The Vergecast - Inside the Google algorithm

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss Google's algorithm leak, OpenAI content deals, and more tech news from this week. Further reading: Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation Google confirms the leaked Search documents are real An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search’s Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked Unpacking Google's massive Search documentation leak How SEO moves forward with the Google Content Warehouse API leak Google responds to leak: Documentation lacks context Vox Media and The Atlantic sign content deals with OpenAI Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search  Apple’s WWDC may include AI-generated emoji and an OpenAI partnership OpenAI CEO Cements Control as He Secures Apple Deal Custom GPTs open for free ChatGPT users OpenAI has a new safety team — it’s run by Sam Altman Why the OpenAI board fired Sam Altman  Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6 billion to fund its race against ChatGPT and all the rest New Galaxy Z Flip 6 and Galaxy Ring details have leaked, courtesy of the FCC The Fitbit Ace LTE is like a Nintendo smartwatch for kids  Discord’s turning the focus back to games with a new redesign The business behind Unnecessary Inventions’ millions of followers Welcome to Notepad, a newsletter on Microsoft’s era-defining bets by Tom Warren Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom.

And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the podcast, the flagship podcast, massive base, ultimate vibe. Oh, no. We're immediately starting there. Hi, I'm your friend, Eli.

Alex Tran's here. I'm your friend who just discovered Arc. Oh, the browser? Yeah. Nobody told me about it. David definitely has it repeatedly. Every issue of installer is like, have you used this browser?

Turns out he's right. Who knew? David Pierce is also here, although is he? I just, you say ultimate base and I just want to leave. I just immediately know where we're going. Oh, we're driving that car there so fast. All right, here's what I want to tell you.

It's a huge week of news. A bunch of docs about how Google Search works leaked and then they were confirmed to be real. I don't want to oversell. This is on the order of how the Facebook algorithm works. This is true insight into the Google search algorithm. So you've got to talk with that and the fallout across. the web from that. Google search continues

to be bananas. There's a bunch of OpenAI news. I know people want us to talk about Fox Media's deal with OpenAI, which I will, to whatever extent that is interesting. Then we've got a lightning round. Unsponsored. For now. Sam.

But there's one piece of news that I think dominates the week. Yeah, you definitely think it dominates the week. And that is, The verge has received a review unit of the Sony Field 7 ULT speaker. It's enormous.

This is a medium-sized one. If you're not watching this on YouTube, just imagine Nelai pulled a grenade launcher out from underneath the table. I love it so much. It's $3.99. And as many of you know, I think the Internet has eras. And I think technology has eras. We've talked a lot about the end of the Google search era on the Internet, what that might mean. perhaps we're at the dawn of the AI era.

Certainly we were in the mobile era for quite a long time, the social era. This is the ULT era. And what I mean by that is if the 80s were dominated by megabase and the 90s were dominated by megabase, I would say that the 20s, the 2000s, kind of a stumble through Sony's extra base era. Yeah, it wasn't pleasant. You know, it didn't hit. We're now in what Sony has called the ULT era. Ooh, I like these handles.

That's what the button says on it right here, ULT. There's a ULT button? Wait, that changes everything. It lights up. I'm just going to turn this guy on here. It's so big. There we go. In fact, can't see Neli through the speaker.

I'm told that if I hold this play button down for five seconds, we get royalty-free demo music. You hear that, YouTube? Royalty-free. And you guys can't see the lights, but they're there. There she goes. Now, I don't know if you can see the amount of the speaker that's currently lit up, but it's both drivers. And then on the front, the ULT button is rainbow blinking.

And when you push that, you get massive bass, ultimate vibe. This is the most important product in technology. Do you think if you press the ULT button right now, don't podcast would explode? Let's find out. Wait, gotta wait for the drop to come back. Is this English? It's Simlish. Oh, there's another song.

Oh, yeah. Oh, got so much quieter when I pushed the ULT button. Is it just, it just makes little drum hits when you push the ULT? Can you hear that? It's like a timpani. I don't know, man. Like, I'm trying to sell this and it's not going great. The handles are great.

We're turning into QVC or TikTok. This is on our TikTok store right now for $400. It won't burn down your house. That we know of. Anyway, look, all I'm saying is we went from the megabase era to the extra base era, which, again, I think was a failure. I don't... I mean, the ULT era is not bump in so far. I mean, the first song is good.

Extra is not more than mega. And so what happened is in the mega era, everybody went deaf. and so couldn't hear the extra era. But now we have ultimate, which all the deaf people in their 40s can hear now. So it's back. Look, it has powerful sound

with an X-balanced speaker unit and 30 hours of battery life. If it doesn't make the windows rattle, though, is it really big? I just think it's funny when you try to make a spec sheet for a product that is insane and you're just like

RGB lights next to a bullet point. Look, it's the ULT era. I've never been more excited about a product in my entire life. That's the Vergecast, everybody. People have been wondering about when we're going to give a 10 out of 10, and I think it might be happening. It might be time. By the way, this is the medium-sized one.

This is the 7. There's also a 10. I cannot wait for that one to arrive. They also sent us two 7s. Chris Welch just has one in his house, taking it most of his home. All right. There's a lot of news this week. A lot of it is about AI and what it is doing to the Internet.

If you've been listening to our show or reading The Verge or listening to a code or whatever, you know that we've had a thesis for a while now, stretching back into the middle of last year that the internet was about to get flipped over, not just by AI, but by search in general, by social platforms falling apart. I don't know if you're aware they changed the name from Twitter to X. Something's happening. Yeah. And one thing that we really wanted to do was pay a lot of.

of attention to what things were like now so we could properly describe how they changed, which meant we did a lot of SEO coverage last year, covered the culture of SEO, the community of SEO, why the web looks like an SEO disaster, how Google fights back against SEO. Mia Sato did a lot of that reporting for us. I think I've radicalized her. Like, you make someone care about SEO for eight months. They come out a different person on the other side. But Mia isn't a great job of that reporting.

We had a great feature from Amanda Chicago-Lewis, the S-EGarck. SEO community is still mad about that featured an alligator party. We'll link all this stuff. You can read it. The point I'm trying to make is we felt like it was changing. I think that hunch was correct, right? Yeah, I mean, Google kind of sucks now. I'm using coggy. So Google sucks now. Right. There's other search products. Google's rolling out AI overviews. And then over the long weekend, a bunch of SEO people discovered that the API documentation for Google Search had been inadvertently made public on GitHub for quite some time. And there were a couple blog posts, one that was just like, here's how I found it, here's you showed it to me, that one's really interesting. And then there's another one that's more of a deep dive into.

Here's what it says. And then there was a little bit of back and forth about, is this real? Like, can we trust what we're seeing? Because some of what the documentation revealed is that Google has not been telling the whole truth about how search works for a very, very long time. And so some of the headlines in these posts are like, is Google lying to us? And some of the copy in these posts is like, Google has been lying to us. Google was initially just totally dead silent, which is weird. Like, usually we at least got a no comment.

But Mia sent a bunch of emails. We sent some texts. Hey, is there anything? Do you want to deny that this is real? Dead silence. Then yesterday, Wednesday, Google confirmed the leaks. They said, this is real. And they said, we would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about search based on out-of-contextotator and complete information.

Basically, they're saying, yeah, this is real, but it's not super real. It's a lot. David, you have been covering search and how it works and thinking about it, you use the most browsers and search engines of anyone I know. there's some real explosive information here, but it's still not clear how much we should take seriously and how much Google is lying. It's just a lot of angry people are suddenly like, oh, this is what I've been angry about. Yeah, it's a weird moment because Google search has always been a black box. Google has very deliberately not revealed how Google search works and what it cares about, in part because it's so complicated that it's actually a hard.

borderline impossible thing to sit down and explain to somebody why something is where it is in search results. Like I don't think any individual person at Google knows the answer to that question. It's just not how the system works anymore. But also because the more Google reveals about how search works, the more tools it is giving people with which to game Google search, which has been the cat and mouse game they've been playing forever. And so what has been happening is people have been asking Google what is going on.

on what systems and rankings does Google care about? What can I do to make my stuff rank higher in Google search? And Google has given a lot of answers that these 2,500 pages of internal API documents say are essentially not true. Like, there are a series of things that Google has in these documents that it has explicitly said out loud, it does not consider in search ranking.

Are those two statements completely mutually exclusive? No, which is why this gets so weird, right? Like there are, I forget the exact number, but it was right around 14,000 individual things referenced in these pages, which is basically like 14,000 different signals. How those are ranked, which matter more, which matter less, whether they're all even counted, how old this information is what some of the terms actually mean. Very hard to know because a lot of them are terms we've never seen before that Google has been saying for years didn't exist. but what seems to be true is you don't have a heading in your API for a thing that you don't care about. And so for things that Google has for years said that it doesn't care about, there is now evidence that it is at least a piece of data that Google collects. And one of the wild things is that people who do SEO spend a lot of time testing theories.

