Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you just ignore all the other corporate shenanigans, that remains true.
Yep. And here we are. I'm your friend David Pierce. Nilay Patel here. Hey, buddy.
You're home for once. After a month of extremely fancy hotel rooms, you're back in, you know, your lowly old house.
Yeah, I'm back in my attic next to my daughter's room. At any moment, you can hear her singing Taylor Swift. That's what our summer has been.
What does she think about the MSG wedding?
Uh, she's more excited about her iPod. So, I showed her pictures of the wedding and she's like, "Great, good for Taylor." Um, but she, you know, she's going to camp like 8-year-olds do in the summer and she wanted to listen to music on the bus on the way to camp and some of her friends on the bus have like little Android music players. There's like kid music players. Some people have phones without SIM cards in them. It's that time in the parenting journey for me. It will come for you, David.
And I was like, I'm not doing any of this.
We are delaying phone and phone-like objects as long as we can.
Uh, and so I dug out one of my old iPods that we actually retrofitted for a YouTube video ages ago with an SSD and a new battery.
Oh, I've been debating doing this for my own purposes.
Yeah. So, I mean, we had it because we just like did this for a video ages ago. Uh, and I had to remember how to download MP3s. I'm not going to say how or why I did that. It was completely legal. That's all you need to know.
I was like, I pay for every streaming service. I, you know, I pay for every streaming. I would like it on the record, your honor. I pay for every streaming service.
I have done my economic duty to the artists of America and I do it every month at high rates, ever-increasing rates. Um, anyhow, uh, so we gave her an iPod and we put a bunch of music on it. It is the worst selection outside of Taylor Swift, who I will concede as America's finest living songwriter.
Shout out Walt Mossberg, who believes this with every fiber of his being. Um,
One of Walt's better takes.
It is. I agree. I think she's right up there. Um, uh, it's a bunch of Disney direct-to-streaming musical soundtracks, and I could not be unhappier about this. And so, we plugged in the headphones, and now it's over there, but you might hear it coming through the wall at any moment. This is very different from being in the south of France.
Is she old enough to have a conversation with me about which of the High School Musicals is the best High School?
Oh, we haven't gotten there yet. We are at Zombies and Descendants and, oh my friend, the ill-fated crossover musical experience.
Okay, this is a big yikes. This is... I'm in the sweet spot of... we are at Spidey and His Amazing Friends and we are appearing to be stuck there for some time and this is terrific news in my household. I have no... we are not pushing past this until we're ready for, like, you know, The Exorcist. We're just going to stick with Spidey until then. It's gonna be amazing.
Uh, good luck because once it comes for you, it's all over and you're like, can we just listen to Taylor Swift again?
That's actually a thing I say all the time.
It's, I mean, you and everybody else, it turns out. Um, if you have thoughts about the wedding, by the way, I want to hear them. I'm very conflicted about... I need to hear everybody's thoughts. vergecast.com, tell us how you feel. I'm dead serious about this. Um, we have a bunch of stuff we should talk about today. Um, there's a lot of Netflix stuff going on. There's a lot of Meta smart glasses stuff going on. Brendan remains... Brendan is going on at all times. Um, some deeply silly Instagram AI shenanigans that we should get into. Um, but let's start with Netflix. I think we've spent a lot of time talking about streaming services on this show and we have this thing called the go90 scale of streaming services, right? And it is essentially the doom streaming services, right? Sorry, the go90 scale of doom streaming services. And the idea is if you are a 90 like the Verizon streaming service go90, you are dead. Uh, if you are a zero, that's the best, most vibrant, most alive you can possibly be. And we have had Netflix at a zero for a very long time.
I think there is an argument to be made at this particular moment in time that we need to tick it up on the scale a little bit.
In part because there's just been a bunch of news this week that suggests that Netflix is slowly losing its mind and starting to flail uncontrollably in a lot of directions. And that is what happens right before things start to get really ugly. Let me just throw a couple at you. So, the biggest story of the week in sort of media tech circles was this Bloomberg report about how Netflix has this huge problem where it will have a hit first season of a show and then lose a vast quantity of the audience on the second season. And there are a bunch of examples of this. I think Beef was the one with the strongest drop-off. Hugely successful first season, big Zeitgeist show, won a lot of awards. The second season, by all accounts, very good. I didn't watch it and neither did anybody else. And this is a recurring theme at Netflix apparently and they're struggling to figure out what to do about it and how to solve this problem. Everybody has theories about this. People are talking about this all week. Um, then next to that there's news that Netflix is expanding its podcast operations, including deals with folks at the Vox Media Podcast Network. Shout out to Charlie Harding, friend of the Vergecast, whose Switched On Pop is going to be on Netflix sometime soon.
