Siri is good now??

Support for the show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce and more. And the best part? Odu replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odu for free at Odu.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. For a long time, modern life meant remotes. A lot of remotes. Remotes for TVs and sound systems and DVD players and everything else in our lives. And then came the Harmony. The one remote to rule them all with promises to control your living room, and maybe eventually everything else. This week on Version History, our chat show about old technology, we tell the whole story of Harmony and why it never really managed to control everything. That's Version History, wherever you get podcasts. Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, 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, Nilai Patel. Nilai, hopping down the stairs. I need to enter this show this way every week. What have I been doing? That was the coolest entrance. You did it too quickly would be my main note for you. Hi, Nilai. 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, which has happened, but Nilai made a true grand entrance. Pull 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 of 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 at 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 Nilaiputel. Yes, I think I'm the only person who has never done cocaine in this room. Still time buddy. 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 hype desk is back. Brendan Carr is back. We've got a whole late thing around coming. But we have to start Nilaiputel. 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 series. And the new series by all accounts might actually be very good. Like it might just be good. I did the talk show, which I'm going to run Joanna Stern and Joanna had spent that entire day using the new series 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 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, the 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 rebuilt the index of content and now that an AI can just go get it and that is magic. Well, it's both, Fred. 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 the, 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 on my notes was better search. Like if you, if you've ever used spotlight on any of your devices, it is just a 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 at beach balls, like on a Mac, if you try to search your messages and 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 like after, after nearly 20 years of iOS, they clearly had built the database wrong and they went back and fixed it. I agree that that's really exciting, but there's also a piece of this that is just series 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 is 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? 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 other. 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 that 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 has 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 so I think the and that's why I'm saying I think it will become clear what's happening where is more and more people get access to Siri and they put it under strain and 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. I 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. 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 open AI and anthropic and Google are doing. And I don't think that that's the case. And that's what even by 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 like magic happening there. Like it feels amazing. I just it's just so funny. Like I'm very focused on well this database didn't even work before now it works and they will never let open AI have access to it. That's a big differentiator. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think Allison Johnson on 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 S. F. O. And it like went and found where what terminal she's flying out of because it has access to things in your 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 to 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 of 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 that suddenly like blows up the universe for lots of these other companies. Yeah. I mean this is why I keep saying Apple Sherlock the free version of chat. Yeah. Yeah. The free version chat to be 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 maybe try to break you up with your wife on the front page of the New York Times. Shout out to our boy K. But at the end of the day it that didn't improve enough. Right. Open as goals to get you to pay money. And they even you know the the the sort of like false start with Apple intelligence open as 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 open AI for the good version in chat. And none of that ever worked out. And now opening as pivoting 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 chat GPT. This is essentially the same level of capability. But because it has access to your I message in 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. Those are straight 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 like the free AI apps are all kind of there. They're all going to put out statements soon. Like we welcome the competition. That's the thing that happens when apps get Sherlock 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 have spent a lot of time on this show over the last couple of years talking about all of the AI companies trying desperately to figure out how to be a platform. Right. Like chat. You have taken every imaginable run at trying to build app stores. Everybody is doing skills. Everybody is building connectors. M.C.P. is a big part of trying to stitch this whole system together. There's this question of like how do we take a chat bot 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 door dash problem me in a minute. But it does seem like Apple is now on its way to winning that race to becoming chat GPT or at least you know free chat GPT before chat GPT could figure out how to be the app store. And that that to me if I'm open AI is like a very scary state of affairs. This is why open AI is pivoting at a price. I think they have realized that there's not money in the consumer market. I'm the one who keeps yelling there's no great consumer AI products. Right. Like 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 Tik Tok and YouTube, what do you got? You know, like 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 they want to be free. They want to be talking to their their necklace, whatever you think that future is, or you have to disrupt the phone. And you know, open AI has Johnny I've they're actively going to try to disrupt the phone with a phone. We think we maybe with their own phone. You know, Microsoft is like showing off like a lanyard. It's 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 door dash. What are they? 