it with gadgets. Because there's like, they've got an edge there and so they're taking that lead. But they're doing it while they're still developing the idea of what an ambient OS is, what an ambient UI is. It's like partly in the cloud and partly local. And, you know, we could talk about what stuff happens on the edge in your devices and what stuff happens in the cloud and where the app ecosystem is, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the bottom line is, it's like, it's not quite ready.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  So while other companies were maybe hanging back and trying to build out the whole thing and they're in five years, the, the smart home is gonna be amazing. Amazon's like, yeah, in five years, it might be amazing, but we want to sell you stuff now. So we're gonna sell you all the beta products.

• 27:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  And there's a tiny part of me, maybe not that tiny, that is like, fine with that, like sympathetic to that, like, like eager to participate in it in some ways. Like, I do want to have some of this stuff now and I'm willing to deal with some bugs now. And I think that the second piece of this is when everybody saw Astro, there was a resounding, earth-shattering nope from everybody. Everybody's saying, I don't want this thing because it's a surveillance gadget. But you know, like who's, who's the, who's doing the surveilling? It's like, well, is Amazon using the cameras? If we trust them, maybe not. And so we're surveilling ourselves and there's a whole thing there. You talk about Ring cameras, you can get those end to end encrypted now. So there, there is no external surveillance if you set that up properly.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  But we're deep in the weeds at this point for the average person. The average person is like, still kind of likes Amazon. Amazon still does better than all the other big tech companies in terms of like, do consumers like them? And so the average person will look at that Echo Show 15 and be like, oh, it's not a big dumb plastic gadget on my counter. It's a nice thing on the wall and maybe I can put like a shared calendar on it. Done. So I think they're, they're doing fine with this stuff. Like it's not like, it's not a beautifully perfect curated ecosystem. It's a messy, messy, messy ecosystem with lots of like privacy implications that are very troubling. But the stuff is cheap and the stuff is available now. It's not, self-driving cars will be here in five years, pipe dream promise.

• 28:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, I buy all that. I think all that's correct. The thing you're saying that it's all kind of in beta and they don't know what the platform is, means that you're buying stuff that kind of fundamentally isn't very useful. Right? Or not more useful than the old form factor was. And I, I'm the one who most routinely makes the case that all people care about is what they look like. Right? Like it's a bigger screen. They're going to buy a new one because it looks different and you can articulate what's different. This one's a circle and like you just buy it.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  God, I've done that.

• 29:09Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  I have it on my desk right now.

• 29:12Nilay Patel?

  The exact same functionality in a, in a new shape. And it's like the most, it's the easiest sale you can make. But like right now where they're at is they don't have the app platform on the screen. So there's no development case for what's happening on the screen. And they don't have one in the cloud that delivers services to this thing.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  See, the thing is, Deli, technically you're wrong about all of that shit. They have all of that. It's just that we don't, we don't have a framework for thinking about it. And it's like, it's so fuzzy how you access it and set it up. And like, how often do you want to dig into the Alexa app and do its settings to like really gain control of it? They have all of it, but it's very messy and like bad, but they have it technically.

• 29:48Nilay Patel?

  Right. But the Alexa app is like not a delight to use.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  No.

• 29:52Alex Cranz?

  I, I switched to Siri because I couldn't do it anymore and I probably just activated it, but.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  We've been activating people's devices this entire time. We're so sorry, everybody. We haven't tried to not say the A word at all. And we're very, very sorry.

• 30:05Alex Cranz?

  But yeah, like, it's a horrible, horrible app. And if you move, I moved and I was like, oh, I'll keep going with it. And I was like, no, I have to switch to Apple because I have to delete, manually delete all like 40 lights I had attached to it. I was like, that's, why should, no one should do that. It's just like terrifically bad.

• 30:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I will say that I own a Hoobz, which is a rebranded Homebridge. I think we have some home assistant developers that listen to our show. Like, there are fun, open source projects that bridge all these ecosystems together.

• 30:36Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 30:37Nilay Patel?

  In various ways. And if you are listening to this show, you should play with them. Like, they will delight you and entertain you because you're just like, A, you're doing something that the big companies do not want you to do. And B, you too can be a Linux system admin.

• 30:55Nilay Patel?

  It's really quite fun. And when it works, it's great. Although Dieter and I were just together at Code and I was like showing him my little Homebridge setup. And then he was like, mine's broken. And that's about right. Like, 50% of the time, like, I can't, oh, it's, I'll show you at a later time. But it's fun to monkey with. All that said, the Echo stuff is neat. I just think that in a weird way, the competition between Amazon and Google in particular has stagnated. I would not say the competition from Apple has stagnated because they're like,

• 31:22Alex Cranz?

  They're so far behind.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  It's stagged. It's, it's not even the whole word.

• 31:28Nilay Patel?

  And they, and they still have a phone in your pocket, right? Like, they're still, I'm not saying like, Google is doing a good job.

• 31:34Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 31:35Nilay Patel?

  If you like, read the subreddit for like, Google Home, everyone's like, what's going on here? This stopped working. It's, it's much harder to set up smart home stuff on the Google platform.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  So hang on, they announced 45 things and we've gotten through like two and a half.

• 31:47Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  We, we haven't even talked about the weirdest shit they've put on the stage.

• 31:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, here, we've been, let's take a break and come back and talk about the weirdest shit.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:55Nilay Patel?

  We'll be right back.

• 32:00Speaker 04

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• 32:26Speaker 05

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• 32:57Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Where do you want to start? Do you want to start with the Glow or your favorite, the Ring Alarm Pro?

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Okay, that's, we have to start there because I do not want anyone thinking that my favorite is the Ring Alarm Pro. Everybody, hang on just a minute. I do not want to share any information with any cops. It's a new version of the Ring Alarm, their, you know, home security system. The reason I like it is not the Ring part, it's the Eero part. So it has Eero built in, which is great. Every smart home device should be a Wi-Fi bridge in some way, shape or form. They're already all sidewalk bridges from Amazon now, so that's exciting. But it has an LTE modem built in. And so if your internet goes down and it can tell, it will provide emergency backup via LTE to your Wi-Fi network via its built-in Eero router. For like, I think you get like three gigabytes a month or something.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  It's not much, but it's enough to be like, oh, the Wi-Fi is down, the internet is down, but the Wi-Fi is back and now I am like on this emergency thing. And I think, but I have to verify this, that we'll be able to do, like you could set up like theoretically like an Eero profile. It's like, if the internet goes down, don't let the TV keep streaming stuff, but make sure the phones still have access, you know, or whatever. And two thoughts. One, every home router should have an LTE modem in it. They're so cheap now that like, yep, I would happily pay a few bucks a month to have emergency backup LTE internet for my house in case the power goes out. Two, can we all just pause and appreciate the fact that it's an LTE modem because cost in reality and not a 5G millimeter wave modem?

• 34:33Nilay Patel?

  I like that because it also like, you know, the promise of 5G is that it replaced your internet. And I'm like, no, we don't even want you to think about that.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  The thing that actually replaces your internet is a, you know, off the shelf LTE modem because they cost nothing now.

• 34:46Nilay Patel?

  Oh, LTE was supposed to replace your internet. America's wireless carriers, everyone. I love this, actually. I like the, we have a Ring system. There are no cops here. It's like, there's like, social dilemmas if you live in a larger community. We don't, like, mine mostly catches bears. So, I don't know. One time I called the environmental police and asked them about a bear and they're like, you're good. And that was the end of the internet. First of all, the agency was called the environmental police and I was just delighted to call them. Just to be like, are you real? Anyway, so we have Ring stuff. They're the best cameras you can buy. That's why they're, that's why they're popular. They do have excellent consumer interfaces, like the apps are good, all this

• 35:26Nilay Patel?

  stuff. But it is, it's, they own both companies. Amazon owns Ring and Eero. And they have always needed to like merge these things together. And I think it's neat that there's like local processing on this device for your cameras.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, they've got a whole new like, new processor that they're putting in a bunch of their stuff that they're very excited about.

• 35:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's funny, but you still have to pay for the cloud storage, even if you do the local processing. Like, you just have to pay the fee. They're like, whatever. It might be faster though, which is cool. You might use less bandwidth. The idea that you won't have like a separate hub. Like, you have an Eero, you can replace your Eero and you can upgrade your Eero. They need reasons for people to upgrade their Eeros.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Cause if you, like, Mars have just been running for five years and they're fine. Unless you have really fast internet, you have no reason to upgrade your Eeros. So, I think all that stuff is smart. The LTE failover is just great. Did you see the battery packs?

• 36:12Alex Cranz?

  There are battery packs?

• 36:14Nilay Patel?

  You can buy a hundred, you can buy a hundred and thirty dollar USB-C battery pack that'll run this thing for eight hours if your power fails.

• 36:21Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 36:21Nilay Patel?

