BMW's Controversial New Headlight Design

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Find Select shelving and tote storage up to fifteen percent off at the Home Depot to organize every room in your home from your garage to your attic Visit Homedepot. com how Doers Get More D Hello and welcome to the Vergge Cast, the flagship podcast of the N sixty four cartridge, the greatest video game object of all time I'm friend David Perce, M Lap Tells here, Hello sir. What's up? You're in some other new place in the world today. I just I forget what your house looks like at this point. Yeah, the studio at home that we spend a lot of time lighting to make me look perfect, I've avoided conscientiously for some time Uh no, I'm upstate. I've recorded a lot of Vir chasts from this house before U and my book is overdue So I ran away from my family to spend a few days here to wrap this thing up. Like any good writer, you went to the woods to finish her book. This feels this feels right Yeah. a person on our business n Andrew Melzach, who sometimes does her ad reads. You know his voice, even if you've never heard his name. He pointed out to me that this is the beginning of a horror movie. L I came into the woods to finish my book. I'm definitely to die here. This is the last podcast I'll ever be doing. You're going to get to the very last page of the book and then you're going to die. and it's going it's going to sell. it's going to be huge as like honestly, you dying would be so good for book sales I'm just throwing that out there. This is what I keep saying. Almost every bad thing that can happen to me is good for book sales, which is a real negative incentive I love that for you Do you want to pitch the book by the way? Tell the people what the book is? Uh, it's not done. So if you have ideas of what it should be, please let me know. I've got a couple days here to wrap it up. No, it's a decoder book. We're We're gonna take all the stuff we've learned from dececoder over the years How to make decisions, how to structure a company and write it all down so you can hand it of people who don't know what they're doing. The book is called How to get What You W And it really implies that I know So Believe that Also, if we mentioned this last week, but this week is Grill Week on Decoder, which is the best week of Decoder every year. It is very good. This is a particularly good grill week episode I'm excited about it. It's good st I'm just the guy who startarted a competitor Weber ended up buying Weber and now he has to contend with the fact that talk shit about Weber for years. And now he runs it. It's very good. It is everyveryone should have to do that. Go back and like run your worst enemy that all you did was talk shit about for a long time. I really enjoy that. We have a lot to talk about today actually. It's like It's the beginning of July, which is traditionally a very dead time in the news cycle And yet There's kind of a lot going on. We have a bunch of gaming news to talk about Some of it really interesting, some of it just like deeply bleak There's a bunch of gadget stuff going on. Brendon Carr remains up to stuff. We have we have we have a new disclosure here on the firstcast, which is a thing I'm very excited to get do later on in the show. We have to talk about Ccast at some point What words do we say? Who owns Who is an investor in the parent company of the Virge Who knows? It's like an anti disclosure. I literally don't know the answer I know there's now Comcast, there's NBC Universal and there's VersN. And I know that used to be one company and now it's three companies. And one of them, I think, potentially is an investor in the company that used to be part of our company I h that's all correct m Let's start with gaming There's bunch of gaming stuff going on. Let's start with the stable and predictable gaming industry. Yeah. let's start with the chill thing. There's a lot going on gaming business kind of writ large right now. I think that there's a bunch of Microsoft News in particular that I think is a really interesting signal about what's happening in games more broadly. and I want to get to that But we should start with the sort of immediate gadget news from the gaming industry this week, which is that discks are dying immmediately. Sony announced that starting in January of twenty twenty eight, they will stop producing PlayStation discks allog together. Tom Marren on our team had a scoop that Microsoft is testing a feature where you can basically attach digital game to a disk, so you can digitize the game from a disc and then give that disc to somebody else and it'll move the digital game. It sounds like a weird bad idea that probably won't work as well as it's supposed to The overwhelming ideas here seems to be Everything is digital Discs are dead No one needs physical objects in games or frankly anywhere. Like this this is the running theme of the tech industry. put in a weird way game discs feel important. This is like a physical object people have collected and cared about for a really, really long time. peopleeople seem to be having very strong feelings that they're going away Yeah, I mean, you kind of understand why movies and music There's like ongoing access and ability to play backack in real ways. And maybe sometimes it's really hard to find a movie on streaming. It was very hard to find pump up the volume on streaming for a really long time. Yeah And so my physical copy of that movie is really important. There's not a playback issue archival music and movies And I do think the physical copies are important and sometimes they do just disappear forever Games Man, once a game is gone and the console' gone, Actually getting to replay a game is tremendously difficult And if a company goes out of business or they pull the servers or the DM goes away or that servers that run the back end of the game engine go like All kinds of things can go wrong with games in a way that takes the art away from you And I think that has led the gaming community in particular to really prize their physical copies becausecause you can't take those. I do wonder for now, you definitely can, apparently. You super can now, yeah. It does feel a little bit like that feeling has been a placebo for a while now, right? Where even when you buy a thing, you put the disk in and the first thing it does is immediately download several dozen gigabytes of more game So the idea that You can buy the game as a sort of perfectly preserved object on a disk kindind of hasn't been true for a while And I think you see these announcements like Sony is very straforwardly, though' like people just play games digitally. L that nobody wants this is kind of the running line And I think to a large extent that's probably through It's also true that a lot of the games people play are increasingly live service and increasingly multiplayer, like Even if you could buy Fortnite on a disk, what the hell would it be? Do you know what I mean? And so I think Again, to some extent, this has been a trend for a long time going away from the idea of I get to own this thing as an object When you take the discs away makes very clear, I think, in a way that is hard to see on those steps The fact that It has actually already been taken away from you, right? You have not owned these games for a long time. You pay eighty dollars in a very real way, not own a game They're getting more expensive, they're getting further away from you at all times. And I think especially for people who have had, you know ades of consoles, they've bought every playsttation, they have libraries of games.ike I think about our friend Chris Grant who has just an attic full of every gaming console and game you can ever think of, and it's like the ability to create that for yourself is just essentially gone at this point. And there's just something very sad about that. Like I love and play A lot of games that I played twenty five years ago. L I was raised by the Nintendo sixty four in a very real way. I still have an Nendna sixty four. I still play it all the time and now we all sort of exist at the whim of like whether Nintendo feels like putting the game that I like onto its online service that I have to pay extra for And that is just It's just a crappy state of affairs, especially for something as expensive as game consoles and games have been for so long Well David, it's time to discuss whether not video games are art And I would encourage everyone to turn off this portion of the podcast and not engage with it whatsoever, critically or substantively, just to protect the safety of ourselves and our families. And're we're just gonna to layer twenty minutes of silence open this debates. You can just imagine us having a beeping sack We'll come back and Eiline will both be bloody and screaming. and that'll be it Well, just the only reason I bring it up is I think the commercial imperatives of particularly the console makers and the AAA studios have run roughshod over games as an art form Just to be clear, I think there there are some games that are very clearly art Absolutely. But the big push to live service games that essentially blew up in the industry's face was not an artistic push That was straightforward Let's turn video game consoles into a shopping mall. and keep you here all the time and maximize engagement the same way Ma would want to maximize engagement Instagram. O now instead of selling you physical items, we're going to sell you endless DLC in the slash service game industry chase that dream justust like ruthless cynical ways. I don't think any need mean the games are failed Like I think real people looked at all of those live service games and were like, no, thank you We already have a fortnite We don't need another one. we certainly don never need to like rebuy everything that we would want to buy It really is wild to think, by the way, that like at the beginning, there was Fortnite Roblux and Minecraft. everyverybody spent infinity dollars and time trying to join that club. And at the end of all of that, we have Fortnite Roblux and Minecraft It's nuts how unsuccessful everyone else has been mortgaging their future to try and play this game. And I think the thing that I'm just coming back to is I think those are commercial platforms. Those are the shopping malls. Yeah And I think wanting to preserve games, wanting to have discs, wanting to maintain a collection is nowhere close to those games which are the industry And somewhere in here is like a happy medium, I'm sure. and I know lots of people are going to have lots of ideas about the vast amounts of beautiful games that you can buy on steam for your PC But when you buy those games in steam for your PC, they sh up on your hard drive and you have them You you know what I mean? You can like take your hard drive away and put it somewhere else and like store that hard drive forever and maybe that some like steam authentication issues, but you're able to have those games in a way that I don't think Anyone feels like they have the PS five teams or they have the Xbox teams I think that's right. I mean, and what's funny about that is all of the Business machinations you just described just not working. And like again, we talk about some of the other news of this week. Tom Warren also had a story that Microsoft is planning big layoffs across the Xbox team and all We just say that Microsoft is going to sell Xbox Can I just put my steak in the ground Like They are skinnying down Xbox. They're simplifying its business model Yes, Aha Trump is saying a lot of the right things are making gamers happy. But at the same time, a lot of what's making gamers happy is her divorcing Xbox from the strategy demands of larger Microsoft R? She's like I'm gonna getid of all thisI. And you're like, wow You're just cutting it off from Microsoft's core strategic imperatives. So What else are you doing except creating the separation So can you can move on Who would you sell it to Who's gonna toy Xbox? Oh, I don't know, Starlink. Like it doesn't not it's like, you know, like X'll just buy more stuff. it'll be fine aceX. Now in launch business, they do connectivity, they have X. com, the everythingthing app and Xbox I mean, it kind of works. You just just bake the X boox into X. I think there's a lot like I think tencent might b like there's a lot of big companies out there that could buy a giant global gaming brand But I just think Microsoft hasas it? becausecause it's their one connection to consumer. It's the one thing that keeps Microsoft kind of cool And yet you look at what they're doing with it and maybe is sure maybe, the One read, like a very charitable read is there Cutting it down, they're going to focus it up and then they're going to grow again But like why