OpenAI and Jony Ive's AI super-gadget

27:25And he told them that this$6.5 billion acquisition has the potential to add$1 trillion in value to OpenAI, which is just like, you know, making up numbers. You can just say things. But, like, this is where he started to talk a little bit about those limitations, Neal, that you're talking about. He said the device isn't going to be a pair of glasses and that it's something to wear, although it sounds like they're not going to want to call it a wearable. and then you know he's saying we're not going to ship 100 million devices literally on day one duh but uh he does think they'll get there faster than any company ever um and you know allman is just this is he's great at hype right like this is obviously he's hyping this up to employees who are like why did we just give johnny ive six billion dollars and he's not joining us um but um he did so this is from the meeting he said the product will be capable of being fully aware of a user's surroundings and life will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one's pocket or on one's desk, and will be a third core device a person would have after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

28:32So here we go. This is like a better humane pin. I mean, not for nothing. The humane pin was designed by two former Apple designers who regretted their work on the iPhone. Many of whom were called legendary when they started this company. Imran Chowdhury is legendary as it comes coming out of Apple. Did you get Altman gave them millions of dollars in funding? He was the single biggest investor in the company. Like, it's just we're doing humane again. But now it's Johnny. I did say that humane pin was a poor product, which tracks with your review, David. Yeah. That's right. Good call by Johnny.

29:08I would say that I called that watching the first demo video, the humane pin. And maybe I've maybe I've lost some friends forever. because of that. I've also called the rabbit a poor product, which I think Jesse, Lou, and Rabbit loved because Johnny Ive knows who they are. And they released a long statement being like, we love that the pie is growing. And I, good luck, guys. Let me read this. Jesse sent us a statement. It's actually amazing. He says, it's an honor to get mentioned by Johnny Ive and Sam Altman. However, we don't like to be put side by side with Humane, a company that stopped trying, got acquired, and shut down.

29:41That's very good. That's brutal. You can call us shit, but don't compare us to human. That's very good. That's very good, Jesse. It's really good. Yeah. You can tell that he wrote that, not the robot. You can tell when it's like, that's human. Don't compare me to humane. But those are the products. And there's a million of them. David, you reviewed a bunch of note-taking products. I'm going to have a microphone that's recording all the time. Yeah. Last time I saw Joanna Stern, she was wearing a wristband that records everything and the lights were backwards. It was red when it was off. It's called the Bee.

30:18VSON reviewed it for us. It's a delightful and terrible product. Right. I mean, there's just like a million of these devices that's like, what if we just feed input into an AI and then it does something? Yeah. Summarize or talk to you or whatever. And that's what I mean by the limitation. The limitation of those products is very, very obvious. Right. The AIs can't, they can't take actions for you. Right. The agents don't work yet. Maybe they will. We'll talk about that with IO. Like there's a lot of activity around how to make the agents work and go do stuff for you when you ask them to do it.

30:50Right? They don't actually know a bunch of stuff. The search features don't work as well as they should. Like there's just a bunch of stuff where the limitation of the product is so obvious because the interface is so good. I'm just going to talk to this thing and it's going to talk to me. And then everything beyond that is like a house of cards. And I just, yeah, okay, maybe we can make a more beautiful, humane pin and we won't call it a pin. Maybe we can make earbuds that talk to you like her, which Altman really has been obsessed with for a long time. What's it going to do that makes it valuable?

31:22Yeah, I do come back to that Google bike demo. I think the idea is just always on AI that can be your girlfriend, boyfriend, or your assistant. On the device itself, Ming-Chi Kuo, who's a pretty reputable analyst, he covers Apple. he's saying that mass production for this is expected to start in 2027 the current prototype is slightly larger than the ai pin with a form factor as compact and elegant as an ipod shuffle okay um and then one of the intended use cases is wearing the device around the neck it will have cameras and microphones for environment detection no display it's expected to connect to smartphones and pcs so yeah it's one of these just always on listening ai devices but made from brushed aluminum.

32:08Yeah. And Eli, to your point, this is everybody's idea, right? Like this is the thing everyone is pushing towards. I have four of them on my desk right now that are like a little thing with a microphone in it that you wear on a lanyard that goes around with you. And I think in a lot of ways, that is actually probably the correct format for this kind of stuff right now. If the goal is just like lots and lots of AI input, especially if this thing is gonna have a camera, which I think it has to, to come even remotely close to what Sam and Johnny are talking about here. Sure. Like a little thing on a lanyard makes a lot of sense.

32:41I will say I went back this morning and watched the intro to the original iPod shuffle, which was from 2005. And Steve Jobs like shows off the thing, does a great reveal, the whole thing. And then they have this giant set of promotional photos of people wearing it around a lanyard. Like Apple really wanted to make this the thing that you would wear it. They had a white lanyard. It was like the the cap for the usb port was also the cap for the lanyard it looks so stupid and just looking back i'm like i don't think i ever once saw a person in the wild wearing an ipod shuffle around their neck the shuffle became like a pocket device uh and the problem with like the humane pin maybe not above all else but one real problem with the humane pin was that it sat right here it was a thing you had to look at all the time and it was looking at you all the time and this is very similar to that.

33:31I think you have to do it if you want to have a camera, but that's just a high bar to clear for any of these kinds of products. Yeah. Also, anything that size does not have a battery or a chip in it that can do any of the things that they want it to do. I will say, I think there are a lot of ways to do this. And one of them is just to offload a ton of that onto your phone and just do all the work over Bluetooth and local Wi-Fi and not worry so much about it, which is like, that's what Meta's glasses do. Humane didn't do it and it was a huge mistake. And I suspect anyone who is doing this going forward will learn that lesson of like, this thing actually isn't ready to be a fully self-contained device.

34:10But I think if you just take it as like a pure input system and do all of the work on your phone, I can sort of see how you'd get a battery that could last. So you're selling 100 million Johnny Ive designed microphones. and cameras that require an iPhone to use. You know what it makes me think of? Do you remember the Google Clips camera? Yeah. It's going to be that with a microphone. I mean, there's, you know, there's a couple of players in there who have a vested interest in not letting Johnny Ive supplant their products. Yeah. Right. One of them is Apple. They're stumbling around lately, but I think after this video in which Johnny Ive referred to his own products as legacy devices that are 10 years old and should be replaced are not going to show up and be like, yes, you can have preferred Bluetooth access to it.

34:55You're always on chat. She BTA, like good luck. No watchmaker in history has gotten that access to iOS. And maybe, you know, maybe governments around the world will shatter Apple into a thousand pieces and let this happen. But you've now made a$1 trillion bet on that. So good luck. Well, the deep irony of all of this is that is the exact thing that open AI and all these other companies are desperate to get around. They're like, we have to build the next platform so that not everything is, you know, intermediated by your phone and these two operating system makers. And yet they all are going to have to be completely intermediated by your phone.

35:29Otherwise, the hardware is going to be bad. Right. And then the other one is Android, which is more open and would allow many, many more of these things to happen. But Google is, as we'll talk about in the next segment, a pretty ferocious competitor to open AI when it comes to AI products. And then your market in the United States is people with Android phones. good luck johnny like there's just a problem there like to solve like either all the compute is in the device which is what meta is pushing towards and i mean we've heard zuck i think zuck has said it to you alex like he's furious that apple won't give him access to the bluetooth stack on the iphone yeah and the glasses are worse on the iphone than on android i don't think altman's gonna get that deal like i again i'm just like what are the limitations johnny has great success and maybe he did a better job of it when Steve Jobs was there than after.

36:19But his great success is designing to the limitations, making the limitations feel like they're not there because they're so apparent. In having covered Apple for all of that time, right? In like gadget blog days where we would obsess, we would write thousands of words about screen radius on LCD screens. Like we did it and we are immersed in the culture that that developed, but it's now the design culture everywhere. part of the problem for i've like in a big way is every product company has a design culture that is his design culture right like why is that a problem because he has to do something new he has to stand out like his moves are you know um uh when i was like learning to play the guitar my guitar teacher was trying to teach me how to play guns and roses and van halen and i was like this stuff is whatever it's a garbage it's like it's so cliche and he was like that's because they invented it and now everything is this right that's johnny johnny i've is eddie van halen you listen to Van Halen now you're like this is some campy stuff and at the time it was like a revolution and it's because it's everything yeah like it's the foundation for everything and like he's got he's got to reinvent some moves here and I just I'm just I'm focused on there are some real limitations to these products and making the limitations the strengths maybe he'll do it I'm not a great designer right he's the legendary designer but what's we've seen a lot of shots yeah I am going to remain cautiously optimistic about this just because of the fact that I do think a lot of people would talk to ChatGPT in a device like this if it worked.

