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- [00:01]
A
Support for today's show comes from Attio, the AI CRM for modern teams inside startups and major companies. The tech world is obsessed with one thing right now, AI that knows your business. That's what Attio, the AI CRM is built for. Attio instantly builds your CRM with enriched data by connecting to your emails, calls and more. You can also ask AIO to prep for a meeting, spot what's at risk or run research on a prospect. That way you'll know exactly what to focus on next. You can go to attio.com vergecast and you'll get 15% off your first year. That's a T T I O.com vergecast support for the show comes from Ring Peace of mind starts with keeping your home safe, like keeping an eye on packages, visitors and whatever else your Ring system captures. With battery doorbell, you get a clear view of your front door and you can extend that view to your yard with outdoor cam. Plus it has a wide field of view and enhanced video clarity for both day and night. You can also upgrade to 4K cameras and doorbells with retinal vision, which means ultra clear footage and zooming in without losing important details. Your door, your your yard, your home with Ring it's protected shop cameras, doorbells and more. Right now@ring.com Support for this show comes from Klaviyo. Imagine hiring two brilliant employees. The first takes your marketing from idea to full campaign, email, SMS push and the time it takes to describe it. The second handles every customer conversation 24 7, answering questions, recommending products, handling orders both on brand and always. On your next hires, Klaviyo's AI agents get started at K L A V I Y-O.com.
- [02:12]
B
Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Vox Media. At least for a little while longer. I'm your friend David Pearce. Neil Abatel is here.
- [02:21]
C
Hey buddy, what's up?
- [02:22]
B
We haven't seen each other in like forever. Like people think it's a bit when we say we only talk to each other sometimes on the podcast, but sometimes we only talk to each other on the podcast.
- [02:30]
C
It's true. This. This week in particular, I was at IO and you were sick so you were out. Are you feeling better?
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B
I am feeling better. I feel like a person for the first time in like five days, which is very exciting. I got a just horrific stomach thing that made me just delirious through all of Google I o. It's been a strange week. But you were out there. You talked to Sundarp Chai, that's going to be on decoder.
- [02:54]
C
I did, and then I took the red eye home this morning and I have. I'm on Benadryl sleep, so I'm super loopy too. This is going to be a wild episode of this show.
- [03:04]
B
Quite the episode. We have a bunch of stuff to talk about. Jake and Hayden did a great job talking through all of the stuff going on at IO, all the agent stuff, all the AI stuff. Go watch or listen to that if you haven't for a lot of the news. You and I are going mostly talk about search because I think we like to talk about search and the web and what all of this means. And I want to dig in on some of that with you. But first, we have a bunch of, I would call it some personal news stuff to talk about.
- [03:32]
C
No, we don't have any personal news that means things to people.
- [03:35]
B
That's true. We've gotten a lot of questions about some, some corporate goings ons in the last couple of days. Do you want to just talk about what has happened with Vox Media and with us and with the podcast network over the last couple of days?
- [03:47]
C
Yes. And all these names are bad. We make a lot of fun of a lot of companies for having bad names. And our company is not immune to it. There's something about being an executive at a large company that just makes you incapable of naming things other than using the same word over and over again. And Vox Media is absolutely guilty of it. So here's a quick version story. Fifteen years ago, we started a company called Vox Media and it was called Vox Media because when we all left aol, we had actually joined a company called Sports Blogs Inc. SB Nation for a sports platform. And so we launched the Verge. We needed a new parent company name. And I will never forget it. The people of this company voted and they wanted to call it like Super Huge Inc. Our CEO was like, we're super not doing that. And so there's a company called Vox Media and it was just the two brands for a minute. It was just the Virgin Espionation and the third one is Polygon, which I'm unhappy they sold in deeply meaningful ways that all the executives know that I'm deeply unhappy that they sold. And then they launched vox.com and then they bought Eater and they bought New York Magazine. And so like the people who run this company have just been acquiring stuff under this umbrella brand called Vox Media. And none of that has really ever bothered us. And because I have like founder syndrome, I've Basically just ignored them. Like, I don't pay a lot of attention to the thing that is Vox Media. And we don't share a lot of, like, stuff with them. We just don't. We're just our own little thing. Uh, anyhow, I'm saying all that because 15 years later, those same group of executives, Jim Bankoff and all the rest of them, have decided they're going to sell New York Magazine, vox.com In a thing that is confusing everyone, called the Vox Media Podcast Network to James Murdoch, who is like the younger, more liberal son of Rupert Murdoch. There's a whole succession drama, and they're going to go over there and then, because no one is good at names or being clear about what is what, they've also bought the name Vox Media, and they're taking that with them.
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B
Right.
- [05:43]
C
So that is confusing everyone in the deepest way. So they're still our company, the same one that we've had forever. It's, you know, it's selling things to another company. So it's going to receive a check, and then we're just going to continue operating our company the same as ever. And so the amount of nothing changing for the Verge is, like, off the charts. Like, literally nothing is changing for us. We're gonna have to rename our company. So I'm in the market for new names. People want to suggest them. I'm happy to take them.
- [06:13]
B
Can I interest you in Versant? What are your thoughts?
- [06:16]
C
We're just, like, not going to do that. None of that's going to happen. I will move.
- [06:20]
B
What if we come up with an abbreviation that starts with Ms. And then ends in a bunch of nonsense?
- [06:25]
C
So that's what's happening. It's like, James Murrac bought a bunch of stuff from our company, including the name, which is hilarious. Some of our executives are going to go to that company. Some of them are going to stay at this company. But the. Like, the Verge is staying exactly the same. The thing that is confusing everyone is that they bought this thing called the Vox Media Podcast Network, which David and I have to say in the credits of our shows all the time. The Vox Media Podcast Network does not own our podcast feeds. It does not run our podcasts. It does not have editorial oversight into us. It is an ad sales network. So it has a bunch of people that it works with, including Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway and Maria Sharapova and Brene Brown and Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bert. Like, it just has this, like, cast of characters who all basically all own their own feeds and it bundles them all up. Marques Brownlee, Waveform, their client of the Vox Media Podcast Network, but they own their feed. That's their product. And all the MPN does is it bundles all that inventory up and it goes out in the world and it sells ads for us. And that has always been the case. And so they're, they're just our vendor now. And that's fine. Like, I, I don't, as you all know, I do not think about the ads. I don't read the ads. So, like, I, I don't have any particular feelings about that. Because it is called the Vox Media Podcast Network and because we say we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in an effort to communicate to listeners that if they would like to buy ads, that's who you should talk to. People think that something is happening to us, but literally nothing is happening to us.
- [07:55]
B
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, and I think the, the way I have explained it to a couple of people is, is essentially just that. It is, it is not their podcast, it is our podcast. Right? Like, they, they took a. They. They took the people who sell the ads for our podcasts, and, and that is now part of a different company. And what that will mean down the road, I have absolutely no idea and plan to spend absolutely no time. Everything.
- [08:18]
C
Imagine what I'm going to be like when I'm your client instead of your
- [08:21]
B
coworker and genuine nightmare. Having been your coworker nightmare.
- [08:27]
C
I'm just saying, like, that's the relationship that's going to change. And I'm honestly, I'm excited about some of that stuff. Like, it has been a big, unwieldy company for a minute. It does a lot of things. It pulls in a lot of directions. The company that we will run, that is legitimately the same company they just bought. The name is one. It's going to be fine. It's like a healthy company with a healthy amount of revenue. We're going to be fine. And we're a bigger, more important part of it now. Right? So it's like smaller, more focused, and I'm excited about smaller, more focused in real ways.
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B
Yeah, walk me through that just a little bit, because I think the most common question we've both gotten in the last 36 hours has been something to the effect of, is this the beginning of something terrifying for the Verge? Right. Like, there's been actually a really sort of lovely, overwhelming bit of support from people being like, don't let this kill the Verge. Like, oh, God, if this, if this kills the Verge. And like, I want to make everyone feel better that this is not killing the Verge. There are no bad signs for the Verge here. But I do want you to just sort of briefly explain what this actually looks like in your head right now for the sort of next turn for us. If anything, maybe literally nothing changes and that's fine. But, like, what does this mean for the Verge in your mind as we go forward now?
- [09:46]
C
So let me, let me just pull apart two aspects of the Verge. There's the newsroom, right? The reporters and editors who wake up every day and like, write and edit and report the news. Nothing is going to change for them. Maybe, like some software licenses will change, right? Because the company is deciding who gets what software license.
- [10:04]
B
Stop using airtable and David can finally be happy.
- [10:07]
C
You see what I mean? Like that, like that kind of corporate stuff will change, but the actual work will not change our relationship to you. The audience will not change. But the. We're shipping dark mode, you know, it's like we're, we're just going to keep trucking along on the corporate side. Yeah, a bunch of stuff will change. Like, like to. These companies are pulling themselves apart. They're going to have to duplicate services in a lot of ways and figure out who gets what. And the people that go over, like the lawyers and accountants that go to one company or the other, the other, the other company will have to rebuild those competencies, right? Like just corporate stuff. I don't expect that to affect how we do anything. And maybe the simplest way of saying this is we are not the ones who got bought fair. We're the ones receiving the money, right? Like there was a purchase, right?
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B
We're also not the ones being left behind, right? Like, it's important to say that is not the thing that is happening here. The company is not leaving and just sort of abandoning us back here. That's not at all what's going on here.
- [11:04]
C
I'm honestly, I'm like, see you later. I don't know what else to say about it. Like, I don't think about that. I don't think about those things. I do not spend a one minute of my. I say this to our staff all the time. I, I don't care. Like, I don't buy, Like, I'm excited to run a, a smaller, more focused company that can be more aggressive. And that is what I intend to do. Now, if some other billionaire shows up and is like, what we're going to do is AI generated slop. Like, one. I will fight them to the death. I don't think that's going to happen. But, like, I. That's, like, who knows, right? Like, Jeff Bezos could be like, well, I ruined the Washington Post. Now I'm going to ruin the Verge. Like, sure, right? Like, anything is possible. But the thing that's visible to me from where I sit today is we're going to operate the Verge tomorrow exactly the same as we did yesterday.
- [11:50]
B
I just. I just want to say that if Jeff Bezos tries to turn the Verge cast into whatever that weird new Washington Post opinions podcast, he's going to make
- [11:57]
C
us do to our faces, whatever he did to his face, that's the only way I will accept any editorial oversight of the Verge. If you make my face look like
- [12:06]
B
Jeff Bezos, my price for that is so much lower than you think it is.
- [12:10]
C
We're going to give you the little necklace.
- [12:13]
B
He's got a good beard. I'll give that to Bezos. He's got a good beard game.
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C
Yeah, I would just say, look, people are. Change makes people nervous, but in there, like, we have to figure out who gets the, like, Google Docs logins. Like, there's, like, stuff we have to do, but the actual, like, work it. Zero. Zero changes to what we do every day, and zero changes to the show. And maybe one day, the people who sell our ads will have to present a deck to me about why they're good at selling ads, which I think will be very funny.
