The post-search Google era begins

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24:30David Pierce:All right, we're back. Let's talk Google I.O. Nila, you were there. I missed this whole experience. So like, give me the give me the vibe check. How were things at Shoreline this year at Google I.O.? They were very hot. It was like 85 degrees. I made a video. That's a sunny place. It's sunny. Yeah. Well, it was hot. Like, there was a lot of, like, I'm going to do this AI demo just to be in the air conditioning. I made a social video when I was not wearing a jacket for the first time, like in any video ever, maybe. And a lot of people were like, Mila, it's hot. And I sent all those comments to my wife immediately.

25:04So thank you to Google for it.

25:06David Pierce:You did look good in that video. It was just a fact. Fully the camera angle. Also, the sun glinting off my eyes. again I said just if you want to say I look hot in Instagram comments it it hasn't worked yet on Becky but I'm they're going straight to her if you want to guarantee me I will read your comment 12 times that's how to do it I sent her the screenshot of the first one and we're getting like a new air conditioner and her entire response was to send me a picture of the wiring to the new air conditioner I was like come on man that sucks anyway uh Google I was great uh it was you know It's just like always fun to see everybody.

25:45I'll just like describe the narrative of what we heard in this keynote, which is, okay, it's not AI anymore. It's agents. We're putting agents everywhere. We have a new model called Omni, which is very powerful. It has some world model characteristics. It can simulate physics, so it can make better videos because it understands physics. 3.5 Flash is their new faster model. It's cheaper to run. It's more performant and more powerful than some of the pro models of the past. Google is very happy about where it's taking its models. And then it is agents everywhere. That is their whole idea, is that now Google can take action on your behalf across a number of products, across a number of services.

26:22How that will come together is, I would not say, a coherent story for them in, like, the classic Google sense.

26:27David Pierce:Yeah, that's Google. And then the changes to search are, like, vast. Yeah. And you can see that actually the future of search, if we just keep linearly progressing, is that it becomes the agent platform. So they changed the search box. It's now called Intelligent Search. It's bigger. It's multimodal. You can put photos in there. It can generate stuff at you. It can generate apps at you, which we should talk about. And you can see how Intelligent Search is going to connect right to what's called Gemini Spark, which is their agent in the cloud. and you're going to ask it some stuff and it's going to deliver you some information, but it might also say, hey, do you want me to just do that for you?

27:06And like the agent will run away and do that. And that is all monumentally important for the future of the web, but Google seems very committed to all of it. Then the last piece of this. So I've now described some very tactical, very tangible things. Like here's these products and like here's how they work. And at the very end of it, Demis Hassadis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, came out and was like, with Google's power and skill, we will get to AGI and we will look back on this time as standing on the foothills of the singularity. And he was like, goodbye everybody. And it was, that was like the, the most jarring part of IO, like very tactical announcements, very product focused.

27:46They announced something called the universal commerce protocol. And like Walmart's going to use that so that agents can shop for you, right? Like whatever. And then at the end, it's like the singularity is also here.

27:57David Pierce:Yeah, I'm curious for your reaction to that, because the thing that is most fascinating about that to me is that Demis Hassabis is the one who said it. And I think for a long time, Demis has been one of the most sort of calculatedly reasonable people talking about how big and huge AI is going to be. he's not one of the people talking about universal basic income he's not one of the people saying it's gonna you know take away everybody's jobs in two years he just won a nobel prize for some of the work he's done in ai like he he is a person with as many sort of receipts on the work that they've done and also who has done i would say a reasonably good job of explaining what this stuff is and is not for a long time so for him to say that was shocking to me like was it was it in the moment bizarre.

28:44David Pierce:Like if Sam Altman had said that, you'd have been like, whatever, Sam, you wrote that on your blog 45 times. But for Demis Asabas to close Google I.O. by saying like, what up singularity is just wild. Like it was wild in the juxtaposition. Has Demis Asabas always believed that he's working on AGI? Yes. Sure. We just saw in the Musquey Altman trial, everyone in this industry from the top down is always talking about Google and Demis beating them to AGI. Like he's just a specter that looms over this industry. It's obvious that this is what he's working on. I think that the juxtaposition that made it stand out for me was we just spent like two hours of Google launching products, like very tangible, pretty small in the scheme of things, products to build on a lot of these capabilities in huge ways.

29:29But when you search Google for what are some great restaurants in Tuscany and it builds you an app that's like, I made a schedule for you for the weekend. You're not like AGI is here. Do you know what i mean like yeah the the products we saw were meaningful interesting improvements to the existing products because of ai and what you can do with it and then you know and then because it's google and they always have to talk about the revenue we saw a bunch of stuff about like shopping um and then then at the very end he was like we're going to cure all disease with power of alpha fold and the singularities here that to me is like i think i think they did it that way is a reminder of what the ultimate ambition is.

30:08David Pierce:Right. Right. And the products we're seeing, and I talked to Suna about this, the products we're seeing are still not, they're not going to prove that out to anyone. That's the gap they have to close. Right. If you're like everyone, like I asked Suna why, you know, people hate AI and we talked about it for a little bit and he's like, it's not just a marketing problem, which I think was an important, I asked him directly and he, he was like, this is what I'm saying. It's not a marketing problem. Like we have to communicate all the value and we have to show that we're going to make people's lives better.

30:36And some of that is, yeah, when you use Gemini Spark, it can like run around and like figure out how to do a block party for you, which is like their big example. And I want to talk about that because it was very funny in very specific ways. But also we're going to cure all disease. And also we've got our eyes in the big prize. And like there's some amount of, you've got to show more of an intermediate step, right? Like there's, we're going to make productivity a little bit faster with agents. And then there's the singularity. And like, what is the thing in the middle that actually shows us that we're almost there?

31:09Yeah.

31:09David Pierce:Step one, a daily briefing in the Gemini app. Step two, cure all disease. That's kind of what I'm getting at. Yeah. So that was the vibe was like, well, boy, Google's doing a lot of stuff. Everything is called Gemini. So it's hard to even tell them all apart in the classic big company naming problem scheme. But if you look at all the stuff, you're like, oh, eventually this will all come together right in the future of google as an interface looks like an agent of some kind yeah yeah and you you get the sense i mean i think this is where it goes back to the the search box thing right that uh the the like google is redoing the search box thing i think has been slightly overblown they're basically it's like it's getting slightly bigger and you can add more stuff to it but fundamentally google has not changed what the thing looks like when you go to google.com in a long time.

31:59David Pierce:So just the sheer fact that that is changing at all is really meaningful. And I think I spent some time with Liz Reed, who runs Search, and Josh Woodward, who runs Gemini, ahead of IO, and basically just kept trying to get them to explain where one ends and the other begins. And their answer was essentially people come to us for different things. Now. And I think everyone at Google seems to see a world in which these things begin to converge on one another. And I think if you're Google, what you are correctly realizing is, oh, we own the search box, which is the single most valuable piece of real estate on the internet.

32:34David Pierce:We have to do all of this there, right? Like Gemini is growing really fast, doing really well. People are downloading the app. People like it. It's going fine. The Google search box is still the thing. And you really get the sense that they're building more and more stuff into that, working their way back to some of this Gemini stuff. And just the thing that Google search is becoming to me is super fascinating, right? Because the sense that I got from this is Google has figured out how it's going to make money from AI in search, which is why you mentioned the universal AI cart thing where you can shop all over the internet with your agents and essentially Google will manage all of the shopping aspects of it.

33:13David Pierce:Do you know what's really great for Google when it does that is it gets to make money during that. Like everything on the internet is payment processing is like not a long way to think about the business of the internet. And that's a good thing for Google to do. It is a thing that will work for Google as a business. It's a thing that's going to make a lot of agentic stuff easier. Google is also building a lot of the tech that people are going to use to run their agents. Like you can just see how it all accrues back to Google makes money, even in a world where the search business goes down. I don't think they're counting on that happening tomorrow.

