Siri is good now??

Summary

The Vergecast – June 12, 2026

Episode: “Siri is good now??”

Hosts: Nilay Patel & David Pierce
Theme: Exploring the surprising improvements to Apple’s Siri, a major shift in the consumer AI landscape, and the shifting tides in social media and tech news.

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the unexpectedly positive reception to Apple’s “New Siri” and analyzes what it means for Apple, the broader AI ecosystem, and competitors like OpenAI and Google. Nilay and David also dive into recent developments across social media, the ongoing saga of “the Trump Phone,” and notable changes in tech policy and regulation.

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Main Topics & Key Insights

1. Siri’s Notable Leap Forward

[04:00-28:30]

• Public Response: Reports from tech writers, especially Joanna Stern, describe the new Siri as genuinely “good”—a notable surprise given its rocky history.
• Biggest Improvement:
  • David: “The index of content on your phone actually works now.” (05:11)
  • Spotlight and on-device search have historically been awful. Now, searching messages, emails, and files is substantially improved, forming the foundation of Siri’s usefulness.
  • Nilay highlights that simply fixing search and indexing is a huge leap after Apple “built the database wrong” for almost 20 years. (07:04)

Notable Quote

“If all you're looking for is files, the idea of being able to search for like words inside of a file and it should be able to find it is uncomplicated technology and is something that Apple devices have been bad at for a really long time.”
—Nilay Patel [06:22]

• How Siri Works Now:

  • There's a hybrid system: a much better on-device index, complemented by cloud-based AI (possibly using Google’s Gemini for natural language processing).
  • Siri’s query recognition of user intent is vastly improved.
  • Some processing remains cloud-dependent, raising questions about reliability when offline or on poor connections.

• AI “Magic” or Just Fixing the Basics?

  • David is skeptical whether this is an AI leap or a case of Apple finally catching up on basic software engineering.
  • Nilay counters: Not just the index, but the interface and natural language understanding have been notably enhanced, possibly due to Gemini’s integration. (08:02)

• Implications: “Sherlocking” the AI Market

  • Siri becoming “good enough” could destroy incentives for most standalone AI assistant apps, echoing how Apple has previously absorbed the core functions of third-party apps into iOS (“Sherlocking”).
  • David: “This completely upends the entire consumer AI industry for like hundreds of millions or billions of people around the world.” (13:19)

Notable Quote

“If Siri is now good enough, this completely upends the entire consumer AI industry...That suddenly like blows up the universe for lots of these other companies.”
—David Pierce [13:19]

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2. Consumer AI: Platforms, Agents, and Lock-In

[16:26-28:05]

• The Platform Wars:

  • The hope among AI companies was to outpace Apple in creating a powerful platform before Siri caught up.
  • Nilay: Apple’s deep OS integration, developer sway, and data access make it nearly impossible for competitors to offer something compelling enough that users would switch.

• Consumer Lock-In:

  • The enhanced index and Siri’s access to iMessage and personal data will make leaving Apple’s ecosystem even more difficult.

Notable Exchange

“If you were a person who...just have however many years of messages, you are in for a wild surprise when that index finishes with the new Siri.”
—Nilay Patel [26:28]

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3. Siri’s Design Philosophy and the Limits of Agents

[18:59-24:53]

• Apple’s “Human in the Loop” Approach:
  • Apple claims users don’t necessarily want fully autonomous, multi-step agents doing everything for them.
  • Siri is positioned as a helpful addition to normal workflows—not a radical new paradigm. Some speculation about whether this is genuine philosophy or just Apple catching up.

Notable Quote

“Most people don’t and won’t think of computers as a bunch of agents to send to do things on their behalf. They just want to order food.”
—Nilay Patel [20:48]

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4. The Shift in Social Networks: Making Big Platforms Feel Small

[32:04-56:11]

News Recap:

• Instagram will let you direct your feed with more explicit “algorithm controls”
• BlueSky is pivoting to smaller, Reddit-like “Communities”
• YouTube launches DMs (again)

Theme:
The era of the one-big-feed (Twitter model) is waning; platforms now hunt for ways to make the social web feel more intimate and community-oriented.

• LLMs Make Algorithms Legible:

  • Instagram sees LLMs as a way to let users interact in natural language with their recommendation feed.
  • Adam Mosseri’s vision: true agency over your feed isn’t just about filters, but about “talking” to the algorithm. (35:52)

• BlueSky’s Community Pivot:

  • Moving away from “global public square” toward Reddit-inspired small groups.
  • The social internet’s next chapter may be about interoperable, protocol-driven communities, not monolithic products.
  • Twitter’s public timeline model may never return.

• YouTube Admits Social Gravity:

  • The addition of DMs is tacit acknowledgment that video sharing is now social, driven by private sharing and group conversations.

Notable Quotes

“All of the things you’re describing are ways to make the big social networks feel small. And I think that’s fascinating.”
—David Pierce [33:52]

“A world where you are making personalized experiences on the fly is exciting in terms of agency, but at the extreme, starts to undermine shared experiences. If AI can generate entire apps and experiences that each of us wants, you and I might no longer share any sense of space.”
—Adam Mosseri, relayed by David [53:23]

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5. Lightning Round: Tech News & Culture

“Social Reckoning” Trailer (The Social Network Sequel)

[61:42-72:56]

• Aaron Sorkin returns with a sequel focused on the Facebook Files whistleblower (Francis Haugen) era.
• Jeremy Strong (Kendall Roy of “Succession”) plays a gravitas-heavy Zuckerberg.
• Hosts debate the odd framing of the story: “Sorkin loves a pressure cooker.” (68:15)
• David: “I have a feeling we’ll probably see clips of Bill Burr... say some cool stuff in this movie.” (72:00)
• General vibe: This will not be as good as the original, but will be “wild and weird and messy.” (69:08)

“Brendan Carr is a Dummy” (Regulatory Rant)

[73:15-84:30]

• Two stories:
  • FCC commissioner Carr’s take on the CBS News/60 Minutes shake-up, revealing a deep misunderstanding of newsroom power dynamics.
  • Carr’s pattern of regulatory favoritism toward Elon Musk’s SpaceX, as reported by the NYT, and the problematic consequences of such regulatory capture.
• “It is just so nakedly corrupt.” — David Pierce [83:07]

Anthropic’s “Fable” AI Model Drama

[84:42-89:42]

• Anthropic launches its most powerful model, Fable, with guardrails for bio/cybersecurity; users immediately revolt against limitations.
• The company quickly rolls back restrictions; is caught “in the crosshairs” of the current political climate.
• Nilay: “We're like a week away from just Mythos being available to everyone.” (85:59)
• The AI model race remains super-competitive and unstable.

The “Trump Phone” Saga

[90:01-93:54]

• The much-hyped “Trump Phone” turns out to be a repackaged HTC U24 Pro, with zero real custom development.
• iFixit swaps boards to prove hardware is identical.
• Humorous speculation about incoming administration officials pretending to use the gold Trump phones.

AT&T’s New iPad Day Pass

[94:04-96:12]

• $3/day unlimited data with no contract—a surprisingly customer-friendly U.S. telecom innovation.
• Nilay: “That's the first smart thing AT&T has ever done.” (94:34)

Solar Power Surpasses Coal in the US

[96:15-98:16]

• For the first time, U.S. solar electricity production surpasses coal. Nilay attributes this partly to the post-tax-credit solar installation surge.
• A “heartwarming” close to the episode.

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Notable Quotes (with Timestamps)

• On Siri’s leap:
  “It seems to be able to do these things pretty capably...if Siri is now good enough, this completely upends the entire consumer AI industry.” —David [13:19]
• On user intent:
  “I think they have realized that there’s not money in the consumer market. There hasn’t been the thing that would make people pick up a different device or have a different experience before picking up an iPhone.” —David [16:26]
• On social network design:
  “All of the things you’re describing are ways to make the big social networks feel small. And I think that’s fascinating.” —David [33:52]
• On AI-driven personalization and the loss of shared reality:
  “If AI can generate entire apps and experiences that each of us wants, you and I might no longer share any sense of space.” —Meta’s Adam Mosseri via David [53:23]
• On regulatory capture:
  “It is just so nakedly corrupt. And we’re at the point where the Times is writing about it so dryly because you can't even... it's not worth the outrage compared to all the other corruption.” —David [83:07]

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Segment Timestamps

• [02:00] Podcast intro, hotel banter
• [04:00] Siri’s transformation, technical changes, impact analysis
• [13:19] AI market implications
• [18:59] Agentic AI, Apple’s constraints, UX discussion
• [26:28] Data lock-in and switching costs
• [32:04] Social platform evolution: Instagram, BlueSky, YouTube
• [53:23] The problem of AI-customized reality and shared experience
• [61:42] “Social Reckoning” movie trailer (The Social Network sequel)
• [73:15] “Brendan Carr is a Dummy” segment
• [84:42] Anthropic’s Fable model and the problem with AI guardrails
• [90:01] Trump phone teardown
• [94:04] AT&T iPad day pass
• [96:15] Solar surpasses coal
• [98:16] Show close and programming notes

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Tone and Style

The episode mixes deep critical analysis with banter, industry war stories, and plenty of sarcasm. Both hosts express skepticism, humor, and genuine enthusiasm (especially about underdog wins like solar).

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In Summary

This episode marks a watershed moment for Apple’s Siri, as the assistant appears to be finally delivering on its promise—raising existential questions for the AI app market. Meanwhile, social networks are inventing ways to make themselves feel smaller and more community-driven, AI remains a Wild West, and tech regulation and product grifting remain as colorful and absurd as ever.

Notable moments are marked by hosts' quotable rants, friendly roasts, and musings about tech’s future—both bright and worrying.

Transcript

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[Nilay Patel]

Hello and welcome to the Verdcast, the flagship podcast of Orbs. I'm your friend David Pearce and right now I am staring at an empty chair, a microphone and an absolutely gorgeous spiral staircase. And somewhere out of here is going to emerge my co host Nilay Patel. Nilai hopping down the stairs.

[David Pierce]

I need to enter this show this way every week. What have I been doing?

[Nilay Patel]

That was the coolest entrance. Like you. You did it too quickly would be my main note for you. Hi Nilai. Welcome to the show.

[David Pierce]

I was so excited. I'm a little princess.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm very sorry to all of our audio listeners that you missed what just happened, but Nilai made a true grand

[David Pierce]

entrance over in your Close your eyes and imagine me skipping down a spiral staircase.

[Nilay Patel]

All we need is you in like a long gown and something truly special would have just happened. Where are you? How on earth are you sitting in front of a spiral staircase?

[David Pierce]

So I went from San Francisco, where I was there for wwc. I came to LA for a couple days to have some meetings, meet some friends. I'm staying at the W in Beverly Hills, and it's a very nice hotel. It's been updated, but it's still like an 80s hotel. And I got upgraded to, like, the room with the staircase, which was a delight and a surprise. And so it's very cool. The bed is upstairs in the loft and it still kind of has, like,'80s vibes all over the place. Like where the TV is over there. There's definitely, like, space for a cable box to be. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, it's just very cool. Like, I'm in love with this hotel room. I'm, like, staring at the mountains out the window. It's just the collision of trying to modernize an 80s hotel is very apparent in this space, and I kind of love it.

[Nilay Patel]

This room, to me just screams like, years of B list actors and now Neelai Patel.

[David Pierce]

Yes. I think I'm the only person who has never done cocaine in this room.

[Nilay Patel]

Still time, buddy.

[David Pierce]

I know what I'm supposed to be doing in here, and I'm not doing it.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, that's very fair. So we have a lot to talk about this week. There's a bunch of interesting AI news. There's a bunch of interesting social network news. The hype desk is back. Brandon Carr is back. We got a whole lathing round coming, but we have to start nilay with, I would say, one of the most remarkable pieces of news this week. We've talked a lot about wwdc, but a thing has been happening over the last couple of days that we have to talk about, which is that lots of people are starting to get access to the New Siri. And the New Siri, by all accounts, might actually be very good. Like, it might just. It might just be good.

