It's code red for ChatGPT

27:52Some of them are, I think, it's time, right? Jeff Williams, he's, yep, it's time to retire. He's run his course. He's not going to be the CO. He's also, I think, if you're Apple's board of directors, he's the same age as Tim Cook. Tim Cook is headed towards retirement. You're trying to get more long-term than that. Great. Take your money and go. So he retires. CFO, I think the same deal. John Giandria, who ran AI, I think that was much more how much is this going to cost to make everyone believe it was your idea? And the answer was apparently a lot of money. And everyone is like, so it goes. Gurman's point is Apple doesn't fire people.

28:28They don't fire their senior executives. They manage them out in specific ways. They retire them out the door. And this wasn't a guy that they were not going to fire Alan Dye. It was not in the cards. It was not going to happen. This is Zuck poached him. And so Gurman is very much saying this is a poach. This is a big deal that Apple's, one of Apple's main design people reporting directly to Tim Cook is saying, I think there's a better opportunity for design at Meta and Apple couldn't keep him. Fascinating. Like that dynamic is in here. You can believe Mark or not. I tend to sort of believe what Mark is saying here.

29:07like I don't think Tim Cook has brilliant ideas about design I don't think that he knows how to hire designers and so the idea that he would lose his guy and then he could refill the slot you know what I mean like this is not a problem Tim Cook wanted to solve I think I need an AI guy that's a problem Tim Cook had to solve yes right and they went and recruited the guy from Microsoft and the you know the word on the street about that is like he went from Google to Microsoft he was all in on the Microsoft job And then you just can't turn down, be in charge of AI at Apple. It's unbeatable opportunity.

29:42I'm looking at Zuck's post about this new thing. Today, I'm just reading. This is a long threads post from Zuck. Today, we're establishing a creative studio and reality labs led by Alan Dye. The new studio will bring together design, fashion, and technology to define the next generation of products and experiences. Our idea is to treat intelligence as a new design material and imagine what becomes possible and is abundant capable and human-centered. They're going to elevate design, blah, blah, blah, blah. He's going to be joined by Billy Soratino, who's another designer at Apple. And he goes on to say, we're entering a new era where AI glasses and other devices will change how we connect with technology and each other.

30:16With this new studio, we're focused on making every interaction thoughtful, intuitive, and built to serve people. So, first of all, intelligence is a new design material. If you believe in good user interface design, the thing you don't want to do is hide the user interface. if I have one criticism throughout all of the products I've ever reviewed it's hiding the UI from people makes the products more confusing you can say it's magic and it just does it but like what do we want? We want the buttons everybody just wants the buttons back put the buttons in front of us in the car so I can turn the air conditioning on put the auto switch on the devices just give us the buttons stop hiding the UI from us intelligence as a design material is one of those like, you'll just say magic words and the computer will understand you and then do what you want.

31:05And it's like, oh, who's the perfect designer for this? It's Alan Dye, who kind of hates user interface design. Who has hidden more UI across Apple's operating systems than anyone else in history. Except on the iPad where they just keep putting more. So that's one. Like, I'm just, I'm like, oh, that's why they vibe. I will say the intelligence is a new design material thing is like a very liquid glassy thing to say. Do you know what I mean? It's like, how do we take these digital concepts and make them feel physical is like precisely what liquid glass was trying to do with a sort of different type of thing to work with.

31:45And so this idea of like, what I'm hearing is like blobs. Do you know what I mean? How do we make the AI look like something while it's working is a real part of the challenge here. And we had a generation of it where it was like spinning blue lights on Alexa devices. And now we're going to get these blobs that move around in front of your face while they're ordering DoorDash for you on your meta display glasses. Like I can see it. I know what this is going to be. And this is the thing everyone is going to try to build. And you're going to land on pretty clippy. Like pretty clippy is intelligence as a new design material.

32:23That's where we're headed. Well, so that's the second part of this. We're entering a new era where AI glasses and other devices change how we connect with each other. I have two things about this. One, I sort of agree with you that, you know, sexy, clippy, dancing while it orders a sandwich for you while you walk around, maybe that's what Zuck wants. You know, like lots of ideas there. If you put on a meta quest, you're like, hey, you all need some design help. You know, like there's a bunch of interface design there, even with the band on the new meta display glasses. None of that's refined or perfect.

32:56I understand what you want to design in there. But I'm just going to point out that Apple has spent over a decade saying it's going to make glasses. Tim Cook has said the future is glasses. The future is AR. We have watched Apple demo people playing chess on a chessboard they can only see on their iPads on stage for a decade. The entire Vision Pro is a bet on the future of AR interactions. And they couldn't do the glasses, so they made the VR headset. And Allendei designed all of that interface, which led to Liquid Glass. And you have to imagine he's looking at what Meta is doing with its display.

33:34And he obviously knows what Apple's doing with its. And he's saying, I'm going to go work at Meta. Oh, that's interesting. And maybe Zuck just wrote him the check. Maybe Zuck just wrote him the check. I don't know. Zuck has been writing a lot of checks. There's a report in Bloomberg today that says Zuck and Meta are going to be cutting down Reality Labs' metaverse investment drastically. Which is, duh. Like, what a surprise. Like, Alan Dye got to work in his first day, and he's like, no legs, get this out of here. First of all, there are legs now. There are. It's just that no one knows because no one has put on a quest in two years.

34:08So the metaverse is over, and they're all in on these glasses, and all that's fine. But you have to imagine Alan Dye is looking at, you know, perfect knowledge of Apple's efforts. And whatever Zuck tells him the roadmap is going to be, or Andrew Bosworth, who's the CTO of Meta, who he's reporting to, and he's saying, I'm going to pick a meta. Again, maybe that's just the check. But all these people are already rich. Right. And what they usually are motivated by is the opportunity. And based on everything we know externally just about the products that exist in the world, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to have done.

34:45I think meta is so clearly ahead on this stuff. It has the partnerships. It has built and shipped the glasses. people are starting to use it. Like the Apple has a bunch of sort of unsolved things that it needs to solve in order to do those things. And one of them is Siri, right? Like a lot of this comes back to if you believe the underlying technology here is AI, do you want to be the guy who built the Siri glasses right now? Seriously, like that's a - Do you want to be the guy who is probably just doing the meta AI glasses? The llama glasses? you should have called them llama glasses i don't you know it's a totally fair point who's going to succeed here regardless of who's first or who's second apple is more poised to succeed because meta's incredible brand tax is overwhelming yes people i know people like their meta sunglasses and i think it's just because it's a cool camera you can wear on your face but the second you're like you're going to talk to mark zuckerberg all day no i think that's i think that's right and it is like can can meta figure out its way out of that hole faster than apple can ship is kind of the question or is like google going to make android xr and sort of upend a lot of this stuff in general as always i will just run through the set of problems that no one has solved in the context of these glasses these are all vaporware today and i realize the meta display glasses exist yeah they exist but i've tried them on you've tried them on you can read V's review of them, they're just fine.

