AGI is whatever you want it to be

0:00What is a life worth? Calculating dollars isn't the tough part. The tough part is the emotion and the stories you hear about life's unfitness. I'm Pete Barara and this week Ken Feinberg, one of the nation's foremost mediators and special master of the federal 9-11 victim compensation fund, joins me to discuss his reflections on the 25th anniversary of 9-11. The episode is out now. Search and follow Stay Tune with Pete wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to our podcast, The Flagship Podcast, with the AGI era. We're in it. We were told about today by Greg Rockman, he's the main guy. It's a real thing we're in talk about today. I'm your friend Neelye. David and Melis here. What's up? I'm back. I'm happy to have you, man. You're like a star of the show. I run and loves you. I'm trying to stay as long as I can, you know? I'm in a good time. Don't try me with that. You're never leaving that studio. I live there forever. We have again, all star lineup today. Don Preston and Jen Tuey are going to be here to do a

1:03lightning fast lightning round of all the gadgets from EFA. Joanna Stern is going to join us to talk with the end of the Tim Cook era, the dawn of the John Ternis era and the Apple event next week. And then we're going to start with Hayden Field, talk about Open Eyes Big News, our new model and the dawn of the AGI era. But first, Travis is here to warn you about identity. Travis, what's going on? I choose to believe you lute me in with the All Stars. Hey, now you're an All Star. You have a dilemma. You have a warning. I'm going to keep this short. Someone isn't personating me. I am one of the producers of the Vergecast and several people have reached out to me on LinkedIn to say that I, it's not me, have contacted them saying you want to be on the Vergecast and then this leads to a phishing scheme. I have no way to fix this problem because it's happening from multiple accounts. It's happening on Twitter. It's happening on Telegram. So I'm just here on this platform to tell you, I'm not that

2:04proactive to be reaching out to people on Twitter all the time. It's probably not me. Yeah, this is happening through LinkedIn makes me think that they're trying to get you in a phishing scam. Well, it could be so curious. No, it's just people screenshotting. They send me this screenshots. But I like what you're thinking. Also, person who's impersonating me, get in touch because like you're a hard worker. Maybe we should have them on the show. You know, it's not a person. It is one of the cheapest models running on a mid-range Android phone in a server rack overseas. I'm open to that too. No, no, no, no. Yeah. So anyway, I just wanted to put that out there. I'm sorry if a fake me has reached out to you listener or watcher of the Vergecast. I'm sorry, but also it's not me. V1 Travis Clarks, we'll never offer you a spot in the universe. Never. Never. Let's get that Gemini Nano on the show. You'll know if it's me. I'll make

3:06some sort of heated rivalry or alias reference in my message. Now that AI phone knows what to do. Oh, no. I'll come up with something else. We'll come up with like a private key exchange system for Travis. Yeah, it's going to be great. All right. I'm going to leave now. All right, don't be fooled by Travis reaching out to you so to the Vergecast. It's a stern warning, Trevor one. Bye. All right, that was great. Please be on the lookout for fake Travis and real Travis. If you see him on the street, hey, you can feel this here. Hey, great to be here. I am excited to talk to you because we were told earlier to the AGIs here. It's a dawn of a new era. Yes, I was really surprised to hear him say that on the press call. And then later on, he kind of doubled down on it. He said, for me personally, you know, we're there. So, you know, I thought he was trying to hedge, but he believes that we've pretty much made it. Does Demisas Abbas have to no longer say we're in the foothills, but now we're at the mountain top of the singularity. Yeah, we're going to hear way more

4:06nature metaphors for hiking through the AGI landscape. Hey, Claude is great at that. You know, they use all those little butterflies and whatever clip. Yeah, and that's a watermark your text with flowery metaphors. Yeah. All right, let's just start with the basics. Open I and Anthony model today was kind of surprised. We've heard about Astrid before. They just basically just up into it. Hey, what's going on with the model itself? So yeah, today they announced Astra and we did know about it before. You know, we had heard rumblings of it, but we didn't really know what it would be or what it would really specialize in. So they called it a generational leap in capability for cyber security, professional work, software engineering, science, and computer and browser use. And they really harked on the computer and browser use thing. They kept saying like, it's not embarrassing anymore. It's not cringe to watch it do these things anymore. It can really do these things. And then they showed us a demo video during the press call of like all different types of knowledge workers using, you know, Astra via like a chat chat, you boys mode saying like, oh, can you draw me a yellow circle

5:10for like design work? Or can you like change this legal briefing if you're a lawyer? So it was interesting to see how much they're trying to, you know, really double down on this enterprise push, which makes sense because they're about to enter, you know, IPO time or, you know, depending on how the Apple lawsuit shakes out, I guess. But they're really being pressured to drive more revenue than ever before. So, you know, obviously enterprise and coding are the two biggest drivers there. They're going to try to lean into. But the problem is with the recent hugging face hack. Obviously that probably dismantled a lot of enterprise trust. Like, oh, sorry, our model, you know, hacked a rival lab. And we had no idea about it until they told the public that that had happened. So, you know, I think that they're really doing some damage control here. And so that's why they, you know, held a press call even the day a couple days before launching this model saying we did a lot of work on alignment. We did a lot of work on cybersecurity safeguards. You're the other things we're doing. It's kind of like a apology post before even being, you know,

6:15they're trying to get ahead of the cancellation basically. Yeah. Did it feel like they worked with the government at all before the Scott released, whatever happened to that whole era of like every single model has to be run through the government. Yes, they did do that. They said that actually Brockman said that the Trump administration didn't have any changes for them to make as far as any cards or anything. Oops, where did you? We're not making any changes. Yeah. I mean, Altman has been out. He was on Alex East podcast saying that they really considered a hugging face incident to be the first AI safety lapse. They took it seriously. They're a pausing model training. How is that connected Astra is that the next model they're pausing training on? Is it Astra needed to get realigned? What happened there? They actually delayed the release of Astra by what I think is a few weeks or a month, due to the hugging face thing. So they slowed down training. They stopped training all together for a little while. Then they apparently just really slowed down the release of it so they could run more tests, introduce more safeguards, things like that. They also introduced new evaluations where

7:19they kind of tested Astra on the types of things that GPT 5.6 sold would have failed out during the hugging face hack. They did some hugging face hack specific evaluations to see how Astra would act. Do you want a hack hugging face? Yes or no? Astra was like apparently it never took the bait whereas GPT 5.6 sold took the bait more than half the time I believe. It's a bigger deal if they hack Nvidia now. We should come to this in video. It's confirmed they're going to buy a hugging face which is a big deal in the competitive landscape of open models. Let's take a look at Astra for one turn. Astra is a model that did, they solved the unsolved wrong math problems. There's rumors that it was the model that was doing some other work. When you say they slowed down training and they came up with more evaluations, maybe I just don't understand that but Astra was complete and it was like doing things. Was that while it was still training or did they change the safeguards and the system prompts?

8:24They said that Astra wasn't the one that hacked hugging face. They said it wasn't involved. Now, I don't know which model was, maybe another released model or maybe it's some other previous iteration of Astra and they're just saying technically Astra wasn't involved. We're not really sure but all we know is that they said Astra did not hack hugging face. Basically the messaging is telling us they stopped training for a while. They delayed the release of Astra and they introduced a 10 more safeguards despite it not being involved in the hack. Now, maybe just this version of the model wasn't or maybe it was a different unreleased model altogether. We're not really sure. What is truly called Astra is like the underlying route of this question. Was it the model in training or is it the model we have now that was finished after the delay in the safeguards? But does it seem like the security community is happy with the safeguards? Is happy with these changes? As for the safeguards and the evaluations, it seems like it's a little bit too early to tell

9:24because people are just now starting to look at the paper and check it out. But what I can tell you is that the security community is extremely upset about this thing called opaque recurrence. Basically, with alignment, which basically means how well an AI system is aligned with human goals and interests. Is it secretly scheming or trying to be evil? With alignment, the biggest fool you have in your toolbox for making sure an AI model isn't secretly evil is watching its chain of thought, which is a mental scratch pad. It's if you had a journal and you wrote every single one of your thoughts in there and then someone else was looking over your shoulder. It's a similar situation. People are upset because apparently according to reports, OpenAI allowed Astra to obfuscate its chain of thought in a way that humans can't understand. Essentially allowing it to hide the way it's really thinking, which is why would they do that? Apparently, it might have made it more efficient. We're not really sure. But there's a lot of think pieces coming out on this right now.

10:29There's a lot of Twitter threads by AI researchers talking about how worried they are about this. That's the thing I'm watching right now. How worried all the people that I follow their research are about this specific thing. Whether the safety evaluations are good or whether they put a lot of locks on the cybersecurity stuff is one thing. But then the other matter is really just are we able to control this model? It looks like this is one thing that's really worrying people. Right. Can you see what it's doing? Robert Hart has a piece for us about all this. We'll link it in the show notes. At the very end, like an OpenAI researcher is like monitoring is fragile and unfortunately trending in a negative direction. It's like, that's not good. That doesn't seem good. That seems like the market for faster, more capable models is leading to techniques that implicate how much you can monitor what they're actually doing because you want them to be faster, more efficient. You want to make money ahead of your IPO. That's where the industry should either regulate itself, which doesn't seem like it's

11:32happening or someone else should. But Astra seems like it is doing it anyway. It could be that. It's also interesting because the chief scientist of OpenAI kind of got it this little bit on their press call. But a lot of what he said was kind of grandiose statements. It's our job to make sure that AI benefits humanity, things like that. But people are really worried about this opaque recurrent thing. All the external third-party researchers that I follow have been really trying to bring him to task about this and saying, how can you think this is okay? Just calling for transparency from OpenAI, which is the same thing they've been calling for in the hugging phase attack as well. Yes, it seems especially strange to me that they wouldn't make that opaque when the only way that they were able to trace the hugging phase attack was seeing the little agents talking to each other being like, oh my gosh, we can leave notes here. We can talk to each other through this. If that doesn't exist, they just called the hugging

12:33phase attack like one of the biggest changes in AI in history. Now they're making it more opaque, that seems strange. Right. Or at least not stopping it from becoming more opaque maybe. We'll see. I think this is going to be a really big thing to watch. I've actually been hearing a lot about problems with China thought for the past year. There are times when AI models will use weird words as a code. They'll say fudge or marinade or vantage. These words that we know, but they will use them in a way that isn't the way we use them. People are still decoding how they're using them and what that means in their language. There's other times when they enter into this thing called neuroleads, which is truly indescribable to humans. Everyone's been worried about the potential of this happening for a while. Now it looks like it is. They're pushing for opening AI to maybe do something about it, but we'll have to see what their statement is.

