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Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo: Netflix

The co-CEO who replaced co-founder Reed Hastings details the company’s new culture memo, its ad ambitions, and what’s next for Netflix. Today, I’m talking with Greg Peters, the co-CEO of Netflix. I caught up with Greg while he was at the Cannes Lions festival in France, which is basically the world’s biggest gathering of advertisers and marketers. It’s an increasingly important place for Greg to be, as Netflix’s new ad tier has nearly doubled in six months to more than 40 million subscribers and feels increasingly pivotal to the future of the company.
On top of that, Netflix is updating its famous culture memo. So I wanted to chat with Greg about the changes he’s making to that document and how he’s thinking about maintaining Netflix’s culture as it grows into industries like advertising and gaming.
Greg has only been co-CEO of Netflix for roughly 18 months, after co-founder and former co-CEO Reed Hastings retired last year and Greg was promoted from chief operating officer. He now runs Netflix alongside content chief Ted Sarandos, who’s been running the ship with Hastings since 2020. It’s a complicated setup, and historically, co-CEOs don’t tend to work out all that well. Just look at BlackBerry, SAP, or more recently, Salesforce.

But Netflix seems to be the exception, and that’s pure bait for Decoder — how does that structure work, and how do decisions actually get made with two CEOs? A lot of Netflix’s success is in the marriage of content and technology, and having those split up seems like a recipe for conflict or, at the very least, confusion.
Greg and I talked about this a lot — so much of the solution at Netflix is the company’s unique culture, which gives employees an enormous amount of freedom. That culture was first laid out in a famous 2009 slide deck, which former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg once called the most important document to ever come out of Silicon Valley. That deck was refined into a memo in 2017; the new version Greg’s here to talk about is a shorter, even more streamlined version of that memo.
I have always loved the original culture deck. It’s written in a pretty brash and direct style — it made clear that just saying the company had values wasn’t enough and that the real indicators of a company’s culture were the behaviors and skills that it values and rewards. Most importantly, it said that Netflix wasn’t trying to be a family — its approach to hiring and firing would be more like a sports team, where low performers would be given generous severance packages and replaced with better players on a consistent basis.
This newest version of the memo is not quite so in your face as the original. In fact, it’s a lot nicer and more corporate. I asked Greg why that was, and his answer was fascinating: as the company grows, the memo needs to resonate with a very broad audience, and the tone matters. You’ll hear him talk about this in detail.
Another big change Greg and I talked about is that Netflix removed an oft-quoted section of the original deck labeled “freedom and responsibility.” You’ll hear him talk about needing to more clearly say that freedom requires even more responsibility.
This conversation really hit on so many of the big themes that come up so often on Decoder, and I also found a way to ask Greg what he thinks of the Samsung Frame TV. You know I had to.
Okay, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters. Here we go.
Disclosure: I executive produced a Netflix show called The Future Of back in 2022.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Greg Peters is here, the co-CEO of Netflix, welcome to Decoder.
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
I am really excited to talk to you. You have been the co-CEO for about 18 months now. You were the chief product officer and the chief operating officer before that.
That’s correct.
There’s also a lot going on in streaming generally. We seem to be in a time of bundling and consolidation. And then, on top of it, there’s a new culture memo at Netflix, which is a big deal. Netflix’s culture memos tend to set the tone for the whole industry. Our show is about work charts and decisions and corporate culture, so I have a lot of questions about that, but I want to start at the start, which is you used to work at TiVo, and I used to cover TiVo every minute of every day. Are you ready for a full hour of TiVo questions?
We can do that if you want. Just to be clear: I did a startup that was acquired by Macrovision, which eventually became Rovi, which eventually became TiVo. So there’s a long history of those names there.
All of that is why I used to cover every minute of the twists and turns of that company. But let’s set that aside. Let’s start with Netflix. I feel like there are a lot of similarities between what happened on that side with cable and what is going on with streaming now. I want to start with a big question: How do you think of Netflix right now? Is it a streaming company? Is it a TV company? Is it entertainment because you also have games now? What’s the big-picture definition of Netflix?
We definitely think of ourselves as an entertainment company. We seek to be an entertainment company that does what’s very hard for other companies to do, which is bring a real capability and competency to the creative aspect of it. You see those competencies in many traditional media companies. Disney and movie studios and broadcasters around the world do a great job of these things. But we also try to bring a real tech and product capability and sensibility as well.
I think you see that in other companies: Google is amazing at that; Apple’s amazing at that. But it’s very rare to be able to bring these two centers together and be strong at both. That’s what we’re trying to do and be a global entertainment company as well. Partly what we’re trying to do is help entertain the over half a billion people around the world that currently come to us for that entertainment, and hopefully grow that number over time.
Reed Hastings, the former CEO of Netflix, once famously said the company’s biggest competitor was sleep. This is a statement of purpose about the attention economy. You’re only awake so many hours a day; your eyes are only looking at so many things. This is a zero-sum game. The thing that people will choose over everything is sleep if they can. Is that still the framework that you’re using?
Generally, yes. I think that the import of that is still relevant. I don’t think of it as strictly zero sum because there are some magnifying effects across different things, and I think that what we see is that your enthusiasm, your fandom for a certain title, can show up on social media, for example, in a way that’s additive.
But in the general sense, the entertainment landscape is highly competitive right now. Humans on the planet have more opportunities to entertain themselves than ever before. In that sense, we have to make sure that the entertainment we’re providing is highly compelling, it’s highly attractive, and it can win more of those hours. We call them moments of truth — that’s our way of thinking about if we are doing a good job of entertaining our members.
One thing in the framework of “there are only so many hours a day and we’re competing for attention” that I think is challenging, and I’ve never heard anyone really pull apart well, is that Netflix famously pays for content, Hollywood famously pays for content, and your streaming competitors pay a lot of money for content. That’s a huge part of your economics. The user-generated content platforms do not, or they pay extraordinarily low rates if they do.
I look at something like TikTok, and it’s full of pirated content. It’s a playground of copyright infringement. It’s very clever. As a former copyright attorney, I find myself very entertained by the innovation that occurs on TikTok on that scale. You look at something like Suits, which is a phenomenon that started with a whole bunch of copyright infringement on a whole bunch of social media platforms. What’s that pipeline like for you? Is that, “Okay, that’s fine, that’s just our marketing,” or are you actually competing with the social media platforms directly?
Well, we’re clearly competing at the margin, back to your attention economy model. But I would say that we’re doing two different entertainment jobs, so I don’t think of the competition as strictly substitutable or head-to-head in that regard. In some sense, those social media channels can operate as a way of magnifying fandom and be a great mechanism for people to talk about the shows they’re watching.
You mentioned Suits, for example. I think when we saw a huge amount of engagement with Suits, we saw part of that magnified and reflected in what people were talking about on social media. You mentioned copyright. I’d say, at the extreme, we, in the industry and generally governments around the world, are supportive of protecting the rights of the people that hold those copyrights. But people talking about the shows that they love, that’s a good thing.
Just on the basic economics, it’s still challenging to me. Those platforms get to take a lot of content for free or very, very low rates and address a big audience, and then their model is to sell targeted advertising. Netflix’s model, until recently, was you paid a whole bunch of money for content at very high rates, and then your model is subscription fees are shot higher. But now your model is targeted advertising. Are you getting the higher rates from the ads to support how much money is going into making the content, or are you finding the pressure of the social media platforms that are just getting it for free to be a real driver of your decisions?
I don’t think the competitive dynamic that you’re describing there is as sharp as you’re relaying. Evidence of that is that YouTube, for example, has largely been unsuccessful at delivering the kind of content that we deliver. There are a bunch of examples like this. Cobra Kai is my favorite. It started on YouTube but didn’t do particularly well there. Then we picked it up from them, and it’s become a gigantic show. I think they’re serving one need — one entertainment need state, if you will — and we’re serving a different one.
Then you talked about ads. My principle orientation toward what we are doing in ads is that it allows us to offer consumers around the world a lower price point, and that’s a powerful thing to do because now we can say to folks, “Hey, you can have access to all the amazing stories, the films, the series, the games that we are doing at a lower price,” and that’s super important for them. Then we can also work with advertisers to make up the difference between that and what we would otherwise charge on subscription via the advertising revenue that we get there.
Do you think that the introduction of ads is changing how you think about running the company? You’re at the Cannes Lions festival right now, which is the big advertising festival in France. When you ran a subscription business, I’m guessing you didn’t have to spend as much time talking to advertisers in France. It’s tough work, I feel very badly for you, but I’m guessing that’s a new piece of the puzzle. Did you have to build up that capability?
Yeah, for sure. It’s a new capability from a technology perspective, so we’re building technology that supports what we hope is at some point in time — and we’re still very much in the process of building this — the best-in-class streaming solution for consumers, our members, and advertisers. We’re also building capabilities that we haven’t had in the company before. We never had ad sales, for example. That’s a whole new muscle for us to go build, so it’s definitely about growing that.
.Maybe the question behind your question — and a question that I’ve gotten internally — is, “Are we programming differently as a result of now adding advertising to our model?” And the answer to that question is no because, at the end of the day, whether it’s subscription or advertising, both are anchored in something that consumers want to watch, that our members are dying to watch.
That engagement is at the center of both models. It’s mutually supportive in that regard. We very much think our programming job is to think about what our members need and how we can give them that, and that drives and then fuels both models in a positive way.
I want to come back to that because I think that perceived shift is really important, especially as you add advertising, because the market for advertising is dominated by other big tech companies. Like you said, YouTube is not out there selling premium programming the way that you are, but it’s still all just advertising.
I want to unpack that, but I also want to make sure I get to the Decoder questions because I think they will help me understand how that works in your brain. Famously, there are two CEOs at Netflix. There’s you and Ted Sarandos. Historically, having two CEOs has gone sideways. BlackBerry didn’t work out. It had two CEOs. How is that structured between you and Ted, and how is that working after 18 months?
Having two CEOs is an incredibly powerful model, and it allows us to essentially embody what I mentioned at the beginning, which is we seek to be a company that brings two very strong centers of excellence and capability on the creative side and on the product and tech side together. If you look around the world at our competitors in the space, they typically are run by one CEO, and it’s a CEO who’s either really anchored in one or the other of those worlds. I think that reflects the strengths and weaknesses that those companies have. Ours is a very powerful model. It’s hard to pull off. I think the reason we’ve seen it not be done so often historically is because you need a culture and a set of folks that are bought into this model.
That’s where I go back to our culture and think about it as an enabling function for why the co-CEO model works at Netflix. You think a lot about what we do in culture, the willingness to be transparent with each other, to have honest conversations, to be selfless, to put the company first. These are all things that make the co-CEO model work. Whereas, in other places without those cultural elements, it’s very hard or it’s harder to pull off.
We did do a little bit of a historical look, and I would say that the performance of co-CEO-led companies is bimodal. It either significantly underperforms peers or it significantly overperforms peers. The real discriminating factor there is, do you have that culture and do you have a set of CEOs who are bought into the model and see it as a positive rather than something that’s a compromise or obstacle they have to work around?
Maybe I over-index on the historical underperformers. I think the way people think about it reductively is that you are the tech CEO and Ted is the content CEO. Is it that simple? What’s the overlap?
There’s definitely truth to that. We both feel that we’re responsible for the company at the end of the day. The next level of leaders both report into us. The major decisions that we make as the company, we feel like we have to make together. We always say speaking to one of us is speaking to both of us, so we feel like we owe each other clarity and transparency in those conversations. But it is also true that one of the reasons this model functions for us is that we get the benefit of that collaboration, but also, when you think about speed of decision-making, we have lanes that we are primary in and we know that we can focus on.
If there’s a big content strategy question, depending on how big it is, we’ll both weigh in. But maybe for something that sits below that, Ted is going to have a much better-informed position than I will and he’s going to make a call more quickly. Quite frankly, even more so, our chief content officer, Bella [Bajaria], will be doing that. That allows a speed of decision-making that is part of why this works.
So how is Netflix structured? You said that line below reports to both of you. How does that work?
That next set of leaders reports to both of us. Now, we have a primary responsibility, so you think about content, marketing, legal, comms, and publicity — those are on Ted’s side. On my side, for example, we’ve got product tech, ads, games, finance. That’s an example of how we are taking primary responsibility for the activities that sit at that level.
On your side of the house, you’ve got the core engineering functions, the core product functions. There’s a real dynamic between the product, how it works, and what people experience, which is a bunch of content tiles and content recommendations. Where’s the balance there?
I think a lot of companies think video streaming is just like a white-label product, and you can just buy it and put in your content and you’re off to the races. Netflix is famously not that. How do you think about that mix? Because everyone’s kind of standardized on your approach. Everything kind of looks like Netflix now. Is there still room to innovate?
There’s definitely room to innovate. In fact, we just launched a new version of our TV UI, which is where the majority of engagement takes place on Netflix. I also think it’s important to distinguish what is copyable and what’s not. You’re absolutely right that we do an update to our UI, and I can click a stopwatch and basically count the time until our competitors align on the pixel component of that version. And it ranges. The better competitors can do it in 18 to 24 months, and then some of the folks that take a little bit longer to get going, it can be years before they get there, but they all get there eventually.
An important component of what makes the user experience is all the things that then populate those pixels. How do we think about title recommendations? How do we present titles and use assets in different ways that make it more compelling for different users around the world? Because you and I might both be interested in season 3 of Bridgerton and be super excited about watching it, but we might be interested in it for different reasons, and our ability to communicate those differences effectively is super important to unlocking the value of that incredible storytelling. That’s harder to copy. I’d say no one’s done as good a job as we’ve done with it. Some folks are not even personalizing, which is remarkable to me at this point in time.
Who’s not personalizing?
Well, I’ll let you do your research.
I’ve heard some rumors. I’m wondering if you want to say it out loud.
No, it’s what you’d expect, which is the more traditional media folks are slower to that process. That’s a strength that we can bring that they don’t necessarily have the same fluency of accessing. But then, on the flip side, you’ve got incredible tech companies that live, eat, breathe personalization, but then the quality of their content offering is not the same and their ability to produce amazing shows at scale around the world is something that they just don’t have. We see both sides, and really, the magic for us is bringing those two things together in a way that magnifies them.
That’s the user experience that’s the most forward-facing part of the product stack. Netflix is famous for spending a lot of time and money on core engineering problems. Moving video on the internet was not a solved problem in the early days of Netflix. How much of your time is spent on video and coding and caching network distribution deals and peering arrangements?
Well, it’s still an important part of how we think we can improve the user experience. It’s remarkable to me that you mentioned encoding. And encoding efficiency… I would’ve thought five, seven, eight years ago that we had grounded out on the ability to squeeze more efficiency, which is delivering higher-quality video under less and less good network conditions. Yet something we participate in in the industry writ large is uncovering even more advances in that space, which is shocking to me, but it’s incredibly impressive.
We think that there are more opportunities out there to do that level of work and deliver better experiences to our members. I’ll give you other examples. As you mentioned, content delivery, moving video around the internet, part of this is what we’re working on in games as well. Ultimately, what we want to do is be able to deliver game experiences to the TV, and we’re going to do that by rendering the actual game in the cloud and streaming it essentially as a video. That’s an opportunity to leverage the infrastructure work that we do by being deeply embedded as a client on TV silicon and working with TV manufacturers to make sure we can bring those high-quality experiences to those devices.
Game streaming is one of those things that I hear about constantly on the show. For a while, you would look at Microsoft and be like, “Game streaming is going to happen.” It has not happened. Why do you think it hasn’t taken off in the way that everyone wanted it to?
Well, I’d say I’m convinced it’s going to happen as well.
Wait. Is it going to happen like self-driving cars are going to happen, or is it going to happen like video on the internet is going to happen?
That’s where I was going to go with this, which is, “What is it that’s going to happen?” We should be a little more clear about what that means. If you think about the pinnacle of what that could be, which is, let’s call it, console-like experiences at console-like latency, that is a very high bar, technically. The cost dynamics of that where we think about the infrastructural requirements around that are super hard.
Quite frankly, that part of the market is incredibly well served right now. You’re talking about the apex of an ecosystem that’s evolved to support that. If you think about the software development model, the software development costs, what the consumer model is, it’s a solved problem for so many people around the world. I would say, back to streaming, where’s the opportunity? The opportunity is actually not to come in from that level but to come up from the bottom and say, “Hey, there’s a range of game experiences that we can deliver to folks that are very capable technically today, where the cost dynamics around it are manageable.” If you think about family game night, couch co-op, there’s a whole set of quite impressive interactive experiences that I think we can do.
One of the challenging parts of games is people play them all over the place. I play them on airplanes, where I don’t have the connectivity. With video, you have an out. You can just put the bits on my phone and you’re not streaming them to me anymore. But my phone can probably just play them back. With a game, there are all kinds of things that might happen. You can’t just put the whole game on my phone necessarily, or my phone might not be as powerful as your server that’s making the game to stream it to me as a video file. How are you solving that problem?
We’re delivering games in multiple different ways. Cloud is one way to do it. And I’d say cloud is relevant because it unlocks TVs, which haven’t really been a source of gameplay except as the screen in which connected devices like consoles manifest themselves.
The TV manufacturers think they will be able to do that. This is what I mean by self-driving cars as a comparison. Everyone thinks they’re going to be able to do this.
We think we will be able to do it in the way that I described it. That envelope of what we can deliver will change every year. We’ve seen it grow, and I don’t know when it will get to that ultimate level, but it’s going to be a while away, and we’ve seen that again and again from the folks that have tried it. Back to your question, back to the phone — the phone is a way more capable general gaming device than a TV is. It has way more compute power in that regard, so we will deliver downloaded games to your phone in a way that is totally different from what we would do with a TV.
Do you want to get to that AAA set of games at the end of the day, or are you going to compete for the more casual games that people are playing right now?
If you step back and look at what we do, we’re in the business of working with creators, the most amazing storytellers on the planet, and having them build compelling universes that we can then deliver to people around the world in a variety of different ways. So that could be non-interactive modes like film and TV, and it could be interactive modes like games. Ultimately, to give fans the most compelling immersive experiences, eventually, we’ll get to something that looks like a AAA model. I would definitely not rule that out.
We’ve walked the same path in other places in the company. If you think about when we add new genres and things like that, sometimes we start smaller and then develop more capability and more aspiration to do it at the highest level. I think that’s a pretty common trajectory for us to follow, and I expect that’s where we’ll go with games as well.
Games seem like a new interesting engineering problem. You said you were surprised the industry can keep figuring video and coding out. Are there core engineering problems that would give you an advantage if you solved them today that you’re putting resources against?
Sure, there always are. Back to games, for example, the ability to virtualize multiple game instances on a single GPU. If we can do that more efficiently, that yields a better, more effective use of infrastructure. That’s an example I would put on the list. Another example is just how we think about recommendation systems.
We’re moving and significantly improving how we dynamically assemble the UI for you. That allows us to then, as you are navigating the UI, actually change what we are presenting in real time based on explicit and implicit signals we get from you around your needs for Netflix today. This is an evolution. We talked about how we personalize today and where other folks are in that process. The next step for us is to think about what you need from us on a Thursday night versus what you need from us when your family is assembled in front of the TV on a Sunday afternoon. It’s different, and the UI should show up in a different way to serve those needs differently.
How is your product team structured? I’m guessing this is a pretty functional organization. That’s a lot of goals. We have to figure out game streaming, we’re working on personalization, we want this more semantic UI. How have you structured the product team to chase all of those ideas?
We are a functionally organized group. Within that structure, we’ve got product leaders that are responsible for various different product categories, and then they have respective engineering teams that they go with, with a little bit of a horizontal layer to it. We’ve got a platform team that’s really focused on infrastructural components, services that are generally available to multiple different end-user-facing feature teams. That’s the core model.
And then the big Decoder question. You have a lot of decisions to make. You have a co-CEO to make decisions with. How do you make decisions? What’s the framework?
Well, maybe the first order of business — and this gets to the culture and how we operate as a company — would be, “Is this a decision that I should make, or is this a decision that should be made somewhere else in the company?” Part of what we want to do is enable folks throughout the entire company to make as many decisions as possible. That might be the first order, like, “Okay, is this my decision, or should it be somebody else’s decision?” And then, if it is my and Ted’s decision, partly, we’re trying to figure out what things are most material to the business. Companies can do a lot. You’re at a certain scale and there’s a lot that you can do. We’ve always been pretty choosy about the strategic extensions that we’ve made.
We’ve been very focused as a company. Our orientation, rather than some of our peers who have a “let’s just try something, shotgun stuff out there, and see what sticks” approach, we take the other extreme, which is, we start with the first principles argument around why this is critical to the business. The qualitative version of this might be, “Can you imagine a Netflix 10 years hence where we are not doing this?”
There’s a more wonky version of this, which is that you think about the materiality to the business: Do we have permission to play? Is there leverage off the core in success at scale? Does it lever back to the core? There are different ways of thinking about the same question, but ultimately you’re saying, “Okay, we’re going to do a limited number of things. Does this materially drive the business?” And if it does, then our orientation is, “We are going to do it to win.” We may not be great when we start, but ultimately we will learn and grow. That’s very much, again, how we think about what our culture is, which is an iterative process of trying to get better and better and seek excellence. That’s how I think about top-level decision-making.
This brings us to the culture memo. There is a new version of it. It just came out. The first one was released in 2009. It was a deck that had over 100 pages. Reed Hastings even wrote a book about this deck.
And Netflix streamlined it into a doc in 2017. So it went from being a 100-page PowerPoint to one sheet. Now there’s a new one, which is even more streamlined. Two questions: Why make such a big deal about these culture memos? And why does it keep getting shorter?
You typically have this triumvirate. There’s culture, strategy, and execution. There are probably 100 business books that will tell you that execution is the most important, or strategy is the most important, or culture is the most important. We think, first of all, it’s important to note that you have to be good at all three to be a really successful company. So you can’t be awful at one. But if I were to think about a hierarchy, I would put culture at the top. The rationale for that is if you have an amazing culture and maybe you’re mediocre at strategy or execution, an amazing culture allows you to get better at the rest. It’s a vehicle to improve, so that’s why we make a big deal out of it.
If you really think about what we’re trying to do with the culture memo and why it’s changed so much, we’re trying to constantly do a better job at articulating the practices we can employ as a company to grow and get better — to learn, to seek excellence, and to constantly strive for that. That’s the rationale. And then, why does it get shorter? Probably because we get better at articulating it. What’s the Mark Twain quote? If I had more time, I would’ve written you a shorter letter. It’s an investment in that. And one, understanding the things that matter. So it’s about seeking signal from noise and trying to constantly refine that articulation to have the maximum value for the time that somebody spends on it.
Just before we started talking, I went back and read the first one from 2009. I have to say, sitting here in 2024, I would describe the original deck as refreshingly harsh. It’s mean. It’s not a nice document. It’s very blunt. It opens by saying, “Even Enron says it has integrity. But we’re not going to lie to you. Here’s what we actually value.” The new one is a little softer. It’s a little more corporate. It’s nicer. Is that just meeting a younger employee base? Why make it nicer?
Well, it’s interesting because you called the original one “mean,” and I wouldn’t have used that word.
It’s very direct.
