Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - OnePlus is Dead… (In the US)

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

So much happened this week! First, Marques, Andrew, and David talk about everything from the new pickle emoji to OnePlus shutting down operations in the U.S. Then they get into all of the Pixel 11 color and pricing leaks before talking about Apple suing OpenAI. It all gets wrapped up with some show & tell where Marques demonstrates a new skill he learned. It's a fun one! Links: Jennifer Daniels Substack - New Emojis David Imel - How AI Stolen the Sparkle Emoji Waveform - History of CyanogenMod MKBHD - The Downfall of OnePlus MKBHD - What Happened to OnePlus Verge - google will allow third party app stores 9to5Google - Pixel 11 Leaks Droid Life - Pixel 11 price leaks Verge - Samsung Titanium Flex display Are Technics - OpenAI sued by Apple Bloomberg - Apple sues OpenAI Tom's Hardware - Codex AI Macropad xteink x4 ereader Typora app Dead eyes podcast This episode brought to you by: Framer: https://www.framer.com/wave Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/wave Follow us on socials: Marques: https://twitter.com/MKBHD Andrew: https://www.instagram.com/andrew_manganelli/ David: https://www.instagram.com/davidimel/ Adam: https://www.instagram.com/parmesanpapi17/ Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin Waveform: Twitter: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Threads: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/waveformpodcast/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Intro/Outro music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Okay. Or items that are the same size and shape. So like three small oranges, I can juggle-a-sac-sized things. I will, I'll just. demo it for you. Wait. What is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform podcast.

We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. I'm David. Big week. It is the middle of July, and sometimes we get random big weeks in middle of July. I think this will be a banger. It might be kind of a long episode, but that's okay, because there's a lot to talk about.

I think we can all agree probably the obvious biggest story of the week, which is the new emoji. There's coming. There's new emoji. They're beautiful. There's a pickle. Right? I guess we don't all agree on the biggest story.

So we'll get to all that stuff. If you slow it down and listen to all those things, you're in for a good one. And at the end, we have a recommendation game because that's also one of the things that we planned on doing this week before we knew it would be banger. But first, did they even test this? Does anyone have one? Because I have the most niche one possible. People always thought I had one today, but I don't. Ones at me, and they're always bad.

Okay. Well, stop tweeting at D. David is what he's saying. Stop talking to me. I don't want to talk to. I'm kidding. Okay, my issue is with... Keep tweeting at me.

Gboard. If you're nice. The keyboard. And it's very specific to where a lot of times when I'm typing, and I try and go comma space, I accidentally hit emoji button, sticker button, and then when I go and type again what I'm expecting, there's a bunch of sloth emojis. Or like sloth stickers, sorry. Yeah.

And for some reason, I find once a day... as I'm typing really fast without paying attention, I'm opening up and just posting a sloth sticker in my messages. As God intended. Yeah. Normally I notice it. One time I was emailing our HR person and said, just we're like, yeah, that sounds great.

And then send a sticker of a sloth saying FML above it. So I just want to know, does anyone else accidentally send a bunch of sloth stickers in when they're using Gboard? accidentally no. I intentionally use them all the time. A really? The sloth stickers are awesome. Maybe I need to just bring them into my... Yeah, it's just a sloth

with a rained on cloud saying FML on it. They have the blobs of stickers too. I would use those. Yeah. The blobs. I'm not a fan of the sloth ones. Sorry. Yeah. But apparently I use them all the time. I will say there was like a... This is slightly off tangent. But there was a slack thread that I was going through from like a while back

like years ago, just cleaning out different old messages. And someone had used the blob, and I was like, damn, that blob was a good... The blobs are amazing. The blobs are sick. The blobs are fantastic. Yeah. Well, yeah, they're all sloths. All the sloths, you've never seen the sloths before.

Yeah, I've never seen those before. I guess I just typed too fast and... I don't know. Inaccurately. Slots. That's crazy. Well, these aren't quite slots, and they're not quite stickers. But I knew that we would talk about my story first, just saying.

There are a new emoji coming. everybody everybody clap it's happening so what are these new emojis all right for our audio listeners you're gonna have to explain all of them yeah okay so so Jennifer Daniel who is the chair of the emoji subcommittee

of the Unicode Consortium holy job title I interviewed here for my Sparkle emoji documentary and she's awesome she has a substack where she sometimes posts like early looks at emoji that they're working on which is cool and she just yesterday

posted a new article about the nine new emoji that are coming shortly nine so we're getting monarch butterfly classic there is currently a butterfly but it's just like a blue butterfly monarchs are probably more you know common and popular in media so i think that makes sense we're getting a bug catching net future classic why it's it have to be bug catching i mean it doesn't have to it's just next to the butterfly so it feels bug catching but like i'm just Pokemon pilled is that what they call it a bug catching net in Pokemon so that's a bug catching net what What are you going to catch in that net? Like a jellyfish?

Come on. What about a big fish? Like a large fish? I mean, you'd be swooping under. This one is, I think the reason it feels about catching is because it's coming from up to down. Yeah. However, these are just Google's interpretations. Like, Apple could do.

I know. I'm using that for like caught you. Yeah. Got you. There's a meteor. Nice. I think that was pretty important. That's what this room's going to feel like soon.

Yeah. There's the thumbs that basically imply get a load of this guy. It's like. Who's got two thumbs and is on a podcast? And they're like pointed in words or... One's the left thumb and one is the right thumb. Yeah, yeah. So there's two.

There's a face that is cracking quite a bit. Already my top 10 most use emojis of all time. I very much like this one because I've used the melting face a lot. And then last year they introduced the bug eye emoji as well. So I'm doing a lot of like funny face emojis, which are cool. There's a lighthouse, which is dope. I was just in Maine. Wait, why?

No, keep going, keep going. Okay. There's pickle, which is good, because they did have cucumber, which was being, like, diced, but now it's legit pickle, which I think is important. No way that gets misused. There's a bar of... Wait, hold on. What is this?

A pickle. No, the next one. Oh, a bar of soap. That's clearly not a bar. That's an eraser. That's an eraser. Really? That's very clearly an eraser.

It's only, okay, it's only clearly an eraser because there's bits of eraser coming out. It's only clearly an eraser because of the part of it that makes it an eraser. It's pink. Dude. It would be bubbly if it was soap and there already is a soap one, isn't there? My soap at home and in my shower is not always bubbly. Is it? But that's what all the, if there's a bubble emoji.

If, why don't you see it? Have we lost everyone under 30? Why? I don't think anyone uses emojis. You are in, what are you talking about? Am I wrong about that? You're wrong about that. Everyone, what are they used?

Gen moji? In the comments below, I just want you to comment how old you are and if you regularly use emojis in your conversation. They're all going to say, yes. I've, I have a clue that it might be not happening for younger people. Why wouldn't they use emoji? I don't know. It's cringy and old.

They just use voice notes and Snapchat. It's funny because, it's just a lowercase text, man. They just use, they're just on FaceTime all the time. I feel like we have a, my proof against you on this is we have a, joke in the office where whenever something gets posted that we don't like, one time someone put the skull in crossbones instead of just the skull, and then somebody got really mad at it saying, like, boomer, that's not the right one. So now we just use school and crossbones for everything. Miles, who's like 20 years old, called the unc for you from crossbones instead of just

the skull. So now we use school and crossbones all the time. But the fact that we're getting schooled on what is the proper emo-em-em-em-y-moji. Yeah, use of emoji. Sure, sure. But I can even younger generation maybe. Like Gen Alpha. I'll ask Elaine when I go. Miles found out yesterday that I was 29 and he was so shocked. He was like, wait, so you're like actually unk? I was just kidding this whole

time, but like you're actually old. Brother. We're like, we're at our 30s over here, okay? Bro, they say if your age starts with a, if you're, the year you're born starts with a one. A one? It's funny because, sure. For a while we had the like, oh, when were you born? 2000 end? And?

Yeah. 2000 and? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Someone, someone DM'd me on Instagram the other day because I had posted a camera thing and they're like, wow, it's so crazy because I got into photography because of a photo you posted. And now, and I was born in 2008. And I was like, what? Wait, are you legally allowed to talk to me if you were born in 2008? Loki, one of the things that happens that makes me feel the oldest is someone will come up to me and be like, I've been watching your video since I was like eight years old. And they're a full grown adult. I'm like, wait a second. Hold on.

I'm doing the math. This is crazy. You have been making videos more than half of your life. It's true. And like if you're like your conscious life, you know, your sentient life, it's like three quarters. Pretty much the whole time I've been awake. Yeah. I wake up.

I make videos. I sleep. Yeah. Okay. It's true. Anyway, very excited about these emojis. Speaking of Google, because Jennifer Daniel does work at Google. Google.

is going to begin carrying third-party app stores next week, which is a pretty good deal next Wednesday. You might remember this is the trial that keeps on giving. There was the Google versus Epic trial, which we tried to cover pretty broadly last year, or I guess it was two years ago now, because it happened in October of 2024. Google was ordered to carry other app stores

inside of the Google Play Store for several years. And also all these other app stores would need to have everything available in Google Play available in them as well. So this was like their way of settling this monopoly case. Now, what was weird about this is after the trial happens and after the verdict comes down, they have to basically decide amongst themselves what the remedies for these things are. During this remedy period, the judge found out that Epic and Google had tried to secretly work things out amongst themselves for settlement. And Epic had agreed to buy $800 million of Google services in exchange for Epic helping promote Android, Google using Unreal Engine more deeply,

and each company coordinating on product development, quote unquote. The judge was a little bit worried about this, specifically worried that it was a quid pro quo, and that Epic would still push for changes that would help other developers, and they were a little bit worried that this would not help the Intitrust case and that it seemed like a package deal. The problem with this is that Tim Sweeney, kind of the entire reason that he brought this case in the first place is that his take was that Google was taking special deals from people and they were

being unfair to developers and Tim Sweeney said they would never take a special deal from gatekeepers such as Google based on principle unless it's $800 million. So yeah, well I mean Epic is the one paying Google $800 million apparently which is also weird but apparently Google is just going to be promoting their stuff. The judge felt uneasy, but ultimately let it go through.

That's great. Same. We love America. Either way, it's going to be really interesting to see what this ends up looking like in practice because it should be launching on the 22nd, which is next Wednesday. We're going to see other app stores inside of the Google Play Store, which is weird. So we'll probably see the Epic Store in there. We might see Microsoft will launch their own Microsoft store inside of the Play Store.

But it is interesting that they have to offer everything that the Google Play Store. offers. I think that's pretty weird. Is F-Droid not currently on the Play Store? No, you have to side-load it. Oh, interesting. So that should be there next week. There's that. There's the guys that make Alt Store, which I think, I'm not sure if that's only on the iPhone or not, but Riley, Stout and Co. I think we'll probably be launching some sort of alternative app store on the Google Play Store. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, if these other app stores take less than 30% of a cut, that would theoretically incentivize Google to lower their cut. At the same time, you have to download these other app stores through the Google Play Store,

which is a little roundabout. Play Store is going to be like Internet Explorer. Still super popular because it's the default. But if anything else is good enough, now it will just be the thing that you download other browsers from. That's true. I think it will be fine. I thought you can't even get Internet Explorer. I thought it was Edge.