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B
Yeah, fair enough. And actually, to your point about changing on the show, we have, I would say, some substantially more fun news about changes we're making to this show, which is that we're kind of completely changing the first cast. This is, like, weird completely, but, like,
- [12:59]
C
in a fun way, in a cool
- [13:01]
B
way that we wanted to do and have been doing for a long time. And it is actually in no single way about this, very annoyingly timed news for this particular way. Um, so starting on June 1st, which is, like, not next week, but the Monday following, the Vergecast is becoming a daily podcast. We're gonna start putting out episodes every day, Monday through Friday. Um, we've been talking about this a lot, and I would say the goal is to make the show sort of feel the same, but make more sense. And I actually think in a daily way, we're gonna be able to do a lot more of that. Uh, I don't know. What. What are you excited about about Daily Vergecast? I have a lot of thoughts about this But I know you. You were as early as I was in thinking this is a good idea that we should do.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Why are you psyched about daily podcasts?
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C
There's so much news. That's what I got for you. There's so much news and we have so many listeners who constantly tell us that we should just do it one, like six hour show every week, which we should not do. Like, we will not survive if we do that. It's actually easier to make a little bit of show every day. So we're not going to make like two hour Vergecasts every day. We're going to. I think David's plan is to make tighter, more focused stories every day that you can listen to. And then. Can I. Can I say that? Can I say the most exciting thing, please? We're going to reheat 90 seconds on the Verge. Yeah, we are. Is the top of the new daily vergecast, which is a beloved product that everyone has wanted us to bring back. So we're going to have 90 seconds of verge, which is like news of the day. Obviously we're going to participate in Eclipse economy, so that's going to go out into the world as Eclipse and then we'll have a little story we can tell you every day. And there's so much that even when we make the rundowns for this episode or when David makes the rundown for the other, we just leave so much stuff that is interesting and important. We just leave it out. So I have always been like, we just need to make more show. Like, we have to make more of this because we're not covering everything we can cover. We're not talking about all the things we can talk about. We don't have enough space for our staff to show up on these shows. And I'm really excited that the Daily Broadcast will let you hear from more of our team. And then I'm obviously just thrilled to bring back 90, which is going to be the most fun.
- [15:04]
B
It's going to be great. I am excited about it and I think it's been really funny planning all this out while also becoming more and more ruthless about how we think about distribution around the entire Internet. Because on the one hand, like this, I started from the exact same place that you did, right? Like, this lets us do more stories. It lets us do one story a day. That which is just a thing, I think makes more sense. Like having a structure that is like, here is what you have come to experience. You are going to experience that thing and then you're going to leave. It's like, that's a good user experience. Whereas what we do with a lot of our shows is just like, here's a grab bag of stuff. Are you into any of this? And that's like, I think one reason people want chapters from us and have wanted them from us for so long is that even. Even the way that we have to write titles for the show makes it hard sometimes to know what you're going to get and when. And doing it this way is just going to give us so much more transparency. So, like, one way to think about a lot of this show is we're just going to take the Tuesday episode and pull it apart into three different parts, right? Which gives us a little bit of room to expand on each one so that the episodes don't get insane and we don't have to worry about sort of the packaging of things. Things can just be what they are. But also, like, as somebody who writes most of our headlines, can I tell you how happy I am to only have to make a headline make sense for one thing every day instead of having to be like, what is the underlying theme between these two things that have nothing to do with each other? And how do I tell you what this is going to be on YouTube and how do we make a thumbnail for it? And how do we, like, explain this to our audience?
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C
The YouTube of it is super interesting because YouTube, you know, you have to. You have to play to the algorithm. You have to play the game by the rules of the field or whatever, whatever this metaphor is. That's. That's the Benadryl talking right there. YouTube does not want you to, like, put a long list in a headline.
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B
Correct?
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C
They want you to say one thing like, exclusive Sundarpachai explodes, Watch David get destroyed, whatever. And so that's going to be every
- [17:03]
B
episode of the first cast from now on.
- [17:06]
C
And then you can load up a bunch of Options and then YouTube will A B test them for you and pick one. And often, I think even on just the last episode that we did together, it was like, are we going to pick the Xbox News or the Apple news? And the algorithm picked one. And like, some of the comments, like, I wish I had known that the Apple thing was in here. And like, you can just see the fight that you were having with the platforms themselves about how to just how to tell stories in the way that we want to tell stories. So pulling things apart, I think will. I don't really care if that's easier for the YouTube algorithm. I think it will be better for the audiences. Like, we'll be able to just communicate what you're going to get in a more direct way.
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D
Yeah.
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B
And same in podcast feeds. Right. Like, I think we hear from people all the time who spend a lot of time in our library, which is kind of wild. The idea that anyone is listening to old episodes of the Vergecast just sort of horrifies me to my core. But also, like, I love you and thank you for doing that, but it's going to make it easier for us to communicate what you're about to get. Right. And if you're somebody who just dips in for certain things and doesn't. I think this is all over our website right now. Like, one of the reasons we did follow features and one of the reasons we've done some of the parceling out of different pieces of the site is so that, like, if you don't want to see Elon Musk, you shouldn't have to. Right. And if you come for an episode of the podcast that we don't tell you is about Elon Musk, and then it's half about Elon Musk, that's actually a crappy experience. And this is just going to let us make the show sort of each individual part feel whole and bigger and complete. And also we're going to get to tell you about it and show it to you in a way that makes much more sense. I'm very excited about it.
- [18:36]
C
And also, we get to do 90 seconds on the verdict, and we get
- [18:38]
B
to do 90 seconds on the version. And selfishly, it means I get to do it most days, which I'm very excited about. It's just. I went back and watched a bunch of old episodes of 90 seconds. We were all just completely out of our mind.
- [18:49]
C
The idea that we did that with the people that we did it with, and that this, again, we were younger, most of us were not married, and none of us had children. That's the only way I can explain how we ran a startup the way we ran a startup.
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B
But we also. These were like the halcyon days of VC money. So we had a bunch of camera equipment we probably didn't need, and we were just like, look, this makes the camera go up and down. What if we overuse that in every single episode of many seconds?
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C
We lit up that boom arm all the time. All the time.
- [19:15]
B
It was great. Um, but anyway, we. We. I bring this up largely because we have, what, 10 days from when you might be hearing or seeing this to when we launched this thing and I want to hear all of your thoughts and all of your feedback. Um, if you hate the idea of us doing a daily per podcast, I'm really sorry. But I also would love to hear why. So we can maybe fix that for you. Uh, if you have thoughts about things that we should do or we want to do a lot more, like games and gimmicks. One of the things I've been writing down is TikTok games to make me lai play on this episode. Um, one thing we should also say is that this episode, the Friday episode, where it's just you and me talking about the news of the week, it will probably get a little shorter because we're just going to do more of the stuff over the course of the week. So you and I will have, like, less new things to talk about every week. But the structure of this episode is not going to change. Like, this is the only time we talk to each other and we need to do this.
- [20:06]
C
I actually refuse to talk to David that side of the show.
- [20:10]
B
But yeah. Send us all of your feedback. Call the hotline 866- Verge-11. Send us an email vercastheb.com I wanna hear all of your thoughts, all of your ideas, all of your feedback. The Daily show launches 61 June 1. It's the first time I've said it out loud. I've only seen it written down as 6:1. So that's just what it is in my head. I could not be more excited about it. I think it's gonna be awesome.
- [20:29]
C
Yeah. And just to reinforce the point, it is just all systems go here. Yeah, like, whatever. Corporate Mac and I don't again, bye. Like, we're just doing our thing.
- [20:38]
B
We're just doing stuff.
- [20:38]
C
And Vergecast Daily is a thing we've been working on for a long time. We're very excited about it.
- [20:41]
B
And it's still just called the Vergecast. This is the thing we're all having to break is we've been calling it Vergecast Daily for a long time because that's different from the Vergecast we've been making, but it's still just the Vergecast. Yeah, it's all the one show. We're going to figure it out together. It's going to be great. All right, let's take a quick, quick break and then come back and get into some actual news here. We'll be right back.
- [21:01]
A
Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question comes with a clean, easy answer. And the ones that actually matter tend to come with a mix of sparks and second guessing, aha moments and quiet reflection. So when you're in the middle of something like that, it helps to have a sounding board to kick ideas off and dig into what's really going on underneath. That's where Claude comes in. Claude 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, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic web search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes for problems worth solving. Get started with Claude today at Claude AI Vergecast. That's Claude AI Vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude AI Vergecast Support for this show comes from Klaviyo. There are only so many hours in a day, and Klaviyo's two powerful AI agents can make sure your team spends them on big things. The first Klaviyo AI agent turns your marketing ideas into reality instantly. Describe what you want a holiday campaign, a VIP RE engagement series, and Klaviyo builds it instantly. Email, SMS and push all coordinated on brand grounded in 14 years of Klaviyo marketing data. Nothing goes live without your say so. The other Klaviyo 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. Support that never sleeps. Join more than 193,000 brands, including Away Patrick TA and Dollar Shave Club already growing with Klaviyo. The autonomous B2C CRM. Get started at k L-A-V-I-Y-O.com Support for the show comes from Rippling. Nowadays, every business app claims to be all in one, but for some reason you're still bouncing between a handful of platforms to keep things running. With Rippling, you can finally downsize to one platform that actually does it all. Rippling is the unified platform for global hr, payroll, IT and finance. Workflows that normally bounce across several different tools and departments. All just happen in one place automatically. Let's say you have an employee getting promoted. Rippling can update their payroll taxes, manage any new app permissions, ship them any new devices, issue a new corporate card, and assign trainings all in one platform without the fuss of dealing with 10 different logins to accomplish a short list of tasks. So if you or your company want to run the backbone of your business on one unified platform with people at the center, head to rippling.com verge and sign up today. That's R I P P L-I N G.com verge to sign.
- [24:31]
B
All right, we're back. Let's talk Google I o. Nilay, you were there. I. I missed this whole experience. So, like, give me the. Give me the vibe check. How were things at at Shoreline this year at Google I o?
- [24:42]
C
They were very hot. It was like 85 degrees.
- [24:45]
B
I made a video and that's a sunny place.
- [24:47]
C
It's sunny. You. We were. Well, it was.
- [24:50]
B
It was hot.
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C
Like, there was a lot of, like, I'm gonna do this AI demo just to be in the air conditioning. I made a social video without. When I was not wearing a jacket for like, in any video ever, maybe. And a lot of people were like, mila is hot. And I sent all those comments to my wife immediately. So thank you to Google.
- [25:06]
B
You did look good in that video. It was just a fact.
- [25:09]
C
Fully the camera angle, also the sun glinting off my eyes again. I said, just if you want to say I look hot in Instagram comments, it. It hasn't worked yet on Becky, but I'm. They're going straight to her.
- [25:21]
B
If you want to guarantee Nilai will read your comment 12 times, that's how to do it.
- [25:25]
C
Her text. I sent her the screenshot of the first one and we're getting like a new air conditioner. And her entire respons was to send me a picture of the wiring to the new air conditioner. I was like, come on, man, that sucks. Anyway, Google I O was great. It was just always fun to see everybody. I'll just describe the narrative of what we heard in this keynote, which is, okay, it's not AI anymore. It's agents. We're putting agents everywhere. We have a new model called Omni, which is very powerful. It has some world model characteristics. It can simulate physics so it can make better videos because it understands physics. 3.5 Flash is their new, faster model of. It's cheaper to run. It's more performant and more powerful than some of the pro models of the past. Google's just very happy about where it's taking its models. And then it is agents everywhere. That is their whole idea, is that now Google can take action on your behalf across a number of products, across a number of services. How that will come together is, I would not say, a coherent story for Them in, like the classic Google sense.
- [26:28]
B
Yeah, that's, that's Google.
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C
And then the changes to search are like, vast.
- [26:34]
B
Yeah.
