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additional terms and network management practices, see visible.com. Hello

1:00

and welcome to

1:03

the VergeCast. The flagship podcast of

1:05

perceiving the world through screens. Oh.

1:08

Yeah. Yeah. That thing I told you

1:10

about. It's accurate. That

1:12

no one believed me about. So

1:15

does that mean our podcast is like very

1:17

good at first and then sort of slowly

1:19

gets more annoying over time? You fluctuate. It's

1:21

magic until it's not. It's the VergeCast. It's

1:26

very good. Quite a lot going on

1:28

this week. Yeah. As we're recording, we

1:30

are expecting breaking news from

1:32

Microsoft about the future of the Xbox. Yes.

1:34

Yes. So we're just going to react to

1:36

that in real time. And

1:39

then we'll have Tom Warren come on

1:41

the next show to explain what's going on. But we'll

1:43

react to that in real time, I promise you. I'm your

1:45

friend, Neil. I, David Pierce, is here. Hi. I should warn

1:48

everyone that I have a

1:50

deeply sore throat. So the like sexy

1:52

smoldering thing I'm doing is just a one

1:54

time thing. And it will not be this

1:56

good to listen to me every time. No,

1:59

you should keep it. We're gonna do

2:01

a sexy smolder AI. openai.com/sexy

2:04

smolder. Alex

2:07

Kranz is here. Deeply disappointed I don't

2:09

also have a cold right now. You could vaguely.

2:11

Yeah, I could. I could drop it a little lower. I

2:14

don't even know how far to go. When

2:16

you first started podcasting in the Engadget

2:19

podcast ages ago, I was like,

2:21

I should have a podcast voice. Yeah. But

2:23

I gave up on that immediately. You have to. Otherwise

2:25

you forget about it and then you're like, oh, how

2:27

are you? This is my normal voice. And people are

2:29

like, you went with Mickey Mouse. That's my

2:31

normal voice. You don't. I

2:34

actually do a verge voice at home.

2:36

I talk like this all the time. Can

2:38

you do an impression of your podcast voice for us

2:40

just real fast? I think

2:42

decoder is my fake podcast voice. Oh,

2:45

it's a pseudo NPR. I think of

2:47

that as like, Neillye Patel

2:49

in his study swirling a brandy. Yeah.

2:52

That's the same voice. That's

2:56

right. That makes me. Yes. That's

2:58

the decoder voice. That's what I got for you. Okay.

3:01

I love this for you. We got

3:03

to start with some housekeeping. This is our first

3:06

Verg cast back on the main

3:09

verge YouTube channel. I

3:11

am told this was a complicated move, but

3:13

it should be simple to experience. David, can

3:15

you explain what's going on? Yes. Okay.

3:19

So there are now two channels on which you

3:21

can experience the Verg cast. We have the verges

3:23

main YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/the verge or search

3:26

for the verge. All the

3:28

full episodes are going to live. We

3:31

just wanted to have the show and the rest of

3:33

our stuff kind of be closer to each other, easier

3:35

to find. And with all the stuff YouTube

3:37

is doing with podcasts right now, it actually

3:40

makes sense to have those things a little

3:42

closer together because now you can subscribe to

3:44

just a single playlist. If all

3:46

you want is the podcast, you can subscribe to the channel

3:48

and get everything in YouTube and get the podcast and YouTube

3:50

music. It's all a little

3:52

weird right now because Google is still sorting

3:54

out how all of the podcast stuff works.

3:57

It's very in character for Google. I just

3:59

want to be. Yeah, so like

4:01

all of this is stuff that I think we are

4:03

doing correctly and

4:05

just slightly ahead of Google. So hopefully this will

4:08

continue to make more sense as time goes on.

4:10

But basically all the full episodes are going to

4:12

be on the Verge's YouTube channel from now on.

4:14

And then we're going to do like clips and extras and silly

4:17

stuff where we make fun of Neelai off the

4:19

show on the Verge Cast channel. So that's where

4:21

all that stuff will live. I

4:24

promise there was

4:26

a lot of weirdness as we moved all of

4:28

this stuff. William, our producer, did

4:30

like a heroic job to get all of

4:32

this done. It

4:34

was messy because YouTube is messy, but I think it's

4:36

done now. People seem to have like found the Verge

4:39

Cast again in all the YouTube platforms.

4:42

So it should work. And if you don't listen to this podcast on

4:44

YouTube, don't worry about it. Literally nothing

4:46

else will change. I hope this makes more sense as

4:48

time goes on. It should be Google's motto. I just

4:50

want to be 100% clear on that. We

4:55

have a product team focused on making this make

4:57

sense. Yeah. I

5:00

hope this makes sense as time goes on is

5:03

how Google approaches product strategy at

5:05

a very high level. I'll

5:09

give you one, but one example. And

5:11

I don't know why this thread's posted the

5:13

numbers it did, except I think it spoke

5:16

to people's very souls. I

5:19

bought a big, silly Sony TV. I'm very happy

5:21

with it. It's a 95. Oh,

5:24

very, very pleased with this. It looks amazing.

5:27

It came with the webcam, which

5:30

I think is just representative of how deeply

5:32

overcharged I was for this TV. They were

5:34

like, we made so much money. Here's a

5:36

camera. Fine. So

5:38

I'm like, what can this webcam do? Nothing.

5:41

It can watch you while you watch TV

5:43

and adjust the settings. That's a

5:45

hard no. And then

5:47

there's a Zoom client and

5:50

there's a Google Meet client. So

5:52

I was like, fine. Oh, it

5:54

has gesture controls, which are after the Vision Pro.

5:56

I'm just not doing gesture control. I know what

5:59

happened. Oh, my God. This is the best if

6:01

this goes where I think this is about to go.

6:03

This is my favorite I clipped the camera to the

6:05

top of the TV. I launched Google meet to

6:08

sign into our staff meeting and Basically

6:10

be a brat at our staff meeting and

6:13

I'm like, where do I type in the code? When

6:16

you can't and I was like, okay

6:19

Where do I switch accounts to my

6:21

work account? Then you

6:23

can't oh and so they've

6:25

made a Google meet client for Android Which

6:29

this television runs? They

6:32

can't join me But

6:37

It can't you just call you can just call people with

6:40

your phone number from your television a thing

6:42

that everyone wants to do Yeah,

6:45

no David. I'm curious for your guests under what happened

6:47

here because I think I know so what

6:49

happened was Google in

6:52

its infinite wisdom Decided

6:54

that duo and meet should not be different

6:57

things because when you call one person

6:59

and you call another person It

7:01

should be the same thing So what

7:03

they did was they renamed duo

7:06

to meet and then

7:08

renamed meet to meet

7:10

original and then I Think

7:13

I have this right and then the

7:16

old duo now meet became

7:18

Google meet But I'm guessing what never

7:20

happened is that your TV never got an

7:22

update So you still have Google duo with

7:25

a different name? Yeah, it didn't get up.

7:27

There's no update available It's not my TV

7:29

didn't get update my TV is hardwired to

7:31

the router. This is a very insane TV

7:34

situation Well, okay, you're right Google forgot that

7:36

this TV forgot To update

7:38

the need client so that it

7:40

could join meetings It

7:43

changed the name but forgot to change

7:45

the app. There's a can ban board

7:47

in Mountain View Labeled we

7:49

hope this makes sense over time

7:52

And update the meet client so it can

7:55

join meetings as a card on that board

7:58

And it just hasn't moved in

8:00

over a year. Neil, I have to tell you,

8:02

they, they scrummed this and they

8:04

didn't, they decided that updating Neil eyes TV

8:07

was not a corporate. It's an Android app.

8:09

Your TV was a giant tablet. You

8:13

don't remember when

8:15

they're like, Android tablets are back. We're

8:17

going to try hard again. Remember

8:20

that? It'll make sense over time. We

8:23

hope this makes sense. Anyway, I had

8:26

to audio on the join. I

8:30

was like, I can't join from

8:32

my phone. I had

8:35

all the powers. Great. It

8:37

was great. Uh, truly. All right.

8:40

Uh, so we're on YouTube. The upshot of that

8:42

is one, I can't join meetings for my television,

8:44

uh, and two, we are now available on the

8:46

main YouTube channel. Yeah. All right.

8:49

Let's talk about the news. There's quite a bit of news. Let's

8:51

start with the vision pro. It is two weeks

8:53

after the vision pro hit, which

8:55

means everybody has to return it now. You

8:58

got to make the big return decision. Right. I

9:00

look, a lot of influencers bought the vision pro

9:02

to make a bunch of vision pro views on

9:04

YouTube and now they return the vision pro because

9:08

why would you keep it? But

9:10

if that's your goal, like, why would you keep it? Right?

9:13

Like you you've, you've milked that for all its worth. That's how you

9:15

used to be able to do like reviews and stuff.

9:17

One at a time. You just be like, yeah, I

9:20

definitely want this very expensive product. Right.

9:22

I would just say there's like a clout element to

9:24

vision pro discourse that

9:27

we keep pointing out like

9:29

vision pro thrown at a cyber truck. Subscribe

9:33

to my newsletter. Like that is the whole. Well, that one

9:35

can't be returned. Well,

9:37

if you get enough newsletter subs. That's true. There's

9:41

just a whole universe of that discourse

9:43

that I think we can just set aside. It's a

9:45

family. We can agree. We're going to

9:47

set aside the clout chasing part of the coverage. Then

9:49

there's a bunch of people who are

9:51

happy with it and they're keeping it and it works for them

9:53

and they're excited and they've they've got big

9:55

lonely TVs to watch. That's great. Because

9:59

I think some of that. that is coming into focus as well.

10:02

Then there's the people who the

10:04

hype balloon for them popped and they

10:06

are genuinely returning it for a variety

10:08

of reasons, all of

10:10

which seem fairly predictable. And

10:13

I think that it's the gap between

10:15

the hype and reality that is really disappointing a

10:17

bunch of people here. So

10:20

people are returning because it's not comfortable to wear. People are

10:22

turning because it makes their eyes hurt. They're getting headaches. People

10:25

are returning it because they are lonely

10:27

in it or the pass-through isn't what they thought it was going to

10:29

be. It feels like...

10:31

The Windows management was one I saw.

10:34

Someone who turned it over window management? Yeah, it

10:36

was one of many reasons, but a big factor

10:38

for them was, yeah, I can't manage the windows

10:40

properly. It doesn't feel like... If you are a person who had

10:42

enough feelings about window management to return a $3,500 computer, please, we

10:46

should hang out. We

10:48

love you. Just come on

10:50

over. We should talk. But

10:53

that's how we diagnose it, right? The

10:55

things it was promised to do and

10:59

then the things it can actually do and the product

11:01

it is now, there is a pretty staggering gap between

11:03

those two things. Yes. And I

11:05

think the thing we've really spent the last

11:07

week kind of discovering as

11:09

a society is that it

11:12

turns out that Apple having a long

11:14

history of making these things work and

11:16

having a presumably very cool roadmap doesn't

11:18

mean anything for the thing on your

11:21

face, right? This is what we talked

11:23

about when we did this review, right? You can talk all

11:25

you want about where this is going

11:27

and who's right about the future and the big

11:29

ideas behind all of this and Apple's ability to

11:31

execute. And I still have not

11:34

changed my mind on any of that. I think if you were

11:36

to bet on a horse in this race, you'd be crazy not

11:38

to bet on Apple. Just historically, that is

11:40

true. It doesn't change

11:42

anything for the fact that you just bought a very

11:44

expensive thing that is uncomfortable to wear for a lot

11:46

of people, but

11:48

it doesn't do that much for most people's

11:51

use cases and is $3,500. And

11:53

so I think we saw

11:57

a really normal thing.

12:00

happen, which is a lot of people tried it. It's super

12:02

cool. Like you went through this soon. You know, I like

12:04

the first time you put it on, you spend a couple

12:06

of hours in it, you take it off and you're like,

12:08

Oh my God, that is the most impressive thing I've ever

12:10

seen. And then the fifth time you do that, you're

12:13

like, well, it's, I'm not

12:15

doing this because it's cool. I actually need

12:17

something out of this. And the

12:20

entertainment side of things seems to be holding

12:22

up like the people who want to watch

12:25

a large screen, look at cool

12:27

panoramic pictures they've taken, whatever that

12:30

seems to be working for people. But

12:32

the question of a, is that enough

12:34

for this $3,500 headset? And B, can

12:37

I do that comfortably? Like

12:39

literally physically comfortably is

12:42

turning out to be a higher bar, I think, than a lot

12:44

of people who bought this thing expected. I want

12:47

to stay focused on that use case. I

12:50

would submit to you if

12:52

you take your $3,500 and

12:55

you go and buy the biggest

12:57

TV you can get for that money, you will

12:59

be happier in the long run than owning a first generation

13:02

vision pro. Yeah. Cause you can do TikTok at the same

13:04

time. You can do TikTok at the same time.

13:06

You can watch the show with someone else, which

13:08

everyone keeps forgetting. Like maybe you're a solitary person

13:10

and we've heard from a lot of people like

13:12

this and you never have people over

13:14

to watch TV. The one time

13:16

you want to, and your only option is the

13:19

vision pro, you're going to be like, huh, there's

13:22

also just being able to move around, not having

13:24

the weight on your face. Um, there's

13:26

just something about that that's different. Yeah.

13:30

The thing you'll lose out on is the audio side of

13:32

it. Cause the vision pro is very convincing with spatial

13:34

audio, especially if you wear good headphones

13:36

with it, like AirPods pro, that's

13:39

very convincing. And as a travel device

13:42

on an airplane, I've seen a lot of people wear this thing

13:44

on airplanes and say, I love, like for a long haul flight,

13:47

you're flying New York, San Francisco and

13:49

you do the immersion and you're just like in

13:51

space and you just don't feel cramped anymore. Great.

13:53

$3,500 external battery pack. Like you're still a

13:57

generation or two behind from that thing.

