Gemini, GTA, and the search for the next big thing

26:05Like, here's this cool new tool where you can upload the PDF that we have to read for this week. And it'll give you this summary and these flashcards. And it just, and it's just like, this is just presented as if it's like, you know, how to access your email address. And it's just like, oh my God, like, what are we supposed to do with this? But this is one of the things that I've been thinking about this for forever. Like you guys, I'm sure have heard the thing that Google always says about like, you know, 15 % of Google searches are new every day, like, which is wild given how big Google is and how long it's been around.

26:37But like, this thing that everybody has been promising us with AI is that it is going to like, completely change how we use technology. And I think the thing that I have spent too much time thinking about is like how I'm going to replace all the stuff that I normally do. And so far, the answer is AI doesn't really replace any of that very successfully. But this question of like, can it, are there going to be new things and like new questions we can ask and new ways to do stuff? That feels like where this gets really interesting. And like, what's the title of that yellow book behind me is like not a real use case.

27:09That's not a, no one ever needs to do that in real life. It's a good magic trick. It's a great magic trick. But like just the other day, so there's a bookstore like a mile from my house that's going out of business. And so everything that they're selling is half off. And we were in there the other night and wound up having to like run out before we left. But I was reading the inside of a book, like just the book jacket. And I was like, oh, this sounds cool. It's like a super spy thriller. Maybe I'll buy this. Cannot remember the title of it. And if I could just be like, what was the name of that book I was looking at the other day in the bookstore?

27:36Like that's the stuff, right? That actually is a sincerely useful thing to have in my life. And the question for me is how far we are from that kind of stuff. And again, it seems like the things you're seeing in these demos are not products, but they're also something more than ideas. And so I don't know. I'm sequencing all this stuff in my brain trying to figure out when is this all going to actually work. And it gets harder and harder to figure out. Yeah, it shows that they're capable of building it. I mean, they have built something that I am seeing with my own eyes that is working in some capacity.

28:13So it's like the first step into, you know, and I don't know when we'll get this. I don't know when it'll be, you know, it's scary. Like it genuinely is scary. And you were talking about those TikToks earlier made me think like, is this what people felt like, you know, when kids started using the Internet for the first time? It can't be. This just makes me feel a little sick sometimes. Oh, no, it super is. uh it is this is like the the thing that gives me hope is that this is the same kind of thing we've gone through with every technical development ever uh right and you know whatever kids are growing up not learning how to read so like that the internet did do that so here we are but but we we soldier on uh so v coming out of all these demos do you buy this big thesis from Google that like Gemini unlocks the face wearables for the future?

29:06What I will say is like, knowing that my demos were incredibly controlled, right? They didn't even let me take pictures of anything. Knowing that, seeing everything working, did I feel like Tony Stark and that Gemini was my Jarvis? Yes. That was really freaking, I did. It felt very scary. And that's something, I mean, because you were a person who spent a lot of time in the Vision Pro and kind of every time came out of it being like, what is any of this actually doing for me? So the fact that you had even that much of that experience is something. It was for the glasses, though, just because there is more interaction with the world around you and some things that I would be like, oh, this would actually be useful in my life, like stepping out of a subway and going like, I have no idea which way is north-south.

29:51I have directionally challenged, look down, can see a map, know which way I need to go. Like, those are things that feel real, right? But do I think Gemini is going to be the key to unlocking that? I want to play with it. I want to see how I can break it. Like, I had a demo where I had a woman speaking in Spanish in front of me, and I was getting immediate translations beamed into my eyeballs in English. And she was enunciating. She was speaking clearly. She was not using slang. She was not talking in the ways like, would you be able to translate a Gen Zer saying like Sigma Alpha Riz Ohio to me?

30:30Like, you know, like that sort of stuff is the, you know, like until it can do that, until it can adapt to real life in real time, that's the real question. if we were just living in the control demo, sure. Sure, I believe it. But we don't. Life is weird. You know, and it's very halcyon when you go into these demos. They're very Pollyanna-ish about, like, how people will use these things. And I'm very curious to see how we're going to break them and whether Gemini is up to the task. Gemini was very sassy with me, though, because I was thinking of how to phrase my questions because we are so trained to be like, hey insert name of assistant play song from album in app and like these very stilted ways of talking so natural language is mind-blowing but it's it's also just like i was i was pausing and gemini says to me you don't have to say hey google really like oh geez geez she's so sassy she's like that's actually not my name if you could just if you could address me correctly not my name and then i said i The other really creepy thing is I said I was hungry inside of Project Muhan and I was looking at Google Maps and whatever.

31:39And it just started popping up restaurant recommendations all around me in the thing. And I was like, that's creepy. That's, I don't know if I like that. Thank you. But I don't know if I like that. That is the slow tilt toward the ad hellscape that makes me worry. It is. It is. It is. I can't believe you have to have boundaries with it. Like, hey, I'm not interested in that. I did not ask for that. Thank you. Here's what I will and won't talk about, Gemini. I have rules. Kylie, same question to you with Astra, which I think, like you were saying, is like Google's most ambitious version of AI things.

32:14You've now used the latest and greatest of Astra. Do you see something big inside of that yet? I do. I agree with V, though, that, I mean, like real life is very messy and variable. And yeah, 15 % of Google searches are new. Still this many years after the start. I think that that's real life. So I don't know if this comes out anytime soon. And I think AI as a field is so, it's in a really weird spot. It costs a lot of money, but Google has a lot of money. And I think they're willing to really sink it into this. So yeah, I do. I do see these being really useful. Astra, I'm not sure how I would use that outside of glasses, if I'm being honest.

33:00That's where it seems most useful to me in a wearable form factor because I don't think I want to walk around with my phone killing its battery, asking it questions. But it's cool. It's still cool. As for the Project Mariner, I had said a while ago because I had gone to New York and I was bopping between places really quickly. And I was like, I would just love something I can say like, OK, I'm boarding this flight at this time. Can you get these groceries for me and make sure they're at my door at this time? That would be great. It's a very silly thing. But when I saw Project Mariner, I was like, oh, this is like almost what it's trying to do, except you have to supervise it.

33:37You would be faster and you literally just have to watch it do its work. But yeah, I think that that could be useful if they can nail it down, make it faster, make it safe in the long term. However, I am not 100 % sure they can iron those out. I don't know what they would need to do to iron those things out. I think, as all the AI leaders like to say, like Altman likes to say, we're going to need some major breakthroughs. And I think that's the same for this. Yeah, that makes sense. All right. Well, we're going to have to keep tracking this because I think everyone is kind of running in this same direction.

