You can't ignore Google Zero anymore

21:05David Pierce:And it's like, it is the sort of thing that it has become absolutely unignorable for everyone in this industry. You might say that Google traffic has gone to zero. Somebody should really, there's a, there's a term traffic zero, maybe we'll call it. But it happens. So now I got to do something. And if the outcome here is, it is economically viable to employ people to make the raw information that gets fed into AI engines that people use to summarize it all, at least there's an economic incentive to make new information. Right now, there isn't really one. Like, the information itself isn't valuable unless you're selling something.

21:41And the whole world being lists of great products to use on a hiking trip sponsored by REI is just the bleakest shit possible.

21:51David Pierce:Yes. So if we do get to a place where in some roundabout way of payments, reporters exist, that might be fine. But I don't know which way it's going to go. I think we just might disagree on the degree to which it's optimistic to suggest that the best possible case for a reporter going forward is to feed data into ChatGPT, even if it's new data. Do you know what I mean? I don't know that I find that as blissfully rose-colored as it sounds like you do. Well, if you know any media CEOs who are interested in product innovation, you give me a call. Looking forward to that. All right. We should take a break.

22:24David Pierce:And then we've actually got a bunch more AI-adjacent stuff to talk about. So we'll get into that. We'll be right back.

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25:52David Pierce:All right, we're back. So we have a bunch of AI news to talk about. There's no sort of big broad theme here, but just a bunch of stuff going on. We should talk about it. But Eli, I genuinely need you to explain this first one to me because either there is something about this story I don't understand or I am going to melt down in an aggressive way on this podcast in a couple of minutes. Can you explain what happened between OpenAI and Hugging Face this week? I do like the way to say Hugging Face a lot. Hugging Face. A company I don't know anything about. What actually is Hugging Face? Hugging Face is like a platform to store AI models and it's like GitHub for AI.

26:25Okay. And that really implies that people know what GitHub is, but it's the first guest audience.

26:29David Pierce:Do you know what I mean? It's a place to put things for AI. It's a place to put things and collaborate on AI stuff. And lots and lots of people use it, and it is a central source of truth in the AI community. So there's Hugging Face. OpenAI is testing GPT 5.6 Sol on cybersecurity benchmarks. There's one called XPoint Jim, and they basically said, go figure it out. Find a solution for it. And the model broke out of the sandbox it was in, and it went and broke into Hugging Face and stole the answers. This is as reductive as it gets, but it stole the answers to the test. And it's not supposed to do that.

27:05Hugging Face says its own AI agents detected and stopped the breach. They're now trying to spin this as a partnership, whether this is actually a partnership, to solve it. Who knows? But they're investigating everything. They're going to bring it to some kind of conclusion. And you really have to either believe that the models are so capable they can evade open AI's own systems and that we're all in danger all the time or that maybe Hugging Face was too easily breached. There was no social engineering, which is like a good and important thing to note. Sure. If you're the sort of person who cares about the model, like tricking the CEO of hugging face.

27:41Inputting his password. Yeah. Okay. But here's the summary here. In one example, the model chained together multiple attack vectors, including stolen credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities, to find a remote code execution path on the hugging face servers. It stole the answers to the test. How much do you want to overreact to this is like, it is up to you.

28:00David Pierce:Can I tell you my personal choice? A lot. How is this not like a screaming five alarm fire about what these models are capable of and what they can do? Hugging Face is saying, oh, isn't this adorable? They came and hacked our system and stole the answers, even though we were just trying to prevent you from doing so. And OpenAI is like, oh, look, how adorable. We hacked into and stole their information. And it's like, we're just supposed to think this is like a normal, okay occurrence because everybody is just trying to laugh it off and pretend it's fine. This to me is absolute disaster on all sides.

28:35David Pierce:This means Hugging Face has a problem. This means OpenAI has a problem. This means these things can do the things that they keep promising us they can stop them from doing. They kept putting guardrails on Mythos and calling it Fable. And everybody's like, well, we can just make it Mythos again. The idea that these models can either be put on rails by the company that makes them or forced into a box by the companies that employ them is clearly not correct. And for all of us to pretend that this is just a delightful, silly thing that happened is not okay. Like it turns out I do understand this story and everyone needs to be angrier about it.

29:09Like I make it worse. Do you want me to make it better?

29:12David Pierce:Uh, let's go with worse and then better. Let's, let's end in a happy place for David. All right. So worse is, it is true that the models keep getting out, right? Like opening, AI was not in control of its own model, and they didn't even detect that it was doing this, even though it was in a sandbox. And by OpenAI's account, which we have to trust, the sandbox had no external connections. Like, aside from being able to download packages to the sandbox, the model should not have been able to have network access, and they blew it. That's bad. Just straightforwardly, that's bad. That is bad. And so...

29:48We gave it nothing, and it did it anyway. It's not good. Right. And then you can make it even worse. You can say this is what you would call the paperclip problem, where you tell the machine to make a paperclip, and it vaporizes the human race and turns this all into paperclips because it's just doing what it's told, which is to get the solution to the problem. Which, by the way, it cheated. I do want to point out that it cheated on the test. It didn't look at the problems and solve the problems. It was like, I can probably steal the answers, and it went and did that anyway. So this is all bad.

30:19Yeah. Okay, here's how I can try to make it better. this model in the testing environment had no guardrails at all. So it would not be the model that is deployed to any normal people or any normal customer outside a very select set of security researchers or whatever we're going to come to in whatever regulatory framework we'll eventually come to. So it is true that this all happened, but this model is the guardrail-free model. I don't know if I made this better.

30:49David Pierce:So what you're saying is this will all be fine once we have a completely rational and thorough regulatory system for artificial intelligence in this country. Like I said, I don't know that I made it better. I'm just pointing out that this is the model without any guardrails. If I'm the CEO of Hugging Face, am I not sitting in my office going, gosh, it's good that Sol didn't decide that the best thing to do was burn my office down in order to get... Either everybody is lying and these things are vastly less capable than we think and everybody is just trying to make marketing moments out of cybersecurity disasters, which is weird, but sort of a thing.

31:28David Pierce:Or everyone should be more alarmed by this than everyone seems to be. And I really think both of these companies are trying to pretend that this was not a terrifying overreach by an AI model and a terrifying lack of protective ability by hugging face. And everybody has real incentive to try and save face here. So they're trying to just like lock arms and laugh it off. This feels bad to me. Maybe I'm missing something. If I am missing something and you are a more sophisticated AI person than I am, I would love to hear from you. Vergecast at theverge.com. Tell me why I shouldn't be at like complete run around the neighborhood screaming levels of panic about this because this is where I am.

32:08David Pierce:Enough with this one. I'm feeling bad enough as it is. Let's move on to another AI thing that frankly won't work nearly as well, which is that Substack added an AI detector to theoretically figure out which of your many, many newsletters have been written by AI. I should say it's powered by Pangram, which we had a whole Vergecast about last week with Jake Kastronakis. Really good. Pangram is sort of the one tool in this space that most people seem to agree actually works at detecting AI. My immediate reaction to this from Substack is just kind of what a self-own to have to roll this thing out on your platform.

32:46David Pierce:But what do you think about this, Neelai? All the distributors of content, all the platforms, if you will, are stuck in a trap where they're getting flooded with AI slop. And many of the platform owners are also purveyors of AI or invested in AI companies or have taken an investment from VCs that are heavy on AI, and they're stuck in the middle. If you're Google and you run YouTube and YouTube is being overrun with Slop, you have the finest of lines to walk. You cannot say the output of Google's AI tools are bad, but everyone hates the Slop. Meta is caught in this trap. Substack, the startup, I have a lot of feelings about Substack, but all their VCs are like heavy AI guys and undoubtedly publishing AI Slop.