[David Pierce]

I did the Talk show with Jon Gruber and Joanna Stern, and Joanna had spent that entire day using the New Siri before we did the show. And she was just on a terror about the fact that it was good and how impressed she was. I think it might be good. I think there's a chance it's good. My caveat, and don't read this as cynicism, I'm saying there's a chance it might be good. I haven't had a chance to use it. I've been on the road. I'm not updating my actual phone with a beta while I'm traveling, so I haven't had a chance to Dive deep. But I've seen a lot of people use it. I've watched Joanna use it. The thing that is good, the big improvement is that the index of content on your phone actually works now.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

So the bar was you would try to search messages on the iPhone and it would do nothing. And now there's a meaningful index of that stuff, of your mail, your messages and your photos. That index takes a long time. It actually wasn't even done when I saw Joanna, like, it was still indexing her phone. But even while it was indexing, it could retrieve things. And because there's a useful and good search index on the phone, the AI system, Siri, is able to actually access it, read it, and deliver results, which was the whole promise. I'm not saying any of this like, in a cynical or like minimizing way. It's just so funny that Apple neglected to build that thing for so long that now it's, I don't even think it's the AI that's doing it. I think it's like, functionally they rebuilt the index of content and now the AI can just go get it. And that is magic.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, it's both, right? I mean, you can't, you can't get the, the index is only as useful as the tool built to access it. And like, yeah, it's, it's two sides

[David Pierce]

of the same coin. I totally agree with that. I just don't, I don't think that there's like some huge leap forward in, in AI technology happening here.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, I disagree. But I, I, I think you're right and you're wrong. Like, I think the, it's very clear that the index piece of this is huge. Like, we, you and I did the, the episode on Wednesday with the people's biggest questions from wwdc and one of them was, what's the thing you're most excited about that isn't all this AI stuff? And one of the things I didn't say but had written down in my notes was better search. Like, if you, if you've ever used Spotlight on any of your devices, it is just a awful search engine. Like, if all you're looking for is files, the idea of being able to search for like words inside of a file and it should be able to find it is uncomplicated technology and is something that Apple devices have been bad at for a really long time.

[David Pierce]

Mostly at beach balls. Like on a Mac, if you try to search your messages, it mostly just beach balls.

[Nilay Patel]

Nightmare. Yeah. And so I completely agree that Like, I think, was it Mike Rockwell at the Tech Talk you went to said they literally rebuilt the thing from the ground up. Like that, to me is the single most obvious evidence of the fact that they just rebuilt this thing from nothing. And they started with literally, how do we build the database? Because like after, after nearly 20 years of iOS, they clearly had built the database wrong and they went back and fixed it. So I agree that that's really exciting. But there's also a piece of this that is just Siri's ability to understand what you're talking about has clearly vastly improved. Like, if anyone who has ever used Siri can tell you that it is, it was bad input and bad output. Right? Like, it's, it's the reason that you would say, remind me to do something and it would like set a timer for six and a half days and you're like, what? Just what just happened?

[David Pierce]

Like, yes, every time I try to set a timer for 15 minutes, it sets one for six hours consistently for the past two years.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it's like it was truly like garbage in, garbage out. And I think you're right that maybe the most obvious thing that they've fixed is the actual index of stuff on your phone. And that that like raises the floor of what every single bit of AI technology is going to be able to do. But also it's very clear that they've solved some important pieces of the interface. And I think frankly that's where Gemini did the job. Like Apple continues to be sketchy about what it did with Gemini and the ways in which it's partnering with Google. But like Gemini is an excellent speech to text system and an excellent natural language processing system. Like that is a thing Google is very good at. And I suspect Gemini is a big part of how Apple caught up to that really fast because that's a hard thing to build. But it has been built by other companies now and Apple presumably was able to just grab that and can still say it got all that technology without any of the mess that is Google with a straight face.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, there's some back and forth here and I suspect it will become more clear over time about where the query recognition happens. So I think everyone's assumption is that you talk to Siri, your phone makes a bunch of decisions, and then if it needs the power of the cloud and private cloud compute, it goes up to the cloud. I heard in some briefings that actually the query goes up in private cloud compute using the full power of Nvidia processors and whatever Gemini distillation Apple framework model thing that they won't talk about in great detail is happening up there that's making the decision and saying, okay, you can do this on device. And I think it is query to query which one is happening. But I think for the more complicated ones it's happening there. And so things like, let's search my text messages, like find out when this person said this to me. I think it's both. I think they have the index on device and then private cloud compute is able to actually go understand what you're saying and ask for the data from the index. And I'm very curious, what happens if you don't have connectivity? Or what if for a guy who's been on a plane a lot recently, what if you have really bad connectivity?

[Nilay Patel]

I was just going to say these things are even worse when they're crappy than when you're fully offline.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. And so I, yeah, I think the. And that's what I'm saying. I think it will become clear what's happening where as more and more people get access to Siri and they put it under strain in low or no connectivity situations because I think some queries simply won't work. The point I'm making about the index though, just to come back to that, it all depends on what you're comparing it to, right? So can I search my text messages on an iPhone? The comparison was no, right. The answer was essentially no for the longest time and now the answer is yes in the best possible way. And I think you can get that reaction. What I was thinking about, like AI technology is, is this an AI system at the absolute frontier of what OpenAI and anthropic and Google are doing? And I don't think that that's the case. And that's what I mean by Apple hasn't like pushed that really far. Like all of AI right now is like, can you find a database? Can you get access to that database? Can the AI go read that database and give you something useful back to you? And even like agent stuff is a lot of where's the database? Can I build you a custom front end to it? Or whatever it is? This one is the database was so shit that no one could do anything with it. And now it's great. And only Apple has access in particular to that one. And I do think there's some like magic happening there. Like, it feels amazing. I just, it's just so funny. Like I'm very focused on, well, this database didn't even work before now it works and they will never let OpenAI have access to it. That's a big differentiator.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think Allison Johnson on our team wrote a good piece testing some of the, I would say sort of second order AI things. Not the like find me this thing in my text message, but like, you know, compile these pieces of data and find me something. Like she asked what's good for dinner at SFO and it like went and found where, what terminal she's flying out of because it has access to things in your email and such and gave her some options about places to go. Right. That's like, that's step two of AI assistance. In no way is that new, but this is like a thing that you can do in lots of other services right now, but now Siri can do it too. And it seems to be able to do these things pretty capably. And so this, this is kind of the big picture question I've been asking myself and others for the last few days is let's just say Siri has caught up to the most basic, pretty good AI assistant level. Like it, it does all of the level 1 and level 2 assistant stuff as well as the others do. It's not at the frontier, it's not doing leading edge agentic stuff, but like basic day to day life stuff. Let's say Siri has caught up. We have a lot more testing to do before we can actually say that that's the case. It seems to me that if that is true, if Siri is now good enough, this completely upends the entire consumer AI industry for like hundreds of millions of or billions of people around the world. If suddenly the thing built into my phone and all of my other Apple devices is good enough, it feels like that, that suddenly like blows up the universe for lots of these other companies.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I mean this is why I keep saying Apple sherlocked the free version of ChatGPT. Yeah, yeah, the free version. ChatGPT was a sensation because Google search had become so shit and Siri was useless. And now here's a thing on your phone that would just talk to you and maybe just maybe lie to you, maybe maybe try to break you up with your wife on the front page of the New York Times. Shout out to our boy K roos. But at the end of the day that didn't improve enough.

[Nilay Patel]

Right?

[David Pierce]

OpenAI's goal is to get you to pay money and they even, you know, the, the, the sort of like false start with Apple Intelligence. OpenAI's strategy was still to give it away to Apple for free and hope that you would use it enough to get you to pay money to OpenAI for the good version of ChatGPT. And none of that ever worked out. And now OpenAI is pivoting to enterprise and they're all chasing that money. And I think Apple is just saying, look, this is good enough. This is maybe as good as two years ago. Free ChatGPT. This is essentially the same level of capability, but because it has access to your imessage and your photos and if you use Apple mail, your mail, a lot more can be done here. And we're building visual intelligence directly into the camera, which is a huge deal for iPhone users. That's a lot straightforwardly, that's a lot to build into the operating system. What is the thing you're going to have to sell to get people to pay money or download a different app is a very complicated question. When that's built into Siri. And I really think the free AI apps are all kind of. They're all going to put out statements soon. We welcome the competition. That's the thing that happens when apps get Sherlocked in this way. And it is just here. It's absolutely going to be the thing that happens now.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this being sort of the equivalent of like the can Netflix become HBO before HBO can become Netflix thing. It was like you and I have spent a lot of time on this show over the last couple of years talking about all of the AI companies trying desperately to figure out how to be a platform. Right. Like ChatGPT has taken every imaginable run at trying to build app stores. Everybody is doing skills and everybody's building connectors. MCP is a big part of trying to stitch this whole system together. There's this question of like how do we take a chatbot which clearly people like interacting with, and break it out into something bigger and broader and sort of cross app and more functional. How do we give this tools and things to do? And the bet was that we can get there before Apple can figure out how to make a pretty good assistant because it actually has all this other stuff. And Apple, even more than Google has that kind of access and sway over developers to get them to play some of these games. So I think good Siri is going to have a pretty easy time getting most developers to do things like expose app intents and give Siri access to their tools in order to do stuff. I know you're going to doordash problem me in a minute. But it does seem like Apple is now on its way to winning that race to becoming ChatGPT or at least, you know, free ChatGPT before ChatGPT could figure out how to be the App Store. And that, that, to me, if I'm OpenAI is like a very scary state of affairs.

[David Pierce]

I mean, this is why OpenAI is pivoting to enterprise. I, I think they have realized that there's not money in the, in, in the consumer market. I'm the one who keeps yelling there's no great consumer AI products.

[Nilay Patel]

Right?

[David Pierce]

Like, there hasn't been the thing that would make people pick up a different device or have a different experience before picking up an iPhone. And if you don't have Candy Crush and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, what do you, what do you got? You know, like your phone is going to be with you because those are the things that consumers want on their phones. Your weird meta glasses aren't going to deliver all those experiences in that way. Certainly your friend Pendant, which is essentially useless, is not going to deliver those experiences in that way. So either you lean all the way into. People don't even want apps anymore. They just want, they want to be free, they want to be talking to their necklace, whatever you think that future is. Or you have to disrupt the phone. And you know, OpenAI has. Jony, I've. They're actively going to try to disrupt the phone with a phone. We think maybe with their own phone. You know, Microsoft is like showing off like lanyards, like they've just got weird ideas about what comes next. And I think Apple, they're like, well, all of your products are apps on our phone. So we can just do the thing that we're really good at, which is disrupting the apps on our phone by building the features in the operating system. And then whatever comes next, like, we'll be ready for it. The big question for Apple is they're so device centric for privacy reasons. Yes, but also that's the app model, right? All the apps live on your phone. They don't live in the cloud. So yes, they can do agentic stuff and they can call you a doordash, but what are they, what are you going to do when you just have AirPods in or you have Apple's glasses in and you want to call an app, Is that going to call your phone in your pocket? Is it going to, Are you going to leave your phone at home like you can with an Apple watch? Now, it's really unclear where that app logic lives beyond just the I can strongarm app developers into doing what I want right now it's like, okay, we're going to go and use the Web version of DoorDash. Google is much better at that. Like straightforwardly, Google is much better at that. And their strategy is we will open a Chrome browser on Google Cloud for you and click around DoorDash and they can just do that. Apple doesn't have those moves and they're still very focused on selling devices, running the apps locally on devices. Even the index I'm talking about, Gruber pointed out to me, they rebuild that index per device. So when you update to one of the 27 OSs, your Mac builds its own index, your phone builds, your iPad builds its own index, they don't share it. So this device model is going to be like freeing in one way because they have access to your data limiting in another really big way.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, that's interesting. I, that actually makes sense. I was, I was running the new Siri on my iPad, which like I don't use for things like Calendar. So I asked it a Calendar question and it turns out I've never opened the Calendar app on this thing. So it had no idea. I was like, oh well, this totally failed. And then I was like, no, I just literally have never actually looked at the Calendar on this device. But I agree with what you're saying and I think I'm curious how you feel about the way Apple has been talking about that stuff, because at that same tech talk I think it was Craig Federighi alluded to, basically Apple thinks that a lot of people don't want to use their AI systems the way that software developers do. And I think that is very clearly something you and I agree on. But this question of is Apple basically saying that we don't think these sort of multi step or orchestrating agents is the future of consumer technology? Are they saying that because they haven't built it yet in the same way that they like pretended that AI wasn't important because they screwed up AI so bad? Or is this actually like a statement of UX from Apple that they're like, no, your job is not to orchestrate agents. We just built a thing that can be helpful. Right? Like they even talked about it as we don't think of Siri as sort of the center of the universe. They almost had to sort of answer for why they built an app at all. And they basically see it as a way to go see old conversations, not like the place you go to use your phone, but they see it as sort of a. Across the systems you already use. And sure, if you're Apple and you have all of the incentives Apple has, that's a thing to do. But I also think it's, it's not a crazy case to make as a product person to say actually most people don't and won't think of computers as a bunch of agents to send to do things on their behalf. They just want to order food.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. What was the title of our last episode that we did together? Where's the Computer? It's this. This is a central question in the age of AI. Where does the logic live? Where does the computing happen? And if you want a bunch of agents to go do stuff for you, it should be the cloud. The answer somewhat naturally is the cloud.

