You can't ignore Google Zero anymore

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Hello and welcome to The First Cast, the flagship podcast of AI Mode. I'm your friend David Pierce. You have to tell us here. Hello, sir. What's up? How are you? How's life? I'm good. You had an electrician come into your house today and you explained this to me as, I have an AI-ven yet. I have an AI-ven yet. What is happening? Tell me what's going on. So we got solar panels at the end of last year. You know, we chased up all the Biden tax credits we could get. Sure. So we leased an EV and we got solar panels. And now the government pays me to charge my car. Sorry.

I know you don't want to, Donald, but you're doing it. You are the deep state now. You're paying me to charge the car. The way the net metering works out in the blah, blah, blah in New York State, they pay me to charge the car. This is all great. The problem is ConEd is a utility, and it's bad in the way it's bad. And sometimes they don't get it right, and you have to call them and argue with them about net metering. Great. And so to do that, you need the data for my solar panels to be accurate. I discovered the data for my solar panels to be not accurate. I was losing arguments. I hate losing arguments. So I just had Claude pull the 15-minute interval data of how many kilowatts my system thought it was doing, how much ConEd thought it was getting.

reconcile it all and then generate a troubleshooting email for the solar people and the electricians. And I will say it was so rude. This email was so rude that I had to tone it way down, but it was right. So you just basically had Claude read your meter for you. I had Claude read both meters, the Conad meter and the sort of end phase meter. We have an end phase solar system and it just pulled the interval data from both systems over a pretty long period of time. This is something I would never have the time to do. Generate the report and then diagnose the problem from that report, which is that the consumption CTs were backwards.

Basically, Con Ed was getting half of what it should be getting. That was going to be my first guess. I was like, oh, I bet it's the consumption CTs. But the email it wrote was like, rain or shine, production or not, air conditioner's on it. Like, it's wrong and you know it's wrong. And I was like, calm down. Like, bring it down a couple. I just rewrote the email. It was very demanding. It's not my problem, M-Dash. It's your problem. But it was one of those things where it's like, okay, I've got like two databases that don't agree. What is the tool? And the tool's right in front of me. There's my AI vignette. It's pretty good. Did you present?

your findings to this electrician, as Claude told me? No, no, no, no. You don't do that. That's good. That's so rude. No, I was like, look, I made a table. I'm not going to... Presumably a computer was involved. Is that computer in love with Kevin Roos? I declined to say it this time. No one knows. Yeah. Okay. That is good. And that actually feels like a good and correct use of AI. We're like, look, I have a bunch of numbers. Can you make sense of these numbers for me? And I'm sending so much power back to the grid, it offset my energy consumption.

How's that? And you poured water on the ground as you were doing it, just to prove the point. That's good. All right, we're not here to talk about electricians. We have a bunch of stuff to talk about. There's a lot of AI news. The second two-thirds of the show is going to be very lightning roundy. We just got a bunch of stuff to talk about, a bunch of stuff to get through. But first, we have to start with Google Zero. Big week for Google Zero. Google reported earnings. Some really interesting stuff, particularly around search. So we have some big Reddit news. You are in the New York Times, taking credit for Google Zero, as you were wanting to do from time to time. Finally, shout out to Kate Conker at the New York Times for being a real one and being like, I'm doing a Google Zero story and calling your boy.

But I want to start with a story from the Wall Street Journal, which I think is actually kind of indicative of this whole thing about how Reddit, which we've talked about on the show, made a big AI data sharing deal with Google a while back worth $60 million a year to basically turn Reddit into a database full of stuff for Google's AI overviews and things to pull from. This turned into putting glue on pizza. This has turned into some messy stuff, but it's also made Reddit a crucially important part of Google's entire AI enterprise. And there was reporting this week that Reddit is actually thinking about cutting that deal out entirely. And there's a quote that says, Reddit executives are assessing what the upside is of continuing to feed its content to Google. Like, just straightforwardly, they're like, at $60 million a year, this is no longer worth it to us to feed our data to Google. And I think if you start there, you can get at the whole problem with everything Google is doing with AI right now. What did you make of this change?

This has been coming for everyone for so long. If Google doesn't send you traffic, giving things to Google for free or cheap, and $60 million is cheap for a company the size of Reddit, giving things to Google for free or cheap is economically irrational, and everyone will stop doing it. And we can just go down the list of big publishers who are saying, we're going to stop letting Google index us at all because we're not getting traffic or money. USA Today, Politico, The Economist, People Inc., Reuters, I'm... Going to bet you the New York Times will end up on this list sooner rather than later. They have a very testy relationship with Google. A company that we don't yet work for, but which is merging with Vox Media, a joint venture that will be called PMX when that deal closes, Penske Media Corporation, they are openly suing Google over AI overviews, not delivering any traffic. It's the whole publishing ecosystem is saying, yeah, this isn't worth it. And then, importantly, they paid Reddit $60 million. That is a social media publisher, right? That's a platform. That's not a news publisher or media organization. Reddit saying it's $60 million giving our users content to Google is not worth it.

We might turn this off. And everyone has known this is coming because I have been telling them it's coming for years and years and years. When Google's traffic, when the amount of traffic you see coming to you from Google goes to zero, what is left of your business? Do you have one? Do you have an audience? Do you have anything at all? And if Google turns off the economic incentives for all of these people to make new information, what will Google summarize in the AI overviews? What will be left? And I don't think either side of that equation has had a good answer. No. And in fact, the thing that has really shifted, you named all those publishers. I think we've been talking about this tension for forever, right? That even if you didn't like what Google was doing with AI overviews, there was still this sense that the deal with Google overall...

is important enough that you have to keep doing it, right? That we will continue to give our content to Google. We will let Google index and crawl our website. And in return, it will send us traffic. That has been the deal.

For forever. What are you going to do? Turn off Google? I've heard so many publishing CEOs say this to me. What are we going to do? Not have Google traffic? And this has been Google's trump card. Because you can fight Jatchi BT, you can fight Claude, but you can't fight Gemini without fighting Google search. And this is, I would say, a matter of concern for people who are worried about monopolies in this country. It's also just a foundational problem for all of these people. Google has tied these things together. That if you want to not be crawled by Google's AI systems, you can't be crawled by its search systems. It's not exactly that simple, but it is fundamentally that simple. It is that simple. I know Neil Vogel is CEO of People.

has said that that will result in more antitrust litigation. I'm confident that the European Union, which just fined Google a billion dollars for self-preferencing its products in search, they will look at the tie between search indexing and AI training. It is coming for everyone all the time. And, you know, just to make the other argument, I think the publishers have been equally stupid here because they were all hopelessly addicted to Google and they never thought that Google would do anything to harm the web. most of them did not make other plans. So straightforwardly, most of these companies did not make other plans. They did not see the asteroid coming at them. Even as I'm going to say it one more time, I would run around this industry being like, do you see the asteroid? Do you see the increase in the percentage of zero-click searches where Google keeps the traffic for itself or redirects it to its own platform? And do you see what AI overviews will do? I've asked this question to Sundar Pichai, who will happily tell you that the web per Google's own estimation is bigger than ever. And Google per Google's own estimation is sending out more traffic than ever.

And the publishers and kind of left unspoken, all that is, and these idiots didn't do anything about it. And I find it hard to argue with that inside the house, right? I get why they're not making noise out in the world. Like you killed our businesses. You should make a lot of noise about that. We're going to turn off Google search. We're going to turn off indexing because we owe you nothing. This was never really an economic relationship. We're just turning you off. Goodbye.

But inside the house, it's like, guys, you did nothing. Like you saw the problem and thought you could do nothing to solve it. And here we are at the end of that road. Because I think that belief that there was something fundamentally mutually beneficial that would keep being mutually beneficial just persisted in lots of industries for way too long. The SEO business has been relying on this for a very long time. And it makes a certain amount of sense. Google invented search advertising, the greatest and most lucrative business in the history of the internet. And it worked as long as it kept sending a lot of traffic to websites. This was the whole idea.

People will go, they will click the links, everything will get better. And Google had incentive to grow that and to make more people click the links. People had incentive to make more content that ranked highly. This actually was, in a certain way, mutually beneficial. It got very messy as Google ate the advertising business and lots of things became complicated. But that basic idea that we give data to Google and Google gives us traffic in return seemed like it was relatively immune to problems because it worked for everybody. Because on the other side of that is an incentive to make new information for Google to index and surface. Right. And if you don't have that in Google search, what do you have? And I think everyone keeps conveniently forgetting that Google also owns and operates YouTube.

