The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss Google's algorithm leak, OpenAI content deals, and more tech news from this week.
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TechTranscript
00:00:00Hello and welcome to Rich Hast, the flagship podcast with massive face, ultimate vibe.
00:00:07Oh no.
00:00:09We're immediately starting there.
00:00:10Hi, I'm your friend, Eli.
00:00:11Alex Trans is here.
00:00:12I'm your friend who just discovered ARK.
00:00:14I'm very excited.
00:00:15Oh, the browser?
00:00:16Yeah.
00:00:17Nobody told me about it.
00:00:18David definitely has it, repeatedly.
00:00:20Every issue of Installer is like, have you used this browser?
00:00:24Turns out he's right.
00:00:25Who knew?
00:00:26David Pierce is also here, although is he?
00:00:29You say ultimate base, and I just want to leave.
00:00:31I just immediately know where we're going.
00:00:35Oh, we're driving that car there so fast.
00:00:38All right, here's what I want to tell you.
00:00:40It's a huge week of news.
00:00:42A bunch of docs about how Google search works leaked, and then they were confirmed to be
00:00:47real.
00:00:48I don't want to oversell.
00:00:49This is on the order of how the Facebook algorithm works.
00:00:54This is true insight into the Google search algorithm.
00:00:56We've got to talk about that and the fallout across the web from that.
00:01:01Google search continues to be bananas.
00:01:03There's a bunch of open AI news.
00:01:05I know people want us to talk about Fox Media's deal with open AI, which I will, to whatever
00:01:10extent that is interesting.
00:01:11Then we've got a lightning round, unsponsored, Sam.
00:01:18But there's one piece of news that I think dominates the week.
00:01:25You definitely think it dominates the week.
00:01:28That is, The Verge has received a review unit of the Sony Field 7 ULT speaker.
00:01:35It's enormous.
00:01:36This is a medium-sized one.
00:01:38If you're not watching this on YouTube, just imagine Nealey pulled a grenade launcher out
00:01:42from underneath the table.
00:01:43I love it so much.
00:01:46It's $399.
00:01:47As many of you know, I think the internet has eras, and I think technology has eras.
00:01:53We've talked a lot about the end of the Google search era on the internet, what that might
00:01:56mean.
00:01:57Perhaps we're at the dawn of the AI era.
00:01:59Certainly we were in the mobile era for quite a long time, the social era.
00:02:03This is the ULT era.
00:02:05What I mean by that is, if the 80s were dominated by megabase and the 90s were dominated by
00:02:10megabase, I would say that the 20s, the 2000s, 2010s, kind of a stumble through Sony's extra
00:02:17base era.
00:02:18Yeah.
00:02:19It wasn't pleasant.
00:02:20It didn't hit.
00:02:21We're now in what Sony has called the ULT era.
00:02:25Ooh, I like these handles.
00:02:27That's what the button says on it right here, ULT.
00:02:30There's a ULT button?
00:02:31Wait, that changes everything.
00:02:32There's a ULT button.
00:02:33It lights up.
00:02:34I'm just going to turn this guy on here.
00:02:35It's so big.
00:02:36There we go.
00:02:37I, in fact, can't see Nealey through the speaker.
00:02:41I'm told that if I hold this play button down for five seconds, we get royalty-free demo
00:02:48music.
00:02:49You hear that, YouTube?
00:02:51Royalty-free.
00:02:52And you guys can't see the lights, but they're there.
00:02:55There she is.
00:02:57Now, I don't know if you can see the amount of the speaker that's currently lit up, but
00:03:06it's both drivers, and then on the front, the ULT button is rainbow blinking, and when
00:03:16you push that, you get Massive Bass Ultimate vibe.
00:03:21This is the most important product in technology.
00:03:23Do you think if you press the ULT button right now, the podcast would explode?
00:03:27Let's find out.
00:03:28We've got to wait for the drop to come back.
00:03:35Is this English?
00:03:36It's Simlish.
00:03:37Oh, there's another song.
00:03:38Oh, yeah.
00:03:39Oh, it got so much quieter when I pushed the ULT button.
00:03:49It just makes little drum hits when you push the ULT button.
00:03:51Can you hear that?
00:03:54It's like a timpani.
00:03:55I don't know, man.
00:03:58I'm trying to sell this, and it's not going great.
00:04:03The handles are great.
00:04:04We're turning into QVC or TikTok.
00:04:06This is on our TikTok store right now.
00:04:09For $400.
00:04:12It won't burn down your house.
00:04:14That we know of.
00:04:15Anyway, look.
00:04:16All I'm saying is we went from the Megabass era to the Extra Bass era, which, again, I
00:04:21think was a failure.
00:04:23I mean, the ULT era is not bumping so far.
00:04:28I mean, the first song is good.
00:04:30Extra is not more than mega, and so what happened is in the mega era, everybody went deaf and
00:04:36so couldn't hear the Extra era, but now we have Ultimate, which all the deaf people in
00:04:42their 40s can hear now.
00:04:44So it's back.
00:04:45Look, it has powerful sound with an X-Balance speaker unit and 30 hours of battery life.
00:04:51If it doesn't make the windows rattle, though, is it really big?
00:04:55I just think it's funny when you try to make a spec sheet for a product that is insane,
00:04:59and you're just like RGB lights next to a bullet point.
00:05:03Look, it's the ULT era.
00:05:04I've never been more excited about a product in my entire life.
00:05:06What's the Vertcast, everybody?
00:05:07People have been wondering about when we're going to give a 10 out of 10, and I think
00:05:10it might be happening.
00:05:11It might be time.
00:05:12It's coming.
00:05:13By the way, this is the medium-sized one.
00:05:16This is the 7.
00:05:17There's also a 10.
00:05:19I cannot wait for that one to arrive.
00:05:21They also sent us two 7s.
00:05:23Chris Welch just has one in his house, taking up most of his home.
00:05:25I'd like to formally apologize to everyone for bringing the ULT field 7 on the show,
00:05:31and by apologize, I mean, I'm sorry if you felt bad.
00:05:34I felt great.
00:05:35All right.
00:05:36Let's talk about the news.
00:05:37That's what I've learned about apologies.
00:05:41Soon, I'll be taking a screenshot of Notes app.
00:05:43I'm really excited.
00:05:44I'm headed directly for that.
00:05:47In everyone's career, you're like, is this the screenshot of Notes app?
00:05:50Yeah.
00:05:51Let's find out.
00:05:52OK.
00:05:53Let's talk about the news.
00:05:54There's a lot of news.
00:05:55A lot of it is about AI and what it is doing to the internet.
00:06:00If you've been listening to our show or reading The Verge or listening to Coder, whatever,
00:06:05you know that we've had a thesis for a while now, stretching back into the middle of last
00:06:10year that the internet was about to get flipped over, not just by AI, but by search in general,
00:06:16by social platforms falling apart.
00:06:19I don't know if you're aware, they changed the name from Twitter to X.
00:06:24Something's happening.
00:06:26One thing that we really wanted to do was pay a lot of attention to what things were
00:06:31like now so we could properly describe how they changed, which meant we did a lot of
00:06:36SEO coverage last year, covered the culture of SEO, the community of SEO, why the web
00:06:42looks like an SEO disaster, how Google fights back against SEO.
00:06:46Mia Sato did a lot of that reporting for us.
00:06:50I think I've radicalized her.
00:06:52You make someone care about SEO for eight months, they come out a different person on
00:06:55the other side.
00:06:56Mia Sato did a great job of that reporting.
00:06:57We had a great feature from Amanda Chicago-Lewis, the SEO community is still mad about.
00:07:01It featured an alligator party.
00:07:03We'll link all that stuff, you can read it.
00:07:05The point I'm trying to make is we felt like it was changing.
00:07:07I think that hunch was correct, right?
00:07:10Yeah.
00:07:11I mean, Google kind of sucks now.
00:07:14I'm using Coggy.
00:07:16So Google sucks now.
00:07:18There's other search products, Google's rolling out AI overviews.
00:07:22And then over the long weekend, a bunch of SEO people discovered that the API documentation
00:07:33for Google search had been inadvertently made public on GitHub for quite some time.
00:07:39And there were a couple blog posts, one that was just like, here's how I found it, here's
00:07:43who showed it to me.
00:07:44That one's really interesting.
00:07:45And then there's another one that's more of a deep dive into, here's what it says.
00:07:49And then there was a little bit of back and forth about, is this real?
00:07:51Can we trust what we're seeing?
00:07:53Because some of what the documentation revealed is that Google has not been telling the whole
00:07:58truth about how search works for a very, very long time.
00:08:02And so some of the headlines in these posts are like, is Google lying to us?
00:08:05And some of the copy in these posts is like, Google has been lying to us.
00:08:08Google was initially just totally dead silent, which is weird.
00:08:13Usually we at least get a no comment.
00:08:14But Mia sent a bunch of emails, we sent some texts, hey, is there anything, do you want
00:08:19to deny that this is real?
00:08:21Dead silence.
00:08:23Then yesterday, Wednesday, Google confirmed the leaks.
00:08:26They said this is real.
00:08:27And they said, we would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about search based
00:08:31on out-of-context citator and complete information.
00:08:33Basically they're saying, yeah, this is real, but it's not super real.
00:08:37It's a lot.
00:08:38David, you have been covering search and how it works, and thinking about it, you use the
00:08:43most browsers and search engines of anyone I know.
00:08:46There's some real explosive information here, but it's still not clear how much we should
00:08:52take seriously and how much Google is lying.
00:08:55It's just a lot of angry people are suddenly like, oh, this is what I've been angry about.
00:08:59Yeah, it's a weird moment because Google search has always been a black box.
00:09:05Google has very deliberately not revealed how Google search works and what it cares
00:09:11about, in part because it's so complicated that it's actually a hard, borderline impossible
00:09:17thing to sit down and explain to somebody why something is where it is in search results.
00:09:21I don't think any individual person at Google knows the answer to that question.
00:09:24It's just not how the system works anymore.
00:09:27But also because the more Google reveals about how search works, the more tools it is giving
00:09:33people with which to game Google search, which has been the cat and mouse game they've been
00:09:37playing forever.
00:09:38And so what has been happening is people have been asking Google, what is going on?
00:09:45What systems and rankings does Google care about?
00:09:48What can I do to make myself rank higher in Google search?
00:09:51And Google has given a lot of answers that these 2500 pages of internal API documents
00:09:59say are essentially not true.
00:10:00Like there are a series of things that Google has in these documents that it has explicitly
00:10:05said out loud it does not consider in search ranking.
00:10:09Are those two statements completely mutually exclusive?
00:10:12No.
00:10:13Which is why this gets so weird, right?
00:10:14Like there are, I forget the exact number, but it was right around 14,000 individual
00:10:19things referenced in these pages, which is basically like 14,000 different signals.
00:10:26How those are ranked, which matter more, which matter less, whether they're all even counted,
00:10:32how old this information is, what some of the terms actually mean, very hard to know
00:10:37because a lot of them are terms we've never seen before that Google has been saying for
00:10:40years didn't exist.
00:10:42But what seems to be true is you don't have a heading in your API for a thing that you
00:10:48don't care about.
00:10:50And so for things that Google has for years said that it doesn't care about, there is
00:10:55now evidence that it is at least a piece of data that Google collects.
00:10:59And one of the wild things is that people who do SEO spend a lot of time testing theories,
00:11:04and they've been testing theories, and people like the guy who broke the story, Ran Fishkin,
00:11:08have gotten crap from people in the community for running tests and saying things like,
00:11:14oh, it seems like Google search really cares about click-through rates.
00:11:17And people at Google are saying, no, no, no, no, we don't care about click-through rates,
00:11:20you're an idiot.
00:11:21And this overwhelmingly makes it look like Google cares an awful lot about click-through
00:11:25rates.
00:11:26And so now we're in this place where I think a big part of what we've been seeing from
00:11:29the SEO community is people who are like, oh, not only has Google not been telling us
00:11:32the truth, they've been lying to our faces and gaslighting us into believing the wrong
00:11:38thing about how Google search works.
00:11:40And it's a weird existential crisis when that happens.
00:11:43And the thing I'll just try to chain together is we started paying attention to this story
00:11:48last year because we wanted to know what this ecosystem was like.
00:11:54We wanted a picture of maybe the last days of disco.
00:11:59Here's what it was like before the comet hits.
00:12:02And I thought the comet would be AI, or the end of social networks, or Google keeping
00:12:06more traffic inside a featured whatever the comet is.
