Inside the Google algorithm

26:53A lot of our other rankings is what you do once you interact with a search result. And that is very different from what Google has told people. Yeah, actually my favorite part of all this, my favorite thing, because it's such a good name. Let's be honest. How do you get me? You give something an adorable name. Google has spent years positioning search as a utility, right? Not as a business that they run, but as the water or electricity of the internet. It's just a neutral utility. You just use it. And we don't have any ideas about it. It's just we set the robots to crawl the internet. They're just a baby.

27:29Yeah, they just find the stuff and they show it to you. And when you try to cover search as anything other than a utility, the attitude from Google is like, why would you do that? We want to teach people how search works. And we're like, no, there's like a culture of search, like the same way that there's a culture of TikTok, right? And that's been a disconnect. But they have done that on purpose, right? Because if you treat something like a utility or a neutral algorithm or just the right answer that the Google brilliance of PageRank has discovered across the web, then maybe you don't poke at it too much.

27:58and inside these documents we find things like nav boost as part of a system that is called twiddlers yeah twiddlers and the way to think about it is like the big google algorithm is like the back end and right before it displays your result the twiddlers show up and they twiddle the result we just twiddle the little and so nav boost is a twiddler it's like categorized as a It's like we went and found some other stuff and we're just going to shuffle that around a little bit. And there's a bunch of those. And like lots of Google systems are built as Twiddlers. So they have plausible deniability that the core search ranking algorithm doesn't take these factors in.

28:40But right before they show them to you. Just a little Twiddle. Twiddlers, baby. And it's like, I'm not that stupid. You know, it's like it's one system that displays a search result at the end. And where it happens, I don't think they can run around being like, we were always telling the truth. It's just these twiddlers are out of control. They have no control over it. They're just a baby. It's my favorite thing that everybody does now when they screw up. They just go, I'm just a baby. I don't know. It's my first day running search. Who can say? Anyhow, we are going to learn a lot more about this.

29:17We often try not to oversell things. I'm just telling you the web, the people who make the web are aflame because of these documents, because they do make Google seem, if not outright a liar, as though they have been socially engineering a community of people who make things into not believing what they see, as David is saying. And I think the backlash there is going to be ferocious, especially as search traffic declines, especially as user behavior changes around AI, especially as the AI results continue to tell people to eat glue. Like it's not – there's not a lot of trust left in this ecosystem.

29:54And to me it's weird that there's not more coverage of it. It's not as sexy as the Facebook algorithm or Elon saying it's an open source of Twitter algorithm. But like David said, this is the architecture of the internet. Yeah, I think it is because that's why it's so hard for people. It is so ingrained in how most people function that it's shocking to them to a point where it's like I can't even process this. I have to go. Like most people I don't think fully grasp how much the Google. Most people don't fully grasp how much Google affects their online experience. They just don't. They know it.

30:26They see it and everything. But it's just like just gloss over it. And now it's like, oh, we're having to actually reckon with this and think about this. Yeah. It's why I always like to talk about cooking websites, because if you want the if you want the single cleanest example of how Google changes the way a web page works, go read a recipe site. You will see everything you need to see. You will see the H2s, which Google wants because they're going to be questions that people might be Googling. You're going to see the jump to recipe thing. but then you're also going to see 2000 words of nonsense about their lives because you have to actually stay on the page a long time in order for Google to believe that that's a successful search.

31:04They want images. That's very important to Google. Like every single pixel of that page, right down to how the recipe is structured is made for Google. And anyone who runs a food blog will tell you that the fundamental tension is like, I did this because I like food and I actually work for Google. And that feels crappy to a lot of people. And now Google is going to take that stuff and show the recipes to people in AI. Right. But I do think what one more thought on this, that I've been seeing a lot of increasingly in the SEO world, and I think is a really interesting, like internet question is, uh, one way to read a lot of what we've seen in these leaks is that SEO is dead, uh, and no longer will work.

31:43Like there, let me, I copied this one paragraph out from the thing that Rand wrote. Um, he said, Google no longer rewards scrappy, clever SEO savvy operators who know all the right tricks. They reward established brands, search measurable forms of popularity, and establish domains that searchers already know and click. From 1998 to 2018 or so, one could reasonably start a powerful marketing flywheel with SEO for Google. In 2024, I don't think that's realistic, at least not on the English language web in competitive sectors. Like, there is a real defeatism to the idea that Google cares a lot about the sites that already exist, the places people already go, what has been going on for a long time.

32:20And the idea that you can come and be new and good and smart and people will find you because that's how Google works is a dying theory. Yeah. I asked this question to a lot of just media people, website CEOs and decoder. I asked this question to Sundar. Why would anyone make a website? You're a new creator. We're all going to quit our jobs today. Well, which you should do. Can't recommend it enough. best decision I've ever made. I don't plan on doing it. You should go get a job at AL just to quit. Just to quit. But that's how we founded The Verge. We all worked at Engadget 2010, 2011. We had this idea for The Verge.

32:57We all quit. We're going to start a new thing. We started a website, like a big desktop website. We didn't even have a mobile site. We started a big, hairy desktop website with forums and features and all this stuff. And then the mobile web came and we shrunk down the thing and whatever. But it was never a question that we would start anything but a website. There were 12 of us. We had a big idea. We wanted to do a thing. What we were going to do was start a website. I think if you get to that place in 2024, maybe some people are going to start a substack. I don't think they think of those things as websites.

33:31Those are newsletters or independent newsletter on Ghost or whatever. Mostly what they're going to do is start YouTube channels and TikTok channels. Yeah, the only people I see who are kind of doing that sort of thing, like, right, leaving their jobs or whatever and being like, I'm going to start a website are already established brands, right? Like the folks who were over at Kotaku, 404, who were from Vice, these folks just said, I'm going to go and I'm going to start a new thing. And they all take that model from Deadspin that became Defector. And that works, but that is – You have to have an audience already.

34:01Yeah, that worked because they have that audience, right? Like most people don't have that audience and don't have that scale. And I think Casey has written about that a lot of like he has to work to get Platformer out. He has to really put in the effort because scale is hard, and it's much, much harder now because of Google. Yeah, and those sites are all great. I don't think they – like 4.4 is on Ghost. Yeah. Right, so they're taking advantage of some infrastructure for newsletter that exists that lets them be a different kind of thing. But the idea that we coded our website from scratch. You wouldn't do that.

