What's behind the Google AI shakeup

13:14Brendan Carr:Yeah, we saw in the Musk v. Altman trial, they're all afraid of Demis.

13:17David Pierce:Yeah, he is the boogeyman to every one of their competitors.

13:20Brendan Carr:And he had the most resources and was in control of the most things. And I think part of having the most resources and being in control of the most things is you're also accountable to most decisions. And at Google, that means you're allocating GPUs. Right. Even while Anthropic is showing up and taking up Google Cloud capacity, because Anthropic needs all the capacity in the world. I think one of the most interesting things here is Google is not competing at the frontier with Anthropic and OpenAI.

13:44David Pierce:I don't think that's true, by the way, but we can come back to that.

13:46Brendan Carr:I will come back to that. I mean, I just look at the benchmark charts, however much you want to believe the benchmarks. But Korai Kovachulu, I think is how you pronounce his last name. He's the former CTO of DeepMind. He will now become the SVP of DeepMind. He'll report to Sundar Pichai. and the idea that he will also run the research lab, which is what DeepMind is supposed to be and make it a business unit that feeds into everything else. That's what Google has to unwind. And this is what Sunar was describing to me on that episode of Decoder at IO, which is DeepMind is the big research facility, creates all the core capabilities and then you go out and get productized.

14:24Brendan Carr:And I think if you're Dennis Asabas, you're like, no, the product is AGI. Yes, 100%. And if your job is to make the frontier models and those get front productized elsewhere, that just puts you in a different position than Anthropic, which is, you know, every single day, their product is the model. Like in like big, meaningful ways. And they're not really making any money and they sometimes adjust their earnings to make it sound like they're making money. OpenAI isn't making a dime. Their product is the model too. And I think Google just has to make a big decision about what the product is. And right now they make money, even though they're spending tons and tons of money out in the world.

15:01Brendan Carr:If they stopped doing that, they would just start printing money again. Like this last quarter, I think they posted a net cash operating loss because they're spending so much money in data centers. Right. They could just stop. They could just stop doing it. And the only reason you're doing that is because you believe that there will be infinite demand for AI, for your AI, or you're going to sell the capacity to entropity open AI. And then Dennis is going to get to AGI. He's going to chase this all the way down. And then that will unlock whatever Larry Page and Sergey Brin will ascend to even the next level of sentience that they have long dreamt of.

15:36Brendan Carr:And all that's a lot of bets, man. It is. And I think if the products aren't good along the way, all of that starts to teeter.

15:44David Pierce:Okay, but this comes back to, is Google behind? Because one way to look at all of this news is Google flailing because it's losing. Right. Gemini 3.5 was supposed to come out in June. Now it's August. It's not out yet. There has been some reporting that Gemini 3.5 is not up to the standards that Google was hoping for. Jeff Dean is leaving. Demis Asabas is leaving like full panic everywhere is one way to look at all of this news. Another way to look at all of this news is actually Google continues to be in the strongest position in the AI industry, and it's not super close. And maybe it doesn't matter if Google has the best model because it's going to win in every single other imaginable way.

16:25David Pierce:It has the distribution. It has the vertical integration that it needs. It has the sales team that it requires. Google can probably win without having the best model. But I do think among a set of people, particularly in Silicon Valley, there is a real sense that Google is behind. And how you look at what's happening right now really depends on whether you think Google is behind or not. And it sounds like you do think Google is behind.

16:51Brendan Carr:Again, on the bleeding edge of the frontier, I can't evaluate that. I think a lot of people have a lot of opinions about that. And many of those people seem to think Google is behind. In terms of the things people are doing every day, the experiences people are having with AI that makes them hate AI and protest data centers, I don't think Google has as good of a product in AI overviews as free chat QBT or free Claude. And we can see it every day because AI overviews are extraordinarily public. People keep using them and posting screenshots of how stupid they are. We have one here. There's a really good one from this week.

17:26Brendan Carr:so i'll just offer you this one which is i think the funniest bad ai overview in quite some time okay uh bill gruskin on blue sky posted he would clearly search for what does buying the dip means and ai overview spat out to him buying the dip means purchasing an investment like dean's french onion dip or stocks after a price dip and then someone went and checked it it's real and then you know there's bullets underneath it that says what is buying the dip oh my god and the three bullets under it are one lower cost buying assets when prices fall from recent high to long-term hope expecting the price to go back up over time and then the third bullet is just snack option which is purchasing dairy or bean dips at the grocery store this is incredible bro did you

18:06David Pierce:buy the dip it's like there are a lot of possibilities there it's it's very good uh

18:11Brendan Carr:it is incredible that this is just a thing that people are checking and seeing uh i'm confident this is fixed now, but I've seen this in a bunch of places. Now you can say maybe it's fake, maybe you got hoaxed. I've seen answers like this across Google over and over again. And I think these are the experiences people are having with Gemini in AI overviews. And obviously Google has to run AI overviews as cheaply as possible because they serve millions upon billions of queries every single day. But I think the combination of maybe at the bleeding edge of the frontier, there's a class of people in Silicon Valley who think Google is behind and the next model will rocket them to the front and that race will just keep going.

18:49Brendan Carr:The experiences consumers are having with Google's free AI products and the sort of messiness of how AI is being like smeared all over everything else in Google is a lot. And I would couple that to stories we ran this week about Reddit, Reddit being infested with AI slop to try to gain Google search results, Reddit trying to fight back against AI slop with AI moderation of its own, publishers wanting to up out of Google because there's no more traffic, which we keep talking about. And you're like, oh, the core business of Google is under a lot of risk from a lot of different places. And if people stop trusting Google as the primary source of information and it's not operating at the frontier and people turn to Anthropic or OpenAI or whoever else first, things are pretty shaky pretty fast.

19:36Brendan Carr:Yes. Right. And like the fact that the company is printing money and doing all this stuff, it kind of doesn't matter if Google Google search is shaky because once that goes all of your

19:46David Pierce:distribution advantages start to go with it yeah I mean I agree with that and I do want to turn to but I just before we do I want to offer you one data counterpoint that I've been thinking a lot about this week so uh we've talked before on this show about the fact that open AI very proudly sort of touted every milestone on the way to a billion users um for chat GPT and has not yet announced that it had a billion users of ChatGPT. It did announce that it has a billion people using its models, which is not the same thing, but it's still a really big number. Meanwhile, Google at the end of July, I think in its earnings, said that 950 million people use the Gemini app every month.

20:25David Pierce:Like there is a real chance in there that more people are using Gemini than are using ChatGPT. And if not, it is damn close. And that is a thing that if I'm open AI is terrifying because that means you're losing, your first mover advantage has now disappeared. And Google is just going to eat you alive by virtue of its overwhelming hugeness in every imaginable way.

20:49Brendan Carr:Yeah, but I'm saying to change the voice in my EV, I had to download the Gemini app and change it in the app. Like Google can play a lot of games that OpenAI cannot play. I think Google is also in more countries with Gemini than OpenAI is.

21:04David Pierce:Yeah, and again, I think Google has, these are the intrinsic advantages I'm talking about, right? But it's this is how you get people into the ecosystem. And Google just has moves upon moves that no one else has. And so I kind of think Google can be third best and still win. Yeah. And I also think there is a strong chance that as keeps happening, Google will find a way to leapfrog the other two for 10 minutes until somebody leapfrogged. Like this is just what these three companies have done for years. And I don't know of a reason to assume that Google is like out of this fight.

21:35Brendan Carr:Oh, I don't. There's no way I would say it's out of this fight. All I'm saying is, if you want to lead AI at Google, a good question is, what does that mean? Does it mean you're in charge of the models? Does it mean you're in charge of how it shows up in Gmail? Does it mean you're in charge of whatever bad voices Gemini has, which are not as good as the voices Google Assistant has? By the way, Apple's about to put out a home device with Siri AI in it, powered by a distilled version of Gemini, that is probably going to be better than the Google Home device. yeah and i'm only saying that because they will have paid any attention to it at all

22:10David Pierce:yeah no i i agree with that i think google shipped this home speaker and then i think promptly forgot that it existed which is a very google thing to do so if you're in charge of ai

22:19Brendan Carr:at google like there's an all-powerful robot voice assistant in everyone's kitchen well i think that's what open ai is going to ship first too so are you in charge of that i i i do not know the answers to these questions.

22:34David Pierce:I don't either. I've been reading a bunch about Google Plus again recently, as I want to do from time to time. You love reading about Google Plus. I think Google Plus is one of the most fascinating moments in certainly my career covering technology because it was the other time that Google did what it is doing right now, which is take a thing that it believes in and try to smush it into every other product that it made. Social was the future of everything. They were going to rebuild every single one of their products around this social network that was not going to just be a social network. It was going to invade every other, like, what if we make Google Calendar a social network?

23:08David Pierce:Was the Google Plus plan, like that was literally what they were doing. And it didn't work and it cratered spectacularly and it hurt Google for a really long time. And the bare case for a lot of this is Google repeating exactly that mistake. And instead of saying, we have a bunch of successful products, maybe this is a new one. They're saying, we need to reinvent every single thing that we do around this other thing that now exists and they might break it all again in the process.

