The Vergecast - Google's extreme smart home makeover

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Oh, you thought AI was just in your browser and on your phone? Well, the AI is coming from inside the house. The Verge's Jen Pattison Tuohy and Google's Anish Kattukaran both join the show to discuss last week's Google smart home news, including the company's big bet on the Gemini assistant. Anish explains why Google cares about the smart home in the first place, why things haven't exactly gone great so far, and why he's so convinced the new generation of AI can make it work. After that, The Verge's Vee Song joins the show to talk about Peloton's newest gear, including a $6,695 treadmill and a huge new push into personalized AI training features. Vee then sticks around to help David answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email [e-mail]!) about how many smartwatches is too many smartwatches. Spoiler alert: the answer is two. But it's not quite as simple as that. Further reading: Peloton increases fees and introduces new hardware including a $6,695 treadmill Peloton appoints Apple Fitness Plus cofounder as new CEO Peloton is a media company now, with media company problems Google dismantled Nest — can Gemini save what’s left? Hey Google, meet Gemini: the new voice of your smart home The new Google Home Speaker is built for Gemini Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of treadmills that don't fit anywhere in my house. So I'm moving and we have this new room in our new house that is basically, it's like a big closet. But my wife looked at it and was like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if we use that as like an exercise room? It has no windows. It's just like a seven foot by five foot cave. And she's like, what if we put a treadmill in there? So we've been shopping for treadmills. And it turns out that treadmills are either horrible or $7,000.

and in many cases are both of those things. So if you have an idea of a treadmill that isn't gigantic, isn't horrible, and isn't $7,000, please tell me, my family is dying. We need this. Thank you. Anyway, that is not what we're here to talk about. Actually, we are here a little bit to talk about treadmills,

but we're going to get to that later. We're going to do two things on the Vergecast today. First, we're going to talk more about the smart home. We talked a lot about Amazon and Alexa and Echo devices last week. This week, we're going to dig in to, what Google is really up to. I think Google is maybe the company best set up to figure out the smart home,

but it's been trying as long as anybody and hasn't really made any progress. So we're going to talk to Anish Kadukaran who runs a lot of that stuff at Google and try to figure out whether Google or anybody is actually set up to do this well and do it now. After that, we're going to talk to V's song about what is going on with Peloton.

Because Peloton, a company I hadn't thought about in a long time, announced a bunch of real interesting and really expensive stuff last week. So we're going to get into what it all means and whether the Peloton people are going to be into it. We also have a really fun question on the Vergecast hotline that may or may not lead you to buy many more gadgets and put them all over your body. All of that is coming up in just a second, but first, I just found this treadmill that is

$200. My wife sent me a link. I'm confident it's horrible, but I have to go read reviews. Please send help. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets,

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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. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion?

If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. Jen Tui's here. Hi, Jen.

David, long time, no see. I just can't stop talking about smart home things. You have a guest for us today. You've brought someone you think would be fun for us to talk to. So just set this up for us a little bit before we get into it. Who are we about to talk to? Yes, so we have Anish Katakaran, who is the head of Google Home and Nest, and he is basically the guy that has been leading the sort of resurgence,

should we put it that way, or of Google Home over the last few years. Last week there were a lot of announcements from Google Home about completely re-architecturing the Google Home app, new hardware, new software for Google Home, all of which has been sort of developed under his leadership over the last few years. So he's, and he's the guy that I've spoken to several times over the last few years about this big shift that we're seeing from this command and control infrastructure in our home to these LLMs coming, you know, generative AI powered voice assistants that he, believes, and I guess I'm drinking the Kool-Aid a little bit, it's going to be a huge change for the smart home. This is what Amazon's doing with Alexa Plus. So yeah, he, I'm hopeful he'll be able to give us some interesting insights into what's going on, why it's been so difficult, why Google Home has been so bad for so long, and what's coming in the future. Yeah, so on the Google home being so bad for so long, I just, like, I'm curious of you and I are kind of coming into

this interview in the same headspace, because just to, lay my own cards on the table. I would say the way I think of Google's smart home efforts is that when we talk about sort of the smart assistant 1.0 revolution such as it was, it was basically Alexa and Google Assistant. Like Siri is kind of off on the side doing its own thing, largely very badly. But Alexa and Google Assistant are largely trying to do the same thing the same way. And I think my impression is that Google Assistant became a very good thing to do on your phone and that it seemed like Google sort of forgot it had a smart home project. But I pay less attention to it than you do.

So where's your head kind of coming into this conversation? So yeah, Google Home and Amazon Alexa have kind of grown up together in the smart home. It's been interesting to watch their different approaches. They've kind of copied each other. They've been moving at the same speed, but sometimes we'll get better features on one than the other. And then all of a sudden, a few years ago, Google Home just started to sort of seem to stop to innovate. And everyone was like, well, Google has checked out on the smart home, just like they've checked out on previous projects and hardware in the past. But I'd always, during this period,

I've been talking to the team there. And there's this sort of passionate small team that seems to be doing a lot of really interesting things. And one of the core differences here, I think, for Google Home has been the way it was built. And I think they've spent the last several years fixing that because they brought together Nest, and we've talked about Nest before, and Ness is a great smart home hardware ecosystem, and they brought it together with Google and its software ecosystem and Chromecast. So basically, they built a smart home system on three separate pillars, and I think there have been, this was an interesting space that everyone was trying to understand as they built it. And now what they've done is re-architect,

everything from the ground up. And that's what they've been doing the last few years. And this is why we've been seen sort of not last few years, maybe last couple years. We've been seeing this a bit of a degradation, which has been frustrating users, understandably, because when you have a product that doesn't do what you're expected to do anymore, you get very unhappy. But I think I'm quite excited by what they showed me last week and what they're working towards. Because I do believe, And I think you agree with me here that, David, that Google home with the infrastructure that Google can provide is positioned really well to make the smart home work. So I'm excited to see whether they can take this where they want to go. And most importantly, whether Google slash alphabet is going to really continue to push and invest in this space.

I mean, I think they're paying attention to it now because Gemini, you know, that's everything. That's all Google seems to care about right now. But I'm just hoping we can keep the focus and attention here for a bit longer so that this team can actually do something to make the smart home more exciting, more useful, and more reliable. Yeah, I like it. All right, that's good context. Let's just get into it with Anish. Anish, welcome to the Vergecast.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Very glad to have you here. We have a lot to talk about. Jen has lots of questions for you. I have lots of questions for you. But I think I want to start with the most. like annoyingly philosophical question

I can think of to start with which is why does Google care about the smart home at all? I guess A does Google care about the smart home because there have been times in the last decade I have debated the answer to that question but like for a company

that is as big and broad and into as many things as Google is what's in the smart home for Google at this point? Yeah probably a fair question. And I think we've also been on a journey. So at different points, I can see how we've had some sort of high highs and some challenging, challenging lows.

