Bluesky's quest to be the next Twitter

28:15Yeah, I agree. Like, Twitter isn't not—like, Elon's mistake with Twitter has always been believing it's a monopoly. And I think right now—you can just look at the numbers. People are leaving Twitter to join Blue Sky. And, like, that means it's not a monopoly. Yeah, I tend to think all of this is going to be a blip in the direction of something else, right? And it's like what we've learned so far is that leaving Twitter is harder for a lot of people than we think. Everybody who goes to a new platform loves to talk about the new platform. And then once the novelty of the thing dies down, it's very hard to know what to do.

28:58Right. Like I feel like to some extent we had the same feelings about Mastodon in the early days. And it was like maybe this is the thing. It has different values. I want to be clear. I never had that feeling. No. 1 ,000 % never had that feeling of a mask on. Then why do you have it about Blue Sky? I think, do you know that Steve Jobs quote about Microsoft and taste? I hope listeners know what I'm talking about. There's this very famous Steve Jobs video. It's like young Steve Jobs. And it's in his wilderness period. After he got fired from Apple, he was at Next. And he was a little more bombastic than usual because he was constantly trying to sell the next thing and prove himself.

29:33Whatever. I'm just contextualizing the quote. They asked about Microsoft. and he said the problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste and he looks very pleased with himself and he said I don't mean that in a small way I mean that in a big way right they just the company doesn't have taste it doesn't have a sense of what it is doing or how it should feel yeah and I've always felt that Mastodon lacks that particular kind of taste like it is software threads has no taste in a big way I like the people who are making threads I've talked to them. They've shown up at Verge parties. We threw a funeral for Twitter.

30:08The night team was there. It was great. They're cool. As a company, Meta does not have taste. There's a reason Mark Zuckerberg is like wearing Roman fonts on his shirts and signing deals with Ray-Ban because they need to buy taste. They need to demonstrate taste because it does not exist in their products. They've also decided several times that having taste is dangerous. And the only way to get as big as meta has gotten is to not have taste like it's they made a business decision to not have any taste i challenge anyone to open the facebook app and be like i sense taste here right blue sky largely is a clone of twitter so like i'm not i'm not imputing taste onto that twitter had design like twitter had famous designers like important parts of culture came out of the user base of twitter filtered through twitter's designers and product people and then out into to the world, right?

31:01The at mention, the hashtag, like all this stuff is stuff Twitter took from its community, productized, put design around, and then gave to the world. Pull to refresh was a third party. Yeah, Tweety. Twitter app mechanic that Twitter bought and they signed a patent pledge so that anybody could use it. So they have the patent on it, but they won't use it. But that is like part of the culture now. Like pull to refresh is like an app mechanic. Yeah. Actually, if you like spend a lot of time thinking about it, has led to an entire culture. Blue Sky's design is a lot of copies, but you can see it in the people who are making it.

31:36They have taste. They have a very clear sense about what the product should be and how it should make people feel. And that is why they talk about composable moderation. That's why Jay's go-to response when you ask her about what does that mean is I have a custom feed that just shows me moss. Like, kinds of moss that I like. Like, they're weirdos and posters. And I think that's why they attracted a bunch of weirdos and posters. I think that's why they've leaned into being weirdos and posters and like having that community there. I think that's why a culture has been built like slowly in the way that cultures on platforms get built.

32:08I don't know if any of it will be successful, but when you ask me like, what's the difference? It's, I just think about that quote. It's like, oh, they're, they don't have taste. And I mean that in a big way. Yeah. No, I, I, I agree with that in large ways. I think the challenge there is like, Do you know the 99-1 rule? This is, I don't know where it came from, but it's now like a truism of all sort of social posting platforms that 90 % of people are the audience, right? They never post. They never do anything. They're just there to look. 9 % of people are kind of light interactors. They might post a little bit.

32:44They like things. They reply to things, whatever. But they're sort of around and making their presence known. And then 1 % of people do the vast majority of the things that the other 99 % of people are there for. The problem I think we have right now is that Blue Sky is doing a really good job of appealing to that 1%. Like the people, or maybe it's the 9%, I don't know, the people who like live to post love Blue Sky. And Blue Sky is built for those people. And it is fun. And it is exciting. And the vibes are good. And you want to participate. but that's that is a small percentage of the thing the 90 is who meta builds for better than any other company on planet earth right like that is what has made instagram successful it is what has made facebook successful the meta builds platforms that you come to and do nothing but you come to them over and over and over and over again and so you look at ads and so meta makes a ton of money but that's why meta has to go to weird algorithmic feeds where you open instagram and none of your friends are there anymore.

33:43And it's just creators bootlegging video clips of 80s movies. Right, but so this is the thing, right? Can you build a place that is both fun to post and full of good stuff every time you open the app? I'm honestly not sure that it is. And I think, again, we go back to like the magic of Twitter. Twitter at its peak did both of those things. You could have a Twitter experience that felt like lively and real time and interactive and exciting. and you could also show up and see what The Rock was talking about. Like none of these things that we have now do both of those things. None of them. All right, let me point a few things out just because I know the Vergecast listeners are screaming in their cars right now, weaving all over the road.

34:24One, any criticism of Elon's handling of Twitter is not praise for the previous administration, who by and large is a bad job. Clown car goldmine. Right, so there's that. Could not agree more. Two, they never made any money, even though they had whatever success you're describing. And three, the service at its peak was like 300 some million users. Yeah, but it was the single most cable news was people reading tweets. Like, yeah, it just was like there was a decade in our culture that was mediated by Twitter in a very real way. That if you wanted to share information with a lot of people, no matter who you were, a famous person, a government, a company, you went on Twitter.

35:05You just did. And it's still true because the vestiges of that are still so powerful. And nothing coming up now looks like it has a chance to replace that. Yeah. And I don't think it should. I'm just going to keep coming back to that. I think it would be better if we all owned our own distribution or we built a distribution network that allowed people to come and go more freely. That's what the web is. Until Google search became this hegemon that sort of made the web look exactly how it's going to look. Like that's the web. That's RSS. I think we're on the cusp of doing it. It's a podcast. By and large, that is - Listen, we've made it this far and I haven't brought up Google Reader yet.

