The Vergecast - Amazon’s fall hardware event / Google’s Search On / Code Conference 2021

Episode Date: October 1, 2021

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Alex Cranz discuss all the product announced at Amazon's fall devices event, as well as Google's Search On fall event. Verge senior reporter Alex Heath joins the show to discuss news that came out of the interviews at Code Conference. Further reading: Amazon’s fall hardware event 2021: rumors, news, and announcements Amazon’s race to create the disappearing computer  Here’s the deluge of announcements from Amazon’s fall devices event Say hello to Astro, Alexa on wheels  Amazon’s Astro cannot fetch your beer Amazon Astro is ‘terrible’ and will ‘throw itself down’ stairs, developers reportedly claim Amazon’s automotive efforts appear to be taking a pit stop Don’t be fooled — Amazon’s Astro isn’t a home robot, it’s a camera on wheels Remember when beta testing was free?  Amazon’s new Echo Show 15 is meant to hang on your wall Amazon’s AZ2 CPU knows your face Amazon Glow is a video chat gadget with built-in games to keep kids engaged Amazon announces new wearable and services to try to make you fitter Amazon’s new Ring Alarm Pro combines a security system with an Eero router  Blink’s first doorbell is finally released, four years later Ring Video Doorbells are finally getting package alerts Amazon takes on Nest with a $59.99 smart thermostat Google’s Search On fall 2021 event: news and announcements Google Search’s next phase: context is king  Google expands shopping searches with Lens and in-store inventory checks Google Maps is making it easier to see wildfires and tree coverage Google Lens will soon search for words and images combined Google is using AI to help users explore the topics they’re searching for — here’s how Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos: ‘you cannot sue your way to the Moon Elon Musk: ‘we probably don’t need’ NDAs for Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ beta USB-C cables are getting new, confusing logos for faster 240W charging standard Nintendo categorically denies that a 4K Switch Pro is in development ‘Rife with sexism’: employees of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin describe ‘toxic’ workplace culture Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everybody. Before we start the Vergecast, Deeter and I want to tell you about two very cool things. The first is that we are holding our 10-year anniversary event in New York City on October 22nd and 23rd. It is called On the Verge and is going to be very cool. And the second is that at On the Verge, Deeter, hello, my man, is going to premiere his very first documentary. It's called Springboard, the secret history of the first real smartphone. Deeter, what is it about? It's about a little company called Handspring that time has almost forgot and how they struggled to make what I consider the first real smartphone, which I'm sure many Symbian people are mad at me about. But it's an exciting story because this is a company that year after year, month after month, almost became as big as Apple as today, but just got held back by just crazy, crazy stuff. Deeter finally made a documentary about a device that runs Palm O.S. We're all very proud of him.

You have to watch it, though, because then if you do, I get to make the one about WebOS later. We're premiering this at our party. It's actually going to be a documentary premiere. We're going to have some other stuff around it. Dieter tells me there's a museum in the works. It's going to be great. This is going to be the highlight of our entire event. We're super pumped about it.

There's all sorts of other stuff happening in this event. It's been amazing to watch this team put it together. It's our 10-year birthday party. And we wanted it to be about the verge, and more importantly, about the verge. audience. You know, we just came back from the code conference, which we're going to talk about in the Vergecast today. Co-conference is all about billionaires and CEOs. Our event is about you. And so we wanted it to feel more about us and our audience. So we're going to obviously have a big opening party with a DJ group called the Stickman who perform an LED light suits. Very exciting.

There's a video on our website in the post. Watch it. It's so cool. We have an indie game arcade. We have experimental art installations, including, obviously, we've got to have some Instagram moments. We have some Instagram moments. We have a creator showcase on the roof of the event venue. We're going to have creators come and do talks and demos about what they're making with technology, which is the most verge thing that we can think of. And of course, we're not going to not have interviews. So we'll have a main stage of programming. We're going to have a live Vergecast with some Vergecast all-stars and alums from Verge history. We're hoping to break some news with some people from tech companies. We have a lot of ideas. It's going to be a great two days. We're premiering Deider.

springboard documentary. We have all these experiences for you to have with us. We'd love for you to come. You can get tickets right now. You can go to Voxmediaevents.com slash on the verge. You use promo code, urge to verge. You get a discount. That's the promo code. Is that true? It's true. You get a $50 discount if you use the promo code urge to verge. Voxmediaevents.com slash on the verge. October 22nd, 23rd. We would absolutely love to see you. Okay. Let's do the Vergecast. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run. critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting

on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins,

seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes,

game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome. The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the 5G revolution sponsored by the Salero 5G. I actually forgot to put this on our list. I got to put this on this.

Anyway, I'm Nelai, your friend. Dieter Bone is here. I'm saving for the podcast. It's very good. Very good. Alex Cranes is here. I'm the carrot 5G. Wow.

Very good. That's a very deep cut. That's a dad joke from a mom, non-mom. Look, we have a lot to talk about. Deeter and I actually saw each other for the first time in. over a year and a half, I think, at the code conference this week. I got to tell you, when you're going to see your very, very good friend for the first time after a year and a half, try and do it into context where there aren't literally dozens of

billionaires also vying for his attention. It was weird. We're going to talk about code. Alex Heath is going to join the show. A little later, we're going to talk about code. But, yeah, seeing a lot of people for the first time in an environment where we were in a hotel in Beverly Hills, but not allowed to leave the hotel. That's where you want to be.

Just trapped in a hotel. trapped in a hotel with billionaires. Very strange. It was great to see Dieter. It was great to see Alex, Scott Casey, a bunch of other verge friends and alumni. And billionaires, just an endless string of billionaires. Yeah.

But can I just start? I'm going to start with Dish Network. There's an Amazon event. We all this stuff talking about, but can I just start with Dish Network? We're going to start with the important news. Yeah. The important stuff. Jenner.

Jesus. So as you know, T-Mobile bought Sprint and is part of this deal, which reduced the number of wireless carriers in America. Yeah. The Trump administration manufactured. a sale of assets to DISH Network. They actually brokered the sale.

This is a Trump administration special, by the way. They tried to do the same shit with TikTok, which we're going to talk about later anyway. We are going to talk about that later. Because they're deal makers. Yeah. Like the Trump's head of the antitrust division of the DOJ was like, I know how to fix this. And then he like negotiated this deal where DISH network would become a new competitive wireless network.

So we'd still have four. Right. I don't know if you've looked around. This has not yet occurred. I'm holding out hope. Dish has a website for a new network called Project Gena 5Sys with a 5 in the place. Sheena Figgs. It's still very confusing.

And yet, and they own Boost Network. And yesterday they announced their first phone for boost. Yeah. It's called the Salero 5G. It's spelled with the C. Imagine the word celery and then put it O on the end. That's what you got here. It's a custom phone.

It's a custom low-end phone. for Boost customers. Boost, by the way, still run some T-Bomel's network with a deal to run an 18-T network. So at no point is any of this happening on a competitive fourth network. But if you wish to buy a Solaro 5G, it is now available to you. And this is the glorious wireless competition promised to us by the Trump administration. If you buy one, tell us how it goes with like peanut butter and raisins. Here's my, I think it should be the name of a car in GTA 5. It looks like an old Toyota Supero, the big wing. Oh, yeah, yeah. See, I'm sorry. saying. All right. There was actual news. Let's start with Amazon. They announced 45 things.

Everything. Always. Actually, slower year. Only 45. Not like 66. 66. They finally brought together some of their divisions to make products together. We should talk about that. Just, you know, the usual stuff. Like, what if Alexa in a square? Alexa in a circle? Triangle Alexa? You ever thought about, like, still their strategy. Just throwing stuff at the wall to see what happens. So we got to start with this robot. Alex, what is going on with this robot? You know, it's, I mean, you could call it a robot.

You could also call it a camera on wheels. It's called the Astro. It's called the Astro. Honestly, I think it's kind of cool. I think it's terrible. I probably won't buy one, but I also think it's really, really cool. And if one fell into my lap, I would use it. What is it?

And so it's a robot that, like, goes around your house, and it's got little cameras on it. You can talk to it. It's basically Alexa on a robot that's like dog size. And it's going to roll around your house. and like it can if there's you know alerts around your house you can go check on them you can control it from your phone like a little remote control robot you can like talk to it and ask it to play music and follow you around and it's got cup holders and it has it has a screen that looks at you yeah it has a whole screen like its whole face is a screen and it looks like yeah and the screen is a face of the screen and the screen is it mostly shows a face yeah exactly and it like it's kind of like they took one of the old shows and stuck it on some wheels and Right. Is this, at its core, this is an echo show on a Rumba with no vacuum? Right. Correct. And cup holders. Don't forget the cup holders. And a periscope that like can rise up to look at things. So before we get any further, I just need to say that Amazon insists that they didn't name this after Astro the dog from Jetsons. And I don't believe them, number one. Number two, Astro was a real dog. Rosie was the robot. So they're confused. on multiple levels.

Well, I couldn't have called it Rosie because it can't, like, clean or do any of the things Rosie did. Oh, God. Also, the horrible gender politics is the Jetson's robot. Oh, are you suggesting that Amazon has got bad gender politics with its digital assistance? Oh, we completely new for them. Didn't they add a male voice to Alexa finally? Yeah, and I think that they stopped gendering the voices at that time, but they were like three years behind everybody else.

Yeah. By the way, Alex, you haven't been here for this. but for a long time, every episode of The Virchcast, we would remind people not to gender robots. Yeah. Because it was just, like, real bad. Amazon was like, no, Alex is a lady. She's just a little lady. We've trapped into a tube.

And you talk to her. But they've backed off of this idea. Okay, here's my question about this. I'm like looking at our coverage and watching their videos. Robots are supposed to do things, right? Right. I think that's kind of the problem of Astro is. that to a certain extent, it's just a rolling version of that ring drone that we're going to talk about a little bit, right?

