It’s already the year of AI again

27:37That's a big shift. It's a big culture shift. Like it's hard for me to wrap my head around it because I am very much of the everything is a remix school. But you just – there has to be – like some money has to flow to original creators. And it isn't happening at scale on any of the social platforms. Like every influencer is pivoting into selling you goods. Like whether it's water bottles or shoes or – Mr. Mobile just launched a keyboard case for the iPhone today. Like, it's fine. Like, that's what all their businesses are going there because there isn't enough value in the content itself on the platforms.

28:14I mean, that's why they're boxing. Like, literally, YouTubers are becoming professional boxers because that's how you make money. You can now buy a bottle of Prime that is just Logan Paul's blood. That's not true. Okay, I will be remiss if I don't do this. It will take a little longer, but it's the actual legal nerd thing that we should do to talk about fair use. And there's one point in here that I want to make before we break and talk about CS. So the fair use analysis, which I have pointed out, is always chaos, always a coin flip. But there is a legal analysis. Like you can go read the statute.

28:49There are four factors to consider in a fair use analysis. So just think about OpenAI and the times in this way. So the four factors a judge is supposed to consider. the purpose and character of your use, what are you using it for? The nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the proportion taken, how much of the work you're using, and the effect of the use upon the potential market for the original work. So if I take your thing and I make something based on it, and then I destroy the market for your thing, I've lost. It's not fair, right? That's an unfair use of the work.

29:24So this is, I think this is why it's always a coin flip because in every single case, these four factors are weighted differently. Sometimes judges wake up and they have different ideas about what the market for art looks like in America. Like this is why it's a coin flip because these factors are different every time and different people evaluate them. But the one I would point to here for the times that I would guess that they lean on the most is the fourth factor, the effect of the use upon the market for the original work. Because it is sort of undeniable that the purpose of OpenAI's use is to do the things the Times does, right?

29:59You ask it questions, it delivers you answers that potentially were first generated by the New York Times. The nature of the work is the same. It's the amount and substantiality of proportion take, well, it's all of it. That's all of it. So what's the one with the wiggle room in it? Yeah, it's the effect of the use on the potential market. And if the Times can prove that OpenAI is replacing the market for the New York Times by copying the New York Times, if I had to make one prediction, I would say it's this fourth factor, the market factor, that is the most heavily weighted and the one that gets discussed the most.

30:35Well, and there's a bunch of that in the complaint even, right? Like the Times talks a bunch about trademark dilution and the idea that the chat GPT hallucinating New York Times articles and attributing product recommendations to the wirecutter that didn't come from wirecutter, that that kind of thing is actually bad for the New York Times as a competitor in the market of good and valuable information. And again, like you said, this thing where you can just basically have it read you paragraph by paragraph a New York Times article, it's already seeming to push past this idea that it's illegal to have a database full of our things.

31:12I think it would like to make that case, but it seems to have quickly jumped past that too. By doing this, you're making the times look worse and trying to steal our business. And I think at least of the cases that I've seen, that is the step beyond a lot of the other stuff that I've seen. Not just it's illegal for ChatGPT to have trained on this data, but it is actually turning it back around in ways that harm us. So I think you're right. And I think the times is going to push that pretty hard. I mean, an amazing amount of this complaint is just like examples of conversations with chat GPT about New York Times articles, which, again, to your point about these things being marketing is not accidental.

31:52This thing is made to make the argument for us to read to you on this podcast for news anchors to read. You know, like that's what complaints are for. Eventually, they're going to have to make more pleadings and actually have a trial. And the thing that is crazy about all this is if the time settles with OpenAI, it doesn't mean anything for the next case to come along because there's no fair use precedent here. So I think some of these cases will like run to ground. But what you don't have is a music industry that is invested in its own survival as the music industry to develop a whole bunch of deal structures around sampling and interpolation, which they have done.

32:32Like it has taken them several decades to do, but there's a whole business model for like publishing rights and sampling in the music industry because it's a closed ecosystem. You're like, I'm going to take some music and make some more music based on it. I'll give you this example. Major record labels have songwriter workshops where they get a bunch of songwriters. They take their own catalog of old hits and say write new songs based on these hits because they know that's the safest way to sample their own work and they can trade on some nostalgia. That is a totally wild. that. Like if you said this would be happening in the eighties at the dawn of hip hop, people think you were crazy, but they've built an, uh, they've built a legal and financial ecosystem around this copyright problem of sampling that is actually now generated.

33:17Here's how songs are written. There's none of that on the internet. Like there's, there's no closed ecosystem of news providers and tech platforms and YouTube creators. It's all going to get together in a room and be like, how are we going to do this? There's just chaos. So hypothetically, if say the CEO of Amazon were to buy one of America's largest national newspapers, would that, would that, you know, close the ecosystem a little bit and maybe another one like bought time magazine? Like hypothetically, if these tech companies started to buy these media organizations, like maybe, maybe we'd start to see something like that.

33:56So that would be hilarious. If like all the entire Salesforce UI was based on the Taylor Swift article in Time Magazine, it was just like, she's great. I don't know what you're asking about. I can't increase your sales, but she's amazing. That's actually what Salesforce AI should be. Just talk to your clients about Taylor Swift. Number of times Taylor Swift was mentioned on this. But the Amazon example is better. So Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and he obviously has a huge controller stake in Amazon. If you get to the place where the purpose of the Washington Post is not to make money as the Washington Post, but it's to serve as a cost center for training Amazon's AI, that's a weird reason to do journalism.

34:39Yes. And like you can you can like skip to that ending pretty fast in a lot of these cases um but faster than you think the purpose of x you can argue is to serve as training data for grok yeah that's the argument elon musk is making like is that what we want is that is that the right incentive to to make content so that we can mush it all together and spit it out as ai somewhere else like i don't i don't know the answer to that question that does not appeal to me uh i don't know if it appeals to you but that's you can quickly get to the end result where even if the ai companies are paying millions of dollars in fees to journalism companies or media companies or youtube creators or whatever because there's more margin on the other end of owning the ai tool well then a bunch of youtube creators are basically working for the ai tool but that's weird that's weird that supposes that the AI tool will like actually make that kind of money.

35:39Right. Which is why I said like I don't – we're not at that place yet actually. So it's – I find it tempting to skip to the end of like what does YouTube look like in the world where Bard can summarize a YouTube video? And it's like none of that is good right now. That's like a – that's a problem Google wishes it had. Yeah. But to some extent it's already doing that, right? Because so many YouTube videos are now made to the algorithm, right? Yeah. Like they're already made to appeal to a computer. algorithm. So it's just like, okay, that homogenization that we see on YouTube just gets like accelerated.