14:00

being valuable, I would say. But

14:04

if that's the whole value proposition, you're

14:07

really missing out on a lot that you should

14:09

be getting from a computer that can put windows

14:11

everywhere in your space. And I keep seeing apps

14:13

that could be really cool.

14:15

There's one, Vsong and I were laughing at

14:17

last night. It's

14:19

basically a virtual peloton. So

14:22

you have any exercise bike, preferably

14:25

one with Bluetooth that compared to a thing over

14:27

Ant or whatever protocol that is. And

14:30

it just mounts a big virtual screen in front of you and then you

14:32

go on a bike ride. That's

14:34

cool. That is cool. I

14:36

love that. It's super cool. And then it's like you have to work

14:39

with Vision Pro in your head to do it with an external battery

14:41

pack. With the sweat. Yeah,

14:43

it's not made for that. Yeah. It

14:45

just isn't made for that. And then there's the

14:47

other app that everyone keeps talking about, which is the Mac

14:49

display. And I

14:51

thought it was utterly fascinating that a

14:54

lot of the first conversation you saw

14:56

from Vision Pro owners was the

14:58

killer app for this thing is my Mac. Yeah.

15:01

Which is wild. Just

15:04

what? The application model has nothing to do

15:06

with spatial computing. It's just a big window in your Mac.

15:09

The Mac is notably much more open than an

15:11

iOS or iPad or a space device. So what

15:14

you want is your Mac applications. And

15:16

then you have this big screen and Apple

15:19

keeps building it as a 4K screen. And then over

15:21

time you started seeing people say, this is actually kind

15:23

of a little blurry. This isn't as sharp

15:25

as I thought it was. And it's

15:27

because Apple is making a 5K

15:30

like an iMac display or a

15:32

studio display. That resolution, they're making

15:35

a virtual one of those at that

15:37

resolution. And then they're down-resing

15:39

it to 4K and sending a 4K video

15:41

stream of that. Lies. Which

15:44

you can then scale infinitely to whatever weird size you

15:46

want. And so I called this out in the review.

15:48

And it was just like one of those things that's

15:50

so hard to explain. So

15:53

much of this device is once you see it for yourself, you get

15:55

it. But it is really hard to explain. You're

15:57

looking at a screen that seems sharp. and

16:00

then underneath it are

16:02

like five scaling operations. And

16:05

then on top of that, there's foveated

16:07

rendering. So you've made this huge Mac

16:09

display that is already fuzzy

16:12

because of the scaling steps in between

16:14

the virtual display that's created, that's

16:16

5K that's being scaled down to 4K and sent to the

16:18

headset. And then you've made it really big. And then if

16:20

you look at the center of it, the

16:22

edges of it are blurry because

16:25

of the foveated rendering. And so people are just

16:27

sort of running into the reality of what that

16:29

screen really looks like. And they're

16:31

like, oh, my application model is still the Mac. I

16:34

should just use my Mac. Yeah. Right. And I think

16:36

the other part of that is also, to

16:38

your point about it's not super clear until you see

16:40

it, the actual interaction

16:43

of the Mac apps on

16:45

my Mac, the Vision

16:47

Pro apps that are actually optimized for

16:49

this spatial computing, and the iPad apps

16:51

that run in the Vision Pro is

16:54

not good. Like you can technically have

16:56

all of those things, but the world you want, and

16:58

I think the world a lot of people expected, is

17:00

one where all of my apps are just all of

17:02

my apps and some of them run on my device,

17:04

some of them run on my Mac, but I can

17:07

just sort of put them all anywhere and they all

17:09

interact and that's pretty cool. That

17:11

is not at all how it works. And I think

17:13

that, like the people who are mad about the window

17:15

management are the ones who are like, well, either the

17:18

idea of being able to leave my

17:20

email in the other room is actually

17:23

like not a good thing. It's neat,

17:25

but it's stupid. And why would I

17:27

want that? Or this

17:29

thing about like, okay, I've been promised

17:31

something like sort of world scale app

17:34

multitasking and this is actually

17:37

a tiny little slice of that plus a

17:40

bunch of other slightly confusing things. To

17:42

me, this is like when they put stage manager on the iPad and you're

17:44

like, I can see what you were going for here. You

17:47

just missed it by about 30% and

17:49

it kind of kills the whole premise for me. The

17:53

two things that I think would make that much better and you can

17:55

see them, I think that that's the 30%. One,

18:00

to have to make it smaller. Like, the

18:03

hardware is not ready for the software. Like, I've

18:05

come back to that several times. Like, one

18:08

way to think about this is this is a simulator for the

18:10

hardware they want to build. And you

18:12

can see putting windows over your house

18:15

and having digital objects everywhere would be

18:17

amazing. But then you have to

18:19

wear a Vision Pro. And every time I see a cool

18:21

Vision Pro app, I think, yes. But to have this experience,

18:24

you've got to put all that weight on your head. And for some

18:26

people, that's fine. I don't want to discount the people who are like,

18:29

that's great. But the reality of

18:31

it is then you degrade reality.

18:33

Literally degrade reality. You

18:35

are wearing a Vision Pro on your face. And the

18:37

world around you is a lot grannier. And there's motion

18:39

blur. And the pass-through isn't good. And

18:41

you are prioritizing the digital world over the

18:44

real world. And I just don't

18:46

think that's inappropriate. And the moment you walk into a

18:48

dark room, you just see mud, right? Yeah,

18:50

I mean, it's a camera. You

18:53

just cannot overcome cameras. Because

18:56

in the review, I basically called

18:59

the top on faster. I was like, it can get

19:01

better. But it

19:03

can't get 5,000% better. If

19:06

you did, by the time you get

19:09

that much better, some other technology will come along and

19:11

be disruptive. And very smart people disagree

19:13

with me on this. Fine. Who

19:16

knows? But we all agreed

19:18

that the timeline for that is 10 years out. And

19:21

I am just not making any predictions on what happens

19:24

in 10 years of technology

19:26

development. Well, I think a bunch of us in

19:28

the office have been talking about, how would you shrink this headset?

19:31

Did they make a design mistake in it? And a lot of people

19:33

are like, well, why didn't they just take that computer and put it

19:35

with a battery pack, right? And just take

19:37

a lot of that weight out. But then if

19:39

you put it with a battery pack, you'd effectively

19:41

be carrying around a Mac Mini in

19:43

your pocket with a battery attached

19:45

to it. Backpack, full Apple backpack,

19:48

big puffy white straps. You need

19:50

fans to cool it? Who

19:52

knows if it can actually be fast enough

19:54

along that wire to do all the incredible

19:57

processing it's doing? It's like, no, it's not.

19:59

It's actually a really, I keep

20:02

going back to it, it's a really fascinating device

20:04

because it is so complex. It

20:07

is such a like exquisitely designed

20:09

device that doesn't

20:11

do a whole lot. But that part of it

20:13

where it doesn't do a whole lot, that's because

20:15

it's new, like there's no apps for it. We

20:17

saw a report this week from Immersive Wire, I wanna say

20:19

it was, that most Vision

20:22

Pro apps hit a ceiling of 1,000 downloads. Very

20:26

few people have this product, vanishingly

20:28

few people have this product, vanishingly

20:31

few app developers have started building apps that are

20:33

made for it. But that's a cycle that...

20:35

Yeah, and that's a cycle that's gonna continue because

20:38

if no one's making apps for it, then nobody's

20:40

buying it. And if no one's buying it, then

20:42

no one's making apps for it. I do think

20:44

what's clear is that this is a repeat of the,

20:47

you can't just blow up an iPhone app

20:49

and have it work on the iPad problem,

20:51

which Apple thought that ecosystem would buy it

20:53

a ton of time and

20:55

that it didn't. Luckily, Apple was able to

20:58

get the iPad ecosystem going very quickly because

21:00

the, you will just 2X your iPhone

21:02

app and it'll be great, was a total

21:04

non-starter. And I think we're going through that again,

21:06

where it turns out, iPad apps

21:08

are not the answer. Like what

21:11

we have seen overwhelmingly so far is people being

21:13

like, there's some cool stuff. Even Apple now is

21:15

going into Apple Arcade and saying, here's some of

21:17

the stuff you can actually use for spatial, it's

21:19

cool. This idea that

21:21

you have access to this giant set of

21:23

apps and it will get us there and

21:26

buy us enough time to get to the

21:28

next thing, I'm less convinced of every day

21:30

because it just doesn't seem to be, it

21:33

doesn't seem to be sort of satiating people that

21:35

way. So I want to talk about one more

21:37

limitation that I think the community has discovered of

21:39

this thing. And then I want to

21:41

talk about Mark Zuckerberg reviewing it. Yeah, that was the

21:43

best. Which is deeply, as a

21:45

professional reviewer, all I could think of

21:48

is, boy, I hope more CEOs try

21:50

to take my business. Like,

21:52

just get out there soon to our petri, just

21:54

start reviewing stuff. Review the

21:56

pixel. He should review the pixel. I

22:00

pick up a pixel challenge. Pay

22:03

attention to the pixel challenge. The

22:07

other limitation that I think is really weird,

22:09

and Abby will have a piece on this on the site by the time

22:11

you're listening to this, the people in

22:13

the Vision Pro subreddit and the people that

22:15

I've seen in other places online do

22:17

not think Apple's default fitment is good.

22:20

Yeah. So they're like, you go in, you

22:22

get your face scanned, or you do the iPhone scan, and

22:24

you get a light seal, and all of them are like,

22:27

get a smaller light seal. Some people are like,

22:29

take the light seal off and mash it against your face, which I tried.

22:33

It is very convincing in terms of field of view,

22:35

get a huge field of view. I felt like I

22:37

was underwater, like the ones that are not designed to

22:39

be smashed directly against your eyeballs. But

22:41

they're like, get a different light seal, make it

22:43

smaller, like mess with the fit, because

22:46

they don't think that the fit that Apple is

22:48

giving people is right. Which we've discovered Apple really

22:50

does not want you to do, right? Like it's-

22:53

They really don't want you to do that. You can't just walk

22:55

in and buy three light seals and see which one you like

22:57

the best, right? Like $100. Well,

22:59

they have $200. But so like, I'll just, I'll

23:01

make that concrete for if you're listening. We have

23:03

a review unit. We want more

23:05

people on our team to use it. We want to

23:08

make more videos, or we have ideas on how to

23:10

cover it. Even if we bought another

23:12

one, even if we sent the review unit from Apple back and we

23:14

just bought one. In order

23:16

to be fair in coverage as more people use

23:18

the thing, we have to make sure it fits

23:20

them. Because if it doesn't fit

23:22

right, the eye tracking goes completely wonky and people

23:24

get headaches. So, okay,

23:27

I told Owen our video director, let's just go to the

23:29

Apple store. Just like buy a bunch of light seals. Turns

23:32

out there are 17 sizes. They're

23:34

$200 a piece and Apple won't let you

23:36

just buy some. You cannot go to

23:38

an Apple store and just buy some. They keep them in

23:41

a drawer. But like, you have to ask someone and

23:43

then they'll be like- So Owen who made the

23:45

Vision Pro video with like, Owen is on that

23:47

team. He edited that video. They

23:50

made him sit for the demo, the full

23:52

half hour demo, and then they let him buy one in

23:54

his size. And it's like,

23:56

why? Like, just, we want to give you money.

23:59

Yeah. up to $4,000. If

24:04

you walk into any store and you're like, I'll just use $4,000, just

24:06

give me one of everything. Few

24:08

stores in America will be like, no, you

24:11

just actually there's a process here. Yeah.

24:13

AirMez would be like, get out. You

24:15

get one. Yeah. And when you think of

24:17

the Vision Pro light seal, you immediately leave to

24:19

AirMez. 100% same experience. Same like

24:22

I walk in, I'm like, Ooh, do I have enough money

24:24

to be in here right now? Yeah. It's a,

24:26

Barney's, AirMez and the Vision Pro light seal

24:28

in terms of luxury purchasing experiences. You can't

24:31

just buy a Ferrari. You got to buy

24:33

a bad Ferrari first. Yeah. You can't just

24:35

buy a Vision Pro light seal. You

24:38

got to sit down for 30 minutes first. So

24:42

that is annoying on its face. If

24:44

you buy it for enterprise use, I've

24:47

seen a lot of designers like we want bought one for

24:49

office so we could like share it as a 3d modeling

24:51

tool. And they're like, this is just like

24:53

not designed to be shared. If you spend $3,500 to have

24:55

it as a

24:58

cool TV, it

25:01

is challenging to get it to

25:03

fit the other people. That's

25:06

just physically. Yeah. You can accomplish

25:08

the goal, but it is challenging

25:10

to be like, this computer is available for someone

25:12

in this office to use. Here's a selection of

25:14

things that make it fit your head. It's

25:16

so consumer hostile. So

25:20

there's a, I think there's a connection. Yeah. It's

25:23

too new. Yeah. I think they just

25:25

shipped the thing. There's like, you know,

25:27

you all know, high-filla headphone jacks. Yeah.

25:29

That was a hostile move. This is

25:31

like the product isn't ready

25:34

to support that thing. And the way

25:36

that it's in particular not ready is

25:38

iOS and iPad OS

25:40

have no affordance for multi-user support.

25:43

Yeah. So the Vision Pro, it has

25:46

optic ID in it. It can scan your eyes

25:48

and log you in. It should

25:50

be able to scan my eyes or your eyes or David's

25:52

eyes or someone else's eyes and be like, here's your account.

25:55

You're you. We know you're

25:57

you. Here's your account. And

25:59

here's your site. and it has nothing.

