Siri is a Gemini

27:18It just didn't and couldn't. And so here we are. We'll see. I mean, your point is that between the Apple deal and then Google announcing it's going to do personal intelligence where it'll use your data from Gmail and search and YouTube and photos, which we should talk about a little bit. But your point is between those two announcements on the same day, you're looking at Google taking a commanding lead in whatever the AI race is. I think at this point, if you believe in the biggest possible version of AI, which is very Cook Doctrine-y, right? We want to own all of the pieces of this, and we think that these things add up to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

27:57No one can do what Google is doing. Maybe it's impossible to do what Google is doing, but certainly right now, no one can. Google has essentially infinite computing resources. Sam Altman is out here begging, borrowing, and stealing his way to try and get what Google already has in terms of compute resources. Google built its own chips, so it's not even reliant on NVIDIA's computing resources. It has TPUs, which it used to train Gemini 3, which again, by most measures, is the best model that exists. Google has all of your data that exists in the world. This is the other announcement you're talking about.

28:30It was called personal intelligence. And the idea is that when you ask Gemini, rather than having to give it information about you in order to answer the question, it can go comb through your email or see what's in your photos and actually just get those answers for you based on your own data. That's very powerful. It also has, crucially, places to put all of this now. And this is where the Siri thing comes in, right? Like if you just think of Siri as the new Apple-y character on top of Gemini, that becomes super duper powerful for Gemini because it gets all of the query data. It gets this incredible access to people.

29:07One thing I'm very curious about to see is as the idea of personal intelligence becomes more and more baked into Gemini, is that a thing that exists in the siri version of gemini like can i i just all of this gets weird because it just gives google more and more power but so google is in this position now especially as it continues to put gemini and ai into search which it will and if if i were really going to go out on a limb i would say this is the year that ai mode becomes the default google search interface well yeah all the publishers are suing google yeah right like They got nothing to lose.

29:41Disclosure, Vox Media is one of them. But Google is desperate to do this. Like, make no mistake, Google is desperate for AI mode to be the main interface for search. They believe it is the right answer and they will put it there the minute they feel like they can get away with it. All right, let me issue my scathing criticism of Google that is also me agreeing with you. I think that Google is desperate to put AI mode in search. Absolutely agree. And I think they're going to do it pretty fast. The reason I think they're going to do it is not because they think it's the best product. It's absolutely not the best product.

30:14I know it's not the best product because their own examples of all the crazy things you can do are always, always, always buying shit. Yeah, it's always buying stuff. And the reason it's always buying stuff is because, yes, they have a bunch of investors. They need to convince shareholders that all this AI spend is going to result in some revenue. and here's a transaction that we can put ads in front of is revenue. Like you can just read between the lines. Like look at this thing we're going to monetize. But it's also that Google has two main revenue lines. Three if you count Google Cloud, but it's way smaller in the scheme of things.

30:51They have Google Search, which is the monster. They've got YouTube, which is growing. And then, yeah, they've got Google Cloud and like other bets, right? Yeah. Google Search is the monster. It is the money at Google. And if you think the web is in decline and search is in decline and whatever, you got to move to the next thing pretty fast. And the way Google searches monetize is obviously ads everywhere. There's a reason that traditional search is just cluttered with ads and SponCon up and down the stack. Right? You look at that list of results, you're scrolling halfway down the page on mobile before you see the first organic result.

31:25Google has to get in front of that. Right? They got to replace all of that money, all of the AdWords money, and put that into AI. So of course they want to shift to AI mode because then they are in total control of that results page. Every word on that results page is generated by Google directly. And they can monetize it in all kinds of ways that are way more exciting than just you bought an AdWord and here's the first result that's SponCon. It's coming. And I know it's coming because they got to move the revenue before the old thing dies completely. and then you just look at the personal intelligence blog post and our team like freaked out about this the commenters noticed this everyone knows this the example in the what can we do with personal intelligence was whoever the product manager was said i needed new tires for like my 2019 honda odyssey and i like asked gemini and it looked at my old road trips and it suggested all season tires because I traveled to like Oklahoma or something.

32:21And it's like, dude, what other tires would you buy for a 2019 Honda Odyssey? Like you don't need help buying tires. Most people in the world with Honda Odysseys just get whatever tires came on the Honda Odyssey. Like no one's upgrading. Like I know there are like hot rod dad van guys and I encourage you to reach out to me because I have a lot of questions for you. But like it's just a nonsensical thing query, but you have to find a transaction. And so every example Google gives is always a transaction, which leads them astray in how they even structure the examples. Like, what's the thing I need to buy that you can inform by my history of Google photos?

33:04Of course, you're going to end up with, I bought tires from my car that I took on a road trip. Yeah. And there's just something about all the AI mode stuff that is so nakedly commercial that I think it will actually trip up Google in the end. Well, it's the only idea that anybody has about how to monetize that is, in theory, also kind of part of the product. Right. Because everything else you're describing is just we're going to stick an ad in the middle and everybody's going to hate that. Or the result itself will be an ad. Right. Right. You're like, how do I get this stain out of my shirt? And it is just like you buy Tide.

33:36Right. Shopping at least feels like a sort of payment system people understand, which is people are going to pay to put their things in front of me and I will either buy it or I won't. Like that's a trade people understand on the internet. And it is, I think, the least gross feeling option that these companies have. Yeah. I'm just going to point, but pay attention. Every time Google talks about search or AI mode or any of this, the examples always end in a transaction. And maybe it's a couple steps down the road. But there's always a transaction at the end of the rainbow, which just feels gross.

34:08Like, it's like, can you just be cool for once in your life? Yeah. Anyway, we should move on. But there's a lot more about all of this to talk about. I think we're five months away from WWDC where Apple will presumably talk about all of this in a very different light. We're going to spend, I think, the next several months continuing to do all of this AI ramp up stuff. I have reached a point where I am like a full nihilist about AI. And I'm like, in the name of journalism, I will give all of my data to every AI model that exists. So at some point, this will go horribly awry. But for now, it's going to be fun.

34:42One thing to love to mention, OpenAI didn't get this deal and they leaked to the Financial Times that it was a conscious decision to not try to get the Apple deal. They're going to build their own hardware. That's like how the Vergecast made a conscious decision to not win Best Podcast at the Golden Globes this weekend. We didn't apply. So, yes. Right. It is exactly the same. We decided not to. Yeah. Listen, we're the good people here. What can we say? We would have won if we wanted to. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Watch out, Amy. We're coming for you next year. All right, we should take a break and then we're going to come back and we have just a lot more stuff to talk about.

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39:02all right we're back so before we get into the next bit of news we should probably talk about one of the stories that's been kind of bubbling the last couple of weeks we haven't really had a chance to talk about it with all the stuff going on um and that's what's going on with grok and x in general um this story sucks we should just say that up front it's a real bummer every everyone looks bad in this story but there's been some interesting stuff this week the the basic the basic setup here is that grok xai's ai bot uh is just running around happily making deep faked inappropriate pictures of anyone who asks um young old male female doesn't matter anybody and it has become like a meme on x to reply to any picture and be like put put them in a bikini or uh you know worse in some cases much much much worse yeah i mean it's some of the details are truly horrifying and um this has just become both one of the biggest and also just kind of the ugliest story in our space yeah it's a story of cowardice and corruption at every level of content moderation the economy leadership it's bad i mean you recall like ages ago google got in all kinds of trouble because the gemini image generator would make like racially diverse pictures of Nazis and that was too woke and they had to pull it down because of a woke backlash.