Direct would be the word that I would use. What we’re constantly trying to do is communicate effectively who we seek to be and who we think we are. What we found is that, in the original articulation, the tone of it incorrectly communicated a sense that it was a harsh and maybe cutthroat place, which actually, it’s really not. We want to be very clear that we do think excellence in having the colleagues around you is super important. We have this “dream team” concept in the latest version in which we are trying to be very clear about this being more of a sports team model than a family model. We’re going to seek the best player in every position. To the degree the business evolves or moves and we think there’s a change that needs to be made, we will make it.
We want to be very clear and honest about that. But we also want the tone to reflect what people’s working experience is like inside of Netflix. It’s interesting you brought it up because I think you’re looking at these two points, which is the original doc, and then where we are today. What happened in the middle actually got softened a little too much, I think. We moved the pendulum too far in the other direction, and partly what we were doing in this version is trying to bring more of that directness in while still accurately conveying what it’s like to work at Netflix.
That middle period coincided with a lot of controversy around the content on Netflix, particularly Dave Chappelle’s specials and whether Netflix’s employees were being reflected in the content that was on the service. There was a lot of tension inside the company at that time. I’m noticing, in the new memo, there’s no longer this famous section titled “freedom and responsibility.” Are those things connected? There is a section that discusses the diversity of the content on the service and how you’re going to meet the audience where they are. But there isn’t the sense that Netflix’s employees across the board are going to get a say on what appears on the service.
We actually explicitly say the opposite. You’re capturing two things that are pretty distinct. So one, being direct and setting clear expectations about who we are as a company so people can make good decisions about whether they want to join us. We wanted to be very clear about the fact that we are trying to program for over half a billion people around the planet. Those people’s tastes are very varied, and we have to bring a wide variety of content to be satisfying for those folks. We are definitely supporting artistic expression and a wide variety of creators to do that. We wanted to be very clear about that and take that head-on so folks could understand and decide that “hey, Netflix is a place that I can work for.”
And then [the section titled] “freedom and responsibility,” I would say that’s a different thing. What we found is that, in the many years since that original culture memo, people heard increasingly about the freedom part and less about the responsibility part. We always meant that to be a balance. Essentially, what we were trying to say is, “If everyone’s super responsible, we don’t have to have a lot of rules because we can rely on people’s judgment and people will do great things.”
What people ended up hearing was, “Oh, I can join Netflix and essentially all the decisions that I make are mine, and I don’t have to worry about that overarching responsibility to our collective corporate goals.” So we said, “Okay, this is an opportunity to try and clarify that, rearticulate it in a way that grounds into the original concept.” That’s why we’ve shifted the language.
One of the key values that you’ve had the whole time that I think connects to that is something called “People over Process,” where you’re just going to trust employees, where the expense policy is just “act in Netflix’s best interests.” That works when you’re the challenger, when you’re the startup and maybe you’re focused on one thing. It gets harder when you’re big and the company can do a lot of things. How do you keep that aligned at scale?
I don’t think of it that way. You got to size, which is an important dynamic. But going back to one of the core principles we have behind the culture memo is this idea that a lot of the way companies are run right now comes from the Industrial Revolution and industrial processes. There’s this idea that there’s a manufacturing process, and you get hyper-focused on how you can be amazing at that process. You think about defect reduction and it’s great because, if you’re doing that one thing, you can do it amazingly well. Look, if you’re TSMC and you’re building chips, that is your bread and butter. You do that all day long, and that’s an important part of corporate success.
For us, what we found is that refinement actually comes with brittleness. What happens is you get really good at one thing and then, when you want to do something new, the brilliance and the optimization that you’ve built in creates a lot of rejection of the new. Either it’s incompetence or lack of capability or even what we see in big companies, where all the systems are refined to say “we do X, we don’t do Y” or “we don’t do X and Y.” You get a lot of antibody rejection of Y.
A lot of what we are doing is trying to figure out how we can be a company that can go through multiple iterations of changing the strategy — adding a Y, adding a Z — and have a culture that accommodates that. Partly what we’re trying to do is have amazing judgment, have people in place that we have high expectations of, that are unusually responsible compared to their peers, and that gives them the ability to be flexible and evolve and not have the brittleness of an overly processed company. We like a good process. There are some components of having people work together as a collective unit that require scaffolding and expectations and how you set that up for success. But a lot of the process that gets in is not about that.
Big company process is about how you defend against the employee that expensed something wrong, or whatever, and a lot of that stuff, when you look at it, smart people with good judgment are not going to go do that stuff at the end of the day. We don’t think about that as good process. We reject that. We’d rather lean into, “Let’s hire good people. Let’s set the expectation that people are going to have great judgment, and then that gives them the flexibility to deal with the incredible nuance that exists around what we’re doing.”
You think about programming for over half a billion people — with countries in different situations and every title in a different situation. The user experience changes in these ways. Whether you’re a creator, an engineer, or a game developer, you want that flexibility to engage with that nuance and make smart decisions based on the specific situation that you’re dealing with, and that’s what we try to foster and encourage.
One more question here, then I want to put this into practice and come back to ads and culture. One of the most famous aspects of this memo, some of the most famous vocabulary words, are “loosely coupled, highly aligned” and “disagree and commit.” The second these words were introduced into American business, everyone started saying them. I used to work at AOL, and people would tell me we were loosely coupled and highly aligned. People say these things, but it’s hard to achieve them. You have new people coming in, and Netflix is a very different company. I think about those ideas, and what I see is you need a lot of institutional knowledge to stay highly aligned.
People need to know what you’ve done, what you might do, the ideas that you’ve had, all that nuance you’re talking about. When you have employees coming in, when you have a ferocious battle for talent and AI, for example, people are coming and going, how do you maintain that? It feels like that relies on some amount of history and institutional knowledge to keep going. Otherwise, you’ve just got people reading wikis all day long.
To some degree, yes, but I think there are mechanisms you can employ that don’t rely on tribal knowledge. As an example, “knowing what your north star is” is a very strong mechanism to support alignment. In addition to this culture memo, we have another doc that we don’t publish, which is our strategy bets.
This is a formalization of ambiguous decisions, meaning the company could do A or B. We’re very clear about, “Okay, it’s ambiguous, but we are going to do A and not B, and this is why.” That is another touchstone that allows employees to operate independently to that loosely coupled model but with a sense of how this ladders up into an aligned position.
This brings me to ads and the culture of the company and the market that you’re in. Ads are a tribe — you are in Cannes, you need an ad sales division. There are lots of ways to build an ad sales division, but that’s a different thing. Historically, at the big tech companies, the ad sales division does not look or feel or act like the product division, and there’s often some tension there. How are you bringing in a whole group like that one that feels like the future of your revenue without changing the culture of the company?
It’s funny that you mention it because we have tribes already. We had tribes before this. Let’s break it down. Kernel engineers who work on our content delivery network versus mobile UI engineers, that’s a different tribe. They have different ways of thinking about the world. We’ve always been balancing different groups of people that think about things differently.
That’s why we have these memos because, quite frankly, an evolution of the culture memo was going from the original deck that you talked about, which I would call highly anchored in Silicon Valley — there was a libertarian philosophy or ethos that you could read in there. And partly what we were trying to do over these multiple iterations was tease apart the actual outcomes, the excellence-enabling things that we wanted to identify, versus the behaviors and the articulations, and trying to make those more general.
That way, whether you’re two creatives in Amsterdam who might have a very different form of communication when you talk about direct feedback versus two engineers in Japan, you can have an honest conversation with each other about what we’re good at, what we’re not. We think that’s an important enabling factor that we want to have around the world, or around all those tribes. You mentioned ads as being a super distinct thing, and I don’t think of it as that distinct when it comes down to it because we’ve always been trying to blend these different base cultures or different expectations and then figure out how to layer on top of that a way of working and a set of expectations that allow us to be better together.
I don’t disagree, but it feels like the premium advertising, the brand advertising world, going to Upfronts and meeting with marketers and meeting their demands, that just places a different set of pressures on an engineering organization. You can see it at Google, at Meta. At scale, this is what they do. That’s who you’re competing with now, but you’re also competing with linear TV for their ad dollars. How do you think about, “Okay, we’ve got to build a whole bunch of ad tech now that competes with giant incumbents like Google and Meta but that also takes the brand dollars away from linear television”?
Part of this is knowing what role in the ads ecosystem we can or should play. What’s the strategy? Our position is the ability to bring what is amazing about TV advertising. So, if you think about the creative formats, how we were able to position brands next to titles that were culture-defining moments, essentially, which is, of course, where advertisers are excited to be. And then, you need to also pair that with what is great about digital advertising. So, if you think about targeting performance measurement, the ability to do that at all levels in the funnel.
Our job is not to be the most amazing gigantic-scale digital advertiser, because Google and Facebook are going to do a better job of that. Our job is not to be just a TV advertiser because other folks can do that as well. So we’re trying to bring these two things together in a way that we’re uniquely suited over a five- to 10-year period to magnify the impact of both of those worlds, to create a premium, highly creative space. You couldn’t do these kinds of formats on TikTok but also bring enough targeting, enough brand performance, in these different measurements to try and give advertisers a sense that they’re getting something for their dollar as well. So that’s how I think about blending those.
You mentioned TikTok. I see a lot of younger people, they open Netflix, they just stream whatever in the background, and then they look at TikTok. That’s a real dynamic. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube — on the phone, they can convert. You see the thing, you push the button, you go buy whatever. TikTok wants to sell me a lot of off-brand power tool batteries. I feel like I’m going to light my house on fire, but that’s where they’re at right now. Netflix, you can’t convert on the TV. It’s much harder. Is that a challenge for you, to go to advertisers and say, “Look, you can’t actually shop, but maybe you’ll get more take-up, even though the kids are holding their phones”?
Again, it gets to what role we can play. The demand conversion advertising, that plays a role in the ecosystem, so 100 percent that’s there. Or maybe that moment can’t happen on the phone regardless — if you think you’re going to go out and buy a car, that’s likely not happening there. But there is a lot that we can do that basically operates above the funnel in ways that brand advertisers believe is more compelling. Obviously, we should be able to measure that performance as well. How are we doing in terms of brand affinity awareness? How are we thinking about building demand at certain levels? Our goal would be to operate at that part of the funnel and then think about fulfillment as happening in a wide range of channels after that fact.
You listen to Meta’s quarterly earnings, or you just read its statements, and it feels like it can turn the knob on ad load and make more money and hit its numbers if it needs to. There’s a product manager at Meta who’s like, “It’s fine, Mark [Zuckerberg], I got it.” And then there are more ads in Instagram Reels today. You’ve been raising prices, you’ve been hiking the streaming subscription prices, and that seems to be going fine. Would you ever increase the ad load? Is that a lever that you have at your disposal?
It is a lever that’s at our disposal. It’s a lever that you use at your own peril. I would say my goal is that we will change the ad load — we’ll decrease it over time. If we fulfill that promise that we just talked about, we should be able to increasingly provide higher-relevance, higher-value ads. That’s great for the member, they have a better experience as a result, and it’s great for the advertiser. Quite frankly, advertisers will pay more for that kind of experience because it’s more valuable. I think we should be able to do that.
You can decrease ad load and say, “Look, these slots are more valuable because there are fewer of them. We’re going to charge higher prices.” Has that played out yet? Have you seen evidence that’s true?
We’re very early in this process, so, at this point, we’re trying to build an ad server. We can see on the horizon tons of work to do. We have an amazing roadmap in front of us, and again, back to the culture memo, we’re very much comfortable starting from a position of “we’re at zero, and we will learn to be better at this.” That’s definitely the process that we’re at in terms of building ads is iterating toward that model.
Do you think you’re at the end of price hikes? I have a graph in front of me of Netflix price hikes, and the verticality of this line, especially for premium with no ads, is pretty remarkable. It’s just gone up. And are you sending more people to the ads tier, is that the goal of that price increase? Are we done with this yet?
It’s definitely not the goal. What I would say is that our job is to add more value to the entertainment service that we are offering. We see consistently, again and again, that our members want more entertainment, they want a higher diversity of shows, they want more quality shows, so that’s our job. If we do that well, we’ll go back and occasionally ask members to pay a little bit more to keep that flywheel running. Back to the ads component of this, it’s really just how we then offer a wide range, and our goal will be to have an even wider range over time — to have a set of prices with the right features so that basically we can attract more members around the world and they can enjoy the incredible stories that we have available.
I’m a huge TV nerd. I’ve got a giant Atmos and Vision setup in my house, and then all the streaming services ask me to pay extra for 4K. It seems like everyone’s defaulted to, “You’re going to be fine with 1080p. That’s what we’re going to deliver to most people.” Is that because most consumers don’t care? Is it because you can set the price higher and people do care so they will pay more? How is that playing out?
It goes back to what I said, which is that we’re trying to essentially find a range of prices that have appropriate features connected to them so that people who value those features more have an opportunity to get them.
But I guess my question is: is it that people don’t value the features, or they value them so much that they will pay extra?
What’s the difference, really?
My theory is that most people don’t value the features, so there’s a tiny subset of people who will pay, but most people don’t care. Whereas, if everyone cared, it would just become the default and everyone would price it in.
That’s probably a fair statement. Yeah. I’m not sure. There’s clearly a community of folks that care.
They’re my people.
Yeah, and they’re not a small minority. So we want to serve them well, too.
I feel like I have to ask you a question about AI before we end here. We’ve talked a lot about personalization, about modifying the UI, and making it more responsive. There’s a huge talent war for AI. That’s a huge amount of cost just to get, I’m assuming, Nvidia GPUs. That’s what everybody wants. They’re very expensive, and Nvidia seems to be the only company that’s actually making money with this stuff right now. The talent is expensive. What’s your approach to this? Is it “we’ll wait for the models to come and be good for us”? Is it “we have to make our own foundation model”? How are you thinking about it?
We think one of our competitive advantages is to bring two worlds together. So it’s amazing entertainment, the creativity required to produce that, as well as the technology component. We have a long history of using machine learning and artificial intelligence in our recommender systems. We’ve been doing that for 20-some years. Again, we think that our job is to be proactive about understanding where there’s technical innovation. How do we use that both to serve creators, allow them to tell their stories in more compelling ways, and also then to serve our members better user experiences?
I would also say that we’ve generally been careful about not getting caught up in the hype cycle that often informs Silicon Valley. I am so excited that we didn’t spend any energy on NFTs. If we go back three or four years ago, everybody told me, “My God, Netflix has to have an NFT strategy.” We didn’t need to have an NFT strategy. Now, I would say generative AI, that’s not an apt comparison because I do think there are some interesting things associated with it. It’s not just smoke and mirrors.
But I would also say we have to understand what our role is in that ecosystem, and we’re not going to build frontier models. That’s not what our job is, really. Our job is to think about, “Okay, there are a bunch of interesting technologies that are being developed. How do we give these to creators in ways that allow them to tell their stories in a more compelling fashion?” Just as entertainment has evolved with the evolution of new technology, you can go back from cave painting to where we are today. You mentioned 4K and Atmos. Creators will figure out a way to leverage the newest tools to tell their stories in a more compelling way. Our job is to enable that at the end of the day.
When I think about use cases you could use AI for right now, one is to make different thumbnails for all the shows. It seems very obvious. You’re going to take some creative, you’re going to plug in some targeting keywords or personalization keywords, and you’re going to make a new poster for the show that is just for me. That would, charitably I think, piss off every single one of your creators. People doing that right now to make movie posters face enormous amounts of fan and creator backlash.
This is the tension of the company. You’ve got the creator side and the tech side, and even obviously interesting ideas like “let’s improve personalization by making more custom art,” which you’re already automating in some way, seem very tense. How are you balancing out the tension with the creative side?
It’s interesting because we do that right now. We have a team of people that create a variety of assets that represent the titles so that we can find the biggest audience for that title. Now, we do that with a strong sense of authenticity, meaning that it has to be reflective of the title. So we’ve been constantly using tools, with the human in the loop that understands, is this an authentic representation of that title?
Now, if it’s authentic, it doesn’t misportray the title, which not only would capture some creator ire but is not good for members, either. You don’t want to tell them that it’s a story about something and have it be about something else. Clickbait is something that we completely reject in that regard. But if it is authentic, then it serves a purpose that creators love, which is it finds a bigger audience for that story. If you talk to creators, generally, what they want to do is be able to tell their story in a compelling way and find the largest audience possible. We’ve essentially been navigating that situation already.
Do you think that you’ll start using more AI in situations like that that bridge tech and creative because that’s where some of the opportunity here is? If you’re just using it for the personalization algorithm, I don’t think people would be so upset. Once you start touching on the core creative, that’s at least where our audience has been the most vocal with us. Do you think you’re going to venture into the more creative side with AI?
Creators have been using tools that, in my mind, serve some of the same purposes that the AI that we’re seeing, the capabilities that we’re seeing today, serve. If you think about pixel manipulation or VFX, a great example is previsualization. So having a creator be able to have a more efficient way of understanding the script and be able to manipulate that and understand that in a way that then informs a shooting schedule. It’s a great example of how they can use these technologies. Our creators are going to want to use those tools. It’s also important to recognize that a lot of the creators that we use are independent production companies. They decide what tools they want to use. We don’t tell them that.
I want to wrap up on the TV business as a whole because it is undergoing a lot of change. Netflix itself is changing in response to that. One of the big trends we’re seeing everywhere is bundles. We’re going to make a new sports company and bundle all of our sports together. The cable company, the ISP, is now going to bundle some streamer with it. You sign up for Verizon and you get some collection of things.
The famous line is, “There are only two media business models: bundling and unbundling.” We’re obviously in the bundling period. How is Netflix participating in that? Are we just headed back toward a cable bundle but with Netflix at the center?
I don’t think so, but let’s just step back. I think bundling works when it’s better for consumers: where they have an easy opportunity to buy a package of goods that make sense together, and then they see more value in the assemblage of those than they would with each discreet purchase. To be clear, we’ve done this with a variety of partners for a long time.
[We’ve done this for] six, seven, eight years — whether it’s a pay TV operator or an ISP mobile operator. In some countries, we do it with utilities. You can literally, when you buy your energy, your power, you get Netflix with that as an option. We’ve done that because it’s an efficient way for consumers to be able to decide to add Netflix, and it allows us to access an audience that maybe is less tech-forward, or we show up in a way that’s natural. Think about, “Hey, I’m watching TV on a set-top box. I can see that I can get Netflix as part of that.” It’s a model that’s good for consumers. We’ve been doing that for quite some time.
Some of the bundling behavior that you see today, it’s not entirely clear to me that it’s actually going to work, that it’s pro-consumer. To some degree [the mentality] we’re getting is “let’s throw a bunch of stuff together and see what sticks.” We’ll see how that plays out. But I do think that a bundling of services is a logical thing and it’s pro-consumer, so I don’t see that going away.
Would you ever bundle with a competitor the way that some of your competitors are bundling with each other?
I would never say never. I mean, we’ve done a bunch of things that we probably too strongly had an oppositional position to. We want to remain intellectually open and humble about that. We’re being bundled with our competitors by our bundling partners right now. You can go out and buy a mobile service that includes us and somebody else. So, again, we don’t think it changes what we do, which is we’ve got to provide an incredible entertainment experience for our members. If we do that well, then they’re going to see value, and whether people buy directly from us or in a bundle, that’ll work out.
The place where most consumers, including me, would like all these services to get bundled is at the device level, where I open my Roku or my Apple TV and I just see a whole bunch of content for a whole bunch of services, and it figures out what I’ve paid for and I can go watch some stuff. Netflix has historically resisted those integrations. On the Apple TV, you’re not in their app. On other devices, you’re not in their unified experiences. Why is that? Is that because you want people to come to Netflix and stay there? Is it because the business terms aren’t agreeable? What’s the reason?
We do those integrations all the time. Actually, I would’ve described it as much more balanced in terms of when we do it and when we don’t. Essentially, we think that we’re investing significantly in creating a better user experience for discovering Netflix content within our application. We want to make sure that we have a level competitive field on the device for users who want that differentiated experience, who see that value, to be able to get to Netflix in a very easy, efficient way. Mostly, the terms that we have are around “is that a balanced place to do this?” And if it is, then we participate in things like an aggregated service discovery. And where it’s not, then we typically don’t.
Netflix is on basically every platform that you can think of. Famously, there are Netflix buttons on remotes; it’s nonnegotiable for a lot of TV manufacturers. Most of those platforms want to take a cut of your revenue, either at signup on the subscription side and very much so on the advertising side. You cannot appear on a Roku device unless you give them a cut of your ad sales. Are you big enough now that you can negotiate better terms for revenue splits across TV and on mobile, relative to your competitors? Or are the the terms these platforms and TV makers demand pretty flat across the board?
I don’t know what our competitors get, so I can’t give you a definitive answer to that question. But I would expect that, relative to some other folks who would provide different value, we probably bring more to the platform, and that probably shows up in some way, shape, or form.
The reason I ask that question is because Netflix is one of the companies that’s always pushing back against app store rules from Apple and Google and the restrictions they’ve placed on signup flows, customer acquisitions, and, of course, revenue splits. There’s been a lot of regulatory activity in that area in recent years. Are you starting to see the benefits of that regulatory action showing up in how you acquire new customers, get them to sign up to Netflix, and collect the subscription fee every month?
TV is a highly competitive ecosystem, so I would say there are tons of manufacturers out there, and there’s not really a concentration of power. I’d say that’s a well-functioning market that allows everyone to bring their value to it.
On mobile, we’re seeing marginal benefits as a result of some of the more recent changes. We have slightly better user experiences for our members on those platforms. We can be a little bit more communicative about how they can sign up for Netflix, which is great. Generally, I would say, consumers figure this stuff out, too. It’s been amazing how many people say, “Oh, this doesn’t work so I go to Netflix.com” and it all sort of figures itself out from there.
The power of Bridgerton marketing the service for you. I have one last question. It’s a total wild card. I’ve been dying to ask it the entire time. Do you keep track of what TVs your subscribers are using?
Of course.
Okay. So I have a theory about the Samsung Frame TV, which is the most popular TV. The reason people like this TV is not because it is a great TV; it’s because it looks good when it’s off. But do you see the popularity of the Frame TV as any sort of symbol for the future of television viewing? Because I see a TV that looks good when it’s off as being a sign that soon there might not be a TV. Because if you value the off state more than the on state, something is happening.
I would totally disagree with you on that. There’s a whole bunch of design considerations that go into the things that we use and how we interact with them in our daily lives, and some of those design considerations are about functionality. How does it show up when I’m actually using it? But a lot of the design considerations are aesthetic considerations: it’s an object in my home and I care how it looks even when it’s just static and sitting there. In some cases, we obviously choose these things based on no functional goal and just having something that looks amazing and beautiful.
Yeah. I’m just saying my radar about this has been spinning for a while.
I think you’re reading into it considerably.
I mean, I’m sitting in front of a Frame TV. There are three of them in this house, don’t get me wrong. We buy the TVs, but I think about them as a cultural object quite often. I figured I had one shot to ask you that question.
And you still watch them?
No, we watch the beautiful OLED. That’s what I’m saying. We hang up these TVs, and after a while, I can just be like, “Why are these even here?”
Well, then the key is that a TV manufacturer is going to be able to provide you both, right?
I think that’s what they would prefer. Alright, Greg, you’ve given me so much time. I’m going to let you get back to partying in France.
Awesome.
Thank you so much for being on Decoder.
Thank you. Appreciate it.

Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo: Netflix

The co-CEO who replaced co-founder Reed Hastings details the company’s new culture memo, its ad ambitions, and what’s next for Netflix.

Today, I’m talking with Greg Peters, the co-CEO of Netflix. I caught up with Greg while he was at the Cannes Lions festival in France, which is basically the world’s biggest gathering of advertisers and marketers. It’s an increasingly important place for Greg to be, as Netflix’s new ad tier has nearly doubled in six months to more than 40 million subscribers and feels increasingly pivotal to the future of the company.

On top of that, Netflix is updating its famous culture memo. So I wanted to chat with Greg about the changes he’s making to that document and how he’s thinking about maintaining Netflix’s culture as it grows into industries like advertising and gaming.

Greg has only been co-CEO of Netflix for roughly 18 months, after co-founder and former co-CEO Reed Hastings retired last year and Greg was promoted from chief operating officer. He now runs Netflix alongside content chief Ted Sarandos, who’s been running the ship with Hastings since 2020. It’s a complicated setup, and historically, co-CEOs don’t tend to work out all that well. Just look at BlackBerry, SAP, or more recently, Salesforce.

But Netflix seems to be the exception, and that’s pure bait for Decoder — how does that structure work, and how do decisions actually get made with two CEOs? A lot of Netflix’s success is in the marriage of content and technology, and having those split up seems like a recipe for conflict or, at the very least, confusion.

Greg and I talked about this a lot — so much of the solution at Netflix is the company’s unique culture, which gives employees an enormous amount of freedom. That culture was first laid out in a famous 2009 slide deck, which former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg once called the most important document to ever come out of Silicon Valley. That deck was refined into a memo in 2017; the new version Greg’s here to talk about is a shorter, even more streamlined version of that memo.

I have always loved the original culture deck. It’s written in a pretty brash and direct style — it made clear that just saying the company had values wasn’t enough and that the real indicators of a company’s culture were the behaviors and skills that it values and rewards. Most importantly, it said that Netflix wasn’t trying to be a family — its approach to hiring and firing would be more like a sports team, where low performers would be given generous severance packages and replaced with better players on a consistent basis.

This newest version of the memo is not quite so in your face as the original. In fact, it’s a lot nicer and more corporate. I asked Greg why that was, and his answer was fascinating: as the company grows, the memo needs to resonate with a very broad audience, and the tone matters. You’ll hear him talk about this in detail.

Another big change Greg and I talked about is that Netflix removed an oft-quoted section of the original deck labeled “freedom and responsibility.” You’ll hear him talk about needing to more clearly say that freedom requires even more responsibility.

This conversation really hit on so many of the big themes that come up so often on Decoder, and I also found a way to ask Greg what he thinks of the Samsung Frame TV. You know I had to.

Okay, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters. Here we go.

Disclosure: I executive produced a Netflix show called The Future Of back in 2022.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Greg Peters is here, the co-CEO of Netflix, welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

I am really excited to talk to you. You have been the co-CEO for about 18 months now. You were the chief product officer and the chief operating officer before that.

That’s correct.

There’s also a lot going on in streaming generally. We seem to be in a time of bundling and consolidation. And then, on top of it, there’s a new culture memo at Netflix, which is a big deal. Netflix’s culture memos tend to set the tone for the whole industry. Our show is about work charts and decisions and corporate culture, so I have a lot of questions about that, but I want to start at the start, which is you used to work at TiVo, and I used to cover TiVo every minute of every day. Are you ready for a full hour of TiVo questions?

We can do that if you want. Just to be clear: I did a startup that was acquired by Macrovision, which eventually became Rovi, which eventually became TiVo. So there’s a long history of those names there.

All of that is why I used to cover every minute of the twists and turns of that company. But let’s set that aside. Let’s start with Netflix. I feel like there are a lot of similarities between what happened on that side with cable and what is going on with streaming now. I want to start with a big question: How do you think of Netflix right now? Is it a streaming company? Is it a TV company? Is it entertainment because you also have games now? What’s the big-picture definition of Netflix?

We definitely think of ourselves as an entertainment company. We seek to be an entertainment company that does what’s very hard for other companies to do, which is bring a real capability and competency to the creative aspect of it. You see those competencies in many traditional media companies. Disney and movie studios and broadcasters around the world do a great job of these things. But we also try to bring a real tech and product capability and sensibility as well.

I think you see that in other companies: Google is amazing at that; Apple’s amazing at that. But it’s very rare to be able to bring these two centers together and be strong at both. That’s what we’re trying to do and be a global entertainment company as well. Partly what we’re trying to do is help entertain the over half a billion people around the world that currently come to us for that entertainment, and hopefully grow that number over time.

Reed Hastings, the former CEO of Netflix, once famously said the company’s biggest competitor was sleep. This is a statement of purpose about the attention economy. You’re only awake so many hours a day; your eyes are only looking at so many things. This is a zero-sum game. The thing that people will choose over everything is sleep if they can. Is that still the framework that you’re using?

Generally, yes. I think that the import of that is still relevant. I don’t think of it as strictly zero sum because there are some magnifying effects across different things, and I think that what we see is that your enthusiasm, your fandom for a certain title, can show up on social media, for example, in a way that’s additive.

But in the general sense, the entertainment landscape is highly competitive right now. Humans on the planet have more opportunities to entertain themselves than ever before. In that sense, we have to make sure that the entertainment we’re providing is highly compelling, it’s highly attractive, and it can win more of those hours. We call them moments of truth — that’s our way of thinking about if we are doing a good job of entertaining our members.

One thing in the framework of “there are only so many hours a day and we’re competing for attention” that I think is challenging, and I’ve never heard anyone really pull apart well, is that Netflix famously pays for content, Hollywood famously pays for content, and your streaming competitors pay a lot of money for content. That’s a huge part of your economics. The user-generated content platforms do not, or they pay extraordinarily low rates if they do.

I look at something like TikTok, and it’s full of pirated content. It’s a playground of copyright infringement. It’s very clever. As a former copyright attorney, I find myself very entertained by the innovation that occurs on TikTok on that scale. You look at something like Suits, which is a phenomenon that started with a whole bunch of copyright infringement on a whole bunch of social media platforms. What’s that pipeline like for you? Is that, “Okay, that’s fine, that’s just our marketing,” or are you actually competing with the social media platforms directly?

Well, we’re clearly competing at the margin, back to your attention economy model. But I would say that we’re doing two different entertainment jobs, so I don’t think of the competition as strictly substitutable or head-to-head in that regard. In some sense, those social media channels can operate as a way of magnifying fandom and be a great mechanism for people to talk about the shows they’re watching.

You mentioned Suits, for example. I think when we saw a huge amount of engagement with Suits, we saw part of that magnified and reflected in what people were talking about on social media. You mentioned copyright. I’d say, at the extreme, we, in the industry and generally governments around the world, are supportive of protecting the rights of the people that hold those copyrights. But people talking about the shows that they love, that’s a good thing.

Just on the basic economics, it’s still challenging to me. Those platforms get to take a lot of content for free or very, very low rates and address a big audience, and then their model is to sell targeted advertising. Netflix’s model, until recently, was you paid a whole bunch of money for content at very high rates, and then your model is subscription fees are shot higher. But now your model is targeted advertising. Are you getting the higher rates from the ads to support how much money is going into making the content, or are you finding the pressure of the social media platforms that are just getting it for free to be a real driver of your decisions?

I don’t think the competitive dynamic that you’re describing there is as sharp as you’re relaying. Evidence of that is that YouTube, for example, has largely been unsuccessful at delivering the kind of content that we deliver. There are a bunch of examples like this. Cobra Kai is my favorite. It started on YouTube but didn’t do particularly well there. Then we picked it up from them, and it’s become a gigantic show. I think they’re serving one need — one entertainment need state, if you will — and we’re serving a different one.

Then you talked about ads. My principle orientation toward what we are doing in ads is that it allows us to offer consumers around the world a lower price point, and that’s a powerful thing to do because now we can say to folks, “Hey, you can have access to all the amazing stories, the films, the series, the games that we are doing at a lower price,” and that’s super important for them. Then we can also work with advertisers to make up the difference between that and what we would otherwise charge on subscription via the advertising revenue that we get there.

Do you think that the introduction of ads is changing how you think about running the company? You’re at the Cannes Lions festival right now, which is the big advertising festival in France. When you ran a subscription business, I’m guessing you didn’t have to spend as much time talking to advertisers in France. It’s tough work, I feel very badly for you, but I’m guessing that’s a new piece of the puzzle. Did you have to build up that capability?

Yeah, for sure. It’s a new capability from a technology perspective, so we’re building technology that supports what we hope is at some point in time — and we’re still very much in the process of building this — the best-in-class streaming solution for consumers, our members, and advertisers. We’re also building capabilities that we haven’t had in the company before. We never had ad sales, for example. That’s a whole new muscle for us to go build, so it’s definitely about growing that.

.Maybe the question behind your question — and a question that I’ve gotten internally — is, “Are we programming differently as a result of now adding advertising to our model?” And the answer to that question is no because, at the end of the day, whether it’s subscription or advertising, both are anchored in something that consumers want to watch, that our members are dying to watch.

That engagement is at the center of both models. It’s mutually supportive in that regard. We very much think our programming job is to think about what our members need and how we can give them that, and that drives and then fuels both models in a positive way.

I want to come back to that because I think that perceived shift is really important, especially as you add advertising, because the market for advertising is dominated by other big tech companies. Like you said, YouTube is not out there selling premium programming the way that you are, but it’s still all just advertising.

I want to unpack that, but I also want to make sure I get to the Decoder questions because I think they will help me understand how that works in your brain. Famously, there are two CEOs at Netflix. There’s you and Ted Sarandos. Historically, having two CEOs has gone sideways. BlackBerry didn’t work out. It had two CEOs. How is that structured between you and Ted, and how is that working after 18 months?

Having two CEOs is an incredibly powerful model, and it allows us to essentially embody what I mentioned at the beginning, which is we seek to be a company that brings two very strong centers of excellence and capability on the creative side and on the product and tech side together. If you look around the world at our competitors in the space, they typically are run by one CEO, and it’s a CEO who’s either really anchored in one or the other of those worlds. I think that reflects the strengths and weaknesses that those companies have. Ours is a very powerful model. It’s hard to pull off. I think the reason we’ve seen it not be done so often historically is because you need a culture and a set of folks that are bought into this model.

That’s where I go back to our culture and think about it as an enabling function for why the co-CEO model works at Netflix. You think a lot about what we do in culture, the willingness to be transparent with each other, to have honest conversations, to be selfless, to put the company first. These are all things that make the co-CEO model work. Whereas, in other places without those cultural elements, it’s very hard or it’s harder to pull off.

We did do a little bit of a historical look, and I would say that the performance of co-CEO-led companies is bimodal. It either significantly underperforms peers or it significantly overperforms peers. The real discriminating factor there is, do you have that culture and do you have a set of CEOs who are bought into the model and see it as a positive rather than something that’s a compromise or obstacle they have to work around?

Maybe I over-index on the historical underperformers. I think the way people think about it reductively is that you are the tech CEO and Ted is the content CEO. Is it that simple? What’s the overlap?

There’s definitely truth to that. We both feel that we’re responsible for the company at the end of the day. The next level of leaders both report into us. The major decisions that we make as the company, we feel like we have to make together. We always say speaking to one of us is speaking to both of us, so we feel like we owe each other clarity and transparency in those conversations. But it is also true that one of the reasons this model functions for us is that we get the benefit of that collaboration, but also, when you think about speed of decision-making, we have lanes that we are primary in and we know that we can focus on.

If there’s a big content strategy question, depending on how big it is, we’ll both weigh in. But maybe for something that sits below that, Ted is going to have a much better-informed position than I will and he’s going to make a call more quickly. Quite frankly, even more so, our chief content officer, Bella [Bajaria], will be doing that. That allows a speed of decision-making that is part of why this works.

So how is Netflix structured? You said that line below reports to both of you. How does that work?

That next set of leaders reports to both of us. Now, we have a primary responsibility, so you think about content, marketing, legal, comms, and publicity — those are on Ted’s side. On my side, for example, we’ve got product tech, ads, games, finance. That’s an example of how we are taking primary responsibility for the activities that sit at that level.

On your side of the house, you’ve got the core engineering functions, the core product functions. There’s a real dynamic between the product, how it works, and what people experience, which is a bunch of content tiles and content recommendations. Where’s the balance there?

I think a lot of companies think video streaming is just like a white-label product, and you can just buy it and put in your content and you’re off to the races. Netflix is famously not that. How do you think about that mix? Because everyone’s kind of standardized on your approach. Everything kind of looks like Netflix now. Is there still room to innovate?

There’s definitely room to innovate. In fact, we just launched a new version of our TV UI, which is where the majority of engagement takes place on Netflix. I also think it’s important to distinguish what is copyable and what’s not. You’re absolutely right that we do an update to our UI, and I can click a stopwatch and basically count the time until our competitors align on the pixel component of that version. And it ranges. The better competitors can do it in 18 to 24 months, and then some of the folks that take a little bit longer to get going, it can be years before they get there, but they all get there eventually.

An important component of what makes the user experience is all the things that then populate those pixels. How do we think about title recommendations? How do we present titles and use assets in different ways that make it more compelling for different users around the world? Because you and I might both be interested in season 3 of Bridgerton and be super excited about watching it, but we might be interested in it for different reasons, and our ability to communicate those differences effectively is super important to unlocking the value of that incredible storytelling. That’s harder to copy. I’d say no one’s done as good a job as we’ve done with it. Some folks are not even personalizing, which is remarkable to me at this point in time.

Who’s not personalizing?

Well, I’ll let you do your research.

I’ve heard some rumors. I’m wondering if you want to say it out loud.

No, it’s what you’d expect, which is the more traditional media folks are slower to that process. That’s a strength that we can bring that they don’t necessarily have the same fluency of accessing. But then, on the flip side, you’ve got incredible tech companies that live, eat, breathe personalization, but then the quality of their content offering is not the same and their ability to produce amazing shows at scale around the world is something that they just don’t have. We see both sides, and really, the magic for us is bringing those two things together in a way that magnifies them.

That’s the user experience that’s the most forward-facing part of the product stack. Netflix is famous for spending a lot of time and money on core engineering problems. Moving video on the internet was not a solved problem in the early days of Netflix. How much of your time is spent on video and coding and caching network distribution deals and peering arrangements?

Well, it’s still an important part of how we think we can improve the user experience. It’s remarkable to me that you mentioned encoding. And encoding efficiency… I would’ve thought five, seven, eight years ago that we had grounded out on the ability to squeeze more efficiency, which is delivering higher-quality video under less and less good network conditions. Yet something we participate in in the industry writ large is uncovering even more advances in that space, which is shocking to me, but it’s incredibly impressive.

We think that there are more opportunities out there to do that level of work and deliver better experiences to our members. I’ll give you other examples. As you mentioned, content delivery, moving video around the internet, part of this is what we’re working on in games as well. Ultimately, what we want to do is be able to deliver game experiences to the TV, and we’re going to do that by rendering the actual game in the cloud and streaming it essentially as a video. That’s an opportunity to leverage the infrastructure work that we do by being deeply embedded as a client on TV silicon and working with TV manufacturers to make sure we can bring those high-quality experiences to those devices.

Game streaming is one of those things that I hear about constantly on the show. For a while, you would look at Microsoft and be like, “Game streaming is going to happen.” It has not happened. Why do you think it hasn’t taken off in the way that everyone wanted it to?

Well, I’d say I’m convinced it’s going to happen as well.

Wait. Is it going to happen like self-driving cars are going to happen, or is it going to happen like video on the internet is going to happen?

That’s where I was going to go with this, which is, “What is it that’s going to happen?” We should be a little more clear about what that means. If you think about the pinnacle of what that could be, which is, let’s call it, console-like experiences at console-like latency, that is a very high bar, technically. The cost dynamics of that where we think about the infrastructural requirements around that are super hard.

Quite frankly, that part of the market is incredibly well served right now. You’re talking about the apex of an ecosystem that’s evolved to support that. If you think about the software development model, the software development costs, what the consumer model is, it’s a solved problem for so many people around the world. I would say, back to streaming, where’s the opportunity? The opportunity is actually not to come in from that level but to come up from the bottom and say, “Hey, there’s a range of game experiences that we can deliver to folks that are very capable technically today, where the cost dynamics around it are manageable.” If you think about family game night, couch co-op, there’s a whole set of quite impressive interactive experiences that I think we can do.