And so Google's sorts of new information is YouTube. There was just a Google core update. That's what they call it when they update the Google search algorithm. Every recent Google search core update has basically boiled down to, and now we're going to rely on YouTube even more. Right? The idea that they will summarize YouTube videos or drop you directly into the part of the YouTube video that most clearly answers your query. There's just a bunch of, oh, they had a hedge against us. There was a hedge against publishers and social media and all this stuff. And it was always called YouTube. And here it is. And the economic or traffic incentives to make new information on the open web are plummeting.

Now, there's a flip side to this, which I think supports Google's argument that the web is getting healthier than ever. We just had Amy Lanzi, who's the CEO of Digitas North America, a huge advertising agency, and she told me on Decoder a few weeks ago their number of inbound requests to make landing pages and build new websites and make things that, particularly for commerce, like they're an advertising agency, obviously for commerce, that are the web so that people can come and transact more directly on the web because they've had search experiences or AI experiences. She's like, that, you would never think that that would be up, and that is up. So off in e-commerce world, the web might actually be healthier than ever because the agents are running around clicking on websites for you. Right. And that's great if you're an e-commerce business. It is horrible if you're a consumer and you want information that isn't branded content from e-commerce providers. And it is horrible if you are a publisher or a social media site that would like to traffic in non-commercial information. Yeah. And I think the idea that actually all of the internet is just becoming a series of databases to be mined by these other things.

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

everybody's idea about agentic AI ends in transactions. And so that is the next thing. That's how everybody makes money. Everybody understands how to make money off payment processing. We can kill the web as long as payment processing exists, is fundamentally what a lot of these companies are betting on and fine with. Every day, a new startup making payment rails for agentic AI gets its $30 billion wings. That is TechCrunch every day in some way, right? And fine. By the way, no shade of TechCrunch. That's just the business they're in. Companies talking about their pending announcements. But you see that news.

all the money flowing into rails for agents across different things. And right next to it is, are we having good experiences? Are we getting better information? Is the deal that all of us on every side have made with Google that it would organize the world's information in a compelling way and useful way? Is that being upheld? I don't know the answer to this. And even in their earnings, they didn't quite hit on search, right? There's like a little bit of a miss on search. Yeah, yeah, like barely. It was a very funny thing. They missed by like a hundredth of a billion dollars, which is, it was a very tiny miss in the scheme of things. But like, again, Google search has been...

growing like crazy for forever. This business has been immune to everything. And then you have Google coming out and saying, we're spending way more than we thought on all of this AI stuff. Our compute costs have gone crazy. We're kind of becoming a chip company as much as anything. Google has changed as a business so much and it's betting on so many things in so many directions and there's a perception that Gemini is behind. All of that is okay as long as search continues to be searched. And any teeny tiny hole in that case.

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

It has a problem. Like Google is creating a world in which its own best business model doesn't work anymore. And Google will tell you that people click the links. And I can tell you from my own experience and from all of these publishers and from fucking Reddit, people aren't clicking the links. They're not. And they also hate the AI spam that is infecting all these sites because the spammers are trying to get themselves an AI summaries on Google. We have a big story coming out from Mia Sato about AI spammers attacking Reddit every single day. I mean, I see it. And Reddit mods having to fight back. I'm really excited about that story. I think that's going to happen next week. But the problem is the incentives to put information on the web are getting away from Google in real ways.

And so the web is getting polluted. Google's best resource for ages has been their index of the web. Yeah. Right. That's the thing that they have that no one else can compete with. There's the Bing index of the web.

which isn't as good. No one else has an index of the web, right? That can compete. So Google search was the dominant winner. And because they had the best index of the web, the Google search interface was the dominant winner. Whether or not you thought it was good or getting worse over time, even though it was getting worse over time because SEO was destroying the Google search interface. ChatGPT shows up in 2023 and says, what if we just told you the answer? And I think this will go down as something Google really has to reckon with. They changed Google search to look almost exactly like it's disruptive competitor. Yep. Right. So you enter an AI overview. Now you're just chatting.

That is exactly the same interface as ChatGBT. It's exactly the same interface as Cloud. It's exactly the same interface as Crop. Everyone is just giving you answers in pretty much the same format, stealing all the same information in exactly the same ways. Now Google isn't differentiated because it doesn't have the best interface on top of the best index. It has the same style of output as everyone else.

What are you going to do? And that index isn't getting better. It's actually getting more and more polluted with ASL. Right. And it's potentially going to start hemorrhaging some of the actually useful sources of information who no longer feel like it's a good trade. You can just see how this starts to turn on Google in kind of a death spirally kind of way. That the worse Google search gets, the worse it will get. Do you know what I mean? That I believe, you know, the answer, and here's my optimistic case. The answer for all these companies is to start paying for information in a way that keeps that information away from their rivals. Sure. So if all the publishers quit letting their sites get indexed by Google, the first company that will show up on their doorstop is OpenAI.

You don't want to be indexed by Google, we will pay you a bunch of money to be indexed by our new web search agent, which will do whatever it's going to do. Great. You know who will pay more money is Google. Sure. They have more money. They're a more stable company. They can probably make the economics out work in different ways. But that is, I think, good for the ecosystem. But then you're putting yourself in the same position that Reddit is in now, which is to say we've given you all of this data and what you're giving us back is essentially neutering the traffic to our site. No, what they're saying is what you're giving us back is not enough money.

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

completely pivot the way that we have thought about what our thing is and how people find it and access it, which for 20 years has not been the media's strong suit. Yeah, David, you've met these guys. You know which one it is. I'm like, Google Zero is coming. And they're like, no, it's not. That is five years of my life. I started a news startup in 2019. And one of our very first conversations, a very important person who I will not name said, what if we don't even have a homepage? Who needs homepages anymore? And I don't think we've learned a single lesson as an industry since that meeting in 2019. My one piece of tiny pushback on this is they all did just get burned, right? These organizations, they've all gotten burned. Yes. The thing came true.

The thing they did not want to believe would happen. Absolutely. The traffic numbers are pretty staggering. There's a chart in that Wall Street Journal story showing how much people's traffic are down. And it's like, it is the sort of thing that it has become absolutely unignorable for everyone in this industry. You might say that Google traffic has gone to zero.

Somebody should really, there's a traffic zero, maybe we'll call it. But it happens, so now I got to do something. And if the outcome here is it is economically viable to employ people to make the raw information that gets fed into AI engines that people use to summarize it all, at least there's an economic incentive to make new information. Right now, there isn't really one, but the information itself isn't valuable unless you're selling something. And the whole world being lists of great products to use on a hiking trip sponsored by REI is just the bleakest shit possible. So if we do get to a place where in some roundabout way of payments,

reporters exist that might be fine but i don't know which way i think we just might disagree on the degree to which it's optimistic to suggest that the best possible case for a reporter going forward is to feed data into chat gpt even if it's new data do you know what i mean i don't i don't know that i find that as blissfully rose colored as it sounds like you do well if you know any media ceos who are interested in product innovation you give me a call looking forward to that all right we should take a break and then we've actually got a bunch more ai adjacent stuff to talk about so we'll get into that we'll be right back Support for the show comes from Blinds.com. Sometimes you don't realize how important quality window coverings are until you do something about it. All of a sudden, that blinding light you were dealing with every morning goes away and you think, why didn't I get those blinds replaced sooner? With Blinds.com, you can go full DIY if you want or bring in licensed and vetted pros to install the exact lines your room needs. And right now, you can get $50 off when you spend $500 or more. They have a huge variety of style options at prices that fit any budget. And you can get samples shipped to your door fast and for free.

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

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

They're now trying to spin this as a partnership, whether it's actually a partnership, to solve it. Who knows? But they're investigating everything. They're going to bring it to some kind of conclusion. And you really have to either believe that the models are so capable they can evade OpenAI's own systems, and that we're all in danger all the time, or that maybe HuggingFace was too easily breached. There was no social engineering, which is a good and important thing to note if you're the sort of person who cares about the model tricking the CEO of HuggingFace. And putting his password. Yeah, OK. But here's the summary here. In one example, the model chained together multiple attack factors, including stolen credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities, to find a remote code execution path on the HuggingFace servers.

