A buggy Sonos mystery

25:17I was completely skeptical that there was something like about the magnetic fields and insects. It just seemed like totally out of left field. But Sam had thoughts on that. It hasn't been looked at specifically in oha's, but it has been looked at in other ant species where they are actually attracted to magnetic fields or the voltage. There's a couple of different trains of thought when it comes to that. One, with the electricity, there's a slight heat increase. So some ants might be perceiving it as a slightly warmer environment. There's also some evidence that suggests when ants get into electronics, they're more likely to get shocked.

26:06And when they get shocked, they release a pheromone. And that pheromone is then attracting more ants. Those ants are more likely going to get shocked, and they're going to release the pheromone that's going to attract even more ants. And it's a vicious cycle. And so it's this pheromone that's being released that's making this behavior to say, come here, come here. But it's an interesting thing, and it's only been looked at in a couple of studies about what is it. And they did see an increase in attractiveness as the voltage increased. Gotcha. So they're noticing an attraction to electricity, and the possible reasons for that are the heat, the shockings.

26:53Or a third thing. They could be picking up on a magnetic field that is eliciting some kind of response that we don't understand. You know, I'm not an ant. I'm an ant person, but I can't necessarily think exactly like an ant. So there could be some third reason behind this. I wonder if Sam frequently has to remind herself that she's not an ant. That seems like the kind of thing that as an entomologist, you every once in a while have to be like, it is true. I'm not an ant. She says that sort of reminding you, but also sort of reminding herself. You know what I mean? Yeah, well, she kind of went back and forth between, well, I'm not an aunt, but if I were an aunt, in a way that you really felt like she was inhabiting this position.

27:36Yeah. So is this satisfying to you? Like, do you feel like this is sort of the complete answer? It feels like, I understand now why they might pick your speaker in particular, but does it feel like you've gotten all the way to the end of the answer? It kind of did. Yeah, I honestly wasn't expecting to get quite this far. But it after talking to Sam, it felt like, yes, it is these specific ants that are doing this. And this specific speaker definitely has some traits that they love. So I don't to me, it really does explain all of those forum posts on the Sonos website. Like it's, it's not just this speaker.

28:19There's all kinds of electronics that have grills and little cubbies. and have magnetic fields. But this speaker of mine definitely ticks all of these different boxes for the ants. Yeah, it's like the perfect storm for ant attraction. Absolutely. Lots of electronics do sort of one or two of the things you just described, but the play one is sort of the perfect center of the Venn diagram of all the things that those ants like to live. Exactly. And so that's the thing that just completely flipped my thinking 180 degrees from like, of all the places, why the Sonos? to like, oh yeah, no, it would be the Stone House.

28:58So you destroyed your play one, we think. I'm very curious to know when you put it back together how it goes. Yeah, I'll follow up with that, but I don't have high hopes. It was done sort of in a fit of mania. Yeah, but knowing what you know now, outside of full panic, heave the thing into the yard, what would you do? Like for all the people who are on these forums trying to figure it out, what is the right answer? How do you get the ants out? So it turns out, in my own panic, I was kind of on the right track. Well, so let's talk about getting them out. I think I might have lucked into a solution.

29:30But if someone came to you and said, my speaker is full of ants, what would you tell them to do? I think you did the right thing. You got them out of your house and gave them time to move all their brood out. You just have made it an environment that's not what they want anymore. So, I mean, basically, the advice is leverage that fact that we learned that they move around pretty regularly anyway. Just move the nest outside and wait for them to just wander off. If you can't move the nest, then you're in kind of ant trap territory or calling in a professional or something like that. As for all those other ideas in the forum, San said that trying to bully them out with heat and cold is kind of tricky because they're just so resilient.

30:19Like, she told me the story about how the thermostat in her lab went haywire one weekend and just cooked her whole lab at like 100 plus degrees all weekend. And she came back and all of her ant colonies were dead except for the Ohas, which were just chugging along. So you might have a hard time with extreme temperatures with them specifically. Fair enough. And she did not know what to make of the bucket of water trick. That is just going to be the last enduring mystery of this story. So the electricity theorists are going to be unbearable on these forums now is what I'm hearing. Yeah. Yeah. We just added a lot of fuel to that.

30:54What about can you just play really loud music? Like my immediate instinct was just like put on something bassy, turn it up to 100 and see if you can just like bounce them out of the speaker. Did you ask Sam about this? I did. And the answer is maybe like just just walk it outside and leave it alone is the easiest thing to do. but she got really curious about all these options, and she thought that that might bother them, because it turns out that these ants communicate via sound themselves. They rub little parts of their ant bodies together to talk to each other, and so a whole bunch of vibrations from the speaker might interfere with that, and it might piss them off enough that they would just give up and leave.

31:33So that's a real possibility, too. She got really into the idea of further testing of speakers and ants. So I really think I might have accidentally inspired like a PhD thesis. Which genre of music most repels ants is a thing I very much look forward to reading. So that was sort of the rundown of all of the theories. She also just gave me a bunch of ant 101 kind of tips to keep ants from getting into my house in the first place so that I'm not playing whack-a-mole with the colonies once they're in there just basic prevention probably the best strategy yeah but okay do you know what i keep thinking about here this whole time is as soon as you said the the the cubbies and the grill and the mesh of the play one i just keep sitting here being like there's gonna be some sonos designer who is sitting there listening to this being like oh my god do i have to add ant colony habitability to my like design checklist the next time I make a speaker.

