What's behind the Google AI shakeup

Summary

The Vergecast – Episode Summary

Episode Title: What's Behind the Google AI Shakeup
Release Date: August 7, 2026
Hosts: Nilay Patel & David Pierce
Podcast: The Vergecast

---

Overview

This episode dives into a pivotal shakeup within Google’s AI leadership, examining the departures of top researchers, shifting organizational priorities, and what it means for the future of Google’s AI ambitions. Nilay and David unpack Google’s product strategy (or lack thereof), internal politics, product fragmentation, and the broader implications for AI industry competition. They later explore the dynamics between Google and Reddit, AI-generated web slop, Disney's 'Everything App' ambitions, broadcast consolidation, and more, touching on the health and direction of major tech and media players.

---

Key Topics & Insights

1. Google AI Shakeup — What Happened and Why?

[02:31–13:18]

• Headline Events:
  • Jeff Dean (legendary Google engineer/researcher) and many respected AI colleagues departed to start their own company, chasing the AI startup gold rush.
  • Meanwhile, Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind head) steps away from his operational role, becoming Alphabet’s Chief Scientist and Chair of DeepMind.
  • Koray Kavukcuoglu, former DeepMind CTO, is promoted to SVP, leading DeepMind as more of a business unit.
• Backstory:
  • Jeff Dean previously lost out to Demis for leadership of Google’s consolidated AI org; longstanding friction likely contributed to his exit.
• Quote:
  • Nilay: "One of the reasons Google DeepMind is the way it is is because Jeff Dean lost a fight to be in charge of AI at Google in a very straightforward way." [03:28]
  • David: "They’ve put AI everywhere across the Google suite at really high rates and they’re very proud of this. And in many ways, they’re winning, right? They’re shipping more AI products to more people than anyone... But there’s no strategy here. There’s no vision for how all of this makes a Google ecosystem powered by AI." [06:34]
• Organizational Turmoil:
  • The changes reflect “turmoil” and scattershot product approaches, with DeepMind research ambition (frontier AI, AGI) at odds with the messy integration of AI features everywhere in Google products.
  • Researchers are reportedly frustrated, both by directions (including military applications) and internal resource fights.

---

2. Google’s Fragmented AI Product Experience

[04:45–07:23]

• Examples of Incoherence:
  • Google’s Gemini AI varies widely—different in cars, on phones, via speakers, and in Workspace.
  • Key insight: You “ship your org chart”—and Google’s scattered AI org produces scattered products.
• Quote:
  • David: "I have a GM car that has Google built in, in it, and it just got upgraded to Gemini, which sometimes goes away... Sometimes it just goes away and becomes Google Assistant again. Weird." [05:00]
• Lack of Unified Vision:
  • Despite massive AI distribution, Google lacks a cohesive user experience.
  • Gemini’s role is inconsistently realized across devices and products.

---

3. The Battle of AI Product Philosophy: AGI vs. Business Use

[07:23–13:00]

• Demis Hassabis’s True Focus:
  • Demis favors moonshot, fundamental research—curing diseases, creating AGI—rather than business-AI or productivity tools.
  • Nilay: "He has been pretty straightforward over the years about not thinking that building an AI personal assistant to search your Gmail is the most interesting thing you can do with AI. I happen to think he’s right." [09:53]
• Business Reality:
  • Google’s AI monetization is firmly rooted in business software and cloud, creating disconnects with “frontier” ambitions.
  • Surging infrastructure and R&D spending is only justifiable if belief in long-term, high-value returns holds up.

---

4. Is Google Behind in AI? Measuring Strengths and Weaknesses

[15:49–24:59]

• Industry Perception:
  • Some say Google is “flailing”—model delays (e.g., Gemini 3.5), leadership departures, product missteps, and AI overviews gone viral for inaccuracy.
  • Quote:
    • Nilay: "One way to look at all of this news is Google flailing because it’s losing. Right? Gemini 3.5 was supposed to come. Now it’s August, it’s not out yet... Jeff Dean is leaving. Demis Hassabis is leaving like full panic. Everywhere is one way to look at all of this news." [15:52]
    • David: "I don’t think Google has as good of a product in AI overviews as free ChatGPT or free Claude. And we can see it every day. Because AI overviews are extraordinarily public, people keep using them and posting screenshots of how stupid they are." [16:54]
  • “Buying the dip” (AI overview error) goes viral as the latest example of Gemini weirdness:
    • David: "AI overviews spat out to him ‘buying the Dip means purchasing an investment like Dean’s French onion dip…’ This is incredible, bro." [17:37]
• Distribution Advantage:
  • Google is close to or surpassing a billion Gemini users, leveraging its global reach and pre-installed/mandatory product ecosystem.
  • Quote:
    • Nilay: "There is a real chance in there that more people are using Gemini than are using ChatGPT. And if not, it is damn close." [20:37]

---

5. Google’s Product Dilemma: Integrate AI Everywhere or Just Make a Good Product?

[22:42–25:41]

• Historical Echoes:
  • Nilay compares current AI-over-everything mania to Google’s failed “make everything social” era—the risk being mass product incoherence and user confusion.
  • Nilay: "The bear case for a lot of this is Google repeating exactly that mistake…Instead of saying we have a bunch of successful products, maybe this is a new one, they’re saying we need to reinvent every single thing that we do around this other thing." [22:44]

---

6. Google & Reddit: AI Slop, Traffic Dependency, and Gamed Search Results

[25:44–37:12]

• Reddit-Driven Search:
  • Google increasingly surfaces Reddit in results to combat AI-generated web spam and slop; Reddit is now the most cited domain for Gemini in “AI mode.”
• Reddit’s AI Problem:
  • Brands and bots now flood Reddit with posts designed to game AI search (i.e., be cited in AI Overviews or other aggregators).
  • Human trust suffers; “authenticity” is undermined.
  • Nilay: "We’ve just completely poisoned the well because Google’s crawlers believe Reddit is full of humans and Reddit is demonstrably no longer full of humans." [30:00]
• Co-Dependence:
  • Google is existentially reliant on Reddit’s content/referral traffic, while Reddit is critically dependent on Google’s indexing to survive.
  • The circular relationship is, in host’s words, a “death spiral” of bots begetting bots.

---

7. Lightning Round: Broadcast Consolidation, X (Twitter), SpaceX/Starlink, Snapchat, and BMW

[63:56–95:25]

A. FCC Broadcast Limits & Brendan Carr Segment [64:53–75:50]

• Analysis of the FCC’s decision to lift TV station ownership caps—skepticism that it will revive local news, concern about Sinclair and other conglomerates’ political motives.

B. X (Twitter) Product Chief Nikita Bier Quits [76:12–78:06]

• Nikita Bier, who oversaw controversial features and numerous failed experiments, departs X, further evidence of decline and dysfunction.

C. SpaceX as an AI Data Center Company

• Despite its image, SpaceX is mostly monetizing AI data center capacity and Starlink’s nascent telecom ambitions, facing steep economics proved by decades of telecom market history.
• David: "The only truly profitable part of SpaceX is Starlink, which is a telecom. And Gwynne Shotwell on their earnings call said they have ambitions to come after terrestrial cell networks. Good luck." [79:32]

D. Snapchat’s Stand Against Wholly AI-Generated Content [85:17–89:42]

• Snapchat will attempt to remove fully AI-generated videos from its feeds, bucking industry trends and emphasizing “authenticity.”
• Nilay: "It is really interesting to see Snapchat, which tends to be first to see this stuff and do something about it, make that turn and say, actually, we are going to go out of our way to be the place for humans." [86:22]

E. BMW Puts Spider-Man Ads in Car Infotainment [90:28–95:07]

• BMW’s move to insert branded Spider-Man animation ads into their infotainment systems is universally reviled by users, seen as a harbinger of intrusive, screen-based in-car advertising.
• Nilay: "Our commercials will be available in more than 70 countries worldwide. People truly hate this. I can’t tell you how much people actually hate it." [92:29]

---

Notable Quotes

• "You always ship your org chart." – David Pierce [04:48]
• "If you are all the way at the end of that spectrum, the hell are you doing working on business software?" – Nilay Patel, on AGI researchers being forced into less ambitious roles [12:20]
• "It's a death spiral of AI everything all the way down. But right now it works." – Nilay Patel on Google & Reddit's symbiosis [36:26]
• "Anything that looks like time spent wins." – Nilay Patel on entertainment platforms [47:45]
• "Everyone hates this. The subtitle of too many of our podcasts needs to be: Don't forget, everyone hates this." – Nilay Patel on in-car ads [94:41]

---

Memorable Moments

• The “buying the dip” AI Overview fail where Google's AI conflated financial advice with supermarket dips [17:36].
• The “Brendan Carr’s a Dummy” recurring segment lampooning the logic of current FCC policy changes [64:53–75:50].
• The “mutually assured destruction” dynamic between Google and Reddit [34:03–36:26].
• Nilay’s social-vs-AI platform comparison and cautionary tale of Google’s past failed “social everything” strategy [22:42–23:41].

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Google AI Shakeup Begins: [02:31]
• Product Fragmentation / Org Chart: [04:45]
• Strategy: AGI vs. Product: [07:23]
• Is Google Behind? [15:49]
• Reddit & Google, AI Slop: [25:44]
• Disney’s Everything App & Streaming: [40:34]
• Brendan Carr FCC Segment: [64:53]
• X Product Chief Departure: [76:12]
• SpaceX/Starlink Business Analysis: [78:06]
• Snapchat’s AI Policy: [85:17]
• BMW In-Car Ads Debacle: [90:28]

---

Final Thoughts

This Vergecast episode offered a rich, candid assessment of Google’s AI struggles—organizationally, strategically, and operationally—while situating those issues within the broader battleground of AI, digital content, and platform dependency. The hosts balance humor, skepticism, and deep industry analysis, making this a valuable episode for anyone invested in the future of AI, tech platforms, media consolidation, and the authenticity crisis on the modern web.

Transcript

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Support for the show comes from Attio, the CRM for teams who set the pace. Imagine if your CRM could learn your business and build itself around it. That's exactly what you get with Attio the Agentix CRM. All you have to do is connect your inbox and calendar. Then every lead gets scored for fit. You get full briefs in hand before every call and personalized follow ups in your voice get drafted to target accounts. 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 ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done and what it's about do so you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com

[Nilay Patel]

you know that feeling. Too many updates, too many meetings, too

[David Pierce]

many things falling through the cracks.

[Nilay Patel]

Monday.com was built for that gap, the AI work platform designed from the ground up for people and agents to work side by side and deliver more together.

[David Pierce]

Drafting the brief, flagging risks, running a competitive scan.

[Nilay Patel]

Your agent can do it all. And the best part, anyone can build one.

[David Pierce]

Even you.

[Guest/Producer]

Try it.

[Nilay Patel]

Create your first Monday agent [e-mail]. hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of ticking fees. For every minute this podcast goes. Nilay owes me $1 million. I'm your friend, David Pearce. Neil Ibtel's here. Hello.

[David Pierce]

I won't pay.

[Nilay Patel]

That works. In the current state of things, it's actually a pretty good strategy.

[David Pierce]

Did you read the. There's a New York Times story today about a town in California that had a recall election for the mayor and three county commissioners and they just won't leave. They're just like, yeah, we don't, we don't believe something illegal must have happened and they just didn't leave office. It's very good.

[Nilay Patel]

That rocks, man. You can just, you can just do whatever you want and it's probably, you'll probably get away with it.

[David Pierce]

Right now it's like, yeah, it's fine, whatever you want. I own TikTok now. Let's go.

[Nilay Patel]

Who does own TikTok now?

[David Pierce]

Oh, we're going to get to it. We're, we're coming to it.

[Nilay Patel]

It's.

[David Pierce]

It's it's going to be a part of this episode.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. All right. We actually, we have a lot to talk about. We have a bunch of earnings stuff with some streaming news. The everybody wants to be YouTube phenomenon rages on. We have a lot of Paramount news. We have some car news. Nilay's going to have a lot of feelings about BMW at some point in the show, I think, which I'm very much looking forward to. But we should start with the news from Wednesday about Google's AI leadership. Sh up.