34:34We're going to build a product that is a website. I didn't do it. Yeah, but you wouldn't do that in 2024. It was just not a good investment in 2024 for the reason David is saying. And there's – many things have changed in the past 13 years. But the idea that the new creators on the internet will not go to the open web but instead will go to a closed video platform I think is very dangerous. And I don't know the right answer to get people back to making open searchable web properties if the biggest search engine is like screw it. like Hearst. We'll just, everyone can go read dot dash Meredith, like whatever, you know, like maybe that's the right outcome and maybe that's just the closing of the web.

35:16But I, again, the reason we started covering it last year is cause I was like, Oh, the comment's coming. And the more we covered it, we're like, Oh, the comment's coming. Like we should capture this moment. And it feels like, again, I thought the comment would be, I thought I did not expect it to be like, everyone is this mad. It just feels like, we'll see how it goes. We're going to cover a lot more of it. I think the other browser makers, regulators, there's just a flood of negative emotion about how Google has behaved. It feels like it's coming to a head. I do have one question for you guys, especially you, David, because you use a lot of different search engines.

35:54Are any of them good? Do any of them, when you go and you search something, actually give you those unique results that used to be like, ooh, yeah, now I know what I'm doing on this search engine? Yes and no. Kagi, which is the one you mentioned, which is also what I use. It's$10 a month. It's excellent. I cannot recommend it enough. Paying for a search engine feels ridiculous, but it's worth it. Has a thing that it calls small web, where it actually deliberately built a crowdsourced database of sites that aren't the verge and aren't big mainstream news sites, the kind that dominate search results, but are people's blogs and little alternative news sites and local newspapers and all the kinds of cool stuff.

36:37And you can, you can toggle the search just to that. And I think the sort of big omnibus search is never coming back from what it is now. It's, you, it's just interface changes really. Like I think Kagi stuff is better than Google, but mostly just because it's a nicer thing to use than Google is at this moment. Especially in ARC. Yeah. But where we are now is like the, the only solution is going to be to artificially decide which part of the web you want to look at because all of the signals for the rest of the web are starting to break away from that like find and explore new things vibe because that's harder to do and harder to measure than oh people generally believe that neilai is right about which printer to buy and that's actually like a pretty easy thing for a search engine to believe and send you to over and over again.

37:32Yeah. And we will continue ruthlessly using our domain authority. We will. I love it. To break big printer. David, I can't remember if it was you who said this, or Casey might have said it to me in passing. We used to think of surfing the web as a fun thing to do. And all of Google's messaging at I.O. was, let Google do the Googling for you. Yeah. Which makes it seem like work. And it's like, no, this is how I wasted time. Do you know how much I didn't pay attention in law school? because I was just browsing the web in class. It's weird that we've made the web this unpleasant and the platforms figured it out.

38:06And hopefully we can get some of that back. I don't know if we can. We're going to keep running a website. We do have a TikTok for as long as TikTok lasts. All right, we're going to keep using our domain authority to crush Big Printer. Hell yes. Just ruthless, ruthless domain authority abuse. But that's our mission here at The Bridge. We got to take a break. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs.

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39:11Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than two and a half million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs.

39:49When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote. Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best.

40:22Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in.

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41:40Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

42:00All right, we're back. It's lightning round one, according to our rundown, the AI lightning round. So, there's a bunch of WWC rumors about what's going to happen with OpenAI. They've apparently inked their deal. Google had a bad week last week. We should talk about that. More Google. GPTs are open now with OpenAI Store. There's a lot. But I know people want us to talk about our press release, Fox Media's press release, which is that like many media companies, Vox Media signed a content and technology deal with OpenAI. The Atlantic had one on the same day. It was like Vox Media and the Atlantic were in the headlines together.

42:39I don't know, David, you run, you interview me. Yeah, so, okay. I think the big question to me is both how do we feel as people who work at a company with a deal like this and what is this what does all this mean about the media in general so i think like we we just had a conversation earlier with a bunch of the folks in our newsroom talking about this stuff and and i think i want to know for you as somebody who runs a newsroom you didn't make this deal uh you i assume will at some point see the contract because you'd like yelling about contracts i don't think that's the thing you do i sincerely doubt that is true i'll do my best it is more likely that I will see someone else's contract before I see our own companies.

43:27Oh, that's interesting. That's a, that's a fun reporting tactic. Can I, can I bully my boss before I can play somebody else? That's good. Our company is very good at being like, no, you can't just report on our own company. Other companies like here's the stuff. Like it, that's just the way of being a reporter. Yeah, that's fair. But so I am curious for you as like a newsroom leader, how you even think through what a deal like this means. Sure. uh we do a lot of disclosures on this show famously i think uh i've had journalism professors talk to me about the fact that our disclosures are a running joke with the audience like we want to be really transparent about where information comes from reasons to not trust us if you don't want to trust us like my goal is always to just empower the audience with information That's the top level.

44:19So if you're listening to this and you've listened to the show, that's why we do disclosures. That's why they're a joke. Like I want – the only currency we have as a news organization is trust. So we're trying to – that's why we have the background policy, right? All the spokespeople have to use their names when they talk to us because we don't want to pretend we know something that they just told us. If Google or Apple or Microsoft or whoever wants to talk to us and get some information on our pages, they need to be accountable for it, not us. And that's just trust. That's just who are you going to trust?

44:49Where does a trust go? Who do you have to trust for to believe this story? So that's the top level. Right next to that, which I think the audience doesn't see as much because why would you, is our newsroom has to not think about it. Like that's actually what independence is, right? It's not I know that our company has a deal or an investor and I'm just going to like I'm going to think about it as I write the story. The goal is they don't think about it at all. Right. And we just go do the reporting and we publish what is true or what we believe or what we think people should know. Right. And that in any traditional newsroom, that's what is called the firewall.

45:33Right. So we do stuff. Our sales team. There's advertising. We just came back from an ad break. Right. Like in that. But we don't know what the ads are. I don't know what ads just played. I get so many emails about the crypto ads. I don't know, man. Yeah. Like I think crypto is stupid as shit. Like what do you want me to do? Like that's that team. And if we open the door and start telling that team what to do, the danger – and this is a danger that is proven out over and over again in newsrooms around the world. If we open the door and start telling them what to do, they're like, hey, that door is open.

46:03We're going to start telling you what to do. So we just keep the door closed. This is why you have the firewall. It works in both directions. So for me – and I understand OpenAI in particular is a pretty shady company. I feel like our entire episode last week was like this company is pretty shady. We're going to talk about Sam. I was like, I'm just waiting. Whatever. Fine. But like that's the commercial side of our company. And I understand – like I've talked to a lot of media executives. Like I'm running around covering Google Zero. I've been talking to a lot of media people lately. And I can talk about that bigger question, David, of like are these good deals?

