Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Vox Media, at least for a little while longer. I'm your friend David Pierce. Nilay Patel is here. Hey buddy, what's up?
We haven't seen each other in like forever. Like people think it's a bit when we say we only talk to each other sometimes on the podcast, but sometimes we only talk to each other on the podcast. Nice to see your face.
This week in particular, I was at I/O and you were sick, so you were out. Are you feeling better?
I am feeling better. I feel like a person for the first time in like five days, which is very exciting. I got a just horrific stomach thing that made me just delirious through all of Google I/O. It's been a strange week.
But you were out there. You talked to Sundar Pichai. That's going to be on Decoder.
I did. And then I took the redeye home this morning and I'm on Benadryl sleep. So I'm super loopy too. This is going to be a wild episode of this show.
Quite the episode. We have a bunch of stuff to talk about. Jake and Hayden did a great job talking through all of the stuff going on at I/O, all the agent stuff, all the AI stuff. Go watch or listen to that if you haven't for a lot of the news. You and I are going to mostly talk about search because I think we like to talk about search and the web and what all of this means, and I want to dig in on some of that with you. But first we have a bunch of, I would call it some personal news stuff to talk about.
No, we don't have any personal news. That means things to people.
That's true. We've gotten a lot of questions about some corporate going on in the last couple of days. Do you want to just talk about what has happened with Vox Media and with us and with the podcast network over the last couple of days?
Yes. And all these names are bad. We make a lot of fun of a lot of companies for having bad names and our company is not immune to it. There's something about being an executive at a large company that just makes you incapable of naming things other than using the same word over and over again, and Vox Media is absolutely guilty of it. So, here's a quick version of the story. 15 years ago, we started a company called Vox Media. And it was called Vox Media because when we all left AOL, we had actually joined a company called Sports Blogs Inc., SB Nation, for a sports platform. And so, we launched The Verge. We needed a new parent company name. And I will never forget it. The people of this company voted and they wanted to call it like Super Huge Inc. See, it was like, we're super not doing that. And so there's a company called Vox Media, and that was it. It was just the two brands for a minute. It was just The Verge and SB Nation. And the third one is Polygon, which I'm unhappy they sold in deeply meaningful ways that all the executives know that I'm deeply unhappy that they sold. And then they launched Vox.com and then they bought Eater and they bought New York Magazine. And so like the people who run this company have just been acquiring stuff under this umbrella brand called Vox Media. And none of that has really ever bothered us. And because I have like founder syndrome, I've basically just ignored them. Like I don't pay a lot of attention to the thing that is Vox Media. And we don't share a lot of like stuff with them. We just don't. We're just our own little thing. Anyhow, I'm saying all that because 15 years later, those same group of executives, Jim Bankoff and all the rest of them, have decided that they're going to sell New York Magazine, Vox.com, and a thing that is confusing everyone called the Vox Media Podcast Network to James Murdoch, who is like the younger, more liberal son of Rupert Murdoch. There's a whole succession drama, and they're going to go over there. And then because no one is good at names or being clear about what is what, they've also bought the name Vox Media and they're taking that with them, right? So that is confusing everyone in like the deepest way. So they're still our company, the same one that we've had forever. It's, you know, it's selling things to another company. So it's going to receive a check and then we're just going to continue operating our company the same as ever. And so the amount of nothing changing for The Verge is like off the charts. Like literally nothing is changing for us. We're going to have to rename our company. So I'm in the market for new names. People want to suggest them, I'm happy to take them.
Can I interest you in Versent? What are your thoughts?
We're just like not going to do that. None of that's going to happen. I will move.
What if we come up with an abbreviation that starts with MS and then ends in a bunch of nonsense?
So that's what's happening. It's like James Murdoch bought a bunch of stuff from our company including the name, which is hilarious. Some of our executives are going to go to that company. Some of them are going to stay at this company. But like The Verge is staying exactly the same. The thing that is confusing everyone is that they bought this thing called the Vox Media Podcast Network, which Dave and I have to say in the credits of our shows all the time. The Vox Media Podcast Network does not own our podcast feeds. It does not run our podcast. It does not have editorial oversight into us. It is an ad sales network. So it has a bunch of people that it works with including Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway and Maria Shriver and Brené Brown and Megan Rapinoe and Subert. Like it just has this like cast of characters who all basically all own their own feeds and it bundles them all up. Marques Brownlee, Waveform, that they're a client of the Vox Media Podcast Network, but they own their feed. That's their product and all the MPN does is it bundles all that inventory up and it goes out in the world and it sells ads for us and that has always been the case and so they're just our vendor now and that's fine. Like I don't, as you all know, I do not think about the ads, I don't read the ads. So like I don't have any particular feelings about that because it is called the Vox Media Podcast Network and because we say we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in an effort to communicate to listeners that if they would like to buy ads, that's who you should talk to. People think that something is happening to us, but literally nothing is happening to us.
