The Vergecast - Siri is a Gemini

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

Nearly two years ago, Apple showed off what an AI-powered Siri might do. That Siri never materialized, but thanks to a deal with Google for its Gemini tech, it might finally have a chance to work. David and Nilay discuss the ins and outs of the deal, and what it might mean for both Apple's and Google's ambitions in AI. (They also talk about the onslaught of new lawsuits from publishers related to Google's adtech antitrust case, including from our parent company Vox Media. Disclosure is our brand.) After that, they talk about Grok's horrific deepfake problem on X, and why everyone involved deserves the blame. Then it's time to pour one out for VR and the metaverse, which is losing steam as Meta loses interest and continues to pivot to AI. RIP Supernatural, a surprise hit of an exercise app! Finally, in the lightning round, it's time for Brendan Carr is a Dummy, the latest Paramount / Warner / Netflix drama, the Trump Phone, and the Digg reboot. Further reading: The Atlantic, Penske, and Vox Media have all sued Google for antitrust violations Apple picks Google’s Gemini AI for its big Siri upgrade What Apple and Google’s Gemini deal means for both companies Google’s Gemini AI will use what it knows about you from Gmail, Search, and YouTube  Why Google Gemini looks poised to win the AI race over OpenAI  A “conscious decision” from OpenAI.  X hasn’t really stopped Grok AI from undressing women in the UK  Advocacy groups demand Apple and Google block X from app stores  UK pushes up a law criminalizing deepfake nudes in response to Grok X claims it has stopped Grok from undressing people, but of course it hasn’t   Meta plans to lay off hundreds of metaverse employees this week  Meta confirms Reality Labs layoffs and shifts to invest more in wearables  Meta is closing down three VR studios as part of its metaverse cuts  Meta’s layoffs hit the studio that made Batman: Arkham Shadow, too.   Supernatural Will No Longer Get New Content Or Features  FTC won’t appeal court decision permitting Meta to buy Within The best thing to do in VR is work out FCC chair Brendan Carr is pressed on removing ‘independent’ from its website.  Verizon gets FCC permission to end 60-day phone unlocking rule  Anthropic wants you to use Claude to ‘Cowork’ in latest AI agent push  Paramount sues after Warner Bros. Discovery rejects its latest deal Netflix is reportedly considering an all-cash offer for Warner Bros.  The new Digg is launching an open beta.  Elon Musk Cannot Get Away With This Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome with the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of foundation model foundations, which are a thing that we understand. I'm a friend David Pierce.

Neil Appetal is here. Hey, buddy. There's so many concepts in this episode of the Vergecast. We literally got an email that was like, can you explain to me what a foundation for a foundation model is? And yes, in fact, that is what we are going to attempt to do here on the Vergecast. Neal, have you recovered from CES? How are you feeling? I've recovered.

I think I'm feeling better. You know, this is like the first working week of the year for us for real. So there's a lot of catching up to do because everyone else is one week ahead. And then everyone got sick because that's what happens. We see us. But I think we're ready to go.

And there was a lot of news this week. And we just have to start with a big disclosure update, I think. My favorite kind of news story, the news story that is like irritatingly about us and also requires us to figure out how to disclose for a long time. Yeah. So Vox Media has sued Google. That's the news.

And so have the, Atlantic Penske Media, which disclosure within a disclosure, Penske is an investor in Vox Media. Condé Nast, their parent company, advanced publications, but everyone just knows on this Condé Nast. Advanced publications, by the way, famously,

owns an interest in Reddit. Right. Which is very funny. They incubated Reddit and then did the IPO. But that's the parent company of Condi Nast, which owns Wired and Vanity Fair and everything else. And then McClatchy, which owns a bunch of other publications. They have all of these media

companies have sued Google. for antitrust violations. And basically what happened was Google was sued by the government last year for ad tech antitrust. So double click for publishers and how ads get displayed around the web and all this stuff.

And they lost, like running away, they lost. They're like, yep, this is a huge monopoly of how advertising works on the web. That was the case where Google's lawyers had the quote that was like, this doesn't matter because the open web is dying. And then everyone ran that quote. And then Google had to like walk it back and explain that what they really meant was display advertising on the open web.

Yep. Which is the same thing as the open web because if you don't have any money on the open web, the web itself is under a lot of threat. Anyhow, that case came to an end. The government won. It said Google had an illegal monopoly in ad tech on the web. There is not remedies in that case yet. But what you have is proof that Google has an illegal monopoly on web advertising. And so all of these media companies.

are like, well, we got hurt by that. UOS money. And so one by one this week, it started with Penske on Monday and the Atlantic on Tuesday and Vox Media on Wednesday and Kande and Thursday, just down the line. They've all filed their lawsuits, obviously to get attention.

We had nothing to do with it. I literally found this out from our company's like press statements because they don't tell us. There's a wall. The whole ethics policy, there's a big wall between us and them. So it's very funny that they told us like they told everyone else. And we read about it, of course.

But anyway, Vox Media, our parent company is suing Google for antitrust violations in ad tech, along with basically every other publisher in the world. I'm assuming there's going to be a new one every day. Like, who will be today? It is a pretty fabulously coordinated system here that it's just like somebody is going to file. And all the lawsuits are sort of functionally identical, right? And you described it to me as it was coming out as like they're all just pointing it. They're all pointing to the lawsuit from last year. being like, see, they did it.

They also did it to us. Can we have some money, please? Just over and over. That's essentially what it is. And everybody wants to negotiate separately. It also, I think there is power in doing it a bunch of different times instead of all together all at once. Like publishers are suing Google is somehow like less meaningful to me than this like

individual drumbeat of publishers suing Google. And so I think it's, this is very clearly being calculated on a bunch of different levels. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm very hesitant. to say anything about it because I don't want anyone to make the mistake of thinking that we have any insight into this strategy or that we are driving the strategy or made any of these choices. I don't know anything. So I can just talk. Yeah, David, like, I think we all understand David doesn't know shit. You at least know the lawyers on our team who didn't talk to you about this. I've never met any of them.

I spend a lot of time with our lawyers on like defamation claims and, you know, pre-publication legal review and all that stuff. So I do know them. They're all great. But they did not tell me on any of this. And they're very careful about drawing the lines appropriately. But it is true. They all filed separately. It's all the biggest media companies in the world. I would assume all the rest of them that aren't on the list so far are next. They're all in trade organizations together.

All these executives have been talking on Google forever. I'm shocked that, like, the New York Times and News Corp haven't made these same decisions because they beat the same drum all the time. Anyhow, it's happening. The thing that is relevant to us is that, We have to disclose that our company is suing Google all the time now. Yep. My instinct, and I'm willing to hear from the audience how you'd like us to handle this,

it really doesn't affect our coverage, and Google is vast. So I think we should disclose it, you know, often and early. We do it all the time. I just don't want every time we half mentioned Google in a sentence to require us to be distracted by a thing that doesn't affect the cover. Like, that's the dance with these disclosures. So I think we should do it when we talk about the web. Right?

And like web advertising. And I don't know if we need to do it when you talk about Android. Yeah, I think that's right. But you tell me, like, I'm open to the feedback. If you want me to do it every single time, we'll do it every single time. Yeah. Disclosure is our brand, after all. Email us, vergecast to the verge.com.

This is like a thing I wonder sometimes is, frankly, if we, like, disclose performatively to, like, be proud of ourselves about our disclosures. And so I think finding that balance of, like, we have to tell you all of this stuff versus like look how good we are at disclosing all of our conflicts is the thing I wonder about. So I do want to hear from people. But I think it was a very funny 24 hours because I also wrote a story yesterday about how Gemini is just like kicking everybody's ass in the AI race, which we're about to talk about. And I got I got nice emails from people in the know at Google and elsewhere who were like,

wow, you're really nice to Google right next to like, we just, our company just sued Google. So this is what we live with every day as journalists. Also, Lauren Feiner covered the trial last year for us, sat in the courtroom through all of this. And we talked a lot on the show about how consequential that trial is, for a lot of reasons, the remedies piece of that trial is still coming. Go read Lauren's coverage. And I think if you've listened to this show for longer than five minutes,

you know how Neil and I feel about the state of the open web. A thing we're going to keep talking an awful lot about. But for today, the Google News of the Week, And I think the biggest news of the week is a couple of different Gemini-related things that happened. And this is where we get into foundation model foundations. The first thing that happened, this was kind of the driving first piece of news this week, was that Apple and Google co-announced that the next generation Siri will be in some way powered by Gemini. And I say in some way because I think the details are really important here and we should get into them

because we know some and we don't know others. But basically Apple has been running this bake-off. Mark German at Bloomberg has covered this really well over the last like 12 months, testing all of the different stuff trying to build its own AI internally and eventually seems to have decided that the best path forward to make Siri great and some of Apple's other AI stuff is to just turn it over in a pretty meaningful way to Google's Gemini models. This strikes me as a very big deal,

but maybe not exactly for the reason people have been talking. about. What do you make of all this? I think training a foundation model is very time intensive and very costly. It is also not that much an advantage right now to have your own that's the best unless you're going to sell it to lots of other people because that's how you make the money back from it. And that's the business that all the model providers are in. That's Anthropic and Google and opening it. Just down the line. They all spend a bunch of money to train models or they find ways to train models that are really good on the cheap, like Deepseek, and then the goal is to sell that capability to lots and lots and lots of application providers. There's some question about

whether the models will crush the application providers. That's like part of the bubble. Like, if the model is just good enough and the chatbot just good enough, will you ever need to build a specialized application? Sure. But that's a lot of complexity that Apple doesn't need to manage, because Apple is itself an application provider. Right. Like Apple makes hardware because it wants to make great software. This is the founding DNA of the company. And so you don't need to run the cloud infrastructure to do it unless you have some reason to do it.