40:28This is like dead at the heart of a thing that everyone says they agree on. Right. You should not sexualize children. You should not harass women just left and right. Deepfake pornography is bad. It's like these are things people agree on. Right. And there are bipartisan bills in our country to stop deepfake pornography. there are regulations in the world and elon is just letting grok do it he is throwing tantrums about it basically every day saying this is free speech they just want to censor me he will comply with the law he's letting grok speak for x which is stupid because grok can't actually speak for x because it's not a person it's not a person and it's hallucinating the responses it's not actually the policy of x but media organizations like the mainstream media especially is like here's a grok said about what it's doing.

41:19And that doesn't make any sense. Grok spent a while lying and saying that the image generation features are behind a paywall, but that's just a thing it was programmed to say on X, that you could just go to Grok and just do the thing. There's also workarounds on X where you could click the button and still get it to do it. Today, they say they've stopped the image generation from being inappropriate in the countries where it's illegal, including the UK. We have reporters in the UK. That is not true. You can still just get around it trivially. Elon does not want to stop this. No. It is very clear he thinks this is fine.

41:51And in fact, he's like putting like Keir Starmer, the prime minister of England in a bikini on Grok to like protest the English government being mad about it. We're going to do an entire episode of Decoder on this. I'm actually recording it right after the broadcast today. it is a problem at every single layer of content moderation all the way up to apple and google who have built empires on needing total control of their app stores ostensibly to protect people from bad actors yeah why does apple say it needs total control of the app store it needs to take 30 of every dollar that almost everybody spends on that platform it's because if they don't bad Bad things will happen to people.

42:30This is the worst thing. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't allow porn apps on the app store. And what is this in practice if not a porn app? Yeah, just a straightforward harassment vector by which real people are getting deep-picked porn. It is fully against both rules of both the app stores. I will say, again, we have a whole episode of Decoder coming up on every layer of the stack being corrupt and cowardly about this. we ran the headline Tim Cook and Sunar Pachai are cowards Liz wrote that piece of course Liz wrote that piece just a little inside baseball we do no surprises just like every major news organization does we tell people what's coming if we're going to put their names in a headline we told Apple and Google I will tell you it is business as normal in our newsroom yeah I think everybody knows what's going on here and I think they know they just have to take the hits so people are like they're going to take their access away from you like I don't think they are I really don't And if they do, I'll let you know, because that would be even more cowardly.

43:30But I suspect that they've made the calculation that that criticism is less costly than if they stand on their principles and Elon Musk gets mad at them. And I think that is just ridiculous for two of the most powerful companies on the face of the earth. Yeah, I don't know what else the dynamic could be if it's not that. If it is fear of what happens if you pick the fight is worse than being correct and picking the fight. especially on this yeah on this specifically there there is one correct moral outcome and it is to say this rule that we've had we built our empire over enforcing we're going to enforce it again and you will have to force us to back off as opposed to backing off right away that's also us who's criticizing them everyone but charlie wars off the atlantic wrote a great piece that we'll link a bunch of advocacy groups have sent open letters again to your point people agree on this.

44:26This is not like a complicated question about free speech and people being mean to each other on the internet. This is not a complicated moral line to draw. This is a bad thing that should not be allowed. Well, the one person who sort of disagrees is Tim Sweeney, who thinks app stores are bad and thinks calling for app stores to use the power he thinks they shouldn't have is just as bad. But I don't think that's actually the case. I think in this case, you're like, all of society's gatekeepers should make this stop. And whether that's the government or the people who have the power, that's fine.

44:58And I don't, especially when the app stores in particular have fought their way for a decade through antitrust, through angry developers by saying, if we don't have this control, we won't be able to stop these bad things. And now here in the face of the bad thing, they're rolling right over. Anyway, like I said, a full episode of Decoder is coming. I think it's next Thursday. We're going to, like every piece of the content moderation stack that we've talked about for over a decade is implicated here and we're starting to go through it. But that's coming next week. We'll keep talking about it here too because it's a funny thing in that there's been a lot of talk and a lot of sort of movement, but also the platform is in the same place that it was.

45:39Like, let's be so clear for whatever Elon Musk is saying, for whatever their policy team is saying, you can still do the stuff. Our team has heroically been testing these things in some like truly heinous, awful ways to prove how easy it is to do it. We'll keep covering it. We'll have more to talk about here, too. Yeah, if I can issue, like, one strident instruction to my peers in the media, to every influencer and greater... You cannot trust what Grok says about X's policies. It's not real. That is not a meaningful way to do any reporting is to ask Grok about itself. No, it is, in fact, nothing.

46:13Yeah. It is nothing. And right next to that, you can't trust what Elon is saying. You have to verify that what he's saying is true. Right. And that... It's just very hard. It's hard to break out of these patterns. I get it. But in this case, it's obvious that he does not want to stop it. And it's deeply bizarre that the way to verify it right now is to ask an AI to make pictures of you in a bikini. But shouts to the folks on our team who have been doing so. And I'm so sorry. This is what our job is. All right. Let's talk about the other piece of the news I really want to talk about here is meta, which I think you can sort of call the metaverse now.

46:52The news of this week is that Meta laid off a bunch of people in the reality labs division. It closed three of its VR studios. It is essentially like taking all of the resources it has been putting into the metaverse and moving it towards AI. The company continues to think that wearables are the thing. It is just moving every dollar it can find toward smart glasses and AI. and most of those dollars are from the reality labs team and this to me feels like the end of a story that we've been covering for most of a decade now that that meta believed in the metaverse as a concept so much that it paid a bunch of money to palmer lucky to buy oculus it basically it i'm not basically, it renamed the company to Meta, a story that we had.

47:48Great job, Alex Heath. And it essentially tried to corner the market to the point where there was an FTC trial about whether Meta should be allowed to buy this company called Within, which made Supernatural, which is one of the most interesting VR apps that exists. So Meta basically makes this big, gigantic, industry-shaking bet that the Metaverse is going to be the thing, and then kind of slowly and sort of all at once here has just decided to walk away. Can I connect the dots from the App Store and Grok to Meta and VR and Mark Zuckerberg? Sure. Jesus. They're not hard to do. Okay. Mark Zuckerberg hates Apple.

48:28He hates the fact that Tim Cook, through App Store policies, can affect Meta's business. And Tim Cook hates Meta. And I think he hates Mark Zuckerberg. And in fact, Apple has many times just directly screwed with Meta's businesses. They did app tracking transparency. They ruined Meta's ability to do app install ads. They took billions off Meta's bottom line and they had to re-architect the business to make that money back. Straightforwardly, Mark Zuckerberg hates the fact that Tim Cook was able to do that to his business through iOS-level permissions and App Store-level policies. At one point, Meta was running a VPN called Onavo to get data on what users were doing, which is super sketchy.

