How to vibe-write a country hit

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More excitement with an available panoramic moonroof? More you. That's what it means to get behind the wheel of the Acura ADX. Get on the road and experience more than you ever thought possible. The new Acura ADX, crafted for more. Explore the Acura ADX at Acura.com. I'm David Pears-Sneel-Huppetel. Hello, sir. We have a lot going on this week. Just a tremendous amount going on. But before we get into all the news, we have Netflix stuff. Our friend Charlie Harding is going to come on, and we're all going to play AI music at each other in a way that I'm very excited about. We have a bunch of lightning round stuff to do, but we have two housekeeping things, and then you have some very important follow-up. Housekeeping thing number one. We are doing an event at CES this year. We're going to do a live, Vergecast and a live decoder. We're going to be at the Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas on January 7th, which is the Wednesday of CES. We have a lot more details to come. We'll eventually have a big, fancy webpage with all the stuff. But come out, come hang out. We're also going to bowl this year. We were in a bowling alley, and we didn't bowl last year. We're going to bowl this year. It's going to be unbelievable. Are you just making promises? Yes. I know. All right. But I'm also, I'm speaking this into existence as we sit here right now. I see what's happening. So January 7th, Las Vegas, Brooklyn Bowl, come out. Yeah. It's going to be great. We did this last year at Brooklyn Bowl there, and it was so much fun. I'm excited to be here again. It was so fun. Yeah. And we actually have the place like the whole day this time, and we're going to get to hang out even more. It's going to be great. Thing number two, this is the one-year anniversary of the Verge subscription. Lots of stuff is renewing for people. A lot of people are getting, hopefully, very happy credit card charges. So thank you to everybody. We've gotten a lot of questions. You wrote something for the site about how things are going, but just update the people here. How is Verge subscription going a year in? It's going to be well. We hit our goal. We set a goal of how many subscribers we wanted. We hit that goal a year ago. Helen, our publisher, who Verge has the source right now, she comes on the show from time to time. She's in charge of our business. Her point is always the subscription business operates in year two. Year one is you just try to get it started. Year two is where the money happens. We have really aggressive goals for year two. We've heard a lot of feedback about how the paywall works in particular. The number one piece of feedback is we don't know what's free. We know what's paid. The answer is, well, the paywall is dynamic. We can never tell you. That's part one of the answer. The way it works is if the paywall thinks you've read a lot of Verge stories and you're back a lot, it'll hit you with the paywall. The people who see the paywall the most are the people that the paywall is like, you should pay your here every day. The people who don't complain are the people who are like, drive by search visitors. I don't know if that's fair enough, but that's how paywalls work. That's the industry standard that's we're doing. I think that's very frustrating. I understand everyone's frustration. We are trying to do is make our homepage really valuable even if you don't pay us. If you just have an account, you're just a Verge member of the community, just a listener, you come. The whole story stream feed is free. It's quick post and everything. That's going to stay free. Decoder transcripts are free. I think our live log should be free. There's a bunch of stuff that's free. And then we're going to take three stories a day and just make them free. So at the very least, if you come to our homepage at noon every day, right now it's just me picking. I'm drunk with power. I will take your suggestions on what to pick, but I am just picking three cool stories a day that I think are fun and interesting to read. It's kind of a fun process because there's no rhyme or reason to it yet. There's no data to shape our decision making. So I'm just like pulling old features out of a hat. I'm like, Lauren Grush went to the SpaceX town. We wrote a huge feature about it. Remember that? You should read that for free today. Like there's obviously new tech news. We put the MCP feature that Hayden wrote in the free box. So the idea is every single day for 24 hours, we will just window three stories. And I'm personally picking them because I want those to be really valuable. It's just be worth visiting every day. So you get the stream, you get the three stories. You still have the meter to pay wall, which will probably drive you bonkers. But that is the, that's the life of a paywall business. Like that is the industry standard. So that's what we're doing. And we have a lot more ideas on what to do next year to make that even clearer and even better. Our model, just to say things into existence like David is doing. The model is Spotify in like a very specific way, which is Spotify free is really valuable for a lot of people. And that's a big ad supported business. And over time, all of the people who sign up for Spotify premium come from Spotify free. So where I would like the verge to get is we are a really valuable, really important free service for everyone. And that when we are looking for people to pay us, it comes from that group of users. Not we put links on social media and then you hit the paywall because the headlines really clicky and we trick like, I don't, I think that feels bad. But it is just a fact that in inside of that model is we do have to slightly annoy you into giving us money. And for that, we are sorry, but in exchange, we will also give you ad free podcasts. And the single most important thing, which is no one can tell us what to do. What you are buying from us is an ethics policy. No brand deals, no influence from our investors, none of that stuff. That's what you buy from us. That's our business. We are very clear that that is the heart of what we sell. I think full text RSS right next to it in terms of importance. Absolutely. It's like, yes, ethical journalism, also full text RSS like on the surveys. So that's it's going well. We're excited. We're going to keep pushing on it. I do think we have to make a great product and we have big plans to improve the product this year and in particular, take that feedback that the payroll needs to be more clear. Yeah. Theverge.com slash become ungovernable. No, sorry. Theverge.com slash subscribe, subscribe to The Verge. You, before we get into the news and by the news, I mean Netflix, which has been brewing for, we've even been able to talk about this for a week and it's been driving me insane. Yeah. You have some, some important smart shades information to convey to the people here on the virtual. I think I mentioned it in passing. I'm one of the year end show. It came out like so briefly. It was like one of my favorite things I bought this year. Yeah. So everyone wants to know what smart shades I bought. So I bought Matter Over Thread smart shades and I, I'm not saying I did a ton of research here. I'm saying that I asked friend of The Verge cast, Stephen Robles, who reviews all of them on his YouTube channel, which ones to buy and he was like, buy these canister ones from Amazon and I went on Amazon and I did the measurements. I, I did buy the $4 swatch of fabric samples. So that came first to me. Looked at that. And then I just bought them. I just typed in some measurements and I made some guesses on what some of the options mean because there's infinite options and they showed up and I am a hundred percent certain they are just rebranded smart wings shades. Interesting. Because of the logo on there. This is smart wings. Are you serious? Oh my God. It's not like. So this is one of those. There's not just like a shot in the dark. I'm like, this is like, there's one factory. Yeah. It's a smart wing shade. But they're canisterio, C A N I S T E O. Okay. Stephen has a review on his YouTube channel. They should watch them. They're great. They do not screw up. It is impossible. Matter is bad in like specific ways. So the idea that you can add them to both Apple home and Google home and whatever else requires you to do like incantations and maybe turn off the thread network on your ERA routers. Just the, just the thing I'm saying for no reason whatsoever. Um, but once you get it all going, we have smart shades. They, I can control them with all of our assistants and they are rock solid and they are, they're great. Do you just scream darkness and the shades all go down? Is that, that's the only way I'm getting smart shades is if I can do that. You can, I think you can make that happen if you set a scene called darkness, but you, you have to take the affirmative steps. You have to choose to live that life, David. It's not going to do anything. Stephen Robles, build me a shortcut and I'll do it. It'll be great. I do, I do recommend getting the physical remote. Hmm. Yeah. Cause having an actual button to move the shades very convenient. Um, yeah, they're literally, I asked even he was like, buy these ones. I watched his video. I was like, you seem smart. No regrets whatsoever. Easily one of the top and they're so much cheaper than the Lutron ones or if you go to the shade store or wherever else and they're mad over that. They're great. There we go. All right. We'll, we'll put a link in the show notes. Uh, thank you to Stephen for end of the show. Um, all right. This is like the story of the week, right? This is, this is the thing everybody's talking about. Um, the deal that Netflix was going to buy Warner Brothers. This broke like right after the podcast published last week. And I, I don't know how you feel, but there is nothing that infuriates me more than really fascinating news dropping on a Friday morning because it's like people should know that you and I don't speak to each other except for podcasts. So we, we just, we need completely separate lives. Uh, and then we come together. That's how we're secretly hating each other. That's right. Exactly. Um, so we have not had a chance to talk about this, but the good news is we've had a week of just unending insanity about this deal and now we have a lot to catch up on. So just to lay the very basic groundwork here, um, there's been smoke for a long time that Paramount, which is now owned by David Ellison and Skydance, which is backed by Larry Ellison. And there's a lot of, there's just a lot of money tied up in Larry Ellison and Donald Trump are very good friends. It's a whole thing. Um, the smoke has been that Paramount was going to also try to buy Warner Brothers Discovery and Paramount has been making offers and these offers have been rebuffed. And then out of nowhere, it started to sound like actually Netflix is a real possible bidder. And then last Friday, Netflix and Warner Brothers Discovery announced that Netflix is buying Warner Brothers, not the whole company, but the, the important streaming bits. And we can talk about that in a minute. We went into the weekend thinking that this deal was done. Netflix is going to do it. $83 billion. Huge deal. Lots of questions about what it's going to do to Hollywood. And then like out of nowhere, off the top rope, Paramount decides what it actually wants to do is launch a hostile $108 billion bid to take over the whole company. It wants all of the assets, give us CNN, give us the game studios, give us everything. And now these two companies are, I want to say it war, even though they're not really, they're in this interesting competitive space where both sides are trying to argue that they are a better deal, even though they're buying different parts of the company at different prices. And there's also a lot of regulatory questions. There's a lot of political questions about how this is all going to go. So we're, we're kind of, there's a lot happening. And also it feels like not all that much happening at this moment. Is that a reasonable summary of where we are? Yeah, I think, you know, the, the most galaxy brain read of this all is Netflix announced this bid to tie up Warner Brothers and drama for two years and they were never serious about it. Mission accomplished. It is, that is a conspiracy theory you see that I quite enjoy. It certainly, it will be an outcome that this is going to stretch on for years. Oh yeah. Just to, I think back up, you know, I had this conversation with some of our own younger reporters. It feels important to say like, this is some 80s corporate Raider stuff. Like we live in Donald Trump's America. So there's 80s corporate Raider stuff going on and he likes it. And I think you can see some of that happening in how Paramount is talking about its bid in the very nature of a hostile takeover. There was a bidding process. Other companies were involved in the bidding process. I think Comcast was involved in the bidding process. Disclosure, Comcast is an investor in a parent company, but they lost this bid. We're not going to talk about them anymore. That's going to be a big issue. There's other companies that