One of the challenging parts of games is people play them all over the place. I play them on airplanes, where I don’t have the connectivity. With video, you have an out. You can just put the bits on my phone and you’re not streaming them to me anymore. But my phone can probably just play them back. With a game, there are all kinds of things that might happen. You can’t just put the whole game on my phone necessarily, or my phone might not be as powerful as your server that’s making the game to stream it to me as a video file. How are you solving that problem?

We’re delivering games in multiple different ways. Cloud is one way to do it. And I’d say cloud is relevant because it unlocks TVs, which haven’t really been a source of gameplay except as the screen in which connected devices like consoles manifest themselves.

The TV manufacturers think they will be able to do that. This is what I mean by self-driving cars as a comparison. Everyone thinks they’re going to be able to do this.

We think we will be able to do it in the way that I described it. That envelope of what we can deliver will change every year. We’ve seen it grow, and I don’t know when it will get to that ultimate level, but it’s going to be a while away, and we’ve seen that again and again from the folks that have tried it. Back to your question, back to the phone — the phone is a way more capable general gaming device than a TV is. It has way more compute power in that regard, so we will deliver downloaded games to your phone in a way that is totally different from what we would do with a TV.

Do you want to get to that AAA set of games at the end of the day, or are you going to compete for the more casual games that people are playing right now?

If you step back and look at what we do, we’re in the business of working with creators, the most amazing storytellers on the planet, and having them build compelling universes that we can then deliver to people around the world in a variety of different ways. So that could be non-interactive modes like film and TV, and it could be interactive modes like games. Ultimately, to give fans the most compelling immersive experiences, eventually, we’ll get to something that looks like a AAA model. I would definitely not rule that out.

We’ve walked the same path in other places in the company. If you think about when we add new genres and things like that, sometimes we start smaller and then develop more capability and more aspiration to do it at the highest level. I think that’s a pretty common trajectory for us to follow, and I expect that’s where we’ll go with games as well.

Games seem like a new interesting engineering problem. You said you were surprised the industry can keep figuring video and coding out. Are there core engineering problems that would give you an advantage if you solved them today that you’re putting resources against?

Sure, there always are. Back to games, for example, the ability to virtualize multiple game instances on a single GPU. If we can do that more efficiently, that yields a better, more effective use of infrastructure. That’s an example I would put on the list. Another example is just how we think about recommendation systems.

We’re moving and significantly improving how we dynamically assemble the UI for you. That allows us to then, as you are navigating the UI, actually change what we are presenting in real time based on explicit and implicit signals we get from you around your needs for Netflix today. This is an evolution. We talked about how we personalize today and where other folks are in that process. The next step for us is to think about what you need from us on a Thursday night versus what you need from us when your family is assembled in front of the TV on a Sunday afternoon. It’s different, and the UI should show up in a different way to serve those needs differently.

How is your product team structured? I’m guessing this is a pretty functional organization. That’s a lot of goals. We have to figure out game streaming, we’re working on personalization, we want this more semantic UI. How have you structured the product team to chase all of those ideas?

We are a functionally organized group. Within that structure, we’ve got product leaders that are responsible for various different product categories, and then they have respective engineering teams that they go with, with a little bit of a horizontal layer to it. We’ve got a platform team that’s really focused on infrastructural components, services that are generally available to multiple different end-user-facing feature teams. That’s the core model.

And then the big Decoder question. You have a lot of decisions to make. You have a co-CEO to make decisions with. How do you make decisions? What’s the framework?

Well, maybe the first order of business — and this gets to the culture and how we operate as a company — would be, “Is this a decision that I should make, or is this a decision that should be made somewhere else in the company?” Part of what we want to do is enable folks throughout the entire company to make as many decisions as possible. That might be the first order, like, “Okay, is this my decision, or should it be somebody else’s decision?” And then, if it is my and Ted’s decision, partly, we’re trying to figure out what things are most material to the business. Companies can do a lot. You’re at a certain scale and there’s a lot that you can do. We’ve always been pretty choosy about the strategic extensions that we’ve made.

We’ve been very focused as a company. Our orientation, rather than some of our peers who have a “let’s just try something, shotgun stuff out there, and see what sticks” approach, we take the other extreme, which is, we start with the first principles argument around why this is critical to the business. The qualitative version of this might be, “Can you imagine a Netflix 10 years hence where we are not doing this?”

There’s a more wonky version of this, which is that you think about the materiality to the business: Do we have permission to play? Is there leverage off the core in success at scale? Does it lever back to the core? There are different ways of thinking about the same question, but ultimately you’re saying, “Okay, we’re going to do a limited number of things. Does this materially drive the business?” And if it does, then our orientation is, “We are going to do it to win.” We may not be great when we start, but ultimately we will learn and grow. That’s very much, again, how we think about what our culture is, which is an iterative process of trying to get better and better and seek excellence. That’s how I think about top-level decision-making.

This brings us to the culture memo. There is a new version of it. It just came out. The first one was released in 2009. It was a deck that had over 100 pages. Reed Hastings even wrote a book about this deck.

And Netflix streamlined it into a doc in 2017. So it went from being a 100-page PowerPoint to one sheet. Now there’s a new one, which is even more streamlined. Two questions: Why make such a big deal about these culture memos? And why does it keep getting shorter?

You typically have this triumvirate. There’s culture, strategy, and execution. There are probably 100 business books that will tell you that execution is the most important, or strategy is the most important, or culture is the most important. We think, first of all, it’s important to note that you have to be good at all three to be a really successful company. So you can’t be awful at one. But if I were to think about a hierarchy, I would put culture at the top. The rationale for that is if you have an amazing culture and maybe you’re mediocre at strategy or execution, an amazing culture allows you to get better at the rest. It’s a vehicle to improve, so that’s why we make a big deal out of it.

If you really think about what we’re trying to do with the culture memo and why it’s changed so much, we’re trying to constantly do a better job at articulating the practices we can employ as a company to grow and get better — to learn, to seek excellence, and to constantly strive for that. That’s the rationale. And then, why does it get shorter? Probably because we get better at articulating it. What’s the Mark Twain quote? If I had more time, I would’ve written you a shorter letter. It’s an investment in that. And one, understanding the things that matter. So it’s about seeking signal from noise and trying to constantly refine that articulation to have the maximum value for the time that somebody spends on it.

Just before we started talking, I went back and read the first one from 2009. I have to say, sitting here in 2024, I would describe the original deck as refreshingly harsh. It’s mean. It’s not a nice document. It’s very blunt. It opens by saying, “Even Enron says it has integrity. But we’re not going to lie to you. Here’s what we actually value.” The new one is a little softer. It’s a little more corporate. It’s nicer. Is that just meeting a younger employee base? Why make it nicer?

Well, it’s interesting because you called the original one “mean,” and I wouldn’t have used that word.

It’s very direct.

Direct would be the word that I would use. What we’re constantly trying to do is communicate effectively who we seek to be and who we think we are. What we found is that, in the original articulation, the tone of it incorrectly communicated a sense that it was a harsh and maybe cutthroat place, which actually, it’s really not. We want to be very clear that we do think excellence in having the colleagues around you is super important. We have this “dream team” concept in the latest version in which we are trying to be very clear about this being more of a sports team model than a family model. We’re going to seek the best player in every position. To the degree the business evolves or moves and we think there’s a change that needs to be made, we will make it.

We want to be very clear and honest about that. But we also want the tone to reflect what people’s working experience is like inside of Netflix. It’s interesting you brought it up because I think you’re looking at these two points, which is the original doc, and then where we are today. What happened in the middle actually got softened a little too much, I think. We moved the pendulum too far in the other direction, and partly what we were doing in this version is trying to bring more of that directness in while still accurately conveying what it’s like to work at Netflix.

That middle period coincided with a lot of controversy around the content on Netflix, particularly Dave Chappelle’s specials and whether Netflix’s employees were being reflected in the content that was on the service. There was a lot of tension inside the company at that time. I’m noticing, in the new memo, there’s no longer this famous section titled “freedom and responsibility.” Are those things connected? There is a section that discusses the diversity of the content on the service and how you’re going to meet the audience where they are. But there isn’t the sense that Netflix’s employees across the board are going to get a say on what appears on the service.

We actually explicitly say the opposite. You’re capturing two things that are pretty distinct. So one, being direct and setting clear expectations about who we are as a company so people can make good decisions about whether they want to join us. We wanted to be very clear about the fact that we are trying to program for over half a billion people around the planet. Those people’s tastes are very varied, and we have to bring a wide variety of content to be satisfying for those folks. We are definitely supporting artistic expression and a wide variety of creators to do that. We wanted to be very clear about that and take that head-on so folks could understand and decide that “hey, Netflix is a place that I can work for.”

And then [the section titled] “freedom and responsibility,” I would say that’s a different thing. What we found is that, in the many years since that original culture memo, people heard increasingly about the freedom part and less about the responsibility part. We always meant that to be a balance. Essentially, what we were trying to say is, “If everyone’s super responsible, we don’t have to have a lot of rules because we can rely on people’s judgment and people will do great things.”

What people ended up hearing was, “Oh, I can join Netflix and essentially all the decisions that I make are mine, and I don’t have to worry about that overarching responsibility to our collective corporate goals.” So we said, “Okay, this is an opportunity to try and clarify that, rearticulate it in a way that grounds into the original concept.” That’s why we’ve shifted the language.

One of the key values that you’ve had the whole time that I think connects to that is something called “People over Process,” where you’re just going to trust employees, where the expense policy is just “act in Netflix’s best interests.” That works when you’re the challenger, when you’re the startup and maybe you’re focused on one thing. It gets harder when you’re big and the company can do a lot of things. How do you keep that aligned at scale?

I don’t think of it that way. You got to size, which is an important dynamic. But going back to one of the core principles we have behind the culture memo is this idea that a lot of the way companies are run right now comes from the Industrial Revolution and industrial processes. There’s this idea that there’s a manufacturing process, and you get hyper-focused on how you can be amazing at that process. You think about defect reduction and it’s great because, if you’re doing that one thing, you can do it amazingly well. Look, if you’re TSMC and you’re building chips, that is your bread and butter. You do that all day long, and that’s an important part of corporate success.

For us, what we found is that refinement actually comes with brittleness. What happens is you get really good at one thing and then, when you want to do something new, the brilliance and the optimization that you’ve built in creates a lot of rejection of the new. Either it’s incompetence or lack of capability or even what we see in big companies, where all the systems are refined to say “we do X, we don’t do Y” or “we don’t do X and Y.” You get a lot of antibody rejection of Y.

A lot of what we are doing is trying to figure out how we can be a company that can go through multiple iterations of changing the strategy — adding a Y, adding a Z — and have a culture that accommodates that. Partly what we’re trying to do is have amazing judgment, have people in place that we have high expectations of, that are unusually responsible compared to their peers, and that gives them the ability to be flexible and evolve and not have the brittleness of an overly processed company. We like a good process. There are some components of having people work together as a collective unit that require scaffolding and expectations and how you set that up for success. But a lot of the process that gets in is not about that.

Big company process is about how you defend against the employee that expensed something wrong, or whatever, and a lot of that stuff, when you look at it, smart people with good judgment are not going to go do that stuff at the end of the day. We don’t think about that as good process. We reject that. We’d rather lean into, “Let’s hire good people. Let’s set the expectation that people are going to have great judgment, and then that gives them the flexibility to deal with the incredible nuance that exists around what we’re doing.”

You think about programming for over half a billion people — with countries in different situations and every title in a different situation. The user experience changes in these ways. Whether you’re a creator, an engineer, or a game developer, you want that flexibility to engage with that nuance and make smart decisions based on the specific situation that you’re dealing with, and that’s what we try to foster and encourage.

One more question here, then I want to put this into practice and come back to ads and culture. One of the most famous aspects of this memo, some of the most famous vocabulary words, are “loosely coupled, highly aligned” and “disagree and commit.” The second these words were introduced into American business, everyone started saying them. I used to work at AOL, and people would tell me we were loosely coupled and highly aligned. People say these things, but it’s hard to achieve them. You have new people coming in, and Netflix is a very different company. I think about those ideas, and what I see is you need a lot of institutional knowledge to stay highly aligned.

People need to know what you’ve done, what you might do, the ideas that you’ve had, all that nuance you’re talking about. When you have employees coming in, when you have a ferocious battle for talent and AI, for example, people are coming and going, how do you maintain that? It feels like that relies on some amount of history and institutional knowledge to keep going. Otherwise, you’ve just got people reading wikis all day long.

To some degree, yes, but I think there are mechanisms you can employ that don’t rely on tribal knowledge. As an example, “knowing what your north star is” is a very strong mechanism to support alignment. In addition to this culture memo, we have another doc that we don’t publish, which is our strategy bets.

This is a formalization of ambiguous decisions, meaning the company could do A or B. We’re very clear about, “Okay, it’s ambiguous, but we are going to do A and not B, and this is why.” That is another touchstone that allows employees to operate independently to that loosely coupled model but with a sense of how this ladders up into an aligned position.

This brings me to ads and the culture of the company and the market that you’re in. Ads are a tribe — you are in Cannes, you need an ad sales division. There are lots of ways to build an ad sales division, but that’s a different thing. Historically, at the big tech companies, the ad sales division does not look or feel or act like the product division, and there’s often some tension there. How are you bringing in a whole group like that one that feels like the future of your revenue without changing the culture of the company?

It’s funny that you mention it because we have tribes already. We had tribes before this. Let’s break it down. Kernel engineers who work on our content delivery network versus mobile UI engineers, that’s a different tribe. They have different ways of thinking about the world. We’ve always been balancing different groups of people that think about things differently.

That’s why we have these memos because, quite frankly, an evolution of the culture memo was going from the original deck that you talked about, which I would call highly anchored in Silicon Valley — there was a libertarian philosophy or ethos that you could read in there. And partly what we were trying to do over these multiple iterations was tease apart the actual outcomes, the excellence-enabling things that we wanted to identify, versus the behaviors and the articulations, and trying to make those more general.

That way, whether you’re two creatives in Amsterdam who might have a very different form of communication when you talk about direct feedback versus two engineers in Japan, you can have an honest conversation with each other about what we’re good at, what we’re not. We think that’s an important enabling factor that we want to have around the world, or around all those tribes. You mentioned ads as being a super distinct thing, and I don’t think of it as that distinct when it comes down to it because we’ve always been trying to blend these different base cultures or different expectations and then figure out how to layer on top of that a way of working and a set of expectations that allow us to be better together.

I don’t disagree, but it feels like the premium advertising, the brand advertising world, going to Upfronts and meeting with marketers and meeting their demands, that just places a different set of pressures on an engineering organization. You can see it at Google, at Meta. At scale, this is what they do. That’s who you’re competing with now, but you’re also competing with linear TV for their ad dollars. How do you think about, “Okay, we’ve got to build a whole bunch of ad tech now that competes with giant incumbents like Google and Meta but that also takes the brand dollars away from linear television”?

Part of this is knowing what role in the ads ecosystem we can or should play. What’s the strategy? Our position is the ability to bring what is amazing about TV advertising. So, if you think about the creative formats, how we were able to position brands next to titles that were culture-defining moments, essentially, which is, of course, where advertisers are excited to be. And then, you need to also pair that with what is great about digital advertising. So, if you think about targeting performance measurement, the ability to do that at all levels in the funnel.

Our job is not to be the most amazing gigantic-scale digital advertiser, because Google and Facebook are going to do a better job of that. Our job is not to be just a TV advertiser because other folks can do that as well. So we’re trying to bring these two things together in a way that we’re uniquely suited over a five- to 10-year period to magnify the impact of both of those worlds, to create a premium, highly creative space. You couldn’t do these kinds of formats on TikTok but also bring enough targeting, enough brand performance, in these different measurements to try and give advertisers a sense that they’re getting something for their dollar as well. So that’s how I think about blending those.

You mentioned TikTok. I see a lot of younger people, they open Netflix, they just stream whatever in the background, and then they look at TikTok. That’s a real dynamic. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube — on the phone, they can convert. You see the thing, you push the button, you go buy whatever. TikTok wants to sell me a lot of off-brand power tool batteries. I feel like I’m going to light my house on fire, but that’s where they’re at right now. Netflix, you can’t convert on the TV. It’s much harder. Is that a challenge for you, to go to advertisers and say, “Look, you can’t actually shop, but maybe you’ll get more take-up, even though the kids are holding their phones”?

Again, it gets to what role we can play. The demand conversion advertising, that plays a role in the ecosystem, so 100 percent that’s there. Or maybe that moment can’t happen on the phone regardless — if you think you’re going to go out and buy a car, that’s likely not happening there. But there is a lot that we can do that basically operates above the funnel in ways that brand advertisers believe is more compelling. Obviously, we should be able to measure that performance as well. How are we doing in terms of brand affinity awareness? How are we thinking about building demand at certain levels? Our goal would be to operate at that part of the funnel and then think about fulfillment as happening in a wide range of channels after that fact.

You listen to Meta’s quarterly earnings, or you just read its statements, and it feels like it can turn the knob on ad load and make more money and hit its numbers if it needs to. There’s a product manager at Meta who’s like, “It’s fine, Mark [Zuckerberg], I got it.” And then there are more ads in Instagram Reels today. You’ve been raising prices, you’ve been hiking the streaming subscription prices, and that seems to be going fine. Would you ever increase the ad load? Is that a lever that you have at your disposal?

It is a lever that’s at our disposal. It’s a lever that you use at your own peril. I would say my goal is that we will change the ad load — we’ll decrease it over time. If we fulfill that promise that we just talked about, we should be able to increasingly provide higher-relevance, higher-value ads. That’s great for the member, they have a better experience as a result, and it’s great for the advertiser. Quite frankly, advertisers will pay more for that kind of experience because it’s more valuable. I think we should be able to do that.

You can decrease ad load and say, “Look, these slots are more valuable because there are fewer of them. We’re going to charge higher prices.” Has that played out yet? Have you seen evidence that’s true?

We’re very early in this process, so, at this point, we’re trying to build an ad server. We can see on the horizon tons of work to do. We have an amazing roadmap in front of us, and again, back to the culture memo, we’re very much comfortable starting from a position of “we’re at zero, and we will learn to be better at this.” That’s definitely the process that we’re at in terms of building ads is iterating toward that model.

Do you think you’re at the end of price hikes? I have a graph in front of me of Netflix price hikes, and the verticality of this line, especially for premium with no ads, is pretty remarkable. It’s just gone up. And are you sending more people to the ads tier, is that the goal of that price increase? Are we done with this yet?

It’s definitely not the goal. What I would say is that our job is to add more value to the entertainment service that we are offering. We see consistently, again and again, that our members want more entertainment, they want a higher diversity of shows, they want more quality shows, so that’s our job. If we do that well, we’ll go back and occasionally ask members to pay a little bit more to keep that flywheel running. Back to the ads component of this, it’s really just how we then offer a wide range, and our goal will be to have an even wider range over time — to have a set of prices with the right features so that basically we can attract more members around the world and they can enjoy the incredible stories that we have available.

I’m a huge TV nerd. I’ve got a giant Atmos and Vision setup in my house, and then all the streaming services ask me to pay extra for 4K. It seems like everyone’s defaulted to, “You’re going to be fine with 1080p. That’s what we’re going to deliver to most people.” Is that because most consumers don’t care? Is it because you can set the price higher and people do care so they will pay more? How is that playing out?

It goes back to what I said, which is that we’re trying to essentially find a range of prices that have appropriate features connected to them so that people who value those features more have an opportunity to get them.

But I guess my question is: is it that people don’t value the features, or they value them so much that they will pay extra?

What’s the difference, really?

My theory is that most people don’t value the features, so there’s a tiny subset of people who will pay, but most people don’t care. Whereas, if everyone cared, it would just become the default and everyone would price it in.

That’s probably a fair statement. Yeah. I’m not sure. There’s clearly a community of folks that care.

They’re my people.

Yeah, and they’re not a small minority. So we want to serve them well, too.

I feel like I have to ask you a question about AI before we end here. We’ve talked a lot about personalization, about modifying the UI, and making it more responsive. There’s a huge talent war for AI. That’s a huge amount of cost just to get, I’m assuming, Nvidia GPUs. That’s what everybody wants. They’re very expensive, and Nvidia seems to be the only company that’s actually making money with this stuff right now. The talent is expensive. What’s your approach to this? Is it “we’ll wait for the models to come and be good for us”? Is it “we have to make our own foundation model”? How are you thinking about it?

We think one of our competitive advantages is to bring two worlds together. So it’s amazing entertainment, the creativity required to produce that, as well as the technology component. We have a long history of using machine learning and artificial intelligence in our recommender systems. We’ve been doing that for 20-some years. Again, we think that our job is to be proactive about understanding where there’s technical innovation. How do we use that both to serve creators, allow them to tell their stories in more compelling ways, and also then to serve our members better user experiences?

I would also say that we’ve generally been careful about not getting caught up in the hype cycle that often informs Silicon Valley. I am so excited that we didn’t spend any energy on NFTs. If we go back three or four years ago, everybody told me, “My God, Netflix has to have an NFT strategy.” We didn’t need to have an NFT strategy. Now, I would say generative AI, that’s not an apt comparison because I do think there are some interesting things associated with it. It’s not just smoke and mirrors.