But listen, in 2015, 2016, when we rolled out the first assistant, for us, getting into the smart home was a means for people to have this sort of fundamentally new interaction with the way they access information and sort of how they control things in their home. I think that was sort of a step function change for us at the time. And then while, you know, the subsequent years have been challenging, the vision for us has always been, can we build a home that's truly helpful and proactive and can take care of the people inside of it? That mission has been unchanged. I think for us as we looked at what has made it complicated over the last few years, like we haven't always sort of lived up to, like the delta between expectations and reality. I think has been, there's been a gap. And I was telling Jen last week when we were chatting, like in a lot of ways,

the biggest limiting function was the last generation of AI and ML. And so for us now, at this inflection point, with the Gemini as sort of this core asset, we think we are best positioned to realize that initial vision of ours. And then Gemini is this like incredible, powerful sort of technology that can help us do that. And so, so yeah, so I think for us,

this is realizing our, existing vision, but with Gemini at its core, and that's going to help us sort of have a step function change in what we can do there. But just let me just poke at that strategy a little bit, because I think you said two things that are, I think, different that actually get conflated a lot. And I want to see if we can separate them out a little bit. Because there's, on the one side, there's the, we have this thing called Google Assistant. We want people to use it as much as possible. In order to do that, one of the things we need is probably something for them to yell at in their living room that

isn't their phone, right? So like, smart home is a means to an end, and the end is lots of people use Google Assistant seems like a perfectly rational Google strategy, right? Like, what we want is people to use Google. This is a speaker through which they will use Google. That I completely get. The idea of like, oh, we need to help people turn their lights on and off. Doesn't necessarily have to follow from that. But it seems like to some extent it did that you're like, okay, well, now we have this thing in people's living rooms. What can we do? with it? Like, is that, are those two different things? Am I, am I wrong in personally those two things out? I think they're related, right? Like, I, in my mind, it's, that's almost

sort of like a slightly internal way of looking at it. Like, if you're, if you take a, if you sort of take a consumer or user lens, if you're talking to this thing, let's call it, if you're talking to something in your home, there's, there's a question that we ask often, which is like, what are our users' expectations of what they can do with that? And I think in that mental model, users expect to be able to have at least sort of a partner where they can get access to information, which is sort of the first thing you talked about. But they also want to be able to take a lot of sort of like fundamental actions, right? Things that can actually help, like I've got three kids, things that can help me make my life a little bit easier so that I

can go back to spending time with the kids. To me, is incredibly powerful. I think a lot of people say that. So if you can make it a little bit easier to, you know, do stuff in the home, like, listening to your media, consuming your media, things like household coordination, like setting timers, getting recipes, like, you know, adding to lists, coordinating your, you know, your groceries and maybe in the future sort of ordering them, having them show up at your door. And then, like, all the smartphone controls, I think those are all sort of like things that are related if you put it through the lens of what do users expect when they're having this sort of conversation with Google and or Gemini in the home. And so maybe that's the way that I would sort of

reframe what you asked. Okay. I think one of the reasons that perhaps, you know, the reason behind these questions are that Google as a company has sort of had a history of paying attention to things and then not paying attention to things. And where, but, you know, the smart home has been part of Google for, as you say, over a decade. But it has gone through, as you mentioned, some peaks and troughs.

And so one of the things, and I've heard from my. readers, and I think you've heard from your users, is a fear that Google's just going to say, oh, we're done with the smart home, you know, especially with the shift away from the NEST hardware, the NEST protect, the NEST secure security system, the NEST Yale door lock, you know, you sort of moved those to new partners, and there was, and over the last few months and years, it felt like maybe to some users, the smart home wasn't a priority. So I guess one of the things that would be interesting to sort of understand from Google's perspective

is what is that value to the company and that we can see and understand so that we think, okay, I don't worry that they're just going to pull the rug out from under me. Yeah, listen, I think it's a probably fair criticism for what it's worth. I've read all of those comments in your comment threads. I spent a lot of time on Reddit and our communities reading all that stuff.

And I have a deep empathy for this. Like I started building out my ecosystem well before I was here in this role. Like I've got, you know, Jen, we talk about this often. I've got like 150, 200 devices in my home that I accrued, you know, well before that. But yeah, so maybe going back to your question around should people or should our users sort of trust our commitment and our focus? And that's, is that a fair summary of what your, you know? You're asking me? Okay.

The thing that I would say to that is our, and this is what we talk about internally as well, like our mission has not changed once over the last decade. I think what people feel sometimes is how we have tried to realize that has evolved, right? Yeah. So when we start, like, when we started over a decade ago in sort of like the nascent phase of smart home, not all of your devices were connected, right? There weren't a ton of smart home OEMs making every device under the sun. And so, yeah, there was an initial hypothesis that, yeah, we'll go and build every device

in every category at every price point, and you have this sort of like price ladder and people can choose everything. And I think what we saw over time was that a few different things, but people just, you know, there was a sort of massive explosion. You had a whole bunch of OEMs and manufacturers come into the ecosystem. and suddenly everything was, quote-unquote, connected or smart. And then we had to sort of look at, are we actually going to build every device in the home?

Like, am I going to go and build, like, vacuum cleaners and robocumes and blinds and washers and dryers and stuff like that? Because the reality was users were very clear. They wanted a lot of those devices. And they didn't necessarily tell us that they wanted all of it from one partner or one brand. It was very clear from the, early days of assistant, they were like, hey, I want to be able to connect to everything, right?

I want to connect to all sort of the partners in the ecosystem. So we did have to like take a step back and say, where do we lean into our strengths and sort of like, how do we evolve our hardware strategy as a function of that? And it has evolved. Like you'll, you know, I, when I was sharing with you last week was the way that I think about our hardware strategy is that we will continue, we love building hardware. We will continue to build awesome hardware. we think of it as a two-pronged strategy. We're going to build sort of flagship devices in a few categories where we can showcase innovation,

where we can sort of push the boundaries of what Gemini can do. And then we'll complement that with partners that can sort of expand choice for users, give you choice of form factor and price points and stuff like that. And you saw a little bit of that, you know, this week, certainly in cameras and doorbells, we announced Walmart and stuff like that.

So there's going to be a lot more of that. But that's how I think about how our hardware strategies evolved. but our broader mission remains like pretty unchanged. Is it obviously where that line is now in the sort of what is and isn't your job in a smart home? Yeah, yeah. I think so. And maybe just to sort of put a finer point on the last question of people trusting us,

we've made some hard calls for sure. But we've also sort of done a lot of hard work. Like you think about two things that have happened this week. we said, we're going to replace the Google Assistant on every speaker and smart display that we've built in a decade. There was an easier path for us, by the way, which was to say just the new ones, right?

But not for a second did we say that we were going to take that path. Like for us, obviously, like, that was a, that is like one sign of commitment to our ecosystem. I think the other way, the other one that I would point to is on the devices in the Nest app, right? We finally finished this, this, migration and we've said like hey now all those old nest devices some as old is like you know over a

decade old you can use all of those in the google home app like also not an easy undertaking i know most people don't care about the the behind the scenes but between those two things those were like millions of lines of code that we rewrote to support devices a decade old and for me that's a sign of commitment where we could have taken that easier path uh so maybe that's that's a perfect question but David, sorry, you were asking a follow-on. Yeah, how would you describe sort of where your job begins and ends as Google? Because, like, I think everybody in this industry has at various times tried to do the, actually, yes, we're going to become a washing machine manufacturer strategy.

And most companies, including many washing machine manufacturers, have realized that's the wrong strategy. So, like, how do you paint the sort of clear lines about, like, this is actually not what we do in this space? Yeah, I think we play a couple different roles in the space. So I think one key place that we play is, you know, we think it's really critical to build a platform layer to enable partners to sort of innovate. We're deeply committed, you know, Jen and I talk often about Matter. We're very committed to that as sort of an open standard as one of the early supporters. And we have to, like, Matter's got a way to go and we'll sort of spend time there.

we'll continue to invest. It's not something that's done in a week or a month or a year. But yeah, so we think that platform layer is really, really important. So what you saw with the sort of Walmart on-camera announcement, we spent a lot of time building software tools, right, like SDKs, APIs, things like that, where you could have a partner like Walmart whose core competency is building hardware in this context. There's a lot of partners there that don't want to build the software layers, the intelligence layers.

And so we think that that's an important role. And the user ultimately is the net beneficiary. You get devices at a whole bunch of different price points. Other partners will do stuff that I don't think necessarily is in Google's best interest to do. Like, you know, if you want a peephole camera or a bird bath camera and stuff like that, I think there's a, there's markets for all these things.