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 door dash. Google is much better at that. Like 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 door dash 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 and 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 OS's, 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 like freeing in one way because they've 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 like I don't use for things like calendar. So I asked it a calendar question and it turns out I've never opened the calendar app on this thing. So it had no idea. I was like, oh, well, this totally failed. And then I was like, no, I just 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 the app. They're 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 a I 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 is 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. Yeah. What was the title of our last episode that we did together? Where's the computer? It's this. It's this is a central question in the age of AI. Where does the logic live? Where does the computing happen? And if you want a bunch of agents to go do stuff for you, it should be the cloud. The answer somewhat naturally is the cloud. Sure. Because then you can just issue commands and you don't have to worry about your phone battery dying or whatever it is, the things happen and then the result is delivered to you. I'm less of the opinion that consumers care or don't care about multi-step agent orchestration. I think, sure, they also don't care about Docker or HTML or like what, you know, it's like, yes, like technology exists. Our audience cares a lot that Bluetooth 5.0 exists. Sure. Do normal people understand that Bluetooth 5.0 is what enables a bunch of wireless head buds to have pairing across and well, no, of course they don't. So I think Apple. Damn it. We're going to do a great holiday spectacular this year. 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? And somewhere in there, Apple's pendulum swings back and forth. Yes. 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. Sure. 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 just put your spaghetti in 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 Vergecast movie night, 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 the part of what you were saying before that I keep thinking about is this idea that I'm just going to be like, 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, 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 device. I think that's the way to review your order just to make sure we're getting it right. That like that's, that's the, that's the step before multi-agent orchestration, right? That is like, this is the human in the loop stuff we keep talking about that. How do we, how do we make this work in a way that feels like normal people using normal devices in normal ways? And I think, again, it's very possible that all of this is just Apple continuing to be behind on technology and trying to invent reasons that it's behind on purpose. 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. True. 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. Oh, absolutely. Just like it has a weird riff on Dolby Vision that the entire industry has to use to get Dolby Vision and Apple TV. Like it's just the way it goes. And that's how they, that's how they maintain control of their ecosystem. I think this is one of the reasons that the European Union is like, no, like you have to let things be interoperable. If your AI assistant is the only thing that works at the operating system level in this way, there will not be competition for AI assistants. 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 they're actually developed a parallel ecosystem or maybe Apple figures out whatever technical solution that currently says is too hard to figure out or that it can't get approval for from the EU. And Gemini or Chatspity or Claude get to tell you, hey, look at your screen for the human and loop verification. And that power of the ecosystem right now is all tilted in Apple's favor. That's the argument you're making. I mean, 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 two-opoly. Actually, let me ask you this. There's a big argument to be made based on all the Siri reactions that once again, I message lock in is the thing. Right. All these texts are an I message. 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 I messages. And so you just have however many years of messages, you were in for a wild surprise when that index finishes with the new Siri. But yeah, I kind of think you're right. I mean, there's the lock in certainly is going to be vastly more intense now because the story is going to be more intense now. Because the switching costs of losing all of those messages, even if you decide to move, right? Like if I switched to Android, I've now done this like switching to Android is easier than it used to be. But the idea of like my 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. Like and again, this is something all of the other 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 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 20s when I say can't wait. 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. Like if it just remembers my reminders correctly from now on, this will have all been worth it. AI is worth it just for that. All right, we just take a break and then we're going to come back and we have some social networking figuring out to do. We'll be right back. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic web search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude today at Claude.ai slash verge. That's Claude.ai slash verge and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai slash verge. Support for the show comes from Granola. It feels good to walk away from a meeting that actually felt productive, but our brains can hold only so much info. You might look back and realize you either A, got caught up in your notes and missed some important stuff, or B, you couldn't even take notes. And now you're just trying to reconstruct it all from memory. If that's your dilemma, Granola can help solve it. Granola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. You could take rough notes like you normally would while Granola securely transcribes the meeting. Then after you wrap, it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes. Granola also works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. It's your standard meeting setup, but enhanced. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You could try it totally free for three months. Just head to granola.ai slash verge. That's granola.ai slash verge to get your time back. Get three months free at granola.ai slash verge. Support for this show comes from Clavio. There are only so many hours in a day, and Clavio's two powerful AI agents can make sure your team spends them on big things. The first Clavio AI agent turns your marketing ideas into reality instantly. Describe what you want. A holiday campaign, a VIP re-engagement series, and Clavio builds it instantly. Email, SMS, and push all coordinated on-brand, grounded in 14 years of Clavio marketing data. Nothing goes live without your say-so. The other Clavio AI agent keeps your customers happy at any hour. Brand trained to answer questions, make product recommendations, and handle orders and returns. No hold music. Marketing that launches instantly. Support that never sleeps. Join more than 193,000 brands including Away, Patrick Ta, and Dollar Shave Club. Already growing with Clavio. The autonomous B2C CRM. Get started at klavio.com. Alright, we're back. Nila, I'm going to give you three small pieces of news, and then I want you to GalaxyBrain 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. 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 version updates every week. Here's what we shipped this week. She's great. She does a lot of user research. When we were doing our homepage refresh, she's a lot of user research about the story stream and quick response stuff. One 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. This is very self-serving. 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 the community. 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. All of the things you're describing are ways to make the big social networks feel small. I think that's fascinating. Let's start with Misery, because I could talk about Adam Misery's threads post about the recommendations algorithm and the sense of agency and control all day and all night. I've asked Adam to come on Decoder or the Verge 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. 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. Then he goes on to say, what's new is that LLMs can now look at clusters of content and describe them in language people understand. All of this is just math. Any given video, the algorithm was just putting together coordinates to say inside of our giant database of content, these all match in a cluster. You could never look at that. It would be like looking at the matrix. 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. You can say, I want more of this and less of that. What he is describing is not just like a set of filters. It's not just ask it for more puppy videos. It's very directly an interface to the algorithm itself that you can now talk to in natural language. His point is, I'm doing this because I want you to feel control. Recommendations are great. Not all of your friends are posting all the time. If you open Instagram and it's just the last five posts from your friends that you saw the last time, you won't be as happy as if we show you something else interesting that's happening on the network. 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 LLMs were. That is a way of making it feel small, making it feel in your control. Again, I could talk about this all day and all night. I'm not sure this matches how Meta makes money by showing you ads across recommended content. I'm not sure it matches Meta's entire approach to engagement maximization or the fact that threads, which is built on all the same algorithms, appears to be built just to make dumb people as angry as possible. It is engagement-bait as a platform. It really, really is. Threads in particular is that thing. There's a lot here, but you can see in a mysterious argument for why they built this is not just we can. There's a lengthy reason to post for it and it's to make it feel small. Blue Sky Community, it's funny. Everyone thinks Blue Sky is a platform. It's a product. I've talked to the new interim CEO of Blue Sky, Tony Schneider. They have always been a protocol company. They're trying to build the next generation of decentralized social protocols. 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? Here's the group of people talking at 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 big thing. 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 fire hose 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 to us many, many times over the years, describing what a community is online is very challenging. Yes. Like, is book talk a community? What are the boundaries of book talking? Is it moderated? Is it controlled? No, it's just a bunch of people who say they're 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 book talk. 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 that 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 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 really great embed that you could put anywhere on the Internet. Like you 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 Asari says this all the time that 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. I leave. I know a lot of people watch YouTube all day and all night. But the idea that that's a social experience you're having, this is what I mean about they have to admit that it's a social product. Yeah. 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 serve as you more ads. All that requires just admitting that reels has made YouTube vastly more of a social network than traditional YouTube ever really was. 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 tech talks. That's right. It's like that's super real. And YouTube obviously wants to piece that. Oh dude, the Christian Dior meme. That's brought more men together in the past three weeks. Maybe anything. It's not as like 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. 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 what a week maybe after Blue Sky's COO Rose Wang did an interview with CNBC where she kind of teased this. Happening basically saying that they were more inspired by Reddit going forward than by X or threads. But she said this thing that I've been thinking about ever since which is 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 going to be fine. Threads did the same thing. They like they built threads really fast in large part to capitalize on this idea of people want 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 has really kind of tapered off into 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 growing because if you open Instagram, they're like, look at this thread 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 and sort of real time ways in the sense that like maybe maybe that is gone and that everything has moved to these smaller communities and group chats and private sharing and all of this stuff. 