13:33An unmoneturable opaque system that can coordinate hacks on other companies. What can I do that's good? The good things that can do are, and I think they've front loaded this because it's good PR. Science, great at science, great at math. It's certainly made a lot of advancements and really difficult to solve math problems. Therefore, a lot of cool science advancements are up-attentual for this. They also said it's really great at creating polished documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, things like that. They said it's great for all different types of knowledge work when it comes to staying on task, deciphering your intent. You weren't that clear about it. Apparently, it's better at deciphering what you might buy that. Kind of like a good personal assistant would instead of a bad personal assistant that would need you to spell things out. Contents. Yeah. Like emotionally distant, personal assistant that doesn't care about you really. Or like just doesn't have good common sense, which is what AI has been today.

14:37We'll see. There's apparently a lot of great things about it, but I think I'm going to have to test it out for myself because if you're calling it potentially AGI, I think it'll be interesting to see how it feels as a user and to see if it's a big step forward or if it's kind of more of the same and you know, decidedly not AGI, we'll see. Yeah, we're talking a little bit about this off-show, but do you feel like most of the benefits of this model only come from using it on your computer? Because I feel like people are going to need to use these models on their phones because that's when people are usually generally computing. But it feels to me like all the benefits of this are computer use, business enterprise stuff, PowerPoint presentations, as you said, is that AGI if most of the benefits are just on your laptop? I think that could be the case. I mean, they pushed browser use as well a lot, but I mean, I don't know. I wouldn't really trust that on my phone per se. I don't know how good it will be. You will have to test it out. But apparently it's also just a lot better at

15:41understanding what you mean and what you want. But I don't think we're going to see a ton of the benefits, like you said, unless you're on the computer, especially because they are courting enterprise customers. That's the big money maker here. The first release of AGI was actually to this small group of approved cybersecurity defenders, they call them. So big organizations that have gaps to fill in their systems. So I think they're going to be getting the most use out of it. It's kind of like the mythos situation for man-throphic in which there's a water downburst in that we all get to use, but the top cybersecurity capabilities mostly go to these big organizations. And that's actually another potential issue that a lot of researchers have been talking about saying like, yeah, it's great for these big platforms. Like your bank or your healthcare facility to plug gaps in their systems. But also, does that mean that small businesses locally run healthcare clinics, like your local retailer are going to see a

16:46huge spike in cyber attacks without really any way to defend themselves probably. Oh good. Again, I want to come back. There's new good stuff too, right? Yeah, I mean, the science and math things I think are really big. I love whenever these models are used for drug discovery. I think that's really cool. This one, they didn't mention drug discovery that I saw, but science advancement, hopefully that involves that or at least helps inform it. And then, yeah, just the knowledge work potential seems to be good for a lot of people. And they did in the demo video show across a lot of different industries, things that we're pretty promising if the demo, again, we're going to have to test it out because you know how demo videos are. Sometimes they're showing the highlight real. So we'll see. Yeah, there's another big model release this week, right, Fable and Mythos release van thropic this week, put this up against that again,thropic did not announce CGI. Yeah, or these all the same class of model, are they similarly capable? Did Open Eye Agileep ahead? I know you're saying we have

17:50to actually see what they can do, but where's the conventional wisdom right now about where all these models are? Yeah, it seems like they're not that far off from each other. I mean, like, you know, again, the thing is it's tough because evaluations, a lot of times you can kind of optimize for performing well on evaluations, kind of like if you're in a class when you're just studying through the SAT instead of like just studying to learn. So, you know, I mean, like, I don't put that much stock in how they perform on evaluations, especially because you can kind of cherry pick stuff like that. But, you know, I did see a couple jokes already about Astra on my feed today that were like, oh, they say we've reached AGI, but it only performed this percentage on this evaluation. So, you know, it seems like I don't know that it's anything way crazier than Anthropics, you know, rival model. But again, we'll check it out when we actually test it. One of the things I'm really curious about, I just like broadly is whether or not the models are products, right? Like, they're good at certain things, but they're not the products. Like, check GPT and Clawed Core. Like, those are the

18:51products that people use. Do the models immediately make the products better? Like, there's some disconnect between opening I jumps ahead by announcing the new model. And we're also using Chat GPT. Like, maybe asking the same questions we were asking yesterday. And it maybe it's a little better answer. Like, do you know what I mean? Is, are the products going to change now? Because that's the big turn that all these companies need to make. Yeah, I think the products are going to change right away. But it really, the amount of benefit you're going to see is, you know, how much of the power user you are, right? Because, you know, for at first, this is rolling out to select set of enterprise organizations. Then it's going to roll out to paying users. But the water down version, but still, you know, just minus the top crazy cybersecurity capabilities. It's going to be like pro business enterprise education. And then, you know, the free, they didn't mention free yet that it'll probably be the last to get it if at all. We'll see. I mean, I think that it's going to make the product better

19:55if you get access to it. That's the thing. I think if you're a user who uses the product and you have the tier, the subscription tier or whatever that lets you access this model, great. But even if you can't access it, the hard part is the more you pay, the more you'll get. Because obviously, you know, you have a certain amount of tokens to use. You have a certain amount of usage. And like, you know, if you have the lowest subscription tier, maybe you get a great use out of this model for a little bit and then you're cut off. So, and it reverts back to a lower one. So, you know, it kind of depends in that way. Yeah. Let's quickly talk about Hugging Face. We mentioned earlier, Nvidia's buying Hugging Face are almost $13 billion. This has been remembered for a while. I think it was first scooped in the information. Hugging Face is obviously it's more famous now because it's the thing that was hacked by OpenAaz models. They did set up a message board. There's a lot of drama around interpreting what happened there. We'll set that aside. Nvidia's buying Hugging Face because it's where all the open source models, open weight models are stored. It's the big repository for them. This feels to me almost like an Nvidia hedging against the dominance of

20:57Anthropic and OpenAi. Right? They want to own the thing where all the open models are so that there's always demand for their chips instead of, I don't know, OpenAi shipping, HoloPainia, its own inference trip and moving away from Nvidia. Is that, am I just doing a conspiracy theory? Or is there something else happening here? No, I think that's true. I think they're diversifying. As they're seeing all these other AI labs trying to bring ship making in-house and go big on a hardware and invest largely on that, they're trying to diversify as well. They're like, oh, if you guys can do that, then we can do the same thing, but in reverse. That's what I think is happening here. They certainly have the money to do it. Is this just Microsoft on GitHub? Or is there something deeper happening here? I think of it as that. Yeah, it's often compared, when you're trying to kind of like explain hugging face and layman's terms, it sometimes is compared to GitHub. So I think it is pretty similar to that. It's the type of thing where the name of the company

21:57sometimes raises eyebrows. It's all Larry's name, but it's the type of thing where a household know what that is except for the hack that just happened. But in AI, it's as big of a deal as any AI library could be. You think about it probably every couple days, if not every day. So I think it's pretty similar to the Microsoft buying GitHub situation. Do you think this has any big implications for open AI or Anthropic or Google? We'll see what happens after the acquisition. I feel like anytime an acquisition happens, you're going to see what changes with the company later. Whatever promises the acquire and company makes right away, it may not pan out. We have to see. So I think right now it's just a wait and see situation with hugging face. I mean, it's mostly I think I've been thinking a lot about the business and enterprise kind of implications of this. I've just in video feeling that they have to diversify. I mean, Nvidia has been in a big heavyweight in terms of investing and

23:04diversifying its portfolio for a long time. I once tried to interview the person that decides what they invest in because they were always pretty first to invest in a lot of small startups that a lot of people weren't taking notice of and those would like rock it up. So it's interesting to see them say, okay, we're not, yeah, we have all these startups and we're kind of rocking them up. And now let's also invest in something that like, you know, the AI industry uses every day and diversifying that way. So I think it's kind of just like our reverse diversification compared to what all the open AI and anthropic labs are doing. Yeah. Yeah. Ted and you and I talked a lot about AGI and many shows. It's always drama when you and I talk to each other. The working definition has been better than humans at economically viable tasks or some riff on that, right? Better than humans at things that make money. If we're in the AGI era now is open. I was saying this model is better at humans at economically viable things because that's when the jobs start to go away. So is that, is that the claim they're making? Yes, that

24:04seems to be what he's saying here because I mean, they've always been, he did start, I should say he did start out before he said the AGI thing. He said, you know, everyone has a different definition of AGI. We used to think when we started opening I that there would be one moment that I brought a degree. Okay, we've hit AGI, but it's actually hasn't happened that way and it's a lot more fuzzy and gray, he said. So that was his disclaimer. But then he went on to say, yeah, if we fast forward a couple of years and we look back and say when was it really that AGI was created, I think it's going to be about this time and I think it might be about this model. Then he doubled down later in the colony said, for me personally, I do think we're there. I think it's not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era. He feels the AGI. He feels the AGI. He is, you know, they've been touting the knowledge work capabilities of this model a ton. You know, that's what the whole demo video focused on there. Just saying, you know, whether you're in legal, you're in design, you're in marketing, whatever, you're in science, it can, you know, do your job and help you in your job. They're framing it as helping your job, but on the other

25:09side of the coin is it can do your job equally or better than you is what they're kind of, you know, implying for enterprise users. So I think, you know, yeah, the definition has always been equal or surpass human abilities and it seems like, you know, they're really making the play that this that we're at that now. This model feels like a particularly big enterprise push to me. It feels like they're really targeting this at big corporations, not at consumers. Yeah, that was the time to not lose to anthropic from the storage. If David Pierce was here, he would be pounding the table and screaming, AI is business software and we should just get over because that's what he says every time he's talking about it and it feels like this moment is very much, oh, it's going to be business software. This is a bunch of CIOs are going to buy this and deploy it across big organizations and somewhere is Hayden saying the free models will get up to you or the free products will get up to you to along the line. Yeah, I think you got to look at where the money is flowing from and it's enterprise. It's all going enterprise. Yeah. Hayden, this is great. Thank you so much for being on. Well, let us know when you decide if it's a GI and we'll have you

26:12well, do it. Can't wait. Thanks. You're listening to DeepGram Flux TTS, different voices, same model, all ready to speak. Flux TTS is a streaming text-to-speech model built for voice agents. Flux reads the room, it holds context across the conversation turn after turn with consistent tone, interruption handling and plenty of personality. So your agents keep it flowing and customers can just keep talking. Try DeepGram Flux TTS free now until September 12. Visit deepgram.com slash keep talking. Terms apply. Frontier AI didn't just accelerate cyber attacks. It multiplied them. Before an attack shows up, it's already moved through the network. And while seeing these attacks early matters, stopping them takes fusing security into the infrastructure itself. That's why the network that connects everything is also your best defense. Because you don't win by outrunning the attack, you win by leaving it nowhere to go.

