The iPhone Duo should have been an iPad

We gave the iPhone Duo a 7 /10. But that wasn’t always the score we planned, and it might not be the right score forever. Such are the challenges of reviewing — and assessing — a big, new idea about the most popular smartphone in history. On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay debate whether the Duo deserved the score it got, and try to work through how this device might change over time. After that, the hosts talk about the huge PHP cybersecurity flaw that rocked the web this week, the ongoing increase in AI shopping, an impending reboot inside of Netflix, and some very confusing Gemini news. Also, Brendan Carr is a Dummy. Further reading: The iPhone Duo is a messy, expensive, good time All the news about the iPhone Duo Daring Fireball: The iPhone Duo PHP: The three little letters wreaking havoc across the web AI agents are ready to shop. Some retailers are wary Walmart is inviting AI agents to shop for you 10 million people have already set up Muse agents. Netflix is telling investors not to worry, even though you’re watching less and less Google’s more personalized Gemini AI is heading to your car Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. 0:00 No Sevens Pact 01:03 Show Agenda Setup 01:46 Duo Score Debate 03:08 App Optimization Phases 07:47 Two Thousand Dollar Problem 10:44 iPad Not iPhone 14:41 Outer Screen Compromises 18:04 Developer Badges Future 20:34 Early Adopter Reality 30:19 Handoff eSIM Limitations 34:49 PHP Shell Chaos 36:17 PHP Under the Hood 37:46 AI Finds the Exploit 40:46 Disclosure Panic Fallout 42:44 Patch Now or Go Dark 45:58 Autonomous Defense Arms Race 48:42 Agents Break the Web 53:04 Muse Adoption Shopping Stats 54:11 Bots Buying Movie Tickets 01:01:05 Instagram Deepfake Crisis 01:07:30 Brendan Carr is a Dummy 01:10:06 FCC Threatens Poll Coverage 01:17:44 FCC Free Speech Alarm 01:20:20 The Lightning Round 01:20:49 Arc Browser Shutdown 01:23:12 AI Browsers Future 01:27:14 Meta Terms Backlash 01:34:04 Netflix Identity Crisis 01:43:16 Gemini Confusion Car 01:49:12 Wrap Up And Awards 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.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  Support for the show comes from AWS AI. AWS AI is helping the world's leading organizations transform their industries in production at scale right now. From bringing fans inside every swing at the PGA Tour, to helping small businesses grow online with GoDaddy, to taking vehicles from concept to customer with Audi. AWS AI is how businesses innovate, lead and revolutionize. AWS AI is how. This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, host Liz Ann Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy

• 0:45Nilay Patel?

  for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Liz Ann as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, host Liz Ann Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Liz Ann as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:03David Pierce?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the world of no sevens. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neelai Patel is here. Hello, Neelai.

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  So here's my plan.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  Here's my plan. We're gonna do no sevens in 27.

• 2:18David Pierce?

  Oh, I see. Interesting.

• 2:21Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's, that's what we're gonna do.

• 2:22David Pierce?

  So you had to get all the sevens out of your system.

• 2:25Nilay Patel?

  We got it.

• 2:25David Pierce?

  At the end of 2020.

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  We can talk about this at length. I understand every comment on every platform that I am on is people saying you gave it a seven. And I know you and I are gonna talk about it because I know you're mad at me.

• 2:37David Pierce?

  I am mad.

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  But I'm just committing right now to no sevens in 27.

• 2:43David Pierce?

  I love it.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  And we're gonna, we're gonna have to put like a box in the reviews explaining basically every six that we give.

• 2:52David Pierce?

  It's like, I would have given this a seven, but my boss has this weird thing about this number. So I gave it a six.

• 2:58Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna do no sevens in 27 and we're gonna see how we feel.

• 3:01David Pierce?

  That's good.

• 3:02Nilay Patel?

  We could, we'll just get into it. Go ahead. Bring it on.

• 3:04David Pierce?

  Yeah. Okay, we have a lot to do today. There's, there's wild news in the world of server-side app development. We're gonna talk about that. There's PHP stuff we gotta get into. Like, the internet is breaking as we speak. Brendan Carr did a lot of things this week. We have a lot to talk about.

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  Real bad this week with him.

• 3:20David Pierce?

  But we need to come back to the iPhone Duo. The review came out this week. We did a live stream on Wednesday. Thank you to everybody who hung out with us and, and was there and sent us questions and had comments. It's been super fun to review this thing. It's now been two days since the review's dropped. We've both, I assume, had a chance to consume lots of coverage. You've seen lots of questions. We've seen all the comments and all the stuff that we've been making. And I think we can boil it down to a few things that have become very controversial about this phone. But we have to start with the score. Neelai Patel, the man of no sevens.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  The world of no sevens. This is my phrase. World of no sevens. If you live in a world of no sevens, what would you give it?

• 3:58David Pierce?

  You have walked into your own trap.

• 4:00Nilay Patel?

  I've walked into my own trap. I've given a lot of first generation Apple products a seven. And I think a lot of people have noticed this trend for me.

• 4:07David Pierce?

  Okay. The, the one we have fought about most aggressively in the past was the Vision Pro.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  And I got that one wrong.

• 4:14David Pierce?

  Okay, okay.

• 4:15Nilay Patel?

  Flat out, I'm, I'm copying to, I should have given the Vision Pro a six.

• 4:18David Pierce?

  Okay. Cool. That is a good place to start. I, you went, I don't know if this is a spoiler you'd rather not talk about, but you went in the course of reviewing this from, I think this phone is a six, to I think this phone is a seven.

• 4:30Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 4:30David Pierce?

  Take me on that journey with you.

• 4:32Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it, I mean, this is gonna drive a lot of people nuts. So when we first got that phone, the first two days, Alison and I kept saying two things to each other. Boy, this is very Androidy.

• 4:42David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:42Nilay Patel?

  Right? In the sort of, these ideas are not cohesive and not polished. You can just get yourself twisted into, into just weird shapes using this phone. Then, over the course of the week, one, you get used to it. And two, and this is the one that's gonna drive very crazy, just a flood of apps got updated the first way.

• 5:03David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 5:04Nilay Patel?

  And I'm calling it the first way on purpose because there's a second important ways.

• 5:09David Pierce?

  Right. Run through the three phases of, of Duo apps for people who weren't there for the live stream.

• 5:14Nilay Patel?

  So there are three ways apps are on on the Duo right now. The first way is the totally unoptimized itty-baby iPhone app, which is bad.

• 5:23David Pierce?

  It's a rectangle floating in black space. It looks bad.

• 5:26Nilay Patel?

  On the inner sort of tablet mode, this is not useful. And then because they have vertically shrunk the apps, they're just not useful on a cover display either. And we can come back to my feelings about the cover display. In fact, we should come back to John Gruber's feelings about the cover display.

• 5:40David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 5:41Nilay Patel?

  Um, so that's the first way. Totally unoptimized. Then there's the second way, which improves the experience of using the Duo, which is apps that are updated for iOS 27. And this just makes them a little bit wider, but you still get the black bar on the side. And that black bar on the side is a whole rat's nest of problems. Then there's the last and final way, which is updated for iOS 27.1, which is the Duo-specific version of iOS 27. And that moves the controls over and then you can relay out your app and do all this stuff. And a lot of apps have gotten there and they are still broken. And we're gonna talk a lot about the, the power of vibe coding in this episode when it comes to PHP vulnerabilities. It took down lots of websites. But we just have to acknowledge

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  that a bunch of apps are being updated in what can only be described as vibe-coded ways. And they're still pretty broken. But over the course of one week, I went from using almost exclusively not updated apps to at least a little better.

• 6:42David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 6:43Nilay Patel?

  Right? And so during that period, you're like, oh, the experience of using this phone has changed during the time that I'm reviewing this. Our rule is you review what's right in front of you.

• 6:52David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 6:53Nilay Patel?

  And that improvement, to me, was enough to get you from, this is a six and you ought to wait, to this is a seven, which in my personal worldview means it's fine. It's just fine. And I think that's where I've landed with the Duo. Like, if you're excited to spend $2,000 on Apple's first folding phone and live through a bunch of other compromises that we can talk about, you're gonna have fun. And by, maybe my number one feeling about this review is I looked into the camera in that video three different times and said, I'm having fun. And all the comments from angry people are like, why won't this guy have fun? And I, I don't know what to tell you, man. Like, it's fun. It is a fun first generation product.

• 7:38Nilay Patel?

  And I think Alison and I landed on that vibe in our review. I think Joanna landed on that vibe. Marquez basically has the same headline as, as us, which I think is his first generation fun. And ours is like early adopter stuff. Like, yeah. Yeah. It's, that's what it is. It is a fun first generation product with all of the attendant weirdness of a first generation product, including the fact that developers are, they don't know what to do with it yet. And so this first wave of optimized apps, in many cases, is actually like worse. Like Instagram is optimized. It is broken. It is just a broken experience on this phone.

• 8:15David Pierce?

  Broken how?

• 8:16Nilay Patel?

  If you have the dynamic island open on the cover, like I was in an Uber on the way home last night. And it has a little dynamic island widget. And that scoots all of the system UI down and just covers up the Instagram UI.

• 8:29David Pierce?

  Oh, God.

• 8:30Nilay Patel?

  That like, they just did not account for this happening. And so they got it, they'll fix it. On what timeline will they fix it now that they've shipped the first very clearly sort of auto-relayed out app? I don't know.

• 8:42David Pierce?

  Right.

• 8:43Nilay Patel?

  Google is the laziest of all the companies in the world. And Gmail on this thing is like, it's just a hilariously thoughtless exercise in optimizing for the Duo.

• 8:54David Pierce?

  Yeah. I, I would put the over-under for Google updates its apps for the Duo at like a year. And I think I'm probably taking the over.

• 9:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, they've all been updated to the, the middle ground. Like YouTube isn't upgraded in the middle ground. YouTube TV is updated in the middle ground. Gmail is updated in the middle ground. They're just not good yet.

• 9:10David Pierce?

  Right. I think a lot of companies will be very happy being in the middle ground. They'll be like, look, it fills up the space. The end.

• 9:15Nilay Patel?

  And you're like, okay, so in a year, some companies will feel shame and they will have done a good job.

• 9:22David Pierce?

  Right.

• 9:22Nilay Patel?

  And this is all I mean, like, you gotta review what's in the box. And so at the very beginning, it was fully the experiences using this phone was little tiny iPhone apps and a not useful cover screen. And by the end, it was a not useful cover screen, little tiny iPhone apps, and at least something a little bit better on the inner screen.

• 9:41David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 9:42Nilay Patel?

  And that, that to me was like, okay, you get one point back.

• 9:45David Pierce?

  All of that logic makes sense to me. I just cannot get past the fact that, A, this thing costs $2,000.

• 9:54Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 9:55David Pierce?

  This is not like an adorable first try at a thing. Maybe it's $2,000. And also, it's called an iPhone. Like, I, I said this on, on Wednesday's live stream, but if Apple had actually pitched this like an entirely new category of device, I would be so much more willing to put up with a lot of weird new bad ideas about how things work. But they're calling it an iPhone and they are going to try to sell it to people who are just trying to buy iPhones. They, they keep talking about how it is an iPhone. And I just, like, I, I want to give a company like Apple lots of license to innovate and try new things. We give them a lot of crap for not doing those things.

• 10:37David Pierce?

  And so when there is opportunity and reason to go try new stuff, I think that rocks. And I think you, you get lots of leeway to go try new things. I just don't think you can look at this and say, for a product called iPhone that is going to be sold in stores next to all the other iPhones to hundreds of millions of people around the world, that this is a good product for almost any of those people? Because it isn't. It might be. I think the thing that I'm most excited about, about the Duo is there is such a straight line from this to the second or third one being awesome.

• 11:11Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 11:12David Pierce?

  And I was not sure that that was the case.

• 11:13Nilay Patel?

  Like, I think a lot of people are upset with our review for not. Pointing at that more.

• 11:19David Pierce?

  Sure, but we, again, we only review the products that exist. If we reviewed the future, every review would be a 10 out of 10. Like, that's not how it works. But I really, I think, in a way that with the early days of like the Samsung foldables, it was not obvious how this thing goes from this to awesome. I think that path with the Duo is obvious. There's a lot of things to do and Apple has to rely on a lot of third-party developers to do it. And those third-party developers are constantly given more stuff to do and having more things taken away from them by Apple. So like, that is not a guaranteed thing, but it's coming there. But it's, this thing is too expensive and not good enough. And I just don't know how you give that a seven.

• 11:59Nilay Patel?

  Sure. I, in the context of expensive, it is definitely more expensive than the other phones.

• 12:04David Pierce?

  It's $2,000.

• 12:05Nilay Patel?

  It's slightly more expensive than its pure foldables, so fine. I think it's as expensive as it is, as it is, so more people don't buy it. I think it is priced very deliberately.

• 12:15David Pierce?

  Right? It is. But that's stupid.

• 12:17Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, that's.

• 12:18David Pierce?

  You're not reviewing Apple's economic strategy.

• 12:20Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, like, the iPhone 10 was also the more expensive iPhone at the time. And it was, it was not meant for everyone to buy. Like, they limited, they limited the amount they would have to make at the price point. I agree with you that as an iPhone, it is not the best iPhone. And, right, the best iPhone right now is the iPhone 18 Pro or the Pro Max.

• 12:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:41Nilay Patel?

  But it's right there. You can just buy the best iPhone if that's what you want.