And they've been testing theories. And people like the guy who broke the story, Ran Fishkin, have gotten crap from people. people in the community for running tests and saying things like, oh, it seems like Google search really cares about click-through rates. And people at Google saying, no, no, no, no, no, we don't care about click-through rates. You're an idiot. And this overwhelmingly makes it look like Google cares an awful lot about click-through rates. And so now we're in this place where I think a big part of what we've been seeing from the

SEO community is people who are like, oh, not only has Google not been telling us the truth, they've been lying to our faces and making it, like, gaslighting us into believing the wrong thing about how Google search works. And it's a weird, like, existential crisis when that happens. And the thing I'll just, like, try to chain together is we started paying attention to this story last year because we wanted to know what this ecosystem was like. Right. Like, we wanted a picture of maybe, like, the last days of disco, right? Like, here's what it was like before the comet hits.

And I thought the comet would be AI or the end of social networks or Google keeping more traffic inside a feature, whatever the comet is. And it kind of feels like the comment is actually just knowing that Google wasn't telling the whole truth. Right? Like the headings in these blog posts, like legitimately there's a trade publication called Search Engine Land that we've been watching a lot of the coverage of this on that site. It's one of the bigger SEO trade publications to exist. And the headings are like, how does SEO move on from here? One of the subheadings in their piece where they run the Google statement was, did Google lie to us? That's just a subhead.

That's just a straight H2 on their story. Which, by the way, people do in order to be ranked higher in Google. You put questions people might Google in an H2. I'm serious, right? And that is like push this all the way down. And it's like, what's inside this document is how the internet works. Right? Like, people have built the internet to try to figure out how to game the stuff that is inside these 2,500 pages.

And like, you can reverse engineer the internet out of Google's API, which I think is why this feels so huge. Like, your point about the Facebook algorithm that you've been saying all week, like this is on the order. of leaking the Facebook algorithm. Like, it is. And in the way that understanding the Facebook algorithm would essentially help us understand a decade of our online relationships, like, this is the internet in 2,500 pages of like weird and scrutable API calls. And I think that's hard for people who aren't in the SEO business or our business,

which is kind of the SEO business, to fully wrap their hands. We make websites. If you make a website, you care about this a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we have to, right? Like, it's required. I edit buying guides.

I have to care a lot about SEO. And people who don't care about SEO, they, like, I go and I tell my friends, I'm like, this huge document, like, cash of documents dropped. This is huge. And they're like, why are you, what is SEO? Elon Musk says, I'm going to open source the Twitter algorithm, and this is front page news. The API calls, or fields, basically, of what data Google collects to run a ranking algorithm leaks. And it's like us, like freaking out. Yeah.

And it's kind of nowhere. And to David's point, we don't know how these things are ranked. That's true. But we do know that Google has said for years it does not collect some of this data or care about some of this data, and it definitely does. What are you going to do with that? Rand, Fishkin, the same person you mentioned, David, has spent a long time saying it seems like this thing called dwell time is important. So you click through a Google result. You land on a website.

You're there for however long you come back to Google, you go to the next one. That time you spend on the website. He's like, that seems important. And Google has basically said no. Yep, they're tracking that too. Yeah. The one that I think is the most explosive, which we don't really know how to understand, is click data from Chrome. And it's there somewhere, right?

So one thing we know that Google does, which is a little shaky, is when you search for a website, I think the example that came out in one of the antitrust trials was Vogue or Cosmopolitan. There was some magazine like this. Yeah, it was one of those, yeah. And you get the website and right below it in the search result, you get their headings like beauty, fashion, style coverage, MetGala. Those headings are generated by what people click on in those websites in Chrome. Yeah. And Google has forever said it does not use data from Chrome to impact search.

And then you look at these API talks. You're like, oh, it's in there. There's data from Chrome. Like it's potential that Google is actually using that for search. And they have sworn up and down to every regular. to every SEO professional, to everyone, that these things are not the same. What are you going to do with that? It's such a funny example, too, because, like, of course Google does that.

Like, this to me, so much of this leak is things that you would obviously assume Google is doing, except that Google has been denying doing it for years that it turns out, in fact, Google is doing. Like, I'm in the business of knowing which links are good, and I also run a browser in which billions of people click links every day. Like, at some point, you'd be insane not to let one affect the other. You have maybe the best possible data stream, which is the links that people go to and how long they spend there, which is literally, that is all you could ever want to know in search rankings.

And so the idea that they are spread apart and not, you know, in any way correlated out of the goodness of Google's heart, I think has always been sort of silly to people. And so to some extent, it's like it just confirms what your instincts tell you in a lot of this league. Yeah, I keep going back to Nealai earlier. You said this was kind of like a comet hitting. And I feel like it's definitely a comment for the SEO community. But for the rest of us, we've kind of been in more like high waters rising as apocalypse is going to, right? Like the Google, the Google experience for 90% of people has just been like, okay, the sea levels are rising now.

And it feels like this was maybe that big push in the water. Oh, now it's covering Manhattan's. Dang it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it does feel like the dam is breaking. One of the things that we were talking about when we did our decoder episode recently about Google Zero was the stuff leaks because people are mad. Yeah. And so if you were an SEO operator and you uncovered a bunch of secret data that Google was collecting, you would not tell the SEO community.

Right? You would definitely keep that to yourself. but inside what's happening is people are mad and they're like, look at all these lies. Or look at what we perceive to be lies. Yeah. And there's just a lot of the ideas that people have had about how Google Search works. One of them is domain authority. So a very funny thing that happens is every year I publish Best Printer, 2004, buy a Brother Liser Printer.

And it goes to the top of the rankings. It goes to the top of the search rankings. One, because I have the right answer, which is you should buy a brother laser printer and never think about it. Two, because I'm the best person to write about printers in world history. No one else has written a better printer post than me. I'm sorry, that's just the truth. Certainly. These two can try.

And I don't mean that because there's not better writers than me. I mean, those writers are not wasting their time. They have better things to do. Right. You are the perfect, the perfect middle of good at your job and also interested in printer posts that has ever existed. The whole staff is better at this than me. I just, they won't do it. Yeah.

That's fine. And then everyone tweets it and shares it and people write about it because it's a joke and it's funny and it's at the top of the list. And then the SEO community says things like, the verge is just taking advantage of their domain authority. Which, yeah, that's true. That's totally what we're doing. And then Google's like, we don't have domain authority. That's not a thing we keep track of. And then you look at the thing and they track something called site authority.

And it's that dynamic. Which is just domain authority. Yeah. Right. It's just that dynamic, which is like, okay. We understand that you don't want people to game search. We have been very critical of SEO forms at game search. Again, Decoder this week is just about people gaming search and putting small businesses out of business.

But if you're not honest, right? Then if you deny the things are happening, then the backlash is really strong. The example I keep thinking about is what if every Instagram influencer woke up today and was like, Instagram has been lying to us for a decade. Like, how'd that go for that platform? Adam Messeri just like immediately, like, hey guys. He's not making it better.

I'm here with a video on why the lies were worth it. Yeah, exactly. Now I've got to go to the Met Gallag. Yeah, I mean, kind of. My glasses are getting more expensive every day. And they look fabulous. They're very good. What would happen if every YouTuber?

I always joke that every YouTuber gets their wings when they make the video about how they're my head at YouTube. What happened if every YouTuber was like they've been lying to us for a decade? That's where Google is landing with the web with these leaks. We're going to have a lot more coverage of them. Now that we know they're real, we're going to pull them apart. We're going to talk to some experts. I have people from other companies in my inbox saying things like, if some of this is real, then Chrome is essentially spyware.

Right? I mean, it sounds like last week we were having this whole conversation about co-pilot and how everybody, everybody was very upset because they felt like co-pilot plus PCs, all the stuff that Microsoft is doing, it was horrible. And it was essentially key loggers. And it's like, okay, well, now we basically have confirmation that Chrome is a key logger. Well, we, right? Right. There's like a field.

Yeah. It's like if you were to make a spreadsheet and one of the things in spreadsheet would be like my friend's bank account numbers and you're like, but I never filled it in. Yeah. I just kind of wanted in case someone told me their bank account number. Sure. I do that all the time. Yeah. People, my friends have gone out with on dates. Like, I just keep, maybe. Maybe that's a page I want to have in my notebook, right?

Again, I would encourage anyone who is alarmed by this to go to your Chrome history, think about all the cookies that you have. I mean, like, of course it's a key. Like, what the hell is a browser, if not a key logger? That's literally its job is to know all the links that you've been to and all the things that you typed inside of them. And I think to some extent, again, I just keep coming back to this idea that like Google is going to say, okay, we run a search engine. Wouldn't it be cool if we knew all the links people would go to when they weren't on Google? And then somebody on Chrome is like, what if we just built an awesome browser?

And they just, it would be the most like, have you met Google thing in history? And to be fair, if any company could accidentally keep those two things apart, it is Google. But like just strategically, it would be absurd for Google to do this and not actually can. connect those dots together. Right. Again, and I think from some of the antitrust trials, David, you covered some of them. Google's been pretty open. Like, our engineers wanted a bunch of click data to make the search engine better.

