Switch, Xbox, and the portable future of games
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Hello and welcome to Red Shast, the flagship podcast of America's best-selling video game console. See? It's topical. It's not snarky. I know. That was it. It wasn't mean. I can do it. I feel like you were really trying to prove it. See? See, everybody? That wasn't the most confident you've ever been in the tagline. The flagship podcast of smashing the state.

That's where we are. It's one or the other. There it is. It's either Mario Kart or Revolution. Those are your choices. Smashing the State, ironically, everybody's favorite Switch 2 game so far. That's very good. It's a GameCube port. Smashing the State is like a very 90s, like early 2000s kind of GameCube title. 100%. What was that one that was like, it had a moral panic about it?

It was like something like fight TV and you were like doing, doing a riot. Is it postal? No, no, this is like ancient.

Like when I was a kid, there was a moral panic about this game. Smash Super, it was like Smash TV or something. I don't know. And it was like you were doing a riot in a shopping mall. Perfect. Okay, that is a really great premise for a video game. Is this 8-bit? Like what are we talking here? Yeah, it's like 8-bit. Oh, I found it. It's a, Smash TV is a 1990 arcade game. And then it came out as Super Smash TV on the SNES and the Genesis. Okay.

And it was the theme of the game was borrowed from Robocop. Oh, wow. And then in the game, you're playing on the most violent game show of all time in the not too distant future of 1999. And the goal is to survive while earning cash and prizes, including VCRs and toasters. How has this not been made into a movie? This is like a perfect premise for 2025. You just described Squid Game. You know that, right? They did Squid Game. But there was like a straight...

Oh, and if you cannot collect enough keys, you go to a bonus level called the Pleasure Dome where you can collect hundreds of blue bikini-clad women. There was just a full moral panic about this game for obvious reasons. And now it's just Squid Game.

Yeah, that's like a pretty medium Black Mirror episode premise, what you just said. That's really good. Anyway, welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Pleasure Dome. It's been unusually horny on the Vergecast these past few weeks, mostly David Pierce's fault, I have to say. So I'm just trying to keep our team alive. Anyway, I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is here. Hello.

Jay Kastanakis is here. Hey, good to be here. A lot has gone on this week. Obviously, I just came back from WDC. My brain is basically mush after that experience. The Switch 2 came out. We should talk about that. We got lightning round after lightning round. Brendan, Brendan, there's, we gotta talk about 6G because of Brendan. It's just getting dumber and dumber over there every day, you guys.

The media companies continue to merge and unmerge at unprecedented rates. Just a lot going on. And then I missed most of it because I was at Apple Park where talking about the F1 movie just took precedent. You say that, but like it really seemed like that. Like the main thing from afar that it seemed like Apple cared about this week was F1.

It was the intro to the keynote. It was all over the place at Apple Park. They did a screening for press. It was like... With an F1 car in the middle of the Steve Jobs theater, like the top part. Oh, wild. It's a big empty area. And many different things have been staged in this big empty area. But this was an F1 car. I was told Allison was there. I was not there.

I was podcasting with Rob Gruber. And then like Tim Cook, who was sort of mysteriously absent from a lot of stuff this week, was in a big, I think it was a variety profile that was largely about like F1. It's just this is like Apple's flagship product is now like a Brad Pitt movie, which is just a weird state of affairs.

The thing that's great about F1 at a developer conference is that nobody there is even remotely qualified to assess whether it is the right thing to do or a good thing. Like, that is not... Like, they're just like, hey, here's this thing. It's for a totally different audience. It's probably good. Well, that's very much reflected in the, like, the tvOS segment of WWDC where they announced, like, the pictures are bigger and there's more content. And those are the features of tvOS. Like, no new ideas. I will say, like, it's...

WC has two tracks. There's a big consumer track, which is the part that we cover. And then there's an actual developer track where they get into the nitty gritty of how you can use different AI models and Xcode to make Swift. Like that's all there. It's just tucked away. They had a bunch of like sub stackers there, like fashion and culture sub stackers who did a meet and greet with Tim. Sure. Right. But what's really interesting is Tim did nothing about Apple's products.

The only big press that Tim did was that profile and variety with Lewis Hamilton, where they talked about F1. And I encourage everyone to read it because Lewis Hamilton convinced the author of that profile, but he was impressed by,

at the skyline of San Jose. Like, I can't... That's where that profile begins, is like, they're on the roof of Apple Park together, and he's like, is that San Jose? And Tim Cook is like, it is. And then they stand there and admire the beauty. And I'm like...

San Jose is very pretty. It's very pretty California town. I lived in San Jose. I am qualified to opine on the skyline of San Jose. The skyline of San Jose does not exist. That's like four buildings. That's not a skyline. That's four buildings. But if you read the profile, it's like even Lewis Park was taken in by Apple Park. And Apple Park is very pretty. It's been around for a while now. And it

it's been, it's just a familiar thing. Like lots of people have been there for lots of reasons. Lewis Hamilton is a knight to like routinely drives the most expensive cars in the world around Monaco. Like I just get the feeling like maybe, maybe this room with no furniture in it was not that impressive. So Matt, when Matt Bellany from puck was on this show a month or so ago, he basically was like, my question for him was essentially like, why are all these big tech companies like,

so invested in being part of the streaming wars when it seems to mostly be all downside. And, and basically what he said is like, don't underestimate how much really wealthy people want really famous friends. And I just look at that picture of Tim Cook and Lewis Hamilton and I'm like, Oh, I get it. Like, this is why you do it. Uh,

There's an entire side to that. It's fine variety. They're the trade publication of Hollywood. They do glossy features on new movies all the time. It's like that's their function, and I'm glad they did it because I get to read it. But you just read it as a tech reporter, and they're like, Apple invented cameras for this movie. And it's like, did they? What are the cameras like? And there's no follow-up that's given. It's like, I guess they did. There was a really big GQ story about the movie that actually had some of that detail on how they made the thing. It was pretty cool. But they are like...

I mean, this is as universally promoted a movie as I can remember in a long time. Like...

Apple is partly, you know, it's Brad Pitt and it's the guy who made Top Gun Maverick. And so it's like a big name production. But also it's very clear that Apple is putting like absolutely everything it has behind this movie being a huge hit, which is just fascinating. I surprised a lot of Apple people with my extensive knowledge of the movie Days of Thunder and my many questions about whether they had just made Days of Thunder again and whether there was as much cocaine on the set of F1 as there was F1.

on "Days of Thunder." And like literally at one point, someone from Apple looked at me and said, "You know a lot about 'Days of Thunder.'" So I'm dying to know. That's my only angle on this movie. Like, did they make "Days of Thunder" again? But Tim only did press.

about the movie. He only did photo ops with, you would call them culture reporters. And that's great. That's what he did. That's what they got. No product conversation. The person who talked about products the most was Craig Federighi. And mostly what he did in those conversations with Lance Ulanoff, with Joanna Stern, with a few others, he apologized for AI not being ready. And Tim is not on the hook for that in any way, shape, or form.

And you can, that's kind of the WWDC, right? Over here, we're going to have this conversation about Siri and why it didn't happen and what's going to happen next. And over here, we're going to celebrate F1 and that's the CEO. And it's this guy who's accountable for the mistake. And this guy who's hanging out with the race car driver. And that,

It feels a little upside down to me. Did you guys perceive that from the outside? It was very much the sense on the ground there. Remotely, I feel like it was not. I mean, the F1 stuff was certainly not as prevalent remotely. I think the AI thing was very loud, right? Because I think coming into it from the past year of Apple, right? Their last WWDC, they went all in on AI. And it's funny, I feel like I've seen some...

uh, folks say like, why, you know, why is Apple being held up? Why do they have to do AI? Why, why does it matter if they get to say I done in time? And it's like, well, Apple promised it. Apple went like really big last year saying that AI was part of their identity. They redefined AI as an acronym with their name in it.

They ran ads promoting these features. Fast forward a year, and AI is really just this very shallow thing throughout the conference. Now, in fairness, they did have a lot to show with liquid glass in every single possible location. But yeah, that felt like the big one. And the fact that they did not talk about it and then only kind of threaded it into these interviews after the fact where they kind of just like,

Even then, you said, Craig, I apologize, but I feel like he gave kind of the same exact explanation to everybody where he was like, well, it was kind of ready, but not ready enough. And we're like, but what does that mean? Every other company has done this. You guys have more money than, I don't know, anyone on earth. How can you not get money?

working. Wait, I want, actually, I want to be fair. No one else has pulled this off. We'll come to this because we're going to talk about Alexa plus later on in the show. No one else has done this. Like zero companies have pulled off the thing that everyone wants to pull off. And Apple has this problem where they can't say agent because that's the word everyone else is using. But the idea that you have some like agent that like uses the apps for you is like a, isn't

is the thing. Everybody wants to do it. And Google has come sort of the closest. That's fair, but they're not even halfway there. They're not even like, but they're in their excuses. We won't ship the bad one and everyone else is bad, which is very Apple. Yeah. But everyone else is like shipping the bad one. Like you can just buy a pixel phone and like talk to it for six hours. It's fine. The like true legacy of chat GPT is going to be there. It made everybody comfortable with shipping the bad one. Right. Cause it's like, if you remember before chat GPT,

Google, which was like working on all of this stuff internally, was like, well, this stuff sucks. Why would we ship it to people? And then ChatGPT, they were just like, we don't know if this is anything. It's a research preview. Here you go. And it like set the world on fire. And now all of a sudden, everybody had to ship all of their bad stuff just to prove they had a bad thing to ship. And Apple let itself get caught up in that, which is very un-Appley in that sense. You know, if Apple had made Chatbot,

You know, in all these interviews they did, they said they were never going to make a chatbot and everyone just trying to pin a chatbot on them. That's not what I'm trying to make and fine. But if they just made one, can you imagine just how absolutely anodyne it would be to comply with me? Like they have like some brand problems here where, you know, like I'm assuming there's not one lick of sex in the F1 movie.

Right. Like Apple, just like it doesn't exist for them. Like it is the most androgynous company that has ever existed in the history of the world. Like it's just liquid glass. You know what I mean? Like it's just smooth. That's it. That's Apple. And so like chatbots thrive on having personality and like open eyes, always talking like, oh, this was too nice. It's too obsequious. We're going to dial it back. Grok is just out there. Right. Elon's like, it's me. And someone's like, this is horrifying. Like there's an element of danger to the chatbot because it is just talking to you that

Can you imagine if a chatbot talked like an Apple executive in an interview? Like there's a problem here that, you know, and so look, my point, Jake is yes, they haven't done it nearly as they haven't shipped anything as bad as anyone else, but everyone else is still kind of bad and doesn't work. And I think they should say like the Apple of old Steve jobs of old. I've been like, look at this garbage. Yep. Like, look at this. Like we're not doing this. And he, he just like, won't bring, they can't bring themselves to do it for whatever reason. Um,

And that I think they're just they're kind of trapped in a puzzle of their own making. Yeah, I think that's like a fair enough argument. And I think, again, if they had done nothing last year, we'd be like, you know, we could we could impugn all of this onto them. Right. Like they're waiting to ship the right thing. But like instead, there's a situation where Siri has existed for a decade and it is the bad version of the chat bot. Yeah. They promised a better version. And now it's like.

you know, if, if they just ship, honestly, like again, if they just ship chat GBT, we'd be like, it has some problems. It has, but it's better than Siri currently is. Yeah. I don't need to belabor this. Joanna did the best of these interviews. She pushed them really hard. Uh,

Like really hard. Good on her for doing that. And then I was on a podcast with her. We were the guests who replaced Craig Federighi and Craig Shaswiak or whoever, whatever. I think the last year was Mike Rockwell. John Gruber always does a talk show with Apple executives. He has for a decade and they declined his invitation this year. And Joanna and I were the dancing monkey fill-ins and we had a great time, but we just honestly had a great time, especially because Joanna had just interviewed them. So.