36:12I cannot wait for the New York Times to adopt the Mr. Beast style for all journalism. Oh my God. This is how we're, I was wondering how we're going to cover the election and it's just straight rips of Mr. Beast videos about tech policy. Man, every, every picture on the homepage of the New York Times is just the reporter with their mouth open making a face. No, it's closed now, right? It's closed now. Oh, you're right. It's, yeah, your mouth is closed and there's something gold and a bunch of money behind you. It's just the New York times reporters.

36:43Look, it would, it would certainly be interesting. That's all I'm saying. All right. We got to take a break. I'm, I talked about copyright law for two. This is my, my fault. We're going to watch the chart and Apple podcast be like, you know, I did it again. All right. We're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back and talk about some CES. We'll be right back.

37:02Support for this show comes from Shopify. One of the most exciting parts of starting a business is when the sales start coming in. If your business is looking to start selling online, Shopify has everything you need to create your online store. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 % of all e-commerce in the U.S., from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. with hundreds of ready to use templates Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style and Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions page headlines and even enhance your product photography and best yet Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing, returns and beyond turn those dreams into and give them the best shot at Success with Shopify.

37:58Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash vergecast. Go to shopify.com slash vergecast. Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for this show comes from Grammarly. Have you ever had something tailor-made for you? A jacket, a suit, a pair of jeans? The difference is transformative because once you find something made to fit your needs, you just can't go back to a generic feel. That's kind of how it works at Grammarly. Because they have features that are tailor-made for working professionals, you can get all of your writing done from start to finish, all in one place.

38:38Grammarly brings more polish and impact to your emails, presentations, and proposals without switching between tools and tabs, all while amplifying your voice and moving your ideas forward. Your time is valuable, and you don't want to waste it on some second-rate program. That's why Grammarly is designed to help professionals with real-time writing support on any project email and more. When you open a new doc, start typing right away or ask Grammarly's AI chat to help anytime. Whether to kick off your ideas or polish them, one easy place to get quick help from AI whenever you're writing. Sign up for free and experience how Grammarly can elevate your professional writing from start to finish.

39:15Visit grammarly.com slash podcast. That's grammarly.com slash podcast.

39:27okay we're back that's all the copyright law talk well there'll be a little more i was gonna say you've made that promise before don't don't believe him guys it's my favorite it's the only law that works on the internet telling you this is true uh it's also the law that might break google in the end which is fascinating to think about okay that's enough that's enough uh we should talk about cs cs is coming in a week we're going we're going to be there. I would say there's a bunch of stuff here that has been announced pre-CES. I always wonder if they announce the best stuff early to get the early wave of hype, or this is just the, hey, pay attention to us, the real stuff is coming.

40:08I think it's like both. I think it depends on the company. Some companies are like, I want to get my cool stuff out early, but most companies are like, I want to get some fun stuff out, tease you, and then do the really cool stuff later. Yeah. And nothing will have a price or a ship date. Yeah. All of it will be like the weirdest render you've ever seen. And then you can come see it in person at our booth. Or it'll be a sticker. Or it is the thing you are most likely to buy, but is kind of the least interesting, right? Like the, if you're going to release a spec update to your already existing laptop, do it before CES.

40:42Because by the time we get there, nobody cares because everybody is like drowning in weird flying iPhone cases. but if you have something that is like, here is an actual product that actual people will probably buy. This is when some of this stuff comes out. That's why we're seeing a lot of like monitor upgrades and, you know, spec bumps to laptops and things like that. And then I think you get to CES and that's when they're like, have you seen these speakers? They're 62 feet tall and they cost$5 million. CES. And there's just me standing in front of them. This is why I do what I do. I'm home again Alright so I'm just gonna read a few of them that I think are incredible LG released Like a speaker system I don't know how to describe this thing It's a speaker with vacuum tubes in it And a transparent OLED display on the front of it That displays the name of the song In like old time font I want this thing so badly It is so stupid It is so dumb But it is so cool It's just like a kickstarter that somehow LG made real.

41:47That's exactly right. Like a 2014 Kickstarter and they're like, no, we're just going to sell this thing and put LG on it. It is so cool. Like ridiculously cool. Big vacuum tubes, little vacuum tubes, old timey fonts. I'm not even sure if it's recasting the name of the song into the old timey font or if they just found a song whose album cover is in an old timey font. Do you know what I mean? Like I don't know what's going on here exactly. I just know that this picture of this – it's a black and white picture of a guy leaning back in a chair. But then the speaker system is in color. But then it's actually not in color.

42:25It's just the orange of the vacuum tubes is the color. It's just sepia. It's perfect. It's so good. It's a very CES product. I'm very excited about it. I'm going to go look at it a lot. There's been a bunch of display news that I'll just read quickly because it's a bunch of gaming monitors. Samsung now has more OLED gaming monitors. Some of them have up to 360 hertz refresh rates, which I believe is many times faster than human perception, but good for Samsung. Hell yeah. And then LG has topped Samsung with a 27-inch OLED that has a 480 hertz refresh rate. In your face, Samsung. So we are just doing watt war, horsepower war specs.

43:04Is this the new thing? this actually kind of makes sense that if if we're definitely in a phase where the best way to sell a really fancy monitor is to sell really great gameplay to gamers like that's who buys your fancy monitors and i think we're just in a place now where we're just going to be on like a crazy hertz refresh rate arm race and eventually samsung is going to be like we did it everybody 1080. I think it'll be more like everybody will start to realize they don't actually need that. And most of their games will never take advantage of it. And it's probably not worth their money. Yeah, but that's like three years from now.

43:42Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. After a bunch of people buy monitors that no human would ever notice. Right, exactly. It's after. And then we'll be like, oh, remember that phase? Weird. Well, so just to be specific, the LG display is 480 hertz at 1080p. which is I think that's why a bunch of monitors hit 1440 for a minute. That was a sweet spot of resolution and refresh rate. And so I think what this actually signals is you're going to get faster refresh rates at the resolutions you actually want to run at. And then you have to make some sort of decisions about what you prioritize. But yeah, this is just a spec war and I'm here for it.

44:18I want to be very clear that anytime LG and Samsung decide to engage in a display spec war, you just call me. I'll be there. 100%. We're going to cover every ounce of that spec war because display spec wars are what this business is made of. I also still really like this trend where everybody is putting smart TV stuff into computer monitors. It's the best. It's so good. Like just to have a thing that's like I have a 32-inch screen and it is my television and my gaming monitor and my computer monitor and it does all those things pretty well. It's like I love it. It's great. Can you imagine being a college student and having that?