46:35Are these like a good idea broadly? Because I think – I've done some reporting. I have some thoughts about that. But the thing that like when our press release went out, like no, we're not going to change our recover opening. Yes. I think when it's appropriate, we'll disclose it. It's not like a – like Comcast is an investor in our company. Right. Like we disclose it every time we whisper about Comcast because they're an investor. This is a licensing deal. Like we have a lot of those across our company. I don't want to just get into a situation where I'm like, disclosure, Yahoo licenses an RSS feed of the Dodo.

47:10Like what do you – like I think that door can get too open. We can overread it. First cast would go a little long. It would go a little long. And I want to preserve our independence. And what independence really means to me is, yes, we'll disclose it. Yes, we'll earn everyone's trust. But I would prefer it if we were just covering OpenAI without thinking about it. And so that's the balance I'm trying to strike. I'm open to people's thoughts about how much you need from us to continue having that trust. But it is, in many ways, like more of a normal deal than people are expecting. right like when when we did a netflix show i think there was less outcry but like i was the producer of a disclosure i made a netflix show every time you should watch you should watch a netflix show uh david and i are going to make one just so that was like way messier right like i'm going to meetings at netflix about our show i was not allowed to talk about until our show was made um so i want to make sure we like find the right balance and i understand there's just a lot feelings about AI and OpenAI in particular.

48:13But at the end of the day, the goal for all of these media companies is to just get some control back out of a situation that felt out of control. And what situation is that? Well, they took everything anyway. Right. That's the situation. And we can talk about that broadly. I just want to separate the two things. Our newsroom is independent. OpenAI did not buy any control of our newsroom. We will be very honest with everybody when we think the disclosure could affect how you perceive one of our stories. And I think that, you know, around copyright law, like that makes sense to me. We're going to write a story about the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI.

48:54That is a great place for disclosure. OpenAI launches a new GPT feature. Like, I don't know. You tell me. Maybe we need to do that every time. But like I don't want to overread it as though – to make it seem like we're doing something we're not. So that's it. That's like my top line. Like we will have a disclosure. I love a disclosure. Disclosure. Comcast is an investor in Vox Media. I'm in an Netflix show. Disclosure. Alex Kranz is the last remaining Paramount Plus subscriber. It's true. Hi. Look, this is our brand and we're going to do them. The thing that I am trying to be careful about is separating how people feel about these deals broadly and what it means for our newsroom.

49:35Right. And what it means for our newsroom is the status quo. Like it is not changing. We are going to operate without fear or favor. And again, my goal is to earn everyone's trust by being as transparent as we can be. And I just want to make sure that we're not so transparent that we actually go in a full circle and no one believes us. So like you tell me where you think the line is. I'm open to the feedback. I asked for it from our staff today. I'm asking for it from the audience today. But the main thing is not changing, which is I want I would prefer it if our reporters were not worried about an opening ideal or thinking about it.

50:09And we just covered the company like we have been for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. And this is the thing we should say, like a thing I've learned about the media business over the years is that it's very unusual in the sense that like that tension you're describing between the work that we do and where the money comes from is like good and healthy. and should always exist. And our editorial and sales team should always like hate each other a little bit. It's like a useful thing. Uh, but also like we have tech company ads all over our website. Like that is, that is it's, it's a not dissimilar thing.

50:38And it is, it is just something you have to navigate and get comfortable with. And like people always like sending us the stuff where I will, we'll make a verge cast about how terrible Facebook is right before a Facebook ad. Like it's my favorite thing. It's so fun. but I do want to talk about the broader piece of this because I think the, I think you're right that the reaction I saw out there was less like, you know, one more thing. Sure. We're not going to start publishing a bunch of AI content. Hello. I think people see partnership and they're like, except for the printer post. Yeah. I'm the only person who's put AI content on the website.

51:14Both posts were about printers. You just, I wish you people would get madder at me about it and make that post go even more viral. no one will do it we will only use ai to ruin our domain authority in google search i'm sure we're going to end up building some like there's one thing that all of us want which is we would like better alt text on our images to make them more accessible to make the site more accessible we would like our site to be better for screen readers right now it's a lot of very manual work if we can use some of these tools to make that better make our site more accessible that's a great outcome right i don't know if that's gonna work right now our creative team and tells me like, this alt text is not good enough.

51:54AI, everybody, it's just not good enough yet. But if we can start to build that stuff, that's great. So there is that part of it, which I think is interesting. I don't know what that looks like. I haven't talked to our product team about any of that stuff yet. But the other part where the verge is just the verge, that's going to remain exactly the same today as it was yesterday. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about the broader side of this because I think there are two pieces of the, should media companies be making deals like this with open AI question that I find very interesting we should talk about both of them the first is um haven't you idiots learned your lesson from making these deals with companies like Facebook and Google and everybody else who promised you money to save journalism and in fact forced you to do a bunch of stuff pulled out the rug and kind of screwed up the industry the second is um aren't you guys don't you realize that AI is out to put all of you out of jobs and just take your information, use it in training data, and then get rid of you?

52:48Why are you ushering in the journalism apocalypse? And I think to some extent, those are like two versions of the same question, but I think are like the big picture things going on here. Like, are we contributing to our own downfall or are we chasing money at the expense of doing anything that is smart or long-term thinking? I mean, the media industry never does anything. yeah this is the media industry is not known for a really good business this is mostly a vanity project a thing we have talked a lot about on this show is that we the media industry as a whole probably should have spent more time over the last decade building facebook competitors than making facebook videos and i think like my hope is we have learned that lesson and that the next minute of the journalism industry will be learning that lesson and executing on it which is i think part of why we're so excited about the Fediverse because it's a thing that opens up possibilities for new kinds of media products.

53:46Is there a fear that open AI and the like AI search engine stuff that is inevitably coming is just the next pivot to video and everybody falls for it and gives up on building new things for five more years? Yes. Okay. So here's – I just – I'm going to bracket our company because they did not talk to you about this, which is like that's the firewall. Yeah. But Nick Thompson, who is the CEO of The Atlantic, has published a bunch about why The Atlantic did the deal. He made a video about it. You can go watch it on LinkedIn. Nick used to be the editor-in-chief of WIRE. David used to work for Nick.

54:24I did. I love Nick. Nick knows. He knows. Yeah, he gets it. Nick and I are friends. He knows. He understands what he's doing. Axel Springer has signed one of these deals. The Financial Times has signed one of these deals. A lot of these companies are signing these deals. My understanding of the deals from the reporting, not from the digging around our company, but from the reporting is twofold. One, we just spent a whole bunch of time talking about Google. Google is a fair use argument, right? We're going to come and index all of your information. We're going to show it to people. In return, you'll get traffic.

