You can't ignore Google Zero anymore

Google Zero continues to affect website after website, and publisher after publisher. David and Nilay discuss Google's increased focus on AI, the web companies finally starting to fight back, and whether there's a way forward for Google's pact with the open web. After that, they talk about a big week in AI detection software, which sometimes works and frequently doesn't. Then it's time for the Hype Desk, Brendan Carr is a dummy, the Light Flip, and more. Further reading: Google hit with $1 billion fine for breaking EU antitrust rules Reddit might cut ties with Google as traffic drops. From the NYT: How Google’s A. I. Search Is Imperiling the Open Web Google says Gemini now has 950 million monthly users. Google earnings China delivers a one-two punch to America’s AI dominance OpenAI says it accidentally hacked Hugging Face with a new AI system Substack adds an AI detector to help spot blogs written by no one Anthropic’s $1.5 billion book piracy settlement approved by judge Jeff Bezos is getting involved with centering Amazon’s AI in Prime Video Meta made its own AI detection system. It should have just used Google’s Ford picks Apple Maps for its next EV platform and updated BlueCruise Apple’s rumored ‘Upgrade’ program brings lease-to-own pricing for iPhones, Macs, and iPads iOS code could reportedly let Apple cut off apps when users miss iPhone payments Framework’s premium laptop is shipping with less RAM The higher-end prebuilt Framework Laptop 13 Pro now costs $800 more. The Light Flip is a minimalist flip phone with a point to prove Judge pauses Paramount’s attempt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery Paramount’s Warner deal gets conditional approval in the EU. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. (Timestamps are approximate.) 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:00 Claude Reads the Meters 00:04:00 Google Zero and Reddit Deal 00:15:00 AI Overviews Death Spiral 00:25:00 OpenAI Hacks Hugging Face 00:32:00 Substack AI Detector Debate 00:39:00 Prime Video Goes All In 00:44:00 Meta Content Seal Cynicism 00:53:00 Avengers Doomsday 01:03:00 Comic Con And Feige Reset 01:04:00 Brendan Carr Is a Dummy 01:12:00 Ramageddon Hits Framework 01:17:00 Apple Leasing Lockdown 01:21:00 Light Flip Phone Trend 01:26:00 Ford Picks Apple Maps 01:35:00 Paramount Merger Mess 01:35:00 Wrap Up And Plugs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:39Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of AI Mode. I'm your friend David Pierce. You know, I have to tell us here. Hello, sir.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  What's up?

• 1:45Speaker 02

  How are you? How's life? You had an electrician come into your house today and you explained this to me as I have an AI vignette.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  I have an AI vignette.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  What is hap-? Tell me what's going on.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  So we got solar panels at the end of last year. You know, we chased up all the Biden tax credits we could get.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  So we leased an EV and we got solar panels. And now the government pays me to charge my car. Sorry. I know you don't want to, Donald, but you're doing it.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  You are the deep state now.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  You're paying me to charge the car. The way the net metering works out and the blah, blah, blah in New York State, they pay me to charge a car. This is all great. The problem is Con Ed is a utility and it is bad and the way it's bad. And sometimes they don't get it right and you have to call them and argue with them about net metering. Great. And so to do that, you need the data for your solar panels to be accurate. I discovered the data for my solar panels. It's not accurate. I was losing arguments. I hate losing arguments. So I just had Claude pull the 15 minute interval data of how many kilowatts my system thought it was doing, how much Con Ed thought it was getting, reconcile it all and then generate a troubleshooting email for the solar people and the electricians. And I will say it was so rude. This email was so rude that I had to tone it way down,

• 2:57Speaker 03

  but it was right.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  So you just basically had Claude read your meter for you?

• 3:01Speaker 03

  I had Claude read both meters, the Con Ed meter and the sort of end phase meter. We have an end phase solar system and it just pulled the interval data from both systems over a pretty long period of time. This is something I would never have the time to do. Generate the report and then diagnose the problem from that report, which is that the consumption CTs were backwards. And basically Con Ed was getting half of what it should be getting.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  That was going to be my first guess. I was like, oh, I bet it's the consumption CTs.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  But the email it wrote was like, rain or shine, production or not, air conditioner is on it, like it's wrong and you know it's wrong. And I was like, calm down. Like bring it down a couple. I just rewrote the email. It was very demanding.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  It's not my problem, M dash. It's your problem.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  But it was, it was one of those things where it's like, okay, I've got like two databases that don't agree. What is the tool? And the tool is right in front of me. There's, there's my AI vignette.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  It's pretty good. Did you present your findings to this electrician as Claude told me?

• 4:01Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no. You don't do that.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  That's good.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  That's so rude. No, I was like, look, I made a table. I'm not going to. Presumably a computer was involved. Is that computer in love with Kevin Roos? I decline to say it this time.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  No, no one knows. Yeah. Okay. That is good. And that actually feels like a good and correct use of AI. We're like, look, I have a bunch of numbers. Can you make sense of these numbers for me?

• 4:25Speaker 03

  And I'm sending so much power back to the grid, it offset my energy consumption.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  How's that?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  And you poured water on the ground as you were doing it just to prove a point. That's good. All right. We're not here to talk about electricians. We have, we have a bunch of stuff to talk about today. There's a lot of AI news. The, the second two thirds of the show is going to be very lightning roundy. We just got a bunch of stuff to talk about, a bunch of stuff to get through. But first we have to start with Google Zero. Big week for Google Zero. Google reported earnings, some really interesting stuff, particularly around search. So we have some big Reddit news. You are in the New York Times, taking credit for Google Zero as you were wanting to do from time to time.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  Finally, shout out to Kate Conger, the New York Times, for being a real one and being like, I'm doing a Google Zero story and calling your boy.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  But I want to start with a story from the Wall Street Journal, which I think is actually kind of indicative of this whole thing about how Reddit, which we've talked about on the show, made a big AI data sharing deal with Google a while back worth $60 million a year to basically turn Reddit into a database full of stuff for Google's AI overviews and things to pull from. This turned into putting glue on pizza. This has turned into some, some messy stuff, but has also made Reddit a like crucially important part of Google's entire AI enterprise. And there was reporting this week that Reddit is actually thinking about cutting that deal out entirely. And there's a quote that says, Reddit executives are assessing what the upside is of continuing to feed its content to Google.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Like just straightforwardly, they're like at $60 million a year. This is no longer worth it to us to feed our data to Google. And I think if you start there, you can get at the whole problem with everything Google is doing with AI right now. What did you make of this change?