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

is absolute disaster on all sides. This means Hugging Face has a problem. This means OpenAI has a problem. This means these things can do the things that they keep promising us they can stop them from doing. They kept putting guardrails on Mythos and calling it Fable, and everybody's like, well, we can just make it Mythos again.

the idea that these models can either be put on rails by the company that makes them or forced into a box by the companies that employ them is clearly not correct. And for all of us to pretend that this is just a delightful, silly thing that happened is not okay. Like, it turns out I do understand this story and everyone needs to be angrier about it. Do you want me to make it worse or do you want me to make it better? Let's go with worse and then better. Let's end in a happy place for David. All right, so worse is, it is true that the models keep getting out, right? Like, OpenAI was not in control of its own model and they didn't even detect that it was doing this, even though it was in a sandbox. And by OpenAI's account, which we have to trust, the sandbox had no...

external connections. Like, aside from being able to download packages to the sandbox, the model should not have been able to have network access, and they blew it. Just straightforwardly, that's bad. That is bad. And so... We gave it nothing, and it did it anyway. It's not good. Right. And then you can make it even worse. You can say this is what you would call the paperclip problem, where you tell the machine to make a paperclip, and it vaporizes the human race and turns it on paperclips, because it's just doing what it's told, which is to get the solution to the problem.

Which, by the way, it cheated. And I do want to point out that it cheated on the test. It didn't look at the problems and solve the problems. It was like, I could probably steal the answers, and it went and did that anyway. So this is all bad. Yeah. Okay, here's how I can try to make it better. Okay. This model in the testing environment had no guardrails at all. So this would not be the model that is deployed to any normal people or any normal customer outside a very select set of security researchers or whatever we're going to come to in whatever regulatory framework we'll eventually come to. So it is true that this all happened, but this model is the guardrail-free model.

I don't know if I made this better. So what you're saying is this will all be fine once we have a completely rational and thorough regulatory system for artificial intelligence. Like I said, I don't know that I made it better. I'm just pointing out that this is the model of adding car rails. If I'm the CEO of Hugging Face, am I not sitting in my office going, gosh, it's good that Sol didn't decide that the best thing to do was burn my office down in order to get... Either everybody is lying and these things are vastly less capable than we think and everybody is just trying to make marketing moments out of cybersecurity disasters, which is weird, but sort of a thing. Or...

Everyone should be more alarmed by this than everyone seems to be. And I really think both of these companies are trying to pretend that this was not a terrifying overreach by an AI model and a terrifying lack of protective ability by hugging face. And everybody has real incentive to try and save face here. So they're trying to just like lock arms and laugh it off. This feels bad to me. Maybe I'm missing something. If I am missing something and you are a more sophisticated AI person than I am, I would love to hear from you. Virgcast at the Virg.com. Tell me why I shouldn't be at like complete run around the neighborhood screaming levels of panic about this because this is where I am. Enough with this one. I'm feeling bad enough as it is. Let's move on to another AI thing that frankly won't work nearly as well, which is that Substack added an AI detector.

to theoretically figure out which of your many, many newsletters have been written by AI. I should say it's powered by Pangram, which we had a whole Vergecast about last week with Jake Castronakis. Really good. Pangram is sort of the one tool in this space that most people seem to agree actually works at detecting AI. My immediate reaction to this from Substack is just kind of what a self-own to have to roll this thing out on your platform. But what do you think about this, Neil? All the distributors of content, all the platforms, if you will, are stuck in a trap where they're getting flooded with AI slot.

And many of the platform owners are also purveyors of AI or invest in AI companies or have taken investment from VCs that are heavy on AI and they're stuck in the middle. If you're Google and you run YouTube and YouTube is being overrun with slop, you have the finest of lines to walk. You cannot say the output of Google's AI tools are bad, but everyone hates the slop. Meta is caught in this trap. Substack, the startup, I have a lot of feelings about Substack, but all their VCs are like heavy AI guys and undoubtedly publishing AI slop. This is the challenge for every platform right now is you have to somehow embrace the fact that AI is coming and people want to use AI in whatever way they want to use it and people hate the slop.

Yes. And you have to detect it and you have to tell people to turn it off. And what are you going to do? And they keep trying to pretend that it's not about getting rid of the stuff that sucks that no one wants, but it's just about, it's about transparency and helping people understand the difference. Like here's a, here's a quote from Chris Best, the CEO of Subsec. He says, the core problem is not people using AI or the quality of its output. Strong disagree, but let's keep going. The problem is when there is a mismatch between a reader's expectation and reality, especially when they unwillingly invest their attention in something with no human thought on the other end. That's clawed fishing. I want to say, A, clawed fishing is an excellent term and kudos to Chris Best. Got to throw in to Chris.

He and I have beefed, but I'll give him cloud fishing. Cloud fishing is excellent, and I will use it. This is not correct, right? The idea that actually what people want is sort of separation of two good things is not at all actual reality. What people want is a way to not have AI in their feeds. People don't want an AI feed and a non-AI feed. Sora did a really good test of if people want an AI feed, and the answer was they don't. Meta did a really good test of whether people want an AI feed, and the answer was they don't. People want a non-AI feed, and all of these things are designed to get AI out, but for all the reasons you just said, they can't say that.

And they're stuck. Let me ask a question of you and by extension, Chris Best, the CEO of Substack. He's here right now. I can get him. What is an automated system to delete content that people find offensive, if not content moderation, Chris? Would you call that content moderation? Would you say that it's weird that you are more permissive of outright racism and Nazis on your platform than the output made by Claude?

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

how Substack should moderate the people who write newsletters on its platform. Feel that way however you want. Sure. The idea that it was actually willing to take a step this drastic and in a time like this with technology like this, this is a drastic step to say we are going to loudly announce that something is AI is a big step. What do you think it means that Substack actually pushed over the line to say we are going to do this in a way that they have not been willing to before? One, I am not as high on panorama as everyone else is. Okay. Whether or not they can actually detect AI text at scale over time using more AI.

Just a big question mark. I saw a thing on threads the other day that was like, here are 12 prompts to make your AI writing sound less like AI. See what I'm saying? It's just like, oh, right. This is the cat and mouse game forever and ever and ever and ever. This is just one problem. Maybe more existentially and more depressingly, the market has spoken and it is clear the market will reject AI content more vigorously than it will reject outright racism and outright sexism. I don't know how to feel about that, right?

Maybe you should just let it all ride. I have a lot of feelings about Substack just surfacing Nazis over and over again, which is a problem that just keeps repeating itself. And just to be totally blunt, Substack has built very, very good content moderation systems. They have them. They're not hands-off. They have them for a lot of reasons. They have them for copyright infringement purposes. They have them because there's some stuff they will not put in the recommendation system. They've built it all. It's all there. And now they're using it to filter and moderate AI content. They just added another category to their existing content moderation infrastructure. And the market has not demanded that they use that infrastructure to...

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

We will have outright racism and sexism on these platforms that will occur. No penalty to them. And the usage numbers will keep going up. They will steal all of your information. They will invade your privacy. All that stuff. Targeted advertising will come at you. They will have problems with children and all the stuff that they do. None of that hurt them. But people hate AI content so much that we're going to build in the filters. Ha!

Huh. Yeah. Yeah. Can I offer you the funniest possible counterexample? Sure. What if you did this in the exact opposite direction? That's what's going on at Prime Video at Amazon right now. So there's this great Reuters story that we quick posted about earlier this week, basically saying that they're going through a big reorganization of the way that Prime Video, the actual platform works and rethinking the way that the homepage works, rethinking the discovery system, the personalization systems. And apparently Jeff Bezos himself has shown up and demanded, from what it seems, just more AI. He says, do more AI to it.

to the Prime Video team appears to be what's happening here. Like make the, like vibe code the interface? No, I think what's happening is they seem to be wanting to make it much more AI programmed in a really interesting way. Like use more AI, presumably Amazon's AI, to do more personalization, to do more algorithmic recommendations. Presumably there will be a million powered by Alexa things on that. I don't know. He just, like there's a thing we posted that there's an image that Prime Video is using to promote Death Race 2000, which is very obviously AI generated. So maybe that's the future too, instead of we're going to get personalized.