So we gave Apple $20 billion. Right. Okay, well, a bunch of people run Windows. We don't have to pay Microsoft. We just have to make a browser and put it on there. And now we run the biggest browser in the world and we get all the clicks. Like, that is exactly what you would do. Yeah, I think the thing is what's different here is that everybody should understand.

this, right? Like, I understand that Google is reading my emails because I signed up for Gmail in like 2004, 2005. That was part of the deal. You know, it reads my email is to deliver me ads. So I understand that. Most people don't. And a lot of times they have these moments when stuff like this happens where it's like, oh, shit, they have so much more information about me than I ever thought they did. And it's just this moment for a lot of people where it's just like, oh, I didn't, I never intellectualize this. I never like fully comprehended how much these companies. have about me. Yeah. And then on the flip side, you have people who are trying to build businesses saying, hey, it looks like you are doing this. And Google's saying, no. Yeah. And just flat out lying to them in a way that's like, you know, I don't think Google has

any interest in rebuilding trust with the SEO people. Actually, one of the funniest things about this is that it's such an antagonistic relationship. I often make the comparison to platforms. Like, I think the web is essentially Google's platform. And certainly a lot of these businesses are building their businesses. on the platform known as Google Search, not the web. Right.

They're search-dependent businesses. And Google does not have like warm and fuzzy platform creator relationships with these folks. Like Adam is like, I'm going to sit down with creators. Like, look at all these great creators. He's got a great sweater on. Right. Neil Mohan, who runs YouTube, loves a creator breakfast. Yeah.

Right? Like every platform that depends on creators has that relationship that extracts more value than it pays them. that's life and platform world. They try to mollify the creators all the time. Google does not try to mollify website owners. No. Because, I mean, at this point, the internet is reliant on Google. And what Google says is, hey, run our ads on your site and you can have some money.

Does that seem good? But what I think is so interesting about this is like the YouTube, the sort of social platform example is really interesting. Because what those companies, by and large, have done is be inscrutable on purpose, right? Like you look at Adam Aseri responding to people who are like, why didn't I post do numbers? Why is this one working and this one not working? And they never really answer the question except to say, you know, do good work and keep posting and whatever. And so what you see is like the people who are successful on these platforms are the ones who are constantly running experiments in public. Like do you remember Mr. Beast's whole thing where he's like, if I have my mouth open in the thumbnail, it gets more clicks?

Like YouTube didn't tell him that. These are the experiments he's running in public. What Google has done that is so wild is it's as if Neil Mohan called Mr. Beast and said, shut your mouth, it doesn't help. And instead, so it's like, okay, it's one thing to not be told the rules of the game and figure them out for yourself. I actually think that relationship is like odd, but fine, right? And it's like here is a black box. It's your job to figure it out.

That is sort of the internet we live on. but for Google to have spent this long denying the existence of what people are finding on their own and sort of making people question what they're finding with their own two hands in front of their own two eyes is just wild. And again, we should say there is a lot about how all of this works that we still don't know.

I think a lot of it is going to start to come out very fast because there are a lot of people who do these experiments who are now armed with a tremendous amount of new data. And so I think we're going to learn a lot about how Google works really, really quickly now. But it just feels so weird to hear the people who do this for a living be like, yeah, I've been asking these questions and being publicly lied to about how my job works for a decade. That just feels crazy.

Also, we should note there are pending antitrust lawsuits against Google and lots and lots of regulators around the world who have been asking the same questions and getting the same kind of answers. Which is another place, a lot of this information is coming from, by the way. There was this thing called Nav Boost that came up a bunch in the API, which talks a lot about how click-through. rate and the stuff you're talking about, like the long and short clicks, whether you come back very quickly from a search result or stay on the page a while, all of that is part of a system Google has called Nav Boost that came up in the antitrust trial and made some noise where it's like, okay, this is actually overriding a lot of our other rankings is what you do once you interact with a search result. And that is very different from what Google has told

people. Yeah, actually, my favorite part of all this, my favorite thing, because it's such a good name. Let's be honest. How do you get me? You give something an adorable name. Google has spent years positioning search as a utility, right? Not as a business that they run, but as the water or electricity of the internet. It's just a neutral utility. You just use it. And we don't have any ideas about it. It's just we set the robots to crawl the internet and they're just a baby. Yeah, they just find the stuff and they show it to you. And when you try to cover search as anything other than a utility, the attitude from Google is like, why would you do that? We want to teach people how search works.

And we're like, no, there's like a culture of search, like the same way that there's a culture of TikTok, right? And that's been a disconnect. But they have done that on purpose, right? Because if you treat something like a utility or a neutral algorithm or just the right answer that the Google brilliance of page rank has discovered across the web, then maybe you don't poke at it too much. And inside these documents, we find things like Nav Boost as part of a system.

that is called twiddlers. Yeah. Twiddlers. And the way to think about it is like the big Google algorithm is like the back end. And right before it displays your result, the twiddlers show up. And they twiddler. We just twiddler. And so Nav Boost is a twiddler.

It's like categorized as a twiddler. It's like we went and found some other stuff and we're just going to shuffle that around a little bit. And there's a bunch of those. And like lots of Google systems are built as twiddlers. So they have plausible denials. that the core search ranking algorithm doesn't take these factors in. But right before they show them to you. Just a little twiddler.

Twiddlers, baby. And it's like, I'm not that stupid. You know, it's like it's one system that displays a search result at the end, where it happens. Like, I don't think they can run around being like, we were always telling the truth. Yeah. These twiddlers are out of control. Right. They have no control over it.

They're just a baby. It's my favorite thing that everybody does now when they screw up. They just go, I'm just a baby. I don't know. It's my first day running search. Who can say? Anyhow, we are going to learn a lot more about this. We often try not to oversell things.

I'm just telling you the web, the people who make the web are aflame because of these documents. Because they do make Google seem, if not outright, a liar, as though they have been socially engineering a community of people who make things into not believing what they see, as David is saying. And I think the backlash there is going to be ferocious, especially as search traffic declines, especially as user behavior changes around AI, especially as the AI results continue to tell people to eat glue. Like, there's not a lot of trust left in this ecosystem. And to me, it's weird that there's not more coverage of it.

It's not as sexy as the Facebook algorithm or Elon saying is an open source to Twitter algorithm. But like David said, this is the architecture of the internet. Yeah, I think it is because that's why it's so hard for people. It is so ingrained in how most people function that it's shocking to them to a point where it's like, I can't even process this stuff to go. Like most people I don't think fully grasp how much the Google, and most people don't fully grasp how much Google affects their online experience. They just don't. They know it, they see it and everything, but it's just like just gloss over it. And now it's like, oh, we're having to actually reckon with this and think about this.

Yeah, it's why I always like to talk about cooking websites. Because if you want the, if you want the single cleanest example of how Google changes the way a web page works, go read a recipe site. You will see everything you need to see. You will see the H2s, which Google wants because there are going to be questions that people might be Googling. You're going to see the jump to recipe thing, but then you're also going to see 2,000 words of nonsense about their lives because you have to.

actually stay on the page a long time in order for Google to believe that that's a successful search. They want images. That's very important to Google. Like every single pixel of that page right down to how the recipe is structured is made for Google. And anyone who runs a food blog will tell you that the fundamental tension is like, I did this because I like food and I actually work for Google. And that feels crappy to a lot of people. And now Google's going to take that stuff and show the recipes to people in AI. Right. But I do think one more thought on this that I've been seeing a lot of increasingly in the SEO world, and I think is a really interesting, like, internet question is one way to read a lot of what we've seen in these leaks is that SEO is

dead and no longer will work. Like, I copied this one paragraph out from the thing that Rand wrote. He said, Google no longer rewards scrappy, clever SEO savvy operators who know all the right tricks. They reward established brands, search measurable forms of popularity, and establishes domain is that searchers already know and click. From 1998 to 2018 or so, one could reasonably start a powerful marketing

flywheel with SEO for Google. In 2024, I don't think that's realistic, at least not on the English language web in competitive sectors. There is a real defeatism to the idea that Google cares a lot about the sites that already exist, the places people already go, what has been

going on for a long time, and the idea that you can come and be new and good and smart and people will find you because that's how Google works, is a dying theory. Yeah. I asked this question to a lot of just media people, website, CEOs, and Decoder. I asked this question at Sundar.

Why would anyone make a website? You're a new creator. We're all going to quit our jobs at AOL, which you should do. Can't recommend it enough. Best decision I've ever made. I don't plan on doing it. You should go get a job at AOL just to quit. But that's how we found out of the verge.

We all worked at Engadgett, just 2010, 2011. We had this idea for the verge. We all quit. We're going to start anything. We started a website, like a big desktop website. We didn't even have a mobile site. We started a big, hairy desktop website with like forums and features and all this stuff. And then the mobile web came and we shrunk down the thing and whatever.

But it was never a question that we would start anything but a website. There were 12 of us. We had a big idea. We wanted to do a thing. What we were going to do was start a website. I think if you get to that place in 2024, maybe some people are going to start a substack. I don't think they think of those things as websites. Those are newsletters or independent newsletter on Ghost or whatever.

Mostly what they're going to do is start YouTube channels and TikTok channels. Yeah, the only people I see who are kind of doing that sort of thing, like, right, leaving their jobs, whatever, and being like, I'm going to start a website are already established brands, right? Yeah. Like the folks who are over at Ketaku 404, who were from Vice, these folks just said, I'm going to go and I'm going to start a new thing. and they all take that model from Deadspin that became defector. And that works, but that is... You have to have an audience already. That worked because they have that audience, right?