54:58And everyone said, it's a little squeaky, but OK. And then Google won a bunch of cases against different media organizations that did not like this idea. We're going to index every book in the world and show it to people. And the book publishers were like, no, you're stealing our stuff. And Google won that case. We're going to index all the images on the internet. A bunch of porn publishers said, no, we don't want you to do that. And they were not the most sympathetic defendants in the world. Google won that case. Google said, we're going to put every episode of South Park on YouTube. And Viacom said, no.

55:26And then they started posting episodes of South Park to YouTube on their own. And they lost that case. It was not a great legal strategy, but that's what they did. But that all of Google, that whole platform dynamic was we're going to take your stuff and we're going to pay you and we'll get something. We'll pay you an exposure. And look around. So I think a lot of the reaction right now is, well, we cannot let that happen again. We need some rules. I think a problem for all these companies is that OpenAI and Google and whoever else, Anthropic, Perplexity, you name it. They've all taken it anyway.

56:08Yeah. Yeah. They have it. Llama scraped on the internet. Every Facebook video we've ever made is in Llama. OpenAI built a tool to scrape YouTube for more data. Yeah. Like that's just how it's done. Yeah. I think, you know, absent our own company, I know nothing about the deal beyond we have one. We don't have to keep saying it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have one. There it is. There's a new disclosure. There it is. Fox Media has a content and technology deal with opening up. I think you're right where it's like it is a thing of everybody – it's already been taken. It's already gone. Everybody – the cat is out of the bag, right?

56:43Genie's out of the bottle. Whatever euphemism you want to use there. It's happened. And now it's, okay, what do we put a price on that? And a lot of these companies, we're starting to hear more about the price there. We're starting to hear what it is. And that might not end up being the right price, right? Like these deals might not be the right deals, but they are deals. They are money where there wasn't money. I think a really interesting thing is how do you set the right price? What is the value? They've already trained on it. What is deal for now? One of the things that has come out about these deals, which are all – from what I understand, they're all basically the same structure.

57:15I think the News Corp deal is like$250 million over five or ten years, right? Most of the other deals are$10 million over five to ten years, something like that. I think it's five. The main thing that has come out about them is that they govern how much can be displayed, how the information is displayed, how it's attributed, what links are in it. And you look at that and what I see is honestly a reaction to Google, which has gone from we're linking to your stuff to we're going to cut out your stuff and put it in featured snippets to we're going to have our AI rewrite whatever and just show you the answer and never send you a click.

57:53And then you'll eat glue. And there's nothing you can do about it because we're indexing your website every single day. Right. And there's nothing you can do about it because there's no contract. Right. So what I have heard and what I see is like that control. And I think Nick, again, Nick Thompson, that former RRWired, who knows, has been public about this in his announcement in the Atlantic. That control is the thing. Because if you go beyond that, you don't have to go invent some copyright argument. You have a breach of contract claim. And that's much easier to litigate. The other thing that I see happening all over the industry, and we made an entire Decoder episode with Sarah Zhang and I about how all of AI rests on a totally shaky copyright fair use argument that could blow up at any moment.

58:33Like OpenAI, your business could blow up at any moment because you have weird ideas about copyright law. No one can afford to litigate these ideas. So the New York Times sued OpenAI somewhat famously. They've spent a million dollars on that lawsuit so far. Public company, we just know the answer. to get nothing. They haven't achieved an outcome yet. They've just done the - And they could lose. And they could lose. So that's a coin flip. The New York Times, big public company, they run a very successful video game service. Maybe the most successful online game service of all is the New York Times.

59:05We're all just paying the bills for this lawsuit. Most media companies do not have just some cash cow cooking website or gaming service to fund a lawsuit about their journalism. And so I think they're all looking at the Times lawsuit. They're saying, well, this is going to take five years. This is going to take 10 years. It might go to the Supreme Court. They might lose. Hopefully, the Times wins. If they win, our contracts will expire right around then and we'll renegotiate with the strength of this copyright precedent. And if they lose, we'll just re-up our deal. And I see that playing out as most media companies cannot afford to go litigate these deals.

59:41And importantly, no one can afford to sue Google. Yeah. Like Google's got infinite money. And I know everyone's talking about OpenAI and whatever. Disclosure, OpenAI has a content technology deal with Fox Media. I would just – we just spent that whole first segment about Google, which is the thing. It's the 800-pound gorilla. Everyone on the web operates in the universe of Google, including OpenAI, right? OpenAI has made Google dance. It's a power on a Dallas quote. But they're still it. Like Google is the big profitable ultra high margin company and OpenAI doesn't make a dollar as far as I understand, right?

1:00:21They're still losing money. So you just – there's a difference there in how these companies are perceiving their antagonists. And I think they can get OpenAI to come to the table and eventually what they're going to do is they're going to go to Google and they're going to say, pay us. Your competitor is paying us. Our traffic is dropping. And if it continues to drop, we're going to pull the plug on you indexing our website. And I don't know how long that's going to take. Maybe it will never happen because the threats are effective. But you just see that's where the trend line is headed. And then you'll see you'll only get the URL for buy this one printer and new line that recommends.

1:00:55I'll sell you one link, Google. But that's like broadly how I see the dynamic of this playing out is the copyright. I care a lot about copyright law. The copyright argument is so uncertain on both sides of the coin that people are trying to buy some certainty so that they have leverage to go negotiate against the real power in the ecosystem. That makes logical sense to me. I also think it might be wildly optimistic about who is actually going to extract anything from Google. I like our media executives. I think they're brilliant. It should be clear. I think Nick is very smart. Most media executives are not like A players.

1:01:34Even the thesis is good, right? I buy the thesis as far as it goes. I just think there is not a lot of evidence that says anyone can pick a fight with google and win because we are in this i mean like you keep harping about google zero like when that happens and people have nothing to lose by picking that fight with google they might start to pick that fight with right now if i just say you can't crawl my website anymore overwhelmingly i go straight out of business yep yep that's what i mean that's this is what i'm saying like the trend lines right but the trend is so slow it's so so slow it's slow and it isn't slow i think for some publishers it's it's super slow for others it's not right yeah if you're if you're seeing shakiness in your google results and you're seeing ai overviews and you're like maybe google zero is real or you're a mid-sized publisher right which are not getting these deals right now it's all the big publishers are getting But somewhere down the road, the midsize publishers, I assume, will get the deal.

