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Hello and welcome to the BirdCast, the flagship podcast of Orbs. I'm your friend David Pierce, and right now I am staring at an empty chair, a microphone, and an absolutely gorgeous spiral staircase. And somewhere out of here is going to emerge my co-host, Nilay Patel. Nilay, hopping down the stairs. I need to enter the show this way every week. What have I been doing? That was the coolest entrance. Like, you did it too quickly would be my main note for you. Hi, Nilay. Welcome to the show. I was so excited.
I'm a little princess. I'm very sorry to all of our audio listeners that you missed what just happened, but Neelai made a true grand entrance. Go over in your car, close your eyes, and imagine me skipping down a spiral staircase. All we need is you in like a long gown and something truly special would have just happened. Where are you? How on earth are you sitting in front of a spiral staircase? So I went from San Francisco where I was there for WWC. I came to LA for a couple days to have some meetings, meet some friends. I'm staying at the W in Beverly Hills. And it's a very nice hotel. It's been updated, but it's still like an 80s hotel. And I got upgraded to like the room with the staircase, which was a delight and a surprise. And so it's very cool. The bed is upstairs.
in the loft, and it still kind of has, like, 80s vibes all over the place, like, where the TV is over there. There's definitely, like, space for a cable box to be, do you know what I mean? Yeah. It's just very cool. Like, I'm in love with this hotel room. I'm, like, staring at the mountains out the window. It's just, the collision of trying to modernize an 80s hotel is very apparent in this space, and I kind of love it. This room to me just screams, like, years of B-list actors, and now Milai Patel. Yes, I think I'm the only person who has never done cocaine in this room. Still time, though. I know what I'm supposed to be doing in here, and I'm not doing it.
Yeah, that's very fair. So we have a lot to talk about this week. There's a bunch of interesting AI news. There's a bunch of interesting social network news. The Hypedesk is back. Brandon Carr is back. We got a whole lightning round coming. But we have to start, Neelai, with, I would say, one of the most remarkable pieces of news this week. We've talked a lot about WWDC, but a thing has been happening over the last couple of days that we have to talk about, which is that lots of people are starting to get access to the new Siri. And the new Siri, by all accounts, might actually be very good.
Like, it might just be good. I did the talk show with John Graber and Joanna Stern, and Joanna had spent that entire day using the new Siri before we did the show, and she was just on a tear about the fact that it was good and how impressed she was. I think it might be good. I think there's a chance it's good. My caveat, and don't read this as cynicism. I'm saying there's a chance it might be good. I haven't had a chance to use it. I've been on the road. I'm not updating my, like, actual phone with the beta while I'm traveling, so I haven't had a chance to dive deep, but I've seen a lot of people use it. I've watched Joanna use it.
The thing that is good, the big improvement, is that the index of content on your phone actually works now. Yes. So the bar was you would try to search messages on the iPhone, and it would do nothing. And now there's a meaningful index of that stuff, of your mail, your messages, and your photos. That index takes a long time. It actually wasn't even done when I saw Joanna. Like, it was still indexing her phone. But even while it was indexing, it could retrieve things. And because there's a useful and good search index on the phone, that...
AI system, Siri, is able to actually access it, read it, and deliver results, which was the whole promise. I'm not saying any of this like in a cynical or like minimizing way. It's just so funny that Apple neglected to build that thing for so long that now it's, I don't even think it's the AI that's doing it. I think it's like functionally they've rebuilt the index of content and now the AI can just go get it and that is magic. Well, it's both, right? I mean, you can't get the index is only as useful as the tool built to access it and like... Yeah, it's two sides of the same coin. I totally agree with that. I just don't, I don't think that there's like some huge leap forward in AI technology happening here.
Oh, I disagree. But I think you're right and you're wrong. Like, I think it's very clear that the index piece of this is huge. Like, you and I did the episode on Wednesday with the people's biggest questions from WWDC. And one of them was, what's the thing you're most excited about that isn't all this AI stuff? And one of the things I didn't say but had written down in my notes was better search. Like, if you've ever used Spotlight on any of your devices, it is just an awful search engine. Like, if all you're looking for is files.
