Meta's AI headset future — and that X interview at Code

The Verge's David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Alex Cranz break down an awkward interview out of the Code Conference from X (formerly Twitter) CEO Linda Yaccarino. Then, the crew gets into all the big news from Meta's Connect event where the Quest 3 and Meta Smart Glasses were announced. Further reading: The Code Conference 2023: news, interviews, and more Linda Yaccarino defends Elon Musk, X, and herself at Code 2023 [FULL INTERVIEW] AMD CEO Lisa Su on the GPU shortage, the AI revolution, and Nvidia | Decoder Yoel Roth warns new X CEO about Elon and company status [FULL INTERVIEW] Artifact is becoming Twitter, too, thanks to new posts feature The Quest 3 is Meta’s last chance to win the headset war before it truly begins The Meta Quest 3 is sharper, more powerful, and still trying to make mixed reality happen Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg on Threads, the future of AI, and Quest 3 Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses: livestreaming, headphone-replacing eyewear Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses hands-on: in pursuit of content The new WGA contract will change how Hollywood works Summary of the 2023 WGA MBA Streaming giants have banded together for lobbying power Apple and Google are changing how you listen to podcasts Google Podcasts shut down in 2024 as podcasts debut globally for YouTube Music Logitech now sells a $299 folding chair Former Amazon hardware boss Dave Limp will take over as CEO of Blue Origin Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:10David Pierce?

  Welcome to the Vergecast, a flagship podcast of surprise interviews. I'm your friend David Pierce. I didn't tell anyone we were doing this podcast. We're just here. We're podcasting. Neelai Patel is here. Hi, Neelai, welcome back.

• 1:22Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm on the show. I know people have been very confused. I was just doing the code conference and what I said to David right before I started is I've hosted enough things. So David, can you just drive this? I'll just sink back into being a guest.

• 1:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:35Nilay Patel?

  That seems nice. People bring you M and M's. It seems nice, you know?

• 1:39David Pierce?

  I like this for you. You've moved, you've done code, you get to like be a person now. This is very exciting.

• 1:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just react, blind reacting to things. This episode of the Vergecast, in many ways, the entire theme is Neelai reacts.

• 1:52David Pierce?

  This episode's gonna be very fun because the first half is stuff that you know about. And the second half is stuff you don't know anything about. It's gonna be great. Alex Krantz is here. Hi, Alex.

• 1:59Alex Cranz?

  I didn't know I was doing this podcast until about five minutes ago. I'm very excited to be here.

• 2:03David Pierce?

  I knocked on both of your doors and I said, it's podcast time.

• 2:05Alex Cranz?

  It's like, okay, put on some pants. We're here, let's go.

• 2:09David Pierce?

  We have lots to talk about this week. Meta Connect was this week. We got a bunch of news about AI, all kinds of stuff going on. New Raspberry Pi, which I'm weirdly excited about. Mac OS Xonomo is this week. We have more.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  I just bought a Raspberry Pi 4. I'm an idiot, but like it'll be fine. It was really, it was really cheap. Yeah.

• 2:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, as a like smart home sensor or whatever the four will.

• 2:27Nilay Patel?

  Like how you immediately guessed when I was using it.

• 2:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, listen, you just moved house. It's not unclear. We have big trials going on all over the place. We're going to talk a little bit about those today and we're going to talk a bunch about those next week. But let's start with code. Code was the, we've been working up to code for months. There was a ton going on. We booked a ton of guests. We talked to a ton of people. It got real weird right at the end.

• 2:48Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:49David Pierce?

  Neelai, you co-hosted this thing. Congratulations. You've made it through. You're back. Seemed like it went really well. Should we start at the end? Can we start anywhere other than Linda?

• 2:58Nilay Patel?

  Look, we, here is my goal at code. This is how I booked everybody. I know everybody thinks about Kara when they think of code because Kara is Kara and she has run the conference really well for the past couple of years. The conferences I started going to as a little baby that changed my career around were hosted by Walt in Kara. Right? All the, the things, Steve Jobs on stage at code, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates on stage, which by the way, has it like a lore and drama behind it. That's Walt. And like, I just don't like, it's both of them. And I don't mean to detract anything from like Kara, but there's a Walt component there.

• 3:36Nilay Patel?

  And like, I'm on that coaching tree, like just to be really clear, like Walt was my mentor. He, we did the podcast together. He was on our staff. Like, there's just a piece of that that I was thinking about a lot as we were like, doing the conference and like making the conference, which is very challenging. And again, I know like Kara did an amazing job with that. That's a high standard to live up to.

• 3:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 3:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm not trying to detract from that. I'm just saying, everyone thinks about that and I was thinking about the before that. And what I really wanted on stage was to be a product reviewer, was to talk about products, right? The Walt side of the equation. And we put a lot of products on that stage. So I'm like very proud of that, right? Adobe launched Photoshop for the web. Mike Krieger from Artifact launched what is effectively a Twitter competitor. There's a bunch, we can get to all that.

• 4:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  But that's like the part of code that, you know, there's a lot of drama. But if you actually look at our conference and you look at how much we talked about Nvidia H100 GPUs on stage, like we made a tech conference, like a tech conference and that's pretty cool.

• 4:34David Pierce?

  And we got a True Detective trailer, like.

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  And we had a True Detective trailer. Yeah. Like there was a lot going on at this conference and then there was like one little bit of chaos, which I will happily talk about.

• 4:44David Pierce?

  We should that first because that continues to be the thing on a lot of people's minds right now, partly because of what Lyndy Akarino, the CEO of X, talked about on stage and partly because of just the, I don't know, the scenery around it. The interview, you can watch in full on our YouTube channel or on the Decoder podcast. I listened to it while walking my son in a stroller this morning, which is deeply weird.

• 5:08Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my. Your son is a supervillain now. That's his origin story.

• 5:13David Pierce?

  The cognitive dissonance of that was a very strange 45 minutes.

• 5:16Nilay Patel?

  When I was a wee lad, I heard the sounds of Lyndy Akarino emanating from my father's headset. And now, now I have to destroy humanity to save it.

• 5:29David Pierce?

  You can go listen to the interview. It's really interesting, but the like, the way the interview happened seemed to be as big a thing as anything because Yoel Roth, who used to be, what was his job?

• 5:39Nilay Patel?

  Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter.

• 5:41David Pierce?

  He was a sort of surprise guest early and talked about a lot of the things that Twitter has struggled with over the years. I don't think he broke a huge amount of new ground in terms of like problems we've known about on that platform for a very long time. But then Lynda was sort of forced to answer for a lot of those in a way that she didn't seem super psyched about answering for.

• 5:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, look, Lynda did a shit job.

• 6:01David Pierce?

  She did.

• 6:02Nilay Patel?

  We can make a lot of excuses and like Yoel is like a very convenient excuse and that's great. She sucked. Like, what do you want me to do? I interview a lot of CEOs all the time. You can go listen to them. You know, we don't shy away from hard questions. You know what you get with Kara Swisher, right? Like, she did a bad job. Like, and like, I can talk about the setup there. I just don't want to give her the out. I think if you're the CEO of a major company that is the global town square, da, da, da, da, da, da, you better be ready.

• 6:32David Pierce?

  You should at least have some numbers, I would say, about how well you're doing instead of, she spent a lot of time not answering questions about how well are you doing? And instead, talking about her feelings about how well they're doing, which we've learned over the years is when you should be really alarmed about how well something is doing.

• 6:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Let me get to the setup and then we can talk about that. But I don't want to, for one second, let anyone walk away from this thinking that the setup or the chaos of Yoel or whatever, the surprise of it, should have, is an excuse. There are lots of choices you can make if you don't want to be, you could, she could have just walked away and she might have, right?

• 7:08David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 7:08Nilay Patel?

  But she chose to be on this stage and all she had to say, she stayed on, she wanted to be on that stage, which was an important piece of public. So let me just talk about that. So as rich has listeners know, one of our star guests was supposed to be GMC Mary Barra. And she dropped out because of strike and we made a lot of fun at her, the code stage. So we, you know, there's like a last minute scramble to replace your guests. We've, you know, people paid to attend the conference who want to put on a good show for them. So we, we booked the CEO of Rivian, RJ's current, she was great. And he was like, she was great. The one to one replacement and we can, I tried so hard to make him talk shit about the cyber shop. We can talk about that, but that's sort of the one to one replacement. But everyone was like working hard to replace him.

• 7:49Nilay Patel?

  Including Kara, right? Who had no obligations to this conference really, but she, you know, she did it. So she was gonna interview John Lovett and that was gonna be like the Kara comedy show in the middle of her thing to get Carrie back on stage. But then she asked Yole to do it and Yole said yes. And the history of code and code is unlike every other conference. Every other conference and David has worked at a lot of media companies, every other conference gets corrupted by advertising or sales response. Like the history of code and before that, the all things de-conference, like Walton care, like we're doing whatever you want and you can show up here. And they had the capital to do it.

• 8:26Nilay Patel?

  And this is like a, again, like these are people that I've worked with and around who are my seniors, me going to their conference when I was like a $12 a post reporter at Engadget. Like that, that stuff is all in my brain. Like I'm taking over this legacy. So our conference is the same, right? We invite people, we say, we, you know, we have a lot of conversations about, you know, it's a show like to me interviewing another person. There's prep calls and we like chat about what they want to say and what I want to say, but they don't get the questions ahead of time. In particular, the most important part of code is audience questions, which Linda refused to take. And there's just an element of chaos, like journalistic chaos that makes code code. It's unlike any other conference for those reasons.

• 9:08Nilay Patel?

  And I have texts in my pocket from Walt before the show and after the show, reminding me that that is what his conference was all about and what Kara's conference was all about.

• 9:16David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. He always used to say the thing that we do here is journalism.

• 9:19Nilay Patel?

  Live journalism. That's the thing that they, and they both said it. I just, again, I, I, I'm just coming back to the foundations of code. So whatever, we are all trying to fill in for Mary Barra and put on a good show and make it good. And so Kara was like, Yul's gonna do it. And that's great. Like, fine. And so, and Linda knew this information, right? Like, there was a lot of consternation about what she would drop out or not. We should tell it, like, obviously. So Kara knows her. She texted her. She knew. She knew the entire day. And basically, we spent the day being like, is she gonna show up or not? Like, who knows? Maybe she won't. That'll be its own news. She showed up. So that, that's like the whole backstory.

• 9:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, and like, I think the, the backstory of it and the interview are sort of two different things. And the interview itself, actually, for all of the drama around it, is not that interesting. Like, Julia Boorstein did a really good job of trying to get her to say something interesting and revelatory about what's going on at X.

• 10:12Nilay Patel?

  Can I, can I just say something about Julia? Julia is incredible. And like, watching Julia work up close was like, I was like, oh, I have, I have a long way to go. Like, that's really how I feel. Like, oh, I've got a long way to go. She is overprepared. She knows her shit cold. She knows everybody. There's one thing, when you're, you know, when you're like, near someone for a long time, and you're like, watching them work, you like, notice things about them. When Julia is in the middle of an interview, and she knows that she has it, she smiles. Like, and like, maybe it doesn't come through on TV, but like, in person, I was like, oh, I can see that she has. It was incredible.

• 10:44David Pierce?

  It's like the poker hand, like, I have, I have a good hand tell.

