Phones don't have lights

27:11The new Sonos Beam Ultra soundbar brings theater-quality audio to your home. Sonos Ace Ultra headphones connect to your system, so you can listen when and how you want. And Sonos Play speakers can move with you throughout your day. Every Sonos product syncs and can be controlled from your phone, so whatever you're listening to can follow you room to room, moment to moment. Visit Sonos.com and build your system. Sonos. Love the sound? Feel the system.

27:44At T-Mobile, the new iPhone 18 Pro is here with a big leap in battery life, and you can get it on us. With so many reasons to choose T-Mobile, you'll want to talk about it. At T-Mobile, you can get iPhone 18 Pro on them. Pass it on. My friend said you can get it on T-Mobile. Pass it on. They got the best network with the fastest speeds. Hey, Mickey, pass it on. iPhone 18 Pro has the most advanced iPhone camera ever. Pass it on. I heard it, T-Mobile. You can get it on them. Pass it on. For a limited time at T-Mobile, get the amazing iPhone 18 Pro on us. With up to 36 monthly bill credits, when you trade in an eligible device, example iPhone 16 on a qualifying plan, example$100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees.

28:31For well-qualified customers, plus tax and$35 device connection charge. Credits and imbalance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel. Finance agreement,$1 ,199.99. iPhone 18 Pro 256GB to acquire. Best and fastest mobile network in the U.S. Based on analysis by Oocalypse Speedtest Intelligence Data 1-H-2026. Visit T-Mobile.com.

28:47All right, we're back. It was a busy week for hardware. We've got a lot to talk about. First up, MetaConnect was not just Muse. There's also new hardware. They had an entire line of new glasses in a million different styles. they also had new vr glasses and i think the one that we maybe all found the most interesting they have glasses without a camera yeah they are the meta ray-ban parenthesis audio 349 dollars it does this solve their problem no i have i have a general question for you guys like do you think that meta kind of destroyed the ray-ban brand because now it feels like if the meta Ray-Bans look pretty darn similar to like the traditional Ray-Bans and they just have little small cameras.

29:37If you see someone wearing Ray-Bans and they're not meta Ray-Bans, do you now go like take a second look and kind of be a little weirded out about it? Oh, that's interesting. I do. I do. When I see people in Ray-Bans now, I kind of like do a double take and feel like, is there a little camera in that? Yeah. Am I seeing something? So if I don't see a camera, I'm just like, all right. The audio only version, I don't think it's going to solve their issue because I think now the issue is a Ray-Ban issue more than it's like a meta issue. I think if they had started audio only, these would still be a successful product, right?

30:09Like, I think the headphone is the best use case for these glasses. The Bose kind of, the Bose style. Yeah, it's great. It is a casual, nice-looking pair of open-ear headphones. I mean, again, the question I have is, did they solve an input problem for their new platform? so they have always thought of these as AI glasses. That's what they've been calling them from the beginning. And my, my read on it was people actually do like having a little camera with them. Right? Like it, they've, they've been successful because people have a camera, right? Okay. Were they successful because you can talk to meta AI?

30:49I don't think so. What is the audio glasses are a bet on whether or not the muse, will be convenient and powerful enough for you to just be able to talk to it through your glasses. Right? Like, if the backend isn't useful, having the audio on the glasses just means you have headphones. The backend is really powerful, having an ambient microphone that you can just talk to Muse all the time will be very useful. And again, I think this all just comes down to how useful do you think Muse is? Because that's what enables this product. Right. I mean, now, that does make this a better moment to release these glasses because meta AI before Muse was not useful.

31:31It was not a thing anybody was tapping into. We're still being shown the same demos, right? So David, you talked to V and Jay on the show yesterday. They went to Meta's campus. They got all the same demos that they do every single year where Meta's like, look at these food items and ask which one has the most protein in it. And it's like, this is not useful for anyone on earth. Right. And so I'm not sure. Right. I'm not sure if the glasses with Muse are still going to be helpful enough because they're ultimately not getting a lot of data. They have to be tapped into everything and hooked up to your phone in order to do anything.

32:09Yeah, I personally think that they should have done more Muse style demos, right? Because if Muse is sort of the platform driving these glasses, all of those demos that Meta always gives of look at these ingredients, what can I make in my kitchen with these foods? They're still doing that. Yeah. And they still have Meta AI shoved in everything. And nobody's ever really used Meta AI. So they're so excited about this platform. It seems like they would be pushing that through these demos and to reporters. so I don't know if that means that like they didn't expect Muse to be a huge hit and so now they're kind of trying to shove it in but the demos were already set up before that it's a little weird it does feel to me like Muse operates at the speed of all the other you know products from the AI industry where one day it doesn't exist and the next day they're like we've got this thing we're just going to put it out and see what happens and maybe it'll crash and burn maybe it'll be the next big game yeah yeah and now they're like perfect we have Muse it's working We have audio glasses.

33:04I mean, this is a thing, right? Every reporter, I think, on the planet asked Meta's team, is this your response to the perv glasses backlash? Correct. And they kept saying, no, no, no. Right. Look, I buy the idea, Mark said this to Joanna, that they've been working on these for ages. Like, it takes a while to bring up products and develop them. I don't think they would have released them if not for Muse. If what you have is a pair of sunglasses that have some headphones and then a microphone where you can talk to a not great AI, you don't have a product. If you have Muse, now you have the possibility of building all kinds of other products.

33:41And I think it's convenient that they don't have a camera. Phones don't have a light, you guys. Phones don't have a light. But I think it's very obvious that Mark is betting the company on Muse, right? Like he's just very happy to say, okay, we have the platform after the phone. And he's all but saying it, right? In the history of computers that he will deliver, if you ask him. He's like, there are mainframes, the mini computers, and PCs, and the laptops, and the phones, and now there's going to be something else. And AI, to him, is something else. But, you know, whether or not people want to trust Meta such that you can make AI powerful for you remains the biggest open question from this company.

34:24And I really think they've decided to just not engage it. They're just setting it aside. Phones don't have a light. And we'll see. I mean, people do buy these glasses. But again, my point of view on the ones they've had so far is people did want a camera on their face for action sports and kids. Whether they're going to buy these to talk to Muse is actually a big statement about Muse and whether or not Muse is helpful and useful. Right. Right. Notably, the audio glasses do have a hearing enhancement feature, which the AirPods Pro and some of the other AirPods also added, which is just kind of a nice like, oh, well, you can now use this for other things in your life that you used to need to use.

35:04So it does cost more. It's an extra$149, but is FSA and HSA eligible? So now people have excuses to use their insurance to buy these glasses. Yes, yes, yes. That is a decent selling point, you know, for a lot of people. It's like if I have to have a hearing aid, but I would rather wear my metaglasses. People have been talking about this with earbuds forever. Right. If you can make it look like something that is more normal, if it's something that you're already using and wearing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have bought my own father every over the counter hearing aid you can buy. He's rejected them all.

