We can’t quit electric cars — or robotaxis

Robotaxis: in. EVs: Out? The Verge's Andy Hawkins joins the show to talk about the goings-on in the transportation industry, including the reasons car makers are slowing down on EV production (but not giving up entirely) and why suddenly everyone's back in on robotaxis. Then, The Social Web Foundation's Evan Prodromou tells us what's new with the fediverse. We talk about Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, and the increasingly ambitious plans for the ActivityPub protocol. Finally, we talk through some feedback on last week's episode about the pricing of the iPhone 16E, and how the way you buy your phone changes the way you feel about its price. Further reading: EV truck maker Nikola goes bust Senate Republicans introduce bills to make EVs more expensive Volkswagen claims it’s actually making that $20,000 EV and will show it next month Ford lost $5 billion on EVs in 2024, teases new models Lyft eyes robotaxi launch in 2026 Uber to Austin: get ready for Waymo The fediverse, explained: Mastodon, Threads, and the open future of social networking Flipboard’s Surf app is a feed reader for the fediverse Tumblr’s fediverse integration might finally happen soon. The Social Web Foundation Apple launches the iPhone 16E 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.

• 0:03David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of intra-protocol competition. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am once again attempting to learn how to do a Rubik's Cube. So during the pandemic, the two weirdest days I had were the day that I woke up and decided to learn how to juggle, which I successfully did. I'm not going to do it for you now, but I'm like a reasonably good juggler now. And then there was the day that I woke up and decided I was going to learn how to solve a Rubik's Cube and just utterly failed. And so now I have this Rubik's Cube that just sits here on my desk and I fidget with it during meetings. I like it for that, but mostly it just taunts me because it is unsolved and I don't know how to solve it. So I have a bunch of YouTube videos. I have a webpage that is just step-by-step instructions. I'm realizing this is less like a creative endeavor and more just sort of memorizing

• 0:48David Pierce?

  an algorithm, but I kind of like that. I'm ready for that. I'm going to try it. It's going to be great. I'll update you next week, see if I actually pull this off. That is not what we're here to do on the show today. We're going to do two things today. First, we're going to talk to Andy Hawkins about what's going on in the car world because right now it seems like EVs are kind of going away and robot taxis are suddenly back. So we're going to talk about both those things. Then we're going to talk to Evan Perdomo, who is one of the people overseeing the Activity Pub protocol. We're going to talk about Blue Sky and Threads and Mastodon and the whole world of social networking right now and where we're headed this year. We also have a really fun hotline question about the iPhone 16e with some of the thoughts that we've heard from all of you since we talked about it on Friday.

• 1:31David Pierce?

  Lots to do, lots to talk about, but the first step in my Rubik's Cube, as I understand it, is to get one side solved. So I'm going to go do that and we will be right back. This is The Vergecast. See you in a sec.

• 1:43Speaker 01

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

• 1:52Speaker 02

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

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Cut the bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 2:44Speaker 04

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Whether it's hot yoga, over 100 degree weather, or too much sun. Gator Light, with a specialized blend of five electrolytes, was scientifically designed to help move fluids into the body faster for rapid rehydration. Shop now at retailers nationwide. Gator Light: hydrates faster than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 3:15David Pierce?

  Welcome back. I managed to get six out of nine blue things in the right place during the break. I don't think that's very good, but it feels like a start. I will solve this thing if it kills me. Anyway, let's just get into it. First up, we're going to talk to Andy Hawkins, because following the transportation news the last few weeks, there's this strange momentum shift happening. On the one hand, electric vehicles, which I think have been not on the decline, but kind of out of fashion for the last little while, feel like they're falling further and further out of fashion really quickly, and that seems odd to me. Then, on the flip side, you have companies like Uber and Lyft making a big deal out of robotaxis again, like it's a decade ago, and we're all pretending that robotaxis are going to be a thing.

• 3:59David Pierce?

  The momentum shift here is just very odd to me, and Andy's been covering it a lot. So I think it's just time to get into it. Let's just call up Andy, see how we're doing. Andy Hawkins, welcome back to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. It's been a minute. I feel like there is both, there's like so much car news that there's never a good moment to be like, let's just take a break and talk about car news. It just like, it just keeps happening. It does. It never stops. So, okay, so I brought you here, I think, for like two and a half reasons. Uh, and the half, we're gonna do as quickly and painlessly as possible, and that is we have to talk about Elon Musk and Tesla.

• 4:35Speaker 05

  Oh, God. All right.

• 4:36David Pierce?

  But we're gonna do that so fast and at the end.

• 4:38Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 4:39David Pierce?

  Uh, I promised at the top of this show that the Tuesday Vergecast is going to be a safe place from now on, and I intend to live up to that as best we can.

• 4:48David Pierce?

  The two things I really want to talk about are sort of this moment in the EV revolution, because we're at sort of an odd moment in the EV landscape, and I just want to feel that out a little bit. And then I want to talk about robo taxis, which are both like closer than ever and still seem like a total pipe dream, and I just need you to make sense of those things to me. Does that all sound good?

• 5:07Speaker 05

  I'm, I'm happy to do that for you.

• 5:08David Pierce?

  Okay, good. Let's start with the EV stuff, and I think this is particularly on my mind because Nikola, this EV truck maker that I think has been somewhere between mostly a fraud and entirely a fraud for a pretty long time now, uh, finally declared bankruptcy, and it just feels like we're at this moment, and we've talked about this a few times on the show, where EVs were going to be the thing, and everybody decided that EVs were going to be the thing, and this, this revolution in electric vehicles just keeps shooting itself in the foot every imaginable way. So where, where are we right now in, in early 2025 in kind of the, the EV universe?

• 5:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I, I think you could say that even the, the biggest supporters and boosters of electric vehicles will, will admit that sales have kind of flatlined. And this is, you know, both in the US and in Europe, but also in, in China as well. And China is sort of like the, the, the kind of the big X factor hanging over all this, and we can get to them in a minute. But, but yeah, it's sort of a, it's a weird place, uh, because we're coming off of four years of an extremely EV-friendly administration in the White House, um, to whatever the opposite of that is now. The most hostile, uh, administration that we've ever seen towards electric vehicles, to the point where a lot of these policy decisions seem to be being made just out of spite, um, is how I would describe it.

• 6:34Speaker 05

  And so on, on top of all of that, you also have, um, a lot of these kind of like mid to low tier startups, um, that came into prominence over the last decade or so, um, on the promise of electrifying, you know, certain segments of the car market. So for Nicholas' case, it was going to be heavy duty trucks. And they were going to be battery powered. There were going to be some hydrogen powered trucks in the mix. And this was going to be sort of a major push to get all the pollution out of the heavy trucking industry. But this is a company that had a lot of problems even before Trump came into office. I mean, like you mentioned, there was allegations of fraud.

• 7:15Speaker 05

  There was a real kind of like dramatic report from this short selling group called Hindenburg that accused Nikola of staging a lot of its sort of hype videos showing its trucks driving out in the desert. One of the videos apparently was shown the truck was just being rolled downhill. It was even operational. And so

• 7:36David Pierce?

  It's kind of amazing, honestly.

• 7:37Speaker 05

  I know.

• 7:38David Pierce?

  It's like, it's really, it's like, not even technically a lie. They're like, we didn't say the car was on. Like, it's just a truck moving. It was really moving. It's just beautiful.

