The robots, phones and Lego of CES 2026

26:31Again, I want to be the person who doesn't carry anything but a phone, but if you're the person who needs to have a tablet, sometimes it also feels like you're gonna annoy everyone around you when you're like sorry guys i don't have my laptop i just have this dumb thing yeah so all right before before we switch gears the the biggest things that this show does are tvs and nonsense and we're gonna do those after we take a break but before we get to tvs and nonsense we gotta talk about smart home stuff because that's the other thing i think that ces has pretty aggressively become the last few years because it's a gadget show.

27:08Smart home stuff is all gadgets. Well, and it's like if this is the new what what mobile accessories were 10 years ago, right, which is the most sort of simple, easy technology to make lots of is now smart home gadgets. It's pretty easy to make a bunch of water ingress sensors that you can put in a house, right? There's a lot of ways you can get into this market if you're a small company or trying to do new stuff. So what we have is just a truly wild amount of smart home stuff from i feel like i'm obligated by verge cast law to point out that the reason for that is that the standards have started working yeah yeah matter is just you were mr poo poo matter it's gonna go away i was wrong i'm thrilled to have been wrong i really matter as a standard has enabled all kinds of companies to make all kinds of new stuff uh the new smart lock standard which is called aliro which is very silly that is official now i think we're gonna see many more kinds of locks and it's just because you can plug this stuff into home kit into google home into smart things into whatever you want into Alexa.

28:09It works with both Android and iOS. Like the standard enabled more companies to participate, which again, if you're a VergeCast listener, you know that we have won. We have vanquished capitalism. We've made these companies develop a standard. They all work together. And that means actually there's more competition, which is good. Yeah. No, I agree. So we've seen a ton of gadgets. I would say big things we've seen are there's a A lot of smart lock stuff happening here. Using your face to unlock your front door, using your veins to unlock your front door, using all kinds of needles with scans. You hold your hand over it.

28:46You don't. Just to be clear, I don't like it either way. Either one. All of this to me is just like I've been I've been rewatching the Mission Impossible movies. And all of this to me is like, it just feels like somebody is trying to do Mission Impossible when actually a long time ago we realized that keys are really good. They're just not as cool on camera. No, we have the Slage locks, the previous ones, and beeping it with an Apple Watch or a phone, tremendously useful. I'll give you that. And even like the NFC tap stuff, like one of the reasons I think Aliro is going to be exciting is that it makes that sort of quick contact thing work.

29:20Right. And the idea that I should be able to walk up, touch my phone or my wrist or whatever to the front door and it opens. Awesome. The idea that what I actually want is to stand in front of it while it does a retinal scan is like, no, I don't work in a clean room in the CIA. No, that is not required to get into my house. But anyway, did anything of the smart home stuff excite you? Is there anything in here that you're looking for? There's a lot of smart shades. That's what I was going to call out. We didn't realize this, but the data shows Verge House listeners are very into smart shades. Yes, it does.

29:50Who knew? So Lutron has new wood blinds in its Cassetta line, which I'm not a wood blinds person, but their pricing is really interesting. It's just a flat cost for every size. Every other, if you go and try to like, if you go on Amazon and get the Canasteo ones that I bought, as you enter in the specs, the pricing changes and it seems like it's really expensive really fast. So Lutron is just like, whatever, they cost this much. Cassetta stuff is really reliable because Lutron owns its own RF frequencies. Like they bought Spectrum and they run it. So that's great. Not Matter, but they integrate with all the platforms.

30:30And then GE, or is it GE Lighting, a different division of a different conglomerate? Who knows at this point? The 30 Rock jokes just write themselves. They really do. All these brands have been split up and bought by PE and weird Chinese conglomerates. But GE Lighting, to be specific, has new matter-compatible shades at$300. That's great. I mean, again, this is what I mean by the standards are enabling more companies to just enter these markets and bring these prices down. If you were going to ship the proprietary Zigbee shades or whatever people were using, no one is going to buy them because they wouldn't integrate in anything.

31:03And you would have to maintain the software bridges to blah, blah, blah to connect to HomeKit. Now it does matter. So you can just ship this stuff. I'm confident this is a rebranding of whatever. I'm dying to buy this to figure out what it's a rebrand of. It's undoubtedly a rebrand of something. But you see that there's just more entrance in the market and the pricing is going to come down or become more rational. Lutron pricing everything at the same number, regardless of size, I think is, in the world of smart trades, a big deal. It means the prices are going to come down on the bigger stuff.

31:38There's also a bunch of other neat stuff. Do you see this lithics mirror that is just like a matter compatible mirror with like lights in it that you can plug in the wall? They have a new dimmer switch, which looks bananas. It's also a matter controller. A lot of pressure is going to end up on Apple to make these matter buttons work better. So I have a scene controller in my house. It just has like five buttons on it, four buttons on it. And what you want is to assign each of those buttons to a light. Right. And so when you push it, it turns on. And when you push it, it turns off. Do you know HomeKit does not natively support that functionality?

32:13What does it do? It's meant, the way it's designed right now, is that it's meant that you need one scene that's on and one scene that's off. And you assign one button to on and off. So to control one light, you have to use two buttons, which is bananas. Or, you're going to love this, you can write a shortcut that checks the state of the light and says, if light is on, turn off. If light is off, turn on. And so you end up writing this like little basic program. And this is all ridiculous. Like Apple needs to figure this stuff out because there's now a flood of these devices. And the other platforms are going to get better at it real fast because they have incentives to get better at it real fast.

32:52So you just see like, oh, there's something happening here that's really interesting where there's new kinds of controllers, new kinds of tools, new kinds of lights, new kinds of shades. And the platforms themselves now have incentive to help people get use out of it. The really interesting one here, do you see this Mew board? Yes. Jen Toohey's all-time favorite gadget in history, it appears. This has been Jen's white whale of a smart home controller for as long as I have known Jen. I mean, it's just a plank of wood that you match on the wall. I'm very curious to see what it looks like in person, because when you touch it, it lights up behind your finger.

33:23It's basically like a capacitive touchscreen underneath a wood plank, essentially, right? But does it have dots drilled into the wood? How is the light getting through the wood? That's a really good question. Or is it just really, really thin veneer? I'm just dying to know. It looks like it's just really, really thin veneer over a screen. Yeah. Like a dot matrix display. But this thing itself is a Matter Controller. So the question I have is, when you say it's a Matter Controller, does that mean you have to add all of your stuff to this Things Matter platform as well? Or can it just read your Apple and Google ones?