were involved in it. But I think always people thought Paramount would win because David Alson, Larry Alson, the Donald Trump of it all suggested that they would be the ones who could overcome antitrust scrutiny. And I think it's also important to say like the regulatory process in this country right now is 1000% political. Yes. We do a Brendan Carr segment on the show every single week because he has made the FCC regulatory process so deeply political. And we'll come to that, but it is already political to the idea that there should be antitrust scrutiny. That is not objective or legal. That is, hey, the government can stop it unless the government gets what it wants. So that's all tied up in here. I think the most interesting part though is we saw the Netflix news. We went into the weekend and Netflix was the villain. Right? Hollywood was furious that Netflix was going to buy Warner Brothers and take the Warner Brothers legacy and turn it all into streaming slop and then Paramount showed up and Netflix seems really sympathetic because people trust Paramount even less. Yes. And there's something very important about that. Yeah. It's weird in the sense that I think there has been a very long sort of wary relationship between Netflix and Hollywood. Netflix is not quite completely a tech company run by Goofuses who just want famous friends, but it's also not quite fully a Hollywood company. I mean, they have literally two CEOs. Greg Peters, the tech CEO has been on the coder. Ted Serandos, the Hollywood CEO is like, I'm good. Yeah. He's like, I need to talk to Hollywood people. Right. And it's like almost two different companies. Yeah. But I would say the biggest thing is Netflix has for many, many, many years made loud proclamations about the fact that it thinks the old way of doing Hollywood is dead. It is completely uninterested in theatrical movies. It's completely uninterested in the way that movies get made. It changed the economics of all of this by getting rid of the sort of back end royalty structures and just writing people gigantic checks upfront. It has blown up the economy of Hollywood already. And so the idea that now it's going to do that to one of the last remaining sort of functional parts of the old Hollywood made people really nervous. But then you're exactly right. David Ellison comes in having just bought Paramount with Skydance. And all they've talked about is the gigantic amounts of layoffs and redundancies and problems that they're going to cause for Hollywood. And of course, like there's all this politicization of it all. And this is just not a company that is like engendering a lot of faith in people who want to make beautiful art and movies and put them in movie theaters. So I think you're right that everybody now is like sort of stuck in a rock and a hard place. But we should also say it's not like David Zaslaw and Co, which has been running Warner Brothers Discovery for the last few years, has been doing like a blisteringly great job. It's the same. It's the same disclaimer I will give whenever we talk about Elon running Twitter. Yeah, right. Right. Criticism of Elon running Twitter is in no way praise of the people who ran Twitter before Elon showed up. It's all bad. They did a bad job. David Zaslaw had effectively the same ideas as David Ellison. He's like, I'm going to buy all this stuff. I'm going to mash Warner Brothers and Discovery together. We'll have mountains of slop. I'll put all the back-end tech platforms together and then I will run a cable business that has tonnage of reality shows for ladies and then Batman for the dudes. And literally we saw slides. That was David Ellison's pitch. And that didn't work. He didn't do a good job at that. Well, he forgot a thing that David Ellison is very good at, which is having an unlimited money funnel of a father. It goes a long way. That's very important. It really helps. I think that we should start with some of the structure here. Netflix just wants to buy Warner Brothers, the movie studio, and HBO Max, and the modern part of the business that makes movies and TVs and puts them on streaming. It does not want any of the cable channels, including CNN, which is really interesting. We also live in a world where that kind of split is happening all over the place. Did you know that that part of the company is just commonly known around Hollywood as Shitco? Oh, really? Off-handed, as sort of everybody calls it, which I think is so funny. So yeah, all of these legacy cable networks, many of them still making a lot of money, but those are perceived to be the rapidly dying businesses. And Wall Street hates them. We'll bring this up. I'll bring up Comcast again. Comcast just did this by spinning off MSNow and CNNC and a bunch of their cable channels. That company is now called Versint. We've seen all that rebranding happen. That company is also known as Shitco before it was rebranded as Versint. This is like a... Again, I just come back to this is some 80s Raider stuff. You take a company, you split up a part into a profitable part, and then Shitco, and you have to Shitco, the private equity squeezes Shitco for parts. Pretty much. That's what Dazov is what he was trying to do. He had announced he was going to split up Warner Brothers Discovery. So he took the two companies, he mashed them together, he kind of remixed them, and he's like, now we'll split them apart. So the good part and a bad part. Netflix is like, we want to buy our good part. The Netflix has been at is 83 billion. Paramount's hostile bid, which again, you're allowed to do. You're allowed to just wake up one day and be like, shareholders of Warner Brothers Discovery, we have announced a bid and you should pick us. And if they don't pick us, you can sue the company. The Vergecast has announced a bid for Warner Brothers Discovery today for 108.1 billion dollars. And if I don't get a call from David Dazov, I think we should sue him. Celebrate your shares. That's how it works. That's the whole mechanism, by the way. It's like the office, you're like, I announced a bid. The split here is 25 billion dollars. So you think CNN and all those cable networks are worth just 25 billion dollars, which Netflix could fund out of its couch cushions. Oh yeah. They just don't want the garbage. So Paramount is basically saying, we'll just buy the whole thing for slightly more money. I am not at all sure that Paramount's big argument that Netflix is an antitrust disaster holds water when Paramount plus Warner Brothers is also an antitrust disaster. But that is the argument they are basically making. Especially if it's the whole picture, right? Because I think it's easy to forget when we talk about the dying business that is all of these cable channels, that there's actually still a lot of money and a lot of viewership in them. And especially then when you look at like CBS, like we talk about Netflix a lot more than we talk about CBS, but like a hell of a lot of people still watch CBS. And yes, all those people are very old. And yes, that number is going down. But it's a hell of a lot of people still watch CBS. And so if you like we talk way too much about market definitions on this show because in the guise of these trials, but like because that's an interest law. If you think about it as like how people stream shows and movies on the internet, you're going to land in one very specific antitrust place. But if you think about it as like how people watch television, you end up in a very different kind of antitrust place. And then if you define it as just like how people spend their time in front of screens, which is increasingly what everybody wants these markets to be, it ends up very different again. So I think there seems to have been this sense from Paramount that they were going to be the only ones who could get this deal done because David Ellison and Larry Ellison are friends with the Trump administration and the Trump administration would block anything else. But then we saw this reporting last week that Ted Serandos was like in the White House meeting with Trump. Netflix seems to be very confident that this is going to get done. Trump is like on truth social posting weird stuff about that kind of cuts in all directions where he's like he likes Ted Serandos. But then he's like, I think CNN needs to be part of this deal in order for it to. And it's just I we're at a point now where like I couldn't even begin to handicap who has the upper hand here. Do you have a do you have a read? I'm sort of at the conspiracy theory, which is this is two and a half years of noise. The Trump administration is not good at executing. You know, like if you if you like Trump announces things on true social all day long and they just like happen or don't happen, everything goes to court. Every court decision is like I saw Blue Sky Post here is like every court opinion lately is a hundred year old Reagan appointee saying like democracy should be protected or the Supreme Court saying Trump is a king and we should listen to him. And those are your choices. And who knows who knows like the Trump administration getting the seal over the finish line and then all the attendant litigation. I do think this is two to three years of noise. I will say that it's very funny that it's Warner Brothers along the way, a company that has killed everything that has ever tried to acquire it just killed it dead. Like one of the reasons they didn't work out for discovery is that when AT&T bought Warner Brothers, they just saddled it with a bunch of like leverage debt. And then David Zazzel was like, I'll deal with it. And he's like, whoops, that killed me. Nevermind. Nevermind. AT&T, by the way, bought it bought Warner Brothers so that it could compete with Netflix. That was it stated rationale for this deal. And it won its antitrust lawsuit. The government, the Trump administration tried to block AT&T in the first term from buying Warner Brothers and it weren't AT&T won because it convinced a judge that AT&T owning Warner Brothers would somehow compete against Netflix. This is a real thing that happened. It, I rewind the clock. I wrote about it. It was insanity. Uh, I don't think that AT&T competed with Netflix at this time. And now Netflix is going to buy it. And we're like, that's an antitrust problem. And it's like, none of this makes any sense. I will say that just looking at all of the plans these companies have for what they want to do with Warner Brothers does not inspire confidence. In fact, I'm pretty sure that on a call where Netflix announced it was going to buy Warner Brothers, they straight up asked Ted Sarandos, like, why won't Warner Brothers kill you too? Oh yeah, we have this clip. Ted Sarandos' answer is so funny. He's, yeah, the question is basically, every time somebody does this, it goes horribly. Why isn't this going to go horribly? Here's his answer. A lot of those failures that we've seen historically is because the company that was doing the acquisitions didn't understand the entertainment business. They didn't really understand what they were buying. We understand the assets that we're buying. The things that are critical in Warner Brothers are key businesses that we operate in and we understand. A lot of times the acquiring company, it was a legacy non-growth business that was looking for a sort of a lifeline that doesn't apply to us. So incredible shade in AT&T there. We understand the poison challenge for buying is an incredible argument. We're good at this is literally what that boils down. Netflix has promised they'll leave HBO Max as a separate app. I believe it. No way. Are you kidding me? No, I don't believe that. What I do think and Tedzrandis has said this a bunch is that what Netflix wants with all of those assets is both all of those assets, but also some of those businesses. And I think if you're in Netflix and you've been looking at movie theaters going, oh, maybe we actually need a way into this business in a way that makes some sense. It would be ridiculous to stop doing movies for theaters. But there are lots of open questions. Right? Like if you're one of the things that Warner Brothers Discovery does is make tons of shows for other streaming networks, right? Like it's HBO is the flagship, but Warner Brothers Studios makes tons of stuff. And would Netflix just take it all for itself? Or is it going to like enter the business of just being a studio that makes things for others? Would it get into theaters because Warner has a long, very good relationship with theaters? Tedzrandis has said all the things I think you'd want him to say if you're a Hollywood person. I 100 percent believe that he's lying, that HBO Max will continue to be an app. The other ones make sense to me that they would continue to do. I think he's lying about all of it. Look, I you think they really just like they decided it was worth eighty three billion dollars to get like friends and Harry Potter on. Yeah, like forever in whatever James Gunn is going to do next at DC. Yeah, I think like they want the IP. They don't have a lot of their own great IP. No, especially not stranger things is over. They can they can do sops at theater owners or whatever, but they can also just squeeze that stuff to death. And then the the main thing, this idea