Switch, Xbox, and the portable future of games

34:31Well, there's weirdness there. uh i mean i i do enjoy it like bomber's version of windows everywhere manifested in like microsoft trying to conquer the living room with windows right and for years they would announce a new attempt to put a windows pc in your living room culminating in the xbox one which ran a cut down weird version of windows with an xbox launcher on top of it and then like this whole plan to ir blaster control your satellite box or something that uh did not work it just didn't work uh and then they you know they moved on and they they're like the xbox is the xbox again we're totally focused on gaming it's this custom thing but in the meantime the the handheld market was the it became basically the switch and a bunch of steam deck clones in the steam deck right and if you're gonna go compete with that you're like oh this is taking market share from us in any way, then you're stuck with they don't want Xbox games, they want PC games here.

35:32What gamers are saying is we want to take our PC games on the go and you can't be like, here's some console games on the go because I don't think they can compete with the gamers who want PC games and that might be the strategy here. Do you know what I mean? That might actually be the mistake. So you have to go backwards from where is our big library of games into a handheld because that's just what Microsoft has to do. Because if you're like the future of the Xbox is more accessible PC gaming, you are cruising your way towards putting Windows underneath the TV again. Yeah. They're headed there.

36:05Tom basically wrote this story for us. Microsoft just teased its next Xbox console and nobody noticed. Right. And his point is if you look at these handhelds that are basically ways to run PC games in cut down power-restricted environments that acknowledge the existence of Steam but still have Windows so you can run your Windows games. Oh, that's going to be the next. It's obviously this is how the next Xbox will work. Somewhere in there is like what happens to the Xbox library? Because that is pretty important to a lot of people. And that's the answer that I think Microsoft hasn't even gestured at.

36:38And then the additional weirdness is they didn't make this handheld. Someone else made this handheld. Well, and there was some news recently that Microsoft actually killed a project or paused a project to build something like this. So it is like it seems to be running further and further towards we want to be a software provider and a games provider, not the hardware system. Right. They want to be Steam. Yeah. Being Steam is a better business than being Windows in the gaming industry right now, which is really weird. That is. Yeah. that's true and so you'd rather be steam where you're like collecting your credits and like taking percentages of the transactions as opposed to microsoft which collects a license when you buy your pc and like you only do that once like most of the time you they don't even get a cut of your gpu right like the things you might upgrade on pc microsoft doesn't get a piece of and they certainly don't have a piece of the transactions that are kind of platform they want to be steam so they're shipping a thing that looks way way more like steam by the way that that launcher they haven't given a name it's just they keep calling it the single screen experience or the full screen experience which is just like guys give it a name knowing microsoft that's just what it'll be it's a weird one it's it's interesting to see the gaming market just like shake out like all game studios are coming and going like it's a topsy-turvy time in games and then there's nintendo that's like mario kart 3.5 million sold yeah i do think though that we are running headlong into the like the handheld is the future of gaming era here uh there's like there's been a bunch of news about a playstation 6 portable uh that's starting to you know all of that is like super early rumors about a thing that's going to launch in like two or three years but it's like that's the that's the scuttlebutt that's out there it's like these flagship devices might start to look more like the switch than the ps5 like quickly this is just my theory that the Samsung frame TV heralds the death of Hollywood.

38:33People don't want TVs, man. Yeah. They don't want them. They want handhelds. They want, everybody wants to be playing their own weird PS5 handheld on the couch next to someone else playing a weird Asus ROG ally next to someone playing a Switch. Yeah. Jake, what's your Switch playing setup? Are you a handheld guy or are you docked on the TV? Yeah, no, it's almost exclusively TV. But like, and yet I don't think I would buy it if it was not also a handheld console. like knowing I can. Yeah, I don't know. It's wonderful to be able to take it on the go. Have you brought it on the subway yet? I'm not crazy.

39:07Subway Switch was one of the most transformative gaming experiences I've ever, like sincerely. I do see so many people using them on the subway. Does the new Switch have better support for Bluetooth headphones? Someone say yes. Yes. Okay. Better is such a low point. You see what I'm saying. It is better. It's not good, but it's better. But I'm saying Subway Switch was also a transformative experience for everyone else on the subway. Speakers are better on it. Well, now it has two USB-C ports, so you can plug in your headphones a little more easily, which is something. But yeah, I think it's going to be a very handheld-y next 18 months.

39:42And I think there's a decent chance that if Microsoft can't figure out how to push all this stuff together in a way that makes sense, it's going to have had the right idea and still lose. Microsoft. Microsoft. Yeah.

39:56yeah fair enough a couple other little bits in our gadget lightning round by the way this has been a gadget lightning round in case you hadn't noticed yes we're going so fast uh nothing phone three coming to the u.s it's actually happening very exciting so nothing is launching its next phone and its first over-ear headphones which i'm actually very intrigued by uh on july 1st so like in three weeks uh and over the course of the run of this company they've gotten sort of increasingly u.s.y uh the the last the the phone two i think worked on a couple of carriers in the u.s and like worked fine on others but wasn't sort of officially supported uh but now so the news about the phone three is it's going to be on sale uh on amazon in the u.s which i actually think is a pretty big deal uh and in nothing store uh it'll support at &t and t-mobile uh and is going to be like an actual like honest to god u.s phone which i think is pretty cool nothing has surprised me over the years in that it continues to make like pretty interesting pretty compelling phones uh the company was always like we're doing phones so that we can do the next thing and part of me is Like, is the next thing just over your headphones?

41:09Like, I don't know. But it is maybe the most compelling, non-gigantic smartphone maker left. And so I find myself continuing to root for it. There's this book out now called Apple in China. It's by Patrick McGee. He was the Financial Times correspondent on Apple for years. He was, you got to read this book. This book is incredible. It has all kinds of like bits and bobs about Apple in China, including like how they figure out how to manufacture the first iMac and how badly that went and Foxconn swooping in with a pirated reverse engineered iMac to prove that they could do it at scale it's very good uh anyway the point of bringing this up in the context of nothing because a lot of that book is about Apple basically creating the Chinese phone ecosystem by training all these engineers at all these factories and how to do the things and then the Chinese government and Chinese companies realizing they could just take those engineers away and swap in new engineers and Apple would have to train those two.

42:05And that became sort of like the basis of the peace between Apple and the Chinese government. Super fascinating stuff. And what's really interesting about that is there's a part where Huawei gets in trouble with the US government and to save itself, it spins out honor. It's like budget phone division, which is the competitor to Oppo, which was where nothing came from. And this is all this ecosystem is created because Apple trained all these engineers and then like there's been all these battles and i'm only bringing this up because nothing has gotten to a place where it is an interesting competitor to apple but it came out of that ecosystem like in very real ways and i i if you're interested in these phones and like what they can do and whether they're better than apple if you have if you're that sort of person and many many many many vergecast people are you should read this book just to get a sense of the foundation of where these companies came from and why they're able to kind of like collect a bunch of interesting ideas from the the chinese iphone supply chain and design ecosystem and seemingly outpace apple which is just totally fascinating to me yeah that's really interesting don presson on our team has just like every week seems to just like drop a story about some wild china brand phone that we'll never see in the u.s and every single time it's like look at this weird thing they did with the camera and we're just like everybody is just starting to push past into weird new ideas about what smartphones can be yeah and it's because of this incredible base of manufacturing there which by the way is like the reason for tariffs and blah blah blah like it's all there i i can't recommend this book enough and it's so funny after you read the book you look at things like the nothing fun free and you're like oh i have a totally different perspective on these devices they came from like a different ecosystem than the one that we are used to, but that ecosystem was seeded by the success of the iPhone.

43:58It's wild stuff. Speaking of totally weird products that make no sense, HP has revealed a$25 ,000 piece of hardware to do Google Beam, which is Google's 3D TV video conferencing system. This is a victory because the first Google Beams were totally custom and cost a million dollars and were only prototypes. $25 ,000. I mean, this is a corporate video conferencing product. And to be clear, you need at least two of these, correct? This is not, you can't just spend 25K. Or you have a friend, right, at another company. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. True. But if you just have the one, you're basically just going to be like the best looking person on your Google Meet.