00:12:09And it kind of feels like the comet is actually just knowing that Google wasn't telling the
00:12:13whole truth.
00:12:15The headings in these blog posts, legitimately there's a trade publication called Search
00:12:19Engine Land that we've been watching a lot of the coverage of this on that site.
00:12:23One of the bigger SEO trade publications to exist.
00:12:25And the headings are like, how does SEO move on from here?
00:12:28One of the subheadings in their piece where they run the Google statement was, did Google
00:12:32lie to us?
00:12:34That's just a subhead.
00:12:35That's just a straight H2 on their story.
00:12:37Which, by the way, people do in order to be ranked higher in Google.
00:12:41You put questions people might Google in an H2.
00:12:43I'm serious, right?
00:12:44And that is like, push this all the way down.
00:12:46And it's like, what's inside this document is how the internet works, right?
00:12:51People have built the internet to try to figure out how to game the stuff that is inside
00:12:56these 2,500 pages.
00:12:57And you can reverse engineer the internet out of Google's API, which I think is why
00:13:02this feels so huge.
00:13:04Your point about the Facebook algorithm that you've been saying all week, this is on the
00:13:07order of leaking the Facebook algorithm.
00:13:09It is.
00:13:10And in the way that understanding the Facebook algorithm would essentially help us understand
00:13:14a decade of our online relationships.
00:13:17This is the internet in 2,500 pages of weird, inscrutable API calls.
00:13:21And I think that's hard for people who aren't in the SEO business, or our business, which
00:13:26is kind of the SEO business, to fully wrap their heads around.
00:13:28We make websites.
00:13:29If you make a website, you care about this a little bit.
00:13:32Yeah.
00:13:33Yeah.
00:13:34We have to, right?
00:13:35It's required.
00:13:36I edit buying guides.
00:13:38I have to care a lot about SEO.
00:13:40And people who don't care about SEO, I go and I tell my friends, this huge cache of
00:13:45documents dropped.
00:13:47It's huge.
00:13:48And they're like, what is SEO?
00:13:49Elon Musk says, I'm going to open source the Twitter algorithm, and this is front page
00:13:52news.
00:13:53The API calls, or fields, basically, of what data Google collects to run a ranking algorithm
00:14:00leaks.
00:14:01And it's us freaking out, and it's kind of nowhere.
00:14:06To David's point, we don't know how these things are ranked.
00:14:10That's true.
00:14:11But we do know that Google has said for years it does not collect some of this data or care
00:14:13about some of this data, and it definitely does.
00:14:17Rand Fishkin, the same person you mentioned, David, has spent a long time saying, it seems
00:14:22like this thing called dwell time is important.
00:14:25So you click through a Google result, you land on a website, you're there for however
00:14:28long.
00:14:29You come back to Google, you go to the next one.
00:14:30That time you spend on the website, he's like, that seems important.
00:14:33And Google has basically said no.
00:14:35Yep.
00:14:36They're tracking that, too.
00:14:37Yeah.
00:14:38The one that I think is the most explosive, which we don't really know how to understand,
00:14:42is click data from Chrome.
00:14:45And it's there somewhere, right?
00:14:47So one thing we know that Google does, which is a little shaky, is when you search for
00:14:53a website, I think the example that came out in one of the antitrust trials was Vogue or
00:14:58Cosmopolitan.
00:14:59It was some magazine like this.
00:15:00Yeah, it was one of those.
00:15:01Yeah.
00:15:02And you get the website, and then right below it in the search result, you get their headings
00:15:05like beauty, fashion, style coverage, Met Gala.
00:15:08Those headings are generated by what people click on in those websites in Chrome.
00:15:12Yeah.
00:15:13And Google has forever said it does not use data from Chrome to impact search.
00:15:21And then you look at these API docs, and you're like, oh, it's in there.
00:15:25There's data from Chrome.
00:15:26It's potential that Google is actually using that for search.
00:15:29And they have sworn up and down to every regulator, to every SEO professional, to everyone, that
00:15:34these things are not the same.
00:15:36What are you going to do with that?
00:15:38It's such a funny example, too, because of course Google does that.
00:15:42This to me, so much of this leak is things that you would obviously assume Google is
00:15:47doing, except that Google has been denying doing it for years, that it turns out in fact
00:15:51Google is doing.
00:15:53I'm in the business of knowing which links are good.
00:15:56And I also run a browser in which billions of people click links every day.
00:16:02At some point, you'd be insane not to let one affect the other.
00:16:06You have maybe the best possible data stream, which is the links that people go to and how
00:16:11long they spend there, which is literally, that is all you could ever want to know in
00:16:15search rankings.
00:16:17And so the idea that they are spread apart and not in any way correlated out of the goodness
00:16:22of Google's heart, I think has always been sort of silly to people.
00:16:27And so to some extent, it's like, it just confirms what your instincts tell you in a
00:16:31lot of this leak.
00:16:32Yeah.
00:16:33I keep going back to, Nilay, earlier, you said this was kind of like a comment hitting.
00:16:36And I feel like it's definitely a comment for the SEO community.
00:16:40But for the rest of us, we've kind of been in more like high waters rising, as apocalypse
00:16:45is coming.
00:16:46Right?
00:16:47Like the Google experience for 90% of people has just been like, OK, the sea levels are
00:16:51rising now.
00:16:52And it feels like this was maybe that big push in the water.
00:16:57Oh, now it's covering Manhattan's, dang it.
00:17:00Yeah.
00:17:01Yeah.
00:17:02I mean, it does feel like the dam is breaking.
00:17:04One of the things that we were talking about when we did our Decoder episode recently about
00:17:08Google Zero was, this stuff leaks because people are mad.
00:17:13And so if you were an SEO operator and you uncovered a bunch of secret data that Google
00:17:19was collecting, you would not tell the SEO community, right?
00:17:24You would definitely keep that to yourself.
00:17:26But instead what's happening is people are mad and they're like, look at all these lies.
00:17:30Or look at what we perceive to be lies.
00:17:33There's just a lot of the ideas that people have had about how Google search works.
00:17:39One of them is domain authority.
00:17:40So a very funny thing that happens is every year I publish Best Printer 2024 by a brother
00:17:47laser printer, and it goes to the top of the rankings.
00:17:49It goes to the top of the search rankings, one, because I have the right answer, which
00:17:53is you should write a brother laser printer and never think about it.
00:17:55Two, because I'm the best person to write about printers in world history.
00:17:59No one else has written a better printer post than me.
00:18:01I'm sorry.
00:18:02That's just the truth.
00:18:03Certainly.
00:18:04These two can try.
00:18:05And I don't mean that because there's not better writers than me.
00:18:08I mean, those writers are not wasting their time writing about printers.
00:18:13You are the perfect, the perfect middle of good at your job and also interested in printer
00:18:17posts.
00:18:18Like the whole staff is better at this than me.
00:18:21I just, they won't do it.
00:18:25That's fine.
00:18:27And then everyone tweets it and shares it and people write about it because it's a joke
00:18:31and it's funny and it's at the top of the list.
00:18:33And then the SEO community says things like the verge is just taking advantage of their
00:18:36domain authority, which yeah, yeah, that's true.
00:18:39That's fully what we're doing.
00:18:40And then Google's like, we don't have domain authority.
00:18:42That's not a thing we keep track of.
00:18:43And then you look at the thing and they track something called site authority and it's that
00:18:48dynamic.
00:18:49Yeah.
00:18:50Right.
00:18:51It's just that dynamic, which is like, okay.
00:18:53Like we understand that you don't want people to game search.
00:18:58We have been very critical of SEO forms that game search again, decoder this week is just
00:19:05about people gaming search and putting small businesses out of business.
00:19:10But if you're not honest, right, then, and if you deny the things are happening, then
00:19:16the backlash is really strong.
00:19:18The example I keep thinking about is what if every Instagram influencer woke up today
00:19:24and was like, Instagram has been lying to us for a decade, like how'd that go for that
00:19:29platform?
00:19:30Adam Asari just like immediately, like, Hey guys, he's not making it better.
00:19:34I'm here with a video on why the lies were worth it.
00:19:37Now I got to go to the Met Gala.
00:19:40Yeah, exactly.
00:19:41I mean, kind of, it's like my glasses are getting more expensive every day and they
00:19:44look fabulous.
00:19:45They're very good.
00:19:46Um, what would happen if every YouTuber, I always joke that every YouTuber gets their
00:19:49wings and they make the video about how they're mad at YouTube.
00:19:52What would happen if every YouTuber was like, they've been lying to us for a decade?
00:19:57That's where Google is landing with the web, with these leaks, we're going to have a lot
00:20:00more coverage of them now that we know they're real.
00:20:02We're going to pull them apart.
00:20:03We're going to talk to some experts.
00:20:04I have people from other companies in my inbox saying things like, if some of this is real,
00:20:14then Chrome is essentially spyware.
00:20:16Yeah.
00:20:17I mean, it sounds like last week we were having this whole conversation about copilot and
00:20:21how everybody was very upset because they felt like copilot plus PCs, all this stuff
00:20:25that Microsoft is doing is horrible.
00:20:28And it was, it was essentially key loggers and it's like, okay, well now we basically
00:20:31have confirmation that Chrome is a key logger.
00:20:34Well, we, we, right, we, there's like a field, it's like if you were to make a spreadsheet
00:20:41and one of the things in spreadsheet would be like my friend's bank account numbers
00:20:45and you're like, but I never filled it in.
00:20:47Yeah.
00:20:48I just kind of wanted in case someone told me their bank account number.
00:20:51Sure.
00:20:52I do that all the time.
00:20:53Yeah.
00:20:54People, my friends have gone out with on dates.
00:20:56Like I will, I just keep, maybe, maybe that's a page I want to have in my notebook.
00:21:01But again, I would encourage anyone who is alarmed by this to go to your Chrome history,
00:21:07think about all the cookies that you have.
00:21:09I mean like, of course it's a key.
00:21:11It's like, what the hell is a browser if not a key logger?
00:21:15That's literally its job is to know all the links that you've been to and all the things
00:21:19that you've typed inside of them.
00:21:21And I think to some extent, again, I just keep coming back to this idea that like Google
00:21:25is going to say, okay, we run a search engine.
00:21:27Wouldn't it be cool if we knew all the links people would go to when they weren't on Google
00:21:31and then somebody on Chrome is like, what if we just built an awesome browser and they
00:21:34just, it would be the most like, have you met Google thing in history?
00:21:39And to be fair, if any company could accidentally keep those two things apart, it is Google.
00:21:44But like just strategically, it would be absurd for Google to do this and not actually connect
00:21:51those dots together.
00:21:52Right.
00:21:53Again, and I think from some of the antitrust trials, David, you covered some of them.
00:21:57Google has been pretty open.
00:21:58Like our engineers wanted a bunch of click data to make the search engine better.
00:22:00So we gave Apple $20 billion.
00:22:03Right.
00:22:04Okay.
00:22:05Well, a bunch of people run Windows.
00:22:06We don't have to pay Microsoft.
00:22:08We just have to make a browser and put it on there.
00:22:11And now we run the biggest browser in the world and we get all the clicks.
00:22:13Like that is exactly what you would do.
00:22:16Yeah.
00:22:17I think the thing is, what's different here is that everybody should understand this,
00:22:21right?
00:22:22Like I understand that Google is reading my emails because I signed up for Gmail in like
00:22:272004, 2005.
00:22:29That was part of the deal.
00:22:30You know, it reads my emails to deliver me ads.
00:22:32So I understand that.
00:22:34Most people don't.
00:22:35And a lot of times they have these moments when stuff like this happens, where they're
00:22:38like, oh shit, they have so much more information about me than I ever thought they did.
00:22:43And it's just this moment for a lot of people where it's just like, oh, I didn't, I never
00:22:47intellectualized this.
00:22:48I never like fully comprehended how much these companies have about me.
00:22:52Yeah.
00:22:53And then on the flip side, you have people who are trying to build businesses saying,
00:22:56hey, it looks like you are doing this.
00:22:58And Google's saying, no.
00:22:59Yeah.
00:23:00And just flat out lying to them in a way that's like, you know, I don't think they, Google
00:23:05has any interest in rebuilding trust with the SEO people.
00:23:08Right.
00:23:09Actually, one of the funniest things about this is that it's such an antagonistic relationship.
00:23:11I often make the comparison to platforms.
00:23:14I think the web is essentially Google's platform.
00:23:17And certainly a lot of these businesses are building their businesses on the platform
00:23:21known as Google search, not the web.
00:23:23Right.
00:23:24Right.
00:23:25They're search dependent businesses.