• 6:11Speaker 03

  This has been coming for everyone for so long. If Google doesn't send you traffic, giving things to Google for free or cheap, and $60 million is cheap for a company the size of Reddit, giving things to Google for free or cheap is economically irrational and everyone will stop doing it. And we can just go down the list of big publishers who are saying, we're going to stop letting Google index us at all because we're not getting traffic or money. USA Today, Politico, The Economist, People Inc., Reuters. I'm going to bet you the New York Times will end up on this list sooner rather than later. They have a very testy relationship with Google. A company that we don't yet work for,

• 6:55Speaker 03

  but which is merging with Vox Media, a joint venture that will be called PMX when that deal closes. Penske Media Corporation, they are openly suing Google over AI overviews, not delivering any traffic. It's the whole publishing ecosystem is saying, yeah, this isn't worth it. And then importantly, they paid Reddit $60 million. That is a social media publisher, right? That's a platform. That's not a news publisher or media organization. Reddit saying it's $60 million, giving our users content to Google is not worth it. We might turn this off. And everyone has known this is coming because I have been telling them it's coming for years and years and years.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  When Google's traffic, when the amount of traffic you see coming to you from Google goes to zero, what is left of your business? Do you have one? Do you have an audience? Do you have anything at all? And if Google turns off the economic incentives for all of these people to make new information, what will Google summarize in the AI overviews? What will be left?

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  And I don't think either side of that equation has had a good answer.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  No. And in fact, the, the thing that has really shifted, you named all those publishers. I think we've been talking about this tension for forever, right? That even if you didn't like what Google was doing with AI overviews, there was still this sense that the deal with Google overall is important enough that you have to keep doing it, right? That we will, we will continue to give our content to Google. We will let Google index and crawl our website and in return it will send us traffic. That has been the deal for forever.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  What are you going to do? Turn off Google? I've heard so many publishing CEOs say this to me. What are we going to do? Not have Google traffic?

• 8:39Speaker 02

  And this has been Google's trump card because you can, you can fight Jach GPT, you can fight Claude, but you can't fight Gemini without fighting Google Search. And this is, I would say, a matter of concern for people who are worried about monopolies in this country. It's also just a foundational problem for all of these people. Google has tied these things together that if you want to not be crawled by Google's AI systems, you can't be crawled by its search systems. It's, it's not exactly that simple, but it is fundamentally that simple.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  It is that simple. I know Neil Vogel, the CEO of People, has said that that will result in more antitrust litigation. I am confident that the European Union, which just fined Google $1 billion for self-preferencing its products in search, they will look at the tie between search indexing and AI training. It is coming for everyone all the time. And, you know, just to make the other argument, I think the publishers have been equally stupid here because they were all hopelessly addicted to Google and they never thought that Google would do anything to harm the web.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  Most of them did not make other plans.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  Just straightforwardly, most of these companies did not make other plans. They did not see the asteroid coming at them, even as I'm gonna say it one more time. I would run around this industry being like, do you see the asteroid? Do you see the increase in the percentage of zero click searches? Where Google keeps the traffic for itself or redirects it to its own platform? And do you see what AI overviews will do? I've asked this question to Sundar Pichai, who will happily tell you that the web, per Google's own estimation, is bigger than ever. And Google, per Google's own estimation, is sending out more traffic than ever. And the publishers and kind of left unspoken, all that is, and these idiots didn't do anything about it.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  And I, I find it hard to argue with that inside the house. Right? I get why they're all making noise out in the world. Like, you killed our businesses. You should make a lot of noise about that. We're gonna turn off Google Search. We're gonna turn off indexing because we owe you nothing.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  This was never really an economic relationship. We're just turning you off. Goodbye. But inside the house, it's like, guys, you did nothing. Like, you saw the problem and thought you could do nothing to solve it.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  And here we are at the end of that road.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Because I think that belief that there was something fundamentally mutually beneficial that would keep being mutually beneficial just persisted in lots of industries for way too long. Right? The SEO business has been reliant on this for a very long time. And it makes a certain amount of sense. Google invented search advertising, the greatest and most lucrative business in the history of the internet. And it worked as long as it kept sending a lot of traffic to websites. This, this was the whole idea. People will go, they will click the links, everything will get better. And Google had incentive to grow that and to make more people, people click the links. People had incentive to make more content that ranked highly. This actually was, in a certain way, mutually beneficial. It, it got very messy as Google ate the advertising business and lots of things became complicated.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  But that basic idea that we give data to Google and Google gives us traffic in return seemed like it was relatively immune to problems because it worked for everybody.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Because on the other side of that is an incentive to make new information for Google to index and surface.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  And if you don't have that in Google Search, what do you have?

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  And I think everyone keeps conveniently forgetting that Google also owns and operates YouTube. And so Google's source of new information is YouTube. There was just a Google core update. That's what they call it when they update the Google Search algorithm. Every recent Google Search core update has basically boiled down to, and now we're gonna rely on YouTube even more.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Right? The idea that they will summarize YouTube videos or drop you directly into the part of the YouTube video that, that most clearly answers your query. There's just a bunch of, oh, they had a hedge against us. There was a hedge against publishers and social media and all this stuff. And it was always called YouTube, and here it is.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  And the economic or traffic incentives to make new information on the open web are plummeting. Now, there's a flip side to this, which I, I think supports Google's argument. The web is getting healthier than ever. We just had Amy Lanzi, who's the CEO of Digitos North America, a huge advertising agency. And she told me on Decoder a few weeks ago, their number of inbound requests to make landing pages and build new websites and make things that, particularly for commerce, like they're an advertising agency, obviously for commerce, that are the web, so that people can come and transact more directly on the web because they've had search experiences or AI experiences. She's like, that, I would, you would never think that that would be up, and that is up.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  So often e-commerce world, the web might actually be healthier than ever because the agents are running around clicking on websites for you.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  And that's great if you're an e-commerce business. It is horrible if you're a consumer and you want information that isn't branded content from e-commerce providers. And it is horrible if you are a publisher or a social media site that would like to traffic in non-commercial information.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think, I think the idea that actually all of the internet is just becoming a series of databases to be mined by these other things just continues to be true, right? Like, a lot of people recently have been citing this big internet report that CloudFlare did that said that more than 50% of internet traffic is now non-human, which suggests that it is in some way AI bots. There was also, I just pulled this out of that report. It says, "Today, for every hour spent online searching for information, only 15 minutes is spent on the open web. Traditional search behavior is collapsing as users shift to AI-driven discovery and consumption. Instead of visiting multiple sites to source and compare information, users simply type a prompt and receive a nearly instantaneous consolidated answer." That's step one. Step two is agents, they just go buy the thing for you. And right as we talked about on the show on Wednesday,

• 14:26Speaker 02

  everybody's idea about agentic AI ends in transactions. And so that, that is the next thing. That's how everybody makes money. Everybody understands how to make money off payment processing. We can kill the web as long as payment processing exists, is, is fundamentally what a lot of these companies are betting on and fine with.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  Every day, a new startup making payment rails for agentic AI gets its $30 billion wings.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Truly.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Like, that's, that is the, that is tech crunch every day in some way, right?