Like, most people don't have that audience and don't have that scale. And I think Casey's written about that a lot of, like, he has to work to get platformer out. He has to, like, really put in the effort because scale is hard, and it's much, much harder now because of Google. Yeah. And those sites are all great. I don't think they, like, 4-4 is on Ghost. Yeah. Right.

So they're taking advantage of some infrastructure for newsletter that exists that lets them be a different kind of thing. But the idea that, like, we coded our website from scratch. You wouldn't do that. We're going to, like, build a product that is a website. I didn't do it. Yeah. But, you know, you wouldn't do that in 2024. It was just not a good investment in 2024 for the reason David is saying.

Yeah. And there's, you know, many things have changed in the past 13 years. But the idea that the new creator, on the internet will not go to the open web, but instead will go to a closed video platform, I think is very dangerous. And I don't know the right answer to get people back to making open searchable web properties.

If the biggest search engine is like, screw it, like Hearst. We'll just, everyone can go read. Dot dash Meredith. Like, whatever. You know, like, maybe that's the right outcome and maybe that's just the closing of the web. But again, the reason we started covering it last year because I was like, oh, the comment's coming.

And the more we covered it, we're like, oh, the comment's coming. Like, we should capture this moment. And it feels like, again, I thought the comment would be, I thought, I did not expect it to be like, everyone is this mad. And it just feels like, we'll see how it goes. We're going to cover a lot more of it. I think the other browser makers, regulators, there's just a flood of negative emotion about how Google has behaved. That it might, it feels like it's coming to a head. I do have one question for you guys, especially you, David, because you use a lot of different search engines.

Are any of them good? Like, do any of them, when you go and you search something, actually give you those unique results that used to be like, ooh, yeah. Now I know what I'm doing on this search engine? Yes and no. Kagi, which is the one you mentioned, which is also what I use. It's 10 bucks a month. It's excellent. I cannot recommend it enough.

Paying for a search engine feels ridiculous, but it's worth it. has a thing that it calls small web where it actually deliberately built a like crowdsource database of sites that aren't the verge and aren't like big mainstream news sites the kind that dominate search results, but are like people's blogs

and little alternative news sites and local newspapers and all the kinds of cool stuff and you can you can toggle the search just to that. And I think the sort of big omnibus search is never coming back. from what it is now. It's just interface changes, really. Like, I think Kagi's stuff is better than Google,

but mostly just because it's a nicer thing to use than Google is at this moment. Especially an arc. Yeah, but where we are now is, like, the only solution is going to be to artificially decide which part of the web you want to look at, because all of the signals for the rest of the web are starting to break away from that, like,

find and explore new things, vibe, because that's harder to do and harder to measure than, oh, people generally believe that Neli is right

about which printer to buy. And that's actually like a pretty easy thing for a search engine to believe and send you to over and over again. Yeah. And we will continue

ruthlessly using our domain authority. We will. I love it. To break big printer. David, I can't remember as you said this. Casey might have said it to me in passing. We used to think of

surfing the web is a fun thing to do. And all of Google's messaging at I.O. was let Google do the Googling for you. Yeah. Which makes it seem like work. And it's like, no, this is how I wasted time. Do you know how much I didn't pay attention in law school? Because I was just browsing the web in class.

Like, it's weird that we've made the web this unpleasant and the platforms figured it out. And hopefully we can get some of that back. I don't know if we can. We're going to keep running a website. We do have a TikTok for as long as TikTok All right, we're going to keep using our domain authority to crush big printer. Hell yes.

Just ruthless. Ruthless domain authority abuse. But that's our mission here at the bridge. We've got to take a break. We'll get back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question.

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interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free

at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. It's Lightning Round 1, according to our rundown. The AI Lightning Round. So there's a bunch of WWC rumors about what's going to happen with OpenAI. They've apparently inked their deal.

Google had a bad week last week. We should talk about that. More Google. GBT's are open now with Open AI store. There's a lot. But I know people want us to talk about our press release, Fox Media's press release, which is that, like many media companies, Vox Media signed a content in technology deal with Open AI.

The Atlantic had one on the same day. It was like Fox Media, Atlantic. We're in the headlines together. I know, David. You were on, you interview me. Yeah, so, okay. I think the big question to me is both, how do we feel as people who work at a company with a deal like this?

And what is this, what does all this mean about the media in general? So I think, like, we just had a conversation earlier with a bunch of the folks in our newsroom talking about this stuff. And I think I want to know for you as somebody who runs. a newsroom, you didn't make this deal. You, I assume, will at some point see the contract because you'd like yelling about contracts. I don't think that's the thing you do from time of time of time. I sincerely doubt that is true. I'll do my best. It is more likely that I will see someone else's contract before I see our own companies. Oh, that's interesting. That's a,

that's a fun reporting tactic. Can I, can I bully my boss before I can bully somebody else? That's good. Our company is very good at being like, no, you can't just report on our own company. Other companies are like, here's the stuff. Like, that's just the way of being a reporter. Yeah, that's fair. But so I am curious for you as like a newsroom leader, how you even think through what a deal like this means. Sure. We do a lot of disclosures on this show.

Famously, I think. I've had journalism professors talk to me about the fact that our disclosures are a running joke with the audience. Like, we want to be really transparent about where information. comes from reasons to not trust us if you don't want to trust us. My goal is always to just empower the audience with information. That's the top level. So, like, if you're listening to this and you've listened to the show, that's why we do the disclosures. That's why they're a joke.

Like, I want the only currency we have as a news organization is trust. So we're trying to, that's why we have the background policy. All the spokespeople have to use their names when they talk to us because we don't want to pretend we know something. that they just told us. If Google or Apple or Microsoft or whoever wants to talk to us and get some information on our pages, they need to be accountable for it, not us. And that's just trust. Who are you going to trust?

Where does it trust go? Who do you have to trust to believe this story? So that's the top level. Right next to that, which I think the audience doesn't see as much, because why would you, is our newsroom has to not think about it. Like, that's actually what independence is. Right. It's not, I know that our company has a deal or an investor and I'm just going to, like, I'm going to think about it as I write the story.

The goal is they don't think about it at all. Right. And we just go do the reporting and we publish what is true or what we believe or what we think people should know, right? And that in any traditional newsroom, that's what is called the firewall. Right. So we do stuff, our sales team, there's advertising. We just came back from an ad break. Right?

But we don't know what the ads are. I don't know what ads just played. I get so many emails with the crypto ads. I don't know, man. I think crypto's stupid as shit. What do you want me to do? That's that team. And if we open the door and start telling that team what to do, the danger, and this is a

danger that is proven out over and over again in newsrooms around the world. If we open the door and start telling them what to do, they're like, hey, that door's open. We're going to start telling you what to do. So we just keep the door closed. This is why you have the firewall. It works in both directions. So for me, and I understand Open Eye in particular,

it's pretty shady company. I feel like our entire episode last week was like this company is pretty shady. We're going to talk about Sam Alton. I was like, I'm just waiting. Like, whatever. Fine. But like that's the commercial side of our company. And I understand, like I've talked to a lot of media executives.

Like I'm running around and covering Google Zero. I've been talking to a lot of media people lately. And I can talk about that bigger question, David, of like, are these good deals? Are these like a good idea broadly? because I think I've done some reporting. I have some thoughts about that. But the thing that, like, when our press release went out of it, like, no, we're not going

to change our recovery opening. Yes, I think when it's appropriate, we'll disclose it. It's not like a, like Comcast is an investor in our company. Right. Like, we disclose it every time we whisper about Comcast because they're an investor. This is a licensing deal. Like, we have a lot of those across our company. I don't want to just get into a situation where I'm like, disclosure.

Yahoo licenses and RSS feed of the Dodo. Like, what do you want? Like, I think that door can get too open. We can overread it. So we're just going. It would go a little long. It would go a little long. And I want to preserve our independence.

And what independence really means to me is, yes, will this close it? Yes, we'll earn everyone's trust. But I would prefer it if we were just covering open AI without thinking about it. And so that's the balance I'm trying to strike. I'm open to people's thoughts about how much you need from us to continue having that trust. But it is in many ways, like, more of a normal deal than people are expecting. Right. Like, when we did a Netflix show, I think there was less outcry.

But, like, I was the producer of a disclosure. I made a Netflix show. Every time. You should watch a Netflix show. David and I were going to make one just so that we did that disclosure. That was, like, way messier, right? Like, I'm going to meetings at Netflix about our show that I wasn't a lot to talk about until our show was made.

So I want to make sure we find the right balance. And I understand there's just a lot of feelings about AI and open AI in particular. But like at the end of the day, the goal for all of these media companies is to just get some control back out of a situation that felt out of control. And what situation is that? Well, they took everything anyway. Right. Right. That's the situation.

And we can talk about that broadly. I just want to separate the two things. Like our newsroom is independent. Open AI did not buy any control of our newsroom. We will be very honest with everybody when we think the disclosure would affect how you perceive one of our stories. And I think that, you know, around copyright law. Like, that makes sense to me. We're going to write a story about the New York Times lawsuit against Open AI.

