The high stakes for AI Alexa
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It's time to review the highlights. I'm joined by my co-anchor, Snoop. Hey, what up, dog? Snoop, number one has to be getting iPhone 16 with Apple Intelligence at T-Mobile. Yeah, you should hustle down at T-Mobile like a dog chasing a squirrel, chasing a nut. Number two, at T-Mobile, families can switch and save 20% on plans plus streaming services versus the other big guys.

What a deal. Y'all giving it away too fast, T-Mobile. Slow down. Head to T-Mobile.com and get iPhone 16 on them. Da-da-da-da-da. Yeah, you can save on wireless and streaming versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch. Apple intelligence requires iOS 18.1 or later. Hello and welcome to Dirt Chats, the flagship podcast of being free with Prime.

Who knows? Maybe it's $20. Maybe crime is $15 and this comes to the ride. That one feels slightly too plausible to me, and I don't like it. That we're free with Prime? That we're free with Prime. Like, we might be. I honestly don't know. At the rate we're going. What is free with Prime? Yeah. Just bundle us in, Jeff. We support free markets here. There's a lot to talk about this week. An awful lot to talk about. I'm your friend, Neil. David Pierce is here. Hello.

And I've got a guest in studio, David Imel, the co-host of the Waveform podcast is joining me today. How's it going? Good to be here. I just want more human beings physically present with me. Understandable. And Pierce won't say yes to that idea. We're legally not allowed to be in the same room. You need to stay in your green screen, basically. No, it's like, you know how they won't put the whole...

on a plane, like just in case something happens. Like you and I can't be in the same room just in case. We have to be several hundred miles away because the energy is just not enough. This isn't the right time in America for plane jokes, David. I was just on a flight and it landed and everybody burst into applause and that is a, you want to, you want to temp check on the country. It's the amount of clapping when planes land is going up. I got a new plane story in Slack every single time I arrived at the airport and I had to remind everyone I'm now at the airport. Yeah.

All right. A lot happened this week. Wait, first, Neil, you have to tell us where you went on vacation, because as always happens when you go on vacation, some single digit but not insignificant percentage of the Verge cast audience believes that you have quit your job and will never, ever come back. So can we just can we just tell the people about your vacation and that you have triumphantly returned? No. OK, so.

That's the answer. Is Neelye back? Who knows? I think it's you want to be at a place in your life where people are like, there's a secret various plot to defenestrate you every time you take a break. I literally got an email last week that was like, well, Neelye seems like he's about to retire. And then they just sort of went on with the rest of their question. Hold on.

Uh, I might be, um, you never know. Uh, no, we went to Turks and Caicos. It was, uh, um, it's like Max's winter break. So we went to the beach and we sat on island and then everyone else on that island at that beach was also from New York, which is the whole state is on winter break. So all of the children of New York were on this one small British island.

It was great. We caught a, we, we do for a conch shell, but we did the whole thing. It was just a lot of like little kids going, I'm walking here on the beach. Basically, Max made a bunch of friends. It was delightful. My phone service was bad, which was important. Perfect. This is a thing I look for in destinations now is.

Is AT&T's roaming agreement not quite as rock solid as it should be? That's where we're going. I used the satellite texting feature on the iPhone quite a bit in the last few months. That's not great, man. Well, yeah, it's, it's great to not have the service. It is surprising that it works at all. Yeah. But you know, I,

I'm probably Apple's perfect boy for that because no one has ever used it except for me. Have you seen the conspiracy theories? They launched the trial of letting T-Mobile iPhones connect to Starlink.

So now there are conspiracy theories online that Elon Musk is spying on you on your iPhone? But, yeah, I don't have Google Fi, you know. I'm just using the baseline Apple free feature. Probably has nothing to do with Elon, but. That's very good. Does it work well? Oh, well. Is it RCS? Is it SMS? What's the story? Well, it only works with iMessage. Okay, of course. Which is very dumb, extremely dumb. Yeah.

But it works fine. Wait, so if you're in an emergency and you need to text somebody with an Android phone, it's like...

Sorry, you're a green bubble. You're going to die. That's a great question. I think in the emergency SOS like version of it, it will send an SMS and it will ping off of that. But there are much there are not that many satellites, right, that they are actually using because they just go over pretty quickly. So you have to wait a few minutes every time, like every five minutes. It just goes over the hill and you have to wait another five minutes and then you can connect to it again. Yeah.

Yeah. And then if you're in a car, even if it has like a glass roof or something, or if there is one single tree, you cannot text via satellite. So it works. And I did need to use it in a semi-emergency where someone at home was having a problem and it was really great for me. Hey, that's great. Hashtag not sponsored. So, yeah. See, it's spicy here on the version. There you go. That's very cool. I just sign up for horrible roaming agreements and be like, my phone isn't working. And then I'd

Stop thinking about the news for a week. Yeah, Romeo and Romeo sound terrible. I've had Google Fi since like 2017, and it is overpriced when you live in the United States. But it is great when you have to think about nothing ever at all. Yeah. In other countries. But then Google periodically forgets that you exist for several years at a time. That's true. And you're like, can I have new features, Google? And Google says, no, no.

Yeah. You can have nothing. And then they just rebrand the name of the service and move on. Yeah. Yeah. That's perfect. Don't give you any new features. That seems right. Yeah. Lots to talk about this week. There is an Amazon Alexa event. They announced Alexa Plus. We should talk about that. Panos Panay.

And literally in the middle of the event, while he was announcing Alexa Plus, looked me in the eye and said, hey, how you doing? One of the weirdest and funniest moments at any event I've ever had in my entire life. Very good. Very pan-ass. Only me, by the way. That only happened once. And it was to me. He looked me dead in the eye and said, hey, how you doing? And I was like, hey. And then he went on. He continued announcing Alexa Plus. Go watch the video. You can see him do it. Did they put it up?

- Oh wait, there's no videos. It wasn't live streamed. - Yeah, it was really painful for us when we were trying to cover this. - I didn't realize. I just said go watch the video 'cause I just assume everything is available, but I don't think-- - Oh no. - Well, and I think Panos at one point at the beginning of the event said,

Like, welcome to everybody watching from home. And I was like, well, my guy, you are used to Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah. We just read your live blog. All right. Well, I might be lying about Panos Panay looking me dead in the eye in the middle of his presentation and saying, hey, how are you doing? But I promise you it happened. There are like 20 people that can confirm that. Yeah. Apple announced a very boring iPhone, which we will talk about for a very boring amount of time, a very appropriate amount of time. But it will be exciting. That's what I meant to say. I don't know about that. There's a Sigma camera.

The David and I need to yell about at length. There's some framework stuff. We got a lightning round, Brendan Carr. I'm back from vacation, buddy. I didn't forget about you. It's got it's pack show. Let's start with Alexa. Uh, it's what we expected. I will tell you, uh, Panos is on decoder on Monday. So I've talked to him at length about this. And what I mean by what we expected is everybody saw chat GPT, uh,

or LLMs in general, and they thought, boy, this is how these voice assistants should have worked this whole time. And now they announced a version of Alexa that approximates that. Yeah. Well, notably, none of the assistants for the home have had it yet. So it's actually a big deal that they're finally bringing it to something. It is a big deal. I think the most important thing to note here is that

Outside of phones, Alexa has the biggest user base installed base of devices that have AI now, which is just nothing else has gotten there. Yeah. Like Google has sort of rolled out some stuff to some bits and bobs of phone apps. Yeah. But like Google home devices do not have Gemini. True. Apple home pods. They have Siri, which, which it's not a thing. Yeah. Um, there is the humane pin. Yeah.

uh, dear, sweet, humane pin. Humane. Yeah. HP stands for humane pin, by the way, my, my close personal friend, my dead humane pin, uh, Pannis did not know that the humane pin had been canceled when I said, I was like, you've got the big installed base and you know, it's not like you were sweating the humane pin. He was like, well, they're part of HP now. And I was like, no, they're not. Um, but like that, the idea was that,

voice assistants would be this big platform shift. We'd create a new generation of devices that would take over the phone that has absolutely not played out. But there's a lot of Echo devices out there. And so this is kind of a big deal, like just from that standpoint. I think it hasn't played out actually doesn't

give these things quite enough credit. People use Alexa a lot. Like, a lot. It's a running joke that people use it for, you know, music and timers. And their lights. And it's largely true. But, like...

Yeah.

early on and then Google assistant and Alexa. But I think, especially as you talk about like standalone, I talk to my house things like that happened. It worked. We can, we can argue for days about how useful it is. And I think the answer is it's not that useful, but like it, it worked at like,

Like Amazon did the thing. And now the question is like, can we take this behavior that we've trained people and point it at something? Yeah. And I think that is the open question. And that is what Alexa plus is trying to be. It's like, okay, we've now taught you that it is possible to talk to your technology. Now we have to give you things to do with it. And that was always going to be the hard part and remains the hard part. And I have 1000 questions about what Amazon is trying to do here. But like,

I think it did come to pass in a real way. And this is like the opportunity that Amazon has where they're like, there are a lot of people who are used to talking to their devices. Now we have to give them something to do with it. Yeah. And that's what I mean by it's, I don't mean to diminish it by saying it's as expected. What I mean to say is they put out commercials at the Super Bowl with celebrities and them talking to their Alexas. And people tried to do that and it didn't work because the classic, because I think at the event, a bunch of Amazon executives called it Alexa speak.

Where you trained yourself to talk to the Alexa or the Google home or whatever it was in like robot voice and like give it ordered commands because it's just a computer at the end of the day and it needs like structured commands. And now it's like, oh, because there's an LLM because there's some AI natural language input.

You can just talk to it and then also it can figure out what you want and talk back to you naturally. And now you're in this conversation with this thing that can like maybe do stuff. And so that's like the big idea of Alexa plus is like total reboot of Alexa with not one, but like multiple AI models underneath it. The hard part, as I understand it was building the system that figures out what AI model to use when, um,

Because you don't want to light up like all of Anthropic to turn off your lights. Right. So like that, that was very much the hard part. That's what everyone is telling me is like, they have all these different models. I can use all these different ways. They can do this stuff. Um, and they call it orchestration. So you issue it a command and then it figures out how to do it. And then they don't want to call them apps. So they keep using this term experts. So it's like the photos expert will show you your photos. And it's like, what, what, what?

And that is just an Amazon language. It's like an actual term of art in the AI community. Like one of the things they call this problem is the mixture of experts problem where it's like, if we, if we turn on the whole system, every time you have to do anything, that's way too much work. No, no, that's the, this is what, no, no, no, no, no. That's the AI community is using experts as a term of art in that way. Amazon is like,

When you ask it for photos, the photos expert shows you photos. Oh, right. No, I agree. And what they mean there is like, there's an app. It is absurd. Don't get me wrong. Everyone is just using words however they want. Amazon tried to make skills happen, and that didn't work. And now they're trying to make experts happen. I think they wanted to not use skills again. Yeah, because that went so poorly. So anyway, it's the whole system. Although ironically, skills is actually a better term.

explanation of what Amazon is trying to do this time. Yeah. Last time it was just apps. Now it's actual skills. They can just keep calling it that because no one knew they were called that before. So it's fine. They want to make this break. But it's all this is like very clever, right? You can just naturally speak to Alexa. Panos gave a bunch of demos on stage. Other people from Amazon gave a bunch of demos on stage at this event.

They were all live. Importantly, he was only talking to Echo Show devices. So the 8, 10, 15, 21 are getting this first. His point of view is that screens are important and you want a screen. He wants to put a screen in your house. And the big change for Amazon is...

Alexa used to be on everything. Like you buy a smoke detector with Alexa. Yeah. I remember that event. It was crazy. And now they're like, they're cutting down the product line. There is going to be some new hardware eventually, we are told. But they're cutting down the product line. They want to put a screen in your house. It's in the center of your living room or wherever your kitchen, you talk to it. It shows you stuff. You,

You have a device and that is the centerpiece of their strategy. And then it is smart and it can do things, everything from tell your kids a story to, I think this is really fascinating, like automatically great smart home routines for you.