35:43And so I won't. All right, we gotta get off this. Can I just read you some user numbers before we go? I went and pulled the user numbers for all of these platforms and I just found them fascinating. And I just wanna read them all out loud because it's useful context for everything we've talked about. So Threads, as we mentioned, as of October 30th, when Meta reported earnings, has 275 million active users. What that means is always hard to know how companies measure these things is different across the board in all ways, but that's the number they reported and they're getting a million signups a day.

36:18Blue Sky, today, Wednesday, as we're recording this, passed 15 million total users. And yesterday, on Tuesday the 12th, had 798 ,142 unique posters, which is people who actually posted a thing, which I love as a metric and I think everyone should do it uh and 990 ,464 unique likers so that's a decent like balance of who's here and who's doing stuff Mastodon this is the one that really surprised me uh and why I wanted to do this has 9 ,034 ,753 total users as of today 886 ,711 than active users. Like Mastodon, and you go look at this, a lot of this stuff comes from like open APIs that these things have.

37:05They just ping every day. You can see how they go. Mastodon had that big bump, real momentum after the Twitter thing happened with Elon Musk. And it had a moment and it just lost all of that momentum. And it has settled back slightly higher than it was before. It went from like a half a million active users every day to 886 ,000 active users every day, which is not nothing but like that's also not momentum two years later like mastodon just kind of lost it and i feel like right now we got a ton of people who are asking us like oh where should i go and i feel like the only two answers i would even think about at this moment are blue sky and threads and i would tell you like go to blue sky is more fun and threads is easier i guess the place i'd land i don't even know if it's easier the blue sky app is the number one app in the store today, mostly because, speaking of cable news, Chris Hayes brought it up on MSNBC last night and said, I really like Blue Sky.

37:58And they had a bump. The Blue Sky devs were pointing out that this made the line go up. So it's the number one app in the store today. People are leaving. The thing about Blue Sky is that right now is it's self-contained. There isn't another at protocol server. It's on Blue Sky. And I feel like the Mastodon number is a little bit confusing because all those people on Mastodon have the ability to see content from threads. right true because that is the promise of federation so it kind of doesn't matter if that number stagnates as long as the threads number goes up because you're still being able to follow threads depending on your mass on server and this is the complexity it's all weird but if your mass on server interoperates with threads as long as threads numbers keep going up you have the ability to follow and interact with all those people or you will over time so there there's some promise of federation here that i think skews these numbers but the one thing that is clear is that a smaller number of bad people are interacting in higher rates on twitter yes x it's weird it's a weird time but i think the shakeup is going to be good i think it is time to think about distribution on the internet in way different ways particularly as the creator platforms just shove creators and influencers around and like start adding i opened my instagram yesterday and it was like do you want to make an ai of yourself to talk to your fans and I you know you super did it I was like yeah sure do ask them for money make sure that it's pay pay me money um I that is a response to creators feeling burned out that's what that's why that button is there it's because creators have complained about it for so long they're burned out doing all the things that's you and the platforms are just going to be more extractive and if just some handful of I don't know creators publications whatever mixture of things is like we're actually going to make this a little more open, I think we'll be in a much better place.

39:49I agree. Also, The Verge is on Blue Sky now. Go follow us on Blue Sky. We are. And we got to start a pack. We got the whole thing. Yeah. Open distribution. All right, we got to take a break. We're going to come back with a new segment we call Show & Tell. We'll be right back. Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin? or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app.

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41:31All right, we're back. Kylie Robinson is here. Hi, Kylie. Hello. Welcome to the Virtue House. Have we been on the show together yet? No, I don't think so. well spooky there was a reason that's so rude uh you're here we're gonna do a new segment we're calling show and tell are we actually calling it show and tell david we're calling it that until someone calls or emails with a better name uh we've had very good luck in the past letting smarter people than us name things for us so please if you have a better idea call the hotline send us an email name this segment for us all right so here's what we're gonna do during the presumptively named show and tell.

42:12All of us are going to bring one story to the table. We're going to say what it is, and then we're going to talk about it. But it has to be good. Oh, God. So we're putting David on the spot first. David, what's your story this week? I feel like we have to talk about the Square iPad. You mentioned it briefly at the top, but this is the only thing I can think about, so we have to talk about this now. So we've been hearing rumors and reporting for a long time that Apple was really interested in getting into the smart home. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, who is better at reporting what Apple is going to do than everybody, had a big story this week about what this thing is going to be.

42:53Apple is essentially building a smart home controller that is going to live inside of your house. Can I just read you several sentences from this article? And I would like you to tell me what device it sounds like I am describing. First, I've been called Show and Tell. I feel like this is a little backwards in that you're reading and then I'm describing what I think you've shown me. But let's go ahead. It's a tell and show. It's fine. Don't worry about it. Other people are going to name this for us. So Mark Irwin says, it's about the size of two iPhones side by side with a thick edge around the display.

43:24There's also a camera at the top front, a rechargeable built-in battery and internal speakers. Apple plans to offer it in silver and black options. If you're already thinking, gosh, I know what David is describing, I have more for you. The product has a touch interface. The company expects most people to use their voice to interact with the device, relying on the Siri digital assistant and Apple intelligence. The product will be marketed as a way to control home appliances, chat with Siri, and hold intercom sessions with FaceTime. It will also be loaded with Apple apps, including ones for web browsing, listening to news updates, and playing music.

43:53Users will be able to access their notes and calendar information, and the device can turn into a slideshow display for their photos. Do you know what device I'm describing? Is it a$320 iPad? It's an iPad. Apple is going to make an iPad and they're going to sell it to you to use in your house. Let me read you the thing that is actually new and is actually interesting. If you just imagine an iPad, Mark Gurman writes this in his story. He says, Apple has designed different attachments for the device, including ones that affix the screens onto walls like a classic home security panel. There will be bases with additional speakers that can be placed in the kitchen, on a nightstand, or on a desk.