that Warner sells content to other streamers, well, they're going to be the other bitter. Right. Like they like Warner already makes content for Apple TV and HBO Max, its own service and Netflix and whoever else. And Netflix is just going to take them out of that game. Or people are going to pitch into a system where Netflix usually is a bitter, but not they won't be because they're just going to like they are going to reduce competition for the shows that are made. Yeah, meaningful way. And there's there you can't just horsepower your way through that reality. Like you're just taking one big player off the board on both sides of the market. And so look, we've heard in the context of people buying Warner Brothers, we have heard these lies before. Sure. It's like just directly heard these lies before. And they usually kill the company that tells the lies because Warner Brothers is huge. It's part of the Hollywood ecosystem in a very important way. The fans care about that IP in a very important way. You can bully AT&T into releasing a four, three grayscale Justice League movie re-edited by Zack Snyder. You sure can. Like that should not be a possible thing that happened. That is the only real outcome of AT&T buying Time Warner. So I just I look at all this and my Netflix will get eaten alive. On the other side, you look at Paramount's plans for its company, even in the absence of Warner Brothers. And you're like, oh, you're doomed too. Like David Ellison, you know, he when they bought when Skydance bought Paramount back in August, give a bunch of interviews about their plans. And it's all the same stuff. Yeah. Right. He's like, we're going to see efficiencies by combining all the backend platforms and making one store of data so we can target ads more effectively. And it's like, yeah, you could do that. Have you thought of making good shows? Right. Like cool. And yeah, so what he's going to buy Warner and then they're going to combine the tech back ends of the HBO Max app, which means inevitably there will be yet another version of the HBO Max app. If David Ellison would just agree to just call it HBO and get rid of absolutely everything else any of these companies make and just call it HBO, they have my vote. I'm in. I mean, sure. Uh, the reason they changed it from HBO Max to Max was they didn't want to clutter up the HBO brand with a bunch of discovery slot. Right. And then they realized that no one cares about discovery slot. They only care about HBO. So like they're going to run headfirst in this problem. Uh, Ellison has a dream that he can make a TikTok like recommendation algorithm for this single platform that contains all of Paramount's IP. And obviously he has a dream because Oracle is the big partner to buy TikTok. If that deal ever goes through, which I will point out again, the Trump administration is not good at executing. Yeah. I don't know if Oracle is going to run TikTok in the future because we just keep letting bite dance run TikTok for as long as it wants. But that's right. You see that you can just say that if you're a media executive, you're like, you know what we need? We need the TikTok algorithm for our IP. It's like, great. I'm, I'm glad that you had that idea. Everyone else does too. Yeah. It's really hard to do that. And then he has even more bananas ideas about integrating AI. Can I just read you this quote? Sure. This is from the rap that he gave this, he did all these reporter roundtables. And he was like, here's how I see us using AI. Ellison gave a specific example of what potential use of AI he sees, uh, for the, the company, Paramount. Ellison's daughter is a fan of Paw Patrol. And he said the industry is potentially three years away from his daughter being able to talk to Sky, the pink dog from the show in a real time AI generated conversation for 20 minutes. No, if your vision of the future of your company is someone can talk to dogs who are cops for 20 minutes, but you got a problem. Like Paw Patrol is not great. Like we are a Paw Patrol hustle mask. This is a Paw Patrol child. I, we didn't like it. Well, we dealt with it. Sure. I would have never in my life allowed Max to talk to an AI sky for 20. Well, it's, it's also, it's just very funny that even in that case, it's not like, Oh, wouldn't it be so cool if we could make more Paw Patrol? Like we're going to pour, we're going to, we're going real life Paw Patrol. I'm aware that not all the dogs are cops. All right. I'm aware that one of them does recycling and another one has a jet ski. Like this is not high art. No. But yeah, I mean, and again, I think that's the kind of thing that if you're a Hollywood person, you look at and you're like, Oh, you have no interest in making things. Right. Do you want engagement? Yeah. 20 minutes of talking to sky the dog is not art. It is just engagement time. It is time that you can collect data to target advertising. And then all of the other David Alson ideas are about unifying data across your platforms to more effectively target advertising. So then, so then you look at a company like Warner Brothers Discovery and of course they'd want everything, right? You're, you're in the, you're in the library buying business at that point. You're like, I'm not here to make things. I am here to have things that are already made. Right. And I think this is why hilariously over the course of one weekend, Netflix went from being the villain in Hollywood to being at least a little sympathetic. Yeah. Because at the very least Netflix, Netflix pays actors and directors and DPs money to make films. Yeah. Not enough money. And there's not enough backend residual. Like all of the structure of that money is not what people want, but they are in the business of paying those people to make things that some of those people at least are proud of. Right. Finding new ways to remix all of the episodes of the Big Bang Theory so that you can hang out with. You can talk to Sheldon. You're like, what age do you want Sheldon to be on? Young Sheldon or regular Sheldon? He's going to talk to you for 20 minutes about being a cop. Like, who knows? I'm just like, you look at these visions for what to do with Warner and they are not meaningfully different from the visions that every other doomed purchaser of Warner has ever had. Yep. They are hard to execute. They come right up against Warner Brothers own history, its own legacy in Hollywood. And I, none, no one has the idea of what if we tried to do a good job? It's just not, it's not an outcome on the board right now. Yeah. What if we bought Warner and tried to do a good job? And I think where this really comes to head is how CNN is being used as a pawn in this whole conversation. Yeah. CNN like it or hate it. I personally think CNN has kind of devolved into just being a fairly bad 24 seven podcast, but it's still like an important thing that happens every day. But it is an important news source. You, I mean, that is a very harsh criticism, but I will also concede CNN still operates a worldwide newsroom with actual reporters on the ground with video cameras and sources and fixtures around the world in war zones in a way that nothing else exists. Like there are very few of that left in the world. Yep. CNN is important. Ellison, according to Wall Street Journal, promised Donald Trump quote sweeping changes to CNN. We can already see the sweeping changes he's made to CBS news where he took Barry Weiss and the free press installed her as the editor-in-chief of CBS news. She's making changes to their talent. She's interviewing Erica Kirk in a prime time special herself. I mean, as an editor-in-chief, like Joe, work himself. Yeah, yeah, a little sympathy there, but that's how we're supposed to do it. Funny thing about that too, by the way, is there was a 60 minutes interview with Leslie Saul and Marjorie Taylor Greene that Donald Trump really hated and said a bunch of mean things about how the new ownership is not any better than the old ownership. And it's like, just how does anyone not see what this is at this point? If you can, if you start to concede a little, you end up conceding a lot. Yeah. Right. And particularly for a news organization, I'm the one who rants and rays or ethics falsely. The thing you need to say is you can't tell us what to do. That's the only message a big news organization needs to say. And then you can be whoever you want to be. Yeah, which to me is so clearly why Netflix is like, we want no part of this. Right. I actually, Liz and I talk to this all the time, you have a lot of feelings about Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch knows that the most important thing for the Wall Street Journal is that you can't tell it what to do. Yeah. And he will defend it on those grounds over and over. He did it with their nose. He does it against the Trump administration. It is core. He's Rupert Murdoch. What's to say about Rupert Murdoch? But at his heart, he's a news person and he understands actually the Wall Street Journal needs not to be told what to do. Yeah. And that's what he's told. Many powerful people to shove it when it is. Yeah, it used to work there. I did. And like, that's the thing. Like they had to go into the New York office, passed a really like a like a twice life-sized thing of Sean Hannity, which was not great. Did you ever think of yourselves as a Tom Wamskans of News Corp. Were you like, I can get into this family? I always thought of myself as the slightly shorter Greg, where everybody was just kind of like, what are you doing here? David, I don't understand why you work here when you could have done a succession at News Corp. Anyhow, I would say like David Elson does not, he does not understand that Rupert Murdoch's role is to say you can't tell my news from what to do. Yeah. Which he also does for Fox News. You can, again, you can have a lot of feelings about Rupert Murdoch, but he plays that role as the billionaire or an urban media company very well. Yeah. Um, David Elson is like, you can tell us what to do. I want this steel gun. David Zazloff, to some extent, was like, you can tell me what to do. I want this steel gun. It, Netflix doesn't want any of that smoke. No. They don't even want to buy this thing. And so here's this important institution that is one of the last of its kind worldwide, and everyone's like, we're just going to screw with it to make this money with our bad ideas about talking to the Paw Patrol. I just think that Charles wrote this headline for us. There are no good outcomes for the Warner Brothers sale. And I, again, nowhere on this list is we should try hard. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I agree. And I do think the, the only certain outcome at this point is probably two plus years of just abject chaos that causes a lot of problems in the process. Um, but that means we have lots of time to talk about it. We should move on. Um, we're going to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk to Charlie Harding about AI music. Um, because I like AI music more than I like AI Paw Patrol. So we're going to, we're going to come back and we're going to do that. We'll be right back. 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Light Straight and Multistyler and the new LED face mask, both of which were recognized as CES 2026 Innovation Award honorees. Learn more about both technologies on L'Oreal.com. L'Oreal Group, create the beauty that moves the world. All right, we're back. Joining us now, Charlie Harding. Hi, Charlie. Hello. Thanks for having me. Charlie, you are the co-host of Switched On Pop, a very good podcast. You are a music journalist and a professor. And I believe we called you a verge cast intern at one point. Is that right? Why did I earn that? I don't recall. You've been on the show a number of times that you need some title, but I don't want it to go too much to your head. Oh, yeah. I appreciate the choosing to not have title inflation. Like really put me down. Yeah, Nila is big on titles, not being too grand in inflationary. Everyone at the verge is just a person. You're just a person. That's it. How it should be. Present. It's very flat. What was that holocracy that like Zappos had where no one had a title or a job? And you all just sort of showed up and were like, how do we still choose? It's perfect. Um, so you are here because you just did a big story about Suno and AI and essentially what it has done to country music in particular. And I'm curious to know where this story came from because Nila has been on the show ranting and raving about his favorite AI songs for a long time. Did Nila do this to you? Well, I feel like Nila and I have bonded for years now over the question of when will these music AI generative apps be any good? And last time we spoke, we had not crossed the threshold. Maybe we, maybe we talked a little bit about BBL Drizzy at some point. Yeah. But now I feel like we've really, we've crossed the line. And I actually had a former student. Uh, I lecture at NYU and at Berkeley College of Music one day a week. And I had a former student who was down in Nashville and was like, I got to tell you something, I went to write country songs and this city is not what I thought it was. Wow. Well, it's interesting that it started country music because you