00:23:27And Google does not have like warm and fuzzy platform creator relationships with these
00:23:33folks.
00:23:34No.
00:23:35No.
00:23:36Google basically is like, I'm going to sit down with the creators.
00:23:37Like, look at all these great creators.
00:23:38He's got a great sweater on.
00:23:39Right.
00:23:40Neil Mohan, who runs YouTube, loves, loves a creator breakfast.
00:23:42Yeah.
00:23:43Right.
00:23:44Like every platform that depends on creators has that relationship that extracts more value
00:23:48than it pays them.
00:23:50That's life and platform world.
00:23:52They try to mollify the creators all the time.
00:23:54Google does not try to mollify website owners.
00:23:56No.
00:23:57Because, I mean, at this point, the internet is reliant on Google.
00:24:01And what Google says is, hey, run our ads on your site and you can have some money.
00:24:04Does that seem good?
00:24:05But what I think is so interesting about this is like the YouTube, the sort of social platform
00:24:09example is really interesting.
00:24:10Because what those companies, by and large, have done is be inscrutable on purpose.
00:24:17Right.
00:24:18Like, you look at Adam Asari responding to people who are like, why didn't my post do
00:24:23numbers?
00:24:24Why is this one working and this one not working?
00:24:26And they never really answer the question except to say, you know, do good work and
00:24:31keep posting and whatever.
00:24:33So what you see is like the people who are successful on these platforms are the ones
00:24:36who are constantly running experiments in public.
00:24:38Like, do you remember Mr. Beast's whole thing where he was like, if I have my mouth open
00:24:42in the thumbnail, it gets more clicks?
00:24:44Like, YouTube didn't tell him that.
00:24:46These are the experiments he's running in public.
00:24:48What Google has done that is so wild is it's as if Neil Mohan called Mr. Beast and said,
00:24:53shut your mouth.
00:24:54It doesn't help.
00:24:55And instead, so it's like, OK, it's one thing to not be told the rules of the game and figure
00:25:01them out for yourself.
00:25:03And I actually think that relationship is like odd, but fine.
00:25:06Right.
00:25:07And it's like, here, here is a black box.
00:25:09It's your job to figure it out.
00:25:11That is sort of the Internet we live on.
00:25:12But for Google to have spent this long denying the existence of what people are finding on
00:25:18their own and sort of making people question what they're finding with their own two hands
00:25:22in front of their own two eyes is just wild.
00:25:24And again, we should say there is a lot about how all of this works that we still don't
00:25:29know.
00:25:30And I think a lot of it is going to start to come out very fast because there are a
00:25:33lot of people who do these experiments who are now armed with a tremendous amount of
00:25:37new data.
00:25:38And so I think we're going to learn a lot about how Google works really, really quickly
00:25:41now.
00:25:42But it's just it just feels so weird to hear the people who do this for a living be like,
00:25:46yeah, I've been asking these questions and being publicly lied to about how my job works
00:25:51for a decade.
00:25:52That just feels crazy.
00:25:54Also, we should know there are pending antitrust lawsuits against Google and lots and lots
00:25:59of regulators around the world who have been asking the same questions and getting the
00:26:02same kind of answers.
00:26:03Well, which is another place.
00:26:04A lot of this information is coming from, by the way, like the there was this thing
00:26:06called Nav Boost that came up a bunch in the in the API, which talks a lot about how click
00:26:12through rate and the stuff you're talking about, like the long and short clicks, whether
00:26:15you come back very quickly from a search result or stay on the page a while.
00:26:19All of that is part of a system Google has called Nav Boost that came up in the antitrust
00:26:23trial and made some noise where it's like, OK, this is actually overriding a lot of our
00:26:28other rankings is what you do once you interact with a search result.
00:26:33And that is very different from what Google has told people.
00:26:36Yeah, actually, my favorite part of all this, my favorite thing, because it's such a good
00:26:40name.
00:26:41Let's be honest.
00:26:42How do you get me?
00:26:43You give something an adorable name.
00:26:45Google has spent years positioning search as a utility, right?
00:26:50Not as a business that they run, but as the water or electricity of the Internet.
00:26:55It's just a neutral utility.
00:26:57You just use it.
00:26:59And we don't have any ideas about it.
00:27:00We set the robots to crawl the Internet.
00:27:02They're just a baby.
00:27:03Yeah.
00:27:04They just find the stuff and they show it to you.
00:27:06And when you try to cover search as anything other than a utility, the attitude from Google
00:27:11is like, why would you do that?
00:27:13We want to teach people how search works.
00:27:14And we're like, no, there's like a culture of search, like the same way that there's
00:27:16a culture of TikTok, right?
00:27:18And that's been a disconnect.
00:27:20But they have done that on purpose, right?
00:27:22Because if you treat something like a utility or a neutral algorithm or just the right answer
00:27:27that the Google brilliance of PageRank has discovered across the web, then maybe you
00:27:31don't poke at it too much.
00:27:33And inside these documents, we find things like NavBoost as part of a system that is
00:27:39called Twiddlers.
00:27:40Yeah.
00:27:41Twiddlers.
00:27:42So good.
00:27:43And the way to think about it is like the big Google algorithm is like the back end.
00:27:49And right before it displays your result, the Twiddlers show up and they twiddle the
00:27:55result.
00:27:56And so NavBoost is a Twiddler.
00:27:58It's like categorized as a Twiddler.
00:27:59It's like, we went and found some other stuff and we're just going to shuffle that around
00:28:02a little bit.
00:28:03And there's a bunch of those.
00:28:05And like lots of Google systems are built as Twiddlers.
00:28:07So they have plausible deniability that the core search ranking algorithm doesn't take
00:28:13these factors in.
00:28:15But right before they show them to you, just a little twiddle.
00:28:19Twiddlers, baby.
00:28:20And it's like, I'm not that stupid.
00:28:25It's one system that displays a search result at the end where it happens.
00:28:29I don't think they can run around being like, we were always telling the truth.
00:28:33These Twiddlers are out of control.
00:28:35They have no control over it.
00:28:36They're just a baby.
00:28:39It's my favorite thing that everybody does now when they screw up.
00:28:41They just go, I'm just a baby.
00:28:42I don't want to know.
00:28:44It's my first day running search.
00:28:45Who can say?
00:28:46You can't hurt yourselves.
00:28:48Anyhow, we are going to learn a lot more about this.
00:28:51We often try not to oversell things.
00:28:53I'm just telling you, the people who make the web are aflame because of these documents.
00:29:00Because they do make Google seem, if not outright a liar, as though they have been socially
00:29:05engineering a community of people who make things into not believing what they see, as
00:29:10David is saying.
00:29:11And I think the backlash there is going to be ferocious.
00:29:15Especially as search traffic declines.
00:29:18Especially as user behavior changes around AI.
00:29:20Especially as the AI results continue to tell people to eat glue.
00:29:25There's not a lot of trust left in this ecosystem.
00:29:30To me, it's weird that there's not more coverage of it.
00:29:32It's not as sexy as the Facebook algorithm, or Elon saying he's going to open source the
00:29:35Twitter algorithm.
00:29:36But like David said, this is the architecture of the internet.
00:29:39Yeah, I think it is.
00:29:40That's why it's so hard for people.
00:29:42It is so ingrained in how most people function that it's shocking to them to a point where
00:29:48it's like, I can't even process this, I have to go.
00:29:51Most people I don't think fully grasp how much the Google, most people don't fully grasp
00:29:56how much Google affects their online experience.
00:29:59They just don't.
00:30:00They know it, they see it and everything, but it's just like, just gloss over it.
00:30:04And now it's like, oh, we're having to actually reckon with this and think about this.
00:30:08It's why I always like to talk about cooking websites.
00:30:11Because if you want the single cleanest example of how Google changes the way a webpage works,
00:30:18go read a recipe site.
00:30:20You will see everything you need to see.
00:30:23You will see the H2s, which Google wants, because they're going to be questions that
00:30:26people might be Googling.
00:30:28You're going to see the jump to recipe thing, but then you're also going to see 2000 words
00:30:31of nonsense about their lives, because you have to actually stay on the page a long time
00:30:36in order for Google to believe that that's a successful search.
00:30:39They want images, that's very important to Google.
00:30:42Every single pixel of that page, right down to how the recipe is structured, is made for
00:30:48Google.
00:30:49And anyone who runs a food blog will tell you that the fundamental tension is like,
00:30:51I did this because I like food, and I actually work for Google.
00:30:54And that feels crappy to a lot of people.
00:30:56And now Google's going to take that stuff and show the recipes to people in AI.
00:30:59Right.
00:31:00But I do think one more thought on this that I've been seeing a lot of increasingly in
00:31:03the SEO world, and I think is a really interesting internet question, is one way to read a lot
00:31:10of what we've seen in these leaks, is that SEO is dead, and no longer will work.
00:31:18I copied this one paragraph out from the thing that Rand wrote.
00:31:23He said, Google no longer rewards scrappy, clever, SEO-savvy operators who know all the
00:31:27right tricks.
00:31:28They reward established brands, search measurable forms of popularity, and established domains
00:31:32that searchers already know and click.
00:31:34From 1998 to 2018 or so, one could reasonably start a powerful marketing flywheel with SEO
00:31:38for Google.
00:31:40But in 2024, I don't think that's realistic, at least not on the English language web in
00:31:43competitive sectors.
00:31:45There is a real defeatism to the idea that Google cares a lot about the sites that already
00:31:51exist, the places people already go, what has been going on for a long time.
00:31:55And the idea that you can come and be new and good and smart, and people will find you
00:32:00because that's how Google works, is a dying theory.
00:32:03Yeah.
00:32:04I asked this question to a lot of just media people, website CEOs on Decoder.
00:32:10I asked this question to Sundar.
00:32:12Why would anyone make a website?
00:32:13You're a new creator.
00:32:15We're all going to quit our jobs at AOL, which you should do.
00:32:19Can't recommend it enough.
00:32:20Best decision I've ever made.
00:32:21I don't plan on doing it.
00:32:23You should go get a job at AOL just to quit.
00:32:24Just to quit.
00:32:25But that's how we founded The Verge.
00:32:27We all worked at Engadget, 2010, 2011.
00:32:30We had this idea for The Verge.
00:32:32We all quit.
00:32:33We didn't want to start anything.
00:32:34We started a website, like a big desktop website.
00:32:38We didn't even have a mobile site.
00:32:40We started a big, hairy desktop website with forums and features and all this stuff.
00:32:45And then the mobile web came and we shrunk down the thing and whatever.
00:32:49But it was never a question that we would start anything but a website.
00:32:53There were 12 of us.
00:32:54We had a big idea.
00:32:55We wanted to do a thing.
00:32:56What we were going to do was start a website.
00:32:59I think if you get to that place in 2024, maybe some people are going to start a sub-stack.
00:33:03I don't think they think of those things as websites.
00:33:05Those are newsletters or independent newsletter on Ghost or whatever.
00:33:09Mostly what they're going to do is start YouTube channels and TikTok channels.
00:33:13The only people I see who are kind of doing that sort of thing, like, right, leaving their
00:33:16jobs or whatever and being like, I'm going to start a website, are already established
00:33:20brands, right?
00:33:21Yeah.
00:33:22Like the folks who are over at Kotaku, 404, who are from Vice.
00:33:25These folks just said, I'm going to go and I'm going to start a new thing.
00:33:28They all take that model from Deadspin that became Defector.
00:33:33And that works.
00:33:34But that is...
00:33:35You have to have an audience.
00:33:36Yeah.
00:33:37That worked because they have that audience, right?
00:33:39Most people don't have that audience and don't have that scale.
00:33:41And I think Casey's written about that a lot of like, he has to work to get Platformer
00:33:45out.
00:33:46He has to really put in the effort because scale is hard and it's much, much harder now
00:33:52because of Google.
00:33:53Yeah.
00:33:54And those sites are all great.
00:33:55I don't think they...
00:33:57Like 404 is on Ghost.
00:33:58Yeah.
00:33:59Right.
00:34:00So they're taking advantage of some infrastructure for Newsletter that exists that lets them
00:34:02be a different kind of thing.
00:34:03But the idea that we coded our website from scratch.
00:34:08You wouldn't do that.
00:34:09We're going to build a product that is a website.
00:34:11I didn't do it.
00:34:12Yeah.
00:34:13But you wouldn't do that in 2024.
00:34:14It was just not a good investment in 2024 for the reason David is saying.
00:34:18Yeah.