44:27Apple imagines the FaceTime feature being used while cooking or for video conferencing during work meetings. A, still just an iPad. Honestly, it sounds very much like the thing Apple is going to make is a bad iPad that it wants to sell you lots of for your house. B, an accessory ecosystem of cool new things that you can add to your iPad just by docking it on these different docks around your house is a kick-ass idea that Apple should totally do. just not with a stupid six inch bad iPad. I'm like losing my mind about this thing. I just want to say out loud, I've said this many times before, Apple is horrible at accessory ecosystems actually.

45:05It's just a thing. It's just reality. How many smart keyboard covers are there for the iPad today? Oh, I agree. Zero. Belkin has become like the official Apple accessory maker because Apple either can't or won't do it itself. Well, Belkin is owned by Foxconn. So you get the idea that every now and again, an Apple designer goes in the Foxconn factory and is like, I have a number of ideas.

45:30There's something real there, I find. But great. And a third-party ecosystem of like weird docks and adapters. Everybody wants this to exist for every Apple product, and they just don't. Sure. But like I just have to keep reading. The newly designed operating system will also include a customizable home screen where users can run widgets for checking stock tickers, the weather, and appointments. That's an iPad. or they can configure the screen to highlight key home controls ipad there will also be a doc for quickly launching favorite apps and a screen grid of software icons it's an ipad i look in all fairness ipad again mark bloomberg is a very traditional news organization and carmen has to hit a word count also none of this is this is all very good reporting from german the fact that this is saying this is very good reporting it's just apple is just going to make an ipad again and they're going to try to sell it to you as a new thing because it can dock on a speaker.

46:24That's nothing. Make the iPad better. They're going to cut down the interface, right, to make it more smart homey. You're going to let people talk to, you know, the presumably smarter Siri. That's a thing that could happen. During development, Apple discussed launching an app store as part of the device, but it recently decided to exclude this feature, at least in the initial version. It's an iPad without the app store, so it's just worse. I'm just going to point out that a couple weeks ago, we had Joanna Stern on the show and we talked about garage door openers for five hours. And Apple's dreams of making a smart home product are going to run head first into the reality of smart home products.

46:59Yes. That's what's going to happen. Which is? They're, it's impossible. Fascinating. That's the whole answer. That really is the whole answer. Very smart people get tripped up at whether the smart part of the light bulb should be in the light bulb or the switch. And there are religious arguments for both. there are good reasons to do it. In my own home, I have both. Yeah. I have smart light bulbs and I have smart switches. And no one in my family that literally I'm trying to illuminate knows why or how any of it works. Yeah. And so you put the thing on the wall and you're like, now your house is smart.

47:33You end up having to tell a bunch of consumers where a bunch of other computers in their houses have to go. Yeah. And that just falls, it just falls flat immediately. So would you guys not do this though? This is not something, because all I'm thinking as you say this, is don't hate the player, hate the game. There's going to be a dozen people in this office who buy this. It feels like it's just going to happen. Sure. But if you're Apple, you have this tablet lineup that is very mature and full of identity crises. And what if instead you just took the thing and said, now here's a doc that makes it have an always on screen.

48:14and thus you can control all the things you can still control from your iPad. Like, it's just, it's such a tiny leap from an iPad to this. I think the reason you don't do it if you're Apple is because you can sell a bad iPad a lot cheaper than you can sell a good iPad. And so they're going to make a bad iPad and stick it to your wall. Fine. There's also, German has been reporting that the next version of it is going to have a robotic arm and cost$1 ,000. Like, sure, that's all fine and good. But I think there is a really interesting case to be made that you could turn an iPad, which is already for most people kind of statistically speaking like a homebound device.

48:52It is a thing that lives on your bedside table or on your couch or on your coffee table. Like it's not as portable a thing as it maybe is presumed to be in a lot of ways. You could just turn that up a little bit and turn it into something really cool and powerful with this accessory ecosystem. But instead, Apple is going to reinvent the entire wheel in a way that just feels ridiculous to me. I'm excited for you to buy an iPad that you stick to your world. Yeah. I think you're going to love it. You're going to love talking to Siri and be like, Siri, do this automation. And then Siri is not going to work.

49:25And you're like, what is the answer? Then you're going to Google it. And the answer, for some reason, is going to be restarting your iPhone, which is 100 % the Apple home story. A big part of this feels like what you do when you build all of this other AI stuff. like the app intense stuff that Apple is working on with Siri, this new Siri, all the Apple intelligence stuff. And you go, hmm, what is any of this actually useful for? This is the same thing, by the way, that Google did with Google Assistant and Amazon did with Alexa. And you realize, oh, it's just you can turn off two sets of lights at once instead of one set of lights.

49:59And that Apple is running directly towards that and nowhere else. I do want to call it the number of listeners who responded to our Joanna conversation on garage door openers in which he said Craig Fegariti uses Siri to open his garage door by pointing out that there is zero percent chance that Craig Federighi has an Apple Home home and instead definitely has a custom Crestron home automation system. Yeah. Oh, great. The emails we got that were like, you all understand that there's a custom that this man has a Crestron system. Anyhow. All right. You've shown, you've told. Do I give you a score?

50:40Seven. I'm leaving now. It's the meanest thing you've ever said to me. Jesus. It's a new segment. We're figuring out how it works. All right, Kylie, what do you have? Oh, my God. It's going to be hard to top. A seven? No, bad iPad. Well, now I'm talking about scaling laws, which are really interesting. Everyone's reporting this week that scaling laws are failing. So what that is is just put more compute and more data into an LLM, and it will get bigger, better, smarter. And everyone has the same training data, which is the Internet, the entire Internet, and all of our work. So they have all that.

