Phones don't have lights

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A little bit about, that's right. I'm your friend, you know, I'm back. After two weeks away, that's what you were expecting. Check out St. Macus is here.

So glad you're back for delightful intros like these new lives. David Mellow's here, what's up, man? I haven't left yet. We're never letting you leave. You understand this, right?

Let's leave it. The people demand that you stay in that studio and never go anywhere else. We'll figure it out. I love you now. All right.

There's a lot going on this week. There's Google books, there's Metacranic Check, what's on the menu? Yeah, it was a busy week for gadgets, Google books. We're going to finish up with a brand new card, a dummy naturally, now you're back. The long way to return, we're going to lightning round.

We've got to start with Meta. 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? But not the band.

If only, if only. If they had brought on the band. Another more fun. Yeah, the branding, I think, would have gotten a little conflated with the sexy, what is it, bear? I don't know what it is.

It's called the Jolly. The mascot's name is Jolly. That will fix their privacy. We're going to come back to Jolly. I assure you.

I don't want to come back to Jolly. It became a show about Muse. Muse was everywhere and 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? 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. This is the problem with Muse, right? Straight forwardly, every piece of coverage we do, all the comments, even we had a editorial meeting about the other hands, like, every needs at least use a thing. And half of our editors were like, I won't.

I was like, you have to. So I gave it one thing. I gave it my personal spam Gmail, right? Which is, if Meta can look at however many Home Depot E-reseats it was, that's fine. And there's some boring thing.

It's like, we have, we return something overseas, and there's a tax form. And I was like, can you just figure this out? And it did it, right? Like, I bought a thing from overseas, and we had to send it back, and all this stuff. And I was like, I do not have the time or inclination to do this.

And I just asked me to do it, and it did it. And it did it by connecting to my Gmail and my email, which I don't love. And I don't love that Meta now has access to that. There are a lot of promises around Meta's privacy, and encryption, with a virtual machine, and they hired Marlon Moxie Spike for a signal to build it. And Mark Zuckerberg keeps saying his name like a talisman.

You know? Well, Moxie and Spike is here. Nothing can possibly go wrong. But it is shockingly useful. And it's a good product.

There's a lot of it that is Open Claw part 2. Yeah. Like, people have dug into it, and a lot of the. The file names are exactly the same. The structure of the files are effectively Open Claw.

And one of the developers of Muse came on and said, we are heavily inspired by what? By the files we downloaded. Yeah, exactly. It seems like Open Source. Yeah, that's what it goes.

The thing about it though is that it is a product. Meta is a good consumer product company. They have the chops. They are a bunch of designers. It works.

Like, you can show it to a normal person, and it works as a consumer product, not Open Claw, which is a little bit terrifying. Or any of the other AI products really are kind of rough around the edges of 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. Jacob, you used it? Yeah, I've been putting around, but that is exactly it. Right? It is sort of like, baby's first open claw or something.

Like, it's very friendly and cuddly. And it's like, I can do anything. Just give me access. And you're like, oh, cool. I mean, I guess I'll just give you my Instagram access because probably you're tapping into that anyway.

But then 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 blue sky to scan for posts that you asked about, I will need access to your Gmail account. And I'm like, man, it just went off and did that. And it's able to build this brief for me and paste it into its own chat. But if I wanted to email it to me in my inbox, I need to give a Gmail access.

I don't necessarily want to give a Gmail access. Yeah. And that is just the problem with all of these AI tools. So do you believe I saw an analyst writing? These downloads indicate that meta's privacy terms and conditions and its promises about secure virtual machines are resonating with consumers.

I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. Consumers do not know what to do. It's not guaranteed. I mean, this is the problem for meta. And we should come back to news in detail, because it is their next platform.

It's their next bet. We can talk about Alexander Wang, the head of meta super intelligence 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 may be at worst because of the glasses, right? They're putting cameras on their faces, and everyone's falling on perfect glasses.

And the reputation that meta is not good at privacy is everywhere. And it feels to me anyway, like it hangs like a dark cloud over news. Like, why would you give this company even more data? Yeah. I think that this company has 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 extract more from you. So at least from my perspective, and again, I probably should try this. But 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 harvesting my data and serving even more ads? The reason I don't want to meta this really been displays is because I don't want ads injected into my eyeballs, which is the long horizon of what I see with all the meta products. And that's sort of the problem. So my feeling here is that they know this is a problem, and they're just going to horsepower through it. Yeah.

Like they don't have a strategy besides publishing my paper about secure virtual machines. They're just going to do it. Part of my feeling here is based on interviews Mark's like, we're just doing. He just did a big interview with Alex Heath. He did a big interview on a stern, but former virtual people, you can check out, you can ever leave.

And with Joanna, he specifically said, most people think of meta as a sharing company because we started his Facebook. But we also make what's app which is encrypted in 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 what's app is also for sharing?

Like in a very real way. And like meta's business is advertising. And there's no business model that they have that isn't advertising. So they're going to have to come up with something else to prove that's the case. And then the second thing, and David, this is just me wanting to prompt another camera at a crash out with you.

My favorite thing to do 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. He just said it's obviously we have that clip here. 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. OK. So phones don't have a light is. OK, I see where he's coming from.

But yeah. I like that he's just like, I just thought of this. Like this just occurred to me. He's just saying that flash does not always go off when you take a picture. Sure.

Not everything is a flash photo. Yeah. Phones don't have a light feels like meta. Like meta has to hold on to that as tightly as they can now. Yeah.

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 I mean, a long time ago, 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. And obviously, maybe phones should have a light is a good response to this. But Joanna, several weeks later, asked a similar question and actually did the phone pull out of the pocket. I mean, we've got that here too. Let's watch this.

I mean, this is the only device that I'm aware of that. It tells you when you're taking a photo or recording a video. I mean, people do that with phones all the time. And this is just like, you know, this sort of you're holding your phone up, right? They're not as sure.

But we kind of took this into account from day one, 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 going to have questions about this. And we want to make sure that we're handling this responsibly from the beginning. So we built the camera light up. So it's that sure, right?

Sure. 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. Do you buy phones don't have a light as a response and much like when you're using your phone. And it is obvious to other people that you're not paying attention to them because your attention is being directed in a specific vector towards your phone, down at your phone. Generally, when people are recording on a raving 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 mentioned the other countries in Japan. It's not 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 and see around them when they're being photographed.

The light to me is not enough. You know, they're apps now that are like, oh my god, someone has a lot of glasses around you, but I don't know. It doesn't seem like enough to me. This argument would be so much stronger if it was a prominent light. 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. Like more lights, like light up the front of those glasses. Like Kanye style, like 2000s.