34:10We're going to see a lot of headsets really soon. We're going to see a lot more of this multimodal AI stuff. So I think the three of us are going to have to just do this periodically because it's getting weird out there. Multimodal. I'm so sick of that word. Everyone's just like, it's multimodal. We are a multimodal podcast now, V. You, me, and Kylie, we are multimodal. I don't know what that means, but I don't think I'm allowed to say it on a podcast. The podcast of multimodal agents. All right. Thank you both. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Thanks for having me. All right. We got to take a break, and then we're going to come back and talk about video games.

34:47We'll be right back.

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37:28All right, we're back. Let's talk about video games. And more specifically, the most important stories yet to come in the video game industry. There are two things looming over video games. Grand Theft Auto 6, Nintendo Switch 2. Both things seem to be real. Both things will ship at some point. And it's kind of all anybody has been able to talk about all year. Ash Parish came on the show a few weeks ago and said that the biggest story of the year in gaming was these two things that don't exist yet. Grand Theft Auto 6 just won most anticipated game at the game awards. It's literally winning awards before the game even ships.

38:06Like, this is how much this stuff matters right now. And I think the story of those two things is going to be, in a very real way, the story of the game industry, but also maybe bigger. It might be a story about the entertainment industry or the tech industry. If these things are as big and successful as they might be, we are going to talk an awful lot about them. And so I figured before they launch, before things get too crazy, Chris Grant, who is the founding editor of Polygon and is now the group publisher for The Verge and Polygon. And I think that makes him like my boss's boss's boss or something like that.

38:42He's just a video game nerd. So I figured I'd have him on and we'd talk about why these things matter so much and where they're headed. Chris Grant, welcome back. I don't even know when the last time I've been on the show is. It's been a minute. I'm going to accept welcome back, but it's been a couple of decades. It has been a couple of decades. Every once in a while, I'm like, Chris, you should come on the show. And you're like, I'd love to come on the show. And then I'm like, do you want to come on the show? And you're like, I'm busy. This happens frequently. Or, Chris, you should come on the show.

39:07I'm like, sick. Any time, David. And you're like, I'll put it in your calendar. And then I wait patiently. That doesn't sound as right to me. But anyway, I have two things I want to talk about before the year is over. Ash Parrish came on the show a couple of weeks ago and said that the biggest story in gaming of 2024 was two things that have not yet shipped. And I find that fascinating. And I've been thinking about it ever since. And I want to talk about both of them with you. We're recording this on Friday, the day after the Game Awards, where Grand Theft Auto 6 just won most anticipated game.

39:39So let's just start there. Let's just talk about GTA 6 because I feel like I am still struggling to wrap my mind around how important and anticipated and big a deal this game is in the next year, but also in kind of like the next generation of video gaming. So, like, just to wind this all the way back to the beginning, why is Grand Theft Auto such an important franchise? Like, why has this thing meant so much to the gaming industry for this long? Grand Theft Auto is an older franchise. So it's been around a minute, most notably Grand Theft Auto 3, which came out on the PlayStation 2. PlayStation 2 is the best-selling game console of all time.

40:19And as gaming became a more adult pursuit, there were fewer and fewer games to play as an adult, or maybe more specifically as a teenager looking for things that weren't more childish. And Grand Theft Auto 3 came out at a time when there was a real appetite for that. There was a real appetite for games to feel more mature. And Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2 were, for all intents and purposes, different games. They were top-down. It wasn't the same kind of open-world sandbox that we think of today. So Grand Theft Auto 3 was the real change. It came at the right moment technologically. It came at the right moment culturally.

40:52I think a lot of video games, like, it's cultural. So video games are entertainment products. They are powered by hardware. They have generational leaps. We'll talk about some of that generational leap when we get into 6. But they are fundamentally cultural moments and how you talk about them, how you play them, what you do. That's what powers the sort of culture and sort of legend of some of these games. Why are people excited about Grand Theft Auto 6? Because it's part of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. They haven't played it before. It'll be different. And why are they excited about the Grand Theft Auto franchise?

41:23because they've played three or they played four or they played five and they have memories of playing with their friends or they played in their college dorm and they played it with their buddies after work they played it online increasingly is how a lot of people engage with this game and that volume of play across decades is so profound and the sales numbers are so high that the number of people have touched this franchise and may want to touch it again becomes kind of staggering under its own weight. And so when you talk about 2025, you're really looking at an audience that not just the audience for GTA 5 or GTA Online, but some of that audience for four, and some of that audience for three, or some of that audience for Vice City or San Andreas or whatever.

42:04And how many of those people will trade up for the new one? That's a lot of folks. Yeah. Well, but what I wonder about the way you described the legacy is like, You could say a lot of that same stuff about, I don't know, the Halo franchise over the years or Call of Duty or Madden, if you stretch a little bit, right? The stuff that sort of culturally means things to people, unlike your average video game. But I don't feel like we talk about Grand Theft Auto the same way that we talk about those games. Nobody is hanging the future of the gaming and entertainment industries on the success of the next Call of Duty.

42:41There's something different about GTA. I might argue the thesis on Call of Duty a little bit, considering the Microsoft Activision Blizzard merger, largely powered by Call of Duty. Fair. Maybe the next one more than most, yeah. Call of Duty is a little different because it comes out every year. Fair. So, you know, if the last GTA came out in 2013, which is wild. Is that true? Yes. We'll talk about sort of like what that means to have a franchise that's taking that kind of gap year between its career and what's happened since 2013 to now. The whole world's different, frankly, and not to mention video gaming and technology that makes video games possible, which is also sort of a wild testament to GTA V's success that it remains one of the top 10 most played games and best selling games every year in that interim period.

43:29And I confess, I haven't played GTA 5 in a long time, but from the little bit I understand, it's a very different game now than it was in 2013, right? The game is the same, as in the single-player game, sure. Okay. There's a bunch of DLC that they had committed to release that never came out, right? Like, what is different is GTA Online. And GTA Online did not launch alongside GTA 5. It came out a little later. GTA Online is the thing that has propelled that game and propelled its sort of popularity over the years, which we can get into. but the uh you know games like madden games like call of duty they're immensely popular they sell a ton there's some of the best-selling games every year those are the games that people will trade up every year they have this memories of playing it and they accrue some new audience and they shed some audience and so it's like not different from a subscription business right is your churn kind of turn over the audience on the higher end they don't want to play anymore do you pick up new audience at the younger end it's interesting way to think about it you just pay 60 bucks a year for madden that's just how that's your subscription cost yeah and so uh halo a little different i think microsoft wishes it had a call of duty or a madden and halo has not managed to retain that cultural relevance uh but gta has and it has in part because you know previous gta four to five i think was 2009 to 13 so there's a four-year gap there reasonable right same generation that was the xbox 360 ps3 generation gta 5 comes on the tail end of that generation as in like the very tail end, like the new consoles are coming out and it sets records, right?