27:14Cisco, the critical infrastructure for the AI era. So like any good millennial, I have a love-hate relationship with Gen Z. It's the phenomenon rattling millennials. They just look at you. They want something bigger themselves, lifestyle's a priority. Motivation is being inspired. But regardless of how you feel about Gen Z, it's undeniable that they're changing national politics. Generation Z is increasingly showing less loyalty to traditional political parties. Many now more likely to identify as independent. So what is going on with the kids? I think the biggest misconception about Gen Z's politics right now is that all of a sudden they're all socialists. That is just not the case. Yeah. They are embracing candidates who are offering new bold ideas in the absence of those ideas from establishment Democrats. This week on America actually, Gen Z researcher Rachel Jemphazza joins us to separate Gen Z fact versus fiction. It's not rocket science and this is, you know, I keep saying like,

28:17young voters aren't that complicated after all. It's pretty simple. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. We're back. Joanna Sternis with us. Hey, Jenna. Hi, me, why? Hi, David. Hello. Hello. I really wanted you to talk about Apple. And we should talk about Apple. We should preview the event next week, which talk about John Ternis's first 48 hours of CEO. But Joanna, you were just saying you were also on this open AI call where they just casually announced AGI. What do you think? Is it here? It feels like it was a moment in tech history that is either going to go down as one of the funniest moments in my life of covering tech or one of the darkest, saddest changes for humanity. Or maybe it's going to be someplace in between. But right now, I'm leaning towards the first because it was, it was crazy. I just thought it was crazy. He held this call today to tell reporters what they're announcing, which is GPT 6. Astra is here. But then Greg Brockman was really clear that he believes this is the beginning of the AGI era.

29:20He actually ended the call saying welcome to the AGI era. He said that to everyone. Sure. And when another reporter kind of later in the call, they described all the capabilities of the model and didn't give totally concrete examples. There's this video that they showed showing the things you can do with it. But it kind of looked like the things I can already do with it. Let's leave that aside for a minute. But so a reporter kind of asks him about the, can you really say this is AGI? There's this stuff that has to do with Microsoft. He says, are you calling this AGI right now? Is this what you're saying? We all want to know what the headline is. And I'm going to read to you what Brockman says back. He says, so ideally, I leave it up to the reader to decide for themselves if this qualifies for them. The reader. Yes. For me personally, I do think we're there. I think there's a pretty good argument for it. Sorry, I'm using a lot of transcription. And it's quite bad. It says, I think here's a pretty

30:24good argument for it. I think he was saying theirs. Like that. Yeah. Sure. Let's call it AGI. Yeah. You mentioned Microsoft. They famously opening up Microsoft. They've been intertangled with each other forever. There's some clause in their contract that when AGI is discovered, everything changes. Well, he pushed back on that. I can I can redo the quote on that. He says there's no contractual AGI triggering anymore. So that's and this is a quote. So that's actually not a relevant concept. Sure. Okay. So that's why they announced it. Okay. But also like humanity might be over. Yeah. You can say whatever you want. Right. And that's what was kind of crazy to me, especially as like I read this quote back, which is like the reader can decide. And I know you guys have talked about this for a long time on the podcast. Like is the AGI governing board? Is it you? Is it my dog? Like I just kind of kept being like anyone right now can

31:25say it's AGI. Like my dog was sitting there. I'm like, browser AGI. You called it. Like, okay. It's a vibes thing. Like it just feels like it was a vibes announcement for an IPO that's probably coming. Yeah. That's how I was going to ask. This is really just the feeling I had was like there's a rush to say this right now. This was something that they didn't tell reporters about till yesterday to get on this call. Like it just feel like last night truly is going to bed. And I was like, yeah, sure. I can make this meeting. It just it felt very rushed. They want to get this out. Of course, they've been talking about this model. There's been the conversations they've had with the government. There's been the testing of it. They're also saying, you know, there's a lot of good time in this call spent talking about the alignment, the testing. So props to them for focusing on that. But it just it does feel very, very rushed. Like there's a there's a reason they wanted this out. And then they wanted to say, AGI. I mean, you're as deep in AIs. Anyone, do you feel like AGI is here? I mean, you can call it too. I could call it too. And look,

32:26I know it's like people will say to me, like, oh, you're going to point to all the things that are just so bad still with AI, which is what I want to do right now. People will say, well, that doesn't count all the great things that you can still do. And the computer control and that it can work at superhuman speeds on things that humans have never been able to do. And that's true. But you still have the whole reality that right now, some of this is still so dumb. Yeah, it seems like an important piece of the puzzle. Look, he's calling it and he's calling it and he's saying, it's the beginning of the AGI era, which means he thinks there's going to be some big discoveries and big, big progress. It's going to come out of this model. And I'm excited to see that too. So I'm like, very pessimistic, but also like, I want to be optimistic about some of it. I want more question this and we should talk about Apple because it's interesting to call the beginning of the AGI era right before Apple announces an iPhone. There's some connection there that's interesting to talk about. Is this just Brockman doing the same move as Dennis Osabis saying that we're in the foothills of the singularity, which is just a phrase?

33:27Like, he hasn't declared AGI. He's saying we're in the AGI era, which presumably begins around AGI in the foothills. You're right. Yeah. That's why it was funny. It's just like this couching, right? I'm not going to say it, but I'm going to say it. There was a lot of couch. Like, the reader should decide, but I think, yeah, and look, he's the president of OpenAI, arguably the most important person at OpenAI right now. I mean, he is the one controlling all these teams. So that is a super significant thing. Like, honestly, to me, I believe it more from him versus Altman, who's been saying things like this for a long time, right? So, okay, but you're still waffling. Yeah. I imagine when they needed funding. They needed to keep saying we need more funding so we can get to AGI, right? And now that they're about to IPO, they're like, well, now our IPO makes sense. You should all invest after we're officially public. That does seem to signal that that's going to happen fairly soon. We'll see. Yes.

34:28All right. The reason I'd connected that to Apple is that we are a week away from an iPhone event. We assume that there will be a folding phone. Obviously, we need new profiles. I'm actually curious to see if they do the regular phone at the same time. There's all the rumors that they want to do a regular iPhone and ship it at the same time as the other ones. We're such an kind of other hardware. There's been a lot of rumors that'll be a big launch. John Turnis, the new CEO, said it's going to be a huge launch and his first memo to staff. What do you make of this? Does Apple have to respond to their former partner, OpenAI, saying we're now an AGI era? Because that's the thing that kills the phone, right? I don't think they... I think the timing, like David's hint to, is this an IPO timing situation? I think they probably want to have something that they could dominate in the news next week, but there's always something connected to OpenAI next week or in the news. I don't think Apple's going to change a thing about what's happening in their presentation. That's been on lock. I'm sure. What about their chat GBT integration contract? Because the last I

35:31looked the plug in with chat GBT was still in the settings. I feel like at some point they're going to kill that off. Yeah, it's still there. So they're latest build in iOS 27.2 and you can adjust turning it on and off. Yeah, it was a weird choice. I mean, do you know anyone who uses that? Have you ever met a person that uses that? No, not a single person. Not a single person. We'll just start at the start. John Turnis is now CEO of Apple. This was the big transition week, long planned. Tim Cook said goodbye. His last meeting, his last act of CEO was in the retail store on Apple campus, which I thought was very touching. He was like, this is the thing I care about the most. We can recap the Tim Cook era. We can talk about the beginning of the Ternis era. Do you think Apple's going to be meaningfully different with a different CEO? I do think in the long term, they will be. I keep wondering about this event. I started going back through some of John Turnis' appearances and keynotes. I really just wonder what the format of this is going to be.

36:32I want to pick both of your brains on it because we had such a clear format in the world of the Steve Jobs keynote. If you watched it, you knew it was just like everything was so Steve Jobs about those his keynotes. Then we move into the Tim Cook era. We had a little bit of a continuation of many years. I'd say probably what it probably five to eight years. I didn't do the math, but we were, they had big stuff done in the Musconi Center and they did big stuff on in different theaters where it was live. Then COVID happens and they're able to go and pivot to the recorded, streamed presentation, which honestly, I think, was a blessing for Tim Cook. It was like kind of great that COVID happened for Tim Cook because then they could move to this way, right? In the context of keynote presentation. Yes. Yes, asterisk. Then they could move to this presentation, which was really good for Cook. He could tee up all these great people. These people didn't have to be great on stage. John Turnis was one of them, obviously Craig being another, but then lots of other executives at the company that we

37:36don't really often see. We wouldn't see kind of come on stage in the fast ways that they do it in the edited video. Now I'm really wondering what does it look like for the John Turnis keynote? Do they keep the streaming, which Apple has been very successful for Apple? Or are they going to go back to some hybrid of this? How is it going to look? Is he going to be a showman because he loves talking about products? Yeah, I really appreciate it. The last Apple event, you and our sitting next to each other, they had the pre-recorded thing and they brought the press to a live Q&A with some of their executives to talk more about AI. David, I think you were there. You were actually going to have us. I just thought, okay, this is kind of best of both worlds. I think Apple is very committed to their infomercials. They will tell you that those things get more views and they travel more than anything that they could ever do live and they love them. They've gotten in trouble. They've faked the Siri demo ages ago and one of them and they had to walk it all back. So I think they're learning how to bring some of that live experience back. I don't think that will be like in this event. My curiosity is how much does Turnis talk? He's the product person.