[Nilay Patel]

Sure.

[David Pierce]

Because then you can just issue commands and you don't have to worry about your phone battery dying or whatever it is that things happen and then the result is delivered to you. I'm less of the opinion that consumers care or don't care about multi step agent orchestration. Like, sure. They also don't care about Docker or HTML or like what, you know, it's like, yes, like technology exists. Our audience cares a lot that Bluetooth 5.0 exists. Sure. Do normal people understand that Bluetooth 5.0 is what enables a bunch of wireless headbuds to have pairing across multiple. No, of course they don't. So I think Apple, we're going to do a great holiday spectacular this year. Like I think there's a little bit of difference between the tech companies, the sort of enthusiast audience which we have here and then like the mainstream technology consumer.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

And somewhere in there, Apple's pendulum swings back and forth.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

Like when it. It's time for a new iPhone, we are going to hear exactly the details of the new A series chip. If the iPhone folds, we will hear exactly the details of how they remove the crease from that OLED screen. They care about the technical innovation when it's theirs, when it's someone else's. They're like, no one cares about this. Like no one has to care about any of this stuff. And it's like, well, the stuff is what you make the products out of. I don't think consumers need to care about multi step agent orchestration, but if you do want to say, hey, I'm landing in LA in the next hour, make sure I have an Uber, my hotel is checked into, make sure and there's food waiting for me when I get There. Well, yeah, that's a pretty normal consumer use case. It's a pretty normal use case for anybody who's traveling. You need multi step agent orchestration. Like it doesn't matter that if you know that that's the thing that's happening or not. And that's the gap that I think Apple's in the spot where they're saying no one cares about the technology and what would you even use it for? You just put, you're spaghettiing it at the wall, which is what they do while they let the rest of the tech industry figure it out. But it's not to say the technology is not important.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I agree with that. Next time we do a Vergecast movie night, we need to do her. Because her, a shockingly prescient 2013 movie, I think, has really strong opinions about how an assistant might tell you when to look at a screen in a way that I think is really fascinating. But like that to me is, is. I think, I don't know, I think the part of what you were saying before that, that I keep thinking about is this idea that I'm just going to be on AirPods and that I might order dinner without any other device ever but AirPods that I just sort of declare to the world through my AirPods that I would like pizza and it does all of the work and pizza arrives at my house. And I think, I, I think Apple might believe and it might be right, that that's just not how people are ever going to use their devices. And that Apple actually has a huge advantage by being able to be like, hey, open up your phone to review your order just to make sure we're getting it right. That, like, that's, that's the, that's the step before multi agent orchestration. Right. That is like this is the human in the loop stuff. We keep talking about that how do we, how do we make this work in a way that feels like normal people using normal devices in normal ways? And I think again, it's very possible that all of this is just Apple continuing to be behind on technology and trying to invent reasons that it's behind on purpose. But I do, I do think there is a real case for Apple coming out here and being like, Siri is not the immediate way that you are going to do most things on your phone from now until the end of time, but it is just another feature of how you already use your phone. Yeah, like, I sort of hope that's the answer.

[David Pierce]

Apple's addicted to weird riffs on Standards that no one else uses.

[Nilay Patel]

True.

[David Pierce]

You know, you could probably build all this stuff with MCP today. Is Apple going to have a weird riff on MCP that it's going to force the entire industry? Of course.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, absolutely.

[David Pierce]

Just like it has a weird riff on Dolby Vision that the entire industry has to use to get Dolby Vision on an Apple tv. Like it's just the way it goes and that's how they maintain control of their ecosystem. I think this is one of the reasons the European Union is like, no, like you have to let things be interoperable. If your AI assistant is the only thing that works at the operating system level in this way, there will not be competition for AI assistance. And we want competition this time around. You know, Apple's response is to say, screw you, we're going home. Maybe that means more people use Claude in this way or Gemini in this way in Europe and there actually develops a parallel ecosystem. Or, or maybe Apple figures out whatever technical solution that currently says is too hard to figure out or that it can't get approval for from the EU and Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude get to tell you, hey, look at your screen for human and loop verification. And that power of the ecosystem right now is all tilted in Apple's favor. That's the argument you're making. I think you can see Europe saying, actually we need to make sure we break it open this time so it's not just a monopoly or a duopoly. Actually, let me ask you this. There's a big argument to be made based on all the Siri reactions that once again, imessage lock in is the thing, right? All these texts are an imessage. No one else can see them. Boy, Siri is great now.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean if you, if you were a person who like a sicko has had never delete as the option in your imessages. And so you just have however many years of messages, you are in for a wild surprise when that index finishes with the new Siri. But yeah, I kind of think you're right. I mean there's the lock in certainly is going to be vastly more intense now because the switching costs of losing all of those messages, even if you decide to move, right, like if I switch to Android, I've now done this, like switching to Android is easier than it used to be. But the idea of like my assistant is now going to have vastly less stuff to work with because there's a huge source of my life in those messages is a big deal. Like the lock in feels stronger than ever. If Siri is good, because good. Siri is going to be very hard to walk away from and to start over from with one of these other things. Like, and again, this is something all of the other AI services have been trying to do, too. They all have memory. They're all, like, asking for custom instructions. Right. Like, the idea is the better we know you, the more we know about you, the harder it is going to be to leave the. Because you're going to have to start over with something else. And the fact that, like you said, Apple fixed this database just gave it a huge advantage on that front. That is going to be very hard to walk away from for a lot of people.

[David Pierce]

I feel like if two years ago they had said, here's what we want Siri to do. We're going to spend two years figuring out how to search messages. I think a lot of people, I'm like, yeah, that's how long it's going to take.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. And then we're going to be able to find all of the stuff in your messages that you can't now. Everybody would have been like, great, see you in 2026. Can't wait.

[David Pierce]

Perfect.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Yeah. I. I'm, I'm fascinated by this. I need to test it so much more. But, like, the number of deeply infuriating basic tasks that Siri can't do seems to have gone way down. And just that alone. What a great day this is like. If it just remembers my reminders correctly, from now on, this will have all been worth it. AI is worth it just for that. All right, we should take a break, and then we're going to come back and we have some social networking figuring out to do. We'll be right back.

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[David Pierce]

I Y O dot com.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, we're back. Neali, I'm gonna give you three small pieces of news and then I want you to galaxy brain your way through them for me. You think we can do this?

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay, here are the three pieces of news. Piece number one. Instagram is letting you more explicitly define your algorithm. In Instagram, you you are going to be able to tell Instagram what you want to see more of in your main feed. Piece number two, Blue sky is getting a new feature called Communities, which is basically a smaller version of Blue Sky. For people who want to talk to each other, it's Reddit, but on Blue sky Piece number three, YouTube has introduced DMS for somewhere between the 2nd and 53rd time in the history of YouTube. There's something going on in social networks right now and all three of these things feel like they are part of some turn in how we think about social media and social networks. Do you have a grand theory of this moment in social?

[David Pierce]

Can I add a fourth thing that is utterly self serving, but I think fascinating in this context? We have a really great product manager named Danielle. If you follow our site, you can see she does like version updates like every week. Like here's what we shipped this week. She's great. She does a lot of user research and when we were doing our homepage refresh, she did a lot of user research about the story stream and QuickBooks and all that stuff. And one thing, the thing that I'm adding to this piece number four is a lot of people tell Danielle like a lot of Verge readers tell Danielle. They use our story stream instead of social networking products, which is always our goal. So this is very self serving. Like I'm very proud of this thing. But they're like, I'm tired of algorithmic social media. Here's a thing that feels like that with a community I like.

[Nilay Patel]

Great.

[David Pierce]

We're nowhere near the scale of these other networks. But I'm just adding that to the mix because it's something that our audience, maybe some of you listening to this have said to us. We are tired of big social networks. And all of the things you're describing are ways to make the big social networks feel small. And I think that's fascinating. Let's start with Masseri, because I could talk about Adam Masseri's threads, post about the recommendations algorithm and the sense of agency and control all day and all night. And I've asked Adam to come on Dakota or the Virtual House or wherever he wants to come and talk about this. Because I could spend hours and hours talking to him about this post and what he thinks agency and control means in the context of a giant multi billion user algorithmic social networking product. But here's what he wrote. Something is shifting in what's technically possible. For years, ranking algorithms have been built with technologies that aren't legible to people. No human can read a neural net and explain why an algorithm thought you might be interested in a given video. You can't have agency over a system that lacks an interface. You understand, Understand. And then he goes on to say, what's new is that LLMs can now look at clusters of content and describe them in language people understand. Right? So all of this is just math. And so any given video, the algorithm was just putting together, like coordinates to, say, inside of our giant database of content. These all match in a cluster, and you could never look at that. It would be like looking at the matrix. And now the LLM can look at that at scale, in low latency and say, this is why this video is here. Which means you can talk back to it and you can say, I want more of this and less of that. So what he is describing is not just like a set of filters. It's not just, you know, ask it for more puppy videos. It's like, very directly an interface to the algorithm itself that you can now talk to in natural language. And his point is, I'm doing this because I want you to feel controlled. Right. Recommendations are great. Not all of your friends are posting all the time. If you open Instagram and it's just the last five posts from your friends that you saw the last time, you won't be as happy as if we show you something else interesting that's happening in the network. People like viral content for a reason. Now we can let you talk directly to the algorithm. We want you to feel a sense of control of what's happening. That's what the LLM is for. That is a way of making it feel small, making it feel in your control again. I could talk about this all day and all night. I'm not sure this matches how Meta makes money by showing you ads. Yeah, right across recommended content. I'm not sure it matches Meta's entire approach to engagement maximization or the fact that threads, which is built on all the same algorithms, appears to be built just to make dumb people as angry as possible.

[Nilay Patel]

It is Engagement Beta as a platform. Like, it really, really is.