26:02

And like on top of it, it has none of the like

26:06

recalibrations stored. So

26:09

if I have one, if I have a Vision Pro

26:12

and I lend it to you, every time

26:14

I lend it to you, you have to recalibrate. I have to put

26:16

it in guest mode and you have to recalibrate it for

26:18

your eyes. Yeah, that's stupid. That has

26:20

to, that was a deliberate choice though, right? That

26:22

has to have been a deliberate choice by Apple

26:24

to make it hard for you to

26:27

share this thing with people because- But why? That's the

26:29

reason you've been talking about, that the hardware is

26:32

not set up for success for you to

26:34

be sharing. But why? That's

26:38

why I think it's a hostile because they never- Because

26:40

it's not finished. But they cannot possibly, it's

26:42

hostile with like- I don't think it's like

26:44

hostile style. Okay, so let me explain why

26:46

I think the headphone jack is hostile. Let

26:48

me rewind the foundation. They took

26:50

out the headphone jack, they didn't need to, especially the funds

26:52

started getting bigger. They did that because they wanted AirPods to

26:54

succeed. AirPods are a huge success. I know people love their

26:56

AirPods. I know people think we were wrong about AirPods. They

27:01

basically created a market for proprietary headphones.

27:03

Yes. AirPods are proprietary headphones.

27:05

Like I know they run on Bluetooth, but they actually

27:07

run a special version of Bluetooth. Kinsey

27:10

gets you on that one. They're all like, can

27:12

you believe they got rid of the headphone jack?

27:14

Cool, allowed that. And I'm like, we

27:16

wrote about it all the time. I did my best.

27:19

But like that was straight and hostile. Like they created

27:21

a market for proprietary headphones and they flooded the market

27:23

with their headphones. Yes, I'm aware that people really like

27:25

them. Whatever, it's a thing that happened. Not

27:28

allowing multiple users on the iPad. At this point in

27:30

the iPad's history, little bit

27:32

hostile. Hostile, yeah. You have families.

27:34

People share their iPads. Schools.

27:37

There's some enterprise support for shared

27:39

accounts on iOS devices if

27:42

you're in a school or a business. But a regular

27:44

person who spends five, six, $700 on iPad, that

27:47

is not a family device by any stretch of the imagination

27:49

is locked to one user. Because Apple wants you to buy

27:51

multiple iPads. They want everyone in your family to have an

27:53

iPad. Okay, there's some

27:55

just raw capitalistic user hostility

27:57

there. Yeah. Fine, they're the richest company in

27:59

the world. What a shock. I

28:02

think with the Vision Pro, there's

28:04

no expectation that a family of four

28:06

is going to buy four Vision Pros. And

28:08

I think that's why I'm not ready to

28:10

call it. I think they just

28:13

shipped the product that was done. I think

28:15

it was hostile design. I

28:17

don't think it's necessarily like Apple

28:19

was set out to had a big vision here.

28:21

I think it was just, well, we

28:24

want to make this thing as cool as possible. And

28:26

that means we need to make it as finicky as

28:28

possible, regardless of what that means for use cases for

28:30

other people, because we want to make it as cool

28:32

as possible. And that's hostile to

28:34

the users because then they can't share it.

28:37

They can't do anything with it. They do

28:39

have to go buy another one, or they have to go buy a $200 light seal if

28:42

they want to have that experience. And I don't

28:44

want to say the Quest Pro was a good

28:46

product, but that

28:49

part of it... I just remind everyone, we gave the

28:51

Quest Pro a four, and the headline

28:53

was, Get Me Out of Here. But

28:55

could you put it on... When you

28:57

put it on your head, did it fit? Did you have to

28:59

go buy a $200 light seal to make

29:01

sure it worked? Oh, no.

29:03

So I don't buy that premise

29:05

at all, honestly. Have

29:07

you ever put on somebody else's headset and you spend

29:10

15 minutes screwing around with the lenses

29:12

and the strap to get it to fit your head? There's

29:15

just no world in which you have a

29:17

good experience using these things. Ironically, it's one

29:19

of the reasons I think Meta

29:21

Ray-Ban strategy is closer to the right one

29:23

because that's just a pair of glasses that

29:26

is much closer to a thing you

29:28

can just put on anyone's head and it will more

29:30

or less work. You might look stupid in them, but

29:32

it's just a pair of glasses. Whereas

29:35

something like this is just by

29:37

definition so individual

29:40

user-centric that I think for Apple to say,

29:43

Oh, share it with your friends, they're going

29:45

to have a trash experience in it. It's

29:47

actually a bad idea. I think it

29:49

was a bad idea... What I'm saying is go further

29:51

back. I think it was a bad idea to design

29:53

a product. Well, you're just starting to think it was

29:55

a bad idea to ship the Vision Pro, which is

29:57

fine. Yeah, like, do you ship it in the... to

30:00

say, hey, we're going to charge you $200 for a light seal. Hey, we're going

30:02

to make it

30:04

so extraordinary for one person and no

30:07

one else. I think that's just inherently

30:09

hostile design. I will say I do

30:11

think an interesting question that is becoming more and

30:13

more open is whether

30:15

Apple overshot. And this

30:17

is where we should get into Mark Zuckerberg's review of

30:19

this thing, because it's part of the case that he made,

30:21

which is that Apple basically came out and said, we

30:23

are going to make the best, most

30:26

impressive, most incredible thing possible.

30:29

Every other consequence be damned. Right. And it

30:32

did that by all accounts. Like I

30:34

don't, I don't think it missed in terms

30:36

of doing the best anyone possibly can at

30:39

this moment in time on very many fronts. Is

30:43

doing that a better idea than making

30:45

something that is 85% as

30:48

good and maybe half the weight? Don't

30:50

know. It's like, is

30:52

it something that Apple should

30:54

have shipped that was much closer to

30:57

just a screen and an

30:59

entertainment device as opposed to trying to do

31:01

all of this other stuff? These,

31:03

I think this roadmap Apple has set itself on where

31:05

it made the best thing possible and it's just going

31:08

to try to bring it down in all of those

31:10

ways over time towards people is

31:12

a strategy. But I

31:14

think it's, it's less and less obvious to me that it's

31:16

the right one because it's like you

31:19

want that to be the luxury thing that not

31:21

everybody can afford, but everybody who can really loves.

31:24

And even that is not what it's getting right

31:26

now. It's not like the Tesla Roadster or

31:28

the super expensive first luxury item you see

31:31

from a lot of companies. It's

31:33

not even working for those people.

31:36

It's not the Samsung flip phones, right? Like, like

31:38

that was, that was the thing. It was like,

31:40

okay, there's a lot of flaws in this. If

31:43

you peel this part off, it will destroy

31:45

it and then Samsung will not be happy.

31:48

But like it still worked pretty well. And

31:50

I mean, yeah, more than one person could

31:52

use it, but it actually did it

31:55

delivered on the promise and this feels like it does.

31:57

But the promise there was just, it unfolds.

32:00

The promise that Apple is making

32:02

is we will Intermediate reality for

32:05

you and that was perhaps too big a promise

32:07

to me I think David said this

32:09

a couple weeks ago Which is with

32:11

the Apple watch and so so many people have

32:13

compared the vision Pro to the Apple watch which?

32:17

I'm just gonna remind everyone I got right in that

32:19

review, too But

32:21

the Apple watch underwent drastic drastic

32:24

changes But David I think it

32:26

was you said this couple weeks ago They got the form

32:28

factor right everyone knew that this is how should look and

32:30

all you're doing is refining The

32:32

thing around the shape that it should

32:35

be and here it just

32:37

seems obvious the form factor Isn't right

32:40

right that they shouldn't do pass through

32:42

in this way that what you want is all

32:45

you want glasses So I think

32:47

it does bring it to the Zuckerberg review Which

32:50

again, I think every CEO should just review their competitors

32:52

like head on a percent David You want to tell

32:54

us what's going on with mark sure? Okay. So let

32:56

me let me just briefly set the

32:58

scene for you here So mark Zuckerberg and

33:00

his newly long hair, which I'm

33:02

all shocked. We have not talked about in this show

33:04

yet But we'll just leave that Sitting

33:07

on a couch in a in

33:09

a you know dark long-sleeve shirt I think with

33:12

an immaculately fluffed pillow behind

33:14

him lovely setup Did

33:17

a I don't know what maybe five minutes or

33:19

so just kind of riff on His

33:22

experience with the vision Pro how he feels about the quest

33:24

three compared to the vision Pro because there were a lot

33:26

of people Remember when this came out who were like, oh

33:28

the quest is dead Meta

33:30

actually rushed to launch the quest three

33:33

ahead of the vision Pro these

33:35

two things have been very closely pitted against each

33:37

other as sort of opposite ends of this strategy

33:39

for a very long time and He

33:42

sat down and and basically we should just play

33:45

a clip here But he basically said at the

33:47

end of his experience He thinks not only is the

33:49

quest three a better value He thinks it is straight

33:51

up a better product than the vision pro Yeah,

33:53

pull over in your car and just look

33:55

at this man's hair and then listen to his voice The

33:58

quest is the better product And

34:01

you know the different companies made different design decisions

34:03

for the headsets. They have different strengths, but

34:05

overall Quest is better

34:07

for the vast majority of things that

34:09

people use mixed reality for and

34:12

that's a good line, right? It

34:16

is like lustrous that's what punching other

34:18

men in the face will get you Just

34:21

get the follicles. Yeah, he's just rocking. Um Healthier

34:24

than ever by the way, you know, uh mixed

34:26

martial arts is listed in metas risk factors with

34:29

investors So good

34:31

made me deeply injured himself fighting other

34:33

humans. Very good. Anyway, so

34:35

the point there right is everyone

34:38

thought okay, could this $500 get me 85% of the vision Pro

34:40

and Honestly

34:43

in the review we didn't talk about the

34:45

quest a lot in our review because

34:47

they they feel very different Yeah,

34:50

yeah, and I think now what Zuckerberg is

34:52

trying to do is actually make them more competitors See,

34:55

I don't even know if I agree with that. I think you

34:57

don't part of his take I think is that they're

35:00

actually very different things that Everybody

35:03

wants them to be trying to do the same thing

35:05

and sort of compete on What

35:07

they can do for different people and it's like oh I want

35:09

to do x y and z should I buy a quest or

35:11

a vision? Pro and his whole point is kind of You

35:14

can't do any of that stuff on the vision The

35:18

quest and I will say the single funniest thing

35:20

about this whole video to me was the moment

35:23

Where the camera flips around and it

35:25

becomes clear that he's filming this thing

35:27

on a quest 3 Which

35:29

just means there is a person sitting there

35:31

very still Staring at

35:34

him with the headset on just like you do

35:36

with the vision Pro your child's birthday push. Yeah,

35:38

exactly Like next time we make a video

35:40

and you know, I I'm just gonna stare into your eyes But

35:45

he it's a big part of what he talks about and I think

35:47

is the most compelling part of Zuckerberg's case

35:50

here is that for all the stuff

35:52

people actually want to do in

35:54

a headset like this right now We can talk about

35:56

10 years from now. We can talk about

35:58

the big far future of headsets everybody. But in

36:00

terms of like right now what people want to do inside of

36:02

a headset, there's just more of that

36:05

in the class. Yeah, there's more games, there's

36:07

more apps. There are there is you can

36:09

do three Mac windows if you want to.

36:12

Although setting that up is a

36:14

Byzantine nightmare. Like

36:16

what I call software dongles. Yeah, you

36:18

don't want it's not great. You have

36:20

to download a bunch of apps that

36:22

just sound like malware in order. Like

36:24

it's that. Yeah, the in your like

36:26

I'm sending my entire screen to meta.

36:29

No, thank you, sir. I don't get what your hair looks

36:32

like today. No. So you're

36:35

not actually sending your entire screen to meta.

36:37

But you understand what I'm saying. It's a

36:40

nightmare of weird applications. And

36:42

Mark actually calls it out like their eco apples

36:44

ecosystem is great. But if you want to

36:46

play a bunch of games, or you want to do fitness, if

36:48

you want to control the thing you have high resolution

36:50

controllers, or she's called out very specifically.

36:52

And the heart of what he's getting at, and I

36:54

think this is really interesting, because you

36:57

rarely see CEOs acknowledge this.

37:00

He's like, we made different trade offs than

37:02

Apple. And we think

37:04

our trade offs make

37:06

a better product period, not just a cheaper

37:08

product, not just a better product at our

37:11

price point. And he

37:13

comes back to that over and over again. And

37:15

you if you go listen to any CEO ever

37:17

talk about their products, I talked to a lot

37:19

of CEOs, and a lot of decoders like you

37:21

made this trade off. How did you make that

37:23

choice? And like, we didn't make any trade offs at all. All

37:26

the time. Yeah, like all the time. Especially

37:28

Apple refuses to acknowledge that they made trade offs. Right?

37:31

Like in the review process, work, why is the battery

37:33

over here? And like, yeah, we want to save weight

37:35

on your head. And that is as much of a

37:37

trade off because it is meant to be over here.

37:39

Jesus wanted it that way.

37:43

And it's like, there's that one you can't avoid. But everything

37:47

else they're like these are the best displays ever made.

37:49

Yeah. And then Mark is everything like we've looked at

37:51

these displays and they are OLED displays and they have

37:53

exactly the kind of motion blur that you would expect

37:55

from OLED displays. Our lenses

37:57

are better than the meta really believes the

37:59

Quest 3. pancake lenses are better, they have

38:01

a wider field of view, so we

38:03

lose X from the displays, the resolution

38:05

that Apple has on their displays, but

38:07

we gain X in the lenses. I'm

38:10

not saying these are the right trade-offs, I'm

38:12

not saying these are the trade-offs that make

38:15

you buy anything. I'm saying a CEO acknowledging

38:17

the trade-offs in a product category is wild,

38:20

like fully wild. And

38:22

I don't know if you saw this, Saks, a lot

38:24

of people were like, this is

38:26

Saks Balmer moment where

38:29

Balmer was like, $500 fully on

38:31

subsides of the plan, I like

38:33

our phone better. And there's

38:35

an element of that to what Saks was saying.

38:37

Oh, no, I disagree. It

38:40

felt more like a victory lap, like a legit

38:42

victory lap. Wow, okay, that's how you took it.

