The post-search Google era begins

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At least for a little while longer. I'm your friend, David Pierce. Neil Abtel is here. Hey, buddy. What's up? We haven't seen each other in like forever. Like people think it's a bit when we say we only talk to each other sometimes on the podcast, but sometimes we only talk to each other on the podcast. It's nice to see your face. This week in particular, I was at IO and you were six. You were out. Are you feeling better? I am feeling better. I feel like a person for the first time in like five days, which is very exciting. I got a just horrific stomach thing that made me just delirious through all of Google IO. It's been a strange week. But you were out there. You talked to Sundar Pshai. That's going to be on Decoder. I did. And I took the red eye home this morning and I have...

I'm on Benadryl sleep. So I'm super loopy too. This is going to be a wild episode of the show. Quite the episode. We have a bunch of stuff to talk about. Jake and Hayden did a great job talking through all of the stuff going on at IO, all the agent stuff, all the AI stuff. Go watch or listen to that if you haven't for a lot of the news. You and I are going to mostly talk about search because I think we like to talk about search and the web and what all of this means. And I want to dig in on some of that with you. But first we have a bunch of, I would call it.

some personal news stuff to talk about. No, we don't have any personal news. That means things to people. That's true. We've gotten a lot of questions about some corporate goings-ons in the last couple of days. Do you want to just talk about what has happened with Vox Media and with us and with the Podcast Network over the last couple of days? Yes. And all these names are bad.

We make a lot of fun of a lot of companies having bad names and our company is not immune to it. There's something about being an executive at a large company that just makes you incapable of naming things other than using the same word over and over again. And Vox Media is absolutely guilty. So here's a quick version of the story. 15 years ago, we started a company called Vox Media. And it was called Vox Media because when we all left AOL, we had actually joined a company called Sports Blogs Inc., SB Nation, our sports platform. And so we launched The Verge. We needed a new parent company name. And I will never forget it. The people of this company voted and they wanted to call it like Super Huge Inc. See, I was like, we're super not doing that.

And so there was a company called Vox Media. And that was just the two brands for a minute. It was just the Virgin Estimation. And the third one was Polygon, which I'm unhappy they sold in deeply meaningful ways that all the executives know that I'm deeply unhappy that they sold. And then they launched Vox.com and then they bought Eater and they bought New York Magazine. And so like the people who run this company have just been acquiring stuff under this umbrella brand called Vox Media. And none of that has really ever bothered us. And because I have like founder syndrome, I basically just ignored them. Like I don't pay a lot of attention to the thing that is Vox Media. And we don't share a lot of like stuff with them. We just don't. We're just our own little thing.

Anyhow, I'm saying all that because 15 years later, those same group executives, Jim Bancroft and all the rest of them, have decided they're going to sell New York Magazine, Vox.com, and a thing that is confusing everyone called the Vox Media Podcast Network to James Murdoch, who is like the younger, more liberal son of Rupert Murdoch. There's a whole succession drama. And they're going to go over there. And then, because no one is good at names or being clear about what is what, they've also... bought the name Vox Media and they're taking that with them. Right. So that is confusing everyone in the deepest way. So they're still our company, the same one that we've had forever. It's, you know, it's selling things to another company. So it's going to receive a check and then we're just going to continue operating our company the same as ever. And so the amount of nothing changing for The Verge is like off the charts. Like literally nothing is changing for us. We're going to have to rename our company. So I'm in the market for new names. People want to want to suggest them. I'm happy to take them. Can I trust you in Versant?

We're just like not going to do that. None of that's going to happen. What if we come up with an abbreviation that starts with MS and then ends in a bunch of nonsense? So that's what's happening. It's like James Murak bought a bunch of stuff from our company, including the name, which is hilarious. Some of our executives are going to go to that company. Some of them are going to say this company. But the verge is staying exactly the same. The thing that is confusing everyone is that they bought this thing called the Vox Media Podcast Network, which David and I have to say in the credits of our shows all the time. The Vox Media Podcast Network does not own our podcast feeds. It does not run our podcast. It does not have editorial oversight into us. It is an ad sales network.

It has a bunch of people that it works with, including Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway and Maria Sharapova and Brene Brown. Megan Rapinoe and Sue Burt. It just has this cast of characters who basically all own their own feeds, and it bundles them all up. Marquez Brownlee, Waveform, they're a client of the Vox Media Podcast Network. But they own their feed. That's their product. And all the NPN does is it bundles all that inventory up, and it goes out in the world, and it sells ads for us. And that has always been the case. And so they're just our vendor now. And that's fine. As you all know, I do not think about the ads. I don't read the ads. So I don't have any particular feelings about that. Because it is called the Vox Media Podcast Network, and because we say we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in an effort to...

communicate to listeners that if they'd like to buy ads, that's who you should talk to. People think that something is happening to us, but literally nothing is happening to us. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, and I think that the way I have explained it to a couple of people is essentially just that... It is not their podcast. It is our podcast, right? Like they took the people who sell the ads for our podcasts and that is now part of a different company. And what that will mean down the road, I have absolutely no idea and plan to spend absolutely no time. Imagine what I'm going to be like when I'm your client instead of your coworker. Genuine nightmare. Having been your coworker, nightmare. I'm just saying like that's the relationship that's going to change. And I'm honestly, I'm excited about some of that stuff. Like it has been a big and really company for a minute. It does a lot of things. It pulls in a lot of directions. The company that we will run that is legitimately the same company they just bought the name is.

One, it's gonna be fine. It's like a healthy company with a healthy amount of revenue. We're gonna be fine. And we're a bigger, more important part of it now. Right. So it's like smaller, more focused. And I'm excited about smaller, more focused in real ways. Yeah. Walk me through that just a little bit, because I think the most common question we've both gotten in the last 36 hours has been something to the effect of, is this the beginning of something terrifying for The Verge? Right. Like there's been actually a really sort of lovely, overwhelming bit of support from people being like, don't let this kill The Verge. Like, oh, God, if this kills The Verge. And like, I want to I want to make everyone feel better that this is not killing The Verge. There are there are no bad signs for The Verge here. But I do want you to just sort of briefly explain what this actually looks like in your head right now.

for the sort of next turn for us. If anything, maybe literally nothing changes. And that's fine. But like, what does this mean for The Verge in your mind as we go forward now? So let me just pull apart two aspects of The Verge. There's the newsroom.

right? The reporters and editors who wake up every day and like write and edit and report the news. Nothing is going to change for them. Maybe like some software licenses will change, right? Because the company is deciding who gets what software licenses. Maybe we can stop using Airtable and David can finally be happy. You see what I mean? Like that kind of corporate-y stuff will change. But the actual work will not change. Our relationship to you, the audience will not change. We're shipping dark mode. You know, it's like we're just going to keep trucking along. On the corporate side, yeah, a bunch of stuff will change. Like these companies are pulling themselves apart. They're going to have to duplicate services in a lot of ways and figure out who gets what.

the people that go over like the lawyers and accountants that go to one company or the other, the other company will have to rebuild those competencies, right? Like just corporate stuff. I don't expect that to affect how we do anything. And maybe the simplest way of saying this is we are not the ones who got bought. We're the ones receiving the money.

right? Like there was a purchase. Right. We're also not the ones being left behind, right? Like it's important to say that is not the thing that is happening here. The company is not leaving and just sort of abandoning us back here. That's not at all what's going on here. I'm honestly, I'm like, see you later. I don't know what else to say about it. Like, I don't think about that. I don't think about those things. I do not spend one minute of my, I say this for staff all the time. I don't care. Like I don't buy, like I'm excited to run a smaller, more focused company that can be more aggressive. And that is what I intend to do. Now, if some other billionaire shows up and is like, what we're going to do is AI generated slop.

One, I will fight them to the death. I don't think that's going to happen. But that's like, who knows, right? Like Jeff Bezos could be like, well, I ruined the Washington Post. Now I'm going to ruin the Verge. Like, sure, right? Like anything is possible. But the thing that's visible to me from where I sit today is we're going to operate the Verge tomorrow exactly the same as we did yesterday. I just want to say that if Jeff Bezos tries to turn the Verge cast into whatever that weird new Washington Post opinions podcasting is. He's going to make us do to our faces whatever he did to his face. That's the only way I will accept any editorial oversight of Verge. If you make my face look like Jeff Bezos. My price for that is so much lower than you think it is. We're going to give you a little necklace.

He's got a good beard. I'll give that to Bezos. He's got a good beard game. But yeah, I would just say, look, change makes people nervous. But we have to figure out who gets the Google Docs logins. There's stuff we have to do. But the actual work, zero changes to what we do every day and zero changes to the show. And maybe one day the people who sell our ads will have to present a deck to me about why they're good at selling ads, which I think will be very funny. Yeah, fair enough. And actually, to your point about changing on the show, we have, I would say, some substantially more fun news about changes we're making to this show, which is that we're kind of completely changing the first cast.