And it has always just made sense to me that Apple would turn to some external provider to do this. And I think a lot of the conversation about is Apple behind an AI was they didn't see it early enough to build the capability for themselves. Like Apple wasted a bunch of money trying to do a self-driving car. They should have spent every one of those dollars.

back then building data center capability and training their own model that could be as private as they wanted. And they just didn't see it. That was Apple's miss. Like straightforwardly, they put a lot of local compute neural engine stuff on their phones,

and they didn't see the other revolution that was happening along the way. Fine. All that occurred. We never got to see Johnny Ives' car, which, again, I would remind everyone. The best-selling car in the country is like a mid-sized crossover,

and Johnny Ave designing a mid-size crossover was fundamentally doomed from the start. Yes. Anyhow, I just don't think it matters if the back end is Gemini or OpenAI or Apple's own model that they built because the thing that no one has really made is the product that brings it all together

and does all of the stuff that needs to pay off the bubble. I could caveat this. I think there's important Apple lost and Apple is violating its own principles, arguments to be made, but the point it is Apple is in a position to build the product that pays off the bubble. And I don't think the model underneath it is the important part of that product.

Okay, I have two thoughts about that. One is I sort of foundationally agree. And I think I actually don't buy the theory that what Apple should have done 10 years ago instead of trying to build a car was build a bunch of data centers. I think, sure. I think what Apple should have done 10 years ago is like probably sign this deal with Google. Do you know what I mean? Like, there were opportunities to do this a long time ago and to understand that this was going to be a meaningful thing. I mean, the attention is all you need paper was in 2017.

And a lot of people then were like, this is going to change things. And it was like, Google was on top of that in a lot of ways and had weird shipping cadences that got all screwed up. But I think for Apple, what it should have done a long time ago is start building AI products, not fail to build a model and then panic and say, oh, we need to build a model. and now arrive here. I think it should have arrived here a long time ago. This feels like a heated agreement to me. This is what I'm saying.

Like Apple didn't care about Siri. They stopped caring about Siri. And nothing Google did made anyone switch to an Android phone, even though the assistant was better. And then, you know, all that stuff, all the helpful Android stuff that they were announcing.

None of that made a dent in iPhone sales. And they just did monopoly stuff with the iPhone. They got lazy. And they fell behind a disruptive change. to the user interface, which is what everyone says. That is what Sundar Pichai says. It's a platform shift.

That's what Satchan Adele says. It's a platform shift. Sam Altman doesn't say it's a platform shift. He says no one in the future will have a job and I will have all the money. And he literally says that out loud, but he's basically saying it's a platform shift. We're all the benefit war around to him. I just hired Johnny F. Apple is like, I don't care about a platform shift.

We're still selling a bunch of phones and they didn't get ahead of it. And so I guess I'm saying they should have built a bunch of data centers. Where I'm really saying is they should have made Siri good and looked at the core technology that was available to make Siri good, and then done all the stuff to make Siri good on their own terms. I think that's right. And I think your point about Apple being the company to make this stuff into useful products, I think is historically true that Apple is very good at being the company that takes kind of a lump of clay technology and turns it into something

that people use. And like, I would not say there's a ton of recent evidence that that's the case, especially with AI. But I think about like, what they did with Spotlight on MacOS, right? This idea of like, okay, this is actually going to be a sort of function engine for your computer that you can use to just start actually doing stuff without having to open apps and do stuff in the apps. This becomes a new interface to new parts of your computer. What Apple needs to do is build a hundred different versions of that kind of thing,

and it should have started doing it a long time ago. And so I think this is where we agree is that I think Apple, there are going to be a lot of people who are like, well, Apple is the company that. It famously talks about how it makes its own hardware and its own software and that AI models deserve to be kind of the third pillar of that stack. And an argument that already heard is like, okay, well, Apple invested heavily in Apple Silicon for years and years and years and years because it believed that it mattered and that it couldn't do all the other stuff it wanted to do without it. Aren't AI models the same? And I think the answer to that is still somewhat undetermined. But I think it's at least in my mind, I think the answer is no.

it's not the same, and that actually these things are racing towards commoditization really, really, really fast. And that actually the best thing you can do is say, we're just, we're not going to build the data centers. We don't need this. We're going to buy it from somebody else. We have quite a bit of money, it turns out. And our job is to build the stuff on top of it rather than try to reinvent every single wheel for ourselves. All right. Let me make this much more complex. Because the thing you're describing is called the Cook Doctrine. Oh, yeah. And Tim Cook said this in 2000. in a moment where he was the acting CEO of Apple, and it was unclear of jobs would come back from medical leave.

Right. Yeah. And so he needed to put his stamp on the company in like, you know, play the Steve Jobs role a little bit. Like boldly proclaim his values. And it's a long statement and it's everywhere, but I'll just say, I'll just read the first part. We believe that we're on the, and this is the cook doctrine. We believe that we're on the face of the earth to make great products,

and that's not changing. We're constantly focused on innovating. We believe in the simple. not the complex, and here's the important part. We believe we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.

So AI, that's two parts of a sentence, right? We need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make. Okay, Apple should own the AI, right? Like, obviously, this is a primary technology. Yeah. But also, we participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.

Can Apple make a significant contribution to the state of the art in the models? No. Clearly no. So, like, which part of the cook doctrine do you think is operative here is very important? Right. And I would say most people are focused on own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make. Because if Apple loses control of what the models can do or where the models are going or what Google thinks is important, that changes the destiny of the iPhone. and that to me is tremendously important

in a way that Apple being beholden to the Intel chip roadmap drove that company crazy until they made Apple Silicon. Yeah. But I think inherent in that divide is the question that a lot of people have been asking, which is, is this Apple making a sort prudent, responsible decision based on available technology, or is this Apple recognizing that it failed spectacularly to compete

and giving up. Yeah. I think it's the second one. You think it's fully the second one? I think Apple was really convinced that it could execute all of the things it wanted to do with Apple Intelligence, either locally

on the phone or with its own models running on private cloud compute and it can't. We know it can't because it delayed all the products and reset the whole project. Right. Like there's just evidence that their first idea whiffed and failed.

Yep. And actually, you know, the story of AI up until about now is you need bigger and bigger training sets in order to make the models capable. And Google, as we will discuss, has the biggest training data sets of them all. And it has finding ways to make those training datasets even bigger and more relevant. And I think this is very important. And this goes into how the deal actually works. Google has also apparently done a bunch of work to run Gemini on Apple's servers.

And that seems very important in the scheme of how Apple will work. All of this announcement is super weird, by the way. Apple barely announced it. They gave one quote to Jim Kramer anonymously, not even sourced to a name spokesperson, which is what we would demand. Kramer just said, sources tell me this. And then Google tweeted it.

Google tweeted on X of all places in the middle of the whole X GROC scandal, Google tweets, here's a joint statement from Apple and Google. and the statement's super weird when you can get into it. But that's how they announced this news. It wasn't like a, they knew it would make waves, but they didn't want to make it a big deal.

Yeah, I mean, I think that is partly weird, but also partly just kind of a recognition of what this deal actually is, right? And every bit of reporting that we've seen suggest that this is not some big partnership, even on the scale of what Apple launched with chat GPT, right, where if you ask Syria a question, and it might punt it to chat GPT,

and you can sort of interact with chat GPT inside of the Siri interface. That, by the way, is just a trash product. It doesn't work at all. It never routes things correctly. It doesn't come back with the right answers. Like, that thing sucks. And Apple has said all along

that it wants to have other providers there. And I would be shocked if we don't see Gemini as one of those providers. No, all that's getting thrown away. I would be shocked if any of that survives this deal. So maybe that I would say if you're Google, that is like the 10 out of 10 best possible outcome, right? That Gemini just becomes Siri. You address Siri, but you talk to Gemini.

That is what Google wants. I think Google is. What is the foundation of a foundation model? So, but I think what this actually is is it's essentially a technology deal, right? Google in this case becomes a technology provider in the same way that, you know, if Apple signed a gigantic, deal with AWS. We wouldn't suddenly be like Amazon and Apple are crucial forward facing. It would just be like, no, they're just renting a bunch of cloud storage from Amazon. It's a meaningful deal in terms of like the mechanics of the industry, but it doesn't like change how we should

perceive these two companies. What this actually is is it appears to be Apple paying Google, somewhere in the range of a billion dollars a year. Again, this is not official, but Mark German has been reporting this for a long time, for some version of the Gemini model to run some places. And this is where it gets messy, right? Because Apple has its own private cloud compute. It does have its own data centers and systems that it runs that will, I think, have a version of the Gemini model that runs on those things, but may not talk back to Google. but then there's also a cloud technology portion of this agreement that suggests that, in fact, a lot of this stuff will just be routed through Google Cloud and Jonathan. Wait, can I just read this statement to you? I feel like we're already trying to explain a thing that from the plain language of the statement makes no sense.

I'm just going to read the statement. And again, Apple barely issued this statement. Google tweeted this and it says a joint statement from Apple and Google, which is wild. Apple usually speaks for itself. But anyway, here's the same thing. Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration

under which the next generation of Apple Foundation models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.

Okay. The next generation of Apple Foundation models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology. and that is all going to happen fast enough for a new Siri coming this year. So is Apple forking Gemini and then making its own version that it will call Apple Foundation models? Is it going to just call Gemini in the cloud? These are pretty important questions.