So you're like around bedtime, do bedtime stuff. And it's like, okay, I'm going to dim the lights and play some music and turn on your security system. And we'll just like come up with some ideas. That will go right every time. I have a lot of questions about how that's going to work. And then it has some, I don't want to say agentic because there's a lot of ways for this to work, but it has some capability. It has some ability to do stuff out in the world.

So you can have it book an Uber for your friend, which is a... We can pull apart that demo piece by piece. I would like to. Because it was very complicated. Hello to Rabbit. Yeah, exactly. So that was APIs. So with Uber and DoorDash and a handful of others, they're just using the...

boring old APIs, which is how most computers work. Interesting. I thought the agentic stuff was going to be a big part of this. And then the agentic stuff is they called for like a dishwasher repair. Right. So if you like run some service, like Thumbtack was the one they, and you don't want to build a bunch of APIs. Yeah. You can just say to Amazon, it's okay for Alexa to click around in our website and the agent can do that. And then there's like a middle ground where you're like,

You can like Suno, the music service. Yeah. Creating songs out of nothing. Yeah. Where it's like, it's still, it's got to do some API stuff, but it can still click around on the website. Weird, like weird, weird stuff. And a lot of the demos of that capability, I, I were less believable in the moment. Yeah. Just like Rabbit. Right. I know that they're partners, but my question with any of the agentic stuff is what happens? Like,

Are they actually just targeting certain areas of the site or are they doing recognition of the buttons? Like, Rabbit always says it was recognition. As soon as one of these websites changes their website, everything breaks. Yep. That happened before. Could see it happening again. Well, so Rabbit's pitch was it could go to any website. Yeah. And really they had just like hard-coded itself to like Uber and Spotify. Yeah. Amazon's pitch is a little different, which is that people will come to Amazon. Right. And they will say, we would like...

our website to be part of your agentic system. So presumably there's not like the incentives are aligned more to make sure the agent can use the website consistently or like maybe you'll build a special or website and that's even less of a lift than building an API, but you can still do it. Yeah. I don't know, but I do know that the straight up

book my friend in Uber at JFK made no sense. Yeah. Yeah. Like no sense. How do I know what pickup zone to go to? Yeah. I mean, there are a hundred things about that demo that don't make any sense. Like, and the way I've come to think about all the agentic stuff is there's like, tell people what the demo is because apparently there's no live stream. Well, I'll get there. But the, the, I think the way to think about the agentic stuff in general is like, there's a set of things that are just like knobs that some app can expose in an API and,

Rather than try to fake your website, you should just use their API. And Amazon has the business deals to do that. Right. So like if I don't have to use Ticketmaster.com and I can just access the Ticketmaster database, victory. Right. Like that is that's still agentic and that's still good. That is the correct answer.

In the middle, there's the stuff that is like solvable Internet problems. Right. It's like go to Bing and click on the first result is like a thing chat GPT does all the time when you're an operator. Right. That or like scan down this page for things with five star results. These are like tractable problems for AI. And then there's the thing that's just like, ah, we'll figure it out. AI is smart. It'll figure it out and we'll see what happens.

The problem with all of those is there are a billion edge cases to every single one, right? And let me see if I remember the demo correctly for Uber. It was, it started with booking a restaurant reservation, successfully booked the restaurant reservation through OpenTable, which is presumably just an API that Alexa has access to. Again, fairly tractable problem, right? Like there are times there is a restaurant. I know so many people like it can click the dropdowns for you in the API. Fine. The next thing was,

My friend is coming from JFK. Can you book an Uber to pick them up and I guess bring them to the restaurant? Okay, right there. I just want to say right there, a fully insane thing to say to any, any, another human being to your friend who's landing at JFK. I've booked you an Uber. Why? Yes. Right. Right.

Yes. You know, use your phone. Anyone with a phone. Yeah, I will say I have a friend who is an assistant for a hedge fund manager. And this is stuff that she does all the time. And so I see an end case where way in the future.

The idea of a lot of these AI platforms is like, what if we could take this job that people do and get rid of it? Yeah. And so in this universe, it's sort of like just automate this job away. Right. But I'm saying the command I need an Uber or I would like to have a car pick me up. Yeah. Your hedge fund manager friend. Yeah.

boss, your hedge fund manager. In this example, the hedge fund manager just says out loud, I need a car. And then a person uses the Uber app. Yeah. In this case, they would just, they would still just tell their own AI. Yeah. To book them a car. Yeah. It's I, that was the part that got me like right there in that demo was like, I'm going to send my friend a car. JFK is in like, in a very abstract sense, makes a lot of sense.

And then keep going. Right. Well, but there are just that instinct was like very confusing to me. Also, David, to your point, like in that system where I'm the assistant working with somebody, odds are overwhelmingly good that we share an Uber account, that your picture is going to be there somewhere, that you're an authorized user, that it's going to pop up on your phone to tell you where to go. So like these these systems exist that I know what terminal you're at and have a way to tell people what term like. Right.

And there's a shared universe of information that exists in that world that does not exist in my friend Molly is flying into JFK. Right. And so, but in all of this, okay, now I have a series of- This super sounds like you're about to do a drug deal, by the way. Every time you say my friend Molly is- My friend Molly. That was, I forget who it was, and I'm sorry, but somebody in our Slack was like, this definitely ends with just a bag of drugs being delivered to your restaurant. This is starting to come into focus. All right.

But so it raises all these questions, right? Like, OK, where at JFK? JFK is an enormous airport with lots of terminals and lots of different pickup points at each of those terminals. How is it going to figure that out? How is it going to tell the Uber driver? And then how is it going to communicate that information to Molly, who is completely looped out of this whole set of information? We need to normalize just doing really basic tasks yourself. Just click the button. In the demo, it was like, I booked a car to pick up your friend Molly at JFK.

And at no point, and I think the next command was like text Molly this information. Right. But like, I'm assuming some of our listeners have never landed at JFK. It is a huge, sprawling, ridiculous airport.

And its Uber pickup situation is among the worst, I believe, in the world. Yeah, it's very bad. Yeah. Second to LA. Yeah. Like LA is like you're going to a different city to get on a Uber. Have you thought about standing in a parking lot six miles away from the airport? Like that's LA. JFK is almost as bad. I just landed back at JFK and I had to get on a train to another terminal to walk up a flight of stairs to go to another weird parking lot. And no one was happy about that. The Uber driver was like, I went to the first terminal.

And I was like, the app is, it's all bad. Yeah. And the idea that Alexa collapsed that to JFK. Right. Pato said all of the demos are real. I'm sure in some universe it just picked the first result for JFK in the Uber app and it was at the cargo terminal or something. The way that that ends is there is an Uber circling JFK endlessly looking for your friend Mike. Powering down the runways. Who I would point out, don't.

does not have access to your Uber account because you don't share an Uber account with your friend Molly, because why would you do that? And so your friend Molly actually has no way to contact this Uber driver. So actually what you've done is you've invented a more complicated situation to solve than if you had just done it yourself. And I just want to point out, by the way, this is the simplest case of the integration where everything happened with APIs. Yeah. Right. Like Uber has APIs that are exposed to Amazon in this way. Yeah.

the open table has APIs that are supposed to Amazon this way. The next one where it was slightly more agentic was I, to me is like the, where it all starts to fall apart. Right. Because the Uber case you can solve.

You can solve it, right? Molly can send you some Uber access code or give you access to her account. It's also the kind of thing you're never going to do. And in the real case where it's like book me an Uber to go to the airport, perfectly solvable problem. Like that is a thing that will work. Yeah.

Again, normalize doing basic things yourself. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. If Molly were just to get off and be like, Alexa, I'm at Terminal 5. Can you get me an Uber to this restaurant? Like that is that is actually a thing that every step of the way is a solvable problem for AI. Yeah, especially if you have access to Uber. The problem, I'll talk about the agentic one because I'm more curious about how they will solve some of those problems. The problem is that, you know, who would also love that deal is Lyft.

Right. And so you're saying book me an Uber and that means one thing. But if you say book me a car now, Amazon gets to pick what service or it gets to. And this is what they really don't want to have happen. It gets to go look at both services and say the Lyft is $5 cheaper than the Uber.

do you want me to book you the lift and like i do that on my phone right now and the apps can't stop me but there's nothing stopping uber from saying amazon we want to be exclusive here right and i i always call this the doordash problem like these service writers get commodified in these interfaces and there's no incentive for them to participate unless amazon pays them money and then now we start making deals that prevent you from competing right like you just see this

It's really fascinating. It's really interesting. It's what everybody wants to have like a Butler to booking cars for them left and right. And then actually making it work requires a bunch of companies to basically take themselves out of the loop. And it's unclear right now as to why, if you're like, order me a sandwich, I'm

And DoorDash never gets to show you an ad or upsell you on fries or get you to sign up for DoorDash Plus or whatever they call it. Why would they pay part of it? Why would they do it? Right. Because their margins are just crushed and now they're just a commodity provider of sandwiches. Yep. Next to whoever else. And I just don't know why they'll do it. We'll see. I don't know. But if you then get to be the exclusive commodity provider of sandwiches, that's a pretty good business.

For one company, it's a pretty good business. It's a great business for one company that has no growth potential. Right. Yeah. Like you will be forever is only as big as the sandwich market inside of the Amazon Alexa app. Yep. Maybe that's all you aspire to. And that's fine, David. Listen, yeah, I have goals. The harder one was when they were like, my dishwasher, my stove is broken. Find me a repair person for my Miele appliance.

meal appliances by the way very expensive very expensive to fix so this is a perfect only amazon executives have this specific problem kind of demo and it went on to a website called thumbtack which like has a list of repair people just like angie's list or any of these other billion websites are like this and i'm sitting there watching that demo and it did it right it clicked around the website it found a service provider with some reviews it said they're going to come and eat in the morning at the end and i was

And I was like, that's great because now they don't have to use those websites. And then the reality of all of those websites is you go on there to find a plumber or a repair person for your dishwasher or whoever, and they don't give a shit about those websites. And they have not actually handed their business over to Thumbtack and let Thumbtack run their schedule or their billing or their customer relationships. They've just listed themselves there because they want to be in some SEO result for people searching for repairmen.

And then you call and they run their own business. And it's like, oh, Amazon depends on that whole ecosystem actually working. Right. And like, there's nothing Alexa can do about the fact that it mostly doesn't work. Like if you go on some of these websites, like sometimes, yes, the house painter comes and they actually let those kinds of middlemen services run their business. But for the most part,

They're like, I don't want anything to do. It's like, I want you to pay me in cash under the table is like the end result. And it's specifically because all of those businesses have been

Chopped off at the knees by middleman after middleman after middleman after middleman. And so, I mean, you're starting to see this with restaurants and stuff in the DoorDash universe where they're just like, no, like I will deliver my own food by paying a high teenager to drive it to your house because that is actually a business I can afford. And so like all this stuff has been so centralized that it's actually broken for the businesses themselves and they're starting to run away from it.

But because it has been so centralized, and this is the bet that Amazon and everybody else is making, it's really hard to decentralize it because now everybody is used to being on those platforms. And so like, if you're Uber Eats or DoorDash, if you're a restaurant now, you have to make the bet that people will go find my restaurant rather than just pick the next best thing on the platform. And...

I think how that shakes out remains to be seen, but like it's pretty clear which one of those things Alexa is betting on, which is that platform convenience, which you can make even more convenient by abstracting it all the way to order me a pizza or find me a repairman will outweigh actually having successful businesses on the other side. Yeah. And I think this is just like

This is the problem. Like, I should just write a piece called The DoorDash Problem. Like, why would you want to run the pipes between you and the sandwich in a world where that is becoming the least differentiated part of the entire experience? Yeah. Right? If you run...

Thumbtack. And I'm sorry if there's like a, we have a bunch of listeners who work at Thumbtack. I mean, I'm, I'm proud of you. Uh, and that's, you've done a good job every day. Another victory. Um, but like what, what about Thumbtack is making it better on both sides of that equation that isn't going to just get completely erased by the fact that Alexa is just clicking around your website for you. Great. Like someone will figure that out. And that's like, so that's the hardest stuff that they demoed. It's not rolling out at first.

