The Vergecast - The creepy AI era is here

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

Would you like Siri more if it had a face? This week on The Vergecast, we’re talking about AI assistants getting smarter… and uncomfortably personal. The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy joins the show to talk about her early tests of Alexa Plus, which is finally AI-powered and a lot more capable. Jake shares his uncomfortable first interaction with Grok’s anime girlfriend. And Waveform cohost David Imel is here to talk about Sony’s RX1R III and other premium “compact” cameras. Finally, the THUNDER ROUND is back. New, improved, and still loud. Further reading: 24 hours with Alexa Plus: we cooked, we chatted, and it kinda lied to me Alexa Plus launches to “small number” of people More than a million people now have Alexa Plus Elon Musk’s AI bot adds a ridiculous anime companion with ‘NSFW’ mode I spent 24 hours flirting with Elon Musk’s AI girlfriend System prompt dump of xAI / Grok’s new AI anime girlfriend Elon Musk teases AI anime boyfriend based on Edward Cullen “We will, of course, have another character inspired by Mr. Darcy” xAI has open roles for building AI “waifus.” US government announces $200 million Grok contract a week after ‘MechaHitler’ incident Grok will no longer call itself Hitler or base its opinions on Elon Musk’s, promises xAI Sony’s pocket-sized RX1R camera returns with its first update in 10 years Original RX1R  RX1R II Google exec: ‘We’re going to be combining ChromeOS and Android’ Our biggest questions about ChromeOS and Android merging  Ikea goes all in on Matter/Thread Eric Migicovsky  Texts.com Google Nest subscription The next batch of emoji includes Bigfoot Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to the Virgecast, the flagship podcast of deeply uncomfortable conversations with AI. I'm Jay Castranakis, executive editor of Verge. Neelai Patel, David Pierce. They're on parental leave. They'll both be back later this year.

Today, we've got a fantastic crew. Joining us remotely, we've got Verge, Smart Home Reviewer, Jen Toey. Hello, nice to be here. And in the studio with us, special guest, friend of the show, and Waveform co-host, David Amel. Hello, glad to be here. We've got a lot to talk about today. David's joining because I really want to talk about Sony's new camera, which people have been waiting 10 years for. The Thunder Round is back, new and improved.

Just wait for it. But first, we have to talk about AI assistance because two big things happened this week. First, Jen got access to Alexa Plus, the new AI-powered version of Alexa. And second, Grock got weird again. It's always getting weird. It keeps going. And I actually think these two things are kind of related in the long term. So first, Jen, you've been talking to Alexa a bunch lately. Tell us what have you seen? What is new with Alexa Plus?

Yeah, so I've been waiting a long time to chat to this AI. I'm not going to lie. This is Amazon's newly revamped generative AI powered voice assistant. Now, for context, I've had, I'm going to try not to say the A-L-E-X-A word too many times because I know that might annoy all the listeners out there. But I've had Amazon's A in my home pretty much since it launched. And this, and it's been an experience over the years. It was great when it first launched, but it kind of started to get less and less useful as time went by. And Amazon has completely revamped the assistant. So now it's powered by large language models.

They launched or announced it fully February of this year, although they had originally launched it in 2023 and then spent a really long time bringing it to the public. They said it was going to come out in March. It's now July. So it's slowly rolling out to people. You have to request early access, so it's still technically in a beta stage. It's free to use currently.

But the plan, according to Amazon, is it's going to be $19.99 a month. However, you get it free with Prime. So when Prime costs $15 a month, the math is a bit screwy there. But it's interesting to see this approach. I mean, obviously, currently you pay for more advanced features with a lot of different AI assistants out there. So you can kind of see their approach here. But it's also a big shift for people who have been able to use Alexa. Sorry, who've been able to use A for free for over a decade.

So it's, I was excited to try out the new capabilities, see if they're worth any extra money, even though you don't have to pay that yet. The big thing they're pushing is that it is more agentic. Like this assistant can do things for you from what it could already do, such as controlling your smart home devices and playing you music, but being able to do it in a natural language way. So you don't have to use that precise nomenclature. If anyone that's used A before will know you have to get it very, very precise to get it to do what you want.

And it's very frustrating when it misunderstands you and does something that it shouldn't. So that's one of the big shifts. And then the other is that it's actually going to be able to sort of do things like book you. Well, this is where it gets a bit fuzzy because it used to be able to book you an Uber. And then they stopped being able to do that. But now they're bringing it back. And so it's more these agentic sort of clicking around on the websites feature, as Neely would put it, where your A assistant is going to be able to be able to book you a plumber or an electrician, book you an open table.

restaurant reservation, do things for you outside of what it traditionally had been able to do, again, in natural language. And then the other element of it, which is kind of more of a, you were already able to do some of this, but it's got better, is be much more conversational. So you can ask the assistant questions like you maybe would ask chaty-B-T or Gemini. And rather than just getting sort of very basic responses. It's got much deeper knowledge and is much more able to respond to more general knowledge questions. So in my testing, when I wrote a piece that we published last week, I spent my first 24 hours. So I was chatting with it about the Wimbledon tennis tournament, which is one of my favorite times of the year. I was also asking it questions

about booking my next vacation. I'm about to go on a trip and I was asking for suggestions. And it told me some great tips and ideas and then completely lied to me. So it's just like your general AI, basically. Jen, I love that you're avoiding the name. This is the sign of a true professional who has been, I'm also assuming, yelled at a lot by people in comments. Yeah, I'm sorry to everyone. Okay, but this is the big thing, right?

Like, they announced this, like, twice now. Yeah. They launched it like in, what is it, in March? Quote, quote, launch. Yes, right, right? Yes. I believe there are now more than a million people now have access to it, which sounds like a lot until you're saying.

They've sold 500 million Alexa devices. So this is like not even quite a beta test. Like this is the teeny tiny group. And I guess I have been wondering, okay, like what are they hiding? Like why is it so limited? And Jen, I don't know. Like I read your piece and it sounds like it's like it's mostly functional. Like, are you running, how is it working?

Are you running into problems nonstop? So, no, I mean, it is functional, but what's really interesting here is it's a completely new assistant. I think originally when they went to launch it in 2023, and we went to a big event in 2023 for the launch, it was going to be the existing commander control style AI that Alexa was. I'm sorry, everyone. It was going to be that with an infusion of, you know, chat GPT, large language model style smarts. Because one of the confounding things about using the assistant over the years is it's limited capabilities. It is very much command and control.

It can do specific things and that's it. And that was getting frustrating over time. It never really got any smarter. And that was sort of what people, I think, most people that use it for smart home control, I think that was fine. But as things, as we're starting to see better capabilities throughout generative AI and more and better abilities, being able to use your voice for more than just turning your lights on and off, setting a timer, that, you know, that felt like the next step.

That move towards, you know, what Alexa was originally envisioned as, which is Star Trek's computer, you know, that all knowing, all omnipresent. AI that can do whatever you want. And that was kind of where I was, I was excited to see Amazon move this. And that was what they promised in 2000, in 2023, then we're not entirely sure kind of what went on behind the scenes, but there was an awful lot of reporting about real struggles. And this is struggles that we have seen of, it appears places like Apple and Google are also having trying to get this to happen with their assistance because they were built on one type of infrastructure and they're now trying to add this new large language model capability

and they're just not meshing. There's not. And so when I spoke to Panos Panay at the last, the second launch, the second coming of Alexa Plus, which I'm not sure if I mentioned, that's its name, sorry, but you still use the original word. You still use the A word. But Alexa, when they announced in February, I spoke to Panos Panis and he said, no, this is a, completely new. We just, we got rid of the old, brought in the new, because that was, it seems the only way that they were able to completely reimagine, couldn't keep the old. And I think that is the key to the slow rollout. Because as you say, there are millions of devices out there that people are using for many different purposes and use cases, mostly to set a timer.

But there are a lot of people that use this and depend on it. And I think also the accessibility community, you know, voice control is a really important feature for a lot of people. So I think the slow rollout has been not breaking what already works and adding the new capabilities. And in my testing, I did notice that it had broken some of what already worked. And that is, you know, you can see how that's going to be a problem as this, as they flip the switch and bring this into multiple, multiple millions of homes. So, but for me, it was mainly around that smart home control. So if you're familiar with using A, every time I say, you laugh. And I do think this is so interesting, right?

Because, like, Apple has not done this with Apple Intelligence on the HomePod. No. Google has a very, very limited beta. I've been trying to get into it on the Google Home one. Yeah. And can't get, you know, it's also not rolling out. Are you an Alexa guy? I'm a mix of Google Home and HomeKit.

That's terrifying. Well, the reason. Yeah, yeah. The only reason I'm on HomeKit is because the smart plugs that I bought were the first ones that supported Matter. But they were, well, they were going to support Matter. They did have an update. It doesn't work for me. But they are HomeKit native.

So that is the reason that I have HomeKit Native stuff. But I also have like Google Nest hubs in my apartment. Okay. The magical idea was that one day when Matter actually, actually like works for everybody, they will all integrate and it won't matter. Well, it will matter. But yes, that's your answer. But yes, yes.

So you are also, yes. I mean, this is the thing, it's like, especially when we have these complex like multisystem networks, the idea of an AI thing that can actually like string stuff together and understand, I mean, Jen, you have this in your piece where you're giving it these complicated commands and telling it to figure out how to build a routine for you. And it's like, that's great. Yeah. Right.

Like, I hate filling with these things. So I have like a big, um, my home is, I guess it's mixed with it. It's like Phillips Hugh and that's all built into, what is it, what is it Google Home? Um, yeah, I've got a whole bunch of other things to hook into Google Home. So that was called now. But it might be called Google Home. I think it's Google Home. And like, half of them just like didn't work for a couple years.

And I had to like remove them and re-ad them. And it's like eventually it all hooks together on some level. and they're just like it is not easy enough to string them together right now. And I imagine that like there's a million different issues for Amazon to untangle as a rolling out Alexa Plus. The first one and most immediate one is just being like, if you're going to put an LLM in 500 million devices, you got to make sure it's not going to go off the rails, unlike other companies which just don't care. Well, and there's something very different about having, and I mentioned this in my piece, having a voice in your home telling you something confidently, that's not true versus having a text bot write a sentence to you that you can then quickly Google or click on the link that it produces so that you can go and confirm where it got that information. So is that, it's that computer, it's that Star Trek computer idea, again, that omniscient being in your home, that is, you know, that's where that fine line is. And it is so much, I mean, the new Alexa Plus is definitely better than the old one in terms of being able to talk to it however you like, getting a response, whether it can actually answer correctly or not.