00:34:19And there's, you know, many things have changed in the past 13 years, but the idea that the
00:34:24new creators on the internet will not go to the open web, but instead will go to a
00:34:30closed video platform, I think is very dangerous.
00:34:34And I don't know the right answer to get people back to making open searchable web properties.
00:34:40If the biggest search engine is like, screw it, like Hearst, we'll just, everyone can
00:34:44go read dot dash Meredith, like whatever, you know, like maybe that's the right outcome
00:34:49and maybe that's just the closing of the web.
00:34:52But again, the reason we started covering it last year is because I was like, oh, the
00:34:55comment's coming.
00:34:56And the more we covered it, we're like, oh, the comment's coming.
00:34:59We should capture this moment.
00:35:00And it feels like, again, I thought the comment would be, I thought, I did not expect it to
00:35:06be like, everyone is this mad.
00:35:09It just feels like, we'll see how it goes.
00:35:11We're going to cover a lot more of it.
00:35:12I think the other browser makers, regulators, there's just a flood of negative emotion about
00:35:19how Google has behaved, that it might, it feels like it's coming to a head.
00:35:23I do have one question for you guys, especially you, David, because you use a lot of different
00:35:28search engines.
00:35:29Are any of them good?
00:35:30Like, do any of them, when you go and you search something, actually give you those
00:35:34unique results that used to be like, ooh, yeah, now I know what I'm doing on this search
00:35:39engine.
00:35:40Um, yes and no, um, Coggy, which is the one you mentioned, which is also what I use.
00:35:45It's 10 bucks a month.
00:35:46It's excellent.
00:35:47I cannot recommend it enough.
00:35:48I know the search engine feels ridiculous, but it's worth it, uh, has a thing that it
00:35:53calls small web where it actually deliberately built a like crowdsource database of sites
00:35:59that aren't the verge and aren't like big mainstream news sites, the kind that dominate
00:36:05search results, but are like people's blogs and little alternative news sites and local
00:36:10newspapers and all the kinds of cool stuff.
00:36:12And you can, you can toggle the search just to that.
00:36:15And I think the, the sort of big omnibus search is never coming back from what it is
00:36:21now.
00:36:22It's you, it's just interface changes really.
00:36:24Like I think Coggy stuff is better than Google, but mostly just because it's a nicer thing
00:36:28to use than Google is at this moment, especially an arc.
00:36:31Yeah.
00:36:32But where we are now is like the, the only solution is going to be to artificially decide
00:36:39which part of the web you want to look at because all of the signals for the rest of
00:36:44the web are, are starting to break away from that, like find and explore new things vibe
00:36:52because that's harder to do and harder to measure than, Oh, people generally believe
00:36:58that Neely is right about which printer to buy.
00:37:01And that's actually like a pretty easy thing for a search engine to believe and send you
00:37:05to over and over again.
00:37:06Yeah.
00:37:07And we will continue ruthlessly using our domain authority.
00:37:10We will.
00:37:11I love it.
00:37:12To break big printer.
00:37:14David, I can't remember if it was you who said this or Casey might've said it to me
00:37:16in passing.
00:37:17We used to think of surfing the web as a fun thing to do and all of Google's messaging
00:37:22at IO was let Google do the Googling for you.
00:37:25Yeah.
00:37:26Which makes it seem like work.
00:37:27And it's like, no, this is how I wasted time.
00:37:29Do you know how much I didn't pay attention in law school because I was just browsing
00:37:32the web in class?
00:37:35Like that's a, it's weird that we've made the web this unpleasant and the platforms
00:37:39figured it out.
00:37:40And hopefully we can get some of that back.
00:37:42I don't know if we can.
00:37:43We're going to keep running a website.
00:37:44We're not, we do have a tick tock for as long as tick tock, but it's good.
00:37:47All right.
00:37:48We're going to keep using our domain authority to crush big printer.
00:37:51Hell yes.
00:37:52Just ruthless, ruthless domain authority abuse.
00:37:54Uh, but that's our mission here at the bridge.
00:37:56We got to take a break.
00:37:57We'll be right back.
00:37:58All right, we're back.
00:38:04The post credit scene on this episode of the British house on YouTube is going to be great.
00:38:08It is.
00:38:09That's all I can say.
00:38:10I'm not allowed to say it's lightning round one, according to our rundown, the AI lightning
00:38:15round.
00:38:16So there's a bunch of WWC rumors about what's going to happen with open AI.
00:38:21They've apparently inked their deal.
00:38:24Google had a bad week last week.
00:38:25We should talk about that.
00:38:26More Google.
00:38:27Um, GPTs are open now with open AI store.
00:38:31There's a lot, but I know people want us to talk about our press release, Fox media's
00:38:37press release, uh, which is that like many media companies, Vox media signed a content
00:38:43and technology deal with open AI.
00:38:45The Atlantic had one on the same day.
00:38:47It was like Fox media, Atlantic, we're in the headlines together.
00:38:49I know David, what you run, you interview me.
00:38:52Yeah.
00:38:53So, okay.
00:38:54I think the, the big question to me is both, uh, how do we feel as people who work at a
00:39:03company with a deal like this and what is this, what does all this mean about the media
00:39:10in general?
00:39:11So I think like we, we just had a conversation earlier with a bunch of the folks in our newsroom
00:39:15talking about this stuff.
00:39:16And, and I think I want to know for you as somebody who runs a newsroom, you didn't make
00:39:21this deal.
00:39:22Uh, you, I assume we'll at some point see the contract because you'd like yelling about
00:39:27contracts.
00:39:28I don't think that's the thing you don't, I sincerely doubt that is true.
00:39:31But I'll do my best.
00:39:32It is more likely that I will see someone else's contract before I see our own companies.
00:39:37Oh, that's interesting.
00:39:38That's a, that's a fun reporting tactic.
00:39:40Can I, can I bully my boss before I can bully somebody else?
00:39:45Our company is very good at being like, no, you can't just report on our own company.
00:39:49Other companies are like, here's the stuff.
00:39:50Like that's just the way of being a reporter.
00:39:52Yeah, that's fair.
00:39:54But so I am curious for you as like a newsroom leader, how you even think through what a
00:39:59deal like this means.
00:40:01Sure.
00:40:02Uh, we do a lot of disclosures on the show famously, I think, uh, I've had journalism
00:40:10professors talk to me about the fact that our disclosures are a running joke with the
00:40:14audience.
00:40:15Like we want to be really transparent about where information comes from, reasons to not
00:40:21trust us if you don't want to trust us.
00:40:24Like my goal is always to just empower the audience with information.
00:40:29That's the top level.
00:40:30So like if you're listening to this and you've listened to the show, that's why we do the
00:40:34disclosures.
00:40:35That's why they're a joke.
00:40:36Like I want, the only currency we have as a news organization is trust.
00:40:40So we're trying to, that's why we have the background policy, right?
00:40:42All the spokespeople have to use their names when they talk to us because we don't want
00:40:47to pretend we know something that they just told us.
00:40:50Right.
00:40:51If Google or Apple or Microsoft or whoever wants to talk to us and get some information
00:40:54on our pages, they need to be accountable for it, not us.
00:40:57And that's just trust.
00:40:58Who are you going to trust?
00:40:59Where does the trust go?
00:41:00Who do you have to trust for to believe this story?
00:41:04So that's the top level right next to that, which I think the audience doesn't see as
00:41:10much because why would you is our newsroom has to not think about it like that's actually
00:41:17what independence is, right?
00:41:19Is not.
00:41:20I know that our company has a deal or an investor and I'm just going to like, I'm going to think
00:41:27about it as I write the story.
00:41:28The goal is they don't think about it at all and we just go do the reporting and we
00:41:32publish what is true or what we believe or what we think people should know.
00:41:36Right.
00:41:37And that, that the, in any traditional newsroom, that's the, what is called the firewall, right?
00:41:44So we do stuff, our sales team, there's advertising over there.
00:41:47We just came back from an ad break, right?
00:41:50Like in that, we don't know what the ads are.
00:41:53I don't know what ads just played.
00:41:54I get so many emails with the crypto ads.
00:41:56I don't know, man.
00:41:57Yeah.
00:41:58Like I think crypto is stupid shit.
00:42:00Like what do you want me to do?
00:42:01Like that's that team.
00:42:02And if we open the door and start telling that team what to do, the danger, and this
00:42:07is a danger that is proven out over and over again in newsrooms around the world.
00:42:09If we open the door and start telling them what to do, they're like, Hey, that door's
00:42:13open.
00:42:14Right.
00:42:15We're going to start telling you what to do.
00:42:16So we just keep the door closed.
00:42:17This is why you have the firewall.
00:42:18It works in both directions.
00:42:20So for me, and I understand OpenAI in particular is pretty shady company.
00:42:24I feel like our entire episode last week was like, this company is pretty shady.
00:42:26We're going to talk about Sam.
00:42:27I was like, I'm just waiting.
00:42:28Um, whatever.
00:42:29Um, fine.
00:42:30But like, that's the commercial side of our company.
00:42:37And I understand, like, I've talked to a lot of media executives, like I'm running around
00:42:40covering Google zero.
00:42:41I've been talking to a lot of media people lately and I can talk about that bigger question,
00:42:45David, of like, are these good deals?
00:42:46Are these like a good idea broadly?
00:42:47Because I think I've done some reporting.
00:42:49I have some thoughts about that.
00:42:51The thing that like when our press release went out, like, no, we're not going to change
00:42:56our cover OpenAI.
00:42:57Yes.
00:42:58I think when it's appropriate, we'll disclose it.
00:43:00It's not like a, like Comcast is an investor in our company.
00:43:05Right.
00:43:06Like we disclose it every time we whisper about Comcast because they're an investor.
00:43:10This is a licensing deal.
00:43:11Like we have a lot of those across our company.
00:43:13I don't want to just get into a situation where I'm like, disclosure, Yahoo licenses
00:43:19and RSS feed of the Dodo.
00:43:20Like what do you like?
00:43:22I think that door can get too open.
00:43:24We can overread it.
00:43:25So we're just going to go a little long.
00:43:26It would go a little long.
00:43:29And I want to preserve our independence.
00:43:30And what independence really means to me is yes, we'll disclose it.
00:43:33Yes, we'll earn everyone's trust.
00:43:35But I would prefer it if we were just covering OpenAI without thinking about it.
00:43:40And so that's, that's the balance I'm trying to strike.
00:43:41I'm open to people's thoughts about how much you need from us to continue having that trust.
00:43:49But it is, in many ways, like more of a normal deal than people are expecting.
00:43:54Right.
00:43:55Like when we did a Netflix show, I think there was less outcry, but like I was the producer
00:44:02of a disclosure.
00:44:03I made a Netflix show.
00:44:05Every time.
00:44:06You should watch.
00:44:07You should watch a Netflix show.
00:44:08David and I are going to make one just so that we can do that disclosure.
00:44:09That was like way messier.
00:44:10Right.
00:44:11Like I'm going to meetings at Netflix about our show.
00:44:13I was not allowed to talk about it until our show was made.
00:44:16So I want to make sure we like find the right balance.
00:44:19And I understand there's just a lot of feelings about AI and OpenAI in particular.
00:44:24But like at the end of the day, the goal for all of these media companies is to just get
00:44:31some control back out of a situation that felt out of control.
00:44:35And what situation is that?
00:44:37Well, they took everything anyway.
00:44:39Right.
00:44:40Right.
00:44:41That's the situation.
00:44:42And we can talk about that broadly.
00:44:43I just want to separate the two things.
00:44:45Like our newsroom is independent.
00:44:48OpenAI did not buy any control of our newsroom.
00:44:51We will be very honest with everybody when we think the disclosure would affect how you
00:44:56perceive one of our stories.
00:44:59And I think that, you know, around copyright law, like that makes sense to me.
00:45:02We're going to write a story about the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI.
00:45:05That is a great place for disclosure.
00:45:07OpenAI launches a new GPT feature.
00:45:09Like I don't know.
00:45:10You tell me.
00:45:11Maybe we need to do that every time.
00:45:12I don't want to overread it as though to make it seem like we're doing something we're not.
00:45:19So that's it.
00:45:20That's like my top line.
00:45:21Like we will have a disclosure.
00:45:22I love a disclosure.
00:45:23Disclosure.
00:45:24Comcast is an investor in Vox Media.
00:45:25I'm in a Netflix show.
00:45:26Disclosure.
00:45:27Alex Kranz is the last remaining Paramount Plus subscriber.
00:45:30It's true.
00:45:31Hi.
00:45:32Look, this is our brand and we're going to do them.