They're going to roll that over time. What is rolling out first on the Echo Show devices is like an even harder problem, which is we're going to automate your smart home. And it's like, oh, like no part of this is easy. Is that a harder problem? So Panos told me, I mean, someone decoder on Monday, he's like the Alexa smart home ecosystem was already so good that everything we demoed required no new code.

Right. Alexa plus could just like push all the buttons and twist all the knobs any way it wanted to and make its own routines because that stuff has just been ready to go for so long. So they, yes, I think they think it's good. What I mean by it's harder is you buy this new device, you plop it down in your kitchen and then now you have a smart home. That's the promise. But the reality is you've got to add everything to your Alexa smart home system. Yes. All those cloud accounts have to sync.

some stuff you're controlling in an app on your iPhone, another thing you're right. Like you actually have to still do the setup.

to make the magic happen and nothing about the setup has gotten particularly easier here. And you need to decide where you want to set it up on. And then you need to decide where your automations and routines live. Right. If that's going to be Amazon forever. Yeah. Amazon, are they on Google Home? Are they on the manufacturer's website? There's like five different places that you could potentially set up all of these devices. David, are you a smart home guy? Minimally. I live in a Brooklyn basement. What do you have?

I pretty much completely put everything on HomeKit, I guess. I guess it's HomeKit. Yeah. Because I have Eve stuff. But it is only Eve smart plugs and smart blinds.

I got them because of Matter. Famously does not really work, which is cool. But at least it's all in the same thing. But I also do have a singular Google Home Hub Mini that I was dreaming of being able to tell to make my blinds go up and down. Famously still does not work. Yeah.

This is the, like, what a perfect smart home scenario where you're like, okay, I bought all the pieces. Yeah. And each of the things does the things that are required for this puzzle to fit together. And yet it doesn't for some unknowable technical reason that will never ever get solved. I set up a routine that automates my blinds. That's all that I really care about. And then I have a widget on my phone that turns my lights on and off. And I really don't care to make it more automated than that. I think that's good. And truthfully, I think, like,

A, I think that is most people's smart home desire, right? Like I want one thing to happen when I do another thing is I genuinely believe the extent of most people's smart home wishes. And that's also a thing that something like Alexa Plus is well positioned to do pretty well because...

What these routines and things have is a massive user interface problem. It's the same thing like I rail on Apple shortcuts all the time. And it's like it's this massively powerful thing buried behind what amounts to like a scripting language. And you need to go through a series of really complicated like if then statements. So to be able to just say to this system, hey, every time I turn off my alarm clock, turn the lights on in the bathroom. It's like that's actually a thing that a system requires.

like an LLM is well positioned to understand what that means. And then if Amazon has done as good a job as Panos is saying, which I think it reasonably probably has of understanding all of those endpoints, then,

It can actually put all of that together in a way that strikes me as like it would work. And then I'm just at a point where all I have to do is learn how to explain what I want rather than like program it in detail in the Alexa app. But so even that explain what I want, you know, their examples were come up with a bedtime routine. And it was like Alexa just was like, I don't know, I'm going to play some music. I'm going to turn off these lights. I'm going to dim these other lights.

Call it a bedtime routine. I really don't think that's a real use case. This is one of the things that drives me the craziest about all of these things is it's like, what, like, it's... I still have this...

picture on my desktop for some reason from for like years of this Apple event from years ago. I think it was an iPad launch where they had this picture. They were showing like the lifestyle photos they always show. And it was it was a guy sitting in like the crook of two beams on the Brooklyn Bridge sketching on his iPad. And I was just like, no one does this. Like, talk about your product. You didn't do that when you lived in New York? No.

I did it the once and they took my picture and they paid me for it. And then I went home. But it's just like all of these things is like I spend a lot of time wondering if part of the problem here is that no one actually understands what any regular human would ever want to do with these products. Because the idea that I'm going to come home one day and be like, Alexa,

Make up a bedtime routine. I'm so sorry to everybody who's hearing us say Alexa over and over, by the way. Wait, you never just ask a computer to make it nice when you're sleepy? No. Yeah. Never. And no one is going to. And the idea that I'm going to ask it to and then I'm going to live with what it creates for me for the rest of my life is just preposterous. And so I hate this stuff now because it's like, show me this product as it's going to actually work for people instead of like a fake thing that seems vaguely impressive until you poke at it at all. Yeah.

Yeah, it seems to me that most of these companies extrapolate this stuff to the furthest degree where they're like, how can we reduce as much friction as possible between the user and doing what they want to do? And they just forget that people don't want to just give up complete control of these systems. The famous book me a travel itinerary and book my plane and book my hotel. Nobody wants to do that. And yet every company uses it as their example. Luckily, Amazon did not actually

have them book the itinerary. They just made the itinerary, which is better. That is better. I agree. I like that. But still, that is like the extrapolated version of that, right? Like nobody, even in the home, nobody wants you to

bedtime routine. I don't know what it's going to be. Let's just find out. If that's going to be the case, let me like test five of them out and then I will pick. People don't actually want to just give up complete control to a system like this, especially when it's completely random. You don't know what it's going to be. Totally. Well, so I have many things to say. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to everyone. One, I think the hard part here is not the reduction of friction. It's letting people know they can do this stuff at all.

And that I think requires, but does anyone want to? Yes. To some, to some broad approximation, just have stuff happen is a thing people want. Like when I get home, turn on the lights is nice. Yeah.

It's just nice. And I am convinced that like my family does not know how lights turn on or off anymore because many lights in our house just turn on or off throughout the day. Interesting. Like we have hue lights in our kitchen and they're in adaptive mode. So they just go from cool in the morning to warm at night. Mm-hmm.

I think this is the coolest shit in the world. No, that's great. Someday Max is going to go to college and like call you from her dorm room being like, why is it dark? So, uh, Jen Tui told us that her kids, her teenage children don't know how to use house keys. Oh my God. What?

Which is incredible. We're ruining future generations, Nealey. So I got a text from Becky and she was like, the kitchen is the wrong color. And I was like, this is victory. I'm getting divorced now, but this is victory. The kitchen is the wrong color. Like the lights are warm in the morning. And she's like, why is it so orange in here? And I was like, I've won and I've also lost in like equal measure. So it's true that people like it when things just sort of like happen the right way at the right time. And I think most people cannot express that

in structured if then statements. Right. Like if I come home between these times, turn on lights when garage opens is,

people do not speak that way. And going through every single little thing in your home and having to create an if-then statement is just really tedious. But you can say, when I get home, turn the lights on, and Alexa figures out how to script that for you. That, I think, is very powerful. The jump is getting people to even understand that this is now a thing you can ask for, and then delivering it

In a way that is consistently good enough that they, they tell their friends about it. And then their friends buy Alexa and a bunch of smart lights. And like, I don't know about any of that.

Right. Like the comparison that I have to that is like, I keep talking, I always talk about the local news test. Okay. Like what piece of technology will like break through on the local news. And like the first iPhone was like, look at this. You could pinch to zoom. And like, that was all you needed. And then they sold all the iPhones. This one's like, here's what you do. You buy this weird screen. It can talk to you like a person and tell you stories. Also, you need to change all of the light bulbs in your house. And it's like, well, this is just, what are we doing? And to your point, you know what that thing was? The first time around with Alexa was music.

You can have it play music just by asking for it was like that was that was the breakthrough. Yeah. And I think everybody has wanted the smart home to be that next thing. And it hasn't been. But but so now the question is, like, if you've made it easier to the point where you can just do this as quickly as asking for it, like maybe it becomes that thing. Yeah. And I do think there are an awful lot of people out there who have bought Govee light strips before.

or weird smart bulbs. There's an awful lot of smart locks out there. Like some of this stuff is ready to go and to be linked together in automations like this. And I, like, you know, AI is good at coding. And like, really what we're talking about is like, write a little script for me. Mm-hmm.

Okay. Like, some of this all clicks together, but I'm still just at, like, you have to get people to even want it. I also, I cannot stop thinking about how important cameras are to all of this and how many feelings this is going to make people feel about cameras. Like, one of the demos was being able to ask...

If somebody had walked the dog recently, I think, and it'll actually like comb back through your security camera data to see. Oh, no, actually, I know how that one works. There's another demo that was scarier from the camera sense. Oh, OK. Tell me more. You were there. I wasn't there. Let me know. Someone has walked the dog recently is that just Amazon owns a bunch of stuff, including ring. So if you have ring cameras today without any of this Alexa stuff.

It will detect pets. It will detect people. It will detect packages. That's a service that you have to get from Ring as part of the Ring service. But that's just a Ring video search product that Alexa as an API can just call.

So that wasn't Alexa doing any of that. That was just Ring. Okay. It was just being expressed through the Echo Show. Still a little creepy how accessible you've made the archive of that recording. But sure, fair enough. What was the other demo? It's the same accessibleness as it is in the Ring app today. Sure. Right. Especially because they already owned it.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, that's fair. Like the problems with ring accessibility are like, and then they send it to the cops. Like that's a different, right. There is that. But like inside of your ring archive, like it gets indexed and searchable. The one you're thinking about, um, I believe is when you see my daughter play this music and that one is very creepy to me. Ooh, that is creepy. I don't like that at all. Yep. And that thing is like, again, so much of what we're describing is,

works way better if you have cameras if you have lots of cameras that do lots of things really convincingly like the uh play music or turn on the lights when i get home thing like

You can do that a bunch of ways, but the actual cleanest and most reliable way to do that, to know that it's you coming home, is cameras. And this system in general, A, requires a vast amount of data to really work. And one of the things that Panos talked about a bunch and that Amazon is making very clear is like, it's going to ask and remember a lot of information about you. You can forward emails, you can send... Like,

Alexa would like to know every single thing that happens to you all the time, always, everywhere, all the time. And like, on the one hand, fine, Google has that data anyway, just by virtue of like, we are all alive. But Amazon wants it too. And it wants your camera data. And the more data you give it, the better this system will be. And that linear scale is going to be deeply fascinating to see people try to walk through. It's just so funny because I can tell that you have not tried to set up any smart home automations.

Do you know what the best way to know that your home is? Amazon has no access to it. It's when your fucking phone connects to your Wi-Fi network. Amazon owns Euro, so sure they do. Oh, that's interesting.

But that's like too creepy. It's like one step too creepy. But like, that is how a bunch of home kit automation. No, you're right. That's a good point. Right. So like, um, when you do, if you've ever set up a home kit automation, right, there's run this when no one's home or just I'm home or anyone is home. And all it's looking for is whether various devices signed in iCloud or on your network, you can do, I think there's a little bit of geo fencing in there, but it's, it's the network connection that like tells you your home. Um, and yeah,

It's funny because the other day my wife and I were both not home and Max came home and none of the lights turned on because she doesn't have an iCloud device. She doesn't know how to turn the lights on. So she turned on the lights, but they were on. I would say wrong. Max is just sitting in the dark. I was like, why are all the lights wrong is actually what I said. She's like, now I need an iPhone. Yeah, basically. But it's really interesting to think, oh, they'll link Eero into this and know like network states of devices. Yeah.

There's a lot they can do. Was this compelling to you? Yeah, in some ways. I mean, the fact that the Echoes were sort of the first ways that people interacted with any form of voice-based AI, I think was interesting to me because Amazon was so early to that and then they were so late to everything else. And so this like dream of my mother can set up something and come home and start talking to her smart speaker and it actually does things instead of me having to teach her

voice lessons or like specific lessons on how to talk to the AI.

is a big thing. The automations, if they work, is going to be the giant question. I would love it if you could ask it to have an automation and then it just randomly, it creates a bunch that you can pick from. Yeah. Because I just, I don't know. I understand some people probably just want things to be made for them and just be developed. But having no say in any of the development of these things and just letting it do things for you

Just feels very sketch, almost as sketch as the pickup my friend from JFK. I don't know if it will work. This is the thing. That's one reason that I think pushing really hard towards screen devices is really smart for Amazon because it just lets it do that kind of stuff where it's going to be able to be like, hey, here's the thing I was going to do.

make sure this is make sure we're cool. Like, is this is this what you want? Is this your grocery order? Like, do you want this or this? Like, it's the kind of sort of quick back and forth. Did they show any of that?