[Guest/Producer]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

This feels to me like kind of the biggest newsy story of the week.

[David Pierce]

Oh, it's it. I think it is the story of the week.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay, I want you to explain why, but let me just quickly explain. So two things happened that my understanding is, are happening simultaneously, but not because of one another, if that makes sense. So on the one hand you have Jeff Dean, who was, I think, employee number 30 at Google, along with a bunch of other respected AI researchers at Google, going off and starting their own company. Uh, they, they are doing what a lot of people in AI seem to be doing right now, which is realizing, oh, my God, there's so much money in this space. Why am I doing this at a large tech company? We're going to go start a startup. Presumably they will raise tons of money and that will be that. Right next to it, you have a big shakeup inside of Google DeepMind, which is the team that runs all of the AI stuff inside of Google. If you remember, one of the reasons Google DeepMind is the way that it is is because Jeff Dean lost a fight to be in charge of AI at Google in a very straightforward way. Demis Hassabis sort of elevated to the top of all of Google's AI stuff. Jeff Dean did not. I think it is not entirely surprising that Jeff Dean, after this time, no longer works at Google. But anyway, Demis Hassabis, who has been running Google DeepMind for some time, is. Is moving to a different job. He's now the chief scientist at Alphabet and has, I think is the chair of Google DeepMind now, some sort of honorific title that is basically, uh, he does not want to run the thing anymore, but he wants to keep going and being fancy and doing AI things. Um, one of his sort of deputies, this guy named Karai, is Now running Google DeepMind. And there's a sense going around with all of this news that something is amiss or maybe just confused or wrong or in some ways very googly with Google's whole AI. So tell me what you make of all of this news?

[David Pierce]

First of all, you know I love an org chart story, David.

[Nilay Patel]

I do.

[David Pierce]

I got, I got a whole podcast over there that's basically like, tell me about your org chart and I'll tell you everything that's wrong with you. And one of the cliches about org charts and products is you can look at a product and you always ship your org chart.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

So if you look at Microsoft Word, you can see the political fights inside of Microsoft that led to all those buttons being there over time. And, and I would just say you can look at Google's suite of AI products and realize that there's no cohesion in what Google is doing with AI. And I'll just give you three examples. I have a GM car that has Google built in, in it and it just got upgraded to Gemini, which sometimes goes away. This is probably GM's fault, but it's somewhere between Google and GM. Sometimes it just goes away and becomes Google Assistant. Again. Weird. That's just a weird thing that happens in my car. Sometimes the all powerful AI just disappears.

[Nilay Patel]

They get tired.

[David Pierce]

What are you going to do? Gemini in my car is supposed to be the same as Gemini in my phone.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

But it actually has a slightly different set of capabilities and none of that is related to Google Assistant Gemini on my Google home devices in my home.

[Guest/Producer]

Right.

[David Pierce]

And all of that is different than whatever appears in Gmail in Google Workspace. So today I asked my Google home, hey, I got an email this morning, can you find the like order code for me? And it was just like, I can't read your email. And I was like, the whole point of this is that you're supposed to

[Nilay Patel]

be able to read like, no, you super can.

[David Pierce]

Gemini, why did I turn voice match on and all this stuff and give you access to my email if I can't just say, hey, can you, can you pull the order number out of my email for me?

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

And it could not do that.

[Nilay Patel]

But then the best part is randomly, like your car might have been able to do you know what I mean? Like, this is the Gemini story, right?

[David Pierce]

And this is, all I'm saying is I can look at that mess of products and they, they've put AI everywhere across the Google suite at really high rates and they're very proud of this.

[Guest/Producer]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And in many ways they're winning, Right. They're shipping more AI products to more people than anyone because they just have the most surface area. And you can say, well, there's no strategy here. There's no vision for how all of this makes a Google ecosystem powered by AI. There's just different rifts on Gemini in every single place they can put them. And you know, Sundar was on decoder at IO and his whole point of view was we've got the big foundational technology team that's Google DeepMind. And then we're productizing it all these different ways. And I get the sense that the product that Demis Hassabas wanted to make@google DeepMind was AGI. This is demis saying over and over again, we're in the foothills of the Singularity.

[Nilay Patel]

A phrase Sundar has now adopted, which makes it a thing, which it was in the blog post that like, he's just parroting this as like, this is now. This is now the phrase we're using. It's like live, laugh, love the foothills of the Singularity. Like, this is what we're doing now.

[David Pierce]

Well, if you think we're in the foothills of the Singularity, by the way, which generally defined as a point by which you cannot see through or beyond, who knows, man, that AGI is going to come about and the super robots are going to be smart enough to do everything in the world and we'll just live a life of carefree, fully automated communism, whatever. If you think that's happening, you should spend all of your time focused on that. You should spend 0% of your time allocating GPUs to Gmail search, which was part of Dennis's job, right? Like just fighting over who gets what access to what model when. And I think he wants to do automated drug discovery and bleeding edge frontier research. There's no question that Google is no longer at the frontier, competing with OpenAI anthropic even on the latest benchmarks. They're way behind Demos wants to go do that. And the very prosaic let's put the Google Assistant here, powered by Gemini over there, connecting to your data source over here to make real products people might like and not hate AI. That seems like someone else's problem. And I don't know the new person who's going to run DeepMind. It's notable that they're not a CEO, they're an SVP in Google structure. DeepMind is now a business unit inside of Google that has an svp, a chair, and it doesn't have a CEO. Like, it doesn't have business results to to contend with on its own. So it's getting subsumed more into Google and all of the researchers inside of Google. Hayden has a Great story about this. Are pretty mad that Google is doing military applications with AI.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

So there, there's just a lot of turmoil inside of this organization that I think is reflected in the products. By the way, the products are the ones that have to make money while Demis goes and, you know, tries to escape the foothills to climb the mountain of the singularity. What do you think?

[Nilay Patel]

I think I agree with almost all of that. I think the other piece of this that I've been thinking a lot about is where AI is interesting and where AI is actually finding real product market fit.

[David Pierce]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

Like if you, if you look at Demis office, I've talked to him a number of times over the years. And one of my favorite things about talking to Demis is you talk to Google executives or executives at almost any company and you usually talk to them in the course of talking about some new product.

[David Pierce]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

They're about to launch a thing so they make Demis Hasabis available to talk about that thing. He never wants to talk about the news. He's like, look at this cool new thing we shipped. I actually don't care very much about that. Let me tell you all these other things that we're working on and all the reasons I think this is interesting. And he has been pretty straightforward over the years about not thinking that building an AI personal assistant to search your Gmail is the most interesting thing you can do with AI. I happen to think he's right and he really believes, I mean, he won a Nobel Prize for some of the work that that DeepMind has been doing for many years on this stuff to actually go and try to cure diseases and come up with new proteins and invent whole new things. Like he just earnestly believes that all of the places we are pointing AI right now are the, are the uninteresting places to put it. And especially you look at it right now we're in earnings season so we're learning how much all of these companies are spending on this stuff. Everybody's capital expenses are out of control. Everybody is spending like the world is going to end on AI infrastructure of one sort or another. And the only way any of that stuff is going to return for itself is business services. Right. Like this is what we always talk about. AI is business software. The business of AI is business software. And again, if you're Demis has and you're really interested in curing cancer, like building B2B AI infrastructure to make it slightly easier for people to do accounting at their companies is not going to be Very interesting to you. And there's been some really good reporting since this news in, in Semaphore and elsewhere that Demis is. Habas has actually been kind of disengaging over the course of the last year because he doesn't want to run a giant organization. He doesn't enjoy the politics of Google by all accounts. He doesn't, he doesn't care about any of this. He's like, he is a true believer in I think the truest sense of what AGI is going to be and what it could be and what it could mean. And I think it's exactly what you said. If, if you are all the way at the end of that spectrum, the hell are you doing working on business software? And, and I think the thing about this that I really enjoy is my joke about AI all the time is AI is going to cure cancer way before it builds you a good personal assistant. You know who believes that is Demis Hassabis. And, and I. And like again, if, if that's what you believe, of course you should give yourself a giant fancy title like Chief Scientist at Alphabet that lets you go be on stages around the world to proclaim what AI is going to be. It lets you go be influential all over Google instead of just a DeepMind. It lets you not spend all of your time dealing with people fighting for compute at Google Maps versus Gmail and it lets you go invent AGI. Like, is that a weird decision that's going to make him do a lot of odd things with his time over the next few years? Like yes, absolutely. But it makes perfect sense to me and I think is like pretty clearly where this is headed. So they're, they're going to replace him with somebody who is a much more normal operator of a business unit inside of Google who will spend all of his time talking about the new features of Gemini and that will be the job.

[David Pierce]

I, I don't, I don't disagree with any of that. I think that is going to be fundamentally dangerous at a company like Google that does not have any top down product strategy.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes. And who is losing the person in Demis Hasabis who is maybe the single most credible person in the entire AI industry.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

We saw in the Musk v. Altman trial they're all afraid of Dennis.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, he is the boogeyman to every one of their competitors and he had

[David Pierce]

the most resources and was in control of the most things. And I think part of having the most resources and being in control of the most things is you're also a accountable to most decisions. And at Google that means you're allocating GPUs even while anthropic is showing up and taking up Google cloud capacity because Anthropic needs all the capacity in the world. I think one of the most interesting things here is Google is not competing at the frontier with Anthropic and OpenAI

[Nilay Patel]

Anthropic, I don't think it's true by the way, but we can come back to that.

[David Pierce]

I will come back to that. I mean I just look at the benchmark charts however much you want to believe the benchmarks. But Corai Kovachulu I think is how you pronounce his last name. He's the former CTO of DeepMind. He will now become the SVP of DeepMind. He'll report to Sundar Pichai and the idea that he will also run the research lab, which is what DeepMind is supposed to be, and make it a business unit that feeds into everything else. That's what Google has to unwind. And this is what Sunar was describing to me, you know, on that episode of decoder at IO, which is DeepMind is the big research facility, creates all the core capabilities and then you go out and get productized and I think if you're Dennis Asabis, you're like no, the product is AGI.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes, a hundred percent.

[David Pierce]

And if your job is to make the frontier models and those get front productized elsewhere, that it just puts you in a different position than Anthropic which is, you know, every single day their product is the model like in, in like big meaningful ways and they're not really making any money and they sometimes adjust their earnings to make it sound like they're making money. OpenAI isn't making a dime. Their product is a model too. And I think Google just has to make a big decision about what the product is. And right now they make money even though they're spending tons and tons of money out in the world. If they stopped doing that, they would just start printing money again. Yeah, like this last quarter I think they posted a net cash operating loss because they're spending so much money in data centers.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

They could just stop, they could just stop doing it. And the only reason you're doing that is because you believe that there will be infinite demand for AI, for your AI or you're going to sell the capacity to anthropic OpenAI and then Dennis is going to get to AGI, he's going to, he's going to chase this all the way down and then that will unlock whatever Larry Page and Sergey Brin will ascend to the neck, even the next level of sentience that they have long dreamt of. And I, all of that's a lot of bets, man.

[Nilay Patel]

It is.

[David Pierce]

And I, I think if you, if the products aren't good along the way, all of that starts to teeter.

[Guest/Producer]

Okay.

[Nilay Patel]

But this, this comes back to is Google behind?

[Guest/Producer]

Right?

[Nilay Patel]

Because one, one way to look at all of this news is Google flailing because it's losing. Right? Gemini3.5 was supposed to come. Now it's August, it's not out yet. There has been some reporting that Gemini 3.5 is not up to the standards that Google was hoping for. Jeff Dean is leaving. Demis Hassabis is leaving like full panic. Everywhere is one way to look at all of this news. Another way to look at all of this news is actually Google is continues to be in the strongest position in the AI industry and it's not super close. And maybe, maybe it doesn't matter if Google has the best model because it's going to win in every single other imaginable way. It has the distribution, it has the, the vertical integration that it needs. It has the like sales team that it requires. Like Google can probably win without having the best model. But I do think among among a set of people, particularly in Silicon Valley, there is a real sense that Google is behind. And the how you look at what's happening right now really depends on whether you think Google is behind or not. And it sounds like you do think Google is behind.