would Microsoft do? How do you connect that to Microsoft's larger strategy of we're going to put copil out everyhere I agree with the thesis I also think the answer is the same. it's been for a very long time, which is Microsoft is desperately trying to have some tie to regular people Microsoft cannot for some reason fully embrace the fact that it is a business to business company that is like a deeply unsexy hugely successful business That's just it's that is just not Microsoft's conception of itself all the way back, right to like the computer in every on every desk and like, they wanted to be a thing for people at work, but also a thing for people in their real lives and Microsoft too its demise over and over and over and over again stop trying to do that, and the Xbox is the only one of them that has ever kind of sort of worked Microsoft will not sell Xbox for the same reason it made the kin. Do you know what I mean? Like it just can't give up on this dream of being relevant to regular people in their regular lives I think they probably should. I think they should probably sell Xbox to somebody who will better time And I also think like all the news right now is really interesting because like our comments on this story from Tom, which is about The layoffs coming and the possibility of closing a bunch of the studios that Microsoft has bought and like laying off those people, canceling some games, just sort of mass mass mass problems coming to all of Microsoft's gaming. systems. Comments are basically like, well Of course, you have to do this. This is all Phil Spencer' fault. Phil Spencer, who was the boss before Asha Sharma was the one who like colloected all of these like Pokemon Let them do whatever they want. All these games are over budget, way behind schedule. This has just been allowed to sort of be a giant mess because of the previous leadership of the Xbox team. So there's a sense that like, okay, actually what this is is maybe a return to being a successfully run B Sure. posossibly inside of Microsoft. Yeah, that's the charitable read, right? It is a very charitable read. It's theitable read. We should have never bought Activision and got totally distracted with an integration that let all the other stuff we bought fall by the wayside that got us away from poor gaming experienceces all anybody ever really wants and all anybody ever really says to Microsoft about the Xbox But instead we're going put Xbox everywhere and something that makes no sense. and try to turn every Windows PC into Xbox or whatever that strategy was. It was very hazy. We're going to body up against Apple and Proxy antitrust fights to try to put game streaming on the iPhone instead of just making the Xbox great That was basically the strategy. Okay, none of that worked So now we're going to get rid of all this fat, all the stuff that wasn't working. And we're going to focus up and we're going to run a great Xbox business That is a very charitable read. It is on its face the thing that they are doing The only question that remains is why Why would Microsoft do this? Like What is the point of running the great Xbox business I just think Suchendell is ruthless enough and cananny enough to know that he needs a lot of capital to go buy a bunch of GPU's or whatever it is the AI business is going to demand and a successful Xbox business brring him that capital without him having to go beg the public markets for it, and he will probably be rewarded just for saying he wants to sell it Right That' the market will probably reward him for saying we're going to focus up and move on from this this fail disaster. By the way, the antitrust argument here is really great Because I keep saying mergers are bad. and the idea that they bought Activision to gain some leverage over Apple was such an obvious failure at the time, and now it's just a pure failure It is no part of the thesis that Microsoft laid out has come to pass It's kind of wild. Yeah. And if they if they hadn't done it, would Xbox be more successful in some useful way, like You have to imagine, yes I mean, but then meanwhile we have An analyst firm this week. I think it was the end of last week early this week that said, and I'm just going to read you this quote from Circana analyst Matt Piscatella says PlayStation hardware unit sales fell to their lowest May total since may two thousand while Xbox hardware unit sales were the lowest ever recorded for a May month that next to Microsoft just raised the price of the Xbox and it is like How on earth are they going to convince anyone to play any games ever again? Like the proposition here, if you're any of these companies tryrying to build a successful gaming business The headwinds just seem like they get Wse We're at a point now where either GTA six is going to be so good and so earth shatteringly successful Everyone on Earth goes out and upgrades their console in order to be able to play it or it feels like bloodshed is going to get even worse because the consoles are getting even more expensive. Asha Shara herself has been like we're worried about people's ongoing ability to afford our consoles, that like there is so much money tied up in this idea of we're actually going to make everyone a gamer and it's going to take over the world and this is the most mainstream activity on Earth that all just feels like it's collapsing inside of itself right now I mean, the consoles are supposed to be sold for loss. Is there anybody left in the world who would ever want a PS five or Xbox that does not have one I will tell you, I've heard from a number of people recently who are like me discovering how outrageously priced a console is right now and being like, what am I supposed to do Like why on eararth would I buy this right now But we're like many, many years into this generation. Yeah The fact that raising prices is not lowering them is outrageous We're also just at the tailw like this is when the sailes should be slowming down Yes, sure But we're looking at the lowest in twenty six years and the lowest ever. This is not like the ebb of a cycle worse than that I mean, I agree with that. I just People play games on their phones. you know, like sure. That was the thing that Microsoft was worried about was how do I get games on your phone And they tried kinds ways to do, and they couldn't do it I just think Yes, the consoles are more expensive games are maybe less compelling is a bigger problem for them all to solve And there are fewer of them being made because all these layoffs are happening in service of trying to build these gigantic live service games that nobody wants to play. Like we're just spinning in this cycle that it feels like It's going to be very hard to get out of. And again, I think that's the credit a lot of people have given Asha Sharma at Xbox is she seems to be trying to unwind some of this thing that's like, let's put all of our resources into games nobody wants to play. becausecause in theory, those would be a great business except nobody wants to play them and actually get back to making things for people that they like oy does that sell get harder when you're asking me to buy a many years old many hundreds of dollars more expensive console I mean, I would put that right next to what this remumor from Sony that the next PlayStation will go beyond the living room. Oh yeah, I was gonna ask you about this. Everyone knows what to do. It's to build a cheap handheld. Yes, much easier said than done at the moment. But yes, that's true. But I mean, that's going to be the thing that juices all the hardware sales for them. Tell me what you make of this quote. So this is the PlayStation folks did an interview. and Let me see, this is with it says for the next generation platform, rather than simply serving as an alternative to PCs, we aim to deliver value that is unique to PlayStation This includes not only technological advancements, but also an expansion of usage styles enabl a seamless experience that can enjoyed naturally beyond the living. Part of that is like, okay, that's kind of what PlayStation already does, right? They have remote play. they have the portal, you can play on your couch. There's also a part of this that's like We're going to go make all the same mistakes that Microsoft has been making with Game Bass Uh, I mean,, I don't know, I have PSO I download. Everything's a playlaystation Everything's a playlsttation. Is this aation? I can see but Sony has some someome credibility, and we're going to build a first party handold that's good Yes, and that credibility was the PSP. It was not any of the stuff they're making now Bing I can see it, especially if all the games are digital and you can play them anywhere And they I mean, they can see how the Steam Dcks are doing. They can see how the little Legion goes to the world are doing. Now is the time to do it And maybe you get a cheaper console and you can sell an upsell bundle with a proper PS five, L You need to get some interest back into the ecosystem. You cannot just wait for GTS six I agree with that. I also think everybody is just waiting for GTA six. I mean, we keep hearing about the games being moved around for GTA six, like The stakes for that game are so high, both for Rockstar, which is like existentially dependent on this thing being the biggest game in history. and it's sort of everyone's clue as to whether people will pay money for video games And that is that is a lot to put on the back of one game I suspect people will pay money for GTA six, but though I mean, I planned, I literally I would like to I don't know how. I' like This is because you buy everything at the very last like dying gasp of the life cycle I do. It's a real problem. I have an Xbox one that I used for like an alarmingly small amount of time And that might be my most recent console. It's a real problem. Yeah All right, we should take a break. We have more gadgets to talk about including some weird open AI hardware that We just need to discuss. We'll be right back Our roll battery is the same That's like asking if all soccer players are the same. Take Messi, the most decorated player ever. Is there any other player who has achieved that? No, just him. Now take Duracl. Is there any other battery with power boost ingredients inside? No, just Duracl. Remember, goats only trust goats because they're built different And Messi only trusts do yourselfves. I'm Mranning. I'maddonkinner, I'm Vv Yov. I'm Coria Moo. want to train like a Red Bowl athlete. Tell us your fitness goals this summer to enter the Red Bowull Athlete challenge. You'll get to try each of our workouts for a chance to win an ultimate Red Bowull experience. D you have what it takes We're back gadgets. spepecifically, Neili, your very favorite thing AI gadgets. There's nothing you enjoy more than a good AI gadget I'm So the news is that OpAI is building new hardware, specifically for Kodex Don't get excited about this. This appears to be basically a little macro keyboard that sits next to your keyboard that you can use to do some basic codex things Mostly what I want to talk about, Eli is this trend I've been noticing recently where There is this ongoing thesis that actually mayaybe I can start to use AI and ditch this keyboard. I'm not going to ditch my phone. I'm not going to ditch my laptop But what I don't need anymore is a big old quiry keyboard. What I actually need is did you see this this tweet that went like lightly viral where somebody's like, oh, our senior engineer replaced his keyboard with a microphone. and he had one of those like Bob Barker skinny microphones that he was just sitting there talking into presumably talking to, know CodeX or Cloud code But there is this thing out there now that is like what we're going to do is build specialized input hardware isn't typing for basic like AI coding experiences I can't tell if all of this is like essentially a bit by a bunch of engineers who are just unnecessarily optimizing everything, or if there's actually something to this idea of like specific coding hardware F AI. It doesnn't it all just seem like attempts to lock you into ecosystems with hardware because it's so easy to switch between them in software Oh, that's interesting Yeah, I'm totally a cynic about all that. That's super cynically ye. Like sure, Csor has an app now but keep make sure you use Cursor. S Right? Like Cursor launchess IOS app is just you're going to have cursor on your phone And then you'll use cursor You know what I mean? L But that's another example, I think of this sort of macro trend, right? Like The idea that anyone would need to access there Coding IDE from their phone is a brand new idea. And yet I keep talking to people who are like, I actually spend a lot of time interacting with Cg code or codex or