The Vergecast - The high stakes for AI Alexa

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

AI will fix everything, right? In this episode, friend of The Verge (and Waveform co-host) David Imel joins Nilay and David to talk all about Alexa Plus, and the AI-powered voice assistant Amazon thinks can do everything from turn on your lights to order your friend an Uber. The hosts also talk about the other gadgets of the week, from the wild new Sigma BF camera to the boring iPhone 16E. Finally, in the lightning round, they talk about TikTok becoming YouTube and YouTube becoming TikTok and Instagram becoming YouTube and TikTok, plus the latest in Brendan Carr being a dummy and what's coming next from Automattic, DOGE, and everything. Further reading: Amazon Alexa Plus Event 2025: live updates and product announcements Amazon announces AI upgrade for Alexa Amazon’s Alexa Plus’ AI upgrades cost $19.99, but it’s free with Prime  Amazon is launching Alexa.com and new app for Alexa Plus  Alexa engagement continues to grow. Alexa Plus leaves behind Amazon’s earliest Echo devices Sigma’s BF is a minimalist full-frame camera with no memory card slot iPhone 16E review: Eh, it’s alright Framework’s first tiny Desktop beautifully straddles the line between cute and badass More than 1 billion people are now watching podcasts on YouTube every month Instagram’s Reels may get its own app From TechCrunch: In challenge to YouTube, TikTok revamps its desktop platform Someone flooded HUD HQ TVs with an AI-generated video of Trump and Musk. Bluesky banned this video Elon Musk claims federal employees have 48 hours to explain recent work or resign DOGE asks federal workers to justify their recent work or resign. Donald Trump and Elon Musk threaten to ‘semi-fire’ workers who don’t answer email Amy Gleason officially named as DOGE administrator Apple responds to tariff threat with a $500 billion US investment plan Trump shed some light on his meeting with Tim Cook. Starlink poised to take over $2.4 billion contract to overhaul air traffic control communication FCC to brief lawmakers on George Soros investigation in closed-door meeting FCC Chairman Brendan Carr Probes iHeartMedia Over How it Pays Musicians FCC Chair Brendan Carr taking first steps in eroding key legal protection enjoyed by Big Tech Automattic combines its Beeper and Texts.com messaging services 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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Who knows? Maybe it's $20. Maybe it's crime is $15 and this comes for the ride. That one feels slightly too plausible to me and I don't like it. That we're free with Prime. We might be. I honestly don't know. At the rate, we're going.

What is free with Prime? Yeah. Just bundle us in, Jeff. We support free markets here. There's a lot to talk about this week. An awful lot to talk about. I'm a friend, Neal. David Pierce is here.

Hello. And I've got a guest in studio, David Mell, the co-hosts of the Wayform podcast, is joining me today. How's going? Good to be here. I just want more human beings physically present with me. Understandable. And Pierce won't say yes to that idea. We're legally not allowed to be in the same room.

You need to say in your green screen basis. No, it's like, you know how they like won't put the whole group on a a plane, like, just in case something had... Like, you and I can't be in the same room just in case. We have to be several hundred miles away because... This isn't the right time in America for plane jokes, too. I was just on a flight and it landed and everybody burst into applause. And that is a...

It's a real thing. You want to temp check on the country. It's the amount of clapping when planes land is going up. I got a new plane story in Slack every single time I arrived at the airport. And I had to remind everyone, I'm now at the airport. All right, a lot happened this week. Wait, first, Neely, you have to tell us where you went on vacation because, as always happens when you go on vacation, some single digit but not insignificant percentage of the Vergecast audience believes that you have quit your job and will never, ever come back.

So can we just, can we just tell the people about your vacation and that you have triumphantly returned? No. Okay. That's the answer. Is Neelai back? Who knows? I think it's, you want to be at a place in your life where people are like, there's a secret, various plot to defenestrate you every time you take a break. I literally got an email last week that was like, well, Neli seems like he's about to retire.

And then they just sort of went on with the rest of their question. I was like, hold on. I might be. You never know. No, we went to Turks and Kekos. It was, it's like Max's winter break. So we went to the beach and we sat on an island. And then everyone else on that island at that beach was also from New York, which was also from New York, which was.

which is the whole state is on winter break. So all of the children of New York were on this one small British island. It was great. We caught a, we dove for a cog shell, but we did the whole thing. It was just a lot of little kids going, I'm walking here. On the beach. Basically, Max made a bunch of friends. It was delight.

My phone service was bad, which was important. Perfect. This is a thing I look for in destinations now. Is 18T's roaming agreement not quite as rock solid as it should be? That's where we're going. I used the satellite texting feature on the iPhone quite a bit in the last few months. That's not great, man. Well, yeah, it's great to not have the service.

It is surprising that it works at all. Yeah. But, you know, I'm probably Apple's like perfect boy for that because no one has ever used it except for me. Have you seen the conspiracy theories? They launched the trial of letting T-Mobile iPhones connect to Starlink. So now there are conspiracy theories online that Elon Musk is spying on you on your iPhone. But, yeah, I don't have Google Fi, you know. I'm just using the baseline Apple free feature.

Probably has nothing to do with Elon, but. That's very good. Does it work well? Oh, it, well, is it RCS? Is it SMS? What's the story? Well, it only works with IMessage. Okay, of course.

Which is very dumb, extremely dumb. But it works fine. Wait, so if you're like in an emergency and you need to text somebody with an Android phone, it's like, sorry, you're a green bubble. You're going to die. That's a great question. I think in the emergency SOS version of it, it will send an SMS

and it will ping off of that satellite. But there are much, there are not that many satellites, right, that they are actually using because they just go over pretty quickly. So you have to wait a few minutes every time, like every five minutes,

it just goes over the hill and you have to wait another five minutes and then you can connect to it again. Yeah, and then if you're in a car, even it has like a glass roof or something, or if there is one single tree, you cannot text via satellite. So,

it works and I did need to use it in a semi-emergency where someone at home was having a problem and it was really great for me. Hey, that's great. Hashtag not sponsored. So, yeah. See, it's spicy here on the version. That's very cool. I just sign up for horrible roaming agreements and be like, my phone isn't working and then I

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

You can have nothing. And then they just rebrand the name of the service and move on. Yeah. That seems to don't give you any new features. That seems right. Yeah. Lots to talk about this week. There is an Amazon Alexa event.

They announced Alexa Plus. We should talk all about that. Pannas Penae. Literally, in the middle of the event, while he was announcing Alexa Plus, looked me in the eye and said, hey, how you doing? One of the weirdest and funniest moments at any event I've ever had my entire life. Very good, very pan-house. Only me, that only happened once. And it was to me, he looked me in the eye, said, hey, how you doing?

And I was like, hey. And then he went on, he continued announcing Alexa Plus. Go watch the video. You can see him do it. Do they put it up? Oh, wait, there's no videos. It wasn't live stream. Yeah, it was really painful for us when we were trying to cover this.

I didn't realize. I just said go watch the video because I just. just assume everything is available, but I don't think... Oh, no. Well, and I think Panoz at one point at the beginning of the event said, like, welcome to everybody watching from home. And I was like, well, my guy, you are used to Microsoft events. Yeah.

We just read your live blog. All right. Well, I might be lying about Panos Penae looking me dead in the eye in the middle of his presentation and saying, hey, are you doing? But I promise you would happen. They're like 20 people that can confirm that. Yeah. Apple announced a very boring iPhone, which we will talk about for a very boring amount of time,

a very appropriate amount of time, but it will be exciting. That's what I meant to say. I don't know about that. There's a Sigma camera that David and I need to yell about at length. There's some framework stuff. We got a lightning round. Brendan Carr,

I'm back from vacation buddy. I don't forget about you. It's a pack show. Let's start with Alexa. It's what we expected. I will tell you, Pannos is on Decoder on Monday, so I've talked to him at length about this.

And what I mean by what we expected is everybody saw chat GPT or El LMs in general, and they thought, boy, this is how these voice assistants should have worked this whole time. And now they announced a version of Alexa that approximates that. Yeah. Well, notably, none of the assistants for the home have had it yet. So it's actually a big deal that they're finally bringing into something. It is a big deal.

I think the most important thing to note here is outside of phones, Alexa has the biggest user base, installed base of device. that have AI now, which is just nothing else has gotten there. Yeah. Like Google has sort of rolled out some stuff to some bits and bobs of phone apps. Yeah. But like Google home devices do not have Gemini. True. Apple, home pods, they have Siri, which.

Which is not a thing. Yeah. There is the Humane Pin, Deer Sweet Humane Pin. Humane, yeah. HP stands for Humane Pin, by the way. my my close personal friend my dead humane pin uh panis did not know that the humane pin had been canceled when i said i was like you got the big installed base and you know it's not like you were sweating the humane pin he's like well they're part of HP now and i was like no they're not

and that was the end of that um but like that the idea was that voice assistance would be this big platform shift we'd create a new generation advices that would take over the phone that has absolutely not played out yeah but there's a lot of lot of echo devices out there. And so this is kind of a big deal. Like, just from that standpoint. I think it hasn't played out actually doesn't give these things quite enough credit. Uh, people use Alexa a lot.

Like, like a lot. It's, it's a running joke that people use it for, you know, music and timers and their lights. And it's largely true. But like, the idea that people would interact with technology in a different and voice first way, like happened. It came to pass. It is a fully mainstream device and interaction method now. And that's some combination of, I think, what Apple did with Siri early on and then Google Assistant and Alexa. But I think especially as you talk about like standalone, I talk to my house things,

like that happened. It worked. We can argue for days about how useful it is. And I think the answer is it's not that useful. But like it worked. Like Amazon did the thing. And now, Now the question is like, can we take this behavior that we've trained people and point it at something? Yeah. And I think that is the open question. And that is what Alexa Plus is trying to be. It's like, okay, we've now taught you that it is possible to talk to your technology. Now we have to give you things to do with it.

And that was always going to be the hard part and remains the hard part. And I have 1,000 questions about what Amazon is trying to do here. But like, I think it did come to pass in a real way. And this is like the opportunity that Amazon has where they're like, there are a lot of people who are used to talking to their devices. is now we have to give them something to do with it. Yeah, and that's what I mean by it's, I don't mean to diminish it by saying it's as expected. What I mean to say is they put out commercials at the Super Bowl with celebrities and them talking to their Alexas. And people tried to do that and it didn't work because the classic.

And I think at the event, a bunch of Amazon executives called it Alexa speak, where you trained yourself to talk to the Alexa or the Google Home or whatever it was in like robot voice. Yep. and like give it ordered commands because it's just a computer at the end of the day and it needs like structured commands. And now it's like, oh, because there's an LOM, because there's some AI natural language input,

you can just talk to it. And then also it can figure out what you want and talk back to you naturally. And now you're in this conversation with this thing that can like maybe do stuff. And so that's like the big idea of Alexa Plus. It's like total reboot of Alexa with not one but like multiple AI

models underneath it. The hard part, as I understand it, was building the system that figures out what AI model to use when, because you don't want to light up like all of Anthropic to turn off your lights. So like that was very much the hard part. That's what everyone is telling me is like they have all these different models that can use all these different ways they can do this stuff. And they call it orchestration. So you issue at a command and then it figures out how to do it. and then they don't want to call them apps, so they keep using this term experts. So it's like, the photos expert will show you your photos.

