The high stakes for AI Alexa

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 [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 0:32Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Dr. Chast, the flagship podcast of being free with Prime. Who knows? Maybe it's $20. Maybe it's Prime is $15 and this comes for the ride.

• 0:42David Pierce?

  That one feels slightly too plausible to me, and I don't like it.

• 0:45Nilay Patel?

  That we're free with Prime?

• 0:46David Pierce?

  Free with Prime? Like, we might be. I honestly don't know.

• 0:49Nilay Patel?

  At the rate, we're going.

• 0:50David Pierce?

  What is free with Prime? Yeah.

• 0:52Nilay Patel?

  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 your friend Neil, and David Pierce is here.

• 1:00David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  And I've got a guest next to you, David Immelt, the co-host of the Waveform Podcast, is joining me today.

• 1:06David Pierce?

  How's it going? Good to be here.

• 1:07Nilay Patel?

  I just like, I just want more human beings physically present with me.

• 1:11David Pierce?

  Understandable.

• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  And Pearce won't say yes to that idea.

• 1:14David Pierce?

  We're legally not allowed to be in the same room.

• 1:16Nilay Patel?

  You need to stay in your green screen basement.

• 1:18David Pierce?

  No, it's like, you know how they like, won't put the whole group on a plane? Like, just in case something hap- like, you and I can't be in the same room just in case. We have to be several hundred miles away.

• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  This isn't the right time in America for plane jokes, David. I was just on a flight and it landed and everybody burst into applause. And that is a, you want to, you want to temp check on the country. It's the amount of clapping when planes land is going up.

• 1:44David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  All right, a lot happened this week.

• 1:55David Pierce?

  Wait, first, Neil, you have to tell us where you went on vacation because as always happens when you go on vacation, um, some single digit, but not insignificant percentage of the Vergecast audience believes that you have quit your job and will never ever come back. Uh, so can we just, can we just tell the people about your vacation and that you have triumphantly returned?

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 2:17David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 2:18Nilay Patel?

  That's the answer.

• 2:19David Pierce?

  Is Neil back? Who knows?

• 2:20Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 2:27David Pierce?

  I literally got an email last week that was like, well, Neil seems like he's about to retire. And then they just sort of went on with the rest of their question.

• 2:36Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it might be, um, you never know. Uh, no, we went to Turks and Caicos. It was, uh, um, it's like Max's winter break. So we went to the beach and we sat on island and then everyone else on that island at that beach was also from New York, 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 conch shell, but we did the whole thing.

• 3:01David Pierce?

  It was just a lot of like little kids going, I'm walking here.

• 3:05David Pierce?

  On the beach.

• 3:05Nilay Patel?

  Basically. Max made a bunch of friends. It was delightful. My phone service was bad, which was important.

• 3:11David Pierce?

  Perfect.

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

  This is a thing I look for in destinations now is, is AT&T's roaming agreement not quite as rock solid as it should be? That's where we're going.

• 3:19David Pierce?

  I use the satellite texting feature on the iPhone quite a bit in the last few months.

• 3:24Nilay Patel?

  That's not great, man.

• 3:25David Pierce?

  Well, yeah, it's, it's great to not have the service. It is surprising that it works at all.

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:31David Pierce?

  But, you know, I, I'm probably Apple's like perfect boy for that because no one has ever used it except for me. So.

• 3:38Nilay Patel?

  Have you seen the conspiracy theories? They, 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?

• 3:49Speaker 04

  But, yeah, I don't, I have Google Fi, you know? So I'm just using the baseline, Apple-free feature. Probably has nothing to do with Elon, but...

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  That's very good. Um, does it work well?

• 3:59Speaker 04

  Oh, it, well, mm.

• 4:00Nilay Patel?

  Is it RCS? Is it SMS? Is it, what's the story?

• 4:03Speaker 04

  Well, it only works with iMessage.

• 4:05Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  Which is very dumb, extremely dumb. But it works fine.

• 4:10Nilay Patel?

  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 gonna die."

• 4:17Speaker 04

  That's a great question. I think in the emergency SOS, like, 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 if it has like a glass roof or something, or if there is one single tree, you cannot, uh, you cannot text via satellite. So it, 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.

• 4:55Nilay Patel?

  Hey, that's great.

• 4:56Speaker 04

  #notsponsored, so, yeah.

• 4:58Nilay Patel?

  See, it's spicy here in 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.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, roaming agreements sound terrible. I've had Google Fi since like 2017, um, 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.

• 5:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:21Speaker 04

  In other countries.

• 5:22David Pierce?

  But then Google periodically forgets that you exist for several years at a time.

• 5:26Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 5:27David Pierce?

  And you're like, "Can I have new features, Google?" And Google says, "No, no."

• 5:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:30David Pierce?

  You can have nothing.

• 5:31Speaker 04

  And then they just rebrand the name of the service and move on.

• 5:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:35Speaker 04

  Don't give you any new features.

• 5:36Nilay Patel?

  That seems right, right?

• 5:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:37Nilay Patel?

  Uh, lots to talk about this week. There is an Amazon Alexa event. They announced Alexa Plus, we should talk about that. Panas Panay, 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 in my entire life. Very good, very Panas. Only me, by the way. That only happened once and it was to me. He looked me dead in the eye and 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.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  Did they put it up? Uh, there wasn't a live stream.

• 6:12Nilay Patel?

  There wasn't a live stream.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was really painful for us when we were trying to cover this.

• 6:15Nilay Patel?

  I didn't realize. I just said, go watch the video because I just assume everything is available, but I don't think.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 6:19David Pierce?

  Well, and I think Panos, 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.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  We just read your live blog.

• 6:32Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, I might be lying about Panos Fane looking me dead in the eye in the middle of his presentation and saying, hey, how are you doing? But I promise you it happened.

• 6:39Speaker 04

  There are like 20 people that can confirm that.

• 6:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Um, 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'll be exciting. That's what I meant to say.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  I don't know about that.

• 6:50Nilay Patel?

  Uh, 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 didn't forget about you. It's a, it's packed show. Let's start with Alexa. Uh, it's what we expected. I will tell you, uh, Panos 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 ChatGPT or LLMs in general, and they thought, boy, this is how the, these voice assistants should have worked this whole time. And now they announced a version of Alexa that approximates that.

• 7:26Speaker 04

  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 it to something.

• 7:33Nilay Patel?

  It is a big deal. Um, I think the most important thing to note here is outside of phones, Alexa has the biggest user base, installed base of devices that have AI now.

• 7:50Nilay Patel?

  Which is just, nothing else has gotten there.

• 7:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:53Nilay Patel?

  Like, Google has sort of rolled out some stuff to some bits and bobs of phone apps.

• 7:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:58Nilay Patel?

  But like, Google Home devices do not have Gemini.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  True.

• 8:02Nilay Patel?

  Apple HomePods, they have Siri, which.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  Which.

• 8:06Nilay Patel?

  It's not a thing.

• 8:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:07Nilay Patel?

  Um, there is the humane pin. Dear sweet humane pin.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  Humane, yeah. HP stands for humane pin, by the way.

• 8:16David Pierce?

  My, my close, personal friend, my dead humane pin.

• 8:19Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Panos did not know that the humane pin had been canceled when I said. I was like, you've got the big installed base and, you know, it's not like you were sweating the humane pin. And he's like, well, they're part of HP now. And I was like, no, they're not. That was the end of that.

• 8:34Nilay Patel?

  But like that, the idea was that voice assistants would be this big platform shift. We'd create a new generation of devices that would take over the phone that has absolutely not played out.

• 8:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 8:45Nilay Patel?

  But there's a lot of Echo devices out there. And so this is kind of a big deal, like just from that standpoint.

• 8:51David Pierce?

  I think it hasn't played out, actually doesn't give these things quite enough credit. 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.

• 9:06Nilay Patel?

  And their lights.

• 9:06David Pierce?

  And it's largely true, but like the, the idea that people would interact with technology in a different and voice-first way, like, happened. It, 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, we can argue for days about how useful it is. And I think the answer is it's not that useful, but like it, it worked. Like, Amazon did the thing. And now the question is like, can we take this behavior that we've trained people and point it at something?

• 9:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:52David Pierce?

  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, 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. Now we have to give them something to do with it.

• 10:16Nilay Patel?

  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 then people tried to do that and it didn't work because the

• 10:30David Pierce?

  Classic.

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  Because, and I, 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.

• 10:42David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  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 L O M. 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 is 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.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  So like that, 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 it a command and then it figures out how to do it. And then they didn'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.

• 11:51David Pierce?

  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.

• 12:01Nilay Patel?

  No, no, that's the, this is what, no, 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.

• 12:13David Pierce?

  No, I agree. It's like,

• 12:14Nilay Patel?

  And what they mean there is like, there's an app.

• 12:17David Pierce?

  It is absurd. Like, don't get me wrong.

• 12:19Nilay Patel?

  Like, everyone is just using words however they want.

• 12:22David Pierce?

  Amazon tried to make skills happen and that didn't work. And now they're trying to make experts happen.

• 12:25Nilay Patel?

  I think they wanted to not use skills again.

• 12:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, because that went so poorly.

• 12:29Nilay Patel?

  So anyway, it's the whole,

• 12:31David Pierce?

  Although ironically, skills is actually a better explanation of what Amazon is trying to do this time.

• 12:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:38David Pierce?

  Last time it was just apps. Now it's actual skills. They can just keep calling it that because no one knew they were called that before. So it's fine.

• 12:46Nilay Patel?

  They want to make this break. But it's, 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.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  I remember that event.

• 13:23Nilay Patel?

  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, 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 create smart home routines for you. So you're like, around bedtime, do bedtime stuff. And it's like, okay, I'm gonna dim the lights and play some music and turn on your security system. And we'll just like come up with some ideas.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  That will go right every time.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  I have a lot of questions about how that's gonna 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 capability. 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, we can pull apart that demo piece by piece. I would like, because it was very complicated.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  Hello to Rabbit.