32:34Like, do you have advice, did Sam have advice for Sonos on how to solve this clearly very real problem? Well, I wanted to ask Sonos these questions. Like my first stop was going to be Sonos because I had to know, I don't know, there's a lot of people that keep their speakers outside on patios and things like that. And after this happened to me, I was like, is there a designer at Sonos somewhere that is asking ant infestation questions about the design of these speakers? So I got in touch with them They were very polite. They said no very firmly two times about participating. I was still very curious, so I emailed a bunch of other speaker companies because I figured a lot of them would be dealing with a similar question.

33:16All no's were non-responses from them. I think I'm just creating small panics on comms teams around the speaker industry. I can guarantee you that somewhere there has been a meeting about the ant infestations over the last week. And if that's not impact journalism, I don't know what is. I just, I want to be an ant on the wall in one of those meetings. I just want to know, but we may never know. But like I said, I think I really inspired Sam to look into this more. I would love to do an experiment where I had a bunch of these speakers and I could have them in different environments and have some that are plugged in and some aren't to see if it's the magnetism.

34:00So I'd love to do an experiment like this. Well, I guess my last question is any advice for Sonos on making speakers that ants might not be as attracted to? I think that they should switch businesses and start making ant homes. They're really good at that. They're accidentally really, really good at this. They're accidentally really good. Look, I'm just saying Sonos tried headphones that didn't really work. They were going to do set-top boxes. They canceled that. There might be a straighter line from speakers to ant homes than from speakers to any of that other stuff. They've done all the hard work already.

34:39They've got this. Just start selling it at PetSmart. You're good to go. Ask the ants. Dozens of colonies of ants in speakers can't be wrong. They're onto something. I love it. So you, this story for you started in the best possible way, which is just like a reporter staring at a mystery trying to figure it out. I feel like you 100 %ed this mystery. You solved it. I'm giving myself full points. I feel good. I don't feel good about my Sonos, but I feel good about everything else. This was going to be the last question I asked you. Has it changed how you think about speakers? Like, are you looking at your speaker placement in your house differently now knowing what you know?

35:16I am looking at all of my electronics differently. I will say that because it did completely invert my thinking around what ants want. And we're still going to be dealing with these ants seasonally forever. And it's a little ominous. It's a little bit of a burden of knowledge situation. Because like you said, I look at my Roku now and all I can think of are the tiny little cubbies inside of it. and that's a weird thing to think about when you're looking at your Roku. But here I am. Yeah, if you're watching or listening to this, my advice is just forget all of this. Don't look. Ignorance is bliss.

35:58Everything's probably fine. You all shouldn't have listened to this is basically the takeaway. Yeah, but if you find a bunch of ants, now you know what to do. And if you don't see them, don't go looking and everything will probably be fine. and join the Sonos user forums. It's a fun time. I'm going to go post a few things. Yeah, you've got answers for people. Yeah, I need to like go back and be the conquering hero. Exactly. It's time that the people knew. Yeah. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about podcasts, specifically AI-generated podcasts.

36:33We'll be right back.

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39:31All right, we're back. Andrew Marino is here. Hi, Andrew. Hi, David. You have been making podcasts for a very long time and then recently decided to make a very weird and slightly unnerving kind of podcast. Yes, with artificial intelligence. Yeah, so this one I'm actually curious to hear the backstory of for you, because I think this is the sort of thing that a lot of people who have made podcasts professionally get really kind of squirrely and itchy about. But you were just like, I'm going all in. I'm going to get weird with AI podcasts. Why did you get into this in the first place? Yeah, the real draw to me was you can upload any kind of document to it and it will take it and turn it into two robots talking to each other.

40:17So, like, my immediate thought about this was, what if I upload stereo instructions as kind of like a funny gag, but also like thinking of stuff I wouldn't want to read and maybe an easier way to understand something. It's such a novelty that I think that's initially where I was going. But, yeah, there's actually some interesting use cases for it. Yeah, talk me through that a little bit. And I'm curious how you think about this as somebody who has been making podcasts for a long time, I think, because the sort of obvious step one is like stereo instructions is a good example, right? I, I have this giant document that is full of technical information that I don't want to read, right?

40:59And for years, the step was, just have something read the document to you, right? And there are just lots of people who learn better that way, who rather than reading something, you hear something, and that is a better learning tool for lots of people. that's very straightforward, right? This is something different. The idea of like, we're going to not read the thing to you, but we're going to talk about the thing is both sort of in that same line, but also just a very different proposition for like how to learn information. Yes. So I have realized from listening to a bunch of these how much easier it is to You understand something when it's a lot more casual and there's a lot more space between sentences and kind of breathing a little bit between topics.

41:48I just want to play a clip and you can kind of understand what this is sounding like and what it's trying to mimic. That's OK. Yeah. OK, get this. Imagine a world where like every website you go to starts charging robots to access it. Oh, wow. And smart homes still can't even make us a decent cup of coffee. Okay. So there's like space between each phrase and there's the other host is like commenting back. And you kind of like take a second to digest what that last sentence was versus sometimes when I read a person reading straight text, you kind of forget what the last paragraph was about or you weren't paying attention closely.