It's Edge now. It's still Internet Explorer. Welcome to Edge. We're so excited to have you, Chrome. Give me Chrome Download You know you know what you're here for Give me Chrome

Yeah All right well speaking of things that don't exist anymore In some regions Yeah in some regions Let's get to some heavier news Which is that one plus Officially I don't know why I actually was expecting a harmonica

In Ellis's mouth I mean audio listeners Why not? He has a harmonica right now Right officially the news is 1-plus is shutting down operations in the U.S.,

North America, and Europe. We saw the writing on the wall. They kind of started slowing down a bunch of future devices were discontinued. We thought we might get a new foldable, canceled. We thought we might get a new flagship, canceled. And now there will be no more

new 1-plus phones for us. They will continue in Asia and India. They're actually pretty popular there still. Nor devices especially. But I've been a 1-plus user for a long time here, and I will no longer be able to daily slash buy the devices here, which is very sad. Yeah, one other thing is that they are going to be merging people over to color OS.

This is fascinating. This is very funny because they had already done this. People got mad, and then they just, like, changed the name back to oxygen, but it was basically still color OS. It changed. It was, Oxygen OS was its own thing for such a long time. for One Plus phones, and I loved Oxygen OS. And then they did this hard pivot into Color OS.

And also great OS. It's fine. It's just very different. When people love Oxygen OS, that's very jarring to them. And so they just named it Oxygen OS again, but it's essentially the same thing. Apo being the parent company to One Plus. So now it will officially update and just become shamelessly color OS again. Yeah.

Yeah, there's a long history with One Plus, especially on this channel. on the MKBHD channel, I've talked about them since the One Plus One. They've had so many interesting phones and twists and turns in their history. They felt like the enthusiast brand that showed up and was really disruptive for quite a while

before they became the enemy that you either live long enough to see yourself come or die. And so, yeah, they did now die. Yeah. If you want to learn more about One Plus history, I recommend that you go watch our Sion Engine Mod episode

because we have a ton of one. one plus history in there. And then go watch the downfall of one plus will be studied video. I think you even had an older videos like this. You have another one plus video. I've had, I've done various history of one plus videos in the past, but that's the latest one where I did get some comments saying, wow, this is way too early. They're not going away, but now that video is aged very well. What happened to one plus five years ago? Yeah, five years ago. What happened to one plus? They really went through a lot of twists and turns. Like they would, they would just be bad all of a sudden and their phones would not be good value

and then people get mad and eventually they'd come back and make a banger and then they'd be bad again and yeah eventually they just I think Opo group just got tired of having to deal with those that fan base. I would like to give my top three one plus phones of all time. All right. Let's do it.

In no particular order. Then it's no particular order. All right, fine, fine, fine, I will do it in order, fine. Stay out of business, Marquez. Top three best one plus phones of all time. Number three, the one plus 15. Oh. The 1 plus 15, which I'm still using, still daling, with its unbelievable battery, incredible performance, total lack of bloat, very average cameras, and just the complete

one plus experience right here. This is the epitome of modern 1 plus, still pushing the boundaries and not too overpriced. Top three, 1 plus 15. Okay. Number two, the 1 plus 1. The sandstone, the hype factor, the price per dollar ratio. You could just say sandstone three times. The sandstone was pretty fire, but I actually think I daily the white one because the sandstone kind of aged in its weird way. It was cool at first, and then it was a little weird when it aged. But that had a whole lore with it from like how difficult it was to get the invite system, all the things that were happening with One Plus at the time. But the one plus one, I'm putting it number two.

Can I guess your number one? You probably guess it. Is it the 7T? It's the 7 Pro. 7T's. There's a whole cluster of them in there, but I would put like, yeah. the 7T Pro McLaren Edition is the best of these. But right around that year,

where the 7 Pro and then the 7T and 7T Pro came out, these phones, I think I could still use that phone today. Obviously, the camera is going to be much worse. But like those, the software experience was damn near perfect. It had very, it was early to high refresh rate displays. So they were some of the only 90 hertz, I believe, displays out there, super, super smooth. The batteries lasted a long time.

They also did this thing where they were approaching like 100% screen-to-body ratio on the front and that was like a hype number people talked about at the time so they threw the selfie camera and a little pop-up camera that's fun and that was kind of fun and it didn't seem to break very easily so I like that yeah one of ours got water logged because we tried opening it underwater oh okay well the one I was using I never did that underwater and it it didn't have any issues it was the battery lasted a long time charged super fast yeah all of the best parts of one plus which is what had me recommending one plus phones to people uh were in the phones of that exact era.

And yeah, I feel like that might be the phone. If you look back at the last 10 to 15 years, I'm pretty sure the number one brand of smartphone that I've dalyed myself would be one plus. Yeah, the seven pro series, you have bigger hands than me, but for me it was a little too big and it had a lot of ghost touching issues because the screen to body ratio was so high.

They did waterfall it a little bit. And it wrapped her on the side and there were so many times I'd just be holding the phone. and it would just be doing things on its own because I thought I was touching the side. That was a fun time of, we have to do screen to body ratio

because it's a number and a marketing photo we can put up and we don't care how bad it screws up usability. Send it. I like the 7T so much because it was like all the best things about the 7 pro, but it was cheaper. It was like $4.99. I had a flat screen. It was better in certain little ways.

Yeah, I was obsessed with that one. I recommended it to everybody. I bought my dad one. That was a terrible mistake because after a long period of time when the OS started randomly changing and it randomly changed the color OS, my dad just had a meltdown. Yeah, it was always an enthusiast phone and it was funny because people in real life would ask me like, what phone is that? And I'd say, oh, it's a one plus seven.

And they go, what? Who makes it? What are you talking about? And I was like, oh, sorry, the company name is one plus. Yeah. And then it's the seven. So it's the one plus seven. And they'd be like, okay, so the eight, I guess.

Yeah, sure, whatever, fine. So it was always a bit of an enthusiast phone. It was always a slightly, if you know, you know, brand. But, yeah, man, people, I have friends that got these that were also in the nose. So is this a good time. I have a take that I want to mention about this that I'm also writing an article about, where I don't think that One Plus and U.S. carriers were ever going to work. They never got along.

They never, maybe there was a brief, wasn't there like a, like a One Plus 12 or something? The 6T, sorry, no, yeah, the 6T was the first phone on T-Mobile. Okay. And they made a big deal about it. And they launched it on T-Mobile and it was a whole thing. And then that lasted a few years. Verizon had one-plus phones for the 1-plus 8 and the 1-plus 9. Right.

The most annoying thing about the 1-plus 8 was that if you bought it at T-Mobile, it was like one price. But if you bought it at Verizon, you had to buy it with the millimeter wave bands. Right. And it added $100. Yeah. which made it like not really a good value anymore. Anyway, my sort of like theory about US carriers and Oneplus is that like US carriers, because of the way they want to do the subsidies for you,

where they slowly have you pay off the phone with your monthly bill, but then they sort of lock you into that 24 to 36 month pay period. They actually want you to buy more expensive phones. Because then if you leave the plan and if you go to another option, you still have to pay off the rest of the phone. So if you're paying $4 to T-Mobile every month for a $1,400 iPhone, and as long as you're on that plan for 24 to 36 months, it's like, oh, yeah, it's $4 for a $1,400 iPhone.

That's amazing. But as soon as you want to leave to, like, Visible or Verizon or something, like, oh, you owe us $1,000 now. Yeah. And it's sort of this chain. And so, like, carriers actually want you to buy more expensive phones because it keeps you on the plan longer, Whereas a $500 one plus phone, if you like eventually, they're like, hey, you owe us 400 bucks now.

You're like, okay, I guess. Yeah, less incentive. It's way less incentive. Yeah. This is one of those things that I think we talk about once in a while in videos and maybe people who aren't from the U.S. get kind of annoyed with it. But it's still true that here in the U.S. carriers still basically run like what phones people buy and what phones sell the most. Yeah. So people go to their carrier to buy a new phone most of the time.

Yeah. So whatever phones get pushed by carriers get sold the most. So whichever ones have the best deals who buddy up with those carriers will do the best. And so that's why you see that the big companies in the U.S. continue to do well because they have their deals with Verizon, AT&T, et cetera. And One Plus was never one of those companies, at least here. So they never really got a ton of – they were probably like a fraction of a percent of market share here. I saw some crazy statistic yesterday. There was a statistic that came out recently that three out of every four phones sold at U.S. carriers, or I,

phones 75% and there was a statistic from 2020 which was two years after the one plus uh launched in t-mobile stores that uh the like 92% of all phones sold that carriers were either apple phones or samsung phones so one plus was fighting for that 8% against Motorola and like google pixel and all these other yeah it is not not good for them so you can see why they pulled out this whole thing makes our previous time talking about this really, really funny because there was that really weird article like, like, One Plus is going out of business. And then the One Plus of India was like, we're not going anywhere. We said that. Like I went back and looked at our thing is that was like the AI written article that was everyone agreed that like it made sense, but it just said

exclusive and it was a complete opinion piece. Written by AI. Helped by AI. So, No one took it seriously. But yes, but then... Yeah, what's funny is One Plus of India was like, we're not going anything. Because they're not. Yeah, exactly.

And the rest of One Plus was like... We specifically said that. We were like, yeah, this is One Plus India saying they're not going anywhere. But like the big thing, the general gist of this article is like Apo is winding down some things

in different regions because there's too much going on in the Apo parent company, which makes sense. Like, why not take away the regions you're selling the worst in and just make... Better Apo phones, especially with the prices of everything now. Less skews is better for you.

Value for money is still the most important thing in India. And in the U.S., we just don't care because of this carrier plans. Yeah, we don't have nearly as much hardware competition, which is a real bummer. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Very bummer. But yeah. Yeah.

One plus, no more here. No more RIP. Do you think we'll get Apo in the U.S.? No, absolutely not? I don't think so. And the Aup will find X-9 Ultra is like one of the best phones in the world. and I would probably be using that phone if I could use it in the U.S.

Especially the way the U.S. government feels about Chinese companies right now. Like DJI just got banned. Honestly, One Plus was sort of their Trojan horse into the U.S. in general. Basically. You know? And it just never did the things

they had to do to make it work. Yeah. I mean, it's just not compatible with their brand ethos. Yeah. But there is a company that is in the United States that is launching a phone in a month.

That also has really small market share. That also has really smart. I know. We get all excited all the time when the pixel gains market share. There was like one quarter where they were 7% of sales and we're like, it's going, it's going. And I looked at a chart yesterday. Almost every quarter, they have three to two, two to three percent of sales. There was one quarter where they randomly got seven and it was the month the new pixel came out.

Yep. So they're still not doing great. That's Google, baby. That's Google. But maybe this one will change it. You know why it'll change it? Because the new colors are fire. Yeah, let's, uh, we'll talk about it all.