44:57It's the fastest selling entertainment product of all time, et cetera, et cetera, right? It continues to hold some of these records as being one of the highest grossing entertainment products ever made as an individual product. But that's on the Xbox 360 hardware. That's on the PlayStation 3 hardware. And just to like put that in context, those consoles, at least the 360 came out in 2005, PS3 came out the following year. that's 20 years ago yeah 20 years before the 360 came out was the NES wow like yeah I don't want to make half the listeners just turn to ash I'm sorry that was awful I didn't like that at all should I add trigger warning Liam let's add a trigger warning before I say that just in case anyone's driving or something so 20 years is a long time technologically and we're talking about you know a game that was targeting hardware that came out in 2005, and now we're talking about a game that's targeting hardware that came out in 2020.

45:54We're already on, well, you could say we're on the tail end, you know, on the back half of this generation of hardware, the PS5 and Series X. So this is a wild generational leap for a game that itself has come to define technological leaps, what is possible with the state-of-the-art in games technology. What is that going to mean? I'm sure you've seen some of the GTA V videos where they put crazy real-time mods in there. Like, it looks like real-life stuff. Like, it's kind of nuts. What happens to a game like GTA VI when this amount of budget, this amount of time, and then, to your point, the expectations that come on the other side of it?

46:31Will it meet them? To some degree, I mean, it has to. It's a make-or-break kind of moment. The franchise, and then, on the other hand, of course it will. Like, the level of expectation on a game like this is so high. the number of people that will buy it just to mess around with it i will buy it i'm not a huge gta but i will say i will confess on the internet please don't harass me on the internet i've never beat a gta game i've played hundreds of hours of gta games and i play the missions and they're just i'm not for me and i can't get through them um but i will play it to mess around and so you get to gta online and the point of gta online is just go mess around right okay and i think that what a game looks like today and how you develop a game what kind of audience you target it's really hard if you haven't been providing that live service that rockstar has been providing this whole time and so i assume that they are going to gta 6 with some real focus on the single player a huge focus on the technology and what that sandbox enables them to do but then just as much focus on the living game aspect of it games as a service what does it mean to have a game like gta 6 and its online component exist for another 13 years afterwards that's going to put us into 2038 for everyone else that wants to think about when their retirement target looks like.

47:47Yeah. I mean, that's part of what's interesting about this moment to me, because if GTA Online didn't exist, I think everybody would be making sort of the same assumption about what GTA 6 was going to be, right? They were going to expand the idea of an open world game, give you more to do, more things going on, make the world feel bigger, just like do it at a scale nobody has done before, right that's kind of gta's thing but that's kind of already what it's doing that's like what gta online is and is becoming to a certain extent so part of me wonders what if there is even an obvious thing for this game to do that feels like a generational leap that way i think that there's a couple things i could imagine them doing and you know gta online is really big and ambitious but it's not what people think of a state of the art when it comes to online social based play right i mean fortnight's right there i'm sort of commanding a level of attention and a level of diversity across its different products just this week they launched new ballistic mode 5v5 multiplayer like they're going to go head to head with call of duty now in fortnight they've got a new lego brick life mode so it's you can just hang out and build lego stuff and have a little town and play different careers they're going to have um the og mode is back right hugely popular and And Fortnite as a platform is a really interesting idea and how it competes in a world of increasing consolidation on that end of the market.

49:11Is GTA 6 a platform? I don't know. I would not be surprised. If you roll back to the way you described the game 20 years ago, the phrase that just popped into my mind is Roblox for adults, which is a thoroughly fascinating possibility that really doesn't exist in the way you're describing it. Roblox wants to tell you it exists, but it does not. it does not exist I think and Epic is trying to make that into Fortnite and I see the Fortnite Islands and it's all the same Roblox junk billionaire simulator and like all this like clicker game stuff the vernacular of those games is pretty limited and when I see my son play Roblox games I know I'm a bad parent they're trash the low nutritional value right trust that I make Astro Bot available at all times for my family it's available day or night.

50:02See, you're a good parent. That's the job. I'm a good parent. Astro Bot, notably Game of the Year winner yesterday, last night. That's right. I don't want to say Polygon got it wrong. It was Bellachio at Polygon, but in this household, we stand Astro Bot. So GTA 6, yeah, I have some real questions about what it means to support that game over the decade plus that they intend to support it. Is it going to be a platform? Are they going to think of it that way? How do experiences get built in it? how do you keep an audience engaged when the competition is more fierce they are not going up against the competition in 2013 they're going up against competition in 2025 you see call of duty i think doing an admirable job here with warzone and thinking about what that free-to-play environment looks like for a call of duty game and how that is complementary to a retail product and how they sort of push it forward but yeah it's uh it's going to be fascinating i think they have a track record that really can't be denied and i think even just to ash's point one of the biggest stories this year is just like waiting for any sign of anything having to do with gta 6 a news announcement a trailer you name it those things they really indicate a level of sort of uh like latent energy right it's just gonna explode when it comes out and you'll capture all of that well you capture more and i think they do need to capture more for a product this size to be successful we will see i do i think the um the sense though that the non-release of some of these things has been looming over 24 last year we had tears of the kingdom which i think you know demanded a lot of attention and sort of gathered up a lot of that energy but in the background amidst gaming today the top 10 most played games on pc in 2023 fortnite number one robux minecraft counter strike two counter-strike go sort of shared sims 4 call of duty you know tktk modern warfare 2 3 warzone 2 league of legends valorant gta 5 and rocket league that's the top played games here's the wild statistic about that average years on the market for those games 9.6 years wow so the games people are playing are not new games that just come out and so what's happened in gaming is that these things have to last much longer.

52:20They have to function like platforms. They have to function like, I actually look at this list of games even across the other consoles, maybe with the exception of Switch. And it doesn't look like games the way I think a lot of times we think about it. It looks like sports. And I don't mean esports here. I mean, like, it looks like the way you think of sports. I like Minecraft. I like soccer. Like, it's just an abstraction. It always is there. It has rules. You play it with friends. It's Minecraft. Will GTA 6 earn a spot on this table? Like, I kind of assume some of that GTA 5 audience moves to it, but what does it look like?

52:53But do you think it does that by owning that mold and sort of leaning into the kind of things that you're describing, you know, Roblox for adults? Or does it do it by going, doing the thing no one else can do and making a new sort of wholly contained game that is good enough to pull this off? Because I feel like you can put your hopes on either one of those, but maybe not both at the same time. No, I'm going to say both. I'm going to say both. I'm going to say that they're going to make a single-player game that's going to move the needle and sell a lot of units because people want to play it.