44:36And that's it. Yeah, if you have two. So this is the thing that used to be Project Starline. The like fancy conferencing thing that has been inside of Google for like a decade. They've been working on this for forever. And it's super fascinating. and they rebranded it to Beam. That was just this year, right? That was like a month ago. And now our actually, their shipping is strong, but products with names exist. This thing is called the HP Dimension and it has, the spec list is just truly fantastic. It has a 65 inch light field display with six high speed cameras inside the bezel. And the idea is that it is able to basically map you you and your space to turn you into like a three-dimensional thing that sits on the other side of the screen from the person that you're talking to and i've done a demo of this in the past and it is the effect is amazing like it is really sincerely the best version of this thing i have ever tried in my life yeah but it's again like jake said this is fifty thousand dollars worth of equipment and i look at this and i'm like who who is this actually for sergey brin Maybe.

45:47Maybe this is like, this is just going to be every CEO is going to have this and this is just going to be how they talk to each other. Well, so the one piece of weirdness here, it's a single user product. But you can't have this in a conference room with like six people talking about a conference room. So there are a lot of enterprise video conferencing products that cost this much. By the way, the$25 ,000 doesn't come with a license to run Google Beam. That's a separate, that's just like a separate monthly charge or something. It's very good. All that's perfect. Love it. But usually you buy that for a conference room.

46:20And so you get the value out of all that money in a conference room. This is for one person talking to one person in as lifelike a manner as possible, which I think is perfect. Yeah. The effect is really convincing. Like I use it like a year and a half ago or something and it looks great and it feels great. And, you know, to the extent that video calls are kind of uncomfortable, I think this does away with a lot of that. but it still feels like one of those things where the the end goal of this has to be to shrink this way down and make it like i don't know 250 because this is just not a thing that can scale like there's not going to be a world in which uh companies outfit every single conference room with these in part because again you need a dedicated room for a single person right to have a video call but the problem is and i i suspect this is what google continues to run into is as soon as you make it smaller you kill the effect yeah the thing only tracks if you look like you and you don't look like you on a 10 inch screen even if it's the most amazing perfectly rendered version of you oh come on i want to talk to tiny 3d david just me but you can put me in your pocket is like that's what we're going for it's like hey buddy.

47:34Have you tried this notion update? Like I was just about to say the Facebook portal stuff is like, that's a version of the hardware I have always imagined for this, that like, that's what you try to get to. It's a thing I can put on top of my television, or it's a thing I can just have as like my secondary screen that I use for calls. But again, that's really hard because you need the person to be life-size in order for them to appear life-size. And so I think I totally agree with you, Jake, but I also don't know how you get to that point. Maybe this thing just doesn't scale in any meaningful way, and maybe Google is just going to have to be fine with it.

48:11Actually, it's the display. As always, it's the display that fascinates me the most. They keep calling it a light field display, which is, you know, I haven't seen a Beam device up close. They had them at I.O., but I wasn't allowed to go and walk up to them. The early versions of Starline, it was very much just a wave guide in the front of a TV. it was more complicated than that but that's what it was you know and i'm sure this is more complicated than that but that's still what it is and those things glasses free 3d in that way tends to be optimized for a single viewer in a specific spot and there are some new interesting glasses free 3d technologies that are sort of out there there have been some like overheated articles lately they're like 3d's back baby and it's like i don't know about that but sure and And that's your multi-user problem, really.

48:59Can the display show 3D to multiple people in multiple spots around the room? I truly do not know the answer to that for Beam. I've known the answer for everything else for a long time. That has required glasses. Right. And then your product is said. What are you going to do? That's the end of that. So we'll see. I'm excited about it. I do love a new display. I love a new display technology. And I certainly think it's time for some more interesting video conferencing ideas that are not Zoom making an AI advocate. avatar view to pretend to pay attention to meetings like that is an innovation unto itself but i don't think it's the right one so no my my ongoing assumption and i think the the plan all along has been that this will be like a neat really high-end thing and most of the best features will eventually sort of trickle down into google meet in less impressive ways that this gets to be the like tip of the technological spear and i i assume it's like a victory inside of google that they got hp to actually make and ship one of these things because now they get to like keep making it oh i mean hp just got the best toy for its like enterprise demos of all time totally yeah this this is the thing you trot out in every meeting you ever have with potential customers from now like i get why all of this exists i just uh i have a hard time imagining it like showing up in a we work near you anytime soon look 3d displays are back and you're going to get a 3d laptop and we're all going to talk to tiny versions of each other on google beam it's going to be amazing uh all all right, that's the first lightning round.

50:25We got to take a break. We have a second lightning round. And then I'm told there's even a third. Can you imagine? It's wild here on The Verge Cast. 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.

51:06Morning, 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. It'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.

51:37Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

52:11Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

52:50All right, we're back. I'm told this is an AI lightning round. It's not sponsored by an AI company. It's for flavor. So unsponsored. Now that we have had sponsors again, I feel like I need to rework this entire pitch. Basically, what I'm trying to say is you can't buy us for any price. We're flavorful no matter what. I did ask Apple to send me home in an Aston Martin with CarPlay Ultra. And the vibe was like, will you break the rules for that? And I was like, no, but I liked saying it. And that was literally the end of the conversation.

53:24So that's where we're at. It's like, I will make jokes about breaking our very strict ethics policies for an Aston Martin and above. But even then, probably not. But that's where you got to be. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. Everybody has limits. You know what I mean? If you can't be bought for any price, I don't trust you. You know what I mean? Yeah. I don't know what it is. It's more than an Aston Martin. That's what I got for you. Let's explore from there. Next year, you and I are going to go to the Monaco Yacht Show and just sort of see how much trouble I can get you into. It would be amazing if I only did branded content for yachts.

54:00I was like, this is my specific corruption. Yachts and PJs. The Neil Patel ethics policy. I've been trying to sell G6s on the show for so many years.

54:14Anyhow, unsponsored for flavor. Because you can't buy us. What you can buy is a subscription from us, which preserves our editorial independence. So go buy those. They're still on sale, I think, as of you listening to this on the Friday. It will still be on sale because developer conference season is still technically ongoing. But they're going to go back up in price. So act now. Buy me an Aston Martin. I'm pretty sure, by the way, that the next lighting round is sponsored, and we're going to have to cut all of this. But it's going to be fine. I don't know. I just spend the money. That's what keeps us pure.

54:41Eric, if you need to cut all of this, just cut all of this. No, no, keep it in. It's fine. Okay, AI Lighting Out. Speaking of AI, lots of action in the AI world this week, most of which did not happen at Apple Park, but out in the world. We should start, though, with the web, because we've been talking a lot about what AI is doing to the web, how AI might reconfigure the web, the very idea of what the web represents to people as an application environment is sort of up for grabs right now. and before any of that happens, the old web has to be crushed out of existence by changes to Google search.

55:12Is that about right, David? I feel like I have that. That's the narrative we're on. That's basically right. I think there are a lot of people who work at Google who would take offense to that characterization, but I think that characterization is pretty much exactly right. And I think it's been a really interesting trend line over this past year because I think I've been spending a lot of time I'm talking to people about like the death of linear television and cable and that whole bundle, which everybody thought would would take a long time. And there would be a bunch of money on the way down.

55:44And it's like, OK, we're going to we're going to build this new era of entertainment while we sort of coast on the slowly dying, but still very profitable previous way that it existed. And that actually what happened is all of that just died immediately. And now everybody is scrambling and businesses are falling apart. And that is exactly the same thing that's happening on the web. Like, I think it has been sort of intellectually true for a couple of years that most people knew they couldn't rely on Google search forever. I think everybody always knew it was fraught to rely on Google search, but it worked for a long time.

56:17And there was just this sense of like, OK, this is not going to be the thing for us forever. Right. Like people have known that since Google started doing like the answer boxes on search results. And there was this sense of like, okay, over time, Google is going to be less and less interested in sending clicks to our website and more and more interested in just keeping you inside of Google products. Everybody kind of knew that. Well, they kind of knew it, but the incentive to not believe it was so overpowering that they didn't know it. Right. Do you know what I mean? Because to lean into that and to work with that requires essentially completely upending the business of being online.

56:58Like a thing I think I didn't realize until recently is like almost every publisher in particular online has only ever existed in the Google world. It's not like everybody did the like Facebook style pivot to video and then that all fell apart and a lot of stuff went away. But also a lot of people sort of knew what to go back to. Most of these places have not ever done this. And by this, I mean like online publishing, media, journalism, whatever you want to call it out in a world where Google is not the main source of people and traffic on the Internet. So it comes to this existential crisis of like, if I don't believe in Google anymore, what do I do?