35:36This is a market that was supposed to develop in like a rare. It's a Trump one in a rare display of bipartisan unity. a bill was passed to deregulate hearing aids. And at the time, it was just very obvious that all of the members of Congress are very old. So they could agree that we should deregulate hearing aids. It was just one of those moments where I looked at that picture of like, you know, the bill signing. And I was like, oh, I understand why you agree. You can set aside your partisan differences. And Bose made hearing aids and Sony made hearing aids. I bought them all. We just had the CEO of Bose on Decoder.

36:09And I was like, why didn't this work? Like all of those products have essentially failed. Yeah. And she's like, it turns out hearing aids are a lot more complicated than you think. So I love that Meta's doing this. It's a thing that you can do. But the history of the product category thus far suggests that even suggesting to your father they should wear a hearing aid. Yeah. Just like ices you out of the family. That's fair. That's been my experience. Yeah, I got all the way to like, do you want to just try the AirPods like the kids? And he was like, I will kill you. Like, I'm not wearing AirPods.

36:38And I understand other people find all these tools very, very useful. I'm not discounting at all. I'm just saying broadly, my experience with my dad and the numbers in the industry suggest that there's more there than you need. Is he in the market for an AI agent? Yeah, maybe. Please use, please go through the hell of their Gmail. That's probably the single greatest parent technology of all time. Okay. We've got to talk about the other big piece of hardware that Meta announced this week, because if you rewind, I don't know, two years ago their big thing was the metaverse it was vr they went with they had a whole bunch of quest products they had the quest pro that's gotten a lot quieter in recent years this year they came back it was part of but not necessarily the flagship moment in their announcement they announced the meta vr glasses and it is a vision pro style headset except it basically just looks like a very chunky pair of sunglasses.

37:36And this feels like a very big step forward. I think in another environment, this would have made much more of a splash. They have these demos. They opened the event with Zuck wearing these glasses, and he's got like nine different screens open inside his VR workspace. And it's this lightweight thing that he's able to just like casually take off rather than having to undo a bunch of straps over his head to go in and out of virtual reality. Nila, you've used a bunch of these big headsets. I'm curious, like, does this being lighter weight and slimmer make you want to go back into that world? It makes me want to try them on an airplane.

38:19Like every night, you know, I fly to San Francisco a lot. David, I know you fly to San Francisco a lot. Yeah. That New York to San Francisco flight or New York to San Francisco flight. Just a little too long. It's just a little too long. But because of the thing that it is, there's always a Vision Pro guy. That's true. Yeah. It's like that route in particular is where the Vision Pro guy is on the plane. Yeah. Like every time. And I'm always like, that seems horrible, but I get it. Yeah. Like if I could just nope out of this and be in VR. Look, it is remarkable that Meta showed up and they announced what amounts to a much better Vision Pro.

39:00What is it? One sixth the weight, half the price. Yeah. Now, it's been 2.5 years since the Vision Pro came out. I was like, right, it's early 24 it came out. So it's been a minute. They've revved it once. But, you know, and Meta gets the benefit of just hardware development cycles and everything getting faster and lighter. But it is such a shockingly better Vision Pro than the Vision Pro. Yeah. And you can tell that there were a lot of people that were working on the Vision Pro in this thing, too, or at least that took very heavy inspiration. They look very similar. They do a thing that a lot of people were doing on the Vision Pro where they don't have those eye seals that kind of like contain your eyes into this darkness through the portal of the glasses.

39:39They have like a gap between what you're looking at and sort of the world around you. That makes them lighter. That makes them easier to wear. It makes them more comfortable in general. 100 grams is a really big deal. You know, the Vision Pro is notably really, really, really heavy. and if you can use this and it's the puck that it's attached to as a fully standalone computer i mean that's that's a that's a pretty massive deal i think yeah it is wild to me that this feels like almost an afterthought in their event because i don't know where this platform is going for them right this there was a moment when they thought this was their future they thought everyone's going to live inside of these and now it's this is squeezed in between a bunch of muse announcements They're like, also, we improved the Vision Pro.

40:26And everyone's like, that's very impressive, but. Well, no, look, shout out to my VR nerd friends. There are people who really, really care about VR in this world. And every time we make fun of it, they come and talk to me. It's fine. But this is a real platform. They've had it for a long time. They had early glimmers of success. you know i think the oculus quest 2 was actually another great consumer product from meta that thing was complete yeah and it was inexpensive in the middle of a pandemic i think everyone got confused because people were buying all kinds of stuff and like a lot of people bought quest 2s yeah and that deeply confused meta into believing that there was demand for the metaverse yeah when there was actually just demand to be somewhere other than your living room yeah and so like you know everything got a little topsy-turvy there and obviously ai sort of upended all of the plans that everybody had.

41:18But the idea that they're just putting out the next version of their best product in a thing instead of just killing it dead. I think that makes sense. I think the question is whether, you know, the investment they're making into even better holograms that are photorealistic with legs inside of their platforms. Like I have a million questions about this. The holograms look good. They're there. Where you have to take a bunch of photos to make a hologram like that right yeah where are the photos coming from how do you make that hologram the vision pro persona process was easy but it was very limited right like there's a lot of execution steps with this product that i'm deeply curious about it's not coming out until like next spring yeah so they've got some time but i i as a piece of hardware that just advanced it makes sense the the stuff they're doing with the keyboard and the the trackpad yeah with camera only finger tracking, it seems incredible.

42:14Like the Vision Pro can't do that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. But it's just like unclear, like how all the execution details are going to work. And if what you want is a big movie theater or like 10 extra screens. Yeah. Again, the flight from New York to San Francisco is going to be better than ever. But that's maybe that's worth$1 ,300. Yeah. For the people that were just using these devices as entertainment devices, it seems like the best version of something that meta personally has made right there's been a lot of third parties that make these like big screen vr and you can slap it on your face it's really small but it has super high resolution and the main purpose of that device is to be in a movie theater and not be on the plane but this gives me a lot of vibes of the quest pro when they were working with i think was it atlassian it was like some major b2b sass company and they were like we sold 10 ,000 of these to this big B2B SaaS company.

43:08And in the future, you're going to take all of your meetings in this VR space. And they had these kind of cringe, like Nintendo Wii style VR avatars, whatever. But the holograms in this demo that they gave, gave a lot of vibes of that because it was like you're on a video call and then you can press a button and that person's upper body suddenly grows and their whole body is there. and in this world where they sell 10 ,000 of these units to Atlassian, Atlassian can mandate that everyone takes scans of their body so that the video calls are like this. Are average people going to be taking video calls like this and go through the whole process of scanning their whole body to get it like that?