But it will talk to you and it'll explain to you why it can't answer or if it can answer. But in terms of that command and control structure, I ran into a number of issues. Like it can't run routines in the way that the current Amazon assistant can. It can't. So I think that's, there's going to be friction there. But what's interesting, I think, is where we can see Amazon's taking this. And it's an area that they've really been behind, you know, after the failure of the fire phone, is that they never had a direct connection to your information. So being able to be an actual personal assistant wasn't really possible. And what's changed with this is that you can now tell it information about you, if you want. You can feel. information by like emailing it or uploading it through an app you can connect calendars or your family calendars which you could do before but like I can say to it oh when's the next available weekend that everyone in my family is going to be free and it can reply to me so there is that sort of next level of convenience beyond the smart home control

becoming an actual personal assistant in your home that combination you know because right now Apple's Siri and Google's assistant, you know, they also, they can do a lot more of that than Amazon can, but not, but just in your phone, just on a personal device. And I think that's what's made, for me, that's what's made this more interesting is how Amazon's going to be able to sort of become a personal home assistant for a family or a household. Those kind of, that's a, that's a next step, which we've not seen anyone succeed with, although I've been testing that element. And it's not been great so far.

Well, that's so interesting because, you know, chat chibi-t, they had their operator assistant a few months back. They actually just sent us another one today. Yeah. What was it? It's chat chachy-b-t agent. And both of them work on remote servers. And so they just like don't have your stuff. And it's like, oh, this is incredible. There's this AI that can control a mouse and control a computer and do things for you. Except it doesn't know your credit card number. It doesn't know your name. It doesn't know where you live. to ship stuff too. Yeah.

And so, like, I don't know if Alexa can do that either, right? It sort of exists in a world where everything is in the cloud anyway. That's true. You know, I think that that's probably the future that they're looking at and the future that Google would love.

Yes. Because they don't really make a dedicated computer hardware that's not cloud-based anyway. But to your point, Jen, I was, like, thinking about this, and it's like, yeah, Google is the most well set up to be able to do all of this stuff for you because you have given them every single piece of information that you've ever,

if you Google anything which you Google all the time, it knows that you're interested in this kind of stuff. You've got Google Drive information. You've got Gmail information. It's just like scraping all that stuff. Amazon is like the least well positioned to do any of this because all they know is what you're buying, and that's powerful for commerce,

but it's not powerful for actually helping you with things. Right, like what calendar is it going to put things into? And now, and that's a big change again. That's a great point. It's that you can connect. So it's limited. I think it's just personal Gmail accounts and Outlook accounts. But there's no prime calendar.

Please tell me they're not. So there is an Alexa calendar you can create. There always has been. That's always been an option. But that's one of the things that they are touting. And I remember colleague Allison Johnson had written about this when she'd used the Gemini feature where you can take a screenshot and add it to your calendar, you know, through visual, multimodal AI. And Amazon's trying to do that as well. So you can forward a photo of an event to your Alexa email address or you can upload it in the app and it should add it to your calendar.

I could take a picture of a recipe and send it to, I'm just, Alexa, sorry everyone. mute your devices. I can take a picture and send a recipe and then ask it to read me the steps or ask, you know, how much did I need? for this, you know, how much sour cream did I need? And it will, it can talk back to me. So I can now put information into the assistant, which you couldn't really do before. And that, that's what makes the difference. And that's where it gets closer to being as useful as, as an, as a Siri or as a Google assistant can be because it has access to your data. And this is what Apple promised with its AI coming, which it hasn't delivered. So, you know, this is, and those kind of features.

are incredibly useful. And I know there's a lot of concern about giving these companies your data. But if, you know, people use Gmail because it really works and is very helpful and useful, and that's the trade-off. So you're willing to give up that, some people are willing to give up that privacy or illusion of privacy to use a device, a service like Gmail because of how much value it gives. And that's where Amazon's got to really make Alexa Plus sort of shine. is in that value proposition. And I'm not sure whether they'll get there. I think Gemini and Apple, you know, and Apple's Siri intelligence that is supposedly coming at some point, what, 2027 now, is there are always going to be one step ahead because of the access to that data.

But Amazon has actually launched something and the other two haven't. That's a good point. That's the point. The friction, though, seems insane, right? Like you said you can email Alexa information. I don't see anyone doing this, especially, you know, people that are using Alexa in their home all the time. The whole point of the LLM stuff is that they don't know how to do stuff.

And now they don't have to know because they can just talk to it. So unless there's some prompts and stuff that say, oh, you know, go into the Alexa app and upload this image, it just doesn't seem like people are going to actually be giving it information. Google, you're already giving it all your information. It makes sense for them. Apple's in a weird position because their whole thing is. privacy, right? So they can't auto grab anything, really. ChatGBT is like a little bit in the middle because so many people are using it, that people are learning how to use AI through

open AI's platforms and maybe they're more willing to tell it things about themselves. And this is why they're going to build a browser. Yeah, of course. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's whole, that's like Dia's whole proposition, right? It's like as you use your browser, the AI gets better, that kind of thing. Yeah, Amazon is, it's a strange position for Amazon to be in. Although one of the things that I was testing just this week is that agentic element, which we really haven't seen any. I mean, Google's doing it a little bit with Gemini, but this, so I was trying like booking tickets to a concert, booking an electrician. And there are a couple other things, booking a table.

Now, I live in Charleston, South Carolina, so, you know, there aren't, there's a lot of great restaurants here, but apparently not very many on open tables. So it only gave me like three options. But I was able to book, and this was kind of an interesting back and forth. So I said, you know, okay, let's go ahead and book this restaurant. And then it booked it for, and I said, I want to book it for two weeks out from Friday. And it ended up booking it for Thursday for me. And I was like, oh, no, no, no, I don't want it for Thursday.

I want it for Friday. And it did all of that back and forth with Open Table. And I got like confirmations from Open Table to my text messages confirming that I had booked it and that my reservation had then been updated. and so it was doing it all for me. And then it did the same thing with the electrician through Thumbtack, which is something they demoed on stage when they launched it. And I got the confirmation and I had to give it all my information.

And then I got a message from the Thumbtack guy, the electrician through Thumbtack saying, call me and we'll set up an appointment. I'm like, that was not the point. I don't want to call anyone. I just want it to all happen. So as I was, I mean, it all worked. But I think to your point, David,

is that necessary? Is that what you need your home assistant to do? Or is it just going to be easier for you to pick up your phone and do it or do it on a web browser? So, you know, it's got, I think that's going to be the friction that needs to be resolved. It's like, how can you make this so easy that this is a better way of doing it rather than it, rather than just picking up your phone or, you know, maybe mind reading. I mean, to that point, something I was very surprised about in your article was when you created the routine through it and it actually worked. That's something that I foresee being very difficult for these AI models to do because, you know, they're really good at the semantic understanding of like, what do words mean with each other? But once they actually take those words and they start executing on actual hardware, that's the layer where I'm like, how do they even figure this out?

especially considering a lot of smart home devices are secretly named like WH93 slash 928, you know, and they can't find it. The fact that it worked with your lighting setup and your music setup and all that stuff was very surprising to me. Yeah, and this was something when I spoke with Dave Limp, the former Amazon devices chief, when they first launched Alexa, he talked about or announced the new Alexa. He talked about that they basically have fed, they almost created their own LLM. out of smart home manuals, like fed all the APIs, all the data into the system. And that is where I was quite interested and had some pretty good experiences so far. There's a few that I've, that have been a bit shaky, but that it knows what's in my house. So when I ask it to do something like, oh, you know, I just spilled milk and I'm like, Alexa, the kitchen floor's dirty.

and it knows to send that there's a robot vacuum in the next room and it'll send the robot vacuum in to mop up and then go home. That's honestly really impressive. That is very interesting. That's more advanced than I would have expected it to do by now. Yeah. Do you have a sense of like what is going wrong? Like why is this not rolled out yet?

I think, well, the last time I spoke to them, they said many millions. Many millions. Oh, okay, okay. So we've gone up from a million. Slightly more than a percent maybe. I have, you know, I hang out on the user groups, and I've seen a lot more people saying that they have it now. I think from my understanding, it's very much because it is still a beta, it's an early access. And they're really constantly trying to get feedback before they push it out, which, you know, honestly I think is a wise move.

You know, they don't want, if they unleash this and it causes chaos, you know, and they have to try and roll things back. I think they're probably starting out with small setups, not a lot of complicated devices and things that might go wrong, trying to sort of see where the friction points are. Because that's something we've all seen with rollout generative AI is that you'll hit pretty scary, you know, dystopian elements, which is I think something we'll be talking about surely, where it can. get kind of scary. And like you said, and that's a big concern I've had, and I did ask Panos Penae this, what happens when it, you know, decides actually it's freezing outside and I need to turn up your heat to 90 degrees when, you know, actually it's 90 degrees outside and I need my heat to be turned down and suddenly my house turns into a sweatbox. And, you know, is it going to hallucinate? And, you know, he said, we hope not. Something along those lines, you know, I said, of course,

He was pretty confident that they've ironed out all of those concerns. But of course, I think his line, his comment was something like, of course it's possible because you just, this type of technology is not command and control. It has reasoning. It is able to, you know, take your information, take what you tell it and come up with a solution as opposed to just going by a prescribed, this is what I do when this happens. So there is that concern. That is something I'm, you know, I don't necessarily want to put my house in Jeffodiva.

I'd be interested to see if there is any anything here where the smart home is just too, I guess, you know, it's too important. You know, it's connected to actual things that are happening in my home. And I don't necessarily want to break my home. Although I've done that multiple times. But that's more on my part, not on a generative AI. We appreciate your sacrifice. Yes, my sacrifices. You're welcome.

I mean, my husband has had many injuries as they've been documented on the first. The robot lawnmower one, by the way, I'm so sorry. It's rough. Yeah, it's everyone, you should look that up. It's concerning. Speaking of, you know, AI that maybe doesn't behave the way you want it to. I'm so sorry, but I want to talk about GROC again. last week we were talking about GROC because it declared itself to be Mecca Hitler.