in this case, cursor from my phone. Like Paul Ford came on the show a while ago and he was telling me about like all the weird little projects he's doing from his phone on his commute home And that is like a brand new kind of software development activity. U And it just again, I'm still at this place where I can't decide if this is a bunch of people tinkering with workflows that won't actually amount to much and everybody willll go back to typing or if there is some actual change in how people want to input long lines of code and this kind of prompt happening in front of us? I think it's both The keyboard are going gonna stick around, confident prediction. keyboards will stick around. Keyboards are gonna stick around in software engineering because we keep learning over and over again that the software engineering projects are vastly more complicated than anyone gives them credit for. and require a bunch of senior software engineer attention to make them work the way they want to Over and over, the evidence of this is vast So I I do think there's a bunch of people who are AI pilled who are convinced that because they can now talk to a computer in a natural language, that everything about computing is up for grabs And I totally respect that belief. I think it is valuable and fun and interesting to be like, I have changed our core assumption And now everything is up for grabs. The music is no longer on twelve inch vinyl records. It's on tapes And now Walkmans exist, right? Like this is all fine. And you can just go through the history of technology and you're like this core Asumption changed and now the entire ecosystem can change around it. I'm just not at all convinced any of them have set upon a path that is sustainable in the way that is being expressed today Interesting What do you mean So like you, I know a bunch of engineers who are like constantly basically texting their coding agents. and I think That's great because what they're doing is tinkering in their spare time They're like, I now write software all I play video games by texting my phone But That's not If you're like, I do my actual job as a software engineer by texting a handful of agents and then just like sitting around, you're not actually doing Like, your time will get filled up by other things Right next to this is a bunch of weird gadgets that engineers in San Francisco are using to keep their laptops open while their agents run locally because they need their laptops around for their agents run So I do think all this is just up for grabs and I think partart of the the rush to the models are good at coding, we're going to redefine how coding works is because that is domain where the models are verifiable And you hear this if you're paying attention to AI, you're hearing about this so much. R verifiability, running loops. This is theot new thing where You have the model make something, you see if it gets verified by a compiler or other software testing tool and then it tries again And you hear the sort of like senior AI people be like, I write loops now I't even write proms, I write loops, right? And I they're off off it goes and it does its own thing. And like maybe they're just all burning a lot of tokens because that is the thing that makes them more money. Promptps are so like april twenty twenty six. likeike loops are very july twenty twenty six. Loops are in man. And you just kind of look at this and you're like Does this extend to anything else? S. If you want to build a bridge, do you know how you verify that a bridge won't collapse R L there's just like many, many other domains in the world besides software engineering, where the verifiability and the ability to make a loop against that verifier happens outside of a computer all over the place. I'm always using the legal system as an example, but the Verification in the legal system is a judge who are very unpredictable often hungry. You know, and you can't be like, well, we're going to run that again, Judge. L it's no, no, you're going to jail. Like J just like you're off to jail with you. There's no no loop will occur here, my friend And this is like my worry with the AI industry is they They try to generalize everything from the experience of software engineering over and over and over again. And so yeah, it's cool that they're building hardware. I think that is just to lock software engineers into like muscle memory for macros That's a fair thing. None of this is the thing that we were promised for Mi No, I agree with that. I think the one part of it that I have been most personally compelled by is ation as a sort of system wide thing. This is not the thing everyone is building. For a minute, everybody was vibe coding like habit trackers and to do list apps. and now everybody is vibe coding a Mac local first dictation app. There are four hundred thousand of them every single day and they're all the same thing And the idea that you can just speak into your computer and have it spit out properly formatted text, I think is very powerful there are a lot of messy complicated things with that. And again, the idea I'm sure that that tweet with the guy who replaced his computer with the or his laptop keyboard with the Bob Barker mic was a bit. but like That is that is a thing that people are out there saying. I barely type anymore. I do. I just do all of my talking. I'm like, A, are you ever in public? Are you ever doing anything other than wrriting perfectly formatted emails, like How do you how do you actually do a real life computer work? with this kind of tool I but And yet there are times where I can write an email much more quickly by saying it out loud into Gmail. then by typing them out loud into Gmail And so like there's there's some version of What if we didn't have to do every single thing available to us on a KQordi keyboard, that I think is going to be very exciting? I just, I think I agree that it's not adding macro keyboards to your desk I just put take that outside of the domain of software engineering. Yes, it's great. you're like, that app isn't any good Make it better, which is basically what happens in design interviewsross the industry every single day, right? Fine Take that into Photoshop where you know, graphic designers now can use AI proms in Photoshop. You like, what I want you to do is talk to this picture instead of just clicking on the parts you want to fix And it immediately breaks down Yeah Like make that sharper is actually not deterministic command the way that sliding the sharpness slider is There's a reason we have graphical user interfaces. I just think There's G good and useful to start from zero and try to build it back up again In many ways, the success of the iPhone itself because Steve Jobs and Apple threw away the mac Right? They built it on the same Mac OS ten foundation as Max of the Day But they threw away the app model, they threw away the interface parent. they just started it over and they They threw a copy and paste And they just started layering it all back in And now the iPhone regardless of its's utterly nerfed application model. is like as powerful as any Mac as evidenced by the fact that the Mac with No is an iPhone chip, right? Y. Fine. can you can see how powerful that willingness to start over is, especially the whole industry does it once. But like we can definitely get over our skis because we're trying to impmress our friends on X, the Ething app. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of that going on right now. And I think that is driving as much antipathy towards AI as anything Yeah, there's a There's a real sense of kind of what you said, everybody has looked at this is a chance to reinvent everything. and has decided that that actually means we are required to reinvent everything. And I think that just leaves a lot of people feeling exhausted where it's like actually I actually know how to do a lot of things on my computer. Do know what I mean? Like there ares some things I don't know how to do on my computer and it would be great to have systems through which to do those more successfully But I'm pretty good at a lot of things on my computer. And I don't actually need help doing those things And I think there is this sense of like, well, no, actually, You have to relearn every single thing you know how to do, even the things You really know how to do and have no problem doing. you have to relearn them anyway because of technology. And I think that just makes people feel bad I mean, I do like the idea that opening ey Johnny Iiv and love Fr and did all this hype around phones and laptops being quote, legacy devices, which is what Sam Altman said to Johnny I in that video. and First thing is like a macro keyboard It is very good. likeike the most legacy device you can get to. And ironically, if anything, I think But actual winner of the AI revolution so far has been laptops. Like Yeah without a question. Laptops are so cool now in a way they have not been cool in a very long time What did I just say about the utterly nerfed application modelone? It's because you can just run anything you want in a laptop. And I think that's great I' L again, I think it's fun and exciting to be like, what if What if you could talk to the computer and that change everything about computers think the overreading of that to be like, oh, I can definitely new software development. because I can run my code against some sort of external verification does not translate to anything else Like literally any other domain gets caught up in the reality of reality And so there's just this weird moment where it's like, of course, it's a codex keyboard That's the thing it can do, right? Of course you can build on the foundation of the thing it can do. big plan to ship a pen or a necklace or a bracelet that replaces your laptop because you can just Issue commands and have your agents run around the internet doing stuff for you None of that works yet And it might never Like have you caught this? likeike the AI industry is slowly starting to concede The models don't know anything And I can't learn Interesting. No, I hadn't actually really clocked that It's just at some point you can't hyipe your way past the idea that When Jem and I gets it wrong and you're like, it's wrong. And it's like, I'm so sorry you're so right. It will get it wrong exactly the same way the next time Interesting, but you can't tweet your way past that lived experience that all of us have had now And so there' like there's just a little bit of concession here. Hm the models like, they know what they know they don't learn anything And like a vast amount of the supposed project of the AI industry is that these things will eventually become recursive and able to teach themselves. and Once we get to self improving AI, We take over the world. Yeah, bet's off. then it'ays Yeahah, that's all it's all super intelligence or whatever. Yeah. whatever definition that thing is. But like right now, The industry has models that don't learn. they know what they know at the time of training and that's it And if they hallucinate get things wrong they aren't smarter the next day So like you just see there's like a little bit of un like You can make a lot of promises about what AI can do with every single industry, every single situation But now we've all been doing it for three years in that experience of You're so right, you shouldn't drink bleach is like It's just like baked into the human experience now. And you can't just like tweet your way past it Can I tell you my new favorite horrible saying that my AI system does to me all the time It's starting a paragraph with the word honestly. drives me nuts. when it's like, I was I was I was doing a thing this morning. I need like a little tiny chrome extension And I was just like, what approach would you take? How would you do this? And it gives me all the lists all the possible options and then it goes, honestly I would go with number three. or like here's my honest recommendation. second. And over and over and over. it's like, hereere's a bunch of shit, and then it's like, honestly, and I'm like, I don't Just answer my question. It's very bad. Stop using any of these words. Every time you use the word honestly, it's like a word I don't want to use in my writing anymore because it's now the thing that makes you sound like AI to me when you use the word honestly. U I hate it Anyway, there are a couple of other gadget of things we should talk about here. And I want you to know that because I love you, Neili, I'm not going to make you talk about the working demo of the Clicks commommunicator, a device that I think is very exciting, and we will cover more on this show but you as somebody noted hater of physical keyboards on phones. Yeah V to leave that