43:51I'm not sure. The technology is still fairly impressive, even though it's 2D instead of Gaussian splats like on the Vision Pro. There's something happening, by the way, with splats and rendering. Oh, yeah. That is at the bleeding edge of how cool computers can possibly be that is also terrifying. Yeah. We're chasing a story on it because I want to cover it. But have you seen the demos of we'll just set up four iPhones and throw water on the ground? Yeah. And then have like a full virtual walkable environment? Uh-huh. That is so far from where we were even just a couple years ago. A hundred percent.

44:25It's all coming together in here. And then it's like, what is reality? And is anything real? Yeah. I don't know, man. No. But there's something. It's still cool. I've had two separate friends send me a vibe-coded Gaussian splatting platform that they made. Wow. That they made. People are really into Gaussian splatting. What are they splatting? They're splatting objects, photos. I mean, there's a big movement. Every time I see a Gaussian splat, I'm like, this is beautiful. This is so cool. And then I'm like, what are we doing? Well, Apple and Google are both using the technology to make maps more realistic as well.

44:54Like, they're speeding ahead. This is a pretty new technology. They've made big advancements in it in the last year, year and a half. Now all these companies are like, we got to utilize it right now. But we should chase that story. It's a great idea. We should talk about the other big hardware news this week, which is that the Google Books are finally here. So earlier this week, Google announced the first five Google Books are going to arrive October 4th. Important date. That was the date that the Pixel 1 released in 2016. It's auspicious. That's good. Some of these look really good. There's a Dell XPS Google Book.

45:27It looks like a knockoff MacBook Air. I shouldn't say knockoff. It looks like a Delafide MacBook Air, but with a Google platform. Have you, I'm curious. This is a very big bet. Nilay, were you one of the big Chromebook Pixel fans back in the day? Because this feels like the next era for those people. I think the best piece I've ever written for The Verge is I bought my mom a$1 ,000 Chromebook Pixel, which is was so expensive uh and it's like the best computer i've ever bought for my parents and this has nothing to do with that idea it's like i think these are really interesting and there's a lot of really interesting ideas about applications and where they live and how you can synthesize a phone and a piece like all that's there the the reason i loved the chrome pixel was that it was just a web browser there was exactly one metaphor in that computer and if you just give Chrome 16 gigs of RAM, it ran pretty good at the time.

46:28Like this is ages ago, right? Yeah. And the whole point of it was whenever you buy a Windows PC or even a Mac, there are so many competing interface metaphors now that my parents were getting caught up in just confusion, right? Like, am I using a launch pad? Am I using a Mac app? Am I in the web? Like all that stuff was just like too much. And the idea of just one fast web browser that worked one way all the time was really great for them. Now, obviously, that's all along in the past that didn't work except for, I guess, school children or whatever, and Android and Chrome even get ever closer.

47:00And I think these are really fascinating. It's just, I think the lineage of those two products is as divergent as possible. Right. Because this thing is all metaphors, like up and down, new ideas, new metaphors. You know, as a tech dork, I love it. I can't get enough of it. But man, is it just a list of new ideas? This feels like they already had Android basically running at a desktop operating system level. They went, sure, we can do that. They are trying to do the thing that Macs and iPhones do, right? So they're natively integrated. You can get access to the file system of your phone from a Google Book laptop.

47:37You can access apps from your phone on a Google Book laptop. That's great if you have Android. David, can you imagine seeking this out as an Android user versus just going to Windows or just going to Mac or a platform that you already know and trust that has a rich app ecosystem? As an Android user, actually, absolutely. This is really interesting to me as an Android user because most people use their phone for most tasks. Like, a lot of people have laptops, but a lot of people spend$1 ,200 on a phone and do a lot of power tasks on their phone. and phones have gotten better and better and better at doing the things you need to do on the internet through apps, all of these things.

48:17But there are many times when you just need to sit down and book your flight and you don't want to do that on your phone. And the continue on feature where you have your phone next to it and it pops up on the screen, all that stuff is there, your files are there, all of these things. I mean, we explored this idea with the Motorola Atrix, you know, in 2014 or whenever that was probably before then. But now it's just this weird like this synthesizing thing where it just goes from your phone to your laptop all the files are there all the stuff's on your phone i think it's a really cool idea what blows me away is that the lock-in here is actually more intense than the iphone to the mac right because if you do not if you have an iphone google books are basically useless yeah that is kind of wild to me so if you're using an android phone you buy a 1200 laptop you can't get an iphone it just makes it useless.

49:07That is strange. I mean, useless is maybe an overstatement because I mean, I have an Android phone and I use a Mac and it's like, I think that same amount of features are not available to me, right? You still have an operating system. You still have a laptop, but then you're just into a Chromebook territory, right? Where it's like, it has a browser and it can run Android apps. And those Android apps may or may not be good enough for a desktop environment. I to me I'm just like I see the audience for this that they are competing with people who are going to buy Windows laptops. Yeah. And I am not sure if Google is ready to compete against Windows laptops.

49:45From a marketing perspective I'm not sure they are. From like from a what people usually do in their computers perspective I could totally say they are. I mean like people are there's a lot of people who are very mad at Windows these days. Yeah. Yeah. Do those overlap with the people who are looking for, who are Android fans, who are looking for this sort of integration? Like, can this appeal to that mainstream audience with this frustration brewing? my my feeling about the anger at windows and we've we've covered a lot of this and it's funny like i think our instruction at the beginning of the year is like we should do more linux coverage and that is just paid off like people are mad and the fact that you can run windows games better on linux than windows i think that all just has to do with how commercialized and shitified windows has become like it's it's just always asking you to do one more thing like you want to try copilot it like it's just kind of like mug you in a blind alley every time you use it yeah that's just like like there's whatever problems you might have with windows or not the fact that it has just gotten so engagement baity is a real problem right they're just always trying to get you to do the next thing microsoft would like you to do yeah google doesn't have that problem so much but there's a bunch of gemini in there right like i'm not sure that those experiences are going to be meaningfully different they'll just be different and maybe that's enough like maybe you're so upset with windows that you're going to go over there if google would like fully lean into the fact that android and linux have some commonalities and be like you can play windows games on here yeah and emulation like maybe that would change some hearts and minds uh but i'm with you that if you take away the android integration which is fascinating like the the merger of phone and laptop here is way beyond anything anything else is doing right i i think that's so cool but if you take that away you are kind of left with a chromebook with a backstop of android apps and that might not be enough yeah unless you just want a great chromebook maybe i'm back where i started i'm like this is just a great chromebook mom and dad please ignore the other interface metaphors but they are way too expensive for what people expect a chromebook to cost you know what i mean like they start at 900 and that's an interrupt introductory price for the acer one and they said it might change based on market conditions oh it will change the price of is making that go up.