They fixed that bug. You know, we're all good there. Grok is not Hitler anymore. There's a new GROC feature that they added to the iOS app where GROC will be your AI girlfriend or will be a bear, this red panda bear, that tells you stories and sometimes gets mad at you. And I think this is so interesting because there have been a few other, there are things. things in this wheelhouse, right? Like, there's character AI where you can chat with an imaginary character or somebody who's like based on Harry Potter.

And there's replica where you can have an AI boyfriend. And this is sort of, sort of the first time where a, you know, general purpose AI assistant has added like a face to itself, right? Where there is a personality and a name to it. And there is like, you know, this person in front of you who you are a stentiful. to be talking to. And this one is very weird and uncomfortable because the person in this case

is this like Gothic anime girl. I don't really know how to explain this person. There's a couple ways. One, it's just like Grimes. Someone's something there. And then in another way, someone was comparing it to a Death Note character

that apparently Elon has said before that he's a big fan of. This all tracks. Anime. This all tracks. And it's, I will say, like, I expected this to be a little bit more of like general purpose assistant. And it is true. So I tried it out. And you can just be like, I was like, hey, I need to help with my math homework. And this like, you know, sexy girlfriend is like whispering to me

in her like asthma voice like, like, sure, Jake, tell me, what do you need help with? And I'm like, okay, this is like not what this is meant to be used for. But you just open it up and it just immediately starts like flirting with you. And there's like a progress bar where it's like gamified. and if you flirt with it, you'll get points. And if you, like, do a bad job of flirting, you'll lose points. It's very weird. I want to read you guys a little bit of my transcript here. I'm afraid.

So this is, I'm like about two minutes into talking with Annie. And I have given her a compliment. And she says, and now she's responding to this. She goes, she's happy with my compliment. She wants me to keep going. She says, okay, your turn to keep up. Tell me something spicy to make me blush. even harder.

I say, I'm married. Annie. Shit, Jake. Really? Married? What the hell am I supposed to do with that? Why didn't you tell me sooner?

I'm like, we literally just met. And this is what this bot is like. It's very strange. You could do a whole role play session here on the bridge cast. Oh, believe me. It could be Annie. This thing will keep going. Let me tell you, it will get explicit.

You don't have to prompt it very much to get it explicit. I think this is so strong. for a million different reasons. But I honestly, the, the question in my mind is, like, is there a future, right? Let's put aside the weird, like, sexy, clingy girlfriend, which, to be clear, like, according to, like, system prompts that have been leaked by the developer Jane Mansion Wong, it is, it is coded to be this, like, girlfriend-esque, like, obsessed with you character. Yeah.

Putting that aside, like, in my head, I'm like, okay, does Grock, Like, is there a future where Siri has, like, a face where we, like, where Alexa has a face? Yeah, this is what was the end of my first 24 hours. And my daughter, and I put this in my piece, my daughter heard Alexa respond to something. And it's very different from how it used to talk. It's like, you're very welcome, Jen. I hope you have a great day today. And don't forget that, you know, it's very different.

And she's like, oh, my God, what was that? That's horrifying. Now, to frame this, she's 14-year-old and she hates AI. She thinks AI is like the devil. So, you know, she's 14, you know, you have strong opinions when you're 14. And this, but, you know, it definitely opened my eyes to this because I've lived with an AI in my home for over a decade. And I've never felt like it was part of my family or, you know, a friend. And this is what that's the difference is now, you know, and this is, this Annie is obviously, you know, the extreme version of this.

you can see Apple and Google and Amazon potentially wanting this to become part of your life, like a friend in your home. And that, I draw the line out. I'm like, no, I want this to be a utility. I want my technology to be a tool, not a friend. And then this, you know, goes to the next step in the home where, you know, the humanoid robot, the kind of Jarvis in our home, or the Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons where it's, you know, another being. It's not just a tool or utility. And that's the fine line here. And I find all of this sort of real personality angle a little disturbing and hard to align sort of my experience with.

And I don't want that. And maybe once I've spent a bit more time with this more personable, Alexa, I might feel more comfortable. I think you can, like you can with Annie, it sounded like, you can kind of ask it to dial it down, not be too personable. I believe Annie will dial it back up automatically. Yeah. Yeah.

And I, that stuff. She will shift around. It gives me the chills. The scales that these companies are sort of trying to balance is we want more user uptick, right? We want users to, but, and so Google, they're like. Like, well, we don't really want you to anthropomorphize this because it is a bad thing that everyone, most people can agree on that the more you become attached to this figure, the more dangerous that can become. But at the same time, they do want you to import the primarize it because it'll make you use it more. And Elon Musk is an accelerationist, right?

And he will just do whatever it is that will get people to use the product. They've done a lot of different stuff on X to try to get people to use the product. GROC now they want more users. This is a GROC premium feature or GROC plus or whatever. It's the $30 a month feature. It's not even the standard GROC. So I think he's like, oh, other companies care about guardrails. I don't care about guardrails.

I just want to get here as soon as I can. What's the easiest way to do that? Porn. Basically porn. Yeah. It's not a great world. Well, and you know, I do hear this from Amazon a lot when I've spoken to executives there. They do, they always, they nearly all refer to Amazon as, to the assistant as she and her.

They do anthropomorphize it. And, you know, and most people do as well, to be fair. And they do talk a lot about how their customers love Alexa, like love it. Not in any way, but in that it helps me in all these different ways. You know, obviously this marketing, but they use the term love. And that is like to me, every time I hear it, I kind of go, because I don't want to love technology in that way. I want to appreciate its usefulness and value. And I want it to bring that to my smart home and to, you know, my organizational life.

I guess, you know, how much you are attached to your personal device. I guess people probably say I love my phone and couldn't live without it. But I just, I don't feel like we need another level of that. in our lives. I think artificial intelligence, generative AI needs to, we need the boundaries, we need the guardrails, but I think they're going to be gone. Yeah. I mean, in a big sense, it's the ultimate way to get people hooked on your product, right? It's to develop an actual relationship with it where you want to be checking in. Like when you're dating someone new, you feel like you want to text them all the time. And if that makes it, see, they have more daily

average users, they're going to do that. And good news, there's only more to come. It's great news. Elon has already said they're working on a character inspired by Edward Cullen from Twilight and Christian Gray from 50 Shades. There's another one. He responded to somebody saying they're going to work on a Mr. Darcy character. Oh, they're going for the older demographic there. Can I tell you my conspiracy theory here? Okay, okay.

Mr. Darcy, Pride and Prejudice, who starred in the 2005, Pride and Prejudice film as Mary Bennett, Toulula Riley, who was, hear me out, twice married to Elon Musk. Oh. And Annie looks like Grimes. There's something here. There's something here. This man's going through. I don't. I can't add this all up. There's something here. All of his his exes will be represented someday. I think you're adding it up perfectly. Anyway, if you want the experience of dating Elon Musk's exes, I guess try grok. Well, and there's now a roll open for AI wifoos at XAI, which pay very well. They pay between 140,000 and 340,000 a year. It's a lot of money to develop some AI girlfriends.

It makes sense that that is where the money is. That's where you're going to get people hooked. Makes a lot of sense. I do, I am really curious to see where this goes a long term. Because like, right, if you just think back to their, like, Cortana literally was inspired by a character who has a personification and is this general persistent. And it feels like, I mean, mercifully, Alexa is not there yet, but like they did start it with a name. And now it's getting really smart. And it's interesting that your daughter keyed on, there's a personality here now.

And it's like, we're at the beginning of something. and it's going to get weird. And it is a little scary because every time Elon goes way past the boundaries of whatever people are comfortable with, the rest of the market realizes that they could probably do it too. When he fired everyone at Twitter, every other company decided to do massive layoffs. Things just like follow in Elon's wake because we live in a society, but Elon doesn't like to live in the society, so everyone just kind of follows. Anime Siri, WWC-26.

Google is going to rename Gemini to like Jenna or something. Yeah, yeah. All right, everybody, be careful out there. Talk to real people. Talk to real people. Please. Please. We should take a break.

When we get back, let's talk cameras. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great S-Cased. not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one.

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Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. So, David, I really wanted to have you on because Sony kind of surprise dropped a very expensive new camera this week. Yeah.

And this is like, I remember the original version of this camera over 10 years ago now. And it was a delight and a surprise and then it just disappeared. And out of nowhere, it just comes back. So this is the Sony RX-1R, three.

Three. One of the prized Sony names. Yeah. Okay, can you tell me about this? Like, give me a rundown. Yeah, I'll break this down for you because Sony has some weird names and they do have reason to the names. I just don't think consumers maybe necessarily understand it. The original RX1 was a full frame point and shoot camera.

And that means that has a fixed lens. It's a prime lens. It's great. They also have the RX 100 series, which is not prime lens. It's still a point and shoot, but it's got zooms usually. The new ones have zooms. They used to have primes. Anyway, the whole point is that you now have this full frame point and shoot camera.

This is important for Sony because in the past they had released this. And it did not super well. That's the reason they only released two. Actually, the RX1 Mark 2 released 10 years ago now in 2015. This is great. 10 years ago, they just never did anything else with this camera line. Yes. And it's, they like, they were ahead of the curve here, I feel like.

Yeah, they were. They were quite ahead of the curve because a few years ago, Fuji films there's so many letters and all of these things Fuji films I use it every single day X100

X100 5 V there's so many letters I can't do this is hard this segment is gonna be it's gonna be difficult I'm sorry to everybody

the X100 V which is their fifth edition of the X100 camera blew up on TikTok it got really really big it is my probably my most used camera is their newest

model, the X-106. Anyway, suddenly everybody wanted a small point-and-chute camera because smartphones use computational photography to the point where images all look very flat. They don't really look realistic. They look good to a regular person's eye. That's what these camera engineers will all tune the smartphone cameras to look. They just have as much information as possible. But they don't really look realistic.

Back in 2020, people started shooting film again because it was like more realistic and it was, you know, had more of a vibe. but then everyone realized film was too expensive and everyone's poor right now so people just decided they should get an actual camera. So the X100 V blew up because it has these film simulations where everyone can basically shoot film for like

free if they just buy the camera. Can I say something? It's the film, not only the film expensive, developing the film is expensive. Dude, it's horrible. I have like 10 rolls saved up in my house. Don't, you're gonna be upset. They're just like in a closet that I need to send off for development.