[David Pierce]

Like threads in particular. Is that thing right? Yeah. So there's a lot here. But you can see Mosseri's argument for why they built this is not just we can. It's like there's a. A lengthy reason to post for it, and it's to make it feel small. BlueSky communities. It's funny, everyone thinks BlueSky is a platform, like it's a product. Like, I. I've talked to the new interim CEO of Blue Sky, Tony Schneider. They're. They are. And they have always been a protocol company. Right. They're trying to build the next generation of decentralized social protocols. And I think what they see as communities here and is they would just describe it as like, schema. Like, how do you describe a New York Knicks community? Like, here's the group of people talking at the Knicks in a way that is legible across the whole atmosphere. So that if you make a Reddit on the atmosphere that works in OpenSocial, you can say, oh, there's a community of Knicks fans on bluesky. I'm going to show that community in this app in a way that is coherent. And that's a big deal. Right. It's. We want big thing. We want little groups of communities to travel in different ways across the big network. That's a way of making the big network, which up until now is like, here's a firehose of content. You can filter it. Now, it's not just a firehose of content. Like, here's a group, here's a taxonomy of what a community is, which is, oh, by the way, you and I have talked about this many, many times over the years. Describing what a community is online is very challenging.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

Like, is booktok a community? What are the boundaries of booktok? Is it moderated? Is it controlled? No, it's just a bunch of people who say they're a book talk. That's it. Yeah, that's. That's all it is. There are platforms, like early Twitter communities were just people using the same hashtag. Is that a community? Reddit has a very different model of what a community is. Right. People start them, they are in control of them. The moderators do stuff. Reddit as a platform occasionally goes to war with its communities. People split off and they have rival subreddits when they're mad at the moderators. Totally different model of community. All to make a big platform feel small in different ways. So I think this is bluesky saying, okay, the protocol itself has to reflect the fact that communities form here because you can't just rely on hashtags or people declaring they're part of booktok. And so you see, again, it's another attempt to make a thing feel small. And I think it Truly, with YouTube, they have to admit that they're a social network every now and again. And so if you do shorts and you have people in the comments, it is only natural those people should want to talk to each other. Right. And particularly the number of creators who Are like, comment with whatever, you know, comment with course. And I'll DM you a discount code like that is actually a monetization funnel for a lot of, like, weird creators. They need to support it.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. I think the DMs one is, is kind of the most straightforward to me because everything we've seen from YouTube over the last year or so has been about keeping you on YouTube for more activities longer. And one obvious one is let people send videos to each other, which is just like, not really a behavior that exists inside of YouTube. And so you can build all of these other monetization systems into YouTube. You can build all of these new, like, super subscription things into YouTube. They're. They're just trying to make it so that your entire experience of YouTube can stay inside of YouTube. Which is very funny because if you remember way, way, way back, one of the main ways YouTube became the default video player on the Internet was because it had really great embed that you could put anywhere on the Internet. Like you. YouTube's embed system was better than everybody's for a really long time. And it was like a thing the company took great pride in. And they've actually kind of made it worse. Like, YouTube embeds on our website right now are worse than they were a couple of years ago. And it is because YouTube is really, really, really trying to get you to go to YouTube.com and so just DMs is just a way to send videos to each other. Strikes me as like an obvious answer to that.

[David Pierce]

And by the way, Instagram knows this. Adam Aseri says this all the time, that the, the number one mechanic on Instagram is you watch reels and send it to a friend. YouTube doesn't have that mechanic.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

Like, it just never has. And I think part of the reason this is again, my point about trying to make everything feel smaller. I don't perceive that my friends are on YouTube. That is not a social product. In the same way.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, Right.

[David Pierce]

Like, I open YouTube to get something done and I leave. I know a lot of people watch YouTube all day and all night, but the idea that that's a social experience you're having. This is what I mean about they have to admit that it's a social product.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And so they have to just capitulate to. On social products, people need to be able to message each other. And that mechanic of you watched a great reel and you sent it to your friend and then you have a little conversation and now your engagement time has gone up and we can surface you more ads. All that requires just admitting that reels has made YouTube vastly more of a social network than traditional YouTube ever really was.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I was. I was listening to a podcast the other day where they were. They were talking about how male friendship in 2026 is just sending each other tiktoks. It's like, that's super real, dude. And YouTube obviously wants piece that.

[David Pierce]

Oh, dude, my Christian Dior meme. I mean, that's brought more men together in the past three weeks. Maybe anything in modern society, that thing is going to save America.

[Nilay Patel]

It's really true. That and the random New Zealand soccer player. Have you heard about this?

[David Pierce]

No.

[Nilay Patel]

So there's an Argentinian influencer. I'll. I'll link this somewhere in the show notes. But there's an Argentinian influencer who went and found the person they deemed to be the most random sort of unfollowed person at the World Cup. And they identified a New Zealand soccer player named Tim Payne. And we're just like, let's blow up Tim Payne. And he went from having 4,000 followers on Instagram to, last I checked, it's well over 5 million.

[David Pierce]

That's amazing.

[Nilay Patel]

And he has just become. He is now like a phenomenon of soccer just in the last, like two weeks before the World Cup. And it is like, this is another person like Tim Payne comes up in every group chat that I'm in now. It's great. But let's go back to Blue sky for a minute because this community's announcement comes, what, a week maybe after Blue Sky's coo, Rose Wang, did an interview with CNBC where she kind of teased this happening, basically saying that they were more inspired by Reddit going forward than by X or threads. But she said this thing that I've been thinking about ever since, which is, she said, what we've learned through this process is that I think the public square is not the direction we want to go in, essentially. I think it's useful as a discovery mechanism. But we're very inspired by companies like Reddit. A public square where there's only a stage and there's posters like people on a stage and people who are watching, that is not social. We're in the medieval stages of the online world. A, completely agree that is like fundamentally not a social product. But B, I think, I think this communities thing might be a bigger pivot for Blue sky than you're giving it credit for. That. Like, this thing popped up as this is supposed to be Twitter, right? Like, Twitter is dead. Blue sky is the new place to go. Everything's going to be fine. Threads did the same thing. They like, they built threads really fast in large part to capitalize on this idea of people wanted to leave Twitter but didn't have anywhere to go. Neither of those has worked in that way. Neither of them has become the new Twitter. Blue sky grew really fast and has, has really kind of tapered off in some interesting ways. Threads as. I don't know that we've heard numbers in a minute, but presumably continues to grow. But it's like, it's not what Twitter was.

[David Pierce]

Threads is growing because they, if you open Instagram, they're like, look at this Threads post. It's also a picture. And then you click on it and it opens Threads.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, Threads will never be what Twitter was for a very long time. But, but I, what I wonder for Blue sky is like, do you look at this and say, oh, actually maybe what the end of Twitter was, was the end of this kind of era of social period and that Instagram got away from that. Facebook is no longer that. Like, not only is Twitter not that thing, that thing might just be a dead activity of like giant, primarily text based posting systems where everybody has a single feed in sort of real time ways in the sense that like maybe, maybe that is gone and that everything has moved to these smaller communities and group chats and private sharing and all of this stuff. And so like, one way to look at this, I agree, is that bluesky has always attempted to be more than just the Twitter clone and the atmosphere and the protocol is a bigger deal than bluesky. But this also kind of feels to me like a complete pivot for Blue sky away from the idea of being Twitter at all.

[David Pierce]

You know, the former CEO of bluesky, Jay Graber, she's still at bluesky. She's working on sort of the technical aspects of it now. And Tony's the interim CEO while they figure out what they're going to do next. Jay was on decoder ages ago and what she said to me then was we made a thing that looked like Twitter because one, they came out of Twitter, if you will recall, bluesky was a project inside of Twitter that got spun out. But the reason they made a thing that looked like Twitter is they just needed a product that people could understand while they worked on the protocol that they were actually interested in. And this is back when Jack Dorsey, you know, would pronounce that Twitter never wanted to be a company, it really wanted to be a protocol and no one understood what he meant. And I think Blue sky is a real extension of that. What you want is an open social protocol. And if that's the thing you want, then you will never build a product that is great. And I think you can see that with bluesky today. There's a reason that, sure, bluesky has whatever reputation it has, but they're not actively trying to go change that reputation or recruit users or build a bunch of features that people love. All of their time is on the protocol. And I think what they've discovered is, yeah, I, I agree with you. The idea of the big influential Twitter may have just come to an end. And Twitter itself, you know, we can see in a SpaceX IPO, Elon has destroyed that business. The users are down, the revenue is down. The only revenue that's up at at X, the Everything app is data licensing to X AI. So like in a, in a circular way.

[Nilay Patel]

Not shady at all.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, yeah. And I'm certainly doing all of my credit card processing in X. I don't know about you. Oh, same who doesn't want to trust their financial data to Elon Musk. So you see, like, maybe that era has come to an end and maybe threads will never actually replace Twitter as the zeitgeist. I don't know. But Blue sky is saying the next generation of all these platforms should be interoperable. So if you want to build your own version of a Twitter and you want to go for it, you can accept this fire hose of content from the atmosphere and build something out of it. And if you think that Reddit is dumb and you want to build your own Reddit, you should be able to look at communities somewhere else on the web and Surface and display those communities in ways that are better than whoever else would do it. The problem for all this, and I think everyone knows I'm like a believer, I believe in this. The problem here is that there is no shipping validation of these ideas anywhere because Threads is on Activity Pub and bluesky is on App protocol. And yes, there are like bridges and whatever to make them fake interoperate, but they don't actually interoperate. So the two big, theoretically interoperable social networks are in their own silos. And there's literally no other thing that's big that proves the point for either of them. Like Mastodon does not prove the point for threats. I'm very sorry, it just does not. There isn't another big atmosphere product that proves the point for Bluesky. And there's a lot of interesting ones. Pixelfed is interesting. Skylight the video player is interesting. They do not have the scale to prove the point that they're interoperable. I think maybe until they interoperate with each other, that thing will not exist. Or if someone sends up a Reddit, that thing will not exist. But I do think bluesky's thesis is that the Internet should be more open and it's not their job to build all of the products. I think that confuses everyone all the time.

[Nilay Patel]

Sure.

[David Pierce]

I really think everyone thinks BlueSky is a product company and they are just not.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. But I think like one of the things that we've always struggled with in explaining why we're so excited about the Federeverse is like explaining what it looks like. Right. And I think for a long time the running theory was that the sort of base experience of it should probably look like Twitter, that it's a. It's a bunch of posts in a row, and that the cool thing about the Fediverse is you can, you can react to constitute that in whatever way you want to. Right. That what you have is a giant bucket of content and you can write into that bucket and you can read out of that bucket in whatever way you want. And that is cool and exciting in theory, but that probably what most people want and the way most people will experience it is something that looks like Twitter. And I think that might have been right four years ago. And I, I think it seems to me that everyone is rapidly coming to the conclusion that that is wrong and that, that even as you look at something like the algorithm changes on Instagram, like, to your point, it's about making it feel smaller. Right. Like, this is. This is me saying there's this giant corpus of content. I want all the gardening stuff that is not Twitter at all. That's Pinterest. Like, that's. That is such a fundamentally different way of looking at content than this idea of rapidly moving reverse cron posts. And I think it's very possible that we are just at the end of that era of the Internet. And I just think that's fascinating.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I agree with that. And I do think maybe this pivot to communities is a response to that. I think. All I'm saying is it's not. I don't think bluesky is launching communities. I think bluesky is launching a set of extensions to app protocol that support communities. Do you know? And it's just very different. That company is very different in how it thinks about what it makes. And I, I do think that gets everyone confused all the time because People talk about Blue sky as though it's a competitor to Twitter, and I don't think it has any desire to be that thing.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I agree. I also just went to Blue sky and it just popped up a thing and it said new feature group chats.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, this is just.

