What's up, y'all? I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WNBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and moms. And this is AmMoms, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.
It's dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome to the First Cast, the flagship podcast of internet-connected baby monitors. I'm your friend David Pierce, and he's back, my friends.
The one, the only, the man, the myth, the legend. Yeah, I'm here. Hey, buddy. Welcome back.
I didn't prepare. Which is very different from other episodes. You normally come just prepared to the teeth this time. Just full of riffs.
No, I'm back. I'm back. It's week one, you know. How is it being back?
It's been a very weird transition for me. Yeah, I'm curious how it's been. You're like the skeleton key, right? I was like, how's baby, too?
And you gave me all the tips, which were fine, basically. More or less. Yeah, it's been like, it's been just pure, unadulterated chaos, but I'm like used to it now, if that makes sense. Like, I know how to do the chaos now.
And so it's been, it's been okay. But I don't know the teenagers will change. I was going to take way more time off, and then our baby, Jack, just started sleeping through the night. So my job was to do all the nights.
Because what I learned from our first baby, Max, seven years ago, was that if Becky doesn't get enough sleep, we are all in danger. Physical, emotional danger. Yeah, it's not good. And then like a seven-year-old versus sleepless wife is like, the town is in danger.
Like, that has the last radius. So I was like, what, I'll just do it. I like being up at night. I can scroll TikTok.
It's fine. I'll just be up all night with this baby, and we'll do it. And then literally, he was like, well, I sleep now. So then I was just buying stuff on Instagram by myself in the middle of the night.
And I was like, I should go back to work. I got nothing to do. What's the dumbest thing you bought me around during this? Are we on a steam mop, David?
Why do I want a steam mop? A steam mop with seams. Does it mop with steam, or does it mop and also steam? It's unclear if it accomplishes either of those goals particularly well.
Just, why? Why? You know how you watch a cleaning video, and you're like, I'm going to get that bathroom real clean. And then you're in your bathroom holding a steam mop.
And it turns out, they produce steam. So you're like, I'm hot and damp, alone, and I've made a mistake. I should go back to work. Like, I had that full, you know?
They don't tell you that it's damp in the Instagram video. You will be more damp than you were before if you use this product. Yeah, steam. Who would have thought?
You know what I mean? Who could possibly see that coming? Also, just, you know, I don't know if you're doing this, but I'm the sucker for a cute baby onesie. Oh, God.
What's this? A truly alarming number of, like, brand name onesies have come across. I own a Nike swoosh to just do it. Newborn's going now that I'm very excited about.
Has he grown into or out of it yet? I mean, one and then almost immediately the other. We just looked it through it. So, first cast question for you, because I've actually been at this a bunch.
Did you do any tech stuff differently this time than last time? Actually, you and I were texting about this with our friend Joanna. So I thought we would upgrade the baby monitors, and I'm totally opposed to having internet connected cameras in our house. Which is not a thing that I want to screw with.
So I was like, I'll get ones to do, like, a picture-in-picture of the split screen, and we screwed with it, and that was too much user interface. You know? Like, our daughter, she doesn't want that baby monitor, but she wants to yell out. She uses it like a walkie-talkie.
Sure. Right? But that's what it's there for. She's in her room, and she's like, Dad, it comes through on the thing.
So, and so we just have two. And one's labeled Max, and one is labeled Jack, and the hardware walks around. And literally, my wife and I refer to them as the children. And we're like, do you have Max?
And she, like, waves a baby monitor me. So that was, like, the big, I thought we would solve the problem with, like, innovative technology, and we just solved it with adding more devices. We just threw hardware at the problem until it was solved. But no weird sensors or anything like that?
Like, I feel like the new thing that happened since Max was there's now just a billion sensors you can put everywhere. Yes. So, Jack was in the queue for the first nine days, and so I bought an outlet, and then I immediately returned the outlet. For, like, a number of reasons.
The first thing, I was just annoyed that it only runs on 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi. Just in principle, yeah. That has to get out. Right?
Like, being like, to set up this sock that will do nothing but false alarm, I have to put my Eero, like, the whole network has to be downgraded to 2.4 gigahertz for 90 minutes so that it can figure itself out. And I was like, I hate you. And then, again, it's like, they're not even meant for very small babies, which is not a thing anyone says out loud. Yeah, I did not know that.
Here's my outlet review. They're not meant for very small babies, and they will constantly false alarm, which is, like, when you want it the most, really. So, whatever. So he's going to be really good at the back.
The sensors that we did add is the smart home is out of control in this house all the time. Oh, okay. So he's got automatic shades in his room, and I have a lot to say about shades. So when you close the shades in his room, the lights go off and the fan turns on.