49:11Super sketchy to give people a VPN in the name of privacy and then track every single thing they do in every single app to figure out what apps to buy or compete with. Yes. Super sketchy. Apple revoked Meta's entire enterprise development certificate and took down every single one of Meta's internal apps on iOS. People were not able to order food in the Meta cafeteria because Apple thought Onava was so bad. This is scandalous levels of power being used against a not sensible competitor. Apple has done all this. You can look it up. They just have attacked Meta left and right using the power of the App Store.

49:47They've threatened to pull Instagram over some of the teenage girl issues that Instagram has had. Yeah, I mean, so much of Apple's in particular sort of privacy is the thing. messaging is directly aimed at meta. Well, it used to be aimed at Google, but that's a little too cozy now. So now it's all been aimed at meta. Yeah. And everyone still thinks their iPhones are listening to them. They've accomplished nothing with this messaging. That's true. Because the ads on Instagram are still good enough. It doesn't matter. But that dynamic between meta and Apple is a dynamic born of the App Store. Mark Zuckerberg knows that Apple's authority over the App Store, rightfully or wrongfully, is a check on his business.

50:30And we've just been in that dynamic for 15 years. And he hates it. Yep. He openly talks about it. He said it on The Verge. In interviews on Decoder, he has said, I hate this. Like, once people realize how much power Apple has, they'll be mad. Meanwhile, Apple is so afraid of Elon and Trump that they won't use the power. In one case, they should. So that's just a naked hypocrisy thing. I'm only bringing this up because that's why Zuck bought Oculus. Right? He said, I need to buy the next plug. I need to get away from the iPhone. I need the next thing. And I will control that platform. And then I will turn off Apple's developer certificates.

51:07Like this is the motivation. The man is motivated by power. So he bought the headset and he said, this is going to be the thing that takes over from the phone. And he did all of the metaverse and he would talk about the embodied internet because he thought he could get you away from the phone. I think now he thinks he can do AR glasses before Apple gets to AR glasses and that will be the next platform and he will be in control of that. And he is motivated by that. He is not motivated by making these products great. He is not motivated by finishing the thought, by investing in the things that he bought in this case.

51:36He just wants to get out of Apple's shadow. He wants to own the thing after smartphones. Yes. And he is so unworried about what that thing is. And I do, I mean, I think he's like, if it had been, I was just about to make a cryptocurrency joke. Meta got really into cryptocurrency. Like David Marcus showed up and did a whole thing at Meta about Web3. Like they don't care what the thing is as long as they don't have to play in somebody else's yard for the next one. Because they perceive that it cost meta a lot of money. And it objectively did. But here, I pulled this one quote from the original FTC complaint against meta for this fight about whether it was allowed to buy within.

52:19And just to put everybody in the moment, this was when the quest was growing really fast. there was a sense that this was like an exciting platform, at least for video games and stuff. And every time anybody would release anything cool on that platform, Meta would immediately buy it. And it just, every good app that came out was swallowed up by Meta, including Supernatural, this like Beat Saber workout thing that I think you and I both had pretty long stints of using, if I remember correctly. Yeah, I want to talk about, I mean, remind you, this is all in the pandemic. Like everyone's at home. Things were weird.

52:51It was really hard to buy a Peloton. Yeah. Supernatural came out. It was a fitness app in VR. A lot of people had bought Quest because what else? At least you can get out of your house somehow. At least you and your partner don't have to look at each other for a while. Well, I guess I'm in Jurassic Park now. And it was, we should talk about Supernatural more directly, but it was in that moment. Just the context was the pandemic. And Zuck went to Biden and the FTC, the Biden FTC tried to stop him. Yeah. And so here's the line from the complaint. It says, Mr. Zuckerberg has made clear that his aspiration for the VR space is control of the entire ecosystem.

53:25As early as 2015, Mr. Zuckerberg instructed key Facebook executives that his vision for, quote, the next wave of computing was control of apps in the platform on which those apps are distributed, making clear in an internal email to key Facebook executives that a key part of his strategy was for his company to be, quote, completely ubiquitous in killer apps. Completely ubiquitous in killer apps is a kind of a bar and be the whole thing. Right. It's not. I am so with you in the sense that I don't think Mark Zuckerberg was ever a true believer in the metaverse so much as a true believer in I will spend whatever it takes to not lose the next platform war.

54:02Yeah, absolutely. And he was spending that money. And so the tragedy here to me is supernatural. And I really feel like it's tragic that as part of all these cuts to reality labs, the supernatural division is no longer going to invest in new content or features. They're just going to maintain it. It's purely on life support now. It's on life support, which means it's dead. And the reason I say it's a tragedy is I interviewed the founder of Supernatural, Chris Milk, in 2021 on Decoder. Like a legend of the VR industry. A legend of the VR industry. One of the most creative people around. A legend of the music industry.

54:37And he had come up with Supernatural after playing Beat Saber. Supernatural and Beat Saber are obviously very close to each other. By the way, justice for Beat Saber. Like, Beat Saber was a monumental shift in how people think about VR. It's like one of the first and most important VR applications ever exist. People are like, oh, this is so cool. So he was playing Beat Saber. Guess who bought Beat Saber?

55:00This sucks. But anyway, Chris had been playing Beat Saber, asked him about the influence, and he was like, oh, I can make an actual fitness app out of this. It won't just be an accident. So he basically set out to build a Peloton, like a Beat Saber Peloton. And he hired a bunch of fitness teachers, He called them athletes. He had a bunch of choreographers. Like he built that entire studio. He has a background in the music industry. He figured out all of the licensing for all of the music in Supernatural. And not only was he growing, he was growing in like a normie way. Actually play this quote.

55:34I just want you all to hear the stats for Supernatural in 2021. Fitness is the killer use case for VR. It will be the first driving force of mass adoption through a normal consumer audience. Just as an example, what we're seeing from our membership base, where 50-50 split women and men, where I think over 60 % are over 40. This is not what a typical VR demographic looks like. It's the understatement of the century. That's remarkable, right? To get a 50-50 split men and women, 60 % over 40, to be early adopters of new hardware. And so Supernatural was so important that Apple and Meta were in a bidding war for it.

56:21And everyone, this is before the Vision Pro came out. Everyone thought Apple wanted it to drive Vision Pro sales. And you can imagine how that might've gone very differently if Apple had succeeded here. But it is just a tragedy that Meta bought it, didn't really invest a ton into it. The Supernatural audience was immediately upset about this, right? Like no one wants this acquisition to happen. and they were cheering on the FTC case. The FTC lost, whatever, and then Meta has done nothing but drain reality labs of funds and with it kill the thing that everyone saw as the killer app for this new hardware.

56:53Because Mark Zuckerberg doesn't actually care about the metaverse, he cares about power, and he cares about being first to whatever he thinks the next platform is going to be. And if Supernatural had just been on its own, growing in this way, maybe it would have gotten bought by Peloton. Maybe it would have built its own ecosystem of hardware that was more specialized for fitness. you can think of another hundred things that would have happened that would have been better for an audience of consumers who are significant enough for Apple and Meta to want to buy the platform to get healthier, right?

