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The Vergecast
The Verge
Anthropic and AI Safety Guardrails
From Siri is good now?? — Jun 12, 2026
Siri is good now?? — Jun 12, 2026 — starts at 0:00
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Go to fetchpet dot com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet dot com slash save. Hello and welcome to the Virdcast, the flagship podcast of Orbs I'm your friend David Peerce, and right now I am staring at an empty chair, a microphone absolutely gorgeous spiral staircase. And somewhere out of here is going to emerge my co host Ne Ies toel I Hopping down the stairs. I need to enter the show this way every week What have I been doing? That was the coolest entrance. Like you did it too quickly would be my main note for you. H Li. Welcome to this chan. I' so excited I'm a little princess. I'm very sorry to all of our audio listeners that you missed what has happened. but Nili made a true grand.urn in your car, close your eyes and imagine me skipping down a spiral staircase 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? So I went from San Francisco, where I was there for WWC. I came to LA for a couple of 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 eighties 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 eighties 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. L I'm in love with this hotel room. I'm like staring at the mountains at the window. It's just the collision of trying to modernize an eightS hotel is very apparent in this space and I kind of love it. This room to me just screams like years of B list actors and now Nili Patel Yeah, I think I'm the only person who has never done cocaine in this room St'ill still tal I know what I'm supposed to be doing in here and I'm not doing it. 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 Hype desesk is back, Brandon car is back. We got a whole ling round coming I But we have to start, Neili 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 Si And the new serory by all accounts might actually be very good Like it might just it might just be good I did the talk show with Jon Grber and Joanna Sttern and Joanna had spent that entire day using New Sira before we did the show. And she was just on a tear 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 aance 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 the beta while I'm traveling. So I haven't had chance to dive deep, but I've seen a lot of people use it. What try to use it The thing that is good, the big improvement is that the index of content on your phone actually works now. So the bar was you would try to search messages on the iPhone Do nothing And now there's a meaningful index of that stuff of your male, your messages and your photos The index takes a long time It actually wasn't even done when I saw Joanna. 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 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 and A I can just go get it. And that is magic Bose, 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 two sid 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 and an AI technology happening here. Oh I disagree. But 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 you and I did the episode on Wednesday with the peoplee's biggest questions from WWEC. 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've ever used Sotlight 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 deevices have been bad at for a really long time. mosticallyly it beach falls Like on a m, can you try to search your messages, it mostly just beach balls. Nightmare. Yeah. And so I completely agree that U I think was it Mike Rockwell at the tech talkalk you went to? said they 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 nearly twenty 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 piece of this that is just Siries's ability to understand what you're talking about has clearly vastly improved Like if anyone who has ever used SRing can tell you that it is it was bad input and bad output, right? Like 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 what has happened? Like Yes, every time I try to set a timer for fifteen minutes, it sets one for six hours. consistently for the past two years. Yeah, it's like it was truly like garbage and 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. 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 clloud compute it, it goes up to the cloud I heard in some briefings that actually the query goes up and private cloud compute using the full power of NVIidia 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 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're They have the index on device, and then private Cloud comppute is able to actually go understand what you're saying and ask for the data from the index. I'm very curious what happens if you don't have connectivity Or what if for a guy's been on a plane a lot recently? What if you have really bad connectivity? I was just going to say these things are even worse when they're crappy than when you're fully offline. And so yeah, I think that and that's why I'm saying, I think it will become clearearr What's happening where is more and more people get access to Siri and they put it under strain and 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 So Can I search my text messages on an iPhone. The comparison was no Right Yeah. 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'm saying about like AI technology is, is this an AI system at the absolute frontier of what openp AI and Anthropic and Google are doing? And I don't think that that's the case. And that's what you mean why Apple hasn't like push 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 No one could do anything with it. And now it's great and only Apple has access in particular to that I do think there's some like magic happening there. like it feels amazing. I just It's just so funny 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. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think Allison Johnson and 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 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 Mm Siri has caught up to the most basic pretty good AI assistant level. Like it does all of the level one and level two assistant stuff as well as the others do. It's not at the frontier. It's not doing leading edge agentic stuff, but like Bic day to day life Stuff let's say Syrii 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 completely upends the entire consumer AI industry for like hundreds of millions of were 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. Yeah. I mean, this is why I keep saying Well shherlocked the free version of Chat GPutT The free version Chaty was a sensation because Google search had become so shit and Sirory was useless And now here's a thing on your phone that would just talk to you and Maybe just maybe lie to you, may maybe try to Break up with your wife in the front page of New Yk Tim Shout out to every b, Kay Roous At the end of the day, that didn't improve enough open air goals to get you to pay money. And they even, you know, the sort of like false start with Apple intntelligence Oen A 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 open a eye for the good version of Chashouta. And none of that ever worked out. and now open ass pivoting and enterprise and they're all chasing that money. I think Apple is just saying, look, this is good enough. This is maybe as good as two years ago Free chat GPT. This is essentially the same level of capability. But because it has access to your I message in 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. There'sraight 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 the serory And I really think like the free AI apps are all kind of They're all going to put out statementson right? We welcome the competition. You know, like that's the thing that happens when apps get shherlocked in this way. And it it is just here. it's absolutely going to be the thing that happens now 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 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 Chat GPT has taken every imaginable run at trying to build app