Do we really want Rosie the Robot?

30:55And I understand, you know, I can, I can, you know, go get me a beer suddenly makes sense because I know where the kitchen is. I know where the, I can recognize the refrigerator, I can open it up. And so now I can pick up a beer. And those are all really, really, really, really hard problems prior to, you know, Gen.A.I. changing the rules. I think that the idea, you know, if I was building a warehouse robot, I would put arms on it immediately, but I wouldn't put legs on it because warehouses are flat. Wheels work really, really good on flat. So Rosie had it right. I mean, she was arms and no legs.

31:35I think Rosie did have it right, honestly. And if she wanted to go upstairs, she just hovered, which was like the, you know, just like R2-D2 could magically make itself upstairs until they put rockets on it, which really wouldn't work very well in a home environment. But, you know, but I think legs are hard. You know, the amount of force that needs to be stored in the knee of a leg in order for it to do the types of things, lifting moves, and if that amount of energy in the knee is not necessarily something you want people near. And so that there's some physics that need to be figured out a little bit as we think about the realities of thoughtful Rosie the robot design so that we can get all of the good, minimize cost and maximize safety.

32:32And that will require letting go of some of the preconceptions of how things need to be. No, that makes a lot of sense. I see an arm being much more useful, although to date, the arm that I've tried in my house has not really been very useful. But the potential's there. The potential is there. Yeah. And that's exciting. It is exciting. But just to sort of wrap up and to bring us sort of full circle to when you first talked at the beginning of the chat about where you feel, I think you mentioned like companionship and bringing like robots that have a connection with people in the home. This is something that I've been struggling with in my mind.

33:12It's like the idea of anthropomorphizing appliances sort of brings with it like a whole host of complicated challenges to me around like the nature of consciousness and the boundaries of humanity. And we don't have to dive into all of that now, but I would love to just sort of ask you, if you think, as you said, genitive AI and this sort of more true intelligence in robots is going to become very much part of the future of home robots. And if we're building something that we're looking to have a connection with, that is perhaps part of our life or our family, not just a machine, what is that? You know, like everything robotics, it's complicated.

33:54Right. You know, I think that what is true is humanity is desperately isolated and lonely. And, you know, 50 % of Americans would self-identify as feeling isolated and lonely. And the health impact of feeling self-isolated and lonely has been well documented as, you know, U.S. Surgeon General a number of years ago said it was the same as smoking 15 cigarettes a day in its negative impact. And so this is a epidemic level challenge that society is facing. Where do robots come into this? And I would argue that building, whether it be Rosie the Robot or the Starship Enterprise, without considering the fact that what you're doing is creating an opportunity for real human connection is a mistake.

35:02now once you've realized and once you've committed yourself to the fact that human connection is an important part of what the world needs then there's a question of okay where are the challenges that we need to make sure that we're very aware of what metaphors can be healthfully imposed is it recognized that the goal of your smart home is to occasionally motivate you to get out of the home and go do something that would drive additional human connection? Or how do you become part of the solution as opposed to an increasing part of the problem? But it begins with a recognition that this is an important challenge, and generative AI, without taking on, at a very fundamental level, the opportunity and challenge of human connection, is not going to succeed in the long term.

36:06Yeah, yeah, wow. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it's there, it's happening. how do we make sure we do it right? And part of doing it right is having it be just a wonderful and healthy experience and not just a wonderful experience. Well, and I know you can't tell us much, but I'm just guessing from the name of your new business, Familiar Machines and Magic, that maybe this is something we might be hearing more about from you later. And I'm excited one day, hopefully, to hear more. But I really appreciate your time chatting with me today, walking me through this and helping me sort of figure out what I actually want from my home robotics.

36:46It's been very, very illuminating and really interesting. And I very much appreciate you sharing your time with us today, Colin. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you very much. And we're going to take another ad break. And when we come back, we're going to be talking about Thread. No, not Meta's social network, but the Thread protocol and how one goes about creating a smart home protocol. We'll be right back.

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39:21Welcome back to the Vergecast. Putting together a smart home can be complicated, especially if you want to buy devices from different companies. That's because as manufacturers have made new devices for the Internet of Things, the IoT, they've all used different protocols and created different walled gardens. Zigbee, Z-Wave, HomeKit, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Thread, Weave, and more. I could go on and on. It's been a frustrating experience for consumers. Do I need a hub? Will it work with my Android and my spouse's iPhone? Am I locked into one manufacturer ecosystem if I just want to turn my lights on with a voice command?

40:03So to fix all of this, about five years ago, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung, and a bunch of manufacturers, but not all, rallied together to create a solution, MATA. Think of MATA as a shared language for your smart home devices so that they can talk to each other, no matter where they came from. But for them to talk, they need a way to do that. They need like telephone lines or a network infrastructure. And MATA works with two. One is Wi-Fi and its hardwired sibling Ethernet. And the other one you may be unfamiliar with. It's called Thread. Thread is a low-power, low-bandwidth mesh networking protocol that, unlike all those other protocols, was specifically designed for smart home devices.

40:55It's super fast, works locally, and doesn't need an internet connection to turn on your lights. Today, we're going to do a deep dive into Thread, how it came to be, what makes it stand out, and then explore why matter and Thread haven't yet seen the widespread adoption that some were hoping for. To do this, I've invited someone who's probably forgotten more about Thread than most people know. Grant Erickson is an engineer who actually developed Thread while working on Nest's early smart home products. He then helped grow the protocol as president of the Thread Group and was instrumental in bringing together Google, Apple, and Amazon to form the MatterSmart Home Standard.

41:37Hi, Grant. Welcome, and thank you so much for joining me. Good morning, Jennifer. It's a pleasure to be here and a pleasure to finally be able to chat live. Wonderful. Great. Yes, we've communicated over the years over email, and this is our first time face-to-face, so it's exciting for me. Can't wait to get some more insight here. And just to kick us off, can you just give us kind of a brief overview of what is Thread? Absolutely. So in order to really orientate yourself to what Thread is and where it fits, I think the best peer that you can think of is Wi-Fi. We love Wi-Fi. It's on our phones.

42:11It's on our tablets. It's on our laptops. It's on our computers at home. And it allows us to do things like stream Netflix or look at Facebook or do all the things that sort of the killer app of the internet and the web have become. But Wi-Fi is, in addition to providing a lot of bandwidth, it needs a lot of power to do what it does. And for constrained devices that either need to be small and tiny or need to run on a very tiny battery, Wi-Fi can be made to work, but it's not ideal because you're often going to replace batteries very frequently or you have to figure out how to plug the thing into a wall.