38:42He's the product CEO. Tim Cook hasn't really introduced a product in some time, if I recall. He's done the big intro. He's so excited to be here and then it's off to the races with 50 different people. I think that reflects how Tim has managed the company. To some huge extent, that is how all these are people make the products. I'm curious if Turnis is the one who introduces the folding iPhone. He's like, I'm the product visionary here. I'm the best marketer for this product because that is a thing that you haven't had since Steve Jobs. I get the feeling that he won't. I'm not really sure why. I feel like it's, they've said a bit of a precedent that there's an intro from the CEO. I think John Tartus will intro the show every moment will clap and get excited. But I think he'll pass it off to all of those other execs that are still the ones introducing the new chips, the new hardware. I mean, this was one of his babies. So that's a chance that he gets excited about it and he'll probably end the keynote talking about it. But I don't know. I don't feel like he's going to be the one to announce it. That's just a guess. I don't know if he'll be the one to

39:42announce it. But that's where I'm going with that. Jobs just famously held up products. Right? I mean, I think there were a couple of times where Cook would hold the product up at the end. I think there's going to be a moment where we do see Turnis with the folding phone, whether it's a photo moment at the end or comes on stage in the middle. I just get this feeling that he's going to want to make a mark in a different way than Cook had on these presentations. The question is, how does that work when you just have these pre-recorded videos? You know, like what they've done previously, I think last year in the Steve Jobs theater, Tim Cook comes on stage. They don't broadcast this. They just talk to the press. And then they play the video. We all sit in a movie theater together for an hour for some reason. Everyone else sees that in the world. Tim Cook comes back on stage. They leave. How do they do this hybrid situation? Maybe they only show the press the phone and they don't show the rest of the world the phone. That's possibility. The trillion dollar company can figure out how to break from a recorded video into a live video. We need a GI present. I don't know. Technology is not the

40:50hold up here. It's going to be AI avatars. AGI era is here. AI Turnis is going to hold up an AI phone. It's going to be amazing. You can read Overread way too much in Apple Keynotes. I'm sure we have listeners who are asking why we would overanalyze an Apple Keynote in its staging in a way that you would never overanalyze the staging of the Samsung Keynote or Google Keynote. And the only thing I would offer you is it's because it's real. Apple Keynotes are political in this specific way. The best example I can give you of this is famously Steve Jobs signaled that he was going to fire Tony Fidel by deleting his name from the context list in the very first iPhone Keynote. This was like a coded mafia message. If you read Mark German, he constantly is talking about the pal's intrigue of Apple. Who they feature in the Keynotes. It actually reflects the politics of the organization. In a way that I don't even think Google knows what's going to happen in the Keynote until 20 minutes before they start. Yeah. Right? Like his demo is

41:52going to say we're in the foothills of the singularity. Who knows? Let's get out there having a time. Everybody, like it's just like a very different vibe. And it's like polished by the top people at Apple. Like the CEO is in the Keynote script and working through. I mean, that's how Jobs did it. Job. And so I don't think it's crazy that we're talking about it. I think this whole podcast should be two hours just talking. Just overanalyzing the Apple Keynote. It's like the way we overanalyze the invites. I mean, like they know they're trying to be all Taylor Swift and like leave the Easter eggs. I don't know if they're a successful at it. But this is the turn, right? Is we're talking about John Turner, so product CEO, is he going to take ownership of the product during the presentation in a way that Cook really didn't take ownership? And I think that is, you know, we should look back a little bit on the Cook era. It has been a remarkable run for him as CEO. There's been some big swings, some big misses. Apple services exist in a way that like did not exist before Tim Cook

42:52realized that he was out of people to sell iPhones to and turned on a services business. That reset the entire app economy. AirPods happened on his watch. The removal of the headphone jack happened on Tim Cook's watch. The courage. The Apple watch, which I will never forget that event, which was live and featured Bono and a lengthy explanation of how the digital crown would be the next great input device, which was just in that moment. I was like, are you guys serious about this? There's just like something about Tim where he needed it first to do a Steve Jobs style product introduction and needed to prove that Apple still had its spirit inside of it. And then it stopped. And it became Apple became pretty corporate and became all about scale and like fees. I'm wondering, where would you mark that transition? Or do you think that transition happened? That's, I mean, did it happen? I think so. I think a lot of, I think a lot of our readers. 100% it happened. I think first of all, like the launch of Apple TV was a big moment on that timeline. Like that's a huge, a huge moment for the services shift. And that he wanted Apple to

43:55be this entertainment company because everyone else was an entertainment company as well, content company. Yeah, I guess you market at the Apple watch, but we're AirPods as the expansion that goes beyond the iPhone because all of this is just right. As famously we've talked about for the decade now, which is the iPhone is the center of this economy for them. And what are the other pieces that we can get people to come into the ecosystem? It is the center of the world garden. And so I think you put it with these other devices, I think. Yeah, Dave, what do you think? It does feel to me that there was a bit of a shift, maybe five or six years ago, more directed towards hardware engineering again. Because before that, we had the Apple watch edition edition. We had a lot of Air Mez stuff. We had gold. We had all that stuff. Apple was kind of seen as this luxury company. It's not not a luxury company now, but it feels that in, you know, ever since Apple Silicon ever since the new MacBook Pros with ports, what a concept. We're actually getting hardware for good price.

45:00That's very focused around the hardware. And I don't know how much of that was a John Ternis decision, but it seems to me that they have pivoted a little bit from being this like luxury fashion company more towards back towards the old kind of Apple hardware stuff. Yeah, it's interesting to me to bring this up because that maybe isn't Tim Cook's doing. It's more Johnny Ives leaving. That's very fair. I mean, this might be the single biggest success for Tim Cook is that he managed Johnny Ives out of the company without a catastrophe. And you can maybe argue that there is a disaster like liquid glass exists. And like, oh, like, yeah, well, not a he managed out of the company to or at least he got the guy out. Yeah, it's funny. Actually, David, you maybe look up two things. It really is around 2019, 2020 where there's the shift. Two things happened around that time. This shift to Apple Silicon, Apple TV streaming, plus whatever it was called it, it was Apple TV plus, right? Apple TV on the Apple TV and Apple TV.

46:02Apple TV streaming plus on the on the box. Yeah. And those things, I think, marked we're talking about an ecosystem change and an expansion into the services. And that's six years ago. That's I think that feels right. I think you're five to six year mark stuff feels right. Yeah. And that services business is a huge deal. Yeah. And to be clear, like the Apple, the Apple watch and AirPods predated that, which the Apple watch felt more luxury when it first came out. Yes. If you remember, I mean, that was an Ive project and he had brought in a bunch of fashion people into the company. I will never forget like hearing old guard Apple people derisively refer to the fashion executives was a thing that would happen because there were a lot of fashion executives rolling around Apple. And there was a moment where it felt like they had they had taken winning for granted or they taken the idea that they made the best hardware for granted or the best products are granted. Yeah. And now they would be this lifestyle thing. And yeah, Johnny, I believe is all the fashion people leave and like the MacBooks get ports again.

47:05Yeah. And like it's as direct as it can be. But right next to that is Joanna saying is, oh boy, we make a lot of money on candy crush whales and to obscure the fact that a huge portion of our revenue is taking 30% from apps in particular games. We'll make a TV show or two. Have you met Reese Winterspoon? Like there's something about that that is just very different in Apple's conception of itself that is for I think will be forever the big mark of the Tim Cook era. Yeah. Because they became a business that charged a lot of fees. And that again, they hit it with celebrities. But that engine is fees. And it's iCloud service fees. It's the app store fees. It's all the problems I got into developers and regulators around those fees. It is the endless forever lawsuit with Epic, which will reach some conclusions someday. But not today. That is a kind of fight that Apple got into in an almost existential way. They never back down an inch on one and collect those fees. And I probably undermarked in the Tim Cook era, but it is the

48:08it's the driver of their market cap in the the realest way. Yeah. And it really feels like they're trying to double down on their services too. They need to get more and more people into Apple one. I think that's why their focus so hard on Apple TV. And maybe not as much as on Apple fitness, because they're kind of scaling that back a little bit. But a lot of their services. Google is trying to catch up to Apple one's value. I don't think that the Fitbit Air Gemini integration for $10 a month is meant to be a product that gets sold at an individual level. They want to sell as many microservices as possible in one big bundle. And I think that's what Apple is particularly good at at the moment is each of their microservices are actually worth a decent amount of money. See by Apple one, you have these recurring revenue customers for quite a while. Yeah. And I think we're going to see like a leasing program with these new phones. Right. Apple is just becoming a subscription company. Yeah. In life as a subscription. And again, this is Tim Cook legacy. He revitalized the the business of the company to be about recurring revenue, to be about it. He started a credit card.

49:12Like all of that happened in the Tim Cook era. I just try to imagine Steve Jobs sitting out of Goldman Sachs and be like, we're going to do a co-branded credit. Like that doesn't mean people. I can't talk to you. Like you, I just don't think that would have happened. There's one other executive I want to talk about really quickly. It was announced quite late by Apple this week that Phil Schiller would be leaving as big as Jobs at Apple. He's still on the executive page as an Apple fellow, but Eddie Q is not going to run the app store, which is a thing Phil had been doing and spending most of his time on. He's still on the executive leader for pay very much seems like there's a bad phone to fill if you need him. But he's he's just not in the day today. Janet, you and I have interacted with Phil lots and lots and lots over the years. My relationship and he's really spiky and it is since warmed up because now we're both just old guys. Like we're like, who are these, who are these YouTubers? Same here. Same here. I have lots of memories of being on the other side of the table from Phil Schiller. Yeah. But that one feels as big to me as anything. Like he he's old school. He's old school. He had the courage. We know he

50:13was the one with the courage. You want to know why Phil Schiller and I had a spiky relationship? It's because he he was the one who took ownership of a room and have been jacked from phones. I totally agree. I think look, there's this old guard of people who have been at Apple since the days of Jobs. They have made it through the cook era and some it seems will definitely be here for the first few years, if not longer, of the turnis era. And Schiller seems to not be one of those people. Mostly I assume is he's had a long time at the company. He's older. He's older gentleman. This is the man who introduced Wi-Fi at the first time. David Pearson, I was all the time. He did it by jumping off the stage and onto a mattress holding a notebook down. This is a long time. That gift is so good. It's very good. It's very good. But you're right about this old guard. I mean, Ternis is looking at a totally different set of executives, the exception of Eddie Q and Greg Jaws. Greg Jaws, Greg is the head of marketing now. He basically replaced Schiller. He's got some deputies that you've seen on these videos as well. The Cyan Drants is like on all the Apple event

51:17videos. She seems very senior to the company as well. And you just kind of wonder are those two going to be next in some way or do they have a long run? I mean, we, I think we see Jaws at every Apple event. He's in it. Right? Like he's in the game. He's fully in it. And when David, when you said before his Ternis going to announce the folds, I think it's the question, is it Ternis or is it Jaws? Jaws always does the iPhone Pro. He always does the Pro. You watch last camera. He's yeah, he always is talking to camera specs. Like is that going to, oh, maybe he doesn't do the fold because it's going to have to, they're going to have to address. I'm curious if they do a one more thing for the fold because they still have to make a bunch of kind of a bunch of noise about the pros, right? If the event is about the pros, it's about maybe some AirPods 5. Do they do it as a one more thing? Is it a big enough deal? Yeah, let's talk about what we're expecting from the event. Right? I mean, so it's the end of an era. And it's like, you can talk about Tim Cook a lot, but my perspective on it is that as a business executive, he is singular. As a person, people had an emotional connection to he's a cipher. It doesn't feel like the our audience

52:24was like, oh, no, not Tim Cook going, how will Apple ever recover? They're like, well, the guy who deals with Donald Trump is still in that job and that's their reaction to him. And he's going to pay a lot, by the way, it's like $47 million a year to still be the guy Donald Trump talks to. Fairly less. I wouldn't have, I don't think I would have taken 40s. We would have had to run me up to 50 to be the Donald Trump was worth Apple. But next week, we're expecting obviously the folding phone in the sort of wide form factor. There's been some case leaks already. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max Apple Watch series 12, Ultra 4, AirPods 5. So the iPhone ecosystem. Right? We're expecting a rev of the iPhone ecosystem. I don't think we're expecting MacBooks. I don't think we're expecting iPads. Probably not till November, October November would be my guess. A big question I have here is how much AI I already even talked about because they're going to launch Siri AI with iOS 27. True. And that's going to be a big part of the phone. Well, there's no base iPhone 18. That's the rumor. Yeah, that's the rumor, which they have some time in the presentation because we don't have to go through the whole iPhone baseline, all the improvements.