44:52I'm just like, I want that. I know. I'm going to go back to college just so I can have this monitor experience. But then I'm going to be in the dorm one night and be like, wait, I like having a house. I just want to be clear. Both of you are very senior editorial staffers at TheVerse.com. David's like, I can't wait until I can own a chair. Alex is like, I'm going to go back to college to get a monitor.

45:16It's good. We all need dreams and hopes. Yeah, our dreams just go backwards or forwards rapidly in time. I'm going to get a chair, guys. it's going to be my chair he's going to have his name on the back you have to earn comfort don't forget that the last little display one I want to call out and we should do this as a lighting round is this LG projector that looks like an old Bell and Howell film projector it's a handle but it looks like a crank on the side it's called the Cinebeam Cube Cube is spelled with a Q extraordinarily important to note that it's spelled with a Q it weighs 3.2 pounds it's just a little bit shorter than an iPhone.

45:58So it's itty bitty and it can do 120 inch image at 4k. It's pretty dim. It's 500. It's not great, but it is so pretty. It's beautiful. It runs web OS, of course. So I really think back to like what we were talking about, about the kind of disintermediating phones as a thing. I think this is one way it's going to happen. I think we're going to get this really cool run of like furniture-y gadgets that I'm really excited about. Like we spent a long time with all the smart speakers and all this stuff being like, what if we made everything in your house more gadgety and it looked more like the future?

46:39And everybody said, that sucks. and then like with TVs and like the Samsung frame, which I know you haven't have many feelings about, we've kind of gone back to like, what if these things actually looked, you know, nice and designed and looked like they belonged in your house and weren't just sort of dropped out of a Best Buy? And I think you're starting to see it from some of these bigger companies too. These things are all kind of like special edition LARCs right now, but you really get the sense that these companies are testing the waters to see, like if we made a thing that doesn't look like a big fat white piece of plastic would people buy that and like i know for me the answer is yes and i really hope it is for other people too because i think design like this is what a projector should look like yeah i'm so cool as hell yeah what's funny though about all of that is you know old projectors look this way partially beautiful but partially because form followed function like they were very utilitarian products this is just a projector like this is just an arm chip and some i'm guessing some like very standard off-the-shelf projector parts that they have they have lying around and they've made it beautiful they've made it look like the old form like the old function and we haven't we haven't quite figured out like oh you could just make it really really small like oh we should make it bigger and like beautiful and like that is interesting to me the frame tv is like a deeply fascinating product to me.

48:06As somebody who now owns a frame TV in a frame, I will rant about this product all day and all night. First of all, have you used SmartThings? What? I used it like four years ago. Horrible. So the frame TV is fascinating because Samsung will just tell you this is a TV that's designed to be off. And people buy it because they realize that their TV is off more than on. Yeah. And so it should be beautiful when it's off, which is just wildly interesting. Second, if you actually put a frame on it, you destroy the functionality of a frame TV. This is a true thing that I will talk about at length because it blocks all the sensors in the front.

48:40Neal has assigned like a half dozen stories investigating what went wrong with his frame TV. I think a tech product that is a bad TV that kind of doesn't work when you do what you're supposed to do with it and is still the best-selling tech product in its category is a cultural object. We should just think about that more. Totally agree. It's kind of like what happened was for a long time when they were making technology for like going in the homes. They wanted to make it look cool or they wanted to make it look like it was meant for anyone and not be scary. That's why they had all the wood paneling and stuff like that.

49:13And then one day they were like, oh, we can just go like balls to the wall, do whatever we want, like do our spec wars, get to 1080 Hertz. We can do all of that and have fun with it and not worry about the design factor. And now they're starting to realize like they're starting to hit a lot of those limits on like a lot of the technology. And so they're like, okay, what do we have left? Oh, we can actually make it not look like garbage. Well, there's such an interesting philosophical shift underneath what you just described too, right? Because we went through this whole long phase where technology was exciting because it was technology, right?

49:45And you kind of wanted the things in your life to scream technology. Yeah. And I feel like we are headed into something very different from that. That is going to be like technology is not supposed to be everywhere and scream its name in my face all the time. it's supposed to like blend into my life and surroundings. And I think like, if that's this next generation and the design is sort of the leader of that, it's going to change a lot of things in really interesting ways. But I think you're right. I think that is at least where a lot of people are pushing us right now is out of this thing where it's like, everything I have looks more and more like a gadget and my house just becomes one big gadget to like, I have more gadgets, but they don't show themselves the same way.

50:25Well, we're seeing it too. And like how, how people are moving that in different spaces in their house, right? Like, like the, The office is not in the kitchen. It's not in the dining room, generally speaking. It's often a room. The home theater is another one. Most people's home theaters probably isn't the same room where they do other just hanging out stuff. It's probably cool and dark, and I want to own all$10 ,000 worth of equipment. Do you have one of those in your dorm room also? I will. I will when I go back to school. No, the home theater thing is really interesting, and I'm sure we'll see us a bunch.

50:55This is why sound bars exist as a category. Yeah. Because people didn't want to put five speakers in their house. Now, if you're me, you want to put 12 speakers in your house. That's a very different approach. But most people are like, no, what about one inconspicuous black bar under the TV that sounds good? Leave everything else out. And that more or less won. The thing you're talking about, David, is what we used to call like the ambient computer. Like several years ago, this was the theme. The computers would disappear on the walls and we would just like talk to Alexa. And that really didn't play out.

51:25and I think the twist here that is interesting and again this is just one 500 lumen projector but the twist here that is interesting is that things are designed to be seen yeah right they're they're designed to be beautiful objects and because you can take the smartphone supply chain and say okay now your computer monitor also has its own operating system and its own arm processor and also by the way it's like easier to to get a bunch of streaming services on this weird custom computer than on your desktop computer. So we'll just like run it over here or we can make a little projector or whatever we want to do using all these commodity smartphone pieces.

52:04You're seeing more technology, more complete computers put into different things as like single purpose things that actually work well. And that lets you get to the design element of it. Whereas before, I think the idea of putting a computer in anything required like an awful lot of computer. Yes. Yeah. And that made everything ugly. And now all that stuff is just teeny tiny and small and cheap because we've had smartphones for so long. Yeah. I think that's right. And I think we're going to see a ton of that at CES, including some of the stuff we've seen already. All right. So let's wrap up this little CES preview segment by doing a CES lightning round.