stores. Everybody is doing skills, everybody is 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 chat bot, which clearly people like interacting with and brereak 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 intenthents and give Siri access to their tools in order to do stuff. I know you're going to doordash problem me in a minute does seem like ull is now on its way to winning that race, to becoming Chat GBT or at least, you know free chat GPT before Chat GPT could figure out how to be the apppp store And that to me, if I'm open AI is like a very scary state of affairs This is why openAS pivoting enterprise. I think they have realized that there's not money in the consumer market I'm the one who keeps yelling that there's no great consumer AI products R? Like there hasn't been the thing that would make people pick up a different device or have a different experience beforefore picking up aniPhone And if you don't have Candy Crush and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube What do you got? you know, like Your phone is going to be with you. becausecause those are the things that consumers want on their phones your weird metaglasses 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, openpen Air has Johnny Ibe. 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 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 door dash What 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 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 canstrong arm developers into doing what I want Right now, it's like, okay, we're going to go and use the web version of Dordash Google is much better at that L 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 Doorash 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 in devices. Even the index I'm talking about Grouber pointed out to me, they rebuild that index per device So when you update to one of the twenty seven OSs 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 free in one way because they have access to your data. limiting in another really big way Yeah, that's interesting. That actually makes sense. I was I was running the new serory 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 T. I I had 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 Federigi. alluded to basically Apple thinks 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 O this question of is Apple basically saying that we don't think these sort of multi step 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 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 Syri 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 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. 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. becausecause then you can just issue commands and you don't have to worry about your phone battery dying or whatever it is thingsings happen and 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 five point zero exists Do normal people understand a Bluetooth five point zero is what? enables a bunch of wireless headbuds to have pairing across the world? No, of course they don't So I think damnit. We're going do a great holiday spectacular this year. I think there's a little bit of difference between the tech companies that sort of enthusiast audience, which we have here and then like the mainstream technology consumer, right? And somewhere in there, Apple's pendulum swings back and forth likeike when it's time for any new iPhone. We are going to hear exactly the details of the new A series trip If the iPhone folds, we will hear exactly the details of how they remove the crease from that OWED 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 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 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 if you know that that's the thing that's happening right. 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 your spaghetti 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 that technology is not important Yeah, I agree with that. N nextxt time we do a Virt cast movie night we need to do her becausecause her U a shockingly prescient teeen 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 I keep thinking about is Uh 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 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 behind on technology and trying to invent reasons that it's behind on purpose I do think there is a real case for Apple coming out here and being like Siri is not D immediate way that you were 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 I sort of hope that's the answer Apple's addicted to weird riffs on standards that no one else uses 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 so Absolutely. Just like it has a weird riff on Dolby Vision that the entire industry has to use to get Dolby Vision on Apple TV. Like it's just the way it goes and that's how they that's how they maintain control of their ecosystem. I think this is one of the reasons that 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 assistants And we want competition this time around. You know, Apple's response is to say Srew, We're going home. Maybe that means More people use Claud in this way or Gemini in this way in Europe and they're actually develops a parallel ecosystem where maybe Apple figures out whatever technical solution it currently says it's too hard to figure out or that it can't get approval for from the EU and Gemini or ChBT or Claud. to tell you Hey, look at your screen for human andp urification The power of the ecosystem right now is all tilted in and apples favor that's the argument you're making. I you can see you're saying, actually, we need to make sure we break it open this time. So it's not just a monopoly or a twoopoly Actually let me ask you this, there's a big argument to be made based on all the seri reactions that once again INMSessage lock in is the thing. Right? All these texts are an I message. no one else can see them Boy, Siri is great now I mean, if you are a person who like a sicko has had never delete as the option in your messages. and so you just have however many years of messages, you are in for a Wild surprise when that index finishes with the new Si U 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? If I switch to Android I've now done this. like switching to Android is easier than it used to be The idea of like my assistant is now going to have vastly less stuff to work with because there is a huge source of my life in those messages is a big deal. Like the lock in feels stronger than ever if Sirrii is good because good Sirrii 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? L the ideas is, the better we know you, the more we know about you the harder it is going to be to leave 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 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 are like, yeah That's how long it's going to take. And then we're going to be able to find all of the stuff in your messages that you can't now. Everybody would been like, great, see in twenty twenty can't w' perfect Yeah I 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. L 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 take a break and then we're going to come back and We have some social networking figuring out to do. Support for the show comes from Anthropic Important questions don't usually have simple answers, and they usually come with a mix of uncertainty, excitement, and reflection before a big breakthrough So when you're working through something important, it helps to have a sounding board to explore ideas and uncover what's really underneath them. That's where cllaud comes in Cloud is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claouud extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus Claud's research capabilities go deeper than basic web search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes Problems worth solving, Get started with Cled todayoday cllaud. Ai slash erge. That's cllaud. Ai slash Verge. And check out Clad Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode Caud. Ai slash verge Pupport for the show comes from Granola It feels good to walk away from a meeting that actually felt productive But our brains can hold only so much info You might look back and realize you either A got caught up in your notes and missed some important stuff or B. 