57:40And I think, again, because Google was so huge and so successful and because the the abyss of whatever else we have to do was so huge and unknowable, people just didn't really try. but then what has happened is this this like slow gradual decline everybody was betting on that would give us like a generation of technology to figure out what's coming next is just happening like it is happening like minute to minute and day to day in front of our eyes the wall street journal had a big story this week uh going through a bunch of different like huffington post and and the wall street journal and the washington post uh and i think business insider was the other one showing these just like dramatically downsloping charts of traffic from Google.

58:20And Business Insider has done layoffs and they have quotes from a bunch of the folks at the other publications being like, we now can see the obvious trend line toward Google Zero, which has caused you, Neelai, to just take victory lap after victory lap. They won't say Google Zero. If you hear someone say our Google traffic is going to zero, I need you to jump out of a bush and say, that is called Google Zero, a term coined by Neelai Patel in 2022. $26. Yeah. In addition to your crashing revenues, you now owe a royalty fee for acknowledging your crashing revenue. Yeah. But so we are like, we have gone from this being a theoretical eventuality to like, it is happening in front of us right now.

58:59It's interesting. Like Google, there are Google changes all the time, right? This is a thing that's happened for years where there have been winners and losers as Google makes changes to its algorithm. And I think what is particularly unique about this one is that there are no winners. Right. It's not like there is some subset of publishers or I don't even know, like companies online that have figured out a way to crack this, at least that I have heard of. Wait, there's a there's a weird set of winners. It's not a great set of winners. Reddit is a winner in all of this. Right. Like Google has made it gone out and made a deal with Reddit and they know that Reddit is a rich source of actual human content that it can synthesize to get the answers to questions.

59:40YouTube, oddly, a winner in this. Google owns YouTube, but it's a winner. But like, you know what I mean? Like there are media platforms where people are that are winners in this. They're just not publishers that pay people money to make news. And Google will just, and I should disclose, like OpenAI has a deal like that with Fox Media and a bunch of other publishers. None of that is sending us the traffic that would counteract Google. By the way, to be clear, our Google traffic is in decline and so is everyone else's. We have just been paranoid freaks for so long that we've been talking about it forever on this show but also in our business.

1:00:13That's our redesign. And so we've just been hedged against it. And when I run out and talk to other publishers about it or other executives on Decoder or wherever else, this is what I mean about the incentives to not believe it. I've had media executives look me in the eye and say things like, you think people are going to stop searching? And they cannot separate the concept of search from Google as a company upon which they have a business dependency. Right. And so people are searching. They might be searching more than ever. Google will tell you they're searching more than ever. They're just not getting links.

1:00:43to publishers as answers. They might be getting links to Reddit. Google's like, we're sending more traffic to the web than ever. And the question that I have, to which there is no answer, is where is that traffic going? Who are these winners? It can't all just be Reddit, right? It has to be other stuff. And it's just unclear what that other stuff is. Like, where has the traffic gone? So, Jay, I mean, and I don't, none of those AI deals are paying anyone nearly enough money to counteract the loss of revenue, as you can obviously tell. but it's i just i don't want to it they're not keeping everything for themselves it's just unclear who the true winners will be nick thompson at the atlantic um uh he keeps talking about optimizing the content to be like show up in the ai search results as the next generation of seo That is a galaxy brain idea, but I'm starting to see pop up everywhere.

1:01:37Right? To be like we want to make sure we become part of the AI generated answer. Wacky. But like the SEO community is already talking about that I'm starting to see pop up to be like we want to make sure. is in the answer. Actually, what people will do after reading the answer is click the links. And at least in my behavior and what I observe in other people, that is sure not the case. And that is sure not the product goal is to send you out of ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever. I mean, Sundar will say that is the goal of AI overviews and that people search more in AI overviews and that means they inevitably click more.

1:02:14There is no public data backing that up. What they say also is that the people who go are more engaged because basically they've like, by the time they get to your website, they're already halfway down the rabbit hole. And that it's actually like the people who are coming are the people who are serious. Right. And it's like, well, okay, yes. But the whole business of Google forever was fundamentally predicated on the people who were not serious. And there being lots and lots and lots of them. Right. And it's like, it's, I mean, it's what it was. And it's for, for so many people, it's the, the huge bet of internet publishing for so long was that you can with enough volume pennies turns into dollars right like that's that's the bet and and there was so much of it that is like we don't have to be good we just have to be voluminous and as long as we can get enough people coming to our crap by accident we will make a lot of money on it and that is the thing to jake's point that is just dead there's just it's not they're not pointing it anywhere else they're not changing the way that they think about it, it's just dying.

1:03:16And so it's like, if you're good at product reviews, it's dying. If you're bad at product reviews, it's dying. And Google is, I think, spent a long time trying to pretend that it was optimizing for quality and just trying to get rid of the sort of bad scammy stuff that is basically just like copying and pasting Amazon reviews and pushing it toward other stuff. And increasingly, it's like, no, what they've done is just knife the entire like product review and buying guide world from google and they're fine with that i mean there's so much scams there that it might be fine like uh i don't know there's something happening there with the old web that people didn't like anyway right wait did people not like the old web or is it that because of google's incentives the old web got completely corrupted and now Google is solving its own problem.

1:04:08Oh, it's completely that. That's that one. But I don't think those are different things, right? Like the outcome is the same. And I think like recipe sites are the perfect example of this, right? Like the running joke of the internet is that recipe sites are awful because you go to a recipe blog, you click on the thing to get the recipe. And what you get is like six pop-up video ads and 2000 words about the person's Thursday before they get to the actual thing. And it's a bunch of H2s telling you like different kinds of substitutions. And it's just an immeasurable amount of barely useful information.

1:04:38The thing is, every single pixel on every single one of those sites exists because of SEO. Like they are ruthlessly optimized to get to the top of Google search results because there is a lot of money in being the first thing people click on when they search for chocolate chip cookies. That is going to die. Because now when you search chocolate chip cookie recipe, it just gives you a recipe. It doesn't give you links. It doesn't give you anything else. It just gives you a recipe. And so all of these sites are going to have to figure out, OK, not only do I am I able to undo all of this SEO stuff, I have to figure out an entire new strategy for getting people to come to my website.

1:05:13And I think and we've talked about this on the show, right? Like long term, there are things about that that are really great. Like the the the amount of time publishers have spent thinking about Google versus the amount of time they've spent thinking about their audience vastly skewed in the wrong direction over the last two decades. It's not true of everybody, but more true than it should be. So that incentive is going to go back in the right direction of the only thing we have left is to take care of our audience because Google won't just gin one up for us every day. The problem is in the interim, many, many, many, many businesses will die and many, many, many people will lose their jobs.

1:05:51And they already are. We have been covering literally the words Google Zero for at least three years. Yeah. And we have headlines of Google Zero. and the mia wrote an incredible feature about the incentives and how they shape web pages that we can link and like you know the web page animates into place like we've done endless coverage of this here's the front of the recipe war that i'm very curious about because this dynamic of i hate that the recipe content is buried for me i'm just going to make a tool that scrapes recipes and everyone's going to yell like well known in the seo era yep the recipe bloggers get to yell at those people for taking their labor blah blah and everything okay there are now infinite tools to scrape and store the recipes from like tiktok chefs but the tiktok videos are inherently monetized by the platform themselves and the games they play to win the tiktok algorithm wars have nothing to do with the recipes right like in kind of the same way but they're getting the video views and so all these new recipes store all these new like recipe cataloging and storage tools that promise to like save the recipes from instagram and tiktok that you love most and don't actually take economic value from the creators because you they sort of imply that you have watched the video right because the video is the thing they don't care about the recipe the same way the video is inherently itself monetized inside a distribution algorithm does not change the content in like that specific way, I'm dying to know.

1:07:20Like I'm very much dying to know if the same kind of dynamic plays out where everyone gets mad at the recipe app people. I suspect it will not because the economics are so different. And that to me is like a view into what's happening across the web where I'm desperate to get any eyeball onto this webpage. So desperate that when you land here, I will attack you. I will mug you. I will put pop-up ads and subscription boxes and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all over your face because the chances of getting a visitor are so infinitesimally small. I have to make as much money from every single visitor as I can.