1:02:37Or we offered a deal or go ask for a deal. Who knows? At some point, the trend line of our Google traffic is going down. Our investment in caring about you is no longer worth it. And they're paying us money. It's a destabilizing factor in all these conversations where there have never been destabilizing factors for about a decade. And so we'll just see. Like the last time this happens, this is the negative argument. I'll give everyone the negative argument. David wrote about this. He wrote about Google AMP at the beginning of last year because I was like, we got to start with what Google has done to the web.

1:03:12Google did AMP because Facebook showed up and said, do instant articles and put all of your articles directly into our platform. And they'll load really fast something native on the web and we'll send a shitload of audience to them. And Google freaked out and did AMP. And then all the publishers thought, do AMP. And this was a disaster. Just broadly all the way around a disaster. And then Facebook was like, we hate news. and actually what we hate is text. All of you make videos and everyone pivoted to video. This equal growing disaster. AMP turned out to be a huge mess and you couldn't do anything good.

1:03:38It actually spread misinformation because all the websites look the same. I could go on about this for days and days and days. Google is there again. Yep. They're afraid of something. And so like the ripple effect of that I think is interesting. And I think what most of the publishers that I've talked to, what they're interested in is can we make them not copy instant articles stamp, but copy payments for search because that's what they all want. One thing we haven't talked a lot about on the show is a bill in the United States called the JCPA, the Journalism Competition Preservation Act. It's funny.

1:04:15You would think that the publishers could all get together and say, we're going to pull our content from Google search. They have a lot of leverage. If they do it all together, you get a lot of leverage. What's left? They can't because that would be collusion under the antitrust laws, which is incredible. So the JCPA is – I think it's a Klobuchar bill that would create an exemption for publishers to bargain with large platforms like over a billion in revenue. One of those numbers that makes it Google and Facebook. Yeah. It's one of those ways of saying Google and Facebook without saying Google and Facebook.

1:04:49It would create an exception to antitrust law so they could bargain as a unit against large platforms. Or they could just rule that Google has built a monopoly. Yeah, there's a lot of that. There's just a lot of these ideas floating around about how you equalize the bargaining power. Yeah. Anyway, I just see the bigger picture, which is the raw deal is real. Like people got burned super hard by the raw deal of the platforms, most of which were – we'll give you some money with no contract that says where the money will come from, the Facebook news partnerships or the Google news initiatives. Or it was make a thing for us that we want, Facebook video.

1:05:32or it was, we're going to take your stuff for free and pay you an exposure, which is Google search. And I, what I see now is we have a contract. Yeah. Right. We're just not doing this again. You're going to pay us money. We're going to tell you what you can take. And if you don't pay us enough money, we'll see you. And if you take too much, we'll see you. And that has a little bit of teeth. I don't know if it'll work again. I know a lot of media executives, Alex used to work for some of the worst media executives. I sure. It's not like they're not all, this is not an industry that can see the long game and it's an industry that's under pressure.

1:06:07So it might be making mistakes, but I, I see the difference here. I don't know if these are good ideas. I don't know. They feel great, right? Like there's a lot of the response yesterday and to all these other deals is do these feel great? No, but I think I can identify the differences. And I think at least what I see is, well, they took the shit anyway. Some money is better than no money. And a lot of the deal for a long time was no money. That's definitely where I'm sitting. It's like some money is better than no money. But also, one, I want to just point out, this is a lightning round. And we've been on Nealize lightning round.

1:06:42Sorry, sorry, sorry. For a while. And so I want to take over for my lightning round. Oh, yeah, okay. Which is also about OpenAI. Of course it is. Because I called it. I just – back when OpenAI, there was the coup, a bunch of the board members were like, we don't like Sam. We're firing him. Everybody gathered around Sam was like, no, you were a baby. We love you. Come back. He's now back in charge. More powerful than ever. Right? Like that's the reporting allegedly. Like information just said OpenAI CEO cements control. So like that's happening. They started – they fired all the safety people or pushed them out.

1:07:19Yeah, they fired all the safety people. He's the head of the safety committee. Yeah. Yeah, that's a choice, Sam. But Helen Toner, who was one of those board members who voted to have him kicked off, kicked out and then left because he won, was on a podcast this week and was like, yeah, we just didn't trust him. Yeah. Like he just was so consistently not telling us the truth. We just lost all trust in him. and that is really really interesting to think about as he does cement more power as he does get more powerful as he does put himself in charge of safety at the company and all of those people who were in charge of safety have left and as that company is still technically run by a non-profit that's whole job is to protect us all from ai like oh buddy yeah that's not working for you I'm actually – I'm curious.

1:08:11It's been – like the Scarlett Johansson situation has not – there has been no new pieces of information. It's been pretty quiet on that front. That's not going to just end. No. Right? It ends with a settlement or a statement or an apology. Well, she's going to do a partnership with OpenAI as well. Like, no. She has some great ideas for all text. Yeah. But like the backlash to AI in general. But I'll give you this little data point. I think there's a real gap in how people feel about the thing and then what people are doing. We've never gotten so many sort of like unhappy notes about a Decoder episode is when we had the CEO of Adobe on.

1:08:55We had some happy ones too. People want to hear from that guy. He doesn't give a lot of interviews. I asked him what he thought a photo was. He doesn't know. But then we got a lot of people who are like, screw this guy. Yeah. We just don't like Adobe. We don't like AI. Like, they're ruining everything. His comments about AI are offensive. Weird. Weird, right? There's real backlash to AI. There's some negativity. One thing he told me in that episode was generative fill is used as much as layers. They launched this tool, and it is used on the order of layers in photos, which is basically people open the app.

1:09:28Yeah. That's how you get layers. You open the app. You open the app and then people use it. And so there's a real gap. And I think Sam kind of embodies the gap. Yeah. Right? Which is he's just the face of, boy, we're not being very careful with this. He's the face of, I can do whatever I want because I'm a Silicon Valley bro. Someone's going to call him the bad boy of AI soon. I'm sorry. No, there's nothing about his demeanor that supports bad boy. I'm sorry. It's coming. Don't worry. It's not going to happen. I'm sorry. They're much better contenders for bad boy than Sam Wallman. But like he's the face of that gap.

1:10:06Yeah. Which is actually the revealed behavior of many people is that the tools are useful. They can be helpful. People like them. Like I'm the nation's foremost hand wringer of what is a photo. And I definitely used generative eraser in Lightroom yesterday. For a family photo that I shared with no one. I would use it all the time. But AI denoise in Lightroom, I think, is magic. I've talked about it. It has recontextualized how I think about some of my old cameras. Yeah, we were talking about this earlier today where I think a lot of people don't realize how many of the tools we actually use are already AI, right?

