Bluesky's rise and AI's fall

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Sarah Jeong discuss Bluesky gaining popularity and why it may be Twitter's most chaotic successor. Also: is AI going too far too soon? Further reading: shop.theverge.com Google announces the Pixel Fold Everything happening on Bluesky, Twitter’s most chaotic successor Bluesky is starting to feel like Twitter Mozilla’s new Mozilla. Social Mastodon instance is an attempt to reinvent content moderation ‘Godfather of AI’ quits Google with regrets and fears about his life’s work White House rolls out plan to promote ethical AI Snapchat is already testing sponsored links in its My AI chatbot New ChatGPT Zillow plug-in rolls out to select users today AI is being used to generate whole spam sites AI offers new tools for making games, but developers worry about their jobs Writers are striking and AI rights are on the table. Microsoft is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge, and IT admins are angry Microsoft’s Bing chatbot gets smarter with restaurant bookings, image results, and more Andreessen Horowitz saw the future — but did the future leave it behind? Now Gmail has blue verified checkmark icons too Google accounts now support passkeys for password-free sign-in 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

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

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Company spending is complex. Managing it should be simple. Amex Corporate connects cards, expenses, and payments to streamline the way you work. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is Amex Corporate. Get started at go.amex slash Amex Corporate. Terms apply.

• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of knowing your phone leaked, so just announcing it before you were going to announce it anyway.

• 1:27Nilay Patel?

  It's a strategy.

• 1:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's, it is a choice you can make.

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Google has made it for many years in a row now.

• 1:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's Google's annual tradition. It's just a marketing strategy now.

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, it leaked. Here it is. Anyway, I'm your friend Eli. Alex Franz is here.

• 1:39Alex Cranz?

  I'm your friend who doesn't want the Pixel Fold.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  The only one.

• 1:42Alex Cranz?

  The only one, the only one in The Vergecast who doesn't want one. I'm sorry.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we'll get to it in a minute. David Pierce is here.

• 1:47David Pierce?

  Hi, can I just show you this verge mug that I found? This was just chilling in my closet. It's the like, old, old, old, old verge mug, and it makes me very happy.

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, is it big? I feel like our new ones are not big enough.

• 1:59David Pierce?

  No, they're definitely not big enough. This is like probably 14 ounces. It's a nice size. Big fan.

• 2:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, they may not be big enough, but they certainly make us money. Go to store at theverge.com and buy just, we have actually, we have really cool joggers.

• 2:11Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  This is just, this is just gonna be QVC for the rest of the hour. We have very cool pillows.

• 2:17David Pierce?

  I was just thinking I need to buy a pillow and put it back here on my mantle so you can see it during the show.

• 2:22Alex Cranz?

  That's where everybody puts their pillows is on the mantle.

• 2:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, classic pillow spot.

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  By the way, it's shop dot theverge.com. You can tell that I'm great at this. Anyhow, there's a lot of news. Sarah John is gonna join us in a little bit to talk about what's happening on Blue Sky, which as near as I can tell is butts, just nude butts. But Sarah's gonna join the show to talk about what they mean on a deeper level.

• 2:45Alex Cranz?

  What do the butts mean?

• 2:46David Pierce?

  What is the Vergecast if not discussing the deeper level of butts on the internet?

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what it's for. But the internet was created by butts. We should talk about the Pixel Fold. That's going on. There's a bunch of AI news to get into. Let's start with the Fold since it is, at least for us, breaking news. You in your car tomorrow.

• 3:04Alex Cranz?

  You know about it.

• 3:05Nilay Patel?

  But just imagine, put yourself in the headspace we're in, which is we're gonna start the show and then Google is like, yeah, here it is. David, what's going on here?

• 3:12David Pierce?

  So, yeah, Google I/O is next week, next Wednesday, the 10th. And there have been rumors that the Pixel Fold was gonna happen for a while. We kind of knew Google was gonna make a foldable phone. They've been making software kind of in that direction for a while. This is a good way to like try and make some noise because it's still a relatively new market. And then, like you said, they literally just tweeted it out. It's just like, just out of nowhere.

• 3:36Nilay Patel?

  They just tweeted it out.

• 3:37David Pierce?

  They just tweeted it out. And it's, it's a foldable phone. So all we've seen is basically one of those sort of, you know, spinning models. So there's not a ton you can learn from it. But I will say the two things that seem to be true, based on the picture so far, is that rather than being one of those like super tall things, like when you close a Galaxy Fold, it basically turns into a TV remote. It's like 11 feet long. And thus is like a totally ridiculous thing to use closed, I think. But this looks more like, I don't know, like the Surface Duo, where it's like relatively normal phone sized and then sort of folds open to be wider rather than just tall. So it has a little bit of like a iPad mini turned on its side vibe when it's open and just kind of looks like a phone on the inside.

• 4:22David Pierce?

  There's a million questions like, Will there be a big crease down the middle? How thick are these are these pictures hiding that it's like chunkier than it actually is, which they sometimes do. But just at the very basic level that we've seen, this thing looks really nice. I'm kind of into it.

• 4:37Nilay Patel?

  It does look really nice. The sort of new age pixel camera bump on the back. This is the first execution of it where I'm not like, ugh.

• 4:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, can I click on the, does it rotate? It's the, oh no, that's a big bump.

• 4:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:48Alex Cranz?

  I was like, this is so small now.

• 4:49Nilay Patel?

  No, it's a gigantic camera bump.

• 4:50Alex Cranz?

  It's huge.

• 4:51Nilay Patel?

  The thing we've heard about the most is that when you close it, there's no gap. They've they've managed to re-engineer the hinge.

• 4:57Alex Cranz?

  That's all I come to Google for is re-engineered hinges.

• 5:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, when you think of Google, you think of physical products and hinges.

• 5:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:04David Pierce?

  I'm just saying, when Apple makes an iPhone that folds, there's going to be a 19-minute-long video about the hinge. And so if Google doesn't do that now, they're missing a real opportunity. Like, they should just stop the I/O keynote in the middle and just play a 30-minute documentary they made about the hinge. That's that's what I would do.

• 5:23Alex Cranz?

  I would watch it. I will watch it.

• 5:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're gonna watch it. We're gonna be there.

• 5:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:26Nilay Patel?

  So here's the thing, we went through a pretty intense period of excitement about folding phones.

• 5:32Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 5:33Nilay Patel?

  And I will, I will happily accept the criticism that I was very excited about them because I think form factor changes are when people actually shift products and platforms.

• 5:43Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 5:43David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 5:44Nilay Patel?

  And I was super wrong about this. Zero iPhone owners were like, well, that phone folds, I'm leaving iMessage, which I think says something very important about iMessage.

• 5:51Alex Cranz?

  iMessage definitely more superior, but I want this. Like, I want a folding iPad. That's what, that's all I want in the world is like an iPad mini that just does this. But I want it on iOS because I want messages.

• 6:04David Pierce?

  Well, I also think that the thing about the Galaxy Fold is that it it still has a lot of caveats, right? Like, it looks cool, and then the longer you look at it, the worse it gets, right? It has that big seam down the middle. It has the gaps kind of all around the edges. It's like, the very first one-second impression is really good, but after like 60 seconds, it kind of gets worse and worse. And then, from what I've heard from people who own these things, you like, stop seeing those things that are not really problems anyways, so the actual experience of owning one seems to be pretty great. Everybody I know who has one is very happy with it. But what there hasn't been- Then is one that doesn't feel like it makes you make sort of obvious compromises in how you use your phone. Like, the fold is also enormous. And I think the pixel fold, just by virtue of what it is, is probably also going to be big. It's also going to be expensive.

• 6:46David Pierce?

  The rumor is it's going to be, I think, upwards of 1,700 bucks, which is a lot of money for a phone. I just don't think we've got the data to prove your theory wrong, Neelai. I think there's a chance.

• 6:56Nilay Patel?

  That's the, the phone unfolds into a tablet part of the foldable world.

• 7:01Alex Cranz?

  You're thinking about the?

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Z flips of the world, which like T-Mobile would just, they would just throw at you. They would just accost you.

• 7:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Nilay Patel?

  And give you a Galaxy Z Flip. If you were like, I've been thinking about switching wireless carriers. Like, Z Flip? You got it. It's in your car already.

• 7:17David Pierce?

  It's just boomerang it to you from across the T-Mobile store?

• 7:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I, I've seen lots and lots of people, at least here in New York, people have Z flips. And it just hasn't, there was a time when a phone that was that reasonably popular would actually have some sort of cultural impact. Right? Like, the LG Chocolate had more of a cultural impact than the Galaxy Z Flip. That's weird.

• 7:39David Pierce?

  The LG Chocolate was a sick phone. I will not hear LG Chocolate slander.

• 7:44Nilay Patel?

  The LG Chocolate fans out there are like...

• 7:46Alex Cranz?

  Oh, they pulled over to like DM you?

• 7:48Nilay Patel?

  Pulled over. And guess what you did? You pulled over and you pulled out your iPhone to write me that note.

• 7:52Alex Cranz?

  But that's the thing, I don't think people care as much about phones.

• 7:56Nilay Patel?

  No, I disagree. They're listening to this show.

• 7:59Alex Cranz?

  The people who, who care about phones are listening to us right now. And I'm sorry, but the majority of people are like, I got my iPhone, it does a thing. I got my Samsung, it does a thing.

• 8:08Nilay Patel?

  We were actually talking about this in the context of Humane last week. And then it's come up in, on our team for a few other reasons. But the notion that something has to come after the phone is like, the industry really wants that to be true. And regular people are like, meh.

• 8:21Alex Cranz?

  It does, it does the thing.

• 8:22Nilay Patel?