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 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. You know, the former CEO of Blue Sky, Jay Graver, she's still at Blue Sky, she's working on the sort of the technical aspects of it now and Tony's the interim CEO, I figure out what they're going to do next. Jay was on Dakota 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, you will recall, Blue Sky was a project inside of Twitter, I got spun out. But the reason they made a thing that looks 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, 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 you can 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 our 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 a SpaceX IPO, Elon has destroyed that business. The users are down, the revenue is down. The only revenue that's up at X, the everything app is data licensing to XAI. So like in a circular way. Not shady at all. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm certainly doing all of my credit card processing in X, I don't know about you. Oh, same. Who doesn't want to trust their financial data to one musk? So you see, like maybe that era has come to an end and maybe threads will never actually replace Twitter as the, there's like, 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 fire hose 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 who else, 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. Okay. Because threads is on Activity Pub and Blue Sky is on that protocol. And yes, there are like bridges and whatever to make them, you know, fake interoperate, but they don't actually interoperate. So the two big theoretically interoperable social networks are in their own silos. And there's, 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 sends up a Reddit, that thing will not exist. But I do think Blue Sky's thesis is that the internet should be more open and it's not their job to build all of the products. I think that confuses everyone all the time. 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 Federerverse is like explaining what it looks like, right? And I think for a long time, the running theory was that this 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 Federerverse is you can reconstitute that in whatever way you want to. 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 into the conclusion that that is wrong. And that even as you look at something like the algorithm changes on Instagram, like to your point, it's about making it feel smaller, right? Like this is 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 it's not, I don't think Blue Sky is launching communities. I think Blue Sky is launching a set of extensions to app protocol that support communities. You know, it's like, it's just like very different. Like that company is very different in how it thinks about what it makes. And I do think that gets everyone confused all the time because people talk about Blue Sky as though it's a competitor to Twitter. And I don't think it has any desire to be that thing. 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, just let's just go back to Instagram for a minute here because I think this is also really interesting. Like there's this broader trend happening and TikTok has done a little bit of this. And I think Instagram has been poking at this for a while. Just the idea that you should be able to have some more proactive control of your algorithm that like threads has the thing where you can literally say dear algo. And TikTok lets you sort of tell things, tell it things, not just that you're not interested, but that you are interested in. 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. You've walked into the end of the Misery 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 Misery. This is a start of something bigger than a feature. It's in our best interest as a business to empower people to shape Instagram and is something that works for them and that people should have a meaningful amount of agency over the products they spend so much time in. We intend to build much of what comes next on the principle. So that's great statement of purpose, agreeing what you said. And then he says there's a harder version of this question on the horizon. It's worth saying out loud. Within a few years, AI will be capable of not only letting us see and shape algorithms, but also generating entire bespoke experiences on the fly. Tailored to an individual in real time. 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 I date. Like I read this and I literally opened my email and I wrote to Adam and 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 lawnmowering business might be totally different than the Instagram. So it 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 Sunar 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 and 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. The tap and bridge. I mean, if you're 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 Meta. You can have a lot of feelings about Mark Zuckerberg. You know, a lot of feelings about Adam Massari, 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. And Adam, you know, I will put up the screenshot of like five exclamation points that I sent to him. I've talked to him many times over the years. I would love to spend a lot of time digging into this because this is, I think this is the future of computing. In a real way, right? Is these like bespoke experiences and it will undermine our shared sense of truth, our shared sense of experience. You know how people say like Reddit is mad about something that implies a structure and experience of Reddit that allows that to mean something. If you destabilize that, it doesn't mean anything at all. Right. And there's something there that's 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 is 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. Like all the idea has been the same regardless of whether you're wearing a helmet or AI glasses or whatever. I even 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? Like he's like, instead of buying a TV, you'll buy my TV, which displays my content and we'll just like generate it virtually. Like his version of this is that you live in a synthetic environment under his control. And again, whether that is happening in a headset or in glasses or just on Instagram, that's it's the thing that is being pushed towards like every pixel will be under the control of Meta. And I think it is just fascinating to see Adam Asari 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 could talk about 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 Nelai and Adam Masari. I would do hot ones with Adam Masari. Sold. All right. We're going to take a break. Then we're going to come back. It's lightning round time. We're back. I'm Seth Matlin. My new show, Creator Destroy Reimagining Marketing Explores how every decision a company makes, not just the marketing ones, but the HR, IR, pricing, org design and