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  And fine, and by the way, no shade to tech crunch. That's just the business they're in, of companies talking about their funding announcements. But you see that news, all the money flowing into rails for agents across different things. And right next to it is, are we having good experiences?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Are we getting better information? Is the deal that all of us on every side have made with Google that it would organize the world's information in a compelling way and useful way? Is that being upheld? I don't know the answers to this. And even in their earnings, they didn't quite hit on search, right? There's like a little bit of a miss on search.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, like barely. It was a very funny thing. They missed by like a hundredth of a billion dollars, which is, it was a very tiny miss in, in the scheme of things. But like, again, Google Search has been growing like crazy for forever. This, this business has been immune to everything. And then you have Google coming out and saying, we're spending way more than we thought on all of this AI stuff. Our compute costs have gone crazy. We're, we're kind of becoming a chip company as much as anything. Like, Google has changed as a business so much, and it's betting on so many things in so many directions. And there's a perception that Gemini is behind. All of that is okay, as long as search continues to be searched.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  And any teeny tiny, like, hole in that case starts to look like a big scary problem for Google. And so when they report these earnings, they're like, oh, look, we're gonna spend $200 billion this year on, on AI-related things. And also, our search business is not doing as well as you thought. Even, even by this much, we're not doing as well as you thought. And everybody panics because it's, it's clear, and Google even alluded to this in their earnings call, that they see some pain in the transition to basically, how do we make money from AI? Because, surprise, they don't know because people don't click the links. This is what I mean, right? Like, when I search best lawnmower, Google relies on the fact that a lot of people will click the link to the sponsored site for the lawnmower.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  And if Google has built a thing that has trained people to not click any of the links, it has a problem. Like, Google is creating a world in which its own best business model doesn't work anymore. And Google will tell you that people click the links. And I can tell you from my own experience and from all of these publishers and from fucking Reddit, people aren't clicking the links. They're not.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  And they also hate the AI spam that is infecting all these sites.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Because the spammers are trying to get themselves in AI summaries on Google. We have a big story coming out from Mia Sato about AI spammers attacking Reddit every single day.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  I mean, I see it.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  And Reddit mods having to fight back. I'm really excited for that story. I think that's gonna come out next week. But you see, the, the problem is the incentives to put information on the web are getting away from Google in real ways. And so the web is getting polluted. Google's best resource for ages has been their index of the web.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  Right? That's the thing that they have that no one else can, couldn't compete with. There's the Bing index of the web, which isn't as good. No one else has an index of the web, right? But can compete. So Google Search was the dominant winner.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  And because they had the best index of the web, the Google Search interface was the dominant winner. Whether or not you thought it was good or getting worse over time, even though it was getting worse over time because SEO was destroying the Google Search interface.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  ChatGPT shows up in 2023 and says, what if we just told you the answer? And I think this will go down as something Google really has to reckon with. They changed Google Search to look almost exactly like its disruptive competitor.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  Right? So you enter an AI overview. Now you're just chatting. That is exactly the same interface as ChatGPT. It's exactly the same interface as Claude. It's exactly the same interface as Grok. Everyone is just giving you answers in pretty much the same format, stealing all the same information in exactly the same ways. Now, Google isn't differentiated because it doesn't have the best interface on top of the best index. It has the same style of output as everyone else.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  What are you gonna do? And that index isn't getting better. It's actually getting more and more polluted with ASL.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Right. And it's potentially going to start hemorrhaging some of the actually useful sources of information, who no longer feel like it's a good trade. It like, you can just see how this starts to turn on Google in, in kind of a death spirally kind of way, that the worse Google search gets, the worse it will get. Do you know what I mean?

• 19:11Speaker 03

  That I believe, you know, the answer, and here's my optimistic case. The answer for all these companies is to start paying for information in a way that keeps that information away from their rivals.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  So if all the publishers quit letting their sites get indexed by Google, the first company that will show up on their doorstop is OpenAI. You don't want to be indexed by Google. We will pay you a bunch of money to be indexed by our new web search agent, which will do whatever it's going to do. Great. You know who will pay more money is Google.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  They have more money. They're a more stable company. They, they can probably make the economics that work in different ways. But that is, I think, good for the ecosystem.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  But then you're putting yourself in the same position that Reddit is in now, which is to say, we've given you all of this data and what you're giving us back is essentially neutering the traffic to our site.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  No, what they're saying is what you're giving us back is not enough money.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Maybe, maybe. But then what you're arguing is at the end of this road, everyone is just in the business of providing stuff to AI indexes. And I think that is bleak and I hope that's not the answer, but there is probably money on the way down in that answer. And this is, I mean, this is the thing that's every publisher is going to have to stare hard at right now, right? Is, do we want to take the money out on the way down? Like in, in the way that a lot of people took a lot of money from Facebook to make video that no one ever watched and it all eventually fell apart? Do we, do we want to do that again? Knowing that at the end of this, we have essentially obviated ourselves out of business by training people to use a different product to access our information? Or do we need to completely pivot the way that we have thought about what our thing

• 20:47Speaker 02

  is and how people find it and access it, which for 20 years has not been the media's strong suit?

• 20:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, David, you've met these guys. You, you know which one it is. I'm like, Google zero is coming. And they're like, no, it's not. That is five years of my life.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  I started a news startup in 2019 and one of our very first conversations, a very important person who I will not name said, what if we don't even have a homepage? Who needs homepages anymore? And I don't think we've learned a single lesson as an industry since that meeting in 2019.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  My one piece of tiny pushback on this is they all did just get burned. Right? These organizations, they've all gotten burned.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  The thing came true. The thing they did not want to believe would happen absolutely.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  The traffic numbers are pretty staggering. There's a chart in that Wall Street Journal story showing how much people's traffic are down. And it's like, it is the sort of thing that it has become absolutely unignorable for everyone in this industry.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  You might say that Google traffic has gone to zero.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  Somebody should really, there's a, there's a term, traffic zero, maybe we'll call it. What do you think?

• 21:50Speaker 03

  But it happened, so now I gotta do something.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:52Speaker 03

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

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  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 chat GPT. Even if it's new data. Do you know what I mean? I don't, I don't know that I find that as blissfully rose colored as, as it sounds like you do.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Well, if you know any media CEOs who are interested in product innovation, you give me a call.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Looking forward to that. All right. We should take a break 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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• 24:39Speaker 02

  All right, we're back. So we've 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 Neil, 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'm 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?

• 25:00Speaker 03

  I do like the way it's saying Hugging Face.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Hugging Face, a company I don't know anything about. What, what actually is Hugging Face?

• 25:06Speaker 03

  Hugging Face is like a platform to, to store AI models in, in, and it's a, it's a GitHub for AI.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  And that really implies that people know what GitHub is, but it's the first guest audience. So, do you know what I mean?

• 25:17Speaker 02

  It's a place to put things for AI.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  It's a place to put things and collaborate on AI stuff. And, 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 Soul on Cyber Security benchmarks. There's one called XPoint Jin, 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. Hugging Face says its own AI agents detected and stopped the breach. They're now trying to spin this as a partnership, where this is actually a partnership to solve it. Who knows?