00:45:35The thing that I am trying to be careful about is separating how people feel about
00:45:42these deals broadly and what it means for our newsroom.
00:45:45Right.
00:45:46Well, what it means for our newsroom is the status quo.
00:45:49Like it is not changing.
00:45:50We are going to operate without fear or favor.
00:45:53And again, my goal is to earn everyone's trust by being as transparent as we can be.
00:45:57And I just want to make sure that we're not so transparent that we actually go in a full
00:46:02circle and no one believes us.
00:46:05So you tell me where you think the line is.
00:46:06I'm open to the feedback.
00:46:07I asked for it from our staff today.
00:46:08I'm asking for it from the audience today.
00:46:10But the main thing is not changing, which is I would prefer it if our reporters were
00:46:16not worried about an opening ideal or thinking about it and we just covered the company like
00:46:20we have been for a long time.
00:46:22Yeah.
00:46:23And this is the thing we should say, like a thing I've learned about the media business
00:46:26over the years is that it's very unusual in the sense that like that tension you're describing
00:46:29between the work that we do and where the money comes from is like good and healthy
00:46:34and should always exist.
00:46:35And our editorial and sales team should always like hate each other a little bit.
00:46:39It's like a useful thing.
00:46:41But also like we have tech company ads all over our website like that is that is it's
00:46:47it's a not dissimilar thing and it is it is just something you have to navigate and get
00:46:51comfortable with.
00:46:52And like people always like sending us the stuff where I will make a verge cast about
00:46:57how terrible Facebook is right before a Facebook ad.
00:47:00Like it's my favorite thing.
00:47:02It's so fun.
00:47:03But I do want to talk about the broader piece of this, because I think the I think you're
00:47:07right that the reaction I saw out there was less like, you know, one more thing.
00:47:13We're not going to start publishing a bunch of content.
00:47:16Hello.
00:47:17I think people see partnership and they're like, except for the printer post.
00:47:21Yeah, I'm the only person who's put a condom on the website.
00:47:24Both posts were about printers.
00:47:26You just wish you people would get madder at me about it and make that post go even
00:47:30more viral.
00:47:32No one will do it.
00:47:33We will only use AI to ruin our domain authority in Google search.
00:47:37That's where I'm sure we're going to end up building some.
00:47:41Like there's one thing that all of us want, which is we would like better alt text on
00:47:45our images to make them more accessible to make the site more accessible.
00:47:48We would like our site to be better for screen readers.
00:47:51Right now it's a lot of very manual work.
00:47:52If we can use some of these tools to make that better, make our site more accessible.
00:47:56That's a great outcome.
00:47:57Right.
00:47:58I don't know if that's going to work right now.
00:47:59My creative team tells me like this alt text is not good enough and AI everybody, it's
00:48:06just not good enough yet.
00:48:07But if we can start to build that stuff, that's great.
00:48:09So there is that part of it, which I think is interesting.
00:48:12I don't know what that looks like.
00:48:13I haven't talked to our product team about any of that stuff yet.
00:48:17But the other part where the verge is just the verge, that's going to remain exactly
00:48:20the same today as it was yesterday.
00:48:22Yeah.
00:48:23Okay.
00:48:24Let's talk about the broader side of this because I think there are, there are two pieces
00:48:26of the should media companies be making deals like this with open AI question that I find
00:48:31very interesting.
00:48:32We should talk about both of them.
00:48:33The first is, um, haven't you idiots learned your lesson from making these deals with companies
00:48:39like Facebook and Google and everybody else who promised you money to save journalism
00:48:43and in fact forced you to do a bunch of stuff, pulled out the rug and kind of screwed up
00:48:47the industry.
00:48:48The second is, um, aren't you guys, don't you realize that AI is out to put all of you
00:48:53out of jobs and just take your information, use it in training data, and then get rid
00:48:59of you.
00:49:00Why are you ushering in the journalism apocalypse?
00:49:02And I think to some extent those are like two versions of the same question, but I think
00:49:07are like the big picture things going on here.
00:49:09Like are we contributing to our own downfall or are we chasing money at the expense of
00:49:15doing anything that is smart or long-term thinking?
00:49:19I'm in the media industry.
00:49:21Never does anything.
00:49:22Yeah, this is the media industry is not known for a really good business.
00:49:26This is mostly a vanity project.
00:49:28I think we have talked a lot about on this show is that we, the media industry as a whole
00:49:33probably should have spent more time over the last decade building Facebook competitors
00:49:39than making Facebook videos.
00:49:41And I think like my hope is we have learned that lesson and that the next minute of the
00:49:46journalism industry will be learning that lesson and executing on it, which is I think
00:49:49part of why we're so excited about the Fediverse, because it's a thing that opens up possibilities
00:49:53for new kinds of media products.
00:49:57Is there a fear that open AI and the like AI search engine stuff that is inevitably
00:50:04coming is just the next pivot to video and everybody falls for it and gives up on building
00:50:09new things for five more years?
00:50:12Yes.
00:50:13Okay.
00:50:14I'm going to bracket our company because they did not talk to us, which is like, that's
00:50:22the firewall.
00:50:23Yeah.
00:50:24But Nick Thompson, who is the CEO of The Atlantic, has published a bunch about why The Atlantic
00:50:29did the deal.
00:50:30He made a video about it.
00:50:31You can go watch on LinkedIn.
00:50:32Nick used to be the editor in chief of Wired.
00:50:33Dave, you used to work for Nick.
00:50:34I did.
00:50:35I love Nick.
00:50:36Nick knows.
00:50:37He knows.
00:50:38Yeah, he gets it.
00:50:39Nick and I are friends.
00:50:40He knows.
00:50:41He understands what he's doing.
00:50:42Axel Springer has signed one of these deals.
00:50:43The Financial Times has signed one of these deals.
00:50:44A lot of these companies are signing these deals.
00:50:45My understanding of the deals from the reporting, not from the digging around our company, but
00:50:46from the reporting is twofold.
00:50:47One, we just spent a whole bunch of time talking at Google.
00:50:48Google is a fair use argument, right?
00:50:49We're going to come and index all of your information.
00:50:50We're going to show it to people.
00:50:51In return, you'll get traffic.
00:50:52And everyone said, it's a little squeaky, but okay.
00:50:53And then Google was like, no, we're not going to do that.
00:50:54We're not going to do that.
00:50:55We're not going to do that.
00:50:56We're not going to do that.
00:50:57We're not going to do that.
00:50:58We're not going to do that.
00:50:59We're not going to do that.
00:51:12We're not going to do that.
00:51:13We're not going to do that.
00:51:14We're not going to do that.
00:51:15We're not going to do that.
00:51:16We're not going to do that.
00:51:17We're not going to do that.
00:51:18We're not going to do that.
00:51:19We're not going to do that.
00:51:20We're not going to do that.
00:51:21We're not going to do that.
00:51:22We're not going to do that.
00:51:23We're not going to do that.
00:51:24We're not going to do that.
00:51:25We're not going to do that.
00:51:26We're not going to do that.
00:51:27We're not going to do that.
00:51:28We're not going to do that.
00:51:29We're not going to do that.
00:51:30We're not going to do that.
00:51:31We're not going to do that.
00:51:32We're not going to do that.
00:51:33We're not going to do that.
00:51:34We're not going to do that.
00:51:35We're not going to do that.
00:51:36We're not going to do that.
00:51:37We're not going to do that.
00:51:38We're not going to do that.
00:51:39We're not going to do that.
00:51:40We're not going to do that.
00:51:41We're not going to do that.
00:51:42We're not going to do that.
00:51:43We're not going to do that.
00:51:44We're not going to do that.
00:51:45We're not going to do that.
00:51:46We're not going to do that.
00:51:47We're not going to do that.
00:51:48We're not going to do that.
00:51:49We're not going to do that.
00:51:50We're not going to do that.
00:51:51We're not going to do that.
00:51:52We're not going to do that.
00:51:53We're not going to do that.
00:51:54We're not going to do that.
00:51:55We're not going to do that.
00:51:57I think a lot of the reaction right now is, well, we cannot let that happen again.
00:52:03We need some rules.
00:52:05I think a problem for all these companies is that OpenAI and Google and whoever else,
00:52:11Anthropic, Perplexity, you name it, they've all taken it anyway.
00:52:17Yeah.
00:52:18Yeah.
00:52:19They have it.
00:52:20Llama, scraped on the internet.
00:52:22Every Facebook video we've ever made is in Llama.
00:52:24OpenAI built a tool to scrape YouTube for more data.
00:52:30That's just how it's done.
00:52:32Yeah.
00:52:33I think absent our own company, I know nothing about the deal beyond we have one.
00:52:38We don't have to keep saying it.
00:52:39Yeah.
00:52:40Yeah.
00:52:41Yeah.
00:52:42We have one.
00:52:43There it is.
00:52:44There it is.
00:52:45There it is.
00:52:46There it is.
00:52:47There it is.
00:52:48There it is.
00:52:49There it is.
00:52:50There it is.
00:52:51There it is.
00:52:52There it is.
00:52:53I don't know.
00:52:54Genie's out of the bottle.
00:52:55Whatever euphemism you want to use there.
00:52:56It's happened.
00:52:57Now it's, okay, what do we put a price on that?
00:53:00A lot of these companies, we're starting to hear more about the price there.
00:53:03We're starting to hear what it is.
00:53:04That might not end up being the right price.
00:53:07These deals might not be the right deals, but they are deals.
00:53:10They are money where there wasn't money.
00:53:13I think a really interesting thing is how do you set the right price?
00:53:16What is the value?
00:53:17They've already trained on it.
00:53:18Yep.
00:53:19What is the deal for now?
00:53:20One of the things that has come out about these deals, which are all, from what I understand,
00:53:23they're all basically the same structure.
00:53:25I think the News Corp deal is like $250 million over five or 10 years, right?
00:53:32Most of the other deals are $10 million over five to 10 years, something like that.
00:53:37I think it's five.
00:53:40The main thing that has come out about them is that they govern how much can be displayed,
00:53:45how the information is displayed, how it's attributed, what links are in it.
00:53:49When you look at that, what I see is honestly a reaction to Google, which has gone from
00:53:55we're linking to your stuff to we're going to cut out your stuff and put it in featured
00:53:58snippets to we're going to have our AI rewrite whatever and just show you the answer and
00:54:03never send you a click.
00:54:04And then you'll eat glue.
00:54:05And there's nothing you can do about it because we're indexing your website every single
00:54:08day.
00:54:09Right.
00:54:10And there's nothing you can do about it because there's no contract, right?
00:54:12What I have heard and what I see is that control, and I think Nick, again, Nick Thompson, that
00:54:16former editor of Wired, who knows, has been public about this in his announcement in The
00:54:21Atlantic.
00:54:22That control is the thing because if you go beyond that, you don't have to go invent some
00:54:28copyright argument.
00:54:29You have a breach of contract claim and that's much easier to litigate.
00:54:33The other thing that I see happening all over the industry, and we made an entire Decoder
00:54:36episode, Sarah Jong and I, about how all of AI rests on a totally shaky copyright fair
00:54:42use argument that could blow up at any moment.
00:54:44Like OpenAI, your business could blow up at any moment because you have weird ideas
00:54:48about copyright law.
00:54:50No one can afford to litigate these ideas.
00:54:52So the New York Times sued OpenAI, somewhat famously.
00:54:56They've spent a million dollars on that lawsuit so far.
00:54:59Public company, we just know the answer.
00:55:01To get nothing.
00:55:02They haven't achieved an outcome yet.
00:55:05They've just done the litigation.
00:55:06And they could lose.
00:55:07And they could lose.
00:55:08So that's a coin flip.
00:55:09New York Times, big public company.
00:55:10They run a very successful video game service.
00:55:12Maybe the most successful online game service of all is the New York Times, where it all
00:55:16is just paying the bills for this lawsuit.
00:55:18Most media companies do not have just some cash cow cooking website or gaming service
00:55:23to fund a lawsuit about their journalism.
00:55:25And so I think they're all looking at the Times lawsuit.
00:55:27They're saying, well, this is going to take five years.
00:55:29This is going to take 10 years.
00:55:30It might go to the Supreme Court.
00:55:32They might lose.
00:55:33Hopefully the Times wins.
00:55:35If they win, our contracts will expire right around then and we'll renegotiate with the
00:55:40strength of this copyright precedent.
00:55:42And if they lose, we'll just re-up our deal.
00:55:44And I see that playing out as most media companies cannot afford to go litigate these deals.
00:55:52And importantly, no one can afford to sue Google.