1:10:42Like Grammarly is using some sort of AI. Photoshop is all AI. And if you've been using Photoshop for the last 10 years, you've been using AI. Yeah, it's in there somewhere. But I think you're right where it's Sam Altman has become the kind of this center point and everybody's talking about him and they're talking about specifically. Because they don't trust him. They don't trust him and they don't trust the kind of AI he's doing, which is a very specific kind, right? It's taking over your search. It's providing just easy generative content in a way that most AI tools that people use have a very specific purpose and are used for very specific things.

1:11:17And he's built the LIBOT. and you know open i had this incredibly byzantine corporate structure was all meant to box in the bad things box in the lie bot and keep the lie bot keep it safe and he's torn all that down yeah and now open ai instead of being this weird non-profit with a profit center that supports the non-profit is feels like just sam altman's company it's called open ai like i would just i would just point out like their whole thing was being the good guys for so so so long and they made it so far on big promises of being the good guys and then just like on a dime turned and went the other way i mean it's really wild how fast this has happened right gpt 3.5 hit they're like oh people like this we're evil now just it's like they just put on their little evil helmets so the interesting thing is they don't, again, they don't have any revenue, right?

1:12:14Like this company is not wildly profitable. They might be on a path to it. You don't make all this noise. It's not important. You've, you've been covering tech too long to know that, to not realize that revenue is not important. As long as people will keep giving you money, you don't need revenue, which is why I think they make all this noise about AGI. Right. They're like, we're, we built the future. People will keep giving you money. Uh, the number one, the funniest, uh, like a GPT apps are at now, Um, yeah. to everybody and I was just looking at the top one in Lifestyles astrology app and I was like oh this is actually a perfect use case for AI yeah like you'd be like I'll just make some shit up about your future yeah we should talk about that so WDC is coming up there was some reporting this week that Apple has made the deal to sign with OpenAI that OpenAI will power the stuff interestingly there's some back and forth about whether it will run locally on the phone which would match Apple's privacy promises or go up to the cloud which is fascinating because more powerful more powerful but where will it run there's some reporting i think mark german and bloomberg reported that they're going to put m2 ultras or m3 ultras in a data center and have a virtual black box oh boy privacy that that works out every time uh who knows it gives real like beeper running mac minis on your behalf vibes yeah uh and then you've got open air in the mix which is like where's this model gonna run can it run on the m2 ultra m3 ultra or whatever um i mean no you can't fit the thing on your phone i'm very confident that you cannot run gpt40 on your phone locally right but can you port it to arm like this thing right right out runs on nvidia h100s a lot of them yeah like a lot of them uh and you know what two companies hate each other with the fury of a thousand burning suns is nvidia and apple yep but they're also two of the best people at making processors that can handle ai stuff except for gps One of them is really good at making GPUs.

1:14:08One of them is really good at using. The other one. The other one just took the training wheels off its back. I can play Crusader Kings on my laptop. So I'm just very curious about how all this will play out. Because if you're going to run GPT-4, there's a chance you're running it on a bunch of H100s in a Microsoft data center, which is a real weird place for Apple to be. Well, I thought German's piece this week about the deal was also kind of interesting because it seemed to be like they're not going to go full out. With all the AI tools, what we're going to see from them at WWDC, as far as AI goes, is going to be a lot more Adobe-like than Scarlett Johansson voice-like.

1:14:47I don't think they're going to do chatbot, and I think that is the right move. Yes. Oh, that's so fun. I totally disagree. Really? I think they are going to go full hard with Siri. And I think that's the open AI play, is just take the Siri you can talk to and plug it into GPT-40, and instantly it's the best Siri has ever been. Uh, then how you scale that down to like turning off Bluetooth, which is a thing that I can do on my phone that does not require the internet is becomes a really interesting AI challenge. You just described like the promise of Bixby. I mean, what do you, what I use Siri for almost exclusively is playing music, adding reminders to the reminders app and setting timers.

1:15:31And none of those things require pinging GPT-4O. They just don't. But I think Apple, like everyone else, is going to have to convince investors that it has a chatbot play in order to survive. Not survive. But you know what I mean. it's wall street wants to see that you have some big newfangled idea and so they're going to do it because they feel like they have to all the interesting ai stuff is going to be the like on device stuff and that's the thing that we're already seeing apple do well just by putting ai features into apps you're going to see a lot of it with photos there's a lot of noise around ai generated emoji that's the kind of thing you don't really need open ai for that actually apple has been working on for a long time the the only reason i can see that you would strike a deal like this with open AI is if you want to blow out the like conversational aspect of things.

1:16:26Just why so much in the face of Apple's security stuff. Yeah, but so does the Google deal. Like it's fine. That's true. That's true. But the Google deal, like we didn't know the terms of the Google deal for years, right? And whereas this was a fairly public deal with open AI, really close. It's just been better reported on because open AI is the leakiest company in the history of the world. Just like, just holes everywhere. By the way, it's only the M2 Ultra. Only. It was just driving me crazy that I kept saying M3 Ultra. Because they're on the M4 now, so I just assumed. They just got a lot of M2 Ultras.

1:16:59M2 Ultras where they stopped with the. They're like, is this as good as an H100? Open AI, tell us. I think Apple knows that the idea behind is an external perception of the company. And they're watching. They're watching companies kind of light their brands on fire. And not, they're just never going to do that. They are cautious to the extreme in that way. And I think this crush ad disaster for them, which was not even about AI. It was an iPad ad that everyone decided was about AI. I think they saw that and they were like, no. Like, we're going to do some stuff in photos and some stuff in emojis.

1:17:41Well, there's going to be stuff in search. I'm sure, yeah, there's going to be some light dusting. Remember last year where they're like, the keyboard has AI in it now. And it's like, this keyboard is dumb. Yeah, it's real bad. It's like still pretty bad. They're going to do that kind of thing. Yeah. And I think it might be everywhere. They might announce more features. But that last turn where it's like, do you want to bang an iPad? Like, I don't know if we're going to get there this time. I think they're very comfortable with the perception that they're, quote, behind. Because I think they're watching Google.