  So, everything will stay up.

• 36:23Alex Cranz?

  Couldn't you just buy a UPS?

• 36:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you could do that too.

• 36:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  Or you can buy a hundred and twenty.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  That wouldn't be smart.

• 36:29Nilay Patel?

  The USB, this USB-C connection for the power only works with the Ring power packs.

• 36:35Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Ah, I love it.

• 36:40Nilay Patel?

  Very good. Very, very good. I don't know. There's like, we've been waiting for Amazon and to bring its various acquisitions together. This is the first time they've done it.

• 36:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:52Nilay Patel?

  What's funny to me is they own another camera company called Blink and Blink and Ring. Nothing.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, but Blink and, but, but Ring and Eero are talking, like eventually they'll, they'll all have a party, but like it's, it's, it's the pandemic. They're, they're starting their social gathering small. And then eventually they'll invite more people.

• 37:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Alex Cranz?

  I completely forgot that Blink was another company and I thought it was just like, that's what we're calling our really cheap Ring devices.

• 37:19Nilay Patel?

  That would make sense. So they said Blink sales are like up.

• 37:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because they're really cheap.

• 37:23Nilay Patel?

  Right. They said they tripled.

• 37:26Alex Cranz?

  So four.

• 37:26Nilay Patel?

  The number that tripled, was it single digits?

• 37:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was gonna say nine. They sold nine now.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  They sold Bezos blinks.

• 37:36Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, all this is just like ridiculous, but they announced like a new Blink doorbell, which is hilarious because they, that's the Ring product.

• 37:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:44Nilay Patel?

  And they also announced a Blink doorbell last year and it never came out. Like the things Amazon announces that don't come out include like a drone for your home and a $50 doorbell. And I'm pretty sure the $50 doorbell was killed in like a strategy session, not because they couldn't execute it. Whereas the drone, they're like, no, it's, it's killing people. We should, we should work on this. It throws itself down the stairs.

• 38:10Alex Cranz?

  Did they just wait until they were like fully saturated on Ring doorbell sales? And they're like, okay, now we can go for that cheaper market.

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  We can go lower, but the systems don't work together.

• 38:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, right.

• 38:21Nilay Patel?

  It's just like very.

• 38:22Alex Cranz?

  It's for people who are too cheap.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  They do, they do if your hoop server is up.

• 38:26Nilay Patel?

  Although, uh, Thomas Stricker wrote about trying to add Blink to, uh, his Homebridge system. And the Blink API will just delete, like it'll ban your account if you hit it.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Oh, great.

• 38:40Nilay Patel?

  Nice. He was enraged and I read this story and I was like. I mean, Thomas

• 38:44Alex Cranz?

  $50 down the drain.

• 38:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, when you get an angry Dutchman writing about API access, that's just gold. That's internet.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Well, also, this is incredibly hypocritical because Amazon will talk night and day about how it wants to be open and it wants open access to to voice assistants and blah, blah, blah, blah. They just gave, you know, a whole talking point about Sonos saying, we, we want, we, we made Google Assistant and Alexa work together on our speaker at the same time and Google won't let us. And Amazon's like, we would, we think they should. So the fact that they are trying to kill interoperability on Blink shows that they're fundamentally being disingenuous about a lot of this so-called openness stuff.

• 39:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that was like Rikers. We'll link this in the chat.

• 39:22Alex Cranz?

  You just channeled him. That was really good.

• 39:25Nilay Patel?

  But because it also, it's like five people in the world are like, I want my, my weird little Linux Raspberry Pi to talk to me.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we, but we write for the Verge, so.

• 39:35Nilay Patel?

  We found them. We found all five of them. We went to their houses individually. But anyway, but it's interesting, like, do these systems do not interoperate at all?

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:45Nilay Patel?

  Except for the neighbors app, which is like the most problematic part of the entire Ring ecosystem. You can send your Blink videos to the neighbors app. Meanwhile, on the radio side, which is much more complicated, because like, you know, the Blink has a hub.

• 39:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:58Nilay Patel?

  That standard is not in any of this new stuff, but they're like, we're going to figure out how to make Z-Wave and Zigbee work. Eero's already support Thread. We've got this Ring proprietary radio thing to support, like, they're doing the, like, the hardest part of radio engineering to make one single hub. And they're like, no, but Blink, you still have this crap box hub you have to plug into the wall. I don't, I think that, like, this is the sort of stuff when, we were like sad when Amazon bought Eero. Like, Dieter wrote a piece, he was like sad about it. Like, here was like an innovative startup, they made a great product, they were doing well. They, their burn rate was too high and they just failed into the arms of a big tech company. And we all had emotions about it. And this is the sort of thing that we expected them to do.

• 40:43Nilay Patel?

  It's fine that they're doing it, I guess. All right. Man, we, I thought we were going to blaze through this and instead.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  We're not, we're like, we haven't even brought the fact that they made a Fitbit, that they, they took their Halo product and just like, what if we made it a Fitbit? And if it was like, what, wait, hang on, I guess we're on my Google now, we're fine.

• 41:00Alex Cranz?

  An $80 Fitbit. So they made the Halo View, which is just like an $80 Fitbit with none of the really expensive sensors that that a lot of people want, but just like the main stuff. So like pedometer, heart rate, everything. I don't think it even has heart rate, actually. And I think the big thing about it is it just, it's going after Fitbit, but it's also going after Apple and Fitness Plus. Because it's like,

• 41:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:24Alex Cranz?

  It's bundling in, you get this $3, $4 a month app that you can get workouts and stuff from to use with your $80 view Halo View that doesn't have the microphone in it to judge your voice, which is like, the thing everybody hated about the original view. So they kind of were like, the original Halo, they're like, okay, we're gonna go, we're gonna build something and try to be like, a little different and unique with our wearable. And they're like, no, no, no, we're just gonna undercut Fitbit. Never mind. That was dumb. Just undercut.

• 41:55Nilay Patel?

  There's like, a world in which you feel really bad about this. Like, Amazon does this to other companies all the time. Right? Like, they're like, you made a laptop stand, now we made the same one from the same supplier, but $10 cheaper, and we gave it prominence in search when they search. Like, that's bad. Fitbit is now owned by Google, and it is amazing how that has wiped out any, whatever. Like, let them fight, I say.

• 42:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:17Alex Cranz?

  Just go to war. Sorry. The Halo View does actually have most of the same sensors. So it's got heart rate, it's doing blood oxygen level, it's doing skin temperature, which I think is one of the ones that like, Fitbit has been trying to use to figure out your stress levels and stuff. And really, this is just like, a super cheap Fitbit. And it's also got like, this, what is it? Halo membership, which is $4 a month, and you get all the, the apps, which I don't think will be anywhere as good as Fitness Plus. I mainly say that because I'm gonna go do Pilates after this recording on Fitness Plus. I love it.

• 42:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:49Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I'm curious, we'll see, it could be as good, and it's only $4 a month, which is way better than what you're paying for Fitness Plus, but like, yeah. And then it's also, it went after, it's doing this Halo Nutrition, which is so you can count your calories and everything. And it's got, you know, the Alexa integration, and it's, it's doing all the sleep scan, sleep analysis, and activity point systems, and all this other junk. And it's just cheap Fitbit.

• 43:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:14Alex Cranz?

  Like, that's it. It's cheap Fitbit.

• 43:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I'm saying like,

• 43:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. Like, I love that they they made no effort to like, make it look like anything else. Like, they they were like, oh, could we do a watch like form factor? Like, make it look like all the other wearables? No, no, we're just gonna do a fit a fitness band. That looks and not even like a recent one. Like, this looks like, remember the Samsung fitness band from like 2016? That's what this looks like. But yeah, it's got, you know, it's it's got this like color display, which is nice because it took Fitbit 40 years to put a color display into a wearable and it's super cheap. So but I don't know if like the the wearable market, the drive for really cheap

• 44:00Alex Cranz?

  wearables kind of went away five years ago. So Amazon is really, really late to this party.

• 44:06Nilay Patel?

  I have a Whoop update. The CEO of Whoop was at Code. Yeah, he's living his best life.

• 44:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:13Nilay Patel?

  They're apparently doing quite well. Also, for better or worse, anytime anything happens with Whoop, people tweet at us now. We have single handedly like created a social engagement feedback loop for this company.

• 44:31Nilay Patel?

  They're doing it.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Okay, if you are, if you are a parent, if you're lucky enough to be a parent of, say, a three year old, any age between three and nine, if you're a parent and you also are lucky enough to have your parents around, I want you to close your eyes. Actually, no, pull over in your car and then close your eyes. And I want you to think about your three year old's ability to use technology and your parents' ability to use technology. And then I want you to put those two things together and imagine them doing a teleconference with a projected game board.

• 45:02Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  That is.

• 45:03Nilay Patel?

  This.

