The many pluses and minuses of Alexa Plus

I'm so sorry to everyone. We should have warned you. Oh, yeah. Turn off all your devices. Mute your devices. So sorry. Hello, and welcome to the First Cast, the flagship podcast of the Alexa Plus shopping list. I'm your David Pierce, and today on the show, we're gonna talk about the smart home, specifically Alexa Plus, which is going through a bunch of changes right now. Amazon has been on a run of hardware announcements, new Ring stuff, new Kindle stuff, and today, a new Alexa tablet, which is maybe the most surprising new Amazon device in years. All of it centered around the idea of getting Alexa Plus deeper and deeper into your life. Plus, Jen Tui on our team has spent the last year testing Alexa Plus, and she has some thoughts about it. But first, here's what else is happening on The Verge today. This is ninety seconds on The Verge for Thursday, 10/08/2026. Some big news in the red hot world of domain names. ICANN, the governing body for names and numbers on the Internet, just released a batch of 1,600 applications for new top level domains. Those are mostly called TLDs, and they represent the thing on the other side of the dot in your URL, .com or .gov, but also .pizza and .ai and dot everything else. The new batch is, surprise, all about AI. A bunch of big companies like Meta and OpenAI are fighting to own the .agent and .agi domains, while lots of companies are also trying to get their own brands turned into URLs. So you can imagine URLs ending in .facebook and .chatgpt and even apparently .applebee's all appear to be on the way. In an AI world, do we even type domains anymore? I don't know. But everybody still clearly wants the good ones. Meanwhile, we're only a few weeks away from the launch of Grand Theft Auto six, the most anticipated game in, I don't know, forever. There's been a lot of leaks already, including a brand new one that shows one of the main characters running around Vice City naked because this is GTA and that's what we do. You can also get in the mood for the game by going to Rockstar's website to listen to one of six of the game's radio stations or a bunch of the fictional podcasts made by fictional podcasters that will be available while you play the game. Frankly, I'm just outraged that the Vergecast won't be there. And finally, Joe Rogan and Spotify have made a new deal. This one apparently worth around 250,000,000 to keep the show on the platform. The Joe Rogan experience is messy and complicated, but it is still the biggest show in the space. So I guess it's not hard to see why Spotify still wants it. You can read more about all this at theverge.com. That is ninety seconds on the verge for Thursday, 10/08/2026. Support for the show comes from …