36:23They're not ready for primetime in any way, shape, or form. They just exist as a product that Meta was able to ship. If you want to ship AR glasses at scale, you need a display that's bright enough to show you content over the real world and a battery to power that display all on the device. Then you need a battery that's powerful enough to power the compute that is necessary to visually process everything you're looking at, generate a real-time render over it and redisplay it with perfect positioning over the thing you're looking at. Then you also need a cell radio to go talk to the AI cloud.

36:56All of that is also going to drain your power and all that has to sit on your fucking face and not be so heavy that you die. That is a lot of problems. Small things. Seems fine. It's a lot of problems and Apple couldn't solve it and they couldn't solve it so hard. They pivoted to, it's a giant VR headset with an external battery pack. Maybe Meta can increment their way there. Maybe. I mean, it's certainly ahead. Like, unless there is some... It's ahead in the sense that it made the display. It shipped a display in a pair of glasses, but that thing is not ready. No, it's not. And that display also does not do anything but be a display.

37:37There's no AR in that display. Right. Right. It's not looking at the world and, like, labeling the world. So I just thought a huge set of problems before you get to your sexy blobs or whatever you think it's going to be. It's going to be sexy blobs. No, I think you're right. But I think this there's just a lot here. I also think one reason if you're Mark Zuckerberg, you hire Alan Dye is because there is a long established design culture at Apple that I would say fairly clearly meta does not have right that like yeah if if you want to build a great design program you should hire somebody from apple right like they just that that company understands how to make design central to work we just said all their designs basically no one else doesn't they i mean i didn't say all their all their software designs suck because of alan dye who's going to go now you know run software design sure i'm not saying this is going to go well but i'm saying if you want to build a design culture it it makes logical sense that that's where you would start because that is the strongest design culture in tech and has been for decades.

38:45Sure. I don't disagree with you. I just... There's a part of me that says Sam Altman hired Johnny Ive and Mark wanted one too. Very possible. You know what I mean? They all want to be the next Steve Jobs. So Sam went and got Johnny and Johnny's job is to sit on panels and be like, what's the future of ideas and never ship anything because the AI technology cannot support whatever humane penny wants to invent. And Zuck was like, I'll get one too. And the one that was available was Alan Dye. And that's like a very Mark Zuckerberg way of accomplishing a goal. Yeah, I don't see the problem with this.

39:21All right, we need to take a break. But before we do, I just, I want to read you a headline that's going to make you happy. Are you ready for this? Yeah. Linux usage on Steam hits a record high for the second month in a row. It's the year of Linux on the desktop, baby. We're doing it. It's happening. If you have ideas about Linux coverage, by which I mean anything at all. You just let us know. So Stevie Bonifield wrote this story for us and they wrote, this is my favorite. As of last month, Linux users accounted for 3.2 % of all Steam users. That pales in comparison to Windows usage, 94.79%. But it's still a boost from October and marks a new all-time high for Linux usage on Steam.

39:59That's amazing. That's like new upstart browser challenges Chrome, which has still everyone uses Chrome. Linux, it's happening. This is the story of 2026. I'm telling you, man, it's sexy blobs floating in front of your face and Linux on the desktop. It's divergent, but it all makes sense. Yeah, we're going two directions hard at the same time. I love it. All right, we need to take a break and then we're going to come back and we are declaring a code red. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. If you've ever hired for your small business, you know how important it is to find the right person.

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45:06All right, we're back. It's time to hit the panic button on OpenAI. The news here is that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, wrote a memo to his team declaring a code red, which is a thing people talk about in tech because they all love like a military metaphor. and basically saying they have to stop doing all the sort of outside work that they've been doing open ai as we've talked about many times is like kind of trying to do everything all at once in all directions and he's saying what we have to we have to pause on a bunch of that work health agents its personal assistant that it was calling pulse the the work to do advertising which i think is really interesting, all to pour their focus back into ChatGPT.

45:51And this is directly a result of, I would say, two things. One, Google Gemini is, I think, pretty widely considered a better product than what ChatGPT is and what OpenAI is making models-wise right now. It's ahead on the leaderboards. People like it very much. Google has a lot of intrinsic advantages, and there is a sense that Google is winning in a way that it was not winning 12 months ago, which if you're OpenAI and you need to win big in order to pull off all these things you're trying to do is scary. There's also been some, I would say, somewhat alarming numbers about what has happened as OpenAI has introduced more guardrails and pulled back on some of the like sycophantic personality stuff in ChatGPT and basically has tried to make it a very slightly more responsible product.

46:41It turns out people like and use it less. welcome to the engagement trap of the technology industry um how big and scary a thing do you think this actually is nilai i think the idea of gemini winning is really interesting because it's it's just layers and layers so gemini 3 pro the model everyone thinks it's the best model the idea that people will switch from claude or chat gpt or gpt5 right like hayden poked at it A lot of people are like, we have our workflows. Everyone's happy. We're not going to switch to it. But Google trained that model. They're deploying that model. They have massive distribution advantages because they have Google search and Gmail and YouTube and docs and whatever.

47:22If you use a Google product right now, it's like, do you want Gemini to do some stuff? It's ferociously annoying. Every time we start a Google Meet meeting, it's like, do you want Gemini here? Gemini? Should we meet with Gemini? It's a lot. So there's that. And Google's distribution advantage is real. Google is also running it on their own chips, their own TPUs, which are, they, from all accounts, last longer than the GPUs, which everyone's burning out right now, and are cheaper to run and more efficient. And boy, that's a lot, right? You don't have this big dependency in NVIDIA because you got your own chips.

47:54You maybe have a dependency on TSMC because they make everyone's chips, but like, set that aside. So you just have this like Google problem. Google is now, I mean, you just described more or less the whole stack, right? Like Google is now a successful - Oh, there's one more part of that stack, which is Google also makes money. Right. There's that too. Google is wildly profitable. One of the best quarters in business history last quarter. And it's because of the products that they're now accelerating AI. So Google can afford to spend its excess profit, of which it has an infinite amount on AI stuff, which it owns, like vertically integrated, owns every part of the stack.

48:28OpenAI is just burning other people's money on NVIDIA chips. And I think Sam Altman has spent his time traveling the world asking for even more money, making more outlandish promises about what will happen when AGI reboots the economy. In the meantime, its product team isn't the one shipping its most interesting product. Like Sora 2 came out of the research team, not the product team. It's weird that OpenAI has a research team that launches products. So I kind of understand why he's declaring code red. I just, you know, the code red is like they should make a dollar. Well, that's not going to happen anytime soon.