Yeah, yeah, I think on it. I think like fundamentally, there is a light just doesn't work because the light is barely there. Like it just at its most basic argument, even if you accept that a light should work, should be enough. Yeah, like that light is not it. Well, and Joanna asks Mark Zuckerberg in the interview around the audio glasses, which we'll 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 lights for the camera. And there's no camera. Yeah, but you're recording people and he goes, the lights for a camera. Yeah, I'm like, oh, god, didn't expect it.

Oh, the audio is a totally different thing, really. So I very much recommend everyone go watch the full joiner interview. She makes them uncomfortable several times. I'm still stuck on phones to have a light because it feels, what's the phrase? It feels like a thought terminating cliche.

Like you just say this and no further questions, you're on our we're done here. Right. Bones don't have a light. And it feels like Met is approached to their privacy problems is to come up with a cliche and bash you over that with it. Right.

It's the same as me who's not being allowed to go surf Amazon.com. And they're going to get to you. Well, 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 be worthwhile to consider how it works. Or are we just going to bash people over the head until we get our way? And I don't think that is the right approach to privacy. We actually have a big piece on the site right now from Janice Rose. I think Jake wrote this out.

I'm sorry. Everything is spying on you. And there's no opting out. 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 not ready for this. Like the legal framework of privacy has nothing to do with anyone can quietly record you at all times. And I think that the social norms are actually way ahead of the legal norms here, where people are saying about flop cameras and ring gordels and meta-glasses.

We don't like this. And well, phones don't have a light is absolutely not the correct response. 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. Met has learned all the wrong lessons from their privacy scandals.

They went, oh, when we apologize, everyone's still mad at us. And so let's just plow ahead. It doesn't matter. Let's just go for it. They did not try the thing where they respect what people ask.

That is, I think, what we wanted from them. And instead they're selling, I don't know what to tell you, like someone's going to do it may as well be us, which in this case, Muse is by 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. So they're not going to apologize for something that's working for them.

For sure. They need this to work, too. 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 also a very strong start.

I think Facebook, sorry, 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 clickier. And a lot of it is hard-coded prompts. And we know they're hard-coded because people are getting used to send it. Their file system is pulling out the hard-coded prompts.

But the hard-coded prompt to go through my receipts and find returns, they're good ideas. 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 designed at Metas Goode. Right? What is the onboarding flow?

What are the first few things that's in this address? There's an ideas feed. These, again, are very basic product design ideas and consumer products, but Metas Goode at them already. The number of questions 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.

It has been for several days. It's early numbers out-paced chat GPT, which is a fascinating thing we can dig into. And 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.

This is a future of all-computer interaction. You've got a little fuzzy guy who's going to 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 chat GPT kind of forgets the fact that ChatGP was a little bit of a slow burn. Right? So I think it's a very open app that's a research preview. It's like a wild fireness community.

But it really accelerated a little bit later. So these early comparisons are just to be careful. And then, I think most importantly, Casey Newton has been pointing out that success until years very relative here, like, threads had 100 million users because Metas is good at scaling a social graph really fast. And everyone still thinks threads is a flop. And it's way bigger than that, actually, now.

And so what does success here actually mean? For an AI product, from Meta, I think it is actually has good vibes. I think that is success for Meta right now. They need to be in the conversation. And they are in the conversation.

I think a 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 presentation the other night would have been, we have some new glasses and their new styles and their battery life is a little bit longer. And we would have been like, cool.

All right, sure. Yeah. You didn't change the light at all. But instead, it became- Oh, we're trying to talk to VR glasses a little bit. The VR glasses are quite impressive.

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

Yeah, soon. Right. They see that this is high potential for them. But they have to get there. They're still building this.

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's, right? You have companies like Polk from the interaction company, which I believe got acquired. That lived in your iMessage.

And that was their whole thing. It's 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 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 going to get something out of that. Even if you describe 1% of all your users, that's a huge amount of people.

All right. So here's my question for you. I mean, think about this a lot. There's a reason people are excited about a consumer agent, right? This is the promise of all of this technology that you will have a robot bot where it will just do stuff for you.

It may be a losing your iMessage or maybe open clock in your WhatsApp or your telegram or whatever. How do you think that people at Humain felt when they saw it more cold up the little Muse charm? Because this is the whole thing, right? You're going to have a not phone device with its own modem and it's talking about stuff on that work doing stuff for you. And it'll be a little personality.

Well, or the people at Radit. Yeah. Muse works. That's one thing. That's a big differentiator right there.

Yeah, probably vindicated, I suppose, but also their own by HP now. So what are you going to do? Right. 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 Rabidar one and we're like, this hardware looks beautiful and then it can't do anything. Yeah. 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? Yeah. Yeah. And like how much will it make me pay for this? Or they consider it a spot watch?

It's $1 a month or a phone at 40. There's a lot of questions about that. But it just occurs to me. All of that is scandals aside. And there's a reason we led with scandals and privacy issues.

And the phones don't have a light, which I find infuriating. If you set all that aside, which I appreciate it. Not everybody can install it 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 a frontier level model. 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.

Or Google should have been shipping for five years now. Or humane wanted to build. Or Rabbit promised what member it's yes, it's the large action model. And really, it was absolutely brain dead automations running on Spotify server and the cloud. They built the thing that this industry has been promising to make in one way or another for quite a long time.

I actually do think that that is remarkable. Whether or not it's hacked together or in the back end, 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. The gap between vision and reality has been vast.

And I think news has in fact closed it. Yeah, I have a question for you guys though. If I'm going to be paying $5 a month for an internet connection on this thing or whatever. $5 a month is such a huge, such a bad dream. OK, $5 a month for internet connection on my low-muse talk.

A lot of these models, I just don't even really know what to do with. We can test the edge cases of them. You can say go in my Gmail and delete all of my Home Depot 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. I understand Claude. Like, coworked on Claude is cool because it fixes my computer for me. When I run into issues on my computer, it clicks around on my computer and solves the problem when I was searching for it forever.

Or, you know, vibe coding something. That's a whole other thing. That is a clear problem that I'm trying to solve. But in a generalized sort of agent in a box, 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 I haven't really set it up yet. One is obviously it's meta. I was more comfortable with a different company. But two, I installed this thing and then I'm like, now what? I think this is where you get the Tomogachie element of it.

I think this is where you see things like the friend pendant. The 24-7 utility of AI for the average person, it's not that high. 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. Yeah.

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. And so you look at the Muse charm and 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. Yeah, based on the people 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 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. I trust and can rely on absolutely. 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, I 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. But do you have to test one thing? That's what I'm saying.