• 14:25Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. So it 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 work.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  Interesting. I thought the agentic stuff was going to be a big part of this.

• 14:36Nilay Patel?

  And then the agentic stuff is they called for like a dishwasher repair.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 14:41Nilay Patel?

  So if you like run some service, like Thumbtack was the one they, and you don't want to build a bunch of APIs.

• 14:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:48Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, creating songs out of nothing.

• 15:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, where it's like, it's still, it's got to do some API stuff, but it can still click around on the website. Weird, like weird, weird stuff. And a lot of the demos of that capability.

• 15:15Nilay Patel?

  I I were less believable in the moment.

• 15:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, just like Rabbit.

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  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.

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  That happened before. Could see it happening again.

• 15:40Nilay Patel?

  Well, so Rabbit's pitch was it could go to any website.

• 15:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:43Nilay Patel?

  And really, they had just like card coded itself to like Uber and Spotify.

• 15:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  Um, Amazon's pitch is a little different, which is that people will come to Amazon.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:53Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  More so.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  To make sure the agent can use the website consistently. Or like, maybe you'll build a special or website. And that's even less of a lift than building an API, but you can still do it.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:12Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, but I do know that the straight up book my friend in Uber at JFK made no sense.

• 16:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like, no sense.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  How do I know what pickup zone to go to?

• 16:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, there are 100 things about that demo that don't make any sense. Like, and and the way I've come to think about all the agentic stuff is there's like.

• 16:28Nilay Patel?

  Tell people what the demo is, because apparently there's no live stream.

• 16:31David Pierce?

  Well, I'll I'll get there. But the 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. Is like a thing ChatGPT does all the time when you're an operator, right? That or like, scan down this page for things with five star results. These are like tractable problems for AI.

• 17:15David Pierce?

  And then there's the thing that's just like, ah, we'll figure it out. Like, 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.

• 17:32Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 17:32David Pierce?

  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 know so many people, like, it can click the dropdowns 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?

• 17:55Nilay Patel?

  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 an Uber. Why?

• 18:09David Pierce?

  Yes, right? Yes.

• 18:12Nilay Patel?

  You know, who can book an Uber?

• 18:13David Pierce?

  Anyone with a phone.

• 18:16Speaker 04

  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?

• 18:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so, in this universe, it's sort of like, just automate this job away, right? But.

• 18:44Nilay Patel?

  Right, but I'm saying, the command, I need an Uber, or I would like to have a car pick me up?

• 18:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:49Nilay Patel?

  Your hedge fund manager friend.

• 18:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:52Nilay Patel?

  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?

• 19:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  In this case, they would just, they would still just tell their own AI.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:05Nilay Patel?

  To book them a car.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:08Nilay Patel?

  It's, I, that was the part that got me, like, right there in that demo, was like, I'm gonna send my friend a car at JFK, is, in like, in a very abstract sense, it makes a lot of sense. And then keep going.

• 19:20David Pierce?

  Right. Well, but there are.

• 19:20Nilay Patel?

  But just that instinct was like very confusing to me.

• 19:22David Pierce?

  Also, David, to your point, like in that system where I'm the assistant working with somebody, odds 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, these systems exist that I know what terminal you're at and have a way to tell people what terminal. Like, right. There's a, there's a shared universe of information that exists in that world that does not exist in, my friend Molly is flying into JFK.

• 19:50Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:51David Pierce?

  And so, so, but in all of this, okay, now I have a, a series of.

• 19:56Nilay Patel?

  This super sounds like you're about to do a drug deal, by the way. Every time you say, my friend Molly is.

• 20:01David Pierce?

  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 restaurant.

• 20:09Nilay Patel?

  This is starting to come into focus.

• 20:12David Pierce?

  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?

• 20:29Speaker 04

  We need to normalize just doing really basic tasks yourself.

• 20:33David Pierce?

  Just click the button.

• 20:34Nilay Patel?

  But in the demo, it was like, I've booked a car to pick up your friend Molly at JFK. And at no point, and then I think the next command was like, text Molly this information.

• 20:44David Pierce?

  Right.

• 20:45Nilay Patel?

  Like, I, I, I'm assuming some of our listeners have never landed at JFK. It is a huge sprawling ridiculous airport. And its Uber pickup situation is among the worst, I believe, in the world.

• 20:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's very bad. Yeah. Second to LA.

• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like LA is like, you're going to a different city to get on a Uber. Have you, have you thought about standing in a parking lot six miles away from the airport? Like, that's LA.

• 21:10David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 21:11Nilay Patel?

  JFK is almost as bad.

• 21:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:13Nilay Patel?

  I, 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 then no one is, 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.

• 21:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Nilay Patel?

  And the idea that Alexa collapsed that to JFK.

• 21:29David Pierce?

  Right.

• 21:30Nilay Patel?

  Pato said, all of the demos are real. I'm, 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.

• 21:40David Pierce?

  The way that that ends is there is an Uber circling JFK endlessly, looking for your friend.

• 21:45Nilay Patel?

  Powering down the runways.

• 21:47David Pierce?

  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.

• 22:03Nilay Patel?

  And I just want to point out, by the way, this is the simplest case of the integration where everything happened with APIs.

• 22:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:10Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like Uber has APIs that are exposed to Amazon in this way. The OpenTable has APIs that are exposed to Amazon this way. The next one where it was slightly more agentic was I, to me is like where it all starts to fall apart. Right? Cause the Uber case you can solve. You, you can solve it, right? You, Molly can send you some Uber access code or give you access to her account.

• 22:35David Pierce?

  It's also the kind of thing you're never gonna do. And in the ca- in the real case where it's like, book me an 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. No, 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 this restaurant? Like that is, that is actually a thing that every step of the way is a solvable problem for AI.

• 23:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Especially if you have access to Uber. The problem, the, I'll talk about the agentic one. Cause 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, I always call this the DoorDash problem. Like these service riders get commodified in these interfaces.

• 23:45Nilay Patel?

  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 see this, it's really fascinating. It's really interesting. It's what everybody wants to have like a Butler do 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 loop. 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.

• 24:20David Pierce?

  Why would they pay part of it?

• 24:21Nilay Patel?

  Why would they do it?

• 24:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:22Nilay Patel?

  Right? Cause their margins are just crushed and now they're just a commodity provider of sandwiches.

• 24:26David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 24:27Nilay Patel?

  Next to whoever else. And like, I don't, I just don't know why they'll do it. We'll see.

• 24:30David Pierce?

  I don't know, but if you, 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.

• 24:40Nilay Patel?

  It's a great business for one company that has no growth potential.

• 24:43David Pierce?

  Right?

• 24:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like you will be forever is only as big as the sandwich market inside of the Amazon Alexa.

• 24:49David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 24:50Nilay Patel?

  Maybe that's all you aspire to and that's fine, David.

• 24:53David Pierce?

  Listen, me, I have goals.

• 24:55Nilay Patel?

  The harder one was when they were like, uh, my dishwasher, my stove is broken. Find me a repair person for my melee appliance. Meal I appliances, 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, it found a service provider with some reviews. It said they're going to come at eight in the morning, the end. And I was like, that's great. Cause 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.

• 25:39Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 25:49David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 25:50Nilay Patel?

  Cause they want to be in some SEO result for people searching for repairmen. And then you call and then they run their own business. And it's like, oh, Amazon depends on that whole ecosystem actually working.

• 26:02David Pierce?

  Right.

• 26:03Nilay Patel?

  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 middleman 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.

• 26:23David Pierce?

  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. 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.

• 27:04David Pierce?

  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 repairman, will outweigh actually having successful businesses on the other side.

• 27:34Nilay Patel?

  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?

• 27:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Nilay Patel?

  Right? If you run Thumbtack, and I'm sorry if there's like, we have a bunch of listeners who work at Thumbtack, I'm proud of you. And you're doing a good job. Every day, another victory. But, like, 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's 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 not rolling out at first.

• 28:23Nilay Patel?

  They're going to roll that over time. What is rolling out first on the Echo Show device is, is like, an even harder problem, which is we're going to automate your smartphone.

• 28:33Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, oh, like, no part of this is easy.

• 28:35David Pierce?

  Is that a harder problem?

• 28:38Nilay Patel?

  So Pato's told me, I mean, someone decoder 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 anyway it wanted to and make its own routines because that stuff has just been ready to go for so long. So they, 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.

• 29:16Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 29:17Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 29:32Speaker 04

  And you need to decide where you want to set it up on.

• 29:34Nilay Patel?

  And then you need to decide where your automations and routines live.

• 29:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 29:39Nilay Patel?

  If that's going to be Amazon forever.

• 29:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Amazon, are they on Google Home? Are they on the manufacturer's website?

• 29:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 04

  There's like five different places that you could potentially set up all of these devices.

• 29:49Nilay Patel?

  David, are you a smart home guy?

• 29:50Speaker 04

  Um, minimally. I live in a Brooklyn basement.

• 29:54Nilay Patel?

  What do you have?

• 29:55Speaker 04

  I pretty much completely put everything on HomeKit, I guess. I guess it's HomeKit.

• 30:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:02Speaker 04

  Because I have Eve stuff.

• 30:03Nilay Patel?

  Hmm.

• 30:04Speaker 04

  So, but it is only Eve smart plugs and smart blinds. Uh, I got them because of Matter, famously does not really work, which is cool. Uh, 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.

• 30:30David Pierce?

  This is the, this is the, like, what a perfect smart home scenario where you'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. Will 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.

• 31:13David Pierce?

  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. Yep. So to be able to just say to the 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 L L M 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 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.

• 31:58David Pierce?

  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.

• 32:05Nilay Patel?

  But so that even that explain what I want, that, 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.

• 32:19David Pierce?

  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, I still have this picture on my desktop for some reason from, 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, 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 product.

• 32:47Nilay Patel?

  You didn't do that when you lived in New York?

• 32:51David Pierce?