The idea of being able to search for like words inside of a file and it should be able to find it is uncomplicated technology and is something that Apple devices have been bad at for a really long time. Mostly beach balls. Like on a Mac, if you try to search your messages, it's mostly just beach balls. Nightmare. Yeah. And so I completely agree that like, I think, was it Mike Rockwell at the tech talk you went to said they literally rebuilt the thing from the ground up. Like that to me is the single most.
obvious evidence of the fact that they just rebuilt this thing from nothing. And they started with literally, how do we build the database? Because after nearly 20 years of iOS, they clearly had built the database wrong, and they went back and fixed it. So I agree that that's really exciting. But there's also a piece of this that is just Siri's ability to understand what you're talking about has clearly vastly improved.
Like if anyone who has ever used Siri can tell you that it was bad input and bad output, right? Like it's the reason that you would say, remind me to do something. And it would like set a timer for six and a half days. You know, like what just happened? Like, yes, every time I try to set a timer for 15 minutes, it sets one for six hours consistently for the past two years. Yeah, it's like it was truly like garbage and garbage out. And I think you're right that maybe the most obvious thing that they fixed is the actual index of stuff on your phone. And that that like raises the floor of what every single bit of AI technology is going to be able to do. But also it's very clear that they've solved some important pieces of the interface. And I think, frankly, that's where.
Gemini did the job. Like Apple continues to be sketchy about what it did with Gemini and the ways in which it's partnering with Google. But like Gemini is an excellent speech to text system and an excellent natural language processing system. Like that is a thing Google is very good at. And I suspect Gemini is a big part of how Apple caught up to that really fast because that's a hard thing to build. But it has been built by other companies now. And Apple presumably was able to just grab that and can still say it got all that technology without any of the mess that is Google with a straight face. Yeah, there's some back and forth here. And I suspect it will become more clear over time about where the query recognition happens.
So I think everyone's assumption is that you talk to Siri, your phone makes a bunch of decisions, and then if it needs the power of the cloud and private cloud compute, it goes up to the cloud. I heard in some briefings that actually the query goes up in private cloud compute using the full power of NVIDIA processors and whatever Gemini distillation Apple framework model thing that they won't talk about in great detail is happening up there. That's making the decision and saying, okay, you can do this on device. And I think it is query to query, which one is happening. But I think for the more complicated ones, it's happening there. And so things like, let's search my text messages, like find out when this person said this to me. I think it's both. I think they're...
They have the index on device, and then private cloud compute is able to actually go understand what you're saying and ask for the data from the index. And I'm very curious what happens if you don't have connectivity. Or what if, for a guy who's been on a plane a lot recently, what if you have really bad connectivity? I was just going to say, these things are even worse when they're crappy than when you're fully offline. Yeah, and that's what I'm saying. I think it will become clear what's happening where as more and more people get access to Siri, and they put it under strain in low or no connectivity situations. Because I think some queries simply won't work. The point I'm making about the index, though, just to come back to that, it all depends on what you're comparing it to.
Right. So can I search my text messages on an iPhone? The comparison was no. Right. Yeah. The answer was essentially no for the longest time. And now the answer is yes, in the best possible way. And I think you can get that reaction. What I'm saying about like AI technology is, is this an AI system at the absolute frontier of what OpenAI and Anthropic and Google are doing? And I don't think that that's the case. And that's why my Apple hasn't like pushed that really far. Like all of AI right now is like, can you find a database? Can you get access to that database? Can the AI go read that database and give you something useful back to you? And even like agent stuff is a lot of.