[Nilay Patel]

We're all doing the same thing again here. The algorithm piece just. Let's just go back to Instagram for a minute here because I. I think this is also really interesting. Like, there's this broader Trend happening and TikTok has done a little bit of this and I think Instagram has been poking at this for a while. Just the idea that you should be able to have some more proactive control of your algorithm that, like Threads has the thing where you can literally say dear algo. And TikTok lets you sort of tell things. Tell it things, not just that you're not interested, but that you are interested in. I've been trying to figure out to what extent this is actually like a real change in how these companies run their products versus sort of a placebo to make it feel like you have some control, where actually all it is is continuing to measure your behavior and showing you videos that statistically you're going to watch, even if they make you feel gross and bad. I love the idea that we can give everyone more proactive control over their algorithm, but like you said earlier, I also wonder if that is just frankly bad for business for all these companies.

[David Pierce]

All right, you've walked into the end of the Masseri post, which is.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, did I really?

[David Pierce]

Saving for last.

[Nilay Patel]

I confess, it's really long.

[David Pierce]

It's very long. And everyone hit the heart of it, which is you can talk to your algorithm now. Okay, here's the end of this. This is Atomissary. This is the start of something bigger than a feature. It's in our best interest as a business to empower people to shape Instagram into something that works for them and that people should have a meaningful amount of agency over the products they spend so much time in. We intend to build much of what comes next on that principle. So that's great. Statement of purpose. Agreeing what you say. And then he says there's a harder version of this question on the horizon that's worth saying out loud. Within a few years, AI will be capable of not only letting us see and shape algorithms, but also generating entire bespoke experiences on the fly, tailored to an individual in real time.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, wow.

[David Pierce]

At that point, you can imagine shaping much more than ranking. You can shape the structure of the app itself, the experiences inside it, even the things the app is for, could be different for each of us. Okay, and then this is. Here's the neighbor. Like, I read this and I literally opened my email and I wrote to Adam in like, all capital letters, like, come on, decoder and talk about this. This is a real thing. That's a real thing that I did, because this is what he wrote. A world where you are making personalized experiences on the fly is exciting in terms of agency, but at the extreme, starts to undermine shared experiences. If AI can generate entire apps and experiences that each of us wants, you and I might no longer share any sense of space.

[Nilay Patel]

Wow. Right?

[David Pierce]

That's like the biggest idea. Like, you open Instagram, it's like not only different content for you, not just a different algorithm, but a whole different app that is doing different things for

[Nilay Patel]

you, filled with different kinds of synthetic content.

[David Pierce]

Different synthetic content, different buttons. Right. Like, the Instagram you might see as somebody who needs to sell ads for your lawn mowing business might be totally different than the Instagram someone might see who just wants to see. Get ready with me.

[Nilay Patel]

It's like, oh, that is a big idea.

[David Pierce]

Different app. Like, they will be different apps with different content and, like, different business goals for Instagram. If you recall, when I interviewed Sunar this last time, I said, look, you're going to ship different apps to everybody based on their search results. Like, you're going to undermine Google as a shared sense of truth. And his response was, it's a spectrum. So if you ask, what is the capital of California? You'll get an answer. And that answer should be the same for everybody. But if you ask something like, what's the best place for me to go in California? Google will, like, build you a trip planner, right? And he's like, that's a spectrum, and I'll just figure it out. And it's like, oh, there's a whole blurry middle of that spectrum. It's actually pretty blurry, man. What is the body of water between Florida and Texas called?

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

There's one guy who definitely wants a different answer than I do.

[Nilay Patel]

The tapestry standing out front of the Capitol. What happened here on January 6, 2021, is forever. The great example.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Was the election stolen? Who knows? I know the answer, by the way. It was not. But I know some people who are very invested in Google issuing a different answer to that question. Okay, now bring that to Instagram. And Instagram is rewriting itself on the fly to show you different content and make different experiences for you. And you can direct it in natural language. Like, Adam is pointing right at it. He's not shying away from the messy spectrum. And you can have a lot of feelings about Meta. You can have a lot of feelings about Mark Zuckerberg, you know, a lot of feelings about Adam Mosseri. But it is clear in at least the times I've talked to him that he has been the most thoughtful about this. Like, he sees all the problems you might disagree with, all the trade offs he's made and all the decisions he's made, but he's been the most like, yeah, we're going to screw everything up.

[Nilay Patel]

He does see the thing.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, he sees the thing very clearly. And he's like, yeah, whatever trade offs we're making, we're making them. But at least I'm copying to the trade offs. I think that's fascinating. Again, Adam, you know, we put up the screenshot of my, like, five exclamation points that I sent to him. I've talked to him many times over the years. I would love to spend a lot of time digging into this because this is, I think this is the future of computing in a real way. Right. Is these, like, bespoke experiences. And it will undermine our shared sense of truth, our shared sense of experience. You know how people say, like, Reddit is mad about something? That implies a structure and experience of Reddit that allows that to mean something. If you destabilize that, it doesn't mean anything at all.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

And there's something there that's important.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. We're at this fascinating moment where we, we totally sort of destroyed the idea of a monoculture. Right. The idea that, like, you and I have shared cultural references just increasingly has gone out the window. Everybody has different algorithms, everybody has different apps, we see different stuff. But there's still a sense that some other people have seen this. The things that I'm seeing. Right. And all of these communities now exist inside of these apps. So that, like, I can't trust that you and I have seen the same things. But I can, I can, I can identify with the other people who have it does there. There's a limit to how bespoke you can get before we're all just hanging out by ourselves. And I have to believe, like, for my own sanity, I have to believe that is not an experience that people want.

[David Pierce]

I don't know.

[Nilay Patel]

I don't either. And like, and I think there is a real, if from a sort of ruthlessly efficient business standpoint that probably works for Meta, to some extent, to give everybody exactly what they want without any regard for its connection to the broader culture or society might work. We. We can just spin up the exact thing that you're looking for right now. No one will ever see it but you in this moment. There are a lot of reasons that's really good business if you're meta. And, boy, is that just like a bleak, bleak universe to live in.

[David Pierce]

I mean, that is Mark Zuckerberg's vision of the metaverse in a very real way. Like, all the idea has been the same, regardless of whether you're wearing a helmet or AI glasses or whatever.

[Nilay Patel]

I even think the metaverse is less bleak, at least in his world. There are other legless people with you in the metaverse.

[David Pierce]

Right. But your. Your brain's still in a vat, and he has total control of you. And, like, you know what I mean? Like, he's like, instead of buying a tv, you'll buy my tv, which displays my content, and we'll just like, generate it virtually. Like, we're. His version of this is that you live in a synthetic environment under his control. And again, whether that is happening in a headset or in glasses or just on Instagram, that's. It's the thing that is being pushed towards. Like, every pixel will be under the control of meta. And I think it is just fascinating to see Adam Aseri just come right out and say there might be some problems with that. Weird. You don't hear many of these CEOs ever just say that out loud.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. This new feature might be the end of shared human experiences. We'll see how that goes.

[David Pierce]

We're turning this knob. Let us know when it destroys the world. It's just. You never see it. I read this and I was like, again, I could talk about it all day and all night because it's so self aware that something about all of us using our phones at the same time actually did create shared experience. As much as it has driven us apart, there's something very important about the structures being the same.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it's good. Adam, come on the show. This show decoder, which I don't know. I get AI summaries.

[David Pierce]

We'll do subway takes together, man, whatever. I just want to do the whole thing. You can tell I'm so into it.

[Nilay Patel]

We're going to do a chicken shop date, but it's Nilai and Adam Mosseri.

[David Pierce]

I would do hot ones with Adam Mosseri.

[Nilay Patel]

Sold. All right, we're going to take a break, then we're going to come back. It's lightning round time. We are back.

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[David Pierce]

No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza.

[Nilay Patel]

Lately though, the shop's been quiet, so

[David Pierce]

Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice.

[Nilay Patel]

He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to

[David Pierce]

look at his sales and costs and

[Nilay Patel]

help him see if he can afford it.

[David Pierce]

Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now Hanks has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn [e-mail] work

[Nilay Patel]

all right, we're back. It's time now for the hype desk when our friends Ross and Ashley come and tell us about what's cool in the world this week. No Ross. Screw you Ross. It's just Ashley Esqueto. Welcome back Ashley.

[Ashley Esqueto]

I'm So you finally fired him. I'm so excited.

[Nilay Patel]

Honestly. It was long overdue.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Really.

[David Pierce]

This is the third time for me.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Honestly, this is the longest game I've been playing, let me tell you. I had to go into business with this man.

[Nilay Patel]

What have you brought for us this week?

[Ashley Esqueto]

Oh, boy. Guys, we gotta talk about the Social Reckoning trailer. Because, you know, what's cooler than a million dollars? Whatever. Not this trailer is. I don't know.

[David Pierce]

I'm.

[Ashley Esqueto]

I have a lot of questions.

[David Pierce]

So this is the sequel to the Social Network, the Aaron Sorkin, Jesse Eisenberg, dawn of Facebook movie.

[Ashley Esqueto]

This is the sequel.

[Nilay Patel]

I will say, Nilai, you missed a very important name in those names, which is David Fincher, the legendary director who directed that movie.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Yeah. And made it very stylish. Made it very stylish.

[David Pierce]

He did make it very stylish. Also, like Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross did the music. That movie had a lot of moves going on.

[Ashley Esqueto]

A perfect storm.

[David Pierce]

A young Dakota Johnson making a spectacular cameo appearance.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Yeah, you cannot fucking force lightning in a bottle. But that's about as close as you can get to doing it. You know what I mean? Like, if you. Those are the ingredients, and maybe you get a good reaction like that. That was. Those are the ingredients. But this time it's just the Aaron Sorkin Show. He's written this, he has directed this. And. And now the eldest boy, everyone's favorite eldest boy, Jeremy Strong, who played Kendall Roy on Succession, is playing an older Mark Zuckerberg, which is odd because wasn't he like 35 or 36 when this happened? Like Zuckerberg and then. But Jeremy Strong is like 46. So he adds a little bit too. I feel he adds maybe too much gravitas.

[Nilay Patel]

Zuckerberg, not a person normally associated with the word gravitas, I would say.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Agreed.

[David Pierce]

Okay, so you watch the. The trailer, and the first thing that jumped out to me is this is pre haircut Zuckerberg. Right. The modern, I would say post pandemic Zuckerberg is defined by the haircut, the shirts that say, like, e Pluribus Zucker. Whatever they say on them, like, Caesar era. Zuck.

[Ashley Esqueto]

He's gone very Roman. Yeah, yeah. Caesar era. Yeah. This all the things.

[David Pierce]

But this isn't that. This is. We're gonna do congressional hearings. Zuck seems very much like the Facebook files are gonna be an important part of this. From the trailer. There's one part where, you know, the person leaking says, are you a tech reporter? And the person says, ish. And she Goes ish, which is a perfect Sorkin moment. And I'm not sure that ever actually happened in real life.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Also, at the end of the trailer where they're like, she's a disruptor. And I was just like, I can't.

[David Pierce]

It's a lot.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Somebody who's worked in Techvert, So, like, I'm like, that word. I can't. I feel like it's just really. I don't know, guys. I don't know if I can do this again.

[David Pierce]

When you watch this trailer, did you catch that Jeremy Strong is just playing Kendall Roy again? That was 100% my takeaway from this.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Kendall Roy with a really good Mark Zuckerberg accent.

[David Pierce]

I'm a free speech absolutist. I'm not the one who's lying, and I'm not stopping them from seeing someone who is. He got the voice exactly right.

[Ashley Esqueto]

The voice is really good. Like, I am incredibly impressed by that. But, yeah, like, especially that moment where he's yelling at Bill Burr. It's just. He's like, when I say, no, that's the end. Like, that's the end of the thing. Like, you don't get to like, that's the end of the conversation. And it's just that it was very Kendall Roy to me.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

And this is such a weird story to choose. Like, this is. They're essentially making this movie about Francis Haugen and the Facebook files, which is just an odd way of framing this version of the story. Like, it'll be interesting to see how much it gets away from that. But, like, Francis Haugen, who, like, famously moved to Puerto Rico to get away from crypto taxes, is, like, the. The hero of the story. That. The whole Facebook files thing is very strange, and Francis Haugen's story is. Is strange and complicated. Like, what came out in the Facebook files is big and important, and, like, there's almost part of me that wishes Aaron Sorkin had just, like, straight up made a Cambridge Analytica movie just to, like, fully piss everybody off.

