Phones don't have lights

Meta's Muse AI agent is cute (sometimes caked-up) and it performs well as a productivity tool. And, if you give it access to your social media and e-mail, it can know basically everything about you. This week on The Vergecast, Nilay Patel, Jake Kastrenakes and David Imel give their reactions to Mark Zuckerberg's demos at Wednesday's Meta Connect keynote. They also talk about the new glasses hardware, including the new VR glasses and audio-only, camera-free Ray-Bans. Then, we take a look at the newly-announced, chimeric Chrome/Android hybrid Googlebooks, find out why Brendan Carr is a dummy this week, analyze the Paramount merger, discuss what YouTube's A/B video testing means for the increasingly tenuous concept of a shared reality, and end on a surprisingly heartwarming story about RODECaster 4K support. Further reading: Meta Connect 2026: The 7 biggest announcements Meta Connect 2026 live blog: On the ground at Mark Zuckerberg’s next big product launch Meta’s Muse AI works and creeps me out Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse AI agent Meta ditches the camera on its newest smart glasses Meta’s next VR device isn’t a headset — it’s glasses These are the first five Googlebook laptops Googlebooks feel like the first laptops built for Android owners I got to see Google’s wild ideas about the future of laptops The long dream of the Googlebook Mahershala Ali On ‘Blade’ Being A Big Failure For Kevin Feige: “100%. He Should Feel That Way” Paramount will need to release way more movies to make this merger work Xbox is barely Xbox anymore YouTube is cooking up new Live features. Free Rodecaster Video firmware update adds 4K support. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. 0:00 Welcome Back Banter 00:31 Meta Connect Setup 01:27 Muse First Impressions 05:28 Privacy Trust Gap 07:58 Pervert Glasses Debate 12:55 Passive Surveillance Reality 15:42 Is Muse Actually Winning 18:44 Muse Charm Post Phone 21:38 Do We Need Agents 26:12 Break And Return 26:29 New Meta Hardware 27:00 Audio Only Ray Bans 28:30 Muse Powered Glasses 31:15 Meta Bets on Muse 32:28 Hearing Aid Glasses Pitch 34:40 VR Glasses Return 39:04 Holograms and Splats 42:44 Google Books Arrive 44:57 Android Laptop Lock In 47:49 Windows Fatigue Debate 54:54 Hype Desk Blade Drama 57:14 Remembering Blade Chaos 01:00:37 Blade Reboot Frustrations 01:01:26 Sonos Sponsor Break 01:03:07 Brendan Carr is a Dummy 01:07:38 Lightning Round Kickoff 01:08:02 Meta Muse Mascot Chaos 01:09:26 Paramount Warner Deal Fallout 01:12:37 YouTube AI Channel Agents 01:14:05 A B Video Testing Ethics 01:21:25 Xbox Layoffs And Halo Shift 01:24:45 Rodecaster Free 4K Update 01:26:36 Muse Marketplace Haggling 01:27:35 Wrap Up And Next Episodes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 soundbars, 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.

• 0:39Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of AI mascots and a little bit of butt. That's right, I'm your friend Neil Ibatia. I'm back after two weeks away. That's what you were expecting. Jake Kastrenakes is here.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  So glad you're back for delightful intros like these, Neil I.

• 0:54Nilay Patel?

  David Amell is here, what's up, man?

• 0:55David Pierce?

  I haven't left yet.

• 0:57Nilay Patel?

  We're never letting you leave. You understand this, right?

• 1:00David Pierce?

  We'll see, we'll see.

• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  The people demand that you stay in that studio and never go anywhere else. We're gonna figure it out.

• 1:05David Pierce?

  I live here now, okay, all right.

• 1:08Nilay Patel?

  Uh, there is a lot going on this week. There's Google Books, there's Meta Connect. Jake, what's on the menu?

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a busy week for gadgets. Google Books, we're gonna finish up with Brendan Carr as a dummy naturally now that you're back. The long way to return, we've got a lightning round. We've got to start with Meta. Uh, so Wednesday night, Meta Connect, Mark Zuckerberg takes to the stage. This is their VR and glasses show most recently. Actually, if you watched it this week, it turned into the Muse show, right?

• 1:39David Pierce?

  But not the band.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  If only, if only they had brought on the band.

• 1:44David Pierce?

  A little more fun.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  That, that, yeah, the branding, I think, would have gotten a little conflated with the, uh, the sexy, what is it? Bear?

• 1:51David Pierce?

  I don't know what it is.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  It's called the Jolly. It's the, the mascot's name is Jolly.

• 1:56David Pierce?

  That will fix their privacy.

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna, we're gonna come back to Jolly, I assure you.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  And we don't, I don't want to come back to Jolly. It became a show about Muse. Muse was everywhere in everything. I think this is fascinating, right? This is Meta's new AI agent. It's like three weeks old at this point, two or three weeks old. Have you guys been using this yet? Have you instructed your muse to shop for you yet, David?

• 2:18David Pierce?

  No, I do not know if this makes me a bad tech journalist, and it probably does. But I do not feel comfortable with Meta having my information, so I have not used it yet.

• 2:29Nilay Patel?

  This is the problem with Muse, right? It's straightforwardly, every piece of coverage we do, all the comments, even we had an editorial meeting about it the other day. I was like, everyone needs to at least use the thing. And half of our editors were like, I don't, I won't. I was like, you have to. So I did, I gave it one thing. I gave it my personal spam Gmail.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:51Nilay Patel?

  Right, which is like, if Meta can look at however many Home Depot e-receives it wants to, that's fine.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:56Nilay Patel?

  Um, and I, what, it was some boring thing. It's like, we have, we returned something overseas and there's like a tax form. And I was like, can you just figure this out? And it did it.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, I bought a thing from overseas and we had to send it back and all this stuff. And I was like, I, I, I do not have the time or inclination to do this. And I just asked Muse to do it and it did it. And it did it by connecting to my Gmail and reading my email, which I don't love. Uh, and I don't love that Meta now has access to that. There are a lot of promises around Meta's privacy and end-to-end encryption with the virtual machine. And they hired Marlon Moxie Spike from Signal to build it. And they, Mark Zuckerberg keeps saying his name like a talisman, you know? Like in interviews, like, well, Moxie Marlon Spike is here, nothing can possibly go wrong. Um, but it is shockingly useful and it's a, it's a good product. There's a lot of it that is like OpenClaw Part Two.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:55Nilay Patel?

  Like people have dug into it and a lot of the-

• 3:57David Pierce?

  The file names are exactly the same. Like the, the structure of the files are effectively OpenClaw. And one of the developers of Muse came on and said, we are heavily inspired by, by what Peter-

• 4:08Speaker 02

  By the files we downloaded.

• 4:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, OpenClaw is open source, you know, that's the way it goes. Um, yeah. The thing about it, though, is that it is a product. Like Meta is a good consumer product company. They have the chops, they hired a bunch of designers. It works, like, you can show it to a normal person and it works as a consumer product. Not like OpenClaw, which is a little bit terrifying, or any of the other AI products really are kind of rough around the edges chatbots. Muse is just a fun consumer product you can use. And the thing that struck me about it is I don't want it to do anything more than look at my spam Gmail. Right, like, that's as far as I'm willing to go. Jake, have you used it?

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've been poking around, but that is exactly it, right? Like, it is, it's sort of like baby's first OpenClaw or something? Like, it's, it's, it's very friendly and cuddly and it's like, I can do anything, just give me access. And you're like, oh, cool. Uh, I mean, I guess I'll just give you like my Instagram access, because like probably you're tapping into that anyway. But then it's, there's a ton of stuff it can do and can access. And every single time you ask it to do something, it's like, oh, if you want me to email that daily brief that I'm making for you, based on the fact that I'm tapping into the API of Blue Sky to scan for posts that you asked about, I will need access to your Gmail account. And I'm like, man, like, it, it just, it just went off and did that.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  And it, it's able to build this brief for me and paste it into its own chat. But if I want it to email to me in my inbox, I need to give it Gmail access. I don't necessarily want to give it Gmail access.

• 5:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  And that is just the problem with all of these AI tools.