Yes. The only hint that these questions have an answer comes at the end of this long statement. Apple intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices. and private cloud compute while maintaining Apple's industry-leading privacy standards. So whatever is happening here is going to happen on Apple's private cloud compute and somewhere locally on the devices, what is unclear and left unsaid and I think open to interpretation is whether when you want the more powerful Gemini or the next version of Gemini to do something that only Gemini can do, whether Apple has access to that as well, or whether this is happening today

and Apple's going to take Gemini and run it on its servers. I don't know. Right. And I don't think anybody knows. What seems to be true is that the idea of Siri basically just having its back end lobotomized and replaced with Gemini is not exactly correct, but is maybe functionally kind of correct. That you won't interact with sort of the character of Gemini, but the basic underlying technology, for all intends and purses, for all intends and purses, I think is going to be Gemini. And that's a big deal, right? Gemini, Gemini three in particular is by pretty much every measure the best overall large language model on the market. It is being used by

lots of other companies. Apple is hardly the first company to go do this. You can just go have Gemini if you have a credit card. You can just go use it. But Apple putting the Siri name and character on top of that seems like what is likely, again, if they're trying to show you. ship this thing in the next couple of months. I don't know what else you can do. It's not like they're not going to use Gemini to build some complete new Apple thing. They just tried to do that and it didn't work. I think it's just going to look like Gemini.

Yeah. I mean, this is, you can't do this this fast. Right. Right. Like you can't take all of Gemini, rework it to be your own model, which is what this half implies. You basically just have to call Gemini. Like you're going to run Gemini.

Google's already done by. work. They have their own RIF on private cloud compute, which they obviously built for Apple. Like this whole time, as they've been building it and talking about it, it's like, oh, this is obviously for one customer, the only customer that cares about this. Yep. Okay, I'm going to read you the cook doctrine again. We believe we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution. This is the primary technology behind the product he makes. It's the first part. They got rocked and they are having to turn to an outside provider

for the primary technology for the product they make and that's fine and every company does this stuff it's not like Apple makes OLED displays like whatever. Right.

They have a lot of say in how those OLED displays are made. Right? They're the biggest buyer of OLED displays. They basically tell Samsung what to do.

Right? They basically tell TSMC what they're going to do and what their manufacturing roadmap is going to look like. Are they going to be such a big client of Google

that they get to tell Google what to do? Because here's the really interesting flip. Antitrust rears its head. Part of the antitrust case with Google Search, not AdTech, the one our company is suing Google

over, but Google search was Google was paying Apple to be the default provider of search results on the iPhone, because that in many ways kept Apple from competing with Google and search. And it provided an enormous stream of data to Google that no one could

compete with because it was making search more relevant. In this case, the reporting is Apple is paying Google a billion dollars a year to be the model provider for Apple intelligence. That suggests to me that Apple will one day walk. Apple hates paying other people money. Apple hates paying its suppliers money. And there's already been some reporting. There was a good, I think it was a financial time story saying that Apple continues to hope this is a temporary agreement, that it wants to build its own things. But I also think there is an interesting case to be made.

and I think this is the case you make if you want Apple to look good in this deal, that maybe the model isn't primary technology. That again, maybe we get to the point where choosing AI models is like choosing cloud storage, where there are pros and cons to different things, but it is fundamentally the same technology run the same ways by the same people, and the only stuff that matters is around the edges. Maybe that is where it lands. Maybe these models stop doing the thing where they leapfrog each other every six weeks,

and we hit this sort of plateau where what you get from Anthropic and what you get from OpenAI and what you get from Google and what you get from Deepseek and what you get from Lama are close enough. And that actually if you're Apple being the sixth option is a waste of your time and resources. I think all recent evidence suggests that if you believe the tech industry and where all the money is flowing, the belief continues to be that the model itself, is primary technology and that if you own the model, there's other stuff you can do on top of it that's very powerful. But all the way back to what you said at the beginning,

the only reason to do that is to sell it to other people. And Apple doesn't do that. That's not a thing Apple does. Yeah, I mean, like, ICloud runs on all the big cloud providers. Apple has some of its own I cloud infrastructure. Like, Apple doesn't rent space on ICloud to enterprises. I'm sure it does. There's some enterprise IT person who's going to tell us what their enterprise ICloud.

But that's not what we mean, right? They're not competing with AWS. In fact, they are a client of AWS. Exactly. And so I think if you're Apple, it's not impossible that that is where it will land. That's saying, you know, it's like being a wireless carrier. Like, let others do it and we will live on the technology that exists. I will point out that Verizon went down for 10 hours yesterday.

It's a swing, right? If you're Apple, and again, all of the last several years of Apple trying desperately to do this itself suggests that it does not share the opinion that it doesn't really matter to do it. yourself. It just didn't and couldn't. And so here we are. We'll see. I mean, your point is it between the Apple deal and then Google announcing it's going to do personal intelligence where it'll use your data from Gmail and searching YouTube in photos, which we should talk about a little bit. But your point is between those two announcements on the same day, you're looking at Google taking a commanding lead in whatever the AI race is. I think at this point, if you believe in the biggest

possible version of AI, which is very cook doctriney, right? It's, it's, we want to own all of the pieces of this and we think that these things add up to a hole that is greater than the sum of its parts. No one can do what Google is doing. Maybe it's impossible to do what Google is doing, but certainly right now no one can. Google has essentially infinite computing resources. Like Sam Altman is out here begging, borrowing, and stealing his way to try and get what Google all already has in terms of compute resources. Google built its own chips, so it's not even reliant on Nvidia's computing resources. It has TPUs, which it used to train Gemini 3, which, again, by most measures, is the best model that exists. Google has all of your data that exists in the

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

It gets this incredible access to people. One thing I'm very curious about to see is as the idea of personal intelligence becomes more and more baked into Gemini. Is that a thing that exists in the Siri version of Gemini? Like, can I, I just, all of this gets weird because it just gives Google more and more power. But so Google is in this position now, especially as it continues to put Gemini and AI into search, which it will. And if I were really going to go out on a limb, I would say this is the year that AI mode becomes the default Google search interface. Well, yeah, all the publishers are suing Google.

Yeah, right. Like, they got nothing to lose. Disclosure, Vox Media is one of them. But Google is desperate to do this. Like, make no a mistake, Google is desperate for AI mode to be the main interface for search. They believe it is the right answer, and they will put it there the minute they feel like they can get away with it. All right, let me issue my skating criticism of Google that is also me agreeing with you. I think that Google is desperate to put A.A.M.R. in search.

Absolutely great. I think they're going to do it pretty fast. The reason I think they're going to do it is not because I think it's the best product. It's absolutely not the best product. I know it's not the best product because their own examples of all the crazy things you can do are always, always, always buying shit. Yeah, it's always buying stuff. And the reason it's always buying stuff is because, yes, they have a bunch of investors. They need to convince shareholders that all this AI spend is going to result in some revenue. And here's a transaction that we can put ads in front of is revenue.

Like you can just read between the lines. Or like, look at this thing we're going to monetize. But it's also that Google has two main revenue lines. Three, if you count Google Cloud, but it's way smaller in the scheme of things. Google Search, which is the monster. They've got YouTube, which is growing. And then, yeah, they've got Google Cloud and like other bets, right?

Yeah. Google search is the monster. It is the money at Google. And if you think the web is in the client and searches in the client and whatever, you've got to move to the next thing pretty fast. and the way Google searches monetizes obviously ads everywhere, there's a reason that traditional search

is just cluttered with ads in SponCon up and down the stack. You look at that list of results, you're scrolling halfway down the page on mobile before you see the first organic result. Google has to get in front of that, right? They got to replace all of that money, all of the AdWords money,

and put that into AI. So of course they want to shift to AI mode because then they are in total control of that results page. every word on that results page is generated by Google directly and they can monetize it in all kinds of ways

that are way more exciting than just you bought an ad word and here's the first result that's SpontCon. It's coming and I know it's coming because they got to move the revenue before the old thing dies completely. And then you just look at the personal intelligence

blog post and our team freaked out about this the commenters noticed this, everyone noticed this. The example in the what can we do with personal intelligence was whoever the product manager was I said I needed new tires for like my 2019 Honda Odyssey and I like asked Gemini

and it looked at my old road trips and it suggested all season tires because I traveled to like Oklahoma or something. And it's like dude, what other tires would you buy for a 2019 Honda Odyssey? Like you don't need help buying tires. Most people in the world with Honda Odyssey's just get whatever tires came on the Honda Odyssey.

see. Like, no one's upgrading. Like, I know there are, like, Hot Rod, Dadvan guys, and I encourage you to reach out to me because I have a lot of questions for you. But, like, it's just a nonsensical query, but you have to find a transaction. And so, every

example Google gives is always a transaction, which leads them astray in how they even structure the examples. Like, what's the thing I need to buy that you can inform by my history of Google Photos? Of course, you're going to end up with, I bought tires from my car that I took on a road trip.

Yeah. And there's just something about all the AI mode stuff that is so nakedly commercial that I think it will actually trip up Google in the end. Well, it's the only idea that anybody has about how to monetize that is, in theory, also kind of part of the product, right? Because everything else you're describing is just, we're going to stick an ad in the middle. And everybody's going to hate that.

Or the result itself will be an ad. Right. Right. You're like, how do I get this stain out of my shirt? and it is just like, you buy tied. Right. Shopping at least feels like a sort of payment system people understand, which is people are going to pay to put their things in front of me

and I will either buy it or I won't. Like that's a trade people understand on the internet and it is I think the least gross feeling option that these companies have. Yeah, I'm just going to put it. But pay attention. Every time Google talks about search or AI mode or any of this, the examples always end in a transaction. And maybe it's a couple steps down the road.

but there's always a transaction at the end of the rainbow, which just feels gross. It's like, can you just be cool for once in your life? Yeah. Anyway, we should move on, but there's a lot more about all of this to talk about. I think we're five months away from WWDC, where Apple will presumably talk about all of this

in a very different light. We're going to spend, I think, the next several months continuing to do all of this AI ramp-up stuff. I have reached a point where I am like a full nihilist about AI and I'm like in the name of journalism I will give all of my data to every AI model that exists. So at some point this will go horribly awry. Yeah. But for now it's going to be fun. One thing to love to mention, open I didn't get this deal and they leaked to the financial times that there was a conscious decision to not try to get the Apple deal that they're going to build

their own hardware. That's like how the Vergecast made a conscious decision to not win best podcast at the Golden Globes this weekend. We didn't apply. So yes. It is exactly the same. We decided not to. Yeah. Listen, we're the good people here. What can we say? We would have won if we wanted to. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Watch out, Amy. We're coming for you next year. All right, we should take a break, and then we're going to come back, and we have just a lot more stuff to talk about. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, your designers and

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sold in the first month. You can visit Whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. That's W-H-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. What-N-O-T-com slash sell. All right, we're back. So before we get into the next bit of news, we should probably talk about one of the stories that's been kind of bubbling the last couple of weeks.