• 7:46Speaker 05

  You just put it in neutral and shoved it down a hill. Just if you assumed that it was driving, that's, you know, that's on you, not on us. And amongst a lot of other things that they had promised, you know, that they had said that they were going to be, this is going to be a billion dollar, multi billions of dollars, this company was going to eventually pull in. And so, yes, they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. And this came, I want to say maybe about seven or eight months after the original founder and first CEO of the company, Trevor Milton, was convicted of these frauds and jailed. He's currently in jail. I believe his sentence was for around four years. And so the company was under new, different leadership at the time. And I think that they had sold around

• 8:28Speaker 05

  like 600, they eventually got to make it, got around to actually making the trucks and they sold around 600 of them. But the, the, the environment and the, the sort of the market environment right now for EVs is just so upended that some of these smaller companies that were kind of like hanging on by a thread already and had sort of other various problems are just going to, you know, it's going to be tough for those companies to hang on and to survive, given sort of these market and policy forces that are sort of weighing down on the industry.

• 8:59David Pierce?

  And is the lesson in all of this, that this really has just been driven by politics and policy in both directions, that the reason everybody got excited about it was because we had a government that got excited about it. And then the reason it's falling apart is because we have a government that wants it to fall apart, that actually, if you just let the market decide, maybe there hasn't really been the EV market everyone sort of assumed was coming?

• 9:22Speaker 05

  I think that that plays a big role, but I think that there's also a lot of responsibility that's on the companies and the automakers themselves, who were the ones that were out there out front, saying that they were going to be, that electrification was the future, and that they were going to be fully electric companies. Like you got companies like GM, which you know, is a huge global automaker, makes Cadillac and Chevy and Buick and all of these major brands. And they said that they were going to be zero emission by 2030, that there was, you know, there was no equivocating about this decision. And all of the other automakers basically said something similar. Ford said that it was going to be zero emission and EV

• 10:03Speaker 05

  only in Europe by 2030. Mercedes said it, BMW, all of these major companies coming out and saying, you know, gas is the past and electric is the future. And they were fully convinced that they were going to be able to be selling these cars hand over fist, and that customers were just going to eat it up, that they were going to love the experience of driving EVs, that they were going to love the ownership experience. The only problem is that the prices didn't really match what the expectations were, that they were selling a lot of cars that were in the luxury segment at first, and then you got into like the heavy trucks, like your Hummers, and your Ford F-150 Lightnings, and your Chevy Silverados. And these are giant, heavy vehicles with big, heavy batteries, that yeah, they have

• 10:48Speaker 05

  some pretty decent range, over 300 miles, but the expense associated with getting these batteries in these vehicles was just so much, that customers just sort of balked at the prices that they were seeing. That, you know, you could buy a gas-powered F-150 for around $30,000, $40,000 at the base model, why would you spend 70, 80 grand on an electric version of that? Yeah, you know, and when you start towing stuff and doing truck stuff with it, all of a sudden that range, that precious range starts to, starts to drop precipitously. So it was, I think, a misstep on the part of the industry to prioritize the luxury and the, the heavy EV, heavy truck and SUV, assuming that customer preferences

• 11:31Speaker 05

  in the gas market were going to carry over to the electric market. And then you had all of these sort of EV favorable policies from the Biden administration that were instrumental in getting all these factories spun up and getting a lot of regionalization, companies bringing the production to the US from overseas. It had a big effort in that and also funding the EV charging picture, which is another thing altogether. But seeing now how quickly all of that kind of stuff can be unwound and unspooled by the president administration, I think is giving a lot of these companies pause about sort of like banking too much on this certain technology when perhaps the customers aren't there and then the government help is not going to be there as well.

• 12:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, you wrote this great story a couple of weeks ago about Ford that had, and I don't think I told you this at the time, but it had my favorite Verge headline of like the last 12 months that I feel like also like perfectly summed up the EV market. The headline is Ford lost $5 billion on EVs in 2024, teases new models. Which just to me, it just perfectly sums up the whole thing. And then there was, there was news, I think around the same time as that, that VW was like, no, no, we're actually going to do the $20,000 EV that we've been promising that everybody holds up as this like mythical thing that someday when somebody does that, it'll change everything. These companies at some point should just look at themselves and be like, never mind, this didn't work, maybe it'll work someday, we'll like leave a team working on it over

• 13:00David Pierce?

  there. Can they just not help themselves at this point? Like, why, why can't these companies quit EVs, given that right now, if you're just being pragmatic, like if you're in pure shareholder value mode, it seems like the clear, obvious thing to do is spend a lot less time thinking about electric cars.

• 13:18Speaker 05

  I think fear is playing a big role in, in sort of why it is that they are not just giving up entirely. I think there is like an aspect of it that a lot of them do still believe that EVs are the future and that this is the right technology to be betting all of the money in the companies on, that, you know, eventually we'll get to a point where we can bring battery costs down and EV charging infrastructure will get up to speed and will become something that you can actually rely on and that the prices will get right and the, the form factor will be spot on. And obviously you can have your cake and eat it too, because this will be an environmentally, more environmentally friendly. Technology to bet on zero emission.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  If you can find a way to recycle the batteries and get this sort of supply chain built up that will encourage people that this is actually the technology of the future, that they will actually get there. And then there's the fear aspect, which is fear of China and Chinese EVs. And we're already sort of starting to see the effect, less so in the US, but definitely in Europe, where, you know, Germany, this, you know, country that is, has this storied auto sector with, you know, Mercedes and BMW and Audi and Volkswagen and all of these, you know, sort of major legacy brands are just, you know, in a free fall at the moment because of competition from China. The Chinese companies like BYD and Neo and Geely and others are just flooding the market

• 14:47Speaker 05

  with these cheap, affordable, and honestly, pretty fucking cool EVs that like everyone that I've read, sources that I trust that have driven these cars and seen them up close and been to China and toured the factories and tested the vehicles have said, this is, they cracked the code. Like, you know, say what you will about government subsidies and, you know, the Chinese government is got its thumb on the scale and is potentially, you know, cheating a little bit in terms of like how much money they're pouring into the industry. But it's certainly, you know, it's not coming at the expense of like good, fun cars to drive and decent technology.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  So that, you know, there are certain vehicles that are, you know, in the 12, $13,000 range that if you had a vehicle like that available here in the US, like it would just eat Ford and GM's lunch. Like, there's just no question. And Ford, Ford CEO Jim Farley has, you know, he had a Xiaomi EV last year that he drove around for like a couple of months, I think. And he saw like the demise of his own company, like basically in the future while driving this vehicle, that it was just such an impressive experience that he's like, there's, we have to catch up to these guys because they have beat us. They've been at this for much longer than we have and they have figured out a way to bring all the costs in line and.

• 16:09Speaker 05

  And come up with these with these cars that are just so technologically and design wise above the rest. So I think that the rest of the industry, the Europeans and the in the in the big three and here in the US have really no choice. If they don't continue to pursue and like it may be like, you know, the Trump administration puts in some policies in place that will like actively make it like detrimental to their business to produce EVs, which I could see happening. They will have really no choice to just keep pursuing and keep trying to like, you know, throw everything that they've got at this problem because otherwise it's it's literally their own futures that are at stake.

• 16:47David Pierce?

  Interesting. Okay. I think the China piece of it, I think I have been underrating in all of this because I keep looking at this thinking, okay, the the first mover advantage of this already happened, right? Like Tesla did that. And I think has pretty much ridden out its entire advantage on that front by being so far out in front of everybody else. Now we're at a point where it's like, okay, if this isn't going mainstream tomorrow, what's actually the harm in waiting? And the harm in waiting is that when it goes mainstream, China will have already won. That we will, we will be so far behind at that point that it will just like China, it's it seems like is just sitting there waiting to flood the market the minute the market is ready for it to do so. And that's pretty scary if you're if you're Volkswagen.