Yeah, big win for Charlie. We love Charlie. Go listen to and watch Switched On Pop.
Um, but they're also doing just straight up what I would call YouTube videos. They made a deal with a bunch of publishers, including our potential soon-to-be parent company. It's all very confusing. I don't understand any of it. You can do the disclosure if you'd like to.
Go ahead. To basically take, in many cases, existing videos that were made for other social platforms and just put them on Netflix. And the Emmy nominations were this week, there's been a bunch of new information coming in, earnings and such, that suggests that even as Netflix continues to grow, people are spending less time on Netflix. There's just... the thing I wrote at the top of this Google doc is: what is Netflix anymore? And I feel like if I am asking this question, maybe we're not at a zero on the go90 scale of doom streaming services anymore.
Yeah, I think that's right. Netflix is a subscription that you definitely had is no longer a given. I think that's right.
Right. That's what kept it at zero on the doom scale for so long was if you were going to have one subscription, it was almost certainly Netflix.
I think what you are describing is not what is Netflix anymore. It's, boy, how fast is Netflix going to turn into YouTube, right? And is that maybe the goal? Like, it sure looks like that is not just a thing that's accidentally happening, but that might be affirmatively the plan. And there are a lot of reasons that's really hard to do.
It's really... no one has succeeded in doing that, to be clear. No one has ever succeeded in doing that. You know, I did just come back from Cannes. I listened to so many creators at that event talk about advertising and talk about reaching audiences. They all make long YouTube videos and they've integrated the advertising into the videos very directly. They market products. This is the thing. And the two pieces of the creator economy that are booming are Instagram and YouTube.
Like those are the things, those are the formats that people operate in. And TikTok is actually pretty secondary in really interesting ways.
Is that just because there's no money in it? Like still to this day, no one has figured out how to make any money on TikTok. It's a discovery mechanism for other platforms.
I mean, that's one argument. I think, I mean, there are TikTokers who make a lot of money. Like Charli D'Amelio exists, right? Like, sure, there are TikTokers who do brand deals on that platform in big ways. But the idea that the audiences are growing or that you can reach new audiences or you can experiment in new formats or you can like light up new channels... like TikTok is so interest-graph driven and it really does not have any follow-graph that the creators sort of flock back to YouTube in real life.
And that means things like Backrooms happen as YouTube phenomenons, and then Netflix gets to participate in that later at more expensive economics, whereas YouTube gets to grow the talent that then becomes the Hollywood talent. And I think if you're Netflix, you're kind of looking at this and you're like, "Okay, the future of this industry is a bunch of creators who control all of the attention and all the cultural capital today. They're nowhere near our platform." And the only time we will get a hold of them is later when they have the cachet and the influence and the money to make bigger budget things and then we have to pay really high rates to get those bigger budget things, right? And then we're going to charge people for that and we'll just be late because those creators are also available for free on Instagram and YouTube and TikTok and we had better go get a piece of that early. And I think all of this flailing is a response to that. Netflix does not have anything close to what you would call a creator strategy.
No, right? That's just not the thing that they do.
And if you think that's where the action is, if you think creators are where the future of the cultural industries are, you had better do something and you might as well just fire a bunch of stuff at the wall, including paying for YouTube videos. Why not? The question is whether that's worth the ever-increasing amount of money that Netflix charges customers to be on its platform at all compared to YouTube, which somewhat famously is free.
Yeah. Although YouTube Premium, I would say, even as it goes through its own unbelievably large series of price increases, remains the best deal in streaming and it's not particularly close.
Oh yeah, it's the only... that's the true zero now.
Yeah, I honestly think that's right. And so this is the thing, right? I think you can put a lot of pieces together and figure out how Netflix got here, right? Like you go way back to the idea that Netflix's main competitor was Sleep. This company has been obsessed with time spent in the service for a really long time. And to some extent, I get that. And then they've also made a bunch of other moves that suggest that that is the thing that they're after. They said they weren't into sports and then they got into sports. They said they weren't doing gaming and then they got into gaming and they're increasingly into gaming. And this service is just a place to go to do entertainment, which is fine and good, but like you said, that puts them in a very different competitive space with a bunch of gigantic platforms with impossible resources that are well-established in this space that you just can't compete with. Like the billions of dollars that have been spent over the years trying to take down YouTube, even in some small way, have all been wasted. It just hasn't worked. And so for Netflix to say we want to be the shiny entertainment thing made sense to me, right? That it was like the race was how do we become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix? And it actually made sense a while back that the thing to aspire to was to be HBO and that if you could be HBO and become the factory of great shows, all the rest of your problems solve themselves. So to me it's like I look at this and either if you're Netflix, you don't think you can win that game anymore by making the most best shows, which I think in a lot of ways is demonstrably true at this point. The best shows are not on Netflix.
