The Vergecast - The Last of Us recap, lessons learned from Silicon Valley, and Vergecast Hotline

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of zombie kisses: 02:02 - The Verge’s managing editor Alex Cranz chats with film & TV reporter Charles Pulliam-Moore about HBO’s The Last of Us and how it handles the video game adaptation. [Spoilers for episode 1 + 2] 22:40 - Historian and author of the book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America Margaret O'Mara talks about how the lack of non-compete clauses shaped Silicon Valley. 38:30 - We answer your questions left on our Vergecast Hotline! Thunderbolt docks, end-to-end encryption, and smart assistants. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, and you're listening to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of zombie kisses. I'm your friend Alex Cranz, and we've got a big show today. Obviously, we're going to be talking about The Last of Us with Charles Pulliam Moore. It's going to be really, really exciting. And we're going to be talking about the zombie kisses. So if you haven't seen the latest episode of The Last of Us, probably should go ahead and skip that part. Right now, though, I'm making cocktails. I'm making something called a jet pilot, which involves a lot of booze, a lot of juices, a little ice in a blender.

And it wouldn't exist if non-competes had existed in the bartending world in the 30s, because it's based on something called the zombie. The bartenders took the idea for it, went to another hotel, made it, it's delicious. And it also makes sense because I'm going to be talking about non-competes on the show today. I've got Margaret O'Mara coming on. She's a professor. She's written this incredible book called The Code all about the creation of Silicon Valley. She makes a really smart case that the Silicon Valley we know today might not be the same

if non-competees had been enforced in California in the 50s and 60s. It's going to be really, really fun. I'm super excited for you guys to hear it. We've also going to be doing the hotline today, so we've got a lot of your questions in, and we're going to go ahead and answer them. It's going to be a great time. But first, I'm going to get back to making this cocktail in a blender.

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built in. Go to retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. And we're back. Okay, so as I already noted, we're talking The Last of Us with Charles Pulliam Moore today. So if you haven't watched it don't want to be spoiled, go ahead and skip this segment. No, really, I'm waiting.

Okay, great. Welcome everybody else. Look, the Last of Us is a bona fide hit, and it's also one of the most successful adaptations of a video game we've seen since like Angelina Jolie's Tomb Raider. So Charles and I are going to talk about the first two episodes, the state of video game adaptations, and the hurdles still facing The Last of Us. Hello, Charles. How are you doing today? I'm good, Kranz. How are you? I'm good. I'm excited to talk with you about The Last of Us because we have some different opinions and some similar opinions on this.

And I think what we first want to probably talk about is this is kind of a big deal for HBO, right? Like it's been super successful so far. Yeah, to listen to the way that HBO is talking about this show, it is the second coming. More specifically, it is their second highest rated show after House of the Dragon, sort of like since 2010. which is the, that's sort of like, that's sort of the starting point that we're using as the beginning of like when streaming got serious. And it's like, HBO, you existed before then. And HBO's like, don't think about it. Don't think about that.

Don't think about it. Don't, yeah, don't worry about it. But it is, you know, it is sort of impressive that aside from the follow up to one of HBO's most successful shows, which, you know, has eclipsed its predecessor in terms of its premiere's popularity, or rather in terms of its premier's popularity, this new endeavor from the network has also shown the early signs of Behaping. what the kids like to call a hit. Yeah. You know, 4.7 million viewers for premieres, nothing to sneeze at. And while HBO as an entity is not new to this game, right?

HBO, this is what they do. They put out hits, right? What is sort of, you know, special and momentous about The Last of Us, as, you know, if you're listening to this, you know, the Last of Us, based on a video game. Video games have a reputation for not being, not lending themselves to the most interesting or compelling adaptations.

I mean, I loved Super Mario Brothers the movie. Was it a good movie? No. I mean, like, we are of an age. We are of that age where we have gone through enough waves of things, both from, like, the first-party creators. Like, we've just seen a number of different Mario's that now at our big ages, we can appreciate what the movie was trying to do.

Right? Whereas when you're young and impressionable, it's like, It's not the thing that I thought it was going to be. It's terrible. Whereas now it's sort of like in this era of hermetically sealed and calculated for success adaptations, you look at something like that Mario movie and go, wow, like the studios really would not try to be like that bold. I was actually just having a conversation about The Last of Us and the upcoming Mario movie. And it's like, yeah, like looking back on that Mario, on the live action Mario film, like the idea of a New York City encased in like wet fungus that's kind of.

colonized and everything is very much what the last of us is trying to go for. Who's to say, who knows? Like, maybe if Bob Hoskins' RIP was popping up as Mario now, we'd all be like, yo, that right there, that's something I really want to dig into. I know. I feel like nobody understood how video game adaptations should work then. And you look back on it, you're like, yeah, it would have been stupid to do a live action, like adaptation of the actual Mario game.

That would have been dumb. It could have been dumb. It's one of those things where it's, you know, in order for video game adaptations, to be successful, there is no one, there is no one way to do it, right? You can go for accuracy and authenticity, quote unquote. Which is what the last of us is doing. Which is a lot of what the last of us is doing. And that's what we're going to talk about. But there's also something to be said for taking risks and spending money on the production to make it look good and interesting and really selling people on the concept. I think that oftentimes when the shorthand is sort of like, oh, this video game

adaptation is bad. What people are really speaking to is the different ways in which the adaptations maybe didn't quite work hard enough to get people on board with their idea of what the adaptation was going to be. And it's kind of like, look, you know this thing and you recognize that this thing is going to be something different. How about you come on this journey with us? And oftentimes when a film goes out of its way to sort of make that jump from one medium to another easy for you, you kind of find yourself having a good time. Like, that's kind of, that was, we're not even talking about the last was yet. Like, that's, that's often and how I think about Detective Pikachu, which is a solid film that people don't recognize as being

like pretty close to a game. One, because a lot of people didn't play the game. But two, because the movie really does go out of its way to sell you on, hey, what if there was a city filled with 12 species of Pokemon, no more, no less? Yeah, I think like, I think we can talk about The Last of Us when we talk about this because Detective Pikachu told a really good story first, right? Like the reason that people like that movie, the reason people still like that movie is because it was out to tell a good story. And if it hadn't been Pikachu, if it's just been some other adorable, tiny, fluffy creature and a whole bunch of other adorable tiny fluffy creatures, probably wouldn't have done as well because you wouldn't have had that emotional resonance.

But it still would have like worked. And I was going to say, well, like, what about Detective Mielf? That wouldn't have worked. But then I was thinking to myself, like, I totally would have seen a live action team rocket movie. But the thing is, like, the magic of Detective Pikachu really was. sort of like, let's create a world that feels rooted in the Pokemon world, which is to say, you know, you've got Machamps guiding traffic, but we are going to make it read as realistic enough for you, adult Pokemon fans, because we all know who these movies are for, to be able to

and want to project yourself into this space so that you can still get that, you know, little nostalgia kick and be able to appreciate the story being told about how Mew 2 is plotting to take over the world by swapping everywhere. It's very, it's a lot. It's a lot. Everybody, go watch Detective Pikachu. It's a fun movie. But I think that's interesting to talk about that when we talk about the last of us,

because The Last of Us didn't have as many hurdles to jump over, right? Like, Nottie Dog has historically done video games that are, everybody calls them movies. Everybody's like, oh, Uncharted is a movie. The Last of Us is a movie. So it kind of like, it already had a lot of the big beats that you seal. It felt like easy mode as adaptations go. It is the truth.