This is like weird, completely. Like in a fun way. In a cool way that we wanted to do and have been doing for a long time. And it is actually in no single way about this very annoyingly timed news for this particular way. So starting on June 1st, which is like not next week, but the Monday following, The Verge Cast is becoming a daily podcast. We're going to start putting out episodes every day, Monday through Friday. We've been talking about this a lot. And I would say the goal is to make the show sort of feel the same, but make more sense. And I actually think in a daily way, we're going to be able to do a lot more of that. I don't know. What are you excited about, about Daily Verge Cast? I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I know you were as early as I was in thinking this is a good idea that we should do.

Yeah. Why are you psyched about daily podcasts? There's so much news. That's what I got for you. There's so much news. And we have so many listeners who constantly tell us that we should just do one, like, six-hour show every week, which we should not do. Like, we will not survive if we do that. It's actually easier to make a little bit of show every day. So we're not going to make, like, two-hour Virgcasts every day. I think David's plan is to make tighter, more focused stories every day that you can listen to. And then, can I say the most exciting thing? Please. We're going to reheat 90 seconds on the Virg. Yeah, we are. Is the top of the new daily Virgcast, which is a beloved product that everyone has wanted.

us to bring back. So we're going to have 90 seconds of urge, which is like news of the day. Obviously, we're going to participate in the clips economy. So that's going to go out into the world as clips. And then we'll have a little story we can tell you every day. And there's so much that even when we make the rundowns for this episode or when David makes the rundown for the other, we just leave so much stuff that is interesting and important. We just leave it out. So I have always been like, we just need to make more show. Like we have to make more of this because we're not covering everything we can cover. We're not talking about all the things we can talk about. We don't have enough space for our staff to show up on these shows. And I'm really excited that the Daily Verge House will let you hear from more of our team. And then I'm obviously just...

thrilled to bring back 90 which is going to be the most fun it's gonna be great i am excited about it and i think it's been really funny planning all this out while also becoming more and more uh ruthless about how we think about distribution around the entire internet because on the one hand like this i started from the exact same place that you did right like this lets us do more stories it lets us do one story a day that which is just a thing i think makes more sense like having a structure that is like here is what you have come to experience you are going to experience that thing and then you're going to leave it's like that's a good user experience whereas what we do with a lot of our shows is just like here's a grab bag of stuff are you into any of this and that's like i think one reason people want chapters from us and have wanted them from us for so long is that even even the way that we have to write titles for the show makes it hard sometimes to know what you're going to get and when and doing it this way is just going to give us so much more transparency so like one way to think about a lot of the show is we're just going to take the tuesday episode and pull it apart into three different parts right which gives us a little bit of room to expand on each one so that the episodes don't get insane and we don't have to worry about sort of the packaging of things things can just be what they are but also like As somebody who writes most of our headlines, can I tell you how happy I am to only have to make a headline make sense for one thing every day instead of having to be like, what is the underlying theme between these two things that have nothing to do with each other? And how do I tell you what this is going to be on YouTube and how do we make a thumbnail for it? And how do we like explain this to our audience? The YouTube of it is super interesting. Yeah. Because YouTube, you know, you have to play to the algorithm. You have to play the game by the rules of the field or whatever this metaphor is. That's the Benadryl talking right there. YouTube does not want you to like put a long list and headline. Correct. They want you to say one thing like.

exclusive, soon to our pitch high explodes. Watch, watch David get destroyed. Whatever. And so we, that's going to be every episode. And then you can, you can load up a bunch of options and then YouTube will like A-B test them for you and pick one. And often, I think even on just the last episode that we did together, it was like, are we going to pick the Xbox news or the Apple news? And the algorithm picked one. And like some of the comments were like, I wish I had known that the Apple thing was in here. And like, you can just see the fight that you were having with the platforms themselves about how to, just how to tell stories in the way that we want to tell stories. So pulling things apart, I think will, I don't really care if that's easier for YouTube algorithm. I think it'll be better for the audiences.

Like, we'll be able to just communicate what you're going to get in a more direct way. Yeah, and same in podcast feeds, right? Like, I think we hear from people all the time who spend a lot of time in our library, which is kind of wild. The idea that anyone's listening to old episodes of The Verge Cast just sort of horrifies me to my core. But also, like, I love you and thank you for doing that. But...

it's going to make it easier for us to communicate what you're about to get, right? And if you're somebody who just dips in for certain things and doesn't, I think this is all over our website right now. Like one of the reasons we did follow features and one of the reasons we've done some of the parceling out of different pieces of the site is so that like, if you don't want to see Elon Musk, you shouldn't have to, right? And if you come for an episode of the podcast that we don't tell you about Elon Musk and then it's half about Elon Musk, it's actually a crappy experience. And this is just going to let us make the show sort of each individual part feel whole and bigger and complete. And also we're going to get to tell you about it and show it to you in a way that makes much more sense. I'm very excited about it.

And also we get to do 90 seconds on the version. And we get to do 90 seconds on the version. And selfishly means I get to do it most days, which I'm very excited about. It's just, I went back and watched a bunch of old episodes of 90 seconds. We were all just completely out of our mind. The idea that we did that with the people that we did it with, again, we were younger. Most of us were not married and none of us had children. That's the only way I can explain how we ran a start the way we ran a start. But we also, we like, these were like the halcyon days of VC money. So we like had a bunch of camera equipment we probably didn't need. And we were just like, look, this makes the camera go up and down. What if we overuse that in every single episode of 90 seconds? We lit up that boom arm all the time. All the time. It was great.

But anyway, I bring this up largely because we have, what, 10 days from when you might be hearing or seeing this to when we launch this thing. And I want to hear all of your thoughts and all of your feedback. If you hate the idea of us doing a daily podcast, I'm really sorry. But I also would love to hear why so we can maybe fix that for you. If you have thoughts about things that we should do or we want to do a lot more like games and gimmicks. One of the things I've been writing down is TikTok games to make me live play on this episode. One thing we should also say is that this episode, the Friday episode where it's just you and me.

talking about the news of the week. It will probably get a little shorter because we're just going to do more of this stuff over the course of the week. So you and I will have like less new things to talk about every week. But the structure of this episode is not going to change. Yeah. This is the only time we talk to each other and we need to do this. I actually refuse to talk to David. But yeah, send us all of your feedback. Call the hotline 86611. Send us an email at vergecastintheverge.com. I want to hear all of your thoughts, all of your ideas, all of your feedback. The Daily Show launches 6-1, June 1st. It's the first time I've said it out loud. I've only seen it written down as 6-1. So that's just what it is in my head. I could not be more excited about it. I think it's going to be awesome. Yeah. And just to reinforce the point, it is just all systems go here.

Yeah. Like whatever corporate, I don't, again, bye. Like we're just doing our thing. We're just doing stuff. And Verge Cast Daily is a thing we've been working on for a long time. We're very excited about it. And it's still just called the Verge Cast. This is the thing we're all having to break is we've been calling it Verge Cast Daily for a long time because that's different from the Verge Cast we've been making, but it's still just the Verge Cast. Yeah. It's all the one show. We're going to figure it out together. It's going to be great. All right, let's take a quick break and then come back and get into some actual news here. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. Let's talk Google I.O. Neil, you were there. I missed this whole experience. So give me the vibe check. How were things at Shoreline this year at Google I.O.? They were very hot. It was like 85 degrees. I made a video. That's a sunny place. It's sunny. It was hot. There was a lot of like, I'm going to do this AI demo just to be in air conditioning. I made a social video when I was not wearing a jacket for the first time, like in any video ever, maybe. And a lot of people were like, Neil, it's hot. And I sent all those comments to my wife immediately. So thank you to Google for it. You did look good in that video. It was just a fact. Fully the camera angle. Also, the sun glinting off my eyes.

Again, I said, just if you want to say I look hot in Instagram comments, it hasn't worked yet on Becky, but they're going straight to her. If you want to guarantee me, I will read your comment 12 times. That's how to do it. I sent her the screenshot of the first one, and we're getting a new air conditioner, and her entire response was to send me a picture of the wiring to the new air conditioner. I was like, come on, man. That sucks. Anyway, Google I.O. was great. It was always fun to see everybody.

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

is i would not say a coherent story for them in like the classic google sense yeah that's google and then the changes to search are like, vast. And you can see that actually the future of search, if, you know, if we just keep linearly progressing, is that it becomes the agent platform. So they change the search box. It's not called intelligent search. It's bigger. It's multimodal. You can put photos in there. It can generate stuff at you. It can generate apps at you, which we should talk about. And you can see how intelligent search is going to connect right to what's called Gemini Spark, which is their, like, agent in the cloud. And you're going to ask it some stuff, and it's going to deliver you some information. But it might also say, hey, do you want me to just do that for you? And, like, the agent will run away and do that. And that is all monumentally important for the future of the web. But Google seems very committed to all of it.