• 10:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like the tiniest little tell. And she's like, I'm holding a knife. It's great. All that's great. The Linda interview was pure chaos, right? And because of Yul, and because Linda had decided, I think, inaccurately and inappropriately decided that she could blame all of her problems on Yul, she kept going back to it. You know, and that's like a sympathetic position. I, I understand why, like, sort of intuitively, like, I can just be like, mad about Yul, and everyone in this room will care about it. But she knew. But if you watch Julia, all of her, like, cable news anchor training, she's like, I don't, I'm moving on. Like, I'm not gonna let you do this. That part of it, if you're like a journalism nerd, go back and watch that interview. Don't pay attention to Linda, pay attention to Julia. And it is actually just revelatory. Like, again, I walked away

• 11:31Nilay Patel?

  thinking, I've got a lot to learn. I have a lot to learn about how to do this.

• 11:34David Pierce?

  Just the ability to constantly say, can I finish my question? It's like a real, it's a real skill.

• 11:39Nilay Patel?

  Can I finish my question, David?

• 11:40David Pierce?

  To do in front of a lot of people. It's very impressive.

• 11:42Nilay Patel?

  Right. There's a room full of people, some of whom are not on any one side, right? They're just like there for the train wreck.

• 11:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 11:51Nilay Patel?

  Some of whom are there and they're very sympathetic to Linda and some of whom are there and they're very sympathetic, like whatever it is, or they're mad at Twitter, whatever it is. And like the tension in that room was out of control. And so for Julia to stay locked in and focused on, I'm going to ask the questions. Uh, again, it, watch that side of it because it is incredible.

• 12:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And it's like hard questions about halfway through. She, she kind of manages to get Linda off of blaming Yoel for all of her responses.

• 12:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:22Alex Cranz?

  Which is like, like the first half of it, she's, she, she makes a lot of remarks.

• 12:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:26Alex Cranz?

  About like, yeah, no one knew he was here today.

• 12:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's like ever, I promise you, you know what? Like we all saw what app she had. Yoel was on the schedule.

• 12:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:36Nilay Patel?

  Right. He was like listed publicly on the schedule. We updated the app like 50 times because we were, we were moving the things. Cause she, you know, Linda had first insisted on being last. She went, great. And then she was like, I know, I want to go before you. And then she switched it back. So like, actually the schedule is moving all day. It's like you, there, none of this was a secret. In fact, more of it should have been a secret.

• 12:59David Pierce?

  Fair. Yeah. Alex, you, you and I have both watched the interview since the, the full thing got posted. Did you take anything of like substance away from it about X, the company or platform?

• 13:09Alex Cranz?

  I took a lot about it from the hostility towards journalism that I saw in it. Like that was the main thing I took away was we've seen that threat of hostility from the company since Elon took over and saw it very apparently on stage and knowing now that like, She knew because you watch it initially and you're like, oh, she just found out. Yeah, I'd probably be that pissed on stage too. Like, no, if you knew the whole day.

• 13:32Nilay Patel?

  And by the way, not to say anything about Yoel. Yoel is great and, you know, he's very compelling and he knows a lot of shit about trust and safety. There was no content in his interview that he had not shared before.

• 13:45Alex Cranz?

  Right, right. Like, like the things he was saying was things he said quite often about the company.

• 13:50Nilay Patel?

  That he has put in the New York Times. But by the way, if, if, if you want like a slightly more produced version of the Yoel interview, you can go listen to an episode of This American Life that he did with Casey Newton. Again, he's very compelling. I'm glad he was on stage. I'm glad that audience, which, you know, is a very powerful influential audience, like, heard it. I think that's important. But if you're Linda, there was nothing that you were reacting to that you had, you hadn't already reacted to.

• 14:18Alex Cranz?

  Right. It was just like a very familiar, like you, you see this kind of hostility sometimes from people who, who don't want to give you the answers. And they, they have their narrative and they really don't want to deviate from that narrative. And that just seemed to be the case here. And I was like, okay, so I'm not going to get necessarily something substantial from Linda. But I thought it was a very revealing interview, even if it wasn't like a substantial one. Like it was super revealing.

• 14:43Nilay Patel?

  Is there a scientific term for revealing nothing? For like the substance of something to be nothing?

• 14:49David Pierce?

  Press releases.

• 14:53David Pierce?

  No, I think, I mean, to me, even the things that she said, and this is the thing that has really stuck with me about the interview is even the things that she said didn't seem like they were true. Like she named, I think the number was 540 million monthly active users. And she said that, or not monthly active users, just users. So whatever that means, she said that number twice. So I'm inclined to believe that is actually a number. But then she said, she said, Julia asked about how many daily active users X has, which is actually a really important number, right? Like we, there are a million external things saying X is not doing well, right? Like there are engagement metrics that seem to be down that are all reported by third parties. So, you know, grain of salt with that.

• 15:32Nilay Patel?

  That people on the platform are experiencing.

• 15:34David Pierce?

  Right. It's way down on the App Store, like all of the vibes are bad, but the number of people who log into Twitter every day is like potentially the most important number. And I don't believe for one second that she doesn't know that number to like the decimal place. And instead she gets up and is like, oh, it's between 200 and 250 million people every day. And Julia followed up by saying that it was 237 million when Elon Musk took it over. And then Linda said at 1.225. And there's just like, you don't have to tell anybody. You're a private company owned by one dude.

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  At one point she pulled out her phone to as though she was going to check the number and then did not and then showed the phone to the audience and it was just her home screen.

• 16:20David Pierce?

  And a lot of sleuthing has showed that X was not on her home screen.

• 16:24Nilay Patel?

  It's a very confusing situation.

• 16:26Alex Cranz?

  And we just got a report this week about most of the big companies daily, like daily active users. And it was so far from that. I think Twitter was like 56 million.

• 16:38Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. Twitter, Twitter's always, again, I, and I, I've said this many times and I will say it again now, very clearly for everyone to hear me. Criticism of Twitter or X's current leadership is in no way praise for the previous administration. They were bad. And actually, one of the most interesting things about it is you can make an argument that Twitter is so hard to run. It is such a mess that that version of bad was the only way to be. Like they had entered a steady state of horribleness, but they weren't growing. They weren't making any money. They, this is why they sold it to Elon at an inflated share price because its board of directors had come essentially come to the conclusion that

• 17:23Nilay Patel?

  nothing they could do would ever bring the company to that share price on their own. That is like, if you look at the mirror, you know, like, you know, like every kid wakes up one day and like realizes like, I'm not gonna pass. Okay. Like, I'm just not gonna be a doctor, you know, like, maybe that was just me. But like, you know, there's like those moments in your life where like, ah, I had better give up.

• 17:45Alex Cranz?

  Me in sports.

• 17:46Nilay Patel?

  Like Twitter as a company. Was like, ah, we're never gonna hit forty four dollars a share and they sold it to Elon. And like, again, I just don't want to say like, criticism of this administration is praise. It does not imply that they were doing, they were doing a horrible job such that they quit. Just flat out, they just quit. They couldn't figure out how to do it on their own and they, and they sold it to Elon because he'd showed up like a dummy to buy it. But it's not that he's now put in place a team that will do a better job. He's put in place a team, a CEO, who doesn't appear to know what's going on.

• 18:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think to me, like, the worst look for Linda in this entire interview, which is a fairly high bar in this particular interview, was when Julia asked about Musk's tweet about going to a fully subscription model where everyone using Twitter would have to pay for Twitter. And I'm paraphrasing, but Linda was basically like, well, she first asked to repeat the question, which was bizarre. It was a very simple question.

• 18:42Alex Cranz?

  No, I don't say, I don't think that was bizarre. I like, like, everybody is like, oh, she didn't know the answer.

• 18:49David Pierce?

  Oh, sure. It was a total filibuster.

• 18:50Alex Cranz?

  She was straight up filibustering, like, like, let's, let's give her a little, a little acknowledgement of that at least. She was, she was doing something. It wasn't.

• 19:00David Pierce?

  But then Julia rephrases the question and she says, I think she says, did he say that's what we're doing or that's what he's thinking about? And then Julia said, he said, that's the plan. So at this point, it's now abundantly clear that Linda doesn't know what's going on. And, and then she says, essentially in response to another question, she says, we talk about everything, and then has no more response. So I don't know how I'm supposed to come out of that, not thinking that she didn't know this was a thing.

• 19:28Alex Cranz?

  I came out of that thinking she was filibustering and trying to make fun of Julia for asking the question at all. Like, the way she looked to the audience after, she was like, did he say that or? And that's why I want to know, like, Neelai, you were there.

• 19:42Nilay Patel?

  She, okay, being in the room, Linda, I don't know. I, I don't know. I was in that room all day. And I would just say the room was packed. You know, a lot of things, if you ever go to a conference, like the, the composition of the room changes over the day. Cause people are like networking, they're like doing it, whatever. And like they're like doing work calls, whatever. Like this was packed and Linda got a lot of cheers, which. Like big cheers. Linda came with an entourage.

• 20:13David Pierce?

  Like the, like the Apple employees you hear cheering at an Apple event. This is like a small version of that.

• 20:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, there was just, there was an element in there that was weird. And I will say this, at the end, Julia got a standing ovation. This is a real thing that happened at the end of code, like. She deserved it. The conference ends, Linda leaves, Case and I walk back on stage. I literally said, holy shit. And then I said, Julia Borson, everyone. And Julia got a standing ovation from that crowd. That's awesome. So like, you know, when I say the composition of the room was, it was odd, but the people who were noisiest at the beginning were like the Linda people. Yeah. And so I think she thought the room was a lot warmer to her than it might have been. Played to the room a lot. Played to the room a lot, cause I think she had the sense of the room is really, was like on her side. So she kept looking at the room as though everyone agreed with her that this was bullshit. Yeah.

• 21:03Nilay Patel?

  And that was not the case. And the one example of that, which was absolutely the funniest thing that I've ever seen happen at code. And I've been, I've been going to this conference for a decade. She said, who wouldn't want Elon Musk by their side, running product? And like, there's just like, people just like burst into laughter.

• 21:19David Pierce?

  They start raising their hands.

• 21:20Nilay Patel?

  Cause it's a room full of product people. Like, what did I say at the beginning? What did I want code to be? I wanted the code to be about product. Who did we invite? Who did we put on the stage? Who did they bring? Product people. And they were like, no. And Julia was like, raise your hand if, and like.

• 21:38Nilay Patel?

  I was like, I cannot believe, like, you don't know, like, you don't know this is a room full of product people.

• 21:43Alex Cranz?

  That was a brutal moment.

• 21:44David Pierce?

  All right, that's enough of that.

• 21:45Nilay Patel?

  I could talk about this, by the way, for like maybe the rest of it.

• 21:48David Pierce?

  I know, which is precisely why it's enough of that. Let's.

• 21:50Nilay Patel?

  This is why I was like, I need to be the guest and not the host.

• 21:53David Pierce?

  Everybody should go. It's worth watching the whole interview. You're gonna get three minutes in and your whole body is gonna start to feel itchy because it is very uncomfortable.

• 22:01Nilay Patel?

  Imagine being in the room.

• 22:02Alex Cranz?

  It's like the first half of Never Been Kissed, which is the most excruciating movie.

• 22:06Nilay Patel?

  And then, just, just to make it about me for one second, very important, imagine being like, I have to go back out on the stage.