38:44

Yeah, because I, you know,

38:46

V put up a story this week that I worked

38:48

with her on about the visions of

38:50

these two companies because they're both, the end game for

38:53

both of them isn't VR, it's AR, right? Like both

38:55

of these companies are waiting, eventually the technology is going

38:57

to get there and they're going to do face computers

38:59

and that's what everybody wants. After

39:03

15 days of the vision from, can

39:05

we say everyone wants a face computer? That's what

39:07

everyone in Silicon Valley wants. That's

39:10

what all the VCs want. But

39:13

I think like their strategy is a much

39:15

smarter strategy and I think when you

39:17

think about how you have to normalize these

39:19

products because they are really big, really wild

39:22

and really insane, you have to normalize

39:24

that. It's going to require a cultural shift

39:27

and Meta is moving with much smarter

39:29

purpose in that direction than Apple who

39:31

is like, face computer that looks like

39:33

ski goggles, put it on your face, it's way too heavy

39:35

and you might throw up, it'll be fine. And

39:38

Meta's like, okay, well, we've got like these glasses

39:40

that just look like glasses and you

39:42

can't do as much, but you can still do like, you can

39:44

still like scan photos and

39:46

stuff like that, which is really, really cool. And

39:48

they've got the VR headsets that actually like do

39:51

VR well. Yeah. Which

39:54

like, I think that's just a better strategy. I think

39:56

he's right and when I was watching it, I was

39:58

like, oh, this is... and just taking

40:00

this victory lap and also making

40:02

some egregious claims like meta is

40:05

going to be the open ecosystem.

40:08

Which is bananas. Yeah, are they going to let

40:10

Lenovo build quests? I was like, oh,

40:12

are you just announcing that everybody's going to

40:15

be making headsets for meta OS? What

40:17

they mean, from what I understand, is that

40:19

you can side-load applications on a quest. No,

40:21

what meta means is if you build something

40:24

cool, we'll just buy your company. And that's

40:26

an open model. Yeah, it's an open ecosystem

40:28

because you get rich. Yeah, what they mean

40:30

in every phase of computing, there's Apple being

40:32

weird, and then there's everyone else being like,

40:34

what if we work together? And then there's

40:36

Apple being weird. Yeah, that part I

40:38

was like, oh, I feel like you

40:40

had me this whole time. Your hair looks great.

40:43

You're saying the things that I really do think

40:45

about this whole field, and now you've just lied?

40:49

He does keep saying that they will be

40:51

the open player in VR, and it's really

40:53

unclear. I really want to sit him down

40:55

with a computer historian to explain to him

40:57

computer histories that he understands that what he

41:00

is saying is not true. Oh, I'm

41:02

sure he has access to computer historians. He

41:04

probably does, but he doesn't listen. I

41:07

think there's just a way of positioning yourself

41:09

up against the big bad of Apple that

41:11

he's taking advantage of. But I think right

41:13

now what they have is side-loading apps. Yeah,

41:15

but I will say also, to your point,

41:17

Alex, I think one thing I'm

41:19

really starting to realize is how

41:22

significant Meta's lead is, just having

41:24

been at this in public for

41:26

a decade. Yep.

41:28

Because, again, like Nia, I go back to the Apple Watch. You

41:31

launch the thing, and then you wait around for a couple

41:33

of years for people to tell you what they want from

41:35

it. And then it's your job to

41:37

kind of chase that and figure it out, right? And

41:39

Apple is good at that, generally, and does it very

41:42

quickly and relies on its developers to do it for

41:44

them. Meta's been at that for 10

41:46

years now. Like the thing where here's the thing

41:48

on your face that's kind of ugly and you'll

41:50

probably throw up, like you know what that sounds

41:52

like? It's the first three Oculus products. That's

41:55

just what it was, and it turned off a lot of people,

41:57

and we all hemmed and hawed whole

42:00

generation was being turned off by their first experience

42:02

in VR because it was so bad. But

42:05

now it's been at this long enough that it's pretty good

42:07

at it and it has a pretty clear sense of what

42:09

people want right now. And I think that's

42:11

where things like the meta Ray-Ban stuff come

42:13

from. It's like, oh, people want super

42:16

immersive and that's either like gaming or

42:18

the fitness stuff. They want

42:20

to be in another world or they want as little

42:22

technology as possible. And so they've pushed to

42:24

both ends of that and I think are able to

42:26

do it. Apple very much just put out a tech

42:28

demo and we're like, is this anything?

42:30

Like it's starting at that road now and meta

42:33

has been on it for a long time. I

42:35

would say that there's a, there, I think there's a

42:37

little bit of a danger of the bomber problem and

42:39

then Apple is relentless and they

42:42

do stay focused. The difference,

42:44

the difference is that uh,

42:47

Mark Zuckerberg is not Steve Vollmer. Yes. It's

42:51

just a, just an observation that I've made over time.

42:53

I've studied these two men very carefully. I

42:57

think meta is more reactive to

42:59

consumers and that bomber's Microsoft was

43:01

much more reactive to enterprise. Yeah.

43:03

And so, and they just, and that version

43:05

of Microsoft, not Microsoft now, but that version

43:07

of Microsoft in particular was addicted to making

43:09

the ugliest shit possible. They're

43:12

just like, it's windows mobile 6.5. It's

43:15

the same windows mobile that you've hated

43:17

all this time, but now the stock

43:19

launcher is a honeycomb. Also that won't

43:21

be there and carriers can do whatever garbage

43:23

they want. And it's like, this isn't a

43:25

good idea. We made the icons smaller. This

43:29

is bad. And Apple

43:31

was able to for, and so I think there are

43:33

some meaningful differences here because they have

43:35

been in market with a complete consumer product. I'm not

43:37

saying I have a quest

43:40

to you have a quite like lots of

43:42

quest twos out there. Some quest threes, Apple's

43:45

coming at this from a different direction. I'm not saying they won't succeed,

43:48

but I think after two weeks with this thing,

43:50

like the, the

43:53

barriers are just crystal

43:55

clear in a way that the

43:58

barriers to the quest are also crystal clear

44:01

and they are going to

44:03

converge more than they don't, but saying

44:05

like Apple revitalized this market I think is...

44:08

Generous. Yeah, and with the watch

44:10

they had a huge advantage, which is no one

44:12

else could make a watch. Well. No,

44:15

I mean like literally like the iPhone does not

44:17

allow other watches. Oh, that's true, yeah. Like Pebble

44:19

existed. Yeah, I was just like Pebble was a

44:22

great watch. No, but if you want to do

44:24

the thing really, you get a text message and

44:26

you just respond yes. Like Pebble

44:28

was not allowed to do that. Yeah, you'd be like, oh, okay,

44:30

let me pull my phone out. So we'll see.

44:34

Now we've talked enough about the Vision Pro.

44:36

I like that we just spent 40 minutes being

44:38

like, everybody's returning this product. Let's talk about it.

44:40

Oh, it is the most fascinating product. It is

44:42

Apple's first big bet. I want to talk about

44:45

it. I just want to end on this. I

44:48

want everyone to do this homework and send me

44:50

your evaluation. We've talked a

44:52

lot about my theory of wearable bullshit.

44:56

Whatever that is. Where the chart

44:58

is value on one axis and

45:01

then like fiddlyness and then a

45:04

10x multiplier if it's on your face. That's

45:06

as far as I've gotten on this. So an

45:09

Apple Watch started really fiddly with not

45:11

a lot of value, eventually crossed the

45:13

line and now people really like Apple Watches.

45:15

We all have one. Yeah.

45:18

AirPods, not very fiddly at all. Super

45:20

valuable. People really like

45:22

them. Face computers historically below the

45:24

line. Very fiddly,

45:27

enormous social cost, not

45:29

a lot of value. Yeah. Where do you think

45:31

the Vision Pro is on the graph? Send

45:33

me your graph. We'll just go through

45:35

them. I'm dying to know what you all think after

45:38

this because that's fiddliness.

45:42

No, it's value on

45:44

the y-axis, fiddliness

45:47

on the x and then a 10x

45:50

multiplier on your face. That's

45:53

what I think it is. There's an entire episode where we go

45:56

through it. So I'm just... Go

45:58

back and look at that one if you want more version. of the

46:00

graph. But just send me your graph. I'm dying

46:02

to know what you think about the theory

46:05

of wearable blushes. Alright, we have

46:07

to take a break. We'll be right back. Wow,

46:11

that guy means business. Just an amazing

46:13

player. No, not him, the sports photographer

46:16

behind him. Uh, what? He has a

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business bank account with QuickBooks Money, where

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he earns 5% annual percentage yield, so

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he's scoring big on and off the field.

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You might even say he's the MVB. MVB?

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driving conditions. Always drive safely. We're

47:44

back. As we've been recording, vamping

47:48

to fill time with Division Pro, Microsoft

47:51

has been quietly making announcements in

47:53

the background on a podcast, I

47:55

believe. Yeah. Weirdest way ever to

47:57

announce things. We've been recording a

47:59

podcast. they have been publishing a

48:01

podcast and now our podcast will be about

48:03

what they said on their podcast. Does it

48:05

do we now directly compete with the Xbox?

48:08

Yes. Download ours. Don't

48:10

download the Xbox. Phil Spencer just went on a

48:12

podcast and said everything the Verge said is true. And

48:15

always has been. All right,

48:17

Alex, what is going on in the news over there? Okay, so

48:20

there's been rumors for the last few weeks

48:22

that Microsoft was going to take a

48:24

couple of games and that are

48:26

exclusive for the Xbox and

48:28

make them not exclusive. Put them on the Switch. Put

48:31

them on the PS5. Fans were not

48:33

pleased about that. Can you explain that to

48:35

me? Actually, I have realized in all of this chaos

48:37

that I don't understand why people would be so up

48:40

in arms about that. Well, I think if you go

48:42

and you spend a lot of money on a product and

48:44

you invest a lot of time and energy into it and

48:46

like buying a lot of games for it and

48:49

then and you're like, yeah, I don't get

48:51

like the last of us and I don't

48:53

get Horizon Zero Dawn. I don't get all

48:55

these cool PS5 games, but I get Starfield.

48:58

And I get see a thieves and

49:00

then they say, OK, now Starfield is going to

49:03

go off and be on on

49:05

PS5. I would probably like. I'd

49:08

probably be a little bit. So you're like, maybe I should

49:10

have just bought a PlayStation and now I get all right.

49:12

Like why did I even buy an Xbox to begin with?

49:14

I get that because they're like five, six hundred dollars. That's

49:16

expensive. So Starfield is not coming

49:19

to the five. But see thieves grounded.

49:21

Hi, Fira and Pintment are coming to

49:24

the PS5 and switch first.

49:26

Hi, Fira and Pintment thin. See

49:29

if these and grounded. See if these is like a really pretty

49:31

popular Xbox game where you can like be

49:34

a pirate and you go play with other

49:36

pirates. It's cute. It's

49:38

fun. It's a big like it's almost an MMORPG, but not

49:40

quite. These are these are

49:42

pretty popular games for Xbox and now they're going to

49:44

be on PS5 and Nintendo

49:48

Switch. And wait, can I just say something about

49:50

this? Microsoft

49:53

has not actually officially confirmed those four games.

49:56

Tom Tom has reported in

49:59

nose. that it's those four games. Microsoft

50:01

won't confirm that those are the four.

50:04

They're just saying four games, but

50:06

they've pretty clearly said it's not gonna

50:08

be Starfield, and it's not

50:10

gonna be the rumored Indiana Jones

50:13

video game that's coming out. So it's not any of the

50:15

big games? I

50:18

mean, like, really, like, Microsoft

50:20

has a handful of, like, gigantic things in

50:22

its arsenal now, and none of the games

50:24

you just named are those. Yeah, like,

50:27

Xbox fans, please don't come for me, but

50:30

if you're not, like, a big, hardcore Xbox fan, these

50:32

are probably not the biggest games in the world. It's

50:35

nowhere, nothing compared to, like, The

50:37

Last of Us or Uncharted or some of PlayStation's

50:39

exclusives. I'm horrible at video games,

50:41

and all of these sound like

50:43

fun names for thieves in a

50:46

comic book. Yeah. I'm Pentamint.

50:48

Yeah. I'm a sea of thieves. Like...

50:51

Like rejected musketeers. Yeah, exactly.

50:53

Yeah. Yeah. Oh,

50:56

no, it's High Five Rush. Like... But

50:59

it's, it's, this has been a

51:01

big deal for the community. Tom actually got to

51:04

talk with Phil Spencer about it. There was a

51:06

big interview, and I

51:08

have definitely been maybe editing

51:10

that, looking at that

51:13

stuff. I maybe knew a little ahead of the

51:15

podcast what was coming

51:17

or not coming. Spoilers. And

51:20

I thought what was really interesting was,

51:22

he was very evasive in the interview

51:24

with us about, like, what games were coming and what

51:26

games weren't coming. He wasn't really committed to anything.

51:29

And when asked specifically about Starfield and Indiana Jones,

51:31

which are the ones I think fans are most

51:34

concerned about losing that

51:36

access to, or losing that exclusive

51:38

access to, he said,

51:40

you know, I don't think we should, as

51:42

an industry, ever rule out a game going

51:44

to any other platform. Which is,

51:48

you know, if you just want to be able to play any game,

51:50

like you, Neeliah, who's bad at games,

51:52

and probably doesn't want to own every system, that's

51:54

great news for you. If you're really invested in

51:57

one ecosystem, that's less great news. Because,

51:59

like, the console. Yeah, so a

52:01

really interesting thing here that I am hoping

52:03

you can explain to me. I have

52:06

for years now assumed

52:09

that the Microsoft strategy

52:11

is game streaming. Right,

52:14

they're slowly moving to Xbox game

52:16

streaming. They bought Activision. They

52:19

want to be everywhere and Phil Spencer has

52:22

said to me, like we

52:24

are bad. We're the number three player in video

52:26

games and consoles and

52:28

consoles and if you look

52:30

broadly all the action is on phones and we

52:33

got to go there. Yeah, and that has always

52:35

felt like a hint of we're gonna go do

52:37

game streaming. Now there's the Digital Markets Act. Apple

52:39

has to open up different stores. Apple has said

52:41

they're gonna allow game streaming. So you look at

52:43

this shift and it is

52:46

not that. They're not putting Xbox

52:48

game pass on the PS5.