planning ones. The ones most don't consider marketing at all contribute to either creating value or destroying it. Each week I sit down with CMOs, COs, founders, cultural thinkers, the people building, breaking and reimagining how businesses grow or don't for conversations about what creates value and what destroys it. It's a business show. It's a marketing show. Creator destroys the show that argues they've always been the same thing from the Vox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdomist Company. New episodes drop weekly on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. All right. We're back. It's time now for the hype desk. When our friends Ross and Ashley come and tell us about what's cool in the world this week, no Ross. Screw you, Ross. Just Ashley Iscada. Welcome back, Ashley. I'm so you finally fired him. I'm so excited. Honestly, it was long overdue. Really? This is like a 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'm a lot of questions. This is the sequel to the social network that Aaron Sorkin, Jesse Eisenberg, and Dawn of Facebook movie. This is the sequel. I will say, Neila, 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 and Atticus Ross did the music. That movie had a lot of moves going on there. 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. This time, it's just the Aaron Sorkin show. He's written this. He has directed this. 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, 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. 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, this is all the things. But this isn't that. This is, we're going to do congressional hearings. Zuck seems very much like the Facebook files are going to be an important part of this from the trailer. There's one part where the person leaking says, are you a tech reporter? And the person says, ish. And she goes, ish, which is a perfect Swerkin moment. And I'm not sure that ever actually happened in real life. Also at the end of the trailer where they're like, she's a disruptor. And I was just like, I can't. It's a lot. Somebody who's worked in tech, so like I'm like, that word, I can't. It's okay. 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 a hundred percent 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. Like I am incredibly impressed by that. But yeah, especially that moment where he's yelling at Bill Burr. He's like, when I say no, that's the end. That's the end of the thing. You don't get to end. That's the end of the conversation. And it was very Kendall Roy to me. Yeah. And this is such a weird story to choose. They're essentially making this movie about Francis Hogan and the Facebook files, which is just an odd way of framing this version of the story. It'll be interesting to see how much it gets away from that. But Francis Hogan, who famously moved to Puerto Rico to get away from crypto taxes, is the hero of the story. The whole Facebook files thing is very strange. And Francis Hogan's story is strange and complicated. What came out in the Facebook files is big and important. And there's almost part of me that wishes Aaron Sorkin had just straight up made a Cambridge Analytica movie just to fully piss everybody off. Yeah, that was... I was very surprised that this was, in fact, not a Cambridge Analytica movie. I was like, oh, they're doing that scandal, that massive Facebook scandal by bad. But what I've been trying to figure out is, do you think Aaron Sorkin just feels bad for making Mark Zuckerberg look cooler than he was at the time? And this is why he made this movie. 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. Was 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. Is like set up in three acts in its three keynotes. And the way Sorkin wrote it, everything in Steve Jobs' life happened in the green room before the iPod introduction. Of course, yeah. All of his best epiphanies. And it is just nonsense. Like, it's pure nonsense. And that's weird and fascinating. But it creates structure for the movie and the narrative. And it raises the stakes of everything all the time. Because everything has to happen before the show begins. Like, there's just literally a clock. And then he's like, it's the iMac. And you're like, did that happen? And you can see that's the same structure he's going for here. When I did that event with him, I was like, you know, none of this happened. And 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 to you. And 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. But Steve, you know, Steve, here's what we can agree on, I'm sure. And he defeated the other members. Was he economy of filmmaking? I mean, he's like, he's got a show. He can't just, it'd be too boring. He's just too fast. And 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 in these like very convenient spaces. Right. There's a pressure cooker. Yeah, the pressure cooker. We're going to prepare for your congressional testimony about the Facebook files. And Francis Haugen is going to feel hunted. And we're going to have, I mean, Sorkin loves a journalist, right? We're going to have like the newsroom plus whatever pressure cooker of the West Wing that you can sort of create like in the debate prep scenes of the West Wing. You can just see all the moves. By the way, I don't mean any of this is criticism. I'm stoked for this. This is like the most Sorkin Sorkin gets. Yeah. It is a very polished, like it is like the end stage sorkinning. Like this is like, this is like, 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 like the social network is just a like terrifically made film. Really good movie. It is like a technically excellent piece of filmmaking. In addition to being like a fascinating look at the Facebook story. This is going to be wild and weird and messy and I'm thoroughly going to enjoy every single second of it. Like I just started rewatching the newsroom is a sentence that is true about my life and tells you everything you should know better. Are you watching it like in full fat streaming or 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. Not greatest. It could be. And I got to the end of that and I was ready to just run through a wall again and was like, all right, I got to watch this show again. Yeah, I got to get right back in. I got to get right back in. This is what happens. Has Olivia Munn started doing anything by season two or is she still just floating around the background scene to scene? Mostly floating. Yep. Yeah. But then there's 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 Francis Hogan 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, in so far as Justin Timberlake saying, you know, what's cool? 