But I would also say we have to understand what our role is in that ecosystem, and we’re not going to build frontier models. That’s not what our job is, really. Our job is to think about, “Okay, there are a bunch of interesting technologies that are being developed. How do we give these to creators in ways that allow them to tell their stories in a more compelling fashion?” Just as entertainment has evolved with the evolution of new technology, you can go back from cave painting to where we are today. You mentioned 4K and Atmos. Creators will figure out a way to leverage the newest tools to tell their stories in a more compelling way. Our job is to enable that at the end of the day.

When I think about use cases you could use AI for right now, one is to make different thumbnails for all the shows. It seems very obvious. You’re going to take some creative, you’re going to plug in some targeting keywords or personalization keywords, and you’re going to make a new poster for the show that is just for me. That would, charitably I think, piss off every single one of your creators. People doing that right now to make movie posters face enormous amounts of fan and creator backlash.

This is the tension of the company. You’ve got the creator side and the tech side, and even obviously interesting ideas like “let’s improve personalization by making more custom art,” which you’re already automating in some way, seem very tense. How are you balancing out the tension with the creative side?

It’s interesting because we do that right now. We have a team of people that create a variety of assets that represent the titles so that we can find the biggest audience for that title. Now, we do that with a strong sense of authenticity, meaning that it has to be reflective of the title. So we’ve been constantly using tools, with the human in the loop that understands, is this an authentic representation of that title?

Now, if it’s authentic, it doesn’t misportray the title, which not only would capture some creator ire but is not good for members, either. You don’t want to tell them that it’s a story about something and have it be about something else. Clickbait is something that we completely reject in that regard. But if it is authentic, then it serves a purpose that creators love, which is it finds a bigger audience for that story. If you talk to creators, generally, what they want to do is be able to tell their story in a compelling way and find the largest audience possible. We’ve essentially been navigating that situation already.

Do you think that you’ll start using more AI in situations like that that bridge tech and creative because that’s where some of the opportunity here is? If you’re just using it for the personalization algorithm, I don’t think people would be so upset. Once you start touching on the core creative, that’s at least where our audience has been the most vocal with us. Do you think you’re going to venture into the more creative side with AI?

Creators have been using tools that, in my mind, serve some of the same purposes that the AI that we’re seeing, the capabilities that we’re seeing today, serve. If you think about pixel manipulation or VFX, a great example is previsualization. So having a creator be able to have a more efficient way of understanding the script and be able to manipulate that and understand that in a way that then informs a shooting schedule. It’s a great example of how they can use these technologies. Our creators are going to want to use those tools. It’s also important to recognize that a lot of the creators that we use are independent production companies. They decide what tools they want to use. We don’t tell them that.

I want to wrap up on the TV business as a whole because it is undergoing a lot of change. Netflix itself is changing in response to that. One of the big trends we’re seeing everywhere is bundles. We’re going to make a new sports company and bundle all of our sports together. The cable company, the ISP, is now going to bundle some streamer with it. You sign up for Verizon and you get some collection of things.

The famous line is, “There are only two media business models: bundling and unbundling.” We’re obviously in the bundling period. How is Netflix participating in that? Are we just headed back toward a cable bundle but with Netflix at the center?

I don’t think so, but let’s just step back. I think bundling works when it’s better for consumers: where they have an easy opportunity to buy a package of goods that make sense together, and then they see more value in the assemblage of those than they would with each discreet purchase. To be clear, we’ve done this with a variety of partners for a long time.

[We’ve done this for] six, seven, eight years — whether it’s a pay TV operator or an ISP mobile operator. In some countries, we do it with utilities. You can literally, when you buy your energy, your power, you get Netflix with that as an option. We’ve done that because it’s an efficient way for consumers to be able to decide to add Netflix, and it allows us to access an audience that maybe is less tech-forward, or we show up in a way that’s natural. Think about, “Hey, I’m watching TV on a set-top box. I can see that I can get Netflix as part of that.” It’s a model that’s good for consumers. We’ve been doing that for quite some time.

Some of the bundling behavior that you see today, it’s not entirely clear to me that it’s actually going to work, that it’s pro-consumer. To some degree [the mentality] we’re getting is “let’s throw a bunch of stuff together and see what sticks.” We’ll see how that plays out. But I do think that a bundling of services is a logical thing and it’s pro-consumer, so I don’t see that going away.

Would you ever bundle with a competitor the way that some of your competitors are bundling with each other?

I would never say never. I mean, we’ve done a bunch of things that we probably too strongly had an oppositional position to. We want to remain intellectually open and humble about that. We’re being bundled with our competitors by our bundling partners right now. You can go out and buy a mobile service that includes us and somebody else. So, again, we don’t think it changes what we do, which is we’ve got to provide an incredible entertainment experience for our members. If we do that well, then they’re going to see value, and whether people buy directly from us or in a bundle, that’ll work out.

The place where most consumers, including me, would like all these services to get bundled is at the device level, where I open my Roku or my Apple TV and I just see a whole bunch of content for a whole bunch of services, and it figures out what I’ve paid for and I can go watch some stuff. Netflix has historically resisted those integrations. On the Apple TV, you’re not in their app. On other devices, you’re not in their unified experiences. Why is that? Is that because you want people to come to Netflix and stay there? Is it because the business terms aren’t agreeable? What’s the reason?

We do those integrations all the time. Actually, I would’ve described it as much more balanced in terms of when we do it and when we don’t. Essentially, we think that we’re investing significantly in creating a better user experience for discovering Netflix content within our application. We want to make sure that we have a level competitive field on the device for users who want that differentiated experience, who see that value, to be able to get to Netflix in a very easy, efficient way. Mostly, the terms that we have are around “is that a balanced place to do this?” And if it is, then we participate in things like an aggregated service discovery. And where it’s not, then we typically don’t.

Netflix is on basically every platform that you can think of. Famously, there are Netflix buttons on remotes; it’s nonnegotiable for a lot of TV manufacturers. Most of those platforms want to take a cut of your revenue, either at signup on the subscription side and very much so on the advertising side. You cannot appear on a Roku device unless you give them a cut of your ad sales. Are you big enough now that you can negotiate better terms for revenue splits across TV and on mobile, relative to your competitors? Or are the the terms these platforms and TV makers demand pretty flat across the board?

I don’t know what our competitors get, so I can’t give you a definitive answer to that question. But I would expect that, relative to some other folks who would provide different value, we probably bring more to the platform, and that probably shows up in some way, shape, or form.

The reason I ask that question is because Netflix is one of the companies that’s always pushing back against app store rules from Apple and Google and the restrictions they’ve placed on signup flows, customer acquisitions, and, of course, revenue splits. There’s been a lot of regulatory activity in that area in recent years. Are you starting to see the benefits of that regulatory action showing up in how you acquire new customers, get them to sign up to Netflix, and collect the subscription fee every month?

TV is a highly competitive ecosystem, so I would say there are tons of manufacturers out there, and there’s not really a concentration of power. I’d say that’s a well-functioning market that allows everyone to bring their value to it.

On mobile, we’re seeing marginal benefits as a result of some of the more recent changes. We have slightly better user experiences for our members on those platforms. We can be a little bit more communicative about how they can sign up for Netflix, which is great. Generally, I would say, consumers figure this stuff out, too. It’s been amazing how many people say, “Oh, this doesn’t work so I go to Netflix.com” and it all sort of figures itself out from there.

The power of Bridgerton marketing the service for you. I have one last question. It’s a total wild card. I’ve been dying to ask it the entire time. Do you keep track of what TVs your subscribers are using?

Of course.

Okay. So I have a theory about the Samsung Frame TV, which is the most popular TV. The reason people like this TV is not because it is a great TV; it’s because it looks good when it’s off. But do you see the popularity of the Frame TV as any sort of symbol for the future of television viewing? Because I see a TV that looks good when it’s off as being a sign that soon there might not be a TV. Because if you value the off state more than the on state, something is happening.

I would totally disagree with you on that. There’s a whole bunch of design considerations that go into the things that we use and how we interact with them in our daily lives, and some of those design considerations are about functionality. How does it show up when I’m actually using it? But a lot of the design considerations are aesthetic considerations: it’s an object in my home and I care how it looks even when it’s just static and sitting there. In some cases, we obviously choose these things based on no functional goal and just having something that looks amazing and beautiful.

Yeah. I’m just saying my radar about this has been spinning for a while.

I think you’re reading into it considerably.

I mean, I’m sitting in front of a Frame TV. There are three of them in this house, don’t get me wrong. We buy the TVs, but I think about them as a cultural object quite often. I figured I had one shot to ask you that question.

And you still watch them?

No, we watch the beautiful OLED. That’s what I’m saying. We hang up these TVs, and after a while, I can just be like, “Why are these even here?”

Well, then the key is that a TV manufacturer is going to be able to provide you both, right?

I think that’s what they would prefer. Alright, Greg, you’ve given me so much time. I’m going to let you get back to partying in France.

Awesome.

Thank you so much for being on Decoder.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Read More 

A promotional image for Shopify’s Sidekick chatbot. | Image: Shopify

Shopify’s new AI “Sidekick” chatbot is officially launching in early access, the company said as part of its “2024 Summer Edition” updates announced on Monday.
Sidekick, which the company first revealed last year, functions as a support chatbot for merchants, helping them do things like make discount codes, generate reports about your store, or suggest blog post ideas. Sure, it sounds like pretty typical AI chatbot stuff, but it seems like it could be a useful way to get help or assistance, especially if Shopify continues to tailor the chatbot to fit merchant needs.
Sidekick is live across thousands of Shopify stores, but it’s currently limited to merchants who have English stores in North America, Vanessa Lee, Shopify’s vice president of product, says in an interview with The Verge. If you don’t have Sidekick and want to try it, you can sign up for the waitlist. And the company wants to make it available in other languages and other locales, Lee says.
Shopify is making a handful of other AI-focused announcements, too. One, AI-powered product categorization, seems like it could actually save merchants a lot of time. As you’re building a product listing, Shopify’s tech can automatically suggest the taxonomy about the product — taxonomy that’s used to make listings more easily discoverable — that might fit that product so that you don’t have to type it in yourself. If Shopify’s suggestions aren’t right, you can manually change things.

Image: Shopify

Another AI tool will offer suggested replies for customer chats that come in through Shopify Inbox. Right now, these replies are just suggestions, meaning merchants will have to be the ones to finalize and actually send a response. Lee says Shopify is open to the possibility of letting customers chat with an AI chatbot that speaks on behalf of the merchant, but for now, the company has chosen to keep the human in the loop “until we’re uber confident that nothing would happen.”
Shopify is also bringing its AI-powered image generator, which launched in January, to its iOS and Android apps and letting merchants use it in more places in their Shopify admin. The company says Shopify merchants have saved more than 1 million AI-generated images in six months.

A promotional image for Shopify’s Sidekick chatbot. | Image: Shopify

Shopify’s new AI “Sidekick” chatbot is officially launching in early access, the company said as part of its “2024 Summer Edition” updates announced on Monday.

Sidekick, which the company first revealed last year, functions as a support chatbot for merchants, helping them do things like make discount codes, generate reports about your store, or suggest blog post ideas. Sure, it sounds like pretty typical AI chatbot stuff, but it seems like it could be a useful way to get help or assistance, especially if Shopify continues to tailor the chatbot to fit merchant needs.

Sidekick is live across thousands of Shopify stores, but it’s currently limited to merchants who have English stores in North America, Vanessa Lee, Shopify’s vice president of product, says in an interview with The Verge. If you don’t have Sidekick and want to try it, you can sign up for the waitlist. And the company wants to make it available in other languages and other locales, Lee says.

Shopify is making a handful of other AI-focused announcements, too. One, AI-powered product categorization, seems like it could actually save merchants a lot of time. As you’re building a product listing, Shopify’s tech can automatically suggest the taxonomy about the product — taxonomy that’s used to make listings more easily discoverable — that might fit that product so that you don’t have to type it in yourself. If Shopify’s suggestions aren’t right, you can manually change things.

Image: Shopify

Another AI tool will offer suggested replies for customer chats that come in through Shopify Inbox. Right now, these replies are just suggestions, meaning merchants will have to be the ones to finalize and actually send a response. Lee says Shopify is open to the possibility of letting customers chat with an AI chatbot that speaks on behalf of the merchant, but for now, the company has chosen to keep the human in the loop “until we’re uber confident that nothing would happen.”

Shopify is also bringing its AI-powered image generator, which launched in January, to its iOS and Android apps and letting merchants use it in more places in their Shopify admin. The company says Shopify merchants have saved more than 1 million AI-generated images in six months.

Read More 

Enso’s eco-friendly tire. | Image: Enso

Congratulations, world. We’ve done it. Since passing the Clean Air Act in the 1970s, we’ve reduced cancer-causing particulate emissions from our cars and other sources dramatically, a change that has added years to our lives.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that we can now spend more time focusing on the remaining sources, including some unexpected ones. In an EV era, tires are becoming the greatest emitters of particulate matter, and as we’ve seen, whether it’s the microplastics in our shrimp or the preservatives in our salmon, they’re having a disturbing impact on our environment.
In an EV era, tires are becoming the greatest emitters of particulate matter
Gunnlaugur Erlendsson wants to do something about that. The affable Icelander founded Enso to tackle what he saw as a developing need for better EV tires. The UK-based company’s next big step is coming close to home: a $500 million US tire factory specifically for building eco-friendly tires for EVs.
Well, eco-friendlier, anyway.
Founding Enso

Image: Enso
A rendering of Enso’s proposed factory.

Enso’s 2016 founding was “a bit ahead of the curve” when it comes to EV adoption, according to Erlendsson. “There was only a handful of any research reports done on tire pollution, and almost none of them were really on the subject of either microplastics or air pollution,” he said.
But the writing was on the road. Early industry movers, like the Tesla Model S, offered way more power than the internal combustion cars they competed against but also carried massive weight penalties. A Model S Plaid, for example, is about the same size as a Lexus ES but is about 1,000 pounds heavier and has more than three times the horsepower. More weight and more power means more tire wear, leading to expensive and frequent trips to the shop for fresh rubber.
While EV-specific tires are increasingly common, Erlendsson says most tire manufacturers are too focused on partnering with auto manufacturers, shipping new tires with new cars. “So even though technology exists to make tires much better today, it isn’t hitting the 90 percent of the tire industry, which is the aftermarket,” he said.
While Erlendsson said Enso is working to develop partnerships with those same vehicle manufacturers, the company’s US business model will focus on the 90 percent, creating tires in the correct fitments for popular EVs, regardless of brand, then selling them directly to customers.
More life, less pollution

Image: Enso
Enso wants to sell its tires directly to consumers.

What makes Enso’s tires different? Erlendsson was light on the technical details but promised 10 percent lower rolling resistance than regular tires, equating to a commensurate range increase. That’ll make your EV cheaper to run, while a 35 percent increase in tire life means lower wear, fewer particulates in the air, and fewer old tires sent to the incinerator, where half of all American tires go to die.
Enso’s new factory will also handle recycling. It will be truly carbon neutral, not reliant on carbon offsets, and manufacture tires out of recycled carbon black and tire silica made from rice husks.
But what about 6PPD, the troubling tire preservative that’s shown up in our fish and even our bodies? Enso is still using it, but its days are numbered.
Making tires out of recycled carbon black and tire silica made from rice husks
“All tire companies in the world are using 6PPD in their current production tires,” Erlendsson said. “The technology to remove 6PPD exists,” he added, but he declined to discuss the topic further, claiming restrictions due to signed NDAs. Research bodies in both California and Washington state have provided early assessments of alternatives, but none look to be a silver bullet that will save our tires without destroying the environment.
The use of 6PPD is still permitted, but the EPA has recently issued new guidelines for monitoring its presence, and earlier this year, Washington state passed a bill regulating its use. More restrictions are coming, which Enso says it welcomes.
American-sized goals

Image: Enso
Enso hasn’t decided where to build its factory yet.

Enso is aiming for the production of 5 million tires from the new factory by 2027. Its location is still being finalized, but Enso cites Colorado, Nevada, Texas, or Georgia as likely locations. With the southeastern US becoming a hotbed for EV production and the so-called “Battery Belt” seeing huge investments from startups like Redwood Materials, that last option might be the safest bet.
A factory of that size will be a huge step up for Enso, which right now provides tires exclusively for fleet use in the UK, including the Royal Mail. Per The Guardian, a study from Transport for London, which regulates public transit in the city, shows Enso’s tires are living up to Erlendsson’s claims of increased efficiency, reduced wear, and reduced cost.
If Enso can deliver that on a larger scale to American drivers, it’ll fly in the face of typical corporate goals of selling more things to more people. Erlendsson sees this as a way to reset today’s tire economy.
“A proposition where you sell fewer tires is just not palatable to most listed companies in this industry,” he said. “It’s hard for someone with a legacy manufacturing and legacy supply chains and legacy distribution model to suddenly say, ‘I’m going to make fewer tires, and I’m going to spend more to make them,’ while not tanking your share price at the same time.”
Of course, upending a more than 150-year-old industry is no small feat, either.

Enso’s eco-friendly tire. | Image: Enso

Congratulations, world. We’ve done it. Since passing the Clean Air Act in the 1970s, we’ve reduced cancer-causing particulate emissions from our cars and other sources dramatically, a change that has added years to our lives.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that we can now spend more time focusing on the remaining sources, including some unexpected ones. In an EV era, tires are becoming the greatest emitters of particulate matter, and as we’ve seen, whether it’s the microplastics in our shrimp or the preservatives in our salmon, they’re having a disturbing impact on our environment.

Gunnlaugur Erlendsson wants to do something about that. The affable Icelander founded Enso to tackle what he saw as a developing need for better EV tires. The UK-based company’s next big step is coming close to home: a $500 million US tire factory specifically for building eco-friendly tires for EVs.

Well, eco-friendlier, anyway.

Founding Enso

Image: Enso
A rendering of Enso’s proposed factory.

Enso’s 2016 founding was “a bit ahead of the curve” when it comes to EV adoption, according to Erlendsson. “There was only a handful of any research reports done on tire pollution, and almost none of them were really on the subject of either microplastics or air pollution,” he said.

But the writing was on the road. Early industry movers, like the Tesla Model S, offered way more power than the internal combustion cars they competed against but also carried massive weight penalties. A Model S Plaid, for example, is about the same size as a Lexus ES but is about 1,000 pounds heavier and has more than three times the horsepower. More weight and more power means more tire wear, leading to expensive and frequent trips to the shop for fresh rubber.

While EV-specific tires are increasingly common, Erlendsson says most tire manufacturers are too focused on partnering with auto manufacturers, shipping new tires with new cars. “So even though technology exists to make tires much better today, it isn’t hitting the 90 percent of the tire industry, which is the aftermarket,” he said.

While Erlendsson said Enso is working to develop partnerships with those same vehicle manufacturers, the company’s US business model will focus on the 90 percent, creating tires in the correct fitments for popular EVs, regardless of brand, then selling them directly to customers.

More life, less pollution

Image: Enso
Enso wants to sell its tires directly to consumers.

What makes Enso’s tires different? Erlendsson was light on the technical details but promised 10 percent lower rolling resistance than regular tires, equating to a commensurate range increase. That’ll make your EV cheaper to run, while a 35 percent increase in tire life means lower wear, fewer particulates in the air, and fewer old tires sent to the incinerator, where half of all American tires go to die.

Enso’s new factory will also handle recycling. It will be truly carbon neutral, not reliant on carbon offsets, and manufacture tires out of recycled carbon black and tire silica made from rice husks.

But what about 6PPD, the troubling tire preservative that’s shown up in our fish and even our bodies? Enso is still using it, but its days are numbered.

“All tire companies in the world are using 6PPD in their current production tires,” Erlendsson said. “The technology to remove 6PPD exists,” he added, but he declined to discuss the topic further, claiming restrictions due to signed NDAs. Research bodies in both California and Washington state have provided early assessments of alternatives, but none look to be a silver bullet that will save our tires without destroying the environment.

The use of 6PPD is still permitted, but the EPA has recently issued new guidelines for monitoring its presence, and earlier this year, Washington state passed a bill regulating its use. More restrictions are coming, which Enso says it welcomes.

American-sized goals

Image: Enso
Enso hasn’t decided where to build its factory yet.

Enso is aiming for the production of 5 million tires from the new factory by 2027. Its location is still being finalized, but Enso cites Colorado, Nevada, Texas, or Georgia as likely locations. With the southeastern US becoming a hotbed for EV production and the so-called “Battery Belt” seeing huge investments from startups like Redwood Materials, that last option might be the safest bet.

A factory of that size will be a huge step up for Enso, which right now provides tires exclusively for fleet use in the UK, including the Royal Mail. Per The Guardian, a study from Transport for London, which regulates public transit in the city, shows Enso’s tires are living up to Erlendsson’s claims of increased efficiency, reduced wear, and reduced cost.

If Enso can deliver that on a larger scale to American drivers, it’ll fly in the face of typical corporate goals of selling more things to more people. Erlendsson sees this as a way to reset today’s tire economy.