• 45:05Alex Cranz?

  Does Amazon have like older people that work there? Like, do they talk to older people, like grandparents?

• 45:12Nilay Patel?

  Product, by the way, is called the Amazon Glow.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  And it is a tabletop projector and the idea is your kids, your kids get bored during video calls, which is true. They just like

• 45:23Nilay Patel?

  Absolutely true.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  They just wander off. They're like, hi, okay, this is not interesting. And they bail and the grandparents are sad. So what they've done is they've made a video conference system that projects a game board on a table, on a 19 inch plastic mat. And then on the other end, the grandparent or the aunt or whomever has a tablet and then they both control what's happening on the board, the puzzle or the game or the ebook or whatever. And so then the kid is less likely to wander off because you've captured them with a screen.

• 45:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So it's like a monolith looking thing with a screen in the base.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:01Nilay Patel?

  That shows like a FaceTime sized screen that shows like your parent.

• 46:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 46:06Nilay Patel?

  And then there's a projector in front of you. So you get a rectangle on the, on the surface in front of the monolith type thing.

• 46:12Alex Cranz?

  I love

• 46:12Nilay Patel?

  So I'm just like, okay, I mean, I, I'm the market that Dieter's talking about. I have a three year old. I have parents varying levels of computer ability.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:22Nilay Patel?

  They're all brilliant, by the way. I just want to put that out there. It's, um, so their brilliant brilliance is not expressed onto touchscreens. That's about as nicely as I can say that. Just the, the idea that I'm going to tell my parents, like, you're going to download an app onto your iPads. Presumably they're going to make an iOS app.

• 46:39Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 46:39Nilay Patel?

  And then that thing will call a hardware device in my home that you've never seen. Cause we're not going to set these up together, right? So it's a hardware device in my home that you've never seen. That thing will then light up a projector and then you're going to play a game with my kid who's FaceTiming with you.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:55Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. What is the interface of that tablet?

• 46:58Speaker 01

  It's a screen.

• 46:58Nilay Patel?

  Is it a split screen?

• 46:59Speaker 01

  No, it's just like, there's a, there's a hovering face and then the, the interface is the, is the interface of this projected screen.

• 47:06Nilay Patel?

  So they can, they can obviously see the kid. There's a camera in the model.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there's a camera to like, see the kid and then the kid can see the thing. And I think their idea is the, it's more likely that the kid will call the grandparent, which, which means that they'll be sitting there like ringing up grandma nonstop. She gives them access to the glow.

• 47:22Alex Cranz?

  They do that. My, my friend's kid does it all the time. Like I was, we were at the beach one time and, and my, my, her, her aunt just got a message from her. And it was like, she was like on the phone being like, hey guys, what are you all doing? Can we just hang out now? And we're like, we're at the beach. Go away.

• 47:39Nilay Patel?

  That's great. Yeah, if I had a button in my house that could, uh, that backs a push to irritate other people at a long distance, should push it.

• 47:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:48Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I like the idea. I mean, every projected display idea, right? There's like latency problems. There's resolution problem. Uh, it's projector. Can you use it in a bright room?

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Uh, they recommend not using it next to a bright window.

• 48:02Nilay Patel?

  So go to the dark, child.

• 48:05Alex Cranz?

  Sit in the cave.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  They also recommend that you project it on the white mat, which they promise is easy to clean. Uh, by the way, one of the features of this thing is like coloring, like digital coloring. So of course it's going to get covered up with crayons and stuff. If you buy it, it comes with Amazon sort of standard kids warranty where they'll just like, if things break because the kid chucked it out a window or whatever, they'll just replace it for a couple of years. And but the, one of the things you could do, actually this is cool. So in a, there's another camera on it in addition to the camera looks at the kid. And it looks at the screen. And so the kid can like run over with their toy or this thing that they drew on another piece of paper or this little cut out or, you know, the, the turkey that they made in arts and crafts or whatever, throw it on the board and then hit a button.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  And then the camera will scan it and then it becomes a digital object on their little drawing that they can move around and manipulate and do stuff with. And it also shows up on the, you know, on the tablet and too. So that's kind of cool.

• 48:58Alex Cranz?

  That's, that's kind of neat. Why does it look like a teleconferencing device though? Like there was no effort, it feels like to make it kid friendly.

• 49:06Nilay Patel?

  It's not cuddly at all.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Have you seen any of Amazon's gadgets? They don't make it look nice. It takes them six years to figure out how to make something look nice. The Echo was a, was a Pringles can for years before they finally, oh, wait, fabric is a thing.

• 49:22Alex Cranz?

  It just looks like something in a conference room and it's just teleconferencing for kids, which is wild to me.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  You know, they can't call each other. They can only call a tablet. So you can't set up a playdate with them.

• 49:33Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 49:33Nilay Patel?

  That's hilarious because I would buy another one for my parents, have someone else set it up and be like, now you can push a button.

• 49:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:42Nilay Patel?

  Can I call other Echo devices?

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Uh, I believe they can only call the iOS apps. Android tablet apps, you can, you can technically use it on a phone, but would you want to control a 19 inch screen with your phone? By the way, when I say control the screen, I'm referring to both the child and the person, the teleconference grandparent or parent or aunt or whomever. There's no like, you can just like take over and keep the kid from messing with the screen. So when the kid gets bored and starts like pushing buttons, there's nothing you can do about it. You both have total control.

• 50:13Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So I just want to talk about the marketing photo for this real quick.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:16Nilay Patel?

  Cause it's an all time great, this scenario, whatever happens. It's a living room that is obviously well lit. Obviously the white mat has just been digitally enhanced to make it look bright and good. The child is much older than three, I'll say, but fundamentally, the child is sitting at a tiny desk in the middle of a living room on a rug with like, this scenario, oh, and the thing doesn't have a, it might have a power cable back there.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:43Nilay Patel?

  But you don't see like, it's just in the middle of the room on the desk.

• 50:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:46Nilay Patel?

  And I'm, what, in what circumstance are you like, child, I have created a portal to your grandparents. It lives in the middle of our living room. It's a small desk that you may use at your lecture. Like this thing is going to end up in corners, it's going to end up maybe in kids' rooms, but you don't, do you want a camera in your kids' rooms? Is it somebody else going to operate?

• 51:07Alex Cranz?

  A really like ugly camera, not even a good looking one.

• 51:11Nilay Patel?

  I think a good question is like, where in your home will you put this? Because this, this photo, also this kid looks very old and the game they're playing is just an insult to their intelligence. It's like, find a picture of a dinosaur. Like, no, they're way beyond this, dude.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  But here's the thing, like they, they got Disney and SpongeBob and you know, Pixar and whatever on board. They got, I think Doris on here. They're going to sell accessory packs. So like it comes with a tangram pack and there's going to be other packs. I guarantee you there's going to be like a Hot Wheels pack at some point where like you put the car on there and then like, you know, they drives around or whatever. So as usual with Amazon's gadgets that have cameras on them, we're all like, ah, privacy nightmare. But we don't know. It could be that like the rest of America's like, nope, this is cool. We're, we're in it. We, we want this thing.

• 52:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I, I keep thinking about the grandparents side of this.

• 52:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:05Nilay Patel?

  The grandparents are still sitting at home. Using their iPad Air 2.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:10Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, kinda not getting paid attention to and like trying to play some game.

• 52:13Alex Cranz?

  And they have to log in, don't they?

• 52:15Nilay Patel?

  Log into that. Like, I, the experience has to be great on both sides. And to be like, kid, you get a fun piece of hardware to sit at this desk that I've placed in the middle of the living room.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:25Nilay Patel?

  Mom, you, uh, just keep on with that iPad. Right? Like, we'll see. Uh, last bits of Amazon stuff? Anything worth talking about here? It's not a lot. It's

• 52:35Alex Cranz?

  Package alerts.

• 52:37Nilay Patel?

  They did package alerts for Ring. That's cool. They're adding Sling TV to Echo shows. They should have done that ages ago. They do have this cheap thermostat that looks like a copy of an existing thermostat. The Eco B people are very unhappy about this because Amazon did the bad thing.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:52Nilay Patel?

  They're like, thermostats are selling. How about we make a cheap one? And if you search for Eco B, our cheap one will be at the top. Always fun for them. Uh, yeah, it's like Ring stuff. That's it. Okay. Uh, last thing we should talk about before we take a break and talk about code. Google had a search event this week too, right, Teeter?

• 53:07Speaker 01

  They did. Yeah, they did it live. Uh, Google likes to do their events fully live, not pre-recorded. They announced, man, I, I could either talk about this for two minutes and we move on with our lives, or I could talk about it for three hours. And there's kind of no in-between. So let's see what we can rush through.

• 53:21Alex Cranz?