• 17:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was it was it was crazy. So I was in Brazil, visiting some friends last year. And, you know, at first, you know, I saw like a lot of like Peugeot and Renault and like a lot of these like European brands out on the road. And then eventually I started to notice that like, most of the cars that I saw, and we were taking Ubers and, you know, rideshare and all that kind of stuff. And they were all Chinese EVs. They were BYD, they were Neo. And it was just like, it was incredible. How just like overnight, apparently, like had come in and just like dominated, you know, these markets like like Brazil and others. And I think like, yeah, I think it's like, it's certainly the case that you can slap tariffs on every single one. And Biden has done that. And now Trump's talking about

• 18:10Speaker 05

  doing the same or one upping and trying to make it sort of financially prohibitive for these Chinese companies. But the cars are so inexpensive and so cheap. That they literally can absorb the cost of a tariff and still come into the market. Like, I don't see how you can eventually stop that. And that's something that I think a lot of these companies are in the US are deeply afraid of.

• 18:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, a $12,000 car plus a 25% tariff is still gonna win the price wars in a lot of these cases.

• 18:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 18:40David Pierce?

  That's really interesting. Uh, okay, and so on the, on the other hand, as we talk about, you know, things happening sort of slowly and all at once and maybe not, and going back and forth a million times. Robo taxis, uh, which kind of seemed to be having another moment. Uh, I, I think Joanna Stern on the show at the end of last year predicted that this was going to be kind of the year of Waymo. Seems like that might be kind of coming true, but also like Lyft and Uber are back in this game. Like, it's like it's 2016 all over again in the robo taxi world. What is happening here?

• 19:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a, it's a weird situation because I think what you've seen is that the, the major automakers, you know, like a good seven, eight years ago were like, oh, we need to be all in on part, you know, on autonomous vehicles, the same way that they, you know, missed the boat on EVs.

• 19:29David Pierce?

  It was gonna be by 2020. They were all like, by 2020, we'll be robo taxiing everywhere.

• 19:33Speaker 05

  It was always by 2020, and I seem to recall 2020 being the kind of a different year.

• 19:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, I, I had a real different experience. I didn't take other taxis very much in 2020, so I guess that's something.

• 19:42Speaker 05

  People were buying a lot of e-bikes and scooters and not so much robo taxis. But yeah, so they were, they were all in on automation. They were like, this is gonna be us. We're gonna be the future of, of the auto industry is gonna be full autonomy. And now they are like, oh, this is just taking too long and it's, it's really expensive, actually. And, um, uh, our business is really precarious at this moment, so we cannot be so deeply invested in, in, uh, in these sort of like long-term, like, hyper-expensive science experiments. So yeah, just recently you had GM completely divesting itself from Cruise. And that was after, you know, Cruise having a pretty rough year, um, a rough couple of years because of some of, uh,

• 20:24Speaker 05

  You know, its cars were blocking traffic and were getting on people's nerves in San Francisco. And then, you know, a lady got ran over and that was bad.

• 20:33David Pierce?

  On that one, by the way, do you, do you read the whole Cruise thing as GM wanting out of the robotaxi business and deciding that that whole idea was just not what it wanted? Or is that like a specific Cruise problem?

• 20:46Speaker 05

  Oh, no. Yeah, it's, it's the, I would say it's, it's a little bit of both. It was, it was a specific Cruise problem. Cruise was known to be sort of pushing the envelope and going a bit too aggressive.

• 20:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:56Speaker 05

  Um, as compared to like Waymo and others, they were trying to like get, you know, up to speed and, and, and compete and they were sort of, you know, um, not being as buttoned up and safe, which is like with a, with a autonomous vehicle operation, you really have to be as cautious and conservative as you possibly can. And that's just wasn't the ethos at Cruise. They were really trying to, um, just they were, they were pushing the envelope.

• 21:22David Pierce?

  Yeah. Real like move fast and break things, which is not a good idea in robotaxis.

• 21:26Speaker 05

  The move fast and break thing ethos was just, yeah, it was at, at odds with the, uh, the safety element and, um, they really kind of, um, screwed, screwed themselves over with that one. Uh, but then also, yeah, that was sort of like the big, the big message when GM said that they were going to be getting out of Cruise was that, you know, this was not a part of our core business, uh, which is hilarious because, you know, seven, eight years ago, GM said its core business was going to be zero, zero deaths, zero emissions. Um, all this stuff that they were, they were sort of like, uh, betting the company on the future of being, you know, sort of like no more car crashes, no more, uh, traffic fatalities and also no more emissions. So autonomy and electrification. Um, and now actually GM's doing pretty good with EVs, um, but.

• 22:08David Pierce?

  GM just like working backwards from a cool slogan was, was a, an interesting move.

• 22:14Speaker 05

  Um, so, so yeah, so they, so they divested and Cruise is dead now. Um, they absorbed some of the engineers into their super Cruise division, which is like their partial automation, their hands off driving assist feature. Um, and a lot of these companies now are going all in on like this sort of, uh, level three, like hands off, eyes off, driving on highways or in like traffic situations. Um, and that's, you know, a huge bag of worms. I mean, like there's been so many safety assessments that show that, that, that kind of stuff is extremely dangerous. Um, so I. I don't want to say that like there's, you know, there's a whole raft of liability concerns that are going to be coming up, I think, in smashing into these companies. No, no pun intended with that, but there is a lot of potential there as well.

• 22:58Speaker 05

  Obviously, it was short-term revenue, like you can sell options to customers that you have. So really, that kind of just leaves Waymo all alone in the robotaxi space. And they're light years ahead of all the rest of the competition. Like Zooks is still just sort of in beta phase and like Las Vegas and some others. That's Amazon's robotaxi company. And there's obviously some Chinese robotaxi companies that are operating Baidu and others in their country. So it seems like really Waymo is way ahead of the rest of the competition and they've, you know, they've got operations in San Francisco and Phoenix and Los Angeles. And this year they're launching in Austin and Atlanta. And the interesting thing about those launches is that they're going to be done exclusively with Uber.

• 23:43Speaker 05

  So instead of using the Waymo app where you've done in previous markets, you'll open up your Uber and potentially you'll get paired with a human driver or maybe a robot Waymo car will be the one to come and pick you up in those, in those two cities. So I think that that's why you hear, you've been hearing a lot about, about robotaxis. But also it's interesting because, you know, you have now Uber that is very much a part of the conversation. Lyft as well, but Uber obviously is the one that's really trying to make itself like the, like the agnostic platform that will take anybody's autonomous vehicle. So whether it's Waymo or some of these other companies like AV Ride and some of the other ones that are putting out like sidewalk robots for Uber Eats deliveries and others, Uber

• 24:26Speaker 05

  just wants to be like the, like the neutral party that is just like, we'll, we'll take anyone's robot. You got a robot, put it on our platform, we'll take your robot, we'll, we'll, we'll give it, we'll send it out to a customer and we'll see how, how it works.

• 24:38David Pierce?

  Which strikes me as a real lesson learned from the last time around, right? Like the, the first time everybody thought robotaxis were right around the corner, all these companies were spending money they didn't have to own the technology themselves, right? You had Travis Kalanick being like, we are fundamentally going to be a self-driving company. It was like, that was the-

• 24:55Speaker 05

  Well, it was like an existential-

• 24:57David Pierce?

  Right.

• 24:57Speaker 05

  -thing for him. He was like, we, we won't exist if we don't design the technology ourselves. And then they did that and they killed somebody and they were like, oh, wait, no. We changed our minds.

• 25:09David Pierce?

  We want to be a different thing. And I think, I mean, it's just been interesting to me, especially, like you said, watching Uber and Lyft get back into this, because those companies were so wrong a decade ago and were so badly burned by how wrong they were and invested incorrectly so heavily in those directions for so long that I think it really set them back. And so to see them now come back and it was like, it was Lyft saying again, like Lyft is a pretty careful company at this point. And so for Lyft to come out and be like, robotaxis, y'all, like, we're, we're ready, we're doing it. Was just so interesting to me. This company is like finally making money for the first time in its history. And they're like, so robotaxis? It's like, there must be something here.