00:55:55Yeah.
00:55:56Google's got infinite money.
00:55:58And I know everyone's talking about OpenAI.
00:56:00Whatever.
00:56:01Disclosure.
00:56:02OpenAI has a content technology deal with Fox Media.
00:56:04We just spent that whole first segment about Google, which is the thing.
00:56:10It's the 800-pound grill.
00:56:12Everyone on the web operates in the universe of Google, including OpenAI, right?
00:56:17OpenAI has made Google dance, to borrow a Dallas quote.
00:56:22But they're still it.
00:56:23Like Google's the big, profitable, ultra-high margin company.
00:56:28And OpenAI doesn't make a dollar, as far as I understand, right?
00:56:32They're still losing money.
00:56:33So there's a difference there in how these companies are perceiving their antagonists.
00:56:37And I think they can get OpenAI to come to the table.
00:56:40And eventually, what they're going to do is they're going to go to Google, and they're
00:56:43going to say, pay us.
00:56:45Your competitor is paying us.
00:56:46Our traffic is dropping.
00:56:47And if it continues to drop, we're going to pull the plug on you indexing our website.
00:56:54And I don't know how long that's going to take.
00:56:55Maybe it'll never happen, because the threats are effective.
00:56:58But you just see, that's where the trend line is headed.
00:57:01And then you'll see, you'll only get the URL for, buy this one printer Neal Eitel recommends.
00:57:06I'll sell you one link, Google.
00:57:09But that's broadly how I see the dynamic of this playing out, is the copyright.
00:57:14I care a lot about copyright law.
00:57:16The copyright argument is so uncertain on both sides of the coin, that people are trying
00:57:20to buy some certainty, so that they have leverage to go negotiate against the real power in
00:57:25the ecosystem.
00:57:26That makes logical sense to me.
00:57:28I also think it might be wildly optimistic about who is actually going to extract anything
00:57:34from Google.
00:57:35I like our media executives.
00:57:36I think they're brilliant.
00:57:37It should be clear, I think Nick is very smart.
00:57:41Most media executives are not.
00:57:42No, I mean.
00:57:43Like A players.
00:57:45Even the thesis is good, right?
00:57:46I buy the thesis as far as it goes.
00:57:48I just think there is not a lot of evidence that says anyone can pick a fight with Google
00:57:55and win.
00:57:57I mean, like you keep harping about Google zero, like when that happens and people have
00:58:03nothing to lose by picking that fight with Google, they might start to pick that fight
00:58:06with Google.
00:58:07Right now, if I just say you can't crawl my website anymore, overwhelmingly I go straight
00:58:16out of business.
00:58:17Yep.
00:58:18Yep.
00:58:19That's what I mean.
00:58:20That's this is what I'm saying.
00:58:21Like the trend lines.
00:58:22Right.
00:58:23But the trend is so slow.
00:58:24It's so, so slow.
00:58:25It's slow and it isn't slow.
00:58:27I think for some publishers, it's super slow.
00:58:29For others, it's not.
00:58:30Right.
00:58:31Yeah.
00:58:32And if you're seeing shakiness in your Google results and you're seeing AI overviews and
00:58:36you're like maybe Google zero is real or you're a midsize publisher, right, which are not
00:58:41getting these deals right now.
00:58:42That's all the big publishers are getting these deals.
00:58:44But somewhere down the road, the midsize publishers, I assume, will get the deal or be offered
00:58:48a deal or go ask for a deal.
00:58:50Who knows?
00:58:51But at some point, right, the trend line of our Google traffic is going down, our investment
00:58:56in caring about you is no longer worth it, and they're paying us money like I just that
00:59:02is it's a destabilizing factor in all these conversations where there have never been
00:59:08destabilizing factors for about a decade.
00:59:10Yeah.
00:59:11And so we'll just see like the last time this happens.
00:59:14This is the negative argument.
00:59:15I'll give everyone the negative argument.
00:59:16David wrote about this.
00:59:17He wrote about Google AMP at the beginning of last year because I was like, we got to
00:59:20start with what Google has done to the web.
00:59:22Google did AMP because Facebook showed up and said, do instant articles and put all
00:59:26of your articles directly into our platform, and they'll load really fast something native
00:59:30on the web, and we'll send a shitload of audience to them.
00:59:33And Google freaked out and did AMP, and then all the publishers had to do AMP.
00:59:35And this was a disaster, just broadly all the way around a disaster, and then Facebook
00:59:39was like, we hate news, and they're like, actually what we hate is text.
00:59:41All of you make videos, and everyone pivoted to video.
00:59:44This equal growing disaster.
00:59:46AMP turned out to be a huge mess, and you couldn't do anything good.
00:59:48It actually spread misinformation because all the websites looked the same.
00:59:51I could go on about this for days and days and days.
00:59:55Google is there again.
00:59:58They're afraid of something, and so the ripple effect of that I think is interesting, and
01:00:03I think what most of the publishers that I've talked to, what they're interested in is,
01:00:08can we make them not copy instant articles to AMP, but copy payments for search?
01:00:15Because that's what they all want.
01:00:17One thing we haven't talked a lot about on the show is a bill in the United States called
01:00:21the JCPA, the Journalism Competition Preservation Act.
01:00:25It's funny.
01:00:26You would think that the publishers could all get together and say, we're going to pull
01:00:32our content from Google search.
01:00:33They have a lot of leverage.
01:00:35If they do it all together, you get a lot of leverage.
01:00:36What's left?
01:00:37They can't, because that would be collusion under the antitrust laws, which is incredible.
01:00:43The JCPA is, I think it's a Klobuchar bill, that would create an exemption for publishers
01:00:49to bargain with large platforms, over a billion in revenue.
01:00:53One of those numbers that makes it Google and Facebook.
01:00:57It's one of those ways of saying Google and Facebook without saying Google and Facebook.
01:00:59It would create an exception to antitrust law so they could bargain as a unit against
01:01:05large platforms.
01:01:06They could just rule that Google has built a monopoly.
01:01:11There's a lot of that.
01:01:13There's just a lot of these ideas floating around about how you equalize the bargaining
01:01:16power.
01:01:17Anyway, I just see the bigger picture, which is the raw deal is real.
01:01:24People got burned super hard by the raw deal of the platforms, most of which were, we'll
01:01:31give you some money with no contract that says where the money will come from, the Facebook
01:01:35news partnerships or the Google news initiatives, or it was make a thing for us that we want,
01:01:41a Facebook video, or it was we're going to take your stuff for free and pay you an exposure,
01:01:46which is Google search.
01:01:47What I see now is we have a contract.
01:01:52We're just not doing this again.
01:01:53You're going to pay us money, we're going to tell you what you can take, and if you
01:01:57don't pay us enough money, we'll see you, and if you take too much, we'll see you.
01:02:00That has a little bit of teeth.
01:02:01I don't know if it'll work.
01:02:03Again, I know a lot of media executives ... Alex used to work for some of the worst media executives
01:02:08in the game.
01:02:09I sure did.
01:02:12They're not all ... This is not an industry that can see the long game, and it's an industry
01:02:16that's under pressure, so it might be making mistakes, but I see the difference here.
01:02:20I don't know if these are good ideas.
01:02:22I don't know if they feel great.
01:02:24There's a lot of the response yesterday and to all these other deals is, do these feel
01:02:28great?
01:02:29No, but I think I can identify the differences, and I think at least what I see is, well,
01:02:36they took the shit anyway.
01:02:38Some money is better than no money.
01:02:40A lot of the deal for a long time was no money.
01:02:43That's definitely where I'm sitting.
01:02:44It's like, some money is better than no money, but also, one, I want to just point out, this
01:02:49is a lightning round, and we've been on Nealey's lightning round for a while, and so I want
01:02:55to take over for my lightning round, which is also about OpenAI, because I called it.
01:03:04Back when OpenAI, there was the coup, a bunch of the board members were like, we don't like
01:03:09Sam, we're firing him.
01:03:12Everybody gathered around Sam was like, no, you were a baby, we love you, come back.
01:03:16He's now back in charge, more powerful than ever, right?
01:03:21That's the reporting, allegedly.
01:03:23Information just said, OpenAI CEO cements control.
01:03:27That's happening.
01:03:28They fired all the safety people or pushed them out, and then they started a new safety
01:03:31committee, and he's the head of the safety committee.
01:03:32Yeah.
01:03:33Ooh, gold.
01:03:34That's a choice, Sam, but Helen Toner, who was one of those board members who voted to
01:03:39have him kicked out and then left because he won, was on a podcast this week and was
01:03:46like, yeah, we just didn't trust him.
01:03:49He just was so consistently not telling us the truth, we just lost all trust in him.
01:03:56That is really, really interesting to think about, as he does cement more power, as he
01:04:01does get more powerful, as he does put himself in charge of safety at the company, and all
01:04:05of those people who were in charge of safety have left.
01:04:08Because that company is still technically run by a non-profit, that's whole job is to
01:04:13protect us all from AI, like, oh, buddy, that's not working for you.
01:04:19I'm actually, I'm curious.
01:04:22It's been like the Scarlett Johansson situation has not, there has been no new pieces of information.
01:04:28It's been pretty quiet on that front.
01:04:31That's not going to just end.
01:04:32No.
01:04:33Right?
01:04:34It ends with a settlement or a statement or an apology.
01:04:36Who's going to do a partnership with OpenAI as well?
01:04:42She has some great ideas for AllText.
01:04:45But like the backlash to AI in general, but I'll give you this little data point.
01:04:54I think there's a real gap in how people feel about the thing and then what people are doing.
01:04:59We've never gotten so many sort of like unhappy notes about a Decoder episode as when we had
01:05:04the CEO of Adobe on.
01:05:05We got some happy ones too.
01:05:07People want to hear from that guy.
01:05:08He doesn't give a lot of interviews.
01:05:09I asked him what he thought a photo was.
01:05:12He doesn't know.
01:05:13But then we got a lot of people who are like, screw this guy.
01:05:16We just don't like Adobe.
01:05:17We don't like AI.
01:05:18Like they're ruining everything.
01:05:19His comments about AI are offensive.
01:05:20Weird.
01:05:21Weird.
01:05:22Right?
01:05:23There's real backlash to AI happening right now.
01:05:24There's some negativity there.
01:05:25One thing he told me that episode was generative fill is used as much as layers.
01:05:32They launched this tool and it is used on the order of layers, which is basically people
01:05:37open the app.
01:05:38Yeah.
01:05:39That's how you get layers.
01:05:40You open the app.
01:05:41You open the app and then like people use it.
01:05:43And so there's a real gap.
01:05:44And I think Sam kind of embodies the gap, right?
01:05:48Which is he's just the face of, boy, we're not being very careful with this.
01:05:53He's the face of, I can do whatever I want because I'm a Silicon Valley person.
01:05:57Someone's going to call him the bad boy of AI soon.
01:05:59I'm sorry.
01:06:00There's nothing about his demeanor that supports bad boy.
01:06:03I'm sorry.
01:06:04It's just not coming.
01:06:07It's not going to happen.
01:06:08I'm sorry.
01:06:09There's much better contenders for bad boy than Sam.
01:06:14But like he's the face of that gap, which is actually the revealed behavior of many
01:06:20people is that the tools are useful.
01:06:22They can be helpful.
01:06:24People like them.
01:06:26I'm the nation's foremost hand wringer of what is a photo.
01:06:29And I definitely used generative eraser in Lightroom yesterday.
01:06:33For a family photo that I shared with no one.
01:06:36I would use it all the time.
01:06:39AI denoise in Lightroom I think is magic.
01:06:42I've talked about it.
01:06:43It has recontextualized how I think about some of my old cameras.
01:06:46Yeah, we were talking about this earlier today where I think a lot of people don't realize
01:06:50how many of the tools we actually use are already AI, right?
01:06:53Grammarly is using some sort of AI.
01:06:57Photoshop is all AI.
01:06:59And if you've been using Photoshop for the last 10 years, you've been using AI.
01:07:03Yeah, it's in there somewhere.
01:07:04But I think you're right where it's Sam Altman has become the kind of this center point and
01:07:09everybody's talking about him and they're talking about specifically.
01:07:11Because they don't trust him.
01:07:12They don't trust him.
01:07:13And they don't trust the kind of AI he's doing, which is very specific kind, right?
01:07:17It's taking over your search.
01:07:19It's providing just easy generative content in a way that most AI tools that people use
01:07:24have a very specific purpose and are used for very specific things.
01:07:28And he's built the lie bot.