49:06But that's like the, I don't think, I mean, you know me, I don't think core LLM technology can do the things that in particular Sam Altman is promising it can do. Well, and that's the other thing that is happening right now is I think that thesis is growing in its sort of mainstream acceptability. The idea that actually LLMs are not in their current form going to get us where we want to go or where everybody has been promising that they're going to go. That actually what we need is some entirely new like orthogonal breakthrough to go do something else. If we're going to make these true, like, you know, generally intelligent systems, better, bigger, faster LLMs is not the thing.

49:57Yeah, but it has to be the thing for OpenAI. If LLMs aren't the thing, like, I don't know if OpenAI has it in the move, right? All of their promises are about ChatGPT, which is running on GPT-5, which is an LLM. They've lost a lot of their bleeding edge research talent to other labs, many of whom left because they thought Sam Altman wasn't behaving in a safe enough manner, which now might be borne out because there's like a serious mental health crisis associated with chat GBT. That's not good. And then another set of whom left because people like Mark Zuckerberg wrote them gigantic preposterous checks to go do it for them.

50:35Yeah, sure. I mean, but like the bleeding edge talent doesn't work there anymore, right? Meta also makes dollars. For Prince money. And you know, what I keep hearing about Meta is like, they'll buy all the GPUs. And even if none of this comes to pass, they'll just do ad targeting with the GPUs. Yeah. Because that's how they make their money. Maybe that's fine. Yep. All the people that OpenAI has hired are product people. Johnny Ive and all of those Apple designers, they're to make products. All the people from Instagram that they've hired, they're to make consumer products. the consumer products can't be executed if the llm technology can't make the products good like you can make the prettiest humane pin in the world but it's if the llm is still kind of dumb you're you didn't get very far you didn't disrupt the iphone such that you can pay back all the investors who gave you all that money sure but i think the the assumption there is that there are no products that can work with LLMs.

51:33And that's just not true, right? Like the question of, can we build God in such a way that, I mean, because right, like as we've talked about many times on the show, like open AI is so leveraged in so many directions that if it does half the job, it fails, like literally specifically fails. This thing has to work at such unbelievably huge scale that eventually it is so big and so powerful that it like remakes the economy. And that's how open AI succeeds. Anything short of that is a disaster. Like I was listening to an interview with James Cameron about the new Avatar movie. And Matt Bellany, who was interviewing him, was trying to get him to say how much the movie costs.

52:15And he was like, I'll tell you this, it is one metric fuck ton of money. And so I have to go out and make two metric fuck tons of money or else none of this is worth it. And that is such a perfect analogy to open AI. Like this thing can't just be pretty good and pretty successful. It has to be unprecedentedly good and successful in order to pay off all the things that OpenAI is doing just from a business perspective. That said, I think there is a compelling argument to be made that if none of the technology got any better, there's still a lot of room for chat GPT to get better. Oh, sure. Okay.

52:49And that's the thing that I think. That's your code red. that's the thing that Sam Altman should be pointing at, right? Because they keep trying things inside of ChatGPT. They tried this weird stuff where it was going to be like a to-do list and they tried the apps and they tried the custom GPTs and none of it has worked. The only like meaningful addition to ChatGPT since the beginning of ChatGPT I think has been web search. And you just need more than that. If you want to build the thing that becomes like the new app store for how people interact with AI, chat chpt has as good a shot of getting there as anybody right now because it's it is huge it has the brand people have been using it like it's it has a lead in a real way as like a consumer adopted product but it's not getting better at the speed that other things are going to get better so i have some pushback there i agree with you there is room to make the core chat chpt product better.

53:45And by room, I mean, sometimes it just hallucinates pure garbage at you. You could just make that better. You could just have it not do that. I don't know if that's technically possible. I also, I will tell you with great confidence, I don't think most people give two craps that it hallucinates. I think that is so far down the list of people's concerns about AI right now, whether it should be or not is like, well, I mean, it hallucinates capabilities. Oh yeah, for sure. It will tell you it's good at things. It is not good at, which is a real problem. Right. I have a 10-year-old car that needed a transmission service and I like took it to the place and they were like, here's a bunch of costs and I was like, tragic, is it cost that much?

54:21And I was like, that's reasonable, it's on the high side. Do you want me to find you a list of other service areas near you that will do it for cheaper? And I was like, yes. And then it just can't do that. Like, it just said it could. It's a great idea. I should be able to do that. It just super can't do that. But it's like happy to suggest it can. I love that. Like you can, round that off, right? You think ChatGPT is the product manager for ChatGPT? It's just like, here's all the cool stuff it would be so rad if I could do. It's just like, it super can't do that. I don't know. It came back with some results, but it was like, here's a place in Canada whose price list I found online for transmissions.

55:01And it's like, that's not helpful at all. It's not even the right currency. These are fake dollars, man. So there's that. You could just finish that. But the thing that Sam Altman has to deliver on is fully replacing Google as a business and the iPhone. That's how much money. That's your two metric fuck tons of money. That's how much money he has to pay back to everyone. Yeah. Is fully disrupt the iPhone and the entire iPhone economy and all of the money Apple makes from the iPhone and fully disrupt Google search and all of the money Google has printed off of Google search for years. And I don't think either one of those companies is particularly motivated to let him.

55:44And so Google, like first and foremost, Google declared its own code red two years ago. I guess it's almost three years ago now, two and a half years ago. Yeah. Google said, code red, chat GPT is here. We invented the transformer. This was like right after the original chat GPT launch, right? Yep. Yeah. This is Nadella saying, I'm going to make you dance. And he was like, I'm not going to, it was like a whole thing. And they declared their own code red. Sundar basically turned over all of his executives. and they have done nothing but execute and now they're done fine. Okay, maybe a code red works.

56:13but it means you have to still fight Google, which is Ascendant. And then what does your app run on? It runs on the iPhone. And every time someone signs up for ChatGP on the iPhone, Tim Cook goes cha-ching and takes 30 % of your money away. These are structural problems that are hard to overcome. And to your point, Google had three years of runway to go do this because it has effectively unlimited resources to throw at this. And I think the thing about being Sam Altman is that it is his ability to infinitely raise money is really powerful until it's not, right? And those things turn on a dime and the minute you become a not viable candidate to give money to at crazy scales anymore, it all kind of falls apart, right?

57:00Like it is, that is a thing, it's a Ponzi scheme, you have to keep running. Well, they did just make yet another circular deal. Yeah. They bought their own VC firm, which is incredible. Just an incredible move. You know, Dario from Anthropic is out there saying, like, there's a bubble. Everyone's been saying there's a bubble. The thing that really pays us off is agents, right? You have a little butler that you can tell to go do something and it goes and does something for you. And maybe that changes the economy. The problem is the agents don't work because, again, I think the LMs can't do it. Like, the core technology can't do it because it doesn't know anything.