Yes. They did. The grocery demo in particular one was like so far from what anyone would ever do, but also the coolest one. Yeah. So they were like, go to Amazon Fresh. I want to do this recipe. Here's ingest, like I want to make these cookies and start filling it out. And then he was talking to it while he was like clicking quantities on the screen. Yeah. And so he was adjusting one row of data while it was like adding this kind of thing. And it was just like very cool.

Cool, like multimodal. Are people going to do that? I don't I have no. It's a big question. Gen 2A will and no one else. Yeah. But that is the kind of interaction that if you can get it makes all of this stuff work better. Right. Because it's like the first time you ask a question and you get like a 600 word long spoken answer. You're like, this is nothing.

I hate this. That's the part that it needs to fix. Yeah. But then it's and this is the thing I've always gotten a kick out of this in like sci fi and stuff like they always just gravitate towards. Let me show you. Right. And then it's like, put it, put it on a screen and I can look at it, which is like better movie making than listening to something talk for four minutes, but it's also just better user experience. It's like, do you want this or this? And I don't have to show them or I don't have to read them to you. I can show them to you.

Right. Famously, the Google Home minis that every carrier on the planet throws 15 of you at at Christmas. Every single time you ask it, what's the weather or turn the light on? It goes, just so you know, in the morning, we can also do this. Just ask me what to do every single time. Every time. And I just want, OK, being, you know, that's it. Or just turn the light on. What if you didn't talk? And then I knew it worked because the light was on. What if you didn't talk? Yeah, that's a visual cue. I think as long as you have some sort of cue.

which is like why the screen is important, especially when you're having it do these tasks that you cannot see because they're APIs or because they're like agentic or whatever.

Oh, this is one of the coolest parts of the whole thing. They call them Alexicons. I do like that. So the little blue bar on the bottom of the screen turns into like line animations. Pano told me that he wants there to be like 200, but right now there's 33 because he's approving all of them individually. Okay. Which is great. I love it. That's good. They're very cute. And then Alexa just sort of picks whatever kind it wants. Like it turns into like a little line drawing of music notes or like

a picture of. If it thinks it's arguing with you, it shows you a ping pong paddle going back and forth. I don't want to argue with my computer. All this is great. I hate that I really like that, but I really like that. It was easily the cutest part of the whole thing. They're trying to show these interactions. Look, we've got to get this stuff, like I said, but you're listening to this on what, Friday? Or sometime after that? On Tuesday, Pond House will be on the Coder. You'll hear even more about

the new Alexa and how it works. There's a bunch of questions about what models it's using, when, how they're managing all that cost. Anthropic is involved. Yeah. Um, they're a major investor in, right? Yeah. They're a major investor and they built their own model called Nova, which they're using. Does anyone know anything about the rumor is that they were trying to build this for a long time and it was delayed. Yeah. I remember that. And then they had Anthropic sweep in to help them. And we should say, we should take a break. We've been talking about this for way too long, but, uh,

All evidence and reporting so far suggests that Alexa Plus is super late and sucks. And so this thing is not shipping until at least several weeks from now. We've seen a few demos that Amazon did as I wasn't at the event, but everything I understand is it was all super on rails. It's all canned. So like, I actually think the big picture ideas here from Amazon are both really ambitious and pretty close to right and

If you made me bet right now, I would say I bet it's not any good. Yeah. Yeah. But I sincerely hope I'm wrong and we will see. I'm very curious. Again, to underline what David is saying, all of the demos were canned. Yeah. We were not allowed to just like freely talk to this thing. So who knows? And for months, like I would also remind you that this thing launched the first time 18 months ago. And Dave Limp-

We've had a whole regime change on this team since this thing launched the first time. Amazon has been talking about this for a long time and for, I mean, a year. The reporting and everything we've been hearing has been that this thing is not very good and it has been massively delayed and...

I think there is an argument to be made that Amazon is launching this now because it had to, not because it's ready. And I hope I'm wrong. And I'm very curious to try this thing. But like, what is the primary pressure, do you think? Like, who are they worried about coming after them? Because Google is not doing anything agentic right now. Google Smart Home is still Google Assistant, which is the artist formerly known as, you know, and it's not really doing anything. I think everybody's still worried about Cheshire Pity.

If you find yourself talking to advanced voice mode instead of Alexa, you're not switching back. Yeah. And Operator is out there. Google is doing stuff. Like, Project Mariner is real. Operator is not out there. Operator is out there in the way that, like, a baby goat is out there just, like, stumbling over shit. Like, it doesn't matter. I used Operator today. You know what I can't use today is Alexa. Yeah, what did you use it for? I used it as a test to see if it could buy me something on Amazon, and it didn't.

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Apple's way of doing agentic stuff is going to be app intense with Siri on the phone. It has perfect access to all those apps. Those developers can get strong-armed into playing ball. Apple's very good at that in particular. Apple's going to do some iPad on a robot arm in your house, right? That is true. There's a lot there that is going to be difficult. Can Apple actually pull any of that off? We don't know. Siri is getting worse by the day somehow. I think they just needed to...

put the stake in the ground and say, actually, we put AI capabilities into Alexa in the way that everybody wanted us to. And Panos has said this to us before, Nili, but I suspect probably said it to you on Decoder too, is like, they see this as like...

a full-on platform shift. Oh, yeah. He very much said that in the most intense, panos way. There is a sense now that missing this would be like missing mobile 15 years ago, right? In the sense that it crowned a generation of trillion-dollar companies and killed everybody else. And there is, right or wrong, real belief in the industry that this is that moment again. And there is a sense that you cannot afford to be late

at all because A, your investors will kill you for it and B, you'll just miss the future. And I think for Amazon, which is

deep down this hole of we have to make Alexa work, like it's now or never. And I think they feel that. We haven't actually mentioned the most important part, which is Alexa Plus is $20 a month or it is free with Amazon Prime, which notably costs $15 a month. It's free with Prime. Like the $20 a month is such a fake price. It drives me nuts. Like it is cheaper to get Prime and everything else. Yeah. Then like for $5 less, you can get everything else on Prime, which is obviously what Amazon does.

And the sort of overlap of like Alexa owners and prime customers is like a hundred percent. Right. So they're just what, and this is where we started. I use my Echo to buy exclusively from Walmart. It's like an amazing. But they're basic. They have the big, they have the advantage. Yeah. No one else has a distribution advantage like Amazon has. Yeah.

Maybe Google, but they're Google. Yeah. I mean, I think they just want that recurring revenue. It's like they've got 180 million users in the United States on Prime. They've got 200 worldwide, 200 million. They just need to keep growing that number because it accelerated very fast at first. It's starting to peter off, even though it's still one of the most popular services in the world. Yeah.

I don't know who the user is that is like, I don't have Prime, but I want Alexa LLM. Who is who are you? I don't know who you are. Let us know. Maybe the like really hardcore AI heads that just want to try everything. But I also don't know why they wouldn't have Prime.

We'll find out, I guess, eventually. Yeah. But if anyone can do it, it's Amazon because they have scale. If anyone can make the platform shift happen. Yeah. Because they already have the microphones in everybody's house. Yeah. And they own that whole platform tip to tip. It was probably a way for them to say it's $20 because everyone else is $20. And in that way, they're kind of saying we're just as good in every way. But you can get it if you have Prime for cheaper. Yeah.

Well, I'm excited to see just how chaotic it is.

We'll see. Again, next week on Decoder, Panos answers a bunch more questions in classically intense Panos, by the way. It was a fun conversation. Also, we finally get to do the assistant battles between all of the major assistants. Well, when Siri is actually out. So, never. I don't think Siri counts as a major assistant anymore. It's rough. Yeah. All right. We've got to take a break. We're going to come back, and we're going to keep talking on Siri. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.

It's time to review the highlights. I'm joined by my co-anchor, Snoop. Hey, what up, dog? Snoop, number one, has to be getting iPhone 16 with Apple Intelligence at T-Mobile. Yeah, you should hustle down at T-Mobile like a dog chasing a squirrel, chasing a nut. Number two, at T-Mobile, families can switch and save 20% on plans plus streaming services versus the other big guys.

What a deal. Y'all giving it away too fast, T-Mobile. Slow down. Head to T-Mobile.com and get iPhone 16 on them. Yeah, you can save on wireless and streaming versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch. Apple intelligence requires iOS 18.1 or later. All right, we're back to Siri Dunks, the new podcast. Guess what I asked Siri to do today and they couldn't do. Oh, no. That's the whole show.

It's just us listing things we asked Siri to do that it cannot do. It would be the longest Vergecast episode in history. That it used to be able to do and can no longer do. I asked it how many days until something the other day, and it was like, do you want me to ask ChatGPT? It's rough. And ChatGPT famously is not good at math. Yeah. I was like, this is the most powerful phone in history. Nice. Speaking of iPhones, we should probably talk about the iPhone 16E at some point, but

But actually, I want to talk about the Sigma BF, this camera. I just want to say it's very telling that the iPhone 16E is handily the second most interesting gadget that came out this week, which in part says something about... I would say third. I just think we're like legally obligated to feel like there was a new iPhone. You're right. It is at least third. It might be fourth given some of the framework stuff, but it's certainly not first. And I think Sigma is clearly first. My proposed headline for Allison's review was no one should care about this phone. Yeah.

They didn't go with it. She did go with it's fine and give it a seven, which is the most seven headline in the history of headlines. Yep. I still don't know who's going to buy this thing.

So what's going on here? With the camera or the phone? Oh, well, I still don't know who's going to buy this thing. It actually applies to both. Oh, that's true. That is true. That is true. Let's start with the camera because it's vastly more interesting than the iPhone. And we can come back to the iPhone. Sigma BF is just a beautiful camera. Right. And it seems like no one should buy it.

Yeah, there's a new camera from Sigma. It is a Japanese camera brand that has made famously extremely weird cameras. They have done very weird things with sensors. They made something called a foveon sensor, which has different pixels on the color filter array on the same pixel. You get better quality. They did not do that with this camera because they got rid of it a while ago. And everyone is sad about that.

Sigma stuff is generally pretty good, right? Like it's weird, but they make good cameras, right? Is my impression? They're weird. They're good. They are part of the L-Mount Alliance, which Panasonic and Leica are also part of. So that's nice. Weirdly enough, you don't really see them on the street almost ever, mostly because they're so weird. And I think that people just go when you're going hiking in Utah, you see 100 million of the cheapest Canon camera and the cheapest Nikon camera.

Sigma always does weird stuff. That's kind of their angle. They released a camera this week called the BF does not stand for boyfriend or best friend. It stands for beautiful foolishness. Really? Really, really love this. So this is kind of like when someone says, I know that this is stupid, but and in that way, it's very difficult to critique. You know what I mean?

It's like, there are many things about this camera that I'm like, but they're like, we know that it's dumb. Here it is anyway. And you have to respect that in a way, right? So this is a full frame, 24 megapixel camera. They tried to remove as many buttons as physically possible. It is machined out of a block of aluminum. They can make nine per day. So it's not a high yield kit, which not that many people are going to buy it anyway. So that's probably fine.

Famously, Fujifilm can only make 15,000 X106s per week, and that still was not enough because they had over a million pre-orders in China alone on the first day. Wow. So this camera, I don't even know to say what it looks like. It is just a small block of aluminum in a weird way. It has a...

LCD screen on the back that does not tilt. This is actually my only complaint about this camera. That it has no EVF? No, the screen doesn't tilt. Oh, okay. Well, I don't... And I have a very specific reason why. I'm like, I love you. I'm buying this camera. I'm mad that the screen doesn't tilt. Yeah. It's a very, very minor complaint in the scheme of things. I don't think it's that minor. Yeah. I think screens should tilt even though they break easier. Yeah. It has no...