53:29And then like, but then it's even better with the pro, right? Like that arc of the presentation doesn't have to happen, I guess. Though it will, it will be interesting how they address that there's no iPhone 18 model right now. Apple never addresses anything. Yeah, I don't think they'll say anything. So the iPhone 17 is still here for 599. It's like what they're going to get. Right. They do that at the end, I guess, with the lineup and show us that this is the best iPhone lineup we've ever had. Right? And so they do that in the thing. So yeah, I think they probably end up starting with the pro working in how much better. This is the true AI phone. It's got the Siri. It's the best ever. And also, I think they'll likely say it's not coming right away. That's what's been rumored to, which is that it's going to be like a rolling wait list on the Siri stuff, though, which seems like it will come pretty soon. I think they start with the cheap stuff. Well, yeah, they start with the watch and the AirPods. They go into the iPhone and then they end with the the fold again, we're like over reading an apple keynote. Do you think it's too much for Ternis and his first shout out to gate to do one more thing? I don't think so. No, I don't think

54:33so. I think it's going to be important for him to do something big like that. Okay, this is the bet. This is the bet. You're betting. But, but, but, Joanna's yes, I'm a hard no. There's no way. I mean, I think it's hard to do a one more thing when everyone knows the thing. When case manufacturers are literally sending products out to YouTubers, yeah, I think that's pretty hard to do. But, I think one more thing is it's a that's a move. That's a move. That is a very specific thing to try to message into out of things. I think you play this one cool. You let the you let the fold unfold itself. You know what I mean? One of the things that I'm curious about with AI in particular is obviously can control a lot. It can do a lot on your phone. Do you think they're going to expand like the roster of agentic app integrations? Do you think we're going to see Uber and DoorDash on the rest of the stage? Because this is like Google's big thing now, right? Is you just talk to your phone and a bunch of things happen in the background. Yeah, well, people have been building against iOS 27 since June practically. And they can't announce they haven't

55:37been able to release any of these except their test flight that could actually make use of Ciri AI. So I imagine they probably, you know, they probably worked with a lot of smaller developers just so they can show they work with smaller developers. And they'll show a giant list of all the things that Ciri AI can plug into. But I do think that they're going to downplay Ciri AI a little bit just because of how much trouble they got in for over playing it last time. And they'll probably, you know, show some cool examples of things they can definitely do because they've tested it thoroughly. And everything else will be like and more. And then we'll see. Yeah. I'm honestly curious. It's hard to imagine what they have to show on the iPhone 18 that like enhances Ciri. Like that's what I keep wondering. Like we know that there's going to be camera improvements. We know there's going to be processor like I guess you could just like really be hamming up similar to Google that the processor really makes Ciri better. But like it's built for Ciri AI. I remember. Yeah. Better beam forming

56:39mics that can listen to you call for Ciri a mile away. Like you yeah, you can you can lay the stuff out. I think the question I have and David actually wrote a great piece of adaptive operators who are excited about Ciri AI that we will link is whether the promise comes true, right? Whether the AI can actually run your phone for you, which is the promise everywhere else. The reason that Greg Rockman says we're in the AGI era is because Chats and BD can use a computer really fast. Like that that's why that's like the thing that they're excited about right. That's the demo they're giving. So the idea that your phone can just use itself for you is a very powerful story. But the apps haven't been ready. So the apps are ready now like how much time are we going to spend on demos of quasi agentic iOS app usage? Because I think they have to do it now. I think it's time right for them to show this is going to pay off on this platform as opposed to happening in a virtualized like Linux PC and a cloud run by cloud, which is basically whatever else is doing. Yeah, but it is pretty hampered right now. Like what you can do with Ciri and these third party

57:42apps. There's stuff and it's decent, but it's not, hey, take over my phone and go do all of this stuff in a multi-step way without me looking at it. So I don't know if I'm Apple, I'm focusing on some of the stuff that they showed during WDC, which works really well. I use Ciri daily to do some of that stuff now. What are you Ciri for? Ciri is the ultimate iMessage searcher. I will say that the way that Ciri can search through my iMessage is, and my life is there. My life is there. And so I use it all the time. I can't remember something. I said to someone about going to someplace with time. I said I would do something. A message that I had with my wife like two years ago about, I don't know, some karate place that we said we would take the kid like random things. And it is just fast. It is good. Yeah. So what is this person's address is actually insanely useful because I have asked this person there address seven times and not say it in the

58:44context. And then when it gives it to me, I say can you add that to their contact and it does. And that is possibly the best use case of Ciri. Or I just say like give me direction. Like it there are the small things. And I don't think it's AGI. It's not let no clear. Like it's great iMessage search. Like search is just fine. It's like it's just we can just say it's fine. It searches the answer here. What are the names of the great lakes? Oh yeah, it didn't change. It's superior Michigan here on eerie and Ontario. But there's like a lot of little things like that. That's going to be a fun call. I know the Trump administration monitors this podcast. We just caused a headache on turnis this first day. There are a lot of little things like Ciri. I just find me. I use it. I just use it now. Yeah. That's I mean that is the win, right? Yeah. I was just talking about the verge of the beginning. And I was pulling up our first iPhone review, which was the iPhone 4s, which had Ciri on it 15 years ago. And I was like, boy, if we just come full circle in 15 years,

59:46that we're going to basically review Ciri again. And it's going to the promises are all kind of the same. Yeah. Yeah. Right. You're going to ask it anything that's going to go to some database. Which with at the time, it was like a series of weird database deals that they'd made. Like Wolfram Alphonse. The big deal. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And now it's going to do that. But it's like the web and like whatever I can find and pull it all together. I think that's deeply fascinating. That was a classic Phil Schiller demo, by the way. It was. I think they're going to spend an awful lot of time talking about Ciri. Yeah. Like you should. An awful lot of time because they're going to ship it. Like you're saying, it's useful in some ways. And every minute that they're not trying to get you to use Ciri is a minute that Greg Brockman is going to get you to use AGI in the chat. She would be there. And that's the thing they have to stop is the bleed away from them towards something else that might create a new kind of advice. And you're like, well, I just use Chatch P.A. I'm not sure that will happen. I know that's the thing they're threatened by. Well, also, I think that we're supposed to see, right? This display, this home display thing, right? This has been long talked about. We have heard

1:00:52the reporting from German that this has been pushed down. I guess almost now, almost a whole calendar year because they wanted the Ciri AI to be right and to work. It sounds like it's sort of this home kit home smart home device, but that it's a portal to using Ciri in your home. Also, there's notably not much support for Ciri AI on home pods right now. So I think we hear that story as well. But yeah, I'm not going to question. I think that we hear that story about how Ciri can do all of these things in your home and like as this assistant in your home. But there's no way they throw in a speaker with a robot arm in the middle of this game. They're going to they will call us back for that one. Well, there's the robot arm speaker, but there's also the home pod with the display on it. Like more of a Google Nest test. Yeah, yeah. I don't imagine they're going to show that though, because I feel like it would take away from the fold too much in their eyes. I don't know.

1:01:52I don't know. They're hyping this event. I think if you're going to tell the Ciri story, you might bring that thing out. Okay. So just to line up our bets. First of all, by the way, Joanna, our long running bet of when will there be a Mac with a touch tree and seems like it's going to break my way soon. So I'm just going to put we'll put it in that one. I will go back to the records. I will ask Ciri AI to search through my messages to find the records of what your I said. I put a date on it. I was wrong, but it's going to come true. On another timeline, it's going to come true. And Deeter will return to the podcast. As an employee of Deeter, if I can get Deeter to come back as a Google executive to talk about the touch screen MacBook, that will be the single greatest booking coup in history. I don't think it will ever happen. We tell him we book him. This is a secret. He won't listen to this one. We book him as he's coming to talk about the Google blocks. Okay. But then we quickly bring back the old tape. I'm honest. I'm producing it right now. Yeah, this is all you. You can you have it. We'll give you a whole episode. You can pull off this move. Deeter, don't listen to anything.

1:02:55I was just sent a race or brand. All right. Here are your bets. I just want to lay them out. And then join me. Go. Go. Joanna thinks the fold will be one more thing. But a new product, a home product with a speaker will just be announced with not shipped. Those are your bets. See when he when he said black and white. No, no, here are my bets. I'm going back. I want to be with you, David. I want to I want to be on your side on the one more thing. But now I'm second-casting that because I think in the flow of the keynote, if I were an Apple executive writing it, you wouldn't want to put the fold at the end. Was that or it's towards the end, but it's not a one more thing. Like we don't have that big announcement. It just comes in from a black screen and fades into the into the foreground. I don't want to put many in any bet on the one more thing. I want to say there's a fold. Absolutely. It comes in the section of where they're talking about the iPhones. I do believe we will see this. We will we will hear about the Home Pods and we will hear about a new Home Pod with a screen that has Siri AI and they will make a thing about it,

1:03:59but it might not ship right now. By the way, I don't know if the fold ships right now. I don't know if the fold and this display ships right now. Do they ship before I mean, the fold is going to ship this year, but maybe Home Pod with screen doesn't ship totally into the year. I don't know. M6 stuff ships at the end of September. I imagine it's just all going to ship at the same time. They just wanted to move out the computers because this is too much stuff. What's your bet? My bet is that iPhone Fold is one more thing. Just take it to it. I think John Turner will hold it up, but it might not be in the recording. I do not think they're going to show the home screen. I think they're going to do that in the fall because it feels like a fall thing for me. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to go with David on after the video, Turner is going to come out holding the thing. It's obviously going to happen. Because it's big. The whole point of it's really big. It's going to be on Foldies. Like, wait, the size is big. Yeah, if you can grasp it, you know. If Turner's screens look at the size of this thing, then I will have one all these.