  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 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 gonna come home one day and be like Alexa, make up a bed bedtime routine. I'm so sorry to everybody who's hearing us say Alexa over and over, by the way.

• 33:14Nilay Patel?

  What you never you never just ask a computer to make it nice when you're sleepy?

• 33:17David Pierce?

  No. Yeah. Never, and no one is going to. And the idea that I'm gonna 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.

• 33:36Speaker 04

  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 to 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, which is better.

• 34:09David Pierce?

  That is better. I agree. I like that.

• 34:11Speaker 04

  But still, that is like the extrapolated version of that, right? Like, nobody, even in the home, nobody wants you to bedtime routine. I don't know what it's gonna be. Let's just find out. If that's gonna 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 it's gonna be.

• 34:31David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 34:31Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I have many things to say.

• 34:33David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 34:35Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry. I'm sorry to everyone.

• 34:38Nilay Patel?

  One, I think the hard part here is not the reduction of friction. It's letting people know that they can do this stuff at all. And that, I think, requires.

• 34:46David Pierce?

  But does anyone want to?

• 34:48Nilay Patel?

  Yes, to some to some broad approximation, just have stuff happen is a thing people want. Like, when I get home, turn on the lights is nice.

• 34:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 35:10David Pierce?

  Interesting.

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 35:21David Pierce?

  No, that's great. Someday Max is gonna go to college and like call you from her dorm room being like, why is it dark?

• 35:26Nilay Patel?

  So Jen Tuohy told us that her kids, her teenage children don't know how to use house keys.

• 35:32David Pierce?

  Oh my god.

• 35:34Nilay Patel?

  Uh, which is incredible.

• 35:35David Pierce?

  Ruining future generations, Neil.

• 35:37Nilay Patel?

  But so I got a text from Becky, uh, and she was like, the light, 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, 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.

• 35:55David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 35:55Nilay Patel?

  So it's true that people like it when things just sort of like happen the right way at the right time.

• 36:01David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 36:01Nilay Patel?

  And I think most people cannot express that in structured if then statements.

• 36:06David Pierce?

  Right.

• 36:06Nilay Patel?

  Like if I come home between these times, turn on lights when garage opens is, people do not speak that.

• 36:15David Pierce?

  And going through every single little thing in your home and having to create an if then statement is just really tedious.

• 36:20Nilay Patel?

  But you can say, when I get home, turn the lights on and Alexa figures out how to strip that for you. That I think is very powerful.

• 36:27David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  The, 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, they tell their friends about it. And then their friends buy Alexa and a bunch of smart lights. I'm 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.

• 36:49David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 36:49Nilay Patel?

  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. It can talk to you like a person and tell you stories. Also, you need to change all of the light bulbs in your house. And it's like, well, this is just, what are we doing?

• 37:10David Pierce?

  And to your point, you know what that thing was the first time around with Alexa was music? Yeah. You can have it play music just by asking for it. It was like, that was, that was the breakthrough thing.

• 37:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:19David Pierce?

  And I, I think everybody has wanted the smart home to be that next thing and it hasn't been. But 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.

• 37:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I do think there are an awful lot of people out there who have bought Govee 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.

• 37:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:47Nilay Patel?

  And to be linked together on 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, there, some of this all clicks together, but I'm still just at like, you have to get people to even want it.

• 38:04David Pierce?

  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, uh, 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.

• 38:21Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no, actually, I know how that one works. There's another demo that was scarier from the camera sense.

• 38:26David Pierce?

  Oh, okay. Tell me more. You were there, I wasn't there.

• 38:28Nilay Patel?

  Let me know if someone has walked the dog recently is, um, that's just Amazon owns a bunch of stuff, including Ring.

• 38:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 38:35Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 38:52Nilay Patel?

  So that wasn't Alexa doing any of that. That was just Ring.

• 38:54David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 38:54Nilay Patel?

  It was just being expressed through the Echo Show.

• 38:57David Pierce?

  Still a little creepy how accessible you've made the archive of that recording, but but sure, fair enough. What was the other demo?

• 39:04Nilay Patel?

  It's the same accessibleness as it is in the Ring app today.

• 39:08David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 39:08Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, especially because they, they already owned it.

• 39:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's fair.

• 39:13Nilay Patel?

  Like, the problems with Ring accessibility are like, and then they send it to the cops? Like, that's a different, right?

• 39:18David Pierce?

  There is that.

• 39:18Nilay Patel?

  But like, inside of your Ring archive, like, it gets indexed and searchable. The one you're thinking about, um, I believe, is when you see my daughter play this music, and that one is very creepy to me.

• 39:32David Pierce?

  Oh, that is creepy. I don't like that at all.

• 39:35Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 39:35David Pierce?

  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, this, this system in general, A, requires a vast amount of data to really work. And one of the things that Panos 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,

• 40:20David Pierce?

  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.

• 40:40Nilay Patel?

  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 wifi network.

• 40:52David Pierce?

  Amazon owns ERO, so sure they do.

• 40:54Nilay Patel?

  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 HomeKit automation.

• 41:02David Pierce?

  Sure, no, you're right. That's a good point.

• 41:03Nilay Patel?

  Right. So like, um, when you do, if you've ever set up a HomeKit automation.

• 41:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Nilay Patel?

  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 into iCloud are on your network. You can do, I think there's a little bit of geo fencing in there, but it's, it's the network connection that like tells you that you're home. And it's funny, cause 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.

• 41:35David Pierce?

  Ooh. She doesn't know how to turn the lights on.

• 41:37Nilay Patel?

  So she did know she turned on the lights, but they were on.

• 41:39David Pierce?

  You go home, Max is just sitting in the dark.

• 41:42Nilay Patel?

  I was like, why are all the lights wrong is actually what I said.

• 41:45David Pierce?

  She's like, now I need an iPhone.

• 41:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, basically. Uh, but it's really interesting to think, oh, they'll, they'll link Eero into this and know like network states of devices. There's a lot they can do. Uh, was this compelling to you?

• 41:59Speaker 04

  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.

• 42:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Speaker 04

  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, uh, voice lessons or like specific lessons on how to talk to the AI is a big thing. The automations, I, 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.

• 42:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  Cause 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, 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.

• 43:02David Pierce?

  That's one reason that I think pushing really hard towards screen devices is really smart for Amazon. Cause 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, is this what you want? Is this your grocery order? Like, do you want this or this? Like, it's the kind of sort of quick back and forth.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  Did they show any of that?

• 43:26Nilay Patel?

  Yes, the grocery demo in particular, one was like so far from what anyone would ever do, but also the coolest one.

• 43:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:34Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 43:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:47Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  Are people gonna do that?

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I have no idea.

• 43:59Speaker 04

  It's a big question.

• 44:00David Pierce?

  Gen 2 will and no one else.

• 44:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:02David Pierce?

  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, 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.

• 44:15Speaker 04

  That's the part that it needs to fix.

• 44:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, but then it's, and, and this is the thing, I've always gotten a kick out of this in, 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, 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 is 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.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  Right. Famously, the Google Home Mini is 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's it, every single time.

• 44:51Nilay Patel?

  Every time.

• 44:52Speaker 04

  And I just want, okay, bing, you know, that's it.

• 44:55David Pierce?

  Or just turn the light on. What if you didn't talk? And then I knew it worked because the light was on.

• 44:59Speaker 04

  What if you didn't talk? Yeah, that's a visual cue. I, 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.

• 45:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this is one of the coolest parts of the whole thing. They call them lexicons.

• 45:16Speaker 04

  I do like that.

• 45:17Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so the little blue bar on the bottom of the screen turns into like line animations. Pana told me that he wants there to be like 200, but right now there's 33 because he's approving all of them individually.

• 45:26Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 45:26Nilay Patel?

  Um, which is great. I love it.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  That's good.

• 45:29Nilay Patel?

  They're very cute. Uh, and then Alexa just sort of picks whatever kind it wants. Like 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 forth. Uh, cause you're, you know.

• 45:44David Pierce?

  I don't want to argue with.

• 45:45Nilay Patel?

  All this is great.

• 45:47David Pierce?

  I hate that I really like that, but I really like.

• 45:49Nilay Patel?

  It was like easily the cutest part of the whole thing. Uh, and so they're, they're trying to show these interactions. Look, we gotta get the stuff. Like I said, but you're listening to this on what Friday or sometime after that. On Tuesday, Podhouse will be on the cover. You hear even more about, uh, 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.

• 46:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. They're a major investor in, right?

• 46:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're a major investor and they built their own model called Nova, which they're using.

• 46:18David Pierce?

  Does anyone know anything about the Nova model?

• 46:20Nilay Patel?

  The rumor is that they were trying to build this for a long time and it was delayed.

• 46:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 46:23Nilay Patel?

  And then they had Anthropic swoop in to help them.

• 46:27David Pierce?

  And we should say, we should take a break. We've been talking about this for way too long, but, uh, 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.

• 46:50Nilay Patel?

  It's all canned.

• 46:51David Pierce?

  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.

• 47:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:03David Pierce?

  Yeah. But I sincerely hope I'm wrong and we will see.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  I'm very curious. Again, to underline what David is saying, all of the demos were canned.

• 47:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:12Nilay Patel?

  We were not allowed to just like freely talk to this thing. So who knows?

• 47:15David Pierce?

  And for months, like I, I would, I would also remind you that this thing launched the first time 18 months ago. And, uh, 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, 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.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  What is the primary pressure, do you think? Like, who, who are they worried about coming after them? Because Google's not doing anything agentic right now. Google's smart home is still Google Assistant, which is artist formerly known as, you know, and it's not really doing anything.

• 48:03Nilay Patel?

  I think, I think everybody's still worried about ChatGPT. If you find yourself talking to advanced voice mode instead of Alexa.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:10Nilay Patel?

  You're not switching back.

• 48:11David Pierce?

  Yeah. And operator is out there. Google is doing stuff like Project Mariner is real.

• 48:15Nilay Patel?