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C
And you can see that actually the future of search, if, you know, if we just keep linearly progressing, is that it becomes the agent platform, so they change the search box. It's now called intelligent search. It's bigger, it's multimodal. You can put photos in there, it can generate stuff at you, it can generate apps at you, which we should talk about. And you can see how intelligent search is going to connect, right, to what's called Gemini Spark, which is their agent in the cloud. And you're going to ask it some stuff and it's going to deliver you some information, but it might also say, hey, do you want me to just do that for you? And the agent will run away and do that. And that is all monumentally important for the future of the web. But Google seems very committed to all of it. Then the last piece of this. So I've now described some very tactical, very tangible things like here's these products and here's how they work. And at the very end of it, Dennis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, came out and was like, with Google's power and skill, we will get to AGI and we will look back on this time as standing on the foothills of the Singularity. And he was like, goodbye, everybody. And it was. That was like the, the most jarring part of IO, like, very tactical announcements, very product focused. They announced something called the Universal Commerce Protocol. And like, Walmart's going to use that so that agents can shop for you. Right. Like, whatever. And then at the end, it's like, the Singularity is also here.
- [27:57]
B
Yeah. I'm curious for your reaction to that, because the thing that is most fascinating about that to me is that Demis Hassabis is the one who said it. And I think for a long time, Demis has been one of the most sort of calculatedly reasonable people talking about how big and huge AI is going to be. He's not one of the people talking about universal basic income. He's not one of the people saying it's going to, you know, take away everybody's jobs in two years. He just won a Nobel Prize for some of the work he's done in AI. He is a person with as many sort of receipts on the work that they've done and also who has done, I would say, a reasonably good job of explaining what this stuff is and is not for a long time. So for him to say that was shocking to me. Like, was it, was it in the moment, bizarre? Like, if Sam Altman had said that, you'd have been like, whatever, Sam, you wrote that on your blog 45 times. But for Demis Hasabis to close Google, I o by saying like, what up? Singularity is just wild.
- [28:55]
C
Like, it was wild in the juxtaposition. Has Demis Hasabis always believed that he's working in AGI? Yes, sure. We just saw in the Musk Feltman trial. Everyone in this industry from the top down is always talking about Google and Demis beating them to AGI. Like, he's just a specter that looms over this industry. It's obvious that this is what he's working on. I think that the juxtaposition that made it stand out for me was we just spent like two hours of Google launching products, like, very tangible, pretty small in the scheme of things. Products that build on a lot of these capabilities in huge ways. But when you search Google for what are some great restaurants in Tuscany and it builds you an app that's like, I made a schedule for you for the weekend. You're not like, AGI is here. Do you know what I mean? Like, the products we saw were meaningful, interesting improvements to the existing products because of AI and what you can do with it. And then, you know, and then because it's Google and they always have to talk about the revenue, we saw a bunch of stuff about shopping and then, then at the very end, he was like, we're going to cure all disease with the power of AlphaFold. And then it's singularity is here. That to me is like, I think, I think they did it that way as a reminder of what the ultimate ambition is.
- [30:08]
B
Right, Right.
- [30:09]
C
And the, the products we're seeing, and I talked to sooner about this, the products we're seeing are still not, they're not going to prove that out to anyone. That's the gap they have to close.
- [30:19]
B
Right.
- [30:20]
C
If you're like, everyone, like I asked, you know, why, you know, people hate AI and we talked about it for a little bit and he's like, it's not just a marketing problem. Which I think was an important. I asked him directly and he, he was like, this is what I'm saying. It's not a marketing problem. Like, we have to communicate all the value and we have to show that we're going to make people's lives better. And some of that is, yeah, when you use Gemini Spark, it can run around and figure out how to do a block party for you, which is their big example. And I want to talk about that because it was very funny in very specific ways. But also we're going to cure all disease. And also we've got our eyes in the big prize and there's some amount of. You've got to show more of an intermediate step. We're going to make productivity a little bit faster with agents. And then there's the singularity. And like, what is the thing in the middle that actually shows us that we're almost there? Yeah.
- [31:10]
B
Step one, a daily briefing in the Gemini app. Step two, cure all disease.
- [31:13]
C
That's kind of what I'm getting at.
- [31:15]
B
Yeah.
- [31:16]
C
So that was. The vibe was like, well, boy, Google's doing a lot of stuff. Everything is called Gemini. So it's hard to even tell them all apart in the classic big company naming problem scheme. But if you look at all the stuff, you're like, oh, eventually this will all come together right. In the future of Google as an interface. Looks like an agent of some kind.
- [31:37]
B
Yeah, yeah. And you, you get the sense, I mean, I think this is where it goes back to the, the search box thing, right. That the, the, like Google is redoing. The search box thing, I think, has been slightly overblown. They're basically, it's like it's getting slightly bigger and you can add more stuff to it. But fundamentally, Google has not changed what the thing looks like when you go to google.com in a long time. So just the sheer fact that that is changing at all is really meaningful. And I think I spent some time with Liz Reid who runs Search, and Josh Woodward who runs Gemini Ahead of IO and basically just kept trying to get them to explain where one ends and the other begins. And their answer was essentially, people come to us for different things now. And I think they. Everyone at Google seems to see a world in which these things begin to converge on one another. And I think if you're Google, what you are correctly realizing is, oh, we own the search box, which is the single most valuable piece of real estate on the Internet. We have to do all of this there, right? Like, Gemini is growing really fast, doing really well. People are downloading the app, people like it, it's going fine. The Google search box is still the thing. And you really get the sense that they're building more and more stuff into that, working their way back to some of this Gemini stuff. And just the thing that Google search is becoming to me is super fascinating. Right. Because the sense that I got from this is Google has figured out how it's going to make money from AI in search, which is why you mentioned the universal AI cart thing where you can shop all over the Internet with your agents and essentially Google will manage all of the shopping aspects of it. Do you know what's really great for Google when it does that? Is it gets to make money during that. Like, everything on the Internet is. Payment processing is like not a wrong way to think about the business of the Internet. And that's a, that's a good thing for Google to do. It is a thing that will work for Google as a business. It's a thing that's going to make a lot of agentic stuff easier. Google's also building a lot of the tech that people are going to use to run their agents. Like, you can just see how it all accrues back to Google makes money even in a world where the search business goes down. I don't think they're counting on that happening tomorrow. And I suspect they're counting on a really big AI ad world coming too. But like, you get the sense Google thinks they know how to make this turn now, which I don't think they knew even a year ago.
- [33:56]
C
I think there's a couple of things at play there. One, the other way they're going to make money is by charging you lots of money to use this stuff.
- [34:05]
B
Yes, true.
- [34:05]
C
Like, most of these features are in paid versions of Gemini and you can pay anywhere from, what was it, 20 bucks to 200 bucks a month to use this stuff. And the idea that Google should be a paid product in this way is just really interesting. Right. Like, this is the most look at these cool new features we can give you in Google Search if you pay us money that I think we've ever seen.
- [34:25]
B
Yeah.
- [34:26]
C
So that's just really interesting.
- [34:27]
B
Like, Google's gotta be so thrilled. Like, at some point we need to go do a whole retrospective on OpenAI randomly deciding to charge $20 a month for ChatGPT and the fact that that like changed the economy forever. Like it's. That is what happened. But. Sorry, keep going.
- [34:42]
C
Well, there's. I just like the idea that Google is going to make money by charging you a lot of money for a thing that has been free for a long time is fascinating. Right. Like, and I don't think anybody knows the rates, which is why it's from 2 to 20 to $200. Like, there's just a huge amount of rate variability and pricing pressure that they're going to sort out. The other piece is I think they are less worried about sending traffic to the web at large than ever before.
- [35:10]
B
Oh, clearly.
- [35:11]
C
I think they're over it. And they, you know, when they first rolled out AI overviews, there was like outcry, you know, like uproar, like, we did it. Like I coined the term Google Zero that everyone uses now. All the, literally every publishing CEO, every media CEO is running around being like Google Zero. Like Roger lynch, the CEO of Conde Nasty, is on TVPN being like our, we, we model our company at zero Google traffic now. And I'm like, oh, that's. You're saying zero because of me. Like, I know what's happening and you
- [35:38]
B
know, what I really respect is that you don't get mad that you don't get credit.
- [35:41]
C
I should, I should charge these people license. It's 20 bucks a month to say Google zero.
- [35:45]
B
You should trademark it.
- [35:46]
C
But like, you know, the reason I'm, I should charge all the AI front, the Frontier goes for training on Google 0. The reason I bring it up is like, that was not real, right? It was, it was a danger and everyone was guarded against the danger and now it's real. And like all the digital media companies are talking about Google Zero and Google itself is like, all right, like you got mad at us. There's a lawsuit in the UK where we lit. They Google literally referred to publishers as free riders on Google search because the publishers want to be able to opt into search and opt out of training and Google won't let them. And like that's a lawsuit. They're training on YouTube videos. They're not gonna let creators opt out of training on YouTube videos. Like, there's a lot there and I think Google has decided that they're over it. Like, do you know what I mean? Like in a real way, the traffic is zero. They're sending zero traffic to big publishers now. They get to do the next thing and you know, they will tell you, I'm sure Liz said this to you, that in many ways I think the web is bigger and more vibrant than before and people are doing longer and more in depth searches and to validate like their data shows that when people at the end of AI mode, they actually go read the original sources to validate.
- [36:58]
B
Right?
- [36:58]
C
And this is the dynamic that they think they're in is Google.
- [37:00]
B
Well, no, can I, can I frame that slightly differently? Because I actually, Liz Reed said this to me in our conversation. I've been thinking about it ever since that Google's stance seems to be that we are going to send vastly less traffic, but the traffic we're going to send you is going to be so good that like if you're a commerce site, you're going to get fewer people, but you're also going to get fewer sort of passersby that by the time somebody makes it to your website, their likelihood of buying from you is going to be so high that you're going to make up for it with traffic quality over traffic quantity. And I think across a huge spectrum that is the case. Google is going to make to people that yes, we're sending fewer people to you, but the people we're sending to you are going to be there so much more on purpose that it's going to be worth it. And I think that that is an unbelievably generous read both of Google's intentions and of society. But it is a fascinating thing. And even if that comes true exactly the way as Google sees it, it will still change the way the web works in its entirety forever and ever.
- [38:00]
C
My criticism of almost every Google search demo for the past five years has been they cannot see beyond ending every single interaction with a transaction, right? Every Google Search summit, you go back and look and they're like, we gotta buy shoes and then you buy something. And the idea that you're gonna get fewer drive by visitors but more of them are gonna buy shoes is one view of the web, right? This, the web is for shopping. The idea that the web is for information required. All that scale, right? Like the programmatic ad business that propped the whole web up required Google to send floods of traffic to all kinds of people. All that's gone, like straightforwardly gone. The affiliate, you know, the affiliate business, like the wirecutter, like we have it. Like we um, we've talked about Google Zero with those small, we did Air Purifier. So there's like Air purifier blogs that just like got wiped out because Google's just like buy this one and now you're not going to the dedicated Air Purifier review company that's going to sell you the best one, right?
- [38:54]
B
And even if Google is trying to do that, that assumes that Google is exceptionally good at only identifying really great content and really great users to match the two together. And Google is demonstrably not good at that.
- [39:05]
C
Over the years and I have a, you know, over time I've, I've had a lot of feelings about that. Like one, Google just changed the rules of the game on a lot of companies, on a lot of People.