That is also horrible, in my opinion. I feel nothing about this. Especially for a $2,000 camera. The number of people who can afford that camera, want to buy that camera, and have strong visceral feelings about how far away from your eye you should hold your camera. Yeah. It's just one group of people. It's just that with no articulating viewfinder and no EVF or OVF,

You can only do this. Yep. And this is why I think the screen should tilt. Yeah. That's it. Any other angle than right in front of you. You know what I mean? It has this knurled kind of jog wheel on the back that you're supposed to do most of the stuff through. It has a play button. It has a menu button for going to the menus. The menu looks...

Not great. Not great. Yeah. You see Seb from Halide was looking at this interface is why I make camera apps. Yeah. It's not great. Has an extra little screen that tells you like the aperture and things like that. Even though I just I hate when you hide the aperture behind a sub menu. It's horrible for cameras. I don't know. I think that the biggest reason that people really like this camera is because it is

Super basic. It is just a square of aluminum with a couple little knurled parts. Now, let me tell you why people like this camera.

People like this camera because it is sexy as hell and I want it so bad. Yeah. This to me is like, imagine a cave painting of a camera. You go back like 8,000 years and it's like, oh, someone just drew a camera and this is the first camera that anyone ever imagined. That's this camera and I love it for that. Yeah. I will say the fact that it doesn't have a memory card slot and it has a built-in SSD is like, oh...

This thing has a shelf life. Oh, yeah. You're either going to have to get it serviced, which I'm not really sure how they're going to get inside of it when it's a solid block of aluminum without taking a lot of stuff off of it, or you're just going to have to get a new one. But

Hopefully it doesn't die before, you know, memory cards famously die a lot. Yeah. But at least you can put a new memory card in. So here's my argument in favor of this, except for the tilting screen, which I agree is a huge problem. Okay. Um, I, again, cause I mostly take pictures of a six year old who is notably down here. Right. So I'm always shooting at like hip height, which means I want to tilt the screen up. Yeah. That's it. That's like, I need to solve that problem. This camera doesn't solve that problem. It is sexy as hell and I do want it. Um, but.

I think it is like well beyond time for a camera manufacturer to get rid of like camera controls as we know them. Like as a person who mostly shoots an ancient Nikon D7500, still the greatest hands-on camera ever made. Um,

it's like fine. And there's just a million buttons on it. And I know what they all do. And the reason I've never upgraded that camera is because I know where all those buttons are and I know what they all do. Right. And that's, it's cool. Like I like having that relationship with the camera and I've got most of them set.

So I never have to touch them again. I just know where they are. And the reality is if I could just set them and then set this one dial to mostly ever control shutter speed, I'd be fine. Yeah. Right. Or like exposure compensation. The only problem with that approach is you want that camera, but to be like the...

size and quality of like a Sony RX100. Right? Like give me all of what you just described, a basically designed to shoot in auto, super simple, all in one piece, more or less unbreakable thing.

That is like a really fun, cool point and shoot. And I think it'd be gangbusters. I'd be all over that thing. You're kind of describing X100 in a few ways. That's why people love them. But this one to me, I just like the idea that Sigma is like, we have no history of Nikon F-series SLRs to honor. That's fair. Like, screw it. We're just changing how the controls work. Have you seen the old Sigma cameras?

Because they are much weirder than this. Yes. They're really, really weird. It's funny because Sigma started out as like a lens brand and they were like, screw it, we can do whatever we want. It would be a lot more compelling in that way you just described, Nilay, if the menu was better. Yeah. Here's a really usable thing unless you have to do anything. Have

Have you guys driven the EQS, the new one, the electric one? Yes. It's like being in a Korean nightclub on wheels. Yeah. I don't know how else to describe it. But you've used the infotainment system, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's like Windows 95. Yeah. No one has good ideas about software design. No. And, like, the fact that most products are now software means that we live in, like, a world of crime. Yeah.

But yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah. It's pretty and I just want it on my shelf. I understand. I want to put a $2,000 knickknack on my shelf. Also, the fact that it is removable lenses means that it will never actually be as small as it looks. That's true. But this is also like, David, I feel like we're in such an era where like the camera is...

is both a tool and an accessory, right? And this is like, this is the X100 story, right? Where like a lot of people who bought X100s bought them not to shoot with them, but to be shot shooting with them. Like a Leica. Yeah, it's like, it's a creator camera because I want you to see me using it. And I, it's like, it's a fashion accessory as much as anything. And I feel like this is Sigma just kind of acknowledging the same thing. And they're like, yeah, you'll take some pictures with this. But,

but it's also going to look cool as hell. And that's like 60% of the, I was thinking about that in a lot of ways because the M 11 is over $9,000 for the body. This is 2000. So there you go. Think of the savings, much more affordable, looks very beautiful. People will ask you, what is that?

It shoots about two and a half hours of video if you want to do the highest quality video and then you have to offload it. I do like this idea of offloading everything onto your computer from the USB-C port and not having to worry about an SD card at all because...

SD cards are sort of like, I don't know, Bluetooth standards or Wi-Fi standards where you got to read the little three or the nine on it. And there's no five for some reason. And you just have to decide what is the speed and the fact that you can just plug it into USB-C port and then into your computer. Very nice. But, you know, that comes with its tradeoffs. It's not great that this conversation has inspired me to start searching for an X100. Yeah.

Good luck. I mean, they're very hard to find. I can pay a $700 premium for one right now. Yeah. Yeah. Or you could get the five, which is not that different. But, you know, let's just wrap up the show. I've got some stuff. He looks busy. All right. Let's talk about the iPhone briefly. Can I say one more thing? Yeah, of course. The LCD has a sub, like a sub bezel. And I just want to acknowledge that. Yeah.

None of the press photos show the LCD on. Well, it doesn't show it on, but it shows the sub bezel, which is not something Apple would have done. I just want to acknowledge that. I'm buying all the cameras. Oh, no, it's bad. You're right. I just looked and you're right. How does that make you feel? Do you not want it anymore? Have you bought an RX100 to take pictures of your kid yet? No. This is the single greatest purchase you can make if you're a parent. It's the right choice. Everyone's always happy with the photos. No one's ever sad. Yeah. The screen tilts.

Yeah. They're, they're, I would, I would not say they're indestructible. They're very destructible, but like they're tough enough, you know? Yeah. You don't have to worry about interchangeable lenses. Yeah. They're great. But like they are in fact destructible. Like you get some dust near that lens mechanism. You don't have a hard 100 anymore. It's all over. Okay. I think all these cameras are ultimately to David's point,

kind of competing with the concept of the accessory kind of well it's the rx100 it solves the most problems in that zone yeah and it's it's very hard to solve the pro like all the problems better than that camera yeah i also want to acknowledge that they made an rx1 a long time ago which was full frame and they just never updated it yeah and it's been around for a long time and they could be dominating this space but they decide not to i've loved

that camera. Yeah, it was great. Holy crap, I loved the RX one. It was great. It was fantastic. And it hasn't been updated in like over five years. So I don't really know what they're doing. No, Leica is like the only one right now that makes a full frame fixed lens camera. Weird. Yeah, and it costs $6,000 and no one can afford it. See, the Sigma's cheap, man. What are we doing here? You're getting one. It's an impulse purchase. We did call one in for review.

So we did not go on the influencer trip to Japan that everyone else went on because we have this annoying ethics policy. But we did ask for a review unit. I think someone's getting it. Yeah, well, they can make nine a day. So presumably we'll get it in 2034. We'll get one. It'll be awesome. Someone on our team is getting one. And then I'm going to look at it with love in my eyes. You know, like cartoons. Yeah.

All right, we should talk about this. It's like amazing how much we want to avoid talking about the iPhone 16E. Yeah. I know we have some Vertex listeners who just totally tune out when we talk about cameras. I was much happier talking about the camera than I'm going to be talking about the iPhone 16E. Never has a phone been so thoroughly, exactly...

what we expected it to be. Oh, that's I was going to say never as a phone been so thoroughly exactly not it. Yeah, it's funny because on social media, usually the few days after a new iPhone comes out, people are trying to justify the reasons why they want to upgrade. I've not seen one thing about this from anybody.

why you should get this necessarily, except for people that are insane. And on the one hand, look, like, this phone is so clearly not meant for those people. And that's fine. That's fair enough. Right? Like, it just, it's, this is...

A thing that Apple, I think, struggles with is that it operates at such scale and with so much attention that everything it launches is ostensibly geared towards everyone everywhere. And this is just so not that. I don't think anyone who is considering a pro phone will ever look twice at this. Like, Nila, your proposed headline, no one should ever have to care about this, I actually think is like,

Very descriptive because this is for people who don't care about their phone. This is like, I want to have a phone. But it's $599. If you're that person, you should buy a used iPhone 15. Or a new iPhone 15. You should buy a used 15 Pro for like the same amount. Right. And you'll get MagSafe and you'll get way better cameras and like you'll just make a happier person. No Apple intelligence, Nilay. That's a plus. I cannot be bothered. Yeah.

To what end? Yeah.

I think Apple really thought Apple intelligence was going to drive a huge cycle. And it was the super cycle. This was the, this was the thing last year. Do you remember this? They were talking about the super cycle of smartphone upgrades because of Apple intelligence. Yeah. And Oh boy, is that not the thing? Well, have you noticed that the billboards have changed? They used to be hello, Apple intelligence. I don't see those anymore at all. Now it's all gen Moji billboards because they know that's what people actually care about. Do they though? It's all I care about. Dude,

Do you? So is this just a phone that can get Genmoji? Is that what we're saying? This is your cheapest Genmoji access? Wait, okay. Hold on. I no longer care about the 16-E, David. I need to know everything about your Genmoji life. Oh, God. What are your use cases for Genmoji? How long do you have? I'm frustrated by Genmoji and the same reason that I'm delighted by Genmoji. Okay. In that it's just like...

They tried to make Genmoji exactly like emoji in every possible way. And in that way, it's very useful for regular people as long as they know where the button is, which it's glowing. So I hope that they know where it is. But they look like Apple emoji because they're trained on that Apple emoji character set. And there just aren't emojis for everything like Unicode. They add three or four a year. Everyone has to vote on them. That's great.

But when you want to make very specific things, you know, like stickers, I think were one of the biggest upgrades to the iPhone in a very long time, or at least to iMessage. Because when you can press and hold on something, make a custom sticker, everyone uses that. People love it. That is cool. Genmoji is like that, but it's more, it's like it abstracts it away a little bit so that it's more usable with people that you do not have that specific relationship with. What was the last Genmoji you made?

We're doing this now. Oh, gosh. All right. I'm going to look right now.

I've never made a Genmoji. Maybe I should buy an iPhone 16. Yeah, like is this in your day-to-day? You're just out here Genmoji-ing up a storm? Somebody's like, do you want to get dinner? And you're like, Genmoji, make me a person eating spaghetti. Wait, is that how you invoke a Genmoji? You have to say Genmoji out loud? Genmoji, Genmoji, Genmoji. I'm not sure if we can put this in the show, but if you just say, if you just Genmoji gun, it will make you a gun.

um cool i just wanted to test that very strange so you're just sending cartoons of guns to you oh uh laughing crying throwing up very good one oh this is your genmoji these are these are genmoji this is this is what i'm saying they mix stickers genmoji and emoji in the same area of the keyboard because they want people to think of them as the exact same thing i will say i like laughing crying throwing up as a genmoji that's pretty good it's

It's quite good. I will send it to you because it is very good. I'm just going to send you some guns. It's just the middle of the night, David. I just wanted to test how many different types of guns it would make. And it's a lot. You could do a pipe. Wait, so. Oh, this one is good. This is the pumpkin and the devil emoji mixed. And I use them for Halloween. That's very good.

I do like that you're just spamming David with like the worst emoji. This is fantastic. That's very good. Uh, so again, to just bring this all the way around, our thesis is that people will buy a $600, not good iPhone to send cartoons of guns.

No, but I have noticed all of the billboards have changed to Genmoji billboards. And I think that they looked at Apple intelligence and before it was just so abstract. Before it was just, hello, Apple intelligence, iPhone 16. Now it's

Genmoji it. That's their whole thing. It has lasted longer than the Apple Intelligence ads. There are more Genmoji ads. They've lasted a longer period of time. It's funny because they started all those ads before you could get Apple Intelligence. And then people got Apple Intelligence and they stopped advertising it. Yeah. I see what you're saying. My experience with Apple Intelligence outside of Genmoji was that I took a script that I had in Apple Notes and I...

did the rewrite feature intending to revert back to the old script because, you know, I was just testing it and then it crashed Apple notes and then I could not revert it to my actual script. And that was my only copy of the script. Um, and that was my mistake. So I just, I don't think people really care about it. But the only true feeling I have about the 16 E is that not having mag safe on it is criminal. It is.