53:22And then they're going to make a sticky multiplayer online experience that is going to be competitive across a landscape that looks like this. That would be a hell of an achievement. That is going to grow and shift over time because they will continue to iterate on it and develop it. Heists for GTA V came out years later. Sure. Right? And that was 10 years ago. Yeah. And they were still aware that that game had to shift and move. They had to continuously add features and add functionality for it to be successful. And now again, they're in a world where they compete against Fortnite. And it has to be different now.

53:55Right now, there's an ongoing event in Minecraft. My son is very excited about it. There's just a constant pace of iteration, innovation happening in these spaces that GTA will have to compete with in a way that it kind of currently does. It is not non-competitive. I think a lot about what happens in the pace of development in games. I think a lot about the new Final Fantasy games that have come out and how they've really been struggling to meet some sales expectations. One of the things that was crazy is the last Final Fantasy game, 16, which struggled on a PlayStation exclusive, a weird concept these days, and came to PC much later and struggled there.

54:35They'll make it up over time, I suspect, but it started development before Fortnite came out. And I think that is kind of a wild sense of how much changes in a certain period of time when a game like Fortnite can come out and quite literally change what our expectations are of games and games culture, what you get for a free-to-play game, how much value there is in a freemium model, something that a lot of gamers would turn their nose down at. But then you look at Fortnite and this is a very high-quality game that's a lot of fun to play and is very good and you don't need to pay for anything. so if that was 2018 that Fortnite really popped off again GTA 5 2013 like how much has changed since they even started development on this game and I think that's part of the expectation that's part of the anticipation it's part of that legacy and I think there's you know there's also the technology of it what more can they do with another effectively 15 years of hardware iteration hardware development it'll be exciting to see yeah you've tracked the hype cycle of games like this many times over the years uh are like should people keep their hopes high on this one do you feel like like is it does seem like if historically speaking if anything is going to live up to this kind of hype GTA has as good a shot as any, but also kind of like you said before, like maybe nothing can be as good as we're sort of expecting this game to be.

55:59My general point of view is you shouldn't get hyped about anything. Try not to. Just a touch of nihilism right before the holidays. Try not to. But if you insist on getting hyped about GTA 6, if you like those games, will this game meet your expectations? I think so, right? I think that they've had a kind of impressively consistent hit rate for that entire series. Again, it's not my kind of game, but if you like those games, like they have, I don't want to say never missed, but they've come closer than most franchises to upholding a certain level of expectation and value. I think the way that they're releasing it and why, to Ash's point, it's been looming over 24 is because Take-Two has a very specific point of view on the release strategy for this game, which is when it is ready, there is no competition.

56:53It is an alpha predator. There is no competition for GTA in the market. They don't need to release it. Nobody's nipping at their heels. They're still banking cash on five, which is still in the top 10 most played games every year. So why rush it? They don't need to rush it. And they will wait until it is ready and done. And I think that that should be comforting to somebody who's looking forward to it. And then the question becomes, do they know what done means? Is the target quality good? Is it what you want? Is it fun? Again, I think they have enough of a blueprint at this point to follow that people who like GTA games should probably be well targeted by it and they'll appreciate it.

57:36Now, again, that isn't enough. They will need to grow a new audience. They will need to bring in new players. They will need to siphon off some of those Fortnite fans, et cetera. Will it do that? Does it have enough juice to continue to grow over time instead of just keep what they have? And that's the big question for me. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, I think to some extent the like we're just going to make a slightly better new game every year is like an actually easier strategy. Yeah. The iterative year by year strategy is like expensive and difficult in its own way. But you can have misses in there and keep going.

58:13Call of Duty Modern Warfare with a notable miss a few years ago. Like a little bit of a return to form this year. Okay. it can absorb that impact again for gta 6 if this were to be a miss i find it almost impossible to imagine it being a miss but if it were to be a miss catastrophic right like you don't get another at bat um so yeah it's a it's a bit of a riskier game and again to take two's point they'll just wait until it's ready there's no there's no sense in taking that kind of risk yeah so the the other highly anticipated thing that i think we're likely to get way before gta 6 uh is the switch to I asked you when I saw you in person a couple of weeks ago to make me feel better that the Switch 2 isn't going to suck because I have pinned a surprising amount of my hopes and gaming future on the Switch 2 not sucking tell me how to feel about the Switch 2 we assume it's coming sometime in the next three months right like it is legitimately imminent in some way here if I were to bet I'm going to say it's coming in the first half of the year Nintendo's fiscal I want to say starts in Q2 in April So there's a reason to think maybe they try and get it out just before or just after.

59:22We'll see. Nintendo will also wait until it's ready. So there's that. The reporting so far has been that they want to wait until they have enough units, that there isn't any risk of hardware shortages or any other sort of holdup. So they just want to be sure when it comes out, you can get one. Because there was a bunch of that at the beginning with the first Switch, right? Wasn't it hard to get for a while? Nintendo historically has struggled with inventory pipeline, right? Remember the Wii? Oh, yeah. You couldn't buy it for years. Yeah. And it was already using old hardware. Nintendo's strategy of using older hardware.

59:56The Game Boy was famously built using really old hardware. And they reimagined what that old hardware can do. And that's sort of Nintendo's magic. But it's old hardware. Yeah. So the Wii comes out with old hardware, and they can't keep this thing in stock. So there's something I always found Nintendo's point of view on this a little disingenuous. I think that they like having things sell out. I think they like managing a very tight retail environment. That feeling of you got one. Fresh. I don't know if that works anymore. The space is too competitive. If you don't get that and there's a PlayStation 5 right next to it on the shelf, maybe you have to pick that up instead.

1:00:33That has Fortnite on it too. What's the point? And so I do think that they recognize they're in a different environment and that they will need to keep stock and they will need to take advantage of people's appetite to buy right now. Every kid has a tablet. But what do they need to switch for? So we'll see. That's one of the pieces that's been reported about the timing is that they're waiting for volume to be ready. They have released a couple little nuggets. And just for the calendar enthusiasts out there, you know who you are. October 2016, they announced the switch. Switch came out the following year, April.

1:01:09There was no October announcement this year. It has not been announced yet. They have announced in a sort of like to shareholders way that there is a successor to the console and their hard work on it. And that they will announce more when ready. Okay. They dropped one weird little nugget of news maybe like a month or so ago, which was like random at night. And it was just like the Switch successor will play Switch software. Oh, yeah. That was like on election day. Yeah. Yes. Right. Yes. Thanks, Nintendo. What a weird drop. What a like. Yeah. Again, for the calendar, it's easy. if you're looking at a calendar what day could we pick to put this piece in this which is generally good news why would you not trumpet it?