• 12:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, we should talk about Gruber's review and we should talk about Marquez's review. They both landed on a line that I wish I had stolen. I think Marquez, Marquez was much nicer than John. He was like, do you want a kick-ass OLED iPad that folds? You can buy one now. But it's not an iPhone. Like, he's talking about an iPad.

• 13:05David Pierce?

  Right.

• 13:06Nilay Patel?

  John was like, this is the worst iPhone that has ever been made. He referred to it as a miserable, fat little thing, which is just incredible.

• 13:13David Pierce?

  It is a good line. Yeah.

• 13:15Nilay Patel?

  And he's totally right. Right? So if you just, and John later in his review was like, this is the best iPad ever made. It's better than the iPad. The multitasking is more rational. It makes more sense. I have feelings about that. But you will know that both of those perspectives are, this is less an iPhone and more an iPad. This thing represents the future.

• 13:36David Pierce?

  Neil, what's the name of the product?

• 13:38Nilay Patel?

  This is, I'm agreeing with you. I'm just pointing out that our friends and sometimes rivals got to the exact point that you're getting at.

• 13:48David Pierce?

  It is a fun hypothetical, actually. If Apple was selling this thing as the iPad Duo and you could buy it as a Wi-Fi only or as the tethered thing that, that the Apple does with the iPads. And there was absolutely no pretense that you might buy this and use it as your primary computing device, which is what a smartphone is. We might be talking about this radically differently.

• 14:10Nilay Patel?

  This would be easily the best iPad ever made. It would be, you would just think about it as a full reboot of the iPad.

• 14:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Nilay Patel?

  That had a little cover screen and it would be crazy expensive. And everyone would say, I wish this could just be my phone. And then we would have that conversation.

• 14:20David Pierce?

  They should have just called it the Apple Duo. They should have just called it the Duo.

• 14:24Nilay Patel?

  The problem is, they ran away from the iPad and maybe for good reason. Like, I didn't get too much into, is the iPad a success? John just put a knife through the heart of the iPad in his review. Like, Gruber was like, the iPad sucks. It's multitasking is stupid. Everyone who's involved in its first version of multitasking should feel shame and maybe never work at Apple again. Like, he's mad at this. And he and I, you know, we texted a little bit. He, you know, Gruber's entire approach to reviews of Apple products is to hold them to the highest possible standard.

• 14:57David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 14:57Nilay Patel?

  Are they perfect? Or do they exude the amount of consideration that Apple typically is famous for? And lately, I think he's been like, nope.

• 15:07David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:08Nilay Patel?

  Like, John's approach to liquid glass is like, Alan and I should never, like, leave the planet.

• 15:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, I encourage everyone to go read the posts that John put out when Alan and I left Apple to go to Meta and how he felt about what that, even just the addition by subtraction might mean for Apple's design.

• 15:25Nilay Patel?

  You know, I think John was very harsh on the Siri AI debacle because it meant that Apple wasn't making some products as well as they should. So that perspective applied to this product is fascinating to me because he's like, they didn't actually solve the problems. And it's the lead of his review, is here are all the questions you might have had about Apple's first foldable. And then you'd be like, what did Apple do? Like, how did they horsepower their way out of it? And then his, you know, the reveal is like, they didn't.

• 15:50David Pierce?

  Right.

• 15:51Nilay Patel?

  And, but he did get to, this is an improvement over the iPad. By throwing out the baggage of the iPad and thinking of multitasking in this way, you get to a better, smarter place where you essentially have two little phones. Okay, that's something.

• 16:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know that I agree with that take, but I see where that take comes from.

• 16:08Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's like, if you think about it as a duo, where the outside is an iPhone and the inside is an iPad. He's like, they took the opportunity to rethink the iPad and they got to something better. And they did not take the opportunity to make a good phone. They made the worst iPhone ever made. That, that is his view. I do not 100% agree with that. I think there have been worse iPhones.

• 16:28Nilay Patel?

  The iPhone 5C, I think, was a worse iPhone than this one.

• 16:31David Pierce?

  Just a tough beat.

• 16:32Nilay Patel?

  Unapologetically plastic, if you will recall.

• 16:35David Pierce?

  The open circle back case, those are, those are the days.

• 16:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's, there were just some weird iPhones in the past that you could litigate what was the worst iPhone. I think this one is too small. I think it, it, you have to concede that all of the small iPhones did not succeed in the market. There's a reason Apple doesn't make them. It's because people want big phones and developers have responded to that by making big apps. And so now you have a tiny phone. You have a phone that the market wholeheartedly rejected. And then you have an iPad. And I just keep coming back to that, like, the outer screen is not very useful. The inner screen could be wonderful. I want a matte display OLED iPad that folds up and goes my pocket. That thing rules.

• 17:16David Pierce?

  It does look great. Like, the, the experience of, like, I was thinking about this this morning, actually, that like, one fun test for something like the Duo is just if I, if I opened it up, put a full-screen video on it and handed it to you, what would your reaction be? And I think overwhelmingly, the reaction would be wildly positive. Like, the screen looks great. It feels good to hold. It's the right size and that, like, they did that part extremely, extremely correctly.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  I was on a, Google Meet is not optimized for this thing. I was on a Google Meet call with a bunch of people the other day in the back of a car and I was like, oh, this is the future. I pulled out a little sheet of glass from my pocket, unfolded it and took a video call.

• 17:55David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 17:56Nilay Patel?

  Neat.

• 17:56David Pierce?

  Where was the camera?

• 17:58Nilay Patel?

  I had it, I was, you don't, you don't join video calls from the back of the car and have the camera on. No, no, no, that's very rude.

• 18:04David Pierce?

  Bye, projects.

• 18:06Nilay Patel?

  No, thank you.

• 18:07David Pierce?

  Neil, I just don't allow his whereabouts to be known.

• 18:10Nilay Patel?

  I just think it's rude. I think if you're like, if you're like, I'm joining this call from a moving car, you just keep your camera off and you keep yourself unmuted unless you have something very specific to add.

• 18:19David Pierce?

  I agree with that.

• 18:20Nilay Patel?

  But you, you've taken yourself out. But the camera's on the front of the display, like, that works fine for that task.

• 18:25Nilay Patel?

  But there's something about that that is legitimately cool. And everybody who's had any foldable in the past is saying, yep, it's always been cool. It's been cool for like eight years now. Okay, like, I, all that is true. There's a reason in Android world, foldables have not eaten the market. It's because they also contain these compromises. They are also more expensive. And you have to decide whether you want a great phone on the outside and a compromised tablet on the inside, or a compromised phone on the outside and a great tablet on the inside. And here, Apple just picked the weirdest of all worlds.

• 18:54David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, and I also think Apple, the reason the app situation is so frustrating, and I'm, I'm both sensitive to the thesis that not very long from now, this app situation will be much less of a problem. I think that is probably true. Apple is very good at getting developers on board. But with something like this, Apple's main success over Android is that it has cohesion in its software, right? Like, Apple is unusually set up to make all of this make sense. And Apple couldn't even do it with its own software. Like, some, some of Apple's apps look great in, in Duo optimization land. Some of them look like butts.

• 19:37David Pierce?

  None of them know what to do with the outer screen. So you look at this and it's like, I'm not even sure Apple has a whole idea about how this software is supposed to work. And Apple's whole advantage here is that it has that idea and is able to communicate it to its developers in a way that they follow. Like, like or hate liquid glass, liquid glass is now everywhere. And that is, there, there is something powerful about that, especially next to Android, which is just a big jumble of a thousand ideas.

• 20:01Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Apple can enforce a bad decision at scale is a real thing. Look, they're putting out a label this week in the App Store that says made for iPhone Duo. And we'll just point out that that is. Straightforwardly a Google Play Store idea.

• 20:14David Pierce?

  This is also, this is the most admission of failure as a, as a developer platform that you could possibly imagine.

• 20:22Nilay Patel?

  Like, oh, I don't think that's true at all. Come on.

• 20:24David Pierce?

  Apple's whole thing is like, these apps just work. You can, you can run them all everywhere. Don't even worry about it. And now there's, it's literally going to be.

• 20:30Nilay Patel?

  They have a fancy new phone and this is the most any iPhone owner is going to go look for new apps in the past five years.

• 20:38David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  And they have a little badge to incentivize developers to get in that game. This might be the last time anyone does apps forever. Because Muse is just going to run Linux for you in the background, hacking PHP. Let me, actually, let me put that in front of you. I've been thinking about this a lot. For better or worse, Apple just caused a week-long panic about whether iOS apps would be optimized for its new hardware.

• 21:00David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  That idea is right next to, maybe there will never be apps again. And you're just going to talk to a Tamagotchi that uses Linux in the cloud on your behalf. And everything will be headless. And what are we even doing here? And there's a new platform. These ideas are running away from each other. And I think app developers are much happier about, we're going to make a weird tablet app and maybe you'll use our app than they are about.

• 21:29Nilay Patel?

  Claude, what, what's a duet? Claude duet is going to come use our website and you, like, human beings won't even see it.

• 21:37David Pierce?

  Oh, I, I agree. And I, I think, I, again, I am actually optimistic for the future of the duo because again, it looks like it's been a hit. People are excited about it. Crucially, techie people are excited about it. It is not actually going to suffer some of the challenges that other Apple devices have, which is that the right group of people, which is people like app developers, have not been super psyched about having this device. So they don't build for this device and you don't get that app flywheel. Every developer I know has been goofing around in the simulator for a while. They all complained about how slow the simulator has been for the duo. But they've all been using it. Everybody's excited to update. They all have ideas about how this stuff is going to work. Like, I think the App Store situation will get better fast.

• 22:21David Pierce?

  This is why I'm not mad at the App Store. I'm mad at you. Cause you reviewed the thing in the box and none of that is there yet.

• 22:28Nilay Patel?

  It got, they, they went from six to seven over the course of one week. That's all I'm saying. And maybe over the course of the next six months, it's going to go from seven to nine. I doubt it because the phone's still going to get hot. And if you use the inner display a lot, you know, the battery is going to die faster. And I think the camera's not as good. And if you use a camera a lot, it definitely gets hot. Like the Touch ID is a compromise. There's already reports this week from German that Apple's working on Face ID.

• 22:55David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 22:55Nilay Patel?

  Which is just an incredible way to tank sales of the first generation device. I mean, the thing is compromised. It's a compromised first generation. It's heavy. It, yes, app support could help it go, the experience of it out of the box, go from six to seven. Seven to nine is not going to happen because more apps get optimized. Do you know what I mean?

• 23:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think, I think I probably agree with that. Um, but the, the, I'm just so stuck on the idea that like, right now, a lot of people bought this phone. I think more people than we expected, more people than Apple expected pre-ordered this phone such that stuff is backed all the way up to January and February.

• 23:32Nilay Patel?

  But the, the dates are moving up.

• 23:33David Pierce?

  They are moving up, which has been really interesting. I've seen a lot of people who were like, I expected my phone to come in December and it, I got, I just got the it shipped message. I actually don't know what to make of that, but it does seem like Apple.

• 23:45Nilay Patel?

  Greg Joswiak is turning the knobs on perceived demand.

• 23:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, he like hit the make more of them button, like factory, factory line, go faster. Uh, that's how, that's how manufacturing works, right?

• 23:55Nilay Patel?

  We gotta, we gotta, they gotta, they gotta book the sales in Q4, man.

• 23:58David Pierce?

  I guess. But a, a lot of those people are going to get a phone in the mail. They're going to open it up. They're going to turn it on and it is going to be confusing as all hell for a while. It just is like, it is going to be a frustrating experience. And if your argument is that you're, these people are self-selecting because they're buying a thing that is first generation and is $2,000, that's fine.

• 24:21Nilay Patel?

  By the way, that is my entire review. That is the conclusion of my review. If you want to have that experience, if you, like me, find it somewhat fun to be frustrated by new ideas about smartphones, you're going to love this thing. You're going to have the time of your life.

• 24:38David Pierce?

  I think a lot of people bought this phone predicated on the idea that Apple figured it out. And I don't think there's any evidence anywhere in this device that Apple has figured it out. Not in the hardware, not in the software. Nobody, but like the, the whole pitch, the whole message coming out of Apple has been, we're, we're six years late to this party, but we did it. And they didn't yet. They might, they might, they genuinely might.

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  Cause the way they could have nailed it is if it was an iPhone on the outside and an iPad on the inside. And they just didn't do that.

• 25:09David Pierce?

  You know what's funny? Do you remember last year when the, we, the iPhone era came out and everybody was like, oh, the obvious future of this device is they're just going to stick two of them together and that's the iPhone Duo. They probably should have just done.

• 25:21David Pierce?

  That might've been the answer.

• 25:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I think I, again, I think the aspect ratio caught me. To quote my friend John Gruber, a miserable fat little thing. Just one of the, one of the all-time harshest burns from, from anyone in any product review. But that size and shape for the cover screen, I think will not last. It might last a generation or two, but I don't think it's the right one.

• 25:47Nilay Patel?

  And I think it, it is inevitable that this device crashes into the iPad. And it might be that the iPad steals more from the Duo than the Duo steals from the iPad, but these things are going to run into each other.

• 26:01David Pierce?

  What was your line that this wants to be an iPad the way the iPad wants to be a Mac?

• 26:05Nilay Patel?

  The iPhone Duo wants to be an iPad the exact way that an iPad wants to be a Mac. You know, when you use an iPad, you can just see over the fence into what it would be like if it was a Mac.

• 26:13David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 26:14Nilay Patel?