But it's like cheaper to do. do it in bulk. Yeah. I was sponsored by a lab in Arizona for so many years and I only recently had to bring one roll of film in to get developed and scanned. It's like $25. This is outrageous. Like the per price of a photo.

Oh, yeah. I can't do this. It's stupid. And I waste too much money on film. But, but this point and shoot game has kind of exploded in the last couple years, specifically because of Fuji film, right? So everyone started coming out with more. point and shoot cameras. Digicams have blown up. They're these like kind of early 2010s cameras

that you probably found in your parents' drawer or you would find in like a Goodwill. Those used to go for $5 at the Goodwill and now they're $300. People are really all about these things, right? So people have been wondering like when is Sony going to bring back a point and shoot camera? Because most other companies at this point have brought out their own addition. Actually, only a couple of months ago, Canon brought out their like G7, I believe it's called, which was sort of a reimagining of an old camera that they had that was pointing to just like Sony is doing now. Anyway, the drama around this is that the X100 series, even the X-1006, the newest one, is $1,700, which was already more expensive than X-105, and people are kind of upset about that.

This is the Fuji. The Fuji is 1700. The Fuji is 1700. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got the Lyca Q3, which launched at $6,000. Now after the tariff situation, it's like $6,800. almost $7,000. So that's a big price discreference, obviously. The RX1R2 from 10 years ago was $3,300, which, if you look at inflation, is about $4,700. To be fair. Oh, man. To be fair.

Yeah. Anyway, this camera just, this new version of this camera, RX1R, Mark 3, just launched yesterday. As you said, it was like a stealth launch. The way I found out about it was an email press release directly from So, which is like not usually how I find out about cameras. Well, okay, and this is another thing that I want to bring up. It's, if you're like a camera nerd, you probably know that like when a new camera is announced, you go to YouTube and there are dozens of videos.

And even though the company is like, here it is, here's a new camera, nobody's heard about it before. A bunch of people have been using it for like a month or more. Yeah. Then they've been like flown out to Junction's in like Japan and Prague. So like take these gorgeous photos. and Sony did none of that. They really did none of that. Which is crazy because this feels like, I'm not even trying to knock influencers.

This feels like the kind of camera that would appeal to like a pretty wide, like it's an aspirational camera. It's a full frame sensor in a super small body. Yeah, I guess we should talk about the actual camera. Yeah, yeah. We just talked about the context. Well, we haven't mentioned how much it costs yet. And I really want to understand why. Yes.

Yes, sorry. I am not a camera girl. I'm sorry. Okay. This is an expensive camera. A lot of other people are also trying to understand why. So I get you. It's $5,100.

It's really expensive. You know, the Lika Q3 is $6,800 now. That's also Lika and Lika everything has always ridiculously expensive. Fujifilm released the GFX 100 RF, which is $4,800 and people are saying it was $2,000. And that's for a medium format. That's medium format 100 megapixel. Is this technically? half, is it a technical thing?

Like they couldn't be cheaper? Or is this aspirational? Well, the thing about Sony is, the thing about the Sony camera is no. This is the big question that everyone's wondering about, right? Is that there are all these sort of point and shoot cameras. And yes, the Lyca Q3 is like the only other full frame one. And then you get into Fuji phone with the GFX.

But it is very, very weird that this is $5,100 because Sony also offers another camera called the A7C. R2, also horrible naming system, not fixed lens, but also quite small. And it is half this price. So it is weird. It is physically, okay, let's talk about this camera. It is 61 megapixels because the R always stands for resolution. Currently, the A7R5 is 61 megapigals.

Aren't they all high resolution now? Well, define high resolution. Oh, my God. I know. I know. I know. So it's 61 megapixels. It has a 35 millimeter F2 lens, which F2 on a full frame is actually quite good.

You know, that's nice. They like a Q3 is F1.7, so it's a little different, but the lens is way bigger. It has an EVF now, but the EVF is like pretty old. It's like a multi-generation old EVF, so people are complaining about that. And it does not have a tiltable screen on the back, which is a really big miss in a lot people's opinions, including mine, because the way that a lot of people use these point and shoot cameras is sort of just like keeping it in their pocket or keeping it on a strap and then just sort of like shooting over their head or, you know, putting it down by their waist and kind of

flipping up the screen so they can shoot at waist level. But now not being able to have a screen that flips out, you always have to have it up to your eye or you just have to guess. And Sony said that the reason they did this was because of this magnesium alloy body and it's like unibody and whatever and they wanted to keep it slim, but it just feels like it takes away from the functionality a lot. And the paradox of this camera in general is that Sony is generally about, we want to slap the latest technology, the fastest readout, the highest resolution on a lens. Like sensor to lens, that's what it's all about. It's getting the fastest data throughput and it's getting the highest resolution. And there you go. And sometimes it can be expensive, like the A7R5 is expensive,

but or the A7, but the A9, Mark 2, there's too many cameras. Sony has way too many cameras. That's a whole other, that's a whole episode. It feels like you're thinking in code.

Yeah, I'm sorry. If you are not a camera person. Yeah. If you're not a camera person, this is probably horrible. But people are just kind of upset about this because it takes a lot of last generation features

and it sort of does this in the pursuit of compactness, which Antonio on the verge, wrote a very good article about that this morning, about how effectively Sony wanted this to be small so much that they had to give away everything that would have made this possibly more palatable at $5,100. A primary issue is that these cameras are very small,

and this is even smaller than the X100, but it doesn't fit in your pocket. Like, you still have to have a strap on it, and it's still going to, like, sit on your waist, sort of on the strap. Maybe you could put it in a large jacket pocket. This is where I'm at with, I got an X-101. Yeah. I am one of those people.

And the goal for me is to, like, bring it everywhere, right? Because, like, I would like to take better photos than I can on my phone. Yeah. And I would like to not spend as much as I do on film. But the thing is, it is still, like, just a touch too big to be, like, I have this everywhere. And I'm not going to bother people if I'm just, like, holding this up. Yeah. And the Sony gets, like, a little bit closer.

Yeah. It's still, it's not there. The RICO GR3 is what people really use for pocket cameras. Yeah. Yeah. But that doesn't have like the same, I think, charm and full experience that these do, right? 100%. These, like the Fuji, the Sony, they have viewfinders.

Yeah. They hold like a regular camera. And like, admittedly, the fact that they hold a regular camera is why they're not pocketable. Right. But there's really nothing else, like, quite like this camera if you want a full frame sensor. I mean, I guess I say that there is the Q3, but the Q3 lens is humongous. Two, three, that's humongous. Who is going to buy this?

Like, what is the end result that you're getting from this that you couldn't get other, you know, that you couldn't get from one that's maybe $3,000 cheaper? Yeah, I mean, it is sort of one of those things I believe where their thought process is make it as small as possible with a high resolution sensor so that if someone doesn't want to just use their phone all the time, they can keep this in a pocket, they see a moment. It's got a pretty fast lens. It's a ice lens. They're really high quality.

Sony usually has good, you know, good image quality. And they now have these film simulations, but they're not very good, at least based on what I saw. And I don't know, I guess it's for the person. It's sort of the same reason Fuji sold the GFX 100 RF, which is, again, like $4,700. Their whole market for that, they told me directly is a lawyer or a doctor who has too much money and like just wants to be able to take photos of everyday life. and they just want the best of the best and they don't really care. And it feels like to me it is the same category of person, but they want something that is so small that they could keep it in a jacket pocket

or a small bag pocket, which is true. Like it is, you know, it's going to be a good camera. I think it's just the fact that it's $5,100 that people are like, what is going on here. Yeah, and the portability, I think, that seems like the biggest selling point. I mean, the last time I bought a proper camera was for my honeymoon, which was, I'm about to celebrate my 20th wedding anniversary. So that tells you how out of the market, I think.

But we bought the, you know, the DSLR. It was a cannon. And, you know, we bought the two lenses, two or three lenses. And we were going to Costa Rica. So we wanted to, like, capture the birds and the monkeys. And, you know, we had the long lens and the big bag. And, you know, after the honeymoon, we basically never used it. Because carrying it around, you know, and this was pre-smartphones, too.

So we had a little point-and-shoot that we used for everything else. And that being able to have a fantastic camera that you could frame the photo you have taken and put it on your wall, that you can fit in a pocket. I can definitely see the real benefit there. But you can also get really good images out of your smartphone today compared to what you could do a couple decades ago. It's a huge difference. but I understand for like the purest having a camera like this, you're going to come up, you're going to be able to do so much more with the image that you produce.

But are you actually printing out these photos or are they just living online and everyone's just seeing them on the screen anyway? This photo is going to be for the people who are photographer. This camera is going to be for the people who are photographers. So it's a pro. It's definitely a pro level. It's definitely a pro. And almost every pro photographer who like shoots weddings or just whatever will tell you that they have.

a fun camera that they carry on them because it is small. That is the whole reason that they buy it. And this helps bridge that gap between fun because it's small and, oh, this is like the same specs as my A7R5 with a fast lens on it. It just has that sort of like, okay, but you have to be able to justify that because pro photographers in general are not making below $5,100 money all the time. So, you know, it's, it could be a tariff thing. It could be an inflation thing.

It is just surprisingly expensive. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. Like, I think these cameras are necessarily about tradeoffs. Like, they're saying, right, once you're at a fixed lens, you are talking about a camera with tradeoffs. Yes. And you are making the tradeoffs for the size. Right. I think it's very difficult when it's five grand and doesn't have, you know, ibis image stapled.

That is a huge thing. Yeah, no ibis in this is pretty wild. Yeah. I think that gets really difficult. But, like, I do think there is some level in which, like, you sort of have to be okay with it because you're right. Like if you are a pro photographer, this is probably your second camera or if I think you're an enthusiast like me, you know, the reason that I pick, you know, an X100 over any like a Fuji with an interchangeable lens is because I don't want to deal with it,

right? Like I just, I've done this before. I've shot Sony before. I've had a bunch of lenses and it's like, I kind of choose, I'm not going to bring multiple lenses with me. Lenses are too big. Okay, I can get a pancake lens, but then this lens is one lens I want. Um, I do think like trying to pack it all into as small of a package as you can and make it like a freaking good one too, right? Like I think I have no doubts that this camera is going to shoot some great photos. Sure. But it is true. Like there's a lot of kind of weird tradeoffs that they're making here that feel like they're not quite the right ones for the market for the price.