1:01:50And I'll say this about the successorship Nintendo has somewhat of a reputation especially in modern times of following up consoles that are hits with flops or duds or disappointments let's say most notably you have the Super Nintendo followed up with the N64 there's a little bit of a back-to-back N64 at least from a sales standpoint followed up by the GameCube Yikes Although GameCube heads, no. Good console. Also N64. This is like N64 slander I was not prepared for and will not acknowledge, but we can just move past that. I have an N64 right here. Okay, all right. Then we're cool. All right. With library games, I'm going to not, but if you're going to prioritize and rank the best Nintendo consoles of all time, inclusive of the virtual boy, the Nintendo 64 is still going to be low on that list.

1:02:35That's fair. I mean, but the most recent one, right, is like I've heard a lot of people say like Wii, Wii U, right? huge revolutionary hit followed by weird new idea on top of it that didn't work. A big flop. And I actually went back for this podcast and read some of my Wii U coverage from their launch event in New York. And the piece that I was the most upset by, the most frustrated by, the most sort of like incredulous about was the absence of an online service. They announced the Wii U and they said, we'll make an online service. You can't know. It's 2013. gta 5 is coming out like you can't you need it now you need it yesterday in fact it's an embarrassment xbox live has been out for a decade like just kind of a bizarre omission and they weren't able to do it they partnered with a third party and the we used struggled with that absence of an online function there was different systems there was your nintendo network id and other stuff it wasn't until switch online that there's something that feels modern right that you could go on to one of my um examples that i used in this piece from 2013 is that if i buy a book on a kindle and i lose my kindle i just get a new kindle my books there right this is something that most consumers understand what was crazy about nintendo until the switch the switch is even a little bit goofy with this but it's okay um 3ds and ds they're two portable consoles 3ds also from a sales standpoint and from an audience i think standpoint and critical standpoint a disappointment relative to the ds the um ds and 3ds were portable consoles largely targeted at children or younger people, let's say.

1:04:10And if you lost it, can you imagine a kid losing something? Never. Never happened. Purely hypothetically, yeah. If you lost it and you had digital games that you purchased, they were gone too. Tied to the console. What? Like what? I would never buy, to this day, I don't buy Nintendo games digitally. I just don't. I'm like, I don't know, I'm old. I have a lot of physical games because I'm also old. but also I just I don't trust them still and so this announcement that my Switch games would carry forward was like huh okay huh maybe it is okay to buy Nintendo games digitally now maybe my purchases through Nintendo are in some cases like sacred maybe too strong of a word but like respected in a way that I expect them to be and this has not happened over some generations right your not all of your 360 games work on your Xbox Series X but a lot of them do and I just feel like they try and that's been newer for them.

1:05:07But going forward, I think, to some sense, your expectation that the things that you purchase digitally will retain their value over time and will have forward compatibility. The idea that backwards compatibility is backwards thinking to use, I think that was Don Matrick's dumbass quote. Yeah, it's not great. It's not just that it's not backwards thinking. It's the way games work today. They have to be backwards. Your stuff has to carry forward. this is how and what consumer expectations are and so i think for nintendo that was a huge piece of news that i don't want to diminish it was a tiny weird drop on election day but the idea that they're thinking about that suggests to me that they are thinking in a forward capacity about how people think about their software and their purchases they are thinking about it as a successor not to nintendo consoles but as a successor to the switch which is an important differentiation this is not n64 to gamecube or gamecube to wii this is more of a wii to wii environment where they're keeping the name there they're anticipating some consumer adoption based on that name your games will play the wii would play wii games it did drop the gamecube support i think saying that um in the 3ds played ds games i think that if comparing it to the 3ds and the Wii U doesn't give you a lot of comfort and doesn't make you feel super confident.

1:06:26My hope here is that they try not to reinvent the wheel. And some of the reporting suggests it will still be a portable console that will be able to be docked, that it has a bigger screen, which like, maybe that's weird. It's already kind of a big portable hangout, but so is the Steam Deck. And I carry that around. So maybe it's fine. That it will have detachable controllers. if this sounds familiar that should be comforting because it's a bigger switch with maybe some better hardware and some different games i've really come around to that actually being my ideal outcome i don't know how you feel but for me like i i still play the switch a lot uh and the more i use it the more i'm like okay this thing plus faster processor uh presumably more efficient chip so it'll last a little longer uh better wi-fi is actually like the most important one for me because the Wi-Fi chip in this thing is old and bad and just does not work very well.

1:07:20And like maybe an upgraded screen, but honestly, even that is like relatively low on my list is like there's very little else I want from this. Like tweak everything, upgrade all the parts to newer versions of those parts and keep it a switch feels to me like what I'm looking for. I would like the following things. I'd like it to be more durable. Yeah. the joy cons are kind of a nightmare if anyone has kids in their household I don't want to say how many times I've taken apart a joy con and replaced and fixed parts of it it's very tiny and those screws are very small and it's all very tightly packed in there and I'm pretty good at that stuff but can I say the f word on this podcast?

1:08:02is that loud? sure fuck the joy cons I don't want to see them again do not bring them back I don't want to get rid of them stop the joy con shit give me a better analog stick please give me get rid of the ir port labo community i see you i don't mean any disrespect labo is incredible everyone else got it wrong we knew it was good however get rid of the ir port get rid of the complexity lower the cost of those things um make it more durable yeah this is a console that you're gonna be throwing in your bag why is it so fragile why are things so wiggly um so i would love to see it beefed up i would love to see multiple switches and your profile travel better if you have two switches in your house going between them is not a nice affair it does not feel good um and i think a lot of families now have a lot of switches i was about to make fun of you for being like the only person on earth who's like worried about managing multiple switches but you are probably right that there are there are are people out there for whom that's a real thing i know a lot of folks who have kids that have like a switch light and then there's the switch at home but why is it why is my game there is it saved did it transfer is my save file there what's my thing do i have to download this again this is my home console not my home console it gets like a bit goofy or it has to always be online if it's not the home console but then it's a switch light you're traveling with it so there's just like some part of managing multiple consoles that i think you know especially as these things last longer and people play the games longer like there should be some expectation of it this gets into Nintendo's profile management, software management part, where I have some confidence that they have radically improved.

1:09:39I think their yearbook title would be most improved. Maybe it would be. But I think I really want to see that. I think for the big open question for Switch, I don't know if it's Switch 2. What are they going to call it? Polygon's official vote is Super Switch. It's got to be. Super Switch is the, I don't think they will, but that is the correct answer. And the Super should definitely be the Super font from Super Nintendo. That's the other part I'm going to say out loud. We're doing a retro thing in the world right now. Like, go for it. We all live in the 90s again. Like, let's just do it. I'm into it.