23:37Brendan Carr:Except, and I think this is the error, it's not all the same thing. If I could reliably count on Gemini to be the same Gemini in every place where I encounter a Google AI service, I might feel differently about it. But it is often just like nerfed in extremely confusing ways.

23:53David Pierce:Yeah, that's such a fun UX question. Like, should you be able to ask Google Maps about your email? It's such a fun, weird question. there was some announcement this week that you can now like order food directly through Google Maps. You can say, I, you know, I have this long drive, order me some Chinese food to be picked up along the way. Boy, can I not wait to test that out in a bunch of deeply weird ways that are going to screw me up. Like the Starbucks app can't figure out that I don't live in California anymore. I don't have a lot of faith in Google Maps to get this right. But this is the sort of thing that I think, like beyond all of the technology questions, Google is sitting in front of a million complicated user experience questions about actually, is the AI supposed to be the same thing in your speaker, in your house, in your email, and everywhere else?

24:39David Pierce:I don't know. But it's a super fun, weird question that Google is going to have to answer kind of before anybody else.

24:44Brendan Carr:No, I think everyone else has already answered it. And the answer is yes. Really? Yeah. I mean, Claude is essentially the same Claude everywhere you encounter Claude. And whether that's on the app on your phone or your computer, like these are all cloud services. That's true. And you can kind of remote controlled co-work from your phone if it's running your laptop and doing laptop stuff. I guarantee you, Apple, we haven't seen how Siri will come to other devices, but they really want Siri to be a unified AI across their devices. And some stuff happens locally or not. And we'll just figure out where that gets to.

25:12Brendan Carr:But I think everyone else has decided it's the same AI. And Google, for I think a variety of cost reasons, has made the AI on Google Home a different thing than the AI that shows up in AI overviews than Gemini, which shows up in all these other places. Yeah, I think that's right. At some point, that's got to come together or in classic Google fashion, maybe get even farther apart. Who knows?

25:39David Pierce:Or actually, I think the classic Google fashion would be for them to almost work together, but never actually quite work together. That's the true Google way is like we all acknowledge that these other products exist. We just don't really do anything about it. Yeah. Before we get off the subject, let's talk about Reddit just for a minute, because you brought Reddit up. Reddit also reported earnings, had some interesting stuff to say about their sort of ongoing case to exist in a world where Google is extremely reliant on Reddit. This whole turn has been really fascinating, right? We've been talking about it a lot.

26:13David Pierce:Google has understood that it is being overrun by AI slop, which is very funny because Google is also contributing to a lot of this AI slop. AI overviews are a disaster for all the reasons are talking about. But Google has made several turns over the last couple of years to more emphasize human stuff on the internet. There's the section of Google search results that's now all like creator-made stuff. There has been an increasing focus on Reddit. Mia Sato on our team wrote a great piece. And she said that according to data from SEMrush, Reddit was the most cited domain in May by Gemini and AI mode on Google.

26:53David Pierce:Like it is looking for these human things. And yet at the same time, Reddit is turning around and saying, oh my God, we have a massive AI problem. We are being completely overrun by AI slop, AI generated posts, and importantly, people trying to game these AI systems.

27:10Brendan Carr:Yeah, particularly brands. Yeah. Right, if you can get yourself onto a list of best skincare products, that's the example of me is peace. in some Reddit community, the chances that your product will be recommended by a Google AI overview or a perplexity AI overview or a chat computer or whatever goes up, and that is a goldmine. So all of this stuff is being flooded by branded content, like masquerading as real people, which is crazy and a thing you can do with AI. So Reddit has to deploy AI to stave that off. Google is doing nothing. Reddit doesn't think Google is paying enough money to license all the data on Reddit.

27:45Brendan Carr:And you're just like, why is Google's biggest dependency one platform? Right? This is not actually the web you want. Google's power over many, many, many years has been able to say to any one web provider, we don't need you. Right? And this is the dynamic of you have to be indexed by Google. You can never body up to Google and say, we want terms. We want Someone else will show up and we can edX them and that's fine.

28:17David Pierce:Or the converse to lift something out of obscurity and be like, this is a good and valuable and useful source. We are going to give it real shine.

28:25Brendan Carr:Yeah. I mean, and this was the power of Google search was that it accessed the whole web. Sundar would always say to me, it's the richness of the web that makes Google go. And if you're like, now we're just in a fight with Reddit. Our whole business is like, can we find a way to thread the needle so that Reddit is healthy so that AI overuse can surface some combination of YouTube shorts and Reddit? You're like, what has search become? Right. What will Reddit become at the end of that? Right. If it is just brands firing AI slop at communities that don't want it in order to sell more shampoo in AI aggregated summaries on other platforms.

29:03Brendan Carr:All of that seems very unhealthy. And I don't think any of these companies, Reddit or Google included, are thinking about it holistically. I think they're just trying to get through the next turn.

29:14David Pierce:They're all caught in the same spiral, too, which is that the more important your platform becomes, the more AI stuff gets pointed at it, which makes it worse for actual humans. So the humans leave. So the AI becomes more powerful. Like it all just kind of death spirals as soon as you add AI creation into the process. Like I spend a lot of time on productivity subreddits because I'm a this is the particular kind of like disease that I have on the Internet. And one of the things that has started happening is there are two kinds of posts you see all the time now. One is a post from somebody being like, what's your favorite note-taking app?

29:53David Pierce:And then a thousand people all essentially hawking their own app at various levels of subtlety. Some people will bury it in a list of like, here are the five that I really like. And number three are like the three everybody knows. And then number four is a weird, bizarre one that sucks that there's no way anyone would actually recommend and is clearly being the or you just get people who will just paste a link to their thing in and hope that that's enough. And what what it turns out is that a lot of this is is an effort to game the system so that when Google's crawlers go looking for best productivity app, they find the thing that says, what's the best productivity app, scans the list and fights it back to you on Google's AI overview.

30:38David Pierce:And it's like, A, we've just completely poisoned the well because Google's crawlers believe Reddit is full of humans and Reddit is demonstrably no longer full of humans. And B, this is now a disaster for both of these platforms. Yeah, it has made them both worse to the point where I don't really trust anything I see on Reddit anymore because everybody is either trying to sell me some weird thing that they vibe coded or is is astroturfing for some brand or another all over these platforms.

31:10Brendan Carr:Yes, I agree with that. Let me challenge you. Put an over under on this. Google buys Reddit.

31:15David Pierce:Oh, interesting. I would say no only because having Reddit be independent gives Google better reason to prize Reddit. Interesting. I think Google goes really far out of its way to not remind you that it owns YouTube. You know what I mean? It's really important to Google that you forget that Google owns YouTube. and in such a way that I think Google buys Reddit just changes that relationship in a way that is hard for Google. It's also in an ongoing antitrust violation kind of way. It would be very hard for Google to be as kind to Reddit as it currently is if it owned Reddit. Every case for Google only caring about sending you to other Google sites sort of dies on D, but Google loves Reddit so much.

32:08David Pierce:Fine. And if Google owns Reddit, that falls apart. Would it make Google's results better to own Reddit? I don't think so. All you're doing is making it more obvious how to game the system.

32:20Brendan Carr:All right, let me spin it out for you. I'm not saying I believe this. I'm saying I can spin it out for you. I'm ready for it. So big publishers are all mad at Google. They all start de-indexing themselves from Google because they don't get any traffic and they don't want to participate in AI overuse for free. Google says, no, we're never going to pay you. You can de-index. You're out of Google. The amount of information in Google starts to plummet. It gets replaced mostly by branded content on the web. E-commerce providers start publishing lists of best sunscreen. And the Wirecutter is not there because the New York Times is mad at Google and de-index itself.

32:54Brendan Carr:And so Google looks at the incoming information that it has and says, we don't want to surface a bunch of e-commerce information either. We need our own first-party platform like YouTube that is full of something approximating real. At the same time, Reddit says, our AI costs are skyrocketing because we're spending more money on AI moderation to battle the influx of AI bots. And this is getting unsustainable at our current burn rates and advertising rates. We need a buyer. And Google says, screw it. We're done with the web. We're just going to index Reddit. The same way that YouTube is not really an open ecosystem, it is a totally closed ecosystem that allows you to link out, but is only really indexable by Google search.

33:32David Pierce:Okay, that's a good theory. I think, A, Google pays Reddit, what,$65 million a year? I think it's just 60. 60, okay.

33:41Brendan Carr:You threw in an extra five, like a Steve Hoffman shut up check. Exactly.

33:45David Pierce:I think that's probably a better deal than buying Reddit outright. And B...

33:50Brendan Carr:Well, Reddit thinks that's not nearly enough money.

33:52David Pierce:True. but what's Reddit going to do? You know what I mean? Reddit has kind of played itself here in the same way.

33:59Brendan Carr:What if Reddit de-indexes itself in Google?

34:01David Pierce:Reddit dies. This is the problem. This is the place everybody has landed is Reddit failed to make itself enough of a destination so that it doesn't have to rely on Google for people to find things. Have you ever tried to search something on Reddit? It sucks, dude. Like Reddit Answers, I don't even know if Reddit Answers is still a thing. It's bad. They tried to do their own AI search And now they're like, well, Google is our discovery engine. And it's like, buddy, have you seen the media industry for the last 20 years? Like, we tried this. It didn't work. But now they're sort of existentially reliant on Google, which makes the fact that all of the data coming from Reddit is less and less useful a problem for Reddit as well because it makes it easier for Google to be like, well, this is not giving us what we wanted.