  Operator is not out there. Operator's out there in the way that like, uh, like a, like a baby goat is out there just like stumbling over shit. Like, it doesn't matter.

• 48:23David Pierce?

  I used operator today. You know what I can't use today is Alexa.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. What did you use it for?

• 48:29David Pierce?

  I used it, uh, as a test to see if it could buy me something on Amazon and it could not.

• 48:35Nilay Patel?

  Baby goat.

• 48:38Nilay Patel?

  Yes, it's good. There's a toddler out in the world who is just falling over itself all the time. Um, I think they're a little, probably a little worried about Apple, right? That'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.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  That is true.

• 49:05Nilay Patel?

  The, 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. Um, I think they, they just like needed to put the stake in the ground and say, actually, we put L like AI capabilities into Alexa in the way that everybody wanted us to.

• 49:25David Pierce?

  Yeah. And Ponis has said this to us before, Neil, but I think I suspect probably said it to you on, does he could or two is like, they see this as like. A full-on platform shift.

• 49:35Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, he very much said that in like the most intense Panos way.

• 49:39David Pierce?

  There is a sense now that missing, missing this would be like missing mobile 15 years ago.

• 49:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:44David Pierce?

  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, 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 feel that.

• 50:09Nilay Patel?

  We haven't actually mentioned the most important part, which is Alexa Plus is $20 a month or it is free with Amazon Prime.

• 50:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 50:16Nilay Patel?

  Which notably costs $15 a month.

• 50:17David Pierce?

  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.

• 50:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:25David Pierce?

  Then like for $5 less, you can get everything else on Prime, which is obviously what Amazon wants.

• 50:31Nilay Patel?

  And the, and the sort of overlap of like Alexa owners and Prime customers is like 100%.

• 50:38Nilay Patel?

  Right? So they're just what, and this is where we started.

• 50:42David Pierce?

  I use my Echo to buy exclusively from Walmart. It's like an amazing.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  But they're basic, they have the big, they have the advantage.

• 50:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 50:53Nilay Patel?

  No one else has a distribution advantage like Amazon has. Maybe Google, but they're Google.

• 50:58David Pierce?

  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.

• 51:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:13David Pierce?

  It's starting to peter off, even though it's still one of the most popular services in the world.

• 51:19David Pierce?

  I don't know who the user is that is like, I don't have Prime, but I want Alexa LLM.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  Who is, who are you? I don't know who you are.

• 51:29Nilay Patel?

  Email us, let us know.

• 51:30Speaker 04

  Maybe the like really hardcore AI heads that just want to try everything. But I also don't know why they wouldn't have Prime. We'll find out, I guess, eventually.

• 51:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but they, if anyone can do it, it's Amazon because they have scale. If anyone can make the platform shift happen.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:47Nilay Patel?

  Because they already have the microphones in everybody's house.

• 51:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  They've already like, and they own that whole platform, tips to.

• 51:52Speaker 04

  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.

• 52:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'm, I'm excited to see just how chaotic it is. We'll see again, and next week on Decoder, Panos answers a bunch more questions in like classically intense Panos Paneway. It was, it was a fun conversation.

• 52:17Speaker 04

  Also, we finally get to do the assistant like battles between all of the major assistants. Well, one Siri is actually like out, out.

• 52:25Nilay Patel?

  So never.

• 52:26Speaker 04

  Never.

• 52:26Nilay Patel?

  I don't think Siri counts as a major assistant anymore. It's rough.

• 52:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:30Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. We're gonna come back and we're gonna keep talking on Siri. We'll be right back.

• 52:36Speaker 00

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• 52:46Speaker 01

  I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it, it wasn't.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  Cut the bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 53:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back to Siri Dunks, the new podcast.

• 53:15Nilay Patel?

  Guess what I asked Siri to do today and they couldn't do?

• 53:17Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 53:18Nilay Patel?

  That's the whole show. It's just us listing things that we asked Siri to do that it cannot do.

• 53:23Speaker 04

  It'll be the longest Vergecast episode in history. That it used to be able to do and it no longer do.

• 53:28Nilay Patel?

  Um, I asked it how many days until something the other day? And it, it was like, do you want me to ask ChatGPT? It's rough.

• 53:35Speaker 04

  And ChatGPT famously is not good at math.

• 53:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I was like, this is the most powerful phone in history.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 53:43Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 53:50David Pierce?

  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-

• 53:59Nilay Patel?

  I would say third. I just think we're legally obligated to feel like there was a new iPhone.

• 54:03David Pierce?

  You're right. It is. It is at least third. It might be, it might be fourth, given some of the framework stuff, but it's certainly not first. And I think Sigma is clearly first.

• 54:11Nilay Patel?

  My proposed headline for Allison's review was, "No one should care about this phone." They didn't, they didn't go with it. She did go with, "It's fine," and give it a seven, which is the most seven headline in the history of headlines.

• 54:23David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 54:24Speaker 04

  I still don't know who's gonna buy this thing.

• 54:26Nilay Patel?

  So what, what's going on here?

• 54:28Speaker 04

  With the, the camera or the phone?

• 54:30Nilay Patel?

  Oh, well, I still don't know who's gonna buy this thing.

• 54:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 54:33Nilay Patel?

  Actually applies to both.

• 54:34Speaker 04

  Oh, that's true. That is true. That is true.

• 54:39Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 54:46David Pierce?

  Right.

• 54:46Nilay Patel?

  And it seems like no one should buy it.

• 54:48Speaker 04

  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 Foveon 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.

• 55:07David Pierce?

  Sigma's stuff is generally pretty good, right? Like, it's, it's weird, but they make good cameras, right? Is my impression?

• 55:12Speaker 04

  Yes. They're weird, they're good. They are part of the Elmont Alliance, which Panasonic and Leica 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.

• 55:43Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 55:44Speaker 04

  Really, really.

• 55:44Nilay Patel?

  I love this.

• 55:45Speaker 04

  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, eh, eh. But they're like, we know that it's dumb.

• 56:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:02Speaker 04

  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 gonna buy it anyway. So that's probably fine. Famously, Fujifilm can only make 15,000 X1006s per week, and that still was not enough, because they had over a million pre-orders in China alone on the first day.

• 56:34Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 56:35Speaker 04

  So this camera, I don't even know to say what it looks like. It is just a small block of aluminum in a weird way. It has a LCD screen on the back that does not tilt.

• 56:47Nilay Patel?

  This is my, this is actually my only complaint about this camera.

• 56:49Speaker 04

  That it has no EVF?

• 56:51Nilay Patel?

  No, the screen doesn't tilt.

• 56:52Speaker 04

  Oh, okay. Well, I don't-

• 56:54Nilay Patel?

  And I have a very specific reason why, but that, I'm like, I love you. I'm buying this camera, I'm mad that the screen doesn't tilt.

• 57:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:00Nilay Patel?

  It's a very, very minor complaint in the scheme of things.

• 57:03Speaker 04

  I don't think it's that minor.

• 57:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:05Speaker 04

  I think screens should tilt, even though they break easier.

• 57:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:08Speaker 04

  It has no viewfinder. That is also horrible, in my opinion.

• 57:11Nilay Patel?

  I feel nothing about that.

• 57:12David Pierce?

  Especially for a $2,000 camera. Like, the number of people who would, 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-

• 57:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:28David Pierce?

  It's just one group of people.

• 57:29Speaker 04

  It's just that, that makes it, with no articulating viewfinder and no, like, EVF or OVF, you can only do this.

• 57:38Nilay Patel?

  Yep, that's, and this is why I think the screen should tilt.

• 57:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:41Nilay Patel?

  That's it.

• 57:41Speaker 04

  Any other angle than right in front of you, you know what I mean? It has this knurled kind of jog wheel on the back that you're supposed to do most of the stuff through. Has a play button. It has a menu button for going to the menus. The menu looks not great.

• 57:57Nilay Patel?

  Not great.

• 57:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:59Nilay Patel?

  You see, Seb from Allied was-

• 58:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:02Nilay Patel?

  Looking at this interface is why I make camera apps.

• 58:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:06Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 58:06David Pierce?

  It's not great.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  Uh, 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 sub menu. It's horrible for cameras. I don't know. I think that the, 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 knurled parts.

• 58:29David Pierce?

  No, let me tell you why people like this camera.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  Because?

• 58:32David Pierce?

  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, you go back like 8,000 years and it's like, oh, someone in, you know, someone just drew a camera. And it, this is the first camera that anyone ever imagined. That's this camera and I love it for that. Yeah.

• 58:54Nilay Patel?

  I will say the fact that it doesn't have a memory card slot.

• 58:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:57Nilay Patel?

  And it has a built in SSD is like, oh, this thing has a, has a shelf life.

• 59:02Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. You're either gonna have to get it serviced, which I'm not really sure how they're gonna get inside of it when it's a solid block of aluminum without taking a lot of stuff off of it. Uh, or you're just gonna have to get a new one. But hopefully it doesn't die before, you know, memory cards famously die a lot.

• 59:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:18Speaker 04

  But at least you can put a new memory card in.

• 59:21Nilay Patel?

  So here's my argument in favor of this, except for the tilting screen, which I agree is a huge problem.

• 59:24Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 59:25Nilay Patel?

  Um, I, again, because I mostly take pictures of a six year old who is notably down here.

• 59:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 59:29Nilay Patel?

  So I'm always shooting at like hip height, which means I want to tilt the screen up.

• 59:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:34Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That's like, I, I need to solve that problem. This camera doesn't solve that problem. It is sexy as hell and I do want it. Um, 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.

• 59:59Nilay Patel?

  Uh, 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 all do.

• 1:00:08David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  And that's what it's cool. I like having that relationship with a 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 that I could just set them and then. Set this one dial to mostly ever control shutter speed. I'd be fine.

• 1:00:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  Right? Or like exposure compensation.

• 1:00:28David Pierce?

  The only problem with that approach is you, you want. That camera, but to be like the. Size and quality of like a Sony RX 100. 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.

• 1:00:53Speaker 04

  You're kind of describing X 100 in a, in a few ways.