1:07:56Yep. Whereas a TikTok video just makes money in the algorithm and then you make another one and it makes money in the algorithm and you have distribution that doesn't put as much pressure on monetization. And that's just a big story that the web's distribution made everybody so desperate for so long, but nobody could see their way through it. nobody on the web maybe we do people don't like our readers but like we try very hard to compete on user experience on web pages we don't have pop-up ads and weird banners and all this stuff but the sites that do are doing because that's the only way they can make money because there's no other referral source to get onto their pages right i don't know what happens next i i think the web turns into like an application platform like at a big big level i think the future of the web is not as a media platform.

1:08:40I think it is as an application platform. And thinking of the web as an application platform changes how we think about web browsers. I think it's changing how Google's thinking of Chrome. And David, you just covered Dia, the new browser from the browser company that replaces Arc. And that's sort of predicated on this idea that something else is happening on the web. Yeah, its whole thesis is essentially that you're going to spend most of your time, A, on the web, and B, inside of apps on the web. And its whole idea is like, okay, well, you want a chatbot that can see that stuff, right? And it's like, wouldn't it be cool if there was an AI assistant that knew everything that I was doing in Slack and knew everything that I was doing in my email and could see all my Figma files?

1:09:26And it's like, oh, there's only one layer that can do that, and it's the browser. But to your point, that thing is not, like all the demos I saw and all the stuff I heard from the folks at the browser company, like they're not intrigued by the idea of like summarizing news articles for you, right? They're like, you're doing job interviews. This is like an example I got from a few people. You're doing job interviews and you have a Slack thread in which you're talking about all the potential candidates and you have their resume in a Google Doc and you have their scorecards from their interviews and you ask the bot to summarize it.

1:09:57And it is able to pull from those things because all of those things are web apps that just exist in a tab. all of it is it's an app platform, right? And this is like, it's not that different from like what Apple imagines someday future good Siri to be on the iPhone. It's not different from what anyone imagines about anything. Like, right, we're going to lace together all of your apps and they can all talk to each other and you will have a natural language interface to a bunch of capabilities. That broadly, the industry is coalesced on this being the future. Yeah, and the bet is just at which layer should that thing exist in order to have the most power, right?

1:10:34And Apple's bet is it's at the operating system and Dia's bet is it's in the browser. Well, the browser is like, right, we saw this already when OpenAI tried to launch operator, right? It is just running in a browser. It is an agent that is poking around a browser, trying to get things done for you, but it is not your browser. And so we can't get anything done for you, right? And so I think like fundamentally, it's pretty clear that Dia is probably the right approach. Even at an operating system level, it doesn't necessarily have the permission for all that stuff in your browser. The problem is I don't think any bot can reliably do any of that stuff yet.

1:11:09So I will say one thing I thought was really interesting is in talking to the folks at the browser company about this, they went way down the road of like pure agentic AI. Like how do we actively do stuff for you on these websites that we have access to? Because one of the things that you get as the browser is cookies. And if you have cookies, you essentially have a logged in state to every app that I am logged into, which is just a vast amount of power to have over what's going on on the web. And so they were like, well, sure, we have what we need to go in and control your Spotify for you or book stuff for you on Airbnb.

1:11:43And what they discovered is that A, the tech for that doesn't really work. And it certainly doesn't work reliably enough to do it on your behalf. And also it feels bad. The idea of just basically sitting passively while your browser uses itself actually was not an enjoyable experience for people. And I felt very vindicated hearing them say that, that they were like, we ran this down and it doesn't work and people don't want it. And I'm like, oh, I agree. And they're like, maybe that's where we'll get. And some of this will be possible. And you'll be able to say the assistant, like, you know, go do this and this and this in this app for me.

1:12:15And that'll be great. But the idea that that works right now, they were like, we ran it down as far as we could and it just doesn't work. And I was like, oh, good. That's That's also my exact experience. I'm going to come off sounding like an AI booster. And I am not. I'm not. I'm just, I think there are major flaws with the AI industry. There's a fatal copyright flaw, which we will talk about in one second. And then there's like, can LLMs actually do this in scale flaw, which might just like upend this whole thing. Like the rate of improvement of LLMs is the core technology for the AI industry.

1:12:48Maybe. Right. And there's actually a paper out of Apple this week in which the answer is a hard no. Yeah. Like we've hit a wall and that's the end of it. Who knows? I don't know. I'm going to come off like a booster. I'm just saying I'm aware of these like core flaws. And climate. We're going to talk about climate in a second too. There's all this stuff. The thing that has changed my mind recently is I'm watching people not do a bunch of prompts to get answers, not make a bunch of, you know, VO3 videos. although people are making lots of VO3 videos. I'm watching people create application logic in automation platforms out of AI agent capabilities.

1:13:28Right, in a way that is like, the stuff they're doing is not important. Some of it is just like straight up content piracy. Like take all the most viral videos on TikTok, make faceless YouTube shorts about them, and then republish them as YouTube shorts and I will collect money for free. And all this is happening inside of an AI-based automation platform called N8N. Okay, great. Here's the slot machine at scale, right? But what that is is application logic. They're building new apps in a new way using new tools. They're using new emergent standards like MCP to go query a bunch of databases and write to a bunch of spreadsheets and then create content and publish it to other places.

1:14:08And they're moving stuff around. A bunch of call center logic is being automated on these platforms, right? Someone talks to you and it goes and gets an answer and spits it back to you. That stuff reminds me a lot of the original Web 2.0, where the idea was all of these services have APIs, and you can make new things out of APIs by mashing them up. The entire website Mashable was founded because people were making so many interesting things by remixing APIs. Remember there was a service called Yahoo Pipes? Yeah. Yahoo Pipes ruled. Like we ran a lot of Engadget on weird Yahoo Pipes automations.

1:14:49Sorry, what was Yahoo Pipes? Yahoo Pipes is this like drag and drop service builder that was basically like you can take an API. It was like if this, then that, but for like web APIs. Oh my God. It was awesome. Yeah. And all of that was the original promise of Web 2.0. We're going to build all these services and then you can, at some level of API abstraction, you can build new services by mashing them up. And literally this is where Mashable as a website came from. then it went away all that went away like facebook like closed down the internet basically they said we're going to do all these services in a proprietary way we won't talk to anyone else and that was the end of that i'm only making the comparison because i see what people are doing with mcp with these automation platforms with a bunch of agentic no code tools and i'm like oh i see this parallel right i see a bunch of people making applications in a new way using new standards, having some straightforwardly depressing ideas about what the application should do.

1:15:50But there's an energy there that is unlike the energy of, I don't know, crypto, right? Where the only goal was ever to make a number go up or take a cut of transactions, which is just the least inspiring economic model of all time. That was all financialized. This is very much like the kids are making toys and they're having a good time doing it and they're hosting tech talks about the toys they're making and the other ideas that that is inspiring them to have and there's i just know that there's usually something there there are all these other flaws that there's a fatal copyright flaw there's a really really really important climate flaw that everyone should talk about more there is just an llm technology flaw that who knows but in the meantime there's this like little thing like there's this little green shoot of activity that it feels like, oh, we're about to re-architect how applications work.

1:16:45MCP is like fundamentally a conversation about what is an API? How should APIs work? And that stuff is like, you know, fundamentally interesting. Yeah, I think I've come to see AI as like two separate things that really need separate words. And the one is like AI as essentially tool building systems. And I think the thing I hear over and over from people is that like the coding use of generative AI has like already found product market fit. Like however much code you think you use is being written by AI, the actual answer is much higher, like much, much higher. And it's everywhere and it works and it is powerful and it is in use in vastly mainstream ways.

1:17:31Like the idea of vibe coding like is here and it works. And I generally agree. I think it's very cool. I think like one level of above that is the question of like, is any of this worth it? Which I think is like a good and valuable question, but it is a separate question, right? Like it, that piece of it works. I don't think there's any question about that. And I think there's a really interesting road down that that is also the same question about like, is AI going to get us closer to curing cancer? Like, yes. And that that stuff is real, and it's working, and it's meaningful. Again, is it worth it is a fair question, but like that stuff is real.

1:18:09The flip side, and I think this is the thing that gets us tripped up because we conflate these two things is should my computer be my friend? Seriously, and this is the thing that I have come to is like the question of like, do we think as humans it is good that people are building relationships with AI chatbots is a completely separate and I think equally important question in all of this. And it has nothing to do with the other thing. Like cursor is not your friend. Cursor is just this like unbelievably powerful AI tool for building things. It's not trying to bang you. It's not trying to like give you advice about how to live your life.