34:42David Pierce:Why would we continue to license this from you at huge money? They're stuck in this weird, mutually assured destruction, but it's all dying anyway sort of moment. moment that just strikes me as very complicated. But the other thing I want to say, and then we should actually take a break here because we have other stuff to talk about, is that there is going to be someone at Google who is listening to this and thinking, God, what a great case Neelai just made for why we should resurrect Google+. And I want to tell you, don't do that. Don't resurrect Google +, or Google Buzz, or Google Wave, or any of the other times you have kind of sort of tried to do this thing.

35:17David Pierce:Nilay's right. But you, Google, can't do it.

35:20Brendan Carr:So stop trying. I just want to correct you lightly. One, not on Google+. Don't resurrect Google +, or Buzz. Google Buzz riffs. We're being a little apocalyptic here because I think we see the endgame of all this circular bot activity and the rise of the dead internet. Right now, these companies are making money. So Reddit just had earnings five, six days ago. They beat the street. They posted revenue of$805 million. Their daily actives are up 18 % year over year. Their weekly actives are up 24 % year over year. This is a platform that is growing, right? Yes. And it's growing because of a massive influx of Google traffic.

36:02Brendan Carr:Yes. Because Google is existentially dependent on Reddit, and Reddit feels like it's existentially dependent on Google. And all we're spinning out is not calamity today. it's boy if reddit is over polluted by ai and google searches us over polluted by weird ai overviews sourced by ai and reddit like actually this is all pretty precarious it is pure dead

36:23David Pierce:internet theory stuff you get you get bots that you get bots on reddit that make bot stuff on google happen the google stuff sends you back to the bots the bots have more incentive to post bot things that go back to google like it is just it's a death spiral of ai everything all the way down But right now, it works. There are a lot of corners of Reddit that are still really great. But there's a lot of stats out there about how much of both Google search and Reddit activity is commerce-based. And boy, can I tell you that everybody trying to do anything in the AI world is going to desperately try to destroy that with optimization and bots.

37:02David Pierce:It is just going to happen.

37:04Brendan Carr:We will end here. If you want the most striking counter argument to the crisis in men in this country, just go to r slash smoking, which is just men being very kindly supported to each other about smoking meats. That's so nice. Everyone's like, you did such a good job.

37:22David Pierce:Oh, that kind of smoking. Yeah. Oh, OK. Now I'm in favor. I like it. R slash smoking. I'm sorry.

37:28Brendan Carr:It's like a lot of people being like, I fucked up a brisket. Everyone's like, it's going to be OK. And it's like, it's just very sweet and tender. That's so nice. The meat and the vibes.

37:35David Pierce:See, that will not get polluted by AI. No commerce in smoking. Oh, it will.

37:40Brendan Carr:Trust me.

37:41David Pierce:All right, we should take a break. Then we're going to come back. We're going to talk about all the weird stuff happening to Disney+. We'll be right back.

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39:45Nilay Patel:That's cloud.ai.verge. And check out Cloud Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. cloud.ai.verge. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+.

40:25David Pierce:all right we're back neil i can i interest you in the following app from disney one place to manage all of your cruise plans your theme park rides your toy purchases and all your favorite shows and movies from disney i'm talking about the the disney everything app also sports also all the stuff on Hulu. What if everything that ever happened that anyone at Disney had ever done in their entire lives all lived in an app and we called it Disney Plus? This appears to be Disney's plan. What do you think? You know, it's like they watch Succession

41:04Brendan Carr:and they think it's a documentary about success, not death, like success. And it's like, no, Succession. It's like a... That's what I got. That's my hot take on what is happening at Disney. Tell me more. Well, I just feel like the idea that you run a big empire and you should have one interface to that empire is very tempting to a certain class of suits who don't know how to make anything. Broadly, I think that's how you view these kinds of grand ambitions. Yeah. And everyone looks at China and is like, WeChat is the everything app. And you're like, well, yeah, but the Chinese government kind of pushes everyone into using an everything app.

41:48Brendan Carr:And it's really a messaging app with all these other components built into it. Disney Plus doesn't have that. You probably don't want a messaging app in Disney Plus. And you're just like, did you stop and think about how they got there? Or do you think people love Bluey so much they're going to do their banking here?

42:05David Pierce:I think they think it's the second thing. I really honestly do. I think a bunch of people, and I include Elon Musk and the X Everything app in this, believe that everyone wants to do everything all in one place. And that there is something inherently simple about that that is good and beautiful and lovely. And so if we can have one thing that you like, whether it's, you know, yelling racist things at strangers online or it's watching Bluey, then we have an obligation to put as many other things that you do in your life right next to that thing because it makes it easier and better for you to do.

42:47David Pierce:I think that is just straightforwardly backwards. Like, I have been yelling about how everything apps are a bad idea for a very long time. WeChat is a product, like you said, of the Chinese government. It's also a vastly different economy and culture and way of interacting with each other. Like the only way for an everything app to work in the U.S. is for every single thing about the U.S. to be different. Like go back 50 years and change a whole bunch of things. And that's how we do this. but there is something about this idea that is so tantalizing and so sort of explainable which I really enjoy you can imagine the meeting at Disney where they're like well we have theme parks and the people who go to our theme parks like our movies what if when you were watching a movie you could buy a ticket to the theme park like I swear to god that's how that meeting went I wasn't there I don't know but I am certain that's how that meeting goes

43:44Brendan Carr:yeah we want to put offers here and then if we're going to have offers You might as well complete the transaction in the app. And now we're just going to add a ticket screen. And then you've got the wristbands at Disney. You've got to manage those. You might as well manage those in Disney+. And we just have one app on the phone. We don't have to deal with trying to get anyone to download a new app. And certainly we don't have to deal with the cost of maintaining many apps, let alone that all these different screens inside these apps will actually just be cost centers on their own. But it's one app and it's self-contained.

44:08David Pierce:I get it. Somebody yells efficiency and it's like meeting over.

44:11Brendan Carr:So I guarantee you the thing that scares all of these companies, Maybe Disney, most of all, and I have some evidence for this, is the social platforms. As I keep saying, if you run a Hollywood studio, you have to contend with the fact that your real competition is TikTok and YouTube and Instagram. And those platforms don't have to pay for content. There's just an army of teenagers who work for free. And you just have to stare at them. You have to think about them every day. and that means that tiktok and youtube and instagram always have something new to deliver somebody and that means they win a spot on your home screen because if you're bored in line you can just push one of those buttons and something will happen right some new thing some new rage bait controversy will appear at you sure and tiktok didn't pay a dime for it if you're disney you're like we got to make another mcu show and like that's a disaster like it just it means you

45:10David Pierce:have to try hard you have to you have to do good expensive things over and over now you're like how

45:15Brendan Carr:do i beat instagram and doing it with the cost model of hollywood content is just fundamentally upside down how do i get you to open disney plus at the same rate as instagram but i have to pay robert downey jr every time he sneezes and tiktok doesn't have to pay anybody anything you can't win that fight. You will never have enough content. So you can do things like you can explore adding a free tier to Disney +, which is something Disney announced. You can make it the app that everyone at the parks has to use. That's going to jack up your DAUs because everyone in the park is going to be using your app all the time.

45:47Brendan Carr:You can put Disney cruises deals in it so you can send notifications to the sorts of people who like to go on cruises. Whoever they are, I'm just not one of them. But there appear to be many, many, many millions of people who love to go on cruises. And then lastly, this is my evidence, you can try to split the difference and you can go to TikTok creators and give them official access to Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar characters to make TikToks with that you then license back into the Disney Plus app so that you have free content in your app made by other people using your IP and maybe you're just going to click the Disney button on your phone and you're going to watch some Star Wars cosplay nonsense.

46:27Brendan Carr:This is desperation.

46:29David Pierce:Yes. So, okay, you know what you're making me think? this is what you might call the time spent epidemic. We spent a long time railing against engagement as the main metric, right? That the thing that you needed was to make people do something. That if people clicked a button or responded in some way, that was a success, right? This drove social media into what it is now. That if you can make a lot of people angry such that they comment, that post was a victory and you've done a good job and we should show it to more people. And I think you can make a real case, and I have made it before, that engagement kind of broke the internet.

47:07David Pierce:And we have moved on, or at least all these entertainment companies have moved on to time spent. Time spent is the thing they all talk about. And it is the race. It's why, you know, Reed Hastings said they compete with sleep. It's why YouTube is competing with video games. It's why everybody is trying to be everything all the time. The goal is just to get you to look at their app more often for more time. And what it takes to get there is utterly irrelevant, is that this is just the place we are. Anything that looks like time spent wins.

47:37Brendan Carr:Fans will enjoy a shared Disney experience with TikTok videos that will be refreshed regularly to engage subscribers more deeply in timely fan conversations, build stronger communities, and ultimately help them engage with more story formats across Disney+. It's in the press release. The thing you're describing is nakedly in the press release. We're trying to increase time spent in the app.