34:00Or your Alexa ones? Like, at some point you run into this, oh everything's interoperable but i'm still adding devices to two independent ecosystems for no reason whereas what it should be is i have one ecosystem and all of these tools can control it right and we're not there at all yet that like i i've been dealing with this so i bought a bunch of button a bunch of these ikea buttons uh with no idea what i was going to do with them they were just eight bucks a piece and i was like sure i'll buy some ikea buttons um and the the process of getting them to work and do the things they're supposed to do is so much easier than the process of figuring out how I manage the settings of the thing.

34:38Do you know what I mean? It's like the administration of this network is vastly more complicated than actually operating the network. Again, like as matter gets more ubiquitous and gets more robust, like all this stuff starts to get better, but it does rely on Amazon and Apple and Google and all of these other providers have actual lots of work left to do to make this happen and this brings me to we're going to talk a lot more about alexa plus um on wednesday because i have a lot of feelings about it that i need to go use a bunch of devices to really sort out but just one more smart home gadget i want to mention is um a new coffee machine from bosch um it's called the personal ai barista which i hate just hate that and it's basically an Alexa plus coffee machine and Bosch has had Alexa enabled coffee machines before and what Jen discovered in attempting to use this thing is that Alexa plus is much worse at understanding basic coffee instructions than Alexa and this goes back to a lot of things we've been talking about right where it's like actually what what Alexa plus is really good at is like open-ended conversation and sort of understanding complicated inputs.

35:52What I need from my coffee machine is latte, skim milk. And that's actually much better suited to the last generation of voice assistants. And with all of these things, I think, again, we're talking sort of at these different layers of AI, right? Where it's like, what I want some things to do is be open-ended and conversational and thoughtful. And then with other ones, I want the Star Trek thing, tea, Earl Grey, hot. That is as complex as my interaction with my coffee maker needs to be. And it feels like what we're seeing here in many ways is we're just like way overshooting conversationality.

36:27And what we actually need to get back to is like, just make the thing easy to use. And with all of this smart home stuff, it's like, but there's so much new stuff it can do. And I'm just like, does it turn the light on and off when I push the button? That's the bar. me saying that smart home is canary in the coal mine for ai is it's like a verge cast meme it's on the bingo card it is on the travis wants to vibe code the bingo card it goes there i need to correct you by the way it's very important that i correct you it's actually called the personal ai barista powered by alexa plus sure and it is not a product it is a software capability coming to the bosch 800 series of fully automatic espresso machine i will not be doing that software upgrade So instead of just something that's understandable, you actually have a complicated software platform.

37:11You're going to wake up one morning and instead of being useful, your coffee maker is going to be like, what's up, dude? How are you doing today? Hold on. And you're like, do you love me? And you're going to fall down the rabbit hole. And I'm just going to stand there and yell coffee at it until something happens. Look, this is the promise. This is why everybody's so excited about AI, or at least LLMAI, which is all of this stuff is brittle. Fundamentally, all computers are brittle. and if you put the wrong inputs in the API, the API crashes out and nothing happens. If you misprogram your IR blaster automation in your 1995 home theater, the TV doesn't turn off.

37:45Like it's all brittle. It all falls apart if the inputs and the outputs don't match up, if the system gets the wrong input. And the whole point of AI is to reduce the brittleness of the input. As far as I can tell, that's what we're trying to get to. And then you can make a whole bunch of claims about how Claude Opus is now alive or whatever people are saying on X in between whatever sex bot scandal we're doing on X. I don't think it's actually working out. I think we've reduced the perception of the brittleness, but then you're like, make me an espresso and it can't do it as well as the previous brittle system.

38:21That's the big mismatch. Well, isn't it that both things that you just said can be true, right? That it is better at understanding unclear communication and worse at understanding clear communication? It is like the tacit assumption of every one of these AI bots is that something complicated is happening. And I have to address all of this complexity with lots of context and all of this information. And I have to go look on the web. And it's like, no, actually, all you need to do is hear me say the word coffee and make a coffee. Wait, can I do this by analogy? Sure. This is a really dumb analogy.

38:54So we lived in the woods for three years. In the pandemic, we moved upstate to the middle of nowhere in New York. We lived on an unpaved road. We had no trash service. We had our own well. We had all these people come to our house to like fix stuff that was broken. And one of them was an exterminator because we were in the woods. And our house was surrounded by the woods and bugs and stuff were all in the house. And no matter what I said to the exterminator, he was like, yeah. And then he would go to his truck and he would get a tank and he would like spray stuff. Right? Like that, like really.

39:27And I was like, I basically have a subscription to that tank of chemicals. Like I'd say that there are spiders and then that tank of chemicals shows up. And it doesn't matter what I say. That dude's going to show up with that tank of chemicals and he's going to spray it around my house. And I don't want to know what's in that tank. And I don't want to handle that stuff myself. But like at the end of the day, what I have is a subscription to that tank of chemicals. And the whole point of my analogy here is the actual human being whose job it was to keep the bugs out of my house was accepting all kinds of unstructured, chaotic, extremely emotional input about the number of ladybugs in our house.

40:06And then he was like, I know what to do. And he would do the very deterministic thing, which was go to the truck, get the chemicals and spray the chemicals in the house and be like, that'll work until you call the next time. And these AI systems can't actually do that next time. They're always starting from scratch. So you're like, make me the coffee. You're like, I need coffee or tea or gray hot. And it's like, how do I do that? Right. Which is essentially the same as me being like, I'm going to get the chemicals, which no one wants me to do that. And to like really beat this analogy to death, it is an open question whether your exterminator knowing all of the details of the spiders in the woods is useful, right?

40:43Like, yes, yes, it can know in much richer, greater detail all of the things around your house. But if the answer is just a bucket of chemicals, Have we solved any new problems? He might have been mixing up new batches of different blends. You know, this one had a much more floral top note. Like, I don't know, man. I just know what it looked like, which is the chemicals showed up. We got sprayed on the house all the time. And all I'm saying is what you pay for there is expertise. Yeah. Right? This is the thing. You pay the plumber the ton of money to come and it takes them two minutes and it's because they know what they're doing.

41:17And that's the thing you're paying for. These AI systems do not have the expertise. And so I think even in the coffee example, which is very dumb, it doesn't know how to make coffee. It knows that there's a coffee machine with API inputs, and it might have some ability to use those API inputs. actually unclear how this is all working in the background. But you tell it, I want this coffee. And it started kind of starting from scratch every time. And I think that's why we're seeing the LLMs break down in the smart homes so much. They don't know, like, no matter what you're saying, you want the hallway lights to be turned on.