1:18:49But then there is other stuff that is very explicitly doing that, like the replicas and the characters of the world. And then there's all this stuff in the middle that's like chat GPT is nice to you because you'll use it more if it's nice to you. Like that's just real. but then they tipped that over where it was like it got weirdly nice to you and then people didn't want to use it anymore and they had to roll that back and this is like all this stuff is being tuned so that you'll use it and it's like it's an engagement machine in the way that like social media is an engagement machine and i think that's the thing that i'm trying to sort of separate and reckon with separately because like as a as an infrastructure for product making ai is like very powerful and everywhere and i think is is essentially inevitable at this point but this question of like should i hang out with my computer i think we should spend a lot more time thinking about and talking about i would separate that i i agree with that separation i i think i would do it differently okay there's and it's just really about the hype of of the industry there's i can see the old web going away because google has decided to answer the questions itself And some of those answers are wrong because the AI isn't actually smart and can't be trusted.

1:19:59Well, right, there's that. And then right next to that is, you know, Sundar saying to me on Decoder, we're going to start to do web app deployment on the search result page. Like zero shot vibe coded custom web apps when you search for something. And that is a very powerful new idea about search. I don't know what those web apps are going to be. All of their ideas are like, we made a chart of baseball statistics. And it's like, well, we're literally boiling the oceans for this. Is it worth it, to your point? Then there's the, right next to that, if you believe in any of all that's going to happen and Google's making it happen, there's the, we are going to reconceptualize the web itself as a new kind of application environment where agents are able to go and talk to what are effectively databases and services and kind of like construct new capabilities for you.

1:20:51that's a big big big big big idea like maybe the biggest idea in the history of application development that we're going to take the web from a series of user interfaces you can click around on which is already a remarkably big idea yeah that changed the entire nature of computers and we're going to say we're abstracting the user interface away to a bot or an agent or whatever and the services themselves are just like coin-operated databases and you show up and you say uber do you have cars and uber says i do have cars that'll be three dollars for me to tell you what cars you have and you pay the fee and it tells you the cars and off you go okay right like and then you got to pay uber it's transaction fees on top of that that's a big idea about how you would build new kinds of capabilities in the world do we think that's going to happen though do we think that uber is going to open up that api for google i mean basically i mean what what dara has said to me is we're going to try it at first because it'll be cool and if it's really cool and everyone likes it, we're going to charge a lot of money for it.

1:21:49Okay, yeah. Because this is my question, right? Like, if they open a specific API for Google, then, like, probably Google's going to want a cut of that, too, right? Well, so it's not a specific API for Google. It's more like they will open up an MCP server and your agent can show up and maybe your agent is run by Google or maybe you're running it. Who knows how many of this will work? It'll show up and be able to, like, instead of having to issue known API commands, it can, in a more natural language-y way, say, I've got a person who needs a car. Do you have cars? Right? And you won't need this like big database of API commands.

1:22:24It'll just be like, yeah, I do. They're very expensive. Yeah. Do you have money? And then like a third service will be like, I'm here to process your transaction. That will also cost money. And maybe all of that makes everything too expensive and untenable. Right? But you just have these like vastly more resilient APIs. Like that's how I've been thinking about it. It's just so interesting. I feel like what you're describing is the AI version of the App Store versus the web, where it's like, that would be great. It would be really nice if everything worked nicely. And all I see is a way for Google to take a big cut of money on every single thing it's doing.

1:22:59I think that might be what Google sees too. Right. I mean, there's a reason they're all chasing it. Microsoft's chasing it, Google's chasing it. And the fight, the reason I was like, yep, when you said the App Store, the fight is that the whole industry is chasing this on the web. That's where the industry is going. the web mcp big web services how do we can we buy chrome from google if the if the government makes google sell chrome can we light up a new browser called dia instead of arc our old browser the browser company is a startup there is no reason for them to burn down their existing browser other people don't use right they had to start over because that's the future they see and you got to re-architect the whole idea if you're like all of this new application logic will exist on the web in new ways.

1:23:43And maybe we're not clicking around yet, right? Maybe we're just summarizing here, but owning the browser, owning the literal application layer is important. And then there's Apple, which thinks all of this is going to happen inside apps locally on your phone. Boy, is that risky. Boy, is that existentially risky for Apple. I mean, gosh, it's like, it's so weird that everybody believes the thing that they are heavily financially incentivized to believe is going to be the one that comes true. Yeah, but I mean, the iPhone already exists as a vessel for other people's services, right? Like, chat GPT is nothing, nothing really happens on the iPhone when you open the chat GPT app.

1:24:22Right. So like, there's just some thing where like, if you think the user interface is moving because of AI, it's not because people are in love with their computers. Like, that's the, that's the distinction that I'm making is there's a part of AI that is very much about where the applications go, what the platform shift looks like, what even is an application or an API in this new world. And then there's Sam Altman being like, I've developed artificial general intelligence and you will, you will marry your computer and I need a trillion dollars. And it's like, well, that's just hype, right? Like what you need is a bunch of money to take down Apple's application model.

1:25:01Or maybe Sam Altman really believes he's going to fall in love with this computer? I don't know the answer to that question. I mean, ironically, if you're Sam Altman, there's way more money in being the one who takes down Apple's application model than in making people fall in love with their computers. But I think that's where they're going. I think that's why they're doing this Johnny Ive deal, right? The next platform has to overtake the iPhone application model. Yeah. The distinction to me, like, I think that will Kevin Roos eventually leave his family for ChatGPT? Again, my sincere thanks to Kevin for allowing me to continue to make this joke.

1:25:33but it just feels like a sideshow and like it's a sideshow that justifies the hype but it's not I don't think it's actually the thing I agree you know it's funny is like in all this chum Amazon announced that a million people now have Alexa plus and I have only ever met one person who has Alexa plus you met some I have met zero people there is one person at the talk show I basically asked this question of the room at the talk show I was like, does any of you, any of these 700 or how many people were there, does anybody have Alexa Plus? A million people do. And one guy was like, yes. And then we asked, is it any good?

1:26:07And there was like silence. And everyone laughed. It was like very funny. And then he came up to me afterwards. His name is Don McCaskill. He's the CEO of Flickr. He's the guy who has Alexa Plus. That feels right. And we talked to him. And Jerry and I talked to him for a minute. It was very nice for him to be there, for him to talk to us about it. And he was like, it's fine. It's sort of fine. And it works. works it's better than you think it is but it's not very good it's like was basically a takeaway we should just have him on to talk about flicker and then his also his experiences with lexa plus yeah 100 love this idea but that's like where we're at it's like amazon shipped it they promised they were going to do it and it's like meh and google has promised it and like they might be the closest and with you know some of the stuff gemini can do on a samsung phone is like you can just talk to it uh you just talk to it and you can be like turn off my bluetooth and like it'll kind of do it.

1:26:55That's the state of the art. All this stuff is going to change, but none of it works yet. And so you can give shit to Apple, but none of it works yet. And until it really, really, really works, it's a bad product. This is not the kind of thing that can be successful at a 70 % success rate. This thing you're supposed to talk to and interact with all the time, if it is kind of good, it's actually really bad. And it's going to be in kind of good for a pretty long time, I think. Yeah. The last thing we should talk about here, Sam Altman put out a long blog post as he is wont to do. Yeah. I always wonder if he has chat GPT to write the blog posts.

1:27:36He said he didn't, but he said in his tweet that this was probably the last blog post he would write without chat GPT. All right, Sam. And I just like, there's so many executives now who are like, I didn't even have to do anything. I just used AI to do this. And it's like, are you trying to fire yourself? Like, what a cool way to tell on yourself for being bad at your job. There's a very funny, like from the late 90s, early 2000s image. It's like a meme. It's like a proto meme. I don't know how to describe it. Will, Joel, our senior creative director, and I send it to each other all the time. And it has a title that's like Life Cycle Advertising Career Evolution.

1:28:15And it's told through application icons. so it's like you start as a junior account designer and you've and the icon is like the photoshop icon and then it's like photoshop and illustrator and then it's flash which is very funny this is how old this meme is and then at some point they add excel to the stack and then some point the entire stack goes away and it's the microsoft entourage icon again how old this is that was an email client that microsoft had and the very last one is chief creative officer and it's just a bottle of champagne that's i will dig this up we will find a way to share this it is it It makes me laugh every time.