It's one of those truths that when you say to out loud fans get upset with you. And it's like, well, you know, let's just call it it. Like, let's just call the thing what it is. When you're playing through The Last of Us, while it is just really dramatic story about a man and his charge trying to survive through the apocalypse, that feels rather specific and unique in the moment when you're like ensconced in it, the moment that you take a step back from The Last of Us and, you know, you look to the left and the right and see things like The Walking Dead, you know, in all of its fullness. You recognize that it's just, it's, and I don't say this disparagingly, it's another one of these stories, right?

This one is right down the middle. You've got a grizzled, middle-ish-aged man who's got regrets and a lot of, you know, guilt, and he wears it on his face, and he carries it in his gait, and he's really just living for this little girl who isn't his daughter, but she's just like his. And it's like, where have I heard this story before?

And the answer is everywhere, right? That it is one of those, you know, quote-unquote universal stories. whose universality comes from the fact that it is told over and over and over again. I mean, that's like Pedro Pascal's career the last couple of years has been telling this story. I don't know if anyone's seen The Mandalorian, but I mean, to say that, like, Ellie and Grogu are essentially the same figure. It's not like, they got a lot in common, right? I feel like the two of them would get along very, very well. But with the last device, as a video game, what really sort of set it apart

and what really solidified it in a lot of fans' minds as being, you know, quote-unquote, best video game story ever. Has a lot to do with the fact that the game brought together a lot of the components of, I'm going to call them prestige, but, you know, serious and well-crafted apocalyptic stories. It brought all of those together and packaged them into a video game that played a lot like a cinematic story that gave you the ability

because it's a third-person game to just sort of shift around the scene as it was unfolding. There are action elements, there are stealth elements, but you are supposed to really develop a relationship. You are supposed to develop an affinity for Ellie and all of her foul-mouthedness and sort of the way that she balks at the way that Joel is. And you're supposed to sort of almost feel like the unseen third companion who's following along with them. And for people, for whom this was their first exposure to that kind of story, that kind of game, it's not hard to understand why. why this caught on for so many people, why this sort of became such a big,

such a big hit, because, and again, this is not to disparage. Oftentimes, you know, video game stories, they're not always great, right? They're not always. Sometimes it is like, hey, you are here to power these guns up and mow through these masses of undead people. And that's it. Don't worry about the story.

And the last of us really did sort of prioritize you internalizing the story and your feelings about those characters. There were rumblings for a very long time. there was going to be a last of us film. It's also easy to understand why, because this does ape the shape and the movements of, not just a zombie movie, but there are also traces of things like children of men in this. There are shades of the road in this for the Cormick McCarthy fans, right? It's obvious, it's easy to see why the studios thought to themselves, oh, this has to be on the big screen.

Yeah. But is often the case with video game projects. You know, they get stuck in development, hell. It was messy. And ultimately, you know, it finds its home. The project finds its home on HBO as a series, which, you know, the general understanding is that the adaptation curse is not specific to movies. It's like, no, no, no, once you try to turn a video game into anything that's not a video game, it just instantly becomes bad. But again, because the last of us at its core was always crafted with such a cinematic style of storytelling in mind, what we've seen, what you and I have seen, people who are listening, who've been to watch it.

the show we're seeing is a lot of the show is like a pretty faithful recreate. You know, there are, I'd say maybe 60% faithful recreations and there are other 40% are things that are different. But it's like, oh, this is just what I didn't see on camera because I didn't, I wasn't facing in that direction while I was playing. Yeah, I think that's really, that's one of the things I've kind of liked about it is because I played the game and I hate zombies. They terrify me.

And so like, playing the game was the worst experience in the world because I got to play it. Everybody loves it. I got to play it. My brother would come over and do his laundry and I'd be like, can you beat this part because I'm too scared? I'm like a grown-ass woman asking my brother to do this. But that's why I liked the movie as I was like, oh, I can just skip to the cutscenes. I don't have to worry about mowing down all these guys or sneaking past all of these zombies. I can just get to the good parts, the reason that I played the game and have historically played naughty dog games. But there were definitely some changes here. And I want to talk about some of those.

The first one we're going to talk about is the death of Tess. Presumably everybody's listening to this. Very different from the game, because the game, Her death happens off camera, and it's by humans. And in this, she fringes a zombie. It's a heroic, noble sacrifice, and she's like, Joel, they got me. They got me. They got me, Joel.

And I'm glad we're talking about this, because in this first episode, Tess has sort of been won over on the idea of Ellie being, potentially like the savior of humanity. And that's also something that is not unlike the show, or rather unlike the game, But the show puts a lot more emphasis on it subtly, right? It's not exactly the most, like, they're not beating you off the head with it, but there are more people who are sort of aware of Ellie's specialness. And it sort of inspires them to rise to do heroic things in order to make sure that she and Joel are able to, like, make it away. And one of the first big examples of this is us seeing Tess, you know, decide to,

she blows the thing up. There's a bunch of cordisab zombies coming in, and they swarm her. And she's trying to light the lighter. Can I tell you that's one of my least favorite tropes? I've never had a lighter just like stay lit also when I like let it go. So this whole like, I'm going to throw it dramatically. Zippos will do it.

But Zippos also light easy. And I was just like, I know you're dying. I know you're scared. But can you like, can you focus for half a second? Do it with some intentionality and then just set it down. When I saw that moment where it's a really violent, really kind of gross moment, her death in this versus the game. The game is like, happens off camera.

And yes, you can technically go back and look at her body and be like, omisiotis. That was my Joel impression, by the way. You can technically do that. But in this, it's like, no, she's going to have a very graphic death and you are going to know she's dead. And it felt really kind of cruel to me. I was like, okay, I didn't need that.

Like one, Anna Torv is doing a great job of getting us to care about this character. She's doing a great job of developing relationships with these other characters. So, like, we feel her relationship and her commitment to Ellie in a way that didn't always necessarily translate in the game. We feel that relationship with her and Joel in a way that didn't translate in the game. And then to be like, no, now she's going to, like, make out with a zombie. My reading, the zombie made out with her. The zombie was very much, like, come on, come on. And she was like, look, where else am I going to go?

I know what you mean, as you alluded to earlier. I'm neutral on the show. I think it's fine, right? I think it is definitely, it's one of the better apocalyptic zombie shows out in the past 10 years, let's say, in that I just like that it moves.