Where's the database? Can I build you a custom front end to it? Or whatever it is. This one is, the database was so shit that no one could do anything with it. And now it's great. And only Apple has access in particular to that one. And I do think there's some magic happening there. It feels amazing. It's just so funny. I'm very focused on, well, this database didn't even work before. Now it works and they will never let OpenAI have access to it. That's a big differentiator. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think Allison Johnson and our team wrote a good piece testing some of the, I would say, sort of second order AI things. Not the like, find me this thing in my text message, but like, you know, compile these pieces of data and...
find me something. Like she asked, what's good for dinner at SFO? And it like went and found where, what terminal she's flying out of because it has access to things in her email and such and gave her some options about places to go, right? That's like, that's step two of AI assistance. In no way is that new, but this is like a thing that you can do in lots of other services right now, but now Siri can do it too. And it seems to be able to do these things pretty capably. And so this, this is kind of the big picture question I've been asking myself and others for the last few days is let's just say Siri has caught up.
to the most basic, pretty good AI assistant level. Like it does all of the level one and level two assistant stuff as well as the others do. It's not at the frontier. It's not doing leading edge agentic stuff, but like basic day-to-day life stuff. Let's say Siri has caught up. We have a lot more testing to do before we can actually say that that's the case. It seems to me that if that is true, if Siri is now good enough, this completely upends the entire consumer AI industry for like hundreds of millions or billions of people around the world. If suddenly the thing built into my phone and all of my other Apple devices is good enough,
it feels like that suddenly like blows up the universe for lots of these other companies. Yeah. I mean, this is why I keep saying Apple Sherlocked the free version of ChatGPT. Yeah. Yeah. The free version of ChatGPT was a sensation because Google search had become so shit and Siri was useless. And now here's a thing on your phone that would just talk to you and maybe just, maybe lie to you. Maybe try to break up your wife on the front page of the New York Times. Shout out to our boy K. Roos.
But at the end of the day, that didn't improve enough, right? OpenAI's goal is to get you to pay money. And they even, you know, the sort of like false start with Apple Intelligence, OpenAI's strategy was still to give it away to Apple for free and hope that you would use it enough to get you to pay money to OpenAI for the good version of ChatGPT. And none of that ever worked out. And now OpenAI's building an 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. And I really think the free AI apps are all going to put out statements soon. We welcome the competition. 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.
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 spent a lot of time on the 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's 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? 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. And that to me, if I'm open AI, is like a very scary state of affairs.
This is why OpenAI is pivoting the 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. 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. 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. 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? 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 on devices. 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.
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 I had no idea. I was like, oh, well, this totally failed. And then I 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. 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. 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.
What was the title of our last episode 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. Because then you can just issue commands and you don't have to worry about your phone battery dying or whatever it is. Things happen and the result is delivered to you. I'm less of the opinion that...
consumers care or don't care about multi-step agent orchestration. Like, sure, they also don't care about Docker or HTML or like, you know, it's like, yes, like technology exists. Our audience cares a lot that Bluetooth 5.0 exists. Do normal people understand that Bluetooth 5.0 is what enables a bunch of wireless headbands to have pairing across? No, of course they don't. So I think, 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?
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. 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. Yeah, I agree with that. Next time we do a first cast 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, I think, I don't know. I think that the part of what you were saying before 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. And 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's the step before multi-agent orchestration, right? That is like, this is the human in the loop stuff we keep talking about. 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. 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. 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 it will. 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 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. 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 it actually develops a parallel ecosystem. Or maybe Apple figures out whatever technical solution that currently says it's too hard to figure out or that it can't get approval for from the EU, and Gemini or Chatsubt 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. And 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 tuopoly.
Actually, let me ask you this. There's a big argument to be made based on all those Siri rations that once again, iMessageLockin is the thing. Right? All these texts are in iMessage. No one else can see them. Boy, Siri is great now. 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, 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's a huge source of my life in those messages is a big deal. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. Um, Neil, 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? Yeah. 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. Do you have a grand theory of this moment in social? 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 like version updates like every week. Like here's what we ship 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. So this is very social. I'm very proud of this thing. But they're like, I'm tired of algorithmic social media. Here's the 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're 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 Maseri, because I could talk about Adam Maseri's Threads post about the recommendations algorithm and the sense of agency and control all day and all night. And I've asked Adam to come on Decoder or the virtual house where everyone's 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. And then he goes on to say, what's new is that LMs 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, 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 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's describing is not just like a set of filters. 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 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 in the network. You know, people like viral content for a reason. Now we can let you talk directly to the algorithm. We want you to feel a sense of control of what's happening. That's what the LMS were. That is a way of making it feel small, right? Making it feel 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.