42:42And Thread is really the low-power sort of constrained wireless network peer to Wi-Fi, it allows you to sort of bring internet connectivity to things for which it was either previously impossible or expensive, or as people in the biz love to acknowledge, required gateways and coordinators and bridges and all these other types of technology that consumers really... Hubs, yeah. Hubs, exactly. Consumers don't care about or don't want, but they're sort of little necessary evils that we have to bring in when the technology doesn't get us to the internet end-to-end. So in summary, really think of Thread as a super low-power complement to Wi-Fi for bringing devices that previously couldn't connect to the internet to connect to the internet and other wireless devices or wired devices.

43:26Excellent. But one of the main things I wanted to talk to you about, because I think it's fascinating that you created a new smart home protocol. So we're going to go back in time and do a bit of smart home lore here. And this is for the smart home geeks along here. I hope you guys will enjoy this. But Thread began way back in 2011 with the original Nest learning thermostat. And you were involved in developing that, having worked with Tony Fidel and Matt Rogers at Apple before joining them when they founded Nest. So can you tell us why you guys decided to create your very own smart home protocol, considering there were already a few of them?

44:05Why create Thread? So back when I got the call from Matt Rogers to join getting the band back together, it was with my wife at the Space Needle in Seattle. And even at the moment that he had called, there was already a prototype, and even before I joined, of the Nest Learning thermostat. And it had what we call some dark silicon in it. And I think it was the TICC something or another 802-154 radio. For those in the audience that aren't aware, your thermostat fundamentally controls one of the largest energy loads in your home. And the Zigbee Alliance, of course, at the time had a standard called Smart Energy Profile.

44:40And the idea was that the Nest Learning Thermostat was going to participate with your energy meter in your home through the Smart Energy Profile. And by the time I joined, I was sort of helping lead the charge with some other engineers on how we were going to make this work. And we found something very interesting. And that is, even though there was a smart energy profile and standard, as we approached, for example, Pacific Gas and Electric or Con Ed, all the different energy companies, even though there was a standard, at the top of that standard, each energy company had a special sauce in terms of onboarding and security in terms of how the device would get involved on their platform, on their network and participate.

45:18And what we quickly realized is, wait, we're a small startup. We only have less than 50 employees. There are 20 energy, major energy companies. We're going to have to have effectively 20 different firmware loads for our thermostat to deploy this across the country. And we're like, disaster. That's not going to work. That's not scalable. We just simply can't support this. And so we basically said, let's stop. Let's retrench. Let's refigure this out. And what we ultimately did, which I think was the right choice, is, of course, all these energy providers had cloud platforms. And what we realized is we could integrate at the cloud level where software and resources are much more fungible and easily changed and redeployed.

45:56And so we did cloud-to-cloud integrations with all the energy providers. And so what that meant is we now had this radio that we thought we knew what we wanted to use it for, but suddenly we didn't have a use for it that we thought we did. so that kind of brings us to the next part of the journey and that is it's important to understand the company was called Nest it wasn't called the Nest Learning Thermostat company it wasn't called the Nest Security Company there was always a vision for an ecosystem of connected products and services not just within the walls of Nest but outside to other partners and products and services outside of Nest and Nest presumably being like the home like nesting in your home Exactly, exactly.

46:34And so there was always this vision for more than just the thermostat. And there was always a vision for connectivity both outside the home. You're outside the home. You want to have awareness of what's going on in your home. How do you connect through back to your products and back to your home? There's a notion of I'm in the home. I want to control my thermostat from the bed. Maybe not going all the way up through the cloud as a lot of early smart home integrations were. What would this need to look like? And in fact, even before the fact, we were, of course, many of us Apple alumni, but we knew that Apple was not the start and the end of mobile platforms and tablets.

47:06And so we were thinking about, again, Android and Google and other ecosystems. And so we asked ourselves, what technologies do we need to bring to bear to bring this vision to life? Hey, we've got this 15-4 radio. What could we do with that? And the real key moment for us was, and it was sort of a Wayne Gretzky moment, a skate to where the puck is going, not where the puck is. we bet on IP. We said, yeah, there's all these protocols. Yeah, they've got some market traction. But ultimately, if we want people to start with a particular product in our ecosystem, we don't want them to have to start with that product.

47:39Plus, oh, you need to buy a gateway or a hub. Or, oh, I have the product, but I want connectivity. I can't do it until I get this hub. And so we really wanted to make the ability for consumers to choose the product in our ecosystem they wanted to start with and be able to incrementally grow from there without having to be networking engineers without having to buy additional pieces of just sort of network-only hardware to make the whole ecosystem work. And ultimately, we decided we need to build something ourselves. But building yourself, I mean, you mentioned earlier, you're a 50-person company, I think you said, right?

48:09And that was an already taking on a large project, launching essentially the first smart thermostat. I think Ecobee was there just before you guys. But what made you think, okay, let's create a whole new smart home protocol. And how did you then decide to develop Thread? So the actual genesis for Thread didn't actually start with a thermostat. The thermostat was the thing that kind of triggered the vision. But by the time we released the thermostat, the first generation, we already had our second product in the pipeline in engineering development, and that was Nest Protect. And Nest Protect had this interesting problem of, from a regulatory perspective having to be interconnected.

48:52Just to clarify for everyone, that is the amazing smoke alarm. That was the first smart smoke alarm, which unfortunately has recently been discontinued. But I still have two in my home. I'm hanging on. I think mine expire this month. Ah, okay. Yeah, it's really a fantastic product. One of the best I've worked on in my career. So yes, that is the smoke and CO alarm. And of course, it's not just enough to detect smoke and CEO where you detect it, you have to broadcast that alarm to every other connected alarm that's in the home. And so we had a challenge of, okay, we have these connectivity requirements for people, for end users, for the cloud, but we also need these smoke detectors to connect to one another.

49:34Hmm, okay, what does that need to look like? What do we need to design to make that happen? And that was really where the genesis of Thread started to come to the fore. Again, we looked at all sorts of different technologies, proprietary radios from different vendors that we could have done, other network types. And ultimately, we said, okay, we could do this with this particular technology. Like, okay, well, now we need to have that radio, plus we need to have connectivity to the cloud that increases our product costs. What can we do with just one radio, one network stack, be an interconnected alarm, and do all of this and still achieve the vision of, okay, let's say people just start in their home with Nest Protect and want to grow from there.