57:38We can come to that. But V tested all the AI browsers, including Chrome with agents in it. Yeah. And none of them can like buy a pair of shoes. Right. I think it was really fun. I edited that story with V and we went back and forth a lot because it's like, the question is, how useful is this thing? Despite the fact that it can't do the whole thing, right? Like it is so abundantly clear that the idea that I should just be able to declare to my browser that I would like the best pair of new balances and I need them to be delivered tomorrow, which to be clear is the vision. That is what everyone claims they are going to build.

58:12That is not, I'm not being hyperbolic in the least that I should be able to say I need new shoes and it should deliver the right shoes at the right price to my house tomorrow. That's, that's the promise. Holy God, are we far away from it? But there's a bunch of questions in the middle, right? Where it's like, okay, how close to that, how close to that do we need to be in order for it to be even a little bit useful. And V had a bunch of really fun experiences. She's like, okay, well, this thing can help me figure out which pair of shoes I need as somebody who has like, you know, wide feet and likes off white colors.

58:49That's a thing these tools are able to do very quickly. And that's genuinely useful, right? And it's like, if I have a bunch of specs on a webpage, it is able to successfully summarize and compare those stats to other specs on another webpage. Great. That is not how you pay off the investment in OpenAI. And so I think it's like if you're, this is kind of what I mean, right? Where there's a lot of things that these products can do that are genuinely useful, but we are so leveraged against the end state here that none of it matters until we get there in a way. And this is why I'm saying that the promise has to be the web browser Browse is the web for you.

59:35The computer uses itself. Yeah. Right. When I, when I talked to Casey Newton who lives in San Francisco, it might be a little bit more appellate than me. He's like, but the computer is using itself. Like, why don't you have any wonder? You're too jaded and you live in New York. And I say, yes, I do. The greatest city. Sorry.

59:54Related story. I like it here. and I get it, right? You're like, the computer's using itself. Like, that's going to get there. From here to there, there's a straight line, line go up. And I don't think that's true. So like, here's a little like, just inside baseball of how the bridge works. So we had this guy, Dr. Adam Dubé on Decoder to talk about AI and education. At the end, he was like, that was really great. And I said, hey, do you know any people who study intelligence, right? You're an education professor. Do you know people who study intelligence? because I've been curious about the idea of language and intelligence.

1:00:29And he was like, I got the perfect person for you. It's got Ben Reilly, made the introduction. And we had Ben write, like, based on cutting-edge research into the science of intelligence, my favorite headline of the past year, large language mistake. That's good. And basically the thesis is language is not intelligence. And you should read Ben's piece. I think it's one of the smartest things we have published this year. And basically it just runs down. Everything we know about language and intelligence suggests you can have intelligence without language. and you can have language without intelligence.

1:01:00And just doing language does not make you intelligent. And everything we know about these AI models, just looking at them today, suggests they are very capable of language, right? They're auto-prediction machines. That does not mean they understand one lick of what they're doing. They're just moving words around and sort of prompting themselves. Like chain of thought is sort of like the very, very reductive way of thinking about it. It's just prompting itself over and over again. I'm just going to read you one very small chunk of his story that I really like, that I think hits this on the head really well and has been a thing I've been thinking about a lot ever since.

1:01:32He says about large language models, that they have no apparent reason to become dissatisfied with the data they're being fed, and by extension, to make great scientific and creative leaps. Instead, the most obvious outcome is nothing more than a common-sense repository. I love that. Thinking about LLMs as a common-sense repository is so good. And it's not the burn that it might immediately sound. Like a giant repository of common sense is actually like an incredibly valuable thing, but it is not the next thing. And it's I know that we, you know, I've been ranting and raving about whether or not the LMS can do it for a long time in the show.

1:02:10The industry is starting to say it. Yeah. Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, is patiently explaining on podcasts that they're just doing token prediction and they don't actually know what they're talking about. And it gets dangerous when you start to believe they do. So Ilya Sutskiver, who was one of the founders of OpenAI, participated in the coup against Altman, left to start Safe Superintelligence. He's on the, I think it's the Dworkesh podcast this week, saying the age of scaling is over. Just adding more data to pre-training isn't going to do it. We need to go back to research. Actually, I think we have this clip.

1:02:44Can we just run this clip? Yeah. Up until 2020, from 2012 to 2020, it was the age of research. now from 2020 to 2025 it was the age of scaling or maybe plus minus let's add error bars to those years because people say this is amazing you got to scale more keep scaling the one word scaling but now the scale is so big like is is the belief really that oh it's so big but if you had a 100x more everything would be so different like it would be different for sure but like is the belief that if you just honeydex the scale, everything would be transformed? I don't think that's true. So it's back to the age of research again, just with big computers.

1:03:28I mean, good for you, Elliot. You got a big computer out of it. Like, I wish I could be like, I have this idea, but I need like$100 billion to build the world's biggest computer. And then it still won't happen and I need to do more research with the big computer. Yeah. It's nice working if you can get it. But that really is such a tone shift from the way a lot of this stuff was being talked about. And the fact that that idea that actually what we need is not more of this breakthrough, but new breakthroughs is completely runs against the bet that all of these companies like this is how NVIDIA became the biggest company in the world is everybody was like, oh, if we just do this more, we will get where we're going.

1:04:07And now there is an increasing sense that actually we have to do something else and then do it more. Right. The computers don't know anything. It's as simple as that. Language is not intelligence. We built computers that have an incredible facility with language. And I understand that now they're multimodal and token prediction and language prediction. Like, yeah, I understand, but they don't know anything. there's something very important about that where if you want to send an agent out onto the web to buy you a pair of shoes it needs to have a glimmer of actual intelligence and i think we can see with just the browsers that exist today we can see with the humane pin you can see with chad chpd pretending it can find you prices of auto repair near you which it absolutely cannot do that it knows what words it should say but it has no idea what those words mean and then it falls down.

1:05:01And I think this is the danger for open AI. It's the danger for Anthropic. It's the danger for every company except Google because Google makes a lot of money. Yes. Well, and the thing here is what you're describing wouldn't be such a problem if all of these companies hadn't spent the last three years promising us that it was going to come true, right? Like if we were just in the what do we do with these models that exists era, like the thing you described, where can it go find me another service center that is cheaper where I can get my car fixed? Incredible. Totally, utterly doable with current technology.

1:05:40Like that is a thing that an LLM is actually perfectly placed to do. And there has been so much work that has been based on the idea that actually that problem will just get solved if we make the models bigger, not I need to point the models at interesting problems and products, right? And that to me is like the correct thing that Sam is doing with this code red is like what we need to do is not just keep building technology based on the belief that more better technology will solve all of our problems. We need to go build products with the technology that exists because it really like there is nothing about the problem that you just described with your transmission that isn't possible.