I, okay, pixel 11. We actually just complimented Pixel 11 on not leaking as much as we thought it would, like a week or two ago. And then like mere days after we'd said that, basically everything is leaked. So, okay, yeah, now the Pixel 11, we kind of already know everything from the new colors to the design to the lack of a glow bar. You don't know the camera features, though. There's that. True. We'll get some AI stuff because software can't leak.

Well, it can. It doesn't as much from these companies. But from what we see, the design looks essentially the same as we've seen for the past couple years, but a new set of colors, which seems nice. And then we get the spec sheets and the prices, so we'll get to that in a second. But what are the new colors, David? Because you're pumped about these. Okay.

Well, so, Andrew, you wrote this down. Yeah, I wrote. When you say there are like two colors for each color, what is that? What's the deal? You tell me. This is the most confusing set of rumors and leaks I've ever read in my entire life. writing out just the colors of this probably took me over an hour because the reason we have these leaks is an accidental Amazon listing. And the reason we kind of need to take that with a

grain of salt is because even though it said it was from the Google Play Store on Amazon with Amazon third party sellers, like sometimes you can get something shipped by a third party that still will say like the company name behind it. So like something can be shipped by third party like a Canon camera, but still might say Canon under Amazon. So we don't know exactly what this is. But the way things were listed is there was the original rumors of colors that we had, names. There was then the listed ones in the title of all these Amazon listings associated with their code names, which seemed to all match up. And then in the list sometimes had different color names. So I'm going to tell you the colors with one or two potential names they might each have.

It's also possible that they give the distributors different names than the actual colors. Totally true. They might have literally found who accidentally did this, if that's. That's the case. But so for the Pixel 11, we have Obsidian or Midnight Hays, which is like a black. We have frost or light sterling, which is like a whitish, light bluey tinty. Yeah. We have Hibiscus or fuchsia, which is like a sick pink.

Hot fuchsia. Right. Yeah. Hot but dark pink, I would say. But isn't it hot pink dark? I don't know. I would generally do it lighter than this. This is a hot pink saturation slider.

100% for sure and then export it and 100% again and then green which is either going to be called pistachio or moss I hope it's pistachio I like pistachios I'm going to go towards moss or actually I don't know because then the green

for the pros are also either a forest object or a food which is the same as pistachia or moss and then for the 11 pro we have another black either Midnayzer Obsidian we have a light fog or sterling so it's not the same, but very similar as the whiteish

bluish-blue-ish color before. Yeah. Dune. Dune. Dune is fire. Dune or Canyon, which is like this is now a light pink, almost orangey copper. These colors are so good. They are really good. And then

we have pine or olive as the green. Which is a light... So good. I don't even know how to... I hate all of them. These two are very similar. The greenish one. Give me the black and that's it. You're insane. I hate all of them. You're insane. The pros are fine.

The pros are fine. The pros are better for sure. No, I disagree. The non-pros are duky. Okay, this is my actual thoughts. You're ranking. All these companies do this thing where they have bright, fun, interesting colors for the non-pros, and then they have all these muted colors for the pros.

Not true. And then Apple kind of broke out of that with this orange pro iPhone, which is crazy. And we're like, oh, maybe this is finally going to be the year of, like, interesting pro colors. But they're doing it again here. Google has this bright pink on the non-prone. They have these, a green, a light purple, and an acidion that's not really black. And then the pros are like a muted version of all of them. Yeah, yeah.

But give us like a bold pro or give us a black. And they don't do either. Well, it's almost black. Yeah, but that's why it's not black. It's a rat sight. It's the purple regular 11 and only because it looks like Ellis's old mini. I mean, it does. Yeah, that's basically the same color as the 12 mini.

I really like the pro colors. I think the green is very like Pacific Northwesty sort of adventure color. I'll unfortunately never use a green phone. What about the Dune? No. I like that color. The green's funny because...

Green is dope. You're right, the pros are the muted versions of the normal ones, except the green on the normal 11 is already like a muted green. So this is like, how do we mute this more? Oh, let's mute the logo. It feels like a dark forest color. Yeah, it's interesting they have no

sort of perlessent option. year. They've always gone like the white like a fashiony one. The fog could... The light fog. I think that might wind up being a little purlier than this... Oh, I have another pet peeve. I have more beef. The

non-pro phones, they always do the matte aluminum rails and then the pro phones they do the shiny like fingerprinty rails because it's pro and it's supposed to feel more premium. Didn't they flip that last year though? Maybe, but it looks like they're not, they're going to do that again this time. The pros have the shiny rails and the

on pros have matte rails. And that is a bummer. That is a bummer. I'm glad they're doing colors, but maybe it's just a me thing, but I'm not a fan of any of these colors. Adam, hold up your phone. He's on an iPhone now. We can't trust him. He's a chill.

Silver iPhone. Also, real quick, the 11 Pro Fold colors are obsidian, Midnight Hays, or green, yeah. Although, I like the rails on this screen better. Is that the same? Maybe it is the same. You just see more of it because of the camera bump. at the corners. Last year they did blue, right?

For the color one? I don't remember. I'm pretty sure they did. Yeah, for the color names, I'm pretty sure they're probably going to go with obsidian, frost. These are names that they've used in the past. So I imagine that they will just stick with those names. Fog.

And they, especially when the colors match the other accessories that they have, like the pixel band accessories and stuff, like the greenish one is called Fog. You know, I think that they just try to stick with that across the line. So I don't think they're going to be changing the name significantly. Yeah.

Now here's the slightly worse news. All the specs and prices have also leaked from this. So if we are to believe these specs and prices, then what's happening is the base Pixel 11 will start now at double 256 gigs, but it also now starts at $900. Oh my God. And goes up from there.

So Pixel 11 Pro will start at 256 with 12 gigs of RAM. It will be. $1,100. I mean, they all have to get ranch. 12 gigs of RAM. It's not nothing, but 1,200, or 1100 for Pixel 11 Pro, and 1,300 for the 11 Pro XL. Wow, $1,300 for a pixel.

I thought Google just got $800 million from Epic Games. Why are they charging this much? The rest of the specs do appear to be pretty much in line with last year. Batteries get a tiny bit of a bump, like 13 megapixel front cameras the same. No, it's not. It was a, the pro had a, 42 megapixel front facing camera. Oh, really?

Yeah. Pixel 10 Pro had a nice front facing camera. Yeah. And they made a big deal about it. And now they made it worse. Now these are weak specs. We're not totally true. Yeah.

Correct. But 120 hertz OLEDs across the board, similar sizes. And then the pro phone will start at $1900. Pro fold. Pro fold, sorry. We'll start $1,900. And $1,900. Yeah.

That's going to look like a steel next to the Apple fold. That's true. That's going to be 2499 plus. A couple of funny things. The Pixel 11 has a better battery than the Pixel 11 Pro. Yeah. Yeah, the selfie cameras are worse. The, and yeah, these prices are, you know,

last year they had the chance to make things right. And this year, obviously there are RAM things, but I'm not going to let them use that as an excuse because $900 for 256 bases, is wild. It's dumb. Yeah, so it's awful. But the iPhone at least last year

got to be like, we cared about you guys for a little bit. Pixel just spit in your face. On the 11 Pro versus 11, it's $200 more. Are you just getting the tele lens and that's it? That's typically the only difference,

yeah, which is why I keep saying like it's hard to sell people on that. And I'm... It's the same size. Something else too. Often it's like a brighter display and like a couple other small, like, HDR-related things

that are like small tweaks for the pro. But yeah, it's a slightly smaller battery because you have slightly more camera. This leak, though, says that the 11 Pro is lighter than the 11, which is very weird. Less battery. Could be the materials. Maybe the materials. Oh, yeah, less battery.

Less battery. Yeah, but not by a lot. How much does 100 million hours weigh? I mean, if we're talking about inside of a phone, it's probably one of the more dense things. They're just electrons. They can't weigh that much. The things we don't know about the pixel are how good is the new tensor chip and what sort of new features will that unlock.

That is kind of the only way that I think that they can sell me on these phones being like substantially new in any way. I don't have the leak and I can tell you that already. Not much better and something that will be available on all the other pixels three months after. Yeah. I have had this optimism before for pixels and it has not worked out for me. Yeah.

So I am not going to cross my fingers or hold my breath, but that is the thing that we don't know yet is what are they going to show on stage? Oh, TensorFlow has more TPU, more AI features, more stuff that you can't do on the previous phones until six months later. We'll see. But that's what we don't know. I did see a report that the new the new Gemma model is like being optimized for tensor on the pixel 10 and above. So it's possible they have more GPU accelerators, stuff like that. But as far as what actual features this makes better, whether or not it's, you know, Google Photos features or whatever. And then it'll probably, yeah, just all go to the cloud and everyone will have in three months. Well, this feels like if you

upgrade from a pixel 10 pro to a pixel 11 pro you get a worse phone. Pixel 10 pro to 11 pro is a selfie camera. But who's worse? Upgrading from a 10 pro to an 11 pro? Possibly. But then why wouldn't you upgrade from a pixel 9 pro to a pixel 10 pro that's cheaper and on sale? That's probably the better movie.

Yeah. I mean maybe there's some other stuff we don't know, but usually the stuff we don't know is software features that go to another phone later anyways. Yeah. Very curious. Well, there's a new Samsung flex titanium display technology that is apparently allegedly going to be used in the Fold 8 and the Fold 8 Ultra. In previous Samsung Galaxy folds, they have used a plastic backing material against the OLED,

and they have reportedly developed a new Flex Titanium, which swaps the plastic support stack that used to be under the OLED panel with a new titanium alloy film, which Samsung is claiming has about 20 times the mechanical stiffness of the old polymer. Great. Wait, what does this do? There's a couple things that does. Yeah. I guess I'm assuming this is basically ideally going to bring the hinge creaselessness

of whatever new fold comes out up to the level of what we just saw with, I want to get the name right, the Apofind N6, is that what is called? The fold? I don't know. The best foldable, peak foldable, find N6. which we've seen that one. It's like a super impressive lack of a hinge crease when you're actually using it.

So it's beautiful. And Samsung's now, we look at it side by side and we're like, oh, Samsung actually does kind of still have a crease. So they have essentially directly responded to it by also doing the same thing, putting metal right behind that little crease and flattening it out. Yeah. Hopefully it works.

It's supposed to make it a lot stronger too. I will say almost everyone I know who has a flip after about a year to a year and a half, the crease in the center cracks. So, apparently this should not crack, theoretically, hopefully, on God, for real, this time.

And yeah, it's supposed to be a lot more flat and stable. Right now, when you unfold it, there's like a little dip in the center, and that's just because the plastic support cannot actually, like, it's not stiff enough to keep it flat. This is supposed to be much more stiff.

Also, because, Because they are using this material now, they don't have to put reinforcement layers on the display, which means that there are less layers between the OLED and your eyes. So they say that they don't have to put as much power in order to achieve the same brightness because there is less diffusion happening on top of the OLED. How much power that actually saves? I'm not totally sure this could just be their marketing spin. But any little, it's like an electric car. Like any little efficiency improvement will take it because these phones don't have the biggest batteries. For sure.