Then the last piece of this. So I've now described some very tactical, very tangible things. Like, here's these products and like, here's how they work. And at the very end of it, Dennis Hazard, the CEO of Google DeepMind, came out and was like, with Google's power and skill, we will get to AGI and we will look back on this time and standing on the foothills of the singularity. And he was like, goodbye, everybody. And that was like the most jarring part of IO. Like, very tactical announcements, very product-focused. They announced something called the Universal Commerce Protocol and like, Walmart's going to use that so that agents can shop for you, right? Like, whatever. And then at the end, it's like, the singularity is also here.

Yeah, I'm curious for your reaction to that because the thing that is most fascinating about that to me is that Demis Hassabis is the one who said it. And I think for a long time, Demis has been one of the most sort of calculatedly reasonable people talking about how big and huge AI is going to be. He's not one of the people talking about universal basic income. He's not one of the people saying it's going to take away everybody's jobs in two years. He just won a Nobel Prize for some of the work he's done in AI. He is a person with as many sort of receipts on the work that they've done and also who has done, I would say, a reasonably good job of explaining what this stuff is and is not.

for a long time. So for him to say that was shocking to me. Like, was it in the moment? bizarre. Like if Sam Altman had said that, you'd have been like, whatever, Sam, you wrote that on your blog 45 times. But for Demis Asabas to close Google I.O. by saying, like, what up singularity is just wild. Like it was wild in the juxtaposition. Has Demis Asabas always believed that he's working on AGI? Yes. Sure. We just saw in the Musquey Altman trial, everyone in this industry from the top down is always talking about Google and Demis beating them to AGI. Like he's just a specter that looms over this industry. It's obvious that this is what he's working on. I think that the juxtaposition that made it stand out for me was we just spent like two hours of Google launching products, like very tangible.

pretty small in the scheme of things products to build on a lot of these capabilities in huge ways. But when you search Google for what are some great restaurants in Tuscany and it builds you an app that's like, I made a schedule for you for the weekend. You're not like AGI is here. Do you know what I mean? Like the products we saw were meaningful, interesting improvements to the existing products because of AI and what you can do with it. And then, you know, and then because it's Google, they always have to talk about the revenue. We saw a bunch of stuff about shopping.

And then at the very end, he was like, we're going to cure all disease with the power of AlphaFold and then Singularity is here. That to me is like, I think they did it that way as a reminder of what the ultimate ambition is. Right. And the products we're seeing, and I talked to Suna about this, the products we're seeing are still not, they're not going to prove that out to anyone. that's the gap they have to close, right? If you're like everyone, like I asked you to know why, you know, people hate AI and we talked about it for a little bit and he's like, it's not just a marketing problem, which I think was important. I asked him directly and he was like, this is what I'm saying. It's not a marketing problem. Like we have to communicate all the value and we have to show that we're gonna make people's lives better. And some of that is, yeah, when you use Gemini Spark, it can like run around and like figure out how to block party for you, which is like a big example. And I want to talk about that because it was very funny in very specific ways. But also we're gonna cure all disease. And also we've got our eyes in the big place. And like there's some amount of, you've got to show more of an intermediate step.

Right? Like, there's, we're going to make productivity a little bit faster with agents. And then there's the singularity. And like, what is the thing in the middle that actually shows us that we're almost there? Yeah, step one, a daily briefing in the Gemini app. Step two, cure all disease. That's kind of what I'm getting at. Yeah. So that was the vibe. It was like, well, boy, Google's doing a lot of stuff. Everything is called Gemini. So it's hard to even tell them all apart in the classic big company naming problem scheme. But if you look at all the stuff, you're like, oh, eventually this will all come together. Right? And the future of Google as an interface looks like an agent of some kind. Yeah. Yeah. And you get the sense, I mean, I think this is going back to the search box thing, right?

Google is redoing the search box thing, I think has been slightly overblown. They're basically, it's like, it's getting slightly bigger and you can add more stuff to it. But fundamentally, Google has not changed what the thing looks like when you go to google.com in a long time. So just the sheer fact that that is changing at all is really meaningful. And I think I spent some time with Liz Reed who runs search and Josh Woodward who runs Gemini ahead of IO and basically just kept trying to get them to explain where one ends and the other begins. And their answer was essentially people come to us for different things now. And I think everyone at Google seems to see a world in which

these things begin to converge on one another. And I think if you're Google, what you are correctly realizing is, oh, we own the search box, which is the single most valuable piece of real estate on the internet. We have to do all of this there, right? Like Gemini is growing really fast, doing really well. People are downloading the app, people like it, it's going fine. The Google search box is still the thing. And you really get the sense that they're building more and more stuff into that, working their way back to some of this Gemini stuff. And just the thing that Google search is becoming to me is super fascinating, right? Because the sense that I got from this is Google has figured out how it's going to make money from AI in search, which is why you mentioned the universal.

AI cart thing where you can shop all over the internet with your agents and essentially Google will manage all of the shopping aspects of it. Do you know what's really great for Google when it does that is it gets to make money during that? Like everything on the internet as payment processing is like not a long way to think about the business of the internet. And that's a good thing for Google to do. It is a thing that will work for Google as a business. It's a thing that's going to make a lot of agentic stuff easier. Google's also building a lot of the tech that people are going to use to run their agents. Like you can just see how it all accrues back to Google makes money even in a world where the search business goes down.

I don't think they're counting on that happening tomorrow. And I suspect they're counting on a really big AI ad world coming too. But like you get the sense Google thinks they know how to make this turn now, which I don't think they knew even a year ago. I think there's a couple of things to play there. One, the other way they're going to make money is by charging you lots of money to use this stuff. Yes, true. Most of these features are in paid versions of Gemini, and you can pay anywhere from, what was it, $20 to $200 a month to use this stuff. And the idea that Google should be a paid product in this way is just really interesting. This is the most look at these cool new features we can give you in Google search if you pay us money that I think we've ever seen. So that's just really interesting. Google's got to be so thrilled. At some point, we need to go do a whole retrospective on OpenAI randomly deciding to charge $20 a month for ChatGPT and the fact that that changed the economy forever.

That is what happened. But sorry, keep going. Well, I just like the idea that Google is going to make money by charging you a lot of money for a thing that has been free for a long time is fascinating, right? And I don't think anybody knows the rates, which is why it's from $20 to $200. There's just a huge amount of rate variability and pricing pressure that they're going to throw out. The other piece is I think they are less worried about sending traffic to the web at large than ever before. Oh, clearly. I think they're over it. And they, you know, when they first rolled out AI overviews, there was like outcry.

you know, like, uproar. Like, we did it. Like, I coined the term Google Zero that everyone uses now. Literally, every publishing CEO, every media CEO is running around being like, Google Zero. Like, Roger Lynch, the CEO of Condé Nast, is on TBPN being like, we model our company at zero Google traffic now. I'm like, oh, that's, you're saying zero because of me. Like, I know what's happening. And you know what I really respect is that you don't get mad that you don't get credit. I should charge these people. It's 20 bucks a month to say Google Zero. You should trademark it. But like, you know, the reason I'm bringing, I should charge all the AI front, the frontier for training on Google Zero. The reason I bring it up is like, that was not real.

right it was it was a danger and everyone was guarded against the danger and now it's real and like all the digital media companies are talking about google zero and google itself is like all right like you got mad at us there's a lawsuit in the uk where we google literally refer to publishers as free riders on google search uh because the publishers want to be able to opt into search and opt out of training and google won't let them and like that's a lawsuit they're training on youtube videos they're not gonna let creators opt out of training on youtube videos like there's a lot there and i think google has decided that they're over it. Like, do you know what I mean? In a real way. The traffic is zero. They're sending zero traffic to big publishers. Now they get to do the next thing. And, you know, they will tell you, I'm sure Liz said this to you, that in many ways, I think the web is bigger and more vibrant than before and people are doing longer and more in-depth searches and to validate, like their data shows that when people at the end of AI mode, they actually go read the original sources to validate, right? And this is the dynamic that they think they're in as Google. Well, no, can I frame that to you differently? Because actually, Liz Reed said this to me in our conversation, I've been thinking about it ever since, that Google's stance seems to be that we are going to send vastly less traffic, but the traffic we're going to send you is going to be so good.

That like, if you're a commerce site, you're going to get fewer people, but you're also going to get fewer sort of passersby. That by the time somebody makes it to your website, their likelihood of buying from you is going to be so high that you're going to make up for it with traffic quality over traffic quantity. And I think across a huge spectrum, that is the case Google is going to make to people. That yes, we're sending fewer people to you, but the people we're sending to you are going to be there so much more on purpose that it's going to be worth it. And I think that is an unbelievably generous read, both of Google's intentions and of society.

It is a fascinating thing. And even if that comes true exactly the way as Google sees it, it will still change the way the web works in its entirety forever and ever. My criticism of almost every Google search demo for the past five years has been they cannot see beyond ending every single interaction with a transaction. Every Google search, you go back and look and they're like, we got to buy shoes. And then you buy something. And the idea that you're going to get fewer drive-by visitors, but more of them are going to buy shoes is one view of the web. The web is for shopping. The idea of the web is for information required all that scale, right? Like the programmatic ad business, the prop, the whole web up required Google to send floods of traffic to all kinds of people. All that's gone.