52:38Then the third segment will just be a regular. None of these are never quick. I don't know why we pretend this is a lightning round. Please buy the lightning round. Someone show up. You can have it. We'll rename it for you. It's fine. This is the one thing where I will abandon my journalistic ethics and just sell, sell, sell. The Samsung Frameland. You tell me. Yeah, whatever kind of refrigerator you want me to hawk. You got it. What's that weird brand that just makes the retro fridges? You want the lightning round? Smeg? Smeg. The lightning round. Chilled by Smeg. You got it. Oh, boy. Anything.

53:14Just show up. His name is Andrew Malazek. He's our director of network integrations or whatever. Talk to him. Write him a check. He got you. Say whatever you want. All right, Alex, what's your CES line? So this one, they announced it before CES. They're going to show them off at CES. But Dell has redone the whole XPS lineup. The XPS 13 Plus has gone away. Which is good because it sucked. But it is also technically the new XPS 13. It's using a lot of the same stuff, but then they've gotten rid of the 15-inch and the 17-inch. Those will both still be around. You'll still be able to buy the old version for a while, but they're not going to be doing big upgrades to it.

53:57And instead, you're getting a 14 and a 16-inch. And the 14-inch, I'm really excited about because it's only like a pound more than the 13-inch, which I don't carry my computer everywhere, so that's not bad for me. It gets you like a much larger battery. I think it goes up to 69.5 watts per hour versus the previous one, which was 55 watts per hour. And it gets you discrete graphics. And that's just really exciting. And also there's a little tiny co-pilot button. But they hadn't figured out the rounding. This is one of the funniest pictures we have ever run. With just a little sticker? The sticker on the co-pilot button.

54:35Yeah, they hadn't figured out. They didn't get it until the last minute. And so they're like, okay, sticker. We already made these laptops. Thanks, Microsoft. The sticker's a little fuzzy. Everything about this picture is perfect. I love it. Thank you, Amelia, for taking beautiful photos. Yeah, it's just, what is this? Is this the menu button that they just literally put a little sticker over with the co-pilot? And now it'll go co-pilot, which just, it really, I know everybody's very excited about the co-pilot button, but for me, maybe it was because I first experienced it with the Dell XPS. I had big, like, Cortana vibes.

55:10Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, this is the dream for Microsoft, right? It's like there's a button, an assistant shows up, you ask it some things, it lies to your face and tries to bang you, and you move on with your day. That was the original pitch for Clippy. Clippy tries to bang you. I don't want that. Clippy, get away. Yeah, that's somehow worse. Those eyes. The fact that I keep insisting that Bing is trying to bang you and they haven't said a word to me about it is like very funny to me. The silence is deafening Microsoft. not one email not one text not one linkedin message from some aggrieved bing product manager they're just like yeah i'm trying to bang a bunch of people sure did all right david what do you got uh mine is and i literally have to load the page so that i can tell you the name because the name just breaks my heart every time i say it out loud the samsung 2024 bespoke four-door flex refrigerator with ai family hub plus yes which is the samsungiest thing to ever samsung it is samsung's new smart fridge i love love love that samsung is all in on smart fridges like this company will not abandon the idea that your fridge should be the biggest and most important screen in your house and i think that rules and i hope it never changes so and like and i actually think like i have two thoughts about this one is that we're going to see just just infinite gadgets at ces that are just gadget plus chat gpt like name a thing plus chat gpt and they'll be like is this anything and i'll just be wandering through the venetian being like that's nothing that's nothing that's nothing you can't just put chat GPT in it.

56:58That's still, it's still nothing. Uh, but then the other thing is going to be companies that are further ahead of the game, trying to figure out what cool stuff you can actually do with some of these AI tools. And Samsung has been doing this for a while. It's had some fun slash bizarre ideas about what you can do with a camera inside of your fridge. Uh, and this one in particular, it uses a camera inside of your fridge to not just figure out what you have, but to help you identify recipes that you can cook with what you have in the fridge, which for me is like the dream, right? It's like, you want to open it up and be like, okay, I have, I have broccoli and pasta and a half a thing of Worcestershire sauce.

57:40Like what can I make for dinner? And it'll just tell you that's like, that is. If you can't figure out what to do with broccoli and pasta and Worcestershire, you mix the broccoli with the pasta and you set the Worcestershire aside. Throw the Worcestershire sauce. You drizzle it on. You're like, not today, weird sauce. No, that's, I mean, you should. Can I just, I support your dream. Can I just point out the most hilarious limitation of the dream as expressed in this refrigerator? The AI camera can only recognize 33 different food items. So if you're just like a little bit out of Samsung's strike zone of 33 foods it knows about, it's like I don't know man you're on your own just one small clarification it can identify up to 33 food I guess 33 is the dream does it have to be like specific brands yeah unclear I will say the touch screen has a TikTok app and a YouTube app and standing in front of your fridge scrolling TikTok videos actually kind of amazing like honestly kind of like I'm going to go try to have that experience.

58:53I mean, how have you never done the thing where there's something in the microwave for 60 seconds and you're like, oh, I'm just going to look at four TikToks while I do this. You could do that on your fridge, the screen. And the way that I'm going to choose to express that desire is not by pulling out my$1 ,500 state of the art phone. It's using the computer in my fridge. Yeah, I don't see what the problem is. By the way, deciding who in the family gets to determine the TikTok algorithm or even the TikTok account loaded onto the refrigerator. I think you got to give the fridge its own algorithm.

59:27The fridge gets its own account. Yeah. That's like the truly one of the most dangerous and destabilizing pieces of technology you can introduce into any family is full size TikTok on the fridge. and you're like, whose account is going to sign into this TikTok? I don't know about that. It's a lot of trust. We have an LG. By the way, LG has a smart platform called ThinkQ that looks exactly like smart things. I know everyone always wants to dunk on Xiaomi and Huawei for exactly copying iOS. The fact that LG and Samsung have exactly copied their bad smartphone experiences, very funny. Very funny. So we now have a ThinkQ microwave and a ThinkQ fridge.

1:00:12Uh, the microwave will send you a notification when it is done, which is the least useful notification in the world. Because how long, like getting a notification on your phone for something that you've set for a minute is like not useful. People used to roast turkeys in them. Maybe, maybe you're roasting a turkey. Turn on your microwave and just sprint out the front door. I'm out. I'm gone. Um, uh, you, ours is over our stove. so you can also tell whatever voice assistant to turn on the light and the fan. And my wife was like, but the button is right there. And then our refrigerator will not send me notifications for when it thinks our ice is too old.

