The Vergecast - Hotline: E Ink, the fediverse, and smart Puka shells
Episode Date: August 5, 2026You have questions. We have (some) answers! For this week's hotline episode, Travis Larchuk asks David your questions about E Ink screens, federated messaging, minimalist phones, AI wearables, and wha...t we got wrong about wide foldables. And don't forget, you can always call 866-VERGE11 or email vergecast@theverge.com to get your questions in about anything and everything. Bonus points if it involves popping your two collars. Further reading: The Light Flip is a minimalist flip phone with a point to prove ‘Max Ink Mode’ is back on TCL’s NXTPaper 70 Pro Daylight DC-1 tablet hands-on: an Android tablet with a new kind of screen Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 feels like the future Disney says it’s ‘exploring’ adding a free tier to Disney Plus Disney Plus is about to go beyond streaming. Disney gives TikTok creators official access to Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar characters SpaceX is coming for T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon | The Verge Google Assistant will disappear from your phone next month Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of anti-reflective display coatings.
I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're taking your questions about I actually don't know what.
Travis Larchuk, our producer, is going to come on and he's going to ask me some of the questions we've been getting on the Vergecast hotline.
We're going to get into all of them.
He has promised me I'm going to love at least one of them.
I'm very excited about it.
All that's coming in just a sec, but first, here's everything else happening on the Verge today.
This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Wednesday, August 5th, 2026.
Disney is thinking about some pretty big changes to its streaming strategy.
On its earnings call, Josh Diomaro, the new CEO, said that the Disney Plus app will soon get games,
merchandise, and other experiences, whatever that means.
Basically, it seems like Disney Plus is going to become the Disney Everything app.
Disney's even partnering with TikTok to turn the vertical video feed into, I guess, Disney Talk,
whatever that looks like.
DeMorrow also said that Disney is looking into adding a free ad-supported tier to Disney Plus
and set it in such a way that it's very clear that that,
that is in fact coming and probably very soon.
Right now, the streaming wars in general are just a race to become YouTube
before YouTube can swallow the entertainment industry whole.
It's wild out there.
SpaceX also just reported earnings for the first time ever,
and it's doing, I don't know, fine.
SpaceX wants you to think that it's a space and AI company,
but right now it's mostly making money renting compute to other AI companies.
But the big news was Gwynne Shotwell,
the company's president and actual leader,
saying SpaceX is planning to build a terrestrial mobile,
network in addition to its satellite systems.
In part, the plan seems to be to connect all of its existing Starlink antennas and build a
network that way.
Starlink evidently has its sites set on taking, quote, quite a few customers from T-Mobile,
ATT, and Verizon.
We'll see.
And finally, a preemptive RIP to Google Assistant, which is officially being removed from
Android devices starting on September 4th.
This isn't at all surprising.
Google has been all in on Gemini for a while now, but I think Assistant is actually still
the best way to do some simple phone tasks, and now it is all LLLM.
all the time, apparently forever.
You can read more about all this at Theverge.com.
That is 90 seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, August 5th.
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All right, let's get to some of your questions.
As a reminder, the best way to ask us questions about anything and everything, we love all of your weirdest possible questions.
You can email vergecast at the verge.com.
You can call the hotline 866, verge 1.1.
We're going to do more and more of these all the time.
Travis Larchuk, our producer who is here, just wants to do the hotline all the time.
All the time.
Every show.
I love this.
You have a bunch of questions.
I am going to do my best to answer them.
Let's get into it.
All right.
Our audience is very interested in that sick light phone that you talked about.
Everyone is interested in this.
It is extremely sick.
Our first voicemail is from Wiley, and he has some thoughts on how phones like this.
could be successful in the long run.
Hey, David, this is Riley.
I just listened to the podcast with a light phone flip,
and I've had a light phone and Nokia's and every other flip phone
that's basically new.
And you asked, what is the thing that needs to happen
in order for these things to work, basically?
And in my opinion, the thing that needs to happen is,
open development and leverage the power of the very passionate community that is willing to do
development for them and approve and don't approve based on purely philosophical lines.
I think, in my opinion, that would be the game changer that allows these things to take off.
Okay, Wiley, I say this with love.