  And so like, the Z Flip is one of those, like, what comes after the phone? A phone that closes and like, leaves you alone. And then you like, look at, when we're in the third Z Flip, the fourth one, they just put a phone on the front of it. So you close it and you still have the phone. And then you see the Pixel Fold and the Galaxy Fold. And you close it and there's still a phone. And the promise is then you'll have a tablet. And I'm very excited. I think this thing looks cool. I am a sucker. I'm almost certainly going to buy one. But I'm just looking at it. I'm like, do I want an Android tablet?

• 8:51Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 8:52Nilay Patel?

  Is that what's missing?

• 8:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, that is the question.

• 8:55Alex Cranz?

  And the answer will be no.

• 8:56Nilay Patel?

  I'm not. I reserve judgment on the answer to that question. After I spend $1,700, I will let you know if I wanted an Android tablet all along.

• 9:04Alex Cranz?

  There's so many ways you could save that money. You can get a little cheap, like, Amazon Fire.

• 9:08Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, Max, you're not going to college. I bought an Android tablet.

• 9:11David Pierce?

  The good news is I absolutely guarantee you Google will give you a Pixel Watch if you buy one of these things. We should move on, though. Sarah's here. And also, we're going to have a ton more to talk about at I/O.

• 9:22Nilay Patel?

  We're going to be at I/O next week. We have lots and lots to discuss. There's somebody on Decoder that I think people want to hear from. It's Dieter.

• 9:31David Pierce?

  You finally got Thomas Google to come on the show.

• 9:36Nilay Patel?

  They were like, you can have Dieter. Dieter, I love you. You can't be on Decoder. Like, that breaks even our over-disclosed conflict rules. I don't think. It would be like one hour of disclosures. And then I'd be like, what's up, Dieter? And then that would be the show. Anyhow, let's talk about Blue Sky. Sarah, welcome.

• 9:54Alex Cranz?

  Hi.

• 9:55Nilay Patel?

  All right, so we're in a moment of, I would say, market correction in social networking. Where people are shopping. They're just out there. They're trying on new hats.

• 10:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:04Nilay Patel?

  Throwing some of the hats away.

• 10:05Alex Cranz?

  I like that approach to it. That's what it is, though. People are just checking it out.

• 10:09Nilay Patel?

  Today, I'm going to dress up like a firefighter and use Blue Sky. And then tomorrow, I'm going to throw that away. I'm going to be a policeman. I'll be on Activity Pub. Like, that's the moment we're in. I don't know how to fight fires or solve crimes.

• 10:18David Pierce?

  But the hats are really important to both of us.

• 10:20Alex Cranz?

  It's all that matters.

• 10:21Nilay Patel?

  This is a very deep Village People reference that is just completely off the rails. Anyhow, the social network of the moment. We've talked a lot about Activity Pub on the show. But there is another decentralized or potentially decentralized social network that has attracted a ton of attention that we're all on called Blue Sky. Sarah, you wrote one of the best scene reports in Verge history about what's going on on Blue Sky. It's a lot of butts from what we can tell.

• 10:50Alex Cranz?

  Tell us about the butts.

• 10:51Nilay Patel?

  What's going on.

• 10:53Speaker 05

  So many butts. I mean, for one thing, that when they set out to make this, one of the intentional decisions they made was, oh, we want people to be able to post racy content.

• 11:02Nilay Patel?

  Nailed it.

• 11:03Speaker 05

  I know, right? They did make some changes to the what's hot tab, so that's like the for you page, basically. No longer shows all of the butts. So there's way fewer butts going around, but that said, it's still, there's plenty of it. There's still plenty of it. You can, it's like, turn around, people are enthusiastically posting themselves and just having a great time.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  So, Blue Sky is, Jack Dorsey started it to decentralize Twitter as an exploration. Then there was the Elon cataclysm. He shut it down, but it still exists. Now it's a company, it's a foundation. How does this thing work?

• 11:40Speaker 05

  I believe they are a public benefit corporation. Apparently, there's 12 people in the work slack. I believe it's like nine people who are employed formally, and then there's like, some technical advisors to the project, who I guess have been suckered into doing actual work, and they should really check out that situation soon. It's this thing where I think that they are eventually like, planning on, like, they've got seed, seed funding, they've got like, I think that they have a really normal, projected, like, corporate runway and so on. But I think like, their eventual plan is to spin off into having this full protocol that people license. And I like, I really don't know what they intend to do with that. Like, they haven't been, I think that they're probably planning on making like, a full,

• 12:22Speaker 05

  like, detailed statement about what their financial plans are, but my guess is that they're really fixing to be something like the Mozilla Foundation, or the Tor Foundation, or, or how Signal works. That said, the business of running and making social networks is very different from all of those other things. And like, we're seeing that this past week, where the CEO has to personally step in, because it's, you know, 12 people in the work slack, they, she has to personally step in and kick people off because they're making trouble. Because it's like, that's what happens when you get a lot of people together in one place, is, uh, things tend towards one person having to make a decision.

• 13:06Speaker 05

  And I find that really fascinating, because the whole vision of this thing is to be decentralized, to be a protocol, not to be a platform. This is just a beta, so on and so forth.

• 13:16Alex Cranz?

  But it's a big beta. It's a very big beta.

• 13:19David Pierce?

  Well, and that's kind of the thing I want to talk about because there was, what I can't figure out is like, how this happened because it sort of seems like, like, the app got launched.

• 13:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, David, you put butts on the internet. The people show up. There they are.

• 13:31David Pierce?

  But at first, there was this moment where there was like this very small number of people. And it was all people who had sort of a reason to be there and they all seemed to know each other. And it was just this like tiny little group chat that happened to be happening in Blue Sky. And then all of a sudden, over the course of what seemed like a day, all of the internet shit posters arrived en masse, all at once, and just started decimating the platform in every possible way they could find. And I'm assuming this is not what Jay, the CEO, meant to happen. It's like, how, how did this blow up? It was like one of the top apps in the App Store for a minute there, despite being like a total disaster of an app like.

• 14:07Nilay Patel?

  And also that you couldn't get into. Being at the top app on the App Store that most people cannot use is a wild outcome.

• 14:13Speaker 05

  It's absurd. You can't get into it. And if you can, your phone is going to be so hot, so very hot. Like, my phone was just burning up in my hands. It's like, it's a very impressive piece of technology for being built by nine to 12 people, however many that actual number is. But it's, uh, it's not good. It's not a good app. I think that like, I don't know, there's just a tipping point. And this is one of those things where like, is there like an economics, a fancy economics word for this? It's the thing where why, why everyone has to read Harry Potter? Because everyone else has, right? Like, there is just a tipping point where once everyone else is doing it, now you're there. Maybe it's like, we should name it after like the, uh, the Apple Blue Bubble issue, right? Like, it's like, everyone like pressures you into doing it.

• 14:58Speaker 05

  But there, there was just a point where once AOC and drill were on there, it just felt like, oh, I've got to be on there. I really want to be on there. I want to try that out.

• 15:07Alex Cranz?

  It felt like the invites were a big part of this because the invite, like, that kind of built the, the drama for, right? Like, everybody wanted to be in it because you were like, oh, I've got an invite. Do you want an invite? I've got an invite. And so suddenly it was like, oh, yeah, yeah, I gotta get an invite to this because. The exclusivity of it. It felt a lot like, do you guys remember, we're all old here, we can, we can talk about it. Gmail? Those first days, no, the first days of Facebook. Like, it took over my college campus.

• 15:31Nilay Patel?

  I thought you were gonna be like, Telnet.

• 15:33Alex Cranz?

  We're not that old.

• 15:34Nilay Patel?

  Grandpa Patel over here is like, yes, I remember Pine. No, the first days of Facebook was real.

• 15:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. And it was suddenly like, everybody's like, oh, you had an invite, I want to do it. And then you go to the cafeteria and it was just a wasteland. Because everybody was at home checking out Facebook. And it felt very much like that, but only for shit posters instead of like, college.

• 15:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I have two questions about this. One, it's, the promise is decentralization. And so, it's fascinating that they are not, in reality, decentralized.

• 16:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Nilay Patel?

  So you can get the app, if you have an invite code, you can join one server on an app that is technically supposed to be able to let you join any server. And this is one enormous advantage over Mastodon, where just picking a server is the first thing you have to do. And Mastodon has now responded, I think, to Blue Sky by just setting itself as the default. Like Mastodon, that social is now the default in the app. This was, this is an ideological position they didn't want to take, and I think Blue Sky has forced them to take it. And then the other thing that I think is fascinating is, yeah, it's not a good app, and it is broken in some deeply hilarious ways. But the way that it is a great app is that it looks exactly like Twitter.

• 16:39Alex Cranz?

  Just exactly.

• 16:40Nilay Patel?

  Like, they didn't, there, there's no interface innovation occurring in the Blue Sky app whatsoever. It is just Twitter again. So all the people are just doing what they did on Twitter.

• 16:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:52Nilay Patel?

  And the platform is not actually Twitter.

• 16:53Alex Cranz?

  Well, and it, it helps that it is only one server right now. Because last week, I was like, okay, I'll, I'll join Blue Sky. Okay, yeah, I'll go and join Mastodon finally. Very different experience, doing those back to back. Because Blue Sky was just like Twitter or anything else. You go and you make it and you're, you're in. You'd go, do things. Mastodon, I went and I made it. And then I was like, oh, I want to follow this guy. He's really great. And then it was like, no, he's not on the same server. And I had to do like copy paste. It was like all that friction. And there's just none of that there with Blue Sky, but it's garbage.

• 17:25Nilay Patel?

  It's a mess.

• 17:25Alex Cranz?

  It's a mess of an app.

• 17:27Nilay Patel?

  Do you think that they're ever going to announce others? Like, this is the promise. This is what they're meant to do. But the fact that everyone's on the main server right now is why it's popular.