And also look at it and say, "Okay, we need to continue to be the biggest thing in the world to support our unbelievable investment in everything. We just have to go eat up minutes in people's day, whatever that looks like." And that just runs you directly into YouTube and TikTok. And I think that is a losing game for Netflix in a big, big way.
Yeah. I mean, again, the problem for every media business of every kind, not news websites or whatever, like every literal media business that the thing that makes content, that's your business. You're up against an army of teenagers who will work for free.
It is the problem. You just have to stare at it and say most people on their phones, on their home screens, have Instagram and YouTube. And the economics of Instagram and YouTube are an army of teenagers who will work for free.
And they make infinity content. Okay. Like what are you going to do about that? Something. It has to be something.
Right? The two things Netflix has always said about itself that you've described, one, our only competition is sleep, and we have to become HBO before HBO comes out, have always been in absolute opposition to each other.
Our only competition is sleep means they have to just have stuff, right? A huge array of stuff that commands your attention and keeps you from playing video games and keeps you from opening TikTok. And that means eventually they're going to make video games, which they did. And eventually they're going to have YouTube videos and podcasts, which they do. And they've picked that one. They did not pick we will have the best quality content. They just didn't. And Netflix has gotten really numeric about it. The New York Times did a profile of Dan Lin who runs the studio now. Here's the quote: Mr. Lin is a reversion to the norm. He knows what works on the service and how much each movie should cost and there's little he's willing to budge on no matter how big a star is.
I mean, the whole profile is like he's like, I say no. Like I say no and I'm like, this is how much you can get and you're going to hold to this budget. And like he reorganized how their studio works and it is... it's like quant stuff, you know what I mean? Like it is financial engineering to make the content and people like working with him because he's honest, which is a rarity in Hollywood.
It's the other part of the profile. We'll link it, you can read it, it's really good. Um, but I think that's very different than we charge you a lot of money to show you the best stuff.
Right, and it's a fundamentally different creative proposition too, right? It is like ruthless execution on a series of numbers as opposed to actual creative execution. I mean, Ryan Broderick, our friend over at Garbage Day, wrote a good thing about this that is like Netflix, because of that exact approach that you're describing, has become sort of a trailing indicator of what's cool and interesting and not leading any of it, right? Like you can look at something on Netflix and see what was trending 18 months ago when they started production on it and that everything is sort of a copy of a copy of a copy of something that worked on Netflix. And Netflix's movies, frankly, have been like that for some time. Uh, it's why like Dwayne The Rock Johnson just does that movie over and over and over again on Netflix. Um, but its shows at least for a long time didn't feel like that. And they're not all like that. There's still some good stuff on Netflix, but it does... like if you are going to run your business that way, you are going to run a very particular kind of business that is not the like big swing creative thing that Netflix seemed to want to be for a really long time.
There's just some part of this where the, you know, there's a big drop-off between season one and season two of a Netflix show that runs right into Netflix is best when it's buying the content from networks that are good at this.
Yes. It's not like there's a bunch of Hollywood talent that's all locked up at great jobs right now and is totally against the idea of making more episodes of television.
Yeah. Like it feels like you could be like, "All right, we're going to set up a studio to do it like NBC did in the 90s, maybe at lower rates, right? We're not going to pay every single cast member of Friends a million dollars per episode, but like we're gonna make 22-minute-long sitcoms and make 60 episodes of that in a season and do it again the next year." And just market that thing so that you have to watch Netflix. But it seems like they have decided the economics of that don't work and the economics of buying YouTube videos do. And that seems upside down to me for some reason.
Well, the argument for Netflix in this case would be that it is such a good distributor, right? I've done a lot of reporting on recommendation algorithms over the years and one of the things that is sort of seemingly true about Netflix is that it has done a better job than just about anybody else of putting content into a recommendation machine to put the right thing in front of you at the right time. It is very good at that. Um, what it has not had is the raw volume of content to do that with that something like YouTube has. And so maybe for Netflix what they're saying is like, well, we know what you want to watch. We just don't have it on the service. Let's go get it all on the service and then we can put it in front of you. And I think like I can see the spirit of that theory. I just feel like it doesn't hold up the minute you tell me that I came here to watch, you know, Beef, which I didn't. And instead, you're going to show me a bunch of like old BuzzFeed YouTube videos because structurally to you that's the same thing. Like I just don't think that's...
Right. That's a company that believes what they do is distribute content, not sell you TV movies. Yeah.
Okay. Let me put two ideas next to you.
