Bluesky's quest to be the next Twitter

Nilay and David talk about the future of social, in light of Bluesky's recent surge in growth. Threads is huge, Bluesky is ascendent, Mastodon is... around, but can any of them become the next Twitter? Is that even the goal? After that, Kylie Robison joins the show and the gang discusses Apple's smart home device (which is just an iPad), the AI scaling slowdown, and a new twist in the delivery wars. In the lightning round, it's all about disclosures, wireless carriers, and the sad end of Freevee. Further reading: Twitter’s succession: all the news about alternative social media platforms One million people have joined Bluesky in the past week. Bluesky adds 700,000 new users in a week The Guardian is quitting X. Remember the TikTok ban? Apple’s rumored six-inch ‘AI wall tablet’ could control your smart home by March 2025 Apple is reportedly working on an Apple Home security camera Anthropic co-founder Darius Amodei said we’ll have artificial general intelligence “in 2026 or 2027.” Just Eat is selling Grubhub to Marc Lore’s Wonder for $650M Boost Mobile says it’s a real wireless carrier now Amazon is shutting down Freevee Trump says Elon Musk will lead ‘DOGE’ office to cut ‘wasteful’ government spending Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to VerChast, the flagship podcast of 6-inch wall tablets. It's what everybody wants. Do we have to be? I don't like that one very much.

• 1:45Nilay Patel?

  From what I gather, this is the product that's going to set the tech industry on fire.

• 1:51Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna happen, David.

• 1:52David Pierce?

  Sure. Listen, if it'll make you shut up about your garage door, I'll take it.

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no, where there's gonna be some garage door talk on this show. Hi, my friend Eli. David Pierce is here.

• 2:01David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 2:02Nilay Patel?

  A little later, Kylie Robinson is gonna join us. We're gonna talk about whether or not AI is real, whether it's just a fake idea.

• 2:08David Pierce?

  The Vergecast.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of news to talk about this week. It is week negative eight of the Trump administration. So is that how they count? And that's how George Washington.

• 2:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, that seems right.

• 2:18Nilay Patel?

  That's in the Constitution.

• 2:19David Pierce?

  As he was in a boat, he was like, this is week negative six. And then, yeah, no, that makes sense. Yeah.

• 2:25Nilay Patel?

  Elon is already doing stuff. There's a fake Department of Government efficiency that we should talk about for as much as we need to talk about it. There's a fake wireless carrier called Boost Mobile that we should talk about, that I'm excited to talk about.

• 2:36David Pierce?

  It's a real carrier, Eli.

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  There are rumors that Apple's gonna make a wall tablet, so we gotta talk about garage door burners as promised. But let's start with what's happening on social media. We've talked a lot about the Fediverse on this show, about the idea of the open social web, that maybe you weren't gonna be locked into one platform, that you can move around. That's Mastodon. There's a protocol called Activity Pub that we've talked about a lot. Threads from Meta is using Activity Pub. They very slowly inched their way to support. People have a lot of issues with Threads overall because of its moderation. And then this week, after the election, after Elon has basically turned the X algorithm to being a pure flood of propaganda for himself.

• 3:23Nilay Patel?

  Not even, I would say, conservative ideas, just for Elon Musk.

• 3:27Nilay Patel?

  People are fleeing X. They're out of there. Huge drop in users, and they are not going to Threads or Mastodon. They are going to Blue Sky, which is a different federated social platform that uses a different protocol called AT Protocol.

• 3:41Nilay Patel?

  I've talked to Blue Sky CEO Jay Graber on Decoder. We can get into the weeds of it, but it seems like that is the winner in social media this week. David, what do you think is going on here?

• 3:50David Pierce?

  Is it the winner? This is such an interesting question.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  This week?

• 3:53David Pierce?

  This week, yes. It is. It is the vibes winner in a very real way. And I think the thing that we've discovered over the two years since Elon Musk bought Twitter is that the vibe shift really matters. And I think your diagnosis is exactly right, right? Like Threads was the thing. Threads probably still is the thing, and we should talk about it. But Threads has 275 million users. That's what Mark Zuckerberg announced. They're signing up a million people a day. Like, that thing is growing like a weed. There's been some news that Threads is gonna turn on ads next year, which means it's going to be a big scale business. All anyone wants to talk about right now is Blue Sky.

• 4:32David Pierce?

  And I think Blue Sky has hit something like mainstream critical mass, which I think is A, really exciting, B, really annoying in some ways that we should talk about, and C, really surprising. I think if I'm being completely honest, I kind of left Blue Sky for dead a while ago. It had its first spike. People were really excited. I think Blue Sky has done a lot of things really right in how to build this kind of thing. It was very smart about how to think about identity. It was very smart in thinking about discovery. They built products like lists and messages. And like, as a platform, Blue Sky is dramatically better than any of the other competitors right now.

• 5:13David Pierce?

  But it was weird. And it was like, all the people who went to Blue Sky at the beginning went to be weird on purpose. And that is like, fine and good as far as it goes, right? And so my thinking was there's going to be this subset of people, like the Twitter shit posters, who are going to be very happy on Blue Sky and were just going to sort of hang out with each other over there. And it got out of that this week. We're now in a moment where people who don't want any part of that Are coming on to Blue Sky. People are coming back to Blue Sky. AOC came back to Blue Sky and caused like a mini uproar when she started posting there again. Everybody's trying to make skeeting happen again instead of calling it posting.

• 5:50David Pierce?

  Like, Blue Sky is, is I think by far like an order of magnitude out of the actual competitor to Threads world right now, but in terms of like, who has the juice? I think Blue Sky legitimately has the juice at this point.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Two things about this that I think are really important. One, Threads is an algorithmic platform and so is X now.

• 6:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 6:15Nilay Patel?

  You open X, I open my X account and it is just the algorithm feeding me whatever Elon Musk wants me to see, which is mostly himself.

• 6:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  Weird. And I think people are just reacting to that and reacting to that poison. It is a right wing echo chamber. It is impossible to participate there unless you say exactly what that audience wants to hear. That's bad. Like, that's, algorithmic collapse is real. I don't think anybody wants to be in an echo chamber that powerful in any way, shape or form.

• 6:44David Pierce?

  Some people do. I mean, to be blunt, some people do, and that's fine, right? But it is like, the distance between X and like Truth Social and Rumble is smaller and smaller every day.

• 6:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:55David Pierce?

  And there is a community of people who is well-served by that, great. But it is like, if that platform has run away from anything like mainstream appeal, like actively running away from it.

• 7:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And, and we should talk about the extreme hypocrisy of Elon Musk in general, who was like, I'm a free speech warrior and then slowly closed the boundary of speech on X to be exactly what he wants.

• 7:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 7:19Nilay Patel?

  The point I'm making is Threads is also an algorithmic platform. You open it and you just see a fire hose of whatever Meta wants you to see, which is the most inane engagement bait that has ever been produced in the entire game. Right? Like, and it's, so it's like not a, you opening, you're like, what is happening here? What am I seeing? And yes, there's a reverse cron feed that you can like slide over to, but it's not the default. Even if you do set it, they'll drop you back into the algorithmic feed at a moment's notice. And really you just get to a place where they're not platforms that replace Twitter. Like, they, they don't serve the same role. They're not doing the same job. Threads, I think intentionally, they've talked about how they don't want it to be that. X, I think intentionally in another way, which is, he just broke it, you know?

• 8:02Nilay Patel?

  He just like took the thing and used it for his own purposes.

• 8:07David Pierce?

  Super successfully, by the way, like just to briefly give credit where credit is due. Like, I got a bunch of crap from people after the election because we've said many times how stupid a purchasing decision Twitter was, which I would also remind you, Elon Musk also agrees with that fact. He tried very hard to not purchase it, but like, in a certain way of thinking about it, boy, was buying Twitter a good move for Elon Musk, who is now just the shadow president of the United States.

• 8:37Nilay Patel?

  I totally think that's debatable. I think he spent a lot of money and he got a bunch of votes and he did a bunch of rallies and he gave away a million dollars to sign people to a petition that may or may not have been constituted, who knows? The, I'm gonna make the X algorithm, just do whatever I want. Debatable. I think, I don't know that the average swing voter got swayed by the amount of garbage on X.

• 8:58David Pierce?

  No, but he's now the second most powerful person in America.

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  Right, but did X make him that? Or did his money spent, like literally handing novelty checks out on stadium? Like, I don't know the answer to that question.

• 9:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 9:13Nilay Patel?

  But the point, the broader point I'm making, the second part is, these are now creator platforms. That's what they are. They're closed, insanely closed. X will de-rank your post if you put links in them. So will Threads.

• 9:27David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 9:28Nilay Patel?

  Because they're algorithmic, they're designed to promote engagement on the platform themselves. So they are just very closed. They're in their little walled gardens that you're supposed to be in. And even if Threads finishes its Activity Pub integration, even if it all works out the way that I would very much want it to work out, it's still closed. Like, it's designed to be a closed ecosystem.

• 9:50David Pierce?

  And I think crucially, that, that thing has kind of calcified since really the last time we talked about this, right? Like, Threads has now been telling us what Threads is for long enough that the smart thing to do is just believe it, right? Everybody is after it being like, Adam Mosseri, please, dear God, let me just see the reverse Kron of all the people I follow. If, if Adam Mosseri and Mark Zuckerberg and the Threads team wanted to do that, they would have. Right? Like, this is, this is where we are. The thing you're describing is what Threads is going to be for the foreseeable future. And I think, to me, that is what is underlying a lot of this, is there is this sense of, like, Threads was new, and it was early, and we weren't sure what it was going to be, and they seem to have these big, interesting, ambitious goals. None of that-

• 10:33David Pierce?

  Counts in its favor anymore. Like Threads is Threads now, and we should take the thing for what it is.

• 10:37Nilay Patel?

  And it's going to grow however it grows, right? It is growing at some rate, but it is very much meant to be a creator platform. And I think that's how they're going to think about it. Blue Sky, for whatever it will become, is way smaller, as you noted, David. It's 15 million users just today as we're talking. But it's designed to be an open platform. Links are not suppressed in the algorithm. It is leading you towards Revtron feeds by default. There are algorithms you can get that sort the firehose in different ways. That's a part of their monetization strategy is actually to sell you algorithms, which is fascinating.

• 11:12David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 11:13Nilay Patel?

  The moderation is quote composable, so you can tell it how you want to moderate the feeds. The protocol, I think, is wonkier, right? There isn't another Blue Sky server yet.