Yeah, for sure. So we should be seeing that. Yeah, next time you, the next podcast, we'll be talking exactly about these things. We'll know everything about them. Everything. No? Yes. No?

Yes. The next podcast will be doing a game show. Oh, yeah. Yeah, where we talk about everything from Samsung. Right? A day early. Yeah. The next podcast is trivia extravaganza.

That's right, baby. Finally. Finally. And then the next next podcast. It's trivia extravaganza, too. Yeah. Electric, Oogaloo. The trivening.

The trivening. Yeah. So, well, the next real, regular, not real, the next regular scheduled show, you'll be here. Wow. Tell us how you really feel, baby. Minutes five points. If I win. I think what you're trying to say is everyone should hit the subscribe button to know when both of those podcasts are out.

That's true. You want to know. You just want to click. Yeah. So that should be interesting and exciting. We are going to learn more about that next week. Speaking of learning more about things. know that always happens when we do trivia.

I said it did there. I was going to say, I try and forget all the ones I get wrong because they just make me mad instead. True. It's a lot. You learn temporarily. Pete Lau, who founded One Plus, right? Okay, I wasn't sure if he was the OG guy or if he came on later.

But anyway, Pete Lau, when describing his aspirations for One Plus all the way back in 2014, 12 years ago, said that he wanted One Plus to be which Japanese minimalist home goods brand, but for the tech industry. I feel like I read this recently. What did you say? He wanted a one plus to be. He said he wanted it to be the blank of the tech industry.

Fujifilm. And it's a Japanese minimalist home goods store known for not putting their logo on any of their products. World market. Trader Joe's. Well, like we said,

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This is my fourth time trying to get us back into the episode. But Apple's suing Open AI, and that's fun. And they're doing it for stealing trade secrets. And the more you read about it. Allegedly, allegedly, allegedly. Allegedly, allegedly, but the alleged stories are very funny. So we're going to tell you some of them. We just posted a skit to the main channel called Apple's winning the AI race.

and at the end we kind of pose this question of what do you think is more likely do you think Apple will create good enough AI to make people stick with the iPhone if people are looking for AIs or do you think someone like an AI company will make a good enough piece of hardware like a phone to make people switch off of iPhones

and... The first one. Yeah, I agree, but apparently OpenAI didn't and their best thought was, well, let's just steal the iPhone pretty much. That's done. In a suit filed last week, the iPhone maker alleges that OpenAI asked former

Apple employees, even potential recruits to bring information about unreleased products. They also are claiming that Open AI instructed hires on how to evade security procedures. I'll get to that in a second. That's a really funny image, though, if someone being like, hey, your interview with Open AIs tomorrow, oh, what do they tell you to bring? Bring my resume. Trade secrets from Apple. Are you, did you read the rest of what I wrote?

Because it's worse somehow. Okay, they're going to. Okay. Everything I'm going to do here is basically. Allegedly. Just, well, yes, allegedly, but things I pulled from, there's a Bloomberg article, there's an Ars Technica article, everyone covered this. I'm just going to tell you some of the things that Open AI is allegedly doing, because some of them are wild. So one of the crazier things I read is that Tang U.Tan, a formal Apple VP of the iPhone and Apple Watch product design.

He was over 29 years, by the way. Yep. He is now the chief hardware officer at OpenAI. He, I mean, like, first of all, you can swap. tech swaps jobs all the time. We're all used to that. But in the suit, it's alleging that... Is it a three-piece suit?

This man became the chief hardware officer at a company that makes no hardware. Yes, right? Well, they're working on. Apple's alleging that he took information about Apple's suppliers to him with OpenAI and encourages interviewees at OpenAI to divulge confidential company information. He has, quote, directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring in actual parts from Apple to their interviews for show and tell sessions. What?

Okay, that's so hilarious. Unrelated to the show and tell session we'll be doing later in this episode. Yes, yeah. And then, yeah. I'm bringing in trades. No, I'm bringing in the physical products. I got my MacBuffalo. He's relied on his insider knowledge, like knowing project secret code names to have Apple

employees in their interviews discuss unreleased products. He also has used internal, allegedly, used internal Apple documents to create a checklist to help departing Apple employees circumvent security measures while bringing those trade secrets. Some of that is the show and tell thing is hilarious. That show and tell thing is like a parrot, it almost reads like an onion article. Yes. Yeah. It is, I'm sure that there are like very specific things that Apple makes you sign to. work there and then like once you leave like you're not allowed to disclose a bunch of that stuff

but there also is probably a gray area that open a i is clearly going past but there's probably a gray area of like well the reason why open ai wants to hire you is because of your expertise in the places you work that's how hiring works but then they're just kind of being way more over the line about it where they're like yeah bring all the bring the folders from your desk at apple when you come to work yeah like stuff like open i has has also hired over 400 people from apple and they have gutted so many teams at Apple that they have had to completely rehire for different organizations

because so many people left to Open AI. Yeah. Here's a little inside baseball is like the number one most common pitch I see in my inbox for companies that think that they're about to get a bunch of investment is we have a bunch of people that came from Apple. Yeah.

That is like the golden words that you need to be able to say to get people to be interested in your startup. Humane. Like it's not new. This is not a new strategy. Right. So, yes, inevitably, you're going to get a lot of people who are, like, poached from Apple to go to this new place because they are promised a way bigger role and the ability to, like, shape some crazy new thing.

And you're taking a risk, but, yeah, that is clearly over the line. It's tricky because during the Biden administration, they put forward a bunch of legislation that made it so they could not stop. They could not make you sign agreements that say, I cannot work at these tech companies. Non-compete. Two years. Yeah, non-competes, basically. And they made it so they can't do that because then you're basically trapped at a corporation and then you can't have a job for two years, which is insane.

But on the other side of that coin, it's like even if you don't explicitly bring trade secrets, it's not like they can take the information out of your brain. You know what I mean? And it's very, very, very difficult to not use that similar information or similar knowledge. It's part of who you are. It's like, okay. I don't know. It depends.

No, no, there's a difference between. I want to use a sports analogy for this one, because it's helped me sympathize, not sympathize, but understand, when you are a unrestricted free agent from a... Is this basketball again? Any sport. Any team's sport, there are players that play for some teams who've played against other teams.

And one team will win the championship. And then the next year, they're a free agent. They just won the championship. And a competing team might go, we would like to make a trade to get that guy. because he's a good basketball player, but also because we know we're going to have to beat that team again next year, and he knows all their plays.

He knows the way they run and the way their coach and all these secrets that they have. And I'm not going to ask him outright to be like, hey, we want to trade for you. Like, are you going to give us the playbook from your team? But it kind of just comes with the package. Like, that's part of who you are as a basketball player. He also wants to win. Yeah. It's competitive.

They brought in the actual thing. Yeah, there's no. That's so different. That's not what we're talking. I'm saying. That's open eyes over the line. But in any other like hiring situation, that that's like part of the story of like who you're hiring. I think the better analogy here is like Formula One and being like, oh, Lewis Hamilton or Adrian Newey is up and we're going to sign him at Astin Martin.

He brings in a wealth of knowledge of developing the car. Yeah. That's something they can expect. This would be like Adrian Newee is showing up with the blueprint. The front wing and being like in his interview. Like this is what's helping us. It's like him driving the world. work on his first day in the old part.

Yeah. Apple is also alleging that Lou left Apple on January 22nd, 2026, never returned at least one company laptop, and he texted a formal colleague, Sillet Apple, writing, Lull, I found out I can access the network storage. So funny. Her reply was, I'm ready. And then she left Apple and went to open AIA after. Wow. They do have some, they got some dirt, I'm going to say. Yeah, the text trails are. Yeah, he, like, used some bug through it and can still access, could still access the network storage while he was already working at Open it.

It's crazy. Some of this stuff is, like, a whole other level of not just, like, oh, I have a bunch of experience from Apple to just, like, I have the Apple thing. I would like to remind everybody that currently on the iPhone, there is an OpenAI, Ask Chat, GPT integration. You're supposed to be friends. Yeah. Buddy, buddy.

Really awkward. Yeah. Oh, but then this morning, don't worry. everyone. We have a resolution to this already. Really? Yes, hold on. Where did I post this? OpenAI says it has seen no evidence supporting Apple's trade secret theft

claims. They've investigated themselves. They find themselves totally innocent. An investigation and found nothing wrong. Oh, that's crazy. Okay, well, I guess they can just This is a company that stole everything being like, wait, we didn't take that. We didn't take that, though. Yeah, we

literally took everything, but we But guys, we already built so many things on the things we stole. Do you think we could just use it anyway? You remember that episode of Futurama where Bender walks around singing that song and goes, I love stealing. I love taking this. Exactly. Yeah.

Out in the open, out in the open, baby. It's kind of like Suno, a little tangent, but there was a report this morning. Suno got hacked and Althasource code got leaked. And Alterscote's code is like YouTube tags. And it's just genius. And genius lyrics, which are also copyrighted. this is all this is all stolen

yeah there's a lot going on there this is going to be a really fun lawsuit to watch play out it's going to be the more discovery there is the more fun

we're all going to have ultimately what's probably going to happen is it's just going to take forever opening eyes

probably going to have to like pause what they're doing hardware-wise and try and redo things as much as they can without looking

like they're taking anything from Apple or else Apple's is going to but that's the other thing is they kind of

still do want to look like they're taking things from Apple. They took Johnny I. It took Johnny Ive from Apple. Yeah, and Ferrari took Johnny Ive and was probably like this is the guy who did the Apple stuff. Now he's with us. That makes it good, right? Like that's, it's so, and yeah, it didn't work.

Notice how he's still the former Apple guy, not the Lucche creator? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, question. If you're hiring someone, like, you're opening AI and you're hiring someone for their knowledge of like a certain part of the market and their relationships and like, oh, I know these factories, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. and then you hire them away from someone like Apple.

How does that person then not just go back and use those same factories? Like there's only so many factories you can use to build things. I don't think China cares. No, but I mean... You're saying to use the factories? Like to Marquez's point, it's this guy's knowledge of these factories. Like, oh, I know this one factory builds this thing. He has that knowledge no matter what.

Whether or not he's bringing in old iPhone parts or whatever or new iPhone parts. Yeah. This is what I'm saying. can't restrict knowledge. And this is the whole reason why these non-competes existed in the first place. But by non-competees existing, you're also basically locking people into a company. So it's kind of... But even two years later, I'm still going to know that company exists.

For sure. Knowing the factory doesn't mean you're going to know how they're building everything in it. I mean, you could use it again, but then it would be the factory breaking trade secrets that they probably have some sort of contract in and how things are built and whatnot. Plus, chances are if you're going to the factory, Apple's using... Apple's probably using them at a pretty high capacity already. Yeah. I mean, I remember getting a tour of the Pegatron factory.