Like, it's just surveillance on wheels that can play music for you if you want. And theoretically, you could control it and put a drink in it and send it to somebody else in your house and they can take the drink out of it. But I think they have big aspirations, right? They have these really big aspirations. So what are their aspirations is you're going to be able to buy like accessory kits for it? So they described a scenario to me, wherein you give this to your aging parents or grandparents. And then it tootles around the house and keeps an eye on them,

makes sure they're on the move and hanging out, whatever. The thing also will quote unquote hang out. It like learns your family's patterns and learns when it should be around and what it should go away, apparently. But you're going to be able to buy like an accessory kit, for example, a blood pressure monitor. So like you, it'll like instead of, you'll take the cup holders out and then it'll be like the blood pressure detector on it with the cuff. And then when it's time, it'll like roll up to,

dad and it'll call you and you'll be like, dad, check your blood pressure and have like, okay, and then he'll attach the cuff that's attached to the robot to check his blood pressure. And then everyone will do a little dance. I don't know. That's part of their plan. I don't know. I talked to my parents after this came out because they're both, they're like in their 70s, they're baby boomers, right?

Like they're the generation that this is kind of built for. And I was like, if I bought you a robot that would follow you around and remind you to take your medication, would you use it? And they were both like, I would hit it with a bat. Yeah. I just, I can't, Deider, I will give you, if one year from now, market Vergecast audience, I know one of you will, someone's got a Google sheet open already. If one year from now, there is a blood pressure accessory for this version of Astro,

I will give you $100. Like, it's just not going to happen. And that use case, I get it. I get where it's coming from, right? And we saw it in, in particular, we saw it in Japan first. We actually covered a bunch of these. Like, as a population gets older, the market for, elder tech booms. We've covered it at CES. Like there's already markets where that is,

it's just happening. And now it's happening to the U.S. market. And so you have this idea of like, this robot will help old people. And that is great. And you like sketch out the scenario where you're like helping them do their like whatever. And then you back that down to reality, which is a Rumba without a vacuum with an echo on it. And you're like, hold up. Like how will it take the blood, like even if the hardware, the blood pressure cuff hardware, because there is a lot of connected blood pressure cuff hardware, even if you get that to work. And you figure out which of the myriad USBC specs you need to support on both sides of that chain to connect the things. Is the, like, Alexa OS going to support hooks to a provider?

Is there, are you going to have a database? Is the database secure? Who owns the database? Like, none of that is operable. Oh, no, but see, it's all handled by the. the ambient AI, ambient UI in the cloud, which we can talk about in a minute because I did talk to Dave Limb. But like, I just want to point out that we have moved from what's a computer to what's a photo to what's a robot. So like the march of technology has progressed. No, I'm going to stop this is not a robot. I don't think it's a robot. What makes it not a robot? I think making something move around does not make it a robot. Okay. It needs to have a utility. It needs to automate

some task for you. Oh, so it needs to interact with the physical world a way other than moving around in it is what you're saying. That's what, that's what, that's, That's what defines a robot. No, it needs to automate a task for you. So, like, you know, we did, I did that episode of Decoder with Kevin Roos about robotic process automation. We're like, yeah, yeah, very smart KVM switch uses Excel for accountants around the world. And then those accountants, I don't know, could go hopefully get some other skills.

That's, I think that's a robot. There are software robots in this world, right? They're doing a thing for you. They're able to manipulate something on your behalf. This is like, it just toodles around. It sets alarms. It sets a lot, and it's set two at once? Sure, yeah.

That's like Alexa's superpower compared to every other digital assistant. Yeah, I don't know, man. That's all I'm saying. Like, I buy that we should have some argument about what a robot is and it isn't. But even by the barest definition, this thing is not. It's just a, it's an RC car with an Alexa mounted to it. But it moves around on its own and potentially, you know, like, hey, man, when it gets us some stairs, it may or may not fall down them. So we should talk.

Do you want to talk about this doc, Dieter? This is from motherboard, which is doing excellent work all the time. So they got a bunch of developer documents from people working on this thing internally. And the TLDR is, it's a disaster. It can't do stare detection. And so it'll just like tumble down them. And just it sounded like it was an unmitigated disaster, which, by the way, that lines up with the reporting ahead of the event from Mark German, who suggested that this thing might not have been ready to be released this past week.

who knows, Amazon, by the way, very aggressive this week on multiple fronts in pushing back on negative stories. They shot us a note that said that this report was inaccurate and they also suggested that all of these developer reports about it being an unmitigated disaster were old. Well, the sources at motherboard were like not current employees, right? Sure. But I mean, I don't know. How long did it take Rumba to go from like unable to stop bouncing into walls into, you know, like getting trapped by furniture. I mean, Rumba just this year added the don't roll over dog shit mode so that it just like, you know, drags it all over your house, right?

It took them a decade to get there. You know, how long for Amazon to get there? I don't know. I don't say Rumba was like somewhat famously slow. Yeah. Right? They're like cheaper competitors that were doing more sensing. Yeah.

But Ruma has like the brand name. I just love like this line from the stock. It would throw it, throw itself down. stairs if presented with the opportunity. Like, same. It's not, it often throws itself downstairs.

It's, if it sees stairs, it's like, goodbye. This is the only way to know, with all of this Amazon stuff, we can only know when it comes out. Yeah.

And this thing is announced to kind of not come out. The ring drone was announced last year. It's a year later. It's not out. These events, often on the one hand they're like we shoved a chip in a microwave and we made a $60 microwave that will

destroy the microwave industry and Alexa can make it beep or whatever and you go like okay I get it like two great tastes that no one thought of putting together there was no echo auto stuff at this one right and they released it and it was like the Echo Auto was like in your car was Alexa

in your car and no one could figure out what it was for yeah like you don't often set timers while driving You're often in range of clocks. And they just kind of like didn't update it. They haven't talked about it. The Echo Link, remember they made all that Sonos stuff? Oh, yeah, yeah. None of that stuff is updated, barely even talked about anymore.

Like Amazon sometimes releases this stuff. They sometimes announce it. They announce, remember delivery drones? Yeah. Anyone gotten a drone delivery? I remember the final episode of what was it, Parks and Recreation was like in set now, I think. And they're like, oh, yes, here's our Amazon drones. flying in with our packages.

Every day. Who's not getting a drone delivery? Primary, that's what it's called. I just think Amazon announces about half of the stuff to make you think that they're way ahead of the curve with some fanciful ideas about elder care and blah, blah, blah. And then the other half of the stuff is extraordinarily iterative updates to the things people are buying. And there's just like a concept car element to this that they won't cop to.

Yeah. They were ahead of the curve once, right? Like they did the initial echo. And that was, honestly, ahead of the curve. Right? Like, that kind of changed things. That introduced this whole new category of things. And everything after feels like they're just kind of trying to chase that one success.

Yeah. What if we put an echo in a thermostat? Huh? What if we put it in a remote control car and stick a cute face on it and have it follow you around? That'd be awesome if this was, like, an actual RC car with an echo on it. And then I'd, like, build it the way I did when I was a teen. So, I don't know. We'll see what happens with Astro.

We have more reporting to come. Dieter, do they say when it was going to come out? Fall and invite only is the key thing there. So next fall, invite only. Yeah, well, no, I think this fall. It's supposed to be this fall. Fall is over. Well, no, fall doesn't end until December 21st.

We know this from all the rumors about the Apple Watch. Everyone, when Apple says is coming this fall, everyone immediately checks the calendar to be like, okay, when does fall technically end? And now we know. Oh, well, Q3 is over, is what I would say. Yeah, yes, that's true. That's how I think of the year.

Not all of us are financial analysts. Posened by my career. All right. They announced a bunch of other stuff. There's an Echo Show, 15. This I'm excited about. Yeah, it's cool. It's a 15-inch display.

It's got, it's on the wall. It's got a camera so you can, you know, chat, whatever the Amazon equivalent of FaceTime is with family and friends. And it's got a whole new chip in it, the AZ2, which is supposed to be able to better recognize faces. So it should better recognize your face when you're using it. And it feels a little like, I think if you're one of those people that's using Amazon to talk to family and friends, this is probably a good thing. I think if you're not one of those people, this makes no sense for you to own.

I mean, I like the idea of a picture frame that hangs in the wall. That is why it makes sense. That and the idea that maybe they'll actually make the screen useful for something other than showing weather and ads for Amazon things and like completely useless news updates. Yeah, the picture of this, by the way, is very. Very funny. Just go look at the picture of it. It's a giant screen on the wall. And then because Amazon does not have any services, the widgets that they've chosen to display in their own marketing material are the most mundane things I've ever seen in my entire life. Imagine that you have a giant screen on your wall. It's huge. I'm doing it. I'm imagining it. I've pulled over in my car. You have a 15 inch 1080p display in your wall. Yeah. By the way, can we just talk about how like we're talking about a 15 inch 1080P display as quote. unquote huge. I just want, okay. Have you seen TVs lately?

Well, it's just like a giant echo on your wall compared to everything else. Here's what Amazon is like, here's the people are going to rev up for. A recipe for freshberry yogurt parfait. Your calendar of which one entire like, there's like a list like as like an agenda view and then like the actual month view in case you forgot what day it is. Then there's a shopping list that says asparagus, egg. halve, granola and blueberries. The blueberries, presumably for the berry parfe that you're making.

Yeah. Then there's like three, it's just three smart home switches, like the lights. And then there's a sticky note that just says, good luck with the pitch. Yeah. And I'm like, why would I put any of this on the wall? Like, at what point throughout the day, I'm like, oh, shit, do I need asparagus? And I glanced at the wall. I'm like, yes.

Yeah. Do I need to think about parfe? It's what it is not is a photo, which is, is like the thing you want to hang on the wall. And then Dan, because Dan is an enormous smart home nerd, immediately said, hey, why can I see the cord of this display? Because they're just hanging down. Yep.

And they're like, yeah, that's how we're going to show it to you. And he asked if the cord was rated for in-wall use. So you could mount it behind the thing or run it to an outlet. And they're like, uh, we'll get back to you. Their marketing materials don't seem to show the cord. This one picture has the cord. There's others where they were not. There's others where the court is missing.

And it's like, huh. They just use a heel brush. Content aware. Phil on the cord. That's a button. I think all of Amazon's Echo ambitions are they're hitting the wall of their services not being any good. Well, it's not just their services. It's their platform.

So this Echo Show 15, I'm very excited about because we currently have an iPad in our kitchen. And my partner, disclosure, actually, I don't need to disclose what she works for right now, has threatened to get one of those microwaves that has an Android tablet on it because we would like to have our own recipes easily available. And the thing you can't do on this Echo is, you know, run apps. You can run Amazon widgets from developers that have bothered to make a widget for the Echo Show ecosystem. But, you know, sorry to the 13 of you who have done this, there's just not enough of them. And, you know, you can't make a smart home dashboard out of it. You're like, that interface is not great.