And then when you open the shades, the noise machine turns off. Okay. So there's just, like, a lot of if-then statements in his room. Like the good night and good morning routine, basically.
Yeah, because otherwise the noise machine is on 24-7 because no one can be bothered to turn off holding a baby and it's driving nuts. So that's on a smart plug. All the other stuff is on Lutron switches. And it's all just, like, I'm sitting here just writing if-then statements in the rocker while the baby's sleeping.
Like, okay, if this happens, what four other things should happen? Conditionally, this other stuff should happen. A bunch of matter stuff made its way, like matter and thread devices made its way into our house. Huge win for Gen 2A.
Some are Gen is just fist-pumping listening to this. Not a win for those companies because now I know how well those devices work. And it is, it all feels like a hack. So the way it works, more smart sheets, the shades in his room are matter-over-thread smart sheets.
They're can't stay on ones, but I bought on Amazon and the recognition of Stephen Roles, who runs a great YouTube channel. And we'll be on this podcast right now. He and I are scheduled to play about shortcuts. Yeah, that's right.
I was like, I'm buying these and he's like, he's made videos for every single one you can buy. They're all we-branded smart wings. Like, at the end of the day, they're all the same. But these are great.
They're inexpensive. So to do it, you pair them to HomeKit. And then HomeKit will generate a code that you can have Google Home pair to. So it's a weird round trip where Apple becomes the hub for Google and everything.
And it's like, oh, this is not great, actually. Like, the thing that you think is going to happen, which is you have multiple smart home platforms all working together in harmony, is much more like I'm typing strings of alphanumeric characters into Google and praying that this works until I realize that I have multiple competing thread networks in my home. And I once again have to shut my ear up on until I get the base configuration to bring it back up again. But it all works now.
It does all work now. Until, like, the light changes and it's all over. Like, a gentle breeze will scroll your smart home at this point. It's all rock solid in Apple Home.
And it is all Google Home. And it's like, what? Who am I? What comes to this?
This is my theory about Google and AI. But, like, the Google Home stuff is like a canary in the coal mine for the entire bubble of pop. Because it's just every day it wakes up. And it's like, I don't know who you are.
And I don't know where I am. But I will tell you facts about the moon. You know, it's like, what's going on? What do I do?
Did you do any stuff? Not really. We did sort of the same baby monitor thing you did. So we got a video monitor.
But I think it's VTech. I think it's somebody that makes it. It's not connected to the internet. It's just it's all, like, on our local network.
That's been great. So I have to do it all in, like, a sneaky way that she doesn't even notice. That's the best way. We'll see how that goes.
But we ended up doing less than I expected. Like, with our first kid, Arthur, there was a period of time when he was, like, two weeks old where I basically went on Amazon and bought every sleep device that existed. And I was just like, whatever amount of money it costs me to have this child sleep and whatever weird Bluetooth technology it requires, I will do it. And our Louis, our youngest, like, he just, like, sort of did okay from the beginning.
And so the, like, panic I have to buy technology to solve this problem just didn't really appear, which was nice. We got lucky on that front. The flip side has been I am much more susceptible to being conned by Instagram and TikTok ads late at night than I guess. It's just like, sure, that sounds delicious.
You can ship that to me in three days. Bon, bon. Like, let's do this. Yeah, it was just a lot of scrolling in one hand.
I have become even more of a PopSockets zealot because you hold it in one hand while you hold a baby. No nuts. Oh, this is a game changer. I have dropped my iPhone 17 Pro Max every single day.
This is what I'm taking. So there's a new PopSocket with the kickstand now that you can actually, not only is a PopSocket, it folds out so you can prop up your phone on things. Do you know how many things I prop up my phone on you like? All of them.
All I got for you is it's very good that you're married because if you were not, the chances for creation you would drop to zero. No one ever suggested that I was cool, but my phone never falls down from her. I don't know what that thing is, man. My job in my marriage is to be the one who brings all the chargers, and I do that very well.
Yeah, that's right. That's all. Anna just does not know cables exist, and whenever her phone dies, she just reaches out her hand, and it's my job to have the correct cable. That's right.
And sometimes it's a USB-C cable. Yeah. I just have a bag full of them. Yeah.
Same. All right. There's a bunch of news we should get into. There's some Apple stuff to talk about-ish.
There's a bunch of AI news that's always going to be laying around to do. We should probably do just a little bit of housekeeping up the top here. Most people listening to this or watching this probably already know, but we just launched ad-free Verge Podcasts. If you're a Verge subscriber, you can now get all of our podcasts, this one, Decoder and Version History, all ad-free.
There's a post on the site we'll print in the show notes with the instructions on how to do that. But, Neal, I want you to talk about this, because we talked about this when subscriptions were coming out. And basically, since day one of the Verge has a subscription, the number one thing people have asked for is ad-free podcasts. And I got to post anything on threads from somebody this week who was like, well, what changed?