• 22:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, was holy shit a rehearsed line? Had you like stood backstage going, holy shit, holy shit, like, yeah.

• 22:20Alex Cranz?

  That's on the teleprompter, actually.

• 22:22Nilay Patel?

  Casey and I were just like holding hands. Like, what are we gonna do?

• 22:26David Pierce?

  That's great. But yeah, everybody, we'll put it in the show notes. You should go watch it. Go listen to it. It's, it's really interesting. Let's just blow through some of the actual, like, interesting product stuff that happened. To me, the Getty AI thing was one of the most interesting pieces of the whole show. Do you wanna, do you wanna just explain a little bit about that conversation and what we got from Craig Peters, the Getty CEO?

• 22:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so we had two conversations back to back that I really wanted to make sure we had back to back. It was Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, who is wonderful, and the CEO of Getty, Craig Peters, who is a firecracker.

• 22:56David Pierce?

  Which you wouldn't think for the Getty CEO, but like, kudos.

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but he's, he's a creative. Like, he manages thousands of photographers. Like, once you like put that together, you're like, oh, I get it, you know? So Getty is suing Stability AI, which makes stable diffusion. And the, you know, the lawsuit is what you think. It's whether training on copyrighted images is fair use. Stable diffusion is like some, I don't, I don't think it does this anymore, but like, for a while it would produce the Getty watermark in AI-generated images. And here he is like, come on, right? So, you know, everyone thinks that Stability is kind of a chaotic company. They refused to come on stage at Code. We'd invited them to, you know, respond to Craig, and they, they said no. Says a lot, but you know, Craig's entire thesis was like, you can build AI tools that

• 23:42Nilay Patel?

  don't step on other people's copyrighted stuff. And in fact, we have. And so, you know, they, they shut off their brand new product stuff at Code. They shut off their brand new AI image generator and we like had fun using it on stage. But his argument was this industry is stepping all over creatives and like what Getty makes is important to history and we need to like protect it and we need to build business models that protect it instead of just like racing headlong into devaluing it even further. And the reason I said I put the interviews back to back is because Kevin Scott is an author, he's an artist, he's a maker, he is a Renaissance fan, he's great, he can talk about anything. Microsoft has a $10 billion bet on it being fair use with OpenAI, right? Like, that's crazy. And so,

• 24:27Nilay Patel?

  you know, Kevin was like, a lot of people think this is fair use. And I was like, not everyone. And then we brought out Craig, which was really cool. So, listen to those two conversations back to back. They're all going to up in the decoder feed and they'll be on the verge YouTube. But that was the dynamic that I really put in front of everybody. Like, the industry has not figured out this huge problem at the center of AI. And we had, you know, we had Warner Music CEO, Robert Kinsel on stage, he's a former head of business at YouTube. Like, I'm not on the side of the music industry very often. I'm not on the side of big copyright very often, but you see this dynamic and it actually like shuffles the decks a little bit. And the Getty conversation in particular, I think, really brought us to the fore because they're making some of the technology too. They want to show that you can make the technology in the right way.

• 25:10David Pierce?

  That bit that he showed where he was basically like, we're in this race with, you know, OpenAI and Anthropic and Google where everybody's trying to do the biggest possible thing, right? Like, everybody brags about like the number of parameters in their model and how big the training set is. And it's like, everything is supposed to be this gigantic all purpose thing for everybody, for everything, forever. Like, AI is just Windows now, right? Like, it's huge. And then I thought, that was just why I thought Craig and the Getty stuff is so interesting because like, we can take this smaller corpus of data that is better, and we can actually make it work just as well, but more successfully for everyone involved. And I just think that's very cool.

• 25:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then somehow, inside of that, there's one more piece, one more turn that's super interesting there. And somehow, we will compensate the artists whose work is in the training data. And I was like, how? And he's like, we just are making it up.

• 26:01David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah, he was very honest about like, we only have half the answers.

• 26:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but he's like, right now, we're basically doing it on popularity. Like, if you're, it's like Spotify, the way Spotify works. So this was too weedsy to get into on the code stage, but the answer is like, we'll look at the proportion of images inside of the training data that people call up more often in the wider world of Getty. And then when people pay to generate images, we'll dole out fractions of a penny based on that sort of like underlying ranking, which is like, it is more like how Spotify works than anything, but it is not some incredible complicated algorithm about what training pixels were put. It's, it's more like, what's popular? You get more money, you know, and like, they're, they need to refine that.

• 26:47David Pierce?

  Um, the other one, Alex, you and I watched Casey Boyce together. What, what did, did we get anything from Casey that, that we thought was interesting? Casey Boyce runs HBO, is like a very important person. This happened right after the end of the writer's strike. So we had like new information. Peter Kafka interviewed him. They talked a little bit about that, a little bit about some other stuff. Like, what, what, what did we get from Casey that you thought was interesting?

• 27:08Alex Cranz?

  We got the True Detective season four trailer.

• 27:10David Pierce?

  Which looked sick.

• 27:10Alex Cranz?

  Just apparently very excited. Yeah. I think I was like texting you like, this is my personality for the next four months. Yeah. I think we just got his, his reinforcement of David Zaslove's kind of way of thinking out there, right? Like, he was talking a lot about how the, the cable bundle was back and it was going to be on, on these streaming services and that, like, he felt that was, that was good. And, and he wants to see that more. And, and then they talked a lot about this new show Naked Attraction that's on HBO Max, which is like, my, my sister-in-law had just texted me the night before about it and I'd never heard about it. And I was like, yes, I know what he's talking about because I just Googled this.

• 27:49Alex Cranz?

  And, and so he was kind of like defending the way that they're choosing what they put on HBO and what they, what they share as HBO versus Max versus Cartoon Network versus all HGTV and all of these other channels that are now part of, of the larger streaming ecosystem. And yeah, it was, it was mainly just like reinforcement of David Zaslove's kind of way of thinking. And that was nice. Like, it was interesting to see that because you're kind of like, well, how does, how does someone like Boyce think about it? And apparently very similarly.

• 28:19David Pierce?

  I don't know, Neil, what did you, what did you take away from it?

• 28:21Nilay Patel?

  That I think Casey Boyce is maybe one of the most powerful people at Warner Brothers Discovery and he knows it and David Zaslove knows it. And, you know, the, the stuff about HBO versus Max, like, he was just very calm and comfortable with it. You know, I, I saw Casey backstage and I was like, do you want me to ask you some more questions about HBO Max versus Max?

• 28:43Nilay Patel?

  But, you know, his, his thesis, his argument was that HBO by itself has never been a successful business in the history of HBO. Even when you think about people paying for HBO directly, he's like, people had a cable bundle and they would pay us extra money for HBO. And if we don't ride along with that cable bundle, that has never been a successful business for us. Is that a retcon? Maybe, you know, like, maybe, but it is historically true. And, you know, there's a new owner at the company and that is his thesis. That's very much has us a lot of things like what people want is 90 Day Fiance. And then sometimes they want True or Detective. It's not the other way around. And that is, uh, I think probably for our chat listeners don't feel that way, but have, have you ever been to America?

• 29:27Alex Cranz?

  Like, I think that's, I honestly, I do think that's true, right? Like, like, most people are watching, the reason you like HBO and the reason you like those things is that, like, Sunday night, you go watch HBO. But you were probably weren't watching HBO every single night of the week when you were watching TV channels. I mean, you could have been, but like, that was a very small population of folks and they could kind of be insufferable.

• 29:48Nilay Patel?

  Right. What are the dominant, like, from the golden age of television and the bundle? It's, but it's a bunch of network TV series. It's Friends, it's The Office, right? Like, and they're still dominant, which is crazy. So, yeah, you know, there, there was that, he talked a lot about HBO shows now appearing on Netflix again. And he was like, look, in, you know, the brass ring used to be syndication and we need to go back there. And we went through this weird period where everyone was trying to build their own little monopoly. And we've like, we've realized like, that's not the way. And I was like, I always knew that wasn't the way.

• 30:18Alex Cranz?

  No, no one's told Netflix, though.

• 30:21Nilay Patel?

  Right. Well, I, but Netflix is a different business. It's the only one that's successful, right? They, they fired like just cannon blasts of venture capital money into building their moat. And everyone else tried to do it and it like destroyed the industry along the way. Casey did talk about the strike, by the way, you know, just speaking of costs going up. And Peter asked him like, is the resolution of the strike and maybe the SAG strike going to bring your costs up? Uh, cause your labor costs are higher. And he was like, no. Which I think if I was in the writer's guilt or the screen actor's guilt, I'd be like, yeah, we told you so. By the way, here's all the disclosures. Our staff is unionized by the WGAE. Alex is in the WGAE. Comcast is one of our investors. Lynda Yaccarino doesn't like me very much.

• 31:02David Pierce?

  We made a Netflix show.

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  We made a Netflix show. I'm the EP of a Netflix show. Someone has asked us many times, that show was not, because it's documentary, it was not covered. What it, it's, what do you want from me, man?

• 31:13David Pierce?

  Neel is so tired.

• 31:14Nilay Patel?

  I'm the host of the Code Conference. I'm so tired.

• 31:17David Pierce?

  All right, let's do, we're gonna, I want to talk more about the writer's strike. We're gonna get to that in a little bit because it ended in some really interesting ways. We're gonna talk about that. Let's do two more just ultra-fast things about code and then get out of here. First, Neel, I am going to give you 65 seconds and no longer to talk about the Monarch Tractor CEO that you had on stage. Ready, go.

• 31:36Nilay Patel?

  The most important interview I did at Code was with Praveen Pemmatso, the CEO of Monarch Tractor. I opened that interview by saying, the entire human species is utterly dependent on tractors. And I saw Jake, like our deputy editor Jake, just start cracking. He's like, oh, Neel is on his bullshit again. It's true. It's a fact. Praveen just like blew the crowd away by talking about his tractors. So it's an EV tractor, it has a full sensor suite. They built it to be ultra-modular. All the sensor suite is in the roof of the tractor, which is just a handful of bolts and a couple of cables for power and data. And he's like, that is what we're gonna upgrade. Like, over time, we'll just sell you new roofs. Other people that have new roofs are, you know, they're the open ecosystem compared to John Deere. They're partnered with Case. Case is making tractors using

• 32:20Nilay Patel?

  their technology. Go watch it. He's like, we're the Android. Like, John Deere is the iPhone, closed, proprietary, hard to service. We're gonna be the open ecosystem. And the tractor's cool.

• 32:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, his line was, we're becoming the Android of agriculture, which is just an unbelievably cool and vergy sentence.

• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  And I will tell you this, I've talked a lot about the crowd in this room. They loved him by the end of this. They're like, oh, tractors are the shit. Like, one person was like, I'm gonna buy a tractor for my vineyard, which is the code audience.

• 32:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, I did a, I did a conference one time and basically just introduced a man and asked him, "So 3D printing houses, huh?" And he talked for like 20 uninterrupted minutes about all the cool things you can do when you can 3D print concrete houses. And it was the most excited room I've ever been in. Like, people love this stuff. It's awesome. The world runs on it. I agree.

• 33:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, technology and products, I'm telling you, it's the, that's, that's what code's all about.

• 33:11David Pierce?

  It's, it's the stuff. And then the other one was Artifact Mike Krieger, which I think I continue to think Artifact is interesting, but it's like a little kind of tiny thing, but they just launched Twitter at Code, right? Like, Mike Krieger was just like, "We're doing Twitter."