That is a great place for disclosure. OpenAA launches a new GPT feature. Like, I don't know. You tell me. Maybe we need to do that every time. But like, I don't want to overread it as though. to make it seem like we're doing something we're not. So that's it.

That's like my top line. Like we will have a disclosure. I love a disclosure. Disclosure. Comcast is an investor in box media. I'm in an Netflix show. Disclosure. Alex Cranz is the last remaining Paramount Plus subscriber.

It's true. Hi. Look, I, this is our brand and we're going to do them. I just, the thing that I am trying to be careful about is separating how people feel about these deals broadly and what it means for our newsroom. Right. And what it means for our newsroom is the status quo. It is not changing. We are going to operate without fear or favor. And again, my goal is to earn everyone's trust by being as transparent as we can be. And I just want to make sure that we're not so transparent that we actually go in a full circle and no one believes us. So like, you tell me where you think the line is. I'm open to the feedback. I ask for it from our staff today. I'm asking for it from the audience today. But the main thing is not changing, which is I would prefer it. Our reporters were not worried about an opening ideal or thinking about it. And we just covered the company like we have been for a long time.

Yeah. And this is a thing we should say, like a thing I've learned about the media business over the years is that it's very unusual in the sense that like that tension you're describing between the work that we do and where the money comes from is like good and healthy and should always exist. And our editorial on sales team should always like hate each other a little bit. It's like a useful thing. But also like we have tech company ads all over our website. Like that is that is it's it's a not dissimilar thing and it is it is just something you have to navigate and get comfortable with and like people always like sending us the stuff where I will make a verge cast about how terrible Facebook is right before a Facebook ad like it's my favorite thing it's so fun but I do want to talk about the broader piece of this because I think the I think you're right that the reaction I saw out there was less like you know

oh let me say one more thing sure we're not going to start publishing a bunch of AI content Who? Hello? I think people see partnership and they're like AI content. Yeah. Yeah, I'm the only person who has put AI content on the website. Both posts were about printers. You just close.

I wish you people would get madder at me about it and make that post go even more viral. No one will do it. We will only use AI to ruin our domain authority in Google search. Yeah. I'm sure we're going to end up building some like there's one thing that all of us want, which is we would like better alt text on it. to make them more accessible, to make the site more accessible. We would like our site to be better for screen readers.

Right now, it's a lot of very manual work. If we can use some of these tools to make that better or make our site more accessible, that's a great outcome, right? I don't know if that's going to work. Right now, our creative team tells me, like, this all text is not good enough. AI, everybody. It's just not good enough yet. But if we can start to build that stuff, that's great. So there is that part of it, which I think is interesting.

I don't know what that looks like. I haven't talked to our product team about any of that stuff yet. any of that stuff yet. But the other part, where the verge is just the verge, that's going to remain exactly the same today as it was yesterday. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about the broader side of this, because I think there are two pieces of the should

media companies be making deals like this with OpenAI question that I find very interesting. We should talk about both of them. The first is, haven't you idiots learned your lesson from making these deals with companies like Facebook and Google and everybody else who promised you money to save journalism? and in fact forced you to do a bunch of stuff pulled out the rug and kind of screwed up the industry. The second is, aren't you guys, don't you realize that AI is out to put all of you out of jobs and just take your information, use it in training data, and then get rid of you,

why are you ushering in the journalism apocalypse? And I think to some extent those are like two versions of the same question, but I think are like the big picture things going on here? Like are we contributing to our own downfall or are we changing? chasing money at the expense of doing anything that is smart or long-term thinking. I mean, the media industry never does anything. Yeah, the media industry is not known for a really good business. This is mostly a vanity project.

A thing we have talked a lot about on this show is that we, the media industry as a whole, probably should have spent more time over the last decade building Facebook competitors than making Facebook videos. And I think, like, my hope is we have learned that lesson and that the next minute of the journalism industry will be learning that lesson and executing on it, which is, I think, part of why we're so excited about the Fediverse because it's a thing that opens up possibilities for new kinds of media products. Is there a fear that open AI and the, like, AI search engine stuff that is inevitably coming is just the next pivot to video and everybody falls for it and gives up on building new things for five more years? Yes. Okay. So here's, I just, I'm going to bracket our company because they did not talk to you.

Which is like, that's the firewall. Yeah. But Nick Thompson, who is the CEO of the Atlantic, has published a bunch about why the Atlantic did the deal. He made a video about it. You can go watch on LinkedIn. Nick used to be the editor-in-chief of wire. Dave used to work for Nick. I did.

I love Nick. Nick knows. He knows. Yeah, he gets it. Nick and I are friends. He knows. He understands what he's doing. Axel Springer has signed one of these deals.

The Financial Times has signed one of these deals. A lot of these companies are signing these deals. My understanding of the deals from the reporting, not from the digging around our company, but from the reporting is twofold. One, we just spent a whole bunch of time talking about Google. Google is a fair use argument, right? We're going to come and index all of your information. We're going to show it to people. In return, you'll get traffic.

And everyone said, it's a little. A little squeaky, but okay. And then Google won a bunch of cases against different media organizations that did not like this idea. Yeah. We're going to index every book in the world and show to people. And the book publishers are like, no, you're stealing our stuff. And Google won that case. Google, we're going to index all the images on the internet.

A bunch of porn publishers said, no, that's, we don't want you to do that. And they were not the most sympathetic defendants in the world. Google won that case. Google said, we're going to put every episode of South Park on YouTube. And Viacom said, no. And then they started posting episodes of South Park to YouTube on their own, and they lost that case. It was not a great legal strategy, but that's what they did. But that all of Google, that whole platform dynamic was, we're going to take your stuff and we're going to pay you.

And we'll get something, you'll pay you an exposure. Yeah. And that look around. So I think a lot of the reaction right now is, well, we cannot let that happen again. We need some rules. I think a problem for all these companies is that Open AI and Google and whoever else, anthropic, perplexity, you name it. They've all taken it anyway. Yeah.

Yeah. They have it. Lama scraped on the internet. Every Facebook video we've ever made is in Lama. Open AI built a tool to scrape YouTube for more data. Yeah. Like that's just how it's done. Yeah, I think, you know, absent our own company, I know nothing about the deal beyond.

We don't have to keep saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have one. There is. There is. There is. There is. There is.

There is. I think you're right where it's like it is a thing of everybody, it's already been taken. It's already gone. Everybody, the cat is out of the bag. Right? Genie's out of the bottle. Whatever euphemism you want to use there. It's happened.

And now it's, okay, what do we put a price on that? And a lot of these companies, we're starting to, we're starting to use. to hear more about the price there. We're starting to hear what it is. And that might not end up being the right price, right? Like these deals might not be the right deals, but they are deals. They are money where there wasn't money. I think a really interesting thing is how do you set the right price?

What is the value? They've already trained on it. What is the deal for now? One of the things that has come out about these deals, which are all, from what I understand, they're all basically the same structure. I think the News Corp deal is like $250 million over five or 10 years, right? Most of the other deals are $10 million over five to ten years, something like that. I mean, it's five.

The main thing that has come out about them is that they govern how much can be displayed, how the information is displayed, how it's attributed, what links are in it. And you look at that, and what I see is honestly a reaction to Google, which has gone from, we're linking to your stuff to, we're going to cut out your stuff and put it in featured snippets, to we're going to have our AI rewrite whatever and just show you the answer and never send you a click. And then you'll eat glue. And there's nothing you can do about it because we're indexing your website every single day. Right.

And there's nothing you can do about because there's no contract. Right. So what I have heard and what I see is like that control. And I think Nick, again, Nick Thompson at Formaner Irwired, who knows has been public about this and his announcement of the Atlantic. That control is the thing. Because if you go beyond that, you don't have to go invent some copyright argument. you have a breach of contract claim. And that's much easier to litigate.

The other thing that I see happening, all of the industry, and we made an entire decoder episode with Sarah Zhang and I, about how all of AI rests on a totally shaky copyright fair use argument that could blow up at any moment. Yeah. Like Open AI, your business could blow up at any moment because you have weird ideas about copyright law. No one can afford to litigate these ideas.

So the New York Times sued Open AI, someone famously. They've spent a million dollars in that lawsuit so far. public company, we just know the answer, to get nothing. They haven't achieved an outcome yet. They're just done the living. And they could lose. And they could lose. So that's a coin flip. New York Times big public company, they run a very successful video game service.

Maybe the most successful online game service of all is the New York Times. Wordhol just paying the bills for this lawsuit. Most many companies do not have just some cash cow cooking website or gaming service to fund a lawsuit about their journalism. And so I think they're all looking at the Times lawsuit. They're saying, well, this is going to take five years. This is going to take 10 years. It might go to the Supreme Court. They might lose.