Like, straightforwardly gone. You know, the affiliate business, like the Wirecutter, like we have it. Like, we've talked about Google Zero with the small, we did air purifiers. There's like air purifier blogs that just like got wiped out because Google's just like, buy this one. And now you're not going to the dedicated air purifier review company that's going to sell you the best one. And even if Google is trying to do that, that assumes that Google is exceptionally good at only identifying really great content and really great users to match the two together. And Google is demonstrably not good at that over the years. And I have, you know, over time, I've had a lot of feelings about it. Like one, Google just changed the rules of the game on a lot of companies and a lot of people.

Right? And on the audience, like Google users are getting measurably different Google experiences now. One of the things I assume are, and I won't give away his answer, but the idea that you and I are going to get different sort of infinitely personalized answers to different search queries because Gemini might make you a different search results page than me with different answers in it or even different interactivity because it's going to make you a different app than it will make for me is kind of wild, right? Like Google search has been a universal source of truth for a lot of people in a way that no other platform company has even cared about for years. But like you can Google it and the answers will be pretty much the same for you and me. It's like pretty foundational. Yeah.

And now it's like, nope, it's just you and your agent having your own little world. And what's that going to be like? So beyond traffic and money, and I think digital media companies are all pretty done. I haven't seen Google Zero for years and years and years. Now they're all saying, it's like, do you make any plans? Are you ready for this? Because it was always happening. It was never going to not happen. So does Google owe them the traffic? I don't know.

But they did change the terms of the deal. They did weather the storm of introducing AI overviews and AI mode. And now I think they're over it. And their position is, yeah, we'll send some traffic to you. And it's the last step when people want to buy the shoes. That's the traffic you're going to get. And you have to be happy with that. And then for us, people who just use Google, the step to...

oh, this is an agent. Now I'm not using the web. Google is going to use the web for me and I'm going to just use this interface. It's right there. Like where it's so close. And on the one hand, it's kind of exciting, right? Like that is the next version of an interface. It's the next version of an, like an interactive assistant that everyone's been talking about for years and years and years and Google is poised to do it. And then it's also like, oh, but this is going to change how I get information. Like my list of primary sources that I can go evaluate and look at that might just be gone. There might not be another search engine like that ever. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that Google, like everybody else is.

one really important step away from pulling that off, which is that nobody seems to know how that thing works or what it looks like. This was sort of all over IO is Google is they launched, they launched widgets and they launched super widgets and they have this thing called generative UI and they have the new thing that's like Google alerts, but AI generated. So when you tell it to sort of monitor something for you and it'll tell you when things update, that actually is going to be really useful to a lot of people. Like tell me when XYZ happens and it just will is actually like a very cool Google search feature. But there's this thing that Google is trying to create that is not quite an app and it's not quite a page of search results.

But it's somewhere, it's sort of a, it's like a living, breathing organism of something that is like permanent, but also changing and acting on your behalf. And it's like, what is an agent supposed to make for you? Is a question no one has answered and everyone is desperately trying to figure out, right? Because it's like, is what's supposed to happen that I tell you what I want and then at the end you show me the Amazon order page? Sure, that's one kind of problem. But it's also trying to figure out all these different ways to keep you in the loop, like booting up a virtual machine inside of your chat GPT chat, ain't it? Like that I know for sure.

And I was talking to Liz and Josh about this too, and they're still very much trying to figure this out. Like, what is this thing that it's supposed to be? Because I think from a pure user perspective, the idea of, are 10 blue links the best we can do for you when you ask for some information? The answer is no, right? Like, I think Google is correct about that. For most of the time, when I want to know the stock price of the stuff in my portfolio, 10 links is the wrong answer. Google can do better than that. And I think Google is correct to have pushed to do better than that. There are lots of downstream effects to that that I think are complicated and messy. But if you just purely look at it from like, what is the best user experience in this moment? Google is pushing in a lot of...

good user forward directions here. But the question is, what is the thing that I want when I ask those questions? No one knows, including Google. And so I think the reason a lot of this looks like mess to me is just that no one has solved this sort of basic primitive question of what is this new interface? It's not chat. It's not a page of links. It's not charts. It's not spreadsheets. It's something new. And no one has even begun to crack it as far as I can tell. And I think that's why they're doing it in like three different places. Yeah. Because you can see like, oh, these should all come together, right? Search and...

Spark, which is the agent platform in the cloud, and then Canvas, which is the thing that builds you an app. Those things should get a lot closer together. What does Voltron look like? Does it have a mustache? That's the question you're asking. What does Voltron look like is very good. Canvas is really interesting, the thing that makes you apps. All of the demos are like, I'm going on vacation. I want to eat at these kinds of restaurants. I've got these kinds of days. It makes you a trip planner.

Right. And it's like, here are your time slots. Here are the choices in these time slots. Like push the button and then you'll make all of your picks and you'll have it. And so, you know, like at the demo, these poor people, like I asked so many questions and eventually they brought me one of the PMs and one of the senior engineers who had built the whole thing to answer my questions. Because I have so many questions. Like the wizards behind the curtain came out to talk to you. It was super fun to talk to them, right? These are problems of first impression in software and computers. Like you're going to say that you want to go on a vacation and the computer is going to respond to you by making you an app is not a thing that has happened before.

Right, like kind of no matter how you feel about AI, like that has never happened before. That is super interesting. So I'm looking at this app. And, you know, in the demo, you can watch it in the keynote. It's the same kind of demo that I got. You can watch it write the code. And I'm like, first of all, that is insane. Like, there's no way that we're making the app, like, from scratch every time. Like, that can't be how we're doing it. And then you look at the app, and it's got, like, heart icons and the things. You can say favorites. And, like, it's got all these app ideas, like, that you would make. And I was like, does it know about the heart? Did it just decide that there should be heart icons here? Where do they go? Like, where's the data stored? If I want to share this plan or someone else? Like, it's an app. Like, there's all kinds of questions you can just get to by looking at it. And one of the most interesting things that they talked to me about was...

The idea that there's only so many categories of apps that are appropriate. Everyone asks for planners and fitness trackers and like food trackers, like basically all just like trackers and lists, right? I'm, you know, all just like pounding the table about software brand and you're turning everyone into software. And then here's the thing that makes everything into software. And they're like, yeah, we're not actually in the end going to custom write everybody different apps. We know that people asking for vacations are going to want a vacation app and we will have one and we will tailor it to you on the front end. And that's just a bunch of HTML, CSS, and you can use it. And then...

if the next person asks for one, we're not going to code it from scratch again. We're going to use the template again and make it a little bit customized for you. And yes, there will be a long tail. They told me lots of people make video games in this thing in their testing, which is super interesting. But that long tail is, eventually they will see the patterns in the long tail and they'll templatize those too.

That's really interesting. Right, so here's this fascinating Google dynamic where they're going to use the AI to let you have an infinite canvas of app development as the response to searches, but also they have so much scale that they can see the most popular kinds of apps that need to be made, and they're just going to pre-make them for you. And then, yes, you can adjust, you can vibe code the UI, but the logic of the app and how it works and what is the best practice for a trip planner app, that will just exist. And that is, again, in software, I cannot think of anything that has ever looked like that. Maybe like you could buy HyperCard stacks on 3.5 inch floppies. Well, weirdly, the analog that comes to mind for me is like Microsoft Word templates where it's like Clippy pops up and it's like, it looks like you're writing a resume. It's like we're almost there again. And I think that actually checks me as exactly the right approach rather than reinventing the wheel every single time. Because again, these tools are prone to go wrong. And when they go wrong, they spiral off wrong further and further and further wrong. But like, that's why, you know.

Anthropic came out with Claude Design, which is designed to say, here's basically what a good design is. And let's just start with that. And if you want to mess it up, knock yourself out. But we're going to try to start you in a good place and let you build out from some sort of functional structure. And with apps and stuff, that seems actually like exactly the right strategy, especially for people who don't want to think about data storage and the structure of their app and what tabs go where and what the mechanics are supposed to be. People are like, I want an app that feels like an app, but does this one thing the way that I want it to. And Google can just do that for you. That's very smart. And the opportunity is you're going to introduce more interactivity.

And you can only really do that with AI. Like, it would have been hard, I think, for Google to do this with the tools that existed before AI at this point where they have it now. They can bring the cost down because they'll be able to see so much interactivity and be like, these are the core categories where we're bringing the cost down. And then they still let you have the infinite canvas where you can try anything you want, right? And then more and more people will do more and more things and they will templatize more and more things. The turn, and this was the second part that I just found so fascinating, is let's say you do build the trip planner, right? Like, okay, I picked all the restaurants I want to go to. The turn to, okay, agent, go book the restaurants. Go get these things done is right there. And that is not wired up yet.