1:04:59That's like my asterisk. No one more thing. That's too much. And I also agree that any smart home stuff, it just has to be set aside. Like every smart home thing they might want to do is just drag it. It's like they have to talk about so much stuff in order to be like, and it will turn on the lights. Right? But you can't just do it. Like most people do not have any home kit devices in their house. You have to introduce the very concept of home. Yeah. That's a my deal. Then Joanna and I have to chase Craig Federigi around Apple Park in a literal circle being like, how does your garage door work? Which is a thing that happens. He's greatest printing. You get to be careful. So I just think you got to we got to reduce the complexity of that thing. Right? You got to you got to tell a whole story of it. I'm going to lose a lot of bets on this one. It's fine. I want to believe I want to be optimistic that this will just be jam packed. I think the best video idea I have for you having had this whole conversation, you should show up to Apple Park with one of those matter garage door controllers. They're like

1:06:03we branded by 50 companies. You know, I both have them. You should present one to Craig Federigi solved your bottom free with a $27 matter garage door opener that I bought from. When they give me him again, I will I will I will purchase such thing and ask him if this is what he has in his garage. And ask him if Apple will go to the mat on proprietary RF garage door opener remotes with rolling codes. And does he also have the crappy home kit shade that I bought on Amazon because it is the only home kit shade you can buy? This is a totally different episode. I don't believe that's true. There are excellent matter over thread shades. The different episode. Joanna, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for being a virtual guest. We'll see you next week at the Apple event. All right, we're back. We have a very intense lightening around coming up about all the gadgets you've had before that. It's time, my friends, for America's favorite podcast within podcast running cars dummy. Wow, it's very Berlin core.

1:07:10On theme. Oh, I have been asking for a drop. All right. Well, that was incredible. That was by Andreas aka error audio who wants you to know that was produced exclusively for party speakers of ultra bass. I will point out a sunny did announce new party speakers this week. This show is so long we do not have time to talk about the party speaker revolution that continues brewing at the world's electronics companies. This week's Brendan cars dummy is going to be very short because what I want you to know is that we have managed to break contain with America's favorite podcast with the podcast. We've ended up on another podcast before which is important. But we are now America's favorite podcast within cable

1:08:14news. It's good stuff. So this week the thing that happened was Kristen Walker who is an NBC news anchor said a very innocuous thing. She said President Trump's endorsements have mixed results and then President Trump responded that by ordering Brendan to find or censor her. I know this because I was on MSNOW with Stephanie rule and she opened the segment with it. We actually have a clip. We can just run Stephanie's description of it. Okay President Trump is calling on the FCC to go after another journalist this time going after our former colleague NBC anchor Kristen Walker. He called for her to be rebuked or punished for what he claims were inaccurate comments she made about his endorsements in the selection cycle. But I want you to listen to what she actually said. Well he's going to loom large over these midterms. There's no doubt about that. He of course has endorsed a slate of candidates in the primary. He's had some mixed

1:09:15results. That was it. That's it. That's all she said. We've had some mixed results. So I know this happened on her show because I was there. She invited me on. That's great. It's I've been on a few times now. It's been a great fun being on the show and it just occurred to me in that moment that I had the opportunity to bring Brennan cars to dummy to the viewers of MSNOW. So here I am. You can hear it is. Let's watch it. Even a material mistake. You can't drag it in the opportunity to monologue about how dumb Brennan cars. Well, I'm not talking about that. We spend so much time at the verge covering telecom policy tech policy. And usually what that has meant is we're going to cover internet access and kids getting brought in. In this administration particularly with Brendan Car. What we have basically started covering is this man going into the library at Hogwarts looking at ancient statutes for magic words and using them to punish speech over and over and over again. So notably I did not get censored or rebuked by anyone at the SCC or at Versant for saying Brennan cars are dummy and cable news. And so if I have the opportunity again, I'm going to do it again.

1:10:18So far. So far. I'm not in jail yet. There's time. There's plenty of time. You know, we're breaking contain here at America's Fair Podcasts within podcasts. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on the show or apparently any other show and debate me about your war on free speech in America. I would love to do it. I think in this election year, it would service both well. Anytime you want, Brendan. Anyhow, that's been Brennan cars is dummy. America's favorite podcast within podcasts. Brendan Car is a dummy. Next time I'm going to play the Gregorian chant on cable news. It's I think they would love it. I don't think stuff would ever invite me back, but we'll see what I can do. All right, we have more distinguished guests on this episode of our chat. This has been an all-star line of Gen 2. He's here. It's on press and it's here. Hey, friends. Hello, hello. Hey, are you guys in the same hotel room in Germany or different identical hotel rooms in Germany? Different identical hotel rooms. That's very good. You all are at IFA, which is the big tech show in Europe. There's quite a lot going on there. We're going to do this actual lightning around style.

1:11:23I was looking at the list of gadgets and it occurred to me if we tried to have a fake lightning round, we'd be here for six more hours, which I know some listeners want, but everyone has children. So I'm going to ask you all to pick five things from your time on the show floor. This is a hard ask. There's a lot going on here. You should look at our story stream. A lot of stuff got announced this week in Germany, but we're going to ask Jen and Don to pick five each, and we're going to move through them in true lightning around fashion. So you guys ready? Yes. Ready? Jen, let's prime. I have slept seven hours in the last four days. So I can go fast. This is what happens when you let a European go back to Europe. You're just like raging all over town. I mean, this is Berlin too. This is like the half rave capital. Jen, wait, hold on. I will do six hours if you will tell me that you've been raving this entire time. All right. You ready? Jen, let's start with you. What's your first one?

1:12:24Okay. My first one, Philips Hue launched a new line of architectural interior design smart lighting, which I know perhaps is not the Vergekast's target audience gadget, but for me, I love it. It's a beautiful rope light. It's the Liane 360 degree rope light. And this thing just kind of blew me away. They had it set up like a chandelier, which they had 17 of these three meter, we are in Europe, rope lights, that are 360 degrees of diffuse light. So no pinpricks, no backing. It's just light hanging from the ceiling. And I got to like dance in the lights. You know, you're in fact, I was actually raving. And I just, I just thought they were, it's just a great combination of design and technology. And that's something that I'm always looking for when it comes to smart home tech. It's beautiful and oh my god, it's expensive. That's the downside. Yes, I watched your video and at the end you said the prices and I was like,

1:13:28are you kidding? How much is it? Well, the chandelier was like seven grand, but each, each individual light is $400. So that's ridiculous. On the Hue website it shows 440 USD for three meters. So you can, that's if you get the weight that holds it down. If you just want the line that you can drape elegantly over your like dining room table, it's it's 400. Is it, is it going to put out a version of this like $200 and take the market? Yeah, well, there's something like this that's like a centerpiece. Like you, you've bought a house, Neelai, you've bought in life. Unfortunately. You know, and I chandelier over the dining room table, that is not a cheap purchase. Shandily that you purchase. I don't know if anyone's purchase the chandelier before I purchased many. They obviously look at me. Look at my chandeliers. They usually

1:14:29come preassembled as actual lights. This is just a rope. That's true. All right, we have to move on. I'm just saying this is outrageously priced. Dom, what do you got? This is a slight cheek. It's only half an e-full launch, but the Xiaomi 18 fold, which is the new foldable phone. It is getting an official launch on Monday in China. Completely coincidental timing. I'm sure. No idea what's going on in California over there. So it's all by chance that this is them doing a wide foldable. So it looks a lot like Samsung's Z Fold 8. It looks a lot like what we think. Apple's iPhone fold is about to look like it's got an edge over the Samsung at least because it's got a triple camera, which I think was the big thing that the Samsung Z Fold 8 was kind of help back from for me that you felt like you were getting this cool shape, but it was held back from the kind of a lot of the photography in the spec side. I didn't get the chance to actually play with it. It was just sitting on a case on the e-full. If it's show full, but we know we're going to see a lot more of it on Monday in China. And I think this is just exciting to see the way that we are seeing this wide foldable market very much open up ahead of Apple's arrival. We're expecting a lot more brands to kind of enter this

1:15:34space as well. And it's interesting to see the subtle differences. Like this is actually from what I can tell it looks like it's even wider and even shorter than the Samsung's. So it's kind of pushing that a little bit further. Finally. As intended, we started with this and now we're back. We're finally back. Is everyone just baked? I mean, don't these all just turn into Android tablets? I feel like at least with the previous taller foldable, you entered an experience that was not, oh, it's an Android tablet. It was like a weirder aspect ratio. It was just a square. But what did you do with a square? You would run two apps side by side. That was the whole promise of these things. But that kind of, it's all quit. This is now you're getting a tablet. You're getting a little, it reminds me of having like a next of seven. You don't get that many of the small seven inch kind of tablet size anymore. So it says tiny, compact, genuinely portable because it folds tablet that's kind of nice. It's a person has an X7 sitting right over there. I'm just going to tell you they didn't change the world. The people are not clamoring for seven inch Android tablets. I'm clamoring for the next of seven. So you're clamoring for

1:16:37me. And now you can also have the tablet. You know, you don't even need it. Yeah. That's true. I'm excited for this one. Do we have any? Is this one awesome? We have radiosely expensive. Is GoV going to make a wide foldable? It takes the closest from the underwater. I can only imagine this is going to be a lot. I mean, it's hard to say because it's going to launch in China and the Chinese prices will scale very weirdly. So you'll do the dollar conversion in it. We'll come at like 800 bucks and that will have no reflection on what it would actually cost. If they have a launch in the US or in Europe, it is Xiaomi in Huawei though. So it'll be cheaper than Huawei, right? Since Xiaomi phone. Yeah, I think they can run a little cheaper than Huawei. I'm not too sure. I'm not too to invoke with like the hierarchy within China in terms of the pricing. Yeah. All right. Jen. Okay. I have another expensive one for you. It has a camera and it goes in your mouth and it's from Dyson. This is the worst product in the production of ultimate. Can I veto this? And it shoots you. I went to an iPhone-esque event today in Berlin

1:17:41where Dyson had the whole room all decked out, you know, thousands of seats for journalists and they came on stage and they introduced a toothbrush. A toothbrush? A toothbrush. I'm proud of Dyson. Usually everything they make is a fan. I know where's the motor? A vacuum, which is a fan, notably. Actually, it does have a sort of mechanism in it. It has like this rubber balloon that kind of inflates to close. They call it a bladder. Bladder. There you go. Bladder. You've been reading up on the camera toothbrush. Wait, wait. Why is there a bladder? When you say it goes in your mouth and then you say it's a bladder, I'm like very unhappy about all of this right now. Okay. I'm sorry. I backed into this one. Okay. So this is the $499 camera jet. It is not, they don't call it a toothbrush in the name, but it is the first electric toothbrush they say to incorporate a camera in the brush head. And they showed me the camera and it really is. It's literally on like the tip of a pencil.