33:44David Pierce:And I suspect they're counting on a really big AI ad world coming to. But like you get the sense Google thinks they know how to make this turn now, which I don't think they knew even a year ago. I think there's a couple of things at play there. One, the other way they're going to make money is by charging you lots of money to use this stuff. Yes, true. Most of these features are in paid versions of Gemini, and you can pay anywhere from, what was it, $20 to$200 a month to use this stuff. And the idea that Google should be a paid product in this way is just really interesting. This is the most look at these cool new features we can give you in Google search if you pay us money that I think we've ever seen.

34:25Yeah. So that's just really interesting.

34:27David Pierce:Google's got to be so thrilled. Like at some point we need to go do a whole retrospective on OpenAI randomly deciding to charge$20 a month for ChatGPT and the fact that that like changed the economy forever. Like it's that is what happened. But sorry, keep going. Well, there's I just like the idea that Google is going to make money by charging you a lot of money for a thing that has been free for a long time is fascinating. Right. And I don't think anybody knows the rates, which is why it's from$20 to$200. There's just a huge amount of rate variability and pricing pressure that the things we're at.

35:01The other piece is I think they are less worried about sending traffic to the web at large than ever before. Oh, clearly. I think they're over it. And they, you know, when they first rolled out AI overviews, there was like outcry, you know, like uproar. Like we did it. Like I coined the term Google Zero that everyone uses now. Literally, every publishing CEO, every media CEO is running around being like, Google Zero. Like, Roger Lynch, the CEO of Condé Nast, is on TVPN being like, we model our company at zero Google traffic now. And I'm like, oh, you're saying zero because of me. Like, I know what's happening.

35:37David Pierce:And you know what I really respect is that you don't get mad that you don't get credit. I should charge these people less. It's 20 bucks a month to say Google Zero. You should trademark it. But, like, you know, the reason I'm – I should charge all the AI front – the frontier labs. There you go. for training on Google Zero. The reason I'm bringing it up is like that was not real, right? It was a danger and everyone was guarded against the danger. And now it's real. And like all the digital media companies are talking about Google Zero and Google itself is like, all right, like you got mad at us.

36:10There's a lawsuit in the UK where Google literally referred to publishers as free riders on Google search because the publishers want to be able to opt into search and opt out of training and Google won't let them. and like that's a lawsuit they're training on youtube videos they're not going to let creators opt out of training on youtube videos like there's a lot there and i think google has decided that it they're over it like do you know what i mean like in a real way the traffic is zero they're sending zero traffic to big publishers now they get to do the next thing and you know they will tell you i'm sure liz said this to you that in many ways i think the web is bigger and more vibrant than before and people are doing longer and more in-depth searches and to validate like their data shows that when people at the end of ai mode they actually go read the original sources to validate right and this is the dynamic that they think they're in is google well no can i can i frame

37:01David Pierce:that to you differently because i actually liz read said this to me in our conversation i've been thinking about it ever since that google's stance seems to be that we are going to send vastly less traffic but the traffic we're going to send you is going to be so good that like if you're a commerce site, you're going to get fewer people, but you're also going to get fewer sort of passersby that by the time somebody makes it to your website, their likelihood of buying from you is going to be so high that you're going to make up for it with traffic quality over traffic quantity. And I think across a huge spectrum, that is the case Google is going to make to people that yes, we're sending fewer people to you, but the people we're sending to you are going to be there so much more on purpose that it's going to be worth it.

37:43David Pierce:And I think that is an unbelievable generous read both of Google's intentions and of society. But it is a fascinating thing. And even if that comes true exactly the way as Google sees it, it will still change the way the web works in its entirety forever and ever. My criticism of almost every Google search demo for the past five years has been they cannot see beyond ending every single interaction with a transaction. Right. Every Google search demo, you go back and look and they're like, we got to buy shoes. And then you buy something and the idea that you're going to get fewer drive-by visitors but more of them are going to buy shoes is one view of the web right this the web is for shopping the idea of the web is for information required all that scale right like the programmatic ad business that propped the whole web up required google to send floods of traffic to all kinds of people all that's gone like just straightforwardly gone uh the affiliate you know the affiliate business that like the wire cutter like we have it like um we've talked about google zero with those small we did air purifiers.

38:43There's like air purifier blogs that just like got wiped out because Google's just like, buy this one. And now you're not going to the dedicated air purifier review company that's going to sell you the best one.

38:53David Pierce:Right. And even if Google is trying to do that, that assumes that Google is exceptionally good at only identifying really great content and really great users to match the two together. And Google is demonstrably not good at that over the years. And I have a, you know, over time, I've had a lot of feelings about that. Like one, And Google just changed the rules of the game on a lot of companies and a lot of people. Yep. Right. And on the audience, like Google users are getting measurably different Google experiences now. Yeah. One of the things I asked Sundar, and I won't give away his answer, but the idea that you and I are going to get different sort of infinitely personalized answers to different search queries.

39:33because Gemini might make you a different search results page than me. Sure. With different answers in it or even different interactivity because it's going to make you a different app than it will make for me is kind of wild, right? Like Google search has been a universal source of truth for a lot of people in a way that no other platform company has even cared about for years. But like you can Google it and the answers will be pretty much the same for you and me is like pretty foundational. Yeah. And now it's like, nope, it's just you. It's you and your agent, like having your own little world.

40:04And like, what's that going to be like? So beyond traffic and money and, you know, I think digital media companies are all pretty done. Like I've been saying Google Zero for years and years and years. Like now they're all saying, it's like, did you make any plans? Are you ready for this? Because it was always happening. It was never going to not happen. So does Google owe them the traffic? I don't know. But they did change the terms of the deal. They did weather the storm of introducing AI overviews and AI mode. And now I think they're over it. And their position is, yeah, we'll send some traffic to you.

40:36And it's the last step when people want to buy the shoes. That's the traffic you're going to get. And you have to be happy with that. And then for us, people who just use Google, the step to, oh, this is an agent. Now, I'm not using the web. Google is going to use the web for me. And I'm going to just use this interface. It's right there. It's so close. And on the one hand, it's kind of exciting, right? Like that is the next version of an interface. It's the next version of an, like an interactive assistant that everyone's been talking about for years and years and years. And Google is poised to do it.

41:14And then it's also like, oh, but this is going to change how I get information. Like my list of primary sources that I can go evaluate and look at that might just be gone. There might not be another search engine like that ever.

41:27David Pierce:Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that Google, like everybody else, is one really important step away from pulling that off, which is that nobody seems to know how that thing works or what it looks like. This was sort of all over IO is Google is they launched they launched widgets and they launched super widgets and they have this thing called generative, generative UI. And they have the new thing that's like Google alerts, but I generated. So when you tell it to sort of monitor something for you and it'll tell you when things update, that I actually think is going to be really useful to a lot of people.

42:01David Pierce:Like, tell me when XYZ happens and it just will is actually like a very cool Google search feature. But there's this thing that Google is trying to create that is not quite an app and it's not quite a page of search results. but it's somewhere it's it's sort of a it's like a living breathing organism of something that is like permanent but also changing and acting on your behalf and it's like what what is an agent supposed to make for you is a question no one has answered and everyone is desperately trying to figure out right because it's like is is what's supposed to happen that i tell you what i want and then at the end you show me the amazon order page sure that's all one one kind of problem um but it's also trying to figure out all these different ways to keep you in the loop like booting up a virtual machine inside of your chat gpt chat ain't it like that i know for sure but and i was talking to to liz and josh about this too and they're still very much trying to figure this out like what what is this thing that it's supposed to be because i think from a pure user perspective the idea of are 10 blue links the best we can do for you when you ask for some information?