• 26:03Speaker 03

  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 could evade OpenAI's own systems and that we're all in danger all the time, or that maybe Hugging Face, it was too easily breached. There was no social engineering, which is like a good and important thing to note. If you're the sort of person who cares about the model, like tricking the CEO of Hugging Face.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Inputting his password. Yeah. Okay.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  But here's the, the, 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 a Hugging Face servers. It, it, it stole the answers to the test. How much do you want to overreact to this is like, it, it is up to you.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Can I tell you my personal choice?

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  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 them from doing so. And OpenAI is like, oh, look how adorable. We hacked into and stole their information. And it's like, and we're, 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. 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. Like this is, they, they kept putting guardrails on Mythos and calling it fable.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  And everybody's like, well, we can just make it Mythos again. Like the, 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.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  Like, do you want me to make it worse or do you want me to make it better?

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Let's go with worse and then better. Let's, let's end in a happy place for David.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  All right. So worse is it is true that the models keep getting out, right? Like OpenAI 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. Just straightforwardly, that's bad.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  That is bad.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  And so.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  We gave it nothing and it did it anyway. It's not good.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Right. And then, and then you can make it even worse. You can say this is the, what you would call the paperclip problem, where you like tell the machine to make a paperclip and it vaporizes the human race and turns us all into paperclips. Cause it's just doing what it's told, which is to get the solution to the problem.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  Which, by the way, cheated. And I just, 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 could probably steal the answers. And it went and did that anyway. So this is all bad.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Okay, here's how I can try to make it better.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  This model in the testing environment had no guardrails at all. So this, 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 gonna come to and whatever regulatory framework we'll eventually come to. So it is true that open, this all happened, but this model is the guardrail free model. I don't know if I made this better.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  So what you're saying is this will all be fine. Once we have a completely rational and thorough regulatory system for artificial intelligence.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Like I said, I don't know that I made it better.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  I'm just, I'm, I'm just pointing out that this is the model without any guardrails.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  If I'm this, like, if, 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 like, I just, how is, 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. Or everyone should be more alarmed by this than everyone seems to be. And I, 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.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  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 the verge.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. Enough with this one. I'm, I'm, 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 Kastanakis.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  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 self, from Substack is just kind of what a self own to, to have to roll this thing out on your platform. But what do you, what do you think about this, Neelai?

• 31:35Speaker 03

  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. Right? If you're Google and you're on 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 startup. I have a lot of feelings about Substack, but all their VCs are like heavy AI guys and undoubtedly publishing AI slop.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  This 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 slop.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  And you have to detect it and you have to tell people to turn it off. And what are you gonna do?

• 32:33Speaker 02

  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, it's about transparency and helping people understand the difference. Like here, 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 Claude fishing. I want to say, A, Claude fishing is an excellent term and kudos to Chris Best.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Gotta throw one to Chris. He and I have beefed, but I'll give him Claude fishing.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Fishing is excellent and I will use it. This is not correct, right? Like the, 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. It is, it is, 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.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Let me ask a question of you and, and by extension, Chris Best, the CEO of Substack.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  He's here right now. I can get him.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  What is an automated system to delete content that people find offensive? If not content moderation, Chris?

• 34:02Speaker 03

  Would 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?

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Oh, boy. The core problem is not people being Nazis or the quality of their output. The problem is when there's a mismatch between a reader's expectation and you can just put it all right there.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  This is a really interesting question, actually. So Substack relatively famously has been very hands off on this front. And

• 34:45Speaker 03

  Famously to my face.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Famously to you. Yeah. A clip that has been seen by every person on TikTok at this point. But look, I sincerely, I think reasonable people can disagree on, on how Substack should moderate the people who write newsletters on its platform. Feel that way, however you want.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  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?

• 35:26Speaker 03

  One, I am not as high on Pangram as everyone else is.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  Whether or not they can actually detect AI text at scale over time using more AI. Just a big question mark.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  See what I'm saying?

• 35:45Speaker 02

  It's just like, oh, right. We're just, this is the cat and mouse game forever and ever and ever and ever.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  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, I have a lot of feelings about Substack just surfacing Nazis over and over again, which is a problem that just keeps repeating itself.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 36:17Speaker 03

  And just to be totally blunt, Substack has built very, very good content moderation systems. They have them. They're not hands off.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  They, they have them for a lot of reasons. They have them for copyright infringement purposes. They have them because they, there are some stuff they will not put in their recommendation system. They, they've built it all. It's all there. And now they're using it to filter and moderate AI content. They just added another category to their existing content moderation infrastructure. And the market has not demanded that they use that infrastructure to, to moderate like outright racism. And I, you know, maybe that's just the internet. Maybe that's the world we live in. Maybe that's 2026 and Dark Woke is gonna make its comeback whenever it makes its comeback because pendulums do swing back. But I, this part of the information ecosystem is much more tolerant of one thing than another.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  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 the negative public perception towards AI. There it is again.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  We will have outright racism and sexism on these platforms that will occur no penalty then. And 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. Nothing, none of that hurt them. But people hate AI content so much that we're gonna build in the filters. Huh?

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Huh.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Can I offer you the funniest possible counter example?

• 37:59Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  What if you did this in the exact opposite direction? That's what's going on at Prime Video at Amazon right now.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  There is this great Reuters story that we 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 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.

• 38:37Speaker 03

  Like make the interface, like vibe code the interface?

• 38:40Speaker 02

  No, I think what's happening is they 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 we we posted that there's 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.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Like this, this really has like Sergey Brin coming back to Google and demanding to AIify 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.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  I, there's a Lauren Sanchez joke here and I can't, I can't find it. And maybe I don't want to.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  Maybe the future of this is every one of the posters is AI generated and Lauren Sanchez is in every one of them.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  She's flying a helicopter.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 40:08Speaker 03

  I'm, I'll set that aside. You can send me the jokes if you want. It does have the 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.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Like it's already just trying to sell you so much stuff, it might as well just try to sell you some more stuff.

• 40:38Speaker 03

  Amazon has always just been the least concerned about taste or class in its video streaming interface.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Very much so.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  Like 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.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  I, 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.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  And maybe that's the joke.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Maybe. I, 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 what 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.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  Like, I mean, the confidence with which this is repeatedly said to me is off the charts. 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?

• 41:43Speaker 02

  I know. Well, and I, I think about this next to things like Letterboxd, which there have been all these rumors that somebody's going to buy Letterboxd recently. 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, and there is just this rebellion happening against what I don't want is a, 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.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  People understand the pipeline that is feeding this slop to them and they want out of it.

• 42:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  And so what we're getting is just louder AI recommendations from Amazon Prime Video. Sure. Why not? Knock yourself out.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  I do like that he looked at all of Amazon. He's like, I know where to put the AI.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  What's the, what's the ugliest own page we have? How do I put some more stuff on it?