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, and I think the way I have explained it to a couple of people is essentially just that it is not their podcast, it is our podcast, right? Like they took the people who sell the ads for our podcasts and that is now part of a different company. And what that will mean down the road, I have absolutely no idea. And plan to spend absolutely no time on it.
Imagine what I'm going to be like when I'm your client instead of your coworker.
Genuine nightmare. Having been your coworker, nightmare.
I'm just saying like that's the relationship that's going to change. And I'm honestly, I'm excited about some of that stuff. Like it has been a big unwieldy company for a minute. It does a lot of things. It pulls in a lot of directions. The company that we will run that is legitimately the same company, they just bought the name, is one, it's going to be fine. It's like a healthy company with a healthy amount of revenue. We're going to be fine. And we're a bigger, more important part of it now, right? So it's like smaller, more focused. And like I'm excited about smaller, more focused in real ways.
Yeah, walk me through that just a little bit because I think the most common question we've both gotten in the last, you know, 36, 48 hours has been something to the effect of, is this the beginning of something terrifying for The Verge, right? Like there's been actually a really sort of lovely, overwhelming bit of support from people being like, don't let this kill The Verge. Like, oh god, if this kills The Verge. And like I want to make everyone feel better that this is not killing The Verge. There are no bad signs for The Verge here. But I do want you to just sort of briefly explain what this actually looks like in your head right now for the sort of next turn for us, if anything. Maybe literally nothing changes and that's fine, but like what does this mean for The Verge in your mind as we go forward now?
So let me just pull apart two aspects of The Verge. There's the newsroom, right? The reporters and editors who wake up every day and like write and edit and report the news. Nothing is going to change for them that maybe like some software licenses will change, right? Because the company is deciding who gets what software.
Stop using Airtable and David can finally be happy.
You see what I mean? Like that kind of corporate stuff will change, but the actual work will not change. Our relationship to you, the audience, will not change. We're shipping dark mode, you know? It's like we're just going to keep trucking along. On the corporate side, yeah, a bunch of stuff will change. Like these two companies are pulling themselves apart. They're going to have to duplicate services in a lot of ways and figure out who gets what. And the people that go over, like the lawyers and accountants that go to one company or the other, the other company will have to rebuild those competencies, right? Like just corporate stuff. I don't expect that to affect how we do anything. And maybe the simplest way of saying this is we are not the ones who got bought.
We're the ones receiving the money, right? Like there was a purchase, right? We're also not the ones being left behind, right? Like it's important to say that is not the thing that is happening here. The company is not leaving and just sort of abandoning us back here. That's not at all what's going on here.
I'm honestly, I'm like, see you later. I don't know what else to say about it. Like I don't think about that. I don't think about those things. I do not spend one minute of my... I say this to our staff all the time. I don't care. Like I don't buy... I'm excited to run a smaller, more focused company that can be more aggressive and that is what I intend to do. Now if some other billionaire shows up and is like, what we're going to do is AI-generated slop, like one, I will fight them to the death. I don't think that's going to happen. But like, who knows, right? Like Jeff Bezos could be like, well, I ruined The Washington Post, now I'm going to ruin The Verge. Sure. Right. Like anything is possible. But the thing that's visible to me from where I sit today is we're going to operate The Verge tomorrow exactly the same as we did yesterday.
I just want to say that if Jeff Bezos tries to turn the Vergecast into whatever that weird new Washington Post opinions podcast, he's going to make us do to our faces whatever he did to his face. That's the only way I will accept any editorial oversight of The Verge. If you make my face look like Jeff Bezos, my price for that is so much lower than you think it is. We're going to give you the little necklace.
He's got a good beard. I'll give that to Bezos. He's got a good beard game.