Right? You can go do that independently in Spark. You can go say, do all this stuff for me. You can do that in other parts of search. Like, it will call around. Its intelligence search will, like, call around all the barbershops and find out what, like, the prices are. Like, I don't know if anybody wants to do it. Like, I personally am not yet at, I am comfortable having Google synthetically voice call all of my local businesses and talk to them. And they gave me a demo and it was, like, the fake is 10 million times. I was like, this phone call did not happen this way. That's not how anybody reacts to this. No one responds in such structured ways. The robot definitely knows what's happening with prices and cuts, right? It just made no sense to me. But, like, that's the next turn.

And if you just wire up, okay, I'm going on a trip, help me out. And then you get some choices and you're like, all right, get it all done. And then the agent goes and gets it all done. You have, you've totally gotten away from search. You've actually ended up at the robot butler that everyone's been talking about this whole time. Especially because it has a computer in the cloud that can use on your behalf and it can write code for.

And this, you know, if you want to get all wild-eyed about AGI, you're like, oh, I have a computer that can use itself. That's the thing that like inches you closer to something that looks like autonomous intelligence. I'm not sure that's a singularity. I think that might just be a Chrome browser that can use itself. But like for a lot of people, that might be good enough. You know what I think Google thinks that is? This is actually the last thing we should talk about, which happened last week while we weren't podcasting. But you just described Google Books.

Like this is why Google is making Google Books. Google had this big, they had the Android show. They announced a bunch of new stuff the week before IO. But the big thing they announced is this new lineup of devices called Google Books, which is a horrible name that no one should have allowed. But here we are. And the pitch is essentially what you just described. It's how do we bake all of this AI stuff more directly, more seamlessly, more cross-platform into your computer. And I think you just backed all the way from search into the exact case for the Google Book, which I find absolutely fascinating. The danger here, and it's funny that you said search, right?

you're kind of not doing any searching anymore. Google is doing searching. And the name Google book is bad because I don't think people are like, what I want is to more closely align myself with a giant corporation that has scraped all the data in the entire world to try to hang out. It's also just a crappy word to say and look at. Google book. I don't like it. Microsoft book. It's just like nobody wants this. But the idea that your computer is actually just an interface to a giant robot in the cloud, it's also coming.

Right? And it's coming in voice. You saw the glasses demo. The glasses demo, by the way, is fascinating. They asked it to order coffee on DoorDash, and it opened DoorDash in a virtualized container on an Android phone and clicked around in DoorDash to order the coffee. Oh, interesting. Like, totally wild, right? Like, shouldn't you be able to just use the DoorDash API? Like, what's happening here? Like, where does the logic live? Where do the apps live? Can Google just use all the apps on your phone without permission from the app vendor or without additional payments? Does it even matter economically? Like, Google is upending the soft economic agreements of the entire internet by just doing stuff for people now and finding ways to do that stuff, even if there's not.

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

able to actually do this thing, right? Like this would seem like incredible brazen nonsense for almost any other company, but like Google for a lot of ways is the company that sets the standards that the internet runs on, like in a very real way. This is why they're so excited about universal commerce protocol. Right. Like Amazon is going to use UCP. They're not going to participate in Google's universal shopping cart, but Amazon is like, yeah, we need a standard for how agents will access our shopping platform. And we're going to use the same one that Google is pushing. They also, Google is pushing Synth ID and they're signing on to C2PA, which is content credentials. And now everyone is going to use them. Yeah. And like, you need Google to do it to your point. But yeah, and Google is also now, I think they talked about this at IO. They're pushing on WebMCP, trying to make the model context protocol sort of part of the fabric of the internet. They put out all this stuff called modern web guidance, basically telling everybody how to do agents. Like Google is able to tell the internet.

how to work and people will do it. Like in the way that Apple can tell you how to design your iPhone app, Google can tell you how to do the web. Okay, so here's why though. This is the thing that I think is really interesting. They've been able to do that because if you play ball, Google sends you a flood of traffic. Google, I don't know, 10 years ago, they were like, we're going to do Google AMP. And every web developer who listens to the show just like involuntarily shuttered. Like that shit was horrible. And Google's like, but if you use AMP, wink, wink, we can't say it out loud, but you'll rank higher, right? Like this was the, and I know now there's a Google exec who's furious. We never said that, but like this is what everybody believed. The deal was if you play ball.

you get a ton of traffic. Google will send you a ton of traffic. If you play ball now, what happens? Google's still keeping all the traffic and you might get a transaction down the line. And again, like I'm saying, that's a lot of change for this ecosystem. Like a ton of change for this ecosystem. And I can't tell if Google is being thoughtful. Like Google's always thoughtful. You know, I talked to Sundar, he's very thoughtful. Or if they are, they just see the end point and they're going to get there. Right. And like both of those things are, for a company of Google's scale and ambition, both of those approaches are valid. But the part where they were like, we're never going to change the 10 blue links because everyone will be mad. That thing is over. Yeah. That company is gone. Yeah. Long, long, long gone. And I think to me, it's really.

a fact of how caught off guard Google was by ChatGPT. You get the sense the company learned to stop being afraid. when that happened, right? That it's like, oh, actually being careful and thoughtful and slow and deliberate cost us. Like we spent two years fighting the reputation that we had by being the ones who were careful and thoughtful. And actually what we need to do here is win. And look, I think there are a million questions about whether any of this is a good idea or is gonna ruin humanity. And like, we've talked about them ad nauseum, we will talk about them again. But like, just purely if you believe this is the game to be won, it is very clear to me that Google has decided that the only thing to do is to win. Otherwise you are at an existential risk as a company. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think they feel like they're winning too.

Yeah, there was, like, a muscularity. It was scattershot in, like, Google way. Like, Gemini what now? You know, like, what are you saying? But everything had some confidence to it. Actually, I opened Decoder. It's coming out on Tuesday. I keep plugging this up. But I literally talked to Sundari yesterday. So it's fresh on the mind. But we opened the Decoder conversation by talking about how he had turned over a significant amount of his senior executives and restructured the company after that chat GPT moment when Google felt like it was on its back foot. And he was like, yeah, I had to make all the changes. I had to restructure. And I had to make some big decisions about how to win. And I think this is the payoff.

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

I brought up the bounce house earlier. Some of them are just the most software brain nonsense I've ever heard in my entire life. They're like, I'm planning a block party. I want to get a bounce house. And then it issues an architectural drawing of a bounce house. And it's like, we're going to RFP the bounce house vendors. And it's like, what are you talking about? I don't know if you've ever gotten a bounce house, but the bounce house guy gets paid in cash. You know what I mean? That's not how this goes.

Can I tell you, by the way, a thing I learned recently? Bounce house is not that expensive. And make you very famous in your neighborhood. There's somebody like four doors down from us who has a bounce house. That bounce house shows up at every damn birthday party in the neighborhood. You know what I mean? And no one's RFPing the bounce house. Google is not part of that transaction. You can buy a pickup truck and like a dozen bounce houses and you can run a very good business the government will never find out about. Yeah. That's my advice to you, everyone. You're worried about AI? Bounce house guy. There we go. All right. We should take a break. And then we're going to come back. We're going to do Hypedesk. We're going to do the lightning round. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. It's time now for the Hype Desk. This is when our friends Ross Miller and Ashley has got to come and tell us about what's cool on the internet and in the world. Today, we have But Ross. Ross, welcome back. But Ross. I'm sorry, hello, it is I, But Ross. No, Ashley is actually out in Japan. She's at BitSummit, which is a major indie game event festival. Really cool. Excited to hear what she's doing with that. But yeah, you were stuck with me this week, and I do want to talk about Japan anyway. I want to talk about Japan cars, and specifically Forza Horizon 6, which just came out this week. All the car nerd game nerds I know love this game.

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

Is that fair? Yes. So there has always been two different Forza branches. The Forza Motorsport, which is like a super serious simulation style. That is unfortunately, they stopped making those games as about 2023. But the arcadey ones, the playground games, it's kind of like a West Midlands English studio. They've always made the Horizon series, which is open world. We'll pick a city in the world and we'll just make it a playground of like driving. So on the scale of like Mario Kart to Gran Turismo, it's somewhere in the middle. But I was showing Travis as more. I was like, do you think I like the game? And I was like, here are the photos I took of me in an Acura NSX racing a Gundam mech.

And he looked at him and went, I don't think this game is for me, but I get what you're talking about now. But this is like pure Neelai bait, right? This is, I mean, this is what I love. I love a card game. Like I'm a Madden player. As everyone knows, I mostly just play Madden. And then I love a card game. Horizon for me has always been, it's got a little bit of like RPG grinding in it. Like you got to play it a lot to get the good cars, which is just a feature of card games now. But it looks so beautiful. Horizon 6 looks so beautiful. I might be willing to give in. It is gorgeous. It is also on Game Pass Ultimate, like the expensive tier. So pay 23 bucks, give it a shot. But no, it is, it's like...