It's hilarious name. And they were building the iPhone 10 there while I was there. And that's how that stuff gets leaked. It's like very, very simple. There is difference between just like knowledge and like trade secrets, though. Like you can. Yes, but that's the gray area. It's out if all these alleged things happened, we pass the gray area.

Yeah. No, yeah, those things are past a gray area. But I think there is a gray area in knowledge that you had to do your job and trade secrets. And I'm sure Apple probably explicitly defines some things as secret and cannot be traded. But the things that aren't explicitly defined are just kind of like, oh, proprietary. Well, you can be, you can have a not have a non. Sorry, too many. Non.

Yeah, too many abbreviations here. You can have a contract that doesn't involve a nondisdiscuitary. But you could still probably have NDA things that you learned at the company that if it were to be those things came out, you'd be breaking that contract. No? Yeah. Just never open your mouth. Here's another thing that happens a lot in my inbox is I'll get an email from someone who was working at one smartphone company or one car company or whatever. And they go, hey, it's my last day at the job.

Just wanted to say, it was great working with you. Here's me passing you off to your new contact here. And then five minutes later, I'll get an email from the same. person, hey, I'm now working at this company. Good to be in touch. Here's some stuff to just get our relationship started. So they are taking their contacts from one relationship that they had at one company to another one. Is that trade secrets? No. Is that part of the knowledge you have on the job? Kind of yeah. That's just how business works. That's why you got hired. You're a PR person who has those contacts. Yeah. So yeah, it goes with you. It goes with you.

Well, funny enough, open- This is legal information, or legal advice. Yes. Legal advice or financial advice. Funny, related to this, related to this, Open AI, big, big report out of Bloomberg this week, Open Eye's first hardware device is reportedly a movable screenless speaker built as an AI companion. I thought it was an iPhone. That's not their first one.

It will be their second, probably. This is actually really interesting. They're actually allowed to. Why are we calling a movable, it's a blue-based? It's a Bluetooth speaker. It's a Bluetooth. It's a Bluetooth. But it's not Bluetooth.

It's not Bluetooth. It's probably Wi-Fi. They have, it has, anyway, I'll go through. Who cares? So it's going to be a smart speaker that lives in your home, and it will exist as a sort of companion that you'll be able to talk to casually, control other smart home devices, play media, respond to messages, and tap into the full range of capabilities offered by Chat, TBT.

It kind of sounds like the Sonos Rome speaker, their little portable speaker that the move around the house that both has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. German says that it will become more personalized and proactive as it grows to understand its owner over time, and it will use a more advanced version of the chat GPT live feature they just announced last week to communicate with users. It can listen and talk at the same time, adapt naturally to conversations, and quickly process information. It's designed to stay in your home, but it will be extremely easy to move around different rooms.

So if you take it to the washing machine room or something, if you live in in a house and you're rich unlike me. It's supposed to have... I don't have a laundry room, bro. The device is said to have mechanical elements that can move on their own to give the users a sense that the device is actually responding and is a bit more anthropomorphized.

Don't love that. You mean like that Apple research paper they put out a few years ago? Yes, just like that confidential trade secret paper. It will include a camera and other sensors to better understand its surroundings and context. Don't love that part. and reportedly open i has working on five different hardware devices including the phone but it plans to announce this one this year and probably released in 27 though because of this lawsuit

is very possible this gets pushed by like a year this might stay in I don't want a speaker that gets more proactive that might be the the worst feature I could think of on a a thing that's constantly listening and looking at me all the time I don't want it to... Yeah. No, you're right. That's crazy. You're right.

It's crazy that it would, like, get more adapted to you as a matter to you. They're using the word proactive, which makes me think it will start prompting you because it knows... It will stop prompting me instead of me prompting it. Like, I don't want to walk by it. I don't know we've lost. You know, it's up whether it's pretty nice out today. And I'm going to pick up the movable speaker and move it as far into the woods as possible. You walk by and it just says, Andrew, design a web app that does this.

I'm going to just toss it out the window. Make no mistakes. Make no mistake. All of these tech bro, like, there's so much discussion in the tech space right now about taste. And everyone thinks doing things with taste means doing things with like an Apple hardware finish. You know what I mean? No, taste means not making a robot wife in any capacity. I don't care if it's a dude.

I don't care if it's a beautiful brushed aluminum speaker. Don't do it. But you know Sam Olman's. Sam Olman is just trying to figure out as many ways as possible to get people. to buy a chat jpd subscription for life like that's what he wants he wants you to become attached to things he wants you to just never want to unsubscribe to jat jopt because you're basically killing your friend if you do this that's what he wants you to do i'll tell you why i think this is really interesting and this is this is kind of what came from that video that i just made which was

do you think that apple with the ip will make an a good enough to keep you on the ipone or do you think a hardware company will come along and make hardware good enough to take you off of the iPhone. Every company is looking for what the next big thing is all the time. The iPhone has been the big thing for a long time, which has everybody on edge looking for the next big thing. And it seems like AI is going to be related to this next big thing in some way. And so if you're a company that's either new or very heavily invested in AI and you think that there's a possibility that you can get someone to the next big thing that is not the iPhone, how do you make that? What is that thing, those are all unanswered questions. This is going to be one of them first big company

attempts at the next big thing. And what they will absolutely not have is a way to connect it to the iPhone. And so they'll have to do everything on this device anticipating that it never connects to an iPhone. It'll have to connect to the internet on its own. It will have to listen to the user and move and connect to the chat GPT service on its own. And if you want to have it do all the things that you were talking about that it's supposed to do, which is like play media, respond to messages and do all this other stuff. How does it do that without talking to your iPhone? That's really tricky.

But the second that you make it connect to the iPhone, you are dependent on the iPhone, and it is therefore not the next big thing after the iPhone. And that's the challenge that they're all after. We saw this fail many times. Think of the humane pin. Okay, we want to build the next big thing. What if it's a pin that sits on your chest and it has this little AI in it and you can talk to it and it listens to you, whatever.

We all know that it was a dumb idea and it was way too early and it was a bad product, but one of the things that it absolutely could not do was connect to the iPhone to get messages to do any of the things we wanted it to do because the smartphone's so good. Right. So the challenge that seems impossible that is up against all these big companies and chat GPT or OpenAI is going to try is to make something that you are willing to use that never connects to your phone and it's a really hard challenge and it's probably going to be a dumb, bad product, and we're way too early still, but that's the challenge ahead of them.

That is exactly why specifically the line respond to messages perked my ears up. Yeah, same. Because how are you going to do that? Does that mean that they're going to launch their own messaging service? Is that included in chat? Do we get a... It's the exact issue humane has. ChatGBT messages or something? Because if you're going to respond to I messages, then you need to plug into the iPhone, which Apple will never let you do it, even if you did hire Johnny I. This is the main thing for me. Like, open eye has been trying to build out an ecosystem of tasks and things that chat chabutee is able to do,

none of these things have to do with other people, right? And you cannot get rid of the iPhone, you can't get rid of the phone without replacing the messaging ecosystem and the ability to talk to other people, work with other people in Slack in messages. Most of the things that we do are on our phones are connect with other people digitally, whether it's social media, whether it's texting.

Open AI does not have that. So, yes, you could probably make a bot that you talk to that is anthropomorphized, that you develop a relationship with, that you just sort of have conversations with, sure. But like replacing the iPhone is insane. And I still don't know what they expect their phone to be because if it's a phone, it's just going to be an Android phone.

And like, sure, maybe it's optimized for chat GPT in some way. And the reason they're doing that is because they want you to keep using the chat GBT subscription until you die. But it's not going to replace the core fundamental features of what makes texting, texting, to stop using the messages app. Yeah. Insane.

What I do see is the people on the bleeding edge, the tech bros, as we call them, who are like trying to turn these AI chatbots into useful tools and to have them do tasks for them or to be useful to them or whatever. And there are existing, I was just pulling it up because I think John, I used one of these, applaud, like a little note-taking campaign, which is essentially just like a little hand-help thing. Yeah, which is like it is just a little useful thing, which you can listen to the meetings that you're in and summarizing for you. or it can listen to the notes that you talk to it, and it can bring back that stuff later proactively when it thinks you want to hear that stuff again.

Marquez was not paid to say that that time, but we haven't paid to say that. Correct. Good disclosure. But it's an example of a thing that does not connect to your iPhone, but uses AI to try to be useful. Yeah.

And the more big ambitions you have with this thing to be useful, the more you start to overlap with, oh, well, my phone can do that already. Or, oh, well, I think it's just easier to do that on my phone instead of also getting a second device to do that. And that's where you're up against like, well, what do we make this thing do?

Does it live alongside your iPhone, like the AI pin tried to? Is it just like a thing I have in my pocket sometimes? I take it with me everywhere. Is it wearable? So it's on me all the time. This one, the first descriptions of it kind of sounded like a home pod like it was plugged into the wall. But it's clearly not. It's like a battery power thing.

So you put it in your pocket with you? I don't think it, no, no, you're not supposed to take it out of your home. It's out of your, it's in your home all the time. It never leaves. It's a Bluetooth speaker. So yeah, it's like a, not just Wi-Fi. Yeah. So it is interesting to see what their attempt of it will be.

And then, of course, they will shower this with former Apple designers and lots of people who. Maybe they didn't hire an Apple designer from HomePod because they maybe have a bunch of old casings from Sam Altman's stupid eye orb thing that he tried to sell a long time ago. They're still for what? Dude, to prove you're a human, bro, and get rich off crypto. This is the original reason I thought Sam Baldwin was a loser, but this is. Prove you're a human, rich off crypto. Bing, you're die. It's for UBI, baby.

Tell me you couldn't see this orb thing being a little speaker with a camera sensor that would like talk to you. Yeah. Like this is almost what I imagined it being. It looks like a membrane. It would be so funny if this is what winds up being the hardware for or something very similar to it. Say what you want, but I would be so happy to have a BB8 just follow me around all day, chatting with me. Little BB8 guy from Star Wars. That thing's so cute.

So apparently they're working on five hardware devices right now, which is. is very interesting. I imagine one of them is planning to leave the house. Probably headphones, maybe. That could make sense, yeah. Yeah. We also, there's also,

like Apple is going to be trying to work on things that compete too because they are also constantly worried about what will beat the iPhone or beat next. So, like, AirPods with cameras, like random AI stuff. They're always working on stuff. Yeah. So, yeah. We'll see. It's funny that,

I don't think Anthropic is going to make hardware anytime soon. I think they're just cool doing the B-to-B thing. Aren't they releasing like a keyboard? No, the WorkLouter keyboard is with Open AI. Also, that was with Open AI? Yeah. Wait, wait. Just if I can rant on that, it's literally something that's been available forever. It's just a macro.

WorkLowder just makes a little Macropad. We've talked about WorkLouter here. They're an interesting company that makes a lot of stuff that goes on pre-order and almost never gets actually sold. It's just a Macropad. They've had forever, and it says Open AI on it. They've done it for Figma already. I'm pretty sure it's the exact same thing.