Yeah, I would just say, look, change makes people nervous, but we have to figure out who gets the Google Docs login. Like there's stuff we have to do. But the actual work, it's zero changes to what we do every day and zero changes to the show. And maybe one day the people who sell our ads will have to present a deck to me about why they're good at selling ads, which I think will be very funny.
Yeah, fair enough. And actually, to your point about changing on the show, we have, I would say, some substantially more fun news about changes we're making to this show. Which is that we're kind of completely changing the Vergecast. This is like weird, completely, but like in a fun way, in a cool way that we wanted to do and have been doing for a long time. And it is actually in no single way about this very annoyingly timed news for this particular way. So starting on June 1st, which is like not next week but the Monday following, the Vergecast is becoming a daily podcast. We're going to start putting out episodes every day Monday through Friday. We've been talking about this a lot and I would say the goal is to make the show sort of feel the same but make more sense. And I actually think in a daily way we're going to be able to do a lot more of that. I don't know, what are you excited about about Daily Vergecast? I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I know you were as early as I was in thinking this is a good idea that we should do.
Why are you psyched about the daily podcast?
There's so much news. That's what I got for you. So much news and we have so many listeners who constantly tell us that we should just do one like six-hour show every week, which we should not do. Like we will not survive if we do that. It's actually easier to make a little bit of show every day. So we're not going to make like two-hour broadcasts every day. We're going to... I think David's plan is to make tighter, more focused stories every day that you can listen to. And then can I say the most exciting thing?
We're going to bring back 90 Seconds on The Verge.
It's the top of the new Daily Vergecast, which is a beloved product that everyone has wanted us to bring back. So we're going to have 90 Seconds of Verge, which is like news of the day. Obviously, we're going to participate in the clip economy. So that's going to go out into the world as clips and then we'll have a little story we can tell you every day. And there's so much that even when we make the rundowns for this episode or when David makes the rundown for the other, we just leave so much stuff that is interesting and important. We just leave it out.
Yeah. So I have always been like, we just need to make more show. Like we have to make more of this because we're not covering everything we can cover. We're not talking about all the things we can talk about. We don't have enough space for our staff to show up on these shows. And I'm really excited that the daily broadcast will let you hear from more of our team. And then I'm obviously just thrilled to bring back 90, which is going to be the most fun.
It's going to be great. I am excited about it. And I think it's been really funny planning all this out while also becoming more and more ruthless about how we think about distribution around the entire internet. Because on the one hand, like this, I started from the exact same place that you did, right? Like this lets us do more stories. It lets us do one story a day, which is just a thing I think makes more sense. Like having a structure that is like, here is what you have come to experience. You are going to experience that thing and then you're going to leave. It's like that's a good user experience. Whereas what we do with a lot of our shows is just like, here's a grab bag of stuff. Are you into any of this? And that's like, I think one reason people want chapters from us and have wanted them from us for so long is that even the way that we have to write titles for the show makes it hard sometimes to know what you're going to get and when. And doing it this way is just going to give us so much more transparency. So like one way to think about a lot of the show is we're just going to take the Tuesday episode and pull it apart into three different parts, right? Which gives us a little bit of room to expand on each one so that the episodes don't get insane and we don't have to worry about sort of the packaging of things. Things can just be what they are. But also like as somebody who writes most of our headlines, can I tell you how happy I am to only have to make a headline make sense for one thing every day instead of having to be like, what is the underlying theme between these two things that have nothing to do with each other? And how do I tell you what this is going to be on YouTube? And how do we make a thumbnail for it? And how do we explain this to our audience?
The YouTube of it is super interesting. Yeah. Because YouTube, you know, you have to play to the algorithm. You have to play the game by the rules of the field or whatever this metaphor is. That's the Benadryl talking right there. YouTube does not want you to like put a long list in a headline.
They want you to say one thing like exclusive Sundar Pichai explodes or like whatever, you know, watch David get destroyed, like whatever. And so that's going to be every episode of the Vergecast from now on. And then you can load up a bunch of options and then YouTube will like A/B test them for you and pick one. And often I think even on just the last episode that we did together, it was like, are we going to pick the Xbox news or the Apple news? And the algorithm picked one. And like some of the comments are like, I wish I had known that the Apple thing was in here.