37:52If it was a good-looking version of the Humane Pen that actually worked, that didn't take five minutes to load, that didn't also like blow up after five minutes because the battery doesn't work. Like if all of that is fixed, which yes, is a huge if, and you get access to, you know, the leading ChatGPT models and it syncs with your ChatGPT account that, by the way, already knows everything about you because you are saying thank you to it, even when you don't need to. That's interesting. And one of the things that Altman said in this meeting that really stuck out to me was he said, we both got excited about the idea that if you subscribe to ChatGPT, we should just mail you new computers.

38:29And he actually said something else at a VC conference I caught a couple of weeks ago where he said the goal for OpenAI to now be the core AI subscription for your life. So my prediction, and this is an informed prediction, is that Chessy Pee subscribers will just get these devices or they'll get them heavily subsidized. And he's going to build a subscription model around not just software, but hardware, which everyone has tried. Apple has tried it, didn't really work. I mean, they have the installment program, but they wanted to bundle everything more and that program never got off the ground.

39:04we'll see if they can make it work. Do you know why that program never got off the ground? Because the cell carriers wouldn't let them get it off the ground. Ah, there you go. The cell carriers want that recurring revenue. And that's another thing is like, do they need cell carriers for this? Right. How does that change things? TBD. Probably. Yeah. A different set of gatekeepers who are even worse to deal with than Apple. Yeah. Question of how ambitious this thing sets out to be. I think it's going to be just as interesting as anything else. Because like, Alex to your point there are there are a lot of pieces of the puzzle here and open ai and johnny i've together control more of those pieces than anybody else has right like in terms of being able to actually make the whole stack work together that's a lot of the stack but it's not all of the stack and a lot of the stack is either out of their control or will require like honest to god like physics breakthroughs that no one has made yet.

39:59If there's no display, the physics breakthroughs are probably not as bad as we think. I mean, they probably have disassembled Humane and figured out exactly everything they did wrong and are going to learn from it. And Sam saw that as like a, I'm going to invest in this thing to see how it doesn't work. I'm going to do it the right way with Johnny. We'll see. I mean, Humane was not full of dumb people. No. Like the cautionary tale of Humane is it's like, like one of the things Conan O 'Brien always says is it takes a lot of really smart people working really hard to make a bad movie. And like the Humane pin is the perfect version of that to me.

40:32It's like a lot of people doing their best who are very smart and very capable and have really long track records who made a horrible product. And there's like, that's such an easy way to go. Yeah, we should not beat up on Humane too much more. I just am saying like - Disagree. No, I think you should read the Jesse statement again, actually. But like if by the end of next year, there's an option in ChatGPT to get this, you know, Johnny Ive Pokedex mailed to your house for an extra$20 a month in your pro subscription and it will automatically hook into everything ChatGPT already knows about you.

41:05And it's an always-on listening device for talking to ChatGPT. Do I think people will want that? Yeah. I think a lot of people would want that. I totally agree. We'll see. If you're Sam Altman, you've looked at how many people happily ponied up$200 a month just to use your cool stuff. And I think the, like, Like subscription is whatever they want it to be for this kind of stuff. I think it is where they're headed. All right, we should wrap this up. I will say that I can already hear the people furiously writing us tweets and emails about the iPhone upgrade program, which currently exists. What we are talking about, just to be 100 % clear, is that Apple wanted to bundle getting a new iPhone every year into Apple One, and they were not able to do that.

41:44Also, subscription hardware is a bad idea, and everyone should feel bad about doing it. Do you remember when Logitech said a forever mouse and we laughed at them? This is a forever mouse. Sam Altman's forever mouse sounds like an incredible movie. I just, I would go watch whatever that is. That's a stage spectacular that I would absolutely go watch. I don't know what it is. It feels like one of those like places in London. That's like next to the wax museum. Sam Altman's forever mouse. Like what I was, you asked chat GPT to render that and email that to us instead of your angry emails about the iPhone.

42:13There we go. I beg of you. All right, we got to take a break and we're going to talk about the other side of IO, which is actually Google IO. See what I did there? We'll be right back. Amazon has everything for everyone on your list. Like your teenage son, who won't give up the peach fuzz currently posing as a mustache on his upper lip. Get him an electric razor. Amazon has early holiday deals on gifts everyone wants. Like the latest kitchen gadgets and toys. And some they don't even know they need. Like that razor. Grab him a mirror, too, so he can see how pretty he is without that dirt on his lip.

42:56all right we're back we got to talk about google io which if not for johnny ivan sam altman literally trying to upstage google io with their own company called io would have easily been the only thing we talked about the first yesterday because so much happened there i do feel a little bad we we allowed open ai and sam altman to get away with this by putting it first in the show they did it again that was you by the way i want to be 100 clear that was david's decision yeah i i did that and i stand by it and i am deeply annoyed that i'm giving johnny and sam what they want uh it was it was interesting timing because google had a great io like by all accounts i think they announced a bunch of stuff that people were excited about the demos are all really good they announced a bunch of stuff that is shipping soon like we got to try a bunch of the stuff including the glasses which are you know they're just more prototype air glasses but they were there and we people got to try them there's a video with v wearing them uh and they googled just everyone from sundar on down just full of confidence david run us through the the big news and let's get into it oh boy okay so i think the the overarching story of google io is google is absolutely convinced it's winning at AI.

44:12And especially I talked to a bunch of the folks over there ahead of IO, including Demis Asabas, who runs DeepMind and all their AI stuff. And they are like really feeling themselves with Gemini 2.5 and are convinced that not only are they ahead, but they might be ahead in a way that is hard for others to quickly catch up with, which I think is fascinating. And so now Google is like, okay, we have what we perceive to be the best model we have vast distribution everywhere on the internet and we are going to put ai in front of you in every single imaginable way all the time everywhere so there were a bunch of things uh there were new models new imagined vo models to make images and video uh which were like not super impressive i don't know how they felt in the crowd at shoreline but like watching some of those on youtube it was like this is like not as cool as you think it is you're talking about the video stuff yeah oh no i disagree some of the video stuff was cool but the part where they demoed the like the the woman the filmmaker who made a video about herself being born and it was called ancestra and i was like this is a horror movie do you know that you made a horror movie it's darren naranofsky yeah yeah i agree that what they showed on stage was not as compelling but the stuff i've seen on like x that people have been making with this is mind-blowing.

45:32It's like full-on reality is over stuff. Yeah, no, some of it is very good. So anyway, so there are a lot of new things coming to existing products, sort of improvements inside of Gmail. But I would say the biggest things we heard a lot about were AI mode, which is the new tab inside of search that is basically just a full AI experience next to traditional search in a way that is messy and complicated and we should talk about. Um, there's also, um, Gemini is now being baked into Chrome, which is fascinating in the context of everything else going on with Google, which may or may not have to sell Chrome at some point in the very near future.

46:13Uh, the Gemini app continues to get better. So the Google has set it up so that there's project Astra, which is, it's like, they called it a concept car of an AI assistant. And that's where they try all their like truly wild stuff. and it was Astra where they're showing off all of the like wild demos where it's like watching you do stuff as you live your life and then can speak up. But as stuff gets better from there, it all graduates into the Gemini app, which got a bunch of new stuff. There's new features for Gemini Live. There's now like some of the live stuff is also in the search app. It's very confusing.

46:46You were saying this like it makes sense and it does not. No, none of it makes any sense. There's one part. There's one little part that makes sense, which is Google has figured out a vocabulary for what things are shipping mainstream products and what stuff is weird Google ideas. Yes. So there are projects of which there are too many and all of their names are confusing because it's Google. The projects are like, here are the demos. Right. Here's this thing. Project Mariner is the tech demo of we're going to let our agent go click around the website. and then the verb which david just used is that stuff graduates to the actual products like search and then there's like weird hybrids where search has the new ai mode tab which is not a project but an actual thing that rolled out to everybody united states but eventually things in ai mode will graduate to the main search experience so they've just introduced i'm not saying it's great i'm saying they've introduced a verb to make sense of like how google does stuff which is instead of shipping products, they now just graduate.

47:53Right. Oh my God. Like you graduate from preschool. It's very simple, guys. Project Astra is the Google lens to Gemini's AI mode. Jesus, that's true. I hate that. Yeah. It's a lot. But that little, once you understand that Google needed a way to make people stop asking when the thing would become the real thing, and they came up with the word graduate, some Some of it clicks into place. And then everyone at Google would be like, yeah, it's still pretty bad though, right? The important thing though, is that there are essentially two places that really matter to Google. One is the Gemini app and one is search.

48:30And so every other thing it's working on is at some point moving towards one of those two places. And the Gemini app is designed to be your assistant, right? Like that's the thing. It's trying to be what, what chat GPT is for lots of people. It's competing with Claude. It is the all-in-one operating system for your life thing that Google is trying to do. Search is search. And AI mode and all this stuff is a big bet in a slightly different direction that it can be what search has been for 25 years, but much better. And I think Gemini and search are actually, they overlap in sort of how you can use them, but they are different things in Google's mind.