51:27They're all building sort of the same thing. And they are all finding Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, that it is not working anymore. That they are not getting better than their last generation of models. And they're all pissing their pants about it. That's the story this week. I think this is, I keep thinking about that tweet, which is like, you know, the haters said I couldn't do it. And they were right. Great call from the haters. I think all of the AI skeptics are like, yeah, we told you. We told you that this wasn't something you could scale infinitely. So, yeah, I don't think it's like doomsday, like it's over for AI.

52:06But still, it's interesting that they're all sort of frustrated that they can't make that giant next leap. And it costs so much money. So if people, if they want to release something that costs so much money for people to use, it's got to be way better. And it's just not. So the idea here is, okay, we made an MGBT4 by training on the entire internet. We'll get more data, which was always confusing to me where the more data would come from. Yes. Synthetic data. So we'll make some fake AI data. Yes. We'll train an even bigger model, and that one will necessarily be smarter. Yes. And that just hasn't worked out.

52:37And it hasn't worked out. It does not appear that any of them are going to be more capable than the last. So that means, you know, for instance, I believe it was reported that O1 was helping train the next generation of OpenAI's GPT models. But that has become a problem because then, you know, it just gets confused by synthetic data. It's not high quality data. So, yeah, they're all running into that same issue. and that means that there's going to be, there's going to have to be some like research breakthrough that gets them to that next step that they don't currently have. And there's just tons of money riding on this for them to figure it out.

53:17So I think they're all, again, pissing their pants over it. As one of the haters, I definitely feel like I should say I told you so. This so exposes to be something, Kylie, that you've been saying to us and on the VertCast for forever, which is there has been this ongoing line from all of these AI companies that it's like, we're going to do a model and we're going to do another model and we're going to do another model and we're going to do another model and then it's god and it's like well what what's what is it going to be on the way and they're like don't worry about it god none of this shit matters because god we're going to make god and then you're going to feel dumb for not giving us money and what happens now is they're going to get to the point where they're like okay you've built this thing it's actually very cool it's very capable it can do lots of things what's it for what are people going to do with it and all these companies are like emails we're gonna write some bomb emails yes and we're like we are going to be stuck in this what can you do with this phase for a lot longer than any of these companies would like you to believe well there's that but there's just also this week right dario mode from anthropic is telling lex friedman that we'll have agi in like two years yes sam altman i think in the past couple weeks has said on current hardware we can have AGI which by the way it means the tech industry should stop like if you can make current if you can make God on NVIDIA's current hardware we should we should stop yeah yeah we did it we're good we're done let God build the next version of the GPU like it'll be here soon totally the God processing unit If you're like, if I just put enough H100s in a room, I can have God.

54:57NVIDIA should just slow the fuck down. Sure. Right? And there's something very incompatible with in two years we'll have AGI. I can build AGI in current hardware. And the bigger models we just trained aren't more capable than the previous models. Yes. Is that what's going on? I've been asked on Vergecast, or sorry, I think it was Decoder, should we trust them? And I mean, I, as a journalist, am just very skeptical. So Dario's saying, you know, we're going to get AGI, it's going to do all these beautiful things. And I mean, they just have to sell products at the end of the day. The Reddit AMA that Sam Altman did recently, where he said, oh, it's really hard to release these things in parallel.

55:40We have like such limited compute and it's hard to work on all of these things. But the next big thing I think is going to be agents. It just feels like they're pivoting. They're like, don't look at this. Don't look at this right here. We haven't figured it out. Just don't think about agents on current hardware, current models. Look at that. Please give us money. Don't look at how we are failing to make the next big model. And I don't think we need a next bigger model. I think we really enjoyed these companies, really enjoyed making these huge leaps from model to model. and if they're capable enough now of achieving some good emails, then fine.

56:18They think that they can combine, you know, the GPT series with the O reasoning series and perhaps get AGI. Again, I think all of this is to sell more products and get more money. That has always been my position. So, yeah. I just want to read you the quote from Daria. If you believe the straight line extrapolation will have artificial general intelligence in 2026 or 2027. Right. If line go up forever, I will make God. Have you guys seen the tweet from the guy? I'm sorry. I don't remember who it is. We'll find it and put it in the show notes. He has two pictures of him with his newborn baby and then his baby, who's now three months old.

56:57He's like, wild, guys. My baby has doubled in weight in three months. At this rate, by his 10th birthday, he'll be 7 trillion pounds. I think about that every single time somebody talks about one of these things. Like it's really and people talk about this stuff as if it is guaranteed. Like you look at Moore's law, right? And this this thing that has like governed technology, technological progress for so long. We now take it as truth that everything that grows grows the same way and forever. And it just doesn't like there is no guarantee that any of this will work like that just because the way we make semiconductors works like that.

57:31It's just not how it works. Okay, to add to this too, you know how Sam Altman was going across the world trying to get these trillion dollar data centers built somewhere. Someone give me the money to build these data centers so I can power digital God. There was a story in the information today that a competitor flew like a crop plane over XAI's data center to figure out how he was cooling those chips because they're so scared about liquid cooling and it's so confusing. And I thought that's crazy that we're getting to a point where people are just flying, you know, little planes over Elon's data center to figure out how the fuck they can build Digital God in the same way.

58:11It's just such a funny thing. The next Mission Impossible movie is just Tom Cruise breaking into a data center to figure out how they power all this stuff. I think that was the last Mission Impossible movie. It was. David, what was that? It was underwater. You're exactly right. It was that. Oh, my God. They did that all day. Fast and Furious in space, man. By the way, if you look on all the streaming services, they've taken part one off of that movie because it ends on such a garbage cliffhanger that people are mad. Yeah, they're like, never mind. We're just doing a different one. It's just a full movie.

58:47I don't know, man. All right, Kyle, you've shown, you've told. Yes. David, I think you have to score this one. Two and a half.

58:58But that's out of three, to be clear. Sorry, you're so jealous. We didn't say what our scoring metric was. We actually didn't say that we were scoring. Nila gave me a seven out of 10. I'm giving you a two and a half out of three. Perfect. And then we'll see. Actually, you get like the Netflix one thumb up, but not the two thumbs up. It's like a like it but not a love it kind of thing. You know what I mean? So that's your score. Digital God, David. We can do it on current hardware. I want to say this as directly as I can. If you believe we can build AGI and current hardware, the tech industry should stop.