• 25:50Speaker 05

  It's, I think it's, it's a couple of things. So I think for, uh, one, it's that Uber and Lyft are now sort of like newly profitable. Uber is profitable. Lyft is, it had just had, it's like its first profitable year, their cash flow positive. They finally, after like over a decade and a half have, have figured out how to make money off of, off of rideshare. And so they've got like, you know, they, they're kind of like, they're feeling themselves a little bit, I think, in one respect. And then the other respect is, I think, is, is, is the, is the market and, and investors are really kind of pushing them towards this because every time Waymo makes a, some sort of, you know, iterative announcement about like going into a new market or a new city, saying like, we're going to be in Miami or we're going to be in this city.

• 26:32Speaker 05

  You see that, that reflected in Uber's share price, like Uber's stock starts to go down a little bit. So Uber feels a little bit like pressure to pair up with these companies as a way to keep them close to them so that they can be part of this conversation. They can be part of sort of how this technology rolls out. If they're the ones that are sort of like at the front line of being in between the customer and the robotaxi, they see that as like a benefit to them, that they, they get like, sort of like the positive vibe, you know, sort of like ricochet off of, you know, the, the experience of riding in a Waymo, like, oh, this is so fun. I get to, you know, control my music and there's nobody in the front seat and it's. It's so unique and different and wow. And, you know, maybe you associate that all 100% with Waymo, but maybe you get like, you know,

• 27:16Speaker 05

  a little bit, a little nudge to Uber as well. And so Uber gets something out of that. So.

• 27:22David Pierce?

  So Waymo is really like the, the boogeyman of this whole industry. Like everybody who's doing any of this is just watching Waymo essentially have unlimited time and money and resources to do this. And is, I assume anyone else working on any part of this is petrified of what's going on at Waymo.

• 27:37Speaker 05

  And yet they like operate at a like fraction of a fraction of the levels that Uber does. Like Waymo's got like less than a thousand cars on the road today.

• 27:46David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting. I didn't realize that.

• 27:47Speaker 05

  And Uber is doing like, just recently did like, it's like a one millionth concurrent ride. Like it's like, wow, all over the world.

• 27:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 05

  It's taken in taxi cabs now. It's, you know, it's like fully eaten the rideshare and like the, the, the vehicle transportation market. And, and Uber is just like so small. It's like, it boggles my mind somewhat too, because like, it's got like, it's got great, you know, sort of like brand value in the terms of like, yeah, people like associate, are starting to like, you know, like fully associate, like a Waymo has become like the Xerox or like the Kleenex of like robot taxis. And that, that there's, there is certainly value involved in that. But yeah, given how, like how few cities are actually, and how slowly and conservatively, which they have to, they have to do that because they don't want to fall into the same pitfalls as Cruise or as Uber did.

• 28:40David Pierce?

  They can also afford to importantly.

• 28:42Speaker 05

  And they, I mean, maybe, I mean, like if you've seen.

• 28:47David Pierce?

  Also that certainly has the money is all I mean.

• 28:48Speaker 05

  If you've seen like the other bets and stuff like that, like, you know, where they list like the losses there, like it's not, it's not looking good. Like they're still losing hundreds of millions of dollars on this project.

• 28:58David Pierce?

  Right. But they're, they're, they're, I suppose at risk of running out of corporate patience.

• 29:03Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 29:03David Pierce?

  But they're not at risk of running out of money. That's really all.

• 29:05Speaker 05

  It's a very different situation than Cruise with GM where GM was just like, our margins are so incredibly tight that we just cannot continue to fund this thing. Whereas Alphabet's like, sure, five more billion dollars for the next five years. Sure. Why not?

• 29:17David Pierce?

  Eight minutes of running Google, like it'll take five. Yeah.

• 29:19Speaker 05

  So yeah, it is. And I think like one could see the same with Amazon too, right? Like Amazon can continue to fund like money losing operation like Zooks for us, which like Zooks is an interesting player because we just had a piece that ran where our freelancer, Abigail Bassett, wrote in one in Las Vegas during CES. They they're taking a different tack. They're like, it's actually purpose-built vehicles. It's these vehicles that look kind of like weird toaster-shaped things and they don't have, they don't have pedals and they don't have steering wheels and you sort of like sit on these bench seats facing each other.

• 29:49David Pierce?

  It's like the foursome seat on a train that faces each other made into a vehicle.

• 29:54Speaker 05

  Which are always the worst seats on the train. Like, nobody ever wants to, like, when your knees bump up against the other person's knees and it's like, ah.

• 30:01David Pierce?

  Everybody wants that. Yeah, perfect.

• 30:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, so that's what Zooks is going for. And that was interestingly what Cruise was also going for at first until everything fell apart for them. So it's interesting because, you know, and Waymo's got, you know, its future platforms. They've got a deal with Geely to make these Zeeker vehicles, but that could get seriously compromised by the Chinese tariffs. They've got deals with Hyundai to use Hyundai's Ioniq 5 as a vehicle. So there, you know, there's, everyone's got, you know, is putting their, placing their bets. And I think interestingly, Waymo, being the one so far out ahead on the technology, is still like, we need regular cars that we can just retrofit. We're not ready to go like the purpose-built direction quite yet, which I think is quite telling.

• 30:44David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay. All right. Before I let you go, let's do 90 seconds on Tesla because I think a lot of this, like a lot of everything we've talked about is Tesla is wrapped up in.

• 30:57David Pierce?

  But it's, the company's in an odd place, right? The the last quarter was fine, but not great. Sales are down year over the year for the first time in forever, maybe ever. Was it ever?

• 31:07Speaker 05

  I think it's like an over a decade, basically. It's like a long time. Since they've been profitable. Yeah, it's the first time.

• 31:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I think also Teslas have been sort of political statements in a variety of ways for a long time now, but that has really escalated. Like, what's your read on sort of the the market vibes around Tesla right now? How, what's going on inside that company?

• 31:27Speaker 05

  So, yeah, I mean, like, stock price-wise, it's not doing too great. It's definitely down, I think, this year, year over year. And, yeah, as you mentioned, sales, sales are down and the vibes are off. You could say, I mean, I feel like I've been like writing the same story for like five, six years now about the vibes being off at Tesla. But now the vibes are seriously off and that's obviously due entirely to Elon Musk and his newfound prominence as, you know, as Trump's hatchet guy. So it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's like, you know, you once had, it was a brand that was once associated with like California liberals and as a, as sort of like a statement about like what you thought about like the environment and climate change and the future and technology.

• 32:10Speaker 05

  And, uh, and now it's like fully like a MAGA brand, but it's not though, because MAGA people will not buy Teslas and they're not interested in buying Teslas. They still like their trucks and their SUVs. Um, so it's in a very, leave sort of Tesla, the, the company in like a very weird limbo space right now where, um, you know, uh, this, it's, uh, it's sort of like unsure of what's gonna, what it's gonna take in order to, um, to sort of like reset the narrative, I guess. And I, I think one of the things is the Cybercab, which, um, came out last year. Um, and Musk has said that it's gonna, you know, sort of, um, start doing robot taxi rides in Austin, uh, starting this summer. Right. Big year for Austin and robot taxis. Yeah, it does seem that way.

• 32:51Speaker 05

  Um, but, you know, Tesla's approach to autonomy, very different than Waymo, you know, they, um, have been, it's a camera only system, you know, it relies on its full self-driving hardware and software. And there's a lot of concerns about sort of like the safety of that technology. Tesla famously a company that does not like to accept liability for crashes that occur, um, with its vehicles. That's gonna be a really interesting thing to watch going forward as, as they start to take drivers out from behind the steering wheel and offer, uh, rides to people as part of like a, a fleet service. Uh, very different business for them. It, it'll be really interesting to see how, how they navigate that. Um, and then you've got like this promise for, um, uh, this next gen platform or this more mass market vehicle. Um, you know, they've, there's been talk about, you know, a model two.