1:18:11I think they're watching the reaction to their own advertising and saying, this stuff is not ready. And the culture around it is too negative. That is just my sense from, you know, just talking to folks. But I don't know if I know what they're actually going to announce. I look forward to we're going to be there live and we're doing a podcast in Cupertino. And I am going to spend a lot of time gloating on that show about how right I was. And I'm really looking forward to it. I really hope David's wrong just so I can gloat. I just that's it. But I hope you're right for you spiritually, David. i just i think if you're worried about the stock price of your company and i know that they are you look at what is happening at microsoft and you say oh we need something like that and what they'll say is they'll make a lot of noise about like all the stuff you can do inside of apps and then it will come around too and also it wants to be your best friend let's hang out also serious horny now.

1:19:14Tim Cook would be like, whoo! Can you imagine Tim Cook being like, in Siri's horny now. Just flirting with Siri? I'd love it. Kevin Roos, dead in the eyes. This is for you. This lightning round has ended up in strange places. But it's been a good one. We'll be right back. We have yet another unsponsored lightning round.

1:19:41support for this show comes from one password think for just a moment about the herculean tasks that your it security department has to handle there's keeping identities devices and applications safe then there's dealing with shadow it securely onboarding and offboarding employees oh also there's meeting compliance goals the point is it's a lot if you want to help lighten that load, you can try Trileka by 1Password. Trileka by 1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance, and it's just one of the ways that extended access management helps teams strengthen compliance and security.

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1:21:50That's framer.com slash design and use promo code VERGE. Framer.com slash design promo code verge rules and restrictions may apply. Support for this show comes from Figma. Figma is the collaborative design platform where teams come together to turn ideas into the world's best digital apps, websites, and experiences. And now there's a faster way to bring those ideas to life. Introducing Figma Make, an AI-powered prompt-to-code tool that helps you turn ideas into something real fast. Figma Make is a different kind of vibe coding tool. With just a few prompts, you can turn any idea into a code-backed prototype or app that anyone can explore, iterate on, and share.

1:22:38And it's all connected to Figma. So you can start from scratch or from your design file. Figma Make is made for designers, product managers, and builders who want to move fast and explore more ideas. Try it now and see how quickly you can make your ideas real with Figma Make. Just go to Figma.com slash Vergecast. That's F-I-G-M-A dot com slash Vergecast. How long is this episode now? Four hours? We're going to talk about ourselves more for another hour. Three. We are currently at 81 minutes. Alright, we got to bring this to a close. Lightning round style. I'm going to bring out the ULT Power 7 or whatever it's called.

1:23:20Is that your lightning round? This is my lightning it's been more like a lot of lightning this god this the sony logo is slightly holographic it looks kind of like oh you're like oh is it lit up no holograms sometimes i remind people that the verger's entire competitive differentiation is that we love gadgets and i'm telling you this is our entire competitive differentiation yeah we both we freaked out over it for a minute nobody's gonna sponsor the lightning round if you just pick up a speaker and talk about how terrific it is every week like get that money from sony before you do that man I don't know how.

1:23:52There's a firewall between edit and sales. They keep telling me that there's incoming lightning round. I think all of our sponsors are going to be like a month late being like, remember that time Neil, I got really weird with our speaker on air. Sony. I wish I knew how. I think Sony will love your lightning round. Look, if you're a Phil Sony or whoever runs Sony, give us a call. Someone is here to take your call. Mega bass, ultimate sound, or whatever. Power vibes. Whatever it is. Power vibes. ULT. All right. Kranz, I ran you over on the last one. You get the first one. Yeah. So it's going to be a gadget in that Fitbit has a new watch for kids.

1:24:37The Ace. The Ace. The Ace LTE. And is it a way for you to track your children with GPS? Yes. Yes. Do you feel uncomfortable about that? I don't know. I'm not you. if you do this probably is not an exciting gadget for you but uh it seems really cool because it like gamifies fitness in what appears to be a really nice way victoria song went and got to check it out i've heard from some other people have gotten to check it out and everybody's just like no this thing rules and i kind of want one for myself yes and like that's the hallmark of a good ass gadget for kids yeah like you can take the the band and replace the band and there's like a little tamagotchi kind of thing in the watch and so when you replace the band it'll like change it's it's awesome stuff it's it's sick all adult fitness trackers are like let's talk about your vo2 max and this one's just like make the cool little guy go and like that's how you get me to do stuff come on exactly like this this thing just kind of rules um it's too expensive though it is way too expensive it is 229.95 and it's also called the ace lte which is like the least cool kid name I've ever heard.

1:25:46It's real bad. And also you need a data plan to get the full richness of it called the Ace Pass. Oh boy. And it is not cheap. It is like$10 a month. Oh, that's tough. I'm going to stick with just putting an AirTag somewhere in my child. You can alternatively stick an AirTag in your child and give them a 20-year-old Tamagotchi. There you go. And you're done. Yeah. We're not yet We have not yet hit the, let's put an air tag on her. What if you glue the air tag to the Katamagaji? I see that's the move. Or 3D print some sort of case. I bet Sean could do that for you. Yeah. Oh, there's infinite. This is the entire Etsy economy is weird AI generated crap and then 3D printed stuff.

1:26:28It's beautiful. That's real. And please, you can put your air tag on anything. There is a case for it. If you want to attach your air tag to a thing, you can find a case for it on Etsy. Yeah. All right, David, what's yours? uh i just want to talk about this like slightly weird discord blog post this week uh the company basically announced it's pivoting back to video games i didn't know it left so this is the thing so in 2020 when discord was like really feeling itself and there was noise that discord was going to be acquired for i think like 10 billion dollars it was it was the the work from home moment the world was weird we try not to talk about that period of 2020 very often uh discord like announced that it was going to be more than just a gaming thing right it wanted to be a community app for the future of the world and discord actually has like gotten a lot of things about building a community app really right there are a lot of things about it they're very clever uh i don't think that worked except that people started planning like crypto and crimes in discord more it turns out there's a lot of like shitty communities out there yeah and not a lot of like fortune 500 companies running on discord so anyway so the company pivoted back and is now about gaming again but then made a bunch of small changes that don't really change anything and then said they want to be easier for connecting either before during or after playing a game and i would just point out that's all the time that's still just everything so i think i'm just in a strange place where it was like i forget who it was but somebody in our slack was saying like this is not a message to users this is a message to investors of like we get it it's fine we're running away from crypto please stop doing crimes in discord and but i just thought it was very funny it's like discord is like we will remain discord just like please only only do games here please yeah i did learn new things from that blog post i didn't know you could have discord on like the ps5 yeah yes clearly i don't it's a web app like ultimately you can deploy a web app anywhere.