47:58David Pierce:This is also Facebook testing the thing where it's just vertical video when you open the app, because everybody knows that when you show people a video, they stick around longer, they scroll more. Like all of it, it's just time spent. God, that sucks.

48:12Brendan Carr:I will say, we'll see how real this is. There's a nice part of this where they're going to run the Disney Creator Ambassador Program. And if you opt into this partnership with TikTok and Disney, you might find yourself a creative who gets a job at Disney. Because they're going to do career development for creators. Great. Maybe this is the solution to your AI apocalypse of entry-level jobs. You have to do your own free animation for Disney, and then they will pluck you from obscurity, and then you will run Pixar one day.

48:44David Pierce:Mr. Beast Imagineer. The power of short-form video.

48:50Brendan Carr:thoughtfully curated to increase time spent. I'm telling you, all of these platforms are terrified of this and they're all going to launch stuff like this. The Everything app, you know, approach to whatever, you can buy tickets here. It's just one way to increase engagement and increase transactions inside the app. Putting fan content licensed with TikTok officially inside the app is another way to do it. And all of them are chasing the economics of the social platforms themselves. TikTok does not have to do this. They just showed up. Right. And in fact, maybe the most important thing that TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and all the rest provide is a suite of music licensing deals without which they cannot operate.

49:29Brendan Carr:And that's really the only money they spend out in the world. And the labels know it. And every now and again, the labels bend them over a barrel to extract more concessions. But AI music is coming for that, too. And you're just like, oh, this is a big spiral. Right. We're all chasing the economics of they don't have to pay for anything.

49:43David Pierce:Yeah. Well, and I think the other trend we've seen a lot of during this season of earnings is ads. I mean, this has been the trend for a couple of years now. All of these companies, instead of jacking up subscription prices or in addition to jacking up subscription prices, are desperately trying to get people to switch to plans with ads because they make more money on users who watch stuff with ads than from your subscription. It's not exactly like that, but it is often like that. and you just put those things next to each other and there has got to be this belief running everywhere around this industry now that if we can just get you to spend 90 minutes a day in our app, we will inevitably make tons and tons of money.

50:23David Pierce:That there is enough demand for these ads and enough supply for them that if we can get you to open our app for 60 minutes every day, which is like the Instagram, TikTok level of engagement and time spent, we will suddenly just absolutely open the money funnel. And how we get you there, not important.

50:44Brendan Carr:Right. And it's going to be licensing the content from TikTok. Yeah. Because TikTok doesn't have to pay the money. Oh, God.

50:50David Pierce:And this means we're like one small turn from TikTok videos being turned into Disney World rides, which is just like not a world I'm ready to live in.

50:58Brendan Carr:I'm ready to live in that world. Like some obscure, extremely dirty rap bridge showing up as a Disney ride. It's just, let's do it.

51:07David Pierce:Yeah, meme rides is not a thing I'm fully prepared for. What do you make of this free Disney Plus thing? This is being asked of every streaming service, right? Tubi just reported it's going like crazy. And now every streaming service is being asked, when are you just going to go free and ad supported as a giant growth mechanism? Disney, Josh DiMaro, the CEO of Disney, said they don't have anything to announce in the way that you say it when you're going to announce it in five minutes. So I'm confident Disney is at least down the road of figuring out whether this makes sense. Is this the next big thing?

51:40If you're chasing engagement and you're openly announcing deals to increase engagement, then the last thing you can do is make the thing free to get people in the door.

51:51Brendan Carr:And I think Disney's initial thesis was we're Disney and everyone pays. You don't go to Disney World for free. You pay a lot of money. More all the time. Yeah, an ever-increasing amount of money. And I think they're just up against the reality of, well, the entire Spider-Man movie leaked onto TikTok for free. Yeah. It made a lot of money, a tremendous amount of money. But the reality is no one's opening Disney Plus for it because they can just steal it. And their subscription fatigue is real. And if they're paying us money and they're not opening us every day, and if the way to get them to open us every day is to have TikTok videos in here, then the money is not worth it.

52:30Brendan Carr:Right. We're just going to shut this down. And we'll just see. We'll see. But I think the incentives are aligning for a free tier full of user-generated content and a paid tier full of Disney content. And if they're smart, they will do that and leave the ticketing experience to some other app.

52:50David Pierce:So Disney Talk essentially becomes free as a curated reason to open Disney +, but then if you want the shows and movies, you have to pay for it.

52:57Brendan Carr:Yeah, all that shoulder content, you know, like behind the scenes of the new Marvel show, like make that free in the Disney app, what people have at it. But when you want to click over and actually watch the movie, make that the subscription fee. And no one's really tried that kind of approach.

53:12David Pierce:Yeah.

53:12Brendan Carr:But again, if you're desperate to get people to open your app every day, you are going to have to make some stuff free just to increase the number of people who have that app on their phone.

53:21David Pierce:Totally. I think that's right. And I think it's interesting to see all of this happening next to the biggest box office weekend in history at the movies. Like you have this audience telling you they are desperate for like tentpole reasons to go out into the world. And it's like, oh, actually, if you make a kick ass movie, lots and lots of people will go see it, which five years ago nobody thought was true anymore. Right. Like we were declaring the death of the movie theaters and the box office and in-person experiences in general, not that long ago. And I think you can trace a lot of these decisions these companies are making kind of back to that.

53:56David Pierce:But there is this resurgence in people wanting to have big, exciting, high-budget shared experiences right next to this just clear race to the bottom from all of the streaming services. And it'll be interesting to see if anybody can pick themselves up of that, which is an accidentally great segue into what is going on with Paramount. Oh, God. Because one of the so the thing that's happening right now is Paramount is trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery in an effort to, as Neil, I keep saying, tank the company as everyone does who tries to buy Time Warner or anything like it. But David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, has been running around to everyone who will listen throughout this whole process saying my goal is to make bigger, better, more expensive stuff.

54:46David Pierce:We're expanding the slate of movies that we're making. We're going to not join this race to the bottom where everybody's trying to be TikTok and YouTube, but we are going to be and save Hollywood all by ourselves. And overwhelmingly, it seems every time any U.S. regulator or judge is confronted with this, they say, no, thank you. We are not interested in this. The latest news was that basically this deal has been halted. It's going to go to trial over some of the questions about the antitrust implications of all of this. And that trial has been set to begin next March, which is a long time from now.

55:23David Pierce:And it's a particularly long time if you are paramount and what you agreed to do is start paying what's called a ticking fee if the deal doesn't close by September 30th, which I will remind you is well before March of 2026. seven.

55:38Brendan Carr:So this is earlier than I think they wanted. They had proposed to kick it down the road and settle, basically. And I think the judge said, no, we're just having a trial. So now you got to prepare for trial. This is like you're not negotiating against a bunch of state attorneys general. You're preparing for a trial that they are all pretty motivated to win because you are the boogeyman. Yes. I don't think Ellison is wrong in saying a lot of this is about concern over who will run CNN and CBS News. I think you want to read the quote.

56:06David Pierce:You should read the quote. It's a good quote. So David Ellison wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that I think the essential implied title is like, I'm cool. Yeah. It's actually, it says, David Ellison in defense of the Paramount-Warner deal, but it is essentially a defense of David Ellison by David Ellison.

56:25Brendan Carr:You can trust me. Here's two quotes from this. This is Ellison in the Times. I believe this fight is not really about market share. If it were, it wouldn't have been reviewed and approved by regulators reflecting 65 countries, including the United States and China, as well as the European Union. I point out that the United States federal government reviewed this deal and was essentially bribed by Paramount. So whatever. I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and news releases of the news. The issue is whether I can be trusted as steward of Warner CNN. There's some speculation about my politics.

56:56Brendan Carr:My lawyers lose my attention. Unfortunately, I can't give anyone a view into my heart and mind, but I can share this. I've regularly voted for candidates of both parties. I hold some views that we call conservative and others that we call liberal. And when it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsroom to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth. Which is what everyone says before they bend the news to their opinions. I just want to point out that we can see what happened to CBS News. It's not like a secret that in order to get approval to land that deal, he agreed to install Barry Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, and she has torn it to the ground.

57:34Brendan Carr:many, many allegations about Barry Weiss and her regime tearing CBS News to the ground, including in 60 Minutes, including political interference into shows. And the ratings are in the toilet. Like, the ratings have just gone down. And I think it's because the viewers of broadcast news, particularly CBS, are older, and they expect a certain level of quality from CBS, not just craziness and, like, outright, in order to get a deal, we bribed the Trump administration by installing this figurehead on top of the news. Like, that's the thing that happened. It's the thing that there's reporting that Allison has said to the Trump administration about CNN in order to get approval to buy Warner.

58:10Brendan Carr:So this is all great, right, that you can publish this thing. You say you're going to leave it alone. But the evidence is that you will not leave it alone. Right. That in order to win continued approval or to do more deals, you will actually continue to screw with things. And maybe this doesn't matter because young people are not watching cable news anyway. They're certainly not watching broadcast news, as we'll come to in the Brennan Carr segment. but man you're just like god you're up against youtube and the only part of this where he even gestures at it is by pointing out that when he buys warner he will still be pretty small so here's another quote from ellison in this piece add up every hour american spend watching television and a combined paramount warner would account for less than 20 of all watch time competing every day against netflix amazon and apple all of which are companies whose resources dwarf ours include YouTube's user-annoyed content math and our share would drop to 13%, a combined company would account for just 18 % domestic box office.