[Ashley Esqueto]

That's. Yeah, that was. I was very surprised that this was, in fact, not a Cambridge Analytica movie. I was like, oh, oh, they're doing. Oh, they're doing that. So scandal. That massive Facebook scandal. My bad. Like, I did.

[Nilay Patel]

But what I've been trying to figure out is, like, do you think Aaron Sorkin just feels bad for, like, making Mark Zuckerberg look cooler than he was at the time? And this is why he made this movie. He's like. He's like, I lionized Facebook by accident. And now here we are.

[David Pierce]

Did that movie Lionize?

[Ashley Esqueto]

Do you think Aaron Sorkin feels bad about anything ever? Because I. That's an honest question.

[David Pierce]

I did an event with Sorkin when he did his Jobs movie, which that movie is pure nonsense. Like, I don't even know how to describe. The structure of that movie is actually. It feels like the structure of this movie.

[Nilay Patel]

Was that the Ashton Kutcher one or the Michael Fassbender one?

[David Pierce]

The Fassbender one. Okay, so the Fassbender, Steve Jobs movie.

[Ashley Esqueto]

What's the magical distortion field of the novel?

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

Where Michael Fassbender plays Steve Jobs is like set up in three acts and it's three keynotes. And the way Sorkin wrote it, everything in Steve Jobs life happened in the green room. Before the ipod introduction, of course.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Yeah. All of his best epiphanies.

[David Pierce]

And it is just nonsense. Like it's pure nonsense. And that's weird and fascinating, but it creates structure for the movie and the narrative and it raises the stakes of everything all the time because everything has to happen before the show begins. There's just literally a clock. And then he's like, it's the imac. And you're like, did that happen? And you can see that's the same structure he's going for here. When I did that event with him, I was like, you know, none of this happened. And Aaron's. He was like, he's very loud, he talks really fast. And he just like overcame my objection. I don't remember what was actually said. I just remember being in the theater asking him that question and being like, well, I have nothing to say to him. Then there are other parts, like the fact that Next was a 14 year project that did actually have an OS that wasn't designed to be sold to Apple. How do you kind of reconcile that? I reconcile it this way. I don't want to have an argument with you about the truth of. Of Next, but I.

[Ashley Esqueto]

It.

[David Pierce]

Steve. You know, Steve, here's what we can agree on, I'm sure. And he further economy of filmmaking.

[Ashley Esqueto]

I mean, he's like, he's got a show. He can't. Can't just. It'd be too. It'd be too boring. He moves too fast and all. Everything that he does, everything has such a pace to it and it feels like the economy of that has to turn. Ends up in these scenes where these like massive, you know, epiphanies or changes or in people happen in these like very convenient spaces.

[David Pierce]

Right. There's a Pressure cooker.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Yeah, the pressure cooker.

[David Pierce]

We're going to prepare for your congressional testimony about the Facebook files, and Francis Haugen is going to feel hunted. And we're going to have. I mean, Sorkin loves a journalist, right? We're going to have, like, the newsroom plus whatever pressure cooker of the West Wing that you can sort of create. Like, in the debate prep scenes of the West Wing, you can just see all the moves. By the way, I don't mean any of this as criticism. I'm stoked for this. Oh, yeah, this is like the most Sorkin. Sorkin gets.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Yeah, it is a very polished, like, it is, like, end stage Sorkining. Like, this is like. This is like. This is the most distilled version of it you're ever gonna get.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I think this is, like, my. My read on this so far is there's no chance this is going to be a good movie in the way that, like, the Social Network is. Is just a, like, terrifically made film.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Really good movie. Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

It is, like, a technically excellent piece of filmmaking. In addition to being, like, a fascinating look at the Facebook story, this is going to be wild and weird and messy, and I'm thoroughly going to enjoy every single second of it. Like, I just started rewatching the Newsroom is a sentence that is true about my life and tells you everything you should know about Aaron.

[David Pierce]

Sorry, wait, are you. Are you watching it? Like, full fat streaming, or did the TikTok algorithm just start delivering you clips of the newsroom?

[Nilay Patel]

So I'll tell you what happened is the TikTok algorithm delivered me the speech from the first episode where he talks about why America's not the greatest country in the world, but it could be. And I got to the end of that and I was ready to just run through a wall again and was like, all right, I gotta watch the show again.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Yeah, I gotta get right back in. I gotta get right back in.

[David Pierce]

Has Olivia Munn started doing anything by season two, or is she still just floating around the background scene to scene?

[Nilay Patel]

Mostly floating.

[David Pierce]

Yep.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, but then there's a whole drama about whether she does or doesn't know Japanese. It's very complicated. Aaron Sorkin, famously great at writing women. What could possibly go wrong with the Francis Haugen story?

[David Pierce]

Yeah, so the thing that I'm wondering about is if you remember, Facebook tried to reclaim the narrative around the Social Network. Right. They had showings of it. Zuckerberg pretended that he liked it. You know, insofar as Justin Timberlake saying, you Know what's cool? A billion dollars became a meme. They tried to recapture the meme again. This is like the pre Caesar era for Zuck. I don't think they're gonna try to recapture this. They're in the middle of, like, scandal after scandal and trial and social media regulation in states.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Well. And the metaverse is completely in ruins. It's just very sad. It's very sad.

[David Pierce]

There's a scene in the trailer where Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg is like, I'm a free speech absolutist. Which first of all is an Elon Musk quote, not a Mark Zuckerberg quote.

[Ashley Esqueto]

I was gonna say he didn't. I don't think he said that.

[David Pierce]

He said variations. He had this, like, famous speech at Harvard where he was like, I believe in free speech, which came to nothing. I'm wondering if he tries to recapture the narrative from this movie or they just allow Andy Stone, the meta head of comms, to rage about it on threads to no one for a minute and then move on with their lives.

[Ashley Esqueto]

I think it ends up being how popular the movie ends up being. Right. So it's like they didn't really try to recapture the Social Network until it blew up. And then all of a sudden it was like, as someone who does media training now, it's like, we better do this crisis comms thing where we embrace the memeification of our film and say, like, oh, yeah, we love it, we love it.

[David Pierce]

But also, like, it was like a Jesse Eisenberg. He says a bunch of cool stuff in the movie. I get the feeling Jeremy Strong is not going to say a bunch of cool stuff in this movie.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Well, and also David Fincher makes it look cool, which makes it very shareable. The clips are very shareable. So I don't know how much of this is going to be like, again, like, the memeification of this movie will be much harder than I think the first one.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it's all going to be like a series of eight minute monologues, because that's what Aaron Sorkin does. It's like, he's really lucky TikTok allows 10 minute videos now because, like, that's. Those are going to be the clips.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

From the Social reckoning, I have a

[Ashley Esqueto]

feeling we'll probably see clips of Bill Burr. Bill Burr is going to say some cool stuff in this movie.

[Nilay Patel]

This just made me realize that the press tour for this movie, when they're doing, like, junkets and Jeremy Strong, the method actor, is doing it as Mark Zuckerberg is going to be specific. Spectacular.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Can we have him on the hype desk? Can we ask?

[David Pierce]

We can. We should do a screening, and we can see if we can get Sorkin to run me over like a truck again, because that was truly one of the weirdest experiences of my life.

[Ashley Esqueto]

I might actually pay to see that. Like, that would be. That. That could be a Verge subscriber exclusive. We should do that.

[Nilay Patel]

I like it. All right, Ashley, we're gonna. We're gonna play you out with just a brief clip from the trailer because everybody needs to hear Jeremy Strong's voice.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Amazing.

[Nilay Patel]

Thank you for coming on. It's good to see you.

[Ashley Esqueto]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Spell your name and state your current

[David Pierce]

occupation for the record. M A, R, K, Z, U, C K, E, R, B, E, R, G. And your occupation? I'm a professional defendant.

[Nilay Patel]

It's so good.

[Ashley Esqueto]

I'm a professional defendant.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, before we get into this, I just want to say when. When we do the Brandon Carr as a dummy movie. Jeremy Strong as Brendan Carr. This is just happening. All right, it is time now once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

[David Pierce]

Brandon Car is a dummy.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, it's beautiful. It never hits every time.

[David Pierce]

I will say that that one, the one that we bought by Viola de Goomba, is great, and we love it. I'm in the market for additional theme songs. Like, I always. That's very fun. I don't want you to. I don't want people to think that because we bought the one so we could use it at will means that we're not open to new ones. Travis, our producer, has said that we're getting a lot of AI ones, so I just want to set the bar. If you're going to send us an AI Brennan Carr as a dummy theme song, it has to be as good as the Puerto Rico song.

[Nilay Patel]

That's a high. I don't know if you know how high a bar that is.

[David Pierce]

I'm extraordinarily aware of how high that bar is.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay. Okay. I'm also very, very in the market for, like, indie pop branding. Car is a dummy. That's very good.

[David Pierce]

We've had a couple of good pop punk ones. By the way, do you know what the funniest. The funniest, like, turnabout of the Puerto Rico song I've seen is? Real bands covering it and then saying it's not AI slot anymore. We've, like, fixed. We've fixed the moral dilemma. We've reclaimed it. And then all the comments are like, oh, stealing from AI feels great.

[Nilay Patel]

That's so good. Oh, that's fantastic.

[David Pierce]

I love.

[Nilay Patel]

That's. That is the nature healing right there. What did he do this week, Neeli?

[David Pierce]

I got two this week. Brennan was particularly dumb in two different ways. One in sort of the standard way, you know, like just dumb. And one in the sort of deeply corrupt, maybe we should all actually move to an island nation kind of way.

[Nilay Patel]

Cool.

[David Pierce]

So the dumb one, I'm assuming people listening to Vershcast are at least lightly aware of the disaster at CBS News in 60 Minutes. So if you're not totally tracking it, David Ellison came and bought Paramount, took control of CBS News in order to close that deal with the government and get the regulatory scrutiny. He made some promises about changing the news to the Trump administration and hired Barry Weiss, who ran the Free Press, to come and be the new editor in chief of CBS News. She has no experience doing this. We've written about this at length. And she just set about sort of just unleashing chaos, in particular at 60 minutes. And so Scott Pelley, who's like a very famous, very legendary anchor correspondent, 60 Minutes, gets into a fight with the new management. 60 Minutes with Nick Bilton, the new executive producer. I think both of us know Nick. Nick is a nice guy. He's been very kind to me in the past. But Nick is the new executive producer. He has no experience running broadcast television. He's coming in on back foot because he's perceived as a stooge of the Trump administration, the Ellisons. So Scott Pelly gets really mad at him in a meeting and says, why did you fire all these people? Nick doesn't have any answers. There's another meeting with Scott Pelley and he gets himself fired. I think everybody basically understood that Scott Pelly was going to get fired. So then Pelly gives an interview with the New York Times and says, I didn't think I was going to get fired. Like, I thought. I thought I was keeping this in the family. And I think the question the time has asked was, why didn't you do this behind closed doors? And Pelly's response was, I was behind closed doors. It just leaked.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it was in a meeting with my coworkers.