01:07:30And OpenAI had this incredibly Byzantine corporate structure was all meant to box in the bad
01:07:38things.
01:07:39Box in the lie bot and keep the lie bot.
01:07:41Keep it safe.
01:07:42And he's torn all that down.
01:07:43And now OpenAI, instead of being this weird nonprofit with a profit center that supports
01:07:47the nonprofit, feels like just Sam Altman's company.
01:07:52It's called OpenAI.
01:07:53I would just point out their whole thing was being the good guys for so, so, so long.
01:08:01And they made it so far on big promises of being the good guys and then just on a dime
01:08:07turned and went the other way.
01:08:08I mean, it's really wild how fast this has happened.
01:08:11Right.
01:08:12GPT 3.5 hit.
01:08:13They're like, oh, people like this.
01:08:15We're evil now.
01:08:17They just cut on their little evil helmets.
01:08:20So the interesting thing is they don't, again, they don't have any revenue, right?
01:08:25Like this company is not wildly profitable.
01:08:28They might be on a path to it.
01:08:29You don't need to make all this noise.
01:08:30Revenue is not important.
01:08:31You've been covering tech too long to know that, to not realize that revenue is not important.
01:08:36As long as people will keep giving you money, you don't need revenue.
01:08:38Which is why I think they make all this noise about AGI all the time, right?
01:08:41They're like, we built the future.
01:08:43People will keep giving you money.
01:08:46The funniest GPT apps are out now, right?
01:08:49Yeah.
01:08:50For everybody.
01:08:51And I was just looking at the top one in lifestyles, an astrology app.
01:08:54And I was like, oh, this is actually a perfect use case for AI.
01:08:56Yeah.
01:08:57You'd be like, I'll just make some shit up about your future.
01:08:59Yeah, we should talk about that.
01:09:02So WDC is coming up.
01:09:03There was some reporting this week that Apple has made the deal to sign with OpenAI, that
01:09:08OpenAI will power this stuff.
01:09:10Interestingly, there's some back and forth about whether it will run locally on the phone,
01:09:14which would match Apple's privacy promises, or go up to the cloud, which is fascinating
01:09:20because more powerful, more powerful, but where will it run?
01:09:24There's some reporting Mark Gurman in Bloomberg reported that they're going to put M2 Ultras
01:09:28or M3 Ultras in a data center and have a virtual black box for privacy.
01:09:35That works out every time.
01:09:36Who knows?
01:09:37It gives real like beeper running Mac minis on your behalf vibes.
01:09:42Yeah.
01:09:43And then you've got OpenAI in the mix, which is like, where is this model going to run?
01:09:46Can it run on the M2 Ultra or M3 Ultra or whatever?
01:09:48I mean, no, you can't fit the thing on your phone.
01:09:50I'm very confident that you cannot run GPT 4.0 on your phone locally.
01:09:54Right.
01:09:55But can you port it to ARM?
01:09:56Like this thing right now runs on NVIDIA H100s.
01:10:00A lot of them.
01:10:01Yeah.
01:10:02Like a lot of them.
01:10:03And you know what two companies hate each other with the fury of a thousand burning
01:10:09suns is NVIDIA and Apple.
01:10:11Yep.
01:10:13I know two of the best people at making processors that can handle AI stuff.
01:10:16Except for GPUs.
01:10:18One of them is really good at making GPUs.
01:10:19One of them is really good at using.
01:10:20The other one.
01:10:21The other one just took the training wheels off its back.
01:10:23I can play Crusader Kings on my laptop.
01:10:27So I'm just very curious about how all this will play out because if you're going to run
01:10:29GPT 4.0, there's a chance you're running it on a bunch of H100s in a Microsoft data center,
01:10:37which is a real weird place for Apple to be.
01:10:39Well, I thought German's piece this week about the deal was also kind of interesting
01:10:43because it seemed to be like they're not going to go full out with all the AI tools.
01:10:49What we're going to see from them at WWDC as far as AI goes is going to be a lot more
01:10:54Adobe-like than Scarlett Johansson voice-like.
01:10:58I don't think they're going to do a chatbot and I think that is the right move.
01:11:00Yes.
01:11:01Oh, that's so fun.
01:11:02I totally disagree.
01:11:03Really?
01:11:04Yeah.
01:11:05I think they are going to go full hard with Siri.
01:11:07And I think that's the open AI play is just take the Siri you can talk to and plug it
01:11:14into GPT 4.0 and instantly it's the best Siri has ever been.
01:11:19Then how you scale that down to like turning off Bluetooth, which is a thing that I can
01:11:25do on my phone that does not require the internet, becomes a really interesting AI challenge.
01:11:31You just described like the promise of Bixby.
01:11:33I mean, what I use Siri for almost exclusively is playing music, adding reminders to the
01:11:39reminders app and setting timers.
01:11:42And none of those things require pinging GPT 4.0.
01:11:47They just don't.
01:11:49But I think Apple, like everyone else, is going to have to convince investors that it
01:11:54has a chatbot play in order to survive, not survive, but you know what I mean?
01:12:02Wall Street wants to see that you have some big newfangled idea.
01:12:06And so they're going to do it because they feel like they have to.
01:12:08All the interesting AI stuff is going to be the like on device stuff.
01:12:12And that's the thing that we're already seeing Apple do well.
01:12:16Just by putting AI features into apps, you're going to see a lot of it with photos.
01:12:19There's a lot of noise around AI generated emoji.
01:12:23That's the kind of thing you don't really need open AI for that actually Apple has been
01:12:26working on for a long time.
01:12:28The only reason I can see that you would strike a deal like this with open AI is if you want
01:12:33to blow out the like conversational aspect of things.
01:12:37Just fly so much in the face of Apple's security stuff.
01:12:41Yeah, but so does the Google deal like it's fine.
01:12:45That's true.
01:12:46But the Google deal, like we didn't know the terms of the Google deal for years, right?
01:12:49And whereas this was a fairly public deal with open AI really close.
01:12:54It's just been better reported on because open AI is the leakiest company in the history
01:12:57of the world.
01:12:58Just like just holes everywhere.
01:13:01By the way, it's only the M2 Ultra.
01:13:03This is driving me crazy that I kept saying M3 Ultra.
01:13:06Because they're on the M4 now, so I just assumed.
01:13:08They just got a lot of M2 Ultras.
01:13:10M2 Ultras where they stopped with the...
01:13:12They're like, is this as good as an H100?
01:13:15Open AI, tell us.
01:13:16I think Apple knows that the idea behind is an external perception of the company and
01:13:21they're watching companies kind of light their brands on fire and they're just never
01:13:30going to do that.
01:13:31They are cautious to the extreme in that way.
01:13:35I think this Crush ad disaster for them, which was not even about AI, it was an iPad ad that
01:13:42everyone decided was about AI.
01:13:46I think they saw that and they were like, no, we're going to do some stuff in photos
01:13:50and some stuff in emojis.
01:13:51Well, there's going to be stuff in search, so.
01:13:54I'm sure, yeah.
01:13:55There's going to be some light dusting.
01:13:56Remember last year where they were like, the keyboard has AI in it now.
01:13:59It's like, this keyboard is dumb.
01:14:00Yeah, it's real bad.
01:14:02It's still pretty bad.
01:14:04They're going to do that kind of thing.
01:14:06I think it might be everywhere.
01:14:07They might announce more features, but that last turn where it's like, do you want to
01:14:12bang an iPad?
01:14:15I don't know if we're going to get there this time.
01:14:16I think they're very comfortable with the perception that they're, quote, behind because
01:14:20they're, I think they're watching Google.
01:14:22I think they're watching the reaction to their own advertising and saying this stuff is not
01:14:25ready and the culture around it is too negative.
01:14:28That is just my sense from just talking to folks, but I don't know if, I don't know what
01:14:34they're actually going to announce.
01:14:36I look forward to, we're going to be there live and we're doing a podcast in Cupertino
01:14:42and I am going to spend a lot of time gloating on that show about how right it was and I'm
01:14:47really looking forward to it.
01:14:48I really hope David's wrong just so I can gloat.
01:14:52I just, that's it, but I hope you're right for you spiritually, David.
01:14:57I just, I think if you're worried about the stock price of your company, and I know that
01:15:03they are, you look at what is happening at Microsoft and you say, oh, we need something
01:15:10like that.
01:15:11And what they'll say is they'll make a lot of noise about like the, all the stuff you
01:15:15can do inside of apps and then it will come around to, and also it wants to be your best
01:15:20friend.
01:15:21Let's hang out.
01:15:22Also Siri's horny now.
01:15:24Tim Cook would be like, whoo.
01:15:28Can you imagine, just imagine Tim Cook being like in Siri's horny now.
01:15:33Yeah, just flirty with Siri.
01:15:35I love it.
01:15:36Having a roost in the eyes.
01:15:38All right, we got it.
01:15:39This is, this lightning round has ended up in strange places, but it's been a good one.
01:15:43We'll be right back.
01:15:44We have yet another unsponsored lightning round.
01:15:51How long is this episode now?
01:15:52Four hours?
01:15:53We're going to talk about ourselves more for another hour.
01:15:56Three.
01:15:56We are currently at 81 minutes.
01:15:58All right, we got to, we got to, we got to bring this to a close.
01:16:02Lightning round style.
01:16:03I'm going to bring out the ULT power seven or whatever it's called.
01:16:06Is that your lightning round?
01:16:07Lightning round.
01:16:08It's been more like a lot of lightning.
01:16:11The Sony logo is slightly holographic.
01:16:14It looks kind of like, oh, you're like, oh, is it lit up?
01:16:16No.
01:16:17Holograms.
01:16:18Sometimes I remind people that the Average's entire competitive
01:16:20differentiation is that we love gadgets.
01:16:22And I'm telling you, this is our entire competitive differentiation.
01:16:25Yeah, we both, we freaked out over it for a minute.
01:16:28Nobody's going to sponsor the lightning round.
01:16:30If you just pick up a speaker and talk about how terrific it is every week.
01:16:34Get that money from Sony before you do that, man.
01:16:37I don't know how.
01:16:38There's a firewall between edit and sales.
01:16:42They keep telling me that there's incoming lightning.
01:16:45I think all of our sponsors are going to be like a month late being like,
01:16:48remember that time Neil, I got really weird with our speaker on air.
01:16:52Sony.
01:16:54I wish I knew how.
01:16:56I think Sony will love your lightning round.
01:16:59Look, if you're a Phil Sony or whoever runs Sony, give us a call.
01:17:03Someone is here to take your call.
01:17:07Mega bass, ultimate sound or whatever.
01:17:08Power vibes, whatever it is.
01:17:11Power vibes.
01:17:12ULT.
01:17:13All right.
01:17:13Kranz, I ran you over in the last one.
01:17:16You get the first one.
01:17:16Yeah.
01:17:18So it's going to be a gadget in that Fitbit has a new watch for kids.
01:17:24The Ace.
01:17:24The Ace.
01:17:25The Ace LTE.
01:17:27And is it a way for you to track your children with GPS?
01:17:30Yes.
01:17:30Yes.
01:17:32Do you feel uncomfortable about that?
01:17:33I don't know.
01:17:34I'm not you.
01:17:34If you do, this probably is not an exciting gadget for you,
01:17:37but it seems really cool because it like gamifies fitness
01:17:42in what appears to be a really nice way.
01:17:43Victoria Song went and got to check it out.
01:17:45I've heard from some other people who've gotten to check it out
01:17:47and everybody's just like, no, this thing rules.
01:17:49And I kind of want one for myself.
01:17:50Yes.
01:17:51And like, that's the hallmark of a good ass gadget for kids.
01:17:54Yeah.
01:17:54Like you can take the band and replace the band
01:17:58and there's like a little Tamagotchi kind of thing in the watch.
01:18:01And so when you replace the band, it'll like change.
01:18:04It's awesome stuff.
01:18:05It's sick.
01:18:07All adult fitness trackers are like, let's talk about your VO2 Max.
01:18:10And this one's just like, make the cool little guy go.
01:18:13And like, that's how you get me to do stuff.
01:18:15Come on.
01:18:15Exactly.
01:18:16Like this thing just kind of rules.
01:18:19It's too expensive though.
01:18:21It is way too expensive.
01:18:22It is $229.95.
01:18:26And.
01:18:26It's also called the Ace LTE, which is like the least cool kid name I've ever heard.
01:18:32It's real bad.
01:18:33And also you need a data plan to get the full richness of it called the Ace Pass.
01:18:40Oh boy.
01:18:41And it is not cheap.
01:18:43It is like $10 a month.