42:34I realized that podcast actually is great for listening in the background because it does move really slowly and helps you still grasp what they're talking about without paying super close attention. So as you listen to something like that, what do you like? I always think about the training data with something like this. Like what's what are these being trained to sound like? Do you think? Yeah. Yeah, so I talked to the director of product, Simon Tokamine, at Notebook LM, and he was saying that, like, a lot of this was they got two people whose voices you're hearing in those Notebook LM pieces to just riff in a studio for a long period of time.

43:17Oh, interesting. He said one of the things they did was just give them a picture and just, like, describe to each other what's in the picture. So you can hear a lot of stuff within these generative podcasts that were probably picked up over time in these recordings. That's fascinating. Like, how do you mimic a podcast without making a podcast is such a mind-bending exercise. That's very fun to think about. Yeah, yeah. There's moments where I've listened to these audio overviews where they toss to a break. As we navigate this crazy, ever-evolving tech landscape. Couldn't have said it better myself.

43:56Right. So let's take a quick break and then we'll be back to explore some of the other intriguing details from the Verges review. Sounds good. Stay tuned.

44:06And it's just, there's no need for that at all. But that was, you know, probably over time, that's what this tool was gathering. And also there's probably a lot of other like podcasts that Gemini was had been trained on, which, you know, obviously this uses Google's Gemini as well. Okay. So take me through your research process a little bit. I think part of what I'm curious about on this one is like what you even decide to upload to test how something like this can be used. What did you what did you feed into the audio overview system? Yeah. So there's different things you can feed in. Like you can link your Google Drive right up to it.

44:44So any document that's in your Google Drive is pretty easy to add. Any text, audio, any link for like a website, and YouTube. So YouTube, it will just grab the transcript basically from the video and turn that into a summarization. So what I was trying to do was figure out what you can actually get from adding a bunch of different sources together. So like a YouTube video, just putting one YouTube video, I don't think is a great way of using this. But if like a YouTube video and some notes that you took and recording of a meeting and like a PDF of something, like combining all that stuff together and then turning it into an overview or just whatever you want to do with the notebook, like take notes and ask it questions and all that.

45:35That was the most useful. And I thought that was like a just a great way of researching and studying for something. Yeah, I think that's I mean, that's kind of the notebook LM pitch in general. And I think it makes a lot of sense. I am curious, though, about the if you just feed it one YouTube link, what do you get back? Like a podcast about a YouTube video. Do they just describe the YouTube video? Yes. So I uploaded the Verge's iPhone 16 Pro review. OK. And it kind of just went through all the points of the video. So the video was 22 minutes and it made it into a 20 minute podcast. So it's not really something that like you could have just listened to the YouTube video, you know.

46:17So it doesn't really translate that well. But if you upload maybe a bunch of iPhone 16 Pro reviews and you kind of get a summarization of all these different takes on the phone. Right. Maybe that's more useful. But so, OK, so walk me through. Let's start on the good side. What did you try that sort of worked for you? That you were like, okay, this is a real useful or interesting thing that is coming out of this whole process. Yeah, like I said, instruction manuals, like the stereo receiver. I recently came across an iBo, original iBo dog robot. And there's a pretty long instruction manual. And I just uploaded that PDF to kind of just I can listen to on my commute or something to understand how that works.

47:05A robot with moods? That's pretty wild for the early 2000s. It really was ambitious. And you could still interact, pad its head sensor, show it the ball, or maybe colors it had learned to like. That thing worked pretty well. The other one is I'm trying to get my drone pilot's license. So Notebook LM has this tool called Discover where you can just type into it, I want, you know, drone license tutorial. and it will pull up a bunch of stuff from the internet that is related to that. And you can check off boxes of which source you want to use to put into the notebook. So you can really use it as Google and then input those links into your notebook and turn that into a podcast or whatever.

47:52So like I wanted to read all these different tutorials about how to get my drone pilot's license. And I put all that, all those different sources, a YouTube video, a PDF, a website, and that kind of took all the stuff maybe that they're all, there's some stuff that they're all saying similarly. And then some stuff you grab from different sources that might help better than others. Give me a sense of what that sounds like. I'm just trying to figure out because, you know, again, you don't want it to read you the instructions for the robot or your stereo or whatever. But I also feel like them talking about instructions without giving me the instructions is not quite the right answer either.

48:33So, like, what does this actually sort of come out sounding like when you feed something like this in? Yeah, I'll share what the stereo instructions sound like, which is, like, pretty useful here. Phono inputs and a ground screw. For your turntable. Yeah. But only if your turntable doesn't have its own built-in phono preamp. Right. If it does, use a regular analog input instead. Correct. And don't forget that MMMC switch we mentioned earlier needs to match your turntable's cartridge type. So like out of context, this is kind of silly and you don't really know what they're talking about. But when you're listening to the whole thing, like they do go into each thing and it's not just they're talking about.

49:08So this is a PDF of the stereo manual and like goes through a bunch of these different options. Like this is probably actually better if you just want to know how do I do this on the stereo and you just type to it. Or you can ask the podcast a question. Well, you can ask the podcast a question. It's like a call-in show? You can actually stop the hosts and tell them you have questions? Yes. Within the Notebook LM interface, there is an interactive mode, which you can basically join the discussion. While they're talking, they'll be like, oh, hey, what's up? So you've just like barged into the studio while they're recording and you're like, I have something to say.