1:10:13Look, I love the 90s. And it turns out one of the things that younger folks and myself still have in common is they love the 90s now, too? The 90s are so back. It's great. So let's all just live it and do the Super font, please. I'm in. And then if it doesn't have a lot of secrets, if it doesn't have a lot of surprises, right? when the Wii came out. Do you remember the Wii's codename? Revolution. Oh, yeah. And everyone wanted to know what the revolution was. And there was, this was like 2005, so the internet was different back then, but there was all these rumors and mock-ups and somebody found a footage, but the lighting is off and you can tell because of the direction of whatever.

1:10:46I don't think we have that this time because it's probably just going to be a big switch. It's going to be a big switch with some different things. And then, is Nintendo, will they feel compelled to add in a Goo-Gaw, a Whiz-Bang? i don't know is it gonna have like a big radio antenna on the back and it does ham radio too i don't know i have like no idea what the thing is gonna be or will they just make it a better switch keep in mind the wii u successor to the wii all they had to do was make it faster week and they added this goofball tablet that connected locally yep to your console and it created this environment for asynchronous gameplay which was really cool and then no games did that it did give them some of the insight into the switch but like okay and then also was a like a cable box controller similar to the xbox one which again both of those two don't it wasn't just microsoft being dumb both of them were like yeah cable boxes that's what kids love yeah right um i just actually asked the polyon staff yesterday who who still had a cable subscription and the only people who did was only a handful of people and they have it for just sports that's it like everyone else has been i've been a core cutter since 2005 six so we you had some bonkers ideas about what people wanted in a console and i'm hopeful that they don't feel the urgency to like add something fancy i will also flag one other thing the switch is not the best on console ever it is the best on nintendo console the best on console is the playstation 2 but also the ds uh handheld is still a little bit over the switch the switch may overtake a lifetime.

1:12:21We'll see. But I do want to flag another really notable part about the Switch. It has sold more software than any other Nintendo console. The Wii sold roughly a billion units of software. The Switch has sold 1.3 billion units of software. The DS sold about a billion units of software too. But there's a timeline issue with the DS and the Wii were out at the same time. So you sold a ton of hardware units. You sold a ton of software units. And you had two hardware lines. And Nintendo consolidated those in the Switch. So again, for the Switch to be successful, it had to be. This was a consolidation of two businesses into one, the handheld and the console business.

1:12:59And it did not sell as many software units as either of those two separately combined did. And it didn't sell as many hardware units. And so the Switch, while it has been a big hit, has been like a necessary consolidation of its business. They make a little bit of money on Nintendo Online, right? There's other ways to make money. They got theme parks now. They got Mario movies. Nintendo's doing okay. But I think one of my questions for Switch 2, as they continue to consolidate this market from handheld to console, is how do they, again, keep not only the audience it has, but continue to grow audience?

1:13:35And some of that means being increasingly competitive in a world full of these other games we're talking about. So I think modernization is something Nintendo sort of has to do while also keeping its sandbox somewhat pristine and clean and like full of high quality stuff. Do you feel like this next era for Nintendo is more competitive because there is this huge upswing in the Steam Deck and these other kind of handheld game systems that are starting to come out and do really well? Or is Nintendo as ever just kind of like over here doing Nintendo things? Um, Nintendo will always be over here doing Nintendo things.

1:14:16Like, they can't help themselves. Right. And I do think, to your point about doing all the weirdness, like, one of the things I have wondered about is if things like Alarmo and this museum and all this stuff is, like, Nintendo is putting its weird energy on that stuff so that it can keep the Switch non-insane. I like that. That's a fun idea. Uh-huh. I have no evidence for that theory, but it's kind of what it feels like to me. The theme parks? Yeah, right. All the people here we've hired to just do whatever, they now do it over there. And then the Switch just gets to be the Switch. You do hear some reporting and some Nintendo people on Miyamoto will talk about the younger designers at Nintendo, right?

1:14:53The younger designers get a lot of credit for Splatoon, the Splatoon series, which has its own just totally perfect vibe. And the Switch gets some credit from the younger designers. and so i think that there is some world in which as the old guard at nintendo gets older and older even though uh miyamoto doesn't appear to age true i think but as they get older and older like there are younger folks in there who are coming with a different point of view and different set of expectations who can drive the business and the products they make towards an audience that is going to be more compatible with that sensibility and so maybe there is some world in which those weird experiments go to the side and the experiments are still part of what makes Nintendo Nintendo and I think that even some of the games like when the switch came out one two switch like I miss some of the goofball again Labo I miss some of these goofball exercises and I would really dread having a Nintendo product come out with just a triple-a Metroid Prime game a triple-a Mario game a triple-a Zelda game that's all great but what's exciting about Nintendo products are the weird one two switches or snipper clips or labo yeah um and so i i don't want to disabuse them of any of that whimsy but i worry again about integrating a pinwheel into the console and like understandable um trying to make that a thing um so we'll see i think it will have some surprises in store, is my guess.

1:16:24Whether they are going to add value or be a distraction is a bigger question. But I'm pretty confident Switch 2 will just be a gooder switch. Boy, I hope so. A gooder switch is truly all I need in 2025. All right, Chris, we've got to take a break. But thank you for doing this. Good to have you back. Thanks. All right, we've got to take one more break. And then we have a much-requested hotline that I'm very excited about. We'll be right back.

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1:18:22All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. This week's VergeCast hotline is brought to you by Amazon Q, the new generative AI assistant from AWS. As always, the number is 866-VERGE11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. We love all of your questions. We've gotten a bunch more great ones after the meta show we did last week that I think have been really interesting. And I look forward to finding a way to answer. I will say we're taking a couple of weeks off after this week. So we're not going to have a ton of time to do hotline stuff. But we're also going to do a bunch of fun catch up stuff in January.

1:18:55And we will not lose track of your questions. So please keep them coming. All of your weirdest tech questions. If you're ever like, huh, I want just pick up the phone and call us or send us an email. 866-VERGE11. The email is vergecast at verge.com. This week's hotline comes from, I would say, a semi-throwaway line in last week's meta episode that came up a whole bunch, and it's time to dig back into it. Let's hear it. Hi, my name is Chris, and I'm on vacation right now in the United Kingdom. And I was just kind of like listening on the plane, whatever, and I heard Helen Havlack talk about her garden design in Figma.

1:19:36And like, what the—like, I gotta know about that. Like, come. I'm a designer. I'm using Sigma. It's a great tool. Like, tell me about one time about your garden. Mama wants to know. Thanks so much. Helen Havlack, welcome back. Thank you so much. It's been so long. One entire week. We got so much of this. Like, I sort of assumed there would be someone who was like, oh, I am also a gardening sicko and I want to know what Helen is up to. But we got more of this than I expected. So it was just time to do this with you. I now feel extra guilty for having drafted this how-to guide for Barbara to publish on TheVerge.com in 2023 and then never publishing it.