49:10But those are the two places that all of this is designed to end up. Gemini is the big agentic assistant that goes and does things for you. That's the demo, right? Alex has been talking about the bike demo. If you go watch the video of that demo in particular, it's the guy's got his phone open. He's looking at his bike. He says, pull up the instruction manual. Gemini goes and does a search, gets the PDF of the bike's instruction manual, and he says, scroll to the page about whatever breaks. And it finds that by scant. Like you have to believe that Huffy has produced an OCR capable PDF, but like whatever, there's a lot of steps in there, but it scans the manual, finds a thing.

49:48You watch it literally scroll the phone in the background. It calls the bike shop and has a whole interaction on the phone with the bike shop. That's agent stuff, like big, hairy agent stuff. And then search is like the vision for AI mode is that every search result page you get is a custom built application. all the way down to like we can build charts for you. We might actually build custom code apps. Like you ask a question about stats in the NFL and we will build a data visualization app for you on the fly and show that to you as a search result, which is a big, a huge idea, but not an agent, right?

50:26And at some point they're going to overlap. Gemini can do that. This is what I don't understand. I mean, the reason these products are separate is because Google makes all of its money from search. and they are shipping their org chart quite literally which is like Demis has his fiefdom of deep mind and now the app and he's brought product into his org so now he controls the app fully. He doesn't control search. That's a whole other org that is 10 times as large that is the most profitable software business in the history of the world and they cannot disrupt that to the degree that they're willing to do wild stuff in Gemini.

51:00And should these be one product? Like does OpenAI say, no, we have a separate app for you to search with ChatGPT. No, they don't. It's just one big product. And it's actually, it's way simpler to understand. And Google's struggle, I think, was that from this IO is that, yes, they have the best models. They suck at product. They suck at making it work holistically and making it simple for people to understand. And that's still something they're working through. That's Google. Google loves to ship its work. And it was even on like a parent on stage at IO where like different executives got to announce the same product in different ways.

51:35Yeah. Because everybody needed a bite. You know, like this stuff happens. But from the product perspective, what I actually saw was all of their big bets that they've taken over time and all of their data about people is now resulting in products that look like they might work. Which, again, has been my criticism of AI for a long time. I don't know if they're actually going to work. but they have gmail yeah they just have gmail and so a lot of their like personal context boils down to well we had we we're just going to read your email right like we know when your flights are because it's in your email so we don't have to do anything else like what if we were just better at reading your email to you is like an incredible product for you how to solve and now google has all this like research and the models to do it and then you can just productize that and i think the search piece of it, yeah, I do think there's two different charts and that's all their money so they can't screw with it too much.

52:32But there's a world in which you would make that decision anyway because you don't want every search to be like agentic. Sure. Right? You do just want some information presented back to you without the emotional package of your agent reading your email to you. And I don't know where that line is and I think it's actually useful for Google to know like on some timeline they converge but not know when or how and just see how it plays out i also think if you're google there is very little evidence to suggest that you need to overhaul search soon uh google like the the everybody is like oh you have to cannibalize your own product or somebody else to do it for google just continues to destroy everybody at search and and everybody's It's like, oh, you know, Zoomers use chat GPT and Google is just like, show us in the market share friendos.

53:25So they are playing games with their metrics. Yeah. Pretty flatly. Because, you know, Eddie Q was at the search remedies trial and he said, look, you don't need to do this. Search is already under threat. Searches in iOS Safari have gone down for the first time in 22 years. and Google's, and we talked about this, Google's stock price dropped like that day because everyone is waiting for the pin to drop, right? So Sundar is on Decoder. You'll hear it on Monday. And so I asked about that directly and we'll just play the clip. Eddie Q on the stand in the trial the other day said, search in Safari for the last month dropped for the first time in 22 years.

54:07That's a big stat. Obviously your stock price was affected by it. There was a statement. Is that trend bearing out that the standard Google search is dropping from devices and different kinds of searches are increasing? No, look, we've been very clear. We are seeing overall query growth in search. You know, it looks... But have you actually seen the drop in Safari? Look, we have a comprehensive view of how we look at data across the board. There's a lot of, there can be a lot of noise in search data. but everything we see tells us we are seeing query growth, including across Apple's devices and platforms.

54:43And specifically, I think we quantified the query growth from AI overviews. And what's healthy is that the query growth is continuing to grow over time. So first of all, children, if your parents ask you how you did on your report card, you should just say, I have a comprehensive view of the data. That's good. That's really good. Incredible answer. That whole interview coming on Monday was a good one. But Alex, you weren't laughing because he keeps saying query growth. Yeah. And from what I have gathered from our conversations over the past couple of days, you're very skeptical of this. Well, so two things can be true.

55:17So overall, queries for Google can be growing, but the growth rate can be declining. So yes, do I think that queries in Google products or across everywhere that search touches have just like literally gone negative like year over year? No. Like in aggregate, is it probably growing? Yes. Is it growing as fast? Google will not say. And also, like, are the amount of searches done per person growing or are fewer people doing more searches? Right. There's a lot that they are not saying. And they're just trying to flat out say, like, broadly, query growth is growing because the moment you drill down into what's actually happening, maybe you learn, oh, wait, like maybe in North America in a key cohort for advertisers, which is like, you know, 20 to 35, a significant chunk of people are doing increasingly commercial intent searches on ChatGPT.

56:05And that's like if you actually try to drill down into how search works, which they don't want to do. They want to just talk about it at a high level. You maybe learn stuff like that. And, you know, we saw that reaction in the stock price because I think investors are so on edge. And you can see it in the way Google just how the stock is traded. Like it's heavily discounted relative to its peers because there is this fear not only of will the company be broken up, but is ChatGPT and these other AR products actually eating into search in a meaningful way? And so far, Google's answer is our types of queries are expanding.

56:40People are using search in deeper, new ways, which, yes, that's true. That's how these AI products work. You want to thank it and have a conversation with it. That doesn't mean that overall query volume is growing like it did. I'm just not sure there's any evidence to suggest either way, right? Like the, all we know is that. people like chat gpt right i mean no there's there is i mean there's the fact that like 500 million people use chat gpt every week and people also use all these other ai chatbots there was like a bunch of things that did not exist three years ago that now exist that directly do what google used to do and like we all see it and i bet a lot of our listeners feel it like in their daily lives you think all 500 million of those people every week are firing up chat gpt to do web search i think i'm getting answers from chat gpt that i would normally use google for whether it's like searching the web or not.

57:33It could be like, do a math equation for me. It could be like, what is a time zone conversion? Like there's a ton of things you use Google for. And yes, ChatGPT doesn't do the commercial shopping stuff, especially yet, though I think they will. And that's when it really gets potentially scary for Google. But yeah, do I and my family members and my friends, are we using ChatGPT like we used to use search? Absolutely. And I think a lot of people are. There's also other search replacements. Yeah. Perplexity. Last year, we talked about TikTok a bunch, right? Like people just search in TikTok and TikTok has search surfaces.

58:05Whether or not they're useful, like I think TikTok search has like dramatically declined in quality since all these other products at the scene. I think the point is like to connect this to there's Gemini and there's search. They need search to remain competitive and vital. Yeah. And that's why you don't make your big bet on Gemini because then you are head up against chat GPT and perplexity and whatever else. Right. But you're saying, oh, actually, this thing is just really good. Like, you don't need to open this other app. Like, Google search is now just incredible. And when assistance happen, we're going to have one ready for you.

58:38The real fear for Google here, I think, is less about how sort of meaningful a competitor ChatGPT is right now and how good a brand ChatGPT is. Like, the thing that no one has ever been able to touch with Google is, like, sheer awareness. and chat gpt is like running at it really fast in terms of like when i need to do something where do i go the answer for 20 years has been google and like the the omnibox in chrome was the most important surface on the internet for two decades and chat gpt is is pushing at that about as fast and hard as you could possibly imagine and like chat gpt is a is a terrible business and has many limitations as a product, but like, again, it is, it is hitting that like mainstream clean exercise, like kind of at record speed.

59:30And I think if I'm Google, that's the thing I'm afraid of. And that's the reason, Neil, that's your point. That's why you don't bet on Gemini because your brand is Google. And so what you, what you want everybody to think of is you want to think of Google as the thing that is like chat GPT, not Gemini. Gemini is like off here doing other stuff. But I really think like the confidence we saw from Google this last week is because it's there. Like they have a lot of products that are good, not just Chachi PT, right? Like Sora is not a great video generator yet. Sora doesn't exist yet. It's like it's around.

1:00:07Like some people have used it sometimes. VO3 is just like you can screw with it. I watched Sergey Brin try to generate his own face for a while. at least that's what i was told like it's just people are using it today and it will lead to some outcomes i think some of those outcomes might be like negative for the film industry like who knows but the products exist and the changes are going to happen around them some of the agentic stuff like i just literally watched a live demo of project mariner like look for jobs and it was just clicking around a remote desktop chrome session and you know i have a lot of questions about that.