50:13What would that look like and ultimately that was sort of the seeds to get us to thread and again we went back to that north star which is this has all got to be ip it's got to be mobile connected it's got to be cloud connected these things have to be connected to each other we need something that can carry ip but can also talk to each other when the internet is down broadcast these alarms all that and that really was the genesis of okay we need an ip-based wireless mesh network that's low power because yes Some homes have connected powered smoke and CO detectors. They've got line voltage in the box behind them, but some don't.

50:48Some just have to run on batteries, and those batteries have to last for a couple of years. And so how do we do that? How do we meet that multi-year AA battery lifetime with an interconnected wireless alarm and meet those product costs and technology constraints? And so Thread was born, and that was the genesis. And what was the vision then? Like in 2012, I think you said, 2012, 2013. So what was the vision then? What was coming next? I mean, again, at that point, we already knew that there was the thermostat, even with the first generation. The second generation was already on the drawing boards.

51:22We had Nest Protect already in flight. Nest Guard was already on the drawing board. We already knew we were going to be building eventually a security system. We had, you know, ideas of additional sensors. We had the Nest Yale lock was already in flight at that point. So we already had a first-party ecosystem that we had a roadmap for, and we had different points on that roadmap for here's when we're going to do this and here's when we're going to do that. So as we were building that first product, we already had points on the horizon that we knew we needed to get to. So as we were making decisions, again, we already kind of had needles that we needed to thread to make sure, ah, if we make this decision, we need to make sure that we're enabling that.

52:00And even at that time, we also had the Works with Nest program that was getting off the ground. And that was, of course, a cloud-based integration. But we always had it in mind that in addition to cloud-based integrations, we wanted to have local integrations. We wanted to bring weave and thread to other first-party, second-party, third-party partners for doing integrations within the home outside the cloud. So, again, all this stuff was even as early as 2011, 2012, stuff that we knew we needed to get done. And we needed to thread that needle correctly to make sure we got there. Well, and then something happened.

52:32Google bought Nest in 2014. What specifically happened to the technology of threat when that happened? Yeah, it's an excellent question. And I'll do an unofficial plug for those in the audience that haven't read it. Tony Fidel's excellent book, Build, really covers a lot of detail that we probably won't cover today about that relationship and that acquisition. But there sort of was an interesting, I don't want to say cultural clash, but an interesting clash of sort of agendas and goals. Of course, Nest, at the time we were acquired, was probably 175, 150 employees, very small, still laser-focused on what we were doing.

53:09Google, of course, at that time was a multi-billion dollar international company with many divisions, many different initiatives. And, of course, Google's famous for sort of controlled chaos and not top-down decision-making. So one of the interesting things that happened, of course, is IoT and smart home was sort of getting off the ground, but had not been acquired. And that was sort of a match in the haystack for igniting interest in that space. But it was interesting when the day we were acquired, one of the founders of Google sort of said, you know, to the extent that we are doing other things related to IoT within Google, today we are going to stop doing those and we're focused on Nest.

53:46And that was kind of sort of true. There was an initiative within Google called Android at Home. and within a week of that acquisition Android at Home was shut down. There was an opportunity for those teams to come together and work together with Nest. But what was interesting and what we learned shortly thereafter is I'd say within a month of that acquisition many of us would start getting meeting requests for say I'm working on this little IoT project and how can Nest help me in my IoT project and there literally was tens if not hundreds of IoT initiatives within Google. And so how do we make Threat and Weave move forward?

54:21Of course, it was abundantly clear that we needed to do what we needed to do to achieve our roadmap. But there was a lot of, I would say, competing interests within Google that were not aligned and convinced that what we were doing was the right choice. And so a lot of us spent a lot of time and energy trying to convince Google what we were doing was the right choice. And that wasn't obvious to them, even though it maybe seemed apparent to us based on what we were doing and our vision. But ultimately, you know, the people that needed to be were supportive and we kept moving forward and kept doing what we were doing.

54:51But certainly there was, I think, a lot of confusing competing initiatives within Google with their partner ecosystem and what they were doing with IoT that made it beyond the challenges that we've talked about already. There was a lot of internal challenges that, again, just made that journey a lot more difficult than probably otherwise could have been or should have been. Well, and then in 2016, Google open-sourced Thread, correct? Yeah, that was an interesting moment. Open Thread is really another interesting part of this journey. What you typically see a lot historically in the world of standards is sort of what I call leading with paper.

55:28You sort of have multiple companies coming together with an idea, and the idea is that we're going to write a specification, we're going to write a standard. and eventually to the extent that standard and that document generates excitement, you get multiple takers, multiple comers on that say we're going to write a software to that standard. And different standards bodies have different thresholds. Some require one implementer, some require two, some require three. But the idea is we're going to get some number of implementers and we're going to have a race to have them all implement this. And then we're going to do an interop fest to make sure they all work together.

56:02And when we get sort of the right level of convergence and interoperability, we're going to laugh and clap and say the standard is complete. We have this many implementations and it's done. And that is an okay way of working, but we needed to move faster. As you knew, as you heard earlier, we had a lot of products. We had a lot of ambition. We had a lot of vision. We needed to get done and we needed to get done quickly. And so as that process was happening within the thread group and was not necessarily happening at the speed and the quality that we wanted it to happen, we had a unique opportunity.

56:32We had a brilliant hire in the industry, Jonathan Way. We picked up from Cisco. Jonathan had a ton of experience in this space. And he and the rest of the team suggested, hey, I think I could write a thread stack and we could open source it and really unlock and scale this market in a way that's different from the way this industry works in the past. and OpenThread was born. And we approached some partners and we said, hey, we're doing this. And they're like, oh my God, this has never been done before. Like, this is fantastic. Can you really do this? I'm like, yep, we're doing it. And Jonathan got it done and we went and did it.

57:05And it really, again, took Thread from sort of in terms of silicon vendors and stacks and availability from very small number. So we literally had 15 partners overnight with OpenThread. It was truly a watershed moment for Thread. And Jonathan is Google, correct? But he's, I mean, he's still. Jonathan is still at Google. He's actually also VP of technology of Thread Group as well. Right. Now, so you mentioned Thread Group. Now, when did that develop? Because that came in. So Nest was bought by Google and then open source Thread. Somewhere in the point here, this becomes, Thread becomes a small industry collaboration with Thread Group.