So if you want more unpacking of all of that, you can listen to the talk show. It was fun to do. Thanks to John for having us on. The only thing I just wanted to unpack was like, this was a weird one. In like a lot of ways, it was just a weird one. And usually Apple is very confident. Like they're doing what they're doing. And this year, the split between the confidence of Hollywood style marketing of a race car movie and this sort of like back foot thing

The rest of the industry is pursuing AI in one way and we don't think it's good enough. And we will, we will try to explain, but never, not really explain like it was on the ground kind of drawing. It was weird to watch because it was, it was, I mean, Apple doesn't do anything like this, not deliberately, but this felt particularly deliberate in the sense that like you go and read and watch some of the stuff that Craig Federighi in particular was saying that,

I mean, he had a he had the speech just nailed. Right. And he was unusually accessible in a bunch of different ways. They were they talked to a bunch of different people and just said the same thing over and over and over again. And that's not to say it's not true. It's just like clearly this was the message that they had. And they're like, not only do we have to communicate all this stuff that we think is cool and exciting and why liquid glass is great.

Yeah.

And even at the very beginning of the keynote on Monday for Craig to be like, yeah, we're shipping this stuff. We're still working on it. It's not quite ready. It's coming later this year.

very unappley and you can tell this company is just like very much on its back foot with a lot of this stuff right now yeah and a lot of by the way that the the speech it was them saying john gruber was wrong like directly like there's a bad narrative out there about this and what they mean what they have meant this entire time is we hate john's blog post we are mad at him and for it's like fine like

John Gruber is maybe the most influential Apple blogger of all time. He remains so he has been like Steve Jobs used to like send his blog posts to people to be like, here's yes, this is what I think too. Great. He's he's achieved that goal, but it's just pretty wild. The disparity between a trillion dollar company and literally one guy.

They're not mad at like the New York times. They're mad at one guy. Well, they're also mad at the New York times. Like in a way that you're like always like, yeah, supposed to like everyone in America is perpetually angry at the New York times. They feed on your hate and they drive subscriptions to their games because of it. Like that's their job. They're the New York times. They're, they're owned by a billionaire family and they have 10 million lawyers and apples and that's fine. This is like literally one guy. Like he, at one point he was like, I'm one guy. Yeah.

Like the Virgin newsroom dwarfs John Gruber by 80 X.

Right? Yeah. He's one guy. And that dynamic was one of the, like, truly the weirdest parts of this where what they meant was we're mad at that one blog post. If I'm intuiting the dynamic here correctly, it seems like what Gruber said in that post, what, earlier this spring, was basically that what Apple showed was more or less a lie. Like, it was a concept video disguised as a product demonstration. And...

Apple is saying, no, it was just a really bad product that we were demonstrating. And it's like, I guess that's an argument, but I'm not sure that's as compelling as you think that it is. Right. What they said to everyone is that was real code. Right. And it just didn't meet our quality standards. Right. Okay. We made a bad thing.

But we made a thing is a really interesting version of a defense against the spirit of Gruber's argument, which is that Siri sucks and Apple should feel bad about it. Right. And then somewhere in Apple's culture, the decision that they could get away with it was made. Right. Right. And then if you're gambling like that, especially in a prerecorded video, when the bill comes due, someone has to pay it. Right.

That's really his argument. I don't think he ever says they lied. I think the title is something is rotten in the state of Cupertino. What he means is something in the culture has gone awry to the place where because you have these pre-recorded videos, you can get away with a little bit more. Do you know what else was real code that was definitely not up to Apple's quality standards? The iPhone that Steve Jobs demoed at the first iPhone event.

Like that, that was a demo on rails. Like famously, there was a magic path through the demo that would prevent that iPhone from crashing and any deviation from it would have crashed the phone. And the whole iPhone team was like doing shots through that demo. Steve Jobs got through it because they were like so worked up and nervous and they were all completely hammer drunk at the end of it. It's like great stories. You can go find it out on the internet, but he took the risk and the risk is what would have absolved them of a delay.

Right. He's like, I actually use this thing. I actually showed it to you. It's not quite up to our standards. We're going to keep working on it. People like, well, we believe you. The prerecorded demo eliminates the risk. It can be even worse. There can be no magic path because it's a prerecorded demo. Right. Like how many tries did it take you to get this to work once the way that you needed it to in order to shoot it is very different from what it used to be, which is like Craig Federighi walks up to a laptop on stage and uses it in front of you. It's just a completely different dynamic. Yeah. So again, yeah.

It was just that vibe was weird. And that's what I, I was just immersed in it for like several days. And in the meantime, like the switch to is coming and Microsoft is announcing an entirely new, like handheld strategy for Xbox. And I'm like looking at our list. I'm like all this other stuff happened. And that stuff is basically like, I didn't know how to describe it. It was like an alternate reality where like there's the highest of highs, like Lewis Hamilton in a race car and the weirdest of lows. Yeah.

So let's talk about the other stuff. Again, if you want to hear me dive way more into the weirdness of Apple talk show, I assume we'll be out. You can also watch it in a vision pro. It was a full event. The pack theater is really fun to meet everybody who was there. Spatial knee lies. I don't think a thing I'm ready for. It was really weird. Lots of cameras on stage and then a 360 camera in the middle. It was fun. Anyhow, you can go with some talk show.

Or watch it, I guess. But the Switch 2 came out and it's like very, like we have a lot of them on our team. People have been playing them. People are buying them at incredible rates. But then there's like the inevitable problems of scale. Dave, what's going on? Yeah, so the vibes around the Switch 2 launch have been strange in the sense that like the, there were, I mean, going all the way back to like the day they announced it was also the day that

Trump announced tariffs with like the big, you know, sign on the lawn of the White House. And so everything was thrown into chaos and nobody knew what it was going to cost or whatever can ship. But the thing ends up shipping. People had an unusually easy time buying it, I think, which a lot of people took to mean maybe demand was not as high as we expected. We talked a little bit about this last week, but like I was able to just walk into Target.

on launch day and buy one. I heard from lots of people who also did. Chris Grant from Fox Media was very excited. He saw my post about how easy it was to get one and he went and got one and was very thankful. So everybody's like, okay, maybe this thing isn't the hit that we thought it was. It's just a better Switch. And then Nintendo puts out data earlier this week that said it sold 3.5 million of them over...

over basically the long launch weekend, which would make it the fastest selling game console of all time.

Which is a huge number full of context, right? And actually what it suggests is that what Nintendo did was manage its supply chain for a launch better than any console in the history of video games. Right. Which is like not a small thing, but it appears that both tons of people wanted this thing and Nintendo had enough of them, which is like a pretty remarkable accomplishment in the current world that we live in.

Uh, reviews are still coming out. No one got one ahead of time, which was an interesting and odd thing, uh, that doesn't often happen with things like this. But, uh, so reviews are still coming out. Uh, I think there's a pretty good chance that by the time you're hearing this episode, Andrew Webster's review will be live. He's also going to be on the show next Tuesday talking about it. Uh, but like all of them say sort of the same thing, which is like, yeah, it's a really great switch.

Yeah, my sense of reading all the reviews and I read a bunch on the plane on the way home yesterday was I could not bring myself to buy an OLED switch. Like I have the original switch and like after a while you're like, man, this screen is small and bad. I should get an OLED screen. And then you like look at it like this is this is just a switch with an OLED. I can't spend this money. I have children. Like no. And then this is enough.

This is enough to make you buy a new Switch. But then it's a new Switch. Right. And there's this weird dynamic of it is both, I think, a nearly perfect upgrade to the Switch in the sense that it made all the things that you didn't like better, and it made all of the things that you already liked better than that. But there are no new ideas here in a way that I think Nintendo's bar for...

launching things that are like weird and wild and wonderful is so high that you're like, my mind has not been blown by something I never even imagined a game console could do.

four out of 10. And you're like, wait, hold on. What are we supposed to? So it's just, it's been a very strange phenomenon. And I will say the biggest concern I've heard so far, uh, has been about battery life. Uh, people have done a bunch of tests and, and there's some indication that like the switch to battery life is as much as like half of the switch OLEDs battery life, which is bad. Uh, like, like two hours of battery life, bad, which is bad. Uh, and,

And it's bad enough that Nintendo is now saying it might be a bug, which is like dangerously close to a you're holding it wrong. Yeah. Explanation for this kind of stuff. And so that's that's a little sketchy and weird. But in general, outside of not being as exciting as some people wanted, this is all going exceptionally well for Nintendo.

I got one Monday. I've been playing Zelda. It's delightful. It really is a Switch, and everything is a little bit better. It is what it should be for this year. The thing that I think is a little bit underwhelming about it right now is not necessarily the hardware. I think one of the things that's so wonderful about the original Switch is...

By virtue of being a little bit behind all the other consoles, it just has this incredible library of old games from other consoles that it can now play because it is capable enough. And so now, theoretically, the Switch 2 is unlocking the ability to play a whole wave of games that the original Switch wasn't capable of.

Can you get Smash TV on the Switch too? That's what I'm asking right now. Maybe. That age rating might not be supported by Nintendo. But the problem is on day one, that stuff is not there, right? You can play Cyberpunk. That is crazy. You can play an upgraded No Man's Sky. That's cool. Fortnite's sick. Right. Fortnite. Okay, great. But like, you know, I'm playing through Zelda and it's like,

I'm playing the final five side quests that I did not finish earlier. Like it's, you know, so I'm very excited. I think this is going to be a fantastic handheld eventually. But what I'm looking forward to is, OK, eventually Red Dead Redemption 2, which I have never been able to play because I only have a switch, is going to come to the switch, too. Yeah. And it will look very good.

That day is not today. That's also like a perfect Switch 2 game because so much of it is just like ride a horse for 45 minutes. And like this, you can just sit on the couch and ride a horse for 45 minutes. Like that's the dream. Which by the way, is also the appeal of Zelda. Yeah, that's true. Like it's great. Would you like to walk through a forest all night? Like sure, here you go. They're the only games I play. Zelda is one of the few games that involves that level of grinding that I can tolerate because it doesn't feel like a job. And like so many of these games, I'm like, I have a job.

Like I already do so much grinding. Have you seen my, you know? There's a lot of that in Red Dead, frankly. That's what I'm saying. Do you want to go milk the cows this morning? And it's like, no, it's 2025. I don't have to do that anymore. But Zelda is very much, it's very different. It's like you have to cook. And it's like, this is delightful, actually. I don't know why. Because you cook with magic. I won't do this for myself. Right.

I'm excited for it. I'm goading myself into buying one at some point. I just need one more game. I think it's not Breath of the Wild for me. I've played Breath of the Wild a lot. Breath of the Wild again, but better when I've already done lock grinding. We'll see. But it's coming. This is the thing. I think give it a year and that library will be there. And right now it's like, if you want Mario Kart, great. And if not,

I also think if you're Nintendo, you are absolutely fine with this outcome. I was actually thinking about this earlier that most companies spend a lot of time caring about and perfectly trying to time their launch weekend and sort of bring everything in one place and make it a huge event. Nintendo ships like one console every eight years and I think is not super concerned about

With what happens in the first four days. That said, it sold three and a half million of them in the first few days. So like, it's a real have your cake and eat it too situation. But I think if all of this goes well, this will be a notably better console, like on Labor Day weekend than it was at launch day. Oh, I think it's the holidays that matter the most, right? Like,

They sold a lot of them, but they will have the inventory. They will understand their supply chain fluctuations, and maybe they will understand a tariff, and they will have a better library of games through a market. Good for them. Somewhat related, Microsoft announced a vastly more confused strategy about handheld gaming this week. Oh, my God. I cannot tell you how much I've read about this trying to figure out if any of it makes any sense. They announced new Xboxes that you can hold in your hand that don't play Xbox games, just to be 100% clear on what happened.