Yeah, it's for codex. Oh. Oh, okay. It's just like whatever that can do, you can do with any amount of buttons that can plug into a USB port. The action button on my phone does that. I have a shortcut set. So when you press the action button, it does speak to text and then gives that to Claude. And it's just my series now clawed button.

Yeah. A Steam deck could do whatever that is. It's nothing. Well, in a move that nobody saw coming, except. for everybody. Meta wants to make glasses that record all the time. They're rumored to be working on this always on pair of

AI glasses that are constantly recording audio and snapping photos that you'll be able to ask Meta AI about later. The absolute cohones on this company is crazy. We gave them credit last week for like working on the drilling out LED lights and then this

week they said, hold my beer. I want to make this even worse. They're like, they're working on a new pair of glasses that essentially would be recording audio and snapping photos every couple seconds. Yeah. Constantly. So you can talk about it later. So you can ask meta-AI questions about it later, like a memory assistance, I guess. We have talked about this with other things. What was the bubble memory pickle thing? They claim that it wouldn't be, quote, stored on, stored by meta and users wouldn't be able to access it. It would just be, they would be pulling the metadata from it.

and then you would be able to prompt into it. Sure, guys. But they're also not sure if they're going to use it to train their AI models, which definitely means they're 100% going to find a way that they can train from their AI models on it. We already saw them do that. Is this not exactly what we were talking about with the AirPods with cameras? I wasn't here for that. I don't think the AirPods with cameras are going to be recording all the time.

Well, okay, so recording, I think that's a weird misnomer in the title. It's not recording, but it is. So here's what the rumor was for the AirPods. It was, there was going to be cameras in stems of the AirPods. Right. And there are low resolution cameras that are never recording video, but are always recording some low resolution map of whatever, which is like kind of still video.

Was that the rumor? But it would be, yeah. So it wouldn't be, it's not a high enough, like, quality camera to, like, record videos with it. But it would be able to sense your environment, the context. Yeah, it's more like a sensor. Are you outside or inside? It's kind of like a low-res video sensor in a way that the AI can then use that to identify,

oh, you're looking at a sign or, oh, you're outside right now or inside right now. And so it's constantly running, but it's not recording. And so this article I'm reading it now, it's saying like, oh, there's this super sensing feature, which is, again, it's not recording photos and videos, but it is always running so that it has the context of what's going on when you're trying to ask it stuff and you're trying to engage with it. recording audio all the time and snapping photos every couple seconds. So this says in one proposed system, which is this is all rumored. Raw footage and audio would not be stored by meta or made available to the user.

Instead, the metadata from the audio and images would be extracted, and that would be uploaded to a server for AI to query. But that's still being recorded with the camera on the thing, which is not a low-resolution camera and still recording audio all of the time. Yeah, but that never gets accessed by even the device. self, I guess. It's just the metadata that gets the metadata gets pulled. But yeah, like, what does that mean? Extracting metadata from video and audio and time.

It needs to be stored at some point to extract that information. Yeah. Yeah, but it can't all be stored. So I guess it's only uploading the metadata. I don't know. You can't ask questions about metadata. There's no, like it'll have your location. It'll have the lens.

It'll have the battery life when the thing got taken. I mean, it can make tags, I guess. Have you looked at a sign? but this is meadow. Why are we pretending that they're not going to do the worst possible thing with this? Sooner or later this data, someone's going to discover you can buy people's memories from a data broker because they're obviously going to be selling this for ad purposes. And the whole thing's going to explore.

It's the same like, I don't know if you guys remember, this is like five or six years ago. The New York Times did this experiment where they started buying people in New York's commutes from data brokers because Google Maps was like tracking their location and keep it like, had a record of like, oh, their commute starts at this place and this is where they work. And you could buy people's commutes by name from data brokers. And sooner or later, you're going to be able to buy people's meta glasses, memories or whatever. Even in a sense, like before that level, like if they're potentially training AI with this, then they're obviously going to be taking enough of a audio or picture sample to be able to train it.

And the last time we saw them train with AI is a bunch of people doing private things. training AI is a bunch of people in a room looking at all of the photos and recordings like labeling them for AI to understand lately it's you know I don't know obviously all of this is rumored the Apple AirPods one I would think that they would only do it if you asked it specifically like what am I looking at what is that if that I wasn't here for the Apple AirPods one if that's what they're doing

you should be just a skip with them? Sure. Yes. If you have something constantly recording, you should be skeptical of it. I don't know. Maybe don't think that's fair. I think that's fair. I don't think we need cameras on your ears. I don't think we need cameras on your ears. I think when you're, the thing that makes the smartphone so good is that you are very intentional about everything you're doing and it's very obvious to other people the things that you're doing most of the time. Even though, like, using a smartphone to take a photo is less in your face as using a camera because it's very obvious you're just taking a picture and you can sneakily snap a photo with your smartphone. Holding it up to do a thing,

people can see. Staring at your screen, people can see. This is why like the meta-glasses with the screen inside is like a bad idea because nobody knows that you're just surfing Instagram, you know? I think it's important that the people around you have an awareness of what you're doing with the technology in front of you. And the more we try to hide this stuff, the worse it is for everybody's privacy. Yeah, they specifically said in their statement that we read last week that like they need to be able for people to trust their products because you know this is a product that people are supposed to be wearing all the time and the more people don't trust it the more it's going to get banned from different places and therefore like

they're going to shoot themselves in the foot with their own product yeah and at this point I don't see why these products don't get banned from uh bathrooms changing facilities gyms pools like f1 paddocks F-1. Like, they're going to get banned from so many things that are part of your everyday life, that these aren't going to be able to be things that you can have on your person as an everyday accessory, and they're going to shoot themselves in the foot with it. Yeah, that's what's very hard about this, is that the banning of these things is going to get more and more difficult,

the more smart glasses companies start to exist, right? Like, we admit it first, but now we have all of these smaller companies that are making smart glasses. Google's going to start making them. Apple's going to make them. it's going to be very difficult for people to actually know what's smart glasses and what's not smart glasses. I have to assume by the end of next year

glasses with cameras in them will be banned from public restrooms. You don't think so? From lobbying? Dude, no one is ever going to take care of any of these tech companies, man. Yeah, I think that's... I think that might be a creepy enough thing that I could see it. Well, I mean, it's going to happen whether

it's a government ban or just most private companies are allowed to ban it from their own public. own spaces. But the problem too is that some of these like the meta ones in particular have prescription lenses in them. So they are the people's glasses. But that's at that point, that's what shoots meta in the foot is because it doesn't matter if it's prescription glasses or not. If you're a facility that doesn't want recording in it like that, you ban it from it. And then if you either don't wear your glasses or you don't get to come in or you have to have another pair of prescription

glasses, which is annoying. Which is really annoying. Dude, I've straight up gotten ads on Facebook, like recommended Facebook marketplace listings for crystal meth. Like there's no, there is nothing that can be done about this. You know, like I really believe we're at a point where unless we have like some sort of radical change in the power structure of this country, they're just going to do whatever they want. You know, and I can make all the jokes I want about, you know, bender stealing or whatever. but, you know, that's how I feel. Yeah. You did look up the Apple story from a couple weeks ago,

which, again, this is a rumor thing, so we don't know if it's coming out or not, but it was infrared cameras. Infrared, yeah. Okay, so it's cameras, and people will say it's cameras, but there you go. Yep, it's still a camera. It's a camera.

There are people that still put tape over there, like, webcams, you know, like, anytime there's a camera involved, people are super... Computers that come with a physical... Yeah, a lot of... So, like, I think anytime you put a camera in your thing, people are going to look at it with a skeptical

I mean if you want to believe all the companies you should even just be skeptical of it because if someone can somehow get into any of the thing like most people do it for webcams more because if someone gets into your network you're worried people are seeing what's on your webcam there's a thousand reasons to be

skeptical of it. What is a photo anyway? It doesn't matter. The other thing I saw on this which is still a rumor is I guess they pulled up a statement from meta a while ago that kind of breathed some information to what we talked about before, but they claim that the reason they don't want it lighting up during AI instances versus recording instances is that if it's lighting up all of

the time, then people won't actually know when people are recording actively versus the AI recording it and then become too accustomed to it that they won't actually know, which is just one, two different color records, two different color lights, solved meta, I'll take my check. How long did that take you? 30 seconds. But yeah, it's like, that's one of those things that, like, on the absolute baseline of it is like, that makes sense. And then you think about it for five seconds and you're like, that's just all for your benefit and not for the benefit of any of your users. So stupid, but, uh, so I can only assume always super sensing will not activate the recording

light because it would just be on all the time. And thus concludes our depressing meta coverage. Well, wait, one more thing. Um, well, well, but wait, there's more. There's more. is, but they are also potentially thinking if they would bring this into existing products already. So like the current meta glasses, just getting out of terms. If you assume this could be a software update, right? It's got all the stuff it needs for it already. The Cajonis. Well, that concludes our depressing medic.

It's really hot in this room right now. You know, maybe that is raising our tempers a little bit. Maybe we'd feel more sympathetic. This is a pretty stupid one. What did Marquez, what was, how did you post this in Slack one? happen? Oh yeah. It was like could Meta be more tone deaf? And then just posted an article that just says meta wants to make glasses that are recording all the time. Yeah, this is not new by the way. Meta wanted to put like that thing in your house. What was that called? That little screen that had

a camera on. The portal. The portal. The Facebook portal. They wanted to put that in your house years ago. They've always wanted to put camera. Oh, yes. Oh yeah. They were not allergic to cameras. Early into me working for you and you were like, we just got an ad opportunity. And it's the most money we've ever been offered. And he sent it to me. And I was like, we can't do this. He's like, yeah, I know we can't do this. It's Facebook camera in your house.

We obviously can't do this. He's just like, just crazy. Yeah, they've had the Caconos for many years. Listen, I, everyone wants a camera in your house. I love the meta glasses as a GoPro. The moment that you're using them for anything else, just take them off. They're a way cooler GoPro. It's like if you're snowboarding, sure.

I want to see your first person like peel, video. That's super cool. If you're surfing, if you're doing anything, extreme sports. But, like, if you're just walking on your, like, daily commute to the train station, just wear regular glasses. It's fine. Yeah. These are not metaglasses, by the way. Sometimes they're shaped like metaglasses, because mediglasses

are shaped like regular glasses, and you kind of have to, like, do a double-check. Let people know. I got got by the Oakley's on the train the other day. I was like, why those Oakley's so thick? The metal ones? Yeah. Because also, like, I don't know if I didn't see this before, but the Oakley's I saw only had a camera on one side.

No, they usually older. And they had a stud on the other side. Like, there was something portrayed. I was on the other side. The Oakley ones have it in the center from what I remember. No, no, the Oakley running ones. The normal Oakley ones are just like the Raybans. Yeah.

The first Oakley ones that came out are more like a pair of glasses that just look crazy. Yeah. And kind of cool at the same time. I hate that. I kind of like them. But you're talking about the like Oakley running like Pit Viper-esque. Yeah. It wasn't those.