41:53That's actually what you're trying to get to. Like, you can just be like, shut up, shut up. The lights are on, right? Like, the previous systems were kind of like, yeah, I did it, right? I heard the keywords. And that's why people would talk in that clipped Alexa voice. Because you learned that you just needed to say the keywords. And that was much more efficient and much more reliable than this thing, this like, can I run 10 ,000 GPUs as hot as they can for a minute to not make me coffee? Yeah. I know. Again, we're going to see a lot of Alexa Plus at the show. Amazon is there in force. There's other Amazon stuff to talk about.

42:24Gemini is coming to TVs. Like, this is the bet. Is this a thing? and on the other end of it, particularly in the smart home, I think we just keep seeing that gap between we've reduced the brittleness of the input and increased the brittleness of the output. Yeah, agreed. All right. By the way, I think a very fun thing to do would be to take a foghorn into the convention center and just start yelling Alexa commands and just see how many booths respond. All right, we need to take a break and then we're going to go back and we're going to talk TVs because, Neelai, you have won the future and I'm furious about it.

42:56We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Zapier. The list of tasks AI can handle these days is so extensive, it can be confusing and frankly, overwhelming. And sure, there's a lot of potential to talk about. But you don't need AI to do everything it could potentially do. You need it to sync up to your workflow right now. Zapier says they can help. Zapier helps you deliver on your AI strategy, not just talk about it. With Zapier's AI orchestration platform, you can bring the power of AI to any workflow, so you can do more of what matters. Teams already use Zapier to streamline their rev ops, marketing, sales, IT, HR, and more.

43:39You can connect top AI models like ChatGPT and Cloud to the tools your team already uses, so you can add AI exactly where you need it. Zapier is for everyone, tech expert or not. And teams have already automated over 300 million AI tasks using Zapier. Join the millions of businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.com slash verge. That's Z-A-P-I-E-R dot com slash verge.

44:14All right, we're back. Like, Neelai, the frame TV is just, it's just art TVs now. We've done art TVs. This is the story of CES, it appears. Sometimes it's big TVs. Sometimes it's new acronyms about TVs that I don't understand. And you have to explain to me on the show. This year, it appears the story of CES is art TVs. Yeah, everyone realized you can take your five-year-old panel and sell it for high numbers. And that will be great. I think a lot of these TV companies looked at Samsung selling an ancient edge-lit LCD panel with a subscription for art and thought, that's dumb. Check out our new OLEDs.

44:53That's what the people want. They want high-quality colors and brightness and resolution and black blacks. And Samsung's like, you know what they want? They want a five-year-old panel with a subscription to an art store and a lot of influencer marketing saying this is the best TV for your house because you don't actually watch TV. You watch TikTok. here we are. Yep. So they all figured it out that actually making a huge profit margin on old technology is better than making a small profit margin on new technology. To me, it's quite a list. The moment that made this feel sort of obviously mainstream was when Amazon announced that it was making an art TV.

45:30The Ember Artline TV. It is just purely a Samsung frame TV running Fire TV from Amazon. And that to me is like this when this is when we've reached sort of full market penetration is when Amazon, a company not particularly interested in selling you luxury goods is in on this. Can I just compliment Amazon for the best gadget name in a long time? It's a fire TV, but it gets really dim. Oh yeah, that is good. I didn't even put that. That's that is good. It's good. It's really good. Amazon has really gone, I would say too hard on the whole like kindle and fire and the whole the whole ember is pretty good because it gets dim it's dim it's a dim fire tv do you see what i mean that's not very smart so here's my question on this there's a lot of this stuff coming out and and like you said the the thing that all of these are competing on is um like lots of different color frames and thinness and you know they have dolby vision and they have is there even a tech war to be had in art tvs no i mean the the tech war is do they look the most like art and this is a real fight between do you want it to look like art or do you want it to look like good tv and i keep joking these are five-year-old panels but the reason they're all five-year-old panels is because the state of the art in backlights are you know massive amounts of local dimming zones now powered by micro rgb leds like the backlight technology on the make a good TV side of the house is still rapidly advancing, but none of that stuff is good at make it look really dim, almost reflective.

47:11Like it's reflecting the light in the room instead of producing its own light, which is an edge lit TV is still pretty good at. So you just have this like fight between what, what do you actually want this thing to look like? You want it to look like a piece of art or you want it to look like a great TV, like LG announced one, but they won't say they just will say it's a special screen. And it's like obvious that it's, they're just obfuscating the fact that it's still just an edge lit LED TV. Yeah. So I think the question is, you know, Samsung has its variety of sensors and ambient light controls.

47:42You know, there's several generations into this technology to make it look like a good piece of art. Does that stuff actually work well? It's kind of up for debate. If anyone can do that better, I think that's actually what people are buying these for. I think if you said this is a great frame TV and it looks much better as a TV and it looks worse as a piece of art, it's actually less competitive in this market. Oh, I agree. I think people will trade off how it looks as a TV all day, every day for how good it looks as a piece of art. So I don't know how well Amazon has done with that. Of course, they've added Alexa Plus to this thing.

48:15There's microphones in it. And then they have this bananas feature where you can take photos of the room on your phone and it will choose what art to display on the screen. That's just that's just nothing. It's so nothing. I think I don't know all of this stuff. And there's a bunch of stuff. There was a frame that we covered right before Christmas that was basically like an AI generated art frame. That's dumb. All of this is just I don't know solutions in search of problems on that particular front. But I do think you've been asking for a couple of years now why this isn't a more robust and competitive category.

48:56Like it's been so obvious, I think, to you in particular that the art TV is a powerful and good idea in the TV marketplace. Why isn't everybody doing it? It seems like 2026 is the year everybody's doing it. Like it's just it's just out there now. Yeah, they're getting walloped by frame TVs. Yeah. And I think there, again, I think there's a certain amount of pride at these companies that keeps them from shipping five-year-old panels with subscription services and calling that a day. I think they would rather ship really great TVs and then, you know, build the connected TV advertising ecosystem by watching everything you watch and integrating the apps.

49:31And that feels like a much more robust business. And then you're like, well, or we could charge you 50 bucks a year to look at art on your TV and that's enough. Right. And like, I don't know which one it is, man. but it I hear from our audience I look at it in our comments whenever we talk about it the number of people who are like it looks good to me stop complaining about the RAM TV but we should briefly talk about the the very other end of the spectrum here there are a lot of high-end TVs happening LG continues to do the wallpaper TV thing no they brought it back they don't continue to it went away it came back wait it went away I thought it just sort of it went away the original one was 2017 and this one is actually thicker than the one I got in 2017 I would have told you that was like two years ago.