52:50

They're just porting four titles

52:53

to the PS5. Yeah,

52:55

and people were that upset about it. But that's

52:57

the part that I don't get. It's like why

52:59

that's a lot of work. Like

53:01

isn't the point that we're gonna stream

53:03

the titles over there? It's not like

53:06

given that the architecture of these consoles now it's not

53:08

as hard of work as it used to be because

53:10

they both run on the same like AMD kind

53:12

of architecture. It's different enough that it's

53:15

like it's not like just point and click and you immediately

53:17

transfer. But it's not as hard as it used to be.

53:19

I think this is all kind of part of showing

53:22

that they're friendly and that they're not going to create

53:27

a monopoly in gaming. Because right now they own

53:29

Activision Blizzard, which was like one of the largest

53:31

game companies. They are effectively one of the largest

53:33

game companies in the world right now.

53:35

I think Tencent and maybe Nintendo are the only thing

53:37

that might even come close to them. So

53:40

just absolutely enormous. And if they want to

53:42

say okay, no more Call of Duty on

53:45

PS5, in ten years they can do that.

53:47

So this... No, but they ran around

53:49

the world. Right. Promising any government official that

53:52

they would ship Call of Duty for at

53:54

least five more years, right? Like ten ten

53:56

ten. Yeah, so so they're like committed for the

53:58

next ten years. I mean they're like... feudal lords

54:00

in European countries that you've never heard of that

54:02

have secured a 10-year commitment for Call of Duty.

54:05

And they're trying, and like a feudal lord, they're trying to

54:08

show how magnanimous they are, right? They're

54:10

trying to show, yeah, yeah, we got you. We want to

54:12

be everywhere all at once, but we also don't want to

54:14

destroy all of our competition because

54:16

we need them to sell games. Oh, man.

54:19

That is so charitable and so wrong.

54:22

Yeah. Oh, man. What's your read

54:24

on it? So we should, you're

54:26

probably right, honestly. I don't know. We

54:29

should cut off here because I think

54:31

we're going to have Tom on the show on Tuesday

54:33

who knows clearly more about what's going

54:35

on than anyone at Microsoft. So Tom's going to

54:37

explain what's going on here. But, Neil, I would

54:39

just point you to the

54:42

Xbox One and the thing

54:44

where Microsoft said, hey, here's a console

54:46

that plays all of your games, but

54:48

we're doing it in a slightly new

54:50

way. And also a different thing happens

54:52

when you turn on your TV and

54:54

gamers just about burned the buildings down

54:56

at Microsoft. Like this business is too

54:58

big to screw up. And if

55:00

you're Microsoft and you're out here saying game

55:03

streaming is the future, we're moving these

55:05

three games you've never heard of and

55:07

Sea of Thieves over and people lose

55:10

their minds. But

55:12

Microsoft is going to play this the slowest

55:14

possible way because it is desperately afraid of

55:17

losing this little bit of love that it

55:19

has in the gaming community. Like I do

55:21

actually agree with Alex that there are some

55:23

reasons to be worried about the antitrust ramifications

55:26

of just running roughshod over the gaming industry,

55:28

which in theory Microsoft could afford to do.

55:31

But also, pissing off

55:33

gamers goes real bad for everybody and Microsoft

55:35

knows that better than anybody. And so it

55:38

is going to take this the slowest. It

55:40

feels like it can afford to take. Which is

55:43

why there's a lot of rumors. We wrote a

55:45

piece this week like Tom really thinks a handheld

55:47

is coming. He'll talk more about it with David

55:49

on next week. Sean

55:52

also fully wants he

55:54

wants to manifest a handheld that's like a

55:56

steam deck with Xbox built in. Like I

55:58

am rooting for Sean. I think that will

56:01

be cool too, but they did tease some like

56:03

unique hardware coming They've teased that some bigger hardware

56:05

is coming down the line. The sponsor keeps liking

56:07

tweets about yeah He keeps liking tweets

56:09

about hand tells and they keep in

56:11

in this conversation. He had with Tom.

56:13

He said yes unique stuff's coming So

56:15

like a handheld is coming like yeah Coming

56:18

is it gonna be like a good handheld or

56:20

is it gonna be more like what Sony like

56:23

farted out? We'll see Yeah,

56:26

sorry welcome Tom will be on the show.

56:28

We'll unpack all of it. Yeah, I'm

56:31

legitimately confused about Why

56:35

port four games to another console? I'm gonna

56:37

like if your strategy is to be everywhere

56:39

and the problem is phones We're gonna throw

56:41

you into the Xbox like reddit and just I

56:44

think the confusion will go. Can I interest

56:46

you in gamers? Oh No,

56:50

it's high-five rush I

56:56

Think they were more concerned about starfield which it sounds

56:58

like is not gonna be in this initial run So

57:00

to be fair that was the one they were really

57:02

passionate about because it just came out They're like don't

57:04

do it like this But I would

57:06

bet you ten dollars that if Microsoft

57:08

had its druthers and was not afraid

57:10

of their ramifications Starfield would be in

57:12

this Oh a hundred percent like Microsoft

57:14

strategy includes Starfield and Indiana

57:16

Jones being available everywhere. It just does

57:20

It's coming. It's just they're gonna be like six months

57:22

from now. They're really I came up to worry about

57:24

it Yeah, Phil Spencer is just

57:26

like quietly tiptoeing

57:28

in slippers towards

57:30

the future Like that's

57:32

where we're at here high up on

57:34

the tippies. Exactly. Oh my god Hi

57:37

heels on the tip. Yep. Yep. I know. I

57:39

said it all the way to work today. That's how I walk

57:41

the next line That's the real problem. I'm not gonna

57:44

finish move on We're good.

57:46

We're good here. I love to talk All

57:48

right, that's that's Microsoft and again

57:51

Tom will be on the show and well,

57:53

we'll try to figure out what all this means We

57:56

should talk about AI briefly before our

57:58

lightning around by the two more people

58:00

have asked me how to sponsor the lightning round and the

58:02

answer is that for all my jokes about

58:04

taking your money, that's not my job. I

58:06

don't know how. That's not

58:09

what we do here. Just Venmo him.

58:11

The influencers know how to take money,

58:13

but we just do disclosures and

58:15

other people take money. So

58:17

we'll figure it out. I promise someone else is going to take your

58:19

money. But we start with AI quickly and then do

58:21

a lightning round. We

58:24

mentioned at the top of the show that Google's

58:26

strategy is very much we hope over time this

58:28

makes sense. I would say

58:30

that my understanding of the Gemini product

58:33

roadmap right now fits

58:35

perfectly into over

58:37

time we hope this makes sense because

58:39

they announced Gemini Ultra, which is

58:41

20 bucks a month. And then David,

58:43

you just wrote about Gemini 1.5 Pro,

58:46

which they're like is as good as Gemini

58:48

Ultra. What is

58:51

going on here? So Google, in

58:53

case you've wondered if Google is

58:55

good at naming things now because

58:57

they decided to name everything Gemini

58:59

and that seems like it made

59:01

sense. Don't worry, my friends. Google

59:04

still sucks at naming stuff. There

59:06

are, I think, four different product

59:08

names between the Gemini

59:10

product that you use and the Gemini

59:12

subscription that you pay for. There are

59:14

four different product names, but at any

59:16

rate, so Gemini

59:18

1.5 is basically Google's

59:21

new next model. It

59:24

makes sense. Everybody's always working on these next models.

59:27

I was talking to Sunar Pichai, their CEO, about this

59:29

yesterday. And one of the things that he told me

59:31

was he thinks that over time,

59:33

eventually, these numbers won't matter to people and all

59:36

of this stuff will just sort of happen in

59:38

the background. He compared it to Google search where

59:40

like search doesn't get new version names. It just

59:42

kind of gets better over time. I want to

59:44

point out that Sam Altman said that a

59:47

million times before announcing GBD4. Just to

59:50

be honest. Oh, sure. And there's 3.5 and there's 3.5

59:52

turbo and there's GBD4 and now GBD5 is apparently a

59:55

thing even though he said it wouldn't matter. Like all

59:57

of this is insane. We're

1:00:00

going to get to that point, essentially. But

1:00:02

right now, we're very much in this arms race. And I

1:00:04

think especially the way you have to understand the arms race

1:00:06

is these two companies in

1:00:09

particular, OpenAI and Google, are

1:00:11

in a massive land grab

1:00:13

for developer resources, right? Like,

1:00:15

if every company on Earth is at some point going to have

1:00:18

an AI strategy, and at this moment, that's what it looks like,

1:00:21

there are basically two players right

1:00:23

now they can give a whole lot of

1:00:26

money to. And there is a

1:00:28

lot of money in winning that, like, think about what

1:00:30

AWS did for Amazon, right? Because

1:00:32

it was early to, we're very good at giving you

1:00:34

developer resources in the cloud. There is now

1:00:36

a belief that the market for AI is going to be

1:00:38

even bigger and happen even faster. So these

1:00:40

companies are just running as fast as they possibly can. And

1:00:43

they honestly don't care all that much if the

1:00:45

version numbers don't make any sense to us as

1:00:47

users. But so Gemini 1.5 is coming

1:00:49

out. And at

1:00:51

some point, it will just sort of wholly replace

1:00:54

Gemini 1.0. Then

1:00:56

there's the three sizes of it. There's Ultra, which

1:00:58

is like the big full model, all the epic

1:01:01

stuff. The Pro, which is the middle one, which

1:01:03

is the one that most consumers see. And then

1:01:05

there's Nano, which is specifically designed to run on

1:01:07

people's devices. Google hasn't talked much

1:01:09

about Nano yet on any of its Gemini stuff.

1:01:12

But that's an, I think, interesting piece of

1:01:14

it. The big thing with Gemini 1.5 is

1:01:17

that its context window is much bigger. And essentially what

1:01:19

that means is you can just put a lot more

1:01:21

stuff into it at a time. There's

1:01:26

a bunch of weird, complicated math to do.

1:01:28

But typically they say it's like three quarters

1:01:30

of a word is a token. And

1:01:33

Google's context window for Gemini 1.5

1:01:35

is a million tokens, which

1:01:37

is a lot of words. You can do hours

1:01:39

of video, hours of audio, all kinds of different

1:01:41

stuff. So you can just plug all this in

1:01:44

and then ask questions about it,

1:01:46

do stuff with it. And they

1:01:48

have big ideas about what people might do with

1:01:50

this huge context window. And

1:01:53

there's a lot coming. So we could put the

1:01:56

entire B movie in there

1:01:58

and then find out. if we were supposed to

1:02:00

really think there was a romance between a human woman

1:02:03

and her youth. That

1:02:05

is a great question to ask a computer. Yeah. Do

1:02:07

you detect love? Yeah. I

1:02:09

really want to do this. Let me up the difficult for

1:02:11

you. If you do this, please email me. There's

1:02:13

a great exchange in David's report on this

1:02:16

where I think Sundar

1:02:18

says you could fit the entire Lord of the Rings

1:02:20

movie into the context window and David's like, that means

1:02:22

that's happened to Google. He said it so without

1:02:25

thinking that he was just like, it was as if

1:02:27

he had like left the Lord of the Rings meeting

1:02:29

right before talking to me. It's

1:02:32

just like this definitely happened. It's

1:02:35

very good. What's

1:02:38

fascinating to me about all of this is yes, there's

1:02:40

an arms race for developers. There

1:02:42

are still, I think we're hitting the

1:02:45

same place of AI and a slightly longer timeframe

1:02:48

as people are hitting with the Vision Pro in

1:02:50

a slightly shorter timeframe, which is like, it's really

1:02:53

cool. Fastest consumer adoption history.

1:02:55

And now we've all just run into the limits. That's right.

1:02:58

Yes. Right. And

1:03:00

I think developers love it because we can build new apps. They can

1:03:02

certainly go get funding from VCs. You

1:03:04

can write code with it, which I think people

1:03:06

really love to do and sort of everywhere else

1:03:09

it's like what I can do is produce spam

1:03:11

at a higher rate than spam has ever been

1:03:13

produced before and turn the internet into a fetid

1:03:15

swamp. Oh, the corporate

1:03:17

folks love it. Yeah. Because

1:03:20

they're like, yeah, I can just have it do all my emails when

1:03:22

I have to do a memo. I just have it write

1:03:24

the first draft of my memo for me. And

1:03:27

you're like, well, you shouldn't do

1:03:29

that. You should write. That's

1:03:32

important. Oh, I actually, I think

1:03:35

sending corporate emails with AI, I don't actually send

1:03:37

a lot of emails. I refuse

1:03:39

to use enterprise software. Well, not that part. But

1:03:45

like the idea that some transactional email is

1:03:47

better written by AI than fine. But

1:03:50

like that is a pretty small use case

1:03:52

on the grand order of things. I'm

1:03:55

wondering, like David, as you looked at this model, as you

1:03:57

played with Ultra, as you've played

1:03:59

with the other ones. Do you see that next

1:04:01

set of big uses showing up? No,

1:04:05

I think there there's going to be an increasing

1:04:07

kind of creative state of the art Like one

1:04:09

of the other things that happened this week was

1:04:12

open AI launched Sora, which is its next

1:04:14

to video model And so I think the

1:04:16

kind of state of the art of stuff

1:04:18

you can make Creatively,

1:04:21

there's a just massive Room

1:04:24

left to go and there's gonna be all kinds of cool stuff

1:04:26

on that front But I think we've

1:04:29

been talking about on the show for a while

1:04:31

now When is the sort of novelty of using

1:04:33

these AI chatbots going to wear off and

1:04:36

we're there I think it's happening and and one

1:04:38

of the other things I'm starting to see all

1:04:40

over social is a lot of people who started

1:04:42

Paying for a copilot from Microsoft and are now

1:04:44

canceling it and people are starting to

1:04:46

sign up for Gemini advanced with

1:04:48

$20 a month people are starting to goof around with it and

1:04:51

You look at it And it's like the thing

1:04:54

so many people keep saying about the vision Pro

1:04:56

is like amazing technology. I Took

1:04:59

it off and kind of never had a reason to put it

1:05:01

on again And I think a lot of people are starting to

1:05:03

feel that way especially in the sort of one-to-one

1:05:06

consumer use case about

1:05:09

AI stuff and also I think that's why all

1:05:11

these companies are going after companies

1:05:13

because if I'm Already

1:05:15

signed up for this stuff through my

1:05:17

organization like yeah I'll use it to

1:05:20

make it easier to make charts or whatever I

1:05:22

mean that was Microsoft's whole strategy right like

1:05:25

get your pilot out Yeah, but co-pilot is

1:05:27

20 bucks a month to make charts easier.