33:30This is the challenge for every platform right now is you have to somehow embrace the fact that AI is coming and people want to use AI in whatever way they want to use it, and people hate the slump.

33:41David Pierce:Yes. And you have to detect it and you have to tell people to turn it off. And what are you going to do? And they keep trying to pretend that it's not about getting rid of the stuff that sucks that no one wants, but it's just about, it's about transparency and helping people understand the difference. Like here's a, here's a quote from Chris Best, the CEO of Substack. He says, the core problem is not people using AI or the quality of its output. Strong disagree, but let's keep going. The problem is when there is a mismatch between a reader's expectation and reality, especially when they unwillingly invest their attention in something with no human thought on the other end that's clawed fishing i want to say a clawed fishing is an excellent term and kudos to chris best and so i'll throw one to chris he and i have beefed but i'll give him clawed fishing is excellent and i will use it this is not correct right like the idea that actually what people want is is sort of separation of two good things is not at all actual reality what people want is a way to not have AI in their feeds.

34:40David Pierce:People don't want an AI feed and a not AI feed. Sora did a really good test of if people want an AI feed, and the answer was they don't. Meta did a really good test of whether people want an AI feed, and the answer was they don't. People want a non-AI feed. And all of these things are designed to get AI out, but for all the reasons you just said, they can't say that. And they're stuck. Let me ask a question of you, and by extension, Chris Best, the CO Substack. He's here right now. I can get him. What is an automated system to delete content that people find offensive, if not content moderation, Chris?

35:15Would you call that content moderation? Would you say that it's weird that you are more permissive of outright racism and Nazis on your platform than the output made by Claude?

35:29David Pierce:Oh, boy. The core problem is not people being Nazis or the quality of their output. But the problem is when there's a mismatch between a reader's expectation and a reader. You can just put it all right there. What are we describing? Is it content moderation? Is it the ability to detect certain kinds of content and make sure it does not find an organic audience because the people don't like it? This is a really interesting question, actually. So, Substack, relatively famously, has been very hands-off on this front. And famously to my face. Famously to you. Yeah. Yeah, a clip that has been seen by every person on TikTok at this point.

36:06David Pierce:But look, sincerely, I think reasonable people can disagree on how Substack should moderate the people who write newsletters on its platform. Feel that way however you want. The idea that it was actually willing to take a step this drastic, and in a time like this, with technology like this, this is a drastic step to say we are going to loudly announce that something is AI is a big step. What do you think it means that Substack actually pushed over the line to say we are going to do this in a way that they have not been willing to before? One, I am not as high on Pangram as everyone else is. Okay.

36:45Whether or not they can actually detect AI text at scale over time using more AI, just a big question mark.

36:53David Pierce:I saw a thing on threads the other day that was like, here are 12 prompts to make your AI writing sound less like AI. See what I'm saying? It's just like, oh, right. We're just, this is the cat and mouse game forever and ever and ever and ever. This is just one problem. Maybe more existentially and more depressingly, the market has spoken and it is clear the market will reject AI content more vigorously than it will reject outright racism and outright sexism. I don't know how to feel about that, right? Like maybe you should just let it all ride. I have a lot of feelings about Substack just surfacing Nazis over and over again, which is a problem that just keeps repeating itself.

37:30And just to be totally blunt, Substack has built very, very good content moderation systems. They have them. They're not hands-off. They have them for a lot of reasons. They have them for copyright infringement purposes. They have them because there is some stuff they will not put in their recommendation system. They've built it all. It's all there. And now they're using it to filter and moderate AI content. They've just added another category to their existing content moderation infrastructure. And the market has not demanded that they use that infrastructure to moderate outright racism. And I, you know, maybe that's just the internet.

38:09Maybe that's the world we live in. Maybe that's 2026 and Dark Woke is going to make its comeback whenever it makes its comeback because pendulums do swing back. But this part of the information ecosystem is much more tolerant of one thing than another. And I do think it's very notable that an ecosystem that will tolerate some horrible speech seems to have no tolerance for AI. And that is, you know, you talk about data center protests and have a negative public perception towards AI. There it is again. We will have outright racism and sexism on these platforms that will occur no penalty to them.

38:47And the usage numbers will keep going up. They will steal all of your information. They will invade your privacy. All that stuff. targeted advertising will come at you. They will have problems with children and all the stuff that they do. None of that hurt them. But people hate AI content so much that we're going to build in the filters. Huh. Huh.

39:06David Pierce:Yeah. Yeah. Can I offer you the funniest possible counter example? Sure. What if you did this in the exact opposite direction? That's what's going on at Prime Video at Amazon right now. So there is this great Reuters story that we quick posted about earlier this week, basically saying that they're going through a big reorganization of the way that Prime Video, the actual platform works and rethinking the way that the homepage works, rethinking the discovery systems, the personalization systems. and apparently Jeff Bezos himself has shown up and demanded from what it seems just more AI he says do do more AI to it to the Prime video team appears to be what's happening here like make the inner like vibe code the interface no I think what's happening is they seem to be wanting to make it much more AI programmed in a really interesting way like use more AI presumably amazon's ai to do more personalization to do more algorithmic recommendations presumably there will be a million powered by alexa things on that i don't know he just like there there's a thing uh we we posted that there's a an image that prime video is using to promote death race 2000 which is very obviously ai generated so maybe that's the future too where instead of we're going to get personalized posters for every title generated with AI.

40:33David Pierce:Like this, this really has like Sergey Brin coming back to Google and demanding to AI-ify everything energy to it, where Bezos is like, take Prime Video on AI. And we just, what if we put more AI in front of people? Which in a moment where AI slop is filling up all of these platforms everywhere and people are aggressively fighting against the use of AI, particularly in movies and shows, this is a very funny energy to be putting into your streaming service right now. There's a Lauren Sanchez joke here and I can't find it. And maybe I don't want to. Maybe the future of this is every one of the posters is AI generated and Lauren Sanchez is in every one of them.

41:17She's flying a helicopter over. Yeah, right. I'll set that aside. You can send me the jokes if you want. it does have that AI has a marketing problem energy to it. People would like us better if we would just show them more AI, which I hear from every corner of this industry. And it also there's probably some amount of Prime Video's interface is already just like a carnival. Like it's already just trying to sell you so much stuff. It might as well just try to sell you some more stuff. Amazon has always just been the least concerned about taste or class in its video streaming interface. Very much so.

41:59Like, it is just the most capitalistic hellhole that has ever existed in the history of television. And so, of course, he's like, I don't know, use AI to do more recommendations of the last thing you saw on Amazon.com and make that shoppable. I could not tell you what this actually means, but it is, it's very good that it's just going to be loud and stupid all at once. Yeah. And maybe that's the joke.

42:20David Pierce:Maybe. I do think there is a real energy behind a lot of this stuff that suggests all of these people think that all we need to see is more examples of how AI is already making our lives better. And if you were just confronted with how great AI is, more often you would learn to love AI. And I just don't think that's true. I mean, the confidence with which this is repeatedly said to me is off the charts. It's if only people could see it's if you had three great use cases and then you're an AI convert for life. And it's like, have you looked at the polling data? I know. Well, and I think about this next to things like Letterboxd, which there have been all these rumors that somebody is going to buy Letterboxd recently.