You can't get your own recipes on it unless you go through their web browser, which if you've ever tried to use a web browser on a show device, no thank you. And then like I was saying, like your photos are me. So like not only are their services not quite there, like their app platforms such as it is, is not quite there. And this gets to the question of like what exactly is Amazon's ecosystem? What's its platform? What's its operating system? And what can it do and who is it for? And what it can do and who it's for seems to be, you know, what it can do is get you to buy more gadgets.

And who it's for are for the companies that make those gadgets. All of which is a great service to them, but not necessarily to us. I think they thought their platform was like Alexa skills and smart home stuff. And to some extent, they are correct, to some much more realistic extent that never happened. Right. Right. Like the smart home stuff has happened. that is legitimately fun and cool. But the idea that you're going to spend your days talking to

Alexa that mediates your relationship to some other thing and you have a voice relationship with the New York Times app or whatever, it's like not true. It just hasn't happened for them. So then the devices, they've added screens to the devices, which is smart because looking at things is also useful. And I don't think either Google or Amazon have done a good job with the screens that they have. but the one reason we have Google Home devices in our house and send of Alexa devices is because Google Photos is great. Right. Well, it was great. They haven't been doing a great job the past year, I would say. Google Photos continues to relentlessly exist.

That is exactly, it is very relentlessly existing in the last few months. But it's the one to use, right? And there's many, right? It was free. They killed all the competitors and now the competitors are dead, so they're charging for it. Like a whole corner of conversation there. But it works. It's on our phone. It's uploading the photos automatically. It's sorting them. It's doing AI.

It has a consumer-grade interface. Amazon Photos is like, remember Windows 3.1? Well, would you like to use it? Because, like, Amazon Photos is not an updated or care for a product. It's not doing it as smart stuff Google does. And there's no way you would use it. Right. Like, Google Home has a lock-in to Google Photos in, like, a real way.

Yeah. So we have Google Home devices. I think it was Dieter and I had talked about this before, like with Luna, a lot of this is just Amazon wants to be in spaces. It doesn't care if it's good or not because it's so big that it doesn't have to be. Like it can just exist and people are going to be like, yeah, all right, that's cheap. I'm on Amazon. I'm not going to research everywhere else. I'll get it.

Yeah. And like so much of the strategy for its smart home stuff nowadays is less about like making really usable stuff and just being like, yeah, all right, I'll be there. This is a space I could exist in because I'm huge. I'm Amazon. So here's the thing. Here's how I see what's going on here. Amazon saw that the smart home was relatively ignored by the rest of big tech. They didn't know quite what to do.

And they got a win with the Echo. And so they have literally flooded the zone. The zone is your house and they flooded it with gadgets because they've got an edge there. And so they're taking that lead. But they're doing it while they're still developing the idea of what an ambient OS is, what an ambient UI is. It's like partly in the cloud and partly local. And, you know, we can talk about what stuff happens on the edge and your devices and what stuff happens in the cloud and where the app ecosystem is, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the bottom line is, it's like,

it's not quite ready. So while other companies were maybe hanging back and trying to build out the whole thing, and in five years, the smart home is going to be amazing, Amazon's like, yeah, in five years, it might be amazing, but we want to sell you stuff now. So we're going to sell you all the beta products. Yeah. And there's a tiny part of me, maybe not that tiny, that is, like, fine with that, like sympathetic to that, like, eager to participate in it in some ways. Like, I do want to have some of this stuff now, and I'm willing to deal with some bugs

now. And I think the second piece of this is when everybody saw Astro, there was a resounding, earth-shattering, nope, from everybody saying, I don't want this thing, because it's a surveillance gadget. But, you know, like, who's doing the surveilling? It's like, well, is Amazon using the cameras? If we trust them, maybe not. And so we're surveilling ourselves and there's a whole thing there. You talk about ring cameras. You can get those end-to-end encrypted now. So, like, there is no external surveillance if you set that up properly. But we're deep in the weeds at this point for the average person. The average person is like still kind of likes Amazon. Amazon still does better

than all the other big tech companies in terms of like, do consumers like them? And so the average person will look at that Echo Show 15 and be like, oh, it's not a big, dumb plastic gadget on my counter. It's a nice thing on the wall. And maybe I can put like a shared calendar on it. Done. So I think they're doing fine with this stuff. Like it's not like it's not a beautifully perfect curated ecosystem. It's a messy, messy, messy ecosystem with lots of like privacy implications that are very troubling.

But the stuff is cheap and the stuff is available now. It's not self-driving cars will be here in five years. pipe dream promise. Yeah. No, I buy all that. I think all that's correct. The thing you're saying that it's all kind of in beta and they don't know what the platform is means that you're buying stuff that kind of fundamentally isn't very useful,

right? Or not more useful than the old form factor was. And I, I'm the one who most routinely makes the case that all people care about is what they look like, right? Like it's a bigger screen. They're going to buy a new one because it looks different and you can articulate what's different.

This one's a circle. and like, you just buy it. God, I've done that. I'm telling you. I have it on my desk right now. The exact same functionality and a new shape. And it's like the most, it's the easiest sale you can make.

But like right now where they're at is they don't have the app platform on the screen. So there's no development case for what's happening on the screen. And they don't have one in the cloud that deliver services to this thing. See, the thing is, technically you're wrong about all of that shit. They have all of that. It's just that we don't, we don't have a framework for thinking about it.

And it's like, it's so fuzzy how you access it and set it up. And like, how often do you want to dig into the Alexa app into its settings to, like, really gain control of it? They have all of it, but it's very messy and, like, bad. But they have it technically. Right. But the Alexa app is like not a delight to use. No.

I switched to Siri because I couldn't do it anymore. And I probably just activated it. But we've been activating people's devices this entire time. We're so sorry, everybody. We haven't tried to not say the A word at all. And we're very, very sorry. But yeah, like, it's a horrible, horrible app. And if you move, I moved and I was like, oh, I'll keep going with it.

And I was like, no, I have to switch to Apple because I have to delete, manually delete all like 40 lights I had attached to it. And I was like, that's why should, no one should do that. It's just like terrifically bad. Yeah. I will say that I own a hoobes, which is a rebranded home bridge. I think we have some home assistant developers that listen to our show. Like there are fun open source projects that bridge all these. ecosystems together.

Yes. In various ways. And if you are listening to this show, you should play with them. Like, they will delight you and entertain you because you're just like, A, you're doing something that the big companies do not want you to do. And B, you too can be a Linux system admin when it fails. It's really quite fun. And when it works, it's great.

Although Deeter and I were just together at code. And I was like showing him my little home bridge setup. And he was like, mine's broken. And that's about right. Like 50% of time, you're like, I can't, oh, it's, I'll show you at a later time. Yeah. But it's fun to monkey with. All that said, the echo stuff is neat.

I just think that in a weird way, the competition between Amazon and Google in particular has stagnated. I would not say the competition from Apple has stagnated because they're like, they're so far behind. It's stagged. It's like, they're trying to catch up. It's not even the whole word. And they, and they still have a phone in your pocket, right? Like, they're still. Yeah.

I'm not saying like Google is doing a good job. No. If you, like, read the subreddit for, like, Google Home, everyone's like, what's going on here? This stopped working. It's much harder to set up Smart Home stuff on the Google platform. So hang out. They announced 45 things. We've gotten through, like, two and a half.

Okay. We haven't even talked about the weirdest shit they've put on the stage. Well, here, we've been, let's take a break and come back and talk about the weirdest shit. Okay. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like perplexity and Miro to move faster.

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visit upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's UPWRK.com. Upwork.com. Okay, we're back. Where do you want to start? Do you want to start with the glow or your favorite, the ring alarm pro? Okay, that's, we have to start there because I do not want anyone thinking that my favorite is the ring alarm pro. Everybody, hang on just a minute. I do not want to share any information with any cops. It's a new version of the ring alarm, their, you know, home security system. The reason I like it is not the ring part. It's the Eero part. So it has Eero built in, which is great. Every smart home device should be a Wi-Fi bridge in some way, shape, or form. They're already all sidewalk bridges from Amazon now, so that's exciting. But it has an LTE modem built in. And so if your Internet goes down and it can tell, it will provide emergency backup via LTE to your Wi-Fi network via its built-in ERO router for like, I think you get like three gigabytes a month or something.

It's not much, but it's enough to be like, oh, the Wi-Fi is down, the Internet is down, but the Wi-Fi is bad. And now I am like on this emergency thing. And I think, but I have to verify this that we'll be able to do, like you could set up like theoretically like an Euro profile that's like if the internet goes down, don't let the TV keep streaming stuff, but make sure the phones still have access or whatever. Yeah. And two thoughts. One, every home router should have an LTE mode a minute.

They're so cheap now that like, yep, I would happily pay a few bucks a month to have emergency backup LTE internet for my house in case the power goes out. two, can we all just pause and appreciate the fact that it's an LTE modem because cost in reality and not a 5G millimeter wave modem? I like that because it also, like, you know, the promise of 5G is that it replaced your internet. And I'm like, no, we don't even want you to think about that. The thing that actually replaces your internet is a, you know, off the shelf LTE modem because they cost nothing now. LTE was supposed to replace your own internet.

America's wireless carriers, everyone. I love this, actually. Like, we have a ring system. There are no cops here. It's like, like, there's like social dilemmas. If you live in a larger community, we don't. Like, mine mostly catches bears. So, I don't know.

One time I called the environmental police and asked them about a bear, and they're like, you're good. And that was the end of the internet. First of all, the agency was called the environmental police. And I was just delighted to call them. Just to be like, are you real? Anyway, so we have ring stuff. They're the best cameras you can buy. that's why they're popular.

They do have excellent consumer interfaces. Like the apps are good, all this stuff. But it is, they own both companies. Amazon owns Ring and Eero. And they have always needed to like merge these things together. And I think it's neat that there's like local processing on this device for your cameras. Yeah, they've got a whole new like new processor that they're putting in a bunch of their stuff that they're very excited about.

Yeah. It's funny, but you still have to pay for the cloud storage, even if you do the local processing. Like you just have to pay the fee. They're like, whatever. It might be faster, though, which is cool. You might use less bandwidth. The idea that you won't have like a separate hub. Like you have an arrow, you can replace your ear, and you can upgrade your ear.