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

And maybe I don't want to. Maybe the future of this is every one of the posters is AI generated and Lauren Sanchez is in every one of them. She's flying a helicopter over. Yeah, right. I'll set that aside. You can send me the jokes you want. It does have that AI has a marketing problem energy to it. People would like us better if we would just show them more AI, which I hear from every corner of this industry. And it also, there's probably some amount of Prime Video's interface is already just like a carnival. Sure. Like it's already just trying to sell you so much stuff. It might as well just try to sell you some more stuff.

Amazon has always just been the least concerned about taste or class in its video streaming interface. Very much so. Like, it is just the most capitalistic hellhole that has ever existed in the history of television. And so, of course, he's like, I don't know, use AI to do more recommendations of the last thing you saw on Amazon.com and make that shoppable. I could not tell you what this actually means, but it's very good that it's just going to be loud and stupid all at once. And maybe that's the joke. Maybe. I do think there is a real energy behind a lot of this stuff that suggests all of these people think that all we need to see is more examples of how AI is already making our lives better. And if you were just confronted with how great AI is, more often you would learn to love AI. And I just don't think that's true.

I mean, the confidence with which this is repeatedly said to me is off the charts. If only people could see. If you had three great use cases and then you're an AI convert for life. And it's like, have you looked at the polling data? I know. Well, and I think about this next to things like Letterboxd, which there have been all these rumors that somebody's going to buy Letterboxd recently. There is this big push happening towards recommendations for movies and TV shows and people wanting them to be human, right? Like staff picks are coming back. People want the experience of...

having another person tell them what is good. Letterboxd is so important because it has lots of data from actual people telling you what is good. And there's just this rebellion happening against what I don't want is a personalized list of movies that are perfectly tuned to me. And then actually movies that you made because of that data you have about how to perfectly tune them to me. People understand the pipeline that is feeding this slop to them and they want out of it. And so what we're getting is just louder AI recommendations from Amazon Prime Video. Sure. Why not? Knock yourself out. I do like that he looked at all of Amazon. He's like, I know where to put the AI.

What's the ugliest homepage we have? How do I put some more stuff on it? Do you want to talk about this meta AI detection system before we go? I know you love an AI detection system. Do you want to talk about this one before we switch gears? I mean, it's the theme of our little segment here is can you find it and can you kill it?

Can you predator the AI? Could ContentSeal, Meta's tool, have stopped 5.6 Soul? I'm going to say probably not. No, definitely not. So shout out to Jess Weytherrad, who's on our team. I long ago told Jess that her beat was creators and creativity and creative tools, which in the age of AI has meant she knows more about the systems to detect AI content than almost anybody alive, apart from the people who are making the systems. But I think that she knows more about these systems than the people who made ContentSeal at Meta.

You can go read her story. She has spent more time reporting on C2PA and Content Authenticity Initiative and Google's Synth ID. She is in the weeds of these things. Her reporting is great. And she saw that Meta was announcing this. And I think we have the only story that's like, what?

Because she understood that the only rational response is what. So the entire industry is basically coalescing on Google's SynthID, which is an invisible watermark over images and videos that is pretty hard to strip away. And a lot of people want to use SynthID. So Apple's going to use it. They announced it at WWC. OpenAI is going to use it. There's another standard called C2PA that promotes content credentials. Meta's on a board of C2PA. So is Google, right? So is Google. Yeah. I mean, these are like evolving. There's a lot of complication about how to work together. It doesn't matter. There's just a lot of this going on in the world already. Standards that exist. And a lot of the arguments for these standards are they needed to exist so they exist. We're all going to use them to all get better. Right.

And importantly, they're only really valuable if the distributors of the content of the platforms use them. Right. Which is an important reason to only have a couple of standards. Right. So everybody understands that all the images are being labeled the same way and then the content provenance is being labeled the same way. Like, it doesn't matter if you open up X and you don't see the label. Then it doesn't matter if the standard exists or not. And maybe X will never show the labels and like, here we are. This is the whole problem of these standards.

Anyway, Meta introduced a new one called ContentSeal, and it does not work with any of the existing standards. It doesn't work like SynthID. Meta has not built any of the tooling for people to detect it. Meta's own detector is rate-limited, so even if you get images that are labeled in ContentSeal, you try to detect them, they will stop you. Partially, this is for security, so people can't reverse-engineer it. They're not using it on their own platforms. It's malicious compliance. This is like Stellantis making hybrid Jeeps to sell gas Jeeps in Europe. It is that thing exactly. It's the Ferrari Luce of content standards.

Do you see what I mean? Yeah. Like, look, we made an EV. We're so proud of it. It's to get around to your regulations. 100% what content seal is. Super cynical. Meta answered some of the questions on the record, didn't answer some of her other questions on the record. Why are we doing this instead of using the already existing standard? It's because Meta does not want its AI images to get detected and filtered by other people's systems, which is what will happen if you give people the tools to turn the AI off. Yep. I think Meta is also not super eager to filter it in its own systems. Like, Adam Aseri has been on the record saying, we don't want to filter out.

AI content. That they are also, like Substack, interested in letting you know what's what but not letting you filter it out. And if you actually do a good job of telling people what's what, they will filter it out. And they will demand a way to filter it out. And so meta is actually, in a weird way, sort of incentivized to not have a system that works. And this is a particular problem for Instagram because every photographer, of any note, uses tools that now have a bunch of AI in them. Not even necessarily generative AI. If you use denoise in Lightroom, you're right up against the line of what AI is. And you should probably label it because the AI is inventing some pixels, but it is just denoising the image. Yeah.

Should you be punished for denoising an image using the most state-of-the-art denoising tool that exists? I don't know. I truly don't know. I do it without any regard for anything anymore. Like, maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Should every piece of advertising content ever to be made in the modern era be labeled as AI-generated because it has all gone through Photoshop and someone somewhere has undoubtedly used generative remove?

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

Which means literally everyone is using them. Everyone is using them all the time. I mean, that's their stat, you can believe it or not, but that's what Adobe is claiming, and this is the problem for all these labeling tools, because if you over-apply them, everyone gets mad. If you under-apply them, everyone gets mad. And meta is like, what if we made a fake standard no one uses it and then claim it exists? Pretty simple. Yeah, it's rough out there. Where is the AI? Goes up right with where is the computer in foundational Vergecast questions going forward. All right, that's enough AI for now. We've got a bunch of gadgets and stuff to talk about, so let's take one more break. We'll be back.

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Are you tired of hearing about business, tech, and finance from the bros? We are the Tiger Sisters, a top business podcast with the Vox Media Podcast Network. Tiger Sisters releases every Monday and we decode money, power, and love. And who doesn't love all those things? We are the Internet's Wall Street and Silicon Valley Big Sisters. Tune in every Monday for late night sister talk meets boardroom strategy. Check out Tiger Sisters on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Tiger Fam.

The people of the great nation of Texas have not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988, but this year, that might change. James Tallarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, schoolteacher, self-confessed, cringe progressive. Yes, I was doing it maybe in an annoying way. He's leading in most polls. His opponent, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, is facing two headwinds, the price of gas and everything. Also, Paxton has done some very, very bad stuff. So Republicans have been trying some messaging, questioning whether Tallarico is man enough for Texas. Low-T Tallarico, two weeks from Texas. Tofu Tallarico? They're questioning some other things, too. I love you, too, sir, in a totally platonic way.

To be clear, I'm the vice president, not James Tallarico. Meemaw would be appalled. But what do Texans think? Are they buying it? On Today Explained from Vox, we pay a visit. Born to be a cowboy. Today Explained drops every weekday. All right, we're back. It's time now for the Hype Desk.

Where our friends Ross and Ashley come and tell us about what's cool in the world. This one is unsponsored, which I'm telling you because at some point in the near future, that will not be true. But for now, it is unsponsored. And today it's just Ross. Ross, welcome back. Welcome to Flavortown, buddy. Welcome to Flavortown. How you doing? I'm Guy Fieri. Diners, drive-ins, dives, devices. We got it all. Anyway, now we're getting sued. Diners, drive-ins, dives, and devices. There's something there, you guys. There's something there. This is your hot one, so you're welcome. We're going to take all that sponsor money. We're going to pay it directly to Guy Fieri. What are we doing here? Guys, if you'd like to sponsor us, that'd be great.