• 33:36Speaker 05

  Now it seems like that's, that's being replaced by something called the model Q. It's, it's unclear exactly. What that's going to look like if it's just like a Model 3 or a Model Y, that's like a little bit cheaper and a little bit more, less, less kind of like technologically advanced.

• 33:52David Pierce?

  A little more car-ish.

• 33:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, than like the current models.

• 33:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:56Speaker 05

  So it's, we're, it's really unclear and, and like the company is only sort of vaguely referenced, you know, keeps referencing like this new model that's going to be coming out sometime this year. So that's going to be an opportunity for them also to kind of like reset things around, you know, affordability and availability. But yeah, as long as like Musk is out there, you know, throwing his salutes and, and being sort of like the very public face of like running roughshod over the government and taking people's Medicaid away from them. I, I'm not, I'm not too, too convinced that like Tesla's act, it's, it's going to take more than just like a, a new vehicle or a new, a new service to, to really kind of like reset the conversation around this company.

• 34:40David Pierce?

  Fair enough. All right, Andy, thank you as always. You and I this summer are going to go to Austin and we're going to ride every robot taxi we can find.

• 34:47Speaker 05

  Ooh, let's do it.

• 34:47David Pierce?

  And we're going to build a Vergecast for it. I can't wait.

• 34:49Speaker 05

  I love it. That's a great idea. Let's do it. I'm all about it.

• 34:52David Pierce?

  Thanks, buddy.

• 34:52Speaker 05

  Thanks, man.

• 34:54David Pierce?

  All right, we got to take a quick break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about social. We'll be right back.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline? That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard, confessions.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Cut the bull spend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 36:04Speaker 06

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body. With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade, hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 36:35David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Now I want to talk about Activity Pub, because I cannot help myself from talking about the Fediverse and the open social web and all of the different ways that we might interact with each other. Evan Prodromou is a person I've talked to before about this stuff, because he is one of the people actually in charge of maintaining the Activity Pub protocol that underpins Mastodon and Flipboard Surf and a lot of this Fediverse stuff that we've been talking about for the last couple of years. They're not quite the same, the Fediverse and Activity Pub, but a lot of what's happening on the Fediverse is happening because of Activity Pub. It's what Threads is invested in, it's what Medium has been working on, it's what Tumblr and WordPress are going to.

• 37:17David Pierce?

  This is kind of the protocol, the underlying infrastructure that might make all of this work. And Evan is not only in charge of helping make sure that the protocol works, he's trying to convince the world to use it. So I figured it'd be a fun time to catch up with him, see how all of it's going, and see where this is headed. Let's get into it. I think the place I want to start is sort of in the, in the deep tech of Activity Pub. And we're going, we're going to sort of build out from the base of the technology out into taking over the world. Oh, boy.

• 37:52David Pierce?

  You're, one of the things that you spend your time on is thinking about what this protocol is and how it's supposed to work. And what is going on? What is new with Activity Pub? How is the protocol work going at like the deepest level these days?

• 38:05Speaker 07

  Well, there is a lot that's new happening with Activity Pub. So just to like, you know, pull back for a second. Activity Pub is the protocol that lets the network of independent heterogeneous social platforms that we call the Fediverse talk to each other. So it is the streams of activities and contents that go from one social platform to the other. And when it was initially developed, it was developed for kind of a very straightforward idea of social networking, right? I create an image or some text.

• 38:47Speaker 07

  You reply to it, maybe like it or share it. We had a fairly limited number of interesting objects and activities that you could share across this network.

• 39:00David Pierce?

  So actually, can I pause you on that really fast?

• 39:01Speaker 07

  Go ahead.

• 39:02David Pierce?

  This is a thing I've always wondered about Activity Pub and have never asked somebody, and you're the perfect person to ask this question. That focus, the idea that this, this thing should be essentially about social networking in a, in a sort of Twitter posts kind of way.

• 39:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 39:19David Pierce?

  Was that intentional? Like, was there, was there a meeting at the very beginning that was like, let's keep this thing simple and focused and straightforward? Because now it's like, you can look at Activity Pub and sort of make it anything. And I think there are people who kind of want to make it anything, and I want to talk about that. But like, how deliberate was the idea that it's like, let's keep this in a sort of box that we understand on the internet?

• 39:40Speaker 07

  I, I think there's two sides to it, right? I think we wanted to at least be able to cover that very simple idea of like, you know, I post a lot of tweets and people can reply and like them. But we wanted to also make it extensible so we could cover different kinds of social interactions.

• 40:00David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 40:00Speaker 07

  Right? And things that have changed, you know, in the time since Activity Pub was created are things like stories that we see in Snap or Instagram or Facebook or other kinds of Of interactions, um, geosocial interactions like, um, Swarm or Foursquare is a, is another one, being able to do check-ins. And so there are new kinds of interactions, um, that we send over that wire now, but it's the same wire and it's the same, uh, kind of packets. We've just like made an extensibility mechanism that makes it possible to define new kinds of packets.

• 40:45David Pierce?

  Okay. And in theory, as long as you can do one of those things well and reliably across that wire, building new ones shouldn't be as hard. Like you don't have to reinvent every wheel every time.

• 40:56Speaker 07

  Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah. So the idea is that you should be like 95% of the way there. And if you want to start defining new kinds of interactions, you don't have to start from the ground up. You can start at this very high level of like social interactions.

• 41:11David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay. That's a good answer. So I, I derailed you from talking about what's, what's been going on recently.

• 41:16Speaker 07

  Yeah. So there are quite a few interesting things going on, uh, recently. I, I realize that, um, these can be, um, exciting for me, not necessarily exciting for everyone in the world. One of the ones that's, um, that was recently announced is that Mastodon and other services are going to be supporting quote posts, right? So quote tweet like posts.

• 41:41David Pierce?

  Slightly controversial decision.

• 41:43Speaker 07

  Slightly controversial, right? A very interesting thing. And one of the things that, you know, the like Fediverse can be kind of Amish in the way that it approaches technology sometimes, right? Where it's like, hey, we're considering this new type of interaction. Is this actually good for our community, for our social benefits? So there were some concern about quote posts, whether they would be primarily for like, Dunking and holding people up to ridicule. And I think that we've kind of coalesced around some ideas about quote posts that would give the quoted person some control in how that they are talked about. Interesting. Okay.

• 42:25Speaker 07

  And so I think that's a nice, like, kind of compromise that's come up there. So that's one that's really interesting. Well, it's interesting because it's going to have kind of broad use. Yeah. But the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, which is the organization that established the Activity Pub standard, is working on a number of new types of interaction. So one that's very important is end-to-end encrypted messaging. End-to-end encrypted messaging has become the default for DMs across systems. So if you use Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or Signal, those are all end-to-end encrypted

• 43:10Speaker 07

  from my phone to your phone. I can read it on my phone. You can read it on your phone. Nobody in between can read it. Right. And that is the type of topology that we want to see with end-to-end encrypted DMs in the Fediverse also. So that's some work that started middle of last year. We're heading into doing like first implementations and definitions around it. And that's a really exciting step because it lets people have a level of interaction and trust that they wouldn't otherwise have, right? Right. People are starting off conversations on the Fediverse and moving to like a Signal or a WhatsApp. And this would let them kind of have their DM interface happen right there.