57:24And like, they're getting robbed of that now. The thing that helped them get healthier, the thing they were excited about is going away because Microsoft would rather pay for glasses. I just think that that's a tragedy. Like, yeah. I rant and rave about antitrust and buying stuff. but this one in particular is like oh this was a great product this thing was demoed on late night with jimmy fallon like it was it had crossed into mainstream appeal and zuck lost interest and that just sucks and the thing is this whole run that they went on put it in a position of just being able to do it until they lost interest right like meta so cornered the market that it didn't become a competitive space.

58:10Nobody else is trying to do that anymore. And there's an argument to be made that it's because it was a bad idea all along and nobody was ever going to do it. But that market never even had a chance to materialize because Meta just completely cornered it from the first minute it could. And then it was then existent based on Mark Zuckerberg remaining interested in doing it. And that was never going to work for any of these companies. I mean, the other thing, I think the best VR game ever was Batman Arkham Shadow. And that studio was bought by Meta and was also hit by these layoffs. Like this whole thing, this whole ecosystem of people who were the only ones who had a chance to make this into something viable.

58:51And again, I think there are lots of reasons to think the metaverse is a bad idea. I think immersive gaming, just boil it all the way down. That basic thing is very cool. And like, wouldn't it be awesome if I had a supernatural app for my Nintendo Switch that I could play on my TV? Like this should have had a better run than it did and meta just swallowed it whole and then just kind of give up. And that sucks. That feels bad. Yeah. I think I slightly disagree with you. Only in the sense that I think general purpose VR headsets might have always been a dead end. You know, like the idea that I have a face computer, like whatever, you know, like that's the axis of wearable bullshit.

59:29Like it's so fiddly and you have to care for it and it's on your face and some of the stuff is gonna make you dizzy. there were there were these bright spots and maybe you think gaming was a brighter spot than fitness i just saw what people were doing in fitness and i i heard that quote about the demographic and we went and looked at those communities on on facebook and reddit where people were gathering to talk about supernatural and it was just it was the thing you want from technology yeah right it was a bunch of people who were not there for technology they were there to like lead better lives and support each other and like do that thing that in fitness communities is often very like rewarding and Mark didn't care about that at all like and I just think that's tragic I also think like they should have gotten away from the quest and made their own hardware and like had a cheap VR headset to do this in or like whatever kind of motion tracking like there's a million things they could have done this is what I mean by switch game like there you supernatural could have been a lot of places that weren't a VR headset set.

1:00:27Yeah, sure. I mean, it's dancing. like it's dance fighting there should be more dance fighting in the world is basically what I'm saying and like that's cool like Cranes and I were both Supernatural fans like in the pandemic we were both like dance fighting every day like it was like great I was like I'm not at my house I'm not like trudging along in this treadmill I'm like having a good time in a different environment Supernatural was selling a lot of Quest headsets like I think you can't and that's why they bought them it was the killer app in so many cases for people yeah especially at that time it was fun Becky was wearing a she's there's she i'm like do you want a new laptop she's like get i get this technology out of my face like that's her reaction to most ideas about taking a kindle for like 12 years until you had to bully her into upgrading yeah i upgraded her and that's gonna she's having for another 20 years she like wore the headset all the time we bought a dock it lived in our in the place where we work out and she would take it off and like use it um and that's like that's what i was like oh we should get this dude on decoder again the tragedy of supernatural aside the thing you're looking at is I think the essential character of meta is not about taste or what the products are or the experiences people are having.

1:01:31It is just about power. And I think in this turn, if you're like, why won't meta win an AI? Why won't they win in the next platform shift? Well, why are they letting their platforms be overrun by slop? Well, it's because I don't think they actually care about the products. I really don't. And I think that the companies that do care about the products tend to be the companies that always, even to this day, they still tend to be the companies that win. And I see them pulling back from Reality Labs, and it's because it didn't win, and they don't actually care. They don't actually have the persistence and the drive to execute.

1:02:05This is why Horizon sucked. It was so bad. It was so, so, so bad, because no one knew what good looked like or cared to sit down and rigorously think through what good looked like. This is why Mark Zuckerberg just hired Alan Dye from Apple, because he doesn't know what good books like. Yeah. And I don't know that he cares. I think conviction is overrated in a lot of these cases that that having having a thesis clouds you from chasing whatever feels like it's going to be the next thing. Can I just read you maybe the single bleakest part of this entire thing, which is that there was a Bloomberg reported that there was an internal memo.

1:02:48from Andrew Bosworth, who is Meta's CTO, about a shift in the metaverse strategy. Meta is careful to say it's not ditching the metaverse entirely. It still believes in the metaverse. So they renamed the company Meta. Yeah, right. What are they going to do? But this is just the last line of our story about this, and it just hits. Rather than being a VR-first social platform, the metaverse will be focused more on mobile devices moving forward. Sure. Womp womp. Sure. it's just it's just tough and i think what's funny is to some extent like if you sort of broadly define the concept of metaverse it's happening already like fortnite and roblox and minecraft like the the this idea of people being in virtual worlds is already happening and it's huge get out of here that was the argument they were making five years ago that's still what it is no the metaverse is you got you need to protect you need to the you got to be in it you gotta be in a virtual environment where you're buying and trading NFTs like whatever the hell is going on I think that was the thing that Mark Zuckerberg was undeniably wrong about yeah but the idea that Fortnite is the metaverse is nonsensical oh you're totally wrong Fortnite is the metaverse in all of the ways that it is useful to be the metaverse all the other stuff is dumb but the definition it's a video game like I can draw a distinction between I live my economic life in a virtual environment and I'm playing this video game where there are occasionally concerts and brand integrations.

1:04:16I mean, how many people live their economic lives in Roblox? We could do this all day. Too many people is the answer to that question. That is true. That's the PSA at the end here. Stop playing Roblox, everybody. It's very funny that Apple still makes the Vision Pro, has not announced any pullback, and is shipping more and more VR content for it. Yeah. If you want a great VR experience, you're like, I'm going to watch this basketball game in the Vision Pro in VR, which is supposed to be an augmented reality headset. Although our friend Ben Thompson says the basketball stuff is horrible. He wrote a very good piece that I thought was really smart and essentially boiled down to Apple is trying to program beautiful immersive television and what it has is the opportunity to just sit me courtside at a basketball game.

1:04:59Yeah, but I mean that Google was shipping that on cardboard 15 years ago. Yeah, and it was sick. It was also on a literal cardboard box. I interviewed Michelle Obama at the White House in that style of VR. You can go watch that video on our YouTube channel today. and now look where you are. And that was with one of the very first VR cameras. This is a real backstory. That camera broke the night before the shoot and we had a call in a backup company and it was crazy. Yikes. So, okay, last thing on this before we move on to the lightning round. The big bet sort of inherent in all of this continues to be that wearables and glasses and AI are the next thing, right?