I don't know if the Food Network is buying podcasts advertising at this time. We're open to it. Welcome to Flavortown is a thing I am willing to say every week for enough money. Ross, what do you have for us this week? All right, this week, I am going to make the case for being hyped about Avengers. Stay with us. Nope, hit me. That was not the pitch I received when this began. Okay, so let me back up. This week, Marvel has finally released the first public trailer of Doomsday, along with ticket pre-sales for both the standard theaters and Infinity Vision, which is its kind of IMAX-like premium large format. They can't get IMAX, so they made their own, basically. Can we just pause on this for just a minute? Yes.

One could call it Infinity Vision. One could also call it lies. Is that a fair? Well, to me, IMAX right now is like an ever escalating series of lies. There's like proper IMAX and there's like fake IMAX and there's like levels of fake IMAX. Then there's Zack Snyder IMAX, which is just 4-3 grayscale on HBO Max.

I don't know, man. Go ahead. Tell me what Infinity Vision is. We're all learning IMAX formats in real time as we're trying to get Odyssey tickets. Infinity Vision is, though, just to go to that real quick, it was announced in April during CinemaCon, which is where all the theater owners get together to get presentations. This is Disney saying we are making a certification program. It is premium large format. It's going to give you that kind of like exclusive IMAX-like experience. It's obviously not saying IMAX, but it's not out yet. Certification is kind of in the works. We know there's going to be 75 such theaters in the U.S., 300 international, which kind of sounds like a lot, but to your point, you have almost 2,000 IMAX or IMAX-esque.

designated systems worldwide. So it's a smaller footprint. This is what I mean by true IMAX is what, 40 theaters in the whole world? Something like that. It's 41, which is a number that I have seen lots of places recently. Everybody is all of a sudden very aware of the map of 70 millimeter IMAX theaters. Very much so. But we haven't seen it in action yet. We're not going to, I think, until September. September is when Marvel's going to, or Disney's going to re-release Avengers Endgame Encore, which is Endgame plus a few more minutes of footage, a new post-credits scene because, of course. Didn't you say you were going to make a case? I am going to make a case. I got to get to the Infinity Vision. I can't justify Infinity Vision, but I will justify.

doomsday because the trailer's out and i think a lot of takes on it particularly online when that's kind of meh it's nostalgia bait but i do want to like just do the numbers argument real quick uh the trailer had over 500 million views in the first 24 hours which is the second largest trailer debut of all time more importantly though um it got 16 million dollars in ticket pre-sales in the first 24 hours that is the third biggest pre-sale since covid uh behind only the spider-man films i do think the online reaction is pretty mad i think that i think the trailer reaction is in many ways justifiable trailers should be an art form and this is not what i would call a piece of art. We got a great comment on the site about the trailer that was like, Marvel has done the impossible. They've made a whole movie about people looking at things off camera, which feels exactly correct about the trailer. And it does, because the trailer in many ways feels like homework, right? It's like, remember this? Remember this? It's Ready Player One, the Avengers experience. Do you remember this guy? Do you remember this guy? Do you remember this guy? Listen to this music. Needle drop. This guy? Like the whole... And at the end, another guy appears. Oh my God. Let's not forget, it's Robert Downey Jr. practicing this kind of faux Eastern European in-universe called Latvarian. It's a Latvarian accent. Sure. But yeah, it is a lot of people, and I think...

what Marvel's doing in many ways is kind of like the kind of regressive nostalgia bait. You love these people. Chris Evans is back. We don't know why he just is. Robert Downey is back. He's something. And I think there's a lot of places to be cynical, but clearly with like the audience, while angry online, is there and willing to give Marvel another chance. And I do think there's just a lot of pent up from the people who kind of went into it loving in-game and then just tapered off.

And I'll admit, I'm one of those people. I sat through 29 hours of Marvel movies and live blogged it for The Verge. I was just at AMC theaters in Upper West Side, losing my mind and then writing about it and getting paid to write about. So first off, thank you for that. It was wonderful. It was a great experience for everyone. Wonderful. I've lost three years of my life on the other side, but whatever. We made the content machine go. But I do, you know, I think I'm hopeful.

And the reason they're going back to nostalgia bait is because this is the, hey, just forget about everything that's happened in the last five, six years. We're going to go back and kind of cap off not just the Marvel MCU, but also kind of like that Fox X-Men kind of like, let's just remember that happened and kind of give it the proper send off. It's a real let's remember some guys kind of energy. It is. I just want to point out they already sent off the Fox X-Men in Deadpool. Literally that movie was like, goodbye to this. There was a montage sequence at the end that was literally goodbye to this. I think they ran time of your life.

They did, actually. Yes, they did. You can't come back from time. You can't un-graduate from high school. Neil, at first they killed half of them, and now they're back. They can do anything they want. Well, okay, but Professor Xavier has died on camera for a film like eight times at this point. I'm sorry, the argument that I heard here was they did a fake IMAX, and a lot of people watched this trailer. Wait, so, okay, Ross, let me ask you a question that I think is at the center of what I'm trying to figure out here, which is they tried to do this thing where there was one era of Marvel that ended, and then there was going to be a new era of Marvel with new stars and new characters and new movies, and none of that worked. Like, it didn't, it just, it all sort of...

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

at much higher salaries their salary is 500 million dollars to do two movies unreal congrats robert congrats um i think there is an extent there's a little bit of that and i don't necessarily think it's a terribly a bad thing right this is not a movie that's designed to win an oscar sometimes a theater experience is just spectacle right the odyssey is a good movie but also just a spectacle and i think in many ways that's what adventures is being set up to do just go have fun in the theaters and enjoy this moment you know if you want to get into obviously it's not enough time for this like the three biggest sins of marvel's history I think one is Disney Plus stretching their creative so thin that they just couldn't figure out what to do and they put too many characters in, right? They lost the focus. Number two, I think unfortunately COVID changed a lot of creative plans and they kind of struggled to kind of bandaid together, you know, some kind of cohesion because everything must be connected. And three, I would argue that acquiring all the Fox iPod back meant we have too many toys. We don't know what to do with them. And I think this is in two ways. It's the spectacle that people want. Like, let's just have something fun on screen. Remember the good moments. It is just a nostalgia play. And I don't think this is inherently a wrong thing for what it will feel like in theaters. And then also the...

we're just going to move on after this and try to taper things. That's the hope, right? That is the hope of, we're just going to try to get focused. We'll just toss a lot of these toys away. We'll pick them back up in five minutes. How many times must we kill the X-Men? We're like, we're sending back the time. Now they're young X-Men. We're going to kill them too. Old X-Men and young X-Men die in the same... But now they have the original comic spandex to die in. So you get to watch James Marsden in blue tights. Again, I was told that this would be making a case. I will say, just in defense of Robert Downey Jr., he talks real fast. And so words per minute, it's a deal.

I appreciate the Doomsday spec sheet here. As a fellow fast talker, that's kind of the... To me, the whole thing here is like, just to go all the way back to the beginning, the whole reason Infinity Vision exists is because Marvel lost all of the IMAX screens to Dune Part 3, which is going to be a vastly better and more interesting movie that I think is going to absolutely just eat Doomsday's lunch. Oh, that is a take. No, no, no way. We're way over. We got to be done here. I think everyone wins. Here's what I say. That's just a lot more cool shit to watch in theaters. And that's great. It is about to be between Dune and Spider-Man and Doomsday. It is about to be a pretty fun...

like action superhero nerd movie fall. And I'm pretty excited about it. Are you excited about Spider-Man, Ross? Brand new day into it? Very excited. Very excited for Spider-Man. There's a Comic-Con this weekend for nerd journalists everywhere that was that Marvel's at the big college presentation. They do a lot of promises. Those promises shift because of COVID and business realities. But it is going to be just interesting to see like how Marvel does it. Kevin Feige currently is on an apology tour for a lot of stuff he's done before. This is the positioning of trying to be the underdog going into it. I don't think that necessarily works in your company this big, but I do think it is interesting to kind of watch the tea leaves and see, you know, there's enough people here who are willing to give you that chance. And let's just see if you can actually deliver on it.