And like you can just see the fight that you were having with the platforms themselves about how to tell stories in the way that we want to tell stories. So pulling things apart, I think will... I don't really care if that's easier for the YouTube algorithm. I think it will be better for the audiences. Like we'll be able to just communicate what you're going to get in a more direct way. Yeah. And same in podcast feeds, right? Like I think we hear from people all the time who spend a lot of time in our library, which is kind of wild. The idea that anyone is listening to old episodes of Vergecast just sort of horrifies me to my core, but also like I love you and thank you for doing that. But it's going to make it easier for us to communicate what you're about to get, right? And if you're somebody who just dips in for certain things and doesn't... I think this is all over our website right now. Like one of the reasons we did follow features and one of the reasons we've done some of the parceling out of different pieces of the site is so that like if you don't want to see Elon Musk, you shouldn't have to, right? And if you come for an episode of the podcast that we don't tell you about Elon Musk and then it's half about Elon Musk, that's actually a crappy experience. And this is just going to let us make the show sort of each individual part feel whole and bigger and complete. And also we're going to get to tell you about it and show it to you in a way that makes much more sense. I'm very excited about it.
And also we get to do 90 Seconds on The Verge.
And we get to do 90 Seconds on The Verge. And selfishly it means I get to do it most days, which I'm very excited about. It's just I went back and watched a bunch of old episodes of 90 Seconds. We were all just completely out of our mind. The idea that we did that with the people that we did it with and that this again, we were younger. Most of us were not married and none of us had children. That's the only way I can explain how we ran a startup the way we ran.
But we also, like these are like the halcyon days of VC money. So we like had a bunch of camera equipment we probably didn't need. And we were just like, look, this makes the camera go up and down. What if we overuse that in every single episode of 90 Seconds?
We lit up that boom arm all the time. All the time.
It was great. But anyway, I bring this up largely because we have what, 10 days from when you might be hearing or seeing this to when we launch this thing. And I want to hear all of your thoughts and all of your feedback. If you hate the idea of us doing a daily podcast, I'm really sorry. But I also would love to hear why so we can maybe fix that for you. If you have thoughts about things that we should do or we want to do a lot more like games and gimmicks. One of the things I've been writing down is TikTok games to make me play on this episode.
One thing we should also say is that this episode, the Friday episode where it's just you and me talking about the news of the week, it will probably get a little shorter because we're just going to do more of the stuff over the course of the week. So you and I will have like less new things to talk about every week.
But the structure of this episode is not going to change. Like, yeah, this is the only time we talk to each other and we need to do this.
I actually refuse to talk to David outside of the show.
But yeah, send us all of your feedback. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11. Send us an email
[email protected]. I want to hear all of your thoughts, all of your ideas, all of your feedback. The daily show launches June 1st. It's the first time I've said it out loud. I've only seen it written down as 6/1, so that's just what it is in my head. I could not be more excited about it. I think it's going to be awesome.
Yeah. And just to reinforce the point, it is just all systems go here.
Like whatever corporate mechanism, I don't... again, bye. Like we're just doing our thing.
And Vergecast Daily is a thing we've been working on for a long time. We're very excited about it.
And it's still just called the Vergecast. This is the thing we're all having to break is we've been calling it Vergecast Daily for a long time because that's different from the Vergecast we've been making. But it's still just the Vergecast.
It's all the one show. We're going to figure it out together. It's going to be great. All right, let's take a quick break and then come back and get into some actual news here. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. Let's talk Google I/O. Nilay, you were there. I missed this whole experience. So, like, give me the vibe check. How were things at Shoreline this year at Google I/O?
They were very hot. It was like 85 degrees.
It's sunny. Well, it was hot. Like, there was a lot of like, I'm going to do this AI demo just to be in the air conditioning.
I made a social video when I was not wearing a jacket for the first time, like in any video ever maybe. And a lot of people were like, Nilay is hot. And I sent all those comments to my wife immediately. So, thank you to Google.
You did look good in that video. It was just a fact.
Fully the camera angle. Also, the sun glinting off my eyes.
Again, I said just if you want to say I look hot in Instagram comments, it hasn't worked yet on Becky, but they're going straight to her.
If you want to guarantee Nilay will read your comment 12 times, that's how to do it.