• 5:45Nilay Patel?

  So do you believe, I, I saw an analyst writing, uh, these downloads indicate that Meta's privacy, terms and conditions, and its promises about secure virtual machines are resonating with consumers. And I was like, I don't, I don't know what you're talking about.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Consumers do not know what a virtual machine is, I guarantee you.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I mean, this is the problem for Meta. And we should come back to Muse in detail, because it is their next platform. It's their next bet. We can talk about Alexander Wang, the head of Meta Superintelligence Labs, just making that mascot sexy, which I think is hilarious and also very disturbing. But the privacy problem for Meta is super real. And it maybe got worse because of the glasses, right? That everyone, they're putting cameras in everyone's faces and everyone's calling them pervert glasses. And the reputation that Meta is not good at privacy is everywhere. And it, it feels to me, anyway, like it hangs like a dark cloud over Muse. Like, why would you give this company even more of your data?

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that this company has, like, over time, used a lot of your data to make you even more sad. So people don't really want to be like, have access to my Gmail, have access to my text messages. There's a level of trusting that Meta will eventually enshitify and all of their products will just sort of extract more from you. So at least from my perspective, and again, I probably should try this. But the, my, the red flags that are going up in my head are just like, now I see the horizon where it's good for now. And then at what point does it start to become addictive? Or it starts like harvesting my data and serving me even more ads?

• 7:22Speaker 02

  The reason I don't want a Meta, like Meta Ray-Ban displays is because I don't want ads like injected into my eyeballs, which is the long horizon of what I see with all Meta products. And that's, that's sort of the problem.

• 7:33Nilay Patel?

  So my feeling here is that they know this is a problem and they're just gonna horsepower through it.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:40Nilay Patel?

  Like, they don't have a strategy besides publishing white papers about secure virtual machines. They're just gonna do it. Part of my feeling here is based on interviews Mark Zuckerberg is doing. He just did a big interview with Alex Heath. Uh, he did a big interview with Joanna Stern, the former Verge people. You can check up, you can never leave. Um, and with Joanna, he specifically said, most people think of Meta as a sharing company because we started as Facebook. But we also make WhatsApp, which is encrypted. And many more products we make will be private and encrypted in the future. They won't just be for sharing. I don't know if I buy this. Like WhatsApp is also for sharing, like in a very real way. And, uh, like Meta's business is advertising. And there's no business model that they have that isn't advertising.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:24Nilay Patel?

  So they're gonna have to come up with something else to prove that that's the case. And then the second thing, and David, this is just me wanting to prompt another camera crash out with you, which is my favorite thing to do.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:35Nilay Patel?

  Is their response to, how do you feel about people calling them pervert glasses? Is to just say it has a light. Like, that's what he's got. You can watch it. Here's, he just said it, Alex Heath, we have that clip here.

• 8:48Speaker 04

  We designed the glasses from the beginning with these privacy considerations in mind. And we built the light into it. I mean, phones don't have a light.

• 8:56Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 8:59Nilay Patel?

  Phones don't have a light is-

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Okay, I see where he's coming from, but yeah. He, it's, I like that he's just like, I just thought of this. Like, this just occurred to me.

• 9:06David Pierce?

  He's just saying the flash does not always go off when you take a picture.

• 9:10Nilay Patel?

  Sure, not everything is a flash photo.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:12Nilay Patel?

  Phones don't have a light feels like Meta, like Meta has to hold on to that as tightly as they can now.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:19Nilay Patel?

  That's what they got. You're mad about these glasses, everyone's calling them pervert glasses, and the only meaningful response is phones don't have a light. And, uh, you know, I made a long decoder, we don't have to go into it. But my immediate thought here was, well, you have to pull your phone out of your pocket, hold it up in someone's face.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:35Nilay Patel?

  And honestly, maybe phones should have a light.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:38Nilay Patel?

  Is a good response to this. But Joanna, you know, several weeks later, asked a similar question and actually did, like, did the phone pulling out of the pocket move? We've got that here too, let's watch this.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  I mean, this is the only device that, that I'm aware of, that it tells you when you're taking a photo or, or recording a video. I mean, you, people, you know, do that with, with phones all the time and this is, we're just like-

• 9:57Speaker 05

  You know, this sort of, you're holding your phone up, right? They're not as-

• 10:01Speaker 04

  Sure, but, but we, we kind of took this into account from, from day one. You know, the, the very first pair of glasses that we shipped, we're like, this is a thing where we want to lead on. We know that people are gonna have questions about this and we want to make sure that we're handling this responsibly from the beginning. So, so we built the, the, the camera light in.

• 10:17Nilay Patel?

  So it's that sure, right? Sure. It's, it's very dismissive of the fact that you have to take your phone out of your pocket and hold it in someone's face. Sure, whatever, but it doesn't have a light. David, I know you've been thinking about this and there's all kinds of rules about photos in different countries.

• 10:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 10:31Nilay Patel?

  Do you buy phones don't have a light as a response to privacy concern about the glasses?

• 10:36David Pierce?

  No, because the entire point of the glasses is to blend into your face. And, and much like when you're using your phone and it is obvious to other people that you are not paying attention to them because your attention is being directed in a specific vector towards your phone, down at your, at your phone. Generally, when people are recording on their Ray-Ban glasses, they just click it really quickly and then they kind of go about their day. And the light is not the most obvious thing in the world, you know, like you, you mentioned the other countries in Japan. It's not a law, but they have an agreement among all of these cell phone manufacturers that the phones must emit a shutter sound every time you take a photo. And it's very loud. They try to make it very obvious that people can hear around them, see around them when they're being photographed.

• 11:20David Pierce?

  The light to me is not enough. You know, there are apps now that are like, oh my God, someone has metal glasses around you, but I don't know. It doesn't, it doesn't seem like enough to me.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  This argument would be so much stronger if it was a prominent light. It, it is not. It's a little pinpoint that they're doing some work to try to prevent people from covering it up or obfuscating it. But even in the best situation, unless it is dark, like this is a very easy to miss light, right? Like, except that the light is something. It's like, you, more lights, like light up the front of those glasses, right?

• 11:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the whole like, like, like Kanye style, like 2000s.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, there we, listen, yeah, yeah. I think, own it.

• 12:03David Pierce?

  New Year's glasses.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  I think like fundamentally, there is a light just doesn't work because the light is barely there. Like it, it just, at, at its most basic argument, even if you accept that a light should work, should be enough.

• 12:16David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Like, that light is not it.

• 12:18David Pierce?

  Well, and Joanna asks Mark Zuckerberg in the interview around the audio glasses, which we will probably talk about, which are just only recording audio. She says, well, why isn't there a light on those glasses? And he says, well, the light's for the camera and there's no camera. She's like, yeah, but you're recording people. And he goes, the light's for a camera.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:38David Pierce?

  It's like, oh God, didn't expect it.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 12:41David Pierce?

  Audio is a totally different thing, apparently, so.

• 12:43Nilay Patel?

  I very much recommend everyone go watch the, the full Joanna interview. She makes him uncomfortable several times. I'm still stuck on phones don't have a light because it feels, what's the phrase? It, it feels like a thought terminating cliche. Like you just say this and no further questions, your honor. We're done here.

• 13:00David Pierce?

  Right.

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  Phones don't have a light. And it feels like Meta's approach to their privacy problems is to come up with a cliche and bash you over the head with it. Right? It's the same as Muse not being allowed to go surf amazon.com. And they're going to get to, well, it's, it's, it's the user's agent. So you're blocking the user. And it's like, well, this is a totally new way for computers to use the internet. It, might it be worthwhile to consider how it works? Or are we just gonna bash people over the head until we get our way? And I, I don't think that is the right approach to privacy. We actually have a, a big piece on the site right now from Janice Rose.

• 13:36Nilay Patel?

  I think Jake wrote this headline, it's very good. Everything is spying on you and there's no opting out. Like, we are in an era of passive surveillance and it's a hijack of the law, which says you don't have an expectation of privacy in public, but that law was written 10 million years ago before cameras existed, right? Like, we're, we're not ready for this. Like, the, the legal framework of privacy has nothing to do with, anyone can quietly record you at all times. And I, I think that the social norms are actually way ahead of the legal norms here, where people are saying about flock cameras and Ring doorbells and Meta glasses, we don't like this. And while phones don't have a light is absolutely not the correct response.