  The map updates. Let's do the map updates first because that feels to me like one of the bigger things here. Am I wrong? I don't know. Like, so, so big, big map updates. One, you, like, more people are gonna be able to see wildfires and where they're happening. They'll still need internet to see those wildfires on Google Maps, which is like not great in a lot of instances where you're running from wildfires. But it's, it's still a nice thing. And then they're also adding like a, a tree coverage layer. So you'll be able to like see tree coverage and that's, that's gonna be really useful for someone.

• 53:54Alex Cranz?

  I think the idea is more for like researchers and stuff on that front. So they can understand like ambient temperatures and stuff. Because when you don't have tree coverage, places just feel hotter. And then they also are adding this, this new way of like, a new, I guess, code so that you can find addresses that don't exist. And, and you know, the example they used was on a Navajo reservation. I think it was a Navajo reservation, going to these places that don't have addresses, don't have US or American recognized addresses and being able to find them still by punching this code into Google Maps, which is like really, really useful for rural areas where a lot of the times it is, even when you do have an address, the actual place is totally different and you

• 54:38Alex Cranz?

  don't know how to get there. And so you're driving through a cornfield and feeling like you've made a wrong turn somewhere. And this might help that.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Does this open source location descriptor thing that Google's using, is it integrated or related to what three words in any way? Or is it just, is it completely different system? And they don't actually talk to each other?

• 54:57Alex Cranz?

  I don't know, actually.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Okay, I think I'm assuming not the same.

• 55:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I don't think it's the same. It's part of this, it already existed was, so this is called the address maker and it's part of like this, this system that already worked that was called plus codes. And yeah, it's just a nice six digit code. You pop it in and you'll be able to find stuff. It's almost like GPS coordinates, but not.

• 55:20Nilay Patel?

  I'm assuming we would have gotten a what three words, press release, discussion if Google had decided to work with them.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  So the search stuff, it's a bunch. They, you may remember MUM, the multi-task unified model, which is their, Google's new AI system that's even bigger than BERT, which was their last system for taking knowledge in different like areas of domains and different kinds of visual and auditory and textual search and mashing them together in a way not completely dissimilar from the way that GPT-3 is able to take things from different domains and put them together. If you haven't listened to Ashley's special Tuesday Vergecast episode about that, you really should. Anyway, so there's some new MUM stuff. So if you take a picture of a shirt, say of Matias Duarte, it was very clever that they used him and his shirts. You can then ask, you can actually ask a question of the thing you took a picture

• 56:10Speaker 01

  of to get information from other domains. So socks that match that pattern. That's interesting. They, they, they're a little bit in overpromised land with MUM. Like they said, MUM is awesome. Here's the thing it can do. And then there's like 15 other things that search does and the implication is MUM is involved in that, but it's not clear if it is. Anyway, so the thing that's interesting to me is that Google Lens is now getting built into the Google Search app on the iPhone and it's getting built into desktop Chrome. And so their, their push to get Google Lens to be a thing that you actually use and becomes actually useful is getting very real. It's no longer pointed at a flower and have the

• 56:51Speaker 01

  flower identified to you. It's pointed at the flower and shop for, you know, flower seeds or, you know, pictures of it or whatever.

• 56:59Nilay Patel?

  It's always shopping. No one can think of what to do with a camera on a phone except make you buy stuff with it.

• 57:04Alex Cranz?

  I invented Google Lens today while I was like, I was shopping.

• 57:07Nilay Patel?

  I'm lying.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Congratulations.

• 57:09Nilay Patel?

  It's been so nice working with you. When are you buying a boat?

• 57:13Alex Cranz?

  You know how you're like, when you're like on the bus and you, you're like, man, if only this were underground and I could avoid traffic and you're like, oh, I invented the subway. This is like, it was the same thing today where I was like, wow, I wish, I was like, I was looking at, I'm trying to avoid fast fashion and get into slow fashion, you know, more like sustainable clothing and stuff. And I was like, wow, I wish I could just like, take a picture of, of a sweater and then have like other options of it available and, and see it. And I was like, oh, that's, that's just Google Lens. I've just, I just created Google Lens again.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Speaking of shopping, they are expanding their shopping. They're going to do local inventory. So if you want to find something that's nearby and actually in stock, you can do that. There also, I believe they're integrating Lens into shopping, of course. You know, like ultimately, I was like, are you, what does a product page look like on Google, right? Cause like Google, Amazon has like a famously optimized product page, right? And so Google's landing pages for products is different because they can, like they integrate other things, blah, blah, blah. And we had a long discussion about a search journey. But the long and the short of it, I interviewed the SVP of Search and Ads and so on and so forth. And from what I can tell, Google wants to provide more

• 58:32Speaker 01

  answers, more like, like full context, not just like a Ten Blue Links, not just like an answer to your query, but like a whole thing. They're doing this thing where they'll, they'll give you like needs to know, or like if you search for something, they'll give you like an info box that actually has like other things you might be interested in if you know nothing about the subject. So they're providing yet more stuff, which is, you know, problematic on many levels, staying on Google pages. Does Google have a point of view? Are they trying to do view from nowhere? Do they have bias? Like, there's a whole, there's, there's again, three hours of discussion about that. But at the same time, I think they've hit a wall where they can't collect more information from us with their text box,

• 59:12Speaker 01

  with their search box. Like, they're getting ungodly amounts of searches, you know, I forget, you know, seventy five, some percentage of all searches are still brand new or whatever. But I think that they need more information from us via our searches. They need more context from us via our searches in order to continue their march of making their own product better. So both the inputs and the outputs are adding more context. I think Google needs both to happen, which is why I think they're pushing Lens so hard.

• 59:40Nilay Patel?

  And I, I keep joking about shopping, but it is true, by the way, that every, every app eventually turns into a catalog. Like Instagram is just like full on the march towards becoming a catalog, a shopping destination. And it's because they're out of ad money. Yeah, like all these companies are doing great. They're all just like printing money. Google's an advertising company, Facebook's an advertising company. But like, e- even the other one, like Snapchat and Twitter are doing great because all these dollars have moved online. And then Apple like pushed the button and Facebook had to issue guidance that was like, numbers are going down.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:12Nilay Patel?

  But to make that work, to make that direct consumer relationship work, you also need the sellers to show up and like participate. And I think Google is like not done that yet.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Well, they did, they did announce a deal with Shopify. So there's that. I think they're.

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  That's the deal. Like, that's the enabling.

• 1:00:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, the, the inventory thing sounds like a really good idea, you know, being able to see what's in stock somewhere. But it requires somebody at the store to update the inventory and to like be a willing participant in this. Otherwise, it's just going to say limited stock. So like, how useful is that? And also you're asking like, well, that's going to get. Sit straight down to like the person getting paid minimum wage to be constantly updating that. And it's just, I don't know if it's actually like as useful and in practice as it is in theory.

• 1:00:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, we'll see. Like, are the big box retailers going to want to get their inventory systems to Google? They are not, right? So we'll see. Like, all this stuff is neat, but I think, Dieter, you're right. Like, they need more information on both sides of the search.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Nilay Patel?

  Because they've gone from, we're going to point you at the resource, to we are the resource. And they've, they've got a long, they still have a long way to go there.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was just gonna say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give myself a little, little kudos for my, the line that I wrote back for the Amazon piece, which was, when we thought about our AI future, we were expecting Hal 9000, and we got Hammacher Schlemmer.

• 1:01:32Nilay Patel?

  That's very good. All right, we have to take a break. We're gonna bring on Alex Heath. We're gonna talk about the Code Conference. We'll be right back.

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• 1:03:05Nilay Patel?

  We're back with Alex Heath. Hello, Alex.

• 1:03:07Speaker 06

  Hello.

• 1:03:08Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna have to do a Heath and Krans situation.

• 1:03:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:11Nilay Patel?

  Krans and Heath. You sound like a private detective agency.

• 1:03:16Speaker 06

  It's a buddy cop show.

• 1:03:18Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited for us. What's our first, what's our first one? Our first case?

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  Wait, who's the, who's the straight cop and who's the bad cop?

• 1:03:26Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, that's a tough one. I'll be, I'll be, we'll figure it out. We'll figure it out.

• 1:03:30Speaker 06

  Who has the dog for comic relief? That's what I want to know.

• 1:03:33Alex Cranz?

  That's me.

• 1:03:33Nilay Patel?

  Which one of you, which one of you is Mel Gibson and who's Danny?

• 1:03:37Speaker 06

  Oh, my God. No, we're not going there at all.

• 1:03:40Alex Cranz?

  Moving on, moving on.

• 1:03:42Nilay Patel?

  Here's my idea. At the end of the segment, the, the listeners can tweet at us.

• 1:03:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:47Alex Cranz?

  Who's the cagney and who's the lacy?

• 1:03:49Speaker 06

  There you go. That I'm on board with.

• 1:03:52Nilay Patel?