I can hear from your voicemail that you are reckoning with the exact same thing that everyone does in this space,
which is who decides.
This is the problem with all of this, right?
Like, you can make a phone that does a certain number of things.
And if you, the developer, limit that phone to a certain number of things,
that is at least a very clear principle, right?
You say, here is the phone.
It does the things that it does.
It does not do other things.
The end, you can either like it or you cannot.
The minute you open it up to any more than that,
everything gets weird and messy and complicated.
Because you say either I, David Pierce, the CEO of Flipphone Incorporated,
am now the single arbiter of what belongs on this device that you've actually already paid a bunch of money for.
And in theory could make a very compelling case that is yours to do with as you please.
Like, Travis, do you remember that thing going around with the Lightphone 3 where a bunch of people started putting full Android on it?
Like, the Lightphone 3 is running on Android.
So people were just hacking it to run actual, honest to God, Android.
It seems like it defeats the person.
a little bit, but okay.
A lot of people would agree with you.
So this became a whole thing because there were a bunch of people who were like,
you are destroying the thing that this is supposed to be.
Why on earth would you buy this phone to run all of this stuff?
And then there were a bunch of people who were just like, screw you.
I paid $700 for this phone.
It is mine to do with as I please.
Both of those things are good and true things.
And I've been talking to a bunch of people about this.
And the two different courses of action that I've really found are
Commodore, which is making a flip phone.
They sort of bought and rebooted the brand.
There's a really fascinating Commodore thing happening with retro tech.
They're making a flip phone.
And their idea is actually almost exactly what Wiley said,
is that anybody's going to be able to make apps,
but they're only going to be able to be listed on the app store
if they are approved by Commodore.
And that sets up the CEO of Commodore, this guy, Christian,
as like the Lord and Savior of Flipphones.
He is the arbiter of truth.
and whether that could be good.
And I think to some extent, that is a perfectly good and valid opinion, right?
He's like, we're selling this phone.
We're selling a belief system and a value system with this phone.
And I will be the one in control of that value system.
Light phone has gone very much the other way.
They opened up the development kit.
They're going to have some curation and things in their own store as you go to the website
to download stuff to do on your phone.
If somebody wants to make a Facebook app, Light is not going to be.
to promote the Facebook app.
But if you want to make a Facebook app
and run it on your light flip,
Kai Tang would tell you that that is your right.
And it is your phone.
And if you want to completely destroy
the whole value system and belief system
behind this phone in the name of getting Facebook
and Instagram on your phone,
knock yourself out.
So I think in line with the thing
that all these flip phones have been dealing with for forever,
which is what can these do before they become a problem?
Like, everybody agrees you shouldn't be able to have Instagram
on a minimalist phone.
That is simple.
Should you be able to have WhatsApp?
Should you be able to have Snapchat,
which is both a social media platform
and like straightforwardly a text messaging replacement?
Nobody knows exactly where that line is.
And now the question is who gets to be the one
to be the keeper of that line?
And I think I probably err on the side of
you should be able to do whatever you want.
If you want to get a phone and then use Claude
to build some weird apps that run
and violate the whole premise,
and light would hate you for it. I earnestly believe that is your right as the person who just
spent a bunch of money on this phone. But different people will land in different places on this.
And I think it's going to be one of the big questions in this era going forward with these devices.
All right. And then our next one, this question, I believe, is David Pierce Bate. This is right up
your alley. This is going straight for your heart, David. Wait, can I guess? Sure. It's about, it's
going to be about one of two things. It's either going to be about
which note-taking slash to-do list app this person should use,
or it's going to be about e-ink screens.
Hey, David, this is Eddie. I just listened to the episode
with Kai from the light phone slip.
I was just curious, how do these minimalist phone designers,
how do they decide between, like, e-ink, LCD, OLA?
Bam.
To me, it seems like you would want e-ink for just terrible screen and screen time restrictions, basically.
But I don't know.
I think this new one has an LCD.
I might be wrong.
But yeah, how do they make those decisions?
What are the pros and cons?
My personal brand is immaculate, Travis.
Yeah, before you answer, I had this moment when you were like, I'm going to guess,
where I felt like I was on the newlywed game.