[David Pierce]

I again, the bleeding edge of the frontier. I, I'm, I can't evaluate that. I think a lot of people have a lot of opinions about that and many of those people seem to think Google is behind in terms of the things people are doing every day, the experiences people are having with AI that makes them hate AI in protest data centers. I don't think Google has as good of a product in AI overviews as free ChatGPT or free Claude. And we can see it every day. Because AI overviews are extraordinarily public, people keep using them and posting screenshots of how stupid they are. We have one here, there's a really good one from this week. So I'll just offer you this one which is I think the funniest bad AI overview in quite some time.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay.

[David Pierce]

Bill Grusian on Bluesky posted he would clearly search for what does buying the dip means and AI overviews spat out to him buying the Dip means purchasing an investment like Dean's French onion dip or stocks after a price dip. And then someone went and checked it, it's real. And then you know, there's bullets underneath it that says what is buying the dip? Oh my God. And the three bullets under it are one, lower cost buying assets when prices fall from recent high. Two, long term hope expecting the price to go back up over time. And then the third bullet is just snack option, which is purchasing dairy or bean dips at the grocery store. This is incredible, bro.

[Nilay Patel]

Did you buy the dip? It's like there are a lot of possibilities there.

[David Pierce]

It's, it's very good. It is incredible that this is just a thing that people are checking and seeing. I'm confident this is fixed now, but I've seen this in a bunch of places now. You can say, maybe it's fake, maybe you got hoaxed. I've seen answers like this across Google over and over again. And I think these are the experiences people are having with Gemini in AI overviews. And obviously Google has to run AI overviews as cheaply as possible because they serve millions upon billions of queries every single day. But I think the combination of maybe at the bleeding edge of the frontier, there's a class of people in Silicon Valley who think Google is behind and the next model will rocket them to the front and that race will just keep going. The experiences consumers are having with Google's free AI products and the sort of messiness of how AI is being smeared all over everything else in Google is a lot. And I would couple that to stories we ran this week about Reddit. Reddit being infested with AI slop to try to gain Google search results. Reddit trying to fight back against AI slop with AI moderation of its own, publishers wanting to opt out of Google because there's still more traffic, which we keep talking about. And you're like, oh, the core business of Google is under a lot of risk from a lot of different places. And if people stop trusting Google as the primary source of information and it's not operating at the frontier and people turn to Anthropic or OpenAI or whoever else first, things are pretty shaky, pretty fast.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

Right. And like the fact that the company is printing money and doing all this stuff, it kind of doesn't matter if Google. Google search is shaky because once that goes, all of your distribution advantages start to go with it.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I mean, I agree with that and I do want to turn to Reddit, but I just. Before we do, I Want to offer you one data counterpoint that I've been thinking a lot about this week. So we've talked before on this show about the fact that OpenAI very proudly sort of touted every milestone on the way to a billion users for ChatGPT and has not yet announced that it had a billion users of ChatGPT. It did announce that it has a billion people using its models, which is not the same thing, but it's still a really big number. Meanwhile, Google, at the end of July, I think, in its earnings, said that it. 950 million people use the Gemini app every month like it's. There is a. There is a real chance in there that more people are using Gemini than are using ChatGPT. And if not, it is damn close.

[David Pierce]

Sure.

[Nilay Patel]

And that is a thing that, if I'm OpenAI is terrifying because that means you're losing your first mover advantage has now disappeared, and Google is just going to eat you alive by virtue of its overwhelming hugeness in every imaginable way.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. But I'm saying to change the voice in my ev, I had to download the Gemini app and change it in. The app, like, Google can play a lot of games that OpenAI cannot play. I think Google is also in more countries with Gemini than OpenAI is.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. And again, I think Google has. These are the intrinsic advantages I'm talking about. Right. But it's. This is how you get people into the ecosystem and Google just has moves upon moves that no one else has. And so I. I kind of think Google can be third best and still win.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

And I also think there is a strong chance that as keeps happening, Google will find a way to leapfrog the Other 2 for 10 minutes until somebody leapfrog. Like, this is just what these three companies have done for years. And I don't know of a reason to assume that Google is, like, out of this fight.

[David Pierce]

Oh, I don't. There's no way I would say it's out of this fight. All I'm saying is, if you want to lead AI at Google, a good question is, what does that mean? Yes. Does it mean you're in charge of the models? Does it mean you're in charge of how it shows up in Gmail? Does it mean you're in charge of whatever bad voices Gemini has, which are not as good as the voices Google Assistant has, by the way, Apple's about to put out, like, a home device with Siri AI in it, powered by a distilled version of Gemini that is probably going to be better than the Google home device.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And I'm only saying that because they will have paid any attention to it at all.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, no, I agree with that. I think Google shipped this home speaker and then I think promptly forgot that it existed, which is a very Google thing to do.

[David Pierce]

So if you're in charge of AI at Google, like there's an all powerful robot voice assistant in everyone's kitchen. Well, I think that's what OpenAI is going to ship first too. So are you in charge of that? I do not know the answers to these questions.

[Nilay Patel]

I don't either. I've been reading a bunch about Google again recently as I am want to do from time to time.

[David Pierce]

You love reading about Google.

[Nilay Patel]

I think Google is one of the most fascinating moments in certainly my career covering technology because it's, it was the other time that Google did what it is doing right now, which is take a thing that it believes in and try to smush it into every other product that it made. Social was the future of everything. They were going to rebuild every single one of their products around this social network that was not going to just be a social network. It was going to invade every other like what if we make Google Calendar a social network? Was the Google plan. Like that was literally what they were doing. And it, it didn't work and it cratered spectacularly and it hurt Google for a really long time. And the, the bear case for a lot of this is Google repeating exactly that mistake. And instead of saying we have a bunch of successful products, maybe this is a new one. They're saying we need to reinvent every single thing that we do around this other thing that now exists and they might break it all again in the process.

[David Pierce]

Except, and I think this is the error, it's not all the same thing. If I could reliably count on Gemini to be the same Gemini in every place where I encounter a Google AI service, I might feel differently about it, but it is often just like nerfed in extremely confusing ways.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, that's such a fun UX question. Like should you be able to ask Google Maps about your email Is such a fun weird question. There was some announcement this week that you can now like order food directly through Google Maps. You can say I, you know, I have this long drive, order me some Chinese food to be picked up along the way. Boy, can I not wait to test that out in a bunch of deeply weird ways that are going to screw me up. Like the Starbucks app. Can't figure out that I don't live in California anymore. I don't have a lot of faith in Google Maps to get this right, but this is the sort of thing that I think like, beyond all of the technology questions, Google is sitting in front of a million complicated user experience questions about actually, is the AI supposed to be the same thing in your speaker and your house and your email and everywhere else? I don't know, but it's a super fun, weird question that Google is going to have to answer kind of before anybody else.

[David Pierce]

No, I think everyone else has already answered it and the answer is yes.

[Nilay Patel]

Really?

[David Pierce]

Yeah. I mean, Claude is essentially the same Claude everywhere you encounter Claude and whether that's on the app, on your phone or your computer, like these are all cloud services.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

That's true.

[David Pierce]

And you can kind of remote control cowork from your phone if it's running your laptop and doing laptop stuff. I guarantee you Apple, we haven't seen how Siri will come to other devices, but they really want Siri to be a unified AI across their devices. And some stuff happens locally and not. And we'll just like figure out where that gets to. But I think everyone else has decided it's the same AI. And Google, for I think a variety of cost reasons, has made the AI on Google home a different thing than the AI that shows up in AI overviews than Gemini, which shows up in all these other places.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I think that's right.

[David Pierce]

I'm. At some point that's gotta come together or in classic Google fashion, maybe get even farther apart.

[Guest/Producer]

Who knows?

[Nilay Patel]

Well, that.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Or actually I think the classic Google fashion would be for them to almost work together, but never actually quite work together. That's the true Google way is like we all acknowledge that these other products exist. We just don't really do anything about it. Yeah. Before we get off this subject, let's talk about Reddit just for a minute, because you, you brought Reddit up. Reddit also reported earnings, had some interesting stuff to say about the. Their sort of ongoing case to exist in a world where Google is extremely reliant on Reddit. This whole turn has been really fascinating. Right. We've been, we've been talking about it a lot. Google has understood that it is being overrun by AI slop, which is very funny because Google is also contributing to a lot of this AI slop. AI overviews are a disaster for all reasons you're talking about. But Google has made several turns over the last couple of years to more emphasize human stuff on the Internet. There was the section of Google search results. That's now all like creator made stuff.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

There has been an increasing focus on Reddit. Miya Sato on our team wrote a great piece and she said that according to data from Semrush, Reddit was the most cited domain in May by Gemini and AI mode on Google, like it is it, it is looking for these human things. And yet at the same time, Reddit is turning around and saying, oh my God, we have a massive AI problem. We are being completely overrun by AI slop, AI generated posts and importantly, people trying to game these AI systems.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Particularly brands.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Right. If you can get yourself onto a list of best skincare products, that's the example of me as peace in some Reddit community. The chances that your products will be recommended by a Google AI overview or perplexity AI overview or ChatGPT or whatever goes up and that is a gold mine. Right. So all of this stuff is being flooded by branded content like masquerading as real people, which is crazy and I think you can do with AI. So Reddit has to deploy AI to stave that off. Google is doing nothing. Reddit doesn't think Google is paying enough money to license all the data on Reddit. And you're just like, why is Google's biggest dependency one platform? Right. This, this is not actually the web you want.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Right.

[David Pierce]

Google's power over many, many, many years has been able to say to any one web provider, we don't need you. Yeah, Right. Like, and this is the dynamic of you have to be indexed by Google. You can never body up to Google and say, we want terms, we want business terms for you to index us. Google will say, we don't need you anyway. Someone else will show up and we can edx them and that's fine. And.

[Nilay Patel]

Or the converse to lift something out of obscurity and be like, this is a good and valuable and useful source. We are going to give it real shine.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. I mean, and this was the power of Google search, was that it accessed the whole web. Sundar would always say to me, it's the richness of the web that makes Google go. And if you're like, now we're just in a fight with Reddit, our whole business is like, can we find a way to thread the needle so that Reddit is healthy, so that AI overuse can surface some combination of YouTube shorts and Reddit, you're like, what has search become?

[Guest/Producer]

Right.

[David Pierce]

What will Reddit become at the end of that? Right. If it is just brands firing AI slop at communities that don't want it in order to sell more shampoo in AI aggregated summaries on other platforms. All of that seems very unhealthy. And I don't think any of these companies, Reddit or Google included, are thinking about it holistically. I think they're, they're just trying to get through the next turn.

[Nilay Patel]

They're all caught in the same spiral too, which is that the more important your platform becomes, the more AI stuff gets pointed at it, which makes it worse for actual humans. So the humans leave, so the AI becomes more powerful. Like it, it all just kind of death spirals as soon as you add AI creation into the process. Like I spend a lot of time on productivity subreddits because I'm a, this is the particular kind of like disease that I have on the Internet. And one of the things that has started happening is there, there are two kinds of posts you see all the time now. One is a post from somebody being like what's your favorite note taking app? And then a thousand people all essentially hawking their own app at various levels of subtlety. Some people will bury it in a list of like here are the five that I really like and number four, like three are like the three everybody knows. And, and then number four is a weird bizarre one that sucks that there's no way anyone would actually recommend and is clearly being the. Or you just get people who will just paste a link to their thing in and, and hope that that's enough. And what, what it turns out is that a lot of this is, is an effort to game the system so that when Google's crawlers go looking for best productivity app, they find the thing that says what's the best productivity app? Scans the list and fights it back to you on Google's AI overview. And it's like a, we've just completely poisoned the well because Google's crawlers believe Reddit is full of humans and Reddit is demonstrably no longer full of humans. And B, this is now a disaster for both of these platforms. Yeah, it has made them both worse to the point where I don't really trust anything I see on Reddit anymore because everybody is either trying to sell me some weird thing that they vibe coded or is is astroturfing for some brand or another all over these platforms.