51:59Yeah, this is market price, just like your fish. Yeah. No, I mean, I just, again, I think that we're in a time of like big new ideas about what computers should be. Yeah. And I'm just very happy to see Google basically throw caution to the wind. To your point about lock-in, right, if you don't have an Android phone, this isn't useful. And that means a lot of people are just not going to think they're useful. But what can you do when you know that there's a phone there with a bunch of applications on it? Can you just make that feel seamless with your laptop. I mean, that, how many variations of this promise have there been?

52:36Jake, like I'm thinking of the Motorola Atrix from like 2012. It is wild to me that at like the dawn of smartphones, a bunch of companies were like, this will be all of your computers. And then we spent like a decade being like, that was bad. We like, we made a mistake there. And now we're back to it where we're like, Like these things, it's all one operating system. It can do it all. We still have the same Android problems, right? Like Android, even today, like an Android smartphone is not a best in class app experience. And now they're saying, oh, we don't have any desktop apps, but you can use all the Android phone apps.

53:16And like, all right, Android tablets had problems because of, in part, the app ecosystem isn't there. and now they're doing this thing that I think everybody kind of liked in the Play Store. It'll tell you if one of the apps is best as an app or it'll say, oh, this is better as a website. Go to the website. Which on one hand - This is better as a website is one of the harshest burns an app store can possibly do. Yeah, it's really bad. But also it's so polite, but also like that convenience is showing their failure, right? That they have not gotten the desktop apps. Yeah, well, it's notable that Google's been spending so many years to make Android and the experiences on Android flexible for multiple screen sizes, right?

53:59First, it was for foldables. And then it was because they wanted to compete with decks. So you could plug your phone directly into display because people just have displays sitting around, I guess. And then now it makes sense, I guess, to like now that that foundation is there, you can feasibly just run it on a laptop. And I think that that's a cool evolution of the thing that they've been thinking about for a lot of years now. Obviously, not all the Android apps are going to be optimized for that kind of thing. They said, I think they said the half of the top 100, which is an interesting way to say 50.

54:33But that's something I guess. It's not the top 50. It's more equally. And you don't know if it's the bottom 50. It could be the bottom 50. Yeah. You know, what's funny is right next to that is Apple, which is like, here's a new form factor. Everybody write your apps from scratch for it. Yeah. The iPhone duo. Yeah. It's not an iPad. Within two months. We need all of your best engineers on reflections. There's something there. I mean, again, Google has done a lot of work to try to make their app ecosystem just appear more places. Yeah. Whereas Apple can just drag developers to be where they want.

55:07Yeah. But I do think for Apple, that has come at a cost, right? They're like, we want these very bespoke experiences. But I think it would be much harder for Apple to do things like this on, say, a forthcoming touchscreen MacBook. Yeah. because you're going to, it's here's yet another screen size and form factor interaction paradigm instead of, you know, and you can feel how you want about Google's approach to it and what that means the apps have become, but it is trivial for them to do these kinds of things now. For sure. Even with the foldable iPhone, there are now like eight new, like screen size paradigms that you have to code for, which I'm sure developers are very not happy about.

55:46So to me, at the end of the day, these laptops, the reason you end up choosing windows or mac or one or the other right now is usually there is a specific piece of software that i need on one or the other right if you are a professional and you need a specific piece of software you are just locked in and none of those specialized pieces of software are going to be on this platform right now and so they're appealing to an a subset of the audience right people who have android phones who do not need specialized pieces of software who are okay with what is going to be a developing experience of the apps that even do exist.

56:22What is interesting is that a lot of these specialized pieces of software are being ported to mobile. Like Premiere Pro just came out on Android like two days ago. But is it like full Premiere Pro? Well, is it? It's a Premiere Pro. It's a Premiere Pro. It's a Premiere Pro. This is the thing. It's like Lightroom is on Android. Yeah. But like, it's not Lightroom Classic. It's not quite the same. Yeah. It's not. I don't know. It's very exciting to see this. And the hardware, I think, looks much better than certainly I expected. These don't ship for a couple of weeks, but I'm really excited for folks to get their hands on them to see just what that interaction is actually like.

56:55Yeah. If anything, Google has done a, you know, they may have not done an amazing job at explaining what Google Books really are supposed to be to people, but they've kept it in the media cycle for a really long time. And now on October 4th, we're going to be all be doing reviews of it. So, you know, months ago, we were talking about it. We're talking about it this week and we're going to be talking about it next week. Yeah. It's an exciting time for laptops. All right. It's time to turn to the hype desk. Ashley Esqueda is here. Ashley. Hello. I'm here. I'm alive. Ashley, good to have you. It's been a minute.

57:27Where are you? I'm in an undisclosed hotel room in San Francisco. I like the secretiveness. I think this is good for you. Me too. I feel like Carmen Sandiego a little bit. Hype can happen anywhere at any time. That is true. We are entering a period of hotel design where it's like, I'm very close to being able to identify specifically what hotel you're in because they all look the same now. Yeah, I have to keep my I'm trying to keep a low profile. I can't be seen. I don't want people to identify where I am. It's important. You're spotting the trends early. All right, Ashley, what do you have for us today?

57:58You know, we got to talk about Blade because Mahershala Ali. We don't quite often see this level of shade from an A-list actor, an Oscar winning actor to somebody who is also very powerful in Hollywood. Kevin Feige of Marvel. But he was interviewed and Mahershala Ali, they asked, the interviewer asked Mahershala Ali about Kevin Feige having said, you know, that he felt like a gigantic loser and a failure, that they couldn't get the Blade movie off the ground with Mahershala Ali. And Mahershala Ali just looked this interviewer in the eye and said, he's 100 % right. He should feel that way. He's a failure and a loser.

58:42Just straight up just came for him so hard. Like just right up right out front. Kevin, he said it was the biggest failure of his career. And I said the quote was, I feel like a giant loser and failure for not getting off the ground. I agree with him. I agree with him. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. He should feel that way. My entire TikTok feed is clips of this interview and it is incredible. Mahershala is just like, Like, he's chill and he's just like, this is how it is. Like, we all know this. This is not controversial, even within Disney. Yeah. First of all, I just want to point out, he's wearing an incredible jacket in this interview.

59:20And I was not able to, like, view the content of the interview or, like, understand what was being said to me because I spent so much time trying to decide if I could pull off that jacket. The answer is no. The answer is flatly no. I have one style of jacket that works for me, and it's not that one. So I tried to do this exercise where I tried to remember the existing Wesley Snipes Blade movies. Like, I didn't go watch them. I didn't think about them. I didn't, like, read the Wikipedia summaries. All I remember, I barely remember the first one. I have zero. There's zero content in my brain about the second Blade movie, which I know exists.