49:52Yes, totally. Is it to move production back? Good point. Apple's preemptive shipment of that volume. Yep. Go on. Can we skip to the lightning round on AI? You know what? Absolutely. Sounds like you're eager to dive into the world of artificial intelligence. Let's do it. We were just about to wrap up our initial look at the tariffs anyway. Exactly. So without further ado. Let's jump right into that AI lightning round. First up, we saw that Meta was apparently caught doing some interesting things. And then we'll get back to the rest of the show. And be like, anyways. Oh, okay. So you can't sort of right turn the whole thing.

50:28But you can just, you can kind of pop your head in and be like, oh, but what about, and then they'll get back to work. Yes, there are like prompts you can kind of do when you generate to be like, focus on this topic or make this topic shorter. Or, you know, I only want this amount of time to listen to this. Got it. Okay. one thing i know you tried that i'm i'm very curious about is uh recipes because i think this is one thing audio recipes to me strike me as potentially a very good idea okay you know in a way that is weird right because it's like i use i use an app that i'm like checking on my phone a hundred thousand times while i'm cooking and the idea of like just somebody in my ear sort of talking me through the process as i'm cooking seems very cool complicated right like you can't make a 20 minute podcast that like perfectly matches everything that I'm doing.

51:15But it does seem like there's something to like you could make a fun cooking show recipe by recipe that is actually kind of instructional if this really works. So I've like I went from thinking this is a totally silly version of it to thinking maybe there's something here. What did you find? Yeah, I was real. Someone on the team suggested we upload some recipes to it to see how it would do. and I didn't feel like it was something I could follow along with while cooking. And also like in podcast fashion, it took like way too long to get to the point of the conversation. Now, let me play you a clip I got from this honey lemon chicken recipe.

51:54But the thing is, we're not just going to like read out the ingredients and call it a day right. We're going to try to figure out why this particular approach, and it's got like a 4.7 star rating, by the way. Why? Yeah, pretty solid. Right. So we're going to figure out why this approach is so popular and what we can learn from it, even if we're not, you know, planning on cooking anytime soon. Absolutely. I love so much that they're like, no, no, no, we're not going to tell you about the recipe. You uploaded a recipe. We're not going to tell you about the recipe. We're going to talk about other stuff.

52:22Right. So eventually it does get to like what you do, what the ingredients are. But it was like, let's speak to the power of why this honey lemon chicken is so popular. And it's like, I don't really want to know that. I just want to get to the points. There may be a world in the future where it's like, all right, now you're going to do this. Let me know when you're done and I'll get to the next thing. This does sort of neatly map to everything wrong with recipe sites on the internet, right? The thing where you open a recipe webpage and you're like, I would just like to see the recipe. And they're like, first, how about 2000 words about my life and all of my thoughts about honey chicken and everything that's happening to me right now.

52:58And then way down the page after some ads and videos, we'll get to the recipe. It's like they're just making the podcast version of that. Oh, my gosh. And what I mentioned about how they toss to a break, like there is a world where maybe like they want to start monetizing these. And when you generate a honey lemon chicken recipe, there's like, all right, let's get to a break before we get into the ingredients. And it just plays an ad or something like that. Yeah, that's super interesting. Did you test this with podcasts? I know you did YouTube videos, but can you put a podcast in here and it'll make a podcast about the podcast?

53:33Yes. Someone suggested putting a four-hour Joe Rogan podcast into it to generate a 20-minute summary. It's basically like a meta podcast. Like, I'm going to make a podcast about your podcast. Yes. We did try a scenario where we uploaded pre-production documents from our own podcasts and made them into a podcast compared to how we made them. Oh, interesting. So Decoder with Nilay Patel, they have like a nice pre-production document with questions, topics, guest bios, and a lot of relevant links and all that stuff. So I uploaded that to Notebook LM, and it generated a podcast of that discussion.

54:20I made one from an episode about EVs that Nilay and Andy Hawkins from The Verge talked about. But it didn't have it didn't you didn't upload the actual finished podcast, just the pre-production documents. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to see how it worked compared to how we end up making the show. Obviously, you don't get enough of it because you don't have Neela. You don't have Andy. But it like did a pretty it did a pretty impressive job of like taking all these points and like going through them all. But it was more just like how you would do it if you just wanted to get the information for a research paper or something like that.

54:59It wasn't like going to break down these topics and what they mean and like what are these questions that unfold because of these news things. Much like the Verge cast, we uploaded a rundown from the Verge cast, which is just a lot of links to stuff on the Verge. That's really interesting because that's like the decoder rundown you described is full of like information and clues and hints about what's interesting and has similar structure. The Friday Vergecast rundown is just I mean, it's just like 100 links in a Google Doc. And that's that's the entirety of the prep doc. Yes. So when you listen to that audio overview of a Vergecast rundown, you quickly learn that it cannot open hyperlinks and that it is just reading the headlines and making some kind of generic takes about what that means.

55:53So it's experiencing the world like the way people who just scroll really fast through their Facebook feed do? Yeah. Here's a clip from it about the Framework laptop. And then there's Framework, the laptop company. Ah, the modular laptop folks. Them. They actually had to stop selling some of their more affordable laptops, experienced order delays. Because of the tariffs. Yeah, and even briefly raised and then lowered their prices because of the tariffs. It just sounds incredibly volatile for them. That really underscores the immediate disruption, the instability that tariffs can inject into supply chains and pricing strategies.