and I had a conversation, I've been obsessed with soul covers of rap songs that are all over YouTube and Spotify. Now, I said that there's like a funk cover. It's not really very funky, but there's a quote unquote funk cover of killing the name of I Rage Against Machine. It's good. That I, I literally just said to David and Joanna on this show was the most important AI innovation of the last year. It, it, something happened, right? And my theory was this was hard to do. So I obviously came and asked Charlie, Hey, is this hard to do? And you scratched it. I go, this is trivially easy to do. And I think the next turn is because Nashville is so structured, because country music is so structured, you can see it happening and how it's happening. Cause my theory is that this already happened in hip hop and pop music, which is not nearly as structured as country music. All right. So Charlie, before we get too far into the actual demo here, just what is Sune and how does it work? Sune is basically chat GPT for audio generation. You can make a text prompt and you can output an entire song with music, lyrics, vocals, you get a whole track from Sune. Is it like an LLM in the sense that it is trained on lots of stuff and then makes other stuff like the stuff that it has trained on. They don't like to tell us what they've trained their material on. But yes, it seems to be trained on the entire corpus of music. And you could basically prompt it to make music in any style. Yeah. Let's just dive into this. So Charlie, what I want you to do is basically like, I want to do this process here live on the show as if we are like in Nashville making a song. And I want you to sort of, as we go, explain both kind of what's new about the tool and how it is sort of newly fitting into the process. Right. So like we have this longstanding kind of assembly line of how music it's made. And I just want to soon know the hell out of it. Does this sound reasonable? Yeah. So the thing that folks in Nashville have figured out is that if you try to create a song from a text prompt, it's going to give you the lowest common denominator country song with really predictable bad rhyme schemes. It's not going to have a very good story. The melody is going to be. Meh, good enough, but like pretty meh. So what folks are doing is instead of handing everything over to this tool, they're still getting together in a songwriting room. They're writing a song. You got to have, you got to start with a decent song anyway. It's got to have melody lyrics and probably some sort of background supporting instrument that is enough. Now, typically you would take that. You would hire what everyone in Nashville calls a track guy. They all use the term track guy. I think it is unfortunately a very gendered position. A track guy is basically a producer, but they don't call them a producer because that producer is not going to get a producer credit. All they're going to do is they're going to produce a really high quality demo. And they're the person being replaced in this in this pipeline. So what we're going to do is I in writing this article, the Verge was like, I need, I need some examples. Very few songwriters wanted to send their examples, not just because they were maybe reticent about speaking about how they're using these tools, but also that's their IP and they want to pitch these songs. Right. But so we're talking about the point where it's like some combination of voice memos on my phone and lyrics in the notes app. Like that's that's the level we're at at the beginning here. That is exactly right. You don't even have to submit your lyrics. All I need to do is make a voice memo on your phone. So I did just that. So the morning before publishing my article, I was like, I need an example. I was in the shower and it was like country song, dirt road, something. And ran back into my little home studio or I am now and I played this little chorus. A dirt road blue skies. We drive down every mile. I like your country. Back porch. While we wrote every single vow. We swing for the fences. Live with no defenses up and down through and through a good life. A dirt road blue skies. It's giving like what if Johnny Cash had like a really good day? That's not good music. Because what you're saying is the voice is mediocre and does not match with the the upbeatness of the song. Even though I don't have any country twang, I was proud of rhyming every mile with single vowel, mile and vowel is a kind of slant rhyme. And I figure if I could give this to Suno and put in a country style, maybe we could hear it with that twang. So here's what we'll do. We're going to take that little voice memo that I made on my iPhone and we're going to send it to Suno. Just by the way, this is the thing that if you're a songwriter, you're you're doing what you just did all the time. Right? Like this is like part of the job. Yeah, that's what you do. Yeah, you write songs. OK, so I uploaded my little dirt road demo to Suno and it automatically identifies its core characteristics, such as it's an acoustic full country song in the key of G major at a moderate tempo of around 100 BPM. My timing is not that good on that blank. And it captures the lyrics. I haven't written a whole song. This is just kind of like a chorus. But what I can do now is I can remix this song. I can take my file and I can hit cover in Suno. And this is where I can describe what style song we want this this demo to turn into. You said something in the style of Johnny Cash. Perhaps we could try that. Yeah. OK, so this is where I would say we probably shouldn't describe Johnny Cash because there are content filters that will say, oh, we can't make a song in the style of Johnny Cash, but we can go over to, you know, Gemini and say, oh my God, I need to write a prompt for Suno to create a song in the style of Johnny Cash. Without using his name. I mean, this is like where things just my mind explodes. Like people have thought about this workflow, right? This is a pretty standard workflow. Exactly. Because I've seen so many people prompt Suno with stuff from Chachi P and Claude and Gemini. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is just what everyone is doing. Yeah. I love Gemini begins its response with that's a fun challenge. I'd like to evade YouTube's content ID filters, Gemini. Exactly. OK, so it's given me a number of options. We'll describe the first one, a classic American country song with a deep baritone male vocal acoustic guitar provides a steady driving boom chicka boom rhythm supported by a sparse reverberate electric guitar and a simple upright bass line. The tempo is a walking pace. So that's how we're going to get. Can you just add in just for me the horns? Oh, you know what I mean? From and it has to have some trumpets. They need some Johnny Cash horns. Yeah. And then if we want to make it even better, we'll say what are the negative styles I should indicate? You can tell it what not to sound like. That really helps influence it to sound more like what you're aiming for. So. Too complicated. Give it to me as a bullet pointed list. These things are too smart for us now. Great. I'm just going to throw out here this theoretically is the agentic revolution where Charlie should just be replaced by. OK, now we're going to just add in our advanced options are excluded styles. We're going to hit create and let's see how long this thing takes. All right, it's already generated to their actually. My gosh, it's like the music industry is so doomed. You're dead. You don't even know it. No, no, no, you have my amazing voice memo first. All right, let's see what we get. A dirt road, blue skies, we drive down every mile to our home back porch where we rode every single mile. We swing for the bounces living on what's going on with the face. Why is Johnny Cash in space? A dirt road, blue skies are all we need. Trumpets. What a guy to give them once. Ha ha. They're literally playing the ring of fire. I was just about to say that. OK, but. What you you managed to prompt and negative prompt, you know, yeah, into just do ring of fire horns. Yeah, basically. Yeah. You didn't say ring of fire and you didn't say Johnny Cash, but Gemini produced enough words that soon I was like, oh, you just want ring of fire. Yeah, but let's do it this time in the style of a Limp Bizkit. I'm telling you, why did you go there? Because Charlie, we're friends. What do you do? What I'm doing to you is showing how this you can take your song and you can put it into any kind of vibe that you want. So let's cover this one more time. Thank you, Gemini. Ridiculous. All right. And immediately we have two songs in the style of Limp Bizkit covering my really ridiculous dirt road song. There's you just drained a lake for these two Limp Bizkit songs. I'm very upset with you. By the way, the water thing is not true. I just like saying it. Goodbye. OK, the FaZe vocals do work in this case because I think Fred Durst phase his own vocals. I'm not going to say the name of the artist, but there is a country artist in Nashville who makes songs that sound alarmingly like that and I never listen to them ever again. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. So that was just that fast. Yeah, you could do every style of country music or any other genre and you get them super quick. OK, so I have two questions here. One, I call that the vocals on both versions. And it's in your story, right? So you can do a lot of things, but the audio quality isn't there. And in particular, like vocal quality is pretty messy. I think I could just hear it there, that there was some weird effects on those vocals, like it can't quite do it. Is that just the way it works? Is that getting better over time? Is that just the nature of trying to synthetically generate singing? I noticed that there is a lot of kind of strange artifacts, more so in Suno than something like, you know, Gemini's nano banana and the photo output that we're getting today where, increasingly, it's very hard to tell if a photograph is AI or not. With music, there's still this very overly tuned, grainy kind of quality. But I will say it will output all kinds of varieties of vocals. Sometimes it will sound exactly like another artist. I had a student give me a song once that sounded just like Paul Simon. It was just like, wow, that's Paul Simon's voice. A number of my sources in this song said they really don't like when they get a Suno pitch and it clearly is it just feels like it's trained off of the voice of one of their friends. That happens all the time. I've also received songs, though, that are what sound like almost like a lo-fi bedroom recording with someone who is singing out of tune. So it's able to output all kinds of facsimiles of humans. But they're still definitely facsimiles. Well, but I'm really struck by the fact that, yes, it's a facsimile. And like, nobody is going to confuse that with like a perfectly produced country song. But that's not the goal at this part of the process, right? Like we're one step past voice memo. And I think that this just makes me think of like we talk a lot about vibe coding on this show. And it's like the thing I hear from people in tech all the time where they're like, we used to make slide decks to show off an idea that we had. And now we just make a prototype. I can just build a thing in an hour and a half that it doesn't it doesn't even resemble a finished product, but it's enough to get to the next thing much more quickly. I can show you what it looks like. Better headline. Nashville is vibe coding songs. That's kind of what it is. Well, that's a part that I'm really interested in, right? Like the idea that. You know, famous artists want to hear the pitches they're getting in their own voices. That's part of your story. Yeah, certainly. There's a lot of weird vibes around AI and the music industry we shouldn't come to. But the part where you can just say, OK, I'm going to go pitch this to Morgan Wallin and put it in his voice. Right. That seems like a sooner shouldn't let you do that. And then based on what we just saw with how you can prompt it, it can absolutely do that. Yeah. So there's kind of two approaches to this. One is that you can get sooner to get really close to sounding like another artist. But there are also a voice replacement tools where you can take another AI voice and transform it into a trained vocal to sound exactly in the style of an artist. Or it could be a sung vocal from. You know, I could sing. I could sing something and have it output in the quality of Shania Twain if I had her voice model. That's just an impression you do. That's different. When you say voice model, it's Charlie in the wig wearing the Shania outfit. Don't impress me much. I definitely won't do that. So I have I received some reporting. Very few people wanted to talk on the record about the fact that lots of artists like receiving their their vocals on the actual track. And whether or not they even like it, artists are receiving pitches that sound like them. This is not totally new practice. In fact, there were demo artists who were sound elikes that when real demos were made, that you'd go get this one person to sound like that other person. Because what you're trying to do is show that