The delightfully messy state of Apple gadgets

Nilay is going to buy the new touchscreen MacBook. But not for the touchscreen. He and David talk through Apple's new laptop, and what it means for Apple's other devices, including the tablet that used to be the future of everything. Then the hosts talk about Instagram's push into long-form video and its battle with AI content. Finally, it's time for Brendan Carr, Anthropic's S-1, robot vacuums, and the rest of the lightning round. Further reading: Apple finally combined a toaster and a refrigerator Hands-on with the new OLED iPad Mini Instagram doesn’t have a plan to pay long-form video creators Adam Mosseri says negativity around AI is ‘going to get worse’ Invasion of the Sexy A. I. Joke Thieves Brendan Carr plans to let prisons jam cellphone signals Five weird details from Anthropic’s IPO filing Microsoft is ending Copilot support on smart TVs Google says its investments in AI are driving more searches Palmer Luckey’s Anduril is getting into laptops — and claims they’ll be American-made 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 ProLED Cold Open 01:04 Touchscreen Mac Arrives 02:39 Why Apple Did Touch 05:27 App Store Pressure 07:54 Touch Is Just Enough 09:49 Influencer Event Demos 13:56 iPad Squeezed Middle 18:34 Luxury Hardware Bet 22:37 Duo Reality Check 28:18 Instagram Going Through It 29:07 AI Agents vs Ads 32:18 Zuck Escapes iPhone 32:41 Instagram Becomes TV 33:23 Slop Meme Deepfakes 36:09 Mosseri AI Crisis 42:58 Longform Video Push 44:34 Creators Demand Revshare 48:19 Loop Closing Arms Race 49:34 Reddit Versus Google Zero 53:22 AI Kills The Web 01:00:20 Brendan Carr is a Dummy 01:02:22 Spectrum Auction Plan 01:03:35 NOAA Weather Spectrum Fight 01:04:29 700 MHz Auction History 01:05:38 FCC Spectrum Power Grab 01:06:09 Privatizing Weather Data 01:09:27 Anthropic S1 Reality Check 01:12:34 AI Products Beat Models 01:16:55 Claude Goes Sentient 01:17:55 Copilot Leaves Smart TVs 01:21:16 Quiet Robot Vacuum Thoughts 01:25:03 Palmer Luckey Laptop Fight 01:30:10 X Replies and Racism 01:32:32 Wrap Up and Next Week 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:13Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts 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.

• 2:00David Pierce?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the word ProLED, which I assumed was an acronym until just before we started recording, when my friend and yours, Neelai Patel, told me, in fact, it's a portmanteau. And now I'm mad at everything. Hi, Neelai.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  Hi, buddy. Hi, I'm Neelai, your friend. So I was traveling during the Apple event, I was in San Francisco. And I was reading our live blog and I saw Nathan write, "Apple's doing an elaborate if you give a mouse a cookie" a bit. And I didn't know what he was talking about, because I wasn't watching the video. And then I went and I watched the video. If you have children, you've read, "If you give a mouse a cookie," right? It's this escalating series of things the mouse will do. And that's what they did to announce this laptop, all the way to, and then you touch it.

• 2:42David Pierce?

  It's pretty good.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  It's, I mean, it's, it's good, it's just not what I think about when I think about a $4,000 Pro laptop.

• 2:49David Pierce?

  Or what I want from my computers. Yeah, the, listen, I'm going to get over my feelings about the word ProLED, which is, appears to be a portmanteau of the word Pro and the word OLED. And that's the only reason it exists. It accomplishes no other goals. Sure. We need to talk about touchscreen Macs. We've got a bunch of other gadgety stuff to talk about. Apple had a whole week of announcements. You and I, every once in a while, a story comes along where I just say, oh, good. Neelai and I get to have feelings about the creator economy for 20 minutes. And we're going to do that. We've got Brendan Carr, we've got a lightning round, we've got all kinds of stuff to do. But let's start with the new MacBook Pro. We talked a little bit about this on the show with Antonio yesterday. He was at the event in LA.

• 3:28David Pierce?

  But Neelai, I just, like, we have talked about the possibility and existence of a touchscreen MacBook for so long. I want to know how you feel about the, A, the fact that it exists, and B, the fact that it exists like this.

• 3:42Nilay Patel?

  I love that it exists. I feel like I won a bet with you and Joanna, like, years after the bet was due. But I did finally win my bet.

• 3:50David Pierce?

  Was it, was it touchscreen Mac versus iPad with macOS?

• 3:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, something like that.

• 3:54David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 3:55Nilay Patel?

  And we got there.

• 3:56David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  Apple is in a delightfully messy era right now.

• 4:02Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what any of these products are or how they're meant to work. I watched the videos, Antonio has a great video of using the touchscreen Mac. They're like, I don't know, sometimes the buttons will get bigger. Sometimes the screen won't be responsive at all. Like, it's, it's messy. And I think it's, it's great. Like, this company's been so buttoned down and so risk averse for so long. And now it's like, it's a Mac that you can touch, but it doesn't run iPadOS. There's a new iPad Mini that doesn't run Duo apps, even though it's the same size as the Duo. The Duo is a touchscreen, but it's actually an iPhone. And it is just all up in the air. And I think that is great. I honestly think that's great. As in regards to this Mac in particular, it does not seem like there's any particular intention behind it.

• 4:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's no, there's no switch that flipped. They were just like, yeah, we could do it now. It's just as thin and light. They gave an interview to Stephen Levy in Wired. And they're like, yeah, it's, we made a really good MacBook Pro. And it could have a touchscreen, so it does.

• 4:59David Pierce?

  There's a really great conspiracy theory floating around that the only reason Apple did it is because it's really hard to get the panels that they wanted without touch.

• 5:06Nilay Patel?

  I totally buy this.

• 5:07David Pierce?

  It's a really good theory, that you'd actually have to pay more and work harder to get at-scale, non-touch displays like this. So they just were like, whatever, screw it, we'll do a touchscreen. I don't, I have no evidence for it, but it would make perfect sense.

• 5:19Nilay Patel?

  Is the true innovation here selling a $20 touchscreen for $400 more?

• 5:24David Pierce?

  It's not $400 more.

• 5:26Nilay Patel?

  Than a regular MacBook Pro?

• 5:27David Pierce?

  It's also lighter and thinner. It has a better display, otherwise. It's got the fancy chips. It's like, this is like a meaningful, better computer, anyway.

• 5:36Nilay Patel?

  To be fair, I'll say this from the jump. I'm going to buy this laptop. It's, it's time. My M1 Pro, MacBook Pro, single best laptop I've ever owned in my entire life, is struggling.

• 5:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 5:50Nilay Patel?

  So it's, it's time. And I'm going to buy this laptop. Like, there's no chance I'm not buying this laptop. It's so expensive. The children aren't going to college, but I'm going to buy this laptop.

• 6:01David Pierce?

  Yeah. So, but the touch of it all, I think, like, this is actually why I find this computer fascinating. Because I think on, on every level, it's just an excellent computer, right? By all accounts, the display is great. The people love the OLED. ProLED is a stupid word, but the screen seems to be really good. It has, it has, it'll have plenty of power. I think the thin and light of it all is actually really meaningful. Like, you're a perfect person for whom this matters a lot. That, like, you, you travel and use your computer on the go all the time. And have, losing almost a pound of weight on the bigger model is a really big deal on a computer like this.

• 6:37Nilay Patel?

  Lately, I've been traveling with MacBook Neo, which is a perfect airplane computer. And my only complaint about it is the keyboard doesn't light up. And I'm going to solve that problem by buying a $3,000 touchscreen MacBook Pro.

• 6:51David Pierce?

  I'm thrilled for you. But on the touchscreen, it feels like there are two ways to look at the touchscreen announcement. One is, this is incredibly lazy. Apple just got a bunch of panels, stuck it on. They don't, they don't care that much. Why should I? The other is, this is, like, the, the first gesture at something bigger. That actually, maybe there is someday going to be some giant plan about touchscreen Macs. But right now, they're just starting small and giving people something relatively simple and straightforward to deal with. Do you fall on one side or the other of that debate?

• 7:25Nilay Patel?

  I think Apple's app model is under so much pressure from all sides that they, they're gonna have to do something. Right? And so, the, you know, Apple's app mo, like, Apple's money is candy crush on the iPhone. It just has been for years. That is, the services business is candy crush on the iPhone. And every button you push on your iPhone, if it connects to some transaction on the internet that isn't physical goods, Apple takes 30%. And maybe sometimes it's 20%. I realize it's different in every country in the world, but you understand. There's an Apple tax and Apple collects it. That is under some pressure. Right? It's under the pressure of people being bored with phones. It's under some pressure of, I don't know, social media regulation.

• 8:09Nilay Patel?

  It's under some pressure of AI agents that might just use Linux in the cloud on your behalf. Some, something is happening. Right? One platform may or may not give way to another. Then there is the literal pressure of governments around the world trying to break open the App Store, or whatever else might happen. And then I do think that there's just boredom. Like, all of the big advancements are happening in desktop clients on desktop computers. And phones are great. But I've seen so many people run Claude and ChatGPT side by side in an iPhone Duo. I think it's hilarious, right? So there's just a lot of pressure on like, what is Apple's app ecosystem look like? Where does it go? How does it generate revenue? And so, do I think there's a grand plan? I actually don't.

• 8:54Nilay Patel?

  I think there's a reason this all feels kind of messy. I think they're putting a lot of ideas out into the world. Like, as many as they can.

• 9:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 9:02Nilay Patel?

  And then they will see how they all kind of reconcile. But at some point, the thing that is truly under the most pressure is the iPad. Right? Like, the iPad cannot withstand the iPhone eating it from the bottom and the Mac eating it from the top.

• 9:19David Pierce?

  True.

• 9:19Nilay Patel?

  And I'm dying to know what happens there.

• 9:22David Pierce?

  We almost played for, I think, the third week in a row, a game called Should This Have Been An iPad?

• 9:28Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 9:28David Pierce?

  Because you could also argue fairly successfully that maybe Apple should kill all of its product lines except for the iPad, and it would just be fine. You could just make everything an iPad, and it would be fine.

• 9:39Nilay Patel?

  You fired off some takes last week that went viral for the wrong reasons, and I feel like that's another one. And I just want everyone to know that I had nothing to do with it. It was not planned, and I didn't approve it.

• 9:49David Pierce?

  It all could have been iPads. It all could have been iPads.

• 9:51Nilay Patel?

  No, thank you.

• 9:52David Pierce?

  So, okay, the more I think about the touchscreen thing, the more I think essentially just slapping it on and being like, yeah, here, you wanted this, you have it, is actually exactly the correct approach to take here. Kind of for the reasons you just described. Like, I think there is, there is a world in which you look at this to say, okay, what we have now is a generation of computer users who grew up using touch devices, right? Like, if you want to get galaxy-brained about this, you look at this and you say, there's, there's now a whole, two generations, really, of people entering the workforce, or entering college, or those moments where you like first get a real computer, who grew up on iPads and smartphones. And so, in the same way that Google went to Google Books and

• 10:36David Pierce?

  said, okay, we need to give people a laptop that looks like Android, Apple could come to this and say, we need to give people a laptop that looks like touchscreens. And you can sort of see how that would make sense. I don't think this is that, because that would inspire some big new idea about how the interface worked. And I think in this particular case, if Apple had made a lot of noise about, now you can run all of the iPad apps natively and successfully as touch apps on this, you would start to see inklings of like, okay, there's a big convergence plan happening here. This, to me, really feels like they were like, okay, you said you wanted a touchscreen, you're gonna do some stuff with it. Knock yourself out.

• 11:13Nilay Patel?