1:00:43Like, why would any of those services agree to that? Like, I don't know. Is that pretty brittle? And like, should you just use some of these new technologies like MCP? Like, I don't know, maybe, but it works like it's there. And the rate of improvement is so fast that Google is like, oh, we're going to, we're going to do this. Like this is definitely just happening for us. They have the best models and that is a tremendous advantage. I was talking to someone who works in another big AI lab and they were saying model quality impacts usage of the products more than anything. We don't think it does, but if you release a shittier model and a chatbot, people use the chatbot less.

1:01:20People can feel how these models react and what they want to get out of them in a way that maybe we just broadly discount and how we cover them. And Google is objectively leading in model quality right now. And that was like the first thing Sundar came out on stage and talked about was like, we're number one on all the leaderboards. And like, that is true. But is everyone talking about Gemini? Is Gemini like the thing I hear when I go home for like Memorial Day weekend? No, no one even knows Gemini has an app except like early adopters and certain pockets. Like ChatGPT is the Kleenex of all this.

1:01:53And that's a problem for Google, unless we hit AGI like Demis once and none of this matters anyway. Yeah. And Demis, the only one left standing, just openly being like, I'm doing AGI. That's what this is all for. I'm on stage with Sergey Brin being like, the AGI moment is coming. We're taking bets on whether it happens before or after 2030. And they were six months on either side of the line. Every other company has stopped talking about it because they have to make some products and make some money to justify all this huge investment. And Google's like, yeah, we did it already. I think Google, maybe last year, particularly two years ago, was incredibly insecure about Having done all of the research investment.

1:02:33Like we've been joking for years now that if you say chat GPT, a Google comms person like leaps out of a bush and is like the tea in chat GPT was invented at Google. Like they're over that. Right. They're like, okay, we're, we caught up. Like we're going to ship products that are good. But I think the interesting part of that, Alex, is maybe chat GPT has the brand name. Google has the distribution. Yeah. Right. So they're loud about AI overviews being the single most popular generative AI product at scale. Hundreds of millions of people. You could remove popular and used. Like, yes. Do people know what they're using?

1:03:09Do they know that Astra is the lens to DeepMind's AI mode? No. But that's the problem is like, yes. I think it's more of an ego thing, honestly. And I think it's a recruiting thing. And I think for Google, yeah, they're seeing metrics that are not as bad as everyone thought. But this race, this perception of the race, this perception of how far ahead ChatGPT is and just consumer mindshare, it's an ego problem for them. It's maybe a long-term strategy problem. And I think it just hits them more in that realm. I don't think it actually – it's clearly not hitting them on the business. And that's what you and I were feeling being on site.

1:03:46But like is it still a problem for them in that they are not winning at it all? Yes. I was with a Google exec who's been there forever at one point yesterday, and they were like, yeah, you know, just like a thing we really have a problem with is like not being first, you know? And that's like every company, but I think Google for so long just had this perch that was untouchable, right? They just ran the internet, and now they're getting challenged on all sides. And I think that just, that messes with the ego a little bit in a way that makes, it seeps into the products. It seeps into the decisions they make.

1:04:23But yes, is the business maybe doing better than we thought? Yeah. I mean, I thought it was crazy. Like at the very end of the keynote, Sundar mentions Waymo for like 30 seconds. It's like, you know, they may have a trillion dollar company in Waymo that has solved self-driving and is now doing more rides in San Francisco than Lyft. Like that is happening in one part of Google. Yeah. YouTube is unshakable. YouTube is probably going to eat the entire entertainment industry. So they have all these products that are just huge and dominant. And I think they were feeling that. Yeah. At the end of the keynote, Sunar just casually mentioned their satellite constellation to detect fires.

1:04:57And he literally was like, it will be fully operational by your end. And I was like, that's how they announced the second Death Star. Those are the words they used for the Death Star. And he was like, come get out of everybody. And I laughed. Also, I think they're feeling really great because, you know, Dieter is more famous than Giannis. That's true. Dieter got the single biggest cheer at the Iowa keynote. Shout out to Dieter. It was very fun seeing him as a popular Google executive on that stage. Also, when he came out, we were all sitting next to each other live blogging, and V just goes, Dieter!

1:05:34It's like totally quiet, right? She just screams, Dieter! Incredible moment. it was very good uh there's the distribution right that we have ai overviews everyone's using them is it popular does the brand work on some timeline it doesn't matter because they're just there and they get really really good and then you just you know the next new person never even thinks to get chat gpt and that feels like a big part of this bet right that's where ai mode really comes to play where you've got this big new search experience and over time things will graduate to the main search experience and then maybe no one's ever using chat gpt because yeah the people who have yet to experience ai are just like whatever google just does this like i'm looking at this other you want me to use this app that's doing the thing that's already happening it could be like stories it could be like how meta copied snapchat and yeah snapchat got big and it's still big but it never became a multi-trillion dollar company because a company with tremendous scale just copied it quickly and leveraged its distribution yeah that definitely could happen this is where Google shipping its org chart, I think, is hurting it pretty badly.

1:06:40Because the thing I can't figure out and that no one at Google will give me an honest answer to is, do they care about Gemini as a public-facing brand? Is it important to Google that we know and care about Gemini? Yes. It's funny they wouldn't tell you that. I think it's because they know they are nowhere near where they need to be, and they don't want to say that on the record. I mean, they all say yes, but I don't believe them. No, it's actually Sundar told employees at the beginning there that is the top goal for the company is that Gemini wins the chatbot race. I believe that. But I think if Google were a different company where it was easier to succeed by making things good and not by launching new things, would it have made a lot more sense to just do all of this work inside of AI mode from the very beginning?

1:07:31Yes. And you go back to how can we make Google.com the most important thing on the internet again forever. And you just you pull this thing from a tab slowly into search. Like the thing I think they're doing with AI mode makes a lot of sense. And the fact that it's not called Gemini doesn't make any sense. And so I'm just lost on this thing about like Google is actually trying to point you in so many places that I think it is risking like diluting the actually interesting work that it's doing. It's because it's the money. Search is the money. They can't. They can't do this. Like they can't disrupt.

1:08:01This is classic innovator's dilemma. This is what OpenAI is attacking head on, is that Google cannot change its business fast enough for the consumer awareness and just attention sucking that ChatGPT is doing right now. And yeah, that is exactly what it should be. Gemini should be searched. There should be no distinction. The problem is, is that Google isn't a company. It's a combination of like 14 companies with their own CEOs. And yeah, should Westeros run it all? Probably. Like, would things run smoother? Yes. But there's a lot of Lords and they all have their own features. I mean, I even think about, like, there's a Google app.

1:08:37That was a seamless Game of Thrones reference. That was really good. But, like, there's a Google app in which you can either do Google search or with one button go to Gemini. And then there's also a Gemini app. And in no sane world do both of those things need to exist. No. I cannot believe I am the person who is saying this. I don't think any of this shit matters. I really don't. It might not. Like, I think the main search experience is going to get better. People are going to see the words AI mode and like click it because it just says AI mode. And that is a clickier thing than the word Gemini, which means nothing.

1:09:12Then they're going to be like, wow, people are using AI mode and that's going to become the main thing. and at some point they will do the thing that google is uniquely capable of doing and say click this link to download the gemini app and they will just get gemini distribution and that will all just happen like they're they are uniquely capable of doing that one of the they have and yes they got the innovators still no problem right they can't burn down the most lucrative business in favor of the the cheap disruptive thing that's almost good enough but works better for some people, right? Like, yeah, they got that problem.

1:09:45I think their other problem is they're basically going to torch the web. Like along the way, the web as we know it is coming to an end. And they are, you know, what Sunara will tell you, it's not a zero sum game that the web is growing, they're crawling more web pages than ever. You'll hear that in Decoder next week. Every Google executive there is like more stuff is happening on the web. They're more and better applications on the web than ever. Like the web is the place where you deploy new apps. High point, like maybe of all time. Because of all this app store ruling and the Epic case, the web is a place where you go to buy stuff about to become incredibly important again, right?

1:10:29All these apps are going to kick you out of in-app purchases to the web and we're going to all be buying stuff on the web because you don't have to pay the Apple tech. Like all that stuff is great, but like the web is a media platform where the new information is. It's like, it's already under pressure from all these tools, right? It's already dying because of these tools. You can see it every day. All that new information is on, I mean, you're listening to this in your podcast player on YouTube. Like it's in these other weird platforms. It's on TikTok. And Google has to figure out how to get that information or it has to figure out how its agents can go and look at all those databases and make that worthwhile for people.