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  CEO, co-founder and co-founder of Instagram, launches Instagram. Yeah, it's like, I don't know what you want me to say, like, Krieger's great. He was literally coding, you know, Artifact's a tiny company. He was literally shipping code in our green room.

• 33:38David Pierce?

  That's awesome.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  And he was like, "This is so much better than being at the big company."

• 33:43Nilay Patel?

  So that was really fun. Yeah, go look, it's Twitter, right? It's posts. The only, the only real difference is you have to have a photo for some reason. There's a lot of Instagram DNA coming through. But, you know, what, what, what Mike Krieger has told me, what Kevin Systrom has told me, is they always launch Artifact with the goal of being something much bigger, with the goal of creating a much bigger corpus of machine learning data and doing more interesting things with it. And you can see, they started with, it's links on the web, it's a recommendation engine for webpages to, you can share links, so now you can just share your own content and we will recommend that to you. And they are building, they're building sort of like an AI-first social network. It's cool. And like, again, what, what, what am I hammering home here? Yes, there's the chaos. There was a lot of product conversation at Code.

• 34:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, an awful lot of, what products are we building? Why are we building them? What are the dependencies? On Nvidia, on GPUs, on other stuff that we need to overcome in order to build products. And to me, Mike was like the pinnacle of that moment because he was literally building the product in the green room before he walked out on stage.

• 34:46David Pierce?

  He was great. And then, okay, last one. You did not successfully get R. J. Scaringe, the CEO of Rivian, to talk shit about the Cybertruck, but I would say he made fairly clear that he thinks the Cybertruck is stupid. Would you agree with that assessment?

• 34:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you know, there's, um, the code name of Decoder is Neil I versus media training. You know, it's like, can I fight you to a draw? And like, sometimes I usually get to a draw, I think. Sometimes I win and that's.

• 35:10David Pierce?

  And then the Substack CEO gets in trouble.

• 35:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. Sometimes I win too much, honestly. But it's like, fine, it's a game and that's why CEOs come and do it because they're all type A. And it's, you know, it's a game that's set up to be winnable, like not to be unfair, but you know, you know, the questions are coming. And the reason I bring all that up is sometimes I can see the media training and the most devastating answer you can give inside of the media training is, well, that's a choice.

• 35:39David Pierce?

  As allowable answers go, that is the most damning one. Yeah.

• 35:44Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like, yeah, people are free to make that choice. We'll see what the market decides.

• 35:48David Pierce?

  Like, it's a real like bless their heart kind of response. Yeah.

• 35:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, if you know what that means. You're like, the one piece of news that's inside of there that was important and I hope sort of the EV community caught this. I asked him about the deal terms to use the Tesla charger because Rivian's using an ACS2. And he said, everyone thinks there's some like complicated data sharing agreement. There's these conspiracy theories out there and there is not. There is an agreement to use a charger and there's agreement to give us access to their network and that's it. So.

• 36:18David Pierce?

  There you go.

• 36:19Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what it's like for everybody else, but he was like, like everyone else, we thought the charger was better to use. The Biden administration did its thing. It's like some tax scheme that requires them to basically open up their network. And then everyone rushed in to use the charger in the network because the conditions were there for us to go make a deal on not on our terms.

• 36:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, fair enough. It was good stuff. There's a ton of good stuff coming out. We're gonna have a lot more. It'll be on the YouTube channel. It'll be on podcasts all over the network.

• 36:44Nilay Patel?

  I did ask him about the, the single wiper.

• 36:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was about to ask. Is that where he said bless your heart?

• 36:49Nilay Patel?

  No, that was, that was the second, it's a choice. I was like, do you think this triangle is going to destroy your business? And he was like, I don't know, man, don't. No, thank you. I was like, what about one big wiper? And he was like, many people have had to say, it's great.

• 37:01David Pierce?

  You can have as many wipers as you want, Elon. All right, we need to take a break and then we're gonna come back and Alex and I are gonna tell Neel about everything else that happened this week. We'll be right back.

• 37:16Speaker 00

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• 38:18David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's get to the other news of the week. Alex, I'm gonna give you the choice. Do you want to do the writer's strike first, or do you want to do Meta Connect first?

• 38:26Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, I kinda wanna do Meta Connect first. I think both are really important, but I wanna talk about some gadgets.

• 38:31David Pierce?

  All right, let's do Meta. Three big things from Meta Connect, big annual hardware event, the Quest 3 headset, the new smart glasses, and the just weird slew of AI stuff. Let's start with the headset.

• 38:45Nilay Patel?

  You don't wanna start with T-Pain?

• 38:47David Pierce?

  I'm not, I'm not ready for T-Pain. I need like a minute before we get to T-Pain, and Snoop Dogg, and Dwyane Wade pretending to be not Dwyane Wade, and I don't understand what any of that... Actually, you know what? Let's do that right now. I'm angry.

• 38:59Nilay Patel?

  I knew it. I knew it. It's like, do you want Tom Brady in your house not being Tom Brady?

• 39:04David Pierce?

  I don't. Yeah. Alex, will you just, will you just explain what Meta is doing with all these chatbots?

• 39:09Alex Cranz?

  Well, they assume you don't have any friends and that you need artificial intelligence to be chat, like your friend. Basically, it's a bunch of chatbots, but the chatbots are designed to look and sound like famous people. So there's like a Snoop Dogg Dungeon Master that they, he tried to demo on stage. It didn't work. That was kind of unfortunate. And that's basically the gist of it, right? Like these chatbots are meant to just replicate people and build these, like enhance those parasocial relationships you already have with celebrities. And I really, really, really, really encourage you to make more friends.

• 39:47Nilay Patel?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me, let me offer you the flip of, let me offer you the flip of this. So I was reading Casey's newsletter last night and he was writing about the new version of ChatGPT, which can actually speak to you. He can play these characters. It's multimodal, whatever. And he had this example in here, which I had not really considered, but he's like a teenager, a young trans teenager, wrote into Hard Fork and was like, I get affirmations every day from GPT. Like it's the thing that I talk to on this like, right? And I, and that's an earlier version. So I, there's, yeah. And his whole newsletter is basically like, we're on the cusp of this being, these relationships being realer. And like, there's all the Silicon Valley baggage. There's the endless conversation with the movie Her.

• 40:31Nilay Patel?

  All that stuff is in there, but he's like, there's something here that is worth paying attention to. And that kind of unlocked my brain when I was reading it. I don't know that I want to be talking to T-Pain about, you know, like, but there's something in there.

• 40:44David Pierce?

  What you just described is kind of the story of community on the internet since the beginning of the internet, right? Like,

• 40:49Nilay Patel?

  Actually, wait, I want to take this back. I want to be talking to T-Pain now that I'm very tired.

• 40:55Nilay Patel?

  But I just want it to be actual T-Pain. T-Pain rules. Like, I just, like, there's no, you should watch his podcast. He's amazing.

• 41:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, T-Pain is great. But no, I think the, the question of like, where is your community on the web is a really interesting and important one and is one people have been talking about for 25 years, right? Like, you go back far enough and there were people who were like, oh, these kids are talking to other people online. That's bad. And we've like come to realize that that's like, you, those relationships are real. And you, that stuff is real. And then it turns again, once it's an AI thing. And I think that changes the calculus a little bit. But there are versions of that that are good and valuable and useful. I just think this thing Meta is trying to do, which is not like build tools that are good and useful and sort of human, but like,

• 41:44David Pierce?

  make a thing that looks like Dwyane Wade that will like help me. Or like Snoop Dogg can be the DM for my Dungeons and Dragons games or like, random celebrities will help me cook, like, that to me feels like the uncanny valley of all of this, where it's just like, we're, we're not anywhere with that to me.

• 42:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think what left me kind of like cold on it, because I do think right now I'm trying to play Dungeons and Dragons for the very first time ever. And apparently it is very hard to get a bunch of people coordinated in a room. So like, apparently that Snoop Dogg thing is actually really, really good. If you play Dungeons and Dragons, that seems like a really compelling thing. But it just felt a lot like when, when Alexa started doing the voices. It felt, it feels like, like it, it just hit me that same way of like, this feels like the technology's not ready yet. So we're having to put like a celebrity layer on top of it to get you to engage.

• 42:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, this is like the meta thing. It's like we launched Threads. Here's a bunch of celebrities and, and then, and they've been backing into the, the func, the real functionality that will make it successful or not. I think that's this too.

• 42:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:51Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's what you want is I want to talk to Tom Brady. I don't think anyone's ready, let alone Tom Brady for like, you can just talk to me whenever you want. All right. And that's dangerous if you're a celebrity in a lot of ways, like whatever. But hey, come play a character and give life to a character that you can talk to with some personality. I think that's very safe. It's just playing a role, right?

• 43:13Alex Cranz?

  To Meta's credit, like, there's a big, there's like big K-pop groups that already do this, where you can go talk to an AI and it's, it's like programmed to kind of be like the, the K-pop star you like. So, so it's out there. This stuff exists already.

• 43:29Nilay Patel?

  K-pop is always on the bleeding edge of being really weird.

• 43:33David Pierce?

  Yeah. Also, Alex, if you just spoke A-pop as AI-pop into existence, I'm going to be furious.

• 43:39Alex Cranz?

  AI-pop, it's coming. A-pop.

• 43:40Nilay Patel?

  Go watch, we have it on our site. It's in a quick post. It's on

• 43:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:45Nilay Patel?

  T-Pain's Instagram, or it's on T-Pain's TikTok. Go watch the video. It's very strange.

• 43:48David Pierce?

  But I do think the more interesting piece of the AI thing is the, is the Meta AI chatbot that they're putting out and putting into basically all of their messaging platforms. You'll be able to get it everywhere you use Meta products. And it's essentially ChatGPT, like they're just turning on ChatGPT inside of Meta products.

• 44:05Nilay Patel?

  No, it's, ChatGPT is OpenAI. They've turned, this is their own model.

• 44:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, but it's like functionally, it's the same, like the, the goal is the same.

• 44:11Nilay Patel?

  They think it's better.

• 44:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:13Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if it's better.

• 44:14David Pierce?

  I don't know if it's better either.

• 44:15Alex Cranz?

  We've heard some people say it is. We've heard some people say it is, and we'll just have to find out.

• 44:20David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they're big on Llama, which is their large language model. Like there's this three-headed triangle now, like Amazon just made this big investment in Anthropic. They're going to do some really interesting stuff over time. Microsoft and OpenAI are obviously together. Google is doing its own thing and now Meta is doing its own thing. And like this race is getting real and really expensive and really high stakes for all four of these companies really fast.

• 44:44Alex Cranz?

  And they're doing art generation too. It's not just, it's not just words. Like there's going to be a bunch of stickers where you can just like make something up and do that. And that I'm actually very excited about because like the possibility for trolling my friends is extraordinarily high when I can just make AI generate horrible art for me.

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can I say some like deeply divergent chassis thing about that?

• 45:04Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 45:05David Pierce?

  What is a sticker?

• 45:06Nilay Patel?

  What is a sticker? The reason that stickers and memes and reaction gifs and all that stuff is powerful is because they have shared meaning.

• 45:15David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 45:16Nilay Patel?