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Ai slash Verge Support for this show comes from Clavio only so many hours in a day Enclavio's two powerful AI agents can make sure your team spends them on big things The first Clavio AI agent turns your marketing ideas into reality instantly Describe what you want A holiday campaign, a VIP reengagement series, and Clavio builds it instantly email, SMS, and push All coordinated on brand, grounded in fourteen years of Clavio marketing data. Nothing goes live without your se so. The other Clavio AI agent keeps your customers happy at any hour Brand trained to answer questions, make product recommendations, and handle orders and returns. No hold music Marketing that launches instantly supportupport that never sleeps Join more than one hundred ninety three thousand brands, including Ow, Patrick Ta, and Dollar Shave Club, already growing with Clavo the autonomous BaC CRM Get started at K L A V IY O. com All right, we're back I'm Nei, I want to give you three small pieces of news And then I want you to Galaxy braing your way through them for me. You think we can do this? Yeah Here are the three pieces of news Peiece number one, Instagram is letting you more explicitly define your algorithm in Instagram, you are going to be able to tell Instagram what you want to see more of in your main feed P's number two Blue skky 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 second and fifty third time in the history of YouTube. There's something going on in social networks And all three of these things feel like they are 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 Can I add a fourth thing that is utterly self serving, but I think fascinating in this context. Yeah, 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, likeike here's what we ship this week. She's great. She does a lot of user research. And when we're doing O homepage refresh, She did a lot of user research about the story streaming quQickross and stuff. 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 whichich is always our goal. So this is very self shing. Like I'm very proud this thing but they're like, I'm tired of algorithmic social media Here's a thing that feels like that with the community. 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 Miseri because I could talk about Adam Missari's threads post about the recommendations algorithm and the sense of agency and control all day and all night I've asked Aam to come on the deccoder or the virtast or where everyones 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. 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 smashed And so any given video, the algorithm was just putting together 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 LM can look at that att 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 What he's 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 a natural language And his point is I'm doing this because I want you to feel control 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 on 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 algorM is for That is a way of making it feel small. Right making it feel under 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 recommending 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. It is engagement bed as a platform. likeike it really, really is. Like threads in particular is that thing, right? Yeah. So there's a lot here, but you can see, I mysterious'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 Blue sky community is it's funny everyone thinks B blue Sy a platform, like it's a product Like I've talked to the new intimy of loose guy, 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 is they would just describe it as like schema How do you describe a New York Kicks community Like here's the group of people talking at the Ns in a way that is legible across the whole atmosphere. so that if you make a Reddit on the atmosphere that works in open social. You can say, o, there's a community of Nicks fans on Blue Sky. I'm going to show that community in this app in a way that is coherent And that's a big deal, right? It' We want big thing we want little groups of communities to travel in different ways across the big net That's a way of making the big network, which up until now is like here's a fire hose of content You can filter it Now it's not just a fire house of content, like Here's a group, Here's a taxonomy of what a community is, which is, by the way, you and I haveve talked to this many, many times over years Describing what a community is online is very challenging Like is book talkalk a community? What are the boundaries of book talkalk? Is it moderated? Is it controlled? No, it's just a bunch of people who say they're book talkk. That's it. Yeah. 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 rivaled subreddits when they're at Mad at the moderators, tootally 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 BookTalk. And so you see again, it's another attempt to make a thing feel small And I think it's 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 that 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 ye, that is actually a monetization funotel for a lot of like weird creators they need to support it Yeah, I think the DMs one is kind of the most straightforward to me because Everything we've seen from YouTube over the last year or so has been about keepeing 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' they're tryrying to make it so that your entire experience of YouTube can stay inside of YouTube whichich is very funny because if you remember way, way, way back, one of the main ways YouTube became the default video player on the interternet was because it had really great in bed. that you could put anywhere on the internet. Like 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 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 d. com And so just DMs is just a way to send videos to each other. stries me as like an obvious answer that. And by the way, Instagram knows this. Adam Oarry says this all the time that The number one mechanic on Instagram is you watch reels and send it to a friend. YouTube doesn't have that mechanic, right? 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. Yeah. Right? Like I open YouTube to get something done. 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 Yeah 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 greatreat 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 Traditional YouTube ever really wass. Yeah, I was listening to a podcast the other day where they were they were talking about how male friendship in twenty twenty six is just sending each other TikToks. It was like, that's super real, you' think YouTube obviously wants to pez that. Oh, dude my Christian Dor meme. I mean, that'srought that's brought more men together in the past threeree weeks, like maybe anything. Like that thing is gonna save America That's really true. That and the random New Zealand soccer player. Have you heard about this So there's an Argentinian influencer. I'll link this somewhere in the show notes, but there's an Arentinian influencer who went and found person they deem 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 Paynee And he went from having four thousand followers on Instagram. to last I checked, it's well over five million. That's amazing. 