1:05:37Like this is where all of Meta's attention is now. It's off the quest and it is on to Meta Ray-Bans. you have been very suspicious of that idea for a long time has your mind changed at all no i think people like having a camera in their glasses yeah and i don't think anyone wants to talk to meta's chatbot and i think that the meta display glasses are an interesting proof of concept and they have not figured out an app model they have not figured out an interface like i don't think that neural band interface does the thing they want it to do it's very cool but there are many many many generations away from that product being a mainstream product i think i agree like did they stumble into a cool exciting piece of hardware that lots of people will like yes is that a platform shift not even a little bit so far yeah you know what they have to compete with their own app on my phone that i can open and watch endless memes of aaron rogers weeping what are you gonna do with that how you're gonna compete with that well aaron rogers is gonna retire so they won't have to for very long that's why he's crying and ai on my phone every day All right.

1:06:40On that note, before we get to, Neil just tells me about his time. We should take one more break and then we're going to go back. We're going to do a lightning round. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Rippling. Your IT team shouldn't be endlessly chasing tickets and manually solving access and identity problems. But when you're running multiple disconnected tools, this is exactly what you have to deal with. And that's not just SaaS. That's sad. Software as a disservice. What if you could run IT with one system powered by one source of truth? Meet Rippling. Rippling is the unified platform for global HR, payroll, IT, and finance.

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1:08:20All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round, unsponsored. For flavor. I'm just going to do that pause longer every time I'm really excited about it we got an email that said we should say unsponsored for taste instead of for flavor which is a thing I'd like you to consider for next week it's just an idea I think once you're in the catchphrase you've got to live in the catchphrase yeah changing the catchphrase over and over seems like it defeats the purpose Neela is it time? it's time and we have a very special thank you so it's time for America's Favorite Podcast within Podcast, Brendan Carr's a dummy and when we did the live show, I believe your name was TJ.

1:09:00TJ came to the live show in Vegas and gave us both t-shirts that say Brennan Carr is a dummy and on the back, what does it say, David? On the back, it says America's favorite podcast for the podcast. The greatest t-shirt I own. It's the only thing I wear. The best t-shirt we have. Thank you so much for making us shirts. He was wearing a shirt. We all took photos together. We forgot to get your name. There were so many people we were talking to at the live show. Just send us a note, would you? And we can send you some swag back. You got to send us some proof that you're you. Yeah. Which I'm sure.

1:09:27We will gladly trade you some swag for swag. Yes, please do. But thank you so much for the shirts. They're incredible. And Brendan, we'll send you one too, buddy. If you just get in touch and do an interview with us here on America's Favorite Podcast. The podcast is Brendan Carr's a dummy. Or in your case, I am a dummy. The Brendan Carr experience. You see what I'm saying? All right. Two quick Brendan Carr notes this week. One actually meaningful. The other one, I just want people to experience how dumb this man is. and how openly he will just say dumb lies to try to weasel his way out of his own contradictions.

1:09:58So Brendan was in front of Congress this week. There was an oversight hearing. They asked him a bunch of stuff about free speech, and he said a bunch of stuff about broadcast license rules and all the usual nonsense Brendan spews, where he says legal words really fast in a way that sort of insists that his interpretation is correct. When if you just peel back what he's saying, you're like, oh, you're a dummy. Okay. So his big justification for all the speech nonsense that he's doing with TV is to protect local news. He says this over and over again. He needs competition in local news. Broadcasters have a public interest requirement because they don't pay for the spectrum.

1:10:30All this stuff. This is all nonsensical because if you look at the landscape of local news, Sinclair Broadcasting owns all the stations and Tegna owns all the other ones and they're trying to merge, which would just create a giant monopoly. And Brendan Carr appears to be very willing to let them do so. And Brendan Carr wants to let them. Interestingly, you know who does not want to let that happen is Donald Trump. Yeah. Because his buddy Chris Ruddy, who owns Newsmax does not want that to happen because Newsmax is uncaped. There's a whole dynamic there that's not worth unpacking. Yeah. But it's a dynamic.

1:10:59Anyway, Brendan keeps lying about wanting to protect local news, even though local news is predominantly made by two big companies that want to emerge. Nonsensical on its face. And he got to press on this a little bit. And then he gave this quote during this congressional hearing. And I just want to play it. I'm not even going to set it up. I just want to see if you can catch the blatant, nonsensical lie in the middle of this quote. Let's run the quote. I think as a Congress, it's important that we figure out, do we want investment in local news? Because right now, you've got Comcast and Disney that are programming almost 100 % of the content that Americans are seeing.

1:11:35And how do we incentivize the local TV stations to continue to generate their own local news and information? A hundred percent? Did you catch that? Comcast and Disney, disclosure, NBCUniversal, division of Comcast is an investor in our parent company, Vox Media, but whatever. Comcast and Disney are programming almost 100 % of the content that Americans are seeing. Is that true? No. Is that true in anyone's experience? Does YouTube exist, Brendan? I was just about to say. Does TikTok, does this podcast exist? What? I don't know. I don't know what that means. Even if you slice it down to I'm just talking about broadcast television and Comcast owns NBC and Disney owns ABC.

1:12:21Well, there are a bunch of other letters that exist. CB and S. CBS, which is owned by Paramount, which is refactoring its entire news division to please Donald Trump. Does CBS exist? The one that has the NFL on it. Does that one exist? Does Fox exist? Uh-huh. Just, are they, do they suck? Brendan, is your position that Fox sucks? Not only do they suck, they don't exist. They don't exist. They're so bad that Comcast and Disney are programming almost 100 % of the content that Americans, and this is where his, the intellectual justification for his war on free speech is so weak that he has to invent this claim that Comcast and Disney are programming I mean, almost 100 % of the content Americans are seeing.

1:13:13Just so he can say, I have to break that monopoly. Just so he can say, like, that's a problem. I need to use the power of the government to impose new. And it's like, dude, Fox is right there. Fox is dominant. Fox is the largest cable news station that exists. Brendan Carr might be the most you can just say things person in the history of you can just say things. He's such a dumb. It's like if you walked up to anyone and were like, do you get 100 % of your content from Comcast and Disney? They'd be like, no, I watch YouTube all day. what are you talking about, dude? Anyway, by the way, can I say this one thing?

1:13:43I do the Comcast disclosure all the time. In the comments on, like, one of our TikTok clips, someone was like, he's bought and paid for by Comcast. And it was someone who had misconstrued the fact that I sarcastically say they love me all the time. Oh. Or at least that's the charitable interpretation. I say they love me sarcastically because they hate me.

1:14:08Yeah. Yeah. I don't think, I don't think generally speaking. It was just one of those things where I was like looking at the comments on like a TikTok clip and I was like, oh, we, we, this is like a post literacy world that we live in where I'm like disclosure Comcast. And the guy's like, he's always going on and on about how much Comcast loves him. do you think somewhere the peacock team is like thrilled that brendan carr said this they're like look how powerful he thinks we are i just comcast and disney are programming almost a hundred percent of the content that americans are seeing is such a blatantly stupid lie that like all of the the people i know who are like live posting the hearing were like what did he just say anyway there's one substantive thing i want to point out that the brendan carr fcc did which is not just blatant lies in a war on free speech which is what he has set out to accomplish.