this song that I've written could be major country stars next hit. That's that's your goal in writing a demo. And now you can potentially AI a vocal to sound like 20 different artists, 100 different artists, put it in their voice and show them what they might sound like in this song. Again, it's kind of a sketch. Like this is a vibe coded demo. It's not the finished product. It's probably not going to make it to radio, though I have heard that some elements might. We can talk more about that if you want. This is widespread. Everybody is making these things. Everybody is receiving them. I shouldn't say everybody, everybody. Some people feel not so good about it. But what my sourcing shows is that from the most upstart people in Nashville to the biggest stars, there are people at every part of the supply chain who are working in this sooner demo world. What's this doing to the industry? Like there's a lot of feelings about AI in general. I would say that the big labels making deals with platforms like Suno and Udio is saying AI is the future. The president of the recording Academy just, I think, put on Instagram. He hasn't been in a session in months where AI hasn't been used. That's a lot. That's a big thing for him to say, right? I'm sort of stunned by that because. In music, there are so many places that AI is being used. And the primary place that AI is being used in music is some like really benign things like noise removal, like some plugins that use AI as part of how they might EQ something. So in that case, I absolutely believe it. But, you know, people are, I think most frequently what I hear is like songwriters using chat. GPT as a rhyme assistant and sort of like idea generation brainstorming. The generative music part, there are definitely producers doing it. But I would doubt that it is the widespread thing that every producer is doing at this moment. But at the same time, I'm having a hard time thinking if I'm a songwriter, whose job is to make a lot of things and try to convince other people to cut records based on them. This seems like an unbelievable like productivity unlock. It is. Yeah. So I'm struck by the fact that this seems like the sort of thing that I can totally see why all these people would embrace it. And yet they don't want to talk to you about it. Are we just still in this phase where people are like everyone is using it and it's sort of an open secret, but nobody wants to be the first one to admit that they're using AI to make songs? So I reached out to dozens of people in Nashville. Most people did not want to talk about it. A lot of people want to talk off the record. But I was able to find some people who are very enthusiastic about these tools and were willing to share with me some some stuff that hadn't been reported before. There seems to be a thing in Nashville that there's a bit of shame about using AI in the song creating process. I think it's a shame in every creative industry, but in particular in the music industry, there's just an all out war brewing. I see it every day on my Instagram feed where you have artists and labels saying they want to use AI. You have big producers from the past like Tim Bowen saying it's here. Get over it. You have all these catalog sales where big name artists are selling their catalogs for millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think the reason that they're being purchased is the purchasers of the catalogs are like, well, we'll just have AI remix the entire Rolling Stones catalog. And we'll sell those songs. And that that's just a big tension in this industry that it feels like the young songwriters can use AI as a tool to play the lottery and try to get a hit. And that's good for them. And the biggest players can sell their catalogs and the labels can get more AI music because the labels are fundamentally exploitative. And the middle is just getting squeezed. Is that what you're seeing as well, Charlie? Yeah, everybody's pissed right now. It's like, where was this stuff trained on? Why are we draining lakes? Why are we making a bunch of covers of slop that nobody needed? Is this real organic music? Why is this stuff flooding my playlists? There are there's so much tension about whether or not this is providing any real value. I think in the Nashville system, this idea of demoing a song to figure out what it might sound like if we really properly recorded it. There's probably a lot more arguable value that it's creating in just this one little piece of the supply chain. And yet I think just given all of the press about is it the right way of saying? There's some I agree with you. There's a lot of anti AI coverage. We do it. Then there's what you're talking about, which is this is a huge creative unlock, particularly for people who are just trying to make it. And we're basically in a volume game. Yeah, it sounds like if you're a songwriter in Nashville, like it's a volume game. You're just taking shots until you hit. But it seems like the people at the bottom of the food chain who are in the volume business and the people at the top of the food chain are benefiting from AI. Everyone else is getting squeezed in the middle. And I just don't know how that plays out. How is that playing out from who you're talking to? Well, it makes me think about the early stage of chat, GPD and the early all m's where it was easier to prompt them to output things that were clearly built off of their training data. Right. Like, I'm not happy that every LLM basically took my book from me and used it in its training data without my permission. Right. Like, I would have loved to have like received some kind of royalty around that. Maybe I'll get some kind of settlement at some point. But with music, it is, as we saw, quite easy to make a really strong copy of someone else's sound. All of a sudden, the like blurred lines for LLM's Robin Thicke case feels like it's coming back into the conversation because I don't like that someone is making something that is so similar to my art that clearly was trained on my art. That sounds like my voice. That sounds like we literally just got the horn solo from Ring of Fire. Yep. Not the exact same one, but the thing that you ask any person, they're like, yeah, that's the Ring of Fire horn solo. So I think there's that kind of reaction of feeling, you know, my work is being cheapened because it can be copied so obviously. That's certainly part of how people are feeling. But I think there's a lot of feelings that are going around. And we are in a moment where there's a lot of embrace with these tools, but also, you know, when I first started sourcing this article, nobody wanted to talk. And why are you doing this thing? Ravidously in your business and yet feel so ashamed of it. It's a lot of that going on right now. Should I feel bad listening to and liking these songs? I can't give you, I can't be the guardian angel on your shoulder. I guess you can. Please. I need this. This is a very moral. I like how David started by calling you an intern and ended with like, can you provide the moral absolution for using AI? That's what we ask of our interns here at theverge.com. Oh my God. David Pierce, would you like to come and confess something? I listen to an AI cover rage against the machine. It's one of the most blatantly capitalistic things I've ever done. Oh my gosh. I think that's actually, Mike, do you think you said people don't care? One of my tropes on the show has been people don't care about quality, right? They will listen to music at 64 kilobits on AirPods, as long as it's the song they want. They don't care. They're going to listen to 15th generation YouTube, like bootlegs. It's just a thing. As long as it's the song they want. Yeah. I think the question here is, do they care that it's people making the music? Right. Because that's a big next step up in people don't care. I've always been skeptical of the audio quality wars. Like people enjoyed music through AM radio. It was great because it was your favorite song. Songs matter. You know, I'm surrounded by amazing musical equipment that helps me make really high-fi cool recordings. Most of the time I'm listening through terrible AirPods that just sound like meh. But they seem to be my word of the day. But they help me go on the subway and the subway is quiet. I can hear the song that I like. It takes me to a special moment. I'm happy. So I think the audio quality thing, all that's mostly nonsense. Most people can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a wave file. I hardly can. And despite that, music is where we go to. I think music serves like two core purposes. One, to either enhance or to change how we are feeling. And two, to commune and to be a part of something or to be seen in who we are. And I think that hearing a rage against the machine AI cover song can maybe help change or enhance how you're feeling. I think it doesn't do a good job of the helping you feel seen in the world. We most most of pop music is built off of the relationship to the fans, to the artist. When you love Charlie XCX like I do and you go to the Brat concert, you are a part of a thing. I don't just mean to me making a plea for live music, but. Experiencing her music is about being a part of a thing that just I think that that cannot be. I don't think that gets replaced. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's a part of the rage against machine cover where I know it's a rage against machine song that makes it really important. Yeah. But also the thing is like, if you like right now it's novel and if you hear 17 more of those covers, you're going to get bored of it. Yeah. I think that's right. So all right, we need to take a break here, but Charlie, can you do can you do us a favor? What are we going to do next? Can we do dirt road in the style of rage against the machine? I'd like you to play us out break. Give me a second. We need a prompt first. I'm terrified what this is going to sound like. Here's dirt road in the genre is heavy political funk metal. That sounds right. Here we go. There's that face vocal again. It's bad. You can hear it. Down through and through. It's horrible. Can we turn this off somewhere? Tom Marullo just threw his laptop out a window. Listen, that's a Pepsi commercial in 12 months. You heard it here first. Zachary Larocco is so fucking mad at you. All right, Charlie. Come on. I just need to say this very clearly based on that, that example, the music industry is in no danger from. None at all. You should sleep well tonight, my friends. Rage against the machine. You're going to be just fine. All right, Charlie. Thank you. Limp biscuit again. All right, you get it, buddy. Charlie, thank you. We got to take a break. We'll be back to do lightning round. Support for this show comes from Indeed. If you're looking to hire top tier talent with expertise in your field, Indeed says they can help. Indeed's sponsored jobs gives your job the best chance at standing out and grants you access to quality candidates who can drive the results you need. Spend more time interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Now with Indeed sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash Fox business. Just go to Indeed.com slash Fox business right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash Fox business terms and conditions apply. Hiring do it the right way with Indeed. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up and audit thread. It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place and cuts audit prep by 82 percent. Less manual work, clearer visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance or call it calm clients. Get it? Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to Vanta.com slash calm. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up and audit thread. It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place and cuts audit prep by 82 percent. Less manual work, clearer visibility, faster deals. Zero chaos. Call it compliance or call it calm clients. Get it? Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Get started at Vanta.com slash calm. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up and audit thread. It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place and cuts audit prep by 82 percent. Less manual work, clearer visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance or call it calm clients. Get it? Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to Vanta.com slash calm. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Eric, I believe we've a sponsor today. Indeed we do. This week's Lighty round is presented by AWS. How leading businesses use AI for next level innovation. That's great work. Nailed it. All right, so there's a lot of stuff to get to here. Neal, we're going to do, it's Brendan. Brendan Cardeverstow. He's a dummy every week. I don't want to get to that. We'll get to that. But first, Neal, there is the most unusual thing, which is breaking typeface news. Yes, this week Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State of the United States, declared that the State Department no longer used Calibri and it would start using Times New Roman again. He chalked this up to being like anti DEI and anti woke. I was reading about it. I was all set to be all mad. And then I started reading John Gruber's blog post about it. And I thought to myself, why am I going to read Gruber on the Vergecast when I can just summon John Gruber? Hey, John, how's it going? Here I am on my beat as usual. When I need people to be mad about fonts, I immediately turn to John. It's like the Yankees, fonts, James Bond and like a side of Apple. And on top of it, you're also like the New York Times got this story wrong, which is choice. Yes. Yes. It's a real swirl of things that I enjoy. So Rubio puts out this, I think they call it like a memo and he says all paper at the State Department needs to be in Times New Roman now, which is a great word for just describing stuff. And then you're like, actually, this makes sense. Explain what you mean. Oh, where to start? How much time do we have? Five minutes. Five minutes. So I think that the 2023 decision. So the State Department, as you might expect, is a slow moving organization in its tradition bound and they didn't even adopt, it seems, word processing until fairly late in the game, like 2004. And so for 20 years, I think they were a Microsoft Word PC shop and they said everything should be set in Times New Roman 14. And before that, it was like Courier. It was our Courier New, which is God awful. And we could talk about that separately compared to regular Courier, because Courier New is thin and wispy and terrible. Un-American, you could say. And but their current font guidelines at the State Department are that anything that they produce that the president needs to design needs to be in time or Courier New, not Times New Roman. And that never changed even with the other thing. But in 2023, then Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. And I just love that his name is Antony. And because it just sounds like you're kind of playing up. They'll call him Tony. I know some people know him. Everyone just calls him Tony. Yeah. Well, Blinken put out a memo with the which again, who I'm sure Rubio didn't write this new one. I'm sure Blinken didn't write the other one, but somebody put out a memo and signed their name to it. And they changed the font from Times New Roman to Calibri. And the reasons for it were bogus. It was in the name of accessibility and blah, blah, blah. But it's and again, Calibri is not a terrible font. And for a while, it was Microsoft's default font for documents. But the state to show how slow moving they are, they changed their default font to Calibri after Microsoft went through a very high profile. Hey, we're going to change from Calibri to something else. So we're going to have our users have a contest and vote for the top five entries. So after Microsoft, that bastion of taste decided to move away from Calibri. The state department was like, oh, now that's what we're going to switch to to be hip and modern and appeal to the kids. If if they had never changed from Times New Roman ever, nobody would ever talk about it and nobody, nobody, not even somebody, somebody who doesn't even know what Times New Roman is or somebody like me, who could get a couple thousand words out of it and a guest spot on a verge cast. Well, so this is what I want to ask you. Nobody would think twice if they had stuck with Times New Roman and used it for the next hundred years, because Times New Roman looks like the type of font the state department should use for diplomatic documents. So this is part of the point in your blog post, which people should read. And it's one of the main questions I want to ask you. These fonts, these typefaces, you're picking them for aesthetics, for style, right? A lot of the Trump administration is about weird style decisions, right? Brain wreck the luster of America. Here's a ballroom that gets bigger every single day until I fire the architect. Right. Um, they can't start building it because it can't grow. If it was real, it couldn't possibly grow fast enough to keep up with his imaginary needs. So it needs to be in a constant state of planning so that it can keep getting bigger. And that's how we're picking fonts, too. Like there's like an aesthetic. Yeah. But your point is all of this is all aesthetic because the accessibility concerns raised by Blinken and the Biden administration are fake. Like they're not technologically real. Can you explain what you mean? It's, there's, trust me, after what I've written, if there were scientific studies or actual, you know, reproducible studies that showed that there is an accessibility gain for using Calibri versus Times New Roman, people would be pointing me to the studies and there's not. The font people read John is, I think, what you're trying to say. It's just a bit of voodoo. Now there is an argument. And this is why my website is set in Verdana and always has been. And, and I think the verge is set mostly in sans serif fonts. Most websites are set in sans serif fonts. And it's kind of stems from the idea that on a computer screen, sans serif fonts are more readable. But I kind of think that's a vestige, I believe, of the pre-retina era. And so you can make an argument that it's a little easier on your eyes to use this on serif font for on screen reading. And a lot of state department people read this stuff on screen. The secretary of states themselves probably do get their stuff on paper. And if you go to a bookstore, just go if you don't know anything about fonts. If you're listening to this somehow and still listening to me, go to a bookstore. Just go to any Barnes and Noble and just go to the front of the store and pick up like five random books, novels, nonfiction, just a couple of, you know, new, new books at Barnes and Noble and just flip through and see if the book is set in a serif font or a sans serif font. The odds are very good that if you pick up a stack of ten random books at the front of a Barnes and Noble brand new books in the year 2025, they're all set in serif fonts because it's just sort of what you do for long form text and it looks a little more serious. It's the connotation that's, you know, and they're not all set. And it's not like there's one font that everybody sets books or documents in. But they all, you know, for long form stuff that is supposed to look serious, serif fonts just sort of have that feel because they are older and more tradition bound and I think it is appropriate. Put the politics of everybody's feelings about the Democrats and the Republicans and Trump in particular and these num nuts in this administration. It just is true that the State Department probably ought to use a serif font. And then it runs into the nerdy problem of they're a PC shop using Microsoft Word and they kind of have to stick to the default fonts and Microsoft Word because Word really freaks out if one person who touches a document doesn't have a font installed. Yeah. So actually really funny. The verge started off when we launched in 2011 with serifs and is pre-retina and everyone got mad at us and we switched to sans serifs. And with the last redesign, we finally switched back to serif because we assumed everyone had retina screens. And this was an entire conversation we had. Yeah, I guess that is true. I am not looking at the verge right now, but I guess I do know that the little white on black blurbs that you guys have now, the little social media type posts that that to me define the new modern Verge design are set in that. Yeah. And they have they have ink traps in them, which is very funny for a font. This is all font nerdy. Yes, it's all font nerdy. But actually the reasons for ink traps kind of make sense with anti aliasing, too. It kind of the same type of graphic tricks that look good for making sure that ink that bleeds into a paper remain readable or actually kind of similar tricks to what typographers do for body text size to deal with anti aliasing. So there's one point that I just want to hit on real quick. There's some amount of argument that Kaliber is better for screen readers, which makes no sense to me because I'm assuming screen readers are just reading the underlying Unicode. Is Kaliber better for screen readers? There's no truth to it at all, A. But B, I don't even have to be. I don't even know the I'm not intimately familiar with the exact format of the documents that get passed around within the State Department. But it's probably like if you can just run your cursor over and select and copy, it's probably just actual text. But we're now at a point like and I'm not familiar with the latest version of Windows. But on the Mac on Mac, you can do that with images now, too. Right. Like the difference between live text that you can select copy or even edit and an image of text is actually going away. Because why is that? Because even that when you take a screenshot on your iPhone or on a Mac or whatever, and even if it's a screenshot, you can select and copy the text because OCR is everywhere and it has conquered all fonts. It can even do a really good job with handwriting, even bad handwriting. But certainly if it can even do a passable job with chicken scratch, human handwriting, Times New Roman is not a problem and has not been a problem. Whether the text is actually a series of characters, in which case the screen reader doesn't even have to care about the font. And even if it's an image, if somebody prints something out at the State Department in Times New Roman and scans it and it's just an image of a document, the OCR software will ace it 100 percent of the time. This is a completely solved problem and has been for a long time. And anybody who has like a low vision problem or for whatever reason wants to use software that will reformat a document in bigger fonts or read it aloud or something like that will have zero difference between whether it's in Times New Roman or Vedana or or Calibri or probably anything up to and including James Cameron's favorite Papyrus. No, now. OK, that's it. We've now. There's like I need to cut the font and I can't do this anymore. Yeah, I'm going to get emails. You're not going to get emails about this. We're going to get emails. He did, though. But Cameron sent a memo to the projectionist showing the new avatar movie, telling them how he wants the movie projected and where to set the sound. And the memo is set in Papyrus. All right, spectacular. Well, let's get the secretary of state on that. It's the most important. John, we should let you go here. But before before we do, this is your opportunity. Can we do better than Times New Roman 14? So I don't know that you can if if you're going to live within the limits of the default fonts of Microsoft Word. And so if so, then fine. I actually think that gets to the broader question of how have we let the IT overlords rule everybody's lives? And if the IT department says, no, no, there's no possible way that we can guarantee that everybody working at the State Department has a custom font installed in their machine. And that's the end of the discussion. Pick one of these default fonts. Why are we letting IT department limit our font choices? This is also a solved problem. And, you know, but that's an entirely separate question. So, A, if we're going to live within the world of default fonts in Microsoft Office, Times New Roman 14 is probably the best choice. And fair enough. B, we shouldn't live within that world and they should pick something else. Dream big people. This is what we do here. All right, John, thank you. This is my dream. This is exactly what I wanted. Thanks, buddy. It's a Christmas miracle a couple of weeks early. All right, that was great. All right. That was everything I hoped it would be and more. And much more, I think. Having people come and just randomly yell at us about things they care about on the Vergecast is precisely what we are. I do like that the answer was Marco Rubio was right, but for all the wrong reasons. And he's still kind of an idiot. Listen, worst person you know. All right. My first one, I have an app and a gadget for you today. And I'm very excited about both of them. The gadget I want to talk to you about is, did you see this thing, the pebble index? The new, it's a smart ring. And basically its whole stick is it is a ring that you're supposed to wear in your index finger and it has a little button and a microphone. And that's it. That's that's its whole job. And they're they they're building this like pipeline behind it. It's it's a seventy five dollar ring. It's made by the people who make the pebble watches. Eric Mijikowski is like a long time friend of the Verge. This thing just exists for you to record little bits of audio and you can set reminders for yourself. You can take notes. It's like this is my dream as somebody who is constantly yelling at Siri to remember things for me. It's just a little it's like a spy. Doing that. That you hold. Oh my God, constantly. It's the only way I remember anything. I think I like a thing that I say to people sometimes is that I'm not I'm not better at doing anything than anybody. I'm just better at writing it down. Oh yeah. I'm like I am like a I'm an above average productive person because I'm just better at writing things down than most people. And this is like just a little sort of spy gadget where you can just be like. Buy toilet paper tomorrow and