59:26We should just stop doing everything and focus on that one goal so that digital God can design the next iPhone. But I don't think that's true. Right. That claim just implies you should stop working. and let, you know, AGI do it for you. Please, I beg you, let AGI write about Donald Trump for the next four years. It'll be, everyone can take a break. All right, here's mine. Just the series of words is so silly. Just Eat is selling Grubhub to Wonder. What? None of those words make any sense. So Grubhub, as you know, is the delivery service. It's like probably the one that you are most familiar with.

1:00:06They bought Seamless a while ago, so it's all the same app. That was such a New Yorker thing to say, by the way. Grubhub is the one, is such a New York-centric thing to say. None of these words were in the Bible. I don't know what's going on. Yeah. I don't know what's going on. It's like in LA, it's just Postmates, but nowhere else. SF is, I think, probably still like a DoorDash town. DoorDash, yeah. This is like when you live in New York, it was like, oh, just seamless it. And it's like, that's nothing. That's not a word that exists. When we moved to New York from Chicago. Anyway, it doesn't matter.

1:00:40These are all nonsense words and failing businesses that are just selling each other in different configurations. What I want to get to is they're selling it to a company called Wonder, which is owned by a part owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves and a former Walmart VP. And Wonder's business model is bananas. Perfect. He licenses recipes from famous chefs. So you're like, yes. What? So Wonder is like a high-end food hall, and it's a ghost kitchen with like famous restaurants' logos on the front. So you go in there, and you're like, here's all these like famous local restaurants, or like restaurants I've heard of that like celebrities go to.

1:01:21So Wonder licenses recipes from famous chefs. So you open Wonder, and there's Bobby Flay's Steak. There's Street Bird by Marcus Samuelson. uh there is detroit brick pizza there's all this stuff um defaro pizza which is like a famous new york pizza place isn't there but they don't actually make the food they license the recipes and they have one big commissary kitchen that like pre-makes the food so good and then it goes to the food hall where they with like steam baths and microwaves reheat the food and assemble it and deliver it to you or serve it in the food hall. So they've like commoditized the famous chef's recipe at industrial scale.

1:02:04And now they're going to buy Grubhub and they're going to bring that model to an even bigger delivery system. And it's like, oh, this is wild. Wow. Like the reason that the chefs are famous is because you think Jose Andres is going to make you the food. Yeah. And now he's just licensed a recipe so someone else can steam bath the food to you and send it to you. And we don't know how much they're making off these licenses that hasn't leaked. Wow. And it's also just to be clear, some of it's very expensive because it's famous chefs. So you're buying. But it's not famous chefs. This is like a knockoff version of eating dinner in a Vegas casino.

1:02:37Right. Where it's like a bunch of restaurants that all claim to be, you know, run by famous people, but it just has their name on it. It's like getting this is the equivalent of getting room service from a Bobby Flay restaurant in a Vegas casino. know well Gordon Ramsay burger is delicious let's be clear I'm sure some of this stuff is good it's just it also isn't the point of going to Gordon Ramsay burger places the like vibe like getting take out Gordon Ramsay seems just wrong no that's gross well I mean you want to be screamed at in the face by Gordon Ramsay exactly to some extent the Vegas version of the chain restaurants Like the Vegas Carbone, some people think is the best Carbone because it just like moves the most business and there's the most dumb money flowing through it.

1:03:28Sure. Fine. This is very much like we're going to half make the famous pizza, send it to a food hall, and then a steam oven will finish the famous pizza. Right. And then we will put that on Grubhub. And, you know, it's just like, oh, this is the end point of a very particular business model that started with cloud kitchens. Right. where you like open the delivery app right and it's actually chuck e cheese and then people are like what if you didn't even have the chuck e cheese and they're like but then you still you can't just have like wings.com or whatever was in the so now you need bobby flay's name next to it and you're just kind of like oh this is this circle is getting real weird it's all of that but it ends it like a golden corral buffet is essentially the end point of this whole system donald trump's america every restaurant is carbon have you seen people joking about how They don't want DoorDash coming in like a Nissan Altima.

1:04:20They want it in an Uber Black. Like, this is that same thing. Are you serious? It's just like sending an Uber Black to a commissary to get your food. Like, what is the point anymore? I feel like we've just reached a new level of consumerism that is absolutely absurd. And I'm pure point. It's not absurd enough yet. I would like every part of this process to feel fancy, but actually not be fancy at all. Right. Exactly. I want to think it's expensive, even though it sucks. I just like the idea that you would order any steak from a delivery app has always seemed odd to me. Like, it's just, that's not, that's not a great environment for a steak to be in, like, in the back of an Nissan Altima for a while.

1:05:00I feel the same way about delivery sushi. Like, yeah, not about it. Sorry, I can't really. Like, do you know why Meryl Streep was angry in The Devil Wears Prada? Because she was having delivery steak for lunch every day. Such a good point. All right, that's it. I've shown, I've told. Wait, can I add one more thing to this? Yeah. So four years ago, when there was some other stuff going on in the world, Just Eat, which was then called Just Eat Takeaway, because sure, bought Grubhub for$7.3 billion and is now selling it to Wonder for$650 million. I don't know enough about this world to really process why that is, but that is a giant loss in four years.

1:05:43Yeah, I don't remember the last time I used Grubhub, maybe 2020. I mean, it might have been. So it makes sense to me. Well, and Just Eat Takeaway was, for a minute, they were like, it was called Just Eat Takeaway because that was the combination of two businesses. And it was supposed to be the, like, giant delivery conglomerate that was going to eat everything. And that just has not panned out for anybody. I mean, the margins can't be good, right? I know nothing about this world, but it's... I'm guessing the margins on selling microwave Gordon Ramsay is... Well, that's probably better than... I may not say Gordon Ramsay name.