  Alex Heath, we were just at the Code Conference together. It was very strange, I would have to say. You had to get tested when you got in. If you left, you had to pay to get retested. We were all had to verify our vaccination status through CLEAR, which was a real adventure. And we all had to wear red wristbands the entire time. We were trapped in Beverly Hilton. It was very fun. It was just like a very, it felt like we were entering a secure area, but we were in the middle of Beverly Hills. So it was strange in that respect, but it was good. What'd you, what'd you think of the conference, Alex?

• 1:04:21Speaker 06

  I thought it was good. I liked Ted Sarandos. I thought, you know, he was probably one of the newsier speakers we had. And obviously Elon is always gonna Elon. I didn't stay for the last day, though. The last day about psychedelics. I'm kind of mad I missed that.

• 1:04:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So the, just to give people a rundown on the show, you get there, there's the first day programming, interviews, panels. Second day was chock full. That was Elon day. Lots went on. The third day, Kara Sosher, in her great wisdom, programmed Hangover Recovery. So you could-

• 1:04:50Alex Cranz?

  Incredible.

• 1:04:50Nilay Patel?

  It's true. You could listen to them talk about psychedelics and how they're the future. Well, if you were selected, you could get an IV drip to enhance, enhance your recovery.

• 1:05:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01Nilay Patel?

  It was really weird. And then people were getting electro stimulation of their muscles. So like, imagine like, there's an outdoor stage, lots of people just in regular chairs. And like, the perimeter of this is like, a science experiment. It was very good. It was very entertaining. Let's start with Sarandos, though. So Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix. He released some data that we should talk about with a weird methodology. But he was just very bullish on Netflix's, I mean, obviously, he's the co-CEO, but people are like, your subscribers are down. There's some softness in that. You've got all this competition. And he was kind of like, yeah, whatever.

• 1:05:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, Squid Game, right?

• 1:05:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:37Speaker 06

  Squid Game runs the world. That was the, that was the headline for me, a show that I had never heard of until that comment he made, revealing that it is their top show around the world. And now I feel like I can't escape Squid Game content in any of my feeds. I don't know about you all.

• 1:05:53Alex Cranz?

  It's everywhere.

• 1:05:53Nilay Patel?

  It is very much, once you like, buy a car, you notice that same car everywhere, all the time.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59Nilay Patel?

  Does this ever happen to you? Or like, you, you notice it? Like, like, oh, everyone is actually talking about this thing that I was completely ignoring.

• 1:06:03Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think it only dropped like, last week, too. Like, it's, it's not like it's been slowly building. It was just like, kind of hit with full force. And everybody was like, yeah, that looks cool.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  But Sarandos was like, not only is this thing the most popular show right now, it's like, he's like, it's on track to become the most popular show ever, or something ridiculous.

• 1:06:22Speaker 06

  Which is wild, because it's a non-English, South Korean show that, to be honest, I have not finished, but based on what I, the limited footage I have seen, looks absolutely bananas.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  It's super bananas.

• 1:06:36Nilay Patel?

  Can you describe Squid Game to the people?

• 1:06:39Speaker 06

  I don't even know if I can. Can you, Dieter?

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  So imagine, it's like, you know, the, the, like, super wacky, physical challenge game shows? Imagine that, but you're trapped on Murder Island. And if you lose, you die.

• 1:06:52Nilay Patel?

  Why is it called Squid Game?

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  Because there was a, there's a game as children called The Squid Game that had, you know, convoluted rules in the, it was played on a playground on a chalk outline of a squid. And so like, depending on where you were on the squid, where you had your feet, there was like, you know, it's like a child's game of complicated rules about running around on a squid. And so you take that, and then you transpose the idea of a complicated game with weird rules to adults, but they get shot in the head.

• 1:07:22Speaker 06

  Sounds awesome.

• 1:07:23Nilay Patel?

  I'm super down for this.

• 1:07:25Speaker 06

  Two things, actually, that he said, Serando said about kind of Netflix's strategy that stuck out to me, which were actually just kind of denials of things that people thought Netflix may do, but him really like throwing cold water on the idea that they would make a, you know, piece of hardware, like a streaming stick, like a Roku competitor, saying that, you know, it's not vital for them to do something like that. I would maybe beg to disagree over the next five years or so, but it was interesting to hear him say that. And then also him saying that they had no interest in buying like a movie theater chain, which if you follow any of that commentary, everyone kind of expects that the tech companies will just own all the theaters.

• 1:08:04Alex Cranz?

  Don't they already own theaters? Like they own one here in in New York City, right?

• 1:08:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, they own the, I think they bought the Chinese theater here in Los Angeles where I am. They have a few kind of art house outposts for screenings and stuff, but I think the implication of that question was like, is Netflix gonna buy AMC or something like that? And he, he was like, nope.

• 1:08:24Alex Cranz?

  No, Disney is.

• 1:08:25Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:08:25Nilay Patel?

  He said a third thing too, along the same lines. He's like, we're not gonna spend money on sports.

• 1:08:29Speaker 06

  Mm hmm. Which is not a surprise. I mean, Netflix has historically said no to sports and no to news and probably for, probably for the best. But yeah, I mean, I agree with you, Neil. He was very confident, seemed bullish and, you know, as a co-CEO should. But I mean, maybe we should just briefly touch on the gaming part two, him kind of talking about the gaming strategy that Netflix recently announced, saying it's really just like any other vertical of content for them, kind of a continuation of the storytelling they already do with scripted and non-scripted, and that they're gonna do their own games and licensed games, but wouldn't share anything about a launch outside of, I think they're just testing these in Poland right now. So who knows when we'll get them.

• 1:09:12Nilay Patel?

  He did say it was more mobile focused, which I think, I think he said before, or Netflix has said before, but which is fascinating to me, right? Like, I personally perceive of Netflix as an app that I use on my television.

• 1:09:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:09:24Nilay Patel?

  Occasionally on a tablet. I do not think of it as a thing I use on my phone. That is obviously different for a lot of people. Lots of people watch Netflix on their phone. But what's the big market on phones? It's games. Netflix wants to bundle games in your subscription. So you'll start using the Netflix app on your phone. And I think that's just so you think about their expansion into like minutes of the day, which is like what they actually care about.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:45Nilay Patel?

  They're competing for minutes. They're like Fortnite's our competitor. They want those minutes.

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like, look, if Netflix just puts like a free, a free, good enough version of any number of games that you were paying to play that you see people play on the subway or the plane or the bus right now, if you're lucky enough to be on one of those modes of transportation, if they just put Solitaire in Netflix, they will have a gangbusters quarter. I'm kind of not kidding. That's like all they really need to do.

• 1:10:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, a gangbusters, I mean, they have a weird, they'll have a gangbusters quarter in terms of like minutes used.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:18Nilay Patel?

  Attracting new subscribers and reducing churn.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:23Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's actually what matters.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  Well, we should actually talk about their numbers then.

• 1:10:26Nilay Patel?

  So, yeah, so this methodology is weird. So Sarandos made some news on stage with Kara. He put up slides showing, actually, let me contextualize this. For years, no one knows how anything is performing in Netflix. And like, this is a big problem. It's a problem for how people get paid. Like creatives are like, I don't know how my show's doing. Netflix buys and cancels things at, on a whim, it appears. The networks obviously don't like it because they want to compare ratings, blah, blah, blah. Now they've got a lot of competitors. They've got the Disney Plus and the Hulu's and HBO Max's of the world. And so they need to, Netflix now needs to prove, they've got the same problem that the networks used to have with Netflix. So they've invented some metrics. There's just no other way to put this.

• 1:11:10Nilay Patel?

  They've invented some metrics that we cannot possibly audit. One is, they're both, they both these slides are titled most popular series in films. And the first metric is view hours, and that is total view hours per title in the first 28 days on Netflix. So the thing launches on Netflix, here's how many hours it was viewed in the first 28 days. In aggregate by all of humanity? Yeah, I guess. Okay.

• 1:11:36Alex Cranz?

  Well, that's not a new metric for them. Like, they've talked about that metric before, I think.

• 1:11:41Nilay Patel?

  But they've done it softly. They've never released a top 10.

• 1:11:43Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:11:43Nilay Patel?

  Right. So like, this is like, actual data. So you've got Bridgerton, season one, 625 million view hours. It's number one series. Number one film, Bird Box, 282 million view hours. You kind of go through this list, and it's like, the top 10 films on Netflix are their own films that they have relentlessly promoted. Yeah. Right? Like-

• 1:12:03Speaker 06

  And they all suck.

• 1:12:04Nilay Patel?

  And they all suck. Like, The Old Guard is fine. It was totally fine. It got me through yet another night of the pandemic.

• 1:12:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:12Nilay Patel?

  I don't even remember this thing. The Irishman is good. The Irishman is hilarious, because it's also 70 hours long. So this 250 million view hours represents three people watching The Irishman.