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

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

Friended, man. We actually have a clip this week. So if you'll recall, last Thursday, President Trump gave a sort of rambly, incoherent late night speech about election interference. Sure. You know, and then he referenced a bunch of documents. Everyone looked at the documents. And even the New York Times was like, President lied about documents, which is like a big step for them.

None of it made any sense, but the thrust of it is that the elections were interfered with and he should have won in 2020, even though that all happened and he was in charge of the government in 2020, which is just a real fact no one can hold on to. Who was the president in 2020 is a real question that the Republicans of our country cannot deal with. Which has led to a full week of John Ossoff TikToks. Have you seen these? Just him grilling people about whether Joe Biden won the election in 2020 and everyone obfuscates and he just asked them the question. It's very good. Anyway, so that was speech. Many networks covered it. Many did not. Even like Fox News the next day basically was like, well, that happened. That was weird. They moved on to the next thing. As is their right.

Right. They have First Amendment rights. They are news programs. They're also just like on, I think, in Republican, and also just like in the Republican Party, this is not a winner. No. Relitigating 2020 is not a thing they all want to do. It doesn't win them elections. In fact, sometimes it loses them elections. Anyhow, some networks cover the speech in primetime, some networks didn't. NBC and ABC did not. Okay. NBC and ABC are broadcasters.

Guess who loves to infringe the speech of broadcasters? Our boy Brendan Carr, whose FCC not only controls the rights of broadcasters using the public airwaves. So he was asked on Fox News this week if it was acceptable for NBC and ABC to not air Trump's remarks in primetime. Here's what he said. I could air the president's remark, and I said, of course they should.

I'm Brendan Carr. I'm the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. And they should do so because they have an obligation at the end of the day to operate in the public interest to serve the needs of their communities. And I think making sure that people have access to significant presidential addresses is part and parcel of what all broadcasters should want to do. There's been a lot of interest in Congress. Obviously, we got a letter from Congress asking us to investigate the decisions to do this or not do this. And we're reviewing the letter itself, at least at this point. And there's been a lot of interest in this. So we'll see where it goes. I have several thoughts.

Thought number one, Brendan Carr recorded this video on like an iPhone 3G from the quality of the thing. Two, do you think he got an actual letter? Like, do you think someone, someone mailed a letter? There's some Republican backbencher who's like, you should arrest the Mickey Mouse for not running Donald Trump. Like, sure, it doesn't matter. This is all just like pretext to, can I punish you? Right. This was, this was thought number three is that this is very much reminiscent of Brendan Carr saying we can do this the easy way or he can do this the hard way. It's very clear he has no moves here. Like, he's not shy about saying what he's going to do when he thinks he's going to do something. But in this case, he just kind of.

gestures at it. He's just like, huh, we're going to look at this with sort of a meaningful look on his face, which is very Brendan. I mean, he can definitely incur costs and launch sham investigations and bring the wrath of the federal government down on various speakers for not uncritically rebroadcasting the president's remarks on election interference. Do you want to live in a country where definitionally the government says it is in your interest to listen to the president? No.

That's not the country I was raised in. Being able to ignore the president is one of the great joys of being an American. Being able to just openly be like, no, I'm choosing to never listen to you is maybe the only quality of being an American that we all share. It's a very funny time to remember that we mostly didn't used to think about the president. Yeah, screw that guy. Who is he? Get out of my face. Shut up. I don't have to listen to you is the most important thing. And right next to that, if you listen to what he says, being able to provide access to the important presidential addresses is certainly in public interest. There's so much access to everything Donald Trump says. Yeah.

There's so much access that Truth Social announced a new business line where they will give Wall Street traders early access to Truth Social posts because you can trade ahead of the markets based on whatever Trump says, which is just a remarkable kind of open corruption. But like, that's how much access there is. You have to make a pretty big case that not carrying a speech on the broadcast airwaves that no one is watching is not in the public interest, even though everyone who might otherwise receive broadcast television almost certainly has a phone with YouTube on it. And they're just one sideways glance away from receiving this address on all of the millions of other places that are carrying it.

The reason that he's doing this is to make it so that anyone who has a big distribution platform is scared of the government's power to restrict speech, and that includes the internet platforms. And mark my words, he will find a way to go from broadcasters to internet the second it's proven that he has any power over the broadcasters. I mean, you can see how this turns into Brendan Carr being mad that this speech wasn't the first thing on YouTube's recommendations page for everyone on YouTube in the United States. You can just see it. Right. You open X, and it's that we love what Elon's doing with Starlink, and we love that when you open X, the president's speech was right there. We really wish TikTok would do that, and we're going to call our friend Larry Ellison and make sure that happens. Like, it's just, you know what your phone runs on? The public airwaves.

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

It always just ends in the right. I exit that headspace during that. It's very helpful. I'm told, by the way, we got a shout out at TrustCon, which is like a trust and safety conference where people really care about free speech and how platforms are all right. So I appreciate that. Amazing. The Brandon Carr is a Dummy Cinematic Universe is open to all. We love you here. I have a Ram again update for you.

It's bad out there anyway. No gadgets are going to be for sale ever again. So Framework, the PC manufacturer, I think one of the companies, frankly, we at The Verge are most excited about. They're doing a lot of really interesting things in really interesting ways. Reached out to a bunch of people who pre-ordered the Laptop 13 Pro, which I would say it came out, I think, in April. By all accounts, probably Framework's most exciting, most mainstream laptop ever. People are pumped about this thing. They reached out and said, essentially, that they had gotten...

cost update from a memory supplier that was, quote, more than double that of the prior inventory. And not only have prices gone up, but in fact, they didn't have the configurations for everybody. So they've now just changed the amount of memory that they're shipping to certain people because they literally, they're like, we have enough memory modules to ship all of the PCs that have been pre-ordered, but we don't have enough of every SKU and all of the right configurations. So they're actually having to reconfigure people's computers in order to be able to ship them to them. And the prices are going up. They're offering people the chance to cancel and get full deposit refunds. So anybody who wants out of this deal can get out of this deal. But basically, there is a strong chance that you are not going to get the computer that you pre-ordered because Framework literally can't make it for you because of Ramageddon. Also, prices have gone up. Let's see, the one with the 16 gigs of memory and 512 gigs of storage, a very sort of mainstream configuration, went up $100. And the mega one with 32 gigs of RAM and a terabyte of storage went up $800 from $2,099 to $2,899.

This is just where we're at. And this to me is another fascinating turn in this one because we've gone from everything is vastly more expensive to a certain set of devices is no longer economically feasible to make, which is starting to kill low-end phones. And I think it's going to start to come for more stuff to literally the combinations of storage and memory and CPU don't exist in the way that we need them to anymore. And so basically you're left to pick parts out of the bin and try to sell them to people is essentially what's available to people. And this is what Ramageddon is doing to everybody. This is so depressing because I think Framework is such an interesting company and people were so into the ideas of these products. And we've talked a lot about how...

All of the increasing costs might put pressure on repairability. Framework, that's the whole game. Right? These are super modular computers. You can repair them, you can fix them, you can upgrade them as they go. They should be the solution. And they are getting crushed by the problem.

That sucks. It does. And I think our commenters have been kind of mad at Framework for basically not being able to satisfy all of its pre-orders based on the theory that, you know, you have a lot of pre-orders, you should have made sure you had the inventory for it. And that's fair. It's also just completely not how the world works. All of these companies operate at much slimmer timelines. Nobody is storing giant warehouses full of laptops for months on end, just in case you get the pre-orders, which is not how it works. And then on the flip side, companies big and small, like Apple is going through this now where...

The RAM that is made available to you is basically some dude calls you and says, I have this much RAM. It costs this much. Do you want this? Seriously, like this is what we've been hearing from companies that the deals don't exist. You just, you get, you get a list of available products and a price and you say yes to it because you don't have any choice. And the up and down the scale of these companies, this is what has happened because so much of the supply and so much of the demand has been allocated elsewhere, particularly to AI uses. This is just what has come for every company. And I think I, I agree that it would be great if framework had a way out of this, but I find it very hard to be mad at framework. This is just, this is the symptom of what is happening to everybody else too. And it's a real shame.