1:00:52And it's like, throw away your ice. And I've never even considered this before. And I don't know why I have any of these notifications turned on or why I've even connected any of these devices to the internet to begin with. Wait, are you supposed to throw away your ice? Yeah, I was like quietly Googling. Straight up. I got a notification. It's like, it's been seven days. Please discard your ice so we can make you fresh ice. Seven days? In first, if you had said a year, I would have been like, oh, I've never, I've still never done that. So our old fridge didn't have an ice maker. So I, you know, we bought the most ice maker.

1:01:24It can make four kinds of ice, my good man. And I was like, what a luxury. And then it turns out we don't use ice. So now I just have like a fridge full of ice. And the fridge is like, get this ice out of me. and that is the relationship I have with technology. Listen, if you are listening to this and you know if you're supposed to replace your ice every seven days, please email us, vergecasts at theverge.com. If you're an expert on ice replacement situations in fridges, I need to know this. Please. I think LG is in the pocket of big oil. That's where I'm at right now. Yeah, and it's also someone who's been installing a lot of new smart light switches.

1:01:59I think Lutron is in the pocket of big wire nut. Oh yeah. Because God bless the Lutron switch, but that's a lot of wire nuts. You're just packing them in that box and screwing them tight.

1:02:12What's your lightning round? So mine is the TV stuff. We're getting some glimmers of the TV stuff. There's two trends that I think are really interesting in TVs this year. One, they're bringing AI to settings. So actually, if you go back years now, AI has been at CS for years because every TV company is like, Look at our AI picture processing and upscaling. They've been talking about it forever and ever and ever. And everyone's like, ha ha, AI. And this year it's going to be out of control because now the AIs can lie to you. But they've been doing AI and upscaling for years and years and years to get – to upscale your horrible 720p Fox NFL broadcast to 4K.

1:02:52They've applied a lot of AI to that at the panel level. So they're going to do more and more of that this year. The thing that they're all doing is they're applying it to settings. So they're going to say, OK, we're going to recognize your content and adjust to the settings of the TV. So you won't have to switch between game mode and cinema mode or whatever. We'll recognize, OK, you're playing a video game. We're going to switch you to the highest refresh rate, lowest latency, the whole thing. OK, you're watching a movie. That's Tom Cruise's face. We're going to put you in Tom Cruise mode, which is fascinating.

1:03:24They should have done this ages ago. Yeah, that's a good idea. But why does that require AI? Couldn't that just require acknowledging that you've changed inputs? You can already do input level settings. But if your input level setting is like an Xbox, knowing what kind of content is coming out of the Xbox is actually really hard. The Xbox either needs to communicate with the TV, which given the state of HDMI seems unlikely. What was the name of that thing, the box that had all the inputs? The cavo. That was one of the things it tried to do was figure out what you're watching and actually like tune the experience based on literally the content on the screen.

1:04:04Yeah, the Kavo is different because it was a universal remote. So its whole pitch was like, you tell us what you want and we'll know what you have and we'll deliver that. Like we'll click around the Apple TV interface for you. And because it was machine learning, it wouldn't be brittle. like if you want to do a most universal or most if you want to do a macro you're like okay press power wait four seconds click right three times wait you know like and that is all inherently brittle and broken the cavo is like we will look at the screen and we'll make sure we're going to click on the hulu app we'll click on the hulu app we'll see what's on the screen we'll find the thing you want it did not work that company pivoted to selling video conferencing solutions for nursing homes is a true story uh but the idea that you can recognize it's on the screen and take action on it.

1:04:48Kind of an old idea. Advertising on connected TVs has worked this way for a very long time. Really weird stuff, but ACR, automatic content recognition, has been built into most panels for a long time. So the TV manufacturers know what you're watching. They can sell hands against it, which isn't great. And now they're going to finally start doing a useful thing with that technology, which is saying, okay, it's a movie. We're going to put you in the best mode for this movie. Roku is going to announce new Roku Pro mini LED TVs. They've got smart picture modes. Their pitch is 90 % of people never change the settings on the TV.

1:05:21This will help a lot of people. They're also, Roku's going to do mini LED TVs. They're going to make higher end TVs that I think is really interesting. Mini LED is going to be everywhere at CS this year. And then Sony is not going to announce new TVs. Sony is off the TV cycle at CS, which is fascinating. The Sony A95 Quantum Dot OLED that was the flagship TV of last year just hit in October. So Sony is just way off the cycle. They're just doing whatever they want. But they previewed, we've got a bunch of mini LED tech coming this year. It's better than before. So they're still making CS announcements, which is fascinating.

1:05:54And then LG announced its next generation of OLEDs. Kind of minor bumps from last year, but the big news is MLA, its multiple lens array technology, is going to hit the 83 inch size on the G3. And then they've got smaller versions of its ones that are wireless, which means you plug all your stuff into a box on the other side of your room, and you still have to plug your TV into the wall, which I don't know, man. But so like sort of iterative on the OLED side. And then I think huge strides in the mini LED side, which is going to be really interesting because mini LEDs are cheaper. They're just LCD screens with really, really advanced backlights.

1:06:30But the backlights are getting simultaneously more advanced and more interesting and cheaper. Right. So they're going to crash right into OLED. So I just bought an A95. My thesis is that the TV has gone on my wall for like a decade. spending money on a TV is actually a pretty good investment. And I came this close to buying an X95. Shout out to Value Electronics and Scarsdale. I went and they had two calibrated Sony TVs. Not in retail mode but calibrated. A95 next to an X95. A95 is the OLED. X95 is the mini LED. And I was like this close to buying an X95. What were they playing on it? They were playing some dark stereo stereo.

1:07:12I literally I feel like like look at this lizard I want to know a how many hours you spent standing between the two of them and and quit and like how close you got to one and then you'd walk over the other like did you bring a did you bring a loop did you bring a microscope like did you did you bring your trusty Nikon macro lens to take pictures of the pixels like they just closed and left you in there overnight they were like we'll see you tomorrow let us know it was like me alone in a dark store with like various$30 ,000 like BW speakers, hugely expensive. I was just like in heaven. And then this store, they're the ones who run this thing on YouTube called the King of TV Shootouts.

1:07:49We've been doing it for like 20 years. And so like they calibrate everything. It's like beautiful. But I came this close to buying the X9 pack because the mini LED tech is so close. It's like, it's right there. And I think at CS, we're going to see the next evolution of it across a number of manufacturers. And then Sony's going to show us some more stuff this year. And the point I always make is if you pay attention to displays, like one, it's fun because it's just a it's a stakeless spec war. Right. Like it's not like will TikTok ruin democracy? You know, it's like, will this display look sick or not?