Right? Yeah, that's no, that's that's right. That's yes. It's weird. It's just a weird thing that they did. Yeah. And they're like not being super clear about this either. Right? Like if you just watch this video, you're like sick. It's an Xbox. It plays Xbox games and it's like Xbox asterisk. Like what is an Xbox game? That's not clear. So the launch here is is we've we're in the middle of this like run of game launches and game events. Summer Game Fest, which used to be three was last week. They

They've just done a we've heard about a million new games, all of which are going to ship at some point in the next century over the last like eight days. And at one of these, Microsoft and Asus announced two new devices that are just like ROG ally handhelds, except they run this like brand new X.

Xbox focused version of Windows, which is an insane sentence that I look forward to talking about. Yep. But did it in this very like casual way where it was like it was mostly a Gears of War demo. And they were just like, here's this new handheld that is actually the future of our entire portable gaming strategy. They would not allow anybody to take photos of it operating currently, by the way. That's perfect. Yeah, it's really it's very weird. And it's also called

the Asus ROG Xbox ally and the Asus ROG Xbox ally X, which is bad. And everyone should feel bad who came up with a name that is that many words long, but it's all just very weird. And I think the, the strategy as I understand it. And, and again, that is, that is a leap that I'm about to take here because I don't understand it is that instead of trying to basically make a

Xbox specific things. What what Microsoft is trying to do is shove the Xbox software and Windows ever closer together so that what you get on a handheld in particular is not Xbox software like which would be sort of Windows underneath but it's like all Xbox on the top but it is actually essentially Windows that.

It's optimized for Xbox with like it's like Android, but with a custom launcher is like essentially what Microsoft is trying to do with Windows and Xbox. The classic winning strategy of a custom launcher. Yeah, right. So you turn this thing on and Tom Warren has covered this a bunch for us. I'll put some links in the show notes. But the way he describes it, it loads some of Windows, but not all of Windows and then loads this Xbox launcher on top.

So the idea is Windows should use less memory and thus run faster, which is a good thing because it just absolutely crushes most of these handhelds. And then the layer on top is what looks like an Xbox launcher that'll launch not just your Xbox games, but all of the other games that run on PCs. So like Steam store stuff and things like that. Notably, like you said, not Xbox games. You can stream Xbox games. Oh, good. You can't. They are PC games that you are playing on your Xbox handheld.

And so it's like there is this like mush of all of

Microsoft's many things into a handheld software that kind of sort of looks like an Xbox. I think you can see the trajectory, right? Like they lost to the PS4, they lost to the PS5, and now they're like, okay, wait a second, we run Windows. We run possibly the biggest gaming platform that exists. And Windows to the consumer most relevant as a gaming platform. Yes, right. And so I think when you look ahead, what is the next Xbox, if there is a singular next Xbox, it's like perhaps

Perhaps it is this Windows thing, right? They're doing a pretty hard, a pretty aggressive pivot. And I think in some ways they're looking at it as maybe they don't actually have a lot to lose given the state of the Xbox in the console race. This is just such an old school Microsoft strategy to me, though. And I don't mean that as a compliment. Like in the Steve Ballmer days, the thing was...

all windows, everything, right? Like we are, we are going to put windows on everything. And that is how we are going to win. We are the windows company. So we're going to put windows on phones and we're going to put windows on your desktop and we're going to put windows everywhere you can think of. And Satya Nadella came in and said, actually, that's the wrong like level of abstraction at which to put our focus. What we are as a cloud company. And they were like, the bet is not on windows. The bet is on the internet. And

And like, we are going to power data centers and that's going to be very successful. And they've been doing that with the Xbox, right? Like Game Pass is the big bet for the Xbox, right? That like, instead of having a console that I plug a disc into and play games on it, anything with a screen becomes an Xbox, right? Like that's the whole marketing strategy. That's what they're trying to do.

And now they're just like rather than build good software, they're just trying to shove Windows back into it. And I'm like, no, you missed you missed the point of all of this, which is that it doesn't all have to be Windows because it shouldn't all be Windows. Well, there's a weirdness there. I mean, I do enjoy it. Like Bomber's version of Windows everywhere manifested in like Microsoft trying to conquer the living room with Windows.

Right. And for years, they would announce a new attempt to put a Windows PC in your living room, culminating in the Xbox One, which ran a cut down weird version of Windows with an Xbox launcher on top of it. And then like this whole plan to IR blaster control your satellite box or something that did not work. It just didn't work. And then they, you know, they moved on and they they're like, the Xbox is the Xbox again. We're totally focused on gaming. It's this custom thing. But in the meantime, the Xbox

The handheld market became basically the Switch and a bunch of Steam Deck clones in the Steam Deck. And if you're going to go compete with that, you're like, oh, this is taking market share from us in any way, then you're stuck with they don't want Xbox games, they want PC games here. What gamers are saying is we want to take our PC games on the go. And you can't be like, here's some console games on the go. Because I don't think they can compete with the gamers who want PC games. And that might be the strategy error.

Do you know what I mean? Like that might actually be the mistake. So you have to go backwards from where is our big library of games into a handheld? Yeah. Because that's just what Microsoft has to do. Because if you're like the future of the Xbox is more accessible PC gaming, you are cruising your way towards putting Windows underneath the TV again. Yeah. They're headed there. Tom basically wrote this story for us. Microsoft just teased its next-gen Xbox console and nobody noticed.

Right. And his point is, if you look at these handhelds that are basically ways to run PC games in cut down power restricted environments that acknowledge the existence of Steam, but still have Windows, you can run your Windows games. Oh, that's going to be the next. It's obviously this is how the next Xbox will work. Yeah. Somewhere in there is like what happens to the Xbox library? Because that is pretty important to a lot of people.

And that's the answer that I think Microsoft hasn't even gestured at. And then the additional weirdness is they didn't make this handheld. Someone else made this handheld. Well, and there was some news recently that Microsoft actually killed a project or paused a project to build something like this. So it seems to be running further and further towards we want to be a software provider and a games provider, not...

the hardware system. Right. They want to be steam. Yeah. Being steam is a better business than being windows in the gaming industry right now, which is really weird. That is. Yeah, that's true. And so you'd rather be steam where you're like collecting your credits and like taking percentages of the transactions as opposed to Microsoft, which collects a license when you buy your PC and like you only do that once.

Like most of the time, they don't even get a cut of your GPU, right? Like the things you might upgrade on PC, Microsoft doesn't get a piece of. And they certainly don't get a piece of the transactions that are kind of the platform. They want to be Steam. So they're shipping a thing that looks way, way more like Steam. By the way, that launcher, they haven't given a name. It's just they keep calling it the single screen experience or the full screen experience, which is just like, guys, give it a name. Knowing Microsoft, that's just what it'll be. Yeah.

It's a weird one. It's interesting to see the gaming market just shake up. All game studios are coming and going. It's a topsy-turvy time in games. And then there's Nintendo. It's like Mario Kart, 3.5 million sold. Yeah. I do think, though, that we are running headlong into the handheld is the future of gaming era.

here. There's been a bunch of news about a PlayStation 6 portable. That's starting to... All of that is super early rumors about a thing that's going to launch in two or three years. But that's the scuttlebutt that's out there. These flagship devices might start to look more like the Switch than the PS5 quickly. This is just my theory that the Samsung Frame TV...

heralds the death of Hollywood. People don't want TVs, man. They don't want them. They want handhelds. Everybody wants to be playing their own weird PS5 handheld on the couch next to someone else playing a weird Asus ROG Ally.

Next to someone playing a switch. Yeah. Jake, what's your switch playing setup? Are you a are you a handheld guy or are you docked on the TV? I yeah, no, it's almost exclusively TV. But like and yet I don't think I would buy it if it was not also a handheld console like knowing I can. Yeah, I don't know. It's wonderful to be able to take it on the go. But have you brought it on the subway yet?

I'm not crazy. Subway switch was one of the most like transformative gaming experiences I've ever like sincerely. I do see so many people using them on Subway. Does the new switch have better support for Bluetooth headphones?

Someone say yes. Yes. Okay. Better is such a low point. You see what I'm saying? It is better. It's not good, but it's better. But I'm saying subway switch was also a transformative experience for everyone else on the subway. Yeah. So speakers are better on it. Well, now it has two USB-C ports so you can, you can plug in your headphones a little more easily, which is something. But yeah, I think, I think it's, it's, it's going to be a very handheldy next like 18 months. And I think there's a decent chance that if Microsoft can't figure out how to

push all this stuff together in a way that makes sense it's going to have had the right idea and still lose microsoft yeah fair enough a couple other little bits in our gadget lightning round by the way this has been a gadget lightning round in case you hadn't noticed yes we're going so fast uh nothing fun three coming to the u.s it's actually happening

Very exciting. So Nothing is launching its next phone and its first over-ear headphones, which I'm actually very intrigued by, on July 1st. So like in three weeks. And over the course of the run of this company, they've gotten sort of increasingly US-y. The last...

The phone two, I think, worked on a couple of carriers in the U.S. and, like, worked fine on others, but wasn't sort of officially supported. But now, so the news about the phone three is it's going to be on sale on Amazon in the U.S., which I actually think is a pretty big deal, and in nothing store. It'll support AT&T and T-Mobile and is going to be, like, an actual, like, honest-to-God U.S. phone, which I think is pretty cool. Nothing...

has surprised me over the years in that it continues to make like pretty interesting, pretty compelling phones. The company...

Was always like, we're doing phones so that we can do the next thing. And part of me is like, is the next thing just over your headphones? Like, I don't know. But it is it is maybe the most compelling non gigantic smartphone maker left. And so I find myself continuing to root for it. There's this book out now called Apple and China's by Patrick McGee. He was the Financial Times author.

correspondent on Apple for years. He was, you got to read this book. This book is incredible. It has all kinds of like bits and bobs in about Apple and China, including like how they figured out how to manufacture the first iMac and how badly that went and Foxconn swooping in with a pirated reverse engineered iMac to prove that they could do it at scale. It's very good. Anyway, the point I'm bringing this up in the context of nothing, because a lot of that book is about Apple basically creating the Chinese phone ecosystem and

by training all these engineers at all these factories and how to do the things. And then the Chinese government and Chinese companies realizing they could just take those engineers away and swap in new engineers and Apple would have to train those too. And that became sort of like the basis of the peace between Apple and the Chinese government.

Super fascinating stuff. And what's really interesting about that is, uh, there's a part where Huawei gets in trouble with us government and to save itself, it spins out honor. It's like budget phone division, which is the competitor to oppo, which was where nothing came from. And this is all this ecosystem is created because apple trained all these engineers. And then like, there has been all these battles and I'm only bringing this up because.

nothing has gotten to a place where it is an interesting competitor to Apple, but it came out of that ecosystem, like in very real ways. And I, if you're interested in these phones and like what they can do and whether they're better than Apple, if you have, if you're that sort of person and many, many, many, many Vergecast people are, you should read this book just to get a sense of the foundation of where these companies came from and why they're able to kind of like

collect a bunch of interesting ideas from the Chinese iPhone supply chain and design ecosystem and seemingly outpace Apple, which is just totally fascinating to me. Yeah, that's really interesting. Dom Preston on our team has just like

every week seems to just like drop a story about some wild China brand phone that we'll never see in the US and every single time it's like look at this weird thing they did with the camera and we're just like everybody is just starting to push past in

into weird new ideas about what smartphones can be. Yeah, and it's because of this incredible base of manufacturing over there, which, by the way, is like the reason for tariffs and blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, it's all there. I can't recommend this book enough. And it's so funny. After you read the book, you look at things like the nothing phone free and you're like, oh, I have a totally different perspective on these devices. They came from like a different ecosystem than the one that we are used to. But that ecosystem was seeded by the success of the iPhone. It's wild stuff.