Yeah. Like, especially for the charm. Why would you pay a whole separate thing instead of just running on your phone? Well, and 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. Yeah. And the reality is you do not have enough things to necessarily justify a standalone device, but they need it to be everywhere to get the data to accomplish these things. Yeah.

And I think that is sort of where this starts to break down. Yeah. 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 opening eyes, trying to make hardware try to make the same product.

Yeah. Eventually, Apple is going to have to do the same thing in some way and Google is going to try to do the same thing in some way. That I think the exciting thing for meta is they got their first with a thing like Muse that appears to be complete. Now, it's early. It's like just very obviously early, but it feels like the industry is going to have to react to it in a much stronger way.

Apple's next hardware products are delayed because Serie A didn't work. So if you don't have the new user interface, you're stuck with what kind of hardware you can make. And for meta, you know, they've been chasing VR for ages and ages and ages. They at least got good at making hardware. Like they're pretty good at it now, right?

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 in a post phone device. They're not currently being sued by Apple. Okay.

We have a time where to talk about from meta connecting all the hardware they showed off this week. We're going to take a break. We're going to dive into the MediConnect hardware and Google books. Support for the show comes from Sonos. Think about the first time you heard your favorite song.

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It was a busy week for hardware. We've got a lot to talk about. First up, MediConnect was not just news. 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 you'll find the most interesting. They have glasses without a camera. Yeah. They're the meta Ray band, parentheses, audio, $349.

It does this solve their problem? No, I have a general question for you guys. Like, do you think that meta kind of destroyed the Ray band brand? Because now it feels like if the meta Ray bands look pretty down and similar to like the traditional Ray bands and they just have little small cameras, if you see someone wearing Ray bands and they're not meta Ray bands, do you now go like take a second look and kind of be a little weirded out about it? That's interesting.

I do. I do. When I see people in Ray bands now, I kind of like do a double take and feel like there's a little camera in that. Yeah. Am I seeing something?

So if I don't see a camera, I'm just like, all right, the audio version, I don't think it's going to solve their issue because I think now the issue is a Ray band issue more than it's like a meta issue. I think if they had started audio only, these would still be a successful product, right? Like, I think the headphone is the best use case of those kind of the lifestyle. It's great. It is a casual, nice looking pair of open your headphones.

I mean, this, the, 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 been successful because people have a camera, right?

Okay. Were they successful because you can talk to meta AI? I don't think so. What is that? 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 and through your glasses.

Right. Like if the backend isn't useful, having the audio only glasses just means you have headphones. The backend is really powerful, having an ambient microphone that you can just talk to music all the time will be very useful. And I, again, I think that's, I'll just kind of sound like how we usually can use this because that's what enables this product. Right.

I mean, 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 the end of the show yesterday. They went to, to Metas campus, they got all the same demos that they do every single year where Metas 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. Right. And so I'm not sure, right? I'm not sure if the glasses with muse are still going to be helpful enough because they're ultimately not getting a lot of data that has to be tapped into everything and hooked up to your phone in order to do anything. 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. Yeah.

And they still have meta AI shoved in everything. And nobody's ever really used meta AI. So they're so excited about this platform. It seems like they would be pushing that through these demos and two reporters. So I don't know if that means that like they didn't expect muse to be a huge hit.

And so now they're kind of trying to shove it in, but the demos were already set up before that. It's a little weird. It does feel to me like muse operates at the speed of all the other, you know, products from the AI industry where one day it doesn't exist. And the next day they're like, we've got this thing. We're just going to put it out and see what happens and maybe it'll crash and burn.

Maybe it'll be the next. Yeah. Yeah. And now they're like, perfect. We have muse working.

We have audio glasses. I mean, this is a thing, right? And my machine is so, you know, so they have the tools that are left. They have the tools that you want them to do. So I think that that's not the tool that you are supposed to be able to dumb out and that is how you're going to think about it.

Okay. So I mean, that's kind of like, I mean, you've got to remind people that these things don't have much fun. I mean, I mean, we've got. We've got to make that a lot of fun, so I mean, both of these things. Yeah.

We'll be able to make it easier. So if you're going to make that turn right. Okay. Okay. Right.

This is what we decided that we need to make it easy to make it easy to make it easy. platform after the phone. And he's all but saying it, right? In the history of computers that he will deliver if you ask him. He's like, there are main frames and the mini computers and PCs and laptops and phones, and now there's going to be something else.

And the AI to him is something else. But 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. Bones don't have a light.

And we'll see. I mean, people do buy these glasses. But again, my point of view on the ones they've had so far is people did want to camera on their face for action sports and kids. Whether they're going to buy these to talk to me is like actually a big statement about me is whether or not I'm useful. 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. It's an extra $149, but it's FSA and HSA eligible. It's not people have excuses to use their insurance to buy these glasses. Yes, yes, yes.

That is a decent selling point, you know, for a lot of people it's like, if I have to have a hearing aid, but I would rather wear my meta glasses. People have been talking about this with earbuds forever. If you can make it look like something that is more normal, if it's something you're already using and wearing. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I have bought my own father every over the counter hearing aid you provided and you've directed them all. This is a market that was supposed to develop in like a rare, it's a Trump one and a rare display of bipartisan unity. Oh, Bill was passed to deregulate hearing aids. And at the time it was just very obvious that all the members of Congress are very old. So they could agree that we should deregulate hearing aids.

Oh, it was just one of those moments when I looked at that picture of like, you know, the bill signing, I was like, I understand why you're doing it. You can set aside your partisan differences and Bo is made hearing aids and Sony made hearing aids. Yeah. And I was like, why did this work? Like all those products have essentially failed.

Yeah. And she's like, it turns out hearing aids are not complicated. So I love that that is doing this. It's a thing that you can do. But the history of the product category thus far suggests that even suggesting to your father that they should wear hearing aid, just like I see you out of the family.

That's fair. That's been my experience. I got all the way to like, do you want to try the airpods like the kids? And he was like, I will kill you. Like I'm not wearing a box.

And I understand other people find all these tools very, very useful, not discounting at all. I'm just saying broadly my experience with my dad and the numbers in industry suggest there's more there than you need. Is it in the market for an AI agent? Yeah, maybe. Please use, please go through the hell of their Gmail.

That's probably the single greatest technology of all time. Okay, we've got to talk about the other big piece of hardware that meta announced this week because if you rewind, I don't know, two years ago, their big thing was the metaverse. It was VR. They went with, they had a whole bunch of Quest products. They had the Quest Pro.