1:11:08And I don't know if that stuff makes sense yet. I don't even know if it makes sense for OpenAI. But at least they're the upstart, right? Like if their core business fails, like Sam Altman will just lit a bunch of money on fire. And that's kind of what we expected him to do. If Google can't pull it off, like a lot of things go wrong. But they have to work that curve of like the web is the place where the information is, is quickly getting abstracted away to the web is the database that the new AI Google search synthesizes for you. Yeah. I heard that too at IO. I heard execs saying like, no, like the content on the web is bigger than it ever has.

1:11:44We have more to crawl than we ever have. And I just was thinking like, wait, isn't that all AI slop? Like, isn't the reason you have more to crawl is because your models are producing a bunch of garbage. And I really think they view data like sand. Like it's just like the beach has gotten bigger. But it's like, yeah, but there's like a bunch of dead animals in it. Like that's kind of how they view data. Look at the amount of rubble we're standing on. It's like, well, you blew up the city. Yeah. So like, yes, in aggregate, is there more data for them to crawl? Probably. How much of that is human?

1:12:15How much of that is high quality? We know, we feel this as people in the media business, like all of the best content is going behind paywalls. It's going to be hard for agents to get to this stuff. And how does that work? How do you solve the fundamental business tension of people who make the good stuff cannot support what they do on the web as it exists today? Well, actually, let's take a tiny detour into MCP. because David wrote about it in the context of Microsoft Build this week. We had Kevin Scott, Microsoft CTO, on Decoder this week. MCB is like a phenomenon, right? It's a standard from Anthropic that is basically, here's how an agent shows up to a website or a database and interacts.

1:12:54It's basically just an API replacement. Like it's not more complicated than like we made some APIs for agents to go do stuff. And if you just run it all the way to the end, it's kind of like, oh, you don't need websites anymore. You just have, you need auth and maybe payments to databases. And then the agents can just like go and API into the databases and come back and give you stuff. And I just, I don't know how that business works. But Dave, you wrote about it this week. I mean, I think built into the way that you're talking about it is the assumption that everyone will access every part of the web via some chat bot.

1:13:30Which is what a bunch of these companies would like you to believe, but I don't think is true. And I don't really think has ever been true. the the theory is that like okay what we what we can do in one of two ways is help plug ai into the web right and i think that's like mcp stands for model context protocol and basically the idea is it's like a structured way for me to say i have a bunch of information on my website here is how to give the model access to that information in order to be able to do things fine uh microsoft is also working on this thing called NL web that I think is very cool, which is basically an open version of a protocol like that, that says, okay, what if I could actually run all of that AI stuff on my website?

1:14:14Uh, and so now instead of going to chat GPT to talk to my website or go to Claude to talk to my website, you come to my website to talk to my website. And that is like, as somebody who believes in the open web, that is a future I am much more interested in over time. Um, but I think to Alex's point, I don't think these companies care about the information on the internet. Like, I think a lot about, I think Mark Zuckerberg has said a few times, which is that like, everybody talks a lot about news content on Facebook. And that is like a vanishingly small portion of what people do on Facebook. And so eventually they just stopped caring.

1:14:47Like this is no longer worth our time and investment and energy to care that much about what happens with news content, because it doesn't matter that much to our platform. And I think most of these companies feel the same way, that actually most of this is just headache. And what people come to Google for is to like find Adele music videos and chocolate chip cookie recipes and not read politics news. Yeah. And there are all kinds of terrifying downstream effects from the fact that they don't really care. But I think they don't really care. And the idea that what they're going to do is set up a world in which everybody who owns a website has to stop thinking about Google distribution and go build themselves into a destination people go to on purpose.

1:15:27And that that's going to require reprogramming 20 years of behavior of how we do the Internet. Like, it's a mess and it's going to kill a lot of the web. and I just don't think these companies care because there's new stuff to do. I think Google wants you to believe that it cares, but on the longest timelines that Google thinks, it does not. So I would say it the other way. I think Google cares a lot about the web and very little about websites. Making sure that websites that exist today get to continue as they exist today, I don't think Google cares that much about that. Oh, sure. No, we're agreeing.

1:16:00But I think Google cares about the web is just like really... The web is a miracle. Like, I just, like, straightforwardly, the web is a miracle. We have, in the world, a giant, interconnected, interdependent, mostly open application platform. That's weird. Yeah. Thank you, government spending. You can just, yeah, like, right? We just horsepowered this thing into existence because, honestly, Mark Andreessen got a bunch of government funding in the middle of the country. Like, that's a thing that happened. Like, that's Mosaic. And it turned into Netscape. And it's all here. And now Figma exists.

1:16:36And like Johnny Ive, legendary designer, probably opens a web app to do a bunch of design work. That's crazy. Now he uses pages for everything. Yeah, it's funny you brought up Andreessen. I actually talked to OpenAI to their MCP lead this week because they joined the steering committee for MCP. So they're now working with basically every AI lab has agreed that this is the new standard. and I actually came away thinking we are actually still pre-Netscape on agents as it relates to the actual plumbing that it takes to hook them together. So this open AI lead was like, there's still no registry. Like there's no discoverability mechanism for a developer to even know who has an MCP server.

1:17:19Like we know there's a few of them. There's like Stripe and Zendesk or whatever, but no one's even built the interface for then the developer to go, okay x model go make this happen with this server and that that will happen it'll probably happen this year but we're not even at the browser point this is funny to be talking in these words because like yes agents are supposed to like replace browsers but like we are not in the browser phase of agent building yet like this has not even been connected in that way it's still very very early and it will be enterprise and very developer focused first it's not like we're to be getting some all-powerful agent that can just like go and order a bunch of stuff for you and talk to a bunch of apps like anytime soon even though google showed that off like this is going to be a developer replacing function calling with telling a model to go talk to an api yeah and that's really interesting that's interesting yeah exactly you can see there's a new web you would build on that like yeah and that's what i mean like i agree with david i think they care a lot about the web because this big interconnected application platform where you can like instantly deliver complex applications to a runtime like Chrome is a miracle.

1:18:28And I think Google is very invested in that particular miracle. I think as a media platform where you read a bunch of text and it's a doc, they don't care about that at all. And like, I know this because Alex and I were sitting in the audience for the Demis Asabas and Sergey Brin fireside chat with Alex Kantrowitz and Kantrowitz asked, what do you think the web is in 10 years? And Sergey was like, who knows? Like, right. He was like, the world will have hit the singularity. Like, I will be one with the sun. Like, off in space. And Demis said, it's a good question. And then, quote, I think the web in the near term, the web is going to change a lot if you think about an agent first web.

1:19:08Do the agents have to see renders in things that we need to see as humans? Do we need to actually render web pages? Do we need websites? That's the question. And he's, I mean, his answer clearly is no. His answer is no. And then I asked Sundar a riff on this question. I read him that quote. And he was like, what is the web but a series of databases? Which, first of all, is the vergiest verge answer of all time. Yes. Like, I literally started, you're going to hear him. I just started laughing. I was like, thank you. Like, I feel very validated. Like, what are we but a series of databases? Dine out on that one for a while.

1:19:38But, like, if you reconceptualize the entire interconnected application environment of the web, it's just a bunch of databases that you can go ask for stuff. And some of those databases have Toyota's Camrys in them. And some of them have vacation houses in them. And some of them have sandwiches. is, it's like, oh, those are just businesses that are going away. Or they're businesses that get funded through API calls instead of ads on their web pages. Like, will the incentives figure themselves out because do agents need things to do? Yes. So like, if everything that an agent would talk to suddenly goes away because its business model is destroyed, like, guess what?

1:20:12Agents don't work. So will this get figured out? Will it be super messy? Will a lot of companies go away? Will whole new categories of companies get invented? Yes. Yes, that's all true. But do I think like the fundamental building blocks of the plumbing of the web, like content and things that an agent could do will go away? No, because then there's no agent. And what Google and ChatGPT are both racing to be is the interface to interact with all those databases on your behalf, which is like the greatest abstraction of technology I think maybe we've ever seen like in our lifetimes, if that happens at scale.

1:20:47and the value that will accrue to the interface is arguably greater than the value that Google gets now from running ads on search. I mean, this is the funny thing is like, Alex, you and I have now spent a lot of time on this podcast in the last week talking about display ads. But like the fundamental question here is what happens when display ads don't work anymore? What is the business of the internet without display ads for the people who have traditionally relied on display ads? Paying 250 a month for Google Ultra. Maybe that's the answer. Maybe Google, maybe the end of this is Google and OpenAI pay websites directly.

1:21:21I don't love that, but that is one possible outcome of this. But if the web is a series of unrendered databases, the whole business of the web is suddenly immediately gone. Ben Thompson, by the way, wrote about this this week based on MCP. And he was like, this is what stable coins are for. And like a full body groan basically is. Yeah. Boy, I hate that. Oh, man. This is the idea that we'll have these crypto microtransactions pegged to the dollar in some way that make all that happen. I would just say if one more person says microtransactions are the answer, I'm going to send everyone a thousand links to all the times we've tried microtransactions and it didn't work.