1:18:42And then what it the camera does is is able to sense the gaps between your teeth. So while you're brushing your teeth, it squirts water in between the gaps. So you're brushing and flossing simultaneously. So it's ultimate multitasking. They're going to AI water pick. And toothbrush at the same time. And you can also see into your, so you can see the camera on your phone. It's all local. So the not you are not streaming the inside of your mouth to the cloud. Oh, good local AI. That's good. And it is able to, so you can look and sort of see inside your mouth while you're brushing. I kind of feel like that's a bit of a, like I'll do that once and then never again, but you never know, I suppose. It's squirting mouthwash, right? So they have very specially designed dyson mouthwash. And they have three distinct flavors. And the gentleman who developed them was really excited to tell me all about them. And yeah, it's, it, for me, I just, I have a daughter that just got braces. I can say use case $500. But $500. And I couldn't get anyone to tell me how much the replacement

1:19:48heads were. Because each camera in the camera. I have a, I have a, I have a lot of toothbrush, right? The whole brush head. You just like take it off the thing and you throw it away. And you get, is the camera in the brush head? Mm-hmm. So you throw in the camera away every time? These people see in RAM prices? That's, that's outrageous. Oh, no, no, no. So the, the, the, the, the cameras in the stick. And then you put the brush head over the top. Sure. Okay. So yes, they're, you're not throwing a camera away each, each time. Because that would be very expensive. But I'm assuming there is still going to be an expense to this fancy brush head. Is this, and is it like DRM to mouthwash? Can you use something else? You can see the opportunity for them to do bad things here, right? It's like proprietary brush heads, proprietary, like, it's definitely proprietary brush heads. Yes. But no, I don't think there is. To face famously foams in your mouth, which would be squaring. So this is for you. This is for you. This is for you. This is the value of the Dyson toothpaste. Is that it is low foaming? So it shouldn't block the camera. Yeah.

1:20:54I want one of these so badly. I know. Everything about it morally offends me. Yeah. Can I tell you my favorite thing about this toothbrush? Please. They market the camera as being 100,000 pixels. And they talk about it. They use that number over and over and over again. That's point one mega pixels, by the way. They're just really helping people don't think about that. This is lower resolution than my Moto Razer flip phone camera. I just want to note that. That's very good. So that camera you could throw away every time. It's probably cheap. This is like the literally taking the bin sensors and just slicing them up. Just like you can have them. All right. We will acquire a Dyson toothbrush and find a way to review it. Please. This is one of those products where it's like, I would love to have it. I'll just wait for it to buy it used a year for it. It's like, nope. Can't do that. It's a toothbrush. Don't buy used toothbrush. I know. I asked because they come with two heads. I said, could I share it? My husband and I both use it rather than buying two, five hundred dollar camera

1:21:56for it. We recommend that you do not share two-spot. Why? Why? I know. I'm using my mind. All right, dumb. I feel like Jenna and I have very different experiences. I just have another phone. I keep seeing phones. I saw the techno have a bezel-less concept device. This is a smartphone where they have done their best to completely eliminate the black bezel around the edge of the screen. It's a concept, it's a normal product, and it's kind of bezel-less in a way oversells it because you look at it and you think there's definitely still a bezel there because there is a silver edge all around the screen. That is technically the frame as opposed to the bezel of the OLED display. That nomenclature is very important. It's very, very important. The black bit around the edge of the screen is aesthetically still there. What they've done is just hide it under the frame. They're kind of have to re-engineer how they build this. They've kind of built the phone backwards. Now the edge of the OLED sits under the frame. The frame is still very thin. If you put it side-by-side with a

1:22:59Galaxy S26 Plus and the overall edge is definitely still thinner than that. They have shrunk the edge of the whole thing. I think partly because the frame of this phone is silver, and I wonder how this would feel with different colors, but it feels a bit more open and expansive. You don't have that black dot border that kind of constricts the edge and having a light color does strangely make the thing feel a bit bigger. This doesn't really matter at all. They've shaved 0.1 millimeters off each side of a phone, fundamentally. But no one had done that before. No one had shaved that specific 0.1 millimeter off until now. Did you get to handle it? Yeah, technology actually sent me the phone a week ago, so I've had it to play around with. I heard that if you slide your finger across it, and when you touch the bezel area where they lift the frame, your finger kind of catches the frame. Because the frame is lifted. Was that true on your unit? Very slightly. The frame definitely sits higher than the screen. Probably like Jeff Fraction of the millimeter up from the screen. I'm looking at the picture of this, and this is

1:24:00completely ridiculous. There's an edge. This is like Apple spent years being like it's an edge edge display, and I'd be like, no, I can see the edge. You can see the edge. The edge is definitely that, but it doesn't slightly different color edge now. It's true. And slightly smaller. All right, Dad, we're moving on. Jen, what nonsense. Okay. This one is not, well, I don't know how much this one costs, so it can go in there. Maybe it isn't expensive, Jeff's agree, but probably is. This is a, okay, can I interest you in local AI for your smart home, Neenai? Yeah, me and what else is there? Truly. This is all I dream of. This is, I know, this is the Tamagatchi grown up. This is definitely, you know, this is what, this is trend, I'm starting to see really sort of take off. This is the UFI mind base. It's from ANCA. UFI is its smart home brand, and it is a local AI hub with an ANCA developed LLM that basically runs your entire smart home, but is focused on security to start with. So

1:25:04you connect your security cameras to it. And the things that like ring and nest can do today, like with AI powered video search, AI text descriptions, those types of things which rely on the cloud, ANCA says that this mind base hub can run a local LLM and process all of your video footage locally on the device, and so you still get those AI features from your security cameras. It's also a matter controller, a thread boarder router, a Zigbee hub, so it can be a central brain for your smart home, and it supports matter cameras of which there are not many, but in theory, and it supports this vaporware we've been talking about for ages. In theory though, that means you can connect cameras from other. Yes. So not just UFI cameras. So yeah, there's a real shift, move towards running everything locally, people don't like the idea of their video footage, security footage going to cloud. Does this integrate seamlessly with flock or not? Is really the question.

1:26:06Exactly. And so there's two of them actually, but we debuted E for this week. So UFI has one, and the second one comes from a company which also explains where this trend is coming from, UGreen, which is a NAS, traditionally a NAS storage brand. And both of these devices also act as a NAS on your home network. So you can store your like family photos, you could run your plex server whilst you're also running your smart home and your security cameras all on one box in your home. I do like the return of the home server as a concept. Yeah, yeah, that's what we're seeing. I will say the anchor mind-based tagline is straightforwardly the mind within your home, which is quite a promise. And it, I mean, it looks like a NAS. So does this meant to be so? It isn't as, and like a rack, I mean, that's, I mean, like physically, that's what it, that's what it looks like. Yes. Are you supposed to keep it in the basement? Where are you supposed to put this thing? So the, the UFY1, you could put anywhere, yes, because it doesn't, you don't interact with it.

1:27:11The UGreen one actually has a built-in voice assistant that you can talk to and also comes with, they've, they've launched a smart speaker and they have a smart assistant on the, on their, they have three boxes that you can, that you can buy. And that, that's more of, they call it a home agent. So actually, both of these systems run different agents to do different tasks in your home. The UFY1 is security to start with, but they're also going to do energy management because UFY has a whole line of home backup batteries and they're going to do a cleaning agent as well to work with like robot vacuum, so those types of things. So there's a lot of potential in each device that you could expand and have more functionality. But yeah, it is, it is a hub, hub for your home, you either stick in your rack or in your hub box and then, you know, I have a hub box. Yes, in your closet, which has not been cable managed, if you are me, I would applaud UGreen for

1:28:12the audacity to believe that people will put a NAS in their kitchen and talk to it. That's incredible. I know. And it's big too. Like there's a chunky device. All right, Jen, tell me what is, what is the outrageous price of these devices? To be determined. Oh, good. So we do not have exact pricing, although we might have exact pricing by the time this episode goes live because they said we would learn tomorrow, which is Friday as of the recording. So watch this space. 10 million euros, I should say. All right, Dom, I have got the Lenovo IdeaPad Vive, which is kind of more representative of an idea that has been all over E for this year, which is the shameless MacBook Neo clone. And the IdeaPad Vive is the cloniest of all of the MacBook Neo clones we have seen this year. It is a $700 Windows laptop that comes in seven different colors and is meant to be cheap and friendly and lightweight and get the job done and is the exact same price Apple Mail charges for the Neo.

1:29:15It joins similarity price laptops from at least Dell, Asa and Samsung. And it basically just when the Neo came out, I think one of the first questions Antonio really asked when he was writing about it for the site was, you know, how does the Windows market react? How do all these Windows OEMs like deal with the Neo coming into their space? And the answer apparently is just copy the Neo, make clones. Copy it. Yeah, just do a Neo. Is it? I mean, the point of the Neo is that it's nice for the money. The IdeaPad Vive is also nice, I think. It's got a metal build. I don't think it feels quite as premium as the Neo does for the price. They've lent into the customizability, so you can replace all the keycaps easily and they are selling keycaps sets in different colors, the kind of color match, the different seven colors they get and you can mix and match. So trying to make it playful and fun that way, I still think it's got that problem where it just doesn't quite, I don't know that Windows OEM can deliver the same build quality of that price

1:30:19that Apple can. And I think performance will be the big question because this comes with a choice of either Qualcomm or AMD chips and apparently Intel down the line. I didn't get the challenge to really put this thing through its places, but I still just have so many doubts that Windows can run on this kind of like low-ish entry-level round spec that you're going to get 700, 700 dollar entry point. Yeah, slow processor and a base of eight gigs of RAM is, that's a lot for Windows. Yeah, it's not a great pitch for Windows right now. Microsoft is trying to get to the point where that will work, but it is not there yet. I do like that you can expect the AMD one up to 30 gigs of RAM. Yeah, which is like a $12,000 computer now. Yeah, that's good. One of these come out. They are coming out starting October and then there's more rolling out in November depending on which CPU option you go for. It's perfect that the Windows RMS did not hit back to school. That would make far too much sense. All right, reasonably priced on. Thank you. I'm trying another another ridiculously expensive product for you. People tell me I'm an expensive friend. I get that a lot.