• 1:12:24Nilay Patel?

  Six Underground is horrible, and it's number five on this list.

• 1:12:28Alex Cranz?

  Why does Stranger Things, season three, have more view hours than Stranger Things, season two?

• 1:12:34Speaker 06

  Because it's a better season, Cranz.

• 1:12:36Nilay Patel?

  No, because it's in the first 28 days.

• 1:12:38Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:12:38Nilay Patel?

  So, season three got the hype boost. It's not cumulative.

• 1:12:43Alex Cranz?

  All right, all right.

• 1:12:44Nilay Patel?

  So that's, you can look at that. So that one's fine, and it is, whatever. It's, it's a metric that feels like a, I don't know, a standard digital metric, like a YouTube metric. Yeah. The second one, I would categorize as a Facebook metric.

• 1:12:59Nilay Patel?

  So this is, this is engagement. This is number of accounts that have watched the stuff. And what they are counting is people who have watched a show for more than two minutes. Two minutes? I thought it was even less than. It's two minutes. Okay. It's two minutes in the first 28 days.

• 1:13:13Speaker 06

  To be fair, that is a lot of time to commit to Bird Box.

• 1:13:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Speaker 06

  Sorry, I keep crapping on Bird Box, but-

• 1:13:21Nilay Patel?

  It's, yeah, I don't know, man, like-

• 1:13:23Alex Cranz?

  It's a lot of time to commit to Emily in Paris.

• 1:13:25Nilay Patel?

  We got no clarity on how they're counting that two minutes. Right? So is it, Netflix, like, auto-runs a lot of things in their interface. So you open Netflix, and it is sort of geared toward just like, starting a thing, so you'll sit there. So we don't know if they're counting those watches. We don't know. But their metric is two minutes. Which is like, I don't know, on par for me with the Facebook 30 seconds counts as a view. Nonsense that they used to. And this list also looks exactly the same. It's just a bunch of Netflix stuff that they relentlessly promote. And so you can argue about the list. I think probably every podcast and local radio DJ in the world has argued about this list and what

• 1:14:05Nilay Patel?

  these shows are. You can find that stuff elsewhere. But to me, the thing that's absolutely fascinating is like Netflix self-promotion works, at least according to their their own metrics, which are not comparable to anyone else's metrics because no one else has standards metrics. But if Netflix is buying the content and it's promoting it and its stuff works and by its own metrics, their own stuff is the most successful. Netflix is the wholesaler of other people's stuff starts to get really complicated.

• 1:14:34Speaker 06

  That, and I think it's just interesting that they're releasing this data at all because, like you said, Netflix famously never released data. When they did, it was impossible to determine. It's like an Amazon chart without the Y axis, right? It's like impossible to determine what it is. So the fact that they're releasing this at all to me indicates some competitive pressure and that they feel the need to say, hey, like, if you make content with us, you know, 82 million people are going to watch at least two minutes of Bridgerton. Whereas Apple, you know, we found out through a union shop, has less than 20 million subscribers last week, but you know, we don't really know anything about these other streamers. So Netflix is trying to go, hey, we have, we have all the eyeballs, you know, stay with

• 1:15:17Speaker 06

  us. And I bet over time, these, this data will become more detailed, more granular, potentially independently verified. But for now, yeah, this is a Facebook metric for sure.

• 1:15:30Nilay Patel?

  It's funny that we call it Facebook metrics. It's just to imply that they're unreliable, not to be trusted.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  I was gonna say they're Bezos numbers, but they both work.

• 1:15:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, Facebook, Facebook is like notoriously bad at counting.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's especially when it comes to paying people like for advertising anyway.

• 1:15:45Nilay Patel?

  We'll leave that for another time. So that was Netflix. I will say, Mr. Heath, to your point, there's a lot of, a lot of calamity in the ratings business right now. Like NBC wants to get away from Nielsen and start its own thing. There's just a lot of like industry pressure on how can we measure anything? Where should these dollars go? If you are an analytics person. Please start a blog so that we can read it because I'm dying to know how this will shake out. Let's talk about Elon. What did you think of Elon?

• 1:16:12Speaker 06

  I mean, you know, Elon's gonna Elon. I mean, I knew he was gonna want to talk about Mars a lot, but I was surprised at the general lack of conversation about, you know, Tesla, the the main company he runs. I did ask about self-driving and this, you know, full self-driving beta they're rolling out and the NDA that they make people sign is like, you know, people want Tesla to fail, basically, so therefore sign this NDA. It seems pretty clear that they're trying to suppress, you know, crash reports, that sort of thing. And I just asked him point blank. I was like, you know, why have these NDAs for full self-driving? And he was like, you know, I don't think we need them. Um, I don't actually know why we have those. And then, you know, a team of lawyers at Tesla cried. I imagine.

• 1:16:55Nilay Patel?

  But nobody will ever know because they themselves have signed NDAs. Yeah. Just to be specific, the NDA that people were supposed to sign for full self-driving was you shouldn't take or share too many videos of the thing failing. You were free to share all the videos of it being successful. It is notable that Kara mostly asked about SpaceX. There was a little bit of Starlink. He was on his talking. It was very much the Elon greatest hits. Yeah. I interview CEOs. I'm well aware that CEOs love to see the greatest hits. Like, there's a reason they're the greatest hits. So he said a bunch of stuff that we've heard him say. He said a couple of things to me in regards to Tesla. They, he's pissed that the White House had an EV summit and didn't invite Tesla. He was like notably angry about that. Kara asked him why they thought that was, and he said Biden is controlled by the unions. Yeah.

• 1:17:40Nilay Patel?

  Tesla famously will not have unions at its trap. By the way, the White House's excuse for not inviting Tesla is like world historical stupid. They were like, this was an event about fuel efficiency standards and Teslas don't use fuel.

• 1:17:52Alex Cranz?

  Incredible.

• 1:17:54Nilay Patel?

  Like, they really had to backtrack into that.

• 1:17:57Alex Cranz?

  They could have dunked on the fact that they can't ship cars, but instead they're like, no.

• 1:18:02Speaker 06

  He had, he had several zingers. He had the, when he said the union thing, you could hear everyone in the room be like, oh, and then also when he was like, you can't sue your way to space. That was good. There were several singers.

• 1:18:14Nilay Patel?

  That one, that was, that's the one I kind of want to end on. So he, he launched several attacks at Jeff Bezos. Kara asked him why the Bezos rocket looks like that. And he was like, well, if you're only designing a suborbital, your rocket can be smaller. And then like literally did the office look to the camera? I got you.

• 1:18:32Nilay Patel?

  Which is like very funny. And then he said, you cannot sue your way to space. Amazon, Blue Origin is not Amazon.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:39Nilay Patel?

  They're both, you know, operated by Bezos, but Amazon responded to this by having like their satellite division, send us an email of all the times SpaceX has done litigation to prove that and it's like, you want us to believe that Jeff Bezos has left Amazon?

• 1:18:59Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, he's no longer the CEO and he's not like exerting iron fisted control. Elon says something about Blue Origin and Amazon is responding like, maybe there's a little blurriness here that you don't want to lean into.

• 1:19:11Alex Cranz?

  They just really miss him. They care about him.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  They just, they just got his back. That's all. He's not related.

• 1:19:18Nilay Patel?

  Oh, by the way, the exact line is you cannot sue your way to the moon.

• 1:19:21Alex Cranz?

  Yes. That's a good line though.

• 1:19:23Nilay Patel?

  Because the government has a contract with SpaceX and Blue Origin is suing because they think they were unfairly excluded from said contract. He talked a bunch about Starship and how that will make things cheaper. His line about the moon was, we should go to Mars. That's like where the relaxation is and the moon is there. So we might as well go there too. Which I thought was very funny.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  He did also, I just want to briefly, we talked a bit about satellite internet and he did have this weird thing where he's like, a bunch of amateur astronomers are pissed at me, but all the professionals think I'm great. And I was like, hmm.

• 1:19:52Alex Cranz?

  That's not true.

• 1:19:53Nilay Patel?

  Just a hundred percent not true. He's like, yeah, we've called them all.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:56Nilay Patel?

  And they, they seem satisfied with what we're doing. And like, you could just hear the like Astro nerds in the crowd be like, what?

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  They're like, they're checking their call histories. Like, no, I did, I did miss a call from Elon. Damn it.

• 1:20:10Nilay Patel?

  So that was strange. He was like, we don't want to get in the way of astronomers, but they have, you know, there's like, big satellite constellations are going to get in the way of astronomers. He did walk back, I think, some expectations on Starlink.

• 1:20:20Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 1:20:20Nilay Patel?