59:57Nothing. Okay. And the thing that stands out to me is the third one is the most incredibly bananas movie that I can recall. It is bonkers. First of all, it has Dracula in it. Dracula's hot, but like an older hot, because he's like a million years old, because he's Dracula. And they insistently call him Drake throughout the movie. These are the facts that I know in my brain. I can't believe this is what you remember at the Blade franchise. I don't remember any of the plot. I just remember Hot Dracula is insistently called Drake throughout this movie, and Ryan Reynolds is in it. Ryan Reynolds. These are the two.

1:00:31Yeah, I remember that too. Well, the first one, though, I love the first Blade movie, so I remember quite a bit. I remember loving the first Blade movie, too, but there's nothing in my brain about it. Blood Rave? You don't remember the Blood Rave where they're all at the club? They're in the club and everyone's fam, and then it rains blood and all the vampires are all excited. That could be any of the Blade movies. Like, all of the Blade movies have that scene in it. Oh, no. Now I'm scared that it's Blade. Oh, no. Now I'm scared. The point that I'm trying to make here is, one, the third one has some kind of crazy psychic hold on me where all I remember is hot Dracula.

1:01:08That's what I got. And I know Chris Christopherson is in them for some reason. Like, he just needed money. But everybody likes hot Dracula. But here's my question. Based on all this controversy, and they tried to make another one, and obviously Wesley Snipes was in the Deadpool movie, and he's like, there's never going to be another Blade. I really, I'm curious if the people at Disney, if Kevin Feige sat down and said, we're going to make a new Blade movie. I've got all this IP. And they watched those movies and they thought to themselves, there's no way that you can make another movie like this.

1:01:38Not even top this, like, just even, like, acknowledge that that happened and you can do something else. Like, once you get to hot Dracula, you, like, you might be done. Because you can't go gritty, realistic Blade from there. Well, you could, but, like, I mean, that's coming down from a silliness high. That's, like, that's a tough transition. There's sort of an inherent silliness of it. I think you might, that could be a thing. That could be very real. Just to bring it back to jackets. Again, I haven't watched this movie. I didn't look at any clips. What I remember about that movie is I wish I could wear jackets, like Hot Dracula has jackets in that movie.

1:02:17Top tier jackets in the Blade series. Let's all, I mean, I will say that. I can remember the top tier jackets in all three movies. So you remember like the second Blade movie. It's in your brain. I'm thinking of the first two are just mushed together into one giant Blade movie. So I like I feel like. See what I mean? Like, I think Marvel had this exact problem where the Blade movies and Wesley Slipes' Blade are so permeated into the consciousness, but not in a specific way, just in a general way. There's no way to move on. Sort of nebulous. Like it was easy to move on from like Val Kilmer's Batman.

1:02:49You're like, well, that didn't matter. Yeah. Right. And even in some way, it was easy to get to a Robert Pattinson Batman because you're like, well, this is done. Right? Like this thing is done. This is complete. We're going to start again. I don't know. I feel what Mahershala is saying here. Like he got screwed up. They were in pre-production from what I understand from that interview. Those are conversations that should have happened before they hired Mahershala Ali, you know? I think the point we're trying to make here is Ashley and I will watch all three Blade movies and try to write a new one.

1:03:19I'll do it this weekend. We'll get it, Marvel. We'll get it done. This is what AI is for. If you need one, yeah. 100%. No, no, we can't do it that way. We have to, that's only a true good Blade movie, a crazy, a one that takes a psychic hold on you can only be written by human minds. The problem in the current AI safety debate might be that the Blade movies are in the training data. And that might be why they're trying to kill us all. Think about it. That could be. All right, Ash, we got to let you get back to your undisclosed location. But there's news. There is news. We have a sponsor on the Hype Desk.

1:03:55Let's watch it.

1:04:00If you're like me, you need music around you all day long. I got my first Sonos setup all the way back in 2013. Yes, I am very old. I had a tiny apartment. So two speakers was enough to fill my entire place with sound. Then, when my family moved into our house, it was super easy to expand the system. I was able to add each new speaker to my existing setup with just a few short taps in the Sonos app. Recently, Sonos was kind enough to send over an adventure set, which includes two Sonos Plays. These speakers work seamlessly with the Sonos system I already have. I work from home, so these Sonos Play speakers mean I never have to be without music.

1:04:41If I'm working at my desk, or when I take a break to read in the yard, it comes with me. And when I head to the garage to lift weights, I bring both speakers because the louder the music, the heavier I can lift. Okay, fine, I made that last part up, but it feels like a scientific fact in my heart. And if I need some extra oomph in the living room, these will come in very handy as some excellent surround speakers for my Sonos soundbar. Especially if I upgrade to the Sonos Beam Ultra. You know, if two speakers help me lift heavier, maybe two speakers will help me fold my laundry faster? I have to go test the theory for science.

1:05:18Start building your system at Sonos.com. Support for the show comes from Sonos. Most of us here at The Verge are big movie buffs. When watching at home, I don't want that experience to be any less immersive than it would be in a theater. And sound plays a huge role in that. The Verge has actually published a few pieces over the years about how much sound matters to a movie. From headphones to sound bars, a Sonos system pulls you in. So far, you might actually think the phone call is coming from inside the house. Visit Sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

1:06:05All right, we're back. And after a long two-week absence, it's time once again for everyone's favorite segment, Nealai? It's time now for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brennan Carr is a dummy. Brennan Carr is a big old dummy. He says things that aren't that funny. No, so we can laugh. When we come together, we can call him an ass.

1:06:33I like that riff at the end. That was very good. That was good. That's why Greg Pierce, who may or may not be David Pierce in a track record. Very unclear. That was great. That was a good one. I do like these analog ones. I did like the extremely harsh AI slop one, but the producers won't let me run AI slop on the show. So that's the rule. You gotta make it yourself, even if it's a banger. So this week on Brennan Carr's Dummy, I first want to address the number one tip we've ever gotten here on America's Favorite Podcast from the podcast, which is a Guardian report that Brennan Carr was in an offshoot AA chapter that may or may not have been a cult that had some very unsavory things happen in it.

1:07:15Many people have sent this to me. We're just not going to touch it. Because one, he was a teenager, it appears, during this time. And two, there's no allegations of any unsavory things. So what you do when you're a teenager, when you're maybe attempting to get sober, like, just not for us. Like, that's not the point of the segment. The point is that he's in power now and doing dumb, harmful things now. and you can attribute that to whatever history, but he's got the power now. So you can go read the Guardian piece. We'll link it. It's there for you if you want it. But I'm much more focused on the fact that this week cities and townships across the country are protesting an FCC rule Brendan has put forth that would essentially take away their ability to hold ISPs accountable for not building the broadband they promise.