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 Paye comes up in every group chat that I'm in now. it's great. It's great But let's go back to Blue sky for a minute because this community's announcement comomes what? a week maybe after Blue Sy COO, Rose Wang did an interview with CNBC. where she kind of teased this happening Basically saying that they were more inspired by Rddit going forward than by s 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 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 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. Freds I don't know that we've heard numbers in a minute, but presumably continues to grow, but is like It's not what Twitter was. Perhaps it's trying because 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. Yeah, Threads will never be what Twitter was for a very long time But what I wonder for blues 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 pereriod And that Instagram got away from that. Facebook is no longer that like Not only is Twitter not that thing, Th might just be a dead activity of likeike giant primarily text based posting systems where everybody has single feed in sort of real time ways in the sense that like M 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 Blue Sky has always attempted to be more than just the Twitter clone and the atmosphere and the A protocol is a bigg deal than Blue Sky, but This also kind of feels to me like a complete pivot for Blue Sky away from The idea of being Twitter at all You know, the former CEO of Blue Gy Jay Graver. She's still at Blue Guy. She's working on sort of the technical aspects of it now. Tony iss the interrimcyLid they're going next U Jay was on dec coder Ageso and What she said to me then was we made a thing that looked like Twitter Because one they came out of Twitter, you will recall, Lucight was a project inside of Twitter that got spun out But the reason they made a thing that looks 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 Dory you know, what pronounced 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 L Ky 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 You can I think you can see that with Blue skky today. There's a reason that Sure, you know, Blue skies, whatever reputation has, but they're not actively trying to go ch 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 agree with you The idea of the big inflential Twitter may have just come to an end. Twitter itself, you know, we can see in SpaceX IPO Elon has destroyed that business. The users are down, the revenue is down. The only revenue that's up at X, the everythingthing app is data licensing to XA M So like in a circular way notot shady at all. 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 us? So you see like maybe that era has come to an end and maybe threads will never actually replace Twitter as I don't know Blue skky is saying the next generation of all these platforms should be interoperable So if you want to build your own version of 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 else 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 actctivity pub and Blue Sky is on that protocol. and yes, there are like bridges and whatever to make them you fake inter or operate, but they don't actually interoperate two big theoretically interoperable social networks are in their own silos And there's there's literally no other thing that's big. proves the point for either of them Like Mastodon does not prove the point for threats. L I'm very sorry, it just does not There isn't another big atmosphere product proves the point for Blue sky. And there's a lot of interesting ones. Pixel fed is interesting. Skylight, the video player is interesting They do not have the scale to proved 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 Blueky's thesis is 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 Sure, I really think everyone thinks Blue Sky is a product company and they are just not Yeah, but I think like One of the things that we've always struggled with in explaining why we're so excited about the Fetaverse is like explaining what it looks like, right? And I think for a long time, The running theory was that this sort of base experience of it should probably look like Twitter. that it's a bunch posts in a row. And the cool thing about the Fedaverse is you can you can re 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 I think It seems to me that everyone is rapidly coming to the conclusion that that is wrong. And 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 is such a fundamentally different way of looking at content then 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. 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 Blue S sky is launching communities. I think Blue skky is launching a set of extensions to A protocol that support communities You know, it's like very different. likeike that company is very different in how it thinks about what it makes. And I do think that gets everyone confused all the time People talk about blue skies It's a competitor to Twitter. and I don't think it has any desire to be that thing I agree. I also just went to Blue Sky and it just popped up a thing and it said newew feature group chats This is just we're all doing the same thing again here F. The algorithm piece, just let's just go to Instagram for a minute here. because 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 Fred has the thing where you can literally say, deear Algo. Uh 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 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 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. All right, you've walked into the end of the Misseri post. whichich I did I saving for last. I confess it's really long. It's very long And everyone hit the heart of it, which is you can talk to your algorithm. Yeah. Okay, here's the end of this Yeah this is adamissary This is a 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, Greing what you say. And then he says There's a harder version of this question on 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. Oh. 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 to be different for each of us. And then this is, here's the new I. Like I read this and I literally opened my email and I wrote to Adam and like all capital letters, like come on to Coder 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 Wow right? That's like the biggest idea. Like, you up an 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 you Filled with different kinds of synthetic content. Diffnt synthetic content. Different buttons. Right? Like the Instagram you might see is somebody who needs to sell ads for your lawnbowing business might be totally different than the Instagram. someomeone might see you who just wants to see get ready with me. It's like, that is a different app. Like they will be different apps with different content and like different business goals for Instagram If you recall, when I interviewed Suner this last time, I said, Look, you're going to ship different apps 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 answer and that answer should be 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 And he's like, that's a sperum,'ll figure it out. And it's like her, Oh, there's whole blurry middle that specrum It's actually pretty blurry, man. What is the body of water between Florida and Texas called There's one guy who definitely wants a different answer than I do Uh the tapamina Binger. Standing out front of the Citol what happened on january sixth, twenty twenty one is What remember a great example U 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 I You know, you know, a lot of feelings are Mad, you know, a of feelings at Mark Stuckward. You know, a of things about Adamisserary But it is clearer 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 of the trade offffs he's made, and all the decisions he's made But he's been the most like, yeah, we're going to shrew everything up He does see the thing. Yeah. He sees the thing very clearly. And he's like, Yeahah, whatever tradeoffs we' making we're making them, but at least I'm copying to the tradeoffs. I think that's fascinating. Again Adam You know, we put up the screenshot of like five exclamation points that they sent to him. I've talked to him many times over 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 shared sense of truth, our shared sense of experience You know, 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. Right. And there's something there that's important Yet we're at this fascinating moment where 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 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 can I can identify with the other people who have does 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. I don't know I don't either. And like and I think there is a real if from a sort of ruthlessly efficient business standpoint probablybably works for Ma to some extent. to give everybody exactly what they want without any regard for its connection to the broader culture or society might 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 at a What is that just like a bleak, bleak universe to live in? 