1:06:16I'm sure the margin on selling microwave bobby fly is like very good. That's probably a better business idea than people enslaved to McDonald's on motorcycles. Well, and all of these companies have said for years in like Uber and DoorDash among them that shipping food and stuff is a much higher margin business around a city than people. Right. Like giving humans rides is not nearly as good a business as moving steak around for a huge profit. so like you can see it i there was just gonna be this time when all of these companies were competing and whoever won was going to be a giant and it was going to be epic and they were going to be the biggest company in the world and what actually seems to have happened is it's a bunch of like reasonably successful but fairly low margin businesses yeah that works well in some places and not in others the vc dollars were not able to buy monopolies and then raise the prices exactly the business model for, in particular, Uber for a long time.

1:07:17Yep. But look, again, this is just the words I'm using. Just Eat has sold Grubhub to wonder is a sentence that you now understand. I don't want to understand it. I want to go back. Give me a score. Three Michelin stars. Very good. Wow. That means I'm now a raging asshole and I can't be stopped. I'm a made man. No, I'm going to put you in the ring with Bobby Flay and then we'll figure it out from there. It's all over. Yes, chef. Yes, chef. We got to stop. That's it. That was show and tell. We have to take a break. Thank you, Kylie. We'll be right back. When it comes to what your family eats and drinks, you know your choices matter.

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1:08:49Lemo, Lemo! And Doug. Here we have the Lemo, Lemo in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.

1:09:22We're back. The lightning round. I have news. It's not today, but I'm told the lightning round is sponsored. It's very exciting. Big money. We're going to be doing this podcast from a yacht starting sometime soon. It was sponsored by a boat show. If you run a boat show and you'd like to sponsor the Lighting Room, please let me know. Talk about a sponsor integration, which we are ethically not allowed to do. I have been trying to come up with a reason to go to the Monaco Yacht Show for journalism for approximately my entire journalism career. I've always said that the main thing I want to do is figure out a reason to expense drugs.

1:09:57uh figure out a journalistically real reason to go to the monaco yacht show is now number one on my list you've mellowed in your old age yeah i just want to be on a boat now i just sober on a boat seems great it's very good uh all right lightning round uh what do you think you you have selected three things in the lightning round which is the least lightning round thing i could imagine so uh why don't you go first and do one uh okay so my first one which i just want to talk about very quickly um it's something a bunch of people have asked me about this week uh and it's ethics and disclosure so talk about this for as much as anybody wants me to talk about it and we'll move on to more fun lightning round ones um but this week marquez brownley made a video as a sponsored video and the video is speeding his car people got all mad about it we wrote about it because marquez is a huge character in tech we write about other creators all the time uh we think our audience wants to know and keep up with the thing so we wrote about it here's what's happening.

1:10:53If you read the story, it's pretty straight. It's on the website. Here's some stuff that happened. Here's the coverage of it. Marquez, we wrote about his wallpaper app recently too. There's whatever controversy. I don't want to dwell on the video or what happened in the video or any of that stuff. What people are asking about is that I think it's Waveform, right? Marquez's podcast. At the end of it or at the beginning of it, they say this is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And so people are asking, do we need to disclose this? Should we disclose this in the story? Should we talk about it now?

1:11:19As I think for chess listeners know, I got no problems with disclosures. Disclosures all night and all day. I think we should be as transparent as possible about potential sources of conflicts. I think we should earn people's trust as just transparently as we can. We talk about the making of journalism more than any other traditional journalist that I can think of. We certainly do more disclosures than any traditional media or any influencers do all the time. I have literally no problem with this. I'm happy to disclose it. The thing that we're running into right now is like, when and why do we disclose things?

1:11:50And so in this case, the Vox Media Podcast Network is an ad sales network, right? If you start a podcast and you just like go onto YouTube or you go into Spotify's platform or whatever, you're kind of, unless you have big scale, you're kind of stuck with programmatic advertising, whatever the platforms will give to you. And if you want better advertising, you want more money, you need scale. So you join a podcast network that has a lot of inventory across a lot of shows. And then our sellers go out and sell that inventory and then you make more money or whatever. I actually don't know because that's the other side of the house, right?

1:12:23So the conflict here doesn't exist. Like our sales team is selling ads, which they do on our own website that we don't know about, that they do on the show that we basically don't know about. As many of you have heard, sometimes we just run the same ad 500 times in a row. Like there's a wall between us and sales and we are very, very, very protective of that. wall. Our coverage often loses them money because various companies are mad at our coverage and they walk away with deals. I've personally cost this company a bunch of money. But that's the whole point of the wall, right? It's to keep our newsroom away from any of those considerations so that we can just write about what's happening and have editorial independence and freedom.

1:13:05And we can, it's like the first line of our ethics policy is like, is the editorial independence that allows us to cover companies critically without fear or favor or whatever. That's the thing that's the most important. That's the, truly the heart of this whole operation is the independence. So what we disclose is where there's a plausible connection to some conflict in our newsroom. So Comcast, NBCUniversal is an investor in our company. They're on our board of directors. They can want to fire me. Right, they can. They don't like me a lot. they might right like they can have a board meeting and say we should fire this guy that is a plausible imposition on our newsroom it has never happened you know we've been running this thing for 13 years but that's plausible I think you can you can fairly look at our company and say they're at the top of it the verge is talking about Comcast maybe they'll get him fired maybe he's shading the coverage fine so we disclose it I made a Netflix show this is just like an open conflict of interest, right?

1:14:10Like every time I talk about Netflix, I should point out that I made a Netflix show. I didn't get paid for it because the company made it, but you know, whatever, I still made the show. Great, like I think that's fine. That's a totally rational conflict of interest. There's a plausible connection to the thing and the conflict. There's a million of these. We disclose them all the time. This one, there isn't a plausible conflict. The actually more plausible conflict is that David and I know most of the people on Waveform and we like them. Yeah, so I will disclose to you, I've known Marquez for a long time.