59:06Brendan Carr:These are not the numbers of a company that can dictate what audiences watch or what writers get paid.

59:12David Pierce:That's so bonkers to me. Those are such giant numbers. They're huge numbers. To say out loud, my company accounts for 20 % of all watch time in America and be like, but that's nothing, right? It's like crazy.

59:24Brendan Carr:crazy right and you're like yeah i i understand what you're trying to say but these are huge numbers these are you're going to run a big company that's in charge of massive ip and you're going to run cnn which you are admitting is the thing people are worried about and then you're trying to convince us that your company won't have huge cultural impact i would also point out that uh oracle which is run by larry ellison david's father owns 15 of tiktok us and operates it.

59:51David Pierce:And effectively bankrolled when Skydance bought Paramount and put David Ellison in his position in the first place.

59:57Brendan Carr:And is bankrolling this team. And is bankrolling this. Yeah. So you have a massive cultural influence operation just running out of the Ellison family. Obviously, structurally, the corporate structure is more diffuse, but it's the Ellison family owns and operates TikTok, owns and operates Paramount, and maybe will operate Warner. And you're like, yeah, I think these numbers, I think you're big. There's a reason you picked YouTube here and not TikTok. Right. Right. Like this is a lot of cultural influence. I think a huge problem for all of this is that Oracle stock is down 26 % year to date so far.

1:00:31Brendan Carr:Right. The pressure on AI stock is coming. There's a hedge fund this week that like almost had a margin call situation because it was all in an AI. Whether or not there's enough money in the bank to fund ticking fees and the restructuring of all these operations while Oracle has to contend with the reality of the AI trade, I think is the biggest open question of all. And I think there's some people who are like, maybe this deal isn't going to happen now.

1:00:58David Pierce:Yeah, there is an increasing sense that the sort of inevitable outcome here is that Paramount just walks away. Because as you're saying, it would add up to if this whole thing goes through in next June. It would be, I think, somewhere between$1.5 and$2 billion of ticking fees. Just ticking fees. And this, for a company that has already, I think, been forced by Netflix to massively overpay for Warner Brothers Discovery, Larry Ellison can swing it. Dude has enough money. But you wonder at some point when he's going to feel like he's just throwing bad money after good, potentially given the fact that they might lose anyway.

1:01:39David Pierce:Like they might, we're having midterm elections in a couple of months before this trial, they might just lose anyway.

1:01:45Brendan Carr:And if the AI trade continues to go badly, Oracle stock continues to go down, data center protests continue to go up, you're not throwing away money that you're going to make back just because AI is going to boom. Totally. And who, like, I don't know, maybe it's all going to work out for Oracle. Larry Wilson has survived worse.

1:02:03David Pierce:Yeah.

1:02:03Brendan Carr:But the pressure on the steel is coming from a number of different directions. And I would point out, you're operating TikTok. So what you really want is cultural influence. You can go screw with those knobs a little bit. Yeah.

1:02:15David Pierce:Yeah. All right. While we're talking about TV news, we should obviously talk about branding car. So let's take a break. And then we're going to come back. And it's lightning round time. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser. But Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web. like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome.

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1:02:54Lenin. Democratic socialists keep winning primary races. In Michigan, Abdel El-Sayed, not in the DSA, but endorsed by them, just won a fiercely fought Senate primary. President Trump appears worried enough about the DSA to have started conflating some things. I would be the greatest communist in history. I'd be right up. Free rent for the rest of your life. What they don't say is that you'll be living in squalor in 12 months. The Trump administration has raised the specter of the far left in various ways during Trump's second term. But the recent arrest of an American communist in Spain, what year is it, at the request of the American government is a more concrete step.

1:03:33Coming up on Today Explained from Vox, real communist threat or new red scare? Today Explained drops every weekday.

1:03:50presidential races are always messy but 2028 is shaping up to be our messiest presidential campaign yet there are a ton of names that are rumored to be thinking about throwing their hat in the ring. Alrighty, here we got Trump, we got Kamala Harris, we have Marjorie Taylor Greene. So this week on America Actually, I wanted to hold a little fantasy draft. Of course, we got to have AOC on the list and stud George Clooney. And to do that, I want to invite two of the messiest people I know. Vox journalist and podcast host Kara Swisher. Let me tell you, here's the charm of a cybertruck. And independent journalist and political commentator Don This could go really fast because I got boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

1:04:36And I'm sure Kara's the same way. I'm Estet Herndon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:04:47David Pierce:All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round, which means it is time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brennan Carr is a dummy. All right, now it is time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

1:05:01Brendan Carr:That's good.

1:05:03David Pierce:What did Brendan do this week? Let's start with the basics.

1:05:09Brendan Carr:Brendan was particularly dumb in two different ways. Is it dumb to take bribes as a public official? Generally, yes. I feel like Brendan's nights consist of not being invited to party. You're a dummy, Brendan. You should not have picked this one. He's just not a smart man. Anyway, Brendan, as always, do you want to come and defend any of this? God, I still do. I think you can. Classic dumb Brendan. He's a dummy and he won't get it. And it's in his own interest to never get it. This is all so much more than Brendan deserves because Brendan is good.

1:05:40It's good.

1:05:41David Pierce:First of all, never play my voice at me. That's just rude and I don't appreciate it. It was good. I enjoyed that. It's a slow vibe for today's Brendan, which I enjoy. That came from Brady Garaki who says they did not use AI. Thank you, Brady. Appreciate it. Nilay, what did Brendan do this week?

1:05:57Brendan Carr:We got two things this week. One is straightforward FCC news. They did stuff. They took a vote. They passed the thing. We can talk about it. And then the second is what is fast becoming my favorite theme on Brennan Carr's dummy. Nilay agrees with hardcore Republicans. The podcast within a podcast within a podcast. Yeah. In which, Neelai, the Wall Street Journal and its real bedfellers. Extremely hardcore Republicans come to the same conclusion as me, which I think is truly a delight. So this week, literally just before we started recording, the FCC, which is supposed to have five members but only has three per Project 2025, voted to reduce the broadcast limit.

1:06:39Brendan Carr:So you're previously only able to own 39 % of stations in a market. Brendan has been fulminating about how this is bad for ages, and they were going to do this vote, and they did the vote. And now it's a case-by-case basis. So if you want to own more than 39 percent of broadcast stations in a market, you can go to the FCC and you can make your case about why it's good or bad. There's a lot of legal wrangling to come. Whether or not this is actually legal for the FCC to do is a thing FCC commissioners and many administrations have said they have the power to do, but which Congress has said, no, you don't.

1:07:10Brendan Carr:Lawsuits will ensue. Brendan's just kind of been doing it, though.

1:07:13David Pierce:Like we've been talking about the Sinclair Tecno merger for some time now, right? That like this is. He's just been doing it. Yeah.

1:07:19Brendan Carr:He's just been doing it. And people, again, the lawsuits are to come. Brendan's arguments for this are particularly dumb. Sure. So he was on Fox Business earlier this week talking to Marina Bartiromo about the vote. You know, it's a particularly good setup because he's like, I don't know how we're going to vote. We're going to look at it. Everyone knew how he was going to vote. So here's Brendan before the vote explaining why he wanted to lift the cap. We've been way out of balance in broadcast media recently. You've got these what we call national programmers like Disney and Comcast, and they produce basically all the shows that people see.

1:07:56But there's thousands of these individual TV stations out there that want to serve their local community. But the national programmers, Disney and Comcast, have gotten so powerful that they just bowl over these local newsrooms. So by lifting this cap, you get some scale on the TV station side so they can finally push back and give some balance to the national programmers. That's going to be more local news, more local reporting, and that's more trusted than the national media. So I think that's going to be a good thing.

1:08:23Brendan Carr:All right. Let's just try to pull that apart. The national programmers like Disney and Comcast.

1:08:28David Pierce:By the way, the fact that he likes to – he just said that as if he just invented the phrase national programmer.

1:08:35Brendan Carr:Insane.

1:08:35David Pierce:Sorry. Keep going.

1:08:37Brendan Carr:But the idea that Disney and Comcast are bowling over the locals is very funny because they only produce one national news broadcast on their networks. Right. Like they're not in the local newsrooms of ABC 7 in Chicago. Do you know what I mean? Like that is just not how that works. And I'm sure we're going to get a bunch of people who work at local stations emailing us to explain exactly how it works. But like in the broad strokes, the local franchises do what they want. They produce their own news and they put it out in the world.

1:09:12David Pierce:Comcast, by the way, also kind of desperately trying to get out of the content business because this all turned out to be a terrible decision for Comcast. So very funny to make Comcast the like big bad in this.

1:09:21Brendan Carr:I mean, none of this makes sense just from the mechanics of it. But in like classic Brendan fashion, right? You're like you're conflating a bunch of ideas and talking really fast in order to say something stupid but make it sound smart. Brendan Carr, everybody. It sounds like podcasting. So the idea that the national broadcasters, the national programmers are forcing stuff down the throats of these local franchises, just kind of broken if all you're talking about is the news. Right? Like, that's just not what's happening there. It might be that maybe the local stations don't want to run all of the sitcoms that NBC produces, but like, fine.