“A proposition where you sell fewer tires is just not palatable to most listed companies in this industry,” he said. “It’s hard for someone with a legacy manufacturing and legacy supply chains and legacy distribution model to suddenly say, ‘I’m going to make fewer tires, and I’m going to spend more to make them,’ while not tanking your share price at the same time.”

Of course, upending a more than 150-year-old industry is no small feat, either.

Read More 

Dr Disrespect at a golf tournament in January 2024. | Photo by Orlando Ramirez/Getty Images

Twitch abruptly banned one of its biggest stars — Herschel “Guy” Beahm, better known by his persona Dr Disrespect — in 2020 without a word of explanation. Now, four years after Beahm’s permanent ban, two former Twitch employees have come forward to describe events they say contributed to his removal from the platform.
One former Twitch employee, who asked to remain anonymous citing the potential risk to their career, told The Verge that Beahm had used Whispers, Twitch’s now-defunct messaging system, to exchange messages with a minor and initiate a conversation about meeting up at TwitchCon. The employee worked on Twitch’s trust and safety team at the time of the ban in 2020.
Their comments corroborate a post from Cody Conners, a former Twitch employee who worked on the company’s strategic partnerships team. Late Friday, Conners posted on X, “He got banned because got caught sexting a minor in the then existing Twitch whispers product. He was trying to meet up with her at TwitchCon. The powers that be could read in plain text.”

He got banned because got caught sexting a minor in the then existing Twitch whispers product. He was trying to meet up with her at TwitchCon. The powers that be could read in plain text. Case closed, gang.— Cody Conners (@evoli) June 22, 2024

Though Conners did not explicitly name Beahm, it was understood the streamer was the subject of the post. Beahm’s ban came shortly after Twitch updated its sexual harassment policy to punish offenders with permanent suspensions.
Beahm denied Connors’ allegations. “This has been settled, no wrongdoing was acknowledged, and they paid out the whole contract,” he posted on X. Beahm published an additional post reiterating that no wrongdoing was found. “I didn’t do anything wrong, all this has been probed and settled, nothing illegal, no wrongdoing was found, and I was paid,” he wrote.

Moving on. pic.twitter.com/aA4KfHOSK2— Dr Disrespect (@DrDisrespect) March 10, 2022

The news of Beahm’s ban, which came down four years ago this week, was shocking. Beahm was one of Twitch’s most popular stars at the time, with around 4 million followers, and he had just signed a seven-figure, two-year exclusivity contract with the platform. Neither Twitch nor Beahm would say why the streamer had been banned. In an interview with The Washington Post shortly after the ban, Beahm said that Twitch wouldn’t even tell him the reason why his account had been removed.
The former employee who spoke with The Verge also shared more insight into the order of events that led to the ban. They said there was a significant amount of time between when the messages between Beahm and the alleged victim were sent and when the moderation report about those messages was filed, but they weren’t able to recall how much time. When Twitch received the report in 2020, they said that Twitch investigated the claims and ultimately banned Beahm’s channel.
A year after being banned, Beahm said he was suing Twitch for monetary damages and disclosed that he finally knew why the platform issued the ban. However, Beahm declined to say what that was. A year later, the dispute was resolved with Beahm saying, “I have resolved my legal dispute with Twitch. No party admits to any wrongdoing.”
Beahm and Twitch did not respond to The Verge’s requests for comment.

Dr Disrespect at a golf tournament in January 2024. | Photo by Orlando Ramirez/Getty Images

Twitch abruptly banned one of its biggest stars — Herschel “Guy” Beahm, better known by his persona Dr Disrespect — in 2020 without a word of explanation. Now, four years after Beahm’s permanent ban, two former Twitch employees have come forward to describe events they say contributed to his removal from the platform.

One former Twitch employee, who asked to remain anonymous citing the potential risk to their career, told The Verge that Beahm had used Whispers, Twitch’s now-defunct messaging system, to exchange messages with a minor and initiate a conversation about meeting up at TwitchCon. The employee worked on Twitch’s trust and safety team at the time of the ban in 2020.

Their comments corroborate a post from Cody Conners, a former Twitch employee who worked on the company’s strategic partnerships team. Late Friday, Conners posted on X, “He got banned because got caught sexting a minor in the then existing Twitch whispers product. He was trying to meet up with her at TwitchCon. The powers that be could read in plain text.”

Though Conners did not explicitly name Beahm, it was understood the streamer was the subject of the post. Beahm’s ban came shortly after Twitch updated its sexual harassment policy to punish offenders with permanent suspensions.

Beahm denied Connors’ allegations. “This has been settled, no wrongdoing was acknowledged, and they paid out the whole contract,” he posted on X. Beahm published an additional post reiterating that no wrongdoing was found. “I didn’t do anything wrong, all this has been probed and settled, nothing illegal, no wrongdoing was found, and I was paid,” he wrote.

The news of Beahm’s ban, which came down four years ago this week, was shocking. Beahm was one of Twitch’s most popular stars at the time, with around 4 million followers, and he had just signed a seven-figure, two-year exclusivity contract with the platform. Neither Twitch nor Beahm would say why the streamer had been banned. In an interview with The Washington Post shortly after the ban, Beahm said that Twitch wouldn’t even tell him the reason why his account had been removed.

The former employee who spoke with The Verge also shared more insight into the order of events that led to the ban. They said there was a significant amount of time between when the messages between Beahm and the alleged victim were sent and when the moderation report about those messages was filed, but they weren’t able to recall how much time. When Twitch received the report in 2020, they said that Twitch investigated the claims and ultimately banned Beahm’s channel.

A year after being banned, Beahm said he was suing Twitch for monetary damages and disclosed that he finally knew why the platform issued the ban. However, Beahm declined to say what that was. A year later, the dispute was resolved with Beahm saying, “I have resolved my legal dispute with Twitch. No party admits to any wrongdoing.”

Beahm and Twitch did not respond to The Verge’s requests for comment.

Read More 

If you weren’t able to catch the season two premiere of House of Dragon last weekend, now is your chance. | Image: Ollie Upton / HBO

There’s no denying that streaming services just keep getting more expensive, with Peacock and Max being the latest streamers to raise prices across their ad-free plans. We’re also seeing a number of services — including Max — dropping support for free trials, ensuring no one other than paying subscribers can access their trove of content. Fortunately, if you haven’t previously subscribed to Max, you can sign up for a rare weeklong trial through the end of today, June 23rd.

Admittedly, a week isn’t enough time to burn through Max’s extensive back catalog of original programming, which includes newer shows like Hacks, the animated sci-fi epic Scavenger’s Reign, True Detective: Night Country, and last year’s excellent adaptation of The Last of Us. It is enough time to revisit Dune: Part Two and your favorite Studio Ghibli film, though, as well as the first couple of episodes of the new season of House of the Dragon.
Max’s current seven-day trial extends to all three subscription tiers, all of which are set to auto-renew at the end of the trial period if you don’t cancel your subscription beforehand. The annual ad-supported plan starts at $9.99 a month or $99 a year, while the ad-free plans — both of which allow for offline downloads — start at $16.99 a month or $169.99 annually. Max doesn’t typically offer free trials, so if you’re unsure as to which plan is right for you, now is a good opportunity to find out.

More deals, discounts, and ways to save

Speaking of limited-time offers, you can still snag UE’s adorable Wonderboom 3 directly from Ultimate Ears in select colors for $54.99 ($45 off) — an all-time low — when you clip the on-page coupon. I’ve long been a fan of the third-gen Bluetooth speaker, which continues to offer tremendous sound for its size, ample battery life, and a waterproof design that allows it to float. Need more convincing? David Pierce, The Verge’s Editor-at-Large, recently gave it a nod in his excellent newsletter, Installer.

Although I was hoping REI’s ongoing Fourth of July sale would bring discounts on the inReach Mini 2 and other Garmin devices, I’ll settle for the current promo on the Yeti Tundra 45, which drops the hard cooler to $240 ($60 off) if you’re an REI member. You’re still paying a premium for the Yeti name, but, as an owner of this exact model, I can attest to the 32.9-liter cooler’s heavy-duty rotomolded construction and its ability to keep drinks cool in even the hottest conditions. The included five-year warranty is just a plus.

Anker’s 522 Portable Power Station is still on sale at Best Buy for a cool $199 ($70 off), nearly matching its best price to date. The boxy 299Wh power station has been my go-to charger for camping over the past year or so, as it offers a car outlet, a USB-A port, two AC ports, and a pair of USB-C ports for charging up to six devices. It also features an integrated LED light bar and display, one that allows you to quickly see the input / output power, remaining battery capacity, and other useful tidbits of information.

If you weren’t able to catch the season two premiere of House of Dragon last weekend, now is your chance. | Image: Ollie Upton / HBO

There’s no denying that streaming services just keep getting more expensive, with Peacock and Max being the latest streamers to raise prices across their ad-free plans. We’re also seeing a number of services — including Max — dropping support for free trials, ensuring no one other than paying subscribers can access their trove of content. Fortunately, if you haven’t previously subscribed to Max, you can sign up for a rare weeklong trial through the end of today, June 23rd.

Admittedly, a week isn’t enough time to burn through Max’s extensive back catalog of original programming, which includes newer shows like Hacks, the animated sci-fi epic Scavenger’s Reign, True Detective: Night Country, and last year’s excellent adaptation of The Last of Us. It is enough time to revisit Dune: Part Two and your favorite Studio Ghibli film, though, as well as the first couple of episodes of the new season of House of the Dragon.

Max’s current seven-day trial extends to all three subscription tiers, all of which are set to auto-renew at the end of the trial period if you don’t cancel your subscription beforehand. The annual ad-supported plan starts at $9.99 a month or $99 a year, while the ad-free plans — both of which allow for offline downloads — start at $16.99 a month or $169.99 annually. Max doesn’t typically offer free trials, so if you’re unsure as to which plan is right for you, now is a good opportunity to find out.

More deals, discounts, and ways to save

Speaking of limited-time offers, you can still snag UE’s adorable Wonderboom 3 directly from Ultimate Ears in select colors for $54.99 ($45 off) — an all-time low — when you clip the on-page coupon. I’ve long been a fan of the third-gen Bluetooth speaker, which continues to offer tremendous sound for its size, ample battery life, and a waterproof design that allows it to float. Need more convincing? David Pierce, The Verge’s Editor-at-Large, recently gave it a nod in his excellent newsletter, Installer.

Although I was hoping REI’s ongoing Fourth of July sale would bring discounts on the inReach Mini 2 and other Garmin devices, I’ll settle for the current promo on the Yeti Tundra 45, which drops the hard cooler to $240 ($60 off) if you’re an REI member. You’re still paying a premium for the Yeti name, but, as an owner of this exact model, I can attest to the 32.9-liter cooler’s heavy-duty rotomolded construction and its ability to keep drinks cool in even the hottest conditions. The included five-year warranty is just a plus.

Anker’s 522 Portable Power Station is still on sale at Best Buy for a cool $199 ($70 off), nearly matching its best price to date. The boxy 299Wh power station has been my go-to charger for camping over the past year or so, as it offers a car outlet, a USB-A port, two AC ports, and a pair of USB-C ports for charging up to six devices. It also features an integrated LED light bar and display, one that allows you to quickly see the input / output power, remaining battery capacity, and other useful tidbits of information.

Read More 

For the past two weeks, I’ve been editing in the newest version of Final Cut Pro for the iPad. For many professionals, the original release of this app last year missed the mark. Its tools have just been too limited to use on a daily basis. The new version doesn’t necessarily change that — but despite my many frustrations, I’m finally discovering the joy of using it.
The new version of the app, confusingly named “Final Cut Pro for iPad 2” (it is for all current iPads, not the iPad 2), came out this week. And perhaps the biggest new feature in this year’s release isn’t entirely a Final Cut Pro feature: it’s a brand-new app that integrates with it.
The new Final Cut Camera is a standalone app for your iPhone that offers advanced camera controls. If you’ve seen the Blackmagic app or the recently released Kino app, you’ll know what to expect: peaking, manual focusing, and audio metering. You just won’t be able to add custom LUTs like you can in the other two.
The Final Cut Camera app can be used in unison with Final Cut Pro on the iPad to record Live Multicam sessions with footage streaming in from up to four iPhones or iPads. In Final Cut on the iPad, you assume the role of director. You can monitor footage coming from iPhones, zoom in, and change the white balance, focus mode, and more on the fly. I can see this new feature being particularly popular for video podcasts.

Final Cut Camera is telling me all that red stuff is way too overexposed and I should adjust my backgrounds.

The previews you’re seeing are compressed, but they still look great. Once you stop the recording session, the full-quality files get transferred over to the iPad running Final Cut Pro and rendered. The whole process is a lot faster than I anticipated. My 10-minute session with three iPhones was available for editing minutes later. A new transfer indicator window on the top of the UI shows you the progress.
There’s one upgrade I’d love to see for this feature in the future: live editing. Currently, you’ll still need to end the recording first before syncing up all files and jumping into the edit.
Multicam support is a great new feature, but it contrasts with how little else Apple has done to improve the Final Cut Pro for iPad experience. The standout feature in this year’s update is external hard drive support. That’s important — this feature was oddly absent last year. But its addition instantly reminded me of how poorly Final Cut Pro for iPad (and iPadOS) handles file management.
All of your media files have to live within the FCP Library files, and that same library file has to be stored on either the internal or external drive. That means you can’t split your media across multiple drives or cloud storage. One side effect of this method is that it means you’re just constantly duplicating files from one place to another.

The M4 iPad Pro comes with support for Thunderbolt 3 and USB 4 connectivity.

And there are other issues that haven’t changed from last year. For example, you still can’t import complete folders into Final Cut Pro, just individual files. And once they’re imported, you still can’t organize the files into separate folders or bins like “A-roll,” “B-roll,” “Music,” or “Graphics.”
Another new feature that’s unique to the iPad version of Final Cut Pro is Live Drawings. Using an Apple Pencil, you can draw animations directly onto your clips. Apple’s latest Pencil Pro tricks are supported here, but aside from that, there’s not much to do with the Pencil Pro itself. I wish there was a way to program the haptic squeeze to do something more on the editing front — maybe selecting multiple clips while hovering, or just make it a right-click. I feel like that would be useful and would speed up working with a pencil.
There are still a lot of serious video editing features that I’m waiting on Apple to add: compound clips, folders, adjustment layers, post stabilization, coloring tools like curves, project sharing between machines, the ability to add new LUTs, 360 video support, object tracking, linear keyframes — the list goes on and on. If you read my review from last year, you’ll find the exact same list there.
All of those missing things really catch you off guard when you are in the flow. Ultimately, I found myself making creative decisions based on bad software limitations.
Meanwhile, the market for mobile video editing apps is more competitive than ever. CapCut has been extremely popular among TikTokers. “Why I’m switching to DaVinci” videos are all over my YouTube feed. And folks still stan the OG iPad app Lumafusion. In fact, three of the features I desperately need are already on the DaVinci’s iPad app.

The M4 iPad Pro running Final Cut Pro for iPad 2.

But even after trying all of the other apps I just listed and even with all my frustration with the missing features, I keep coming back to Final Cut on the iPad. Because there is one thing Apple is doing right here, and that’s the overall experience.
Apple calls this a “touch-first” app, and I finally understand what that means. Once you’re past the learning curve and once you get a hang of the controls and once you’re aware of its limitations, you start to actually enjoy it and have fun. Apple isn’t trying to replicate the Final Cut desktop experience — it’s building toward a new one. And you can see in the way you interact with the jog wheel and the way that the sidebar comes in so you can edit with your left hand.
I found that using the Final Cut Pro with my hands is by far the most immersive way to edit. It’s all right there at your fingertips, literally. There is something about this more tangible approach that I’m starting to find charming, even if it’s not as efficient as a mouse and keyboard.
If Apple can check off those easy wins, then its vision of a capable and touch-first Final Cut Pro could really thrive.
Photography by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

For the past two weeks, I’ve been editing in the newest version of Final Cut Pro for the iPad. For many professionals, the original release of this app last year missed the mark. Its tools have just been too limited to use on a daily basis. The new version doesn’t necessarily change that — but despite my many frustrations, I’m finally discovering the joy of using it.

The new version of the app, confusingly named “Final Cut Pro for iPad 2” (it is for all current iPads, not the iPad 2), came out this week. And perhaps the biggest new feature in this year’s release isn’t entirely a Final Cut Pro feature: it’s a brand-new app that integrates with it.

The new Final Cut Camera is a standalone app for your iPhone that offers advanced camera controls. If you’ve seen the Blackmagic app or the recently released Kino app, you’ll know what to expect: peaking, manual focusing, and audio metering. You just won’t be able to add custom LUTs like you can in the other two.

The Final Cut Camera app can be used in unison with Final Cut Pro on the iPad to record Live Multicam sessions with footage streaming in from up to four iPhones or iPads. In Final Cut on the iPad, you assume the role of director. You can monitor footage coming from iPhones, zoom in, and change the white balance, focus mode, and more on the fly. I can see this new feature being particularly popular for video podcasts.

The previews you’re seeing are compressed, but they still look great. Once you stop the recording session, the full-quality files get transferred over to the iPad running Final Cut Pro and rendered. The whole process is a lot faster than I anticipated. My 10-minute session with three iPhones was available for editing minutes later. A new transfer indicator window on the top of the UI shows you the progress.

There’s one upgrade I’d love to see for this feature in the future: live editing. Currently, you’ll still need to end the recording first before syncing up all files and jumping into the edit.

Multicam support is a great new feature, but it contrasts with how little else Apple has done to improve the Final Cut Pro for iPad experience. The standout feature in this year’s update is external hard drive support. That’s important — this feature was oddly absent last year. But its addition instantly reminded me of how poorly Final Cut Pro for iPad (and iPadOS) handles file management.

All of your media files have to live within the FCP Library files, and that same library file has to be stored on either the internal or external drive. That means you can’t split your media across multiple drives or cloud storage. One side effect of this method is that it means you’re just constantly duplicating files from one place to another.

And there are other issues that haven’t changed from last year. For example, you still can’t import complete folders into Final Cut Pro, just individual files. And once they’re imported, you still can’t organize the files into separate folders or bins like “A-roll,” “B-roll,” “Music,” or “Graphics.”

Another new feature that’s unique to the iPad version of Final Cut Pro is Live Drawings. Using an Apple Pencil, you can draw animations directly onto your clips. Apple’s latest Pencil Pro tricks are supported here, but aside from that, there’s not much to do with the Pencil Pro itself. I wish there was a way to program the haptic squeeze to do something more on the editing front — maybe selecting multiple clips while hovering, or just make it a right-click. I feel like that would be useful and would speed up working with a pencil.

There are still a lot of serious video editing features that I’m waiting on Apple to add: compound clips, folders, adjustment layers, post stabilization, coloring tools like curves, project sharing between machines, the ability to add new LUTs, 360 video support, object tracking, linear keyframes — the list goes on and on. If you read my review from last year, you’ll find the exact same list there.

All of those missing things really catch you off guard when you are in the flow. Ultimately, I found myself making creative decisions based on bad software limitations.

Meanwhile, the market for mobile video editing apps is more competitive than ever. CapCut has been extremely popular among TikTokers. “Why I’m switching to DaVinci” videos are all over my YouTube feed. And folks still stan the OG iPad app Lumafusion. In fact, three of the features I desperately need are already on the DaVinci’s iPad app.

The M4 iPad Pro running Final Cut Pro for iPad 2.

But even after trying all of the other apps I just listed and even with all my frustration with the missing features, I keep coming back to Final Cut on the iPad. Because there is one thing Apple is doing right here, and that’s the overall experience.

Apple calls this a “touch-first” app, and I finally understand what that means. Once you’re past the learning curve and once you get a hang of the controls and once you’re aware of its limitations, you start to actually enjoy it and have fun. Apple isn’t trying to replicate the Final Cut desktop experience — it’s building toward a new one. And you can see in the way you interact with the jog wheel and the way that the sidebar comes in so you can edit with your left hand.

I found that using the Final Cut Pro with my hands is by far the most immersive way to edit. It’s all right there at your fingertips, literally. There is something about this more tangible approach that I’m starting to find charming, even if it’s not as efficient as a mouse and keyboard.

If Apple can check off those easy wins, then its vision of a capable and touch-first Final Cut Pro could really thrive.

Photography by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Read More 

Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

For months, I’ve been thinking about selling my PlayStation VR2. After a damning scoop, I’m finally ready to let it go.
Months ago, I stashed the PSVR 2 away in a closet. I hadn’t played it for a very long time, but I hoped Sony might release new games that would make me want to bring it back out. Based on Android Central’s reporting, I should let those hopes go: apparently, Sony has cut funding for VR games and has just two more PSVR 2 titles in the works. Two!
The future of the headset has been grim for a while. Earlier this year, Sony laid off developers at Firesprite, the studio that made Horizon Call of the Mountain. It closed its London Studio, which made PlayStation VR Worlds, a game that came bundled with the original PSVR. Since its February 2023 launch, Sony’s barely featured any PSVR 2 games in its announcement showcases, and none of those games have been major first-party PSVR 2 titles. Sony isn’t even making a PSVR 2 mode for Astro Bot despite how much people loved Astro Bot Rescue Mission on the PSVR.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
My colleague Adi Robertson using the PSVR 2.