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

ask it for photos, the photos expert shows you photos. And what they mean there is like, there's an app. It is absurd. Don't get me wrong. It's like, it's like one of Amazon. It's just using words however they want. Amazon tried to make skills happen and that didn't work. And now they're trying to make experts happen.

I think they wanted to not use skills again. Yeah, because that went so poorly. So anyway, it's the whole system. Although ironically, skills is actually a better explanation of what Amazon is trying to do this time. Yeah. Last time it was just apps. now it's actual skills. They can just keep calling at that

because no one knew they were called that before. So it's fine. They want to make this break. But all this is like very clever, right? You can just naturally speak to Alexa. Panos gave a bunch of demos on stage. Other people from Amazon gave a bunch of demos on stage at this event.

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

Alexa used to be on everything. Like you buy a smoke detector with Alexa in it. I remember that event. It was crazy. And now they're like they're cutting down the product line. There is going to be some new hardware eventually we are told. But they're cutting down the product line.

They want to put a screen in your house. It's in the center of your living room or wherever your kitchen. You talk to it. It shows you stuff. you have a device. And that is the centerpiece of their strategy. And then it is smart and it can do things, everything from tell your kids a story to,

I think this is really fascinating, like automatically great smart home routines for you. So you're like around bedtime, do bedtime stuff. And it's like, okay, I'm going to din the lights and play some music and turn on your security system and we'll just come up with some ideas. That will go right every time. I have a lot of questions about how that's going to work.

And then it has some, I don't want to say agentic because there's a lot of ways for this to work, but it has some ability to do stuff out in the world. So you can have it book an Uber for your friend, which is a, we can pull apart that demo piece by piece. I would like to. It was very complicated. Hello to Rabbit. Yeah, exactly. So that was APIs.

So with Uber and DoorDash and a handful of others, they're just using the boring old APIs, which is how most computers were. Interesting. I thought the agentic stuff was going. to be a big part of this. And then the agentic stuff is they called for like a dishwasher repair. Right. So if you like run some service like Thumbtack was the one they, and you don't want to build a bunch of APIs, you can just say to Amazon, it's okay for Alexa to click around in our

website and the agent can do that. And then there's like a middle ground where you're like you can like Suno the music service. Yeah, creating songs out of nothing. Yeah. Where it's like it's still, it's got to do something. API stuff, but it can still click around on the website. Weird. Like, weird, weird, weird stuff.

And a lot of the demos of that capability were less believable in the moment. Yeah, just like Rabbit. Right. I know that they're partners, but my question with any of the agentic stuff is what happens, like, are they actually just targeting certain areas of the site,

or are they doing recognition of the buttons? Like, Rabbit always says it was recognition. As soon as one of these websites, changes their website, everything breaks. Yep. That happened before. I could see it happening again. Well, so Rabbit's pitch was it could go to any website.

Yeah. And really they had just like card-coded itself to like Uber and Spotify. Yeah. Amazon's pitch is a little different, which is that people will come to Amazon. Right. And they will say, we would like our website to be part of your agentic system. So presumably there's not like the incentives are aligned. More so.

sure the agent can use the website consistently, or like, maybe you'll build a special or a website. And that's even less of a lift than building an API, but you can still do it. Yeah. I don't know. But I do know that the straight up book my friend in Uber at JFK made no sense. Yeah. Yeah. Like, no sense.

How do I know what pick-up zone to go to? Yeah. I mean, there are a hundred things about that demo that don't make any sense. And the way I've come to think about all the agentic stuff is there's like- Well, tell people what the demo is because apparently there's no live stream. Well, I'll get there. But the, I think the way. to think about the agentic stuff in general is like there's a set of things that are just like

knobs that some app can expose in an API and rather than try to fake your website you should just use their API and Amazon has the business deals to do that right so like if I don't have to use Ticketmaster.com and I can just access the Ticketmaster database victory right like that is that's still agentic and that's still good that is the correct answer in the middle there's the stuff that is like solvable internet problems, right? That it's like, go to Bing and click on the first result. It's like a thing chat GPT does all the time when you're an operator, right? Or like scan down this page for things with five-star results.

These are like tractable problems for AI. And then there's the thing that's just like, ah, we'll figure it out. AI is smart. It'll figure it out and we'll see what happens. The problem with all of those is there are a billion edge cases to every single one. Right. And let me see, if I remember the demo correctly for Uber, it was it started with, booking a restaurant reservation.

Yep. Successfully booked the restaurant reservation through OpenTable, which is presumably just an API that Alexa has access to. Again, fairly tractable problem, right? Like, there are times. There is a restaurant.

I notice how many people like, it can click the drop downs for you in the API. Fine. The next thing was, my friend is coming from JFK. Can you book an Uber to pick them up and I guess bring them to the restaurant? Okay, right there.

I just want to say, right there, a fully insane thing to say. to any, any, another human being to your friend who's landing at JFK, I've booked you in Uber. Why? Yes. Right? Yes.

You know, who can book an Uber? Anyone with a phone. Yeah, I will say I have a friend who is an assistant for a hedge fund manager. And this is stuff that she does all the time. And so I see an end case where way in the future, The idea of a lot of these AI platforms is like, what if we could take this job that people do and get rid of it? Yeah. And so in this universe, it's sort of like just automate this job away, right?

But I'm saying the command I need an Uber or I would like to have a car pick me up. Yeah. Your hedge fund manager friend. Yeah. Boss. Your hedge fund manager. In this example, the hedge fund manager just says out loud, I need a car. and then a person uses the Uber app.

Yeah. In this case, they would just, they would still just tell their own AI to book them a car. Yeah. That was the part that got me. Like, right there in that demo was like, I'm going to send my friend a car at JFK is, in a very abstract sense, makes a lot of sense. And then keep going. Right. Well, but there are.

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

Like, there's a shared universe of information that exists in that world that does not exist in my friend Molly is flying into JFK. Right. And so, but in all of this, okay, now I have a series of. This super sounds like you're about to do a drug deal. by the way. Every time you say my friend Molly is the friend, my friend, that was, I forget who it was, and I'm sorry,

but somebody in our Slack was like, this definitely ends with just a bag of drugs being delivered to your restaurants. This is starting to come into focus. But so it raises all these questions, right? Like, okay, where at JFK? JFK is an enormous airport with lots of terminals and lots of different pickup points

at each of those terminals. How is it going to figure that out? How is it going to tell the Uber driver, and then how is it going to communicate that information to Molly, who is completely looped out of this whole set of information. We need to normalize just doing really basic tasks yourself.

Just click the button. In the demo, it was like, I've booked a car to pick up your friend Molly at JFK. And at no point, and I think the next command was like text Molly this information. Right. But like I'm assuming some of our listeners I've never landed at JFK. It is a huge, sprawling, ridiculous airport. And its Uber pickup situation is a market. the worst, I believe in the world.

Yeah, it's very bad. Yeah. Second to L.A. Yeah. Like, L.A. is like, you're going to a different city to get on a sewer. Like, have you thought about standing in a parking lot six miles away? Yeah. Like, that's L.A.

Yep. J.F.K. is almost as bad. Yeah. I just landed back at JFK and I had to get on a train to another terminal to walk up a flight of stairs to go to another weird parking lot. And no one was happy about that. The Uber driver was like, I went to the first terminal. And I was like, the app is, it's all bad. Yeah. Yeah.

And the idea that, Alexa collapsed that to JFK. Right. Pano said all of the demos are real. I'm sure in some universe, it just picked the first result for JFK in the Uber app and it was at the cargo terminal

or something. The way that that ends is there is an Uber circling JFK endlessly looking for your friend Mallory down the runways. Who I would point out does not have access to your Uber account because you don't share an Uber account with your friend Molly because why would you do that? And so your friend Molly

actually has no way to contact this Uber driver. So actually what you've done is you've invented a more complicated situation to solve than if you had just done it yourself. And I just want to point out, by the way, this is the simplest case of the integration where everything happened with APIs. Yeah. Right? Like Uber has APIs that are exposed to Amazon in this way. The Open table has APIs that are exposed to Amazon this way. The next one where it was slightly more agentic was, to me, is like where it all starts to fall apart.

right because the Uber case you can solve you can solve it right you Molly can send you some Uber access code or give you access to her account it's also the kind of thing you're never going to do and in the case in the real case where it's like book me and Uber to go to the airport perfectly solvable problem like that is that is a thing that will work yeah again normalize doing basic things yourself yeah that's what I mean if Molly were just to get off and be like Alexa I'm I'm at Terminal 5 can you get me an Uber to the restaurant. Like that is that is actually a thing that every step of the way is a solvable problem for AI. Yeah. Especially if you have access to Uber. The problem, I'll talk about the agentic one because

I'm more curious about how they will solve some of those problems. The problem is that you know who would also love that deal is Lyft. Right. And so you're saying book me an Uber and that means one thing. But if you say book me a car, now Amazon gets to pick what service or it gets to and this is what they really don't want to have happen. It gets to go look at both services. and say the Lyft is $5 cheaper than the Uber, do you want me to book you the Lyft? And like, I do that on my phone right now, and the apps can't stop me,

but there's nothing stopping Uber from saying, Amazon, we want to be exclusive here, right? And I always call this the DoorDash problem. Like, these service riders get commodified in these interfaces, and there's no incentive for them to participate, unless Amazon pays them money. And then now we start making deals that prevent you from competing, right? Like, you can just see this,

it's really fascinating. It's really interesting. It's what everybody wants to have like a butler two booking cars for them left and right. And then actually making it work requires a bunch of companies to basically take themselves out of the wood. And it's unclear right now as to why. If you're like, order me a sandwich and DoorDash never gets to show you an ad or upsell you on fries or get you to sign up for DoorDash Plus or whatever they call it. Why would they pay part of it? Why would they do it? Right? Because their margins are just crushed. And now they're just a commodity provider of sandwiches. Yep.

Next to whoever else. And I just don't know why I'll do it. We'll see. I don't know, but if you then get to be the exclusive commodity provider of sandwiches, that's a pretty good business. For one company, it's a pretty good business. It's a great business for one company that has no growth potential. Right.

Yeah. Like you will be forever as only as big as the sandwich market inside of the Amazon Alexa app. Yep. Maybe that's all you aspire to. And that's fine, David. Listen, I have goal. The harder one was when they were like My dishwasher, my stove is broken

Find me a repair person for my melee appliance Mealy appliance is by the way very expensive Very expensive to fix So this is a perfect Only Amazon executives have this specific problem Kind of demo And it went onto a website called Thumbtack Which like has a list of repair people

Just like Angie's list or any of these other billion websites Are like this And I'm sitting there watching that demo And it did it right It clicked around the website found a service provider with some reviews. It said they're going to come in eight in the morning at the end. And I was like, that's great because now they don't have to use those websites.

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

And like, there's nothing Alexa can do about the fact that it mostly doesn't work. Like, if you go on some of these websites, like sometimes, yes, the house painter comes and they actually let those kinds of middlemen services run their business. But for the most part, they're like, I don't want anything to do.