  And then you're like, screw it. I gotta just use my Mac. When you use an iPhone Duo, you can just see over the fence into what if this was just an iPad. And then somewhat importantly, I do not then go use my iPad. I just go use my Mac.

• 26:27David Pierce?

  Skip straight to the Mac. But a lot of people do use their iPad. Yeah. I think the way that that goes, that could be really interesting is if the iPad stays on the current trajectory, which is just to be increasingly Mac-like. Like it is, it is just running right into the Mac. And the Mac sort of runs back towards the iPad. If we're going to get a touchscreen Mac as soon as next week.

• 26:52David Pierce?

  This is going to be a, a just true collision of two different kinds of devices that maybe Apple is starting to accept are for all intents and purposes, the same thing. We'll see, but those two things seem to be running at each other. What that leaves is this giant gap in the middle, right? The, the third thing Steve Jobs always talked about. And maybe, maybe Apple's new idea is that actually the duo can occupy both of those spaces. I disagree with both you and Gruber that this thing is a perfect iPad. You've both used it way more than I have, but we, when we talked about this on Wednesday, like this thing doesn't run iPad apps and it should. There's a bunch of apps that don't exist because of that. And there's also a bunch of apps that will never make sense on a screen this large unless they are functionally or actually iPad apps.

• 27:37Nilay Patel?

  Completely agree. This is what I'm saying. Like it's not an iPad. I think everyone assumes that you have an iPhone that unfolds into an iPad. It, it is what you, it's the only natural assumption. And it, it is not that thing.

• 27:51David Pierce?

  No, it's an iPhone that unfolds into a bigger iPhone.

• 27:54Nilay Patel?

  And I think people are going to look at a touchscreen Mac and assume it is an iPad. Like, I honestly think Apple is in a period of like intense soul searching. The idea that they're, they're going to come out with jewel-like products that perfectly split the difference and solve, you know, like look at all these hardware keyboards and these stupid BlackBerrys. Here's an innovation that just outdoes them all, right? And that's going to change the paradigm. I think Apple is actively like looking for those new ideas. While the idea that AI is the next great interface platform or interface paradigm just like looms over them.

• 28:27David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 28:28Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like you're going to talk to Siri AI and it's going to use the apps on your phone on your behalf is not a thing that exists in Apple yet. It might be the thing that everyone else is chasing.

• 28:37David Pierce?

  Yes. And I think in a funny way, Apple allowed itself to get sort of lost in the sauce of AR and VR in the same way that Meta did. Not quite to the same extent. Nobody's worried about legs at Apple Park. But Apple, I mean, you, you think about even something like Liquid Glass, right? Like that starts from the idea of the Vision Pro and it starts with this idea that we are going to mesh the digital and physical worlds. The Duo has none of that pretense, right? Like this is, this is new questions about digital software. And I think Apple is, is going to have to pull itself back into array in some ways around what devices do we actually make and what do people actually use them for?

• 29:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think this is good. By the way, just to, to put this out there, I think that it's good for Apple to be in the, what if we tried this mode? They haven't been in 1,000 years. And, you know, the Tim Cook era at Apple is dominated by, it's an iPhone and we're going to make 60 SKUs at every price point. And everyone in the world will have them and our supply chain efficiency will be unmatched. And

• 29:39Nilay Patel?

  the software will get worse over time. Like, there's no, there's no getting around it. And we're going to wage a bunch of European regulatory battles or whatever.

• 29:46David Pierce?

  And I think that has made people forget, by the way, that Apple, even when it was a huge company, still tried things. Apple has failed a lot and they, and, but they have relentlessly tried things.

• 29:58Nilay Patel?

  Steve Jobs launched a social network inside of iTunes.

• 30:02David Pierce?

  Yeah. And like, I think that, I think that rocks. Like it's, it is, I genuinely am thrilled that the duo exists. I think it's fun and interesting for all the reasons that you do. I just don't think.

• 30:10Nilay Patel?

  Steve's just thinking it should be $500.

• 30:11David Pierce?

  I just don't think I can look anyone in the face and say, you should buy this phone. And if, if that is the case.

• 30:16Nilay Patel?

  Just to be a hundred percent clear.

• 30:17David Pierce?

  It's a seven out of 10.

• 30:19Nilay Patel?

  Cause if you are like, I will spend 2,000, I don't think, it's not going to like explode in your face. You're just going to be like, this cover screen's a little bit small and these apps are pretty weird on the inner screen. And the team at Meta allowed Claude to update Instagram and I hope they allow Claude to try a little bit harder next time.

• 30:37David Pierce?

  Yeah. They gotta update the, to the Pro Plan. Then it'll, then it'll be.

• 30:40Nilay Patel?

  I mean, like, look, Instagram edits, the video editing app, like that team did a great job. The main Instagram app, I do not think they did a great job.

• 30:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:49Nilay Patel?

  YouTube.

• 30:51Nilay Patel?

  Just, you know, like, does Google have a bunch of AI coding tools? Like, I'm making this accusation somewhat in jest. I assume someone tried. But I'm also just aware that we live in the age of vibe coding. And this is a thing that will be happening to people as these apps go. So there's, there's that. But I, the things that you will actually complain about as a first generation early adopter. The phone does get hot, especially if you run the camera with the screens on. It gets hot if you stream a bunch of video. I watched, I watched YouTube TV every morning. I watched CNBC every morning while I get ready. And it gets hot when you do that. That's just a thing that happens.

• 31:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:31Nilay Patel?

  Is that Google's fault? Is it Apple's fault? I don't know. The phone gets hot when you, when you, when I do a thing that I do with my other phone all the time.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  That, you know, if you use it open a lot, you're using a tablet mode. If you have brightness ramped up, you're going to drain the battery. Like, these are the things that are going to happen with this phone. That's early adopter stuff. Touch ID is going to annoy you. Early adopter stuff. The next generation might be great. The third generation might just be the iPhone.

• 31:54David Pierce?

  Yeah. And that's what I mean. The, the thing that I am most excited about about the duo is you can see that path. And I, I, I think there is a real chance that this ends up being the iPhone. Like, I, I think that's exactly the right way to put it. It's certainly not now. And it's, it's, it's not even competitive with the iPhone in that sense, right? Like, it is such a radically different thing that you actually shouldn't even comparison shop this versus another iPhone.

• 32:20Nilay Patel?

  Until, and by the way, the other reason is that handoff is not ready. And we touched on this briefly in the live stream, but it's worth saying again now. I know a lot of people who assumed they could keep their existing iPhone and then buy a duo. And use this new handoff feature where your eSIM seamlessly is active on both phones. And just goes into active mode, depending on which one you're using it. That only works on T-Mobile. You have to pay extra money for it. And it doesn't transfer your Apple Watch.

• 32:47David Pierce?

  Right.

• 32:48Nilay Patel?

  So you, or your Whoop Band, or any other sort of like hardware device that thinks it's connected to your phone. Signal does not go back and forth automatically. So it, that, it's like the glimmer of how that will work in the future.

• 33:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:01Nilay Patel?

  But the reality is it doesn't actually work right now. Like, handoff works. It'll, it'll move a phone line back and forth. But the iPhone is not built to be multi-device in that way.

• 33:12David Pierce?

  Right.

• 33:13Nilay Patel?

  And so that needs another year of refinement as well.

• 33:15David Pierce?

  So interesting idea, doesn't really work, needs a year of refinement. Seven out of 10, Neelai Patel.

• 33:21Nilay Patel?

  Because you're gonna have a good time. If, if, if this, if that's the experience you want, do I want to go on this adventure? Sure. This is like saying you shouldn't buy a Corvette as a daily driver. But the people who buy Corvettes are very happy that they have Corvettes.

• 33:35David Pierce?

  Sure. They don't, crucially, they don't call the Corvette the Camry, the Camry Plus.

• 33:40Nilay Patel?

  The Camry Duo.

• 33:42David Pierce?

  The Camry Duo. It's because it has more, it has more exhaust. That's how you know.

• 33:47Nilay Patel?

  That's true. All right. If that's, if that's your objection, I will go revise the score. I'm going to change this to that they should have called this the Corvette.

• 33:57David Pierce?

  I'm telling you, the, the world in which they talk about this thing as an iPad is a truly fascinating parallel universe to me. We should get off this subject because we have something just as sexy to talk about, which is server-side application technology. The internet is breaking, people, and we need to talk about it. We'll be right back.

• 34:17Nilay Patel?

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• 34:59Nilay Patel?

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• 35:39Nilay Patel?

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• 36:09Nilay Patel?

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• 36:53Nilay Patel?

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• 37:12David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. It's been very strange, 48 hours in the world of web technology. And it has done the thing that sometimes we like to do on this show, which is take all the parts of the internet and computers and the world that no one should ever have to think about. And brought them right into the forefront of everyone's lives. Neelai, do you want to try to explain what's going on with PHP2 Shell? Or do you want me to try to do it?

• 37:34Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna, I'm just gonna say what the prompt was that caused the global internet catastrophe that we faced yesterday.

• 37:40David Pierce?

  Wait, I don't actually know this. Okay.

• 37:41Nilay Patel?

  So David's going to tell you a long story about AI being used to find vulnerabilities in PHP, which is a load-bearing piece of technology that runs a lot of websites. But I'm going to tell you that the, the prompt that the security researcher used was just

• 37:58Nilay Patel?

  find bad vulnerabilities in PHP.

• 38:02David Pierce?

  That's it?

• 38:02Nilay Patel?

  That's it.

• 38:03David Pierce?

  Oh my God. You know, this makes me think of, have you ever seen that, that meme where it's like the, the, the bell curve? And at the bottom, at the beginning, it's Apple Notes. And then at the top, it's like everybody's super complicated productivity systems. And then at the end, it's just Apple Notes again.

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 38:18David Pierce?

  That's AI again. Like, remember when everybody was like, here's how you have to set up your Claude MD? And you have to have a folder full of markdown files and you have to do all this stuff. And then the model's got one step better. And now all you have to do is type find bad vulnerabilities in PHP. And it breaks the internet forever.

• 38:32Nilay Patel?

  Everyone had all these complicated Claude MD files or whatever. And now it's like, just, I don't know.

• 38:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, just, just type one lowercase sentence or probably be fine. So, okay, so let me, let me try and explain out just very basically what's happening here. So PHP is software that runs on servers to create web apps. That's, that's sort of the, the simplest way I can think to explain it. Apps, apps run on several versions of software. PHP is the one that runs on the servers in order to make them dynamic. It's bad as a programming language. A thing I've discovered over the last couple of days is every developer who has been forced to work with PHP in some way or another. Thinks it is a crappy, unhelpful, sort of chaotic programming language. But everybody is sort of forced to use it because it is so structurally important to the way that the internet works.

• 39:22David Pierce?

  To the point that I've seen estimates as high as 70% of the websites on the internet use PHP in some way. And importantly, PHP is, is underlying technology. So lots of apps, lots of CMS's WordPress runs on top of PHP. Like, it is deep, deep down in the infrastructure of the internet. And this organization called Wiz Research, which is just a fabulous name for research. I assume they used to be into touch wiz on Samsung devices and now they've pivoted to AI. They found these vulnerabilities in PHP and, and crucially, in PHP itself, right? This underlying technology way below all the apps. It doesn't matter what app you're running. It doesn't matter what website you're on.

• 40:06David Pierce?

  It is in, in part of the base layer of technology that does this. And, and like, like Neelai said, they used AI to find these vulnerabilities by typing find bad vulnerabilities in PHP.

• 40:17Nilay Patel?

  I will say, there's a little bit of complexity in like, who found what when. There was an embargo. There's a second company that independently found the vulnerabilities with the prompt. But they're the ones who released the fixes early and it caused a panic in the scene. But it is true. That the prompt was find bad vulnerabilities in PHP.

• 40:35David Pierce?

  Yes. And basically, these vulnerabilities are, are, there's several of them and they're each very specific. But basically, the overarching idea is that they are related to what happens when a process runs out of memory. So you, the computer asks PHP to do something. It, it fails for an unexpected reason. And essentially, there are a lot of people who know this stuff better than I do, who are going to yell at me about this. But it basically, it leaves a hole. Rather than finishing the process, it just sort of disappears. And it leaves a hole that if, if you are there as an attacker at the right time with the right tools, you can just exploit. And what you can do if you get in is just anything you want.

• 41:16David Pierce?

  You don't have to have administrator access. You don't have to do anything. You have core access to all of the data, all of the code. You can execute your own code inside of this server. So it's like, if you are there at the right place and time, you have just absolute complete control over anything running PHP. We have known about this exploit for a couple of years and there have actually been people talking about this thing for some time. But what was really different about the world a couple of years ago was that if you wanted to engineer a hack on a website, you basically had to do it manually. And because this is a very specific thing that only happens in very specific circumstances,

• 41:56David Pierce?

  the idea that you were going to do this, A, at all, and B, at any kind of scale, was just sort of impossible, right? You'd need a giant army of people individually attacking websites over and over and over and over and over and over again.

• 42:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:09David Pierce?

  Hoping to land on this one particular instance in which you can take over the website entirely. But you don't need all of those people when you can just set an army of AI agents out into the world with instructions to go looking for these things and keep pounding on them until they hit the jackpot. And that's essentially what is able to happen now. So it was, it was GPT 5.6 Sol and the new Gemini, Gemini 4 Argon were both used in service of both discovering and in theory, starting to fix this exploit.

• 42:50David Pierce?

  But they were basically able to go out and find that, okay, now automatically, this is doable at scale, simply, quickly, and automatically. And anyone who wants to can just, just force their way into vast swaths of the internet.