[David Pierce]

Yes, I agree with that. Let me challenge you. Put an over under on this.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay.

[David Pierce]

Google buys Reddit.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, interesting. I, I would say no only because it having Reddit be independent gives Google better Reason to prize Reddit, like, interesting. I, I think I like Google goes really far out of its way to not remind you that it owns YouTube. You know what I mean? It's, it's really important to Google that you forget that Google owns YouTube. Uh, and in such a way that I think Google buys Reddit just changes that relationship in a way that is hard for Google. It's also in a, an ongoing antitrust violation kind of way. It would be very hard for Google to be as, as kind to Reddit as it currently is if it owned Reddit. Every case for Google only caring about sending you to other Google sites sort of dies on the. But Google loves Reddit so much.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Fine.

[Nilay Patel]

And if Google owns Reddit that, that falls apart. Would it, would it make Google's results better to own Reddit? I don't actually, I don't think so. All you're doing is making it more obvious how to game the system.

[David Pierce]

All right, let me spin it out for you. I'm not saying I believe this. I'm saying I can, I can spin it out. I'm listening.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm ready for it.

[David Pierce]

Big publishers are all mad at Google. They all start de indexing themselves from Google because they don't get any traffic and they don't want to participate in AI overviews for free. Google says, no, we're never going to pay you. We're just, you can de index, you're out of Google. The amount of information in Google starts to plummet. It gets replaced mostly by branded content on the web. Right. E commerce providers start publishing lists of best sunscreen and the wire cutter is not there because the New York Times is mad at Google and D index itself. And so Google looks at the incoming information that it has and says, we don't want to surface a bunch of E commerce information either. We need our own first party platform like YouTube that is full of something approximating real. At the same time, Reddit says our AI costs are skyrocketing because we're spending more money on AI moderation to battle the influx of AI bots. And this is getting unsustainable at our current burn rates and advertising rates. We need a buyer. And Google says, screw it, we're done with the web. We're just going to index Reddit the same way that YouTube is not really an open ecosystem. It is a totally closed ecosystem, allows you to link out, but is only really indexable by Google search.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay, that's a good theory. I think a Google pays Reddit what, 65 million a year. That's probably 60. 60. Okay, that's probably.

[David Pierce]

They threw in an extra five. Like a Steve Huffman. Shut up.

[Nilay Patel]

Exactly. I think that's probably a better deal than buying Reddit outright. Um, and B, well, Reddit thinks that's

[David Pierce]

not nearly that funny.

[Nilay Patel]

True, but what's Reddit going to do?

[David Pierce]

You know what I mean?

[Nilay Patel]

Like, Reddit. Reddit has kind of played itself here in the same way.

[David Pierce]

What if Reddit dnx itself from Google?

[Nilay Patel]

Reddit dies. This is the problem. This is the. This is the. The place everybody has landed is Reddit failed to make itself enough of a destination so that it doesn't have to rely on Google for people to find things. Have you ever tried to search something on Reddit? It sucks, dude. Like Reddit Answers. I don't even know if Reddit answers is still a thing. It's bad. They tried to do their own AI search and now they're like, well, Google is our discovery engine. And it's like, buddy, have you seen the media industry for the last 20 years? Like, we tried this, it didn't work. But now they're sort of existentially reliant on Google, which makes the fact that all of the data coming from Reddit is less and less useful a problem for Reddit as well, because it makes it easier for Google to be like, well, this is not giving us what we wanted. Why would we continue to license this from you? At huge money, they're stuck in this weird mutually assured destruction, but it's all dying anyway sort of moment that just strikes me as very complicated. But the other thing I want to say, and then we should actually take a break here because we have other stuff to talk about, is that there is going to be someone at Google who is listening to this and thinking, God, what a great case Nilai just made for why we should resurrect Google. And I want to tell you, it's always Google. Don't do that. Don't resurrect Google or Google Buzz or Google Wave or any of the other times you have kind of sort of tried to do this thing. Nilay's right. But you, Google can't do it, so stop trying.

[David Pierce]

I just want to correct you lightly. One, I not on Google. Don't resurrect Google for buzz.

[Nilay Patel]

Google Buzz riffs.

[David Pierce]

We are being a little apocalyptic here because I think we see the end game of all this circular bot activity and the rise of the dead Internet right now. These companies are making money. So Reddit just had earnings five, six days Ago, they beat the street. They posted revenue of 805 million. Their daily actives are up 18% year over year. Their weekly actives are up 24% year over year. This is a platform that is growing, right?

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

And it's growing because of a massive influx of Google traffic. Yes, because Google is existentially dependent on Reddit and in Reddit feels like it's existentially dependent on Google. And all we're spinning out is not calamity today, it's, boy, if Reddit is over polluted by AI and Google search is thus over polluted by weird AI overviews sourced by AI and Reddit. Like, actually, this is all pretty precarious.

[Nilay Patel]

It is pure dead Internet theory stuff. You get, you get bots that, you get bots on Reddit that make bot stuff on Google happen. The Google stuff sends you back to the bots. The bots have more incentive to post bot things that go back to Google. Like, it is just. It's a death spiral of AI everything all the way down. But right now it works. There are a lot of corners of Reddit that are still really great, but there's a lot of stats out there about how much of both Google search and Reddit activity is commerce based. And boy, can I tell you that everybody trying to do anything in the AI world is going to desperately try to destroy that with optimization and bots. It is just, it is just going to happen.

[David Pierce]

We will end here. If you want the most striking counter argument to the, the, the crisis in men in this country, just go to R Smoking, which is just men being very kindly supportive to each other about smoking meats.

[Nilay Patel]

That's so nice.

[David Pierce]

Everyone's like, you did such a good job.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, that kind of smoking.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, okay, now I'm in favor. I like it r smoking.

[David Pierce]

I'm just telling you, it's like a lot of people being like, I fucked up a brisket. And everyone's like, it's gonna be okay. And it's like, it's just very sweet and tender.

[Nilay Patel]

That's so nice.

[David Pierce]

The meat and the vibes.

[Nilay Patel]

See, that will not get polluted by AI.

[David Pierce]

No commerce in smoking. Trust me.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, we should take a break. Then we're gonna come back, we're gonna talk about all the weird stuff happening to Disney. We'll be right back.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Support for the show comes from Bitwarden.

[David Pierce]

Quick gut check.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

How many of your passwords are actually strong and unique? If you had to think about that for more than a second. Today's sponsor is for you. Bitwarden is the trusted open source solution for passkey, password and secrets management built to make secure password management accessible to everyone. With its free Forever plan for individuals, you can create, securely store and auto fill strong unique passwords across all your accounts and devices so you never have to remember dozens of complicated logins or rely on the same password everywhere. It also makes signing in faster by securely auto filling passkeys, passwords, payment cards and identities on virtually any device. Behind it all is end to end encryption that helps protect your information from phishing attacks and data breaches. Get started with a basic free plan for individuals or protect your business today with a free trial. Visit bitwarden.com vergecast to get started today. Support for Vergecast comes from anthropic complex work problems need tools that are up to the challenge. Thankfully, there's Claude. 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. You can delegate tasks of all sizes, from tedious bug fixes to new feature ideas, then handle other work while Claude runs in the background. Claude has checkpoints that let you roll back to any previous state instantly. Plus, you could set up workflows to run on a schedule, such as daily reports, weekly summaries, and reoccurring data pools for problems worth solving. Get started with Claude at Claude AI Verge. That's Claude AI Verge, and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude AI Verge why can't we get AI to production?

[Nilay Patel]

Our competitors are already how do we keep data secure?

[David Pierce]

When do we actually see our roi?

[Nilay Patel]

All this talk about AI, but talk doesn't transform businesses. AWS AI cuts through the noise, making AI easier to securely deploy and scale with ready to use agents and the broadest set of AI tools and services you can build, buy or partner your way. Stop overthinking, start building AWS AI is

[Guest/Producer]

how

[Nilay Patel]

all right, we're back. Nilay, Can I interest you in the following app from Disney? One place to manage all of your cruise plans, your theme park rides, your toy purchases, and all your favorite shows and movies from Disney. I'm talking about the Disney Everything app. Also sports. Also all the stuff on Hulu. What if everything that ever happened that anyone at Disney had ever done in their entire lives all lived in an app? And we called It Disney. This appears to be Disney's plan. What do you think?

[David Pierce]

You know, it's like they watch Succession and they think it's a documentary about success, not death. Like, success. And it's like, no, Succession. It's like a. That's what I got. That's my hot take on what is happening with Disney.

[Nilay Patel]

Tell me more.

[David Pierce]

Well, I just feel like the idea that you run a big empire and you should have one interface to that empire is very tempting to a certain class of suits who don't know how to make anything broadly. I think that's. That is. That's how you view these kinds of grand ambitions.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And everyone looks at China and is like, WeChat is the everything app. And you're like, yeah, but the Chinese government kind of pushes everyone into using, like, an Everything app. And it's really a messaging app with all these other components built into it. Disney plus doesn't have that. You probably don't want a messaging app in Disney plus. And you're just like, did you stop and think about how they got there, or do you think people love Bluey so much they're going to do their banking here?

[Nilay Patel]

I think they think it's the second thing I really honestly do. I think. I think a bunch of people, and I include, like, Elon Musk and the X Everything app in this, believe that everyone wants to do everything all in one place and that there is something. There is something inherently simple about that that is good and beautiful and lovely. And so if we can have one thing that you like, whether it's, you know, yelling racist things at strangers online or it's watching Bluey, then we have an obligation to put as many other things that you do in your life right next to that thing because it makes it easier and better for you to do. I think that is just straightforwardly backwards. I, like, I have been yelling about how Everything apps are a bad idea for a very long time. WeChat is a product, like you said, of the Chinese government. It's also a vastly different economy and culture and way of interacting with each other. Like, the only way for an Everything app to work in the US is for every single thing about the US to be different. Like, go back 50 years and change a whole bunch of things. And that's how we do this. But there is something about this idea that is so tantalizing and so sort of explainable, which I really enjoy. Right. Like, you can imagine the meeting at Disney where they're like, well, we have theme parks and the People who go to our theme parks, like our movies. What if when you were watching a movie, you could buy a ticket to the theme park? Like, I swear to God, that's how that meeting went. I wasn't there. I don't know. But I am certain that's how that meeting goes.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, we want to put offers here, and then if we're going to have offers, you might as well complete the transaction in the app. And now we're just going to add a ticket screen and then you've got the wristbands at Disney. You got to manage those. You might as well manage those in Disney. And we just have one app on the phone. We don't have to deal with trying to get anyone to download a new app. And certainly we don't have to deal with the cost of maintaining many apps, let alone that all these different screens inside these apps will actually just be cost centers on their own. But it's one app and it's self contained. I get it.

[Nilay Patel]

Somebody yells efficiency and it's like meeting over.

[David Pierce]

So I guarantee you the thing that scares all of these companies, maybe Disney most of all, and I have some evidence for this, is the social platforms, is I keep saying, if you run a Hollywood studio, you have to contend with the fact that your real competition is TikTok and YouTube and Instagram. And those platforms don't have to pay for content. There's just an army of teenagers who work for free and you just have to stare at them. You have to think about them every day. And that means that TikTok and YouTube and Instagram always have something new to deliver somebody. And that means they win a spot on your home screen. Because if you're bored in line, you can just push one of those buttons and something will happen, right? Some new thing, some new rage, bait, controversy will appear at you. Sure. And TikTok didn't pay a dime for it. If you're Disney, you're like, we gotta make another MCU show. And like, that's a disaster.