• 11:25David Pierce?

  Right.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  So everything is happening on one server. You can kind of set your own domain name, so you can like make it feel a little bit different. But eventually, when there is one, the idea of following someone from another server is not as political as it is on Mastodon. Like, you're not getting at these like server-wide block lists. Like, it's just not how it works.

• 11:42David Pierce?

  Right.

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  All the federation is at the user level. So if you're like, I don't like this Blue Sky server that I'm on, I can take my whole account and take it to another server. Because that's the, the, the element that is moderated is the user account. Whereas on Activity Pub and Mastodon and whatever else, the thing that is federated is the servers.

• 12:01David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  Right? So like, if the verge dot Mastodon existed, that would be the, the thing that is federated. And you could be like, I hate you, Neil, I am like, leave and go to mastodon.com or whatever. On Blue Sky, it's your account is the thing that moves around.

• 12:15David Pierce?

  Right.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  And you can take that from server to server at will, kind of.

• 12:19David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah, and I think that's the thing. It, Blue Sky, like I said, got a lot right, but I think that is the thing it got most right. And I think is the thing that is proving to be the hardest about the Fediverse and this kind of whole universe is nobody can figure out. Who you are, like in a sort of meaningful way, like what is my username and identity and profile is actually like a crucially important part of this entire system. And it is the most complicated thing going in Activity Pub and Mastodon. And Blue Sky, it is like central and they've done a bunch of really smart stuff. And like your username is also just a URL. You can just type your username into a bar and it will load up your profile. Like that stuff is powerful and I think is a big win.

• 13:01David Pierce?

  Like you said, Blue Sky desperately needs a second thing because it is, it is currently, it is exactly as open as Facebook. It has a bunch of big ideas about being open and it just isn't right now. And they've got to build the next thing. But I, I, a big part of this honestly is I believe Blue Sky is telling the truth much more than I believe Threads is telling the truth about where they want to go.

• 13:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And Adam Mosseri, again, very direct. We don't want to do news. It's more trouble than it's worth.

• 13:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Nilay Patel?

  Okay, well, you have an X, in this election, you had an X platform that was explicitly showcasing one view of America explicitly in the tank for one candidate.

• 13:45David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 13:45Nilay Patel?

  And then the alternative was nothing. Right? The alternative platform and that, and that style of social media was we don't want this here. And that's a weird imbalance, right? So all the people who are leaving X were going to a platform where that stuff was not there the way that it was in the other platforms, certainly not as overt. And I think now what you're getting is, okay, that didn't work either. And I think now what you're getting is a bunch of people saying, well, this didn't feel right. Let's go to a platform where we can make it what we want.

• 14:11David Pierce?

  Right.

• 14:12Nilay Patel?

  And Blue Sky literally has the tools built into it to make it what you want. They have, the APIs are there. The availability of just a fire hose of posts is there and people can build tools. There's already Deck Blue, I think it's called, is the tweet deck for Blue Sky. It already exists.

• 14:30David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 14:30Nilay Patel?

  There it is. You can just use it. So there's something really interesting happening here. We have kind of like a VHS beta situation inside of federated social media, open social media. But a lot of the smart people that I talk to are like, this isn't going to matter at the end of the day, because there's software that bridges between all of these things. And actually, the best outcome is for Mastodon and Blue Sky and Threads and whatever else part of the Fediverse, Ghost, to all just be able to talk to each other, and the protocol shouldn't matter as much. I don't know if we'll get there. I think that's a long way away. I think people are still trying to make their specific protocols work, and you gotta make technology bets. So you gotta start with something. But I can see a future where, yeah, actually, everything does work together way better. And if you, what you

• 15:14Nilay Patel?

  want to do is pick the creator platform, you can go pick the creator platform. But if what you want is the more open, here's where we share a bunch of links and talk about them platform, that is also available to you.

• 15:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think the outcome you're describing, I think, is pretty clearly the best version of this story. And it was always going to take a long time, right? Like, we've been talking a lot about the Fediverse and Activity Pub for the last couple of years. And I've reached a point where I'm sort of itchy that it hasn't happened yet. And it's like, okay, maybe this just isn't gonna hap- and then it's like, okay. Every time I talk to people, they're like, everyone who works on this has been working on this longer than you realize, and is unaware of the fact that this is going to take a long time, right? So it's like, none of this gets built in a day. I also think these things are in some ways getting further apart. And that's the part that gets problematic, right? Like,

• 16:08David Pierce?

  Everyday Threads doesn't build out really strong Activity Pub integration. It gets harder to build really strong Activity Pub integration. And Everyday Threads gets more successful, building that stuff well becomes less and less compelling, right? Like, Threads as a powerful, closed creator platform could be very successful. It is already very successful. It's just like, there comes a time when being a good steward of an open ecosystem is not as exciting as it once was, when you were teeny tiny and kind of needed that ecosystem. I still believe the people who work there are serious when they say they want to do that, but that doesn't get you very far.

• 16:47Nilay Patel?

  Let me make the defense of the Threads team, not of Meta, but specifically the challenge facing the Threads team. Because I think they've done something here that is smart, interesting at least, but potentially smart.

• 17:00Nilay Patel?

  If you look at Blue Sky, they built all their features and they have struggled to scale them to even 15 million users, which is why they had invites at the beginning, which is why they had the thing called the hell thread. All you could see was one insane thread that was going crazy every day. But they built the complete product and they scaled it. And that is, and that's how most people build things. The Threads team is taking a approach to Activity Pub where they're adding one piece of Federation at scale immediately.

• 17:29David Pierce?

  Right.

• 17:30Nilay Patel?

  So they're like, okay, you can now see who follows you in a Fediverse. All 275 million of you can see this at scale. It works. Okay, now we're gonna let you see who liked it. We're not gonna let you reply yet. Now we're gonna let the next thing happen. And they're adding sort of like one piece of the stack at the scale of the whole platform, which is just a different way of going about it. But the fact that the loops haven't closed yet, I think is what's driving everybody crazy.

• 17:56David Pierce?

  Right. And I agree with you.

• 17:58Nilay Patel?

  If someone replies to you from a Fediverse and you can't write back to them, it's like, what is the point of this?

• 18:01David Pierce?

  Right. That's actually like an actively bad experience. If you're, if you're someone who is paying attention to protocol development, that is like exciting, but the thing where somebody replies to me. This is what I mean, right? But it's like, what it actually looks like as a user is I see a thing that asks me periodically if I want to keep sharing to the Fediverse, that I have to figure out what that means and decide. And then I get a bunch of people who are like concerned trolling me into sharing to the Fediverse. And then people reply to me, but I can't reply to them. And if I like what they reply to, they don't see it like it's bad product until it works. And I think the longer it goes being bad product, the less compelling it becomes kind of to everybody involved.

• 18:41David Pierce?

  I'm still very hopeful and I do still think it's the right answer, but I worry increasingly. Like the reason I think this Blue Sky thing has been such good news is I think Threads really didn't seem like it was gonna have meaningful competition there for a while. And I think the idea that Blue Sky, even if it doesn't- Like federate in the way that we want, even if it doesn't become this sort of big, beautiful, open thing. Like, competition is good. And the idea that Threads was just going to sort of walk away with this because we all wanted some other place to post text was bad. And so I'm like, I'm all for competition, even if the right answer is like, what did Jay call it in your interview? It was like competition and cooperation. Cooperation. Cooperation, yeah, it's good.

• 19:25David Pierce?

  That's what we should root for. All right, we should take a break. We'll be right back.

• 19:31Speaker 06

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

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• 21:04Nilay Patel?

  We're back. If I was starting The Verge cold today, you can already see it in our design, what I want it to be. But if I was starting it cold today, the open source licenses, these various platforms aside, because they're complicated, I would be like, we're starting a server and you can follow our feeds. Like, I'm just gonna post all day on my server and we'll have some ads on it or whatever. And if you want to follow my posts, you can follow them. But we're gonna own this and we're gonna curate a bunch of stuff from these other places using Activity Pub. So if you want to see the best of what we're looking at, you can see it here. You can already see what we're doing with QuickPost. We've talked about federating our site quite a bit. Like, you can add all these ideas together, right? Your Vergecast listeners are smart. You can see what I'm trying to do here. It's

• 21:47Nilay Patel?

  harder when you have a giant website with 13 years of archives and static site CSS features that animate and blow up your phone when you scroll, to be honest. Some of our old ones were, look, the technology was not ready yet. We have a big archive that we gotta deal with. But if I was starting one today, I would be like, the thing to do is lean into federated distribution and to actually own your own distribution. Not be like, I'm gonna start a website and make SEO content for the Google robot, or I'm gonna start a YouTube channel and eventually get buffeted around by this algorithm until I have to make a video about how mad I am at YouTube, which everyone does. That's

• 22:29Nilay Patel?

  when you get your wings. It's actually lean into the next phase of what the internet looks like. And that's why it's like, which of these protocols is gonna win? Because I think there's a bunch of businesses that are sort of like waiting to start, once it's clear, like, how to do it. But nobody knows yet. Like, there's just a bunch of this foundational work that is still just inching towards the finish line.

• 22:54David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, and it's weird, because I think we're at a moment now where, at a protocol level, Activity Pub is way ahead, right? Just in terms of sort of adoption and belief. It is the one that everybody who is making bets is betting on at this moment.

• 23:11David Pierce?

  But in terms of actual places people are, Blue Sky is winning. Like, I think it is, it is going to keep growing like this because it made the bet that what people want is Twitter minus the mess. And I think, truthfully, one of the things that I have come to feel over the last couple of years is like Twitter was a disaster of a company, run poorly in so many ways, and also was kind of like a magical thing that really accomplished a lot of goals that are hard to accomplish in one place. And we're seeing that now, right? Like, what, what all of these companies are doing is sort of pulling pieces apart of

• 23:53David Pierce?

  Twitter and doing one or two of those things well. No one is trying to do full Twitter. And frankly, you probably shouldn't, like, was Twitter good for the world? Who knows? But the thing where it was like a place to hang out with your friends and also a place to discover creators, but also a place to get like government information at incredible speed is like Twitter was central in our culture in a way that I think we still kind of underrate now. And nothing out there is even close to getting to that.

• 24:27Nilay Patel?

  But to be clear, this is what I'm saying. It would be better if that was reconstructed, but actually the government agencies owned their own servers. So the next time a billionaire shows up and breaks it, we're not like, where do I get earthquake information from? Like, that's a real thing that has occurred in the past several years.