Hopefully the Times wins. If they win, our contracts will expire right around then and we'll renegotiate with the strength of this copyright precedent. And if they lose, we'll just re-up our deal. Yeah. And I see that playing out as most media companies cannot afford to go litigate these deals. And importantly, importantly, no one can afford to sue Google. Yeah. Like, Google's got infinite.

money. And I know everyone's talking about Open Eye and whatever, just disclosure. Open AI has a content technology of Fox Media. I would just, we just spent that whole first segment about Google, which is the thing. It's the 800 pound grill. Everyone on the web operates in the universe of Google, including Open AI, right? Open AI has made Google dance to power on a Dallas quote. But they're still it. Like Google's the big profitable, ultra high margin company. and Open AI doesn't make a dollar as far as I understand, right? They're still losing money. So there's a difference there in how these companies are perceiving their antagonists.

And I think they can get Open AI to come to the table. And eventually what they're going to do is they're going to go to Google and they're going to say pay us. Your competitor is paying us. Our traffic is dropping. And if it continues to drop, we're going to let we're going to pull the plug on you indexing our website. And I don't know how long that's going to take. Maybe it will never happen because the threat. are effective. But you just see, that's where the trend line is headed. And then you'll see,

you'll only get the URL for buy this one printer, Niline Hotel recommends. I'll sell you one link, Google. But that's, that's broadly how I see the dynamic of this playing out is the copyright, I care a lot about copyright a lot. The copyright argument is so uncertain on both sides of the coin that people are trying to buy some certainty so that they have leverage to go negotiate against the real power in the ecosystem. That makes logical sense to me. I also think it might be wildly optimistic about

who is actually going to extract anything from Google. I like our media executives. I think they're brilliant. It should be clear. I think Nick is very smart. Most media executives are not like A players. Even the thesis is good, right? Like I buy the thesis as far as it goes. I just think

there is not a lot of evidence that says anyone can pick a fight with Google and win. Because we are in this moment, I mean, like, you keep harping about Google Zero. Like, when that happens, and people have nothing to lose by picking that fight with Google, they might start to pick that fight with Google.

Right now, if I just say, you can't crawl my website anymore, overwhelmingly I go straight out of business. Yep. That's what I mean. That's, this is what I'm saying. Like, the trend lines are headed. That trend is so slow.

It's so, so slow. It's slow and it isn't slow. I think for some publishers, it's super slow. For others, it's not, right? Yeah, and we'll see. If you're seeing shakiness in your Google results and you're seeing AI overviews, and you're like, maybe Google Zero is real. Or you're a mid-sized publisher, right?

Which are not getting these deals right now. It's all the big publishers are getting these deal. But somewhere down the road, the mid-sized publishers, I assume, will get the deal. Or we offered a deal or go ask for a deal. Who knows? At some point, right, the trend line of, our Google traffic is going down, our investment in caring about you is no longer worth it, and they're paying us money.

Like, I just, that is, it's a destabilizing factor in all these conversations where there have never been destabilizing factors for about a decade. Yeah. And so we'll just see, like, the last time this happens, this is the negative argument. I'll give everyone the negative argument. David wrote about this. He wrote about Google AMP at the beginning of last year, because I was like, we got to start with what Google has done to the web.

Google did AMP because Facebook showed up and said, do instant articles and put all of your articles directly into our platform. And they'll load really fast, I'm a native on the web, and we'll send a shitload of the audience to them. And Google freaked out and did AMP, and then all the publishers had do AMP. And this was a disaster. Just broadly, all the way around is disaster. And then Facebook was like, we hate news. And actually what we hate is text. All of you make videos.

And we're pivoted to video. This equal growing disaster. Amp turned out to be a huge mess and you couldn't do anything good. It actually spread misinformation because all the websites look the same. I can go on about this for days and days and days. Google is there again. Yep. They're afraid of something.

And so like the ripple effect of that I think is interesting. And I think what most of the publishers that I've talked to, what they're interested in is, can we make them not copy and start articles stamp, but copy payments for search? Because that's what they all want. One thing we haven't talked a lot about on the show is a bill in the United States. say it's called the JCPA, the journalism competition preservation act. It's funny, you would think that the publishers could all get together and say, we're going to pull our content from Google search. They have a lot of leverage. If they do it all together, you get a lot of leverage.

What's left? They can't, because that would be collusion under the antitrust laws. Which is incredible. So the JCPA is, I think it's a Klobuchar bill that would create an exemption for publishers to bargain with large, platforms, like over a billion in revenue. One of those numbers that, like, makes it Google and Facebook. Yeah. It's one of those ways they're saying Google and Facebook without saying Google and Facebook.

It would create an exception to antitrust law so that they could bargain as a unit against large platforms. Or they could just, like, rule that Google has built a monopoly. Yeah, there's a lot of that. There's just a lot of these ideas floating around about how you equalize the bargaining power. Anyway, I just see the bigger picture. which is the raw deal is real. Like people got burned super hard by the raw deal of the platforms, most of which were,

we'll give you some money with no contract that says where the money will come from, the Facebook news partnerships or the Google News initiatives. Or it was make a thing for us that we want, Facebook video. Or it was, we're going to take your stuff for free and pay you an exposure, which is Google Search. And what I see now is we have a contract. Yeah. Right.

We're just not doing this again. You're going to pay us money. We're going to tell you what you can take. And if you don't pay us enough money, we'll see you. And if you take too much, we'll see you. And that has a little bit of teeth. I don't know if it'll work. Again, I know a lot of media executives.

Alex used to work for some of the worst media executives. I sure. It's not like they're not all, this is not an industry that can see the long game. And it's an industry that's under pressure. So it might be making mistakes. But I see the difference here. I don't know if these are good ideas. I don't know if they feel great, right?

Like there's a lot of the response yesterday and to all these other deals is do these feel great? No. But I think I can identify the differences. And I think at least what I see is, well, they took the shit anyway. Some money is better than no money. And a lot of the deal for a long time was no money. That's definitely where I'm sitting. It's like some money is better than no money.

But also, one, I want to just point out, this is a lightning round. And we've been on Neely's LightningRoy. Sorry, sorry, sorry. For a while. And so I want to take over for my lightning round. Oh, yeah, okay. Which is also about Open AI. Of course it is.

Because I called it. I just, back when Open AI, there was the coup. A bunch of the board members were like, we don't like Sam. We're firing him. Everybody gathered around Sam was like, no, you are a baby. We love you. Come back. He's now back in charge.

More powerful than ever. Right? Like that's the reporting allegedly, like information just said open AI CEO cements control. So like that's happening. They started, they fired all the safety people or pushed him out. Yeah, they fired all the safety committee. And he's the head of the safety committee. Yeah.

That's a choice, Sam. But Helen Toner, who is one of those board members who voted to have him kicked off, kicked out. And then left because he won was on a podcast this week and was like, yeah, we just didn't trust him. Yeah. Like, he just was so consistently not telling us the truth. We just lost all trust in him. And that is really, really interesting to think about as he does cement more power, as he does get more powerful, as he does put himself in charge of safety at the company. And all of those people who were in charge of safety have left.

And as that company is still technically run by a nonprofit, that's whole job is to protect us all from AI. Like, oh, buddy. Yeah. That's not working for. Yeah. I'm actually, I'm curious, it's been like the Scarlett Johansson situation has not, there's been no new pieces of information. It's been pretty quiet on that front. Yeah.

That's not going to just end. No. Right? It ends with a settlement or a statement or an apology. Well, she's going to do a partnership with Open AI as well. Like, no. She has some great ideas for all texts. Yeah.

But like the backlash to AI in general, but I'll give you this little data point. I think there's a real gap in how people feel about the thing and then what people are doing. We've never gotten so many sort of like unhappy notes about a decoder episode is when we had the CEO of Adobe. We got some happy ones too. People want to hear from that guy. He doesn't give a lot of interviews. I asked him what he thought a photo was. He doesn't know.

But then we got a lot of people who are like screw this guy. Yeah. We just don't like Adobe. We don't like AI. Like they're ruining everything. His comments about AI are offensive. Weird. Weird.

There's real backlash to AI. There's some negativity. One thing he told me that episode was generative fill is used as much as layers. They launched this tool and it is used on the order of layers in photo, which is basically people open the app. Yeah. That's how you get layers. You open the app.

Like you open the app and then like people use it. And so there's a real gap. And I think Sam kind of embodies the gap. Yeah. Right. Which is he's just the face of boy, we're not being very careful with this. He's the face of I can do whatever I want because I'm so. Someone's going to call him the bad boy of AI soon.

I'm sorry. No, there's nothing about his demeanor that supports bad boy. I'm sorry. It's just not. It's coming. Don't worry. It's not going to happen. I'm sorry.

They're much better contenders for bad boy than Sam. But like he's the face of that gap. Yeah. Which is actually the revealed behavior of many people is that the tools are useful. They can be helpful. People like them. Like I'm the nation's foremost hand ringer of what is a photo. And I definitely use Generative Eraser in Lightroom yesterday.

For a family photo that I shared with no one. I would use it all that. AID noise in Lightroom. I think is magic. I've talked about it. It has re-contextualized how I think about some of my old cameras. Yeah, we talked about this earlier today, where I think a lot of people don't realize how many of the tools we actually use are already AI, right?