56:28Total chaos, seems like. The fact that they had to make such rapid adjustments reflects the real-time pressures businesses are under. So you can tell, like, all it's doing is just seeing that headline and adding it to context of the world, which it does have from Gemini a little bit. There was another one where I asked about a Sony Bravia TV from a headline. I actually asked it, like, what is the model of that TV? And it didn't know because it wasn't in the headline. Okay. Yeah, that's an interesting one. I can even hear they're mentioning in there that they raised and then lowered the prices very quickly.

57:04And literally the headline we had in that document is framework raised prices and then unraised them an hour later because of Trump. It said all those words in a slightly different order again. But again, that was all right. I don't know that that was good or thoughtful, but it was right. you sent me a big chunk of one of these and my my memory of listening to it was that there are a bunch of things it got sort of flatly wrong all for sort of understandable reasons which i thought was interesting like at least there is absolutely we should say potential for these things to just completely make things up out of absolutely nowhere um and i'm curious if you had that experience but at least in the one that i heard there were a bunch of things that it just kind of whiffed on making connections between or made connections that are wrong and like misread a headline or something but in every single case i could figure out where it was getting the wrong information from which i thought was really interesting and it's like okay this thing is making a lot of mistakes but i can trace the mistakes most people wouldn't right which is like why this is dangerous i like i had i had also made this podcast that it was trying to make so like i knew the stuff it was talking about um but so there but it does just very confidently get things wrong without telling you anything about sort of where it's coming from.

58:25Yes. I uploaded some notes from a podcast I was working on, and it's had some of the people I talked to in the document, but not any quotes or anything. And when I put it in Notebook LM, the audio overview is just kind of made up quotes that the people said. Like attributed to these people? Yes. Oh, my gosh. So that is just made up. That's really bad. They just made that up. Yeah. that's really bad yeah um luckily it was only about salad dressing but like you can imagine this could be serious yeah i mean and this is like that's the thing with all of this stuff right and and so many of these tools are like it's it's the it's the glue on pizza in google right some of this stuff you can see where it comes from some of it is just being purely hallucinated by these tools that have been taught to have answers even when no answers are available like this is the a lot of these have been through, right?

59:15Where they will go and they are asked for information that they don't have, and so they will fabricate it. And that is the wrong outcome. But with something like this, where it would be a bad version of an audio overview, for it to just 10 times in 20 minutes be like, we don't really know anything about that, so let's move on. And so that tension feels so, so real to me in a way that even Notebook LM in general has done a good job of citing its sources pretty aggressively and it'll point you to the thing it's talking about in all of the different documents. And it is pretty thoughtful in that way.

59:51You can't do that with audio. You just can't. Like if you are constantly like referencing the name of your source for every single thing that you say, that's bad podcast. And it's a problem. Yeah. And also in the interactive mode, you can try to correct the podcast host and maybe it will learn that and put it in some bank or something. But no, it doesn't work like that. the iPhone 16 review, they kept referring to Neelai as Nelly and calling him her and she. Okay, so Nelly Patel from The Verge reviewed this. Exactly. And she brings a really interesting perspective, doesn't she? Oh, yeah. Uh-huh.

1:00:24The host is Neelai Patel and his pronouns are he, him. Oh, that's an interesting question. You know, it's easy to make assumptions. Based on what we've seen and heard. But actually, Nelly Patel uses she, her pronouns. Thanks for pointing that out. It's good to be accurate. Absolutely. Thanks for keeping us on our toes. So getting back to Neely's review.

1:00:45She wrote the review. So poor Neely. Neely, I have, I've known Neely a long time and that man has had his name mispronounced every way you possibly could. But Nelly, she, her is, is a tough beat for, for Neely Patel. So what, what does that make you think as a consumer of this stuff? I mean, I think you've now done the research to know that like there is there is something that works about this kind of thing for certain kinds of information. But is there that thing in your brain that's like, OK, this is giving me stereo instructions even or like information about a recipe. And I don't know if I should completely trust it.

1:01:20And by the time I have to pull out my phone to fact check this podcast, what am I doing here? Yeah, yeah. I think it's like low-stakes stuff. I think like really if you want to get the most out of Notebook LM, I think it's more useful to just be typing to it and asking you questions about the sources. The audio overview is interesting. Like maybe it's just some people just like that's the way they can learn and that's the way they want to do it. And I know they're going to have more voices. If you get tired of those voices, there's going to be more personas, they call it. So I think in the future, it's going to get better.

1:01:51It's going to be hard to see how much it is actually improving as far as accuracy goes. Yeah. Yeah. I think the way I have always thought about AI is like, I treat it like I treat Wikipedia in a certain sense. And I actually, I would argue Wikipedia is in many ways a more trustworthy source. But in the same sense that like, I wouldn't, I wouldn't take anything I read on Wikipedia and then like, submit it as professional work or swear to it under oath or like, bet my life on anything that I read on Wikipedia. Do you know what I mean? but it's like in terms of going from i don't know something about this to i now kind of know something about this it tends to work and and as long as the requirement is not that i be an expert with 100 correct knowledge fine right but i'm like i was i was looking it up this morning uh we were watching mulan because my son is home from daycare this week and we have watched mulan 250 times and it was like who is that that's singing this song that voice sounds kind of familiar that is information that both ai and wikipedia are well equipped to have and find and give to me and also if it's wrong the world will not end and so for the stuff at the bottom of that pyramid i'm like go nuts listen to the audio podcast about the mulan singer and and enjoy the next 20 minutes of your life anything above that i think like real skepticism becomes very important yeah um but it's part because these are like the thing that has amazed me and I'm curious if this has been your experience too is how quickly I came to listen to these hosts as if they were people like I've made a lot of podcasts and so I'm like editing their podcast in my mind as I'm going which makes me realize I'm producing this thing like I'm producing people and that was sort of alarming yeah after a while I do get sick of the host to be honest yeah I just like I don't I'm sick of these people.