• 24:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:48Nilay Patel?

  Right? The next time someone shows up and breaks it, we're not like, where will independent creators post their apologies? Which is a real question that was asked this week. It's just a lot of that that's like, oh, we should actually just own our own tools. Like, in a, in a meaningful way, we should own our own tools. And I know I'm always ranting and raving about this because we have our own website, it's the last website on earth and all, but I'm...

• 25:11Nilay Patel?

  You look at the who gets to control speech in America and it's like three guys. Yeah. Like, at the end of the day. Yeah. It's not the government. That's bad. It's like three guys. And they can come and go, like, very clearly, they can come and go. I think one of the miracles of Twitter, and people can, you are free to disagree with me about this, but by and large, they got the balance of moderation correct. Yeah, I agree with that. That platform was lively. It, it, everybody was mad. It like, sort of exactly the right volume. Jack Dorsey was bizarrely the sort of right personality to go sit in front of Congress and just accept blame. With a beard in his kitchen? Yeah. He was just like, yeah. I'll never forget that. He was like, I suck. I want to be clear. I agree with you that I suck.

• 25:57Nilay Patel?

  Like, I don't, I'm sad that I did this. The Mark Zuckerberg quote about Twitter is, it was a clown car that fell into a goldmine. And they've dismantled all that and they've turned the knobs of moderation and algorithms. And you can just see, okay, this is a thing that can happen. Right. In, in America, at least for the next eight weeks, we have a First Amendment that prevents the government from passing content moderation rules that let the government level set. So what you need is competition. I'm actually, we, we should not talk about Trump too much at all, but I'm confident the next chairman of the FCC is going to be Brendan Carr. Brendan Carr does not think that the First Amendment should keep the FCC out of content moderation. Uh, it's like a real thing that he's talked about. Yeah.

• 26:38Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and if he becomes a chairman, we will talk about him a lot. So I'll set that aside. But up in, up until now, the who gets to make the rules about what you see is guys. Yeah. Mostly just guys. It's just dudes. And Sherry Redstone. Yeah. And I'm hopeful that this moment where people are like, screw it, we'll go to Blue Sky. That's fun here. Points to a future where, if not the protocols, push people towards a better outcome, the fact that everybody can still vote with their attention points to the better outcome. Yeah, I agree. Like Twitter is not, like Elon's mistake with Twitter has always been believing it's a monopoly. And I think right now, you can just look at the numbers. People are leaving Twitter to join Blue Sky.

• 27:22Nilay Patel?

  And like, that means it's not a monopoly.

• 27:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, I tend to think all of this is going to be a blip in the direction of something else, right? And it's like, what we've learned so far is that leaving Twitter is harder for a lot of people than we think. Everybody who goes to a new platform loves to talk about the new platform. And then, once the novelty of the thing dies down, it's very hard to know what to do, right? Like, I feel like, to some extent, we had the same feelings about Mastodon in the early days. And it was like, maybe this is the thing. It's, it has different values.

• 28:01Nilay Patel?

  I want to be clear, I never had that feeling.

• 28:03David Pierce?

  No?

• 28:03Nilay Patel?

  1,000% never had that feeling about Mastodon.

• 28:06David Pierce?

  Why, then why do you have it about Blue Sky?

• 28:08Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I think, do you know that Steve Jobs quote about Microsoft and taste? I hope listeners know what I'm talking about. There's this very famous Steve Jobs, it's like young Steve Jobs. And it's in his wilderness period. After he got fired from Apple, he was at Next, and he was a little more bummed ass than usual because he was constantly trying to sell the next thing and prove himself. Whatever, I'm just contextualizing the quote. They asked about Microsoft, and he said, "The problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste." And he looked very pleased with himself, and he said, "I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way." Right? They just, the company doesn't have taste. It doesn't have a sense of what it is doing or how it should feel.

• 28:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:47Nilay Patel?

  And I've always felt that Mastodon lacks that particular kind of taste. Like, it is software. Threads has no taste in a big way. I like the people who are making Threads. I've talked to them, they've shown up at Verge parties. We threw a funeral for Twitter. The science team was there, it was great. They're cool. As a company, Meta does not have taste. There's a reason Mark Zuckerberg is like, wearing Roman fonts on his shirts.

• 29:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Nilay Patel?

  And signing deals with Ray-Ban. Because they need to buy taste. They need to, they need to demonstrate taste because it does not exist in their products.

• 29:21David Pierce?

  They've also decided several times that having taste is dangerous.

• 29:24Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 29:24David Pierce?

  And the only way to get as big as Meta has gotten is to not have taste. Like, it's, they made a business decision to not have any taste.

• 29:31Nilay Patel?

  I challenge anyone to open the Facebook app and be like, "I sense taste here."

• 29:37David Pierce?

  Right.

• 29:38Nilay Patel?

  Blue Sky largely is a clone of Twitter. So like, I'm not, I'm not imputing taste onto that. Twitter had, like Twitter had famous designers. Like important parts of culture came out of the user base of Twitter, filtered through Twitter's designers and product people and then out into the world. Right? The at mention, the hashtag, like all this stuff is stuff Twitter took from its community, productized, put design around and then gave to the world. Pull to refresh was a third party.

• 30:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  Twitter app.

• 30:07David Pierce?

  Tweeting.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  Mechanic that Twitter bought and they signed a patent pledge that anybody could use it. So they have the patent on it, but they won't use it. But that is like part of the culture now, like pull to refresh is like an app mechanic.

• 30:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:18Nilay Patel?

  It's actually, if you like, spend a lot of time thinking about it, has led to an entire culture.

• 30:26Nilay Patel?

  Blue Sky's design has a lot of copies, but the, you can see it in the people who are making it. They have taste. They have a very clear sense about what the product should be and how it should make people feel. And that is why they talk about composable moderation. That's why Jay's go to response, when you ask her about, what does that mean? Is I have a custom feed that just shows me moss, like kinds of moss that I like. Like they're weirdos and posters. And I think that's why they attracted a bunch of weirdos and posters. I think that's why they've leaned into being weirdos and posters and like having that community there. I think that's why a culture has been built, like slowly in the way that cultures and platforms have built. I don't know if any of it will be successful. But when you ask her like, what's the difference? It's, I just think about that quote.

• 31:08Nilay Patel?

  It's like, oh, they're, they don't have taste and I mean that in a big way.

• 31:12David Pierce?

  Yeah. No, I, I, I agree with that in large ways. I think the challenge there is like, do you know the 99 one rule? This is, I don't, I don't know where it came from, but it's now like a truism of all sort of social posting platforms that 90% of people are the audience, right? They never post, they never do anything, they're just there to look. 9% of people. Are kind of light interactors. They might post a little bit. They like things. They reply to things, whatever. But they're they're sort of around and making their presence known. And then 1% of people do the vast majority of the things that the other 99% of people are there for. The problem I think we have right now is that Blue Sky is doing a really good

• 31:55David Pierce?

  job of appealing to that 1%. Like, the people, or maybe it's the 9%. I don't know. The people who like, live to post, love Blue Sky. And Blue Sky is built for those people. And it is fun, and it is exciting, and the vibes are good, and you want to participate. But that's that is a small percentage of the thing. The 90% is who Meta builds for better than any other company on planet Earth. Right? Like, that is what has made Instagram successful. It is what has made Facebook successful. The Meta builds platforms that you come to and do nothing. But you come to them over and over and over and over again. And so you look at ads, and so Meta makes a ton of money.

• 32:33Nilay Patel?

  But that's why Meta has to go to weird algorithmic feeds where you open Instagram, and none of your friends are there anymore. And it's just creators bootlegging video clips of 80s movies.

• 32:42David Pierce?

  Right. But so this is the thing, right? Can you can you build a place that is both fun to post and full of good stuff every time you open the app? I'm honestly not sure that it is. And I think, again, we go back to like, the magic of Twitter. Twitter, at its peak, did both of those things. You could have a Twitter experience that felt like lively and real time and interactive and exciting. And you could also show up and see what The Rock was talking about. Like, we none of these things that we have now do both of those things. None of them.

• 33:12Nilay Patel?

  All right. Let me point a few things out, just because I know the Vergecast listeners are screaming in their cars right now, weaving all over the road. One, any criticism of Elon's handling of Twitter is not praise for the previous administration, who by and large did a bad job.

• 33:26David Pierce?

  Clown car goldmine.

• 33:27Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 33:28David Pierce?

  Could not agree more.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  Two, they never made any money. Even though they had whatever success you're describing. And three, the service at its peak was like 300 some million users.

• 33:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, but it was the single most cable news was people reading tweets like.

• 33:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:43David Pierce?

  It it just was like there there was a decade in our culture that was mediated by Twitter in a like very real way. That if you wanted to share information with a lot of people, no matter who you were, a famous person, a government, a company, you went on Twitter. You just did. And that it's still true because the vestiges of that are still so powerful. And nothing coming up now looks like it has a chance to replace that.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I don't think it should. That's I'm just gonna keep coming back to that. I think it would be better if we all owned our own distribution. Or we built a distribution network that allowed people to come and go more freely. That's what the web is. Until Google search became this hegemon that sort of made the web look exactly how it's gonna look like that's the web. That's RSS. I think we're on the cusp of doing it. It's podcasts. By and large, that is.

• 34:35David Pierce?

  Listen, we've made it this far and I haven't brought up Google Reader yet. And so I won't.

• 34:39Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta we gotta get off this.

• 34:41David Pierce?

  Wait, can I just read you some user numbers before we go? I went and pulled the user numbers for all of these platforms. And I just found them fascinating and I just want to read them all out loud because it's it's useful context for everything we've talked about. So threads, as we mentioned, as of October 30th, when Meta reported earnings, has 275 million active users. What that means is always hard to know how companies measure these things is different across the board in all ways. But that's the number they reported and they're getting a million signups a day. Blue Sky, today, Wednesday, as we're recording this, passed 15 million total users. And yesterday, on Tuesday, the 12th, had 798,142 unique posters, which is people who actually

• 35:26David Pierce?

  posted a thing, which I love as a metric, and I think everyone should do it. And 990,464 unique likers. So that's a decent like balance of who's here and who's doing stuff. Mastodon, this is the one that really surprised me and why I wanted to do this, has 9,034,753 total users as of today. 886,711 active users. Like Mastodon, and you go look at this, a lot of this stuff comes from like open APIs that these things have, they just ping every day, you can see how they go. Mastodon had that big bump, real momentum after the Twitter thing happened with Elon Musk,

• 36:09David Pierce?

  and it was, it had a moment, and it's just lost all of that momentum. And it has settled back slightly higher than it was before. It went from like a half a million active users every day to 886,000 active users every day, which is not nothing, but like, that's also not momentum. Two years later, like Mastodon just kind of lost it. And I feel like right now, we got a ton of people who are asking us like, oh, where should I go? And I feel like the only two answers I would even think about at this moment are Blue Sky and Threads. And I would tell you like, go to, Blue Sky is more fun, and Threads is easier, is I guess the place I'd land.