  But you're describing the consumer product. You're describing the regular MacBook, the MacBook Air, and the iMac, or the Mac Mini. There's like, Apple has consumer Macs, and they, they do a job. And if Apple had brought touch to those Macs, I would agree with you. In this case, this is their top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. Every single demo was, I'm zooming in in the timeline on, in Final Cut Pro. They did, they, they did it. They did a Gossian splatting demo.

• 11:45David Pierce?

  They did.

• 11:46Nilay Patel?

  They did.

• 11:47David Pierce?

  It's very important.

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  So, this event was like, all influencers in LA, Apple loves influencers now, can't get enough of them. They flew them all in. We did not pay them, we did not take the flights because we have our cursed ethics policy. But they all got to stay in a nice hotel and eat fancy food.

• 12:02David Pierce?

  Sorry, Antonio.

• 12:03Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, bud. Anyhow, other reporters are there. It's fine. Everyone make your money however you want. I'm just pointing this out. Apple put a bunch of influencers in the room and gave them a bunch of like, program demos. And one of them, very cool, was they did put the nine iPhones on like, the big tripod rig. And I think a guy was like waving his arms around, and they recreated it in 3D using AI on like, four Mac Studios. And then the demo was you could like spin around it on the MacBook Pro.

• 12:29David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 12:30Nilay Patel?

  Perfect, perfect. It's like, didn't you render this on four Mac Studios? Couldn't, couldn't this have been an iPad?

• 12:36David Pierce?

  Listen.

• 12:36Nilay Patel?

  Very good. But all of their demos were creative demos, or

• 12:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Nilay Patel?

  mocking up iPhone apps in the simulator and now you can touch the screen demos. That's this market.

• 12:49David Pierce?

  Yes. But, but even for that market, the argument is not revolutionary input device, right? This is, this is, here, have a touchscreen. And I think, I look at this, and I've been seeing reactions from creative people, and it's like, everybody has this small set of things that they're interested in doing, where it's, if I want to spin the thing around, it actually is more natural to reach out and spin it around than it is to try and figure out how to do it on my trackpad. If I want to zoom into something in a very precise way, it actually makes more sense to do that on the touchscreen. None of that, even if you take all of that in totality, that does not add up to a brand-new idea about computing. It's just slightly more direct ways of doing things you are already doing anyway. And I

• 13:34David Pierce?

  think for Apple's approach to this, that is fine. Like, wait, can I just play you, so everybody, this, this Steve Jobs clip has been going around, right? Because Steve Jobs made a lot of fun of the idea of touchscreen computers. I just want to play you a clip, literally from The Verge's TikTok, where we, we showed this. And I just, I, all I've been thinking about is this clip and the fact that Steve Jobs is actually not wrong at all. Let me just play this clip for you.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical. It doesn't work. It's ergonomically terrible. Touch surfaces want to be horizontal. It gives great demo, but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.

• 14:19David Pierce?

  All of that is true.

• 14:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:20David Pierce?

  And, and all of that exists successfully underneath this touchscreen. What they're not saying is this is now the way you're going to use your Mac. This is now saying, three times a day, you will discover it's easier to reach out and touch something than it is to move it around at the trackpad. And that is good enough.

• 14:35Nilay Patel?

  Every single Windows user is like, yeah.

• 14:38David Pierce?

  Is, is that worth the extra cost? Who knows? I don't actually know what the extra cost is. Like, we were talking about this with Antonio the other day. It's baked into this one device that has other changes. Like, if this made the Neo $150 more expensive, we'd be having a really different conversation about it. But right now, it is just, it is another spec in the list of specs, and that is how people will use this, and I think that is fine.

• 15:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that's fine.

• 15:02David Pierce?

  It's not like a lazy move from Apple to not have ideas about how this works. I don't, honestly, if they had like reinvented macOS to work better with touch, just to support this one device that very few people own, I'd be furious. But this is like, just, just do the least. It's actually fine.

• 15:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I talked to a friend who did not go, and they're like, yeah, I made the recall. Like, you know what I mean? Like, not a lot happened here.

• 15:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:27Nilay Patel?

  I do think the Gossian splatting demo was very cool. I'm gonna buy this laptop.

• 15:32David Pierce?

  Will you touch it?

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I use, I use that laptop almost primarily for Lightroom. So, yeah, I think I will.

• 15:37David Pierce?

  That's actually a really good example. Like, basic photo editing stuff, sliders and graphs and stuff like that, like, perfect. Perfect to do little tiny movements.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  Does it support the Apple pencil?

• 15:49David Pierce?

  No, which is dumb.

• 15:51Nilay Patel?

  But I guess you don't want to be, you know, be writing on that thing. Oh, look, I, again, the, the pressure here is on the iPad. It is remarkable that Apple has an entire iPad ecosystem of apps that are built for these screen sizes, right? You can get a 13-inch iPad. There are apps that are made for that thing. They, they rhyme with apps that are built for macOS, if you use their frameworks, right? Like,

• 16:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 16:18Nilay Patel?

  These apps are, you can run Catalyst iPad apps on a Mac. I do it all the time. And Apple's like, yeah, whatever. Like, you just get the feeling like, ah, we got this wrong. And they started it over with the Duo. Even though they announced the new iPad Mini this week. And I thought the most fascinating thing about that new iPad Mini is that, you know, it was like a stealth announcement, like it was a press release and some tweets from their executives. It's an iPad Mini. And it's like, it has an OLED screen now. It's thinner and lighter. No new capabilities.

• 16:45David Pierce?

  Right.

• 16:46Nilay Patel?

  And fundamentally, it doesn't eat any, because I think the iPad Mini's main market is airline pilots. And they're just gonna keep making it for airline pilots for the rest of eternity. But you're just like, fine, but there's the Duo. Like, it's crazy, the Duo has a different and better multitasking approach and runs different apps than the Mini.

• 17:07David Pierce?

  So, okay, so your, your argument there, I think, is really interesting. So, if you rewind 10 years ago, there was absolute conviction coming out of Apple that the iPad was the future of computing. And that actually, in the year 2026, it might be more likely that the iPad would essentially strip the Mac for parts than the other way around. And what you're saying is maybe Apple has flipped its conviction and now is kind of stripping the iPad for parts from both sides. Take the best of what works on the platform, hardware and software, and use it to make iPhone and Mac better, leaving the iPad kind of

• 17:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. If you have an iPhone Duo and a new touchscreen Mac, what are you using an iPad for? I'm guessing Apple doesn't care because you just bought their most expensive products.

• 17:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, you just spent $5,000. Yeah.

• 17:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. They don't care. Like, it's fine. Yeah, it's $5,000 for the base ones.

• 17:58David Pierce?

  It's starting price $5,000.

• 18:02Nilay Patel?

  That's their opening gambit to replace an iPad. So, they got a ways to go, but you're just like, they didn't take the app ecosystem. And in fact, in many ways, the app ecosystem on the Mac is getting more interesting, because AI exists and all that stuff is happening on the Mac. And the app ecosystem on the Duo is a bunch of excited developers who are not bringing any of those ideas to the iPad. At some point, the Duo and the iPad definitely have to run into each other. And then you have to wonder if touchscreens will come to cheaper, more consumer Macs, and the iPad will run into those in some way, too.

• 18:38David Pierce?

  Yeah. A touchscreen MacBook Air, I think, really does start to eat the iPad in meaningful ways.

• 18:45Nilay Patel?

  Especially if it flips.

• 18:47David Pierce?

  Well, yeah, but now, now we're getting into Apple having weird new ideas about computers, which I, I don't know.

• 18:54Nilay Patel?

  It's the John Turner's era, man.

• 18:56David Pierce?

  But again, go, go back.

• 18:57Nilay Patel?

  It's only crazy.

• 18:58David Pierce?

  Do you remember the last time Apple had a bunch of new ideas about Macs? Everybody hated it, and the success for Apple has come back to, we're just going to make great laptops.

• 19:06Nilay Patel?

  Right. The, the last time they had big ideas about Macs were like, it has one port, it has the keyboard, doesn't work. Have you, have you ever thought about an expensive laptop with no ports and a keyboard that breaks? It was not their best era. The, the, the resurgence of the Mac is because they've made great hardware. I loved, they did a port rundown of the new MacBook Pro and called up the headphone jack.

• 19:28David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 19:29Nilay Patel?

  Like, I, I know they were looking at me. I know the people there that thought about me when they saw those words on the screen. And I'm looking right back at you. I think that's great. I think they know that these are computers that people need to use for work.

• 19:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  Their MacBook Pros. Like, they're expensive, and you gotta get your money back out of them. But I think all these ideas come to the rest of their line. And I do think they know that they cannot just let a bunch of AI agent apps eat the iPhone. Right? If you're like, the future of apps might be Dots, or Grokbot, or Muse, or Claude Duette, or whatever it is, Instinct, which everyone thinks they should buy. If you think that that is gonna take over some meaningful amount of computer usage, your services revenue goes down somehow. You're gonna use your phone less, you're gonna play fewer games, something is gonna happen. The advertising revenue across these devices might go down. Like, who knows? You gotta compete, and maybe your Apple, and your best way of competing is being like,

• 20:25Nilay Patel?

  the computers are crazy now. Like, don't you want this new piece of hardware that is bonkers?

• 20:32David Pierce?

  So you're, you're saying that in basically the, the way to uh, uh, solve some of your software problem is to lean back into high-end hardware?

• 20:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just be like, well, if you, you like, sure, you can buy your Muse Tamagotchi, but wouldn't you rather have a sick touchscreen MacBook? And it's like, yeah, I would.

• 20:51David Pierce?

  We talked about this earlier this year, that Apple was, was moving into becoming a essentially a luxury company. I think we're really seeing that. The Duo is very much that. It is, that is a luxury device in a very real way.

• 21:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:05David Pierce?

  And uh, uh, calling a laptop a luxury device is a little bit tricky, but, but there is something to the, the showiness of bringing back the glowing Apple icon, right? Like they, they are, it, it, these things are designed to show themselves off to the world in a really interesting way, which is a thing you have to do when they're this expensive.

• 21:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:24David Pierce?

  But.

• 21:24Nilay Patel?

  What you want is your laptop to announce, I have $4,000.

• 21:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, right.

• 21:27Nilay Patel?

  Or I did.

• 21:28David Pierce?

  Please, please, please don't take this while I go up to the counter at Starbucks.

• 21:32Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I keep saying 4,000. I know that's not the base price of 16, but you add RAM to it and then you're, you're just done.

• 21:37David Pierce?

  No, you, what you're saying is you've specced this thing out on Apple's website.

• 21:40Nilay Patel?

  So many times.

• 21:41David Pierce?

  And the one you're gonna buy is $4,000.

• 21:43Nilay Patel?

  That's exactly what I'm saying.

• 21:45David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 21:45Nilay Patel?

  I haven't bought it yet. I have to look my children in the eye and tell them it's not gonna go the way they thought it was this year.

• 21:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, this is when you tell Max that she needs to start a professional sports career right out of high school. It's, it's not a problem at all.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah, AI-proof professional sports career. And then we're gonna do some illegal gambling on the side. It's gonna go.

• 22:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Nilay Patel?

  My big question about these, these computers, just writ large, you're right, they didn't do a bunch of software tweaks, they didn't make macOS work differently, but they did reemphasize that they're gonna make the best laptop, right? Like, they have the ability to really sit around thinking about hinges, they have the ability to make it thinner and lighter and improve battery life, increasing performance. They have the ability to do tandem OLED and make it 2,000 nits of brightness. Like, I, I could do display nerdery on this thing all day and all night. That, I, to me, that is, that is the point. Like, you still need computers. For as much as you and I talk about where is the computer in the context of AI, like, you still need computers. And Apple's like, yeah, we're gonna make the best ones.