1:05:29

Yeah. Yeah, but you're like a IT

1:05:32

guy with endless budget at a

1:05:34

big company days of endless IT budgets

1:05:36

are Who knows right you can see

1:05:38

all these companies are contracting. They're like not spending

1:05:40

lots of money like All right,

1:05:42

that to me is like this is the big gap I

1:05:44

will say that I recently set the action button on my

1:05:46

iPhone 15 Pro to

1:05:49

Open the chat GPT voice assistant just a cheap

1:05:52

one 3.5 not for not the one you have

1:05:54

to be for and it is like Oh, they

1:05:56

should just make Siri this yeah, like they should

1:05:58

throw Siri away, and they should just

1:06:00

to make Siri this, it is revelatory.

1:06:04

When you're like the other day, we had

1:06:06

to reheat chicken wings from the Super Bowl,

1:06:08

and I just asked my phone, and it

1:06:10

said an answer to me. Was that answer

1:06:12

correct? Did it lie? Did it

1:06:15

hallucinate the temperature and the time? It was

1:06:18

fine because the steaks were so low. Yeah.

1:06:20

I asked it twice. Chicken wings

1:06:23

is high steaks, though. No, but not reheating.

1:06:25

No, that's... That's true. Yeah. Reheating, that's... Yeah,

1:06:27

that's fair. Does it... Because I asked it

1:06:29

twice, and the first time I said 300-50

1:06:32

degrees, the second time I said 375, and

1:06:34

I was like, this doesn't matter. The steaks

1:06:36

are very low here, and I didn't have to

1:06:39

trawl the SEO'd internet. Yeah.

1:06:41

In Siri, I asked Siri, and Siri was like, I

1:06:44

don't know. If it

1:06:46

had said 200, would you have been in there

1:06:48

being like, this feels wrong, but I'll go with it. That's

1:06:50

how I described the Chagibati use case. You know

1:06:53

that old Stephen Colbert word truthiness? Yeah.

1:06:56

Like, if you're comfortable with something that just feels

1:06:58

right, I really encourage you

1:07:00

to send Chagibati to your action button. No,

1:07:02

but actually, that's a really good example

1:07:06

of the problem that all these companies are

1:07:08

having, right? Like, Google is essentially

1:07:10

ripping and replacing Google Assistant with Gemini for

1:07:12

the same reason. Like, this stuff is going

1:07:14

to be better at those things. Would you

1:07:16

pay $20 a month for the thing that

1:07:18

you just described? Like, no, nobody would. And

1:07:20

so there's going to be this like, mainstream

1:07:24

use case for this stuff that no one will

1:07:26

pay for. And then there's going to

1:07:28

be a ton of money, at least that's what

1:07:31

these companies are betting in the

1:07:33

business use cases. But to me, it feels like we

1:07:35

are quickly hitting

1:07:38

something like a ceiling of what people actually

1:07:40

want to do with these things day in

1:07:42

and day out. Like, a million token context

1:07:45

window does not make you better at chicken

1:07:47

wings. It just doesn't. And so I think

1:07:49

that next thing for regular people is going

1:07:51

to have to come from somewhere else. And

1:07:53

there's a bunch of different ways these companies

1:07:55

are trying to do it. OpenAI

1:07:57

has been making a bunch of Tweaks.

1:08:00

You like how it builds it's models to try

1:08:02

and make them sir, smarter and more efficient and

1:08:04

also a soothing this week called memory where it

1:08:06

can actually remember things about you and what you

1:08:08

like in your preferences so that it should sort

1:08:10

of interact with you in a more human than

1:08:13

like friendly way over time. That's.

1:08:15

The stuff that I think is gonna be interesting just building.

1:08:17

Bigger. Models to do more high end stuff

1:08:19

is like purely a display. And I think you're

1:08:22

right that twenty dollars per person per month is

1:08:24

more money than most companies have to send at

1:08:26

this moment in time. Yell, I don't know. I

1:08:28

don't know which of those things as gonna catch

1:08:30

up first. Can. You imagine sending twenty dollars

1:08:32

a month for lead? Possibly.

1:08:35

Right possibly wrong. Chicken.

1:08:37

Wings reheating instructions. I

1:08:41

mean I think if you just buy

1:08:43

chicken wings astronauts you're always so we

1:08:45

are in of you. Very very good.

1:08:48

Yes! Nurture your wings Rodgers Twenty bucks

1:08:50

a month. It's a gamble everytime s

1:08:52

access Ah said Windsor. Big deal. They

1:08:54

are very important. I want

1:08:56

to talk about the other side of the

1:08:59

air debate real quick. David: He wrote about

1:09:01

robots that he is t this week said

1:09:03

Sarah Jong un. I talked about the copyright

1:09:05

battles. That. Are facing always

1:09:07

air companies on decoder this

1:09:09

something else here right? The

1:09:11

seventies are forging ahead. With.

1:09:14

Ever bigger models, ever more use

1:09:16

cases, higher prices and mode. Sort.

1:09:20

Of underlying question is is it ok

1:09:22

to take all the stuff to make?

1:09:24

The models remains extraordinarily and results are

1:09:26

the Sarah Silverman case, a group of

1:09:28

others including Ser Ser and Serving of

1:09:30

Nice. They just had it set back

1:09:32

in their taste. All of the claims

1:09:34

accepted direct copyright infringement which is a

1:09:36

big deal, but all the other claims

1:09:38

are thrown out. The judge seems very

1:09:41

skeptical. Third, There's some

1:09:43

like. Specific. Concerns in

1:09:45

there that are pretty wonky soon as we go into

1:09:47

them, but. That. Cases were getting whittled

1:09:49

down over times. Case against of and I'd

1:09:51

is a little bit stronger so we'll see,

1:09:54

but we don't know if these companies. Can

1:09:56

even do it. Like. Whether

1:09:58

this is offer and. When such that. The.

1:10:01

Courts to shut down the entire notion of

1:10:03

this to begin with or of the payments

1:10:05

that are required to make become so high.

1:10:08

That the business models don't work out. All.

1:10:10

Of them questions and a day. But I want you

1:10:12

to say about robots Arctic Sea because. There's.

1:10:15

This little handshake agreement of a text

1:10:17

file on every web sites. And that

1:10:20

handshake agreement. Is I One hand

1:10:22

is crushing, the other will focus and it's

1:10:24

like this thing can't support the weight of

1:10:26

it. I don't think. yes I got. I

1:10:28

got sort of those as at this year's

1:10:30

ago. Ah, when I first started talking to

1:10:32

people about google and first story I wrote

1:10:34

which is basically like. What? Is

1:10:36

devalue exchange on the internet right? And it

1:10:38

turns out that a lot of this

1:10:40

sort of policing of the internet happens in

1:10:43

that fighting robots that he acts if

1:10:45

you that almost any website. and

1:10:47

then just put up/robots that txt it'll

1:10:49

pop other tech fall that you can

1:10:52

see that. Basically. Decides which

1:10:54

crawlers from around the web are and

1:10:56

are not allowed to go on to

1:10:58

website. So crawlers exists for of reasons

1:11:00

many them are from search engines which

1:11:02

are indexing the web and Rubio said

1:11:04

sources of Amazon has a crawler the

1:11:06

text for pricing around the web for

1:11:08

what the government would say are extremely

1:11:10

nefarious reasons and Amazon retire for legitimate

1:11:12

business reasons. You. Might run a

1:11:15

crawler to check all the links on your

1:11:17

own site to make sure that they're still

1:11:19

live like they're A lot of reasons run

1:11:21

Christ's and this is like a technology from

1:11:23

the early nineties that basically a bunch of

1:11:25

people on a mailing list including like Tim

1:11:27

Berners Lee and Mark entries answer and a

1:11:29

bunch of like early internet optimists decided as

1:11:31

like okay years gonna put a pissing that

1:11:33

says essentially who's in, who's out and everyone

1:11:36

else who makes and that he's crawlers is

1:11:38

gonna abide by this rule because we want

1:11:40

the internet to work. Roku people, this is

1:11:42

gonna be great. That. works pretty

1:11:44

well for a surprisingly long time and now what's

1:11:46

happening as if you run an ai company new

1:11:48

and going up on to twenty did at you

1:11:50

know it's full of training data is the internet

1:11:52

and so you just go you crawl the whole

1:11:55

internet you pull all that stuff and you dump

1:11:57

it in a new trained remodel on that's how

1:11:59

you get recipes That's how you get all this stuff. Like

1:12:01

you just base it on all the stuff that exists on the public

1:12:03

internet. And so now if you're

1:12:05

a person who runs

1:12:07

a website or a recipe

1:12:10

blog or any number of other things

1:12:12

on the internet, you have to

1:12:14

go in and decide who's in and who's out

1:12:17

with a thousand new crawlers, a

1:12:19

bunch of companies of varying levels

1:12:21

of decency and sketchiness. OpenAI

1:12:23

has been in a bunch of like

1:12:26

media coverage about this because it actually

1:12:28

told people how to block GPT bot

1:12:30

and promise to abide by it and

1:12:32

by all accounts is doing so. A

1:12:35

huge portion of websites on the

1:12:37

internet, including I believe all of Vox Media blocked

1:12:39

GPT bot. The New York Times did.

1:12:41

A lot of publishers have. But

1:12:43

there are a lot of things out there that are either too

1:12:46

small for now to even be

1:12:49

known to these publishers or

1:12:51

just don't care. They just don't have to

1:12:53

respect this little tiny text file that has

1:12:56

no legal or technical authority. So

1:12:59

any AI that wants to come in just can.

1:13:02

That's just where we are. And we have just like

1:13:04

broken this basic give

1:13:06

and take that the internet ran on for so

1:13:08

long. And like I talked to Tony

1:13:10

Stubblebein at the CEO of Medium, who

1:13:12

has been a big proponent of

1:13:15

kicking out the bots in

1:13:17

this particular way. And what

1:13:19

he said is basically like we're getting nothing

1:13:21

out of this exchange. They're just taking everything

1:13:24

from us and telling us

1:13:26

that it's for the good of society.

1:13:28

And like screw that. That's

1:13:30

not how the internet works. That's not what we're after.

1:13:32

And I think everyone on the internet now is starting

1:13:35

to have to make that exact same set

1:13:37

of decisions. And

1:13:40

what's fascinating is OpenAI only

1:13:43

made GPT bot blockable after

1:13:46

they had scraped the internet. Correct.

1:13:49

I honestly think that they did that

1:13:51

so that media organizations, and I'm not privy

1:13:54

to what Vox Media does at that level.

1:13:56

I don't know why they did that or

1:13:58

didn't do that. I'm

1:14:00

pretty sure they did it so media organizations,

1:14:02

companies could block OpenAI and feel like they

1:14:05

had some control and then

1:14:07

OpenAI could go make a deal. And

1:14:10

they're like, oh no, you took the control away from

1:14:12

us. I will say

1:14:14

that is precisely why. I mean, I talked

1:14:16

to the OpenAI's chief strategy officer who said

1:14:18

basically that exact thing, that it

1:14:20

is this is a way to signal that you would

1:14:22

like to make a commercial deal and let's do

1:14:24

it. That is a

1:14:27

pretty wild way of backing into something

1:14:29

like that. But yeah, it is. It's

1:14:31

not an accident that OpenAI didn't tell

1:14:34

people about GPT bot until it had already

1:14:36

been pretty far down the road. Yeah, because

1:14:38

without doing what it did, GPT

1:14:41

for and chat GPT wouldn't be as good as

1:14:43

they are like that. That is the trade. But

1:14:45

then the question is who

1:14:48

experiences the downside of that? Like, is that bad

1:14:50

for the Internet? Is it bad for the world

1:14:52

or is it just bad for OpenAI? Like,

1:14:54

that's the question now. Yeah. And

1:14:56

I think individual creators are feeling the pain

1:14:58

of this very deeply.

1:15:00

Yeah. Even

1:15:03

when we just write about neat AI tools,

1:15:05

we get people who are sort of morally outraged that we

1:15:07

would acknowledge that some of them are neat because

1:15:10

it's built on something.

1:15:12

It's built on some taking. And

1:15:14

whether or not you think that taking is fair or not is

1:15:17

sort of divorced from whether it's legal or not.

1:15:20

And I don't know that anyone has quite

1:15:22

figured that out. Right. Somebody needs to

1:15:24

pop it into Am I the asshole on Reddit?

1:15:26

Like, it's a perfect one, right? And

1:15:30

then you enter all of that

1:15:32

into the million token Gemini field.

1:15:34

Is this correct? Yeah. And then we

1:15:36

send it to the judges and we're like, look,

1:15:38

we figured it out. The robots figured it out.