• 1:00:56Nilay Patel?

  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 is like. We have no history of. Nikon F series SLRs to honor.

• 1:01:06David Pierce?

  That's fair.

• 1:01:07Nilay Patel?

  Like, screw it. We're just changing how the controls work.

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  Have you seen the old Sigma cameras? Cause they are much weirder than this.

• 1:01:13Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:01:14Speaker 04

  They're really, really weird. Like.

• 1:01:17Nilay Patel?

  It's funny because Sigma started out as like a, like a lens brand and they're like, screw it. We can do whatever we want.

• 1:01:21David Pierce?

  Yeah. It would be a lot more compelling in that way you just described, Neelai, if the menu was better. Yeah. Here's a really usable thing unless you have to do anything.

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  Have you guys driven the EQS, the, the new one, the electric one?

• 1:01:34Nilay Patel?

  Yes. It's like being in a Korean nightclub on wheels.

• 1:01:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37Nilay Patel?

  I don't know how else to describe it.

• 1:01:38Speaker 04

  But you've used the infotainment system, right? Yeah. It's like Windows 95.

• 1:01:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's, no one has good ideas about software design.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:01:45Nilay Patel?

  And like the fact that most products are now are software. Means that we live in a, like a world of crime.

• 1:01:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, I see what you're saying.

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Nilay Patel?

  It's pretty and I just want it on my shelf.

• 1:01:55Speaker 04

  I understand.

• 1:01:56Nilay Patel?

  I want, I want to put a $2,000 knickknack on my shelf. Also, the fact that you, it is removable lenses means that it will never actually be as small as it looks.

• 1:02:04Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 1:02:06David Pierce?

  But this is also like, David, I feel like we're, 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.

• 1:02:20Speaker 04

  Like a Leica.

• 1:02:21David Pierce?

  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 gonna look cool as hell. And that's like 60% of the.

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:02:43David Pierce?

  There you go. Think of the savings.

• 1:02:44Speaker 04

  Much more affordable, looks very beautiful. People will ask you, what is that? Uh, 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 USB C 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 gotta 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 USB C port and then into your computer. Very nice. Um, but you know, that comes with its trade offs.

• 1:03:23Nilay Patel?

  It's not great that this conversation has inspired me to start searching for an X100.

• 1:03:30Speaker 04

  Good luck.

• 1:03:31Nilay Patel?

  I mean.

• 1:03:31Speaker 04

  They're very hard to find.

• 1:03:32Nilay Patel?

  I can pay a $700 premium for one right now.

• 1:03:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Or you could get the five, which is not that different, but.

• 1:03:38Nilay Patel?

  You know, let's just wrap up the show. I've got some.

• 1:03:41Speaker 04

  I feel like it's busy.

• 1:03:43Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's talk about the iPhone briefly.

• 1:03:44Speaker 04

  Can I say one more thing?

• 1:03:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:03:46Speaker 04

  The LCD has a, has a sub, like a, a sub bezel. And I just want to acknowledge that.

• 1:03:52Nilay Patel?

  None of the press photos show the LCD on.

• 1:03:55Speaker 04

  Well, it doesn't show it on, but it shows it, it shows the sub bezel.

• 1:03:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I see it.

• 1:03:59Speaker 04

  Which is not something Apple would have done. I just want to acknowledge that.

• 1:04:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm buying all the.

• 1:04:04David Pierce?

  Oh no, it's bad. You're right. I just looked and it, you're right.

• 1:04:07Speaker 04

  How does that make you feel? Do you not want it anymore?

• 1:04:10Nilay Patel?

  Have you bought an RX100 to take pictures of your kid yet?

• 1:04:13Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:04:13Nilay Patel?

  This is the single greatest purchase you can make if you're a parent.

• 1:04:16Speaker 04

  Yes, it's the right choice.

• 1:04:17Nilay Patel?

  Like, everyone's always happy with the photos. No one's ever sad.

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Nilay Patel?

  The screen tilts.

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Nilay Patel?

  They're, they're, I would, I would not say indestructible, they're very destructible, but like, they're tough enough, you know?

• 1:04:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. You don't have to worry about interchangeable lenses.

• 1:04:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're, they're great, but like, they are in fact destructible, like you get some dust near that lens mechanism, you don't have RX 100 anymore, it's all, it's all over.

• 1:04:42Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:04:42Nilay Patel?

  But they are, I think all these cameras are ultimately, to David's point, kind of competing with the concept of the RX.

• 1:04:47Speaker 04

  Accessory, kind of.

• 1:04:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, I just, the RX 100, it solves the most problems in that zone.

• 1:04:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:55Nilay Patel?

  And it's, it's very hard to solve the, like, all the problems better than that camera.

• 1:04:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I also want to acknowledge that they made an RX 1 a long time ago, which was full frame, and they just never updated it.

• 1:05:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06Speaker 04

  And it's been around for a long time, and they could be dominating this space, but they decide not to.

• 1:05:11David Pierce?

  I loved that camera.

• 1:05:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was great.

• 1:05:13David Pierce?

  Holy crap, I loved the RX 1.

• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  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 doing. No, Leica is like, the only one right now that makes a full frame fixed lens camera.

• 1:05:25Nilay Patel?

  Weird.

• 1:05:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it costs $6,000, and no one can afford it.

• 1:05:29David Pierce?

  See, the Sigma's cheap, man, what are we doing here?

• 1:05:32Nilay Patel?

  You're getting one.

• 1:05:33David Pierce?

  It's an impulse purchase.

• 1:05:34Nilay Patel?

  We did call one in for a review, so we did not go on the influencer trip to Japan that everyone else went on because we have this annoying ethics policy, but we did ask for a review of it, I think someone's getting it.

• 1:05:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, they can make nine a day, so presumably we'll get it in 2034, we'll get one, it'll be awesome.

• 1:05:52Nilay Patel?

  Someone on our team is, is getting one, and, and then I'm gonna, I'm gonna look at it with love in my eyes, my, you know, like cartoons.

• 1:06:02Nilay Patel?

  Alright, we should talk about this, it's, it's like amazing how much we want to avoid talking about the iPhone 16e.

• 1:06:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Nilay Patel?

  I know we have some Verchess listeners who just totally tune out when we talk about cameras. I was much happier talking about the camera than I'm gonna be talking about the iPhone 16e.

• 1:06:16David Pierce?

  Never has a phone been so thoroughly exactly what we expected it to be.

• 1:06:22Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's, I was gonna say, never has a phone been so thoroughly exactly not it.

• 1:06:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:06:44David Pierce?

  And on the one hand, look, like, this phone is so clearly not meant for those people. And that's fine.

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  That's fair enough.

• 1:06:50David Pierce?

  Right? 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 is, like, very descriptive because this is for people who don't care about their phone. This is like, I, I want, I want to have a phone.

• 1:07:24Nilay Patel?

  But it's $599. If you're that person, you should buy a used iPhone 15.

• 1:07:31David Pierce?

  Or a new iPhone 15.

• 1:07:33Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I forgot.

• 1:07:34Speaker 04

  If I have a used 15 Pro for, like, the same amount.

• 1:07:36Nilay Patel?

  Right, and you'll get MagSafe, and you'll get way better cameras, and like, you'll, you'll just make a happier person.

• 1:07:42David Pierce?

  No Apple Intelligence, Neelai.

• 1:07:43Speaker 04

  That's a plus.

• 1:07:44Nilay Patel?

  I cannot be bothered. To what end?

• 1:07:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Nilay Patel?

  I, I think Apple really thought Apple Intelligence was gonna drive a, a huge cycle and...

• 1:07:54David Pierce?

  It was the super cycle. This was the, this was the thing last year. Do you remember this? They were talking about the super cycle of smartphone upgrades because of Apple Intelligence.

• 1:08:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02David Pierce?

  And, oh, boy, is that not the thing.

• 1:08:03Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:08:13David Pierce?

  Do they, though?

• 1:08:14Speaker 04

  It's all I care about.

• 1:08:17David Pierce?

  Do you?

• 1:08:17Nilay Patel?

  So is this just a phone that can get Gen Moji? Is that...

• 1:08:20David Pierce?

  This is your cheapest Gen Moji access? Wait, okay, hold on. I no longer care about the 16E, David. I need to know everything about your Gen Moji life.

• 1:08:28Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 1:08:29David Pierce?

  What are your use cases for Gen Moji?

• 1:08:30Speaker 04

  How long do you have?

• 1:08:33Speaker 04

  I'm frustrated by Genmoji in the same reason that I'm delighted by Genmoji.

• 1:08:38David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  In that it's just like, they tried to make Genmoji 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.

• 1:09:21David Pierce?

  That is cool.

• 1:09:22Speaker 04

  Genmoji 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.

• 1:09:33David Pierce?

  What was the last Genmoji you made? We're doing this now.

• 1:09:36Speaker 04

  Oh, gosh. Alright, I'm gonna look right now.

• 1:09:39Nilay Patel?

  I've never made a Genmoji. Maybe I should buy an iPhone 16.

• 1:09:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, is this in your day-to-day? Like, you're just, you're just out here Genmoji-ing up a storm?

• 1:09:48Speaker 04

  I don't-

• 1:09:49David Pierce?

  Somebody's like, "Do you want to get dinner?" And you're like, "Genmoji, make me a person eating spaghetti."

• 1:09:54Nilay Patel?

  Wait, is that how you invoke a Genmoji? You have to say "Genmoji" out loud?

• 1:09:58Speaker 04

  Genmoji, Genmoji, Genmoji.

• 1:10:01Speaker 04

  I'm not sure if we can put this in the show, but if you just say, if you just Genmoji "gun", it will make you a gun.

• 1:10:09David Pierce?

  Cool.

• 1:10:09Speaker 04

  I just wanted to test that. Very strange.

• 1:10:12Nilay Patel?

  So you're just sending cartoons of guns to people?

• 1:10:15Speaker 04

  Oh, laughing, crying, throwing up, very good one.