• 22:48David Pierce?

  I mean, this is like, think about when there was the giant run on Mac Studios when OpenClaw first came out. Like, there, again, this, this thing has been in development since longer ago than that, but you can see that Apple has come around to like, being the shovels provider in the gold rush, right? That like, actually, we don't need to build frontier models, we're gonna build the devices on which everybody interacts with the frontier models, and that is how we win. And I think as a person who wants good gadgets more than I want more frontier models, I think that rules. Uh, I wish these things were less expensive, but that is neither here nor there.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  By the way, they, they raised the price of the MacBook Neo for students this week too.

• 23:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's also Apple's strength, right? Like, this is, this is the thing Apple is historically very good at. And I think even across the OSs this year, like, think about macOS Golden Gate, right? What they did is go in and fix all the things that were bad about it, and they fixed the corner radii. And it's like, I think they are, they are back, particularly with the Mac, to a really good place of just being like, actually, this thing doesn't need a bunch of wild reinvention and new ideas, it just needs to be better all the time. And, and if they, they're gonna put a touchscreen on and they're like, if people like this, kick ass, we'll probably bring it to more places. I bet we will see it more places. I bet we will eventually see pencil support. But there is nothing in this that suggests they're betting anything on touchscreens.

• 24:11David Pierce?

  And I find that sort of comforting and like, absolutely convinced that was the right decision.

• 24:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, they're betting that people are gonna spend $400 more on it. That's what.

• 24:21David Pierce?

  Sure, but that's the bet of every Apple product, right? But I, I don't, I don't get the sense they've made any downstream decisions based on a Mac now has a touchscreen.

• 24:30Nilay Patel?

  No, and I, I think the low key-ness of this event in its way is part of the evidence there. By the way, speaking of the Duo, and you, you're just talking about software polish, I encourage everyone to go read the, the Duo reddits. People are starting to have lived with the device for a minute.

• 24:45Nilay Patel?

  Just saying I was right.

• 24:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:47Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's, it's a messy for, everyone's having a great time, and they are running right up into the reality of a first generation device, and it's a little messy.

• 24:54David Pierce?

  I've spent a lot of time thinking about, we, we talked a lot about this, obviously, last week, but the, you, you alluded to the idea that uh, it being $2,000 is a useful break in that most people who shouldn't buy this are never in a million years gonna even think about buying this. I think that's right, and I think I probably underestimated that distinction. I still think that is certainly not why it's $2,000. But, but the fact that it is $2,000, I think is useful in that sense. Like, it's not, you're not gonna walk into a store and, like, in the way that Apple tries to ladder you up, I don't think the jump from Pro to Pro Max to Duo is something most people are going to actually make. And I think that's probably a good thing.

• 25:34Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I've just been reading all this sort of like, user reviews on Reddit, and they're fascinating, people are finding stuff that I never thought about, but there is a theme of, wait, that's not, it's not an iPad.

• 25:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:43Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's in there. They're like, wait, I, I really was expecting to get the whole iPad experience here. And instead, it's a bunch of people figure out, we're gonna talk about Instagram a lot, but like, the Instagram team has been rapidly updating their Duo app because the first version was not right at all. The YouTube team just updated the YouTube app because the first version was like in the weird middle zone, and this new version is not right at all. And it's just gonna be that for a while. And again, it's fun. I cannot, by the way, continue to uh, overemphasize this. I, I wrote a review, Alison, I wrote a review where we said it was fun, like 10 times in a row, and people are like, how dare you give it this negative review? I, I don't know what to tell you guys.

• 26:23David Pierce?

  Welcome to the internet.

• 26:24Nilay Patel?

  But we were, we were dead right. We, we clocked it.

• 26:26David Pierce?

  Yep. I, I think I have found really interesting is how many people, uh, even developers who were like mucking around in the simulator all summer, got one in their hands and went, oh, this is completely different than I thought.

• 26:37Nilay Patel?

  Totally different.

• 26:37David Pierce?

  That the actual experience of holding and flipping and using the thing just cannot be replicated on a screen, which by the way, may be an interesting piece of the touchscreen MacBook, being able to actually use your app more like people will use it. But Duos for another day. Let's actually get to some of the Instagram stuff, because Instagram, as we like to say, on the, Instagram's going through it, right? Like, for a while, Nikita Beer was going through it. He left X. He's, X has a new product person who I'm sure in short order will be doing.

• 27:07Nilay Patel?

  I have a lot of notes for the new X product person, that's coming later in the show.

• 27:09David Pierce?

  He will also be going through it at some point in the near future. Instagram is, is kinda going through it now, so let's take a break and then let's get into that. We'll be right back.

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• 30:15David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Uh, Neelai, we have some what I would call updates in the Instagram is becoming YouTube is becoming TikTok is becoming Instagram story, which is my favorite story in the world of social media. All the apps are just becoming video app. I call them all video app. Big news from Instagram this week was they're launching a new push for longer form content called features. They're also continuing to roll out their TV app. Those things are obviously very connected, but also Adam Mosseri has just been running around the creator economy, having feelings about what it's like to be a creator and how to program Instagram and seems, and I mean this in a sort of genuine earnest way, seems kind of lost. I'm not sure he knows how to deal with

• 30:59David Pierce?

  the thing that is coming for Instagram right now.

• 31:01Nilay Patel?

  If Meta has its way, it will kill Instagram.

• 31:05David Pierce?

  Say more.

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  If Meta makes the bets that it is making on AI and AI future, the bets Mark Zuckerberg and Alexander Wang are making AI and AI future, they will crush Instagram into dust.

• 31:17David Pierce?

  Why?

• 31:18Nilay Patel?

  So first of all, just from a revenue perspective, Instagram is the, maybe the single greatest advertising platform in world history. It just is. The, the entire advertising business right now is like Instagram, YouTube, a weird amount of like trying to scam Google AI overviews and then like connected TV. Yeah. Those are the things that people spend money on. And Instagram and YouTube are just like way up there. Instagram, like everyone has this experience. You go on Instagram, it's like, would you like to buy a pressure washer? And it's like, well, I already have one, but let me see another couple dozen ads for this. And then maybe, and this just works. It works on me anyway. If you have a muse that is shopping for you, like maybe

• 32:00Nilay Patel?

  you're watching Instagram for that stuff, but maybe also Muse is like, we're not going to buy it based on this ad. We're going to just like wait for the price to go down somewhere else.

• 32:07David Pierce?

  I see.

• 32:08Nilay Patel?

  Some other, like the connection between the shopping and the advertising and the actual purchasing is going to get delegated to some agent and that's going to just disrupt Instagram. I don't know how, right? But like, this is the future of Muse.

• 32:22David Pierce?

  Right.

• 32:22Nilay Patel?

  It's how Mark Zuckerberg is saying Muse will make money. You're going to ask it to buy you things. It's going to go and do it for you and Meta will take a cut. Something about that is bad for Instagram.

• 32:35David Pierce?

  Let me cast that slightly differently, uh, which is that maybe actually in Mark Zuckerberg's fever dream, you discover the thing you want to buy because you're scrolling Instagram, because that's what we all do 24 hours a day in Mark Zuckerberg's world. And you say like, oh, I like that shirt that person's wearing. You take a picture of it with your Muse Tamagotchi and it goes and buys it for you. And now Meta has one coming and going. They're getting the ad rates to show me stuff and they're getting the transaction fees at the end of it. There's a, there's a, if, if you live in this closed ecosystem they're describing, it works.

• 33:07Nilay Patel?

  It almost works because you don't need Muse in that example. Right? So like, I won't buy anything on TikTok shop. I just, I don't know, a mental block to get TikTok my credit card. Like, I look at that interface. I'm like, I don't trust you. Whatever that is. I, that's not rational. It's just how I feel about it. I do the thing where I jump from TikTok to Amazon all the time to see if the thing is on Amazon. Sure. Muse is that thing. I'm looking at this ad. I want you to find me the best price. It might not be the vendor in the ad. This is a problem for Meta.

• 33:41David Pierce?

  Right?

• 33:42Nilay Patel?

  Sure. Like you're going to disconnect the ad from the purchase. And we don't have to go in these weeds because I don't know what's going to happen.

• 33:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:49Nilay Patel?

  But like, this is the kind of disruption that Muse is bringing to Instagram, where it might devalue the advertising on Instagram, or it might enhance it in some way, or everyone will be mad and there will be lawsuits. I don't know what's going to happen. Right? Like that, that, this is like a real story of the past few weeks of like Meta changing its advertising terms of service. And it turns out, whoops, we gave ourselves permission to scrape every website in the world. Now the publishers are mad, the creators are mad, they walked it back. It's, it's already happening is all I'm saying. That's one. Two, what are you scrolling Instagram on?

• 34:20Nilay Patel?

  Is it your Muse Tamagotchi, which doesn't have an Instagram app? Because the long-term future of this is Mark Zuckerberg breaking his dependence on the iPhone in particular.

• 34:30David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 34:30Nilay Patel?

  He, he does not like being on Apple's platform under Apple's control. So where are you scrolling? Are you in?

• 34:38David Pierce?

  Your smart glasses with a display. There, I, I, every world that you're describing is one in which Mark Zuckerberg has found a place to put Instagram.

• 34:46Nilay Patel?

  But, but something has happened to Instagram.

• 34:49David Pierce?

  Would you like to know what the actual answer is? It's your television.

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  Sure, it might be your television.

• 34:53David Pierce?

  It's your television.

• 34:54Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I'm just saying that Instagram that people love or had loved is like, it just two turns. If Meta's long-term plans are successful, it changes forever.

• 35:07David Pierce?

  Sure. To be fair, these have been Meta's long-term plans for approximately 45 minutes.

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  Right. But until recently, it was like, here's what's going to happen. You're going to live in a helmet and you won't have legs. And it's like, well, Instagram's going to be fine. Like right now, I'm like, oh, this is going to change her. And then third, maybe more immediately, it, Instagram is so full of slop, like incessant, wild slop, slop that frankly should be illegal, but you, you're like overwhelmed with everyone singing that one song.

• 35:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:38Nilay Patel?

  Right? Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 35:41David Pierce?

  No.

• 35:42Nilay Patel?

  Oh God, what is this?

• 35:43David Pierce?

  Was everybody singing one song? I think what I, my favorite disconnect that you and I have is I doom scroll on TikTok and you doom scroll on Instagram. And I fear it is actually pulling us further apart socially from one another. Like our references are getting further and further apart. Cause I know all the weird TikTok trends and you know all the weird Instagram trends.

• 36:00Nilay Patel?

  Have you not seen, no, no, this is, have you seen like, every NFL team has had its like players doing outstanding by Charlie Wilson.

• 36:07David Pierce?

  Oh yeah, that I have seen. I saw one with all the Apple executives doing it and it was, it was just one of the greatest.

• 36:11Nilay Patel?

  And then there's something else being that I don't understand. Apparently it's bad to get photoshopped into this, but like people are very confused. They're starting doing it to themselves. So it's, none of this is good. I don't understand any of it. It doesn't matter. But like, the layers of intellectual property infringement contained in this, right? Like, you're just deep faking people who theoretically do, did not give anyone permission to do this. You are re-appropriating the song itself and the video itself that NPR owns. And then like, Charlie Wilson, it's a performance with the Gap band owns the song. Like you cannot pull that apart. This is an existential crisis on Instagram every single day. Like I just have a folder full of deep fakes that are okay on Instagram and they don't know what to do with them.

• 36:53David Pierce?

  To be fair, it's not unique to Instagram. That's everybody.

• 36:56Nilay Patel?

  But it's everybody, but you know, like YouTube has a likeness detection. They're at least trying. There's some sop being made to this.

• 37:04David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 37:04Nilay Patel?