I was like, oh, do I know David as well as I think I do?
Yeah, so I'm glad that worked out.
You and everyone else pretty much have me pegged at this point.
Okay, this is a really good one.
And as America's foremost expert in the books, palma, I feel very qualified to answer this.
So the tradeoff here is actually relatively straightforward, which is that e-ink lasts a lot longer.
It's much easier on the eyes, and it sucks.
And I mean sucks as a compliment in this sense, right?
It is actively unpleasant to do things like scroll TikTok on any ink screen.
So even something like the Books Palma or all of these other devices that are more full-fledged Android devices,
they do the thing they intend to do not by making it impossible, but just by making it terrible.
Like if you want to put TikTok on your books palma, you can.
And as I said before, I believe that is that is you're right.
Knock yourself out.
That's weird, but go get it.
But no one does.
and that because it doesn't work and you wouldn't like it and you would have a bad time.
E-ink screens are more complicated than you'd think.
They're all essentially run by a single company.
The whole E-Nc ecosystem is a strange thing that we should probably get into at some point in the show.
But it's actually probably in many ways easier to get your hands on an LCD or an OLED screen than it is an E-Nx screen.
But that is neither here nor there.
So the pros for E-ink are I think fairly straightforward in having.
you use the product, right? The cons are that sometimes you want things that suck on an e-ink screen.
And I think the one that comes up over and over with these companies is the camera. You can't use
a camera properly with an e-ink screen. It doesn't refresh fast enough. It doesn't show enough
fidelity. It won't properly show you what's in focus. Even books which ships a camera,
they're like, this is a document scanner. Like, don't even try to take pictures with this thing.
It will roughly capture the thing you are trying to do, and that will solve your problem relatively fine.
The reason light started using non-E-ink screens, Light started making E-ink phones way back in the day for all of the reasons I just described.
But they realized, okay, the number one thing people require on their primary device is a camera.
Like if you were to make a list of features people want on their phone, I think you'd get to camera before you'd get to phone.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
So like, you just have to have a camera.
And then the minute you have a camera and you want to use it for anything at all,
you need a better display than what you get on an e-ink screen.
You just can't do the thing on e-ink that you need to do the camera.
So now you're stuck with like, okay, do we do a bunch of weird tricks to an OLED screen
to make it look more e-inky?
And we're starting to see this from a lot of companies.
Like TCL is doing some really interesting stuff in this space with Nextpaper.
There are a lot of ideas about how you can change.
the color of the backlight. There's this really interesting company called Daylight that
basically just like took all the blue out of an LCD and made it feel much warmer and a little
different and change the reflectivity. So there's a lot of stuff you can do on an LCD to make it
more e-inky, which is where most of these companies are landing, right? Like even on the light phone,
it's a black and white experience until you open up the camera and then all of a sudden it's a
full color camera because a black and white camera would suck and no one wants that. So I think
the trade here is basically
E-ink solves kind of all of your problems
but one, but the one turns out to be
maybe the single most important feature
of most of these devices.
So I think anyone who's going to use a phone
or try to make something that you can use as a phone
is going to ultimately land on the side
of how can we minimize an E-inkify
an LCD or an OED
rather than just go pure E-A-G.
Until there may be some magical e-ink revolution, new technology to come.
Travis, you're shaking your head.
And that is also how I feel.
I don't know whose priority that is right now.
No one's, yeah.
But yeah, I think that the trade-off is tricky.
And I think most of these phone makers are actually landing on the right side
by landing on non-E-ink screens.
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AI Cloud ERP for any size business. All right, David, I don't know how much longer we have you
before you go and leave, so I just need to run this by you before you're out. This is some more David
Beers bait. It is not about to-do lists, though. Oh, well, then I'm not interested. This is from
someone named Travis, but it's not me. It's not me, I promise. We love a Travis here on this show.
Question, friends. I've been very interested in your coverage of the Fediverse, or lack thereof.
We're so back. But I'm wondering why it's only about social media. There's such a splintering of messaging
platforms, especially in the work context. What once was established norms in email has turned to
client and teen conversations with important documents across email, Slack, G-chat, WhatsApp. The beauty of email is any
client can email any other.
Are there efforts to federate messaging?