We haven't really had a chance to talk about it with all the stuff going on. And that's what's going on with GROC and X in general. This story sucks. We should just say that up front. It's a real bummer. Everyone looks bad in this story. But there's been some interesting stuff this week. The basic setup here is that GROC, XAI's AI bot, is just running around happily.

making deep faked inappropriate pictures of anyone who asks. Young, old, male, female, doesn't matter. Anybody. And it has become like a meme on X to reply to any picture and be like, put them in a bikini or, you know, worse

in some cases. Much, much, much, much worse. Yeah, I mean, some of the details are truly horrifying. And this has just become both one of the biggest and also just kind of the ugliest story in our space right now. Yeah, it's a story of cowardice

and corruption at every level of content moderation, the economy, leadership, it's bad. I mean, you recall, like ages ago,

Google got in all kinds of trouble because the Gemini image generator would make, like, racially diverse pictures of Nazis, and that was too woke, and they had to pull it down because of a woke backlash.

This is, like, dead at the heart of a thing that everyone says they agree on. Right? You should not sexualize children. You should not harass women just left and right. Deep fake pornography is bad. It's like these are things people agree on. Right. And there are bipartisan bills in our country to stop deep fake pornography. There are regulations in the world. And Elon is just letting Grock do it. He is throwing tantrums about it basically every day saying this is free speech. They just want to censor me. He will comply with the law. He's letting GROC. speak for X, which is stupid because GROC can't actually speak for X.

Because it's not a person. It's not a person, and it's hallucinating the responses. It's not actually the policy of X. But media organizations, like the mainstream media especially is like, here's what it's doing. That doesn't make any sense. GROC spent a while lying and saying that the image generation features are behind a paywall, but that's just a thing it was programmed to say on X.

That you could just go to GROC and just do the thing. There's also workarounds on X where you could click the button and still get it to do it. Today, they say they've stopped the image generation from being inappropriate in the countries where it's illegal, including the UK. We have reporters in the UK. That is not true. You can still just get around it trivially. Elon does not want to stop this. No.

It is very clear he thinks this is fine. And in fact, he's putting, like, Keir Starmour, the Prime Minister of England, in a bikini on Grock to, like, protest the English government being mad about it. We're going to do an entire episode of Dakota on this. I'm actually recording it right after the Rochast today. It is a problem at every single layer of content moderation all the way up to Apple and Google, who have built empires on needing total control of their app stores ostensibly to protect people from bad actors. Yeah. Why does Apple say it needs total control of the app store?

It needs to take 30% of every dollar that almost everybody spends on that platform. It's because if they don't, bad things will happen to people. This is the worst thing. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't allow porn apps on the app store. And what is this in practice, if not a porn app? Yeah, just a straightforward harassment vector by which real people are getting deep-pick porn made of them.

It is fully against both rules about the app stores. I will say, again, we have a whole episode of a decoder coming up on every layer of a stack being corrupt and cowardly about this. We ran the headline, Tim Cook in Sooner-Pachar cowards. Liz wrote that piece. Of course, Liz wrote that piece. Just a little inside baseball. We do no surprises, just like every major news organization does.

We tell people what's coming if we're going to put their names in a headline. We told Apple and Google, I will tell you it is business as normal in our newsroom. Yeah. I think everybody knows what's going on here. And I think they know they just have to take the hits. So people are going to take their access away from you. Like, I don't think they are. I really don't.

And if they do, I'll let you know because that would be even more cowardly. but I suspect that they've made the calculation that that criticism is less costly than if they stand on their principles and Elon Musk gets mad at them. And I think that is just ridiculous for two of the most powerful companies on the face of the earth.

Yeah, I don't know what else the dynamic could be if it's not that. If it is fear of what happens if you pick the fight is worse than like being correct and picking the fight. especially on this. Yeah. On this specifically, there is one correct moral outcome, and it is to say this rule that

we've had, we've built our empire over enforcing, we're going to enforce it again, and you will have to force us to back off as opposed to backing off right away. That's also as Lassie's criticizing them. Charlie Worsaltz, the Atlantic wrote a great piece that we'll link. A bunch of advocacy groups have sent open letters. Again, to your point, people agree on this. This is not like a complicated. question about, you know, free speech and people being mean to each other on the internet.

This is not a complicated moral line to draw. No. This is a bad thing that should not be allowed. Well, the one person who sort of disagrees is Tim Sweeney, who thinks appswors are bad and calling for apps for us to use the power he thinks they shouldn't have is just as bad. But I don't think that's actually the case. I think in this case, you're like, all of society's gatekeepers should make this stop. And whether that's the government or the people who have the power, that's fine.

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

Our team has heroically been testing these things in some like truly heinous, awful ways to prove how easy it is to do it. We'll keep covering it. We'll have more to talk about here, too. Yeah, if I can issue like one strident. instruction to my peers in the media, to every influencer and greater, you cannot trust what Grock says about X's policies. It's not real. That is not a meaningful way to do any reporting is to ask Grock about itself. No, it is in fact nothing. Yeah. It is, it is nothing. And right next to that, you can't trust what Elon is saying. You have to verify that what he's saying is true. Right.

And that, it's just very hard, it's hard to break out of these patterns. I get it. But in this case, it's obvious that he does not want to stop it. And it's deeply bizarre that the way to verify it right now is to ask an AI to make pictures of you in a bikini. But shouts to the folks on our team who have been doing so. And I'm so sorry, this is what our job is. All right, let's talk about the other piece of the news I really want to talk about here is meta, which I think you can sort of call the metaverse now. The news of this week is that meta laid off a bunch of people. in the reality labs division. It closed three of its VR studios. It is essentially like taking all of

the resources it has been putting into the Metaverse and moving it towards AI. The company continues to think that wearables are the thing. It is it is just moving every dollar it can find toward smart glasses and AI. And most of those dollars are from the reality labs team. And this to me feels like the end of a story that we've been covering for most of a decade now, that Meta believed in the Metaverse as a concept so much that it paid a bunch of money to Palmer Lucky to buy Oculus. It basically, it, not basically, it renamed the company to Meta, a story that we had. Great job, Alex Heath. And it essentially tried to corner the market to the point where there was an FTC trial about whether meta should be allowed to buy this company called

within, which made supernatural, which is one of the most interesting VR apps that exists. So meta basically makes this big, gigantic industry-shaking bet that the metaverse is going to be the thing, and then kind of slowly and sort of all at once here has just decided to walk away. Can I connect the dots from the app store and Grock to meta and VR and Mark Zuckerberg? Sure. Jesus. They're not hard to do. Okay. Mark Zuckerberg hates Apple.

He hates the fact that Tim Cook, through App Store policies, can affect Meta's business. And Tim Cook hates Meta. And I think he hates Mark Zuckerberg. And in fact, Apple has many times just directly screwed with Meta's businesses. Yes. They did app tracking transparency. They ruined Meta's ability to do app install ads. They took billions off Meta's bottom line and they had to re-architect the business to make that money back.

straightforwardly, Mark Zuckerberg hates the fact that Tim Cook was able to do that to his business through iOS-level permissions and apps for-level policies. At one point, Meadow was running a VPN called Onavo to get data on what users were doing, which is super sketchy, super-sketchy to give people a VPN in the name of privacy and then track every single thing they do in every single app to figure out what apps to buy or compete with. Yes. Super sketchy. Apple revoked meta's entire enterprise development service. and took down every single one of meta's internal apps on iOS. People were not able to, like, order food in the meta cafeteria because Apple thought Onavo was so bad.

This is scandalous levels of power being used against a not-sensible competitor. This is real. Apple has done all this. You can look it up. They just have attacked meta left and right using the power of the app store. They've threatened to pull Instagram over some of the teenage girl issues that Instagram has had. Yeah, I mean, so much of Apple's... in particular sort of privacy is the thing

messaging is directly aimed at meta. Well, it used to be aimed at Google, but that's a little too cozy now. So now it's all been aimed at meta. Yeah. And everyone still thinks their iPhones are listening to them. They've accomplished nothing with this message. That's true.

Because the ads on Instagram are still good enough. It doesn't matter. But that dynamic between meta and Apple is a dynamic born of the app store. Mark Zuckerberg knows that Apple's authority over the app story. Rightfully or wrongfully is a check on his

business. And we've just been in that dynamic for 15 years. And he hates it. He openly talks about it. He said it on the verge. In interviews on Decoder, he has said, I hate this. Once people realize how much power Apple has, they'll be mad. Meanwhile, Apple

is so afraid of Elon and Trump that they won't use the power in the one case they should. So that's just naked hypocrisy. I'm only bringing this up because that's why Zuck bought Oculus. Right? He said,

I need to buy the next platform. I need to get away from the iPhone. I need the next thing. And I will control that platform.

And then I will turn off Apple's developer certificates. Like, this is the motivation. The man is motivated by power. Yep. So he bought the headset

and he said, this is going to be the thing that takes over from the phone. And he did all of the metaverse and he would talk about the embodied internet

because he thought he could get you away from the phone. I think now he thinks he can do AR glasses before Apple gets to AR glasses and that will be

the next platform. And he will be in control of that. And he is motivated by that. He is not motivated by making these products. Great. He's not motivated by finishing the thought by investing in the things that he bought in this case. He just wants to get out of Apple's shadow. He wants to own the thing after smartphones. And he is so unworried about what that thing is. And I do, I mean, I think he's like, if it had been, I was just about to make a cryptocurrency joke, Meda got really into cryptocurrency. Yep. Like, David Marcus showed up and did a whole thing at Meta about Web3.