One, YouTube is going to end up incentivizing its creators to make things that look like TV faster than Netflix will get to having enough stuff that looks like YouTube.
I think that's right. I mean, that's... YouTube is already well down that road. It's making those kinds of shows. It rebuilt the TV app to look like a television. Confidently tell you that it's growing faster on TV than any other platform.
Yeah, this is the new race. Like, right. Like before it was we have to become HBO before they become us. Then it was our only competition is sleep. And now I think you and I are saying it very much feels like Netflix is that we have to overtake YouTube before YouTube overtakes us.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. If you were to handicap that race, YouTube is well ahead.
So where would you put Netflix on the go90 scale of doom streaming services? I mean, it's like a... it's in the low single digits, right? It's like a two or a three. Um, but I think it is just meaningful to me that it doesn't... I don't know what Netflix is anymore. Like I don't know what the value prop of Netflix is in my life anymore. But you look at all those shows and some of them are good and I've seen a bunch of them. Uh, none of those are like the shows of the year, right? Like even looking at the Emmys, it's like Severance was a show a lot of people talked about. The Bear was a huge hit that a lot of people talked about. The Pitt is probably the show of the year for the second year running, which is pretty impressive. Uh, it just... Netflix is not a thing you sort of have to go to. It's a thing you just sort of have in the background. And boy, is that just already YouTube.
Yeah. Here's my second one.
Wow. Is that not where I thought that was going? Okay. Hottest take: Netflix should buy Xbox.
Uh, well, we'll start from the Xbox side of the house. Xbox is a disaster. And I know this because the people running Xbox keep issuing memos saying it's a disaster.
Right. Sarah Bond just put out the big memo being like, I got to reset this whole thing. We don't make enough money. I think she said something like, "For every dollar we put into Xbox, we lose 68 cents."
That is one of the worst businesses I've heard of at massive scale in this industry.
Oh, wait. It was 64 cents.
64. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That extra 4 cents is... changes. Really? And the calculus of Microsoft is really going to... You can buy three more GPUs over the course of one year. Um, that's a bad business. And she is stripping it way down.
Right. Like you can see that she's spinning off the big studios. Uh, she's firing people at all the other studios that she's keeping and she's focusing her energy on like Minecraft and like the big multi-service games that kind of print money and she wants to be at a billion players a day.
Which is... don't we all.
I think the Vergecast should be one of the platforms that entertains billions of people a day. A billion players a day is my favorite Fat Joe song actually. Um, sorry.
Uh, anyhow, and you could get there. Like I know there's like a lot... like Andrew Webster wrote for us a big piece being like that this number is big and like he's like this whole plan doesn't make any sense. And basically the answer is this number is really big and you can't get there. Even if you count Candy Crush, right, and all the other sort of big casual games that they have, that's a huge goal that you have to get to. I think the reason that you would say that goal, which is, I think, impossible for Microsoft to reach with its current economics and commitment to AI over everything else, is that you have to pump a lot of money in the system and do a lot of marketing, and you have to compete with sleep.
You have to say, "We're going to win in all of these places over every other kind of entertainment," right? Such that you're going to play a game probably on a phone. Netflix has been desperate to get itself on your phone.
True. Yeah, they are desperate to get on your phone. That's why they've done games. It's why they've revamped their mobile app to be more TikTok-y. It's probably why they're doing podcasts and stuff now, right? This is inherently mobile content that people are watching on their phones. Well, why not just buy the gaming company and capture a bunch of that additional attention? You would have license then as Netflix to continue to sort of spin out of studios, but you are already really good at knowing what content to license and put in front of a bunch of people as a distributor and recommend the right stuff to the right people at the right time. And then you would body up against the phone platforms, which basically killed Microsoft's ambitions to do game streaming and find ways to turn your phone into an Xbox and say, "Look, you want Netflix here, you want Netflix on all your other platforms. We need to put games on in the Netflix app in some way that is economically viable for us." And there's a lot of regulators around the world who are going to look more kindly upon Netflix needing to do this than Microsoft.
Yes. Because it is Netflix's actual business.
Because it's Netflix's actual business. And I think to Microsoft they're like, yeah, file lawsuits, let's see what happens.
Right. But I think Netflix has a much stronger case to say, look, we need to expand the range of entertainment options and these platform policies are keeping us from doing it. And you would just get... maybe not that... maybe they don't care about the console hardware. You would get the ecosystem of creatives that make games to drive whatever IP that you need to drive and all the studios and all the things you need to.
They are probably the most logical home for Xbox if you believe the future of entertainment has interactivity and gaming at the center.
Which I want to say I do not.
But many, many, many people do.