[David Pierce]

I was in a meeting with my coworkers, my new boss. And I was the most senior person in that room. And I spoke up for the group. And I did not think this was firewall sense because it wasn't like, public. I was asking the new boss, like, why did you fire everybody? And there are no answers. And so Brendan responds to this. He puts on X. One of the reasons why trusted media is so low is because many legacy journalists are completely out of touch. You could not get away with that behavior at any run of the mill job. It is revealing to see how blind some are to that. Okay, so I'm just gonna point out, being the 79 year old legendary correspondent at 60 Minutes is not run of the mill job. Yeah, Just isn't right. Like, actually, Scott Pelly was extraordinarily aware of his role in his tenure and his stature at 60 minutes. And he's the talent at a broadcast network. Leslie Stahl has a different relationship to CBS than, I don't know, the random PA who just got hired yesterday. Like, obviously, like, this is just dumb on its face to think that these people have run of the mill Jones jobs. That is just, they're all millionaires. You know what I mean? Like, that's not the case. And you and I both work in newsrooms. Newsrooms are just argumentative. I open our edit meeting with our newsroom every week by saying, all right, just bring it. Like, let me have it. And then they just let me have it. Because that's how they're reporters. What are you going to do? They want to know stuff.

[Nilay Patel]

It's the job.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, it's the job. It's just like, take the heat.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

I don't know. I don't know what else to say. There's no way to build credibility in newsroom unless you can answer the question. And I often do not have good answers to questions. But at least I, I'm not even saying I'm good at this. I'm just saying I, I've managed reporters for over a decade and that's the job. Like, Brendan doesn't know this. Okay, so that's just dumb on its face.

[Nilay Patel]

Wait, can I just say, just a tiny little aside on that front. The reaction to the whole Scott Pelley story across different social networks has been so fascinating because they, they are so cleanly on one side on every single social network. Like, like everybody on Twitter is like, Scott Pelley is a lunatic. The, the old media is bad. Screw them all. This guy sucks. And then on Blue sky, everybody is like, up in arms and pro Scott Pelly. And then on Threads, everybody is just like engagement baiting pictures of Scott. Like it's, it is.

[David Pierce]

So every network has become itself.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, we just get these moments where it's like you, you can just see exactly which every social network is. And the Scott Pelley Story has been one of them and it's been so funny.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. So first of all, I just want to point out this is dumb because Brendan doesn't even understand how many, like how the cultures that make the thing. Whether or not it was appropriate for Scott Pelley to yell at his new boss about who got fired. Yeah, sure, you can debate that. Whether or not he should have done that in a smaller meeting. First, maybe he's just trying to get fired. Like, I don't know. I, I haven't asked Scott any of these questions. I just know that the idea that this is a run of the mill job is just dumb. Like, it, anybody with any common sense could look at this situation and be like, none of this is about run of the mill jobs. Right. Like, that's just not how this is going. Yeah. Second, I'm going to point out Brendan is our nation's communications regulator and he should not in any sense be stepping into this dispute. But he is the one who created the conditions for this dispute. He obviously has a thumb on the scale in this dispute. He wants it to go one way.

[Nilay Patel]

And he wants, you know, Brendan is loving this.

[David Pierce]

He wants to tear down the credibility of CBS News and all of the people who work there. So his reaction to this saying, you could not get away with this. This is why no one trusts legacy media is not to support the people who are desperately trying to find some stability at a news program whose ratings were actually up last year.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

That is doing some of this fast work. Instead, he's trying to tear it down and to make sure even if Nick is successful in hiring all kinds of new correspondents and they make all kinds of new stuff, Brendan is making sure that the credibility of the institution has been reduced, which is absolutely inappropriate for our nation's top communications regulator. Like, this is Brendan doing Speech police in a very direct way. I would argue that, you know, cbs, if you look at the ratings of CBS News, they're in the toilet. They're low in ways that, like, people, other executives at CBS News are leaking that they think Barry Wise should be fired because she's destroyed the brand and destroyed the ratings. So that's just one. Like, I love the idea that this is run of mill jobs. I'd also point out, by the way, Bari Weiss got herself run out of the New York Times by causing this exact kind of trouble.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

She built her career by trashing the New York Times and then starting a new thing. And now everyone's very offended that Scott Pelly might be doing the Same thing. Very funny. Okay, so here's the second one, much more important. SpaceX is going to IPO. And the new York Times just has a long rundown of all of the ways in which Brendan Carr has done regulatory favors for Elon Musk and specifically SpaceX to make that IPO more worthwhile.

[Nilay Patel]

How Brendan Carr and SpaceX are even near each other, it just befuddles me.

[David Pierce]

Well, So, I mean, SpaceX is. Their only business that makes any money is Starlink, which is an ISP. Brendan loves an ISP. Sure. SpaceX needs Spectrum. They need waivers on some of the things they want to do if they're going to launch another 50 billion satellites to be data centers, or they can never figure that out. They will need additional spectrum, additional ground stations. This is all like bread and butter FCC work. Who's going to get the spectrum? Are the people who've been allocated the spectrum using it efficiently? Should we reallocate that spectrum? Brendan tips the scales to Elon in every one of those disputes. Whether it's Amazon LEO Spectrum that hasn't been deployed fast enough or their satellites haven't gone up fast enough. He criticizes Amazon and suggests that Elon should get that spectrum and that stuff instead. Whether it's Dish Network reselling its spectrum to people and SpaceX winning the auctions, he's doing it. It is a very thorough rundown from the Times. We'll link it, but you just look at it and you're like, oh, this man is corrupt. It is beyond the speech policing that he's doing. Our nation's top regulator has a favorite isp, a favorite guy. And in every case, the regulatory decisions get pushed in Elon's favor. Now you can say the pressure should be on Amazon, Leo. Like, the satellites aren't in orbit, the rockets are blowing up on the launch pad, sure. But the point of the regulator is to preserve competition in the market and push prices down and speeds up. And instead what we're getting is very quickly marching our way towards one kind of Starlink monopoly, which is exactly the wrong outcome. But it will make Elon Musk invite Brendan Carr to more rocket launches. You might get a free model 3 out of it. You never know. That's the kind of vibe we're in right now. And so we'll link it. At times, man, it's so corrupt. It's like just so nakedly corrupt. And we're at the point where the Times is writing about it so dryly because you can't even. It's like, not worth the outrage compared to all the other corruption.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, but it's so corrupt, and it. And there's about to be so much money in it in so many different directions. By the time people hear this, the IPO will have happened. We're recording this on Thursday afternoon. You'll hear it on Friday. We will. We will catch up on this as it continues. But, like, this is one of the strangest moments in a deeply strange moment in tech that is coming. And it feels perfect to me that actually Brennan is just running around enabling Elon Musk to get richer. Like, that's. That's our guy.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, that's what he's there for. And, you know, he's just there for you, like, if you're a telecom. I mean, I didn't even mention this, but, like, this week, he's going around and he's. He might undo the E Rate program, which provides discounted Internet service to poor families because telecom's hated. Like, there's just a very standard kind of. I like FCC corruption happening with Brendan on top of the speech police stuff, but you kind of look at it like, oh, the speech police stuff covers up, like, a vast amount of standard corruption. Anyway, Brendan, as always, if you want to come and defend any of this, I don't think you can. I don't think you have the processing ability up there, but maybe with a Starling connection, you'll get there. You're welcome to come on this show, any show. We'll do Hot Ones together. That would be great.

[Nilay Patel]

There we go.

[David Pierce]

I suspect I can take Brendan Carr and Hot Ones.

[Nilay Patel]

I like your chances. We'll do Hot Ones in the woods over starlink, and that'll be how we get this done. It'll be amazing.

[David Pierce]

As always, that has been Brendan Carr's dummy. America's favorite podcast, women podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

[Nilay Patel]

See, I like that theme song because I feel like it winds me up, and it also calms me down at the end. Like, it gets me in and out of the headspace simultaneously. It's good stuff. Neil. I. I have a thing I want to recommend to you, but first, can we just talk about Anthropic's Fable model just for, like, two minutes?

[David Pierce]

Sure.

[Nilay Patel]

This is the other kind of story of the week that's been percolating out there. Anthropic launched this new model called Claude Fable, which is based on Mythos, which it didn't launch a couple of months ago because Fable was too dangerous. Basically, the idea behind Fable seems to be that it is Mythos. With some guardrails. So you, you can ask, have it do lots of things. It's this super powerful model, but it won't do certain things. People got immediately mad that there were guardrails as people are want to do. And so Anthropic has like kind of started to already roll them back.

[David Pierce]

Of course, yes.

[Nilay Patel]

And you say of course. Right. Like this to me is just the most obvious AI story ever. Like the company tries to be safe. People get real pissed when company's product doesn't work because it's trying to be too safe. Company says, great point, let's make it less safe. And here we like, Anthropic is the company that is trading on being the good guy here and is being the one concerned for your well being. And it just, it's just, we're like a week away from just Mythos being available to everyone.

[David Pierce]

Well, you know, Anthropic is like deeply enmeshed in Trump administration chaos.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

So if the people on X are mad that there are any guardrails at all, then maybe Anthropic's controversy with the Defense Department being designated as supply chain risk goes sideways in some way. It's cybersecurity initiatives it's doing with another part of the Trump department go sideways in another way. Like they are in one of the weirdest spots in all of this because they're in the most active crosshairs. I think if Google had a model that was too woke, Google would be like, yeah, that's, that's what we do.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it's very weird. And I think one of the funniest parts of this is like a big part of what they're trying to do with Fable is prevent it from being distilled. They clearly think at Anthropic that this is a big deal model. The early impressions of it seem to be very good, that it is in fact hugely powerful. It's more expensive, it's more complicated. I think it is going to be very good. But they've gone way out of their way to make it hard to use, to distill and they're just sort of breaking people's workflows. And so you have a bunch of researchers now who are like, well, we can't do the work that we need to do on these products. And this to me, like, do you remember this phase with social networks back in the day when they were like, we're going to make it so that you can't scrape our website anymore. And a bunch of people with good intentions about Trying to study this stuff were like, well, what the hell? And they're like, God, whatever, go away. We don't really care what you think. Yeah, just.

[David Pierce]

That was crowded.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Actually, another shout out to our boy Kevin Roose. Kevin Roos used to use Crown Tagle every week to point out that regardless of how liberal you thought Facebook was, the top performing pages on Facebook every single week were insane, conservative, mean pages. And Facebook hated this. And shut Crown Tangle down.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep. Like, it literally, I think you can draw that line as straight as that. It's good stuff. But in general, I think this fable story is just really interesting because, like, you have anthropic, which clearly believes still that this model is too powerful for general consumption. Robert Hart on our team wrote a great piece about the guardrails around biology in particular. There are questions it just won't answer, including very basic ones. And there's a lot of cybersecurity stuff that it won't do. We're at this moment where what do you release and what do you allow is this weird sliding scale that feels like you ship the thing. Everybody gets pissed at you because you don't let them figure out how to build bombs on it. And then you say, well, okay, fine, and then you let them build bombs on it. And that's the future of AI.

[David Pierce]

The thing that drives me crazy is there are other models. You want some weird biology information. Like, ChatGPT is right there. It's like, yeah, let's cook some stuff up. Like, let's go.

[Nilay Patel]

And OpenAI is very clear that it believes everybody should have access to all of this information.

[David Pierce]

That's the funniest thing. It's like, actually, like, in. In a weird way, AI is the most competitive tech has ever been. Like, in recent memory. It's like, well, if you're mad, anthropogenous, I don't know, use Gemini. Like, it's. It's all good. Like, but everyone's like, this model doesn't do everything every other model does. We should yell on. On X the everything app, and then obviously do our banking.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it's. It's. It's a weird one. I think we're. We're still. I. I've been waiting for two years for the model race to slow down to the point where, like, where this sort of leapfrogging everybody does every three weeks is going to end, and eventually everything will plateau, and then we can just start talking about products. And that hasn't happened yet. But the ways in which the models are getting better Just keeps getting weirder. Yeah. Like, it's just we are headed in all kinds of strange new directions about what these things can do that I feel like we are vastly unprepared for.