They need reasons for people to upgrade their eros. Yeah. Because if you, like, ours have just been running for five years and they're fine. Unless you have really fast internet, you have no reason to upgrade your eros. So I think all that stuff is smart. The LTE failover is just great. Did you see the battery packs? They're battery packs?

You can buy $130. You can buy a $130 pack that will run this thing for A. hours of your power fails. Oh. So everything will stay up. Couldn't you just buy a UPS? Yeah, you could do that too. Yeah.

Or you could buy 120. The USB, this USB C connection for the power only works with the ring power packs. Wow. Oh, I love it. Very good. Very, very good.

I don't know. There's like, we've been waiting for Amazon to bring its various acquisitions together. this is the first time they've done it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. What's funny to me is they own another camera company called Blink.

And Blink and Ring, nothing. Yeah, but Blink and, but Ring and Ero are talking. Like, eventually they'll all have a party. But like it's, it's the pandemic. They're starting their social gathering small. And then eventually they'll invite more people. Yeah. I completely forgot that Blink was another company.

And I thought it was just like, that's what we're calling our really cheap ring devices. that would make sense so they said blink sales are like up yeah because they're really cheap right they said they tripled so the number that tripled was it single digits yeah I was giving nine

they sold nine now they sold Bezos blinks yeah anyway all this is just like ridiculous but they announced like a new blink doorbell which is hilarious because they that's the ring product yeah and they also announced a blink

doorbell last year and it never came out Like the things Amazon announces that don't come out include like a drone for your home and a $50 doorbell. And I'm pretty sure the $50 doorbell was killed in like a strategy session, not because they couldn't execute it. Whereas the drone, they're like, no, it's killing people. We should work on this. It throws itself down the stairs. Did they just wait until they were like fully saturated on ring doorbell cells? And they're like, okay, now we can go for that cheaper market.

We can go lower. But the systems don't work together. Yeah. Right. It's just like very confusing. It's for people who are too cheap. They do if your Hoob server is up. That's true.

Although Thomas Stricker wrote about trying to add Blink to his home bridge system. And the Blank API will just delete, like it'll ban your account if you hit it. Oh, great. Nice. He was enraged. And I read this story and I was like, I mean, Thomas Stryker. $50 down the drain. Like when you get an angry.

Dutchman writing about API access. That's just gold. That's internet gold. Also, this is incredibly hypocritical because Amazon will talk night and day about how it wants to be open and it wants open access to voice assistance and blah, blah, blah, blah. They just gave a whole talking point about Sonos saying we made Google Assistant and Alexa work together on our speaker at the same time and Google won't let us. And Amazon's like, we would, we think they should. So the fact that they are trying to kill interoperability on Blink shows that they're fundamentally being disingenuous about a lot of this that's so-called open-ness stuff.

Yeah, that was like, Rickers. We'll link this in the show. You just channeled him. That was really good. But also, it's like five people in the world are like, I want my weird little Linux Raspberry Pi to talk to me. Yeah, but we write for the verge.

So we found them. We found all five of them. We went to their houses individually. But anyway, but it's interesting. Like, these systems do not interoperate at all. Yeah. Except for the neighbor's app, which is like the most problematic part of the entire ring ecosystem,

you can send your blink videos to the neighbor's app. Meanwhile, on the radio side, which is much more complicated, because like, you know, the blink has a hub. Yeah.

That standard is not in any of this new stuff. But they're like, we're going to figure out how to make Z wave and Zigby work. Eros already support thread. We've got this ring proprietary radio thing to support. Like, they're doing the like the hardest part of radio engineering to, make one single hub and they're like no but blink you still have this crap box hub you have to plug into

the wall i don't i think that like this is the sort of stuff when we were like sad when amazon bought euro like Dieter wrote a piece he was like sad about it like here was like an innovative startup they made a great product they were doing well they their burn rate was too high and they just failed into the arms of big tech company and we all had emotions about it and this is the sort of thing that we expected them to do it's fine that they're doing it i guess all right man I thought we were going to blaze through this. Yeah, we're not, we're like, we haven't even brought the fact that they made a Fitbit, that they took their Halo product and just like, what if we made it a Fitbit?

And everyone, it was like, wait, hey God, I guess we're on my Google now we're fine. An $80 fit bit. So they made the Halo View, which is just like an $80 fit bit with none of the really expensive sensors that a lot of people want, but just like the main stuff. So like pedometer, heart rate and everything. I don't think it even has heart rate, actually. And I think the big thing about it is it's just, it's going after FitBed, but it's also going after Apple and Fitness Plus. Because it's like, it's bundling in.

You get this $4 a month app that you can get workouts and stuff from to use with your $80 halo view that doesn't have the microphone in it to judge your voice, which is like the thing everybody hated about the original view. So they kind of were like, the original Halo, they're like, okay, we're going to go. we're going to build something and try to be like a little different and unique with our wearable. And they're like, no, no, no, we're just going to undercut Fitbit. Never mind. That was dumb. Just undercut. There's like a world that wants you feel really bad at this.

Like Amazon does this at other companies all the time, right? Like they're like, you made a laptop stand. Now we made the same one from the same supplier, but $10 cheaper. And we gave it prominence in search when they search. Like that's bad. Fitbit is now owned by Google. And it is amazing how that has wiped out any whatever. Like let them fight, I say.

Yeah. Just go to war. Sorry. The Halo View does actually have most of the same sensor. So it's got heart rate. It's doing blood oxygen level. It's doing skin temperature, which I think is one of the ones that like Fitbit has been trying to use to figure out your stress levels and stuff.

And really this is just like a super cheap Fitbit. And it's also got like this, what is it, Halo membership, which is $4 a month. And you get all the apps, which I don't think will be anywhere as good as fitness plus. I mainly say that because I'm going to go do Pilates after this recording on Fitness Plus. I love it. Yeah. I mean, I'm curious. We'll see.

It could be as good and it's only $4 a month, which is way better than what you're paying for Fitness Plus. But like, yeah. And then it's also, it went after, it's doing this halo nutrition, which is so you can count your calories and everything. And it's got, you know, the Alexa integration and it's doing all the sleep analysis and activity point systems and all this other junk. and it's just cheap Fitbit. Yeah. Like, that's it. It's cheap Fitbit.

Yeah, but I'm saying like, like, let them go, right? Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. Like, I love that they, they made no effort to like,

make it look like anything else. Like, they, they were like, oh, could we do a watch, like, form factor? Like, make it look like all the other wearables? No, no,

we're just going to do a fitness band that looks, and not even like a recent one. Like, this looks like, remember the Samsung fitness band from like, 2016. That's what this looks like. But yeah, it's got, you know, it's got this like colored display, which is nice because it took Fitbit 40 years to put a color display into a wearable. And

it's super cheap. So, but I don't know if like the, the wearable market, the drive for really cheap wearables kind of went away five years ago. So Amazon is really, really late to this party. I have a whoop update. The CEO of loop was at code. Yeah. Just live in his best life. Yeah. They're apparently doing quite well. Also, for better or worse, anytime anything happens with whoop, people tweet at us now.

Like, we have single, candidly, like, created a social engagement feedback loop for this company. They're doing it. Okay, if you are a parent, if you're lucky enough to be a parent of, say a three-year-old, any age between three and nine,

if you're a parent, and you also are lucky, enough to have your parents around. I want you to close your eyes. Actually, no, pull over in your car and then close your eyes. And I want you to think about your three-year-old's ability to use technology and your parents' ability to use technology. And then I want you to put those two things together and imagine them doing a teleconference

with a projected game board. Yep. That is... This. Does Amazon have, like, older people that work there? Like, do they talk to older people? like grandparents. Product, by the way,

it's called the Amazon Globe. And it is a tabletop projector, and the idea is your kids, your kids get bored during video calls, which is true. They just like, absolutely true. They just wander off.

They're like, hi, okay, this is not interesting. And they bail. And the grandparents are sad. So what they've done is they've made a video conference system that projects a game board on a table, on a 19 inch plastic mat. And then on the other end,

the grandparent or the aunt or whomever, has a tablet, and then they both control what's happening on the board, the puzzle or the game or the e-book or whatever. And so then the kid is less likely to wander off because you've captured them with a screen. Yeah. So it's like a monolith-looking thing with a screen in a base. Yep. That shows like a FaceTime-sized screen that shows like your parent. Yeah.

And then there's a projector in front of you, so you get a rectangle on the surface in front of the monolith type thing. I love it. So I'm just like, okay, I mean, I'm the market that Dieter's talking about. I have a three-year-old. I have parents varying levels of computer ability. Yeah. They're all brilliant, by the way. I just want to put that out there.

It's, um, so that their brilliant, brilliance is not expressed onto touch screens. It's about as nicely as I can say that. Just the, the idea that I'm going to tell my parents, like, you're going to download an app onto your iPads, presumably they're going to make an iOS app. Right. And then that thing will call. a hardware device in my home that you've never seen because we're not going to set these up together, right? So there's a whole hardware device in my home that you've never seen.

That thing will then light up a projector and then you're going to play a game with my kid who's FaceTime with you. Yep. I don't know. What is the interface of the tablet? It's the screen. Is it a split screen? No, it's just like there's a hovering face and then the interface is the, is the interface of this projected screen. So they can obviously see the kid.

There's a camera in the model. Yeah. So there's a camera to like see the kid and then the kid can see the thing. And I think their idea is it's more likely that the kid will call the grandparent, which means that they'll be sitting there, like, ringing up grandma nonstop. She give them access to the glow. They do that. My friend's kid does it all the time. Like, I was, we were at the beach one time.

And her, her aunt just got a message from her. And it was like, she was like on the phone being like, hey, guys, what are you all doing? Can we just hang out now? And we're like, we're at the beach. Go away. That's great. Yeah. If I had a button in my house that could

Max would push to irritate other people at a long distance, should push it? Yeah. I mean, I like the idea. I mean, every projected display idea, right? There's like latency problems. There's resolution problem.

It's a projector. Can you use it in a bright room? They recommend not using it next to a bright window. So go to the dark child and call your grandparents. Sit in the cave. They also recommend that you project it on the white mat, which they promise is easy to clean. By the way, one of the features of this thing is like coloring, like digital coloring.