• 36:43Nilay Patel?

  I don't even know if it's easier. The Blue Sky app is the number one app in the app store today, mostly because, speaking of cable news, Chris Hayes brought it up on MSNBC last night and said, I really like Blue Sky. And they had a bump, the Blue Sky devs were pointing out that this made the line go up. So it's the number one app in the store today, people are leaving. The thing of Blue Sky is that right now is it's self-contained, there isn't another app protocol server, the, everything, it's on Blue Sky. And I feel like the Mastodon number is a little bit confusing, because all those people on Mastodon have the ability to see content from Threads.

• 37:15David Pierce?

  Right, true.

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  Because that is the promise of federation. So it kind of doesn't matter if that number stagnates, as long as the Threads number goes up, because you're still being able to follow Threads users, depending on your Mastodon server, and this is the complexity, it gets all weird. But if your Mastodon server interoperates with Threads, as long as Threads numbers keep going up, you have the ability to follow and interact with all those people, or you will over time. So there's some promise of federation here, that I think skews these numbers. But the one thing that is clear, is that a smaller number of Bad people are interacting at higher rates on Twitter.

• 37:52David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 37:52Nilay Patel?

  At X. It's weird. It's a weird time, but I think the shakeup is going to be good. I think it is time to think about distribution on the internet in way different ways, particularly as the creator platforms just shove creators and influencers around and like, start adding, "I opened my Instagram yesterday and it was like, do you want to make an AI of yourself to talk to your fans?"

• 38:13David Pierce?

  Ugh.

• 38:14Nilay Patel?

  And, you know.

• 38:15David Pierce?

  You super did it, didn't you?

• 38:16Nilay Patel?

  I was like, yeah, sure do. Ask them for money. Make sure that they pay, pay me money.

• 38:24Nilay Patel?

  That is a response to creators feeling burned out. That's what, that's why that button is there. It's because creators have complained about it for so long. They're burned out doing all the things that's here. And the platforms are just going to be more extractive. And if just some handful of creators, publications, whatever mixture of things is like, we're actually going to make this a little more open, I think we'll be in a much better place.

• 38:44David Pierce?

  I agree. Also, The Verge is on Blue Sky now. Go follow us on Blue Sky.

• 38:48Nilay Patel?

  We are, and we got a starter pack. We got the whole thing.

• 38:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 38:50Nilay Patel?

  Open distribution. All right, we gotta take a break. We're gonna come back with a new segment we call Show and Tell. We'll be right back.

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• 40:30Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Kylie Robinson is here. Hi, Kylie.

• 40:32Speaker 08

  Hello.

• 40:32Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to the Vergecast. Have we been on the show together yet?

• 40:36Speaker 08

  No, I don't think so.

• 40:37Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 40:38Speaker 08

  Spooky.

• 40:39Nilay Patel?

  There was a reason.

• 40:42Nilay Patel?

  That's so rude. You're here. We're going to do a new segment. We're calling Show and Tell. Are we actually calling it Show and Tell, David?

• 40:50David Pierce?

  We're calling it that until someone calls or emails with a better name. We've had very good luck in the past letting smarter people than us name things for us. So please, if you have a better idea, call the hotline, send us an email, name this segment for us.

• 41:04Nilay Patel?

  All right, so here's what we're going to do during the presumptively named Show and Tell. All of us are going to bring one story to the table. We're going to say what it is and then we're going to talk about it. But it has to be good.

• 41:19Speaker 08

  Oh, God.

• 41:19Nilay Patel?

  So we're putting David on the spot first. David, what's your story this week?

• 41:23David Pierce?

  I feel like we have to talk about the Square iPad. You mentioned it briefly at the top, but this is the only thing I can think about. So we have to talk about this now. So we've been hearing rumors and reporting for a long time that Apple was really interested in getting into the smart home. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, who is better at reporting what Apple is going to do than everybody, had a big story this week about what this thing is going to be. Apple is essentially building a smart home controller that is going to live inside of your house. Can I just read you several sentences from this article? And I would like you to tell me what device it sounds like I am describing.

• 42:05Nilay Patel?

  For a segment called "Show and Tell," I feel like this is a little backwards in that you're reading and then I'm describing what I think you've shown me, but let's go ahead.

• 42:12David Pierce?

  It's a tell and show. It's fine. Don't worry about it. Other people are gonna name this for us. So Mark Gurman says, "It's about the size of two iPhones side by side with a thick edge around the display. There's also a camera at the top front, a rechargeable built-in battery, and internal speakers. Apple plans to offer it in silver and black options. If you're already thinking, 'Gosh, I know what David is describing,' I have more for you. The product has a touch interface." The company expects most people to use their voice to interact the device, relying on the Siri digital assistant and Apple Intelligence. "The product will be marketed as a way to control home appliances, chat with Siri, and hold intercom sessions with FaceTime. It will also be loaded with Apple apps, including ones for web browsing, listening to news updates, and playing music. Users will be able to access their notes and calendar information, and the device can turn into a slideshow display for their photos."

• 42:57David Pierce?

  Do you know what device I'm describing?

• 43:00Nilay Patel?

  Is it a $320 iPad?

• 43:01David Pierce?

  It's an iPad. Apple is going to make an iPad, and they're going to sell it to you to use in your house. Let me read you the thing that is actually new and is actually interesting. If you just imagine an iPad, Mark Gurman writes this in his story. He says, "Apple has designed different attachments for the device, including ones that affix the screens onto walls like a classic home security panel. There will be bases with additional speakers that can be placed in the kitchen, on a nightstand, or on a desk. Apple imagines the FaceTime feature being used while cooking or for video conferencing during work meetings." A, still just an iPad. Honestly, it sounds very much like the thing Apple is going to make is a bad iPad that it wants to sell you lots of for your house. B, an accessory

• 43:43David Pierce?

  ecosystem of cool, new things that you can add to your iPad just by docking it on these different docks around your house is a kick-ass idea that Apple should totally do, just not with a stupid 6-inch bad iPad. I'm like, losing my mind about this thing.

• 43:59Nilay Patel?

  I just want to say out loud, I've said this many times before, Apple is horrible accessory ecosystems, actually. It's just a thing. It's just reality. How many smart keyboard covers are there for the iPad today?

• 44:11David Pierce?

  Oh, I agree. Like, Belkin has become like, the official Apple accessory maker, because Apple either can't or won't do it itself.

• 44:19Nilay Patel?

  Well, Belkin is owned by Foxconn, so you get the idea that every now and again, an Apple designer goes in the Foxconn factory and is like, "I have a number of ideas."

• 44:29Nilay Patel?

  There's, there's something real there, I find. But, great, and a third-party ecosystem of like weird docs and adapters, everybody wants this to exist for every Apple product, and they just don't.

• 44:40David Pierce?

  Sure, but like, I just, I have, I just have to keep reading. The newly designed operating system will also include a customizable home screen.

• 44:45Nilay Patel?

  Stop telling me about iPads.

• 44:46David Pierce?

  Where users can run widgets for checking stock tickers, the weather, and appointments. That's an iPad. Or they can configure the screen to highlight key home controls. iPad. There will also be a dock for quickly launching favorite apps and a screen grid of software icons. It's an iPad.

• 45:00Nilay Patel?

  Look, in all fairness-

• 45:00David Pierce?

  They did iPad again.

• 45:02Nilay Patel?

  Mark Bloomberg is a very traditional news organization, and Kermit has to hit a workout.

• 45:08David Pierce?

  Also, none of this is, this is all very good reporting from Kermit. The fact that this is all-

• 45:11Nilay Patel?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 45:12David Pierce?

  This is very good reporting. It's just, Apple is just going to make an iPad again, and they're gonna try to sell it to you as a new thing because it can dock on a speaker.

• 45:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:23David Pierce?

  That's nothing. Make the iPad better.

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna cut down the, the interface, right, to make it more smart homey. You're gonna let people talk to, you know, the presumably smarter Siri. That's a thing that could happen.

• 45:35David Pierce?

  During development, Apple discussed launching an App Store as part of the device, but it recently decided to exclude this feature, at least in the initial version. It's an iPad without the App Store, so it's just worse.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna point out that a couple of weeks ago, we had Joanna Stern on the show, and we talked about garage door openers for five hours, and Apple's dreams of making a smart home product are gonna run headfirst into the reality of smart home products.

• 45:58David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 45:59Nilay Patel?

  That's what's gonna happen.

• 45:59David Pierce?

  Which is?

• 46:01Nilay Patel?

  There, it's impossible.

• 46:03David Pierce?

  Fascinating.

• 46:04Nilay Patel?

  That's the whole answer.

• 46:05David Pierce?

  That really is the whole answer.

• 46:06Nilay Patel?

  Very smart people get tripped up at whether the smart part of the light bulb should be in the light bulb or the switch. And there are, there are religious arguments for both. There are good reasons to do, in my own home, I have both.

• 46:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 46:20Nilay Patel?

  I have smart light bulbs and I have smart switches, and no one, no one in my family that literally I'm trying to illuminate knows why or how any of it works.

• 46:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 46:29Nilay Patel?

  And so you put the thing on the wall, and you're like, now your house is smart. You end up having to tell a bunch of consumers- Where a bunch of other computers in their houses have to go.

• 46:39Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 46:40Nilay Patel?

  And that just falls, it just falls flat immediately.

• 46:42Speaker 08

  So would you guys not do this, though? This is not something, because all I'm thinking as you say this is don't hate the player, hate the game. There's going to be a dozen people in this office who buy this. It feels like it's just, it's just gonna happen.

• 46:54David Pierce?

  Sure, but if you're Apple, you have this tablet lineup that is very mature and full of identity crises. And what if instead you just took the thing and said, now here's a dock that makes it have an always on screen? And thus you can control all the things you can still control from your iPad. Like, it's just, it's such a tiny leap from an iPad to this. I think the reason you don't do it if you're Apple is because you can sell a bad iPad a lot cheaper than you can sell a good iPad.

