It’s the podcast crossover event of the century... or at least the afternoon. As you can imagine, the audience is very energized.
Swisher also just teased a surprise guest she’s bringing in later: Yoel Roth. Should be fun counter-programming to X CEO Linda Yaccarino at the end of the day.
Bloys made fun of critics for complaining that the “HBO Max” name diluted the HBO brand... and then complaining that the “Max” rebrand cast HBO aside. Here’s his reason:
If HBO is in the title of the platform, it represents everything on the platform, and it was about to get a lot bigger ... I did not want the HBO brand to take on all that stuff because it wasn’t designed to. So now we get to go back to HBO being exactly what HBO is.
Max’s Casey Bloys says the new writers contract isn’t going to raise costs so much that he won’t make a show that he thinks will be great.
“Is it gonna be more expensive?” he asked. “Yeah, but not that I’m gonna say I’m not gonna make this show now.”
He thinks the strike went on so long because “there’s a lot changing, a lot shifting” in the industry. “It has been upended,” he said.
He’s talking with Vox senior correspondent Peter Kafka. Are there any major developments in Hollywood they might want to talk about?
Adam Mosseri asked about Artifact supporting publishers in a post on Threads — so my colleague Alex Heath asked him in an audience question.
“We’ve tried to come at this from a publisher friendly perspective,” Mike Krieger said. Artifact thrives if the publisher ecosystem “is healthy and thriving,” so that approach is a long-term play.
“It’s about recognizing what needs to exist several years from now for you to have a viable product,” Krieger said
Mike Krieger says it’s “a very strange experience to see Instagram do these big things.”
He’s happy to see that some of the ethos he and co-founder Kevin Systrom built continue onward, though. “They really nailed photo galleries on Threads,” he said.
AKA, the co-founder of Instagram. He’s speaking with Platformer’s Casey Newton.
Artifact, his news app, has been doing some neat things with AI and just launched a fun new section called Links.
“It’s wicked fast,” he says. But naturally, he’s mostly here to talk infotainment systems and CarPlay.
Penmetsa says Monarch Tractor is licensing its technology to other tractor companies and is very open about sharing data with “everybody who works in the food ecosystem.”
“Today we know more about the DoorDash person who delivered our food than the person who grew our food,” he says.
He’s speaking with Verge EIC Nilay Patel.
Monarch makes an electric, autonomous tractor that runs on top of Nvidia AI tech. It’s a big day for AI convos, and Penmetsa’s company is trying to expand the tech to a very different corner of the market than everyone else.