1:15:40

They talked to each other. We got this. We

1:15:43

know who the asshole is. That means who legally is

1:15:45

right. Again, I keep

1:15:47

coming back to what I refer

1:15:50

to as the endgame post, which is a person

1:15:52

who's like, I love podcasts, but they don't have

1:15:54

time for them. I just feed them into an

1:15:56

AI and it's like, dude, you just want articles.

1:15:58

Yeah. Just go read them. What

1:16:00

you want is articles. Just go read articles made by

1:16:02

people who care about you. It's

1:16:05

a very simple, very simple way of getting what you

1:16:07

want from the internet. People

1:16:11

would like to read. It is

1:16:13

amazing that the broad future of

1:16:15

computing is more reading. After

1:16:18

all these... Anyway, doesn't matter. I

1:16:20

think that the turn for these

1:16:22

AI companies, for OpenAI, for example,

1:16:24

you can think of any more commercial deals. They're being

1:16:27

sued. You go out and make a

1:16:29

bunch of deals, you're admitting that you need the deals.

1:16:32

The New York Times is going to, or whoever else

1:16:34

is suing OpenAI, get ease doing stability. It's going to

1:16:36

say, look, you know that you

1:16:38

should pay money for this stuff. You

1:16:41

didn't pay us to begin

1:16:43

with. That

1:16:45

is a strategic nightmare for these

1:16:47

companies. It is. I think James

1:16:50

Kwon, the Chief Strategy Officer at OpenAI, is talking to you.

1:16:52

One of the things he said is, and this goes back

1:16:54

to what you were talking about before, is that OpenAI

1:16:57

feels very strongly that chat

1:16:59

GPT should be mostly free for most

1:17:01

people for exactly that reason. That's

1:17:04

the value they believe they deliver back to the

1:17:06

world, is that by giving to

1:17:09

this system, you then get access to

1:17:11

this system. The increase in

1:17:13

quality of this system is good

1:17:15

for the world, and you can have it, and

1:17:17

it will make your life better. I think you

1:17:19

can view that as dystopian, black mirror nonsense, or

1:17:21

you can view that as a fair trade in

1:17:24

the way that Google search was a fair trade.

1:17:27

That is the dynamic that we're about to

1:17:29

reckon with in a lot of really, really

1:17:31

messy ways. What is the

1:17:33

most fascinating about all this, we can bring it all

1:17:35

the way back around to Google, no

1:17:37

one is going to block the Google bot. No

1:17:41

one thinks it's going to be invisible from

1:17:43

search. You can block- Dorit's sites probably would.

1:17:46

I don't know what those are. Alex's

1:17:49

Flex server continues to rock and roll in

1:17:51

the background. No one's blocking Alex's Flex server.

1:17:54

You can block Google with some gradations.

1:17:56

You can block Google search, which no

1:17:58

one will do. And then you

1:18:00

can block the other stuff. You can block

1:18:03

Google's AI training. But no one is willing

1:18:05

to say, I'm so mad at Google for

1:18:07

scraping all of our stuff that we're going

1:18:09

to block search. And I think that's when

1:18:11

that one flips and people are

1:18:13

like, it is worth it to the invisible Google. The

1:18:15

architecture of the internet changes. Yeah. Alright.

1:18:19

We got to take a break. We're going to come

1:18:21

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1:19:23

We're back. Do you

1:19:25

remember when Time magazine said the person of the year was you? Yeah.

1:19:27

And the little mirror. It was in a

1:19:29

real mirror. That was when print magazines had budget to

1:19:32

put mirror on the cover of magazines in every grocery

1:19:34

store in America and be like, the

1:19:36

person here is you. It was like a foggy, see like

1:19:38

holding their carrots. Like what?

1:19:40

It was all like curvy, warped looking. Oh,

1:19:44

that's not me. I was here for

1:19:46

milk, not consent. I was like, oh, I'm not. I'm not. I'm

1:19:49

not. I'm not. I was here

1:19:51

for milk, not conceptual print ideas.

1:19:54

So you're saying y'all didn't frame yours and put it up

1:19:56

next year or the other awards? Not. It's

1:19:59

not. That's weird. Donald

1:20:02

Trump has like the fake one and I'm like,

1:20:05

this one's real. He looks at it and he's like, it

1:20:07

is me. I

1:20:12

was for real that time. All

1:20:14

right. I feel like all of

1:20:16

my lightning round entries are just complaining about streaming

1:20:18

the Super Bowl. So Kranz, do you

1:20:20

want to... First, mine is like, I just

1:20:22

find it fascinating. It's a

1:20:24

big turn in the whole DMA

1:20:26

thing with the

1:20:29

European Union. iMessage is not

1:20:31

found to be a... What is it

1:20:33

they call it? Gatekeeper.

1:20:35

Yeah. iMessage is not found

1:20:37

to be a core platform service. So

1:20:40

they're not going to make it open up,

1:20:42

which feels probably right given that no

1:20:44

one in the EU... Well, this is a

1:20:46

trade app. They've notably made

1:20:48

the trade of saying, we will support

1:20:50

RCS and I think this is what

1:20:53

they got in return. Yeah. So

1:20:55

they're free and clear, as are my

1:20:57

personal favorite. Microsoft's Edge browser is

1:21:00

not considered a core service and

1:21:02

Bing search was found to not

1:21:04

be a core service. I don't think anybody

1:21:06

has ever found Bing search to be a core service. I

1:21:09

know. I just, I really loved that it was like, okay,

1:21:12

iMessage, like, damn it. And

1:21:14

then Edge and then Bing.

1:21:17

Not even a bureaucrats of the European Union could

1:21:19

bring themselves to regulate Bing. I wonder if they

1:21:21

just like chuckled. They're like, oh, no. One

1:21:27

thing that is really interesting in the mix

1:21:29

there is

1:21:32

Apple broke web apps in the EU. So

1:21:35

for a minute, it looked like Apple would support what's

1:21:37

called progressive web apps on the iPhone. When you have

1:21:39

a web app, you can save it to your home

1:21:41

screen. You push the button. It

1:21:43

loads up in a wrapper and it feels just like a

1:21:46

normal app. This

1:21:48

is great. I think this is like in

1:21:50

terms of out. That's how I do

1:21:52

the Verge. Yeah, that's how I do the Verge. That's how I

1:21:54

do our CMS when I want to post a quick post really

1:21:56

fast. Ooh, that's smart. A quick link that just opens up a

1:21:58

web wrapper. It's not in so far. and

1:22:00

Apple broke it two betas ago in

1:22:02

iOS 17 and they didn't say

1:22:05

anything about why. And then today

1:22:07

they finally released a statement on their developer

1:22:09

portal that's like, well we

1:22:11

have to support other browsers in iOS now with

1:22:13

a browser. And as you know, they all have

1:22:15

to be equal. So how could we possibly re-architect

1:22:18

all of iOS to support launching a web app

1:22:20

and another browser engine from the home screen? So

1:22:22

we just shut it off. And it's like,

1:22:25

stop doing malicious compliance. Yeah, like that

1:22:27

was just like kicking and screaming.

1:22:29

Like that's just a hissy fit. Like,

1:22:31

do you know what platform supports PWAs and

1:22:33

allows other browser engines? Android.

1:22:36

It's right there. You can just look

1:22:38

at it. It's just whiny. It's

1:22:40

the most popular operating system on earth. Meanwhile,

1:22:43

the other browser makers have spent the last few

1:22:45

weeks making very clear to everyone that

1:22:47

Apple has actually, if anything, made it harder to

1:22:49

be a browser maker in the EU now because

1:22:51

you essentially have to run many

1:22:53

different versions of your app inside your one

1:22:56

app. And it's

1:22:58

just going to make everyone's life impossible. Apple.

1:23:01

Come on. Great job, Apple. Look, we

1:23:03

don't talk about this aspect of companies

1:23:05

very often. We treat companies as sort

1:23:07

of singular entities. There's a real split

1:23:10

inside Apple right now between the suits,

1:23:12

basically, the policy and the business folks,

1:23:15

and the very idealistic

1:23:18

engineers who make the products. And

1:23:21

I think that this EU thing is really

1:23:23

pushing on that split in a way that

1:23:26

Apple is a very well-run company. They

1:23:28

are mission-driven in their way. But

1:23:31

I'm wondering how much of this stuff,

1:23:34

where it's a bunch of pretty bad faith

1:23:36

responses to

1:23:39

a law that's designed to make computers feel more

1:23:41

like computers, you just

1:23:43

wonder. Someone had to write

1:23:45

the code to break all the web apps in the

1:23:47

EU. Just like,

1:23:50

furiously? Yeah. Like, suits standing

1:23:52

over their shoulder, just like, I hate you so much right

1:23:54

now. But I'm going to write the really good code. Yeah.

1:23:56

Some lawyer is like, do the malicious compliance. Yeah.

1:23:58

Yeah, and I like, fire. the Jira ticket

1:24:00

and the Jira ticket is labeled malicious compliance.

1:24:04

That's kind of suck. That's all I'm saying. Like

1:24:06

on the, on, on decoder, I'm always asking about

1:24:08

how decisions are made, but like how a decision

1:24:10

actually gets implemented is equally interesting to me. It's

1:24:13

like someone had to file the Jira ticket. It's

1:24:15

like per DMA break web apps. There

1:24:19

are just three levers in Tim Cook's office.

1:24:21

One of them says ship the thing. The

1:24:24

other one says buy that company.

1:24:26

And the third one just says

1:24:28

malicious compliance. And

1:24:31

he just pulls it and just like lights start flashing

1:24:33

all over Apple park. And that's how everybody knows. Yeah.

1:24:36

I don't know. There's something weird there

1:24:38

that I, you know, again, we usually think of companies

1:24:40

like singular entities. Like there's

1:24:42

Tim Cook in arms, you know, like, and

1:24:44

like Tim Cook is in control of all the arms or the sooner

1:24:47

we're trying arms and the arms are like, who are you? You

1:24:51

made a messaging app. But

1:24:54

these companies are tens of thousands of people, if not a

1:24:56

hundred thousand people when they're at

1:24:58

their biggest and they are not

1:25:00

singular in that way. And I, this

1:25:02

is the sort of thing that I think I

1:25:05

get that Apple's very mad at the Europeans. My

1:25:07

caution is this is the sort of

1:25:09

thing that breaks a very idealistic culture

1:25:11

because you have to make everyone believe that you

1:25:14

are totally right. Yeah. Yeah.

1:25:17

And that this little move, which is not a very, which

1:25:19

is a very cynical kind of move is

1:25:21

actually is actually somehow idealistic. That's

1:25:24

just complicated. Yeah. All right.

1:25:27

I basically did a lightning round under your lightning. It

1:25:29

was great. Well, yeah,

1:25:31

we have an aftershock. There's like a sub

1:25:33

lightning round under. You can sponsor an aftershock. I don't

1:25:35

know. Just a minute. David, what's

1:25:37

yours? Uh, mine,

1:25:40

well, I'm gonna,

1:25:43

I'm gonna ask for shock when we start complaining

1:25:45

about the Super Bowl. So I'll come back to

1:25:47

that. Yeah. Mine was just,

1:25:49

there was this news this week from

1:25:51

a wall street journal report that Walmart

1:25:53

might buy a Vizio, which I

1:25:55

just find deeply fascinating. And

1:25:58

also kind of to be a bummer. I feel like it wasn't that. Long

1:26:00

ago that we thought Vizio had a chance to be a

1:26:02

really interesting Forward-thinking player and

1:26:04

that was 2011. I wrote a profile of

1:26:06

Vizio in 2011. That's 2011 It

1:26:09

was like when we launched. Yeah,

1:26:12

it was supposed to buy Vizio in what 2017 Yeah,

1:26:14

then after that it just kind of started

1:26:16

to Like

1:26:21

TV and then they disappeared and then I could not

1:26:23

get them to take the TV back they make a car

1:26:25

at one point Yes, yeah, that

1:26:27

was a truly weird. Yeah, like that was

1:26:29

a sign up. That was a Chinese government

1:26:31

sign up I loved that company. That

1:26:33

was a good time But

1:26:35

anyway, but you remember that in 2011. I wrote the

1:26:38

profile of Vizio. This guy Matt McCrae was the CTO

1:26:40

He was a lot of fun. Do you remember they

1:26:42

put out Windows laptops and kept saying they were bone

1:26:44

stock? It

1:26:46

was great All that was great and they

1:26:49

they kept on the trend it would span by

1:26:51

doing like fan service and the TV business was

1:26:53

a third Business Matt is now the CEO of

1:26:55

Arlo cameras And

1:26:58

I think Vizio is just like really they

1:27:00

tried so many interesting things Remember

1:27:03

when the TVs were just chromecast? Yep. Yeah,

1:27:05

I have one of those. Oh

1:27:07

boy, but that's what everybody wanted In

1:27:10

fact, it's actually they had like the engine that

1:27:12

revealed was the remote, right? I know. Yeah, I

1:27:14

don't know where it is But

1:27:16

this is what I mean. I'm fired my house

1:27:18

Everyone in our audience is like I don't want

1:27:21

a smart TV. I just want a panel and

1:27:23

then they like ship the thing But

1:27:26

had no remote we wanted a remote I

1:27:28

just want to be able to turn up the volume without having

1:27:30

to charge my everyone is like I just want a dumb TV

1:27:32

I don't want that did that and then they shipped it and

1:27:34

I like no, I don't want that Yeah, I want giving us

1:27:36

more. I the day the update

1:27:38

came and I like I Didn't even a

1:27:41

must-have come months in advance and I turned that TV

1:27:43

on because it's like my bedroom TV sits over on

1:27:45

I turned it on I was like, oh my

1:27:47

physique was smart now and it was

1:27:49

much more usable And then I was very upset cuz

1:27:51

I'm like that wasn't the promise.

1:27:54

Yeah, it got bumped It's revealed preferences man.