• 47:28Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 47:28David Pierce?

  And so they're gonna make a bad iPad and stick it to your wall. Fine. That, that, there's also, uh, Gorman has been reporting that the next version of it is gonna have a robotic arm. It costs a thousand dollars. Sure. That's all fine and good. But I think there is, there is a really interesting case to be made that you could turn an iPad, which is already for most people, kind of statistically speaking, like a homebound device. It is a thing that lives on your bedside table or on your couch or on your coffee table. Like, it's not as portable a thing as it maybe is presumed to be in a lot of ways.

• 48:02David Pierce?

  You could just turn that up a little bit and turn it into something really cool and powerful with this accessory ecosystem. But instead, Apple is going to reinvent the entire wheel in a way that just feels ridiculous to me.

• 48:15Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited for you to buy an iPad that you stick to your wall, David.

• 48:17Speaker 08

  Yep.

• 48:18Nilay Patel?

  I think you're gonna love it. You're gonna love talking to Siri and be like, Siri, do this automation. And then Siri's not gonna work. And you're like, what is the answer? Then you're gonna Google it. And the answer, for some reason, is gonna be restarting your iPhone. Which is 100% the Apple Home story.

• 48:32David Pierce?

  A big part of this feels like what you do when you build all of this other AI stuff, like the app intense stuff that Apple is working on with Siri, this new Siri, all the Apple intelligence stuff, and you go, hmm, what is any of this actually useful for? This is the same thing, by the way, that Google did with Google Assistant and Amazon did with Alexa. And you realize, oh, it's just, you can turn off two sets of lights at once instead of one set of lights. And that, that Apple is, is running directly towards that and nowhere else.

• 49:04Nilay Patel?

  I do want to call the number of listeners who responded to our Joanna conversation on garage door openers in which she said Fred Fegoridi uses Siri to open his garage door by pointing out that there is 0% chance that Craig Federighi has an Apple Home home and instead definitely has a custom Creston home automation system.

• 49:23David Pierce?

  Yeah. Oh, great.

• 49:25Nilay Patel?

  The emails we got that were like, you all understand that there's a custom, that this man has a Creston system. Anyhow, all right. You've shown, you've told. Do I, do I give you a score?

• 49:39Nilay Patel?

  Seven.

• 49:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm going for seven.

• 49:43David Pierce?

  I'm leaving now. It's the meanest thing you've ever said to me. Jesus.

• 49:47Nilay Patel?

  It's a new segment. We're figuring out how it works.

• 49:51Nilay Patel?

  All right, Kylie, what do you have?

• 49:53Speaker 08

  Oh, my God. It's gonna be hard to top.

• 49:55Nilay Patel?

  A seven?

• 49:56Speaker 08

  No, bad iPad. Um, well, now I'm talking about scaling laws, which are really interesting. Everyone's reporting this week that scaling laws are failing. So what that is, is just put more compute and more data into an LLM, and it will get bigger, better, smarter. And everyone has the same training data, which is the internet, the entire internet and all of our work. So they have all that. They're all building sort of the same thing. And they are all finding Google OpenAI Anthropic that it is not working anymore, that they are not getting better than their last generation of models. And they're all pissing their pants about it. That's the story this week.

• 50:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:41Speaker 08

  I think this is, I keep thinking about that tweet, which is like, you know, the haters said I couldn't do it. And they were right. Great call from the haters. I think all.

• 50:54Speaker 08

  I think all of the AI skeptics are like, yeah, we told you.

• 50:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:58Speaker 08

  We told you that this wasn't something you could scale infinitely. So yeah, I don't think it's like doomsday, like it's over for AI. But still, it's, it's interesting that they're all sort of frustrated that they can't make that giant next leap. And it costs so much money. So if people, if they want to release something that costs so much money for people to use, it's got to be way better. And it's just not.

• 51:19Nilay Patel?

  So the idea here is, okay, we made an M G P T four.

• 51:22Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 51:22Nilay Patel?

  By training on the entire internet. We'll get more data, which was always confusing to me where the more data would come from.

• 51:27Speaker 08

  Yes. Synthetic data.

• 51:29Nilay Patel?

  So we'll make some fake AI data. We'll train an even bigger model and that one will necessarily be smarter.

• 51:35Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 51:35Nilay Patel?

  And that just hasn't worked out.

• 51:36Speaker 08

  And it hasn't worked out. It does not appear that any of them are going to be more capable than the last. So that means, you know, for instance, I believe it was reported that O one was helping train the next generation of OpenAI's G P T models. But that has become a problem because then, you know, it just gets confused by synthetic data. It's not high quality data. So yeah, they're all running into that same issue. And that means that there's going to be, there's going to have to be some like research breakthrough that gets them to that next step that they don't currently have. And there's just tons of money riding on this for them to figure it out. So I think they're all, again, pissing their pants over it.

• 52:19Nilay Patel?

  Is one of the haters, I definitely feel like I should say I told you so.

• 52:21David Pierce?

  This so exposes to be something, Kylie, that you've been saying to us and on the Vergecast for forever, which is there has been this ongoing line from all of these AI companies that it's like, we're going to do a model and we're going to do another model and we're going to do another model and we're going to do another model. And then it's God. And it's like, well, what's, what is it going to be on the way? And they're like, don't worry about it. God. None of this shit matters because God, we're going to make God and then you're going to feel dumb for not giving us money. And what happens now is they're going to get to the point where they're like, okay, you've built this thing. It's actually very cool. It's very capable, it can do lots of things. What's it for? What are people going to do with it? And all of these companies are like.

• 53:02David Pierce?

  Emails. We're gonna write some bomb emails.

• 53:05Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 53:06David Pierce?

  And we're like, we are going to be stuck in this, what can you do with this phase for a lot longer than any of these companies would like you to believe?

• 53:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's that, but there's just also this week, right? Dario Moda from Anthropic is telling Lex Friedman that we'll have AGI in like two years.

• 53:25Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 53:26Nilay Patel?

  Sam Altman, I think in the past couple of weeks has said on current hardware, we can have AGI, which by the way, it means the tech industry should stop.

• 53:34Nilay Patel?

  Like if you can make current, if you can make God on Nvidia's current hardware, we should, we should stop.

• 53:39Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 53:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, we did it.

• 53:41Nilay Patel?

  We're good.

• 53:41Speaker 08

  We did it. We're done.

• 53:42Nilay Patel?

  Let God build the next version of the GPU. Like it'll be here soon.

• 53:47Speaker 08

  Totally.

• 53:47David Pierce?

  The God processing unit.

• 53:51Nilay Patel?

  What if you're like, if I just put enough H100s in a room, I can have God. To like, we should, Nvidia should just slow the fuck down.

• 53:58Speaker 08

  Sure.

• 53:59Nilay Patel?

  Right? And it, that, there's something very incompatible with, in two years, we'll have AGI, I can build AGI in current hardware and the bigger models we just trained aren't more capable than the previous models.

• 54:11Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 54:11Nilay Patel?

  Is that, what, what's going on?

• 54:14Speaker 08

  Um, I've been asked on Vergecast, or sorry, I think it was Decoder, should we trust them? And I'm, I, I mean, I as a journalist am just very skeptical. So Dario saying, you know, we're gonna get AGI, it's gonna do all these beautiful things. And I mean, they just have to sell products at the end of the day. The Reddit AMA that Sam Altman did recently, where he said, oh, it's really hard to release these things in parallel. We have like such limited compute and it's hard to work on all of these things, but the next big thing I think is gonna be agents. It's just feels like they're pivoting. They're like, don't, don't look at this. Don't look, don't look at this right here. We haven't figured it out. Just don't think about agents on current hardware, current models. Look at that. Please give us money.

• 54:58Speaker 08

  Don't look at how we are failing to make the next big model. And I don't think we need a next bigger model. I think we really enjoyed, these companies really enjoyed making these huge leaps from model to model. And if they're capable enough now of achieving some good emails, then fine. They think that they can combine, you know, the GPT series with the O reasoning series and perhaps get AGI. Again, I think all of this is to sell more products and get more money. That has always been my position. So, yeah.

• 55:32Nilay Patel?

  I just want to read you the quote from Daria. If you believe the straight line extrapolation will have artificial general intelligence in 2026 or 2027.

• 55:43Speaker 08

  Right.

• 55:43Nilay Patel?

  If line go up forever, I will make God.

• 55:47David Pierce?

  Have you guys seen the tweet from the guy? I'm sorry. I don't remember who it is. We'll find it and put in the show notes. Who was like, he has two pictures of him with his newborn baby and then his baby who's now three months old. And he's like, wild guys. My baby has doubled in weight in three months. At this rate, by his 10th birthday, he'll be seven trillion pounds. I think about that every single time somebody talks about one of these things like it's, it's really, and people talk about this stuff as if it is guaranteed. Like you look at Moore's law, right? And this, this thing that has like governed technological progress for so long. We now take it as truth that everything that grows, grows the same way and forever. And it just doesn't like, there is no guarantee that any of this will work like that, just because the way we make semiconductors works like that. It's just not how it works.

• 56:33Speaker 08

  Okay. To add to this too, you know how Sam Altman was going across the world, trying to get these trillion dollar data centers built somewhere? Someone give me the money to build these data centers so I can power digital God. There was a story in the information today that a competitor flew like a crop plane over XAI's data center to figure out how he was cooling those chips because they're so scared about liquid cooling and it's so confusing. And I thought that's crazy that we're getting to a point where people are just flying, you know, little planes over Elon's data center to figure out how the fuck they can build digital God in the same way. It's just such a funny thing.

• 57:12David Pierce?

  The next Mission Impossible movie is just Tom Cruise breaking into a data center to figure out how they power all this stuff.

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  I think that was the last Mission Impossible.

• 57:22Speaker 08

  David, what?

• 57:24David Pierce?

  And it was underwater.

• 57:27David Pierce?

  Oh my God.

• 57:29Speaker 08

  Fast and Furious in space, man.

• 57:32Nilay Patel?

  By the way, if you look on, on all the streaming services, they've taken part one off of that movie because it ends on such a garbage cliffhanger, people are mad.

• 57:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're like, never mind, we're just doing a different one.

• 57:42Nilay Patel?

  It's just a full movie.

• 57:47David Pierce?

  I don't know, man.

• 57:47Nilay Patel?

  All right, Kyle, you've shown, you've told.

• 57:49Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 57:49Nilay Patel?