1:08:03That seems much more relevant to me. You see what I mean? This is the balance I'm striking. I do think he's a dummy. I think he's a danger to the First Amendment and a traitor to our Constitution. I just don't care about what he did in high school. You feel me? That feels appropriate. That's the line I'm drawing. You can disagree with me. But this week, the FCC has a rule out that would preempt local regulations about broadband deployment. They say, as Brendan is wont to say, that cities are holding up permits. They're preventing broadband. And if you would just deregulate, the ISPs would finally show up in your town and build the fiber you've been asking for.

1:08:36Do you believe this? Do you think it's the local communities that are holding up the broadband providers? Surely that is not correct. The governments in response to their filings say ISPs themselves are often to blame. I'm reading Ars Technica now. The groups representing local governments urged the FCC to issue new rules that apply to providers and suggested a requirement that ISPs deploy networks within 180 days of local authorization. So the fight here is that ISPs get permits. They hoard them. They don't do anything about them. The clock runs out on the cities and the FCC has decided that this is the city's fault because they're not approving permits fast enough.

1:09:14And the cities are saying, why don't you pass a rule that would let us force the broadband providers to take action on the permits we issue and build the broadband? Brendan Carr, everybody. Anytime there's a fight in which the ISPs are involved, he will pick the ISPs and make sure that your broadband does not get faster or cheaper here in America, where we pay the most money for the slowest broadband amongst all of our competitor nations. Three up, everybody. That's what I got for you. As usual, there's a bunch of speech stuff going on. I think I wasn't here when another James Tallarico interview ended up on YouTube instead of the airwaves.

1:09:51That's all Bruin in court. But every now and again, I want to bring it back to our roots, which is you should have faster, cheaper internet. And our FCC is pretty bad at delivering that to you. And Brendan in particular has made it harder and continues to try to make that harder. As always, Brendan, if you can come on the show and defend any of this, I'm happy to talk to you. Here at Decoder, on the street, we could do a live stream you from Metaglasses. That appears to be all the rage. There's a light. Did you know? Phones don't have a light. that's when Brendan Carr is a dummy America's favorite podcast within a podcast Brendan Carr is a dummy

1:10:32that was beautiful unlike Brendan's actions as FC chairman you know we didn't talk about the we didn't talk about the muse butt at all oh yeah Jake I feel like you steered me against it I'm so sorry listen it was unintentional shall we that's the top of the lightning round everyone it's time for the lightning round and we've got an important story to open with nilai i was gonna start i was gonna start with paramount you you listen we decided that this should be a good vibes round and i think that we got to start with alexander wang's uh horny tweets for the ai mascot he created it's paramount we start with this come on it's true what what is going to entertain more people over time is it the paramount warner brothers merger or is it alexander wang tweeting pictures of the meta muse mascot jolly just with butt there's no other way to describe i mean it is a picture of its butt and he's like is this doing anything for you i have to say i appreciate that a major company executive has a personality like you know i talked to a lot of them a lot of them are robots uh alexander wang is just like i'm doing horny tweets about my mascot uh the other one that i very much appreciated from him uh was a comparison all the ai logos and someone said uses the only one that doesn't look like a butthole and his his response was to quote tweet it and say state of the art motherfuckers which again is it the appropriate personality you can make some art is it a personality that's true and it did make me laugh i did i did laugh at this one Listen, this is the most winning meta has been in the AI race.

1:12:15And he's feeling it. He's feeling good. Listen, if this is what it means for us, I'll take more entertaining tweets from Alexander Wang. Yeah. All right, Eli. You got another for us? We should talk about Paramount briefly. Yes. Okay. So this week, the big news in the Paramount-Warner merger is that the state suing them for antitrust to block the merger, most notably California, settled the case. There are some restrictions in there. I think the big ones are CNN is going to get an independent editorial board of experienced journalists. That board will be appointed by the Paramount Warner board.

1:12:49So, like, we'll see, like, how independent can they really be? We've learned a lot about the power you get when you appoint your own board members, but that's the promise. They're going to promise to release 30 movies a year from the combined studio. Or if they don't do that, pay$30 million per movie they don't release into health care and retirement funds managed by the Hollywood unions. So we'll see. There's a lot of that in here, but I think a big part of the story is that California appears to have caved. The Ellison threat to take Paramount out of California and move it to Nashville or Texas appears to have rattled the politicians in California, including the attorney general, and they were like, we got to get this done.

1:13:29Figure out the remedies, get this done. And they got it done. This feels like Paramount 1, for sure, right? It absolutely feels like Paramount 1. Paramount agreed to release movies. Like that's movie stuff. Agrees to release movies. Well, there's going to be an independent board of someone. Yeah. Oh, no. CNN will. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The head of CNN apparently gave an all hand speech yesterday when she said, I literally don't know what's going to happen now. And I mean, it's just really unclear now. Like they got to this finish line. There was a lot of pressure on this deal. They got it done. There's some reports that Elon Musk will now be an investor in the deal.

1:14:05By the way, Brendan, who cares so much about the fairness of broadcast news, approved an exception to foreign investment rules and is allowing a bunch of Saudi money, 49.5 % of the deal being financed by Saudi money. And he says, well, they'll be hands off. Cool. Fine. Our FCC is very worried about Jimmy Kimmel and not so worried about foreign money flooding into our big studios that own big news organizations. there's just a lot of corruption in this deal. I think a lot of people feel and sense that corruption, but it's done. It's going to happen. We're going to see what happens next. Yeah. A mysterious board that is in place to determine whether you are a biased reporter that feels, I understand where they're coming from.

1:14:54I understand the intention there. They're trying to avoid a CBS takeover, but man, the, the, the broad strokes of that feel uncomfortable. Yeah. We'll see. I mean, again, the deal is closed. You know what's going to happen. There's going to be a bunch of downstream weird tech things. These apps are going to get merged. David Ellison has talked for a long time about how we he's going to we don't have to lay people off because we'll achieve synergy and merging the tech platforms. We're going to run it like a tech company. So get ready. I just hope they finish lanterns before they start ruining the app because if that gets disrupted, I'll be very unhappy.

1:15:33All right. David, what have you got for us? All right. So every year YouTube hosts a made on YouTube event throughout the AI era. It's basically been whatever the AI industry is pushing on people that year. So in previous years, it's been, you know, a chat bot that you can talk to about your videos. They introduced AAB thumbnail testing last year, which is a good feature that we use a lot. That one I do see a lot. That one you see a lot. There's thumbnail testing. There's also title testing. And, you know, we're already kind of approaching this world where my reality is not quite your reality.