1:28:27Sometimes you're like, what if I deployed this on the PS5? And you're like, why? Because it's got a sick process. Looks cool. I mean, Discord's a really good chat app. Part of me wishes they had gone more mainstream, and instead of the 50 WhatsApp group chats I'm in, I was in a bunch of Discords. I feel like I'd feel cooler, but alas. No, I'm in a bunch of Discords. You're fine. I don't do enough crimes. You're right. I don't do enough NFTs or crimes. Oh, no. Alex, I'm guessing you're in at least one Plex-related Discord. I'm not. But I did think of, yeah, some crimes have definitely happened in some Discord.

1:29:07By the way, Jason was on a decoder a while ago, basically previewing all of this. If you want to listen to him talk about it, I spent a lot of time being like, crimes happen here. And he's like, I need it to stop, more or less. And he said to me a really interesting stat. He's like most discords are like three people. It's just like three or four friends hanging out in a discord. And that's like the vast majority of discord activity. And then the big ones are like for other stuff. Right. But we talked about why they make games and their app platform and all this stuff. And he's like, we just do that to dog food, like features for the big games.

1:29:40All right. I'm going to pick one. I wanted to pick iFixit and Samsung breaking up. And other repair companies are starting to say they can't fix Samsung stuff either. That's boring. What I want to pick is X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, now hiding likes. Wait, what? I missed this. It's very good. So they're not hiding likes. They're hiding who likes something. So, you know, people used to go on Twitter and like something. You can see all their public likes. They're hiding that. They're hiding replies. They're doing this because bros keep liking porn. Yeah, that's not. That's all the funniest stuff on Twitter.

1:30:15That was the best, like, when Tim, Ted, Tim Cruz, Ted Cruz, like, was like, I love this. It's very good. Yeah, you do. It is the funniest sign of a platform in decline that its user base is now so stupid they don't even have fake accounts to like porn. I was hearing about, there's apparently some male reporters who love to like models on Instagram, and they don't know that they get the little, the emoji also is shared on threads. so uh it's pretty good be be thoughtful if you're gonna be horny don't be horny on main look how do you increase android phone sales buy a burner phone to do horny stuff all right are you listening to me google that's what the pixel is for horny stuff it's pretty good actually buy a burner pixel just for the horny stuff a refurb pixel 5 with that beautiful red case it's it's available to you it's just an idea i have to increase your sales save your company um twitter x is saying um you soon you'll be able to like without worrying who might see it we want to encourage people to like more edgy content they use the word edgy wow we want you to like your porn more often uh i'm if you are the sort of person who describes your own work is edgy not edgy like i don't know it's like it's like sam altman is the bad boy of it's like he can't be but he would love it he would like it so much that he'll never get it yeah elon wants twitter to be edgy so much he will never have it uh i just think this is truly one of the funniest changes any social platform has ever made there's like other reasons right like i'm i'm confident elon wants the weird racists who now populate twitter to be able to like weird racist posts without seeing it like yep yeah there's there's a deep dark will you be able to like this there go into the likes and look at the likes still no other people can't see them at all right you yourself will be able to see who liked your posts okay um you can see the like counts for posts like public like counts man but you will not see who likes someone else's post and you will not see others you will not see what other people i cannot wait for one of those creators of edgy content to get fed up with their edgy followers and just put them all on the saddest little black book in the world yeah the saddest little black book it'll be so good uh it's i mean it's truly deeply wonderfully hilarious uh platform and decline just doing the weirdest stuff you can i just really like the idea of ultimately doing good healthy things by removing engagement metrics in the service of making your platform easier to be sketchy on like i think Twitter is going to end up, X, is going to end up, I think, as a porn platform.

1:33:06I think they will find a way to subsume OnlyFans because it's the last thing left for them to do. It's video first now, supposedly. Oh, yeah. Linda Yaccarino, she appeared. She had not appeared anywhere since the Code Conference, from what I understand, which went great for her. Can you repeat the question? And she appeared and said, X is now a video first platform for creators. And everyone went, what? You don't make any videos. Elon Musk never makes a video on his video first platform. But if you want to make horny videos, you can. And secretly like them. Yep. Ted Cruz is just going to be ecstatic.

1:33:46All right. I'm just saying, and we're in a new era of the internet, right? I don't know what's going to happen to the web, but I know this is the ULT power sound era and i'm convinced this is the horny burner android phone for when your urge to like something is irresistible but you don't want anyone to know the pixel 6a i just gotta hit that heart yeah you want them to know but you don't want anyone else to know that's actually a great like opposite of what happens on iphone stays on iphone messaging for google when you want them to know but no one else to know the google picks android you're just doing google's job today i'm trying man i'm trying to help everybody all right it's someone give us some money somehow lightning rounds available for a horny pixel sponsorship all right that's it we're way over time i appreciate you all we do want your feedback i'm very sincere about this i know people have a lot of feelings we are here to earn your trust in whatever way that this previous segment earned your trust.

1:34:47Send us a note. You can reach out to us. You can call David at some phone number. 866-VERGE-11. Call the hotline. See it? Call us. We'll answer your questions. Again, we're not trying to hide the ball here at all, but we are trying to go home to our families. So that's it. That's our chest. Rock and roll.

1:35:05And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 - VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week. All right, Alex just made a huge discovery on the ULT7 or whatever this thing is called. Tell us what the ports are. Okay, we got a light button. We got a battery button with a minus sign for battery care. Okay. Key control. I don't know music. That's for karaoke. Okay. Echo, guitar. We got a guitar input, right? This thing rules.

1:35:47There's a lot going on down there. These are all fully karaoke controls, and then you can play a guitar through it. Sure. I don't know what battery minus care does. I really want to know, but probably not today on The Verge Cast. One, two, three, four, five. Boy, can I... There we go. There it goes. It's got some Numa Numa energy, right? Yeah. It always starts in the middle, which I really like. I love you. This thing fills me with pure joy. You're so happy. Like every other tech company is like, we gotta do some AI stuff that the robots are gonna bang you, like, let's just threaten everyone. And Sony's like, here's what's gonna happen.

1:36:33The bass speakers on the side, really. Yeah, Sony's like, we're put RGBs in the bass speakers, also it's called ULT Power Sound now, and that's our business. It's good shit. Support for this show comes from SC Johnson. We've all been there. Choosing not to wear your new white shoes because there's a 10 % chance of rain. Bending awkwardly over the tiny coffee table to enjoy a sip of your latte. Not ordering the red sauce. Those feelings of dread are what we call Stainziety. But now you can break free from your Stainziety with Shouts Triple Acting Spray that has stain-fighting ingredients to remove a huge variety of stains so you can live in the moment and clean up later.

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