• 1:10:18Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this is your Genmoji?

• 1:10:19Speaker 04

  These are, these are Genmoji. This is, this is one thing, they mix stickers, Genmoji, 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 Genmoji. That's pretty good. It's quite good. I will send it to you, because it is very good.

• 1:10:37Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna send you some guns.

• 1:10:40Nilay Patel?

  It's just in the middle of the night, David.

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  I just wanted to test how many different types of guns it would make, and it's a lot. You could do a pipe.

• 1:10:48Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so-

• 1:10:49Speaker 04

  Oh, this one is good. This is the pumpkin and the devil emoji mixed, and I use them for Halloween. That's very good.

• 1:10:57Nilay Patel?

  I do like that you're just spamming, David, with like, the worst emoji you've ever seen.

• 1:11:01Speaker 04

  This is fantastic.

• 1:11:03Nilay Patel?

  That's very good. So again, to just bring this all the way around, our thesis is that people will buy a $600

• 1:11:11Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:11:11Nilay Patel?

  not good iPhone to send cartoons of guns.

• 1:11:15Speaker 04

  No, but, but I have noticed all of the billboards have changed to Genmoji billboards.

• 1:11:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21Speaker 04

  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 Genmoji it. That's their whole thing.

• 1:11:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:31Speaker 04

  It has lasted longer than the, than the Apple Intelligence ads. Like there are more Genmoji ads they've lasted a longer period of time.

• 1:11:38Nilay Patel?

  It's funny because they, they started all those ads before you could get Apple Intelligence.

• 1:11:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:42Nilay Patel?

  And then people got Apple Intelligence and they stopped advertising it.

• 1:11:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:46Nilay Patel?

  And, yeah, I see, I see what you're saying.

• 1:11:47Speaker 04

  My experience with Apple Intelligence outside of Genmoji 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, you know, 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.

• 1:12:10Nilay Patel?

  Woof.

• 1:12:11Speaker 04

  And that was my mistake. So I just, I don't think people really care about this.

• 1:12:15Nilay Patel?

  But the only true feeling I have about the 16E is that not having MagSafe on it is criminal.

• 1:12:23Speaker 04

  It is.

• 1:12:24Nilay Patel?

  Like almost all of the phone mounts in my house, all of the batteries that I use now, like it's all MagSafe all the way down the line. In the car, I have one next to the mirror in my bathroom and I just like put the phone on the, next to that in the morning.

• 1:12:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:41Nilay Patel?

  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's ever created.

• 1:12:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:52Nilay Patel?

  And there's just like the cheap phone, the $600 phone can't have it.

• 1:12:55Speaker 04

  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, employee is 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 at 7.5 watts. Like, how does this work?

• 1:13:23David Pierce?

  It just seems like a horror, like, why would you take this out?

• 1:13:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is the one completely perplexing thing about this phone is MagSafe.

• 1:13:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, I actually think you can make a pretty strong case for every other one of the trade offs. I think it lands a hundred dollars 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 gonna sell you some of those? Sure, but like, that's not a solution to the problem.

• 1:14:13Speaker 04

  They just get rid of MagSafe altogether and everything's chi two and chi two ready?

• 1:14:17David Pierce?

  That sounds like Apple.

• 1:14:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I don't know, it's a phone. Let us know if you're the target market for this phone.

• 1:14:23David Pierce?

  Who is?

• 1:14:24Nilay Patel?

  But this is like, the weirdest iPhone launch.

• 1:14:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27Nilay Patel?

  I can remember. Like, never has an iPhone come out with such a, okay.

• 1:14:33David Pierce?

  Yeah. Do you think if this thing were $450, we'd be having a totally different conversation about it?

• 1:14:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:39Nilay Patel?

  If it was $350.

• 1:14:40David Pierce?

  Well, I think that's unreal. That's like unrealistic for what phones cost right now, like.

• 1:14:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:46David Pierce?

  I don't know if you've heard of that inflation, Neelai? Yeah, and tariffs, like.

• 1:14:49Speaker 04

  Is this the first tariff phone? That's the other question.

• 1:14:51Nilay Patel?

  I read Ben Thompson makes the argument that this is the first tariff phone. But we'll see, I mean, like, Tim Cook is, you know, we're gonna get to it in the next segment. And it's probably like, you're on, Tim Cook is just throwing fake numbers to Donald Trump to get out of the tariffs, so.

• 1:15:03Speaker 04

  Smart move.

• 1:15:04Nilay Patel?

  We'll see, and we'll see if, and also, every, realistically, no one ever buys this phone. Like, you go to your Verizon store and Verizon's like, this one.

• 1:15:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:14Nilay Patel?

  And you just leave, and that's the end of that.

• 1:15:15Speaker 04

  Did you, did you watch Marquez's review of it, by the way?

• 1:15:17Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:15:18Speaker 04

  That, he has a skit at the beginning, it's like 90 seconds long, and there's, one of him plays the employee, and one of them plays a customer, and the customer's just asking, "I want a phone that does exactly this, exactly this." And the employee just gives him everything but the 16e, because it just makes no sense.

• 1:15:36David Pierce?

  And I just, again.

• 1:15:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:39David Pierce?

  Who is this?

• 1:15:39Nilay Patel?

  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 16. I just didn't give it the time.

• 1:15:46David Pierce?

  It's a way in the door and then Apple can sell you more expensive things.

• 1:15:49Nilay Patel?

  I do love.

• 1:15:50David Pierce?

  Except for Max Safe Accessories.

• 1:15:51Nilay Patel?

  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 this, the 16E only exists on the website.

• 1:16:02David Pierce?

  It's like the lobster at a diner.

• 1:16:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04David Pierce?

  It's not there.

• 1:16:05Nilay Patel?

  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 gotta take a break. Uh, we were supposed to talk about the Framework Laptop, which looks really cool, but David tells me that Framework CEO Neerav Patel is coming on the show next week.

• 1:16:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, he's coming. Sean and I are gonna hang out with Neerav, actually, uh, later this afternoon. And we're gonna have a lot to say, but like if, I'll, 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 like 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 gonna have lots more to talk about on that one on Tuesday.

• 1:16:50Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Cool. All right, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back with Lightning Round. We'll be right back.

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• 1:17:29Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Lightning Round, unsponsored for flavor.

• 1:17:35Nilay Patel?

  The people have started saying it to us, so we're gonna start saying it back to you.

• 1:17:38David Pierce?

  It is marching up the charts of the most demanded merch in the history of The Verge. It's an unsponsored-for-flavor t-shirt.

• 1:17:44Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't mean anything.

• 1:17:46David Pierce?

  It doesn't mean anything, but we're gonna make it.

• 1:17:48Nilay Patel?

  When people spot, you can't tell us what to do. It's their defining principle here at The Verge.

• 1:17:54David Pierce?

  For some reason to me, that belongs on the bottom of a skateboard that just says "unsponsored for flavor." That's where that goes.

• 1:18:01Nilay Patel?

  You could throw away the entire, it's a long ethics policy on the website. It's very complicated. You could throw it out and you could replace it with "you can't tell us what to do." And that would pretty much get you there.

• 1:18:14Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, if you'd like to sponsor the lightning round, you can call someone at Vox Media and pay them 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.

• 1:18:34David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:19:19David Pierce?

  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. Uh, 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

• 1:20:02David Pierce?

  video is really discoverable in a way that audio is not. And so, everybody now is turning to video.

• 1:20:09Speaker 04

  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?

• 1:20:17David Pierce?

  What could possibly go wrong? Uh, no, it's a terrible user interface. And, uh, I, I did this whole thing in the installer, the newsletter I write last week. Where I basically was like, tell me your music setup. And the overwhelming piece of feedback from people was, I use Spotify. I hate Spotify. Which is like precisely how I feel about Spotify. Like, perfect, no notes. Uh, and it's because all of this stuff is trying desperately to chase YouTube. Uh, and YouTube meanwhile is just out 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 100 million podcast listeners.

• 1:20:57David Pierce?

  Uh, and Spotify is like what everybody thinks as either the most important or second most important podcast platform next to Apple Podcasts. And YouTube is just out there crushing everybody. It's nuts.

• 1:21:06Nilay Patel?

  Let me ask you a foundational question.

• 1:21:11Nilay Patel?

  What is a podcast?

• 1:21:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna ask that too.

• 1:21:16Nilay Patel?

  Cause I, are we just talking about YouTube videos that say they're podcasts?

• 1:21:21Speaker 04

  Well, what is that then?

• 1:21:23Nilay Patel?

  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 it on YouTube. But I, I don't know, like, what is the difference between waveform and a regular Marquez video?

• 1:21:40Speaker 04

  It's.

• 1:21:41Nilay Patel?

  Is it just the microphones?

• 1:21:43Speaker 04

  Editing, the microphones?

• 1:21:45David Pierce?

  But do you know who broke that distinction?

• 1:21:47Nilay Patel?

  YouTube.

• 1:21:48David Pierce?

  YouTube. This is, this is the point, right? Like what, 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.

• 1:22:13Speaker 04

  How do you categorize a late night show? Because that's a podcast in the way that a YouTube show is a podcast.

• 1:22:20David Pierce?

  It's a podcast, but it's also just a bunch of YouTube clips in a row.

• 1:22:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, no, cable news has just been podcasts for a long time.

• 1:22:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Nilay Patel?

  If you ever just like, watch whatever cable news channel you want to watch, but you just like, watch CNBC or CNN or MSNBC or Fox News or whatever. You know, oh, this is just the most chaotic podcast in history.

• 1:22:36David Pierce?

  Very unstructured.

• 1:22:38Nilay Patel?

  It's just happening all at once all the time.

• 1:22:40David Pierce?

  A lot of them actually run podcasts that are just the full audio feed of the show.

• 1:22:44Nilay Patel?

  And it works.

• 1:22:45David Pierce?

  Horrible. I don't know if 60 Minutes still does it, but they did for a long time and like, it works.