1:16:06But I feel like that stays in the little the little happy medium. Is the thumbnail you're seeing the same as the thumbnail I'm seeing? Is that like, yeah, that's like the very beginnings this year, because it is 2026. And the talk of the AI world this year is agents doing things. There is now an AI YouTube agent that will work in the background to optimize your channel. so it will review the backlog of your videos and it will look for content that has taken a new life so if the analytics of a video that you made five years ago are randomly popping off it'll suggest that you make a new thumbnail or a new title for this video so that it traffics better on the platform that seems okay that seems okay um it will also automatically generate you a new youtube thumbnail.

1:16:53Oh my gosh. Which is a little less okay, but you know, I think that's the future that is happening to YouTube for sure. Hyper optimization. There are a lot of new features that got announced, but the one that I want to talk to you about specifically is AB video testing. Yes. The entire video? Well, it's a little unclear. YouTube does not quite know what the boundaries of this are going to be yet uh they say it's going to release later so i think that they're going to change this around a lot but the the idea that they give to these people is like well imagine you have a hook for your video and it might not work for all of your viewers so you make multiple versions of the intro of your video so that different people get served a different hook and it tracks different well differently for different people it's so and then when it lands on one that's working the best for the most amount of people, it just collapses that, it collapses the wave function and everybody gets the same video.

1:17:55That's weird. In my opinion, that's weird. They don't say exactly what the boundaries are for how different the videos can be. You know, you can make one review where you say the Galaxy S26 is awful and one where you say it's amazing. And if people really like the one where you say it's awful, then it pushes that video. When I think about when I when I see things like this are how is this going to be abused? Yeah, because every single YouTube features that's ever come out has been just abused, abused, abused. We used to have annotations on YouTube where if you made a mistake in your video, you could leave a little tag on top of the video that said this is a thing.

1:18:30Go to this link to learn more. And then people started doing crypto scams on them. They got rid of annotations. All I think about with this is how are people going to abuse this? And this pushes, I think, a little past that boundary of like, is my reality your reality? Because you're talking about a video you watched on YouTube and you watched a totally different video, but it was under the same name, the same link. That's very strange to me. All right. So it's interesting to have this conversation because I appreciate your perspective as somebody who works a lot on YouTube and also cares a lot about journalism.

1:19:01And I spent a lot of time talking to money. And so Mr. Ethics Policy here is going to tell you, oh, this makes perfect sense to me. Okay. Because all of these platforms are marketing platforms. Yeah. And so if you swim in the swamps of D2C video marketing, which I do way too often and have poisoned my brain, the way that YouTube is talking about almost every single one of these features is just something that the cutting edge of marketing has been doing to YouTube forever. Right. And so even the AB video testing, their example is, if you have two different hook ideas in mind and you want to try them, you can just run them, which is a thing marketers want to do all the time.

1:19:45Right. So Gary Vaynerchuk, who is more aggressive about these platforms than any single other person I've ever talked to, uploads like 800 videos a day from just his channels across like seven platforms. Wow. And you can watch videos of him and he's like, all of you care about quality. I can't measure that. I can measure quantity. And so if I flood these platforms, these algorithmic social platforms that are all interest graphs now, not follow graphs, I will see what's working. I will take that data and I will use it to reheat all the videos from the catalog over and over and over again. And I am telling you, this man regularly goes viral with seven-year-old content all the time.

1:20:27And he's just building systems to do it. So from one perspective, YouTube is just like, well, they're doing it to us. We're just going to give the tools to everyone. Yeah. Because that's what everyone's doing. And from the other perspective, it's, well, if you want to sell your illegal peptides, like the best thing YouTube can do for you is tell you which hooks are going to perform because then you're going to make more videos for YouTube. And that is coming to all of these other platforms. And if you watch the way the marketers talk about videos, the most insane thing I've ever seen is someone break down, like we've uploaded 50 videos.

1:21:01We've cut them into different parts. So you have like the hook, the content and the call to action in a marketing video. And they're like, we figure out which hook works better. We figure out which thing converts into sales. And then we just like put it back in the clod and it remixes all of our videos and it turns 30 videos into a thousand videos. And then we just run them again. And it's like, oh, this is really bad. It's really bad, but it is what is happening on these platforms every minute of every day. And it's just funny to me that my view of it is YouTube is actually behind. Yeah. Yeah.

1:21:33I think if you're a consumer, you're like, oh, this is some really bad things are going to start happening. Right. I totally understand like the business mindset for this, because obviously YouTube wants to keep people on the platform for longer. Everything everybody always thinks about view duration and like retention graphs. Right. And so when you can keep people on the platform longer, it plays another ad for YouTube. That's exactly what they want. They want that to happen. And what feels bad is that instead of everything being about quality content, like you said, it's just about content. Like if we're optimizing for what people's brains are just going to stare at the longest, you're just sort of like moving all content towards this one stream of like it is just content for your eyeballs that your dopamine receptors are feasting on.

1:22:17I completely understand that that's exactly YouTube's incentive structure. it just feels like a far end of the inshittification of the platform. I feel like there's something funny here where YouTube is acting like they are not in control of the platform, right? Like if your stuff happens to be picking up, right, then you could go and optimize it. You can go and do, you can change the thumbnail, you can change the title, you can recirculate in your own ways rather than YouTube saying, oh, this is relevant. We have noticed it is relevant. We're going to serve it to more people as is because people like it as is.

1:22:51They're saying you can go and do a bunch more work to try to hack our platform to get more views. And everything like within these AI announcements is we will tell you how to win on the platform. We will not change the platform because the platform is optimized to get as many like views as possible. It's just so interesting because imagine like if a documentary that was uploaded to YouTube five years later, the platform AI agent was just like, oh, change the name of and the thumbnail of that document. It's like, it's so strange to live in that world. I understand the business case for it, but it feels wrong.

1:23:25I don't even think it's a business case. To your point, all these features get gamed and the shift from you're going to have followers or even notifications from the people you follow when they upload a new video to everything is algorithmic has actually changed the game. For sure. And I don't see any of these platforms pulling back from that anytime soon. Yeah. I think TikTok has basically like made itself irrelevant because it's fallen so far down this hole. Yeah. That everything is weird video game streaming slop or TikTok shop or something. Like something has happened to that platform where it used to be the center of culture that everyone was afraid of to now just sort of like being around.

1:24:06Yeah, I completely agree with that. I used to hear people talking about, oh, did you see that TikTok? Did you see that TikTok? I hear that. I never hear that anymore. I feel like Instagram has kind of eaten that. whether that has to do with Larry Ellison I don't know Mark wins again he's relentless Mark wins again it happened anyway do you have an exciting one for us? I well exciting isn't exactly what I would put it yeah the state of Xbox continues to that's what the opposite of exciting a giant meteor is headed for Earth I just said Xbox and everyone flinched like what happened this time we had like a lovely two months where everyone was like Asha Sharma's gonna save the world that's true and then she's like about that so she's like we did a translucent xbox yeah we will now lay off a lot of people and cut down a bunch of these studios so there was another round this week uh which was the the layoffs were smaller it was less than 300 people um which in the scope of things is is not their biggest however the changes they made to the studios feel like some of the most monumental that they have done right so Previously, they had shut down a bunch of studios.