It's like, I want you to pay me in cash under the table is like the end result. Well, and it's specifically because all of those businesses have been chopped off at the knees by middleman after middleman after middleman after middleman after middleman. And so, I mean, you're starting to see this with restaurants and stuff in the DoorDash universe where they're just like, no. Like, I will deliver my own food by paying a high teenager to drive it to your house because that is actually a business I can afford. And so like all this stuff has been so centralized that it's actually broken for the businesses. themselves and they're starting to run away from it. But because it has been so centralized, and this is the bet that Amazon and everybody else is making, it's really hard to decentralize it

because now everybody is used to being on those platforms. And so like if you're Uber Eats or DoorDash, if you're a restaurant now, you have to make the bet that people will go find my restaurant rather than just pick the next best thing on the platform. And I think how that shakes out remains to be seen. But like it's pretty clear which one of those things Alexa is betting on, which is that platform convenience, which you can make even more convenient by abstracting it all the way to order me a pizza or find me a repair man, will outweigh actually having successful businesses on the other side. Yeah.

And I think this is just like, this is the problem. Like, I should just write a piece called the DoorDash problem. Like, why would you want to run the pipes between you and the sandwich in a world where that is becoming the most, the least differentiated part of the entire experience? Yeah. All right. If you run Thumbtack, and I'm sorry if there's like a, we have a bunch of listeners who work at Thumbtack. I mean, I'm proud of you. Uh, and you're doing a good job every day, another victory. Um, but like, what, what about Thumbtack is making it better on both sides of that equation that isn't going to just get completely erased by the fact that Alexa is just clicking around your website for you. Great. Like, someone will figure that out. And that's like, so that's the hardest stuff that they demoed. It's, it's, it's, not rolling out at first, they're going to roll that over time. What is rolling out first on the Echo Show devices is like an even harder problem, which is we're going to automate your smart home.

And it's like, oh, like no part of this is easy. Is that a harder problem? So Pados told me, I mean, someone to code on Monday, he's like, the Alexa smart home ecosystem was already so good that everything we demoed required no new code. Alexa Plus could just like push all the buttons and twist all the knobs any way it wanted to and make its own routines because that stuff has just been ready to go for so long. So yes, I think they think it's good. What I mean by it's harder is you buy this new device, you plop it down in your kitchen, and then now you have a smart home. That's the promise.

But the reality is you've got to add everything to your Alexa smart home system. Yes. All those cloud accounts have to sync. some stuff you're controlling in an app on your iPhone, another thing you're... Right, like, you actually have to still do the setup to make the magic happen, and nothing about the setup has gotten particularly easier here.

And you need to decide where you want to set it up on. And then you need to decide where your automations and routines live, and if that's going to be Amazon forever. Yeah, Amazon, are they on Google Home? Are they on the manufacturer's website? There's like five different places that you could potentially set up all of these devices. David, are you a smart home guy?

Minimally, I live in a Brooklyn basement. What do you have? I pretty much completely put everything on home kit, I guess. I guess it's home kit. Because I have Eve stuff. But it is only Eve smart plugs and smart blinds. I got them because of Matter. Famously does not really work, which is cool.

But at least it's all in the same thing. But I also do have a singular Google Home Hub mini that I was dreaming of being able to tell to make my blinds go up and down. Famously still does not work. This is the, this is the like, what a perfect smart home scenario. We're like, okay, I bought all the pieces. Yeah. And each of the things does the things that are required for this puzzle to fit together. And yet it doesn't for some unknowable technical reason.

Yeah. We'll never ever get solved. I set up a routine that automates my. blinds, that's all that I really care about. And then I have a widget on my phone that turns my lights on and off. And I really don't care to make it more automated than that. I think that's good. And truthfully, I think, like, A, I think that is most people's smart home desire, right? Like, I want one thing to happen when I do another thing is I genuinely believe the extent of most people's smart home wishes. Yeah. And that's also a thing that something like Alexa Plus is well positioned to do

pretty well because what what these routines and things have is a like massive user interface problem. It's the same thing like I rail on Apple shortcuts all the time. And it's like it's this massively powerful thing buried behind what amounts to like a scripting language and you need to go through a series of really complicated like if then statements. So to be able to just say to this system, hey, every time I turn off my alarm clock, turn the lights on in the bathroom is like that's actually a thing that a system like an LLM. is well positioned to understand what that means. And then if Amazon has done as good a job as Panos is saying,

which I think it reasonably probably has, of understanding all of those endpoints, it can actually put all of that together in a way that strikes me as like it would work. And then I'm just at a point where all I have to do is learn how to explain what I want rather than like program it in detail in the Alexa app. But so even that explain what I want, you know, their examples were come up with a bedtime routine. And it was like,

Alexa just was like, I don't know, I'm going to play some music, I'm going to turn off these lights, I'm going to dim these other lights. Call it a bedtime routine. I really don't think that's a real use case. This is one of the things that drives me the craziest about all of these things is it's like, what, like, it's, I still have this picture on my desktop for some reason for like years of this Apple event from years ago. I think it was an iPad launch where they had this picture. They were showing like the lifestyle photos they always show.

And it was a guy sitting in like the crook of two. beams on the Brooklyn Bridge sketching on his iPad. And I was just like, no one does this. Like, talk about your products. You didn't do that when you lived in New York? I did it the once and they took my picture and they paid me for it and then I went home. It's fine. But it's just like all of these things is like I spend a lot of time wondering if part of the problem here is that no one actually understands what any regular human would ever want to do with these products. Because the idea that I'm going to come home one day and be like, Alexa, make up a bedtime routine.

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

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

that, right? Like nobody, even in the home, nobody wants you to bed time routine. I don't know what it's going to be. Let's just find out. If that's going to be the case, let me like test five of them out and then I will pick. People don't actually want to just give up complete control to a system like this, especially when it's completely random. You don't know what's going to be totally. Well, so I have many things to say. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to everyone. I think the hard part here is not the reduction of friction. It's letting people know they can do this stuff at all. And that, I think, requires...

But does anyone want to? Yes. To some broad approximation, just have stuff happen is a thing people want. Like, when I get home, turn on the lights is nice. Yeah. That's just nice. And I am convinced that, like, my family does not know how lights turn on or off anymore. because many lights in our house

just turn on or off throughout the day. Interesting. Like we have, we have hue lights in our kitchen and they're in adaptive mode. So they just go from cool in the morning to warm at night. I think this is the coolest shit in the world.

No, that's great. Someday Max is going to go to college and, like, call you from her dorm room being like, why is it dark? Gen Tui told us that her kids, her teenage children don't know how to use house keys. Oh, my God. Which is incredible.

We're ruining future generations. So I got a text from Becky, and she was like, the kitchen is the wrong color. And I was like, this is victory. I'm getting divorced now, but this is victory. The kitchen is the wrong color. Like the lights are warm in the morning. And she's like, why is it so orange in here? And I was like, I've won and I've also lost in like equal measure.

Yep. So it's true that people like it when things just sort of like happen the right way at the right time. And I think most people cannot express that in structured if then statements. Right. Like, if I come home between these times, turn on lights when garage opens is people do not speak that way. And going through every single little thing in your home and having to create an if-thadstatement, it's just really tedious. But you can say when I get home, turn the lights on and Alexa figures out how to script that for you, that I think is very powerful. Yes.

The jump is getting people to even understand that this is now a thing you can ask for and then delivering it in a way that is, consistently good enough that they tell their friends about it. And then their friends buy Alexa in a bunch of smart lights. And like, I don't know about any of that. Right. Like the comparison that I have to that is like, I keep talking. I always talk about the local news test. Okay.

Like what piece of technology will like break through on the local news? And like the first iPhone was like, look at this. You could pinch to Zoom. And like, that was all you needed. And then they sold all the iPhones. This one's like, here's what you do. You buy this weird screen. They can talk to you like a person and tell you stories.

Also, you need to change all of the. the light bulbs in your house. And it's like, well, this is just, what are we doing? And to your point, you know what that thing was the first time around with Alexa was music. You can have it play music just by asking for it. It was like that was the breakthrough thing. And I think everybody has wanted the smart home to be that next thing. And it hasn't been.

But so now the question is like, if you've made it easier to the point where you can just do this as quickly as asking for it, like maybe it becomes that thing. Yeah. And I do think there are an awful lot of people out there who have bought GoV light strips or weird smart bulbs. There's an awful lot of smart locks out there. Like some of this stuff is ready to go. Yeah. And to be linked together in automations like this.

And I, like, you know, AI is good at coding. And like, really what we're talking about is like, write a little script for me. Okay. Like, some of this all clicks together, but I'm still just at like, you have to get people to even want it. I also, I cannot stop thinking about how important cameras are to all of this and how many feelings this is going to make people feel about cameras. Like one of the demos was being able to ask if somebody had walked the dog recently, I think, and it'll actually like comb back through your security camera data to see. Oh, no, actually, I know how that one works. There's another demo that was scarier from the camera sense.

Oh, okay. Tell me more. You were there. I wasn't there. Let me know someone has walked the dog recently is that's just Amazon owns a bunch of stuff. stuff, including Ring. So if you have Ring cameras today without any of this Alexa stuff, it will detect pets, it will detect people, it will detect packages. That's a service that you have to get from Ring as part of the Ring service. But that's just a Ring video search product

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

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's fair. Like, the problems with ring accessibility are like, and then they send it to the cops. Like, that's a different, right. There is that. But like inside of your ring archive, like it gets indexed and searchable. The one you're thinking about, I believe, is when you see my daughter play this music.

And that one is very creepy to me. Oh, that is creepy. I don't like that at all. Yep. And that thing is like, again, so much of what we're describing works way better if you have cameras. If you have lots of cameras that do lots of things really convincingly, like the play music or turn on the lights when I get home thing. Like you can do that a bunch of ways, but the actual cleanest and most reliable way to do that to know that it's you coming home is cameras. and this system in general, A, requires a vast amount of data to really work.

And one of the things that Pano's talked about a bunch and that Amazon is making very clear is, like, it's going to ask and remember a lot of information about you. You can forward emails. You can send email. Like, Alexa would like to know every single thing that happens to you all the time, always, everywhere, all the time. And, like, on the one hand, fine, Google has that data anyway, just by virtue of, like, we are all alive. but Amazon wants it too and it wants your camera data and the more data you give it

the better this system will be and that that linear scale is going to be deeply fascinating to see people try to walk through. It's just so funny because I can tell that you have not tried to set up any smart home automations do you know what the best way to know that your home is?

Amazon has no access to it. It's when your fucking phone connects to your Wi-Fi network. Amazon owns Euro, so sure they do. Oh, that's interesting. But that's like too creepy. It's like one step too creepy. But like that is how a bunch of home kit automation.

No, you're right. That's a good point. Right. So like when you do it, if you've ever set up a home kit automation. Yeah. Right? There's run this when no one's home or just I'm home or anyone is home. And all it's looking for is whether various devices signed in ICloud or on your network.

You can do. I think there's a little bit of geo fencing in there, but it's the network connection that like tells you your home. And it's funny because, the other day, my wife and I were both not home, and Max came home, and none of the lights turned on because she doesn't have an ICloud device. Ooh, she doesn't know how to turn the lights on. So she didn't know, she turned on the lights, but they were on, I would say wrong. Max is just sitting in the dark.