1:03:48I don't want to listen to them anymore. They make too many puns. There's too many metaphors. They do. What have you learned about like podcast tropes? Because I feel like this would teach you every all the bad habits that every podcaster has are like boiled into this. What have you learned about being a podcast producer? Yeah. Like I said, like the ums actually might do something, might help. But yeah, no, the tropes of like, let's unpack this. It really speaks to the power of that kind of stuff is like, oh, my gosh, I can't. I'm I'm never using those phrases. They start like every episode by being like, let's do a deep dive.

1:04:22And I just now deep dive is like on the list of corporate jargon that I'm just like, I can't hear it without wanting to leap out of a window anymore. Yeah. Simon Tokamine from Notebook LM mentioned that he heard some other podcasts saying stuff that he noticed in Notebook LM first. Like, oh, that's the million dollar question. I don't know. I don't know. I think that's just that's just a podcast. I don't think he gets credit for million dollar. I don't think so. I think that one's been around. But like you can see like now you're already like they're sounding the same. Right. Totally. Yeah. And I'm going to be deep in my head about not sounding like notebook LM.

1:05:00Like there was that thing going around not that long ago where everybody was talking about the M dash and chat GPT is like the how you know it's chat GPT is when there's M dashes. I'm like, no, I love M dashes. I wrote them dashes all the time. I write with fewer M dashes now. Yeah, yeah, right. Consciously, I'm like, I don't want to sound like chat GPT. I have to not use M dashes. Totally. The more we see of all this artificial stuff online is like the more you appreciate stuff humans make. And the more like maybe we are making better stuff now because we see like how boring or uncreative AI can be.

1:05:35And like maybe that's like we always talk about competition on the Verge cast. Like, what if humans are now competing with AI and now humans are just going to be better because of what AI is? I'll take it. That's an okay outcome. I think the last question I keep thinking about with this is I can see it as a tool for learning things, right? Like in a sort of deliberate, I need to acquire this information kind of way. And I think the feedback we've gotten so far in the video suggests that there are people who are using it that way that are like, this is just a way that I absorb information better.

1:06:09And that's great. Um, but another thing podcasts are for a lot of people is just pure entertainment. It's just, it's like a fun and interesting and valuable way to spend your time hanging out with people. Do you see any of this ever getting there? Like, can these hosts ever be so fun to listen to that you don't even really care what they're talking about? I think the only thing is the interactive mode that really takes it another level because you can't call into the verge cast whenever you're listening to it and ask the hosts a question. like you can do that with this um you're not getting like i don't think people are going to have a parasocial relationship with these two ai hosts um so you you don't get a lot of that we don't know we don't know but there is something to that where like i know that uh notebook album is developing an app or they're going to release an app and that is like if i'm on my phone and i have the app and I'm just listening to the podcast, I think it's just be like, oh, hey, can you take that again?

1:07:10Or what is that? Can you explain more about this thing? That's actually like pretty useful. Yeah, it makes sense. And I think I like I want to see the version of this that is just like two dudes shooting the shit about sports, which is like a lot of the podcasts I listen to just to sort of zone out while I'm walking the dog or whatever. and in a way that kind of stuff is sort of replicable we we've we have a lot of data of it in a certain way it's like it doesn't require all that much like true information it's just kind of a hang yeah uh and people are talking to the voice modes of these assistants that way like it both seems totally implausible to me that it might just be fun to listen to this for an hour but also seems like maybe we're closer to that than i'm giving it credit for i don't know maybe Yeah, I was given an example that someone who really likes one of the Real Housewives shows did not have anyone to talk to about it and just wanted to listen to some two people talking about it on the podcast.

1:08:13And like, I think there's a lot of examples of like sports and stuff that just like thousands of podcasts that do this. but maybe something like super niche, like maybe it's like high school football team of your hometown or something like that. And you're just feeding all that information to it. And like, no one's going to be doing a podcast about that. That could be useful. Yeah, I like that idea. Super niche podcasts is a thing I would like to see more of in the world in general. Yes, yes, yeah. Particularly, I would prefer it more from people, but yeah. Yeah, I'll take what I can get. All right, Andrew, this was very fun.

1:08:49Thank you for doing this with us. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to do a question from the First Cast Hotline. Andrew, thanks, buddy. Thank you.

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1:10:44All right, we're back. Let's get to a question from the VergeCast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. You can email vergecast at theverge.com. Send us all of your thoughts and feelings and questions and pictures of party speakers. Statistically speaking, all of you care deeply about smart home things. And as always, we have smart home questions. Today is about lighting, and I bet you can guess who is here with me to answer it. But before we get to that, here's the question. Hello, VergeCast Hotline. This is Sean in Berkeley, California. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Today, I'm calling about smart home lighting.