1:22:03And then I'm going to heave myself out of a window. I will, again, full body cringe in reading that stable coins are the answer. But he did make one good point. Ben Thompson made it at one particularly excellent point here in that the web already runs on thousands, if not millions of microtransactions every second, because that's how the ads work. Yep. Yeah, but it's not me giving you - All of those banner ads are microtransactions. Sure. But it's there. You just hate stable coins. I get it. I get it. Whatever those are. that's that's sure all of that exists but if you made me type in the ip address of every website i wanted to go to that wouldn't that doesn't work either like making the users do it falls apart go order me a sandwich and it's going to be like or or you have some uh subscription to one of these centralized indexes that needs to get built and that subscription like has the weird spotify model where it's like you get a penny and you get a penny and taylor swift gets most of the pennies And like, maybe that's how it plays out.

1:23:02But you can see just at IO in the conversations they're having that the web we have today is, is reaching its like termination point. And this new other kind of web is definitely like the thing they all want to build. It's a thing Microsoft wants to build. It's right. That's why they're doing NL web. It's a thing Google is just sort of openly talking about. It's what open AI needs to have happened to make its dreams realized. Like if you wear your Johnny Ive iPod shuffle and it can't do anything, you're kind of stuck, right? Like it needs that whole ecosystem to be developed and built and for the money to all work for that product to be as useful as they want it to be.

1:23:42And I think this is a marker. And I think part of Google's confidence is they think they can horsepower into existence while sort of preserving the best of the old web and bridging the revenue into the future. I will say publishers are furious about this. Oh, yeah. They're super mad. We have a statement on our site from the News Media Alliance, Disclosure, Vox Media is in the News Media Alliance, along with Conde Nast. It's the business side of the company. But we're also taking money from OpenAI. Oh, it's true. We have an OpenAI deal. It doesn't even occur to me. I also made a Netflix show. You should watch it.

1:24:15It's great. That's relevant, right? That's not just me bragging. Google wanted to buy Netflix. That's true. Google. There you go. Sundar announced that Google wanted to buy Netflix at one point. But the publishers are like, the whole point of this deal was us getting traffic and now that's gone. And then they called it theft. Like that is what the publisher industry, the news industry is saying about AI mode. And I think Google is like, well, it'll be sad when you're dead. Like that's kind of how it feels. And I think that will get litigated even harder. Not to mention the fact that they might have to sell Chrome, which I don't know what will happen if they have to sell Chrome.

1:24:52I don't think they're going to have to sell Chrome. No one, I got no vibe that anyone was worried about Chrome at IO. Well, what are they going to, they're not going to like wander around their own party being like, well, this is going to suck. No, no, no. But like, you know, like when you're, when you're actually like having a drink and you're staring at someone's face a few feet away and you ask them, like, are you worried about Chrome? Like, yeah, you're trained, but like you do it enough and you kind of get a vibe. And I did this on a few topics and like, I was very curious, like, are they worried about this?

1:25:18Like up and down the chain. and I think they know they're going to have to stop just like mafia style buying out search distribution. Like that's going to go away. But do they think they're still the best search engine? Yeah. So I don't think they think they're going to have a divestiture. And that's another topic. I mean, on the website thing, I'm curious what you guys think about this. Our website's just going to become like driving a vintage car. It's going to be this thing you do because it's a luxury. It feels good. It's like a really bespoke, unique, like visceral experience. It's not as efficient, but you do it and you spend more money.

1:25:56Like I kind of feel like that's the direction websites are going to go. I do like thinking of the Verge.com as like a cranky vintage Jaguar. Yeah. Right. It's kind of always broken, but you love it. It's going to be great. Yeah. I don't know. I, there's other kinds of web, like, you know, Substack and Ghost are web properties. Blue Sky, like App Protocol built on a lot of web ideas. and the thing about google is that all of these websites are effectively addicted to google's distribution right that's why seo has polluted the web so badly there wasn't another choice and so like yeah maybe agents are going to turn everyone in a day basis like i think if you're a retailer if you are walmart or target or macy's or whatever and you're looking at google's new try-on mode which looks very cool like the promise there is that once you've tried on the clothes virtually, the demo was you set a price and then at some point Google just buys the clothes when it hits a sale.

1:26:50If you're a target, you just totally got disintermediated. Now you're just doing high-frequency trading with a Google bot. This is a really weird business to be in. And Google's kind of answer there is like, oh, well, we'll talk to them and make sure that we show some of their webpages sometimes. And I said, well, what's that negotiation going to look like and Google is like, it won't be a negotiation. It'll be a conversation. This is ice cold, right? Like there's a whole universe of businesses that are going to have to get reconfigured. And a lot of them are going to want to say, well, actually, we don't want anything to do with this all.

1:27:21We want you to come to our website. Substack for, you know, it's many, many faults is a web property. It's expressed on the web. There's not like a Substack desktop app. And the innovation is they've solved distribution inside of their own little network. And that is really, really lucrative for a lot of people on Substack. All of that is the optimistic case, right? The pessimistic case is yes, websites die and everything becomes the high frequency trading. You're essentially fighting for Google scraps. The upside is for the first time in two decades, everybody's going to have to care about their website because it has to be, I mean, this is the verge bet, right?

1:27:54Like this is the thing we've been talking about for a while that like the bet is we have to make something that you come to on purpose or else we can't be that upset when nobody comes. I think maybe that's a place we're going to land and and a lot of that's going to make things harder for a lot of the web there's going to be a lot of pain along the way but like if if we do this correctly uh i think and the the this guy guha who i was talking to about all of the nl web stuff he's like the fact that the web trends towards centralization is bad and it has been bad several generations in a row and we have to stop it and the only way to stop it is to distribute the good technology everywhere.

1:28:33And I think the way we think about the federated social networks, the way we think about MCP, the way we think about NL Web, bringing some of this AI stuff to websites is like maybe there's a chance that actually this ecosystem gets bigger instead of you just going to google.com, landing on a webpage you've never heard of and then never going back. Because that's what we've been doing, but you could argue that's not the correct outcome. But it's an outcome. I mean, what is this index of MCP servers except incredible centralization on the web that will reemerge, right? Right. I mean, there's a reason the AI labs are the ones doing this.

1:29:11This is not Tim Berners-Lee being like, this is great for the internet. This is Anthropic being like, this is how we get internet access. Yeah. Because they can't, I mean, their first shot at it was what if we click around your website, which is just incredibly brittle. It's just, it's never, that is never going to work. That will be the backup plan for all of this. And MCP will be plan A. We'll see. Again, we walked around Google I.O. and they were all feeling it. They are riding high. Their theme, they kept saying, was research into reality. And it's like, what they mean is, you didn't believe us for a long time.

1:29:43That we had all this stuff in the labs. That we were working on it. That it was coming to fruition. And now all at once, here's all of it. And it has to ship. and you know people are i'm confident we're gonna get feedback on this part of the episode that's like they're stealing our jobs and boiling the ocean there are some really weird downsides to all this stuff happening yeah both of those things are true by the way they're true they are true uh but the weirdest one is that we're staring at the beginning of a wholesale re-architecture of the internet yep and that we should probably pay a little more attention to that to make sure it's good this time because the last time like four people just got to be in charge yeah and like i might take the trade-off if you can actually decentralize a little bit more we'll see all right we got to take a break we're gonna come back with the lightning round we'll be right back morning zoe jeff bridges why are you still living above our garage i want to be in a t-mobile commercial like you teach me sildana i couldn't possibly at t-mobile get the new iphone 17 pro on them.

1:30:45It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch. All right, it's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored for flavor. I said it with a question mark because I actually don't know if it's unsponsored. There are rumors that we have a sponsor. There are rumors that we have a sponsor, but I believe it's not today.

1:31:19And I wouldn't even know because the whole point is no one can tell me what to do. That's why Verge subscriptions are 40 % off this week. Next week, it'll say sponsored for flavor. And then we'll make new t-shirts. It's going to be Doritos. It's going to be great, you guys. Actually, does anyone know anyone at Doritos? Listen. We should reach out. Yes. I will eat Doritos constantly through an entire Verge cast if Doritos would like to pay for that. It's funny, you know, our great rivals for podcasts within a podcast, my brother, my brother and me, they were once sponsored, I believe, by Tostitos Pizza Rolls.

1:31:50They were. They made a whole Totino's episode and it was excellent content, if I may say so myself. We've got a lot to live up to on that front. We do. We will never do that. I just want to be clear. You can't pay us money to tell us what to do. That's where the flavor comes from. I guess in this case, this would be Brendan Carr's the Dummy brought to you by the FCC. Speaking of which. It's time, David. Let's do this one more time. just for this week. And then hopefully never again. Every week I root for it to be the last version of Brendan Carr as a dummy for a lot of reasons. And every week it is not.