Like, Grammarly is using some sort of AI. Photoshop is all AI. And if you've been using Photoshop for the last 10 years, you've been using AI. Yeah, it's in their summer. But I think you're right where it's Sam Altman has become kind of this center point. And everybody's talking about him and they're talking about. Because they don't trust him. They don't trust him and they don't trust the kind of AI he's doing, which is very specific kind, right?

It's taking over your search. It's providing just easy generative content in a way that most AI tools that people use have a very specific purpose and are used for very specific things. And he's built the LIBOT. And, you know, Open-I had this incredibly Byzantine corporate structure was all meant to box in the bad things. You box in the LIBot and keep the LIBOT. Keep it safe and he's torn all that down. Yeah. And now Open AI, instead of being this weird nonprofit with a profit center that supports the nonprofit is, it feels like just Sam Altman's company.

Yeah. It's called Open AI. Like I would just, I would just point out like their whole thing was being the good guys for so, so, so long. And they made it so far on big promises of being the good guys and then just like on a dime turned and went the other way. Yeah. It's really wild. this has happened. Right. GPD 3.5 hit. They're like, oh, people like this. We're evil now. Just, it's like, they just put on their little evil helmets. So the interesting thing is they don't, again, they don't have any revenue. Right. Like this company is not wildly profitable. They might be on a path to it. You don't need. Revenue is not important. You've, you've been covering tech too long to know that to not realize that revenue is not important. As long as people will keep giving you money, you don't need revenue. Which is why I think they make all this noise about AGI. Yeah.

They're like, we built the future. People will keep giving you money. The number one, the funniest, like the GPT apps are at now, right? Yeah. For everybody. And I was just looking at the top one in Lifesty App. And I was like, oh, this is actually a perfect use case for AI. Yeah.

Like, you'd be like, I'll just make some shit up about your future. Yeah, we should talk about that. So WDC is coming up. There was some reporting this week that Apple has made the deal to sign with Open AI, that open AI will power this stuff. Interestingly, there's some back and forth about whether it will run locally on the phone, which would match Apple's privacy, promises, or go up to the cloud, which is fascinating, because more powerful.

More powerful, but where will it run? There's some reporting anything Mark German and Bloomberg reported that they're going to put M2 Ultras, or M3 Ultras in a data center and have a virtual black box for privacy. That works out every time. Who knows? It gives real, like, Beeper running Mac Mini. on your behalf vibes. Yeah.

And then you've got opening eye in the mix, which is like, where is this model going to run? Can it run on the M2 Ultra or M3 Ultra or whatever? I mean, no, you can't fit the thing on your phone.

I'm very confident that you cannot run GPT40 on your phone locally. Right, but can you court it to arm? Like, this thing right right now runs on Nvidia H-100s. A lot of them. Yeah.

Like a lot of them. And you know what two companies hate each other with the fury of a thousand burning suns. is Nvidia and Apple. Yep. But they're also two of the best people at making processors that can handle AI stuff.

Except for GPUs. One of them is really good at making GPU. The other one, the other one just took the training wheels off. I can play Crusader Kings on my laptop. So I'm just very curious about how all this will play out, because if you're going to run GPD4, there's a chance you're running it on a bunch of H-100s in a Microsoft data center,

which is a real weird place for Apple to be. Well, I thought German's piece this week about the deal was also kind of interesting because it seemed to be like they're not going to go full out with all the AI tools. What we're going to see from them at WWDC as far as AI goes is going to be a lot more Adobe-like than Scarlet-Jolian-Send voice-like. I don't think they're going to do chatbot. I think that is the right move. Yes. Oh, that's so fun. I totally disagree.

Really? I think they are going to go full hard with Siri. And I think that's the open AI play is just take the Siri you can talk to and plug it into GPT40 and instantly it's the best Siri has ever been. Then how you scale that down to like turning off Bluetooth, which is a thing that I can do on my phone that does not require the internet, is becomes a really interesting AI challenge. You just described like the promise of Bigsby. I mean, what I use Siri for almost exclusive. is playing music, adding reminders to the reminders app,

and setting timers. And none of those things require pinging GPT4-O. They just don't. But I think Apple, like everyone else, is going to have to convince investors that it has a chatbot play in order to survive,

not survive. But you know what I mean? Wall Street wants to see that you have some big, newfangled idea. And so they're going to do it because they feel like they have to. All the interesting AI stuff is going to be the on-device stuff. And that's the thing that we're already seeing Apple do well just by putting AI features into apps.

You're going to see a lot of it with photos. There's a lot of noise around AI-generated emoji. That's the kind of thing you don't really need OpenAI for that actually Apple has been working on for a long time. The only reason I can see that you would strike a deal like this with Open AI is if you want to blow out the like conversational aspect of things. Just lie so much in the face of Apple's security stuff. Yeah, but so does the Google deal. That's true. That's true.

But the Google deal, like, we didn't know the terms of the Google deal for years, right? And whereas this was a fairly public deal with Open AI really close. It's just been better reported on because OpenAI is the leakiest company in the history of the world. Just like just holes everywhere. By the way, it's only the M2 Ultra. Only. This was driving me crazy that I kept saying M3A3LTRA. They won't because they're on the M4 now, so I just assumed.

They just got a lot of M2 Ultras. They're like, is this as good as an H100? Open AI, tell us. I think Apple knows that the idea that behind is an external perception of the company, and they're watching companies kind of light their brands on fire, and they're just never going to do that. They are cautious to the extreme in that way. And I think this crush ad disaster for them, which was not even about AI.

It was an iPad. Yeah. That everyone decided was about AI. I think they saw that and they were like, no. Like we're going to do some stuff in photos and some stuff in emojis. Well, there's going to be stuff in search. I'm sure. Yeah, there's going to be like some like light dusting.

Remember last year where they're like the keyboard has AI in it now? And it's like this keyboard is dumb. Yeah. It's real bad. It's like still pretty bad. They're going to do that kind of thing. Yeah. And I think it might be everywhere.

They might announce more features. But that last turn where it's like, do you want to bang an iPad? I don't know if we're going to get there this time. I think they're very comfortable with the perception that they're quote behind because they're, I think they're watching Google. I think they're watching the reaction to their own advertising and saying this stuff is not ready and the culture around it is too negative. That is just my sense from, you know, just talking to folks. but I don't know if, I don't know what they're actually going to announce. I look forward to, we're going to be there live, and we're doing a podcast in Cupertino,

and I am going to spend a lot of time gloating on that show about how red I was, and I'm really looking forward to it. I really hope David's wrong just so I can gloat. I just, that's it. But I hope you're right for you spiritually, David. I just, I think if you're worried about the stock price of your company, and I know that they are, you look at what is happening at Microsoft

and you say, oh, we need something like that. And what they'll say is they'll make a lot of noise about, like, all the stuff you can do inside of apps, and then it will come around too. And also, it wants to be your best friend. Let's hang out.

Also serious horny now. Tim Cook will be like, whoo. Can you imagine, just imagine Tim Cook being like, Siri's warning now. Yeah. Just flirty with Siri.

I'd love it. Kevin Roos dead in the eyes. All right, we got to, this lightning around has ended up in strange places. But it's been a good one. We'll be right back. We have yet another unsponsored lightning round. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale,

it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. you got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, asset compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500.

And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things.

One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being concerned. progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people?

So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third. Like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin.

Complex and unprecedented. The Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus.

And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that. individual, they are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain, drops every weekday afternoon. How long is this episode now? Four hours?

We're going to talk about ourselves more for another hour. Three. We are currently at 81 minutes. All right. We got to bring this to a close. Lightning round style. I'm going to bring up the ULT Power 7 or whatever it's called. Is that your lightning round?

This is my lightning round. It's been more like a lot of lightning. God, this Sony logo is slightly holography. It looks kind of like, oh, you're like, oh, is it lit up? No. Holograms. Sometimes I remind people that the Averger's entire competitive differentiation is that we love gadgets. And I'm telling you, this is our entire competitive differentiation. Yeah, we both, we freaked out over it for a minute.

Me neither. Nobody's going to sponsor the lightning round if you just pick up a speaker and talk about how terrific it is every week. Get that money from Sony before you do that, man. Come on. I don't know how. There's a firewall between edit and sales. They keep telling me. that there's incoming lightning round.

I think all of our sponsors are going to be like a month late being like, remember that time, Neil, I got really weird with our speaker on air. Sony.

I wish I knew how. I think Sony will love your lightning round. Look, if you're a Phil Sony or run Sony, give us a call. Someone is here to take your call.

Mega bass, ultimate sound, or whatever, power vibes. Whatever it is. Power vibes. ULT. All right.

Cranes, I ran you over in the last one. You get the first one. Yeah. So it's going to be a gadget. And that Fitbit has a new watch for kids. The Ace. The Ace. The Ace LTE.

And is it a way for you to track your children with GPS? Yes. Yes. Do you feel uncomfortable about that? I don't know. I'm not you. If you do, this probably is not an exciting gadget for you. But it seems really cool because it like gamifies fitness in what appears to be a really nice way.

in what appears to be a really nice way. Victoria's song went and got to check it out. I've heard from some other people have gotten to check it out and everybody's just like, no, this thing rules and I kind of want one for myself. Yes.