1:28:46And literally, Will and I send it back and forth to each other all the time because we both live in the meeting zone now, like constantly. That's what I think of every time an executive says, Chachi Peter wrote this for me. Like, oh, you're just the bottle. Yep. Your job is just the bottle. The fact that you can fire off text is sort of irrelevant to your actual job. Anyhow, the blog post is titled The Gentle Singularity. It is very long, very convoluted in Sam Altman ways. And basically, the thesis is AGI is already here. Like, I don't know how else to explain his thesis. He's like, it's already happening.

1:29:15just sit back, enjoy the ride, and give me a trillion dollars. Pretty much.

1:29:21And in it, he makes this claim that the average chat GPT query uses roughly one-fifteenth of a teaspoon of water. And I think that means the climate concerns are finally getting to Sam Allman. Right? We're lighting up new coal and gas plants. We're building data centers faster than we were building data centers than ever. Justine called on our team and covers climate for us. She and I are having this conversation and she's like, the thing is data center use was basically flat and then AI showed up and now it's skyrocketing. Right. So we, we, it's not that like using computers is bad. It's that this new thing is like inefficient and we're, we're just, the demand for data centers has skyrocketed because of it.

1:30:01What do you think? Like I look at this stat, I'll read the full quote. This is from Sam Altman. People, let me actually, let me read the full stat from Altman's blog post and I want to get your actions to it. Quote, people are often curious about how much energy a chat to be uses. The average query uses about 0.34 watt hours about what an oven would use in a little over a second or a high efficiency light bulb would use in a couple of minutes. And then he says the cost will converge too near the cost of the electricity itself. And he says this thing on 15th of a teaspoon of water. Those aren't great stats.

1:30:32What do you think? I don't know exactly how much water, uh, I don't know any piece of electronics like it should use. I don't know. I don't know what a good amount of a teaspoon is. So it's like, this makes it sound really tiny, but I don't actually know what this means. It's interesting. I kind of want to separate this, or at least in my mind, it separates us two different things. I think a lot of the like, oh, AI is terrible, it's boiling the oceans. That feels like a way of actually just dismissing AI rather than genuine concern about climate to me in a lot of ways. That being said, as we're talking about data center use, is dramatically increasing.

1:31:11Electricity use is dramatically increasing. And these companies that made these climate goals are now having a much more difficult time reaching them. I think that is compounded by the current electricity plans of the administration that is in office, which is not making it easier to get clean energy online. So I don't know. I think it is very interesting that this has boiled up enough to reach Sam Altman that he feels that he has to defend against it. This doesn't really feel like a meaningful defense in any way to me. But, you know, when you're measuring it by teaspoons of water, that's like not you're clearly trying to downplay it.

1:31:58You're not actually trying to solve it. you're trying to say, look, it's so small, you can't actually tell what it is. I don't want to, like, it kind of, like, disturbs me to know, like, that any amount of water is disappearing when I'm using technology. I mean, I assume we're all drinking a little bit of water listening to this podcast. But, like, I don't know what the right number is. And I think it's very, it is funny to think of it as individual chat GPT queries versus the data centers themselves. I'm obliged on behalf of our most pedantic listeners to say the water doesn't disappear. It's just diverted into a different part of the water cycle.

1:32:36But that's not people drinking it or being used in farmlands, right? Like, that's the problem. Like, you're using the water elsewhere. That's the problem, right? Like, the water is being diverted to this use as opposed to whatever higher value use you might believe exists. That's weird. Like, we should just acknowledge that's a weird outcome of this. The other thing that really gets me, and David, I think you've spent more time using AI tools than I have in this way. No one does but one chat GPT query. Well, right. I mean, I think it's just a stupid way to quantify this stuff, right? And I think we've talked a lot about how much this stuff costs.

1:33:15We know OpenAI loses money every time you do the query. That's just true. They're just burning money happily as they grow. but yeah the the these things are designed for like long conversations and some of the numbers that we've seen are like there are some estimates out there that chat gpt gets more than a billion queries a day uh a billion fifteenths of a teaspoon is still an awful lot of water and so i think again it's it's this question of uh it's the is it worth it question right like all this stuff is trade-offs and it's like to the data center point that there have been all these issues recently where these massive data centers are being built in these communities that just don't want massive data centers because it changes the look of your community.

1:34:03It changes the electrical grid of your community. All of these things are happening downstream of this belief that AI is going to change the way that we do everything and we have to build enough infrastructure to support it. And so, sure, the cost will come down towards the cost of electricity, but still what that means is a vast amount of the electricity of my town is going to be diverted to doing AI queries. We should decide how we feel about that, right? One way or another. And even if it's not a huge amount right now, have you seen the growth that OpenAI is projecting? This is not going to flatline at this number of queries per day.

1:34:46If Sam Altman is right, we are all going to do a 15th of a teaspoon of water thousands of times a day for billions of people around the world. And like that changes things. How much water do you think it took to fall in love with Kevin Rees? Gallons? Easily. Hundreds of gallons. Like Olympic size pools worth at that point. Kevin, I will give you two Olympic pools in exchange for your wife and child. Again, my, my continued thanks. I've asked, I want everyone to know, I've asked him if I can keep making this joke. And he looked very tired and said, yes, that's it. So I just need to make that clear.

1:35:22Resignation and permission, I guess, are the same thing in this case. He's the one who chose to put it on the front page of the New York Times. That wasn't my decision. Yeah. I would also, we should move on from this, but I would also just point out that there is absolutely nothing that Sam Altman offers in this post to substantiate that particular claim and in fact it is vastly smaller than what lots of other researchers have said uh like like orders of magnitude smaller and so either sam knows something that we don't and he should tell us how he got to that number or uh maybe that's chat gpt it's also worth gpt also estimates much higher if you just ask chat gpt how much water it uses its estimates are much higher than it's just It's just thinking about Kevin.

1:36:04We should ask Microsoft because it runs on Azure. Yeah. One last, very quickly before we move on climate, one fatal flaw. The other fatal flaw I keep talking about is copyright law. And Disney and Universal sued Mid Journey this week for copyright infringement because you can just generate their characters. You can just generate Marvel characters and DC characters. You can just do it. And you don't even have to do the thing where you ask around it. You can just be like, show me Simpsons and it'll just do that. Yeah. Yeah, I'm confused how this took so long. Like, it's just there. It is right there.

1:36:36Like, the lawsuit is just filled with AI images of Shrek. That's what I meant. It wasn't DC characters. It was Shrek that was on my mind. This is a big problem. By the way, that's the same as the New York Times lawsuit. The lawsuit, their complaint is filled with the thing just generating Times articles or information from Times articles. The analysis that I've read is, you know, OpenAI is kind of losing that lawsuit against the Times. meta you know they torrented a bunch of books and there's emails in their discovery in their case where their research was like should we torn a bunch of books i'm like what else are we gonna do i'm like that's bad and so you see the most aggressive rights holders disney the most aggressive copyright litigant in history being like oh we can we we got it we're gonna crush these guys there there's some weird outcomes when disney wins its copyright battles like that is a real be careful what you wish for situation with disney in particular but this is a fatal flaw for this industry to the point where nick clegg who um used to run meta like policy stuff i think last week was like if we make artists if we pay artists or ask for their permission the ai industry will fail and then disney's like here we are so fatal flaw for this industry i like i i see this like thing happening with applications on the web and blah blah blah i want to be clear there are some fatal flaws that are going to have to be overcome that I don't think money alone can overcome.

1:37:58This is what I mean by the is it worth it question, right? Like, we are starting to understand the list of what it costs, literally and figuratively, to do the AI thing all of these tech companies are trying to do. And to them, the answer is yes, it's worth it, right? Like, is it worth the destruction of the art business in the world? Yes. Clearly, the answer is yes. is it worth like a flattening of how we think about all of the stuff that we make as a society clearly yes is it worth all the climate stuff is it the answer is just yes all the way across the board they think it's worth it and like a lot of other people are standing up and being like no the fact that you can't do this without stealing every artistic work that has ever been created means you shouldn't do this like we just it's just how like we should have the other side of that conversation too uh i also want to say just kudos to disney again for like having its lawyers write bars like this is we're in we're on such a good run of just sick ass burns in legal filings uh i just this it's right at the beginning of this filing it just says mid journey is the quintessential copyright free writer and a bottomless pit of plagiarism you know somebody wrote bottomless pit of plagiarism and then just like fist bumped a bunch of dudes in suits around a table.

1:39:19That's how lawyers do their writing. They just are like, Steve, read this.