  David, you, I think you have to score this one.

• 57:51David Pierce?

  Two and a half.

• 57:57David Pierce?

  But that's out of three, to be clear.

• 57:59Speaker 08

  Sorry, you're so jealous.

• 58:00David Pierce?

  We didn't say what our scoring.

• 58:01Nilay Patel?

  We actually didn't say that we were scoring.

• 58:03David Pierce?

  Neela gave me a seven out of 10. I'm giving you a two and a half out of three.

• 58:06Speaker 08

  Perfect.

• 58:07David Pierce?

  And then we'll see. Actually, you get like the Netflix one thumb up, but not the two thumbs up. It's like a like it, but not a love it kind of thing. You know what I mean?

• 58:14Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 58:14David Pierce?

  So that's your score.

• 58:15Nilay Patel?

  Digital God, David, we can do it on current hardware. I want to say this as directly as I can. If you believe we can build AGI in current hardware, the tech industry should stop. We should just stop doing everything and focus on that one goal so that Digital God can design the next iPhone. But I don't think that's true.

• 58:35Speaker 08

  Right.

• 58:35Nilay Patel?

  Like that, that claim just implies you should stop working.

• 58:40Nilay Patel?

  And let, you know, AGI do it for you. Please, I beg you, let AGI write about Donald Trump for the next four years. It'll be, it'll, everyone can take a break. All right, here's mine.

• 58:51Nilay Patel?

  Just the series of words is so silly. Just Eat is selling Grubhub to Wunder.

• 58:58David Pierce?

  What?

• 58:59Nilay Patel?

  None of those words make any sense. So Grubhub is, you know, is the delivery service. It's like probably the one that you are most familiar with. They bought Seamless a while ago, so it's all the same app.

• 59:08David Pierce?

  That was such a New Yorker thing to say, by the way. Grubhub is the one is such a New York centric thing to say.

• 59:17Speaker 08

  None of these words were in the Bible. I don't know what's going on.

• 59:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:20Speaker 08

  I don't know what's going on.

• 59:21David Pierce?

  All right. It's like in LA, it's just Postmates, but nowhere else. SF is, I think, probably still like a DoorDash town.

• 59:27Speaker 08

  DoorDash, yeah.

• 59:28David Pierce?

  Uh, this is like, this is like when you live in New York, it was like, oh, just Seamless it. And it's like, what, that's nothing. That's, that's, that's not a word to exist.

• 59:36Nilay Patel?

  When we moved to New York from Chicago. Anyway, it doesn't matter. These are all nonsense words and failing businesses that are just selling each other in different configurations. What I want to get to is they're selling it to a company called Wunder, which is owned by a part owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves and a former Walmart VP. And Wunder's business model is bananas.

• 59:55Speaker 08

  Perfect.

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  They, he licenses recipes from famous chefs.

• 1:00:00Nilay Patel?

  So you're like, yes.

• 1:00:01Speaker 08

  What?

• 1:00:02Nilay Patel?

  So Wonder is like a high end food hall. And it's a ghost kitchen with like famous restaurants logos on the front. So you go in there and you're like, here's all these like famous local restaurants. Or like restaurants I've heard of that like celebrities go to.

• 1:00:19Speaker 08

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:20Nilay Patel?

  So Wonder licenses recipes from famous chefs. So you open Wonder and there's Bobby Flay's Steak. There's Street Bird by Marcus Samuelson. Uh, there is Detroit Brick Pizza. There's all this stuff. Um, Defaro Pizza, which is like a famous New York pizza place isn't there. But they don't actually make the food. They license the recipes and they have one big commissary kitchen that like pre makes the food.

• 1:00:47Speaker 08

  So good.

• 1:00:47Nilay Patel?

  And then it goes to the food hall where they with like steam baths and microwaves, reheat the food and assemble it and then deliver it to you or serve it in the food hall. So they've like commoditized the famous chef's recipe.

• 1:01:01Speaker 08

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:02Nilay Patel?

  At industrial scale. And now they're gonna buy Grubhub and they're gonna bring that model to the even bigger delivery system. And it's like, oh, this is wild.

• 1:01:10Speaker 08

  Wow.

• 1:01:11Nilay Patel?

  Like, the reason that the chefs are famous is because you think Jose Andres is gonna make you the food.

• 1:01:15Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:01:16Nilay Patel?

  And now he's just licensed a recipe so someone else can steam bath the food to you and send it to you.

• 1:01:20Speaker 08

  And we don't know how much they're making off these licenses. That hasn't leaked. Wow.

• 1:01:24Nilay Patel?

  And it's all, also just to be clear, some of it's very expensive because it's famous chefs, so you're buying.

• 1:01:29Speaker 08

  But it's not famous chefs.

• 1:01:31David Pierce?

  This is like a knockoff version of eating dinner in a Vegas casino.

• 1:01:36Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:01:37David Pierce?

  Where it's like a bunch of restaurants that all claim to be, you know, run by famous people, but it just has their name on it. Uh, it's like getting, this is the equivalent of getting room service from a Bobby Flay restaurant in a Vegas casino.

• 1:01:53Speaker 08

  Well, Gordon Ramsay Burger is delicious. Let's be clear.

• 1:01:56David Pierce?

  Look, I'm sure some of this stuff is good. It's just, it also, isn't the point of going to? Gordon Ramsay burger places, the like vibe, like getting, take out Gordon Ramsay seems just wrong.

• 1:02:10Speaker 08

  No, that's gross.

• 1:02:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, you want to be screamed at in the face by Gordon Ramsay.

• 1:02:14David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 1:02:15Nilay Patel?

  To some extent, the Vegas version of the chain restaurants, like the Vegas Carbone, some people think is the best Carbone because it just like moves the most business and there's the most dumb money flowing through it.

• 1:02:27David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:02:28Nilay Patel?

  Fine. This is very much like, we're gonna half make the famous pizza, send it to a food hall, and then a steam oven will finish the famous pizza.

• 1:02:37David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:02:37Nilay Patel?

  And then we will put that on Grubhub. And you're just like, oh, this is the endpoint of a very particular business model that started with cloud kitchens, right? Where you like open the delivery app.

• 1:02:49David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:02:49Nilay Patel?

  And it's actually Chuck E. Cheese. And then people are like, what if you didn't even have the Chuck E. Cheese? And they're like, but then you still, you can't just have like wings.com or whatever was in the, so now you need Bobby Flay's name next to it. And you're just kind of like, oh, this is, this, this circle is getting real weird.

• 1:03:06David Pierce?

  It's almost like. But it ends at like a, a Golden Corral buffet is essentially the endpoint of this whole system.

• 1:03:12Nilay Patel?

  In Donald Trump's America, every restaurant is Carbone.

• 1:03:15Speaker 08

  Have you seen people joking about how they don't want DoorDash coming in like a Nissan Altima? They want it in an Uber Black? Like, this is that same, that same thing.

• 1:03:23David Pierce?

  Are you serious?

• 1:03:24Speaker 08

  It's just like, it's like sending an Uber Black to a, a commissary to get your food. Like, what is the point anymore? I feel like we've just reached a new level of consumerism that is absolutely absurd. And I'm.

• 1:03:34Nilay Patel?

  It's not absurd enough yet.

• 1:03:35David Pierce?

  I would like every part of this process to feel fancy, but actually not be fancy at all.

• 1:03:40Speaker 08

  Right. Exactly.

• 1:03:41David Pierce?

  I want to think it's expensive, even though it's, it sucks.

• 1:03:46Nilay Patel?

  I just like the idea that you would order any steak from a delivery app has always seemed odd to me. Like it's just, that's not, it's not a great environment for steak to be in, like in the back of an Nissan Altima for a while.

• 1:03:59David Pierce?

  I feel the same way about delivery sushi, like, yeah, not about it.

• 1:04:03Speaker 08

  Sorry, I can't relate.

• 1:04:04Nilay Patel?

  Like, do you know why Meryl Streep was angry in The Devil Wears Prada? Cause she was having delivery steak for lunch every day.

• 1:04:09David Pierce?

  Such a good point.

• 1:04:11Nilay Patel?

  Uh, all right, that's it. I've, I've shown, I've told.

• 1:04:13David Pierce?

  Wait, can I, can I add one more thing to this?

• 1:04:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:15David Pierce?

  So four years ago, uh, when there was some other stuff going on in the world, uh, Just Eat, which was then called Just Eat Takeaway, cause sure, uh, bought Grubhub for $7.3 billion and is now selling it to wonder for $650 million. I don't know enough about this world to like really process why that is, but that is a giant loss in four years.

• 1:04:42Speaker 08

  Yeah, I don't remember the last time I used Grubhub, maybe 2020.

• 1:04:46David Pierce?

  I mean, it might've been.

• 1:04:47Speaker 08

  So makes sense to me.

• 1:04:49David Pierce?

  Well, and Just Eat Takeaway was, for a minute, they were like, it was called Just Eat Takeaway because that was the combination of two businesses and it was supposed to be the like giant delivery conglomerate that was gonna eat everything, uh, and that just has not panned out for anybody.

• 1:05:04Speaker 08

  I mean, the margins can't be good, right? I know nothing about this world, but it's.

• 1:05:07Nilay Patel?

  I'm, I'm guessing the margins on selling microwave Gordon Ramsay is, I don't think.

• 1:05:12Speaker 08

  Well, that's, that's probably better than.

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  Not say Gordon Ramsay name. I'm sure the margins on selling microwave Bobby Flay is like very good.

• 1:05:19Speaker 08

  That's probably a better business idea than, um, people enslaved to McDonald's on motorcycles.

• 1:05:27David Pierce?

  Well, and all of these companies have said for years and like Uber and DoorDash among them, that shipping food and stuff is a much higher margin business around a city than people, right? Like giving humans rides is not nearly as good a business as moving steak around for a huge profit. Uh, so like, you can see it, I, there was just gonna be this time when all of these companies were competing and whoever won was gonna be a giant and it was gonna be epic and they were gonna be the biggest company in the world. And what actually seems to have happened is it's a bunch of like. Reasonably successful but fairly low margin businesses.

• 1:06:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06David Pierce?

  That works well in some places and not in others.

• 1:06:10Nilay Patel?

  The VC dollars are not able to buy monopolies and then raise the prices.

• 1:06:13David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 1:06:14Nilay Patel?

  The business model for, in particular Uber, for a long time.

• 1:06:16David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:06:17Nilay Patel?