1:08:19It's like all you need to know. But if you keep track of it, you can kind of tell what kind of devices we're going to get a few years down the line. Yeah. Right. Because the display is usually the thing that limits the form factor of any device you're talking about. and so TVs are where you kind of get the state of the arty state of the art and that stuff just trickles down to everything else and I the mini led moment is like we're right here we're spending the extra money on an oled for a lot of people isn't going to be worth it which I think is fascinating that's gonna suck I like to be smug about my oled I love it I just I bought I didn't buy the x95 I bought the a95 because I want to I want to be smug I want to look at that thing and just feel a wave of smugness every time I look at it.

1:09:01Like I need to know what I'm going to be smug about in four to five years. Here's what I'm smug about. I now have access to the world's most useless streaming service, BraviaCore. You get the really good reds on Spider-Man though. You get the really good reds. It streams in pure stream. It streams 80 megabits per second on BraviaCore. But you can stream four movies and three of them are Spider-Man.

1:09:26And as soon as you turn it on, Comcast calls and says, or are you running a Bitcoin mine out of your house? But one of the movies on Bravia Core that I had access to, because they changed the library all the time, was a remaster in IMAX of the original Ghostbusters. And I was like, I'm in heaven. Like this is a kind of, it was kind of like a bad 4K upscale. You like see the pores, but they were weird looking. Yeah, you know, there's like too much contrast. Alex, what was the one you were pointing out the other day? You quick posted about it. There was something that just got upscaled and it looked really bad.

1:09:54Well, they're doing it a bunch with everything. Like on YouTube right now, if you go and look up an old trailer, almost all of them have been upscaled. Yeah. And you're just like, oh, that's weird. I sat and rewatched all of Ghostbusters in this bad upscale. I mean, it looked insane in some ways. Like, just like too contrasty. Like, that's the thing I always catch with these bad upscales. Like, it's like too contrasty and some things get blown out in weird ways. But then I was like, I'm reading the titles of the name tags. Because you can't. This is a movie I watched 100 times on VHS on a 13-inch screen.

1:10:25I'm like, look at all those words that are on the screen. How is Slimer beautiful? I mean, you look – no, like parts of it are blurry. Because, you know, the old lenses weren't perfectly sharp across the whole frame. And they were – and like – you know, a lot of that movie was shot at night. So there's like a lot of film grain that's getting re-upscaled. None of this looked good. I do not think you should buy a Sony TV for this experience. but in terms of things I am smug about having had this experience because I own this TV very high in the list like I need a shirt that's just like Bravia core Stan and everyone's like what are you watching I'm like nothing Air Force One I gotta go got rid of your Netflix account years ago yeah I'm watching four movies on Bravia core meanwhile I was just making plans to watch Oppenheimer on my iPad on the way to Vegas next week Christopher Nolan is going to be behind you on the plane.

1:11:23Be careful. All right, we got to take a break. As you can tell, I'm very excited to go look at TVs at CS. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back with a non-CS lightning round. We'll be right back.

1:11:37Support for this show comes from Figma. Figma is the collaborative design platform where teams come together to turn ideas into the world's best digital apps, websites, and experiences. And now there's a faster way to bring those ideas to life. Introducing Figma Make, an AI-powered prompt-to-code tool that helps you turn ideas into something real fast. Figma Make is a different kind of vibe coding tool. With just a few prompts, you can turn any idea into a code-backed prototype or app that anyone can explore, iterate on, and share. And it's all connected to Figma. So you can start from scratch or from your design file.

1:12:15Figma Make is made for designers, product managers, and builders who want to move fast and explore more ideas. Try it now and see how quickly you can make your ideas real with Figma Make. Just go to Figma.com slash Vergecast. That's F-I-G-M-A dot com slash Vergecast. Support for this show comes from 1Password. Think for just a moment about the Herculean tasks that your IT security department has to handle. There's keeping identities, devices, and applications safe. Then there's dealing with shadow IT, securely onboarding and offboarding employees. Oh, also there's meeting compliance goals. The point is, it's a lot.

1:12:57If you want to help lighten that load, you can try Trileka by 1Password. Trileka by 1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance. And it's just one of the ways that extended access management helps teams strengthen compliance and security. 1Password's award-winning password manager is trusted by millions of users in over 150 ,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. Plus, 1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third-party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. Take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged shadow IT.

1:13:39Learn more at onepassword.com slash Vergecast. That's the number one password.com slash Vergecast.

1:13:55We're back. The lightning round not sponsored by Smeg. It's unchill.

1:14:05This poor company is like a great business selling retro fridges in the back of Office Max and I'm like, boss? Whatever, man. We said Smeg like 10 times already on this podcast. Weird name. Weird name. Our Google results are blowing up today. Someone's got the Google email. It's like, what is going... They're adorable. They look like the 50s only using modern. Pay us the money and I'll finish the sentence, Smeg. The modern what, Smeg?

1:14:36By the way, in case you're wondering, this is not how you generate sales. I don't know how. I think that should be very clear to everyone. That's not my side of the business at all. But I'm very clear that this isn't how you do it. By threatening the maker of a retro refrigerator. But if you know the good people at Smeg, if you know Alan Smeg, you know, call him up. All right. I don't know if his name is Alan. It's probably not, last name is probably not Smeg.

1:15:07lightning round part two non cs david what you got so there was this patent that came out this week uh we think we're about three weeks ish away from division pro launch from apple that's the the word on the street i think is like january 25th 26th seems to be what that means who knows but it it appears to be imminent that this thing is coming and uh one of the things that came out this week was that Apple was granted a patent for stuff to put on the outside of the display. So if you remember, one of the things that the Vision Pro will do is essentially give you googly eyes on the front of your Vision Pro so that you can sort of look through them.

1:15:50And it's like creepy and weird and I hate it, but it's technologically kind of cool. But what it turns out happened is that Apple, including Johnny Ive, who is named as an inventor on this patent had a bunch of ideas about what it might do with an external screen on your face. And I think they're awesome. One of the ideas is just that you could have the words, do not disturb written on the outside of your face. One of them could just project the weather on the outside screen. I love the weather. The weather one is incredible. So useful. It could show your - All the rest of these are sort of like, the weather one is incredible.