Correct. My favorite thing about this is everything you just said makes perfect sense and I believe with absolute confidence that if that happens it will go disastrously badly.
Like you just made such a compelling argument that I suspect is being made in the offices of Netflix at this moment and probably frankly at a bunch of other companies like this. Uh, like if you think David Ellison is not going to try to roll up Xbox into Paramount, Warner, CNN, whatever it's going to be. Uh,
Oh, David Ellison talks a lot about gaming.
Yeah. Boy, does that guy love to talk about gaming.
Yeah. Uh, for all the reasons you just described. And I think it would just... the cultures of those two things could not be further away from one another in a way that I think anyone who has tried to back their way into becoming a gaming company has found it very hard to do so. Oh, I think Sony managed to get enormous value from owning Sony Movie Studios and they put the Spider-Man font on the PS3.
They did. And Sony, a famously spectacular business that everyone should try and emulate right now. All right, we should switch gears. Um, if you have another idea for who should buy Xbox, I want to hear it because I think the idea that all of this is happening for Xbox to be sold to somebody, uh, Nilay, I think you were kind of there first, but that this is in the ether now. Uh, and I want to know who you think should buy Xbox. We should take a break and then we're going to come back. Um, and I have a bunch of mean things to say about smart glasses. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. Nilay, big week for Nilay Patel's smart glasses panopticon. Uh, this is the facial recognition nightmare that is coming for us all. Uh, continues to come for us all. This is really exciting for you.
You know, I'm gonna... Can I just say this from the beginning? I've been saying for years that the killer app for smart glasses is facial recognition and being able to do faces and names. Like you're somewhere in the world, it tells you faces and names. And I personally, if I had the ability to remember people's names, I would be the president. I just know this in my heart.
It's the only thing in the way.
It's just literally me like every day being awkward with someone that I've definitely met before and being like, "Yeah, let me introduce you to someone else real quick." Just to, you know, like I think that has really thwarted my political ambitions. I say this because I've been saying it for years and it has been so removed from actual shipping reality for years that it's been kind of a joke and now it's not a joke. And every now and again the clips go viral without the context of the fact that I've been saying it for years to illustrate how bad it would be. And I just want to say clearly, I think it would be bad. I think it would be bad to create a worldwide facial recognition panopticon so that I can be the president.
Am I going to refuse the opportunity to be the president when presented with such panopticon?
I think it's a moral dilemma that each of us will have to choose in their own way. But I know it's bad and I just want to say this as clear. I'm going to have to say it every single time.
Because it is the killer app and I think there's a reason that we're inching our way towards panopticon.
So, as a reminder, uh, this was either last week or the week before, we talked about the fact that Meta was building a facial recognition feature into its smart glasses. Uh, I think it was Wired that broke the news that this was a thing that they were building. They hadn't turned it on.
Wired's news was the code was on the glasses,
Right? That the code was on the glasses. Uh, Meta's official response from Andy Stone, who likes to run around yelling at people on Threads, was that this is disingenuous. We were never going to turn it on, which is just a fully insane response to you wrote the code and put it on the glasses like... yeah, that's just a thing that happened. So anyway, um, next to that has been this running story, uh, including some really great reporting by our friend Joanna Stern about this like budding industry of people who will basically hack and break your Meta glasses so that the light doesn't turn on when you're recording. Uh, Meta issued an update this week to make it so that if you tamper with the light, it'll just disable the camera entirely. That's a very good thing. It's a mandatory update. Yay, Meta. Congratulations. And then immediately...
Immediately after this, news breaks that Meta is working on a new pair of smart glasses that is recording all the time. The idea is basically to capture snapshots every few seconds of audio and pictures, and to basically use all of the input in this. Their big idea, apparently, for privacy's sake, is to not send the data itself but to send metadata, because in history metadata has never been reverse engineered into data and has never been dangerous. So, but like, there is just this thing happening where Meta is running around trying to explain and apologize for all of its disastrous security breaches. Andrew Bosworth, the CTO, did an interview with Nick Thompson at The Atlantic about a lot of this stuff. They had an interesting conversation in which Bos, I would say, very unsuccessfully tried to defend why a feature like this is worth doing. They both, like you, agreed it would be awesome. I totally want this. And then Nick was like, "But how do you reckon with all of the other stuff?" And he used the examples of the blind community and veterans who need features like this. And that is both true and just an unbelievably disingenuous way to try and defend a feature like this. Like, if you are going to use accessibility as a reason to, like, hamfist a feature into a thing for billions of people, no. But anyway, even as they're running around doing this, they are also just pushing ahead as fast as they possibly can to make this thing more and more privacy damaging and problematic, and run at all of the things that people already hate about where these glasses are going. And I sort of feel like in the same way that, what, 13, 14 years ago now, the glasshole phenomenon ended smart glasses for a period of time. Like, I talked to people years after that who were like, we had a project and we killed it after Google Glass because we just couldn't. Google ruined it for everybody. It set this industry way behind. I feel like Meta is in the middle of doing that right now. It is going to establish and ruin the idea of smart glasses before anybody else even gets to try.