I, like, it's just, I don't think it's we are well positioned to do that. But if I can give you the tools to do that, I definitely want to. And Gemini, I think, can be sort of a massive unlock in that capacity. So one role I think we play is can we help support the ecosystem in that context by giving you tools? I think the second layer is this intelligence layer. Like this is, you know, for us, Gemini for home, we think it's going to be a big unlock.

And so that's a major investment. Gemini as a whole is a major investment for Google. And so I think there will play a massive role. And to showcase that second part, we'll build devices. it makes sense. That's why we're doing cameras and doorbells because we think, you know, multimodal semantic scene understanding type stuff is pretty unique. We think we can showcase what the market can do, you know, speakers, smart displays, like hub devices. Those are other areas where we think, you know, we should invest to showcase the market. Will we build it at every

price point, every screen size, et cetera? No, probably not. But again, similarly, you'll see that us plus partner approach there. Before we move on to what you announced and what you're doing going forward, I just want to address what we were talking about a little bit about the kind of frustration that maybe some Google Home and Nest users had had over the past. And one of the things we talked about when we spoke last week was that you basically had to rebuild Google Home with this launch, right? You said there had been a number of different infrastructures under there.

You had Nest, you had Chromecast, you had a number of pieces and parts that you kind of had to pull together. And I know that some of the problems, specifically in the last few months, I think a lot of users have been talking about things not working anymore with Google Assistant, features that had been taken away from Google Assistant that we've reported on over the last year or so,

and there was this sort of feeling of like it was dropping off a cliff, but you're sort of saying we've caught it and we're bringing it back up. But I guess I would just love for you to explain a little bit about what's happened and what happened to the existing infrastructure of Google Home and now what you've built that hopefully will be a more solid foundation to go forward. Yeah, you're right, right? But, yeah, we've taken on a lot of different infrastructures over its time,

and tech companies often do that. Though there was sort of definitely an inflection point or sort of a moment in time where we had to look at, I'm going to sort of focus on the assistant piece for a quick second. where we had to say, okay, we see the limitations of the last generation of AINML. And as we sort of did that audit, it became very, very clear that we could put a bunch of band-aids on that old technology, and it would be pretty brittle and probably not take us into the future. So then we had to make this hard call of like, okay, well, listen, like, we've got to go over to this more modern infrastructure and more modern architecture. That was the call to move to Gemini.

But even that wasn't a silver bullet, because if you do that, you get all the stuff that LLMs do really, really well, that creativity, sort of the conversationality. But as an industry, LLMs weren't built to solve like the predictable action type problem, right? And so that's why we had to take some time to say, okay, we have to re-architect Google Home for this world with both LLMs, but then also when I say, turn off my lights, it does it 10 time and a 10. So we had to do that. Like that was a big, big undertaking. Now, we feel like we're in a better place. We'll start off, like I said, with early access. They'll be learning, right?

So it won't be perfect on day one. But that is what we had to do there. And it was a tough call because it meant for the users that had the assistant, things weren't great for a while. And it will take them some time to get to a better place. But that's where we wanted to complement it with, okay, listen, if you had our devices for a decade, I feel deep empathy for sort of the challenges

because I was one of those users, I still am. But I promise, like, the solution is coming to you as well. It's not going to require you to buy a new thing. Right. And that's all starting to roll out this month. Is that right? Yeah. So when are people going to be seen?

Because I know this whole thing with the early access. Yes. I mean, Amazon's been doing this. It's like, yes, some people can get it. So when can people who have been having problems with Google Assistant feel comfortable, you know, when are they going to see improvements with Gemini? And is it going to be improvement, or is there still issues there? Because I know I've seen this with LX Plus, that disconnect between what the LLM can do

and what the deterministic systems that we had before are able to do is still there. Have you solved that problem? That's two questions, I know. Yeah, I think a lot of questions about this since we rolled out. Yes, early access is starting this month. I'll be super clear. Gemini for Home is the thing that's going into early access. For cameras and doorbells, that has already started to ramp up.

So people who have raised their hands to get into the early access should be seen. Just got one of them today. I'm very excited. There you go. And the beautiful red one too. I'm holding up the new camera just arrived today. The very pretty red indoor camera. Barry is what we call it.

Yeah. So early access for cameras and doorbells in the home app, that's already started to roll. out. And it is a rollout. So, you know, it's not day and date for everyone. So, and then on speakers and displays, we'll start ramping that up in the last week of this month. Okay. So, yeah. So like next month for the speakers and displays, for most people. Last week of this month. So, sure, yeah. I mean, yeah. So Google Assistant is gone, RIP. It's dead. Yeah. When you get Gemini, can you, can you bring back Google Assistant if you don't like Gemini or you just, it's just

Gemini. No, it is, it's just Gemini. Yeah. So you'll get in the home app when you're sort of get off the early access list, you'll get a notification in there. You know, you'll go through a couple screens, you know, to select your voices and do a bunch of things. But yeah, when you do that, you switch over from the assistant to Gemini. So when you say, hey, G, and I'm saying that, so I don't trigger everybody's speakers, all your listeners. But yeah, when you say, hey, G, you're, at that point, you are now talking to Gemini. and that that is not a reversible change. Will it be able to do everything that Google Assistant can do today?

And hopefully more. And more. So, yes. Yeah. Yeah, the intent is very much, yeah, whatever you've got with the assistants, all of your media stuff, everything you do with household coordination, you know, people care about setting their timers and their lists and all of those things. Yes, you'll absolutely be able to do that, all of your smart home controls. then I think the big thing, though, is that with Gemini, it sort of unlocks this more natural conversation, right?

And so we, Jen, we often talk about how controlling the smart home has become like this, I have to speak in a very specific syntax, right? Like, if I say the words in this exact order, then something will happen. So that's where I think Gemini will be the upgrade here, is it's going to be far more conversational. You're not, you don't have to, like, remember the formulas to get it right. So pretty excited about that. Well, and you talked about the cameras as being key there with the multi-modality.

Not everyone wants cameras in their homes, but people want smart homes. And there's so many more parts and pieces to creating a more a home that understands what you do than just visual. So I guess can you speak a little bit to what your vision is for how that ambient home kind of all comes together outside of just the cameras? Because obviously the cameras are what you launched last week. but I want to know more about the future. Yeah, and in some ways, I think we have taken, as an industry, we've taken this view that a camera is sort of a predominantly security device, right? Like, you put cameras to, like, that's probably the primary thing that people use it for.

One way that I think about it is that the camera in so many ways will become kind of this general purpose sensor in a way, right? Whereas, you know, today you've got like motion sensors and they do a very specific thing. You've got water leak sensors and they do a specific thing. And you've got all these different sensors, right? And those, I think all have a, have a tremendous role. But I think the role of a camera evolves from just like, you know, I see a thing, I tell you the thing and it's predominantly security to, it could be this incredibly powerful, like general purpose sensor. That sort of makes the home smarter. Now, of course, there's like different layers of comfort that have to come with that for people to adopt it in different contexts, right?

Like you're probably reasonably comfortable with it outdoors in your backyard and your front yard to bring something inside the house. You've got to do it in a way that you trust it and you feel like it's secure and stuff like that. And I think there the biggest unlock will be if users start to see that there's value that it's giving them, then they might be willing to make that trait. Yeah. So that's my sort of view on cameras. I think the notion of Gemini being this proactive, like, helper in the home absolutely has to encompass all of the devices near a smart home. And I think this is like the, this has been in my mind that the gap in the smart home

has been, and we've talked about this before, the journey has never, the promise has been if you invest in a smart home and you add more devices in, the home gets smarter. Right. That is not the case today, right? Every device, every incremental device I had to my home, it gets an order of magnitude worse. It's more set up. They don't work together. Automations is like this thing I've got to do if, this, then, that.