You send it from wherever you want and I receive it, however I want to receive it.
It seems like a far more pressing problem.
Yours and activity pub, Travis.
This is my kind of thing.
Okay.
I just want to very briefly tell you about a company called Matrix that I find absolutely
fascinating and have done a bunch of reporting on and think is sort of an underrated most
important company in tech right now. I really earnestly believe this. So Matrix is exactly the Fedaverse
for messaging. Like imagine I have a Slack instance and you have a Slack instance and they actually
have nothing to do with each other. They're completely separated. We each run our own on premises.
Like you can run Matrix on a on a network on a Navy ship. It's like a real thing that they do. It is a
completely distinct thing. But also I can message your Matrix from my Matrix. Like the
It turns into cross-platform messaging right next to and integrated with, like, team messaging that is incredibly well put together and encrypted and all of the things that you would want.
So Matrix started essentially as a completely federated, encrypted messaging platform.
And the reason, by the way, that this is a much harder problem for messaging than it is for social media is privacy.
We just have completely different expectations about the privacy of our content when we're posting it publicly to a social network and when we're talking to our friends.
And maintaining privacy across different servers and different implementations and different companies and building a system that sort of exists in so many places but all adheres to the same very intense privacy policy is just really hard.
And so this company Matrix has spent a long time working through this.
And the most fascinating thing about Matrix to me
is that they have really struggled to get regular people to use it.
They make an app called Element that is essentially just WhatsApp.
It works very well.
It's very fast.
It's very simple.
But they're having a hard time getting that adoption in part
because people use, you know, WhatsApp.
But they are all over, like, secure government implementations.
Like, countries around the world are using Matrix for important secure communication
because the alternative is WhatsApp.
which is not as secure, causes all kinds of problems,
is not nearly as manageable and administrable.
It's just a worse system.
So what they've done is they've rolled this much more secure,
controllable, onable messaging platform called Matrix
that has kind of percolated all over.
So matrix.org is specifically the answer to this question.
I think it's really good technology.
The people who run it are really smart and interesting and up to cool stuff.
They just can't convince regular people to use it.
And I think this is the most fascinating piece of this story to me is like if it had come along before everyone got entrenched in these worst platforms like teams and Slack, I think Matrix would be essentially ubiquitous in the world right now.
It's the same thing with messaging, right?
Like we could do better messaging except that everybody already uses iMessage and WhatsApp.
They're not good.
They're just the ones that we use and getting people off of those things is very hard.
But whether it's Matrix or something like it, I think it's coming.
Something like this is going to make that mainstream turn,
and it's going to look extremely fed aversey
because that idea is the right one.
All right.
We have some feedback from our episode
where we talked about AI wearables.
Ooh, okay.
Hey, what's up, y'all?
This is Ben from Arlington, Virginia.
I was listening to the episode
where you ranked the different sort of AI wearables,
and it got me thinking when you rank the pendant and necklace
so low, what if we brought back kind of like the puka shell chokers from the late 90s,
early 2000s? Because then people could kind of design the batteries or the different components
into each one of those different like balls or shelves. And then we could bring it back as a fashion
statement. All right, love the show. Thanks. Bye.
Before we get into this, I would like you to just briefly close your eyes and imagine early high
school David. I had a ring on my right hand. It wasn't like a thumb ring or a pinky ring. It's
just like it was just a ring. I'm not really sure why in retrospect. I had not one but two popped
collars on my polo shirts. Not again, it's very important. If just one, you're ridiculous, two
legendary. And I did in fact have a pukeshell necklace. I also had braces and had a giant gap
between my two front teeth, and I was styling.
So this is the David we're bringing back with this idea.
First of all, shout out to Northern Virginia.
Go Nova.
This is a good idea, and Travis, I think you don't understand the extent to which this is also David Bait,
because modular gadgets are my jam and have been for forever.
But they don't work.
That's just the problem.
They don't work.
We have been trying to do modular gadgets for a very long time.
designing them in such a way that each one of them works individually, but also in concert with
any number of other things, just turns out to be essentially impossible. We just can't do it.