Since Horizon came out, I think the last one came out in 2021, it's like a five-year gap between Maddens, right? It's a little bit iterative. You know what you're getting. You're racing. It's a lot of similar cars. But now it's just a new location. This location is Japan. Tokyo, a very small and condensed version of it with a couple of the key Tokyo Tower, certain parks. You can definitely go to Shibuya Crossing with nobody in the street, so it's safe to drift. And then kind of go all the way up toward the mountains and get an off-road vehicle. Nilay knows this. David, you may not. You can also, if you want it to be goofier, you can just...

design the paint jobs, the cars, whatever you want or let other people do it and upload them. So right now I have a fleet of cars that are all Lightning McQueen. People are just going through every single car model and turning them into cars characters right now. That's really funny. What are the early vibes on Horizon 6? My memory of Forza is people feel very strongly about every title and not everyone is a huge success in everybody's mind. But the vibes around this one, at least pre-launch, were very good, right?

Pre-launched were very good. Motorsport has had a little bit mixed. Horizon itself has always been big. I think the meta score has always been 90-plus for the Horizon games, or at least the last four of them. This one launched with a 92 meta score, 72 reviews. That's not changing. It is the best review game of the year right now. It will probably stay top five or at least top ten for the rest of the year. Wild. And this is going to be, without question, I think, the biggest game launch since Asha Sharma took over the Xbox division. So it is kind of, in some ways, a big test of the comeback narrative, the mind share. It is coming to PlayStation 5 later this year, but still in terms of like...

Xbox output. Yeah, I was going to ask about that, right? Like, Xbox is a thing that makes exclusives to drive you to the Xbox console. That seemed like they just gave up on that. And then I was curious how Sharma would, like, deal with that. But they're bringing Horizon to the PS5. They are bringing Horizon to the PS5. This was announced just because these, like, game development cycles. This is a four-plus-year development game. It was probably made a long time ago before Asha took over. Who knows what 7 is going to look like? But this one is absolutely multi-platform. It's coming out sometime between July and September. Next month is Summer Games Fest, which is what E3 used to be. So we'll probably get the release date then.

But for now, it is Xbox timed exclusive. And it is kind of one of the big ones coming this year. Fable is a fantasy RPG coming this year. There's a Halo remake, a new Gears of War game. This is one of the tentpole Xbox comeback narratives that honestly was kind of in the works before Asha took over. But now it's like, it's Susan Shepard about, can't she take what Phil Spencer and the team kind of set up for this year and continue to kind of like push this. We're coming back. We're not just trying to make Game Pass is kind of ubiquitous Netflix. We actually do want to have this sense of console exclusivity and kind of like brand ownership in a way that they were kind of veering away from for a long time. Xbox, all caps.

It's the version all caps now. That's how we're doing it. We're just rebranding things to all caps. Ross, you said you had another game you wanted to talk to us about, and I'm desperately hoping it's the game that I want you to explain to me why it's suddenly so popular. What is the other one you wanted to talk about? It is Subnautica 2. Yes. Okay, good. This is the game. This is like an early preview game that is barely finished, and it's everybody's favorite game all of a sudden out of nowhere. What is up with this game? It's everybody's favorite game for two reasons. One, it is a very fun sequel to a game where you're basically an underwater survival. You're alone on an alien ocean world. You have to keep diving deeper and deeper to get resources, rebuild your base, and see really crazy kind of flora farmer, like giant, colossal...

Fish, this is a game that plays with that kind of like gigantophobia that people have. But the reason people are really excited about it, the other reason is it was a huge part of a lawsuit about a year ago where a CEO used ChatGPT to try to get out of paying a bonus. So let me rewind a bit and I'll try to do this as quick as possible. So Notica 1 was an indie game got bought by a publisher, Crafton. They're known for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. They're a South Korean publisher. And it was one of those kind of two-tier acquisitions. We'll give you a lot of money up front. And then if you hit a certain revenue goal or milestone and sales goal by, I think it was originally next month, you get a $250 million payout.

What has since been released in Delaware court filings is the CEO did not want to pay that. So he went to ChatGPT. And this is like July 2025 version of ChatGPT. So not the best business advisor. And had it make a plan for how to avoid the payout. So they were doing these weird kind of intentional delays on the publisher side. They ultimately ended up firing the three co-founders, hoping that would just kind of put an end to it. A few months ago, I think in March, the Delaware judge said, you can't do this. Reinstate them. I think they now have until September to hit that sales goal. And if they do, Crafton has to pay $250 million. Most of which goes to the three founders.

A 10% carbon will go to 100 of the developer employees. So no small chunk of change. A lot of developers make it $250,000 bonuses out of this. We don't know the exact details or the numbers. Some of this is a lot of rumor and whisper, but the broad strokes of the story are that. So right now, looking very, very good. I think they hit, yes, 2 million units sold in the first 12 hours of the game being released. Unreal. It hit 460,000 concurrents on Steam, which is the biggest PC gaming storefront in the world, which made it the third biggest game in the world for the weekend, this past weekend. Behind only Counter-Strike and Dota 2. And in my...

decades as a journalist and later as a game consultant, I have never seen the top two change. So for all intents and purposes, this was the biggest game in the world for this weekend. And it seems like it's like a perfect storm of good game that people like, plus really cool thing to root for that you might as well spend some money on this weekend instead of waiting a while, right? Like it's... It's a real stick it to the man and also play a fun game, which is a pretty hard thing to beat. Right. If you're mad at AI, you can do Eric Schmidt and you can play Sinatica too. That's right. Basically that. And it's been fun to see. It's fun to play. You did mention it is early access. So I think for people who are not as used to that, it's basically an incomplete game. It is playable. It's got a lot you can do, but it is not going to be the hundreds of hours you can put in the first Sinatica. They're still kind of building it as you go. This has become more and more common, particularly with some of these like bigger indie titles. Hades did this. Hades and Hades 2 both launched early access and they kind of built...

the game in real time, getting feedback from players and almost kind of chaptering the experience. Like you could have played Hades for over the course of three years in early access, getting a little more story and gameplay as you go. That's going to be the same case here. They're thinking about two to three years is the estimate to get more of the world done, more biomes, add a lot more stuff to play and do, and honestly just finish the story. So what you're getting today, if you pay for it, you have the whole game when it comes out in 1.0, but that's going to be a ways off. So there's going to be a little bugs. It's a little broken at times. You do it for the experience more than you do for like the final product at this point. It's good stuff. All right. That's the hype desk. Ross, good to see you. Thanks for coming.

Goodbye. And now, Neelai, it is time. After a week off, the people missed it. It's time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. The world's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brennan Carr is a dummy. We have big Brennan Carr is a dummy.

That was an energy I did not expect. That's a lot. Okay. That theme was by Gear Dead. Congratulations to all of us. Wow. I need to like come down from that. Yeah. Hello. I don't think Brendan deserves that kind of energy. No, it was really good. It was really good. What do you do this week, Neil? Well, actually, first we have some big news in the world of podcasts within a podcast. Okay. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

was federated to On with Kara Swisher. Yes. And we did. You know, she calls him a moron. So we have a beef. So I went on with Kara Swisher, along with current Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez and Jamil Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who I've talked to before, who's great. And we just ran down all the reasons Brendan's a dummy. And I called him a dummy a thousand times. And at the end of that episode, we ran our Gregorian chant by Miela Degumba. And then she actually ran another.

one of our theme songs as she read the credits, which is just deeply funny. So we have successfully federated America's favorite podcast within the podcast. I know, I think Steven Robles has done Brendan Carr's a dummy on his show. Please, by all means, Brendan Carr's a dummy. Like, get out there. Do it on the show. But to do that and to call him a dummy so many times with like a current sitting FCC commissioner, I was like, I might be a little out over my skis here.

What was Ana Gomez's adjective of choice for our boy Brendan? You know, she's wonderful. We've quoted her many times. She's out there saying how much of a threat he is to the First Amendment. She thinks he sucks. Like, that's not unclear. Yeah, it's very obvious that she's like, we're doing way too much. We're censoring too much speech. This is a war. But she's very polite. Where I'm like, look at this dummy. There's a good dynamic there with Commissioner Gomez on Care Show. Yeah, that's good stuff. So do we have news this week? Of course. Or he didn't give us the week off? The news isn't just that I successfully made a podcast with a podcast go on yet another podcast. That would be great if that's all happened. I'm telling you, the Verge cast eventually will be all podcasts. We're going daily and then we're going infinite.