• 17:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:36Speaker 05

  I mean, they say that they're really trying to get. They were prioritizing getting to decentralization, which is one of the reasons why when it really exploded last week, there were no blocks. It was not possible to block another person on Blue Sky because they had just deprioritized a lot of these moderation tools. And so you couldn't block someone. Like, you could mute someone, but you could not prevent them from engaging with you, which is not a great thing to happen when you've got, you know, 50,000 people on one platform altogether.

• 18:06David Pierce?

  All of whom are heavily incentivized to cause trouble.

• 18:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:09Nilay Patel?

  Gleefully causing trouble.

• 18:11Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, and are just manic, extremely manic to be in a place altogether. And so I do think that they are trying to get ahead. And every time something happens, though, which like that's every two hours, something enormous happens on there that seems like a very big deal. Like, it distracts from them moving forward towards decentralization. I think that like in an alternate universe before Blue Sky exploded, they would probably have launched decentralization in a few weeks' time. I don't know where they are right now. They're pretty vague. I'm sure that they'll give more information at some point. But it sounds like people are not getting a ton of sleep and everything is on fire constantly.

• 18:52Nilay Patel?

  So their protocol, Mastodon is built on Activity Pub. We did a whole episode about Activity Pub. Blue Sky's protocol is called AT Protocol, @Protocol Twitter. You can go to their website. It's atproto.com. Here are the three promises they make. Federated social, connect with anyone at any service that's using the AT Protocol. Would just point out that there are no other services using the AT Protocol. Fine. And then the other two are really interesting. Algorithmic choice. So if you want to bring your own recommendation algorithm or your own moderation algorithm, more butts, less butts.

• 19:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:27Nilay Patel?

  You can go out and pick one.

• 19:28Alex Cranz?

  Butt dial.

• 19:29Nilay Patel?

  That means something else, Alex. Sorry. But if we want to leave and start a company that is just algorithmic choice for butts and we call it butt dial, let's do it. Yes, do it. I don't know how to write code. We'll be fine. ChatGPT is going to write our app called butt dial. And then the third one, which is, to me, I think the big, meaningful difference from Activity Pub is portable accounts. So if you hate the server, you can go and leave it and go to a different server without losing all your content, your follows, the people who are following you, or your identity. And so this is like the big change, right? Because David, Activity Pub is pretty basic, right? It's like inbox, outbox.

• 20:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, actually, if, for anyone who wants to spend like an unnecessarily large amount of time reading about this space, Jay Graber, who is running Blue Sky, I think in 2020, when they were starting this whole project, did this like massive sweep of every available tool like this, from whether it was like Matrix and Signal and XMPP and like all these other different tools for how you might run a social network, and wrote like a 200-page document of like how they all work and their pros and cons and all that stuff. And it's really interesting. And where they landed with the AT protocol, like, identity is the thing. And they've sort of said this over and over, that like the main thing Activity Pub does not do well is let you have an identity that is yours that you can move around, right? Like, I just had this experience. I actually moved from the random Mastodon account that I was on when I first signed

• 20:50David Pierce?

  up to mastodon.social, because it's now pretty clearly like the default place. It's where everybody's going to be. I figured I might as well be in that place. And doing it required like downloading a bunch of CSV files onto my computer and uploading them somewhere else. I got rate limited by Mastodon, so I just broke my website for like 30 minutes. It's just a bad system. And the way they're building AT is exactly like you said, such that like if I'm in a server I don't want to be on anymore, for whatever reason, I can just pick up and drop over somewhere else. And like if we're going to live in this federated place, that's really important. All the people who make Activity Pub would say there's nothing about it that prevents that from being possible and that actually people are building it and it'll all be fine in the long run. But right now, that thing, that it is easier to sort of describe who you are to the system, is super, super true.

• 21:35David Pierce?

  And I think it's one of the reasons Blue Sky has worked. It's just easier to show up, pick a username, and go about your life.

• 21:41Alex Cranz?

  But Blue Sky also is, again, just once.

• 21:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's funny, it's like the, it's the better federated system with no federation.

• 21:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:48Nilay Patel?

  And then the clunkier one is actually federated.

• 21:51Alex Cranz?

  Which one do you think is the HD DVD and which is the Blu-ray?

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I knew it was coming.

• 21:56Alex Cranz?

  It has to, right? Like, this is what we're, with that choice, we're Betamax versus VHS again. Which is, which is gonna be the standard? Does anybody know?

• 22:04Speaker 05

  I really don't know, because like, for those kinds of things, like, the industry decides, right? Like, ultimately, it is about, like, for hardware, it's the industry ends up deciding what the standard is, because that's very much, like, companies are going to be making that choice in the long run. But in this case, there's a weird, chaotic element where it's like, whichever one that drill posts a lot on. What's the one that drill is gonna post a lot on? It's the one where Weird Twitter is posting a lot on. Why is Weird Twitter posting a lot on some other thing? It's like, it turns into a very recursive thing, where it's, it's just so chaotic. It is literally chaos theory. And like, I don't know. I don't know how it is that, like, Blue Sky caught the momentum.

• 22:48Speaker 05

  Like, you say this invite system did drive up buzz, and that's true. But it's also true that for weeks on end, people had, you know, 20 invites just sort of sitting in their app that they weren't using, because they could not convince any of their friends to use it, because their friends were like, "Oh, that's the social network where everyone wants to talk about AI art and Bitcoin. I don't want to go there."

• 23:11Speaker 05

  It wasn't that anymore one day. So, yeah, I like, I don't know what the tipping point is.

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  And that was just because it's Jack Dorsey's.

• 23:18Speaker 05

  Right. It is like, it's who they invited early on, right? I don't know what happened to, like, make it branch out, or like, what the tipping point was. They say they're not planning on making invite trees open, but, boy, I really wanna see that invite tree. I would love to see what that moment was.

• 23:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 05

  You just watch it go.

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  So Sarah, in your piece, one of the things that you noted is that they are, in a very odd way, going through like the entire history of running a social network, while the people who have run social networks at scale are posting on the platform about running social networks, which is just like very funny.

• 23:54Speaker 05

  It's so funny.

• 23:55Nilay Patel?

  The example that made me laugh is Yoel Roth, who used to run Trust and Safety at Twitter. When they banned the butts from What's Hot, he was like, "Welcome to breastfeeding hell, because that is the thing that an AI system can't detect." And he's obviously had experience with it. There's a dynamic there that is like very funny, where they're getting a lot of credit for the problems they're gonna have. Like, there's a lot of, I don't know, benefit of the doubt, I guess is a phrase, but then they're running face first into the brick walls of the problems, and everyone's like, "This is hilarious. I can't wait to see what mistake you make next."

• 24:28Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. It's also like the fact that like, all these former heads of Trust and Safety are like on the social network and are watching and like commenting. It's very much like the thing where like, old retired men in Italy stand at construction sites and like lean into the fences to like comment on how people are using the tools, right? Like, it's a, it's really like, I really enjoy watching that. That's, that might actually be my favorite part. Everyone else is enjoying the butts and I'm just going like, "Yes! Trust and Safety heads!"

• 24:59Speaker 05

  From the backseat. But, uh, yeah, it's like a lot of really obvious pitfalls and like, it really is kind of very comical, but it's also inevitable in some ways, just because of how quickly things are moving, uh, how small the team is, and the fact that they're like chasing this utopian vision of decentralized social media that, I don't know how that's gonna turn out. Like, that's like, I understand why they're doing it, but I also think that there are a lot of issues with that, and that they're going to be up against some weirder problems in the future. Like, right now, all the problems are very normal problems that we've seen over and over again, and that they're just having to deal with on the fly because they have no Trust and Safety Department, and it's just one person who

• 25:43Speaker 05

  is running on very, very little sleep going. All right. Looks like coordinated harassment to me.

• 25:48Nilay Patel?

  I mean, the people who are, the people who got banned for actually saying, I am currently engaged in a coordinated harassment campaign, like, out loud. It's like, amazing.

• 25:56Alex Cranz?

  Well, there was somebody who got their, their invite tree cut off.

• 25:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Alex Cranz?

  Cause it was like, no, you invited too many weirdos. We don't want you inviting anymore.

• 26:02Nilay Patel?

  That's a badge of honor. Like, I would print out that email and like, put it on the wall and be like, that's me. Sarah, what are the weirder problems of decentralization that you're referencing here?

• 26:11David Pierce?

  Can you also talk about the hell thread as you answer this question? Because the hell thread is, to me, the story of Blue Sky's chaos, and I don't understand it at all.

• 26:19Speaker 05

  Okay. Why don't I start with the hell thread, which I understand a little better. Whereas with decentralization and its problems, it's mostly that, I ran into this on Mastodon where no one could agree on moderation standards. And so basically you were looking at like, these international treaty negotiations happening in real time, and everyone's very angry with each other. The hell thread, basically, one of the things that they allow on there is bot accounts. People will hook up these chatbots to GPT and they're very cutesy and twee. I have them all muted. I cannot stand them. People love them though, and will engage with them all the time. But there was this one thread where people were going back and forth with a duck that pretends to have a lisp.

• 27:04Speaker 05

  And, um, and I guess the thread got really long.

• 27:07David Pierce?

  You said that so casually.

• 27:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 27:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, of course.

• 27:13Speaker 05

  The thread got so long, you couldn't open it anymore. So you get like a pink, like JSON error at the top, and then they tried to like fix it. And then you get, got a completely different pink error at the top. It still wouldn't open. Um, and then if you were part of the thread, you would get notified every time someone replied. So like, it's like, and you couldn't untag yourself.

• 27:34Nilay Patel?

  Cause you couldn't open the thread.

• 27:35Speaker 05

  You couldn't? Well, you could try to mute the thread, but it would keep unmuting itself for whatever reason. Unclear why. I think they were, they were finding different reasons why. And then it turned out each reason that they had figured out was not quite the reason why people were unmuting. I think at this point. They figured out that one of the reasons why the thread kept unmuting was because people would delete their their, uh, their post and then people would reply to the deleted post and then it would branch out again and then so the mute would no longer apply because the mute had been applied further up thread. Uh, anyways, so like at one point they had two bots talking to each other. So it was sprawling out really hard and then people thought it was funny. So they jump in and post and then they tag their friends, like bait their friends into posting.