And like that's the hallmark of a good ass gadget for kids. Yeah. Like you can take the band and replace the band and there's like a little tomagogy kind of thing in the watch. And so when you replace the band

it will like change its appearance and stuff. It's sick. All adult fitness trackers are like, let's talk about your V-O-2 max. And this one's just like, make the cool little guy go. And like, that's how you get me to do stuff.

Come on. Exactly. Like, this thing just kind of rules. It's too expensive, though. It is way too expensive. It is $229.95. And it's also called the Ace LTE, which is like the least cool kid name I've ever heard. It's real bad.

And also, you need a data plan to get the full richness of it called the Ace Pass. Oh, boy. And it is not cheap. It is like $10 a month. Oh, that's tough. So you got to stick with just putting an air tag. Yeah, just somewhere in my child. You can alternatively stick in an air tag in your child and give them a 20-year-old Tomogachi.

There you go. And done. Yeah. We're not yet. We have not yet hit the, let's put an air tag on her. What if you glue the air tag to the Tomogachi? I see that's the number. Or 3D print some sort of case.

I bet Sean could do that for you. Yeah. Oh, there's infinite. This is the entire. E.C. Economy is weird AI-generated crap and then 3D printed stuff. It's beautiful. That's real. And you can put your air tag on anything.

There is a case for it. If you want to attach your air tag to a thing, you can find a case for it on Etsy. Yeah. All right, David, what's yours? I just want to talk about this, like, slightly weird Discord blog post this week. The company basically announced it's pivoting back to video games. I didn't know it left. So this is the thing.

So in 2020. when Discord was like really feeling itself and there was noise that Discord was going to be acquired for I think like $10 billion, it was the work from home moment the world was weird. We try not to talk about that period of 2020 very often.

Discord like announced that it was going to be more than just a gaming thing, right? It wanted to be a community app for the future of the world. And Discord actually has like gotten a lot of things about building a community app really right. There are a lot of things about it. They're very clever.

I don't think that worked, except that people started planning like crypto and crimes in Discord more. Yeah, it turns out there's a lot of like shitty communities out there. Yeah, and not a lot of like Fortune 500 companies running on Discord. So anyway, so the company pivoted back and is now about gaming again, but then made a bunch of small changes that don't really change anything. And then said they want to be easier for connecting either before, during, or after playing a game. And I would just point out that's all the time. that's still just everything.

So I think I'm just in a strange place where it was like, I forget who it was, but somebody in our Slack was saying, like, this is not a message to users. This is a message to investors of like, we get it. It's fine. We're running away from crypto. Please stop doing crimes in Discord. And but I just thought it was very funny. It's like, Discord is like, we will remain Discord.

Just like, please only do games here, please? Yeah. I did learn new things from that blog post. I didn't know you could have Discord on like the PS5. Yeah. Just clearly I don't know. It's a web app. Like ultimately you can deploy a web app anywhere.

Yeah, but like sometimes like what if I deployed this on the PS5? And you're like, why? Because it's got a sick process. It looks cool. I mean, Discord's a really good chat app. Part of me is they had gone more mainstream. And instead of like the 50 WhatsApp group chats I'm in, I was in a bunch of discords. Like I feel like I'd feel cooler.

But alas. No, I'm in a couple of a bunch of discords. you're fine. You're fine. I don't do enough crimes. No crimes. I don't do enough NFTs or crimes. Oh, no.

Alex, I'm guessing you're in at least one flex related discord. I'm not. But I did think of some crimes have definitely happened in some discreet. By the way, Jason was on a decoder a while ago, basically previewing all this. If you want to listen and talk about it, I spent a lot of time being like, crimes happen here. And it's like, I need it to stop. more or less. And he said to me, a really interesting stat.

He's like, most discords are like three people. It's just like three or four friends hanging out in a discord. And that's like the vast majority of discord activity. And then the big ones are like for other stuff. Right. But we talked about why they make games and their app platform and all this stuff. And he's like, we just do that to dog food like features for the big games. All right.

I'm going to pick one. I wanted to pick I Fix It and Samsung breaking up. And other repair companies are starting to. say they can't pick Samsung stuff either. That's boring. What I want to pick is X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, now hiding likes. Wait, what? I missed this.

It's very good. So they're not hiding likes. They're hiding who likes something. So, you know, people used to go on Twitter and like, like, like something. You can see all their public likes. They're hiding that. They're hiding replies. They're doing this because bros keep liking porn.

Yeah, that's not, that's all the funniest stuff on Twitter. That was the best, like, when Tim, Ted, Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim. cruise. Head crews. Yeah. Like was like, I love this. It's very good. Yeah, you do. It is the funniest sign of a platform in decline that its user base is now so stupid. They don't even have fake accounts to like porn.

I was hearing about, there's apparently some male reporters who love to like models on Instagram and they don't know that they get the little, the emoji also is shared on threads. So be thoughtful. If you're going to be horny. horny on Maine. Look, how do you increase Android phone sales? Buy a burner phone to do horny stuff.

Are you listening to me, Google? That's what the pixel is for. Horny stuff. It's pretty good, actually. Buy a burner pixel. Just for the horny stuff. A refurb pixel 5 with that beautiful red case. It's available to you.

It's just an idea I have to increase your sales. Save your company. Twitter X is saying Soon you'll be able to like without worrying who might see it We want to encourage people to like more edgy content And they use the word edgy Wow We want you to like your porn more often

If you are the sort of person who describes your own work is edgy Not edgy Like I don't know it's like it's like Sam Altman is the bad boy of it It's like he can't be But he would love it He would like it so much that he'll never get it Elon wants Twitter to be edgy so much he'll never have it. I just think this is truly one of the funniest changes any social platform has ever made.

There's like other reasons, right? Like I'm confident Elon wants the weird racist to now populate Twitter to be able to like weird racist posts without seeing it. Like, yeah, there's a deep, dark weirdness there. Go into the likes and look at the likes still? No, other people can't see them. at all. Right. You yourself will be able to see who liked your posts.

Okay. You can see the like counts for posts, like public light counts. Man. But you will not see who likes someone else's post and you will not see others. You will not see what other people like. I cannot wait for one of those creators of edgy content to get fed up with their edgy followers and just put them all on the class. The saddest little black book in the world. Yeah.

The saddest little black book. It'll be so good. I mean, it's truly, deeply, wonderfully hilarious. I love it. Platform and Decline just doing the weirdest stuff you can add. I just really like the idea

of ultimately doing good, healthy things by removing engagement metrics in the service of making your platform easier to be sketchy on. Like, I think that's great. Twitter is going to end up,

X is going to end up, I think, as a porn platform. Like, I think they will find a way to subsume only fans because it's the last thing left for them to do. It's video first now,

supposedly. Oh, yeah, Linda Yaccarino. She appeared. She had not appeared anywhere since the code conference, from what I understand, which went great for her. Can you repeat the question? And she appeared and said, X is now a video first platform for creators. And everyone went, what? You don't make any videos.

Elon Musk never makes a video on his video first. But if you want to make horny videos, you can. And secretly like them. Yep. Ted Cruz is just going to be a static. All right. I'm just saying, and we're in a new era of the internet, right? I don't know what's going to happen to the web,

but I know this is the ULT power sound era, and I'm convinced this is the horny burner Android phone era. For when your urge to like something is irresistible, but you don't want anyone to know this. The pixel 6A. I just got to hit that heart. Yeah, you want them to know, but you don't want anyone else to know. That's actually a great, like, opposite of what happens on iPhone

stays on iPhone messaging for Google when you want them to know but no one else to know the Google pixel Android just doing Google's job today I'm trying man I'm trying to help everybody all right it's someone give us some money somehow lighting rounds available for a horny pixel sponsorship all right that's it we're way over time I appreciate you all we do want your feedback I'm very sincere about this I know people have a lot of feelings we are here to earn your trust in whatever way that this previous segment earned your trust. Send us a note. You can reach out to us. You can call David at some phone number. 866, Verge 1-1. Call the hotline. See it. Call us. We'll answer your questions. Again, we're not trying to hide the ball here at all, but we are trying to go home

to our families. So that's it. That's for our chest. Rock and right. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and box media podcast network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week. Alex just made a huge discovery on the ULT7 or whatever this thing is called. Tell us what the ports are. Okay, we got a light button.

We got a battery button with a minus sign for battery care. Okay. Key control. I don't know music. That's for karaoke. Okay. Echo, guitar. We got a guitar input, right? This thing rules.

I don't know what. There's a lot going on down there. These are all fully karaoke controls, and then you can play a guitar through it. Sure. I don't know what battery minus care does. I really want to know, but probably not today on the Verge cast. One, two, three. Boy, can I...

There we go. There we go. It's got some Numa Numa energy, right? Yeah. It always starts in the middle, which I really like. I love you. This thing fills me with pure joy. You're so happy.

Every other tech company is like, we got to do some AI stuff that the robots are going to bang you. Like, let's just threaten everyone. And Sony's like, here's what's going to happen. The bass speakers on the side, really. Yeah. Sony is like, we're put RGBs and the bass speakers. Also, it's called ULT power sound now. And that's our business.

It's good shit.