You guys made a very compelling case for why this is difficult to do from a business perspective and doesn't really make sense. What's changed? So, like, why did we do this? What's your take?
A few things. One, we're coming up in a year of this subscription. So subscription businesses, I think this is obvious to anybody who's paying attention to it, certainly for trust listeners. So subscription businesses are all about renewals, right?
You're obviously trying to get new people to subscribe, but if you turn off a bunch of people that you already got, then you're in trouble. So we're coming up in a year, we wanted to get a lot of ideas for how to make even better for other people to subscribe. And this was, like I said, by far the number one request. I'm happy to pay you.
I don't want ads in this podcast. So you just, like, look at the list. And, you know, if you were making a bar graph, it would be, like, one bar is the tallest and that ruins the scale and, like, everything else is done. That's basically how the request broke down.
So we figured we had to do it. There are new tools to do it that sort of, like, don't ruin our analytics, which was a big thing. So that's interesting. We'll see how this play out.
And then we were able to figure out basically how to make the money work inside a situation. This is, like, how in our publisher zone. But I think our overall plan is to grow, right? We want to make the podcast more popular.
And so if you have subscribers and helping you grow, that evens out the ad market, which is the first thing to go if you're worried about the economy. Yeah. Then saying, okay, we're going to bet on subscribers and try to grow the overall pie to be more lucrative so the advertisers do show up. Like, you're at least stable, right?
You diversify the revenue. And my perspective is, like, we need to do that. We need to do that a lot. I'm looking broadly at the ad ecosystem, the internet ecosystem, and everyone is turning into a little ad agency.
I think you guys were talking about unwell marketing. Yeah, Alex Cooper's saying. Alex Cooper's saying the last one. Alex Cooper showed up at Cannes, which is a big ad festival.
And she said out loud, I'm not an influencer on the marketer. Great. Again, everyone should go get the money. I'm not going to fault anybody for making their bag by playing the game.
It's kind of designed to be played. Alex Cooper's saying everything about this system demands that I be a marketer. I am a marketer. Right.
Instagram wants you to shop. Yeah. We started the show by being like, we shop on Instagram. We have a bunch of little QVCs.
We, you know, we don't want to do that. Like, I don't know how else to say it. Like, I want to make journalism. I don't want people to be able to pay us to say things or make ads.
I don't want to make ads. You don't want me making ads. No. We did that one little run where they were like, had me read the ads.
And the advertisers were like, make him sound happy. And I was like, I refuse. Richard Lawler on our team the other day, just randomly, there was some like LeBron James Hennessy thing that happened. And Richard reminded me of the time that I read a Hennessy ad on VergeCast and told me that that brought him great joy for a very long time.
There was one, there was a period where I told our ad sales team that the only exception was liquor ads. That would read as many ads for reviews. And that is the one that they delivered. I don't know if that was a good idea or not, but we had the experience, basically.
And the idea that we would do branded segments or we would even just read the ads. Like, I think, I think when you are buying our subscription, what you are buying is our ethics policy. I mean that very sincerely. That is the thing you are buying from us.
Yes, we make fun podcasts. Yes, the site is full of interesting stories. Yes, Liz is occasionally prone to just tearing someone to bit, like, limb from limb into tiny little threads and that is a worthwhile thing to pay for. But the fundamental thing that I think we are selling is that it's short-independence.
Yep. Which is what enables us to do all of that stuff, right? Like, it's not like some high and mighty thing. Like, it is the thing that enables all of that other stuff.
Yeah. And that, to me, you know, on a break, staring at my phone, consuming a lot of platform content because scrolling the phone, no pop socket, I will say, but scrolling the phone in hand, I consumed a lot of platform algorithmic media and has all this ads. At the end of the day, everyone who is great at this is doing brand deals. And if you are prone to perceiving it, you're like, I can see.
I can see all the pressure that is being placed upon all of these folks. And the way that I see it, particularly in tech, is the dam doesn't break until it breaks on, like, conventional wisdom because everyone is like, no one wants to be the person who does the criticism and doesn't get the brand deal done on the line. And then the dam breaks and everyone's like, this is bad. And then everyone's like, this is bad because that's all we use, right?
And I have millions of examples of this, but, like, there's just a piece of that puzzle that I think is, I don't want to play the game. Anyway, let's bring it back to the ad-free podcast. I think we're able to launch it because the subscription is working and we want to make it really valuable for people to renew, really valuable people to sign up. The overwhelming feedback from all of you was give us that free podcast.