  Right? So like you, you're like, here's a gif and like, it means something and it carries a whole layers and layers of meaning when you share it with a friend in response to something else. I'm going to AI generate some stuff for you de novo, like over and over again, does not carry that meaning. It's just you talking. It's just you being like, I made up words.

• 45:35Alex Cranz?

  You say that, but if you make a horrible enough one, it can be a meme.

• 45:40Nilay Patel?

  No, it's true. It's just like, I don't want to, there's a part of this where it's like endlessly customizing everything. Actually detracts from how we communicate.

• 45:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, fractures, the fractures, the communication.

• 45:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's just like, it's at the dumbest level. It's like, now I have to explain all my jokes to you. Like, I made up a joke and I have to explain it to you instead of repeating it or riffing on a thing that already exists is. I know, I know we got some PhDs in our audience who are full of this information. Our, our co-founder and friend, Dieter Bone, deep into semiotics, like the, the meaning of meaning. That it, this is it. It's like right in there. It's like, what if the AI is making up ways for you to communicate? That the person on the other end has no context for.

• 46:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 46:25Nilay Patel?

  And but like it, it's stickers, like it's fine. People aren't going to use them. That's what I'm trying to get at is like, if you don't, if you don't get to free ride on the history of meaning, like the stickers are just silly stickers.

• 46:37David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, there's a big giant, like huge cultural question and all of that, right? This, everything is becoming endlessly personalized versus we need things that everyone understands in order to communicate about them. Which is why the office is so useful. I realized the other day that like, most of the screenshots in, on my phone are gifs from the office that I just use for infinite purposes all the time. There's a why are you the way that you are gif that I just use 50 times a day. And people understand it. It's great. It's very helpful.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  Do you know those people whose entire personality is as movie quotes?

• 47:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:08Nilay Patel?

  Like, they're not going to be out there generating stickers.

• 47:11Alex Cranz?

  They're a dying breed because we don't share that cult. Like, everybody watches their own things now. So that shared culture is, is dying down to Barbie movie, which is great. The Barbie movie is wonderful, but like fewer places.

• 47:23David Pierce?

  You're saying people don't run around quoting Oppenheimer to each other all day?

• 47:26Alex Cranz?

  Why not? What's up with that?

• 47:27Nilay Patel?

  I am become deaf.

• 47:30Nilay Patel?

  That's, I'm just going to start sending that to the Verge staff every day.

• 47:35David Pierce?

  I love it. Alex, tell me about the Quest 3. Tell me, Eli, about the Quest 3. We've been wondering about this thing. We kind of knew what it was.

• 47:42Alex Cranz?

  Eli, it's cool.

• 47:43David Pierce?

  What are we, what's going on?

• 47:45Nilay Patel?

  It looks bananas. Like, I was looking at the photo, Addie wearing this thing, and I was like, I don't know.

• 47:50Alex Cranz?

  I love it. Like, we were talking about this in Slack the other day, and people were like, I hate it, it looks alien. And I'm like, that's exactly why I love it. Because it looks kind of alien. It's got, it's got these three, like, little ovals on the front. And they look kind of like the iPhone X camera module. So it looks like they slapped three of those on there, which feels very like old fashioned and kind of, oh. I've seen that before, but then somehow.

• 48:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, this is in the service of room tracking, of pass-through.

• 48:17Alex Cranz?

  It's $500. It's got dual 2064 by 2208 pixels. So it's a much higher resolution than the previous one, which was only 1832 by 1920. Like, it's going to be a little sharper. And it's got the, the second generation of the Snapdragon XR2 processor. And that's where a lot of the big stuff changes. So I think, like, probably the most notable thing, and the thing that Addie talked about in her hands-on, was that the graphics are better on this thing. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's, things are sharper. The resolution's a little higher. Sean was very excited.

• 48:54Nilay Patel?

  No one else has this frame of reference because zero people bought a Quest Pro. But I have one. Is it better than the Quest Pro or worse than the Quest Pro? Because Quest Pro is pretty good.

• 49:02Alex Cranz?

  Probably about better.

• 49:03Nilay Patel?

  The software is better than the hardware is.

• 49:05David Pierce?

  It's, yeah, from a, from a pure, like, display quality perspective, it's better than the Quest Pro.

• 49:12Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 49:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's actually, it's the highest res thing they've made, including the Quest Pro. The, the ongoing existence of the Quest Pro does not make any sense.

• 49:22Nilay Patel?

  So what we should note here is that Alex Heath interviewed Zuckerberg on our site for, in the Decoder feed. And I think he asked him the Quest Pro, and Zuck was like, I had it. Yeah.

• 49:32David Pierce?

  We just had a bunch around. We had to ship a. But no, it's very clear that this is the one

• 49:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:38David Pierce?

  that Meta would like to sell you. I mean Zuckerberg kept saying, and even Andrew Bosworth, the CTO afterwards, kept saying, this is the first mainstream mixed-reality headset. Like, that is their phrase, right? And they're coming after Apple's Vision Pro in a really big way. They made a bunch of jokes about how it doesn't have a cable or a battery pack.

• 49:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:55David Pierce?

  Which is honestly like a really good burn of the Vision Pro.

• 49:58Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 49:58David Pierce?

  It's also not $3,500, so that's good. But that is, that is the pitch that they are making. They're like, this is the one. It's not finished. This is not where we're ultimately headed. Ultimately, where we're headed, I think they think, is, is these smart glasses, which we should also talk about. But this is the one that is for regular humans now.

• 50:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's the end of this form factor, right? Or like the best version of this form factor you can get right now.

• 50:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly. And I think they continue to struggle to make the case for why people would want this. Like, a lot of what they talked about was video games. They have more games, they have better games, there's stuff to do. But then they occasionally just throw in, you know, Meta Quest for business, but don't really explain that. They're just like, you can have it if you want it for business. That's, that's all we know about that. They talk a little bit about it as an entertainment device, which I think is interesting. Like, they, they show the same screenshot that everybody shows, which is just like, you can watch, instead of watching one NBA game, you can watch seven NBA games on virtual screens.

• 50:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:59David Pierce?

  And that is like extremely my shit. But like, I didn't get the sense that there is some sort of brand-new, life-changing use case for this. It just seems like between pass-through, better screens, and just sort of an overall better experience of using the thing.

• 51:15Nilay Patel?

  That's great, though. I just want to be like, going from the iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4 and getting a retina display is like, great.

• 51:20David Pierce?

  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And, and I've, a bunch of us got a demo of this. I, mine was relatively short, but I still got to play a couple of the games and stuff. It is, I mean, leaps and bounds better than the Quest 2. Like, the, the pass-through is, is not perfect. It's a little sort of, it's a little sort of warpy. Like, the floor was moving a little bit.

• 51:41Alex Cranz?

  But it's better than the Pro.

• 51:42David Pierce?

  Oh, better than the Pro, way better than the Quest 2, which is like black and white and essentially doesn't actually work as pass-through. Not as good as the demo I got at the Vision, of the Vision Pro, but that was super controlled. Who knows what that'll be like in real life. Uh, but yeah, this is a massive improvement over the Quest 2. Whether it will make people who didn't care about headsets care about headsets. To me is still the open question, right? Like, that's what I don't know. But if you're a person who cares about headsets, gigantic upgrade.

• 52:07Alex Cranz?

  I kind of think it didn't sell itself well enough. Like, like, talking to Addy, talking to you, talking to people who got to actually try the thing, was much more compelling to me than watching the actual keynote about the product.

• 52:20Nilay Patel?

  I think this is going to be true for every VR headset, including the Vision Pro, forever.

• 52:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And well, that's just very interesting to me because Addy like told me about it and she's like, oh yeah, the pasers is way, way, way better. And I was like, oh dang, I kind of want it just for that. That sounds really cool. And then I don't see any of that on stage. And I'm like, well, I'm glad Addy told me.

• 52:40David Pierce?

  It really is. One of the great unsolved problems of VR is how to show someone what you're seeing in VR in a way that looks at all compelling. Because your options are either like, show it on the two screens, ones for each eye, which just doesn't make any sense to anybody. Or you just show it like a like slightly low res television. It's like, this doesn't mean anything to anybody. And I've been hearing this from people in this space for like damn near a decade now, that they're like, when we put this on someone's head, they get it.

• 53:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:08David Pierce?

  And until you put it on someone's head, it is so hard to explain what it is about it that works.

• 53:14Nilay Patel?

  The only things I've ever seen, you know, there's people who play Beat Saber and they fill entire green screen rooms. And so like they're doing like real life overlays.

• 53:24David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 53:24Nilay Patel?

  They, everyone's just got to do that. That's, that's my feeling. But the problem is like so many things are like sitting and using a computer. Like Quest for Business is like, now you'll use Excel. And it's like, this sucks.

• 53:36David Pierce?

  Yes. Yeah, very large Excel.

• 53:38Alex Cranz?

  And the price doesn't, I think the big problem is the price doesn't help. Like, one of the reasons the Quest 2 was so compelling was you were like, wow, I can get this for $300 when it was first announced, right? And they've now dropped that price back down to $300 after like a brief time of increasing the price. So little, little wave there. And that was really compelling. Like, I went out and bought it the day it was announced because I was like, that price is so low. I didn't get the $300 one. I spent more money. But I was still like, wow, I'm getting such a deal. This is great. And then this one is still $500. That's the same price as a PS5 or an Xbox.

• 54:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. This is very hard to justify as an impulse purchase at Christmas. The way that I think a lot of Quest 2s got sold is sort of like, what tech present am I buying the kids for Christmas? Because it was like, that the lower number.

• 54:26Alex Cranz?

  And I think that's gonna harm adoption because because of that fact that you have to put it on, you have to try it, or you have to know somebody who has to really be compelled by it.

• 54:36Nilay Patel?

  Or actually, I think what makes it even harder is it's like not a console generation, right? It's not PS4 to PS5. A lot of people have Quest 2s because of what happened last Christmas and the Christmas before it.

• 54:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, oh, that's just sitting on the shelf.

• 54:50David Pierce?

  Although, I don't know, I think this one is going to be a little bit tough because I think the the Quest 3 is going to make the Quest 4 a console generation. Because what it's gonna do, like, everybody's gonna spend the next year building actually usable mixed reality stuff, because for the first time, it's worth doing. Like, the pass-through stuff is good enough.

• 55:10Nilay Patel?

  And the Vision Pro is there.

• 55:11David Pierce?

  Right. And so we're now going to get to a point where there is an actual generation of stuff to do that takes advantage of this tech. Whereas right now, it's like, a lot of the reason for the mixed reality is, and they even pitch it this way, so that like, I can find my coffee cup or look at my phone without taking my headset off, which is useful. It's a bad reason to buy a product. And so there just hasn't, they need the thing. And that will come. And it can come now, which is really exciting. But I think it's gonna make, it's gonna make the selling point for next year's model much easier. But I don't know how much it does for like, right now.

• 55:46Alex Cranz?

  Do you think it'll be next year's model? Or do you think they'll wait a few years? That's the problem is. I don't think they're, I think they're still at console level, not at phone level in encouraging upgrade cycles. And I think if they release a new one next year, it's just going to be like, well, why, like, at what point do I actually invest in this very expensive thing that isn't always reliably backwards compatible, that is like growing each year by these leaps and bounds? Shouldn't I just wait until next year? Shouldn't I just wait until next year? Shouldn't I just wait for another price drop? But I think they need to be a little more thoughtful about how they're marketing this thing and pricing it. But I still also kind of want one.