57:43I think Nest, you mentioned Yale, I believe Silicon Labs. How did all these guys come together, and what was the sort of impetus of creating ThreadGroup? So we talked about winter 2011 kicking off the Nest Protect program. Again, when you sort of think about things from a supply chain perspective, thinking about Apple levels of scale of producing something, one of the worst things you can do in the industry is have single-source suppliers. Like, oh, wait, we've got a production problem. We can't move forward because we're locked into the single supplier. And so, as I mentioned, choosing 802.15.4 was a key choice to make sure, one, we didn't have to spin up that silicon program, but two, there was already a wide range of silicon vendors that were all making 802.15.4 solutions.

58:27And so, as we launched the Nest Protect program, we were out looking for who was going to be our supplier for 15.4 solutions in the Nest Protect. And we went and talked to all the major players, and we talked about our vision, we talked about the problems, and they said, hey, we actually believe in this. We have been hearing from our customers a lot of the same things. We think you, Nest, have the right vision. We're on board with this. And so we started to sort of think to ourselves, maybe the right way to do this is not just a sort of a vendor-to-vendor relationship. Maybe there's an industry collaboration here.

59:00And so we had a meeting even before the Nest Protect program was fully kicked off. And Tony and Matt said, no, we are going to make this an industry initiative. And so we got all the different silicon suppliers we were talking to together, NXP, Silicon Labs, etc., Texas Instruments, so on and so forth, and said, hey, we're going to create an industry. Do you guys want to be a part of this? And they were like, yep, absolutely. and at that point my predecessor as the Thread Group president Chris Boros was actually our first partnership lead he was already working with the likes of Big Ass Fans and Yale etc on the Nest Lock and other programs and we got them together and said hey we're thinking about doing this thing and here's the vision and here's the idea and they're like yes absolutely how do we be part of this and so we got sort of this core group of I think it was 11 or 13 companies together up and down the supply chain and Thread Group was born even before we started on the Nest Protect contact.

59:52So, it sounds very familiar to something that's happened more recently. me. It's very much, I mean, I went back and read the first press release from Thread Group, and it basically sounds exactly like the idea was what Matter eventually became. I think the quote that caught me was, the Thread protocol takes existing technologies and combines the best parts of each to provide a better way to connect products in the home. But then this was 20, What is this, 2013, 2012? Now, that's a long time ago. Matter came in 2019. Just for some of our listeners who maybe aren't super keyed in to the smart home space, what is Matter?

1:00:36Absolutely. So we talked about with Wi-Fi that there's a killer app, and the killer app for Wi-Fi ultimately became the web and all the different web properties and applications. Ultimately, Matter, like its peers HomeKit or OpenWeave or Zigbee, is an IoT application layer. But what really was critical for Matter is Matter is based on the Internet protocol or IP. And because Thread is IP, just like Wi-Fi is IP and Ethernet is IP, you suddenly have a singular application layer that can connect devices that are on any of these IP together to connect, to interoperate with one another and work together to provide features and services in the home.

1:01:13Right. So thread is like the plumbing and matter is like the fun stuff, the showers and the taps. And I'm not a great analogy. I'm sorry. Exactly. But for the smart home, it's helping run, do the fun things that we see. And thread is working behind the scenes to make sure everything connects with each other. Exactly. To borrow a popular metaphor from Linus Torvalds, thread is the plumbing, matter is the porcelain. Right. So the main, the key here is that interoperability, right? Exactly. Any device can work with any platform. And that's something that's really been a struggle in the smart home to date.

1:01:53Silos and walled gardens. And now everyone's coming together, all the big companies, everyone's involved in matter, right? Apple, Google, Samsung, most of the smart home manufacturers, the chip makers, everyone's come together and said, like, this is what we need. And thread, along with Wi-Fi, are the sort of underpinnings of matter today. Exactly. To have, you know, a home that you want to invite people into, a hotel you want to invite people into. Like, they're not looking under the cabinets. They don't necessarily care what the plumbing is. The engineers do. The people making the products do.

1:02:25The people building the building do. But what people interact with is the porcelain. And so an application layer, that killer app that has the right ingredients, the right special sauce to bring all this stuff together to bring the vision alive was what we ultimately needed for this whole industry to really take off. I can imagine our colleagues and peers over at Apple thought they were doing the same thing with HomeKit. And truth told, I think Apple was really doing a fantastic job with building out, as there won't to do with Made for iPod, Made for iPhone, a really rich, vibrant partner ecosystem with HomeKit.

1:02:58Of course, the Zigbee Alliance had been doing this long ago since roughly the early aughts. And so we're all kind of doing our thing in our silos to try to bring this vision to life. But ultimately, to make the plumbing valuable, people needed a killer app. And let's be candid, most companies aren't as insane as Nest to say, here's this super ambitious vision, and we're going to go do this with a limited number of people. Most companies are fast followers. They just say, you know, tell me what to do, tell me what to adopt, and then we'll go make product based around that. They're not necessarily technology creation companies.

1:03:31They're product creation companies. So we're all kind of doing our thing in our silos trying to figure out a way to be successful in this market. Yeah, well, and you mentioned Apple there. They did adopt Thread, right, in 2018. So how did that happen? So we talk about plumbing and choosing the right plumbing for the smart home or the smart building. And one of the sort of elbows, pipe fittings, etc. sitting on the table is Bluetooth. And you might think, hey, Bluetooth is everywhere. It's in my car. It's in my phone. Maybe you think, I'm going to build an IoT solution out of Bluetooth. Bluetooth is great.

1:04:06Love Bluetooth. But ultimately, the best way to think about Bluetooth is sort of a wireless USB. What are the applications that really made Bluetooth prevalent? It was telephony. It was headsets and audio. It was human input devices, keyboards, mice, etc. If you put a USB cable between any of those two devices, you're like, oh, okay, it's a point-to-point connection. It's networking, but it's not a network in and of itself. And so, you know, you translate that. And again, I'm speculating here. I don't have an official line since I wasn't involved in their product development plans. Oh, the Apple guy's still in you there.

1:04:45Not speaking for Apple. But you can imagine a Bluetooth HomeKit door lock on your front door, right? And now I happen to be upstairs in the bedroom, and I want to unlock my front door because my kid has come home late. Somebody's come, the dog walker's come, whatever it is, and I want to open the front door. Ooh, but wait, guess what? The bedroom and the front door are too far apart. Too far away. They can't talk to each other. Yeah. And now the question is, how do I solve that? Well, I can move closer to the door lock. But then I may as well open it manually. Exactly. But because Bluetooth isn't a network, there is no repeater, there is no router, there is no additional devices or things I can put between me and the front door to make that experience better.