- [39:16]
B
Yep. Right.
- [39:17]
C
And on. On the audience. Like, Google users are getting measurably different Google experiences now.
- [39:22]
B
Yeah.
- [39:23]
C
One of the things I asked Sundar, and I won't give away his answer, but the idea that you and I are going to get different sort of infinitely personalized answers to different search queries because Gemini might make you a different search results page than me with different answers in it or even different interactivity because it's going to make you a different app than it will make for me is kind of wild.
- [39:44]
B
Right?
- [39:44]
C
Like, Google search has been a universal source of truth for a lot of people in a way that no other platform company has even cared about for years. But, like, you can Google it and the answers will be pretty much the same for you and me is, like, pretty foundational.
- [39:59]
B
Yeah.
- [39:59]
C
And now it's like, nope. Like, it's just your. It's you and your agent, like, having your own little world. And, like, what's that going to be like? So there it beyond traffic and money. And, you know, I think digital media companies are all pretty dumb. Like, they. I've been saying google zero for years and years and years. Like, now they're all saying, it's like, did you make any plans? Are you ready for this? Because it was always happening. It was. It was never going to not happen. So, like, does Google owe them the traffic? I don't know. But they did change the terms of the deal. They did weather the storm of introducing AI overviews and then AI mode. And now I think they're over it. And their position is, yeah, we'll send some traffic to you. And it's at the last step when people want to buy the shoes, that's the traffic you're going to get, and you have to be happy with that. And then for, like, us people who just use Google, the step to, oh, this is an agent now, I'm not using the web. Google is going to use the web for me, and I'm going to just use this interface. It's right there. Like, we're. It's so close. And on the one hand, it's kind of exciting, right? Like, that is the next version of an interface. It's the next version of an, like, an interactive assistant that everyone's been talking about for years and years and years, and Google's poised to do it. And then it's also like, oh, but this is going to change how I get information. Like, my list of primary sources that I can go evaluate and look at that might just be gone. There might not be another search engine like that ever.
- [41:27]
B
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think Google, like everybody else, is one really important step away from pulling that off, which is that nobody seems to know how that thing works or what it looks like. This was sort of all over IO as Google is. They launched. They launched widgets and they launched super widgets and they have this thing called generative, a generative ui and they have the new thing that's like Google alerts but AI generated. So when you. You tell it to sort of monitor something for you and it'll tell you when things update, that I actually think is going to be really useful to a lot of people. Like tell me when XYZ happens and it just will. Is actually like a very cool Google search feature. But there's this thing that Google is trying to create that is not quite an app and it's not quite a page of search results, but it's somewhere. It's. It's sort of a. It's like a living, breathing organism of something that is like permanent but also changing and acting on your behalf. And it's like, what is an agent supposed to make for you? Is a question no one has answered. And everyone is desperately trying to figure out. Right. Because it's like, is. Is what's supposed to happen that I tell you what I want and then at the end you show me the Amazon order page. Sure. That solves one. One kind of problem. But it's also trying to figure out all these different ways to keep you in the loop, like booting up a virtual machine inside of your chatgpt chat. Ain't it like that? I know for sure, but. And I was talking to Liz and Josh about this too, and they're still very much trying to figure this out. Like, what is this thing that it's supposed to be? Because I think from a pure user perspective, the idea of. Are 10 blue links the best we can do for you when you ask for some information? The answer is no. Right. Like, I think Google is correct about that. For most of the time, when I want to know the stock price of the stuff in my portfolio, 10 Links is the wrong answer. Google can do better than that. And I think Google is correct to have pushed to do better than that. There are lots of downstream effects to that that I think are complicated and messy. But if you just purely look at it from like, what is the best user experience in this moment? Google is pushing in a lot of good user forward directions here. Yeah, but the question is, what is the Thing that I want when I ask those questions, no one knows, including Google. And so I think the reason a lot of this looks like mess to me is just that no one has solved this sort of basic, primitive question of what is this new interface? It's not chat, it's not a page of links, it's not charts, it's. It's not spreadsheets. It's something new. And no one has even begun to crack it, as far as I can tell.
- [44:09]
C
And I think that's why they're doing it in like, three different places.
- [44:12]
B
Yeah.
- [44:13]
C
Because you can see, like, oh, these should all come together, right? Search and Spark, which is the agent platform in the cloud. And then Canvas, which is the thing that builds you an app. Like, those things should get a lot closer together and then form more like, what does Voltron look like? Does it have a mustache? That's like, the question you're asking, what
- [44:32]
B
does Voltron look like? Is very good.
- [44:34]
C
Yeah, Like, Canvas is really interesting. The thing that makes you apps. And all of the demos are like, I'm going on vacation. I want to eat at these kinds of restaurants. I've got these kinds of days. And then it makes you a trip planner. Right? And it's like, here are your time slots. Here are the choices in these time slots. Like, push the button and then you'll make all of your picks and you'll have it. And so, you know, like, at the demo, it's these poor people. Like, I asked so many questions, and eventually they. They brought me one of the PMs and one of the senior engineers who had built the whole thing to answer my questions. Cause I have so many questions.
- [45:10]
B
Like, the wizards behind the curtain came out to talk to you.
- [45:12]
C
It was super fun to talk to them right there. These are problems of first impression in software and computers. Like, you are going to say that you want to go on a vacation and the computer is going to respond to you by making you an app is not a thing that has happened before.
- [45:28]
B
Right, right.
- [45:29]
C
Like, kind of no matter how you feel about AI, you're like, that has never happened before. That is super interesting. So I'm looking at this app and you know, in. In the demo, you can watch it. In the keynote, it was the same kind of demo that I got. You can watch it, write the code. And I'm like, first of all, that is insane. Like, there's no way that we're making the app, like from scratch every time. Like, that can't be how we're doing it. And Then you look at the app and it's got like heart icons in the thing so you can say favorites and like it's got all these app ideas like you would make if you're. And I was like, does it know about the heart? Like, did it just decide that there should be heart icons here? Where do they go? Like, where's the data stored if I want to share this planner or someone else? Like it's an app. Like there's all kinds of questions you, you can just get to by looking at it. And one of the most interesting things that they talked to me about was the idea that there's only so many categories of apps that are appropriate. Everyone asks for planners and fitness trackers and food trackers. Basically all just trackers and lists, right? And I'm all just like pounding the table about software brain and you're turning everyone into software. And then here's the thing that makes everything in this software and they're like, yeah, we're not actually in the end going to custom write everybody different apps. We know that people asking for vacations are going to want a vacation app and we will have one and we will tailor it to you on the front end and that's just a bunch of HTML CSS and you can use it. And then if the next person asks for one, we're not going to code it from scratch again. We're going to like use the template again and make it a little bit customized for you. And yes, there will be a long tail. They told me that like lots of people make video games in this thing in their testing, which is super interesting. But like that long tail is eventually they will see the patterns in the long tail and they'll templatize those too.
- [47:18]
B
That's really interesting. Right?
- [47:19]
C
So like here's this like fascinating Google dynamic where they're going to use the AI to let you have like an infinite canvas of app development as the response to searches. But also they have so much scale that they can see the most popular kinds of apps that need to be made and they're just going to pre make them for you. And then yes, you can adjust, you can like vibe code the UI but like the logic of the app and how it works and like what is the best practice for a trip planner app? Like that will just exist. And I. That is again in software, like I cannot think of anything that has ever looked like that. Like maybe like you could buy hypercard stacks on 3.5 inch floppy.
- [47:59]
B
Well, weirdly the, the analog that comes to mind for me is like Microsoft Word templates where it's like clippy pops up and it's like, it looks like you're writing a resume. It's like, we're almost there again. And I think that actually strikes me as exactly the right approach rather than reinventing the wheel every single time. Because again, these, these tools are prone to go wrong and when they go wrong, they spiral off wrong, further and further and further wrong. Yeah, but like, that's why, you know, Anthropic came out with Claude design, which is designed to say, here's basically what a good design is, and let's just start with that. And if you want to mess it up, knock yourself out. But we're going to try to start you in a good place and let you build out from some sort of functional structure. And with apps and stuff, that seems actually like exactly the right strategy, especially for people who don't want to think about data storage and the structure of their app and what tabs go where and what the mechanics are supposed to be like. People are like, I want an app that feels like an app, but does this one thing the way that I work want it to, and Google can just do that for you. That strikes me as very smart.
- [49:01]
C
And, you know, the, the opportunity is you're going to introduce more interactivity and you can only really do that with AI. Like, it would have been hard, I think Google, for Google to do this with the tools that existed before AI at this rate, they have it now, they can bring the cost down because they, they'll be able to see so much interactivity and be like, these are the core categories where we'll bring the cost down. And then they still let you have the infinite canvas where you can try anything you want. Right. And like, and then more and more people will do more on things and they will templatize more and more things. The, the turn and this was the second part that I, I just found so fascinating is let's say you do build the trip planner, right? Like, okay, I picked all the restaurants I want to go to. The turn to, okay, agent, go book the restaurants, right? Go get, go get these things done is right there. And that is not wired up yet, right? You can go do that independently in Spark. You can go say, do all this stuff for me. You can do that in other parts of search. Like, it will call around its intelligent search will call around all the barbershops and find out what the prices are. I don't know if anybody wants to do that. I personally am not yet at. I am comfortable having Google synthetically voice call all of my local businesses and talk to them. And they gave me a demo and it was like the fakest 10 million times. I was like, this phone call did not happen this way. That's not how anybody reacts to this. No one responds in such structured ways that the robot definitely knows what's happening with prices and cuts. Right? It just made no sense to me. But, like, that's the next turn. And if you just wire up, okay, I'm going on a trip, help me out, and then you get some choices, and then you're like, all right, get it all done. And then the agent goes and gets it all done. You have. You've totally gotten away from search. You've actually ended up at the robot butler that everyone's been talking about this whole time. Especially because it has a computer in the cloud that can use on your behalf and it can write code for it. And this, you know, if you want to get all wild eyed about AGI, you're like, oh, I have a computer that can use itself. That's the thing that, like, inches you closer to something that looks like autonomous intelligence. I'm not sure that's a singularity. I think that might just be a Chrome browser that can use itself. But, like, for a lot of people, that might be good enough.
- [51:07]
B
You know what I think Google thinks that is this is actually the last thing we should talk about, which happened last week while we weren't podcasting. But you just described Google Books like, this is why Google is making Google Books. Google had this big. They had the Android show. They announced a bunch of new stuff the week before I o. But the big thing they announced is this new lineup of devices called Google Books, which is a horrible name that no one should have allowed. But here we are. And the pitch is essentially what you just described. It's how do we bake all of this AI stuff more directly, more seamlessly, more cross platform into your computer? And I think you just backed all the way from search into the exact case for the Google Book, which I find absolutely fascinating.
- [51:53]
C
The danger here, and it's funny that he said search, right? You're kind of not doing any searching anymore. Google is doing searching for you. And the name Google Book is bad because I don't think people are like, what I want is to more closely align myself with a giant corporation that has scraped all the data in the entire world to train AI. Like, whoops.
- [52:11]
B
It's also just a crappy word to say, and look at Google Book. That's true. I don't like it.
- [52:18]
C
Microsoft Book. It's just like nobody wants this. But the idea that your computer is actually just an interface to a giant robot in the cloud, it's also coming, and it's coming in voice. You saw the glasses demo. The Glasses demo, by the way, is fascinating. They asked it to order coffee on DoorDash and it opened DoorDash in a virtualized container on an Android phone and clicked around and DoorDash to order the coffee.