43:05David Pierce:There is this big push happening towards recommendations for movies and TV shows and people wanting them to be human. Right. Like staff picks are coming back. People want the experience of having another person tell them what is good. Letterboxd is so important because it has lots of data from actual people telling you what is good. And there is just this rebellion happening against what I don't want is a personalized list of movies that are perfectly tuned to me. and then actually movies that you made because of that data you have about how to perfectly tune them to me, people understand the pipeline that is feeding this slop to them and they want out of it.

43:45David Pierce:Yeah. And so what we're getting is just louder AI recommendations from Amazon Prime Video. Sure. Why not? Knock yourself out. I do like that he looked at all of Amazon. He's like, I know where to put the AI. I know where it goes. What's the ugliest own page we have? How do I put some more stuff on it? Do you want to talk about this meta AI detection system before we go? I know you love an AI detection system. Do you want to talk about this one before we switch gears? I mean, it's the theme of our little segment here, is can you find it and can you kill it? Can you predator the AI? Could ContentSeal, Meta's tool, have stopped 5.6 Soul?

44:29David Pierce:I'm going to say probably not. No, definitely not. So shout out to Jess Weyther-Red, who is on our team. I long ago told Jess that her beat was creators and creativity and creative tools, which in the age of AI has meant she knows more about the systems to detect AI content than almost anybody alive. Yep. Apart from the people who are making the systems. But I think that she knows more about these systems than the people who made content seal at Meta. You can go read her story. She has spent more time reporting on C2PA and Content Authenticity Initiative and Google's Synth ID. She is in the weeds of these things.

45:09Her reporting is great. And she saw that Meta was announcing this. And I think we have the only story that's like, what? Because she understood that the only rational response is what? So the entire industry is basically coalescing on Google's Synth ID, which is an invisible watermark over images and videos that is pretty hard to strip away. And a lot of people want to use Synth ID. So Apple's going to use it. They announced it at WWC. OpenAI is going to use it. There's another standard called C2PA that promotes content credentials. Meta's on the board of C2PA. So is Google, right? So is Google.

45:45Yeah. I mean, these are like evolving. There's a lot of complication about how they work together. It doesn't matter. There's just a lot of this going on in the world already. Standards that exist. And a lot of the arguments for these standards are they needed to exist so they exist. We're all going to use them. They'll get better. Right. And importantly, they're only really valuable if the distributors of the content of the platforms use them.

46:02David Pierce:Right. Which is an important reason to only have a couple of standards. Right. So everybody understands that all the images are being labeled the same way. And then the content provenance is being labeled the same way. Like it doesn't matter if you open up X and you don't see the label. Then it doesn't matter if the standard exists or not. And maybe X will never show the labels. And like, here we are. This is the whole problem with these standards. Anyway, Meta introduced a new one called Content Seal, and it does not work with any of the existing standards. It doesn't work like Synth ID. Meta has not built any of the tooling for people to detect it.

46:32Meta's own detector is rate limited. So even if you get images that are labeled in Content Seal and you try to detect them, they will stop you. And partially this is for security, so people can't reverse engineer it. They're not using it on their own platforms. It is just, it's malicious compliance. This is like Stellantis making hybrid Jeeps to sell gas Jeeps in Europe. Like, it is that thing exactly. It's the Ferrari Luce of content standards. Brutal. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Like, look, we made an EV. We're so proud of it. It's to get around to EU regulations. 100 % what content steel is.

47:06Super cynical. Meta answered some of the questions on the record, didn't answer some of her other questions on the record. Why are we doing this instead of using the already existing standard? it's because meta does not want its AI images to get detected and filtered by other people's systems, which is what will happen if you give people the tools to turn the AI off.

47:23David Pierce:Yep. I think meta is also not super eager to filter it in its own systems. Like Adam Maseri has been on the record saying we don't want to filter out AI content, that they are also, like Substack, interested in letting you know what's what but not letting you filter it out. And if you actually do a good job of telling people what's what, they will filter it out and they will demand a way to filter it out. And so meta is actually in a weird way sort of incentivized to not have a system that works. And this is a particular problem for Instagram because every photographer of any note uses tools that now have a bunch of AI in them, not even necessarily generative AI.

48:04if you use denoise in Lightroom, you're right up against the line of what AI is and you should probably label it because the AI is inventing some pixels, but it is just denoising an image. Yeah. Should you be punished for denoising an image using the most state-of-the-art denoising tool that exists? I don't know. I truly don't. I do it without any regard for anything anymore. Like maybe, maybe. Yeah. Should every piece of advertising content ever to be made in the modern era be labeled as AI-generated because it has all gone through Photoshop and someone somewhere has undoubtedly used generative remove?

48:42David Pierce:Well, and increasingly, all of those companies are just going to happily make AI slop advertisements about everything all the time. And in fact, all the time, that is fundamentally the new business model for Meta and Google and everybody else is just make her creative with AI and target it with AI and we'll solve all of your problems with AI. I'm going to tell you, the CEO of Adobe, Shantanir and Iron, who is retiring and he should come back on Decoder and tell me who's going to be next. That'd be great. He was on Decoder and he said the generative fill and remove tools in Photoshop are being used at the same rate as layers.

49:15David Pierce:Which means literally everyone is using them. Everyone is using them all the time. I mean, that's their stat. You can believe it or not. But that's what Adobe is claiming. And this is the problem for all these labeling tools because if you over-apply them, everyone gets mad. If you under-apply them, everyone gets mad. And Meta is like, what if we made a fake standard known uses and then claim it exists. Pretty cynical. Yeah, it's rough out there. Where is the AI goes up right with where is the computer in foundational Vergecast questions going forward. All right, that's enough AI for now. We've got a bunch of gadgets and stuff to talk about.

49:46David Pierce:So let's take one more break. We'll be back.

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52:20David Pierce:All right, we're back. It's time now for the Hype Desk, where our friends Ross and Ashley come and tell us about what's cool in the world. This one is unsponsored, which I'm telling you, because at some point in the near future, that will not be true. But for now, it is unsponsored. And today, it's just Ross. Ross, welcome back. Hey, yo. Welcome to Flavortown, buddy. Welcome to Flavortown. How you doing? I'm Guy Fieri. Diners, drive-ins, dives, devices. We got it all. Anyway, that was - Now we're getting sued. Come on, man. Diners, drive-ins, dives, and devices. there's something there you guys there's something there this is your hot one so you're welcome we're gonna take all that sponsor money we're gonna pay it directly to god theory what are we doing here guys you'd like to sponsor us that'd be great i don't know if the food network is buying podcasts advertising at this time we're open to it welcome to flavor town is a thing i am willing to say every week for enough money ross what do you have for us this week uh all right this week i am going to make the case for being hyped about Avengers.

53:21David Pierce:Stay with you. Nope. Nope. That was not the pitch I received when this began. Okay, so let me back up. This week, Marvel has finally released the first public trailer of Doomsday, along with ticket pre-sales for both the standard theaters and Infinity Vision, which is its kind of IMAX-like premium large format. They can't get IMAX, so they made their own, basically. Can we just pause on this for just a minute? Yes. So, one could call it Infinity Vision. One could also call it lies. Is that a fair? Well, to me, IMAX right now is like an ever-escalating series of lies. Fair. There's like proper IMAX, and there's like fake IMAX, and there's like levels of fake IMAX.

54:05Then there's Zack Snyder IMAX, which is just 4.3 grayscale on HBO Max. I don't know, man. Go ahead. Tell me what Infinity Vision is. Go ahead.

54:15David Pierce:We are all learning IMAX formats in real time as we're trying to get Odyssey tickets. Infinity Vision is, though, just to go to that real quick, it was announced in April during CinemaCon, which is where all the theater owners get together to get presentations. This is Disney saying we are making a certification program. It is premium, large format. It's going to give you that kind of like exclusive IMAX-like experience. It's obviously not saying IMAX. But it's not out yet. Certification is kind of in the works. We know there's going to be 75 such theaters in the U.S., 300 international, which kind of sounds like a lot.