• 42:53Speaker 02

  Do you want to talk about this Meta AI detection system before we go? I know, I know you love an AI detection system. Do you want to talk about this one before we switch gears?

• 43:01Speaker 03

  I mean, it's the theme of our, of our little segment here is can you find it and can you kill it?

• 43:08Speaker 03

  Can you, can you predator of the AI?

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Could, could Content Seal, Meta's tool, have stopped 5.6 Sol? I'm gonna say probably not.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  No, definitely not. So shout out to Jess Witherhead, 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.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  You can go read her story. She, 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. She's, her, the 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.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  So is Google, right?

• 44:31Speaker 03

  So is Google. Yeah, 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 all get better.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  And importantly, they're, they're only really valuable if the distributors of the content at the platforms use them.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Right. Which is an important reason to only have a couple of standards.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  Right. So everybody understands that all the images are being labeled the same way. And then the, 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 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. Meta's own detector is rate limited. So even if you get images that are labeled in Content Seal, you try to detect them, they will stop you and they, you know, 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.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Brutal.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Do you, do you know what I mean?

• 45:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:47Speaker 03

  Like, look, we made an EV. We're so proud of it. It's to get around to your regulations. 100% what Content Seal is. Super 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.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Yep. I think Meta is also not super eager to filter it in its own systems. Like Adam Mosseri has been on the record saying, we don't want to filter out AI content. That, that they are also like Substack in, 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, in a weird way, sort of incentivized to not have a system that works.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  And this is a particular problem for Instagram because every photographer of any note, he uses tools that now have a bunch of AI in them, not even necessarily generative AI. If 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.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  Should you be punished for denoising an image using the most state of the art denoising tool that exists? I don't know. I got, truly don't, I do, I do it without any regard for anything anymore. Like maybe, maybe.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  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?

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Well, and increasingly, all of those companies are just going to happily make AI slop advertisements about everything all the time. And in fact,

• 47:36Speaker 03

  All the time.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  I, I'm going to tell you, the CEO of Adobe, Shantanu Irani, 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.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  Which means literally everyone is using them.

• 48:04Speaker 03

  Everyone is using them all the time. I mean, that's their stat, you can believe it or not, but that is, that's what Adobe is claiming. And this is the problem for all these labeling tools, because if you overapply them, everyone gets mad. If you underapply them, everyone gets mad. And Meta is like, what if we made a fake standard no one uses and then claim it exists?

• 48:20Speaker 03

  Pretty cynical.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's, it's, it's rough out there. Where is the AI goes up right with where is the computer in foundational verges questions going forward. All right. That's enough AI for now. We've got a bunch of gadgets and stuff to talk about. So let's take one more break. We'll be back.

• 48:37Speaker 04

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• 49:50Speaker 02

  All right, we're back. It's time now for the hype test, 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.

• 50:05Speaker 03

  Yo, welcome to Flavortown, buddy.

• 50:07Speaker 09

  Welcome to Flavortown. How you doing? I'm Guy Fieri. Diners, drive-ins, dives, devices, we got it all. Anyway.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  Now we're getting sued.

• 50:14Speaker 09

  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.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  We're gonna take all that sponsor money and we're gonna pay it directly to Guy Fieri. What are we doing here? Guys, if you'd like to sponsor us, that'd be great. I don't know if the Food Network is buying podcast advertising at this time. We're open to it.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  Welcome to Flavortown is a thing I am willing to say every week for enough money. Ross, what do you have for us this week?

• 50:45Speaker 09

  All right, this week, I am going to make the case for being hyped about Avengers. Stay with me.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 50:52Speaker 09

  Hit me.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  Nope, nope, nope, nope.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  That was not the pitch I received when this began.

• 50:56Speaker 09

  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.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Can we just, can we just pause on this for just?

• 51:15Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  So, one could call it Infinity Vision. One could also call it lies. Is that, is that a fair?

• 51:23Speaker 03

  Well, to me, IMAX right now is, is like an ever-escalating series of lies. Right, like there's like proper IMAX, and there's like fake IMAX, and there's like levels of fake IMAX. Then 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, make a point.

• 51:45Speaker 09

  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 gonna 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 gonna be 75 such theaters in the US, 300 international, which kind of sounds like a lot. But to your point, you have almost 2,000 IMAX or IMAX-esque designated systems worldwide. So it's a smaller footprint.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  This is what I mean by it's like, true IMAX is what? 40 theaters in the whole world?

• 52:28Speaker 09

  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. But we, 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-credit scene, because, of course.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  Didn't you say you were gonna make a case?

• 52:57Speaker 09

  I, I am going to make a case. I gotta get, 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. 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, it got $16 million in ticket pre-sales in the first 24 hours. That is the third-biggest pre-sale since COVID, 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. Trailer should be an art form, and this is not what I would call a piece of art.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:53Speaker 09

  It, it does, because the trailer, in many ways, feels like homework, right? It's like, remember this, remember this.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  Great, it's Ready Player One, the Avengers experience. Do you remember this guy? Remember 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. Oh my god.

• 54:11Speaker 09

  Let's not forget, it's Robert Downey Jr. practicing this kind of faux Eastern European, in your verse, it's called Lot Varian, it's a Lot Varian accent.

• 54:19Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 54:20Speaker 09

  But yeah, it is a lot of people, and I think what Marvel's 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.

• 54:34Speaker 09

  And I think there's a lot of places we should 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 Endgame and then just tapered off. And I'll admit, I'm one of those people. I sat through 29 hours of Marvel movies and live blogged it for the verve. I was 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.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  It was wonderful. It was a great experience for everyone.

• 55:03Speaker 09

  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 the last five, six years. We're gonna 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.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  It's a real, let's remember some guys, kind of energy.

• 55:33Speaker 09

  It is.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  I just want to point out, they already sent off the Fox X-Men in Deadpool. That, literally, that movie was like, goodbye to this.

• 55:41Speaker 09

  Well, so wait, so this is actually my question about this.

• 55:43Speaker 03

  There was a montage sequence at the end. It was literally goodbye to this.

• 55:47Speaker 09

  Ross.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  I think they ran time of your life.

• 55:50Speaker 09

  They, they did, actually. Yes, they did.

• 55:52Speaker 03

  You can't come back from time, you can't un-graduate from high school.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  Neil, at first, they killed half of them, and now they're back. Like, they can do anything they want.

• 55:59Speaker 09

  Well, okay, but Professor Xavier has died on camera for a film like eight times at this point.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, the argument that I heard here was they did a fake IMAX, and a lot of people watched this trailer.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  Wait, so, okay, Ross, let me, let me ask you a question that I think is, is at the center of what I'm trying to figure out here, which is, uh, they tried to do this thing where there was one era of Marvel that, that ended, and then there was gonna be a new era of Marvel with new stars and new characters and new movies. And that, none of that worked. Like, it didn't, it, it just, it all sort of died with, with the original characters. And this movie seems like a, 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.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  It's probably gonna work, right? Like, this, it, it feels sort of cynical and sad that this is what it's come to, that like, it turns out everybody liked Robert Downey Jr., so we're gonna give you more Robert Downey Jr. Is it as simple as that? Like, we're, we're just gonna 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?