[Nilay Patel]

Like, it just, it means you have to try hard. You have to. You have to try good, expensive things

[David Pierce]

over and over and over. So now you're like, how do I beat Instagram? And doing it with the cost model of Hollywood content is just fundamentally upside down. How do I get you to open Disney at the same rate as Instagram? But I have to pay Robert Downey Jr. Every time he sneezes. And TikTok doesn't have to pay anybody anything. You can't win that fight. You will never have enough content so you can do things like you can explore adding a free tier to Disney, which is something Disney announced. You can make it the app that everyone at the parks has to use. That's going to jack up your daus, because everyone in the park is going to be using your app all the time. You can put Disney Cruises deals in it so you can send notifications to the sorts of people who like to go on cruises, whoever they are. I'm just not one of them. But there appear to be many, many, many millions of people who love Cruise Cruise, in fact. And then lastly, this is my evidence. You can try to split the difference and you can go to TikTok creators and give them official access to Marvel, Star wars and Pixar characters to make TikToks. With that, you then license back into the Disney app so that you have free content in your app made by other people using your ip. And maybe you're just going to click the Disney button on your phone and you're going to watch some Star wars cosplay nonsense. This is desperation.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes. So, okay, you know what you're making me think this is, this is what you might call the time spent epidemic. We, we spent a long time railing against engagement as the main metric, right? That the, the thing that you needed was to make people do something that if people clicked a button or responded in some way, that was a success. Right? This is, this drove social media into what it is now that if you can make a lot of people angry such that they comment, that post was a victory and you've done a good job and we should show it to more people. And I think you can make a real case. And I have made it before that engagement kind of broke the Internet and we, we have moved on, or at least all these entertainment companies have moved on to time spent. Time spent is the thing they all talk about. And it is, it is the race. It's why, you know, Reed Hastings said they compete with sleep. It's why YouTube is competing with video games. It's why everybody is trying to be everything all the time. The goal is just to get you to look at their app more often for more time. And what it takes to get there is utterly irrelevant, is that this is just the place we are. Anything that looks like time spent wins.

[David Pierce]

Fans will enjoy a shared Disney experience with TikTok videos that will be refreshed regularly to engage subscribers more deeply in timely fan conversations, build stronger communities, and ultimately help them engage with more story formats across Disney plus. It's in the press release. The thing you're describing is nakedly in the press release. We're trying to increase time spent in the app.

[Nilay Patel]

This is also Facebook testing the thing where it's just vertical video when you open the app. Because everybody knows that when you show people a video, they act, they stick around longer, they scroll more like all of the. It's just time spent. God, that sucks.

[David Pierce]

I will say we'll see how real this is. There's a nice part of this where they're going to run the Disney creator ambassador program. And if you opt into this partnership with TikTok and Disney, you might find yourself a creative who gets a job at Disney because they're going to do career development for creators.

[Nilay Patel]

Great.

[David Pierce]

Maybe this is the solution to your AI apocalypse of entry level jobs. You have to do your own free animation for Disney and then they will pluck you from obscurity and then you will run Pixar One day, Mr.

[Nilay Patel]

Beast Imagineer.

[David Pierce]

The power of, of. Of short form video thoughtfully curated to increase time spent. I'm telling you, all these platforms are terrified of this. And they're all going to launch stuff like this. The everything app, you know, approach to whatever you can buy tickets here is just one way to increase engagement and increase transactions inside the app. Putting fan content license with TikTok officially inside the app is another way to do it. And all of them are chasing the economics of the social platforms themselves. TikTok does not have to do this. They just showed up, right? And in fact, maybe the most important thing that TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and all the rest provide is a suite of music licensing deals without which they cannot operate. And that's really the only money they spend out in the world. And the labels know it. And every now and again, the labels bend them over a barrel to extract more concessions. But AI music is coming for that too. And you're just like, oh, this is a big spiral, right? We're all chasing the economics of they don't have to pay for anything.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, well, and I think the, the other trend we've seen a lot of during this season of earnings is ads. I mean, we, this has been the trend for a couple of years now. All of these companies, instead of jacking up subscription prices or in addition to jacking up subscription prices, are desperately trying to get people to switch to plans with ads because they make more money on users who watch stuff with ads than from your subscription. It's not exactly like that, but it is often like that. And you just put those things next to each other. And there has got to be this belief running everywhere around this industry now that if we can just get you to spend 90 minutes a day in our app, we will inevitably make tons and tons of money.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

That there is enough demand for these ads and enough supply for them that if we can get you to open our app for 60 minutes every day, which is like the Instagram TikTok level of engagement and time spent, we will suddenly just absolutely open the money funnel. And how we get you there, not important.

[David Pierce]

Right. And it's going to be licensing the content from TikTok.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Which is.

[David Pierce]

TikTok doesn't have to pay the money.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, God. And this means we're like one small turn from TikTok videos being turned into Disney World rides, which is just like, not a world I'm ready to live in.

[David Pierce]

I'm ready to live in that world. Like some obscure, extremely dirty rap bridge showing up as a Disney ride. It's just.

[Guest/Producer]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Meme rides is not a thing I'm fully prepared for. What do you make of this free Disney plus thing? This is being asked of every streaming service. Right. Tubi just reported it's growing like crazy. And now every streaming service is being asked, when are you just going to go free and ad supported as a giant growth mechanism? Disney? Josh d', Amaro, the CEO of Disney, said they don't have anything to announce in the way that you say it when you're going to announce it in five minutes. So, like, I'm confident Disney is at least down the road of figuring out whether this makes sense. Is this the next big thing?

[David Pierce]

If you're chasing engagement and you're openly announcing deals to increase engagement, then the last thing you can do is make the thing free to get people in the door. And I think Disney's initial thesis was, we're Disney and everyone pays. You don't go to Disney World for free. You pay a lot of money.

[Nilay Patel]

More all the time.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. An ever increasing amount of money. And I think they're just up against the reality of, well, the entire Spider man movie leaked onto TikTok for free.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

It made a lot of money. A tremendous amount of money. But the reality is no one's opening Disney for it because they can just steal it. And their subscription fatigue is real. And if they're paying us money and they're not opening us every day, and if the way to get them to open us every day is to have TikTok videos in here, then the money is not worth it.

[Guest/Producer]

Right.

[David Pierce]

We're just going to shut this down and I, we'll just see what we'll, we'll see. But I, I think the incentives are aligning for a free tier full of user generated content and a paid tier full of Disney content. And if they're smart, they will do that and leave the ticketing experience to some other app.

[Nilay Patel]

So like Disney Talk essentially becomes free as a, as a curated reason to open Disney plus. But then if you want the shows and movies, you have to pay for it.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. All that shoulder content, you know, like behind the scenes of the new Marvel show, like make that free in the Disney app. Let people have at it.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

But when you want to click over and actually watch the movie, make that the subscription fee. And no one's really tried that kind of approach. Yeah, but again, if you're desperate to get people to open your app every day, you are going to have to make some stuff free just to increase the number of people who have that app on their phone.

[Nilay Patel]

Totally. I think that's right. And I think it's interesting to see all of this happening next to the biggest box office weekend in history at the movies. Like you have this audience telling you they are desperate for like tentpole reasons to go out into the world and it's like, oh, actually if you make a kick ass movie, lots and lots of people will go see it. Which 5 years ago nobody thought was true anymore.

[Guest/Producer]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

Like we were declaring the death of the movie theaters and the box office and in person experiences in general not that long ago. And I think you can trace a lot of these decisions these companies are making kind of back to that. But this, there is this resurgence in people wanting to have big, exciting, high budget, shared experiences right next to this just clear race to the bottom from all of the streaming services. And it'll be interesting to see if anybody can pick themselves out up of that. Which is an accidentally great segue into what is going on with Paramount.

[David Pierce]

Oh, God.

[Nilay Patel]

Because one of the. So the, the thing that's happening right now is Paramount is trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery in a, in an effort to, as Neelai keeps saying, tank the company. As everyone does who tries to buy Time Warner or anything like it. But David Ellison, the, the CEO of Paramount has been running around to everyone who will listen throughout this whole process saying, my goal is to make bigger, better, more expensive stuff. We're expanding the slate of movies that we're making. We're going to not join this race to the bottom where Everybody's trying to be TikTok and YouTube, but we are going to be and save Hollywood all by ourselves. And overwhelmingly, it seems every time any US regulator or judge is confronted with this, they say, no, thank you. We are not interested in this. The latest news was that basically this. This deal has been halted. It's going to go to trial over. Over some of the questions about the antitrust implications of all of this. And that trial has been set to begin next March, which is a long time from now. And it's a particularly long time if you are Paramount. And what you agreed to do is start paying what's called a ticking fee if the deal doesn't close by September 30th, which I will remind you is well before March of 2027.

[David Pierce]

So this is earlier than I think they wanted. They had proposed to kick it down the road and settle. Basically. I think the judge said, no, we're just having a trial. So now you got to prepare for trial. This is like you're not negotiating against a bunch of state attorneys general. You're preparing for a trial that they are all pretty motivated to win because you are the boogeyman.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

I don't think Ellison is wrong in saying a lot of this is about concern over who will run CNN and CBS News. I think.

[Nilay Patel]

Do you want to read the quote? You should read the quote. It's a good quote. So David Elson wrote an op ed in the New York Times that I think the essential implied title is like, I'm cool. Yeah, it's actually. It says David Ellison in defense of the Paramount Warner deal. But it is essentially a defense of David Ellison by David Ellison.

[David Pierce]

You can trust me.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Here's two quotes from this. This is Ellison in the Times. I believe this fight is not really about market share. If it were, it wouldn't have been reviewed and approved by regulators, reflecting 65 countries, including the United States, as China, as well the European Union. I point out that the United States federal government reviewed this deal and was essentially bribed by Paramount. So whatever. I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and news releases than news. The issue is whether I can be trusted as steward of Warner cnn. There's been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my attention. Unfortunately, I can't give anyone a view into my heart and mind, but I can share this. I've regularly voted for candidates, both parties. I hold some views that we call conservative and others that we call liberal. And when it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead These companies to bend newsroom to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth, which is what

[Nilay Patel]

everyone says before they bend the news to their opinions.

[David Pierce]

I, I just want to point out that we can see what happened to CBS News. It's not like a secret that in order to get approval to land that deal, he agreed to install Barry Weiss as the editor in chief of CBS News. And she has torn it to the ground. Many, many allegations about Barry Weiss and her regime tearing CBS Juice to the ground, including in 60 minutes, including political interference into shows. And the ratings are in the toilet. Like, the ratings have just gone down. And I think it's because the viewers of broadcast news, particularly cbs, are older and they expect a certain level of quality from cbs, not just craziness. And like, outright, in order to get a deal, we bribe the Trump administration by installing this figurehead atop the news. Like, that's the thing that happened. And it's the thing that there's reporting that Ellison has said to the Trump administration about CNN in order to get approval to buy Warner. So this is all great, right, that you can publish this thing. You say you're going to leave it alone, but the evidence is that you will not leave it alone, right? That in order to win continued approval or to do more deals, you will actually continue to screw with things. And maybe this doesn't matter because young people are not watching cable news anyway. They're certainly not watching broadcast news, as we'll come to in the Brennan Carr segment. But, man, you're just like, God, you're up against YouTube. And the only part of this where he even gestures at it is by pointing out that when he buys Warner, he will still be pretty small. So here's another quote from Alison in this piece. Add up every hour Americans spend watching television and a combined Paramount Warner would account for less than 20% of all watch time, competing every day against Netflix, Amazon and Apple, all of which are companies whose resources dwarf ours. Include YouTube's user generated content math. And our share would drop to 13%. A combined company would account for just 18% of domestic box office. These are not the numbers of a company that can dictate what audiences watch or what writers get paid.

[Nilay Patel]

That's so bonkers. That is so. Those are such giant numbers. Huge numbers to say out loud. My company accounts for 20% of all watch time in America. And be like, but that's nothing, right? It's nothing crazy.

[David Pierce]

And you're like, yeah, I understand what you're trying to say, but These are huge numbers. You're going to run a big company that's in charge of a massive ip, and you're going to run cnn, which you are admitting is a thing people are worried about. And then you're trying to convince us that your company won't have huge cultural impact. I would also point out that Oracle, which is run by Larry Ellison, David's father, owns 15% of TikTok US and

[Nilay Patel]

operates it and effectively bankrolled when Skydance bought Paramount and put David Ellison in his position in the first place.