  But look, again, this is just the words I'm using. Just Eat has sold Grubhub to Wonder is a sentence that you now understand.

• 1:06:24Speaker 08

  I don't want to understand it. I want to go back.

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  Give me a score.

• 1:06:26Speaker 08

  Um, three Michelin stars.

• 1:06:28Nilay Patel?

  Very good.

• 1:06:31David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 1:06:33Nilay Patel?

  That means I'm now a raging asshole and I can't be stopped.

• 1:06:37Nilay Patel?

  I'm a made man.

• 1:06:38Speaker 08

  No, I'm going to put you in the ring with Bobby Clay and then we'll figure it out from there.

• 1:06:41David Pierce?

  Yes, chef.

• 1:06:44Nilay Patel?

  We got to stop. That's it. That was show and tell. We have to take a break. Thank you, Kylie. We'll be right back.

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• 1:08:23Nilay Patel?

  We're back with the lightning round. I have news. It's not today, but I'm told the lightning round is sponsored.

• 1:08:30David Pierce?

  It's very exciting.

• 1:08:30Nilay Patel?

  Big money.

• 1:08:31David Pierce?

  We're going to be doing this podcast from a yacht, starting sometime soon.

• 1:08:34Nilay Patel?

  It was sponsored by a boat show. If you run a boat show and you'd like to sponsor the lightning round, please let me know. Talk about a sponsor integration, which we are ethically not allowed to do.

• 1:08:45David Pierce?

  I have been trying to come up with a reason to go to the Monaco yacht show for journalism for approximately my entire journalism career. That is my, I've always said that the main thing I want to do is figure out a reason to expense drugs. Figure out a journalistically real reason to go to the Monaco yacht show is now number one on my list.

• 1:09:04Nilay Patel?

  You've mellowed in your old age.

• 1:09:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, I just want to be on a boat now. I'm just sober on a boat. Seems great.

• 1:09:11Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. All right, lightning round. What do you think?

• 1:09:16David Pierce?

  You have selected three things in the lightning round, which is the least lightning round thing I could imagine. So why don't you go first and do one?

• 1:09:23Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so my first one, which I just want to talk about very quickly, is something a bunch of people have asked me about this week. And it's ethics and disclosure. So talk about this for as much as anybody wants me to talk about it, and we'll move on to more fun lightning round ones. But this week, Mark has finally made a video, is a sponsored video, and the video is speeding his car. People got all mad about it. We wrote about it because Marquez is a huge character in tech. We write about other creators all the time. We think our audience wants to know and keep up with the things. So we wrote about it. Here's what's happening. If you read the story, it's pretty straight. It's on the website. Here's some stuff that happened. Here's the coverage of it. Marquez, we wrote about his wallpaper app recently, too. There's whatever controversy. I don't want to dwell on the video or what happened in the video or any of that stuff.

• 1:10:06Nilay Patel?

  What people are asking about is, I think it's Waveform, right? Marquez's podcast. At the end of it or at the beginning of it, they say this is part of Vox Media Podcast Network. And so people are asking, do we need to disclose this? Should we disclose this in the story? Should we talk about it now? As I think, for your chat listeners know, I got no problems with disclosures. Disclosures all night and all day. I think we should be as transparent as possible about potential sources of conflicts. I think we should earn people's trust as just transparently as we can. We talk about the making of journalism more than any other traditional journalists that I can think of. We certainly do more disclosures than any traditional media or any influencers do all the time. I have literally no problem with this. I'm happy to disclose it. The thing that we're running into right now is like, when and why do we disclose things?

• 1:10:51Nilay Patel?

  And so in this case, the Vox Media Podcast Network is an ad sales network. Right? If you are, if you start a podcast and you just like go onto YouTube or you go onto Spotify's platform or whatever, you're kind of, unless you have big scale, you're kind of stuck with programmatic advertising, whatever the platforms will give to you. And if you want better advertising, you want more money, you need scale. So you join a podcast network that has a lot of inventory across a lot of shows. And then our sellers go out and sell that inventory and then you make more money or whatever. I actually don't know because that's the other side of the house. Right? So the conflict here doesn't exist. Like, our sales team is selling ads, which they do on our own website that we don't know about, that they do on the show, that we basically don't know about.

• 1:11:36Nilay Patel?

  As many of you have heard, sometimes we just run the same ad 500 times.

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:11:40Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's a wall between us and sales and we are very, very, very protective of that wall. We are, coverage often loses them money because various companies are mad at our coverage and they walk away with the deal. I've personally cost this company a bunch of money. But that's the whole point of the wall, right? It's to keep our newsroom away from any of those considerations. So that we can just write about what's happening and have editorial independence and freedom. And we can, if you, it's like the first line of our ethics policy is like, is the editorial independence that allows us to cover companies critically without fear of favor or whatever. That's the thing that's the most important. That's the, truly the heart of this whole operation is the independence.

• 1:12:21Nilay Patel?

  So what we disclose is where there's a plausible connection to some conflict in our newsroom. So Comcast NBC Universal is an investor in our company. They're on our board of directors. They can want to fire me. Right. They can. They don't like me a lot. They might. Right. Like, they can have a board meeting and say, we should fire this guy. That is a plausible imposition on our newsroom. It has never happened. You know, we've, we've been running this thing for 13 years. But that's plausible. I think you can, you can fairly look at our company and say, they're at the top of it. The Verge is talking about Comcast. Maybe they'll get, get him fired. Maybe he's shading the coverage. Fine. So we disclose it. I made a Netflix show.

• 1:13:08Nilay Patel?

  This is just like an open conflict of interest, right? Like every time I talk about Netflix, I should point out that I made a Netflix show. I didn't get paid for it because the company made it, but you know, whatever. I still made the show. Um, great. Like, I, I think that's fine. That's a totally rational conflict of interest. There's a plausible connection to the thing and the conflict. There's a million of these. We disclose them all the time. This one, there isn't a plausible conflict. The actually more plausible conflict is that David and I know most of the people on Waveform and we like them. Yeah. So I will disclose to you, I've known Marquez for a long time. David has known Marquez for a long time. We know a bunch of the folks over there. We're friendly with them. We generally wish them success. When we cover them, I think we do it as straight as we can, but the actual business conflict,

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  it, it's not there. And if I, and if we open the door to disclosing what our sales side is doing, I think we actually threaten our editorial independence. Because then I have to tell the newsroom every single thing they have to disclose. Right. And I have to make the newsroom aware of all of the company's commercial and corporate interactions in a way that I actually don't want them to know. That's the whole purpose of the wall. Is that they're just going to do their jobs. So there's, there's a line here and I'm not saying we always get it a hundred percent right. But in this case, that I know what that arrangement is. Like, I know what the Box Media Podcast Network is. We have a bunch of these deals, like all of Scott Galloway's Prof G shows. We don't own them. We don't make them. But they're in the network. We sell the ads. There are other ones as well. There's all kinds of arrangements.

• 1:14:36Nilay Patel?

  We'll disclose the ones where it's our company, but in this case, it's, it's just a little too removed from our newsroom. In the same way that we run a programmatic ad tech stack called Concert that is on tons of publishers. Every time you see a concert logo on a web ad, that's Vox Media is serving that one. And we just cannot disclose every partner of the concert. It would, it would bring our newsroom to a halt. And, and more importantly, it would force me to make every reporter in the newsroom aware of the company's business deals, which is the most important thing.

• 1:15:10David Pierce?

  Right. That's the key. Right. Like, the, the not knowing on that side is, is important. Right. Like, there, there is a thing, we talk about this with creators and stuff all the time, that one of the challenges is knowing what something you do will do to your business. And because of who is advertising and who wants to sponsor your videos and all this stuff, that is a thing you have to reckon with. And a big part of what we're trying to do is not even give people the chance to think about that. Because it just, it just changes things.

• 1:15:40Nilay Patel?

  And I firmly believe that this is getting confusing and muddled, and most people do not understand this. And that's on us. We have to constantly explain it, which is why I'm happy to talk about it whenever anyone asks. That is not how most of the media that most people consume works anymore. Most creators and influencers have absolutely blurred the lines between advertising, between sales, they have investments, their commercial relationships are in the front of their content. I'm not even calling out any creator. This is the reality of the business on those platforms. If you want to make enough money to eat, this is how you have to play the game.

• 1:16:13David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:16:13Nilay Patel?

  But that's not us. Right. Like, it just isn't us. And so, I'm happy to disclose everything. I'm happy to talk about it. I just, there are times when I'd be like, no, that one doesn't make any sense. And what I'm really talking about is, if I extend the rule that much, we're actually going to defeat the purpose of the rule. Right? We're going to defeat the independence of the newsroom in a way that, that's, that is the product we sell here, is the independence of the newsroom. Let me, I'll give you this example. Every, we disclose Comcast NBC all the time, because everybody knows about it. There are other investors in our company. They're there. And if I extend the rule so far, like, I kind of end up in a place where every single morning, I'm just telling the newsroom who they should be worried of.

• 1:16:54David Pierce?

  Right. Here's, here's a list of problems.

• 1:16:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, here's a list of considerations for every story. And it's like, I, I really think that undercuts the promise of what we do here. So, like I said, we'll take the feedback. I will talk about it whenever we want. In this case, I, there's not a plausible connection to the company's commercial activities in our newsroom. I just assure you that there isn't one, to the point where, until people mentioned it to us, I hadn't even thought about it. And so we'll, we'll keep, we'll keep doing disclosures. My ask of you, if you want to yell at me about this, take 20% of the energy and point it at other media outlets and other creators and influencers. Because I would rather be in a world where the audience is that demanding of everyone, and I'll do my best to live up to it. Because

• 1:17:41Nilay Patel?

  that's the thing that's going to rebuild trust in whatever kind of journalism exists. And that, we do it, so we get it a lot, right? It's an expectation that we have created with all of you, and I'm happy about that. We receive the expectation. But if you think we're failing, take just 20% of the energy and point it at everybody else. Like, it'll make everything a little bit better. All right, David, what's your line?

• 1:18:02David Pierce?

  Uh, mine's gonna be much quicker, because I really don't want to talk about it. Like, we went from something that we like talking about to, I don't, under any circumstances, want to talk about this, but we have to. And it is that President-elect Donald Trump has said that Elon Musk is going to be leading a thing called the Department of Government Efficiency, that is going to do some stuff, cut wasteful government spending. There's apparently going to be a leaderboard on X of all the dumbest ways the government spends money. The, the only reason I want to talk about this is because I think if I have, if I have a bit on this show, it is the question, is this anything? It's the meme of a person holding, like, their hand at a butterfly and going, is this anything? This is nothing.