  Right. I mean, the hype around Starlink is to this day, as high as it can be. It's still in beta, but he was like, this is for 5% of the world's, the 5% of least connected people in the world. We're doing it because we want to create a revenue stream that can fund the development of other stuff. This is a good one. We think there's benefits to connectivity. But he said, maybe three times, maybe four, this is not meant to compete with 5G and fiber.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:20:47Nilay Patel?

  This is a complement to those things for areas that can't be connected, which to me. Represents a significant reset of expectations about what Starlink is and what it can do.

• 1:20:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Nilay Patel?

  Because when he tweets about it, he's like, you're gonna be able to mount it on the back of your RV and go anywhere. Like, and I like, if the thing is indeed about to come out of beta and they're actually gonna open it up. Again, I have a Starlink. People are gonna plug it in. They're gonna see what it can do. And like, yep, when it works, it's great. If there's a tree in the way, it's not great. That's just as simple of a review of that product I can give you. So if you live in a city, you live anywhere with lots of obstructions, there's a reason he's now saying it's only for the 5% of least connected. The people who will build towers over the trees because they have no other choices. So that to me is interesting. We'll just keep track and Starlink. Oh, and he talked about crypto and he was like, I'm not as intuitive as people think I am. Yeah.

• 1:21:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, he was very vague on crypto and someone asked a blockchain question and he was like, yeah, it sounds, sounds good. I'm generally for public ledgers. I mean, he talked about how the payment rails are outdated and, you know, obviously PayPal, he has a lot of actual knowledge about that kind of stuff. But yeah, he didn't hype Doge or Scott Galloway likes to call it Doja. Or anything like that. So kind of disappointing.

• 1:22:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And Kara tried to push him on China and he was like, you know, the real problem there is no face to face meetings. It's a real, that was his real answer. Yeah. So when those come back, our US Chinese relationships will snap right back into place. But overall, like I said, greatest hits. Yeah. He has a cool helicopter. He has a cool, he did arrive in a helicopter. Very loud. And I, you know, the, the Alex, you asked a good question, but overall the other questions were like, can you put a roof rack on my Model X? And Elon was like, well, the doors go up. So that's very challenging for us.

• 1:22:34Speaker 06

  Not one question about the Cybertruck. I was like, where's the Cybertruck?

• 1:22:38Nilay Patel?

  Didn't they already announce it's delayed? They did to 2022.

• 1:22:42Speaker 06

  They announced the date?

• 1:22:43Nilay Patel?

  No. I have asked Elon at previous code conferences, I've asked him about like delivery dates and he was like, it's ready when it's ready. And like, I think people are just used to it now. Like Tesla delivery dates in particular are, are fantastical ideas. Okay. Satya Nadella was also there. You know, he's had a lot of leadershipy things. We said two things that stuck out to me. One was Kara just asked him what happened with TikTok. Oh, God. The Trump administration. So good. And I, we know Satya a little bit, right? We've, I've interviewed him, talked to him, like, he's a familiar character to us. He is usually very buttoned up. He's very professional. And the entire time he was trying to explain what happened with Trump and TikTok. He was just on the, on the edge of cracking up. Yep. Like he could not hold it together.

• 1:23:27Speaker 06

  He said it's the strangest thing he's ever worked on.

• 1:23:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he tried to, he tried to not have to talk about it. He's like, you know, and then some stuff happened and then the rest was history. It all fell apart. And Carol was like, no, no, say what happened. So he was like reminder. So for people who have already forgotten this extremely strange period in our nation's history, Trump was going to hold a rally. People, not as many people showed up as he thought. God, I forgot to include the rally context in the post. Oh my God. So Trump was going to hold a rally. Not as many people showed up. The mechanism by which people did not show up is still unclear to us. But the rumor is that a bunch of teenagers got on TikTok, registered for the rally, inflated the numbers, causing them to open a second remote viewing location for this rally. Yeah. Cause the numbers are so inflated. Yeah.

• 1:24:14Nilay Patel?

  And that the TikTok teens had pranked Trump. Yep. Do we know that this actually happened? Right? Like, yes, the TikTok teens did a thing, but did it cause, still fuzzy. Trump believes the TikTok teens did a thing to him. Yep. So he responded to this by saying TikTok is Chinese. We're going to ban it from America tomorrow. He did this on the flight back home from the rally. Yep. God. Like he just announced it to reporters in the back of the plane. And so all the reporters like Trump says to ban TikTok in that way that like, people insisted on believing that Trump was going to do things, you know? There's an LCD factory in Wisconsin. There's a, there's a website. There's a Google. Anyway, so now there's like this huge cycle at TikTok stuff.

• 1:24:56Nilay Patel?

  And out of all this emerges, Microsoft is going to buy TikTok. A broker to deal with Microsoft. And so Nadella is trying to explain how this happened. And he's like, first understand that TikTok came to us. He was very insistent on that. Yeah. He's like, TikTok came to us. We were available. We thought it was like interesting AI play. And we also ran LinkedIn. So we have some knowledge about social networks work and we have Xbox like, we thought, we thought there was a match. We thought we could do some stuff. We're good at trust and safety. He, uh, Microsoft runs a photo DNA, which is the industry standard child protection photo, like image algorithm. We talk a lot about CSAM when the context is Apple. Yeah. The actual industry standard one. It's called photo DNA. It's Microsoft. He's like, we had that. We felt like we could put it all together. And he's like, and then they just went away. Yeah.

• 1:25:41Nilay Patel?

  He's like, we just didn't hear from them.

• 1:25:43Alex Cranz?

  You got ghosted by TikTok?

• 1:25:45Nilay Patel?

  You got ghosted by the government. He was like, they just lost interest in this.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  Technically, there was a deal with Oracle, sorta.

• 1:25:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they went away and then Oracle got this deal and that deal never happened either. And at TikTok, he's just like rocking. They have a billion users around the world and no one, like, whatever. So the whole time he was trying to tell the story, he was just like cracking up. Like, he could not bring himself to like, be straight laced, Sachin Dall, like, you know, the five elements of leadership that I come back to every day. He was like, I don't know, man, that was really weird.

• 1:26:18Nilay Patel?

  And then he had this other line about Apple where he was like, here's a lesson we learned at Microsoft. When a lot of people are complaining about something you're doing, there must be something you're doing that's bothering people that you should reflect upon.

• 1:26:30Speaker 06

  Yeah. And then the next morning, they open up the Windows App Store.

• 1:26:36Nilay Patel?

  That's good. Overall, I thought that that was interesting. It's worth checking out when when those clips come online.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  I wonder if he's aware that a lot of people are complaining about how they're forcing people onto the Edge browser in Windows 11.

• 1:26:46Alex Cranz?

  I like Edge. I can't complain.

• 1:26:49Nilay Patel?

  Dieter and I have a conspiracy theory, which, by the way, in all fairness, we have laughed about with Microsoft's PR people. Our conspiracy theory is that they saw us waiting in line to ask questions.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:01Nilay Patel?

  Me at one microphone and Dieter another, and we were like texting each other and they were like, hook him, pull him off the stage.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  The reality is that my strat for asking questions is just bad. I don't get up to the microphone soon enough. And so I end up just being like the sad guy standing there hoping that they're gonna let one more question in. That was, that was me at the code conference.

• 1:27:19Nilay Patel?

  They told us they had a plane to catch and I was like, that dude flies private.

• 1:27:22Speaker 06

  Come on. No, it was like, he's got a plane to catch in 40 minutes.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  It's like, comment. That is not how fast planes go through security, maybe for him.

• 1:27:31Nilay Patel?

  It's all, we were, it's all just goof, start. Like, he left. We have asked many questions to him before and we'll ask many questions of him later. Gary Gensler is there, Chairman of the SEC, interviewed by Preet Bharara, host of Stay Tuned with Preet, which is another Fox Media Podcast Network show. Preet was like, what are you going to do about crypto? And I would say for one hour, Gary Gensler said, nothing.

• 1:27:50Speaker 06

  Absolutely nothing.

• 1:27:51Nilay Patel?

  Nothing of value.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  But he was incredibly eager to say nothing. He was like, I'm here and I need you to hear me say, nothing.

• 1:28:01Speaker 06

  One of the tensest moments of Code was when someone got up and asked him about his comments about how, you know, we can't have thousands of private currencies. That's unsustainable. This is the Wild West. We need to tame it. And then this guy just went on this like 30 second rant about DeFi and was like, actually, these are not all currencies. Like, would you call AWS a currency? Like, you know, if someone's building a decentralized cloud database? Like, he really tore into him and he was like, basically saying, like, respectfully, you have no idea what you're talking about, is essentially what he said. And then Gensler just sat there, took it in and was like, I will take that feedback in the spirit that it was given. I asked Gensler about stable

• 1:28:43Speaker 06

  coins and he filibustered for about two minutes. Yeah, the vibe from Gensler was like, he's thinking about doing something with crypto, but he will not tell us what it is. And it's either going to be really nuclear or nothing at all. And I couldn't tell.