There are other series like The Walking Dead that really do meander and spend too much time focusing on petty human things that I understand, I understand that that's where the comics exists, that's where, you know, they are sort of most comfortable. But after a while, it's like,

I don't care about cannibals doing silly things that, you know, hurt people. I'm focused on these two characters. Let's move along. Let's get them to Colorado. That being said, something that I came to feel about the show as I watched all nine episodes is because, so it is a very, it is a really faithful adaptation of the game. But because it is a television show, there are some things that are structurally different about it. And in a way that like when you play through a video game, as you're progressing through, we don't really think about games as levels anymore, but they're just sort of vignettes that you sort of play through.

When I'm sitting down to play a video game, it's almost kind of like interactive theater for me. There is a certain degree to which I do not think or worry too much about the logistics of how people move around the world. I don't think I'm unique in that. And there is some of that here in the game, or rather here in the show, but one of the things that I came away feeling, because of the show's structure, it has a way of creating this kind of like character of the week kind of scenario where just, as a character has had a chance to exist on screen and really sell you on them as a person and how they fit into this world, they end up dying, which, again, is not unique,

especially in an apocalyptic show. But they always end up dying in a way that to me felt as if it was meant to sort of make you go, oh, wow, damn, that's sad. And while I totally appreciate that being the intended response, there comes a point at which, the, I don't say manufacturedness, but sort of the intentional working towards that feeling, kind of started to feel hollow for me.

I get that. I think you can see the structure of this show really clearly in a way that you don't always. And so, like, on The Last of Us, I don't think this is a spoiler. Those odd number episodes tend to be like flashbacks. We're going to stop and we're going to sit with a character and we're going to really think about them. Even number episodes are like, we're going to move through the plot today. Let's get through it. You know what's coming.

Let's go. And so I started to like brace myself, especially because being aware of these characters and being aware of their stories in the game, I was like, okay, I know what's coming next. I know next week is going to be, we're going to go deep dive with these two characters and I know what's going to happen to them probably that episode or the episode right after. So I get like, you do feel that kind of manufactured way where you're like, do I actually like this? Is this actually good, or am I just like enjoying it because it's an adaptation of something I've enjoyed? And I like seeing a new version of it.

But also because the shape of everyone's arcs, the specific details when you zoom in are very different. But after a while, the pattern does become, here's a new character for you to develop an affinity for, get ready for them to die and for us to return to Ellie and Joel. And that's all supposed to serve rather to reinforce upon you. Like, these are the situation. These are the circumstances that Ellie and Joel exist in. And I can appreciate that without, you know, I don't always need to see, you know, the happy couple who finds love and the apocalypse suddenly die. Oh my God, aren't you sad?

Because that happens a couple of times in this show. And it's like, all right, all right. I get it. I get it. I get it. It's funny. I, like you, am a big old scaredy cat when it comes to zombies. Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead truly ruined me for a few years.

I just really, we can talk about that at another time. But with The Last of Us, I being the weirdo that I am, this being both the game and the show, putting so much focus on the fungal aspect of the infection, I came into the show really excited to see, not just the clickers, I want to see all of it, right? I want to see every stage of the infection. And I get that the show doesn't necessarily start off

in a place where we're going to be seeing all of them out and about hunting. But one of the things that I, especially at this point where we are in this series, now personally, I want to see more, I want to see more than just, can we kiss and I give you my fungal infection. I want to see more, I want to see more fungal armor. Yeah. Well, the show is continuing on. We don't want to spoil the rest of it for our audience.

I assume a lot of you who are listening to this are watching the show. I love it if you're listening to this and you haven't been watching. the show. Sorry for the spoilers. I'm sorry you're going to have to go Google like test makeout zombie. Do that Halloween costume. Like that's, start thinking about that now. That's a good costume. I think we might come back to this. This is, this is still going to be a really big adaptation. Do you think this is going to be a sea change for video adaptations? Do you think people are going to stop hand-wringing about it, especially as games themselves have often gotten more cinematic? I think the more interesting thing to pay attention to is if and how games really start posturing.

themselves to lend themselves to adaptations better. And I don't think that's necessarily going to mean everything is going to be third person. Every game is just going to give all of its NPCs, like, you know, wiki entries that you can just click through. And it's like, ooh, I know who's going to play this person. It's not necessarily going to be that. But I think it is going to be interesting to see if more developers try to start positioning their games for this kind of thing.

Kind of like comics have been doing the last like 10, 15 years, where they're like, this is actually just like our pitch for the movie. you should make instead. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why Captain Marvel exists. Sorry. Love Captain Marvel.

Great movie. But it exists because they wanted to make a movie. The comic does. Well, thank you, Charles. This has been a wonderful conversation. Of course. You're going to have to come on again. We'll do, let's do like a two-hour episode on Super Mario Brothers, the movie,

and why it's arguably one of the most interesting film adaptations of a game. This is something that we can 100% agree on. So, yes. Yeah, we're going to do it. Get excited. We'll do that and we'll be like, oh, yeah, and also there's this other Super Mario movie. It's great. But thank you so much, Charles. This is great. We're going to take a break. And when we get back, we're going to be talking with Margaret O'Mara, all about non-competes.

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That's upw-R-K.com. Upwork.com. Welcome back. So a few weeks ago and after months of investigation, the FTC announced its plan to get rid of the non-compete in the United States. The rule would make it illegal for a company to enter into a new non-compete agreement with a worker or maintain an existing non-compete. And companies would mostly not be allowed to tell workers they're subject to non-compete clauses. A lot of people have had feelings about that. And there's a lot of concern that without non-competes, innovation and companies is just going to like falter. But I personally don't think that's true. California has basically never permitted the enforcement of non-competes.

And Silicon Valley, which is like hugely innovative, has thrived partially because of that. But you shouldn't just believe me. And that's why I'm talking to Margaret O'Meara. She's a historian at the University of Washington, an author of several books, including the Code, which is all about the creation of Silicon Valley as we know it. So, Margaret, thank you for joining us today. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. I was really excited to talk to you because obviously there's been a lot of discussion about non-competes lately.

a lot of hand-wringing from certain parts of the world, a lot of like, finally from other parts of the world. And what I thought was really interesting was reading your book, The Code, you kind of talk about this myth that we've known about Silicon Valley for a long time, that the non-compete or the lack of non-competes built Silicon Valley. Would you say that's true? I think it's one factor. You know, it's one of these things that historians love. It's this totally serendipitous accidental. It's an accident of history. It's, yeah.

There was, the reason that Silicon Valley has been advantaged in this particular way has to do with the California state constitution of, you know, formulated in the late 19th century, which was just trying to kind of, it was this hodgepodge of lots of different legal traditions, you know, Spanish, Anglo American. And long story short, just ended up with this provision that you could not enforce the non-compete agreement. and the way that it worked in practice, particularly in early Silicon Valley, meaning in the 1960s, when the chip industry is starting the silicon semiconductor makers that put the silicon in the valley, that people could easily hop from one company to another. And certainly employers kind of tried to prevent IP from traveling with them, but they really couldn't. And so it was incredibly generative and allowed. tacit knowledge and experience and technical knowledge to go from one place to another quite easily. Because there was only a couple of these chip makers there, and then suddenly there was a ton, and you look and you're like, wait, you all seem to start at like Fairchild.