1:14:55Oh, they just went ahead and said Verizon doesn't have to unlock phones after 60 days anymore. This used to be a rule. When, you know, through mergers they put conditions and they want more competition. They want people to move handsets between carriers. So they made it so that Verizon had to unlock your phone within 60 days. Verizon's argument is like this only helps scammers which is true or not true. BFC said fine. Brandon Carr said fine. You can have whatever you want, Verizon. You can keep consumers locked. to your network because I don't care about actual lower prices. I care about a war on free speech that I'm waging every day with blatant lies about Comcast and Disney programming almost 100 % of the content Americans are seeing.

1:15:29Ridiculous. All those stories are on the website. You can just go read them. As always, Brendan, if you would care to defend your outlandishly stupid claims, you're welcome. Both on this show or Decoder, we can do a written interview, old school, but I would challenge you to defend the concept that almost 100 % of the content Americans are seeing come from those two companies. I think Brendan should come on the show and we're just going to read him the titles of CBS shows to see if he thinks anybody watches them. Big Bang Theory. The most popular show in the country. Does it exist? I don't know, man.

1:16:00Anyway, that's been Running Cars, Dummy America's Favorite Podcast. Very good. Thank you again, TJ, for the t-shirts. Yes. I don't know if we're going to wear these every week, but I'm going to keep it around. I'm happy about it. Well, we'll just AI it on my body. There we go. Well, we're going to AI this on Aaron Rodgers' body. It's going to be great. Aaron Rodgers crying at a Senate hearing next to Brendan Carr. Please someone make that and send it to us. All right. I've been canceled. My first lightning round thing is we'll stay in the streaming world here. Paramount, which is now famously owned by David Ellison, runs CBS, a network that doesn't exist.

1:16:36Sucks so bad. Not even 1%. No one has even ever heard of CBS. is still trying desperately to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. And this deal just keeps getting weirder and weirder. So the basic thrust of it is Netflix is going to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. Paramount would very much like for that to not happen. So it keeps launching these aggressive, hostile bids. And the Warner Brothers board keeps telling shareholders to reject them and say, no, thank you. We don't want your money. We're going to be bought by Netflix. So Netflix, in an effort to, I guess, sweeten the deal, is trying to see if it's possible to do an all-cash deal for Warner Brothers.

1:17:19And Paramount is suing, saying essentially that Warner Brothers Discovery owes Paramount a better explanation of why it won't take its money, which is so funny. Because I can tell you with such great confidence why if you're Warner Brothers Discovery, you would rather have Netflix's money than Paramount's money. but it's very good. Actually, David, breaking news. As we're recording, the judge rejected that argument and said that Paramount does not own an explanation of how Warner evaluated its deal. Obviously, because of course it doesn't. Like, can I just read you this thing from David Ellison?

1:17:56So in the suit, David Ellison writes, Warner Brothers Discovery has provided increasingly novel reasons for avoiding a transaction with Paramount, but what it has never said because it cannot is that the Netflix transaction is financially superior to our actual offer. First of all, well written. Great job, David Ellison. Second of all, that's not how it works. It's literally, he's like, why don't you like me? Please tell me why you don't like me. Is just, it's just not going to work. This whole thing, I have a very hard time imagining this continuing to go worse for Paramount, but also like, at what point does it go better?

1:18:32It just is going to be a mess. Can I draw some threads together that I want Liz to write about at some point? Are you going to draw this back to Grok and Elon Musk somehow too? I can sort of draw it back. How is this about supernatural? Look, old people exercising is the future of the metaverse. I can say that because I'm over 40. If you are evaluating Paramount's deal, the big promise Paramount is making is, hey, Larry Ellison is here and he has a lot of money. So if you don't trust our, you know, structure of a deal, Larry Ellison is personally guaranteeing that you're going to get this money.

1:19:08And Netflix's deal can't do that. And also we want to buy the whole thing. Right. Right. We don't just want streaming. We want to buy the whole enchilada and Larry Ellison exists. So what are you talking about? Look at how cool we are. Larry, do you want to, have you heard of the America's Cup? Right? Like that's, he is the inspiration for Iron Man. Don't you like Larry Ellison? Sure. And the problem is that all of Larry Ellison's money is tied up in the AI bubble. And like Oracle in particular has a bunch of weird circular deals with OpenAI, with NVIDIA. There's just a lot in Oracle that means Larry Ellison's money is AI money right now.

1:19:45And it has always been kind of bizarre that the Ellison family is looking at its investments in AI and saying what we would rather have is the company David Zasloff made. That makes no sense. Right? But if you think the AI is going to rejigger the entire economy of the world and we're all going to do fully automated luxury communism or whatever you think is going to happen, you would not be like, what I need is a 4.3 grayscale Batman franchise. That's not that you would not rationally make that determination. No matter how much you love your son. Sorry. I love my son very much. And I was like, I have one investment that might be the future of the entire world.

1:20:29And you want me to buy the Snyder cut. I love you, son, but we're not doing it. You have to go make your own Snyder cut. Okay. Like off you go. Instead, the Ellison family is yelling and screaming how Larry will fund this deal. And I just keep coming back to, oh, they don't, they think it's shaky. Like they're trying to diversify. They want this other power. and I think Warner Brothers is looking at it and saying we can't trust that money because it's AI bubble money. That's interesting. Like we don't want to be the bag holder when the AI bubble pops. That and also Paramount's entire pitch for why it's a good idea to combine these two companies is that they are going to lay off a whole bunch of people and shrink this entire industry and like there are there are both straightforward shareholder value reasons and like moral belief reasons to not want that as a shareholder in Warner Brothers Discovery, right?

1:21:25Like they're going to come in, they're going to fire a bunch of people, shut down a whole lot of production and save billions of dollars is not a compelling business. With the power of AI. It's in there. It's embedded in there. And you're like, well, how's that going for you? And then you watch season two of Landman. You're like, you should not let Taylor Sheridan use AI to write the show because it's very obviously been written by chat gpt and chat like the free version that doesn't have like the long-running memory because that show is just scene to scene none of those people are the same people just different characters played by the same actor you know like nonsensical nonsense is happening on that show that's my biggest argument against paramount being allowed to do anything is like you keep watching that show is so bad that there's an entire community of people who are like what we're gonna watch this show we're gonna we're gonna today we're gonna watch this show together and I'll talk about it because it's so bad.

1:22:19It's almost, it's like improbable. It's like a sign that you've entered a different multiverse because it's so bad. It does appear on my social media timelines a lot. And it's always just Billy Bob Thornton being like, the oil business is big and it's getting even bigger. And there's like 15 different versions of that thing. And I'm like, how many times do you need to give this speech in one show, Billy Bob Thornton? Like, we get it. Everybody's here already. We're doing this. Yeah, again, literally scene to scene that he might be playing different characters with totally different motivations.