1:05:28And so my suspicion is that, like many companies that were building their IoT strategy around Bluetooth, was we need to do something different to make this experience better for customers. We need a network. and I think you know I love Apple and and and they're great because ultimately as we were at Ness they were believers in IP of again Gretzky skating to where that puck is going and I think they reached the conclusion like many companies in the ecosystem did we need something beyond Bluetooth to make this in-home networking experience for IoT better we need to be able to have a HomePod for example sitting between me in the bedroom on my iPhone and the door lock and hey now they're all thread they're all meshed together my request to open the door jumps to the HomePod, the HomePod jumps to the front door.

1:06:13Great. I've got a Nest Protect sitting somewhere between those. I jump from my phone to the Nest Protect, to the HomePod, to the front door. Again, it's just sort of a network that grows as you add devices. Customers don't have to think about it. And so I, again, think Thread was a natural way for them to expand HomeKit and sort of solve some of those customer experience problems that I imagine they were having. And again, HomeKit already worked over IP because they had a cloud component of HomeKit. And so for them to adapt that HomeKit over the cloud component to Thread was, I suspect, a pretty easy exercise for them to do.

1:06:47Okay, right. So we've now got Thread quite established, right? And we've got HomeKit using it. We've got Weave using it. We've got Google and Apple. I think Samsung was also involved in the Thread group here at some point, so they were interested. They were also very early. Yeah. But we still have these ecosystems. We still have these silos of the smart home. the smart home is stalling out to some extent at this point because people are confused, tearing their hair out, trying to make things work. I've spoken to a few people about this in my time reporting on Matter, but I understand there was a moment, Michelle Turner and yourself from Google, Apple, Amazon counterparts, and the Zigbee Alliance all came together to figure this out.

1:07:30Was this kind of a watershed moment, like Apple, Amazon, Google, Zigbee all sitting down together and being like, we're going to work together on this? I think so. I think all the players had reached a point where we sort of had figured out what we need to do to get to the vision of where we need to go. We think we can make a bigger market. We think we can make it better for consumers. We think we can improve all this. And so with that, the team started working together, figuring out what the best of each of these things was and how we were going to bring it all together. And as somebody who's been using it, certainly it's got warts.

1:08:05But I think relative to where it was, say, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, it's getting there. It's getting to the vision. Why was it thread and Wi-Fi? And why not Zigbee or Z-Wave? Or, I mean, Bluetooth mesh was an option that some companies use. There were other things out there. Was this a political move to some extent? I mean, I know with protocols, there's a lot of politics. Or was it very much based on the technology? Like, was it a mix of the two? No, it was absolutely technology. We really, again, were putting the consumer first. And in order to have the consumer experience that those of us who were in product wanted to have, which is, you know, you start with this product, you start with this product, you start with this product and add incrementally over time and things just evolve and get better as you add those products to the mix.

1:08:55We, again, had a very fine line on the horizon that said, we don't want people to have to acquire gateways, converters, bridges, etc., just for the sake of converting one protocol to another. But there was another practical reason for all that. Another North Star was, you know, at Nest, we had the Nest detect window and door sensor. Oh, I love that thing so much. It's so sad it's gone. The resources on that were mind-bogglingly small. And the fact that we packed Bluetooth and Thread into that thing, and it could connect directly to the Nest cloud. It could connect directly to the security system.

1:09:32And to do all that in the form factor that we did and to have it last as long as it did on the battery. Exactly, it was incredible. And so what you learn from an engineering perspective when you're building these products is every protocol you add is call it another 128K of RAM and flash you need. And so to add this thing that is an IP, great, there's another chunk of space we need to find. And now you need to add this thing, another chunk of space you need to find. And so we already had IP and Bluetooth in there. There just was no room for anything else. And so between the customer vision of all this stuff connected without gateways, bridges, and converters, and the engineering constraints of this all has to fit in window and door sensors, it really had to be as simple as possible.

1:10:14And again, IP was we knew where we needed to go because we knew we needed to connect to the cloud. We knew we needed to connect to mobiles. We knew we needed to connect to other devices. That was key. And so we didn't say no, you couldn't have these other protocols. But ultimately, the way matter brings those into the fore is you sort of virtualize them into the matter ecosystem. You have hubs or things that sort of say, oh, the Zigbee light bulb over here is actually a matter light. And so you interact with it from the matter perspective. And then that thing reflects off into the Zigbee world or the Z-Wave world or whatever it happens to be.

1:10:46Okay, well, you brought it up. So I love the story. This is wonderful. It's great. And it was a really interesting and exciting moment, it sounds like, for everyone in the industry to see this sort of North Star. OK, we can we can get there. But I'm going to kind of bring us slightly crashing back down to earth because you were going, you were mentioning there that this big selling point here is we don't need proprietary hubs, bridges and gateways. You know, to this point, anyone in the smart home has maybe a Hue Bridge, a Lutron Bridge, an Apple Home Hub, maybe an Echo device. maybe a SmartThings hub.

1:11:22There's also so many hubs. If I showed you my hub closet, you might have a heart attack. So this is a big selling point. But it really wasn't true, was it? Because matter does need a hub and thread needs a hub thread border router. Okay, maybe nomenclature is a little, you know, some marketing speak. The word hub kind of disappeared. But can you dive in a little bit there just briefly? Like, what is it about matter and thread that makes it different from what the hub world we were coming from to today? Yeah, absolutely. So from a thread perspective, you have different roles in the network, just as you have in the world of IP or Wi-Fi.

1:12:05In fact, you have access points and you've got stations and you've got repeaters, etc. You've got routers and switches and hubs, etc. So from a thread perspective, from this plumbing perspective, these different roles are networky plumbing bits. But the cool thing from a thread perspective is they're application agnostic. So if I've got a thread border router or I've got a thread router, I could be running HomeKit over it. Doesn't matter, doesn't care. I could be running matter over it, doesn't know, doesn't care. So these aren't necessarily sort of proprietary ecosystem vertical silo specific bits of networking.