And you all just kind of left and then like Intel. Intel was started by two guys from Fairchild, right? Yeah. Would Intel exist now? I mean, obviously it might exist now. But if non-capetees had been enforceable in California, would Intel have grown as much as it did then? Gosh, I don't know. I mean, I think just broadly, the incredibly generative nature of lots of small firms,

kind of networked small firms, was really enabled by this kind of fluidity in the marketplace. And, you know, part of it was kind of a, we're making this up as we go along element to it. I like to think about the early valley as kind of like the Galapagos Islands, where you are removed from other inputs. You're kind of in this very isolated space. I mean, keep in mind, the only other thing going on there was growing apricots and fruit orchards. You know, there's just not, this wasn't an industrial area like, say, Boston or, you know, New York or other places that the electronics industry and the computer industry was growing at that time. And so, and these were younger people, the guy.

who ended up out there were there in part because they didn't have connections and money. And they didn't have a lot of managerial experience or a lot of being non-hierarchical and having kind of flat management structures was also something really highly valued in the early valley. Yeah, you talk about in the book that some of these initial companies, the managers were just bad. Like, you'd go and you'd work for a guy and he'd be a genius, but he'd be terrible to work with. And so these guys would go, wait a minute, I can take a lot of. of the ideas I have here and just go start my own company and not work for this jackass. Yeah, it turns out being a Nobel Prize winner does not necessarily mean you're going to be a

great boss. The most notoriously bad boss that really kind of gets this flywheel going is William Shockley, the go inventor of the transistor. He's the person who brings out these super talented young engineers to work for him at his newly created Shockley Semiconductor, which is the very first semiconductor startup in the Valley in the mid-50s. He's impossible to work for. He has a lot of other not very great character traits. And eight of them band together, find someone who's going to help them find financing and start their own company. And yeah, there was no, you know, the long arm of California law couldn't come in and say, no, you can't do that. And then in turn, when the Fairchild Semiconductor, which was that new company, when that got, you.

to be, you know, the people who had financed that were being a little bit obstinate about allowing the people who work there to do what they wanted to do. Shocking. Yeah. They left and went on to start their own companies or go to other companies and see these ideas. So, yeah, there's this ability to just jump ship and go. That is, it's, you know, contributing to it. I mean, one of the really cool things about all of this is that, you know, we all want to kind of point to,

here's this one thing that made everything happen. And actually, it's a lot of things working together. But the non-competes is this sort of wonderful oddball circumstance that underscores how, you know, sometimes you can't, things you don't expect will be really consequential. And also these like distinctions of geography actually really do matter. The kind of state, what state law is like is consequential. Yeah. I think a lot of times my kind of go-to on non-competes is Mark Papers in the mid-2000s. He was at, At IBM, he was overseeing a lot of their chip business there. Tony Fidel leaves Apple. He was a creator of the iPod. He leaves and they say, okay, we're going to bring him Mark Papermaster. And they bring him in and IBM's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

And because he'd signed his contract in New York and not in California, he went to court. And he ended up settling and couldn't work for six months, was unemployed by Apple for six months, worked there for a year and then left. It just ruined kind of his career. And that wouldn't have happened in California. if he'd signed all those contracts additionally. Yeah. And look, you know, part of this story, this California non-compete story is also, you know, the early days, of course, these companies are incorporated in California.

They're just in California. Yeah. Now we have tech companies that have, you know, they may be headquartered in California, but they're all over the world. So, you know, the stories can become a little more murky, too, right? We do have instances in which very valuable talent and ideas try to move and the companies try to claw that. back. So the big, look, the big Silicon Valley-based companies are not immune from that either. But I think there's a real value in recognizing innovation rarely happens kind of vertically within the silo of one company. It usually happens with a lot of different places, inputs. And this is the real contrast

drawn between the Early Valley and Boston's Route 128, which was a lot of big companies where things were within. And the East Coast, more generally, was a lot of big. big companies like AT&T and Bell Labs, which is where Shockley started. And the ability to kind of have these smaller firms, multiple smaller firms, rather than one single one, seems to have been, you know, you can track. There's just more ideas being generated and new things happening. Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about the East Coast side of things. Because pre-Shawkeley, pre-Fertile, it was the East Coast where most of the development was

happening. That was where a lot of the universities were. That was where a lot of the big companies were. And then it slowly moved to Silicon Valley. And part of that was because of the non-competes. Because Boston and New York, yeah, they'd enforce them. They'd keep these guys from it, right? Yeah.

And well, and it was that sort of enforcement, I think, is one piece of kind of a broader story of maybe, let's call it more conservative business culture or, you know, this is the way we do things. You know, keep in mind that in the middle part of the 20th century, a lot of this, advanced electronics, particularly miniature electronics, was really state-of-the-art, not, you know, it was risky business. Like, oh, there's not a, you know, what's the use case? The thing that was, you know, the flywheel that was really creating a market in large part was the Cold War and military spending and the U.S. government was ordering up these esoteric high-tech things. But more broadly, in the commercial side, yeah, there was a commercial computer industry in the 50s and 60s. A huge one, it was almost entirely headquartered on the East Coast. And that's another thing that kind of

gets lost in the story. You have these really early, super important milestones of computing that are happening on the East Coast. I mean, a really important part of this whole history is the very first all-digital programmable computer is the ENIAC, which is developed at the University of Pennsylvania, Penn and Philly. It comes out in 1946. The inventors of that try to commercialize it, Penn makes it super, super difficult for them to do so. And ultimately, they kind of leave their jobs at the university and they don't have kind of financing. They, you know, look, the university, other kind of financiers there were not that interested in investing. They commercialize as this startup called Univac, which creates a commercial version of this. This is really the first, you know,

in the very early days of computing, Univac kind of was synonymous with computer and the way that Kleenex is with facial tissue and Google is with search, right? Yeah. Just for a brief period. But they had to kind of go on their own. And, you know, it's a really good example of this, well, we don't want to, you know, we don't want to invest in this new thing. Like, what are you going to do with that?

How are you going to make money? And whereas on the West Coast, there was, you know, a different, you know, it was less, there were fewer established institutions that were ready to stay, no. and there was now this big stream of money coming in, particularly in places like California, that had to do with military spending. And so that's a wave that these small firms got to ride. Yeah, no, that's cool. They kind of, they wrote it, and then they created Silicon Valley. And, like, now everything's there. Now it's, California's, what, the fifth largest economy in the world or something incredible like that? Yeah, it's enormous. You know, it also points to, like, we can also look and see kind of what matters and what doesn't, right?

