Rocket

Rocket is a three-person tech-and-culture conversation that works like a group chat with a news brief tucked inside it. Simone de Rochefort, introduced as supervising video producer at Polygon, handles the welcome. Brianna Wu, executive director of Rebellion Pack, and Christina Warren, senior developer advocate at GitHub, complete the panel. The familiarity shows early: in one intro, just getting through everyone's job titles earns a round of mock congratulations. What a listener gets is the news explained in plain terms, followed by an honest reaction to it. The subject range is broad. Apple comes up again and again. There is news that the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 had been pulled, and there is Beeper Mini, the app that reverse-engineered the iMessage protocol so Android users could send encrypted blue iMessages. Games get the same attention. The Insomniac hack draws real frustration on behalf of the people who work there, along with a dry aside about Microsoft's own lawyers uploading the wrong files in open court during an acquisition hearing. Legal fights come up too, including a patient walk through the appeals history of Oracle versus Google, with the speaker openly saying what they do not know. The pacing is brisk and the structure loose. A digression or personal story often comes first, then the prepared summary, with corrections and callbacks along the way. Some of the best stretches are the most specific. In one, a host describes dragging a FaceTime window left, right, up, down and finally onto the floor, and hearing the other person's voice move with it, no lag at all. It works as a gadget report and a comedy bit at once. Serious subjects get real gravity, but the language stays human and direct rather than corporate. The format bends when schedules do. With Brianna at an event in Washington, D.C., and Christina out sick, Simone released an earlier recording, 'Fireside Chat', in which Brianna asks Simone about her own life. Most episodes here sign off the same deadpan way: this episode of Rocket is terminated, terminated, terminated. Rocket is part of the Relay FM network, where paying members get an ad-free show plus a bonus segment. Bonus talk mentioned in these excerpts includes the Grand Theft Auto VI trailer and Caroline Calloway's Vanity Fair profile. One excerpt also mentions the show's announced end after almost nine years with the network and points subscribers toward other shows there. For a place to start, 'How to Spend A Lot Of Money' has the WWDC hardware excitement, 'Turn on Push Notifications' has the Beeper Mini story, and 'Very Large Online Problems' has the Insomniac hack.