1:11:19We are about to embark on a garage remodel project, converting it to a finished room, and I'll have the opportunity to start from the ground up on wiring and lighting. We are an iOS HomeKit household, and have primarily Philips Hue lighting, though recently we did add a couple of Lutron Casita smart wall switches. The garage room we used as a guest room, workout space, teenager hangout. So I would like a decent white light option, but also fun color changing stuff would be cool too. Also regular old wall switches are required because my parents will be visiting and ask them to use an app to turn on lights as a no-go.

1:11:56So I wanted to check in about where we are in the state of lighting. Who has the best ecosystem? Who plays nicely with Apple HomeKit? I see all these influencers on socials with amazing lighting setups, and I get a little jealous. Thanks in advance. Keep up the great work. P.S. David, I went and bought a pair of$19 USB-C Apple earpods just to record this voicemail on your recommendation. Your efforts have not been in vain. Take care. First of all, Sean gets it. Great job, Sean. Second of all, Jen 2 is here. Hi, Jen. Hello. Hello. Happy to be here. The first time I heard this question, I was like, oh, this is simple and there are lots of options and we can go through a bunch of them.

1:12:34And then listening to that again, I'm actually like, this is kind of a complex thing to try and do. Sadly, it is. You know what made it tricky? Color changing. As soon as he said that is when it got complicated. Okay, interesting. So if you didn't want color changing. It would be so much easier. Really? Oh, okay. Yes. Well, so, all right. Well, so let's start there because I think the sort of bones of what he's describing, I think, is actually a question a lot of people go through. And then the color changing is a wrinkle. But so let's start without the wrinkle. Where's a good place to start for that?

1:13:09So, well, whenever anyone asks me a question about existing smart home setups and expanding, I would always start with what they have and build on that. So he said I have Hue and Caseta. And Lutron Caseta is, I assume, what he's referring to. And those are smart switches. um number one rule about smart lighting is that smart light switches do not work with smart bulbs um and this is complicated and i do have an article explaining this which we can link to um but there are some exceptions which i'll get into but if you have you cannot put a philips hue light bulb in a socket controlled by a caseta smart switch if it's just on and off you might be okay.

1:13:50But if you have Philips Hue bulbs, you want dimming and dimming, they go crazy. I've done it and I burnt light switches and I've blown bulbs doing it. So it's not good. And this is the problem. So if he didn't want color lighting, I would just say, get some decent quality, dumb, I hate that word, but LED light bulbs or light fixtures and Caseta smart switches because they're rock solid, reliable. They work with Apple Home. You can use fixtures as opposed to just bulbs. So you can have something nice in your guest room slash. But that room has got a lot of purposes. And that also makes it slightly complicated.

1:14:30So yeah, a nice fixture that you can control with light switches. Casetas, great. Love them. But when you throw in color changing and you already have Philips Hue, then I would definitely consider Philips Hue. Then you need to deal with a different switch scenario because you cannot use Caseta. You mentioned wanting a physical switch because you don't want to have to use an app. I'm guessing that means that in-laws probably aren't going to use voice control either because that would be another option. I will say for this particular setup, like you're describing a room with lots of different people and lots of different uses.

1:15:06I think requiring physical switches feels like the right call. Like this is just not, everyone who comes into your house should not have to download an app to use your lights. You should always have physical switches. I agree. And you're wiring it from the ground up. See, this is the other, this is the fun part for me. If I was building a brand new house right now, I would not hardwire switches into my house. Because all smart bulbs can be controlled by wireless switches, which give you placement options so you can move them around if you just don't like where your light switch is. But that could make resale tricky because it's not expected.

1:15:41But for Philips Hue, that's an option. So they do have their own wireless switches that you can use. Their smart button, wall-mounted dimmer switches, and then their Hue tap dial switch would all control every light in the room. Plus, Hue has a great selection of light fixtures if you don't want to just use bulbs. because, you know, especially in more modern homes, just having light bulbs isn't the way people are going there, looking for nice light fixtures that add to the aesthetic of the home. And a lot of those are going to be LEDs, so they're permanently sealed, so you're not replacing bulbs.

1:16:16So that's one option, and you wouldn't actually need wires for that. But in terms of code or resale value, you know, you'd probably want to wire them up the switches, and then you could just put the Philips Hue option, whether you use the dimmer switch, the smart button, or the tap switch over the wall plate. So in future, you could go back to wires if you wanted. Sure. I feel like I'm even seeing more and more people just have the existing switches for existing lights and then just stick the Hue switch or whatever just on the wall right next to it, as if it's another switch. It's not like a perfect strategy, but that seems simple enough.

1:16:52It is. It is. And that would be the most straightforward. You stay in one ecosystem with Hue or Caseta. But there is good news. And this is something that's changed somewhat. Jen, if you're about to say matter, I'm going to hang up on you. No.

1:17:09There is, the matter does play a part in this answer. But no, this is that there are now smart switches with something called smart bulb mode. So you can now buy smart switches that work with smart bulbs. And basically the problem here is if you wire up any switch to a smart bulb, there is going to be a point when you flip the switch off and it's designed to cut the power to the bulb and then your smart bulb doesn't work. Also, there can be power levels with dimming because the whole point of dimming, what dimming actually does is just reduce the power to the bulb. And that's where you get into issues with Caseta because it starts flickering.