They don't care what the thing is as long as they don't have to play in somebody else's yard for the next one. Because they perceive that it cost Meta a lot of money. And it objectively did. But here, I pulled this one quote from the original FTC complaint against Meta for this fight about whether it was allowed to buy within. And just to put everybody in the moment, this was when the quest was growing really fast. there was a sense that this was like an exciting platform, at least for video games and stuff.

And every time anybody would release anything cool on that platform, META would immediately buy it. And it just every good app that came out was swallowed up by meta, including Supernatural, this like Beat Saber workout thing that I think you and I both had pretty long stints of using, if I remember correctly. Yeah, I want to talk about, I mean, remind you, this is all in the pandemic. Like everyone's at home. Things were weird.

It was really hard to buy a Peloton. Yeah. Supernatural came out. It was a fitness app in VR. A lot of people had bought Quest because what else? At least you can get out of your house somehow. At least you and your partner don't have to look at each other for a while. Well, I guess I'm in Jurassic Park now.

And it was, we should talk about Supernatural more directly, but it was in that moment. The context was the pandemic. And Zuck went to Biden and the FTC, the Biden FTC tried to stop him. Yeah. And so here's the line from the complaint. It says, Mr. Zuckerberg has made clear that his aspiration, for the VR space is control of the entire ecosystem. As early as 2015, Mr. Zuckerberg instructed key Facebook executives that his vision for,

quote, the next wave of computing was control of apps in the platform on which those apps are distributed, making clear in an internal email to key Facebook executives that a key part of his strategy was for his company to be, quote, completely ubiquitous in killer apps. Completely ubiquitous in killer apps is A, kind of a bar, and B, the whole thing, right? it's not, I am so with you in the sense that I don't think Mark Zucker was ever a true believer in the Metaverse so much as a true believer in I will spend whatever it takes to not lose the next platform more. Yeah, absolutely. And he was spending that money. And so the tragedy here to me is supernatural. And I really feel like it's tragic that as part of all these cuts to reality labs, the supernatural division is no longer going to invest in new content or features. They're just going to maintain it. support now. It's on live support, which means it's dead. And the reason I say it's a tragedy is I interviewed the founder of Supernatural, Chris Milk in 2021, a decoder. Like a legend of the VR industry.

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

This sucks. Yeah. But anyway, Chris Melk had been playing Beat Sabre, I asked him about the influence, and he was like, oh, I can make an actual fitness app out of this. It won't just be an accident. So he basically set out to build a Peloton, like a Beat Saber Peloton. And he hired a bunch of fitness teachers.

He called them athletes. He had a bunch of choreographers. is like he built that entire studio. He has a background in music industry. He figured out all of the licensing for all of the music in Supernatural. And not only was he growing, he was growing in like a normie way.

Actually, play this quote. I just want you all to hear the stats for Supernatural in 2021. Fitness is the killer use case for VR. It will be the first driving force of mass adoption through a normal consumer audience, just as an. example, what we're seeing from our membership base, where 50-50 split women and men, where

I think over 60% are over 40. This is not what a typical VR demographic looks like. It's the understatement of the century. That's remarkable, right? To get 50-50-split men and women, 60% over 40 to be early adopters of new hardware. And so supernatural is so important that Apple and Meta were in a bidding war for it. And everyone, this is before the Vision Pro came out. Everyone thought Apple wanted it to drive Vision Pro sales. And you can imagine how that might have gone very differently if Apple had succeeded here. But it is just a tragedy that Meta bought it, didn't really invest a ton into it.

The supernatural audience was immediately upset about this, right? Like, no one wants this acquisition to happen. They were cheering on the FTC case. The FCC lost, whatever. And then Meta has done nothing but drain reality labs of funds. and with it, kill the thing that everyone saw is the killer app for this new hardware. Because Mark Zuckerer doesn't actually care

about the Metaverse. He cares about power, and he cares about being first to whatever he thinks the next platform is going to be. And if Supernatural had just been on its own growing in this way, maybe it would have gotten bought by Peloton. Maybe it would have built its own ecosystem of hardware

that was more specialized for fitness. You can think of another 100 things that would have happened that would have been better for an audience of consumers, who were significant enough for Apple and Meta to want to buy the platform to get healthier. Right? And, like, they're getting robbed of that now.

Yep. The thing that helped them get healthier, the thing they were excited about, is going away because of Marks, I would rather pay for glasses. I just think that that's a tragedy. Like, yeah. I rant and rave about antitrust and buying stuff. But this one in particular is like, oh, this was a great product. This thing was demoed on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Like it was it had crossed into mainstream appeal and Zuck lost interest.

And that just sucks. And the thing is this whole run that they went on put it in a position of just being able to do it until they lost interest, right? Like meta has so cornered the market that it didn't become a competitive space. Nobody else is trying to do that anymore. And there's an argument to be made that it's because it was a bad idea all along and nobody was ever going to do it. but that market never even had a chance to materialize because meta just completely cornered it from the first minute it could. And then it was then existent based on Mark Zuckerberg remaining interested in doing it.

And that was never going to work for any of these companies. I mean, the other thing, I think the best VR game ever was Batman Arkham Shadow. And that studio was bought by meta and was also hit by these layoffs. It's like this whole thing, this whole ecosystem of people who were the only ones who had a chance to make this into something viable. And again, I think there are lots of reasons to think the metaverse is a bad idea. I think immersive gaming just boil it all the way down. That basic thing is very cool. And like, wouldn't it be awesome if I had a supernatural app for my Nintendo Switch that I could play on my TV?

Like, this should have had a better run than it did and meta just swallowed it whole and then just kind of gave up. And that sucks. That feels bad. Yeah. I think I slightly disagree with you. Only in the sense that I think general purpose VR headsets might have always been a dead end. You know, like the idea that I have a face computer, like, whatever, you know, like, that's the axis of wearable bullshit. Like, it's so fiddly and you have to care for it and it's on your face and some of the stuff is going to make you dizzy.

There were, there were these bright spots. And maybe you think gaming was a brighter spot than fitness. I just saw what people were doing. in fitness. And I heard that quote about the demographic and we went and looked at those communities on Facebook and Reddit where people were gathering to talk about supernatural. And it was just, it was the thing you want from technology. Yeah. Right. It was a bunch of people who were not there for technology. They were there to like lead better lives and support each other and like do that thing that in fitness communities is often very like rewarding. And Mark didn't care about that

at all. Like I, and I just think that's tragic. I also think, like they should have gotten away from the quest and made their own hardware and like how to cheat VR headset to do this in or like whatever kind of motion tracking. Like there's a million things they could have done. This is what I mean by Switch game.

Like there's Supernatural could have been a lot of places that weren't a VR headset. Yeah. Sure. I mean, it's dancing. Like it's dance fighting. There should be more dance fighting in a world. There should be more dance fighting.

And like that's cool. Like Cranes and I were both supernatural fans like in the pandemic. We were both like dance fighting every day. Like it was like great. I was like I'm not at my house. I'm not, like, trudging along in this treadmill. I'm, like, having a good time in a different environment.

Supernatural was selling a lot of Quest headsets. Like, I think you can't. And that's why they bought them. It was the killer app in so many cases for people. Yeah, especially at that time. Becky was wearing a, she, there's, I'm like, do you want any laptop? She's like, get, I get this technology out of my face. Like, that's her reaction to most ideas about tech in this house.

Didn't she have a candle for like 12 years until you had to bully her into upgrading? Yeah, I upgraded her candle. And that's going to, she's having for another 20 years. She, like, wore the headset all the time. We bought a dock. It lived in the place where we work out, and she would take it off and use it. And that's what, I was like,

oh, we should get this dude on the coder. Again, the tragedy is supernatural aside. The thing you're looking at is, I think the essential character of meta is not about taste or what the products are or the experiences people are having. It is just about power. And I think in this turn,

if you're like, why won't meta win an AI? Why won't they win in the next platform shift? well, why are they letting their platforms be overrun by slop? Well, it's because I don't think they actually care about the products. I really don't. And I think that the companies that do care about the products tend to be the companies at all right. Even to this day, they still tend to be the companies that win.

And I see them pulling back from reality labs and it's because it didn't win and they don't actually care. They don't actually have the persistence in the, like, the drive to execute. This is why Horizon sucked. Like, it was so bad. It was so, so, so bad because no one knew what good looked like or cared to sit down and rigorously think through what good looked like. This is why Marks, like, where I just hired Alan Dye from Apple because he doesn't know what good looks like. Yeah.

And I don't know that he cares. He doesn't care. I think the conviction is overrated in a lot of these cases that having a thesis clouds you from chasing whatever feels like it's going to be the next thing. can I just read you maybe the single bleakest part of this entire thing? Which is that there was a Bloomberg reported that there was an internal memo from Andrew Bosworth, who is meta's CTO, about a shift in the metaverse strategy. Meta is careful to say it's not ditching the Metavers entirely. It still believes the-renamed the company meta. Yeah, right?

What are they going to do? But this is just the last line of our story about this, and it just hits. Rather than being a VR-first social platform, the Metaverse will be focused more on mobile devices moving forward. Sure. Whop. Wom. Sure.

It's just tough. And I think what's funny is to some extent, like if you sort of broadly define the concept of Metaverse, it's happening already. Like, Fortnite and Roblox and Minecraft, like, this idea of people being in virtual worlds is already happening. And it's huge. out of here. That was the argument they were making five years

ago. That's still what it is. No, the metaverse is you need to protect, you need to you got to be in it. You got to be in a virtual environment where you're buying and trading NFTs like, whatever the hell is I think that was the thing that Mark Zuckerberg was undeniably wrong about. Yeah. At least for now. The idea that Fortnite is a

metaverse is nonsensical. Oh, you're totally wrong. Fortnite is the metaverse in all of the ways that it is useful to be the metiverse. All the other stuff is dumb. But the definition, it's a video game. Like I I can draw a distinction between I live my economic life in a virtual environment, and I'm playing this video game where there are occasionally concerts and brand integrations.