• 56:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 56:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's about right. And I think that's like the best case scenario for them.

• 56:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's like Christmas, somebody gives me like a little Best Buy gift card. I'm like,

• 56:33Nilay Patel?

  somebody wants to throw me 500 bucks, you know, maybe I'm buying a question.

• 56:37Alex Cranz?

  Spend it. Spend it, not on Legos.

• 56:39David Pierce?

  It seems clear that what Meta did here was say, we have to stop building the best possible cheap thing and just build a thing that's really good and then charge what we have to. I think Apple went the same route to like the nth degree, but Meta has been on this path and like Snap has been doing this and others have been doing this where they're like, these things have to be cheap. They have to be impulse buys. You have to be able to buy them for Christmas and we're going to make them as good as we can and they'll get better and better over time. And that hasn't really worked because it's still not possible to make a really good one for that price. I don't have any reporting to back this up, but I would bet good money that this hardware is not going to be earth shatteringly

• 57:18David Pierce?

  high margin for Meta. These things are expensive to build and hard to build. And I think Meta was smart to say, like, this is the bar for what quality is and we just have to charge what it costs to build this and let that get cheaper over time as opposed to like hoping quality goes up over time, because that I just don't think has worked so far.

• 57:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:40Alex Cranz?

  It looks cool, though.

• 57:41Nilay Patel?

  And this is, by the way, we should talk about the Heath interview with Zuck. Zuck makes this point, right? Like making things smaller and cheaper is actually very hard. And he, there's a, we can even watch the, we should go watch the whole thing. It's great. But we have a TikTok up where he's like, people are impressed by the pyramids, but it's actually small things.

• 57:59David Pierce?

  Beginning of his History Channel show.

• 58:01Nilay Patel?

  Uh, one more thing I want to, I want to bring up out of the Heath interview. The Heath interview is great. Mark is super loose, uh, super relaxed. Talks a lot about building products. Actually, he's relaxed about two things. It's building products. He's like back in builder mode and he's like, this is what's great. Like the last few years I've needed to be like this first amendment scholar statesman person, but like now I'm building shit again. And he can tell how loose and then he's super loose. When he talks about beating people up.

• 58:26Alex Cranz?

  So loose.

• 58:27Nilay Patel?

  Loves it. Just loves hitting a guy. And that's like, great. It's like, this is the most personality. But he loves like MMA as a sport, not just like street fight. Just be clear. I'm very tired.

• 58:39Alex Cranz?

  He's just out there punching people on the street.

• 58:41Nilay Patel?

  But he like talks about it and he talks about how the skill and discipline and they're like, you can see he's relaxed. Like he's back in his zone as opposed to Senator, we sell ads, you know, like, um, and there's a lot of talking about the quest three and building that and what they've learned and all this stuff. There's a lot of talking about building threads and how excited that's made him. And one more confirmation that they are definitely going to decentralize and federate threads, which I think is really cool.

• 59:06David Pierce?

  Yeah. And he made the case you would hope he would make, which is that like, we think that the future of social, we have to give people confidence that these things are going to be around. And it's like, yes, Mark, where have you been for 20 years?

• 59:19Nilay Patel?

  Right. He's like, we've thought about doing a Facebook, but Facebook is too complicated. So you have to do it from the beginning, which is like, cool, you know?

• 59:24David Pierce?

  And true. Like, I think that's a re like re-architecting Facebook for Activity Pub is probably not possible. It's just, yeah.

• 59:33Alex Cranz?

  Can we talk about the coolest part of the meta connect?

• 59:36David Pierce?

  Was it how ripped Mark Zuckerberg was? I said it like three times as we were sitting, watching the live stream. Like I cannot believe how shredded this dude is.

• 59:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Like we, I think we were all just quietly slacking each other, just being like, yo. Wow.

• 59:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Sucks you out.

• 59:50Alex Cranz?

  It was the glasses. The glasses were something that I think hearing about them, it was the opposite of the quest three. Somebody would tell me about the quest three and I'd be like, oh, that sounds really, really cool. But I'd watch the demo and I'd be like, that's eh. And then this one, I'd watch the demo for the glasses and be like, eh. And then they talk about the glasses. I was like, actually, these they sound cool. Like, I want these glasses.

• 1:00:10David Pierce?

  Convince me. I have been back and forth on this a million times. Smart glasses to me are either a thing that everyone should have immediately or an objectively stupid idea that just should not exist. And I genuinely go between them 10 times a day. Convince me they're cool.

• 1:00:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I do too, because I have to wear glasses and I don't want to go like, get new lenses for these $300 frames, which is probably the same price as most frames anyway. Like, that price isn't that different. But they were good looking. And then the woman that did the presentation for him was like, had such good energy.

• 1:00:42David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:42Alex Cranz?

  She was so excited to be there and talk about these glasses that I was like, are they really awesome? These seem awesome. And I think it was like the camera. It was just like the way the cameras work. The camera is much higher quality than it has been previously. I don't think I, I can't think of a practical use case for these glasses. Because they've got, they got audio in them. So, so you'll be able to hear stuff and you'll be able to like, use your phone to ask it. You can ask it questions and the responses will pop up on your phone. And that seems like kind of cool and moving towards that mixed reality thing. And then it's got the, the cameras that will, that will like, stream to threads and stream to Instagram and do all of that. And that seems really, really cool. And I don't think I actually want to be that connected to other people.

• 1:01:27Alex Cranz?

  But at the same time, part of me was like, but don't I?

• 1:01:31David Pierce?

  So this is actually the exact

• 1:01:33Alex Cranz?

  It's weird.

• 1:01:34David Pierce?

  tension that I have been feeling too. And Neil, I've been wondering all week about you because I remember when you first had a kid. One of the things that you did pretty quickly was buy a point and shoot camera. Because you were like, I want to take a lot of pictures. I want to document a lot of stuff, but I don't want to have my phone in front of my face all the time for lots of obvious reasons. And that is the exact use case that all of these companies make for smart glasses. Like, there are kids in the demo reel for every single one of these. Right? Because like, you can have both hands, you can swing your kid around, whatever. But you, you are less, there's not so much of a thing between you and especially not a thing that is otherwise trying to grab your attention.

• 1:02:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's one thing between you and your kid. You're wearing sunglasses.

• 1:02:16Alex Cranz?

  You can get them in regular frames.

• 1:02:18David Pierce?

  You can get them with prescription lenses.

• 1:02:21Nilay Patel?

  There's like, there's, there's one thing.

• 1:02:22David Pierce?

  You can get transition lenses. My dad wears transitions. They're fine.

• 1:02:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, your dad and like every fourth grader who just got their first pair of glasses. I was that child. That boy was me. It was not cool, my friends. Everyone, someone please go to fourth grades across the country and tell these children.

• 1:02:40David Pierce?

  This is, this is Joey Slater that I will not tolerate. Sorry, Dad.

• 1:02:44Alex Cranz?

  I had an adult person try to help me to get transition glasses recently.

• 1:02:50Nilay Patel?

  No, it's fine. Once you've like achieved in life.

• 1:02:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's okay.

• 1:02:54Nilay Patel?

  You can have transition.

• 1:02:54David Pierce?

  I see, okay.

• 1:02:55Alex Cranz?

  That's what, that was, that was the case made to me. They're like, no, no, you're, you're, you can do it now. You're an adult.

• 1:03:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like your children are at the house. You're married. You got a grandkid. You're like, yeah, just take a load off, bro. Just have sunglasses ready to go. When you're in fourth grade, it's not, just tell the children.

• 1:03:12Alex Cranz?

  They're just gray all the time. These little kids in gray lenses.

• 1:03:17Nilay Patel?

  So weird. 1980s and Wisconsin. Anyway, yes, this is your argument. The problem is the camera's not any good. But my RX 100 is a great camera. That's why I bought it. My iPhone is a extremely complicated philosophical quandary of a camera. That's why I have it. This is like, I'll have it. I'll get my hands back, but I'm going to take shittier photos. Who doesn't love 12 megapixel, single, non HDR photos?

• 1:03:42Alex Cranz?

  People love it more than five megapixels, which was the previous one.

• 1:03:46Nilay Patel?

  But sure, and I'm sure I haven't seen the photos, but that's always, to me, it's like, you know, what's the, the phrase? The best camera is the one you have with you. I always have an amazing camera with me.

• 1:03:56Alex Cranz?

  Your glasses.

• 1:03:57Nilay Patel?

  Right. I, I, my glasses, my transition lenses. I know, I, my phone's around, you know? And I, I bought a really nice camera so I could divest myself of the phone. But I don't think having a more convenient camera. I don't know. Maybe I haven't seen the photos. I haven't like used the thing. Again, blind reacts to the right hand glasses, but you know, I, I don't know. Like it's, it's more technology. And when I was, what David, to your point, I was after less.

• 1:04:27David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I think, I think to me, like, it's very clear that Meta does not see these smart glasses as like the endpoint of smart glasses. Right? Like at the end of Connect, Mark Drucker got up and did the like, almost sort of Steve Jobs impression of like, you know, when he was like, it's a widescreen iPod. It's a phone. It's an internet communicator. And he was like, he showed it. He was like, we have the Quest 3 headset. We have all this AI communication stuff and then we have smart glasses. And the case he made is that like the end state of this is that the first two things, the Quest and the AI stuff are going to end up in the glasses. Right? Like he's like, this is the form factor and we're going to pull this stuff into it over time.

• 1:05:08David Pierce?

  And I don't know how long that's going to take or if that's ever going to happen, but I believe them that that's the vision. And I think the question we've been asking for a bunch of years now is like, is there anything interesting along the way? And to me, just purely from a personal perspective, the cameras don't do anything for me, partly because I think the like real world creepiness factor is still really real and I don't, I don't know how to sort through that. Very high. Yeah. It's just like, even just like walking around, like if you just walk around a city, just holding up your phone, like you might be taking a pic. You're going to creep people out, right? It's like whether or not you're actually doing anything, it feels bad. And so I have not sorted through how to deal with that.

• 1:05:46David Pierce?

  But I do think the, uh, the thing I'm most excited to see about these glasses is whether the mic and headphones are good. Because it's essentially, they're trying to do this like personal audio speaker thing where you can hear it, but nobody else can. It has five mics in the glasses, including one on your nose that's supposed to do a better job of picking up your voice, which makes sense. If that works, that's pretty cool. I don't like being a person who wears AirPods all the time. I would like to be a person who wears AirPods less. And so if that's the kind of thing that I can use, like if I'm out on a walk or whatever, that's compelling to me. But also like it's whatever it's 250 bucks. Am I going to buy? I don't wear glasses anyway.

• 1:06:29David Pierce?

  If I already wore glasses, I think I would be slowly talking myself into this. But as somebody who doesn't otherwise wear glasses, that's a big leap.

• 1:06:37Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's, that's why I'm like, ooh, like, maybe I should get a pair of these the next time I go get my prescription updated.

• 1:06:45David Pierce?

  I mean, a pair of Wayfarers is like $165. You're not that far away to add all this other stuff.

• 1:06:51Nilay Patel?

  We're all learning an important lesson about the amount of margin contained in a pair of Wayfarers.

• 1:06:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, maybe this is gonna drop, start dropping the prices of regular glasses.

