Siri is good now??

14:02Nilay Patel:And none of that ever worked out. And now OpenAI's pivoting to enterprise and they're all chasing that money. And I think Apple is just saying, look, this is good enough. This is maybe as good as two years ago, free ChatGPT. This is essentially the same level of capability. but because it has access to your iMessage and your photos and if you use Apple Mail, your mail, a lot more can be done here. And we're building visual intelligence directly into the camera, which is a huge deal for iPhone users. That's a lot. Straightforwardly, that's a lot to build into the operating system. What is the thing you're going to have to sell to get people to pay money or download a different app is a very complicated question when that's built into Siri.

14:42Nilay Patel:And I really think the free AI apps are all kind of, they're all going to put out statements soon, right? We welcome the competition. You know, like that's the thing that happens when apps get Sherlocked in this way. And it is just here. It's absolutely going to be the thing that happens now.

14:58David Pierce:Yeah. I've been thinking a lot about this being sort of the equivalent of like the, can Netflix become HBO before HBO can become Netflix thing? It was like, you and I have spent a lot of time on this show over the last couple of years talking about all of the AI companies trying desperately to figure out how to be a platform, right? Like ChatGPT has taken every imaginable run at trying to build app stores. Everybody is doing skills. Everybody is building connectors. MCP is a big part of trying to stitch this whole system together. There's this question of like, how do we take a chatbot, which clearly people like interacting with, and break it out into something bigger and broader and sort of cross app and more functional?

15:36David Pierce:How do we give this tools and things to do? And the bet was that we can get there before Apple can figure out how to make a pretty good assistant because it actually has all this other stuff. And Apple, even more than Google, has that kind of access and sway over developers to get them to play some of these games. So I think good Siri is going to have a pretty easy time getting most developers to do things like expose app intents and give Siri access to their tools in order to do stuff. I know you're going to DoorDash problem me in a minute, But it does seem like Apple is now on its way to winning that race, to becoming ChatGPT, or at least, you know, free ChatGPT before ChatGPT could figure out how to be the app store.

16:23David Pierce:And that to me, if I'm open AI, is like a very scary state of affairs.

16:27Nilay Patel:This is why open AI is pivoting in enterprise. I think they have realized that there's not money in the consumer market. I'm the one who keeps yelling that there's no great consumer AI products, right? There hasn't been the thing that would make people pick up a different device or have a different experience before picking up an iPhone. And if you don't have Candy Crush and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, what do you got? Your phone is going to be with you because those are the things that consumers want on their phones. Your weird metaglasses aren't going to deliver all those experiences in that way.

16:59Nilay Patel:Certainly your friend pendant, which is essentially useless, is not going to deliver those experiences in that way. So either you lean all the way into people don't even want apps anymore. They just want to be free. They want to be talking to their necklace, whatever you think that future is. Or you have to disrupt the phone. And, you know, OpenAI has Johnny Ive. They're actively going to try to disrupt the phone. With a phone, we think. Maybe with their own phone. You know, Microsoft is like showing off like lanyards. Like they've just got weird ideas about what comes next. And I think Apple, they're like, well, all of your products are apps on our phone.

17:37Nilay Patel:So we can just do the thing that we're really good at, which is disrupting the apps on our phone by building the features in the operating system. And then whatever comes next, like, we'll be ready for it. The big question for Apple is they're so device-centric. For privacy reasons, yes, but also that's the app model, right? All the apps live on your phone. They don't live in the cloud. So, yes, they can do agentic stuff and they can call you a DoorDash. What are you going to do when you just have AirPods in or you have Apple's glasses in and you want to call an app? Is that going to call your phone in your pocket?

18:08Nilay Patel:Is it going to leave your phone at home like you can with an Apple Watch now? It's really unclear where that app logic lives. Beyond just the I can strong arm app developers into doing what I want. Right now, it's like, okay, we're going to go and use the web version of DoorDash. Google is much better at that. Straightforwardly, Google is much better at that. And their strategy is we will open a Chrome browser on Google Cloud for you and click around DoorDash, and they can just do that. Apple doesn't have those moves, and they're still very focused on selling devices, running the apps locally in devices.

18:39Nilay Patel:Even the index I'm talking about, Gruber pointed out to me, they rebuild that index per device. So when you update to one of the 27 OSs, your Mac builds its own index, your phone builds its own, your iPad builds its own index. They don't share it. So this device model is going to be freeing in one way because they have access to your data. limiting in another really big way.

18:59David Pierce:Yeah, that's interesting. That actually makes sense. I was running the new Siri on my iPad, which I don't use for things like calendar. So I asked it a calendar question and it turns out I've never opened the calendar app on this thing. So it had no idea. I was like, oh, well, this totally failed. And then it was like, no, I just literally have never actually looked at the calendar on this device. But I agree with what you're saying. And I think I'm curious how you feel about the way Apple has been talking about that stuff, because at that same tech talk, I think it was Craig Federighi alluded to basically Apple thinks that a lot of people don't want to use their AI systems the way that software developers do.

19:41David Pierce:And I think that is very clearly something you and I agree on. But this question of is Apple basically saying that we don't think these sort of multi-step orchestrating agents is the future of consumer technology? Are they saying that because they haven't built it yet in the same way that they like pretended that AI wasn't important because they screwed up AI so bad? or is this actually like a statement of UX from Apple that they're like, no, your job is not to orchestrate agents. We just built a thing that can be helpful, right? Like they even talked about it as we don't think of Siri as sort of the center of the universe.

20:16David Pierce:They almost had to sort of answer for why they built an app at all. And they basically see it as a way to go see old conversations, not like the place you go to use your phone, but they see it as sort of a across the systems you already use. And sure, if you're Apple and you have all of the incentives Apple has, that's a thing to do. But I also think it's not a crazy case to make as a product person to say, actually, most people don't and won't think of computers as a bunch of agents to send to do things on their behalf. They just want to order food.

20:48Nilay Patel:Yeah. What was the title of our last episode that we did together? Where's the computer? It's this. This is a central question in the age of AI. Where does the logic live? Where does the computing happen? And if you want a bunch of agents to go do stuff for you, it should be the cloud. The answer somewhat naturally is the cloud. Sure. Because then you can just issue commands and you don't have to worry about your phone battery dying or whatever it is. The things happen and then the result is delivered to you. I'm less of the opinion that consumers care or don't care about multi-step agent orchestration.

21:23Nilay Patel:Like, sure, they also don't care about Docker or HTML. or like what, you know, it's like, yes, like technology exists. Our audience cares a lot that Bluetooth 5.0 exists. Sure. Do normal people understand that Bluetooth 5.0 is what enables a bunch of wireless head buds to have pairing across them? No, of course they don't. Yeah. So I think Apple - They should, damn it. We're going to do a great holiday spectacular this year. Like, I think there's a little bit of difference between the tech companies, the sort of enthusiast audience, which we have here, and then like the mainstream technology consumer, right?

21:59Nilay Patel:And somewhere in there, Apple's pendulum swings back and forth. Like when it's time for a new iPhone, we are going to hear exactly the details of the new A-series chip. If the iPhone folds, we will hear exactly the details of how they remove the crease from that OLED screen. They care about the technical innovation when it's theirs. When it's someone else's, they're like, no one cares about this. Like no one has to care about any of this stuff. And it's like, well, the stuff is what you make the products out of. I don't think consumers need to care about multi-step agent orchestration. But if you do want to say, hey, I'm landing in LA in the next hour, make sure I have an Uber, my hotel is checked into, and there's food waiting for me when I get there.

22:44Nilay Patel:Well, yeah, that's a pretty normal consumer use case. It's a pretty normal use case for anybody who's traveling. You need multi-step agent orchestration. Like, it doesn't matter that you know that that's the thing that's happening or not. And that's the gap that I think Apple's in the spot where they're saying no one cares about the technology. And what would you even use it for? You're just spaghetting it at the wall, which is what they do while they let the rest of the tech industry figure it out. But it's not to say the technology is not important.

23:12David Pierce:Yeah, I agree with that. Next time we do a Vergecast movie, we need to do Her because Her, a shockingly prescient 2013 movie, I think, has really strong opinions about how an assistant might tell you when to look at a screen in a way that I think is really fascinating. But like that to me is is I think I don't know. I think the part of what you were saying before that that I keep thinking about is this idea that I'm just going to be on AirPods and that I might order dinner without any other device ever. But AirPods that I just sort of declare to the world through my AirPods that I would like pizza and it does all of the work and pizza arrives at my house.

23:53David Pierce:And I think I think Apple might believe and it might be right that that's just not how people are ever going to use their devices. And that Apple actually has a huge advantage by being able to be like, hey, open up your phone to review your order just to make sure we're getting it right. That like that's that's the that's the step before multi-agent orchestration. Right. That is like this is the human in the loop stuff we keep talking about that. How do we how do we make this work in a way that feels like normal people using normal devices in normal ways? And I think, again, it's very possible that all of this is just Apple continuing to be behind on technology and trying to invent reasons that it's behind on purpose.

24:34David Pierce:But I do think there is a real case for Apple coming out here and being like, Siri is not the immediate way that you are going to do most things on your phone from now until the end of time. But it is just another feature of how you already use your phone. Yeah. Like, I sort of hope that's the answer.

24:53Nilay Patel:Apple's addicted to weird riffs on standards that no one else uses. You know, you could probably build all this stuff with MCP today. Is Apple going to have a weird riff on MCP that it's going to force the entire industry? Of course so. Oh, absolutely. Just like it has a weird riff on Dolby Vision that the entire industry has to use to get Dolby Vision on Apple TV. Like, it's just the way it goes. And that's how they maintain control of their ecosystem. I think this is one of the reasons that the European Union is like, no. Like, you have to let things be interoperable. If your AI assistant is the only thing that works at the operating system level in this way, there will not be competition for AI assistants.