So, you know, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and business leaders have, you know, forever been complaining about California taxes. And they are high for sure. And certainly here in my state of Washington, there's, it's definitely been a regional advantage that there's no state income tax and other things that kind of tech firms have used to leverage to recruit people and to grow. But look, if we really look at the sort of what is the thing, if high taxes were a deterrent to a high tech class. cluster growing and innovation happening, then California would have been, wouldn't have begun at the first place. You know, they're kind of other things. So this non-compete story is a great example of there are other things, a state, conditions that a state law can create or local business climate that are actually more important than whether it's a high tax or a low tax place. And of course, if you're a really low tax region, then, you know, I mean, taxes pay for public amenities. So one of the things that grew California, certainly in the middle part of the 20th century, was, yes, it was high

taxes, but they were spending a lot on building roads and schools and infrastructure and all these things that were making it pretty easy and interesting. You know, people were drawn to migrate to California because of that. Yeah. I know. And they did not go to Texas. Well, we had TI. We had TI at Tandy. Yeah. I mean, look, a lot of people went to Texas. It's great. Yeah. Another reminder, too, is like, you know, people like, like, oh, Texas is the new high-tech capital. And you're like, well, actually, they've been doing that stuff for a long time. Yeah. Like, this is, you know, nothing's as new as you think. That's the other thing. History professors always like to chime in, be like, this isn't new?

We've been doing this for a while. It's true, though. Yeah. I think a lot of people in California are like, oh, you're making non-competes out, getting rid of non-competes. That's not new. We've been doing that for decades. Since the beginning. Since 1870. Well, so it sounds like non-competes are just kind of one part of this big puzzle for the development of Silicon Valley, but they really did enable a lot of these firms to be much more creative, to let people bounce around, to create that kind of ingenuity that we think of as like a hallmark of the region. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think, you know, what it underscores, I think, for wherever you are is the tech industry,

it's not about necessarily the tech, it's about the people, right? The people who create the ideas. And that, you know, the moving back and forth and the willingness to, you know, I think what it also does is it's not to say that Silicon Valley has not always been an extremely competitive place. These, all these little chip makers in the 60s, you would not, I mean, the elbows were sharp. Yeah. And they were, they were hustling hard to out to outrun one another. But you do create kind of this collaborative ecosystem of people, you know, just a lot of connective tissue across firms. And that over time is really generative.

If you actually look at the – I love Steve Jobs once the metaphor that he used, which I really love, is talk – he talks about passing the baton. Yeah. Which is one generation kind of passes the baton to the next in tech. And so that's the other thing. There's kind of this lateral movement during – a certain tech generation. And then it also turns over to, you know, the people making microchips are the mentors and the investors of the people making desktop computers. And then those people are the ones investing and mentoring the early.com companies and on and on. And so that kind of collaboration

across entities and across time is a real secret of Silicon Valley that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle because we think present tense and future tense is what matters, but actually time and the time it is taken to create this very distinctive community that non-competees helped foster that in the very beginning. That's really what makes it go. Well, thank you, Margaret. This was super, super informative. I appreciate it. You taken the time to come chat. Well, delighted to join you. Thanks. We're going to take another break, and when we're back, we're going to be doing the hotline. Stay tuned.

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And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling. A-ha moments and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to be bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have

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Hi, this is Jay from Ann Arbor, Michigan. And like many of the Vergecast hosts, I am excited about USBC. And as more things use USBC connectors, the problem I'm starting to face is that I don't have enough ports to plug everything in. And it doesn't seem like there are as many hubs available as there are for USBA connectors. I've read that some of that has to do with the chips that are required to make that happen. But I was wondering what your take was. Thanks a lot.

Jay, we're going to go ahead and talk to Sean Hollister, who I like to think is the Verges USBC expert. Sean, what's happening with USBC? Hi, Jay. You're absolutely right. It does have something to do with the chips. You see, there are a lot of companies who want to make USBC hubs, who want to make USBC docking stations, but all of them, or very, very many of them, rely on chips from a smaller number of suppliers. And so these chip companies are like, well, what do people want out of a USBC dock? And most of them say they want a single cable that lets their laptop plug into legacy peripherals.

And so USBA continues to be hugely popular. Ethernet doesn't have a replacement yet. Cameras have not really switched from big SD cards to micro SD cards. And so all of those things are competing for space and for capabilities in the chips and dock. that are made. And so, like, if I want to get USBC ports, right now I'm kind of limited to Thunderbolt four docks. If you want to pay $300, $400, maybe $200 if you're lucky, for a Thunderbolt 4 docking station,

they're out there, Caldigit, plugable, even Anchor mix, some of them. Each one of them is going to make some kind of tradeoffs. Either you're going to pay a lot of money, if you want something that's give to you, like, three downstream USB 4 Thunderbolt 4 ports, or you're going to pay for a lot less capability. I saw one at an anchor that'll give you like two additional USBC ports out of your laptop, but even that costs $200. It's a lot of money. Only two extra ports, $100 a port. Yeah, because when you're talking about Thunderbolt 4, people assume, oh, yeah, this person's

going to plug in a bunch of high speed like external GPUs and heavy-duty storage. It's going to be ray to rays. But then they're also going to have to go to Intel generally and get some fancy chips to do that. Each one of those chips generally gives you two ports on a docking station. So there'll be one port that'll be the one that goes into your laptop, and then you get one downstream port out of that. And then your second chip will probably get you your other two downstream ports. So you'll have your, maybe your monitor will come out of that, and you'll have your rate array,

and then you'll have maybe your second monitor or some other fancy USBC device. on the other end, but you don't get a lot. Yeah, that sounds like nothing. So if Jay or myself wants to add like four or five USBC ports, we basically just need to go spend $300 on a Thunderbolt 4 dock and hope? I really wish it was different. That's kind of the case right now. If you go to Amazon, you search for a USBC hub,

most of them are just going to have a single USB connector that plugs into your laptop. And then if there's a second USBC on it, it might not even be for data. It'll just be a power input. So they figure you're going to plug your laptops U.S.C.PC power adapter into the hub, and then you can get the path through to your laptop. That way you get that glorious, oh, yeah, I can plug this single cable with my laptop. I get my power.

It's charging. It's going to plug my old flash drive in. I can plug my HDMI monitor in. I can plug my Ethernet in for wired Internet. They don't expect that you're going to have all this high-speed additional peripherals. And then if you do, you're going to be willing to spend an extra, you know, $100, $200 to $300 for the Thunderbolt 4 episode. Is there any hope?

Like, is there something, did something get announced at CES? Where there are rumors? Are we going to get any relief? I wish, I think what it's going to take, I think what it's really going to take is when we have passed by some of these old legacy peripherals, when people have accepted, you don't really need the Internet anymore. You're going to be fine with Wi-Fi. We're getting to the point where Wi-Fi is getting a little more reliable.