And, you know, especially when we look around like, right, if you just want something. something a little bit fun, save $4,000 to get the X100. Yeah. And then, yeah, right? Like, if you want something splashy, spend a little more, get the Q3. Although the Q3, I guess I'm curious, have you shot with a Q3? Yeah, I have, yeah. I assume it shoots very different than the Sony.

It's a very different type of camera, for sure. Even the down to the U.X design and the way that the menus work is like very different. Sony is very utilitarian. When I've shot with Sony, it has felt like I am like operating a computer. Yes, that's what they are. It's like not fun. They're very good, but it's not like the experience I want. That is, yeah, that is true.

I mean, it's always felt like they've put a sensor and a processor and slapped it to a lens, and that's been like what we can do. And Zice, like Zice invented a lot of different lenses, like way back in the day. And Sony has this strategic partnership with Zice, so you're obviously going to get really good image quality anyway. You know, they have extremely sharp lenses on a really, fast computer and that's generally the thing. It feels weird to be in a world where the Q3, for example, can sort of justify the price now in a weird way because all like a gear, right? Sure, it's technically good. They have a good 60 megapixel sensor. Like, their lenses are

really good. But it's always been like, yes, I know that this is not good value for money. Like, I know. I get that. I'm buying this for the build quality. I'm buying it because it really feels amazing to shoot. I'm buying this because it's more compact and I like the range finder in an M11 or something like that. But now that the Q3 is not a ton more than this camera, relatively

speaking, I love that. I cannot believe Sony made LICA look like a good value. This is where we're like that's the thing. That's rough. That's rough. And if the Q3 was still $6,000 because that's what it launched at, it would be like because the Q3 has ibis, right? That's a huge feature. It's really

a big feature. It has a Faster F1.7 lens. It's got a sumilux lens, which those lenses are really amazing. It's got a better interface design. It shoots 8K30 video. And to think that the Sony shoots 4K30 video. And to think that a LICA camera shoots better video than a Sony camera, it just completely flips the script on everything.

So it almost makes the price gap like more justifiable, which is weird because the only justifiable thing of a LICA used to be the fact that it's a Lika. That's like, yeah. The main thing. It's a fashion device. They are built better generally. They feel amazing. But you have to really just decide, like, I'm going to go out on this for no reason.

So, I don't know. Like you said, all cameras are good now. And this is going to shoot amazing photos. And it is, it's even smaller than an X-106, which is kind of crazy because the sensor is way bigger. Yeah. But, you know, it's $5,100. Fuji, Fuji, get on it. Please.

I mean, they sort of did it with the RF, right? I mean, so you, you read the, the, GFX100 RF for us, which is Fuji's, I'm going to put, air quotes, compact, medium for it for my camera. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which feels like it's sort of an entire different, like it is. It's the same idea as all these, but feels like it's its own world, particularly like, because it's still kind of chunky, right? Yeah, it's not, for sure. It's certainly not pocketable. Yeah, it's slower than this.

But it is like, I am curious, like, what is, like, what is, maybe. Like, where does this trend come from, right? It is because there's that in between that would normally come right after smartphones is not better than smartphones. And so you need to go all the way to I'm spending five grand to get this dramatically better photo. It's become the point where either you want something worse than your smartphone, which a lot of people do because worse is like trendy and feels more real. And, you know, the zoomers love it, the alpha, the gen alpha kids love it. So they're buying like the digicams, you know, or you want something that's dramatically better. Like you said, like the smartphone is so technically good now.

But the thing about the smartphone is that computational photography crushes the highlights and brings up the shadows. The tone curve is flat. So the entire image is just going to be like, everything's in focus and everything is, you can see everything because there's, there's detail and everything. And while that's like useful for transferring information to one another, it's not that. useful in terms of like being an artist so driving me crazy yeah I am really curious when the camera companies are going to be like oh like man we should do something like it feels very weird to me and I wonder if it's just that they just don't have the processing ability or something but like I spoke to someone very recently that said there are going to be ISPs that are going to come to

dedicated cameras very soon that have been used in smartphones so like about to get much faster I think there are some potential upsides to this, and I think there's a lot of potential downsets. But, like, the power and flexibility of, like, a smartphone's ISP with the actual capabilities of a great lens and a great sensor would love that. That's coming soon. But, I mean, that's, I'm surprised it has taken this long. But, yeah, it is true. Like, right now, it is sort of the worst of both worlds because we have all that power and none of the flexibility. Yeah.

Your photo looks. way it looks and like you can sort of tune it in the iPhone's photo style thing but like you know not everybody's doing that you have to like said that it's up in advance i'm not sure it's the convergence of both things it's sort of like when manufacturers make a computer that's also a tablet and so it's like cool this is a tablet but when i hold it i feel the keys on the back of it right and that's like not fun but if you try to make an iPad a computer it's also still not quite there so people want the dedicated things you know it's like i'm just going to use my phone as phone i'm just going to use my camera as a camera.

But we can't do that right now. That's what frustrates me, is that we've got phones becoming cameras and cameras becoming phones, like the size of a phone. It's like eventually we're going to end up with everything exactly the same and like, how do we pick and what's the time? Because phones are getting bigger in order to be better cameras for the majority of the reason. Obviously, some people want the bigger screens as well.

But I've not done a plus phone for a long time. I'm still, I like, I used to do the plus. I was like, this is just too big. Now, I want a phone to be a phone. I like the idea of a smaller camera, but yeah, that convergence is slowly happening, and it's going to be interesting to see when we're at the same. We're getting close. I mean, a lot of the Chinese phones are getting insane with their image quality.

They're going up to, what, one-inch sensors now? Yeah, like bigger than one-inch at this point, using glass lenses and all this stuff. And attachments of Vivo has this phone now that has like a telephoto lens of, like, attachment on it. Crazy stuff. So, I don't know. We're getting there. It's been a long road.

But I don't know. There were some posts about this Sony camera on threads where some influencers, I suppose, got access to it like the weekend before. So they're posting, like, photos from the weekend before. But like you said, there was no grand, like, everyone's got a review out. It seems like they didn't do that. And that is questionable. I'm curious if it was like a, it either was like a sourcing thing. or it was like a maybe we don't want to make a big splash about this

because we sort of know that it's really expensive and that people are going to get yelled at in their comments section. Yeah, right. The fact that I got it in a press release when they announced it instead of any kind of embargo was quite interesting. For something that's like so hyped and so like long awaited. Yeah. And like this lineup was ahead of the curve and then just sort of disappeared.

Yeah. It's very strange. I am really curious why because honestly, even when I know a camera is not going to be amazing or like it's kind of a weird one, like those are the videos that like I actually like want to watch the most. What was the one, might have been a sigma,

not the like, not the BF, not the BF. What was the one before that? Oh. It was like, I feel like there was blue one. It was a bunch of different colors.

Maybe I should, the weirdly shaped one that uses the foveon sense. Yeah. Yeah. I don't remember the name of it because just like all cameras it has a weird string of letters, but yeah. Right.

It's like I, whenever there's a weird high-end camera, like I, Don't get me wrong. Like, I race to watch these things, even though I know it's like you've been set up in the perfect environment to take these photos. Yeah. But, yeah, it's very interesting. I am excited to see the first photos of this start to hit the web because don't get me wrong, even if this thing is a bad deal, I'm very envious of it.

Yeah. It's a great looking small camera. But, yeah, it's a weird mix of features. I think overall you can just think of it as an A7R5 that's in like a hyper compact body. And you're paying for the. the fact that they were able to shrink this thing that you previously had to like carry around in a bag with you to something that could potentially fit in a jacket pocket. That's what you're paying for. I think before I make this purchase, I need to commit myself to actually carrying

my X-100s round a little bit more often. I think we can all make that commitment. Oh yeah. Okay, we've got a lot more to talk about. The Thunder round is coming up next. Stay tuned. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, asset compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's

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And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people,

all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary.

Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. All right, we're back. So I don't know if you guys heard this last week, but I went on a little bit of a power trip, right? Eli is gone. David's gone. They can't stop me. I can do whatever I want now. And I have officially rebranded the Lightning Round as the Thunder Round. Now, we got, I'm going to say a little bit of feedback on this, right? I got one email saying the Thunder Round was a branding disaster on the order of changing HBO Max to Max.

Okay. Wow. Ooh, sick burn. Dramatic. That one stung. I got to be real with you. Nonetheless, I will persevere. The Thunder Round is here to stay until Nilai or David stops me. Until the investors come back and have you change it back.

Yes. Just like HBO. But listen, Thunder Round is about chaos. As part of this chaos, we will once again be making some changes. It's new. It's improved. Here's what we're going to do. Five stories, five minutes each.

Our producer, Eric Gomez, once. again has been given the power of thunder to keep us in check. He's going to hit us with some rolling thunder around 30 seconds when we need to wrap up. And then if we hit time, the thunder will strike. All right. Okay. Thunder round, take two. The thunder will rumble.

Thunder doesn't strike. We're getting into lightnings. This is, again, we'll fix it next week. We'll fix it next week. There's always room for improvement. Thunder will crack. Thunder crack. Oh, crap.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. We've got, you know, again, these are good notes. These are good notes. Our research team didn't have that up front. ACDC didn't know that either. They named the song Thunderstruck, which didn't happen.

There we. See, okay. Well, I'm going to add another item onto the Thunder Round, and it's going to be room for rooms for improvement. Okay. All right. Let's dive into it. Thunder Round Story 1. I want to talk about what happened in the Android world with this.

week where Android ecosystem president Samir Samat said, quote, we're going to be combining Chrome OS and Android into a single platform. And this feels like there's a lot to unpack, right? They have theoretically been combining ChromeOS and Android for, I don't know, forever now. Even sprinkling features between the two, yeah. Because, like, you've already been able to run Android apps. on ChromeOS. But it kind of stalled out. It was never very good.

They sort of like forgot about it. Stop talking about it. I'm not really sure what this means long term for Chrome OS. Does ChromeOS stick around? Does ChromeOS just become Android? Because Android at the same time, and they show this off at I.O. in the spring, Android's getting a desktop mode, right? They're working with Samsung.