Like almost all of the phone mounts in my house, all of the batteries that I use now, like it's all mag safe all the way down the line in the car. I have one next to the mirror in my bathroom and I just like,

put the phone on the next to that in the morning yeah have it played youtube tv at me that's amazing it's like all that is super fun and interesting and that is the only like really great accessory ecosystem that apple has ever created yeah and they're just like the cheap phone the 600 phone can't have it why are people are now going to go into the apple store they're going to buy an iphone 16e they're going to go over and they're going to look at the magsafe charger because

Because everyone wants that MagSafe wireless charger that is $50. And the Apple employee is either going to say, oh, that doesn't work with your phone, even though it's new. Or they're not going to know that. And then they're going to be like, I don't get this. Like, I have to hold it against my phone and it charges at 7.5 watts. Like, how does this work?

It just seems like a horror. Like, why would you take this out? Yeah, this is the one completely perplexing thing about this phone is MagSafe. Yeah, I actually think you can make a pretty strong case for every other one of the tradeoffs. I think it lands $100 too expensive. Like, I really agree with Allison's takeaway, which is like the idea of we need a cheaper iPhone and we're going to make some sacrifices to get there. I think other than MagSafe, Apple got almost right.

There are like a couple of little things about it, but whatever. Like it's it got it mostly right. But I agree that the MagSafe thing just sucks. And we talked a little bit about this last week and heard from a bunch of people who were like, whatever, just buy a MagSafe case for your phone. And would I bet that Apple is going to sell you some of those? Sure. But like, that's not a solution to the problem. They just get rid of MagSafe altogether and everything's ChiTu and ChiTu ready. That sounds like Apple. Yeah.

I don't know. It's a phone. Let us know if you're the target market for this phone. Who is it? But this is like the weirdest iPhone launch I can remember. Like never has an iPhone come out with such a... Okay. Do you think if this thing were $450, we'd be having a totally different conversation about it?

Yeah. If it was $350. Well, I think that's unreal. That's like unrealistic for what phones cost right now. Like, yeah, I don't know if you've heard of that inflation, Eli. Yeah. And tariffs like is this the first tariff phone? That's the other question. I read Ben Thompson makes the argument that this is the first tariff phone.

But we'll see. I mean, like Tim Cook is, you know, we're going to get to it in the next segment. And it's probably laying around. Tim Cook is just throwing fake numbers at Donald Trump to get out of the tariffs. Smart move. We'll see. And also every, realistically, no one ever buys this phone. Like,

you go to your Verizon store and Verizon's like this one. Yeah. And you just leave and that's the end of that. Did you, did you watch Marquez's review of it by the way? No. He has a skit at the beginning. It's like 90 seconds long and there's, he, one of him plays the employee and one of them plays a customer and,

And the customer is just asking, I want a phone that does exactly this, exactly this. And the employee just gives him everything but the 16E because it just makes no sense. And I just, again. Yeah. Who is this? I'll go watch it. Apologies. It's like one of the few I haven't watched. But it's like, I don't want to care about the 16E. I just didn't give it the time. It's a way in the door.

And then Apple can sell you more expensive things. I do love that. Except for Mac safe accessories. This is my favorite. My favorite ongoing like thesis about Apple is that they have some products that don't exist. Like they just have like this, the 16E only exists on the website. It's like the lobster at a diner. It's not there. It's like they're not manufacturing it. It's not real. It's like the illusion of a phone to get you to buy a more expensive phone. It's like, no, I think they're manufacturing the phone. We'll see.

All right, we got to take a break. We were supposed to talk about the Framework laptop, which looks really cool. But David tells me that Framework CEO Nirav Patel is coming on the show next week. Yeah, he's coming. Sean and I are going to hang out with Nirav actually later this afternoon. And we're going to have a lot to say. But like if I'll put all the Framework stuff in the show notes, I think that company is fascinating. The desktop looks really cool. I'm especially excited with the Framework laptop 12, which is their like lower end touchscreen flippy one that I think is going to be maybe the most kind of mainstreamy thing Framework has made yet.

This company is very exciting and I think up to some really cool stuff. But yeah, we're going to have lots more to talk about on that one on Tuesday. Yeah. Cool. All right. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back with the lightning round. We'll be right back.

It's time to review the highlights. I'm joined by my co-anchor, Snoop. Hey, what up, dog? Snoop, number one, has to be getting iPhone 16 with Apple Intelligence at T-Mobile. Yeah, you should hustle down at T-Mobile like a dog chasing a squirrel, chasing a nut. Number two, at T-Mobile, families can switch and save 20% on plans plus streaming services versus the other big guys.

What a deal. Y'all giving it away too fast, T-Mobile. Slow down. Head to T-Mobile.com and get iPhone 16 on them. Yeah, you can save on wireless and streaming versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch. Apple intelligence requires iOS 18.1 or later. All right, we're back. Lightning round. Unsponsored for flavor.

The people have started saying it to us, so we're going to start saying it back to you. It is marching up the charts of the most demanded merch in the history of the first is an unsponsored for flavor. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean anything, but we're going to make it when people spot. You can't tell us what to do. It's their defining principle here at the. For some reason to me that that belongs on the bottom of a skateboard.

that just says unsponsored for flavor. That's where that goes. You could throw away the entire, it's a long ethics policy on the website. It's very complicated. You can throw it out and you can replace it with, you can't tell us what to do. And that would pretty much get you there. Anyway, if you'd like to sponsor the lightning round, you can call someone at Vox Media and pay them money. And then we will still do this. But today we're unsponsored, which means there's not even a hint of corporate control.

Because again, to repeat myself, you, you can't tell us what to do. Unsponsored for flavor. Okay.

David, take it away. Okay, so the first thing here is that YouTube announced this week that more than a billion people now watch podcasts on YouTube, which is a kind of a number we knew, right? Like YouTube has been creeping up as the most important podcast platform for some time. YouTube music exists, but this is not YouTube music. This is YouTube, YouTube, YouTube main, as they call it, which I

forever think is very funny. And basically, YouTube is very proud of this fact. They're like, we are we are a massively important podcast platform. I think there are several dozen issues with the fact that YouTube is this powerful a podcast platform, in part because it's not a podcast platform. Like there's a non zero chance you're watching this on YouTube right now. YouTube is not a podcast app for a bunch of reasons. You can't get

audio playback unless you have YouTube premium. You can't sort out shows correctly. The audio versus video playback just sucks on YouTube. And YouTube's answer to this is YouTube music. But again, no. And so I just think we're at this really interesting moment where YouTube is both becoming the most popular podcast platform and is kind of changing what podcasts are. And it has changed it so much to the point where now like Spotify is racing to

to do video. And it is because it's trying to catch up to YouTube in part because video is very popular, in part because video is very shareable, and in part because video is really discoverable in a way that audio is not. And so everybody now...

is turning to video. You didn't like the TikTok Spotify thing for music where you heard a clip of a song you've never heard before and decided you wanted to listen to the whole thing? What could possibly go wrong? No, it's a terrible user interface. And I did this whole thing in the installer of the newsletter I write last week where I basically was like, tell me your music setup. And the overwhelming piece of feedback from people was I use Spotify.

I hate Spotify. Yeah, like precisely how I feel. That's fine. Like, perfect. No notes. And it's because all of this stuff is trying desperately to chase YouTube. And YouTube, meanwhile, is just out here flexing. It's like, yeah, if you want to be relevant on the internet, you have to be on YouTube.

And that is increasingly true for people who make podcasts. And I think like Spotify's number, I think, was that it had 100 million podcast listeners. And Spotify is like what everybody thinks is either the most important or second most important podcast platform next to Apple Podcasts. And YouTube is just out there crushing everybody. It's nuts. Let me ask a foundational question. What is a podcast? Yeah, I was going to I was going to ask that, too.

Because I are we just talking about YouTube videos that say they're podcasts. Well, what is that then? Well, I mean, we have been making this show for a long time and it is true. Some people watch it on YouTube. Lots of people actually watch it too. But I don't know. Like, what is the difference between waveform and a regular Marquez video?

It's just the microphone editing the microphones. Do you know who broke that distinction? YouTube. YouTube. This is this is the point, right? Like what has happened? And I think YouTube has actually done this to a lot of different forms of art is YouTube has just collapsed everything into YouTube. And now everything looks like YouTube and works like YouTube and follows YouTube's particular like trends and systems and norms.

Because it's YouTube. Because YouTube is the only platform that matters. And thus, everything has to be YouTube. How do you categorize a late night show? Because that's a podcast in the way that a YouTube show is a podcast. It's a podcast, but it's also just a bunch of YouTube clips in a row. Yeah. I mean, no, cable news has just been podcasts for a long time. Yeah. Have you ever just like watch whatever cable news channel you want to watch? But you just like watch CNBC or CNN or MSNBC or Fox News or whatever. You know, this is just the most chaotic podcast in history. Very unstructured.

at all it's just happening all at once all the time a lot of them actually run podcasts that are just the full audio feed of the show and it works horrible I don't know if 60 minutes still does it but they did for a long time and like it works well 60 minutes makes sense yeah people can visualize things in their heads

Is that different from an audio book? I don't know. So we, I'm trying to remember the headline. The narrative podcasts are running into audio books. Story was a big story. Yeah. And then narrative podcast, podcast, like serial, like fell out of favor in like a real way because the,

I hear you on YouTube and I'm, I do love to criticize YouTube at basically any turn, but like really what you're seeing here is platforms pushing everyone to lower the cost of content because they don't pay enough money. And so like YouTube, as if you're like a YouTuber, the amount of money you get from YouTube, from AdSense and the partner program is just going down over time.

The amount of views everybody's getting is just going down over time. Cause there's so many more YouTubers. Right. So everyone's just trying to make cheaper stuff and we've been making the show for a long time. So I will just tell you like hanging around talking is a very cheap way to make content. Like we try hard, you know, we got like graphics, there's frame TVs everywhere. Those weren't cheap. Let me tell you.

Uh, Samsung's making a pretty penny off all the podcasters in this world with the frame TV graphics that are everywhere. But like, that's, what's happening is like, we're just pushing the cost of content down. So YouTube was able to take podcasts and say, really, we're going to film your podcasts. And now we're just going to ingest hours more video from every creator who's doing podcasts. They don't have to be scripted. They don't have to be structured. We don't take cameras on location.

Here you go. Here's hours and hours of more video. Yeah. What I don't know is whether that's actually taking share away from Apple podcasts. I know why Spotify scared, right? This was Spotify's big bet and they're losing to YouTube in one very specific way. Right.

But I don't know if the Apple podcast listener, who is always an audio listener, is like, screw it, I'm going to watch this on YouTube instead. Yeah, I don't know. I have a lot of... I mean, we get a lot of anecdotal information and feedback from people that I would say, by and large, what we've heard from people who are watching and listening to this right now is that it is more sort of additive than cannibalizing. There are definitely people who have...

found the show on YouTube and only consume it on YouTube. Uh,

But we also get a lot of people who are like, oh, I listen to it while I'm on a walk. And then it's like fun to watch clips or I watch the show later. I put it on the TV while I'm in the car or like whatever. So I think it's from what we've heard so far and what we've seen in our data, they're not kind of killing each other. But also right now, if you're launching a new show, I absolutely guarantee you're spending more of your time thinking about YouTube than you are thinking about Apple podcasts. And that to me is the real shift over time.

I think that people, the shift towards passive consumption, like needing just things to be playing at all periods of time that they can check in on kind of passively and when they want to. We have a lot of people that tell us, oh, I do the dishes while I have waveform on the TV. Yeah. And I look over every now and then. And I think some form of like ingestion through their eyes while it's also being ingested through their ears every now and then is like what people want. They just want things playing all the time. There's a reason people leave their apartments every

They go to the subway, they realize they don't have their headphones with them and they have a panic attack. And people just need more longer things. Yeah. And the fact that the audio medium of podcasts has companies that are like, don't worry, we made sure this is less than 10 minutes.