alone. Everybody should go watch. C click communicor I think it's cool We should talk about what appears to be couple of different leaks of the iPhone eighteen Pro Um ave Have you seen these pictures and these videos of the drop test? The way this has all come out has been very strange to me. Has it felt weird to you? There's like a Reuters story about how there's photos on the dark web and then they end up on X and they get taken down on X, but then that like Stzand affects it and so now it's everywhere. It's everywhere. I first encountered the video of this drop test on a TikTok And it was a TikTok of somebody talking over somebody talking over a TikTok. likeike three generations deep into this video being shared Apple smartter this. I don't know why they did this. They verify that this video is real by issuing the takedowns, right? It's weird. Yeah. And it apparently it all goes back to This company, was it called? I think it was Tatile Electronics had a data breach And the security researchers said seem to think that one of the files that were breached and got posted to the Dark Web included Tatile electronics customers like Apple and I think Tesla was another one And so all this stuff like there's a drop test video that is not the sort of thing you normally see in leaks like this. Normally it's like Marketing images, right? Like somebody finds the best buy URL ahead of time and that's how these things get leaked This has come out in a very different way I was surprised at the same thing you were, which is that Uh by clelearly making an effort to take this down They turned it into a thing. Like I'm now one hundred percent sure this is the iPhone eighteen Pro And it's because of the way that this has gone down and the speed with which someone seems to be trying to scrub it from the internet. I mean, we don't know that it's Apple, right? Like X hasn't been particularly forthcoming about where these takedown requests are coming from.. It could be the manufacturer themselves, there is some amount of like ransomware attack ing on the supplier. So it's just like it's unclear who would even own this video where where it got lost and how And the idea of that The thing went viral and you should have paid the money. is like the whole industry wants to stop that Like when we've had cybersecurity folks on Deoder They are just like, look, pay the ransa L. you're in a spot where if you don't, then the cost of not paying them ransom goes up because they will want to inflict maximum damage. So just pay the money which is not, I think what most people Right, mostost people do not feel this way like I don't knowsociate with terrorist. number one, I don't howso shciate with terrorist. Yeahah.. But theres there's enough diffuse cyber crrime in the world where All of them have an incentive to make it so costly if you don't pay the ransom So there's just this weird back and forth of it, I quite understand. But yeah, you get to the point where it's like Yeah, let it leak and then just like deny it, you know Like you're you're fighting criminals. You don't have to play a totally honorable game. You can just let people let people believe whatever they want. it's the strries and effect of trying to take it. I think is interesting. What do you think of the actual phone itself I mean, it looks exactly like the seventeen Pil. Except the camera bump is huge Okay, I've been trying I'm very glad you said this because I've been trying to figure this out because there's like there are angles at which It looks like it might just be a sort of trick of perspective that the camera bump is huge. But then there are other times where it just looks like the camera bump is huge that we're going to get like full on pixel style Cyclops thing along the back. U which I gott to tell you, I really do not like it all Well so presumably we're looking at the pro in these videos, right? It appears that way Yeah. time So if you have a folding iPhone that has kind of like an iPhone air setup. Thinner cameras, maybe not as good Maybe no Zoom or no ultra wide depending on the configuration apppple goes with This sets up the opportunity for the pro to be even better So you're the halo iPhone of this generation is the folding phone, the camera isn't good, but don't worry if you want the best camera, Apple has made the pro best pro phone that has ever proed. And you think that's the whole push for the pro is it is the camera I think at this point what else? I mean, I guess that's kind of ye, that' sort of been true for the last couple of years. It's going to run iPhone apps slightly slightly better. Do you prefer rectangle apps? or square. Now the iPhone app. Yeah.ike That's fair. That's the only differentiation for the pro in ages, right? Like The screens are better like is promotion. I'm like the person who buys a phone because of promotion on the display notot most people And I think all the people who are dazzled by The most impressive specs are the people Apple is going to try to convince to buy the fold or theltra or whereatever the hell they call it The folding iPhone is going to be the one for the people who want like the best shiny thing A. case for the pro is, I think I think you're right. It's going to have to be about the camera. orr battery life Tue, I have a lot of questions about the battery life on this folding iPhone will be based on the case mockups I've seen might be nothing. That's the other way these things always leak, by the way, is the case companies But yeah, so I mean, like, you know, I think the folding iPhone, there's going to be some set of compromises to come with the folding iPhone. The camera looks very obvious. Battery life is another one that could potentially be obvious. You've got to drive one larger display and the secondary display. Right The cover display. A lot of ways ferallect can go sideways. So then the profone can get bigger and thicker and have more battery life and more cameras and you're like Yes, you can have the thin one You can have the folding one, or you can have the monster And I'm just telling you right now, I'm all monster all the way. If that's actually how this lineup goes, if there's like a cool folding phone, you're like, wow, that's intellectually very interesting. I'll go with the monster please. The biggest battery life and the best cameras I can get Okay, wait, this I'm now this lineup is amazing. So now there's there's the cheap one, which presumably is just like the base eighteen eighteen. We've heard some rumors that might not be a thing weird. I don't know. the rumors are all over the place. But anyway so it's yeah so you have The base model, the cheap one You have the thin one, the air You have the wild one, which is the foldable phone. and then you have the monster. Is that the this is the lineup Yeah. You've got you've got base model Skinny one Foldy and Mster That's how that's how Greg Josswack is going to introduce then. John Turnis is first Apple event to CO. He's like this one's called Foldy and that one's called Monster This is like a Disney pllus show waiting to happen. a virtualast listener should reach out, like tellell me which one sounds more compelling there. Do do you care about folding or do you just want the biggest battery life you can get The the biggest battery with the longest battery. I've been thinking a lot about this. and there's a part of me that is like as a journalist who has been using new products for a very long time, I feel obligated to get the fold just because It is the newest version of the thing. But I also feel like I have now been very happily a base iPhone user for the last two cycles and other than the battery life which is, I think, demonstrably better on the pro There is nothing about this phone would like to upgrade specs wise. Like just nothing. And I am consistently amazed by the fact that I do not miss things about the pro phone Don't you have children Do take pictures of your children? sometometimes But like the wayI do it. You just like prompt the children. Yeah. Like lookook, I already took some pictures of them. Imagine pictures of them in a pool. L that's what I want I mean, we get new iphones every year because we kids and I just want the best cameras every year in whether or not the new cameras are the best cameras is open to debate every year I think this year I am unusually excited about this year. even though I think next year is probably going to be the year anpple will save a bunch of stuff for the twieth anniversary iPhone H whatever is about to happen with all of the rising prices and all of the complicated stuff with supply chains in which products continue to make sense. Figuring out what Apple is about is Most possible to do at the iPhone event. And I think this year is going to be a particularly interesting. we're just going to hear about Siri the whole time. You think You know it's true. It probably is, especially now that it's gone very well. likeike the early SiAI returns continue to be really good Uh They're probably just going to like double and triple down on We've done it. ury is here Yeah All right, one more bit of news, which is just I was thinking about this in particular. We just had a short little quick post on the site about a future cheese standard for charging that might bring fifty watt wireless charging to more devices. Some can do it right now, but you need a fan in your charger. Sure. That's how fast it goes. I was thinking about this this morning because I was charging my phone with a laptop charger that is not like exxcellent highly rated, technically competent laptop charger. and the thing damn near set my phone on fire. Yeah That happens all the time. Boy was it hot trying to charge this thing. And I was like, this is this is the stuff I'm looking forward to. I want my photo to just be boiling hot all the time. So I track a lot of this kind of tech in the weirdest way possible. I pay attention to what TikTokers say when they're making the fun feature videos? Okay So like Forrest Jones is like, I think the single best car feature TikToker there is. like he's set the model. everyveryone does it. He's great. And so The fact that Frest just waves at giant screens cost billions of dollars of RD to produce. and he's like, and it does carPay. tells you one very important thing about the whole industry. It's so brutal. He does it all the time R he's like, and it's got a ninety inch screen that runs CarPlay and Android auto. And then he just moves on and he never looks at the automaker interface at all And if it's a test or something, he's like, and it runs Google Maps, and that's as far as we go. And'm like, you just know something very important. what Kart TikTkers prioritize in this way? Yes. Meanwhile, an entire building of people at GM just sigh deeply every time. Right. But they've got to make like a two minute TikTok running through all the features. Yeah R. Doug D Miero was like, here are all the quirks and features. He would make a long YouTube video. Car Tikoks have to do it in like, 's it's a much more ruthless prioritization. Yeah So the one that I've noticed keeps coming up now. is they will wave the wireless charger and they'll say, and it has a fan. And and that's a ventilated wireless charger becausecause this is important Because when the carmakers started putting wireless chargers in the cars, they weren't ventilating or cooling them in any way. they would get hot and the phones would stop chargingh And so people obviously notice this. So the car TikTokers have all taken to asking or otherwise finding out that the car chargers, that the wireless chargers and new cars are ventilated because the audience gives a shit. That's right L in the prioritization of what I'm going to say, what features I'm gonna talk about in my two minute TikTok Wireless charger is ventilated makes the cut now, like more often than not That's really interesting. My The wireless charging pad in between the seats in my car is probably the single least used feature Yeah myars my ever. In part because it was like it's a twenty twenty two car and So it was like, you know, it's fe years old. We've made some wireless charging progress since then. And this is like you have to set it exactly right. And then if you go over one bump, it stops charging. L it's not a good system but also it's where all of my stuff goes. Like it is the charger is in the spot where when you instinctively get into the car, that's where you put your keys or like sandwich or like whatever, all of my stuff goes into the thing that is ostensibly charging my phone terrible, terrible future. and I have never understood why anyone would want it But maybe with a fan, I'll be into it. This is why I always end up buying a Mag safe charger for my car and mounting it somewhere on the dash because