• 14:20Nilay Patel?

  And I don't think it's going to buy them the privacy reputation they need to get me to put my credit card into Muse. And this just feels like the circle Meta is going to be in for quite a long time.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Meta has learned all the wrong lessons from their privacy scandals, right? They went, oh, when we apologize, everyone's still mad at us. And so let's just plow ahead, right? It doesn't matter. Let's just go for it. They did not try the thing where they respect what people ask. Like, that, that is, I think, what we wanted from them. And instead they're like, they're selling, I don't know what to tell you, like, someone's gonna do it, may as well be us.

• 14:57David Pierce?

  Which in this case, Muse is by, you know, their account, a success, right? Has a million users or so, and we can get into whether or not that's actually a success, but it's a success for them, you know? So they're not going to apologize for something that's working for them.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  For sure. They need this to work too, right? Like, their reputation in AI has been kind of disastrous. Zuckerberg went out and spent an enormous amount of money to hire Alexander Wang to reboot their AI system. And they've had basically nothing up until this month, when they launched Muse, which admittedly is off to a very strong start, right? I think Facebook, sorry, I, I think Meta can scale just about anything pretty quickly, just due to the size of their network. But clearly they did put together the right elements of a consumer product to make something click here.

• 15:46Nilay Patel?

  And a lot of it is like hardcoded prompts. And we know they're hardcoded because people are getting used to send it, their file system and pulling out the hardcoded prompts. But, you know, the hardcoded prompt of like, go through my receipts and find returns, like, they're good ideas. They're, they're what you would want from a consumer product. And this is really basic, make the product fun and easy to use from the jump, design that Meta's good at, right? What is the onboarding flow? What are the first few things it's going to suggest? There's an ideas feed. These again are, are very basic product design ideas in consumer products, but Meta's good at them already. The numbers question is really interesting. The idea that it's a big success comes from the fact that it's at the top of the App Store, has been for several days. Its early numbers outpaced ChatGPT, which is a fascinating thing we can dig into.

• 16:32Nilay Patel?

  And, you know, there aren't huge scaled consumer AI products. Everyone's been waiting for one. I think there's some thirst to prove that an agent like this will be the future, right? This is the future of all computer interaction, that you got a little fuzzy guy who's gonna go do stuff for you. I don't know about those numbers, actually. First, David Pierce wrote an entire story for us about what it means to be at the top of the App Store, and the answer is not a lot. So you can just set that one aside. Second, the early comparison to ChatGPT kind of forgets the fact that ChatGPT was a little bit of a slow burn.

• 17:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:04Nilay Patel?

  Right? OpenAI put this thing out as a research preview. It took off like wildfire in a small community, but it really accelerated a little bit later. So these early comparisons are, are, you just have to be careful. And then, I think most importantly, Casey Newton has been pointing out that success and failure is very relative here. Like Threads had 100 million users because Meta's good at scaling a social graph really fast, and everyone still thinks Threads is a flop. And it's way bigger than X actually now. And so what, what does success here actually mean?

• 17:35Speaker 02

  For, for an AI product, it, I, for, from Meta, I think it is like, I think it is actually just good vibes. Like, I think that is success for Meta right now. They, they need to be in the conversation and they are in the conversation, and I think of very major way. And you see that from Zuckerberg's presentation at Connect, where it is so fascinating to me, right? Imagine Muse is delayed by three weeks. The, the, the presentation the other night would have been, we have some new glasses and they're new styles and their battery life is a little bit longer. And we would have been like, cool, all right, sure.

• 18:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  You didn't change the, the, the light at all. But instead it became.

• 18:14Nilay Patel?

  We probably would have talked about the VR glasses a little bit.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  The VR glasses, the VR glasses are, are quite impressive. But instead they, it, it felt to me like that show was retooled to put Muse through everything. And most of the Muse stuff was forward looking. It is coming to the glasses. It is getting computer use. It is getting an email address.

• 18:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Soon, right? They see that this is high potential for them, but they have to get there. They're still building this.

• 18:38David Pierce?

  Every AI company dreams of releasing an agent like this, to be honest. Like, all of these companies, yeah, they have apps on your phone, but they're not as integrated as something like Muse is, right? You have companies like Poke from the Interaction Company, which I believe got acquired. That lived in your iMessage and that was their whole thing is like, treat this like a friend that you're texting and it can do things for you, but it needs access to all this stuff. That was from a, a company that nobody really knew about, that people were talking about on Twitter. But when you have Meta and you have the scalability of injecting ads for your product into all of the other products that three to four billion people use every single day, you're gonna get something out of that. Even if you scrape 1% of all your users, that's a huge amount of people.

• 19:21Nilay Patel?

  All right. So here's my question for you. I've been thinking about this a lot. There's a reason people are excited about a consumer AI agent, right? This is the promise of all of this technology, that you will have a, a robot butler that will just do stuff for you. Maybe it lives in your iMessage or maybe like OpenClock and live in your WhatsApp or Telegram or whatever. How do you think the people at Humane felt when they saw Mark hold up the little Muse charm? Because this is the whole thing, right? You're gonna have a not-phone device with its own modem and talking to the cell network, doing stuff for you. And it, it'll be a little personality.

• 19:56David Pierce?

  Well.

• 19:57Nilay Patel?

  Or the people at Rabbit.

• 19:58David Pierce?

  Yeah. Muse works, that's one thing. That's, that's a big differentiator right there. Yeah, probably like vindicated, I suppose, but also they're owned by HP now, so what are you gonna do?

• 20:11Speaker 02

  I, I.

• 20:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  When, when they released this thing, so they have this little puck, the Muse charm, supposed to come out later this year. I feel like this is going to be very revealing about the quality and capabilities of Muse, right? Because we saw the Rabbit R1 and we're like, this hardware looks beautiful and then it can't do anything.

• 20:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  And right now, Muse is fantastic in a browser tab that I can go to every now and then. Will it be good as a standalone device that I'm paying for 5G service for every month? Can it actually accomplish that much? Is it just like a cute little Tamagotchi?

• 20:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:46Nilay Patel?

  And like, how much will AT&T make me pay for this? Are they gonna consider it a smartwatch at $10 a month or a phone at 40? You know, like, there's, there, I have a lot of questions about that. But it just occurs to me, all of Meta's scandals aside, and there's a reason we led with scandals and privacy issues and the, it, phones don't have a light, which I find infuriating. If you set all that aside, which I, I appreciate that not everybody can set all that aside. They did it. They did the thing that everyone is trying to do. They built a consumer agent. It doesn't even appear to be running like a frontier level model. Right? They, they took all the technology that exists. They wrapped it up in a good consumer experience. And they built the thing that Siri should have always been.

• 21:28Nilay Patel?

  Or Google should have been shipping for five years now. Or Humane wanted to build, or Rabbit promised with, remember at CS they said they had the large action model? And really it was like absolutely brain dead automations running on a Spotify server in the cloud. Like they, they built the thing that this industry has been promising to make in one way or another for quite a long time. I, I actually do think that that is remarkable. Whether or not it's hacked together or in the backend, it is a bunch of bash scripts running on other people's models, which it might be. There's something there where they actually productized the promise this industry has been talking about for a minute. And now I think a lot of people see what it's supposed to look like.

• 22:11Nilay Patel?

  Right? The gap between vision and reality has been vast and I think Muse has in fact closed it.

• 22:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, I have a question for you guys though. Like if I'm gonna be paying, you know, $5 a month for an internet connection on this thing or whatever.

• 22:21Nilay Patel?

  $5 a month is such a, you're such a pipe dream.

• 22:24David Pierce?