That's gotten a lot quieter in recent years. This year, they came back. It was part of, but not necessarily the flagship moment in their announcement. They announced the meta VR glasses and it is a vision pro style headset, except it basically just looks like a very chunky pair of sunglasses. And this feels like a very big step forward.

I think in another environment, this would have made much more of a splash. They have these demos. They opened the event with Zuck wearing these glasses and he's got like nine different screens open inside his VR workspace. And it's this lightweight thing that they would just casually take off rather than having to undo a bunch of straps over his head to go in and out of virtual reality. You've used a bunch of these big headsets.

I'm curious, does this being lighter weight and slimmer make you want to go back into that world? It makes me want to try them on an airplane. Mm-hmm. Every night, you know, I fly to San Francisco a lot. Yeah.

David, I know you fly to San Francisco a lot. Yeah. That New York to San Francisco flight or New York to San Francisco flight. Just a little too long. It's just a little too long.

But because of the thing that it is, there's always a vision pro guy. That's true. Yeah. Well, it's like that route in particular is where the vision pro guy is on the plane. Yeah.

Yeah. Like every time. And I'm always like, that seems horrible, but I get it. Yeah. Like if I could just nope out of this in B and V.R.

Look, it is remarkable that meta showed up and they announced what amounts to a much better vision pro at what is it? One sixth to weight half the price. Yeah. Now it's been 2.5 years since the vision pro. It's like, right?

It's early 24. It came out. So it's been a minute. They revved it once. But you know, meta gets the benefit of just hardware development cycles and everything getting faster and lighter.

But it is such a shockingly better vision pro than the vision pro. Yeah. And you can tell that there were a lot of people that were working on the vision pro and this thing to 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.

And it's like a gap between what you're looking at and sort of the world around you. That makes them lighter. That makes them easier to wear. It makes them more comfortable in general. 100 grams is a really big deal.

You know, the vision pro is notably really, really, really heavy. And if you can use this and it's the puck that it's attached to as a fully standalone computer, I mean, that's a pretty massive deal, I think. Yeah. It is wild to me that this feels like almost an afterthought in their event because I don't know where this platform is going for them, right? There was a moment when they thought this was their future.

They thought everyone's going to live inside of these. And now it's this is squeezed in between a bunch of news announcements. Like also we improved the vision pro and everyone's like, that's very impressive. But well, no, 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. 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 doculus quest to was actually another great consumer product for that. That thing was complete. Yeah. And it was inexpensive in the middle of pandemic. I think everyone got confused because people were buying all kinds of stuff and like a lot of people bought Quest 2's and deeply confused and that end of believing that there was demand for the matter.

Yeah. When it was actually just demand to be somewhere other than your living room. Yeah. And so like, you know, everything got a little topsy-turvy there and obviously AI sort of upended all of the plans that everybody had. 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. The holograms look good. They're where you have to take a bunch of photos to make a hologram like that, right? Yeah.

Where are the photos coming from? How do you make the hologram? The second pro persona process was easy, but it was very limited, right? Like, there's a lot of execution steps with this product that I'm deeply curious about. It's not coming out until like next spring.

Yeah. So they've got some time. But I, as a piece of hardware that just advanced, it makes sense. The stuff they're doing with the keyboard and the trackpad with camera-only finger tracking, it seems incredible. Like the Vision Pro can't do that stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. But it's just like unclear like how all the execution details are going to work and if what you want is a big movie theater or like 10 extra screens. Yeah. The flight from New York to San Francisco is going to be better than ever.

But that's maybe worth $1,300. Yeah. For the people that were just using these devices as entertainment devices, it seems like the best version of something that meta personally is made, right? There's been a lot of third parties that make these like big screen VR and you can slap 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 going to take all of your meetings in this VR space and it had these kind of cringe, like, Nintendo Wii style VR avatars, whatever. But the holograms in this demo that they gave gave a lot of vibes of that because it was like, you're on a video call and then you can press a button and that person's upper body suddenly grows and their whole body is there. And in this world where they sell 10,000 of these units to Atlassian, Atlassian can mandate that everyone takes scans of their 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 Gaojin Splats, like on the Vision Pro. There's something happening by the way with Splats in rendering that is at the bleeding edge of how cool computers can possibly be that is also terrifying. We're chasing a story on it because I want to cover it.

But have you seen the demos of, we'll just set up four iPhones and throw water on the ground and then have like a full virtual walkable environment that is so far from where we were even just a couple of years ago? 100%. It's all coming together in here and it's like, what is reality and is anything real? Like, I don't know, man. But there's something, it's still cool.

I've had two separate friends send me a vibes coated Gaojin splatting platform that they made. That they made. People are really into Gaojin. They're just adding objects, photos. I mean, there's a big movement.

Every time I see a Gaojin splat, I'm like, this is beautiful. This is so cool. 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 got to utilize it right now. But we should chase that story. It's a great idea.

We should talk about the other big carbon news this week, which is that the Google books are finally here. So other this week, Google announced the first five Google books are going to arrive October 4th. Important date. That was the date that the Pixel 1 released in 2016. All suspicious.

That's good. Some of these look really good. There's a Dell XPS Google book. It looks like a knockoff MacBook Air. I shouldn't say knockoff.

It looks like a Delified MacBook Air with a Google platform. Have you? I'm curious. This is a very big bet. You're like, were you one of the big Chromebook Pixel fans back in the day?

Because this feels like the next era for those people. I think the best piece I've ever written for the Verge is I bought my mom $1,000 Chromebook Pixel, which is so expensive. And it's like the best computer I've ever bought for my parents. And this has nothing to do with that idea. I think it's 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 reason I left the Chromebook Pixel was that it was just a web browser. There was exactly one metaphor in that computer. And if you just give Chrome 16 gigs of RAM, it ran pretty good at the time.

Like this is ages ago, right? Yeah. And the whole point of it was whenever you buy a Windows PC or even a Mac, there are so many competing interface metaphors now that my parents were getting caught up in just confusion. Am I using a watch pad? Am I using a Mac app?

Am I in the web? Like all that stuff was just like too much. And the idea of just one fast web browser that worked one way all the time was really great for them. Now, obviously, it's all along the path that didn't work except for, I guess, school children or whatever. And Android and Chrome are going to get ever closer.

And I think these are really fascinating. They're just, I think the lineage of those two products is as divergent as possible. Right? Because this thing is all metaphors. Like up and down, new ideas, new metaphors, you know, as a tech dork.

I love it. I can't get enough of it. But man, is it just a list of new ideas? This feels like they already had Android basically running at a desktop operating system level. They went, sure, we can do that.

They are trying to do the thing that Macs and iPhones do. Right? So, you can get integrated. You can get access 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, can you imagine seeking this out as an Android user versus just going to Windows or just going to Mac or 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 Android user because most people use their phone for most tasks. Like a lot of people have laptops, but a lot of people spend $1200 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 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 want to do that on your phone. And they 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 whatever that was, probably before then. But now it's just this weird, like, synthesizing thing where it just goes from your phone to your laptop. All the files are there. All the stuff's on your phone.

I think it's a really cool idea. What blows me away is that the lock in here is actually more intense than the iPhone to the Mac, right? If you have an iPhone, Google books are basically useless. That is kind of wild to me. So if you're using an Android phone, you buy a $1200 laptop, you can't get an iPhone.

It just makes it useless. That is strange. I mean, a useless is maybe an overstatement because I mean, I have an Android phone that is a Mac and it's like, I think that same amount of features are not available to me. 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 a browser and it can run Android apps. And those Android apps may or may not be good enough for a desktop environment. To me, I see the audience for this that they are competing with. People who are going to buy Windows laptops.

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 what people usually do in their computer's perspective, I could totally say they are. There's a lot of people who are very mad at Windows these days. Do those overlap with the people who are looking for, who are Android fans who are looking for this sort of integration?

Can this appeal to that mainstream audience with this frustration brewing? My feeling with the Android Windows, we've covered a lot of this and it's funny. I think our instruction at the beginning of the year is like, we should do more Linux coverage and that is just paid off. People are mad and the fact that you can run Windows games better on Linux and Windows. I think all it just has to do with how commercialized and unified Windows has become.

It's just always asking you to do one more thing. Like, you want to try to go buy it? Like, it's just not like muggy when I blind alley every time you use it. Whatever problems you might have with Windows are not. The fact that it has just gotten so engagement-baity is a real problem.

They're just always trying to get you to do the next thing Microsoft would like you to do. Google doesn't have that problem so much. But there's a bunch of Gemini in there. 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 like, fully leaning the fact that Android and Linux have some commonalities, you can play Windows games on here in 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 anything else is doing.

I think that's so cool. But if you take that away, you are kind of left with a Chromebook with a backstop of Android apps and that might not be enough. Yeah, you're just want a great Chromebook. Maybe I'm back where I started. I'm like, this is just a great Chromebook.

I'm going to add, please ignore the other interface metaphors. But they are way too expensive for what people expect a Chromebook to cost. You know what I mean? Like, they start at $900 and that's an introductory price for the Acer one. And they said it might change based on market conditions.

Oh, it will change. Yeah, this is market price, just like your fish. Yeah. I mean, I think we're in a time of big new ideas about what computers should be. And I'm just very happy to see Google basically throw caution to win.

If you're going to lock in, if you don't have an Android one, this isn't useful. 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, I'm thinking of a Motorola Atrix from like 2012. It is wild to me that at the dawn of smartphones, a bunch of companies were like, this will be all of your computers. And then we spent like a decade and like that was bad. We made a mistake there. Yeah.

And now we're back to it where we're like, these things, it's all one operating system, you 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 it's 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 best as an app or it'll say, oh, this is better as a website, go to the website. Which I like about the website is one of the harshest burns and app store compops. Yeah, that's really bad.

But also it's so polite, but also like that convenience is showing their failure, right? That they have not gotten the desktop apps. Yeah. Google's been spending so many years to make Android and the experiences on Android flexible for multiple screens and this is 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 display because people just have displays in your own, I guess. And then now it makes sense, I guess, to like, now that that foundation is there, you can feasibly just run it on a laptop. And I think that that's a cool evolution of the thing that they've been thinking about for a lot of years now. Obviously not all the Android apps are going to be optimized for that kind of thing. They said, I think they said the half of the top 100, which is an interesting way to say that.

But that's something I guess. It's not the top 50. It's pretty cool. You know if it's the bottom 50. It could be the bottom 50.

Yeah. Happened up. You know what's funny is right next to that is Apple, which is like, here's a new form factor. Everybody write your apps from scratch for it. Yeah.

I'm going to do it. It's not an iPad. Within two months. We need all of your best engineers on reflections. There's something there.

I mean, again, Google has done a lot of work to try to make their app ecosystem just appear in more places, whereas Apple can just drag developers to be where they want. 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 touch screen MacBook. Yeah.

Because you're going to, it's here's yet another screen size in form factor interaction paradigm instead of, you know, you can feel how you want to go. What that means, the apps have become, but it is trivial for them to do these kinds of things. 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 of the other right now is usually there is a specific piece of software that's not what I need on one or the other, right?

If you were a professional and you need a specific piece of software, you were just locked in and none of those specialized pieces of software are going to be on this platform right now. And so they're appealing to an all a subset of the audience, right? People who have Android phones, who do not need specialized pieces of software, who are okay with what is going to be a developing experience of the apps that you do exist. 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. But is it like full Premiere Pro?

Well, is it it's a Premiere Pro? It's a Premiere Pro. It's a Premiere Pro. This is the thing is like room is on Android. Yeah.

But like it's not it's not like room. Yeah. I don't know. It's very exciting to see this and the hardware I think looks much better than certainly I expected. They've done it 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.

If anything, Google has done a, you know, they may have not done an amazing job at explaining what Google looks really are supposed to be to people, but they've kept it in the media cycle for a really long time. And now on October 4th, we're going to be all be doing reviews of it. So, you know, months ago, we were talking about it, we're talking about it this week and we're going to be talking about it next week. Yeah. It's an exciting time for laptops.

All right. It's time to turn the hype desk. Ashley Sked is here. Ashley. Ashley, good to have you.

It's been a minute. Where are you? I'm in an undisclosed hotel room in San Francisco. I like the secretiveness. I think this is good for you.

Me too. I feel like Carmen San Diego a little bit. I can happen anywhere at any time. That is true. We are entering a period of hotel design where it's like I'm very close to being able to identify specifically what hotel you're in because they all look the same now.

Yeah, I have to keep my, I try to keep a low profile. I can't be, you know, I don't want people to identify where I am. It's important you're spotting the trends early. All right. Ashley, what do you have for us today?

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

He's just straight up just came for him so hard. Like just right up, right out front. Kevin, he said he was the biggest failure of his career. And I said the quote was, I feel like a giant loser and I agree for not getting off the ground. I agree with him.

I agree with him. I 100 percent. I 100 percent. He should feel that way. My entire TikTok feed is clips of this interview and it is incredible.

Marshall 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. 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. 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 played 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, which I know exists. Nothing. The thing that stands out to me is the third one is the most incredibly bananas movie that I can recall because it is bongering.

First of all, it has Dracula in it. Dracula is hot like an older hot because he's like a million years old because he's a Dracula. And they consistently call him Drake throughout the movie. These are the facts that I know. I can't believe you remember.

This is what you remember the blade for it. I don't remember any of the plot. I just remember a hot Dracula's insistent called Drake throughout this movie and Ryan Reynolds is in it. Ryan Reynolds. These are the two.

Yeah, I remember that too. And well, the first one though, I love the first blade. So I remember quite though. I remember loving the first blade movie too, but there's nothing in my brain about it. Blood wave?

You don't remember the blood wave where they're all at the clurb? They're in the clurb and everyone's fam and then it rains blood and all the vampires are all excited. That could be any of the blade movies. Like all of the blade movies have that scene. Oh no.

Now I'm scared that it's late. 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. That's what I got. And I know Chris Kristofferson is in them for some reason. Like he just needed money.

But everybody likes hot Dracula. But here's my question. Based on all this controversy and I tried to make another one and obviously Wesley Snipes was in the Deadpool movie and he's like, there's never been another blade. I really, I'm curious if the people at Disney, Kevin and Faggy sat down and said we're going to make a new blade movie about all this IP and they watched those movies and they thought themselves there's no way that you can make another movie like this. I don't 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 like you might be done because you can't go gritty realistic blade from there. Well you could but like I mean that's coming down from a silliness high. That's like that's a tough transition. There's sort of an inherent silliness of it. I think you might that could be a thing that could be very.

Just to bring it back to jackets. Again, I haven't watched this movie. I don't look at any clips. What I remember about that movie is I wish I could wear jackets like hot Dracula has jackets in the series. Top top tier jackets in the blade series.

That's all. I can remember the top tier jackets in all three movies. So you remember like the second blade movie. It's in your brain. I'm thinking of the first two are just mushed together into one giant blade movie.

So I feel like I feel like I mean like I think Marvel had this exact problem where the blade movies and Wesen Slipes is blade are so permeated into the consciousness but not in a specific way just in a general way. There's no way to move on. It was easy to move on from like Val Kilmer's Batman. You're like well that didn't matter. Yeah.

Right. And even in some way it was easy to get to Robert Pattinson Batman because you're like well this is done right. Like this thing is done. This is complete. We're gonna start again.

I feel a martial is saying here. Like you guys are in pre production from what I understand. Those are conversations that should have happened before they hired a commercial. You know I think the point we're trying to make here is actually I will watch all three blade movies and try to write anyone if you get a marvel. We'll get it done.

This is what I want. Yeah. 100%. No, no, we can't do it that way. That's only a true good blade movie.

A crazy one that takes the psychic hold on. You can can only be written by human human minds. The problem in the current safety debate might be that the blade movies are in the training data and that might be one that trying to kill us all. Think about it. All right, we got to let you get back to your undisclosed location, but there's news.

There is news. We have a sponsor on the hype desk. Let's watch it. If you're like me, you need music around you all day long. I got my first Sonos set up 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. Sonos 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 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 sound bar, especially if I upgrade to the Sonos beam ultra. You know, if two speakers help me lift heavier, maybe two speakers will help me fold my laundry faster? I have to go test the theory for science.

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 sound bars, a Sonos system pulls you in. So far, you might actually think the phone call is coming from inside the house. Visit Sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

All right, we're back. And after a long two week absence, it's time once again for everyone's favorite segment. You know why? It's time now for America's figure podcast. We're in the podcast.

Running cars dummy. Like that riff at the end. That was very good. That's good. That's like Greg Pierce, who may or may not be David Pierce in a short cut.

Very unclear. That was great. That was good. I do like these analog ones. I did like the extremely harsh AI slop one, but the producers won't be running.

I slop on the show. So that's the rule. You got to make yourself, even if it's a banger. So this week on running cars dummy, I first want to address the number one tip we've ever gotten here on America's figure 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 have sent this to me.

We're just, we're just talking about it because one, he was a teenager. It appears during his time in tutors and allegations of you and say everything. So what you do when you're a teenager, when you're maybe attempting it sober, like, just not for us. Like, that's not the point of the segment. The point is that he's in power now in doing dumb harmful things now.

And you can attribute that to whatever history that he's got the power now. So you can go read the Guardian piece. We'll link it. It's there for you if you want it. But I'm much more focused on the fact that this week, cities in townships across the country are protesting an FCC rule Brendan has put forth.

It would essentially take away their ability to hold ISPs accountable for not building the broadband, they promise. That seems much more relevant to me. You see what I mean? This is the balance I'm striking. I do think he's done.

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. As a rule out, they would preempt local regulations about broadband employment. They say as Brendan is want to say that cities are holding up permits. They're preventing broadband. 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 believe this? Do you think it's the local communities that are holding up the broadband providers? Surely that is not correct. The governments in response, they're filing say ISPs themselves are often to blame. I'm reading our sector now.

The groups representing local governments urge the FCC to issue new rules that apply to providers and suggest their requirement that ISPs deploy networks within 180 days of local authorization. The fight here is that ISPs get permits. They hoard them. They don't do anything about them. The clock runs out on the cities and the FCC has decided that this is the city's fault because they're not approving permits fast enough.

The cities are saying why don't you pass a rule that would force the broadband providers to take action on the permits we issue and build the broadband. Brendan Carr, anytime there's a fight in which the ISPs are involved, he will pick the ISPs and make sure that your broadband does not get faster or cheaper. Here in America where we pay the most money for the slowest broadband amongst all of our competitors. Three up, everybody. That's what I got for you.

As usual, there's a bunch of speech stuff going on. I think I wasn't here when another James Tala Rico 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 on FCC. It's 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 us, I'm happy to talk to you. Here at Dakota on the street, we could do a live stream you for meta glasses. There's a light. Did you know phones don't have a light?

That's when Brendan Carr has done the Americans favorite podcast. Brendan Carr is a Tommy. It's beautiful unlike Brendan's action. You know we didn't talk about the, we didn't talk about the, the muse but at all. Oh yeah.

I feel like you're showing against it. I was so sorry. Listen, it was on time to show. 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. And you like, I was going to start with Paramount. 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. It's true. It's paramount. One of 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 him. He's a picture of his butt. And he's like, is this doing anything for you? I have to say, I appreciate that a major company executive has a personality. Like, you know, I talked to a lot of them.

A lot of them are robots. Alexander Wang is just like, I'm doing horny tweets about me. The other one I very much appreciated from him was a comparison of the AI logos. And someone said, he uses the only one that doesn't look like a button. 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 of that. Is it a personality? That's true. And it did make me laugh. I did laugh at this one.

Listen, this is the most winning meta has been in the AI race. And he's feeling it. He's feeling good. Listen, if this is what it means for us, I'll take more entertainment tweets from all the same. Yeah.

All right. You got another for us? We should talk about paramount briefly. Yes. Okay.

So this week, the big news and the paramount winner 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 winner or like we'll see like how independent they really be. We've learned a lot about the power you get when you appoint your own board members, but that's the promise.

They're going to promise to release 30 movies a year from the combined studio or if they don't do that pay 30 million per movie, they don't release into healthcare and retirement funds managed by the Hollywood unions. So we'll see. There's a lot of that in here, but I think a big part of the story is that California appears to have caved the Ellison threat to take paramount out of California and move it to Nashville or Texas appears to have rattled the politicians in California, including the attorney general, and they're like, we got to get this done. Figure out the remedies, get this done. And they got it done.

This feels like paramount one for sure. Absolutely. Paramount agreed to release movies like that's a great release movie. Well, there's going to be an independent board of someone. Yeah.

Oh, no, CNN will write. Yeah. Yeah. I'd have seen an apparently given all hands speech yesterday when she said I literally don't know know what's going to happen now. And I mean, it's just really unclear now.

Like they got to the finish line. There was a lot of pressure on the steel. They got it done. There's some reports that Elon Musk will now be an investor in the deal by the way, Brendan, who cares so much about the fairness of broadcast news approved an exception to foreign investment rules and is allowing a bunch of Saudi money, 49.5% of the deal being financed by Saudi money. And he says, well, they'll be hands off.

Cool. Fine. Our FCC is very worried about Jimmy Kimmel. They're not so worried about foreign money flooding into our big studios and big news organizations. There's just a lot of corruption in the steel.

I think a lot of people feel and sense that corruption, but it's done. It's going to happen. We're going to see what happens next. Yeah. I mean, I think it's going to be a very interesting place to determine whether you are a biased reporter that feels, I understand where they're coming from.

I understand the intention there. They're trying to avoid a CBS takeover. But man, the broad strokes of that feel uncomfortable. Yeah. We'll see.

I mean, again, the deal is closed. We don't seem to happen. There's going to be a downstream weird tech things. These apps are going to get merged. David Elson talked for a long time about how he's going to, we don't have to lay people off because we'll achieve synergy in merging the tech platforms.

We're running like a tech company. So get ready. I just hope they finish lanterns before they start ruining the act. If that gets disrupted, I'll be very happy. All right.

David would be up for us. All right. So every year YouTube hosts a made on YouTube event throughout the AI era. It's basically been whatever the AI industry is pushing on people that year. So in previous years, it's been a chat bot that you can talk to about your videos.

They introduced AAB thumbnail testing last year, which is a good feature that we use a lot that when I do see a lot that when you see a lot, there's thumbnail testing, there's also title testing. And, you know, we're already kind of approaching this world where my reality is not quite your reality, but I feel like that stays in the little, the little happy medium. Is the thumbnail you're seeing? Same as the thumbnail I'm seeing. Yeah.

That's like the very beginnings this year because it is 2026. And the talk of the AI world this year is agents doing things. There is now an AI YouTube agent that will work in the background to optimize your channel. So it will review the backlog of your videos and 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. Oh my gosh. Which is a little less okay.

But you know, I think that's the future that is happening to YouTube for sure. Hyper optimization. There are a lot of new features that got announced. But the one that I want to talk to you about specifically is A, B, video testing. Yes.

The entire video, the, well, what's a little unclear. YouTube does not quite know what the boundaries of this are going to be yet. They say it's going to release later. So I think that they're going to change this around a lot. But 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 differently for different people. So when it lands on one that's working the best for the most amount of people, it just collapses that, it collapses the wave function and everybody gets the same video. That's weird. 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 that it pushes that video. When I think about when I see things like this or how is this going to be abused? Because every single YouTube feature that's ever come out has been just abused abuse. 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 start doing cryptoscams on them. They got rid of annotations. All I think about with this is how are people going to abuse this. And this pushes I think a little past that boundary of like, is my reality your reality? Because you're talking about a video you watched on YouTube and you watched a totally different video, but it was under the same name, the same link.

That's very strange to me. All right. So it's interesting to have this conversation because I appreciate your perspective as somebody who works on YouTube and also cares a lot about journalism. And I spend a lot of time talking to money. And so Mr. Ethics policy here is going to tell you, oh, this makes perfect sense to me.

Because all these platforms are marketing platforms. And so if you swim in the swamps of D2C video marketing, which I do way too often and it weighs in 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. And so even though even the AB video testing, their example is if you have two different hook ideas in mind and you want to try them, you can just run them, which is a thing marketers want to do all the time. So Gary Vaynerchuk is more aggressive about these platforms than any single other person I ever talked to uploads like 800 videos a day from just his channels across like seven platforms.

And he can watch videos of them and he's like, all you care about quality, I can measure that, I can measure quantity. And so if I flood these platforms, these algorithm social platforms, they're all interest graphs now, not follow graphs, I will see what's working. I will take that data and I will use it to re-heat all the videos from catalog over and and over again. And 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 going to give the tools to everyone because that's what everyone's doing.

And from the other perspective, it's, well, if you want to sell your illegal peptides, like the best thing YouTube can do for you is tell you which hooks are going to perform because then you're going to make more videos for YouTube. And that is coming to all of these other platforms. And if you watch the way the marketers talk about videos, the most insane thing I've ever seen is someone break down, like we've uploaded 50 videos, we've cut them into different parts. So you have like the hook, the content and the call to action in the marketing video. And they're like, we figure out which hook works better, we figure out which thing converts into sales.

And then we just like put it back in the cloud and it remixes all of our videos and turns 30 videos into 1000 videos. And then we just run them again. And it's like, oh, this is really bad. Yeah. It's really bad.

But it is what is happening on these platforms every minute of every day. And it's just funny to me that my view of it is YouTube is actually behind. Yeah. Yeah. I think if you're a consumer, you're like, oh, this is some really bad things are happening.

Right. I totally understand like the business mindset for this because obviously YouTube wants to keep people on the platform for longer everything. Everybody always thinks about view duration and like retention graphs, right? And so when you can keep people on the platform longer, it plays another ad for YouTube. That's exactly what they want.

That's happened. What feels bad is that instead of everything being about quality content, like you said, it's just about content. Like if we're optimizing for what people's brains are just going to stare at the longest, you're just sort of like moving all content towards this one stream of like, it is just content for your eyeballs that your dopamine receptors are feasting on. I completely understand that that's exactly YouTube's incentive structure. It just feels like a far end of the inshitification of the platform.

I feel like there's something funny here where YouTube is acting like they are not in control the platform, right? Like if your stuff happens to be picking up it, right, then you could go and optimize it. You can go and do, you can change the thumbnail. You can change the title. You can research 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. You have to say 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 views as possible.

It's just so interesting because imagine like if a documentary that was uploaded to YouTube five years later, the platform AI agent was just like, oh, change the name of 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. I don't even think it's a business case. It's your point.

All these teachers get games and the shift from you're going to have followers or even notifications from the people you follow when you have a new video to everything is algorithmic has actually changed the game for sure. And I don't see any of these platforms pulling back from that anytime soon. I think TikTok has basically made itself irrelevant because it's fallen so far down this hole that everything is weird video game streaming slop or TikTok shop or something. 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 being around. Yeah, I completely agree with that.

I used to hear people talking about what did you see that TikTok? Did you see that TikTok? I hear that. I never hear that anymore. I feel like Instagram has kind of eaten that.

What does that have to do with Larry Ellison? I don't know. Mark wins again. Mark wins again. Mark wins again.

Anyway, you have an exciting one for us. I, well, exciting isn't exactly what I put it. The state of Xbox continues to be all the time. Sorry. I joined media.

I just said Xbox and everyone flinched. Like what happened this time? We had like a lovely two months where everyone was like, Ash, Ash, Sharma's going to save the world. It's true. And then she's like, about that.

Yeah. We will now lay off a lot of people and cut down a bunch of these studios. So there was another round of this week, which was the layoffs were smaller. It was less than 300 people, which in the scope of things is not their biggest. However, the changes they made to the studios feel like some of the most monumental that they have done, right?

So previously they had shot down a bunch of studios. Now they're consolidating a lot of the teams that are left. And I think the most notable one to me is what they're doing with Halo. So for the longest time, right, they had 343 studios. They had their independent little team that was focused on Halo.

That wasn't going so well. They included 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. The expectation was, okay, they remade the original Halo. They figured out how to make a great Halo.

Now they're going to do their own thing. Nope. Because now Halo is part of Activision. And that is sort of the story of all these changes where everything is just for the most part flowing under Activision Blizzard. And they're going to be put in charge of the future of Xbox exclusive gaming for so many of these titles.

And King is going to be in charge of a bunch of these smaller titles. And it's like, yeah, can I add something? Yes. King is going to be in charge of Solitaire and Minesweeper. Yes.

Which I didn't know were receiving updates. I would say that I'm kind of into. I think there's something there. I play King Minesweeper. Yeah, I guess.

Those in that purchases are going to be crazy. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. But transactions.

Here, the only thing I have to add to this is I only recently suffered. The Xbox CEO Ashisharna is from Raseen, Wisconsin, which is my hometown. And I have proposed that I interview her at my high school. That would be amazing. They ask us out.

I haven't asked my high school if I can do this. Yeah. Just show up. But I'm just saying, I'm just trying to manifest. I think that'd be pretty good.

That's very good. The state of Xbox is shaking. It's not very good. She, yeah. I think this is interesting.

I saw the reactions and a lot of people were like, you know, those others like Halo wasn't going so well previously. So like, let's see what happens. But it feels like the Activision Blizzard acquisition has eaten Xbox. And they are dealing with the fallout at this point. Well, also fallout because that's also being re-fall out.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you have anything for us? I do. And I'm very excited to end on some positive news here.

Let's go. So do you guys know how to roadcaster is? Yeah. You're doing really hard. It's really hard.

Road is an audio tech company. I would use a product. Road makes all the microphones. I'm talking. Yeah.

The tape here is covering up a road logo on my mic stand. Probably the most popular wireless mic for creators as well. Yeah. They're everywhere. They make a bunch of microphones and make a bunch of podcasting equipment.

They just put out a firmware update for several of their products that enables 4K support. Love it. So in almost every other part of our industry, to be like, if you want 4K, the companies would use a new hardware or charge for the firmware update. Road just did it for free. So Roadcaster firmware update 1.4 adds 4K support to a whole bunch of road products.

And it's just free. And they even say, no charge. Like they seem surprised. They're doing this. And I just think it's great.

I just think it's so nice to see a company like substantive, meaningful firmware update to a whole bunch of products they already sold. And they just did it. And like everyone's happy. And it's been a minute since something like that has happened and everyone's happy. Yeah.

Good on you, Road. Yeah. I'm still going to keep the tape on the road on this microphone. I'm actually used to get a lot of accolades for this because they had something called the Kaizen update, which like a year after a product would come out, they would just be like, here's everything that we would have put in the product if we had time or resources. And just like Road, a year after the Fujifilm XT2 and 2017 came out, they released 4K video support.

And everyone was like, that's crazy. I never expected this to have 4K. So good on Road. Yeah. We got to know that's behind it.

That's fantastic. That's a new idea about computers. It's a very old idea about paying for things. Should I use? Should I use?

Should I use? If you're a smartphone. You can do it. It can be like the app. You can do with news that already exists.

Like Jake pointed out, meta already has your Facebook and Instagram data. You can just how to do stuff on those platforms for you. What the funniest one is it works with marketplace. Okay, so like, yeah, okay, good luck out there. Let us know what marketplace finds you, you get next week.

Okay, that's it for the Vergecast, we're ending on a high note. Eli, what's happening on Decoder? A decoder, I did a deep look at the Zux answers. He had the same answers to Heath and Joanna. These are the answers he gives.

So I just did a reaction, because I asked Matt and they said no, I wonder why. And on Monday, I believe we have a CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, who straight up, we talked about his Wall Street Journal op-ed, which the journal title, he was not happy with the title, but the journal title, how I choose to fire people with AI. Whoa, it's a lot. Yeah, that's a real good blame on your editor one. What's a good one?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, this Sunday lookout for new episodes of our back to school season of version history. This one is about one laptop per child. That's me, think it was on there. That's right, love it.

People are really into the season. It's been super fun. We did a live stream of organ 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 The Verge.com for ad free episodes of all of our podcasts, exclusive newsletters and so much more. We'd love to hear from you. Can you email us? Vergecastwithverge.com or call the hotline at 866- Verge-1-1. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media podcast network.

Today's show is produced by Josh Cauhas, Eric Gomez, brain and key for Intro to Slarchuck. We'll see you next week. You know what I'm talking about. Life is too short for bad audio quality. Luckily, there is Sonos.

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