And then I think it's very important to not only just diversify the revenue because you think the economy is going to do whatever the economy is going to do, but to make sure that we preserve our editorial independence. To say the subscription is so valuable that the pressures of the ever-changing ad market on platforms will forever be a distance to us. So let's just watch that. I have lots of other ideas for, like, how to make that case on these platforms.
I think it'll probably get us in some trouble. But the thing that you're buying is our editorial independence. Well, we should, you know, so many people have a relationship with you and me and the rest of our team through these podcasts, the podcast should reflect that, too, I think. Yeah, I agree.
Yeah, and I think, A, thank you to everybody who's reached out being excited about this. Like, it's very rare that you just, like, announce a thing and everybody's just like, oh, thank God you finally did this thing. It was nice to be able to do that. I don't know what your replies in DMs have been like, but just, like, universal joy.
This is, like, a thing that exists. It has made me really happy. I do feel like we pulled the Apple move where we, like, left off one feature. We need the keyboard work again.
Yeah, and then, like, we're, like, a year later, like, we had this great idea. What if the camera zooms? Do you remember USB ports? Do you want one of those?
It's funny. It's like, oh, this is why they do this. Everyone's going to congratulate them because the phone is finally waterproof. Like, okay, fine.
Great. Okay, so speaking of Apple, let's get into some of the news of the week. The big product news of the week was on Wednesday, Apple announced a bunch of new stuff, all unified, essentially, by the new M5 chip, which the fact of that is fascinating. We should talk about it.
But basically, new iPad Pro with an M5, new 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5, new Vision Pro with an M5, just, like, pretty simple sort of internal revs of all of these devices with a new chip inside. Any of these get you excited? Not really. I even thought on the Apple stuff.
I can't remember which one I thought I had. Their take was the M5 MacBook Pro is such a small incremental update. It is the best case for waiting for the next generation. So if you're Apple, then why shift these things at all?
Like, this is kind of what I was saying. The iPad Pro with the M4 is still the best tablet anyone will sell you anywhere. The MacBook Pro doesn't have any particular competition. The Vision Pro, you know, LOL.
Like, why? I did sort of wonder why these things came out in this form at all. My read, a very big remove, right? I've been out of it for several months.
I didn't go to the briefings, I think. We have reviews coming. I don't know if Apple will address any of this directly. But my read is that they are managing their supply chain very tightly.
And they are moving manufacturing around. And in particular, if you have this big bet on TSMC and all your chips are made in Taiwan, like, there's all kinds of tariff stuff happening. And you just get the feeling that they needed to move some chip capacity from one place to another. And you can't go backwards, right?
So you might as well move, you might as well start the M5 stuff and get that going. And maybe you can reallocate some of your M4 to your more popular products. Because I don't think this base MacBook Pro is one of the most popular products. I get it, yeah.
The Vision Pro is not one of the most popular products. The Apple Pro is maybe a different case, but I think it's so expensive. I don't think it is among the most popular iPads. But, you know, in its zone, I think it is more popular than the other two.
But you just get the sense that they're kind of like, okay, we can make these updates. We need to start this production. But there's so much other stuff we have to worry about that we should make sure we have supply for that. That is my sense.
It's like a total outside, this is a shot in the dark guess. You just start updating products off cadence to create capacity elsewhere. Yeah. Well, I think that is certainly true.
And it makes very clear that Apple is now this company that we've thought of for so many years as run by this team of brilliant designers standing around those blonde wood desks. And it's like this very sort of iconic image that lots of people have about how Apple works. This company is run by the supply chain people and Johnny Struge and his team in that weird lab making Apple's looking. Like the cadence of this company are based on those two teams at this moment.
And so it's like what seems to have happened, and this is what we see from lots of other companies that make sort of constant iterative technologies, they base their product reds on new chips, right? And so when you get a new Dell, it's not because Dell had some wild new idea about what a laptop should be. And so they upgrade when there's a new chip to put inside. And increasingly with a lot of these products, it seems like Apple is willing to upgrade when there's a new chip to put inside and then to make big bets on what that chip can do.
And like a lot of this, I mean, you can read Apple's press releases and they're basically like, well, if you had an M4, it's fine. You're good. Don't worry about it. But then they talk a lot about the M1, right?
And so people only use this four or five years ago. This is going to be a huge upgrade. But the huge upgrade is like it'll do local AI inference tasks two and a half times faster. Wait, can I just say, that's more specific than what Apple was saying.
Apple says the M5 in the new iPad Pro brings up to 3.5x the AI performance of last year's Pro. Yeah. Like, it's like nothing happened there. They summarize some notifications badly.
Yeah. So, I mean, even that is like, are we running local models on this thing on your iPad? What are you sure I'm not doing in the background? Like, what are we talking about?