1:32:21It is time once again for 2026 Webby Award winning podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr as a dummy. Neil, you've slept for three hours. I expect this one to be very, very good. There's only two items in this one. The first one is so stupid. Like so, so stupid. And the other one is so disappointing. And that's really the heart of Brendan Carr as a dummy, right? How can you disappoint me in ever more stupid ways? So this week, Brendan Carr, America's number one censor, who continues to make such a splash as a would-be speech cop that more and more profiles and coverage of him emerge. Politico wrote a profile this week.

1:33:00John Oliver did an entire segment that is basically Brendan Carr as a dummy. Thank you to John Oliver for validating us. And thank you everyone who sent that in. He is a real test of all press is good press. Our buddy, Brendan. It's not. You're a traitorous moron, Brendan. And I know this because this week he has started to open an investigation into NBC over Kamala Harris appearing on Saturday Night Live. Disclosure, NBC. Investor in our parent company, Vox Media. Just putting that out there. You can do that what you will. Again, I remind you, no one can pay me to say anything. It's the first subscriptions are on sale.

1:33:39hey do you guys know who won the election do you remember who it was that doesn't matter I forget yeah it's so long ago do you remember who lost definitively lost and is not the president do you know who that is it was Kamala I believe that she lost right she did not win we can agree that she is not currently the president of the United States the other guys okay well Brendan here in mid May of 2025 has decided the most pressing speech issue in the country is whether Saturday Night Live violated the equal time rule for broadcast television stations by having Kamala Harris appear on the show. Do you know what I also know definitively is that Brendan knows they didn't.

1:34:25But yet he has decided here in May of 2025 to reopen an investigation which was closed into whether NBC and Saturday Night Live violated the equal time rule by having Kamala Harris than Saturday Night Live. The equal time rule is like an archaic broadcast rule that says if a broadcaster that uses the public airwaves to broadcast content gives time to one candidate, they got to give equal time to the other candidate. It's a little more complicated, but that's right. It's called the equal time rule. Which NBC did the next day. NBC had Donald Trump on the next day. He got a bunch of time during the NASCAR race.

1:35:00I reported on this while it was happening, right? Because Harris showed up on SNL. There was a bunch of like MAGA tweets and then Brendan was Brendan And before he was auditioning for the jobs, he was like, I will arrest everyone when I meet the FCC commissioner. Great. I reported it out at the time. And what I heard from sources in the FCC was the only program that regularly deals with this is Saturday Night Live. They are the best at it because politicians are always showing up on Saturday Night Live. Oh, interesting. Like they have the infrastructure for dealing with the equal time rule because no one else gives a shit.

1:35:35So, of course, they filed the equal time notice of the FCC. And of course, they were offered Donald Trump time the next day because they're good at it. Like, this is a thing Saturday Night Live is the best at of all of the shows on all the broadcast networks. And so, sure enough, Brendan, there's, you know, his emails were FOIA because he's threatening this investigation before he was ever made the FCC commissioner. And he emailed Fox News producers, here's the equal time request. from NBC and Saturday Night Live. Like, I know he knows it because I'm reading his email saying he knows it. They complied.

1:36:12Former FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel looked at this and dismissed this because they had complied. And I know they complied because Trump was on the air during the NASCAR race the next day. Equal time was given. Well, here we are. May 2025. Election has been won. We have accepted a jet from the government of Qatar. Like, we're definitively past Saturday Night Live booking Kamala Harris having any effect on anything that happens in this country. And Brendan is running around trying to punish NBC for violating the equal time rule, finding ways legally to reopen this investigation just to put more pressure on NBC for its alleged coverage of Donald Trump being biased.

1:36:52This is just speech police stuff. Like it's, it's over. Like the election is over. Whatever harm you may have felt, the Trump campaign felt, that Carr felt for his boss and buddy Donald, it's over. They won. The harm has passed, right? The opportunity for that to have swayed the election has come and gone and it didn't work. And he knows. We can see his emails. We reported on his emails that he knows that they didn't break the rule. And yet he's trying to reopen. I mean, this is just moronic, right? He's doing it to be a cop, to chill the speech of these news divisions that are reporting on Donald Trump.

1:37:33Maybe because NBC owns MSNBC. Even though Comcast is spinning that off into a new company called Versant, which I haven't even talked about yet, but that's why he's doing it. So stupid. We'll put it in the show notes. We have his emails where he's telling Fox producers they complied with the rules, and yet he's going to reopen this investigation just because he wants to be a cop. He's not even trying to hide the fact that this is what it's about. It's very straightforward. It's very straightforward. So that's one. That's very stupid. Here's the very disappointing one. We've talked a lot about how Brendan threatens deals that are in the pipelines and tries to get companies to comply with whatever he wants, whether it's their coverage, which he says is biased, whether it's DEI policies, which he says are not racist enough, whatever it is.

1:38:17He gets what he wants by holding up deals. So last week, Verizon completed its acquisition of Frontier, another fiber provider, and it got that through the FCC by sending a letter to Brendan Carr saying it was walking back all of its DI efforts. Super disappointing, right? Verizon just rolled and said, we're going to give up on our DI efforts. This is Brendan at work, right? He went and threatened the business over something that has nothing to do with the business, and Verizon caved, like just straightforwardly caved and said, this is a government regulation that we're going to deal with, even though the FCC telling us who to hire and fire is kind of a straightforward infringement of its rights as a business.

1:38:59And the thing that is particularly disappointing to me is that whenever the FCC has tried to do something good to Verizon, they have fought it tooth and nail. They are the primary legal antagonists of net neutrality for a decade. Every court case, every challenge, Verizon was there. Whenever you talk about increasing broadband access, Verizon fights that stuff tooth and nail. Verizon takes money and promises Fios will be rolled out in New Jersey. They just never do it. And then they get sued and they fight it tooth and nail. We had the CEO of Verizon Wireless on Decoder. I don't know why enterprise software CEOs or telecom CEOs show up on the show, but they came on the show.

1:39:37And I asked him, are you going to fight Brendan Carr in these weird regulations as hard as you fought net neutrality? Just run the clip. I want to be very clear, very explicit about this. When the government passed net neutrality rules, it wasn't we have to follow the rules of the land. It was we are going to file lawsuits for a decade to get out of these rules because we think they're dumb. And in this case, you're saying Brendan Carr, who has been openly censorious, openly chilling of speech, openly hostile to companies because they have diversity initiatives. You're saying you just have to follow his rules.

1:40:06We have to follow the rules of the land. I don't think those are his rules. Those are rules of the land. Are you going to file a decade worth of lawsuits about these rules? We don't know. We're going to work constructively with them to follow rules that are needed. But at the end of the day, look, our role is to our stakeholders that we have. You know, my stakeholders are my shareholders, my customers, my employees and society at large. We have to manage and we are going to deliver for those stakeholders what's needed for us. And we will do whatever is needed with the administration to deliver to all the stakeholders.

1:40:33It's a balance when you run a large company our size. You have to balance the different stakeholders and we will balance those stakeholders. We've done it extremely well in the last 25 years that we've been Verizon and we'll continue to do that going forward. You have to balance the stakeholders, guys. We have a comprehensive view and we have balancing the stakeholders and you can get out of almost anything. That sucks. That is 60 seconds of him being like, when he says those aren't Brendan Carr's rules, those are the rules of the land. That sucks. That's, I mean, that's straightforwardly a lie.

1:41:04Those are Brendan Carr's rules. He said, I'm going to hold up this deal unless you walk back your DEI initiatives. And Verizon, instead of fighting, which they always do when it comes to consumer protection or broadband deployment, they always fight. Here they rolled. And it worked. And the thing that kills me is it doesn't have to work. Like if you stand up to these bullies in particular, they tend to roll over. And Brendan getting a win is just like the most disappointing outcome. And it's particularly funny because it's Verizon that always fights. Verizon looks at government regulation and is like, no, no, no, no, no.

1:41:40One decade. And here they rolled. And I just think it sucks. I'm incredibly disappointed that it worked in this way. I'm also, you know, not for nothing. It's another merger of ISPs and it will result not in greater service and lower prices. You know how it's going to go. We all know how this is going to go. I was wondering about this in the context of there was news this week that AT &T is paying, I think, five and five point seven five billion dollars to buy Lumens fiber business in a bunch of cities all over the place. And the timing of this is so suspicious to me because it really seems like AT &T looked at this and said, oh, all we have to do is write a letter about DEI and this will get done.