  Instagram is the Wild West. And even to the extent that TikTok is the Wild West, like you expect TikTok to be wilder. Instagram is the celebrity economy and they are letting likeness get away from them. This is very bad. Right? And there's no chance that Meta is going to allow any brakes to be pumped on AI content on Instagram. It is not going to happen. And so, yeah, we should talk about long form and we should talk about Instagram on TV and all this stuff, but you're just like, you started with Adam Mosseri and I know Adam, I've talked to Adam. I know you've talked to Adam. He's going through it.

• 37:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:43Nilay Patel?

  Because he's about to manage the angriest Instagram user base of all time. There's no way for Instagram to look the same as it did before, or it does, does now into the future, based on Meta's own plans for AI.

• 37:57David Pierce?

  You had a clip you wanted to play along these lines. Set it up. This is, there's, again, our references diverge. There's a bunch of things going on that set up this clip you want to play that I know nothing about. So explain what's going on here.

• 38:07Nilay Patel?

  I do feel, this Colin and Samir interview with Mosseri is very good. Everyone should watch it. Uh, I feel like we could have just done Mystery Science Theater 3000 with this episode of Colin and Samir's podcast. Uh, cause I, I reacted to like every minute of it, but the one that got me, because I've been thinking about deep fakes so much, is there's a phenomenon on Instagram and on TikTok, but on Instagram a lot, where stand-up comics are getting their bits stolen and they're getting deep faked by like, big booty AI influencers that then like crypto scam boomers. And like, I've, I've seen like female comedians complain that like they're, they have to like dress conservatively, but like the AI influencers who steal their jokes are

• 38:51Nilay Patel?

  like naked. And they're like, this is so unfair. Um, I'll find that clip. I'll share it. It's like very funny to me, but this is like a real problem on Instagram right now, where AI influencers or AI scammers are stealing jokes from comedians.

• 39:07David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 39:08Nilay Patel?

  And obviously they're all complaining about it. Right? Like, of course they're all complaining about it. Like they're just having their material boosted and they're being replaced by AI. So here is Mosseri talking to Colin and Samir about what to do about it. And I just listen for the existential crisis that this man is going.

• 39:27Speaker 05

  If you create a fictional comedian who steals bits from a bunch of different comedians, but every video looks like the same woman or the same man, the same comedian, then we, now we need to figure out, oh, like, can we find the bit, you know, and can we, can we match that? So I'm not, I'm actually not trying to make any excuses. I think originality is probably the, the principled answer to this problem. Um, and this isn't the only challenge that's coming up. But these are the kinds of things that we need to wrestle with as the content ecosystem changes, as the technology becomes more ubiquitous.

• 40:03Nilay Patel?

  Why is the content ecosystem changing, Adam? Why is the technology becoming more ubiquitous?

• 40:07David Pierce?

  So.

• 40:08Nilay Patel?

  Is, did something happen?

• 40:10David Pierce?

  Here's how I read that clip and I want to know if you read it the same way. I hear that as it is blindingly obvious to Adam Mosseri what he should do, which is massively prioritize the original creators of content and find ways to either in, in practice or in reality, ban those who don't do it.

• 40:32Nilay Patel?

  He should label and filter AI content.

• 40:35David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  That is the thing that every one of these platforms needs to do. It's a thing their users are screaming for them to do.

• 40:41David Pierce?

  That would be, it would be the most popular decision of all time, except on every one of these platforms, they are also force-feeding AI tools to their creators.

• 40:50Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 40:50David Pierce?

  They are betting the company on the existence of AI tools and generative AI. Uh, you can't pick a fight with Muse because you're picking a fight with your boss. Like this is the exact same problem at YouTube, right? Like I think YouTube is, is staring at this in the exact same way. They are primarily interested in getting creators to use AI tools to make more content all over the platform, even as those creators and users are screaming at them to stop. But this to me is like, and, and this is a vibe I get from Adam a lot. And it's why I actually give Adam a lot more credit than maybe I would other people in his position. I think he knows what to do. I just don't think he knows how to do it.

• 41:31Nilay Patel?

  I think there's a reason he's being very public right now.

• 41:34David Pierce?

  That's interesting.

• 41:35Nilay Patel?

  I don't think it's just the, the launch of this stuff. I, I think. Instagram is under a lot of pressure.

• 41:41David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 41:42Nilay Patel?

  That's all I'm saying. It's under pressure inside of Meta for a lot of reasons by all of Meta's plans. And then there's competitive pressure where the whole Hollywood entertainment machine is like YouTube.

• 41:53David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 41:53Nilay Patel?

  YouTube will solve all of our problems and Instagram needs to be a part of that, not just discovery for YouTube. There's a lot of problems there. And I know we're going to talk about the long form video features. But I think Adam being like, I will be the face of this and I will guide us through this and I need to over communicate all this stuff. Is a huge part of the puzzle here because they don't trust the other guy. You can't have Mark Zuckerberg out there being like, I'm going to fix Instagram. You need Adam to do it.

• 42:20David Pierce?

  Well, especially because you can't have Mark Zuckerberg saying, I'm going to label and filter AI content.

• 42:25Nilay Patel?

  Nope. It is the answer. It is without a doubt the answer. Do you know why there are unchecked AI influencers stealing jokes on Instagram? Because they didn't label and filter AI content. You could stop it today, but I don't think they want to.

• 42:39David Pierce?

  I will say I am sympathetic to the idea that it's a sliding scale much more than it is black and white. Right? And this is what everybody will tell you when confronted with this is. There is obviously generated from nothing, purely generative content that is actually fairly easy to find and label and filter. Then there is stuff that is like made by human hands without even a whiff of denoising in Lightroom. And that's all the way on the other end of the spectrum. And then there is a giant messy middle of things. And I think deciding where to draw the line is very challenging. But I think most people would say

• 43:24David Pierce?

  something to the effect of draw the line wherever you want, but anything that is purely AI generated, you should just get rid of tomorrow. And that alone would solve a lot of their problems.

• 43:33Nilay Patel?

  Look, the other answer is a lot of people found great joy in these Charlie Wilson outstanding video memes. They did. I watched a bunch of them. They're funny. I don't know, man. Like, there isn't any great shaking out that's happening. There's just an overwhelming flood that is taking away anyone's ability to make discerning judgments about what works where.

• 43:56David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 43:56Nilay Patel?

  And that's on purpose. I'll give you an example, just inside of the meta ecosystem. They really want meta glasses to be a thing, right? They want this to succeed and they know people call them pervert glasses and they don't like that. And so now what they've done is they've put some restrictions on what you can share on Instagram from the meta glasses. Because they control the distribution platform and if you control the distribution platform, you can influence what people make. And if you can take these weird videos of meta glasses, but we won't distribute them, maybe people will stop. They already, they know that this is power, that they can influence the kind of work people make by controlling the distribution. And they won't apply that to AI.

• 44:36David Pierce?

  Yes, I think that's absolutely right. And that is, those are structural business decisions that I think are bigger and broader than Instagram. And it's like, in this moment, you cannot, as a company, be seen out in the world saying, we are running away from AI. You'll just be crucified for it.

• 44:54Nilay Patel?

  Unless you're on Instagram.

• 44:55David Pierce?

  Unless you're on Instagram.

• 44:56Nilay Patel?

  We should talk about the plan to do long form video and they're putting, they've had other TV apps. They're putting an app on the Apple TV. Like they need to compete with YouTube. They need to grow in some other way. And I think a lot of this is the pressure on Instagram itself.

• 45:11David Pierce?

  Yeah. And especially because, like you said, Instagram is discovery for YouTube is a real thing. I think the thing I've been seeing so much of over the last really year is all of these companies trying desperately to close the loops that their products create. Like go all the way back a bunch of years ago to when TikTok got really into music, right? And TikTok became the discovery platform for the music industry. Like if you want to find new music, overwhelmingly, people are doing it on TikTok. Still true. Been true for a long time. TikTok starts basically trying to build a music app because they're like, well, we're now discovery for Spotify. And it turns out there's more money in being Spotify than in being the pipe to Spotify. So they start trying to close that loop. They did the same thing with the TikTok shop.

• 45:54David Pierce?

  YouTube did it with Shorts. Like everybody is trying to see the rest of the ecosystem and just pull it into their own walls.

• 46:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:02David Pierce?

  And in this one, it's just very obvious for Instagram that people see clips of something on Instagram and then they go find the thing elsewhere.

• 46:11Nilay Patel?

  Or they don't.

• 46:12David Pierce?

  Or they don't. But there's no money in being the thing on Instagram.

• 46:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's money in it for Instagram.

• 46:19David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 46:20Nilay Patel?

  Right. I mean, like the clipping economy exists for reasons. Like those creators have found ways to monetize that kind of attention, right? And most of it was gambling integrations, like whatever it is. Instagram is just printing money because they're not paying for content at all.

• 46:32David Pierce?

  Right.

• 46:32Nilay Patel?

  And this to me was, you rarely see creators just all say the same thing. Again, poor Adam Misery. He's like, I'm taking a big risk. We're launching a long form video with a test in like Brazil or whatever. It's going to be called Features, 90 minute videos, 16 by nine. It's the features you'd expect. And then every creator was like, what about the rev share?

• 46:53David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 46:53Nilay Patel?

  How much are you going to pay us? YouTube pays us. Like, I just seen is not the most like conflict seeking creator in the world. I think she's lovely. Her reply to Adam Misery was like, what's the rev share?

• 47:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's the right question.

• 47:08Nilay Patel?

  And I get it. Like that's the business. Like you're talking about the other platform that pays them money. It's not enough money. I don't think YouTube pays nearly enough money. YouTube will tell you they pay enough money. I'm sure we're going to get some comments pointing out that it's like a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. But for an individual creator, it's still not enough money. They've got to do brand deals.

• 47:26David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 47:26Nilay Patel?

  Instagram is all brand deals all day long. So is TikTok. So for them to be like, now put your long form here. It's like, well, how are we gonna? We're not even getting a little money.

• 47:37David Pierce?

  Right.

• 47:38Nilay Patel?

  Like they've said, Adam has said they're going to try to figure it out. Right? They know they need to do something, but short of matching or exceeding YouTube's rates, I think creators would be like, no.

• 47:52David Pierce?

  It's, I mean, it's an interesting question because it, doing it the way that they're doing it relies on kind of the ongoing primacy of Instagram, right? Like Instagram is, and we've talked about this many times and this has been your case for a long time. Instagram is sort of unassailably winning at a particular version of this, right? Like Instagram's cultural relevance just outstrips any of its competition.

• 48:12Nilay Patel?

  To be fair, TikTok was banned by successive administrations for unclear reasons.

• 48:21Nilay Patel?

  And it got neutered and like is controlled by like a weird Oracle consortium. I don't know.

• 48:26David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 48:27Nilay Patel?

  But like Instagram emerged the winner of that chaos.

• 48:30David Pierce?

  Yeah. Look, however it got there, whatever, but Instagram is so culturally central in a way that almost nothing else is. And you've got to think, again, for all the reasons you're talking about, that is permanently a fragile place to be. If no one wants to make a home on your platform, everybody needs you, but you're a means to an end in almost every case. People are trying to use your massive distribution and algorithm to accomplish some external goal. Whereas on YouTube, the thing that YouTube has done right is convince a lot of people to make their home on YouTube.

• 49:07Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 49:08David Pierce?

  Instagram does not have that same thing at the same scale. And I know they were existentially threatened by the rise of TikTok. They were.

• 49:17Nilay Patel?

  That's arguable by category, right? Like there are not a lot of tech Instagrammers. Like there are tech TikTokers.

• 49:26David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 49:26Nilay Patel?