Speaking of totally weird products that make no sense, HP has revealed a $25,000 piece of hardware to do Google Beam, which is Google's like 3D TV video conferencing system. This is a victory.

Because the first Google Beams were totally custom and cost like a million dollars and were only prototypes. I mean, this is a corporate video conferencing product. And to be clear, you need at least two of these, correct? You can't just spend 25K. Or you have a friend, right, at another company. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. True. But if you just have the one, you're basically just going to be like the best looking person on your Google Meet and that's it.

Uh, yeah, if you have two, so this, this is the thing that used to be project star line, the, the like fancy conferencing thing that has been inside of Google for like a decade. Uh, they've been working on this for forever and it's super fascinating. And, uh, they, they rebranded it to beam. That was just this year, right? It was like a month ago. Yeah. And now our, our actually their shipping is strong, but products with names exist, uh,

This thing is called the HP Dimension. Perfect. And it has, the spec list is just truly fantastic. It has a 65-inch light field display with six high-speed cameras inside the bezel. And the idea is that it is able to basically map you and your space to turn you into like a three-dimensional thing that sits on the other side of

of the screen from the person that you're talking to. And I've done a demo of this in the past and it is, the effect is amazing. Like it is really sincerely the best version of this thing I have ever tried in my life. Yeah. But it's again, like Jake said, this is $50,000 worth of equipment. And I look at this and I'm like, who, who is this actually for? Sergey Brin. Maybe, maybe this is like, this is just going to be every CEO is going to have this. And this is just going to be how they talk to each other. Yeah.

Well, so the one piece of weirdness here, it's a single user product. But you can't have this in a conference room with like six people talking in a conference room. Oh, true. Right. So there are a lot of enterprise video conferencing products that cost this much. By the way, the $25,000 doesn't come with a license to run Google Beam. That's a separate...

That's just like a separate monthly charge or something. It's very good. All that's perfect. Love it. But usually you buy that for a conference room. And so you get the value out of all that money in a conference room. This is for one person talking to one person in his life like a manner as possible, which I think is perfect. Yeah. The effect is really convincing. Like I use it like a year and a half ago or something. And it looks great and it feels great. And, you know, to the extent that video calls are kind of uncomfortable, I think this does away with a lot of that.

But it still feels like one of those things where the end goal of this has to be to shrink this way down and make it like, I don't know, $250? Because this is just not a thing that can scale. Like,

There's not going to be a world in which companies outfit every single conference room with these in part because, again, you need a dedicated room for a single person to have a video call. But the problem is, and I suspect this is what Google continues to run into, is as soon as you make it smaller, you kill the effect. The thing only tracks if you look smaller.

like you and you don't look like you on a 10 inch screen even if it's the most amazing perfectly rendered version of you oh come on i want to talk to tiny 3d david

Just me, but you can put me in your pocket is like, that's what we're going for. It's like, have you tried this notion update? Like I was just about to say the Facebook portal stuff is like, that's a version of the hardware I have always imagined for this that like, that's what you try to get to. It's a thing I can put on top of my television or it's a thing I can just have as like my secondary screen that I use for calls.

But again, that's really hard because you need the person to be life size in order for them to appear life size. And so I think I just I totally agree with you, Jake. But I also don't I don't know how you get to that point.

Like maybe this thing just doesn't scale in any meaningful way. And maybe Google is just going to have to be fine with it. I'm actually, it's the display as always. It's the display that fascinates me the most. So they keep calling a light light field display, which is, you know, we haven't seen a beam device up close. Like they had them at IO, but I wasn't allowed to go and like walk up to them. The early versions of star line, it was very much just a wave guide on, in the front of a TV. Like it was more complicated than that, but that's what it was, you know? Yeah.

And I'm sure this is more complicated than that, but that's still what it is. And those things, glasses-free 3D in that way tends to be optimized for a single viewer in a specific spot. And there are some new interesting glasses-free 3D technologies that are sort of out there. There have been some like overheated articles lately that are like 3D is back, baby. And it's like,

I don't know about that, but sure. And that's your multi-user problem, really. Can the display show 3D to multiple people in multiple spots around the room? I truly do not know the answer to that for Beam. I've known the answer for everything else for a long time. That has required glasses. Right. And then your product is said, what are you going to do? That's the end of that. So we'll see. I'm excited about it. I do love a new display. I love a new display technology, and I certainly think it's time for some more interesting things

video conferencing ideas that are not Zoom making an AI avatar view to pretend to pay attention to meetings. Like that is an innovation unto itself, but I don't think it's the right one. No, my ongoing assumption, and I think the plan all along has been that this will be like a neat,

really high end thing and most of the best features will eventually sort of trickle down into Google Meet in less impressive ways that this gets to be the like tip of the technological spear. And I assume it's like a victory inside of Google that they got HP to actually make and ship one of these things because now they get to like keep making it.

Oh, I mean, HP just got the best toy for its like enterprise demos of all time. Totally. Yeah. This is the thing you trot out in every meeting you ever have with potential customers. Like I get why all of this exists. I just I have a hard time imagining it like showing up in a WeWork near you anytime soon. Look, 3D displays are back and you're going to get a 3D laptop and we're all going to talk to tiny versions of each other on Google. It's going to be amazing. All right.

That's the first lightning round. We got to take a break. We have a second lightning round. And then I'm told there's even a third. Can you imagine? It's wild here on The Verge Cast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Charles Schwab.

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All right, we're back.

I'm told this is an AI lightning round. It's not sponsored by an AI company. It's for flavor. So unsponsored. Now that we have had sponsors again, I feel like I need to rework this entire pitch. Basically, what I'm trying to say is you can't buy us for any price. We're flavorful no matter what. I did ask Apple to send me home in an Aston Martin with CarPlay Ultra. And the vibe was like, will you break the rules for that? And I was like, no, but I liked saying it.

And that was literally the end of the conversation. So that's where we're at is like, I'll, I will make jokes about breaking our very strict ethics policies for an Aston Martin and above.

But even then, probably not. But like, that's where you got to be. Yeah. I think that's right. Yeah. Everybody has, everybody has limits. You know what I mean? Like if you can't, if you can't be bought for any price, I don't trust you. You know what I mean? Yeah. I just, I don't know what it is. It's, it's more than an Aston Martin. That's what I got for you. Let's explore from there. Next year, you and I are going to go to the Monaco yacht show and just, just sort of see how much trouble I can get. It would be amazing if I only did branded content for yachts.

I was like, this is my specific corruption. Yachts and PJs. The Nilay Patel ethics policy. I've been trying to sell G6s on the show for so many years.

Anyhow, unsponsored for flavor. Because you can't buy us. What you can buy is a subscription from us, which preserves our editorial independence. So go buy those. They're still on sale, I think, as of you listening to this on the Friday. They will still be on sale because developer conference season is still technically ongoing. But they're going to go back up in price. So act now and buy me an Aston Martin. I'm pretty sure, by the way, that the next lighting round is sponsored and we're going to have to cut all of this. But it's going to be fine.

I don't know. I just spend the money. That's what keeps us pure. Eric, if you need to cut all of this, just cut all of this. No, no, keep it in. It's fine. Okay, AI lightning round. Speaking of AI, lots of action in the AI world this week, most of which did not happen at Apple Park.

but out in the world. We should start though with the web, because we've been talking a lot about what AI is doing to the web, how AI might reconfigure the web, the very idea of what the web represents to people as an application environment, sort of up for grabs right now. And before any of that happens, the old web has to be crushed out of existence.

By changes to Google search. Is that about right, David? I feel like I have that. That's the narrative we're on. That's basically right. I think there are a lot of people who work at Google who would take offense to that characterization. But I think that characterization is pretty much exactly right. And and I think.

The it's been a really interesting trend line over this past year, because I think I've been spending a lot of time talking to people about like the death of linear television and cable and that whole bundle, which everybody thought would would take a long time and there would be a bunch of money on the way down. And it's like, OK, we're going to we're going to build this new era of entertainment while we sort of coast on the slowly dying, but still very profitable trend.

previous way that it existed. And that actually what happened is all of that just died immediately. And now everybody is scrambling and businesses are falling apart. And that is exactly the same thing that's happening on the web. Like, I think it has been sort of intellectually true for a couple of years that most people knew they couldn't rely on Google search forever. I think everybody always knew it was fraught to rely on Google search, but it worked for a long time. And there was just this sense of like, okay, this is not going to be

The thing for us forever, right? Like people have known that since Google started doing like the answer boxes on search results. And there was the sense of like, OK, over time, Google is going to be less and less interested in sending clicks to our website and more and more interested in just keeping you inside of Google products. Everybody kind of knew that. Well, they kind of knew it, but the incentive to not believe it was so overpowering.

that they didn't know it. Right. Because you know what I mean? Because to to lean into that and to work with that requires essentially completely upending the business of being online. Like a thing I think I didn't realize until recently is like almost every publisher in particular online has only ever existed in the Google world. It's

It's not like everybody did the like Facebook style pivot to video and then that all fell apart and the a lot of stuff went away, but also a lot of people sort of knew what to go back to. Most of these places have not ever done this. And by this, I mean, like online publishing, media, journalism, whatever you want to call it.

In a world where Google is not the main source of people and traffic on the Internet. So it comes to this existential crisis of like, if I don't believe in Google anymore, what do I do? And I think, again, because Google was so huge and so successful and because the the abyss of whatever else we have to do was so huge and unknowable, people just didn't really try.

But then what has happened is this this like slow, gradual decline everybody was betting on that would give us like a generation of technology to figure out what's coming next is just happening. Like it is happening like minute to minute and day to day in front of our eyes. The Wall Street Journal had a big story this week going through a bunch of different like Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. And I think Business Insider was the other one showing these just like dramatically downsloping trends.

Yeah.

They won't say Google zero. If you hear someone say our Google traffic is going to zero, I need you to jump out of a bush and say that is called Google zero, a term coined by Neil I. Patel in 2022. In addition to your crashing revenues, you now owe a royalty fee for acknowledging your crashing revenue. Yeah. But so we are like we have gone from this being a theoretical eventuality to like it is happening in front of us.

right now. It's interesting. Like Google, there are Google changes all the time, right? This is there. This is a thing that's happened for years where there have been winners and losers as Google makes changes to its algorithm. And I think what is particularly unique about this one is that there are no winners, right? It's not like there is some subset of publishers or I don't even know, like companies online that have figured out a way to crack this, at least that I have heard of. Wait, there's a there's a weird set of winners. It's

It's not a great set of winners. Reddit is a winner in all of this, right? Like Google has made it, gone out and made a deal with Reddit and they know that Reddit is a rich source of actual human content that it can synthesize to get the answers to questions. YouTube, oddly, a winner in this. Google owns YouTube, but it's a winner. But like, you know what I mean? Like there are media platforms where people are that are winners in this. They're just not publishers that pay people money to make news. Right.

And Google will just, and I should disclose, like OpenAI has a deal like that with Fox Media and a bunch of other publishers. None of that is sending us the traffic that would counteract Google. Yeah.

By the way, to be clear, our Google traffic is in decline. So is everyone else's. We have just been paranoid freaks for so long that we've been talking about it forever on this show, but also in our business. That's our redesign. And so we've just been hedged against it. And when I run out and talk to other publishers about it or other executives on Decoder or wherever else, it's.

This is what I mean about the incentives to not believe it. I've had media executives look me in the eye and say things like, you think people are going to stop searching? And they cannot separate the concept of search from Google as a company upon which they have a business dependency. And so people are searching. They might be searching more than ever. Google will tell you they're searching more than ever. They're just not getting links to publishers as answers.

