Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the debate over the correct number of folds in a foldable phone.

I'm your friend David Pierce, and boy, is there a lot going on right now. So let me just lay some newsy stuff out because a lot of you are curious when we're going to talk about certain things. There's a lot going on.

There's a lot happening like right now this week. So let me just sort of lay out a bunch of newsy things going on. So over the last few days, there's been a lot of information coming out about Anthropic and Open AI and the Department of War in the United States. That is a really important and complicated topic that we're going to get into, but it felt like that's worth giving a little bit of time. So we're going to talk about that a bunch on Friday show, and then we're going to have Hayden Field on to talk about it next Tuesday. This is an important moment in the AI story, and it felt worth, you know, taking a minute to get it right. There's also a bunch of Apple stuff happening this week, potentially by the time you've ever heard this on Tuesday, we're expecting new iPads, new iPhones, new MacBooks potentially, maybe a touched one. I'm not holding my breath for that. But what we're going to do is Apple is having an event on Wednesday. And Nila and I are both going, and we're pretty sure that that's just going to be to touch the things Apple has announced. And so we're going to go and then we're going to come back and immediately do a podcast about that. And I think, don't hold me to this, but I think we're going to do it live. We've been wanting to do more sort of emergency podcast type things. We've been wanting to do more live shows. We're just going to test a bunch of stuff on Wednesday. And if it breaks, so be it. We'll see what happens. And then the other one going on is the Paramount deal to buy Warner Brothers, which is now no longer the Netflix deal to buy Warner Brothers. That is a big ongoing thing that broke. After we recorded the podcast last week, there is just a ton going on. Expect an awful lot of that on Friday's show.

But every once in a while, we have to just make a Vergecast about phones. You know what I mean?

There's been a lot of phones. Samsung had an event last week. Mobile World Congress is this week.

So we're just going to talk about phones today. We're going to do two things. Allison Johnson,

from the Verge, who was at the Samsung event and is now at MWC, is going to come on and talk to us about all the phones she's been seeing and what it means for 2026. Then the Verge's Jess Weatherbed is going to come on and talk about a new accessory that is not that new in some places, but is very new in the United States and might change the way that we think about our phones. after that we have a really fun fun hotline question about the Metaverse, because this is the Vergecast, and after all, what else do we talk about here? All that is coming up in just a second, but first, I just dug out this pixel fold, and I have to charge it and use it because people keep telling me flip phones and foldable phones are the future. We'll see.

This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.

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