• 1:18:47David Pierce?

  This is nothing.

• 1:18:48Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say, it was announced, and it's announced, it's Elon and Vivek Ramaswamy are gonna run it. And it's amazing that the efficiency department has two leaders. Like, you're just coming out the gate with co-CEOs, like BlackBerry style? Like, what are we doing?

• 1:19:03David Pierce?

  What could possibly go wrong?

• 1:19:04Nilay Patel?

  That's very good.

• 1:19:05David Pierce?

  You can't just do a department. You can't just do it.

• 1:19:08Nilay Patel?

  Like, in life?

• 1:19:09David Pierce?

  I declare a department is not a thing the president can do.

• 1:19:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you mean like in the government?

• 1:19:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. You and I could make a department of, I just, the Department of David's Pillows. Like, that exists. I did it. We're here.

• 1:19:23Nilay Patel?

  I feel like your wife might know something to say about this department.

• 1:19:26David Pierce?

  I'm the president. I did it.

• 1:19:28Nilay Patel?

  It's like a weird pillow room.

• 1:19:33David Pierce?

  But the government cannot just create a department out of thin air because someone says so. That's not how this works.

• 1:19:41Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna say, what, yeah, you need an act of Congress is the thing. So, whatever. The only other thing I'll add to this, because this is gonna be fake when we're gonna have to talk about it. And this is pure, by the way, decoder bait, and we'll definitely talk about it on Decoder. Can you make a fake department in the government? Also, by the way, leaderboards are wasteful government spending. They've been doing that shit since the 80s. Like, guess, some of these ideas, we're just inventing trains again, like the classic Elon Musk.

• 1:20:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:05Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, all this is to say, there is a New York Mag article today about the scene at Mar-a-Lago, and just like the frenzy of corruption that's happening there. And every time Elon Musk walks into dinner, Donald Trump pulls out his iPad and plays "Space Oddity" by David Bowie.

• 1:20:18David Pierce?

  Oh, I don't like that at all.

• 1:20:20Nilay Patel?

  I feel like David Bowie would be very mad, but I also think it's very funny they picked "Space Oddity."

• 1:20:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's like not exactly the compliment you might think it is.

• 1:20:29Nilay Patel?

  It's not.

• 1:20:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, but that's enough. We've talked about that enough. What's your next one, Eli?

• 1:20:33Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'll go back to it. All right, I wanna check in on our nation's fourth wireless carrier, which you will recall is a product of Trump won, when T-Mobile wanted to buy Sprint, and instead of saying no... Which is the exact process by which T-Mobile was created. If you recall, AT&T wanted to buy T-Mobile, the government said no. And then T-Mobile had to go out, they took a bunch of money in the breakup fee, but then they became T-Mobile. They hired a new CEO. They did business. We're gonna try hard. Yeah. We didn't do that with Sprint. The court literally said Sprint sucks so much, no one can fix it, T-Mobile can have it. And to get around this problem, McCon Del Rey, who was the head of antitrust at the time, brokered personally a deal by which T-Mobile would get a bunch of Sprint

• 1:21:17Nilay Patel?

  and a bunch of Sprint spectrum would go to Dish Network, America's favorite satellite TV service, and they would create a fourth wireless network, which it has been 1 billion years and which does not meaningfully exist. There was a pilot network called Project Jennifer 5S, which offered people NFTs if they signed up for service on the Motorola Edge. So that didn't work. Mostly, there's been an MVNO, so they resell AT&T and T-Mobile service. Historically, successful plan to compete with AT&T and T-Mobile, which is buying their service and reselling it for a fee. That really has them quaking in their boots. They have lit up some towers in some cities. They've decided they're gonna let go of all the Jennifer 5S stuff.

• 1:22:01Nilay Patel?

  They're just gonna call it Boost Mobile, which is a brand that they acquired in the thing. And now they say, they say, they have earned the title of mobile network operator. That's their announcement. Congrats. Rather than MVNO, which is Mobile Virtual Network Operator, which is what you have to call yourself when you're just reselling other people's service. They have earned the title of mobile network operator. They're a real network now. By the end of the year, it needs to reach 80% of the people. They said, "We are well on the way to meeting this goal." They have lit up more than 20,000 of the 24,000 cell sites that's promised to deploy by June 2025. But has anybody seen it?

• 1:22:48David Pierce?

  Has anybody?

• 1:22:49Nilay Patel?

  Running ads?

• 1:22:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, do you have, do you have any friends who are on Boost? Like, is that?

• 1:22:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, people who have friends are on Boost, but they're just reusing AT&T service. You go on the subreddits of Genesis or Boost, it's not pretty. And in the meantime, by the way, all of the other three carriers, all they've done is raise their prices.

• 1:23:08David Pierce?

  Yep. Yeah, all of the stuff that I-

• 1:23:11Nilay Patel?

  Not meaningful competition in this market.

• 1:23:12David Pierce?

  All the stuff that I saw on Project Genesis are basically like, if I stand right here, I get the carrier that I think that I have, and if I am literally anywhere else on planet Earth, it's just AT&T. It's like, great. You've just got like a slightly worse AT&T phone. Congratulations.

• 1:23:30Nilay Patel?

  It's a Motorola Edge. You're killing it. We'll see, you know, as always, something will happen. Time will relentlessly go by.

• 1:23:42David Pierce?

  I mean, and you, you mentioned T-Mobile, but it is, it is possible to do interesting things in this space. Like, there, there, there was a time when T-Mobile did the whole un-carrier bit and everything got purple and John Legere was running around doing crazy stuff. Like, there are interesting moves you can make in this market, and there haven't been any in a very long time.

• 1:24:02Nilay Patel?

  Nope.

• 1:24:03David Pierce?

  And I, I think it's, it's like, I, I am hopeful for Boost. I would say I have precisely zero actual expectations of this going anywhere.

• 1:24:13Nilay Patel?

  And I would just point out that all they had to do was not let T-Mobile westbound. And so they brokered this complicated deal.

• 1:24:22Nilay Patel?

  Why? Is T-Mobile cheaper? Certainly isn't. So, and by the way, T-Mobile promised that it wouldn't cut any jobs, immediately cut thousands of jobs.

• 1:24:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:32Nilay Patel?

  We're just, we're entering a period now where there will be more mergers. The Lina Khan era is, is over, right? All that's going to get turned over. Already streaming like David Zaslove is like mergers are back.

• 1:24:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45Nilay Patel?

  Like the net neutrality is going to go away. And you can just see the, hey, should Verizon buy Paramount and bundle it into its service and throttle Disney is like, there's accountants that just, just on their boats, just staring off into the sunset, dreaming up ways to raise prices. And it's not going to result in faster service or more reliable service. Almost a guarantee. You want to know what the rich has is going to be at in the next four years? It just me ranting about cell carriers.

• 1:25:12David Pierce?

  Oh, so the same as always. That's good. It's nice to know that some things don't change, even in these trying times.

• 1:25:19Nilay Patel?

  Three Michelin stars.

• 1:25:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:25:21Nilay Patel?

  All right, one more, then we gotta go.

• 1:25:22David Pierce?

  All right, I just very briefly want to pour one out for everyone's 11th favorite streaming service. Freevee, which was, I believe, once called IMDb Free Dive, I think. And then it was IMDb TV and then it was Freevee. And now it is dying and just everything is being bundled into Prime Video.

• 1:25:45David Pierce?

  This is not going to be sad for very many people, I don't think. Freevee was actually like a sneakily pretty good, pretty light app. So I'm sad to not be able to use it anymore.

• 1:25:54Nilay Patel?

  Didn't they do Jury Duty?

• 1:25:55David Pierce?

  They did do Jury Duty, which was wonderful. And I actually think Jury Duty is sort of funny because there's all these, we've talked a lot about the fast channels and the, the sort of rise of ad-supported streaming. And Jury Duty is kind of the only giant breakout hit to ever come out of one of these services. Like you look at the, the Roku channels had a few, they had the Weird Al Yankovic movie that was like kind of around. Tubi is doing stuff, Pluto is doing stuff like this, this fast universe is growing really quickly. But the huge sort of mainstream content has not really happened. And I think if you look at Amazon, Amazon is all in on ads.

• 1:26:35David Pierce?

  And I think this is the thing that is really starting to happen is the ad business in streaming is turning really fast now. Netflix is now two years into it and it's growing pretty quickly. Hulu is doing really well and so Disney and ESPN is starting to catch up. Like the ad-supported streaming universe.

• 1:26:54David Pierce?

  Is here in a big way. And I think Amazon, was it earlier this year? Turned on the thing where now it's ads by default unless you pay more. And now it's bringing all this free stuff in to give people more stuff to watch with those ads inside of Prime Video. Like, this is the future. And we're going to go back to big, giant libraries, mostly stuff you don't want to watch because they're just trying to churn ad inventory. And I think it's going to change streaming in some really interesting ways. But I am sad Freevee's gone. It's the dumbest name, and I will miss it terribly.

• 1:27:25Nilay Patel?

  The second they named it.

• 1:27:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:28Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry.

• 1:27:29David Pierce?

  They also had like a Bosch Legacy or something. It was like a Bosch spinoff that apparently some people watched. I don't know. I've never felt less connected to pop culture than reading about Bosch Legacy when Freevee died. But I did watch Jury Duty, and it was great.

• 1:27:45Nilay Patel?

  Jury Duty, they should have just, they should just make one of those every week.

• 1:27:47David Pierce?

  I agree.

• 1:27:49Nilay Patel?

  It was very good. All right, we're way over. Thank you to Kylie for being on. Let us know what you think of show and tell. Let us know if you have a better name.

• 1:27:56David Pierce?

  Yes, please.

• 1:27:57Nilay Patel?

  Or if we should actually have scores.

• 1:27:59David Pierce?

  The idea, just so everybody knows, is that we all just sort of bring stories and surprise each other with them. We're going to, we're going to teach each other new things and all have thoughts about it on the show. So name that whatever you want.

• 1:28:11Nilay Patel?

  And please let us know what the scoring.

• 1:28:13David Pierce?

  And the scoring mechanism.

• 1:28:14Nilay Patel?

  We don't know. All right, that's it. That's our chest. Rock and roll.

• 1:28:21Speaker 09

  And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Pore, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:28:42Speaker 10

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• 1:29:29Nilay Patel?

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