1:12:41They're just functionalities that you can build into other products. They could be dedicated if they need to be. But again, going back to the Nest Protect, we had Wi-Fi in the Nest Protect, and we had Thread in the Nest Protect. So we already knew a priori that if you had a house full of Nest Protects, you already had two, three, four, five border routers and Thread routers in your home, and that you didn't have to think about it. You weren't thinking about, I need to buy these things. Additionally, you just suddenly, you know, built out these Nest smoke and CO detectors and suddenly you had a thread network that you didn't even know you had.

1:13:11And so that's really the key to understanding thread is it's just networking. It's just plumbing. It's just infrastructure. Again, no different from the stuff that you have with your Wi-Fi network. You need to have that access point. Right. And that's the thread border router. The thread border router, of course, is a thing that gets you from the thread network to other networks like Wi-Fi or Ethernet or Doxis or DSL or whatever it happens to be. And then, of course, the thread router is the thing within the network that gets you hop-to-hop across the mesh. Right. So you have the thread border routers, which can be anything, which is kind of cool.

1:13:42And then MATA, you need a hub, which would be from your ecosystem. But when this all rolled out, I mean, everyone was excited. I think the smart home community users, not just, you know, as well as manufacturers and companies, were excited, were very sort of bullish on thread because on paper it checks all the boxes. and some of the first Thread devices I tested were super responsive and really fast. But then when Matter did launch eventually, which took a while, I know in the scheme of things, maybe not that long, but it felt like a while for us as we were waiting for it. There were problems, like only a few companies had Thread products available.

1:14:18The infrastructure wasn't really there to support the protocol, at least not in the way that perhaps Matter promised. There were only a handful of Thread border routers. Amazon and Samsung were kind of slow to adopt that protocol, even though Samsung had been involved with Thread from the early days. And it really was Apple and Google that seemed to be pushing it. We ended up with these weird scenarios where companies had to print like long lists on the sides of their boxes of what you could use to use this product in your home. And it felt like, ah, tearing my hair out. We're just back to what it was like before.

1:14:52So do you think there should have maybe been a bit more focus on infrastructure rollout before the launch of Matter and Thread? Was that a big misstep or am I over-egging it? I think you can look at it both ways. I think there's sort of, you know, how would have you done it retrospectively from a perfect execution perspective? But I think given the state of the market, perfect was the enemy of good. and to me proving things out in the market is the best feedback that you can get about what actually works and what doesn't. So I think there was value in sort of having the vision right, sort of stepping and iterating your way to the product.

1:15:32And again, I think missteps have happened. Some experiences from a customer perspective maybe not been quite as ideal as they could have been, not quite to where the vision was. But again, I think getting that market feedback early and often was good in terms of providing real-time feedback to make things better. And of course, you can always do that within one company in the lab internally. But when you're collaborating across the industry, it's kind of hard to keep all that as behind closed doors as you might like. And so it happens maybe a little bit more out in the open than we would ideally like it to be.

1:16:04Well, and then the other issue I've seen here since the rollout is you mentioned at the beginning that Wi-Fi and Thread are kind of, you know, partners. They do similar things, but for different applications. So Wi-Fi is good for high bandwidth, high power use, low power, low bandwidth is great for thread. And MATA works over both Wi-Fi and thread. And everyone has Wi-Fi. So the infrastructure really wasn't an issue there for people when a company came out with a MATA product that works over Wi-Fi. They don't have to worry if there's a thread border router in the house. So one of the things we started to see, I think, is a lot of companies launching matter over Wi-Fi products that potentially would make more sense as a matter over thread product, like light switches, some light bulbs.

1:16:50And we also started to sort of see some companies start sort of to pull away from thread because of some of this confusion and issues early on. um nanoleaf is one company that was very bullish on thread but then recently launched its own protocol called light wave um akara is one company that offers both dual now offers dual thread and zigbee devices because it's easier for the i think one of the reasons they've said to me is it's easier for their consumers if they don't end up having a thread border router they're going to be able to work with their zigbee hub so i guess it sort of seems a little bit like the future that some of these manufacturers were building for didn't necessarily arrive when they were, as you pointed out, you know, it was a work in progress.

1:17:36But why do you think that that has been the adoption of thread among manufacturers has been slower, perhaps, or a struggle for some than perhaps you would have wanted it to be? I think as you stand in the home and you look out various windows, you see different views of what are ultimately the same environment. So I think you can sort of stand on one side of the house and look out one window and you see that, oh, wow, there's now 220 Thread Group member companies. There's now over 600 certified products and solutions. IKEA just came out and said going forward, they're Thread only. So I think different companies sort of are at different places and positions in their journey.

1:18:18But ultimately, I think if you've either got a greenfield and you don't have to think about the past and legacy or legacy customers, there's sort of one way to approach and engage with the market and bet on the market. But as you move across the house and look out a different window in the environment, you still ultimately are seeing the same landscape, but a different part of it with a different view. And I think as you look at some players that do have legacy, do have existing markets, existing customers to consider, there's a different set of constraints. And I know one of those constraints in particular is if you had a huge Zigbee installed base and you had one 802-15-4 radio in your product, but you suddenly want to make that product not only Zigbee compatible, but thread and matter compatible, you now have this challenge in that to share that 15-4 radio across those two protocols is actually a bit more of an engineering trick than it would initially seem to be.

1:19:11And if you say that you want to support both those at the same time, that's a really challenging engineering problem to solve. And ultimately, I think they're going to solve those. But those are tough things to make work. And I think that maybe explains some of the challenges that those players have had. So what do you think needs to happen in the near-term future to make Thread a success for everyone, to make it easy for everyone to jump onto that green playing field? I mean, I think really we've got the key components today. I think there's one issue that probably warrants a bit more standardization and refining to really make things as good as they can be.

1:19:50I think Apple and Google have done some really fantastic work on their mobile platforms. But thread credential sharing is, of course, a challenge that comes up a lot in your content, with your audience, others. Will you explain just briefly what that issue is? Yeah, absolutely. So like any secure wireless network, ultimately, there's a number of different security credentials for securing actors on that network to make sure that they have permission to be there, that they have permission to act on that network. And one of those is sort of the thread administrative credential. And it's just sort of like your Wi-Fi password that you share or if you're an iOS user and or next to another iOS user, like, hey, would you like to share the Wi-Fi network password with this other person?

1:20:32And it's sort of synonymous with the Thread administrative credential. In the early days of Thread, that part of the spec was probably retrospectively underspecified. But how do we share that credential was not something, again, we standardized, and we didn't think about how that would happen. But fast forward to where we are today and matter and everything else, the question then becomes, well, I created the Thread network in my home or my business, and now I want to add other devices. and maybe they're not in my application ecosystem. How do we give people permission to add devices and share this credential in the way that we do with Wi-Fi?