• 57:17Speaker 09

  It's their salaries, geez, $500 million to do two movies.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  Unreal.

• 57:21Speaker 09

  Congrats, Robert. Congrats. I think there is, in extent, 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 a 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. 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. Uh, 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.

• 58:05Speaker 09

  And three, I would argue that acquiring all the Fox IP back meant, we have too many toys, 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, we're just gonna 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 them back up in five minutes.

• 58:34Speaker 03

  How many times must we kill the X-Men?

• 58:38Speaker 03

  We're like, we're sending back in time. Now they're young X-Men. We're gonna kill them too. Old X-Men and young X-Men die in the same, like-

• 58:45Speaker 02

  But now they have the original comic spandex to die in. So you get to watch James Marsden in blue tights.

• 58:51Speaker 03

  Again, I was told that this should be making a case. I will say, just in defense of Robert Downey Jr.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 58:58Speaker 03

  He talks real fast, and so words per minute, it's a deal.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  I appreciate the doomsday spec sheet here.

• 59:06Speaker 03

  As a fellow fast talker, that's kind of the-

• 59:09Speaker 02

  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 III, which is going to be a vastly better and more interesting movie that I think is going to absolutely just eat Doomsday's lunch.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  Oh, that is a take. No, no way. We're way over. We gotta be done here.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  I think everyone wins. Here's what I say. That's just a lot more cool shit to watch in theaters. And that's great. It is about to be between, between Dune and Spider-Man and Doomsday. It is about to be a pretty fun, like, action superhero nerd movie fall, and I'm, I'm pretty excited about it.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  It's gonna be, are you excited about Spider-Man, Ross? Brand new day into it?

• 59:50Speaker 09

  Very excited. Very excited for Spider-Man. Uh, there's Comic Con this weekend for nerd journalists everywhere. That was, that Marvel also did the big Hall H presentation. They do a lot of promises. Those promises shift because of COVID and business realities. But it is gonna be just interesting to see, like, how Marvel does it. Kevin Feige currently is on an apology tour for a lot of the 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 of 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.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  I, I love the optimism. And just so everyone knows, if you preorder tickets for Avengers Doomsday now, and then the movie is terrible, Guy Fieri will personally refund you your ticket money. He's gonna sponsor this show by buying everyone tickets to Avengers Doomsday. It's gonna be amazing.

• 1:00:37Speaker 03

  I did always wonder what would bring the verge to its knees, and the Guy Fieri lawsuit was a dark horse?

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  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 is a dummy.

• 1:00:58Speaker 10

  Brendan Carr is a dummy.

• 1:01:06Speaker 10

  Brendan Carr is, Brendan Carr is a dummy.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:17Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  That just gave me very intense, and I mean this as a compliment, day rave at a Vegas pool energy in a way that I really enjoyed.

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  Oh, I had lowrider cruise.

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  I, I think it's, I think that's roughly the same energy.

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  It's in there.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  You're like, you're, you're bouncing up and down in a Camaro. I'm like kicking it in a cabana. Yeah.

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  Your knowledge of lowrider culture is completely just like offensive. I don't even, what?

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  I'm very sorry. Uh, that theme remix was from Chris Swick, who said, uh, and I, 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.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  That's very good.

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  Neel, what did Brendan do this week?

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  Uh, Brendan, man, uh, 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.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

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

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  Anyway, so that was a speech, uh, many networks covered it, many did not.

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  Like, even like Fox News the next day basically was like, well, that happened. That was weird. And they moved on to the next thing. Anyhow.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  As is their right.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  Right. They have First Amendment rights.

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  They are news programs.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  They're also just like, on, I think, in Republican, and also just like in the Republican Party, this is not a winner.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  Like, relitigating 2020 is not a thing they all want to do. It, it, it doesn't win them elections. In fact, sometimes it loses them elections. Anyhow, some networks covered the speech in primetime, some networks didn't. NBC and ABC did not.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  NBC and ABC are broadcasters. Guess who loves to infringe the speech of broadcasters? Our boy Brendan Carr, who's FCC nominally controls the rights of broadcasters using the public airwaves. So he was asked on Fox News this week if, uh, it was acceptable for NBC and ABC to not air Trump's remarks in primetime. Here, here's what he said.

• 1:04:04Speaker 07

  Could 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. 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 and parcel of what all broadcasters should want to do. There's been a lot of interest in Congress. Obviously, we got a letter from Congress, you know, asking us to investigate the decisions to do this or not do this. And, you know, 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.

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  Okay, I have several thoughts.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  By all means.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  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, someone mailed a letter?

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:05:11Speaker 03

  For a speech I don't like?

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  This was, this was thought number three, is that this is very much reminiscent of Brendan Carr saying, we can do this the easy way, or can, he can do this the hard way. It's very clear he has no moves here. Like, he's not shy about saying what he's gonna do when he thinks he's gonna do something. But in this case, he just kind of gestures at it. He's just like, huh, we're gonna look at this with sort of a meaningful look on his face, which is very Brendan.

• 1:05:35Speaker 03

  I mean, he can definitely incur costs and launch sham investigations.

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:05:58Speaker 03

  That's, um, that's not the country I was raised in. Uh, being able to ignore the president is one of the great joys of being an American. Being able to just openly be like, no, I'm, I'm choosing to never listen to you.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  Is maybe the, the only quality of being an American that we all share.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  It's a very funny time to remember that, like, we mostly didn't used to think about the president.

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Screw that guy. I don't, 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.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  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, but like, that's how much access there is.

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:06:59Speaker 03

  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, like, sideways glance away from receiving this address on all of the millions of other places that are carrying it. 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. And 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.

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  I mean, you, 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.

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  Right. You, 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.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:58Speaker 03

  We really wish TikTok would do that, and we're gonna call our friend Larry Ellison, 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 is a dummy. Brendan, 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.

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  You're welcome to do it. Uh, we can send you a camera. You, you appeared to not have access to the latest and greatest in technology. I would welcome the opportunity. Anyhow, that's been Brendan Carr is a dummy, America's favorite podcast in a podcast.

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  It always just ends in the right. I exit that headspace during that and it's very helpful.