No one wants a less than 10 minutes. Is anyone asking for it? Because you can just pick it back up. Like nobody is asking for that. If anything, people love the length of, you know, this show. People want a two hour Verge cast, David. That's what I'm telling you. That's exactly right. We're very close to delivering it here. I've never heard. In this lightning round that has already gone 10 minutes on a single item. No one's told me that they want a shorter one. That's all I'm saying. All right, David, we're changing your job. You're just doing Twitch streams 24 seven from now on. Justin TV is back.

baby from your green screen basement i'm leaning into that conspiracy theory is david's basement's a green screen i uh i have begun occasionally subtly moving things around in my background uh and if anyone would like to tell me what those things are

I welcome it. All right. Let me add up these next two lightning round items for you. I forgot this was the lightning round. Apparently. Yeah. That's what I was told. Instagram Reels may get its own app, presumably to compete more directly with TikTok. And then TikTok is upgrading its desktop website. To compete with YouTube, they say. To compete with YouTube. What do you got? First one. Yep.

Makes sense. I mean, I think people go to Instagram for reels at this point. So I think all of this is based about the TikTok ban. Yeah. I think if because remember, TikTok is technically banned in this country. Yeah.

Like the law passed, the Supreme Court upheld it. And then Donald Trump was like, no, we're not doing that. Yeah. And the app stores, Apple and Google were like, that's too much risk. And then Pam Bondi, the new attorney general, sent them a letter, which we have still not seen, that made them feel comfortable to put TikTok back. So now we're in this weird period where this app that is banned, they got a 75 day reprieve from the Trump administration of enforcement of the law. That's coming up in what, April, right, David? Mm-hmm.

So in April, this app might go away again or get sold to, I don't know, Don jr limited, whatever's gonna happen. Like, I don't know what's gonna happen. Yeah. And if that, what that moment, whatever that moment is will be a change. And so if you're Instagram, you have to be ready for it. Right. So here's reels, like not Instagram re like this much more direct competitor, TikTok. And if you're TikTok, I think you have to be like, well, you can't ban a website. Yeah.

Instagram is just reels. I think it's almost just like a rebranding thing. And I wonder if it sticks around because Instagram has tested having dedicated apps for things that Instagram already does quite a few times. And they've shut them down quite a few times. Remember IGTV? That was fun. That was a period of time. Someone very senior at Instagram told me recently that IGTV was exactly the right idea. And the only thing that got wrong was the videos were too long. Okay.

Oh, that's interesting. He's like, we had TikTok. It was just long videos. And what people wanted was short videos. I mean, that's kind of true. They tried to do the like...

Hollywood thing and it's actually like no just let people film videos of themselves people want garbage all right just set up some microphones and start a podcast about gadgets and Brendan Carr and you're gonna be fine famously why Quibi worked for sure yeah I think I disagree with you saying that Instagram is just real and I actually think my theory about why this is happening and I'm just gonna throw this at you both and I'm curious what you think is I so I watch these Adam Mosseri like AMA videos every week where they talk about he talks about like what's going on and

That man cannot figure out what is the most important thing on Instagram, right? Like, there are stories, which a lot of people watch and care very much about, that they are forever, like, making more important in the product than denigrating in the product. There's the feed, which is, like, a dying thing, but is also, like, the central pillar of Instagram. So they're trying to make the feed a thing again. And they're like, we want to let it... We want to let you post to your feed without it being such a big deal to post to your feed. And I think Instagram has just...

producted itself into total chaos and i think a knows that clearly the easiest thing to spin out and make its own is reels because then you have an app that opens to video that is playing with the volume on which is really important and is a really important part of why tiktok has been so successful because you open it up and it is playing with the volume on and that is not an that you can't just turn that on on instagram but you could if it's just an app called reels right and

And then it also says, OK, now we understand what Instagram is again, because no one knows what Instagram is anymore. You just post things, places and hope that people see them, which is not a recipe for success. And so now everybody's like, what happened to my reach? Where do I post if I want to reach people? And this like this might actually help Instagram tell a story about itself that makes sense for the first time in a long time. Do you think they know what that will be if a Reels app launches, though? Yeah.

Because they met a famously just takes the best part of every app from their competitors and then puts it in Instagram specifically. Right. So now, you know, they've got the Snapchat in Instagram, which is stories, and they've got the reels in Instagram, which is tick tock. And then they've got the Instagram and Instagram, which they have long forgotten about. Well, but I think that goes back to your point about it. Reels is the most important part of Instagram. Like, I think Instagram.

A, I would bet that if this app still exists, Reels will still be in Instagram and they'll still be in Facebook. And then...

What Meta gets to say is actually we have this video app, but we also have this gigantic distribution across everywhere. So it's like we have TikTok, but we also have TikTok attached to Instagram. It's like the Fediverse, but for one platform. For one company. Which I would just point out is what we call a monopoly. Boosted TikTok videos everywhere you look on Meta platforms. Yeah.

I'm telling you, I think it's just so that when people lose access to TikTok again, Meta can say, download a new app. It's just TikTok. Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think there's probably some conniving, clever motivation, but then there's also a very dumb thing, which is like, are you mad? Push this button. Yeah. And that solves a lot of problems. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, wasn't Instagram Notes supposed to be their Twitter competitor? Oh, yeah. And then they just shut that down? That became Threads.

became threads. Okay. Are you mad at Twitter? Download this app. And it worked for five minutes until they're like, what if this algorithm was the worst? Yeah. We'll see into that. Okay. We got to do, it's a lightning round. So we're going to move through politics very quickly. David, I'm assigning you to this job because I can't, you know. Okay.

I'm just going to say a bunch of things in a row, and you can stop me whenever you feel like it. Does that sound good? Yeah. Doge remains insane. The big news of this past week was that Elon Musk, a lot of federal employees got an email telling them to respond with five bullets about what they did. And then Elon Musk posted on X that if they didn't respond to that email, they would take that as resignation. That's nothing. And

is nothing. So a bunch of departments said, don't answer this email. A bunch of departments said, answer this email. Everybody's up in arms about it. Nobody knows what to make of it. Uh, Musk and then Donald Trump continue to kind of say it's a real thing and people should do it, but it, it appears to be nothing except just more abject chaos. Uh, Doge,

God only knows what it is or who works there. But the new thing that happened this week was that Amy Gleason, who is formerly an employee at the U.S. Digital Service, was like named scapegoated. Like, I don't know what word you want to use in the executive order that creates Doge. It says there will be a Doge administrator.

Then no one knew who that person was. Right. Like judges were asking United States attorneys general, who is the administrator of Doge? And they'd be like, I don't know that at this time. Right. Because I think literally they didn't. And a lot of reporting from from us and Wired and others suggest that even the people who work there didn't know who they were reporting to. Elon Musk is in every meaningful way in charge. He is not a government employee. So that's not how he's a special government employee.

Sure. What is a photo, David? That's where we are. I mean, knock yourself out. Yeah. You can have whatever you want. He was in a cabinet members meeting. Like, none of this is real anymore. I don't know. I think the thing that makes all of this just break and not and weird and all the reporting kind of be weird is that

all of this assumes that there are processes and things that you can and cannot do when you're in certain positions and they are just saying none of that matters and we're going to do what we want anyway. Yeah. And in certain ways they're subverting these things and saying okay here's the administrator because you asked so many times.

But none of that matters for them. They just do not care. So it's important that the reporting is happening, but also what do these facts mean? Right. There's that paragraph in all of these stories that is like, this breaks with longstanding norms and understanding of how these things... And it's like, yeah, do every single other thing. We've been here for a while. No other president has had a full cabinet meeting where just some guy wearing a shirt that reads tech support and wearing a baseball cap talked the most. Yeah. That was Elon in the cabinet meeting. That's...

That's just so. OK, so then I say all of this, which led to, I would say, the funniest thing that happened this week, which is in in the housing and urban development department. Somebody put on TVs all around the department an AI generated video of President Trump sucking on Elon Musk's feet. Like, I don't know how else to say it other than that. And it became it became a whole thing. It got shared a bunch of places. Yeah.

And it is hysterical. If you have not watched it, don't. But also, I will put the link in the show notes. Actually, the funniest part of this is it is an AI deepfake. And so, like, Blue Sky had a content moderation controversy about it because you're not supposed to share AI deepfakes. But then it was a newsworthy video of a TV in a government agency being hacked. So then they undid it. And they're like, we're very sorry. We've rethought our moderation decision here.

Just weird. But if there's anything that's going to get us to an anti-deepfake law, it's deepfakes of this caliber. That's true. It's real. Weird. Okay, so that's like Doge and everyone's reporting on Doge and like the Times say has a whole list of all the people who work there. It's long and extensive. It's definitely a coup. I just want to be as clear as I can be. There's a weird coup happening in our government and it's by weird nerds.

Okay. We're going to keep, we're going to keep reporting on it. Then there's like the regular Trump stuff that also happened this week, which I find very funny because it, it just rhymes with the Trump one. So like Tim Cook had a meeting with, with Donald Trump and promised him $500 billion of us investment. They put out a press release about it. They said, they're going to build a school in Michigan for manufacturing. They're going to do, they're going to build servers for Apple intelligence and

I guess they're all just going to do Genmoji all day long. They're going to build those in Houston. Yeah, those guns don't generate themselves. Right. So Trump is happy because he got, you know, I think whatever Tim Cook promises in American manufacturing, he's like, screw it. They're making iPhones in Kansas. Like, he doesn't know. He's not paying attention. In Trump 1, famously, Tim Cook opened a factory that was already open and invited Trump to the grand opening of the already open factory in

where they were going to start making the Mac pro that they had already been making at the factory. Yeah. It's fantastic. You can, you can, it's, it's, you can go look at it. It's a very confusing situation. I'm glad that Tim Cook knows that he can do this. At least Tim Cook is trapped on a treadmill of his own making. Yeah. Like he can never retire. His job is to manage Donald Trump forever. Um,

Anyway, so they announced this $500 billion investment, which is great. I want Apple to invest in the United States. I think we should manufacture more things here. All this is good. Great for the economy. We should build manufacturing centers of excellence in Detroit all day long. I have no qualms with any of the things that they are doing, the substantive things that they are doing. What I will point out is that the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, looked at the numbers and they're like, these numbers are fake.

So I'm just going to read you this paragraph in the Wall Street Journal. Apple's $500 billion is mostly already on the books, is the headline. Apple spent about $1.1 trillion over the past four fiscal years on total operating expenses and capital expenditures. Wall Street expects nearly $1.3 trillion in total spending over the next four years, according to consensus estimates. While Apple doesn't break out expenses per geography, about 43% of its revenue comes from America. Assuming the U.S. constitutes the bulk of that number, if spending is in line with revenue,

then a rough figure of 40% of projected global spending through 2028 equates to about $505 billion. So if you just math out how Apple spends money,

There you go. They used Apple intelligence to rewrite their expenses and show Donald Trump the expenses. This is just the money they were going to spend. They took an Excel spreadsheet, or I guess a numbers spreadsheet, and said, Apple intelligence, make this a press release. And that's what it was. You can argue with this, right? You can say Apple almost certainly does not spend, does not invest in line with where revenue comes from, right? They do most of the manufacturing in China and other places overseas. Like, you can see all this stuff, but what you're, the, the,

The plan from Apple is always the same, is they manage Trump in particular because they cannot accept tariffs. So they manage Trump in particular by making him promises that they've already made to themselves. And they just reannounce things. And somehow Tim Cook has just made an art of this.