They might be getting links to Reddit. Google's like, we're sending more traffic to the web than ever. And the question that I have to which there is no answer is where is that traffic going? Who are these winners? It can't all just be Reddit, right? It has to be other stuff. And it's just unclear what that other stuff is. Like, where has the traffic gone? So I, Jay, I mean, and I don't, none of those AI deals are paying anyone nearly enough money.

to counteract the loss of revenue, as you can obviously tell. But it's, I just, I don't want to, they're not keeping everything for themselves. It's just unclear who the true winners will be. Nick Thompson at The Atlantic, he keeps talking about optimizing the content to be like show up in the AI search results as the next generation of SEO. That is a galaxy brain idea, but I'm starting to see pop up everywhere.

Right. To be like, we want to make sure we become part of the AI generated answer. Wacky. But like the SEO communities are talking about that as well. But even in inherent in that is the bet that if we are the one that services in the answer, actually what people will do after reading the answer is click the links and.

At least in my behavior and what I observe in other people, that is sure not the case. And that is sure not the product goal is to send you out of chat GPT or Gemini or whatever. I mean, Sundar will say that is the goal of AI overviews and that people search more AI overviews and that means they inevitably click more. There is no public data backing that up. Right. What they say is...

Also is that the people who go are more engaged because basically they've like by the time they get to your website, they're already halfway down the rabbit hole and that it's actually like the people who are coming are the people who are serious. Right. And it's like, well, OK, yes. But the whole business of Google forever was fundamentally predicated on the people who were not serious and there being lots and lots and lots of them.

I mean, it's what it was. And for so many people, the huge bet of internet publishing for so long was that you can, with enough volume...

pennies turns into dollars, right? Like that's, that's the bet. And, and there was so much of it that is like, we don't have to be good. We just have to be voluminous. And as long as we can get enough people coming to our crap by accident, we will make a lot of money on it. And that is the thing to Jake's point that is just dead. There's just, it's not, they're not pointing it anywhere else. They're not changing the way that they think about it. It's just dying.

And so it's like, if you're good at product reviews, it's dying. If you're bad at product reviews, it's dying. And Google is, I think, spent a long time trying to pretend that it was optimizing for quality and just trying to get rid of the sort of bad scammy stuff that is basically just like copying and pasting Amazon reviews and pushing it toward other stuff. And increasingly, it's like, no, what they've done is just knife the entire like product review and buying guide world from Google.

And they're fine with that. I mean, there's so much scams there that it might be fine. Like, I don't know. There's something happening there with the old web that people didn't like anyway. Right. Wait, did people not like the old web or...

Is it that because of Google's incentives, the old web got completely corrupted and now Google is solving its own problem? Oh, it's completely that. But I don't think those are different things, right? Like the outcome is the same. And I think like recipe sites are the perfect example of this, right? Like the running joke of the internet is that recipe sites are awful because you go to a recipe blog, you click on the thing to get the recipe and what you get is

is like six pop-up video ads and 2000 words about the person's Thursday before they get to the actual thing. And it's a bunch of H2s telling you like different kinds of substitutions. And it's just an immeasurable amount of barely useful information. The thing is every single pixel on every single one of those sites exists because of SEO. Like they are ruthlessly optimized to get to the top of Google search results because there is a lot of money in being the first thing people click on when they search for chocolate chip cookies.

That is going to die because now when you search chocolate chip cookie recipe, it just gives you a recipe. It doesn't give you links. It doesn't give you anything else. It just gives you a recipe. And so all of these sites are going to have to figure out, okay, not only do I, am I able to undo all of this SEO stuff? I have to figure out an entire new strategy for getting people to come to my website. And I think,

and we've talked about this on the show, right? Like long-term, there are things about that that are really great. Like the, the, the amount of time publishers have spent thinking about Google versus the amount of time they've spent thinking about their audience vastly skewed in the wrong direction over the last two decades. Uh, not true of everybody, but true, more true than it should be. Uh, so like that, that,

incentive is going to go back in the right direction of like, the only thing we have left is to take care of our audience because Google won't just gin one up for us every day. The problem is in the interim, many, many, many, many businesses will die and many, many, many people will lose their jobs. And they already are. Like we have been covering literally the words Google zero for at least three years. Yeah. And we have done, we have headlines of Google zero and the Mia wrote an incredible feature about the incentives and how they shape web pages that we can link and like

you know, the webpage animates into place. Like we've done endless coverage of this. Here's the front of the recipe war that I'm very curious about. Cause this dynamic of, I hate that the recipe content is buried from me. I'm just going to make a tool that scrapes recipes and then everyone's going to yell at me. Like well known in the SEO era. Yep. The recipe bloggers get to yell at those people for taking their labor, blah, blah, blah. And I've heard, okay, there are now infinite tools to scrape and store the recipes from like TikTok chefs.

But the TikTok videos are inherently monetized by the platform themselves. And the games they play to win the TikTok algorithm wars have nothing to do with the recipes, right? Like in kind of the same way, but they're getting the video views. And so all these new recipes store, all these new like recipe cataloging and storage tools that promise to like save the recipes from Instagram and TikTok that you love most and will like index them and blah, blah, blah. Don't actually take economic value from the creators. Yeah.

Because they sort of imply that you have watched the video. Right. Because the video is the thing. They don't care about the recipe the same way. The video is inherently itself monetized inside a distribution algorithm does not change the content in that specific way. I'm dying to know. I'm very much dying to know if the same kind of dynamic plays out where everyone gets mad at the recipe app people. I suspect it will not because the economics are so different.

And that to me is like a view into what's happening across the web.

Where I'm desperate to get any eyeball onto this webpage. So desperate that when you land here, I will attack you. I will mug you. I will put pop-up ads and subscription boxes and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all over your face. Because the chances of getting a visitor are so infinitesimally small. I have to make as much money from every single visitor as I can. Whereas a TikTok video just makes money in the algorithm. And then you make another one. And it makes money in the algorithm. And you have distribution that doesn't put as much pressure on monetization.

And that's just a big story that the web's distribution made everybody so desperate for so long, but nobody could see their way through it. Nobody on the web, maybe we do, people don't like our readers. But like, we try very hard to compete on user experience on web pages. We don't have pop-up ads and weird banners and all this stuff.

But the sites that do are doing it because that's the only way they can make money because there's no other referral source to get onto their pages. I don't know what happens next. I think the web turns into like an application platform, like at a big, big level. I think the future of the web is not as a media platform. I think it is as an application platform.

And like thinking of the web as an application platform changes how we think about web browsers. I think it's changing how Google's thinking of Chrome. And David, you just covered Dia, the new browser from the browser company that replaces Arc. And that's sort of predicated on this idea that like something else is happening on the web. Yeah, its whole thesis is essentially that you're going to spend most of your time

A, on the web, and B, inside of apps on the web. And its whole idea is like, okay, well, you want a chatbot that can see that stuff, right? And it's like, wouldn't it be cool if there was an AI assistant that knew everything that I was doing in Slack and knew everything that I was doing in my email and could see all my Figma files? And it's like, oh, there's only one layer that can do that, and it's the browser. But to your point, that thing is not... Like, all the demos I saw and all the stuff I heard from the folks at the browser company, like, they're not...

intrigued by the idea of like summarizing news articles for you, right? They're like, you're in, you're, you're doing job interviews. This is like an example I got from a few people. You're doing job interviews and you have, you have a Slack thread in which you're talking about all the potential candidates and you have their, uh, their resume in a Google doc and you have their scorecards from their interviews and you ask the bot to summarize it. And it is able to pull from those things because all of those things are web apps that just are exist in a tab, uh,

All of it is it's an app platform. Right. And this is like it's not that different from like what Apple imagines someday future good Siri to be on the iPhone. It's not different from what anyone imagines about anything like right. We were going to we're going to lace together all of your apps and they can all talk to each other and you will have a natural language interface to a bunch of capabilities. Right.

That broadly, the industry is coalesced on this being the future. Yeah. And the bet is just at which layer should that thing exist in order to have the most power. Right. And Apple's bet is it's a big operating system. And Dia's bet is it's in the browser. Well, the browser is like, right. We saw this already when OpenAI tried to launch Operator.

Right. It is just running in a browser. It is an agent that is poking around a browser trying to get things done for you, but it is not your browser. And so we can't get anything done for you. Right. And so I think like fundamentally, it's pretty clear that Dia is probably the right approach, even at an operating system level. It doesn't necessarily have the permission for all that stuff in your browser. The problem is I don't think any bot can reliably do any of that stuff yet.

So I will say one thing I thought was really interesting is in talking to the folks at the browser company about this, they went way down the road of like pure agentic AI. Like how do we...

actively do stuff for you on these websites that we have access to? Because one of the things that you get as the browser is cookies. And if you have cookies, you essentially have a logged in state to every app that I am logged into, which is just a vast amount of power to have over what's going on on the web. And so they were like, well, sure, we have what we need to go in and control your Spotify for you or book stuff for you on Airbnb. And what they discovered is that A, the tech for that doesn't really work.

And it certainly doesn't work reliably enough to do it on your behalf. And also it feels bad. The idea of just basically sitting passively while your browser uses itself actually was not an enjoyable experience for people. And I felt very vindicated hearing them say that, that they were like, we ran this down and it doesn't work and people don't want it. And I'm like, oh, I agree. And they're like, maybe that's where we'll get. And some of this will be possible. And you'll be able to say the assistant, like, you know, go do this and this and this and this app for me. And that'll be great. But

the idea that that works right now, they were like, we ran it down as far as we could and it just doesn't work. And I was like, oh good, that's also my exact experience.

I'm going to come off as sounding like an AI booster, and I am not. I'm not. I'm just, I think there are major flaws with the industry. There's a fatal copyright flaw, which we will talk about in one second. And then there's like, can LLMs actually do this and scale flaw, which might just like upend this whole thing. Like the rate of improvement of LLMs is the core technology for the AI industry. Maybe. Yeah.

Right. Like, and there's actually a paper out of Apple this week in which the answer is a hard no. Yeah. Like we've hit a wall and that's the end of it. Who knows? I don't know. I'm going to come off like a booster. I'm just saying I'm aware of these like core flaws and climate. We're going to talk about climate a second too. There's all this stuff. The thing that has changed my mind recently is I'm watching people.

Not do a bunch of prompts to get answers, not make a bunch of, you know, the three videos, although people are making lots of videos. I'm watching people create application logic in automation platforms out of AI agent capabilities.

Right. In a way that is like the stuff they're doing is not important. It's some of it is just like straight up content piracy. Like take all the most viral videos on TikTok, make faceless YouTube shorts about them and then republish them as YouTube shorts. And I will collect money for free. And all this is happening inside of an AI based automation platform called N8N. Okay, great. Like here's the slot machine at scale. Right. But what that is, is application logic.

They're building new apps in a new way using new tools. They're using new emergent standards like MCP to go query a bunch of databases and write to a bunch of spreadsheets and then create content and publish it to other places. And they're moving stuff around. A bunch of call center logic is being automated on these platforms, right? Someone talks to you and it goes and gets an answer and spits it back to you.

That stuff reminds me a lot of the, the like original web 2.0 where the idea was all of these services have APIs and you can like make new things out of APIs by mashing them up. The entire website mashable was like founded by,

because people were making so many interesting things by remixing APIs. Remember there was a service called Yahoo Pipes? Yeah. Yahoo Pipes ruled. Like we ran a lot of Engadget on weird Yahoo Pipes automations. Sorry, what was Yahoo Pipes? Yahoo Pipes was this like drag and drop service builder thing

that was basically like, you can take an API. It was like, if this than that, but for like web APIs. Oh my God. It was awesome. Yeah. And all of that was the original promise of web 2.0. We're going to build all these services and then you can, at some level of API abstraction, you can build new services by mashing them up. And literally this is where Mashable as a website came from. Then it went away. Like, I don't know.