1:20:15I am sorry, world, that I did not give you this weird and highly specific content. The world clearly needs this in a way that I did not understand until this past week. So let's just dive in. I don't even know where to start because all of this is so outrageously foreign to me. So how did it come to pass that you are a Figma gardener? Yes. Well, David, you might think it's a little weird that we're talking about gardening here late December, but actually the timing is perfect. We are approaching the darkest day of the year. And what anyone who is a gardener knows is that you do actual gardening from like March to November, you've got spring planning.

1:20:54But from December to like February, you are in pure fantasy gardening. This is when all of your gardening energy is completely thwarted. You can't do shit outside. The ground is frozen. So what you do is you fantasize. This is when you read gardening books, which you would never do in the summertime. This is when you draw plans for your garden and think about what you're going to do when it's not dark and depressing outside. You're like a professional athlete in the offseason, basically. So timing is perfect. So how did this come about? Well, I bought a house in 2022. It had a very kind of like formal foundation planting that we were not super into.

1:21:30And we were thinking about how to expand it, plant more plants. I went full like native plant rabbit hole, some very into like native plants. And my husband, Phil, and I were talking about what we wanted to plant. And we used to come up with a plan for what we're going to put in the ground. And therefore, what did we need to buy? And really, what did we need to buy when like native plant trust pre-orders went live, which is usually late January, February. Is that like a big moment? Like, is it a Taylor Swift on Ticketmaster kind of situation that we're talking about here? Probably not, David. But I should also set the stage that I am not a professional gardener.

1:22:06I am a very amateur gardener. And what I have is some books I have read, boundless enthusiasm, and no practical gardening experience whatsoever. That's the dream. But my husband and I were trying to figure out where did we want to plan for what we were going to do. And he's a front-end web developer, Phil, if I end up mentioning his name. And so we were looking at, OK, is there a good software that will help us do this together? And what we were looking for is something free. We're not landscape architects. We didn't want a really expensive seats on a software program designed for total professionals.

1:22:40I think many of whom use SketchUp or other things. We wanted something that was collaborative. We could work across both of our devices and not have to have access issues. There's some gardening software out there that have component libraries, but a lot of those have really generic plants and not a lot of good local ecotypes and native plants. So we wanted to be able to put our own plants in. So in those, you're kind of like dragging clip art onto a thing with some of those? Okay. So we needed to be able to put our own plants into the system. And a lot of times you do this fantasy gardening and then you're outside and you have to actually place the plants.

1:23:19And so we wanted something that had a reasonably good mobile experience. And so that is how we landed upon the weird choice of actually Figma was good enough for us to do all of the things we wanted to do in the free version of Figma pretty quickly. Okay. Was there another set of possibilities that you almost came to? Because I feel like with that number of constraints, I can't actually think of all that many things that would work. You know, I looked at some Reddits for like, what is gardening software? There are some that are owned by like plant manufacturers, but that's where you run into like the plant library isn't deep enough.

1:23:57There's some cool startups doing interesting things in this place, in this space. I'm going to be real with you. I did not do an exhaustive research of all the software before Phil and I were like, you know what? Actually, what about Figma? And Figma was good enough to do all the things we wanted to do. Okay. Were you good at Figma going in? Because I feel like Figma slightly terrifies me. I'm pretty good at like moving around in Figma, but even that took some work. And the idea of like really setting this thing up successfully is slightly terrifying. No, I think key to this is that I am not expert in Figma.

1:24:30All of where I am in Figma usually is reviewing design files that someone else has created. The Verge has an incredibly talented design team. And so I've looked at plenty of Will Joel's Figma's. And I was like, if Will Joel thinks Figma's good enough, it's probably good enough for me. But key to this is I am not a Figma pro. And you can get pretty far in garden design with like very little specific Figma expertise. That's good. That's encouraging to hear. So this is tough to do on a podcast for a visual design application you're talking about, but describe the Figma a little bit. What is it? How does it actually work?

1:25:04Okay. So you make a free Figma account. It's very easy. You start a new project. That's very easy. It works exactly like you would think it is. The one pain in the ass part of this whole process is importing your plan and determining a scale. Unlike an architecture design program, Figma does not work in like inches or some of the conventions of like one eighth inch printed equals whatever. Like that's not how Figma works. Figma works in pixels. So you have to arbitrarily kind of set up your place in what you're working and decide what your scale is going to be. Um, what we did is we took a PDF of our home design.

1:25:42It was pretty basic. A lot of people might have this from a real estate listing of your house. If you ever did work on your house, if you're not planning something that's like a foundation bed around your house, you could blue sky it. Um, but we ended up coming with the arbitrary rule that 10 pixels would equal one inch. Most plant stuff in the United States seems to be in inches. So this will have a 12 inch spread. This will have a 24 inch spread. If you live in Europe, you would pick something different based on metric. So the most pain in the ass part is taking a PDF, which Figma does not recognize.

1:26:16You have to convert it to a PNG or JPEG and then import it into Figma. We did that in Photoshop. You put it in and then you take something where you know the length is and you set that to the scale you want. So if there's a wall of your house, you can go measure it and say, this wall is 14 feet wide. Therefore, if my scale is 10 pixels equals 12 inches, I know how much that needs to be. I set that scale and then everything from now on exists in that scale. One thing that's nice about Figma is when you specify lengths, for example, you can do math in the field where you use the little star thing to say 10 times 12 and then it'll just do the math for you.

1:27:02So as you're converting into the pixel thing, you could actually do math directly there. But that's the hardest part of the whole system is importing the drawing of your house or your lot. You could use a Google Earth image of your lot as your opening place. People do all kinds of things. But setting that scale is the hardest part where you take one known measurement, you determine what it should be in pixel land, and then you have to do all of your planning with that in mind. Okay. But then at the end of it all, you have something like a rendering of your whole space, and then you can just start to populate it as you like.

1:27:34Yeah, exactly. So you get a background image, then you're planning against that. And things, we'll talk about when you get to planting plants, but what you're generally thinking about is like, how big is this plant going to spread? Therefore, how do I space it when I'm planting? Oh, yeah. So, okay, this is the thing about gardening. This is why I'm bad at gardening, because I just, like, I'm looking outside. We have a big, like, raised planter out on our patio, and it's, like, beautiful and made of brick. And we were like, oh, cool. We'll plant a bunch of stuff in there. We planted it all, as it turned out, too close together, and it all immediately died.