43:13David Pierce:The answer is no. I think Google is correct about that. For most of the time, when I want to know the stock price of the stuff in my portfolio, 10 links is the wrong answer. Google can do better than that. And I think Google is correct to have pushed to do better than that. There are lots of downstream effects to that that I think are complicated and messy. But if you just purely look at it from like, what is the best user experience in this moment? Google is pushing in a lot of good user forward directions here. But the question is, what is the thing that I want when I ask those questions? No one knows, including Google.

43:47David Pierce:And so I think the reason a lot of this looks like mess to me is just that no one has solved this sort of basic primitive question of what is this new interface? It's not chat. It's not a page of links. It's not charts. It's not spreadsheets. It's something new and no one has even begun to crack it as far as I can tell. And I think that's why they're doing it in like three different places. Yeah. Because you can see like, oh these should all come together, right? Search and Spark, which is the agent platform in the cloud, and then Canvas, which is the thing that builds you an app. Like those things should get a lot closer together.

44:25But, and then form, like what does Voltron look like? Does it have a mustache? Like that's like the question you're asking. What does Voltron look like is very good. Yeah. Like, Canvas is really interesting, the thing that makes you apps. And, you know, all of the demos are like, I'm going on vacation. I want to eat at these kinds of restaurants. I've got these kinds of days. And then it makes you a trip planner, right? And it's like, here are your time slots. Here are the choices in these time slots. Like, push the button and then you'll make all of your picks and you'll have it. And so, you know, like, at the demo, you know, it's these poor people.

45:00Like I asked so many questions and eventually they brought me one of the PMs and one of the senior engineers who had built the whole thing to answer my questions because I have so many questions. Like the wizards behind the curtain came out to talk to you. It was super fun to talk to them, right? These are problems of first impression in software and computers. Like you're going to say that you want to go on a vacation and the computer is going to respond to you by making you an app is not a thing that has happened before. Right. Like kind of no matter how you feel about AI, you're like, that has never happened before.

45:32That is super interesting. So I'm looking at this app and, you know, in the demo, you can watch it in the keynote. It was the same kind of demo that I got. You can watch it write the code. And I'm like, first of all, that is insane. Like there's no way that we're making the app like from scratch every time. Like that can't be how we're doing it. And then you look at the app and it's got like heart icons in the things. You can say favorites and like it's got all these app ideas. Like you would make if you're, and I was like, does it know about the heart? Did it just decide that there should be heart icons here?

46:05Where do they go? Like, where's the data stored? If I want to share this plan or someone else, like it's an app. Like there's all kinds of questions you, you can just get to by looking at it. And one of the most interesting things that they talked to me about was the idea that there's only so many categories of apps that are appropriate. Everyone asks for planners and fitness trackers and like food trackers. like basically all just like trackers and lists. Yeah. Right. And I'm, you know, all just like pounding the table about software brain and you're turning everyone into software. And then here's the thing that makes everything into software.

46:36And they're like, yeah, we're not actually in the end going to custom write everybody different apps. We know that people asking for vacations are going to want a vacation app and we will have one. And we will tailor it to you on the front end. And that's just a bunch of HTML, CSS, and you can use it. and then if the next person asks for one, we're not going to code it from scratch again. We're going to like use the template again and make it a little bit customized for you. And yes, there will be a long tail. They told me that like lots of people make video games in this thing in their testing, which is super interesting.

47:11But like that long tail is, eventually they will see the patterns in the long tail and they'll templatize those too.

47:18David Pierce:That's really interesting. Right, so like here's this like fascinating Google dynamic where they're going to use the AI to let you have like an infinite canvas of app development as the response to searches, but also they have so much scale that they can see the most popular kinds of apps that need to be made and they're just going to pre-make them for you. And then, yes, you can adjust, you can like vibe code the UI, but like the logic of the app and how it works and like what is the best practice for a trip planner app, like that will just exist. And I, that is, again, in software, like I cannot think of anything that has ever looked like that.

47:53David Pierce:like maybe like you could buy hyper card stacks on 3.5 inch floppies well weirdly the the analog that comes to mind for me is like microsoft word templates yeah it's like clippy pops up and it's like it looks like you're writing a resume it's like we're we're almost there again and i think that actually strikes me as exactly the right approach rather than reinventing the wheel every single time because again these these tools are prone to go wrong and when they go wrong they spiral off wrong further and further and further wrong. Yeah. But like that's why, you know, Anthropic came out with Claude Design, which is designed to say, here's basically what a good design is.

48:31David Pierce:And let's just start with that. And if you want to mess it up, knock yourself out. But we're going to try to start you in a good place and let you build out from some sort of functional structure. And with apps and stuff, that seems actually like exactly the right strategy, especially for people who don't want to think about data storage and the structure of their app and what tabs go where and what the mechanics are supposed to be. People are like, I want an app that feels like an app, but does this one thing the way that I want it to. And Google can just do that for you. That strikes me as very smart.

49:01And the opportunity is you're going to introduce more interactivity and you can only really do that with AI. It would have been hard, I think, for Google to do this with the tools that existed before AI at this level that they have it now. They can bring the cost down because they'll be able to see so much interactivity and be like, these are the core categories where we're bringing the cost down. And then they still let you have the infinite canvas where you can try anything you want. Right. And like, and then more and more people will do more on things and they will templatize more and more things.

49:28The, the turn, and this was the second part that I, I just found so fascinating is let's say you do build the trip planner, right? Like, okay, I picked all the restaurants I want to go to the turn to, okay, agent, go book the restaurants, right? Go get, go get these things done is right there. And that is not wired up yet. Right. You can go do that independently in Spark. You can go say, do all this stuff for me. You can do that in other parts of search. Like it will call around its intelligence search. We'll like call around all the barbershops and find out what like the prices are. Like, I don't know if anybody wants to do that.

50:02Like I, I personally am not yet at, I am comfortable having Google synthetically voice call all of my local businesses and talk to them. And they gave me a demo and I was like the fakest demo. I was like, this phone call did not happen this way. That's not how anybody reacts to this. No one responds in such structured ways that the robot definitely knows what's happening with prices and cuts, right? It just made no sense to me. But like, that's the next turn. And if you just wire up, okay, I'm going on a trip, help me out. And then you get some choices and you're like, all right, get it all done.

50:34And then the agent goes and gets it all done. You have, you've totally gotten away from search. You've actually ended up at the robot butler that everyone's been talking about this whole time. especially because it has a computer in the cloud that can use on your behalf and it can write code for and this you know if you want to get all wild-eyed about agi you're like oh i have a computer that can use itself that's the thing that like inches you closer to something that looks like autonomous intelligence i'm not sure that's a singularity i think that might just be a chrome browser that can use itself but like for a lot of people that might be good enough you know what i

51:07David Pierce:think google thinks that is this is actually the last thing we should talk about which happened last week while we weren't podcasting, but you just described Google Books. Like this is why Google is making Google Books. Google had this big, they had the Android show, they announced a bunch of new stuff the week before IO, but the big thing they announced is this new lineup of devices called Google Books, which is a horrible name that no one should have allowed, but here we are. And the pitch is essentially what you just described. It's how do we bake all of this AI stuff more directly, more seamlessly, more cross-platform into your computer.

51:44David Pierce:And I think you just backed all the way from search into the exact case for the Google book, which I find absolutely fascinating. The danger here, and it's funny, he said search, right? You're kind of not doing any searching anymore. Google is doing searching for you. And the name Google book is bad because I don't think people are like, what I want is to more closely align myself with a giant corporation that has scraped all the data in the entire world to train AI. Like, whoops. It's also just a crappy word to say and look at. Yeah. Google book. That's true. I don't like it. Microsoft book. Like, it's just like nobody wants this.