- [52:41]
B
Oh, interesting.
- [52:42]
C
Like totally wild, right? Like, shouldn't you be able to just use the DoorDash API? Like, what's happening here? Like, where does the logic live? Where do the apps live? Can Google just use all the apps on your phone without permission from the app vendor or without additional payments? Does it even matter economically? Like Google is upending the soft economic agreements of the entire Internet by just doing stuff for people now and finding ways to do that stuff, even if there's not some formal API to do it. Right. There's not a formal API to call your local businesses. Google's going to call them and use a robot voice to talk to them. There's not a formal way to order coffee on DoorDash. Google is going to open the DoorDash app on your phone and click around for you. And like all of that has just massive implications for how we use computers, how all those companies make money. And I think Google, they've done so much fighting about search traffic in Google 0 that they're just like, screw it, we're doing it. Like this is so obviously the future. We can see it, it's pretty cool if it all works and we'll figure it out along the way and like, respect to them for just getting over it and doing it, but woo, that's a lot of change. Really fast.
- [53:44]
B
Yes. Yeah, I mean, and Google is I think maybe uniquely able to actually do this thing right. Like this would seem like incredible brazen nonsense for almost any other company. But like Google for a lot of ways is the company that sets the standards that the Internet runs on. Like in, in a very real way.
- [54:07]
C
This is why they're so excited about Universal Commerce Protocol.
- [54:10]
B
Right?
- [54:11]
C
Like Amazon is going to use ucp. They're not going to participate in Google's universal shopping cart. But Amazon is like, yeah, we need a standard for how agents will access our shopping platform and we're going to use the same one that Google is pushing. Yeah, they also, Google is pushing Synth ID and they're signing on to C2PA, which is content credentials. And now everyone is going to use them.
- [54:31]
B
Yeah.
- [54:32]
C
And like, you need Google to do it, to your point.
- [54:35]
B
But yeah, and Google is also now, I think they talked about this at IO. They're. They're pushing on WebMcP, trying to make the model context protocol a sort of part of the fabric of the Internet. They put out all this stuff called modern Web guidance, basically telling everybody how to do agents. Like Google is able to tell the Internet how to work, and people will do it. Like, in the way that Apple can tell you how to design your iPhone app. Google can tell you how to do the web.
- [55:00]
C
Okay, so here's why, though. This is the thing that I think is really interesting. They've been able to do that, because if you play ball, Google sends you a flood of traffic.
- [55:09]
B
Right? Right.
- [55:10]
C
Google, I don't know, 10 years ago, they're like, we're going to do Google amp. And every web developer who listens to the show just like, involuntarily shuttered. Like, that shit was horrible. And Google's like, but if you use amp, wink, wink. We can't say it out loud, but you'll rank higher. Right? Like, this was the. And I know now there's a Google executive's fury. She's like, we never said that. But, like, this is what everybody believed the deal was. If you play ball, you get a ton of traffic. Google will send you a ton of traffic. If you play ball. Now what happens? Google's still keeping all the traffic and you might get a transaction down the line. Right? And again, like I'm saying, that's a lot of change for this ecosystem. Like, a ton of change for this ecosystem. And I can't tell if Google is being thoughtful. Like, Google is always thoughtful. And I talked to Sundar, he's very thoughtful. Or if they are, they just see the end point and they're going to get there. Right? And like, both of those things are for a company of Google's scale and ambition. Both of those approaches are valid. But the part where they were like, we're never going to change the 10 blue links because everyone will be mad that thing is over.
- [56:16]
B
Yeah, that company is gone.
- [56:17]
C
Yeah.
- [56:17]
B
Long, long, long gone. And I think, to me, it's really a fact of how caught off guard Google was by ChatGPT. Like, you get the sense the company learned to stop being afraid when that happened, right? That it's like, oh, actually being careful and thoughtful and slow and deliberate cost us. Like, we spent two years Fighting the reputation that we had by being the ones who were careful and thoughtful. And actually what we need to do here is win. And look, I think there are a million questions about whether any of this is a good idea or is going to ruin humanity. And like, we've talked about them ad nauseam. We will talk about them again. But like, just purely, if you believe this is the game to be won, it is very clear to me that Google has decided that the only thing to do is to win. Otherwise you are at an existential risk as a company.
- [57:08]
C
Yeah, I think that's right.
- [57:09]
B
And I think they feel like they're winning too.
- [57:11]
C
Yeah, there was like a muscularity to IO. It was scattershot in like Google way, like Gemini, what now? You know, like, what are you saying? But everything had some confidence to it. Actually. I opened Decoder, it's coming out on Tuesday. I keep plugging this episode, but I literally talked to Sunora yesterday, so it's fresh on the mind. But we opened the decoder conversation by talking about how he had turned over a significant amount of his senior executives and restructured the company after that ChatGPT moment when Google felt like it was on its back foot. And he was like, yeah, I had to make all the changes, I had to restructure and I had to make some big decisions about how to win. And I think this is. This is the payoff.
- [57:55]
B
Yeah, it's going to be a fascinating next phase of this because, like, I mean, as we've been talking about all year, this is the turn from we've built a bunch of technology to now we have to build products that people want. And if you don't build products that people want, none of this matters.
- [58:09]
C
Yeah, people are still going to hate AI. Like, this is in the context of Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, getting booed at a college graduation. Right? Like, the people don't love these products and all of them are so iterative that they're not going to support. People aren't going to change their minds about data centers. Right? Like, that's the dance that this whole industry is in. And some of these products are really interesting. Some of them. I brought up the bounce house earlier. Some of them are just the most software brain nonsense I've ever heard my entire life. They're like, I'm planning a block party. I want to get a bounce house. And then it like, issues like a architectural drawing of a bounce house. And like, it's like, we're going to RFP the bounce house vendors and it's like, what are you talking about? I don't know if you've ever gotten a bounce house, but the bounce house guy gets paid in cash. You know what I mean? That's not. But that's not how this goes.
- [58:59]
B
Can I tell you, by the way, a thing I learned recently? Bounce houses, not that expensive.
- [59:02]
C
See what I mean?
- [59:03]
B
They make you very famous in your neighborhood. There's somebody like four doors down from us who has a bounce house. That bounce house shows up at every damn birthday party in the neighborhood.
- [59:10]
C
You know what I mean? And no one's rfping the bounce house.
- [59:13]
B
No, Google is not part of that transaction.
- [59:14]
C
You can buy a pickup truck and like a dozen bounce houses and an inflator, and you can run a very good business the government will never find out about. Yeah, that's my advice to you. Everyone you're worried about. AI Bounce out Sky.
- [59:26]
B
There we go. All right, we should take a break, and then we're gonna come back, we're gonna do hypedesk, we're gonna do the lightning round. We'll be right back.
- [59:34]
A
Support for Vergecast comes from Granola. Everyone's had a meeting where everything goes wrong. The Internet doesn't work. The presentation has a misspelling in it. You zone out at the most critical part, and you're desperately messaging a coworker to see if they can get you up to speed. Granola wants to help fix those meetings, and meetings in general. Granola is an AI powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. You simply take rough notes like you normally would, and in the background, Granola securely transcribes the meeting. Then it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes. When the meeting ends, and you want to know the best part? Granola works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conference tools you already use. No setup, no awkward bots. It's just your normal meeting with superpowers. You need to do your job better. So if meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no brainer. You can try it totally free for three months. Just head to Granola AI Verge. That's Granola AI. To get your time back, get three months free. At Granola AI Verge, support for the show comes from upwork. To the business owners out there, be honest. Were you the kind of kid who couldn't help but take over the group project in school? If that's the case, it's not surprising that you went on to start your own business. But by now, you know that real growth, growth comes not by doing it all perfectly by yourself, but when you learn how to delegate. That's where upwork comes in. Upwork is a one stop platform to find, hire and pay expert freelancers who can help you with web and software development, data and analytics, marketing, business operations and more. Upwork can help grow your team and your business by connecting you with specialized talent across more than 125 categories. Thousands of thousands of growing businesses already trust Upwork to hire flexible, high quality freelance talent for everything from one off projects to ongoing support. It's free to sign up and posting a job is easy. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upwork.com up upwork.com support for this show comes from protonvpn. No matter where you're located, your online activity shouldn't be up for grabs. That's why ProtonVPN adds a layer of protection that keeps your browsing habits private and your data out of the wrong hands. ProtonVPN is a secure VPN service designed for people who want to prioritize their digital privacy and security. It keeps what you do online private and lets you access the Internet like it should work open, secure and on your terms. Plus, ProtonVPN has a strict no logs policy that's independently verified. It's open source so anyone can inspect how it works. And it's backed by a foundation focused on protecting user rights, not selling your data behind the scenes. It's easy to get started. Started right now. ProtonVPN is offering our listeners 70% off
- [62:54]
C
a two year plan.
- [62:55]
A
When you go to protonvpn.com verge that's P R O-T O N V P N.com verge for 70% off your two year plan, that's protonvpn.com verge.
- [63:20]
C
All right, we're back.
- [63:20]
B
It's time now for the Hype desk. This is when our friends Ross Miller and Ashley Esqueta come and tell us about what's cool on the Internet and in the world today. We have. But Ross, Ross, welcome back.
- [63:34]
D
But Ross, I am sorry. Hello, it is I. But Ross, no, Ashley is actually out in Japan. She's at bitsummit, which is a major indie game event festival. Really cool. Excited to hear what she's doing with that. But yeah, you were stuck with me this year, this week. And I do want to talk about Japan anyway. I want to talk about Japan. Cars and specifically Forza Horizon 6, which just came out this week.
- [63:57]
B
Yeah, all the car nerd game nerds I know love this game.
- [64:02]
C
Yes.
- [64:02]
D
As both y' all know, I do not own a car. I am not as big of a car person. With the exception. Exception of Forza Horizon. Like this is where I get super nerdy into details. I learn fine tuning, I remember how to drift. I amass dozens of cars in this game and just drive around for hours on end. I love this thing so much.
- [64:22]
B
So Forza, if I understand it, is like kind of a racing game. I love a racing game. I don't really care about cars, but my thing with Forza has always been that it seems to be like more a car game than a racing game. Is that fair?
- [64:35]
D
Yes. So there has always been two different Forza branches. The Forza Motorsport, which is like the super serious simulation style that is. Unfortunately they stopped making those games as about 2023. But the arcadey ones that playground games, it's kind of like a West Midlands English studio. They've always made the Horizon series, which is open world. We'll pick a city in the world and we'll just make it a playground of like driving. So on the scale of like Mario Kart to Gran Turismo, it's somewhere in the middle, a little closer to Gran Turismo. But I was showing Travis as Mario. Travis, like, do you think I like the game? And I was like, here are the photos I took of me and an Acura NSX racing a Gundam mech. And he looked at it and went, I don't think this game is for me, but I get what you're talking about now.
- [65:22]
B
But this is like pure Nili bait, right? This is.
- [65:25]
C
I mean, this is what I love. I love a car game. Like I'm a Madden player, as everyone knows. I mostly just play Madden and then I love a car game. Horizon for me has always been it's got a little bit of like RPG grinding in it. Like you gotta play it a lot to get the good cars, which is just a feature of car games now. But it looks so beautiful. Horizon 6 looks so beautiful. I might be willing to give in.