I was like, why are all the lights wrong is actually what I said? She's like, now I need an iPhone. Yeah, basically. But it's really interesting to think, oh, they'll link Eero into this and know like network states of devices. There's a lot they can do. Was this compelling to you? Yeah, in some ways.

I mean, the fact that the echoes were sort of the first ways that people interacted with any form of voice-based AI, I think was interesting to me because Amazon was so early to that, and then they were so late to everything else. And so this like dream of my mother can set up something and come home and start talking to her smart speaker, and it actually does things instead of me having to, teach her voice lessons or like specific lessons on how to talk to the AI is a big thing. The automations, if they work, is going to be the giant question. I would love it if you could ask it to have an automation and then it just randomly, it creates a bunch that you can pick from. Yeah. Because I just,

I don't know, I understand some people probably just want things to be made for them and just be developed. But having no say in any of the development of these things and just letting it do things for you just feels very sketch, almost as sketch as the pick up my friend from JFK. I don't know if it will work. This is the thing. That's one reason that I think pushing really hard towards screen devices is really smart for Amazon. Because it just lets it do that kind of stuff where it's going to be able to be like, hey, here's the thing I was going to do, make sure this is make sure we're cool.

Like is this what you want? Is this your grocery order? do you want this or this? Like, it's the kind of sort of quick back and forth. Did they show any of that? Yes. They did. The grocery demo in particular one was like so far from what anyone would ever do,

but also the coolest one. Yeah. So they were like, go to Amazon Fresh. I want to do this recipe. Here's ingest. Like, I want to make these cookies and start filling it out. And then he was talking to it while he was like clicking quantities on the screen. Yeah.

And so he was adjusting one row of data. while it was like adding this kind of thing. And it was just like very cool, like multimodal. Are people going to do that? I don't. I have no idea. It's a big question. Gen Tuwe will and no one else.

Yeah. But that is the kind of interaction that if you can get it, makes all of this stuff work better. Right. Because it's like the first time you ask a question and you get like a 600 word long spoken answer, you're like, this is nothing. I hate this. That's the part that it needs to fix. Yeah.

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

Right. Famously, the Google Home minis that every carrier on the planet throws 15 of you at at Christmas. Every single time you ask it, what's the weather or turn the light on it, goes, just so you know, in the morning, we can also do this. Just ask me what to do it every single time. Every time. And I just want, okay, bang, you know, that's it. Or just turn the light on.

What if you didn't talk? And then I knew it worked because the light was on. What if you didn't talk? Yeah, that's a visual cue. I think as long as you have some sort of cue, which is like why the screen is important, especially when you're having it do these tasks that you cannot see because they're APIs or because they're like agentic or whatever.

Oh, this is one of the coolest parts of the whole thing. They call them a lexicons. I do like that. So the little blue. bar on the bottom of the screen turns into like line animations. Honolosl made that he wants there to be like 200, but right now there's 33 because he's approving all of them individually. Okay.

Which is great. I love it. That's good. They're very cute. And then Alexa just sort of picks whatever kind it wants. It turns into like a little line drawing of music notes or like a picture of, if it thinks it's arguing with you, it shows you a ping pong paddle going back and follow. Because you're, you know.

I don't want to argue with my computer. All this is great. I hate that I really like that, but I really like that. It was like easily the cutest part of the whole thing. And so they're trying to show these interactions. Look, we got to get the stuff, like I said, but you're listening to this on what, Friday or sometime after that? On Tuesday, Pottos will be on the code or you Monday. Even more about the new Alexa and how it works.

There's a bunch of questions about what models it's using when, how they're managing all that cost. Anthropic is involved. Yeah. They're a major investor in, right? Yeah, they're a major investor in. they built their own model called Nova, which they're using. Does anyone know anything about the Nova? The rumor is that they were trying to build this for a long time and it was delayed.

Yeah, I remember that. And then they had Anthropics who'd been to help them. And we should say, we should take a break. We've been talking about this for way too long. But all evidence and reporting so far suggests that Alexa Plus is super late and sucks. And so this thing is not shipping until at least several weeks from now. we've seen a few demos that Amazon did as I wasn't at the event, but everything I understand is it was all super on rails.

It's all canned. So like I actually think the big picture ideas here from Amazon are both really ambitious and pretty close to right. And if you made me bet right now, I would say I bet it's not any good. Yeah. Yeah. But I sincerely hope I'm wrong and we will see. I'm very curious.

Again, to underline what David is saying, all of the demos were canned. Yeah. We were not allowed to just like freely talk to this. thing. So who knows? And for months, like, I would, I would also remind you that this thing launched the first time 18 months ago. And Dave Limp, we've had a whole regime change on this team since this thing launched the first time. Amazon has been talking about this for a long time. And for, I mean, a year, the reporting and everything we've been hearing has been that this thing is not very good and it has been massively delayed. And I think there is a, there is

an argument to be made that Amazon is launching this now because it had to, not because it's ready. And I hope I'm wrong. And I'm very curious to try this thing. But like, what is the primary pressure do you think? Like who are they worried about coming after them? Because Google's not doing anything agentic right now. Google Smart Home is still Google Assistant, which is the artist formerly known as, you know, and it's not really doing anything. I think everybody's still worried about Chachapiti. Do you find yourself talking to advanced voice mode instead of Alexa? Yeah. You're not switching back. Yeah. An operator is out there. Google is doing stuff. Like Project Mariner is real.

Operator is not out there. Operator's out there in the way that like a like a baby goat is out there just like stumbling over shit. Like it doesn't matter. I used operator today. You know what I can't use today is Alexa? Yeah, what did you use it for? I used it as a test to see if it could buy me something on Amazon and it could not. Baby goat, baby. Yeah, it's good. There's a toddler out in the world who's just fun. falling over itself all the time. I think they're a little worried about Apple, right? It's the larger context to this is Apple's way of doing agentic stuff is going to be app intense with Siri on the phone. It has perfect access to all those apps.

Those developers can get strong-armed into playing ball. Apple's very good at that in particular. Apple's going to do some iPad on a robot arm in your house, right? That is true. There's a lot there that is going to be difficult. Can Apple actually pull any of that off? We don't know. Siri is,

getting worse by the day somehow. I think they just, like, needed to put the stake in the ground and say, actually, we put, like, AI capabilities into Alexa in the way that everybody wanted us to. Yeah. And Panois has said this to us before, Neli, but I think, I suspect probably said it to you on DECoder, too. They see this as, like, a full-on platform shift. Oh, yeah, he very much said that in, like, the most intense Panos way. There is a sense now that missing, missing this would be like missing mobile 15 years ago, right? In the sense that it like, it crowned a generation of trillion dollar companies and killed everybody else.

And there is right or wrong, real belief in the industry that this is that moment again. And there is a sense that you cannot afford to be late at all because A, your investors will kill you for it. And B, you'll just miss the future. And I think for Amazon, which is deep down this hole of we have to make Alexa work, like it's now or never. And I think they field that. We haven't actually mentioned the most important part, which is Alexa Plus is $20 a month or it is free with Amazon Prime, which notably costs $15. Yeah. It's free with Prime.

Like the $20 a month is such a fake price. It drives me nuts. Like it is cheaper to get Prime and everything else. Yeah. Then like for $5 less, you can get everything else on Prime, which is obviously what Amazon wants. And the sort of overlap of like Alexa owners and Prime customers is like 100%. Right. So they're just what, and this is where we started.

I use my echo to buy exclusively from Walmart. It's like an amazing. But they're basic, they have the big, they have the advantage. Yeah. No one else has a distribution advantage like Amazon has. Maybe Google, but they're Google. Yeah. I mean, I think they're just, they just want that recurring revenue.

You know, it's like they've got a 180 million users in the United States on Prime. They've got 200 worldwide, 200 million. They just need to keep growing that number because it accelerated very fast at first. It's starting to peter off, even though it's still one of the most popular service in the world. I don't know who the user is that is like I don't have Prime, but I want Alexa LLM. Who is? Who are you? I don't know who you are.

You know us. Let us know. Maybe the like really hardcore AI heads that just want to try everything, but I also don't know I would. they wouldn't have prime. We'll find out, I guess, eventually. Yeah. But they, if anyone can do it, it's Amazon because they have scale. If anyone can make the platform shift happen. Yeah. Because they already have the microphones in everybody's house. Yeah. They've already, like, and they own that whole platform tips too. It was probably a way for them to say it's $20 because everyone else is $20. And in that way,

they're, they're kind of saying, we're just as good in every way. But you can get it if you have prime for cheaper. Well, I'm, I'm excited to see just how. chaotic it is. We'll see. Again, and next week on Dakota, Panos answers a bunch more questions in, like, classically intense Panos, no way. It was a fun conversation. Also, we finally get to do the assistant, like battles between all of the major assistants. Well, once Siri is actually, like, out, out. So never. I don't think Siri counts as a major assistant anymore. It's rough. Yeah. All right. We got to take a break. We're going to come back and we're going to keep ducking on Siri. We'll be right back.

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Guess what I asked Siri to do today. They couldn't do. Oh, no. That's the whole show. It's just us listing things that we ask Siri to do that it cannot do. It would be the longest Vergecast episode in history that used to be able to do. Yeah, no longer do. I asked it how many days until something the other day?

And it was like, do you want me to ask chat chp-t? It's rough. And Chad Shabutee famously is not good at math. Yeah. I was like, this is the most powerful phone in history. Nice. Speaking of iPhones, we should probably talk about the iPhone 16E at some point, but actually I want to talk about the Sigma BF, this camera.

I just want to say it's very telling that the iPhone 16E is handily the second most interesting gadget that came out this week, which in part says something about. I would say third. I just think we're like legally obligated to feel like there was a new iPhone. You're right. It is at least third. It might be fourth, given some of the framework stuff, but it's certainly not first. And I think Sigma is clearly first.

My proposed headline for Allison's review was no one should care about this phone. They didn't go with it. She didn't go with it, it's fine, and give it a seven, which is the most seven headline in the history of headlines. Yep. I still don't know who's going to buy this thing. So what's going on here? With the camera or the phone? Oh, well, I still don't know who's going to buy this thing.

Actually applies to both. Oh, that's a true. That is true. That is true. Let's start with the camera because it's vastly more interesting than the iPhone. And we can come back to the iPhone. Sigma BF is, it's just a beautiful camera. Right.

And it seems like no one should buy it. Yeah. There's a new camera from Sigma. It is a Japanese camera brand that has made famously extremely weird cameras. They have done very weird things with sensors. They made something called a Fovion sensor, which has different pixels on the color filter array, all in the same pixel. You get better quality. They did not do that with this camera

because they got rid of it a while ago, and everyone is sad about that. Sigma stuff is generally pretty good, right? Like, they're weird, but they make good cameras, right? Is my impression? They're weird, they're good. They are part of the Elmount Alliance, which Panasonic and Lika are also part of.

So that's nice. Weirdly enough, you don't really see them on the street almost ever. Mostly because they're so weird. And I think that people just go, when you're going hiking in Utah, you see 100 million of the cheapest canon camera and the cheapest Nikon camera.

Sigma always does weird stuff. That's kind of their angle. They released a camera this week called the BF does not stand for boyfriend or best friend. It stands for beautiful foolishness. Really? Really, really. I love this.