52:20You know, like, but the idea that your computer is actually just an interface to like a giant robot in the cloud, it's also coming. Right? And it's coming in voice. You saw the glasses demo. The glasses demo, by the way, fascinating. You know, they asked it to order coffee on DoorDash and it opened DoorDash in a virtualized container on an Android phone and clicked around and DoorDash to order the coffee.

52:40David Pierce:Oh, interesting. Like totally wild, right? Like shouldn't you be able to just use the DoorDash API? Like what's happening here? Like where does the logic live? Where do the apps live? Can Google just use all the apps on your phone without permission from the app vendor or without additional payments? Does it even matter economically? Like Google is upending the soft economic agreements of the entire internet by just doing stuff for people now and finding ways to do that stuff. even if there's not some formal API to do it, right? There's not a formal API to call your local businesses. Google is going to call them and use a robot voice to talk to them.

53:13There's not a formal way to order coffee on DoorDash. Google is going to open the DoorDash app on your phone and click around for you. And like all of that has just massive implications for how we use computers, how all those companies make money. And I think Google, they've done so much fighting about search traffic and Google Zero that they're just like, screw it, we're doing it. Like this is so obviously the future. We can see it. It's pretty cool if it all works and we'll figure it out along the way. And like respect to them for just getting over it and doing it. But that's a lot of change really fast.

53:44Yes.

53:45David Pierce:Yeah. I mean, Google is, I think, maybe uniquely able to actually do this thing, right? Like this would seem like incredible brazen nonsense for almost any other company. But like Google, for a lot of ways, is the company that sets the standards that the Internet runs on, like in a very real way. This is why they're so excited about Universal Commerce Protocol. Right. Like Amazon is going to use UCP. They're not going to participate in Google's Universal Shopping Cart, but Amazon is like, yeah, we need a standard for how agents will access our shopping platform. And we're going to use the same one that Google is pushing.

54:23Yeah. They also, Google is pushing Synth ID and they're signing on to C2PA, which is content credentials. And now everyone is going to use them. Yeah. And like you need Google to do it, to your point.

54:34David Pierce:But yeah, and Google is also now, I think they talked about this at IO, they're pushing on WebMCP, trying to make the model context protocol a sort of part of the fabric of the internet. They put out all this stuff called modern web guidance, basically telling everybody how to do agents. Like Google is able to tell the internet how to work and people will do it. Like in the way that Apple can tell you how to design your iPhone app, Google can tell you how to do the web. Okay, so here's why though. This is the thing that I think is really interesting. they've been able to do that because if you play ball google sends you a flood of traffic right google i don't know 10 years ago they're like we're gonna do google amp and every web developer who listens to the show just like involuntarily shuttered like that shit was horrible and google's like but if you use amp wink wink we can't say it out loud but you'll rank higher right like this was the and i know now there's a google executives furious like we never said that but like this is what everybody believed.

55:32The deal was if you play ball, you get a ton of traffic. Google will send you a ton of traffic. If you play ball now... What happens? Google's still keeping all the traffic and you might get a transaction down the line. Right. And again, like I'm saying, that's a lot of change for this ecosystem, like a ton of change for this ecosystem. And I can't tell if Google is being thoughtful. Google is always thoughtful. And I talked to Sundar. He's very thoughtful. Or if they are, they just see the end point and they're going to get there. Right. And like both of those things are for a company of Google's scale and ambition.

56:08Both of those approaches are valid. But the part where they were like, we're never going to change the 10 blue links because everyone will be mad. That thing is over. Yeah, that company is gone.

56:17David Pierce:Yeah. Long, long, long gone. And I think to me, it's really a fact of how caught off guard Google was by ChatGPT. Like you get the sense the company learned to stop being afraid when that happened. Right. That it's like, oh, actually being careful and thoughtful and slow and deliberate cost us. Like we spent two years fighting the reputation that we had by being the ones who were careful and thoughtful. And actually what we need to do here is win. And and I look, I think I think there are a million questions about whether any of this is a good idea or is going to ruin humanity. And like we've talked about them ad nauseum.

56:55David Pierce:We will talk about them again. But like just purely if you believe this is the game to be won, it is very clear to me that Google has decided that the only thing to do is to win. Otherwise, you are at an existential risk as a company. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think they feel like they're winning, too. Yeah. There was like a muscularity to IO. It was scattershot in like Google way. Like, Gemini what now? You know, like, what are you saying? But everything had some confidence to it. Actually, I opened Decoder. It's coming out on Tuesday. I keep plugging this episode. But I literally talked to Sonori yesterday.

57:30So it's fresh on the mind. But we opened the Dakota conversation by talking about how he had turned over a significant amount of his senior executives and restructured the company after that chat GPT moment when Google felt like it was on its back foot. And he was like, yeah, I had to make all the changes. I had to restructure and I had to make some big decisions about how to win. And I think this is the payoff.

57:55David Pierce:Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be a fascinating next phase of this because like, I mean, as we've been talking about all year, this is the turn from we've built a bunch of technology to now we have to build products that people want. And if you don't build products that people want, none of this matters. Yeah, people are still going to hate AI. Like, this is in the context of Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, getting booed at a college graduation. Yes. Right? Like, the people don't love these products. And all of them are so iterative that they're not going to support. People aren't going to change their minds about data centers.

58:25Right. Like that's the dance that this whole industry is in. And some of these products are really interesting. Some of them, I brought up the bounce house earlier. Some of them are just the most software brain nonsense I've ever heard in my entire life. They're like, I'm planning a block party. I want to get a bounce house. And then it like issues like a architectural drawing of a bounce house. And like, it's like, we're going to RFP the bounce house vendors. and it's like what are you talking about like i don't know if you've ever gotten a bounce house but like the bounce house guy gets paid in cash you know what i mean like that's not that's not how this goes can i tell you by the way a thing i learned recently bounce house is

59:01David Pierce:not that expensive and make you very famous in your neighborhood there's somebody like four doors down from us who has a bounce house that bounce house shows up at every damn birthday party in the in the neighborhood you know what i mean and no one's rfp no google is not part of that transaction. Like you can buy a pickup truck and like a dozen bounce houses and you can run a very good business. The government will never find out about. Yeah. That's my advice to you, everyone. You're worried about AI bounce house guy. There we go. All right. We should take a break. Uh, and then we're going to come back.

59:29David Pierce:We're going to do hype desk. We're going to use a lightning round. We'll be right back.

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1:03:19David Pierce:All right, we're back. It's time now for the Hype Desk. This is when our friends Ross Miller and Ashley Esqueda come and tell us about what's cool on the internet and in the world. today we have but ross ross welcome back but ross i am sorry hello it is i but ross um no ashley is actually out in japan she's at uh bit summit which is a major indie game uh event festival really cool excited to hear what she's doing with that but yeah you were stuck with me this year uh this week and i do want to talk about japan anyway i want to talk about japan cars and specifically specifically Forza Horizon 6, which just came out this week.

1:03:57David Pierce:All the car nerd game nerds I know love this game. Yes. As both y 'all know, I do not own a car. I am not as big of a car person with the exception of Forza Horizon. Like this is where I get super nerdy into details. I learn fine tuning. I remember how to drift. I amassed dozens of cars in this game and just drive around for hours on end. I love this thing so much. So Forza, if I understand it, is like kind of a racing game. I love a racing game. I don't really care about cars. But my thing with Forza has always been that it seems to be like more a car game than a racing game. Is that fair? Yes.

1:04:36David Pierce:So there was always been two different Forza branches. The Forza Motorsport, which is like the super serious simulation style. That is unfortunately the stop making those games as about 2023. but the arcadey ones uh the playground games it's a kind of like a west midlands english studio uh they've always made the horizon series which is open world we'll pick a city in the world and we'll just make it a playground of like driving so on the scale of like mario kart to gran turismo it's somewhere in the middle a little closer to gran turismo but as i was i was showing travis as more and travis like do you think i like the game and i was like here are the photos i took of me in an Acura NSX racing a Gundam mech.