I saw a video, you know, Livy Dunne, the influencer, she's like a famous influencer. She posted a video, and we talked about it in our newsroom, and she's like, people sell my travel itineraries, like there's a black market for where she's going on planes, and then she's accosted when she lands in the airport. And she specifically was like, this is really weird and dangerous for me that I get off the plane and a bunch of weirdos are there to, like, take my picture. And then she specifically was like, and they're all wearing Meta glasses.
Oh wow. And it's becoming that thing, right? Like that's the association people are making with it. Like this is a thing for a particular class of weirdos.
Yeah. I have friends who are like world travelers and they're always like doing action sports and, you know, their Instagram feeds are all on their Meta glasses as they're like surfing and going down. Like there's some set of uses that are good and benign.
Sure. Wearing a GoPro on your head while you surf, not a problem. Wearing a GoPro on your head while you, like, walk through the Costco and stalk influencers is bad.
Probably bad. Like there's just something about that where I was like, this is a very famous influencer. She literally is influential and she's like, I feel at danger. And then the product she called out was Meta glasses. And there's something there that I've just been stuck on. Like, what is that a signal of? I haven't quite figured it out. I can't quite articulate it, but the product is starting to stand in as a, like, a symbol of how we treat each other.
Do you know what I mean? Like it means disrespect in some way.
This is an enormous problem for Meta, whose entire brand is we don't respect you.
Right? Like this is the problem. Like they made the product that most communicates their values, which is it belongs to us. Sorry, we're going to listen to you, right? Yeah.
And for all of the Instagram is listening to you explanations about how they're actually, you know, like you're on the same Wi-Fi network as your friend in the same place. So, like, they search for travel, like you can do it. You can back into the programmatic ad tech explanation for why Instagram is listening to you. And then the glasses are going to watch you all the time. And now you're done and everyone you know. And Bos's explanation of how the faces and names feature would work, it's called Name Tag. He's like, 'It would just be people that have actually introduced themselves to you, that have opted in, and it's hashes, and it's all stored locally, and you would say, remember that person.' And you're like, 'This all sounds fine, except that person doesn't consent to be remembered in this way.'
Right. The person on the other side of the glasses does not consent to me storing a hash of their face and then recalling it later. Like maybe they would like it if I did that with my dumb meat sack of a brain, but they would probably have a lot of feelings about my computer doing that.
Yes. Yes. And like, and god, are there going to be ways to break that system? Even in the perfect version of that system, can I, like, go stand up close to my TV and solve that problem with a video on my television?
It's unclear, right? We have not used the thing, but this is their defense of it, is like we limit it to, like, a local system. And then he talked about the various laws in various states that make it hard to ship. He's like, in Illinois you got this dumb law, and it's like, no, the people in Illinois passed a law saying biometric face recognition is illegal.
And I think they're pretty happy about that law.
Right. Like I think on balance there's going to be more of those because people don't want this to happen. They perceive the glasses as an invasion and Meta's whole brand is invasion of privacy. Like whether or not they want it to be that is what people associate with them.
Yeah. All of this, I think, is next to the big dream of everybody wants the AR glasses, right? Everyone is trying to build their way to AR glasses in some way. And if you're gonna have AR glasses, you need a camera that is always on looking at the world next to you, sending that visual information to some computer somewhere, processing it, and then putting data over something. Whether it's real light and the lenses in front of you and clear lenses, or whether it's a Vision Pro headset and it's screens and you're passing through, whatever it is, you need to process the visual information from the world around you.
And there are lots of benign uses for this. I'm in an art museum and I just want to know more about the painting I'm looking at. There are absolutely not benign uses for this. But no one has contended with the fact that at the end of it, you have to record everything all the time.
Because the technology to do that at scale simply has not existed. And I think this Meta attempt to take snapshots and do metadata is the first baby step towards we're going to record everything all the time so we can layer AR information over the world around you.