1:21:09And so that's ultimately the problem is how do you share in a trustworthy, secure manner this Wi-Fi equivalent to the Wi-Fi password, the Thread Network Administrative Password to other entities, other people, other ecosystems? So Apple sharing with Amazon and Samsung sharing with Google and this comes back to the whole, all these guys are working together, But how is that really going? Yeah. So again, it's going as well as it could. And again, kudos to Apple and Google for really saying the first place most people discover this pain point is the mobile to mobile. Like I've got iOS in my family.

1:21:43I've got Android. How does that happen across those two platforms? And again, Apple and Google did a great job of collaborating to make that experience great. But now we need to say, OK, it's not a mobile platform. It's not Android. It's not iOS. How do we, again, standardize that so it could be something else, another device, another you know, controller device, a cloud service, whatever that might be, how do we share that? Yeah. And I mean, when I remember when MATA launched in 2022 at the launch event, you could already see this could be an issue because the issue that it's created is that people end up with multiple thread networks in their home.

1:22:16In theory, that shouldn't be a huge problem for someone who's new to the smart home. But it is something I've already seen from readers having issues with this. Like, so one device can't necessarily communicate to the other device. It can get messy. And I asked all the ecosystems right at the launch, like, how are you going to solve this? And they all said, we're working on it. But like two years later, they still, you said Apple and Google work together, but everyone needs to work together. And I guess one of the things that sort of exemplifies for me this issue, even though it feels like perhaps a small niche one that wouldn't necessarily affect a lot of users, but it required everyone to work together to solve this solution.

1:22:57and they weren't able to do it. In the end, the thread group had to come out and say, this is how you're going to do it. So I guess one of my concerns, and I think a lot of concerns from people in the industry and users is this is an industry collaboration. Matter and thread is supposed to be about these major ecosystems and manufacturers all playing nicely together. But are they really, is this sustainable or could this all still implode from the inside? Is it sustainable? I think absolutely yes. Could it implode from the inside? I think if you look at any one company, the answer is for that specific company, yes.

1:23:35Companies are constantly shifting their priorities where they're investing. I think if you looked back, you know, in the heydays of Nest and Google and IoT, and you said, what's the next big thing? What have we predicted AI? And the answer is probably not. We wouldn't have predicted that watershed moment when ChadGPT came out and suddenly all this energy and investments and money came flooding into AI. And so it may be that some companies, one of these companies decides that, you know what, smart home is not where it's at. We're going to double down on AI, and that's where we're pumping all of our engineering and our money and our cash, and we're going to deemphasize.

1:24:09But I think the use cases for the smart building space, the use cases for smart home remain. You talk to builders, builders still see a tremendous amount of interest in people that want to buy new homes that have some level of smart home technology in it. as, again, things are shifting with post-pandemic and return to office. And so it's hard to say what the office of the future exactly looks like. But regardless, people that are owning those properties still want to optimize resource usage, energy usage, occupancy usage, etc. Ultimately, that demands technology to help make those decisions and run those resources and optimize those resources.

1:24:43So I think, again, short answer, it continues. It has momentum on its own, but individual companies may make decisions to say, you know, this isn't as important as we thought it was. where we're out, that certainly may happen and I suspect will happen. Well, yes, speaking of companies that might want to devalue the smart home side and focus their efforts much more on AI, not to make too obvious of a jump here, but I would like to close things out full circle by coming back to Google and Nest and get your thoughts on how Google is implementing Thread in its Nest hardware today. I was very vocal about how sad I was when the fourth gen Nest learning Threatment stat was launched with no sign of Thread.

1:25:27So would you be able to share just a few of your thoughts slash hopes on what Google might be doing with its Nest hardware and where you see the future there when it comes to Thread? Yeah, absolutely. I'm not affiliated with any particular partner or company anymore, including Google, who was my happy employer for many, many, many years. So I can only speculate and project. But I think to give you a short, concise, immediate answer, I think the Google product graveyard, killed by Google.com, is a very popular, well-known property. And, you know, over the years, for one reason or another, Google has a lot of initiatives that they decide are no longer important for one reason or another.

1:26:09So that's sort of one way that we can maybe approach and answer the question and say, maybe, hard to say, things change. But I think if you sort of look at some of the organizational and product choices that have been made, certainly would seem to me that there is emphasis doubling down on platform. So I know that the people at Google that I still have relationships with doing Thread are still very active, very well supported. The people at Google doing Matter are still very active, very well supported. So what I see happening is Google sort of saying, we're a real believer in the platform and the infrastructure, and that's the thing that we can do best.

1:26:47But as it concerns products, maybe ecosystems and partners. So you saw that there was a transition of security from Nest Guard and Nest Detect off to ADT. And so now as you see ADT trucks rolling around, you see ADT powered by Google. And so that was a partnership relationship. You saw with the sun setting, sad as it was, of Nest Protect that actually Google invested effort to make sure that First Alert and the, I think, what is the SC5 follow-on product actually is interoperable with the Nest Protect. They didn't need to do that, but that, I think, was a really important investment in the customer and making sure that there was a seamless transition there.

1:27:26But again, the signal is we're not doubling down in that product category. That's partner. As far as I can see, speakers, displays, thermostats, cameras still seem to be invested in those. Will that remain forever? Hard to say. It seems like speakers with the locus of AI and an AI interaction surface, it seems reasonable that they'll continue to do that. I suspect cameras and the awareness service model that goes with cameras are probably a big revenue driver. So maybe cameras will continue because that's a lot of high margin service revenue. But as you and I know, in the actual hardware only business in which there isn't a service backing that, you know, you're either a premium product or it's a race to the bottom and there's not a whole lot in between.

1:28:07So what happens with thermostats? Hard to say. I mean, again, I know just from how big that market is, literally hundreds of millions of thermostats have been shipped around the world. that's a big business. That's a big installed base. My gut tells me they'll continue to invest in that, but it's hard to say. Excellent. Well, that's really interesting insight, Grant. Can I get you to stay around just for a few minutes because I have a really interesting Vergecast hotline question that I think you would be, is right up your alley. Would you be willing to help me out with that one? Happy to take a look.

1:28:37No promises, but happy to take a look. Wonderful. Okay, so we're going to take one more break and then we'll come back with that question. Fantastic.