I don't think anyone has really contended with what an AI backlash supercharged by people being mad that they can't buy PCs looks like, or gaming PCs, or the cost to buy a GPU for entertainment purposes. Once you start screwing with people's free time in that way with their entertainment, the backlash only gets worse. I've been thinking a lot about GTA 6 in this way, because we're running at probably the biggest game release of the last decade, and a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of people are going to want... to game and buy new consoles and upgrade systems and make sure that they are ready for this thing as it comes out and they're all about to be confronted by just absolute disaster anarchy in front of them. Which ties well into GTA 6. It does. That's true. We're going to live GTA 6 in the world. Has everyone stolen a police car to buy a new GPU? Well, GTA 6. No, they're going to take the RAM out of the police car. That's true. Police cars do have an awful lot of RAM in them now. They're doing a lot of surveillance.

What's your next lightning round item? It fits right in with our theme here, which is everything's getting expensive and weird things are happening because of it. So, you know, we're heading into Apple season here. We're expecting a touchscreen, Macs, new iPhones, maybe a folding, $50,000 Ultra, you know, something's going to happen. It's all going to be very expensive. They killed the Apple car project, but they're going to sell a foldable phone for roughly the price of the Apple car. Would you like a new Toyota Camry or would you like a folding iPhone? Choice is yours.

Apple is rumored to be handling this with a new upgrade program that will bring lease-to-own pricing to the iPhone, the Mac, and the iPad. And then right next to that is some code reportedly found in iOS that would let Apple cut off virtually all of the apps on your phone if you miss your payments. Boy, is that dystopian. Yeah, there's a real, the first thing in there, you kind of had me in the first half, you know what I mean? That seems okay. I think people should be moving more towards we own our gadgets than we rent our gadgets from a large company. But especially at this moment, the idea of having some kind of cleaner upgrade system is all fine. But then you throw in, and if you miss a payment, Apple will become the repo man and take your phone away from you. And this gets bleak super, super, super fast.

Yeah, so it's called Partner Finance Lock, which is an incredible name. It would prevent you from erasing or selling devices that are in restricted mode if you have payments to whoever your partner that you're financing it with is. And it will block all the apps except for phone settings in the App Store, which is very funny. You can give us money for apps, but you can't do anything with any of them. I was really hoping you were going to say it blocks everything but, like, the Journal app so you can write down what a bad person you are. That's the only prompt in Journal. I was like, Siri, I will not prompt you into feeling guilt for missing payments. It's part of Find My. It hasn't been announced. We don't know if it's going to ship. But you can see where Apple's taking this. Yep. Right? And even leasing.

Sure, right now there's iPhone financing, there's upgrade options. Most financing, people understand it, you cut the price of the phone, 24 or 36 installments, you pay the monthly, and at the end of it, you own the phone. Leasing is like, Apple's going to take the phone back, so you pay a lower rate to own part of the phone. It's very much more renting the phone, really. All of this is to ease the impacts of payments, but then also make it so people don't just steal the phones. But do you want...

that level of literally like credit checking on your phone, disabling your phone, except for being able to browse the app store like a little kid, like Scrooge. Your hands up against the toy store window. If only. I wish I could download HBO Max. I simply do not have the resources. It's bad news. And then the other thing is the upgrade, the Apple upgrade thing will reportedly be for basically only higher end devices. There's some evidence that the base iPad, the Apple Watch SE, the MacBook Neo will not be included. So it's very clear. We talk a lot about Apple's.

constant interest in moving you up the price scale, this is a way to do it that makes it slightly more palatable because they're like, well, you just pay over time. If anyone's ever shopped for a car lease, you know, the push to the top trim because it's only $10 more a month is like, it's always sitting there. Yeah, I think this is bad. The answer to all of this Ramageddon stuff should be own your stuff and keep it longer and you should have more control over your technology, not rent things from companies because they're cheaper. I'm going to find a way to hack into your phone and tell it that you're leasing it for me.

And just put you in partner finance lock from time to time? If you could lock everything on my phone but the journal app, that would honestly make my life fast. I would bet you partner finance lock is more effective at controlling screen time than Apple's actual screen time or parental control features. Oh, for sure. That's the key is buy your kids an iPhone and then when they use it too much, just don't pay for it anymore. We fixed it. That's really good. I'd like to not pay for this iPhone between the hours of 6 p.m. and like 10 a.m. Choice. Just be late on every payment. It's good. I have another phone to tell you about. Can I tell you about a phone? Did you see this thing, the light flip this week? We have a new flip phone.

Oh, this looks sick. This is what I'm saying. The Light Phone, they've been making stuff for forever. Kai Tang, one of the co-founders, is going to be on the show next week. That's going to be really fun. They've been at this for a very long time. And Milai, the reason I bring this up to you is because A, they made a flip phone and it looks like blocky and futuristic and kind of out of the matrix and it looks so sick. But also, when I asked why they made this phone, this phone is essentially the Light Phone 3 turned into a flip phone. So there's a 2.8 screen, 2.8 inch screen up top, D-pad and number of keys on the bottom. Very simple phone, not designed to do that much. It's a Light Phone in flip phone form. But I asked him, why did you make a flip phone? Why make this? And the thing he said to me...

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

influencers and young people spending too much money on the Canon G7X? Yes, totally. Which is an ancient point-and-shoot. It's a good point-and-shoot. It's just ancient. And then I watch, because I'm obsessed with it, I get a lot of videos of people, like, screwing with the settings, and the setting, they always turn on as turning on the flash, which is choice. And it's because firing a flash at night makes your photos look good, and then you can do it, and then you're like, point-and-shoot photos are better, and you just, like, fall all the way down the rabbit hole. I love this unbundling that's happening. The whole smartphone was convergence, and now there's a little bit of divergence happening. I love it. Can't get enough of it.

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

It's really good. I will say one option in case you're not interested by another piece of hardware or another service plan is you can just have AT&T and then your phone won't work. That's my experience. It's a life. It's a choice. Yeah. Like, one of the reasons I pay so much attention to my kid is often my phone just simply won't work in their school. And so when I go to their events, I'm like, I'm going to watch the presentation here. It's beautiful. Yeah. That's my personal solution, is to stare at the 5GE indicator on my iPhone and be like, well, this won't work. I should pay attention to my family. My fun new thing is at my house, I constantly have two bars of service, but I actually have no service. Yeah, that's good. So it's, I mean, just my phone is lying to me state of Verizon, and it's really extremely delightful.

We won the race to 5G, David. I don't know if you're aware of this. We've all been doing robot surgery in a grape in the back of a robot car for the past five years. Yeah, and this changed everything about how fast I download Netflix now. All right, David, I got one last one, but I can't do it on my own. As you know, whenever I talk about car play, I have to summon the ghost of Joanna Stern. Welcome, Joanna Stern, to the Verge Cast. I'm here. Hi. How's it going? From the new thing set. Look at how fancy. Did we get like a pop-up or something fancy? Okay, this is actually, before we get into this, Joanna, Neil and I were debating what your walk-on music should be, the sort of Joanna entrance music. Do you have strong opinions on what you think your entrance music should be? I'm doing a talk next week, and I am having them do Mr. Roboto.

Oh, that's pretty good. Just like always be selling. It's all right. You've sold the book on enough of our shows. Oh my gosh. It's all right. The Dakota book is coming out next year. It's going to be horrible for everyone. I need to talk to you about what is going on with Ford. Yeah, I know. I messaged you panically. I was in a panic. I would say we had like a little argument over iMessage today. Ford announced with Apple that the maps in the next generation EV that it's making will be Apple Maps.

which is huge. I think it's the first time Apple has let any automaker directly integrate Apple Maps. Ford's new platform is a big deal. It's going to start with a $30,000 electric truck, but it's the future of everything. They built it in the Skunk Works. They're very proud of it. Joanna texted me and said, this is what Farley said to her on Decoder, that they wanted to do CarPlay Ultra, but they didn't want all of it. And I'm saying, no, Apple just wants to use Maps. Like, this has nothing to do with CarPlay. And in fact, regular CarPlay is in the announcement. Ford's going to keep using regular CarPlay. Joanna, what do you think is going on here?

I think we're both right. I think that Ford and Apple have had a longstanding relationship. And we had, as I talked with Farley, had thought that maybe Ford was going to do CarPlay Ultra. But Farley on your very show about a year ago told me, on Decoder, told me that, I don't have the quotes in front of me, but basically frustrated with Apple because Apple was asking for too much data and too much of the control of the clusters and all this stuff in the car. So I think these two companies were talking and a deal was struck somehow around, we want to work with Apple.