It was a slightly more normal pair of those. If you saw someone with those just on the subway, I don't know if I would be worried about the camera or what this person's about to like launch out of the subway on some record run that he's going on. Yeah, parkour ever. Record run and his time is going to be like 14 minutes a mile, I guarantee you.

It's everybody in Brooklyn. They wear their like shiny rainbow glasses and their bandit running $100 shorts and they run like 14 minute miles. Listen, 14 minute miles is better than no minute miles. Don't get keep running. Don't keep running. You're allowed to.

be bad at running and run. I run 14 minute miles in, you know, a heavy cotton t-shirt in my $20. That's what I'm saying. If Ellis can do it in that, you don't need those ugly glasses. Yeah, but it's part of getting yourself invested. You can buy fancy golf clubs and shoot 150 and no one's mad at you for getting the clubs. You're out there on the course with the rest of us. 150 is really good though, right?

That's high. It's quite bad. You don't want. Maybe unsustainably bad. You don't want it. But it's okay. You're on the course. I don't shame anyone running.

What does hit 150 mean? Oh, God. In golf, you play 18 holes, the objective of the game is to have as few strokes as possible. So there's par 3s, par 4s, and par 5s. So like a normal golf course, this is like a par 72 for the whole 18 holes. Does that mean you hit the ball 72 times to get all 18 holes in?

For even par, exactly. 150 sounds horrible. So 150 is pretty bad. So best case scenario, you shoot at 18. What? Like 18 holes in... Oh, a hole in one on every hole? Oh, yeah, I guess.

Like, that would be like the best score you could possibly. Allegedly, I shouldn't even say this. So 8.3 strokes for holes. Say it. I say it? No, I'm not going to say it. I feel like I know what you're going to say. You guys to call out someone for being bad at golf? No.

It's a totally unrelated political statement. I don't say. No, no. We won't even say it on the pipe is... Speaking of political statements, trivia. You know what else is unsustainably bad? The state. to the world.

All right. So we spoke about the meta-glasses always recording just now for the last half hour of my life. But it immediately made me think of a

different AI camera that was constantly recording that Google released in 2017. Oh yeah. What was it called? Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah.

I remember this. Yeah, yeah. You know what's funny? Super sensing would be really great for, were you paying attention? You remember how

Super sensing? Marquez, you remember how nobody was mad about the Google camera that was like? always recording in your house. No one used it.

Yeah, wait, why was nobody mad about that? Maybe they were. Because we were not. It was also just more like a dorky thing that no one would buy, but the meta glasses already everywhere. And it was like cute. You were supposed to use it with their kids. And it's only in your house.

So you can't creep on people because it's only in your house. Oh, true, do, do, do. That's a big thing. It was your call to like let Google spy on you. It's you getting creeped on instead of creeping on other people. By Google, instead of creeping on the group. That's true. That's a big difference.

It just made me realize I don't know what the product is. Yeah. I thought it was something else. But I also think that since then, we have just been cursed with knowledge. Yeah. We were willfully ignorant for a long period of time. Many more motivations now. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, answers will be at the end like usual. We'll be right back. It all started with Call Me Maybe. Over 10 years ago, we created Switched on Pop to Listen Closer, uncovering the songcraft behind even the glossiest of pop hits.

Since then, we've released almost 500 episodes. We've defined the sounds of our modern soundtrack and interviewed hundreds of musicians and music insiders, including the singer of Call Me Maybe herself, Carly Ray Jepson. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan, and I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And on July 14th, Switchdown Pop is embarking on a new chapter. We're stepping out from behind our microphones and in front of the camera to stream our podcast on Netflix.

Now, you'll still be able to listen to the show anywhere you get podcasts, but now you'll be able to watch us each week, breaking down the sounds of the moment, digging into musical minutia with your favorite artists and offering questionable dad jokes, as always. We're kicking off our Netflix debut with a four-part series on The Art of the Song with help from artists, producers, and songwriters like Aaron Destner, Audrey Hobart, Trevor Horn, Cypress Hill, and Taylor Parks. Stream switched on pop on Netflix and anywhere you get podcasts every Tuesday, starting on July 14th. Remember Snapchat?

The app best known for being the place to send disappearing photos and videos to your friends? Well, Snapchat was back in the news recently, but this time it was not about disappearing photos and videos. It was about smart glasses that you put and keep on your face. Snapchat was trying to get in on the game with a pair of black, horn-rimmed-looking spectacles, think the pair that the old man in Up wears but like three times thicker, and with a price tag of $2,195. Photos of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wearing his hair. Spex, that's what they're called, by the way, specs, were all over the internet and not in a good way.

People were laughing. And they laughed all the way over the stock market where Snap took a hit. But as you're going to hear on today explain from Box, Snaps playing the long game with smart glasses, and the rest of big tech is too. Smart glasses are officially here, so we're going to officially talk about them on the show and worry about our privacy. Welcome back. So for this last segment, we are going to do a game. I am going to shout out one of my favorite podcasts that I've been listening to recently. It's After the Whistle, which is a soccer podcast all about the World Cup. And they have a segment at the end called Bits and Bob's where they talk about random little things that have something to do with soccer.

Maybe not. Maybe it does. I thought it would be fun for us to do it. And then as I was explaining it to everyone, they were like, so show and tell. And I was like, yeah. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. Okay.

So show and tell. We're going to do show and tell. Who wants to go first? I'm bringing in my trade secrets. I was going to say, I brought in secret apple parts. here's the blueprints for the best generation I'm I'm

I... So this is just stuff we've been like enjoying things that you're excited about Yeah wait Can I read what you described it as And I can justify what I brought? Perfect, yeah

Marquez is a backpack That he won't let any of us see what's inside We have no idea what's in the bag What's in the bag? And also David you said something about you brought three things I have like three things And I also have three things

Oh This is a pretty long episode already guys I'll be quick I'm gonna go first They're related Okay you go My thing thing is my birthday present from Adam and Alex.

It is a Vijay Edgecombe rookie card. Whoa. And also. He is a rookie store, right? A VJ. Edgecom rookie card. And then eight more identical VJGICM rookie cards. And I keep them on my desk, all ten of them. That's cute.

That's adorable. Is he a sixer? Alex bought something from, that's a sixer? That's dedication. That's true dedication. He's fired. Listen, game recognized game. BJ Edgecombe is a baller.

Has Alex ever heard of Joel and Bede? Yeah. So none of my things are going to, actually one of them, users or listeners might actually want to use. Okay, I'm going to do a couple. So first one, fairly recently, I decided that I was going to mod

my old new Nintendo 3DSXL. so I did significant upgrades to it. They're funny enough have been a lot of hardware advancements in the last 20 years. As long as you don't need to buy RAM. I didn't have to buy RAM for this. I did buy a battery.

They sell batteries now that have 3X the battery capacity of the original one, which is crazy for the 3DSXO, the new 3DSXL. It was foretold. I have this beautiful galaxy color. I remember I sold

my original DS was the Occurine of Time edition for it which I regret because now that's worth a lot

of money but I homebrewed it so now you can play practically anything on it pretty awesome that you legally purchase myself on the Nintendo story

that doesn't exist anymore and yeah I've just been I've been playing Occurate not Augurative I've been playing Legend of Zelda uh

I don't know. It's the one after a link to... It's the 3DS one that came out after a link to the past. Can you just pull it out of the thing and read it? No, it's on the site. It's software. Yeah. What's the...

A link between worlds. I think it's Fire Emblem. It's the cartridge. Anyway, I've just been like, you know, on the little subway. That's been fun. So, yeah, that's been fun. Other things for the subway. That's a good one.

I think I gave Alice or you my 3DS or my DS. or my DS, I forget. I think I was so dope. I think it was dope. Yeah. It was me. Okay, other fun thing that you guys might have fun with.

I bought this recently. It only cost $50. So this is called the XTE Inc. It is an E-reader that is super, super thin. It doesn't even have a backlight. There's a lot of problems with it.

But it is very small. This is the X-4. They also make the X3. What's cool with it is that they give you these MagSafe rings with it, and you can stick the MagSafe ring on the back, and it is perfectly sized for the back of your phone. So if you have like an iPhone Air or an iPhone Pro Max, the XT, the 3 fits on the regular Pro, the 4 fits on the Pro Max. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. It just sticks to the back of your phone, and so then when you're on the subway, you can either play a link between worlds, or you can just go on and flip your phone over.

and suddenly you have an e-rader. Can't you read on the front part of your phone? Shut up, Andrew. All right. Last thing really quickly, a piece of software that I've been enjoying a lot recently is called typora, and it's writing software.

And you might think that's boring. You might think that's boring. Because it is. Because it kind of is. But it's sort of just like very simplistic writing software that it has a portfolio. markdown and it's got all these different headings and paragraphs and it's like it's it's got a lot

more features than google docs and it lets you organize things better but it's so simplistic and it's so just like there is nothing else that i found that when i'm writing with it i'm just flying across the zone i love those when i'm on google docs i get so distracted so easily the fact that i'm in a browser with tabs is like horrible um there's way too many things on google docs that don't work well like image insertion is freaking horrible on Google Doc. Still has that created AI as the first, like, clicking insert an image and then generate an image is the first thing. Or even just downloading images that you guys drop in the docks is the worst in Google Docs.

Yeah. And honestly, just not having other tabs available to me so I don't get distracted at all and just just thinking about what I'm writing, I've really liked this app. They have a two-week free trial and then it's like $15 once if you want to buy it outright. And to me, that's very much worth it. So no subscription, which is really nice. Typora for Mac. I really like it.

So those are my three things. Cool. Nice. Andrew, I have one pretty simple one, but I'm in the middle of a podcast right now that I'm really enjoying. We are currently recording it. So we're going to be in the middle of a podcast.

No, Claire found this podcast on Reddit. It's from like 2019, but it's about an actor who got hired for a role in Band of Brothers. And then Tom Hanks fired him after he already got hired because he saw his audition tape and said he has dead eyes. And so the entire... Why don't you want that for a band of brothers?

That's what everyone... A lot of people say that. It's like awful World War II movie. Or no, really good mini series about World War II, but lots of people in World War II are generally. But the whole thing is just him talking to other people in the movie industry that he knows that might know Tom Hanks and trying to figure out what this comment about dead eyes means to the point where he's, because it's 20 years ago at this point, that came out in like 2000. If the last episode doesn't end with him asking Tom Hanks to his face.