it will just remind you to buy toilet paper tomorrow and it's it makes me happy. This is all I want in my life. Little tiny gadgets. I have two reactions to this thing. One neat. I hope everyone's happy. One we got to stop trying to make index finger rings happen. Like the or it ring is an index finger ring. Yeah. And I'm just like I wear a ring. I wear a red and ring all the time. Just you know, to make tell my wife that the ring is smart. No. But like I just I can't be a two rings and then ones in the index. There's something about that that isn't. I can't do it. The industry wants me to wear an index finger ring. I understand the theory behind this one, which is that you can do it basically with your hands full because all it requires is like pinching your thumb and your index finger together. I buy right. You can do all this same stuff on a pebble watch. You can like hold it and talk into it. But this requires so much more work and both your hands in a way that just tapping your thumb and forefinger. I'm just saying all these companies want to put stuff on your body. Your body is really very hard to attach things to a body. Just a ver chest phrase that I've come up with. That's a new ver chest cliche. Your body sucks at having mounting points. Just fundamentally into like index ring. It's hard to mount shit to your body. That is not a t-shirt we will be making. It's hard. It is. It's just hard. Your body sucks at having mounting point. The life of tell. It's like it's on my chart of wearable bullshit. You know, it's like needs a mounting point. But wait, I bring this up to you because A, I think it's very cool. And B, it caused like a little teeny tiny controversy because one of the things about this ring is that it doesn't have a battery. Yeah, it's designed the way Eric described it to me as if you use it like, you know, 10 times a day for a few seconds at a time, which I think is the sort of normal use case. It'll last you a couple of years. And then once you're done with it, you buy a new one and send the old one back to them for recycling. He thinks about this A as just a, just a sort of necessity of the technology, right? Like it would be very hard to build a charging port into this device in a way that worked and that made it still $75. And he's like, it's a thing you don't have to think about when the battery dies. Get a new one. It's $75. What are you going to do? A lot of people did not like. A lot of people have lots of feelings about that. Yeah. No, this is my second reaction is I saw that. I actually connected that to we did the big profile of Hodo and Phantic and a huge criticism throughout that piece was all of these tools are very cool. And these products are neat and all of them have sealed with the mind batteries. These are just waste. This is just looming E-waste. They're impossible to recycle. Yeah. I think it's a neat idea. I think the idea that natural language interfaces are on the rise is going to lead to a lot of put microphones somewhere where you can just whisper to a computer until like neurolink works or whatever, you know, like this thing where you got to get the input to something. I don't see. I just, I, those are my two criticisms. Like index finger rings are it's a hard sell. And the battery thing, I think is going to be real for this entire category of gadgets because everybody wants to be really small. Yes. And they don't work if they're not. I can't even wear an aura ring because it is, it's too big. And I like bang it on everything and it drives me crazy. Not a fan. Next finger ring. It's what you need. They need to start making like big, chunky, pinky rings, like 70s monster guys. I'm thinking I want like brass knuckles, right? Like have it all sort of live on this side. That's what I'm talking about. There you go. All right. It's God, it's time. It is time. Once again, for America's favorite podcast, within a podcast, Brennan Carr is a dummy. He's a dummy. He's just a dummy. Every week we have a pre-production meeting and every week I'm like, Neela, do we get to not do this this week? And every week you go, no, we have to do it this week. And it's like, look, I, you know, we are reasonably well prepared. We spend all week working in a virgin newsroom. We read a lot of stories for the Brennan segments at this point. And I just like, what do you do this week? And like Google AI mode is like, once again, Brennan was an idiot. Why? So this week, Brennan waited into one of the dumbest controversies in all of tech. It's truly one of the dumbest controversy in all tech. So our, our favorites, the European Union, a bunch of gray suits, drink and wine, eaten cheese, they find X, they find Elon Musk and X, $140 million, which is nothing for the richest man in the world. I will point out. I'm finding you, Neela Patel, eight bucks. Yep. And they, they did it. And yeah, because they're finding X and the other must has turned into this cultural thing and everyone's like, this is censorship in Europe. It's nothing about that. The digital services act in Europe says the platforms cannot hold out that they have verified a user being real if they haven't actually done that. Oh, interesting. Okay. Right. This is just that Europe is protective of identity in a specific way. And so X obviously lets you do that because you can just buy the blue check marks. Right. You can just say you're whoever you want and the check mark signifies a verification that is nothing more than the payment of money. Right. So this is a big deal. So Europe has said to X, especially because of its history as Twitter, those blue check marks meant something to a lot of people for a long time. If they were just doing it now, it would be, it would be just a sign that people paid for something, but the blue check used to mean you are who you say you are. Oh, I think there's an argument that even if you did it now, the blue check mark means something on every other platform. So you're inheriting all that, but it doesn't matter because it was Twitter. And it did mean that and they changed it and now it just means payment and people are being confused and Europe has warned X about this. X does not support Elon Musk does not support the idea of the European Union. Like literally he's like the EU should be dissolved. Robert Sexton's already, he got the fine. So Brenton Carr, of course, has weighed it into this because he can't possibly stay out of anything. And he says, once again, Europe is finding a successful US tech company for being a successful US tech company. Europe is taxing Americans to subsidize a continent held back by Europe's own suffocating regulations. Gracious. So a lot here. One, the idea that X is a successful US tech company is very funny. Like straightforwardly very funny. Twitter was not a successful US tech company. Twitter was a failing disaster of a company that Elon was able to buy by simply saying, what if I offer you more money than you think you can make? And Twitter's board of directors is like, it turns out we have no idea how to make money, you can have it. So the idea that X is successful and it is only declining in users, mostly service, serves as like a Nazi bar full of auto-generated grotk replies that say Elon is a better athlete than Ron James. Very funny. So Brenton on the face of it is a dummy. Second, taxing Americans to subsidize a continent. It's $140 million. If you can subsidize all of Europe, $140 million at a time, like what are you doing? And on top of that, it's not as though Brenton doesn't like taxing and fining companies to get what he wants politically. This is the main thing Brenton does. Right. Brenton says you want to deal. You got to fire your late night hosts. Right. You can do this the hardware or the easy way. I'm going to take away your broadcast licenses because I don't like the news on your news stations. Brenton loves suffocating companies with regulations when it suits his agenda. And in this case, the agenda of the European Union is just if you verify people, you have to actually verify that they're real. So the users on your platform are not confused. There are lots of regulations in the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act that our tech companies hate. Truly, meaningfully hate. There are some that are bad. Right. Europe is walking away from its own cookie regulations. Because everyone thinks the cookie banners are bad. This one, don't let people lie in your platform so that who they are for money. Reasonably straightforward. Like Metta isn't running into this one. Metta is going to run into the don't trick people into having sex with your AI chatbots and then drive them crazy regulation that is inevitably coming. But it's not. It's weird that they have the foresight to write that in exactly those terms. I should be in charge of European regulation. Don't drive people bonkers with sex bots. Signed Europe. It's just, it's fun. It's like X got hit with the dumb one because they don't pay attention. They don't give a shit about anything. And now, Brenton's in the mix. Once again, signing. Anyway, that's Brenton. Brenton is always, you're welcome to come on the show or decoder really. You meet me in Vegas. You're speaking at CES. We can talk live on a stage of Vegas about how you're a dummy with no good ideas and a completely incoherent worldview that only serves to support the increase of your power and not actually consumer benefits in any way, shape or form. That's why that's my invitation to you, Brenton, is always. This has been Brenton Kars, a dummy America's favorite podcast with a podcast. That's good stuff. This is a total diversion, but you saying funding Europe, $140 million at a time made me think about, do you remember, I think it was 2019, this guy got arrested and eventually accused of basically scamming Google and Facebook out of, I think it was like $100 million by literally just sending them bills that the company's paid. He just, he just sent them invoices and contracts and basically was like, you owe me money and these companies have so much money and so little process that they were just like, sure. Yeah. I just now I'm imagining Europe doing that, that they're just like, what's the biggest number we can get away with finding them before? If we had 10% more grifter in us. I know. You know, if I just had that idea first, it would have been fine. I wouldn't have gotten caught because I wouldn't have done it. And we had to done it a little bit and then we had to stop. And they would have, you know. I don't need a hundred million dollars. Give me like 35. A hundred percent grifter. You can't stop and then you get caught. You need 10%. It's a real problem. Someone vibe code me an act called 10% grifter that just generates these ideas. All right. My next one, um, every once in a while, as you know, I get way too excited about a web browser and I need you to sort of rein me in. Um, and I have to tell you, I'm currently way too excited about a web browser. This is exciting web browser. Google just launched this thing called Disco and Disco is, it's a new web browser, but it's not like they're not trying to do Chrome. Again, this is an experiment inside of one of their labs. This is a thing Google does a lot. Um, but the thing about Disco is that it's, it's not designed to be a general purpose browser. It's essentially a testing bed for this new thing that Google calls gen tabs. And basically the way a gen tab works is you open up what they call a project. Again, all of the names are different and they don't make sense, but the actual structure of the thing is fairly straightforward. You open up a new project and it just shows you like a Gemini chat box and you type in a prompt and it's like, I, the, the one they showed me was I'm going on a trip to Japan. Can you help me plan it? Right? This is like an absolutely normal thing that everybody does with chat bots. Google only solves problems for a wealthy Google engineers. 