Her text, I sent her the screenshot of the first one and we're getting like a new air conditioner and her entire response was to send me a picture of the wiring to the new air conditioner. I was like, come on, man. That sucks. Anyway, Google I/O was great. It was, you know, like always fun to see everybody. I'll just describe the narrative of what we heard in this keynote, which is, okay, it's not AI anymore. It's agents. We're putting agents everywhere. We have a new model called Omni, which is very powerful. It has some world model characteristics. It can simulate physics, so it can make better videos because it understands physics. 3.5 Flash is their new faster model. It's cheaper to run. It's more performant and more powerful than some of the pro models of the past. Google's very happy about where it's taking its models. And then it is agents everywhere. That is their whole idea is that now Google can take action on your behalf across a number of products, across a number of services. How that will come together is I would not say a coherent story for them in like the classic Google sense.
Yeah, that's Google. And then the changes to search are like vast.
And you can see that actually the future of search, if we just keep linearly progressing, is that it becomes the agent platform. So they changed the search box. It's now called intelligent search. It's bigger. It's multimodal. You can put photos in there. It can generate stuff at you. It can generate apps at you, which we should talk about. And you can see how intelligent search is going to connect right to what's called Gemini Spark, which is our like agent in the cloud. And you're going to ask it some stuff and it's going to deliver you some information, but it might also say, hey, do you want me to just do that for you? And like the agent will run away and do that. And that is all monumentally important for the future of the web. But Google seems very committed to all of it. Then the last piece of this, so I've now described some very tactical, very tangible things like here's these products and like here's how they work. And at the very end of it, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, came out and was like, with Google's power and skill, we will get to AGI and we will look back on this time as standing on the foothills of the singularity. And he was like, goodbye everybody. And that was like the most jarring part of I/O. Like very tactical announcements, very product focused. They announced something called the universal commerce protocol and like Walmart's going to use that so that agents can shop for you, right? Like whatever. And then at the end it's like the singularity is also here.
Yeah. I'm curious for your reaction to that because the thing that is most fascinating about that to me is that Demis Hassabis is the one who said it. And I think for a long time Demis has been one of the most sort of calculatedly reasonable people talking about how big and huge AI is going to be. He's not one of the people talking about universal basic income. He's not one of the people saying it's going to take away everybody's jobs in two years. He just won a Nobel Prize for some of the work he's done in AI. Like he is a person with as many sort of receipts on the work that they've done and also who has done I would say a reasonably good job of explaining what this stuff is and is not for a long time. So for him to say that was shocking to me. Like was it in the moment bizarre? Like if Sam Altman had said that you'd have been like, whatever Sam, you wrote that on your blog 45 times. But for Demis to close Google I/O by saying like, what up, singularity is just wild.
Like it was wild in the juxtaposition. Has Demis Hassabis always believed that he's working on AGI? Yes, sure. We just saw in the Musk v. Altman trial everyone in this industry from the top down is always talking about Google and Demis beating them to AGI. Like he's just a specter that looms over this industry. It's obvious that this is what he's working on. The juxtaposition that made it stand out for me was we just spent like two hours of Google launching products, like very tangible, pretty small in the scheme of things products that build on a lot of these capabilities in huge ways. But when you search Google for what are some great restaurants in Tuscany and it builds you an app that's like, I made a schedule for you for the weekend, you're not like, AGI is here. Do you know what I mean? Like the products we saw were meaningful, interesting improvements to the existing products because of AI and what you can do with it.
And then, you know, and then because it's Google and they always have to talk about the revenue. We saw a bunch of stuff about shopping. And then at the very end he was like, we're going to cure all disease with the power of AlphaFold and the singularity is here. That to me is like, I think they did it that way as a reminder of what the ultimate ambition is.
Right. And that the products we're seeing, and I talked to Sundar about this. The products we're seeing are still not, they're not going to prove that out to anyone. That's the gap they have to close, right? If you're like, everyone, like I asked why, you know, people hate AI and we talked about it for a little bit and he's like, it's not just a marketing problem, which I think was an important... I asked him directly and he was like, this is what I'm saying. It's not a marketing problem. Like we have to communicate all the value and we have to show that we're going to make people's lives better. And some of that is, yeah, when you use Gemini Spark, it can like run around and like figure out how to do a block party for you, which is like their big example. And I want to talk about that because it was very funny in very specific ways. But also we're going to cure all disease and also we've got our eyes on the big prize. And like there's some amount of you've got to show more of an intermediate step, right? Like there's, we're going to make productivity a little bit faster with agents and then there's the singularity. And like what is the thing in the middle that actually shows us that we're almost there.