And like, it's so complex. And so this is where, for me, it's not about automations, but it's about Gemini just being able to say, okay, bring all of your devices in. We'll figure it out for you. That, to me, is the unlock. And it has to, at its core, be bringing in any device, right? any sensor, any compatible, like, smart home device, and can I figure it out and can I make it smarter?

So we haven't had a new Nest Hub smart display for a while. There was the Google Pixel tablet, which wasn't really, but kind of. And yeah. So, and there was, you know, this, you've talked a lot about cameras being key and vision. And so a smart display really does sort of tie a lot of what you've talked about together in theory, unless you have a new. entirely new form factor for this that we don't know that you can share now. But is this something that is part of what you see as integral to that sort of core hardware where you said, you said

at the beginning that you're going to focus on producing the core hardware. And if it is key, why? What's what's important about the smart display? I guess to preempt, given that we're not sharing any explicit news about smart displays, the way that I'll just say it is we're definitely committed to smart displays. While we're not announcing anything now, you should definitely expect that we'll have news to share there soon. And I think the reason that I'm excited about this category is if you think about, you know, how all these LLM technologies are sort of converging, it does present itself as a like incredible form factor to interact with something like Gemini for Home. Right? Like you think about the properties of a smart display, microphone, which means audio in, speaker, audio out. So it's

great for audio and audio out. It's got a screen, which means to complement sort of a voice modality, you can sort of interact with it, you can sort of visualize information. You know, we've got cameras in them, so you get that that's a vision piece to it as well. So I think, you know, as I see where Gemini from home is going and Gemini more broadly is going, all of the things that Google is investing in building, for me, it feels like the almost sort of ultimate form factor to be able to deliver like a really great home experience. So that's why we are going to continue. And you to invest in that category. So I think it's going to be awesome. A lot of people, I think, have correctly identified a lot of the same problems that you have with the smart home, right? And I

think a lot of people also think LLMs are going to help fix it. But you work for Google, which also has this unbelievably gigantic trove of information in real time and not about every person on earth. And as you talk about like multimodal, you know, multimodal input and understanding more about people's context, like, it's all just sitting there for you if you want it. So like is the end of this road that like my smart home not only knows where I am, but has like read my email and my Google Maps history and knows what I shopped for and actually can like preheat the oven for me without even me having to ask. And that I just live my life. And because Google knows everything about me, it starts to solve my life for me. Is that the end of this road? On the point around having access to all this information,

I think what we build with it is going to start and end with trust, right? So you've got to be able to trust the sort of assistant that you're bringing into your home. And so I think, you know, we've got like as Brower or Google and certainly in the context of the home, we definitely have to earn that trust. we thought so deeply about what it meant to bring Gemini into the home, which is why we started with, hey, this is going to be a communal experience first because we don't want to skirt around the ideas

that you might accidentally have access, like my partner might accidentally have access to my personal interactions with Gemini and stuff like that. Now, I can see definitely, like us continue to invest there with the right, you know, maybe, Jen, to your point, with the right sort of sensors and ability to authenticate that is actually a niche alone in the room talking to Gemini. Then in that case, yes, I should have access.

But if there's other people in the room, I probably don't, right? I don't want my credit card details or a personal interaction about what cough medicine I might have wanted to use last week when I had a sore throat to be sort of displayed out to everyone. So I think we're approaching it in a way that we want to be very thoughtful, especially in a communal environment. like how do you utilize the right set of context and history about the person and do that in a thoughtful way in a way that sort of preserves trust long term? Because I don't think, David, we get to, I think the thing you described is definitely a place that we would love to get to. But we have to do it methodically and thoughtfully that maintains trust along that journey the entire way.

I just think it's interesting because you, you, that's a different problem than everybody else has, right? everybody else has that problem and also doesn't know it's in my email. And so I think you're just in this position of like you have to solve the creepy problem, not the where is David problem, right? Like knowing where I am is not hard for Google. It just isn't hard for Google in a way that it's hard for almost every company. You have to reflect back to me where I am without freaking me out about it. And I think in a lot of ways that might actually be the harder problem to solve. I think that's true, not just for us, though. I think with any sort of new technology, right?

Not with any new technology, but with a lot of new technologies, the line between cool and creepy can be a very fine line, right? Oh, and it like dances all over the place all the time. Or it constantly evolves, right? And I think the onus is on us as product builders, to say, people are comfortable moving the line if they can crisply understand what it does for them and whether or not it actually adds value to their life

and then do they trust the person building them and giving them that thing, right? So that's why I think there's two big parts we have to get right, which is one, you've got to deliver enough value to the user to their lives that says, okay, this is cool enough that I'm willing to give you permission to do these things. and then do they trust you as sort of an entity or a company or a product builder to do that?

And so I think if we can do those two things really well, then I think we could actually make people's lives in their home a lot easier. All right, that's a good place for us to end, I think, hopeful and dangerous all in the same way. I like it very much. Anish, thank you so much for doing this. This is really fun. I appreciate it, David. Yes, thank you. Thanks, Jen.

All right. We need to take a break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to talk about Peloton, but an issue you don't get to be here for that. Okay. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I've really put my all into this.

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Whatnot.com slash sell. All right. We're back. V Song is here. Hi, V. Hi. I mean,

fine. We can talk about the glasses. You want to talk about the glasses? Let's talk about the glasses. We're here to talk about Peloton, but you can't just show up on camera with me and wearing these glasses and we're not going to talk about it for two minutes. So you,

you are wearing the, let me, hold on, I'm going to try and get the name right. The Rayban Meta display. The meta display. The meta display. Damn, okay. I know.

Whatever. You're wearing Meta's new smart glasses with a screen. We're going to talk much more about this in a future episode sometime in the next couple of weeks when you finish your review. But you've now been wearing these things for a little while. Give me 60 seconds. How are you feeling so far? It's very gen 1. The hardware is impressive.

But the software, they really need to get this API that they just opened up to third parties going. the neural band is surprisingly good. I actually think the neural band is kind of the most interesting thing about this. That's the thing. It's like you wear it on your wrist and use it to control the... Yes, it's this little guy. And you do... Oh, it looks like a whoop.

It just looks like a whoop. It just looks very unobtrusive. Interesting. It does work if you have to wear another smart watch, which I have taken off because it is embargoed. But like, it does work if you have another smart watch on there, which I was like, oh, thank God, I'm running out of body parts. Like, I have to test all of these things. And, yeah, I can't just give up real estate on this wrist without, you know.

So that was a relief to me personally. Yeah, it's interesting. I literally had to listen to a lecture from my spouse this morning about why they think these look terrible on me. So we'll get into that. Maybe the style section of my review is just a video of them going off for 30 minutes, and you can choose to listen to it or not. It's a very intriguing product. Do I think the rollout was botched?

Yes, absolutely. And I think people are going to be talking about it. And for good reason, there's a lot of meaty stuff to dig into. But is it the future? We'll see. We'll see. Yeah. Well, we're going to come back to it.

My read so far is that they look both vastly better than almost anything we've seen and still kind of bad. They're in a like uncanny valley kind of situation of like I look at those glasses and I don't clock them as glasses that clock them as something else. You know what I mean? But but you don't look at it like it's not it's obviously not like a vision pro, right? It's not like, oh my God, what is that gadget on your face? But it's like you look at those and there's something just like slightly wrong with the pair of glasses V is wearing. And it's throwing me. I think if you if you look at me in person like one on one like this, you might. might feel that way, but if I, you know, I was walking throughout New York City yesterday,

commuting to the office, nobody looked at me twice. I believe that. Which is a huge deal. Like, that is more the barter than almost anything else with a lot of these things. All right, that's not what we're here to talk about. No. Again, we're going to come back and talk about this because I have a thousand things I want to talk about these, but that's for another time.