  Okay, $20 a month for an internet connection on my little Muse puck. A lot of these models, I just don't even really know what to do with. Like we can test the edge cases of them. You can say, go in my Gmail and delete all of my Home Depot, you know, receipts or whatever. How often do I want to do something like that? And a lot of these agents, to me, it just feels like it's a solution to a problem I don't currently have. And I would love to find out about what these problems that I don't even know about are, I suppose. But up until now, none of these companies have really given me a reason to want to use these consistently. Like I understand Claude, like cowork on Claude is cool because it fixes my computer for me.

• 23:05David Pierce?

  When I run into like issues on my computer, it clicks around on my computer and solves the problem when I was searching for it forever. Or the, you know, vibe coding, something. That's a whole nother thing. That is a clear problem that I'm trying to solve. But in a generalized sort of like agent in a box. You know, sometimes maybe once a month, I'm like, oh yeah, I should clean up my Home Depot emails. But besides that, I genuinely don't know what to do with it. And that's another reason why I haven't really set it up yet. One is obviously it's Meta. I would feel more comfortable if it was a different company. But two, like I installed this thing and then I'm like, now what?

• 23:41Speaker 02

  I, I think this is where you get like the Tamagotchi element of it. And I think this is where you see things like the friend pendant. The, the 24/7 utility of AI for the average person, like it's not that high, right? What you need is for these things to always be around gathering the information. So that when you do, out of nowhere go, oh geez, where was that one email I saw that one time three days ago?

• 24:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  It's like, oh, I got it because I've been monitoring your entire life. Easy, done. And I think that's sort of the problem, right? And so you look at like the Muse charm and it's, it's just like the cute little Muse bear is like hanging out, smiling at you and waving. And it's like, they need to make it fun and kind of cutesy so that you hang out with it. Because it is true, you're not going to be at the coffee shop being like, triage my Home Depot emails.

• 24:31David Pierce?

  Like, yeah. Based on the people on, on Twitter who are like, I'm running 80 Mac Pros with like a thousand agents at the same time spinning out my company, which I don't know what that means. I don't know what any of that means. I'm not doing that. General people are not doing that. And I still can't really find a use case where I'm using it all the time.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is the thing. Like if you gave me an agent that I fully trust and can rely on, absolutely, I, I would find things to do it. There's like a bill I've been meaning to bother my insurance company about for fully a year at this point. And like, it would be great if somebody else could do that. I don't want to do it. I'm not going to do it. It's overdue on my to-do list by like months.

• 25:11David Pierce?

  But do you have a task like that all the time? That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Like especially for the charm. Why would you pay a whole separate thing instead of just running it on your phone?

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Well, and I, I think this is the problem, right? Like Meta is making the charm because they don't own the phone. Yeah, they're trying to get around it.

• 25:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  And, and the reality is you do not have enough things to necessarily justify a sans alone device. But they need it to be everywhere to get the data to accomplish these things.

• 25:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  And I think that is sort of where this starts to break down. Yeah.

• 25:40Nilay Patel?

  I mean, yeah, this is the game, right? If you have a new user interface where you get to talk to a computer in a different way and it can do things for you. Then you get to new hardware. This is why OpenAI is trying to make hardware at Johnny I, right? They're trying to make the same product.

• 25:54David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:55Nilay Patel?

  Eventually, Apple's going to have to do the same thing in some way and Google's going to try to do the same thing in some way. That I think the exciting thing for Meta is they got there first with a thing like Muse that appears to be complete. Now, it's early. It's like just very obviously early. But it, it feels like the industry is going to have to react to it in a much stronger way. Like we just had Mark Gurman on Decoder and he said all of Apple's next hardware products are delayed because Siri AI didn't work. So if you don't have the new user interface, you're stuck with, with what kind of hardware you can make. And for Meta, for, you know, they've been chasing VR for ages and ages and ages. They at least got good at making hardware. Like they're, they're pretty good at it now, right?

• 26:35Nilay Patel?

  So you can just see, uh, well, they've got the, they've got a thing that feels like the future of the interface. They've got some hardware chops. Of course they're going to make the first cut at a postphone device.

• 26:45David Pierce?

  And they're not currently being sued by Apple.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Okay, we have a ton more to talk about from Meta Connect and all the hardware they showed off this week. We're going to take a break. When we get back, we're going to dive into the Meta Connect hardware and Google Books.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Support 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.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  But 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 audios become more integrated into our daily media lives. Whether that's music, a movie, and yes, the Verge cast 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.

• 28:20Speaker 06

  Real innovation is powered by real people. This is AMEX Corporate. Trusted experts, smarter technology. 24/7 dedicated support from day one to answer questions, help set up policies and approvals, and consult on spend capacity as your business needs evolve. Plus, on-demand resources help level up operations at every stage. That's the trusted service you've come to expect, built to simplify, designed to scale. This is AMEX Corporate.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  All right, we're back. It was a busy week for hardware. We've got a lot to talk about. First up, Meta Connect 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. They are the Meta Ray-Ban parentheses audio. $349. Does this solve their problem?

• 29:28David Pierce?

  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. If 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?

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Well, 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?

• 29:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Am I seeing something? So if I don't see a camera, I'm just like, all right.

• 30:02David Pierce?

  The audio only version, I don't think is going to solve their issue. Because I think now the issue is a Ray-Ban issue more than it's like a Meta issue.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  I, I think if they had started audio only.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  These would still be a successful product, right? Like, I think the headphone is the best use case for these glasses.

• 30:20David Pierce?

  The Bose, kinda, the Bose style.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's great. It is a casual, nice-looking pair of open-air headphones.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this, 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, they've, they've been successful because people have a camera. Right? Okay. Were they successful because you can talk to Meta AI? I don't think so.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  What is that?

• 30:58Nilay Patel?

  Audio glasses are a bet on whether or not the Muse is, 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 I, again, it all just, I, I think this all just comes down to like how useful they think Muse is. Because that's what enables this product.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, now, that does make this a better moment to release these glasses. Because Meta AI before Muse was not useful. It was not a thing anybody was tapping into. We're still being shown the same demos, right? So, David, you talked to V and J on the show yesterday. They, 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, 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.

• 32:01David Pierce?

  Right.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  And so, I, 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.

• 32:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, 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.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:31David Pierce?

  And they still have Meta AI shoved in everything. And nobody's ever really used Meta AI. So, if 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 kinda trying to shove it in, but the demos were already set up before that. It's a little weird.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  It, 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 gonna put it out and see what happens. And maybe it'll crash and burn, and maybe it'll be the best next big hit."

• 33:07David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  And now they're like, "Perfect, we have Muse."

• 33:09David Pierce?

  It's working.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  "We have audio glasses." I 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?"

• 33:21David Pierce?

  Correct.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  And they kept saying, "No, no, no." They just...

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  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, and a microphone where you can talk to a not-great AI, then you don't have a product. If you have Muse, now you have the possibility of building all kinds of other products. And it just, I think it's convenient that they don't have a camera. Phones don't have a light, you guys.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Phones don't have a light.

• 33:54Nilay Patel?

  But, it is, I, 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, we have the platform after the phone." And he's, he's all but saying it. Right? In the, in the history of computers that he will deliver, if you ask him, he's like, "There were mainframes, and mini-computers, and PCs, and the laptops, and the phones. And now there's gonna be something else." And AI, to him, is just something else.

• 34:21Nilay Patel?

  But, you know, I, 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. And 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, like, people do buy these glasses, but, again, my, my point of view on the, the ones they've had so far is people did want a camera on their face for action sports and kids. Whether they're gonna buy these to talk to Muse is like, actually a big statement about Muse. And whether or not Muse is helpful and useful.

• 34:56David Pierce?

  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," you know? So, it does cost more, is an extra $149, but is FSA and HSA eligible? So, now people have excuses to use their insurance to buy these glasses.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 35:21David Pierce?

  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 Meta glasses.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  People have been talking about this with earbuds forever, right? If, if you can make it look like something that is more normal, if it's something that you're already using and wearing.

• 35:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I have bought my own father every over-the-counter hearing aid you can buy. I've rejected them all. This 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.

• 36:03Nilay Patel?

  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, I understand why you agree. You can set aside your partisan differences." And Bose made hearing aids, and Sony made hearing aids.

• 36:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:13Nilay Patel?