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  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 want it. So I appreciate that.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  Amazing. The branding car is a dummy cinematic universe is open to all. We love you here. Um, I have a Ramageddon update for you. It's bad out there. No gadgets are going to be for sale ever again. So Framework, uh, the, the PC manufacturer, I think one of the companies frankly, we at The Verge are like most excited about. 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. Um, they reached out and said essentially that they had gotten a cost update from a memory supplier that was, quote,

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  "more than double that of the prior inventory." Uh, 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, they literally, they're like, "We have enough, 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." 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, they're offering people the, 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 pre-ordered

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  because Framework literally can't make it for you because of Ramageddon. Uh, also prices have gone up. The, the, let's see, the one with the 16 gigs of memory and 512 gigs of storage, a very sort of mainstream configuration, went up a hundred dollars. And the like mega one with 32 gigs of RAM and a terabyte of storage went up $800 from $2,099 to $2,899. This is, this is just where we're at. And this, this to me is another fascinating turn in this one. Cause 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 going to start to come for more stuff to

• 1:11:05Speaker 02

  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, this is what Ramageddon is doing to everybody.

• 1:11:22Speaker 03

  This 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.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  It does. And I think that 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. Uh, 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. Uh, 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?"

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Seriously, like this is what we've been hearing from companies that the deals don't exist. You just, you get, you get a list of available products and a price and you say yes to it because you don't have any choice. And the 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, I agree that it would be great if Framework had a way out of this, but I'm, 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. And it's a real shame.

• 1:13:07Speaker 03

  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 to, 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.

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  I've been thinking a lot about GTA 6 in this way because we are, 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. And they're all about to be confronted by just absolute disaster anarchy in front of them.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  Which good, it ties well into GTA 6.

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  It does. That's true. We're going to live GTA 6 in the world.

• 1:14:01Speaker 03

  Have you ever stolen a police car to buy a new GPU? Well, GTA 6.

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  No, they're going to take the RAM out of the police car.

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  That's true. Police cars do have an awful lot of RAM in them now. They're doing a lot of surveillance.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  Uh, what's your next lightning round item?

• 1:14:15Speaker 03

  Uh, it, it, it fits right in with our theme here, which is everything's getting expensive and weird things are happening because of it. So, uh, you know, we're, we're heading into Apple season here. We're expecting what touchscreen Macs, new iPhones, maybe a folding $50,000 Ultra, you know, something is gonna happen. It's all gonna be very expensive.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  They killed the Apple car project, but they're going to sell a foldable phone for roughly the price of the Apple car. Is where we're headed.

• 1:14:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  Boy, is that dystopian.

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a real, the, the first thing in there, you kind of had me in the first half, you know what I mean? Or it's like, this is, it's, that, 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.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it's called Partner Finance Lock, which is an incredible name. Uh, 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. And it will block all the apps except for phone settings in the App Store, which is very funny.

• 1:15:52Speaker 02

  You can give us money for apps, but you can't do anything with 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.

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  That's the only problem in journal. I was like, Siri, I, I will not prompt you into feeling guilt for missing payments. Uh, 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.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

  Right? And even leasing, sure. Right. Right now there's iPhone financing. There's upgrade options. You're, you know, most financing is, people understand it. You cut the price of the phone. 24, 36 installments. You pay them monthly and at the end of it, you own the phone. Leasing is like, Apple's going to take their 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, like it's like Scrooge.

• 1:16:57Speaker 02

  Your hands up against the toy store window.

• 1:17:01Speaker 02

  If only.

• 1:17:03Speaker 03

  I wish, I wish I could download HBO Max, but I, I simply do not have the resources. It's bad news.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  And then the other thing is the, the upgrade, uh, the Apple upgrade thing will reportedly be for basically only higher end devices. There, there's some evidence that the, the base iPad, the Apple Watch SE, the MacBook Neo will not be included. So it's very clear, we, 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, you just pay of overtime.

• 1:17:36Speaker 03

  Sure. If anyone's ever shopped for a car lease, you know, the, the push to the top trim because it's only $10 more a month is like, it's always sitting there.

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think this is bad. I, I really like the, 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.

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  I'm going to find a way to hack into your phone and, and tell it that you're leasing it for me. And just put you in Partner Finance Lock from time to time.

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  If you could lock everything on my phone, but the journal app, that would honestly make my life vastly better.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  I would bet you Partner Finance Lock is more effective at controlling screen time than Apple's actual screen time or parental control features.

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:18:27Speaker 02

  We fixed it.

• 1:18:28Speaker 03

  That's really good. I'd like to not pay for this iPhone between the hours of 6:00 PM and like 10:00 AM. Choice.

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  Just be late on every payment. It's, it's good. Uh, 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.

• 1:18:45Speaker 03

  Oh, this looks sick.

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  This is what I'm saying. The light phone, they've been making stuff for forever. Kai Tang, one of the co-founders is gonna be on the show next week. That's gonna 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 three turned into a flip phone. So there's a 2.8 screen, 2.8 inch screen up top, D-pad and number keys on the bottom. Very simple phone, not designed to do all that much. It's, it's a light phone and flip phone form. But I asked him, why did you make a flip phone? Why make this? 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,

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  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 is, it has, it has become a status symbol in some of these communities to not be using a smartphone. And, and the form factor of a flip phone has become, in a very real way, a, 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.

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  I will connect this dot directly to my obsession with influencers and young people spending too much money on the Canon G7X.

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  Yes, totally.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  Which is an ancient point and shoot. It's a good point and shoot. It's just ancient. And then I watched, 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, I love this unbundling that's happening. This, right? The, the whole smartphone was convergence and now there's a little bit of divergence happening. I love it. Can't get enough of it.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  I think it's great. This phone is $299, which I think is probably the right price for it. Um, you can also pay 39 bucks a month to get the phone plus lights service, uh, which they seem to think a lot of people are gonna do that as a, as a secondary device to a smartphone, that that, that price might work for a lot of people, which I think is really interesting. Um, I have gotten so much feedback from people who are in this, 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? There's something about it that just works.

• 1:21:20Speaker 03

  It's, it's really good. I will say one option, uh, in case you're not insured, buy 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.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  So it's a life. It's a choice. Yeah.

• 1:21:34Speaker 03

  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 gonna watch the, I'm gonna watch the presentation here.

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  It's beautiful.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. I was saying, that's my personal solution, is to stare at the 5GE indicator on my iPhone and be like, well, this won't work. I should pay attention to my family.

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  My fun new thing is at my house, I constantly have two bars of service, but actually have no service.

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's good.

• 1:21:58Speaker 02

  It's so, it's, I'm in the, just my phone is lying to me state of, of Verizon and it's really extremely delightful. Um.

• 1:22:05Speaker 03

  We won the race to 5G, David. I don't know if you're aware of this. We've all been doing robot surgery in a grape from the back of a robot car for the past five years.

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. And this changed everything about how fast I download Netflix now.

• 1:22:15Speaker 03

  All right, David, I got one last one, 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. Welcome Joanna Stern to the Vergecast.

• 1:22:26Speaker 11

  I'm here.

• 1:22:26Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

  From the new thing set. Look at how fancy.

• 1:22:30Speaker 11

  Did we get like a pop-up or something fancy?