I, he, the, I'm on episode eight out of ten. So I'm getting really close to seeing if that's the, and I'm only assuming if people say this was a good podcast recommending that I'm hoping something along the life. He's tried to get in touch with the, the, what's it called? Why can I think of? The screening director or the casting director, thank you. but she didn't want to talk to him and now. But a lot of the people he knows know Tom Hanks, so I'm hoping Tom Hanks gets in here somewhere

so you can ask him about, it's like four lines in one episode, but it happens to be episode five of Band of Brothers. Tom Hanks directs, even though he's in it already. Can I ask a stupid question? What is this podcast called? It's called Dead Eyes.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I'll say that. Connor Radcliffe, I believe his name is. He's been in like a bunch of small things here and there. He's pretty, pretty, he has like, John Hamm on it. There's a lot of very impressive people on it. You mean Jonathan Hamon? Yes. Huge bad buddy fan. Yes, huge one. But yeah, I'm enjoying it. I love these podcasts that are hyper-focused on something that's so trivial, but if you can make 10 episodes out of it, it's like,

well, now I'm just invested. So stuff like that. I really enjoy. Yeah, shout to reply. I'll shout out. This is like serial for something that doesn't matter at all. Or only matters. to one person and it really affected their life 20 years ago. And that's fascinating. So I'm excited to finish it. But if you need a quick podcast. Yeah. After you finish this one.

After you can go out. After wait for him and you subscribe and listen to our whole backlog and let it play while you're sleeping. And then you can listen to dead eyes. Once you've gotten through the whole season. All right. Podcasts is what are yours? I'm so. Mine.

So. What's in the bag? Yeah, I brought my bag here. So at the beginning of the new year, I decided I wanted to have a year's resolution to learn a new skill. And I decided that that skill would be juggling. So at the beginning of the year, I bought a set of three juggling balls. How the f*** has none of us known this?

How did I never hear about this? We talked about juggling at work before. Yeah, so every day for the past six months, I've been juggling at the end of every day. And what I can report now is that I've gotten pretty good. at juggling these exact three items or items that are the same size and shape. So like three small oranges, I can juggle like a size things.

I will demo it for you. The goal for this should be by next year at any point when I'm at my desk I can just throw something to your desk and you say, what? No way! I now feel like I know nothing about it. That was pretty good.

What else are you hiding from us? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Dude, are you kidding me? Good for audio listeners, honestly. Broadhead listeners. Why? Can I try? Yeah.

I just thought it would be, so Rufus can juggle. I was like, it looks like fun to be able to juggle, but I also, kind of like a Rubik's Cube, I wanted to be able to try something that didn't have instructions. So like a Rubik's Cube, it would be fun to learn how to solve a Rubik's Cube, but it's basically just learning and memorizing a set of instructions. I wanted it to be a little bit creative. of like there's different, you see different types of juggling and like, we'll do different patterns and stuff like that.

Yeah. I think those still require instructions, but I've just been no instructions just like throwing them up in the air and figuring it out for the past couple months. So. Adam, you probably knows that. The brand. What is the brand? Duncan.

Yep, they make yo-yo's. Yeah, man. Yeah. Dunkin yo-yo's when we were in like fourth grade were. What do you mean? I still have one. You still have a Duncan yo-yo? You guys are into yo-yo's?

I'm hella into yo-dos. You guys are into yo-yo's too. I remember... I was so good at yo-yo. Dude, I could do a bunch of the... Can you? I can do that shit too, baby. How did this...

Do you want me to... Wait, we should... Sorry, a yo-yo core. Yeah. I didn't know you guys were any yo-yo's. Marquez is still juggling, by the way. This might be the oldest thing I've ever said, but when I was younger, I remember going to the five-and-dime and looking for a dunk and yo-yo in my town.

What's a... What's a five-and-dine? It's like a general store. I've never heard of five-end-dye. That's some un-st-st-st-stuff right there. There's a dollar tree here. Yeah, but five and dime is older Five and dimes were you, yeah

Like that pre-saint- Were they? Were they? Were they? In Raspberry Bray. I would like to remind everyone that this was Marquez's first of three things. Oh no, sorry, these are all three things.

Oh. It was a pun. I was like, what else have you been hiding for us? Yeah, sorry, that was it. That was the three things. Juggle sacks. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so what is your thing?

Adam. My, thank you for remembering my name. I couldn't remember it. I was, it's very. I blacked out. It's only been a decade. It's 150 degrees. It is 150 degrees.

I'm cooking in here, dude. My brain is on fire. Mine is just an audiobook that actually Andrew put me on to called Dungeon Crawler Carl. Oh. And I had mentioned to him a couple weeks ago how I've been seeing this book everywhere and I don't really know what it's about. Everyone's talking about it.

Dungeon Carl Carl is like a whole series. And he was like, he explained it to me in like two sentences in a way that made me instantly intrigued. And he was like, oh yeah. And the audiobook was pretty good. but I stopped listening to it because blah, blah, blah, blah. So I was like, okay, maybe I'll just start listening to the audiobook again. And the audiobook is more than pretty good.

It is amazing. It is really good. I just sometimes when my commute is too long, I find myself zoned out, and then I've missed however many minutes. And then it's so hard to find where I miss. But it's what it is to be an adult. Yeah. The reason it's everyone's talking about it's because they just announced a Netflix version. Maybe that's what it is.

Okay. Yeah, but it's really good. Great sound effects. Great direction. the main actor I forget his name I'm terrible but he acted his ass off

like it was so good yeah where do you listen to it what app deal unfortunately it is exclusive to audible so if you're on Spotify if you're on anything else you have to like pretty much

get old pocket cast had ebooks I know there's also like eight books yeah there's audio books out I believe I don't know how many actual books are I'm not there yet I'm on the third one dungeon crawler Carl yeah Andrew do you want to go

the synopsis? Because you're the one that sold it to me. Sounds terrible. I mean, it's like, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's a dungeon crawler game in book format. It's like a guy asked you enter a dungeon with random and, like, that doesn't sound good at all. Bosses and things. I know. I know.

It sounds really silly, but it's pretty well done in the way they describe everything. Like, they describe, like, he's walking and question mark pops up and he clicks question mark to, like, find, like, instructions. The way they do it all is really impressive. I've read the description so many times, and I was just like, this sounds dumb. It's like listening to a D&D game. Basically, yeah. It's like listening to a D&D game because I read it and I was like, yeah, no, not for me. And then when Andrew mentioned that he had been listening to it and he was like, oh, he really liked it.

I was like, oh, let me actually. To be fair, D&D is like all imagination and just imagining things in your head. So I guess Nadiabook would be good fodder. And it's not just like you're not just listening to a book of a guy playing. It's like the world has turned into this and the only people survive. have to go into like these dungeon gates that open up and then you start dungeon crawling in the sense of like there's levels and bosses. Jeff Hayes. That's the actor. Jeff Hayes. Incredible voice actor. Kills it. Okay. Cool. So that was mine. All right. I like this. I think we should be recommending

things more often. We used to do that as an opening segment. Yeah. We did. It was like a piece of content or a thing you want to share. Oh yeah. We've done that. Way long ago. A while ago. Oh. In the before times. Why are you guys getting your boards ready. What do you think is coming up? I have a feeling we might want to answer some trivia questions now. You have a pen? He's not wrong.

The pens keep getting relocated. Guys, what Japanese minimalist, minimalist, minimalist home goods brand? Did Pete Lau want One Plus to be the tech industry equivalent of Hit It?

Japanese. I feel like this is more what is the company the like ROM the Android ROM that became a Xiaomi it feels like more like like Xiaomi would be more of this you know why

well I can't give it away give it away give it away give it away now but I'll give it away later I'm interested yeah no I one plus never actually became anything Not even remote weird quote for 2014 I agree

All right Turn it around Oh Marquez, you put, is that the Japanese flag? Yep. It's not a bad artist's rendering. I mean, it's not a difficult flag to draw. Yeah, but it's red.

Give me some credit. You only has a black marker. Yeah, it's monochrome. Damn it. You had the red marker, too. That's, cut that, cut that. All right, Andrew, you put, that's incorrect. But David, you put, and Moji is the correct answer.

You've never even heard of Moogoo. You've never heard of Moogie. I forgot you guys love in New Jersey. They don't have Mugi in New Jersey? I don't know. Mugi rules. Is it? I'd say this looks just like Uniglo?

Yeah, kind of. No, but they sell less clothes than more others. More like home. My slippers. It's like world market. Uniglo? Yeah, but only Japan. No, and they make it everything.

They don't sell any non-Muji stuff. There is not a Mugi in New Jersey. Oh. That's what I said. I literally never. Wompwop. The slippers I have. There's one in Williamsburg.

Here. Mugi rules. Miji rules. I have a lot of their mixing bowls, and I own some Mugi slippers. Their stuff is really cheap and very good. And their pens, yeah, their stationery is really good. Yeah. All right.

So for the last question of this trivia season, are you guys ready? These two are. I have no idea. I actually don't. I thought I knew what it was. In 2017, Google released an AI camera. What was it called? I don't remember this.

I don't remember his name, though. not a king. I remember what it looked like. I remember it sitting in the middle of your house and swiveling around and looking at you, but I don't remember the name. It's swivel? It moved. It did not swiveled.

Or is this, no, sorry, I'm going to use two things. That's a different thing. But you are supposed to put it on your mantle and just kind of leave it there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that I'm definitely wrong. Yeah, whatever happened to mantles? You never hear about people in their mantles anymore. Well, I have a good man. Because we don't have homes.

I got a great apartment. You got a fireplace? Oh, I got a mantle. Damn. All right. Proven wrong. once again. He juggles.

He's got a mantle. You've got a mantle? I have a mantel. You've been to my house. Yeah, I have a fireplace. We barely use it because I'm afraid he's going to set the whole house in fire. But it looks sick and probably

will split lanes head open one day. Fun fact, the house I grew up in had a fireplace but no mantle. Anyway, we need to do the score because I'm hungry and we have a game show the right. And we have to show our. Flip him and read. What do you got?

Who wants to go first? That's what it was called. Yeah. Thank Marcus. I think. I wrote clicks, but that wasn't it. That was not it. That's the communicator.

Yeah. Andrew, would you write? I wrote solely. I think that's a good guess. That's not a good guess. A camera that's on all the time. But it was on a pixel 4XL. Yeah, and it sucked.

That's true. There's a long video. Tell us what it is, David. Okay. Google Clips. Correct. That's what it was. I was halfway there.

I stay winning. With that correct answer, the score is going into trivia. David with 35. Andrew with 28. And Marquez. with 32. I prefer to stay at 32. Adam, how old are you?

I'm unk. None of these scores are going to matter in the next, in 90 minutes. We'll see. Can we call this the preseason? Wow, that's very sports of you. I know ball. It's very sports of David

because he's still getting it wrong because it would be like regular season and we'd be going to playoffs. Perfect, perfectly wrong. Anyway, thanks for watching. Thank you for listening. And of course, if you made it this far into the episode, comment.

Your trade secrets. Comment your trade secrets down below. Don't do that. Bring them. No, comment the most important top secret trade secrets down below. In Minecraft. We will for sure not use them, but we'll think about maybe hiring you if you leave good ones. Anyway, catch you guys next week in our bonus episode, which will be trivia extravaganza.

See you soon. Pace. Waveform is produced by Adam Alina and Ellis Rovin. partnered with Vox Media Podcasts that work there, conditioners on, and we're also music by vein silk. Do you guys remember when everyone thought prompt engineer was going to be like

the new job everyone had? Yeah, now it's just designer.