  There are lots of tech YouTubers. They're all great. I don't know anyone who's like, my primary platform for tech content is Instagram. Like I might be that person, but I'm just like lazy and I don't know what I'm doing, right? But in other categories, in beauty and fashion, like Instagram is the home for an entire ecosystem.

• 49:45Nilay Patel?

  Cars. There's, I know a bunch of car Instagrammers. Like it's just, I think category by category, it's different.

• 49:51David Pierce?

  I think even a lot of the people in the categories you're just describing make most of their money on YouTube.

• 49:55Nilay Patel?

  Texas real estate agents are on Instagram.

• 49:58David Pierce?

  Sure. I'll give you that one. You can have that one for free.

• 50:02Nilay Patel?

  For whatever reason, the algorithm, every now and again, is like, don't you want to live in the suburbs of Dallas? This house is enormous and cheap. And it's like, well, you've got me intrigued.

• 50:11David Pierce?

  That's, yeah. Think of how many MacBooks you could buy in that giant Dallas house. But yeah, I mean, all of this, and then next to all of this, right? In the endless game of loop closing, right? You have TikTok launching a restaurant guide this week. Again, it's like closing the discovery loops to make, just keep you inside the app, doing the things that previously you would have clicked on a link to go outside. Or you would have done a Google search out of the app. Reddit this week announced that they're doing a for you feed and closing the walled garden in a big way to make much more of it a logged in experience. Because Reddit is, Reddit's slightly different in the sense that I think that is mostly a business decision and not a like cultural importance decision.

• 50:57Nilay Patel?

  Oh no, Reddit's furious. I can split apart some of this.

• 51:01David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 51:01Nilay Patel?

  TikTok being like, we need more verticals. A lot of people discover restaurants on TikTok. And TikTok, TikTok and Instagram in particular have the thing that everyone wants, which is you look at your phone and then you push the first button on the first home screen and it's TikTok or Instagram.

• 51:18David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 51:19Nilay Patel?

  And they're a discovery mechanism, as you keep saying, for all kinds of things. And so like so many people are bookmarking restaurant videos in TikTok. Like it sort of makes sense. Like, God bless you. I hope it works. I have no idea if it will. A lot of these ideas don't work. Reddit is a different problem. In that Reddit has a bunch of users and I'm sure a lot of our listeners have read it on their first home screen. It's the first app they open. Sure. Reddit is also like Google's number one source for all kinds of things. Right? For the past however many years, people were putting the word Reddit into their Google search and Google was sending them to Reddit. And Reddit liked this arrangement and then AI overuse came and Google Zero came and Google Zero wiped out a bunch of websites. And now Reddit is openly saying Google Zero is about to wipe out Reddit.

• 52:04David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 52:04Nilay Patel?

  Like in real ways. And so their shareholder letter, all this stuff, they put it out and all of it is to justify, we're going to make everyone log into Reddit. Because if we don't make you log into Reddit, we will not own our relationship with you, the visitor. We can't keep you here. We can't get you to download the app. We can't send you notifications. And then most importantly, I'm just going to read from the announcement. The vast majority of unauthorized access to Reddit, basically the scraping and stealing of Reddit data happens through logged out experiences.

• 52:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 52:36Nilay Patel?

  So they're like, yeah, the AI companies are just stealing all of this. And so to deal with that and to have a direct relationship with you, with a person, you have to log into Reddit now and they're gonna try to get that app on your phone as hard as they can.

• 52:49David Pierce?

  You know, who wrote something kind of like that about a different social media platform 20 years ago? Mark Zuckerberg. There has been a reason that Facebook has not been available for Google scraping for a very, very long time. And it is the, like, the power that comes with having a bunch of logged in users makes you huge. And obviously, the stakes and the logistics of what's happening have changed over the years, but it's the same bet. The bet is we have to keep the thing out that is going to disintermediate what you would come to our platform to do.

• 53:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I can just read it in the shareholder letter that Reddit put out. This is what websites have, like publisher websites have been saying for ages about Google. Our search, this is from Reddit. Our search referral traffic was done meaningfully in Q3 with the decline accelerating later in the quarter. The biggest impact was on logged out and web traffic. These declines have continued into the early part of Q4. During October, search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week.

• 53:49David Pierce?

  Whoa.

• 53:50Nilay Patel?

  So it's just like plummeting because Google's serving scraped AI overviews.

• 53:54David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:54Nilay Patel?

  And so they go on to say, this is the trend that matters to the long-term health of our platform and business. As we look ahead, our strategy is to make Reddit a direct daily habit for more people. Make Reddit awesome, grow community and belonging and bring in new audiences. And a key piece of that work is making Reddit logged in experience. So they are trying to get on your home screen. They are trying to be a thing that competes with Instagram and YouTube and TikTok. They're a social network and they are trying to steal that attention instead of being the thing that Google directs you to.

• 54:27David Pierce?

  Right.

• 54:28Nilay Patel?

  This is the future of almost everything. Like, these platforms sending traffic out or referring you to another app, as you keep saying, opening the loop. Every one of these platforms know that AI is coming for them and they need a direct relationship with your eyeballs because letting an AI agent do that work is going to destroy their business.

• 54:45David Pierce?

  Yep, and I think Reddit is particularly interesting because, what, two years ago? Not that long ago, Reddit decided to take the giant check from Google to make it make business sense to give all that data to Google. And the fact that Reddit took all that money from Google and then so quickly decided actually this is disaster for Reddit, this is not going to be tenable, is really fascinating, right? Because the flip side of what you're saying is that everything else just becomes content fodder for AI models and then you just hope to get paid on the way out.

• 55:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's that, there's that letter from inside Microsoft or analysis of what AI overviews would do to the web from inside Microsoft that came out in, in the, I think it was the New York Times versus Microsoft case. And there's this quote that is just applicable to Google too, from, from that analysis inside Microsoft. And the gist of it is, this is unique in that rarely does a product become successful and in so becoming successful, kill its own supply chain.

• 55:49David Pierce?

  That's very true.

• 55:49Nilay Patel?

  Like, if you make more iPhones, the iPhone's supply chain just gets more lucrative.

• 55:54David Pierce?

  Right.

• 55:55Nilay Patel?

  It's better to become the supplier of touchscreens to Apple if the iPhone is successful. If AI becomes successful and you're Reddit, Google just kills you.

• 56:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:05Nilay Patel?

  And like, I think Reddit, like many, many, many publishers that I've talked to, did not believe that Google would kill the thing that makes the AI go. And Google just has killed it. Right? Google is like, well, I mean, their answer every time you ask them is like, what are you gonna do if you kill the web? And they're like, we have YouTube. And I think one day a bunch of YouTube creators are gonna wake up and realize they don't love that deal.

• 56:29David Pierce?

  Yeah. And the pace of that, I think, has not only surprised people, but has been much, much, much, much faster than anybody expected.

• 56:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But so I think Reddit signed this deal assuming that Google wasn't so ruthless that it would kill Reddit along the way. Because it, right? If you're like, everyone just types the word Reddit into Google search and Google's like, great, we're gonna prioritize Reddit and pay you money and you just keep this going because everyone's happy.

• 56:54David Pierce?

  Right.

• 56:54Nilay Patel?

  I think Reddit was like, great, and then we'll like, figure something else out. And then Google was like, well, you're dead now.

• 56:58David Pierce?

  Yep. Google shipped two more models and was like, oh, we don't need this anymore.

• 57:01Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 57:01David Pierce?

  We're good. Yeah. It's, it's gonna get weirder and worse, I think. And I think a lot of, like, kudos to Adam Mosseri for being out in public, like you said, because these are the conversations happening in every one of these companies. It's like, literally, what do we do? And even if we know the answer, structurally, can we, inside of these companies, actually do the thing our users are begging us to do?

• 57:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:27David Pierce?

  And the answer in a lot of cases right now is no.

• 57:28Nilay Patel?

  By the way, these internal company trade-offs are super real. I, this is like a different story from a different time.

• 57:35Nilay Patel?

  But, you know, Google used to trade off features in Chrome against search.

• 57:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 57:41Nilay Patel?

  And the one that someone just told me from 100 years ago was they, the Chrome team made it easier to do fav, like fav icons. So you could just like save a thing and like, it made it easier to do favorites. And the search team pushed back because they thought that would reduce the volume of navigational searches in search, which would make people use search less.

• 58:00David Pierce?

  Oh yeah, if you've ever wondered why Chrome bookmarks are bad, it's because Google wants you to search for things. That is, that is a straightforwardly true business thing that I know for sure is correct.

• 58:09Nilay Patel?

  That's funny. I, I just heard this story, but you've heard this story before too.

• 58:11David Pierce?

  I've heard this many times, yeah. So I've, I've talked to a lot of the folks who were there in the early days of Chrome and they can, they can describe to you feature by feature what doesn't exist because the search team won't let it. Because you'll remember, the only thing Google cares about is you doing more searches. If you have ever wondered, why isn't Google better at this thing? It's probably because Google wants you to do more searches. And actually is disincentivized for making great products in a lot of ways because Google wants you to do more searches.

• 58:38Nilay Patel?

  But what are you gonna search for if Reddit is dead?

• 58:40David Pierce?

  That's a really good question. Like, nothing.

• 58:43Nilay Patel?

  Just like, think one more turn.

• 58:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 58:46Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. I, I think the web is about to go through the weirdest period of all time now because it is the fallback user interface for every agent, whether or not those agents work or are good, but it's the fallback user interface for every agent. Right? It's not MCP or APIs. It's like, we're gonna click around the website for you. Half of the companies are just like blocking agents. They're blocking Muse now to extract some business terms. And along the way, it's like, what are you gonna look at? Like, you with your dumb, humid eyes are gonna have to look at something on your phone while we still have phones. And it's like one of four apps and every company wants to be one of those four apps.

• 59:21David Pierce?

  Yeah. And if you are one of those four apps, boy, are you trying to just shrink the world around you as much as you possibly can. I hate it.

• 59:29Nilay Patel?

  Digital future.

• 59:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's really bleak.

• 59:32Nilay Patel?

  On the other hand, Muse has a butt.

• 59:36Nilay Patel?

  Huh? Muse is real cute.

• 59:38David Pierce?

  On the other hand, Muse can get it, is how we should just start ending all of our podcasts from now on. All right, we should take a break. We're gonna come back to me laying around time. We'll be right back.

• 59:48Speaker 00

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• 1:03:05David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Neel, is it, is it time? Are we doing this?

• 1:03:08Nilay Patel?

  It's time.

• 1:03:09David Pierce?

  It's time, once again, for America's favorite podcast within a podcast, Brendan Carr's a Dummy.

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty.

• 1:03:23David Pierce?

  That was beautiful. That theme is from Felix Klangel, who's a classical singer from Austria. That's good stuff. Phew. That made me feel something. That might have been too good for Brendan, if we're being honest. Like, I'm looking for a little bit of, a little bit of sloppiness when it comes to Brendan. But Felix, that was beautiful. Thank you.

• 1:03:41Nilay Patel?

  It was very good, and I do love knowing that we have this many listeners who are this engaged with the vagaries of United States spectrum policy.

• 1:03:51David Pierce?

  Even in Austria, they know Brendan Carr's a dummy. It feels important.

• 1:03:54Nilay Patel?

  You're not supposed to know who the chairman of the FCC is. I do want to make this point clear. I have known personally a number of FCC chairman. I have interviewed them. I have talked about them. No one has ever given a shit until Brendan Carr showed up and started breaking stuff left and right.

• 1:04:10David Pierce?

  It's our guy. What do you do this week?

• 1:04:11Nilay Patel?

  Uh, he's gonna break some stuff, some stuff in a real big way.

• 1:04:14David Pierce?

  Great.

• 1:04:14Nilay Patel?