25:33Nilay Patel:And we want competition this time around. You know, Apple's response is to say, screw you, we're going home. Maybe that means more people use Claude in this way or Gemini in this way in Europe. And there actually develops a parallel ecosystem. or maybe Apple figures out whatever technical solution it currently says is too hard to figure out or that it can't get approval for from the EU and Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude get to tell you, hey, look at your screen for the human in-loop verification. And that power of the ecosystem right now is all tilted in Apple's favor. That's the argument you're making.

26:07Nilay Patel:I think you can see Europe saying, actually, we need to make sure we break it open this time so it's not just a monopoly or a duopoly. Actually, let me ask you this. There's a big argument to be made based on all the Siri reactions, that once again, iMessage lock-in is the thing. Right? All these texts are in iMessage. No one else can see them. Boy, Siri is great now.

26:28David Pierce:I mean, if you were a person who, like a sicko, has had never delete as the option in your iMessages, and so you just have however many years of messages, you were in for a wild surprise when that index finishes with the new Siri. But yeah, I kind of think you're right. I mean, there's the lock-in certainly is going to be vastly more intense now because the switching costs of losing all of those messages, even if you decide to move, right? Like if I switch to Android, I've now done this. Like switching to Android is easier than it used to be. But the idea of like my assistant is now going to have vastly less stuff to work with because there is a huge source of my life in those messages is a big deal.

27:13David Pierce:Like the lock-in feels stronger than ever if Siri is good, because good Siri is going to be very hard to walk away from and to start over from with one of these other things. And again, this is something all of the other AI services have been trying to do, too. They all have memory. They're all like asking for custom instructions, right? Like the idea is the better we know you, the more we know about you, the harder it is going to be to leave because you're going to have to start over with something else. and the fact that, like you said, Apple fixed this database just gave it a huge advantage on that front that is going to be very hard to walk away from for a lot of people.

27:48Nilay Patel:I feel like if two years ago they had said, here's what we want Siri to do. We're going to spend two years figuring out how to search messages. I think a lot of people are like, yeah, that's how long it's going to take.

27:58David Pierce:Yeah, and then we're going to be able to find all of the stuff in your messages that you can't now. Everybody would be like, great. See you in 2026. This is perfect. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm fascinated by this. I need to test it so much more, but like the number of deeply infuriating basic tasks that Siri can't do seems to have gone way down. And just that alone, what a great day this is. Like if it just remembers my reminders correctly from now on, this will have all been worth it. AI is worth it just for that. All right, we should take a break and then we're gonna come back and we have some social networking figuring out to do.

28:34David Pierce:We'll be right back.

28:37Nilay Patel:Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Important questions don't usually have simple answers, and they usually come with a mix of uncertainty, excitement, and reflection before a big breakthrough. So when you're working through something important, it helps to have a sounding board to explore ideas and uncover what's really underneath them. That's where Claude comes in. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter.

29:13Nilay Patel:Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic web search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude today at claude.ai.verge. That's claude.ai.verge. and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai slash verge. Support for the show comes from Granola. It feels good to walk away from a meeting that actually felt productive, but our brains can hold only so much info. You might look back and realize you either, A, got caught up in your notes and missed some important stuff, Or B, you couldn't even take notes, and now you're just trying to reconstruct it all from memory.

30:04Nilay Patel:If that's your dilemma, Granola can help solve it. Granola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. You can take rough notes like you normally would, while Granola securely transcribes the meeting. Then after you wrap, it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes. Granola also works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. It's your standard meeting setup, but enhanced. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You could try it totally free for three months.

30:40Nilay Patel:Just head to granola.ai.verge. That's granola.ai.verge to get your time back. Get three months free at granola.ai.

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32:03David Pierce:All right, we're back. Neal, I'm going to give you three small pieces of news. and then I want you to galaxy brain your way through them for me. You think we can do this?

32:15Nilay Patel:Yeah.

32:15David Pierce:Okay, here are the three pieces of news. Piece number one, Instagram is letting you more explicitly define your algorithm in Instagram. You are going to be able to tell Instagram what you want to see more of in your main feed. Piece number two, Blue Sky is getting a new feature called Communities, which is basically a smaller version of Blue Sky for people who want to talk to each other. It's Reddit, but on blue sky. Piece number three, YouTube has introduced DMs for somewhere between the second and 53rd time in the history of YouTube. There's something going on in social networks right now. And all three of these things feel like they are part of some turn in how we think about social media and social networks.

33:04David Pierce:Do you have a grand theory of this moment in social?

33:07Nilay Patel:Can I add a fourth thing that is utterly self-serving, but I think fascinating in this context? We have a really great product manager named Danielle. If you follow our site, you can see she does version updates every week. Like, here's what we shipped this week. She's great. She does a lot of user research. And when we were doing our homepage refresh, she did a lot of user research about the story stream and QuickBooks and all that stuff. And one thing, the thing that I'm adding to this, piece number four, is a lot of people tell Danielle, like a lot of Verge readers tell Danielle, they use our story stream instead of social networking products, which is always our goal.

33:43Nilay Patel:So this is very self-serving. Like I'm very proud of this thing. But they're like, I'm tired of algorithmic social media. Here's a thing that feels like that with a community I like. Great. We're nowhere near the scale of these other networks. But I'm just adding that to the mix because it's something that our audience, maybe some of you listening to this, have said to us. We are tired of big social networks. And all of the things you're describing are ways to make the big social networks feel small. And I think that's fascinating. Let's start with Masseri, because I could talk about Adam Masseri's Threads post about the recommendations algorithm and the sense of agency and control all day and all night.

34:20Nilay Patel:And I've asked Adam to come on Decoder or the Verge Pass or wherever he wants to come and talk about this, because I could spend hours and hours talking to him about this post and what he thinks agency and control means in the context of a giant multi-billion user algorithmic social networking product. But here's what he wrote. Something is shifting in what's technically possible. For years, ranking algorithms have been built with technologies that aren't legible to people. No human can read a neural net and explain why an algorithm thought you might be interested in a given video. You can't have agency over a system that lacks an interface you understand.

34:52Nilay Patel:And then he goes on to say, what's new is that LLMs can now look at clusters of content and describe them in language people understand. right so all of this is just math and so any given video the algorithm was just putting together like coordinates to say inside of our giant database of content this these all match in a cluster and you could never look at that it would be like looking at the matrix and now the llm can look at that at scale it in low latency and say this is why this video is here which means you can talk back to it and you can say i want more of this and less of that so what he is describing is not just like a set of filters.

35:30Nilay Patel:It's not just, you know, ask it for more puppy videos. It's like very directly an interface to the algorithm itself that you can now talk to in natural language. And his point is, I'm doing this because I want you to feel control. Right? Recommendations are great. Not all of your friends are posting all the time. If you open Instagram and it's just the last five posts from your friends that you saw the last time, you won't be as happy as if we show you something else interesting that's happening on the network. You know, people like viral content for a reason. Now we can let you talk directly to the algorithm.

36:01Nilay Patel:We want you to feel a sense of control of what's happening. That's what the LLM is for. That is a way of making it feel small, right? Making it feel in your control. Again, I could talk about this all day and all night. I'm not sure this matches how Meta makes money by showing you ads, right, across recommended content. I'm not sure it matches Meta's entire approach to engagement maximization or the fact that Threads, which is built on all the same algorithms, appears to be built just to make dumb people as angry as possible.

36:31David Pierce:It is engagement bait as a platform. Like, it really, really is.

36:34Nilay Patel:Like, Threads in particular is that thing, right? Yeah. So there's a lot here. But you can see, I mean, Maseri's argument for why they built this is not just we can. It's like there's a lengthy reason to post for it. And it's to make it feel small. Blue Sky Community is, it's funny, everyone thinks Blue Sky is a platform. Like, it's a product. Like, I've talked to the new interim CEO of Blue Sky, Tony Schneider. They are, and they have always been, a protocol company. They're trying to build the next generation of decentralized social protocols. And I think what they see as communities here is, they would just describe it as like schema.

37:10Nilay Patel:Like, how do you describe a New York Knicks community? Here's the group of people talking about the Knicks in a way that is legible across the whole atmosphere. so that if you make a Reddit on the atmosphere that works in open social, you can say, oh, there's a community of Knicks fans on Blue Sky. I'm going to show that community in this app in a way that is coherent. And that's a big deal, right? We want little groups of communities to travel in different ways across the big network. That's a way of making the big network, which up until now is like, here's a firehose of content. You can filter it.

37:45Nilay Patel:Now it's not just a firehose of content. Here's a group. here's a taxonomy of what a community is, which is, oh, by the way, you and I have talked about this many, many times over the years. Describing what a community is online is very challenging.

37:57David Pierce:Yes.

37:58Nilay Patel:Like, is BookTok a community? What are the boundaries of BookTok? Is it moderated? Is it controlled? No, it's just a bunch of people who say they're BookTok. That's it. That's all it is. There are platforms like early Twitter, communities where just people using the same hashtag. Is that a community? Reddit has a very different model of what a community is, right? People start them. They are in control of them. The moderators do stuff. Reddit, as a platform, occasionally goes to war with its communities. People split off and they have rival subreddits when they're mad at the moderators. Totally different model of community, all to make a big platform feel small in different ways.