Step one, a daily briefing in the Gemini app. Step two, cure all disease.
That's kind of what I'm getting at.
So that was the vibe was like, well boy, Google's doing a lot of stuff. Everything is called Gemini, so it's hard to even tell them all apart in the classic big company naming problem scheme. But if you look at all the stuff, you're like, oh, eventually this will all come together, right? And the future of Google as an interface looks like an agent of some kind.
Yeah. Yeah. And you get the sense, I mean, I think this is where it goes back to the search box thing, right? That the like Google is redoing the search box thing I think has been slightly overblown. They're basically, it's like it's getting slightly bigger and you can add more stuff to it. But fundamentally, Google has not changed what the thing looks like when you go to google.com in a long time. So just the sheer fact that that is changing at all is really meaningful. And I think I spent some time with Liz Reid who runs search and Josh Woodward who runs Gemini ahead of I/O and basically just kept trying to get them to explain where one ends and the other begins. And their answer was essentially people come to us for different things now. And I think everyone at Google seems to see a world in which these things begin to converge on one another. And I think if you're Google, what you are correctly realizing is, oh, we own the search box, which is the single most valuable piece of real estate on the internet. We have to do all of this there, right? Like Gemini is growing really fast, doing really well. People are downloading the app. People like it. It's going fine. The Google search box is still the thing. And you really get the sense that they're building more and more stuff into that, working their way back to some of this Gemini stuff. And just the thing that Google search is becoming to me is super fascinating, right? Because the sense that I got from this is Google has figured out how it's going to make money from AI in search, which is why you mentioned the universal AI cart thing where you can shop all over the internet with your agents and essentially Google will manage all of the shopping aspects of it. Do you know what's really great for Google when it does that is it gets to make money during that. Like everything on the internet as payment processing is like not a long way to think about the business of the internet. And that's a good thing for Google to do. It is a thing that will work for Google as a business. It's a thing that's going to make a lot of agentic stuff easier. Google's also building a lot of the tech that people are going to use to run their agents. Like you can just see how it all arcs back to Google makes money even in a world where the search business goes down. I don't think they're counting on that happening tomorrow. And I suspect they're counting on a really big AI ad world coming too. But like you get the sense Google thinks they know how to make this turn now, which I don't think they knew even a year ago.
Well, I think there's a couple of things at play there. One, the other way they're going to make money is by charging you lots of money to use this stuff.
Yes, true. Like most of these features are in paid versions of Gemini and you can pay anywhere from what is it, 20 bucks to 200 bucks a month to use this stuff. And the idea that Google should be a paid product in this way is just really interesting, right? Like this is the most look at these cool new features we can give you in Google search if you pay us money that I think we've ever seen.
So that's just really interesting. Like Google's got to be so thrilled. Like at some point we need to go do a whole retrospective on OpenAI randomly deciding to charge $20 a month for ChatGPT and the fact that that like changed the economy forever. Like that is what happened. But sorry, keep going.
Well, there's, I just like the idea that Google is going to make money by charging you a lot of money for a thing that has been free for a long time is fascinating, right? Like, and I don't think anybody knows the rates, which is why it's from two to 20 to $200. There's just a huge amount of rate and pricing pressure that is less worried about sending traffic to the web at large than ever before.
Oh, clearly.
I think they're over it. And they, you know, when they first rolled out AI overviews, there was like outcry, you know, like uproar. Like we did it. Like I coined the term Google Zero that everyone uses now. Literally every publishing CEO, every media CEO is running around being like, 'Google Zero.' Like Roger Lynch, the CEO of Condé Nast, is on TV being like, 'We model our company at zero Google traffic now.' And I'm like, 'Oh, that's you're saying zero because of me.' Like, I know what's happening.
And you know what I really respect is that you don't get mad that you don't get credit.
I should charge these people license. It's 20 bucks a month to say Google Zero.
You should trademark it. But like, you know, the reason I'm bringing...
I should charge all the AI frontier guys for training on Google Zero.
The reason I'm bringing it up is like that was not real, right? It was a danger and everyone was guarded against the danger and now it's real and like all the digital media companies are talking about Google Zero and Google itself is like, all right, like you got mad at us. There's a lawsuit in the UK where Google literally referred to publishers as free riders on Google search because the publishers want to be able to opt into search and opt out of training and Google won't let them.