  It's our guy. Like, he, I got emails from listeners sketching out, like, Charlie Day style conspiracy theories. Like, that was the subject line of the email.

• 1:04:24David Pierce?

  Oh, boy. Okay.

• 1:04:25Nilay Patel?

  Like, I'm not, I don't mean to do a Charlie Day conspiracy theory. But it's, it's like, right here for you. So if you're Brendan, and I've heard this now from, from smart analysts. We just did a whole episode on the SpaceX mobile, and we had Walt Pisek from Lightshed on. And he is like, Brendan's, Brendan's goal is to get a spectrum auction under his belt. Like, that's the last thing you do as an FCC chairman.

• 1:04:47David Pierce?

  Is that like a cool, that's like, that's like a cool milestone if you're an FCC commissioner?

• 1:04:51Nilay Patel?

  I guess. It's never occurred to me, but that's like the varsity jacket, you know?

• 1:04:55David Pierce?

  Sure. He like goes home from work and he's like, your boy got a spectrum auction. And just like high fives all his friends.

• 1:05:00Nilay Patel?

  Last notch on the belt, and then you go, and then he will undoubtedly end up going to work for SpaceX. Like, you can just see it coming.

• 1:05:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06Nilay Patel?

  So Brendan had an open meeting today, uh, the day they were recording the broadcast, and he got the remarks. And so Brendan's big proposal today, we propose, I'm quoting, "We propose to auction 25 megahertz of spectrum across the 1675 and 2020 megahertz band, blah, blah, blah. We're gonna open this to a broad range of providers from 5G and 6G to direct to device, which is satellite or some hybrid network. We expect big interest in the seemingly modest amount of spectrum." Great. He's gonna do a spectrum auction. He's very excited about this.

• 1:05:36David Pierce?

  6G, baby. We're doing 6G now.

• 1:05:38Nilay Patel?

  It's our 6G. And then you just keep scrolling down his long letter. "Today's proposal is a strong start. Now we must work with our federal partners to finish the job on time, on budget, with no surprises. Currently, the NTIA, which is the National Technology Office, is working to complete its study of this band by early 2027." Here it is. "Parts of the band support NOAA weather detection, and any transition must relocate incumbents in a timely and efficient manner. I am confident our federal partners will deliver."

• 1:06:15David Pierce?

  Okay. I'm gonna, can I, can I attempt to translate that into English?

• 1:06:19Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:06:20David Pierce?

  I'm going to take spectrum away from the people who predict the weather and give it to the highest bidder?

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna take it from the weather satellites and give it to Elon Musk. That's what you should read this to.

• 1:06:31David Pierce?

  The Trump administrat-, like, this is in the, in the scheme of wrongs that the Trump administration has done. This is maybe a relatively minor one. But their war on NOAA and meteorology and knowing what the weather is, is so bizarre to me.

• 1:06:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. NOAA, by the way, is the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association. It's the weather consortium.

• 1:06:50David Pierce?

  They're, they're the ones who tell us the weather.

• 1:06:52Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:06:53David Pierce?

  In a very real way.

• 1:06:55Nilay Patel?

  And the Trump administration really has-

• 1:06:56David Pierce?

  They don't get to do that anymore.

• 1:06:57Nilay Patel?

  Really has torn down a lot of their infrastructure, and now he's taking the spectrum away. Again, "Any transition must relocate incumbents" is, we're taking it away from NOAA.

• 1:07:08David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:07:09Nilay Patel?

  We're taking it away from the weather satellites, and we must relocate them in a timely, efficient manner. Now, this is not, the FCC hasn't done this before. 4G exists because we relocated the incumbents on that spectrum. So you will remember, uh, 700 megahertz was the big spectrum for 4G. Do you remember this?

• 1:07:25David Pierce?

  "You'll remember" is the most generous thing you've ever said to me on this show, Neil.

• 1:07:30Nilay Patel?

  It was big deal. We covered the 700 megahertz auction a lot, but it was like, in the days.

• 1:07:35David Pierce?

  Like, we talked about it. I'm sorry, keep going.

• 1:07:40Nilay Patel?

  I know all the FCC chairman. Because I'm like, "You'll remember the 700 megahertz auction", which was like consequential spectrum auction. And to get that spectrum back, they had to shut down analog TV broadcasts in this country. We just, we just turned them off. We're like, you know what sucks analog TV broadcasts? We're gonna give every citizen who currently receives analog TV a tiny little digital TV adapter. We're gonna hand them out. We're gonna spend the tax dollars handing out digital TV adapters so we can take back the 700 megahertz spectrum and use it for 4G. The spectrum auction we ran.

• 1:08:15David Pierce?

  And then our friend Alex Cranz gets to talk about ATSC every day for the rest of her life.

• 1:08:20Nilay Patel?

  Did it work? Who knows? This is the kind of thing the FCC does.

• 1:08:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:25Nilay Patel?

  Right? We're like, there's a better use of the spectrum. All TV is moving to cable and whatever, anyway. Why do we have this huge chunk of valuable spectrum? We should use it for the internet. Great. You can run a rulemaking process. You can do the thing. Here, Brendan is just saying, "I'm doing this." "I'm gonna, I'm putting the pressure on our federal partners to finish the job on time, on budget, and with no surprises, part of the band must support NOAA. Any transition must relocate incumbents." No one gets to say. It was just a thing we're doing. So we got a reader email from Jason. This is the Charlie Day email. And Jason says, quote, "This won't let anyone do a 4K livestream from Burning Man using SpaceX satellites from their phone. Instead, it's a stretch of spectrum well suited to mission-critical remote sensing

• 1:09:08Nilay Patel?

  and single-stream, high-bandwidth transmission. It's great for weather satellites. It's NOAA spectrum they use to enable weather forecasting and live hurricane tracking. It's what they use to collect weather balloon data. If Musk expects SpaceX to hit hundreds of trillions of dollars in revenue, he needs to find a way to monetize his constellation. Is he about to rent seek data we currently have available for free? That's Project 2025."

• 1:09:32David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:09:32Nilay Patel?

  So you're gonna privatize the weather.

• 1:09:34David Pierce?

  That is both a good take and a not particularly outlandish one. Because let's privatize the weather has been-

• 1:09:41Nilay Patel?

  It's a thing.

• 1:09:42David Pierce?

  An ongoing attempt in our, like, I encourage anyone who wants to to look up AccuWeather's lobbying. Just, like, we should, we should spend a lot of time talking about the weather at some point on the show because there's like a lot of this stuff wrapped up in that. But like, the, the attempt to make it very hard and very expensive for you to know what the weather is, is an ongoing thing by private industry, and it is working. And this, and what they have done by and large is take the very good data that NOAA gathers using taxpayer money and making it expensive for us. What you, what, what Jason is saying and what immediately seems kind of reasonable is, what if we just sold that whole pipeline to Elon Musk?

• 1:10:22Nilay Patel?

  What if we sold the spectrum? No, I'm not saying Musk is gonna buy it. Like, maybe, maybe T-Mobile will buy it to do weather sensing. 6G?

• 1:10:31David Pierce?

  You can get accurate weather reports only on T-Mobile.

• 1:10:34Nilay Patel?

  Look, this industry is, has a lot of ideas. I will remind you that AT&T at one point owned Time Warner, and their dream was a 4.3 grayscale Justice League formatted for mid-range Android fans. I'm not saying it's a sensible industry. In, in no way am I saying it's a sensible industry.

• 1:10:52David Pierce?

  What if you could get different cuts of Zack Snyder's movies depending on the current weather in your local area?

• 1:10:58Nilay Patel?

  By privatized weather data? Anyway, Brendan, if you want to talk about your dastardly plan to steal spectrum from our weather satellites to sell them to private industry for some use that you have not yet specified, I would love to have you on the show. You know, I think you're a dummy, and honestly, I think you're a coward as well. Brendan, uh, give me a call. That's from Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's Favorite Podcast, we're not a podcast.

• 1:11:30David Pierce?

  Sometimes Brendan just like makes me sad, and other times Brendan fills me with rage. And I'm in a, I'm having a real rage day about what you just described.

• 1:11:40Nilay Patel?

  The weather.

• 1:11:41David Pierce?

  It turns out, it's important, people in, listen, to all of you in San Francisco, you don't understand why weather matters because it's somewhere between 62 and 68 every day. For the rest of us, the weather actually is kind of existentially important all the time. I just took my kid on a walk and accidentally wore a long-sleeve shirt, and it's in the 70s. And that really sucked. Now I'm gonna be sweaty all day. And Brendan's trying to make that even worse.

• 1:12:05Nilay Patel?

  If only you had Starlink Mobile.

• 1:12:07David Pierce?

  If, this is what I'm saying. Elon could have fixed that for me. My Tesla Roadster. All right. This is now a few days old, but we should talk about it. Anthropic finally published its S1 this week. It's, it's probably the most financial detail we've ever gotten about one of these leading AI labs. Anthropic intends to go public very soon. It might be the biggest IPO in history. It has made a lot of people feel a lot of feelings. Neil, I'm, I'm just curious what this S1 made you feel. I, I confess I've only read parts of it because it is just criminally boring for the most part, as all S1s are. But you can read the risk factors.

• 1:12:42Nilay Patel?

  Put it into Claude?

• 1:12:43David Pierce?

  The financials are, I did not put it into Claude. What does Claude think?

• 1:12:46Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I told, I was on a plane, but I told our team the easiest bit in the world was feeding the S1 into Claude to see if Claude thought that Anthropic had a shot. I don't think we did it. And we wouldn't have published it anyway because we're not gonna publish any content. But it is a good bit. I'm just putting it out there.

• 1:12:58David Pierce?

  It's a good bit.

• 1:13:00Nilay Patel?

  Look, I think their risk factors are hilarious. Like, we might end up killing everyone. I think their spend commitments are huge.

• 1:13:06David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:13:06Nilay Patel?

  They've committed $800 billion over the next 10 years, depending on how you count, to the various hyperscalers and cloud providers, including SpaceX AI. I'm sorry, SpaceX SI.

• 1:13:19Nilay Patel?

  And there's a lot of glimmers in there that they're gonna build their own because they can't just be dependent on everyone else. Then there's some really interesting stuff in there. They are one of the only frontier companies that isn't totally dependent on Nvidia. They use a lot of TPUs and Amazon Tranean chips. It is a fascinating company. And in order to do the thing they want to do, the entire rest of the economy has to become AI-enabled and start paying them huge amounts of money. And I'm just going to point out that OpenAI is also going to IPO. And Google exists and there are open weight models. And it is not clear that we can generate all of the money to fund all of these companies.

• 1:13:56David Pierce?

  I was so struck particularly by that last thing, that they understand acutely, and it actually in retrospect makes a lot of the last few years, make a lot of sense, that these companies know inherently that the only way any of this works, they have built such an enormous house of cards that only holds if everyone at all levels of culture in the economy buy in and sort of bend to AI. And the minute anybody goes, it all falls apart. And they have, all of these companies have endeavored to be, you know, too big to fail. There's now too much money in it. So many people in some circular way now have real financial investment in AI working that it just kind of keeps propping itself up.

• 1:14:41David Pierce?

  It's like Bitcoin, right? Like Bitcoin is never going to go to zero because too many rich people have Bitcoin to allow it to go to zero. The AI economy is very much-

• 1:14:49Nilay Patel?

  Like the VCs are all like, get out. It's going to crash. AI is going to crack the encryption. It's a real thing that's happening right now in crypto.

• 1:14:57David Pierce?

  Well, oh, in crypto, yes, absolutely. There's also a lot of, I've been talking to software makers recently who are like, we have to, we just have to stop making software because it's all going to collapse. We don't know what to do. Everybody's screwed. That's a whole, there is such an undercurrent of the world is going to end, but please give us so much money until it dies.