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. And states. Well, and 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 is like, I'm a free speech absolutist, which first of all, is an Elon Musk quote. Not Mark Zuckerberg quote. Yeah. I was going to say he didn't. I don't think he said that. He said variations. He had this like famous speech at Harvard where he was like, I believe in free speech and which came to nothing. I'm wondering if he tries to recapture the narrative from this movie or they just allow Andy Stone, the metahead 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 like, and then all of a sudden it was like, as someone who does media training now, it's like, we better, we better do this crisis comms thing where we embrace the memification of our film and say like, oh yeah, we love it. We love it. But also like it was like, Jesse Eisenberg, he says a bunch of cool stuff in the movie. I get the feeling Jeremy Strong is not going to say a bunch of cool stuff in this movie. Well, and also David Fincher makes it look cool, which makes it very shareable. The clips are very shareable. So I don't know how much of this is going to be like, again, like the memification 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. Tick Tock 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 tour for this movie when they're doing like Junkets and Jeremy Strong, the Method actor is doing it as Mark Zuckerberg is going to be spectacular. Can we have him on the hype desk? Can we ask? We can. We should do a screening and we can see if we can get Sorkin to run me over like a truck again. That would be one of the weirdest experiences of my life. I might actually pay to see that. Like that would be that. That could be a verge subscriber excuses. 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 as 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 with our podcast, Brendan Carr as a dummy. Brendan Carr is a dummy. It's beautiful. It just hits every time. I will say that 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 one so we could use it at will means that we're not open to new ones. Travis, our producer, has said that we're getting a lot of AI ones. So I just want to set the bar. If you're going to send us an AI Brendan Carr as 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 indie pop Brendan Carr as a dummy. That's very good. We've had a couple of good pop punk ones. By the way, do you know the funniest turnabout of the Puerto Rico song I've seen is real bands covering it and then saying it's not AI slot anymore? We've fixed the moral dilemma. We've reclaimed it. And then all the comments are like, oh, stealing from AI feels great. That's so good. That's fantastic. That is the nature healing right there. That's very good. What did he do this week, Neiline? I got two this week. Brendan was particularly dumb in two different ways. One in sort of the standard way, you know, like just done 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 disastrous CBS News in 60 minutes. So if you're not totally tracking it, David Elson came and bought Paramount, took control of CBS News in order to close that deal with the government and get the regulatory scrutiny. He made some promises about changing the news to the Trump administration and hired Barry Weiss, who ran the free press to come and be the new editor-in-chief of CBS News. She has no experience doing this. We've written about this at length and she just said about sort of just unleashing chaos in particular at 60 minutes. And so Scott Pelle, 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. Like he's been very kind to me in the past. Yeah. But Nick is the new executive producer. He has no experience running broadcast television. He's coming in on a back foot because he's perceived as a stooge of the Trump administration, the Ellison's. So Scott Pelle 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 Pelle and he gets himself fired. I think everybody basically understood that Scott Pelle was going to get fired. So then Pelle 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 the Times asked was, why didn't you do this behind closed doors? And Pelle's response was, I was behind closed doors. It just leaked. Yeah. But in a meeting with my coworkers, I was in my meeting, 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 fire well since because it wasn't like public. I was asking the new boss, like why did you fire everybody? And there are no answers. And so Brendan responds to this. He puts on X. One of the reasons why trusted media is so low is because many legacy journalists are completely out of touch. You could not get away with that behavior at any run of the mill job. It is revealing to see how blind some are to that. Okay. So I'm just going to point out, the 79 year old legendary correspondent at 60 minutes is not a run of the mill job. Yeah. Just is it, right? Like actually Scott Pelle was extraordinarily aware of his role in 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 that's how they're reporters. What are you going to do? They want to know stuff. This is the job. Yeah. It's the job. It's just like take the heat. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know what to say. There's no way to build credibility in newsroom 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 a 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 Pelle's 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 Pelle is a lunatic. The old media is bad. Screw them all. This guy sucks. And then on Blue Sky everybody is like up in arms and pro Scott Pelle. And then on threads everybody is just like engagement baiting pictures of Scott. But like it is so. Every artwork 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 Pelle 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 Brendan doesn't even understand how many like how the cultures that are. How the cultures that make the thing. Whether or not it was appropriate for Scott Pelle to yell at his new boss about who got fired. Yeah, sure. You 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 it anybody with any common sense could look at this situation and be like none of this is about run of the mill jobs. It'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 he knows. Brendan is loving. 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 the 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 this fast 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, like if you look at the ratings of CBS News, they're in the toilet. They're low in ways that like people, other executives of CBS News are leaking that they think very wise should be fired. She's destroyed the brand and destroy the ratings. So that's just one. Like I love the idea that this is one of the mill 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 Pele might be doing the same thing. Yeah. 