Yeah. Ironically, one of the most compelling explanations for Instagram is not recording you using the microphone on your phone has been that it's actually just impractical to do that. Like to light up the microphone for a billion Instagram users and then store all of that audio in the cloud and process it is so prohibitively expensive that they actually just couldn't do it even if they wanted to. Is a very, one of the many compelling reasons that Instagram isn't doing that. There's a bunch of evidence that says that's no longer true. That actually everyone is desperately trying to get all of your data. Meta itself rolled out this program to its employees saying we're going to track all your keystrokes. We're going to track how you use your computer so that we can teach our AI models how to use computers. Like everyone in the AI space will tell you that all they want is more data all the time. They will take all of it they can get no matter how, like, wacky or weird it is. Let the compute do the work. And so suddenly this goes from being kind of prohibitively difficult from a technology perspective to being kind of a huge upside and you're going to have to rely on the company that is going to do this to treat that data well, which is just a big huge giant leap. I mean, do you remember Microsoft Recall from whatever that was, a couple years ago? Now, the first run of that was Microsoft saying, 'It's locally stored. It's encrypted. It's completely private to your device. We understand the privacy risks here. This is meant just for you.' And then it turned out they were just storing a huge amount of the data in plain text databases on your computer so that, like, if I leave my computer at a coffee shop, you can just look at everything I've ever done on my computer. Like this, there are so many attack surfaces here that there is just no shot of getting this right at any point in the near or immediate future. And I cannot believe that Meta in particular continues to try to push at this. And this is, like, the thing I keep trying to sort through in my head is do we have a fundamental smart glasses problem which is just that we're going to keep running into this same thing over and over again that you can't do smart glasses without the invasive stuff? It's literally a feature, not a bug, and this is just a problem that is going to follow it forever. Or is it just that Meta is the absolute worst possible advocate for this technology at this time? And if some other company, like if Apple were leading this race instead of Meta, would we feel differently about it? Because by and large, people trust Apple in a way that they don't trust Meta. I can't peel those two things apart in my head.
Meta's brand when it comes to privacy is garbage. And I think Meta's brand in general is garbage.
Yes. Meta is not a beloved company. They're just straightforwardly. And even the way Mark Zuckerberg rolled out the we're tracking all of our employees to train AI was so fundamentally dehumanizing. He said something like we could go collect this data from all the people in the world, but we think we've hired all the smartest people at Meta. We're going to collect the data from you because the way you use computers is smarter than everyone else. And it's like...
We put the good brains in vats.
You know what I mean? Like that. Yeah. It's like we're doing this like diet eugenics. Like it was like just a weird way of talking about the people that you employ, right?
Like I have to surveil you because you're smart.
It's weird. There's just like, there's some disconnect from humanity at the center of that company that I cannot stop thinking about because they are desperate to own a platform. They are desperate to break away from their dependence on iOS and Android and the app store economics and Apple being able to turn off tracking and all this stuff that Apple and Meta have fought about for years. Okay. Then you're like, well, people trust Apple. Do you know what people think is listening to them to do the ads? Their iPhones.
You can trust Apple all you want. Be like, Apple's the privacy company. And then 90% of people are like, 'My phone's listening to me.'
Instagram is listening to me all the time. And it's like, well, did Apple stop it? Like, I don't know. It's listening to me all the time. And it kind of just doesn't matter. Like, I think tech companies as a whole do not have some great reputation for actually protecting people from the experiences they're obviously having.
Yeah, I think that's right.
Does every single person believe that Apple slows down their iPhone after two years so they have to buy a new one? Like, sure. Like, can you trade on that trust in other ways? Maybe. But the reality is to make augmented reality glasses, you need to put a camera next to your eyes that is continuously recording everything you see and processing that to put information over it. There is not another way around it. And there's certainly not a chip that can fit in the stem of glasses that is both powerful enough and power miserly enough to do that in real time. You have to send that data to a cloud. You got to do it there. There just isn't another choice. Or you can build something the size of a Vision Pro with a battery pack that lives somewhere else. Like right, those are the current choices in this world. And it just means like if you want to build the product that everyone thinks is the next thing, you are going to have to invade people's privacy. And maybe you shouldn't. Like there's an incredible argument for nope, you shouldn't do that. Nope. The tradeoffs required to make this product are so high at a societal level that we should stop it.
Mhm. I don't know who is positioned to make that argument today. It does not appear to be in our nation's capability to have a wholesome argument about the risks and rewards of technology and then tell anyone to stop. It might be in the market, right? Like these glasses might get pulled off people's faces and smashed. I think we can see the opposition at data centers happening in, like, local governments around the country. Like something else will happen, but the thing people want, AR glasses, augmented reality glasses where you stare at a painting and it tells you who painted that painting and what it was. You are at a party and you just know that person's name. I'm telling you, I'd be the president if I had this kid. It would, I'm already so charming. I'm just like this one failing, you know. That's, who knows. The social cost of that is too high.