I want to talk about Peloton because there was a lot of gadget news this fall. I found this big swing from Peloton as interesting as anything else that has come out. And I just want to talk through it. So I kind of left Peloton behind in my brain as like an interesting company, right? This is like if you rewind five years, the pandemic happens. Peloton spikes like crazy because lots of people suddenly want and need what it provides. Peloton's doing great. It becomes like culturally relevant because its instructors start to become famous.

So Peloton like has a moment. and then fades, right, and goes through a bunch of leadership changes and has huge hardware issues and pivots and pivots and changes and everything. And I just kind of like relegated Peloton to like a thing that will probably keep being around for a while but has maybe jumped the shark and we'll never quite get it back. Then Peloton just comes out absolutely swinging for the fences with a bunch of new stuff and new ideas. So just sort of walk me through this like new generation. of Peloton stuff that just launched.

Before we get into what it all means, like what is all of this stuff? So basically, for the first time in Peloton's history, they have refreshed their entire product lineup. So there are two new bikes, two new treadmills, and a new rower. And they basically were like, they got a little syringe,

put a bunch of AI into that syringe, and injected it into these products. There's something called Peloton IQ. And so there's, oh, God. Okay, so there's two tiers of products. There's the regular. bike and the regular treadmill, those do not have a camera in them. But everything else now has a handy-dandy little swivel camera. You can like... Plus means camera, right? It's like essentially

the way I think about it. Okay. Yeah, plus means camera. And this camera is basically like if you took the Peloton guide, which is what I would call their first bona fide hardware flop. It was a little, it kind of reminded me of the Microsoft Connect. You stuck it on your TV and it looked like a little webcam and you did strength training exercises with it. And it was, and it was. would kind of analyze your form, not give you very much feedback. And so it was just like, all right, this is the thing. But now they've stuck that and they squished it into their existing products. And now it does give you feedback. The AI will look at you doing strength training exercises and be like, hey, girl, I think you need to go up in weights. Or, man, your form is

really bad. So why don't you go down in wait so that you do that exercise better? So those are in those devices now. All of the devices plus and non-plus have swivel screens. So you can just whip that screen around. So if you're not in a tiny space, you can just like fold out the screen and do your strength exercises, your yoga exercises, who'sy whatsy, whatever. The plus models again, sorry to jump around, but the plus models also now have a fan in them because Peloton fans are like, may I, it sure does get hot when you're doing cardio. Like a fan for your face. I hear fan in like a gadget context. I'm like, oh, it's inside to keep the thing from overheating. It's to keep you from overheating. It's to keep you from overheating, yeah.

It's like on top of the display, there's like this can where the camera's also built in. Like there's just this fan. It's adjustable speed. So when you're working out, you can cool down. There's a phone tray now. The bikes have a cushier seat, so it's more cushy for your tushy, which is what I wanted to write. in my hands on, but I was like, that's a little much. That's a headline.

I don't know. We missed opportunity with the headline. Missed, yeah. So, you know, they've done a bunch of hardware updates. Sonos had a hand with the new speakers. The plus models have a woofer now. So when the base drops, Sonos has done the tuning and the equalizing for those. So I guess to ensure that the base drop really hits when you're in your workout, sure,

the entire interface has been changed around. You know, you can better integrate with your. third-party devices and services so that you can import all of your exercise data, and the AI will be like, hmm, let me give you insights. So it's a lot. It's a pretty much a total revamp of the everything, yeah. From a pure hardware perspective there, do you look at that and say, okay, Peloton is like trying hard to get all the people who bought a bike eight years ago or a treadmill five years ago and trying to get those people to buy a new one? Or is this like a swing at people who have never bought a Peloton before? I think it's both. I definitely, it confuses me a little bit, though,

because you would expect that if they want their existing customers to upgrade, that there would be some sort of trade-in program, but from what I've seen and from what Peloton diehards have been DMing me, that does not look to be the case. You can't just trade in your bike plus and get a new bike plus, which I think is, that's a bummer. Yeah. So that's kind of surprising, I think, because, you know, is Peloton, these do not come cheap. So that's strange. But I really feel, and like I went to this little keynote event that they had in New York

City, same day as the Amazon event. So we're a lot of really tired tech journalists at this event. But, you know, they were saying this is a new era for Peloton. This is going to bust everything wide open. And, you know, I am a fitness AI hater. I'm just going to say it. I'm a hater. I've tested the whoops AI, whereas AI, all of these AI, Garmin, Strava, fucking sucks.

It's regurgitated book reports. They're not particularly useful. The only ones that I've been mildly intrigued by are what, Google's working on and is going to be rolling out sometime later this month for the for for on Fitbit, which is the AI coach that they have on there and Pelotons is surprisingly like I got to see a demo of a fictional Peloton user name Amy and like the insights that she was getting from Peloton IQ and I was like, okay maybe we'll see because you know demos are such they're guardrails so you can't really get a real I mean I got a demo of these glasses and I was like,

whoa, and now that I'm using them in real life, I'm like, ah, now I find some problems and some issues. So, you know, I saw the demo and I was like, okay, these are the types of insights that athletes would want. Like, if you're doing a strengths training program and you're new to strengths training, you're not really sure when you should go up in weights, this will tell you, like, hey, you've been doing chest presses at 25 pounds for two weeks. Next week, you should really be either upping the reps or upping your weight. just so that you maintain progressive overload. That's genuinely useful versus an AI going like,

you ran 35 miles and it was slightly slower than your average. Jesus Christ, thank you. I can also read my own metrics and come to that conclusion. Well, but that's the thing. So this is, I think, the trick and the challenge we've run into with a lot of these things is that what they give you is this incredibly basic feedback on an incredibly advanced device. Right? And I think, like, the stuff with Peloton for me, and the thing I've been trying to figure out for years is whether Peloton is eventually going to go, like, way down market and start to be like, okay, actually, the bike is free. And all you have to pay for is a subscription. And that's how Peloton gets, like, a whole new type of person to be a Peloton person. Or if it's going to go the other way and do the sort of like, you know, go after the Garmin people in the world who are like, no, I'm serious about this. And I want.

tools that help me get more serious. And that gets more expensive. It does more stuff. And so my read of a lot of this announcement is it is like ramping up the seriousness for people who are already serious, right? And these things got more expensive. Uh, they, the, the subscription went up. There's more stuff. And so for me, it's like, you got this demo of someone basically like doing bad form. I think you said they were doing overhead dumbbell presses. And it will, like, if you do comically bad form, it will, it will tell you you're doing a bad job and do better. Fine. That to me is like the equivalent of an AR device that looks at a bag of nuts that says nuts in big letters and can tell me it's a bag of nuts. Like that's not nothing, but it's not

much. What I need is the stuff that is vastly more nuanced and subtle. And it's like you're doing a pretty good job. Here's how you could be doing a really good job. Like that's what the people who are buying these things want and need. And that's the level that they're at. And I think it's just a much harder technology problem. And so I think you're right to be skeptical, even, of the demos, because it's like, it's one thing to see me going like this and be like, that's not right. But if I'm like almost right and it tells me how to do it exactly right, like, that's the actual stuff.

And that's a way harder thing to do. It's very hard. And it's hard even if you have a in-person personal trainer. So that's it's a- Right. That's what people pay a lot of money for. That's what people pay a lot of money for. It's an access thing because it is so much easier to do fitness if it's in your home.

That's just true. If you are a beginner, I can see this being helpful in a lot of different ways. But again, the people who would be most interested in those features are not the beginners. So it's, it's, they call it the cross-training series because on the one hand, you have your cardio device and your preferred method of indoor cardio. And so now you can cross-train and do other things and get this form feedback, which, you know, form feedback. I will say of all the exercise modality, strength training is the thing that stumps all the technology companies the most.