You can get back channel three, you know, you're 60-gigger. Hertz band so that you have that dedicated high-speed short-range connection to your router or to your VR headset or something. Maybe you don't need that port anymore in the future. Maybe microSD becomes more reliable. You don't need that. But right now, if you are a cheap hub manufacturer in Shenzhen that's trying to put out a whole bunch of hubs for all of these Alphabet Soup brands and even some of the brands you know about, you're probably going to be buying that chip from a supplier that wants to supplying all of those legacy, those, you know, those peripherals that people want to plug in that are a little bit more old school. Okay, so people like JAA myself, I am almost completely out

of USBC ports on my Macs Studio at this point. We just need to like hope that these suppliers start to recognize there's more of us and we're a market too. I think there's that. I also think laptops will probably just have more of these ports in the future. What frustrates me to no end is the USBC state on desktop PCs where, yeah, you know if you're getting a desktop, you want to plug a lot of things into it. But the last two motherboards I bought with USBC ports on them, they would only have a single port on the back of the machine. And what frustrates the heck out of me is you know how there's like an I.O panel you need to stick into the back of your PC case to like hold all those ports and keep them from like just electrically touching the sides of your case.

those things are generally springy enough that when I stick a USBC cable into the back, it just pushes it right back out again. It like bounces right out. It frustrates the heck out of me. If you really just do need more USBC ports and you don't care about how fast they are, I have seen a bunch of one port to four port USBC hubs on the internet, that it is one thing that the chips are being made for. Just know that they can be really slow.

Some of them are just 5 gigabits per second. That's USB 3.0 speeds out of your USBC port. I hate that. Well, thank you, Sean. Jay, I wish the news was better. Sorry. Okay, we're going to kick it to this next question, which I've got Dan Seafruit here to answer. Hello. Roll the tape, Andrew. Hey, Vergecast Hotline. My name is Frank from North Carolina. I have two laptops, one work and one personal, and they both use Thunderboat for. What is a good option to easily switch between the two of them seamlessly without paying for one of those? ridiculously expensive KVMs that support Thunderbolt 4.

Is there a quick and easy solution to this? All right, thanks. Bye. All right, Dan. Can you help Frank out? Frank, thank you for this question. I love this question. It is a problem that's near and dear to my heart, so I relate very well to it.

I will say I don't know exactly your setup here. So I'm not sure if you want to use both of these laptops with the same monitor, mouse, and keyboard, or if you just want to be able to switch between inputs on them. So we're going to explore multiple options for you, and hopefully you can find something that works for you. So for starters, you mentioned a Thunderbolt 4 dock. If there's a Thunderbolt 4 dock that has a built-in KVM switch into it, I don't know of it. All of those expensive, fancy docs that you see on the market with lots of ports and they cost about $3 to $400 or so, you can't actually switch between inputs on those. You can output to multiple displays, but you really can only connect one computer at a time to them.

So that's not really the solution. There is a few hardware options for you. There's a basic KVM switch. KVM stands for keyboard, video, and mouse. They've been around for eons. The modern ones these days use HDMI inputs and USB ports. And so you would just kind of, if your laptops have just USBC on them, you would have to do USBC to HTML and get a converter cable,

which is not too hard to do. But basically you plug both laptops into those. You plug your one mouse and your one keyboard into it, and you plug your one display into it. And then you have a little switch on. the switch itself to switch between them. So you use one at a time and you just kind of switch between them. So that's a very simple hardware solution for you.

There is one silly USBC 4 switch. USB 4 switch that uses USBC ports. It's a $1,000 dev board. It takes two USBC inputs and it outputs to one USBC plug. And then you can switch between them. That's an option. I'm just saying I'm laying out all the options here. It's not maybe one I'd recommend.

But it's an option. And then the last hardware solution for you is a lot of big monitors have the ability to accept multiple inputs, whether that's multiple display inputs from two different computers, or also you can connect your keyboard and mouse directly to the monitor. And they have built in KVM switches on them. And so if your screen is big enough, you can split the screen. You usually see this with like the ultra-wide screens. And so one side can be your personal laptop, the other side can be your work laptop, and there's a KVM switch built into the monitor itself so that you can use the same mouse and keyboard to switch between them. So that's another hardware option for you. But if you already have a display already, you don't want to buy a new one or anything like that, there are some software options.

Yeah, software. Yes, software. The first one is universal control on a Mac. It only works between two Macs and they have to share an ICloud account. I'm going to guess that you don't have two Macs here. Most people have a work laptop and a personal laptop don't have two Macs in the same scenario. Maybe you do, but if you don't, or you do also have to have them both on the same ICloud account, which might be precluded by one of the B0 work options.

So universal control works really cool, but it's probably not a practical option here. Another software option is called Logitech flow. If you happen to have a modern keyboard or mouse from Logitech, there's an app that you can download on both computers. It works across Windows and Mac. that will let you do the universal control thing, basically. You just move your cursor over to the edge of the screen, and it passes it over to the next one, and then you click on it,

and your keyboard will work over on that computer, and you can move your mouse back over to the other side. So if you have the right Logitech stuff, you can do that. There's a couple of apps I found that don't require specific hardware. They're called ShareMouse and Synergy, and they both appear to do the same kind of thing. I've used Synergy. Yeah, if you have your computer, like, open and on

and plugged into separate displays, you can use the same mouse and keyboard and just move it between them with these apps installed. Share Mouse is about $81. It does have a free trial that you can try out to see if it works. Synergy is a little bit cheaper.

It's about $30. I haven't personally used either of them. Alex has used Synergy, apparently. I've used Synergy. It was years ago. It technically gets the job done. Is it the prettiest? No.

But it works. Yeah, I mean, it'll work. If we're trying to do this on a shoestring budget, $30 is not bad to spend. It just doesn't ever feel as natural as using the monitor solution you offered or those hardware solutions. Yeah, hardware solutions are probably the way to go. I'm going to recommend the easiest setup. And I'm going to assume that you've got some space on your desk. I think the easiest setup is to use an external display with your main laptop, which would be like probably your work laptop, right?

the one that you're spending the most time on. You install one of the apps like Synergy onto both computers, so you can share your mouse and your keyboard, and then you just leave your personal laptop open on the side of your desk. And when you want to move over to your personal laptop to send a Discord message or an I message or whatever it is you're doing over there, you just move your cursor over, you do it,

and then you move back to your work one. That's on your big display. I think that's probably the most practical, easiest setup. An alternate option for you, if you're not wanting to use your, work laptop and your personal laptop at the same time. Like, this is kind of like, you're like, I've got a work laptop that I do work on, but then I've got a gaming laptop that I only play games on.

You're probably not like having those active at the same time. But what you do there is then you buy a either a Thunderbolt or a USBC dock that's got a lot of ports on it. You plug your display and all your peripherals into it. You plug your mouse, your keyboard, Ethernet, whatever, your speakers. Everything goes into that dock. And then to switch between the computers, you just unplug one cable out of the one and plug it into the other when it's time to play games or something like that. That's what I personally do.