[David Pierce]

And one of these days, one of these companies is going to ask them how to make money and a good answer will emerge. They're just going to keep training new models until one of them, Sam Altman, has said this, by the way. This is like I'm making a joke, but he has literally said, maybe one day we'll just ask him how to make money.

[Nilay Patel]

That's amazing. All right, Nilay, what's your next lightning round item?

[David Pierce]

I feel like I've talked about Trump too much at the end of this episode, but we can't avoid this one. You mentioned, I think at the top of the show that the Trump phone is out in the world. People at WWC had them. Like, notable Verge trader Chris Welch, who's now at Bloomberg, has one. It's hilarious.

[Nilay Patel]

He's just like.

[David Pierce]

He.

[Nilay Patel]

Did he have one with him?

[David Pierce]

Yeah, he was. He was like at the welcome dinner. I wasn't at the welcome dinner. He had one. I was like, did you show John?

[Nilay Patel]

There's something about covering WWDC on a Trump phone that is just so delightful to me.

[David Pierce]

It's very good. People have them and iFixit has one, they've torn it down. And it is an HTC U24 Pro, which is absolutely amazing.

[Nilay Patel]

China. My favorite part of this is like, everybody figured this out so long ago, but there was just like, there's just this thing where through all of this you're like, okay, obviously this is a grift, obviously this administration is corrupt. Obviously this family is conning you. It can't just be. It can't just be this simple, can it?

[David Pierce]

Turns out iFixit took the board out of a U24 Pro and swapped it into the Trump phone. Yeah, they're the same phone, man.

[Nilay Patel]

Wait, did they really?

[David Pierce]

Yeah, they swapped the main boards on the phones to prove that they're the same. The same phone.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, that's amazing.

[David Pierce]

We're still waiting on hours. I think Trump Mobile might be mad at us because we calling it out for being fake for so long.

[Nilay Patel]

I think we might be waiting a

[David Pierce]

while, but the Trump phone people are. Some people have them. I do not think any pre orders have shipped outside of the ones that journalists made, but Dom has been told that his is coming, so presumably we're going to review the Trump phone soon.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay, genuine question. All the people who pre ordered a Trump phone a long time ago. How mad or not mad or are they even going to care? What are people going to feel when they open up their phone that is like a gold painted HTC U24 Pro?

[David Pierce]

I think they're going to feel like they have a mid range Android phone with specs from over a year ago. And there's a reason those phones are not broadly popular in the United States, especially when they're preloaded with Truth Social and one of the weirdest e health apps that has ever existed.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh God. What is that?

[David Pierce]

It's, it's, it's called like Doctegrity. It's like a telemedicine app. But I'm confident it's just gonna like try to sell you gray market supplements. Like I. You know what I mean?

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Like Dr. Oz is gonna be like, have you tried AG1 when you open your Trump phone?

[Nilay Patel]

I have been saying all along that it is a much better and funnier story if the Trump phone actually turns out to be real. And I feel like I'm only half getting what I wanted. Right. Like, this would have been much more delightful if it, if someone at the Trump Organization had actually like tried their hardest and they made a phone and they were like, no, you don't understand. We like really went and did this as right away as we possibly could. I think that would be. So instead they clearly like made one phone call to China, said, what do you have parts in a, in a bucket in a factory? And they said, yeah, and that was it.

[David Pierce]

The funniest part of this is going to be the week or two weeks when America's most senior administration officials all have to pretend to be using the Trump film. Like Marco Rubio, you know how he has to wear the shoes. Like my boy is going to be holding the yellow phone.

[Nilay Patel]

They're all going to have phones that they just use for cabinet meetings that are Trump phones.

[David Pierce]

That's absolutely correct. I suspect this will only last a week. Like, reality will quickly set in and the iPhones will fade back into view. But there's going to be a couple weeks here where a lot of people who have never used Android in their life are going to find themselves using gold mid range Android phones. I love it.

[Nilay Patel]

I love it.

[David Pierce]

It's going to be great.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm going to get one just in case we get to do Brandon Carr's dummy and then you and I will both have them on Brendan Carr's dummy.

[David Pierce]

That'd be perfect.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, my last lightning round item is just a very quick PSA that I sincerely believe everybody should know about, which is this new AT&T iPad data plan. They have this new thing called the unlimited day pass. It's, I think, at least for now, only in the US but for $3, you get 24 hours of unlimited data with no, no subscriptions, no contracts. You don't even have to be an AT&T customer. Just for $3 a day, you can get 24 hours of unlimited data on your iPad. This rules.

[David Pierce]

That's really good. That's the first smart thing at&T has ever done.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes. And it is like I, I really earnestly believe that the iPad with cellular is like a vastly better device than a WI Fi only iPad. Because the thing where you can just pull it out anywhere and like check your email or watch something on Netflix and not even think about, like being on the coffee shop, WI Fi is like wonderful. That is, it is a terrific and great thing. And, and to have it on all the time if it's not your primary device is kind of a lot. Like, I've done some of the T mobile used to have pretty good prepaid deals for some of this stuff. But like, like at $3 a day, like I'm traveling, I'm just going to use this today. Especially because the iPad also happens to be like a kickass hotspot. Like this just. This is a great thing and everybody should know that it exists.

[David Pierce]

Are they going to give you hotspot data for three bucks a day?

[Nilay Patel]

I don't know and I sort of doubt it. Yeah, I have to, I have to read more fine print on some of this stuff. But like, this is also. At&t is apparently going to be offering more of these kinds of day plans to more kinds of devices.

[David Pierce]

I like that.

[Nilay Patel]

But like, I think this, I think this rules. And I think just everybody who owns this kind of iPad should know about this because three bucks a day is not a lot to pay for making your life a lot easier.

[David Pierce]

This immediately makes the case for always buying the cell iPad. I never bought them. Cause I'm like, I'm not gonna pay this plan. And you know, like the, the main iPad in our house is Max's iPad, our daughter's iPad. And it leaves the house like five times a year when we go on a trip with her. And like, I would turn it on for airplane day and then be done.

[Nilay Patel]

Perfect example. Yeah, yeah. Just thought everybody should know about that.

[David Pierce]

That's really good.

[Nilay Patel]

You get to go last. What's your last one?

[David Pierce]

I've got like a. Like a heartwarming one. I know. I don't know what else to say. Solar has overtaken coal in the United States for energy production for the first time.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, that is nice.

[David Pierce]

So there's a think tank, energy think tank called Ember, and it Says Solar provided 12.8% of U.S. electricity in May 2026, compared to 12.22% for coal. That's the lowest ever for the fossil fuel industry and a record for solar. I think I just, like, I'm a guy who has solar panels now, so I'm just like, solar pilled.

[Nilay Patel]

So this is your doing?

[David Pierce]

We got them. I think a lot of people got solar panels at the end of the tax credits last year because they all expired. So everyone at my little town, the installers are so busy. We actually ran a story, Justine Kama wrote a story for us about how tight solar installers were at the end of last year. They were so busy and they were really worried about the cliff and there's new pricing games and whatever that they're trying to do to make it up, but energy prices are through the roof. And I will tell you, for the last three months, our electricity bill has been $0. We. We have paid like $35 just to, like, be connected to the Con Ed grid and whatever fees Con Ed can come up with, but our actual kilowatts, zero. And it's. It's kind of amazing. And we have ev. Like, we're at this point, we're basically being paid to charge our EV at night.

[Nilay Patel]

That's pretty cool. Are you. So my. My parents recently got solar too. And my dad has really enjoyed, like, I don't know if he still does, but at least for a while, really enjoyed, like, looking at the numbers and opening up the app and seeing just how energy efficient you're being at this particular moment in time. Is that you. Are you, like, constantly checking out the energy flow?

[David Pierce]

I got. I have a lot of thoughts about the Enlighten app from Enphase. We can talk about it. They've just added an AI assistant to it. It's like, why is this here? This makes no sense. But yes, I do enjoy looking at it all the time. It's. And it tells you nothing. You're like, oh, boy. The refrigerator compressor clicks on about once an hour. What are you gonna do? That's what they do, actually. They keep the food cold.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. I love it.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

That is heartwarming. That's a good one.

[David Pierce]

That's a good one.

[Nilay Patel]

That Makes me happy. It's a nice one to end on. All right, two bits of business before we go. One is that the new season of Version History is starting this Sunday. If you guys don't know, it's our show about gadget history and the best and worst and strangest products of all time. This season we're doing all smart home gadgets and this Sunday's episode, Nilay, actually features you. We're doing the Harmony universal remote first, which was you, me, the Verges, John Higgins and Matt Rogers, the co founder of Nest, who I kid you not, demanded to be on that episode.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Reached out to us and was like, I will be on that episode with you. It was great. We had a blast. It was really fun episode. This season we're also doing Nest, which Matt is not in.

[David Pierce]

That's very funny, by the way. Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

We also have the Philips hue lights. We're doing Keurig and we're doing the Clapper, which might have been the first thing I ever wrote down when I pitched Version History. It's like a thing to make an episode about. It's going to be really fun. That starts this Sunday. We're going to do a feed drop on this show next Friday because it's Juneteenth and we're going to be off. But, you know, go follow all the Version History stuff. We'll link some of it in the show notes. Who's on Decoder next week? What are we doing?

[David Pierce]

Next week on Decoder is really fun. It's Adam Bri from skydio, the drone company. He let me fly a drone in California from the studio in New York. So we did that. We flew one in the office, which was very annoying to everyone in the office. And then we talked a lot about being a defense contractor and building drones in America and the FCC banning dji. Like, we did it all. It was very. It's very good.

[Nilay Patel]

Did you fly a drone via 5G?

[David Pierce]

I'm not actually. Didn't ask him what. What the what. I should have asked him what. What.

[Nilay Patel]

That would change everything.

[David Pierce]

I'm assuming it was. You know, the thing about flying skydio drones is, like, you're not really flying them, you're issuing them commands and they fly themselves.

[Nilay Patel]

True.

[David Pierce]

So, like, the latency issue wasn't like a big deal, but it was still wild to be like, I'm just flying this drone from this laptop in New York City.

[Nilay Patel]

That is cool. I need to. It's been a long time since I've flown a drone because I did a bunch of drone crashing and got really nervous about it, but I think I could probably handle it now. It seems much easier now than it was a few years ago to fly a drone.

[David Pierce]

Well, you can't get one now.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, true.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. I mean, Adam and I talked about why, why they don't make consumer drones, and he's like, let me figure out my business and then we'll, we'll try again.

[Nilay Patel]

It's fair. That's good stuff. I'm excited about that one. All right, that's it for the Vergecast. We're going to be back, you and I, next Thursday because we're off on Friday for Juneteenth, but you and I are going to be a day early because otherwise we never see each other and it's fun to hang out. Every once in a while you'll be presumably in some other, even swankier hotel.

[David Pierce]

It's going to be great. I've left my family behind. I'm only in staircase hotels from now on.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, exactly. If you have thoughts, feelings, questions, anything else you want us to talk about, you can always email us verscastheburge.com call the hotline 866-verge-11 and remember to subscribe to the Verge. You get ad free versions of all of our podcasts, including this one, Andy Coder and version History. Big week next week. For our podcast, Go get them all ad free. You get all of our exclusive newsletters, you get everything else. Go subscribe theverge.com subscribe the Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk and Aaron Locasio. We'll see you next week. Eli Rock and roll.

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[Nilay Patel]

Stop shopping. Get styled. Not today, Sweatpants. Somebody's wearing jeans that fit.

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[David Pierce]

No photos please. I'm just a regular dad who happens to have a stylist.

[Nilay Patel]

I really look my best when someone

[David Pierce]

else makes the decisions. Hey, we can all see you two way mirrors.

[Nilay Patel]

Just share your sign, style and budget and your stylist sends personalized looks right to your door. Stitch Fix. Get started today@stitch fix.com. i want to hug you. I'm gonna hug you. I'm coming. I'm coming in for a hug.