- [65:50]
D
It is gorgeous. It is also on Game Pass ultimate, like the expensive tier. So pay $23, give it a shot. But no, it is, it's like since Horizon came out, I think the last one came out in 2021, it's like a five year gap between Maddens. Right. It's a little bit iterative. You know what you're Getting you're racing. It's a lot of similar cars but now it's just a new location. This location is Japan Tokyo in a very small and condensed version of it with a couple of like the key, you know, Tokyo Tower, certain parks. You can definitely go to Shibuya Crossing with nobody in the street so it's safe to drift and then kind of go all the way up toward the mountains and get an off road vehicle. Nili knows this. David. You may not. You can also, if you want it to be goofier, you can just design the paint jobs of the cars, whatever you want or let other people do it and upload them.
- [66:38]
B
Nice.
- [66:39]
D
So right now I have a fleet of cars that are all lightning McQueen. People are just going through every single car model and turning them into cars characters right now.
- [66:49]
C
That's really funny.
- [66:50]
B
What are the early vibes on Horizon six? My, my memory of Forza is people feel very strongly about every title and not everyone is a huge success in everybody's mind. But the, the vibes around this one at least pre launch were very good, right?
- [67:05]
D
Pre launch were very good. Motorsport has had a little bit mixed. Horizon itself is always been big. I think the Metascore has always been 90 plus.
- [67:12]
B
Oh dang.
- [67:13]
D
For the Horizon games or at least like the last four of them. This one launched with a 92 Metascore, 72 reviews. That's not changing. It is the best review game of the year right now. It will probably stay top 5 or at least top 10 for the rest of the year.
- [67:27]
B
Wild.
- [67:28]
D
And this is going to be without question, I think the biggest game launch since Asha Sharma took over the Xbox division. So it is kind of in some ways a big test of the comeback narrative, the Mindshare. It is coming to PlayStation 5 later this year, but still in terms of Xbox output.
- [67:45]
C
Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Right. Like Xbox is a thing that makes exclusives to drive you to the Xbox console. That seems like they just gave up on that. And then I was curious how Sharma would like deal with that. But they're bringing Horizon to the PS5.
- [68:00]
D
They are bringing Horizon to PS5. This was announced just because these like game development cycles. This is a four plus year development game. It was a decision probably made long time ago before Asha took over. Who knows what seven is going to look like. But this one is absolutely multi platform. It's coming out sometime between July and September. Next month is Summer Games Fest which is what E3 used to be. So we'll probably get the release Date then. But yeah, for now, it is Xbox timed exclusive, and it is kind of one of the big ones coming this year. Fable is a fantasy rpg coming this year. There's a Halo remake, a new Gears of War game. This is one of the tentpole Xbox comeback narratives that honestly was kind of in the works before Asha took over. But now it's like she's in shepherd mode. Can't she take what Phil Spencer and the team kind of set up for this year and continue to kind of like push this? We're coming back. We're not just trying to make game pass this kind of ubiquitous Netflix. We actually do want to have this sense of console exclusivity and kind of like brand ownership in a way that they were kind of veering away from for a long time.
- [69:04]
B
Xbox all caps.
- [69:07]
C
Yes, the version, all caps. Now that's how we're doing it. It's like we're just rebranding things to all caps.
- [69:13]
B
Ross, you. You said you had another game you wanted to talk to us about, and I'm desperately hoping it's the game that I want you to explain to me why it's suddenly so popular. What is the other one you wanted to talk about?
- [69:22]
D
It is Subnautica 2.
- [69:23]
B
Yes. Is that the game? Good. This is the game. This is like an early preview game that is like barely finished and it's everybody's favorite game. All of a sudden, out of nowhere. What is up with this game?
- [69:31]
D
It is everyone's favorite game for two reasons. One, it is a very fun sequel to a game where you're basically an underwater survival. You are alone on an alien ocean world. You have to keep diving deeper and deeper to get resources, rebuild your base and see really crazy kind of flora farmer, like giant colossal fish. This is a game that plays with that kind of gigantophobia that people have. But the reason people are really excited about it, the other reason is it was a huge part of a lawsuit about a year ago where a CEO used ChatGPT to try to get out of paying a bonus. So let me rewind a bit and I'll try to do this as quick as possible.
- [70:10]
B
Okay.
- [70:11]
D
So Nautica1 was an indie game, got bought by a publisher, Krafton. They're known for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. They're a South Korean publisher. And it was one of those kind of two tier acquisitions. We'll give you a lot of mei up front and then if you hit a certain revenue goal or milestone in sales goal by. I think it was Originally, next month you get a $250 million payout. What has since been released in Delaware court filings is the CEO did not want to pay that. So he went to ChatGPT and this is like July 2025 version of ChatGPT. So not the best business advisor and had it make a plan for how to avoid the payout. So they were doing these weird kind of intentional delays on the publisher side. They ultimately ended up firing the three co founders, hoping that would just kind of put an end to it. A few months ago, I think in March, the Delaware judge said, you can't do this, reinstate them. I think they now have until September to hit that sales goal. And if they do, Krafton has to pay $250 million, most of which goes to the three founders. A 10% carven will go to 100 of the developer employees. No small chunk of change. A lot of developers may get $250,000 bonuses out of this. We don't know the exact details or the numbers. Some of this is a lot of rumor and whisper. But the broad strokes of the story are that right now looking very, very good. I think they hit yes, 2 million units sold in the first 12 hours of the game being released.
- [71:40]
B
Unreal.
- [71:40]
D
It hit 460,000 concurrents on Steam, which is the biggest PC gaming storefront in the world, which made it the third biggest game in the world for the weekend this past weekend behind only counter strike and Dota 2. And in my decades as a journalist and later as a game consultant, I have never seen the top two change. So for all intents and purposes, this was the biggest game in the world for this weekend.
- [72:07]
B
And it seems like it's like a perfect storm of good game that people like. Plus really cool thing to root for that you might as well spend some money on this weekend instead of waiting a while, right? Like it's a real stick it to demand and also play a fun game, which is a pretty hard thing to beat, right?
- [72:23]
C
If you're mad at AI, you can boo Eric Schmidt and you can play Sononica too.
- [72:27]
D
Basically that. And it's been fun to see, it's been fun to play. You did mention it is early access. So I think for people who are not as used to that, it's basically an incomplete game. It is playable, it's got a lot you can do. But it is not going to be the hundreds of hours you can put in the first Subnautica. They're still kind of building it as they go. This has become More and more common, particularly with some of these bigger indie titles. Hades did this. Hades and Hades 2 both launched early Access, and they kind of built the game in real time, getting feedback from players and almost kind of chaptering the experience. Like you could have played Hades for over the course of three years in early Access, getting a little more story and gameplay as you go. That's going to be the same case here. They're thinking about two to three years is the estimate to get more of the world done, more biomes, add a lot more stuff to play and do, and honestly just finish the story. So what you're getting today, if you pay for it, you have the whole game when it comes out in 1.0, but that's going to be a ways off. So there's going to be little bugs, It's a little broken at times. You do it for the experience more than you do for the final product at this point.
- [73:30]
B
It's good stuff. All right, that's the hype desk. Ross, good to see you, buddy. Thanks for coming.
- [73:34]
D
Goodbye.
- [73:36]
B
And now, Nilai, it is time. After a week off, the people missed it. It's time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. The world's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brennan Carr is a dummy.
- [73:48]
C
We have big. Brennan Carr is a d. Wow.
- [73:58]
B
That was an energy I did not expect coming to. Okay, that theme was by Gear Dead. Congratulations to all of us. Wow. I need to, like, woo.
- [74:08]
C
We're awake.
- [74:08]
B
Come down from that. Yeah. Hello. I don't think Brendan deserves that kind of energy.
- [74:13]
C
No, it was really good. It was really good.
- [74:16]
B
What do you do this week, Nili?
- [74:17]
C
Well, actually, first, we have some big news in the world of podcasts within a podcast.
- [74:22]
B
Okay.
- [74:23]
C
Brendan Carr is a dummy was federated to on with Kara Swisher.
- [74:28]
B
Yes.
- [74:30]
C
And we did, you know, she calls him a moron. So we. We have a beef. So I went on. On with Kara Swisher, along with current Democratic FCC commissioner Anna Gomez and. And Jamil Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who I've talked to before, who's great. And we just ran down all the reasons Brendan's a dummy. And I called him a dummy a thousand times. And at the end of that episode, we ran our Gregorian chant by Viola Dagumba. And then she actually ran another one of our theme songs as she read the credits, which is just deeply funny. So we have successfully federated America's favorite podcast within podcast. I know. I think Stephen Robles has done Brandon Carr as a dummy. On his show. Please, by all means. Brandon Carr is a dummy. Like, get out there. Do it on your stream.
- [75:14]
B
You can have it.
- [75:15]
C
Yeah, but to do that and to call him a dummy so many times with, like a current sitting FCC commissioner, I was like, I might be a little out over my skis.
- [75:24]
B
What was Anna Gomez's adjective of choice
- [75:26]
C
for boy, Brendan, you know, she's a. She's, she's wonderful. We've quoted her many times. She's out there saying how much of a threat he is. The First Amendment, she's.
- [75:34]
B
Yeah, she thinks he sucks. Like, that's not unclear.
- [75:36]
C
Yeah, it's very obvious that she's like, we're, we're doing way too much. We're censoring too much speech. This is a war. But she's very polite, where I'm like, look at this dummy. There's a good, A good dynamic there with Commissioner Gomez on Kerr show.
- [75:47]
B
Yeah, that's good stuff. So do we have, do we have news this week?
- [75:50]
C
Of course.
- [75:51]
B
Or did he. He didn't give us the week off.
- [75:53]
C
The news isn't just that. I successfully made a podcast within a podcast. Go on yet another podcast. That would be great if that's all that happened.
- [75:59]
B
Telling you, the Vergecast eventually will be all podcasts. We're going daily and then we're going infinite.
- [76:08]
C
It's like every podcast is just a segment of the Vergecast.
- [76:11]
B
Yes, that's exactly right.
- [76:12]
C
Someone told Bill Slim, okay, Brendan, this week, very dumb, very simple, very dumb. A real element of a Trump administration is how from the top down, everyone believes that if you stop measuring things, they go away. This is just a characteristic of Trump administration. So in the first Trump administration, I think you will all recall, Trump was like, if we stop testing for Covid, the COVID will go away. Like the. Right.
- [76:41]
B
And it's. Well, this was back when Russia had, quote, unquote, zero cases, Right? And Trump was like, well, I could also have zero cases.
- [76:46]
C
Yeah, Florida has zero cases. It's not measuring this stuff. Like, this is just a theme. And if you look for it, it's a repeating pattern in, in Trump administrations. If we just stop measuring the thing, it will. It will go away. It will not be a problem. So there's this thing we have called the national broadband map, where you can see what broadband providers are in your area. People can report if those broadband providers are lying about the speeds and availability and the prices. And so the idea is that we should have a national broadband map that no matter where you are in the country, you should be able to log in and see who's claiming to provide you Internet service, that you can pick between competing vendors and that they have to, like, report truthfully speeds and prices. So Brendan this week issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to streamline the complaints process for the National Broadband Map to. We're going to get rid of some ways you can complain about broadband providers, which just basically means, like, now you can't. I don't know what else to say. Like, now you can't say the broadband providers are lying to you. The National Broadband app, and this just is of a piece of. With him, you know, getting rid of the nutrition labels and making them less rich, because that's an onerous burden on broadband providers to have to say how much the fees are when they charge you for broadband. And now it's like, yeah, even if they're lying to you at the actual speeds that are available in your area, it's harder to complain about them. So that when people go look for competition, they can see what providers are truthful and which ones aren't. And it's just such a classic Brendan move. Like, he's so at his core anti consumer and anti, like, liberty and freedom in markets that he's like, I'm not even gonna let you. I'm not even gonna measure whether or not people are telling the truth.