  I bought them all. We just had the CEO of Bose on Decoder, and I was like, "Why didn't this work?" Like, all of those products have essentially failed.

• 36:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Nilay Patel?

  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, the, the history of the product category thus far suggests that even suggesting to your father that they should wear a hearing aid just like ices you out of the family.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  That's fair.

• 36:37Nilay Patel?

  That's been my experience. Yeah, I got all the way to like, "Do you wanna just try the AirPods like the kids?" And he was like, "I will kill you." Like, I'm not wearing AirPods. And I understand other people find all these tools very, very useful, not discounting it 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.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Is he in the market for an AI agent?

• 37:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, maybe. Please use, please go through the hell of their Gmail. That's probably the single greatest parent technology of all time.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  Okay, we've gotta 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.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  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. And this feels like a very big step forward. I, I, 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

• 38:05Speaker 02

  rather than having to undo a bunch of straps over his head to go in and out of virtual reality. Neela, 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?

• 38:21Nilay Patel?

  It makes me want to try them on an airplane.

• 38:26Nilay Patel?

  Every now, you know, I fly to San Francisco a lot.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:29Nilay Patel?

  David, I know you fly to San Francisco a lot.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:31Nilay Patel?

  That New York to San Francisco flight, or New York to San Francisco flight...

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Just a little too long.

• 38:35Nilay Patel?

  It's just a little too long, but because of the thing that it is, there's always a Vision Pro guy.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 38:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 38:42Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's, it's like, that route in particular is where the Vision Pro guy is on the plane.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:47Nilay Patel?

  Like, every time. And I'm always like, "That seems horrible, but I get it."

• 38:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:52Nilay Patel?

  Like, if I could just nope out of this and be in VR.

• 38:57Nilay Patel?

  Look, it is remarkable that Meta showed up and they, they announced what amounts to a much better Vision Pro. Like, what is it? One-sixth the weight, half the price?

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  Now, it's been 2.5 years since the Vision Pro came out. I was like, "Great, it's early '24 it came out." So, it's been a minute, they've revved it once. But, you know, Meta, 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.

• 39:28David Pierce?

  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. They 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 is a fully standalone computer, I mean, that's, that's a, that's a pretty massive deal, I think.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it, 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 gonna 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." And everyone's like, "That's very impressive, but..."

• 40:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, I, I, 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.

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  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 for Meta. That thing was complete.

• 41:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 41:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:10Nilay Patel?

  And that deeply confused Meta ended believing that there was demand for the Metaverse.

• 41:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:14Nilay Patel?

  When there was actually just demand to be somewhere other than your living room.

• 41:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:18Nilay Patel?

  And so like, you know, it's everything had a little topsy-turvy there. And obviously AI sort of upended all of the plans that everybody had. But 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.

• 41:44David Pierce?

  The holograms look good. They're

• 41:47Nilay Patel?

  Where you have to take a bunch of photos to make a hologram like that, right?

• 41:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:51Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 42:07David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 42:07Nilay Patel?

  So they've got some time, but I, as a piece of hardware that just advanced, it makes sense. The, the stuff they're doing with a keyboard and the, the trackpad.

• 42:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 42:18Nilay Patel?

  With camera-only finger tracking, it seems incredible. Like, the Vision Pro can't do that stuff.

• 42:23David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 42:24Nilay Patel?

  But, but it's just like unclear, like how all the execution details are gonna work. And if what you want is a big movie theater or like 10 extra screens.

• 42:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 42:37Nilay Patel?

  Again, the flight from New York to San Francisco is gonna be better than ever, but that's, maybe that's worth $1,300.

• 42:43David Pierce?

  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 SaaS company. And they were like, we sold 10,000 of these to this big B2B SaaS company. And in the future, you're gonna take all of your meetings in this VR space. And they had these kind of cringe, like Nintendo Wii-style VR avatars, whatever.

• 43:25David Pierce?

  But the holograms in this demo that they gave, gave a lot of, 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 take scans of their bodies 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 like scanning their whole body to get it like that? I'm not sure. The technology is still fairly impressive, even though it's 2D instead of like Gaussian splats, like on the Vision Pro.

• 44:05Nilay Patel?

  There's something happening, by the way, with, with splats and rendering.

• 44:09David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:10Nilay Patel?

  That is at the bleeding edge of how cool computers can possibly be, that is also terrifying.

• 44:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:16Nilay Patel?

  We're chasing a story on it because I, I wanna cover it, but have you seen the demos of, we'll, we'll just set up four iPhones and throw water on the ground?

• 44:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:24Nilay Patel?

  And then have like a full virtual walkable environment.

• 44:26David Pierce?

  Uh huh.

• 44:27Nilay Patel?

  That is so far from where we were even just a couple of years ago.

• 44:31David Pierce?

  A hundred percent.

• 44:32Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's all coming together in here. And then it's like, what is reality and is anything real?

• 44:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man.

• 44:37David Pierce?

  No.

• 44:37Nilay Patel?

  But there's something, it's still cool.

• 44:40David Pierce?

  I've had two separate friends send me a vibe-coded Gaussian splatting platform that they made, that they made. People are really into Gaussian splat. 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. Like, they're, 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 gotta utilize it right now. Uh, 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 gonna arrive October 4th.

• 45:25David Pierce?

  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. It looks like a knockoff MacBook Air. Uh, I shouldn't say knockoff. It looks like a Dellified MacBook Air, but with a Google platform. Have you, uh, I'm curious. This is a very big bet. Neil, were you one of the big Chromebook Pixel fans back in the day? Because this feels like the next era for those people.

• 45:58Nilay Patel?

  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 Chromebook Pixel was that it was just a web browser.

• 46:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Nilay Patel?

  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. Like, this is ages ago, right?

• 46:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 46:37Nilay Patel?

  And the, 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, are, am I using a watchpad? Am I using a Mac app? Is it, uh, am I, am I in the web? Like, all, 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, schoolchildren or whatever. And Android and Chrome have been getting ever closer. And I think these are really fascinating. It just, I think the, the lineage of those two products is as divergent as possible.

• 47:14David Pierce?

  Right.

• 47:14Nilay Patel?

  Right? Because this thing is all metaphors, like up and down, new ideas, new metaphors. You know, as a, as a tech dork, I love it. I can't get enough of it. But man, is it, is it just a list of new ideas?

• 47:26David Pierce?

  This feels like they, they already had Android basically running at a desktop operating system level.

• 47:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:32David Pierce?

  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. You can access apps from your phone on a Google Book laptop. That's great if you have Android. David, do you, 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.

• 48:12David Pierce?

  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. But there are many times when you just need to sit down and book your flight and you don't wanna 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.

• 48:53David Pierce?

  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 $1,200 laptop, you can't get an iPhone. It just makes it useless. Uh, that, that is strange. I mean, useless is maybe an overstatement because, I mean, I, I have an Android phone. 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.

• 49:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:34David Pierce?

  And those Android apps may or may not be good enough for a desktop environment.

• 49:39David Pierce?

  To me, I'm just what, like, I see the audience for this, that they are competing with people who are going to buy Windows laptops.

• 49:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:47David Pierce?

  And I am not sure if Google is ready to compete against Windows laptops. From a marketing perspective, I'm not sure they are. From like, from a what people usually do on their computers perspective, I could totally say they are. Neil, like, people are, there's a lot of people who are very mad at Windows these days.

• 50:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:06David Pierce?

  Do those overlap with the people who are looking for, who, who are Android fans, who are looking for this sort of integration? Like, can this appeal to that mainstream audience with this frustration brewing?

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  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 has just paid off. Like, people are mad. And the fact that you can run Windows games better on Linux than, 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 wanna try Copilot? Like, it's just trying to like mug you in a blind alley every time you use it.

• 50:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 50:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 51:00Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:20Nilay Patel?

  An emulation, like, maybe that would change some hearts and minds. But I'm with you that if you take away the Android integration, which is fascinating, like, the merger of phone and laptop here is way beyond anything anyone else is doing, right? 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.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:44Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  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 introductory price for the Acer one. And they said it might change based on market conditions.

• 52:03David Pierce?

  Oh, it will change.