It is wild. Yeah. I mean, it's the show is the thing, right? And there's a, there's a bunch of really fun details in all of it though. Like I think Apple's plan that they said was to hire 20,000 people over the next four years, which is roughly in line with Apple's ongoing hiring plans. They hire about 5,000 people a year. They were gonna, there was like a big thing. They were going to spend a bunch of money with TSMC in Arizona. Apple is already the largest customer of TSMC in Arizona. It's like,

All you have to do is look at it. But you get to write the thing that's like, thank you, Donald Trump, we're spending $500 billion and everybody wins. Is it ruthless and calculating and not really true? Yeah. But I feel the same way about it that I do about everybody sending a million dollars to go to the inauguration. It's like, I get it. It is obviously straightforwardly good business. And also you should feel bad about yourself. Yeah, it's just weird because there's this big split between

You know, like classic Trump corruption, you know, like he's a real estate developer, so you got to spend money on his party, you know? And it's like, oh, he's a club promoter. You got to do some like club promoting stuff. Like, great. You know, like Trump won. Like we, we lived it. And this is substantially better than, for example, Fox comment announcing LCD factory in Wisconsin that they never built. Right. Apple announced some stuff. It's already doing great.

That's right next to the Doge corruption, which is like weird secrets and like straightforwardly illegal and unconstitutional power grabs by Elon Musk that everyone's like, oh, that's new.

There's a good one of those this week, in fact. Yeah, this FAA thing. What's going on there? So basically, the short version of it is it looks like the FAA, which has been kind of infiltrated with SpaceX employees who have showed up to, you know, quote unquote, fix the FAA, may take a $2.4 billion contract that it had given to Verizon in order to do something.

I don't know, FAA things. I don't pretend to know what the FAA does, but there was $2.4 billion that now they would like to give to Starlink instead. And there's been a big focus of a lot of very good reporting over the last couple of weeks about the very straightforward ways in which Doge is going into departments that either regulate Elon Musk's companies and destroying them or give money to Elon Musk's companies and...

taking more money from them. And this is just this is just that again. And like, this is money that was give was awarded to Verizon that is now being reconsidered. And a bunch of people who work for SpaceX are now at the FAA saying, oh, actually, this money should go to SpaceX. And everybody's like, isn't that corruption? And it's like, yes. And no one who cares. So here's how Elon is justifying this, which is a delight.

Um, so I don't know if you've been noticing this, it's not been great for air travel in the United States lately. So Elon has decided to blame this, not on firing a bunch of FAA employees, which is a thing that he did. Including the head of the FAA. What if you traumatize everybody who works at the FAA? And then you're like, but we made your internet connectivity a little bit better. Do you think that will fix it? You know, I run a podcast that's largely about management that has never come up as an idea. Uh, so, uh,

He's traumatized this workforce. He's stressed them. He's cut them. They're, they're mad. And then he's blaming all the air traffic problems on a communication system that is quote breaking down very rapidly. And also quote from Elon, not backed up by the FAA itself. FAA assessment is single digit months to catastrophic failure, putting air traveler safety at serious risk.

That's a big claim. Like you, you got to back that one. Someone at the FAA should be like, here's the report that says we are nine months away from catastrophic air control failure. That hasn't happened. Just putting that out there. Hasn't happened. Also, you know, who didn't make that system is Verizon. Right. They haven't started yet. This is the new system. So it's unclear what he thinks is breaking.

He's saying he's providing Starlink terminals at no cost to taxpayer on an emergency basis to restore air traffic control connectivity. No cost to taxpayer. Right. Well, there's that, but it's also like, so wait, is it just internet access? Cause that's what Starlink is. Yeah. Is it, are you saying the system that's just the internet? Yeah. Are you saying Verizon can't put some Fios in at the airport?

What are you, like, what are we talking about here? Like, I know I have, I have, I have many problems with our nation's ISPs. I think most of them are bad. I think if any ISP CEO wants to come on the show, I will look them in the eye and say, I think you did a bad job. You're charging people too much money. Great. Provisioning internet access at the airport is like actually not a problem at all.

I was going to say, I don't think I've ever said poor Verizon before. Yeah. And I still, you know, but in this case, it's like,

But he's taking a $2.4 billion contract for himself. There's just a lot of that going on right now. And there was some really fun follow-up on the $400 million State Department plan to buy Cybertrucks that they originally tried to blame on the Biden administration. But it turns out when it was the Biden administration, it was $400,000. And then they made it $400 million under the Trump administration, and then they canceled the whole thing. It's just...

It's just nakedly obvious what everyone is doing here. And the question is just, is anyone going to stop them at this point? And that, to me, feels like a very open question. I think Elon's drug use will stop it before a person. That's my current going theory. But that period of time could be

Yeah. Period of time. My man's obviously like living hard right now. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen him on many stages talking. All right, Neely. It's time for America's favorite segment, the podcast within a podcast. We took a break last week and the people, the people demand it. All right, let's wrap it up. It's time for Brendan Carr is a dummy. A new segment here on America's favorite podcast about the FCC. Brendan Carr is a dummy. So let me just say, I'm just going to say this sentence to you this week. Brendan Carr is,

The chairman of the FCC has decided the best use of his authority is an unelected censorship cop is to attack a country music festival. That's not where I thought that sentence was going. That's what he's doing. That's what our man is doing this week. I want to be 100% clear. This is a real thing that notable idiot Brendan Carr has decided to do this week. So the I Heart Media runs the I Heart Country Festival.

And he sent a letter to Bob Pittman, the CEO of I heart saying, Hey, are you doing some payola? Are you saying if people take cheaper rates to play the I heart country festival, you'll give them more airtime and I heart radio stations in a vacuum. This would be a great story in 1954. In reality. Uh, I don't know if anyone has heard of this company called Spotify, which just does naked payola all the time.

But because I heart runs radio stations and Brendan has regulatory control over the airwaves, he gets to make political hay with a certain constituency by saying, I'm attacking country music festival to make sure there's no liberal corruption in country music. Uh, no problem that has played country music for years now. Just stupid.

Like it's, I heart's a monopoly. Like, yeah, dude, there's weird corruption in I heart media and clear. I heart used to be clear channel. If you're like a nineties kid, like me clear channel is like one of the most nakedly corrupt media enterprises, like in this country's history. Yeah, dude, they're, they're doing some payola at the country music festival.

good job yeah good job brendan he followed that up by the way he had a closed door meeting uh with republican members of congress to talk about uh george soros owning radio stations and what he can do about that i would just point out rupert murdoch also owns a bunch of radio stations and tv stations in this country he doesn't seem to be a problem it's definitely george soros so we're just doing partisan censorship by brennan car none of this makes any sense

Because none of it stands up to even the slightest bit of like intellectual scrutiny. He just likes having the power of being an unelected censor. And that brings us all the way to the stupidest thing that he's doing, which he's making these noises about reinterpreting section 230, which

To, I don't make it easier for him to put Mark Zuckerberg in jail or something, right? Section 230 is a law that says the big companies are not liable for what the users post on their platforms. So if I put something Instagram, you can't sue Mark Zuckerberg over what is on my Instagram account. The whole internet relies on this logic. Our comment section relies on this law existing Reddit, you name it next door. But he's like, we got to reign in big tech and I will reinterpret section 230 unelected.

deeply unstylish Brendan Carr will reinterpret this law, which was written by the way, by people who are still alive. Like Ron Wyden wrote section two 30. He was on decoder two weeks ago. You can just ask him what he thinks it means, but Brendan Carr is going to just reinterpret it.

Somehow he released this in a story in the New York post that I swear to you is written like the worst LinkedIn poetry I've ever seen in my entire life. Like just one sentence long paragraph in the story just says social media has replaced chat rooms. End of sentence, end of paragraph. Why? Uh, it's very confusing. We'll link to it. Just, I want you to know this is some, this is like the Vogue on poetry of policy writing in the New York post. Like it's so bad.

And the idea is that he will somehow reinterpret Section 230 to make Facebook a publisher and then ever consume Facebook defamation. This is absolutely not how that law is supposed to work. This is the height of stupidity from Brendan Carr. And I know this because, again, the guy who wrote the law talks to us all the time. He was just on our shows like two weeks ago. And this is not what he meant when he wrote the law. I do feel like it's dangerous for you to say at any time that this is the height of Brendan Carr stupidity because like.

It's still early, my dude. We're only like six weeks into this. That's true. Well, look, he's going to take down a country music festival first. There's one thing you want the FCC of this country doing. It's attacking the country music industry. What are you doing? Anyway, Brendan, as always, I know you listen. I know your staff gives you readouts. I've known it for years, buddy. If you want to come on Decoder or come on this show, you can tell us about your smart home setup. I bet it sucks. You're welcome to.

You're just not very smart, Brendan. You're welcome to come on the show and face an actual hostile interviewer who questions your use of the government's power to shut down speech that you don't like, because that's what you're doing every single time, and we're just not going to let you off the hook.

All right. That was our weekly segment, Brendan Carr is a dummy. We need theme music. Brandon Kiefer on our team, I will tell you, has been quietly creating theme music for Brendan Carr is a dummy. And there is a chance we are going to roll that out at some point in the near future. So get ready. Can you just imagine waking up and being like, huh, I should control speech in this country. What I will do with that power that I've given myself for no reason is attack a country music festival. Yeah.

Run by I heart media. That's the consequential stuff right there when I think of Complete corrupt. It's I heart go after Coachella first and then we'll talk you know what I mean David I'm gonna read you this sentence and you gotta tell me it's a palate cleanser as for a two-hour broadcast Okay, automatic combines beeper and text comm messaging services. Well, this is two hours easily So

We talked a lot on the show about beeper, the messaging app that ran afoul of Apple and some really interesting and complicated ways. Beeper eventually sold to automatic, the company that owns wordpress.com. Uh, they'll email me if I'm not stat specific about which part of WordPress automatic overseas, uh, automatic kind of a mess because Matt Mullenweg having a weird time on the internet right now. Uh, they're in lawsuits, but anyway, uh,

They made this big bet on messaging. They bought both beeper and this company text.com, which is doing the same kind of thing that beeper was doing, basically trying to like unify all of your messaging apps into one messaging app. Eric Mijakovsky, who was the head of beeper, at least as I understood, it was going to run this whole new thing. The combination of the text.com team and the beeper team at automatic Eric Mijakovsky since left and is now doing pebble again. And so can you tell us a little bit about that?

Kishan Begaria, who was running text.com, is now in charge of this whole team. And they just put out betas of the first new apps, which are essentially just reskinned text.com apps into a thing that is now called Beeper. So Beeper is the new name, but text.com appears to be the actual technology. They redid an iPhone app, but they're still at this like unified messaging everywhere thing. I downloaded the betas.

They're as interesting and messy as ever, but they appear to be still for real at this game. I wondered if after all of the Apple kerfuffle, if they would just spin out a different direction and try to do something else in messaging, but Automatic appears to be actually pushing towards this. Huh.

That all made sense. I think Brendan Carr should arrest them. There you go. I'm here to help. Also, before we go, I have some breaking news. Yeah. Oh, Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, said this afternoon on Bloomberg television that Amazon is going to be releasing some new Alexa devices this fall.

And he said the sentence, I think there's a sustainable business model, which is always what you want to hear. That's good. That makes sense. That tracks basically what Panos was saying. Yeah. So this is 2025, I think, in two runs just became the year Alexa is either going to work or collapse in a really fascinating way.

It's definitely going to turn on all the lights in your house for booking you a ticket to Japan. You can get out of here. And then an Uber will show up and bring you to JFK. Or drugs. It's one or the other. Or drugs. All right, David, thank you so much for being here. That was incredible, my man. Appreciate it. We'll have you back soon. Father David, you're fun. Take it. That was it. That was Superchast. Rock and roll.

And that's it for The Verge Cast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week. ♪

It's time to review the highlights. I'm joined by my co-anchor, Snoop. Hey, what up, dog? Snoop, number one, has to be getting iPhone 16 with Apple Intelligence at T-Mobile. Yeah, you should hustle down at T-Mobile like a dog chasing a squirrel, chasing a nut. Number two, at T-Mobile, families can switch and save 20% on plans plus streaming services versus the other big guys.

What a deal. Y'all giving it away too fast, T-Mobile. Slow down. Head to T-Mobile.com and get iPhone 16 on them. Yeah, you can save on wireless and streaming versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch. Apple intelligence requires iOS 18.1 or later.