So this is kind of like when someone says, I know that this is stupid, but, and in that way, it's very difficult to critique. You know what I mean? It's like, there are many things about this camera that I'm like, but they're like, we know that it's dumb. Here it is anyway.

And you have to respect that in a way, right? So this is a full frame, 24 megapixel camera. They tried to remove as many buttons as physically possible. It is machined out of a block of aluminum. They can make nine per day. So it's not a high yield kit, which not that many people are going to buy it anyway. So that's probably fine. Famously, Fuji film can only make 15,000 X-106s per week,

and that still was not enough because they had over a million per order. in China alone on the first day. Wow. So this camera, I don't even know to say what it looks like. It's just a small block of aluminum in a weird way. It has a LCD screen on the back that does not tilt. This is actually my only complaint about this camera. That it has no EVF?

No, the screen doesn't tilt. Oh, okay. Well, I don't. And I have a very specific reason why. But I'm like, I love you. I'm buying this camera. I'm mad that the screen doesn't tilt. Yeah.

It's a very, very minor. plain in the scheme of things. I don't think it's that minor. Yeah. I think screens should tilt, even though they break easier. Yeah. It has no viewfinder.

That is also horrible, in my opinion. I feel nothing about that. Especially for a $2,000 camera. Like, the number of people who can afford that camera, want to buy that camera, and have strong, like, visceral feelings about how far away from your eye

you should hold your camera. Like, yeah. It's just one group of people. It's just that that makes it, with no articulatory. articulating viewfinder and no like EVF or OVF you can only do this. Yep.

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

The menu looks not great. Not great. Yeah. You see Seb from Halide was looking at this interfaces why I make camera apps. Yeah. Yeah. It's not great.

It has an extra little screen that tells you like the aperture and things like that, even though I just, I hate when you hide the aperture behind a submenu. It's horrible for cameras. I don't know. I think that the biggest reason that people really like this camera is because it is super basic. It is just a square of aluminum with a couple little neural parts. No, let me tell you why people like this camera. People like this camera because it is sexy as hell, and I want it so bad.

Yeah. This is like, this to me is like, imagine like a cave painting of a camera. Whereas like, yeah, you go back like 8,000 years and it's like, oh, someone in, you know, someone just drew a camera and this is the first camera that anyone ever imagined. That's this camera. And I love it for that. Yeah. I will say the fact that it doesn't have a memory card slot. Yeah.

And it has a built-in SSD. It's like, oh, this thing has a. has a shelf life. Oh, yeah. You're either going to have to get it serviced, which I'm not really sure how they're going to get inside of it when it's a solid block of aluminum without taking a lot of it. Or you're just going to have to get a new one. But hopefully it doesn't die before. You know, memory cards famously die a lot.

Yeah. But at least you can put a new memory card in. So here's my argument in favor of this, except for the tilting screen, which I agree is a huge problem. Okay. Again, because I mostly take pictures of a six-year-old who is notably down here. Right. So I'm always shooting at like hip height, which means I want to tilt the screen up. Yeah.

That's it. That's like I need to solve that problem. This camera doesn't solve that problem. It is sexiest hell and I do want it. I think it is like well beyond time for a camera manufacturer to get rid of like camera controls as we know them. Like as a person who mostly shoots an ancient Nikon D7500. Still the greatest hands on camera ever made. it's like fine and there's just a million buttons on it and I know what they all do

and the reason I've never upgraded that camera is because I know where all those buttons are and I know what they'll do right and that's what it's cool like I like having that relationship with the camera and I've got most of them set so I never have to touch them again I just know where they are and the reality is if I could just set them and then set this one dial to mostly ever control shutter speed I'd be fine yeah right right or like exposure compensation. The only problem at that approach is you you want that camera but to be like the size and quality of like a Sony RX100. Right? Like give me all of what you just described a basically designed to shoot in auto super simple all in one piece more or less unbreakable thing

that that is like a really fun cool point and shoot and I think it'd be gangbusters. I'd be all over that thing. Yeah. You're kind of describing X100 in a few ways. That's what I mean that's why people love them. But this one to me, I just like, I just like the idea that Sigma's like, we have no history of Nikon F-Series SLRs to honor. That's fair. Like, screw it. We're just changing how the controls work. Have you seen the old Sigma cameras? Because they are much weird than this. Yes. They're really, really weird. Like, it's funny because Sigma started out as like a, like a lens brand. And they're like, screw, we can do whatever we want. Yeah. It would be a lot more compelling in that way you just described, Nilai, if the menu was better. Yeah. Here's a really usable thing unless you have to do anything.

Have you guys driven the EQS, the new one, the electric one? Yes. It's like being in a Korean nightclub on wheels. Yeah. I don't know how else to describe it. But you've used the infotainment system, right? Yeah, it's like Windows 95. Yeah.

No one has good ideas about software design. No. And like the fact that most products are now are software means that we live in a world of crime. Yeah. But yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah. It's pretty and I just want it on their stuff. I understand.

I understand. I want to put a $2,000 knick-knack on my shelf. Also, the fact that it is removable lenses means that it will never actually be as small as it looks. That's true. But this is also like, David, I feel like we're in such an era where like the camera is both a tool and an accessory. Right. And this is like this is the X100 story, right? Where like a lot of people who bought X100s bought them not to shoot with them but to be shot shooting with them.

Like a LICA. Yeah. It's like it's a creator camera because I want you to see me using it. And I, it's like, it's a fashion accessory as much as anything. And I feel like, this is Sigma just kind of acknowledging the same thing. They're like, yeah, you'll take some pictures with this. But it's also going to look cool as hell. And that's like 60% of the point.

I was thinking about that in a lot of ways because the M11 is over $9,000 for the body. This is $2,000. So there you go. Think of the savings. Much more affordable. Looks very beautiful. People will ask you, what is that? It shoots about two and a half hours of video if you want to do the highest quality video.

And then you have to offload it. I do like this idea of offloading everything onto your computer from the USBC port and not having to worry about an SD card at all because SD cards are sort of like, I don't know, Bluetooth standards or Wi-Fi standards where you got to read the little three or the nine on it and there's no five for some reason. And you just have to decide what is the speed and the fact that you can just plug it into USBC port and then into your computer. Very nice. But you know, that comes with its tradeoffs.

It's not great that this conversation has inspired me to start searching for an X 100. Good luck. I mean, they're very hard to find. I can pay a $700 premium for one right now. Yeah. Yeah. Or you could get the five, which is not that different. But, you know, let's just wrap up the show.

I've got that. He looks busy. All right. Let's talk about the iPhone briefly. Can I say one more thing? Yeah, of course. The LCD has a sub, like a sub-bezzle. And I just want to acknowledge that.

None of the press photos show the LCD on. Well, it doesn't show it on, but it shows it shows the subbezzle. Yeah, I see it. Not something Apple would have done. I just want to acknowledge that. I'm buying all the calendar. Oh, no, it's bad. You're right.

I just looked and you're right. How does that make you feel? Do you not want it anymore? Have you bought an RX100 take pictures of a kid yet? No. This is the single greatest purchase you can make if you're parent. It's the right choice. Everyone's always happy with the photos.

No one's ever sad. Yeah. The screen tilts. Yeah. They're, I would, I would not say they're indestructible. They're very destructible, but like, they're tough enough, you know? Yeah. You don't have to worry about interchangeable lenses.

Yeah, they're great. But, like, they are, in fact, destructible. Like, you get some dust near that lens mechanism. You don't have an ARX 100 anymore. It's all over. Okay. They are, I think all these cameras are ultimately, to David's point, kind of competing with the concept of the arc. Accessory, kind of.

Well, no, just the ARX 100. It's all. the most problems in that zone. Yeah. And it's very hard to solve the problem, like all the problems better than that camera. Yeah. I also would acknowledge that they made an RX1 a long time ago,

which was full frame, and they just never updated it. Yeah. And it's been around for a long time, and they could be dominating this space, but they decide not to, for some reason. I loved that camera. Yeah, it was great.

Holy crap, I loved the RX1. It was great. It was fantastic. And it hasn't been updated in, like, over five years. So I don't really know what they're. No, LICA is like the only one right now that makes a full frame fixed lens camera. Weird. Yeah.

And it costs $6,000. And no one can afford it. See, the Sigma's cheap, man. What are we doing here? You're getting one. It's an impulse purchase. We did call one in for a review. So we did not go on the influencer trip to Japan that everyone else wanted on because we have this

annoying ethics policy. But we did ask for a review unit. I think someone's getting it. Yeah. Well, they can make nine a day. So presumably we'll get it in 2034. or we'll get one. It'll be awesome. Someone on our team is getting one.

And then I'm going to look at it with love in my eyes. You know, like cartoons. Like eyes and eyes. All right. We should talk about this iPhone. It's like amazing how much we want to avoid talking about the iPhone 16E. Yeah. I know we have some virtual ass listeners that just totally tune out when we talk about cameras.

I was much happier talking about the camera than I'm going to be talking about the iPhone 16E. Never has a phone been so thoroughly exactly. what we expected it to be. Oh, I was going to say never as a phone been so thoroughly, exactly not it. Yeah. It's funny because on social media, usually the few days after a new iPhone comes out,

people are trying to justify the reasons why they want to upgrade. I've not seen one thing about this from anybody saying why you should get this necessarily, except for people that are insane. And on the one hand, look, like, this phone is so clearly not meant for those people. And that's fine. That's fair enough. Like, it just, it's, this is a thing that Apple, I think, struggles with is that it operates at such scale and with so much attention that everything it launches is ostensibly geared towards everyone everywhere. And this is just so not that, right?

Like, I don't think anyone who is considering a pro phone will ever look twice at this, right? Like, Neelai, your proposed headline, no one should ever have to care about this. I actually think it's like very descriptive because this is for people who don't care about their phone. This is like, I want, I want to have a phone. But it's $5.99. If you're that person, you should buy a used iPhone 15. Or a new iPhone 15. Oh, I forgot.

You could buy a used 15 pro for like the same amount. Right. And you'll get mag safe and you'll get way better cameras and like, you'll just make a happy. No Apple intelligence, Neelai. That's a plus. I cannot be bothered to what end. Yeah. I think Apple really thought Apple intelligence was going to drive a huge cycle.

It was the super cycle. This was the thing last year. Do you remember this? They were talking about the super cycle of smartphone upgrades because of Apple intelligence. Yeah. And oh, boy, is that not the thing? Well, have you noticed that the billboards have changed? They used to be, hello Apple intelligence.

I don't see those anymore at all. Now it's all Gen Moji billboards because they know that's what people actually care about. Do they, though? It's all I care about. Do you? So is this just a phone that? can get gen moji is that this is your cheapest gen moji access wait okay hold on i no longer care about the 16e date but i need to know everything about your

gen mojee life oh god what are your use cases for gen moji how long do you have i'm frustrated by gen moji and the same reason that i'm delighted by gen moji okay in that it's just like they they tried to make gen moji exactly like emoji in every possible way And in that way, it's very useful for regular people as long as they know where the button is, which it's glowing, so I hope that they know where it is. But they look like Apple emoji because they're trained on that Apple emoji character set. And there just aren't emojis for everything.

Like Unicode, they add three or four a year. Everyone has to vote on them. That's great. But when you want to make very specific things, you know, like stickers, I think, were one of the biggest upgrades to the iPhone in a very long time, or at least to iMessage. Because when you can press and hold on something, make a custom sticker, everyone uses that.