38:35Nilay Patel:So I think this is Blue Sky saying, okay, the protocol itself has to reflect the fact that communities form here. because you can't just rely on hashtags or people declaring they're part of BookTok. And so you see, again, it's another attempt to make a thing feel small. And I think it truly, with YouTube, they have to admit that they're a social network every now and again. And so if you do shorts and you have people in the comments, it is only natural those people should want to talk to each other, right? And particularly the number of creators who are like, comment with whatever, you know, comment with course.

39:11Nilay Patel:and I'll DM you a discount code. Like that is actually a monetization funnel for a lot of like weird creators. They need to support it.

39:20David Pierce:Yeah, I think the DMs one is kind of the most straightforward to me because everything we've seen from YouTube over the last year or so has been about keeping you on YouTube for more activities longer. And one obvious one is let people send videos to each other, which is just like not really a behavior that exists inside of YouTube. And so you can build all of these other monetization systems into YouTube. You can build all of these new, like, super subscription things into YouTube. They're just trying to make it so that your entire experience of YouTube can stay inside of YouTube, which is very funny because if you remember way, way, way back, one of the main ways YouTube became the default video player on the internet was because it had a really great embed that you could put anywhere on the internet.

40:08David Pierce:Like YouTube's embed system was better than everybody's for a really long time. And it was like a thing the company took great pride in. And they've actually kind of made it worse. Like YouTube embeds on our website right now are worse than they were a couple of years ago. And it is because YouTube is really, really, really trying to get you to go to YouTube.com. And so just DMs is just a way to send videos to each other. Strikes me as like an obvious answer to that.

40:34Nilay Patel:And by the way, Instagram knows this. Adam Aseri says this all the time. The number one mechanic on Instagram is you watch Reels and send it to a friend. YouTube doesn't have that mechanic, right? Like, it just never has. And I think part of the reason, this is, again, my point about trying to make everything feel smaller, I don't perceive that my friends are on YouTube. That is not a social product in the same way. Yeah. Right? Like, I open YouTube to get something done and I leave. I know a lot of people watch YouTube all day and all night. But the idea that that's a social experience you're having, this is what I mean about they have to admit that it's a social product.

41:08Nilay Patel:And so they have to just capitulate to on social products, people need to be able to message each other. And that mechanic of you watched a great reel and you sent it to your friend and then you have a little conversation and now your engagement time has gone up and we can surface you more ads. All that requires just admitting that Reels has made YouTube vastly more of a social network than traditional YouTube ever really was.

41:29David Pierce:yeah i was i was listening to a podcast the other day where they were they were talking about how male friendship in 2026 is just sending each other tiktoks uh i was like i was like that's super real dude like and and youtube obviously wants to piece that oh dude that that the the

41:45Nilay Patel:my christian dior meme i mean that's brought that's brought more men together in the past three weeks than like maybe anything in modern society like that thing is going to save america

41:57David Pierce:It's really true. That and the random New Zealand soccer player. Have you heard about this? No. So there's an Argentinian influencer. I'll link this somewhere in the show notes. But there's an Argentinian influencer who went and found the person they deemed to be the most random, sort of unfollowed person at the World Cup. And they identified a New Zealand soccer player named Tim Payne. And were just like, let's blow up Tim Payne. And he went from having 4 ,000 followers on Instagram to last I checked, it's well over 5 million. That's amazing. And he has just become, he is now like a phenomenon of soccer just in the last like two weeks before the World Cup.

42:36David Pierce:And it is like, this is another person. Like Tim Payne comes up in every group chat that I'm in now. It's great. That's great. But let's go back to Blue Sky for a minute, because this community's announcement comes, what, a week maybe after Blue Sky's COO, Rose Wang, did an interview with CNBC where she kind of teased this happening, basically saying that they were more inspired by Reddit going forward than by X or Threads. but she said this thing that i've been thinking about ever since which is um she said what we've learned through this process is that i think the public square is not the direction we want to go in essentially i think it's useful as a discovery mechanism but we're very inspired by companies like reddit a public square where there's only a stage and there's posters like people on a stage and people who are watching that is not social we're in the medieval stages of the online world a completely agree that is like fundamentally not a social product but b i think i think this communities thing might be a bigger pivot for blue sky than you're giving it credit for that like this thing popped up as this is supposed to be twitter right like twitter is dead blue sky is the new place to go everything's going to be fine threads did the same thing they like they built threads really fast in large part to capitalize on this idea of people wanted to leave twitter but didn't have anywhere to go neither of those has worked in that way neither of them has become the new Twitter.

44:02David Pierce:Blue Sky grew really fast and has really kind of tapered off in some interesting ways. Threads, I don't know that we've heard numbers in a minute, but presumably continues to grow, but it's like, it's not what Twitter was.

44:13Nilay Patel:Threads is growing because if you open Instagram, they're like, look at this Threads post that's also a picture, and then you click on it and it opens Threads.

44:19David Pierce:Yeah, Threads will never be what Twitter was for a very long time. But what I wonder for Blue Sky is like, do you look at this and say, oh, actually, maybe what the end of Twitter was was the end of this kind of era of social media? Period. And that Instagram got away from that. Facebook is no longer that. Like, not only is Twitter not that thing, that thing might just be a dead activity of like giant, primarily text based posting systems where everybody has a single feed in sort of real time ways in the sense that like maybe maybe that is gone and that everything has moved to these smaller communities and group chats and and private sharing and all of this stuff.

45:01David Pierce:And so, like, one way to look at this, I agree, is that Blue Sky has always attempted to be more than just the Twitter clone and the atmosphere and the app protocol is a bigger deal than Blue Sky. But this also kind of feels to me like a complete pivot for Blue Sky away from the idea of being Twitter at all.

45:22Nilay Patel:You know, the former CEO of Blue Sky, Jay Graber, she's still at Blue Sky. She's working on sort of the technical aspects of it now. And Tony's the interim CEO. I figure out what they're going to do next. Jay was on Decoder ages ago. And what she said to me then was, we made a thing that looked like Twitter because, one, they came out of Twitter, if you will recall. Blue Sky was a project inside of Twitter that got spun out. But the reason they made a thing that looked like Twitter is they just needed a product that people could understand while they worked on the protocol that they were actually interested in.

45:53Nilay Patel:And this is back when Jack Dorsey, you know, would pronounce that Twitter never wanted to be a company, it really wanted to be a protocol. And no one understood what he meant. And I think Blue Sky is a real extension of that. What you want is an open social protocol. And if that's the thing you want, then you will never build a product that is great. And I think you can see that with Blue Sky today. There's a reason that, sure, you know, Blue Sky has whatever reputation it has, but they're not actively trying to go change that reputation or recruit users or build a bunch of features that people love.

46:28Nilay Patel:All of their time is on the protocol. And I think what they've discovered is, yeah, I agree with you. The idea of the big influential Twitter may have just come to an end. And Twitter itself, you know, we can see in a SpaceX IPO, Elon has destroyed that business. The users are down, the revenue is down. The only revenue that's up at X, the Everything app, is data licensing to XAI. So like in a circular way. Not shady at all. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm certainly doing all of my credit card processing in X. I don't know about you. Oh, same. Who doesn't want to trust their financial data to do on Musk? So you see like maybe that era has come to an end and maybe Threads will never actually replace Twitter as the Zeitgeist.

47:08Nilay Patel:I don't know. But Blue Sky is saying the next generation of all these platforms should be interoperable. So if you want to build your own version of a Twitter and you want to go for it, you can accept this firehose of content from the atmosphere and build something out of it. And if you think that Reddit is dumb and you want to build your own Reddit, you should be able to look at communities somewhere else on the web and surface and display those communities in ways that are better than whoever else would do it. The problem for all this, and I think everyone knows I'm like a believer. I believe in this.

47:42Nilay Patel:The problem here is that there is no shipping validation of these ideas anywhere because Threads is on ActivityPub and BlueSky is on AppProtocol. And yes, there are like bridges and whatever to make them, you know, fake interoperate, but they don't actually interoperate. So the two big theoretically interoperable social networks are in their own silos. And there's literally no other thing that's big that proves the point for either of them. Like, Mastodon does not prove the point for threads. Like, I'm very sorry. It just does not. There isn't another big atmosphere product that proves the point for Blue Sky.

48:24Nilay Patel:And there's a lot of interesting ones. PixelFed is interesting. Skylight, the video player, is interesting. They do not have the scale to prove the point that they're interoperable. I think maybe until they interoperate with each other, that thing will not exist. Or if someone sends up a Reddit, that thing will not exist. But I do think Blue Sky's thesis is that the internet should be more open. and it's not their job to build all of the products. I think that confuses everyone all the time. I really think everyone thinks Blue Sky is a product company and they are just not.

48:52David Pierce:Yeah, but I think like one of the things that we've always struggled with in explaining why we're so excited about the Fediverse is like explaining what it looks like, right? And I think for a long time, the running theory was that the sort of base experience of it should probably look like Twitter, that it's a bunch of posts in a row. And that the cool thing about the Fediverse is you can reconstitute that in whatever way you want to, right? That what you have is a giant bucket of content and you can write into that bucket and you can read out of that bucket in whatever way you want. And that is cool and exciting in theory, but that probably what most people want and the way most people will experience it is something that looks like Twitter.

49:33David Pierce:And I think that might have been right four years ago. and I think it seems to me that everyone is rapidly coming to the conclusion that that is wrong and that even as you look at something like the algorithm changes on Instagram like to your point it's about making it feel smaller right like this is this is me saying there's this giant corpus of content I want all the gardening stuff that is not Twitter at all that's Pinterest like that's that is such a fundamentally different way of looking at content than this idea of rapidly moving reverse cron posts and I think it's very possible that we are just at the end of that era of the internet.

50:09David Pierce:And I just think that's fascinating.