Yeah. Like, I think, honestly, my other read on this is the M5 must be cheaper to produce. And the new networking chips, the C1X cellular modem, if you get that in the iPad, the M1 chip, their in-house networking chip for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Thread for some reason, all that must be cheaper than the ones they're buying because they're no longer paying, you know, Broadcom or Intel's or Qualcomm's fees. So, like, maybe they're just moving to the new architecture, which is cheaper.
Yeah, no, like, if we put this in new devices, we can get it at scale, we can make it even cheaper. The ways to make that across the line makes a lot of sense. But it is. It's just like, what an incredibly rational and boring set of reasons to roll out new devices.
Well, can we just talk about the Vision Pro? I feel like the MacBook and the iPad getting chip bumps is like, whatever, like, you're right. Dell does it. HP does it.
Fine. It's a laptop. Got a chip bump. There's nothing to say.
The Vision Pro, it got a chip bump. Great. It went from the MTDM5. It got heavier.
Literally. It got 150 grams heavier. And they changed the strap. And I think, it's not like a heavier strap.
Yeah, there's going to be some, like, immersive NBA games starting next year, which a bunch of people I've seen are excited about. And why? Like, this is a thing. Everybody who does this tries.
Like, Meta did this years ago with the Quest where they were like, you can sit at half court and watch an NBA game. And it's like, well, first of all, on the floor at half court is actually like a pretty bad seat. So you're going to give me a bad view with none of the fun things about sitting courtside. It's going to be like blocky and blurry.
I'm going to have to go like this back and forth the whole time while I'm watching. This is not actually a good viewing experience for what we're doing here. It just doesn't. It's like not.
It's not a thing that people want. We're pretty good at TV sports now. I don't know that the next gen of TV sports is you're in the sports. I don't know.
And so all of these things, like Apple keeps rolling these things out one by one where they're like, you know, they made an immersive documentary or they'll do a music video or whatever. And every single one of them, the overwhelming reaction is like, oh, neat. And then no one ever talks about it again. Yeah.
And none of them are sticky, right? I mean, maybe you can watch the season of S12 and immersive 3 or whatever. It would be very, very sticky. Every time they show the demo of whatever S1 app where, like, the track is on the table and the cards are on the table, I'm like, that would be great if I had a huge house with empty tables all over the place.
Right. And eight friends who all have Vision Pro. But the chipmunk for the Vision Pro and made it heavier, I feel like it's just the wrong direction. What I want is a cheaper, less powerful, lighter Vision Pro.
Yes. And this thing is just going the wrong direction. I just Googled how heavy is 150 grams just because, you know, it's helpful to have a Vision. I found a website called measuringly.com.
Sure. It's fabulous that this exists. Here's some things that weigh 150 grams. Would you like to hear them?
Yes. A cup of all-purpose flour, a cup of almond nuts, one and a half cups of oatmeal, four slices of bread, three strawberry Pop-Tarts. All right. So the next time I see you wearing a Vision Pro, I'm just going to put four slices of bread on your head and be like, is this better?
Another good one is an iPhone SE. That's right. One iPhone SE. Yeah.
Three Pop-Tarts, one iPhone SE, and four slices of bread. Sure. I mean, like, it's fine. Like, none of that feels like a lot, but it's on your head.
Right. And I don't know if the new strap will, like, counteract it or make it better or weight it better or balance it out, but it doesn't seem like they've made big changes to how it balances, right? The strap might distribute the weight slightly differently, but they don't actually counterbalance it, so it's still very strong. Truly their most confusing product is they're updating it against, right, meta display is going to start shipping soon.
Yeah. Samsung is teasing the Muhan headset next week, which is their partnership with Google. It's just like, this thing, you know, my review is basically, this is the end of this road. Yeah.
Pass-through, big VR pass-through headsets have come to the end of the world. This is the best one you can possibly make. It's $3,500. And I still feel, I think, exactly the same way.
Yeah. My bet for what's about to happen is the meta displays are going to be, like, a medium-sized hit. Meta's not making that many of them, but I think they'll do well. People buy them.
I think the new generation of regular meta-rayed and smart glasses are going to do very well. I think Muhan is a stupid name, but that thing is going to be almost as good as the Vision Pro and, like, drastically cheaper. Like, half the price would be my guess. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if this thing is, like, $1,500.
And all of a sudden, it's going to make the Vision Pro look just completely on an island by itself. And all the reporting, by the way, suggests that Apple is, like, keenly aware of this and is essentially running away from the Vision Pro as fast as possible. And yet, they're doing a trip on it. I know.
That's the odd thing. Like, it would almost make more sense if Apple would do the thing that it occasionally does and just sort of studiously forget their product exists, where they're just, like, they just refuse to acknowledge that it's still there and part of the company, and then someday they'll kill it. But Apple is clearly on to smart glasses as a thing, has pivoted pretty hard internally towards making that stuff work. They've had some weird employee turnover that might make that harder.