It's really, like, Ladder is the only strength training app that I really resonated with. And did Peloton steal everything for its strength training app from Ladder? Yeah. I don't know. Go to Reddit. People are having that conversation there. Yeah, the general vibe on Peloton's strength app is, oh, they just did Ladder. Which is not the wrong.

No, ladder's great. Yeah. Ladder actually has helped me get into lifting a little bit more consistently than previous iterations have. But, you know, exercise is just such a weird thing because it's individual. What works for one person is absolutely not going to work for another person. There's no blanket prescription that you can give people. So. But that's so funny. That is like that exact reason is why it makes perfect sense to me that this is a thing Peloton is doing, right? Because the first move is like, okay, how do we take the experience of a class and bring it home? And that worked super well, but it does have limitations, right?

Where it's like, that by definition can't be responsive to me and what I need. And especially with strength training, that is really important, right? Like, I always think about, I would do the, like, Peloton yoga stuff on the ground next to the Peloton. Like, and I would fall behind and just fall apart, right? Because, like, I suck at yoga. They're good at it. And they're doing this class for people who are going to. good at it. And like what I need is something that actually is engaging with me in some sort of

meaningful way. And so it's like, of course that's the pitch here, right? Like I can absolutely see why Peloton is after this. And there are a bunch of reasons that actually seems like if anybody can do it well, it ought to be Peloton. It does have access to the hardware, all the stuff you're talking about. Like, I think the camera is really fascinating. The swivel screen is really interesting. It has all this historical data on people and me specifically, but also just like people in the aggregate. Like, there are a lot of reasons if someone can pull this off that it might be Peloton. Am I crazy?

Like, am I giving Peloton way too much credit here? No, no. Like, I talked to their chief product officer, Nick Caldwell, at the event. And, you know, he said a couple of really interesting things. Just, you know, their AI is built on chat GPT and Lama in part. But also, it's trained on their thousands of classes, like a lot of thousands of data points. And the AI is integrated. in ways beyond just how you're like interacting with it because it's also in the sense of how they

surface classes to you. So based on what you need, they're like, well, how do we help you find a class that actually helps you in our library of thousands of classes? That's a pain point too, because it's great that they have thousands of classes. But if, you know, if you're on Peloton and you're just trying to find something that'll work for you, an instructor that you like, because instructor personalities can be, you know, not every instructor you're going to jive with. I really can't stand the ones that are just like, hey, girl, you got this and all that. And I'm just like, no, I'm suffering. Please don't try and encourage me.

But so, you know, like the AI is also supposed to help you surface a class that you might actually resonate with and might, you know, there's a new thing that pops up that tells you if your current effort levels match with that class. Like, this class might be harder for you than normal is what will pop up when you're browsing. So there's that. I actually think that's way more interesting than the form. correction, but that's just me. Fair. There's new stuff where you can generate your own workouts that are Sands and structures that you can take at your own pace and moves that you want.

So, like, they're doing a bunch of different things to appeal to a bunch of different people. So they're kind of very thoughtful and smart about how they're going about it in a way that it doesn't feel fully just like, here's AI, let's staple it onto the product, which is what most fitness AI has felt like. So I do think if anyone's going to do it, it is probably them because they are very clued into their diehard fan base. Like a lot of the new hardware upgrades are things that people have been yelling at them to fix for a long time. So they are listening to their core constituency. Do you think their core constituency was also like spending a lot of time saying, God, I wish this was all way more expensive?

You know. Do you feel like that was a bunch of Peloton people being like, you don't have enough of my money? Do you want more of my money, Peloton? So I find Peloton diehard, like, a fascinating group of people. So, you know, I know R.P. Jane Goodall, but I consider myself the Jane Goodall of Pelotan diehards. I love this for you. I spend some time just in, like, their official groups and on Reddit, just reading what they have to say about stuff. Because I did feature last year where I talked to, like, a dozen Peloton diehards.

And you know what? The vast majority of them told me that the hardware was. integral to their experience. And I was just so shocked by that because most people I talk to are like, oh my God, it's so expensive. Why not just buy a $500 version? And with a tablet holder, bada bada bada bong. Well, there was a really sort of obvious future for Peloton after this, like, post-pandemic slump that was like, stop being a hardware company. You have a software and, like, you're a media company. Like, go be an exercise class company and let me run that on any treadmill that exist, like make it, make an API that plugs into every other treadmill, go to the gym.

Like, it becomes like a exercise as a service company. And I have actually been surprised to not see Peloton go more in that direction. But it sounds like that's just because I'm not talking to enough Peloton people that maybe the hardware is more the thing. There's a specific. There's like grades of Peloton people. There's like the people who are like, I've heard of it. Sure. That's the one where the guy died and sex in the city.

And you're like, yes, that, yes. So that's that level of Peloton awareness. And there's the people who are like the spouses of Peloton diehards who are just like, yeah, person I live with, they do Peloton and I don't get it. But sometimes I use their equipment. And yeah, I guess it's nice. And then you have the Peloton diehards. And like they are a unique group of people. I find them fascinating. And, you know, when I talk to them, they're like, they're talking in such tones where I don't want to call them culty, but it's not not culty where they're like, And, you know, they also will positively call themselves cult members, so I'm not trying to be derogative here. But they are like, Jess King helps me get through a really tough period of my life. And I'm just like, okay, cool, yes, who are the instructors you like? And it's very interesting to see who they pick and why and how it relates to their personality. And those people, for sure, are always like, yeah, I'm thinking about how I can upgrade.

and it doesn't matter to me how much it costs because it's just so high quality. And so, you know, to us normies, just looking at them going, you're really going to pay $6.7,000 for a fucking treadmill. So then they're just like this tool fits into my life. It is my life. And I don't see this as a ridiculous cost because I use this treadmill every day. And, you know, it's my life. Life has changed.

This thing. I used to be depressed and sad. And now look at me. I'm running 46 marathons. And I'm like, that's just a different kind of depressed and sad to me personally. No, I love that for you. It's physically healthier. So go for it.

It's physically healthier. I am concerned because marathons are so tight. I know I have talked to people who have trained for whole marathons on a treadmill, on a Peloton treadmill. And I'm like, how? Whoa. I can't do more than three months. miles on a treadmill because I lose my mind. It's so boring. I can do, I can run hours outside. I love that. But like the treadmill, three hours of running, I'm like, how? And, you know, one of the people I interviewed, she was just like this bubbly, enthusiastic, lovely lady. And she was like, yeah, when I ran my marathon, I had the Peloton app and the outdoor classes just going on a loop. And that's what got me through my marathon outdoors. And I was like, you brought Peloton to the marathon? Holy crap.

That is such a telling thing in so many directions that that is the response. That's so interesting. So, okay, so that must mean you look at these prices, because, like, I look at these prices and see them as sort of shocking. Like, Travis, our producer, went through and did the shockingly difficult work of figuring out how these prices have changed over time. And it's kind of nuts. So, like, just to give you one example, the tread plus, which is the, like, high-end treadmill,

launched in 2018, and it was $4,295, which was a ton. And we talked a lot about how expensive it was. And then in 2023, it jumped to $5,995, which is more, just in case you're wondering. And then now is $6,695. And that is just what the Tread plus costs. The Tread has gone up. It went down a little bit, then up again. It's more expensive than ever.

The Rowe Plus is more expensive than ever. The subscription continues to go up. It's not like everything else is getting cheaper. But like maybe it just is true that this is a group of people who are not super price conscious. And the idea of, you know, I'm pitting this against an Equinox membership or like two sessions a week with a personal trainer. And so it's actually not expensive in that context. But like when you look at these prices, what does it make you think Peloton is doing here? I'm just like, ba-ha-ha-ha.