So of course it's going to get covered up with crayons and stuff. If you buy it, it comes with Amazon sort of standard kids warranty where they'll just, like, if things break because the kid chucked it out a window or whatever, they'll just replace it for a couple of years. And but the one of the things you can do, actually, this is cool. So there's another camera on it in addition to the camera looks at the kid. And it looks at the screen. And so the kid can like run over with their toy or this thing that they drew on a another piece of paper or this little cutout or, you know, the turkey that they made in arts and crafts

or whatever, throw it on the board and then hit a button and then the camera will scan it and then it becomes a digital object on their little drawing that they can move around and manipulate and do stuff with. And it also shows up on the, you know, on the tablet in too. So that's kind of cool. That's kind of neat. Why does it look like a teleconferencing device though? Like there was no effort as he feels like to make it kid friendly. It's not cuddly at all. Have you seen a any of Amazon's gadgets, they don't make it look nice. It takes them six years to figure out how to make something look nice. The Echo was a Pringles can for years before they finally, oh, wait, fabric is a thing.

It just looks like something in a conference room. And it's just teleconferencing for kids, which is wild to be. You know, they can't call each other. They can only call a tablet so that you can't set up a play date with them. Aw. That's hilarious, because I would buy another one for my parents, have someone else. set it up and be like, now you can push a button. Yeah.

Can they call other echo devices? I believe they can only call the iOS apps and the tablet apps. You can technically use it on a phone, but would you want to control a 19-inch screen with your phone? By the way, when I say control the screen, I'm referring to both the child and the person, the teleconference grandparent or parent or aunt or whomever. There's no like you can just like take over and keep the kid from messing with the screen. So when the kid gets bored and starts like pushing.

buttons, there's nothing you can do about it. You both have total control. Okay. So I just want to talk about the marketing photo for this real quick. Okay. Because it's an all time great, this scenario it ever happens. It's a living room that is obviously well lit. Obviously, the white mat has just been digitally enhanced to make it look bright and good. The child is much older than three. I will say. But fundamentally, the child is sitting at a tiny desk in the middle of a living room on a rug with like this scenario oh and the thing doesn't have a it might have a power cable back there yeah but you don't see like it's just in the middle of the room yeah yeah and i'm what in what circumstance are you like child i have created a portal to your grandparents it lives in the

middle of our living room small desk that you may use at your at your leisure like this thing is going to end up in corners it's going to end up maybe in kids rooms but you don't do you want a camera in your kid's rooms, it's somebody else can operate? A really, like, ugly camera. Not even a good looking one. I think a good question is, like, where in your home will you put this? Because this photo, also, this kid looks very old, and the game they're playing is just an insult to their intelligence.

It's like, find a picture of a dinosaur. Like, no, they're way beyond this, dude. But here's the thing. Like, they got Disney and SpongeBob and, you know, Pixar and whatever on board. I got, I think Doors on here. They're going to sell accessory packs. So, like, it comes with a Tandgram pack and there's going to be other packs. I guarantee you there's going to be, like, a Hot Wheels pack at some point where, like,

you put the car on there and then, like, you know, they drives around or whatever. So as usual, with Amazon's gadgets that have cameras on them, we're all like, ah, privacy nightmare. But we don't know. It could be that, like, the rest of America's like, nope, this is cool. We're in it. We want this thing. Yeah.

I don't know. I keep thinking about the grandparent side of this. Yeah. The grandparents are still sitting at home using their iPad Air 2. Yeah. Right. Like kind of not getting paid attention to and like trying to play some game. And they have to log in, don't they?

They have to log into that. Like the experience has to be great on both sides. And to be like, kid, you get a fun piece of hardware to sit at this desk that I've placed in the middle of the living room. Yeah. Mom, you just keep on with that iPad. Right. Like, we'll see.

Last bits of Amazon stuff. Anything worth talking about here? It's not a lot. Package alerts. They did package alerts for Ring. That's cool. They're adding Sling TV to Echo Shows. They should have done that ages ago.

They do have this cheap thermostat that looks like a copy of an existing thermostat. The EcoB people are very unhappy about this because Amazon did the bad thing. They're like, thermostats are selling. How about we make a cheap one? And if you search for EcoB, our cheap one will be at the top. Always fun for them. It's like wing stuff. That's it.

Okay. Last thing we should talk about before we take a break and talk about code. Google had a search event this week too, right, Teter? They did, yeah, they did it live. Google likes to do their events fully live, not pre-recorded. They announced, man, I could either talk with this for two minutes and we move on with their lives or I could talk about it for three hours. And there's kind of no in between.

So let's see what we can rush through here. The map updates. Let's do the map updates first because that feels to me like one of the bigger things here. Am I wrong? I don't know. So big map updates. One, like more people are going to be able to see wildfires and where they're happening, they'll still need internet to see those wildfires on Google Maps, which is

like not great in a lot of instances where you're running from wildfires. But it's still a nice thing. And then they're also adding like a tree coverage layer. So you'll be able to like see tree coverage. And that's that's going to be really useful for someone. I think the idea is more for like researchers and stuff on that front. So they can understand like ambient temperatures and stuff because when you don't have tree coverage, places just feel hotter. And then they also are adding this new way of like a new, I guess, code so that you can find addresses that don't exist. And, you know, the example they used was on a Navajo reservation, I think it was a Navajo reservation, going to these places that don't have addresses, don't have U.S. or American-recognized addresses and being able to find them still by punching this code into Google Maps, which is like really, really useful for rural areas where a lot of, lot of the times it is, even when you do have an address, the actual place is totally different

and you don't know how to get there. And so you're driving through a cornfield and feeling like you've made a wrong turn somewhere. And this might help that. Does this open source location, you know, descriptor thing that Google's using, is it integrated or related to what three words in any way or is it just, it's a completely different system? And they don't actually talk to each other? I don't know, actually. Okay. I think, I'm assuming not the same. Yeah, I don't think it's the same. It's part of this. It already existed was, so this is called the address maker, and it's part of like this system that already worked.

It was called plus codes. Yeah. And yeah, it's just a nice six-digit code. You pop it in and you'll be able to find stuff. It's almost like GPS coordinates, but not. I'm assuming we would have gotten a, what, three words, press release, discussing if Google had decided to work with them. So the search stuff, it's a bunch.

You may remember Mum, the multitask unified model, which is Google's new AI system that's even bigger than Burt, which was their last system, for taking knowledge in different areas of domains and different kinds of visual and auditory and textual search and mashing them together in a way not completely dissimilar from the way that GPT3 is able to take things from different domains and put them together. If you haven't listened to Ashley's a special Tuesday Vergecast episode about that, you really should. But anyway, so there's some new mum stuff. So if you take a picture of a shirt, say of Matias Diwarte, it was very clever that they used him and his shirts. You can then ask a question of the thing you took a picture of to get information from other domains, so socks that match that pattern. That's interesting.

They're a little bit in overpromised land with Mum. They said, Mum is awesome. Here's the thing I can do. And then there's like 15 other things that search does. And the implications Mum is involved in that, but it's not clear if it is. Anyway, so the thing that's interesting to me is that Google Lens is now getting built into the Google search app on the iPhone and is getting built into desktop Chrome. And so their push to get Google Lens to be a thing that you actually use and becomes actually useful is getting very real. It's no longer pointed out of flower and have the flower identified to you.

It's pointed at the flower and shop for, you know, flower seeds or, you know, pictures of it or whatever. It's always shopping. No one can think of what to do with a camera on a phone except make you buy stuff with it. I invented Google Lens today while I was like, I was shopping. You know how like, congratulations? It's been so nice working with you. Right. When are you buying a boat?

You know how you're like when you're like on the bus and you're like, man, if only this were underground and I could avoid traffic and you're like, oh, I invented the subway. This is like, it was the same thing today where I was like, wow, I wish, I was like, I was looking at, I'm trying to avoid fast fashion and get into slow fashion, you know, more like sustainable clothing and stuff. And I was like, wow, I wish I could just like take a picture of a sweater and then have like other options of it available and see it. And I was like, oh, that's, that's just Google lens. I've just, I just created Google lens again. Speaking of shopping, they are expanding their shopping. They're going to do local inventory. So if you want to find something that's nearby and actually in stock, you can do that.

They're also, I believe, they're integrating lens into shopping, of course. You know, like, ultimately, I was like, are you, what does a product page look like on Google, right? Because, like, Google, Amazon has, like, a famously optimized product page, right? And so Google's landing pages for products is different because they can, like, they integrate other things, blah, blah, blah, blah. and we had a long discussion about a search journey. Oh, my God. But the long and the short of it, I interviewed the SVP of search and ads and so on and so forth.

And from what I can tell, Google wants to provide more answers, more like full context, not just like 10 blue links, not just like an answer to your query, but like a whole thing. They're doing this thing where they'll give you like needs to know or like if you search for something,

they'll give you like an info box. It actually has like other things you might be interested in if you know nothing about the subject. So they're providing yet more stuff, which is problematic on many levels, staying on Google pages. Does Google have a point of view? Are they trying to do view from nowhere?

Do they have bias? There's a whole, there's, again, three hours of discussion about that. But at the same time, I think they've hit a wall where they can't collect more information from us with their text box, with their search box.

They're getting ungodly amounts of searches. I forget, you know, I forget, you know, 75, some percentage of all searches are still brand new or whatever. But I think that they need more information from us via our searches. They need more context from us via our searches in order to continue their march of making their own product better. So both the inputs and the outputs are adding more context. I think Google needs both to happen, which is why I think they're pushing lens so hard.

And I keep joking about shopping, but it is true, by the way, that every, every app eventually turns into a catalog. Like Instagram is just like full on the march towards becoming a catalog, a shopping destination. And it's because they're out of ad money. Yeah. Like all these companies are doing great. They're all just like printing money. Google's an advertising company.

Facebook's an advertising company. But like even the other one, like Snapchat and Twitter are doing great because all these dollars have moved online. And then Apple like push the button and Facebook had to issue guidance that was like numbers are going to do that. Yeah. But to make that work, to make that direct consumer relationship work, you also need the sellers to show up and like participate. And I think Google is like not done that yet.