Meta just keeps throwing giant sums of money at everybody who works anywhere doing anything with AI. But I think we're headed towards a moment here where the Vision Pro just doesn't make any sense to anybody. Yeah, we're already at that moment. We probably are.
You know, my read on the Meta display glasses is that Meta is equally confused as Apple, but their product is closer to what people want. I think the only reason people are buying the Meta Ray-Bans is because they have camera on them. And headphones. It may be sometimes.
It's mostly, it's like, it's like 60% camera, 30% headphones, 10% everything else. If you bought these, let us know. I'm very curious, but everyone I know who has them is like, I bought these for the camera. No one is sitting around talking to Meta's AI assistant.
Meta has confused itself into fully believing that they have found the form factor by which people will engage with their AI assistant. And it's like, no, they just have a camera. But you just made a camera and literally a pair of Ray-Bans that look pretty good. And so people bought the camera and the pair of Ray-Bans look pretty good.
And then you get all the way to, okay, if people have the AI assistant, now I should put a screen on there because everyone wants to know they are. And you're like, now the glasses look bad. They look bad. Yeah, they do.
V on our team has been using them and is getting review ready. And she shows up to meetings and you look at them and you don't really clock them as anything. And then you always kind of double take at them because it's like, wait, why are your glasses enormous? Did you buy the wrong, like are those costume Ray-Bans?
What are we doing there? And it's just, it's sort of like the Vision Pro in a very different way. And it's very technically impressive that this thing exists. I don't find it compelling.
And from Meta's perspective, I think the best argument for what you just said is that as far as I can tell, there's not that much interesting stuff to do with the screen at all right now. Their big idea is like walking directions. It'll give you a heads up display to tell you to turn right. I know there are so many devices with so many ideas about how to tell me to turn right.
And my phone does it just fine. Like, I'm good. It'll be all right. Yeah.
But again, I think they've concluded for better or worse that they have found a piece of hardware that can replace your phone and the interface for that will not be the neural band, which is fine. Like it's impressive because it is the thing that it is. But you're like, in order to use my computer, I have to put on glasses and a bracelet. Just right.
Like my phone is much better at these things. And they've decided that this is how they will displace the phone. The user interface of the future is somewhere in bed in the hardware. And I think they've missed the fact that everyone's just buying the cool ones for the camera.
And I don't think anyone's going to make the leap to, I'm going to start talking to my glasses. Well, it makes you wonder if maybe Apple sees that, right? Like if Apple called it wrong and tried to do like the Tesla Roadster strategy, where you ship the really expensive luxury thing first and then scale it down rather than shipping the minimum viable product version of it and building up. And if somebody other than Meta is looking at it and going like, oh, this actually isn't an AI product.
It's something else that we can eventually do AI to. There are a lot of interesting ways you could take the thing over time. Sure. But the dream is augmented reality.
None of them are actually augmenting anything. We bought a new car. We bought a catalog for stick and it has an augmented reality heads up display. Sure.
And really it has an arrow that gets bigger in your line of sight as you get closer to the turn. This is what I'm saying. Everybody has ideas about turning right. Like it starts out like really far away and then it's like the arrow zooms in on you and it's like an ever larger cartoon arrow is getting closer to you.
You haven't augmented anything. Like this is, it's very clever, right? You've tricked everyone into believing that you are, but like really the arrow is just getting bigger, like, like very big at the end. It's very funny.
But the goal is like augmented reality. And we've done this next so many times. I'm going to do it again because I haven't done it in months on the show. You need to have a chip that can process what a camera is seeing in real time.
You need to have connectivity to figure out what's happening like in the world. You need to have a battery that can power it all. You need to have a display that is bright enough outside to show you stuff overlaid on things that are themselves and has a large field of view. These are each of them massive technological hurdles.
Oh, then you need a battery that can make it all go. The mission crew was like, the battery is totally external, right? Like one solution problem. I think the meta display doesn't solve most of those problems.
They've literally just added a display. Yeah. They don't have the computer. You can turn right.
They certainly don't have a real time camera recognition. Then they're meta and I don't want them to have it. Yep. I don't want them to have it.
I don't want a bunch of people wearing Zuckerberg glasses, walking around, like live streaming back to meta data centers. It just seems like as a society, we've all made the decision that that would be a bad idea. We're careening towards that future because no one can stop it. But like, I think anytime we discuss this product, we have to look at it.
Then I am very concerned that in a world of like no content moderation, everyone will live in like differently augmented realities. Like right now, if you stare at the Capitol building, you're like, what happened here on January 6th? Like different people have wildly different opinions on what happened in January 6th. Meta will have to make some decisions about what to say.