• 1:22:49Speaker 04

  Well, 60 Minutes makes sense. Yeah, people can visualize things in their heads. Is that different from an audiobook?

• 1:22:55David Pierce?

  I don't know.

• 1:22:56Nilay Patel?

  So we, I'm trying to remember the headline. The, the narrative podcasts are running into audiobook story was a big story.

• 1:23:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:04Nilay Patel?

  And then narrative podcast, podcasts like Serial like fell out of favor. In like a real way, because the, I, I hear you on YouTube and I'm, 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.

• 1:23:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:22Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 1:23:40David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:23:41Nilay Patel?

  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 weren't cheap. Let me tell you.

• 1:24:00Nilay Patel?

  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, here you go, here's hours and hours of more video.

• 1:24:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:28Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 1:24:38Nilay Patel?

  And they're losing to YouTube in one very specific way.

• 1:24:40David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:24:41Nilay Patel?

  But I don't know if like the the Apple Podcast listener was always an audio listener is like, screw it, I'm gonna watch this on YouTube instead.

• 1:24:49David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:25:13David Pierce?

  But we also get a lot of people who are like, oh, I listened 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 car 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.

• 1:25:38Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:25:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:53Speaker 04

  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 the 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.

• 1:26:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13Speaker 04

  And the fact that the 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 minute. Is anyone asking for, because you can just pick it back up. Like, nobody is asking for that. If anything, people love the length of, you know, the show.

• 1:26:30Nilay Patel?

  People want a two hour Verchass, David, that's what I'm telling.

• 1:26:32Speaker 04

  That's exactly right.

• 1:26:33Nilay Patel?

  We're very close to delivering it here.

• 1:26:35Speaker 04

  I've never heard.

• 1:26:36Nilay Patel?

  In this lightning round that has already gone 10 minutes on a single item.

• 1:26:39Speaker 04

  No one's told me that they want a shorter one. That's all I'm saying.

• 1:26:41Nilay Patel?

  All right, David, we're changing your job. You're just doing Twitch streams 24/7 from now on.

• 1:26:46Speaker 04

  Justin TV is back, baby.

• 1:26:48Nilay Patel?

  From your green screen basement. I'm leaning into that conspiracy theory, this David's basement's a green screen.

• 1:26:53David Pierce?

  I have begun occasionally subtly moving things around in my background. And if anyone would like to tell me what those things are.

• 1:27:02Speaker 04

  I welcome it.

• 1:27:03Nilay Patel?

  All right, let me add up these next two lightning round items for you.

• 1:27:06Speaker 04

  I forgot this was the lightning round.

• 1:27:07Nilay Patel?

  We apparently.

• 1:27:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:09Nilay Patel?

  That's what I was told. Instagram reels may get its own app.

• 1:27:12Speaker 04

  Makes sense.

• 1:27:13Nilay Patel?

  Presumably to compete more directly with TikTok. And then TikTok is upgrading its desktop website.

• 1:27:18Speaker 04

  To compete with YouTube, they say.

• 1:27:20Nilay Patel?

  With YouTube. What do you got?

• 1:27:23Speaker 04

  Uh, first one, yep, makes sense. I mean, I think people go to Instagram for reels at this point.

• 1:27:31Nilay Patel?

  So I think all of this is based about the TikTok ban.

• 1:27:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:35Nilay Patel?

  I think if, because remember TikTok is technically banned in this country.

• 1:27:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:41Nilay Patel?

  Like the law passed, the Supreme Court upheld it, and then Donald Trump was like, no, we're not doing that.

• 1:27:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Nilay Patel?

  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?

• 1:28:09Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:28:10Nilay Patel?

  So in April, this app might go away again, or it gets sold to, I don't know, Don Jr. Limited, whatever's gonna happen. Like, I don't know what's gonna happen.

• 1:28:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:19Nilay Patel?

  And if that, what, that moment, whatever that moment is, will be a change. And so if you're Instagram, you have to be ready for it.

• 1:28:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:28:28Nilay Patel?

  So here's reels, like, not Instagram, like, this is your 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.

• 1:28:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. Realistically, Instagram is just reels. I think it's, 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.

• 1:28:52Nilay Patel?

  Remember IGTV?

• 1:28:54Speaker 04

  That was fun. That was a period of time.

• 1:28:56Nilay Patel?

  Uh, 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 were too long.

• 1:29:04Speaker 04

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:29:06Nilay Patel?

  He's like, we had TikTok. It was just long videos and what people wanted was short videos.

• 1:29:09Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:29:16Nilay Patel?

  People want garbage, right? Just set up some microphones and start a podcast about gadgets and Brendan Carr and you're gonna be fine.

• 1:29:23Speaker 04

  Famously like Quibi worked for sure. Yeah.

• 1:29:25David Pierce?

  I think I disagree with you saying that Instagram is just reels. And I actually think my theory about why this is happening, and I'm just gonna throw this at you both. And I'm curious what you think is I, so I watch these Adam Mosseri 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 their 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, we want to let it, we want to let you post to your feed without it being such a big deal to post to your feed. And I think Instagram has just producted itself into total chaos.

• 1:30:09David Pierce?

  And I think A knows that clearly the easiest thing to spin 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 it's 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.

• 1:30:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:30:31David Pierce?

  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 to 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.

• 1:30:51Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:31:03David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:31:04Speaker 04

  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 in Instagram, which they have long forgotten about.

• 1:31:13David Pierce?

  Well, but I think that goes back to your point about it 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.

• 1:31:37Speaker 04

  It's like the Fediverse, but for one platform.

• 1:31:38David Pierce?

  For one company.

• 1:31:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:31:40David Pierce?

  Which is, which I would just point out is what we call a monopoly.

• 1:31:43Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. Boosted TikTok videos everywhere you look on Meta platforms.

• 1:31:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:51Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 1:31:57David Pierce?

  It's just TikTok.

• 1:31:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I think that's right.

• 1:31:59Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 1:32:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:07Nilay Patel?

  And that solves a lot of problems.

• 1:32:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, I totally agree.

• 1:32:09Speaker 04

  I mean, wasn't Instagram Notes supposed to be their Twitter competitor?

• 1:32:12David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:32:13Speaker 04

  And then they just like shut that down?

• 1:32:14Nilay Patel?

  That became Threads.

• 1:32:15Speaker 04

  Became Threads. Okay.

• 1:32:17Nilay Patel?

  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?

• 1:32:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:24Nilay Patel?

  That was the end of that. Okay, we gotta do, it's a lightning round. So we're gonna move through politics very quickly. David, I'm assigning you to this job, because I can't, you know.

• 1:32:34David Pierce?

  Okay. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna say a bunch of things in a row, and you can stop me whenever you feel like it. Does that sound good?

• 1:32:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:43David Pierce?

  Doge remains insane. The, 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,

• 1:33:24David Pierce?

  but the, the new thing that happened this week was that Amy Gleason, who was formerly an employee at the US Digital Service, was like, named, scapegoated, like, I don't, I don't know what word you want to use.

• 1:33:38Nilay Patel?

  In the executive order that creates Doge, it says there will be a Doge administrator.

• 1:33:44Nilay Patel?

  Then no one knew who that person was.

• 1:33:45David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:33:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, judges were asking United States Attorney's General, "Who is the Administrator of Doge?" And they'd be like, "I don't know that at this time."

• 1:33:54David Pierce?

  Right. Because I think literally, they didn't. And, and a lot of reporting from, from us and Wired and others suggests that even the people who work 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.

• 1:34:09Nilay Patel?

  He's a special government employee.

• 1:34:10David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:34:10Nilay Patel?

  What is a photo, David? That's where we are.

• 1:34:12David Pierce?

  I mean, knock yourself out. Yeah. Yeah. You can have whatever you want. He was in a cabinet members' meeting, like, "None of this is real anymore." I don't know.

• 1:34:20Speaker 04

  I think that 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 gonna do what we want anyway."

• 1:34:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:36Speaker 04

  And in certain ways, they're subverting these things and saying, "Okay, here's the Administrator, because you asked 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?

• 1:34:51David Pierce?

  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, dude, every single other thing.

• 1:35:00Nilay Patel?

  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 talked the most.

• 1:35:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:10Nilay Patel?

  That was Elon in the cabinet meeting.

• 1:35:11David Pierce?

  That's, 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, 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, it became a whole thing. It got shared a bunch of places. And it is, it is, it is hysterical. If you have not watched it, don't.

• 1:35:46David Pierce?

  But also, I will put the link in the show notes.

• 1:35:49Nilay Patel?

  Actually, the funniest part of this is it is an AI deep fake. And so like Blue Sky had a content moderation controversy about it because you're not supposed to share AI deep fakes. 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 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 deep fakes of this caliber.

• 1:36:18David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 1:36:19Nilay Patel?

  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 gonna keep we're gonna 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 the Trump one. So like, Tim Cook had a meeting with with Donald Trump and promised him $500 billion of US investment. They put out a press release about it. They said they're gonna build a school in Michigan for manufacturing.

• 1:37:00Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna do they're gonna build servers for Apple Intelligence. I guess they're all just gonna do Gen Moji all day long. They're gonna build those in Houston.

• 1:37:09David Pierce?

  Yet those guns don't generate themselves.

• 1:37:11Nilay Patel?

  Right, so Trump is happy because he got, you know, I think whatever 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. And Trump won, 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 gonna start making the Mac Pro that they had already been making at the factory.

• 1:37:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:35Nilay Patel?

  It's a flex chance. You can you can it's it's you can go look at it. It's a very confusing situation.

• 1:37:39David Pierce?

  I'm glad that Tim Cook knows that he can do this at least.

• 1:37:42Nilay Patel?

  Tim Cook is trapped on a treadmill of his own making.

• 1:37:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, he can never retire. His job is to manage Donald Trump forever. Anyway, so they announce this $500 billion investment, which is great. I I want Apple to invest in the United States. I think we should manufacture more things here. All this is good. Great 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.