• 43:56Speaker 07

  I mentioned geosocial work, right? That's something that has, kind of like in the early 2010s, was very exciting. Yeah. And it was a An area of sociality that kind of fell by the wayside. You know, I think only like I still use Swarm. I use it all the time, but you know, not a lot of other folks do. We do check-ins on Facebook, but it's not as big a deal as it once was. But there's some fun exploration of it going on at the W3C. So there's a task force that's just focused on geosocial work, doing check-ins, collecting, you know, information around a geographical area.

• 44:38Speaker 07

  Another area that's, that's being explored right now is groups. So it's been a little tough to do. Facebook style groups are such an important part about how, how people have social interactions. You know, Facebook, specifically Facebook groups.

• 44:57David Pierce?

  I was gonna say, it's the reason everyone I know is still on Facebook. Like it is, it is the single stickiest thing about the stickiest app in the world. Like it's, it's wild. It's really true.

• 45:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. And people really love working with them. You get other kinds of groups, so like Reddit, Reddit subs, subreddits. And the idea is to have that kind of community process that crosses different social platforms. So people from Mastodon, from Threads, from Flipboard, from WordPress can all be in the same group, right? And still participating together, which is a really cool, interesting part, right? Like your choice of platform doesn't necessarily dictate which groups that you can be part of. And so that, that work has started in December of last year and we're starting to spec that out.

• 45:49Speaker 07

  The Activity Pub spec actually included some group information in it. So, but there haven't been a lot of implementations, so getting to. Better definition and more implementations is kind of the big step there.

• 46:03David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay, that's more stuff than I thought you were gonna say. I think, like, truthfully, I think one of the things I expected you to say is, uh, we are in a sort of happy, optimistic sounding maintenance mode. Like, we just have to keep hardening this thing and make it work and make sure it supports all the things that it needs to. And like, this is new and it's growing really fast. And, uh, but you're out here being like, we're just attaching new stuff to this all the time. Like, that's a, it's a, it's a different kind of headspace.

• 46:27Speaker 07

  There is, I mean, those are some of the interesting parts of what's happening in terms of like new functionality, new stuff happening. I think there are other parts that are, um, also like coming up that are challenging, that we're kind of dealing with as, as we go. Um, last, you know, last year was really the year that we started incorporating threads into the Fediverse, threads being the big meta product that's, you know, shot up in terms, I think there are over 300 million people, 325, something like that. Um, and that has put a lot of pressure on the rest of the Fediverse to be able to encompass having such a big node. Um, largely it's worked

• 47:11Speaker 07

  pretty well because of the way that Activity Pub is, is defined. You make your subscriptions to a person, not a service. So if I follow POTUS at Threads, uh, which was a really great idea a few months ago, and is less interesting now, but like, if I follow POTUS at Threads, I'm able to get just that one person's posts.

• 47:34David Pierce?

  You don't have to digest the whole Threads database every time you want to pull for...

• 47:38Speaker 07

  I'm not get, yeah, exactly. Which is just too much for a little Mastodon server running on somebody's Raspberry Pi. So we're able to kind of make this, make this work pretty well. I think the other thing, and, um, this has been more about implementation than about standards, has been, uh, the growth of Blue Sky, right? So Blue Sky really, um, after the election in, in November, has had this explosive growth. It is, Blue Sky is part of the Fediverse, right? It is, uh, linked through a two-way bridge into the Activity Pub world. So there's a wonderful bridge that lets you... Follow people on Blue Sky, like what they post, respond to them, et cetera.

• 48:22Speaker 07

  It's a very, it very much puts them on an equal footing with other parts of the Fediverse.

• 48:27David Pierce?

  Let's talk about that, actually, before we, I was gonna ask you about Blue Sky later, but.

• 48:31Speaker 07

  No problem.

• 48:31David Pierce?

  But no, we can, we can talk about it now, because I think it's, it's, it's a really interesting part of this story, because I knew you were gonna say it's terrific and we're, everybody's so happy and it's all great, but like, there is a real world in which Blue Sky and the, the at protocol are like a threat competitor, whatever you wanna call it, to what Activity Pub is trying to do. And I think i- in a sense of like, open standards are better and we're trying to help everybody understand that. I get that we're in sort of a rising tide lifts all boats moment, but the idea that I have to build sort of brittle software on top of brittle software on top of brittle software to get all of this to work together.

• 49:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 49:11David Pierce?

  Seems like not the answer anybody is looking for here. So like, and especially Threads is gonna continue to work, it seems. I find Threads personally less interesting than I used to, but it's, it's, it's a booming platform. Blue Sky appears to have some real staying power in this space. Is it a long-term problem for you as somebody who A, cares about the space, but B, believes in Activity Pub in particular, that Blue Sky is not directly in that world?

• 49:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, I will, like, I'll be straight on this one. I, I don't wanna be like, too Pollyanna-ish, but, um, you know, they don't maintain the bridge. The bridge is maintained by a nonprofit called A New Social, who are great guys, Ryan Barrett and Anujat, and they're doing really great work, but they aren't supported by Blue Sky, right? And the Blue Sky Corporation is really focused on their own network. They're not spending a lot of time engaging with the rest of the Fediverse, and that's okay. So I find it frustrating that Blue Sky exists, that there is an AT Proto, that it is kind of set up

• 50:20Speaker 07

  as a competitor to Activity Pub, but in a lot of ways, it's not a direct competitor. If I was gonna say how I understand AT Proto, it's really a way to do. Say a Facebook platform or Twitter platform on a distributed blockchain-like storage system. So if you're familiar with like IPFS or some of the peer-to-peer networks, right? Unlike Activity Pub, which has this like connections between different independent services that have their own internal storage, they do their own, you know, structures, UIs,

• 51:04Speaker 07

  et cetera. Blue Sky is really about having this kind of one big network and then you can build clients or filtering, et cetera, that works on it. So all of which is to say, like, I don't see a Tumblr moving to use AT Proto and Blue Sky, right?

• 51:23David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 51:24Speaker 07

  Tumblr is an existing network that has 100 million people on it and they are working to implement Activity Pub because that gives them a chance to connect to the rest of this Fediverse and still maintain their independence. Kind of Tumblr works its own way, right? And they've got that kind of maintenance. Does that make sense? I, I think that Blue Sky like has some opportunities to pick up like third-party developers. There are some interesting apps that are built, being built on top of that network and don't want to like undercut that entirely. But at the same time, I don't think it represents the same kind of networking between independent platforms that Activity Pub does.

• 52:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, that, that idea of the not needing to build a social graph just to build an app, I think is incredibly exciting. And it's a thing I hear from app developers all the time that I'm like, they're like, I don't even have to build a login system. You just, you just come with your Mastodon account and all your friends are already here like that. There's something really powerful in that. What, I assume you're one of the people running around to companies like YouTube and Facebook and others, trying to get the big platforms to understand the value of this. And I think the, the part of me that is less optimistic about the sort of universal takeover of the Fediverse, which I would love to be the case. Thinks that there's really no compelling reason for any of these sort of sufficiently large networks to be part of this.

• 52:55Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 52:56David Pierce?

  How do you feel like it's going with the, you know, the Youtubes and Linkedins and Facebooks of the world?

• 53:01Speaker 07

  Well, like, I can say that, like, we've had some really great, you know, opportunities that are coming up. They're still like, kind of working, working forward. I'm, I think the thing for, say, a Google, right, who are notoriously skeptical about engaging with social networks, right? They, they took like-

• 53:22David Pierce?

  They've been burned a few times.

• 53:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, they've been burnt so much and they're like, never again, right? No more social. Even though they run one of the biggest social platforms, YouTube, in the world, they, they really kind of think of themselves as like, out of social. And being able to say, like, you can have a product in the social space that doesn't have to be a monopoly, doesn't have to own the whole system, right? Another company that's like, famous for this is Apple, who have made like, a few tentative efforts in the social space and kind of, again, got burnt. Apple is great at, you know, deploying cloud services in iCloud, providing great interfaces

• 54:04Speaker 07

  that are easy for people to use, and like, owning the devices and, and user operating systems where they can be incorporated. So like, that is an opportunity, the Fediverse is an opportunity for Apple to get involved in social networks without necessarily having to be like, the one and only social network in the world.