1:39:29The complaints are being written to be read by the public. This is a new thing. Jonathan Cantor, the DOJ attorney who filed against Apple and won all the Google cases, basically. He was like, yeah, the first 10 pages are for the public to read. This is how we write them now. It's a good one. We'll link it. We can read it. Fatal floss. Alright, we gotta take a break. We're gonna come back. with a lightning round, which may or may not be sponsored. Who knows? I don't know. That's the whole point is that I don't know. We'll be right back. Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start?

1:40:01Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. Every great company's story is defined by moments when the founders make bold decisions. These are high stakes moments that risk the business, but can lead to greatness. I'm Murlov Boota, managing partner of Sequoia Capital and the host of Crucible Moments. We're returning for a brand new season.

1:40:43Join us as leaders from Stripe, ZipLine, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna, Supercell, and more share what it's actually like to navigate the make-or-break decisions. Crucible Moments is back on October 23rd. Until then, catch up on Seasons 1 and 2 wherever you find your podcasts.

1:41:07Morning, 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. It'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.

1:41:40All right, we're back. Lightning round. Unsponsored for flavor. Again, I just made that up because I needed to say something after we had sponsors. But what I really mean is that no one can pay us to do anything, which apparently I've been so loud about lately that people think that like I won't look like I can't even be in the presence of advertising, which is a very hard way to live as an American. People are like, oh, the ads are you go. You have to leave the room. I'm fine. But that's where I'm starting to think you're easily bought. There's a real like, you know, me thinks thou doth protest too much thing going on here where I'm like, maybe Neil is on the take and he's just yelling loudly about it.

1:42:18Have you heard of the new Pegasus GS9 yacht, David? It's delightful. If you have the means. All right. It's time. Oh, my God. I've gone all the way around from excitement about this to I can't believe we have to keep doing this. Keep doing it. It's time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. 2026 Webby award winning podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Nilay, how does this keep happening? What happened this week? It does keep happening. I will say it's getting dumb on a meta level, right? Where like it's just so dumb that like the ecosystem is getting dumb. So this week on Brendan Carr is a dummy, we don't have a lot of Brendan stuff himself, which is fascinating.

1:43:01Oh, I see. We're talking like Brendan dumb ripple effects. Like extremely stupid ripple effects of Brendan's behavior are causing other people to have to be like just monumentally stupid. Okay. In order to keep up with him. The new name of this segment is Brendan Carr made us all dummies. That's where we're going. Or they have to react to him in ways that are like just plainly no normal human being should react to. Right? No one should have to behave this way. So I have three this week. The first is by far my favorite. Like by far one of the best emails we have ever gotten here at The Verge. right up there with um the conspiracy theories i used to get about steve jobs stealing technology and then they would all end with he then died if you're an old school virtual listener you know but like i used to like do dramatic readings of this of he then died on like the engadget podcast right up there with the foxcon emails where the guy would end them all with leave us alone when we'd write up at the foxcon factory not being there right up here only instead of being a weird anonymous poet.

1:44:04This is Dish Network's communications people. So if you recall, Brandon, in the first Trump administration, Ajit Pai and the Trump administration broadly inked a deal in which T-Mobile was allowed to buy Sprint, which reduced the number of national wireless competitors from three to four. And to solve this very obvious problem where reducing competition raises prices, they gave a bunch of spectrum to Dish Network, which had no network, which made promises that it would stand up a nationwide wireless network, become the fourth carrier, and send shockwaves through the market and look around. Right?

1:44:39This mark, it does not exist. It's been years, right? That was the first Trump administration. It's been years. No one is using this network. They had a stat that 1.3 million people have access to this network. There are 300 plus million people in America. No one. No one is on this network. They do operate Boost Mobile, which is a prepaid network. That's a big network. A lot of people use it, But the majority of people who are Boost customers are actually sort of like using AT &T and T-Mobile's networks. They're just like roaming onto it. This is a big problem. Anyhow, SpaceX decided to take it upon itself to study whether or not DISH Network existed.

1:45:14They noticed it didn't. And they just asked for the spectrum. And Brendan responded in his corrupt sort of lackadaisical fashion by saying, I'm opening an investigation. I'm going to give the spectrum to SpaceX. DISH Network has responded to this. They have threatened to declare bankruptcy to preserve their spectrum through the bankruptcy proceeding because that's their big asset. This would prevent – right? They're playing a smarter political game than Brendan who, again, is an idiot. Anyhow, we got this email because we've been covering this. I keep pointing out that Brendan created this problem through his own corruption out of a solution that the previous Trump administration, his former boss, Ajit Pai, created for him.

1:45:50He's an idiot. This is how it goes. Here's the email that we got from Echo Star, which owns Dish Network and Boost Mobile. Hi, folks. Given The Verge's continuing coverage of EchoStars' interaction with the FCC and Chairman Carr, I wanted to share the blow with you. As we lay out in our filings with the FCC, our network, in fact, exists. My t-shirt, it says, my network exists.

1:46:13Like, just a top 10. It's just like, it's incredible. And it goes on to say, we offer high-quality 5G service to 80 % of the U.S. population on our own network, which I do. And that network has won coverage and reliability recognition across the country. That's for Boost. We've come a long way in four years when other carriers have had decades to build a network. The two questions I have is why are people still being issued AT &T and T-Mobile SIM cards when they sign up for Boost, which is a real thing you can see people talking about. And where is it? Where's the advertising? Where's the customer acquisition?

1:46:42Where is this network that you are telling me exists? Yeah. Send me a phone. send me a phone that runs on project genna5sys that runs natively on your network and doesn't run to 18t in new i live in new york city if you're going to stand up a network for 80 of the population presumably i can get service in new york city right i'm just saying our network can fax so that's one my easily and this is what i mean he's just made everyone else have to have to be stupid. Send me the phone. We're wide open to it. I sent them an email back and said I had a lot of questions when I was traveling. And they were just like, safe travels.

1:47:24No scheduling. So we'll follow up. All right, second one. We've talked about the other commissioner on the FCC right now, Ana Gomez, a lot. All of the other commissioners are gone. They all quit. The other Democrat, Jeffrey Starks, quit. The other Republican, Nathan Symington, quit. No one knows who's going to get nominated to replace him. Trump has nominated no Democrats to anything. FCC is supposed to have a quorum of three, but they're actually five, three from the incoming party, two from the opposing party. Right now they got Anna Gomez and Brendan. So we actually interviewed, and Anna's on tour, just talking about what a monster Brendan is.

1:47:59Like literally, she's like on a first-minute tour. We talked about this a lot. She did an interview with Lauren Feiner at one of the stops on this tour. Lauren talked to her, and I just want to say this is just like one of the funniest Brendan Carzademy quotes we have. She just said to Lauren Feiner, actually, I have a good working relationship with Carr. It is what it is. He knows that I need to speak out and we have a relationship where I can tell him my concerns. And Lauren said, do you know why Trump hasn't fired you? And she just said, no. No. Can you imagine Brennan's like, here's this person who's just touring the country saying that I suck and that I'm a threat to American free speech.

1:48:38And yeah, I accept her concerns. Also, I have no idea why my boss hasn't fired her. But if she goes, the FCC is functionally useless. I love the idea of having like a weekly one-on-one with your boss where you're like, here are all the new reasons I believe you're a danger to democracy. And they're just like, hmm, this is your meeting. You tell me what you want to talk about. What are the blockers? This is your time. Yeah, exactly. It's very good. It's very good. So that's the second one. You should read that piece by Lauren. It's very good. It's a good interview. I've been trying to get Anna to come on one or more of our shows.

1:49:08We'll keep working on it. Okay, then last one, Brendan tweeted. This is a Brendan one, but downstream of Brendan's the DC. As you know, Brendan loves giving me a spectrum. So Brendan tweeted this week, President Trump locked in another great win for this country. Freeing up spectrum is key to America's economic prosperity, national security, blah, blah, blah, blah. And really, this is about a Trump post where he says, Trump is congratulating Ted Cruz and Roger Wicker and Tom Cotton for their, quote, amazing deal on spectrum. And he says, this is serious power for American leadership on 6G. David.

1:49:38Oh, God. It's time. We've made it. So as part of the Big Beautiful Bill, there's some compromise where Ted Cruz has been mad at the Pentagon for hoarding spectrum for years and years and years. Everything about this sucks, Nero. It's true. I'm not wrong about this. So as part of this bill, the Big Beautiful Bill, which has not passed, Ted Cruz has agreed that the Defense Department can keep part of the 3 gigahertz band and then like in the middle from 7.4 to 8.4 gigahertz band. And the rest can go into what's called the Spectrum Pipeline and get auctioned for new 5G and 6G services. This bill has not passed.