• 28:19Speaker 05

  And then everyone would be in there and it would be like the, the CC, like you replied all, uh, accidentally. Everyone's like yelling like, um, and then people think it's hilarious. So they start posting their nudes in there. And so now you're getting unsolicited news in your notifications.

• 28:33Nilay Patel?

  And you can't mute them or stop them or even load the thread to get out of it. It's just-

• 28:37Speaker 05

  Well, I think people were able to mute it, but then it was getting uncued.

• 28:41Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 28:42Speaker 05

  Right. Yes. It was the hell thread. At some point, I guess the hell thread branched. So the real elite posters now call them hell ropes. Because it's many threads coming together.

• 28:52Nilay Patel?

  Everything about this platform is just on the edge of me not wanting to say the words.

• 29:03Speaker 05

  It's actually a tremendous amount of fun. That said, like, I mean, the funniest part about the, I, I, I've avoided getting into the hell thread, like at all costs.

• 29:11Nilay Patel?

  Liz keeps tagging me into it. Thanks, Liz.

• 29:13Speaker 05

  Oh, does she?

• 29:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I don't, my superpower is that I don't have notifications for any app on my phone. So-

• 29:18Speaker 05

  So you're just, you're missing all the butts.

• 29:20Nilay Patel?

  You can't touch me. Get, get out of my face with this hell thread.

• 29:23Speaker 05

  When I, when I wrote the scene report, Kevin was like, oh, please add some detail on what it's like to be in the hell thread. I'm like, I can't. I avoided going there because I'm a sane person. Um, but I figured it out. It was, uh, without having to tag myself in there. It, it's possible to avoid it. You do have to be very careful to avoid it. It is very like early 2000s forum vibes where you're like, oh, I know someone's about to go see me. Not gonna clip that. And yeah, I think that people are kind of really into the chaos. I think that there is like this thrill that isn't on any of the other alternatives right now that is getting people to like stick around and really enjoy themselves. I don't know if it's just the fully very online people either.

• 30:05Speaker 05

  Like, I think there's a lot of people who are just enjoying sitting back and watching. And as more and more people get on there, I think things are just gonna sort of smooth out a little bit, and it's going to be more of a a normal place.

• 30:16David Pierce?

  And I think that that goes back to what you were saying earlier about the the sort of like unknowable momentum that it has, that it's just like, once that flywheel starts, it's like it it just, for whatever reason, is a place to be now, in a way that like, two weeks ago, I would have said this is like a neat science project that doesn't really have any sort of meaningful opportunity for actual humans at this point. And then, all of a sudden, as if by magic, it just was a place that was fun and exciting, and-

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, I just want I want to push back, the the tiniest bit of pushback. This thing is 50,000 users. They are all terminally online. Like, they're not cool. And I'm one of those users, and many of us are like, I-

• 30:59Speaker 05

  Everyone in this room is on-

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just want to be clear, like, it's like, it's Jake Tapper and AOC, like, I don't know, man, like, it's not the Met Gala, you know what I mean?

• 31:08David Pierce?

  First of all, AOC went to the Met Gala, so-

• 31:11Nilay Patel?

  Great.

• 31:11David Pierce?

  We can stop that-

• 31:12Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, it's it's a bunch of nerds, and they're having like nerd fun on the internet, but it's it's not actually a threat to Twitter yet.

• 31:19David Pierce?

  I don't know, that's the same set of nerds who made Twitter. It's those people. And like Jake Tapper has millions of followers on Twitter, and was and I don't know if Jake was, but like lots of people with lots of clout and followers were like begging on Twitter for Blue Sky invites.

• 31:31Speaker 05

  William Gibson had to beg on Twitter for an invite. Like, he couldn't just find a friend. He had to beg on Twitter for for one.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  But the the only point I'm making is, any party that is exclusive seems cool, right? Especially if you can't get into it, and all and and then you there's us talking about how cool it is on the inside, right? And we're like, it's a threat of butts, you can't leave. Like, there's a certain subset of our listeners, it's like, man, I wish I was in that thread.

• 31:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, and a much larger subset who absolutely does not.

• 31:56Nilay Patel?

  But when it becomes actually lets anybody in, does that go away? Like, is this Peach, or ELO, or any of the other pop-up, is it B Real? Which is like, appears for a minute-

• 32:06Speaker 05

  I do think that at this point, because it's so buzzy, like, it's not gonna disappear if it opens up. That's it. They absolutely cannot open up because they cannot handle it. Like, they can barely handle what's going on right now. Like, it is genuinely like the next week or so. Like, if they don't buckle, like, it'll be truly a feat if they don't buckle under the pressure of having to speedrun content moderation at scale. It's like, there is no way they can, like, truly open up this platform. The other part of it is that they are airdropping a fairly large number of invites on a select number of people. I will occasionally beg them for invites so that I can spread them out in a really hilarious way. Personally, I think it's very funny to be giving invites to local journalists.

• 32:50Speaker 05

  Like, I gave invites to the entire newsroom of, like, a nonprofit local newsroom. Because, like, I thought that was really funny. I thought it was very funny that celebrities can't get invites and that now the entire newsroom of a small Oregonian nonprofit is on there. Like, that's hysterical. But I know that there's, like, specific individuals. There's one woman where everyone's like, who's this person? But, like, she's, like, passed out hundreds of invites and no one knows why she's getting invites other than that, I guess they like who she keeps inviting. But the way that she's inviting people is that whenever anyone goes, "I need an invite", she'll jump right into their mentions and go, "I've got invites for you." And then, and so the invite tree must just be wild, absolutely wild.

• 33:35Speaker 05

  So I know that, like, there's people definitely coming in and it really does seem like the the fresh blood is, like, filling in, right? But, like, I really don't think this is an yellow peach phenomenon. I don't know how long it's gonna last because it, the energy is so manic, it could just be an extinction burst kind of thing. But, yeah, it's, it's really fascinating. I would disagree with your assertion that the people on there are not cool right now. I mean, no one's very cool on a social network. That's simply how it goes.

• 34:04Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'll accept that. That is, that is an acceptable rebuttal. Like, if you're posting... Automatically two-point deduction.

• 34:11Speaker 05

  If you tell somebody in real life how many followers you have.

• 34:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:15Speaker 05

  Just no.

• 34:16Nilay Patel?

  You're out.

• 34:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. Cool card gone.

• 34:18David Pierce?

  It was super funny to me that all of this was happening like at the exact moment that the blue checks being embarrassing thing was happening. So it was just like all of this energy of like, where is a place to be that is not the worst on the internet was all of a sudden like, like you have Stephen King like telling everyone, I did not pay for this. Please don't make fun of me. I did not pay for Twitter blue. And then all of a sudden, like you're talking about this sort of exclusive club opens up. And it will be interesting. Once those things both sort of come back to a more sort of natural middle ground, whether Blue Sky continues to seem this cool and exciting. I also genuinely wonder if the platform works, will it be as much fun?

• 34:57Nilay Patel?

  Or if they actually decentralize.

• 34:59Speaker 05

  I think that's the big one.

• 35:00Nilay Patel?

  The thing that's funniest about this is like the centralized platform is winning, right? But it's supposed to be decentralized.

• 35:07Speaker 05

  Yeah. People love centralization. That's the thing. Like it's everyone.

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  Everybody wants a king.

• 35:12Speaker 05

  All of these alternatives, like they, they love decentralization. But when it comes down to it, what the people demand is centralization. It's, it is, it is really a weird thing.

• 35:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, everybody wants to be the loudest person in the biggest room. They don't want to be the loudest person in the littlest room.

• 35:27Speaker 05

  Nobody likes fiddling with controls.

• 35:29David Pierce?

  Like Gmail won for a reason. Like email is an open ecosystem and it also isn't because Gmail essentially runs the email universe. And it's because Gmail was good and everybody was like, cool, I don't have to think about this or host my own server anymore. And everybody just has Gmail now. And like, if you have a Yahoo email, that's embarrassing. Now it's like having a Twitter blue check. Like if you have it, you should probably change.

• 35:50Nilay Patel?

  All right. I want to end, David, there's a little bit of other decentralized social media news. You read about Mozilla doing a thing. It does seem like the race to stand up the server is on. Like Mozilla is like, what if we ran the Mastodon server that everybody used?

• 36:04David Pierce?

  Yes, the, the race, I would frame it slightly differently. The race to set up a server is very much on. I think you're going to see a lot of companies suddenly have, you know, X dot social things very quickly. It's relatively easy to stand up. People understand what it is. It solves the problem. What there isn't, and what I wish there was, was somebody coming in and saying, "We are going to be the Gmail of this space." Like, even for this big Activity Pub story I wrote, I kept talking to people who were like, "No, we just want to be good citizens of the Fediverse. We think everything's gonna be great." And it's like, maybe it'll be meta with this P92 thing they're working on, but just show up and be like, "We're the best at this. What's up, fools?" And that's when it's like, okay, this might actually have a chance.

• 36:43Nilay Patel?

  I'm just imagining Mark Zuckerberg saying that phrase.

• 36:45David Pierce?

  "What's up, fools?" He just jujitsu kicks you, and that's it. So the Mozilla news was Mozilla announced in December that it was interested in the Fediverse and was gonna do something. And the news this week was that they're actually standing up a Mastodon instance called Mozilla.social. And their big idea is they want to start to push on some of this content moderation stuff. They came up with a whole new set of content policies that are not about neutrality, they're not about free speech, they're about like, "We are going to protect people and make this a pleasant place to be on the internet." And they're, you know, fiddling with the tools that it's gonna take to make that work, and they're trying to figure out how to enforce some of those policies as they grow. And so they're in this place of like, they're gonna start a very small community

• 37:30David Pierce?

  with a very specific set of rules. It reminds me of like a subreddit, right? Where it's like, "This is how, this is how we talk, this is what we talk about, and if you don't play by the rules, I have absolutely no compunction to just kicking you out." Mozilla's question is like, can they do that at real scale? And they feel like they're in a good position as an organization to test that in a way that a lot of the other folks setting up Mastodon instances right now are not. So I think it's gonna be really interesting. I don't get the sense that they're out here trying to be sort of the biggest name in Mastodon, but that could change.

• 38:00Nilay Patel?

  You get the sense that they think maybe selling moderation software is a potential business in the future. And so if they can do an instance where all the knobs are turned up all the way, they could sell you that same software and you can adjust the knobs.

• 38:14David Pierce?

  I think a lot of people feel that way.

• 38:15Alex Cranz?

  The butt dial.

• 38:16David Pierce?

  Uh, the butt dial, yeah. Mozilla could make the butt dial.

• 38:18Alex Cranz?

  Mozilla, do not take our idea.

• 38:20David Pierce?

  That is trademark The Vergecast, Mozilla. Listen, Mitchell Clark, come at me. But no, I think you're right. And I think, I mean, one of the things that is true of Mozilla's really weird org chart is that it is a corporation owned by a nonprofit. So they're like, their idea of sort of using product to do activism is very alive in what they're doing here. But I also think you're absolutely right, that if they can figure this out, and it can be the sort of thing that like, if I'm, I don't know, they mentioned what brands or like government services, like if I'm the MTA and I'm like, okay, I want to have a place to tell people what's going on, that isn't a total hell site on the internet, and Mozilla can sort of make this nice little package that makes that workable, that could be a pretty interesting business for a while.

• 39:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm like, very obsessed with this entire moment. Like, it just feels like between Twitter kind of breaking and a bunch of people shopping around and every other platform turning into a TikTok version, that like, the true posters are looking for a home, and the competition to make one for them is, will just remake the internet. And I think it's gonna be hilarious.

• 39:27Alex Cranz?

  It's only gonna be fun. It feels very early 2000s right now.

• 39:31Nilay Patel?

  Everything in media is like, absolutely back to...

• 39:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:34Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say this? Jonah Peretti, who's the CEO of BuzzFeed, is like, out there with like, predictions for media. He's like, homepages will be a big deal. And it's like, dude, have you seen the Verge.com? I not only predicted this like, two years ago, like, look at our website. Don't steal my move. You were the Facebook guy. All right, we gotta end this segment before I get in trouble.

• 39:52Alex Cranz?

  Jonah Peretti's actually right there behind you.

• 39:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he's out there. He's putting rubber bands around a watermelon, just waiting for me to walk by. Go to Verge.com. We'll see you on our homepage. We'll be right back.

• 40:08Speaker 06

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

• 40:39Speaker 01

  If you're looking to hire, you need Indeed. With Indeed sponsored jobs, you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 41:26Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Thanks again to Sarah for taking us into a world of butts and lawyers. It's a bull scrib platform. It's great. Lots of AI news this week. Some good, some bad, some weird. David, what's going on?

• 41:40David Pierce?

  So I feel like the place we should start is with Geoffrey Hinton. So he's this guy who won the Turing Award in 2018. He did a lot of the early work on deep learning that is like the foundational stuff for AI as we know it today. So much of the work that has happened, like Google likes to take credit for like, we invented transformers. Like this guy invented the stuff before the stuff. Like, none of where we are happens without Geoffrey Hinton and his team from like a decade ago. And he quit his job at Google and then gave this big interview to the New York Times and has talked to some other folks since then, basically saying, I regret my life's work. I like, I fear first what I have wrought on humanity. And I think he said, let me see, figure this out.

• 42:24David Pierce?

  He said, I console myself with the normal excuse, if I hadn't done it, somebody else would have. And then he said, it's hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things. So we're in this space of like, there have been a bunch of calls for people to slow down. Everybody's worried about the singularity, the world's going to fall apart, AI is going to destroy us all. And yet, as we should talk about, there is this like constant, unending drumbeat of AI news. But it was funny this week to see all of that after the guy, they literally call him the godfather of AI, comes out and is like, maybe all of this was a terrible idea.

• 42:54Alex Cranz?

  Because he like kicked it off. Cade Metz wrote this really great book a couple of years ago about like the origins of AI. And it starts with him trying to figure out where he's going to take all his technology and who's going to pay him the most money. And he like, that kicked everything off because it was like Baidu, Google, whatever. And he ended up going with Google and made a lot of money doing it. And then I think like wasn't one of the chief researchers is now at OpenAI, like everything that we think of as AI nowadays kind of springs from this dude. So for him to say like, it sucks.

• 43:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's like when Elon Musk comes out and is like, oh, you know, six month pause on AI. It's like, okay, well, whatever. And then he comes out and is like, I'm gonna start my own AI company. So there's been a lot of people who have kind of access to grind for one reason or another. But this guy, I can't think of someone who would have more credibility to say something like this than Jeff Hinton.

• 43:45Alex Cranz?

  This is like very similar to when Oppenheimer was like, nope, we did a bad, we made the nuclear bomb. And that's a little terrifying to think like such a big transformative tech and then have the person who kicked it off be like, my bad.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  You just can't wait for this movie.

• 43:59Alex Cranz?

  I cannot, I'm so excited.

• 44:00Nilay Patel?

  You're just working our way to Christopher Nolan.

• 44:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I've been listening to the book on audio for like the last four years.

• 44:05David Pierce?

  I was gonna say, that book is like 1300 pages long.

• 44:08Alex Cranz?

  I even have it sped up. I don't like to speed things up, but I have it sped up. And I'm still like, oh, my God, it just keeps going. And I'm like, and I definitely messaged Liz one day and was like, when do you think like Hinton or someone has their crying to Eisenhower moment about what they did? And it sounds like he cried to Kate Metz.

• 44:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, pretty much. This book, the book you're talking about is called, what is it? The Man Who Built the Atomic Bomb?

• 44:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but now it's gonna be a Christopher Nolan movie.

• 44:32David Pierce?

  The book is excellent, though. And if you start reading it right now and read it 40 hours a week, you'll finish it just before the movie comes out this fall.

• 44:38Nilay Patel?

  So on the same sort of note, Biden had a meeting, or rather, let me say Kamala Harris, Vice President Kamala Harris had a meeting today with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, Dario Emode, the CEO of Anthropic, another big AI company, Sachin Adella, and Sundar Pichai. And the reason I say Biden had the meeting is the White House put out a press release saying that Biden stopped by Kamala Harris's meeting.

• 44:59Alex Cranz?

  He just popped in to be like, what's going on in the Roosevelt Room today? What are you all doing?

• 45:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh, is it for major AI's? There's a bunch of other people there, too. But there's a lot of energy from the government to put some regulations in place. I think we've heard the FTC say, hey, like, we don't have to regulate AI because a lot of what we do is regulate lying. And so if you use robots to lie to people.

• 45:24Alex Cranz?

  It's fine.

• 45:24Nilay Patel?

  That's just lying. And you can't be like, but it's computer lying and somehow escape the laws. So like, there's a lot of that. Like, what is the existing law? What is the existing law that could stop AI Drake? Right, we like, we've written that story and it's like, very funny. It's a laser bong. And then there's like, what is the existing law that? I don't know, if you are writing a bunch of books and putting them on Amazon and holding out that a person wrote them, but they were actually written by ChatGPT. Is there some existing fraud statute that would make that illegal? So I think there's a lot of that going on, but then there's just a lot of, should we actually stop it? Should we like, hit the button and stop it for a minute? So we can make an actual framework of AI laws? And it seems like there's more heat around that than ever.

• 46:06David Pierce?

  And also, what would that look like? Is that even possible? Like, I think the sort of open question for a lot of this is, what would any of that even look like? I mean, so much of the conversation, even coming from the government and the White House this week, is basically to the effect of like, be cool, guys. It's just, it's a lot of saying like, you know, use ethics and morals and don't be bad or discriminatory. And it's like, okay, all of that is well and good, but what does that look like? Even when, I just keep coming back to Sundar Pichai saying, I think he said it on 60 Minutes, that even Google doesn't really understand how its AI works. And it's like, okay, these things are black boxes, even to the people that make them. And there is no be cool button. And so this race to like, what does it mean to stop it?

• 46:50David Pierce?

  Uh, we can't train new systems, but then Sam Altman is out here saying, well, this, the race you're describing to like, build new LLMs is pointless. It's as good as it's ever going to be in this world that we live in. So like, what, what moves does anybody have here is super unclear to me.

• 47:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think there are moves, but they're not, like, you can't just stop large language models. That's, that's out of the bottle, it's happening.

• 47:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you can just run them on a laptop.

• 47:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, anybody can run them on a laptop, then go build them if you're, you're smart enough. I'm not, but there are smart people who can just go build them. You can't stop that anymore. But you can potentially stop like, the aggressive monetization.

• 47:27Alex Cranz?

  Of them.

• 47:27Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I have a, I have a different view of this.

• 47:29Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 47:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think the aggressive monetization will be what saves humanity like.

• 47:33Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:34Nilay Patel?

  Unchecked capitalism will save humanity from AI. Here's my, here's my evidence.

• 47:39Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 47:40Nilay Patel?

  For this claim.

• 47:40Alex Cranz?

  I'm very excited.

• 47:41Nilay Patel?

  Snapchat is already testing sponsored links in its My AI Chatbot.

• 47:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, nobody's gonna use that.

• 47:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just like, you know what? That AI is definitely not, it's not gonna ruin humanity.

• 47:51Alex Cranz?

  Saw that, I'm like, nope, no thank you.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  It's already kind of bad.

• 47:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:54Nilay Patel?

  And then it has ads in it.

• 47:55David Pierce?

  Snapchat users are so mad at my AI that like, I mean, you have all these, all these young people who have like carefully curated screens with their streaks. And it's like, that space is sacred. And now there's just a chatbot who's like, what's up? Would you like to look at some ads?

• 48:10Alex Cranz?

  It's like little stupid shimmy being like, hey, hey, guys.

• 48:13Nilay Patel?

  I think this is true of Bing as well. They rolled out some new Bing features today. Along with some monetization and like, same thing is happening. It's, it's getting weird.

• 48:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, people are, people are turned off by the AIs.

• 48:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I'm telling you, just like the addition of advertising into these AI bots.

• 48:32Alex Cranz?

  Immediate, yeah, that's a good, I like that.

• 48:33Nilay Patel?

  It's like, maybe that will save us.

• 48:34Alex Cranz?

  Finally, capitalism is good for something.

• 48:36Nilay Patel?

  Some direct response advertising for Hulu will do some good in this world. There's other stuff. Uh, Zillow rolled out some chat GPT stuff today where you can just ask it for houses.

• 48:45Alex Cranz?

  Do people not know what the filter button is on Zillow?

• 48:48Nilay Patel?

  Monica wrote our post about Zillow and she sounds ecstatic about just talking to Zillow about houses.

• 48:53Alex Cranz?

  I mean, like, I spend a lot of time.

• 48:55Nilay Patel?

  I was gonna say, you're about to have a fun thing right now. Yeah.

• 48:58Alex Cranz?

  I, I just got mine, so I like deleted the Zillow app and it was a big moment for me. I was like, I don't need you for at least a year.

• 49:03David Pierce?

  It's like a dating app.

• 49:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm like, I'm done for now. But, but yeah, you just, you, that, that filter button's really easy. But I, I could see maybe being like, a really smart AI being like, okay, this is nice. But do you have anything a little closer to the, the path train at Journal Square?

• 49:20David Pierce?

  You guys are thinking about this all wrong. The appeal of Zillow as a chat GPT plugin is I can just ask it to show me the wildest shit. And it will find the houses that are insane. Like, do you, do you guys follow Zillow Gone Wild on Instagram?

• 49:34Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 49:35David Pierce?

  It, it just, imagine. A chatbot that can just give you infinity Zillow gone wild. This is the dream. Like, show me houses that have living rooms covered in medieval armor. And it's just will. It's just, that's perfect. That's the dream. It's the best version of Zillow ever.

• 49:52Nilay Patel?

  You don't think I can just say, dear God, find me a house? Can I just give you a little life update to the Vergecast audience?

• 49:58Alex Cranz?

  How's it going?

• 49:59Nilay Patel?

  The current state of our house hunt, trying to leave the woods and come back to civilization, consists of us finding something that we thought was cool, reasonably priced, sending it to our real estate agent, because we're doing so bad that we have a real estate agent now. And she replied, no, that's the murder house.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  And then we discovered it's the house where someone ate a baby.

• 50:20Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I was gonna be like, it's not that bad, but no, that's a bad one. Don't, don't live in that house.

• 50:26Nilay Patel?

  And Becky was like, but it's a pretty good deal.

• 50:28Alex Cranz?

  It's like, can you just redo the kitchen? Like, those ghosts aren't there anymore.

• 50:32Nilay Patel?

  It's not going great. And if only Zillow could be like, murder house.

• 50:36Alex Cranz?

  Is that a murder house? Yeah.

• 50:37Nilay Patel?

  Real, yeah, right? Could you just be like, is this a murder house? Price suspiciously below market.

• 50:42Alex Cranz?

  I feel like you could get a lot of, like, because people would want that, too.

• 50:45Nilay Patel?

  Find me a murder house?

• 50:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  This is the future of Zillow.

• 50:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  But that's very commercial. This is, I mean, just coming back to this again, very commercial. And for all of its entertainment value, I don't think the Zillow AI poses a threat to humanity. It's just, it's a strong prediction here on the Vergecast today.

• 51:00Alex Cranz?

  I hope it destroys humanity just because that would be funny. It's like, it was the Zillow boss.

• 51:06Nilay Patel?

  That would be good. And I think if any publication is poised to cover it, it's us.

• 51:11Alex Cranz?

  It's us.

• 51:12Nilay Patel?

  But my prediction is that I don't think the Zillow AI is a threat to humanity at this time.

• 51:18Alex Cranz?

  I like that, that qualifier.

• 51:19Nilay Patel?

  You gotta weasel out of it a little bit. But then there's kind of the weird other side, which is there was a study this week from NewsGuard, which kind of like rates, it's a for-profit, but it rates the veracity of news sites. Anyway, they, so they found 49 entire sites generated from whole cloth, designed to just spam Google search. And it's like, oh, this is, it's happening.

• 51:40Alex Cranz?

  You've been saying that for months.

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  The only reason they found forty nine is because they were searching for specific strings that ChatGPT generates, like, my data runs out in twenty twenty one, or as a chatbot. So it's just the most obvious ones. So there's obviously lots that they couldn't find.

• 51:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, these were just the lazy ones.

• 52:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, these are the ones where no one deleted, I'm a chatbot from the output before feeding it into Google, and they found fifty of those.

• 52:07David Pierce?

  Can I just read you the names of a bunch of these, by the way? James Vincent on our team, by the way, has done a really great job of covering this stuff. It turns out if you just follow the phrase as a large language model around the internet, it does some really amazing stuff. He's been writing about how it's showing up in like, product reviews and Yelp and all these different places. It's really fascinating. But I just, I just want to read you the names of a bunch of these. It is the most like, uncanny valley stuff I've ever seen. Biz breaking news, News Live seventy nine, Daily Business Post.

• 52:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:36David Pierce?

  BestBudgetUSA.com.

• 52:41David Pierce?

  HarmonyHustle.com.

• 52:42Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 52:43David Pierce?

  It's just, and just on and on. They're all like that. It's like, CountyLocalNews.com.

• 52:48Nilay Patel?

  CountyLocalNews.com is a great website. I love it.

• 52:51David Pierce?

  And it's just all of those where you're like, they exist in this like, perfect liminal space that it's like, it's almost there.

• 53:00Nilay Patel?

  At any moment, any one of these is signing you up for a class action lawsuit.

• 53:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:06David Pierce?

  One of them is just called The News Network.

• 53:08Nilay Patel?

  I mean, come on.

• 53:09David Pierce?

  It's so good. It's so good.

• 53:10Alex Cranz?

  That's really like, did they get that URL?

• 53:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:13David Pierce?

  I'm sorry, I just saw a screenshot from The News Network, and it's, it's one of those like, okay, imagine a website, right? And you have the, the big header up top with the one sort of main headline. The headline, the breaking news headline on The News Network is, I'm sorry for the confusion. As an AI language model, I don't have access to external information or news updates beyond my knowledge cutoff date. However, based on the given article title, an eye-catching news headline could be, and that's the end of the headline.

• 53:39Alex Cranz?

  That's incredible.

• 53:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm just telling you, these are the ones that got caught. And there's 49 of them already. And they had to buy domains and populate them with whatever they populated them with. The incoming to Google, I'm very excited to go to Iowa next week and just like talk to everyone there about what they're gonna do. When the flood comes in.

• 54:00Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I think the flood's already there.

• 54:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:02David Pierce?

  Well, and this is what we've been talking about, right, Neil? I like the the robot internet. It's stuff with programmatic advertising and AI content made to be found by Google robots. And it just, this is the cycle on and on and on. And those things, they all weirdly kind of like each other for a while. Like, that that is a profitable thing for Google to be part of in a lot of ways. Except in the big picture that it makes Google search unusable and that will ultimately kill its business. But like, it's a it's a weird thing to figure out how to screw up that cycle.

• 54:32Nilay Patel?

  I do think there's something to be said about our long blue sky conversation. And it's like, here's where the people are, a lot of people who are very familiar to you, who are like, good at posting in this way. And then the thing that broke that platform, but one of the many things that broke that platform is like, AI duck with a lisp. It's just like, wherever you introduce this technology, weird things happen. But I I'm just saying, my AI doomerism is like, you just see how this thing is being expressed right now. And yes, you can pay for chat GPT and like, get a bunch of tokens and ruin it. You can basically like, the news network will destroy the internet. It will just, it will ruin the web as an ongoing concern. At least the web is currently structured by Google's influence. Maybe that's fine. I don't know.

• 55:16Nilay Patel?

  But you can just see how, because it's kind of garbage. Like, it's it's just hard to like, feel a sense of pervasive doom when it's like, we can make the laser bong song now.

• 55:28Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think as as good as the laser bong song is, I think the other side of that is that we're learning. Like, we've already learned that people have a capacity to not give a shit about quality. And they'll just be like, this is good enough.

• 55:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:40Alex Cranz?

  And that's where that's where the real threat of AI is, right? Because we have both, we have this meet both the Writers Guild and then a lot of

• 55:46Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this is a good point.

• 55:47Alex Cranz?

  game developers being like, this is bad and it's going to destroy our industry because producers care about the money. They don't care about quality. So they can. We have to stop them.

• 55:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:57Alex Cranz?

  So like, that's the other side of it.

• 55:59Nilay Patel?

  Yes, the Writers Guild is on strike.

• 56:01Alex Cranz?

  They've gone on strike and it's for a wide variety of reasons. A lot of them related to streaming. But one of the things that they asked for was, we want you to commit to not using an AI for writing anything. And you can't use our scripts to teach it. You can't, you can't have it come up with an idea and then give it to us and ask us to write that idea that an AI came up with. It has to be out of the picture. And the producers responded with, well, what about if we just like talk to you every year about updates in technology? And so, yeah, it's this big gap between them. And I don't know how they close that because both sides.

• 56:35Nilay Patel?