Yeah, right, across recommend 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. It is engagement bait as a platform. Like it really, really is. Like Threads in particular is that thing, right? So there's a lot here, but you can see, I mean, my series 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, right? 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. Like how do you describe a New York Knicks community?
But 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 fire hose of content. You can filter it.
Now it's not just a firehouse of content. Like, here's a group. Here's a taxonomy of what a community is, which is, by the way, you and I talked about this many, many times over the years. Describing what a community is online is very challenging. Yes. 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 a book talk. 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. 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 BookTalk. 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 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. Yeah, I think that 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. 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. And by the way, Instagram knows this. Adam Stary 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's a social experience you're having, this is what I mean about, they have to admit that it's a social product. 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 surf to see more ads. All that requires just admitting that Reels has made YouTube vastly more of a social network than...
traditionally YouTube ever really was. Yeah, I was listening to a podcast the other day where they were talking about how male friendship in 2026 is just sending each other TikToks. I was like, that's super real, dude. And YouTube obviously wants to be that. Oh, dude, the My Christian Dior meme? That's brought more men together in the past three weeks than maybe anything. That thing is going to save America. 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 we're 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. 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. But let's go back to Blue Sky for a minute because this community's announcement comes 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, 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 it's 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 gonna be fine threads did the same thing they like they built threads really fast in large part to capitalize on this idea if 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. 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. Threads is great because if you open Instagram, they're like, look at this Threads post, it's also a picture. And then you click on it and it opens Threads. 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 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 that is gone and that everything has moved to these smaller communities and group chats and private sharing and all of this stuff. 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. Yeah, 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 interim CEO. I figured 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. 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. 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. 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 the 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 Elon Musk? So you see like maybe that era has come to an end and maybe Threads will never actually replace Twitter as the, 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. 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 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. 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 stands up a Reddit, that thing will not exist. But I do think Blue Sky's thesis is 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. Sure. I really think everyone thinks Blue Sky is a product company and they are just not.
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 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. 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 if 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 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 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. And I just think that's fascinating. 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
I don't think Blue Sky is launching communities. I think Blue Sky is launching a set of extensions to at protocol that support communities. It's actually very different. 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.
Yeah, I agree. I also just went to Blue Sky and it just popped up a thing and it said new feature, group chats. 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. 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.
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. All right, you've walked into the end of the Missouri post, which I've been saving for last. I confess it's really long. It's very long. 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 Astaire. 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 to something that works for them and that people should have a meaningful amount of agency for 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. Green what you said. And then he says.
There's a harder version of this question on the horizon that'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. 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 new idea. 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. 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. Filled with different kinds of synthetic content. Different synthetic content, different buttons, right? Like the Instagram you might see as somebody who needs to sell ads for your lawnmowing 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. 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. We'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. I mean, it's your standing out front of the Capitol. What happened here on January 6th, 2021 is forever the great example. 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 that. You have a lot of feelings about Mark Zuckerberg. You have a lot of feelings about Adam Seri. But it is clear in at least the times I've talked to him that he has been the most thoughtful about this. 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, we 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? Is these like bespoke experiences and it will undermine our shared sense of truth, our shared sense of experience. You know how people say 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 important. Yeah, we're at this fascinating moment where 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 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. 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's a real, 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. I mean, that is Mark Zuckerberg's vision of the metaverse in a very real way.
The idea has been the same regardless of whether you're wearing a helmet or AI glasses or whatever. I think the metaverse is less bleak. At least in his world, there are other legless people with you in the metaverse. Right, but your brain's still in a vat and he has total control of you. That's fair. You know what I mean? He's like, instead of buying a TV, you'll buy my TV, which displays my content and we'll just generate it virtually. 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. Every pixel will be under the control of meta.
And I think it was just fascinating to see Adam and Sarah just come right out and say, there might be some problems with that. Weird. You don't hear many of these CEOs ever just say that out loud. Yeah, this new feature might be the end of shared human experiences. We'll see how that goes. We're turning this knob. Let us know when it destroys the world. It's just, you never see it. I read this and I was like, again, I can 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.