Samsung has decks. You just plug it in. You get a desktop. This sort of makes sense, right? Chrome OS, if you go back, when it came around, Android, there was not a world where Android is going to be a desktop operating system, right? Google needed a desktop operating system. They needed something that was kind of light, ran on lightweight devices.

We also just, like, did not have, like, these arm processors that could run super powerful desktop applications. And now that they've become so powerful, it's like, what is what purpose is ChromeOS serving, right? And I know they're super big in schools. but I'm curious if that continues in this new world and I'm wondering if they are looking out at the trajectory going, hey, there's not really anywhere further for Chrome OS to go, right? It was a Chrome browser. It's kind of it.

You don't need any more than that. Android, on the other hand, it has a Zapp ecosystem. It's getting windowing and keep going. I'm curious, have either of you been Chromebook users in the past? Oh, absolutely. I've dipped in and out over and over and over again. over and but now that the browser wars have been happening i've been trying like every new browser what why why do you bounce off chrome chrome or wait chrome os or chrome o s yeah so what makes you

bounce off chrome o s um well i'm a photographer yeah right so that's all you really need to know i don't know if you want to do android is not great for photographers either right yeah well the photo editing ecosystem is not yeah i there are laptop tasks you know actually i was at a chrome o s event uh like a month ago, maybe three weeks ago, where they introduce a bunch of new Chrome AI features. And one of the presenters, his thing was, that's a laptop task. Now you can do it on the Chromebook. That was his whole, like, motto. The idea, so they're like new and improved Chrome OS. It's like a laptop. Well, he was saying, that's a laptop thing. He was saying, oh, I have this task. That's a laptop thing. Now I can sort of actually do it with my voice on the laptop, you know. Yeah. This is weird.

It's weird. Okay, my take on this is that ChromeOS and Android should never have been different. I kind of, it's a good way. ChromeOS was a good way for Google to sell laptops, right? Because they didn't want to build a whole desktop ecosystem like Mac OS. You know, they didn't want to compete with Windows. And so they never built these desktop applications. And in some ways, that was like a little bit of forward thinking.

They were thinking of the internet computer way before, you know, the browser company was because that's what ChromeOS was supposed to be. It was logging your Google account, you've got everything. It's right here. That's why it works in schools. That's why it works in libraries, things like that. It's very smart for them. Now that you were, like you said, these processors that are in smartphones are so fast that they can run these applications that are almost having future parity with desktop.

Like Lightroom, for example, Lightroom Mobile is getting very close to the same sort of Lightroom classic functionality. So there are some, you know, photo editing features that I could use. I could use. And so now what they're doing is they're like, okay, well, like, why do we have these two platforms? Because over time, they've had to be like, well, okay, Chrome as just a computer platform that is just Chrome, maybe isn't the move. They bet on this world where everything was in the cloud. Yeah. But they realized that maybe everyone doesn't want everything to be in the cloud all the time.

So they had to allow you to use Android apps on your computer. Also, if they wanted to compete with the ecosystem. ecosystem of the iPhone and the Mac, they had to have some sort of like file sync between the two devices, some way to be able to interact with them together. It's like, oh, well, if you could just run the Android app on your computer, and then now you can like push text to your computer and they added that. They added all these push notifications that were coming directly from your computer. There's like syncing between your Android phone and your in your Chromebook. At this point, it just feels like, why aren't they just the same platform?

Well, can I say this? It is always driven me crazy because I've had, um, had, an Android phone is my main phone for a while now. I don't know why Chrome and Android do not talk to each other, right? I can't get my Android notification. I use a Mac, right? And so the Android Mac, they don't play super well together. Right? If I use an iPhone, I would get all my iPhone notifications on my Mac.

That would be delightful. Can't do that with Android. And I would love, I don't understand why they can't push over to Chrome. I don't understand why there can't be those sort of interactions. when Chrome is already, like, it's a pretty beefy app, right? Like, I don't understand how much more work they would have to do to link it up with Android and having started that integration way back already. Yeah, it feels like if you're logged into the same Google account,

they should be able to push notifications through your account rather than through your device, and then he would show up on your Chrome browser anyway. I don't know. Right, like, give me the file sync. Give me some sort of like parody across websites and apps. I feel like there's something more they could do there, and I think it's interesting that they have just not done that. And now they're just like Chrome OS. Like a couple of years ago, they said that they were moving parts of the Android kernel into Chrome OS.

And it's like, just make it Android. Right. I already have it in tablets. The pixel tablet has Android. You know, that's running Android, not Chrome OS. That's like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. The key, though, is the education. And the thing that makes it so good for education is how simple Chrome OS. And once you add in more of a operating system, more of an infrastructure with Android, it will make it more complicated, which I think is, you know, my main experience with Chromebooks is my kids use them for school. Although the first one I bought was when they promised to bring Android apps. I was like, oh, now this could be more interesting.

But it was so, it was such a poor experience to begin with. And then I never went back. I don't know if it ever got much better. But yeah, that simplicity is the key, really. right now. And it's interesting because on the Mac now, I mean, so much is a web app anyway. It's not that often that you're actually going to find other than high-end software that you need for things like photo editing. You really don't need specific apps. So it's interesting. I think it makes sense to bring it together. But I think the key here is going to be maintaining

the simplicity that Chrome OS has really sold the market on making sure it doesn't make a complicated like a Windows machine. I think all these companies have had different ideas of what an app should be. Like, should it be in your browser? Google thinks everything should be running in your browser. That was the browser company's idea too. Proton, you know, the whole proton thing was, well, everything's sort of a web app, but we could just put it in a different sort of environment where it feels native.

And that was the whole idea behind that because, again, you know, if I'm running a chat app on my laptop, I don't... Wait, quick, quick react. Do you feel good about the future of ChromeOS now with Android? Yes, no. Sure. Sure. I think I feel worse. Really?

Yeah. I feel like it'll be more native. Okay. Next up, Jen, last week in the Thunder Round, in our rapid fire, when we talked about how IKEA had this new lamp. I know. I was screaming at you guys when I listened to him. I know. The speaker was not the big news, people.

It was a really pretty lamp. I thought the lamp looked cool. I wanted to talk about the lamp. And honestly, I don't understand matter well enough. And so now, Jen, okay, actually, IKEA had some really big matter news. Big matter news. Yes. Tell me.

Tell me. Matters. Okay. So I'll tell you why it matters. So IKEA has launched an entire, or announced that it's launching an entire new line of smart home products for its stores that will. be based on thread and use matter. So thread is the protocol. Matter is the connectivity protocol that it runs over. And as David mentioned earlier, is the sort of promise to make your smart plug work with everyone. So the promise of matter is that it works with every platform that's matter

compatible, which are all of them right now and new ones coming along as well. So this is really exciting because IKEA, obviously, big name, big mass market name, to date Matter has been very niche, whilst Apple and Amazon and Google are all involved. For most of them, it's a very small segment of their offering. And this is really pushing Matter into the mainstream. Because crucially, as everyone knows, IKEA products are very inexpensive. And so this is going to make it, so it's easy to by smart light bulb that will work with any platform. And that's huge. And the fact that it's on thread is really big,

because thread is very much a new protocol, like about a decade old, which in the protocol space is quite young. And it's only recently been seen sort of broadly in the smart home outside of Apple and Google. So they basically ditched Zigby for thread. Zigby is the foundation of thread. So it's not a huge leap, but it is a big leap.

And it's going to be very interesting that they say they're launching over 20 new products by January. IKEA kind of rolls things out in a weird way. So we may start seeing things sooner. Light bulbs, plugs, sensors, some air purifying devices, like temperature, humidity, that kind of stuff. And it's replacing the entire trad-free line, which you may be familiar with if you've ever bought smart bulbs in IKEA. And then they have a newish hub, which has been out for a couple of years. now and when they launched it, they promised it would have, it has a thread radio in it, but they hadn't turned it on. This seems to be quite a common theme. So they announced this last week that

they had turned on the thread radio and they are now supporting thread devices and they've turned their hub into a matter controller, which means that you can control any smart plug that is matter compatible with it. So you don't have to use IKEA devices. You can add any device to this hub that works with Matter, that is supported by IKEA. And then the flip side, you don't need the hub anymore to use IKEA's products. So if you go into an IKEA store and pick up a smart bulb and plug it in, turn it on, you don't have to have a hub for the more advanced features because it can connect to any matter hub.

So if you have an Apple Home, Apple TV, HomePod, or an Amazon Alexa Echo Show 15, that can be the hub. So it's just simplifying it. I don't know if anyone's ever, if people are familiar what it was what it was like to use. You deserved it. I'm sorry. I did so well.

Didn't do it before, so. I know. I can't believe we made it this long. I tested the trap for you a while ago. And like I was very skeptical. Like IKEA making tech products, but they were good. They were like really solid, cheap smart gadgets. But a little complicated setup.

And that was. kind of one of the issues. And this should make it a little, it should make it easier. But, you know, you don't have, you didn't have to use the hub, but you couldn't have connectivity outside of the home. So you would only, it was just be in the home, like little, they would have the remotes you could use. What, what did you buy? What was your? Oh, it was, I tested the lights at some point. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't remember. And now I'm on, on, uh, hue. So like, which maybe they're in, I don't know. Yeah. So this is, you can now. And so they always were, in some ways.

interoperable because they both use ZigB and you could add them to each other's bridges. It was a little complicated, but now it's just, it should be a lot more straightforward. And that's, you know, this has been the promise of matter since it launched all those years ago, that it's going to make the smart home easier and more accessible. And this is a big step in that direction because it's, you know, mass market on your IKEA shelves, much less expensive than most products and a brand name that people recognize and trust, not just something they're buying off Amazon for like $10 and who knows where it came from. Yeah. I think this is a pretty big deal because the best way to get people to adopt a new protocol and actually get that protocol moving is to not tell them that they're

adopting a new protocol and getting that protocol moving. And having it in the IKEA where people go to when they're moving, they're like, I'm going to replace all my furniture or I'm moving across the country and I just need to redo everything. Okay, buy lights. Okay, I want them to be smart lights. Not think about it. go through the setup of like scanning a QR code, suddenly they have Matter and everything in their house can be like interworkable. That is that is like very big, right? Like I think that that's pretty huge. So I don't know.