I don't usually use two laptops at the same time. When I'm working, I got my work one set up. If I do want to play games, I pull out the gaming laptop and I just switch the cable over from the dock. So those are my solutions. I don't think any of them are super elegant. I will say, synergy has gotten prettier than the last time I used it, circa like, 2013. It also looks prettier than Share Mouse. Share Mouse looks pretty basic. You can sometimes find, I think there might be an open source one as well out there, but most of them tend to be a little buggy. And it usually requires you to run a server essentially. Yeah, the way those work is basically over an ad hoc Wi-Fi.

So you kind of have to have like a, there is some kind of like internet like communication. And you have to install the software on that work computer, which depending on how tight you are, with your IT department. Yeah. Could be a problem. Exactly. Yeah, there's definitely lots of caveats here in terms of like what your specific setup is and like what you'll be allowed to do. I don't think your IT department can get in the way of you using a basic hardware KVM switch like that because that's just a matter of plugging things in and it's got a hardware switch on it that you just click the button to switch between them.

So that might be the most practical solution for you. All right. Well, Frank, please let us know how the KVM hunt goes. Dan, thank you so much. Good luck. And somebody, please make a Thunderbolt for KVM Doc Switch. I will buy it. Somebody do it, please. Okay, so our next question is from Mark. Let's give it a listen. Hey, Verge fan, it's Mark. I am in Soho in New York City, and I see this ad going up by meta.

It says set up a new era of personal privacy with automatic end-to-end encryption from WhatsApp. And I just want to know, what's the difference between that end-to-end encryption and all the other ones? Is it real? Am I going to get screwed? Is it good? Please help. Thanks. Okay.

So to answer this question, we had to go to somebody who's been writing about a bunch. Mitchell Clark is what's app real. Yeah. So the TRDR is kind of interesting. End-to-end encryption is actually good. And it will almost certainly not screw you over. That's not the same thing as saying that it's immune to surveillance, if that's what you're worried about, because that's kind of like an entirely different thing.

So to go a bit deeper. of that, you asked how its encryption is different from the other apps. And the kind of interesting thing that I've found is that it is not. At least when it comes to Signal, which is kind of like the gold standard for private messaging apps, it uses literally the same protocol as Signal. So in terms of whether Meta or the government would be able to read your messages, you should be totally fine using WhatsApp. Now, the thing that the ad doesn't tell you is that in terms of privacy, are 100% better options out there. That's because WhatsApp can and almost certainly does collect metadata on your conversations.

So while it doesn't know what you're saying, it does have a record of who you were talking with when you were talking with them, you know, if you all exchange pictures or whatever. Like that stuff, it can tell. That seems not great for people who want end in encryption. I'm not saying that it's like lying by a mission. It is technically private. It does have end-to-end encryption. for your messages and those contents.

But the metadata, it can see. And it also collects things like your location information, device information, stuff like that. And that data is super valuable. Governments can and have asked matter to hand it over before. And so if you're the type of person who's concerned about data collection and overall privacy, then that's something you really want to consider, not just with WhatsApp, but with a bunch of different apps that say that they support. end-to-end encryption because they can, but there's more to that story. So I message in OCS,

it's kind of the same deal with those. The one app that doesn't do that is Signal. So there's a feature in it that makes it so that even the company running the app can't tell who you're messaging, which is pretty solid. So like in terms of real word stuff, meta can read what's on the outside of your envelope that you're mailing to someone, your thank you codes for Christmas presents, which you should be sending right now. Meta can read. the address, your address, who you're sending it to, and so can a bunch of other people who make enter and encrypted messaging apps. Signal cannot. Neither of them can see what's in that envelope, but there's a difference between how much data they are collecting. So like WhatsApp, I message.

That's going to make sense for people who are talking with their family and friends and maybe just don't want the world to know what all salacious things they get up to in their chats. And then Signal is like, no, I don't want you to know anything. Right. If you are, I was going to try to come up with an example. I don't want the FBI to burst into my house. I'm going to leave it very vague. But like the one rub of this is that if you have friends and family using a messaging app,

that's probably WhatsApp. Like the network effect with these messaging apps is really, really strong. So you're not, even if you did want to, you know, convince your mom to use signal, you're probably not going to have a whole lot of luck with that. It's usually a losing battle trying to get people to adopt new messaging apps. So if you are wondering, have people wanting me to use WhatsApp, does it have this bare minimum level of safety? The answer is yes. And it should be totally fine if you're not trying to blow the whistle on illegal government actions or corporate espionage.

Like for that, maybe choose something different. I love that. All right. Thank you, Mitchell. Yeah. Okay, here's the final question for today. So number one, David Pierce, you're not my friend. You didn't invite me to your Christmas party.

So let's get through that. Wait, am I supposed to see my name? Anyway, but number two, voice assistants. Like, what's going on with voice assistants? It seems like nobody's doing anything interesting with them anymore. Is it because they can't be monetized? Can they please fix theory? Please.

All right. Well, David is not here to invite you to use Christmas party or answer the question, but I've got Jen Tuohy here. Hi. Hi, Jen. Like, what's going on? Are things happening in voice assistant land? Well, it's an interesting question there.

Multi-part. Honestly, you know, I think voice assistants are really quite good right now. I think we've kind of come to expect a lot from them because our other personal devices are so, you know, intuitive and responsive to us. But voice assistants, especially in the smart home, kind of have a harder job than, say, like your smartphone or your computer. where, you know, we've become used to such easy interaction because voice assistants generally lack the context that, say, a smartphone does

and the attempts that companies have made to sort of personalise the various voice assistants whose names I'll try not to say too many times, so not to activate everyone's devices. But those attempts to sort of personalise them have been, have haven't worked that well, especially in multi-people households. So you may say something to your voice assistant like, you know, play my playlist and it doesn't know who you are. And so those things, that's been a bit tricky. Each company has tried to address that,

but more often than not, it ends up just being frustrating for the user. And generally, I would say, of the three main voice assistants, each kind of has its pluses and minuses. You know, like Amazon's has a very wide range of capabilities, but that can get hard because it's not specific enough. You know, you might,

I've had examples where I've asked the assistant to, you know, turn on a light switch or do some smart home thing and it'll end up sort of telling me the latest news headlines because it gets confused. So, you know, that and that's frustrating. And because we're so used to things, you know, technology has become so advanced, we're used to things doing exactly what we expect. And voice assistants are like, have lagged behind there. You know, Google is really good for general knowledge, you know, things like directions, traffic, weather. And then Apple's assistant is so well integrated. into the Apple ecosystem, you know, they've just launched some new capabilities, like with the HomePod that we

just wrote about this week, you know, you can ask your HomePod mini to find your husband if he's gone missing. So, you know, like find my on your iPhone now, instead of having to pull out the iPhone, you can just say, hey, S, where's my husband? And it will give you direct, you know, give you even directions to go find him. And, you know, they are adding new features. But in general, the problem is no one voice assistant does all of these things well. You know, you kind of have to pick or choose. And the caller did say specifically, please fix Siri. And that's a leading question. You know, I'd love to know what specifically his problem is with Siri. Personally, as I've written about, I do find Siri to sort of actually be one of the better voice assistants for smart home

control, but anything else or largely anything else, and it does kind of spin its wheels a lot. And I think a lot of them have this problem where you're waiting on them to do what you've asked because they're often relying on a cloud connection. And that, you know, gets frustrating for you, sitting there waiting for it to turn the lights on or off or read you the news headlines. Because, you know, one of the issues is in the smart home is if you rely too much on the cloud, the voice assistant has to send the command and then get the data and bring it back and then do its thing. And, you know, in my mind, I think voice control works best when it's local, when the connection, everything it's working on is local. And that's also sometimes why you'll find using the voice assistant on a phone, the ones that work well on a phone, is quicker than using it with smart home speakers.