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

Well, this was back when Russia had quote unquote zero cases, right? Trump was like, well, I could also have zero cases. Yeah, Florida has zero cases. This is just a theme. And if you look for it, it's a repeating pattern in Trump administrations. If we just stop measuring the thing, it will go away. It will not be a problem. So there's this thing we have called the national broadband map where you can see what broadband providers are in your area. People can report if those broadband providers are lying about the speeds and availability and the prices. And so the idea is that we should have a national broadband map that no matter where you're in the country, you should be able to log in and see who's claiming to provide you internet service that you can pick between competing vendors and that they have to like report truthfully.

speeds and prices. So Brendan this week issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to streamline the complaints process for the National Broadband Map. So we're going to get rid of some ways you can complain about broadband providers, which just basically means like now you can't. Like now you can't say the broadband providers are lying to you on the National Broadband Map. And this just is of a piece of within, you know, getting rid of the nutrition labels and making them less rich because that's an onerous burden on broadband providers to have to say how much the fees are when they charge you for broadband. And now it's like, yeah, even if they're lying to you about the actual speeds that are available in your area, it's harder to complain about them.

so that when people go look for competition, they can see what providers are truthful and which ones aren't. And it's just such a classic Brendan move. Like, he's so, at his core, anti-consumer and anti-liberty and freedom in markets that he's like, I'm not even going to let you, I'm not even going to measure whether or not people are telling the truth. Right? Like, we're not even going to have a system for you to say, hey, we made a map of all the broadband providers and who they service and what the speeds are and whether they're, we're just going to, we're going to make that stupider. Because if I stop measuring complaints, I will be able to say there are no complaints.

It's just obviously the goal. And of course, you know, his backers and big telecom will be happy. So that's just very dumb. And it's just a piece of what I was saying at the beginning of like a pattern in Trump administrations is if we stop measuring things, they will go away, which I'm guessing for the virtual audience makes exactly zero sense in like a very particular way. Like that's how it works. And now we're going to start measuring what broadband providers are doing a good job. The thing I hate about that is the, if we stop measuring it, it will go away, might be a more politically successful strategy than I would like it to be, even though it is pure nonsense and actually just only stands to hurt real people. Oh yeah, I mean, there's other examples.

Trump too, right? We're going to change how we calculate unemployment. We're going to fire the people who do inflation calculations. We are monkeying with data across this country all the time. It's just Brendan is particularly done because I'm going to streamline the complaints process.

No, you're not, man. Like, we all know who you are. Just say you're going to end the broadband map. Yeah, just like, just have an email inbox. That's how you streamline your complaints process. Problem solved. What are we talking about? I encourage everyone to go look at the national broadband map. Type in your address. It's like fascinating to see how much or how little competition is in your area competing for your service. Like mine is, it's Verizon or Optimum. It has some speeds listed. And then there's like, you know, it claims that a bunch of like fixed wireless providers service my house. And it's like, no, they don't. That's not as real as we want it to be. But it's nice to see all those options. Yeah. We just got Fios in our neighborhood and it is like the most intense.

door-to-door salesman rivalry happening right now because like for the longest time the only thing anybody had in our whole city was comcast and everybody hates it it's just bad uh and now there's ting which isn't like wired everywhere but you can call them and they'll come and you know run the stuff to your house and everything's fine uh and there's verizon and so now there's actual competition it's literally like twice a week somebody comes to my door and is like so what's ting charging you you happy with the speeds we can probably do better and i'm like listen buddy i've had fios before and then two days later somebody comes back and they're like so do you want fios It's crazy. That's great. It's like actual competition. What you got to do is you got to call whoever you have and be like, you know, this guy came to my door. I'm going to end up deciding to play this game and it's going to save me a lot of money on very fast internet. This is what agents are for. There's one thing I let the robot voice do the phone call for on my behalf is like you call the ISP and negotiate prices. Google can absolutely call Verizon on my behalf. I have no problem. I feel like a lot of people are waiting for the Comcast disclosure right now. Oh, yeah. But here's a fascinating turn of events. But in all the shuffle, the NBC universal investment in Vox Media went to Versant. Oh, God. So disclosure, Versant is an investor company. I've literally never heard from them.

Also, what do they do? What's their round? Like, I don't know. That's your disclosure. It's not Comcast anymore. That day has come to an end. Sure. There was a shuffle. Yeah. Great job, everybody. Digital media executives shuffled some assets around. Once again, leading to nothing of impact happening to us. Does that mean the Versant name is now free? Could we? Can we just start saying it? Yeah. Just like make it a word that exists? Like, that's very Versant of you. It's very Versant. But it's all caps. That's really important. Anyhow, Brendan, if you know what the word Versant means.

Or you want to explain to me how streamlining the collection of broadband data and complaints will actually lead to better data and better competition. You're welcome to come on this show or apparently any show at any time because Brendan Carr's Dummy now exists across the entire podcast ecosystem. It's good stuff. Streamline is such an awful euphemism for get rid of, but you hear it everywhere, right? Like it's also a thing that all these companies say when they do layoffs. They're like, we're streamlining our workforce by firing 12,000 of you. You know, it came into being because people were like doing aerodynamics in the 60s. So I just imagined Brendan putting like big wings on the side of the website. It's very good. Anyhow, that has been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast. It's good stuff. It's so good.

That's still the theme song. I love all the other theme songs equally, but that one's still my favorite. That one feels right to me. Going on a Kara Social podcast and playing a Gregorian chant of Brendan Carr's dummies. It was very good. I just thank you, everybody, for allowing that moment to happen. It is great. I'm only slightly jealous that you did it with her and not me, but you're back here, which suggests that I'm better than Kara Social. This is home. I'm never leaving home. I mean, also, I just want to say, current FCC commissioner Anna Gomez was on the show when we played the Gregorian chant of Brendan Carr's dummies.

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

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

What is happening here? Yeah. We have a verified badge for not AI music. We'll link the story. People can read it. It's basically an honor system. You can just sort of tell Spotify that you didn't use AI. Yeah.

that's it you know and like compare that to google rolling out synth id in all of its products and putting the synth id detector in a bunch of its products and like pushing the whole industry using content credentials like in deepfakes world it is just accepted that you're going to watermark everything that ai generates in music world because there's the way music is made and layered and components and the fact that some artists are really into ai like there's no standards there's no controls and spotify is like just say it and then we'll make a we'll put a badge up right you know it's like a little more complicated than that but like not really and then next to it is like we want to make you playlists and like authors i was just with joanna stern and she spent like four days recording her audiobook Like, does she want a robot to do that for her? Probably not because our audience doesn't want to, but some authors will because they find that like, and you can just see Spotify is like, we don't know where the existential competitive threat will come from, but no one is going to get there before us. Also, everyone hates it. Right. Also, everyone hates it. It's like, that's the thing. They're like, we have to do this. Otherwise we'll miss it and somebody will beat us. But also everyone hates this and no one wants this. And we have to make sure we give people ways to get rid of it entirely. Can I, I have a lightning round item for you that matches right up with this, right? It's more Google IO. But YouTube announced that you can now remix YouTube shorts and just like put yourself in other people's videos. And it's like, are the creators going to be happy with this? Like there's likeness detection, there's controls. Is that something I want to do?

Right. Like there's just this push to be like, put the AI in the places because someone else might get there first and figure out whatever the next iPhone of AI Spotify's is. And it's like, I don't actually think anybody is worried about that. My most nihilistic view on Spotify is that Spotify is actually very happy for you to listen to AI generated music because it doesn't cost Spotify as much money. This is why they're happy for you to listen to white noise. Right. So that Spotify is like thrilled to have a way to make the case to music labels that it's being the good guy here, but it's also sneakily going to try to let you watch and listen to as much AI as possible. I hope that's not the case. I suspect it is the case.

The thing about all of these tools to me is, like, the deepfake detection stuff and the likeness detection, all of this suggests and assumes that these companies have bulletproof tools that work. And they don't. They just don't. They never have. Content ID on YouTube doesn't work. Like, it doesn't. It doesn't work. It works sometimes. It works enough for everyone to pretend that it works. Yes, but then there's been this whole rash recently of people uploading full movies to YouTube that stay up for a long time and lots of people watch them. And you can just watch all of Monsters, Inc. on YouTube because someone uploaded it to their YouTube channel. Like, the tools that are required to make this stuff work.

don't work. And I think at least one of the interesting things about like Sora when OpenAI launched that was like they built these sort of content detection stuff in from the very beginning, which is like, okay, you upload a video and you have to give it your proactive permission to sort of release that in the world for people to make remixes from. And I think if you start with that from the ground up, you have at least a slightly better shot of making that work. to try and backfill that into a platform as big and sprawling and messy as YouTube is just preposterous. It's just not going to happen. And so this thing where they're like, oh, well, you have the control. It's like, no, you don't because your tools don't work. Yeah. And you can't build these things on the premise that the tools work because they don't and they're not going to. And so what are we doing here? It is really the, I think Jess Weatherby wrote for us, like now is the time for all of this content credentialing, watermark, deepfake detection systems to prove that they work. Yeah. Right. Like she has been writing for months, years for us now that everyone keeps talking about it and none of the systems actually work. Right.