54:48David Pierce:But to your point, you have almost 2 ,000 IMAX or IMAX-esque designated systems worldwide. So it's a smaller footprint. This is what I mean by it's like true IMAX is what, 40 theaters in the whole world? Something like that. It's 41, which is a number that I have seen lots of places recently. Everybody is all of a sudden very aware of the map of 70 millimeter IMAX theaters. Very much so. So, but we haven't seen it in action yet. We're not going to, I think, until September. September is when Marvel's gonna, or Disney's gonna re-release Avengers Endgame Encore, which is endgame plus a few more minutes of footage, a new post-credits scene because, of course.

55:24Didn't you say you were gonna make a case?

55:27David Pierce:I am going to make a case. I gotta get to the Infinity Vision. I can't justify Infinity Vision, but I will justify Doomsday because the trailer's out and I think there's a lot of takes on it, particularly online where that's kind of meh it's nostalgia bait but i do want to like just do the numbers argument real quick uh the trailer had over 500 million views in the first 24 hours which is the second largest trailer debut of all time more importantly though um it got 16 million dollars in ticket pre-sales in the first 24 hours that is the third biggest pre-sale since covid uh behind only the spider-man films i do think the online reaction is pretty meh i think that i think the trailer reaction is in many ways justifiable.

56:08David Pierce:Trailer should be an art form, and this is not what I would call a piece of art. We got a great comment on the site about the trailer that was like, Marvel has done the impossible. They've made a whole movie about people looking at things off camera, which feels exactly correct about the trailer. It does, because the trailer in many ways feels like homework, right? It's like, remember this? Remember this? Right. It's Ready Player One, the Avengers experience. Do you remember this guy? What about this guy? Do you remember this guy? Listen to this music. Needle drop. This guy? Like the whole. And at the end, another guy appears.

56:41David Pierce:Oh my God. Let's not forget. It's Robert Downey Jr. practicing this kind of faux Eastern European in-year versus called Latverian. It's a Latverian accent. Sure. But yeah, it is a lot of people. And I think what Marvel is doing in many ways is kind of like the kind of regressive nostalgia bait. You love these people. Chris Evans is back. We don't know why. He just is. Robert Downey is back. He's something. And I think there's a lot of places to be cynical, but clearly with like the audience while angry online is there and willing to give Marvel another chance. And I do think there's this lot of pent up from the people who kind of went into it loving in game and then just tapered off.

57:18David Pierce:And I'll admit, I'm one of those people. I sat through 29 hours of Marvel movies and live blogged it for The Verge. I was just at AMC theaters in Upper West Side losing my mind and then writing about it and getting paid to write about. So first off, thank you for that. It was wonderful. It's a great experience for everyone. Wonderful. I've lost three years of my life on the other side, but whatever. We made the content machine go. But I do, you know, I think I'm hopeful that, and the reason they're going back to nostalgia bait is because this is the, hey, just forget about everything that's happened in the last five, six years.

57:50David Pierce:We're going to go back and kind of cap off not just the Marvel MCU, but also kind of like that Fox X-Men kind of like, let's just remember that happened and kind of give it the proper send off. It's a real let's remember some guys. kind of energy. It is. I just want to point out they already sent off the Fox X-Men in Deadpool. Literally, that movie was like goodbye to this. Well, so wait, this is actually my question. There was a montage sequence at the end that was literally goodbye to this. Russ, I think they ran Time of Your Life. They did, actually. Yes, they did. You can't come back from Time of Your Life.

58:24You can't un-graduate from high school.

58:26David Pierce:Neil, at first they killed half of them and now they're back. They can do anything they want. Well, okay, but Professor Xavier has died on camera for a film like eight times at this point. I'm sorry, the argument that I heard here was they did a fake IMAX and a lot of people watched this trailer. Wait, so, okay, Ross, let me ask you a question that I think is at the center of what I'm trying to figure out here, which is they tried to do this thing where there was one era of Marvel that ended and then there was going to be a new era of Marvel with new stars and new characters and new movies and none of that worked.

59:00David Pierce:Like it didn't, it just, it all sort of died with the original characters. And this movie seems like a good idea in the sense that it is an admission that that first era everybody liked and kind of nobody came along with them into the second era they were trying to build. So they're just going back to the first thing. They paid everybody a lot of money to go make the old kind of Marvel movie with the old characters that everybody liked. It's probably going to work, right? It feels sort of cynical and sad that this is what it's come to, that it turns out everybody liked Robert Downey Jr., so we're going to give you more Robert Downey Jr.

59:37David Pierce:Is it as simple as that? We're just going to pretend that the sort of second era post all of these characters didn't exist and just go back to them again at much higher salaries? Their salaries, Jesus,$500 million to do two movies. Unreal. Congrats, Robert. Congrats. I think there is, in a sense, there is a little bit of that, and I don't necessarily think it's terribly a bad thing, right? This is not a movie that's designed to win an Oscar. Sometimes the theater experience is just spectacle, right? The Odyssey is a good movie, but it's also just a spectacle. And I think in many ways, that's what Avengers is being set up to do.

1:00:09David Pierce:Just go have fun in the theaters and enjoy this moment. You know, if you want to get into, and obviously there's not enough time for this, like the three biggest sins of Marvel's history, I think one is Disney Plus stretching their creative so thin that they just couldn't figure out what to do and they put too many characters in, right? They lost the focus. Number two, I think, unfortunately, COVID changed a lot of creative plans, and they kind of struggled to kind of band-aid together, you know, some kind of cohesion, because everything must be connected. And three, I would argue that acquiring all the Fox IP back meant we have too many toys.

1:00:39David Pierce:We don't know what to do with them. And I think this is, in two ways, it's the spectacle that people want. Like, let's just have something fun on screen. Remember the good moments. It is just a nostalgia play, and I don't think this is inherently a wrong thing for what it will feel like in theaters. And then also the... Thank you. And we're just going to move on after this and try to taper things. That's the hope, right? That is the hope of we're just going to like try to get focused or just toss a lot of these toys away. We'll pick it back up in five minutes. How many times must we kill the X-Men?

1:01:09We're like, we're sending back the time. Now they're young X-Men. We're going to kill them too. Old X-Men and young X-Men die in the same, like.

1:01:15David Pierce:But now they have the original comic spandex to die in. So you get to watch James Marsden in blue tights. Again, I was told that this would be making a case. I will say just in defense of Robert Downey Jr. Yes. He talks real fast. And so words per minute, it's a deal. Yeah. I appreciate the doomsday spec sheet here. As a fellow fast talker, that's kind of the... To me, the whole thing here is like, just to go all the way back to the beginning, the whole reason Infinity Vision exists is because Marvel lost all of the IMAX screens to Dune Part 3, which is going to be a vastly better and more interesting movie that I think is going to absolutely just eat Doomsday's lunch.

1:01:56Oh, that is a take. No, no, no way. We're way over. We got to be done here.