Well, they did it they did announce a deal with Shopify. So there's that. I think that's the deal. Like that's the enabling. Yeah, like the inventory thing sounds like a really good idea, you know, being able to see what's in stock somewhere. But it requires somebody at the store to update the inventory and to like be a willing participant in this. Otherwise it's just going to say limited stock. So like how useful is that? And also you're asking like what that's going to be. it sit straight down to like the person getting paid minimum wage to be constantly updating that. And it's just, I don't know if it's actually like as useful and in practice as it is in theory. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see like are the big box retailers going to want to give their inventory

systems to Google. They are not. Right. So we'll see. Like all this stuff is neat, but I think Deter, you're right. Like they need more information on both sides of the search. Yeah. Because they've gone from, we're going to point you at the resource to we are the resource. and they've got a long, they still have a long way to go there. Yeah. I was just going to say, I'm going to get myself a little, little kudos for the line that I wrote back for the Amazon piece, which was, when we thought about our AI future, we were expecting Hal 9,000, and we got Hammock or Schlemmer. That's very good. All right, we got to take a break.

We're going to bring on Alex Heath. We're going to talk with the code conference. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But WhatNot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love.

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When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually. understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Cloud extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive,

reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.a.ai slash vergecast. That's clod.aI. slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. We're back with Alex Heath. Hello, Alex. Hello. We're going to have to do a Heath and Kranz situation. Kranz and Heath. You sound like a private detective agency. It's a buddy cop show. I'm so excited for us. What's our first one?

Our first case. Wait, who's the straight cop and who's the bad cop? Ooh, that's a tough one. I'll be, I'll be, we'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. Who has the dog for comic relief? That's what I want to know. Which one of you?

Which one of you is Mel Gibson, who's Danny Blaine? Oh my God. No, we're not going there at all. Moving on, moving on. Here's my idea. At the end of the segment, the listeners can tweet at us. Who's the Kagney and who's the Lacey? There you go.

That I'm on board with. Alex Heath, we were just at the code conference together. It was very strange, I would have to say. You had to get tested when you got in. If you left, you had to pay to get retested. We were all to verify our vaccination status through clear, which is a real adventure. And we all had to wear red wristbands the entire time we were trapped in the Beverly Hilton. It was very fun.

It was just like a very, it felt like we were entering a secure area, but we were in the middle of Beverly Hills. It was strange in that respect, but it was good. What did you think of the conference house? I thought it was good. I liked Ted Sarandos. I thought, you know, he was probably one of the news year speakers we had. And obviously, Elon is always going to Elon. I didn't stay for the last day, though.

The last day about psychedelics, I'm kind of mad I missed that. Yeah, so just to give people run out on the show, you get there. There's the first day programming interviews, panels. Second day was chalkful. That was Elon Day. Lots of going on. The third day. Kara Swisher and her great wisdom programmed hangover recovery.

So you could... It's true. You could listen to them, talk about psychedelics and how they're the future. Well, if you were selected, you could get an IV drip to enhance your recovery. It was really weird. And then people were getting electro stimulation of their muscles. So imagine like there's an outdoor stage, lots of people just in regular chairs. And like the perimeter of this is like a science experiment.

It was very good. It was very entertaining. Let's start with Sarandos, though. So Ted Sarandos, the co-ceo of Netflix. He released some data that we should talk about with a weird methodology. But he was just very bullish on Netflix's, I mean, obviously he's Secocio, but people are like, your subscribers are down. There's some softness in that.

You've got all this competition. And he was kind of like, yeah, whatever. Yeah. I mean, Squid Game, right? Yeah. Squid Game runs the world. That was the headline for me, a show that I had never heard of until that, comment he made, revealing that it is their top show around the world. And now I feel like I can't escape squid game content in any of my feeds. I don't know about you all. It's everywhere. It is very much once you like buy a car, you notice that same car everywhere all the time. Yeah. This is ever happened to you? Like you notice it. Like, oh, everyone is actually talking about this thing that was completely ignoring. Well, I think it only dropped like last week too. Like it's, it's not like it's been slowly building. It was just like kind of hit with full force. And everybody was like, yeah, that looks cool.

But Sarandos was like, not only is this thing the most popular show right now, it's like, he's like, it's on track to become the most popular show ever or something ridiculous. Which is wild because it's a non-English South Korean show that, to be honest, I have not finished, but based on what I, the limited footage I have seen looks absolutely bananas. It's super bananas. Can you describe Squid Game to the people? I don't even know if I can. Can you, Deter? So imagine, it's like, you know, the, the. the like super wacky physical challenge game shows.

Imagine that, but you're trapped on murder island. And if you lose, you die. Why is it called Squid Game? Because there's a game as children called The Squid Game that had, you know, convoluted rules in the, it was played on a playground on a chalk outline of a squid. And so like, depending on where you were on the squid, where you had your feet, there's like, you know, it's like a child's game of complicated rules about running around on a squid. And so you take that and then you transpose the idea of.

have a complicated game with weird rules to adults, but they get shot in the head. Sounds awesome. I'm super down for this. Two things actually that he said, Sarando said about kind of Netflix's strategy that stuck out to me, which were actually just kind of denials of things that people thought Netflix may do. But him really like throwing cold water on the idea that they would make a, you know, piece of hardware, like a streaming stick, like a Roku competitor. saying that, you know, it's not vital for them to do something like that. I would maybe beg

to disagree over the next five years or so, but it was interesting to hear him say that. And then also him saying that they had no interest in buying like a movie theater chain, which if you follow any of that commentary, everyone kind of expects that the tech companies will just own all the theaters. Don't they already own theaters? Like they own one here in New York City, right? Yeah, they own the, I think they bought the Chinese theater here in Los Angeles where I am. They have a few kind of art house outposts for screenings and stuff. But I think the implication of that question was like, is Netflix going to buy AMC or something like that?

And he was like, nope. No, Disney is. Right. He said a third thing, too, along the same lines. He's like, we're not going to spend money on sports. Which is not a surprise. I mean, Netflix has historically said no to sports and no to news and probably for probably for the best.

But yeah, I mean, I agree with you, Neelah. He was very confident, seemed bullish and, you know, as a co-CEo should. But, I mean, maybe we should just briefly touch on the gaming part two, him kind of talking about the gaming strategy that Netflix recently announced, saying it's really just like any other vertical of content for them, kind of a continuation of the storytelling they already do with scripted and nonscripted, and that they're going to do their own games and licensed games,

but wouldn't share anything about a launch outside of, I think they're just testing these in Poland right now. So who knows when we'll get them. He did say it was more mobile focused, which I think he said before, or Netflix has said before, but which is fascinating to me, right? Like, I personally perceive of Netflix as an app that I use on my television, occasionally on a tablet. I do not think of it as a thing I use on my phone. That is obviously different for a lot of people.

Lots of people watch Netflix on my phone. But what's the big market on phones? It's games. Netflix wants to bundle games in your subscription, so you'll start using the Netflix app on your phone. And I think that's just so you think about their expansion into, like, minutes of the day, which is like what they actually care about. Yeah. They're competing for minutes.

They're like, Fortnite's are competitor. They want those minutes. Yeah, but like, look, if Netflix just puts, like, a free, a free, good enough version of any number of games that you were paying to play that you see people play on the subway or the plane or the bus right now, if you're lucky enough to be on one of those modes of transportation, if they just put solitaire in Netflix,

they will have a gangbusters quarter. I'm kind of not kidding. That's like all they really need to do. Well, a gangbusters' quarter. I mean, they have a weird, they'll have a gangbusters quarter in terms of like minutes used. Attracting new subscribers and reducing churn. Yeah. That's actually what matters here.

Well, we should actually talk about their numbers then. So, yeah. So this methodology is weird. So Sarandos made some news on stage with Kara. He put up slides showing, actually, I can touch with this. For years, no one knows how anything is performing on Netflix. And like, this is a big problem. It's a problem for how people get paid.

like creatives are like, I don't know how my show is doing. Netflix buys and cancels things on a whim, it appears. The networks obviously don't like it because they want to compare ratings, blah, blah, blah. Now they've got a lot of competitors. They've got the Disney Plus and the Huluos and HBO Maxes of the world. And so they need to Netflix now needs to prove. They've got the same problem that the networks used to have with Netflix. So they've invented some metrics.

There's no other way to put this. They've invented some metrics that we cannot possibly, audit. One is they're both, these slides are titled Most Popular Series in Films. And the first metric is view hours, and that is total view hours per title

in the first 28 days on Netflix. So the thing launches in Netflix, here's how many hours it was viewed in the first 28 days. It aggregate by all of humanity? Yeah, I guess. Okay. Well, that's not a new metric for them.

Like, they've talked about that metric before, I think. But they've done it softly. they've never released a top 10. Right. Right. So, like, this is, like, actual data. So you've got Bridgeton season one, 625 million view hours. That's number one series.

Number one film Birdbox, 282 million view hours. You kind of go through this list, and it's like the top 10 films on Netflix are their own films that they have relentlessly promoted. Yeah. Right? And they all suck. And they all suck. The old guard is fine.

It was totally fine. It got me through yet another night of the pandemic. Yeah. I don't even remember this thing. The Irishman is good. The Irishman is hilarious because it's also 70 hours long. So this 250 million view hours represents three people watching the Irishman. Six Underground is horrible.

And it's number five on this list. Why does Stranger Things Season 3 have more view hours than Stranger Things season two? Because it's a better season, Kranz. No, because it's in the first 28 days. Okay. So season three got the hype boost. It's not cumulative. All right.

All right. So that's, you can look at that. So that one's fine and it is whatever. It's a metric that feels like a, I don't know, a standard digital metric, like a YouTube metric. Yeah. The second one I would categorize as a Facebook metric. So this is engagement. This is number of accounts that have watched this stuff.

And what they are counting is people who have watched a show for more than two minutes. Two minutes? Two minutes. I thought it was leaving less said. It's two minutes. Okay. It's two minutes. in the first 28 days.

To be fair, that is a lot of time to commit to Birdbox. Yeah. Sorry, I keep crapping on Birdbox, but it's, yeah, I don't know, man. It's a lot of time to commit to Emily and Paris. We got no clarity on how they're counting that two minutes, right? So is it Netflix, like, auto runs a lot of things in their interface. So you open Netflix, and it is sort of geared towards just, like, starting a thing, so you'll sit there.