50:12Good Lord. Okay. Well, no, the last one was in 2020, apparently. So 2017, 2020, they had wallpaper TVs. They're basically like super flat, stick on the wall. They hide all the cables. This is before frame TVs were a thing. How thin can you make the TV was a thing. So it's back in... The thing about this one is it has the Zero Connect box. So there's no... You plug nothing into these TVs. You plug everything in the Zero Connect box, which you can place 30 feet away and then it wirelessly sends everything to the TV. And I do not like that. Don't like it at all. It's a good idea in theory. There's just too many ways for that to fall apart.

50:54Yeah. I mean, they all mostly have so far as they've shipped. Again, I think this just goes to my point that people are now buying TVs to not watch them. And so when they fall down on things like, do the inputs work? It doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. But then you have TCL doing quantum dot stuff. Samsung continues to do the, what's it called? The timeless frame, which I think is a truly lovely television. Did I tell you that I tried for a while to convince Anna to buy an easel TV? Those are great. You should get one of those that motorizes into the TikTok mode. That's the one I wanted.

51:32You should get that one. It's like, we can watch everything on this. That was not, that didn't go. You know, there's a motorized mount for the frame TV. We have at least one reader who has one. That's amazing. Apparently, it works about as well as you think it does. That's fair. But is there anything in the high end of TVs that you're seeing that actually seems interesting and useful to you? So LG's OLED tech is getting brighter. They're still doing tandem OLEDs. again as sort of OLEDs get brighter we're seeing right next to it micro RGB backlights which are brighter more colorful are the black levels with local dimming gonna even out I don't know we're also seeing a bunch of mini LED backlights which are now mainstream basically so you just have LED is catching up to OLED black levels in various different ways and then you have a race to be even more colorful on both the OLED side and the micro RGB side and that's just a bunch of backlight technology.

52:30And this is what I mean. Like the emissive backlight that this screen looks like it's producing light at you is that is a spec war. It's a spec war to end all spec wars. The TVs are just going to keep getting brighter. And you can go into AVS forum. You can go into our own comments and you will see people point out that maybe there's a limit to how bright you actually want your TV to be, especially because nothing on streaming is mastered over a thousand nits, really. And nothing on Blu-ray is even mastered over a thousand nits. You get into this walkiness really really, really quickly. But when you're buying the TV in the store, the brightest one wins.

53:03So there's a race to get the brightest TV possible. And these are the, these are the emissive technologies that are doing it. And then again, I'm just going to keep pointing this out. And then on the other side of the spectrum, the TVs everyone are actually buying are the TVs that can get as dim as possible and look like they're reflecting light because you're putting art on them instead of actually watching TV. And I, I don't know. I don't know if the incentive to keep making the other technology bigger and brighter is going to be there for much longer. except in gaming monitors where we're starting to see some of this technology creep in, and then obviously on phones where everyone wants their phone screen to be ever brighter forever.

53:39Yeah. I mean, this is one of the things I was thinking about reading all of this news is it does seem like we were on a run there for a long time of honest-to-God spec wars, right? And you could argue whether any of it meant anything to most people when they turned on their TV. And I think our TVs are proof that, no, it didn't. But at the very high end of TV, these things were getting technically meaningfully better over and over for a long time. And there were a bunch of different ideas about how it would work. And then everybody centered on a couple of them. But we were pushing in a bunch of different directions all at the same time.

54:10And it feels like now we're at a moment of, I don't know, call it stasis or plateau. But I don't see any sort of meaningful leaps forward in new technology about displays here. so much as lots of ideas about what your TV looks like in the room. And maybe that's just the cycle that we do here where it's like the tech gets really good. And then we start to say, okay, how do I make it thinner? What stand should I put it on? Where do we mount it? What does it look like? What does it do when it's off? And then we have some other tech breakthrough and we redo the spec war again. But it just feels like we're at the end of some kind of how good can the picture look road here, which I actually think is kind of a good thing because that means that'll all get cheaper.

54:55my frame TV might not look like shit next time. And then the idea of like, how do we fit this stuff into your house in a way that looks nice becomes the question that matters the most. Yeah, I think that's right. Every new display technology is what changes the form factors of everything. Yeah. If you want to know where phones are going next, you look at the cutting edge of display technology and you would have seen folding phones five years ago. I mean, that's just how this goes. So in TVs specifically, Yep. Some of these ideas enabled frame TVs, which are cool. What they're enabling now is huge TVs.

55:33So I don't know, five years ago, the idea of a hundred inch TV that you could just buy was not available to you. And now they're pretty, you can just go to Costco and you can get a pretty cheap, gigantic TCL TV and it will cost$5. It will surveil you until the day you die. Yes. but it will exist on your wall it will look like crap but it'll be fine um and so i think you're just kind of this place where the display technologies are enabling the big tvs and kind of a split where you either want the tv to be the most dominant thing that has ever existed in your entire home or so invisible people are surprised when your artwork turns into a tv and those are your two choices you either get 150 inch samsung timeless frame that literally sits on an easel and requires you to live in a museum, then it will dominate the gallery or the museum.

56:25Or you want a frame TV, which maybe no one will ever even notice. And it's unclear what's in the middle of that anymore. I'm not sure. And I think over time, it will be less than less. I think the TVs will just get bigger and or more art mode-y and visible. And that sort of middle class of TVs is going to squeeze in nothing because people are just watching their phones anyway. Where do you stand on projectors? which I would argue if there is a sort of third thing in that equation, maybe it's projectors where that presentation of display in your house can literally come and go. And there's a ton of projectors.

56:57They continue to get brighter. That's one where there does seem to be a real spec war in terms of how we actually project this stuff. We did a really cool video with a projector that is sort of spatially aware. It's a freestyle, right? Yeah, it's a freestyle. That's right. And if you project it on a curtain, It will actually straighten the picture on a curtain so it doesn't look like it's wavy the way the curtain is. You can put it against two walls. It'll still show you a flat picture. Like that maybe is the next version of a lot of this is like, how do I display stuff in my house? Maybe a projector becomes a more meaningfully interesting answer pretty fast here.

57:32Yeah, the Samsung Freestyle, this new one, I think they're three generations in. That technology where it is examining what it's projecting on and compensating for it. The most impressive one there is they projected it onto wallpaper and it figured out the colors and patterns of the wallpaper and then compensated the image to disappear the wallpaper. Oh, wow. That's ridiculous. It's really cool. Like fully ridiculous. And it stays in focus the whole time you do it. So you're just like knocking it around, putting it – there's the one, the two walls in the corner where it made the screen look straight on a corner.