Before it launched, I was genuinely excited for the PSVR 2. I eagerly anticipated new games like Horizon and new VR modes for titles like Gran Turismo 7 and the Resident Evil 4 remake. The price tag stung — I preordered the $599 bundle with Horizon — but I figured I’d get my money’s worth by finally tackling some VR classics like Pistol Whip alongside new PSVR 2 titles. (I knew the PSVR 2 couldn’t play PSVR games, but I didn’t mind.)
I was also excited to finally own and dedicate some time to a VR headset. I had messed around with some VR headsets before — I still remember being blown away by an Oculus Rift demo at a PAX conference — but I really thought the PSVR 2 was going to be particularly awesome. The Verge nerd in me was impressed by the tech: I was champing at the bit to bask in 4K games on the PSVR 2’s dual OLED displays and see how developers might use eye tracking to create new ways to play.
Let’s just say I didn’t get my money’s worth. I did dabble: What The Bat? was delightfully silly, filled with VR mayhem. Runner made me feel like an action hero in an old-school anime. Gran Turismo 7 almost made me a PSVR 2 believer. No Man’s Sky was an immersive but overwhelming trip to space. And Before Your Eyes made me cry in my headset.

But my playtime was mostly just dabbling. Nothing was compelling enough for me to keep coming back to over the long term. The only game I beat was Before Your Eyes, and that’s because it only took about an hour and a half. After reading The Verge’s middling review of Horizon Call of the Mountain, it went to the back of my backlog, and I never got around to it. Resident Evil 4 on PSVR 2 made me sick to my stomach. Looking back at my play history, I only put in about 20 hours into PSVR 2 games.
Getting everything set up to play was a chore, too. The PSVR 2 has to be plugged in to your PS5 to work. That meant that every time I wanted to play, I had to fish out the PSVR 2 from its box, plug it in, and — because the PSVR 2 also doesn’t have hand tracking — cross my fingers that the Sense controllers were charged up so that I could actually play something.
Plus, I didn’t like how the PSVR 2 isolated me in my own house. Since I could only play while tethered to the PS5, I didn’t have the option to go to another room — unlike with Meta’s Quest headsets, which I can use wherever I want in the house. Since my partner and I live in a small condo, we’re usually both sharing the living room when one of us is using the entertainment center. Yes, if I was using the PSVR 2, she could see my game on our TV. But not being able to make easy eye contact when she’s right next to me made me feel like I was shutting her out.
My PSVR 2 is collecting dust
So, my PSVR 2 is collecting dust, and I don’t see any reason to break it out again. (I know Sony is launching an adapter to hook up the PSVR 2 to a PC, but I don’t have a beefy gaming PC, so that’s not important to me.)
I should have known better when I preordered the headset. Sony has a habit of stepping on its own feet when building platforms that aren’t its primary console. Sony’s support for the first PSVR was pretty half-hearted, after all. The PlayStation Vita was beloved in spite of Sony’s first-party support, not because of it. The company took forever to put some flagship games on its PlayStation Now cloud service. It insists on forcing PC players to use PSN accounts for single-player games even after dropping that planned requirement for Helldivers 2 following backlash — the better to funnel you toward a future console purchase.
I think I’ll be taking the PSVR 2 out of the closet sometime soon. But I’ll only be moving it so I can sell it to someone else.

Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

For months, I’ve been thinking about selling my PlayStation VR2. After a damning scoop, I’m finally ready to let it go.

Months ago, I stashed the PSVR 2 away in a closet. I hadn’t played it for a very long time, but I hoped Sony might release new games that would make me want to bring it back out. Based on Android Central’s reporting, I should let those hopes go: apparently, Sony has cut funding for VR games and has just two more PSVR 2 titles in the works. Two!

The future of the headset has been grim for a while. Earlier this year, Sony laid off developers at Firesprite, the studio that made Horizon Call of the Mountain. It closed its London Studio, which made PlayStation VR Worlds, a game that came bundled with the original PSVR. Since its February 2023 launch, Sony’s barely featured any PSVR 2 games in its announcement showcases, and none of those games have been major first-party PSVR 2 titles. Sony isn’t even making a PSVR 2 mode for Astro Bot despite how much people loved Astro Bot Rescue Mission on the PSVR.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
My colleague Adi Robertson using the PSVR 2.

Before it launched, I was genuinely excited for the PSVR 2. I eagerly anticipated new games like Horizon and new VR modes for titles like Gran Turismo 7 and the Resident Evil 4 remake. The price tag stung — I preordered the $599 bundle with Horizon — but I figured I’d get my money’s worth by finally tackling some VR classics like Pistol Whip alongside new PSVR 2 titles. (I knew the PSVR 2 couldn’t play PSVR games, but I didn’t mind.)

I was also excited to finally own and dedicate some time to a VR headset. I had messed around with some VR headsets before — I still remember being blown away by an Oculus Rift demo at a PAX conference — but I really thought the PSVR 2 was going to be particularly awesome. The Verge nerd in me was impressed by the tech: I was champing at the bit to bask in 4K games on the PSVR 2’s dual OLED displays and see how developers might use eye tracking to create new ways to play.

Let’s just say I didn’t get my money’s worth. I did dabble: What The Bat? was delightfully silly, filled with VR mayhem. Runner made me feel like an action hero in an old-school anime. Gran Turismo 7 almost made me a PSVR 2 believer. No Man’s Sky was an immersive but overwhelming trip to space. And Before Your Eyes made me cry in my headset.

But my playtime was mostly just dabbling. Nothing was compelling enough for me to keep coming back to over the long term. The only game I beat was Before Your Eyes, and that’s because it only took about an hour and a half. After reading The Verge’s middling review of Horizon Call of the Mountain, it went to the back of my backlog, and I never got around to it. Resident Evil 4 on PSVR 2 made me sick to my stomach. Looking back at my play history, I only put in about 20 hours into PSVR 2 games.

Getting everything set up to play was a chore, too. The PSVR 2 has to be plugged in to your PS5 to work. That meant that every time I wanted to play, I had to fish out the PSVR 2 from its box, plug it in, and — because the PSVR 2 also doesn’t have hand tracking — cross my fingers that the Sense controllers were charged up so that I could actually play something.

Plus, I didn’t like how the PSVR 2 isolated me in my own house. Since I could only play while tethered to the PS5, I didn’t have the option to go to another room — unlike with Meta’s Quest headsets, which I can use wherever I want in the house. Since my partner and I live in a small condo, we’re usually both sharing the living room when one of us is using the entertainment center. Yes, if I was using the PSVR 2, she could see my game on our TV. But not being able to make easy eye contact when she’s right next to me made me feel like I was shutting her out.

So, my PSVR 2 is collecting dust, and I don’t see any reason to break it out again. (I know Sony is launching an adapter to hook up the PSVR 2 to a PC, but I don’t have a beefy gaming PC, so that’s not important to me.)

I should have known better when I preordered the headset. Sony has a habit of stepping on its own feet when building platforms that aren’t its primary console. Sony’s support for the first PSVR was pretty half-hearted, after all. The PlayStation Vita was beloved in spite of Sony’s first-party support, not because of it. The company took forever to put some flagship games on its PlayStation Now cloud service. It insists on forcing PC players to use PSN accounts for single-player games even after dropping that planned requirement for Helldivers 2 following backlash — the better to funnel you toward a future console purchase.

I think I’ll be taking the PSVR 2 out of the closet sometime soon. But I’ll only be moving it so I can sell it to someone else.

Read More 

Image: The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 43, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about memexes and telepathy and John Lennon’s wristwatch, watching Presumed Innocent and Ren Faire, testing Genspark for AI search stuff, redoing my homescreen with Dumbify, and experimenting with overnight oats in an attempt to make mornings less chaotic. (Turns out, peanut butter makes pretty much everything 20 percent better.)
I also have for you a new tech podcast, a couple of handy new gadgets, a new calendar app, the game that will take over your weekend, and much more. Let’s get into it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What great apps / books / podcasts / shows / games / recipes / whatever else have you discovered and loved recently? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

The Asus VivoBook S 15. Copilot Plus PCs cometh. It’s been a weird rollout, what with all the Recall complications, but we’re starting to get a sense of just what this new era of Qualcomm-powered Windows devices can do. So far, I’m pretty optimistic, but I’m still waiting to see how the new Surfaces pan out.

Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree. The overall vibe of this huge new DLC is basically “it’s Elden Ring, only somehow even more so.” Given how deep and big this game already was, and how many hours we’ve all spent in it already, that’s pretty much all you can ask for.

Pissing out Cancer. If all the Dropout Presents stand-up specials are as much fun as this one from Hank Green, we’re about to have a heck of a run of new comedy. Green here is funny and goofy as ever and extremely Hank Green-y. It’s an hour you won’t regret.

The Xreal Beam Pro. Such a fun and different idea about how smart glasses should work: instead of trying to bake everything into the glasses themselves, Xreal is pulling all the smarts and software into a separate fairly cheap smartphone-style device. I’m excited to test this one out.

Backfired: The Vaping Wars. The Juul story might forever be one of the strangest things to ever happen in Silicon Valley. This podcast goes deep on that story, along with the confusing societal debate about vaping, the government’s scramble to keep up, and where things go from here.

Arc for iPad. Still my favorite browser, finally available on almost all my devices. (Android when, Arc people!?!) The app isn’t exactly iPad-optimized — it’s missing some keyboard shortcuts and is really just a blown-up version of the iPhone app — but it syncs and works well and I will absolutely take it.

Amie for Windows. Big week for cross-platform apps! Amie is one of my favorite calendar / to-do apps and has gotten a lot more polished over the last few months. If you’re the all-in-one productivity type and appreciate some delightful design, give this one a whirl.

The Logitech Keys-to-Go 2. I’ve had the original Keys-To-Go in my bag for a few years as a super light and handy way to get some stuff done with my phone or iPad. This looks like a huge upgrade: still light, still small, but with a more proper set of keys. $80 is a lot, but I suspect I’ll end up buying one.

A Sense of Rebellion. An amazingly well-produced and deeply reported podcast on some decades-old ideas about AI and how we might use and live with technology. The story here, about hippies and capitalists and the government and big business, is kind of the story of technology all wrapped up in 10 episodes. Loving this so far.

Clipbud. Clipboard history is helpful and good, but having a place with all the text you type a lot – your shipping address, stock email responses, important links, all of that — is a life-changer. The built-in text replacement and personal dictionary features (on iOS and Android, respectively) do a lot of that, and apps like Snippety are mega-powerful, but this new one is pretty delightful to use.

Screen share
I think Nick Quah has introduced me to more great podcasts than any other person on earth. Whether in the early days of Hot Pod or in his 1.5x Speed newsletter over at Vulture (The Verge’s sister site here at Vox Media), he seems to have listened to all the shows all the time. Just this week, actually, he wrote a fun story about how chat podcasts have taken over and named some of the biggest names in New Radio.
I asked Nick to share his homescreen because a) I was curious what podcast app he used and b) I was hoping he might recommend a new show or two. I got my wish on both counts! Here’s Nick’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: Recently upgraded from my trusty ol’ iPhone 12 to an iPhone 15. Seems to be doing fine so far; I’m no longer stressed about losing juice on long flights.
The wallpaper: My sweet, sweet baby boy Siobhan (aka Shooby).
The apps: Calendar, Photos, Clock, Weather, Google Maps, To Do, Google Calendar, Gmail, Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, Steam, Delta, Strava, Discord, Slack, Stocks, LastPass, Messages, Phone, Firefox, Pocket Casts.
Yeah, well, as you can see, I’m pretty vanilla for the most part. All the immediately accessible apps are stuff I hit up with some frequency on any given day. Google Maps for navigation (and snooping). To Do to get my brain in order. TikTok and Instagram for something to do in the bathroom. I’ve been gaming a lot more these days, so I’m constantly trawling Steam for deals. Strava, ‘cuz I’ve somehow become a big runner. I’ve also been hitting up Delta quite a bit, working through a backlog of old JRPGs. And of course, Pocket Casts, which is my go-to for podcast listening.
I also asked Nick to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:

I’m a big rewatcher / replayer of things, and for whatever reason, the summertime is usually when I pick up my annual revisits. Right now, I’m working my way through Halt and Catch Fire for the sixth time. Gosh, that show is so lovely. It’s the 10-year anniversary, you know?
Like the rest of the universe at this point in time, seemingly, I’m digging Chappell Roan. “Red Wine Supernova,” very good.
Slowly making my way through Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love, David Talbot’s 2013 history of San Francisco. I’m finding it quite remarkable.
Catching up on episodes of My Perfect Console, Simon Parkin’s great “Desert Island Discs, but for Video Games” interview show that’s really doubling as a fun historical record for the medium.

Crowdsourced
Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more recommendations than fit here, check out the replies to this post on Threads.
“This little camera. I’ve been going over ways in my mind to justify it because it’s so cute but also the photos are surprisingly decent.” – Daulton
“Check out Ditto. It is a Nostr server that exposes Mastodon API to its clients. So the promise is that you would be able to use your very nice Mastodon app (Ivory, Ice Cubes) and add Nostr connection right into it. It would be like an additional server in the same app where your main Mastodon account is.” – Adnan
“I’ve been slowly getting back into following Pokemón trading cards and have been hooked watching TheBulbaStore on YouTube. It’s super interesting seeing a vendor’s point of view and the prices some cards go for now!” – Peter
“The Hawthorne & Horowitz mysteries by Anthony Horowitz. He recently released the fifth in the series, Close to Death. They all have tortured puns as titles (in this case, “close” being a British word for enclosed area). On top of that, the books are metafiction in which Horowitz himself is the main character, talking about how he is writing the series of murder mysteries that you are reading. Yet, they are some of the best contemporary murder mysteries I’ve read and do a wonderful job paying homage to Agatha Christie, all while playing with the genre.” – Kendrick
“I’m playing and watching chess! Chess is cool now! Lots of great ways to play, but Chess.com is probably the best for beginners. And there’s great YouTube content out there on chess from Eric Rosen, Irina Krush, Levy Rozman, and Hikaru Nakamura. Getting good so I can teach my three-year-old niece to be a master someday.” – Ryan
“I am really enjoying “Jet Lag: The Game” on YouTube. Imagine The Amazing Race, but actually good and not scripted. The hosts are likable and the game has some decent complexity behind it. They are about to wrap up their Australia season, and it has been a nail-biter.” – Dev
“I’m currently reading Hell Divers II: Ghosts by Nicholas Sansbury Smith. Postapocalyptic sci-fi about halo jumpers who dive into radioactive wastelands to scavenge supplies from mutant monsters, and yes, it is as good as it sounds.” – Jesse
“I’ve been obsessed with my new Klydoclock, a digital take on the classic analog clock. It features changing, artist-curated faces and can even tick and chime on the hour if you want it to. Best of all: it has no other functions and isn’t attached to an app or your phone. Minimalism and elegance at its finest.” – Jonathan
“I really believe that a home server or NAS is useful and easily accessible for more people than currently have one. More people should have their own Plex server, Pi-hole, self-hosted cloud storage, Minecraft server, or self-hosted VPN. An old PC is all you need if you want to keep it simple. And if you don’t mind learning how to work with Linux, you could even use an old Android phone or cheap Raspberry Pi clone.” – Voltaire

Signing off
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I absolutely cannot get enough of watching / listening to / reading about how people who are great at their thing do their thing. (The musician Kygo has a series of making-of videos that is always the first example I think of in this genre.) One of my favorite recent ones is this video, with Zane Lowe interviewing Finneas and Billie Eilish about the making of Eilish’s latest album. They talk about process, fear, microphones, editing, and so much more. I will almost certainly never make an album, or shoot a movie, or make it in the NBA, but listening to people talk about how they do it never gets old.
See you next week!

Image: The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 43, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been reading about memexes and telepathy and John Lennon’s wristwatch, watching Presumed Innocent and Ren Faire, testing Genspark for AI search stuff, redoing my homescreen with Dumbify, and experimenting with overnight oats in an attempt to make mornings less chaotic. (Turns out, peanut butter makes pretty much everything 20 percent better.)

I also have for you a new tech podcast, a couple of handy new gadgets, a new calendar app, the game that will take over your weekend, and much more. Let’s get into it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What great apps / books / podcasts / shows / games / recipes / whatever else have you discovered and loved recently? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

The Asus VivoBook S 15. Copilot Plus PCs cometh. It’s been a weird rollout, what with all the Recall complications, but we’re starting to get a sense of just what this new era of Qualcomm-powered Windows devices can do. So far, I’m pretty optimistic, but I’m still waiting to see how the new Surfaces pan out.

Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree. The overall vibe of this huge new DLC is basically “it’s Elden Ring, only somehow even more so.” Given how deep and big this game already was, and how many hours we’ve all spent in it already, that’s pretty much all you can ask for.

Pissing out Cancer. If all the Dropout Presents stand-up specials are as much fun as this one from Hank Green, we’re about to have a heck of a run of new comedy. Green here is funny and goofy as ever and extremely Hank Green-y. It’s an hour you won’t regret.

The Xreal Beam Pro. Such a fun and different idea about how smart glasses should work: instead of trying to bake everything into the glasses themselves, Xreal is pulling all the smarts and software into a separate fairly cheap smartphone-style device. I’m excited to test this one out.

Backfired: The Vaping Wars. The Juul story might forever be one of the strangest things to ever happen in Silicon Valley. This podcast goes deep on that story, along with the confusing societal debate about vaping, the government’s scramble to keep up, and where things go from here.

Arc for iPad. Still my favorite browser, finally available on almost all my devices. (Android when, Arc people!?!) The app isn’t exactly iPad-optimized — it’s missing some keyboard shortcuts and is really just a blown-up version of the iPhone app — but it syncs and works well and I will absolutely take it.

Amie for Windows. Big week for cross-platform apps! Amie is one of my favorite calendar / to-do apps and has gotten a lot more polished over the last few months. If you’re the all-in-one productivity type and appreciate some delightful design, give this one a whirl.

The Logitech Keys-to-Go 2. I’ve had the original Keys-To-Go in my bag for a few years as a super light and handy way to get some stuff done with my phone or iPad. This looks like a huge upgrade: still light, still small, but with a more proper set of keys. $80 is a lot, but I suspect I’ll end up buying one.

A Sense of Rebellion. An amazingly well-produced and deeply reported podcast on some decades-old ideas about AI and how we might use and live with technology. The story here, about hippies and capitalists and the government and big business, is kind of the story of technology all wrapped up in 10 episodes. Loving this so far.

Clipbud. Clipboard history is helpful and good, but having a place with all the text you type a lot – your shipping address, stock email responses, important links, all of that — is a life-changer. The built-in text replacement and personal dictionary features (on iOS and Android, respectively) do a lot of that, and apps like Snippety are mega-powerful, but this new one is pretty delightful to use.

Screen share

I think Nick Quah has introduced me to more great podcasts than any other person on earth. Whether in the early days of Hot Pod or in his 1.5x Speed newsletter over at Vulture (The Verge’s sister site here at Vox Media), he seems to have listened to all the shows all the time. Just this week, actually, he wrote a fun story about how chat podcasts have taken over and named some of the biggest names in New Radio.

I asked Nick to share his homescreen because a) I was curious what podcast app he used and b) I was hoping he might recommend a new show or two. I got my wish on both counts! Here’s Nick’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: Recently upgraded from my trusty ol’ iPhone 12 to an iPhone 15. Seems to be doing fine so far; I’m no longer stressed about losing juice on long flights.

The wallpaper: My sweet, sweet baby boy Siobhan (aka Shooby).

The apps: Calendar, Photos, Clock, Weather, Google Maps, To Do, Google Calendar, Gmail, Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, Steam, Delta, Strava, Discord, Slack, Stocks, LastPass, Messages, Phone, Firefox, Pocket Casts.

Yeah, well, as you can see, I’m pretty vanilla for the most part. All the immediately accessible apps are stuff I hit up with some frequency on any given day. Google Maps for navigation (and snooping). To Do to get my brain in order. TikTok and Instagram for something to do in the bathroom. I’ve been gaming a lot more these days, so I’m constantly trawling Steam for deals. Strava, ‘cuz I’ve somehow become a big runner. I’ve also been hitting up Delta quite a bit, working through a backlog of old JRPGs. And of course, Pocket Casts, which is my go-to for podcast listening.

I also asked Nick to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:

I’m a big rewatcher / replayer of things, and for whatever reason, the summertime is usually when I pick up my annual revisits. Right now, I’m working my way through Halt and Catch Fire for the sixth time. Gosh, that show is so lovely. It’s the 10-year anniversary, you know?
Like the rest of the universe at this point in time, seemingly, I’m digging Chappell Roan. “Red Wine Supernova,” very good.
Slowly making my way through Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love, David Talbot’s 2013 history of San Francisco. I’m finding it quite remarkable.
Catching up on episodes of My Perfect Console, Simon Parkin’s great “Desert Island Discs, but for Video Games” interview show that’s really doubling as a fun historical record for the medium.