People love it. That is cool. Gen Moji is like that, but it's more, it's like it abstracts it away a little bit so that it's more usable with people that you do not have that specific relationship with. What was the last gen moji you made? We're doing this now. Oh, gosh.

All right, I'm going to look right now. I've never made a genomego. Maybe I should buy an iPhone 16. Yeah, like is this in your day-to-day? did like you're just you're just out here gen mojiing up a storm I don't do you want to get dinner and you're like

Gen moji make me a person eating spaghetti Is that how you invoke a gen moji You have to say gen moji Gen moj I'm not sure if we can put this in the show but if you just say if you just gen moji gun

it will make you a gun Cool I just wanted to test that Very strange So you're just sending cartoons of guns to you Oh, laughing, crying, throwing up. Very good one. Oh, this is your gen moji.

These are gen moji. This is one saying. They mix stickers, gen moji, and emoji in the same area of the keyboard because they want people to think of them as the exact same thing. I will say I like laughing, crying, throwing up as a gen moji. That's pretty good. It's quite good. I will send it to you because it is very good.

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

That's very good. I do like that you're just spamming, David, with, like, the worst emoji. This is fantastic. That's very good. So, again, to just bring this all the way around, our thesis is it people will buy a $600, not good iPhone, to send cartoons. of guns. No, but I have noticed all of the billboards have changed to Gen Moji billboards. And I think that they looked at Apple Intelligence, and before it was just so abstract, before

it was just, hello Apple Intelligence, iPhone 16. Now it's Gen Moji it. That's their whole thing. It has lasted longer than the Apple Intelligence ads. Like there are more Gen Moji ads. They've lasted a longer period of time. It's funny because they started all those ads before you could get Apple Intelligence. and then people got Apple intelligence

and they stopped advertising it. Yeah. Yeah. I see what you're saying. My experience with Apple Intelligence outside of Gen Moji was that I took a script that I had in Apple Notes and I did the rewrite feature

intending to revert back to the old script because I was just testing it. And then it crashed Apple Notes and then I could not revert it to my actual script. And that was my only copy of the script. And that was my mistake. So I just, I don't think people really care about this. Can I, but the only true feeling I have about the 16E is that not having mag safe on it is criminal.

It is. Like almost all of the phone mounts in my house, all of the batteries that I use. Like, it's all mag safe all the way down the line. In the car, I have one next to the mirror in my bathroom. I just like put the phone on the next. next to that in the morning have it played YouTube TV at me. That's amazing.

It's like all of that is super fun and interesting and that is the only like really great accessory ecosystem that Apple has ever created. Yeah. And they're just like the cheap phone, the $600 phone can't have it. Why? People are now going to go into the Apple store.

They're going to buy an iPhone 16E. They're going to go over and they're going to look at the MagSafe charger because everyone wants that magsafe wireless charger that is $50. And the Apple employer is employees either going to say, oh, that doesn't work with your phone, even though it's new. Or they're not going to know that. And then they're going to be like, I don't get this. Like, I have to hold it against my phone and it charges it 7.5 watts. Like, how does this work?

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

Like, it got it mostly right. But I agree that the MagSafe thing just sucks. And we talked a little bit about this last week and heard from a bunch of people who were like, whatever, just buy a MagSafe case for your phone. and would I bet that Apple is going to sell you some of those? Sure. But, like, that's not a solution to the problem. They just get rid of back save altogether and everything's Chee 2 and Chee 2 ready. That sounds like Apple.

Yeah. I don't know. It's a phone. Let us know if you're the target market for this phone. Who is the? But this is, like, the weirdest iPhone launch. Yeah. I can remember.

Like, never as an iPhone come out with such a. Okay. Yeah. Do you think if this thing were $450, we'd be having a totally different conversation about it? Yeah. If it was $350. Well, I think that's unreal. That's, like, unrealistic for what phones cost right now.

Like, I don't know if you've heard of that inflation, Nelai. Yeah, and tariffs. Like, is this the first tariff phone? That's the other question. I read Ben Thompson makes the argument that this is the first tariffone. But we'll see. I mean, like, Tim Cook is, you know, we're going to get to it in the next segment. And it's part of letting your end.

Tim Cook is just throwing fake numbers Donald Trump to get out of the tariffs. So smart move. We'll see. And also every, realistically no one ever buys this phone. Like you go to your Verizon store and Verizon's like this one. Yeah. And you just leave and that's the end of that.

Did you watch Marquez's review of it, by the way? No. He has a skit at the beginning. It's like 90 seconds long. And one of him plays the employee and one of them plays a customer. And the customer is just asking, I want a phone that does exactly this, exactly this. An employee just gives him everything but the 16E. It just makes no sense.

And I just, again, yeah, who is this? I'll go watch it. Apologies. It's like one of the few I haven't watched. But it's like, I don't want to care about the 60. I just didn't give it the time. It's a way in the door. And then Apple can sell you more expensive things.

I do love the- Except for Mac Safe Access. This is my favorite, my favorite ongoing, like, thesis about Apple is that they have some products that don't exist. Like, they just have, like, the 16E only exists on the website. It's like the lobster at a dot. designer. It's not there. Yeah. It's like they're not manufacturing it. It's not real. It's like the illusion of a phone to get you to buy a more expensive phone. It's like, no, I think they're manufacturing the phone. We'll see. All right, we got to take a break. We were supposed to talk about the framework laptop, which looks really cool. But David tells me that Framework CEO Nirov is coming on the show next week.

Yeah, he's coming. Sean and I are going to hang out with Nerov. Actually, later this afternoon. And we're going to have a lot to say. But like, I'll put all the framework stuff in the show notes. I think that company is fascinating. the desktop looks really cool. I'm especially excited with the framework laptop 12, which is their lower end touchscreen flippy one that I think is going to be maybe the most kind of mainstreamy thing framework has made yet. This company is very exciting, and I think up to some really cool stuff.

But yeah, we're going to have lots more to talk about on that one on Tuesday. Yeah, cool. All right, we're going to take a break. We're going to come back with the lightning round. We're right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner,

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You can throw it out and you can replace it with you can't tell us what to do. And that would pretty much get you there. Anyway, if you'd like to sponsor the lightning round, you can call someone in Box Media. And pay that money, and then we will still do this. But today we're unsponsored, which means there's not even a hint of corporate control. Because, again, to repeat myself, you can't tell us what to do. Unsponsored for flavor. Okay.

David, take it away. Okay, so the first thing here is that YouTube announced this week that more than a billion people now watch podcasts on YouTube, which is a kind of a number we knew, right? like YouTube has been creeping up as the most important podcast platform for some time. YouTube music exists, but this is not YouTube music. This is YouTube, YouTube, YouTube main, as they call it, which I forever think is very funny. And basically, YouTube is very proud of this fact. They're like, we are a massively important podcast platform.

I think there are several dozen issues with the fact that YouTube is this powerful a podcast platform. in part because it's not a podcast platform. Like there's a non-zero chance you're watching this on YouTube right now. YouTube is not a podcast app for a bunch of reasons. You can't get background audio playback unless you have YouTube premium.

You can't sort out shows correctly. The audio versus video playback just sucks on YouTube. And YouTube's answer to this is YouTube music. But again, no. And so I just think we're at this really interesting moment where YouTube is both becoming the most popular podcast.

platform and is kind of changing what podcasts are. And it has changed it so much to the point where now, like, Spotify is racing to do video. And it is because it's trying to catch up to YouTube, in part because video is very popular, in part because video is very shareable, and in part because video is really discoverable in a way that audio is not. And so everybody now is turning to video. You didn't like the TikTok Spotify thing for music where you heard a clip of a song you've never heard before and decided you wanted to listen to the whole?

thing. What could possibly go wrong? No, it's a terrible user interface. And I did this whole thing in the installer or the newsletter I write last week where I basically was like, tell me your music set up. And the overwhelming piece of feedback from people was I use Spotify. I hate Spotify. Which is like precisely how I feel that's by fine. Like perfect. No notes. And it's because all of this stuff is trying desperately to chase YouTube. And YouTube meanwhile is just how it here flexing. It's like, yeah, if you want to be relevant on the internet, you have to be on YouTube. And that is increasingly true for people who make podcasts. And I think, like, Spotify's number, I think was that it had a hundred million podcast listeners. And Spotify is like what everybody thinks is either the most important or second

most important podcast platform next to Apple Podcasts. And YouTube is just after crushing everybody. It's nuts. Let me ask a foundational question. What is a podcast? Yeah, I was going to, I was going to ask that too. Because are we just talking about YouTube videos that say their podcasts? Well, what is that then? Well, I mean, we have been making this show for a long time, and it is true some people watch it on YouTube. Lots of people actually watch on YouTube. But I don't know.

Like, what is the difference between waveform and a regular Marquez video? It's, is it just the microphones? The editing, the microphones. But do you know who broke that distinction? YouTube. This is the point, right? Like what has happened. And I think YouTube has actually done this to a lot of different forms of art is YouTube has just collapsed everything into YouTube. And now everything looks like YouTube and works like YouTube and follows YouTube's particular like trends and systems and norms because it's YouTube. Because YouTube is the only platform that matters. And thus everything has to be YouTube. How do you categorize a late night show? Because that's a podcast in the way that a YouTube show is a podcast. It's a podcast, but it's also just a bunch of YouTube clips in a row. Yeah. I mean, no, cable news has just been podcast for a long time. Yeah. If you ever just like watch whatever cable news channel you want to watch, but you just

watch CNBC or CNN or MSNBC or Fox News or whatever, you know, like, oh, this is just the most chaotic podcast industry. Yeah. Very unstructured. At all. It's just happening all at once all the time. A lot of them actually run podcasts that are just the full audio feed of the show. And it works. horrible. I don't know if 60 minutes still does it, but they did for a long time. And like it works. Well, 60 minutes makes sense. Yeah. People can visualize things in their heads. Is that different in an audiobook? I don't know. So we, I'm trying to remember the headline. The narrative podcasts are running into audiobooks story was a big story. Yeah. And then narrative podcast like serial like fell out of favor in like a real way. Yeah. Because the, I hear you on YouTube and I do

love to criticize YouTube at basically any turn. But like really what you're seeing here is platforms pushing everyone to lower the cost of content. Yeah. Because they don't pay enough money. And so like YouTube as if you're like a YouTuber, the amount of money you get from YouTube from AdSense and the partner program is just going down over time. The amount of views everybody's getting is just going down over time because there's so many more YouTubers. Right. So everyone is just trying to make cheaper stuff and we've been making the show for a long time. So I will just tell you, like, hanging around talking is a very cheap way to make content. Like, we try hard. You know, we got like graphics. There's frame TVs everywhere. Those aren't cheap. Let me tell you.

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

Here's hours and hours of more video. Yeah. What I don't know is whether that's actually taking share away from Apple podcasts. I know why Spotify's scared, right? This is Spotify's big bet, and they're losing to YouTube in one very specific way. Right. But I don't know if like the Apple podcast listener was always an audio listener is like screw it. I'm going to watch this on YouTube instead.