  A once a year meeting about technology.

• 56:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:39Nilay Patel?

  I would love to go to that meeting. That'll solve it.

• 56:41Alex Cranz?

  Such a good meeting.

• 56:41Nilay Patel?

  Here on this show, we have that meeting once a week.

• 56:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. You can just come hang out with us. We'll talk to us all the time. But there, there is like that, that existential threat for a lot of people.

• 56:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:52Alex Cranz?

  Where it does affect jobs and stuff like that, where they are like fearful. And so there's like, like capitalism may destroy it, but capitalism is also going to encourage it in these places where people with money just don't care.

• 57:05Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, I'm only half serious when I say capitalism will save us.

• 57:08Alex Cranz?

  It'll save, it'll save some of us.

• 57:09Nilay Patel?

  What I mean is.

• 57:10Alex Cranz?

  It'll save Snapchat.

• 57:11Nilay Patel?

  It'll save Snapchat. It'll insert, it'll cruff up the user interfaces in some of these places.

• 57:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:16Nilay Patel?

  And it will obviously create extremely weird outcomes for people like screenwriters. By the way, many disclosures here.

• 57:22Alex Cranz?

  So many disclosures.

• 57:24Nilay Patel?

  Uh, let's see if I can do, let's see if I can do them all. One, it's Writers Guild of America, our staff and much of the writing staff at Vox Media, represented by the Writers Guild of America. I believe you're in it.

• 57:34Alex Cranz?

  I am in the Writers Guild of America.

• 57:35Nilay Patel?

  You get the screeners.

• 57:36Alex Cranz?

  I get the screeners, that's why I'm in it.

• 57:37Nilay Patel?

  That's very good. We made a Netflix show, which is now nominated for an Emmy. Woo. Well then, so I'm the EP of a Netflix show. Um, I have HBO. I picked TikTok first in the streaming draft. By the way, and then third, I actually wanted to mention this. Adam Conover is one of, from Adam, where is everything? One of the negotiators for the writers guild. And he was just on the town podcast with Matthew Bellany, talking about how it's going.

• 58:02David Pierce?

  I was just about to recommend that podcast. It's a really good episode. Everybody should listen to it.

• 58:05Nilay Patel?

  He is the fastest talker in the world, but I think I might have hit 1.5.

• 58:09David Pierce?

  I was gonna say, I think a lot of people who listen to the show would, would say you might take that.

• 58:13Alex Cranz?

  That's because they listen at 2X.

• 58:15Nilay Patel?

  Very true. Anyway, great episode. Those are our sculptures.

• 58:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:19Nilay Patel?

  Are there any others? Comcast is a minority investor in Box Media, a parent company. That's the, that's the one.

• 58:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Peacock is the only one who's against using AI. That's not true.

• 58:27Nilay Patel?

  Peacock is like, what if the whole thing was AI? Comcast is a minority investor in our parent company, Box Media. Last one, there's some big, big updates this week, sort of. David, what's going on here?

• 58:38David Pierce?

  Some Bing-ish updates. Well, okay, I want to talk a little bit about the updates, but then I mostly want to talk about this weird thing that Microsoft is doing with Edge, because I'm curious how you guys feel about it. But the, the Bing updates are basically, uh, Microsoft continues to look for more ways to put stuff into Bing. So now they're doing things like if you, you know, get the name of a restaurant from Bing, you say like, where should I go for dinner in Seattle? And it says, these restaurants, it's going to start to bake in things from like OpenTable, where it'll actually start to do reservations for you. Or you can integrate with streaming services and it'll actually like deep link and take you to find that stuff. So the, the goal is to like pull more of search into Bing. I think one of the things we've been looking for is sort of this push and pull between like,

• 59:20David Pierce?

  things coming into chatbots and chatbots going out into other products. And so I think what we're starting to see is these chatbots, especially being sort of subsume more and more stuff into this chat interface, which I mostly think is fine and smart and interesting. I think chat as an interface has a lot of work to do for that stuff to work. Like, we're just going to do this thing that we did with the voice assistants, where it's like, wouldn't you like to book a flight through this interface? And the answer is like, no. A chat to book a flight is the single worst possible way to book a flight. The way to book a flight is to see a screen full of numbers and then you click on one of them and that's how you book a flight.

• 59:57Alex Cranz?

  The lowest one.

• 59:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:00Nilay Patel?

  I was about to name some airlines, but I will withhold my judgment.

• 1:00:04David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah, the lowest one, excepting certain airlines.

• 1:00:08David Pierce?

  But I think, so that's all fine and good, right? Like Bing is Bing is still horny. That's like its main thing that is going for it. But Microsoft is desperate to like, figure out more stuff for you to do with it, other than be horny.

• 1:00:20Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so it is notable that next week is I O. We are expecting a lot of A I in search discussion from Google at I O. And Microsoft is like, well, we already launched and here's our first set of updates.

• 1:00:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's, that's a good way to look at it.

• 1:00:35Nilay Patel?

  They still have a pretty, I don't know if you call it a lead. They're ahead in having a functional product. But Google doesn't have one yet. So Microsoft is ahead. It has no market share. So I don't know if you could call it a lead. But they're ahead and like, here's Bing and we're adding features to it. And Google hasn't even like gotten out of the gate yet, really.

• 1:00:53Alex Cranz?

  I like that they did the restaurants because I keep going back to that, that Google I O demo where they're like, yeah, we're going to call the restaurant.

• 1:01:01Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I've used that for real a few times now.

• 1:01:03Alex Cranz?

  Did it really work?

• 1:01:03Nilay Patel?

  It works. It's, it's weird. I feel like a jerk every time I do it, but the restaurants don't seem to care because I show up and spend money.

• 1:01:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's my problem. I always feel bad sicking a robot on the restaurant, even though it does seem to work. I've done it a couple of times to make appointments for various things and it works fine. I just always like, I just feel like an ass that they're like, oh, I'm a robot calling on behalf of.

• 1:01:24Nilay Patel?

  You feel like you're going to walk in and you're like, oh, you're the robot guy.

• 1:01:27David Pierce?

  Yes, 100%.

• 1:01:28Nilay Patel?

  Not truth.

• 1:01:29David Pierce?

  No, it's not. They're just like, oh, you made this reservation. I take a lot of phone calls and I'm not putting faces to names.

• 1:01:35Nilay Patel?

  Would you like a Diet Coke? It's a very normal.

• 1:01:37Alex Cranz?

  They write robot guy next to your name when they get it.

• 1:01:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like beep, boop, bop, boop, you're a jerk.

• 1:01:43David Pierce?

  But the other thing that's happening is Microsoft, because it apparently does not remember the company that it was 23 years ago, is now getting really, really, really aggressive with Edge, its browser. And it has been doing this for a little while where like, if you're on Windows and you try to use a different browser, it just sort of repetitively is like, but what if you used Edge? Wouldn't that be cool if you use Edge? Don't you love Edge? Why don't you love Edge? Love Edge. What's wrong with you? Love Edge. And then it just tries to sort of beat. You into submission, but the new news this week was that if you use Teams, I think it's Teams first and then Outlook after, and you click a link, even if you don't have Edge as your default browser, it will just open Edge.

• 1:02:25David Pierce?

  And what they claim is some confusing nonsense about like, user accounts being the same everywhere that I don't really understand. But what it functionally says is like, if you use Microsoft products, we don't give a rat's ass what your default browser is. You will use Edge. And part of that is because things like Bing is the default search engine and Microsoft really wants you to use Bing all of a sudden. And it's like owning that browser is very important for Microsoft right now. And it is just going way out of its way to make people use it.

• 1:02:54Nilay Patel?

  This is the first sentence of Tom Warren's post about this.

• 1:02:57Alex Cranz?

  Oh, he's right, though.

• 1:02:58Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft Edge is a good browser, but for some reason, Microsoft keeps trying to shove it down everyone's throat and make it more difficult to use rivals like Chrome or Firefox, which I believe is what you were about.

• 1:03:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was just about to say the exact same thing. Because it is like, it's good. You can use it, but they're like, no, we're gonna really cram it in there. I'm like, no, that's how you make it bad. Everybody's gonna immediately hate it.

• 1:03:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:19Alex Cranz?

  Because you're cramming it down their throats. They already have to use Teams and they don't want to use Teams. I promise you.

• 1:03:24Nilay Patel?

  Very few people in my experience are like, oh, the software I was forced to use at work? That's the software I will choose to use in my life.

• 1:03:33Alex Cranz?

  With the exception of Slack.

• 1:03:34Nilay Patel?

  No, I, there's no, I.

• 1:03:36Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I'm in like group chats on Slack.

• 1:03:38Nilay Patel?

  Because you have like media friends.

• 1:03:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Nilay Patel?

  That's, your brain is poisoned. Every time I try to suggest being in a Slack with like non-media friends, everyone's like, why?

• 1:03:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we did one and like, all those people bounced. All the media people are still in there and all the normals are like, nah.

• 1:03:52Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, like, as a, I get it, right? You have this tool, you're very excited about Edge. Edge is really good now because it's based on Chrome.

• 1:04:00Alex Cranz?

  It's just Chrome.

• 1:04:01Nilay Patel?

  And you're like, how do I get? And they pulled their Microsoft move from 23 years ago. And they're like, we'll just assert our dominance in one area by using our dominance in other, and it's like.

• 1:04:11Alex Cranz?

  I like how Microsoft has been very quiet and we were all kind of like, is Microsoft cool now? Like, they're doing cool stuff. They seem like chill. And they're like, yeah, now we're going to crush Google and destroy it and make Sundar

• 1:04:22Nilay Patel?

  Dance.

• 1:04:23Alex Cranz?

  Dance. That was, that was the quote. And we're going to force Teams down your throat. We're going to force Edge down your throat. And I'm like, no, you guys were never cool. You were just waiting. You were just biding your time. Now you're out.