1:14:40David has known Marquez for a long time. We know a bunch of the folks over there. We're friendly with them. We generally wish them success. When we cover them, I think we do it as straight as we can. But the actual business conflict, it's not there. And if we open the door to disclosing what our sales side is doing, I think we actually threaten our editorial independence. Because then I have to tell the newsroom every single thing they have to disclose. And I have to make the newsroom aware of all of the company's commercial and corporate interactions in a way that I actually don't want them to know.

1:15:12That's the whole purpose of the wall is that they're just going to do their jobs. So there's a line here, and I'm not saying we always get it 100 % right. But in this case, I know what that arrangement is. I know what the Box Media Podcast Network is. We have a bunch of these deals. All of Scott Galloway's Prof G shows, we don't own them. We don't make them. But they're in the network. we sell the ads. There are other ones as well. There's all kinds of arrangements. We'll disclose the ones where it's our company. But in this case, it's just a little too removed from our newsroom. In the same way that we run a programmatic ad tech stack called Concert that is on tons of publishers.

1:15:48Every time you see a Concert logo on a web ad, Vox Media is serving that one. And we just cannot disclose every partner at the Concert. It would bring our newsroom to a halt. And more importantly, it would force me to make every reporter in the newsroom aware of the company's business deals, which is the most important thing. Right. That's the key, right? Like the not knowing on that side is important, right? Like there is a thing, we talk about this with creators and stuff all the time, that one of the challenges is knowing what something you do will do to your business. and because of who is advertising and who wants to sponsor your videos and all this stuff, that is a thing you have to reckon with.

1:16:32And a big part of what we're trying to do is not even give people the chance to think about that because it just changes things. And I firmly believe that this is getting confusing and muddled and most people do not understand this. And that's on us. We have to constantly explain it, which is why I'm happy to talk about it whenever anyone asks. That is not how most of the media that most people consume works anymore. or most creators and influencers have absolutely blurred the lines between advertising, between sales. They have investments, their commercial relationships are in the front of their content.

1:17:04I'm not even calling out any creator. This is the reality of the business on those platforms. If you want to make enough money to eat, this is how you have to play the game. But that's not us, right? Like it just isn't us. And so I'm happy to disclose everything. I'm happy to talk about it. I just, there are times when I'm like, no, that one doesn't make any sense. And what I'm really talking about is if I extend the rule that much, we're actually going to defeat the purpose of the rule. We're going to defeat the independence of the newsroom in a way that that is the product we sell here, is the independence of the newsroom.

1:17:37I'll give you this example. We disclose Comcast and NBC all the time because everybody knows about it. There are other investors in our company. They're there. and if I extend the rule so far, like I kind of end up in a place where every single morning I'm just telling the newsroom who they should be worried about. Right. Here's a list of problems. Yeah, here's a list of considerations for every story. And I really think that undercuts the promise of what we do here. So like I said, we'll take the feedback. I will talk about it whenever we want. In this case, there's not a plausible connection to the company's commercial activities in our newsroom.

1:18:13I just assure you that there isn't one to the point where until people mentioned it to us, I hadn't even thought about it. And so we'll keep doing disclosures. My ask of you, if you want to yell at me about this, take 20 % of the energy and point it at other media outlets and other creators and influencers. Because I would rather be in a world where the audience is that demanding of everyone. and I'll do my best to live up to it because that's the thing that's going to rebuild trust in whatever kind of journalism exists. And that we do it so we get it a lot, right? It's an expectation that we have created with all of you and I'm happy about that.

1:18:50We receive the expectation. But if you think we're failing, take just 20 % of the energy and point at everybody else. Like it'll make everything a little bit better. All right, David, what's your turnaround item? Mine's going to be much quicker because I really don't want to talk about it. Like we went from something that we like talking about to I don't under any circumstances want to talk about this, but we have to. And it is that President-elect Donald Trump has said that Elon Musk is going to be leading a thing called the Department of Government Efficiency that is going to do some stuff, cut wasteful government spending.

1:19:26There's apparently going to be a leaderboard on X of all the dumbest ways the government spends money. the the only reason i want to talk about this is because uh i think if if i have a if i have a bit on this show it is the question is this anything it's the meme of a person holding a like their hand at a butterfly and going is this anything this is nothing this is nothing it's it was announced and it's announced it's elon and vivek ramaswamy are going to run it and it's amazing that the efficiency department has two leaders like you're just coming out the gate with co-ceos like blackberry style like what are we doing what could possibly go that's very good you can't just do a department you can't just do it like in life i declare department is not a thing the president can do oh right you mean like in the government yeah you and i could make a department of i just the department of david's pillows like that exists i did it we're here you i feel like your wife might have something to say.

1:20:25I'm the president. I did it. It's like a weird pillow.

1:20:32But the government cannot just create a department out of thin air because someone says so. That's not how this works. I'm going to say what? Yeah. You need an act of Congress. Yeah. That's the thing. So whatever. The only other thing I'll add to this, because this is going to be fake when we're not to talk about it. And this is pure, by the way, decoder bait. And we will definitely talk about on decoder. Can you make a fake department in the government? Also, by the way, leaderboards of wasteful government spending, they've been doing that shit since the 80s. Like, some of these ideas, we're just inventing trains again, like the classic Elon Musk.

1:21:04Yeah. Anyway, all this is to say there was a New York Mag article today about the scene at Mar-a-Lago and just like the frenzy of corruption that's happening there. And every time Elon Musk walks into dinner, Donald Trump pulls out his iPad and plays Space Oddity by David Bowie. Oh, I don't like that at all. I feel like David Bowie would be very mad, but I also think it's very funny they pick Space Oddity. yeah it's like not exactly the compliment you might think it is it's not yeah but that's enough we've talked about that enough what's your next one nila welcome back to it all right i want to check in on our nation's fourth wireless carrier which you will recall is a product of trump one when t-mobile wanted to buy sprint and instead of saying no which is the exact process by which T-Mobile was created.