1:22:51And I'm just saying it's just very obviously been written by AI, but like not a paid. He hasn't paid for like Claude. You know what I mean? He's not paying$200 a month to write that show. He's on the free tier of ChatGPT and he's run out of memory. I will say there are some screenshots in the Stranger Things documentary of the Duffer brothers that ChatGPT open on their laptops. Not good. Not good all the way around. listen I'm very sensitive to people who have lots of tabs open you know what I mean we should not all be judged on the contents of our open tabs the fact that there's like effectively a Stranger Things QAnon about the end of that show it did not was not helped along also what two deadlines for the secret episode have now come and gone it's forever it's QAnon somehow it's gonna merge into January 6th in some way I can see it happening anyhow it's Crazy that Netflix has emerged as the white knight here.

1:23:42People are very unhappy when Netflix was the one that was going to buy Warner Brothers. And Paramount has made such a fool of itself that I think everyone's like, we need Netflix to win this. Yeah, Netflix now seems like the company run by grownups who will do a good job in comparison. And they just seem very happy that they just sort of sit quietly and let Paramount light itself on fire. That will, I'm sure, keep being insane for a while. What's your next lightning round thing? I've got a Trump phone update. I'm sorry. And I recognize I'm doing a lot of politics. But it's all here in America in 2026.

1:24:16It's all the same. We're the phone website. The Trump phone's a phone. It's a phone update. It's a phone update. Except the update on the phone is that the nation's government has taken an interest in the Trump phone. and various Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren, have asked the FTC to investigate false advertising and deceptive practices from Trump Mobile, which has not shipped a phone, you will notice. It has deleted its Made in America branding, but it has taken$100 deposits for its phone without anything to show for it, except an ad, which we identified the phone in the ad as a Galaxy S25 Ultra.

1:24:58And so now the Verge is in the letter sent by the Democrats to Trump Mobile. It's the definitive source on you rebranded an S25 Ultra. So the FCC is being asked to investigate Trump Mobile for taking deposits on a phone that by all rights does not exist. I have heard some whispers that someone has seen a phone. They're not good whispers. They're not reportable whispers in the sense that like, I can't tell you that actually happened. You know what I mean? But if you've seen the Trump phone, you let me know, send me a picture. Let me know what it is. I suspect it is a rebranded like honor phone.

1:25:33Like Donald Trump Jr. got drunk one night and bought a thousand phones from Amazon and then spray painted them gold in the backyard. That would actually be a much more viable path to shipping a Trump phone than anything they appear to be doing. So you let me know if you've seen the Trump phone. But for now, the reporting is basically everyone has done the same story. The Financial Times has just done the same story. You can call the customer service line and some nice folks in the middle of the country because they've set up a call center in the middle of the country somewhere will tell you that the government shutdown has delayed the phone.

1:26:03And that's their straight line. They say it every time. This thing is very fun because the FTC investigation would force Trump Mobile to do one of two things, which is either admit that it was a grift or actually just say we are horrible at this because those are the only two possible options. Right. Like Trump Mobile is it's it's real and a grift all at the same time. Right. It is an expensive MVNO that they are they are rebadging network service. The same thing that Mint Mobile does for fifteen dollars a month. Dude, there's a smartless wireless network. This is what I'm saying. You can just do this.

1:26:41Does Jason Bateman know how to run a next generation wireless network? I don't think he does, but you can rebrand T-Bubble's network. You can drop ship wireless service now. It's not complicated. And most people do it cheap because you can do it less expensive. Visible, Verizon is doing this. Mint has made a lot of money doing this. There are ways you can do this. The Trump mobile service is actually more expensive than a lot of cell phone service. It's$47.45, which is an awful lot to pay for cell service. So that's a that's a grift. The Trump phone is either even more of a grift and was never actually going to be any of the things that they promised, which I think is like pretty clearly what it is.

1:27:22Or the team running this is just so incredibly bad at their jobs that they have not been able to remotely execute on this thing that they loudly promised and took a bunch of people's money for. I'm going with full rug pull but I think in the sense that the Trump family which licensed their name to this fly-by-night operation which is just Liberty Mobile it's a company that already existed they licensed their name they took their money they ran everyone thinks it's a Trump phone and this company has is literally holding the bag on we have to make a made in the United States phone and they can't you cannot do that thing here we are and a bunch of old people paid them$100 because that's That is the core of the Trump grift.

1:28:04I know. If you have seen a phone, if you've had a meeting about a phone, if you have seen someone hold up a phone on a Zoom call, I need to hear about it. David at TheVerge.com. This is the only thing in the world that I care about. Please get at us and also try and get your money back because this is nothing and everyone should know that. I think our team - There are executives who, you know, Dom is writing about this every week. We're going to start reporting on the actual characters here. Yeah. because now that the deadline's missed, it's open season. Like, what is this company? So if you know anything about that company, let us know because we are going to report out the story.

1:28:38Yep. All right. My next one and our last one, Dig is back. Dig has been in revival mode for a while. I covered it last year. Kevin Rose is back doing it. Alexis Ohanian is part of the project. They have been trying to relaunch this new idea about social networking that is also kind of an old idea about social networking. and they launched the public beta of it this week. I don't think everyone can get in, but lots of people have been getting in. I've been using it. Have you used it at all? I have looked at it. I haven't used it. It has the cold start social network problem, right? It's like you click around, you're like, there's not very many people here and you'll click out and you move on with that.

1:29:19Yeah, I mean, it is in so many ways just Reddit again. It has some of the dig ideas in that there's a homepage with all of the stuff. There's a personalized feed. You can go to different categories. They're being moderated by different things. I realize as I'm saying this, I'm literally just describing Reddit. They're just doing Reddit. So the big difference is that they're doing Reddit in like an anti-AI way. Like, isn't there a tagline, handmade by human hands with robot assist or whatever? Like they're obviously doing some amount of like cloud coding but like they Alexis has been on his social channels forever promoting this project by saying we're overrun by bots yes and AI spam and we need a place for real people yes so that I think is one of the really interesting tensions of the new dig is that they're very interested in how to use AI as like tooling for moderators and ways to give people ways to do more stuff on the platform more efficiently but they are i think pretty earnestly and seriously trying to make this a place just for humans to be um and i don't know if you've experienced this or if it feels this way to you but now every time i go on reddit it feels like two-thirds of the comments on every post are just bots like it just but like bots in the way that like they're all auto mod bots because to combat the spam all the moderators needed to deploy their own bots yes there's a Yeah, it's I mean, it's it's nuts and it is it is chaotic and the auto mods have gone kind of out of control.

1:30:55And that's one of the things they're trying to solve for here. But in general, I mean, there's some really interesting design stuff like the we talked a while ago about those new icons on the Airbnb website that are much more sort of physical and skeuomorphic. This very kind of old idea about icons like that's all the dig stuff. Some of it is is sort of clearly purely like nostalgic going back to 2004 when dig launched. but there's also just a different sense of what's going on here and i realized in reading this that i don't really have a good just like aggregator of headlines that people are talking about on the internet anymore and i'm kind of glad to have that back dig is not perfectly that thing again but like here's some stuff people are talking about online reddit doesn't really do that anymore twitter doesn't really do that anymore threads never did it blue sky never did it like there's a version of that that i actually think might be exciting to me about dig you just want CrowdTangle.