1:05:18David Pierce:And he looked at it and went, I don't think this game is for me, but I get what you're talking about now. But this is like pure Neelai bait, right? I mean, this is what I love. I love a car game. Like I'm a Madden player. As everyone knows, I mostly just play Madden. And then I love a car game. Horizon for me has always been, it's got a little bit of like RPG grinding in it. Like you got to play it a lot to get the good cars, which is just a feature of car games now but it looks so beautiful horizon 6 looks so beautiful i might be willing to give in it is it is gorgeous it is also on game pass ultimate like the expensive tier so pay 23 bucks give it a shot um but no it is it's like since horizon came out i think the last one came out 2021 it's like a five-year gap between madden's right it's iterative it's a little bit iterative you know what you're getting you're racing it's a lot of similar cars but now it's just a new location this location is japan uh tokyo and the a very small and condensed version of it with a couple of like the key you know tokyo tower certain parks you can definitely go to shibuya crossing with nobody in the street so it's safe to drift and then kind of go all the way up toward the mountains and get an off-road vehicle nilai knows this david you may not you can also if you want it to be goofier you can just design the paint jobs of the cars whatever you want or let other people do it and upload them nice so right now i have a fleet of cars that are all lightning mcqueen people are just going through every single car model and turning them into cars characters right now that's really funny what are the early vibes on horizon six my my memory of forza is people feel very strongly about every title and not everyone is a huge success in everybody's mind but the vibes around this one at least pre-launch were very good right Pre-launched were very good.

1:07:06David Pierce:Motorsport has had a little bit mixed. Horizon itself has always been big. I think the Metascore has always been 90-plus. Oh, dang. For the Horizon games, or at least the last four of them. This one launched with a 92 Metascore, 72 reviews. That's not changing. It is the best review game of the year right now. It will probably stay top five, or at least top ten, for the rest of the year. Wild. And this is going to be, without question, I think, the biggest game launch since Asha Sharma took over. the Xbox division. So it is kind of in some ways a big test of the comeback narrative, the mind share.

1:07:40David Pierce:It is coming to PlayStation 5 later this year, but still in terms of like Xbox output. Yeah, I was going to ask about that, right? Like Xbox is a thing that makes exclusives to drive you to the Xbox console. That seemed like they just gave up on that. And then I was like, I was curious how Sharma would like deal with that, but they're bringing Horizon to the PS5. They are bringing Horizon PS5. This was announced just because these like game development cycles. This is a four plus year development game. It was a decision probably made a long time ago before Asha took over. Who knows what 7 is going to look like?

1:08:12David Pierce:But this one is absolutely multi-platform. It's coming out sometime between July and September. Next month is Summer Games Fest, which is what E3 used to be. So we'll probably get the release date then. But for now, it is Xbox timed exclusive. and it is kind of the one of the big ones coming this year fable is a fantasy rpg coming this year there's a halo remake a new gears of war game this is one of the tentpole xbox comeback narratives that honestly was kind of in the works before asha took over but now it's like it's she's in shepherding mode can't she take what phil spencer and the the team kind of set up for this year and continue to kind of like push this we're coming back we're not just trying to make game past is kind of ubiquitous Netflix.

1:08:55David Pierce:We actually do want to have this sense of console exclusivity and kind of like brand ownership in a way that they were kind of veering away from for a long time. Xbox, all caps. It's the version all caps now. That's how we're doing it. It's like we're just rebranding things to all caps. Ross, you said you had another game you wanted to talk to us about and I'm desperately hoping it's the game that I want you to explain to me why it's suddenly so popular. What is the other one you wanted to talk about? It is Subnautica 2. Yes. Is that the game? good this is the game this is like an early preview game that is like barely finished and it's everybody's favorite game all of a sudden out of nowhere what is up with this game is there was a game for two reasons one it is a very fun uh sequel to a game where you're basically an underwater survival you're alone on an alien ocean world you have to keep diving deeper and deeper to get resources rebuild your base um and see really crazy kind of flora farmer like giant colossal um fish this is a game that plays with that kind of like gigantophobia that people have but the reason people are really excited about it if the other reason is it's was a huge part of a lawsuit about a year ago where a ceo used chat gpt to try to get out of paying a bonus so let me rewind a bit and i'll try to do this as quick as possible okay so nautica one was an indie game got bought by a publisher craft on their crafton they're known for player unknowns battlegrounds they're a south korean publisher and it was one of those kind of two-tier acquisitions we'll give you a lot of money up front.

1:10:23David Pierce:And then if you hit a certain revenue goal or milestone and sales goal by, I think it was originally next month, you get a$250 million payout. What has since been released in Delaware court filings is the CEO did not want to pay that. So he went to chat GPT. And this is like July 2025 version of chat GPT. So not the best business advisor and had it make a plan for how to avoid the payout. So they were doing these weird kind of intentional delays on the publisher side. They ultimately ended up firing the three co-founders, hoping that would just kind of put an end to it. A few months ago, I think in March, the Delaware judge said, you can't do this.

1:11:03David Pierce:Reinstate them. I think they now have until September to hit that sales goal. And if they do, Crafton has to pay$250 million, most of which goes to the three founders. a 10 % carve-in will go to 100 of the developer employees, which is no small chunk of change. A lot of developers make it $250 ,000 bonuses out of this. We don't know the exact details or the numbers. Some of this is a lot of rumor and whisper, but the broad strokes of the story are that. Right now, looking very, very good. I think they hit, yes, 2 million units sold in the first 12 hours of the game being released. Unreal. It hit 460 ,000 concurrence on Steam, which is the biggest PC gaming storefront in the world, which made it the third biggest game in the world for the weekend, this past weekend.

1:11:52David Pierce:Behind only Counter-Strike and Dota 2, and in my decades as a journalist and later as a game consultant, I have never seen the top two change. So for all intents and purposes, this was the biggest game in the world for this weekend. And it seems like it's like a perfect storm of good game that people like, plus really cool thing to root for that you might as well spend some money on this weekend instead of waiting a while, right? Like it's a real stick it to the man and also play a fun game, which is a pretty hard thing to beat. Right, if you're mad at AI, you can boo Eric Schmidt and you can play Sedona.

1:12:26David Pierce:That's right, basically that. And it's been fun to see, it's fun to play. You did mention it is early access. So I think for people who are not as used to that, it's basically an incomplete game. It is playable, it's got a lot you can do, but it is not going to be the hundreds of hours you can put in the first of Nautica. They're still kind of building it as they go. This has become more and more common, particularly with some of these bigger indie titles. Hades did this. Hades and Hades 2 both launched early access and they kind of built the game in real time, getting feedback from players and almost kind of chaptering the experience.

1:12:57David Pierce:Like you could have played Hades for over the course of three years in early access, getting a little more story and gameplay as you go. That's going to be the same case here. They're thinking about two to three years is the estimate. to get more of the world done, more biomes, add a lot more stuff to play and do, and honestly just finish the story. So what you're getting today, if you pay for it, you have the whole game when it comes out in 1.0, but that's going to be a ways off. So there's going to be a little bugs, it's a little broken at times. You do it for the experience more than you do for like the final product at this point.

1:13:30David Pierce:It's good stuff. All right, that's the hype desk. Ross, good to see you, buddy. Thanks for coming. Goodbye. Bye. And now, Neelai, it is time. After a week off, the people missed it. It's time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. The world's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brennan Carr is a dummy. We have big Brennan Carr is a dummy. Oh, God.

1:13:55Wow.