Yeah, it's good. Adam, come on the show. This show, Decoder, which I don't know. I get AI summaries. We'll do Subway takes together, man. Whatever. I just want to do the whole thing. You can tell I'm so into it. We're going to do a chicken shop date, but it's Nilay and Adam Massari. I would do hot ones with Adam Massari. Sold. All right. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back. It's lightning round time. We'll be right back.
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We pulled all that data in and looked at it and said that it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that... Automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online. This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.
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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. You finally fired him. I'm so excited. Honestly, it was long overdue. This is the third time for me, honestly. This is the longest game I've been playing, let me tell you. I had to go into business with this man. What have you brought for us this week? Oh boy, guys, we got to talk about the Social Reckoning trailer because you know what's cooler than a million dollars?
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 done on a Facebook movie. This is the sequel. I will say, Neil, you missed a very important name in those names, which is David Fincher.
The legendary director who directed that movie. Yeah, and made it very stylish. Made it very stylish. He did make it very stylish. Also, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross did the music. That movie had a lot of moves going on. A perfect storm. A young Dakota Johnson making a spectacular cameo appearance. 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? Those are the ingredients. And maybe you get a good reaction. 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, 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. Zuckerberg, not a person normally associated with the word gravitas, I would say. Agreed. Okay, so you watched the trailer and the first thing that jumped out to me is this is pre-haircut Zuckerberg, right? The modern, I would say post-pandemic Zuckerberg is defined.
by the haircut, 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? 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. 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. 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. 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. That's the end of the conversation. And it's just that, it was very Kendall Roy to me. Yeah, and this is such a weird story to choose. 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 Francis 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. I was very surprised that this was, in fact, not a Cambridge Analytica movie. I was like, oh, oh, they're doing, oh, they're doing that scandal, that massive Facebook scandal. My bad. What I'm 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.
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. Is that the Ashton Kutcher one or the Michael Fassbender one? The Fassbender one. Okay. So the Fassbender, Steve Jobs movie. That's the magical distortion field of it all. Yes, where Michael Fassbender plays Steve Jobs. It's like set up in three acts and it's three keynotes.
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. 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. He was like, he's very loud. He talks really fast. And he just like overcame my objection. 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. 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? I reconcile it this way. I don't want to have an argument with you about the truth of Next.
Steve, you know, Steve, here's what we can agree on, I'm sure. It's the economy of filmmaking. I mean, he's like, he's got a show. He can't, he can't just, it'd be too, it'd be too boring. He moves too fast in everything that he does. Everything has such a pace to it. 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. And he's 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. 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. It is a very polished, like, it is, like...
End stage thorkening. This is the most distilled version of it you're ever going to get. 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 the social network is just a terrifically made film. It's a really good movie, yeah. It is a technically excellent piece of filmmaking in addition to being 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. I just started re-watching the newsroom is a sentence that is true about my life and tells you everything you should know better. Are you watching it in full fat streaming?
Did the TikTok algorithm just start delivering you clips of the newsroom? 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 the show again. I got to get right back in. I got to get right back in. Has Olivia Munz started doing anything by season two or she's still just floating around the background scene to scene? Mostly floating. Yep. Yeah. But then there's a whole drama about whether she does or doesn't know Japanese. It's very complicated. Erin Sorkin, famously great at writing women. What could possibly go wrong with the Frances Haugen story? 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. You know, insofar as Justin Timberlake saying, you know what school, a billion dollars became a meme. They tried 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, the metaverse is completely in ruins. It's just very sad. It's very sad. There's a scene in the trailer where Jeremy Strong is Mark Zuckerberg. He's like, I'm a free speech absolutist, which first of all is an Elon Musk quote, not a Mark Zuckerberg quote. I was going to say, I don't think he said that. He said variations. He had this 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. 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 memeification of our film and say like, oh yeah, we love it. 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. The clips are very shareable. So I don't know how much of this is going to be like, again, like the memeification of this movie will be much harder than I think the first one. 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. I have a feeling we'll probably see clips of Bill Burr. Bill Burr is going to say some cool stuff in this movie. This just made me realize that the press store 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 spec.
Spectacular. Can we have him on the high 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 was 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. 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. 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. And your occupation?