And then Donald Trump might throw Mark Zuckerberg in jail if he doesn't say the right things. Like that's just a weird place to be. It's a set of technology, a set of experiences. And they're like so excited about it.
I'm like, are you guys, you know, it doesn't, A, the tech to do it doesn't exist. And then that outcome is careening towards us as far. I mean, I would say like to the implicit question there of have you thought this all the way through, the answer is like, of course not. What about the history of the tech industry suggests that anyone has thought this all the way through?
We can't convince OpenAI to think, gosh, how will copyright owners feel? Like this is just not what we do here. We ship the thing, see what horrible stuff happens, apologize. Like that's what we do.
It's the tech industry. But I also think a bunch of that is really far away, right? And so the question is, what's the next thing? Like the thing you just described doesn't work yet and it won't work anytime soon.
The like, can I stand in front of the Capitol building? Like what happened here? And it will like usefully tell me how, like none of that is real. It might be eventually, but even, even the thing that is good and interesting and cool between here and there, I think we have not yet to figure it out.
But I do think the idea of what is this going to look like on my face? We all pretty much know it's going to look more like Meta than like the Visual Pro. Yeah, I'll give you that. I mean, you know, the killer app is a killer app.
If they can just do names and faces, everyone will buy one. Yes, I'll buy one. Yeah. Mark's like, all is forgiven if you can let me do names and faces.
And I know they can because the prototypes have been developed. Like kids are building proofs of concept of this using existing Meta Display app. And then they got a lot of publicity and those kids are like, whoo, you started a company? See, it's real.
Perfect. Yeah, there you go. So like that's coming. And I, you know, that set of questions is going to come along with that very, very fast.
Yeah, yeah. Right. We have some more AI stuff to talk about, but we should, we should take a break first. And then we're going to come back and like you, you have just been alone with AI tools for three months and we need to talk about it.
I have a new girlfriend, David. This is the last time I'll ever see you. But we'll get into that. We'll be right back.
Hey, I'm Matthew Shell, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your For You page. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, wait, don't swipe away. It's called That Sounds Like a Lot.
As in, that feeling when you check your phone in the morning, you read through your headlines and you immediately think, oh, that sounds like a lot. I can't deal with all this. But guess what? I can deal with it.
And I'm going to get into it every Friday. I'll break down whatever chaos is happening in the world. Then I'll sit down with a comedian. You can be progressive and not be like fucking annoying.
Maybe an actor. Like feminism has gone too far. You go, why? Because the Stating Hawkins dance happened?
Maybe a filmmaker. Since leaving that show, I'm challenged to sparing. I just got to hang out and try to do stuff. You're on the charmed line.
Could be a politician. Basically anyone who responds to my cold DMs. We're recording the whole thing in a beautiful studio, so yes, you can watch it on YouTube or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. This is not the place to get the news, but it is the place to feel a little better about it.
That Sounds Like a Lot, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Maria Sharapova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey.
Follow Pretty Tough wherever you get your podcasts. So we are 250 years into this American experiment, and I say it's going okay. I give us like a C+. There is no perfect past, but there is also no exclusively negative past.
Because humans are human, that's what we do. I think the story of America is the struggle of people who have not been included in the promise of America to expand those principles to include more people. What's going to determine the next 250 years of America? And how do we write a new social contract that can give us the democracy we deserve?
Okay, so I'm just going to be a jerk here because I'm a historian. So we have to have a prologue explaining, you know, we the people. Oh, okay. You know, I just can't remember it from Schoolhouse Rock.
We the people that go to the former perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility. So you're talking about a foundational document. So I'm building a document that will protect American democracy. That's this week on America, absolutely.
All right, we're back. Neal, when I came back, I spent two weeks shouting my insane sleep-deprived takes at Jake and Hayden. And I offered you the chance to do the same here. And you said basically you only had one, and it was about AI.
Yeah. Do you have something you want to get off your chest here? Well, so I have the same basic AI take as I think a lot of people. I'm going to say that my path to getting there is the virgiest path.
Okay. So I think we're in a bubble. I think we're in a big AI bubble, and it will eventually pop. And, you know, I agree that OpenAI doing sex bots is, like, pretty bubbly.
It's just bubbly. You know, the circular deals. Liz sent me a chart of all the circular deals of the companies investing in each other today. And let me quote specifically what she said.
She drew it and sent me a picture for a story she's working on. And she wrote, hello, I made you something horrible. It's basically just like a series of circles with labels. It's like a lot.
And I think that's like the standard, right? The money's going in circles, that's not good. Well, yeah, the news this week was OpenAI is like, we're going to spend a trillion dollars on compute. And, like, NVIDIA stock goes up, and AMD stock goes up, and everybody's stock goes up every time Sam Altman says, like, a bigger number about computing costs.