So we don't know if they're counting those watches. we don't know but their metric is two minutes which is like on par for me with the facebook 30 seconds counts as a view nonsense that they used to and this list list also looks exactly the same it's just a bunch of Netflix stuff that they relentlessly promote and so you can argue at the list i think probably every podcast and local radio DJ in the world has argued about this list and what these shows are you can find that stuff elsewhere but to me the thing that's absolutely fascinating is like Netflix self-promotion works, at least according to their own metrics, which are not comparable to anyone else's metrics because no one else has standardized metrics. But if Netflix is buying

the content and it's promoting it and its stuff works and by its own metrics, their own stuff is the most successful. Netflix is the wholesaler of other people's stuff starts to get really complicated. That and I think it's just interesting that they're releasing this data at all, because like you said, Netflix famously never released data when they did. It was impossible to determine it's like an Amazon chart without the Y axis, right? It's like impossible to determine what it is. So the fact that they're releasing this at all to me indicates some competitive pressure and that they feel the need to say, hey, like, if you make content with us, you know, 82 million people are going to watch at least two minutes of Bridgeton. Whereas Apple, you know, we found out through a union shop has less than 20. 20 million subscribers last week, but we don't really know anything about these other streamers. So Netflix is trying to go, hey, we have all the eyeballs, you know, stay with us. And I bet over time this data will become more detailed, more granular, potentially independently verified.

But for now, yeah, this is a Facebook metric for sure. It's funny. We just to imply that they're unreliable amounts we trusted. I was going to say there were Bezos numbers, but it both work. Well, Facebook is like notoriously bad at counting. Yeah, that's like, especially when it comes to paying people like for advertise anyway. We'll leave that for another time. So that was Netflix.

I will say, Mr. Heath. To your point, there's a lot of a lot of calamity in the ratings business right now. Like NBC wants to get away from Nielsen and start its own thing. There's just a lot of like industry pressure on how can we measure anything? Where should these dollars go? If you are an analytics person, please start a blog so that we can read it. Because I'm dying to know how this will shake out. Let's talk about Elon.

What do you think of Elon? I mean, you know, Elon's going to Elon. I mean, I knew he was going to want to talk about Mars a lot, but I was surprised at the general lack of conversation about, you know, Tesla, the main company he runs. I did ask about self-driving and this, you know, full self-driving beta they're rolling out. And the NDA, they make people sign as like, you know, people want Tesla to fail, basically. So therefore sign this NDA.

It seems pretty clear that they're trying to sort of. press, you know, crash reports, that sort of thing. And I just asked them, point blank. I was like, you know, why have these NDAs for full self-driving? And he was like, you know, I don't think we need them. I don't actually know why we have those. And then, you know, a team of lawyers at Tesla cried. Yeah, I imagine. But nobody will ever know because they themselves have signed NDAs. Yeah. Just be specific, the NDA that people were supposed to sign for false self-driving was you shouldn't take or share too many videos of the thing failing. You were free to share all those. videos of it being successful. It is notable that Kara mostly asked about SpaceX. There was a little

bit of Starlink. He was on his talking. It was very much the Elon greatest hits. I interview CEOs. I'm well aware that CEOs loves to do the greatest hits. Like there's a reason they're the greatest hits. So he said a bunch of stuff that we've heard him say. He's done a couple of things to me in regards to Tesla. He's pissed that the White House had an EV summit and didn't invite Tesla. He was like notably angry about that. Kara asked him why they thought that was. And and he said, Biden is controlled by the unions. Yeah. Tesla famously will not have unions at its trap.

By the way, the White House's excuse for not inviting Tesla is like world historical stupid. They were like, this was an event about fuel efficiency standards and Tesla's don't use fuel. Incredible. They really had to backtrack into that one. They could have like, done the fact that they can't ship cars. But instead, they're like, no. He had several zingers. He had the, when he said the union thing, you could hear everyone in the room.

like oh and then also when he was like you can't sue your way to space that was good there were several singers that one that was that's one i kind of want to end on so he he launched several attacks at jeff bezos carra asked him why the bezos rocket looks like that and he was like well if you're only designed to go suborbital your rocket can be smaller and then like literally did the office look to the camera like i got you um which is like very funny and then he said you cannot sue your way to space. Amazon, Blue Origin is not Amazon. Yeah.

They're both, you know, operated by Bezos. But Amazon responded to this by having, like, their satellite division send us an email of all the times SpaceX has done litigation to prove that. And it's like, you want us to believe that Jeff Bezos has left Amazon, right? Like, he's no longer the CEO and he's not like exerting iron-fisted control. Elon says something about Blue Origin and Amazon is responding. Like maybe there's a little blurriness here that you don't want to lean into. They just really miss him.

They care about him. They just miss him. They just got us back. That's all. He's not related. Oh, by the way, the exact line was you cannot sue your way to the moon. Yes. That's a good line, though.

Because the government has a contract with SpaceX and Blue Origin is suing because they think they were unfairly excluded from said contract. He talked a bunch about Starship and how that will make things. cheaper. His line about the moon was we should go to Mars. That's like where the real action is and the moon is there so we might as well go there too, which I thought was very funny. He did also, I just want to briefly, we talked a bit about satellite internet and he did

have this weird thing where he's like, a bunch of amateur astronomers are pissed to me, but all the professionals think I'm great. I was like, hmm, that's not true. That's just 100% not true. He's like, yeah, we've called them all. Yeah. And they seem satisfied with what we're doing. And like, you could just hear the like astro nerds and the crowd be like, what? What? No.

they're checking their call history. He's like, oh, I did, I did miss a call from Elon. Damn it. So that was strange. He was like, we don't want to get in the way of astronomers, but they obviously, you know, there's like big satellite constellations are going to get in the way of astronomers. He did walk back, I think, some expectations on Starlink. Oh.

Right. I mean, the hype around Starlink is, to this day, as high as it can be. It's still in beta. But he was like, this is for 5% of the world's popular, the 5% of least connected people. in the world. We're doing it because we want to create a revenue stream that can fund the development of other stuff. This is a good one. We think there's benefits to connectivity. But he said maybe three times, maybe four, this is not meant to compete with 5G and fiber. Yep. This is a compliment to those things for areas that can't be connected, which to me represents a significant reset of expectations

about what Starlink is and what it can do. Yeah. Because when he tweets about it, he's like, you're going to be able to mount it on the back of your RV and go anywhere. Like, And like, if the thing is indeed about to come out of beta and they're actually going to open it up, again, I have a Starlink. People are going to plug it in. They're going to see what it can do. And like, yep, when it works, it's great. And if there's a tree in the way, it's not great. That's just as simple of a review of that product I can give you.

So if you live in a city, you live anywhere with lots of obstructions, there's a reason he's now saying it's only for the 5% of least connected. The people who will build towers over the trees because they have no other choices. So that to me is interesting. We'll just keep track in Starlight. Oh, and he talked about crypto. And he was like, I'm not as intuitive as people think I am. Yeah. Yeah, he was very vague on crypto and someone asked a blockchain question.

And he was like, yeah, it sounds good. I'm generally for public ledgers. I mean, he talked about how the payment rails are outdated and, you know, obviously PayPal. He has a lot of actual knowledge about that kind of stuff. But yeah, he didn't hype Doge or Scott Galloway, likes to call it Doja or anything like that. So kind of disappointing.

Yeah. And Kara tried to push him on China. And he was like, you know, the real problem there is no face-to-face meetings. It's a real, that was his real answer. Yeah. So when those come back, our U.S. Chinese relationships will snap right back into place. But overall, like I said, the greatest hits. Yeah.

He has a cool helicopter. He has a cool. He did arrive in a helicopter. Very loud. And I, you know, the, the, Alex, you asked a good question. But overall, the other questions were like, can you put a roof rack? my Model X. And Elon was like, well, the doors go up. So that's very challenging for us. Not one question about the cyber truck. I was like, where's the cyber truck? Didn't they already

announced it delayed? They did to 2022. They announced the date? No. I have asked Elon at previous code conferences. I've asked him about like delivery dates. And he was like, it's ready when it's ready. And like, I think people are just used to it now. Like Tesla delivery dates in particular are fantastic ideas. Okay. Satchinadella was also there. You know, He said a lot of leadershipy things. But he said two things that stuck out to me. One was Cara just asked him what happened with TikTok. Oh, God.

In the Trump administration. So good. And we know Satchel a little bit, right? I've interviewed him, Deeter, to talk to him. Like, he's a familiar character to us. He's usually very buttoned up. He's very professional. And the entire time he was trying to explain what happened with Trump and

TikTok, he was just on the, on the edge of cracking up. Yep. Like, he could not hold it together. He said it's the strangest thing. he's ever worked on. Yeah. He tried to not have to talk about it. He's like, you know, and then some stuff happened and then the rest was history.

It all fell apart. And Kara was like, no, no, say what happened. So he was like reminder. So for people who have already forgotten this extremely strange period in our nation's history, Trump was going to hold a rally. People, not as many people showed up as he thought. God, I forgot to include the rally context in the post. Oh, my God.

So Trump was going to hold a rally and as many people showed up. The mechanism by. which people did not show up is still unclear to us. But the rumor is that a bunch of teenagers got on TikTok, registered for the rally, inflated the numbers, causing them to open a second remote viewing location for this rally. Yeah. Because the numbers are so inflated. Yeah.

And that the TikTok teens had prank Trump. Yep. Do we know that this actually happened? Right? Like, yes, the TikTok teens did a thing, but did it cause, still fuzzy. Trump believes the TikTok teens did a thing to him. So he responded to this by saying TikTok is Chinese. We're going to ban it from America tomorrow.

He did this on the flight back home from the rally. Yep. God. Like he just announced it to reporters in the back of the plane. And so all the reporters are like Trump says to ban TikTok in that way that like people insisted on believing that Trump was going to do things, you know? There's an LCD factory in Wisconsin. There's a website.

There's a way at Google. Anyway, so now there's like this huge cycle about TikTok stuff. and out of all this emerges, Microsoft is going to buy TikTok. It broke her to deal with Microsoft. And so Nadella is trying to explain how this happened. And he's like first, understand that TikTok came to us. He was very insistent on that. Yeah, yeah.

He was like, TikTok came to us. We were available. We thought it was like interesting AI play. And we also ran LinkedIn. So we have some knowledge about social networks work. And we have Xbox. Like we thought there was a match. We thought we could do some stuff.