the magnets hold it in place. I'm gonna mean to tell you that. I got a long way down the road of wanting to buy one of these the other day. Like to the point where I'm sitting with one of these in an Amazon cart because I CarPlay to work. I'm running the IOS twenty seven developer beta. And CarPlay is so flaky with this. and that's like, it's no one's fault. It's a developer beta. It's my fault. like I get it but I also need Google Maps to work. And so I was all the way down the road of I'm just gonna buy a mount and plug it in in my car. And then the vision of you Taking a victory lap on that popped up in my head and I literally I could not make myself bu. right.'m right. I'm right about this every time. I cannot Theight truck is an entire product, an entire truck built around the reality that most people should just mount their phones. I just knew that every time I looked at it, it would just be you cackling at me from my lock screen about how you were right and I couldn't do it It's very look it makes sense. You put the map in cararplay or you put the music in cararplay and you're run the map on the phone screen I think that just works. Yeah I don't wantan to talk about this any. We should take a break and then we're gonna to come back. We' got Hypeesk, we got Brendon, we got the lighting round We'll be back This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, likeike restoring a vintage motorcycle from a fifty page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responsse is setup required compatibility and availability varies eighteen plus Take your flexibility beyond the mat. with PayPal. Pay nothing at checkout. Then enjoy a flexible monthly payment plan that works for you. with no sign upp or late fees. F yours n, and an easy way to pay. With PayPal. Download the PayPal app to get started. Subject to approval, pay mononthly consonsumer loans made by Webank. available through PayPaling NL nine one zero four fivety seven. Len more at payPal dot com slash pay monthly All right, we're back. It's time now for the hype desk where our friends Ross and Ashley come and tell us what's cool in the world and on the internet You're both here today. Hi Ross, Hi Ashley We are in fact not the same person We have been seen in the same, same room at the same time. Get that mistakeen all the time. It's the hair. I gotta tell you.'s just long, luxurious hair in all cases. I went for a summer Phoenix No joke. what I would get for Ashy's hair right now? Like truly. What do you guys have for us this week I Okay. Can we just go back? Yes, you can I woring nothing stopping you. There is nothing stopping you. This is a multi year project. Anyway I know, is going gonna get cut My promise to all of you is that we will do a hype desk about all of our respective hair care situations at some point in the very near future. I'm just putting that into the universe. Will this also be the Widows Bay Watch party. Yeah. I'm so very ready. But not this time. What do you guys have for us this week Total sort of horror, horror it is actually horror directly related instead of kind of horror comedy. So I I'm super excited because Unhinged is out, which is this new Netflix game by Nightchool And it's I played it and it's I played it last night and maybe that was a poor choice. I did not realize that I would feel actually as scared as as I ended up being Okay, so I love it when I love interactivity. This is like very exciting for me. So the one so unhinged is this horror game. Netflix has a studio called Night School that developed this. and it seems like there's a special thanks for David Fincher and in the credits. So it seems like he was involved in some sort of capacity. And so it's a survival game And you're the lead character is Zoe Krabbitz. And you're this character, you wake up, it's like a storm. and then you realize there's like a killer in your apartment building. And the neat thing about it is, so you can only play this game if you go to your Netflix account on a web browser or a smart TV that supports this game, which is my one like bummer about this. likeike I wanted to play it on my couch like sitting on my couch using my Apple TV. One of my questions for you was gonna be do you know anyone who actually earnestly plays Netflix games? And I feel like that sentence you just said answers no for everyone on planlet Earth. This is like the most frustrating thing because I feel like if this was more accessible, like literally everyone would play it and be raving about it because the experience itself is so visceral You connect your cell phone to the experience and your actual phone in your hand is your flashlight in the game And you can text people who are in the game, like Troy Baker plays the superintendent of the apartment building. You have your best friend, which is Sadie Sink. And it's really stacked like voice cast, which is amazing. And you can you can literally mess you get messages from them like they're like it is so immersive and visceral and interactive and it's So, u There's like, A bunch of ways you can die like in the game and it's like it's not like a no fail state. like this is this is the thing where like, You really do feel like your virtual life is on the line. And it's very good and it's about half it takes a half an hour. It's not a long like experience. It's like It feels like you're experiencing a very scary episode of horror television in real time. And it's so cool and impress. Like I loved it. And like I said, the only thing I wish I could have done was experienced it like on my couch chilling at night instead of at my computer because it sort of felt a little more like work I do like this though it feels very Netflixy. L this is the first Netflix game anyone has ever described to me that I'm like, oh, I kind of get why this would be on Netflix. Yes, very much so. Like this is a thing that feels very organic to the Netflix brand, but also is such a cool thing for Night schoolchool to have developed. Like the way that the technology The way that your web browser like interacted with your phone, like you have your flashlights. It's really cool. canan you explain that more? I don't think I So If you werere watching this on a TV, the TV is all run sort of like H and all five apps So this Just Netflix like running a web browser in your TV. What's happening here? It's kind of I think it's like an HTMO L five streaming thing because your phone becomes basically a gyroscope controller. So as you kind of rotate it around, the flashlight also kind of rotates. So do you have to log in your you just open the Netflix app There's one. So it's kind of like how Jackox Game works a little bit. Jackbox Game lets you use like a web browser here. you'll get a QR code That'll let you download the Netflix Game contontroller app. Connects the thing. Yeah. sureure. So yeah, you're using dyroscope. you kind of move around a little bit. and then when you kind of get your cursor to the edge of the screen you get a button that basically says, go right go to the next scene. So Unlike, let's say like the Banders Snatch black mirror thing, which was just purely choose your own adventure or some of other like early Netflix experiments This really does feel like a full streamed game where you're having kind of real time Yeah. I wouldn't say decision making. It feels much like if you've played this Paysttation game until dawn, so those twose are adventure horror games where you kind of have to make some Motion decisions, it's very much like that. That makes sense because Banders Snatch and all the other Netflix gams have either been like mobile casual games or I'm gonna to pick what the next cutscene is Yeah. And so okay, so in this one, I died a few times and every time I died, there's like a cutscene of the cops like talking about how you died And it's like very like they talk about like the specific they comment on like the crime scene. L And so it's like this is like it's really cool. Like I can't I'm just really de I was so surprised and delighted by how cool it was. This is a good case. I will say, Ashley, you should know. after your Masters of the Universe recommendation You' the trust level with Ashley was a record low on the hype desk. I'm sad I' sad. This is sad to hear that. I'm going to go down with who could have seen this come? I'm going to go down with a ship and agree with Ashley here because unhinged It is great. thirty. I will say sixty minutes because I kept dying For those out who who want to try it, there is story mode, which means you cannot die you should though. You should should though. Like it's like it's worth it to just to see the cops standing over your body being like she was resisting. Yeah to like go through Die Like die a few times and then if you feel like, okay, I kind of get like I'm overdying, then switch to the story mode. Don't start with the story mode But I will add that like there it's hard to find a comp for this even on the gaming side. likeike it is a clever experiment It's only thirty, maybe sixty minutes if you're bad at the game like I am. And I do I'm very curious to see if this is what Netflix does going for because they've tried interactive They've tried to figure what the games program is going to This feels like a step in the right direction in many ways and just finding some that just feels uniquely theirs and can uniquely kind of handle,' say, like their infrastructure to make the streaming work seamless. Like this is a thing I feel like is so unique to a place like Netflix. Like it's something they can say like you really can't get this almost anywhere else. L there are so few places that you could actually platforms that you could actually get this And that feels to Ross's point, like that great really good like solid step in the right direction I dig it. Ross, do you have w for us? I do. I was scanning through kind of like Steams, different like PC demos, checking this out. and I found what I really do feel is kind of like the ultimate Viry game It's in a demo now. it's going to come out late this year. It is called Restory Chill electronic repairs. And here's the gist You are running Pty speak is? Yes. You are running like a mom and pop little gadget repair store in the two thousands in Akihabrur District of Japan And so people come up and you can take your time time with this We'll hand you Old knock off Nokia phones, motoralerasors, like Nintendo DSs and PSPs And you just kind of very slowly and casually Unscrew them, take the parts out and just kind of dust off and clean. All'll the gadget to give him back. It is a czy game. If you've ever play this kind of cleaning games like Power Wash simimulator where you just Very satisfyingly do menial chores That is exactly what this game is. and there's a demo out now it takes about an hour to play. I have a really important question. Yes Is this the kind of game where you look at the gadget and then you press a button that says repair and it is magically repaired or do you have to like do the work repair You have to do the work. Okay, good. This is what I want. Y powerower wash simulator is great because you are actually doing the full activity of power washing. Yeah. If it was just like press a button and it will it will be power washed. You lose all of the fun of the. No, this is like the gentle look at every details. It's like the Tamagashhi. Okay. The little girl comes up and goes, hey, can you fix my Tamagashi? You take off the front panel, the screen cover, the screen the circuit breke. you unscrew every little bit of it And then you take each piece and you can just kind of dust it off or you can order new parts and replace it. And like It really makes you appreciate one how reparable everything was in this kind of joyous mid two thousand dayge where you could just take apart a Nokia three thousand three ten and go, Oh, that's how that works and put it back together yourself You are doing that and then you have this kind of like very gentle like brushing animation The sounds in this game are amazing. Every time you, unscrew and like put a little piece of plastic on the table, it's like So joyous. this. I'm looking at the picture. This is so charming. This looks like what every one of The VR games I played for years was trying to be. No, that's a good point Like every VR game was like, we're gonna put you in a workshop and you're gonna to make beautiful things. And this one is just not trying to do such weird stuff, but is like charming and animated in exactly the same way. I have a question. It's steam game, right? It is a steam game right now? Yes. Can you take a part a Steam Deck on a Steam Deck Oh, they should add that as DLC. Yeah, it should be good. This it's like obvious. It's like the first thing they should have done take