1:02:00David Pierce:But no way. I think everyone wins. Here's what I say. Zero percent. That's just a lot of more cool shit to watch in theaters. And that's great. It is about to be between Dune and Spider-Man and Doomsday. It is about to be a pretty fun like action superhero nerd movie fall. And I'm pretty excited about it. Yep. Are you excited about Spider-Man, Ross? Brand new day? Into it? Very excited. very excited for spider-man uh there's uh comic-con is this weekend for nerd journalists everywhere that was that marvel's had the big hall age presentation they do a lot of promises those promises shift because of covid and business realities but it is going to be just interesting to see like how marvel does it kevin feige currently is on an apology tour for a lot of stuff they've done before this is their positioning of trying to be the underdog going into it i don't think that necessarily works when you're a company this big but i do think it is interesting to kind and watch the tea leaves and see, you know, there's enough people here who are willing to give you that chance and let's just see if you can actually deliver on it.

1:02:54David Pierce:I love the optimism. And just so everyone knows, if you pre-order tickets for Avengers Doomsday now and then the movie is terrible, Guy Fieri will personally refund you your ticket money. He's going to sponsor this show by buying everyone tickets to Avengers Doomsday. It's going to be amazing. I did always wonder what would bring The Verge to its knees and the Guy Fieri lawsuit was a dark horse. Here it comes. I'm ready for it. This is the way I always wanted to go. All right, Ross, good to see you. Thanks for coming. Cheers, y 'all. All right, now it is time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast, Brendan Carr's a dummy.

1:03:29Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:03:32David Pierce:Ooh. Brendan Carr. Brendan Carr is... Brendan Carr is a dummy. Brendan Carr. Oh, yeah.

1:03:48Nilay Patel:All right.

1:03:57David Pierce:That just gave me very intense, and I mean this is a compliment, day rave at a Vegas pool energy in a way that I really enjoyed. Oh, I had lowrider cruise. I think that's roughly the same energy. It's in there. You're bouncing up and down in a Camaro. I'm kicking it in a cabana. Yeah. Your knowledge of low-runner culture is completely just like offensive. I don't even, what? I'm very sorry. That theme remix was from Chris Swick, who said, and this is a very good part of this email, says, no AI was used, not a fan of AI. Everything was done in GarageBand. Big fan of GarageBand. We love to see it.

1:04:37David Pierce:That's very good. Neal, what did Brendan do this week? Brendan, man. We actually have a clip this week. So if you'll recall, last Thursday, President Trump gave a sort of rambly, incoherent, late night speech about election interference. Sure. You know, and then he referenced a bunch of documents. Everyone looked at the documents. And even the New York Times was like, president lied about documents, which is like a big step for them. Like, none of it made any sense. But the thrust of it is that the elections were interfered with and he should have won in 2020, even though that all happened. And he was in charge of the government in 2020, which is just a real fact no one can hold on to.

1:05:13Who was the president in 2020 is a real question that the Republicans of our country cannot deal with.

1:05:20David Pierce:Which has led to a full week of John Ossoff TikToks. Have you seen these? Just him grilling people about whether Joe Biden won the election in 2020. And everyone obfuscates and he just asks them the question. It's very good. Anyway, so that was a speech. Many networks covered it. Many did not. Even like Fox News the next day basically was like, well, that happened. And that was weird. And they moved on to the next thing. Anyhow. As is their right. Right. They have First Amendment rights. They are news programs. They're also just like on, I think, in Republican. And also just like in the Republican Party, this is not a winner.

1:05:57No. Like relitigating 2020 is not a thing they all want to do. It doesn't win them elections. In fact, sometimes it loses them elections. Anyhow, some networks cover the speech in prime time. Some networks didn't. NBC and ABC did not. Okay. NBC and ABC are broadcasters. Guess who loves to infringe the speech of broadcasters? Our boy Brendan Carr, whose FCC nominally controls the rights of broadcasters using the public airwaves. So he was asked on Fox News this week if it was acceptable for NBC and ABC to not air Trump's remarks in primetime. Here's what he said.

1:06:34Nilay Patel:I should air the president's remark. And I said, of course they should. I'm Brendan Carr. I'm the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

1:06:42David Pierce:And they should do so because they have an obligation at the end of the day to operate in the public interest to serve the needs of their communities. And I think making sure that people have access to significant presidential addresses is part

1:06:54Nilay Patel:and parcel of what all broadcasters should want to do. There's been a lot of interest in Congress.

1:06:59David Pierce:Obviously, we got a letter from Congress asking us to investigate the decisions to do this

1:07:06Nilay Patel:or not do this. and we're reviewing the letter itself, at least at this point. And there's been a lot of interest in this. So we'll see where it goes.

1:07:14David Pierce:Okay, I have several thoughts. By all means. Thought number one, Brendan Carr recorded this video on like an iPhone 3G from the quality of the thing. Two, do you think he got an actual letter? Like, do you think someone mailed a letter? There's some Republican backbencher who's like, you should arrest the Mickey Mouse for not running Donald Trump on ABC. Like, sure, it doesn't matter. This is all just like pretext to can I punish you? Right. For speech I don't like. This was thought number three is that this is very much reminiscent of Brendan Carr saying we can do this the easy way or he can do this the hard way.

1:07:50David Pierce:It's very clear he has no moves here. Like he's not shy about saying what he's going to do when he thinks he's going to do something. But in this case, he just kind of gestures at it. He's just like, huh, we're going to look at this with sort of a meaningful look on his face, which is very Brendan. I mean, he can definitely incur costs and launch sham investigations and bring the wrath of the federal government down on various speakers for not uncritically rebroadcasting the president's remarks on election interference. Do you want to live in a country where definitionally the government says it is in your interest to listen to the president?

1:08:27No. That's not the country I was raised in. Being able to ignore the president is one of the great joys of being an American. And being able to just openly be like, no, I'm choosing to never listen to you is maybe the only quality of being an American that we all share.

1:08:44David Pierce:It's a very funny time to remember that, like, we mostly didn't used to think about the president. Yeah. Screw that guy. I don't know. Who is he? Get out of my face. Shut up. I don't have to listen to you is the most important thing. And right next to that, if you listen to what he says, being able to provide access to the important presidential addresses is certainly in the public interest. There's so much access to everything Donald Trump says. Yeah. There's so much access that Truth Social announced a new business line where they will give Wall Street traders early access to Truth Social posts because you can trade ahead of the markets based on whatever Trump says, which is just a remarkable kind of open corruption.

1:09:26But, like, that's how much access there is. Yep. You have to make a pretty big case that not carrying a speech on the broadcast airwaves that no one is watching is not in the public interest, even though everyone who might otherwise receive broadcast television almost certainly has a phone with YouTube on it. And they're just one sideways glance away from receiving this address on all of the millions of other places that are carrying it. And the reason that he's doing this is to make it so that anyone who has a big distribution platform is scared of the government's power to restrict speech. And that includes the Internet platforms.

1:10:03And mark my words, he will find a way to go from broadcasters to Internet the second it's proven that he has any power over the broadcasters.

1:10:10David Pierce:I mean, you can see how this turns into Brendan Carr being mad that this speech wasn't the first thing on YouTube's recommendations page for everyone on YouTube in the United States. You can just see it. Right? You open X, and it's that we love what Elon's doing with Starlink, and we love that when you opened X, the president's speech was right there. Yeah. We really wish TikTok would do that, and we're going to call our friend Larry Ellison and make sure that happens. Like, it's just, you know what your phone runs on? The public airwaves. You can see where he's going. Anyway, that's been Brendan Carr as a dummy.

1:10:41Brendan, if you want to argue against the points I've made here or just come on this show and introduce yourself in 240p, you're welcome to do it. You're welcome to do it. We can send you a camera. You appear to not have access to the latest and greatest in technology. I would welcome the opportunity. Anyhow, that's been Brandon Carr is a Dummy, America's favorite podcast. Brandon Carr is a dummy.