And this is actually something, and, you know, you can't have me on the podcast without me mentioning the word matter. This is something for the smart home, I think matter may actually help with because it will have. help bring all our control of smart home devices locally. Devices will be able to talk directly to each other rather than having to go to the cloud and talk directly to voice assistants. So, you know, that may be an area we're going to see some improvement. It's going to take a while, though. I think voice assistants often get the blame because they're the control point.

Like you get mad at your smartphone when, you know, a website's not working or an app's not working, when in fact it's quite likely that it's like a device, network issue or some connectivity that's sort of broken in the background and it's not actually their fault. But that's why you get, shoot the messenger. Yeah, I use S and S sometimes doesn't want to connect to the internet and it's unclear why and it just likes to return. I can't do that right now. And I'm like, but you can. I know you can. And you just did it like 20 minutes ago. Why can't you do it now? do it now. And it's so frustrating. And I know intellectually, something's going on here. I need to troubleshoot the Wi-Fi. But no, I'm still mad at this little tiny speaker in my kitchen. I want to

throw it out of the window. Do you think we're going to see more use of these conversational AIs that we've seen like ChatGBT, GBT? Do you think those are going to become more involved in these voice assistants? Or are they going to continue to be this place where we ask very specific kind of robotic questions to them and they give us those very tend answers. Yeah. And so that's another area. I think people get frustrated is you have to use, for the most part, very specific nomenclature. And, you know, if you just vary it instead of saying like every day, you say every night and it doesn't know what you're talking about, it is tricky. It also makes it hard for people in your home who aren't used to using voice assistants to control things because they may say, you know,

turn on the lamp instead of turn on the light. And the voice. doesn't know the answer. And these kind of new innovations around AI is very interesting. And we had a great piece on the on the site this week, sort of looking. I think someone created a really cool voice assistant using, yes. And that was amazing. And it looked and it was like, yeah, this could be the sort of Nirvana for voice assistants. But I think people rightly pointed out, when you don't have a tightly controlled ecosystem for a voice assistant, it could get messy and

scary very quickly. Especially, like, you know, I posted this question on Twitter a little while ago. Like, what is it that annoys you most about your voice assistant? And an old colleague of mine said, well, when it plays non-todler-friendly versions of old McDonald's like, you know, you don't, there are times when you want control, you just don't want the whole wide world of artificial intelligence streaming through your smart speaker and into the ears of your three-year-old toddler. So, you know, we kind of need this control mechanism.

And, you know, we need these companies to sort of be able to provide the exact information we want and not go off onto weird tangents. But, you know, it's a hard problem to solve. I'm not an AI expert, but I'm sure our colleague James Vincent would be able to, would agree with me that, you know, this type of natural language processing, this type of, you know, being able to adapt to the way we speak to a voice assistant. Nailing that down and getting that right is incredibly hard. You know, the simplest things in life are a lot harder to do in technology than you would think. On the monetization front, which is the other part of his question, you know, there's one of the three that's sort of the prime target here. Amazon's assistant is constantly trying to sell us things. Yes.

It's a tricky world. I don't, when you think about what we're getting from a voice assistant, it is kind of surprising that we're not having to pay for it. I mean, the functionality that you're getting, you know, it's like, you know, the older dash. I don't know if it's old, but in the tech world, you know, if you're not paying for it, then you're the product. So that's something with Siri and Google Assistant, you know, it's a feature of their hardware. So it's a feature of the smartphone or the smart speaker and those companies are monetizing in different ways. But with Amazon's, you know, their main monetization strategy is buy products from us. So we are going to see more of that.

I'm very sure in the future with the voice assistant in your home. So just be aware when you're picking which one you want to bring into your home that that one is the one that's most likely to see more monetization in the future, which already does. Start trying to sell your stuff. Yep. Well, that's one of the reasons I went with Siri, honestly, is I knew there was a little bit more mindfulness of privacy

and unlikely for me to be monetized in my deal. to necessarily be monetized, or at least in ways that are very visible to me. And then on the flip side, though, Siri doesn't do as much as Amazon's or Google does. And that's why, because it doesn't know as much about you because you've chosen for that reason. So, you know, as I said at the beginning, the three do things very differently and in different ways. And in a way, that's good because you can choose which one. And the ultimate, you know, in the ideal world, there'll be one that can do it all. And, you know, it was interesting at CES this year, Amazon was showing off some integrations using its voice assistant

in different places. So it's, now you can actually get, or you will be able to have both Amazon assistant and Apple's assistant in vehicle infatement system. So you can choose which one you talk to. And then they also partnered with Josh AI, which is a really interesting, entirely local based home voice control system. Oh, cool. So that's kind of an interesting. partnership because you're getting the local control. But then when you want to, you can, you know, reach out to the cloud and, you know, get the latest Buffalo Bills sports score or whatever it is that you want. But it runs like natively on your your home hardware. You don't have to. That's what they were saying. Yeah. So Josh AI has its own little speakers that you can put around

your home. And to be clear, Josh AI is is a very high end, quite an expensive system that you would add to a high end. I got all excited. It may become a little more accessible at some point. But yeah, so they have these, I think they're called nanom microphones and you can just kind of put them around your home. From my understanding was, and this isn't out yet, but this is they were announcing the partnership. My understanding is that there will be integration so you can ask the same device for either Josh AI or Amazon's assistant. And depending on what you want to, what kind of information you want or what actions you want to take. So there are developments and movements in voice assistance, and I think they'll continue to grow and get more useful, but probably also still be something you want to yell at every now and then.

And I have been told by engineers at Amazon that they do pay attention when you swear at it. Oh, no, that's very bad for me. It's registered as a negative customer feedback. Oh, boy. Well, I'm going to have to go apologize. to all my voice assistants now. Thank you, Jen. I appreciate you coming on.

You're welcome. And that's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you for listening. As always, there's a ton more coverage on everything we talked about at theverge.com. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, book recommendations, you can always email the Vergecast at Vergecast at theverge.com. And of course, if you have questions, please call the hotline. It's 866 Verge 11.

Again, that's 866 Verge 11. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Norie Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Mentors is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is The Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil and I know will be back on Friday

to chat with more of the Verge crew about whatever is happening this week, so see you then.