• 43:06Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 43:07David Pierce?

  Is that a reasonably good explanation of what's going on?

• 43:09Nilay Patel?

  It is. The, the, the complication, and I think this is just a fascinating element here, is, you know, there's an entire process and etiquette around disclosing security vulnerabilities. And so the first group of researchers found the vulnerabilities. They were on their way to publishing them. And it's the second company, Chain Guard, that heard that this was going to happen, did the AI prompt, find bad vulnerabilities in PHP, and released fixes before the embargo on the vulnerability. So this set off this like crisis panic of this was released before we were ready for it. You know, they're apologizing for, for it, but they're trying to explain what they're doing.

• 43:53Nilay Patel?

  But what just really struck me about this is that there was like a whisper on the wind that there was a PHP vulnerability and someone else was able to go find it. Right? Because you don't need a sophisticated security researcher who's about to disclose a secret. You need an AI model and say, hey, can you go find some vulnerabilities? And then you will find substantially the same ones. And that's what, that is the, that is the dynamic here.

• 44:17David Pierce?

  Right.

• 44:18Nilay Patel?

  That is, to me, just new. There's not another world where you hear that someone else has done something very complicated. And then you're like, I will front run them by doing something equally complicated.

• 44:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:31Nilay Patel?

  But the price of doing that just came way down.

• 44:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, we've been covering the, the AI math wars recently, and that's, that's very much the same kind of thing. It's like, oh, there's rumblings on Twitter that someone has solved one of the millennium prizes. Let me just sic a bunch of agents on it until they figure out which one it is and try to get there first. Because all of a sudden, we've discovered there is, there is something new to know here. And as soon as you know what direction to point these systems in, they are very powerful in running as far down that direction as anyone ever has before. And so the, the speed of this, I think, has caught a lot of people off guard. So on Wednesday, they disclosed this publicly. It's a, it's a huge thing because the recommendation from the PHP maintainers is essentially,

• 45:15David Pierce?

  A, you need to update your, your web stack as soon as humanly possible. We have a fix. We can fix it. You, you need to install it this minute. And if for some reason you can't, the safest thing to do is go offline. That's their other recommendation is you have to get your website offline until you can fix this. That's how serious and accessible this vulnerability is. So all over Europe in particular, like I was reading in the Netherlands, a huge amount of government websites were going down. There were, there were a lot of like public government sites in Finland and in other countries that just were like, it's going to take us some time to fix this. Ancient infrastructure in every government is, is a thing. These things are not as easy as like a software update on your phone.

• 45:57David Pierce?

  So a lot of folks were just like, the simplest, safest thing for us to do is just go offline. Wikipedia has had trouble with this. The Internet Archive was briefly offline. Like, the, the actual ramifications for this have just been huge. Even as everybody who is incentivized to tell you nothing has gone wrong, has continued to tell you something, nothing has gone wrong. OpenAI came out and said something to the effect of like, the AI found the problem before attackers did, so that's good. But then Amazon was kind of like, well, that actually doesn't seem like it's true. There's, they're, they have some evidence that the hackers got a four day head start. Matthew Prince, the CEO of CloudFlare, has said they've already seen millions of attempts to exploit this.

• 46:41David Pierce?

  It's just out there now. Like this, this swirl has started. And because it is so much easier to exploit, because all you have to do is type that stupid prompt into ChatGPT, it's just like the, the toothpaste comes out of the tube and it is very, very hard to create this incredible worldwide effort to patch 70% of the web all at once.

• 47:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Bill Gates was on Decoder, I would say, was not a hopeful message from the co-founder of Microsoft. He was like, we're in for 20 years of pain. Like, that was basically his vibe. And he's like, but we should do something about it. And I asked him, does something really bad have to happen first? And he was like, maybe. Like, that's how we handle other disasters. And one of, you know, and we, I tried to ask him if like AI was conscious, you know, like, these like high-minded Decoder-y questions. And he's like, who cares? It's, the problem is now. Deal with that later. Like, get on it now.

• 47:34David Pierce?

  By the way, shouts to Bill Gates for correctly answering that question.

• 47:37Nilay Patel?

  He was very much like, shut up, Neil. Talking to Bill Gates is very much like, if he thinks you're smart, he will make it also clear that he is much smarter than you. So it's like a compliment that he spent an hour and 10 minutes with me. And also, at the end of it, I was like, I just got punched in the face.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  But the, the vibe is everything is going to get so much more insecure before it hopefully gets more secure than ever. And we are about to live through the, it gets way more insecure. And even this back and forth about when to release fixes, you know, the company that released the fixes early before the embargo broke, their rationale was we are seeing it being exploited. Like, a couple of days is, might be too many days of this being in the wild because it's out there.

• 48:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 48:22Nilay Patel?

  And so there's just something here where even the people who are the most anti-AI in the world are going to have to deploy the tools to fix a lot of code.

• 48:35David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 48:35Nilay Patel?

  Right? And one of the, I think, bigger sort of existential questions, if you're on like the good guy side, is you probably need your defensive AI to be autonomous as well.

• 48:51Nilay Patel?

  Because the bad guys are going to have autonomous AI looking for vulnerabilities all day and all night.

• 48:56David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 48:56Nilay Patel?

  And finding new ones. And if they can show up on your front door and do something bad and they've got to put it, and you have to put a human in the loop, you're, it is probably too slow.

• 49:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, this to me rhymes so much with the OpenAI hugging face hack in that it like, this is the sort of thing people have theoretically thought about for a long time, right? It seemed obvious that eventually it would get good enough at breaking into these systems that we would have this forever arms race between offensive AI and defensive AI. And that is just what this is. This is that made manifest in a really big way right out of the gate. And, and I suspect if it is like the hugging face incident, we are going to hear about a lot of these again, very quickly.

• 49:48David Pierce?

  And this one was directed, right? It's, it's important to note that somebody asked the tool to do this. But it is, we are, we are not a lot of turns away from being able to just set agents out looking for vulnerabilities.

• 50:01Nilay Patel?

  Right. Go find bad vulnerabilities in PHP and go get me some crypto is, is right there.

• 50:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, right.

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's, I don't think that, that's not even like out of the realm of today. Like, I, I'm confident that is what attackers are going after today.

• 50:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 50:16Nilay Patel?

  The question is whether we have built the control systems, the alignment systems or whatever, to let the defensive agents like run around our code bases and fix them or look for vulnerabilities and, you know, like, and ward them off. And I don't think anybody has like landed on that answer correctly. We've landed at, take the Internet Archive offline for a few days.

• 50:38David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah, the, the only answer is literally turn your computer off. Don't let the AI in.

• 50:42Nilay Patel?

  So right next to this, I know you want to talk about the broader web. So that, this is the PHP story. This story, we're going to tell version of the story for the next couple of years.

• 50:50David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 50:50Nilay Patel?

  It feels very much like, whatever the framework of this story is, we're going to repeat it. It's the hero's journey, only it's PHP vulnerabilities.

• 50:59Nilay Patel?

  At the end, you know, it's, it was really the friends we made along the way. And that friend was PHP.

• 51:06Nilay Patel?

  Right next to that is basically the web breaking through attacks by products that are being used legitimately through the front door.

• 51:16David Pierce?

  Uh huh.

• 51:17Nilay Patel?

  Right? So like Mia Sato on our team this week, she set up an agent to just hold products on the real real, which is a fashion reassess site. And she just had Muse like find some products, hold them for 20 minutes, which is as long as you're allowed to hold them, then drop them and then hold them again.

• 51:36Nilay Patel?

  And then did it again. And she's like, I basically locked these products up for hours.

• 51:39David Pierce?

  I can just, I can just keep it in the cart over and over.

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  Keep it in the cart. And the real rail is like, you know, the whole point of that is to impose some friction. So if you don't buy, someone else can. And Mia was like, this agent is let me do this. Like Muse just did this. Who should stop her? Someone should stop Mia is what I'm saying.

• 51:55David Pierce?

  I did always. Yes.

• 51:57Nilay Patel?

  Who should, should Muse not do that? Is that an alignment problem? Is that a safety problem? It's your agent. If you were to do that as a human, you'd just be a jerk, but you could do it. Should the real real detect Muse and block it the way that a bunch of banks are blocking it?

• 52:12David Pierce?

  Well, I was gonna say, that's, that's, again, that is very much in the just take your website offline answer, right? Because the, the one tool these, these sites have is to block the system entirely. There is no way of working together that makes all of this okay. There is just.

• 52:29Nilay Patel?

  You block them to get terms. We've seen a lot of publishers do this, right? They, they block whatever AI system, OpenAI, whatever. And then the AI companies are sad. And then you're like, we'll do a deal. And like every publisher, I don't even sure if our deal survived the transition to PMC.

• 52:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 52:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm confident our parent company has a deal with someone. It's a, it no longer is relevant to us.

• 52:52David Pierce?

  Presumably. But like, Amazon is, Amazon is out here blocking not for deals. Amazon is saying, we want no part of this game.

• 52:59Nilay Patel?

  But I think that they're gonna end up with deals. We want no part of this game until the rest of the market has settled down and all of you realize you still need Amazon. And then you will come crawling up to us, right? Like, I think that's true. On the flip side, Walmart is basically saying, let your agents come shop with us.

• 53:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:16Nilay Patel?

  We will take over for Amazon, right? Because Walmart also has a giant third-party marketplace and fulfillment centers and all that stuff. And so if you, if they can take points of share away from Amazon for agent commerce, then that's gonna be great for Walmart.

• 53:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:33Nilay Patel?

  But like, all of this is just deals. Like, the idea that your agent is just you going off and doing things on the internet was very tempting for five minutes, the beginning of all this. And it is absolutely not gonna be true. They're gonna be opaque backroom deals that control how the web works, because all that money is too lucrative for this just to be wide open.

• 53:55David Pierce?

  Right. And I think, like, the, the shopping cart example is a good one, right? Because there is, there's a way of looking at this that says, okay, I should be able to buy something from Amazon. And the fact that Amazon's website is so bad, I don't want to use it, is actually Amazon's problem and not mine. So bypassing it is something I can do with no hard feelings. But like, what Mia did with the real real is, is actively shady stuff. And it's the kind of thing a human, not even, even maybe could, but just wouldn't do.

• 54:26Nilay Patel?

  I think lots of people camp on their carts on various platforms.

• 54:30David Pierce?

  Sure, but not, it, it takes work, right? And like, the friction ends up being really important there. It's like, I, a good example of this is, is Ticketmaster scammers, right? Like, as this stuff has gotten more automatic, it's become a much bigger problem. Because it's one thing to sit here with a, with a bunch of computers and all of my friends and try to buy Taylor Swift tickets. It's very different to send an army of bots at Ticketmaster to reserve all of the Taylor Swift tickets. Like, we're, we're now, we are no longer playing a fair game anymore in, in any sense of the word.

• 55:00Nilay Patel?

  The entire internet just looks like more and less illegal DDoS attacks.

• 55:05David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I think the, the question for, for the real real is like, okay, are we, are we even letting human shoppers do human things just with a new tool? And I, I think the answer in so many of these cases is gonna be no. People are going to try to do things they wouldn't feasibly do themselves.

• 55:25Nilay Patel?

  All right, let me throw this data point at you.

• 55:27David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  So Meta had earnings this week. They did great. Meta's gonna make it out of core, you guys. But the most important part was that they confirmed estimates from earlier that Muse has more than 10 million users. And Zuck said 25 people who set up Muse now use it daily, which is either good or bad. We should talk about that.

• 55:47David Pierce?

  Wow. That's a lot of people.

• 55:48Nilay Patel?

  And he said, a quarter of engaged users who were shopping, which is an interesting, a quarter of the users who were shopping. Unclear how many people that actually is, but a quarter of users who are shopping have an average purchase size of over $200.

• 56:04David Pierce?

  Then he said. A big number.

• 56:06Nilay Patel?

  And he said Plaid, which is, you know, the connector to the banks and Stripe had to like, do work to account for that demand.

• 56:11David Pierce?

  Wow. That's a big number.

• 56:14Nilay Patel?

  Or a small number, because not a lot of people are shopping. It's a quarter of the people who are shopping have purchase size of $200.

• 56:21David Pierce?

  Well, sure.

• 56:22Nilay Patel?

  The idea that I'm gonna let Muse spend $200 for me is just not in the realm of possibility. But you have given Muse your credit card and let it buy you movie tickets, which I think is dangerous and irresponsible. But you live on the edge.

• 56:34David Pierce?

  My best Muse experience so far, other than the time it almost bought me a car, was this Monday, when I was in New York, I, I had a very brief period of time away from my children and thus allowed to do things in the evening. And I was like, I want to go see You Can See Everything. So I did what you do when you want to see You Can See Everything, which is I went to Fandango and looked at a bunch of things. I went to the Alamo's website and looked at a bunch of things. I looked at maybe 100 showings and everything was sold out except the occasional front row seat, which I was warned for a variety of filmmaking choices, reasons you should not do. Do not sit in the front row at You Can See Everything,

• 57:17David Pierce?

  I promise. So I just went to Muse and I said, hey, I, I need one seat somewhere in Manhattan. Here's where our office is. The closer the better. Go find me a movie ticket. And it did. It found me literally what it said and what I believe was the last single movie seat in Manhattan for that day. And it bought it for me. It had, it had access to my credit card through link, which I think is a Stripe product.

• 57:44Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 57:45David Pierce?