50:11Nilay Patel:Yeah, I agree with that. And I do think maybe this pivot to communities is a response to that. I think all I'm saying is, it's not, I don't think Blue Sky is launching communities. I think Blue Sky is launching a set of extensions to app protocol that support communities. Do you know, and it's just like very different. Like that company is very different in how it thinks about what it makes. and I do think that gets everyone confused all the time because people talk about Blue Sky as though it's a competitor to Twitter and I don't think it has any desire to be that thing.

50:44David Pierce:Yeah, I agree. I also just went to Blue Sky and it just popped up a thing and it said new feature, group chats. This is just, we're all doing the same thing again here. The algorithm piece, let's just go back to Instagram for a minute here because I think this is also really interesting. There's this broader trend happening and TikTok has done a little bit of this. And I think Instagram has been poking at this for a while. Just the idea that you should be able to have some more proactive control of your algorithm that like Threads has the thing where you can literally say, dear Algo. And TikTok lets you sort of tell things, tell it things, not just that you're not interested, but that you are interested in.

51:26David Pierce:I've been trying to figure out to what extent this is actually like a real change in how these companies run their products versus sort of a placebo to make it feel like you have some control, where actually all it is is continuing to measure your behavior and showing you videos that statistically you're going to watch even if they make you feel gross and bad. I love the idea that we can give everyone more proactive control over their algorithm. But like you said earlier, I also wonder if that is just frankly bad for business for all these companies.

51:54Nilay Patel:All right, you've walked into the end of the Misseri post. Oh, did I really? Which I've been saving for last.

52:00David Pierce:I confess it's really long. It's very long.

52:03Nilay Patel:And everyone hit the heart of it, which is you can talk to your algorithm now. Okay, here's the end of this. This is Adam Aseri. This is the start of something bigger than a feature. It's in our best interest as a business to empower people to shape Instagram into something that works for them and that people should have a meaningful amount of agency over the products they spend so much time in. We intend to build much of what comes next on that principle. So that's great. Statement of purpose, agreeing what you said. And then he says, there's a harder version of this question on the horizon and it's worth saying out loud, within a few years, AI will be capable of not only letting us see and shape algorithms, but also generating entire bespoke experiences on the fly, tailored to an individual in real time.

52:41Nilay Patel:Oh, wow. At that point, you can imagine shaping much more than ranking. You can shape the structure of the app itself, the experiences inside it. Even the things the app is for could be different for each of us. Okay, and then this is, here's the Neil I bait. Like, I read this and I literally opened my email and I wrote to Adam in like all capital letters, like come on Decoder and talk about this. This is a real thing. That's a real thing that I did because this is what he wrote. A world where you are making personalized experiences on the fly is exciting in terms of agency, but at the extreme starts to undermine shared experiences.

53:15Nilay Patel:If AI can generate entire apps and experiences that each of us wants, you and I might no longer share any sense of space. Wow. Right? That's like the biggest idea. Like you have an Instagram. It's like not only different content for you, not just a different algorithm, but a whole different app that is doing different things for you.

53:33David Pierce:Filled with different kinds of synthetic content.

53:37Nilay Patel:Different synthetic content, different buttons, right? Like the Instagram you might see as somebody who needs to sell ads for your lawn mowing business might be totally different than the Instagram someone might see who just wants to see Get Ready With Me. It's like a different app. Like they will be different apps with different content and like different business goals for Instagram. If you recall, when I interviewed Sooner this last time, I said, look, you're going to ship different apps to everybody based on their search results. Like you're going to undermine Google as a shared sense of truth.

54:06Nilay Patel:And his response was, it's a spectrum. So if you ask, what is the capital of California? You'll get an answer. And that answer should be the same for everybody. But if you ask something like, what's the best place for me to go in California? Google will like build you a trip planner. Right. And he's like, that's a spectrum and I'll just figure it out. And it's like, oh, there's a whole blurry middle of that spectrum. It's actually pretty blurry, man. What is the body of water between Florida and Texas called? Yeah. There's one guy who definitely wants a different answer than I do. The Tappan City Bridge.

54:37David Pierce:I mean, it's your standing out front of the Capitol. What happened here on January 6th, 2021 is forever the great example.

54:43Nilay Patel:Yeah. Was the election stolen? Who knows? I know the answer, by the way. It was not. But I know some people who are very invested in Google issuing a different answer to that question. Okay, now bring that to Instagram. And Instagram is rewriting itself on the fly to show you different content and make different experiences for you. And you can direct it in natural language. Like Adam is pointing right at it. He's not shying away from the messy spectrum. And I, you know, you have a lot of feelings about meta. You can have a lot of feelings about Mark Zuckerberg, you know, a lot of feelings about Adam Masseri, but it is clear in at least the times I've talked to him that he has been the most thoughtful about this.

55:20Nilay Patel:Like he sees all the problems. You might disagree with all the trade-offs he's made and all the decisions he's made, but he's been the most like, yeah, we're going to screw everything up. He does see the thing. Yeah. He sees the thing very clearly. And he's like, yeah, whatever trade-offs we're making, we're making them, but at least I'm copying to the trade-offs. I think that's fascinating. Again, Adam, you know, I will put up the screenshot of like five exclamation points that I sent to him. I've talked to him many times over the years. I would love to spend a lot of time digging into this because this is, I think this is the future of computing in a real way, right?

55:52Nilay Patel:Is these like bespoke experiences and it will undermine our shared sense of truth, our shared sense of experience. You know how people say like Reddit is mad about something. That implies a structure and experience of Reddit that allows that to mean something. if you destabilize that it doesn't mean anything at all right and there's something there that's

56:13David Pierce:important yeah we're at this fascinating moment where we we totally sort of destroyed the idea of a monoculture right the idea that like you and i have shared cultural references just increasingly has gone out the window everybody has different algorithms everybody has different apps we see different stuff but there's still a sense that some other people have seen the things that i'm seeing right and all of these communities now exist inside of these apps so that like I can't trust that you and I have seen the same things, but I can I can I can identify with the other people who have it does. There's a limit to how bespoke you can get before we're all just hanging out by ourselves.

56:51David Pierce:And I have to believe like for my own sanity, I have to believe that is not an experience that people want. I don't know. I don't either. And like and I think there is a real if from a sort of ruthlessly efficient business standpoint, that probably works for meta to some extent. To give everybody exactly what they want without any regard for its connection to the broader culture or society might work. We can just spin up the exact thing that you're looking for right now. No one will ever see it but you in this moment. There are a lot of reasons that's really good business if you're meta. And boy, is that just like a bleak, bleak universe to live in.

57:30Nilay Patel:I mean, that is Mark Zuckerberg's vision of the metaverse in a very real way. like all the idea has been the same regardless of whether you're wearing a helmet or ai glasses

57:38David Pierce:or whatever the metaverse is less bleak at least in his world there are other legless people with

57:43Nilay Patel:you in the metaverse right but your your brain's still in a vat and he has total control of you and like it's fair you know what i mean like he's like instead of buying a tv you'll buy my tv which displays my content and we'll just like generate it virtually like his version of this is that you live in a synthetic environment under his control and again whether that is happening in a headset or in glasses or just on Instagram, it's the thing that is being pushed towards. Like every pixel will be under the control of meta. And I think it is just fascinating to see Adam Aseri just come right out and say, there might be some problems with that.

58:21Nilay Patel:Weird. You don't hear many of these CEOs ever just say that out loud. Yeah, this new feature might be the end

58:27David Pierce:of shared human experiences. We'll see how that goes.

58:30Nilay Patel:We're turning this knob. Let us know when it destroys the world. Like, it's just, you never see it. I read this and I was like, again, I could talk about it all day and all night because it's so self-aware that something about all of us using our phones at the same time actually did create shared experience. As much as it has driven us apart, there's something very important about the structures being the same.

58:51David Pierce:Yeah, it's good. Adam, come on the show. This show, Decoder, which, I don't know. I get AI summaries.

58:57Nilay Patel:We'll do Subway takes together, man. Whatever, I just want to do the whole thing. and I'm so, you can tell, I'm so into it.

59:03David Pierce:We're going to do a chicken shop date but it's Nilay and Adam Massari. I would do hot ones

59:07Nilay Patel:with Adam Massari.

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59:39David Pierce:But at T-Mobile, customers had the lowest wireless bills versus Verizon and AT &T over the past five years.

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1:01:15David Pierce:All right, we're back. It's time now for the Hype Desk. When our friends Ross and Ashley come and tell us about what's cool in the world this week. No, Ross. Screw you, Ross. It's just Ashley Esqueda. Welcome back, Ashley.

1:01:28Nilay Patel:I'm so, you finally fired him. I'm so excited. Honestly, it was long overdue.

1:01:32David Pierce:Really? It's like the third time for me, honestly.

1:01:34Nilay Patel:This is the longest game I've been playing, let me tell you. I had to go into business with this man.

1:01:40David Pierce:What have you brought for us this week?

1:01:42Nilay Patel:Oh, boy, guys. We got to talk about the Social Reckoning trailer because you know what's cooler than a million dollars?

1:01:50Nilay Patel:Whatever not this trailer is. I don't know. I have a lot of questions. This is the sequel to The Social Network, the Aaron Sorkin, Jesse Eisenberg, Dawn of Facebook movie. This is the sequel.

1:02:04David Pierce:I will say, Neela, you missed a very important name in those names, which is David Fincher, the legendary director who directed that movie.