1:27:56

Everyone wants to run some weird data tracking

1:27:59

smart TV out rating system. So

1:28:03

$2 billion Walmart with still at Vizio. Yeah. And

1:28:05

it just feels like that's a

1:28:07

lot of money also to basically improve its

1:28:11

house brand of TVs, which is essentially what Walmart

1:28:13

would be doing. I would

1:28:16

remind you that it's existing house brand is

1:28:18

called on with two ends. So

1:28:20

I would spend $2 billion to not have on

1:28:22

with two ends as my house brand of anything.

1:28:24

Like Vizio has kind of gotten

1:28:27

bodied by TCL and Hisense in the last

1:28:29

few years. And the budget TV market. So

1:28:31

it's like, what a bleak statement though,

1:28:33

right? Like the fact that that is

1:28:35

true and that is true. Yeah. So

1:28:38

it's such a bummer. Yeah. Watch Vizio

1:28:40

go from like, it

1:28:43

was such a good company because okay, you could get

1:28:45

the TV in and it wouldn't necessarily be like, but

1:28:47

you'd have to fiddle with it. You'd have to mess

1:28:50

around, but then it could look really, really pretty. And you'd

1:28:52

be like, Oh, holy crap. I spent like half of what

1:28:54

I could have spent on an LG and I

1:28:56

have a great looking TV. And now

1:28:58

that's just not quite the case

1:29:00

anymore. And now the whole TV business is

1:29:03

collecting data on people who watch you while

1:29:05

you put up your webcam. Yeah. Vizio

1:29:09

is, is, has been doing that. Yeah.

1:29:11

Like Vizio was, Vizio was a, was a

1:29:13

really a thought leader

1:29:15

in that department for a while there. Unfortunate

1:29:18

for all of us. Well that's how

1:29:20

they made the TV. I mean, this was, yeah, they

1:29:24

essentially subsidized it. And then Roku came in and

1:29:26

was like, we can

1:29:28

do it better because our operating

1:29:30

system is actually usable. And,

1:29:33

and that's why Roku like partnered with

1:29:35

HySense. That's why they partnered with, with

1:29:37

TCL and, and now Roku is this

1:29:39

really dominant force in advertising and in

1:29:42

TVs and Vizio is off

1:29:44

in the corner being like, let go, I blame

1:29:46

you for everything. Well Roku also came to

1:29:49

people and said, we have an advertising business that will give

1:29:51

you a cut of. And that

1:29:53

has become a business for Walmart that it thinks

1:29:55

it can do more. Like it's just all, this

1:29:58

is a lot of money being thrown around. for

1:30:00

big deals and big companies and none of

1:30:02

it is about making good televisions and that

1:30:04

sucks that sucks yes great television

1:30:06

Sony you know it watches

1:30:09

you while I know I know the

1:30:11

camera and I turned all the stuff off try

1:30:13

to do it another meeting with that TV tell us how great

1:30:15

I'm gonna have it we're done

1:30:17

messing with the features of

1:30:19

the television did you have like go and put the

1:30:21

webcam back in a box oh the webcam

1:30:24

was like too quickly discarded yeah I

1:30:26

got a drawer that I just think of as the e-waste

1:30:29

drawer yeah it's like maybe one day I'll be like where

1:30:31

is that webcam I'm gonna open the e-waste drawer it's gonna

1:30:33

be great speaking of let's complain about

1:30:35

the Super Bowl all right I

1:30:39

have a lot to say it is an embarrassment that in America on

1:30:42

the most

1:30:48

washed Super Bowl ever Lord where

1:30:51

America's sweetheart did

1:30:53

something with Travis Kelsey and after she won the Super Bowl

1:30:55

she won the Super Bowl actually can

1:30:58

I just say this other you know there's a video

1:31:00

clip of them running to each other after the Super

1:31:02

Bowl and she'll call each other and then finally the

1:31:04

clip with audio came out cuz he was miked up

1:31:06

yeah and he's like I love you thank you for

1:31:08

coming I appreciate you thank you flying halfway around the

1:31:10

world and then he says was

1:31:12

it electric she's like it was unbelievable I

1:31:15

have asked

1:31:17

Becky if shit was electric like 50

1:31:19

times a day since I've seen that

1:31:22

clip like I'm like pouring the

1:31:24

coffee like was it electric easily

1:31:26

the best thing to come out of the entire

1:31:28

Taylor Swift Travis Kelsey story on anything it's just

1:31:30

constantly asking Becky if things are and she's like

1:31:32

no she's she does not think

1:31:34

it was unbelievable anyway so she will not

1:31:37

streamed in 4k but kind of streamed

1:31:43

4k so I'm paramount plus I think David that's where you

1:31:46

watched it that is where I watched it they

1:31:51

only gave a 4k stream to

1:31:53

cable companies so

1:31:56

nothing direct from CBS so if you

1:31:58

had cable or direct TV you

1:32:01

could switch to a 4k CBS

1:32:03

channel which

1:32:05

was upscaled 1080p HDR so it

1:32:09

already looked weird one

1:32:11

of the most vibrant cable companies in

1:32:13

America is YouTube so YouTube

1:32:15

TV you can pay for the 4k out on

1:32:17

which I turned off with ages ago because it

1:32:20

was not worth it so I paid the 10

1:32:22

bucks for 4k for the month and

1:32:25

I go to watch it and the bitrate

1:32:27

keeps crashing on YouTube TV just like I'm

1:32:30

watching my router it starts you know like yeah

1:32:32

15 or 20 or whatever the 4k

1:32:34

stream would be at not even that high

1:32:36

it's like eight and then it just like just

1:32:39

dropped like a stone brutal and I

1:32:41

kept switching back to the 1080p feed

1:32:44

on CBS and it looked great I

1:32:46

think it's not my internet switch

1:32:48

over to Nickelodeon everyone told

1:32:50

me Nickelodeon stream look it was it

1:32:52

looked beautiful yeah Dora the Explorer explained

1:32:54

what illegal holding is and now I

1:32:56

know at the end they flamed

1:32:59

everyone I believe on the yeah just

1:33:01

a disaster and some people thought it was working

1:33:03

great but I posted on threads like this bitrate

1:33:06

keeps crashing and too many

1:33:08

people agreed with me yeah that it was a

1:33:10

bad experience for me to think that it was

1:33:12

like my internet I switched

1:33:15

from the Apple TV YouTube TV

1:33:17

app to the Android app on the Sony TV

1:33:20

assuming Google you know with

1:33:22

a good gatekeeper yeah with preference its own

1:33:24

service on its own operating system it worked

1:33:26

for slightly longer worked for five minutes before

1:33:28

it crashed but then

1:33:30

it crashed well we hope it will make sense

1:33:32

over time is

1:33:34

max sports or whatever this new

1:33:37

super sports streaming service called is

1:33:39

that gonna save the Super Bowl once

1:33:42

it wants to move on is not need to be saved well you

1:33:44

know like save it from

1:33:46

bad streaming experiences I I just

1:33:48

think it is fundamentally embarrassing that

1:33:50

we as a nation cannot figure

1:33:52

this out but you go

1:33:54

to watch soccer in in

1:33:57

England and they're like it's ten 4k

1:33:59

feeds anywhere you want to be, it's free,

1:34:01

and also there's free healthcare. And like, what

1:34:03

are we doing? As you said

1:34:05

that, I saw like an American flag drop behind

1:34:07

you, and I just like heard the American

1:34:09

music. Oh yeah, someone's getting mad at me for not

1:34:11

being sufficiently patriotic that we have to watch upscaled 1080p.

1:34:14

No, no, I thought that was the most patriotic thing I've seen

1:34:16

in a while. You have to figure this out. Vote

1:34:19

for tell. I also, speaking

1:34:21

of sports, I made

1:34:23

a big gaff last week because I

1:34:26

mistakenly said that Fox channels

1:34:28

are owned by Disney, and that

1:34:31

is only true in, I believe, Argentina

1:34:33

and some parts of South America. That's

1:34:35

where all of our listeners are. Yeah, it

1:34:38

is not owned by Disney

1:34:40

in America where

1:34:42

it is owned by Fox. Right,

1:34:44

Rupert Murdoch. Yeah, it's still owned by

1:34:46

Rupert. I forgot. But Disney does own

1:34:48

it just not

1:34:50

in this country. I'm sorry. I

1:34:53

would just like to say two things about that.

1:34:55

One, we screwed that up and it was complicated.

1:34:57

It was very embarrassing. I was annoyed. Two, it

1:35:00

makes this whole thing even funnier because

1:35:02

it now is even more like Hulu.

1:35:04

It is three direct competitors being like,

1:35:06

let's be best friends. We'll figure this

1:35:08

out. Yeah, it's fantastic. It's

1:35:10

so good. And it's also very funny if you

1:35:12

go and look at Fox Sports on the Wikipedia

1:35:15

page and it says current owners, and there's a

1:35:17

list of six current owners depending on what region

1:35:19

you're in. I was like, help

1:35:22

out. Come on, Fox. Just one

1:35:24

company own the company, please. Rupert's

1:35:28

breaking up his empire. And by the

1:35:30

way, you need Fox Sports because you have

1:35:32

to have Fox Sports because of football. I

1:35:35

mean, I don't. But the cable companies do. And

1:35:38

to get Fox Sports, you have to carry Fox News. That's

1:35:40

a real thing. They leverage each other. Fox News,

1:35:43

I have a lot of feelings about Fox News. Fox News is

1:35:45

on its own popular, but they

1:35:47

are a bundle deal. Yeah, they are unstoppable. You

1:35:49

can't get football without taking the

1:35:51

other thing. That's not a choice for you, which

1:35:55

many cable operators have always sort of been aware

1:35:57

of. Yeah. That's

1:35:59

America. All I'm saying is we

1:36:01

can stream in for you. How was Paramount Plus? I know you watched

1:36:03

from here Okay, I would just like to briefly complain about this I

1:36:06

try not to use the verge as a

1:36:08

place to be annoyed at customer service

1:36:10

things But Paramount Plus sucked for meter in the

1:36:12

Super Bowl and I'm very upset about it. So

1:36:14

for a while It

1:36:16

just didn't work at all. It would throw up like

1:36:19

a mysterious a bad thing happened We

1:36:21

don't know try again and then I would try again and

1:36:23

it wouldn't work But eventually it worked

1:36:25

and it actually streamed fine and looks fine But

1:36:27

this incredible thing kept happening which is that the

1:36:30

audio would get about eight seconds

1:36:32

ahead of the video And

1:36:35

so literally every single time the

1:36:37

play would have just finished before

1:36:39

I saw the play So

1:36:41

Jim Nance would be like shouting about how Brandon

1:36:44

I you caught it for 20 yards right

1:36:46

as they're snapping ball It made it so unpleasant

1:36:48

to watch this game. It was like I literally

1:36:50

stopped looking at it for a while I was

1:36:53

like I'm gonna listen to this like it's radio

1:36:55

and Tony Romo is just gonna

1:36:57

say nonsensical things at me But

1:36:59

it was just I kept I would like Pause

1:37:01

try to pause and you can't because it's live

1:37:04

and it's illegal to pause things or something I

1:37:06

would go out of the app and come back

1:37:08

in and it would work fine and then go

1:37:10

back to being off By about the same amount

1:37:12

I rebooted my TV at one point. I did

1:37:14

the whole Roku reboot at one place. That's bad

1:37:16

Oh, you're on a Roku see there is your

1:37:18

problem those letters bouncing at you when you want

1:37:20

to watch TV and they're so good My

1:37:23

gosh, you like you got your food right in front of you

1:37:26

Yeah, I'm telling you watching those letters bouncing reboot of Roku

1:37:28

and you're just trying to get there And if was there

1:37:31

anyone else in the room with you? It's like they're taunting

1:37:33

you. Yeah I also think

1:37:35

this is also a little bit like Paramount was

1:37:37

getting back at David particularly because he makes fun

1:37:39

of how much I enjoy Paramount I have said

1:37:41

a lot of their own things about Paramount. Yeah,

1:37:44

I did deserve this. Yeah, like we're square now

1:37:46

Paramount Sherry Redstone, we're

1:37:48

cool. Well, what what what heartened me? Uh-huh

1:37:50

was the number of people responding to my

1:37:52

complaints about streaming sports and internet by telling

1:37:54

me to get an antenna I thought of

1:37:57

you Alex. Oh, I did not dig out

1:37:59

an antenna at with 15 people

1:38:01

in my home. Like I've

1:38:04

already switched operating systems. We're

1:38:06

not doing antenna runs right

1:38:08

now. Great. It's a good time. We

1:38:10

did watch the halftime show at the low bit rate because I

1:38:12

couldn't switch it to the other stream in the middle. Oh,

1:38:15

can I play about another thing

1:38:17

about Paramount Plus? Yeah. So

1:38:19

I, like the genius that

1:38:21

I am, opened up Paramount Plus after

1:38:23

one of my many reboots, clicked

1:38:26

on the thing that said the football game and

1:38:28

it took me to a separate channel where they

1:38:30

were talking about the football game. So I was

1:38:32

like, Oh, this is just a halftime show before

1:38:34

the thing. And then Anna, my wife gets a

1:38:36

text from her friend being like, Oh, are you

1:38:38

watching us? Sure. He's sick. And I'm sitting there

1:38:40

telling her that it must not have started yet.

1:38:42

And it turns out that when I clicked on

1:38:44

football, it didn't click on football. It clicked on

1:38:47

something else for me. And so I

1:38:49

missed like three quarters of usher because it didn't collect

1:38:51

the thing that it was supposed to select. You

1:38:53

can watch it on the Apple TV app. You're

1:38:56

doing great, David. I'm still angry.

1:38:58

I feel like a lot of your choices

1:39:00

are your fault. I took his shirt off,

1:39:03

and I missed it. I missed

1:39:05

it. You did. I did see the roller skates though. So

1:39:07

it was like the roller skates are sick. Can

1:39:09

I just say it was electric? I

1:39:20

want to just do a quick atmos music update for

1:39:22

everyone. We installed the big home

1:39:24

theater in our house. It's done. If