  And it, it bought me a ticket and it sent me the confirmation from Alamo Drafthouse to my email. It was, it was the most remarkable experience I have had. And I still had this conflicting feeling of like, okay, well, it found me something that I wouldn't have found otherwise. I tried to do the manual labor to find this movie ticket and could not. And it found it for me and that's great. But also, if it's one of those, like, if you just imagine everyone is doing the same thing that I am, if everyone did that, it would all collapse.

• 58:17Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Yeah. It, it's just a DDoS attack on Fandango. That's what you're describing.

• 58:22David Pierce?

  Yes. And, and we get to the point where every movie sells out instantly, where the, the allocation of things just becomes sort of insane and doesn't make any sense. It's my bot versus your bot. It just doesn't, it just doesn't work. And so we're, we're in this weird place of the early tech adopters are gonna have this huge advantage, because I can just tell my Muse to go get me a ticket the minute one becomes available. And it makes me feel a little like a Ticketmaster scammer, that I'm just sicking my bots on the website so that I get tickets and you don't. And that feels a little icky, and it also doesn't scale. And as this stuff gets bigger, it's just gonna break in bigger and bigger ways. To the point where like, Alamo Drafthouse might decide that the responsible

• 59:06David Pierce?

  thing to do is just block the bots entirely. Like, we're a human platform for humans to go watch movies. Buy tickets like a person.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Show them at the box office.

• 59:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:14Nilay Patel?

  Send your robots, send your optimists to go buy tickets at the box office.

• 59:18David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've talked a lot about how, like, the, the structure and presentation of the web is gonna change as a result of this stuff. And I think what's maybe more likely to happen is that the two sides are just gonna run further and further away from each other. Like, maybe Alamo does just want money from Muse every time I buy a ticket. Ironically, Muse wants money from Alamo too.

• 59:40Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 59:41David Pierce?

  That's, that's, like you said, that's the business model.

• 59:43Nilay Patel?

  There's gonna be a bunch of weird opaque deals underneath all of this. And it will feel so unlike the web that we have come to know today.

• 59:52David Pierce?

  Yes. All in the name of making it slightly more convenient.

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, the idea that there's like a web for people that is like 1990s GeoCities is great. I'm actually stuck on this other stat from Meta's earnings, which is 25% of people who set up Muse now use it daily. Is that a lot or a little?

• 1:00:12David Pierce?

  I mean, that means what, 2.5 million people?

• 1:00:14Nilay Patel?

  Because Muse won't shut up. If you, if ever, 100% of the people who've set up Muse get a little message from Muse every day.

• 1:00:23David Pierce?

  Yes. Oh, yeah. My favorite one, I came home last night. I got off the plane. I got in the car, I drove home and like 15 minutes after I got home, I get a message from Muse that literally just goes, "You're home. Safe travels back." What? It figured out when my plane was and that it had landed and it told me I was home as I'm standing in my house. And I was like, this is not a good engagement bait, but I suppose it is successful engagement bait.

• 1:00:51Nilay Patel?

  Every single day just tells me some nonsense. One tightening on this morning's Apple NFC story. The blah, blah, blah, the European Union is going to make Apple open NFC in the European Union. And Muse has decided that I care about this story the most. And so it just, it just gives me little updates.

• 1:01:08David Pierce?

  Big Europe guy, Neil. Hi.

• 1:01:10Nilay Patel?

  European regulators have once again made French noises at Apple.

• 1:01:15Nilay Patel?

  But like, but because it does so much engagement bait and sends you so many notifications, I can't decide if 25 is a lot or a little. I think it might be a little.

• 1:01:24David Pierce?

  I kind of think, I kind of think it is. Yeah. Like, that is, that is the sign of a not wildly sticky product.

• 1:01:33Nilay Patel?

  I don't, it's so early in all of these. Again, Anthropic just announced Claude duet this week. It's so early in all these products. And I do think, again, I think Muse is the best consumer product of all these, especially because it's free. It's, it's got a but. There's that. But 25% of people using it daily.

• 1:01:55Nilay Patel?

  I, if this thing is going to overtake the iPhone, that needs to be 100%.

• 1:01:58David Pierce?

  Yes. Well, and even that, like that, that means 2.5 million people, but that is, that is a fair amount of people all competing with me to buy movie tickets. You know what I mean? Like, it's, it's all just sitting there. And to your point about the shopping thing from earlier, Meta and everybody else believes that the most important thing you will do with all of these tools is transact in some way. It's the business model, it's the demos, it's the idea. And so they, they all see these things as shopping platforms above all. And 2.5 new, 2.5 million new people shopping on Meta platforms every day is a pretty big win for Meta, even in these very early days.

• 1:02:36Nilay Patel?

  What are you going to do with your advertising platform on Instagram?

• 1:02:39David Pierce?

  Sell, I don't know. That's a, that's a good question.

• 1:02:41Nilay Patel?

  If, if I had to predict what the hottest controversy inside of Meta is, or the hottest conflict, rather, it's that everything Mark Zuckerberg is working on is going to kill Instagram.

• 1:02:54David Pierce?

  Yeah. Or the ads business in general at the company.

• 1:02:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, you know, if you're taking fees to send customers to movie tickets, you can move those advertising dollars.

• 1:03:05David Pierce?

  These are the shady deals you're talking about.

• 1:03:06Nilay Patel?

  But this is the backend, right? Fandango, just spend some money with us.

• 1:03:10David Pierce?

  You're going to send me to AMC and not Alamo because AMC paid you for it.

• 1:03:13Nilay Patel?

  Great. You can, you can, you can move some advertisers around somehow, but you make people put their phones down? Or you, do you invest in open weight models that anyone can run a Mac Studio to flood Instagram with slop? This is a real problem for Instagram. Adam Misery this week, he had a, he was replying to a creator who was furious that they had been AI cloned. And he's like, no, no, I do think this is a problem. I just don't know what to do about it yet.

• 1:03:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Nilay Patel?

  And I sent it to Mia and Jess, who've been, you know, we've been talking about this so much. And I was like, this is as close to an admission of defeat as we are going to get for Meta.

• 1:03:48David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:03:49Nilay Patel?

  Every single day I get AI Lewis Hamilton doing boy bands. Like that is what this, because I've saved so many of them now. If you want to see AI F1 drivers doing One Direction, boy, do I have an Instagram safe folder for you. Every single day, every single day I get, you know, there's that Drake song that they had Justin Bieber do the video for. Every single day I get Sam Altman as Justin Bieber doing Drake. Every single day. I get Sam and Dario just like goofing all the time. Instagram does not care about deepfakes. They want to, they know they should. They have no strategy for making them go away. They have announced nothing. They have no technology to do it.

• 1:04:33Nilay Patel?

  And all this is next to, what if you didn't look at your phone because Muse was doing it for you and you just had a little Tamagotchi? And what if we just enabled massive deep fakery at scale on our platforms with no plan to stop it? And I'm telling you, like, you can see it's like, it's causing Adam pain. Like he's talking about, he's like, I don't know. This is a real problem and I want to say, I don't know what to do about it. Meanwhile, YouTube is like, we announced, we made likeness detection. We just invented a plan. Is it working? We don't know.

• 1:05:05David Pierce?

  But here it is.

• 1:05:06Nilay Patel?

  Here it is. Like, we have to, we have to have it. Like, and Instagram is nothing. And there's some, it's like the web is under some kind of threat where it's going to get automated and bot driven and maybe the dead internet is live. And then inside of Meta, Instagram is just, it is, it is, it is hunted in a particular way right now by everything else the company is doing.

• 1:05:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's right. But also it is the most relevant platform at Meta by a thousand.

• 1:05:34Nilay Patel?

  This is why I'm saying it's got to be the hottest conflict inside that company. Everything Meta is doing spells the end of Instagram.

• 1:05:40David Pierce?

  Yeah. If you work at Instagram or Meta and are feeling these feelings, get at us. This is a thing we're covering a lot of ways.

• 1:05:47Nilay Patel?

  Adam, once again, you've been on Decoder many times. I know why you're not coming back right now. But you're more than welcome.

• 1:05:54David Pierce?

  If you, you send your deepfakes, Adam, we'd love to see it.

• 1:05:57Nilay Patel?

  I have personally thought about posting a lot of deepfakes of Adam and Zuck, just to prove the point that they do not care about this.

• 1:06:04David Pierce?

  Well, no, they care deeply. They just can't do anything about it.

• 1:06:07Nilay Patel?

  I will say Lewis Hamilton, uh, doing APT by Rosé and Bruno Mars. It's good. It's good stuff. It's Louis, it's Louis and Charlotte Care. That's, that's, that's what I have in my Instagram.

• 1:06:19David Pierce?

  See, that's like dead center of my interests. I need to get this on my feed. That stuff could be very important to me.

• 1:06:24Nilay Patel?

  Shouldn't all these celebrities be like, take this down? But they have no recourse because they, the law to protect your likeness at this level does not exist.

• 1:06:32David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:06:33Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry, like we are, we're in, we're at Bill Gates' tumultuous 20 years, my friend.

• 1:06:38David Pierce?

  It's all going to get worse before it gets better, is I think the thing Bill Gates is going to end up being.

• 1:06:42Nilay Patel?

  But the memes.

• 1:06:44David Pierce?

  It's true. The memes are on point these days. All right. We need to take one more break. Then we're going to come back. It's time for the lightning round. Be right back.

• 1:06:52Nilay Patel?

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• 1:09:49David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. It is time now. I think there was a, there was a Slack message from Neil I earlier this week that was like, Brendan's going to be a long one this week. So I don't even need to ask. It is time now for America's favorite podcast within a podcast, Brendan Carr is a dummy.

• 1:10:11David Pierce?

  I love our theme song. Keep sending us theme songs. The playlist of Brendan themes is getting epic.

• 1:10:19Nilay Patel?

  We should publish the playlist.

• 1:10:20David Pierce?

  We should publish the playlist.

• 1:10:22Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if we have the rights to just publish your music to Spotify.

• 1:10:25David Pierce?

  Listen, Neel, if I've learned one thing about the internet is that you can just do whatever you want and everything is probably gonna be fine. I'm gonna ask Muse to do it and it'll probably be fine.

• 1:10:33Nilay Patel?

  We're just gonna reverse engineer your songs.

• 1:10:35David Pierce?

  Exactly. Keep sending us themes and it's the best ones are the ones that come with an explanation of why this theme deserves to be this way. So keep sending them to us.

• 1:10:44Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I know what we can do. I think it will be too hard to put everything on Spotify, but we can definitely burn CDs for you.

• 1:10:50David Pierce?

  Oh, that's fun.

• 1:10:52Nilay Patel?

  Think about what I'm saying here.

• 1:10:53David Pierce?

  I like this idea a lot.

• 1:10:54Nilay Patel?

  And for one lucky winner, I'll send you a mini disc. All right.

• 1:10:58Nilay Patel?

  The most forgotten, but still the single best format in all of in all of physical media history.

• 1:11:04David Pierce?

  I agree. What did Brendan do this week, Neel?

• 1:11:05Nilay Patel?

  Brendan was real bad this week. I'm actually cutting it down to focus on one thing. I had a lot. Brendan this week decided to run his mouth and he said he'd close the digital divide and now every child in America has internet access. This is not true. He also said that the price of internet service is going down and thus he has beaten inflation. I'm not even, you can respond to that. I will let the listener respond to the notion that internet service in America has gotten faster and cheaper.

• 1:11:29David Pierce?

  For who?

• 1:11:33Nilay Patel?

  Brendan. So that's what I was gonna do. But then Brendan did one of the most overtly hostile, traitorous to the First Amendment things I think we have ever seen him do.

• 1:11:44David Pierce?

  Would we call this full Brendan? Did he go full Brendan?

• 1:11:46Nilay Patel?

  It's full Brendan.

• 1:11:48David Pierce?

  You never go full Brendan.

• 1:11:49Nilay Patel?

  So as you may or may not be aware, we are in the run up to the midterm elections. There are not a lot of polls that suggest that the president is very popular or that Republicans are going to win a lot of seats in said midterm elections.

• 1:12:04David Pierce?

  Correct.

• 1:12:05Nilay Patel?

  There are a lot of polls that suggest Democrats will win a lot. I don't know what's gonna happen. I have now been taught to not trust any polling data in any way, shape or form. There's also a scandal in the past few days about a polling firm that was just publishing fake data. And then they claimed it was a social experiment.

• 1:12:22David Pierce?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:12:23Nilay Patel?

  And then there's the president himself who reacts to all polls by calling them all fake news and saying they're all lies.

• 1:12:27David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:12:28Nilay Patel?

  So this is, this is the swirl of polling information, election noise that we are in as the election is fast approaching. So Brendan decided in his infinite wisdom that the role of the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission at this moment in time is to threaten broadcast networks that publish polling information that the president doesn't like.

• 1:12:49David Pierce?

  What?

• 1:12:50Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna read you the tweet. During this election season, there has been a significant surge in entirely fake polls and suppression polls designs to nothing more than interfere with the regular functioning of the electoral process and alter the normal patterns of voter turnout and enthusiasm. Many journalists and broadcasters have been amplifying or airing these polls without regard to basic journalistic ethics and without informing the public that these polls lack a scientific accuracy or basis. Broadcasters are advised to avoid engaging in news distortions or running broadcast hoaxes by airing polls that would violate their regulatory obligations. If broadcasters believe they should provide their viewers with additional context and information about polls they've covered, they can now take those actions consistent with FCC regulations.

• 1:13:35Nilay Patel?

  There are no FCC regulations about news organizations discussing polls. They don't exist.

• 1:13:41David Pierce?

  No, cuz free speech.