1:02:13Nilay Patel:Yeah, and made it very stylish. Made it very stylish. He did make it very stylish. Also, like, Trent Reznor and Anicus Ross did the music. Yeah. That movie had a lot of moves going on there. A perfect storm. A young Dakota Johnson making a spectacular cameo appearance. Yeah. You cannot force lightning in a bottle, but that's about as close as you can get to doing it. You know what I mean? Like, if you, those are the ingredients, and maybe you get a good reaction. Like, that was, those are the ingredients. But this time, it's just the Aaron Sorkin show. He's written this, he's directed this, and now the eldest boy, everyone's favorite eldest boy, Jeremy Strong, who played Kendall Roy on Succession, is playing an older Mark Zuckerberg.

1:02:56Nilay Patel:Which is odd, because wasn't he, like, 35 or 36 when this happened? like Zuckerberg. And then, but Jeremy Strong is like 46. So he adds a little bit too, I feel he adds maybe too much gravitas.

1:03:09David Pierce:Zuckerberg, not a person normally associated with the word gravitas, I would say.

1:03:13Nilay Patel:Agreed. Okay, so you watched the trailer and the first thing that jumped out to me is this is pre-haircut Zuckerberg. Yes. Right, the modern, I would say, post-pandemic Zuckerberg is defined by the haircut, but the shirts that say, like, E Pluribus Zuck or whatever they say on them. Like, Caesar-era Zuck. He's gone very Roman. Yeah, yeah, Caesar-era, yeah, all the things. But this isn't that. This is, we're going to do congressional hearings, Zuck. It seems very much like the Facebook files are going to be an important part of this from the trailer. There's one part where, you know, the person leaking says, are you a tech reporter?

1:03:49Nilay Patel:And the person says, ish. And she goes, ish, which is a perfect Sorkin moment. And I'm not sure that ever actually happens in real life. Also at the end of the trailer where they're like, she's a disruptor. And I was just like, I can't. It's a lot. As somebody who's worked in Techford, so like I'm like, that word, I can't. I feel like it's just really, I don't know, guys. I don't know if I can do this again. When you watched this trailer, did you catch that Jeremy Strong is just playing Kendall Roy again? That was 100 % my takeaway from this. Kendall Roy with a really good Mark Zuckerberg accent.

1:04:22Nilay Patel:I'm a free speech absolutist. I'm not the one who's lying, and I'm not stopping them from seeing someone who is. He got the voice exactly right. The voice is really good. It is good. I am incredibly impressed by that. But yeah, especially that moment where he's yelling at Bill Burr. He's like, when I say no, that's the end. That's the end of the thing. You don't get to end. That's the end of the conversation. And it's just that. It was very Kendall Roy to me.

1:04:50David Pierce:Yeah, and this is such a weird story to choose. Like this is they're essentially making this movie about Francis Haugen and the Facebook files, which is just an odd way of framing this version of the story. Like it'll be interesting to see how much it gets away from that. But like Francis Haugen, who like famously moved to Puerto Rico to get away from crypto taxes, is like the hero of the story. The whole Facebook Files thing is very strange. And Frances Haugen's story is strange and complicated. Like, what came out in the Facebook Files is big and important. And, like, there's almost part of me that wishes Aaron Sorkin had just, like, straight up made a Cambridge Analytica movie just to, like, fully piss everybody off.

1:05:34Nilay Patel:Yeah, I was very surprised that this was, in fact, not a Cambridge Analytica movie. I was like, oh, they're doing that scandal, that massive Facebook scandal. My bad.

1:05:45David Pierce:But what I've been trying to figure out is like, do you think Aaron Sorkin just feels bad for like making Mark Zuckerberg look cooler than he was at the time? And this is why he made this movie. He's like, he's like, I lionized Facebook by accident. And now here we are.

1:06:02Nilay Patel:Did that movie lionize? Do you think Aaron Sorkin feels bad about anything ever? Because that's an honest question. I did an event with Sorkin when he did his Jobs movie, which that movie is pure nonsense. Like, I don't even know how to describe. The structure of that movie is actually, it feels like the structure of this movie.

1:06:21David Pierce:Was that the Ashton Kutcher one or the Michael Fassbender one?

1:06:23Nilay Patel:The Fassbender one.

1:06:24David Pierce:Okay.

1:06:24Nilay Patel:So the Fassbender, Steve Jobs movie. That's the magical distortion field of it all. Yes, where Michael Fassbender plays Steve Jobs, is like set up in three acts and it's three keynotes. and the way Sorkin wrote it, everything in Steve Jobs' life happened in the green room before the iPod introduction. Of course, yeah. All of his best epiphanies. And it is just nonsense. Like, it's pure nonsense. And that's weird and fascinating, but it creates structure for the movie and the narrative and it raises the stakes of everything all the time because everything has to happen before the show begins. Like, there's just literally a clock and then he's like, it's the iMac!

1:07:05Nilay Patel:And you're like, did that happen? And you can see that's the same structure he's going for here. When I did that event with him, I was like, you know, none of this happened. And Aaron's like, he's very loud. He talks really fast. And he just, like, overcame my objection. Like, I don't remember what was actually said. I just remember being in the theater and asking him that question and being like, well, I have nothing to say to you. Then there are other parts, like the fact that Next was a 14-year project that did actually have an OS that wasn't designed to be sold to Apple. how do you kind of reconcile that uh i i reconcile it this way i don't want to have an argument with you about the truth uh of uh of next but um i it steve you know steve here's what we can agree on i'm sure and he defeated the economy of filmmaking i mean he's like he's got a show he can't he can't just it could be too it'd be too boring he moves too fast and all everything that he does everything has such a pace to it.

1:08:01Nilay Patel:And it feels like the economy of that has to turn, ends up in these scenes where these like massive, you know, epiphanies or changes or people happen in these like very convenient spaces. Right, there's a pressure cooker. Yeah, the pressure cooker. We're going to prepare for your congressional testimony about the Facebook files. And Francis Haugen is going to feel hunted. And we're going to have, I mean, Sorkin loves a journalist, right? We're going to have like the newsroom plus whatever pressure cooker of the West Wing that you can sort of create, like, in the debate prep scenes of the West Wing.

1:08:35Nilay Patel:You can just see all the moves. By the way, I don't mean any of this as criticism. I'm stoked for this. Oh, yeah. This is, like, the most Sorkin Sorkin gets. Yeah. It is a very polished, like, it is, like, end-stage Sorkining. Like, this is, like, this is the most distilled version of it you're ever going to get.

1:08:56David Pierce:Yeah, I think this is like my read on this so far is there's no chance this is going to be a good movie in the way that like the social network is just a like terrifically made really good movie. Yeah, it is like a technically excellent piece of filmmaking in addition to being like a fascinating look at the Facebook story. This is going to be wild and weird and messy and I'm thoroughly going to enjoy every single second of it. Like, I just started re-watching the newsroom is a sentence that is true about my life and tells you everything you should know better.

1:09:28Nilay Patel:Wait, are you watching it like in full fat streaming? Or did the TikTok algorithm just start delivering you clips of the newsroom?

1:09:34David Pierce:So I'll tell you what happened is the TikTok algorithm delivered me the speech from the first episode where he talks about why America is not the greatest country in the world, but it could be. And I got to the end of that and I was ready to just run through a wall again and was like, all right, I got to watch this show again. Yeah, I got to get right back in.

1:09:48Nilay Patel:I got to get right back in. Yeah, this is what happens. Has Olivia Munn started doing anything by season two, or is she still just floating around the background scene to scene?

1:09:53David Pierce:Mostly floating.

1:09:54Nilay Patel:Yep.

1:09:55David Pierce:Yeah. But then there's a whole drama about whether she does or doesn't know Japanese. It's very complicated. Aaron Sorkin, famously great at writing women. What could possibly go wrong with the Frances Haugen story?

1:10:06Nilay Patel:Yeah. So the thing that I'm wondering about is, if you remember, Facebook tried to reclaim the narrative around the social network, right? They had showings of it. Zuckerberg pretended that he liked it. But, you know, insofar as Justin Timberlake saying, you know, what's cool, a billion dollars became a meme. They try to, like, recapture the meme. Again, this is like the pre-Caesar era for Zuck. I don't think they're going to try to recapture this. They're in the middle of, like, scandal after scandal and trial and social media regulation in states. Well, and the metaverse is completely in ruins.

1:10:39Nilay Patel:It's just very sad. It's very sad. There's a scene in the trailer where Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg is like, I'm a free speech absolutist. which, first of all, is an Elon Musk quote, not a Mark Zuckerberg quote. Yeah, I was going to say, he didn't. I don't think he said that. He said variations. He had this, like, famous speech at Harvard where he was like, I believe in free speech, which came to nothing. I'm wondering if he tries to recapture the narrative from this movie, or they just allow Andy Stone, the meta head of comms, to, like, rage about it on threads to no one for a minute, and then, like, move on with their lives.

1:11:08Nilay Patel:I think it ends up being how popular the movie ends up being, right? So it's like they didn't really try to recapture the social network until it blew up. And then all of a sudden it was like, as someone who does media training now, it's like we better do this crisis comms thing where we embrace the meme-ification of our film and say like, oh yeah, we love it. We love it. But also like, it was like Jesse Eisenberg, he says a bunch of cool stuff in the movie. I get the feeling Jeremy Strong is not going to say a bunch of cool stuff in this movie. Well, and also David Fincher makes it look cool, which makes it very shareable.

1:11:40Nilay Patel:The clips are very shareable. So I don't know how much of this is going to be like, again, like the meme-ification of this movie. will be much harder than I think the first one.

1:11:49David Pierce:Yeah, it's all going to be like a series of eight minute monologues because that's what Aaron Sorkin does. It's like he's really lucky TikTok allows 10 minute videos now because like that's those are going to be the clips from The Social Reckoning.