$6.7,000 for a treadmill. Running outside is free. That's me, though, right? Like, I... To be fair, running outside is awful, and you can't watch the office while you run outside. So, like, I would pay a lot

to be able to watch the office while I run indoors. But again, this is, like, different people... But not $6,700. Yeah, this is different people, different preferences, right? I cannot... I've tried watching K-dramas

and my straight-kids videos on treadmills. I can't do it. I can't do it for more than 20 minutes. I thought I was a terrible runner for years because I just could not do it. Outside, I can run for three hours and it's just me, my thoughts, and K-pop for like three hours. I'm the exact opposite. I, so the best gym trick I ever discovered and everyone should try this if you have trouble making yourself go to the gym was I found a TV show that I loved and I was only allowed to watch it at the gym. I tried that. And so I burned through like seasons upon seasons

running on the treadmill at the Y, because that was just, I was just like, I want to watch the show, so I'm going to go and watch it on the treadmill. And then literally it's a, like, third of a mile from here to the gym, and that run is so boring that I didn't want to do it. I would drive to the gym and run on the treadmill. Like what, like a true maniac stuff. But yeah, it's just people are different. I tried doing that.

It does not work for me. So that's such the challenge that they have. You're like my dad who ran a marathon with no headphones, and I still think that's like true psychotic behavior. That's the most psychotic. But I still need the headphones. I still need my beats. I need my little K-pop boys singing whatever.

I need that. But, you know, I've listened in to Peloton earnings dutifully every quarter. And when they up the price to about $6,000, I was like, ha ha! And then the next quarter, they're like, oh, yeah, and we sold out of every, out of all of the stock that we had for $6,000. And I was like, how? So every earnings, they're like, Tread Plus, the most expensive product in their portfolio,

it sells like gangbusters. And I'm like, how? That's the one where the kids died. How do you do this? And the people who love them, love them. I believe it was business insider back when like the height of that controversy was happening. They were like interviewing people who were like, yeah, I fell down and it threw me through a wall never giving it up. And it's just like these people, it resonates with them in such a way.

And it creates such a degree of loyalty that I'm just like, oh my God. And, you know, their turn is a little higher than it used to be, but it's still not that much higher than like 1.5%. So these people really stick with it. Which is like crazy low. It's crazy low for a turn rate of subscribers. And when we talk about Peloton churned subscribers being high, it's like 2%, which is so low if you really think about it in the scale of things. But, you know, whether or not this opens a new chapter for them, I don't know, because their previous CEO, Barry McCarthy, who I absolutely loved because he always had unhinged quotes in the investor shareholder letter. The one time he's like, this is a cargo ship and we're halfway through the Mediterranean. I was like, what is happening here? But he very much went the reason why the prices are like so hard to track over time

was because he was doing a lot of experimenting with the prices and with the theory that this is a media company and we are going to be flossinging around with hardware prices. We're going to see what sticks. We're going to introduce a rental program. What's happening? He did a lot of that. And the numbers went up. Like actually, you know, I tune into these things and the numbers have been going up for

some time, even though it's not pandemic levels of high, in which case I go, you know, investors, does everything have to be on a constant state of growth trajectory? Like, what if, what if it's just fine being a mid-sized company? What if? What if? And the investors are always like, no, you must go to pandemic levels again. And it's like, I don't know. We don't do that in this country, so last question on this. And then we should take a break. I think thinking about these Peloton people, like the stuff that you hear them talk about all the time is, like, we've been talking about the hardware is a hugely important part of it. People love the classes, people love the instructors, people love the sort of real-time competition of it. There is this

sense that you're like part of a community even though you're inside of your house. If you're a Peloton, can you do the AI thing in a way that doesn't ruin that? Like, thinking about what you know about all of these Peloton people is this idea of everything being super individualized and personalized, but also in a certain way sort of de-personalized, that it's not going to feel as though you're in a live class full of people, it's going to feel like an AI is coaching you on how to do things. Is that going to be compelling to those people? So I think they've been very thoughtful about that because when I went to this event, and this is just going to be another description of the Peloton energy, I go into this event and what do they do? First of all,

they don't introduce the CEO first. No, no, no, he's an afterthought. They go, we have Tunday. We have Adrian Williams. And I'm sorry I forgot the third name of the instructor that was there, the instructors come out and they are like clapping people's hands in the audience and like they're, you know, and I'm just like, I don't know who most of these people are, but every single time I've gone to a Peloton event, they have brought out an instructor and the instructor is there. And they have actually put a big hand into how this Peloton IQ has been crafted. So, you know, I had my demo and my demo was with Tunday, who is a cycling instructor, I believe, And she was just like, it's like it's my assistant.

The AI is my assistant. I have helped craft these recommendations. We have had a huge say and like what it tells you. So, you know, you're going to listen to me. You're coming from me. And this is just going to help you out. It's going to be my little helper. It's like, she's like, I'm the professor and this is my teaching assistant.

And I was like, that's a very interesting distinction that they're making there. And I think that could work because if they're messaging that correct, I think the diehards will be like, oh, yeah, Tinday is my professor and this is my teaching assistant. Love you, Peloton IQ, but we'll have to see. I'm in the communities. I do be lurking. And some of them are like, AI, slop, get this shit out of here. So, you know, we'll see how it shakes out over time. I think they kind of stepped in it by not having an upgrade program for those people. Because, you know, if you're a really loyal diehard, you want to be rewarded. awarded for that loyalty. So I think some of them feel a little betrayed by that, to be honest.

But we'll see. We'll see how it goes. I remain an AI and fitness hater and skeptic until proof and otherwise. Again, like, if anybody gets it, I think there's a solid chance that it's Peloton. But also, everything you just said about the relationship between person and AI is the thing every company says six months before being like, we've created a new AI instructor. Her name is Kim, and she is the only instructor on the platform forever. And everything just immediately goes to hell, right? Like, you can just see the path towards here is a new instructor. This is the future of Peloton.

It's blobby. It's like, I actually think you missed it, Peloton. It's Blurbo, which is my name for all AI friends and companions and whatever. But if they can not do that and actually make this thing like a tool and not a character, I think there's something really powerful there. Yeah, it's just, are the insights good? That's going to be the number one. That's the number one question.

If they can't nail that, I'm just going to add it to my AI fitness wall of shame. If you need somebody to really earnestly be bad at exercise, I'm here for you. So just let me know. I got your back. I can't test five of these equipment. My house is not big enough for that. So this might have to be a team effort anyway. I'm in.

I'm here for you. This is, I got, I got room in the basement. I'll get rid of the couch. I'll put in three treadmills and we'll go to work. They're really big treadmills. They're really big. One treadmill. One treadmill, yeah. All right, we need to take a break, but will you stick around at a hotline question for you?

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Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. they are doing well.

Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back. V-Song, still here. Hi, Vee. Hey. So, let's do a question for the Vergecast hotline. We get lots of them that are like specifically directed to a specific person.

And we have one for you today. Oh, I love it. As always, you can call 866 Verge 1-1. You can email Vergecast to theverge.com. There's been like a million gadgets. So send us gadget questions. I think we're also going to do a smart home hotline episode here at some point in your future. So send us all of your questions. For now, V, let's get at it. This one's for you.

Hi, VergecastCru. This is a powerlifter and a new runner. This is a question probably best answered by V-Song. For the longest time, I've been using my Apple Watch in combination with the strong app to track my lifts. I've been a powerlifter for many years and would focus on big compound lifts with some accessories. Recently, I've picked up running and mostly track it with Strava. A lot of my running friends have repeatedly told me to get a Garmin for the better battery life and overall better smart tracking for running. I've been using an Apple Watch series six sinks release and replaced the battery last year and it's already draining fast. My dilemma is I've adopted a hybrid plan that incorporates running with my main traditional strength training lifts that I track with the strong app, and nothing online shows that that app is compatible with Garmin watches.