100%. Um, so you do that. And then what it does is it, it goes through the normal sort of Gemini research process, but rather than just delivering you back like a wall of text and links, it, it does two things simultaneously. It opens a bunch of tabs for you with those pages rather than just say, here's something that actually opens. It was three tabs in every demo that I got. I don't know if that is like required, but that's what it was in every demo I saw. And then it creates this thing called a gen tab, which is basically a tiny one off web app for every single one of these projects that you create. So in this case with the trip planner, it actually just like took a map of Japan and plotted out a bunch of points over it. And it let you sort of filter by different kinds of things that you wanted to see. And you could click on one and add it to an itinerary and it was building you an itinerary. So it's just basically like very rudimentary trip planning app that it just generated out of nothing because I made this prompt. And what they're trying to figure out as far as I can tell is like how, what, what is this thing that we're making here? What they're trying to figure out is what is this? No, like, I mean, what, the question I asked them is I was like, okay, what, what is a gen tab? Should I think of a gen tab as, as like a Google doc, like a sort of permanent artifact that I'm making that I can come back to and edit another time that I can share with other people that sort of lives in an addressable URL somewhere? Or is this just like a silly little thing in my browser that goes away the minute I close the tab? And the both women I was arguing to were both like, we don't know, we're trying to figure it out. That's why we're doing this. But there, there was just this moment I had getting this demo that it was like, okay, it's actually, it is opening an interactive AI app that is doing more work than any of these tabs individually can do for me. But it's also opening the tabs. And then if you open new tabs in that project and you refresh the gen tab, it will pull the data out of the tabs that you've opened and into the gen tabs. So you tell it what you think is interesting by going to web pages. And for me, as somebody who is like, I care a lot about people going to web pages, but I also think like AI is clearly a part of the future of search and the way people experience the internet. This to me felt like the most web forward version of AI browsing that I had ever seen and I got very excited about it. Well, so this is why they did it a not Chrome app, right? They made a little toy so they could push the idea as farther without scaring everyone. Right. Because you know, it didn't show up once in the whole thing was Google search. You know what I mean? Like, but yeah, it is, it is, what if AI mode was the whole browser and is kind of the, the stick? Well, it, it, I owe this past year, soon our demoed the future of search is on the fly, vibe coded apps. Yeah. And a big part of Gemini three is that it can do these interactive things. Right. Like you searched about the solar system and it made you an interactive model of the solar system because Google's demos in that context are usually as benign as they can be. Yeah. Like the one they showed me in this demo was a human ankle. Yeah. Sure. Right. You've got ankle problems that it makes you an ankle. I get it. But like the actual scary demo is instead of going to, you know, some, an actual travel site, Google is going to build you a travel site on the fly, pull in all the data, agent and its way through booking a flight and you're done. Right. And that's like, that's the game they're actually trying to play. Yes. And the idea that the search results page every single time should be a custom application that can do the thing you want or deliver the information you need is very powerful. The idea that it has to open tabs in the background to get that data really just suggests that they need to start to keep delivering page views. I do think they need to keep delivering page views, but I also think they understand that getting your input is the best way to make these systems better very quickly. Right. Like what, what every one of these things needs is to generate the first version of this app and then have me make it better. And, and everyone is struggling with how to do that next turn because when you ask me to make some like aggressive product change to the app, you, you've made me do a lot of like actually very complicated work. So one of the things they have is they have a bunch of like suggested refinements that show up at the top of the GenTab. That's just like, here are ways you might want to change this thing. Just in theory, give us, give it a whirl or you can type in whatever you want it to be, you know, change the colors, show it in some different way, whatever. But what they also really want you to do is they're like, you need to give us the data to make this thing useful. And, and one way you do that is by going to websites and looking at what the data is. And it was just like, it was the first time it's been like, oh, Google understands that actually me using the internet is a good and useful thing. It's like, I'm glad to know that maybe not everyone has forgotten this fact. I'm very curious about this. I think the notion of like the Google search experience being custom developed applications on the fly. It's a big idea. It is a big idea. I, I'm less certain that a bunch of people at tech companies and Silicon Valley in particular understand that not everybody cares about the world in the context of applications. Like you can see this disconnect where you're like, I could just build myself an app to do a thing. And then you like leave the bubble and you tell someone that you can automate your smart home to turn on the lights when you unlock the door. And their minds are just like, what are you talking about? And there's just a huge distance between those ideas. Okay. That like computer programs are a thing that you should do shortcuts. You've done like how many episodes about shortcuts now? Too many. You have not gained one user of shortcuts. You've, you've not created one additional user of shortcuts. I'm just like, there's something about this idea that like the computer is going to develop applications for you on the fly. That's really powerful. That runs right into reality of like people do not care about that thing. No, and it's, it's a like fundamental misunderstanding of what people actually do with Google search, which is type Facebook, you know what I mean? But I do think so. I think the idea that this is like extremely the future of browsing is, is not correct, but I also think what everybody is trying to do with AI is bring it closer to the activities people are already doing. Right. It's like the, what if, what if I can have the chat bot have some awareness of the tab that you're looking at so that it can start to do stuff. And I, I think, and we may disagree on this, but I think there is actually a ton of useful stuff to do in there. Summarization, summarization stuff is really useful. Data manipulation stuff is really useful. There's just a lot you can do if the AI and the tab can see each other. And this to me just feels like the next step of that without removing the tab, which is what everybody is trying to do. They're like, chat, GPT is not interested in you opening web pages. It'll, it'll let you if you have to, but it would love for you to not open any web pages. Yeah. And I think Google, more than most companies has a A incentive to make you look at web pages, but B should also be the one understanding that yes, web pages are good and valuable things that we should look at. Google built its empire by tracking you across the web. They, they're like a deep level. They understand this. I'm curious, is it out? Can I get this? I want to play with it. Uh, you can get on the wait list. Um, but I, not to brag, but I know some people. I like it. All right. What's your last one? I, we got to end by covering the only thing we cover here at the Verge cast. Everything else is just a build to us covering garage door technology. Oh God. Kind of. Why do we exist to cover garage door, to ask Craig Federighi how his garage doors open and close. Um, we've, we've, we've been on the speed a lot. Gen two, he has been on the speed very closely. There is a garage door monopoly in this country. It's the Chamberlain group, which definitely sounds like a group of government mercenary contractors, but the Chamberlain group owns all the garage door openers and they continually try to block third party garage door openers from working with their motors. So they can lock you into the my cue system, which requires a subscription. This is true. Oh, that's awful. The only third party thing they consistently work with is the home link buttons in cars because they get a license fee. Money. It's all mine. Uh, that's the most like nakedly gross tech thing you've described to me in a while. The garage door opener market is dirty. It's gross. This is the mob doing mob stuff in garage doors because they're a huge monopoly. So they had security plus and then security plus 2.0 and they've been in this fight with garage door opening systems. So like, I think Joanna Stern and I both have me Ross things, which literally just, they just closed the contact in at the motor itself. So you just wire it into the terminals on the motor that go to the button on the wall, okay, closes that contact. That's out now because Chamberlain is getting rid of all wired controls for its garage door openers and with security plus 3.0 going to wireless only, which is encrypted, if only its buttons can use that protocol. So like the entire ecosystem of smart home hacks to open Chamberlain cross doors is like under threat. They shut it down. They're Jen has talked to everyone cause she knows all the garage door people. My favorite, uh, third party garage door openers, Ratco, which stands for rage against the garage door opener. Amazing. All of this is shut down. The only option is what some of them do, uh, which is they will sell you a actual physical garage door opener button and they have just wired those contacts in the button to their thing. So you, they're, they're, they're faking, pressing the button. Good Lord. Very funny. This is an official me Ross hack, by the way. Uh, and then there's my favorite of these things, um, which is called the third reality, uh, and it is of the motor and you put your opener in it and a big button comes down and pushes the button. This sucks, man. It's very good. It's very good. The third reality is it's $50. It is matter compatible. It sort of works with everything and it is literally just a thing that pushes the garage door opener button. And that is the only way to get around Chamberlain's dominant monopoly. I'm really imagining like a, like a huge foam finger, just sort of dangling from the ceiling to press this one button for you. That's, uh, it's, it's not, not what it is. Do you know what I mean? Uh, a lot of incredible comments on this post, including Chamberlain having to find ways to block the third reality button masher requiring fingerprint authentication. My God. I mean, there's, there are competitors on market. Ryobi is coming out with one. There are other garage door opener vendors, but changing your garage door opener motor is a very hard thing to do. Yeah. That's not a Neil is going to screw around and actually let us house and fire DIY. That's if you get it wrong, the spring snaps and kills you. So people are very reticent to do this on their own. Um, you should not do this on your own. Um, but there are competitors. But this is why Chamberlain has a monopoly. Cause no one thinks we're replacing these things. Um, I'm sorry. It's not Robbie. Robbie had one. Uh, quick set is launching a matter at compatible garage door opener motor. And I think that means we're all quick set fanboys now. Yeah. Hell yeah. Go quick set. Um, this is not important, but if you have a product called secure 30 plus 3.0, I immediately don't like you as a company. Forces, I'm out. It's very bad. I mean, they killed home bridge integration. I mean, people are doing all kinds of stuff to get my cue to work nice. And Chamberlain is like, no, you got to pay us money to use our shit. You should really, I encourage everyone to read Jen's story about this, um, which has a headline that sounds like it's about the news. And then the first subhead is just in large text, the garage door wars. That's what we're, that's what we're, that's what we're doing. Very good. All right. We need to get out of here. We have gone way over. I mostly blame John Gruber for that, but it's worth it. It's really Marco Rubio's fault. That's right. Yeah. I'm going to write a memo about that to Marco. Uh, but that's it. That's it for the show. Thank you to all of you for watching, listening. Thanks to Charlie for being here. Um, if you want to hear more versions of Charlie's song, I'm going to try to convince him to upload it somewhere where we can all do horrible things with it and destroy it. Um, remember to subscribe to the verge. Our subscription is now a year old. Uh, you can get ad free podcasts, this one and version history. Andy Coder speaking of which version history this weekend, Nile, is you and me and Walt Mossberg talking about the iPhone four. It's a great time. And is as much fun as I've had talking about phones in a very long time. It's very good. Uh, it's a really good episode. Everyone will enjoy it. Uh, you can email us vergecastswiththeverge.com, call the hotline 866 version 11. We're doing more year end year ahead stuff with Joanna this weekend. All kinds of fun stuff. The vergecast is just like full chaos until the end of the year. And then we're all going to go not speak to each other for a week. And it's going to be terrific. Until then, the vergecast is a verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kieffer and Travis Larchuk. We will see you on Sunday. Nile. Support for the show comes from L'Oreal group using the latest advancements in science and tech to create personalized beauty solutions for all. The global beauty leader recently introduced two breakthrough technologies that bring the power of light to hair care and skincare. Light straight and multi-styler and the new LED face mask, both of which were recognized as CES 2026 Innovation Award honorees. Learn more about both technologies on L'Oreal.com. L'Oreal group create the beauty that moves the world. 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