All that went away. Facebook closed down the internet, basically. They said, we're going to do all these services in a proprietary way and we won't talk to anyone else. And that was the end of that. I'm only making the comparison because I see what people are doing with MCP, with these automation platforms, with a bunch of agentic no-code tools. And I'm like, oh, I see this parallel. I see a bunch of people making applications in a new way, using new standards, having some

like straightforwardly depressing ideas about what the application should do. Sure. But like, there's an energy there that is unlike the energy of, I don't know, crypto, right? Where the only goal was ever to make number go up or take a cut of transactions, which is just the least inspiring economic model of all time. It was this, like that was all financialized. This is very much like the kids are making toys.

And they're having a good time doing it. And they're posting tech talks about the toys they're making and the other ideas that that is inspiring them to have. And I just know that there's usually something there. There are all these other flaws. There's a fatal copyright flaw. There's a really, really, really important climate flaw that everyone should talk about more. There is just an LLM technology flaw that who knows what.

But in the meantime, there's this like little thing, like there's this little green shoot of activity that it feels like, oh, we're about to re-architect how applications work. Right. MCP is like fundamentally a conversation about what is an API? How should APIs work? And that stuff is like, you know, fundamentally interesting.

Yeah, I think I've come to see AI as like two separate things that really need separate words. And the one is, is like AI as essentially tool building systems. And I think the thing I hear over and over from people is that like, it's

the coding use of generative AI has like already found product market fit. Like however much code you think you use is being written by AI, the actual answer is much higher, like much, much higher. And it's everywhere and it works and it is powerful and it is in use in vastly mainstream ways. Like the...

The idea of vibe coding is here and it works. And I generally agree. I think it's very cool. I think one level above that is the question of is any of this worth it? Which I think is a good and valuable question, but it is a separate question. That piece of it works. I don't think there's any question about that. And I think there's a really interesting road down that that is also the same question about like,

is AI going to get us closer to curing cancer? Like, yes. And that stuff is real and it's working and it's meaningful. Again, is it worth it is a fair question, but like that stuff is real. The flip side, and I think this is the thing that gets us tripped up because we conflate these two things is, should my computer be my friend? Seriously, and this is the thing that I have come to is like, the question of like,

do we think as humans it is good that people are building relationships with AI chatbots is a completely separate and I think equally important question in all of this. And it has nothing to do with the other thing. Like, Cursor is not your friend. Cursor is just this like unbelievably powerful AI tool for building things. It's not trying to bang you. It's not trying to like give you advice about how to live your life. But then there is other stuff that is

very explicitly doing that, like the replicas and the characters of the world. And then there's all this stuff in the middle that's like,

Chat GPT is nice to you because you'll use it more if it's nice to you. Like that's just real. But then they tipped that over where it was like, it got weirdly nice to you and then people didn't want to use it anymore and they had to roll that back. And this is like, all this stuff is being tuned so that you'll use it. And it's like, it's an engagement machine in the way that like social media is an engagement machine. And I think that's the thing that I'm trying to sort of separate and reckon with separately because like as a, as a,

infrastructure for product making AI is like very powerful and everywhere and I think is essentially inevitable at this point but this question of like should I hang out with my computer I think we should spend a lot more time

thinking about and talking about. I would separate that. I agree with that separation. I think I would do it differently. Okay. There's, and it's just really about the hype of the industry. There's, I can see the old web going away because Google has decided to answer the questions itself. And

And some of those answers are wrong because the AI isn't actually smart and can't be trusted. Well, right. There's that. And then right next to that is, you know, Sundar saying to me on Decoder, we're going to start to do web app deployment on the search result page. Like zero shot vibe coded custom web apps when you search for something. And that is a very powerful new idea about search. I don't know what those web apps are going to be. All of their ideas are like, we made a chart of baseball statistics. And it's like, well...

Do we have to, we're literally boiling the oceans for this. Is it worth it to your point? Right. Then there's the right next to that. If you believe in any, all that's going to happen in Google's making it happen. There's that we are going to reconceptualize the web itself as a new kind of application environment where agents are able to go and talk to what are effectively databases and services and kind of like construct new capabilities for you.

That's a big, big, big, big, big idea. Like maybe the biggest idea in the history of application development that we're going to take the web from a series of user interfaces that you can click around on, which is already a remarkably big idea that changed the entire nature of computers.

And we're going to say we're abstracting the user interface away to a bot or an agent or whatever. And the services themselves are just like coin operated databases. And you show up and you say, Uber, do you have cars? And Uber says, I do have cars. That'll be $3 for me to tell you what cars you have. And you pay the fee and it tells you the cars and off you go. Okay. Right. Like, and then you got to pay Uber its transaction fees on top of that. That's a big idea about how you would build new kinds of capabilities in the world.

Do we think that's going to happen, though? Do we think that Uber is going to open up that API for Google? I mean, basically, I mean, what Dara has said to me is we're going to try it at first because it'll be cool. And if it's really cool and everyone likes it, we're going to charge a lot of money for it. Because this is my question, right? Like if they open a specific API for Google, then like.

Probably Google's going to want a cut of that too. Well, it's not a specific API for Google. It's more like they will open up an MCP server and your agent can show up and maybe your agent is run by Google or maybe you're running it locally. Who knows how any of this work? It'll show up and be able to like instead of having to issue known API commands, it can in a more natural language way say I've got a person who needs a car. Do you do you have cars? Yeah.

Right. And you won't need this like big database of API commands. It'll just be like, yeah, I do. They're very expensive. Yeah. Do you have money? And then like a third service will be like, I'm here to process your transaction. That will also cost money. And maybe all of that makes everything too expensive and untenable. Right. But you just have these like vastly more resilient APIs. Like that's how I've been thinking about it. It's just so interesting. I feel like what you're describing is the AI version of, of the app store versus the web where it's like,

That would be great. It would be really nice if everything worked nicely. And all I see is a way for Google to take a big cut of money on every single thing it's doing. I think that might be what Google sees too. Right. I mean, there's a reason they're all chasing, Microsoft's chasing it, Google's chasing it. And the fight, the reason I was like, yep, when you said the app store, the fight is that the whole industry is chasing this on the web.

That's where the industry is going. The web, MCP, big web services. How do we, can we buy Chrome from Google if the government makes Google sell Chrome? Can we light up a new browser called Dia instead of Arc, our old browser? The browser company is a startup. There is no reason for them to burn down their existing browser other people don't use.

Right. They had to start over because that's the future they see. And you got to re-architect the whole idea. If you're like all of this new application logic will exist on the web in new ways. And maybe we're not clicking around yet. Right. Maybe we're just summarizing here, but owning the, owning the browser, owning the literal application layer is important. And then there's Apple, which thinks all of this is going to happen inside apps locally on your phone.

Boy, is that risky. Boy, is that existentially risky for Apple. I mean, gosh, it's like it's so weird that everybody believes the thing that they are heavily financially incentivized to believe is going to be the one that comes true.

Yeah, but I mean, the iPhone already exists as a vessel for other people's services, right? Like, chat GPT is nothing. Nothing really happens on the iPhone when you open the chat GPT app. Right. So, like, there's just some thing where, like, if you think the user interface is moving because of AI, it's not because people are in love with their computers. Like, that's the distinction that I'm making, is there's a part of AI that is very much about...

Where the applications go, what the platform shift looks like, what even is an application or an API in this new world? And then there's Sam Altman being like, I've developed artificial general intelligence and you will marry your computer and I need a trillion dollars. And it's like, well, that's just hype, right? Like what you need is a bunch of money to take down Apple's application model.

Or maybe Sam Altman really believes he's going to fall in love with this computer. I don't know the answer to that question. I mean, ironically, if you're Sam Altman, there's way more money in being the one who takes down Apple's application model than in making people fall in love with their computers. But I think that's where they're going. I think that's why they're doing the Johnny Ive deal, right? The next platform has to overtake the iPhone application model. Yeah. The distinction to me, like, I think that will Kevin Roos eventually leave his family for ChatGPT?

Again, my sincere thanks to Kevin for allowing me to continue to make this joke. But it just feels like a sideshow. And like, it's a sideshow that justifies the hype. But it's not, I don't think it's actually the thing. I agree. You know, it's funny, it's like,

In all this chum, Amazon announced that a million people now have Alexa Plus, and I have only ever met one person who has Alexa Plus. You met some. I have met zero people. There is one person at the talk show. I basically asked this question of the room at the talk show. I was like, does any of you, any of these 700 or however many people were there, does anybody have Alexa Plus? A million people do. And one guy was like, yes. And then we asked, is it any good? And there was silence.

And everyone watched it. It was like very funny. And then he came up to me afterwards. Uh, his name is Don McCaskill. He's the CEO of Flickr. He's the guy who has Alexa blocks. That feels right. And we talked to him and Jerry and I talked to him for a minute. It was very nice for him to be there for him to, uh, talk to us about it. And he was like, it's fine. It's sort of fine.

And it works. It's better than you think it is, but it's not very good. It was basically a takeaway. We should just have him on to talk about Flickr and then also his experiences with Alexa Plus. Yeah, 100%. Love this idea. But that's where we're at. It's like Amazon shipped it. They promised they were going to do it. And it's like, meh. And Google has promised it. And they might be the closest. Some of the stuff Gemini can do on a Samsung phone is like, you can just talk to it. You can just talk to it.

And you can be like, turn off my Bluetooth and like, it'll kind of do it. That's the state of the art, you know, like it's all this stuff is going to change, but none of it works yet. And so you can give shit to Apple, but like none of it works yet. And until it like really, really, really works, it's a bad product. Like this is not the kind of thing that can be successful at like a, you know, 70% success rate.

This thing you're supposed to talk to and interact with all the time, if it like is kind of good, it's actually really bad. And it's going to be in kind of good for a pretty long time, I think. Yeah. The last thing we should talk about here, Sam Altman put out a long blog post.

As he is want to do. Yeah. I always wonder if he has chat GPT write the blog posts. He said he didn't, but he said in his tweet that this was probably the last blog post he would write without chat GPT. All right, Sam. And I just like, there's so many executives now who are like, I didn't even have to do anything. I just used AI to do this. And it's like, are you trying to fire yourself? Like, like.

Like what a cool way to tell on yourself for being bad at your job. There's a very funny, like from the late nineties, early two thousands, uh, image. Uh, it's like a meme. It's like a proto meme. I don't know how to describe it. Will Joel, our senior creative director. And I send it to each other all the time. And it has a title that's like life cycle advertising career evolution. And it's told through application icons.

So it's like you start as a junior account designer and you've in the icons like the Photoshop icon and then it's like Photoshop and Illustrator and then it's flash, which is very funny. This is how old this meme is. And then at some point they add Excel to the stack and then some point the entire stack goes away and it's the Microsoft Entourage icon. Again, how old this is. That was an email client that Microsoft had. And the very last one is chief creative officer and it's just a bottle of champagne.

That's really cool. I will dig this up. We will find a way to share this. It makes me laugh every time. And literally, Will and I send it back and forth to each other all the time because we both live in the meeting zone now, like constantly. That's what I think of every time an executive says, Trashy Peter wrote this for me. Like, oh, you're just the bottle. Yep. Your job is just the bottle. The fact that you can fire off text is sort of irrelevant to your actual job. That's amazing. Anyhow, the blog post is titled The Gentle Singularity. It is very long, very convoluted in some ways.

And basically the thesis is AGI is already here. Like, I don't know how else to explain his thesis. He's like, it's already happening. Just sit back, enjoy the ride, give me a trillion dollars. And in it, he makes this claim that the average chat GPT query uses roughly one 15th of a teaspoon of water. And I think that means the climate concerns are finally getting to Sam Allman.

We're lighting up new coal and gas plants. We're building data centers faster than we were building data centers than ever. Justine Kahn on our team who covers climate for us, she and I are having this conversation. And she's like, the thing is data center use was basically flat and then AI showed up and now it's skyrocketing. Right? So it's not that like using computers is bad. It's that this new thing is like inefficient and we're just the demand for data centers has skyrocketed because of it.