• 1:29:00Nilay Patel?

  My theory, you know, because I did an interview with Code and we're trying to book people. And like, you have those conversations. Do you want to come onto the Code stage? And like, some of it is, yep, it's just a big fancy stage and CEOs want to be on it. They want to get interviewed by Kara. It's like a badge of honor. But a lot of times, they, they want to have something to say. They, like, it's an opportunity for them to say something new, or in the case of Strando's, break some news, like, whatever. Like, they're there with a reason. And I could not identify what Gary Gensler's reason for being at Code was, except...

• 1:29:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, he was there on Zoom. I think it was to like bicker with Preet because apparently Preet was also up for the role at one point for like SEC Chairman. And there was like an awkward moment where they were like, you could tell, like, he was like, well, what would you do in my job?

• 1:29:48Speaker 06

  That was great.

• 1:29:49Nilay Patel?

  I will say as somebody who like did an interview on that stage, uh, pre doing an interview in a live room over Zoom, he was very good.

• 1:29:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, he was good.

• 1:29:57Nilay Patel?

  I don't know that I would have been able to, to hold the audience's interest, both in a content free, like my interview is saying nothing and we're over Zoom, very challenging. I think it was fun to listen to. They did bicker quite a bit. What did Preet say? He, uh, Preet asked him some question and Gensler was like, I can either confirm or deny that I'm looking at that. And he was like, what does it feel to like, get that answer instead of give it? Cause that was what he used to say as the US attorney. It was good. If you were way more into the Ari Emanuel conversation than I think I was. So Ari Emanuel is the most, he refused to call himself an agent, but he's the most powerful agent in Hollywood. He runs William Morris Endeavor. He just bought another agency for billions of dollars. He owns the UFC.

• 1:30:39Speaker 06

  Entourage.

• 1:30:40Nilay Patel?

  He's, yeah, he's the inspiration for the Ari character in Entourage. It's funny that he's the most famous for that when he's also just like the most powerful man in Hollywood. But so goes. He had this line that the, the market for content is infinite, but he said a bunch of other stuff.

• 1:30:53Speaker 06

  The TAM, the TAM for content is infinite, which is something I just want to tattoo. I just want to tattoo that on my chest.

• 1:31:00Alex Cranz?

  What is TAM?

• 1:31:01Speaker 06

  Total addressable market.

• 1:31:03Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:31:04Nilay Patel?

  Can you tell the three of us were there and all of us were like, wait.

• 1:31:09Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but you, but if you were like into this, explain why.

• 1:31:11Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, it was interesting because there, a giant merger had happened with CAA, which competes with his company and another talent agency like the day before. And so there was a lot of talk of like consolidation in the industry. How is big tech kind of, uh, forcing this consolidation so that people have more leverage against these, you know, two trillion dollar companies that are now doing streaming. But Ari, you know, he's very like loose cannon, um, similar to Elon. Like you can tell his handlers are not, you know, he actually doesn't have any. And he was just kind of like, yeah, no, it's the best time ever to be, uh, talent in Hollywood, you know, because, you know, it used to be that you would get like a backend deal. And then maybe that would work out for you if the movie did really well in theaters. And now all the streamers are paying back in deals upfront.

• 1:31:55Speaker 06

  So everyone's getting more money upfront, even though maybe that takes a little bit of the upside away. And, you know, he, he got asked about some things like Cameo, which is that celebrity, you know, shout out app. And, you know, said he thought that was cool, but.

• 1:32:07Nilay Patel?

  Kind of dunked on it a little bit.

• 1:32:09Speaker 06

  Kind of dunked on it a little bit. And really like, I enjoyed the bickering with Kara about the future of movie theaters. And he was adamant that movie theaters are not going to go away, that they're going to remain essential to American life. Which I think he's probably right on the margin, but I, I agree with Kara that they're not going to be as big as they once were. But yeah, just mostly like, you know, a nice tussle about the future of the entertainment industry. And he's, he's just a fun character.

• 1:32:35Nilay Patel?

  We should say, by the way, uh, for context, uh, and that's your stuff, um, Disney and Scott Chance and Scott settled their lawsuit.

• 1:32:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:32:42Nilay Patel?

  Right. So the, I, the obvious pushback to what he was saying about the best time for talent is like, one of the most famous people in Hollywood is suing Disney because of theatrical distribution and going to Disney plus. And I think there was some feeling that law, like both sides were dug in and that lawsuit would actually create some precedent. But instead they just settled and Disney paid the money. And like now, now we'll never know what the actual, and we don't know the terms. So now we'll never know what the delta between, here's what you should get paid upfront. And here's what the actual backend pays you should be, except millions of dollars. Do you hear anything else from Code you want to talk about? Well, actually, Neelai, you were on stage and you had an interview with Waymo. Yeah, that's fine. I like, I was on stage, we're going to run that interview in the Decoder feed. Yeah. I interviewed the co-CEO of Waymo, Takedra Mawakana.

• 1:33:26Nilay Patel?

  She is great. I asked her what was taking so long with self-driving cars. But we don't need to re-communicate that here because like any good content executive, I'm trying to ladder you into my other show. Decoder with Neelai Patel, which is available in the feed.

• 1:33:37Speaker 06

  Can I say one thing about flying cars? So they also had Kitty Hawk there, which is the Larry Page, Google co-founder funded flying car startup run by the guy who started Google X, their moonshot factory. Uh, giving his, you know, pitch for Kitty Hawk that he's been giving for years. And I talked to someone who shall be anonymous at the conference, who may or may not have worked at Google at one point, who told me that the, literally the idea for Kitty Hawk, uh, started because Larry and Sergey, the other Google, Google co-founder, were obsessed with figuring out how to effectively get Google employees from the Bay Area down to Google's office in Mountain View in a way that would avoid traffic. And so they were like. Flying cars. And so they just came up with flying cars.

• 1:34:20Speaker 06

  And that was the genesis of Kitty Hawk. It was a way for Google to improve its traffic route for employees.

• 1:34:29Nilay Patel?

  And 15 years later, they parked a small glider in the lobby of a hotel.

• 1:34:34Speaker 06

  And the person was like, we didn't really think about what would happen if there are actually hundreds of these little flying cars.

• 1:34:41Speaker 06

  What's gonna happen?

• 1:34:44Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we should do a little light errand. We've gone, we've gone over. There are going to be new logos for USBC cables.

• 1:34:50Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:34:51Nilay Patel?

  The most delightful ongoing disaster. By the way, you complain about the EU doing regulation. The free market of the tech industry is responsible for USBC. No one's in their way. And this is what they've come up with.

• 1:35:03Alex Cranz?

  They've proven why they needed someone overlooking them.

• 1:35:05Nilay Patel?

  Putting that idea out there, like, maybe just Dieter should be the regulator. Tell them what to do. NBC and YouTube TV are having a very boring contract dispute. But it means NBC might leave YouTube TV. I'm just, all I'm saying is every, every new thing turns into the old thing. Like YouTube TV is just being a cable company right now. There's a bunch of little Android news, and I will say this, Nintendo categorically denied that there is a 4K Switch Pro in development, which they should not. They should just be like, yes, of course, we, we're gonna make another Switch. That's the thing that we do. Anyway, all that stuff's on the site. If you hear Heim Gartenberg crying anywhere, it's because he has to write another USBC story. Three things I want to point out, and we got to get out of here.

• 1:35:47Nilay Patel?

  The Elizabeth Holmes trial is ongoing. I just talked to John Kerry-Roo that reported at The Journal, who broke all those stories on Decoder. But Liz Lopato is at the trial. I will say her, her coverage of that trial is by far some of the most popular stuff on our site. So when she is available to that, we're gonna have her on the show and talk about it. But go read that. She's there. Zoe has another story about Apple leaks, employee unrest there. She is, remains the single most interesting Apple reporter right now. And then we talked about Blue Origin, SpaceX, a bunch of Blue Origin employees put out an open letter. It was like 27 employees, current and former, saying the place is rife with sexism and doesn't care about safety. Big deal. Go read that. They were on CBS and stuff. All that's on the site. Lots of other stuff on the site. It was a real busy week.

• 1:36:31Nilay Patel?

  Great week. Go read the website. You can tweet at us. Krans is Alex H. Krans. Heath is Alex E. Heath. Same format there. I'm glad that you guys made this really easy to figure out. We coordinated. Dieter is Backlon. I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you. Like I said, John Carrier was on Decoder. Next week, we're going to run the interview with Takedra from the Code Conference. And the AI series on The Vergecast continues to rock and roll. Last week was text generation, as Dieter said. This week, big finish. AI smell and taste. It's a fun one. All right, that's it. Rock and roll. Get the shot. Come to our party.

• 1:37:23Speaker 07

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• 1:38:15Speaker 08

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