1:06:24It's just that no one has built it because everybody's like, well, we have to do bigger models. That's the only way to do any of this. And it's like, no, go build stuff with your models. We don't need new coding languages. We need to build shit with the code. I don't know, man. Like, I agree. I want to agree with you. I think there's some stuff that is really, really cool here. I think Suno, we ran a piece about Suno and the country music industry this week. It's really good. I think Charlie's going to come on next week and talk about it. Like, there's something there that I find fascinating. I find Sora 2 in its own weird, grotesque way to be deeply fascinating.

1:07:01The products I want, like, I want ChatGPT to call all the car repair shops and get me the prices for the transmission fluid change. Can they execute that? Can Fiji SEMA, where they hired from Meta to run product at OpenAI, that's not like make the product, like, that's not product manager stuff, right? Like we're going to do experiments and A-B test with users until we refine the thing and find it's like, yeah, but the engine of that is like two drunk hamsters on a wheel that's kind of broken. And if that doesn't work, like it doesn't matter how pretty it is. But this is what I'm saying. This is because we keep betting that if we make the foundational infrastructure better, everything it'll be like if 50 years ago, everybody had just been like, well, we're going to make everybody's Internet connection faster and it'll solve all of our problems.

1:07:48And people are going to be like, well, what are they going to do on the Internet? And they're like, I don't know. We're going to make it faster. I will point out that that was the bubble. I know. And then a bunch of people were like, oh, what if we built actual things that people liked? And Jeff Bezos was like, you can buy books and we'll ship them to you. And it's like that we need to get to that much more quickly than we have been getting there, which is like and it's because everybody has raised money against and made deals around. We are inventing God. And so you can't have ideas that are less than that because you will panic the market.

1:08:22And there is nothing that bums me out more than talking about products in terms of stock prices. But more than any time I can remember in doing this, it has felt to me like every product decision is being made based on valuations and stock prices. And if you say the coolest thing that we're doing right now is we're building a thing that will call a bunch of mechanics to get you the cheapest price, that's not God. And it's going to tank your stock price. I don't know if you've ever called a bunch of repair shops. You might need some spiritual energy to pull that off. I'm with you. You know, OpenAI is a public company.

1:08:58Anthropic isn't a public company. There's, you know, a lot of race to go public between all of these companies now. I think there's actually, I would, we can end it here. I just think there's more nihilism to that. It's if you believe that you can get to AGI with these tools, why would you ever stop to make the products good? Sure. Why does it even matter if the products are good? If what you're at the end of it, you're going to be like, I have to call Satya Nadella to convene the Pope and Mariah Carey to declare God. Because they have to put together a panel of experts for their new contract.

1:09:30Right. And those are the two. That's who I got on my list. Mariah Carey and the Pope. I think that would be a fun one. The big three, I call them.

1:09:42Drake and Kendrick have to agree on digital God. And I think what I'm saying is like, make me the AI czar of the world. And I'm just going to look at everybody and say, everybody is going to shut up about AGI for two years. And your only goal and job is to build products that people will pay$10 a month for. And I don't care about anything else that you're doing with your AI. Go do that for two years and tell me if we don't actually make the world better. And that is a vastly more plausible and interesting road to go down. Well, David, I hesitate to say this to you, but that might be what you want.

1:10:20But in the meantime, Sundar Pachai went on Fox News this week to say that he was going to start something called Project Suncatcher to put data centers in space. I'm just going to play this clip and then we're going to take a break because I'm sad. And I hate everything. I love it. And here it is. Over time, at Google, we are always proud of taking moonshots. You mentioned Waymo earlier. You know, that's been over a decade in the making. We're working on quantum computing. In that spirit, one of our moonshots is to how do we one day have data centers in space so that we can better harness the energy from the sun.

1:10:52You know, that is 100 trillion times more energy than what we produce in all of Earth today. So we want to put these data centers in space closer to the sun. And I think we are taking our first step in 27. We'll send tiny, tiny racks of machines and have them in satellites, test them out, and then start scaling from there. But there's no doubt to me that a decade or so away, we'll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers. That's not what moonshots are, Sundar. They don't literally, they're not literally about the moon. It's a metaphor. That's it, everybody. We're taking a break.

1:11:34Nothing else to say. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital. Sometimes the difference between success and failure comes down to one chance encounter or following a counterintuitive instinct or ignoring conventional wisdom to make a bold decision. Like when the founders at Palo Alto Networks wanted to redefine cybersecurity for the modern age. Everybody thought we were crazy. Nobody would use the cloud for cybersecurity. And when I hear something like that, I say, of course I'm going to do it, you know. If everybody believes it shouldn't be done or it cannot be done, then, you know, it's a good reason to do it.

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1:15:07All right, we're back. We're here on Earth. The code red is over. We're back to, what's the opposite? Like a code yellow? Code green. Code green. It's code green here on the Vergecast. Times are good. It's time for the lightning round. Eric, we have a sponsor this week. That is correct. This week's lightning round is presented by AWS. How leading businesses use AI for next level innovation. Neal, is it time? It's time. God. Every week I'm like, he's going to say no. He never stops. And we get to just move on with our lives and everything's going to be fine. He never stops. It is time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

1:15:43I found another one that called itself America's favorite. Shout out to the Ringer Fantasy Football Show. Absolutely not. It is time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Wait, they call themselves America's favorite podcast within a podcast? They called it a segment, but they know what they're doing. And I don't like it. And I'm not okay with it. I do think we should be with the Ringer Fantasy Football Show. Come on, Bill Simmons. for your noise. That's what I'm saying. We're coming for you. All right. It's time for Brandon Carr's a dummy. What do you do this week, Neil? He's such a dummy.

1:16:13And the layers of idiocy here are good. If you've been following Brandon Carr's a dummy or just my telecom coverage for years or our telecom coverage here at The Verge, you will know that in the first Trump administration, Carr, who was floating around the FCC, but part of the FCC with Ajit Pai, who was the chairman at the time, and the Trump DOJ approved the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint, cutting our nation's wireless carriers from three in Sprint to three, from three competitive carriers in Sprint to three. And the idea was that Dish Network would take Boost Mobile and some other bits and bobs and start a fourth wireless carrier that would compete for the hearts and minds and dollars of Americans.

1:17:01This was a farce from the very beginning. It didn't happen, and Dish Network gave up. There's nothing else to say about this. Everyone got utterly bamboozled into reducing the number of competitive wireless carriers in America. Now, of course, we have Trump Mobile, which is just winning every single day. Still not here, by the way. Still not here. Trump Phone. Trump Phone update. Nope. Nothing. Anyway, so now that Dish Network has given up on its plans to compete, leaving us with just three wireless carriers. Everyone wants to buy at Spectrum. AT &T just applied for FCC approval to spend$23 billion on Spectrum from EchoStar, which owns Stitch Network.