What do you think? Like, I look at this stat. I'll read the full quote. This is from Sam Altman. People, let me actually, let me read the full stat from Altman's blog post and I want to get your reactions to it. Quote, people are often curious about how much energy a chat GPT-GPT uses. The average query uses about 0.34 watt hours, about what an oven would use in a little over a second, or a high efficiency light bulb would use in a couple of minutes. And then he says the cost will converge too near the cost of the electricity itself. And he says this thing about 1.15 to a teaspoon of water.

Those aren't great stats. What do you think? I don't know exactly how much water, I don't know, any piece of electronics like it should use. I don't know. I don't know what a good amount of a teaspoon is. So it's like this makes it sound really tiny, but I don't actually know what this means. It's interesting. I kind of want to separate this or at least in my mind to separate this as two different things.

I think a lot of the like, oh, AI is terrible, it's boiling the oceans, that feels like a way of actually just dismissing AI rather than genuine concern about climate to me in a lot of ways. That being said...

as we're talking about data center use is dramatically increasing. Electricity use is dramatically increasing. And these companies that made these climate goals are now having a much more difficult time reaching them. I think that is compounded by the current electricity plans of the administration that is in office, which is not making it easier to get clean energy online. So I don't know. I, I, I,

I think it is very interesting that this has boiled up enough to reach Sam Altman that he feels that he has to defend against it. This doesn't really feel like a meaningful defense in any way to me.

But, you know, when you're measuring it by teaspoons of water, that's like not you're clearly trying to downplay it. You're true. Yeah. You are not actually trying to solve it. You're trying to say, look, it's so small, you can't actually tell what it is. I don't want to like it. It kind of like disturbs me to know like that.

that any amount of water is disappearing when I'm using technology. I mean, I assume we're all drinking a little bit of water listening to this podcast. But like, I don't know what the right number is. And I think it's very, it is funny to think of it as individual chat GPT queries versus the data centers themselves. I'm obliged on behalf of our most pedantic listeners to say the water doesn't disappear. It's just diverted into a different part of the water cycle.

But that's not people drinking it or being used in farmlands, right? Like that's the problem. Like you're using the water elsewhere. That's the problem, right? Like the water is being diverted to this use as opposed to whatever higher value use you might believe exists. That's weird. Like we should just acknowledge that that's a weird outcome of this. The other thing that really gets me, and David, I think you've spent more time like using AI tools than I have in this way. Like no one does but one chat GPT query.

Well, right. I mean, I think it's just a stupid way to quantify this stuff, right? And I think we've talked a lot about how much this stuff costs. Like, we know...

OpenAI loses money every time you do the query. Like that's just true. They're just burning money happily as they grow. But yeah, these things are designed for like long conversations. And some of the numbers that we've seen are like, there are some estimates out there that ChatGPT gets more than a billion queries a day. A billion 15ths of a teaspoon is still an awful lot of water. And so I think, again, it's this question of,

it's the, is it worth it question, right? Like all this stuff is trade-offs and it's like to the data center point that there have been all these issues recently where these massive data centers are being built in these communities that just don't want massive data centers because it changes the look of your community. It changes the electrical grid of your community. Like all of these things are happening downstream of this belief that AI is going to change the way that we do everything and we have to build enough infrastructure to support it. And so it's,

sure, the cost will come down towards the cost of electricity, but still what that means is a vast amount of the electricity of my town is going to be diverted to doing AI queries. Like, I don't know. We should decide how we feel about that, right? One way or another. And even if it's not

a huge amount right now. Have you seen the growth that OpenAI is projecting? This is not going to flatline at this number of queries per day. If Sam Altman is right, we are all going to do a 15th of a teaspoon of water thousands of times a day for billions of people around the world. And that changes things. How much water do you think it took to fall in love with Kevin Rees? Gallons? Gallons. Easily gallons. Hundreds of gallons. Like Olympic-sized pools worth at that point. Yeah.

Kevin, I will give you two Olympic pools in exchange for your wife and child. Again, my, my continued thanks. I've asked, I want everyone to know I've asked him if I can keep making this joke and he looked very tired and said, yes, that's it. And so I just need to make that clear. I,

Resignation and permission, I guess, are the same thing in this case. He's the one who chose to put it on the front page of The New York Times. That wasn't my decision. Yeah. I would also we should move on from this, but I would also just point out that the this there is absolutely nothing that Sam Altman offers in this post to substantiate that particular claim. And in fact, it is vastly smaller than what lots of other researchers have said.

like orders of magnitude smaller. And so either Sam knows something that we don't and he should tell us how he got to that number or maybe that's ChatGPT. It's also worth noting- ChatGPT also estimates much higher. If you just ask ChatGPT how much water it uses, its estimates are much higher than Sam's. It's just thinking about Kevin.

We should ask Microsoft because it runs on Azure. Yeah. One last, very quickly before we move on, climate, one fatal flaw. The other fatal flaw they keep talking about is copyright law. And Disney and Universal sued Midjourney this week for copyright infringement because you can just generate copyright.

There are characters. You can just generate Marvel characters and DC characters. You can just do it. And you don't even have to do the thing where you like ask around it. You can just be like, show me Simpsons and it'll just do that. Yeah. I'm confused how this took so long. Like this is like, it's just there. It is right there. Like the lawsuit is just filled with AI images of Shrek. That's what I meant. It wasn't DC characters. It was Shrek that was on my mind.

This is a big problem. By the way, that's the same as the New York Times lawsuit. The lawsuit, their complaint is filled with the thing just generating Times articles or information from Times articles. The analysis that I've read is –

You know, open as kind of losing that lawsuit against the times meta, you know, they torrented a bunch of books and there's emails in their discovery in their case where their research was like, should we torn a bunch of books? I'm like, what else are we going to do? I'm like, that's bad. And so you see the most aggressive rights holders, Disney, the most aggressive copyright litigant in history being like, oh, we can, we, we got it. We're going to crush these guys. There, there's some weird outcomes when Disney wins its copyright battles.

Like that is a real, be careful what you wish for situation with Disney in particular. But this is a fatal flaw for this industry to the point where Nick Clegg, who used to run meta like policy stuff. I think last week was like, if we make artists, if we pay artists or ask for their permission, the AI industry will fail. And then Disney is like, here we are.

So fatal flaw for this industry. I see this thing happening with applications on the web and blah, blah, blah. I want to be clear. There are some fatal flaws that are going to have to be overcome that I don't think money alone can overcome. This is what I mean by the is it worth it question, right? We are starting to understand the list of what it costs, literally and figuratively, to do the AI thing all of these tech companies are trying to do. And

To them, the answer is yes, it's worth it, right? Like, is it worth the destruction of the art business in the world? Yes. Clearly, the answer is yes. Is it worth like a flattening of how we think about all of the stuff that we make as a society? Clearly, yes. Is it worth all the climate stuff? The answer is just yes, all the way across the board.

they think it's worth it. And like a lot of other people are standing up and being like, no, the fact that you can't do this without stealing every artistic work that has ever been created means you shouldn't do this. Like we just, it's just how, like we should have the other side of that conversation too. I also want to say just,

Kudos to Disney again for like having its lawyers write bars like this. We're on such a good run of just sick ass burns in legal filings. I just this it's right at the beginning of this filing. It just says mid journey is the quintessential copyright free writer and a bottomless pit of plagiarism. You know, somebody wrote bottomless pit of plagiarism and then just like fist bumped a bunch of dudes in suits around a table. That's how lawyers do their writing.

They just are like, "Steve, read this." The complaints are being written to be read by the public. This is a new thing. Jonathan Cantor, the DOJ attorney who filed against Apple and won all the Google cases basically, he was like, "Yeah, the first 10 pages are for the public to read. This is how we write them now." Totally. It's a good one. We'll link it. We can read it, but fatal flaws. All right, we got to take a break. We're going to come back with the lightning round. May or not be sponsored. Who knows?

I don't know. That's the whole point is that I don't know. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea. You know that point in the afternoon when you just hit a wall? You don't have time for self-care rituals or getting some fresh air, so maybe you grab a beverage to bring you back. But somehow it doesn't do the trick, or it leaves you feeling even worse. What you need is a quality break, a tea break.

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Which apparently I've been so loud about lately that people think that like I won't look like I can't even be in the presence of advertising, which is a very hard way to live as an American. Congratulations. People like all the ads are you go. You have to leave the room. I'm fine.

But that's where I'm starting to think you're easily bought. There's a real like, you know, me thinks that doth protest too much thing going on here where I'm like, maybe Neil is on the take and he's just yelling loudly about it. Have you heard of the new Pegasus GS9 yacht, David? It's delightful if you have the means.

All right. It's time. Oh, my God. I've gone all the way around from excitement about this to I can't believe we have to keep doing this. We're going to keep doing it. It's time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. 2026 Webby Award winning podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Nilay, how does this keep happening? What happened this week? It does keep happening. I will say it's getting dumb on a meta level.

Right. We're like, it's just so dumb that like the ecosystem is getting dumb. So this week on Brandon Carr is a dummy. We don't have a lot of Brendan stuff himself, which is fascinating. Oh, I see. We're talking like Brendan dumb ripple effects. Like extremely stupid ripple effects of Brendan's behavior are causing other people to have to be like just monumentally stupid. Okay.

In order to keep up with him. The new name of this segment is Brendan Carr made us all dummies. That's where we're going. Or they have to react to him in ways that are like, like just plainly no normal human being should react to. Right. No, no one should have to behave this way. So I have three this week. The first is by far my favorite.

like by far one of the best emails we have ever gotten here at the verge right up there with the conspiracy theories I used to get about Steve Jobs stealing technology. And then they would all end with, he then died. Yeah.

If you're an old school virtual house listener, you know, but like I used to like do dramatic readings of this, of he then died on like the Engadget podcast, right up there with the Foxconn emails where the guy would end them all with leave us alone. When are we right up at the Foxconn factory not being there? Right up here. Only instead of being a weird anonymous poet, this is Dish Network's communications people. So if you recall, Brandon in the first Trump administration, Ajit Pai,

And the Trump administration broadly inked a deal in which T-Mobile was allowed to buy Sprint, which reduced the number of national wireless competitors from three to four. And to solve this very obvious problem where reducing competition raises prices, they gave a bunch of spectrum to Dish Network, which had no network, which made promises that it would stand up a nationwide wireless network, become the fourth carrier, and send shockwaves through the market worldwide.

and look around. Right, this mark, it does not exist. It's been years, right? That was the first Trump administration. It's been years. No one is using this network. They had a stat that 1.3 million people have access to this network. There are 300 plus million people in America. No one, no one is on this network. They do operate Boost Mobile, which is a prepaid network. That's a big network. A lot of people use it, but the majority of people who are Boost customers actually sort of like using AT&T and T-Mobile's networks. They're just like roaming onto it. This is a big problem.

Anyhow, SpaceX decided to take it upon itself to study whether or not Dish Network existed. They noticed it didn't. And they just asked for the spectrum. And Brendan responded in his corrupt sort of lackadaisical fashion by saying, I'm opening an investigation. I'm going to give the spectrum to SpaceX. Dish Network has responded to this. They have threatened to declare bankruptcy to preserve their spectrum through the bankruptcy proceeding because that's their big asset. This would prevent

Right. They're playing a smarter political game than Brendan, who, again, is an idiot. And we got this email because we've been covering this and keep pointing out that Brendan created this problem through his own corruption out of a solution that the previous Trump administration, his former boss, Ajit Pai, created for him. He's an idiot. This is how it goes. Here's the email that we got from Echo Star, which owns Dish Network and Boost Mobile.

