Chapter 1: What corporate news is shared at the beginning of the episode?
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Welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of Vox Media. At least for a little while longer. I'm your friend, David Pierce. Neil I. 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. It's true.
It's 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 red-eye 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.
It's going to be 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 IO, 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.
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Chapter 2: What changes are happening with The Verge?
He's got a good beard game. Uh, but yeah, I would just say, look, people are changing people nervous, but, um, and they're like, we have to figure out who gets the like Google docs logins. Like there's like stuff we have to do. Um, but the actual like work, it zero, zero changes to what we do every day and zero changes to the show. Uh, 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 first cast.
Yeah.
This is like completely 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. Um, so starting on June 1st, which is like not next week, but the Monday following, uh, the verge cast is becoming a daily podcast.
We're going to start putting out episodes every day, Monday through Friday. Um, 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. Yeah. Why are you psyched about Daily Vergecast?
There's so much news. That's what I got for you. There's so much news and we have so many listeners who constantly tell us that we should just do it one, like six hour show every week, which we should not do. Like we will not survive if we do that. Uh, it's actually easier to make a little bit of show every day. Uh, so we're not going to make like two hour merge casts 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, can I say that, can I say the most exciting thing? Please. We're going to reheat 90 seconds on The Verge. Yeah, we are. Is the top of the new daily Verge cast, which is a beloved product that everyone has wanted us to bring back.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of Google's rapid changes?
And like all of that has just massive implications for how we use computers, how all those companies make money. And I think Google, they've done so much fighting about search traffic and Google zero that they're just like, screw it. We're doing it. Like, this is so obviously the future. We can see it. It's pretty cool if it all works and we'll figure it out along the way. And like,
Respect to them for just getting over it and doing it, but that's a lot of change really fast. Yes.
Yeah, I mean, and Google is, I think, maybe uniquely able to actually do this thing, right? Like, this would seem like incredible brazen nonsense for almost any other company, but, like, Google... for a lot of ways, is the company that sets the standards that the internet runs on, like in a very real way.
This is why they're so excited about universal commerce protocol.
Chapter 4: How is Google shaping the future of online commerce?
Right. Like, Amazon is going to use UCP. They're not going to participate in Google's universal shopping cart, but Amazon is like, yeah, we need a standard for how agents will access our shopping platform, and we're going to use the same one that Google is pushing. Yeah.
They also, Google is pushing SynthID, and they're signing on to C2PA, which is contact credentials, and now everyone is going to use them. Yeah. And, like, you need Google to do it, to your point.
Yeah.
But yeah, and Google is also now, I think they talked about this at IO, they're pushing on web MCP, trying to make the model context protocol a sort of part of the fabric of the internet. They put out all this stuff called modern web guidance, basically telling everybody how to do agents. Like Google is able to tell the internet how to work and people will do it.
Like in the way that Apple can tell you how to design your iPhone app, Google can tell you how to do the web.
Okay, so here's why though. This is the thing that I think is really interesting. They've been able to do that because if you play ball, Google sends you a flood of traffic, right? Google, I don't know, 10 years ago, they're like, we're going to do Google amp and every web developer who listens to the show, just like involuntarily shuttered. Like that shit was horrible.
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Chapter 5: What are the key takeaways from the SpaceX IPO discussion?
And Google's like, but if you use amp wink, wink, we can't say it out loud, but you'll rank higher, right? Like this was the, and I know now there's a Google executives, furious. She's like, we never said that, but like, this is what everybody believed. The deal was if you play ball, you get a ton of traffic. Google will send you a ton of traffic. If you play ball now. What happens?
Google's still keeping on the traffic and you might get a transaction down the line. And again, like I'm saying, that's a lot of change for this ecosystem, like a ton of change for this ecosystem. And I can't tell if Google is being thoughtful, like Google is always thoughtful. You know, I talked to Sundar, he's very thoughtful.
Or if they are, they just see the end point and they're going to get there. Right. And like both of those things are for a company of Google scale and ambition. Both of those approaches are valid. But the part where they were like, we're never going to change the 10 blue links because everyone will be mad.
Chapter 6: What is the significance of the Trump phone?
That thing is over.
Yeah. That company is gone. Yeah. Long, long, long gone. And I think to me, it's really a fact of how caught off guard Google was by chat GPT. Like you get the sense the company learned to stop being afraid of.
When that happened, right, that it's like, oh, actually being careful and thoughtful and slow and deliberate cost us like we spent two years fighting the reputation that we had by being the ones who were careful and thoughtful. And actually what we need to do here is win.
And and I look, I think I think there are a million questions about whether any of this is a good idea or is going to ruin humanity. And like we've talked about them ad nauseum, we will talk about them again. But like just purely if you believe this is the game to be won, it is very clear to me that Google has decided that the only thing to do is to win.
Otherwise, you are at an existential risk as a company.
Yeah. I think that's right.
And I think they're, I think they feel like they're winning too.
Yeah. There was a, there was like a muscularity to IO. It was scattershot in a, in like Google way. Like, yeah. Gemini, what now? You know, like what, what are you saying? But everything had some confidence to it. Uh, Actually, I opened Decoder. It's coming out on Tuesday. I keep plugging this episode. But I literally talked to Sunuri yesterday, so it's fresh on the mind.
But we opened the Decoder conversation by talking about how he had turned over a significant amount of his senior executives and restructured the company after that chat GPT moment when Google felt like it was on its back foot. And he was like, yeah, I had to make all the changes. I had to restructure and I had to make some big decisions about how to win. And I think this is the payoff.
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