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 makes any money as Starlink, which is an ISP. Brendan loves an ISP. SpaceX needs spectrum. They need waivers and some of the things they want to do. If they're going to launch another 50 billion satellites to be data centers, are they going to ever figure that out? They will need additional spectrum, additional ground stations. This is all like bread and butter FCC work. Who's going to get the spectrum are the people who've been allocated the spectrum using it efficiently. Should we reallocate that spectrum? Brendan tips the scales to Elon and every one of those disputes, whether it's Amazon, Leo spectrum. 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 you 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 invite Brendan Carr to more rocket launches. You might get a free Model 3 out of it. You never know. That's the kind of vibe we're in right now. And so we'll link it at 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. But like this is one of the strangest moments in a deeply strange moment in tech that is coming. And it feels perfect to me that actually Brendan is just running around enabling Elon Musk to get richer. Like that's our guy. Yeah. That's what he's there for. And 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 resides discounted internet service to poor families because telecoms hate it. Like there's just a very standard kind of like FCC corruption happening with Brendan on top of the speech police stuff. But you kind of look at it like, oh, the speech police stuff covers up like a vast amount of standard corruption. Anyway, Brendan, as always, if you want to come and defend any of this, I don't think you can. I don't think you have the processing ability up there, but maybe with a Starlink connection you'll get there. You're welcome to come on this show. We'll do hot ones together. That would be great. I suspect I can take Brendan Carr in 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. Brendan Carr is a dummy. See, I like that theme song because I feel like it winds me up and it also calms me down at the end. Like it gets me in and out of the headspace. Samutaneous. Very good. It's good stuff. Neal, I have a thing I want to recommend to you, but first can we just talk about Anthropics' Fable model just for like two minutes? Sure. This is the other kind of story of the week that's been percolating out there. Anthropic launched this new model called Claude Fable, which is based on Mythos, which it didn't launch a couple of months ago because Fable was too dangerous. Basically, the idea behind Fable seems to be that it is Mythos with some guardrails. So you can have it do lots of things. It's this super powerful model, but it won't do certain things. People got immediately mad that there were guardrails as people are 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, we're like a week away from just Mythos being available to us. 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 Anthropic's controversy with the Defense Department being designated as supply chain risk goes sideways in some way. It's cybersecurity initiatives. It's doing with another part of the Trump Department 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 finest 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, God, whatever, go away. We don't really care what you think. Yeah, it just. That was Crown Taggle. Yeah, exactly. Actually, another shout out to our boy Kevin Roos. Kevin Roos used to use Crown Taggle 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 Taggle down. Yep. Like it literally, I think you can draw that line as straight as that. It's good stuff. 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 that 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's driving me crazy is there are other models. You want some weird biology information like Chatterity is right there. It's like, yeah, let's cook some stuff up. Like let's go. And open AI 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. Like in recent memory. It's like, well, if you're maddened, probably just, I don't know, Jesus, Cheminite. Like it's all good. Like, but everyone's like, this model doesn't do everything every other model does. We should yell on X, the everything app. And then obviously you are banking. Yeah. It's a weird one. I think we're, we're still, I've been waiting for two years for the model race to slow down to the point where like, we're this sort of leapfrogging everybody does every three weeks is going to end and eventually everything will plateau. And then we can just start talking about products. And that hasn't happened yet, but the ways in which the models are getting better just keeps getting weirder. Yeah. Like it's just, we are headed in all kinds of strange new directions about what these things can do that I feel like we are vastly unprepared. And one of these days, one of these companies and asked them how to make money and a good answer will emerge. They're just going to keep training new models until one of them, Sam Altman has said this, by the way, this is like, I'm making a joke, but he's literally said, maybe one day we'll just ask you how to make money. That's amazing. All right, Neela, what's your next lightning round item? I feel like I've talked to like Trump too much at the end of this episode, but we can't avoid this one. You mentioned, I think at the top of the show, that the Trump phone is like out in the world. Like people at WWC had them. Like a notable verge trader, Chris Welch, who's now at Bloomberg, has one. It's hilarious. He's just like, did he have one with him? Yeah, he was like at the welcome dinner. I was at the welcome dinner, he had one. I was like, did you show John Turner? There's something about covering WWC on a Trump phone that is just so delightful to me. It's very good. People have them. And I fixed it as one. They've torn it down and it is an HTC U24 Pro, which is absolutely made in China. My favorite part of this is like, everybody figured this out so long ago, but there's just this thing where through all of this, you're like, okay, obviously this is a grift. Obviously this administration is corrupt. Obviously this family is conning you. It can't just be this simple, can it? I fixed it, 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 phone. That's amazing. We're still waiting on ours. I think Trump mobile might be mad at us because we've got to get out there being fake for so long. 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. There's a reason those phones are not broadly popular in the United States, especially when they're pre-loaded with Truth Social and one of the weirdest e-health apps that has ever existed. Oh, God, what is that? It's called like Doc Tegrity. It's like a telemedicine app. But I'm confident it's just going to like try to sell you gray market supplements. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like Dr. Oz is going to be like, have you tried AG1 when you open your Trump phone? 