1:17:44And it needs DOJ approval for a$5 billion deal to buy CenturyLink's fiber division. So AT &T wants to buy stuff. When you want to buy Spectrum, when you want to combine fiber divisions, you need government approval. And if you need government approval, our man Brendan Carr is here to basically be like, be more racist and I'll give you approval. There's nothing else. The man is the speech police. And so he basically, I would say under the table, as he's done with every other telecom company, said, sure, maybe I'll do this deal. You got to get rid of your DEI programs. So AT &T has dropped all of its DEI programs.

1:18:24AT &T filed a letter on its FCC docket for a billion dollar purchase of U.S. cellular spectrum. and the letter says we have closely followed the recent executive orders, Supreme Court filings and guidance issued by the administration and we've ended DEI-related policies as described below, not just in name but in substance. Brendan, of course, is celebrating this. AT &T has now memorialized its commitment to ending DEI-related policies and FCC filing. It will not have any rules focused on DEI. He's very happy about this. This is our government telling a private company how to run its business, how to hire, attract, and retain talent if it wants to do business deals.

1:19:03If you're a raging free marketer, this should drive you bananas. It should absolutely drive you bananas. This isn't, you can feel however you want about a DEI program. So I personally think they've been shown to increase the amount of talent companies have. They've been shown to make companies more resilient to change, to attract a wider array of customers. There's data about that, but you could hate them. You could not like them at all. the government still shouldn't tell AT &T how to manage its talent how to run its business if it wants a deal and it should certainly not let one unelected bureaucrat Brandon Carr at the FCC issue threats left and right Yeah to these companies instead of fighting back obviously all the telecom companies are caving Verizon caved T-Mobile has caved Comcast has caved disclosure Comcast owns some stake at Box Media but they hate me anyway that's true So it's largely correct.

1:19:57None of them like me. So the two things I wonder about here are whether this is AT &T, like a lot of other companies, looking around and saying, okay, we're not being sort of actively threatened. Like no one is telling us to take somebody off the air or whatever. But we understand that we want to do business and this is what is required. Like I was watching a 60 Minutes interview the other day with the CEO of Polymarket who took an investment from Donald Trump Jr. and put him on like an advisory board. And Anderson Cooper was like, is this just like naked politicking? And he was like, well, yeah, we want to do stuff.

1:20:34And this is the administration like. Seems fine. And it's just like just it's like it is sort of corruption in in like de facto, even if it's not official, you know what I mean? Oh, no. I mean, the argument from the Trump administration is it's not corruption if you can see it. Look at how corrupt we are. Right. I guess that's all out in the open. Unlike those corrupt Bidens. And like, sure, here it is all out in the open. Right. I don't have to do anything to do this segment every week except search Brendan Carr's name. And then some ridiculous corruption or censorship appears in front of our face.

1:21:08Right. Because because they are loudly saying what the rules are. and the rules are if you just look at the list right Verizon only got to buy Frontier after caving to Brendan on DEI T-Mobile got to acquire some of the US cellular spectrum after caving to Brendan Carr Paramount got to settle its lawsuit with the Trump with President Trump personally after it agreed to impose a quote bias monitor at CBS on and on and on and on right and all it is and again if you are a raging free marketer this should drive you bananas.

1:21:45My default posture is, I don't trust you.

1:21:51You can think whatever you want in my politics, but mostly what I say on the show is free market competition is good and maybe we should have healthcare. I feel very comfortable that I live in a Venn diagram with many, many people. It drives me bananas that we've decided the government can interfere with private companies in this way. We should make them compete. We should absolutely make them compete. And instead, what they're competing on is to cave to this administration that is directing the economy from the top down, in particular in ways that chill speech. Does it feel any different knowing that Trump got Rush Hour 4 greenlit in this way?

1:22:28Like, is it all OK because we're going to get Rush Hour 4? Do you know the backstory of the Rush Hour 4 thing is hilarious, right? No. He hired Brett Ratner to produce a Melania Trump documentary. Oh, God. And I think Ratner was like, let me do Rush Hour 4 in the production. So now they're doing Rush Hour 4. The one that they sold to Amazon for some outrageous amount of money. It's just free association. There's people say stuff, and then Trump says stuff, and then we have to pretend it's real. There will never be a Rush Hour 4, just as there was never a Foxconn plan in Wisconsin. That's what I have for you.

1:23:01Should we start a how many weeks counter for Rush Hour 4? It's like, was there a Google COVID website? Is there rush hour four? The big questions in front of us. Anyhow, Brendan, as always, you're welcome to come on this show or on Decoder. Face the music. Try to defend your just intolerable meddling in our nation's free markets, your desire for constant censorship, and honestly, like your whole beard situation. I'm happy to insult you to your face. You can insult me right back. I think people will like it. You're welcome. Anytime you want. That's been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

1:23:34You hear that ringer? Favorite. Number one. It's best one. All right. My first one is I just want to say a small shout out to everyone on the Internet for getting involved in the year in review trend. This is like it's it's I guess the week after Thanksgiving is now officially like wrapped week. So we got Spotify wrapped this week. We got Amazon music. It's called like discovered, which is bad. Apple music, I think has replay something. YouTube has a new one this year called recap that I quite like. I think you YouTube is probably up there with tech talk in terms of like the most revealing of my actual personality.

1:24:16So discovering all of the stuff that I watched on YouTube was sort of alarming, but really interesting. There was a Google photos one. Google photos has done this before, but now it's like, here's how many selfies you took this year which is just an incredible burn to do to everyone in google photos i just i just think it's great and this is like it's one of the funniest things about the internet to me because it is like when these companies say the quiet part loud that they are tracking everything you do all the time always yep and it's not the kind of thing you want to think about but then once a year spotify like presents it back to you in a delightful way where your favorite artist makes a video for you and it's like okay maybe the maybe surveillance capitalism is okay for one week a year i saw Evan Gray, who's a great privacy activist, and they were like, oh, you listen to the same song, the same kid's song every morning for 15 minutes?

1:25:00I know when your kids go to school. Oh, God. Yeah. No, that's right. It is like so many things. The minute you think a little bit about it, it becomes really, really horrifying. It is cute. I will say all of mine were Taylor Swift or lullaby versions of Taylor Swift because I have two children and that's the way it goes. Yeah. yep mine was uh my youtube recap was very funny because it was basically like you watch a lot of sports highlights you watch a lot of tech videos and you watch a lot of super simple songs on youtube i haven't looked at my youtube i don't have tracking turn on my youtube i turned it off long ago which is getting increasingly annoying do you have the empty home screen yep interesting i it is very relaxing youtube for me is a pure utility in that way yeah it's good it's a search product.