[David Pierce]

And is bankrolling this.

[Nilay Patel]

And is bankrolling this. Yeah.

[David Pierce]

So you have a massive cultural influence operation just running out of the Ellison family. And obviously, structurally, the corporate structure is more diffuse, but it's. The Ellison family owns and operates TikTok, owns and operates Paramount and maybe will operate Warner. And you're like, yeah, I think these numbers, I think your biggest. There's a reason you picked YouTube here and not TikTok. Right. Like, this is a lot of cultural influence. I think a huge problem for all of this is that Oracle stock is down 26% year to date so far. Right. The pressure on AI stock is coming. There's a hedge fund this week that almost had a margin call situation because it was all in on AI. Whether or not there's enough money in the bank to fund ticking fees and the restructuring of all these operations, while Oracle has to contend with the reality of the AI trade, I think is the biggest open question of all. And I think there are some people who are like, maybe this deal isn't going to happen now.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. There is an increasing sense that the sort of inevitable outcome here is that Paramount just walks away. Because as you're saying it would add up to if this whole thing goes through in next June, it would be, I think, somewhere between 1.5 and $2 billion of ticking fees. Just ticking fees. And this for a company that has already, I think, been forced by Netflix to massively overpay for Warner Brothers discovery. Larry Ellison can swing it. Like, dude, dude has enough money, but you. You wonder at some point when he's going to feel like he's just throwing bad money after good, potentially, given the fact that they might lose anyway. Like, they might. We're having midterm elections in a couple of months before this trial. They might just lose anyway.

[David Pierce]

And if the AI trade continues to go badly, Oracle stock continues to go down, Data center protests continue to go up. You're. You're not throwing away money that you're going to make back just because AI is going to boom.

[Nilay Patel]

Totally.

[David Pierce]

And who, like, I don't know. Maybe. Maybe it's all going to work out for Oracle. Larry Hillson survived worse.

[Guest/Producer]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

But the pressure on the steel is coming from a number of different directions. And I would point out you are operating TikTok, so what you really want is cultural influence. You can go screw with those knobs a little bit.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Yeah.

[Guest/Producer]

Yeah. All right.

[Nilay Patel]

While we're talking about TV news, we should obviously talk about Brandon Carr. So let's take a break and then we're going to come back and it's lightning round time. We'll be right back.

[Guest/Producer]

If you're looking to hire, you need Indeed. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves@ Indeed.com podcast just go to Indeed.com podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com podcast terms and conditions apply. Need to hire. This is a job for Indeed. Sponsored Job support for the show comes from kpmg. In any organization, disruption is inevitable. But struggling through it doesn't have to be. The KPMG Adaptability Index is your blueprint for building capabilities to handle what comes next. It uses real data to look at how your culture, strategy and partnerships all work together to help your business thrive. Stop. Stop reacting and start adapting. Visit kpmg.com US Adaptability to explore the Adaptability Index and Pulse surveys. Today,

[Nilay Patel]

support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder? With a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other, Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, E commerce, and more. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you try Odoo for [e-mail] that's o d o o dot com. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Which means it is time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Car's a dummy. All right, now it is time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

[David Pierce]

That's good.

[Nilay Patel]

What did Brendan do This week, let's

[David Pierce]

start with the basics. Brendan was particularly dumb in two different ways. Is it dumb to take bribes as a public official?

[Nilay Patel]

Generally, yes.

[David Pierce]

I feel like Brendan's nights consist of not being invited to party. You're a dummy, Brendan. You should not have picked this one. He's not a smart man anyway. Brendan, as long as we want to

[Nilay Patel]

come and defend any of us still,

[David Pierce]

dude, I think you can.

[Guest/Producer]

I don't.

[David Pierce]

Classic dumb Brendon.

[Nilay Patel]

He's a dummy and he won't get it.

[David Pierce]

And it's in his own interest to never get it.

[Nilay Patel]

This is all so much more than

[David Pierce]

Brendan deserves because we. Brendan, It's good.

[Nilay Patel]

First of all, never play my voice at me. That's just rude and I don't appreciate it. It was good. I, I, I enjoyed that. It, it, it's a, it's a slow vibe for today's Brendon, which I enjoy. That came from Brady Garacki who says they did not use AI. Thank you, Brady. Appreciate it. Nilai, what did Brendan do this week?

[David Pierce]

We got two things this week, okay. One is straightforward FCC news. They did stuff. They took a vote. They passed the thing. We can talk about it. And then the second is what is fast becoming my favorite theme on Brennan Carr's dummy. Nilai agrees with hardcore Republicans.

[Nilay Patel]

The podcast within a podcast within a podcast.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

In which Nilai, the Wall Street Journal, strange bedfellows. Extremely hardcore Republicans come to the same conclusion as me, which I think is truly a delight. So this week, literally just before we started recording, the FCC, which is supposed to have five members but only has three per project, 20, 25 voted to reduce the broadcast limit. So you're previously only able to own 39% of stations in a market. Brendan has been fulminating about how this is bad for ages. And they were going to do this vote and they did the vote, and now it's a case by case basis. So if you want to own More than 39% of broadcast stations in a market, you can go to the FCC and you can make your case why it's good or bad. There's a lot of legal wrangling to come. Whether or not this is actually legal for the FCC to do is a thing FCC commissioners and many administrations have said they have the power to do, but which Congress has said, no, you don't, lawsuits will ensue.

[Nilay Patel]

Brendan's just kind of been doing it, though. Like we've been talking about the, the Sinclair techno merger for some time now, right? That, like this is, he's just been doing it.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, he's just been doing it. And people, again, the. The lawsuits are to come. Brendan's arguments for this are particularly dumb. So he was on Fox Business earlier this week talking to Maria Bartiromo about the vote. You know, it's a particularly good setup because he's like, I don't know how we're going to vote. We're going to look at it. But everyone knew how he was going to vote. So here's Brendan before the vote explaining why he wanted to lift the cap.

[Nilay Patel]

We've been way out of balance in broadcast media recently. You've got these, what we call national programmers like Disney and Comcast, and they produce basically all the shows that people see. But there's thousands of these individual TV stations out there that want to serve their local community. But the national programmers, Disney and Comcast, have gotten so powerful that they just bowl over these local newsrooms. So by lifting this cap, you get some scale on the TV station side so they can finally push back and give some balance to the national programmers. That's going to be more local news, more local reporting, and that's more trusted than the national media. So I think that's going to be a good thing.

[David Pierce]

All right, let's just try to pull that apart. The national programmers like Disney and Comcast,

[Nilay Patel]

by the way, the fact that he likes to. He just said that as if he just invented the phrase national programmer. Insane. Sorry.

[David Pierce]

But the idea that Disney and Comcast are bowling over the locals is very funny because they only produce one national news broadcast on their networks, right? Like they're not in the local newsrooms of ABC 7 in Chicago. You know what I mean? That is just not how that works. And I'm sure we're going to get a bunch of people who work at local stations emailing us to explain exactly how it works. But in the broad strokes, the local franchises do what they want, they produce their own news, and they put it out in the world.

[Nilay Patel]

Comcast, by the way, also kind of desperately trying to get out of the content business because this all turned out to be a terrible decision for Comcast. So very funny to make Comcast the, like, big bad in this.

[David Pierce]

I mean, none of this makes sense just from the mechanics of it, but in, like, classic Brendan fashion, right? You're like, you're conflating a bunch of ideas and talking really fast in order to say something stupid, but make it sound smart. Brendan Carr, everybody.

[Nilay Patel]

It sounds like podcasting.

[David Pierce]

So the idea that the national broadcasters, the national programmers, are Forcing stuff down the, the throats of these local franchises just kind of broken. If all you're talking about is the news, right? Like, that's just not what's happening there. It might be that maybe the local stations don't want to run all of the sitcoms that NBC produces, but, like, fine. Do you know what I mean? That's not what he's talking about. He's talking about trust in the news. So this is already, like, we're already confused about what the stations have to run, what they hold themselves out at, and who makes the news. And then there's this claim, the heart of his argument here. By lifting this cap, you get some scale in the TV station side, that's going to mean more local news. I'm sorry, do you know who's buying the TV stations? It's giant private equity firms and other national broadcasters. And they're not hiring more reporters. They're not making more local news. The economics of putting more reporters in Kansas City and Milwaukee and Chicago and Detroit are not served by additional scale. Do you know what I mean?

[Nilay Patel]

Like, it's the opposite. It is in fact, the opposite. In fact, chasing scale is what killed all of this stuff in the first place.

[David Pierce]

Right? Because again, Google doesn't have to pay for content and Instagram doesn't pay for content. So they all have this. And Brendan is constantly saying, look, the Cable programmers reach 100% of the country. The Internet platforms reach 100% of the country. These broadcasters, if we let them get really, really big, they'll reach 100% of the country too. And it's like sort of. But there's no connection between that and more local reporting.

[Nilay Patel]

Right?

[David Pierce]

Right. You haven't said, if you want to get really big, we, the government are going to require you to hire local reporters in your markets. Right. And maybe you probably don't want the government to do that anyway, so. And who would watch it? Because who's watching local tv? It's not young people. They're watching Instagram.

[Nilay Patel]

This, by the way, from the same government that is also desperately trying to kill publicly funded media. So I'm, I'm confident to say that's not the plan.

[David Pierce]

And then the real answer is, who's buying this are Sinclair and Tegna, which are aligned to the Trump administration, which there's endless videos of Sinclair stations in particular, forcing their broadcasters to read coverage that is favorable to the Trump administration. You can, you can go search that clip from Deadspin from 100 years ago. They're still doing it. Yeah, what are you talking about, Brendan? Because there's no logical connection between Comcast makes you run reruns of Friends, and if I let the the Sinclair's the world get even bigger, they're going to hire more reporters and that will increase trust in local news. Like it is really difficult to draw those logical connections. That is the fundamental basis of his argument. The FCC is obviously supposed to have five commissioners. It only has three. The one, Democrat, Ana Gomez, voted against this. Of course, she dissented. So you've basically got a situation where people have to file lawsuits against the FCC's authority to do this. In the meantime, these deals are going to get pushed through at lightning speed and I think they will result in more consolidation in local media and eventually even less trust in local media. Because if everyone knows what they're listening to is local news brought to you by some giant national conglomeration of stations that is barely paying attention to your small market and probably going to start churning out AI slop across your markets, you're going to go elsewhere and you're going to continue to turn to actual people in your community who are using tools like TikTok and YouTube and Instagram, thus hastening the death spiral.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, hastening is the right word. This has been happening. And what he is proposing is to

[David Pierce]

speed it up by putting more power in the hands of Trump allies. Yeah, anyway, that's broadcast consolidation. That's the actual thing, Brendan. This week, the other piece of this, which I think is just a delight in a recurring theme here on Brennan Karza, Dummy is the FCC's general counsel, was testifying in front of a congressional committee this week and Senator John Kennedy, who is, I would say a very hard right Republican, straight up said, what are you doing, man? We have a clip. Just play the clip. Sometimes the FCC scares me right now.

[Nilay Patel]

We haven't given the FCC the right

[David Pierce]

to regulate freedom of speech, have we? You have required the fcc.

[Nilay Patel]

FCC to regulate broadcasters pursuant to the public interest.

[David Pierce]

And who decides what the public interest is?

[Nilay Patel]

The judgment of the. Of the FCC following precedent and following the law.

[David Pierce]

What if the FCC is in the hands of someone whose politics you disagree with? You're getting into the foothills of violating First Amendment.

[Nilay Patel]

The foothills, dude, a lot of bad foothills going around right now.

[David Pierce]

Everyone's in the foothills just scrambling around. No one knows what happens next. By the way, who decides what's in the public interest is a great question that you can consistently ask of Brendan Carr because right now it's him. And a thing that he has consistently said is the public interest is listening to everything Donald Trump says, which again, as an American, you simply do not have to. You don't have to listen to the president at all. It's the best part of being American. Yep, put a don't treg me flag on the back of your pickup truck. You jump over little cars. This is just what I dream about it night. It's bad when you have both sides of the aisle in in particular some of the most libertarian leaning conservatives saying, hey, you're getting a little. It's getting a little dicey.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it's like you said, most people agree about free speech. It turns out we're pretty much all on the same side when it comes to government speech.