• 1:15:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I was, Anthropic just announced Claude for legal this week. You know, I was in San Francisco at my sad hustle, telling lawyers that AI will be okay. It's just a thing I do on the side. I'm available for birthday parties as well. You know, their, their version of it is very much like, you can't just give a chatbot with an open-ended prompt, like an open-ended window to every industry and be like, you'll know what to do. You have to build them interfaces. And so Claude for legal is just like basically a bunch of artifacts that like help you do specific legal tasks with an interface. And it's like, oh, they need to make products. Like what do I keep saying? The products aren't very good. Like the models might be good. The agent harnesses might be capable, but actually the products are nowhere close.

• 1:16:01Nilay Patel?

  So if you're like, we're going to productize legal work. So it looks like an application that can do something inside law firms. Maybe more law firms will buy the products instead of just being like, we're buying some Claude seats and token maxing, right? And you're just going to go sector by sector doing that, right? You're, okay, now we're on to accounting. Now we're on to whatever else. We're on to plumbing supply shops. Like you've got to go through the entire economy and be like, here's some intelligence. Here's some product.

• 1:16:31David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:16:32Nilay Patel?

  And that's just a lot of work. And there's a lot of competition for it.

• 1:16:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, and you have to convince all of those people that your tool on top of your model is better than the vast quantity of specific enterprise software they already have.

• 1:16:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:46David Pierce?

  Which is hard. Anybody who has ever tried to sell to an IT manager at a company knows that is very, very, very hard work. And they have to do that at such pace and such scale that just seems virtually impossible. All of this has moved faster than anybody expected. So like, who knows? But all of that is like, that is different from, we just have to keep building bigger models. So we need to spend a theoretically infinite amount of money on compute. And to that point, actually, there, there is a sense in a lot of conversations I'm having with AI people and to some extent in this S1, that actually, maybe we are going to fairly quickly hit a phase where just having a leading model is not how you win.

• 1:17:31David Pierce?

  That, that having better products or more tuned products or other things that a company like Google is much better set up to do, like vast quantities of customer support, is just the thing that's going to be the actual differentiator, rather than we have a slightly better model on some of these benchmarks. That like, we've been talking about this for forever with things like DeepSeek and the open source stuff. And there is a sense of the models are going to be commoditized. And at the top end, that hasn't really happened. But there is a real sense that like, almost nobody actually needs these frontier models to do the things that they're trying to do. The sixth best model at this point is good enough for most of the things people want to do with AI.

• 1:18:06Nilay Patel?

  I'm very curious about this dynamic. Look, if I was young and ambitious instead of old and committed to revenue-free career of journalism, I do love it. You would, you would just start a company and you would take some cheap to run, but pretty capable model. And you would just run around all the businesses in your town and be like, I can help you. I will build you products and something. And you would not be paying for, and if you had even more ambition, you would just be like, I'm going to do this with the, like, maybe the open weight models aren't as capable as they are today, they should be today, but the next two turns of them will be.

• 1:18:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:42Nilay Patel?

  And you can just like, go build a business where you just like automate a bunch of companies. You can just do that. And I think Anthropic has to prove why it will be on the frontier. Now, some of their arguments make sense. And they're not necessarily in S1. They're just like the arguments that the frontier labs make, which is, I'll use law firms as an example because I was just at that conference. If you run a law firm and you're not using the frontier intelligence and your opposing counsel is, you're screwed. So like, there's always an incentive to do that.

• 1:19:06David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:19:07Nilay Patel?

  And if you are, you know, doing some medical application, like you always want the frontier, like, there's some reason to always have frontier in cyber. You always want the best, most capable model because cybersecurity just requires that.

• 1:19:18David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:19:19Nilay Patel?

  Given the scale of threats. So there's some value in that. But I, again, Anthropic thinks they're going to take the entire economy.

• 1:19:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, and, and, and they kind of have to.

• 1:19:28Nilay Patel?

  It's unclear the entire economy needs frontier intelligence.

• 1:19:31David Pierce?

  Right. And again, like you said, OpenAI is about to come out and also ask for the entire economy.

• 1:19:36Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:19:37David Pierce?

  And it turns out we only, we only have a lot of them.

• 1:19:39Nilay Patel?

  Have you used Claude yet?

• 1:19:40David Pierce?

  I haven't, I'm still on the waitlist.

• 1:19:41Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:19:42David Pierce?

  I can't get in.

• 1:19:43Nilay Patel?

  I'm very curious. If people have used it, I'm dying to know what it's like.

• 1:19:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, same. It seems to be much more relaxed than the others. It's like, it's not trying to do too much from what I can tell. But I do want to hear about it. I encourage everybody to read the S1. If just for the risk factors in which Anthropic says out loud a lot of the things we've been talking about, like what if we make a Claude that's alive? What if, if Claude is alive, it becomes a very complicated thing to manage as an employee and make a business around? Because what does Claude want? What if Claude doesn't want to help anybody? What if Claude says he doesn't like lawyers? What do you, what do you do when Claude's alive? And it's just mad at all the lawyers, Neelai? It's all very good. They might end the world, they might build God, or they'll probably die along the way, is like really the vibe of the Anthropic S1.

• 1:20:30David Pierce?

  And it's a, just a fascinating, fascinating thing. Everybody should read it. Neelai, what's your lightning round?

• 1:20:35Nilay Patel?

  It's so funny. I have completely the opposite of this.

• 1:20:38David Pierce?

  Oh, God.

• 1:20:39Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft is sending Copilot support on smart TVs.

• 1:20:49David Pierce?

  Well, there's a sentence I couldn't have care any less about.

• 1:20:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would just say, two years ago, LG and Samsung announced their latest smart TVs would have access to Copilot, which showed up in just the laziest way possible. It was like a link to a web app on, on some LG TVs. It was so bad.

• 1:21:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:05Nilay Patel?

  I think Microsoft thought they cooked. I think they were like, yeah, everyone's going to talk to Copilot on their ties in TVs.

• 1:21:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:10Nilay Patel?

  It didn't happen. Windows Central reported on notification that popped up on the LG TV. It said, "Microsoft has recently decided to end support for Copilot functionality on all TVs, including LG TVs. As a result, it may stop functioning shortly." Do you think anyone cared about this?

• 1:21:25David Pierce?

  I would bet more people saw that pop up than knew the feature existed.

• 1:21:30Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:21:31David Pierce?

  That's very funny.

• 1:21:31Nilay Patel?

  You recall that LG added an unremovable Copilot shortcut to their TVs?

• 1:21:36David Pierce?

  And everybody was so mad about that, right?

• 1:21:38Nilay Patel?

  So mad about it.

• 1:21:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:39Nilay Patel?

  This is great. It's like Microsoft has all these crazy distribution advantages for Copilot in like the enterprise setting, where like Copilot actually does have some adoption in business because it's just part of your Microsoft suite. But they're like, Bing? And it just didn't work. And they're like, Copilot on TVs? And it's just like, didn't work.

• 1:21:56David Pierce?

  I really, it, it, it never stops being funny to me how much Microsoft cannot help itself from trying to be a consumer company.

• 1:22:03Nilay Patel?

  Can't.

• 1:22:03David Pierce?

  Like, just, just own what Copilot is and put it in Excel and count your money and everything will be fine. But they're just like, we, they, they were so high on their own supply when Bing was cool for five minutes that they were like, we can do this. We can win in this. And they just can't. It's just not going to happen.

• 1:22:23Nilay Patel?

  Nope.

• 1:22:24David Pierce?

  Very good.

• 1:22:25Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think they're gonna start building their models. I feel that vibe from them. And they did announce some science discoveries lately. We have a good piece on that from Robert Hart. Talked to Mustafa. But Copilot on TVs is gone, my friends.

• 1:22:37David Pierce?

  Do you, the only experience I have with smart assistants on my TVs is when I accidentally pressed the wrong button on my remote and Bixby shows up on my Samsung TV. So I would say my feelings about voice assistants on my television are not great.

• 1:22:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:50David Pierce?

  Do you have better ones? Are you like a big Ask Alexa guy?

• 1:22:54Nilay Patel?

  We have, you know, our main TV is a Sony and it has Google Assistant or Gemini, some variation thereof.

• 1:23:01David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:23:03Nilay Patel?

  It's, again, is a different one than the one that runs on our Google Homes and that is in my car. So who knows what's going on there. But we just use an Apple TV.

• 1:23:13David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:23:13Nilay Patel?

  That's our thing. And then, and we do have one WebOS TV that has Beanbird. And I, I should go use Copilot before it goes away.

• 1:23:22David Pierce?

  I think the last technical innovation I really enjoyed on televisions was the thing where you could type into a field on your phone and it would show up on the television. That's about as connected to the internet as I need my TV. Like, let me type on the keyboard on my phone instead of mousing around on the screen itself. I'm good.

• 1:23:40Nilay Patel?

  We have a big story coming. I know there's been a lot of coverage of TVs all listening to you or tracking you and stuff. We have a big story coming, pulling that all apart. I won't give away too much, but we, we have a lot of reporting on what these TVs are actually doing and what ways.

• 1:23:53David Pierce?

  Oh, that's exciting.

• 1:23:54Nilay Patel?

  And the answer is that Copilot's been watching you nude. That's why it's being retired. It's seen enough.

• 1:23:59David Pierce?

  That feels right. All right. I have one more lightning round item for you. It's about vacuums. So this company, Matic, which is a bunch of like, I think, ex-Google people who left to start a robot vacuum company, sold a robot vacuum that was very expensive, but kind of adorable and is like everybody's favorite robot vacuum. Like, one of those sort of universally beloved, highly reviewed things, just shipped a new model. It's called the Matic Serene, and it has essentially one new important feature, other than the fact that it's $200 more expensive, which is noise reduction.

• 1:24:36Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:24:37David Pierce?

  It exists only to be quieter. And I read this initially and was like, well, this seems sort of silly.

• 1:24:44Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this picture is so confusing.

• 1:24:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, the main photo is the Matic Serene sort of sitting behind a person doing back bends in yoga.

• 1:24:55Nilay Patel?

  I thought her feet were on the vacuum. I thought the vacuum was like driving away with her. I was like, it's a yoga vacuum. But no, that's not what's happening.

• 1:25:03David Pierce?

  Yoga vacuum would be sick. But I just keep thinking about this. I'm like, actually,

• 1:25:07Nilay Patel?

  $1,700?

• 1:25:08David Pierce?

  $1,700. That's, that's a fun spoiler alert. Robot vacuums are expensive, except for the crappy ones. The good ones are expensive. So this is always the thing. The regular Matic is $1,500, which is vastly more expensive than most of its competition. But over and over, anywhere you look, people seem to be like, it's worth it. It just, it is smarter, it is better, it understands itself in space better. Like, this, this thing has solved a lot of problems with robot vacuums. And I have a Roomba sitting around here somewhere. We got one of the first ones that could go back to its base and empty itself. So you didn't have to empty it every single time. I thought that was really nice. We got one of those. And between my dogs and my children, they picked such a revolt against this loud

• 1:25:51David Pierce?

  thing running around our house that we stopped using it. So now I have an expensive Roomba that we just don't use. And I'm thinking about this thing and I'm actually like, noise reduction might be the single most important new feature in a robot vacuum, particularly in my life. And so now I'm very excited about the idea of the Matic Serene just quietly, and I guess perhaps more menacingly, just like noodling around my house all day. This could work for me.

• 1:26:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, especially if it helps you do back bends. $1,700. You should just, we bought a very expensive, like LG Stick vacuum, and we just use it. And it's, it's good at what it does.

• 1:26:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, but you have to vacuum. I don't want to vacuum.

• 1:26:33Nilay Patel?

  Your children aren't old enough yet. The trick, the trick is coming for you, where you make vacuum an exciting benefit of being an older child.