Right. And every time, you know, Samsung in particular puts on a new camera, like another wave of deepfake apocalypse has occurred. Like what is a photo apocalypse has occurred. It's like in the past, like that's just a smoldering ruin. Yeah, we're well past that now. And now we're like fully into deepfake apocalypse. Yeah. And the idea that whenever you open YouTube, it should be able to read a watermark and show you it's AI generated is right up against everyone hates AI. And the creators know that if they say AI generated in their videos, people will yell at them. So they don't want the watermarks. And it's like, well, then you shouldn't use the tools, but then you can't not use the tools because to be a successful creator on these platforms, you have to make an infinite amount of slop. Like you have to make four videos a day on TikTok to be a TikTok creator. Like that's just the rule.

there's some kind of swirling pressure on all these platforms where they know that what they want is more and the easiest way to get more is AI. And then they know that the audiences hate AI and they also shouldn't serve them deepfakes because they might destroy the world in our shared notion of truth. But then we definitely need more. So here's more AI. And like, I don't think anybody, to your point, I don't think anybody has a clear and coherent vision of what it means to run a social media platform in the age of AI right now. No. But again, I think everyone feels like they have to race after the thing, right? Like so much of this is all the same thing. Everybody feels like they can't risk losing the race, but nobody knows what they're racing towards. So all we get is just...

insanity all the time. But again, it is interesting to see in the product these companies start to recognize that people want out of some of this stuff, right? So you're starting to see, like, you've been saying for a long time that one of your big bets, I think in our year-end episodes last year, you said one of your big bets for 2026 is that we're going to start to see real segmenting of the AI social network and the human social network even inside of some of these apps. It's starting to happen. Like, that is actively starting to happen, even as these companies will not stop talking about all the AI features that they're doing. I also think, and this is maybe more conspiracy theory than not, but all of these companies are, like, pushing their engineers.

to use AI to code more things faster than ever with fewer layers of management and like product management and design than ever. And so like, of course they're shipping a bunch of weirdo garbage features. Like if you want to keep your job at Meta, you had better ship some stuff that uses AI to do something. And it's like, of course there's no plan. Of course there's no thesis to what these platforms look like. You've terrified everybody that they'll lose their job if they don't token max their way into shipping 500 new features tomorrow with literally no oversight. It's just like, they're going to kill themselves. Like, I don't know how else to describe this.

The people don't love it. And I haven't seen one of these features on any of these platforms where I'm like, that rules. Yeah, I totally agree. Actually, no, I did see one. TikTok launched video summaries that were so deeply bad that they were actually great. I got so many that were just completely 90 degrees divorced from what the video was. It was like it had no idea. It wasn't even wrong about the video. It was just a completely different video. Yeah, it was different video. It was always about fruit. Like, these berries are glistening red. I was like, what are you talking about? It's like, these are trucks. What are we doing? It was great. That's the best one. That's fair. I do agree with that one. All right, you piggybacked on mine, so you go next. What's your next one?

I mean, we have to talk about the SpaceX IPO. Elon Musk just filed for it. It's supposed to be a trillion, the biggest IPO ever. There's a lot to say about the SpaceX IPO. The fact that Grok doing deepfakes is a risk factor for SpaceX is hilarious, but it is listed in the IPO documents in the S1. Because X is now part of XAI, which is now SpaceX AI, which is part of SpaceX. Yeah. Cool. Of course, Grok doing deepfakes is a huge risk factor for the space company. That makes sense. Yeah.

You know, you can dive into the financials of it. We maybe should have Liz come back and do that with us. But the thing that really grabbed me was SpaceX business is a broadband business. It is Starlink. That is the profitable part of SpaceX business. Everything else is kind of like losing money or like right on the bleeding edge. There's a part where they just sort of confidently predict that they will have the biggest total addressable market in world history. And it's like, how and why?

And then you look at the actual business and you're like, oh, you're running Verizon, but in space with bigger fixed costs that Verizon could ever possibly dream of. And there's something in there where I don't even think this is a hot take to say anymore. The SpaceX IPO is just a referendum on Elon Musk. Here's some wild ass shit. Do you believe it? Right.

Because if you look at the financials and everybody looking at the financials, it's like, what are you talking about? How do you get from here to there? And like, maybe you believe in Elon and maybe this IPO is a referendum on whether retail investors on the IPO are going to believe in Elon. I think we should go more into detail on it. This is why we're going to do a daily show. Like this would be an episode of the daily show. It will be, in fact. Yeah, maybe a couple of them. Like if you just look at the graph, like estimated total addressable market.

by segment. And like, it's a $28 trillion total addressable market that they're calculating. They're just like, there'll be a $22 billion market for enterprise applications. And we'll have all of it. It's like, what are you talking about? That doesn't seem right. Like, there's just a lot of that going on in SS1. So we'll go through it in detail. But the core of it is like, it's so funny that they're a broadband company. Like the heart of it is that they're running T-Mobile. Yep. Like, I don't think T-Mobile. Space T-Mobile. But with the incredible fixed cost and also you can't repair anything if it goes wrong. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty good. I also encourage everybody, S1s are a lot. They're very interesting because it is...

maybe the most honest a company kind of ever has to be, especially at this stage. But especially the risk factors, especially for a company like SpaceX, they have to detail every single thing they can think of that might go wrong. It's just so funny in this case. One of them literally amounts to like, ah, we might not get to Mars. Imagine having a risk factor for your company. The big payoff on Elon's stock is only triggered if he establishes a colony on Mars with 1 million occupants. Right.

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

Yeah, but it was glorious. And they showed him a phone that we believe was the phone. It is in fact, it appears the phone. The phone is incredibly late. It is not made in the United States. It is now, I believe the phrase is made with American values in mind, which is just hysterical. Like you can just say things. Is the Trump mobile?

thesis. The phone appears to be just a blatant rip of an HTC phone. It comes with a gold, not actually gold, but gold-colored braided USB cable, which I very much appreciate. It has an American flag on the back with only 11 stripes, which is perfect. It just seems like everyone who's buying this phone is going to have wildly overpaid for kind of a crappy mid-range Android phone. So CNET got it. They put up a video. We have it here. I just want to skip to sort of the end. They just did an unboxing hands-on. It's great. They're showing the camera, and they're showing some photos that they took with the camera and the camera roll. Every single photo is watermarked, not only the date and time.

with a Trump logo. Oh my gosh. It's the most insane thing I've ever seen in my entire life. That's insane. There's a T1 phone logo on every photo it takes. That's incredible. It's so good. It's so good. That is the most perfectly on-brand thing I think I can imagine. Presumably you can turn it off, but it's like, how do we set our phone apart?

Put a Trump logo on every photo it takes. Oh, man. So I live near Washington, D.C., and I'm in D.C. all the time. And everywhere you go now, there's some giant banner with that one face of Trump doing his sort of, like, angry. And I'm just like, they need to now figure out a way to watermark that into the background of every photo you take. And that's the real future of... The T2 is just going to have Trump's face somewhere in the background of every photo you take. That's the synth ID? Exactly. It's like that so you can detect if it's a deepfake, like, if there's not, like, in the noise of the photo a Trump face? Yeah.

We're going to get a Trump phone. We're going to review it. I'm confident it's going to be a shit mid-range Android phone loaded with bloatware, but that's the reality of it. But it's happening, David. Honestly, I'm sort of thrilled. Like I really, I have said all along that it is much funnier if this thing actually exists than if it doesn't. And I'm genuinely psyched that it actually exists.

And it's also terrible. I mean, they got farther with the Trump phone than they did with the Foxconn factory. I'll give them that. Sure. Truth Social is built in. Huge distribution win for Truth Social. So far, I do want to point out that so far, only two of them exist. And they went to NBC News and seen it. Is this shipping? You know what I mean? True. That's a fair point. If you have one, vergecastattheverge.com, 866-VERGE-11. Call us from your Trump phone. Tell us how it goes. I'd love to hear from you. All right. We need to get out of here. Nilay, it's good to see you. You go sleep off Google I.O. I'm going to go sleep off whatever the sickness is I've had all week.

Send us emails. Tell us what you want to know on daily Vergecast. If you have more questions about everything going on at The Verge, we are always game to hear about it. Vergecast at TheVerge.com is the email. 866-VERGE-11 is the hotline. Remember, as always, the best thing you can do to make Neelai in particular completely ungovernable is to subscribe to TheVerge.com. TheVerge.com slash subscribe unlocks everything. You get ad-free versions of this podcast, version history, decoder, Neelai.

Sundar on Tuesday? Sundar's on Tuesday. It's a good one. Big decoder week next week. Did you make Sundar look at your phone this year? I did. I did make him look at my phone this year. All right, that's going to be a good one. Go subscribe to that just so you can watch that one over and over and over and over at free. It's going to be amazing. We will be back on Tuesday and Friday, one more week of normal programming before we get into daily stuff. We have a really fun show coming up on Tuesday, including about this thing that I'm wearing, the Fitbit Air. Very excited to talk to you about that. The First Cast is Verge Production and part of the Fox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next week. Me like rock and roll.

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