• 1:04:34Nilay Patel?

  You know, there's a chance that they're just lashing out because the Activision deal's falling through.

• 1:04:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:38Nilay Patel?

  Like, they're just like, it's like a little Edge-based temper tantrum. Look, I think the Google-Microsoft fight is very good. I think it's generally good for us as consumers. I think that even if it wasn't weird from a competitive standpoint to tie one piece of software to another and ignore defaults, like, that's weird. That's like, there's like a European bureaucrat reading The Verge who's like, huh huh, like, ready to go.

• 1:05:00David Pierce?

  It's also just like basic computer decency.

• 1:05:03Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like, there's an etiquette there. And I'm just telling you, forcing people to use enterprise software does not win you market share. It makes people just open Safari on their Macs at home. The end. And like, hopefully Microsoft learns this lesson. All right, we got to take a break. A little bit of lightning round. We'll be right back. I won't tell you if there's going to be bots. We'll be right back.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month-end close that takes weeks. You become what you spend on, and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com/af.

• 1:06:07Speaker 07

  Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odoo.com/vox. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash vox.

• 1:06:47Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. It's lightning round time. There's quite a lot of potential if it's lightning round. Crans, let's start with you.

• 1:06:53Alex Cranz?

  Okay. I'm very excited because Gmail now has blue, or is gonna have, blue verified checkmarks.

• 1:07:00Nilay Patel?

  Should I write this headline? I have no idea what this means.

• 1:07:02Alex Cranz?

  So you know when you get an email and you're like, is that really from Google? And sometimes it's not.

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this is like a phishing protection.

• 1:07:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this is like phishing protection. It's just gonna have a checkmark.

• 1:07:13Nilay Patel?

  Is it $8 a month?

• 1:07:14Alex Cranz?

  No, it's free. It's, they're rolling it out. I think it sounds like it's primarily brands first, but yeah, just verify this is the actual person emailing you. And it's like, why hasn't this existed before now?

• 1:07:25Nilay Patel?

  These emails are open protocol, and this is a thing a centralized provider can... I'm just waving at David, just angrily. Because David said this, it's his fault.

• 1:07:34Alex Cranz?

  I just, I love it. I love that, this is, this is why a nice centralized protocol can sometimes be good, is we can know when we're getting phished. A little better.

• 1:07:44Nilay Patel?

  A little better.

• 1:07:44Alex Cranz?

  Just a little.

• 1:07:45Nilay Patel?

  Are they gonna like, put it into like, the email standard?

• 1:07:48Alex Cranz?

  Oh heavens, no. No, I think it's just gonna be in Gmail, yeah.

• 1:07:53Nilay Patel?

  Very good. The real, centralization, decentralization has been a real theme on today's episode, and centralization is winning. That's the other theme.

• 1:08:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because like, decentralized stuff is really good in your head. It's academically, it's like communism. Academically, great idea. In practice, doesn't work.

• 1:08:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, I can't wait for you to get some emails from people without blue checks.

• 1:08:18David Pierce?

  Oh, will I?

• 1:08:19Nilay Patel?

  All right, here's mine. It's just a call out of a really good Liz Lapato piece this week about Andreessen Horowitz, storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm, but also Andreessen Horowitz, big investor in Clubhouse, big investor, which is not doing great, had layoffs. Turns out, Clubhouse, people wanted to talk to each other on their phone when they were forced to be in their houses during the pandemic. Not a great platform when people can go outside. So Clubhouse is in some weird trouble. Substack in extremely weird trouble. Remember when Substack Notes was going to be the thing that Blue Sky became? Whoops. Negative revenue for Substack. That's a weird one. Andreessen Horowitz, big investor. They were a big investor in BuzzFeed. They're a big investor in Twitter 2.0.

• 1:09:01David Pierce?

  Uber.

• 1:09:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, the point of Liz's story is they thought they could remake the media. And they invested in all these things that were supposed to remake the media and disintermediate legacy institutions like the Times. And I think mostly Andreessen is like mad at the Times.

• 1:09:16David Pierce?

  Well, yeah, and their, and their whole thing, I mean, even, do you remember when they launched their own media vertical future?

• 1:09:20Nilay Patel?

  I forgot.

• 1:09:21David Pierce?

  The whole pitch was get rid of gatekeepers, right? It was like-

• 1:09:24Nilay Patel?

  Go direct is a very famous Andreessen Horowitz phrase.

• 1:09:27David Pierce?

  Go direct, right. Like, let people and creators go direct to each other. Like, that was Substack's whole thing is like, don't go get a salary from a large company, like, get paid by your audience. I think they, they invested in Elon Musk's Twitter, I think, on a lot of the same basis. He was, he made this big creator push that has ultimately amounted to precisely nothing, as far as I can tell. But that was the idea. And like, Clubhouse was supposed to be that too. It was like, and do you remember when it was like, oh, look, here's like lightly famous people just like talking. Wasn't that amazing? And then they all went back to their jobs and lives and that fell apart. But this, that was supposed to be the pitch. And all kind of at the same time, for whatever reason, I don't know if it was a bad idea or just like, hasn't quite worked, but like, that, that turn just never really got made.

• 1:10:11Nilay Patel?

  So it did. The, the creators go direct to your audience has worked for a lot of creators and a lot of platforms, right?

• 1:10:18David Pierce?

  Just not on the ones that A16Z bet on.

• 1:10:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we know Casey's on Substack. He's successful on Substack going direct to an audience. That's great. We know lots of people on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram who are creator companies going well for them. But as platform businesses, as things that replace the sort of architecture of the mainstream media, most of those platforms are still reactive to the media. They're reactive to actual journalism. And then on top of it, there's like bad businesses. And I, there's just something- Really interesting about that dynamic, and Liz does a good job peeling it apart.

• 1:10:46Alex Cranz?

  She does.

• 1:10:47Nilay Patel?

  Disclosure, we are journalists who work at a media organization.

• 1:10:51Alex Cranz?

  You guys suck.

• 1:10:52Nilay Patel?

  Those are facts. All right, David, what you got?

• 1:10:55David Pierce?

  Mine is this Google announcement from this week that they now support pass keys for logging into your Google account. Have either of you set up pass keys on your Google account?

• 1:11:05Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 1:11:05Nilay Patel?

  Not yet.

• 1:11:06David Pierce?

  You should do it. It takes five seconds. Everyone listening to this, if you have a Google account, you don't have to like pull your car over, but next time you're sitting at a red light, that's probably still illegal.

• 1:11:18Nilay Patel?

  Pull the car over.

• 1:11:19David Pierce?

  Next time the car is in park.

• 1:11:23David Pierce?

  Next time you are safely able to use your phone in thoroughly legal ways. Go log into Google and set it up. You will be shocked at how quick it is. And basically, pass keys are these things that are trying to replace passwords with biometrics, essentially. So like you, you log into websites with your face or your thumb, the same way that you log into your phone. And there's a bunch of really interesting cryptography going on underneath. There's a whole thing called the FIDO Alliance that covers all of it. None of that really matters. The point is now, like, website by website, it is getting easier and more secure simultaneously to log into stuff. And this tech has been ready for a long time. We've been covering it for a long time. I read a really great story Russell Brandon wrote on The Verge like several years ago, talking about how this was all kind of around the corner.

• 1:12:04David Pierce?

  And it was for a long time, and now like Google is a huge domino in this game. And I think it's, it's a big moment for pass keys in the sense that this is about to be the first time that most people have ever interacted with pass keys. I'm very excited about it, and everybody should go set it up. It's, it's excellent.

• 1:12:22Alex Cranz?

  It won't work with like, single sign-on stuff, right? Like, if you have to use, for say, Okta.

• 1:12:28David Pierce?

  So what would have to happen there is Okta would have to start supporting pass keys. And this is the problem, right? The tech has existed for a while. It's now built into, the iPhone supports pass keys. I think most modern Android phones support pass keys. But the only way to enable it is like website by website, and you need both sides to support it for it to work. But it's coming, quickly.

• 1:12:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would imagine this announcement came out ahead of I/O. I imagine we hear something about it at I/O, and then I imagine we hear an Apple domino fall at WWDC.

• 1:12:58Nilay Patel?

  This is as developer-y as consumer-y.

• 1:13:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Nilay Patel?

  And this seems like the right season for more of this to happen. It is very exciting because passwords are stupid. If I can get to a place in my life where I'm never reminding my parents what their passwords are.

• 1:13:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:08Nilay Patel?

  I'll be very happy.

• 1:13:09Alex Cranz?

  That's, that's his dream.

• 1:13:11Nilay Patel?

  All right, we've gone over, as always. Thanks to Sarah. There was just a lot of butt talk on this episode of Vergecast. Love the butts. Shouts to Zach for his categorization in the App Store, or the Podcast Store. Is it gonna get the E or not? I say no. Let the children hear about butts on the internet. There's a lot going on on the site. Just a really good week on the site, and the next week is I/O, so verge.com, install it directly to your home screen. It's pretty good. You can do that now. You can do that now. That's it. That's Vergecast.

• 1:13:44Speaker 08

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:14:17Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from Jira by Atlassian. Your work lives in scattered places, and it's not only your team searching for context, your AI agents need it too. Jira taps Atlassian's teamwork graph to bring that context together across Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more, and makes it easy to share with the agents you already use, like Claude, Purser, and GitHub Copilot. Assign them work directly, or connect your agents through MCP. Spend less time hunting for context, less time asking, "Wait, what did we decide?" and more time actually shipping with Jira. Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com.

• 1:15:05Speaker 09

  Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack. That's why The Guardian is launching Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman, a conversation with experts who slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's actually happening in the world. Three times a week, hosts Kai and Carter utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has to discuss the news, international affairs, climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness. And The Guardian is not billionaire-owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more. And listen wherever

• 1:15:47Speaker 09

  you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.