I mean, how many people live their economic lives in Roblox? We can do this all day. Too many people is the answer to that question. That is true. That's the PSA at the end here. Stop playing Roblox. By the way, it's very funny that Apple still makes the Vision Pro has not announced any pullback and is shipping more and more VR content for it.

Yeah. Like, if you want a great VR experience, you're like, I'm going to watch this basketball game in the Vision Pro and VR, which is supposed to be an augmented reality headset. Although our friend Ben Thompson says the basketball stuff is horrible. He wrote a very good piece that I thought was really smart and essentially boiled down to Apple is trying to program beautiful immersive television. And what it has is the opportunity to just sit me court side of a basketball game. Yeah, but I mean, Google was shipping that on cardboard 15 years ago. Yeah, and it was sick. It was also on a literal cardboard box.

I interviewed Michelle Obama at the White House in that style of VR. You can go watch that video on our YouTube channel today. And now look where you are. And that was with one of the very first VR cameras. This is a real backstory. That camera broke the night before the shoot, and we had a call in a backup company, and it was crazy. Yikes.

So, okay, last thing on this before we move on to the lighting ground, the big bet sort of inherent in all of this continues to be that wearables and glasses and AI are the next thing, right? Like, this is where all of META's attention is now. It's off the quest and it is on to META Raybans. You have been very suspicious of that idea for a long time. Has your mind changed at all?

No. I think people like having a camera in their glasses. Yeah. I don't think anyone wants to talk to META's chat bot, and I think the meta display glasses are an interesting proof of concept, and they have not figured out an app model. They have not figured out an interface. Like, I don't think that neural band interface does the thing they want it to do.

It's very cool. But there are many, many, many generations away from that product being a mainstream product. I think I agree. Like, did they stumble into a cool, exciting piece of hardware that lots of people will like? Yes. Is that a platform shift? Not even a little bit so far. Yeah, you know what they have to compete with?

Their own app on my phone that I can open and watch endless memes of Aaron Rogers weeping. What are you going to do with that? How are you going to compete with that? Well, Aaron Rogers is going to retire, so they won't have to for private. And that's why he's crying an AI on my phone every day. All right, on that note, before we get to, Neli just tells me about his time. We should take one more break, and then we're going to go back.

We're going to do lightning round. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database.

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Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus, Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm.

We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored. For flavor. I'm just going to do that pause longer every time. I'm really excited about it. We got an email that said we should say unsponsored for taste instead of for flavor, which is the thing I'd like you to consider for next week. It's just an idea.

I think once you're in the catchphrase, you've got to live in the catchphrase. Yeah, changing the catchphrase over and over. It seems like it defeats the purpose. Nelai, is it time? It's time, and we have a very special thank you. So it's time for America's favorite podcast for them podcast, Brendan Carr's a Dummy. And when we did the live show, I believe your name was T.J.

T.J. came to the live show in Vegas and gave us both t-shirts that say Brennan Carr's a dummy. And on the back, what does it say, David? On the back, it says America's favorite podcast for them podcast. The greatest t-shirt I own. It's the only thing I wear. The best T-shirt we have. Thank you so much for making us shirts.

He was wearing a shirt. We all took photos together. We forgot to get your name. There are so many people we were talking to to the live show, just send us a note, would you? And we can send you some swag back. You got to send us some proof that you're you. Yeah.

Well, we will gladly trade you some swag for swag. Yes, please do. Thank you so much for the shirts. They're incredible. And Brendan, we'll send you one too, buddy. If you just get in touch and do an interview with us here on America's favorite podcast, a podcast, Brennan Carr's a dummy. Or in your case, I am a dummy, the Brennan Car experience.

You see what I'm saying. All right, two quick Brennan Carr. notes this week. One actually meaningful. The other one, just, I just want people to experience how dumb this man is and how openly he will just say dumb lies to try to weasel his way out of his own contradictions. So Brendan was in front of Congress this week. There was an oversight hearing. They asked a bunch of stuff about free speech and he said a bunch of stuff about broadcast license rules and all the usual nonsense, Brendan spews, where he talks, he says legal words really fast in a way that, you know, sort of insists that his interpretation is correct. When if you just peel back what he's

saying, you're like, oh, you're a dummy. Okay. So his big justification for all the speech nonsense that he's doing with TV is to protect local news. He says this over and over again. He needs competition in local news. The broadcasters have a public interest requirement because they don't pay for the spectrum, all this stuff. This is all nonsensical because if you look at the landscape of local news, Sinclair Broadcasting owns all the stations, and Tegna owns all the other ones, and they're trying to merge, which would just create a giant monopoly. And Brendan Carr appears to be very willing to let them do so. And Brendan Carr wants to let it. Interestingly, you know, who does not want to let that happen is Donald Trump. Yeah. Because his buddy, Chris Ruddy, who owns Newsmax, does not want that to happen because Newsmax is on cable. There's a whole dynamic there that's not worth unpacking.

Yeah. But it's a dynamic. Anyway, Brandon keeps lying about wanting to protect local news, even though local news is predominantly made by two big companies that want to emerge. Nonsensical on its face. And he got pressed in this a little bit. And then he gave this quote during this congressional hearing. And I just want to play it. I'm not even to set it up.

I just want to see if you can. catch the blatant, nonsensical lie in the middle of this quote. Let's run the quote. I think as a Congress, it's important that we figure out, do we want investment in local news? Because right now, you've got Comcast and Disney that are programming almost 100% of the content that Americans are seeing. And how do we incentivize the local TV stations to continue to generate their own local news and information? A hundred percent? Did you catch that?

Comcast and Disney, Disclosure, NBC University. a commercial division of Comcast is an investor in our parent company of Box Media, but whatever. Comcast and Disney are programming almost 100% of the content that Americans are seeing. Is that true? No. Is that true in anyone's experience? Does YouTube exist, Brendan? I was just about to say.

Does TikTok, does this podcast exist? What? I don't know. I don't know what that means. Even if you slice it down to I'm just talking. about broadcast television and Comcast owns NBC and Disney owns ABC.

Well, there are a bunch of other letters that exist. CB and S. CBS, which is owned by Paramount, which is refactoring its entire news division to please Donald Trump.

Uh-huh. Does CBS exist? The one that has the NFL on it. Does that one exist? Uh, does Fox? Yes. Uh-huh.

Just, are they, are they, are they, do they suck? Brendan, is your position that Fox sucks? Not only do they suck, they don't exist. They don't exist. They're so bad that Comcast and Disney are programming almost 100% of the content that Americans are. And this is where his,

the intellectual justification for his war on free speech is so weak that he has to invent this claim that Comcast and Disney are programming almost 100% of the content Americans are seeing. Just so we can say, I have to break that monopoly. just so he can say, like, that's a problem. I need to use the power of the government to impose new.

And it's like, dude, Fox is right there. Fox is dominant. Fox is the largest cable news station that exists. Brendan Carr might be the most you can just say things person in the history of you can just say things. He's such a dumb. It's like, if you walked up to anyone, and we're like, do you get 100% of your content from Comcast and Disney?

They're like, no, I watch YouTube all day. What are you talking about, dude? Anyway, by the way, can I say this one thing? I do the Comcast disclosure all the time. In the comments on, like, one of our TikTok clips, someone was like, he's bought and paid for by a Comcast. And it was someone who had misconstrued the fact that I sarcastically say they love me all the time. Oh. Or at least that's the charitable interpretation.

I say they love me sarcastically because they hate me. Yeah. Like, I don't think, I don't think generally speaking. It was just one of those things where I was like looking at the comments on like a TikTok clip. And I was like, oh, we, we, this is. is like a post-literacy world that we live in, where I'm like, Disclosure Comcast. And the guy's like, he's always going on and on about how much Comcast loves him. Do you think somewhere the Peacock team is, like, thrilled that Brendan Carr said this?

They're like, look how powerful he thinks we are. I just, Comcast and Disney are programming almost 100% of the content that Americans are seeing is such a blatantly stupid lie that, like, all of the people I know who are like live posting the hearing were like, what did he just say? Anyway, there's one substance thing I want to point out that the Brennan Carr FCC did, which is not just blatant lies in a war on free speech, which is what he is set out to accomplish. Oh, they just went ahead and said Verizon doesn't have to unlock phones after 60 days anymore. This used to be a rule. When, you know, through mergers, they put conditions and they want more competition. They want people to move handsets between carriers. So they made it so that Verizon had to unlock your phone within 60 days.

Verizon's argument is like, this only helps scammers, which is true or not true. BFC said fine. Brendan Carr said, fine. You can have whatever you want, Verizon. You can keep consumers locked to your network because I don't care about actual lower prices. I care about a war on free speech that I'm waging every day with blatant lies about Comcast and Disney programming almost 100% of the content Americans are seeing. Ridiculous. All those stories are on the website. You can just go read them. As always, Brendan, if you would care to defend your outlandishly stupid claims, you're welcome, both on this show or Decoder. We can do a written interview, old school. But I would challenge you to defend the concept that almost 100% of the content Americans are seeing come from those two companies. I think Brendan should come on the show and we're just going to read him the titles of CBS shows to see if he thinks anybody watches. Big Bang Theory. The most popular show in the country. Does it exist?

Unreal. Anyway, that's been Brennan Carr's dummy America's favorite podcast. Very good. Thank you again, TJ, for the t-shirts. Yes. I don't know if we're going to wear these every week, but I'm going to keep it around. I'm happy. We'll just AI it on my body.