1:13:58David Pierce:That was an energy I did not expect. That's a lot. Okay. That theme was by Gear Dead. Congratulations. to all of us. Wow, I need to like come down from that. Yeah, hello. I don't think Brendan deserves that kind of energy. No, it was really good. It was really good. What do you do this week, Nelai? Well, actually, first, we have some big news in the world of podcasts within a podcast. Okay. Brendan Carr is a dummy was federated to On with Kara Swisher. Yes. And we did, you know, she calls him a moron. So we have a beef. So I went on with Kara Swisher, along with current Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez and Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who I've talked to before, who's great.

1:14:46And we just ran down all the reasons. Brendan's a dummy. And I called him a dummy a thousand times. And at the end of that episode, we ran our Gregorian chant by Mila Dagoomba. And then she actually ran another one of our theme songs as she read the credits, which is just deeply funny. so we have successfully federated America's favorite podcast within podcasts I know I think Stephen Robles has done Brendan Carr as a dummy on his show please by all means Brendan Carr as a dummy like get out there do it on your show you can have it yeah but to do that and to call him a dummy so many times with like a current sitting FCC commissioner I was like I might be a little out over my skis here

1:15:23David Pierce:what was Anna Gomez's adjective of choice for our boy Brendan you know she's wonderful we've quoted her many times she's out there saying how much of a threat he is to the First Amendment. She's still a politician. Yeah, she thinks he sucks. Like, that's not unclear. Yeah, it's very obvious that she's like, we're doing way too much. We're censoring too much speech. This is a war. But she's very polite, where I'm like, look at this dummy. There's a good dynamic there with Commissioner Gomez on the care show. Yeah, that's good stuff. So do we have news this week? Of course. Or did he, he didn't give us the week off?

1:15:52The news isn't just that I successfully made a podcast within a podcast go on yet another podcast. That would be great if that's all that happened. I'm telling you,

1:15:59David Pierce:the Verge cast eventually will be all podcasts. We're going daily and then we're going infinite.

1:16:08Every podcast is just a segment of the Vergecast. Yes, that's exactly right. Someone tell Bill Simmons. Okay. Brendan, this week, very dumb, very simple, very dumb. A real element of a Trump administration is how from the top down, everyone believes that if you stop measuring things, they go away. This is just a characteristic of Trump administration. So in the first Trump administration, I think you will all recall, Trump was like, if we stop testing for COVID, the COVID will go away.

1:16:40David Pierce:Well, this was back when Russia had, quote unquote, zero cases, right? And Trump was like, well, I could also have zero cases. Yeah, Florida has zero cases. It's not measuring this stuff. Like, this is just a theme. And if you look for it, it's a repeating pattern in Trump administrations. If we just stop measuring the thing, it will go away. It will not be a problem. So there's this thing we have called the national broadband map where you can see what broadband providers are in your area. People can report if those broadband providers are lying about the speeds and availability and the prices.

1:17:11And so the idea is that we should have a national broadband map that no matter where you're in the country, you should be able to log in and see who's claiming to provide you Internet service that you can pick between competing vendors and that they have to like report truthfully speeds and prices. So Brendan this week issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to streamline the complaints process for the National Broadband Map. We're going to get rid of some ways you can complain about broadband providers, which just basically means like now you can't. I don't know what else to say. Like now you can't say the broadband providers are lying to you in the National Broadband Map.

1:17:47And this just is of a piece of with him, you know, getting rid of the nutrition labels and making them less rich because that's an onerous burden on broadband providers to have to say how much the fees are when they charge you for broadband. And now it's like, yeah, even if they're lying to you at the actual speeds that are available in your area, it's harder to complain about them so that when people go look for competition, they can see what providers are truthful and which ones aren't. And it's just such a classic Brendan move. Like he's so at his core anti-consumer and anti like liberty and freedom in markets that he's like, I'm not even going to let you, I'm not even going to measure whether or not people are telling the truth.

1:18:27Right? Like we're not even going to have a system for you to say, hey, we made a map of all the broadband providers and who they service and what the speeds are and whether they're, we're just going to, we're going to make that stupider. because if I stop measuring complaints, I will be able to say there are no complaints. It's just obviously the goal. And of course, his backers in Big Telecom will be happy. So that's just very dumb. And it's just of a piece of what I was saying in the beginning of like a pattern in Trump administrations is if we stop measuring things, they will go away, which I'm guessing for the Verge Hess audience makes exactly zero sense in like a very particular way.

1:19:03Like that's not how it works. And now we're going to stop measuring whether or not broadband providers. are doing a good job.

1:19:08David Pierce:The thing I hate about that is the, if we stop measuring it, it will go away, might be a more politically successful strategy than I would like it to be, even though it is pure nonsense and actually just only stands to hurt real people. Oh yeah, I mean, there's other examples in Trump too, right? We're going to change how we calculate unemployment. We're going to fire the people who do inflation calculations. This is, we are monkeying with data across this country all the time. It's just Brendan is particularly dumb because I'm going to streamline the complaints process is like, no, you're not, man.

1:19:44Like, we all know who you are.

1:19:45David Pierce:Just say you're going to end the broadband map. Yeah. Just like, just have an email inbox. There's how you streamline your complaints process. Problem solved. What are we talking about here? By the way, if you go look at the national, I encourage everyone to go look at the national broadband map. Type in your address. It's like fascinating to see how much or how little competition is in your area competing for your service. Like mine is, it's Verizon or Optimum. it has some speeds listed and then there's like you know it claims that a bunch of like fixed wireless providers service my house and it's like no they don't that's not as real as we want it to be but it's nice to see all those options we just got Fios in our neighborhood and it is like the most intense door to door salesman rivalry happening right now because like for the longest time the only thing anybody had in our whole city was Comcast and everybody hates it it's just bad and now there's Ting which isn't like wired everywhere but you can call them and they'll come and you know run the stuff to your house and everything's fine and there's Verizon and so now that there's actual competition it's literally like twice a week somebody comes to my door and is like so what's Ting charging you?

1:20:52David Pierce:Are you happy with the speeds? We can probably do better and I'm like listen buddy I've had Fios before and then two days later somebody comes back and they're like so do you want Fios? It's crazy That's great It's like actual competition I'm gonna end up What you gotta do is you got to call whoever you have and be like, you know, this guy came to my door off for me and they'll lower your prices. I'm going to end up deciding to play this game and it's going to save me a lot of money on very fast internet. This is what agents are for. There's one thing I will let the robot voice do the phone call for on my behalf is like you call the ISP and negotiate prices.

1:21:20Google can absolutely call Verizon on my behalf. I have no problem. I feel like a lot of people are waiting for the Comcast disclosure right now. Oh yeah. But here's a fascinating turn of events. But in all the shuffle, the NBC universal investment in Vox Media went to Versant. Oh, God. So disclosure, Versant is an investor in a company and I've literally never heard from them. Also, what do they do? What's there to Brown? Just like, I don't know. That's your disclosure. It's not Comcast anymore. That day has come to an end. Sure. There is a shuffle. Yeah. Great job, everybody. Digital media executives shuffled some assets around.

1:21:57Once again, leading to nothing of impact happening to us. Does that mean the Versant name is now free? could we can we just start just start saying it yeah just like make it a word that exists like that's very versant of you it's very versant but it's all caps that's really important anyhow Brendan if you know what the word versant means or you want to explain to me how streamlining the collection of broadband data and complaints will actually lead to better data and better competition you're welcome to come on this show or apparently any show at any time because Brendan Carr is a dummy now exists across the entire podcast ecosystem.

1:22:36That's good stuff.

1:22:37David Pierce:Streamline is such an awful euphemism for get rid of, but you hear it everywhere, right? Like it's also a thing all these companies say when they do layoffs, they're like, we're streamlining our workforce by firing 12 ,000 of you. You know, it came into being because people were like doing aerodynamics in the 60s. So I just imagined Brendan putting like big wings on the side of the website. It's very good. Anyhow, that has been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast within podcast. That's good stuff.