• 52:04Nilay Patel?

  The price of RAM is making that go up.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is market price, just like your fish.

• 52:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, I mean, I just, again, I think that it's, we're in a time of like, big new ideas about what computers should be.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  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? Jake, like, I'm thinking of the Motorola Atrix from like, 2012.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, 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.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  And now we're back to it, where we're 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. And 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 some, if one of the apps is, you know, best as an app, or it'll say, oh, this is better as a website. Go to the website.

• 53:43Nilay Patel?

  Which on one hand, you're like- This is better as a website is one of the harshest burns an App Store can possibly go through.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really bad.

• 53:49David Pierce?

  But also, it's so polite, but also like, that convenience is showing their failure, right? That they have not gotten the desktop apps.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  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? First, it was for foldables, and then it was because they wanted to compete with decks. So you could plug your phone directly into a 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 that half of the top 100, which is an interesting way to say 50.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  But that's something, I guess.

• 54:42Nilay Patel?

  But it's not the top 50, it's more equally, and you don't know if it's the bottom 50.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  It could be the bottom 50, yeah.

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  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, your iPhone Duo. It's not an iPad.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Within two months. We need all of your best engineers on reflections.

• 55:04Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:11Nilay Patel?

  Whereas Apple can just drag developers to be where they want.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:14Nilay Patel?

  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 Mac, touchscreen MacBook.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:29Nilay Patel?

  Because you're gonna, here's yet another screen size and form factor and 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.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  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. So, 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 a subset of the audience, right? People who have Android phones, who do not need specialized pieces of software, who are okay

• 56:24Speaker 02

  with what is going to be a developing experience of the apps that even do exist.

• 56:29David Pierce?

  What 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.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  But is it like, full Premiere Pro?

• 56:38David Pierce?

  Well, is it?

• 56:39Speaker 02

  It's a Premiere Pro.

• 56:41David Pierce?

  It's a Premiere Pro.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  This is the thing, it's like, Lightroom is on Android.

• 56:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  But like, it's not Lightroom classic.

• 56:47David Pierce?

  Quite the same, yeah.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  It's not. I don't know, I, 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.

• 57:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, 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 gonna 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 gonna be talking about it next week.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's an exciting time for laptops. All right, it's time to turn to the hype desk.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  Ashley Sket is here. Ashley.

• 57:29Speaker 07

  Hello. I'm here. I'm alive.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  Ashley, good to have you.

• 57:33Speaker 07

  It's been a minute.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  Where are you?

• 57:35Speaker 07

  I'm in an undisclosed hotel room in San Francisco.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  I like the secretiveness. I think this is good for you.

• 57:42Speaker 07

  Me too. I feel like Carmen Sandiego a little bit.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  Hype can happen anywhere, at any time.

• 57:47Speaker 07

  That is true.

• 57:48Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 57:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, I have to keep my, I'm trying to keep a low profile. I can't be, you know, I don't want people to identify where I am.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  It's important. You're spotting the trends early. All right, Ashley, what do you have for us today?

• 58:05Speaker 07

  You know, we gotta talk about Blade, because Mahershala Ali,

• 58:11Speaker 07

  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,

• 58:33Speaker 07

  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, and he, 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. Just straight up, just came for him so hard, like, just right up, right out front.

• 58:54Speaker 08

  Kevin, he said it was the biggest failure of his career, and I agree.

• 58:57Nilay Patel?

  The quote was, I feel like a giant loser and failure for not getting off the ground with Mahershala.

• 59:02Speaker 08

  I agree with him. I agree with him. 100%. 100%. He should feel that way.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  My entire TikTok feed is clips of this interview, and it is incredible. Mahershala is just like, he's chill, and he's just like, this is, this is how it is, like, we all know this. No one, this is not controversial, even within Disney.

• 59:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. First of all, I just want to point out, he's wearing an incredible jacket in this interview. And 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, nothing.

• 1:00:04Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:00:04Nilay Patel?

  And the thing that stands out to me is the third one is the most incredibly bananas movie that I can recall. Because it-

• 1:00:13Speaker 07

  It is bonkers.

• 1:00:14Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 1:00:26Speaker 07

  I can't believe you remember, this is what you remember at the Blade franchise.

• 1:00:29Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 1:00:36Speaker 07

  Ryan Reynolds. These are like, these are the two, yeah, I remember that too. And then, well, the first one, though, I have, I love the first Blade movie, so I remember quite a bit.

• 1:00:45Nilay Patel?

  I remember loving the first Blade movie too, but there's nothing in my brain about it.

• 1:00:49Speaker 07

  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?

• 1:00:57Nilay Patel?

  That could be any of the Blade movies. Like, all of the Blade movies have that scene in it.

• 1:01:01Speaker 07

  Oh, no. Now I'm, now I'm scared that it's Blade. Oh, no. Now I'm scared.

• 1:01:05Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 1:01:15Nilay Patel?

  That's what I got. And I know Kris Kristofferson is in them for some reason. Like, he just needed money.

• 1:01:21Speaker 07

  But everybody likes Hot Dracula.

• 1:01:22Nilay Patel?

  But here's, 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 gonna be another Blade. I really, I'm curious if the people at Disney, if Kevin Feige sat down and said, we're gonna 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. Not even top this, like, just even like, acknowledge that that happened and where, and you can do something else. Like, once you get to Hot Dracula, you're like, you might be done. Because you can't go gritty, realistic Blade from there.

• 1:01:58Speaker 07

  Well, you, you could, but like, I mean, that's, that's coming down from a silliness high. That's like, that's, that's a tough transition. That this, there's sort of an inherent silliness of it. I think you might, that could be a thing. That could be very real.

• 1:02:12Nilay Patel?

  Just to bring it back to jackets. Again, I haven't watched this movie. I didn't look at any clips. I don't, what I, what I remember about that movie is, I, I wish I could wear jackets, like Hot Dracula has jackets in that movie.

• 1:02:24Speaker 07

  Top, top tier jackets in the Blade series. Let's all, that's, I mean, I will say that. I can remember the top tier jackets in all three movies.

• 1:02:31Nilay Patel?

  So you remember like, the second Blade movie? It's, it's in, it's in your brain?

• 1:02:34Speaker 07

  I'm thinking of the first two are just mushed together into one giant Blade movie. So I, like, I feel like-

• 1:02:39Nilay Patel?

  See what I mean? Like, I think Marvel had this exact problem. Where the Blade movies and Wesley Snipes' Blade are so permeated into the consciousness, but not in a specific way, just in a general way, that there's no way to move on.

• 1:02:52Speaker 07

  Sort of nebulous.

• 1:02:53Nilay Patel?

  Like, it was easy to move on from like, Val Kilmer's Batman. You're like, well, that didn't matter.

• 1:02:58Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Nilay Patel?

  Right? And it, and even in some way, it was easy to get to Robert Pattinson Batman. Because you're like, well, this is done.

• 1:03:05Speaker 07

  That's fair.

• 1:03:05Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, this thing is done. This, this, this is complete. We're gonna, we're gonna start again. I, I don't know. I, I feel what Mahershala is saying here. Like, he got screwed up, like, in pre-production, from what I understand from that interview.

• 1:03:16Speaker 07

  Those are conversations that should have happened before they hired Mahershala Ali, you know?

• 1:03:20Nilay Patel?

  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. If you, if you're in the market, Marvel, we'll get it done. This is what AI is for.

• 1:03:29Speaker 07

  If you need one, yeah. Hundred percent. No, no, we can't do it that way. We have to, that's, only a, a true good Blade movie, a crazy, a one that takes a psychic cold on you can, can only be written by human, human minds.

• 1:03:44Nilay Patel?

  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?

• 1:03:54Speaker 07

  That could be.

• 1:03:55Nilay Patel?

  All right. All right, Ash, we gotta let you get back to your undisclosed location. But there's news.

• 1:03:59Speaker 07

  There is news. We have a sponsor on the hype desk. Let's watch it.

• 1:04:07Speaker 09

  If 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. If I'm working at my desk, or when I take a break

• 1:04:51Speaker 09

  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 a theory for science.