• 1:13:42Nilay Patel?

  Cuz that's so easy. Because we have the First Amendment in this country. So here Brendan is just straightforwardly saying if he thinks some polls are fake, that he might punish broadcasters for discussing those polls on their air because that would be against the public interest. And as we have been saying over and over and over again on America's favorite podcast, Within a Podcast, Brendan Carr is a dummy. This is stupid because the vast majority of Americans are not getting their news about polls from broadcast television. Right?

• 1:14:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:16Nilay Patel?

  They're getting it from cable news networks or from TikTok news creators or from other forms of social media or X, whose algorithm is totally controlled by one guy.

• 1:14:28Nilay Patel?

  We do not live in a world where the public interest is served by the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission deciding that some polls are fake and that not talking about their scientific validity doesn't serve the public interest on the nation's airways. This is straightforward censorship. This is Brendan saying if you publish polls that the president sees and are unhappy with, I will call them suppression polls. I will determine whether you have sufficiently discussed their scientific value and then I will punish you.

• 1:15:00David Pierce?

  A suppression poll, by the way, not a thing. That means nothing.

• 1:15:04Nilay Patel?

  It's a concept, right? You say that the other candidate is losing so people don't turn out, but both sides do this. There's a lot of weird speech and counter speech in this in this election in particular, particularly in Texas in the Talarico case. There's a lot of weird stuff going on, fake mailers. I live in New York. I'm watching the Cowboys game and I'm getting anti Talarico ads.

• 1:15:27Nilay Patel?

  And I will tell you the Packers defeated the Cowboys because that stuff is completely unreasonable. It was karma. That's, that's what I'm telling you. That race is out of control and that you get.

• 1:15:35David Pierce?

  It's Ken Paxton's fault that the Cowboys lost.

• 1:15:38Nilay Patel?

  That's all I'm saying. I'm not taking a side in the race. I'm saying I know what karma looks like and it looks like the Packers thumping the Cowboys yet again. Anyhow, this is very bad. Straightforwardly, there, I don't think there's anyone who agrees that this is an appropriate

• 1:15:54Nilay Patel?

  posture for the FCC chairman to take before an election to be openly threatening news organizations that might discuss some polls that the administration doesn't like.

• 1:16:04David Pierce?

  Right. It's also worth, worth mentioning that even if a news organization like this does discuss a poll that turns out to be a fake poll based on nothing, still allowed.

• 1:16:16David Pierce?

  Bad for their, for their journalistic credibility, probably bad for their business over time. Not a punishable offense by law because of free speech.

• 1:16:24Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:16:25David Pierce?

  This stuff is not complicated.

• 1:16:27Nilay Patel?

  Not for nothing. After all this time, I believe the audience for Brendan Carr's dummy, America's favorite podcast from the podcast, understands that there is a very specific distinction here in Brendan's power over broadcast versus power of the internet or cable news or New York Times or whatever. Broadcasters do use spectrum. There is some argument somewhere that that spectrum should be used in the public interest. There's no argument anywhere that that extends to viewpoint discrimination on the part of the government. As I keep saying on the show over and over again, the only two political opinions you ever really hear from us are that free market competition is good for consumers and that government's future regulations are bad. This is straightforwardly government's future regulations. Right? If there's something I don't like that you're saying, I will punish

• 1:17:12Nilay Patel?

  you. And even if you think that the use of the spectrum requires you to operate in the public interest, polls we don't like doesn't cross the line. There's no precedent anywhere for that. So he would have to file the lawsuit. He have to get it over the line. He have to win in court. All these media organizations would fight that lawsuit. And the reason that public officials are not supposed to do this stuff before an election is because there's not enough time to fix it in the courts or to fight back in the courts before the election happens. So now you've imposed a chilling effect on the broadcast networks because they don't know if they're gonna get punished. They won't have, certainly have enough time to fight before the election is over. And maybe more importantly, you have communicated to an enormous audience of Americans who do not really understand the difference in public

• 1:17:57Nilay Patel?

  spectrum rights and the public interest standard and all this stuff, that the government can take an interest in what polls media organizations publish.

• 1:18:06David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:18:06Nilay Patel?

  And then start threatening the New York Times, over which Brendan has no power. And that is some of the replies to this post on X. They can start threatening the cable networks, which over which Brendan has no power.

• 1:18:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:17Nilay Patel?

  They can start threatening internet outlets and they can say these polls are fake and I'm gonna sic the government on you. And over and over and over again, I keep saying, the point of all these machinations is not really to overregulate the broadcast networks. It is to expand the Overton window into we can tell you what to say.

• 1:18:35David Pierce?

  Well, so wait, okay, this is and into I also regulate the internet.

• 1:18:39Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:18:40David Pierce?

  Which is, am I getting too galaxy brained here to wonder what this means for like Kalshi, which is out here making deals with every network and news organization on the planet to provide exactly this kind of somewhat real, somewhat fake data about who's gonna win things. Like, this sounds like precisely the kind of thing. They don't call it polls, but it's exactly the kind of thing Brendan is pointing at here.

• 1:19:06Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah, I mean, Kalshi is the official prediction market provider for CBS News during the election.

• 1:19:11David Pierce?

  There you go.

• 1:19:11Nilay Patel?

  Is that good or bad? Like, I don't know. But is that data gonna cause some people to turn out or not turn out because the Kalshi ads say that someone's gonna win or not win? There's something about this that is just so nakedly self-serving. There was a poll the other day that said the number one issue for some Americans this election is corruption. It's never happened before in the history of our country.

• 1:19:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, like.

• 1:19:37David Pierce?

  Like, it was easier when we worried about like gas prices. Now we have to worry about corruption.

• 1:19:40Nilay Patel?

  Like, I was on MSNBC and they're like, let's talk about this poll where the number one issue is corruption. And everyone on the panel was just like, well, that has literally never happened before. Like, we've allowed a burbling baseline of exciting corruption in the back. Of course, the politicians are corrupt. That's just the way it goes. Welcome to America. And this here, it's like, oh, it's really bad. And it's this kind of stuff on top of crypto scams or whatever other stuff where it's just obvious that there are winners and losers. There's viewpoint discrimination on speech and that the government will punish you if you say a thing they don't like, or they will try to. Anyway, Anna Gomez, who's the lone Democrat on the FCC, just straightforwardly agrees with you. She tweeted, posters who intentionally misleading the public should answer for it, but broadcasters who report

• 1:20:24Nilay Patel?

  publicly available polling data should never be punished when a poll is wrong. FCC rules on news distortion or hoaxes do not apply to a station that reports the data in good faith. So this is, I think, what most people expect.

• 1:20:37Nilay Patel?

  But what we have done is open the Overton window. What Brendan is trying to accomplish is if someone says something you don't like, you can get a government official to threaten them with some kind of punishment.

• 1:20:48David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:20:48Nilay Patel?

  And I don't think most people are gonna dive into the details of, well, these are broadcasters.

• 1:20:53David Pierce?

  Right. It's very important to remember that you, as the viewer, having the right to change the channel is really important. The government having the right to tell them what to put on that channel is really bad.

• 1:21:05Nilay Patel?

  Very bad. Really super bad. Government speech regulations are bad. And look, there's, we have, we have all kinds of coverage of other weird government speech regulations, teen use of social media, all this stuff. We are in a place where more people are frustrated by the First Amendment restricting their ability to regulate things than not. We've been talking about it for years, but this is so overt. This is maximum Brendan attacking the First Amendment. And it should trouble everyone and it should especially trouble everyone in the lead up to an election. Because this, this is the kind of thing that you expect an authoritarian administration to say in the lead up to an election where the, the signs are that they're gonna lose.

• 1:21:50Nilay Patel?

  You can't talk about the polls saying we're gonna lose or you will be punished is the essence of this message. And everyone should feel pretty bad about it, especially like if you have more libertarian leanings, this should terrify you. You should be like, no, this is way over the line. Anyhow, Brendan, as always, you're, you're welcome to, to come on this show or Decoder or any other show really, and explain how your plan to eventually regulate all speech as you laid out in your chapter in Project 2025 is not directly connected to you threatening news organizations for broadcasting polls your boss doesn't like. I think you can do it, Brendan. I think you're a smart guy and you're gonna make a great case and win this, win this conversation.

• 1:22:29David Pierce?

  In the meantime, we're gonna start running a weekly poll called How Big of a Dummy is Brendan?

• 1:22:34David Pierce?

  It's gonna be huge.

• 1:22:35Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, that has been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's Favorite Podcast, when a podcast.

• 1:22:47David Pierce?

  I feel cleansed. It's nice. All right, it's time now for the lightning round, which I'm told this week has a sponsor. Producer Josh Kahas is here. Welcome, Josh.

• 1:22:55Speaker 04

  Hey, David. This week's lightning round is presented by AWS. How leading businesses use AI for next level innovation.

• 1:23:02David Pierce?

  Thank you, Josh. All right. Neelai, I have browser news for you.

• 1:23:05Nilay Patel?

  I love browser news.

• 1:23:06David Pierce?

  You love browser news.

• 1:23:07Nilay Patel?

  Josh is the voice of capitalism.

• 1:23:10David Pierce?

  Josh makes us money. You and I say insane things about PHP.

• 1:23:13Nilay Patel?

  We just spend money here, man. That's all, that's been my job for 15 years. Yeah.

• 1:23:17David Pierce?

  So for the last several years, I have occasionally ranted and raved to you about the Arc browser, uh, which I would say, not to pat myself on the back, was one of the rightest calls I've ever made, that this is a good browser and everyone should use it. It was a great browser.

• 1:23:34Nilay Patel?

  It really succeeded in the marketplace and the news you're about to share is about its overall success.

• 1:23:38David Pierce?

  Yes, it sure did. I converted a lot of people to it. I think at some point you and I are gonna come back on here and we need to talk about the state of the browser wars because something really fascinating has happened in AI and browsers and we should talk about it. But the news of this week is that Arc is shutting down.

• 1:23:56David Pierce?

  It's very sad. Arc stopped being developed a couple of years ago. The browser company, which is the company that made it, Josh Miller, the CEO, I think has been on both this show and on Decoder, talking about this stuff.

• 1:24:09David Pierce?

  They did some of the most interesting work in browsers over the last several years, but they pivoted in a big way to AI. They now make this browser called Dia. They were bought by Atlassian for a bunch of money. The writing has been on the wall for Arc for some time. It's been in, in maintenance mode for the last couple of years. It was very obvious this was eventually going to happen, even though Josh would tell anyone who would listen that they had no intention of doing so. Now it is happening. Arc is going to pretty officially go away in December of this year, right before Christmas. Merry Christmas, everybody. Get a new browser. I think this just sucks. It is, um, it's a shame. I think Arc is actually in a lot of ways, still the best browser you can have, even though it hasn't really been updated in the last few years. Arc, in a fascinating way, is now everywhere in other browsers.

• 1:24:54David Pierce?

  Like the other browsers people like.

• 1:24:57Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:24:57David Pierce?

  One is called Zen, is just literally Arc. The ones that like ChatGPT, the, the Atlas browser from OpenAI and the stuff that perplexity has built, all of it is just Arc. It's just Arc all the way down. The, they changed the design and the feel of browsers kind of forever in that way and just gave up on it.

• 1:25:19Nilay Patel?

  Even vertical tabs in Chrome.

• 1:25:21David Pierce?

  Yeah. Google would tell you people have been asking for that for a long time, but they didn't do it before Arc and they sure did after.

• 1:25:27Nilay Patel?

  Google doesn't do anything until someone else does.

• 1:25:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's right. But yeah, I think it's a shame. The, they're telling people to switch to Dia, which has gotten a lot better. It has a lot of Arc key features. Arc is still a better browser. I, I will miss it. I will miss it very much.

• 1:25:40Nilay Patel?

  We just had, uh, we just had Mike Cannon-Brooks, who's the CEO of Atlassian on. He was big up in Dia all over the place. Their vision of this is, is the same as the browser company had. It's the same as Josh had the whole time, which is your operating system is irrelevant on the desktop. Your real operating system is a browser. You're gonna run all your apps in this browser. I'm gonna make a browser for that. And then the Dia story is like 80% of that and then another 20% is an also AI is gonna watch everything you do.

• 1:26:08David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:26:09Nilay Patel?

  And then something else will happen.

• 1:26:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:11Nilay Patel?

  Some automated set of tasks, because we are watching you use all of, like, instead of having a system level AI like Siri AI or Google Assistant or Gemini or whatever, the AI will live at the browser level because that's where your apps run, is the Dia promise? I don't know about any of that.

• 1:26:28David Pierce?

  I'm starting to think that's a losing battle. And, and this is what I think is so fascinating about this is I think that there's a chance that the browser company might have gotten out while the getting was good.

• 1:26:39Nilay Patel?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:26:40David Pierce?

  And that actually what has happened here is the idea that the browser was the right place to do it because it had access to all of your apps. It was the place that you already were. Cookies give, give browser agents very powerful access to all this stuff. What's actually happening is you're opening up the Claude app or the ChatGPT app and it's just going and doing the browsing for you. Or Muse, like all of these things are trying to basically lead with AI as the interface and just turn the browser into backend software. And I think that's, that's a really big bet in a lot of ways. It's a much bigger bet than what if we just made a good browser? But the idea that you could supplant Chrome and sneak AI in seems like actually maybe

• 1:27:23David Pierce?

  a harder bet than we're just gonna obviate the browser altogether.