I'm excited that they're doing this. I still have problems with Matter and my apartment consistently. What matter gadgets do you have? So I have, oh gosh, what are they called? I'm trying to remember the brand. They are smart plugs. And I also have, I also have smart blinds. Oh, man.

And it was the company that promised first to upgrade to matter. Eve, yes. I have the Eve smart plugs and they're really, really great. And I have the Eve smart blinds and they're really, really great. But every single time I try to upgrade them to matter, it like crashes the network. It removes them from the network. And then I have to reset up everything and it still doesn't work. And then I just go, oh, God, I'm going to go back to home kit.

Yeah. Because it's thread. That's thread. Yeah. Eve updated everything from Bluetooth. I hear you. I hear you. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Eve updated everything from Bluetooth to thread, and just as IKEA is moving from Zigby to thread. But Eve was one of the early adopters, and they promised and carried through on firmware updates to their products. But that is always, you know, completely changing the infrastructure of a device can be tricky. And I've had similar issues with that. But, yeah, it's, I mean, you were an early adopter there, and early adopters definitely feel the pain points. They go to the pain. Exactly.

Exactly. If you're a brand new homeowner, you're moving to a new home and you don't have any smart devices yet and you start with matter, I'm sure this stuff works like pretty well. Yeah. And it's a great point you made about making thread and matter mainstream because actually IKEA did that for Zigby like 10 years ago when it started tradfrey. So it'll be interesting to see. Yeah. All right. Next up, David, you went to a beeper event? I did go to a beeper being the chat app that is now owned by audits. Automatic. Yes. Yeah.

Automatic who also owns WordPress. There's a lot of WordPress drama this year. Yeah. Also owns PocketCast, my favorite podcast player. Yeah, they own a lot of very interesting. They quietly own a lot of the internet. A lot of, like literally like, I mean, we're literally. Tumblr.

Yeah, Tumblr. Yeah. So there was a Beaver event last night. A little context. Beeper is a chat app that their whole idea of it is that you can connect all of your different chat apps into one place. This is sort of nebulous. If you like it,

You like it. If you don't, you don't kind of think, right? It's like, you don't have to. Potentially. It's like Mathis for your messaging apps. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's sort of the thing. Where it doesn't always work. What is happening? I feel a little mixed on it because sometimes I want to compartmentalize different parts of my life. Like I talk to a lot of photography people over my Instagram chat. And I talk to a lot of normies over I message, right? And I talk to a lot of my tech friends over telegram. So it's sort of like, you know, it puts them all in one place.

You can have little different sections. Anyway, what they're changing here is, um, Eric Mijikovsky, who is the guy that invented Pebble, eventually moved on and made this app called Beeper that does this. Last year, famously, they figured out how to basically reverse engineer the iMessage protocol so that Beeper Mini, their new app that they had for a while, worked with iMessage. You can run iMessage on Android, which was crazy. Apple got real upset about that. They shut it down. Now it sold to automatic.

Eric is no longer at the company. He is restarting Pebble, which is very fun. Those are starting to ship actually, which is a whole other thing. But Beeper had this big launch last night with Automatic, where they are relaunching it with a couple of new subscription features. They also changed a lot of the apps. So a little more context. Automatic already owned this chat app called Text.com. And the idea of text.com was exactly the same idea as Beeper.

And so I actually talked to the CEO of Automatic last night, and he told me that they are using the foundation of Text. com with the ux of beeper so it is sort of like the best of both worlds in a lot of ways also if you had a beeper account it automatically works with the new beeper but the the big thing is they're introducing a few new features specifically in these subscription models because they need to figure out how to make money off of beeper what are they selling okay yeah so beeper plus it's a little expensive it's nine ninety nine a month which is quite a lot uh but you can have three accounts per network So if you have multiple Instagram accounts, you can have multiple logins on each Instagram account. So it's like a power user option.

The whole thing is for power users. They have an incognito. So the interesting thing about- Incognito. The interesting thing about Beeper is that even if the platform itself didn't offer a feature, if Beeper operates the feature, you can do it with the app, which is quite cool. So incognito, for example, you can read messages without people seeing that you've read them if it's forced red receipts. Right?

So that's cool. Because we've all done the thing where we've just long pressed on a notification so that didn't technically open it all the time. Okay, I would pay for that. Well, that's great. It's good. Oh, man. Yeah, okay. They should have just called it like beat the read receipt subscription.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I also hate read receipts. Voice note transcriptions. So if the app didn't have voice note transcriptions, now it does. That's great. It has chat reminders to remind you to reply to people. I need that. I'm really bad.

at replying to people because I'm always busy and then I don't reply to you. That's bad. It's good for me if I use this. And then there is send later on every service. So I think like in the last iOS version, IMessage added this like schedule send feature. It's been my favorite feature. I love that. It's amazing. It's so useful. Also if you want to say happy birthday right at midnight to somebody to show you care by automating a message, that would work. And then they have a you can there's a custom app icon thing it's that's good the whole yeah that's great uh yeah that's the plus it doesn't end there though right it kind of ends there okay yeah what it wait but what is beeper plus plus plus okay so then there's plus plus this okay okay okay okay okay so it's not yeah it's sort of this but like instead of three accounts per network you can have unlimited

accounts per network gosh this is like i'm a social media manager yeah i will i am entering the matrix 100%. I will chat with everybody who responds to our accounts. Yes, 100%. Does it still work with iMessage or did that go away? No. They got longer. That's completely gone.

Like there's no integration. Completely. Like you cannot even, yeah, you can't even put your regular text through. There's Google chat or there's Google messages, I believe. But there's no I message. I think it's still worth it. It works with WhatsApp, right? It works with WhatsApp.

Yeah. I have it right now. Oh, interesting. I mean, I'm not trying to be a salesperson, but. Well, I have the same thing. And, like, you know, constantly from different sources. And then I also talking with people in different time zones. And it would just be so nice to have it in one spot.

And does it even has slack? It has slack. It has slack. That might get messy. It's going to be messy. I don't want slack, period. Well, yeah. Yeah.

So you get, like, your Instagram messages and, like, your X DMs. Yep. And your threads DMs? Not yet. They don't have threads DMs. They don't have Blu's. Guy DMs. But they do have X.

Yeah, they have Discord. LinkedIn. This is, okay, this is the thing with Beeperware, I feel like you have to be a very specific type of person who is either like, I don't know, like a messaging madman and like just lives in their inbox. Yeah. Or just like works organizationally that way. But honestly, like putting all those things in there, I understand why you would want

that. And it also sounds like a nightmare. Yeah. I like, get this away from me. Yeah. It does some quirks. For example, on MacOS, in your little notifications area where you normally get like one little text or whatever, every single notification you've got from every single different chat app shows up as a notification. I'm unsold.

It's not good. You can turn them off. You can turn it off. So turn it off once. You're fine. Anyway. Again, it's for people who are just like truly. It's a power user future.

Hardcore. You've got to be that. Yeah. Okay. Next one up, Jen. You want to talk about Google's Nest Aware subscription price is going up. And this is like a trend, right? There's been a lot of this.

Tell me what's going on. Yeah. So Google is raising the price of its Nest Aware service. So this is the service that you subscribe to if you have their cameras predominantly. So the Google Nest cams or the Google Nest doorbell. So this enables recorded video up to 60 days, I think it is. And other features such as familiar faces, so facial recognition. There's a whole bunch of services.

that come with Nestaware. You do get some, I think you get up to three hours of free cloud storage with, or three video storage, because it's not stored in the cloud. It's stored locally with your Google Doorbell or your Google Nest camera. But if you want more, you need to pay. And it was $8 a month or $80 a year. And now it's going from $8 a month to $10 a month or $100 a year if you pay up front. And that's for the basic Nest Aware.

So the Nestaware plus adds just, it has all the same features as Nestaware, but you get 60 days of video history instead of 30 plus 24-7 recording, if that's what you want. So there's extra features in Nest Aware Plus, and that's now going from $15 a month to $20 a month. So from $150 a year to $200 a year if you pay annually. And this is a big jump. And they announced this yesterday with no extra features. It's not like, oh, we're adding all of this and we're putting our prices up. It's just we're putting our prices up. I think the verbiage that they said was that this was, you know, around the current sort of atmosphere.

I'm trying to find the exact wording. Do you have any like premium camera subscriptions currently? Of course, of course. I'm so sorry. Yes, I know. This is one of the things that like has always, I understand, right? If you need a security camera, which like a lot of small businesses do, this makes a ton of sense. But like for a homeowner, you have to keep tacking these on. And a lot of them, you have paid extra for more.

Yeah. This is the second time. Their costs are not going up. Three years. Yeah. It had gone up. I think in 2023, it went up. And, you know, if you just have one camera, like a doorbell camera, it's like, this is a lot of money to be paying.

And what's happening that's interesting. And I think this is why we're seeing the prices go up because Ring went up recently. Arlo is another in this space that went up recently is they're all adding AI powered features to their higher tiers subscriptions. Things like text descriptions for alerts. So one of the most annoying thing about having cameras in your home or around your home is you get a constant stream of like motion alerts. Or maybe if you have, if you pay for the subscriptions, you can get like a person alert or if it's an animal or a vehicle. So you'll get a specific.

It'll tell you what was there. So you don't have to open the app to see. now with these text descriptions, it'll actually describe. Like it'll tell me, I just set up an Arlo in my backyard for testing a floodlight. And it says, a black chicken walked across the yard. It's a calm scene. And there's a ripple of sun in the background. It needs to get face identification and like tell you which chicken it is.