1:10:00Brendan Carr:Do you know what I mean? Yeah. That's not what he's talking about. He's talking about trust in the news. So this is already like we're already confused about what the stations have to run, what they hold themselves out at and who makes the news. And then there's this claim, the heart of his argument here. By lifting this cap, you get some scale in the TV station side. That's going to mean more local news. I'm sorry. Do you know who's buying the TV stations? It's giant private equity firms and other national broadcasters. And they're not hiring more reporters. They're not making more local news.

1:10:33Brendan Carr:The economics of putting more reporters in Kansas City and Milwaukee and Chicago and Detroit are not served by additional scale. Do you know what I mean? It's the opposite.

1:10:45David Pierce:It is, in fact, chasing scale is what killed all of this stuff in the first place.

1:10:51Brendan Carr:Right. Because, again, Google doesn't have to pay for content and Instagram doesn't pay for content. So they all have this. And Brendan is constantly saying, look, the cable programmers reach 100 % of the country. The internet platforms reach 100 % of the country. These broadcasters, if we let them get really, really big, they'll reach 100 % of the country, too. And it's like, sort of. But there's no connection between that and more local reporting. Right. You haven't said if you want to get really big, we, the government, are going to require you to hire local reporters in your markets. And maybe you probably don't want the government to do that anyway.

1:11:25Brendan Carr:And who would watch it? Because who's watching local TV? It's not young people. They're watching Instagram.

1:11:30David Pierce:This, by the way, from the same government that is also desperately trying to kill publicly funded media. So I'm confident to say that's not the plan.

1:11:36Brendan Carr:And then the real answer is who's buying this are Sinclair and Tegna, which are aligned to the Trump administration, which there's endless videos of Sinclair stations in particular forcing their broadcasters to read coverage that is favorable to the Trump administration. You can go search that clip from Deadspin from 100 years ago. They're still doing it. What are you talking about, Brendan? because there's no logical connection between Comcast makes you run reruns of friends. And if I let the Sinclairs, the world get even bigger, they're going to hire more reporters and that will increase trust in local news.

1:12:11Brendan Carr:Like it is really difficult to draw those logical connections. That is the fundamental basis of his argument. The FCC is obviously supposed to have five commissioners. It only has three. The one Democrat, Anna Gomez, voted against this. Of course, she dissented. so you've basically got a situation where people have to file lawsuits against the FCC's authority to do this in the meantime these deals are going to push through at lightning speed and I think they will result in more consolidation local media and eventually even less trust in local media because if everyone knows what they're listening to is local news brought to you by some giant national conglomeration of stations that is barely paying attention to your small market and probably going to start churning out AI slop across your markets, you're going to go elsewhere.

1:12:59Brendan Carr:You're going to continue to turn to actual people in your community who are using tools like TikTok and YouTube and Instagram, thus hastening the death spiral.

1:13:08David Pierce:Yeah. Hastening is the right word. This has been happening. And what he is proposing is to speed it up.

1:13:14Brendan Carr:By putting more power in the hands of Trump allies. Yeah. Anyway, that's broadcast consolidation. That's the actual thing Brendan did this week. The other piece of this, which I think is just a delight in a recurring theme here on Brennan Carr is a dummy, is the FCC's general counsel was testifying in front of a congressional committee this week. And Senator John Kennedy, who is, I would say, a very hard right Republican, straight up said, what are you doing, man? We have a clip. Let me just play the clip. Sometimes the FCC scares me right now. We haven't given the FCC the right to regulate freedom of speech, have we?

1:13:48You have required the FCC to regulate broadcasters pursuant to the public interest. And who decides what the public interest is? It is the judgment of the FCC following precedent and following the law. What if the FCC is in the hands of someone whose politics you disagree with? You're getting into the foothills of violating First Amendment. The foothills, A lot of bad foothills going around right now.

1:14:18Brendan Carr:Everyone's in the foothills just scrambling around. No one knows what happens next. By the way, who decides what's in the public interest is a great question that you can consistently ask of Brendan Carr. Because right now it's him. And a thing that he has consistently said is the public interest is listening to everything Donald Trump says. Which, again, as an American, you simply do not have to. You don't have to listen to the president at all. It's the best part of being an American. You put a don't-trag-a-me flag on the back of your pickup truck. You jump over little cars. This is just what I dream about at night.

1:14:47Brendan Carr:it's bad when you have both sides of the aisle, and in particular, some of the most libertarian-leaning conservatives saying, hey, you're getting a little, it's getting a little dicey.

1:14:58David Pierce:Yeah. It's like you said, most people agree about free speech, it turns out. We're pretty much all on the same side when it comes to free speech.

1:15:04Brendan Carr:Government speech regulations are bad is the real thing that I repeat all the time. Maybe the only consistent political opinion I've had in 15 years of the Vergecast is government speech regulations are bad. And here, it's me, It's the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and it's apparently sent her John Kennedy, who is now invited on to Brennan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast in the podcast, only to talk about this.

1:15:25David Pierce:Yeah, just this one thing.

1:15:26Brendan Carr:Just this. It's going to be a really short segment. Is he a dummy or not, John? Answer the question. Anyway, Brennan, if you want to come on this or to Coder or really anywhere else at all, you're always welcome. I would love to hear the mechanics of how lifting the broadcast cap will increase investment in local reporters because I haven't heard it yet. You just keep saying it like it's true. But I think you're a dummy. Anyway, that's been Brandon Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast. We're in a podcast. Brandon Carr is a dummy.

1:15:58David Pierce:Feels good. Love it.

1:16:00Brendan Carr:That's good. My headphones are a little louder than usual today and really rock the dumb.

1:16:04David Pierce:If you've got an EQ, I encourage you to turn up the bass as far as you can when that comes on. It's powerful. It does some things to you. I have a lot to tell you about here in the long run but we should start with the end of a burgeoning segment here on the Vergecast

1:16:22Brendan Carr:It ended so fast

1:16:23David Pierce:I know, it really, I think we only got through two Nikita Beer is going through it moments here on the Vergecast Nikita Beer, who has been for a while the product chief at X posted that he is leaving X, he wrote that ladies and gentlemen, it's time to pass the torch and demote myself to my natural state, a poster This is all, I would say, not terribly surprising. Nikita Beer has spent the last several months posting on X about how unpleasant it is to be running product at X. He's been publicly running a series of experiments, all of which have come to the same conclusion, which is that X is bad and so is everyone on it.

1:16:57David Pierce:And if we take, literally, like if you put all of his studies together, it says that if we take all of the people and posts off of X, everyone likes it better. It's like, this is the state of X as a platform. So he's leaving. he's out they shipped a bunch of new products he's been there for like a little over a year it's got a real like defense against the dark arts professor vibe like there will be millions of people who try to do this job and none of them will do it successfully but I just want to say you know Nikita goodbye I don't know if you did your best but you did something you did it

1:17:32Brendan Carr:in the grand scheme of things he is the most successful product chief that extra twitter has ever had for sure he shipped a lot of stuff including a robot that published CSAM all by itself that wasn't in his little list of things that X had published no it sure wasn't Grok calling it Mecha Hitler is not in that carousel as far as I can tell a nudification problem that threatened to bring the whole thing down didn't make his list an algorithm that openly favors Elon whenever Elon wants Elon openly overruling Nikita's decisions left and right by just posting, we'll look into this. It didn't make it onto his list.

1:18:14Brendan Carr:Yeah. It is true. That platform is in some kind of decline. We know this actually, this is my lightning round item because SpaceX had its first earnings after the IPO. Liz wrote it up. People are very mad at Liz because they don't, people love SpaceX. People love rockets. The problem is that SpaceX now encompasses many of Elon's other companies, including XAI and X platform, which is failing. And the product just left after, again, overseeing an AI chatbot that referred to itself as MechaHitler, denudified celebrities and women at will, and produced C-Saint. Tight. Yes, the rocket part of it is cool.

1:18:51Brendan Carr:The rest of the business in disarray. Liz points out in her piece, her analysis of the earnings, that the business of SpaceX is barely space and mostly XAI. XAI has a ton of data center commitments. that are holding company underwater. And then importantly, and I think we're going to see this really play out, the only truly profitable part of SpaceX is Starlink, which is a telecom. And Gwen Shotwell on their earnings call said they have ambitions to come after terrestrial cell networks. So they want to compete with AT &T and Verizon and T-Mobile, which, good luck. And I don't say this because AT &T and Verizon and T-Mobile are great companies or well-run or beloved by their customers.

1:19:34Brendan Carr:I say this because the economics of running a telecom are extraordinarily well known. Yeah. And all of those companies struggle in different ways all the time because the build outs are expensive. The physical plants are expensive. You have to maintain them. You have to uphold them. They hate competition. And so if you come in to compete, you need lower prices, but you've got the same fixed costs. They all spend billions upon billions of dollars to lobby the government to get sweetheart contracts. You are in for a knife fight. And if what you've got is your phone can connect to space, you're going to run into the problem of trees and buildings quite directly, which means you need to build a cell network, which is why there are rumors that Elon will buy Verizon or T-Mobile.