And then somebody raises their hand and goes, where is that money going to come from? And Sam Altman just sort of, like, throws a smoke bomb into spheres and just, like, keeps getting away with this. And it continues to work, and everybody believes him about this money for now. But the weird end of bubble talk has gone from sort of a thing people were saying quietly to just, like, mainstream accepted really shortly.
It's been really interesting. And, again, I think that most of that is, like, financially oriented. Yeah. Right.
This is a bubble because this finance stuff doesn't work. I heard Kara Swisher say the circular deal making reminded her of, like, telecom in the 90s. Great. There's that whole argument, and you can get that anywhere.
You can go buy that on the street corner. It's fine. This is a verge cast. Here's my argument.
LLMs as a technology cannot do all the things you need them to do in order to make the products that would pay all this investment off. And a lot of people can argue with me about this. There's a lot of ways to supplement LLMs as a technology. There's a lot of ways to enhance them.
There's a lot of ways to connect them to traditional deterministic computers. But the way that I know it can't be done is I've watched the three biggest tech companies in the world, consumer tech companies in the world, Apple, Google, Amazon, all try to ship a smart home assistant based on an LLM, and they can't do it. They simply cannot turn the lights on and off reliably using the foundation of what modern AI is. But everyone knows what it should be.
Like, I know what would pay off all of this investment. Yes. It's the super capable assistant that can just do stuff when I ask it to do stuff. And I know this because we keep getting shown the demos of it, right?
Computer use from OpenAI, whatever the Chrome thing we saw at iOS or Chrome went and browsed for you. We've talked about whether the web would exist at all because the robots could just use the computers on your behalf. You'll never book a flight or order a sandwich again, right? Like, we've been shown, Microsoft announced that the next major version of Windows would just be a computer you can talk to, all built around AI.
I've heard this from Microsoft before, many, many, many times. But this is the vision that will pay off of that. You will have an ambient computer around you. You will speak into existence or desires.
And then it will happen. Yes. Three of the biggest companies in the world cannot reliably manage to turn the lights on and off. Straightforwardly.
Like, Gen2E has reviewed Alexa Plus. And first of all, they're adding ads, just like straight up ads to all those displays. So, like, get them out of here. They call it orchestration between when you talk to the AI and it figures out what system to use.
None of that is reliable. Nope. Sometimes it hallucinates and just lies to you. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
The real promise of, like, hey, when I get home, like, every time I get home, like, detect that I'm home, turn on the lights, start the cost maker, do this stuff where you're basically programming with prompts and you get automations. Real shaky. Google is starting to roll it out. But it's just adding Gemini as, like, a feature to the existing Google Assistant on these homes.
Right. They haven't even, like, directly connected them. And you have to pay 20 bucks a month. Yeah.
But I think that the Google answer is particularly telling me because that's clearly the right answer. Right? Like, the sort of less impressive version of these systems, which is what they've been building since, like, 2012 with Google Assistant and Siri and Alexa and all these things, they're not interesting in the same way that a lot of the agentic AI stuff is interesting right now to people. But it does work.
Like, when you ask your Assistant to turn off the light, it will much more reliably turn off the light if it's running the old tech than if it's running the new tech. And that is, in a way, like, it's a feature, not a bug. And it's actually because these LLMs are not trained in such a way to just go from A to B like that. They are not command executors.
That's not what they do. There's a bunch of steps in between, like you said, all of which can fall apart all the way along the chain. And the chain is big and interesting and open and allows you to do lots of things. But what people want to do is turn off the light.
It's fascinating to me. And I've just added more and more smart home stuff to this house. You know, my wife and daughter are, like, we're never leaving this house. That's just where they are.
It's like, you know, by the way I say we're never leaving this house. It's like, her foot is down. It's like, I can do it. Like, the house is a real up now.
Like, we're fine rolling. And so I'm like, you know, we have a home assistant set up over here for me to tinker with. Home bridge over there to bridge everything together. And I'm like, oh, the way that this should work is I, you know, it's my network.
I should put one of these assistants on my network. It should just see that there are some few lights over there and there's a TV over there and this thing. It should just go use it for me, right? I should be able to give it credentials and just use it.
I should actually have a smart home platform. That's how this should work. Like, my house has a bunch of network devices on it. And this thing should, you know, assuming that I trust these companies, have permissions to traverse my local network and flip switches for me.
And nope. Like, it's just, nope. And lest you think that is, like, an outrageous thing to ask, Eero, the company that makes a Wi-Fi router, owned by Amazon, the company that makes Alexa. Like, it's sitting.
It's all right there. Yeah. Right. And they just can't do it.