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  Start 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 soundbars, 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.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  All right, we're back. And after a long Tuukic absence, it's time, once again, for everyone's favorite segment. Neelai?

• 1:06:21Nilay Patel?

  It's time now for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

• 1:06:26Speaker 10

  Brendan Carr is a big old dummy. He says things that aren't that funny. It helps that we can laugh. When we come together, we call him an ass.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  Like that riff at the end. That was very good.

• 1:06:41Nilay Patel?

  That was good. That's why Greg Pierce, who may or may not be David Pierce in a truck, 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, you gotta make it yourself, even if it's a banger. So this week on Brendan Carr's Dummy, I first want to address the number one tip we've ever gotten here on America's Favorite Podcast within a podcast, which is a Guardian report that Brendan 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. Many people

• 1:07:22Nilay Patel?

  have sent this to me. We're just, we're just not gonna 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, it's 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, we'll link it. It's, 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

• 1:08:03Nilay Patel?

  rule Brendan has put forth, that would essentially take away their ability to hold ISPs accountable for not building the broadband, I promise. That seems much more relevant to me. You see what I mean? This is the, 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. Do you, do you believe this? Do you think it's the local communities that are holding up the broadband providers?

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  Surely that is not correct.

• 1:08:52Nilay Patel?

  The governments, in response, in 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 applied 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, the cities, and the FCC has decided that this is the city's fault, because they're not approving permits fast enough. And 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. He's, anytime there's a fight in which the

• 1:09:35Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  Three up, everybody.

• 1:09:48Nilay Patel?

  That's what I got for you. As usual, there's a bunch of speech stuff going on. What, I, I think I wasn't here when, you know, another James Talarico interview ended up on YouTube instead of the airwaves. That's all brewing 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, decoder, on the street, we could do a livestream of you for Meta Glasses. That appears to be all the rage. There's a light, did you know? Phones don't have a light. That's from Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  That was beautiful, unlike Brendan's actions as FC chairman.

• 1:10:44Nilay Patel?

  You know, we didn't talk about the, we didn't talk about the muse butt at all.

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:50Nilay Patel?

  Jake, I feel like you steered me against it.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  I'm so sorry. Listen.

• 1:10:54David Pierce?

  It was unintentional.

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  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. Neelai.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  Throw this one straight to you.

• 1:11:05Nilay Patel?

  I was gonna start, I was gonna start with Paramount.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  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 horny tweets for the AI mascot he created. It's Paramount. We start with this. Come on.

• 1:11:20Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 1:11:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, you know, I talked to a lot of them. A lot of them are robots. Alexander Wang is just like, I'm doing horny tweets about my mascot.

• 1:11:54Nilay Patel?

  The other one that I very much appreciated from him was a comparison of all the AI logos. And someone said, Muse is 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, is it a personality? That's true. And it did make me laugh. I did, I did laugh at this one.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  I, listen, this is the most winning Meta has been in the AI race. And, and he's feeling it. He's feeling good. I, listen, if this is what it means for us, I'll take more entertaining tweets from Alexander Wang.

• 1:12:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  All right, Neelai, you got another for us?

• 1:12:32Nilay Patel?

  We should talk about Paramount briefly.

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  Yes, okay.

• 1:12:35Nilay Patel?

  So this week, the, 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. So like, we'll see, like, how independent can they really be? We, we've learned a lot about the power you get when you appoint your own board members, but that's the promise. They're gonna 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 healthcare and retirement funds managed by the Hollywood unions. So we'll see.

• 1:13:18Nilay Patel?

  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 are like, we gotta get this done. Figure out the remedies, get this done. And they got it done.

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  This feels like Paramount One, for sure, right?

• 1:13:42Nilay Patel?

  It absolutely feels like Paramount One.

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  Paramount agreed to release movies. Like, that's movie stuff.

• 1:13:48David Pierce?

  Agrees to release movies.

• 1:13:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's gonna be an independent board of someone.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, oh, no. CNN will, right?

• 1:13:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The head of CNN apparently gave an all hands speech yesterday when she said, I literally don't know what's gonna happen now. And, I mean, like, it's just really unclear now. Like, they got to the 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. By the way, Brendan, you know, who cares so much about the, the fairness of broadcast news, approved an exception to foreign investment rules and is allowing a bunch of Saudi money. Forty nine point five percent of the deal being financed by Saudi money. And he says, well, they, you know, they'll be hands off.

• 1:14:31Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 1:14:32Nilay Patel?

  Fine. The RFCC is, is very worried about Jimmy Kimmel. And not so worried about foreign money flooding into, flooding into our, 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 gonna happen. And we're gonna see what happens next.

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, a mysterious board that is in place to determine whether you are a biased reporter that feels, I, I, I understand where they're coming from. I understand the intention there. They're trying to avoid a CBS takeover, but man, the, the, the broad strokes of that feel uncomfortable.

• 1:15:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. We'll see. I mean, again, the deal is closed. You know what's gonna happen. There's gonna be a bunch of downstream weird tech things. These apps are gonna get merged. David Ellison has talked for a long time about how we'll, he's gonna, we don't have to lay people off because we'll achieve synergy in merging the tech platforms. We're gonna run it like a tech company.

• 1:15:32Nilay Patel?

  So get ready. I, I just hope they finish lanterns before they start ruining the app.

• 1:15:38Nilay Patel?

  If that gets disrupted, I'll be very unhappy.

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  All right. David, what have you got for us?

• 1:15:42David Pierce?

  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 chatbot that you can talk to about your videos. They introduced AI A B thumbnail testing last year, which is a, is a good feature that we use a lot.

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  That one I do see a lot.

• 1:16:04David Pierce?

  That one you do 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. But I feel like that stays in the little, the little happy medium.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  Is the thumbnail you're seeing the same as the thumbnail I'm seeing? Is that like, yeah?

• 1:16:21David Pierce?

  That's like the, the very beginnings. This year, because it is 2026 and the, 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. It will also automatically generate you a new YouTube thumbnail.

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:17:02David Pierce?

  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 about specifically is A B video testing.

• 1:17:18Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  The entire video?

• 1:17:20David Pierce?

  The, well, it's a little unclear. YouTube does not quite know what the boundaries of this are going to be yet. They say it's gonna release later. So I think that they're gonna 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.

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  That's so wild.

• 1:17:51David Pierce?

  And then when it lands on one that's working better, the best for the most amount of people, it's, it just collapses that, it collapses the wave function and everybody gets the same video. That's weird. In, in my opinion, that's weird. They don't, 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?

• 1:18:24Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:18:24David Pierce?

  Because every single YouTube feature 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. Go 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.

• 1:18:59Nilay Patel?

  All right. So it's, it's interesting to have this conversation because I, I appreciate your perspective as somebody who works a lot on YouTube.

• 1:19:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:07Nilay Patel?

  And also cares a lot about journalism. And I spend a lot of time talking to money. And so Mr. Ethics Policy here is gonna tell you, oh, this makes perfect sense to me.

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:19:16Nilay Patel?

  Because all of these platforms are marketing platforms.

• 1:19:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:19Nilay Patel?

  And so if you swim in the swamps of D two C video marketing, which I do way too often, and it 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.

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:19:40Nilay Patel?

  And so even though, even the A B video testing, their example is if you're, 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.

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:19:52Nilay Patel?

  So Gary Vaynerchuk, who is, 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.

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  Wow, okay.

• 1:20:08Nilay Patel?

  And he, 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, I'm telling you, this man regularly goes viral with seven year old content all the time. And 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 gonna give the tools to everyone.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:41Nilay Patel?

  Because that's what everyone's doing. And from the other perspective, it's, well, if you want to sell your illegal peptides.

• 1:20:49Nilay Patel?

  Like, the best thing YouTube can do for you is tell you which hooks are gonna perform, because then you're gonna 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. We'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 into Claude, and it remixes all of our videos, and it turns 30 videos into 1,000 videos. And then we just run them again. And it's like, oh, this is really bad.

• 1:21:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:29Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 1:21:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think if you're a consumer, you're like, oh, this is some really bad things are gonna start happening.

• 1:21:44David Pierce?