• 54:23David Pierce?

  Right.

• 54:23Speaker 07

  Right?

• 54:23David Pierce?

  Or trying to build Facebook from scratch, which turns out to be pretty hard to do.

• 54:27Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah. You don't have to build for like, 1.2 billion people, you can build for like, one person, and they can engage with all those billions of people, you know, across the Fediverse. And that's the really great part. You can start having value really early on.

• 54:43David Pierce?

  Totally. How, what are you hearing in the, in the startup world? I feel like I've been waiting for a while for there to be kind of the, the thing that turns everybody on to the Fediverse. And it was like, it was gonna be Mastodon and it was gonna be Threads, and I think it still might be Threads, but Threads is going kind of slowly. And I don't want to say haphazardly, but let's just say slowly. And I was gonna say, but I think the lesson of Blue Sky is that actually there's something about the simplicity of that that has been really productive for Blue Sky, right? Like, Blue Sky explains itself much, much faster than the Fediverse does in a way that I think has been really helpful for Blue Sky. Like, maybe, maybe in the course of time, that becomes a limiting factor.

• 55:28David Pierce?

  But it's also like, you, you could just sign up and type in a username and start using Blue Sky in a way that I think in, that's the reason to me to have a killer app in the first place. Is just to like, just to have the thing that gets you in the door.

• 55:40Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 55:41David Pierce?

  Goes a long way. And I don't, maybe that doesn't matter in 20 years, but as somebody who would love everybody to just like, start using it right now, I feel like I want that to exist.

• 55:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that's one of the things that Blue Sky has done so well. Like, if you are a Twitter refugee, right, and you're, you're washing up on the Blue Sky shores, like, it looks very familiar. You know what you're doing, you know? Limitations like on the number of characters or things like that are like, yeah, I, I love this. This is just what I know from Twitter, right? But, you know, I think that if you are a startup who is working on making, you know, the next Foursquare or the next Tinder or whatever it is, and you want to build on top of a, a network where you already know that there are millions of people already participating,

• 56:29Speaker 07

  I think it's harder to build that on top of an AT Proto than it is on top of an Activity Pub, right?

• 56:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 07

  There's just more room to like innovate and build interesting things.

• 56:40David Pierce?

  How are the business conversations going on, on all sides of this? Because one of the things, I mean, you talk about the, uh, interesting feelings of people on Mastodon is that anytime you talk about money. On the Fediverse, people get squirrely. And I think, I think it's because there is something that feels pure about this thing that is being built. And people have seen us go through that before, and then it became corrupted by money. And they're desperate for it not to be corrupted by money. But at some point, for this thing to work, there has to be money in it.

• 57:11David Pierce?

  And I think to some extent, there are, there are obvious ways people make money, right? Like you, you can do lots of things on top of these services. You sell ads, like whatever. But the, to me, the, the biggest challenge is just going to be the convincing everybody involved that there is a business inside of this and that that's okay. Strikes me as maybe one of the hardest parts of sort of evangelizing this whole space.

• 57:33Speaker 07

  You know, I mean, when we talk about like business models for social content, right? I think we have some pretty decent ones that have, you know, been proven through the test of time, right? Ad-supported and algorithmic feeds is like a great example that pretty much, whatever, half of tech runs off of, right? It depending on ad-supported feeds. I think another one that has been super positive for creators, for creative people, has been subscription-based business. So, you know, whether you're a Twitch broadcaster or a Substack publisher,

• 58:17Speaker 07

  you get to like establish these subscriptions and you're kind of maintaining a more direct relationship with your audience and develop and delivering premium content to them based on, you know, that direct relationship. And both of those are really awesome. You know, there are other business models that work, but you know, I think that those are two that seem to work pretty well for different players in this, in the social space. I think the question that comes up, and that's been really hard for people who are engaged in the Fediverse to deal with is, and I'm going to be like biting the hand of some of the

• 59:01Speaker 07

  Networks that have that have supported us so far, but you know, when Twitter moved to an advertising based model, they really clamp down on access to their API, right? And your ability to say resort the feed or filter or take parts out of the feed.

• 59:21David Pierce?

  Because suddenly it's their business to have you on twitter.com. Like it's that's how it happens. Yeah.

• 59:26Speaker 07

  Exactly. They only want you to see things in a certain way and a certain way of addressing it. Same with Facebook, right? So they very much cut back on the ability of third party clients to interact with the Facebook data because they needed to maintain a very specific, you know, way of delivering ads to the to the user. And I think that it's a lot harder to do in a Fediverse structure where, you know, I'm on Tumblr and you're on Threads and Threads pushes an ad into that network and Tumblr throws it away, right? Like, or or my client throws it away because I don't want to see it. You don't have that same control in this kind of network.

• 1:00:09Speaker 07

  So there are other ways to deliver ads, but that idea that like one company is going to control from one end to the other, how the stream of content is delivered and make sure that ads are included. That breaks down in the Fediverse. And I think that that means like, A, it's a little bit, you know, tough for companies that have depended on that business model so far, but B, there's a lot of great opportunities to build new kinds of ad networks in that space, right? If you want to, like, that is something that can happen. And and I think that, you know, I think that there's some real interesting opportunities there.

• 1:00:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, it's very funny, the like, user in me looks at that and is like, well, tough noogies, everybody. Now you have to compete on building great products, not on locking me into your social network. Yeah. Oh, no, how awful. But then the part of me that is like, okay, these companies are full of business people making business decisions, worry is that they just won't try because they know it might lead that way. And they'll have to like actually compete and try hard and do good work forever in order to keep winning. And, uh, boy, I hope they all sign up to do that. But I forever worry about how many are just going to run away from that opportunity because they're like, it's, we're, everybody loves a walled garden right now. This is, this is the thing we've built.

• 1:01:36Speaker 07

  But like, you know, there was a moment in, I'm showing my age here, but like in the mid 90s, where, you know, it was a question of like, oh, is MSN gonna join the internet? Is AOL gonna join the internet? And then at some point, it became a tipping point. And it was like, why would you have any kind of online service that wasn't on the internet? It's meaningless. It doesn't make sense. And I think that will hit that kind of tipping point with the Fediverse too, and social networks.

• 1:02:05David Pierce?

  That's a good comparison. I like that.

• 1:02:06Speaker 07

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:02:07David Pierce?

  And speaking of that, I, I'm gonna let you go here, but this, this will be, let's see, it's 2025, so this will be the third, maybe fourth year in a row that I have spent trying to convince people that this is the year of the Fediverse. Basically since like, since, since 2020, was it 2022, right? When Elon Musk started buying Twitter, it was like, alright, this is it. It's Mastodon, it's Activity Pub, it's the Fediverse. And I feel like what we've gotten instead is like, slow and steady momentum, but not yet the year of the Fediverse. So, so Evan, I ask you, is 2025 the year of the Fediverse? Is this, is this it?

• 1:02:43Speaker 07

  2025 is it, yeah. And let me, let me tell you what I really wanna see happen this year, right? Two, two big things. One thing is seeing increased volume from Threads, right? Threads has been kind of taking baby steps into the Fediverse. And I think we're gonna see like, full-blown two-way interaction from Threads. And I think that, that changes the game.

• 1:03:06David Pierce?

  That would be huge.

• 1:03:07Speaker 07

  And then, you know, I don't know who it's gonna be. I don't have any inside information, but I think we're gonna see another like, multi hundred million person network joining the Fediverse this year. And I think as we start seeing those bigger players come in, it really changes the, changes the, the possibilities for the Fediverse. So those are my two predictions. Let me, let me kind of put those in.