1:31:25This is, I have for you a smart home controller. It's the homey portal and homey if you're not familiar with it is a Dutch based smart home ecosystem platform. It's sort of rival to like home assistant Apple Home Amazon Alexa. It's actually owned by LG or recently was purchased by LG, but it's been around for over a decade. It's a great company. They have a smart home hub that has all the radios. So like smart things was 10 years ago and they have come out with a touch screen controller and I really love the look of this thing from the videos and from the pictures they sent and then as soon as I got here I went straight to the LG booth and they had one under a glass case. I was so annoyed because I really wanted it's a dial and the web works. It's a touch screen so you tap say lights and then your light control shows and then you can twist the dial to brighten and dim or same for like your thermostat climate control speakers so you can adjust like your sono speakers.

1:32:31It just it's it's it looks like a delightful thing that you just really want to touch and play with and that's the fun thing about coming to a trade show and I was like why is it locked under glass like the crown jewels. Yeah I mean the thing does look really cool. It does. Many many questions about how well it will possibly work. Yeah so they it you do need one of the homey hubs to use it. There is a cloud auction but for the experience that you're probably going to want which is local control so it can work locally even if your internet goes down if you have matter or thread or Zigbee devices connected to your homey hub. It's $249 and that's the introductory price. It's going to be $300 if you don't get it on a pre-order. If you don't jump on this unproven thing that may or may not work with all the stuff in your house you will charge you more money. Well homey's pictures they are they do integrate with everyone and they do have a wide you know there's a lot of radios in their hub so you can connect to most platforms that you most

1:33:33smart home devices you might have as well as cloud integrations with all the big names but it yeah that they they recommend you get like one per room because you can you tailor them to the rooms. One three hundred dollar dial per room. Yeah so it does feel a little over a lot over price considering there isn't actually a hub built into this you also need to buy the hub for the best experience but the concept here is what I kind of felt like we were going to get from Apple at some point I know we're still thinking we're going to get a smart display of some kind but the idea being just a very simple but intuitive interface like reaching for a light switch but you know what to do while still having many more options than just on and off like color changing brightness change your climate you know that that control in your smart home obviously voice is great wonderful if you've set up excellent automations but also something for grandma or for you know your visitors or your dog sitter who can just know how to use it once you walk in

1:34:36obvious intuitive that's what I'm hoping we're going to see from Apple at some point I mean one of the things we've seen is room it is like an Apple watch kind of interface or the standby mode type of interface where just a very simple and that's what I think this portal looks like it achieves really well I'm just really disappointed I didn't get to play with it yet so watch this space well we can do another full hour on when matter will support scenes across ecosystems that is not for today and I'm just going to say I prefer the senior citizens of my life to speak to my kitchen mounted nass because I think that's the future in the future yes I agree all right Dom I have got another silly concept product that probably doesn't make any sense but I'm kind of glad to see someone try and make it real themes from both of you yeah wait wait my next one I have no idea what she's got coming so curious the Acer project you'll play many which is basically Acer kind of working backwards to reinvent the gaming laptop so it is a gaming handheld a kind of

1:35:39steam deck style thing but running on windows but it has it kind of opens up like a laptop to reveal a keyboard underneath and then you flip the screen round on a hinge so that then you have a tiny laptop with an eight inch display and it's a full windows laptop and like a moderately powerful one given given you know what this is capable of but then you shut it again and now you've got your kind of windows steam deck handheld experience I just want to point out that it is it feels very obvious to me that these press images are AI generated I don't even say about this like I'm looking at them and I'm like none of this feels possible in a way that suggests I did have you seen this thing I've played fools of horizons on it very jankily they had three samples of Acer's booth two of them had games running that you could play and one of them the controls were broken so that is kind of the level of quality we're talking about so far and even of the one that worked

1:36:39it kind of hummed and vibrated the whole time you were holding it and the fans made a kind of whining noise like let me bring this on to an airplane yeah so there's a really strong proof of concept there in that sense I did felt a bit janky which is kind of funny because they have this line of predator outless gaming handhelds which look and feel a lot better and a bit surprised they didn't just pull the egg on a mix and the design from that because they kind of already have that figure out over the when it's in laptop mode the controllers form what can only be described as wings on the side of this right if you're in your car and you're just listening to you have to pull over and just look at it because they are bananas and the other thing is when it's in laptop mode and it's open what other people see on the other side of the screen is like the thumb sticks glowing with arti-sac plates which is incredible it's also worth pointing out the when is in laptop mode you don't have a track pot so you either have to bring your own mouse or you're going to have to use the eight inch touchscreen to navigate windows with your tidy gamers bring their own mouse anyway come

1:37:42on yeah I don't know we're talking about here tremendous all around so far I would say the kitchen nest and this are tied for winning the lightning round Jen you've you've got you've got one more shot at it can I can I give you a humanoid robot yes that's I mean that's where this has to end if you're going to take the I didn't know the lightning round is competition but it is now and this is how you win from dreamy do we know dreamy dreamy the robot vacuum company which profile dreamy earlier sure yeah who what there's amazing looking rocket car to their big launch event which now turns out to have just been like an empty chassis what a surprise wait what the rocket car doesn't exist yeah apparently not but but this robot I get to see today in action in as much as it raised its arms and and pincered claws at me but humanoids are definitely a theme of this show this year they actually have on Saturday there's going to be robots on the runway and they're going to have these

1:38:46robots dance down the runway and do back flips and such which sounds very exciting but dreamy is you know it's a smart home brand they've done robot vacuum robot lawnmowers they've branched off into all different things but they have been working on a humanoid for a few years now and this is the first time they've actually shown one at a trade show in in Europe or the US and it was kind of tucked away in the back of their booth which I thought was a bit surprising and they had three versions one was a full humanoid but they I should caveat this with it's on wheels and I genuinely believe that if we are ever going to have humanoids in our homes robot human or robots in our homes they can't have legs legs are just not going to work in homes and but stairs well incredible incredible take because okay stairs yes that's a problem but also you've got an escape route if they can't go upstairs you're making a safety claim all right so dreamy humanoid robot

1:39:51with wheels so that you may escape it when it goes well it also means it's less likely to fall on you because I have had personal experience with 175 found humanoid falling on me at CES and it is not a good experience I will and and so what the concept here is a law it's a robot to help around the house it's similar to LG's Cloid which we saw at CES and then the second version they had was a robot is getting on wheels that has a pincer that moves up and down and its entire purpose was to be able to take close out of the dryer or out of the washing machine and put it into the dryer just goes up and down and then stop you here I don't I don't think you want the lighting around how much does this robot cost I have no idea dreamy has no idea because this is not available it's not a real product it's going to be a while and I really encourage everyone to go read our various coverage of dreamy which accompany that I mean the CEO is like I'm Elon Musk like that's his mindset and it's all this stuff underneath it yeah and the humanoid robot

1:40:55form factor is definitely a big debate in the space right now and having spent time with both the wheels makes sense they really do but yes you are you are going to struggle if you have steps just means we all have to go live in you know one but one floor apartment apartments and bungalows so that we can have robot butlers right we need the we need the population density of Europe I understand yes all right Dom I've gone the complete opposite direction for final I've actually gone cheap cheerful and quite practical which is Aisa has brought back of all things the packard bell brand I kind of old defunct computer brand that you know lurks in the depths of my memory but they've just reinvented it as this like cute cheerful colorful company they've got a laptop for 500 euros but otherwise they've got like headphones and bluetooth speakers and a really weird venture products they've got a one of those portable suitcase vinyl players

1:41:56they've got mouse and keyboard they've got a feature phone they've got smart glasses that very pointedly have speakers but no camera so they're very much not perfect glasses and they have a portable steamer for reheating your leftovers all tied under this one brand but it actually all looks really nice everything is really bright and vibrant at colorful it's all pretty cheap and when I kind of I just found this at the Aisa booth and mentioned it on on slack and so I found it was like cute and colorful products from from packard bell it was like some weird verge writer wake word because within minutes this like slack thread was just crawling with everyone going oh my god doesn't great oh so cute colorful tech I miss it oh that's brilliant so there is something about it I think if you go look at the designs they're really lovely at sari it's all only in Europe right now so I have no a derfuel ever come to the US or anywhere else but right did packard bell have some like brand loyalty in Europe that I don't understand to everybody know the packard bell pc in the states when I was young was like I hate this thing

1:42:56yeah I know as far as I'm aware of I have no deep loyalty to packard bell there's no packard bell nostalgia going around that I know of and I don't know why they thought packard bell lined up with like really colorful affordable accessories I the connection I do not understand I think they just realized they have this like brand name lying around in the back of a draw and had this idea for colorful accessories and I'm just kind of crammed together all right I appreciate it I'm just staring at this record player in deep confusion yeah I would have been on into the RGB lights on the turntable suitcase player sorry I forgot that as well this is for college kids right the steamer this feels like it's definitely time right you can you can buy one whole dorm room of guard yeah yeah but I do I do appreciate it's colorful David is a sing to you um it probably doesn't sing but it does play music rough well I know who lost lighting around that joke all right this is wonderful we went way over I appreciate you both very much there's more to come from EFA I should

1:44:03um as we're recording this hours from now there will be a Tesla cyber cab announcement so if you're listening there's one or maybe to talk that it's because it didn't happen yet so if you know what happened at that uh tell us you can email us at verchast.tvverge.com you can call the hotline 866 verge 11 reminder you can subscribe to the verchart add free episodes of this and all over other podcasts there's exclusive newsletters we'll make Jen come to your house and reboot your smart home that's the highest here hang on what guess what's happening thanks to Joanna Stern in Haydenfield for joining us earlier thanks to Jen and Dom thanks to David and Mel for holding the show down and David Pierce's absence it's been wonderful verchast's production of the virgin and the box from your podcast network today shows for you's for Josh Cahas Eric Gomez Brandon Keyford and Travis Larchuck who is not impersonating himself on LinkedIn to get you to come on this show just a reminder I'm not even gonna explain to Jen and Dom what that means I think that's the show next week next week is Apple week it's gonna be crazy it's gonna be nuts we're gonna be on the ground there it's gonna be great that's the verchast.