And like that's a lawsuit. They're training on YouTube videos. They're not going to let creators opt out of training on YouTube videos. Like there's a lot there and I think Google has decided that they're over it. Like, do you know what I mean? Like in a real way.
The traffic is zero. They're sending zero traffic to big publishers. Now they get to do the next thing. And you know they will tell you, I'm sure Liz said this to you, that in many ways they think the web is bigger and more vibrant than before and people are doing longer and more in-depth searches. And to validate, like their data shows that when people at the end of AI mode they actually go read the original sources to validate, right? And this is the dynamic that they think they're in as Google.
Well, no. Can I frame that slightly differently? Because actually Liz Reid said this to me in our conversation. And I've been thinking about it ever since that Google's stance seems to be that we are going to send vastly less traffic, but the traffic we're going to send you is going to be so good that like if you're a commerce site, you're going to get fewer people, but you're also going to get fewer sort of passers-by that by the time somebody makes it to your website, their likelihood of buying from you is going to be so high that you're going to make up for it with traffic quality over traffic quantity. And I think across a huge spectrum, that is the case Google is going to make to people that yes, we're sending fewer people to you, but the people we're sending to you are going to be there so much more on purpose that it's going to be worth it. And I think that that is an unbelievably generous read both of Google's intentions and of society. But it is a fascinating thing. And even if that comes true exactly the way Google sees it, it will still change the way the web works in its entirety forever and ever. My criticism of almost every Google search demo for the past five years has been they cannot see beyond ending every single interaction with a transaction.
Every Google search demo you go back and look and they're like, we got to buy shoes and then you buy something. And the idea that you're going to get fewer drive-by visitors but more of them are going to buy shoes is one view of the web, right?
This is the web is for shopping. The idea that the web is for information required all that scale, right? Like the programmatic ad business that propped the whole web up required Google to send floods of traffic to all kinds of people. All that's gone, like just straightforwardly gone. The affiliate business, like The Wirecutter, like we've talked about Google Zero with those small... we did air purifiers. There's like air purifier blogs that just like got wiped out because Google's just like, buy this one, and now you're not going to the dedicated air purifier review company that's going to sell you the best one, right? And even if Google is trying to do that, that assumes that Google is exceptionally good at only identifying really great content and really great users to match the two together. And Google is demonstrably not good at that over the years.
And I have a, you know, over time I've had a lot of feelings about that. Like one, Google just changed the rules of the game on a lot of companies, on a lot of people.
Right. And on the audience, like Google users are getting measurably different Google experiences now. One of the things I asked Sundar, and I won't give away his answer, but the idea that you and I are going to get different sort of infinitely personalized answers to different search queries because Gemini might make you a different search results page than me.
With different answers in it or even different interactivity because it's going to make you a different app than it will make for me is kind of wild, right? Like Google search has been a universal source of truth for a lot of people in a way that no other platform company has even cared about for years. But like you can Google it and the answers will be pretty much the same for you and me is like pretty foundational.
And now it's like, nope. Like it's just you. It's you and your agent like having your own little world and like what's that going to be like? So there beyond traffic and money and you know I think digital media companies are all pretty dumb. Like I've been saying Google Zero for years and years and years. Like now they're all saying it. It's like, did you make any plans? Are you ready for this? Because it was always happening. It was never going to not happen. So like does Google owe them the traffic? I don't know. But they did change the terms of the deal. They did weather the storm of introducing AI overviews and then AI mode. And now I think they're over it. And their position is, yeah, we'll send some traffic to you. And it's at the last step when people want to buy the shoes. That's the traffic you're going to get and you have to be happy with that.
And then for like us people who just use Google, this is the step to, oh, this is an agent now. I'm not using the web. Google is going to use the web for me and I'm going to just use this interface. It's right there. Like we're so close and on the one hand it's kind of exciting, right? Like that is the next version of an interface. It's the next version of an interactive assistant that everyone's been talking about for years and years and years and Google's poised to do it.
And then it's also like, oh, but this is going to change how I get information. Like my list of primary sources that I can go evaluate and look at that might just be gone. There might not be another search engine like that ever.