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 a gllasses think the metaverse is less bleak. At least in his world, there are other legless people with you in the metaverse. Right, But your brain's still in a vat and he has total control of you and that's fair. You know what I mean? L 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. 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. It's the thing that is being pushed towards. like every pixel will be under the control of Meta. And it I think it is just fascinating to see Adamissarry just come right out and say, there might be some problems with that Weird. it. You don't hear many of these CEOs ever just say that out loud. Yeah. This new feature might be the end of shared human experiences. Let see how that goes. We're turning this knob Let us know when it destroys the world. Like 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 missing Come on the show This show decoder, which I don't know, I get a sumariz.ll We'll do sububway takes together, man. whatever there we I just want to do the whole thing. I' so you can tell I'm so into it We're gonna do a chicken shop date between it's Ni and Adam Misaria. I would do hot ones with Adam Missaria Sold. All right, we're going to take a break, and then we're gonna to come back. It's lightning aroundound time. We're back When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use indndeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this showel will get a seventy five dollars sponsored job credit at indndeed dot com slash podcast. That's indndeed dot com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply Need a hiring hero? This is a job for indeed sponsored jobs No one goes to Hanks for a spreadsheets They go for a darn good pizza Lately, though, the shop's been quiet, so Hank decides to bring back the one dollar slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs and help him see if he can afford it. 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 more at M three sixty five coopilot dot com slash work So good, so good New markdowns up to seventy percent off are at Nordstrom rack stores now. Stock up and stve big on shoes, tops, dresses, accessories, and more must haveves for summer. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices That's why you rack 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. sccrew you, Ross.ust Ashley Escetta. Welcome back, Ashley.'m so you finally fired him. I'm so excited. Honestly, it was long overdue. Really It' the third time for me, honestly This is the longest game I've been playing, let me tell you I had to go into business with this man. What have you brought for us this week Oh boy guys, we gotta talk about the social reckoning trailer because you know what it's than a million dollars. whatever not this trailer is. I don't know. I'm u Qestion ge this is the sequel to the social network, the Aaron Sorkin, Jesse Eisenberg Yeah Dwn of Facebook movie. This is the sequel. I will say Neila, you missed a very important name in those names, which is David Fincher The leegendary director who directed that movie. Yeah, and made it very stylish. madeade it very stylish. He did make it very stylish. Also like Trent Resnner Aticus Ros did the music. That movie had a lot of moves going on. perfect storm. A young Dakota Johnson making a spectacular cameo appearance. Yeah. You cannot 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. So this time it's just The Aaron Sorkin S showow. 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 suuccession, is playing an older Mark Zuckerberg, which is odd, because wasn't he like thirty five or thirty six when this happened? L Zuckerberg And then Jeremy Strong is like forty six So he adds a little bit too I feel he adds maybe too much gravitos. Zuckerberg not a person normally associated with the word gravitos, I would say. agreed. Okay, so you watched the trailer and the first thing that jumped out to me is this is Free haircut Zuckerberg Right the modern, I would say post pandemic Zuckerberg is defined by the haircut the shirts that say like E Plurbus Zuck or whatever they say on them. likeike Caesar Era Zuck. He's gone very Roman. Yeah. yeah, Caesar Eerra Yeah this all the But this isn't that. This is we're going to do congressional hearings seems very much like the Facebook files are going to be an important part of this from the trailer. There's one part where you know, the person leaking says, arere you a tech reporter? and the person says ish. And she goes, ish, which is a perfect s in moment. And I'm not sure that ever actually happens. in real. So at the end of the trailer where they're like, she's a disruptor. And I was just like, I can't somebody who's worked in TechVird, 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. When you watched this trailer, did you catch the Jeremy Strong is just playing Kendall Roy again. That was one hundred percent my takeaway from him. Kendall Roy with a really good Mark Zuckerberg accent. 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. The voices reallyally good. Like I am incredibly impressed by that. But yeah, it 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. likeike you don't get to like that's the end of the conversation And it's just that It was very Kendlerooy to me Yeah, and this is such a weird story to choose. Like this is they're essentially making this movie about Francis Haen and the Facebook files on which is just an odd way of framing this version of the story. Like it'll be interesting to see how U much it gets away from that, but like Francis Hogan, who like famously moved to Puerto Rico to get away from crypto taxes is like, The hero the story, The whole Facebook files thing is very strange and Francis Huan's story is strange and complicated. Like what came out in the Facebook files is big and important and like 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. That's ye, that was I was very surprised that this was in fact not a Cambridge Analytica movie. I was like, Oh, oh, they're doing o they're doing that scandal. That massive Facebook scandal. by bad. L did what I've been trying to figure out is like, do you think Aaron Sorkin just feels bad for like making Mark Zuckerberg look Uh cooler than he was at the time. And this is why he made this movie. like He's like, I lionized Facebook by accident. and now here we are. Did that movie lionize? Do you think Aaron Sorkin feels bad about anything ever? 'cause that's an honest question. I did an event with Sorkin when he did his jobs movie whichich 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. Was that the Ashon Cuter one or the Michael Fasbetter one The Fastbender one. Okay. So the Fastnder, Steve Jobs movie That's the magical distortion field of Michael Fastbender pl Steve Jobs is like set up in three acts and it's three keynotes and The way Sorkin wrote it Everything in Steve Jobs's life happened in a green room before the iPod intuction. Of course, yeah, all of his best epiphanyanies. And it is just nonsense. It's pure nonsense. and that's weird and fascinating, but it you know, it creates structure for the movie and the narrative and raising the stakes of everything all the time because everything has to happen before the show begins Like there's just literally a clock. and then he's like, it's 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. Andonry he was like, he's very loud. He talks really fast. and he just like overcame my objection. Like I don't remember what was actually said. I just remember being in the theater and asking him that question and being like, well, I have nothing to say. Then there are other parts, like the fact that next was a fourteen year project did actually have an OS that wasn't designed to be sold 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 next, but U I it being. Steve, you know, Steve here's what we can agree on, I'm sure. And he know the economy of filmaking. I mean, he's like he's got to show. He can't can't just it be too it'd be too boring. He moves too fast All everythingverything 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. Right. There's a pressure cooker. Yeah, the pressure cooker. We're going prepare for your congressional testimony about the Facebook files. and Francis Huen is going to feel hunted and we're going to have, I mean, Sorkin loves a journalist, right? We're going to have the 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 is criticism I'm stoked for this. Oh is this is like the most sork in soran gets. Yeah. It is it is a very polished Like, it is like end end stage sarkening. Like this is like this is like the this is the most distilled version of it you're ever going to get Yeah, I think this is like 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 just a like terrifically made really good movie. Yeah. 