1:23:06David Pierce:It's so good. That's still the theme song. I love all the other theme songs equally, but that one's still my favorite. That one feels right to me. Going on a Kara Swisher podcast and playing a growing inch and a Brennan Karr's dummies. It was very good. Thank you everybody for allowing that moment to happen. It is great. I'm only slightly jealous that you did it with her and not me, but your back here would suggest that I'm better than Kara Swisher. This is home. I'm never leaving home. I mean, also, I just want to say, current FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez was on the show when we played the Gregorian chant of Brendan Carr as a dummy.

1:23:40Yeah, that's good stuff.

1:23:41David Pierce:All right, so I have a lightning round item that is a bunch of things all at once that I just want you to try and make sense of. I would just like to read you a bunch of recent Spotify-related headlines from TheVerge.com, and I want you to explain to me how it's possible that all of these things can be true at the same time. Ready? Yeah. Yeah. Verified by Spotify badge lets you know this artist isn't AI. Open Claw and Claude can put your AI generated podcasts in Spotify. Spotify is verifying podcasts made by real people too. Spotify's studios AI agent creates a daily podcast just for you. Spotify is going to reserve concert tickets for real fans.

1:24:17David Pierce:Spotify is launching AI generated remixes. Spotify's AI will be able to make an audiobook playlist for you. Spotify will offer authors a way to AI generate audio versions of their books. What is happening? I think Spotify is one of the most interesting companies in tech and have for a very long time. They're right in the middle of culture in a really complicated way that has dealt with so many tech ramifications. But this company is both so unbelievably AI-pilled and so aware that its users and its customers and its clients hate AI, that it is twisting itself into knots and is becoming like this completely unmanageable mix of AI slop and AI tools to make AI and tools to prevent AI and tools to run away from it.

1:25:07David Pierce:Like what is happening here? Yeah. We have a verified badge for not AI music is like you should, we will link the story and people can read it. It's basically an honor system. like you can just sort of tell spotify that you didn't use ai yeah and like that's it you know and like compare that to google rolling out synth id in all of its products and putting the synth id detector in a bunch of its products and like pushing the whole industry to using content credentials like in deepfakes world it is just accepted that you are going to watermark everything that ai generates in music world because just the way music is made and layered and components and the fact that some artists are really into AI, like there's no standards, there's no controls.

1:25:50And Spotify is like, just say it. And then we'll make a, we'll put a badge up, right? You know, and it's like a little more complicated than that, but like, not really. And then next to it is like, we want to make you playlists. And like authors, I was just with Joanna Stern and she spent like four days recording her audio book. Like, does she want a robot to do that for her? Probably not because our audience doesn't want to, but some authors will because they find that like, and you can just see Spotify is like, we don't know where the existential competitive threat will come from, but no one is going to get there before us.

1:26:15Also, everyone hates it.

1:26:16David Pierce:Right. Also, everyone hates it. It's like, that's the thing. They're like, we have to do this. Otherwise, we'll miss it and somebody will beat us. But also, everyone hates this and no one wants this and we have to make sure we give people ways to get rid of it entirely. Can I, I have a lightning round item for you that matches right up with this. It's more Google I.O. But YouTube announced that you can now remix YouTube shorts and just like put yourself in other people's videos. And it's like, are the creators going to be happy with this? like there's likeness detection there's controls is that something i want to do right like there's just this push to be like put the ai in the places because someone else might get there first and figure out whatever the next iphone of ai spotify's is right and it's like i don't actually think anybody is worried about that my my most nihilistic view on spotify is that spotify is actually very happy for you to listen to ai generated music because it doesn't cost spotify right this is why they're happy for you to listen to white noise right so that spotify is like thrilled to have a way to make the case to music labels that it's it's being the good guy here but is also sneakily going to try to let you watch and listen to as much ai as possible um i hope that's not the case i suspect it is the case um the thing about all of these tools to me is like the the deepfake detection stuff and the likeness detection all of this suggests and assumes that these companies have bulletproof tools that work and they don't they just don't they they never have content id on youtube doesn't work yep like it doesn't it doesn't work it works sometimes but like there's been this whole enough for everyone to pretend that it works yes but then there's been this whole rash recently of people uploading full movies yep to youtube that stay up for a long time and lots of people watch them and you can just you can just watch all of monsters inc on YouTube because someone uploaded it to their YouTube channel.

1:28:06David Pierce:Like the tools that are required to make this stuff work don't work. And I think at least one of the interesting things about like Sora, when, when opening, I launched that was like, they built the sort of content detection stuff in from the very beginning, which is like, okay, you upload a video and you have to give it your proactive permission to sort of release that in the world for people to make remixes from. And I think if you start with that from the ground up, you have at least a slightly better shot of making that work, to try and backfill that into a platform as big and sprawling and messy as YouTube is just preposterous.

1:28:41David Pierce:It's just not going to happen. And so this thing where they're like, oh, well, you have the control. It's like, no, you don't because your tools don't work. Yeah. And you can't build these things on the premise that the tools work because they don't and they're not going to. And so what are we doing here? It is really the, I think, Jess Weatherby wrote for us, like, Now is the time for all of this content credentialing, watermark, deepfake detection systems to prove that they work. Yeah. Right? Like, she has been writing for months, years for us now that everyone keeps talking about it and none of the systems actually work.

1:29:15Right. Right? And every time, you know, Samsung in particular puts out a new camera, like, another wave of deepfake apocalypse has occurred. Mm-hmm. Like, the what is a photo apocalypse has occurred. It's like in the past. Like, that's just a smoldering ruin. Yeah, we're well past that now. And now we're like fully into deep fake apocalypse. And the idea that whenever you open YouTube, it should be able to read a watermark and show you it's AI generated is right up against everyone hates AI. And the creators know that if they say AI generated in their videos, people will yell at them. So they don't want the watermarks.

1:29:46Yep. And it's like, well, then you shouldn't use the tools, but then you can't not use the tools because to be a successful creator on these platforms, you have to make an infinite amount of slop. Like you have to make four videos a day on TikTok to be a TikTok creator. Like, that's just the rule. Like, there's some kind of swirling pressure on all these platforms where they know that what they want is more. And the easiest way to get more is AI. And then they know that the audiences hate AI. And they also shouldn't serve them deep fakes because they might destroy the world in our shared notion of truth.

1:30:16But then we definitely need more. So here's more AI. And, like, I don't think anybody, to your point, I don't think anybody has a clear and coherent vision of what it means to run a social media platform in the age of AI right now.

1:30:27David Pierce:No. But again, I think everyone feels like they have to race after the thing, right? Like so much of this is all the same thing. Everybody feels like they can't risk losing the race, but nobody knows what they're racing towards. So all we get is just insanity all the time. But again, it is interesting to see in the product, these companies start to recognize that people want out of some of this stuff, right? So you're starting to see, like, you've been saying for a long time that one of your big bets, I think in our year-end episodes last year, you said one of your big bets for 2026 is that we're going to start to see real segmenting of the AI social network and the human social network even inside of some of these apps.

1:31:04David Pierce:it's starting to happen. Like that is that is actively starting to happen even as these companies will not stop talking about all the AI features that they're doing. I also think and this is maybe more conspiracy theory than not but all of these companies are like pushing their engineers to use AI to code more things faster than ever with fewer layers of management and like product management and design than ever and so like of course they're shipping a bunch of weirdo garbage features. Like if you want to keep your job at meta you had better ship some stuff that uses ai to do something right and it's like do you like of course there's no plan like of course of course there's no thesis to what these platforms look like you've terrified everybody that they'll lose their job if they don't token max their way into shipping 500 new features tomorrow with literally no oversight i it's just like they're gonna kill themselves like i don't know how else to describe this like the people don't love it.