• 1:07:01Nilay Patel?

  I only buy $20 sunglasses because I lose them and I think I've, I just realized that came to my conclusion.

• 1:07:06David Pierce?

  Same. I bought one nice pair of sunglasses and I said, if I lose these within a year, I'm never allowed to buy nice sunglasses again. I lost them in three days.

• 1:07:15David Pierce?

  I don't, they're just gone. And so now I buy, I buy $15 sunglasses like four times a year. It's great.

• 1:07:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:21Alex Cranz?

  I bought prescription sunglasses. I have had them 10 years. The prescription's no longer accurate, but I still have the glasses.

• 1:07:27Nilay Patel?

  Perfect.

• 1:07:28Alex Cranz?

  I probably shouldn't drive with them. It's fine.

• 1:07:31Nilay Patel?

  I will just say this, here, you know, everyone thinks this is a form factor. Apple thinks this is a form factor. What the most compelling applications that are being built in the space are all virtual reality applications, even Apple, right? When you look at their demos, it's like your courtside at the NBA or like there's a dinosaur eating you or whatever. They're all VR applications. There are no compelling mixed reality or AR applications yet.

• 1:07:53Alex Cranz?

  Because they haven't figured out the privacy.

• 1:07:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, sure, but they just, they can't even demo, even my demo, my killer app, I will pay any amount of money for it, right? Just show me people's names. I was just at this conference, the amount of time I spent squinting at people's badges, which is just really a weird thing to do. By the way, if you're ever hosting a conference, make the names bigger on the badges. That's my one note. And now that I'm a conference host, well, the font sizes next year are gonna be bananas. It's, it's out of control.

• 1:08:20Nilay Patel?

  Huge. Everyone's gonna carry around like yard signs with their name on them. Uh, this is my killer app. This is the thing I want the most. Faces and names. It's incredibly difficult to do in a privacy centric way. You might have to build a worldwide facial recognition database. All very hard. Even that, right? That, it's not built because of those problems, but it's the killer app for AR. No one can do it. All of the ones are building along the way are VR. And that is in conflict with our belief about what the form factor will be because you have to block out the world in to do VR well. And a pair of glasses does not by definition does not do that. And I was having dinner with a friend at the conference and they're like, oh yeah, but we'll just like do the things on the sides.

• 1:09:04Nilay Patel?

  And I'm like, what kind of like Mad Max like bullshit are you trying to sell me right now?

• 1:09:10Alex Cranz?

  Gotta know you looked just looked like you had cataracts surgery.

• 1:09:13Nilay Patel?

  No, that you're gonna look like Will.i.am in a like early 2000s music video. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

• 1:09:18Alex Cranz?

  She's a bad look. Don't do that.

• 1:09:21Nilay Patel?

  So I'm just saying, like, all of the best applications that we're building are VR applications and everyone thinks the form factor will will make those applications go away. Unless you saw this like block out the world and like, I don't, that's weird. There, there's a tension there that I think, like you said, David, we're figuring out if there's anything interesting along the way. The thing that's interesting to me along the way is the absolute tension between what's why you would put a computer on your face and the form factor of whatever it wants that computer to be.

• 1:09:50David Pierce?

  Or has to be at the right. We're very much in the like, you know, 1990s desktop tower PC thing where the only version of it weighs a thousand pounds and has to live on your wood Office Max setup. Please keep sending us your old desk setups. We love them so much.

• 1:10:05Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna make a coffee table book. I want to be clear about this. This is my goal. It's a coffee table book called Computer Rooms. And then we're going to retire and we're going to buy a boat and that book and that boat will be called The Computer Room. And I've just been thinking about this plan the whole time.

• 1:10:21David Pierce?

  I love it. All right, we need to take one more break and then we're going to come back. We're going to talk about the writer's strike real quick and then we're going to do a little lightning round and then we're going to get out of here. We'll be right back.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

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• 1:11:37David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Alex Krantz, tell us about the end of the writer's strike. It ended this week kind of out of nowhere, it seemed like.

• 1:11:45Alex Cranz?

  Well, we knew that negotiations seemed to be reaching a conclusion. Everybody was starting to get kind of excited about whatever contract was coming. Contract is out now. The Guild still has to vote on it. So both the Writers Guild of America, East and West, both of them still have to vote on it. Everybody's still reading over it. They released a summary Tuesday night. And then the next day, they released the actual contracts. You can go and if you want to, you can go pour through the whole thing. We have like a little summary of it up on the website as well. And there's a lot of big stuff in it. They got almost everything they wanted as far as AI goes. So there's a lot of AI protections in it. You're not going to be able to go ask AI to come up with a plot and then take that

• 1:12:30Alex Cranz?

  to a writer and make a writer write it. And then you keep the rights to that story. You're not going to be able to do that. The writer will maintain the rights to the story because AI's cannot. AI-generated content cannot have rights according to this contract, which is probably good. I think that was really exciting. I know I spoke to a few writers who were really, really excited about that part of it and excited to just have that protection that helps maintain the status quo. And then the thing that's really going to change the status quo is the data. There's now going to be data that the Writers Guild is going to receive from these streamers, like Netflix, Amazon, all these people who've been super, super opaque about their data. They're not going to be able to be opaque with the Writers Guild itself.

• 1:13:14Alex Cranz?

  A lot of that data is not going to come to the rest of us. Because it's, you know, they still don't want everybody to know their numbers, but the writers guild will be able to release it in aggregate. And the fact that the numbers are even going to be out there just changes things. Like, it's a town. People talk. People are gonna know those numbers.

• 1:13:32David Pierce?

  That seems like the bet, right? I was listening to an interview with Adam Conover, who's a writer who's on the negotiating committee for the Guild. And I forget who he was talking to. I wish I could cite the podcast I was listening to. But he basically was like, if you reporters want the number, maybe you should make a journalists' union and go fight with studios. I don't care about you. I'm trying to get numbers for my people. But then, what he basically said is like, between the numbers that are going to get reported to the Guild and the fact that this business is shifting towards advertising, like, we're just gonna start to know more. It's, they're just, the numbers are going to be reported to more people. People talk. It's gonna start to be out there in much bigger ways. And I think that's true. But it does seem like, like, there was some rubric they invented for, like,

• 1:14:16David Pierce?

  total hours watched of something. It's like, we're still inventing the new numbers of what all of these things mean.

• 1:14:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're still new numbers. But I think because they're enshrined in a contract, they'll probably start to stabilize as the new numbers, right? We talked about that on the podcast earlier this week. And the numbers, they've always been fake. They've always been not real. And everybody just agreed, okay, these not real numbers are the ones we're gonna use. And so now we have new numbers that are probably the most realistic numbers we've had for streaming or broadcast television, if I'm being honest. Like, these are numbers that, like, are very, very trackable, very understood. And they're different. It's total hours of something streamed, I think, is it? And that's like, kinda goofy. But it's a real number, you know?

• 1:15:05Alex Cranz?

  But it does mean that, like, if 300 million people watch the first 15 minutes of something, that could be the same as if one person watches it 300 billion times. Which is a real, very real possibility, because there are some weirdos out there.

• 1:15:19David Pierce?

  Like Alex Krantz.

• 1:15:20Alex Cranz?

  I was like, me.

• 1:15:23Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of K-pop fans, I have an important piece of information.

• 1:15:26Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:15:26Nilay Patel?

  So one of our sponsors at Code was Luminate, which formerly Nielsen Scan Scan. They do the Billboard charts. So I was talking to them, hanging out. It was really fun. They did a session. And they were talking about how they measure things. Did you know that at the platform level, if you stream something more than 50 times in a day, doesn't count? Because of K-pop fans.

• 1:15:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45David Pierce?

  You just tap out at 50?

• 1:15:46Nilay Patel?

  Yep, that's it. If you're more than 50 times a day, they're like, that's, you didn't do it.

• 1:15:50David Pierce?

  But do you get the 50?

• 1:15:51Nilay Patel?

  I don't, that's proprietary weirdness.

• 1:15:56David Pierce?

  Interesting.

• 1:15:56Nilay Patel?

  Like, if you talk to the people who measure things, Luminate, which makes the charts with Billboard, yeah, they're like, yep, there's, at the platform level, we, like, K-pop fans are like our antagonists.

• 1:16:09David Pierce?

  So everything you love, you can only stream 49 times a day?

• 1:16:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and then, and then there's still some, like, algorithmic re-normalization. And I think this is now coming. This is my thesis, like, whatever happens to music industry happens to everyone else five years later. This is now going to come to streaming television. Because if you're a writer, or you have a fandom, and there's going to be an aggregate number that everyone agrees on, you're, you're necessarily going to go try to game that number.

• 1:16:37Alex Cranz?

  They, I mean, fans already do that. Like, if they think their show's-

• 1:16:40Nilay Patel?

  But there's no transparency, right?

• 1:16:41Alex Cranz?

  Right, yeah, yeah. Right, right now, it was kind of like, we're working because it showed up in the Netflix top 10. And we're working because some, some company did analysis and said-

• 1:16:50Nilay Patel?

  And boy, to show you up in the Netflix top 10, not guarantee you a goddamn thing.

• 1:16:53Alex Cranz?

  Nothing.

• 1:16:54Nilay Patel?

  Cancelled in the middle of the first episode.

• 1:16:58David Pierce?

  Yeah, but not only that, I mean, the platforms also have, you know, 100 thumbs to put on the scale at any given time. Like, the, the, what Netflix chooses to show you in that big banner when you open the app is very meaningful.

• 1:17:11Nilay Patel?

  And the top 10 is like very localized. Like, here's the top 10 things in your house. It's the show that you were the EP of. You're like, oh, this is all-

• 1:17:17Alex Cranz?

  It's always the shows that they've already cancelled. It's like, Alex, you want to watch this show? We just cancelled. And I'm like, I do, and I hate you. So, so yeah, I like the, the, what, what this contract, this contract is straight up historic, though, also because like there were a lot of big price increases in it, particularly around streaming. Streaming is not lucrative, if you're a writer, just straight up before this, it was not lucrative. You could barely make ends meet for the vast majority of people. And the, the studios have gotten really good about gaming the system that existed to pay as little as possible. And this kind of ended a lot of that gaming. It's still gonna happen. People are still gonna get screwed out of money. That, that is the nature of business. But, but this is, uh, this contract really put some really strong guardrails in, particularly

• 1:18:01Alex Cranz?

  around streaming. Like, they were, they were anticipating, I think it's like a 26% increase in, in revenue for writers of streaming films that make, that have a budget of 30 million or more. So all those really big Netflix, Apple TV films and stuff, where previously, they probably weren't getting a lot of money for that. They're now gonna be getting like at least a hundred thousand dollars. And, uh, that's nice. That, that seems nice to be. So, so yeah, this is like, very historic. SAG is still on strike, but there's a lot of movement there. People were kind of expecting this to be the way WGA goes. They get this really good deal. SAG is gonna get a lot of similar stuff because of that deal, and be

• 1:18:44Alex Cranz?

  able to close things. And if you were in the Directors Guild of America, I don't know what to tell you. You guys decided on your contract before everybody else went on strike.

• 1:18:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think they, they might have known that the writers were.

• 1:18:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they do. They knew. And, and, and their contract is by comparison not nearly as good.

• 1:19:03Nilay Patel?

  They're directors.