• 1:27:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, if you really wanna dive deep into whether human beings will ever look at an app again, you should go listen to that episode, Decoder, because Mike Cannon-Brooks is smart and he's charming and he's Australian. And I asked him, isn't the whole point of this is that I'll just use Claude and Claude will use Jira for me and I'll never look at your app again? And he was like, you mean headless, which is the phrase? And he goes, headless is brainless. Only he did it.

• 1:27:46David Pierce?

  Oh, I like that.

• 1:27:47Nilay Patel?

  In Australian accent. So, I mean, it was good.

• 1:27:50David Pierce?

  Sure. He did it while riding on a kangaroo, is what you're saying.

• 1:27:55David Pierce?

  I got it.

• 1:27:56Nilay Patel?

  Obviously.

• 1:27:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:57Nilay Patel?

  One of the best, one of the most surprising episodes of Decoder we've ever had. But this is like the hot topic for all of these SaaS companies. And his point was, no, the more people use AI with our tools, the more they use the tools. Like they can measure it and the more you let AI do some Jira stuff, the more you end up using Jira.

• 1:28:13David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:28:14Nilay Patel?

  I'm confident every Jira user in, who's listening to this is gonna immediately have an emotional reaction to this, just as they did in the comments on that episode. But there's something about, oh, the browser was gonna be the layer where we put the AI that everyone chased for five minutes because they couldn't get to your operating system and they needed to get to your data. And what they've more or less arrived at is, oh, we can get to your operating system. We're just gonna build you a Linux computer in the cloud.

• 1:28:42David Pierce?

  Or we're just gonna get you to download your Mac app and give it full disk access. Like we're just in computer use now.

• 1:28:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, we'll, we'll see. I, I think, you know, there's, there is, there's a little bit of a metadata scandal this week.

• 1:28:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:54Nilay Patel?

  Where Muse was publishing chats. People are getting access to it. One password is saying like they're gonna do password stuff because they're worried about this. Again, the banks are all blocking these things. There's a shakeout coming in who uses computers, when and for what purpose.

• 1:29:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:09Nilay Patel?

  But the, the notion that all this was gonna converge on OpenAI will have a browser and that will be where they, they take control of your data? I, I agree with you. I think that's, that, that has come to its conclusion.

• 1:29:19David Pierce?

  But this is like, you, you can wrap the whole where is the computer debate up in this little piece of software, which I think is really interesting. But anyway, uh, to everyone using Arc, it is time to get another plan. I'm happy to, I will spend a lot of time in the installer newsletter over the next couple of months, litigating browsers. So come hang, I'm excited about it. Neelai, what's your first lightning round item?

• 1:29:43Nilay Patel?

  So for you, my friend, I have Terms of Service needs.

• 1:29:46David Pierce?

  Ugh, my favorite. This is a real sexy episode of The Vergecast we're doing today.

• 1:29:50Nilay Patel?

  It is, but this one's gonna make you mad.

• 1:29:53Nilay Patel?

  In like the, you know, the way that anytime Meta changes its terms of service, you get mad. Get ready to get real mad.

• 1:29:57David Pierce?

  I'm gonna start a Facebook.

• 1:29:58Nilay Patel?

  If you have, if you have a Meta business account, which most creators and news organizations all do. Disclosure, I'm confident that we have a Meta business account. I don't actually know, but I'm confident we do. Meta updated its terms of service last week and they basically changed it so that they had full access to train AI on your website. So if you had a Meta business account to post on Instagram or use WhatsApp or whatever, communicate with customers, you had, the terms of service just gave Meta permission to train AI on your website.

• 1:30:27David Pierce?

  Not your Facebook content, your website.

• 1:30:29Nilay Patel?

  Not your Facebook content.

• 1:30:30David Pierce?

  What?

• 1:30:31Nilay Patel?

  Broad scraping of websites associated with your accounts. Uh, this caused an immediate backlash. People got real mad. Nieman Lab spotted it. Uh, they've, they've been tracking the story. They went and asked a bunch of attorneys and all the attorneys are like, yeah, this terms of service update literally just says they can train on your, on your content. I'll just read, this is what they changed it to. You authorize us to use automated software such as scraper bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents to create test credentials to access index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve or crawl the domains, webpages or URLs and any content available through them that are associated with your products or services or made available through your users' use of Meta products and services. Meta may use any content from such domains, webpages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train

• 1:31:15Nilay Patel?

  and maintain the integrity of Meta products and services. So just straightforwardly, if you touch Meta.

• 1:31:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:22Nilay Patel?

  Anything that we deem related to you, we can go train the AI.

• 1:31:26David Pierce?

  Yeah. Any, any URL users click on when they're on your page, anything that you use near your page. Wow.

• 1:31:33Nilay Patel?

  Right. So in particular, publishers freak out.

• 1:31:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:37Nilay Patel?

  Because their entire strategy is to block access and then negotiate terms. Disclosure, I am confident that somewhere in the Byzantine corporate mergers that we have in part of, that everyone has these deals. I truly do not know anymore.

• 1:31:49David Pierce?

  Or is suing, I think there's some suing happening.

• 1:31:52Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of suing. I have to meet a bunch of new people and I don't know. That's, that's the disclosure this week. I, I have to, I have to go learn a lot about what our disclosures will be. So for at least now, I, I simply don't know. Um, uh, so Meta hears this, they hear this furious pushback. This thing goes viral. I'm getting texts from like very fancy media people being like, you should make an Instagram video.

• 1:32:18Nilay Patel?

  Which is incredible. Incredibly like, they're like, we've called our lawyers, but you should make an Instagram video with this. So I, I made one and I was all set to publish it. And in that time, Meta comms starts just posting on threads, you're all wrong. This is an overreaction. We don't intend to do this. We're all, we're going to respect robots.txt. We were just consolidating the terms of our existing terms of service. And what we actually meant to do was it's for e-commerce sites. So we can go and learn about their new products and suggest them.

• 1:32:51David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:32:51Nilay Patel?

  This is their, this is their excuse. And if you've dealt with Meta comms, you're like, no one trusts you. Like, I don't know, I don't know what to say about this. Like, this is, this is, sorry, you're Meta. This is how it goes. And trust us, bro, is just not the way it's gonna be.

• 1:33:06David Pierce?

  And also saying you've given us permission to build the Thunderdome, but we have no intention of building the Thunderdome.

• 1:33:10Nilay Patel?

  It turns out the legal contract is more, uh, more enforceable and more valid than the tweets. Just one of those things that you learn in law school. So trust me, bro, is like, just one of those moments where like, they're kind of yelling and they, Meta has had a particularly like apologetic week. Right? They took down no kings and they're all, everyone, everyone's apologizing a lot. So first they say this is, this is, everyone's overreacting. We don't intend to change it. Everyone says, we don't trust you. They changed the terms and they issued us the statement, they changed the terms to make it more clear that they had no intention of doing this and they're always going to respect robots.txt. So here are the new terms. So they're still going to do all the web scrapers, bots, robots, all the stuff that they've clarified.

• 1:33:55Nilay Patel?

  It's in order to provide, develop, improve research and maintain advertising and business products, including business commercial and related products to help you create and deliver ads and other commercial content, provide users information about your products and services and connect you with users who may be interested in your products and services. So they, they've made it, they've added a lot of words and they've taken out the word train.

• 1:34:15David Pierce?

  Right. I was just gonna say, the only thing I don't hear there is train our models.

• 1:34:20Nilay Patel?

  Right. And so they said, this is better, right? We're, we're gonna do this to improve our ads and other commercial content. And then Nieman Lab, again, leading the way in the story, took this new set of terms to the same bunch of lawyers and all those lawyers said, yeah, they can still train on your stuff because the word train is inside of access index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve or crawl. And it's also inside of, in order to provide, develop, improve, research and maintain.

• 1:34:48David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:49Nilay Patel?

  Right. So they took out this word that everyone's mad about, but you can obviously read train into improve.

• 1:34:55David Pierce?

  Yeah. Crawl and improve does the job.

• 1:34:57Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Develop, improve, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve.

• 1:35:01David Pierce?

  That's everything.

• 1:35:01Nilay Patel?

  It's all still train. So now we have to trust Meta that their interpretation of these words does not include train. And so Meta has not said anything yet. This is all set to take effect on October 30th. I imagine that there will be some set of furious pushback from in particular publishers, but also creators with Meta business accounts. Because they're already upset about AI on Meta platforms. And if you're a creator and you have a Substack, you probably don't want to give Meta permission to train on your Substack.

• 1:35:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:29Nilay Patel?

  Which is a thing that you could logically read into these terms. I'm not saying Meta is gonna do it. They're out there tweeting that they're not.

• 1:35:36David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:35:36Nilay Patel?

  Right? But the actual contract has far more authority than some tweets.

• 1:35:44David Pierce?

  This is the company that very recently built facial recognition into its glasses and then promised it was never gonna turn it on.

• 1:35:52Nilay Patel?

  So yeah, Meta cannot run on trust me, bro, especially when it comes to data collection for advertising and training content for its models.

• 1:35:59David Pierce?

  Yeah. No, not a bit.

• 1:36:01Nilay Patel?

  We, you know, we got, we got a week, uh, basically, by the time you hear this, it'll be a week. It's going to affect on October 30th. And I suspect the heat will just get turned up and either this language will change again, or we will hear from a bunch of angry publishers and creators and businesses who say you cannot unilaterally change your terms of service to train on our content.

• 1:36:24David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:36:25Nilay Patel?

  We'll see.

• 1:36:26David Pierce?

  Yeah. That's a, there's a big fight brewing there. That's, that's gonna be a really interesting one.

• 1:36:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:30David Pierce?

  All right. I have one more for you. Last week on the show, we talked about Netflix. We brought up the go 90 scale and we moved Netflix, maybe for the first time.

• 1:36:42Nilay Patel?

  This is a victory lap for you.

• 1:36:43David Pierce?

  From a zero to a 15. I think that might have been the first time in the history of the go 90 scale Netflix was off zero. And what followed is a week of really great reporting, uh, particularly from the Wall Street Journal, about just how messy things actually are inside of Netflix. Netflix also reported earnings that look pretty bad in a couple of ways. The number of hours people are spending on Netflix has gone down over the last couple of years. Netflix's relative share of viewing continues to go down. Nielsen has this gauge that they do about, you know, how much each service has. And the, the story increasingly is that YouTube is just eating everybody.

• 1:37:25David Pierce?

  But Netflix was the other one that was kind of resolutely going up and that is not really the case anymore. There's also this big, great story from the Wall Street Journal that amounts to, there's a lot of really good reporting and I, I encourage you to go read the story. But it amounts to essentially, the company is falling apart because they can't make shows people want to watch anymore. And they have tried a bunch of things to make it so that they didn't have to make things that people wanted to watch. They got really into reality content. They got really into games. None of that is really working. And so Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO is now remaking the company around what if we made things that are good that people liked?

• 1:38:08David Pierce?

  That is, that is barely an exaggeration of what's happening here.

• 1:38:11Nilay Patel?

  I, I just, and he, and he fired a bunch of his content.

• 1:38:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:14Nilay Patel?

  The head of the movie studio, he fired.

• 1:38:16David Pierce?

  His head of TV, like the people who've been running content at Netflix for a long time are out.

• 1:38:22Nilay Patel?

  The only thing I'd point out is that Ted Sarandos, they have two CEOs. They have Greg Peters, Ben on Decoder and Greg's the product CEO. He's, he's Northern California. He's Silicon Valley. They run the products and the algorithm. Ted is Hollywood. He runs content. And you're like, Ted, if you were so upset with these people, you could have changed it at any moment. You could have been like, we're not gonna do weird video podcasts and video games. We're gonna go chase Apple TV. And maybe that is the decision that he is making and he's firing his people. But it is also like, you're in charge.

• 1:38:55David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, and in a lot of ways, I think this, this kind of change is probably long overdue at Netflix that, but it is, it is absolutely right. And, and it's fascinating that this appears to have been how simple the diagnosis was. That, oh, if we don't have hit shows and movies, none of the rest of this even matters, right? Like, I think there was a time where Netflix looked at itself as essentially too big to fail. But one of the things we talk about on the show a lot is that you are really only as good as your current hit shows. If you, if you don't have a constant run of things that people want to watch and share and talk about and subscribe for, people will leave.

• 1:39:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, let me talk about your particularly grim television viewing habits. From, from what I understand.

• 1:39:43David Pierce?

  Please.

• 1:39:44Nilay Patel?

  Instead of making conversation with your young family or listening to someone edifying content, you just turn on old sitcoms at all times?

• 1:39:52David Pierce?

  No. So, okay. I've thought a lot about this since you've started accusing me of this. What I've realized is I watch, the way other people watch the news or reality shows, I watch Parks and Recreation and The Office and New Girl. It's just.

• 1:40:06Nilay Patel?

  They're just always on in the background.

• 1:40:07David Pierce?

  It's just there to happen.

• 1:40:08Nilay Patel?

  Thing that I've come to learn about.

• 1:40:09David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:40:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. They're, they're noise.

• 1:40:10David Pierce?

  Yeah. It is, it is noise.

• 1:40:12Nilay Patel?

  So I think an important fact about cultural history is that those shows are old now.

• 1:40:17David Pierce?

  Yeah. Like 20 years old in some cases.

• 1:40:19Nilay Patel?

  They're all old.

• 1:40:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:20Nilay Patel?

  And because of streaming and, and how the, the models work now, we haven't made new 22 episode sitcoms, 10 seasons each. So there's not this volume of just stuff to watch. So Netflix got the big benefit.

• 1:40:34David Pierce?