1:21:50If you recall, AT &T wanted to buy T-Mobile. The government said no. And then T-Mobile had to go out. They took a bunch of money in the breakup fee, but then they became T-Mobile. They hired a new CEO. They did business. We're going to try hard. Yeah. We didn't do that with Sprint. The court literally said Sprint sucks so much, no one can fix it. T-Mobile can have it. And to get around this problem, Makan Delrahim, who was the head of Antitrust at the time, brokered personally a deal by which T-Mobile would get a bunch of Sprint and a bunch of Sprint Spectrum would go to Dish Network, America's favorite satellite TV service, and they would create a fourth wireless network, which it has been one billion years and which does not meaningfully exist.

1:22:30There was a pilot network called Project Genna 5, which offered people NFTs if they signed up for service on the Motorola Edge. That didn't work. Mostly there's been an NVNO, so they resell AT &T and T-Mobile service. A historically successful plan to compete with AT &T and T-Mobile, which is buying their service and reselling it for a fee. That really has them quaking in their boots. They have lit up some towers in some cities. They've decided they're going to let go of all the Gen F5 stuff. They're just going to call it Boost Mobile, which is a brand that they acquired in the thing. And now they say, they say, they have earned the title of mobile network operator.

1:23:14That's their announcement. Congrats. rather than MVNO, which is mobile virtual network operator, which is what you have to call yourself when you're just reselling other people's service. They have earned the title of mobile network operator. They're a real network now. By the end of the year, it needs to reach 80 % of the people. They said, we are well on the way to meeting this goal. They have lit up more than 20 ,000 of the 24 ,000 cell sites that's promised to deploy by June, 2025. But has anybody seen it? Has anybody running ads? Yeah. Like, do you have, do you have any friends who are on boost?

1:23:52Like, is that, I mean, people have friends are on boost, but they're just reusing AT &T service. You go on the subreddits of Genesis or boost. It's not pretty. Uh, in the meantime, by the way, all the other three carriers, all they've done is raise their prices. yep yeah all of the stuff meaningful competition in this market all the stuff that i saw on project genesis are basically like if i stand right here i get the carrier that i think that i have and if i am literally anywhere else on planet earth it's just at &t it's like great you just got like a slightly worse at &t phone congratulations it's a motorola edge uh you're killing it uh we'll see you know as always something will happen time will relentlessly go by i mean and you mentioned t-mobile but it is it is possible to do interesting things in this space like there there was a time when t-mobile did the whole uncarrier bit and everything got purple and john leger was running around doing crazy stuff like there are interesting moves you can make in this market and there haven't been any in a very long time nope and i i think it's it's like i i am hopeful for boost uh i would say i have precisely zero actual expectations of this going anywhere and i will just point out that all they had to do was not let t-mobile by sprint and so they brokered this complicated deal

1:25:23why is t-mobile cheaper certainly isn't so and by the way t-mobile promised that it wouldn't cut any jobs immediately cut thousands of jobs yeah we're just we're entering a period now where there will be more mergers the lena khan era is is over right all that's going to get turned over already streaming like david zaslov is like mergers are back yeah like the net neutrality is going to go away. You can just see the, hey, should Verizon buy Paramount and bundle it into its service and throttle Disney is like, there's accountants that just, just on their boats, just staring off into the sunset, dreaming up ways to raise prices and it's not going to result in faster service or more reliable service.

1:26:06Almost a guarantee. You want to know what the rich house is going to be about in the next four years? It's just me ranting about cell carriers. Oh, so the same as always. That's good. It's nice to know that some things don't change. even in these trying times three michelin stars yeah exactly all right one more then we gotta go all right i just very briefly want to pour one out for everyone's 11th favorite streaming service uh free v which was i believe once called imdb free dive i think and then it was imdb tv and then it was free v and now it is dying and just everything is being bundled into prime video this is not going to be sad for very many people.

1:26:47I don't think Freeview is actually like a sneakily pretty good, pretty light app. So I'm sad to not be able to use it anymore. Didn't they do jury duty? They did do jury duty, which was wonderful. And I actually think jury duty is sort of funny because there's all these, we've talked a lot about the fast channels and the, the sort of rise of ad supported streaming and jury duty is kind of the only giant breakout hit to ever come out of one of these. services. Like you look at the Roku channel has had a few. They had the Weird Al Yankovic movie that was like kind of around. Tubi is doing stuff.

1:27:21Pluto is doing stuff like this. This fast universe is growing really quickly, but the huge sort of mainstream content has not really happened. And I think if you look at Amazon, Amazon is all in on ads. And I think this is the thing that is really starting to happen is the ad business and streaming is turning really fast now. Netflix is now two years into it and it's growing pretty quickly. Hulu is doing really well. And so Disney and ESPN are starting to catch up. Like the ad supported streaming universe is here in a big way. And I think Amazon, was it earlier this year, turned on the thing where now it's ads by default unless you pay more.

1:28:02And now it's bringing all this free stuff in to give people more stuff to watch with those ads inside of Prime Video. like this is the future and we're going to go back to big giant libraries mostly stuff you don't want to watch because they're just trying to turn at inventory and i think it's going to change streaming in some really interesting ways but i am sad freebies gone this is the dumbest name and i will miss it the second they named it yeah i'm sorry they also had like a bosch legacy or something it was like a bosch spinoff that apparently some people watched i don't know I've never felt less connected to pop culture than reading about Bosch legacy when Free V died.

1:28:41But I did watch Jury Duty and it was great. Jury Duty, they should just make one of those every week. I agree. It was very good. All right, we're way over. Thank you to Kylie for being on. Let us know what you think of show and tell. Let us know if you have a better name. Yes, please. Or if we should actually have scores. The idea, just so everybody knows, is that we all just sort of bring stories and surprise each other with them. We're going to teach each other new things and all have thoughts about it on the show. So name that whatever you want. And please let us know what the scoring mechanism is.

1:29:14We don't know. All right, that's it. That's our chest. Rock and roll.

1:29:20And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.