1:11:12David Pierce:It always just ends in the right. I exit that headspace during that, and it's very helpful. I'm told, by the way, we got a shout out at TrustCon, which is like a trust and safety conference where people really care about free speech and how platforms moderate. So I appreciate that. Amazing. The branding car is a dummy cinematic universe is open to all. We love you here. I have a Ramageddon update for you. It's bad out there, Eli. No gadgets are going to be for sale ever again. So Framework, the PC manufacturer, I think one of the companies, frankly, we at The Verge are like most excited about.

1:11:47David Pierce:They're doing a lot of really interesting things in really interesting ways. Reached out to a bunch of people who pre-ordered the laptop 13 Pro, which I would say it came out, I think, in April. By all accounts, probably Framework's most exciting, most mainstream laptop ever. People are pumped about this thing. They reached out and said, essentially, that they had gotten a cost update from a memory supplier that was, quote, more than double that of the prior inventory. and not only have prices gone up, but in fact, they didn't have the configurations for everybody. So they've now just changed the amount of memory that they're shipping to certain people because they literally, they're like, we have enough memory modules to ship all of the PCs that have been pre-ordered, but we don't have enough of every SKU and all of the right configurations.

1:12:35David Pierce:So they're actually having to reconfigure people's computers in order to be able to ship them to them. And the prices are going up. They're offering people the chance to cancel and get full deposit refunds. So anybody who wants out of this deal can get out of this deal. But basically, there is a strong chance that you are not going to get the computer that you preordered because Framework literally can't make it for you because of Ramageddon. Also, prices have gone up. Let's see, the one with the 16 gigs of memory and 512 gigs of storage, a very sort of mainstream configuration, went up$100. and the like mega one with 32 gigs of RAM and a terabyte of storage went up$800 from$2 ,099 to$2 ,899.

1:13:18David Pierce:This is just where we're at. And this to me is another fascinating turn in this one because we've gone from everything is vastly more expensive to a certain set of devices is no longer economically feasible to make, which is starting to kill low-end phones and I think it's gonna start to come for more stuff to literally the combinations of storage and memory and CPU don't exist in the way that we need them to anymore. And so basically you're left to pick parts out of the bin and try to sell them to people is essentially what's available to people. And this is what RAM, again, is doing to everybody.

1:13:52This is so depressing because I think Framework is such an interesting company and people were so into the ideas of these products. And we've talked a lot about how all of the increasing costs might put pressure on repairability. Framework, that's the whole game. Yeah. right? These are super modular computers. You can repair them. You can fix them. You can upgrade them as they go. They should be the solution and they are getting crushed by the problem that sucks.

1:14:20David Pierce:It does. And I think our commenters have, uh, been kind of mad at framework for basically not being able to satisfy all of its pre-orders based on the theory that, you know, you, you have a lot of pre-orders. You should have made sure you had the inventory for it. And that's fair. It's also just completely not how the world works. All of these companies operate at much slimmer timelines. Nobody is storing giant warehouses full of laptops for months on end, just in case you get the pre-orders, which is not how it works. And then on the flip side, companies big and small, like Apple is going through this now, where the RAM that is made available to you is basically some dude calls you and says, I have this much RAM, it costs this much, do you want this?

1:15:02David Pierce:Seriously, this is what we've been hearing from companies, that deals don't exist. You get a list of available products and a price, and you say yes to it because you don't have any choice. And up and down the scale of these companies, this is what has happened, because so much of the supply and so much of the demand has been allocated elsewhere, particularly to AI uses. This is just what has come for every company. And I think I agree that it would be great if Framework had a way out of this, but I find it very hard to be mad at Framework. This is just, this is the symptom of what is happening to everybody else too.

1:15:36David Pierce:And it's a real shame. I don't think anyone has really contended with what an AI backlash supercharged by people being mad that they can't buy PCs looks like or like gaming PCs. or the cost to buy a GPU for entertainment purposes. Like, once you start screwing with people's free time in that way, with like their entertainment, like the backlash only gets worse. I've been thinking a lot about GTA 6 in this way, because we're running at probably the biggest game release of the last decade. And a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of people are going to want to game and buy new consoles and upgrade systems and make sure that they are ready for this thing as it comes out.

1:16:19David Pierce:And they're all about to be confronted by just absolute disaster anarchy in front of them. Which, good, that ties well into GTA 6. It does. That's true. We're going to live GTA 6 in the world. Has everyone stolen a police car to buy a new GPU? Well, GTA 6. No, they're going to take the RAM out of the police car. That's true. Police cars do have an awful lot of RAM in them now. They're doing a lot of surveillance. What's your next lightning round item? It fits right in with our theme here, which is everything's getting expensive and weird things are happening because of it. Okay. So, you know, we're heading into Apple season here.

1:16:55We're expecting what? Touchscreen, Macs, new iPhones, maybe a folding,$50 ,000 Ultra. You know, something's going to happen. It's all going to be very expensive.

1:17:04David Pierce:They killed the Apple car project, but they're going to sell a foldable phone for roughly the price of the Apple car. Exactly. Is where we're headed. Would you like a new Toyota Camry or would you like a folding iPhone? Choice is yours. Apple is rumored to be handling this with a new upgrade program that will bring lease-to-own pricing to the iPhone, the Mac, and the iPad. And then right next to that is some code reportedly found in iOS that would let Apple cut off virtually all of the apps on your phone if you miss your payments. Boy, is that dystopian. Yeah, there's a real—the first thing in there, you kind of had me in the first half, you know what I mean?

1:17:39David Pierce:or it's like, this is, that seems okay. I think people should be moving more towards we own our gadgets than we rent our gadgets from a large company. But especially at this moment, the idea of having some kind of cleaner upgrade system is all fine. But then you throw in, and if you miss a payment, Apple will become the repo man and take your phone away from you. And this gets bleak super, super, super fast. Yeah, so it's called Partner Finance Lock, which is an incredible name. It would prevent you from erasing or selling devices that are in restricted mode if you have payments to whoever your partner that you're financing it with is.

1:18:15And it will block all the apps except for phone settings in the app store, which is very funny.

1:18:22David Pierce:You can give us money for apps, but you can't do anything with any of them. I was really hoping you were going to say it blocks everything but, like, the journal app so you can write down what a bad person you are. That's the only prompt in journal. I was like, Siri, I will not prompt you into feeling guilt for missing payments. It's part of Find My. It hasn't been announced. We don't know if it's going to ship. But you can see where Apple's taking this. Yep. Right. And even leasing. Sure. Right now there's iPhone financing. There's upgrade options. You're, you know, most financing, people understand it.

1:18:54You cut the price of the phone, the 24, 36 installments. You pay the monthly. And at the end of it, you own the phone. Leasing is like Apple's going to take the phone back, so you pay a lower rate to own part of the phone. It's very much more renting the phone, really. All of this is to ease the impacts of payments, but then also make it so that people don't just steal the phones. But do you want that level of literally like credit checking on your phone, disabling your phone, except for being able to browse the app store like a little kid, like Scrooge.

1:19:27David Pierce:your hands up against the toy store window. If only. I wish I could download HBO Max, but I simply do not have the resources. It's bad news. And then the other thing is the upgrade, the Apple upgrade thing will reportedly be for basically only higher end devices. There's some evidence that the base iPad, the Apple Watch SE, the MacBook Neo will not be included. So it's very clear. We talk a lot about Apple's constant interest in moving you up the price scale, this is a way to do it that makes it slightly more palatable because they're like, well, you just pay over time. If anyone's ever shopped for a car lease, you know that the push to the top trim because it's only$10 more a month is like, it's always sitting there.