And I think we're seeing it now. The cost of AI is too high versus the reward. And there's big backlash. And I think Meta has no ability to make the case that the reward is worth the social cost of interacting with Meta in this way. They do not have an ounce of credibility to say they're going to protect you.
Well, and they have now two decades of evidence to suggest that they'll win in the end. That actually all you need to do is wait and people will come around. And I think I have believed that for a long time, right? And it is the thing that makes me the most nihilistic about tech is this idea that everyone is going to stand in the way and say, 'I don't want this. It's going to be bad.' And then they'll have a Black Friday sale and everybody gets on board. And like everybody, it is very hard to leave Google in such a way that you can feel however you want about Google and then you end up using Google products and you become sort of Stockholm syndrome into Google. And I think a lot of these companies are set up on the belief that they will win in the end because people will always trade those things and those feelings for other features and convenience. And I think again, for most of my career, I also believed that that was true and it sort of filled me with sadness when I really sat and thought about it. I don't know that that's true anymore. It feels like something has changed in a way that I'm still struggling to put my finger on. But like this data center stuff is such a good example of there has been real, like, boots on the ground societal backlash to technology at a scale I don't think we've ever seen. And it feels like it is only growing and not receding. And I think it's why I'm so obsessed with the smart glasses question because I think this is going to be the first big new technology in a very long time that a vast number of people are going to look at and just say no to. Like we all eventually got smartphones. We just did. You feel however you want about what smartphones did to the world. Everybody has a smartphone now. It just happened. I don't think we're going there with smart glasses. And I think it's going to be really different. And I still don't know how it's going to play out, but it feels like it is headed down a different path.
Yeah. I'll just bring it back to, you know, my daughter's silly iPod. That thing was on a shelf. I pulled it off the shelf. I plugged it into my computer and I put some MP3s on it. I will not say where the MP3s came from, but I put some MP3s on it and then it worked. And it worked exactly the same way today as it did 10 years ago when I first bought this iPod and she's delighted, right? And I own the files. Let's just say I own the files. I own the files and I own the hardware and it didn't require some, like, DRM handshake with some cloud service and I didn't worry that social media was on this thing. One of the reasons I didn't want to buy her, like, an old iPod Touch was like, I actually don't want a bunch of 8-year-olds running around with a camera right now.
I just don't. No thank you. That's just a parenting decision. Other people might feel differently. And I see that just, like, burbling with some of my peers, you know, as we all raise our kids together. I see it with, like, a lot of younger people, like they just don't, they're just like looking at it and they're saying no, like I just want to be offline in this way. And I think the promise of the next interface paradigm, the next way of using technology has always been this will be superior to the phone. So, we got to get there first. This is Mark Zuckerberg in the metaverse. You're going to live your life in this helmet because it's more fun than your phone. And like pretty much just rejected.
Like straightforwardly. I think the reaction to AI being everywhere and not being very good in most consumer use cases. People are rejecting it politically now. They're like, 'We don't need to build this infrastructure. I hate this actually. This chatbot on my car dealer's website is not providing me with anything. Turn it off. Like put all those tokens somewhere else.' And I do wonder if the smart glasses, you know, my thesis about the Meta glasses has always been people like them because there's a camera on their face and that's useful.
And then you're like, now a lot of people have cameras in their face.
Now a lot of people are recording you without your consent. And like...
You can stop that pretty fast.
Yeah. But that is the feature, not the bug, right? Like you can't have it both ways. You can't have a camera on your face without having a camera on your face.
Like a zen koan, but sure. Also, I just want to say 'I own the files' is a T-shirt we're going to make. That's going to be about that. I own the files.
I mean, in the sense that I have the files.
Listen, let's not delve into copyright law here.
I do have one more question on this. So, there was a bit of gadget news. In addition to all of the, like, big tech companies trying to make smart glasses, there's just a million startups out there trying to make smart glasses happen. XREAL is probably the best known one, but there's a lot of them out there. And there's this company, Solos, that announced a new version of smart glasses called the AirGo A6.
Sure. But one of its, like, key features is that it doesn't have a camera. It has AI stuff. It has prescription support. It does a bunch of the other things that you would expect like headphone-style things. It doesn't have a camera. And part of me wonders, like, is this the next thing that's going to happen? Is we're going to see if we can do smart glasses minus a camera? This just is like, I don't know how to say this. Bone conduction headphones are a really cool technology. They will never be cool. Do you know what I mean?
I mean, sure, but when my bone conduction headphones look like a pair of Ray-Ban Metas...
I'm not even sure these are bone conduction. The point I'm making is like everyone's just trying to shove the assistant into a form factor.
Do you know what I mean? Like what if I could get a microphone and speakers onto your face? Sure. Or it looks like glasses. Yeah.