• 1:38:17Speaker 04

  I love that.

• 1:38:18Nilay Patel?

  Um, so I'm just gonna 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 over 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 for geography, about 42% of its revenue comes from America. Assuming the US constitutes the bulk of that number, if spending is in line with revenue, then a rough figure of 40% of projected global spending through 2028 equates to about $505 billion. So if you just math out how Apple spends money. There you go.

• 1:39:00Speaker 04

  They used Apple Intelligence to rewrite their expenses and show Donald Trump the expense.

• 1:39:04Nilay Patel?

  This is just the money they were gonna spend.

• 1:39:06David Pierce?

  They took an Excel spreadsheet, or I guess a numbers spreadsheet, and, and said, "Apple Intelligence, make this a press release." And that's what it was.

• 1:39:13Nilay Patel?

  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 this stuff, but what 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, by making him promises that they've already made to themselves, and they just re-announce things. And somehow, Tim Cook has just made an art of this. It is wild.

• 1:39:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, the show is the thing, right? And there's, there's a bunch of really fun details in all of it, though, 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 gonna, there was like a big thing, they were gonna spend a bunch of money with TSMC in Arizona. Apple is already the largest customer of TSMC in Arizona. It's like, you, all you have to do is look at it, but you get to write the thing that's like, "Thank you, Donald Trump, for spending $500 billion," and, like, everybody wins, right? Like, is it, is it ruthless and 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.

• 1:40:31David Pierce?

  Like, it is obviously straightforwardly good business, and also, you should feel bad about yourself.

• 1:40:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just weird, because there's this big split between, you know, like, classic Trump corruption, you know, like-

• 1:40:44Nilay Patel?

  He's a real estate developer, so you gotta spend money on his party. You know, and it's like, oh, he's a club promoter. You gotta do some like, club promoting stuff like, great, you know, like, Trump won, like, we, we lived it. And this is substantially better than, for example, Foxconn announcing LCD factory in Wisconsin that they've never built.

• 1:41:00David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:41:00Nilay Patel?

  But 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 like, oh, that's new.

• 1:41:15David Pierce?

  There's a good one of those this week, in fact.

• 1:41:17Nilay Patel?

  Yes, uh, this FAA thing. What's going on there?

• 1:41:20David Pierce?

  So basically, the, the short version of it is it looks like the FAA, uh, which has been kind of infiltrated with SpaceX employees who have showed up to, you know, quote unquote, fix the FAA, uh, 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, uh, now they would like to give to Starlink instead. Um, and, uh, 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, uh, Doge is going into departments that either regulate Elon Musk's companies and destroying them, or give money to Elon Musk's

• 1:42:05David Pierce?

  companies and taking more money from them. Uh, and this is just, this is just that again. And like, this is money that was give, 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?

• 1:42:29Nilay Patel?

  So Elon is justifying this, which is a delight. Um, so I don't know if you've been noticing this, like, it's not been great for air travel in the United States lately. So Elon has decided to blame this not on firing a bunch of FAA employees, which is a thing that he did.

• 1:42:45David Pierce?

  Including the head of the FAA.

• 1:42:47Nilay Patel?

  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?

• 1:42:56Nilay Patel?

  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 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."

• 1:43:29Nilay Patel?

  That's a big claim. Like, you you gotta 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.

• 1:43:45David Pierce?

  Also, you know who didn't make that system is Verizon.

• 1:43:48Nilay Patel?

  Right. They haven't started yet. 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 to taxpayer on an emergency basis to restore air traffic control connectivity.

• 1:44:03David Pierce?

  No cost to taxpayer. Right.

• 1:44:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's that, but it's also like, so, wait, is it just internet access? Because that's what Starlink is.

• 1:44:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:11Nilay Patel?

  Is it? Are you saying?

• 1:44:12David Pierce?

  That's not the system. That's just the internet.

• 1:44:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Are you saying Verizon can't put some FiOS in at the airport?

• 1:44:21Nilay Patel?

  What are you like? What are we talking about here? Like, I know I have I have I have many problems with our nation's ISPs.

• 1:44:30Nilay Patel?

  I 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.

• 1:44:42Nilay Patel?

  Provisioning internet access at the airport is like, actually not a problem.

• 1:44:47David Pierce?

  I was gonna say, I don't think I've ever said, "Poor Verizon" before.

• 1:44:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:51David Pierce?

  And I still, you know, but in this case, it's like.

• 1:44:55Nilay Patel?

  But he's taking in $2.4 billion. Don't get a lot of contract for himself.

• 1:44:58David Pierce?

  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 plan to buy Cybertrucks 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.

• 1:45:29Nilay Patel?

  I think Elon's drug use will stop it before a person.

• 1:45:34David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 1:45:35Nilay Patel?

  That's my, my current going theory.

• 1:45:37David Pierce?

  But that period of time could be any period of time.

• 1:45:40Nilay Patel?

  My man's obviously like living hard right now.

• 1:45:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:44Nilay Patel?

  I've seen him on many stages talking.

• 1:45:46David Pierce?

  All right, Neel, 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.

• 1:45:53Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's wrap it up.

• 1:45:55David Pierce?

  It's time for Brendan Carr is a dummy.

• 1:45:56Nilay Patel?

  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 gonna say this sentence to you. This week Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, has decided the best use of his authority is an unelected censorship cop

• 1:46:19Nilay Patel?

  is to attack a country music festival.

• 1:46:21David Pierce?

  That's not where I thought that sentence was going.

• 1:46:22Nilay Patel?

  That's what he's doing. That's, 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,

• 1:47:06Nilay Patel?

  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 a 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.

• 1:47:36Nilay Patel?

  Like it's, I heart'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 nineties 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, they're doing some payola at the country music festival. Good job. Yeah. Good job, Brendan. He followed 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, TV stations in this country.

• 1:48:16Nilay Patel?

  He doesn't seem to get a problem. It's definitely George Soros. So we're just doing partisan censorship by Brendan Carr. 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 know, 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.

• 1:48:57Nilay Patel?

  The whole internet relies on this law. Our comment section relies on this law existing Reddit, you name it, next door. But he's like, we gotta rein in big tech and I will reinterpret section 230, unelected.

• 1:49:13Nilay Patel?

  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 gonna just reinterpret it.

• 1:49:32Nilay Patel?

  Somehow, he released this in a story in the New York Post that I swear to you is written like the worst LinkedIn poetry I've ever seen in my entire life. Like, just one sentence long paragraph in the story just says, "Social media has replaced chatrooms." 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 everyone can sue Facebook for defamation. This is absolutely not how that law is supposed to work. This is the height of stupidity from Brendan Carr. And I know this because, again, the guy who wrote the law talks to us all the time.

• 1:50:14Nilay Patel?

  He was just on our shows like two weeks ago, and this is not what he meant when he wrote the law.

• 1:50:19David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:50:28Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Well, look, he's gonna 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 wanna come on the code or come on this show, you can tell us about your smart home setup. I bet it sucks. You're welcome to. 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 gonna let you off the hook. All right, that was our weekly segment, Brendan Carr's Dummy.

• 1:51:08David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:51:19Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 1:51:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:30Nilay Patel?

  Run by iHeartMedia.

• 1:51:31David Pierce?

  That's the consequential stuff right there.

• 1:51:33Nilay Patel?

  What I think of, uh, complete corrupt, it's iHeartMedia.

• 1:51:38David Pierce?

  Go after Coachella first, and then we'll talk. You know what I mean?

• 1:51:41Nilay Patel?

  David, I'm gonna read you this sentence, and you gotta tell me, it's a palate cleanser for a two-hour burp chest. Automatic combines beeper and texts.com messaging services.

• 1:51:49David Pierce?

  All right, so this is two hours easily.

• 1:51:54David Pierce?

  So we talked a lot on this show about Beeper, the messaging app that ran afoul of Apple in some really interesting and complicated ways. Beeper eventually sold to Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com. They'll email me if I'm not that specific about which part of WordPress Automattic oversees. Automattic, 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 texts.com, which is doing the same kind of thing that Beeper was doing, basically trying to unify all of your messaging apps into one messaging app.

• 1:52:34David Pierce?

  Eric Michikovsky, who was the head of Beeper, at least as I understood it, was going to run this whole new thing, the combination of the texts.com team and the Beeper team at Automattic. Eric Michikovsky since left and is now doing Pebble again. And so Kishan Bagharia, who was running texts.com, is now in charge of this whole team. And they just put out betas of the first new apps, which are essentially just reskinned texts.com apps into a thing that is now called Beeper. So Beeper is the new name, but texts.com appears to be the actual technology. They redid an iPhone app, but they're still at this unified messaging everywhere thing. I downloaded the betas.

• 1:53:15David Pierce?

  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 Automattic appears to be actually pushing towards this.

• 1:53:35Nilay Patel?

  Huh. That all made sense. I think Brendan Carr should arrest them.

• 1:53:38David Pierce?

  There you go. I'm here to help. Also, before we go, I have some breaking news.

• 1:53:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:41David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:53:56David Pierce?

  And he said the sentence, I think there's a sustainable business model, which is always what you want to hear.

• 1:54:01Nilay Patel?

  That's good. That makes sense. That tracks what basically upon us was saying.

• 1:54:04David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:54:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's definitely going to turn on all the lights in your house while booking you a ticket to Japan. It's gonna get out of here.

• 1:54:21David Pierce?

  And then an Uber will show up and bring you to JFK.

• 1:54:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Or drugs. It's one or the other.

• 1:54:25David Pierce?

  Or drugs.

• 1:54:26Nilay Patel?

  All right, David, thank you so much for being here. That was incredible, my man.

• 1:54:29David Pierce?

  Appreciate it.

• 1:54:29Nilay Patel?

  We'll have you back soon. Father David, you're fine.

• 1:54:32David Pierce?

  Take it.

• 1:54:33Nilay Patel?

  That was it. That was the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:54:40Nilay Patel?

  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 Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poor, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:55:01Speaker 05

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