1:20:15David Pierce:Yeah, I think this is bad. I really like the answer to all of this Ramageddon stuff should be own your stuff and keep it longer and you should have more control over your technology. not rent things from companies because they're cheaper. I'm going to find a way to hack into your phone and tell it that you're leasing it from me and just put you in partner finance lock from time to time. If you could lock everything on my phone but the journal app, that would honestly make my life fast. I would bet you partner finance lock is more effective at controlling screen time than Apple's actual screen time or parental control features.

1:20:49David Pierce:Oh, for sure. That's the key is buy your kids an iPhone and then when they use it too much, just don't pay for it anymore. We fixed it. That's really good. I'd like to not pay for this iPhone between the hours of 6 p.m. and like 10 a.m. Choice. Just be late on every payment. It's good. I have another phone to tell you about. Can I tell you about a phone? Did you see this thing, the light flip this week? We have a new flip phone. Oh, this looks sick. This is what I'm saying. The light phone, they've been making stuff for forever. Kai Tang, one of the co-founders, is going to be on the show next week.

1:21:23David Pierce:That's going to be really fun. They've been at this for a very long time. and, Neelai, the reason I bring this up to you is because A, they made a flip phone and it looks like blocky and futuristic and kind of out of the matrix and it looks so sick. But also, when I asked why they made this phone, this phone is essentially the Light Phone 3 turned into a flip phone. So there's a 2.8 screen, 2.8 inch screen up top, D-pad and number of keys on the bottom. Very simple phone, not designed to do all that much. It's a Light Phone in flip phone form. But I asked him, why did you make a flip phone? Why make this?

1:21:53David Pierce:And the thing he said to me immediately was because we kept talking to people who had our phone and they said, I like everything about it, except people see it and think I'm using a smartphone. I need something that doesn't look like a smartphone. I don't want to be seen using a smartphone. That it has become a status symbol in some of these communities to not be using a smartphone. And the form factor of a flip phone has become in a very real way, a status symbol, not a symbol that you're a loser who can't afford a smartphone. It's totally inverted. And I think that's fascinating. I will connect this dot directly to my obsession with influencers and young people spending too much money on the Canon G7X.

1:22:38Yes, totally. Which is an ancient point and shoot. It's a good point and shoot. It's just ancient. And then I watch, because I'm obsessed with it, I get a lot of videos of people like screwing with the settings. And the setting they always turn on is turning on the flash, which is choice. and it's because firing a flash at night makes your photos look good and then you can do it and then you're like point and shoot photos are better and you just like fall all the way down the rabbit hole. I love this unbundling that's happening. The whole smartphone was convergence and now there's a little bit of divergence happening.

1:23:09I love it. Can't get enough of it.

1:23:10David Pierce:I think it's great. This phone is$299, which I think is probably the right price for it. You can also pay 39 bucks a month to get the phone plus lights service, which they seem to think a lot of people are going to do that as a secondary device to a smartphone, that that price might work for a lot of people, which I think is really interesting. I have gotten so much feedback from people who are into this phone, included like on our staff, out in the world, in our comments. There is something about like, what if we made a very sexy, red, kind of blocky, futuristic looking flip phone that people just immediately understand.

1:23:48David Pierce:There's something about it that just works. It's really good. I will say one option in case you're not interested by another piece of hardware or another service plan is you can just have AT &T and then your phone won't work. That's my experience. It's a life. It's a choice. Yeah. Like one of the reasons I pay so much attention to my kid is often my phone just simply won't work in their school. And so when I go to their events, I'm like, I'm going to watch the presentation here. It's beautiful. Yeah. That's my personal solution is to stare at the 5G indicator on my iPhone and be like, well, this won't work.

1:24:21I should pay attention to my family.

1:24:23David Pierce:My fun new thing is at my house, I constantly have two bars of service, but actually have no service. Yeah, that's good. It's so it's, I'm in the, just my phone is lying to me state of Verizon. And it's really extremely delightful. We won the race to 5G, David. I don't know if you're aware of this. We've all been doing robot surgery and a grape from the back of a robot car for the past five years. Yeah, and this changed everything about how fast I download Netflix now. All right, David, I got one last one. Okay. But I can't do it on my own. As you know, whenever I talk about CarPlay, I have to summon the ghost of Joanna Stern.

1:24:53Welcome, Joanna Stern, to the Vergecast.

1:24:56Nilay Patel:I'm here. Hi. How's it going? From the new thing set. Look at how fancy. Did we get like a pop-up or something fancy?

1:25:03David Pierce:Okay, this is actually, before we get into this, Joanna, Neil and I were debating what your like walk-on music should be, the sort of Joanna entrance music. Do you have strong opinions on what you think your entrance music should be?

1:25:15Nilay Patel:I'm doing a talk next week and I am having them do Mr. Roboto. Oh, that's pretty good. It's just like always be selling.

1:25:26It's all right. You've sold the book on enough of our shows. Oh, my gosh. She's got it right there. Oh, my gosh. It's all right. The Decoder book is coming out next year. It's going to be horrible for everyone. I need to talk to you about what is going on with Ford.

1:25:38Nilay Patel:Yeah, I know. I messaged you panically. I was in a panic. I would say we had like a little argument over iMessage today. Ford announced with Apple that the maps in the next generation EV that it's making will be Apple Maps, which is huge. I think it's the first time Apple has let any automaker directly integrate Apple Maps. Ford's new platform is a big deal. It's going to start with a$30 ,000 electric truck, but it's the future of everything. They built it in the skunk works. They're very proud of it. Joanna texted me and said, this is what Farley said to her on Decoder, that they wanted to do CarPlay Ultra, but they didn't want all of it.

1:26:17And I'm saying, no, Apple just wants to use Maps. Like, this has nothing to do with CarPlay. And in fact, regular CarPlay is in the announcement. Ford's going to keep using regular CarPlay. Joanna, what do you think is going on here?

1:26:28Nilay Patel:I think we're both right. I think that Ford and Apple have had a longstanding relationship. And we had, as I talked with Farley, had thought that maybe Ford was going to do CarPlay Ultra. But Farley, on your very show about a year ago, told me, on Decoder, told me that, I don't have the quotes in front of me, but basically frustrated with Apple because Apple was asking for too much data and too much of the control of the clusters and all the stuff in the car. So I think these two companies were talking. And a deal was struck somehow around, we want to work with Apple. These are some of the most valuable data things we want from you, Maps being one of them.

1:27:09Nilay Patel:They're going to also be using this for self-driving capabilities and to build a platform on. And this is where they got. And so in this next EV platform of the future that Ford is making, this is sort of the Apple contribution. And it's not Google, right? And now, Neela, you make your point. Okay. It's good. Joanna's like, it's my first podcast. Now I will make my point. We're debate style. We're doing it. Well, no, I teed you up perfectly for your point, which is the Google part of this. Yeah, I mean, the back and forth here is that these big smartphone vendors have tried to get ever more deeply integrated into cars.

1:27:45Google has made some headway, right? A bunch of cars run Android Automotive, which is a whole operating system that just runs. My GM EV just runs Android. It runs Android 12 on Intel, which is not great, but that's what it runs.

1:28:00David Pierce:Which you think is better than CarPlay, just so everyone's clear. Nilay's out on CarPlay and in on Android 12. That's the thing you should know about Nilay. I don't want to be held to that. I'm going to say that it is effective at letting Gemini turn on Spotify and doing Google Maps navigation, which is what we prefer, and that is fine, right? Whatever. Apple did CarPlay Ultra, which is a very complicated system that works in a lot of different ways, and mostly carmakers have rejected it, right? I think you can get CarPlay Ultra in Aston Martins, which is fine because if you had ever looked at aston's existing user interface you'd be like get this out of my face and i think aston was like we don't want to spend money on this uh they announced it in kia and hyundai vehicles that was a year ago there's not even a glimmer of shipping and in fact new uh new vehicles from that brand have a whole system that they've built in other countries already.