1:31:50I want StumbleUpon. Do you remember StumbleUpon? Yeah, yeah. It was just like, here's some neat shit on the internet. You know what I'm really surprised with this day relaunch is that they didn't engage with App Protocol or ActivityPub at all. Right? Like, there's a bigger base of users. And I guess, you know, both these guys are rich. Like, they can just afford to keep the thing going while they collect users. And Alexis in particular is like a, he's got marketing channels upon marketing channels now because he's all over social media. Yeah. So they can get app installs and get over that cold start problem.

1:32:19But it does seem like integrating with the larger networks that exist, the open social networks, would have gone a long way here. They have said it's on their list. I haven't talked to either Kevin or the rest of the team in a while, but at least as of like last summer, it was on the list and it's a thing they want to do, but they were very much in the sort of threads mold of like we want to build this thing to work on its own and then figure out how to kind of make it part of the rest of the world. And they were also thinking along the lines of, you know, we don't know whether throwing in with ActivityPub or throwing in with that protocol or no stir or whatever is going to be the right one.

1:32:54So we're going to let that fight shake out and then we'll pick. And that fight is nowhere closer to shaking out. It's not shaking out because no one's picking. Yeah. Everybody's waiting for someone to decide and someone should just decide. I have heard ActivityPub is in the process of being made an official IETF standard, which will let much larger companies tell like Europe that they're in compliance by using a standard, which might move some things. There's a lot of at protocol action and not so much activity pub action, at least as far as I can tell. But I get pitched more at protocol blue sky stuff than I get pitched activity pub stuff.

1:33:31I think that's right. I mean, it's just because blue sky at this moment has so much more juice than Mastodon does that the flagship thing for activity pub doesn't really exist. And it was going to be Mastodon and then it was going to be Threads and both of those things seem to be waning pretty aggressively. Well, Threads is huge on its own terms. Threads is still just bait. Although you're like a Threads person, not a Blue Sky person. Casey is also just like mystifyingly a Threads person. Threads is huge. It adds, the last stat I heard at a dinner was Threads adds one Blue Sky a day. Yep. In users.

1:34:08Like it's just massive. It's honestly, it's just, they're still so allergic to news and the algorithm is still so aggressively like Like, has anyone ever heard that sound when you open a soda can? What is that? You know, it's like just that all day long. They haven't cracked relevance and whatever. But it's huge. But it also was just rejected by the Mastodon community. So its attempts at Federation came to nothing. Whereas I think if they were on that protocol, there would be some fight between Threads and Blue Sky. But you would more easily perceive that it was one big interoperable network. Maybe.

1:34:44I think that's a lot of credit to give to the Mastodon community for its power to enact much of anything. But yeah, I mean, it certainly seems like the momentum for threads to federate has slowed down. And I think that's why some of the can we make app protocol an actual standard might change some of... Meta did all that to please European regulators. Yeah. Yeah, which would, which would the end of the day in whatever. And but there's nothing to interoperate with. Right. And I think at the end of the day, the answer is going to be both. And that what we're going to end up with is a potentially messy set of tools that also puts those two things together and bridges between one and then the other.

1:35:27And we're going to end up with like a bunch of protocols that all talk to the protocols. And it's just going to be insane. And then somebody will build a product that makes it all work invisibly and it will be fine. Yeah, that'll happen. I'm just thinking of Thread's engagement bait. My favorite of all time was someone posted a picture of, I believe it was the windshield washer light or the low tire light on their car. And it was, how do I make this light go away? Oh, that's good. It was just like the greatest bait of all time. Wow, that is really good. Like dads for hundreds of miles came running to that post.

1:36:06that is honestly genius yeah doing doing something slightly wrong earnestly is the single best way to get engagement on the internet it's just it's just fantastic um all right we have gone way over as we are want to do uh but we had a lot to catch up on it's like it's been almost a month since we actually got to sit down and do a normal verge cast uh it's been good to catch up having a good time it's been good one housekeeping thing before we go season two of version history is now over uh if you haven't yet listened to the tivo episode which you and i did with emily and us mom we had a blast making that episode like i i think it shows in the episode but that was as fun as it has been to just sit and reminisce about old technology uh as i have had uh emily was a delight and did not care at all about our technology stories and it was exactly the energy we were hoping for um but we're taking a break for a while while we get the next bunch of them ready uh and then we're gonna have six more episodes um neil i have i showed you the list of the six i have not you're not i mean what are they i'm gonna read you the six um we're gonna do the original macintosh we're gonna do the amazon echo we're gonna do furby uh which got huge reaction from the verge staff a lot of feelings about furby um we're gonna do the vocoder um we're gonna do the western electric 500 telephone okay uh which is like sneakily a fascinating monopoly story about phone lines.

1:37:31Oh yeah, it's a Carter phone rule. Yeah. Yeah. And we're going to do Clubhouse, the app that everybody used during the pandemic for 15 minutes. I don't like how much the pandemic has come up on this episode. I'm just having an emotional reaction to that. Clubhouse? Clubhouse is maybe the shortest lived and least relevant of anything we have yet done on version history. I would say that's true. That would be my objection. I'm pretty excited about it. it's your show man I'm letting you I'm just I know what the rules are is it possible that that's going to be like a 13 minute long episode yes it is but I think a bunch of billionaires went crazy for a while I have a couple of very weird memories about Clubhouse that I'm very excited to get into on that episode I have only weird memories about Clubhouse there you go but if you have if you have memories or stories or anything that you want to share about any of those six things send us an email vergecast to the verge.com call the hotline 866 verge one one we did a little bit more of like featuring the audience in this season of virgin history and I want to do even more of that going forward so send us emails call in voicemails here's what I want I want photos of your original Macintosh fish tanks ooh I once made it my fish tank was a Macintosh SC30 but in high school I made an aquarium out of an old Mac if you got an original Mac aquarium I want I want photos for that episode of Virgin History.

1:39:00That's very good. I like that a lot. Also, stay tuned to Decoder. Monday's episode, right, is going to be the one you did live in Vegas? Yep, that's the CEO of Razor. That episode's a wild ride, man. It was, sitting in the audience was a time. I'll tell you that. It ended with a softball question and I've never, just to end it, just be like, let's wrap it up. You know, like, thank you for your time. And I've never had a softball question just go that sideways. I'm not going to say what it was, but when you hear it, you'll hear it. It was the talk of the Brooklyn Bowl after that episode finished recording.

1:39:30I'll tell you that. And then you're going to have more on all of the Grok stuff on next Thursday's episode. So make sure you stay tuned. Also, if you're a subscriber to The Verge, you can get all of these podcasts ad-free. You just have to go to your account settings on theverge.com. It's actually a shockingly easy process. We keep hearing from people who are like, I can't believe this is a thing I can actually do. Very exciting. Good job to our product team. Go get all of our stuff. Subscribe to The Verge. It's the best way to support all of this. and make sure that we can continue to yell at Comcast and Google and everybody else.

1:40:02We are ungovernable because of our subscribers. You can't stop us. This is what we're here for. Also, when I say they love me, what I mean is they hate me. Just to be 100 % clear once again. We're going to clip that in at the end of every single social clip we do of you from now on. Yeah. Actually, they hate me. It turns out. All right. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next week, Neelai. Rock and roll.

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