1:17:47That's what happened to my bulbs. So your smart bulbs will start flickering and that's not fun. Anyway, so these new bulbs sort of trick the energy flow and they always keep the bulb with a minimum amount of power. And there's a couple people that make these. One is a company called Innaveli. They're really lovely smart switches. This is the other thing. You probably want ones that look nice because there are some cheaper ones out there. But if you're building a new room, you're going to want some nice looking switches. They have them in different colors. They're really nice. They work with matter.

1:18:22They have a thread over matter. Hopefully you're going to have good Wi-Fi out in your garage, but this could help if that's going to be a problem. But they're$70 each, which is also about how much the Caseta switches are. So smart switches are expensive. That is the big downside. And the other downside with Innoveli is that they always seem to be out of stock. So they may not work in this scenario, but this way you could have Philips Hue bulbs and physical switches in your garage. So I think that could work pretty well for you if you can get these ones in stock. Yeah, I think they're sold primarily through Innoveli's website.

1:18:58Full disclosure, I have not tested any Innoveli smart switches myself, but I've always heard good things about them. They have a whole line. They also have Zigbee ones, Z-Wave ones. So if you have Zigbee or Z-Wave in your smart home, you could go with that option too. There are a couple other choices though, but this would lock you into an ecosystem which, you know, you've already got two ecosystems in your home. You've got Caseta and Hue, although they all work with Apple Home. But Akara has now really expanded its smart lighting options and they have a smart switch with smart bulb mode, but they only work with Akara products.

1:19:37So you'd have to buy Acara light bulbs, Acara light strips, and they also have the Acara ceiling light, and they're much less expensive. We're talking like$20 or$30 instead of$70. So that would be one other option. There are obviously lots of great options in smart lighting. You mentioned YouTubers with wonderful backgrounds. I'm going to guess a lot of those are going to be using Nanoleaf, which would be an option here too. Works with Apple Home, works with Matter. They just came out with a new wireless switch, their wireless sense switch, which I've been testing recently. And it's really interesting.

1:20:13It has a lot of great features. But I hesitate for you to throw another brand in the mix right now. I think Hue is probably your best bet if you're going to go with wireless switches. But that is an option if you were thinking like, I want to move away from Hue. You could look at Nanoleaf. LIFX is another one. They don't have any good switch solutions, though. So it's so odd that it's taken a really long time for us to get a good solution to the smart bulb, smart switch conundrum. Because whilst the white lighting with smart lighting is great, especially when you have tunable white lighting, so you can change the tone throughout the day.

1:20:48But it is fun to be able to throw in colored lighting, especially in a room that's going to maybe use for fun teenage activities or maybe doing some spin classes and you want some pulsing lights to go along with the music. Like if it's going to be, I think he said it was going to be a workout room, Sean. But yeah, I'd like to see more solutions here. And we're beginning to, but they all tend to stay within the same ecosystem. And this is where matter might help. Yeah, in theory, it is actually, this is a perfect reason for matter to exist. Something I have been looking for since matter came. Like, how can I make, because I have a Frankenstein selection of smart lights and switches in my home.

1:21:29And I cannot, it's been a struggle to get them all to work together. And that's where I, you know, sort of to me, the ultimate matter actually has worked moment will be when every light in my home can all work in one app. We're not there yet. That's the dream. How many apps is it right now? What would you say? I don't know that I could actually count. That's too many. Yeah, there's a lot of good solutions. But for this case, I would say probably skip Caseta, go to Philips Hue and use the Philips Hue smart button or more mounted dimmer switches, or these innervilly smart bulb mode switches. I would say go with Caseta if they had supported matter, but they don't.

1:22:13Lutron has not gotten the matter bandwagon. They're great, rock solid, as I said, but again, you know, for future proofing, I think I would, I would definitely stick with products that work with matter. Um, that's, I'm definitely at that stage now. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the right call. And I like, that's like the, the hue solution is a little less elegant, but probably a lot simpler to actually put in your house. And the Innavelia one is like going to be more work to get right, but then is the thing that gives you kind of the most seamless version of the experience you're looking for. So I think one of those two things is probably right.

1:22:50That makes sense. Yeah. And there are the run less wire switches too, if you've come across those, which are like kinetic switches that work with Hue bulbs. Again, I've not used them myself, but I feel like if you're going to go with a wireless solution, go with Hue's wireless solution because the Hue system just really works well together. But if you do want wired, I think Innovelli could be a good option. You just may have to wait. I'm not sure when they're going to be back in stock. But yeah. And if you do get this all set up, I would love to hear a report and what it looks like and send us some pictures and tell us how it all went.

1:23:24Yeah, Sean, whenever you do decide, hit us back. We want to hear it. We'll play it on the show and we'll judge all of your decisions. And I very much look forward to it. All right, Sean, I hope that helps. Jen, thank you as always. You're welcome. All right, that is it for the show. Thank you to everyone who was on this episode. and thank you as always for listening. As ever, if there are questions you have or thoughts or feelings, or you just want to yell at us about the fact that we just did an entire segment about creepy crawly things inside of your gadgets, trust me, I understand. And also we deserve it.

1:23:59Email vergecast at theverge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11 with all of your thoughts and questions and feelings. We love hearing all of them. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Will Poore. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the news that's going on. The antitrust stuff continues. Lots of fun new gadgets. We're getting into developer conference season and there is just a lot of interesting tech news happening right now. We're going to get into all of it. We'll see you then.

1:24:29Rock and roll.

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