1:28:56So like they're moving ahead on their own. It just doesn't seem like the smartphone makers are getting traction, taking over the cars. And I know Ford was like, we have to have CarPlay in our cars. That's our big differentiation against GM. We're going to have it. Why would I, why would I compete with your phone? And I think they did not want everything that came with Google. And I personally think Apple was just happy to get a paying customer for Apple Maps. This is a big expensive product that does not make them any money.

1:29:23Nilay Patel:And I think that ultimately it was Apple was this. They were saying, hey, look at CarPlay Ultra. This is great. And Farley and his team were like, no, we want some parts of what you want, but we don't want you to control everything. And so this is where they got. Yeah. I don't think my take is wrong. We'll see. If someone from Ford wants to confirm this on or off the record, please call me. There's a part of this where the maps for where the EV chargers were going to enter a destination. and it will tell you how much battery you'll have at the end and the charging stops along the way is very important.

1:29:54There's a lot of apps that can do it, but you need that in the vehicle, especially for EVs. And then there's the autonomy part where it's not these maps that are really helping the cars drive themselves, right? There's like another class of very high resolution maps and systems and sensors that actually enable autonomy. And this doesn't seem like anything to do with that. And it's also unclear how Blue Cruise, which is Ford's autonomous system, will fit into it. So I just think Apple essentially got nowhere with CarPlay Ultra.

1:30:21Nilay Patel:As an existing, I'm a Mach-E driver, and I still don't know what I'm doing about my lease that expires next month. But the existing Maps in there is terrible, truly terrible, not usable. So that is why I have CarPlay. And I go between Apple Maps and Google Maps. But that is fundamentally what Ford is just saying here is like, we are done. We are done trying to do this. We have chosen Apple here that has made a special deal for us versus Google.

1:30:47David Pierce:I mean, they're the only ones to get this. This brings me to my theory about this as someone who does not interview car CEOs. This doesn't matter at all. This relegates Apple Maps to being like a slightly better version of the TomTom navigation that shows up on your rental car that you immediately get rid of because you plug your phone in. This is like having a little bit of navigation but no other features solves no problems. Everybody's still going to plug in their phone and just do CarPlay. What is even the point of this? No one's going to use this. What maps do you use when you use CarPlay?

1:31:19David Pierce:I go back and forth between Google Maps and Apple Maps. I think Apple Maps is better at navigation. Google Maps is much better at place data. But I'm going to use either one over the thing built into my car because I have to plug my phone in anyway. True.

1:31:33Nilay Patel:But in the future, and this is what Ford is at the disadvantage of, is it doesn't have the Tesla, and it even doesn't have what Rivian's doing, which is the self-driving component to this. And so eventually when you're, or me, when my, not you, David, we're not sure what kind of car, your car of the future is still your minivan that you're driving right now. This is gonna be even more important. And so I think that's what Farley's trying to say is like, we can't do this on our own. We needed to team up with someone that has this great maps data. We are still gonna do some autonomy. There's a big autonomous announcement to this.

1:32:08Nilay Patel:Apple's our partner here. Oh, our story just got updated. Breaking news. We have a statement from Ford about autonomy in our piece. Apple is not building Ford's self-driving technology, Ford said in an email. Ford is developing our next generation ADAS in-house through Latitude AI, their wholly-owned autonomy subsidiary. Apple Maps will be an important mapping enabler. This is what David is describing. They need a map. Apple sold them a map. Apple gets to make some money on maps. It was previously making no money and threatening to do advertising on maps. I bet Google wanted a whole bunch of Google stuff and Ford didn't want to give it up.

1:32:39Yeah, Google's like, we're going to train our own cars off of this. And Ford said, no, thank you. Yes. It will be fascinating to see if any other car makers start adopting Apple Maps because the TomTom stuff is all bad, right? Like, have you driven a Stellantis vehicle? You don't want any of this any near your face. The reason I think it works for GM is because GM is just running Android. And so what you get out of the box is Google Maps, which is the thing most people want. And so, like, you get to – they get to cover the first sin here. Again, it's Android 12 on Intel. I have a lot of feelings about it every single day.

1:33:10But it's fine. It just does the job. I know, Joanna. You think you're going to buy a new Ford now because it has –

1:33:16Nilay Patel:No, it's not available right now. This is all the prep for the 2027 big reveal that Farley's been prepping for. But my lease is up next month, so what do I do?

1:33:28David Pierce:Joanna, will you come back on the show and the three of us can litigate this decision? I'm serious. There's a whole Verge cast in let's buy Joanna a car, and I think we should do it. Oh, I have the hottest take for what you're going to should buy next, but we should do an entire episode of that. It's going to be good. We should do it live so we can get real feedback. It's going to be great. Wait, Joanna, real quick, Google Maps or Apple Maps, which one is better? Tell the people.

1:33:49Nilay Patel:I have the same answer as you. Yeah? And I think Apple Maps looks a lot nicer now. It's a little selfish. And talk about it has good EV data. They have actually already worked with Ford to do the better integration on the EV data. So if I need to charge and I'm doing a long road trip, I'm using Apple Maps. It has way better data. It comes in from the car. The state of New Jersey is not navigable without Apple Maps. That's my hottest take. You simply cannot survive there. Because driving in New Jersey, you make a turn and then you immediately have to make another turn. And Apple Maps will tell you that that's going to happen.

1:34:18And Google Maps is like, oh, you needed to be in the right lane five minutes ago.

1:34:21Nilay Patel:And they do a very nice job of showing the jug handles, like that you have two or three coming up.

1:34:25David Pierce:That's good stuff. All right, Joanna, thanks for coming on. Good to see you.

1:34:28Nilay Patel:Thank you for having me.

1:34:29David Pierce:Neil, the only update I have left for you is that there is more Paramount shenanigans Oh no Please don't do this to me Paramount is trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery A judge paused it basically saying it seems very much like this is going to be an antitrust disaster We're going to put this on hold before they can do all of the things that make it hard to unwind So that continues to be a mess We will cover that mess, but not today For now, we're going to get out of here thank you to everybody for watching and listening as a reminder the best thing you can do to support all of this including all of our shenanigans with joanna and others uh in help us buy joanna a car subscribe to the verge no no no no no no no i don't know help us buy nila a car to compete with joanna's car in a street race theverse.com slash subscribe gets you all of our podcasts ad free it gets you all of our exclusive newsletters gets you everything else and if you have thoughts feedback.

1:35:26David Pierce:If you can make me feel better about OpenAI and Hugging Face, we would love to hear from you. VergeCastoftheVerge.com is the email. 866-VERGE-11 is the hotline. Neelai, who's on Decoder next week? We have Evan Smith from Altana. It's a big shipping company. We talked about how things are moving around the world right now with tariffs and wars. It was really good. It was like really good. A super chill time in that world. He and I always just fall like right into the weeds of everything. It's great. That's good stuff. I'm excited about that one. Version history. The season is over. We have recorded all of next season.

1:35:59David Pierce:It's great. But if you missed any of the Smart Home episodes we just finished, go do it. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. The set looks awesome and it's very hard to build, so go watch the podcast. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron Locascio. We will see you next week, Eli. Back and roll.

1:36:50Nilay Patel:Check it out at fin.ai.

1:37:20Nilay Patel:with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com slash vox. That's odoo.com slash vox.