I'm a professional defendant. It's so good. I'm a professional defendant. All right. Before we get into this, I just want to say when we do the Brendan Carr is a dummy movie, Jeremy Strong as Brendan Carr. This is just happening. All right. It is time now once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. It's beautiful. It's every time. I will say 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. That's very fun. I don't want people to think that because we bought the ones, 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 Brennan 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. Okay. Okay. I'm also very, very in the market for like indie pop Brandon Carr's Italian. That's very good. We've had a couple of good pop punk ones. By the way, do you know the funniest, the funniest like 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 like fixed, 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. Oh, that's fantastic. That is the nature healing right there. What did you do this week, Neil? 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. 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 Ellison came and bought Paramount, took control of CBS News.
In order to close that deal with the government, 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. 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 at 60 Minutes with Nick Bilton, the new executive producer. I think both of us know Nick.
Nick is like a nice guy. He's been very kind to me in the past. But Nick is the new executive producer. He has no experience running broadcast television. He's coming in on a back foot because he's perceived as a stooge of the Trump administration in Ellicott. 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 Pelley gives an interview with 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 that Times asked was, why didn't you do this behind closed doors? And Pelley's response was, I was behind closed doors. It just leaked.
Yeah, it was in a meeting with my coworkers. 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 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, the 79-year-old legendary correspondent at 60 Minutes is not a run-of-the-mill job.
Yeah. Just isn't, 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. 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. 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 what to say. There's no way to build credibility in his room unless you can answer the questions. And I often do not have good answers to 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. 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's like, up in arms and pro Scott Pelley. And then on threads, everybody is just like, engagement baiting pictures of Scott Pelley. 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. And the Scott Pelley story has been one of them. And it's been so funny. Yeah. So first of all, I just want to point out, this is dumb, because Brennan 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. 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 at a news program whose ratings were actually up last year, right, that is doing some of the 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. They're low in ways that, like, people, other executives at CBS News are leaking that they think Barry Weiss should be fired. She's destroyed the brand and destroyed the ratings. So that's just one. Like, I love the idea that this is running all 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. Okay, so here's the second one, much more important. SpaceX is an 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. How Brendan Carr and SpaceX are even near each other, it just befuddles me. Well, so, I mean, SpaceX is, their only business that makes any money is Starlink, which is an ISP.
Brendan loves an ISP. SpaceX needs spectrum. They need waivers on some things they want to do. If they're going to launch another 50 billion satellites to be data centers or they're going to figure that out, they'll 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've 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. 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. You know, like the rockets are blowing up on the launch pad. Sure. But the point of the regulator is to preserve competition 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 and my Brennan 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, well, Lincoln and 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. 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.
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. Like, that's our guy. Yeah, that's what he's there for. He's just there for you. Like, 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 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 long as we want to come and defend any of this, I don't think you can. I don't think you have a 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. I suspect I can take Brendan Carr and Hot Ones. I like your chances. We'll do Hot Ones in the woods over Starlink, and that'll be how we get this done. It'll be amazing. As always, that has been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast on the podcast.
See, I like that theme song because I feel like it winds me up and it also calms me down at the end. 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 Clawed 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 wanting to do. And so Anthropic has like...
kind of started to already roll them back. Of course, yes. And you say, of course, right? Like, this to me is just the most obvious AI story ever. Like, the company tries to be safe. 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, like, 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 you. 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 that's doing with another part of the Trump Department goes 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, 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.
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. We don't really care what you think. Yeah, that was Crown Tangle. 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. 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. The thing that drives me crazy is there are other models.
You want some weird biology information, like, Shadgy is right there. It's like, let's cook some stuff up. Like, let's go. And OpenAI is very clear that it believes everybody should have access to all of this information. That's the funniest thing. It's like, actually, like, in a weird way...
AI is the most competitive tech has ever been in recent memory. It's like, well, if you're mad, I'm probably just, I don't know, Jesus Gemini. It's all good. 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, it's a weird one. I think we're still, I've been waiting for two years for the model race to slow down to the point where this sort of leapfrogging everybody does every three weeks is going to end.
eventually everything will plateau and then we can just start talking about products. And that hasn't happened yet, but the ways in which the models are getting better just keeps getting weirder. 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. 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, same moment has said this, by the way, this is like, I'm making a joke, but he's literally said, maybe one day we'll just ask them how to make money.