Yeah, I don't know. I have a lot of, I mean, we get a lot of anecdotal information and feedback from people that I would say by and large what we've heard from people who are like watching and listening to this right now is that it is more sort of additive than cannibalizing. Like there are definitely people who have found the show on YouTube and only consume it on YouTube. YouTube. But we also get a lot of people who are like, oh, I listen to it while I'm on a walk. And then it's like fun to watch clips or I watch the show later. I put it on the TV while I'm in the kid or like whatever. So I think it's from what we've heard so far and what we've seen in our data, they're not kind of killing each other. But also, right now, if you're launching a new show, I absolutely guarantee you're spending more of your time thinking about YouTube than you are thinking about Apple Podcasts. And that to me is the real shift over time. I think that people, the shift towards. passive consumption, like needing just things to be playing at all periods of time that they can check in on kind of passively and when they want to. We have a lot of people that tell us, oh, I do the dishes while I have waveform on the TV. Yeah. And I look over every now and then. And I think some form of like ingestion through their eyes while it's also being ingested

through their ears every now and then is like what people want. They just want things playing all time. There's a reason people leave their apartments. They go to the subway. They realize they don't have their headphones with them and they have a panic attack. And people just need more, longer things. Yeah. And the fact that the audio medium of podcasts has companies that are like, don't worry, we made sure this is less than 10 minutes.

No one wants a less than 10 minutes. Is anyone asking for it? Because you can just pick it back up. Like, nobody is asking for that. If anything, people love the length of, you know, this show. People want a two-hour verge cast, David. That's what I'm telling. That's exactly right.

We're very close to delivering it here. I've never heard. lightning round that is already on 10 minutes on a single item. No one's told me that they want a shorter one. That's all I'm saying. All right, David, we're changing your job. You're just doing Twitch streams 24-7 from now. Justin TV is back, baby.

From your green screen basement. I'm leaning into that conspiracy theory. David's basement's a green screen. I have begun occasionally, suddenly moving things around in my background. And if anyone would like to tell me what those things are, I welcome it. All right, let me add up these next two lightning round items for you.

I forgot this was the lightning round. Apparently. Yeah. That's what I was told. Instagram Reels may get its own app. Presumably to compete more directly with TikTok. And then TikTok is upgrading its desktop website. To compete with YouTube, they say.

Be with YouTube. What do you got? First one, yep. Makes sense. I mean, I think people go to Instagram for Reels at this point. So I think all of this is based about the TikTok ban. Yeah. I think if because remember TikTok is technically banned in this country yeah like the law passed the Supreme Court upheld it and then Donald Trump was like no we're not doing that yeah and the app stores Apple and Google were like that's too much risk and then Pam Bondi the new attorney general sent them a letter which we have still not seen that made them feel comfortable to put TikTok back so now we're in this weird period where this app that is banned they got a 75 day reprieve from the Trump administration

of enforcement of the law. That's coming up in, what, April, right, David? So in April, this app might go away again or it's sold to, I don't know, Don Jr. Limited. Like, whatever it's going to happen. Like, I don't know what's going to happen. Yeah. And if that moment, whatever that moment is

will be a change. And so if you're Instagram, you have to be ready for it. Right. So here's Reels. Like, not Instagram. Like this much more direct competitor to TikTok. And if you're TikTok, I think you have to be like, well, you can't ban a website. Yeah.

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

and the only thing they got wrong was the videos are too long. Oh, that's interesting. He's like, we had TikTok. It was just long videos and what people wanted was short videos. I mean, that's kind of true. They tried to do the like Hollywood thing, and it's actually like, no, just let people film videos of themselves. People want garbage, all right? Just set up some microphones and start a podcast about gadgets and Brendan Carr, and you're going to be fine.

Famously, why quibby worked, for sure. Yeah. Dude, I think I disagree with you saying that Instagram is just real. And I actually think my theory about why this is happening, and I'm just going to throw this at you both. And I'm curious what you think. So I watch these Adam Masary like AMA videos every week where they talk about, he talks about like what's going on. And that man cannot figure out what is the most important thing on Instagram. Right.

Like there are stories, which a lot of people watch and care very much about that they are forever like making more important in the product and then denigrating in the product. There's the feed, which is like a dying thing, but is also like the central pillar of Instagram. So they're trying to make the feed a thing again. And they're like, we want to let it. We want to let you post to your phone. feed without it being such a big deal to post to your feed. And I think Instagram has just producted itself into total chaos. And I think A knows that clearly the easiest thing to spend out and make its own is Reels, because then you have an app that opens to video that is

playing with the volume on, which is really important and is a really important part of why TikTok has been so successful. Because you open it up and it is playing with the volume on. And that is not an, that you can't just turn that on on Instagram, but you could if it's just an app called Reels. Right. And then it also says, okay, now we understand what Instagram is again, because no one knows what Instagram is anymore. You just post things, places and hope that people see them, which is not a recipe for success. And so now everybody's like, what happened in my reach. Where do I post if I want to reach people? And this, like, this might actually help Instagram tell a story about itself that makes sense for the first time in a long time. Do you think they know what that will be if a Reels app launches, though? Because they fame, meta famously just takes the best part of every app. from their competitors and then puts it in Instagram specifically. Right. So now, you know, they've got the Snapchat in Instagram, which is Stories, and they've got

the Reels in Instagram, which is TikTok, and then they've got the Instagram and Instagram, which they have long forgotten about. Well, but I think that goes back to your point about Reels is the most important part of Instagram. Like, I think A, I would bet that if this app still exists, Reels will still be in Instagram and they'll still be in Facebook. And then what Meta gets to say is actually we have this video app, but we also have this gigantic distribution across everywhere. So it's like we have TikTok, but we also have TikTok attached to Instagram.

It's like the Fediverse, but for one platform. For one company. Which I would just point out is what we call a monopoly. Boosted TikTok videos everywhere you look at Meta platforms. I'm telling you, I think it's just so that when people lose access to TikTok again, meta can say, download a new app. It's just TikTok. Yeah, no, I think that's right.

I think there's probably some conniving, clever motivation, but then there's also a very dumb thing, which is like, are you mad? Push this button. Yeah. And that solves a lot of problems. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, wasn't Instagram notes supposed to be their Twitter competitor? Oh, yeah. Just like shut that down.

That became threads. Became threads. Okay. Or are you mad at Twitter? Download this app. And it worked for five minutes until they're like, what if this algorithm was the worst? Yeah. We'll see the end of that.

Okay. We got to do, it's a lightning rant. So we're going to move through politics very quickly. David, I'm assigning you to this job because I can't. You know. Okay. I'm just going to say a bunch of things in a row and you can stop me whenever you feel like it. Does that sound good?

Yeah. Doge remains insane. The big news of this past week was that Elon Musk, a lot of federal employees got an email telling them to respond with five bullets about what they did. And then Elon Musk posted on X that if they didn't respond to that email, they would take that as resignation. that's nothing and is nothing. So a bunch of departments said, don't answer this email, a bunch of departments said answer this email. Everybody's up in arms about it.

Nobody knows what to make of it. Musk and then Donald Trump continue to kind of say it's a real thing and people should do it, but it appears to be nothing except just more abject chaos. Doge, God only knows what it is or who works there. But the new thing that happened this week was that Amy Gleason, who was formerly an employee at the U.S. U.S. Digital Service was like named,

scapegoated. Like, I don't know what word do you want to use? In the executive order that creates Doge, it says there will be a Doge administrator. Then no one knew who that person wants. Right. Like judges were asking United States attorneys general, who is the administrator of Doge?

And they'd be like, I don't know that at this time. Right. Because I think literally they didn't. And a lot of reporting from us and Wired and others suggest that even the people who worked there didn't know who they were reporting to. Elon Musk is in every meaningful way in charge. But he is not a government employee, so that's not how that works. He's a special government employee.

Sure. What is a photo, David? That's where we are. I mean, knock yourself out. Yeah. You can have whatever you want. He was in a cabinet member's meeting. Like, none of this is real anymore.

I don't know. I think the thing that makes all of this just break and not, and weird and all the reporting kind of be weird is that all of this assumes that there are processes and things that you can and cannot do when you're in certain positions, and they are just saying, none of that matters. And we're going to do what we want anyway. And in certain ways,

they're subverting these things and saying, okay, here's the administrator because you ask so many times. But none of that matters for them. They just do not care. So it's important that the reporting is happening, but also what do these facts mean? Right.

There's that paragraph in all of these stories that is like, this breaks with longstanding norms and understanding of how they say, and it's like, yeah, like every single other things. thing. We've been here for a while.

No other president has had a full cabinet meeting where just some guy wearing a shirt that reads tech support and wearing a baseball cap. Talk to the most. Yeah. That was Elon in the cabinet meeting. That's just, so, okay, so then I say all of this, which led to, I would say the funniest thing that happened this week, which is in the housing and urban development department, somebody put on TVs all around the department, an AI generated video of

President Trump sucking on Elon Musk's feet. Like, I don't know how else to say it other than that. And it became a whole thing. It got shared a bunch of places. And it is hysterical. If you have not watched it, don't. But also, I will put the link in the show. Actually, the funniest part of this is it is an AI deepfake.

And so, like, Blue Sky had a content moderation controversy about it because you're not supposed to share AI deepfakes. But then it was a newsworthy video of a TV in a government agency being hacked. So then they undid it. And they're like, we're very sorry. We've rethought our moderation decision here. Just weird. But if there's anything that's going to get us to an anti-deep fake law, it's deepfakes of this caliber.

That's real. Weird. Okay. So that's like Doge. And everyone's reporting on Doge. And like the Times say has a whole list of all the people who work there. It's long and extensive. It's definitely a coup.

I just want to be as clear as I can be. There's a weird coup happening in our government. And it's by weird nerds. Okay. We're going to keep reporting on it. Then there's like the regular Trump stuff that also happened this week, which I find very funny because it, it just rhymes with Trump one. So like, Tim Cook had a meeting with Donald Trump and promised him $500 billion of U.S. investment. They put out a press release about it.

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

where they were going to start making the Mac Pro that they had already been making at the factory. Yeah. It's fantastic. You can go look at it. It's a very confusing situation. I'm glad that Tim Cook knows that he can do this at least. Tim Cook is trapped on a treadmill of his own making. Yeah.

Like he can never retire. His job is to manage Donald Trump forever. Anyway, so they announced this $500,000, which is great. I want Apple to invest in the United States. I think we should manufacture more things here. All this is good. Grateful for the economy, we should build manufacturing centers of excellence in Detroit all day long.

I have no qualms with any of the things that they are doing, the substantive things that they're doing. What I will point out is that the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, looked at the numbers, and they're like, these numbers are fake. I love that. So I'm just going to read you this paragraph in the Wall Street Journal.

Apple's $500 billion is mostly already on the books, is the headline. Apple spent about $1.1 trillion in the past four fiscal years on total operating expenses and capital expenditures. Wall Street expects nearly $1.3 trillion in total spending over the next four years, according to consensus estimates. While Apple doesn't break out expenses per geography, about 42 percent of its revenue comes from America, assuming the U.S. constitutes the bulk of that number. If spending is in line with revenue, then a rough figure of 40 percent of projected global sales. spending through 2028 equates to about $505 billion. So if you just math out how Apple spends money, there you go. They used Apple intelligence to rewrite their expenses and show Donald Trump the expense.