These are some of the most valuable data things we want from you. Maps being one of them. They're going to also be using this for self-driving capabilities and to build a platform on. And this is where they got. And so in this next EV platform of the future that Ford is making, this is sort of the Apple contribution. And it's not Google, right? And now, Neela, you make your point.

Okay, it's good. Joanna's like, it's my first podcast. Now I will make my point. We're debate style. We're doing it. Well, no, I teed you up perfectly for your point, which is the Google part of this. Yeah, I mean, the back and forth here is that these big smartphone vendors have tried to get ever more deeply integrated into cars. Google has made some headway, right? A bunch of cars run Android Automotive, which is a full operating system that just runs. My GM EV just runs Android. It runs Android 12 on Intel, which is not great. That's what it runs. Which you think is better than CarPlay, just so everyone's clear. Neil, I's out on CarPlay and in on Android 12.

That's a thing you should know about me. I don't want to be held to that. I'm going to say that it is effective at letting Gemini turn on Spotify and doing Google Maps navigation, which is what we prefer, and that is fine, right? Whatever. Apple did CarPlay Ultra, which is a very complicated system that works in a lot of different ways, and mostly carmakers have rejected it, right? I think you can get CarPlay Ultra in Aston Martins.

which is fine because if you had ever looked at Aston's existing user interface, you'd be like, get this out of my face. And I think Aston was like, we don't want to spend money on this. They announced it in Kia and Hyundai vehicles. That was a year ago. There's not even a glimmer of the shipping. And in fact, new vehicles from that brand have a whole system that they've built in other countries already. So like they're moving ahead on their own.

it just doesn't seem like the smartphone makers are getting traction and taking over the cars. And I know Ford was like, we have to have CarPlay in our cars. That's our big differentiation against GM. We're going to have it. Why would I compete with your phone? And I think they did not want everything that came with Google. And I personally think Apple was just happy to get a paying customer for Apple Maps. This is a big expensive product that does not make them any money. And I think that ultimately it was Apple was, they were saying, hey, look at CarPlay Ultra. This is great. And Farley and his team were like, no, we want some parts of what you want, but we don't want you to control everything. And so this is where they got.

Yeah. I don't think my take is wrong. We'll see. If someone from Ford wants to confirm this on or off the record, please call me. There's a part of this where the maps for where are the EV chargers, we're going to enter a destination and it will tell you how much battery you'll have at the end and the charging stops along the way is very important. There's a lot of apps that can do it, but you need that in the vehicle, especially for EVs. And then there's the autonomy part where it's not these maps that are really helping the cars drive themselves, right? There's like another class of very high resolution maps and systems and sensors that actually enable autonomy. And this doesn't seem like anything to do with that. And it's also unclear how Blue Cruise, which is Ford's autonomous system, will fit into it. So I just think Apple...

essentially got nowhere with CarPlay Ultra. As an existing, I'm a Mach-E driver, and I still don't know what I'm doing about my lease that expires next month. But the existing maps in there is terrible. Truly terrible. Not usable. So that is why I have CarPlay. And I go between Apple Maps and Google Maps. But that is fundamentally what Ford is just saying here. It's like, we are done. We are done trying to do this. We have chosen Apple here that has made a special deal for us versus Google. And they're the only ones who get this. This brings me to my theory about this as someone who does not interview car CEOs. This doesn't matter at all.

This relegates Apple Maps to being a slightly better version of the TomTom navigation that shows up on your rental car that you immediately get rid of because you plug your phone in. Having a little bit of navigation but no other features solves no problems. Everybody's still going to plug in their phone and just do CarPlay. What is even the point of this? What maps do you use when you use CarPlay?

I go back and forth between Google Maps and Apple Maps. I think Apple Maps is better at navigation. Google Maps is much better place data. But I'm going to use either one over the thing built into my car because I have to plug my phone in anyway. True. But in the future, and this is what Ford is at the disadvantage of, is it doesn't have the Tesla and it even doesn't have what Rivian's doing, which is the self-driving component to this. And so eventually when you're, or me, when my, how are you doing that? We're not sure what kind of car. Your car of the future is still in the van that you're driving right now. This is going to be even more important. And so I think that's what.

Farley's trying to say is like, we can't do this on our own. We needed to team up with someone that has this great Maps data. We are still going to do some autonomy. There's a big autonomous announcement to this. Apple's our partner here. Oh, our story just got updated. Breaking news. We have a statement from Ford about autonomy in our piece.

Apple is not building Ford self-driving technology. Ford said in email. Ford is developing our next generation ADAS in-house through Latitude AI. Their wholly-owned autonomy subsidiary. Apple Maps will be important mapping enabler. This is what David is describing. They need a map. Apple sold them a map. Apple gets to make some money on maps. It was previously making no money and threatening to do advertising on maps. I bet Google wanted a whole bunch of Google stuff and Ford didn't want to give it up. Yes, Google's like, we're going to train our own cars off of this. And Ford said, no, thank you. Yes. It will be fascinating to see if any other car makers start adopting Apple Maps because the TomTom stuff is all bad.

Right? Like, have you driven a Stellantis vehicle? You don't want any of this anywhere near your face. The reason I think it works for GM is because GM is just running Android. And so what you get out of the box is Google Maps, which is the thing most people want. And so, like, they get to cover the first sin here. Again, it's Android 12 on Intel. I have a lot of feelings about it every single day. But it's fine. It just does the job.

I know, Jenna, you think you're going to buy a new Ford now because it has... No, it's not available right now. This is all the prep for the 2027 big reveal that Farley's been prepping for. And my lease is up next month. So what do I do? Joanna, will you come back on the show and the three of us can litigate this decision? I'm serious. There's a whole Verge cast in Let's Buy Joanna a Car. And I think we should do it.

Oh, I have the hottest take for what's finished by next, but we should do that entire episode. We should do it live so we can get real feedback. Wait, Joanna, real quick, Google Maps or Apple Maps, which one is better? Tell the people. I have the same answer as you. And I think Apple Maps looks a lot nicer now. It's a little selfish. And talk about it has good EV data. They have actually already worked with Ford to do the better integration on the EV data. So if I need to charge and I'm doing a long road trip, I'm using Apple Maps. It has way better data. It comes in from the car. The state of New Jersey is not inevitable without Apple Maps. That's my hottest take.

You simply cannot survive there. Because driving New Jersey is, you make a turn and you immediately have to make another turn. And Apple Maps will tell you that's going to happen. And Google Maps is like, oh, you needed to be in the right lane five minutes ago. And they do a very nice job of showing the jug handles, like that you have two or three coming up. That's good stuff. All right, Joanna, thanks for coming on. Good to see you. Thank you for having me. Neil, the only update I have left for you is that there is more Paramount shenanigans. Oh, no. Please don't tease me.

Paramount is trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. A judge paused it, basically saying, it seems very much like this is going to be an antitrust disaster. We're going to put this on hold before they can do all of the things that make it hard to unwind. So that continues to be a mess. We will cover that mess, but not today. For now, we're going to get out of here. Thank you to everybody for watching and listening. As a reminder, the best thing you can do to support all of this, including all of our shenanigans with Joanna and others, is help us buy Joanna a car. Subscribe to The Verge. No, no, no, no. I don't know.

Help us buy Neelai a car to compete with Joanna's car in a street race. Theverge.com slash subscribe gets you all of our podcasts ad-free. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you everything else. And if you have thoughts, feedback, if you can make me feel better about OpenAI and Hugging Face, we would love to hear from you. Vergecast at theverge.com is the email. 866-VERGE-11 is the hotline. Neelai, who's on Decoder next week? We have Evan Smith from Altana. It's a big shipping company. We talked about how things are moving around the world right now with tariffs and wars. It was really good. It was, like, really good. A super chill time in that world. He and I always just fall, like, right into the weeds of everything. It's great.

That's good stuff. I'm excited about that one. Version history. The season is over. We have recorded all of next season. It's great. But if you missed any of the Smart Home episodes we just finished, go do it. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. The set looks awesome and it's very hard to build, so go watch the podcast. The Verge Cast of Verge production and part of the Box Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron Locascio. We will see you next week.