1:12:00Nilay Patel:I have a feeling we'll probably see clips of Bill Burr. Bill Burr is going to say some cool stuff in this movie.

1:12:05David Pierce:This just made me realize that the press tour for this movie when they're doing like Junkets and Jeremy Strong, the method actor, is doing it as Mark Zuckerberg is going to be spectacular.

1:12:15Nilay Patel:Can we have him on the hype desk? Can we ask? We can. We should do a screening and we can see if we can get Sorkin to run me over like a truck again. That would be truly one of the weirdest experiences of my life. I might actually pay to see that. That could be a Verge subscriber excuse. We should do that.

1:12:31David Pierce:I like it. All right, Ashley, we're going to play you out with just a brief clip from the trailer because everybody needs to hear Jeremy Strong's voice. Amazing. Thank you for coming on. It's good to see you. Yeah. spell your name and state your current occupation for the record m-a-r-k-z-u-c-k-e-r-b-e-r-g

1:12:49Nilay Patel:and your occupation i'm a professional defendant it's so good i'm a professional defendant

1:12:59David Pierce:all right i before we get into this i just want to say when when we do the brendan car as a dummy movie jeremy strong as brendan car this is just happening uh all right it is time now once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast Brendan Carr is a dummy

1:13:16Nilay Patel:Brendan Carr is a dummy

1:13:22David Pierce:it's beautiful it just hits every time I will say

1:13:25Nilay Patel:that one the one that we bought by Viola de Goomba is great and we love it I'm in the market for additional theme songs always that's very fun I don't want you I don't want people to think that because we bought the one so we could use it at will means that we're not open to new ones. Travis, our producer, has said that we're getting a lot of AI ones. So I just want to set the bar. If you're going to send us an AI Brendan Carr is a Dummy theme song, it has to be as good as the Puerto Rico song. That's a high. I don't know if you know how high a bar that is. I'm extraordinarily aware of how high that bar is.

1:13:58Okay.

1:13:58David Pierce:Okay. I'm also very, very in the market for like indie pop Brendan Carr is a Dummy. That's very good. We've had a couple of good pop punk ones.

1:14:08Nilay Patel:By the way, do you know what the funniest turnabout of the Puerto Rico song I've seen is real bands covering it and then saying it's not AI Slap anymore? We've fixed the moral dilemma. We've reclaimed it. And then all the comments are like, oh, stealing from AI feels great. That's so good.

1:14:25David Pierce:That's fantastic. I love that. That is the nature healing right there. It's very good. What did he do this week, Nelai?

1:14:32Nilay Patel:I got two this week. Brennan was particularly dumb in two different ways. One in sort of the standard way, you know, like just dumb, and one in the sort of deeply corrupt, maybe we should all actually move to an island nation kind of way. Oh, cool. So the dumb one, I'm assuming people listening to Verchast are at least lightly aware of the disaster at CBS News in 60 Minutes. So if you're not totally tracking it, David Elson came and bought Paramount, took control of CBS News. in order to close that deal with the government and get the regulatory scrutiny. He made some promises about changing the news to the Trump administration and hired Barry Weiss, who ran the Free Press, to come and be the new editor-in-chief of CBS News.

1:15:11Nilay Patel:She has no experience doing this. We've written about this at length. And she just set about sort of just unleashing chaos, in particular at 60 Minutes. And so Scott Pelley, who's like a very famous, very legendary anchor, correspondent at 60 Minutes, gets into a fight with the new management, 60 Minutes with Nick Bilton, the new executive producer. I think both of us know Nick. Nick is like a nice guy. Like I've, he's been very kind to me in the past. Yeah. But Nick is the new executive producer. He has no experience running broadcast television. He's coming in on back foot because he's perceived as a stooge of the Trump administration and the Ellisons.

1:15:46Nilay Patel:So Scott Pelley gets really mad at him in a meeting and says, why did you fire all these people? Nick doesn't have any answers. There's another meeting with Scott Pelley and he gets himself fired. I think everybody basically understood that Scott Pelley was going to get fired. So then Pelly gives an interview with the New York Times and says, I didn't think I was going to get fired. Like, I thought I was keeping this in the family. And I think the question the Times asked was, why didn't you do this behind closed doors? And Pelly's response was, I was behind closed doors. It just leaked.

1:16:11David Pierce:Yeah, but in a meeting with my coworkers.

1:16:14Nilay Patel:It was in a meeting with my coworkers, my new boss. And I was the most senior person in that room. And I spoke up for the group. And I did not think this was fireable sense because it wasn't, like, public. I was asking the new boss, like, why did you fire everybody? And there are no answers. And so Brendan responds to this. He puts on X. One of the reasons why trusted media is so low is because many legacy journalists are completely out of touch. You could not get away with that behavior at any run-of-the-mill job. It is revealing to see how blind some are to that. Okay, so I'm just going to point out, being the 79-year-old legendary correspondent at 60 Minutes is not a run-of-the-mill job.

1:16:52Yeah.

1:16:53Nilay Patel:Just is it, right? Like, actually, Scott Pelley was extraordinarily aware of his role and his tenure and his stature at 60 Minutes, and he's the talent at a broadcast network. Like, Leslie Stahl has a different relationship to CBS than, I don't know, the random PA who just got hired yesterday. Like, obviously. Like, this is just dumb on its face to think that these people have run-of-the-mill jobs. That is just, they're all millionaires. You know what I mean? Like, that's not the case. And you and I both work in newsrooms. Newsrooms are just argumentative. I open our edit meeting with our newsroom every week by saying, all right, just bring it.

1:17:30Nilay Patel:Like, let me have it. And then they just let me have it. because they're reporters. What are you going to do? They want to know stuff. This is the job. Yeah. It's the job. It's just like take the heat. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know what else to say. There's no way to build credibility in a newsroom unless you can answer the questions. And I often do not have good answers to the questions, but at least I'm not even saying I'm good at this. I'm just saying I've managed reporters for over a decade and that's the job. Like Brendan doesn't know this. Okay. So that's just dumb on its face.

1:17:59David Pierce:Wait, can I just say just a tiny little aside on that front? the reaction to the whole Scott Pelley story across different social networks has been so fascinating because they are so cleanly on one side on every single social network like everybody on Twitter is like Scott Pelley is a lunatic the old media is bad screw them all this guy sucks and then on Blue Sky everybody is like up in arms and pro Scott Pelley and then on threads everybody is just like engagement baiting pictures of Scott But like, it is so. Every network has become itself. Yeah, we just get these moments where it's like, you can just see exactly which every social network is.

1:18:37David Pierce:And the Scott Pelley story has been one of them. And it's been so funny.

1:18:40Nilay Patel:Yeah. So first of all, I just want to point out, this is dumb because Brendan doesn't even understand how many, like the cultures that make the thing. Whether or not it was appropriate for Scott Pelley to yell at his new boss about who got fired. Yeah, sure. We can debate that. Whether or not he should have done that in a smaller meeting first. Maybe he's just trying to get fired. Like, I don't know. I haven't asked Scott any of these questions. I just know that the idea that this is a run-of-the-mill job is just dumb. Like, anybody with any common sense could look at this situation and be like, none of this is about run-of-the-mill jobs.

1:19:12Right?

1:19:13Nilay Patel:Right? Like, that's just not how this is going. Yeah. Second, I'm going to point out, Brendan is our nation's communications regulator, and he should not in any sense be stepping into this dispute. But he's the one who created the conditions for this dispute, He obviously has a thumb on the scale in this dispute. He wants it to go one way. And you know Brendan is loving this. He wants to tear down the credibility of CBS News and all of the people who work there. So his reaction to this, saying you could not get away with this, this is why no one trusts legacy media, is not to support the people who are desperately trying to find some stability.

1:19:50Nilay Patel:At a news program whose ratings were actually up last year, right, that is doing some of its best work. Instead, he's trying to tear it down. And to make sure, even if Nick is successful in hiring all kinds of new correspondents and they make all kinds of new stuff, Brendan is making sure that the credibility of the institution has been reduced, which is absolutely inappropriate for our nation's top communications regulator. Like, this is Brendan doing speech police in a very direct way. I would argue that, you know, CBS, if you look at the ratings of CBS News, they're in the toilet. but they're low in ways that, like, people, other executives at CBS News are leaking that they think Barry Weiss should be fired.

1:20:27Nilay Patel:She's destroyed the brand and destroyed the ratings. So that's just one. Like, I love the idea that this is running middle jobs. I'd also point out, by the way, Barry Weiss got herself run out of the New York Times by causing this exact kind of trouble. Yeah. She built her career by trashing the New York Times and then starting a new thing, and now everyone's very offended that Scott Pelley might be doing the same thing. Very funny. Okay, so here's the second one, much more important. SpaceX is going to IPO. And the New York Times just has a long rundown of all of the ways in which Brendan Carr has done regulatory favors for Elon Musk and specifically SpaceX to make that IPO more worthwhile.

1:21:04David Pierce:How Brendan Carr and SpaceX are even near each other, it just befuddles me.

1:21:10Nilay Patel:Well, so, I mean, SpaceX is their only business that makes any money is Starlink, which is an ISP. Brendan loves an ISP. Sure. SpaceX needs spectrum. They need waivers on some of the things they want to do. If they're going to launch another 50 billion satellites to be data centers, are they going to ever figure that out? They will need additional spectrum, additional ground stations. This is all like bread and butter FCC work. Who's going to get the spectrum? Are the people who have been allocated the spectrum using it efficiently? Should we reallocate that spectrum? Brendan tips the scales to Elon in every one of those disputes, whether it's Amazon, Leo spectrum that hasn't been deployed fast enough or their satellites haven't gone up fast enough.