I was wondering if you had any advice on maybe potentially reppping two smartwatches, one for lifts and one for runs, or if I should just commit to one. If so, which. I appreciate any help and rock on. V, you can see why I picked this for you, right? Like, our caller didn't give their name, but if ever there is someone who feels our caller's pain, it's you. Yeah. Well, welcome to my world caller. Because I've lived both of those lives. What I will say is that the double-rusting life is difficult because... So the crux of the problem here is the fact that fitness data is messy, right? Lots of people use Strava because it is a de facto hub, where you can import your data from disparate devices and it lives in one place

because that's just how it goes. It integrates with everything. Everyone uses Strava. Love it. So bad news. Travassuit Garmin last week. Oh, no. And is asking Garmin to stop selling all of its devices.

So there's beef between these two companies. As a new runner, what I'm going to say is that Garmin, I love Garmin. Garmin fans are really diehard, so don't come from me. Garmin is overwhelming in terms of the running data for a beginner. Because when you are a beginner and you are just running for the first time, It's about good form. It's about just kind of increasing your time on the road, doing it safely, making sure you're cross-training and all that sort of stuff, and just really kind of finding your rhythm for running. And, you know, is vertical oscillation data going to help you do that? Or is it going to confuse you further? That's what I would say. I do enjoy Garmin. I think it's very, it's very, complicated to kind of get into the garment in-depth data. It's not knocking them at all. I find it very useful, but Apple has made some updates that are for beginners. I think are pretty compelling.

Like they've added training load, so it kind of helps you visualize whether you're doing too much or how your levels are doing. So what I would say is since you're a beginner, just find out if you like running first. And if you really love running, eventually you will naturally gravitate towards the garment just because the features there really are catered towards runners. They're really great. I, you know, if it were up to me and I was just using a watch for running, I would pick a garment. I would probably pick one of the forerunner garments because they're not gigantic and they

fit well and they're like really suited towards that. But just like hold for a second because that's a lot of gear that we're talking about you having in one space. And as much as possible, I do recommend streamlining your data streams just because, look, I'm psycho. I have this notebook. And this notebook literally is where I log all of my disparate fitness data and baselines because I have not found a good digital way of doing it for testing. I spend like 40 minutes after each workout just comparing data points. Like, you don't want to be me. and doing that. So, like, this is reviewer problems, though, because I am testing multiple products. I do have to live this multiple life. And so why would you, why would you do this to yourself, friend? If you are going to go the Garmin route, you can track reps and workouts within Garmin. Is it going to be as good as strong? I'm not sure because, you know, all of my power lifter friends are very into strong and that app. So you are, you are,

running into the problem of how, you know, much like the smart home, there's all these different silos of data that people have. The main thing is to find what works best for you that you will stick with. If strong is something that you really love and has really helped you in your powerlifting life, don't ditch it just because you're running friends are saying that you should go into Garmin. I personally do not like the Garmin strength training tracking because it does not give me enough time to edit my weights and my reps and it like it throws me out. Yeah, it sounds like our caller doesn't like it either. Yeah, I don't love it.

I'll be quite frank about that. So if you find that you love strong on the Apple Watch, I don't know, maybe you upgrade to an Ultra and see how that does for you. This is what I was just about to say. Why is the watch Ultra not the perfect, like, jack of all trades version of the answer here? Okay. So, you know, the outdoor running crowd and Garmin, and they have a lot of really. valid points here is battery life. A garment is measured in weeks. It's measured in months. I have the Ultra 3 here. I'm still reviewing it. That'll be out soon. But, you know, I've got 72 hours out of it,

which is great. Not if you are running lots of marathons, doing a lot of hikes, doing a lot of cross-training. It's still a lot of charging management that you have to do. And that's not for the garment crowd. That's not what they want. There are certain. like metrics that I think the longer you go into endurance sports, the longer you are in outdoor sports, they are useful. I like the hill endurance score. When I was training for a half marathon, I found I think it's called the endurance score. It just basically tracks like how tired you are throughout a run and whether you're exerting a certain amount of energy. I did find that helpful. It did kind of visualize for me whether or not I was going to make it to the end of my first half marathon.

I did. It was great. It was not. I suffered. immensely. But, you know, I trained for my half marathons with garments and I found some of the more in-depth metrics at that point in time once I learned how to read them because you do have to sit there and you do have to like digest that information. I did find it helpful for me, but that was when I had kind of gotten to a level where I was running half marathons and we're talking about thinking about fueling and what those, you can get fueling reminders on your garment. You know, when you're at that level, that can be really useful and helpful and it helps you pare down what you're using. There's a reason why so many high-level runners use garments.

But if powerlifting is your main focus and running is cross-training for you, do what your main modality of exercise, prioritize that. Because the Apple Watch, it's decent at running for a casual runner. Like if you are just doing 10Ks or less, you don't really need, you don't need everything that a garment is going to give you. Okay. If you're a through hiker, if you decide that you are going to make it like Liz Lapato and Ruck and do all that sort of stuff, yeah, no, Garmin makes way more sense for you. It's just, yeah, do don't live the double wrist life. It's expensive.

You get double watchtans. I do it because I'm paid to do this. I don't think any normal person should live this life. I may be biased saying that. But it does sound like largely, unfortunately, as a function of the way that these devices and platforms work, if this person is going to get into running at the same level, it sounds like they're currently into powerlifting,

they are going to end up with two devices. That like I think your advice to like do the casual thing on the Apple Watch as long as you can is really good advice. But it does sound like if you're going to get to like, you know, a nine or ten out of ten on the commitment scale, you're going to end up with two devices. You're going to end up living my life, in which case, welcome, friend, and also, I'm sorry. But yeah, stay on a single device as long as you possibly can because managing the data streams becomes a second full-time unpaid job.

Yeah, I think that's good advice. And then after that, then you get a smart ring, and then you start running stuff around your neck, and then you come work at the verge. I think it's like literally, that's essentially, there's just a certain number of devices that happens and then Eli shows up at your house and offers you a job. I think it's like basically how it works. That's honestly my career trajectory. That's what happened. I was just living my life as a freaking cyborg and then I got a knock on the door on the verge was like, hey, we need a wearables person. I was like, Yolo, let's go. I have all of them. Let's do this. And now look at me. Now look at me. Do you want to be like me, caller? No, no you don't. I only have one face and so many

smart classes that need to. Yeah. Yeah, this is what we do here. It's, it's, no one should live our pain, but too many people are forced to is I think what we're realizing. I mean, like, is this, is this optimal? I don't think so. All right, if you're wearing more gadgets than V, send us an email. I want, I want pictures of people who are wearing more gadgets than V. These aren't all the ones I even wear. Some are embargoed and some are on parts of the body that, you know, that's not going to fit in this camera view. Don't live my life.

Yeah, that's good advice. All right, V, Thank you, as always. We'll see it next time. All right. See you next time. All right, that is it for the show this week. Thank you to everybody who came on, and thank you, as always, for listening. Thank you, by the way, to everybody who reached out about version history. I hope you enjoyed the first episode about hoverboards that was on the Verge's YouTube channel,

on the Virgin History feed, and on the Vergecast feed. So hopefully you encountered it somewhere. We're really proud of the show. It's been really fun to make. But please keep sending us ideas. I want episode ideas. I want ideas about the version history questions and how we can do those better. we have some ideas for the next series of these episodes.

Please keep all your ideas coming. I want to make lots of this show. I think it's going to be great, and I want to keep hearing all of your thoughts about everything that we're up to. For now, we're going to get out of here. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Friday to talk about more news. We may or may not have a very fun person who's coming back on the show. I'm not 100% sure, but I'm like pretty sure, and I'm very excited about it. We got a lot to do.

We'll see you then. Rock and roll.