58:06You can put it against the ceiling too so it looks like a square floating at the corner of a ceiling. and stays in focus. I love that stuff. You are trapped into a weird Tizen. Sure. To use it. But this is the TV life we're all choosing somehow. This is the TV life we're all choosing. And I think the idea that I want to watch a movie, I'm going to bring this thing out, plug it in, it will automatically calibrate itself, set it up. Maybe all I have to do is take one picture off the wall for a few hours and then put it away. That does feel very powerful. None of these companies are yet marketing anything that way.

58:36Yeah. I think the actual people in the market are starting to use these things sets way which is why you see the third generation of the samsung freestyle i have a really good friend who has no tv in his living room and he has a big fancy tv in the basement and he was like i don't spend any time with my family because i'm always going in the basement so he just brought a projector for the living room and it's like a very it's a pretty one okay and he's like this has changed the vibe of my family wow we all just stay upstairs now because we didn't want a tv on the wall in this room but now i have this like it's it's apparently a beautiful projector i haven't actually seen he just told me about it um but it's like it looks like a little piece of art like it looks like a fancy walnut cabinet thing um he's like yeah we'd all just spend time upstairs now like no one disappears downstairs to watch interesting but it doesn't look like we have a tv in our living room i think that's a victory that feels like a good thing it feels like a victory yeah so you see this these kinds of things are going to keep happening because people don't want to put tvs on their wall the first solution was the frame tv i think the next solution is no TVs at all because people are just watching their phones.

59:36And then the sort of like intermediate one is I still want to watch a movie. Sometimes I still want to watch sports. Can I get a projector? And there's more action there than I think in the 150 inch micro RGB TV world. I bet that. But there's something on that freestyle that's very cool. Yeah. That's another one where like you go to CES and you see these giant panels of TVs. And I always think of those as like the outfits they put on like supermodels at at fashion shows that no actual person will ever have, but they're there to look cool and make you feel things. That, to me, that's the 110-inch TV.

1:00:12You know what we should talk about real quick in the context of TVs is, yes, Amazon has Fire TVs. They're putting Alexa Plus on all their TVs, whatever. Gemini is coming to Google TV in a lot of ways. Yeah. And the most interesting thing that they're doing on Gemini is they're putting Nano, Banana, and Veo support directly into Google TV. So you can just sit in front of your TV and prompt it for videos, which is ridiculous. That to me is like, we talk about a lot of things that are like ideas that somebody had in a meeting that seem exciting as long as you don't actually think about it at all.

1:00:50And that to me is the most perfect example of that that I can think of. That is, everybody is going to do that once and go, huh, and then never, ever touch it again. And that - Or they're going to do it all day long. No, I just don't believe that. Like, I think there is no evidence that that is, and we're going to get to this at the very end because there's some holiday AI news that I need to get very upset about on this podcast. And one of those things is this idea that actually the idea that everyone is going to make and interact with AI content all day, every day is like inevitable. Not only is it not inevitable, it's completely unproven and I think it's just flatly not true.

1:01:28And this is like Google being like, well, what if the future of YouTube is you make your own YouTube? And I'm just like, no one wants that. It won't work. And also no one wants that. Oh, I think this battle is already lost. I think the apocalypse has come and gone. We are fully in the post. What is a photo apocalyptic landscape? Which is, I think, is the holiday news you want to talk about. It is, in fact. And actually, before we do that, let's take a break. Then we're going to go back. We're going to lightning round our way through some other stuff. And we're going to get out of here. We'll be right back.

1:02:01All right, we're back. So there's lots more gadgets to talk about. We also, we have a bunch of news that happened over the two weeks we were gone. So we're just going to lightning round our way through some of the most important stuff going on right now. You get to go first. What do you want? CES, other news, you pick. I'm starting with a party speaker. What's more important? We're so back, Eli. We're so back. You know, it's CES. There's party speakers announced. I'm confident we'll see many more this week. Can I tell you what I've enjoyed, by the way? There hasn't been that many like giant party speaker announcements.

1:02:33And yet you and I are going to go to Vegas and I suspect we'll each be encountered by thousands upon thousands of party speakers. I mean, they are the only successful new gadget category of the past 10 years. There's the iPhone and there's party speakers. Name anything else that has rocked the culture in similar ways. Just say your thing. I'm just pointing it out. Bring this up at your next family dinner. Name a gadget that has changed the culture as much as the iPhone or a party speaker. Can't do it. LG announced new XBoom party speakers. There's a really cool little one. I don't know if this counts.

1:03:08It just looks cool. It's called the XBoom Mini. It has a little fabric handle. Anyway, they have AI in them, obviously. And the AI can just remove vocals from songs. So you can just karaoke anything you want. Which is a solved problem because Spotify is full of bootleg karaoke tracks. but you know it's a party speaker it's yes they got lights I'm not gonna lie I actually think this is an amazing idea yeah this is the next big trend immediate karaoke party such a good idea but no lyrics which is a real problem anyway I'm saying we're gonna see more and if you are at CES and you've got the biggest party speaker in Vegas let us know we'll see what we can do okay Neil let me let me just cast a vision for you here oh my god you fire up your X boom you start karaoke mode your cloid robot starts dancing and your lg gallery tv shows the lyrics this is the future thank you lock-in is where i want to be it's miserable smart home platform while we were uh in chicago on the break it it notified me every single day that our refrigerator had an available software update and i was like there's no way i'm updating the refrigerator from hundreds of miles away.

1:04:20Yeah. That's like, there's a real like sequence of horror movie events that start with Neil. I updated his. Yeah. None of it's good. That's pretty good. All right. My first one is some breaking news as we are recording this on Monday afternoon, which is that the, the Lego group made a CES announcement, which is an interesting and unusual thing. They're, they're launching a thing called smart bricks, which are basically little 2x4 Lego bricks that have a bunch of sensors and batteries inside of them. And the idea is that you will use these smart bricks to essentially be aware of the thing that you've made and make it come to life.

1:05:02They're selling sets that when you turn it on, it will make the lightsaber make noise, all this different stuff. They wirelessly charge. The idea of having to charge Lego bricks It's like I can just every parent I know is dying inside at the idea of having to not only keep track of but charge your Legos. But this thing, these like little tiny thing, they have a battery pad. They have light sensors. They make noise. They can do lights. This is like a big leap for this very old toy. um there's one i think sean hosch wrote about this for us and he mentioned one that will play the imperial march from star wars when you sit the emperor palpatine lego piece onto his throne like that's just cool right this is this is such a like over technology solution to a an imagination problem but is is nonetheless very cool and i think is is going to be pretty fascinating um also the smart bricks have a microphone which uh certainly won't cause any consternation or privacy problems for anyone ever um i fully lost the argument in my family that that everything is listening to serve ads i've explained wi-fi tracking i've explained all of it so many times like not just listening dude get over it it's it's it's wild i think societally we have lost that fight yeah it's over i think i think if you just polled america almost everyone would tell you that their microphones are listening to them.