1:21:49Nilay Patel:He criticizes Amazon and suggests that Elon should get that spectrum and that stuff instead, whether it's Dish Network reselling its spectrum to people and SpaceX winning the auctions. He's doing it. It is a very thorough rundown from the Times. We'll link it. But you just look at it and you're like, oh, this man is corrupt. It is beyond the speech placing that he's doing. Our nation's top regulator has a favorite ISP, a favorite guy. And in every case, the regulatory decisions get pushed in Elon's favor. Now, you can say the pressure should be on Amazon Leo. Like, the satellites aren't in orbit.

1:22:26Nilay Patel:You know, like, the rockets are blowing up on the launch pad. Sure. But the point of the regulator is to preserve competition in the market and push prices down and speeds up. And instead, what we're getting is very quickly marching our way towards one kind of Starlink monopoly, which is exactly the wrong outcome. But it will make Elon Musk invite Brendan Carr to more rocket launches. You might get a free Model 3 out of it. You know, you never know. That's the kind of vibe we're in right now. And so we'll link it in the Times. Man, it's so corrupt. It's like just so nakedly corrupt. And we're at the point where the Times is writing about it so dryly because you can't even, it's like not worth the outrage compared to all the other corruption.

1:23:07David Pierce:Yeah. But it's so corrupt. And there's about to be so much money in it in so many different directions. By the time people hear this, the IPO will have happened. we're recording this on Thursday afternoon you'll hear it on Friday we will catch up on this as it continues but like this is one of the strangest moments in a deeply strange moment in tech that is coming and it feels perfect to me that actually Brendan is just running around enabling Elon Musk to get richer that's our guy

1:23:38Nilay Patel:yeah that's what he's there for he's just there for you if you're a telecom I mean, I didn't even mention this, but, like, this week he's going around and he might undo the E-rate program, which provides discounted internet service to poor families because telecoms hate it. Like, there's just a very standard kind of, like, FCC corruption happening with Brendan on top of the speech police stuff. But you kind of look at it like, oh, the speech police stuff covers up, like, a vast amount of standard corruption. Anyway, Brendan, as always, if you want to come and defend any of this, I don't think you can.

1:24:11Nilay Patel:I don't think you have the processing ability up there. but maybe with a Starlink connection you'll get there. You're welcome to come on this show, any show. We'll do Hot Ones together. That would be great.

1:24:19David Pierce:There we go. I suspect I can take

1:24:21Nilay Patel:Brendan Carr and Hot Ones.

1:24:23David Pierce:I like your chances. We'll do Hot Ones in the woods over Starlink and that'll be how we get this done. Very good. It'll be amazing.

1:24:30Nilay Patel:As always, that has been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast from the podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:24:42David Pierce:See, I like that theme song because I feel like it winds me up and it also calms me down at the end. Like it gets me in and out of the headspace simultaneously. It's good stuff. Neil, I have a thing I want to recommend to you. But first, can we just talk about Anthropic's Fable model just for like two minutes? Sure. This is the other kind of story of the week that's been percolating out there. Anthropic launched this new model called Claude Fable, which is based on Mythos, which it didn't launch a couple of months ago because Fable was too dangerous. basically the idea behind Fable seems to be that it is mythos with some guardrails so you can have it do lots of things it's this super powerful model but it won't do certain things people got immediately mad that there were guardrails as people are wont to do and so Anthropic has like kind of started to already roll them back and you say of course right like this to me is just the most obvious AI story ever like Like the company tries to be safe.

1:25:38David Pierce:People get real pissed when company's product doesn't work because it's trying to be too safe. Company says, great point. Let's make it less safe. And here we are. Anthropic is the company that is trading on being the good guy here and is being the one concerned for your well-being. And it just it's just we're like a week away from just mythos being available to everyone.

1:25:59Nilay Patel:Well, you know, Anthropic is like deeply enmeshed in Trump administration chaos. Yeah. So if the people on X are mad that there are any guardrails at all, then maybe Anthropics controversy with the Defense Department being designated as supply chain risk goes sideways in some way. It's cybersecurity initiatives it's doing with another part of the Trump Department go sideways in another way. Like, they are in one of the weirdest spots in all of this because they're in the most active crosshairs. I think if Google had a model that was too woke, Google would be like, yeah, that's what we do. Yeah.

1:26:33David Pierce:It's very weird. And I think one of the funniest parts of this is like a big part of what they're trying to do with Fable is prevent it from being distilled. They clearly think at Anthropic that this is like a big deal model. The early impressions of it seem to be very good, that it is, in fact, hugely powerful. It's more expensive. It's more complicated. Like, I think it is going to be very good. But they've gone way out of their way to make it hard to use to distill. And they're just sort of breaking people's workflows. And so you have a bunch of researchers now who are like, well, we can't do the work that we need to do on these products.

1:27:11David Pierce:And this to me, like, do you remember this phase with social networks back in the day when they were like, we're going to make it so that you can't scrape our website anymore? And a bunch of people with good intentions about trying to study this stuff were like, well, what the hell? And they're like, whatever. Go away.

1:27:24Nilay Patel:We don't really care what you think. Yeah. That was crowd tagle. Yeah. Exactly. Another shout out to our boy, Kevin Roos. Kevin Roos used to use Crown Tangle every week to point out that regardless of how liberal you thought Facebook was, the top performing pages on Facebook every single week were insane conservative mean pages. And Facebook hated this and shut Crown Tangle down.

1:27:48David Pierce:Yep. Like, it literally, I think you can draw that line as straight as that. It's good stuff. But in general, I think this fable story is just really interesting because like you have Anthropic, which clearly believes still that this model is too powerful for general consumption. Robert Hart on our team read a great piece about the guardrails around biology in particular. Like there are questions it just won't answer, including very basic ones. And there's a lot of cybersecurity stuff that it won't do. there's like we're at this moment where what do you release and what do you allow is this weird sliding scale that feels like you ship the thing everybody gets pissed at you because you don't let them figure out how to build bombs on it and then you say well okay fine and then you let them build bombs on it and that's the future of AI

1:28:34Nilay Patel:the thing that drives me crazy is there are other models you want some weird biology information like Shaduji is right there it's like Like, yeah, let's cook some stuff up. Like, let's go.

1:28:45David Pierce:And OpenAI is very clear that it believes everybody should have access to all of this information.

1:28:48Nilay Patel:That's the funniest thing. It's like, actually, like, in a weird way, AI is the most competitive tech has ever been. Like, in recent memory. It's like, well, if you're mad at it, it's just, I don't know, use Gemini. Like, it's all good. Like, but everyone's like, this model doesn't do everything every other model does. We should yell on X, the Everything app, and then obviously do our banking. Yeah.

1:29:11David Pierce:it's it's it's a weird one i think we're we're still i i've been waiting for two years for the model race to slow down to the point where like we're this sort of leapfrogging everybody does every three weeks is going to end and eventually everything will plateau and then we can just start talking about products um and that hasn't happened yet but the ways in which the models are getting better just keeps getting weirder yeah like it's just we are headed in all kinds of strange new directions about what these things can do that I feel like we are vastly unprepared for.

1:29:42Nilay Patel:And one of these days, one of these companies is going to ask them how to make money, and a good answer will emerge. They're just going to keep training new models until one of them... Sam Altman has said this, by the way. I'm making a joke, but he's literally said, maybe one day we'll just ask them how to make money.

1:29:58David Pierce:That's amazing.

1:29:59Nilay Patel:All right, Neal, what's your next lightning round item? I feel like I've talked about Trump too much at the end of this episode, but we can't avoid this one. You mentioned, I think, at the top of the show that the Trump phone is like out in the world. Like people at WWDC have them. Like a notable Verge trader, Chris Welch, who's now at Bloomberg, has one. It's hilarious. He's just like, did he have one with him? Yeah, he was like at the welcome dinner. I wasn't at the welcome dinner. He had one. I was like, did you show John Turner? There's something about

1:30:23David Pierce:covering WWDC on a Trump phone that is just so delightful to me.

1:30:27Nilay Patel:It's very good. People have them. And iFixit has one. They've torn it down. And it is an HTC U24 Pro. which is absolutely made in China.

1:30:39David Pierce:My favorite part of this is like, everybody figured this out so long ago, but there's just this thing where through all of this, you're like, okay, obviously this is a grift. Obviously this administration is corrupt. Obviously this family is conning you. It can't just be this simple, can it?

1:30:58Nilay Patel:Ifixit took the board out of a U24 Pro and swapped it into the Trump phone. Yeah, they're the same phone, man. Wait, did they really? Yeah. They swapped the main boards and the phones to prove that they're the same phone. Oh, that's amazing. We're still waiting on ours. I think Trump Mobile might be mad at us because we've got to get out for being fake for so long.

1:31:19David Pierce:I think we might be waiting a while.

1:31:21Nilay Patel:But the Trump phone, some people have them. I do not think any pre-orders have shipped outside of the ones that journalists made. But Dom has been told that his is coming. So presumably we're going to review the Trump phone soon.

1:31:36David Pierce:Okay, genuine question. All the people who pre-ordered a Trump phone a long time ago, how mad or not mad or are they even going to care? What are people going to feel when they open up their phone that is like a gold-painted HTC U24 Pro?

1:31:56Nilay Patel:I think they're going to feel like they have a mid-range Android phone with specs from over a year ago. and there's a reason those phones are not broadly popular in the United States, especially when they're preloaded with Truth Social and one of the weirdest e-health apps that has ever existed. Oh, God, what is that? It's called, like, Doctegrity. It's like a telemedicine app. But I'm confident it's just going to, like, try to sell you gray market supplements. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah.