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 better Are you watching it like in full fat streaming? or Did the TikTok algorithm just start delivering you clips the newsroom? 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 gott to watch this show again. Yeah. get right back in. I gotta get right it happens. Has Olivia Mun started doing anything by season two or is she still just floating around the background scening the scen? Mostly floating. ye But thens there's a whole drama about whether she does or doesn't know Japanese. It's very complicated Aron Sorkin famously great at writing women. What could possibly wrong with the Francis Han story? 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, in sofar as Justin Timberlake saying, you know, what's school a billion dollars became a meme. they tryed to like recapture the meme Again, this is like the pre Caesar era for Zuck. I don't think they're going to try to recapture this They're in the middle of like scandal after scandal and T it. Social media regulation in states. and the metaverse is completely in ruins. It's just very sad. It's very sad. There's a scene in the trailer where Jeremy Strong is Mark Zucker is like I'm a free speech absolutist, which first of all is an Elon Musk quote, notot a Mark Zuckerberg quote. I' to say he't I don't think he said that 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 ahead of Cs to like rage about it on threads to no one for a minute and then like move on with their lives. 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 like and then all of a sudden it was like, as someone who does media training now, it's like better we better do this crrisis c thing where we embrace the meimification of our film and say like, oh yeah, we love it. L it. But also like it was like Jesse Eisenberg. He says a bunch of cool stuff in the movie I get the feeling Jeremy Strong is not going say aunch cool stuff this movie 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 gonna to be like again, like the meimification of this movie will be much harder than I think the first one. 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 ten minute videos now because like that's those are going to be the clips from the social reckoning. I have a feeling we'll prise e clips of Bill Burr Bill Burrs going to say some cool stuff in this movie This just made me realize that the press tour for this movie when they're doing like junkets and Jeremy Strong, the metethod actor, is doing it as Mark Zuckerberg is going to be speck. Can we have him on the hyed desk? Can we ask? 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 That beuly one of the weirdest experiences of my life. I might actually pay to see that. Like that would be that could be a Virge subscriberence. shouldould do that I like it All right, Ashley,re we're going to play you out with just a brief clip from the trailer because everybody needs to hear Jeremy Strong's voice. Amazing Thank you for coming on. It's good to see you.. Spell your name and state your current occupation for the record M A R K so U C K E R B E G. And your occupation I'm a professional defendant. It's so good. I'm a professional defendant All right, before we get into this, I just want to say when we do the Brendon Carr as a dummy movie, Jeremy Strong as Brandon Carr. This is just happening All right, it is time now once again for America's favorite podcasts within podcasts Bren a car is a done What is a door iful And hits every time. I will say that one, the one that we bought by Viola D Gumba, is great and we love it. I'm in the market for additional theme songs. like I. That's very fun. I don't want you I don't want people to think that because we bought the ones, we could use it at will means that we're Op to new ones Travis our producer has said that we're getting a lot of like AI ones. So I just wantan to set the bar. If you're gonna to send us an AI Brendan Carr as a dummy theme song It has to be as good as the Puerto Rico song That's a I don't know if you know how high a bar that is. I'm extraordinarily aware of how high that bar is. Okay Okay, I'm also very very in the market for like in the pop Brend and Car is a done That's very good. We've had a couple of good pop punk ones By the way, do you get the funniest, the funniest turnabout of the Puerto Rico song I've seen is real bands covering it and then saying it's not AI sl anymore. We've like fixed we' fix the moral dilemma. We've reclaimed and all the comments are like, oh, stealing from AI feels great That's so good. That's fantastic. I love that's that is the nature healing right there right What did he do this week, Nili I got two this week. Brendnon was particularly dominant in two different ways. One in sort of the standard way You know, like just dumb and it won in the sort of deeply corrupt Maybe we should all actually move to an island nation kind of way. Cool. So the dumb one, I'm assuming people listening to V our chast are at least lightly aware of the disaster at CBS News in sixty minutes So if you're not totally tracking it, David Elson, came and bought Paramount took control 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 edor in chief of CBS News. She has no experience doing this. We've written about this at length. and she just said about unleashing chaos, in particular at sixty minutes And so Scott Pelly, who' like a very famous veryery legendary anchor correspondence sixty minutes gets into a fight with the new management, sixty minutes with Nick Bilt, the new execive producer. I think both of us know Nick Nick is like a nice guy. likeike 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 a back fooot because he's perceived as a stooge of the Trump administration Elsons. So Scottelly gets really mad at him in a meeting and says, whyy 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 Plly was going to a fire So then Pelly gives an interview with New York Times and says, I didn't think I was going be fired. Like I thought I was keeping this in the family. And I think the question the time is asked was, why didn't you do this behind closed doors And Pelly's response was, I was behind closed doors. It just leaked. Yeah, was in a meeting with my coworkers. I was in my 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 fire all 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 Brendon response to this, he puts on X, one of the reasons Wh why trust in 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 them So I'm just going to point out U the seventy nine year old legendary correspondent at sixty Minutes is not a run of the mill job Yeah. justust isn't, right? Like Actually, Scott Pelly was extraordinarily aware of his role in his tenure and his stature at sixty minutes, and he's the talent a broadcast network. Lesley Stahall has a different relationship to CBS than I don't know, the random PA who just got hired yesterday. likeike, Obviously, like this is just dumb on its face to think that these people have run of the mill jobs. That is just, they're all millionaires that 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 they're reporters. What are you going to do They want to know It's the job. Yeah. It's the job. It's just like take the heat. Yeah don't know I don't to say there's no way to build credibility in his room unless you can