01:18:44Oh, that's tough.
01:18:46So I'm going to stick with just putting an air tag.
01:18:49Yeah, just somewhere.
01:18:50You can alternatively stick an air tag in your child and give them a 20 year old Tamagotchi.
01:18:55And you're done.
01:18:56Yeah, we're not yet.
01:18:58We have not yet hit the, let's put an air tag on her.
01:19:00What if you glue the air tag to the Tamagotchi or 3D print some sort of case?
01:19:05I bet Sean could do that for you.
01:19:07Yeah.
01:19:07Oh, there's there's infinite.
01:19:09This is the entire Etsy economy is weird AI generated crap and then 3D printed stuff.
01:19:14It's beautiful.
01:19:15And please, you can put your air tag on anything.
01:19:17There is a case for it.
01:19:19If you want to attach your air tag to a thing, you can find a case for it on Etsy.
01:19:23Yeah.
01:19:23All right, David, what's yours?
01:19:25I just want to talk about this like slightly weird discord blog post this week.
01:19:31The company basically announced it's pivoting back to video games.
01:19:36I didn't know it left.
01:19:37So this is the thing.
01:19:38So in 2020, when discord was like really feeling itself and there was
01:19:43noise that discord was going to be acquired for, I think, like 10 billion dollars, it was
01:19:48it was the the work from home moment.
01:19:50The world was weird.
01:19:51We try not to talk about that period of 2020 very often.
01:19:55Discord like announced that it was going to be more than just a gaming thing, right?
01:19:59It wanted to be a community app for the future of the world.
01:20:03And discord actually has gotten a lot of things about building a community app.
01:20:07Really, right.
01:20:07There are a lot of things about it.
01:20:08They're very clever.
01:20:10I don't think that worked, except that people started planning like crypto and crimes.
01:20:16Yeah, it turns out there's a lot of like shitty communities out there.
01:20:19Yeah.
01:20:20And not a lot of like Fortune 500 companies running on discord.
01:20:23So anyway, so the company pivoted back and is now about gaming again,
01:20:27but then made a bunch of small changes that don't really change anything and then said
01:20:31they want to be easier for connecting either before, during or after playing a game.
01:20:36And I would just point out that's all the time.
01:20:38That's still just everything.
01:20:40So I think I'm just in a strange place where it was like, I forget who it was, but somebody in
01:20:44our slack was saying like, this is not a message to users.
01:20:46This is a message to investors of like, we get it.
01:20:49It's fine.
01:20:50We're running away from crypto.
01:20:51Please stop doing crimes in discord.
01:20:55But I just thought it was very funny.
01:20:55It's like, discord is like, we will remain discord.
01:20:58Just like, please only, only do games here, please.
01:21:00Yeah.
01:21:01I did learn new things from that blog post.
01:21:03I didn't know you could have discord on like the PS five.
01:21:06Yeah.
01:21:07Yes.
01:21:08Clearly.
01:21:08I don't know.
01:21:09It's a web app.
01:21:10Like ultimately you can deploy a web app anywhere.
01:21:13Sometimes you're like, what if I deployed this in the PS five?
01:21:15And you're like, well, why?
01:21:17It's because it's got a sick process.
01:21:20Looks cool.
01:21:21I mean, discord is a really good chat app.
01:21:23Part of me wishes they had gone more mainstream.
01:21:27And instead of like the 50 WhatsApp group chats I'm in,
01:21:30I was in a bunch of discords.
01:21:31Like, I feel like I'd feel cooler, but alas.
01:21:34No, I'm in a couple of, a bunch of discords.
01:21:37You're fine.
01:21:38You're fine.
01:21:39I don't do enough crimes.
01:21:39You're right.
01:21:40I don't do enough NFTs or crimes.
01:21:42Oh no.
01:21:43Alex, I'm guessing you're in at least one flex related discord.
01:21:46I, I'm not, but, but I did think of the, uh,
01:21:51some crimes have definitely happened.
01:21:53By the way, Jason was on a decoder a while ago, uh,
01:21:57basically previewing all of this.
01:21:58If you want to listen and talk about it.
01:22:00I was, I spent a lot of time being like, crimes happen here.
01:22:02And he's like, I need it to stop.
01:22:07And he said to me a really interesting stat.
01:22:08He's like, most discords are like three people.
01:22:11It's just like three or four friends hanging out in a discord.
01:22:13And that's like the vast majority of discord activity.
01:22:16And then the big ones are like for other stuff.
01:22:19Right.
01:22:19But we talked about why they make games and their app platform and all this stuff.
01:22:22And he's like, we just do that to dog food, like features for the big games.
01:22:27All right.
01:22:27I'm going to pick one.
01:22:29I wanted to pick, I fix it.
01:22:31And Samsung breaking up and other repair companies are starting to say they can't
01:22:34fix Samsung stuff either.
01:22:36That's boring.
01:22:37What I want to pick is, uh, X the platform formerly known as Twitter now hiding likes.
01:22:42Wait, what?
01:22:43I missed this.
01:22:44It's very good.
01:22:45So they're not hiding likes.
01:22:47They're hiding who likes something.
01:22:48So, you know, people used to go on Twitter and like, like something you can see all their
01:22:52public likes.
01:22:52They're hiding that they're hiding replies.
01:22:54They're doing this because bros keep liking porn.
01:22:58Yeah.
01:22:59That's not, that's all the funniest stuff on Twitter.
01:23:01That was the best.
01:23:02Like when Tim, Tim, Tim cruise head cruise, like was like, I love this.
01:23:08It's very good.
01:23:09You do.
01:23:09Uh, it is the funniest sign of a platform in decline that its user base is now so stupid.
01:23:15They don't even have fake accounts to like, I was hearing about there's, there's some,
01:23:20apparently some, some male reporters who love to, to like models on the Instagram and they
01:23:24don't know that they get the little, the emoji also is shared on threads.
01:23:30So, uh, be, be thoughtful.
01:23:33You're going to be horny.
01:23:34Don't be horny on main.
01:23:35Look, how do you increase Android phone sales by a burner phone to do horny stuff?
01:23:42All right.
01:23:42Are you listening to me?
01:23:43Google, that's what the pixel is for.
01:23:47Horny stuff.
01:23:48It's pretty good actually.
01:23:50Buy a burner pixel just for the horny refurb pixel five with that beautiful red case.
01:23:57It's, it's available to you.
01:23:59It's just an idea.
01:24:00I have to increase your sales.
01:24:01Save your company.
01:24:05Twitter X is saying, um, you assume you'll be able to like without worrying who might
01:24:09see it.
01:24:09We want to encourage people to like more edgy content and they use the word edgy.
01:24:15Wow.
01:24:15We want you to like your porn more often.
01:24:18Uh, I'm, if you are the sort of person who describes your own work as edgy, not edgy,
01:24:23like, I don't know.
01:24:24It's like, it's like Sam Altman is the bad boy of it.
01:24:26It's like, he can't be, but he would love it.
01:24:29He would like it so much that he'll never get it.
01:24:31Elon wants Twitter to be edgy so much.
01:24:33He will never have it.
01:24:35Uh, I just think this is truly one of the funniest changes in any social
01:24:39platform has ever made.
01:24:40There's like other reasons, right?
01:24:41Like I'm, I'm confident Elon wants the weird racist who now populate Twitter to be
01:24:47able to like weird racist posts without seeing it.
01:24:49Like, yeah, there's, there's a deep dark.
01:24:52Will you be able to like, go into the likes and look at the likes still?
01:24:59No other people can't see them at all.
01:25:01Right.
01:25:02You yourself will be able to see who liked your posts.
01:25:05Okay.
01:25:05Um, you can see the light counts for posts like public light counts, but you will
01:25:09not see who likes someone else's post and you will not see others.
01:25:13You will not see what other people cannot wait for one of those creators of edgy
01:25:17content to get fed up with their edgy followers and just put them all on the
01:25:22saddest little black book in the world.
01:25:23Yeah.
01:25:24The saddest little black book.
01:25:25It'll be so good.
01:25:27Uh, it's, I mean, it's truly deeply, wonderfully hilarious, uh, platform and
01:25:31decline, just doing the weirdest stuff.
01:25:33I just really liked the idea of ultimately doing good, healthy things by
01:25:39removing engagement metrics in the service of making your platform easier to
01:25:44be sketchy on.
01:25:45Like, I think that's great.
01:25:46Twitter is going to end up X is going to end up, I think as a porn platform.
01:25:52Like, I think they will find a way to subsume only fans because it's the last
01:25:57thing left for them to do.
01:25:58It's video first now, supposedly.
01:26:00Oh yeah.
01:26:01Linda she appeared, she had not appeared anyway, anywhere since the code
01:26:05conference, from what I understand.
01:26:07Um, which went great for her.
01:26:10Can you repeat the question?
01:26:12Uh, and she appeared and said, X is now a video first platform for creators and
01:26:17everyone went, what?
01:26:19You don't make any videos.
01:26:21Elon Musk never makes a video on his video first, but if you want to make
01:26:26corny videos, you can and secretly like them.
01:26:29Yep.
01:26:30Ted Cruz is just going to be a static.
01:26:32All right.
01:26:32I'm just saying, and we're in a new era of the internet, right?
01:26:35I don't know what's gonna happen to the web, but I know this is the ULT power
01:26:38sound era.
01:26:39And I'm convinced this is the horny burner Android phone for when you're
01:26:45urged to like something is irresistible, but you don't want anyone to know.
01:26:48The Pixel 6a.
01:26:49I just got to hit that heart.
01:26:52Yeah.
01:26:52You want them to know, but you don't want anyone else to know.
01:26:55That's actually a great like opposite of what happens on iPhone stays on iPhone
01:27:00messaging for Google when you want them to know, but no one else to know that
01:27:05Google picks Android.
01:27:07You're just doing Google's job today.
01:27:08I'm trying, man.
01:27:09I'm trying to help everybody.
01:27:11All right.
01:27:13It's someone give us some money.
01:27:14Some lightning rounds available for horny pixels.
01:27:21All right.
01:27:21That's it.
01:27:21We're way over time.
01:27:23I appreciate you all.
01:27:23We do want your feedback.
01:27:25Very sincere about this.
01:27:26I know people have a lot of feelings.
01:27:28We are here to earn your trust in whatever way that this previous segment earned
01:27:32your trust.
01:27:33Send us a note.
01:27:33You can reach out to us.
01:27:34You can call David.
01:27:35It's some phone number.
01:27:36866 Verge 11.
01:27:37Call the hotline.
01:27:38See it.
01:27:39Call us.
01:27:39We'll answer your questions.
01:27:40Again, we're not trying to hide the ball here at all, but we are trying to go
01:27:44home to our families.
01:27:45So that's it.
01:27:46That's our chest.
01:27:51And that's it for the Verge cast this week.
01:27:53Hey, we'd love to hear from you.
01:27:54Give us a call at 866 Verge 11.
01:27:57The Verge cast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network.
01:28:01Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James.
01:28:04That's it.
01:28:04We'll see you next week.
01:28:08All right.
01:28:08Alex just made a huge discovery on the ULT7 or whatever this is called.
01:28:14Tell us what the ports are.
01:28:15Um, okay.
01:28:16We got, we got a light button.
01:28:18We got, we got a battery button with a minus sign for battery care.
01:28:22Okay.
01:28:23Key control.
01:28:24I don't, I don't know music.
01:28:26That's for karaoke.
01:28:27Okay.
01:28:28Echo guitar.
01:28:30We got a guitar input, right?
01:28:32This thing rules.
01:28:33There's a lot going on down there.
01:28:35These are all fully karaoke controls.
01:28:37And then you can play a guitar through it.
01:28:39Sure.
01:28:40I don't know what battery minus care does.
01:28:42I really want to know, but probably not today on the Verge cast.
01:28:46Two, three, four.
01:28:51Boy, can I, there we go.
01:28:52There it goes.
01:28:54It's got some Numa Numa energy, right?
01:28:57Yeah.
01:28:57It always starts in the middle, which I really like.
01:29:01I love you.
01:29:04This thing fills me with pure joy.
01:29:06Like every other tech company is like, we got to do some AI stuff that
01:29:11the robots are going to bang you.
01:29:12Like let's just threaten everyone.
01:29:17And Sony's like, here's what's going to happen.
01:29:19The bass speakers on the side.
01:29:20Really?
01:29:21Yeah.
01:29:21Sony is like, we'll put RGBs in the bass speakers.
01:29:24Also, it's called ULT power sound now.
01:29:26And that's our business.
01:29:28It's good shit.