  To be super clear, that's not some like fact of the universe. That's because nobody tried.

• 1:40:40Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think they thought they could all buy them on the cheap from the broadcast networks.

• 1:40:44David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:40:44Nilay Patel?

  And the broadcast networks, I don't know, I don't know what they've been doing.

• 1:40:46David Pierce?

  They started Peacock.

• 1:40:48Nilay Patel?

  Sure. But Netflix was like the beneficiary of New Girl existed.

• 1:40:53David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:40:54Nilay Patel?

  And so you could, you would have Netflix and like New Girl existed and it was made at high production values and was consistently funny. And there was a lot of it and they bought it on the cheap. And Netflix was like, we are gonna take the excess profits from redistributing New Girl and The Office. And we're gonna make Bright with Will Smith.

• 1:41:14David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:41:14Nilay Patel?

  And like every Netflix movie is as straight to video as any movie has ever been. That's just how they all look and feel.

• 1:41:20David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:41:21Nilay Patel?

  And they didn't make, they didn't realize that people were there to watch things like New Girl, and they should have been making things like New Girl the whole time.

• 1:41:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, Apple TV to me is the, is the example of this. I think, uh, it was, I, I was reluctant to say Apple TV is the best at this until very recently, but I think at this point, Apple's hit ratio is just vastly superior to almost everybody else at this point.

• 1:41:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there are so much slow horses.

• 1:41:44David Pierce?

  There's so much slow horses. There's increasing amounts of Ted Lasso. There's a lot of shrinking. Like, Apple, Apple has shows that it commits to and makes a lot of, and it also just picks better. And Netflix has, has picked wrong and picked in bad directions for a long time. You're right that instead of buying six seasons of some Steve Carell show, they spent a billion dollars on The Gray Man, which sucked and no one watched it.

• 1:42:11Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:42:12David Pierce?

  Just the wrong decisions over and over and over again. And, and, and the thing that they decided to do on the cheap was crappy reality content, which I think works to a point.

• 1:42:22Nilay Patel?

  And they, but then they're also just like binge dropping the reality content, which is nonsense.

• 1:42:26David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah. And so.

• 1:42:27Nilay Patel?

  They need to get away, if, if I had one, like, piece of advice for Netflix as it reboots, is that they don't, you don't have to commit to one thing.

• 1:42:37David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:42:38Nilay Patel?

  To be like, everything on Netflix is bingeable and that's the drop is like, who cares?

• 1:42:42David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:42:43Nilay Patel?

  They're like, maybe you care about this. Inside of Netflix, this is an important debate. Outside of Netflix, no one cares. Right? Like The Pit on HBO Max is a huge hit because they basically just made a network television show and dropped one episode at a time for a while.

• 1:42:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:59Nilay Patel?

  18 episodes per, and then they are like, we'll be, we'll see you next year and they're gonna do it again.

• 1:43:05David Pierce?

  Yeah. And importantly, it's really good.

• 1:43:08Nilay Patel?

  It's also very good. But they, but that's just like broadcast television.

• 1:43:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:11Nilay Patel?

  Right? They're, they're just, they just do, they just made ER again, like quite literally made ER again and got sued by the creators of ER for quite literally making ER again.

• 1:43:19David Pierce?

  Yes. Well, so this is actually, I have two interesting examples of what you're talking about, which are, very recently Netflix has released new seasons of two of its best shows, The Gentleman and The Diplomat, both of which are excellent. And neither of which are zeitgeisty at all because everybody forgot about them because Netflix takes too long to do this. They drop all the episodes at once and Netflix has like, worked its way out of culture in, in so many fascinating ways.

• 1:43:47Nilay Patel?

  Right. Netflix wants to own you for six hours a night and it would be much better if they owned you for six hours a week.

• 1:43:53David Pierce?

  Yeah. And especially if it was the six hours a week that you like cared about and paid attention to.

• 1:43:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:58David Pierce?

  Whereas like people.

• 1:43:59Nilay Patel?

  Because then your subscription would be valuable.

• 1:44:01David Pierce?

  Right. Like Silo is appointment viewing for a lot of people I know on Apple TV in a way that nothing currently is on Netflix.

• 1:44:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:08David Pierce?

  And that is.

• 1:44:09Nilay Patel?

  Look, I'm not gonna say Vision Quest is good. I don't think it's good. But I get a notification about it once a week and then I watch it.

• 1:44:15David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's a really good example. I think, I think we are headed toward a pretty fundamental rethink of what Netflix is. I don't know how it'll go. I don't know how it'll shake out, but I think it really seems like just based on what we've seen, even in the last week about what is going on inside of this company, there's a lot of stuff that is on the table and feels urgent inside of Netflix that has not for a long time.

• 1:44:39Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and then the new guy, Peter Rice, is, he, he's like an old school Hollywood guy.

• 1:44:44David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:44:44Nilay Patel?

  He has experience doing live sports. He has experience doing prestigey things. The idea that Netflix will just be a, a different company, like with a different content mix in a year's time. We'll see. I mean, they have, they, they have a bunch of stuff to put out. I bet that they get away from the binge model faster than not.

• 1:45:05David Pierce?

  That's a good theory. I like that. I think you're probably right. I had not really thought of that at that way, but I, I think, I think it's clearly the right decision. Uh, and almost everybody else has gotten away from it. You'll notice basically nobody drops seasons anymore, except Netflix.

• 1:45:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, it's just like, I, I understand why it's important to Netflix.

• 1:45:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:23Nilay Patel?

  It is part of their identity. But it's also like, dude, it would be way better if once a week, I was like, I have to open Netflix.

• 1:45:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:32Nilay Patel?

  Or like several times a week because you have multiple shows in watching.

• 1:45:35David Pierce?

  Wouldn't that be nice? Especially as you pay $1 more every month for Netflix, it seems. All right. You've got one more before we get out of here. What's your last landing round item?

• 1:45:44Nilay Patel?

  Um, I just want to call out the fact that I have no idea how Gemini works across its many, many platforms. So I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna read you this headline. It's from The Verge.

• 1:45:54David Pierce?

  Good website.

• 1:45:55Nilay Patel?

  It, it's a good website. We, we tend to understand what's going on. Google's more personalized Gemini AI is headed to your car. What's it gonna do in there? Now, here's the thing.

• 1:46:07David Pierce?

  It's just gonna like passenger princess in the car while you drive. It's gonna be great.

• 1:46:11Nilay Patel?

  So like, again, uh, we have, we have Cadillac EV. It, it has Google, it has, it's running Android Automotive OS. So it is, it is just Android. It's like a GM-ified Android. Uh, it has Gemini in it. Sometimes Gemini goes away and it's just Google Assistant again.

• 1:46:27David Pierce?

  Delightful.

• 1:46:29Nilay Patel?

  It can, it can be flighty that Gemini. And it's tied to my account. I have Gemini. I pay the money for Gemini. I don't, I don't know how much money or what features of Gemini I get because the plans keep changing, but I pay money to Google for access to Gemini. I'm logged into a thing called Gemini in my car. And there is some news

• 1:46:56Nilay Patel?

  about Gemini. Google's more personalized Gemini is headed to my car. So I'm, I'm reading this and here's, you know, our sub headline is Gemini AI can now draw from Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Photos and other apps.

• 1:47:07David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:47:08Nilay Patel?

  It could already do that.

• 1:47:09David Pierce?

  Well, yeah, this, this, this assumes that this Gemini is different from the Gemini that has been able to do that for some time.

• 1:47:15Nilay Patel?

  Right? And so the second part of that is while you drive. So somehow Gemini, the one in my car, we can't stop agent swarms from attacking Hugging Face. That's too hard. We can definitely stop Gemini from accessing my Gmail in my car.

• 1:47:34Nilay Patel?

  I don't understand, I, I truly do not understand how Google thinks about what Gemini is. Is Gemini the model? Is Gemini the product? Every now and again, my Google Home on which I talk to something that appears to be an AI, will just put up a, a, a notification on the screen that says, try a Gemini live chat.

• 1:47:57Nilay Patel?

  Who's that?

• 1:48:01Nilay Patel?

  What are you talking about? I, am I not live chatting with Gemini when I talk to the obvious AI assistant that is ever present on my Google Home?

• 1:48:10David Pierce?

  Huh.

• 1:48:13David Pierce?

  This is a.

• 1:48:14Nilay Patel?

  I do, I, I, I sort of get it. Right? You want to roll out the new features to more platforms over

• 1:48:20David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:48:20Nilay Patel?

  Maybe, but isn't, what is Gemini?

• 1:48:24David Pierce?

  Right. I'm stuck on this presumption that when I use Gemini in one place, it is, it is a different set of features than when I use Gemini in another place.

• 1:48:36David Pierce?

  Like the,

• 1:48:38David Pierce?

  huh. This is, this is throwing me now.

• 1:48:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Gemini on my phone. I open the Gemini app on my phone. I'm like, find me, uh, the flight info. And it's like, I, I'm on it. And then I put my phone down and I say, take, take G in my car.

• 1:48:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:54Nilay Patel?

  And it's the same Gemini voice.

• 1:48:55David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:48:55Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, I can't do that.

• 1:48:57David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:48:57Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 1:48:58David Pierce?

  Which is funny because it's, it's very important to all of the other services in this space that you perceive it to be one character that follows you everywhere. Like Amazon's whole business is predicated on the idea that Alexa just kicks it with you no matter where you are. And that it is the same thing with the same knowledge and the same information, the same history, everything. Google is like, what if Gemini was 100 unknowable different people? And some of them were with you at all times, but will never tell you which ones.

• 1:49:26Nilay Patel?

  So here's a clarification from Google. Google says it will connect your apps to Gemini only if you enable personal intelligence, which by the way, you have to enable. Like that's, why have a Gemini that like doesn't know anything about you, right? Um, and also Google already has your data. So like, what are you, what are you saving yourself from? Uh, it will share personalized responses only if your phone connected to your car.

• 1:49:51David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:49:52Nilay Patel?

  Makes sense.

• 1:49:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:53Nilay Patel?

  Right? That's some indication of your presence. And then here's the quote, if you don't use personal intelligence, everything in the car still works. You can use navigation, listen to music, make calls and ask questions, but the answers won't be tailored to you. Okay.

• 1:50:05David Pierce?

  It's just.

• 1:50:06Nilay Patel?

  But that has nothing to do with like the car.

• 1:50:08David Pierce?

  You get in the car and it just navigates you wherever it wants to.

• 1:50:12Nilay Patel?

  Personal intelligence is a global setting.

• 1:50:16Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 1:50:16David Pierce?

  Yeah. This doesn't make any sense.

• 1:50:18Nilay Patel?

  If you turn it off, you can still do all that stuff with Gemini.

• 1:50:22David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:50:22Nilay Patel?

  And then you're in your car and presumably the voice assistant will still be able to use maps.

• 1:50:27David Pierce?

  Yeah. It has to like play dumb. You're like navigate home and it's like, I don't know where that is.

• 1:50:31Nilay Patel?

  No, you set that in maps. It'll be fine. I, look, I don't want to overthink it. I'm not trying to do an infomercial where it's like, I don't know how to use a screwdriver. Like, fine. I, yeah, I'm sure this is all gonna make sense. I'm just pointing out that the way Google thinks about Gemini is as multiple different things.

• 1:50:47David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:50:48Nilay Patel?

  And that is not clear to anyone else at any time. And in particular, the fact that Google has a dominant car operating system and it can't figure out like what to do with it. Like it's too big of an opportunity. They're just like, I don't, there's something about this is just hilarious to me. By the way, still to this day, if I use Google Assistant in my car, it will happily close my garage door. But if I turn on Gemini, it's like, security breach.

• 1:51:15David Pierce?

  Well, Gemini has to go consider the existence of garages before it can get to your garage door. Google Assistant just reaches out and presses the button.

• 1:51:23Nilay Patel?

  No, I think Google Assistant goes through the cloud. Gemini is like, I can't possibly. I, I, that's too much. And then the button is right there.

• 1:51:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:29Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna get like a robot hand button, like one, just like one actuator from China. That's just push the button for me.

• 1:51:37David Pierce?

  That's the future of AI right there. All right. We need to get out of here. The Virgin History season is over. All the back to school episodes are out. We were just in New York shooting the next season. You and I yesterday did a couple of episodes together. We had a very good time. Uh, just to give you a hint, it's, we, we did an iPad episode with Walt Mossberg and it was like 16 hours long and we had an incredibly good time.

• 1:51:56Nilay Patel?

  We're just gonna do a supercut of Walt burning us.

• 1:51:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was, it was very good. And naming famous people he knows. We had a very good time. I enjoyed it very much. Oh, and all three of our podcasts won Signal Awards. Thank you to everybody who voted. Uh, The Vergecast won the Listener Award in addition to the Judging Award. Not to brag, we won, we won all of the awards. The Vergecast objectively the best podcast on the planet. Neelai, we did it. Congratulations to us. Thank you to everybody who voted. Virgin History won, Decoder won, The Vergecast won. We love a podcast here at The Verge and thank you as always for voting. It actually means a lot to us. We, we, we care a lot more about the Listener Awards than all the rest of them. So thank you to everybody who voted.

• 1:52:35Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 1:52:35David Pierce?

  Until then, remember to subscribe to The Verge for ad-free episodes of all of these podcasts, plus all of our newsletters, everything else, theverge.com/subscribe. And if you have thoughts, feedback, anything, [email protected] is the email. 866-VERGE11 is the hotline. We love hearing from you about anything and everything. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk. See you next week. Neelai.

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