1:32:29David Pierce:Like, Dr. Oz is going to be like,

1:32:30Nilay Patel:Like, have you tried AG1 when you opened your Trump phone?

1:32:35David Pierce:I have been saying all along that it is a much better and funnier story if the Trump phone actually turns out to be real. And I feel like I'm only half getting what I wanted, right? Like, this would have been much more delightful if someone at the Trump organization had actually, like, tried their hardest and they made a phone and they were like, no, you don't understand. We, like, really went and did this as right away as we possibly could. I think that would be so. Instead, they clearly like made one phone call to China, said, what, do you have parts in a bucket in a factory? And they said, yeah.

1:33:08David Pierce:And that was it.

1:33:09Nilay Patel:The funniest part of this is going to be the week or two weeks when America's most senior administration officials all have to pretend to be using the Trump phone. Like Marco Rubio. You know how he has to wear the shoes? Like my boy is going to be holding the yellow phone.

1:33:28David Pierce:They're all going to have phones that they just use for cabinet meetings that are Trump phones. That's absolutely correct.

1:33:36Nilay Patel:I suspect this will only last a week. Like, reality will quickly set in and the iPhones will fade back into view. But there's going to be a couple weeks here where a lot of people who have never used Android in their life are going to find themselves using a gold mid-range Android phone. I love it.

1:33:54David Pierce:I love it. It's going to be great. I'm going to get one just in case we get to do Brendan Carr as a dummy. And then you and I will both have them on Brendan Carr as a dummy.

1:34:03Nilay Patel:Oh, good. That'll be perfect.

1:34:04David Pierce:All right. My last lightning round item is just a very quick PSA that I sincerely believe everybody should know about, which is this new AT &T iPad data plan. They have this new thing called the Unlimited Day Pass. It's, I think, at least for now, only in the U.S. But for$3, you get 24 hours of unlimited data with no subscriptions, no contracts. You don't even have to be an AT &T customer. Just for$3 a day, you can get 24 hours of unlimited data on your iPad. This rules. That's really good.

1:34:35Nilay Patel:That's the first smart thing AT &T has ever done.

1:34:38David Pierce:Yes. And it is like, I really earnestly believe that the iPad with cellular is like a vastly better device than a Wi-Fi only iPad. because the thing where you can just pull it out anywhere and like check your email or watch something on Netflix and not even think about like being on the coffee shop Wi-Fi is like wonderful. That is, it is a terrific and great thing. And to have it on all the time, if it's not your primary device is kind of a lot. Like I've done some of the, T-Mobile used to have pretty good prepaid deals for some of this stuff, but like at$3 a day, like I'm traveling, I'm just going to use this today.

1:35:15David Pierce:Especially because the iPad also happens to be like a kick-ass hotspot. This is a great thing and everybody should know that it exists.

1:35:22Nilay Patel:Are they going to give you hotspot data for three bucks a day?

1:35:24David Pierce:I don't know. And I sort of doubt it.

1:35:26Nilay Patel:Yeah.

1:35:27David Pierce:I have to read more fine print on some of this stuff. But this is also, AT &T is apparently going to be offering more of these kinds of day plans to more kinds of devices. I like that. But I think this rules. And I think just everybody who owns this kind of iPad should know about this because three bucks a day is not a lot to pay for making your life a lot easier.

1:35:50Nilay Patel:This immediately makes the case for always buying the cell iPad. I never bought them because I'm like, I'm not going to pay this plan. And, you know, like the main iPad in our house is Max's iPad, our daughter's iPad. And it leaves the house like five times a year when we go on a trip with her. And like, I would turn it on for airplane day and then be done.

1:36:09David Pierce:Perfect example. Yeah. Yeah. Just thought everybody should know about that. That's really good. You get to go last. What's your last one?

1:36:14Nilay Patel:I've got like a heartwarming one. I don't know what else to say. Solar has overtaken coal in the United States for energy production for the first time. Oh, that is nice. So there's a think tank, energy think tank called Ember. And it says solar provided 12.8 % of U.S. electricity in May 2026 compared to 12.2 % for coal. That's the lowest ever for the fossil fuel industry and a record for solar. I think I just like, I'm a guy who has solar panels now, so I'm just like solar pilled. So this is your doing? We got them. I think a lot of people got solar panels at the end of the tax credits last year.

1:36:51Nilay Patel:Because they all expired. So like everyone at my little town, the installers are so busy. We actually ran a story. Justine Kalmer wrote a story for us about how tight solar installers were at the end of last year. Like they were so busy. And they were really worried about the cliff. And there's new pricing games and whatever that they're trying to do to make it up. But energy prices are through the roof. And I will tell you for the last three months, our electricity bill has been zero dollars. We have paid like$35 just to like be connected to the ConEd grid and whatever fees ConEd can come up with.

1:37:20Nilay Patel:But our actual kilowatts, zero. And it's kind of amazing. And we have EV. Like at this point, we're basically being paid to charge our EV at night. That's pretty cool.

1:37:30David Pierce:Are you? So my parents recently got solar too. And my dad has really enjoyed, like, I don't know if he still does, but at least for a while, really enjoyed like looking at the numbers. Oh, yeah. And opening up the app and seeing just how energy efficient you're being at this particular moment in time. Is that you? Are you like constantly checking out the energy flow?

1:37:51Nilay Patel:I have a lot of thoughts about the Enlighten app from Enphase. We can talk about it. They just added an AI assistant to it. It's like, why is this here? This makes no sense. But yes, I do enjoy looking at it all the time. And it tells you nothing. You're like, oh boy, the refrigerator compressor clicks on about once an hour. What are you going to do? That's what they do, actually. they keep the food cold. Yeah.

1:38:13David Pierce:I love it. Yeah. That is heartwarming. That's a good one. That's a good one. That makes me happy. It's a nice one to end on. All right. Two bits of business before we go. One is that the new season of Version History is starting this Sunday. If you guys don't know, it's our show about gadget history and the best and worst and strangest products of all time. This season, we're doing all smart home gadgets. And this Sunday's episode, Neelai, actually features you. We're doing the Harmony Universal Remote first. which was you, me, The Verges, John Higgins, and Matt Rogers, the co-founder of Nest, who I kid you not demanded to be on that episode.

1:38:50David Pierce:Yeah. Like reached out to us and was like, I will be on that episode with you. It was great. We had a blast. It was a really fun episode. This season, we're also doing Nest, which Matt is not in. It's very funny, by the way. Yeah. We also have the Phillips Hue lights. We're doing Keurig and we're doing the Clapper, which might have been the first thing I ever wrote down when I pitched version history. It's like a thing to make an episode about. It's going to be really fun. That starts this Sunday. We're going to do a feed drop on this show next Friday because it's Juneteenth and we're going to be off.

1:39:22David Pierce:But, you know, go follow all the version history stuff. We'll link some of it in the show notes. Who's on Decoder next week? What are we doing?

1:39:29Nilay Patel:Next week on Decoder is really fun. It's Adam Bree from Scotia, the drone company. He let me fly a drone in California from the studio in New York. So we did that. We flew one in the office, which was very annoying to everyone in the office. And then we talked a lot about being a defense contractor and building drones in America and the FCC banning DJI. Like we did it all. It's very good.

1:39:49David Pierce:Did you fly a drone via 5G?

1:39:54Nilay Patel:I'm not actually didn't ask him what what what I should have asked him what that would change everything I'm assuming it was you know the thing about flying scatio drones is like you're not really flying them you're issuing them commands and they fly themselves true uh so like the latency issue wasn't like a big deal but it was still wild to be like I'm just flying this drone from this laptop in New York City that is cool I need to it's been a long time since I've flown a drone

1:40:19David Pierce:because I did a bunch of drone crashing and got really nervous about it. But I think I could probably handle it now. It seems much easier now than it was a few years ago to fly a drone without destroying it. Well, you can't get one now. Well, true.

1:40:30Nilay Patel:I mean, Adam and I talked about why they don't make consumer drones. And he's like, let me figure out my business and then we'll try again. It's fair.

1:40:38David Pierce:It's good stuff. I'm excited about that one. All right, that's it for the VergeCast. We're going to be back, you and I, next Thursday because we're off on Friday for Juneteenth. But you and I are going to be a day early because otherwise we never see each other and it's fun to hang out every once in a while. You'll be presumably in some other even swankier hotel. It's going to be great.

1:40:55Nilay Patel:I've left my family behind.

1:40:57David Pierce:I'm only in staircase hotels from now on. Yeah, exactly. If you have thoughts, feelings, questions, anything else you want us to talk about, you can always email us, vergecastatheverge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. And remember to subscribe to The Verge. You get ad-free versions of all of our podcasts, including this one, Andy Coder, and Version History. Big week next week for our podcast. Go get them all ad-free. You get all of our exclusive newsletters. You get everything else. Go subscribe. Theverge.com slash subscribe. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

1:41:27David Pierce:Today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron Locasio. We'll see you next week. Eli, rock and roll.

1:41:37David Pierce:Formula One, so hot right now. It's like if traders in succession had a baby on wheels. Teams lying. Drivers beefing. celebrities everywhere and scandals lots of scandals so we made a show about it the Red Flags podcast where we recap races and break down all the latest F1 headlines but no nerdy tech talk we only cover the stuff you want to hear about yeah and the only thing hotter than the drivers are our takes and now we're doing it on Vox oh we're so legit now we're basically thought leaders TED talk incoming And we do a podcast with Gunter Steiner called Venka Hours. I still can't believe that's true.

1:42:22David Pierce:Well, believe it. There is so much for the beautiful Vox Media audience to enjoy. So come check out the Red Flags podcast every Monday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.