1:06:36Yeah, I think most people are like, well, I could either listen to you go on and on about reconciling databases, or I could say it's listening to me. I'm going to pick listening to me. In any case, the microphone in the Lego brick is just a button. It's not actually a microphone. So it just detects sounds and triggers some action. Right. But it's still a microphone. Yeah, you did just describe a microphone. Well, no, it doesn't take any input or record anything. Right. It just closes a circuit. Yeah, fair enough. But yeah, I think the idea of that, that's one of those things that is like, there's lots of really interesting potential for how you can do that stuff.

1:07:11And someday when we get like the home assistant Lego thing and I can just set up my smart home by piecing together Lego pieces, that's the stuff. That's what you want. You want to sit Emperor Palpatine on a throne. And my blinds come up. Hell yeah, dude. Are you kidding me? I see what you're doing. That's the dream. What's your next one? Okay, so this is, you might have noticed that I have a haircut. I did notice. I have a lot to say about this haircut. Your hair was, it's good. For people who can't see Neelai right now, Neelai's hair was getting, I don't want to say out of control, but like close to out of control.

1:07:51It was, I was going for full flow. It was at the edges of control. I stopped cutting my hair when the baby was born in July, and then it was fully out of control. And then I saw a picture of myself at the balloon museum, and I was like, well, we're done now. like our experiment with growing the flow has come to an end i'm just gonna cut my hair um and i wish that i had the glide smart hair clipper which has an ai cutting coach and automatic fade trimming and only requires you to wear a face band so it can track your head and go around your head

1:08:25i i don't even know how to describe this face band like imagine you're an nfl player and you're wearing the helmet, but you're only wearing the part of the helmet that goes around your eyes. The face mask, the guard. This is the most ridiculous looking thing. And then somehow it looks like the cutter is cutting the elastic band of the face band you see in this photo. It is ridiculous. This is ridiculous. I love it. I've been cutting my own hair since the pandemic. Have you really? So yeah, I mean, we moved to the woods. There's nothing there. The exterminator couldn't cut my hair. He just brought the tank of chemicals.

1:08:58So I bought a bunch of stuff and I have a a thing with a vacuum in it. It's great. So I cut my own hair, but then I was in Chicago. We went to the balloon museum and I was like, I got it here. And I don't know if you know this in, in my mind, this is like received wisdom for dudes. But if you are a Brown dude and you go into a barber, whatever ethnicity of the barber is the one you come out with. Like I'm a, just a blank canvas. So I went to Pilsen. I won't say what kind of neighborhood Pilsen is, but I came out looking like a, like a hot Pilsen guy, including the shave. They cut my beard. And I was like, I'm ready to rock.

1:09:33Like, this is too hot to handle. So that's why I have like a dramatic swoop in my hair. I've been thinking you were unusually, intimidatingly attractive. This has been. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. I look fly as shit. I'm pretty uncomfortable doing this podcast for reasons I'm not prepared to talk about. What I said to my sister, I was like, I went to Billson. I came out looking like I live in Billson. And she's like, what do you mean? And I was like, well, you know, like, and then my 20-year-old nephew was like, yeah, everybody knows that. Obviously. That's really interesting. But I think the Glide, I don't think I could have told the Glide to be like, make me look sick.

1:10:05No. I think it would have just shaved my ears off. I'm looking at the Glide website and it's basically you go through their app and pick a bunch of presets. And one of the top presets that says recommended just says sides and top. This is the haircut sophistication level we've arrived at. I dare you all, next time you get a haircut, walk in and say, I'd like a sides and top and let me know how that goes for you. Yeah. And then you have to wear this thing on your face. Like there's, I walked into a, you know, a Pilsen barbershop and came out looking like the hottest guy in Pilsen. And then there's, I'm going to wear this thing on my face and no woman will ever talk to me again.

1:10:43Yeah. With my sides and top. Yeah. I'm going to cut my own hair in the dark in the bathroom with the door locked so no one knows my shame. It's good. It's very good. yeah um all right my next one is i need to get very mad about ai for just a just a minute um because two things happened over the holidays um one is that satya nadella um the ceo of microsoft and now a blogger apparently um wrote a whole thing about basically how we should talk about ai and essentially his argument is like stop saying slop because ai is gonna be great there's a line in here that just blows my mind where he's like, we need to get beyond the arguments of slop versus sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our theory of the mind that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other.

1:11:40There's nothing there. That's, I understand what he's trying to say. Sort of. And all he's saying is we need to we like the metaphors we use for how people make things are broken now. So we need new ones. Like that's all he's really saying. Sure. Because theory of the mind actually has a meaning. So he's just using it wrong. Yes. But what he's trying to say is we need a new, we need new metaphors to talk about how we make things. But like there's fine. Have you used Copilot? Nothing about Copilot suggests we need new metaphors to talk about human beings. No, no, it's, it's super doesn't. And then so put that next to this thing that Adam Masseri, the head of Instagram, posted.

1:12:27I think what he was trying to do was talk about what human authenticity means going forward. And basically what he said is we have now we have we have sort of crossed the Rubicon where you can no longer assume that what you're seeing is a thing depicting real life made by a real person. And then just trying to think about, like, where do we go from here? And he starts talking about, you know, the who becomes more important than the what, that actually authenticity is going to be able to be produced at scale, which is like an insane thing to say. But also that what matters now is who you are more than ever.

1:13:04And he said that, you know, the feed is dead and we're on to all these other things. And I've just been thinking about this ever since. And there is this thing that is coming out of these tech companies that both of these things together really hit for me, which is this assumption that all of this is inevitable and it is done. And that like Neil Mohan says stuff like this about YouTube, right? That like, of course, AI is going to become the vast majority of the content that we see on YouTube. And we're all going to be producing things with it this way. And Nano Banana is going to be the way that we create and consume content for forever.

1:13:38none of that is inevitable it's just it's just not these are choices adam massary is reacting to choices that he and his team made about its platform like adam massary should have written this as i did all of this to you and here is what i'm saying and sati nettle is saying the same thing he's like i'm pivoting my company around this stuff please stop calling it slop it hurts my feelings like this this drives me so crazy because we have not a lot of people talk about tech in general as if this stuff happens to us and our only responsibility is to learn how to live with it. It's just not true. It doesn't have to be true.