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that Google, like everybody else, is one really important step away from pulling that off, which is that nobody seems to know how that thing works or what it looks like. This was sort of all over I/O is Google launched widgets and they launched super widgets and they have this thing called generative UI and they have the new thing that's like Google Alerts but AI generated. So when you tell it to sort of monitor something for you and it'll tell you when things update, that I actually think is going to be really useful to a lot of people. Like tell me when XYZ happens and it just will is actually like a very cool Google search feature. But there's this thing that Google is trying to create that is not quite an app and it's not quite a page of search results, but it's somewhere. It's sort of a living, breathing organism of something that is like permanent but also changing and acting on your behalf. And it's like what is an agent supposed to make for you is a question no one has answered and everyone is desperately trying to figure out, right? Because it's like is what's supposed to happen that I tell you what I want and then at the end you show me the Amazon order page. Sure, that solves one kind of problem. But it's also trying to figure out all these different ways to keep you in the loop. Like booting up a virtual machine inside of your ChatGPT chat ain't it. Like that I know for sure. But I was talking to Liz and Josh about this too and they're still very much trying to figure this out like what is this thing that it's supposed to be because I think from a pure user perspective the idea of are 10 blue links the best we can do for you when you ask for some information the answer is no, right? Like I think Google is correct about that for most of the time. When I want to know the stock price of the stuff in my portfolio, 10 links is the wrong answer. Google can do better than that. And I think Google is correct to have pushed to do better than that. There are lots of downstream effects to that that I think are complicated and messy. But if you just purely look at it from like what is the best user experience in this moment, Google is pushing in a lot of good user-forward directions here.
But the question is what is the thing that I want when I ask those questions? No one knows, including Google. And so I think the reason a lot of this looks like mess to me is just that no one has solved this sort of basic primitive question of what is this new interface. It's not chat. It's not a page of links. It's not charts. It's not spreadsheets. It's something new. And no one has even begun to crack it as far as I can tell.
And I think that's why they're doing it in like three different places.
Because you can see like, oh, these should all come together, right? Search and Spark, which is the agent platform in the cloud, and then Canvas, which is the thing that builds you an app. Like those things should get a lot closer together, but...
And then for more like what does Voltron look like is...
Does it have a mustache? Like that's like the question you're asking.
What does Voltron look like is very good.
Like Canvas is really interesting. The thing that makes you apps...
And you know, all of the demos are like, I'm going on vacation. I want to eat at these kinds of restaurants. I've got these kinds of days. And then it makes you a trip planner, right? And it's like, here are your time slots. Here are the choices in these time slots. Like push the button and then you'll make all of your picks and you'll have it. And so, you know, like at the demo, these four people asked so many questions that eventually they brought me one of the PMs and one of the senior engineers who had built the whole thing to answer my questions because I have so many questions.
Like the wizards behind the curtain came out to talk to you.
It was super fun to talk to them, right? These are problems of first impression in software and computers. Like you're going to say that you want to go on a vacation and the computer is going to respond to you by making you an app is not a thing that has happened before.
Right. Right. Like kind of no matter how you feel about AI, you're like that has never happened before. That is super interesting. So I'm looking at this app and you know in the demo you can watch in the keynote is the same kind of demo that I got. You can watch it write the code. And I'm like, first of all, that is insane. Like, there's no way that we're making the app like from scratch every time. Like, that can't be how we're doing it. And then you look at the app and it's got like heart icons in the things. You can say favorites and like it's got all these app ideas like you would make if you... And I was like, does it know about the heart? Like did it just decide that there should be heart icons here? Where do they go? Like where's the data stored if I want to share this plan with someone else? It's an app. Like, there's all kinds of questions you can just get to by looking at it.
And one of the most interesting things that they talked to me about was the idea that there's only so many categories of apps that are appropriate.
Like everyone asks for planners and fitness trackers and...
Like food trackers. Like basically all just like trackers and lists.
Right. And I'm, you know, all just like pounding the table on software brain and you're turning everyone into software and then here's the thing that makes everything in the software. And they're like, 'Yeah, we're not actually in the end going to custom write everybody different apps. We know that people asking for vacations are going to want a vacation app and we will have one and we will tailor it to you on the front end and that's just a bunch of HTML, CSS and you can use it. And then if the next person asks for one, we're not going to code it from scratch again. We're going to like use the template again and make it a little bit customized for you.' And yes, there will be a long tail. They told me that like lots of people make video games in this thing in their testing which is super interesting.