[David Pierce]

Regulations are bad is a real thing that I repeat all the time. Maybe the only consistent political opinion I've had in 15 years of the Vergecast is government speech. Regulations are bad. And here it's me, it's the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, and it's the apparently Senator John Kennedy who is now invited on to Brennan Carr's dummy America's favorite podcast in the podcast only to talk about this.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, just this one thing.

[David Pierce]

Just this.

[Nilay Patel]

It's going to be a really short dummy. Or not.

[David Pierce]

John, answer the question. Anyway, Brandon, if you want to come on this or decoder or really anywhere else at all, you're always welcome. I would love to hear the mechanics of how lifting the broadcast cap will increase investment in local reporters because I haven't heard it yet. You just keep saying it like it's true, but I think you're a dummy. Anyway, that's been Brandon Carr's dummy America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brandon Car is a dummy.

[Nilay Patel]

Feels good. Love it.

[David Pierce]

That's good that my headphones are a little louder than usual today and really rock the dump.

[Guest/Producer]

If you.

[Nilay Patel]

If you've got an an EQ you can do, I encourage you to turn up the bass as far as you can. When that's on it's power. It does some things to you. Um, I have a lot to tell you about here in the long run, but we should start with the end of a burgeoning segment here on the

[David Pierce]

Vergecast which ended so fast.

[Nilay Patel]

I know it it really. I think we only got through two Nikita Beer is going through it moments here on the Vergecast. Uh, Nikita Beer, who has been for a while the product chief at X posted that he is leaving X. Uh, he wrote that. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to pass the torch and demote myself to my natural state. A poster. This is all, I would say, not terribly surprising. Nikita Beer has spent the last several months posting on X about how unpleasant it is to be running products at X. He's been publicly running a series of experiments, all of which have come to the same conclusion, which is that X is bad and so has everyone on it.

[Guest/Producer]

And if.

[David Pierce]

If we take.

[Nilay Patel]

Literally, like, if you put all of his studies together, it says that if we take all of the people and posts off of X, everyone likes it better.

[David Pierce]

It's like this is.

[Nilay Patel]

This is the state of X as a platform. Um, so he's leaving. He's. He's out. They shipped a bunch of new products. He's been there for like a little over a year. It's got a real, like, defense against the dark arts professor vibe. Like there. There will be millions of people who try to do this job, and none of them will do it successfully. But I just want to say, you know, Nikita, goodbye.

[David Pierce]

You.

[Nilay Patel]

I don't know if you did your best, but you did something you did.

[David Pierce]

In. In the grand scheme of things, he is the most successful product chief that X or Twitter has ever had. For sure. He shipped a lot of stuff, including a robot that published CSAM all by itself. That wasn't in his little list of things that X had published. No, it sure wasn't. Grok. Calling it Mecha Hitler is not in that carousel, as far as I can tell. Nudification problem that threatened to bring the whole thing down didn't make his list. An algorithm that openly favors Elon Musk whenever Elon wants. Elon openly overruling Nikita's decisions left and right by just posting. We'll look into this. It didn't make it onto his list.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, industry.

[David Pierce]

That platform is in some kind of decline. We know this. Actually, this is my lightning round item because SpaceX had its first earnings after the IPO. Liz wrote it up. People are very mad at Liz because they don't. People love SpaceX. People love rockets. The problem is that SpaceX now encompasses many of Elon's other companies, including Xai and X Platform, which is failing. And there's a product just left after again overseeing an AI chatbot that referred to itself as Mecca. Hitler denudified celebrities and women at will and produces him.

[Nilay Patel]

Tight.

[David Pierce]

Yes, the rocket part of it is cool. The rest of the business in disarray. Liz points out in her piece, her analysis of the earnings that the business of SpaceX is barely space and mostly XAI. XAI has a ton of Data center commitments that are holding company underwater. And then importantly, and I think we're going to see this really play out, the only truly profitable part of SpaceX is Starlink, which is a telecom. And Gwynne Shotwell on their earnings call said they have ambitions to come after terrestrial cell networks. So they want to compete with AT&T and Verizon and T Mobile, which good luck. And I don't say this because AT and T and Verizon and T Mobile are great companies or well run or beloved by their customers. I say this because the economics of running a telecom are extraordinarily well known.

[Guest/Producer]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And all of those companies struggle in different ways all the time because the build outs are expensive, the, the, the physical plants are expensive. You have to maintain them, you have to uphold them. They hate competition. And so if you come in to compete, you need lower prices, but you've got the same fixed costs. They all spend billions upon billions of dollars to lobby the government to get sweetheart contracts. You are in for a knife fight. And if what you've got is your phone can connect to space, you're going to run into the problem of trees and buildings quite directly, which means you need to build a cell network. Which is why there are rumors that Elon will buy Verizon or T Mobile. Lots of rumors about Verizon this week. A few weeks ago it was T Mobile. I'm guessing next week it'll be AT and T. Hopefully he gets rights to the grayscale Snyder cut if he buys AT&T. That really, I think, brings together a lot of threads for us in the show.

[Nilay Patel]

What about Project Gena 5 SIS? Can they buy Project Gena 5 SIS?

[David Pierce]

It's available, it's bound to be out there. But SpaceX does have some spectrum that they acquired by yelling basically a lot. And Brennan gave it to them. We'll see if they can build that out. But again, the idea that the most profitable part of SpaceX will have the economics of a telecom is openly hilarious. It is very hard to make the economics of a telecom better than the economics of a telecom.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, it's pure Elon musk.

[David Pierce]

Right?

[Nilay Patel]

Like this is. He would like you to think that Tesla is anything but a car company, when in fact Tesla is very much a car company.

[David Pierce]

It's a car company and they're going to do robots soon, don't worry.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, sure. And now he would like you to think that SpaceX is a space company, when in fact it is either a data center supplier or it is a Wannabe telecom challenger. You know, it's a lot like. But. But rockets. Like what if. What if your whole marketing strategy was to launch and reland rockets on Earth? Just what a deeply bizarre fact. But that's where we are.

[David Pierce]

So the leasing data center space made more money than the rockets. It also did more spending. So they spent $15.8 billion on AI alone. Space and connectivity was a touch over a billion. So the data center piece is just like they're a NEO cloud and we'll see if that works. Right. As we discussed with Google, there's a lot of demand from Anthropic and OpenAI. Those are basically your customers.

[Guest/Producer]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

The Colossus stuff that they built appears to have been a shockingly great business decision.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, right. Because people want the capacity. SpaceX is renting capacity to Google. Anthropic reflection and then they bought Cursor. So we'll just see how all this goes on the AI side. X revenue and all that is down. We've seen that happening. But the part I just want to continue to stay focused on is the idea that Starlink will provide Internet connectivity to everyone in the world, which is the thing that they say. And I don't know, man, it's not like I love Verizon, but I got FiOS. What are you going to offer me?

[Nilay Patel]

Trenches to get Internet to my house? It's like a real thing that happened.

[David Pierce]

There's no chance I'm going to take out my fiber connection and replace it with a space connection. I don't know anybody with fiber who would do that. And the ideas are being floated that all of the Starlink dishes will turn into cell repeaters and become a mesh network.

[Nilay Patel]

It's like maybe, maybe we're doing 5G again. We're literally just doing 5G again.

[David Pierce]

These are all fun ideas that maybe you can do. But then you gotta upgrade all of your dishes, you gotta replace all the satellites which keep falling out of the sky. Meanwhile, Verizon's fiber has been dug. It's just there, they can keep using it.

[Nilay Patel]

Like there's a Verizon guy who comes to my house like every three days to try and sell me Internet. Like, are SpaceX gonna employ that person anyway?

[David Pierce]

The way that you compete in telecom historically is you find a way, a cost model that lets you drive lower prices to consumers. And that usually requires a new technology. And you can spin yourself into believing that Starlink is all of those things. The way that Sprint, when Sprint first came out, remember, they had the pin drop sound yeah, it's because they were running a digital network, not an analog one, and they could bring their prices down with higher quality. Sprint did not succeed.

[Nilay Patel]

Sprint famously not referenced in this podcast

[David Pierce]

until just now, pointing it out, like, there have been lots and lots of attempts to do this. Gena 5 assist, another attempt. We're going to use open hardware. We're going to do open ran. Remember we talked about O ran for ages on the show. Amazon is going to. With the power of openness, we will run a cheaper cost model than Verizon. Said Charlie Ergin, who just declared bankruptcy. Good luck, man. The economics of telecoms are extraordinarily well known. If he can pull it off, he can pull it off. But the number of people in our comments are like, you just hate SpaceX. It's like, no, the rockets part is really cool. The part where you're going to run Verizon again is some of the most known challenges in the history of business. But good luck.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep, yep. And also Verizon's been doing it for a pretty long time now.

[David Pierce]

Although again, Verizon, the. The noise around Verizon being like, screw it, you can buy us. It could happen. That might be the solution.

[Nilay Patel]

It certainly could happen. All right, I have one more lightning round item for you, and it's about Snapchat, which I like to remind everyone on this show from time to time, is a terrible business and a massively culturally relevant piece of software. They announced on their earnings call that there are 971 million monthly active users of Snapchat, which is just a gigantic number and especially among young people. It is utterly ubiquitous. Snapchat still exists. Specs are going to be terrible. Snapchat still exists. But Snapchat also did a thing this week that I thought was very interesting and very telling. Snapchat famously, like one or two turns ahead of everybody else when it comes to product. Evan Spiegel, the CEO, still, I think still on his LinkedIn, calls himself the head of product at Meta, which is a very funny joke that I have always appreciated.

[David Pierce]

It's very good.

[Nilay Patel]

But Snapchat is now going to attempt to not recommend what it calls wholly AI generated videos in its feeds anymore. And I'm just gonna read you a quote from the press release. It says as low quality, repetitive AI generated content becomes increasingly common across the Internet, we want Spotlight to remain a place where people can discover authentic creativity from real people. Because we believe there's enduring value in rewarding original perspectives, personal storytelling, and the moments that people choose to create and share themselves. You know who agrees with that is everybody except the companies that are desperately trying to lower the cost of content even further so that it can just all be AI, Right. Like all the stuff we're talking about with Disney and TikTok and YouTube, like, follow that down far enough and it's just feeds of AI content everywhere you look. And there is an obvious cultural revolt against that in progress. And I think it is really interesting to see Snapchat, which tends to be first to see this stuff and do something about it, about it, make that turn and say, actually, we are going to go out of our way to be the place for humans. Have you seen this rumor that MySpace is coming back, by the way?

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

And that its move is going to be like, as a haven against the algorithmic feeds?

[David Pierce]

Sure.

[Nilay Patel]

Somebody's going to do it and it's going to work. And it's really interesting to see Snapchat do it. Snapchat, I think, has the least to lose because it is so far behind these other platforms. There's a reason we didn't talk about Spotlight when we talked about Instagram and TikTok, you know what I mean? But also Snapchat is. Is culturally on the right side of history over and over and over again. And I think is going to be again on this one. And it was interesting, just fascinating to see them take this bigger swing against it.

[David Pierce]

All right. Culture on the right side of history over and over again. When they just did those glasses is like maybe one step too far. David.

[Nilay Patel]

I didn't say every time

[David Pierce]

I've seen the glasses, man, I saw dude's ears. I don't know about culturally the right side of history. I agree with you on this. Not to overdo it, but boy, have we run a lot of stories about how to label and detect AI content. Just weatherbed this poor woman on our team. We made her start doing it, made her start covering this two or three years ago. She knows more about it than anyone. And her point of view is, yeah, none of it really works. And if you want it to work, everyone has to participate. And there are just massive negative incentives to participate. Yes. Meta just announced its own weird AI detection labeling system. And she's like, why? And they don't have a good answer, like, legitimately. Their answer is like, yeah, we don't know why you did this. It's not great.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. But if you want to.