It used to be like, Mary walked across the lawn. I'm sure we'll get there. But the thing is, I don't know that. I mean, it's useful. I can see in the future there could be some. use because if you AI could kind of filter out and only send your notification when there was something you needed to hear about. This is something that Wise is doing. They have something called the no big deal filter, which is supposed to take away. Like it determines what you need to

know about. So a chicken walking across my yard probably don't need to know about. But a man with a balaclava, maybe send the alert. But then you're, you know, so that's what we're seeing happening around smart security cameras, it's this extra level of functionality. But for the majority of people, I think, who just want to know if there's a package at their front door, this is this continual price increase is getting pretty hard to stomach. And most of the other services, which are around the same price, so rings premium services $20 and Arlo's premium service, I think is 29 that includes professional. Well, they include professional monitoring. So if you have a,

security system as well, the cameras in the security system are bundled. You can just pay, I think, for Aalo, it's $10 a month for just a single camera, but it used to be free. This is a thing. If when you bought the camera, it showed you the price for a full year of service, nobody would buy these things, right? Yeah. Because what you're signing up to are a hundred bucks a year on top of the camera price. Yep. You're paying too. Unbelievable. Like, indefinitely, right? As long as you, if you, if you want these things to function to their full stability. Yeah. And there's, there are like a couple of them, what is it, the blink cameras that I think, like,

do it all locally. So you can, yeah, and, well, and Aalow has the option of local recording. Ring also has the option of local recording. But NEST does not. There is a minimal amount of local recording that you get for free, but beyond that, you have to use the cloud. And that's another sort of galling thing, because there are many now on the market options where you don't have to use a cloud service at all.

You can use a microSD card or you can record to a hub. in your home. Like Apple's HomeKit Secure Video offers that. You do pay for your cloud storage on your ICloud server. But yeah, it's just getting a little crazy. It is fundamentally not in their interest to make it easy to do this yourself, to store it locally, right? Right.

It's so much easier than to be like, oh, it's a small amount. It's like, what are we supposed to do? And it's like, oh, what you're supposed to do is make it easy so that I don't have to pay you $200 every single year. Yeah. Well, and they're really pushing these AI things. features. And it's interesting because they're not on the Google Nest cameras yet, and they're still increasing the prices. They've promised them. They're in like a beta in a public preview, these text

descriptions and some other sort of AI-powered search, Gemini-powered features. But they're not available yet. So it seems it's such a weird move to increase the prices now before offering these features to everyone. And honestly, I think Google is kind of done with Nest. There's my spicy take. Ooh, that is the take to end on. I don't know that you're wrong. I do like the Thunder immediately after you said that. That's spooky. Okay, one last story.

And it is a big one. We saved the finest story for the end of the show. I have some thoughts. David, over to you. All right. New emoji are coming, guys. It's a big deal. Okay, every year, the emoji subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium,

that's the specific way they wanted me to say it. releases a number of new emoji. Usually it's not that many. This time it's not that many. This time, kind of weird. Sometimes kind of weird. Last time we got like a splat emoji that was just like a bunch of slime.

This time we got eight new emoji, I believe. Yeah, about eight. So we have Applecore. We have ballet dancers. Distorted face, which is sort of like, I think this is basically a meme that they turned into an emoji. It is sort of that like really up close,

super wide angle face. with like eyes popping out of the side. It looks like this. Yeah, it's like got a bug eye situation. Bug eye on. Yeah. You got a fight cloud, which is basically like in a cartoon

when two characters are fighting and like there's a cloud and there's all those like things zipping around it. There's a trombone, very specific. There is what they call a hairy creature, which is clearly Bigfoot.

A treasure chest and an orca whale. So if you don't know how this works, effectively every single year the emoji subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium will take all of these proposals for emojis. And you have to be able to say, this is important because it has cultural significance across the entire world. People are using this a lot.

You give them Google Trends data. You give them all this information. And then they vote on whether or not they should actually take in your emoji. Famously, Jay Peters of the Verge did make two emoji. He made the waffle emoji. That's huge. Yeah, huge emoji. Obviously, people are using that all the time.

And he also made one other one. I'm trying to remember. It's a face of some. kind I these are important contributions to humanity they are if you're getting a good yawning face this is these are good yeah people use the yawning years there are some weak years oh yeah and it's like you guys yeah there are some really drawing board and this is what you came up there are some very weak years and i would say that maybe the orca whale or the the fight cloud maybe it's not like the fight cloud i i feel like i'm going to say this is like i don't know if this is an a plus

but like this is a solid. This is like one of the top tiers, right? You threw this in the middle. I don't know how you didn't like make a point. They have one called they've named it Harry Creature. Yeah. Which is bizarre. It is Bigfoot.

It is Bigfoot walking and glancing at the camera. It's the famous fake photo. Yes. Yes. Yeah, it is. That is. I am astonished that the grand committee of the Unicode Consortium when you know what we need to make sure.

sure that the entire world has access to. It's a big foot. Big foot emoji. I love it. That's, that alone, the rest of these could have been total losers. Trombone makes sense. Trombone, I assume they have trumpet. They should have trombone.

They should have everything that could be in a ska band should be. Yes. If they had done that as one pack, the sky year. They really, yeah, yeah. They just start branding it a little bit more, right? Like, why isn't there a pirate hat to go with this treasure chest? They should do themes. Yeah.

Yeah. I will say, I am wondering, because Apple, you know, if they have a seat on the Unicode Consortium. Yeah. They must have had some strong opinions about this Apple Corps. This is an Apple that has been bitten down to the core. That is, ooh. That's true. Like, that's not good for them.

I bet Google submitted that. Yeah. Probably submitted that. That is quite funny. Yeah, Apple Core is kind of strange. Like, I understand there being an Apple, but why the core? Weird. I will say a couple of years ago, I interviewed the inventor of emoji Shika Takakararita.

and he told me that he thinks that there are too many emoji. It is getting a little out of hand. I'm not going to lie. It's getting a little crazy. I do think the ballet dancer makes sense because they already have like a disco dancer and they need other types of dance. So that makes sense. But there also opens up this whole other question, which honestly I just might write something on or make a video on or something,

about what we do now that you can just generate like any emoji you want. Right? Like the fact that there's a trombone or an orca whale, If these didn't exist, you could make this with Gen Moji in like half a second. That's true. So it becomes this giant question. The main thing is these are coded into Unicode, so they are standardized. So they're going to work on any computer that supports Unicode.

I'm very torn on the too many emoji versus not enough emoji argument. Because like fundamentally, you cannot. There's way too many emoji. It's outrageous. On the other hand, so we use Slack at Work and we have a zillion custom emoji. And there's some, I don't realize they're not official ones. So then I'll go to like, you know, just send a normal text message. And then not that.

I'm like, why isn't this in here? How did they miss this really obvious one? That's true. It's outrageous. And I think particularly like there was a time before they figured out how to do like search for emoji. Yeah. Now that you can just type it in, it's like, yeah, I will say I feel terrible. Right.

If you're starting up, you know, I mean, I don't know who is in this position. But if you're starting up an app and you want to have your own. presentation of the emoji. Oh, boy, that's an uphill battle now. You got a lot of little things to draw. Yeah, you can use, you should just use the platform. Yeah. Twitter famously has its own emoji for some reason, but usually it's just Google slash Android, Apple, Microsoft are like the main ones. And you can, as a app developer, you can default to system emoji, and you should. Because you want to make your own emoji, you can. But you got to, you got to draw every single one. So, you know, if you only have to make an eight new ones a year, that

That's very manageable. Yeah, if you've already made the other, like, you know, I don't even know how many there are. You got to choose wisely. You got to choose wisely. And, you know, these are, these are a pretty good. I don't know. I think I would have cut the whale. I would like, the orca.

I don't want to be, I don't want to be rude, but like, I'm not using the orca. It's a cute orca. What are you going to use? It's smiling. Please tell me we're going to use Bigfoot. I'm telling you this. Bigfoot is going to, is there like an emoji ranking chart. It is going to shoot to the top of.

It is. Actually, this is part of that news, kind of. Because World Emoji. was this week. And as part of World Emoji Day, they brought back the emoji ranking chart because they used to have

a World emoji ranking chart that used Twitter as its database of like how much people are using emojis but then Elon cut off the API. So now they were able to bring it back as of this week. So we're going to see. I'm telling you, listen,

one year from today, this is my prediction. Bigfoot's going to be in the top 10. I'm setting a calendar. Anytime. This is, I think it's going to ebb and flow. as government conspiracies come and go. Oh, boy.

I think there's a lot of room for Bigfoot. There is a UFO emoji, so I guess there should be a Bigfoot. Yeah, I think Bigfoot's, yeah. But then you need like a Loch Ness Monster. This is why they need to do themes. If they had done a Monsters year? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, man. Yeah, that'd be funny. Yeah, I'm very excited by Distorted Face. I have to say, I think Distorted Face with the eyebrows leaving its head. I'm going to be using that one a lot. And the Fight Clown. Pretty fun. But yeah, I agree with Jake that Bigfoot really is the, is the shining star of this. I want to know how we can get, like, I'm not very up on the emoji world because, you know, it is how my children communicate with me.

But how do these get chosen? Like, can I submit some suggestions, please? Yeah, you can. You actually can. Oh, good. Yeah, you can do it yourself. You actually literally talk to Jay. Like, he's. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a process. It's quite a process.

It is really funny. Like the Unicconcans, it sounds like, it's like this formal body. Yeah. It is the most like religious-esque body in all of technology. It is, you know, these counselors from all the companies. Yeah, I technically am part of it because I pay $75 a year. Oh, right. So you're the guy we should talk to.

I don't know about that. As someone who has, you know, built a career on writing words, I have always slightly shied away from using emojis. But I have to learn how to communicate with my, the youth, so I'm getting there. My mom, who is 80, like all of her text messages are basically emojis now. So it's not a generational thing. I think it's a writer thing. I like to use the words. I like find a few and I just like key in on them. Right. Yeah, that's probably where I would say, and that's what I like about the distorted face. I feel like I could use that a lot. That's it. That's what you've got to find. Yeah. The sweating face, everything.

I think this could replace that, though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Slack also has HDR emoji, by the way, which is awful. Wait, what is it? HDR emoji. HDR emoji. Yeah, so you can send them in Slack. And if it's an HDR emoji, it's just way brighter than everything around it.

It just uses those pixels on your, like, MacBook display and lights them up like five times as bright. It's horrible. That's terrible. Do not recommend it. I'm really, I live in a place where we have a lot of thunderstorms, and I'm not going to lie, this is kind of giving me some trauma. Oh, God. And that's it for the Vergecast. Mia Sato is hosting Tuesday's episode.

You should tune in. It's going to be great. If you like we do here, the best way to support us is to buy a paid subscription to The Verge. And we would love to hear your feedback. I actually, I just got access to the Vergecast email. So please hit us up there. Vergecast at theverge.com. Or you can give us a call 866 Verge 11.

The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Andrew Marino. See you next week.