• 1:19:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. They're directors. They're fine. They got their producer credit. Like, they could just put themselves in as an actor or a writer. Uh, they'll find other ways to make the money.

• 1:19:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, every director now does a cameo.

• 1:19:16Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be great.

• 1:19:17Nilay Patel?

  I will say that Casey on Sage of Code was like, we're doing, we held True Detective. Because we wanted Jodie Foster to be available to promote the show. We wanted people to be able to talk about it. And it's like, oh, the SAG deal isn't done, but they're very confident that the writers deal is gonna give them the actors deal.

• 1:19:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, because so much of the debate is about the same stuff. And I think, I think it definitely seemed to be that it was likely for the Guild to get the deal done first, and then there's gonna be a lot of copying and pasting from this deal to that deal.

• 1:19:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:47David Pierce?

  Especially, it seems, with the AI stuff. And I thought one of the most interesting parts of the AI piece of this deal was essentially that they punted on the question of training data. Like, can you use our work to train AI models that can make other screenplays?

• 1:20:04Alex Cranz?

  There was a very specific reason for that, and that's because there's so much, like, laws that are potentially going to an effect. So why hold on to this bargaining chip when you know that California, like, I think it was last week, California said, we're gonna look into regulating training data and making sure compensation happens and stuff.

• 1:20:24David Pierce?

  I will bet you $10 right now that this deal gets renegotiated again before anybody makes a law on that front.

• 1:20:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:30Nilay Patel?

  Right, if you know that you're operating in three-year cycles, you're like, eh, well...

• 1:20:35David Pierce?

  That's what I mean. Like, I think you're right, Alex, but I think, I think everybody was just like, who the hell knows? Like, let's come back and do this again in three years. If it gets weird, there's a line in here that lets us yell at you if it gets weird. That's good enough for now.

• 1:20:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and I thought that was really smart on their part. Like, okay, we're gonna kick this can down the road. Maybe something happens, maybe something doesn't. We got three years to figure it out.

• 1:20:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's just, it's just a funny acknowledgement of like, no one really knows anything, so like, let's just be cool for now and we'll figure this out later. I thought that was like, that was just a funny place for that to land. All right, let's do a lightning round. We are already very long. So let's just blow through this, hit some more news, and get out of here. I will go first, so you guys can come up with your own. Neelai, you can quickly read five days of The Verge and catch up and see where you are.

• 1:21:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I know, I already picked mine. It's very obvious. No, no, that one's mine, Alex. Alex and I are fighting in the Google Doc right now.

• 1:21:28Nilay Patel?

  There's like two cursors like furiously selecting lines in the Google.

• 1:21:33David Pierce?

  There's a lot happening right now. Mine is, uh, there's this big shift in the podcast world. I feel like we gotta talk about podcasts on podcasts. Google is killing Google podcasts because it's all in on YouTube Music as the home of podcasts. I just like a random side note is I hate the fact that there are apps called Amazon Music and YouTube Music and their podcast apps. Like bad names, everybody like you, you screwed up. But anyway, Google Podcasts is going away because Google can't stop killing its apps. But it's all in on YouTube as a podcast platform. YouTube Music has been like a sneaky place of investment for YouTube for a long time now. And they're getting much louder about like, we really think this is our subscription business going forward. That's really interesting. Apple Podcasts is going the other way.

• 1:22:16David Pierce?

  They're, they're integrating a lot of stuff from outside of podcasts into podcasts, including some of the like radio stuff that they've been doing. Some of the different like meditation stuff that they've been doing. There's just a lot of like audio around the Apple ecosystem that's now all being pulled into Apple Podcasts. So while, while YouTube goes into YouTube, Apple is pulling in podcasts. And I thought that was very interesting. And also to everyone who has asked, what podcast app should I use? The, there are lots of good answers. Mine is Pocket Casts. It's a terrific app. It's been around forever. Automatic owns it, the people who own WordPress, so they're not going to kill it randomly because they hate you. It's a good app. Pocket Casts.

• 1:22:56Nilay Patel?

  I can't even mention podcasts without people telling me to use Overcast. They just like show up out of the.

• 1:23:01David Pierce?

  Overcast is a great app. The only downside of Overcast is that it is, it's pretty platform specific, but otherwise it is a terrific app. Let's see, I feel like whichever one of you I call on right now gets to have this one.

• 1:23:12Alex Cranz?

  No, I, I, I picked another one. Let me go.

• 1:23:14Nilay Patel?

  Stay away.

• 1:23:15Alex Cranz?

  I'm not, I'm not gonna touch.

• 1:23:16Nilay Patel?

  You stay out of my chair, like literally.

• 1:23:19David Pierce?

  All right, Neel, I go.

• 1:23:20Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm, it's a Logitech partnered with a company called Playseat and they've made it, they've made a Logitech branded racing chair. I'm really unhappy because I own the same chair without the Logitech improvements. I own the playseat challenge for PlayStation VR and Gran Turismo VR. It's a great chair. Logitech, by the way, if you just look at it, I own their racing wheel. Now they're doing this chair. That company thinks there's a bigger market in racing sims. And they're just like going after it. And I think they're right.

• 1:23:50Alex Cranz?

  They know, they know it's coming.

• 1:23:51David Pierce?

  This thing folds up. Like that's, I have not bought one of these because.

• 1:23:55Nilay Patel?

  No, I have, again, I have the thing. It folds up. It's very good. Yeah, it folds up and the wheel stays attached and it's all very compact. You can get in a closet. It's just you unfold it and you put it in the center of your living room and you're like, I'm gonna use it again tomorrow.

• 1:24:10David Pierce?

  My problem is I have to buy this thing without my wife ever finding out that I bought it. So I need it. I need to be able to get rid of it very quickly at a moment's notice.

• 1:24:17Nilay Patel?

  And there's nothing like furtively hiding a receipt that says the words playseat on it from your wife.

• 1:24:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fun to explain on the, on the credit card statement. Uh, wait, so what did Logitech do that makes this cool and exciting?

• 1:24:29Nilay Patel?

  So if you just look at some of the, you know, the little latch is a little better. Like they've made, they've made some quality of life improvements because they're Logitech. So it's like, I, it just, from what I can tell, they've just made it slightly easier to like operate the folding and the, you know, they, they've just like made it more ergonomic, but I think it's mostly like the things that were red are now blue, you know? But like Logitech is doing this because they want to distribute the stuff. Like PlayStation doesn't have huge distribution, right? They're actually a little company. Logitech's like best buy. So like, I, I think they're, they're taking it and they're putting it out in the channels because they see a bigger market for this stuff.

• 1:25:04Alex Cranz?

  It folds down so little.

• 1:25:06Nilay Patel?

  Dude, PSVR, Gran Turismo VR, we, we did this whole thing about the Quest 3.

• 1:25:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:11Nilay Patel?

  And I am telling you, the Gran Turismo VR on the PSVR 2 is one of the single most compelling things you can do in VR.

• 1:25:19David Pierce?

  I believe it.

• 1:25:19Nilay Patel?

  Like even, uh, and I'm like a car nerd and I love it. And it's like, fine. Like my friends, my family, I put them in the thing and like they're in this silly little chair and they're like, and they're like blown away.

• 1:25:31Alex Cranz?

  You put a little fan in front of him, really get the immersion.

• 1:25:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I stand right next to him going vroom, vroom.

• 1:25:38Alex Cranz?

  Just back the truck up, roll coal on him.

• 1:25:41Nilay Patel?

  We did, you know, we did a, we did like a, you know, kids react video to Project Starline at Code, which is another thing that's impossible to show people. But it's great. We should do it. We should do a video of people reacting to Grand Treasury VR, because it's super cool.

• 1:25:52David Pierce?

  It's a good idea. I need to stop looking at this page or else I'm gonna buy this thing. Alex, what's yours?

• 1:25:57Alex Cranz?

  Same. I just want to close the loop. We know where Amazon, former Amazon hardware chief David Limp went.

• 1:26:02David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:26:02Alex Cranz?

  And he's going to Blue Origin. So he's gonna go build rockets.

• 1:26:06David Pierce?

  Just can't get enough Jeff Bezos, that guy.

• 1:26:08Alex Cranz?

  Jeff, just can't get enough of Jeff. So that was like, we, everybody, conversely, they also finally confirmed that Panos Panay is definitely coming to Amazon.

• 1:26:17David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:26:17Alex Cranz?

  That's happening. So all of the stuff that was up in the air, now we know where everybody is.

• 1:26:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:22Alex Cranz?

  Dave's gonna be over at Blue Origins, so probably.

• 1:26:25Nilay Patel?

  Dave's definitely gonna put Alexa in our office. Alexa, take me to space for two minutes. I need to float around a little bit.

• 1:26:33Alex Cranz?

  And, and Panos is definitely coming to Amazon, so it's both happening. I, I've already emailed Amazon repeatedly about e-readers as soon as it was announced. I'm so sorry to Amazon PR. But yeah, let's see it, Panos. Let's see the, let's see a really good Kindle.

• 1:26:50David Pierce?

  As soon as the Panos news was announced, somebody just mentioned me on threads and just said the words Kindle fold, question mark?

• 1:26:59David Pierce?

  That's all I've been thinking about all week. Panos, do it. Give me my folding Kindle.

• 1:27:02Alex Cranz?

  I'm feeling it.

• 1:27:03David Pierce?

  Uh, all right. We have gone extremely long. We need to get out of here. Like I said, there's a bunch of lawsuits.

• 1:27:07Nilay Patel?

  Let's talk about Lindy Accarino somewhere.

• 1:27:10David Pierce?

  Neel, I need to go to bed.

• 1:27:13David Pierce?

  So we're gonna go.

• 1:27:14Nilay Patel?

  I'm back, by the way. Code's over. I have become Death.

• 1:27:20Nilay Patel?

  Welcome. The Eye of Sauron is back.

• 1:27:22David Pierce?

  Yeah. Everyone who asked where Neel I was, you're gonna, you're gonna rue how much he is back now.

• 1:27:27Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to hell.

• 1:27:29David Pierce?

  But yeah, like I said, there's gonna be, there's a bunch more trial stuff to come. It sounds like Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, is gonna be testifying.

• 1:27:36Nilay Patel?

  Did we even talk about it? Well, you were there in the room.

• 1:27:38David Pierce?

  We're gonna talk about that next week. There's so much to talk about. It's gonna be great. I'm excited about it. Satya Nadella is testifying on Monday, we think. I'm gonna try and be in the courtroom for that. Lots more going on there. We have the FTC suing Amazon. The FTX trial is starting next week. There is like a lot still happening. There's a Google event coming next week. We are not short of things to talk about. In the meantime, we're gonna have a ton of code stuff going up over the next few days.

• 1:28:02Nilay Patel?

  Interview with AMC CEO Lisa Su is up now. She, she talked a lot about competing with Nvidia.

• 1:28:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, that was a good one, too. We should have mentioned that earlier. She was great and very interesting about like the future of all of this AI hardware stuff. That was a really interesting one.

• 1:28:15Nilay Patel?

  Products. I put products on stage at Code. The bullshit was the bullshit, but the products are real.

• 1:28:20David Pierce?

  There you go. All right, we are out of here. Everybody's gonna go just decompress for a couple of days and then we'll be back next week. That's it. That's Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:28:28Nilay Patel?

  He took my line.

• 1:28:35David Pierce?

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:29:07Speaker 06

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