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1:30:38All right, we are back. Let's get to a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11 and the email is vergecastattheverge.com. We love all of your questions and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. This week, it's a question from John from Massachusetts, who had a surprisingly great experience with a Matter-compatible device that he bought, having previously had no idea that Matter was even a thing. And it got him to thinking about a very important question in the smart home. Who gets your data? Let's have a listen. Hey, Verge Gas team. This is John from Massachusetts.

1:31:19Since last night I unboxed a new air conditioner and I immediately opened up my phone and had a Matter notification saying that this device was ready to set up with Matter. I just scanned the code on the side of the air conditioner and it was in my Google Home instantly. Who knew that was even a thing? Air conditioners with Matter support. I was surprised by this because there's this little symbol on the box that says it works with the Smart Home app. There was literally an app called Smart Home. How original. This got me thinking. When I'm setting up with Matter, does the manufacturer get any data, like any user data, any usage data?

1:32:03Is there a reason why a company might not want to do Matter, like how they don't like it when you use CarPlay in a car? because they're not getting data they can work off of? And is that why matter adoption is slowing? I'm kind of curious on this. Thanks. Excellent. Thank you, John. Yeah, this is a great question. It's actually something Grant and I have talked about in the past because there have been some companies that have pulled back from matter. We don't necessarily know why. There is actually a competing organization, competing slash potentially symbiotic organization called the Home Connectivity Alliance, which is specifically for appliance manufacturers.

1:32:42And it uses all cloud-based integrations, which on the surface of it allows each manufacturer to keep much more control over the customer's data when using their apps. And in theory, with Matter, you can set everything up in Google Home or Apple Home and never touch the manufacturer app. So it does seem to most people that, that means that I no longer have a relationship directly with that manufacturer, and perhaps that may be turning some companies off from going to matter. So, Grant, how would you answer that question? Is that a reason for companies not to go with matter, or is there a way for them to continue that data sharing if they want to?

1:33:25It isn't fundamentally a limitation. One of the precepts, sort of North Stars, about creating matter from the get-go was local only. And in particular, everyone is very sensitive about data and data sharing for that reason, as well as performance and making sure that everything still works when the Internet's down, all those kind of things. So fundamentally, matter sets forth the precept that your data is important, your security is important, and keeping that all in the home by default is important. Now, that's sort of the default answer, but we talked to the Nest Detect window and door sensor.

1:33:59We talked about how that sensor, in addition to being connected on the local thread network, also had the capability through a border router to talk directly to Nest Cloud services. So you talked about the instance in which you've got this smart home. I'm using Apple's HomeKit app. I'm using Google's smart home app. I'm interacting, in John's case, the air conditioner. Now, let's say that air conditioner has Wi-Fi. Could that air conditioner talk directly through the Wi-Fi network to the air conditioner's manufacturer? Absolutely. Matter has no prohibition against that. that's absolutely allowed.

1:34:30So if the vendor is saying the only way I can sort of get insight into customer interactions is through a mobile app, okay, that's a particular design and engineering product choice, but there's no reason to say that that air conditioner can't, again, still be connected to the vendor's cloud, sending telemetry, diagnostic data, how many cycles, you know, what was the average temperature, any of that kind of stuff, directly through the cloud, through the air conditioner. Let's say that air conditioner also implemented Thread, because again, Thread is IP connected, just like the Nest detect window and door sensor.

1:34:59It could also connect through a border router to the provider's cloud. Again, share that data. So data sharing and Matter are sort of orthogonal issues. They're not absolutely related, but Matter says by default within Matter itself, data stays in the home, interactions stay within the home. But again, let's say your control surface is a Amazon Alexa or a Google speaker device. There's nothing to say that those can't interact with Matter within the home, but then couldn't share those bits of data up to the clouds of those providers. And there couldn't be relationships to say Google and, you know, works with Google cloud interactions with, you know, whoever the provider is.

1:35:36So there's all sorts of different opportunities for data sharing to still occur. And Matter neither prohibits it nor enables it. It's just, it's not part of what Matter is about is data sharing. Does that answer the question, hopefully? Well, yeah. And I guess so for, especially for our listeners, a lot of them are interested in a smart home that does not share their data with anyone. But with Matter and Thread and even Wi-Fi, like it can all be working locally in your home without a dependent internet connection, right? Because it's all working over your local network. And you can control that, as you say, you mentioned from Eero, or you can actually control that point of connection with the internet.

1:36:15But each device within the Matter ecosystem is only going to communicate with the Matter ecosystem you choose, be that Apple Home or Home Assistant or Alexa or Google or any of the other companies that are starting to sort of, we've seen quite a few platforms now that work with Matter. So there's a lot of choice here. So I guess the answer really is your data is going to be shared with whichever platform you use and look at what their data sharing policies are in terms of what might leave your home and what can stay locally. And if you're very advanced, you can make sure no one can talk to the internet at all.

1:36:52Yep, exactly. But of course, there are benefits of connecting to the web, to the IP. Yep, absolutely. Yeah, you really brought home an important point, which is with matter, you as the consumer get to choose, and it's your conscious choice that you are choosing what gets shared and what doesn't. And so if you're not comfortable with that sharing, then you get to say, I don't want to do that. Of course, as we said, that means things can happen on the side channel, but that is outside of matter. Right. So then it's about which companies, which air conditioner you bought. We don't know which brand you went with, so we can't answer that one.

1:37:24But yes, that's where you have to keep an eye on if you're concerned about data sharing. So hopefully that answered your question, John. Thank you, Grant, again for your extra time hanging out with us at the end here. And I appreciate it. And hopefully we'll talk soon. Absolutely. The pleasure has been all mine. Such a pleasure, Jen, to be here this morning. that's it for the verge cast and that's the end of the gen era for now to read more about today's topics check out the links in the show notes or go to the verge.com and while you're there why not buy a paid subscription this show is produced by eric gomez brandon kiefer travis larchuk and andrew marino the verge cast is a verge production and part of the vox media podcast network jake Castanakis and the team will be here Friday to talk about the news.

1:38:11And next Tuesday, senior smartphone reviewer Alison Johnson takes the guest host chair. Thanks for listening.

1:38:29And Doug, here we have the Lemo Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with liberty mutual fascinating it's accompanied by his natural ally doug uh limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us cut the camera they see us only pay for what you need at liberty mutual.com liberty liberty liberty savings very unwritten by liberty mutual insurance company and affiliates excludes massachusetts