apart your own steam day. You do have an Atari. If you die in the game, do you die in real life And we're back home unhinged This is the Netflix forty experience. No, when it comes to Rory, it is a lot of like legally distinct. So I think I wrote a few of these down. is The Noni PMP is your Sony PSP, of course. yourour I think Electrogotchi is what they call it. A Fokia. Fokia. And of course, of course they have officially licensed Atari, so it's just a Flat out twenty six hundred., Aari will take money from. You can like we could officially listense Tari right now. You can send them like a handful of loose change in the mail and' be like, yeah, you're in A Tari now All right, I'm going to go play restory like as soon as we finish recording this podcast. This is like extremely my kind of game I hope it makes the newsletter. I just really hopeing go. I'm excited about it. R right Ross Ashy good to see you both. Thankks for being here. C'ers Ell All right, now it is time once again for America's favoriteodcast with our podcast carars a dummy. Brandon carars a dummy makes me stick to my tummy That's. That was beaif. Sure, that's gonna be stuck in my head for a long time. It's playing out, by the way, did you hear that? guitar tone is real. It's still in the back lingered. It gave me like immediate U Do you remember the Disney Robinhood movie? That's that's where my brain went as soon as that started playing. Oh yeah, now I get it.'s It's very cute. I was expecting like the metal breakdown like we had last week which, by the way, maybe the most response we've ever gotten to a Brendon theme song The now with Merks really really hit for people. Yeah. We'll play it at the end of the show every week now It's going to be the end of the show, ten minutes of silence, a bunch of ads, and then that randing car every time. It's going to be amazing. That's how we finance everything from now on Uh what did Brendon do this week? N li? So Brendon did do some stuff this week. We're gonna set that aside though this time because a thing that has you just like kicking it at the the Country Fair or whatever it was called. Brendon issued some new rulings about like spectrum allocations. that means Elon Musk will get more spectrum. Like sureure, you've heard this story before. A thing that happens with Brendon consistently that I have to keep pointing out is that he's such a censorious traitor to the Constitution of the United States that keeps scrambling Partisan divides This week, Brendan is so stupid that he caause Neil Gorsuch to point out that he's a danger to the Constitution. Whoa And like, I don't spend a lot of time agreeing with Supreme Court Justice Nil Gorich Do you know what I mean? Yeah So the coalition is now you, Ted Cruz, and Nill Gon. Yeah, it's like every nning in this show, actually like Ted Cruz, he got a hand it to him or like the Wall Street Journal editorial board once again issued a stunning indictment at Brendan's whole deal, which I once again agree with. Turns out, by the way, free speech, relatively bipartisan issue A lot of people like free speech. So Nil, it's this week, it's me and my budy Neil Gorsich. who is otherwise like a crazy person So this was a big week at the Sureme Court bunch of big partisan decisions, six to three The one you've probably heard of is the birthright citizenship case where they decided that the Constitution protects birthright citizenship. You're hearing that is like a big six three window for the Constitution. It's actually like five four B Kaba's like in the middle See you just have this spread of like Trump lost one big one Actually the Trump administration won a bunch of other big ones that make the presidency even more powerful. The centerpiece of all that is Trump vlaughter which is about whether Trump can just fire the members of independent agencies, in this case, the Federal Trade Commission And former Commissioner Recca Slaughter is actually on Deoder explaining why she filed this case like ages ago. The idea is that independent agencies are supposed to be apolitical The Congress set up all these agencies, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Tade commission, What have you And the president says, I'm going to appoint members of these commissions. Congress will confirm them. The Senate will confirm them And then they will have independence from either the president or from Congress so that they can operate in a bipartisan way outside of the demands of politics and make good decisions over the long term This has been the case for one hundred years And there's like famous law school precedent. and this time, the Supreme Court Threw it all out And that even said, John Roberts even wrote in the opinion, whatever remains of this former president that said the president can't fire these Commissioners is gone. It's overturned. it's overturned This is like a big deal. If you are a lawyer or like somebody who studies the federal system, this is the biggest deal in the world. I bring all this up because Neil Gorsuch wrote a concurrence in this decision saying we have to do this. These agencies have gotten too powerful. They're fundamentally undemocratic. making sure the president can feel the pressure from the public and fire the people and be accountable is important This is his big argument You can believe this argument or not. It's kind of a wild twist of logic to get into that. right? The whole point is that you insulate the agencies from politics and like heated public debate so they can make good long term decisions about spectrum things that should not be political.. And if you make them more political, they will inherently get more corrupt As you can see right now with the Federal Communications Commission run by Brenna Garr, which keeps handing everything to his friend Elon Musk. Right So the idea that the agencies are political is very bad. but this is like a centerpiece of the Trump administration, a centerpiece of the conservative movement. There's this whole idea called the Unitary executive. You can fall down the rabbit hole. None of this actually matters. What matters is that Neil Gorsuch wrote In his concurrence in Trump Veslaughter Independent agencies today hold tremendous sway over the nation's affairs. They regulate our businesses and our financial markets, they set the rules for the internet airwaves. They decide how we light our homes, how we run our elections in the manner of our employment offten These agencies do this with hardly any statutory guidance based on broad grants of legislative authority So he's saying Congress says you can have a federal commommunications commommission and then they're the kings of the airwaves and that's bad. And there should be some political influence over them. because then if you're mad at Trump or if you're mad at some decision that the SCC makes, you can put that pain on the president and he'll fire the person. Again, this is some twisted logic. Yeah then Gorsuch goes through this like laundry list of like ways agencies are too powerful. almost all of which are like I hate the environment, you know whatever sureure Yeah. And then he comes to and then there's late night comedy. Last year, taking objection to a network host ononired remarks, the chairman of the SEC suggested there would be additional work ahead for the agency if broadcast companies did not find ways to take action And then he cited, we can do this the hardware or the easy way, which is what C said about Jimel And so the centerpiece of we will tear down the administrative state Is Brendan Carr being like a traitor of the Constitution and try to censor comedy? And now that a conservative justice is pointing out We should not have an FCC chair who's that powerfula But okay, hold on. Unaccountable to the people. This doesn't make any sense to me. This is a lot, this is a lot of jumps to get there. Yeah, I'm this is this just like broke my brain in half because Nog Gorsich is saying is that we have to Make sure people can be fired by the president. In fact, the whole problem that we have person was put into their job and given every incentive to be completely corrupt in favor of the president You see what I'm saying This feels Bad. I see what I'm saying? Neil I love you, but I don't think you understand what we're doing here. rightight It's not It's I don't think that enough voters are going to be so mad about Jimmy Kimball that they throw Trump out of office, right? The idea is that the agenccy should be independent So the president can't pressure them to be mad at Jimmy Kimmel, to be mad. Yes. A That look, you can make the argument that it's better for the president to operate the government that actually, if you look at the frustrations of everyday Americans, the amount of bureaucratic process between a campaign promise and a policy being aected too high Sure sure I buy all this, but I think it's very funny that Neil Gorsic of all people is like Man, these agencies are out of control, powerful. My best example of them is a guy doing the bidding of the president Thus, the president should have even more power to fire that guy. But what Gorset's project here, and John Roberts's project and a consonservative project generally, is to get to the point where The agencies are the president? Yes And so everything the agencies do is a reflection on the president and there's some political check on the president's worst impulses Y. or that the president's worst impulses are allowed to run completely rampant because this is a purely political What Americans want is a king, I'm told famamously here the three days before the fourth of July, we fought a war Have a king King of Late Night Comy Great movie, by the way. Uh Im Anyway, that's been Bndan Carars, Dmy Neil. You're also welcome to come on the Vircast I welcome any of our Suprem Court justices I think Clarence Thomas would bang on the bird chest. I think that would be one of our best episodes of all time. That would be based on some of the I think it was the birthright citizenship descentent he wrote, was like ninety pages or something like To be fair, he wrote it in forty eight point fun He's very old Clareance Somas. That's another one we'll just play a lot of silence over top of that ee. You can imagine it however you want. Here's my idea for a Virt chest segment God. Our nation's octogenarian Men of power come on the show and I just ask them what font size their eine is sent to. And that's That's the whole segment I love it. We just call it old heads Be what is it? How big are those icons? You tell me How much powerer should you have based on the size of your phone icon prettyt good.'s that's been Brendon Carars,ummy, Brendon, you're welcome.yone's welcome, really If you can explain yourself or your that the amount of corruption it has taken to have the Supreme Court cite your actions in an effort to increase executive power I would love to talk about this with you That's from Rana Car's Dummy America's favorite podast, been podcast. not No context. I'm just going to read to you a Wall Street journal story that just dropped a few minutes ago Elon Musk SpaceX has developed a protype for a handset like device designed to reshape how humans interact with artificial intelligence that SpaceX has shown investors recently The rocket and AI company showed the protype, features a sleek design that is slimmer than an iPhone to some investors and other stakeholders ahead of the company's meega IPO, according to people familiar with the matter SpaceX is building a phone doing AI phones. Sure. Okay. the funniest part about this to me I just want you to imagine a phone in which U X is presresumably a crucial part of the operating system Grock is how you interact with everything. And presumably Starlink is how you get service. this is the all time worst idea about cell phones that I've ever heard. I love it so much. I think it's very funny that there are rumors that SpaceX will bu TMobile. I was going to ask you about this. I genuinely want to know what you think about this. And there's another rumor, you know, Comcast is splitting itself into two that Eventually, the Comcast broadband business will be able to be acquired by SpaceX as well They're at a telecom firm At some point, we're all just going to have to admit that SpaceX is a telecom firm with worse margins than Tamo. R they have way higher costs and they They have to deliver competitive broadband prices So would you inherently have worse margins than Tam. I mean, SpaceX is like It's it's Starlink. And then it's a really expensive marketing department that launches rockets is like functionally how that business works It's and it's funny because, you know Starlink is profitable on its space, but They have to pay the launch cost to you are part of the company And