There we go. Well, we're going to AI this on Aaron Rogers's body. It's going to be great. Aaron Rogers crying at a Senate hearing next to Brendan Carr. Please someone make that incentive to us. All right. I've been canceled. My first lightning around thing is we'll stay in the streaming world here.

Paramount, which is now famously owned by David Ellison, run CBS, a network that doesn't exist. It sucks so bad. Not even 1%. No one has even ever heard of CBS. is still trying desperately to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, and this deal just keeps getting weirder and weirder. So the basic thrust of it is Netflix is going to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. Paramount would very much like for that to not happen.

So it keeps launching these aggressive, hostile bids, and the Warner Brothers board keeps telling shareholders to reject them and say, no, thank you. We don't want your money. We're going to be bought by Netflix. So Netflix, in an effort to, I guess, sweeten the deal is trying to see if it's possible to do an all-cash deal for Warner Brothers. And Paramount is suing saying essentially that Warner Brothers Discovery owes Paramount a better explanation of why it won't take its money, which is so funny. Because I can tell you with such great confidence why if you're Warner Brothers Discovery, you would rather have Netflix's money than Paramount's money.

but it's very good. Actually, David, breaking news. As we're recording, the judge rejected that argument and said that Paramount does not owed an explanation of how Warner evaluated its deal. Because, of course, it doesn't. Like, can I just read this thing for David Ellison? So in the suit, David Ellison writes, Warner Brothers Discovery has provided increasingly novel reasons for avoiding a transaction with Paramount, but what it has never said

because it cannot is that the Netflix transaction is financially superior to our actual offer. first of all, well written. Great job, David Ellison. Second of all, that's not how it works. It's literally, he's like, why don't you like me? Please tell me why you don't like me is just, it's just not going to work. This whole thing, I have a very hard time imagining this continuing to go worse for Paramount,

but also like at what point does it go better? It just is going to be a mess. Can I draw some threads together that I want Liz to write about it? some point because she's going to draw this back to grok and Elon Musk somehow too? I can sort of draw back. How is this about supernatural? Look, old people exercising is the future of the Metaverse. I can say that because I'm over for you.

If you are evaluating Paramount's deal, the big promise Paramount is making is, hey, Larry Ellison is here, and he has a lot of money. So if you don't trust our, you know, structure of a deal, Larry Ellison is personally guaranteeing that you're going to get this money and Netflix's deal can't do that. And also we want to buy the whole thing. Right. Right. We don't just want streaming. We want to buy the whole enchilada and Larry Ellison exists.

So what are you talking about? Look at how cool we are. Larry Ellison. Do you want to, have you heard of the America's Cup? Right? Like that's, he's the inspiration for Iron Man. Don't you like Larry Ellison? Sure. And the problem is that all of Larry Ellison's money is tied up in the AI bubble.

And like Oracle in particular has a bunch of weird circular deals with Open AI with Nvidia. There's just a lot in Oracle that means Larry Ellison's money is AI money right now. And it has always been kind of bizarre that the Ellison

family is looking at its investments in AI and saying what we would rather have is the company David Zasloff made. That makes no sense. Right, if you think the AI is going to rejigger the entire economy of the world and we're all

going to do fully automated luxury communism or like whatever you think is going to happen. You would not be like, what I need is a 4-3 gray scale Batman franchise. That's not that you would not rationally make that determination. No matter how much you love your son. I'm sorry, I love my son very much. I was like, I have one investment that might be the future of the entire world. And you want me to buy the Snyder cut.

I love you, son, but we're not doing it. You have to go make your own Snider. or cut, okay? Like, off you go. Instead, the Ellison family is yelling and screaming how Larry will fund this deal. And I just keep coming back to, oh, they don't, they think it's shaky. Like, they're trying to diversify. They want this other power.

And I think Warner Brothers is looking at it and saying, we can't trust that money because it's AI bubble money. That's interesting. Like, we don't want to be the bag holder when the AI bubble pops. That and also Paramount's entire. pitch for why it's a good idea to combine these two companies is that they are going to lay off a whole bunch of people and shrink this entire industry. And like there are there are both straightforward shareholder value reasons and like moral belief reasons to not want that as a shareholder in Warner Brothers discovery. Right. Like we're going to come in. They're going to fire a bunch of people shut down a whole lot of production and save billions of dollars is not a compelling business. With the power of AI. It's in there. It's embedded in there. And you're like, well, how's that going for you? And then you watch season two of Landman. You're like, you should not let Taylor Sheridan use AI to

write the show because it's very obviously been written by Chatchabit. And chat, like the free version that doesn't have like the long running memory. Because that show is just seen to scene, none of those people are the same people. Just different characters played by the same actor, you know, like nonsensical nonsense is happening on that show. That's my biggest argument against Paramount being allowed to do anything. But you keep watching. That show is so bad that there's an entire community of people who are like, what?

We're going to watch this show. We're going to, today we're going to watch the show together and I'll talk about it because it's so bad. It's almost, it's like improbable. It's like a sign that you've entered a different multiverse because it's so bad. It does appear on my social media timelines a lot. And it's always just Billy Bob Thornton being like, the oil business is big. and it's getting even bigger.

And there's like 15 different versions of that thing. And I'm like, how many times do you need to give this speech in one show, Billy Wethlorton? Like, we get it. Everybody's here already. We're doing this. Again, literally, scene to scene that he might be playing different characters with totally different motivations. And I'm just like, it's just very obviously been written by AI, but like not a paid. He hasn't paid for like Claude.

You know what I mean? He's not paying $200 a month to write that show. He's on the free tier of chat, GBT, and he's run out of memory. I will say there are some screenshots in the Stranger Things documentary, the Duffer Brothers, the Chat ChatsyP open on their laptops. Not good. Not good all the way around. Listen, I'm very sensitive to people who have lots of tabs open.

You know what I mean? We should not all be judged on the contents of our open tabs. The fact that there's effectively a Stranger Things Q and on about the end of that show. It was not helped along with a Duffer Lufth Fuss having Chatchee open. Two deadlines for the secret episode have now come and gone? It's forever. QAnon. Somehow it's going to merge into January 6th in some way. I can see it happening. Anyhow, it's crazy that Netflix has emerged is the white night here. People are very unhappy

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

I recognize them doing a lot of politics. But it's all, you know, it's all this. It's here in America in 2026. It's all the same. Listen, we're the phone website. The Trump phone phone's a phone update. It's a phone update. It's a phone update.

Except the update on the phone is that the nation's government has taken an interest in the Trump phone. And various Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren, have asked the FTC, to investigate false advertising and deceptive practices from Trump Mobile, which has not shipped a phone, you will notice. It has deleted. It's made in America branding, but it has taken $100 deposits for its phone without anything to show for it, except an ad, which we identified the phone in the ad as a Galaxy S-25 Ultra, and so now the verge is in the letter sent by the Democrats to Trump Mobile. It's the definitive source on you rebranded an S-25 Ultra. So the FTC is being asked to investigate Trump Mobile for taking deposits on a phone that by all rights does not exist. I have heard some whispers that someone has seen a phone. They're not good whispers.

They're not reportable whispers in the sense that, like, I can't tell you that actually happened. You know what I mean? But if you've seen the Trump phone, you let me know. Send me a picture. Let me know what it is. I suspect it is a rebranded, like, honor phone. Like Donald Trump Jr. got drunk one night and bought a thousand phones from Amazon and then spray painted than gold in the backyard. That would actually be a much more viable path to shipping a Trump phone than anything they appear to be doing.

So you let me know if you've seen the Trump phone. But for now, the reporting is basically everyone has done the same story. The financial times just did the same story. You can call the customer service line and some nice folks in the middle of the country because, they've set up a call center in the middle of country somewhere, we'll tell you that the government shutdown has delayed the phone. And that's their straight line that they say it every time. This thing is very fun because the FTC investigation would force Trump Mobile to do one of two things,

which is either admit that it was a grift or actually just say we are horrible at this. Because those are the only two possible options, right? Like Trump Mobile is, it's real and a grift all at the same time, right? It is an expensive MVNO that they are rebadging network service. The same thing that Mint Mobile does for $15 a month. Dude, there's a smartless wireless network. This is what I'm saying. You can just do this.

Does Jason Bateman know how to run a next generation wireless network? I don't think he does, but you can rebrand T-Bumbles Network. You can drop ship wireless service now. Like, it's not complicated. And most people do it cheap because you can do it less expensive, visible, Verizon is doing this. It's very... Mint has made a lot of money doing this. Like, there are ways you can do this. The Trump mobile service is actually more expensive than a lot of cell phone service. It's $47.45, which is an awful lot to pay for cell service. So that's a grift. The Trump phone is either even more of a grift and was never actually going to be any of the things that they promised, which I think is pretty clearly what it is. Or the team running this is just so incredibly bad at their jobs. that they have not been able to remotely execute on this thing that they loudly promised and took a bunch of people's money for.

I'm going with full rugpole, but I think in the sense that the Trump family, which licensed their name to this fly-by-night operation, which is just Liberty Mobile. It's a company that already existed. Yeah. They licensed their name. They took their money to Iran. Everyone thinks it's a Trump phone. And this company is literally holding the bag on, we have to make a made-in-the-united-state phone. and you cannot do that thing. Here we are. And a bunch of old people paid them $100 because that's, that is the core of the Trump Grift.

I know. If you have seen a phone, if you've had a meeting about a phone, if you have seen someone hold up a phone on a Zoom call, I need to hear about it. David at theverge.com. This is the only thing in the world that I care about. Please get at us and also try and get your money back

because this is nothing. and everyone should know that. There are characters. There are executives who, you know, Dom is writing on this every week. We're going to start reporting on the actual characters here. Yeah.