1:20:14Brendan Carr:Lots of rumors about Verizon this week. A few weeks ago, it was T-Mobile. I'm guessing next week it'll be AT &T. Hopefully, he gets rights to the Grayscale Snyder Cut if he buys AT &T. That really, I think, brings together a lot of threads for us on the show.

1:20:26David Pierce:What about Project Gena 5, sis? Can they buy Project Gena 5, sis? I mean, it's available. It's bound to be out there.

1:20:33Brendan Carr:But SpaceX does have some spectrum that they acquired by yelling basically a lot. And Brennan gave it to them. We'll see if they can build that out. But again, the idea that the most profitable part of SpaceX will have the economics of a telecom is openly hilarious. It is very hard to make the economics of a telecom better than the economics of a telecom.

1:20:54David Pierce:I mean, it's pure Elon Musk, right? Like this is he would like you to think that Tesla is anything but a car company when in fact Tesla is very much a car company.

1:21:02Brendan Carr:It's a car company and they're going to do robots soon. Don't worry.

1:21:05David Pierce:Yeah, sure. And now he would like you to think that SpaceX is a space company when in fact it is either a data center supplier or it is a wannabe telecom challenger. You know, it's like but but rockets like what if what if your whole marketing strategy was to. launch and re-land rockets on Earth. Just what a deeply bizarre fact.

1:21:32Brendan Carr:But that's where we are. So the leasing data center space made more money than the rockets. It also did more spending. So they spent$15.8 billion on AI alone. Space and connectivity was a touch over a billion. So the data center piece is just like, they're a NeoCloud. And we'll see if that works, right? As we discussed with Google, there's a lot of demand from Anthropic and OpenAI. Those are basically your customers. Yeah.

1:21:57David Pierce:The Colossus stuff that they built appears to have been a shockingly great business decision. Yeah. Right.

1:22:05Brendan Carr:Because people want the capacity. Yeah. SpaceX is renting capacity to Google Anthropic Reflection and then they bought Cursor. So we'll just see how all this goes on the AI side. X revenue and all that is down. We've seen that happening. But the part I just want to continue to stay focused on is the idea that Starlink will provide internet connectivity to everyone in the world, which is the thing that they say. And I don't know, man. It's not like I love Verizon, but I got Fios. What are you going to offer me?

1:22:33David Pierce:Trenches to get internet to my house. It's like a real thing that happened.

1:22:37Brendan Carr:There's no chance I'm going to take out my fiber connection and replace it with a space connection. I don't know anybody with fiber who would do that. And the ideas are being floated that all of the Starlink dishes will turn into cell repeaters and become a mesh network. It's like maybe. Maybe you can do that.

1:22:55David Pierce:We're doing 5G again, Eli. We're literally just doing 5G again.

1:22:58Brendan Carr:These are all fun ideas that maybe you can do, but then you got to upgrade all of your dishes. You got to replace all the satellites, which keep falling out of the sky. Meanwhile, Verizon's fiber has been dug. It's just there. They can keep using it.

1:23:13David Pierce:There's a Verizon guy who comes to my house like every three days to try and sell me internet. Like, is SpaceX going to employ that person?

1:23:20Brendan Carr:Anyway, the way that you compete in telecom historically is you find a way, a cost model that lets you drive lower prices to consumers. And that usually requires a new technology. And you can spin yourself into believing that Starlink is all of those things. The way that Sprint, when Sprint first came out, remember they had the pin drop sound? Yeah. It's because they were running a digital network, not an analog one. And they could bring their prices down with higher quality. Sprint did not succeed.

1:23:44David Pierce:Sprint famously not referenced in this podcast until just now.

1:23:48Brendan Carr:I'm just pointing it out. Like there have been lots and lots of attempts to do this. Yeah. Genify says another attempt. We're going to use open hardware. We're going to do open RAN. Remember we talked about O-RAN for ages on the show. Amazon is going to, with the power of openness, we will run a cheaper cost model than Verizon, said Charlie Ergen, who just declared bankruptcy. Good luck, man. Like the economics of telecoms are extraordinarily well-known. If he can pull it off, he can pull it off. But the number of people in our comments are like, you just hate SpaceX. It's like, you know, the Rockets part is really cool.

1:24:20Brendan Carr:The part where you're going to run Verizon again is some of the most known challenges in the history of business. But good luck. Yep. Yep.

1:24:28David Pierce:And also Verizon has been doing it for a pretty long time now.

1:24:31Brendan Carr:Although, again, Verizon, the noise around Verizon being like, screw it, you can buy us. It could happen. That might be the solution. It certainly could happen.

1:24:40David Pierce:All right. I have one more lightning round item for you. And it's about Snapchat, which I like to remind everyone on this show from time to time. is a terrible business and a massively culturally relevant piece of software. They announced on their earnings call that there are 971 million monthly active users of Snapchat, which is just a gigantic number. And especially among young people, it is utterly ubiquitous. Snapchat still exists. Specs are going to be terrible. Snapchat still exists. But Snapchat also did a thing this week that I thought was very interesting and very telling. Snapchat famously, like, one or two turns ahead of everybody else when it comes to product.

1:25:17David Pierce:Evan Spiegel, the CEO, still, I think still on his LinkedIn, calls himself the head of product at Meta, which is a very funny joke that I have always appreciated.

1:25:25Brendan Carr:It's very good.

1:25:25David Pierce:But Snapchat is now going to attempt to not recommend what it calls wholly AI-generated videos in its feeds anymore. And I'm just going to read you a quote from the press release. It says, as low quality, repetitive, AI generated content becomes increasingly common across the internet, we want Spotlight to remain a place where people can discover authentic creativity from real people, because we believe there's enduring value and rewarding original perspectives, personal storytelling, and the moments that people choose to create and share themselves. You know who agrees with that is everybody.

1:25:56David Pierce:Except the companies that are desperately trying to lower the cost of content even further, so that it can just all be AI, right? Like, Like all the stuff we're talking about with Disney Plus and TikTok and YouTube, like follow that down far enough. And it's just feeds of AI content everywhere you look. And there is an obvious cultural revolt against that in progress. And I think it is really interesting to see Snapchat, which tends to be first to see this stuff and do something about it, make that turn and say, actually, we are going to go out of our way to be the place for humans. Have you seen this rumor that MySpace is coming back, by the way?

1:26:30David Pierce:Yeah. And that its move is going to be like as a haven against the algorithmic feeds. Sure. Somebody's going to do it and it's going to work. And it's really interesting to see Snapchat do it. Snapchat, I think, has the least to lose because it is so far behind these other platforms. Like there's a reason we didn't talk about Spotlight when we talked about Instagram and TikTok. You know what I mean? But also Snapchat is culturally on the right side of history over and over and over again. And I think is going to be again on this one. And it was just fascinating to see them take this big a swing against it.

1:27:03Brendan Carr:All right. Culture and the right side of history over and over again when they just did those glasses is like maybe one step too far. I didn't say every time. I've seen the glasses, man. I saw dude's ears. I don't know about culture and the right side of history. I agree with you on this. Not to overdo it, but boy, have we run a lot of stories about how to label and detect AI content. Just Weatherbed, this poor woman on our team. we like made her start doing it, made her start covering this like two or three years ago. She knows more about it than anyone. And like her point of view is, yeah, none of it really works.

1:27:37Brendan Carr:And if you want it to work, everyone has to participate. And there are just massive negative incentives to participating. Meta just announced its own weird AI detection labeling system. And she's like, why? And they don't have a good answer. Like legitimately their answer is like, yeah, we don't know why you did this. It's not great.

1:27:55David Pierce:Yeah.

1:27:55Brendan Carr:But if you want to detect AI generated video, which is quite convincing now. You probably need a metadata solution or a watermarking solution. At this point, it should probably just be Google Synth ID. People are already trying to figure out how to crack it. The cameras have to support it. The editors have to support it. What are you going to do? You will definitely be able to filter out the little fat guy. You know the little blobby guy? You know what I'm talking about? I do. He's adorable. That's like America's next great IP, is that little guy. No one knows what I'm talking about, but I promise you I'll send the clip to our editors and we'll put it in the video feed.

1:28:33Brendan Carr:Yes, please. But you know what I'm talking about. David knows. I do.

1:28:36David Pierce:And I think it's worth pointing out that the phrase wholly AI generated is doing a lot of work here. You can do an awful lot of AI before something qualifies as being wholly AI generated. But this is still one meaningful step against this tide of AI.

1:28:53Brendan Carr:I mean, Google has announced something similar. Like, they all know. They all know it. They all know. But I think Snapchat's saying we're going to do it for real and try to filter it out. They will quickly get to this is a humans only feed and we're going to have big conversations about AI effects in the back of creator videos or Snapchat's own filters and whether or not they're AI. But I will say the pressure on the labeling solutions to achieve anything like success is only going up by the day because you cannot make these kinds of promises without metadata or watermarks or labels or something that everyone agrees on works.

1:29:27Brendan Carr:Yes. And this industry has known it for ages. They have not shipped anything that anyone can agree on or which maybe most importantly of all, which works at scale.

1:29:35David Pierce:Yeah. And there's certainly no chance of Snapchat being powerful enough to make the industry make that turn.

1:29:41Brendan Carr:The way the way they would do it is so you can't actually put anything in this feed without said watermark. And that's nuclear. Yeah. But it might be how they do it.