1:25:48Yep. That's interesting. That's probably the correct way to use YouTube in a lot of ways. I should have asked YouTube how to fix my car. There are a bunch of Chrome extensions out there that will just basically strip away everything else on the page except the video you're looking at. And every time I load it, I'm like, oh, this is nice. What if my video was just a video and not 65 other things simultaneously? But anyway, shouts to everybody doing recaps. And if you're going to track me, at least give me a stories formatted thing about how weird I am on the internet at the end of the year uh what's your second one uh my second one is a call it to a sean story we ran thanksgiving week and i insisted that we run it before black friday because all these tools from these companies hodo and fantic go on sale for black friday and so every year i look at all the lists i look at our list i'm like what are these things like we sell more of these hodo screwdrivers than you can possibly imagine yep and i'm like where did these companies are they just like tiktok brands like what are they so we sent sean hollister to investigate then he talked to the ceos of both companies he talked to their designers these are wild stories so hodo is like a lead on liu is a pretty notable industrial designer she just like joined the xiaomi incubator and was like what if i make beautiful tools instead of crappy tools and they're just a phenomenon like they're just a phenomenon uh fantic is an even wilder story.

1:27:13So you remember there's that explosion of charger companies? Yeah, the I feel like Anchor was the main one. So remember there was a competitor called Aki? Oh yeah, I do remember Aki. What happened to Aki? Aki was banned from Amazon permanently for review fraud. Oh, sick. 600 Chinese bands were banned from Amazon in 2021 for doing review fraud. So Aki pivoted. It reconstitutes itself as like a house of brands. and launched Fantic as its tool brand. And they're back, baby. Like, it's just Aki, but another brand. And they're running the same playbook as Hodo. They just, like, do well-designed tools.

1:27:53These companies ferociously compete with each other. Like, Sean has pointed out in the story, like, they claim they don't compete with each other. But one company releases one product, and the next revision of the next company's product is slightly better and back and forth. I love it. Like, pure gadget competition makes me the happiest, especially in things as silly as screwdrivers. There are some criticisms here. All these things have like sealed lithium ion batteries in them. They're not as powerful as tools that have, you know, like screwdriver, like DeWalt screwdrivers, you know, replaceable batteries.

1:28:26Some of the designs make no sense at all. Like I have some of these tools that like, it's really pretty, but it's actually not very functional. Yeah. Like straightforwardly, like I have the rotary tool, the Fantec rotary tool. and I'm like my Dremel from 20 years ago that you plug into the wall is like so much more effective than the Fantec rubber equal. I love it. I have the electric screwdriver, the like USB-C powered one and I always describe it to people as like for Ikea level projects and below, it is fabulous. And just like a little tiny powered screwdriver is great. Wait, can we compare algorithms for a second?

1:29:02There is one particular one of these products that has been all over all of my social video apps. Has there been one for you for the last like two weeks? I've seen like every third video has been. Which one is yours? Mine is the the powered scissors that people are using to cut cardboard boxes. The powered scissors for me are a couple months ago. Mine is, you know, all these companies are like little motor companies. That's what that's like fundamentally the innovation here is there's a tiny efficient motor and battery. And if you can get a tiny efficient motor and a battery, you can make anything you want.

1:29:34Yeah, they're like mini Dysons in that sense. Yeah. Dyson is this company. They made a very efficient motor. And then they're like, we make everything. And now we make hair dryers. They got all the way to what is, what can we do with a big efficient motor? We can drive the wheels of a car. Did they really? That's Dyson trying to make a car. They're like, we need an EV. Like what do we, it's a lithium ion batteries and efficient motors. Now you're riding in style. Like, what are you, like you can, you can spin out. I had the CEO of Shark Ninja and Decoder. And I was like, so it's just fans. Everything's a fan.

1:30:02And he's like, stop with the fans. It's all just fans what is the most lucrative fan you can sell he's like we have an air fryer i was like that's a fan he's like i made a grill it was like it does convection like a fan what is the most lucrative fan you can sell a hair dryer it is the most expensive fan you can there's the most expensive dyson product it's still just a fan yep so fantic is moving into beauty and this one isn't a motor but they've got like a brush that heats up and i see the video for the brush that heats up all the time. Constantly. It's like a battery powered brush that is hot for like people with curly hair and I see it every day and I'm like I should get this brush that heats up and I don't know why but maybe I will.

1:30:43I feel like we can make your hair. I'm gonna have like long straight hair. Yeah we could make your hair so big with one of those. It doesn't need help. I've been letting it grow out since we had the baby and it's just getting oppressively large. And Becky's like, it's never going to like fall down and like be cool. It's just going to keep going out. And like, how do you know? And she's like, I've known you since you were 18. Listen, you never know until you find out. You never find out. Okay. Can I tell you the one thing about the feeds in the story that is crazy? Please. Fantix, they basically like horsepower themselves into existence by paying influencers.

1:31:19So Fantix has 31 ,000 TikTok creators competing to make screwdriver social videos. 30 % of the company's sales are from TikTok alone. It sold$25 million for their tools in just two years. It thinks it's going to hit$40 million for the sales just doing TikTok videos. Single videos get 21 million views and sell 13 ,000 screwdrivers. And it's just an army of people taking free products from influencer marketing campaigns and making ads for Fantic. And that is the business. Yep. It is crazy to me that you can just make a brand that way. I mean, yeah, if you if you have a huge amount of supply of almost anything to give away, like I got like halfway down the road of reporting out a big story about the candy ecosystem on TikTok, because it's it's another version of this thing where like there's this company Bon Bon that is just absolutely everywhere on TikTok trying to sell you candy.

1:32:15and it is like I talked to a bunch of people who were like yeah I just started a company and said I have free candy on TikTok and all of a sudden like hundreds and hundreds of people were like I'll make a video about your candy in exchange for free candy and it's like if you have the thing to ship them and they get a commission if they sell it holy lord is it just gonna start to turn for you I mean and this is professionalized there are entire platforms that do this for brands Fantic has its own people they have 30 people that just manage TikTok and the estimates in Sean's story are there are multiple videos about new Fantec products that hit TikTok every hour.

1:32:49Wow. Wow. Like just an influx of ads. That's nuts. Ridiculous. All right. My next one is a very short one, which is there's this new feature on threads that they're testing that you can start a post with Dear Algo and actually literally speak to the threads algorithm about what you want. This was like a mini trend a while ago. People would post like, Dear Algo, show me more basketball scores as a way of trying to like literally state to the algorithm what you want to see on the platform because people have no control over what they see on these platforms. And Threads is now testing just sort of making this explicit.