1:16:32I agree. It could show your eyes in a bunch of different shapes, including like zoom icons in front of each of your eyes for when you're on a video call. It could show a play button. Like if you're playing YouTube, it could show a screensaver. Like there's so many ideas here. And this all reminds me of like early Apple Watch when they were just like, here's a bunch of wacky features. you can send your heartbeat to somebody or draw on your wrist to draw on somebody else's wrist. And this feels so in line with that to me where they're just like, what can we do with a screen on your face? And Johnny Ive is just like hearts.

1:17:11I'm missing the heartbeat thing though. On the Apple watch. That was, was it, it was like creepy. Did you ever do it? I mean, just be like creepy to people. It's, it's from, That's how I do the walkie-talkie now too is just to be creepy. Never to like actually communicate with another human being. Oh, see, my wife and I are constantly using the walkie-talkie. It's really quite good. And actually now our house does not – it's not necessary, but we still do it. So I will walkie-talkie her and she will just yell up the stairs. It's great. Technology, everybody. But I think the thing I like about this is one thing Apple has always been really good at is taking things that are otherwise kind of problems and making them sort of iconic, like all the way back to the white headphones on the silhouette in the iPod commercials.

1:17:58Like it took the cable of your headphones and turned it into a thing, right? And it did the same thing with AirPods, which are objectively ugly, but it made them like culturally cool. And I think Apple's gonna try to do the same thing with the Vision Pro. In some way, it's going to try to make it like, no, this is not a stupid thing you wear on your face because it gives you stuff like, this is a cool thing for your face, which is a hard sell to make, but I think Apple's going to try. But yet, as Jay pointed out in this story that he wrote, we still have not seen, as far as I know anyway, an Apple executive, Tim Cook or otherwise, with a Vision Pro on their face.

1:18:37And it is very rare that one of these things comes out and is not instantly made a meme. And so for Apple to both simultaneously pursue this idea of like, how do we do more and more and more and more and more with the screen on your face? And let's maybe hide the fact that it's a screen on your face for as long as we possibly can. I just, we're like a few weeks away from figuring out which one of those is going to win in the real world. And I think it's fascinating. I'm excited for Tim Cook's digital eyes. Tim Cook, just like giving interviews and he gets bored and the weather pops up. It's just going to be incredible.

1:19:14Like I cannot wait. the little play sign you can go read the post and look at the pictures the actual claims of this patent are very small like the actual thing that is being patented a wearable electronic device with a camera in it that's put captures images of the wearer's face and then a display in the housing that displays images of the wearer's face the images based on the captured images and then a sensor that detects the position of the observer so they can point the images that's the whole thing that's the whole patent oh and the usual thing that they they stick this in all computer patents now they're like a computing system that does it and it's like yeah we we understand the patent office doesn't understand computers there's not a small person inside doing it for you yeah exactly um that's it's always fascinating to read what actual apple is actually claiming in these because they'll put a lot of pictures in these.

1:20:11And as everyone knows, you get to read the actual claims. And the claims are here are just like we put a camera in it and display on the outside. That's the whole claim of this patent. And then, Johnny, I've got to do some pictures. I will say if you walk around in an Apple Vision Pro, just displaying to people the weather in California, it's very good. I like the idea they don't even change the weather. It's always going to be Cupertino. I think if you wear one of these, you should be obligated to be showing your TikTok feed on the outside of it at all times. shame um c s is next week apple has said vision pro is coming early 2024 a lot of rumbles out in the world i would bet there's some sort of vision pro announcement that apple loves upstaging c s loves it yeah yeah i bet you're right so that that's just my bet i don't i don't have any insight until on that i just based on history remember one year at c s apple was like we have an event and i was like the iphone's now in verizon Yeah.

1:21:09Cool. Yeah. It's the same one. All right. Karan's what you got. Okay. So it is with like great sadness. I say that Amazon is moving to advertising starting in January 29th. That means you're going to have to watch ads if you have Amazon Prime. That's crazy. Unless you want to pay extra. But it's also like it was always inevitable. It was always going to happen. They were – nobody was shy about putting ads on these things. when they started with maybe Netflix. But everybody else was always like, yeah, ads is somewhere in a forecast for us. So now it's just like, okay. And for Amazon, a company who we don't actually know how many people watch their shows, we just know they have all of the subscribers because everybody has Amazon Prime.

1:21:52This makes a lot of sense because now they can make... I think we can confidently say it's not very many based on the success of their big shows that they have. Which ones? Yeah. Womp womp. Hey, there's the boys. The boys is good. It's Reacher and boys. It's a show. Yeah. Everybody's dad watches Reachers. Like you two are going to be watching it soon. You don't know it. Isn't it just singular Reacher? It's Reacher. Yeah, you're right. It's just Reacher. It's like the James Cameron sequels Reachers.

1:22:25It's coming for you guys. Just a lot of tall, quiet men running around small towns in America. The only thing I know about Reacher is I saw a TikTok. Who's the main actor? I don't even know. I just saw a TikTok with him where he was saying that the amount of muscle he has to carry on his body to portray Reacher is actually causing a physical toll on his body. He's like, imagine walking up a flight of stairs, but you're holding 240-pound dumbbells. That's my life now. That's a lot. That's too much muscle. Yeah. He was like, yeah, but it's worth it because I'm Reacher. Soon to start the sequel, Reacher is directed by James Cameron.

1:22:59It is inevitable that all these streaming services are doing ads. It's like everyone watch Netflix, turn on ads and make more money. Amazon is actually a secretly huge player in the ads business. Yeah. Like a huge player in the ads business. It's meta Google and Amazon. And of course they're going to do connected TV ads. But it's kind of gross. Like the whole point of Prime is like not that, right? Like you pay Amazon the money up front to get all the good service on the back end. Yeah. And now it's like now it's just cable. I'm paying for cable and shipping. I think for them it's like, okay, you get free shipping.

1:23:33You get whatever other stuff comes with Prime. And now you also get free cable. And if you want to get rid of the ads on your cable, you can give us even more money every month. And four people are going to do that. No one – write us a note. If you're going to pay for the ad-free tier of Amazon Prime Video, I want to meet you. I feel like I could meet you individually. Oh, yeah. That's a scalable proposition is I want to meet all of you. You could fit all of those people in like a single Dave and Buster's. Like no question. We're going to have a party sponsored by, you know who you are.