1:14:12We are not required to just live with this stuff. These things don't have to be like this. And the idea that all of your feeds are going to be overrun with AI slop and that that's just what we have to deal with is not how it has to be. And everybody should just stop it. So let me make the counter argument and let me offer you the barest sliver of sympathy for Adam Assari. Wow. It's not a lot. This is not where I thought we were going. It's not a lot. I love it. I read this post. It's worth reading in full. It kind of looks like it was written a little bit by Adam, but it's worth reading in full.

1:14:47Adam has a pretty good sense of what's happening on Instagram. Yeah. He's connected to his product in a way that I don't think Mark Zuckerberg has connected anything. I agree with that. This post is raw nihilism. Adam has lost. he has lost the war to a like sexy ai influencers and unending course scams and instagram just being only fans marketing like all of that is lost yeah he's lost it whatever pretensions to high art that he thought were happening instagram are gone that thing is a marketing platform is turned into qvc for lifestyle influencers and that's the thing it is and now ai is overrunning that and he cannot stop it.

1:15:25He might want to. He might have made the wrong choices and failing to prevent it at the top of all of it, but it is gone. It is out of his control. And I think he feels a little bad about it. And I think he has no ability to fix it. There's this whole line here about how the camera companies are doing the wrong thing. I'll read the quote. Platforms like Instagram will do good work identifying AI content, but it'll get worse at it over time as AI gets better. It will be more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media. Camera manufacturers will cryptographically sign images of capture, create a chain of custody.

1:15:58That's only part of the solution. We need to service much more context, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He's basically like, this isn't going to work. It's not going to work for you to do content authenticity initiative and for us to show you labels. And to your point, David, it's like, I don't know that it won't work because you have never tried. Yes. Stop accepting the inevitability of this. And I, I just think that the reason they're not trying is because they know they've already lost. To what? To just the flood of slop on these platforms. If you go on Instagram today, it is overrun by people teaching you how to make your own sexy AI influencers to collect whatever money you can collect from your own sexy AI influencers.

1:16:41A secondary economy of people trying to sell courses so you can create your own sexy AI influencers, which is just the worst. People teaching you unethical ways to make money on YouTube by doing AI content of like puppies getting rescued. And you see they're like, I made 100 videos and they all made$20. So now I have$2 ,000 and I'm just going to do it 100 more times and I'll have$20 ,000. Like you see how their brains are working, right? Every one of those dollars is a dollar that's not going to a human creator. Yeah. There's not infinite dollars, right? So every dollar that YouTube spends on AI brain rot is a dollar that isn't going to go to a real creator.

1:17:20Every view on Instagram that doesn't go to a human creator that goes to a sexy AI influencer is gone. There's only so many minutes of attention. In reality, what it is, is it's$1 to an AI system rather than$5 to an influencer, which is why you make the trade. I get it. No, but I'm saying because that economy exists in such force already, to fix it now requires turning it off. and I think their tools to turn it off do not exist as powerfully as the tools to have prevented it in the first place. I think that's probably true. I mean, and to some extent, this is reminiscent of Google's fight against SEO for so many years, right?

1:18:01Where Google forever kind of, really and forever kind of in gesture only tried to fight the flood of crappy content intended to game Google's systems all the while telling us that all Google does is uprank good stuff, like despite all evidence to the contrary. And, but what you could do is just say, if our systems detect that you use AI, we are going to downrank not only your content, but your account. Like you could solve that problem in one move. Would it have lots of problematic false positives and downstream effects? Sure. But if the music industry wanted Instagram to do that, Instagram would do that.

1:18:40you just like you are just deciding to do this right like youtube has really good content identification systems that it is choosing not to apply to ai because it wants that on your feed and i i just it wants to present it to you as if this is just the natural course of things and it isn't and a bunch of people have decided that this is what we want against all evidence to the contrary and i just if adam masseri was just like i'm gonna make so much fucking money from this, that it's going to blow your mind and we're going to become the most valuable company in the world. Sorry, losers. I would actually be more sympathetic to the post than I am to this.

1:19:16Like, don't pretend you don't have any moves here. Oh, Adam's got this line in here that I've been debating with all kinds of people for years now. He said, individuals, not publishers or brands establish there's a significant market for content from people, trust institutions at alzheimer's and i'm like that's not the nature of the universe that's you guys did that the social media platforms did that yeah you destroyed the trust institutions by elevating an infinite army of teenage creators who you can all replace once you burn them out economically and then there's new ones correct and the point of the institution is to resist that by existing over time so you were always opposed to the institution because the institution would demand that you pay them which is the history of the media over the last 20 years the meat like buzzfeed was like we'll be so viral facebook will pay us money and facebook is like we'll destroy you instead here's an infinite army of teenage creators and now here's an infinite army of ai slot yeah i get that i'm just saying my barest sliver of sympathy is i agree with you these are there we exist in the product of the platform owner's choices.

1:20:24I think Adam is looking at this and being like, I do not know how to put this Cheney back in the bottle. I think that's right. The nihilism in this post is real. I think that's right. And I think, yeah, I don't necessarily lay it all at the feet of Adam Masseri for making these decisions about Instagram. Oh, you can. By the way, you're totally fine to lay it all at the feet of Adam Masseri. I lay some of it at the feet of Adam Masseri. I think he'd get fired if he tried to do the things I think he should do. um i also think i lay more of it at the feet of somebody like mark zuckerberg who is one of the few people who actually has the agency and protection to do the right thing and just continues to choose not to like it's just it's just bad everywhere and i'm i'm deeply tired of this idea that all of this is happening inevitably and all we can do is get on board because that's how we got here and we should stop it yeah no i mean i'll read you this and we wrote this story this is very much like if you were reading the virginia this was coming three years ago because we were just blithering on about what is a photo.

1:21:17Yeah. And then Sarah wrote the headline about the pixel that was, no one is ready for this. Yep. And she was like, the flip to not trusting a photo from implicitly trusting every photo will change society. Adam's got that line here. Yeah. Years later, after Sarah Jong wrote that for us, he says, for most of my life, I could safely assume photographs or videos were largely accurate captures of moments that happened. That is clearly no longer the case. That is the what is a photo apocalypse. We've been talking about it forever. These companies have heard us talk about it. They have laughed at us because we spend so much time talking about it.