1:28:07Super cool by us. Really happy about that. Yeah, you know, there's different philosophies of how to think about plant spread. I generally plant things slightly tighter than the nursery will tell you because I don't like weeding and I don't like looking at mulch. So there can be advantages to packing a little bit tighter. That being said, especially if it's perennial, it may get much, much bigger and you should think about the future. That's a good rule of thumb. So tell me about the inserting of plants. I'm now obsessed with like you're not happy with the clipart plants. You want your own. So are you going in and like painstakingly drawing each plant that you might want to?

1:28:46How do you do this? So this is very easy. So I use the ellipsis tool and I draw circles and I draw the circles to the width of a mature plant. So if the plant is going to be 12 inches, I draw a 120 pixel circle. Very easy. That's what its spread is going to be. Then if you're using what I do, which is the browser version of Figma that's free, you can go and say, okay, I want to plant Liatris, Blazing Star, nice native plant. I can just go to Google Photos, copy a photo there, open Figma up, click the ellipsis, paste, and it will fill that little circle with an image of that plant. So if I care about textures and I care about colors, I'm going to have that image there.

1:29:35and then I have a little plint. Now, to be practical, what I don't want to have to do is go copy and paste that a bunch of times. Maybe I find out I want to plant a different variety of liatris and it has a different spread. So you can do something where you right-click the ellipsis and you set it up as a component. So there is a parent object and I place all of my parent objects in a corner of my canvas that's my key. And I name what it is. So I have the thing. I have a little circle that has a picture of what the foliage looks like. It has the name of the plant and it's set to the right mature diameter in a little like component library key.

1:30:17And then I can just copy paste it in as I'm actually laying out plants. I feel like you're describing something that is like sneakily a perfect use for generative AI. I just want to like you're like just describe the plant that you think it's going to be and just let it appear there. And I'm like, this is what all the image systems should be doing. Yeah, you know, there's, well, I'll say there's like limitations to this and maybe this is where AI can come in. It's like what I'm talking about is doing a two-dimensional planting plan. Another thing you have to worry about when you're gardening is the height of your plant.

1:30:48This is not going to do height for you. So you're going to have to pay attention or have enough knowledge of how tall things grow. You're also not going to get seasonality out of this. So things loom at different times of the year. So if you were really psychotic, what you could do is take your garden plan once you've built it in Figma, choose all of the photos that you've used for your plants of like springtime that make a total duplicate of this and replace all the photos with what they look like in June. and then again in like September. But that would be really crazy. And I would say, again, this is not perfect.

1:31:29We are just aiming for good enough for an amateur gardener. I do feel like 2026, Helen, is going to come on and tell me about like how you bought a Vision Pro to do this. So now you can see it all spatially and actually map it in real time as you're walking through the garden. And like, I feel like that's where we're headed. And that is the best possible outcome here. No, I mean, what this, yes, David, that could be the beautiful future. And I'm sure there's actually a bunch of cool startup garden design apps. Maybe. We probably are. How big is your market size of amateur gardeners with lots of enthusiasm?

1:32:02Trapped in winter, only using your software for two months of the year. But no, I mean, the end output you get here is you get an image of your house or your garden bed, which is your background canvas. You get a little key of all the plants in one place. That's where you've arranged all of your components. and then in your little gardening beds that you've drawn it, you can see how you plan to space this out, how you think layering and interspersing plants should work. And then you can go count how many of these did it take for me to fill this bed. This is how many I need to buy before I go put my garden in.

1:32:38So it gets you, again, not a professional garden plan, but it gets you like good enough for an average person who can use basic software. I love this. What's the big garden upgrade for 2025? What are you working on right now? Ooh, we planted a bunch of native plants actually in the fall this year, which turned out to be terrible timing because it was a big drought. So please root for me. So this year is going to be more about observing how all the stuff we've already planted now comes up, how it looks. I'm big into like converting grass to meadow. That I would say I'm not planting in Figma. Meadow is just chaos.

1:33:18It is a constant battle with invasives. Native plant meadows are more of a battleground. They're not a planned ecosystem. AI can't solve that yet. AI can't solve that. Phil does constantly pitch robotics for invasives removal and also dealing with some of the problems we now have of invasive pests. So there's something called the jumping worm, which is exactly what you think it is. It's a worm that jumps. Oh, dear. Which is, one, really gross. It's not fun to have in your land if you're gardening. But also, they really deplete the nutrients from the soil. It's pretty bad. And they're spreading and no one knows what to do about it.

1:33:58And this maybe is like an ideal application for robotics who have enough AI that they could identify and zap jumping worms. Now, how you do that without starting a fire or accidentally zapping other worms? Big question. And then you can really get into deep in the what invasives are bad, what invasives are good. No earthworm is native to the United States, for example, but they're fine. They're good. They don't exist. I do feel like you've just inadvertently started an annual tradition, which is that you and I are going to come on here once a year and we're going to review the whole sweep of technology based on how capably robots can solve your garden for you.

1:34:42Because that's where we're headed. It's like everybody wants the robot gardens to be possible. Yeah. Nature is complicated. This is the future. It seems like robot lawnmowers are getting generally better. I've seen them at some botanical gardens. We're very curious about lawn rubas. I hear Jen's working on something, though. So hold off and see if Jen tells you whether to buy it or not. There's a lot at CES. I'm skeptical. There will be a lot. I will say I've only heard a little bit about what Jen's working on. When she's finished, she's going to come on and we have a whole thing planned. But I don't necessarily think it's going super well.

1:35:13So everybody pray for Jen on that front. All right, Helen, we're going to get some emails. So I'm going to pass them on. If you have tips for Helen on her garden planning software, vergecast.verge.com, we will pass them all along. And we will do this again next winter. I'll try and finally publish a how-to in January. Love it. Everyone needs this. I'm going to get back into it for two weeks like I do every year, and it's going to be incredible. It's very niche. There's like three people like myself who really need this. Oh, I don't know. Again, the response to the offhanded thing you said last week would speak differently, but we'll see.

1:35:49All right, Helen, thank you as always. Thanks, David. Have a good one. All right, that's it for the first guest today. Thank you to everyone who came on the show. And thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about, including the information about the CES Vergecast Wednesday, January 8th. Links in the show notes. I'll put all the links to everything in the show notes, all of our Google coverage. If Helen will let me share her Figma, I'll put it in there too, but you never know. We'll see. And as always, read the website, keep your feedback coming. We love hearing from all of you.

1:36:20Call the hotline 866-VERGE11. Email us vergecast at theverge.com. We have one more episode to come for this year, and then we're taking a little break before CES, but we are not done yet with 2024. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. VergeCast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil and I will be back on Friday with a bit of a surprise, but if you've been listening for a while, I suspect you know exactly what it is. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

1:36:54That would be a delightful punk album, Multimodal Agents. Multimodal Agents, that's pretty good. And 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 liberty savings very underwritten by liberty mutual insurance company affiliates excludes massachusetts