1:25:14Now they're consolidating a lot of the teams that are left. And I think the most notable one to me is what they're doing with Halo. So for the longest time, right, they had 343 studios. They had their independent little team that was focused on Halo. That wasn't going so well, so they rebooted it as Halo Studios. Halo Studios, their first project was they changed the engine. They went to Unreal Engine. They made Halo Campaign Evolved, where they remade Halo CE. It got very good reviews from what I saw. The game looks very good. And the expectation was, okay, they remade the original Halo. They figured out how to make a great Halo.

1:25:52Now they're going to go do their own thing. Nope, because now Halo is part of Activision. And that is sort of the story of all these changes where everything is just, for the most part, flowing under Activision Blizzard, and they're going to be put in charge of the future of Xbox exclusive gaming for so many of these titles. and King is going to be put in charge of a bunch of these smaller titles. And it's like... Yeah. Can I add something? Yes. King is going to be put in charge of Solitaire and Minesweeper. Yes. Which I didn't know were receiving updates. I will say... That I'm kind of into. I think there's something there.

1:26:31I'd play King Minesweeper. Yeah, I guess. Those in-app purchases are going to be crazy. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Microtransactions. The only thing I have to add to this is I only recently discovered that Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is from Racine, Wisconsin, which is my hometown. And I have proposed that I interview her at my high school. That would be amazing. The ask is out. I haven't asked my high school if I can do this yet. Just show up. But I'm just saying, I'm just trying to manifest. I think that'd be pretty good. I think that's very good. The state of Xbox is shaky. is not very good. She, yeah.

1:27:11I think this is, it's interesting. I saw the reactions and a lot of people were like, uh, you know, those others, like, Halo wasn't going so well previously, so like, let's see what happens. But, it feels like the Activision Blizzard acquisition has eaten Xbox. Yeah. And they are dealing with the Fallout at this point. Wow. Also Fallout. Because that's also being re - Fallout. Uh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Okay. Maybe we can end on something a little more positive. Okay. I like that. Neela, do you have anything for us? I do. And I'm very excited to end on some positive news here.

1:27:47Let's go. So do you guys know what a Rodecaster is? I'm sure you do. Yeah. You're nerds. Australian. Rode is an audio tech... How would you describe Rode? Rode makes all the microphones. I'm talking to you. Yeah. The tape here is covering up a Rode logo on my mic stand. Probably the most popular wireless mic for creators as well. Yeah. They're everywhere. They make a bunch of microphones. They make a bunch of podcasting equipment. they just put out a firmware update for several of their products that enables 4k support love it so in almost every other part of our industry to be like if you want 4k the companies would say you have to buy new hardware or charge for the firmware update rog did it for free so roadcaster firmware update 1.4 adds 4k support to a whole bunch of road products and it's just free and they even say it in the video like no charge like they seem surprised that they're doing this and i just think it's great i just think it's it's so nice to see a company like substantive meaningful firmware update to a whole bunch of products they already sold and they just did it and like everyone's happy and it's been a minute since something like that has happened and everyone's happy yeah good on you road yeah i'm still gonna keep the tape on the logo on this microphone fujifilm actually used to uh get a lot of uh accolades for this because they had something called the kaizen update which like a year after a product would come out they would just be like here's everything that we would have put in the product if we had time or resources and just like road a year after the fujifilm xt2 in 2017 came out they released 4k video support and everyone was like that's crazy i never expected this to have 4k so good on road but rules uh yeah we gotta end on the high note that's it that's the high note i love it that's fantastic it's not a new idea about computers it's a very old idea about paying for things should i use muse should i use muse listen do it okay send it shopping for you look there there are things you can do with muse that already exist like jake pointed out meta already has your facebook and instagram data yeah you can just have it do stuff on those platforms for you The funniest one is that it works with Marketplace.

1:30:01Oh. So if you're like trying to do stuff on Marketplace, it can just do it. Negotiate for me. That's interesting. Yeah, it can just be like, are you a real person or are you a murderer? Like on your behalf for you on Marketplace. Their big pitch is that it is a haggling machine. Like Zuck had like a big thing on stage behind him where he's like, Muse will save you money, right? They're purely at like, this is going to go argue with companies for you. Oh boy. So like, yeah, good luck out there. Let us know what marketplace funds you get next week. Okay, that's it for the Vergecast. We're ending on a high note.

1:30:36Neelai, what's happened on Decoder? On Decoder, I did a deep look at Zuck's answers. He gave the same answers to Heath and Joanna. These are the answers he gives. So I just did a reaction because I asked Meta and they said no, I wonder why. And on Monday, I believe we had the CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, who straight up, we talked about his Wall Street Journal op-ed, which the journal title, he was not happy about the title, but the journal titled, How I Choose to Fire People with AI. Whoa. It's a lot. Yeah. That's a real good blame it on your editor one. It wasn't good. Aye, aye, aye. All right.

1:31:13This Sunday, look out for new episodes of our back to school season of version history. This one is about one laptop per child. That's me. David's on there. That's right. Love it. People are really into the season. It's been super fun. We did a live stream of Oregon Trail last week. It was a blast. You should catch up on it if you haven't checked it out yet. Remember, you can subscribe to TheVerge.com for ad-free episodes of all of our podcasts, exclusive newsletters, and so much more. We'd love to hear from you. You can email us at vergecastatheverge.com or call the hotline at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network.

1:31:49Today's show is produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We'll see you next week. Nealai. Back on it all.

1:31:59Support for the show comes from Sonos. Think about the first time you heard your favorite song. Who were you with? What did it make you feel? Was it the music or the lyrics that grabbed you first? And what were the specific tech specs of the sound system it was playing on? Yeah, nobody remembers that last part. Sonos gets that. Their system is designed to just be there. clear, ready, out of the way, so nothing stands between you and the next song that hits you out of left field. For a bunch of years now, I've been incredibly jealous of my friends who have Sonos speakers. I was just always impressed how all that sound and punch and energy came from that speaker in the corner.

1:32:40But Sonos recently sent me two of its play speakers, and now I truly, truly get it. Everyone knows that the quality is immediately noticeable when you listen to a Sonos speaker, But the bigger thing that I've learned is how everything is working together and creating this little ecosystem. It's just really important to me, especially as audio has become more integrated into our daily media lives, whether that's music, a movie, and yes, the Vergecast or Virgin History or Decoder. I want it to sound as good as possible. Visit Sonos.com and build your system. Sonos. Love the sound. Feel the system.