1:21:50We have become cartoons of ourselves talking about it so much. And now they're like, yeah, it happened. Whoops. Who could have possibly seen this coming? Do you know what institution actually has the ability to say whether or not something is real? Instagram. Yep. Instagram has the ability to say, this photo is verified. This is true. We have enough money to fact check information and label the stuff that we have verified as real. If you don't see this badge, then you can look at the authenticity of the creator, whatever it is. But there is some stuff that we do know is real, and they're not going to do it.

1:22:25This is them shutting down content moderation. This is Mark Zuckerberg saying, I don't want to be the arbiter of truth. This is them disclaiming their essential responsibility as a distributor of information for saying even the barest whisper of verifying metadata. We know this one's true. Yep. So it goes. It's rough out there. All right, what's your next one? Speaking of AI Slop, this story blew up over the weekend. It is just such a perfect example of this. There's a Reddit post from someone who claimed to be a developer at a major food delivery app. And it went on and on in great detail about how all the systems are arrayed against the drivers, how they're stealing money from you, that when you pay for rush ordering, you don't actually get rush ordering.

1:23:10Everything else gets slowed down. And everyone believed it. then you know the second wave of stuff happened where people like is this real we reached out i think casey reached out the person behind the post sent us a fake badge a fake uber eats badge turns out all this is generated by ai this is like a medium scale ai news hoax that just went down over the weekend and everyone's like kind of on vacation so it just didn't get this scrutiny and it went super viral for several days the ceo of doordash had to be like this isn't us uber had to be like this isn't us uh and a bunch of people who work these companies like a lot of this stuff like sounds correct but isn't and then you also get the well we hate these companies anyway so we're just willing to believe any negative thing that we hear and it's like oh this is that this is all the people who hate ai are this kind of a perfect venn diagram with people who hate food delivery apps and it's like you are falling for the ai I slept now because it's what you want to hear.

1:24:06Like, this is bad on every level. But anyway, it's all hoax. We did get sent their Uber Eats badge. I'm putting that in air quotes. There's no such thing. It was generated by AI. It was fascinating. And I even fell for it a little bit to the extent that it did seem perfectly plausible that all of this stuff is happening, right? Even like the CEO of DoorDash is coming out being like, this is awful and no one should do this. and I believe him when he says that because the stuff that is being described in this post is awful but I do think the ways in which a lot of people immediately were like oh yeah it makes sense that these companies would be doing that was so fascinating to me the tech industry has lost the benefit of the doubt none of it seemed out of character at all yeah if there's a story of 2026 that we'll be tracking it's the fact that these companies can't say or do anything without immediate backlash because they've trashed their own reputations totally And Nadella being like, get over it.

1:25:02Stop calling it slop. It's like, that's not going to work for you, dude. Nope. Well, you got to earn it back. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. All right. My last one, because this is the Vergecast and this is what we do here. They didn't ship a Trump phone. Oh, they missed the deadline? It was, I mean, it's happy 2026. The Trump phone doesn't exist. What a surprise. They were going to make it at the Foxconn factory right after they started shipping masks and building a website by Google. It was going to be September and then it was going to be later this year. And now no one knows. Don Preston on our team continues to heroically reach out to try and get comment and continues to not get any comment.

1:25:39The Financial Times did some reporting. That's right. Shout out to Financial Times for following us. We do a lot of inspiring the world's financial newspapers. They got one quote, which I think we've gotten in the past. Trump Mobile blamed it on the government shutdown. which very much implies that there was a phone that was tied up in some sort of regulatory. Just like, that's not true. I don't know what to tell you. Not even a little bit. Yeah, it would have been, just come out and say the Democrats did it, right? Joe Biden never shipped a Trump phone. Yeah, sure.

1:26:22Yeah, Obama won't let me ship this phone. It's like a perfectly in-character thing for them to say. But yeah, I think we are going to continue to cover this because I think it is just deeply fascinating and weird and a perfectly story. I'm going to hold on to my bet. The clicks phone will come out before the Trump phone. It's a good bet. And I also think that there are signs when something is going to ship like this. You start to see things like they show up in the FCC. Things will start to leak. Information exists. There are people who are tapped into supply chains that start to know about these things.

1:26:56It's very hard to make a product that exists without anybody knowing about it. It's very hard to do that. Do you think these people are going to try to keep it a secret? No, this is what I'm saying. There has been not one iota of information that the Trump phone exists except for the Trump mobile website, which is my absolute favorite thing about it. They're not trying to keep a real thing a secret. They're trying to make a fake thing really obvious, which is just like such a wild and Trumpy way to think about launching a phone. All right. I'm looking for ideas. I mean, poor Dom, we told him he has to cover this every week and he is doing, it has become like a poetry reading in many ways.

1:27:35Like he just has to ruminate on nothing every week for a few hundred words. And it's very good. If you can think of ways for us to make this story even bigger, you let us know. We're here for it. If you have a Trump phone, call me. I will fly to your house. If you know anybody who works at the Trump phone call center where they are apparently paying people to say whatever they want about the Trump phone, you let us know. Yeah. We'd love to hear from you. And also, come to our live show in Vegas. We should get out of here because you and I have planes to get on. But we're going to be live in Las Vegas.

1:28:12You're doing Decoder, and then we're doing a Vergecast Wednesday afternoon at the Brooklyn Bowl. Keep an eye on the site. Our team is already on the ground doing tons and tons and tons of stuff at CES. This is going to be an interesting one in that it's midday Monday and a huge amount of news has already happened. And we have like a whole week of this left to go. So I think we're going to get like into the true like dregs and bowels of CES in a way that we don't often get to do. And I'm very excited about it. Oh, I'm going to go. I'm going to see if one of these robots will fall in love with me.

1:28:44my truly for me it's like the real sign of how deeply have i done ces is have i gone to the bottom floor of the venetian where it's just it's just like various countries bring groups of developers to show you whatever phone case they've built and that is that's the true meaning of ces as far as i'm concerned and i'm very much looking forward look out for david on the basement of the venetian everybody i will i will be there uh and we'll be there we're running around we're gonna have a blast go say hi to our team be nice to everybody um we we're gonna get out of here um also remember subscribe to the verge it's 2026 thank you to everybody who renewed already if you haven't subscribed i don't know new year's resolution give us money you get ad-free podcasts you do get ad-free podcasts um you can also email us vergecast the verge.com call the hotline 866 version 1 if you see weird stuff at ces that we haven't seen tell us all about it our team's very good at seeing all the weird stuff but send us your weird stuff and we want to hear about it until then the Verge cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk we will all be in Vegas we hope to see a lot of you this week until next time, Neal, it's good to be back rock and roll