1:24:14All right. I have two because I added one because it's so funny. But my first one is Alamo Drafthouse runs Sony digital cinema projectors and they had some sort of certificate timeout over the break and they just stopped showing movies. It's so brutal. And that's like, they're supposed to be the good company. They're supposed to be like the good movie theater that like actually cares about how they screen things. So for them to like drop the ball this bad is. Yeah, so it's unclear what happened. We've read a bunch of forum posts from like theater employees and like projectionists. One amazing thing about the internet is you're like, man i wonder if there's a community online that's deep in the weeds of this like oh it's the projectionist forums yeah obviously um so there's there's people like explaining what happened you know they're like mad at the company but it feels like david i know you read a bunch of this stuff too and we're gonna write a story on it because it is very it's like perfectly virtual house there's a lot of drm involved in digital projection like you send a movie to a movie theater, there's a bunch of DRM steps in being able to play back that digital file.

1:25:25And somewhere between the projector and the file, there was a certificate timeout and no one, like no one saw it coming. Yeah. That's about as far as I've gotten down the rabbit hole. I think that's right. And Sony kind of increasingly has no interest in this business. And these things are notoriously brittle anyway. Like, remember we did that story a few months ago about the IMAX theaters that still crucially rely on a Palm pilot and are now emulating a Palm pilot on an iPad. And we're like the, the true nature of the tape and strings that hold these things together is just unbelievable. Even if you're Alamo draft house and care deeply about how this stuff works, these folks just don't upgrade the equipment unless they have to.

1:26:10And meanwhile, the equipment on which these movies are made is increasingly high tech and the way that they're being shipped around is increasingly digital and increasingly high tech. And to your point, these companies are taking more and more care to lock this stuff down, especially with big, important movies. These things are more carefully controlled than ever. They're not just shipping giant reels around the country nearly the way that they used to. A lot of this is happening online. It's mostly happening digitally now. There are just so many more places for it to break in these old weird systems than there used to be.

1:26:47And if you're Alamo, there's just like nothing you can do. You just update the firmware and hope for the best. I think the suggestion from a lot of those projectionists though was that like Alamo probably did mess up here. And there's been like a lot of talk about like in the theater community about Alamo and it's kind of declined. And so this is kind of like an indication of that decline. They've been rough since like 2017. But like there's no such thing as like a full stack movie theater, right? Like AMC is not out here making its own projectors so that it can show you the movie better. Like everybody is still reliant on this crazy chain that is not really designed to make the process seamless and good.

1:27:27Yeah, it's supposed to be as complex as possible because they don't want like a young projectionist to be like, ooh, let me just upload this to BitTorrent. Gonna have a good time. Beautiful film. Yeah. Can I tell a story for my youth? Yes. When I was in high school, my friend Allison's dad was the manager of the local movie theater. And somehow this emboldened us to believe as we were walking out of a movie that we could pick up the reels of Austin Powers 2, the film reels of Austin Powers 2, and sprint them to our car. They were very heavy. We got nowhere before we were just stopped by a group of theater employees going, what are you doing?

1:28:06And we're like, we don't know. what was your plan like like wind this all the way back for me what was the ideal outcome to this story we did you have a projector stuff i don't know high school we're seeing wisconsin we saw the reels to austin paris too like now we'll have them i was like 16 years old it's but it's burned into my brain how heavy they were like you know that oh this is a mistake but then you're too far in. Is there like a as soon as you pick them up? Yeah, the second you pick them up, it's already over. Even if by simply trying to pick them up, you've realized you've made a horrible mistake.

1:28:50Fun fact, the opening sequence for that movie is you couldn't play it on Twitch now. Oh, because of the nudity rules? Yeah, because of the implied nudity rule, and that's the whole first, like, second chunk of the movie. You know, It's probably for the best. Where will you watch it now? There isn't a time and a place for the opening sequence of Austin Bowers 2. I don't know if it's Twitch, to be honest with you. It's on Bravia Core in 80 megabits per second, crystal clear, pure stream. See every strand of chest hair. Speaking of stealing things, the Kia boys are back. Yeah. And Kia has a new plan to stop them.

1:29:29So if you're aware of the Kia boys, it's apparently very easy to steal many, many Kia and Hyundai cars. So Kia has acknowledged this problem. They're getting sued by various states who say Kia is negligent because they've made their cars too easy to steal. Very funny outcome. It's a deeply funny outcome. Kia is doing, like, software updates. Hyundai is doing software updates. They're shipping out, like, steering wheel locks, like the club to people. It's all very funny. Now, in addition to this, there's a press release. They're shipping out devices to protect the ignition column. incredible incredible line in this press release this is a bullet under the headline in bold device reinforces ignition cylinder body to guard against theft methods popularized on social media wow it's very good it's one of those things that you write and you're like what has the world become like what are we doing here very good and then uh in order to make it clear to the Kia boys that you've installed this device that are giving everybody a sticker.

1:30:34So now your car can have a sticker that says, stay away, Kia boys. We have a device that reinforces ignition cylinder body. No chance whatsoever that that'll backfire. None. That sticker will solve all of your problems for sure. Another bullet in this fresh release. Second wave of local software upgrade clinics also planned in coordination with local Kia dealers in key cities across US. Yep. Software upgrade clinics at the Kia dealer. If you have a Kia on it, go get your car fixed because the Kia boys are on the loose. Only park it in the garage. Yeah. There are Kias in my family and I have family members who are like, I got to get this thing in the garage.

1:31:14I'm like, Nelai, do you think if you were a teen right now, you'd be a Kia boy? I feel like there's like the same Nelai that is stealing Austin Powers 2 reels is definitely out here being a Kia boy right now. Just be like, never take a car. I think it is very good that I was not a teenager in the age of social media. That's what I got for you. I think I would have turned out differently. Fair. Probably in jail. That seems like the most likely outcome of Teenage Eli plus the internet. All right. That's it. We're way over. As always, there was an extended copyright law segment for which I apologize.

1:31:50Nothing. Zero apologies for that. and also zero apologies to the local refrigerator factory, which would sponsor this lightning round immediately. I like how they're turned into a local refrigerator factory. Yeah, just around the corner. I'm coming over there. We're going to CS next week. We'll have a ton of coverage. We have two VergeCasts, right, at CS? So two VergeCasts from CS, historically our craziest VergeCasts of the year because we were all sleep deprived. Just tons of coverage on the site. CS is where the year really kicks off. So I'm excited to go look at some gadgets, see a bunch of people, do a bunch of reporting, and obviously talk to all of you on the Verge Cast.

1:32:29So we'll see you next week at CES. That's the Verge Cast. Rock it roll.

1:32:38And that's a wrap for Verge Cast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by Xander Adams. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

1:33:21Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera! They see us! Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.