• 1:26:42David Pierce?

  I am looking forward to that.

• 1:26:43Nilay Patel?

  I'm not saying Max is good at vacuuming. I'm saying if some vacuuming gets done, but it's on the order of whatever robot vacuum. I've purchased and returned so many robot vacuums.

• 1:26:52David Pierce?

  Why do they keep going back?

• 1:26:53Nilay Patel?

  Uh, because it's like gets stuck. They don't work. I don't know. Every, every, the first time you come downstairs, you know, after the robot's supposed to be cleaning up at night, and it's just like sadly stuck under a table.

• 1:27:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:07Nilay Patel?

  And I'm like, I'm done with this. I can just.

• 1:27:08David Pierce?

  I have had many experiences of being in bed, like getting ready to go to sleep and getting a notification from my Roomba that's just like stuck indoor. It's like wop, wop. I'm like, well, now I have to go rescue this thing or I'm going to be thinking about it all night.

• 1:27:22Nilay Patel?

  I don't need one more thing that's like studying the layout of my house to send it to some server somewhere else.

• 1:27:28David Pierce?

  See, I gotta say, I'm completely unbothered by that. Like, I probably should be more worried about the idea that something is just mapping my house. But there are, there are just so many other things to worry about that if, if it can be a surveillance hellscape, but at least keep my house clean, I feel like that's, that's a trait I'm prepared to make.

• 1:27:45Nilay Patel?

  Fair enough.

• 1:27:45David Pierce?

  All right. What's your last one?

• 1:27:47Nilay Patel?

  I gotta talk about Palmer Lucky for one second.

• 1:27:49David Pierce?

  Oh, God.

• 1:27:49Nilay Patel?

  I'm very sorry about this.

• 1:27:50David Pierce?

  Are we sure?

• 1:27:52Nilay Patel?

  Uh, are we, we're in a fight with Palmer Lucky. I'm in a fight with Palmer Lucky. And it's dumb in the way that all fights with Palmer Lucky are. So Palmer and Andrell, his defense contracting company, announced this week, they're gonna make this thing called the Blue Chip Laptop. And they're gonna make laptops in America. They had Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Aman. They did a briefing. They announced it. I think a lot of people believed that they were gonna have 100% made in America laptop based on this briefing. This is just comments we saw, things I saw on social media. So they had a briefing with us, with Antonio, and we asked very directly how much this laptop would make in the United States. And there's a key number to know here, which is to qualify for the Buy American program, which is what the defense contractor would need to sell to the government. You

• 1:28:36Nilay Patel?

  need to be 65% made in the United States. That's the number. So we asked. Palmer gave a long discursive answer, did not, he said, basically TBD, inside of this answer, he cited some components in the display. So we asked again, didn't get an answer. We asked Qualcomm, how much are you investing in the TSMC plant in Arizona to make the chips for this laptop? They wouldn't give an answer. So we characterized this as it doesn't sound like they're gonna hit the number. They're gonna be well below it. Palmer got very mad about this. This is misinformation. He's very mad that like 10 years ago, we printed the thing about him buying a billboard and said he'd funded right wing troll farms, which he disputes. That's ancient history, but he's very, he's still very upset about that. So this article's full of misinformation. So we responded by asking specifically how

• 1:29:20Nilay Patel?

  much of this laptop is made in the United States. And the answer is that the prototype as it exists today, 32%. So our characterization was correct.

• 1:29:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:29Nilay Patel?

  And their comms said the final domestic content percentage at launch remains unsettled, so we can't confirm above or below 65% today. And they disputed it to be well below.

• 1:29:42David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:29:43Nilay Patel?

  So the product that exists today is at 32%.

• 1:29:45David Pierce?

  Which I think you could argue is well below 65.

• 1:29:47Nilay Patel?

  Sure, but that's the prototype.

• 1:29:49David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:29:49Nilay Patel?

  And so we'd asked these questions, we didn't get these answers. We characterized it well below. Fine, you can argue with that editorially. I do not think that is misinformation. Palmer decided to yell at us a bunch. And so we printed his whole answer, updated story of the statement, then they changed the story the next day, and they sent us another clarification, whatever you wanna call it, and said it will be 65% at launch. So, right, they went from we can't confirm it today to it will be at launch. We just wrote the story, wrote the whole thing. This is fine. Palmer's yelling at me. I was like, Palmer, this, this story is changing. I'll give you another example of this. This actually just happened with Palmer with Wired, where Wired wrote a story about a startup that was making like war dogs, like dogs for war.

• 1:30:30David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:30:30Nilay Patel?

  And they said it was like Palmer's company. He's like, this is wrong. It's misinformation. And they pointed out that the press release had his name in it. It's like, and one of the investors called him the founder. They're like excited about investing in Palmer's company. This is slippery.

• 1:30:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:46Nilay Patel?

  It's fine. These things happen. It is not malicious plot. It is us asking questions. How are you gonna build a laptop in America? Not getting answers, characterizing those answers. Maybe you don't like it. But then the clarification, the initial clarification was 32% and up to 90% if you count the parts made in allied countries, which, just for the sake of clarification, are not America. America's allies are not located in America. So you can say 90%, but it's still not in America. And it's a defense contractor. You get a bunch of waivers, you get all this stuff.

• 1:31:18David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:31:19Nilay Patel?

  But it's not today. Today, this is, this is the whole argument, whatever. Palmer's still very upset that, again, we said they funded a right wing troll farm in 2016. Which, by the way, the reporting on that, he says he didn't do it. We, I, we probably shouldn't have said it. It was a throwaway line, whatever. All this is aside. Palmer, I hope you ship a laptop with 65% made in America parts.

• 1:31:40David Pierce?

  Can I say, this is, this is my favorite thing about this is, like, all of my feelings about Palmer Lucky and Andrell aside, it would rock if someone, anyone could figure out how to make an all-American laptop.

• 1:31:50Nilay Patel?

  I hope you do. And I said this to him. I hope you succeed. Let us know when you succeed.

• 1:31:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:54Nilay Patel?

  So they print all the chips, right? The old rule of the verb. But if you succeed, we'll print the number. Right now, the number's 32, and the America's allies are not located in America. So we're not gonna give you 90. We're not just gonna slide you to 90 because you have allied parts, which I'm guessing means a screen manufacturer in Mexico. That's my, that's my big guess here. I don't know, but we don't have more detail. You're in production.

• 1:32:16David Pierce?

  To be fair, what, what we have is a lot of recent evidence about companies saying things would be made in America that were not and are not and will not be.

• 1:32:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. In particular, drones, which is the thing that Andrell makes. Like, the CEO, Skydio, was on Decoder and said, if you are saying you're making drones in America, you're not.

• 1:32:37David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:32:37Nilay Patel?

  So I'm sure Andrell makes some parts of some drones in America. I'm sure they have some waivers and blah, blah, blah. But like, this is hard. Right? So ship it, prove it. We will happily print the number and say your success. That's one controversy. It is of middling importance at best. I'm just gonna say this. Right next to this is the fact that this whole conversation happened for me on X, the everything app, and I experienced some of the most breathtaking racism of my entire life. Because Palmer Lucky is, has a whole army of fans who do nothing but say slurs and say I should be deported because I dare to disagree with Palmer Lucky on whether 32 is the same number as 65.

• 1:33:16David Pierce?

  Yikes.

• 1:33:16Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and so I know we had the whole conversation about X. I'm happy to be on X. I'm old, whatever. I have thick skin now. Uh, but there's no way that you can say that platform is welcoming and inclusive based on my experience with Palmer Lucky fans over these past two days. And I, I'm just gonna say it. I, I think you cultivate the audience you want. And that is, that is, that is that audience.

• 1:33:41David Pierce?

  Yeah. I just started reading the replies to the first tweet that he sent you. I really encourage everyone to not read these replies.

• 1:33:47Nilay Patel?

  It's very bad.

• 1:33:48David Pierce?

  It's a, it's a bad time.

• 1:33:50Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's like, oh, this is like very racist. Like, oh. Sadly, I'm not going to be deported. And just to clarify for everyone, it is true that I'm Indian, but I'm from Wisconsin.

• 1:34:02Nilay Patel?

  Just to be clear.

• 1:34:03David Pierce?

  We're going to deport you to Wisconsin. You're going to have to live in the Fox condo. This is your future.

• 1:34:10Nilay Patel?

  Honestly.

• 1:34:13Nilay Patel?

  What's the cable package like?

• 1:34:15David Pierce?

  I bet the internet speeds really fast. I'm just saying.

• 1:34:18Nilay Patel?

  It is a data center.

• 1:34:21Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, that's that story. If the laptop has 65%, we're going to happily print the laptop as 65%. We have offered to let Palmer come and talk to us and clarify exactly how he's going to get to 65%. His com said he was busy.

• 1:34:37Nilay Patel?

  Was he busy? I don't know. He was tweeting me. So however it goes. But anyway, that's the story. That's the fight. X is full of racists is really the main takeaway.

• 1:34:45David Pierce?

  It is worth reiterating that I think it would be very cool if they pulled this off. Like, I think, because like a thing we talk a lot about is how supply chains beget supply chains, right? And if you can figure out how to do this once, it probably means somebody else will figure out how to do it too. And that is, that is a cool flywheel to start. Like the, the made in America stuff is, is a cool and interesting story. And I really hope somebody pulls it off.

• 1:35:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it would be great. I mean, that's what I said to him, but I, you know, he's, he's mad about something else. That's how it goes.

• 1:35:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, fair enough. All right. We should get out of here on that happy note. It's nice to see you as always, Neelai. Who's on Decoder this week?

• 1:35:23Nilay Patel?

  If I'm looking at this calendar, right, it's Matt Strauss, the chairman of NBC Universal Media.

• 1:35:28David Pierce?

  Ooh.

• 1:35:29Nilay Patel?

  We, we talked a lot about the swirl in Hollywood. I'll just preview this. He won't say the names of his competitors' companies. So I only refer to them as the red team and the blue team and he took the bait.

• 1:35:40David Pierce?

  That's really good.

• 1:35:42Nilay Patel?

  It was my solution to my problem.

• 1:35:43David Pierce?

  That's a good gambit. I like that a lot. That was one, not to get too inside baseball on people, but I'm in the Decoder production Slack room. And every once in a while, Neelai comes out of an interview and, and sends a Slack message to the extent of like, woof. And now this was one of them. So I'm very excited.

• 1:35:59Nilay Patel?

  Like Matt and I enjoy talking to each other. That was a ride. So.

• 1:36:03David Pierce?

  I'm excited about it. Um, we're going to have, by the way, lots of midterm stuff next week. Next week is the midterms. We're covering data centers. We're going to be covering the elections. Keep it locked on the site. We're going to have stuff on, on The Vergecast. And presumably there's Decoder stuff coming. This is like, it's, it's a fascinating election season about to happen. And I'm very excited it's going to happen so I can stop getting text messages about mid. Living in a swing state is awful and I do not recommend it. Please get in touch with us about all this and everything. If you are going to use Instagram features, tell us how you're going to make money. You can always email us, [email protected], call us on the Vergecast hotline, 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you about everything. And as a reminder, the best way to support all of this is to subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com/subscribe.

• 1:36:45David Pierce?

  It gets you our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our podcasts ad free, including this one, which is, you know, it's somewhat shorter than it already is with no ads. That counts for something. Theverge.com/subscribe. Thank you in advance. 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, and Travis Tharck. We will see you next week. Neelai?

• 1:37:08Nilay Patel?

  Rock and roll.

• 1:37:11Speaker 07

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• 1:37:35Speaker 07

  Still haven't started? Hey, better late than ever. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply.

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

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• 1:38:12Speaker 06

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