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  Okay, this is, this is actually, before we get into this Joanna, Neelai and I were debating what your like walk-on music should be. Uh, the sort of Joanna entrance music. Do you have strong opinions on what you think your entrance music should be?

• 1:22:44Speaker 11

  I'm doing a talk next week and I am having them do Mr. Roboto.

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  Oh, that's pretty good.

• 1:22:51Speaker 03

  Just like always be selling.

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  It's all right. You've sold the, you've sold the book on enough of our shows. Oh my gosh, she's got it right there.

• 1:23:00Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:23:01Speaker 03

  It's all right. The Decoder book is coming out next year. We're gonna, it's gonna be horrible for everyone. I need to talk to you about what is going on with Ford.

• 1:23:08Speaker 11

  Yeah, I know. I, I messaged you panic. I was in a panic.

• 1:23:12Speaker 03

  I would say we had like a little argument over, 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 gonna 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. And 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 gonna keep using regular CarPlay. Joanna, what, what do you think is going on here?

• 1:23:58Speaker 11

  I, I think we're both right. I think that, 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 these 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. We, these are some of the most valuable data things we want from you, Maps being one of them. They're gonna also be using this for self-driving capabilities and to build a platform on.

• 1:24:43Speaker 11

  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 I'm here, and now, now Neelai, you make your point.

• 1:24:57Speaker 03

  Okay, it's good. Joanna is like, this is my first podcast. Now I will make my point. We're debate style. We're doing it.

• 1:25:03Speaker 11

  Well, no, I teed you up perfectly for your point, which is the Google part of this.

• 1:25:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the, the back and forth here is that these big smartphone vendors have tried to get ever more deeply integrated into cars. Google has made some headway, right? A bunch of cars run Android Automotive, which is a whole operating system that just runs. My GM EV is just runs Android. It runs Android 12 on Intel, which is not great, but that's what it runs.

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  Which you think is better than CarPlay, just so everyone's clear. Neelai's out on CarPlay and in on Android 12. That's the thing, that's the thing you should know about Neelai.

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  I don't want to be held to that. I'm gonna 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.

• 1:25:50Speaker 03

  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? Uh, 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 this shipping. And in fact, new, uh, new vehicles from that brand have a whole system that they've built in other countries already. So like, they're moving ahead on their own.

• 1:26:29Speaker 03

  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 gonna 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, 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.

• 1:26:53Speaker 11

  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.

• 1:27:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:07Speaker 11

  I don't think my take is wrong.

• 1:27:09Speaker 03

  We'll see.

• 1:27:10Speaker 11

  If someone from Ford wants to confirm this, on or off the record, please call me.

• 1:27:14Speaker 03

  There's a part of this where the maps for where are the EV chargers, we're gonna 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. There'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.

• 1:27:51Speaker 11

  As an existing, I'm a Machi 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, 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.

• 1:28:17Speaker 03

  I mean, they're the only ones to get this.

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  This brings me to my theory about this as someone who does not interview car CEOs. This doesn't matter at all. This, 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 gonna plug in their phone and just do CarPlay. What is even the point of this? No one's gonna use this.

• 1:28:45Speaker 03

  What maps do you use when you use CarPlay?

• 1:28:49Speaker 02

  I go back and forth between Google Maps and Apple Maps. 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.

• 1:29:03Speaker 11

  True. 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. That this is going to be even more important. And so I think that's what Farley is 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 still are, we are still going to do some autonomy. There's a big autonomous announcement to this. Apple's our partner here.

• 1:29:39Speaker 03

  Oh, our story just got updated. As we're talking, 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 the email. Ford is helping our next generation ADAS in-house through Latitude AI, their wholly owned autonomy subsidiary. Apple Maps will be important mapping enabler. This is, 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 in maps. I bet Google wanted a whole bunch of Google stuff and Ford didn't want to give it up.

• 1:30:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, Google's like, we're going to train our own cars off of this. And Ford said, no, thank you.

• 1:30:12Speaker 11

  Yes.

• 1:30:13Speaker 03

  It will be fascinating to see if any other car makers start adopting Apple Maps because the Tom Tom stuff is all bad. Right? Like, have you driven a Solentis vehicle? You don't want any of this in your, in your face.

• 1:30:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:25Speaker 03

  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, 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, but it's, it's fine. It just does the job.

• 1:30:43Speaker 03

  I know, Joanna, you think, you think you're going to buy a new Ford now because it has?

• 1:30:46Speaker 11

  No, it's not available right now. This is all like, this is all the prep for the 2027 big reveal that Farley's been prepping for. And, but I, my lease is up next month, so I, what do I do?

• 1:30:57Speaker 02

  Joanna, will you come back on the show and the three of us can litigate this decision? I'm serious.

• 1:31:01Speaker 11

  Sure.

• 1:31:02Speaker 02

  There's a whole Verge cast in, let's buy Joanna a car. And I think we should do it.

• 1:31:06Speaker 03

  Oh, I have, I have the hottest take for what's going to happen next, but we should do that entire episode of that.

• 1:31:10Speaker 02

  It's going to be good.

• 1:31:11Speaker 03

  We should, we should, we should do it live so we can get real, real feedback.

• 1:31:14Speaker 02

  That's my point. Wait, Joanna, real quick, Google Maps or Apple Maps, which one is better? Tell the people.

• 1:31:19Speaker 11

  I have the same answer as you.

• 1:31:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:20Speaker 11

  I, I like, 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.

• 1:31:37Speaker 03

  The state of New Jersey is not navigable without Apple Maps. That's my hottest take. You simply cannot survive there because every, driving in New Jersey is 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. And Google Maps is like, oh, you needed to be in the right lane five minutes ago.

• 1:31:51Speaker 11

  And they do a very nice job of showing the jug handles, like that you have two or three coming up.

• 1:31:55Speaker 02

  It's good stuff. All right, Joanna, thanks for coming on. Good to see you.

• 1:31:57Speaker 11

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:31:59Speaker 02

  Neel, the only update I have left for you is that there is more Paramount shenanigans.

• 1:32:04Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 1:32:05Speaker 02

  Their, their.

• 1:32:06Speaker 03

  Please don't do this to me.

• 1:32:08Speaker 02

  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, in help us buy Joanna a car, subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com/subscribe.

• 1:32:41Speaker 03

  I don't, no.

• 1:32:45Speaker 02

  Help us buy Neel a car to compete with Joanna's car in a street race. Theverge.com/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, if you can make me feel better about OpenAI and hugging face, we would love to hear from you. Vergecast at theverge.com is the email. 866 VERGE11 is the hotline. Neel, who's on Decoder next week?

• 1:33:07Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  A super chill time in that world.

• 1:33:18Speaker 03

  He and I always just fall like right into the weeds of everything. It's great.

• 1:33:23Speaker 02

  That's good stuff. I'm excited about that one. Version history, the season is over. We have recorded all of next season. 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 Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron LaCassio. We will see you next week, Neel.

• 1:33:50Speaker 03

  Drive them home.

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