1:32:04And I haven't seen one of these features on any of these platforms where I'm like, that rules. Yeah, I totally agree. Actually, no, I did see one. TikTok launched video summaries that were so deeply bad that they were actually great.

1:32:19David Pierce:I got so many that were just completely 90 degrees divorced from what the video was that it was like it had no idea. It wasn't even wrong about the video. It was just a completely different video. Yeah, it was a different video. It was always about fruit. These berries are glistening red. It's like, what are you talking about? It's like, these are trucks. What are we doing? It was great. That's the best one that I've seen before. That's fair. I do agree with that one. All right. You piggybacked on mine, so you go next. What's your next one? I mean, we have to talk about the SpaceX IPO. Elon Musk just filed for it.

1:32:49It's supposed to be a trillion, the biggest IPO ever. There's a lot to say about the SpaceX IPO. the fact that Grok doing deepfakes is a risk factor for SpaceX is hilarious but it is listed

1:33:02David Pierce:in the IPO documents in the S1 because X is now part of XAI which is now SpaceX AI which is part of SpaceX yep cool so of course Grok doing deepfakes is a huge risk factor for the space company that makes sense yeah you know a lot you can dive into the financials of it we maybe should have like Liz come back and do that with us but the thing that really grabbed me was SpaceX business is a broadband business. It is Starlink. That is the profitable part of SpaceX business. Everything else is kind of like losing money or like right on the bleeding edge. There's a part where they just sort of confidently predict that they will have the biggest total addressable market in world history.

1:33:41And it's like, how and why? And then you look at the actual business and you're like, oh, you're running Verizon, but in space with bigger fixed costs that Verizon could ever possibly dream of. Right. And like, there's something in there where I don't even think this is a hot take to say anymore. The SpaceX IPO is just a referendum on Elon Musk. Like, here's some wild ass shit. Do you believe it? Right. Because if you look at the financials and everybody looking at the financials is like, what are you talking about? How do you get from here to there? And like, maybe you believe in Elon and maybe this IPO is a referendum on whether retail investors on the IPO day are going to believe in Elon.

1:34:21I think we should go more into detail on it. This is why we're going to do a daily show. This would be an episode of the daily show.

1:34:27David Pierce:It will be, in fact. Yeah. Maybe a couple of them. If you just look at the graph, estimated total addressable market by segment, and it's a$28 trillion total addressable market that they're calculating. They're just like, there will be a$22 billion market for enterprise AI applications, and we'll have all of it. It's like, what are you talking about? that doesn't seem right yeah like there's just a lot of that going on in the in the ss1 so yeah we'll go through it in detail but the core of it is like it's so funny that they're a broadband company like the heart of it is that they're they're running t-mobile yep like i don't think t-mobile space t-mobile but with yeah but the incredible fixed cost and also you can't repair anything if it goes wrong right amazing yeah yeah it's pretty good i also encourage everybody s1s are a lot they're very interesting because it is it is maybe the most honest a company kind of ever has to be uh especially at this stage but especially the risk factors especially for a company like spacex they have to they have to detail every single thing they can think of that might go wrong it's just so funny in this case one of them literally amounts to like ah we might not get to mars imagine that being a risk factor for your company oh yeah the big payoff on on elon's stock is only triggered if he establishes a colony on Mars with 1 million occupants.

1:35:51Right. It's like, all right. Like, that's one way to structure your stock vesting schedule.

1:35:56David Pierce:Knock yourself out, buddy. Yeah. It's very good. All right. My last one before we go is we need to briefly talk about the Trump phone. Oh, boy. The Trump phone is in the wild, Eli. I don't know if you're aware of this. A few places have it now. Yeah, it's out there. We don't, which I find incredibly personally upsetting. I'm not saying we're definitely blacklisted by the people at Trump Mobile, but I'm just saying that Don Preston on our team has covered Trump Mobile more closely than anybody. And they have, I would say, become increasingly less thrilled with him and willing to talk to him over time.

1:36:30Well, they've only talked to him once.

1:36:32David Pierce:yeah but it was glorious and they showed him a phone that we believe was the phone it is in fact it appears the phone the phone is incredibly late it is not made in the United States it is now I believe the phrase is made with American values in mind which is just hysterical like you can just say things is the Trump mobile thesis the phone appears to be just a blatant rip of an HTC phone it has a it comes with a gold not actually gold, but gold-colored braided USB cable, which I very much appreciate. It has an American flag on the back with only 11 stripes, which is perfect. It just seems like everyone who is buying this phone is going to have wildly overpaid for kind of a crappy mid-range Android phone.

1:37:18So CNET got it. They put up a video. We have it here. I just want to skip to sort of the end. They just did an unboxing hands-on. It's great. They're showing the camera and they're showing some photos that they took with the camera and the camera roll. every single photo is watermarked with not only the date and time but a trump logo oh my gosh it's the most insane thing i've ever seen in my entire life there's a t1 phone logo on every photo

1:37:42Nilay Patel:it takes that's incredible it's so good it's so good that is the most perfectly on-brand thing i think i can imagine presumably you could turn off but it's like how do we set our phone apart put a Trump logo on every photo it takes.

1:38:00David Pierce:So I live near Washington, D.C., and I'm in D.C. all the time, and everywhere you go now, there's some giant banner with that one face of Trump doing his sort of, like, angry. And I'm just like, they need to now figure out a way to watermark that into the background of every photo you take. And that's the real future of... The T2 is just going to have Trump's face somewhere in the background of every photo that you take. That's the synth ID? Exactly. It's like, that's how you can detect of it's a deep fake. Like if there's not like in the noise of the photo a Trump face. Yeah. We're going to get a Trump phone.

1:38:32We're going to review it. I'm confident it's going to be a shit mid-range Android phone loaded with floatware. But that's the reality of it. Yep. But it's happening, David.

1:38:42David Pierce:It's honestly, I'm sort of thrilled. Like I really, I have said all along that it is much funnier if this thing actually exists than if it doesn't. And I'm genuinely psyched that it actually exists. And it's also terrible. I mean, They got farther with the Trump phone than they did with the Foxconn factory. I'll give them that. Sure. Truth Social is built in. Huge distribution win for Truth Social. So far, I do want to point out that so far only two of them exist. And they went to NBC News and CNET. Is this shipping? You know what I mean? True. That's a fair point. If you have one, vergecastattheverge.com, 866-VERGE-11.

1:39:19David Pierce:Call us from your Trump phone. Tell us how it goes. We'd love to hear from you. All right. We need to get out of here. nilai it's good to see you you go sleep off google io i'm gonna go sleep off whatever the sickness is i've had all week uh send us emails tell us what you want to know on daily verge cast if you have more questions about everything going on at the verge we are always game to hear about it verge cast the verge.com is the email 866 verge 11 is the hotline remember as always the best thing you can do to make nilai in particular completely ungovernable is to subscribe to the verge.com Theverge.com slash subscribe unlocks everything.

1:39:54David Pierce:You get ad-free versions of this podcast, version history, decoder, Neilai Sundar on Tuesday. Is that what you said? Sundar's on Tuesday. It's a good one. We went long. Big decoder week next week. Yeah. Did you make Sundar look at your phone this year? I did. I did make him look at my phone this year. All right. That's going to be a good one. Go subscribe to that just so you can watch that one over and over and over and over ad-free. It's going to be amazing. Yeah. We will be back on Tuesday and Friday, one more week of normal programming before we get into daily stuff. We have a really fun show coming up on Tuesday, including about this thing that I'm wearing, the Fitbit Air.

1:40:23David Pierce:Very excited to talk to V-Song about that. The Verge Cast is Verge production and part of the Fox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next week. Me and I. Rock and roll.