like, it's great that the rock every time you talk about SpaceX, you have to concede It is very cool that the rockets land themselves. abbsolutely. No one thought anyone could do. Gwen Schrotwells done a great job running that company and obviously Elon Musk can just overpower the laws of physics through nothing but charisma and racism or whatever combination of traits he has. The like the reality of that business is that it's a telecom At the end of the day, it is a broadband company and we know the economics of broadband companies extraordinarily well for as Uncompetitive as that market is It's not like the most lucrative market in the history of the world. I also think it's funny that they're going to make a phone. Like you're going to have a starlink phone that has AI in it You have to This is the same bet we were talking about earlier. You're going to rethink all the computers. You're just going to talk to AI and it's going to do stuff for you Are you going to have an Instagram app Is it going to run TikTok People like doing things on their phones G'onna to have candy Crush will it support outlook Like I can just go down the list of things that like exXes the everything up. I don't know if you sure phones can do. You don't need anything L you just run into some pretty obvious problems right. R' money now That's true And it's just one bank account. It's a sweep across many bank accounts in order to It's very good. It's like, oh we're doing financial engineering now as well U I love this. I'm very happy about it It's it's The whole thing is just deeply, deeply silly. By the way, it's the same idea that Sam Waltman has. too build a phone? It's exactly the same idea that Sam Wtman has. Yeah. Like there's no point in making this a startling phone. Most people are around places with cell service The idea is that you will make a device that replaces your phone and you just talk to an AI model and the AI model runs around doing stuff for you. and it's like, that's really hard. No one has pulled it off yet, and there's no true application model for AI yet in that way It's worth saying, by the way that, Elon Musk has denied for a very long time that SpaceX is building a phone. This rumor has been floating around for a long time. It also just makes a lot of sense, right?ike evenven for Starlink in particular, having a sort of halo device kind of tracks. He also on this one even has said he called it utterly false bomb a statement to which I put Almost no That's what he said. And I think there's going to be a very funny turn that a lot of these folks have to make where They're going to have to convince you that the phone that they made isn't a phone Do what I mean like There is there there are a bunch of reasons that we have cataloged extensively on this show The thing you should make is a phone can't because Google and Apple own that. And's no there is no winning that game anymore unless you are Google and Apple. So you have to build something else. but if you like make the stack of things that people want, you end up making a phone. And this is the inccredible challenge with all hardware right now is The only way to win is to build a phone that somehow isn't in Google or Apple's orbit, and that's very hard to do And so what we're going to see With all of these devices is them try very, very hard to explain to you why this isn't a phone while shipping you a thing that looks and feels like a worse phone. And all of it's going to be input. All of it's going to be you just talk to it. Yeah. I think it's going to be fascinating. And in a way, like, These u opening eye headphones that keep floating around, like you can sort of understand why they would do that and what the case is there for, right? It's like easy interaction with your AI assistant. like great, well and good. The thing with a six inch screen that goes in your pocket is a very different kind of game to play next to somebody's phone. But if you run a telecom provider, and you want fee on top of your Starwink broadband fee You almost have to make a phone. Absolutely. And it is certainly true that a phone made by SpaceX and Starlinkx and Elon Musk will sell. likeike that thing will do numbers, whatever that thing is It will. You shake your head at me all you want. It will sell. people will buy it. Whether it's good or not. everythingverything is so expensive. How expensive will that thing be? And it will not have Instagram. There's this Wall Street Journal piece So I mean, who knows? Protype was designed to run a proprietary operating system and integrate AI technology from SpaceX's X AIs to some of the people, running a snapdragon ips Yeah It's it's a phone that grocks. It's a grock phone Cool is going to run, it's not going to run Android, right? That's a proprietary operating system. It feels like a fork of Android You you't have Instagam And I'm keing on Instagram, but just think of any any edge case app for any human being. that's on their iPhone. I think for most people itensry, I think a phone without Instagram almost is a nonstarter for like ninety percent of people Oh yeah. And I think you make that list ten apps long and you've captured everybody, right? Like It's not super hard. But I do think, I mean, the galaxy brain thesis of all of this puts together the idea of X being and everything app And you look at what We chat is in China where essentially that becomes the most important thing and you could essentially build a phone that only ran We chat and it would work if you like Elon Musk could talk himself into all we need is Grock and X and we can solve everything because X is the everything A and Grock is this agent that accomplishes everything on our behalf. And that's all we need. It is utterly divorced from reality you can see why He might be very excited about the idea. Right, You don't need a bank app because you're to use X, the everything app for your bank. Yes, exactly This is nonsense. I just like I can't be. I is it going to run outlook? Do you know what most people need at work? they need outlook It's it's like I can ask you the dumbest questions. How many times have we covered a new phone platform It's true. Is it going to support RCS Yeah I mean, that's a good one. Yeah U No, What version of Bluetooth that is it wr All day. I could do this to you all day long. Yeah I wanted the Trump phone to be real kindind of is Yes It's a real iss , I'm told that our review units are shipped Yeah, that's that's still realish I'm sure there are some Trump att least a Trump friend runs Android. Like I know that that phone has gone through place does have Instagram I first knew that the Trump phone was closer to real when like Google people told me it had gone through Playstore review. Very true Be you know what that means? it has Instagram. It comes preloaded with true social To be clear But you can download Instagram on it By way, the Trumpone supportsCS because Android supports RCS. I can answer the questions. Is any of this good? It' no. But it's more it illegally ming crypto for Eric Trump in the background? Probably That's a phoneess do. That's Android. Baby. What's your ex ling round All right, Well, I mean, I obviously have to do Ccast splitting in too. Yeah, this was the setup. Yeah. you do. I mean, first of all, what an incredible personal victory for me. You did it. You brought down Comcast all by yourself just through the power of disclosure alone. But So like for let me do the disclosure. Uh So all if you might have noticed it is all the rage for media companies to cut themselves into lately. is what we're doing. It time It's that time. There's only two business model, say. There's bumbling and unbundling. And we are going through unbundling. That is that is the time Uh, so Comcast has not been part of our disclosure for ages becausecause the NBC Universal investment in Vox media versant That's right So Versant is an investor in Vox media or parent company, a parent company that is splitting into And so there will be a new Vox media U which we'll sell our ads as part of the Voxedia podcast network And then there's going to be a new company called PMX and Versant is a joint that's a joint venture with an old Vox media that Verson is' an investor in. This is all so tortured. I feel like it can't possibly matter anymore Do you know what I mean? Like yeah We've really like ship a theus to this investment at this point. Right? Our disclosure is going look like we talk about south by southwest and our parent company on South by Southwest. Yeah, something like that If we talk about New Years Eve I think we're going have to disclose our current company own Stick Clark Productions It's going to be great It's a new season of disclosures for us. You know this means our new goal now is for you and I to host New Year' Rock and E. what's happening. This is now the stated goal of the Vircast. We're gonna be there. Okay. it's going to be amazing. Just make it sure. David's going to sing U done. Anyway So Comcast had the thesis. If you will recall, a huge part of like the twenty ten to twenty sixteen net neutrality fight. Ccast. buuying content put on its pipes. So they're like, we're going to buy NBC Universal and then you will have preferential access to NBC Universal content on Comcast network Which just flies in the face of thatet neutrality. To be fair, everybody was doing this. Everybody had this idea. AT andT bought Time Warner and their entire idea was they would preload like game of Thrones shitwear on midrange Android phones This is zero rating. that was the term, right? Yeah. So like zero rating was the thing. So if you're a comcast subscriber PeacockC would not hit your data cap, if you're an AT subscriber, HreMax would not hit your data cap. There's all these ways you can bundle the content to make the pipes more valuable This was the thesis of this industry. and they all ran into reality, which is their content distribution platforms suck. They just suck. They're not as good or compelling as the user generated platforms like TikTok or YouTube or Instagram or whatever And so Is it true that I now watch lots and lots of bite sized clips of Game of Thrones do. I watch them on TikTok, illegally uploaded by crazy people who make fan edits of Oberyn Martel I don't know who those people are. I don't know where they come from, but this is provided to me all day long. Yep This is just like Crazy st I'm actually convinced HBO is behind it to promeouse of the Dragon. Like theyve concocted an army of overseas clippers. to promote game of Ths really hard on Tikok right the thesis didn't work that you would put the content and the pipes in the same company and you would switch from charter to Ccast because you wanted NBC content This never worked It never made any sense. The idea that the distribution the content should be in the same place And now I think we're just at the end of it in like a very real way The content businesses, the big overwrought overhead driven Hollywood cost structure content businesses are getting crushed by creators Just devastated by creaters Actual distribution platforms peopleople care about, Instagram, TikTo, YouTube whatever, pay nothing for content Effectively nothing, right? YouTube pays the most, it pays nothing So what are you going to do? Well, you're going to go back to being a pipe and say, you know what, we're just gonna charge people money to access YouTube Just straightforwardly, that is the business we're going to have And even that business is declining. Comcrast lost I think seven hundred thousand subscribers in twenty twenty five. Y. Yeah. And they're losing them to fiber, they're losing them to fixed wireless. all this stuff in rawand It's sayaying we'll charge you more money and give you peacock for free is not compelling to anyone So they're going to split into Brian Roberts, the C of Comcast going to sit on the boards of both companies and be involved in some way. And they're spinning this very much as now both companies will get to grow independently of each other. It's finally time. And it's like Yeah dude that's what we all told you Gedig this would never work. It didn't work for ATT, it didn't work for comcast. You can go down the line. It didn't work for AOL Time Warner, which try to put content on top of its distribution. It simply doesn't work I'm going to give you two outcomes, you've to tell me what you think is more likely. Outcome number one Both of these companies continue to exist as kind of their ongoing concerns. and if anything become like buyers in the market and try to go and sort of grow on their own Ocome number two In within twenty four months, both of these companies have been bought by somebody else which she is it will be too It's got to be, right Well, I mean, it just depends on whether you think