[David Pierce]

If you want to detect AI generated video, some, which is quite convincing now, you probably need a metadata solution or a watermarking solution. At this point it should probably be just be Google Synth ID People are already trying to figure out how to crack it. The cameras have to support it, the editors have to support it. What are you gonna do? Like, you will definitely be able to filter out the little fat guy. Who, Dan, like the, you know, the little blobby guy?

[Guest/Producer]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

You know what I'm talking about.

[Nilay Patel]

I do.

[David Pierce]

He's adorable. That's like America's next great IP is that little guy. No one knows what I'm talking about. But I promise you I'll send the clip to our editors and we'll put it in the video feed.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes, please.

[David Pierce]

But you know what I'm talking about, David.

[Nilay Patel]

Know I do. And I think it's. It's worth pointing out that the, the phrase wholly AI generated is doing a lot of work here. You can do an awful lot of AI before something qualifies as being wholly AI generated. But this is still one meaningful step against this tide of AI.

[David Pierce]

I mean, Google has announced something similar like they all know. They all know it.

[Nilay Patel]

They all know.

[David Pierce]

But I, I think Snapchat's saying we're going to do it for real and try to filter it out. They will quickly get to this is a humans only feedback. And we're going to have big conversations about AI effects in the back of creator videos or Snapchat's own filters and whether or not they're AI. But I will say the pressure on the labeling solutions to achieve anything like success is only going up by the day because you cannot make these kinds of promises without metadata or watermarks or labels or something that everyone agrees on works.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

And this industry has known it for ages. They have not shipped anything that anyone can agree on or which maybe most importantly of all, which works at scale.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. And there's certainly no chance of Snapchat being powerful enough to make the industry make that turn.

[David Pierce]

The way, the way they would do it is so you can't actually put anything in this feed without said watermark. And that's nuclear.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

But it might be how they do it.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it'd be interesting. All right, you get one more. What do you want? What's yours?

[David Pierce]

I mean, we promised anger about BMW putting Spider man ads in the cars, and I think we have to deliver.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. You should say the other one is we were going to talk about OpenAI responding to Apple's trade secrets lawsuit. Basically their response was, we didn't do it. We'll talk more about that some other time. There's a Lot left to come about.

[David Pierce]

We should do a whole episode on that. There's a. There's a line in that. In their reply where it's like, so and so. Who left Apple for opening? I kept the offboarding documents just to make sure the other employees he was recruiting followed the proper procedure.

[Nilay Patel]

So good.

[David Pierce]

It's choice. It's very good.

[Nilay Patel]

Instead of breaking the rules, what if he did an even better job of following the rules? He followed the rules so good, you don't even know.

[David Pierce]

He kept a bunch of iPhone prototypes to make sure he didn't build any of them.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, but BMW, what's going on?

[David Pierce]

BMW. So there's a BMW integration in brainy day. And I haven't seen this movie yet, but I've been told that it's like a very, like, noisy integration. Like, look at my BMW again. I haven't seen this movie ever.

[Nilay Patel]

Not the BMW.

[David Pierce]

That's like, more or less the vibe I've gotten from people describing it.

[Nilay Patel]

Kill me. Not the BMW.

[David Pierce]

I've been trying to avoid spoilers, so I haven't really got into it. The actor who plays Ned showed up at the Samsung event doing Spider man stuff. There's just Spider man ad integrations everywhere.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Okay. So BMW has this big integration, and what they have done is they've put an ad inside the infotainment display of many BMWs where if you swipe down, you can see in the app icon there's like a Spider man logo that has appeared. And you push it and it plays a Spider man informatic. Everyone hates this. There's like a handful of people in our comments on social media. It's like, I didn't mind this. If this is how advertising works in the car, it's fine. And then all of their replies are like, don't do this. It's a slippery slope.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Because the answer is advertising.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Don't do this.

[David Pierce]

It's a slippery slope. Do not put ads in my car in any way, shape or form.

[Nilay Patel]

This has such. Apple put YouTube on album. YouTube album on your phone. Energy to it where it's like, you can see why somebody was like, people will love this. And no one in the room raised their hand and went, no, they won't. Super won't. Not everyone loves you too.

[David Pierce]

BMW gave a quote to the Autopian, which is a great site, by the way. These festive animations will be available in more than 70 countries worldwide for vehicles equipped with the relevant optional equipment and BMW operating system. 7, 8, 8.59 or BMW operating System X as well as a production date after 7, 2020, which is like, that's. That's a lot of cars. Or not any cars at all. Like, it's hard to know.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Also, I've changed my mind. This is amazing because they just framed. We put an ad in your car as an exclusive product launch.

[David Pierce]

Yes.

[Nilay Patel]

This festive. These festive animations will be available in more than 70 countries worldwide. Is such a funny way to say we made an ad.

[David Pierce]

There's an ad in your car. There's a.

[Nilay Patel]

Our commercials will be available in more than 70 countries worldwide.

[David Pierce]

People truly hate this. I can't tell you how much people actually hate it. It's funny. And on the other side, like, Rivian does easter eggs for Halloween. You can dress up a Rivian as Knight Rider. Tesla obviously has Easter eggs. I think these companies have forgotten that if they want to earn the capital to do this stuff, they have to actually do lots and lots of OTA updates to their cars and make it fun and be like, here's some stuff. And then you can be like, by the way, you're used to getting new stuff in the car all the time. Marvel has made like a Spider man anime. Do you want this? It's in the list of all the other fun stuff. And instead they're like, we've done mostly nothing. The car is still very buggy. And here's an ad. And I don't think they've earned their way into putting these ads in the cars. I'm very curious if a Tesla or Rivian did something like this, that people would freak out as much because at least they have the reputation for delivering new features to their cars all the time.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. And there's a way to do it that. This always makes me think of when they had like the celebrity voices in Waze.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

As an option. And some of them were very clearly sponsorships of some kind or another. Like if you could like turn your car in the nav into Spider man or like one of his cool Spidey vehicles. But like you said, that's an option on a list. That's awesome. A thing that just suddenly appears that is like Spider man is here is not that. There's just. No, there's just no version of that that makes sense. And I don't think that works anywhere. But I think some of these more software driven cars like you're talking about are just more attuned to how do we build this into the experience.

[David Pierce]

The future of the auto industry, everyone agrees, is soon the cars will drive themselves and you will drive around in a shopping mall of screens.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

And we will put advertising all around you in the screens because what else are you going to look at? And no one ever in those meetings is ever like their phones.

[Nilay Patel]

No.

[David Pierce]

Seems like the obvious problem with this whole plan.

[Nilay Patel]

Also, it's worth mentioning everyone hates this.

[David Pierce]

Everyone hates this.

[Nilay Patel]

The subtitle of too many of our podcasts needs to be. Don't forget, everyone hates this.

[David Pierce]

Some people in our comments are like, this was fine. My kids loved it. They, I will say they put themselves out there and I appreciate your point of view. They did get yelled at a lot by other people. But anytime anyone sees a screen with an Internet connection, the next thing they see is dollar signs from advertising. And BMW is no exception.

[Nilay Patel]

Nope, not great.

[David Pierce]

That said BMW, if you'd like to send me any number of vehicles to see the Spider man animation for, I saw that available. Just throw it out there.

[Nilay Patel]

What if instead it just played the TikTok that was the full Spider man

[David Pierce]

movie, just the leak?

[Nilay Patel]

Would that be better?

[David Pierce]

I did watch a little bit more of the Spider man movie than I anticipated. Just because of the leaks on TikTok.

[Nilay Patel]

You're going to prison. All right, we should get out of before you incriminate yourself any further. Nilay, who's on decoder this week?

[David Pierce]

We had a good one this week. It's the CEO of Bose, Lila Snyder. Bose is like, they bought Macintosh Labs, the high end audio company. They're licensing their tech. We talked a lot about, hey, the future of wearables might be all these like AI things. What happens to a headphone company? She got into it. She's great. I really enjoy talking to her. And then next week, Thursday, Hayden's gonna come back and we're gonna go deep into her reporting on the Google AI stuff.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh yeah, she's. She's in the mix.

[David Pierce]

She's in the mix.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. That's good stuff. I am excited about all that. Bose, by the way, shipped some new headphones this week that I'm surprisingly excited about. I love the quiet comfort headphones. Yeah, like I, I have a real weakness for good noise canceling headphones, which means that I know I'm going to buy these and I'm going to feel very bad about it.

[David Pierce]

Do you alternate between Bose and Sony? I alternate between Bose and Sony, yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

I basically like, I try to buy sort of every other generation, if that makes sense. So I'll like wear a Sony, a pair of Sonys for two years and then I'll get a pair of Boses for two years. I also am like weirdly hard on headphones for reasons I've never totally understood. I like, I beat up headphones.

[David Pierce]

I've always said, you have a big stupid head.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, so you and Everybody in our YouTube comments says that I have a big stupid head. I also.

[David Pierce]

No, your head is fine, David.

[Nilay Patel]

You're supposed to like lovingly put them in a case and then like, that's why. Put them in your, in your bag. And I just, I don't know why

[David Pierce]

my headphones break all the time.

[Nilay Patel]

I say as I like, huck them at full speed in my backpack. That's fair. All right. Also, go listen to and watch version history. We're in the middle of making the next season. It's going to be very exciting. That's coming out in a few weeks. Subscribe so you get all of it. That's it. We're getting out of here. As a reminder, the best thing you can do to support all of this, to make sure that Nilay can keep putting screens behind him, to make sure that I can afford to put something here behind me in this new setup that I have, I move the camera. It's very exciting.

[David Pierce]

It is very exciting.

[Nilay Patel]

Subscribe to the Verge theverge.com subscribe it gets you all of our podcasts ad free, including this one and all the other ones we just talked about. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of everything. Keep an eye on what Hayden's up to with this Google stuff. I think she's going to have a couple more fun stories coming. The goings on at the top of the AI race feel very important and very in flux right now. Lots to talk about there. And if you have thoughts, questions, feedback, feelings about any of this, if you want to yell at me about my headphones phone usage, I'd love to hear all of it. Email us verscastheburge.com, call the hotline 866-verge11. We love hearing from you about anything and everything. Once I'm gone, there's going to be a lot more hotline on the show. There's gonna be like we're getting back into the regular drum beat of doing a hotline episode every Wednesday. We're gonna drag Nilay into some of those. Lots of good hotline stuff coming up. Get your stuff in asap. Versecast is a Verge production, part of the Vox Media Podcast network. The show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next week. I will hopefully see you next week. I'm at some point just gonna disappear into production.

[David Pierce]

This might be the last one. I'm sorry that I said you had a big stupid head in the last episode.

[Nilay Patel]

The last episode.

[David Pierce]

I feel really bad about it now.

[Nilay Patel]

My plan is to be here through the end of next week, but I may just suddenly disappear into babyland. And if I do, I'll see you all in a couple of months. Until then, Nilay Rock and roll. Hi, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Are you looking for a beach read this summer? May I suggest your big wireless bill? It's got suspense, mystery, a slightly flat emotional arc, and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time. Fortunately, though, Mint's story is better. Every plan $15 a month even unlimited.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

That's it.

[Nilay Patel]

Happy ending, zero tears. Give it a [e-mail] store switch upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy.

[David Pierce]

See terms Apple News plus has everything you're into, all in one place. Over 500 publications covering the topics that matter most to you. Thousands of recipes from celebrated food publications around the world, local news from all 50 states, sports covers from across the globe, audio stories you can take anywhere. And daily puzzles exclusive to Apple News Plus. All of it curated just for you new subscribers. Try it free for one month at News Apple. Learn Terms Apply.

[Nilay Patel]

Picture it Summer. You and your girls at your favorite patio bar. The sun's out, the breeze is perfect, and you're looking stunning in that new sundress. And what are we drinking? A Campari Spritz. It's just Campari, Prosecco and soda water. Bold, iconic and perfectly bitter. Just like you. Check out official cocktail [e-mail] Campari Spritz Stay Bitter Campari Liqueur 24% alcohol by volume. 48 proof 2026 Campari America New York, NY. Please enjoy responsibly.