We can't make it work with phones without them being like hideous puzzle piece blocks that don't
fit together well. There's so many awkward things with making that work just from a user perspective
that they haven't really worked. And then you throw in the fact that there are all kinds of
battery problems to solve with this. Like, the idea that you could just stick a bunch of parts
into a little puka and string a bunch of them together and make, is such a lovely idea that I,
and I desperately want it to work. And in case you're wondering, Travis, the singular is puka.
One puka, many pukas, and that's, that's your necklace. It, uh, it just doesn't work.
Like, I actually think everybody would like this to be the answer, that you, you could have a smart
watch band that you would stick with a, uh,
a mechanical watch that you like.
You would have a smart pendant that could go on any number of things.
Fitbit has been trying to do this.
Like, how do we accessorize your life with a Fitbit thing for forever?
It just doesn't work.
The battery doesn't work.
You can't do battery and connectivity in a thing that's that small without causing
like heat problems.
And then you introduce a heat sink and all of a sudden the thing is too big.
Like all of these things are several physics miracles away from being actually possible to do.
but the minute they become possible to do,
everyone will do it
because it is so transparently the right idea.
Right?
Like charm bracelets of technology
is such a huge and cool
and interesting idea
that will percolate into every gadget
that you have.
Everybody wants to make accessories
that do more stuff.
Everybody wants to make lots of different kinds of gadgets
that you can put together
with all the functionality you want and nothing else.
Like everybody wants this.
It's more sustainable.
It would be cheaper to make.
It would be cheaper to upgrade.
Like, this is just a good idea,
but in anything smaller than a laptop,
like framework has figured out how to do this
in a way that I have found very impressive.
Even that is like big and expensive
and kind and a little bit clunky
compared to what you'd get from another laptop.
The idea of doing it at necklace size
is just flatly, scientifically not possible right now.
But everybody wants this
and I will buy the puka the minute it becomes available to me.
All right.
This is the last one.
Okay, I'm ready.
We got, there is a new galaxy Z-fold
8 and it is passport shaped.
A lot of excitement about it.
The reviews have been great.
Dom really liked the form factor.
We've been surprised by it.
However, we receive some feedback from people who are saying,
wait a minute, I was on board this passport train a while ago.
And here's an email we got.
This is from Al.
Tech Media Hypocrisy on the Z Fold 8 Form Factor.
I was listening to today's Vergecast episode about the Samsung Z
Fold 8, and it made me wonder, why is this wider form factor being praised as a game changer now
when the original pixel fold launched with this exact same shape years ago?
It feels hypocritical almost as if tech reviewers and media outlets are suddenly warming up to this design now
just to set a favorable precedent ahead of the upcoming foldable iPhone.
Rumored.
Asterisk Ed Travis.
Right.
first of all, it's a fabulous conspiracy theory.
I really, really, really like the idea that, A, we would be doing that.
And B, that we, the tech media, would have gotten together and made a plan to do that.
If I was getting secretly paid by Apple, I'd live in a much nicer apartment.
I'll tell you that right now.
So I will say, I was wrong about the passport size.
And I think I was wrong for a couple of reasons.
one is that it just took a while for the software to make any sense, right?
Like, even everybody's experience so far with the fold eight has been, in a lot of ways,
this is the best of both worlds, right?
Like, it's a pretty small screen that turns into a pretty big screen in a way that is kind
of pocketable.
Like, that's a huge victory.
Software's kind of wacky.
Some things fill the screen.
Some things don't.
Some things have weird sidebars because they don't know what to do with the aspect ratio.
There's a lot to work out here.
And there's a lot less to work out than there was when the pixel.
fault shipped with this, right? But I think increasingly the thing that seems to be true and the thing
that I got wrong, and again, I still have not held the Z-fold eight, so I can't speak to this personally,
but almost every single person who has picked it up seems to have had the reaction, oh, this is
smaller than I thought. And Neil and I talked about this last week, that that is powerful, right?