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. They really went and did this as right away as we possibly could. I think that would be so instead they clearly like made one phone call to China said, what do you have parts in a bucket in a factory? And they said, yeah, 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, I have to wear the shoes. 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 of weeks here where a lot of people who have never used Android in their life are going to find themselves using a gold mid-range Android phone. I love it. It's going to be great. I'm going to get one just in case we get to do Brandon Carr's dummy and then you and I'll both have them on Brandon Carr's dummy. Oh, good. That'll be perfect. All right. My last lightning round item is just a very quick PSA that I like sincerely believe everybody should know about, which is this new AT&T iPad data plan. They have this new thing called the unlimited day pass. It's I think at least for now only in the U.S. But for $3 you get 24 hours of unlimited data with no subscriptions, no contracts. You don't even have to be an AT&T customer. Just for $3 a day you can get 24 hours of unlimited data on your iPad. This rules. That's really good. 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 is kind of a lot like I've done some of the T-Mobile used to have pretty good prepaid deals for some of this stuff. But like at $3 a day like I'm traveling. I'm just going to use this today. Yeah. 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 $3 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. I like that. 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 bought them because I'm like I'm not going to pay this plan. And you know like the main iPad in our house is Max's iPad or 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. That's really good. You get to go last. What's your last one? I've got like a 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 US 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, everyone in my little town that the installers are so busy. We actually ran a story just in common. I wrote a story for us about how how tight solar installers were at the end of last year. Like they were so busy and they were really worried about the cliff. There's new pricing games and whatever that they're trying to do to make it up. But energy prices are through the roof and I will tell you for the last three months, our electricity bill has been zero dollars. We have paid like $35 just to like be connected to the conhead grid and whatever fees conhead can come up with. But our actual kilowatts zero and it's kind of amazing. We have EV like we're at this point, we're basically being paid to charge our EV at night. That's pretty cool. Are you so my parents recently got solar too and my dad has really enjoyed like I don't know if he still does, but at least for a while really enjoyed like looking at the numbers and opening up the app and seeing just how energy efficient you're being at this particular moment in time. Is that you? Are you like constantly checking out the energy flow? 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. It's stuff. 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. That's why I love it. That is heartwarming. That's a good one. That's a good one. That makes me happy. It's a nice one to end on. All right. Two bits of business before we go. One is that the new season of version history is starting this Sunday. If you guys don't know, it's our show about gadget history and the best and worst and strangest products of all time. This season we're doing all smart home gadgets. And this Sunday's episode, Nila actually features you. We're doing the Harmony Universal Remote first, which was you, me, the Verges, John Higgins, and Matt Rogers, the co-founder of Nest, who I kid you not demanded to be on that episode. Reached out to us and was like, I will be on that episode with you. It was great. We had a blast. It was a really fun episode. This season we're also doing Nest, which Matt is not in. 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 history. It's like a thing to make an episode about. It's going to be really fun. That starts this Sunday. We're going to do a feed drop on this show next Friday because it's Juneteenth and we're going to be off. But go follow all the version history stuff. We'll link some of it in the show notes. Who's under Coder next week? What are we doing? Next week on The Coder is really fun. It's Adam Brea from Scotty O, the drone company. He let me fly a drone in California from the studio in New York. So we did that. We flew one in the office, which was very annoying to everyone in the office. And then we talked a lot about being a defense contractor and building drones in America and the FCC banning DJI. Like we did it all. It was very good. Did you fly a drone via 5G? I'm not. I actually didn't ask him what that what I should have asked him what radio. That would change everything. I'm assuming it was. The thing about flying Scotty O 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 to fly a drone. Well, you can't get one now. Well, true. I mean, Adam and I talked about why they don't make consumer drones. And he's like, let me figure out my business and then we'll try again. It's fair. It's good stuff. I'm excited about that one. All right. That's it for the Vergecast. We're going to be back you and I next Thursday because we're off on Friday for Juneteenth, but you and I are going to be a day early because otherwise we never see each other. And it's just fun to hang out every once in a while. You'll be presumably in some other even swanky or hotel. It's going to be great. I've left my family behind. Only in Starr case hotels for now on. Yeah, exactly. If you have thoughts, feelings, questions, anything else you want us to talk about, you can always email us, vergecastsatheverge.com, call the hotline, 866-vergecast.com. 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 to verge.com slash subscribe. The Vergecast 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 Lucasio. We'll see you next week. Eli, rock and roll. Formula One, so hot right now. It's like if traders and succession had a baby on wheels. Teams lying. Drivers beefing. Celebrities everywhere. And scandals, lots of scandals. So we made a show about it, the Red Flags podcast where we recap races and break down all the latest F1 headlines. No nerdy tech talk. We only cover the stuff you want to hear about. Yeah. And the only thing hotter than the drivers are our takes. And now we're doing it on Vox. Oh, we're so legit now. We're basically thought leaders. Ted talk incoming. And we do a podcast with Gunter Steiner called Venka Hours. I still can't believe that's true. Well, believe it. There is so much for the beautiful Vox media audience to enjoy. So come check out the Red Flags podcast every Monday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.