answer the questions. And I often do not have good answers to the questions, but at least I'm not even saying I'm good at this I'm just saying I've managed reporters for over a decade and That's the job. Like Brendon doesn't know this. Okay, so that's just dumb on its face We can I just say just a tiny little aside on that front The reaction to the whole Scott Pelly story across different social networks has been so fascinating because they are so cleanly on one side on every single social network. like everybody on Twitter is like Scott Pelly is a lunatic. The old media is bad, screw 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 it is so everyvery network has become itself. Yeah, we just get these moments where it's like you can just see exactly which every social network is. and the Scott Pelly story has been one of them and it's been so funny. Yeah. So first of all, I just want to point out this is because Brendon doesn't even understand how many like the cultures that make the thing whether or not it was appropriate for a Scott Peny 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. L I don't know I haven't ask Scot any of these questions. I just know that The idea that this is a run of the mill job is It' just dumb. Like Anybody with any commommon sense could look at this situation and be like, none of this is about run of the mill jobs, R? Like that's just not how this is going Second, I'm going to point out, Brendan is our nation's communications regulator and he should not any sense be stepping into this dispute? But he's 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. And you know Bndon is loving. 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 leegacy 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 right that is doing some of its f 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, Brendon 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 Brendon doing speech police in a very direct way I would argue that CBS if you look at the ratings of CBS newews, they're in the toilet They're low in ways people other executives the CBS newews are leaking that they think verywise 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 running mill jobs. I'd also point out, by the way, Barry Weiss got herself run out of the New York Times by causing this exact kind of trouble She built her career by trashing the New York Times and then starting a new thing. And now everyone's very offended that Scott Plly may might be doing the same thing Very funny. Okay, so here's the second one, much more important. U SpaceX is an 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 How Brandon Carr and SpaceX are even near each other just befuddles me. Well, so I mean, SpaceX is The only business makes any money is Starlink, which is an ISP Brendon loves an ISP ace FaceX needs spectrum They need waivers on some of the things they want to do. If they're going to launch another fifty billion satellites to be data centers, or they going to figure that out. They will need additional spectrum, additional ground stations. This is all like bread and butter SCC 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? Brendon. 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 those 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 willll link it. But you just look at it and you're like, o, this man is corrupt It is beyond the speech plicing 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 Uon's favor you can say you The pressure should be on Anaz onlyo. L The satellites aren' in orbit, you know like the rockets are blowing up on the launch pad Sir 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 exxactly the wrong outcome. But it will make you on Musk invite Brendan Carr to more rocket launches You might get a f model three out of it, you know, you never know That's the kind of that's the kind of vibe we're in right now. And so well, Lincoln at the 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 dly because you can't even It's like not worth the outrage compared to all the other corruption But it's so corrupt And 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 Uh We're recording this on Thursday afteroon and 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 U. And it feels perfect to me that actually Brendan is just running around enabling Elon Musk to get richer. That's our guy Yeah, that's what he's there for. And you know, he's there for he's just there for. like if you're on telecom, I mean, I didn't even mention this, but like this week he's going around and hes he might undo the e rate program, which resides discounted internet service to poor families because telecoms hate it There's just a very standard kind of I like FCC corruption happening with Brendon 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 brand As long as we you want to come and defend any of this, I don't think you can. I don't I don't think you have the processing ability up there, but maybe with a Starling connect, you get there. You're welcome to come on this show, any show We'll do hot ones together. That would be great I suspect you can take Brennan Carr and Hot onins I like your chances. We'll do hot ones in the woods over Starlink. and that'll be how we get this done again. It'll be amazing. As always, that has been Brendan Carr' Dummy, America's favorite podcast wominen the podcast Landon c is a dy See, I like the 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 headpace. simultaneously's good stuff U Neili, I have a thing I want to recommend to you, but first can we just talk about Anthropics' fable model just for like two minutes? Sure. This is the other kind of story of the week that's been percolating out there andthropic launched this new model called Claud 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 can have it do lots of things. It's this super powerful model, but it won't do certain things People got immediately mad that they' regardless as people are want to do. And so anthropic has like kind of started to already roll them That coursese. Yes U You say, of course, right? Like this to me is just the most obvious AI story ever. L did compomany tries to be safe peopleeople get real pissed when company's product doesn't work because it's trying to be too safe. comppanyies says Great point. Let's make it less safe. And here weait Lake Anthropic is the company that is trading on being the good guy here and is being the one concerned for your well being. And u justust It's just we're like a week away from just mythos being available to him. Well, you know, Anthrapic is like deeply enmeshed in Trump administration chaos. So if the people on X are mad that there are any guardrails at all then Maybe anthropics controversy with the Defense Department being designated as supply chain risk goes sideways in some way. It's cybersecurity initatives, that'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 w, Google B, yeah, that's what we do. It's very weird. And I think one of the funniest part of this is like A big part of what they're trying to do with Fable is prevent it from being distilled there they they clearly think at anthropic that this is like deal model The early impressions of it seem to be very good, that it is in fact hugely powerful. It's it's more expensive, it's more complicated. likeike I think it is going to be very good. 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 Uh 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 Yeah. 