The idea that this becomes something that is easier to hold in my hand, easier to put away,
easier to fit in my pocket, easier to fit in my purse, like whatever, anything we can get back
in terms of physical wieldability on our phones is a big deal. And I think I underrated the extent
to which the passport form factor would be really nice when it was closed. I expected it to not
be nice when it was closed. And it seems to be nice when it was closed, especially now that they're
starting to figure out how to make the software work. So I think that combination of it's actually a
smaller phone that opens up into a slightly bigger phone is more compelling than I realized. My argument
against it for a long time was you've just given me a phone that opens up into a slightly bigger
phone. Sure. That doesn't do much for me. But a smaller phone that opens up into a slightly
bigger phone actually is something. The other thing is just that all of these phones had so many other
problems that Samsung has done a particularly good job of starting to solve. Like the crease is going
away. The durability problems are going away. The cameras are getting better. So all
all of a sudden the idea that you have to make a bunch of sacrifices
just for the privilege of spending twice as much money
on a slightly bigger internal screen,
that trade is getting easier to make.
I still don't think in good conscience I could tell anyone to make it
because it's still twice the price.
But it still at this point is like getting to the point where,
okay, it's now as good as your other phones
and it has this other thing it can do,
which is get smaller and bigger at the same time.
And that smaller and bigger thing is what I missed.
But I think the real thing that has happened is Samsung fixed a bunch of problems.
It fixed a bunch of software problems.
They're starting to figure out what this thing should be usable for.
Like, for some reason, I keep going back to the moment in the launch event where she opens up the screen and on the one side is the TikTok video and on the other side is the comments.
That was like the first sort of visceral, oh, this is awesome reaction I've ever had to a foldable phone.
And I'm sure Samsung didn't invent that idea,
but it was the first time that I've been like,
oh, I can now do something different by opening up my phone.
And it's not just used to apps side by side,
which I think is a tiny feature for hardly anybody.
It's I can actually meaningfully change the experience
of using my phone just by opening it up.
I think that's very cool.
I think it took us a while to catch up to the idea
that there is stuff you can do on either side of this equation.
I think it took the phone makers a while to get here.
I'm very curious to see if Apple has actually figured out, A, the form factor itself,
like it's going to be very funny, frankly, if there's a big, messy crease in the middle of the iPhone Ultra or whatever ends up being called.
And Samsung can just sit back and be like, yeah, we fix that, you clowns.
I sort of hope that's the case.
But it'll be interesting to see also if Apple has a bunch of new ideas about how to make the software work.
I wouldn't say I'm massively optimistic.
I think the existence of the iPad suggests
that Apple has not yet figured out
what you're supposed to do with a screen that size.
But we'll see.
And that's it for today's hotline show.
Wait, no, wrong.
I've one more to throw you.
You didn't get to this,
but I just want to give a quick shout out to David,
who emailed us about the same show,
talking about the Z-Fold 8,
to point out that the exact device being created now
is Theodore Twomb,
his phone in the movie Her, the little, the little like makeup case that opens up to become his
phone. This is just what we're doing now. And I think that's so funny because her is the most
interesting movie in tech right now in like a very real way because everybody in tech
watched that movie somehow didn't realize it was like horrible and dystopian and started trying
to make Samantha. And this is just literally what we were doing now. But if you look around that
movie, I really encourage everybody to go watch this movie again because it's,
fabulous. There's so many interesting ideas about devices in that movie and the way that he like picks up hardware and how hardware and software interact. And this device that he's talking about, the little makeup case, like, his AI assistant will say like, I need to show you something and he'll pull it out and look at it. And this is like, there's so many good interaction ideas and hardware ideas in that movie, including foldable phones. But everybody should stop trying to make us fall in love with our AI assistants.
steal all the other ideas from that movie,
including the pants that Joaquin Phoenix wears the whole time.
Leave Samantha alone.
That's all I have to say.
That did make me think that maybe this whole time,
any movie with an AI plotline should have had like subtext subtitles
where it's just like parentheses,
this is bad.
Don't do this.
Yeah.
It's like satire needs to be like,
this is satire, just so you know.
All right.
All right.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you, David.
All right, that's it for the show.
Thank you again to Travis for being here.
And thank you, as always, for watching and listening.
Special thanks, by the way, to everybody who sends us questions all the time about everything.
866, Verge11 is the hotline.
Vergecast of the verge.com is the email.
We want to hear everything, especially things I'm wrong about.
We love hearing things that I'm wrong about.
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That's just a little fun fact for all of you.
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