  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. 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 gonna 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. I completely understand that that's exactly YouTube's incentive structure.

• 1:22:28David Pierce?

  It just feels like a far end of the insidification of the platform.

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  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, it, right, we, 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 it 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. They'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,

• 1:23:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:15Speaker 02

  views as possible.

• 1:23:16David Pierce?

  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 documentary. It's like, it's so strange to live in that world. I understand the business case for it, but it feels wrong.

• 1:23:32Nilay Patel?

  I don't even think it's a business case. I, it, to your point, all these teachers get gamed. And the shift from you're gonna 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.

• 1:23:47David Pierce?

  For sure.

• 1:23:48Nilay Patel?

  And I, I don't see any of these platforms pulling back from that anytime soon.

• 1:23:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:53Nilay Patel?

  I think TikTok has basically, like, made itself irrelevant, because it's fallen so far down this hole.

• 1:23:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:59Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 1:24:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, 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, and 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.

• 1:24:24Nilay Patel?

  Mark wins again. He's relentless.

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  Mark wins again.

• 1:24:27David Pierce?

  It happened.

• 1:24:28Speaker 02

  Anyway, do you have an exciting one for us?

• 1:24:30David Pierce?

  I, oh, well, exciting isn't exactly where I put it.

• 1:24:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:33David Pierce?

  The state of Xbox continues to do.

• 1:24:35Nilay Patel?

  That's what the opposite of it started.

• 1:24:37David Pierce?

  A giant meteor is headed for Earth.

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:24:48David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  And then she's like, about that.

• 1:24:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:51Speaker 02

  So like, she's like, we did a translucent Xbox.

• 1:24:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  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?

• 1:25:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:19Speaker 02

  So previously, they had shut down a bunch of studios. Now they're consolidating a lot of the teams that are left. And I think the, 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. That, a, a, and the, the expectation was, okay, they remade the original Halo. They figured out how to make a great Halo. Now they're gonna go do their own thing.

• 1:26:01Speaker 02

  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 are going to be put in charge of the future of Xbox exclusive gaming for so many of these titles. And, uh, King is gonna be put in charge of a bunch of, uh, you know, these smaller titles. And it's like.

• 1:26:24David Pierce?

  Yeah. Can I add something?

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:26:26David Pierce?

  King is gonna be put in charge of Solitaire and Minesweeper.

• 1:26:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:26:31David Pierce?

  Which I didn't know were receiving updates.

• 1:26:33Speaker 02

  I will say, that I'm kind of into. I think there's something there. I'd play King, King Minesweeper.

• 1:26:41David Pierce?

  Uh, yeah, I guess.

• 1:26:42Speaker 02

  Those in-app purchases are gonna be crazy.

• 1:26:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah, that's true.

• 1:26:46Speaker 02

  But.

• 1:26:46David Pierce?

  Microtransactions.

• 1:26:47Nilay Patel?

  Uh, here, 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, I have proposed that I interview her at my high school.

• 1:27:00David Pierce?

  That would be amazing.

• 1:27:01Nilay Patel?

  The ask is out. I haven't asked my high school if I can do this yet.

• 1:27:07David Pierce?

  Just show up.

• 1:27:08Nilay Patel?

  But I'm just saying, I, I'm just, I'm just trying to manifest. I think that'd be pretty good.

• 1:27:12David Pierce?

  That'd be pretty good.

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  That's very good. Um, the state of Xbox i, is shaky.

• 1:27:16David Pierce?

  Is not very good.

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  She, yeah. Um, I, I 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, it feels like the Activision Blizzard acquisition has eaten Xbox.

• 1:27:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:33Speaker 02

  And they are dealing with the fallout at this point.

• 1:27:36David Pierce?

  Well, also fallout, because that's also being re, researched.

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  Fallout. Uh, yes.

• 1:27:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:41Speaker 02

  That, that is, yeah.

• 1:27:43David Pierce?

  Um, yeah.

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:27:44David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:27:45Speaker 02

  Maybe we can end on something, uh, a little more positive.

• 1:27:48David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:49David Pierce?

  Neel, do you have anything for us?

• 1:27:50Nilay Patel?

  I do, and I'm very excited to end on some positive news here.

• 1:27:54David Pierce?

  Let's go.

• 1:27:55Nilay Patel?

  So, do you guys know what a Rodecaster is? I'm sure you do.

• 1:27:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:58Nilay Patel?

  You're nerds.

• 1:27:58David Pierce?

  Australian.

• 1:27:59Nilay Patel?

  Rode is a, a audio tech company. How would you describe Rode? Rode makes all the microphones. I'm talking to a Rode microphone. The tape here is covering up a, a Rode logo on my mic stand.

• 1:28:08David Pierce?

  Probably the most popular wireless mic for creators as well.

• 1:28:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're, 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.

• 1:28:22David Pierce?

  Love it.

• 1:28:22Nilay Patel?

  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. Rode just did it for free. So, Rodecaster firmware update 1.4 adds 4K support to a whole bunch of Rode 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 that they already sold. And they, they just did it. And like, everyone's happy. And it, it's been a minute since something like that has happened, and everyone's happy.

• 1:29:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:04Nilay Patel?

  Good on you, Rode.

• 1:29:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:05Nilay Patel?

  I'm still gonna keep the tape on the logo on this microphone.

• 1:29:08David Pierce?

  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 Rode, 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 Rode. That rules.

• 1:29:38Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah, we gotta end on a high note. That's it, that's the high note.

• 1:29:40David Pierce?

  I love it, that's fantastic.

• 1:29:41Nilay Patel?

  It's not a new idea about computers. It's a very old idea about paying for things.

• 1:29:46David Pierce?

  Should I use Muse? Should I use Muse?

• 1:29:49Speaker 02

  Listen.

• 1:29:49Nilay Patel?

  Do it.

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  It, okay.

• 1:29:51David Pierce?

  Send it shopping for you.

• 1:29:53Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 1:30:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:01Nilay Patel?

  You can just have it do stuff on those platforms for you. What, the funniest one is that it works with Marketplace.

• 1:30:08David Pierce?

  Oh, oh.

• 1:30:09Nilay Patel?

  So if you're, like, trying to do stuff on Marketplace, it can just do.

• 1:30:12David Pierce?

  Negotiate for me?

• 1:30:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It can just be the, it can just, it can just be like, are you a real person? Or are you a murderer, like, on your behalf for you on Marketplace?

• 1:30:20Speaker 02

  Their, 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, they're purely at, like, this is going to go argue with companies for you.

• 1:30:33David Pierce?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:30:34Speaker 02

  So like, yeah.

• 1:30:35David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:30:35Speaker 02

  Well, good, good luck out there. Let us know what Marketplace finds you, uh, you get next, next week.

• 1:30:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  Okay. That's it for The Vergecast. We're ending on a high note. Neel, what's happened on Decoder?

• 1:30:44Nilay Patel?

  Uh, on Decoder, we, I did a, a, a deep look at Zuck's answers. He had the same answers to Heath and Joanna. These are the answers he gives. So I just, a, a reaction, because I asked Meta, and they, they, they said no. I wonder why. Um, 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 titled, he was not happy with the title, but the Journal titled, "How I Choose to Fire People with AI."

• 1:31:11David Pierce?

  Whoa.

• 1:31:12Speaker 02

  Who?

• 1:31:13Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's a lot.

• 1:31:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, that's a real good blame it on your editor one.

• 1:31:17Nilay Patel?

  It wasn't good.

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  Aye, aye, aye.

• 1:31:19David Pierce?

  All right. This Sunday, look out for new episodes of our back-to-school season of Verge history. This one is about one laptop per child.

• 1:31:27Speaker 02

  That's me.

• 1:31:27David Pierce?

  David's on there.

• 1:31:28Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:31:29David Pierce?

  Love it. People are really into this season. It's been super fun. We did a livestream 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, [email protected], or call the hotline at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We'll see you next week. Neel.

• 1:32:02Nilay Patel?

  Back on.

• 1:32:06Speaker 11

  Life is too short for bad audio quality. Luckily, there's Sonos. Sonos is a full sound system that you can customize to fit your life. The 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.