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. G. We don't really care what you think Yeah. It just those crapy another shout out to our boy, Kevin Roose. Kevin Roous used to use Crown tagle every week to point out 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 crrown tangle down. Y It literally, I think you can draw that line as straight as that. Good stuff, but In general, I think this fable story is just really interesting because like you haveanthropic, which clearly believes still that this model is too powerful for general consumption. Robert Hart on our team reade a great piece about Uh. The guardrails around biology in particular, like 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. there's like where 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. The thing that drives me crazy is there are other models. You want some weird biology information like Tragedy is right there. It's like, yeah, let's cook some stuff up. L let's go And opening eye is very clear that it believes everybody should have access to all of this information. That's the funny say. It's like actually like in in a weird way AI is the most competitive tech has ever been. Like in a recent memory. It's like, well, if you're mad at and Throb, just I don't know, Jeeus Gemini. it's all good. Everyone's like, this model doesn't do everything every other model does We should yell on X, the everything app and then obviously do our banking it's a weird one. I think We're we're still, 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. L 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 In 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 Mman 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 if how to make money That's amazing R right Neil, what's next lightninging round item I feel like I've talked about like Trump too much for the end this episode. but we can't avoid this one. You mentioned, I think at the top of the show that the Trump phone is like out in the world People at WWC had them. Like a notable virge trader, Chris Welch, who's now Bloomberg has one It's hilarious. He just like did he have one with him? Yeah, he was like at the welcome dinner I was' at the welcome dinner real you had one. I was like, did you show J? I'king about covering WWDC on a Trump phone that is just so delightful to me. It's very good. People have them. And I fix it has one. they've torn it down and it is an HDC U twenty four pro. which is absolutely made in 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 grrift. Obviously this administration is corrupt. Obviously this family is conning you. can't just be It can't just be this simple, can it? I fix it took the board out of a U twenty four pro and swapped it in the Trump phone. Yeah, they were the same phone man. Wea did they really? Yeah They swap the main boards on the phones to prove that they're the same the same time. that's amazing. We're still wait on hours I think Trump Mobble might be mad at us because we calling it out for being fake for so long. I we might be waiting a while. But the Trump phone people are some people have them. I do not think any preordders have shipped outside of the ones that journalists made U But Dom has been told that his is coming. so P presumably we're going rev the Tump phone soon Genuine question All the people who preordered a Trump phone A long time ago How mad 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 HTCU twenty four proro 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. Eespecially when they're preloaded with truth social and one of the weirdest e health apps that has ever existed What is that? It's called like doct integrity. It's like a telemedicine app But I'm confident it's just going to like try to sell you gay market supplements. Like I You know what I mean Yeah, Like Dr. Aug is going to be like, haveave you tried AG one when you open drop phone 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? 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 bucket in a factory? And they said, yeah And that was it fununniest 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 phone Like Marco Rubia. You know he has to wear the shoes Like my boy is gonna to be holding the yellow phone They're all going to have phones that they just use for cabinet meetings that are Trump phones. That absolutely correct. I suspect this will only last a week. Like reality will quickly set in and You know the iPhes will fade back into view. But there's going to be a couple of 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. It's going to be great I'm gonna get one just in case we get to do Brendon Car's a dummy, and then you and I'll both have them on Brend Cars a Dummy.'ll be perfect. 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 andT iPad data plan They have this new thing called the Unlimited dayay passass It's I think at least for now only in the US But for three dollars three, you get twenty four hours of unlimited data No no subscriptions, no contracts. even have to be an A andT customer. Just for three dollars a day, you can get twenty four hours of unlimited data on your iPad. This rules. That's really good. That's the first smart thing AT andT has ever done Yes, and it is like, I I really earnestly believe that the iPad cellular is like a vastly better device than a WiFi 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 Wiifi is like Wonderful That is it is a Terrific and great thing. 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 At three dollars a day, like I'm traveling, I'm just gonna use this today, especially because the iPad also happens to be like a kick ass hotspot. Like this just this is a great thing and everybody should know that it exists. Are they going to give you hotspot data for three bucks a day No, 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 and T is apparently going to be offering more of these kindinds of day plans to more kinds of devices. that 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 This immediately makes the case for always buying the sell one I never want them because I'm like, I'm not going pay this plan. And you know, like the main iPad in our house is Max's iPad or our daughter's iPad. and it leaves the house like five times a year when we go to a trip with her And like I would turn it on for airplane day. and then be done. Perfect example. Yeah I thought everybody should know about that. That's right. You get to go last. What's your last one? I've got like a heartwarming one I I don't know else to say. solar has overtaken coal. in the United States for energy production for the first time. Oh, that is nice. So there's a think tank, energy think tank called Ember And it says solar provided twelve point eight percent of US electricity in may twenty twenty six compared to twelve point two percent 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 solaranels now, so I'm just like solar pilled. this is your doing. We got them. I think a lot of people got solar panels at the end of the tax credits last year becausecause they all expiire. So everyone everyone at my little town but installers were so busy. We actually ran a story. Justine Cama wrot a story for us. tight solar installers were at the end of us year. Like they were so busy. they they werere really worried about the cliff 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 zero dollars We We have paid like thirty five dollars just to like be connected to the Cond grid and whatever fees ConEed can come up with, but our actual kilowatts zero And it's kind of amazing. we have EV like re at this point we're basically being paid to charge our EV at night That's pretty cool Are you? so my my My parents recently got solar to and my dad has really enjoyed I don't know if he still does, but at least for a while I really enjoyed like looking at the numbers opening up the app and seeing just how energy efficient you're being at this particular moment in time. Is that you? A you like constantly chehecking out the energy flow. I mean got I have a lot of thoughts about the Elightened app for Menface. We can talk about that. They just added an AI assistant to it. and it's like, whyy is this here? This making no sense. But yes, I do enjoy looking at it All the time stuff. it tells you nothing You're like, Ohh boy, the refrigerator compressor clicks on about once an hour. what are you gonna do? That that's what they do actually. they keep the food cold That's I love it. Yeah. That is heartwarming. That's a good one. That's a good 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 U And this Sunday's episode, Nei actually features you We're doing the Harmony Universal Rote course, which was you, me, the Virges, John Higgins, and Matt Rogers, the co founder of Nest who I kid you not demanded to be on that episode. Yeah like reached out to us and was like, I will be on that episode with you It was great. We had a blast. It was a really fun episode
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