Hi, folks. Given The Verge's continuing coverage of Echo Star's interaction with the FCC and Chairman Carr, I wanted to share the blow with you. As we lay out in our filings with the FCC, our network, in fact, exists. My T-shirt, it says, my network exists.

Like just a top 10. It's just like, it's incredible. And it goes on to say, we offer high quality 5G service to 80% of the US population on our own network, which I, and that network has won coverage and reliability recognition across the country. That's for Boost. We've come a long way in four years when other carriers have had decades to build a network.

The two questions I have is why are people still being issued AT&T and T-Mobile SIM cards when they sign up for boost, which is a real thing you can see people talking about. And where is it? Where's the advertising? Where's the customer acquisition? Where is this network that you are telling me exists? Yeah. Send me a phone. Send me a phone that runs on Project Gen 5, sis, that runs natively on your network and doesn't run to AT&T.

I live in New York City. If you're going to stand up a network for 80% of the population, presumably I can get service in New York City, right? I'm just saying. Our network can fax us. So that's one. And this is what I mean. He's just made everyone else have to be stupid. Mm-hmm.

Send me the phone. We're wide open to it. I sent them an email back that I had a lot of questions when I was traveling. And they were just like, safe travels. No scheduling. So we'll follow up. All right. Second one. We've talked about the other commissioner on the FCC right now, Ana Gomez, a lot. All of the other commissioners are gone. They all quit. The other Democrat, Jeffrey Starks, quit. The other Republican, Nathan Symington, quit. No one knows who's going to get nominated to replace him. Trump has nominated no Democrats to anything.

FCC is supposed to have a quorum of three, but they're actually five, three from the incumbent party, two from the opposing party. Right now they got Ana Gomez and they have Brendan. So we actually interviewed, and Ana's on tour just talking about what a monster Brendan is. Like literally she's like on a first night tour. We talked about this a lot. She did an interview with Lauren Finer at one of the stops on this tour. Lauren talked to her, and I just want to say this is just like one of the funniest Brendan Carza dummy quotes we have. She just said to Lauren Finer,

Actually, I have a good working relationship with Carr. It is what it is. He knows that I need to speak out and we have a relationship where I can tell him my concerns. And Lauren said, do you know why Trump hasn't fired you? And she said, no. No. Can you imagine? Brendan's like, here's this person who's just touring the country.

saying that I suck and that I'm a threat to American free speech. And yeah, I accept her concerns. Also, I have no idea why my boss hasn't fired her. But if she goes, the FCC is functionally useless. I love the idea of having like a weekly one-on-one with your boss where you're like, here are all the new reasons I believe you're a danger to democracy. And they're just like, hmm, this is your meeting. You tell me what you want to talk about. What are the blockers? This is your time. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

It's very good. It's very good. So that's the second one. You should read that piece by Lauren. It's very good. It's a good interview. I've been trying to get Anna to come on one or more of our shows. We'll keep working on it. Okay. Then last one, Brendan tweeted. This is a Brendan one, but downstream of Brendan's the DC. As you know, Brendan loves giving me spectrum. So Brendan tweeted this week, President Trump locked in another great win for this country. Freeing up spectrum is key to America's economic prosperity, national security, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Uh, and really this is about a Trump post where he says Trump is congratulating Ted Cruz and Roger wicker and Tom Cotton for their quote, amazing deal on spectrum. And he says, this is serious power for American leadership on six G David. Oh God.

It's time. We've made it. So as part of the Big Beautiful Bill, there's some compromise where Ted Cruz has been mad at the Pentagon for hoarding Spectrum for years and years and years. Everything about this sucks, Ne-Roy. It's true. I'm not wrong about this. So as part of this bill, the Big Beautiful Bill, which has not passed...

Ted Cruz has agreed that the Defense Department can keep part of the 3 gigahertz band and then like the in the middle from 7.4 to 8.4 gigahertz band and the rest can go into what's called the Spectrum Pipeline and get auctioned for new 5G and 6G services. This bill has not passed.

It may not pass. 6G doesn't exist, just to be 100% clear. 5G came to nothing. And in other parts of the government, it seems relatively clear that at any moment, RFK will tell you that 5G lets you see through time or something. Oh, yeah. Bill Gates did 5G to you when COVID happened. I think that is what that was.

So anyway, so Brendan is congratulating Trump on congratulating Ted Cruz on a spectrum plan that is nowhere near reality. But this will preserve American leadership in 6G. We're doing great, everybody. Everyone should be so embarrassed who had to be involved in that in any way. And to some extent, that's just normal politicking, right? Like we're all congratulating ourselves.

But it's like, Brendan, man, like read the room. Like everyone thinks 5G sucked. Yeah. All right. We need a palate cleanser. This palate cleanser is ridiculous. Why is this here as a palate cleanser? I'm so excited about this because what brings the Verge cast more joy than making fun of David Zaslav and his stupid decisions? This is the definition of business success. What is happening here? Jake, do you want to explain what happened here? Walk us through it.

Warner Brothers Discovery, which, correct me if I have this wrong, was created by the merger of Warner Media and Discovery, is now, and again, that was very recently, what, two or three years ago? So recently. They have now announced plans to split themselves in half into two companies. Wow.

And I'm trying to figure out exactly what this looks like. But again, tell me if I have this wrong. It looks roughly like one half is going to be studios. Let's call this roughly Warner Brothers. And another is going to have a bunch of television networks, which I don't know, seems a little discovery-ish to me. They're going to name these companies Warner. Are they not just splitting themselves back up into roughly the original companies, but now one has a boatload of debt?

Yeah, that's the move. That's what you do. This is what Comcast is doing with Versant. Outrageous. This is insane. It's really, honestly, it's pretty incredible. And meanwhile...

Basically, what has happened is nothing. And David Zaslav got $100 million. That's essentially what we've accomplished in the last couple of years with these two companies. We are right back where we started, except David Zaslav made $100 million. And we got to rebrand HBO Max like five times. So here's the Zaslav memo to the company announcing the separation. While the work since the merger has been challenging at times...

The word being rebranding one service over and over again. They've done nothing else. They've done a very bad job ever since. No, there's been a lot of investor presentations where David Zaslav was like, the pink stuff is what chicks like. This is real, by the way. That deck exists. We've talked about it.

Anyway, while the work since that merger has been challenging at times, ultimately have succeeded in strengthening each element of our business. By bringing together the Discovery and Turner networks, we've created a leader in live and unscripted television with a truly global footprint operating industry leading margins. We've transformed our direct-to-consumer offering as HBO Max is one of the world's few global and meaningfully profitable streaming services. And then by fusing creative brilliance with operational excellence, we've made two

strong progress returning our film and television studios to industry leadership. I don't believe that one at all. Actually. I don't really think any of those are true. So Jake T, I think the answer is they combined all the stuff. They remixed it into dying cable company with debt and new look streaming company. So it's not quite Warner brothers and discovery. It's like the worst parts of both go over here.

And then maybe the future is over here. Yeah. I mean, ironically, what, what the streaming company gets is also all of the content. So it's like all of the things that have a chance are going to be over here. And all of the things that are cable networks are going to go over. I mean, it's, it's,

bleak what's going in that second company. And that thing is basically just being set up to fairly rapidly die on top of a giant pile of debt. While the other one just gets to go and try to turn HBO Max into Netflix. Like, that's what this is. They are trying to streamline the thing so the one company can try to go be Netflix. And

So far, everyone who has tried to be Netflix, which is many, many, many companies, had failed fairly spectacularly at trying to be Netflix. Except Netflix, which is doing a very good job. And Netflix is the pure play. Everyone else has tried to do it by bootstrapping the excess margin of the dying cable business into the content to make Netflix. And that's where they've all failed. And now, as David is pointing out, the cable businesses are dying. It's all getting rid of them. So Comcast...

NBCUniversal, part of Comcast, investor in our parent company, Vox Media. But they don't like us for reasons that will be instantly made clear as I continue speaking. Comcast is spinning off all of its dying cable companies into a new company called Versant so they can die or get reborn in any way. And they're going to hold on to Peacock and all the streaming stuff and the Olympics. This is, I think, the same move. Yeah, I think this is exactly the same. It's the same move. I have heard, because CNBC is...

part of the new version thing. There's some excitement, lots of trepidation, some excitement that they will be free of the machine and they can try new things in a way that being part of the machine would not let them in the past.

I don't know if anybody at Discovery Turner is going to feel that way. No, it's just a really interesting moment. I mean, the other, the other streaming thing that happened this week was Disney finally finished the deal to buy the rest of Hulu. And there is now some noise that the end of Hulu is kind of nigh, right? Like all of this stuff is just going to be roped into Disney plus ESPN is doing its flagship thing. That's going to start to be piped further and further into Disney plus like,

we're sort of back in a bundling phase of some of this stuff in a really interesting way that like HBO Max is trying to be Netflix and Disney is trying to be Netflix and everybody is pulling everything they possibly can into these like mega streaming services offloading everything that isn't those things because like you said they thought there was going to be money in those for a long time and there is no longer money in those and just the only path forward is

is to try and be Netflix. And boy, does that look like suicide right now for all of these companies. This palette cleanser sucks. I'm doing another one. Can I give you a better one? Okay, you do one and I'll do one. All right, no, you do yours because we got to go. What's yours? I kind of want to see if we have the same one. You go.

Mine is that PNY just announced the Dual Link V3 flash drive, which has both USB-A and USB-C connectors, but supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 that enables read speeds of up to 1,000 megabits per second and write speeds of up to 800 megabits per second. And it's $3299 for 256 clicks. It's $3299? For 256, but it's the fastest flash drive that exists. So you can fill your flash drive in two seconds. That's a palette cleanser, baby. Yeah.

Sick flash drive. That's a palette cleanser. What was yours? Do people still use flash drives? Have you ever tried to print something out of the office? Now, USB-C into my laptop, USB-A into the printer. Boom. Done. I'm expensing this. How do you think I get these images onto the frame TV?

Ancient flash drives. Man, that story sucks for both of you. What was yours? I just wanted to talk about Threads DMs for like two seconds. Because I think...

Threads, which I have spent a lot of time talking about, it's very slow product development. They announced this week that they're starting to roll out a DM inbox that is actually separate from Instagram. Yeah, that's good. A lot of people not excited about that who are like, oh, cool, you know what? Meta needs is another messaging app. And that's fair. And Meta now has thousands of messaging apps, none of which talk to each other. But I also think...

a threads dm thing is a good idea and that like it's it's threads is gonna end up being one of those accounts that like everybody has but nobody really pays attention to and i think like as twitter continues to fall apart one thing i miss is the like relatively accessible messaging system to reach almost anybody and threads i think is gonna turn into that that's my theory

Interesting. That it's just going to be an inbox that everybody kind of has and you check sometimes and it's fine. And like maybe that's only useful to me as a reporter who like constantly wants to ask people about their stupid iOS home screens. But I think it's like it's a good idea for threads to have DMs. Isn't that LinkedIn?

Yeah, but I don't want it to be. It's like it has been threatening to be LinkedIn in a way that really bums me out because every time I have to use LinkedIn, it makes me sad. And like it used to be Twitter, the like, how do I reach out to a stranger? Twitter was the closest thing we had to that. And I think Threads is smart to try and take that mantle and I think it's going to do it fairly quickly. Yeah. All right. It was a fine power cleanser. I think the cool USB drive is better. You let us know. You can email us something. You can call someone.

Also, if you have a really weird esoteric use for a flash drive that you want to tell us about, I very much want to hear about it. I'm dead serious. What's the number? What's the number again? You can call 866-VERGE11. You can email us, vergecasts at theverge.com. All kinds of stuff. We're going to do a lot of hotline stuff this summer, so keep questions coming. Yeah. All right. That's it. That's VergeCast. All right.

And that's it for The Verge Cast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week. ♪

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