that pendulum swinkings back to bundling fast. So you can see outcome to Well bundling parentheses by right wing billionaires ure That's the thoseose are the bundlers. Everybody else is unbundling. I mean, Brian Roberts, he's the guy who ran MS now You know, likeike Johald Trump does not like Bran Roberts. So true, true. He's gonna emerge in some w as a shareholder of a few companies that go on. whatever term they go on But I think maybe Comcast, the cable company merges with another large telecom Maybe charter and they're just a big national fiber provider. The Trump administration, very amenable to that kind of deal. And if you don't own the content You can't squeeze The broadcast Right? You can't say, oh, I would let you do this merger if only NBC was acting better. So you create some ability to do MNA just outside of the political influence. byy the way, it's completely inappropriate political influence of the Trump administration.. You create a way to go do that. And then I think the Keacock division is just like I bet Netflix buys you, Netflk That thing is not long for this world all by itself. Like NBC Universal will get swallowed up in some way Yeah. they by the way, they claim up and down that this is not going to happen So everybody always says that until the minute the deal gets announced Yeah, but the big Hollywood businesses are all chasing scale in a way that This fundamentally you. And I just want to point out I' I' line this now, it's a light a after all. If we had just had appropriate net neutrality regulation in place, no one would have ever thought that mixing pipes and the content was a good idea because it would have E the thesis that you could zero rate Pacock on Comcast pipe and that would generate more subscribers. It would have been prevented. So you'd be like, whpss, I'm not allowed to do the thing that would make this work I guess I won't do it I'll just invest in My fiber network, which is the thing Americans want. Whing out just saying I was right the whole time We're allowed to have many things, but fast, cheap internet is just not what in this country. All right, I have a very quick one, and then I want to end with your last lighting round item Mine is just a very brief PSA. I mentioned this in ninety seconds on the Vverses the other day, I have now had a personal experience with this and just want to bring it back up. WhatsApp is launching usernames. No point. inststead of needing your phone number You can now give people your username. I think that is going to be messy and complicated, especially with something like WhatsApp, which is very private and not as easy to publicly verify people's identity There are going to be lots of ways this go sideways. Also, You should try and reserve your username. The feature's not out yet, but for a lot of people, you can now go and reserve your username in the app time As someone with a very common first and last name, all of the possible iterations of my name were gone by the time I tried to go and reserve it U So either convince your parents to name you something more interesting than David Pierce or U go fight very hard to go get your user name now It's in settings in the WhatsApp app time This is it's like I just think back to how quickly it became impossible to get like a normal human Gmail address. WhatsApp is going to speedrun that So go get your WhatsApp nickname as soon as you possibly can That means I have to use what Whatspp but I'll do it If I open WhatsApp, there's just a million messages from like My parent's friends in Iia being like goodood morning That's nice. How awful How awful for you? People want you to have a good day. Have you seen the chart like every morning in India, WhatsApp slows the global internet to a crawl because of the amount of Good mornings It's a great story.'s like one of great all time inter our culture stories. I'm very jealous we into it. That is really cool. All right. You have one last one that I know you're very excited about. What do you wantan to talk about has become a running theme on the show. I want to point out that car design has gone completely bananas and leading the charge are BMW and Mercedes But someome of the leading lights in car design, luxury automobile design Where these companies go, the others tend to follow And so David, I'm regret to inform you The people of BMW have lost their fucking minds. YouZnd me a TikTok, I have not watched it yet We're going We're going to watch this now together. The BMW X five is out. There's a new BMW X five And these are the headlights Okay, so oh my god So the blinkers are X's, four of them And the headlights are just too all rectangles in the middle of the car? They're not X's David. It's the X logo. Oh my God, it is the X logo. It looks for all the world like the X logo. whichich is literally just a unicode symbol. Thank you, everybody. And if you don't like it, there's a button to turn them into just plain slashes. And it like it lights up from the inside out It I mean, they look like nostrils. Neili. the headlights are nostrils. No, it looks like you know, in cartoons when a stuffed animal dies and you turn their their eyes in X's. Do know what I mean Do you what' talking about Wait that's what looks like. I can't even figure So the blinkers are the X's I mean, you know, modern cars, the actual headlights are hidden away, right So like there's like the LAD light show that looks like headlights and there's actually for cwhere. So the things that look like headlights and the UBMW X five are X's. Yeah. and the X's look exactly like the X logo A solid slash and then a hollow slash. Yeah. If you don't like it, There's a button on the inside of the car turnurn off one of the slashes and just have a plane slash It's so I would submit to you and the designers at BMW that if you have to button in your car to turn off the design element that makes it look like the logo of a company that people have a lot of feelings that. Maybe you shouldn't have that design element But you know, maybe around the world people think differently EX. Then there's like a million other buttons on this car. It comes with ten different drivetrains, including a hydrogen drivet trarain in twenty twenty eight. The battery technology seems amazing. it's like up to four hundred kobatts. charging, it's like over four hundred miles of range. it's all very cool newew stuff. The interior is bananas, Its screens for days, including the new BMW like Weird, not a squaare screen.ure. The door handles are electronic. You can open the doors electrically from the key foop, all this stuff, but I'm just focused on these headlights which are literally the X logo And so much so that there's a button to turn it off and turn I just into slashes. My My wife, Anna One of her most closely held theories, I think I've mentioned this s before, is that there should only be one kind of acceptable headlight and all of other headlights should be illegal that like was the eighties we in nineteen eighties America, there was only CLBM headlights. All cars had the same headlightes. But they should be the same shape. they should be the same size. they should have the same amount of like light. headlights should not be a thing you get to have design theories about And I could not agree with her more Evenven the little thing I think I'm gonna to buy you like a nineteen eighties Camaro with like pop ups, se'll be bad place. But I think even the u Is it the Mustang that does the thing where it points the arrow from left to right and from right like it? Those are the tail lights sort of blinks out on the tail lights. I hate those That also should be illegal. Tail lightights are different than headlights. Blink your lights and when they're blinks, they blink. They're called blinkers. Y blinkers should blink. Y headlights should be on and they shouldn't blind me and they should be obviously headlights. This is not can have you can have so many things, car designers Just make the headlights, headlights This is not common. You want to go back to sealed beam headlites like the nineteen eighties? Yes. Also, I'm so worried that we're not one hundred percent clear on the difference between headyites and tail lightights Listen if I have to look at it on your car I should be in charge of it. You know what I mean I get it. It's it's a real It's like an inversion of like the John Stewart Mill harm principle, you know? Like everythingvery harms me, thus society should be in charge with it Exactly. this I these are terrible headlights. how and like This is one of those things. whereere're like how many meetings were there where nobody raised their hand and said, you know that's the logo of that other thing, right? Yeah, That's the X logo. Yeah Well, I mean, there wass obviously one meeting because they put in a button to turn it off At the very last second, somebody's like, guysys, this is horrible. And this looks like a cartoon Bonny had a drug overdose. I'm sorry to everyone who's just listening to this, but I promise if you close your eyes and picture what Eah is describing. it isure X five. We didn't even get to the grille, which looks like beaver teeth. but picture of a be Sometimes it looks like nostrils U Yeah picture a BMW X five and where the headlights are, picture blinking X logos That is one hundred percent what it looks like I don't I don't know what's going on over there ' out on this. Thank God, I don't haveough money to buy a BMW. That's I would say U All right, we should get out of here Neili, it's good to see. Are you going home one of these days? will stop' be home next week naturalbitat. Let's assume I get this book, right. I'll home next week. Okay. What are you doing for the fourth Uh we're gonna light some fireworks. We're gonna eat some hots. You know, the baby is born on july eighth. Oh yeah. so we've got a big party coming up The weekend after the fourth exciting. Well we just had we just had a June thirtieth birthday. That was very exciting A And I think we're going to take the three year old fireworks. Okay, which will either go really well or really bad So we will see how that goes. What's Deoder next week Dakota next week is the heads of the Creator Division at UTA, the Giant Twn aggency everybody, the rest Aled Scooper and Alex Earl. Kai Senet, who are not the same person. I'm reliably told, yes But like all the biggest traders, they are their agents and they build them businesses. So we spent some time being like, how does this actually work? How does this money actually work s interesting U Vversion History this weekend is the story of the Kurig, which is one of the most fun episodes we've ever made sounds amazing. Also on that episode, Morgan Eckrooth, who is a coffee influencer and a barista champion U I found the most cooffee snob person I possibly could to litigate the future of Kirig with and we had an absolute blast. That's It was a really good epode Um, Lots of good stuff going on the verge. We published. I think my favorite thing this week that we published was a really great explainer about quantum computing U basasically trying to figure out where are we in the history of quantum computing U really good, really smart story Is it nowhere It's the answer is nowhere, but forever. Do you know what I mean? Like Inching towards somewhere That's the name of my memoir. Anyway, we should get out of here. We've got a long weekend to head off to. We've got one more episode for you. We're doing stuff sort of out of order this week. so you'll be hearing this on Thursday. We've got a fun holiday thing for Friday and then we're off for the weekend I hope everybody has good fun weekends. I hope you have a good long weekend. I'm sure I will not see you until you go do july fourth things. I'm outt of here. You're never gonna see me again All right, The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. You can subscribe to the Verge the Vergeot com slash subscribe to get all of our podcasts ad free, including this one, and deccoder and Version history. You get all of our newsletters, you get all of our coverage of everything Vs.ot com slash subscribe You can also send us email virgecast at verse dot com callall the hotline. It's six version one one. We love hearing from you about all of your branding car theme songs and everything else. This episod is produced by Josh Cahas, Eric Gomez, branding key for Travis Larkuck and Aaron L Cassio. We will see you tomorrow R and roll Your package says delivered but delivered where exactly The hallway the lobb your neighbor's apartment Instead of playing detective with your deliveries, get a mailbox at the UPS store will suck for your packages. Text you when they arrive. And keep your deliveries low key. Under locking key. 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