• 1:03:31David Pierce?

  Those are good.

• 1:03:32Speaker 07

  And I will like, I, I promise I will spend my time being like, I'm gonna make sure that David Pierce is not wrong. I will, I will like dedicate myself to that.

• 1:03:41David Pierce?

  Evan, thank you. This was really fun. I appreciate you doing this with us.

• 1:03:44Speaker 07

  David, thank you so much for having me. I love talking about the Fediverse.

• 1:03:49David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take one more break and then we're gonna come back and do a question from the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline? That's bullspend, and marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard Confessions.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had: impressions.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  Cut the bullspend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 1:04:28Speaker 03

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Wanna make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:04:59Speaker 06

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero Powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body. With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors, great tasting hydration no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade: Hydrates Better Than Water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 1:05:32David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's get into the Vergecast hotline. As always, you can call 866-VERGE11. You can email [email protected]. We love all of your questions. It is truly the best thing, hearing from everybody. We get an email and a Slack notification every time somebody calls in. It's the best. Cannot recommend it highly enough, having a bunch of strangers call and ask you tech questions. Anyway, this week, instead of questions, I want to play you some feedback that we got. We talked a bunch about the iPhone 16e last week. And in particular, I had some strong feelings about the price of the thing. I think a $600 phone and an $800 phone are not actually that different in a meaningful way. When you think of how people actually buy and use smartphones.

• 1:06:17David Pierce?

  But we got a bunch of feedback from people saying, maybe I'm wrong about that. So let me just play you one voicemail that we got. And then we're going to get into it.

• 1:06:27Speaker 08

  Hi, this is Gautam from India. I've been listening to the podcast about the iPhone 16e. And I think you guys have just totally missed why Apple made the iPhone 16e. And it's definitely not for the US market. It's definitely for the Indian market. They have been trying to penetrate into India for so long. And this is the device I think they will be doing it with. Because usually the selling price, the best selling iPhone at sale time is usually the older iPhones,

• 1:07:08Speaker 08

  which is like iPhone 13 or iPhone 14, which is like two, three years ago, the old iPhones. So which sell for around 60,000 to 70,000 rupees in India. This time they are releasing a new iPhone, which you can buy brand new, which is for iPhone 16e, for 60,000 rupees. So imagine the sales numbers that's going to bring for you. And when there is a sale on the iPhone 16e, it's going to come down even more. It's gonna, it's gonna sell like hotcakes in India.

• 1:07:54Speaker 08

  Apple usually have a brand value in India, which a lot of other manufacturers don't have. So everybody wants to buy an iPhone and bringing the price down is like the best move they can do. And I'm telling you right now, it'll be the best selling iPhone model of the year, hands down, in India.

• 1:08:18David Pierce?

  This actually makes quite a lot of sense to me. I think I probably underrated the extent to which people around the world, especially outside of the US, where most of the cellphone market is much less carrier dominated and post-paid and based on like multi-year contracts that you have with your carrier. A lot of people just buy a phone in a store and put a SIM card in and walk away. And in that case, a $200 difference is super meaningful. And obviously, in many parts of the world, the price difference can even be bigger or feel bigger. So I think that's right. I buy that. And we heard this from a bunch of people, actually. I got an email from Mauricio in Brazil, who said that here in Brazil, I can't think of one single person who chooses a phone based on carrier deals. I really don't know anyone who buys this way.

• 1:09:03David Pierce?

  Considering that Apple sells to many other countries, it feels like you missed an important part of the conversation. Totally fair. I still think the logic of why would you make it this cost and not the cost of the SE is complicated, right? I think if Apple had found a way to even split the difference, make this thing $499 instead of $599, I think that price delta becomes really powerful. But Apple has always been happy selling to a smaller but more affluent group of phone buyers. I think maybe the thing that I'm reacting to above all else is that this is just such an unlike Apple move if the thing that Apple is doing here is purely about price. And it seems like it's purely about price. But then again, this is the company that's also selling an M1 MacBook Air in Walmart now.

• 1:09:47David Pierce?

  So maybe Apple just is a price-conscious company in a way that it never really has been before and would still like you to not think that it is. We also got an email from Marcin, who said, "I found some data from 2022 that shows that 44% of the cellular user population in the US is on prepaid plans. I haven't checked that number, but if it's true, that's a higher number than I would have expected." I'm guessing that this group is probably more cost conscious and price sensitive. And for them, the iPhone 16e makes a lot more sense. Also, I want to point out that the price difference between 16e and 16 isn't 200, but more like 250. He's talking about things like adding in taxes and taking away some of the carrier deals that you get to make these things cheaper. Again, all true. And I think the idea that people are walking into a

• 1:10:30David Pierce?

  store, putting down a credit card or cash and buying a phone outright is certainly true. I think that just hasn't really been Apple's clientele for many, many years now. That is not the group of people that Apple has typically served. Apple is typically interested in really high margins on really high prices for people who are much less price conscious. And so maybe what I need to do is just reframe my brain a little bit to think of Apple as a company interested in hitting all price points for the sake of hitting all price points. It makes perfect sense as a business move if you're Apple and you're increasingly a services business. And actually, what you want is to have your stuff in more people's hands. That's what Google has been doing forever, right? Google makes the majority of its money, not when you

• 1:11:14David Pierce?

  buy an Android phone, but when you use the services on an Android phone. So Google has a huge incentive to put its phones in front of as many people as possible across price spectrums, across demographics. It's just a volume game for Google. And if Apple is a services company, it's playing the same kind of volume game. So maybe that just is Apple now. Anyway, thank you to everybody who called in and emailed with feedback. These are good points, and I think the, the price of an iPhone is more interesting and more complicated, maybe, than I even realized. Anyway, that is it for the show today. Thank you to everybody who came on and thank you, as always, so much for listening. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feedbacks, or robo taxi rides you want to tell me about, if you've

• 1:11:58David Pierce?

  like been in a Waymo or a Zooks and had an experience, I would love to hear about it. You can always call 866 VERGE 11, email [email protected], hit us up. We love hearing from you all the time. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Will Poor. The Vergecast is Verge Production, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai will be back on Friday. He's back from vacation this week, by the way. Thank you to everybody who was concerned and sad that you weren't hearing from Neelai. Also, everybody thinks Neelai is like quitting his job every time he goes on vacation. He's just on vacation. You're stuck with us forever, I think. Don't worry about it. Anyway, we'll be back. Lots of news to talk about, lots still happening. We will have the triumphant return, I'm sure, of America's favorite segment,

• 1:12:39David Pierce?

  Brendan Carr is a dummy on this Friday show, plus lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:12:53Speaker 09

  Fall savings are happening now at The Home Depot. Save up to $500 on select appliances. Plus, enjoy free delivery when you spend $998 or more. From prepping to cooking to cleaning up, Frigidaire has you covered. The custom Flex Temp drawer switches from fridge to freezer. With more than 15 cooking modes, including stone baked pizza mode, you can enjoy restaurant quality pizza in as little as two minutes. Then clean up with the Frigidaire dishwasher, featuring the industry's fastest normal wash cycle. Shop fall savings now at The Home Depot. Off and valid through October 21st, US only. See store online for details.

• 1:13:24Speaker 10

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 1:13:54Speaker 11

  Online deal days are back at Kroger. Don't miss your chance for extra savings when you shop, pick up, or delivery. You can save $30 on your first online order of $75 or more with your digital coupon. Plus, enjoy unlimited free delivery by starting a Boost Free trial today. But hurry, these extra savings end October 20th. Restrictions apply. See site for details. Kroger. Fresh for everyone.