- [78:28]
B
Right?
- [78:28]
C
Like, we're not even going to have a system for you to say, hey, we made a map of all the broadband providers and who they service and what the speeds are and whether they're. We're just gonna, we're gonna make that stupider. Because if I stop measuring complaints, I will be able to say there are no complaints. It's just obviously the goal. And of course his, you know, his backers in Big Telecom will be happy. So that's just very dumb. And it's just of a piece of what I was saying in the beginning of, like, a pattern in Trump administrations is if we stop measuring things, they will go away. Which I'm guessing for the Vergecast audience makes exactly zero sense in a very particular way. That's not how it works. And now we're going to stop measuring whether or not broadband providers are doing a good job.
- [79:09]
B
The thing I hate about that is the, if we stop measuring it, it will go away. Might be a more politically successful strategy than I would like it to be. Even though it is pure nonsense and actually just only stands to hurt real people in.
- [79:24]
C
Oh, yeah. I mean, there's other examples in Trump too, right? We're going to change how we calculate unemployment. We're going to fire the people who do inflation calculations. This is. We are. We are monkeying with data across this country all the time. It's just Brendan is particularly dumb because I'm going to streamline the complaints process is like, no, you're not, man. Like, we all know who you are. Just. Just say you're going to end the broadband map.
- [79:48]
B
Yeah, Just like, just have an email inbox. There's how you streamline your complaints process. Problem solved.
- [79:53]
D
What are we talking about?
- [79:53]
C
By the way? If you go look at the National. I encourage everyone to go look at the national broadband app. Type in your address. It's like fascinating to see how much or how little competition is in your area competing for your service. Like mine is. It's Verizon or Optimum. It has some speeds listed. And then there's like, you know, it claims that a bunch of like, fixed wireless providers service my house. And it's like, no, they don't. That's not actually, that's not as real as we want it to be. But it's nice to see all those options.
- [80:21]
B
Yeah, right. We just got FiOS in our neighborhood and it is like the most intense door to door salesman rivalry happening right now. Because, like for the longest time, the only thing anybody had in our whole city was Comcast and everybody hates it. It's just bad. And now there's Ting, which isn't like wired everywhere, but you can call them and they'll come and, you know, run the stuff to your house and everything's fine. And there's Verizon. And so now that there's actual competition, it's literally like twice a week somebody comes to my door and is like, so what's TING charging you? Are you happy with the speeds? We can probably do better. And I'm like, listen, Buddy, I've had FiOS before. And then two days later somebody comes back and they're like, so do you want fios? It's crazy.
- [81:01]
C
That's great.
- [81:02]
B
It's like actual competition. I'm going to.
- [81:03]
C
What you got to do is you got to call whoever you have and be like, you know, this guy came to my door off for prices.
- [81:08]
B
I'm going to end up deciding to play this game and it's going to save me a lot of money on very fast Internet.
- [81:12]
C
This is what agents are for. There's one thing I will let the robot voice do the phone call for on my behalf is like, you call the ISP and Negotiate prices.
- [81:20]
B
Google can absolutely call Verizon on my behalf. I have no problem.
- [81:24]
C
I feel like a lot of people are waiting for the Comcast disclosure right now.
- [81:27]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [81:28]
C
But here's a fascinating turn of events. But in all the shuffle, the NBC Universal investment in Vox Media went to Versant.
- [81:36]
A
Oh, God.
- [81:37]
C
So, disclosure. Versant is an investor in a company, and I've literally never heard from them.
- [81:41]
B
Also, what do they do?
- [81:43]
C
What's there to round? Like, I don't know. That's your disclosure. It's not complex anymore. That day has come to an end. Sure, there was a shuffle.
- [81:53]
B
Yeah. Great job, everybody.
- [81:55]
C
Digital media executives shuffled some assets around once again, leading to nothing of impact happening to us.
- [82:02]
B
Does that mean the Versant name is now free? Could we.
- [82:05]
C
Can we just start. Just start saying it? Yeah, just like, make it a word that exists. Like, that's very Versant of you.
- [82:11]
B
It's very Versant, but it's all caps. That's really important.
- [82:16]
C
Anyhow, Brendan, if you know what the word Versant means or you want to explain to me how streamlining the collection of broadband data and complaints will actually lead to better data and better competition, you're welcome to come on this show, or apparently any show at any time, because Brendan Carr is a dummy now exists across the entire podcast ecosystem.
- [82:37]
B
It's good stuff. Streamline is such an awful euphemism for get rid of, but you hear it everywhere, right? Like, it's also a thing all these companies say when they do layoffs. They're like, we're streamlining our workforce. It's firing 12,000 of you.
- [82:48]
C
You know, it came into being because people were, like, doing aerodynamics in the 60s. So I just imagine Brendan putting, like, big wings on the side of the website. It's very good. Anyhow, that has been Brendan Carr's dummy. America's favorite podcast with a podcast.
- [83:00]
B
It's good stuff.
- [83:07]
C
It's so good.
- [83:09]
B
That's still the theme song. I love all the other theme songs equally, but that one's. That one's still my favorite. That one feels right to me.
- [83:15]
C
Going on Kara Swisher podcast and playing a Gregorian Shannon Brennan, Carr Stunnies. It's very good. I just thank you everybody for allowing that moment to happen.
- [83:24]
B
It is great. I'm only slightly jealous that you did it with her and not me, but you're back here, which suggests that I'm better than Kara.
- [83:29]
C
So this is home.
- [83:30]
B
I'm never leaving home.
- [83:31]
C
I mean, also, I just want to say current FCC commissioner Anna Gomez was On the show when we played the Gregorian chant of Brendan Carr as a dummy.
- [83:41]
B
Yeah, that's good stuff. All right, so I have a lightning round item that is a bunch of things all at once that I just want you to try and make sense of. I would just like to read you a bunch of recent Spotify related headlines from TheVerge.com and I want you to explain to me how it's possible that all of these things can be true at the same time. Ready?
- [83:59]
C
Yeah.
- [83:59]
B
Verified by Spotify Badge lets you know this artist isn't AI. Openclaw and Claude can put your AI generated podcasts in Spotify. Spotify is verifying podcasts made by real people too. Spotify's studios AI agent creates a daily podcast just for you. Spotify is going to reserve concert tickets for real fans. Spotify is launching AI generated remixes. Spotify's AI will be able to make an audiobook playlist for you. Spotify will offer authors a way to AI generate audio versions of their books. What is happening? Like, I've, I, I think Spotify is one of the like most interesting companies in tech and have for a very long time. They're like right in the middle of culture in a really complicated way that has dealt with so many tech ramifications. But like, this company is both so unbelievably AI pilled and so aware that its users and its customers and its clients hate AI, that it is twisting itself into knots and is becoming like this completely unmanageable mix of AI slop and AI tools to make AI and tools to prevent AI and tools to run away from AI. Like what is happening here?
- [85:09]
C
Yeah, we have a verified badge for not AI. Music is like you should. We'll link the story and people can read it. It's basically an honor system. Like you can just sort of tell Spotify that you didn't use AI.
- [85:22]
B
Yeah.
- [85:22]
C
And like that's it, you know. And like compare that to Google rolling out Synth ID in all of its products and putting the synth ID detector in a bunch of its products and like pushing the whole industry to using content credentials. Like in deepfakes world, it is just accepted that you are going to watermark everything that AI generates in music world because it's just the way music is made and layered and components and the fact that some artists are really into AI. Like there's no standards, there's no controls and Spotify is like, just say it and then we'll make a, we'll put a badge up right? You know, and it's like a little more complicated than that. But, like, not really. And then next to it is like, we want to make you playlists. And like, authors hate. I was just with Joanna Stern and she spent like four days recording her audiobook. Like, does she want a robot to do that for her? Probably not, because her audience doesn't want to, but some authors will because they find that, like, and you can just see Spotify as like, we don't know where the existential competitive threat will come from, but no one is going to get there before us. Also, everyone hates it.
- [86:17]
B
Right? Also everyone hates it is like, that's the thing. They're like, we have to do this, otherwise we'll miss it and somebody will beat us. But also everyone hates this and no one wants this. And we have to make sure we give people ways to get rid of it entirely.
- [86:28]
C
Can I. I have a lightning round item for you that matches right up with this. Right. It's more Google I O, but YouTube announced that you can now remix YouTube shorts and just like, put yourself in other people's videos. And it's like, are the creators going to be happy with this? Like, there's likeness detection, there's controls. Is that something I want to do?
- [86:47]
B
Right.
- [86:47]
C
Like, there's just this push to be like, put the AI in the places because someone else might get there first and figure out whatever the next iPhone of AI Spotify is. And it's like, I don't actually think anybody is worried about that.
- [87:01]
B
My, my most nihilistic view on Spotify is that Spotify is actually very happy for you to listen to AI generated music because it doesn't cost Spotify. Right.
- [87:09]
C
This is why they're happy for you to listen to white noise.
- [87:11]
B
Right. So that Spotify is like, thrilled to have a way to make the case to music labels that it's. It's being the good guy here, but is also sneakily going to try to let you watch and listen to as much AI as possible. I hope that's not the case. I suspect it is the case. The thing about all of these tools to me is like the, the deepfake detection stuff and the likeness detection, all of this suggests and assumes that these companies have bulletproof tools that work. And they don't. They just don't. They. They never have content ID on YouTube. Doesn't work.
- [87:46]
C
Yep.
- [87:47]
B
Like, it doesn't. It doesn't work. It works sometimes. But like, there's been this enough for
- [87:52]
C
everyone to pretend that it works.
- [87:53]
B
Yes. But then there's been this whole rash recently of people uploading full movies.
- [87:57]
C
Yep.
- [87:58]
B
To YouTube that stay up for a long time and lots of people watch them. And you can just. You can just watch all of Monsters Inc. On YouTube because someone uploaded it to their YouTube channel. Like, the tools that are required to make this stuff work don't work. And I think at least one of the interesting things about, like, sora when, when OpenAI launched, that was like, they built the sort of content detection stuff in from the very beginning, which is like, okay, you upload a video and you have to give it your proactive permission to sort of release that in the world for people to make remixes from. And I think if you start with that from the ground up, you have at least a slightly better shot of making that work. To try and backfill that into a platform as big and sprawling and messy as YouTube is just preposterous. It's just not going to happen. And so this thing where they're like, oh, well, you have the control. It's like, no, you don't, because your tools don't work.
- [88:48]
C
Yeah.
- [88:48]
B
Like, and you can't build these things on the premise that the tools work because they don't and they're not going to. And so what are we doing here?
- [88:56]
C
It is really the, I think, jest Weatherbread wrote for us, like, now is the time for all of this content credentialing watermark deep fake detection systems to prove that they work. Yeah, right. Like, she has been writing for months, years for us now that everyone keeps talking about it and none of the systems actually work. Right, right. And every time, you know, Samsung in particular puts out a new camera, like, another wave of deepfake apocalypse has occurred. Like the. What is a photo apocalypse has occurred. It's like, in the past. Like, that's just a smoldering ruin.