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

particular because they cannot accept tariffs. So they manage Trump in particular by, right, making him promises that they have already made to themselves. And they just reannounce things. And somehow, Tim Cook has just made an art of this. It is wild. Yeah, I mean, it's the show is the thing, right? And there's a, there's a bunch of really fun details in all of that. that the like, I think Apple's plan that they said was to hire 20,000 people over the next four years, which is roughly in line with Apple's ongoing hiring plans. They hire about 5,000 people a year. They were going to, there was like a big thing. They were going to spend a bunch of money with TSM in Arizona.

Apple is already the largest customer of TSM in Arizona. It's like, all you have to do is look at it. But you get to write the thing that's like, thank you Donald Trump, we're spending $500 billion. And like everybody wins, right? Like, is it ruthless in calculating and not really true? Yeah. But it's, it's, I feel the same way about it that I do about the everybody, uh, sending a million dollars to go to the inauguration. It's like, I get it.

Like, it is obviously straightforwardly good business and also you should feel bad about yourself. Yeah, it's just weird because there's this big split between, you know, like classic Trump corruption. You know, like he's a real estate developer. So you got to spend money on his party, you know, and it's like, oh, he's a club promoter. to do some club promoting stuff. Like, great. You know, like, Trump won. Like, we lived it.

And this is substantially better than, for example, box comment announcing LCD factory in Wisconsin that they never built. Right. Apple announced some stuff. It's already doing great. That's right next to the Doge corruption, which is, like, weird secrets and, like, straightforwardly illegal and unconstitutional power grabs by Elon Musk, that everyone's just like, oh, that's new. There's a good one of those this week, in fact. Yeah. this FAA thing. What's going on there?

So basically the short version of it is it looks like the FAA, which has been kind of infiltrated with SpaceX employees who have showed up to, quote unquote, fix the FAA, may take a $2.4 billion contract that it had given to Verizon in order to do, I don't know, FAA things. I don't pretend to know what the FAA does. But there was $2.4 billion that now they would like to give to start. link instead. And there's been a big focus of a lot of very good reporting over the last couple of weeks

about the very straightforward ways in which Doge is going into departments that either regulate Elon Musk's companies and destroying them or give money to Elon Musk's companies and taking more money from them. And this is just this is just that again. And like this is money that was awarded to Verizon that is now being. reconsidered and a bunch of people who work for SpaceX are now at the FAA saying, oh, actually, this money should go to SpaceX. And everybody's like, isn't that corruption? And it's like, yes. And no one. And who cares? So here's how Elon is justifying this, which is a delight.

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

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

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

Right. This is the new system. So it's unclear what he thinks is breaking. He's saying he's providing Starlink terminals at no cost of taxpayer on an emergency basis to restore air traffic control connectivity. No cost to taxpayer. Right. Well, there's that.

But it's also like, so wait, is it just internet access? Because that's what Starlink is. Yeah. Is it, are you saying- That's not the system. That's just the internet. Yeah. Are you saying Verizon can't put some Fios in at the airport? What are you, like, what are we talking about here?

Like, I know, I have, I have many problems with our nation's ISPs. I think most of them are bad. I think if any ISP, CEO wants to come on the show, I will look them in the eye and say, I think you did a bad job. You're charging people too much money. Great. Provisioning internet access at the airport is like actually not. a problem with it. I was going to say, I don't think I've ever said poor Verizon before. Yeah. And I still, you know, but in this case, it's like. But he's taking a 2.4 billion dollar

contract for himself. There's just a lot of that going on right now. And there's like, there was some really fun follow up on the $400 million state department planned to buy cyber trucks that they originally tried to blame on the Biden administration. But it turns out when it was the Biden administration, it was $400,000. And then they made it $400 million. on the Trump administration, and then they canceled the whole thing. It's like it's just, it's just nakedly obvious what everyone is doing here. And the question is just, is anyone going to stop them at this point? And that, to me, feels like a very open question.

I think Elon's drug use will stop it before a person. That's my current going theory. But that period of time could be any period of time. My man's obviously, like, living hard right now. Yeah, yeah. I've seen him on many states. just talking. All right,

Neilie, it's time for America's favorite segment, the podcast within a podcast. We took a break last week and the people, the people demand it. All right.

Let's wrap it up. It's time for Brendan Carr is a dummy. A new segment here on America's favorite podcast about the FCC. Brendan Carr is a dummy. So let me just say, I'm just going to say

this sentence to you. This week, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, has decided the best use of his authority is an unaleliorable. is an unelected censorship cop is to attack a country music festival.

That's not where I thought that sentence. Let's go. That's what he's doing. That's what our man is doing this week. I want to be 100% clear. This is a real thing that notable idiot Brendan Carr has decided to do this week. So the IHeart media runs the IHeart Country Festival. And he sent a letter to Bob Pittman, the CEO of IHeart, saying,

hey, are you doing some payola? Are you saying if people take cheaper rates to play the IHeart Country Festival, that you'll give them more airtime on IHeart radio stations? In a vacuum, this should be a great story in 1954. In reality, I don't know if anyone has heard of this company called Spotify, which just does naked payola all the time. But because IHeart runs radio stations, and Brendan has regulatory control over the airwaves.

He gets to make political hay with a certain constituency by saying, I'm attacking country music festival to make sure there's no liberal corruption in country music. No problem that has played country music for years now. Just stupid. Like, it's, Iheart's a monopoly. Like, yeah, dude, there's weird corruption in I heart media. And Clear, I Heart used to be Clear Channel. If you're like a 90s kid like me,

Clear Channel is like one of the most nakedly corrupt media enterprises, like in this country's history. Yeah, dude, they're doing some payola at the country music festival. Good job. Yeah. Good job, Brendan. He followed that up, by the way. He had a closed door meeting with Republican members of Congress to talk about George Soros

owning radio stations and what he can do about that. I would just point out Rupert Murdoch, also owns a bunch of radio stations and TV stations in this country. He doesn't seem to be a problem. It's definitely George Soros. So we're just doing partisan censorship by Brennan Card. None of this makes any sense because none of it stands up to even the slightest bit of like intellectual scrutiny.

He just likes having the power of being an unelected censor. And that brings us all the way to the stupidest thing that he's doing, which he's making these noises about reinterpreting section 230. to, I don't make it easier for him to put Mark Zuckerberg in jail or something, right? Section 230 is a law that says the big companies are not liable for what the users post on their platforms. So if I put something on Instagram, you can't sue Mark Zuckerberg over what is on my Instagram account. The whole internet relies on the slot. Our comment section relies on the law existing Reddit, you name it next door.

But he's like, we got to rein in big tech. And I will reinterpret Section 230, unelected. deeply unstylish Brendan Carr will reinterpret this law, which was written, by the way, by people who are still alive. Like Ron Wyden wrote Section 230. He was on Decoder two weeks ago.

You could just ask him what he thinks it means, but Brendan Carr is going to just reinterpret it. Somehow he released this in a story in the New York Post that I swear to you is written like the worst LinkedIn poetry that I've ever seen in my entire life. Like just one sentence long paragraph in the story just says social media has replaced chat rooms. End of sentence, end of paragraph.

Why? It's very confused. We'll link to it. Just I want you to know this is some, this is like the Vogon poetry of policy writing in the New York Post. It's so bad. And the idea is that he will somehow reinterpret Section 230 to make Facebook a publisher and then ever consume Facebook defamation.

This is absolutely not how that law is supposed to work. This is the height of stupidity from Brennan Carr. And I know this because, again, the guy who wrote the law, talks to us all the time. He was just on our shows like two weeks ago. And this is not what he meant when he wrote the law. I do feel like it's dangerous for you to say at any time that this is the height of Brendan Carr's stupidity. Because like it's still early, my dude. We're only like six weeks into this. That's true. Well, look, he's going to take down a country music festival first. There's one thing you want the FCC of this country doing. It's attacking the country music industry. What are you doing? Anyway, Brendan, as always, I know you listen. I know your staff gives you readouts. I've known it for years, buddy. If you want to come on Decoder or come on this show, you can tell us about your smart home setup.

I bet it sucks. You're welcome to. It's just not very smart, Brendan. You're welcome to come on the show and face an actual hostile interviewer who questions your use of the government's power to shut down speech that you don't like. Because that's what you're doing every single time,

and we're just not going to let you off the hook. All right, that was our weekly segment, Brendan Carr's dummy. We need theme music. Brandon Kiefer on our team, I will tell you, has been quietly, creating theme music for Brendan Carr as a dummy, and there is a chance we are going to roll that out at some point in the near future. So get ready. Can you just imagine waking up and being like, huh, I should control speech in this country? What I will do with that power that I've given myself for no reason is attack a country music festival.

Yeah. Run by I heart media. That's the consequential stuff right there. When I think of complete, corrupt, I heart media. Go after Coachella first and then we'll talk. You know what I mean? David, I'm going to read you this sentence and you've got to tell me it's a pallet cleanser for a two-hour of a podcast. Okay. Automatic combines beeper and text.com messaging services. What does that mean?

So this is two hours easily. So we talked a lot on the show about Beeper, the messaging app that ran a foul of Apple in some really interesting and complicated ways. Beeper eventually sold to Automatic, the company that owns WordPress.com. They'll email me if I'm not stat specific. about which part of WordPress Automatic Oversees. Automatic, kind of a mess

because Matt Mullenweg is having a weird time on the internet right now. They're in lawsuits. But anyway, they made this big bet on messaging. They bought both Beeper and this company,

text.com, which is doing the same kind of thing that Beeper was doing, basically trying to like unify all of your messaging apps into one messaging app. Eric Mijikovsky, who was the head of Beeper,

at least as I understood it, was going to run this whole new thing, the combination of the text.com team and the Beeper team at Automatic. Eric Mijikovsky since left and is now doing Pebble again. And so Kishan Bagaria, who was running text.com, is now in charge of this whole team. And they just put out betas of the first new apps,

which are essentially just re-skinned text.com apps, into a thing that is now called Beeper. So Beeper is the new name, but Text.com appears to be the actual technology. They redid an iPhone app, but they're still at this. like unified messaging everywhere thing. I downloaded the betas. They're as interesting and messy as ever,

but they appear to be still for real at this game. I had a, I wondered if after all of the Apple kerfuffle, if they would just spin out a different direction and try to do something else in messaging, but automatic appears to be actually pushing towards this. Huh. That all made sense. I think Brendan Carr should arrest them.

There you go. I'm here to help. Also, before we go, I have some breaking news. Yeah. Oh. Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, said this afternoon on Bloomberg television

that Amazon is going to be releasing some new Alexa devices this fall. And he said the sentence, I think there's a sustainable business model, which is always what you want to hear. That makes sense. That tracks basically O'Connos were saying. Yeah.

So it's, it's, this is 2025, I think, in two runs, just became the year Alexa is either going to work or collapse in a really fascinating way. Yeah. It's definitely going to turn on all the lights in your ass full booking you a ticket to Japan. It's going to get out of here. And then an Uber will show up and bring you to JFK. Yeah. Or drugs. It's one of the other. Or drugs. All right, David, thank you so much for being here. That was incredible, my man.

We'll have you back soon. Father David, you're fine. Take it. That was it. That was the Vergecast. Rock and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcasts Network. Our show is produced by Will Por, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it.

We'll see you next week.