That's amazing. All right, Neil, 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 out in the world. People at WWDC have them. A notable Verge trader, Chris Walsh, who's not Bloomberg, has one. It's hilarious. Did he have one with him? Yeah, he was at the welcome dinner. I was at the welcome dinner. He had one. I was like, did you show John's turn? There's something about covering WWDC on a Trump phone that is just so delightful to me. It's very good. People have them. And iFix has one. They've torn it down. And it is an HTC U24 Pro, which is absolutely amazing, China.
My favorite part of this is like, everybody figured this out so long ago, but there's just like, 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, it can't just be this simple, can it? Ifixit took the board out of a U24 Pro and swapped it into a Trump phone. Yeah, they're the same phone. Wait, did they really? Yeah. They swapped the main boards on the phones to prove that they're the same. Oh, that's amazing. We're still waiting on ours. I think Trump Mobile might be mad at us because we've...
It's calling it out for being fake for so long. I think we might be waiting a while. 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. 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?
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. Like, Dr. Oz is going to be like, have you tried AG1 when you opened your iPhone?
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? This would have been much more delightful if someone at the Trump organization had actually tried their hardest and they made a phone and they were like, no, you don't understand. We really went and did this as right away as we possibly could. I think that would be so. Instead, they clearly made one phone call to China, said, what, do you have parts in a bucket in a factory? And they said, yeah. And that was it. 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. They're all going to have phones that they just use for cabinet meetings that are Trump phones. That's absolutely correct. 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 gold mid-range Android phones. I love it. I love it. It's going to be great.
I'm going to get one just in case we get to do Brennan Carr as a dummy, and then you and I will both have them on Brennan Carr as a dummy. Oh, good. That'd be perfect. 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 US. 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. That's the first smart thing AT&T has ever done. 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, it's 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. Especially because the iPad also happens to be like a kick-ass hotspot. Like this just, this is a great thing and everybody should know that it exists. Are they going to give you hotspot data for three bucks a day? I don't know. And I sort of doubt it. Yeah. I have to, I have to read more fine print on some of this stuff, but like this is also, AT&T is apparently going to be offering more of these kinds of day plans to more kinds of devices. But like, I think this, 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. This immediately makes the case for always buying the cell iPad. I never want 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. Perfect example. Yeah. Yeah. Just thought everybody should know about that. You get to go last. What's your last one? 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 because they all expired. So, like, everyone in my little town, the installers were 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 $0. We have paid, like, $35 just to, like...
be connected to the ConEd grid and whatever fees ConEd can come up with. But our actual kilowatts, zero. And it's kind of amazing. We have EV. At this point, we're basically being paid to charge our EV at night. That's pretty cool. So my parents recently got solar, too. And my dad has really enjoyed, I don't know if he still does, but at least for a while, really enjoyed looking at the numbers 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 constantly checking out the energy flow? 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. I love it. That is heartwarming. 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, Eli, actually features you. We're doing the Harmony Universal remote. Yes. 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. 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 Nests, which Matt is not in. That'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. 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. But, you know, go follow all the version history stuff. We'll link some in the show notes. Who's on Decoder next week? What are we doing?
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. We did it all. It's very good. Did you fly a drone via 5G? I actually didn't ask him what...
I should have asked him. That would change everything. I'm assuming it was. You know, the thing about flying Scotia drones is like, you're not really flying them. You're issuing them commands and they fly themselves. True. So like the latency issue wasn't 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 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. Well, you can't get one now. Well, true. And 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. It's good stuff. I'm excited about that one. All right, that's it for the first cast. 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. I've left my family behind. 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-VERGE11. 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. 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.
Hi, I'm Eli Patel, editor-in-chief of Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week, as part of our special series on the future of business, I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up. We pulled all that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it'd be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that...
Automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online. This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all-in-one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com slash vox. That's odoo.com slash vox.
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