- [89:27]
B
Yeah, we're well past that now.
- [89:28]
C
And now we're like, fully into deep fake apocalypse. Yeah. And the idea that whenever you open YouTube, it should be able to read a watermark and show you that's AI generated is right up against. Everyone hates AI. And the creators know that if they say AI generated in their videos, people will yell at them. So they don't want the watermarks.
- [89:47]
D
Yep.
- [89:47]
C
And it's like, well, then you shouldn't use the tools. But then you can't not use the tools because to be a successful creator on these platforms, you have to make an infinite amount of slop. Like, you have to make four videos a day on TikTok to be a TikTok creator. Like, that's just the rule. Like there, there's some kind of swirling pressure on all these platforms where they know that what they want is more and the easiest way to get more is AI. And then they know that the audiences hate AI and they also shouldn't serve them deepfakes because they might destroy the world in our shared notion of truth. But then we definitely need more. So here's more AI. And like, I don't think anybody, to your point, I don't think anybody has a clear and coherent vision of what it means to run a social media platform in the age of AI right now.
- [90:28]
B
No, but again, I think everyone feels like they have to race after the thing, right? Like so much of this is all the same thing. Everybody feels like they can't risk losing the race, but nobody knows what they're racing towards. So all we get is just insanity all the time. But again, it is interesting to see in the product these companies start to recognize that people want out of some of this stuff, right? So you're starting to see, like you, you've been saying for a long time that one of your big bets, I think in our year end episodes last year, you said one of your big bets for 2026 is that we're going to start to see real segmenting of the AI social network and the human social network. Even inside of some of these apps. It's starting to happen. Like that is, that is actively starting to happen, even as these companies will not stop talking about all the AI features that they're doing.
- [91:11]
C
I also think, and this is maybe more conspiracy theory than not, but all of these companies are like pushing their engineers to use AI to code more things faster than ever, with fewer layers of management and like product management and design than ever. And so like, of course they're shipping a bunch of weirdo garbage features. Like, if you want to keep your job at Meta, you had better ship some stuff that uses AI to do something, right? And it's like, do you. Like, of course there's no plan. Like, of course, of course there's no thesis to what these platforms look like. You've terrified everybody that they'll lose their job if they don't token max their way into shipping 500 new features tomorrow with literally no oversight. It's just like they're going to kill themselves. Like, I don't know how else to describe this. Like, the people don't love it and I don't. I haven't seen one of these features on any of these platforms. Where I'm like, that rules.
- [92:09]
B
Yeah, I totally agree.
- [92:10]
C
Actually, no, I did see one TikTok launched video summaries that were so deeply bad that they were actually great.
- [92:20]
B
I got so many that were just completely 90 degrees divorced from what the video was, that it was, it was like it had no idea. It wasn't even wrong about the video. It was just a completely different video.
- [92:30]
C
Yeah, it was a different video. I was like always about fruit. Like, these berries are glistening red and it's like, what are you talking about?
- [92:35]
B
It's like, these are trucks.
- [92:36]
C
What are we doing? Yeah, it was great. That was, that's the best one that I've seen.
- [92:40]
B
I do agree with that one. All right, you piggybacked on mine, so you go next. What's your next one?
- [92:45]
C
I mean, we have to Talk about the SpaceX IPO. Elon Musk just filed for it. It's supposed to be a trillion, the biggest IPO ever. There's a lot to say about the SpaceX IPO. The fact that Grok doing deepfakes as a risk factor for SpaceX is hilarious. But it is listed in the IPO documents in the S1 because X is
- [93:05]
B
now part of XAI, which is now SpaceX AI, which is part of SpaceX.
- [93:09]
D
Cool.
- [93:09]
C
So of course Grok doing deep fakes is a huge risk factor for the space company. That makes sense.
- [93:15]
B
Yeah.
- [93:17]
C
You know, a lot. You can dive into the financials of it. We should have like, Liz come back and do that with us. But the thing that really grabbed me was SpaceX business is a broadband business. It is Starlink that is the profitable part of SpaceX business. Everything else is kind of like losing money or like right on the bleeding edge. There's a part where they just sort of confidently predict that they will have the biggest total addressable market in world history. And it's like, how and why? And then you look at the actual business and you're like, oh, you are, you're, you're running Verizon, but in space with bigger fixed costs than Verizon could ever possibly dream of. Right? And like, there's something in there where. I don't even think this is a hot take to say anymore. The SpaceX IPO is just a referendum on Elon Musk. Like, here's some wild ass shit. Do you believe it?
- [94:06]
B
Right?
- [94:07]
C
Because if you look at the financials and everybody looking at the financials is like, what are you talking about? How do you get from here to there? And like, maybe you believe in Elon and maybe this IPO is a referendum on whether retail investors on the IPO day are going to believe in Elon. I think we should go more into detail on it. This is why we're going to do a Daily Show. Like, this would be an episode of the Daily Show.
- [94:28]
B
It will be, in fact.
- [94:29]
C
Yeah.
- [94:30]
B
Maybe a couple of them.
- [94:31]
C
Like, if you just look at the graph, like, the estimated total addressable market by segment, and like, it's a $28 trillion total addressable market that they're calculating. They're just like, there will be a $22 billion market for enterprise AI applications, and we'll have all of it. It's like, what are you talking about? That doesn't seem right. Yeah, like, there's just a lot of that going on in the. In the sus one. So we'll go through it in detail. But the core of it is, like, it's so funny that they're a broadband company. Like, the heart of it is that they're. They're running T Mobile.
- [95:03]
B
Yep.
- [95:04]
C
Like, I don't think T Mobile. Space T Mobile, but with. Yeah. But the incredible fixed costs. And also you can't repair anything if it goes wrong. Amazing.
- [95:12]
B
Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty good. I also encourage everybody. S1s are a lot. They're very interesting because it is. It is maybe the most honest a company kind of ever has to be at, especially at this stage. But especially the risk factors, especially for a company like SpaceX, they have to. They have to detail every single thing they can think of that might go wrong. It's just so funny in this case, one of them literally amounts to, like, ah, we might not get to Mars. Imagine that being a risk factor for your company.
- [95:42]
C
Oh, yeah. The. The big payoff on. On Elon's stock is only triggered if he establishes a colony on Mars with 1 million occupants.
- [95:51]
B
Right.
- [95:52]
C
That's like. All right. Like, that's one way to structure your stock vesting schedule.
- [95:57]
B
Knock yourself out, buddy. Yeah. All right, my last one before we go is we need to briefly talk about the Trump phone.
- [96:03]
C
Oh, boy.
- [96:05]
B
The Trump phone is in the wild. Nilay, I don't know if you're aware of this.
- [96:10]
C
A few places have it now.
- [96:11]
B
Yeah, it's out there. We don't. Which I find incredibly personally upsetting. I'm not saying we're definitely blacklisted by the people at Trump Mobile, but I'm just saying that Dom Preston on our team has covered Trump Mobile more closely than anybody, and they have, I would say, become increasingly less Thrilled with him and willing to talk to him over time.
- [96:30]
C
Yes, well, they've only talked to him once.
- [96:33]
B
Yeah, but it was glorious. And they showed him a phone that we believed was the phone. It is in fact it appears the phone. The phone is incredibly late. It is not made in the United States. It is now. I believe the phrase is made with American values in mind, which is just hysterical. Like you can just say things is the Trump Mobile thesis. The phone appears to be just a blatant rip of an HTC phone. It comes with a gold, not actually gold, but gold colored braided USB cable which I very much appreciate. It has an American flag on the back with only 11 stripes which is perfect. It just seems like everyone who is buying this phone is going to have wildly overpaid for kind of a crappy mid range Android phone.
- [97:19]
C
So CNET got it, they put up a video. We have it here. I just want to skip to sort of the end. They just did an unboxing, hands on. It's great. They're showing the camera and they're showing some photos that they took with the camera and the camera roll. Every single photo is watermarked with not only the date and time but a Trump logo.
- [97:35]
B
Oh my gosh.
- [97:36]
C
It's the most insane thing I've ever seen in my entire Life. That's a T1 phone logo on every photo it takes.
- [97:45]
B
That's incredible.
- [97:46]
C
It's so good. It's so good.
- [97:49]
B
That is the most perfectly on brand thing I think I can imagine.
- [97:53]
C
Presumably you could turn off but it's like how do we set our phone apart? Put a Trump logo on every photo it takes.
- [98:01]
B
So I live in near Washington D.C. and I'm in D.C. all the time and everywhere you go now there's some giant banner with that one face of Trump doing his sort of like angry. And I'm just like what? They, they need to now figure out a way to watermark that into the background of every photo you take. And that's the real future of the. The T2 is just going to have Trump's face somewhere in the background of every photo.
- [98:23]
C
That's the Synth id. It's like that's how you can detect if it's a deep fake. Like if there's not like in the noise of the photo a Trump face. Yeah, we're going to get a Trump phone, we're going to review it. I'm confident it's going to be a shit mid range Android phone loaded with bloatware. But that's the reality of it.
- [98:39]
D
Yep.
- [98:40]
C
But it's, it's, it's, it's, it's happening, David.
- [98:42]
B
It's, it's. Honestly, I'm sort of thrilled. Like, I really. I have said all along that it is much funnier if this thing actually exists than if it doesn't. And I'm genuinely psyched that it actually exists. And it's also terrible.
- [98:55]
C
I mean, they got farther with the Trump phone than they did with the Foxconn factory. I'll give them that.
- [99:00]
B
Sure. Truth Social is built in. Huge distribution. Win for Truth Social so far.
- [99:05]
C
I do want to point out that so far only two of them exist and they went to NBC News and seen it. Is this shipping? You know what I mean?
- [99:14]
B
True. That's a fair point. If you have one. Vergecastattheverge.com 866 version 11 call us from your Trump phone. Tell us how it goes. I'd love to hear from you. All right, we need to get out of here. Nilay, it's good to see you. You go sleep off Google I o. I'm gonna go sleep off whatever the sickness is. I've had all week. Send us emails. Tell us what you want to know on daily Vergecast. If you have more questions about everything going on at the Verge, we are always game to Hear about it. Vergecastheverge.com is the email 866 verge11 is the hotline. Remember, as always, the best thing you can do to make Nilay in particular completely ungovernable is to subscribe to the Verge.com TheVerge.com subscribe unlocks everything you get ad free versions of this podcast version history decoder Neelite Sundar on Tuesday.
- [100:00]
C
Sundar's on Tuesday. It's a good one.
- [100:02]
B
Big decoder week next week. Did you make Sundar look at your phone this year?
- [100:06]
C
I did. I did make him look at my phone this year.
- [100:08]
B
All right, that's gonna be a good one. Go subscribe to that just so you can watch that one over and over and over and over ad free. It's gonna be amazing.
- [100:14]
C
Yeah.
- [100:14]
B
We will be back on Tuesday and Friday. One more week of normal programming before we get into daily stuff. We have a really fun show coming up on Tuesday, including about this thing that I'm wearing, the Fitbit Air. Very excited to talk to VC Song about that. The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Keifer and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next week. Eli Rock and roll.
- [100:37]
D
Did you know if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up 20 degree. Turn the temperature down with blinds.com and get up to 50% off custom window treatments like solar roller shades and more
- [100:48]
B
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D
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- [101:21]
B
But that's weird.
- [101:22]
D
Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [101:29]
B
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