We're good at trust and safety. Microsoft runs. photo DNA, which is the industry standard child protection photo, like image algorithm. We talk a lot about C-SAM when the context sample. The actual industry standard one is called photo DNA. It's Microsoft. He's like, we had that. We felt like we could put it all together.

And he's like, and then they just went away. He's like, we just didn't hear from there. You got ghosted by TikTok? He got ghosted by the government. He was like, they just lost interest in this. Technically, there was a deal with Oracle, sort of. Yeah, they went away. And then Oracle got this deal and that deal never happened either.

And now TikTok is just like rocking. They have a billion users around the world. And no one's like, whatever. So the whole time he was trying to tell the story, he was just like cracking up. Like he could not bring himself to like be straight laced Sashindel. Like, you know, the five elements of leadership that I'd come back to everybody. He was like, I don't know, man. That was really weird.

And then he had this other line about Apple where he was like, here's a lesson we learned at Microsoft. When a lot of people are complaining about something. you're doing. There must be something you're doing that's bothering people that you should reflect upon. Yeah. And then the next morning they open up the Windows App Store. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Overall, I thought that was interesting. It's worth checking out when those clips come in line. I wonder if he's aware that a lot of people are complaining about how they're forcing people onto the Edge browser in Windows 11. I like Edge. I can't complain. Dieter and I have a conspiracy theory, which, by the way, in all fairness, we have laughed about with

Microsoft's PR people. Our conspiracy theory is that they saw us waiting in line to ask questions. Yeah. Me at one microphone in a deed or another. And we were like texting each other. And they were like, hook him, pull him off the stage. The reality is that my strat for asking questions is just bad. I don't get up to the microphone soon enough.

And so I end up just being like the sad guy standing there hoping that they're going to let one more question in. That was, that was me at the code conference. They told us they had a plane to catch. And I was like, that dude flies private. Come on. No, it was like, he's got a. plane to catch in 40 minutes. That's like,

that is not how fast planes go through security. Anyway, for him. It's all, we were all just goofs, don't right? Like, he left.

We have asked many questions to him before. We've asked many questions of him later. Gary Gansler was there, chairman of the SEC, interviewed by Prit Barara, host of Stay Tuned with Preet, which is another Fox Media podcast network show. Preet was like,

what are you going to do by crypto? And I would say for one hour, Gary Gensler said nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing of value. But he was incredibly, eager to say nothing. He was like, I'm here and I need you to hear me say nothing. One of the tensest moments of code was when someone got up and asked him about his comments

about how, you know, we can't have thousands of private currencies. That's unsustainable. This is the Wild West. We need to tame it. And then this guy just went on this like 30 second rant about defy and was like, actually these are not all currencies. Like would you call AWS a currency like, you know, if someone's building a decentralized cloud database, like, he really tore into him. And he was like, basically he was saying, like, respectfully, you have no idea what you're talking about is essentially what he said. And then Gensler just sat there, took it in and was like, I will take that feedback in the spirit that it was given. And I asked Gensler about stable coins and he filibustered for about two minutes. Yeah, the vibe from Gensler was like, he's thinking about doing something with crypto, but he will not tell us what it is.

And it's either going to be really nuclear or nothing at all. And I couldn't tell. My theory, you know, because I did interview with code and we're trying to book people. And like you have those conversations. Do you want to come onto the code stage? And like some of it is, yep, it's just a big fancy stage. And CEOs want to be on it. They want to get interviewed by Kara.

It's like a badge of honor. But a lot of times they want to have something to say. They like it's an opportunity for them to say something new or in the case of strandos break some news like whatever like they're there with a reason and I could not identify what Gary Gensler's reason for being a kid was except yeah he was there on Zoom. I think it was to like bicker with Pre because apparently Prit was also up for the role at one point for like SEC chairman. And there was like an awkward moment where they were like you could tell like he was like what would you do in my job since he almost had my job. that was great i will say is somebody who like didn't interview on that stage uh prete doing an interview in a live room over zoom he was very good yeah he was good i don't know that i would have been able to to hold the audience's interest both in a content free like my interview is saying nothing and we're over zoom very challenging i think it was fun to listen to they did bicker quite a bit what did prete say he would prete asked him some question and gensler was like i can either

confirm or deny that i'm looking at that he was like what does it feel to get that answer instead of give it because that was what pretty used to say is the US attorney. It was good. If you were way more into the Ari Emanuel conversation than I think I was. So Ari Emanuel is the most, he refused to call himself an agent. But he's the most powerful agent in Hollywood. He runs William Morris Endeavor. He just bought another agency for billions of dollars.

He owns the UFC. Entourage. Yeah, he's the inspiration for the Ari character and entourage. It's funny that he's the most famous for that when he's also. just like the most powerful man in Illinois. But so it goes. He had this line that the market for content is infinite, but he said a bunch of other stuff.

The tam. The tam for content is infinite, which is something I just want to tattoo. I just want to tattoo that on my chest. What is Tam? Total addressable market. Okay. Can you tell the three of us were there

and all of us were like, wait. But if you were like into this, explain why. Yeah. I mean, it was interesting because a giant merger had happened with CAA, which competes with his company and another talent agency like the day before. And so there was a lot of talk of like consolidation in the industry.

How is big tech kind of forcing this consolidation so that people have more leverage against these, you know, two trillion dollar companies that are now doing streaming. But, you know, he's very like loose cannon similar to Elon. Like you can tell his handlers are not, you know, he actually doesn't have any. And he was just kind of like, yeah, no, it's the best time ever to be talent in Hollywood, you know, because, you know, it used to be that you would get like a back-end deal and then maybe that would work out for you if the movie did really well in theaters. And now all the streamers are paying back-end deals up front. So everyone's getting more money up front, even though maybe that takes a little bit

of the upside away. And, you know, he got asked about some things like Cameo, which is that celebrity, you know, shout-out app and, you know, said he thought that was cool, but... Kind of dunked on it a little bit. Kind of dunked on it a little bit. And really, like, I enjoyed the bickering with Kara about the future of movie theaters and he was adamant that, movie theaters are not going to go away, that they're going to remain essential to American life, which I think he's probably right on the margin, but I agree with Kara that they're not going to be as big as they once were. But yeah, just mostly like, you know, a nice tussle about the future of the entertainment industry. And he's just a fun character. We should say,

by the way, for context, on that streamer stuff, Disney and Scott settled their lawsuit. Yeah. Right. So the obvious pushback to what he was saying about the best time for talent is like one of the most famous people in Hollywood is suing Disney because of theatrical distribution and going to Disney Plus. And I think there was some feeling that both sides were dug in and at lawsuit would actually create some precedent. But instead they just settled and Disney paid the money. And like now we'll never know what the actual, and we don't know the terms.

So now we'll never know what the delta between here's what you should get paid up front and here's what the actual backend pays you should be, except millions of dollars. Do you do anything else from code? You want to talk about it? Well, actually, Eli, you were on stage and you had an interview with Waymo. Yeah, that's fine. Like, I was on stage where we're going to run that interview in the Decoder feed. Yeah.

I interviewed the CoC. of Waymo to Kedro Malacana. She is great. I asked her what was taking so long as self-driving cars. But we don't need to recapitulate that here because, like any good content executive, I'm trying to ladder you into my other show, Decoder with Nilai Patel, which is available in the feed. Can I say one thing about flying cars? So they also had Kitty Hawk there, which is the Larry Page, Google co-founder-funded, flying car startup run by the guy who started Google X, their Moonshot Factory, giving his, you know,

pitch for a Kitty Hawk that he's been giving for years. And I talked to someone who shall be anonymous at the conference, who may or may not have worked at Google at one point, who told me that literally the idea for Kitty Hawk started because Larry and Sergey, the other Google co-founder, were obsessed with figuring out how to effectively get Google employees from the Bay Area down to Google's office in Mountain View in a way that would avoid traffic. And so they were like flying cars. And so they just came up with flying cars. And that was the genesis of, uh, of Kitty Hawk.

Uh, it was a way for Google to improve its, its traffic, uh, route for employees. And 15 years later, they parked a small glider in the, the lobby of a hotel. And the person was like, we didn't really think about what would happen if there are actually hundreds of these little flying cars up in the air. Like, what's going to happen? Okay, we should do a little lightning around.

We've gone over. There are going to be new logos for USBC cables. No. The most delightful ongoing disaster. By the way, you complain about the EU doing regulation. The free market of the tech industry is responsible for USBC. No one's in their way. And this is what they've come up with.

They've proven why they need someone over looking up. Putting that idea out there. Like maybe just Dieter should be the regulator. Oh, God. You can just tell them what to do. NBC and YouTube TV are having a very boring contract dispute, but it means NBC might leave YouTube TV. I'm just all I'm saying is every new thing turns into the old thing. Like YouTube TV is just being a cable company right now.

There's a bunch of little Android news. And I will say this, Nintendo categorically denied that there's a 4K Switch pro in development, which they should not. They should just be like, yes, of course we're going to make another switch. That's the thing that we do. Anyway, all that stuff's on the site. if you hear Heim Gartenberg crying anywhere, it's because he has to write another USBC story. Three things I want to point out,

and then we've got to get out of here. The Elizabeth Holmes trial is ongoing. I just talked to John Kerry Rue that reported the journal who broke all those stories on Decoder, but Liz Lapato is at the trial. I will say her coverage that trial is by far some of the popular stuff on our site. So when she is available today,

we're going to have her on the show and talk about it, but go read that. She's there. Zoe has another story about Apple, leaks employee unrest there. She remains the single most interesting app reporter right now. And then we talked about Blue Origin and SpaceX. A bunch of Blue Origin employees put out an open letter. It's like 20 some employees, current informer, saying the place is rife with sexism and doesn't care about safety. Big deal. Go read that. They were on CBS and stuff. All that's on the site.

Lots of other stuff on the site. It was a real busy week. Great week. Go read the website. You can tweet at us. Cranz is Alex H. Kranz. Heath is Alex E. Heath. Same format there. I'm glad that you guys made this really easy to figure out. We coordinated. Deere is back lawn. I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you. Like I said, John Kerry was on Decoder. Next week, we're going to run the interview with Takedra from the Code Conference. And the AI series on the Vergecast continues to Rock and Roll. Last week was text generation, as Deeter said, this week. Big Finish. AI smell and taste. It's a fun one. All right. That's it. Rocker roll. Get the shot. Come to our party.