1:33:31This is from Connor Hayes, who is the head of Threads. and it says, when people add Dear Algo to a post, it will tell your feed what you want to see more or less of for up to three days. If your profile is public, people can see your request, connect with you about it or repost it. Fascinating. I love it. I have a hundred questions about this, but I have been on this show and in many other places saying for years we need tools to tell algorithms what we want. Like, we should not all be held to our basest desires and behaviors on platforms. And, like it's it's sort of bleak and dystopian that it's dear algo that we've turned the algorithm into like a character but i also think that's very telling about where we are in the world like if you're on youtube you spend a lot of time thinking about the algorithm as if it is like a person with a button who decides whether your video gets played or not and i this is the sort of thing i think we're going to start to see more of because it's people want more control people have more places to go when it feels like the algorithm is getting away from them so the sense that actually i can have some influence is going to go a long way towards making people feel better about being on platforms but just the idea of like me publicly posting like dear algo hot ladies please is like there it's just that stuff is going to be everywhere my entire algorithm is american flag bikinis and trucks jumping over stuff and i would say your algorithm it could be a little bit smarter yeah dear algo like stop this please my weirdest one is tiktok which tiktok is the only platform that does not understand that i like technology my tiktok is exclusively like it's like it's like stand-up comedians and uh like sports stuff and then uh like random influencers telling stories in the passenger seat of their car like that's my entire TikTok algorithm.

1:35:24YouTube is like, David loves gadgets and only gadgets and nothing else. Instagram is like, David just wants to see Marques Brownlee's face 600 times a day. But I want to tell TikTok, like, I'm like, I'm sure there's some cool tech stuff here happening. Can you show me some of it? Have you tried searching for stuff and hitting the heart button? This is how you used to tell the algorithm what you like. You're like, no, I refuse to try anything. I don't, it's just, I, in my mind, the only page on TikTok is the For You page. And I acknowledge the existence of no other part of it. You're not scrolling the STEM page, Dave?

1:35:56Come on, man. Look, here's a, I don't know if this is how this is built. The idea that you can build a Deer Algo and just sort of say stuff and it might react to you. That's an AI victory. That's what that feels like to me. Absolutely. You have a natural language interface for a very complicated system of statistical probability that is ranking content from all around the world that has essentially no built-in semantic organization. That's a victory. Totally. I mean, I'll take that. And I'm guessing, right, you know, the sort of like threads targeting algorithm, the Instagram targeting algorithm, it's all the same advertising targeting.

1:36:35so if you're an advertiser and you can be like I want to hit these people with this content it's a pretty easy flip for the people to say I want to see more of this content but you have to give them an interface that isn't like the crazy demographic targeting interface it's smart we should look into it I'm guessing there's a hint of LLM in here that is actually quite interesting I suspect so yeah we should we should dig further into it Connor if you're listening and I know that you are get at me love to hear from you alright you get one more and then we're going to get out of here. And I'm only letting you do this because you pasted the most boring link into this Google Doc that I've ever seen in my whole life.

1:37:10And I would like you to defend why this belongs on our podcast. All right. It's a thermostat. Here's what I'm saying. It's the new Honeywell Home Thermostat. I will say it did surprisingly well on the website. It has a bad name. It's called the X8S. It's compatible with matter. It has room sensor. It's a touchscreen thermostat. It's also, it supports ring doorbells. So if someone rings your bell, the video pops up on the feed. Whatever. This is all a side note. The point I'm making is that it is crazy to me that it is now 2025, and I think the Honeywell thermostat is more compelling than the Nest thermostat.

1:37:50God. First of all, there is rejoicing in Honeywell happening right now. I mean, we haven't plugged the thing. I don't know. It's ugly in a way. Like, whatever. but there's if you if you showed these to two people and you're like this one will show you a ring doorbell and it'll work with every smart home platform because it's matter and then you show them whatever Nest you'd be like you're gonna buy this one I was like this thing is actually like kind of fine looking I don't I don't mind it it's a you know it's like a 2015 7 inch Android tablet you glued to the wall like it's fine but it it's set of capabilities is way more advanced than whatever Nest is doing right now.

1:38:29Jen was like, I'm going to write about this thermostat and all of us are like, fine. I was like, wait, this is like crazy that Nest is this far behind. God, it's also cheaper than the latest Nest. Yeah, this is a tough beat for Nest. It's rough. It's rough. Yeah. And I do think Jen and I share the theory that thermostats are still one of the most important like entry smart home gadgets and having a nice one goes a really long way. Yeah. Yeah. Like a good smart thermostat is actually an incredibly nice like quality of life improvement in a lot of ways. Yeah. I mean, ideally, they're like not even on the wall, you know?

1:39:09Fair. But I just mean for me, like if you were to be like, David, where has the smart home actively made your life better? The very first example that comes to mind is I can change the temperature of my house after we leave and then raise the temperature again before we come home. Yeah, it's like great done. Just being able to change the temperature of my house from my phone is a victory. And then you start to add, you know, routines and you can do all sorts of other stuff on top of it. But like you start with the energy management stuff. That's pretty cool. I will say mine is a Honeywell and I have used the Resideo app and it's not good.

1:39:44It's not good. So this one doesn't use that app. It uses the First Alert app for some godforsaken reason. I don't know, man. None of this is good. All these companies are merging and unmerging, and they keep the old brand names because they think people care about the old. None of this makes sense. It connects to matter. You can just control it from Apple Home or Google Home. This is the point of matter. That's the dream. I'm just saying. The point here is, boy, Google blew it with past. Google. Gemini going great Nest less great can't win them all by the way if you have like a Google Home and we have Google Homes trying to figure out what you're paying for and what comes with what subscription it's like and now you get monitoring of your Nest cameras it's like I don't have those I just want this to be less stupid than it was yesterday and then it's like we made the voice Australian it's like that's not helpful either yeah Google is back in a what if everything had a hundred names phase for everything right now too.

1:40:45And it drives me completely up the wall. Like there was a story the other day that was like, Google is thinking about merging AI overviews into AI mode. And I'm just like, I can't, I'm not even acknowledging that headline. Like I can't do it. I will not, and I will not address it. I can't even look at this sentence. It's just awful. It's very bad. All right, we've gone way over as we are. Way over. We're gonna get out of here. Thank you to everybody for watching and listening. If you have things you'd like to call a code red on, send us an email, vergecasttotheverge.com. You can call the hotline 866-VERGE-11.

1:41:18I should say before we go that Version History Season 2 starts this Sunday. Google Glass is the first episode of this season. It was a lot of fun. Delightful episode full of us having feelings about our faces, which was very interesting. That is not going to be on the Vergecast feed, so you have to go subscribe to that. If you subscribe to The Verge, verge.com slash subscribe, you get all of our podcasts, including this one and Version History and Decoder, ad-free. People like ad-free podcasts, I would say, has been my main discovery of the last several months. So subscribe to The Verge. It supports everything that we do so we can keep yelling at Comcast about all of its stupid decisions.

1:41:56This show is part of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. We are produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We are going to be back next week. Like you and I are doing some fun year end stuff with Joanna Stern starting next week. So she's going to be all over the show for the next week or so. We're going to be back. There's just more news happening. Someday you and I are going to like disappear into holidays, but that is not happening yet. Not yet. Not yet. We'll see you next time. Back home.

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