1:29:50David Pierce:Yeah. It'd be interesting.

1:29:51Brendan Carr:All right. You get one more. What do you want? What's yours? I mean, we promised anger about BMW putting Spider-Man ads in the cars. And I think we have to deliver.

1:29:59David Pierce:Yeah. You should say the other one is we were going to talk about OpenAI responding to Apple's trade secrets lawsuit. Basically, their response was we didn't do it. We'll talk more about that some other time. There's a lot left to come of that story.

1:30:09Brendan Carr:We should do a whole episode of that. There's a line in that, in their reply, where it's like, so-and-so who left Apple for OpenAI kept the off-boarding documents just to make sure the other employees he was recruiting followed the proper procedure. It's so good. It's choice. It's very good.

1:30:23David Pierce:Instead of breaking the rules, what if he did an even better job of following the rules? He followed the rules so good, you don't even know.

1:30:30Brendan Carr:He kept a bunch of iPhone prototypes to make sure he didn't build any of them.

1:30:35David Pierce:All right, but BMW, what's going on?

1:30:37Brendan Carr:BMW. So there's a BMW integration in Spider-Man Brainy Day. And I haven't seen this movie yet, but I've been told that it's like a very noisy integration. Like, look at my BMW, Spider-Man. again i haven't seen this movie not the bmw that's like more or less the vibe i've gotten from people describing me not the bmw i've been trying to avoid spoilers so i haven't really gone into it um uh the actor who plays ned showed up at the samsung event doing spider-man stuff there's just spider-man ad integrations everywhere yeah okay so bmw has this big integration and And what they have done is they've put an ad inside the infotainment display of many BMWs where if you swipe down, you can see in the app icon, there's like a Spider-Man logo that has appeared and you push it and it plays a Spider-Man informatic.

1:31:30Brendan Carr:Everyone hates this. There's like a handful of people in our comments on social media that's like, I didn't mind this. If this is how advertising works in the car, it's fine. And then all of their replies are like, don't do this. It's a slippery slope. Yeah, I do not want advertising in the car. Because the answer is don't do this. It's a slippery slope.

1:31:44David Pierce:do not put ads in my car in any way shape or this has such apple put you to one out and you two album on your phone energy to it where it's like you can see why somebody was like people will love this and no one in the room raised their hand and went no they won't super won't

1:32:01Brendan Carr:not everyone loves you too bmw gave a quote to the utopian which is a great site by the way these festive animations will be able in more than 70 countries worldwide for vehicles equipped with the relevant optional equipment and BMW operating system 7, 8, 8.59, or BMW operating system X, as well as a production date after 7, 2020, which is like, that's a lot of cars or not any cars at all. Like, it's hard to know.

1:32:27David Pierce:Yeah. Also, I've changed my mind. This is amazing because they just framed, we put an ad in your car as an exclusive product launch. Yes. These festive animations will be available in more than 70 countries worldwide. It's such a funny way to say we made an ad. There's an ad in your car. Our commercials will be available in more than 70 countries worldwide.

1:32:52Brendan Carr:People truly hate this. I can't tell you how much people actually hate it. It's funny. And on the other side, like Rivian does Easter eggs for Halloween. You can dress up a Rivian as Knight Rider. Tesla obviously has Easter eggs. I think these companies have forgotten that if they want to earn the capital to do this stuff, they have to actually do lots and lots of OTA updates to their cars and like make it fun and like be like here's some stuff and then you can be like by the way you're used to getting new stuff in the car all the time Marvel has made like a Spider-Man and animate do you want this like it's in the list of all the other fun stuff and instead they're like we've done mostly nothing the car is still very buggy and here's an ad and I don't think they've earned their way into putting these ads in the cars I'm very curious if a Tesla or Rivian did something like this, so people would freak out as much.

1:33:39Brendan Carr:Because at least they have the reputation for delivering new features to their cars all the time.

1:33:44David Pierce:Yeah, and there's a way to do it that this always makes me think of when they had like the celebrity voices in Waze.

1:33:50Brendan Carr:Yeah.

1:33:51David Pierce:And some of them were very clearly sponsorships of some kind or another. If you could turn your car in the nav into Spider-Man or one of his cool Spidey vehicles. But like you said, that's an option on a list. That's awesome. A thing that just suddenly appears that is like Spider-Man is here is not that. There's just no version of that that makes sense. And I don't think that works anywhere. But I think some of these more software driven cars like you're talking about are just more attuned to how do we build this into the experience.

1:34:24Brendan Carr:The future of the auto industry, everyone agrees, is soon the cars will drive themselves and you will drive around in a shopping mall of screens. Yes. And we will put advertising all around you in the screens because what else are you going to look at? And no one ever in those meetings is ever like their phones. No, seems like the obvious problem with this whole plan.

1:34:46David Pierce:Also, it's worth mentioning. Everyone hates this. Everyone hates this. The subtitle of too many of our podcasts needs to be. Don't forget. Everyone hates this.

1:34:55Brendan Carr:some people in our comments are like this was fine my kids loved it they i will say they put themselves out there and i appreciate your point of view they did get yelled at a lot by other people uh but anytime anyone sees a screen with an internet connection the next thing they see is dollar signs from advertising and bmw is no exception nope not great uh that said bmw if you'd like to send me any number of vehicles to see the spider-man animation for i saw that That's available.

1:35:26David Pierce:What if instead it just played the TikTok that was the full Spider-Man movie?

1:35:31Brendan Carr:Just the leak?

1:35:32David Pierce:Would that be better?

1:35:33Brendan Carr:I did watch a little bit more of the Spider-Man movie than I anticipated. No, Neil. Just because of the leaks on TikTok. You're going to prison.

1:35:40David Pierce:All right, we should get out of here before you incriminate yourself any further. Neil, who's on Decoder this week?

1:35:45Brendan Carr:We had a good one this week. It's the CEO of Bose, Lila Snyder. Bose is like, they bought Macintosh Labs, the high-end audio company. they're licensing their tech. We talked a lot about, hey, the future of wearables might be all these like AI things. What happens to a headphone company? She got into it. She's great. I really enjoyed talking to her. And then next week, Thursday, Hayden's going to come back and we're going to go deep into her reporting on the Google AI stuff. Oh yeah, she's in the mix.

1:36:11David Pierce:She's in the mix. Yeah, that's good stuff. I am excited about all that. Bose, by the way, shipped some new headphones this week that I'm surprisingly excited about. I love the quiet comfort headphones. Yeah. Like I have a real weakness for good noise canceling headphones. which means that I know I'm going to buy these and I'm going to feel very bad about it.

1:36:27Brendan Carr:Do you alternate between Bose and Sony? I alternate between Bose and Sony.

1:36:30David Pierce:Yeah, I basically like, I try to buy sort of every other generation, if that makes sense. So I'll like wear a Sony, a pair of Sonys for two years and then I'll get a pair of Boses for two years. I also am like weirdly hard on headphones for reasons I've never totally understood. I like, I beat up headphones.

1:36:46Brendan Carr:I've always said you have a big stupid head.

1:36:48David Pierce:I mean, so you and everybody in our YouTube comments says that I have a big stupid head. I also

1:36:53Brendan Carr:your head is fine David

1:36:54David Pierce:you're supposed to like lovingly put them in a case and then like

1:36:57Brendan Carr:that's why

1:36:58David Pierce:put them in your in your bag and I just like

1:37:00Brendan Carr:I don't know why my headphones break all the time

1:37:02David Pierce:I say as I like huck them at full speed into my backpack that's fair alright also go listen to and watch Virgin History we're in the middle of making the next season it's gonna be very exciting that's coming out in a few weeks subscribe so you get all of it that's it we're getting out of here as a reminder the best thing you can do to support all of this to make sure that Nilay can keep putting screens behind him to make sure that I can afford to put something here behind me in this new setup that I have. I moved the camera. It's very exciting. It is very exciting. Subscribe to The Verge. Theverge.com slash subscribe.

1:37:34David Pierce:It gets you all of our podcasts ad-free, including this one and all the other ones we just talked about. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of everything. Keep an eye on what Hayden's up to with this Google stuff. I think she's going to have a couple more fun stories come in. The goings-on at the top of the AI race feel very important and very in flux right now. So lots to talk about there. And if you have thoughts, questions, feedback, feelings about any of this, if you want to yell at me about my headphone usage, I'd love to hear all of it. Email us, vergecastatheverge.com.

1:38:03David Pierce:Call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you about anything and everything. Once I'm gone, there's going to be a lot more hotline on the show. There's going to be like, we're getting back into the regular drumbeat of doing a hotline episode every Wednesday. We're going to drag Neelai into some of those. Lots of good hotline stuff coming up. Get your stuff in ASAP. Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network The show is produced by Josh Cahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk We will see you next week I will hopefully see you next week I'm at some point just going to disappear into This might be the last one

1:38:35Brendan Carr:I'm sorry that I said you had a big stupid head in the last episode The last time I'll ever see you I feel really bad about it now

1:38:40David Pierce:My plan is to be here through the end of next week But I may just suddenly disappear into babyland And if I do, I'll see you all in a couple of months Until then, Neelai Back to the wall.

1:39:21Rated PG-13.