Because now that the deadline's missed, it's open season. Like, what is this company? So if you know anything about that company, let us know because we are going to report out the story. Yep. All right. My next one and our last one,

Dig is back. Dig has been in revival mode for a while. I covered it last year. Kevin Rose is back doing it. Alexis O'Hanian is part of the project. They have been trying to relaunch this new idea about social networking that is also kind of an old idea about social networking. And they launched the public beta of it this week. I don't think everyone can get in, but lots of people have been getting in.

I've been using it. Have you used it at all? I have looked at it. I haven't like used it. It has the cold start social network problem, right? It's like you click around. You're like, there's not very many people here. Then you'll click out and you move on with you that.

Yeah. I mean, it is in so many ways. just Reddit again. It is, it has some of the dig ideas in that there's, you know, there's a, there's a homepage with all of the stuff. There's a personalized feed. You can go to different categories. They're, they're being moderated by different things.

I realize, as I'm saying this, I'm literally just describing Reddit. They're just doing Reddit. And, uh, I think. So the big difference is that they're doing Reddit in like an anti-AI way. Like, isn't there a tagline handmade by human hands? With roboticist or whatever, like, they're obviously doing some amount of, like, cloud coding. But, like, they, Alexis has been on his social channels forever, promoting this project by saying we're overrun by bots and AI spam. And we need a place for real people.

Yes. So that, I think, is one of the really interesting tensions of the new dig is that they're very interested in how to use AI as, like, tooling for moderators and ways to give people ways to do more stuff on the platform. platform more efficiently, but they are, I think, pretty earnestly and seriously trying to make this a place just for humans to be. And I don't know if you've experienced this or if it feels this way to you, but now every time I go on Reddit, it feels like two-thirds of the comments on every post are just bots. Like it just... But like bots in the way that like they're all auto-mod bots, because to combat the spam, all the moderators needed to deploy their own bots. Yes. There's a, yeah, it's, I mean, it's nuts. And it is, it is chaotic. And the

The automods have gone kind of out of control, and that's one of the things they're trying to solve for here. But in general, I mean, there's some really interesting design stuff. Like the, we talked a while ago about those new icons on the Airbnb website that are much more sort of physical and skeuomorphic, this very kind of old idea about icons. Like, that's all the dig stuff. Some of it is sort of clearly, purely, like, nostalgic going back to 2004 when Dig launched. But there's also just a different sense of what's going on here. And I realized in reading this that I don't really have a good just like aggregator of headlines that people are talking about on the internet anymore. And I'm kind of glad to have that back.

Dig is not perfectly that thing again. But like here's some stuff people are talking about online. Reddit doesn't really do that anymore. Twitter doesn't really do that anymore. Threads never did it. Blue Sky never did it. Like there's a version of that that I actually think might be exciting to me about Dig. You just want Crown Tangle.

I want stumble upon. Do you remember stumble upon? It was just like, here's some neat shit on the internet. You know what I'm really surprised at this dig relaunch is that they didn't engage with app protocol or activity pub at all. Right? Like, there's a bigger base of users. And I guess, you know, both these guys are rich. Like, they can just afford to keep the thing going while they collect users.

And Alexis in particular is like a, he's got marketing channels upon marketing channels now because he's all over social media. Yeah. So they can get app installs and get over that cold start problem. But it does seem like. integrating with the larger networks that exist, the open social networks would have gone a long way here. They have said it's on their list. I haven't talked to either Kevin or the rest of the team in a while,

but at least as of last summer, it was on the list. And it's a thing they want to do, but they were very much in the sort of threads mold of like, we want to build this thing to work on its own and then figure out how to kind of make it part of the rest of the world. And they were also thinking along the lines of,

you know, we don't know whether throwing in with activity, probably throwing in with that protocol or no stir or whatever is going to be the right one. So we're going to let that fight shake out. And then we'll pick. And that fight is nowhere closer to shaking out. It's not shaking out because no one's picking. Yeah.

Everybody's waiting for someone to decide and someone should just decide. I have heard XTV Pub is in the process of being made an official like IETF standard, which will let much larger companies tell like Europe that they're in compliance by using a standard, which might move some things. There's a lot of At Protocol action and not so much Activity Pub action, at least as far as I can tell. But I get pitched more at Protocol Blue Sky stuff than I get pitched activity pub stuff. I think that's right. I mean, it's just because Blue Sky at this moment has so much more juice than Macedon does that the flagship thing for Activity Pub doesn't really exist.

And it was going to be Massadon and then it was going to be Threads. And both of those things seem to be waning pretty aggressively. Well, Fards is huge. on its own terms. Threads is still just bait, although you're like a Threads person, not a Blue Sky person. Casey is also just like mystifyingly a Threads person.

Threads is huge. It adds, for the last stat I heard at a dinner was Threads adds one blue sky a day. Yep. In users. Like it's just massive. It's honestly.

It's just they're still so allergic to news and the algorithm is still so aggressively like, has anyone ever heard that sound when you open a soda can? What is that? You know, it's like just that all day long? long. They haven't cracked relevance, and whatever, but it's huge,

but it also was just rejected by the Mastodon community, so its attempts at Federation came to nothing. Whereas I think if they were on that protocol, there would be some fight between threads and boo sky, but you would more easily perceive that it was one big interoperable network. Maybe. I think that's a lot of credit to give to the Mastodon community for its power to enact much of anything.

But yeah, I mean, it certainly seems like the momentum for threads to federate has slowed down. And I think that's why some of the can we make a protocol an actual standard might change some of. Meta did all that to please European regulators. Yeah. At the end of the day, whatever, but there's nothing to interoperate with. Right. And I think at the end of the day, the answer is going to be both. and that what we're going to end up with is

a potentially messy set of tools that also puts those two things together and bridges between one and then the other and we're going to end up with a bunch of protocols that all talk to the protocols and it's just going to be insane and then somebody will build a product that makes it all work invisibly and it will be fine.

Yeah, that'll happen. I'm just thinking of threads engagement bait. My favorite of all time was someone posted a picture of, I believe it was the windshield washer light or the like low-tile light on their car. And it was, how do I make this light go away?

Oh, that's good. It was just like the greatest bait of all time. Wow, that is really good. Like dads for hundreds of miles came running to that post. That is honestly genius. Yeah, doing something slightly wrong earnestly is the single best way to get engagement on the internet. It's just, it's just fantastic.

All right. We have gone way over as we are want to do. Way up. But we had a lot to catch up on. It's like, it's been almost a month since we actually got to sit down and do a normal vergecast. It's been good to catch up. Yeah, it's been good. One housekeeping thing before we go, season two of version history is now over.

If you haven't yet listened to the TiVo episode, which you and I did with Emily and Usbaum, we had a blast making that episode. Like, I think it shows in the episode, but that was as fun as it has been to just sit and reminisce about old technology, as I have had. Emily was a delight and did not care at all about our technology stories, and it was exactly the energy we were hoping for. But we're taking a break for a while we get the next bunch of them ready, and then we're going to have six more episodes.

Neelai, have I showed you the list of the six? I'm not. Okay. What are they? I'm going to read you the six. We're going to do the original Macintosh. We're going to do the Amazon Echo. we're going to do Furby,

which got huge reaction from the Verge staff. A lot of feelings about Furby. We're going to do the vocoder. We're going to do the Western Electric 500 telephone. Okay. Which is like sneakily a fascinating monopoly story about phone lines. Oh, yeah, it's a harder phone rule. Yep.

Yeah. And we're going to do Clubhouse, the app that everybody used during the pandemic for 15 minutes. I don't like how much the pandemic has come up on this episode. It's just saying, I'm just having an emotional reaction. to that. Clubhouse? Clubhouse is

maybe the shortest lived and least relevant of anything we have yet done on version history. I would say that's true. That would be my objection. That's your show, man. I'm letting you, I'm just, I know what the rules are.

Is it possible that that's going to be like a 13 minute long episode? Yes, it is. But I think I think we're going to have a bunch of billionaires went crazy for a while. I have a couple of very weird memories about Clubhouse that I'm very excited to get into on that episode. I have only weird memories about Clubhouse.

There you go. But if you have, if you have memories or stories or anything that you want to share about any of those six things, send us an email, Virgast to the verge.com. Call the hotline 866, verge 1-1. We did a little bit more of like featuring the audience in this season of version history, and I want to do even more of that going forward. So send us emails, call in, voicemails. Here's what I want.

I want photos of your original Macintosh fish tanks. Ooh. Do you know people? I once made it, my fish tank was a Macintosh SC30. But in high school, I made an aquarium out of an old Mac. If you got an original Mac aquarium,

I want, I want photos for that episode of Version History. That's very good. I like that a lot. Also, stay tuned to Decoder Monday's episode, right, is going to be the one you did live in Vegas.

Yep, that's the CEO of Razor. That episode's a wild ride, man. It was sitting in the audience. the audience was a time. I'll tell you that. I'd ended with a softball question and I've never, just to end it, just be like, let's wrap it up. You know, like, thank you for your time. Like, here's, and I've never had a softball question to just go that sideways.

Yeah. I'm not going to say what it was, but when you hear it, you'll hear it. It was the talk of the Brooklyn Bowl after that episode finished recording. I'll tell you that. And then you're going to have more on all of the groc stuff on next Thursday's episode. So make sure you stay tuned. Also, if you're a subscriber to The Verge, you can get all of these podcasts, add free. You just have to go to your account. settings on theverger.com. It's actually a shockingly easy process. We keep hearing from people who are like, I can't believe this is a thing I can actually do.

Very exciting. Good job to our product team. Go get all of our stuff. Subscribe to the Verge. It's the best way to support all of this and make sure that we can continue to yell at Comcast and Google and everybody else. We are ungovernable because of our subscribers. You can't stop us.

This is what we're here for. Also, when I say they love me, what I mean is they hate me, just to be 100% clear once again. We're going to clip that in at the end of every single social clip we have. of you from now on. Yeah. Actually, they hate me. Neil, like to tell.

Turns out. All right. The Verge cast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next week. Neli, rock and roll.