Crowdsourced

Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more recommendations than fit here, check out the replies to this post on Threads.

“This little camera. I’ve been going over ways in my mind to justify it because it’s so cute but also the photos are surprisingly decent.” – Daulton

“Check out Ditto. It is a Nostr server that exposes Mastodon API to its clients. So the promise is that you would be able to use your very nice Mastodon app (Ivory, Ice Cubes) and add Nostr connection right into it. It would be like an additional server in the same app where your main Mastodon account is.” – Adnan

“I’ve been slowly getting back into following Pokemón trading cards and have been hooked watching TheBulbaStore on YouTube. It’s super interesting seeing a vendor’s point of view and the prices some cards go for now!” – Peter

“The Hawthorne & Horowitz mysteries by Anthony Horowitz. He recently released the fifth in the series, Close to Death. They all have tortured puns as titles (in this case, “close” being a British word for enclosed area). On top of that, the books are metafiction in which Horowitz himself is the main character, talking about how he is writing the series of murder mysteries that you are reading. Yet, they are some of the best contemporary murder mysteries I’ve read and do a wonderful job paying homage to Agatha Christie, all while playing with the genre.” – Kendrick

“I’m playing and watching chess! Chess is cool now! Lots of great ways to play, but Chess.com is probably the best for beginners. And there’s great YouTube content out there on chess from Eric Rosen, Irina Krush, Levy Rozman, and Hikaru Nakamura. Getting good so I can teach my three-year-old niece to be a master someday.” – Ryan

“I am really enjoying “Jet Lag: The Game” on YouTube. Imagine The Amazing Race, but actually good and not scripted. The hosts are likable and the game has some decent complexity behind it. They are about to wrap up their Australia season, and it has been a nail-biter.” – Dev

“I’m currently reading Hell Divers II: Ghosts by Nicholas Sansbury Smith. Postapocalyptic sci-fi about halo jumpers who dive into radioactive wastelands to scavenge supplies from mutant monsters, and yes, it is as good as it sounds.” – Jesse

“I’ve been obsessed with my new Klydoclock, a digital take on the classic analog clock. It features changing, artist-curated faces and can even tick and chime on the hour if you want it to. Best of all: it has no other functions and isn’t attached to an app or your phone. Minimalism and elegance at its finest.” – Jonathan

“I really believe that a home server or NAS is useful and easily accessible for more people than currently have one. More people should have their own Plex server, Pi-hole, self-hosted cloud storage, Minecraft server, or self-hosted VPN. An old PC is all you need if you want to keep it simple. And if you don’t mind learning how to work with Linux, you could even use an old Android phone or cheap Raspberry Pi clone.” – Voltaire

Signing off

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I absolutely cannot get enough of watching / listening to / reading about how people who are great at their thing do their thing. (The musician Kygo has a series of making-of videos that is always the first example I think of in this genre.) One of my favorite recent ones is this video, with Zane Lowe interviewing Finneas and Billie Eilish about the making of Eilish’s latest album. They talk about process, fear, microphones, editing, and so much more. I will almost certainly never make an album, or shoot a movie, or make it in the NBA, but listening to people talk about how they do it never gets old.

See you next week!

Read More 

Image: Bandai Namco

But he thinks players will be able to handle it. As I work my way through Shadow of the Erdtree, the new DLC for Elden Ring, I can’t help but think that game director Hidetaka Miyazaki is trolling the shit outta me.
Speaking with him at Summer Game Fest two weeks ago, Miyazaki said that Erdtree is “by far the biggest in scale in volume” than any other FromSoftware DLC before it. But he also said Erdtree is “about the same volume as the Limgrave part of the base game,” the starting area of Elden Ring, containing “slightly more content.”
I don’t buy it. While it’s impossible to accurately compare scale in game, I’ve played the game for 30 hours and have already found the new areas in the DLC to be more expansive than Limgrave. Not only is the map itself large, it’s layered, with huge areas propped up on plateaus above, in deep valleys below, and on islands that take some creative platforming to reach.
I’d say it’s far, far larger than Limgrave, with plenty more to do as well. Shadow of the Erdtree honestly feels like it’s big enough to be its own game with its own story — one that was originally intended for Elden Ring but wound up being cut for time before being added back as DLC content.

Image: FromSoftware

Erdtree follows the story arc of Miquella, brother of uber boss Malenia and one of the demigods important to Elden Ring lore. To focus on Miquella was, Miyazaki told me, born of the desire to honor George R. R. Martin’s contributions to the game. “[He] gave us all this great mythology to work with,” Miyazaki said. Packaging Miquella’s story as a standalone DLC was essentially “closing the loop” on Martin’s involvement in the game. “It’s really about completing Elden Ring’s circle,” he said.

But understating the size of Shadow of the Erdtree is just one of the ways it feels like Miyazaki is misleading me. I know he’s trolling me when it comes to difficulty.
I cannot beat Rellana, Twin Moon Knight, the boss ensconced in Castle Enis that players can face five or 50 hours in depending on their exploration choices. (I met her after about 15.) None of my strategies nor any of the game’s built in assistance features — using Mimic Tear Ashes, summoning help from an NPC, changing my weapons or spells, inflicting damaging status effects — seem to work. My best attempt got her down to half of her health and I cannot seem to progress further. And she’s only major boss number two.
According to Miyazaki, this is by design. He said that Erdtree contains “10 plus boss encounters” — honestly, another hilariously absurd understatement, I’ve seen estimates of 55 bosses and up to 80. Thankfully only a small handful of those bosses are necessary to progress the story, while the rest are optional.
“And the ones that [are optional] are especially difficult,” Miyazaki said.
Whenever a new FromSoftware game releases, there’s nearly always a discussion of difficulty. With the DLC, other reviewers have suggested that its difficulty is too extreme. “It’s true that this distinct type of FromSoft-engineered frustration is an indispensable part of the Souls experience,” wrote Alexis Ong in Eurogamer. “This, however, feels like difficulty for difficulty’s sake, turned up to eleven.”
I agree. But while I think Shadow of the Erdtree could better straddle the line between pleasantly challenging and frustratingly impossible, the game was tuned to Miyazaki’s intentions, representing the lessons the development team learned from the original game’s feedback.
“Traditionally we’ve always liked the higher difficulty curve type of games and experiences, but I think that nature in and of itself alienates a good portion of the game playing audience,” he said.
A contradictory thing to say considering his comments in a recent interview with The Guardian: “If we really wanted the whole world to play the game, we could just crank the difficulty down more and more, but that wasn’t the right approach. Turning down difficulty would strip the game of that joy, which, in my eyes, would break the game itself.”
He’s not wrong. Elden Ring ceases to be the game of the year it was if it lacks the kind of difficulty FromSoftware is known for. So Erdtree must be hard, but not so hard that it’ll turn players off. But it also can’t be too easy because that will break the game. What to do? The answer, according to Miyazaki, is freedom.
“The amount of freedom that we give players helps offset that difficulty curve and makes the game more accessible and engaging,” he told me.
I think that worked for Elden Ring, less so for this DLC. In the base game, difficulty could be circumvented with leveling up — the player freedom, as it were. But with the addition of the new DLC-exclusive consumables that increase your attack and defense, becoming more powerful is now dependent on your ability to find those scarce items. As a result, I’ve often found myself fearful of the simplest enemies as encountering more than one at a time will kill me outright.
“I try to imagine different ways I would want to die as a player or be killed.”
In addition to ensuring that players die a lot, Miyazaki also said that how players die is just as important.
“I try to imagine different ways I would want to die as a player or be killed,” he said, explaining that those thoughts manifested in Elden Ring and in other FromSoftware games as his signature poison swamps. But for Erdtree, he confessed to cutting back on that indulgence — “In the original Elden Ring, I went a little too far.”
There are still poison swamps in Erdtree, “but in other parts of gameplay, there are still many ways to die.”

Image: FromSoftware / Ash Parrish
One of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s signature poison swamps in Shadow of the Erdtree.

Too many it seems. I’ve been bludgeoned, exsanguinated, frostbitten, and burned. I’ve fallen off cliffs, had cliffs fall on me — beware the fiery rocks the Furnace Golems spew — and I’ve even accidentally killed myself eating an item that refilled my HP while also inflicting poison.
Despite my tribulations, Miyazaki, like a benevolent god, has faith in me and his players, only giving us trials he believes we can bear.
“We’ve really pushed the envelope in terms of what we think can be withstood by the player,” Miyazaki said.
He clarified that one of the biggest lessons brought forward from Elden Ring into Erdtree was what the audience found fun over what was stressful. “ We tried to make that the foundation of the boss encounters of the DLC, so hopefully players will find it much more engaging and fun,” he said.
“But if that is not the case,” he added. “Then I’m sorry.”

Image: Bandai Namco

But he thinks players will be able to handle it.

As I work my way through Shadow of the Erdtree, the new DLC for Elden Ring, I can’t help but think that game director Hidetaka Miyazaki is trolling the shit outta me.

Speaking with him at Summer Game Fest two weeks ago, Miyazaki said that Erdtree is “by far the biggest in scale in volume” than any other FromSoftware DLC before it. But he also said Erdtree is “about the same volume as the Limgrave part of the base game,” the starting area of Elden Ring, containing “slightly more content.”

I don’t buy it. While it’s impossible to accurately compare scale in game, I’ve played the game for 30 hours and have already found the new areas in the DLC to be more expansive than Limgrave. Not only is the map itself large, it’s layered, with huge areas propped up on plateaus above, in deep valleys below, and on islands that take some creative platforming to reach.

I’d say it’s far, far larger than Limgrave, with plenty more to do as well. Shadow of the Erdtree honestly feels like it’s big enough to be its own game with its own story — one that was originally intended for Elden Ring but wound up being cut for time before being added back as DLC content.

Image: FromSoftware

Erdtree follows the story arc of Miquella, brother of uber boss Malenia and one of the demigods important to Elden Ring lore. To focus on Miquella was, Miyazaki told me, born of the desire to honor George R. R. Martin’s contributions to the game. “[He] gave us all this great mythology to work with,” Miyazaki said. Packaging Miquella’s story as a standalone DLC was essentially “closing the loop” on Martin’s involvement in the game. “It’s really about completing Elden Ring’s circle,” he said.

But understating the size of Shadow of the Erdtree is just one of the ways it feels like Miyazaki is misleading me. I know he’s trolling me when it comes to difficulty.

I cannot beat Rellana, Twin Moon Knight, the boss ensconced in Castle Enis that players can face five or 50 hours in depending on their exploration choices. (I met her after about 15.) None of my strategies nor any of the game’s built in assistance features — using Mimic Tear Ashes, summoning help from an NPC, changing my weapons or spells, inflicting damaging status effects — seem to work. My best attempt got her down to half of her health and I cannot seem to progress further. And she’s only major boss number two.

According to Miyazaki, this is by design. He said that Erdtree contains “10 plus boss encounters” — honestly, another hilariously absurd understatement, I’ve seen estimates of 55 bosses and up to 80. Thankfully only a small handful of those bosses are necessary to progress the story, while the rest are optional.

“And the ones that [are optional] are especially difficult,” Miyazaki said.

Whenever a new FromSoftware game releases, there’s nearly always a discussion of difficulty. With the DLC, other reviewers have suggested that its difficulty is too extreme. “It’s true that this distinct type of FromSoft-engineered frustration is an indispensable part of the Souls experience,” wrote Alexis Ong in Eurogamer. “This, however, feels like difficulty for difficulty’s sake, turned up to eleven.”

I agree. But while I think Shadow of the Erdtree could better straddle the line between pleasantly challenging and frustratingly impossible, the game was tuned to Miyazaki’s intentions, representing the lessons the development team learned from the original game’s feedback.

“Traditionally we’ve always liked the higher difficulty curve type of games and experiences, but I think that nature in and of itself alienates a good portion of the game playing audience,” he said.

A contradictory thing to say considering his comments in a recent interview with The Guardian: “If we really wanted the whole world to play the game, we could just crank the difficulty down more and more, but that wasn’t the right approach. Turning down difficulty would strip the game of that joy, which, in my eyes, would break the game itself.”

He’s not wrong. Elden Ring ceases to be the game of the year it was if it lacks the kind of difficulty FromSoftware is known for. So Erdtree must be hard, but not so hard that it’ll turn players off. But it also can’t be too easy because that will break the game. What to do? The answer, according to Miyazaki, is freedom.

“The amount of freedom that we give players helps offset that difficulty curve and makes the game more accessible and engaging,” he told me.

I think that worked for Elden Ring, less so for this DLC. In the base game, difficulty could be circumvented with leveling up — the player freedom, as it were. But with the addition of the new DLC-exclusive consumables that increase your attack and defense, becoming more powerful is now dependent on your ability to find those scarce items. As a result, I’ve often found myself fearful of the simplest enemies as encountering more than one at a time will kill me outright.

In addition to ensuring that players die a lot, Miyazaki also said that how players die is just as important.

“I try to imagine different ways I would want to die as a player or be killed,” he said, explaining that those thoughts manifested in Elden Ring and in other FromSoftware games as his signature poison swamps. But for Erdtree, he confessed to cutting back on that indulgence — “In the original Elden Ring, I went a little too far.”

There are still poison swamps in Erdtree, “but in other parts of gameplay, there are still many ways to die.”

Image: FromSoftware / Ash Parrish
One of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s signature poison swamps in Shadow of the Erdtree.

Too many it seems. I’ve been bludgeoned, exsanguinated, frostbitten, and burned. I’ve fallen off cliffs, had cliffs fall on me — beware the fiery rocks the Furnace Golems spew — and I’ve even accidentally killed myself eating an item that refilled my HP while also inflicting poison.

Despite my tribulations, Miyazaki, like a benevolent god, has faith in me and his players, only giving us trials he believes we can bear.

“We’ve really pushed the envelope in terms of what we think can be withstood by the player,” Miyazaki said.

He clarified that one of the biggest lessons brought forward from Elden Ring into Erdtree was what the audience found fun over what was stressful. “ We tried to make that the foundation of the boss encounters of the DLC, so hopefully players will find it much more engaging and fun,” he said.

“But if that is not the case,” he added. “Then I’m sorry.”

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The superior way to ask Siri to set a timer when you’re not at home or in the car. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge

There’s a time and place for everything. In the privacy of my own home, I’ve got no problem saying “hey” to Google, Alexa, Siri, Meta, and on occasion, Bixby. But out in public? Where other people can perceive me? I’d rather crawl under a rock.
This has been one of my biggest problems with AI gadgets these past few months. All of them seem convinced that the best way to interact with AI assistants is to actually talk to them, not unlike the movie Her. In reality, I’ve rarely seen my friends and family use their phone’s assistants when we’re hanging out privately and never out in public. So it felt like a tiny “Aha!” moment when, during last week’s WWDC keynote, Apple mentioned that iOS 18 will let you type to Siri instead.
Technically, you can already do this via the iPhone’s accessibility settings. (Go to Accessibility > Siri > Type to Siri.) This brings up a fairly bare-bones window and keyboard for you to type a command in. But in iOS 18, Apple embraces the feature, letting you double-tap the bottom of the screen to bring up a Siri keyboard. You’ll also be able to see quick suggestions that you can simply tap instead of having to type (or say) a whole query out.

There are a ton of reasons why this just makes sense. While digital assistants have gotten better at understanding commands, it’s still tough to talk to them naturally. At home, I feel myself affecting a certain pitch and tone when I use a wake word. I find myself thinking beforehand about how I want to word a query. In spite of myself, I still occasionally botch it when asking Google to turn my living room lights to 25 percent brightness. I feel even more self-conscious if I have to do this in public.
Outside, it’s also incredibly noisy. While testing the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses’ multimodal AI features, I often had the AI tell me that the glasses couldn’t hear me properly. Either my environment was too loud, or I was subconsciously so embarrassed I spoke too quietly for the device to clearly pick up what I was saying. That led to a ton of frustration, which, in turn, caused me to whip out my phone — the exact opposite of what AI hardware wants me to do.

Image: Apple
What the new Siri keyboard will look like in iOS 18.

It’s not just newfangled AI gadgets, either. Speaking into a smartwatch looks cool if you’re James Bond. Most of us are not. If anything, most people I see doing it look a little confused and frustrated. Is this vain? Yes. But self-consciousness is a big reason why people may be hesitant to experiment with voice-controlled assistants when they’re out and about. A 2018 PwC survey into voice assistant use found that 74 percent of consumers prefer to use voice assistants at home, with participants saying that using them in public “just looks weird.” In the same survey, lack of trust was identified as another major hurdle to using voice assistants in general — people just didn’t believe that a voice assistant would correctly understand commands. If experience tells you an AI assistant likely won’t understand you, why would you bother trying to use it in a place where you’re more likely to be judged? (Also, imagine saying “Hey Siri” and activating your fellow commuters’ iPhones. New nightmare unlocked.)
Tech logistics aside, typing to your AI assistant also affords you a greater degree of privacy. I don’t need people to know what I’m doing on my phone, even if it’s something as innocuous as playing a song or setting a timer. I especially don’t want to dictate texts aloud when others can hear me. Typing those kinds of queries allows me to keep my business to myself — and, for that, I’m happy to sacrifice some hands-free capabilities.
I’m not denying that there are reasons why you might need to speak to an assistant, even in public settings. Voice commands are especially useful if you don’t have use of your hands or are driving a car. But having multiple ways to interact with AI assistants lets them fit more seamlessly into how we want to use our gadgets — instead of forcing everyone to adopt new paradigms. Maybe one day, it won’t feel weird to talk to a chatbot out loud while walking down the street. For most people, that day isn’t today. And until such a time comes, I’ll happily type to Siri instead.

The superior way to ask Siri to set a timer when you’re not at home or in the car. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge

There’s a time and place for everything. In the privacy of my own home, I’ve got no problem saying “hey” to Google, Alexa, Siri, Meta, and on occasion, Bixby. But out in public? Where other people can perceive me? I’d rather crawl under a rock.

This has been one of my biggest problems with AI gadgets these past few months. All of them seem convinced that the best way to interact with AI assistants is to actually talk to them, not unlike the movie Her. In reality, I’ve rarely seen my friends and family use their phone’s assistants when we’re hanging out privately and never out in public. So it felt like a tiny “Aha!” moment when, during last week’s WWDC keynote, Apple mentioned that iOS 18 will let you type to Siri instead.

Technically, you can already do this via the iPhone’s accessibility settings. (Go to Accessibility > Siri > Type to Siri.) This brings up a fairly bare-bones window and keyboard for you to type a command in. But in iOS 18, Apple embraces the feature, letting you double-tap the bottom of the screen to bring up a Siri keyboard. You’ll also be able to see quick suggestions that you can simply tap instead of having to type (or say) a whole query out.

There are a ton of reasons why this just makes sense. While digital assistants have gotten better at understanding commands, it’s still tough to talk to them naturally. At home, I feel myself affecting a certain pitch and tone when I use a wake word. I find myself thinking beforehand about how I want to word a query. In spite of myself, I still occasionally botch it when asking Google to turn my living room lights to 25 percent brightness. I feel even more self-conscious if I have to do this in public.

Outside, it’s also incredibly noisy. While testing the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses’ multimodal AI features, I often had the AI tell me that the glasses couldn’t hear me properly. Either my environment was too loud, or I was subconsciously so embarrassed I spoke too quietly for the device to clearly pick up what I was saying. That led to a ton of frustration, which, in turn, caused me to whip out my phone — the exact opposite of what AI hardware wants me to do.

It’s not just newfangled AI gadgets, either. Speaking into a smartwatch looks cool if you’re James Bond. Most of us are not. If anything, most people I see doing it look a little confused and frustrated. Is this vain? Yes. But self-consciousness is a big reason why people may be hesitant to experiment with voice-controlled assistants when they’re out and about. A 2018 PwC survey into voice assistant use found that 74 percent of consumers prefer to use voice assistants at home, with participants saying that using them in public “just looks weird.” In the same survey, lack of trust was identified as another major hurdle to using voice assistants in general — people just didn’t believe that a voice assistant would correctly understand commands. If experience tells you an AI assistant likely won’t understand you, why would you bother trying to use it in a place where you’re more likely to be judged? (Also, imagine saying “Hey Siri” and activating your fellow commuters’ iPhones. New nightmare unlocked.)

Tech logistics aside, typing to your AI assistant also affords you a greater degree of privacy. I don’t need people to know what I’m doing on my phone, even if it’s something as innocuous as playing a song or setting a timer. I especially don’t want to dictate texts aloud when others can hear me. Typing those kinds of queries allows me to keep my business to myself — and, for that, I’m happy to sacrifice some hands-free capabilities.

I’m not denying that there are reasons why you might need to speak to an assistant, even in public settings. Voice commands are especially useful if you don’t have use of your hands or are driving a car. But having multiple ways to interact with AI assistants lets them fit more seamlessly into how we want to use our gadgets — instead of forcing everyone to adopt new paradigms. Maybe one day, it won’t feel weird to talk to a chatbot out loud while walking down the street. For most people, that day isn’t today. And until such a time comes, I’ll happily type to Siri instead.

Read More