1:42:20Yep. And I'm like, I hope that's not how this goes. But it sure seems like AT &T is about to just run the same playbook in order to get this thing done. I think there's a renewed sense that some mergers are allowed to happen. You know, there was a lot of excitement even in the tech industry, right? That like deals are back. Yeah. Biden and Lena Khan were not going to let any deals happen. And now the deals are back. And that actually wasn't the case early on. Like Andrew Ferguson, the new chair of the FTC is kind of a trust buster. He kind of hates big companies. He hates big tech. Brendan is just like, give me an ounce of blood.

1:42:54You know, just bloviating away moronically. Like these deals aren't happening. And I think there's people are starting to figure out like there's a path forward and it involves trading your values to get the deals. Right. And over and over, they're doing it. They're so happy to do it. I think the next one we're going to see is CBS and Paramount settling their case with Donald Trump over 60 minutes to get the Skydance deal done. And that will be a dark and sad day for American journalism. Yep. To the point where it's like, oh, that's over. You shouldn't trust that network anymore. That's brutal.

1:43:26As always, Brendan, if you're listening, and I super know you are, you can come on the show. You know, I got your press release today. I wrote back to your people and invited you on. He put out a press release about how much more spectrum he's opening for satellite networks. He loves it. It's his favorite thing to do. Congrats, Brendan. You can come on. You can defend this stuff. The fanciest CEOs in the industry, telecom CEOs, come on Decoder and answer their questions. because they can defend themselves. Sampath, the CEO of Verizon Wireless, he gave maybe the single best answer to the decision-making question on a decoder we ever had, even though I completely disagree with we have to manage for stakeholders.

1:44:03They can defend themselves. They're smart. I think you're stupid, so you're not going to show up. But if you want to, you can. We're available. You can be on this show. You can be on a decoder. But for now, that has been Brendan Carr's Dunney, America's favorite podcast within a podcast. That's beautiful. I've decided to take a comprehensive view to Brendan Carr. I'll get back to you on what that looks like. I have a comprehensive unit of data. Can I offer you some breaking news as a palate cleanser? Mark Gurman from Bloomberg just published a big story about Apple with two very interesting pieces of information that I think are germane to what we've been talking about.

1:44:34Thing number one is he reported that Apple has been working on smart glasses and has like really ramped up its effort to sell smart glasses and hopes to do so by the end of next year. and he cites one person, presumably inside of Apple, who said they will be similar to the meta Ray-Bans, but better made, which is terrific. So yeah, presumably he called Tim Cook and Tim told him that and here we are. So that's piece of information number one is that Apple smart glasses, which we have been hearing for a while, we're sort of being pushed further and further off, may have been pulled back up in the roadmap.

1:45:10And the other one is that we've been hearing for a while about the idea of an Apple Watch with an integrated camera. And that is apparently shut down and that will no longer be a thing, which is a shame because I wanted to know very badly how any of that was going to work in the real world. But this is Apple pushing on the same kind of stuff, right? Like multimodal AI assistance is the name of the game here. And Apple seems to be on the smart glasses trend along with, at this point, kind of everybody other than OpenAI and Johnny Ive. yeah and i can tell you why they're doing it it's because these smart glasses are hitting decent scale they're doing single digit million sales a year the meta ray-bans are um they may get to double digit millions they're also like good and people like them which i think is an important oh i think everyone's super confused most of all meta about why people like the ray-ban glasses oh that's true but sure but they are good and people do like them people are buying they are but what people like is having glasses with a camera in them sure they don't But that's also, if you're Apple, that's a core competency, right?

1:46:12Like that's a reason to do it if you're Apple. But that's not, I don't think they're an AI distribution platform the way that Meta wants them to be. No. But they don't have a display in them yet. And that's what everyone else is demoing. Apple smart glasses, if they don't have a display, they're one kind of product. If they do have a display, they're a very different kind of product. And no one has cracked that display problem yet. At least about Google. The one we saw, the Android XR, it is so a prototype. It is not a display we're looking at. saw these right i'm gonna talk to v a bunch about all this stuff on tuesday and the glasses but i am curious you you got to try them right yeah just really quickly it was like a five minute demo and it was basically gemini on your face um the weird thing about these prototypes is the wave guide is very small and not high resolution but it's in the dead center of the lens whereas i was expecting like a heads up to the side thing yeah the like glassy kind of like because it's literally yeah it's literally just a gemini icon and then it reads back what it's saying to it and what you're saying, which is like, I don't, I don't need that.

1:47:07The best thing was the map stuff where like you could turn your head down and it would show where you were. Your pin would move. Like it had GPS and tracking and who knows, maybe the room was like set up for that. But, and then the other thing was like, Oh, you, when you take a picture with it, you see the picture. Like you can see how you're framing it because it shows it to you. Whereas the meta Ray-Bans, obviously you have to take your phone out to see what you shot. That's cool. Uh, the hardware is not super compelling yet. The software is very bare bones. I think they will actually start shipping these next year.

1:47:35and they got Warby Parker and Kering, which makes Cartier and like Gucci glasses. And they got another cool, the name escapes me, another cool glasses company out of Asia that V was very excited about. They got them on board. So basically Meta has hitched its wagon to El Soror Luxottica, which makes Ray-Band and Oakley and a bunch of other brands. And Google tried to get that deal. I reported that they tried very hard and they failed. And now they're going for basically every other eyewear partner that they can to get Android as the platform instead of meta so i think we're going to see this ai platform smart glasses battle between meta and google with their partnerships strategy gemini's a better ai meta has a head start we'll see how it shakes out um the demo though at io was like kind of mad i do want to quickly say though a demo that was awesome and that i'm very excited about and we have a great video about that i did with viren is beam which was project starline and is basically google's answer to what if virtual meetings suck less.

1:48:34Starline has been one of those ideas that Google has had that seems to like get cooler every 18 months, but also less and less likely to ever be a real thing. It was really cool. Like they invited Vera and I to the lab where they made it. We were the first ones in their like labs, hardware, prototype room externally and got to see like how they moved all the tech into basically what is, it started as like it filled a room five years ago and now it's basically a DVD player and everything is streamed through Google Cloud. So they built this proprietary volumetric 3D AI model that makes you look like a hologram basically through a 2D, very fancy.

1:49:08I tried to get them, Neelai, to really explain the panel. It's a highly customized panel that's doing a bunch of fancy pixel work, but I couldn't get a lot of detail out of it. But it's a reference design now that HP will actually start deploying into offices later this year. So they've got Salesforce, Deloitte, some other companies that have committed to installs. And I asked, I was like, is this expensive because companies will not buy this if it's not you know just as like cheap as their existing video conferencing software and they're like nope that's why we did the ai work it's all in the cloud and it costs about the same as the video conferencing setups you see in offices today so i think there's a real chance we start seeing beam and people who work in offices start seeing beam over the next couple years and it is it is wild like go watch the video it's on our YouTube.

1:49:56Viren got to try it for the first time. I had done it a couple times because we had it at Code and then it was at IO a few years ago when it was Starline. And Viren tried it and it's just this like holy shit moment every time someone tries it for the first time. I mean, Neelai, you remember. I do. And yeah, it's cool. It's like one of these classic Google things. Like it reminds me of Waymo. They just toil away as like with the resources that only a company like Google can to invent this wild new thing. And then five to 10 years in, they're like, it's ready. And it's like, now the cars are driving themselves.

1:50:26Now we have holograms that we're like putting into Deloitte offices. Like it's just happening. So that was pretty cool. Yeah. My understanding of the screen, by the way, is the reason they're not talking about it in detail is it is more standard lenticular display than not. I think there is a lot of custom stuff going on there. But usually when you have the big tech innovation, you talk about it a lot. Yeah. And the reason they're like, it's a secret is like, it's kind of a 3D display. Like, all the actual happening is in the camera. But eventually, these are going to be out there. We can go look at them and figure it out.

1:50:58But it is very exciting to see that out. On the glasses, the display is not solved. Meta Orion, like, they spent billions of dollars on the wrong technology, and it didn't scale to make those displays, right? Turns out growing crystals doesn't work at scale. Yeah. We're just crystal farmers out here, guys. I don't know. I mean, I don't know who's going to build those displays. I don't know where they're going to come from. No one's cracked it yet. And it's just one of these things. What is the core technology that's going to enable this next generation of products? You need the displays to make the smart glasses.

1:51:32Or you don't. Or you're Johnny Ivan. You make a fancy aluminum Pokedex.

1:51:39All right. We are way over. I'm so sorry to everyone for the rambles today. What did we expect this week? It's the day after I know. We got a lot on the site. Tons and tons of coverage. V is going to be back next week to talk more about the glasses demo. She just published a story trying to guess what Johnny was willing. So way more coverage on the Vergecast from her coming up. Sundar on Monday. Get ready. It's not as tense as it was last year, but there are some moments. I think you're going to like it. All right. That's it. That's Vergecast. Bye.

1:52:15And that's it for the Vergecast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. give us a call at 866 VERGE11 The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez and Brandon Kiefer and that's it, we'll see you next week

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