1:50:13It may not pass. 6G doesn't exist, just to be 100 % clear. Correct. 5G came to nothing. And in other parts of governance, it seems relatively clear that at any moment, RFK will tell you that 5G lets you see through time or something. Oh, yeah. Bill Gates did 5G to you when COVID happened. I think that is what that was. So anyway, so Brandon is congratulating Trump on congratulating Ted Cruz on a spectrum plan that is nowhere near reality. But this will preserve American leadership in 6G. We're doing great, everybody. Everyone should be so embarrassed who had to be involved in that in any way. And to some extent, that's just normal politicking, right?

1:50:53Like we're all congratulating ourselves. But it's like, Brendan, man, like read the room. Like everyone thinks 5G sucked. Yeah. All right. We need a palate cleanser. This palate cleanser is ridiculous. Why is this here as a palate cleanser? I'm so excited about this because what brings the Verge cast more joy than making fun of David Zaslav and his stupid decisions? this is the definition of business success what is happening here jake do you want to do you want to explain what happened here well warner brothers discovery which uh correct me if i have this wrong was created by the merger of uh warner media and discovery is now and again that was very recently what two three years ago like so recently they now announced plans to split themselves in half into two companies.

1:51:43And I'm trying to figure out exactly what this looks like. But again, tell me if I have this wrong. It looks roughly like one half is going to be studios. Let's call this roughly Warner Brothers. And another is going to have a bunch of television networks, which I don't know. Seems a little discovery-ish to me. They're going to name these companies Warner. Are they not just splitting themselves back up into roughly the original companies, but now one has a boatload of debt? Yeah, that's the move. That's what you do. This is what Comcast is doing with Versant. Outrageous. This is insane. It's really, honestly, it's pretty incredible.

1:52:22And meanwhile, basically what has happened is nothing. And David Zaslav got$100 million. That's essentially what we've accomplished in the last couple of years with these two companies. is we are right back where we started except David Zaslav made$100 million. And we got to rebrand HBO Max like five times. So here's the Zaslav memo to the company announcing the separation. While the work since the merger has been challenging at times. The work being rebranding one service over and over again. They've done nothing else. While I've done a very bad job. No, there's been a lot of investor presentations where David Zaslav was like, the pink stuff is what chicks like.

1:53:03This is real, by the way. That deck exists. We've talked about it. Anyway, while the work since I merger has been challenging at times, ultimately, we have succeeded in strengthening each element of our business. By bringing together the discovery in Turner Networks, we have created a leader in live and unscripted television with a truly global footprint operating industry-leading margins. We've transformed our direct-to-consumer offering as HBO Max is one of the world's few global and meaningfully profitable streaming services. And then by fusing creative brilliance with operational excellence, we've made strong progress returning our film and television studios to industry leadership.

1:53:35I don't believe that one at all, actually. I don't really think any of those are true. So, Jake, I think the answer is they combined all the stuff. They remixed it into dying cable company with debt and new look streaming company. So it's not quite Warner Brothers and Discovery. It's like the worst parts of both go over here. And then maybe the future is over here. I mean, ironically, what the streaming company gets is also all of the content. So it's like all of the things that have a chance are going to be over here. And all of the things that are cable networks are going to go over. I mean, it's bleak what's going in that second company.

1:54:18And that thing is basically just being set up to fairly rapidly die on top of a giant pile of debt, while the other one just gets to go and try to turn HBO Max into Netflix. Like, that's what that's what this is. They are trying to streamline the thing so the one company can try to go be Netflix. And so far, everyone who has tried to be Netflix, which is many, many, many companies had failed fairly spectacularly at trying to be Netflix, except Netflix, which is doing a very good job. Yeah. And Netflix is the pure play. Everyone else has tried to do it by bootstrapping the excess margin of the dying cable business into the content to make Netflix.

1:54:55And that's where they've all failed. And now, as David just pointed out, the cable businesses are dying, so I'm getting rid of them. So Comcast, disclosure, NBCUniversal, part of Comcast, investor in our parent company, Vox Media. But they don't like us for reasons that will be instantly made clear as I continue speaking. Comcast is spinning off all of its dying cable companies into a new company called Versant so they can die or get reborn in any way. And they're going to hold on to Peacock and all the streaming stuff in the Olympics. This is, I think, the same move. Yeah, I think this is exactly the same.

1:55:27It's the same move. I have heard, because CNBC is part of the new version thing, there's some excitement, lots of trepidation, some excitement that they will be free of the machine and they can try new things in a way that being part of the machine would not let them in the past. I don't know if anybody at Discovery Turner is going to feel that way. No. It's just a really interesting moment. I mean, the other the other streaming thing that happened this week was Disney finally finished the deal to buy the rest of Hulu. And there is now some noise that the end of Hulu is kind of nigh, right? Like all of this stuff is just going to be roped into Disney Plus.

1:56:09ESPN is doing its flagship thing. That's going to start to be piped further and further into Disney Plus. like the we're sort of back in a bundling phase of some of this stuff in a really interesting way that like hbo max is trying to be netflix and disney is trying to be netflix and everybody is is pulling everything they possibly can into these like mega streaming services offloading everything that isn't those things because like you said they thought there was going to be money in those for a long time and there is there is no longer money in those and just the only path forward is to try and be Netflix.

1:56:44And boy, does that look like suicide right now for all of these companies. This palate cleanser sucks. I'm doing another one. Can I give you a better one? Okay, you do one and I'll do one. No, you do yours because we got to go. What's yours? I kind of want to see if we have the same one. You go. Mine is that PNY just announced the Dual Link V3 flash drive, which has both USB and USB-C connectors, but supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 that enables read speeds of up to 1 ,000 megabits per second and write speeds of up to 800 megabits per second. And it's$32.99 for 256. $32.99? For 256, but it's the fastest flash drive that exists.

1:57:23So you can fill your flash drive in two seconds. That's a palate cleanser, baby. Sick flash drive. That's a palate cleanser. What was yours? Do people still use flash drives? Have you ever tried to print something out of the office? Okay, that's fair. usbc into my laptop usba into the printer boom done i'm expensing this hey how do you think i get these images onto the frame tv ancient flash drive man that story sucks for both of you yeah what was yours i just wanted to talk about threads dms for like two seconds because i think uh threads uh which i have spent a lot of time talking about it's very slow product development they announced this week that they're starting to roll out a dm inbox that is actually separate from Instagram.

1:58:11Yeah, that's good. A lot of people not excited about that who are like, oh, cool, you know what Meta needs is another messaging app. And that's fair. And Meta now has thousands of messaging apps, none of which talk to each other. But I also think a Threads DM thing is a good idea. And that like it's, Threads is going to end up being one of those accounts that like everybody has, but nobody really pays attention to. And I think like as Twitter continues to fall apart, one thing I miss is the like relatively accessible messaging system to reach almost anybody and threads i think is going to turn into that that's my theory interesting that it's it's just going to be an inbox that everybody kind of has and you check sometimes and it's fine and like maybe that's only useful to me as a reporter who like constantly wants to ask people about their stupid ios home screens but uh i think it's like it's a good idea for threads to have dms isn't that linkedin yeah but i don't want it to be it's It's like it has been threatening to be LinkedIn in a way that really bums me out because every time I have to use LinkedIn, it makes me sad.

1:59:16And like it used to be Twitter. The like, how do I reach out to a stranger? Twitter was the closest thing we had to that. And I think Threads is smart to try and take that mantle and I think is going to do it fairly quickly. Yeah. All right. It was a fine power cleanser. I think the cool USB drive is better. You let us know. You can email us something. You can call someone. also if you have a really weird esoteric use for a flash drive that you want to tell us about i very much want to hear about it i'm dead serious what's the number what's the number again uh you can call 866 verge 11 you can email us vergecast at the verge.com uh all kinds of stuff we're gonna do a lot of hotline stuff this summer so keep keep questions coming yeah all right that's it that's where i guess back and roll and that's it for the verge cast this week and hey we'd love to hear from you.

2:00:05Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. 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.

2:00:50Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. Time to be great. Limu, Limu! And Doug. Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Limu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera! They see us! Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts.