The Vergecast - Brendan Carr is a dummy

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

Åhead of our last Friday episode of 2025, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr did The Vergecast an enormous favor: he went in front of Congress and said a bunch of wild things about regulation. So, of course, Nilay and David have to talk about them. For a really long time. After that, the hosts look at all the ways YouTube and Netflix are becoming more like one another, and then update the Go90 Scale of Doomed Streaming Services to round out the year. Finally, in the lightning round, there's talk of web apps, EVs, Bluesky, and the metaverse. Further reading: The Vergecast live at CES Brendan Carr doesn’t regret his threats to broadcasters  Former FCC Chairman Michael Powell: ‘Cable companies are at the mercy of content companies’ The Oscars will stream on YouTube in 2029  Netflix’s next big TV game is FIFA soccer  My Favorite Murder and The Breakfast Club podcasts are ditching YouTube for Netflix  Warner Bros. wants its shareholders to reject Paramount’s latest offer  Netflix is “100% committed” to releasing WB films in theaters.  Even Jared Kushner thinks the Paramount WB bid sucks. Peacock will bombard you with ads as soon as you open the app  HBO Max’s new channels keep Friends and Game of Thrones playing 24/7  Instagram is putting Reels on your TV  LG forced a Copilot web app onto its TVs but will let you delete it Mercedes-Benz discontinues feature that syncs music to driving Ford’s big bet on EVs didn’t pan out — now it’s pivoting to hybrids and energy storage Bluesky claims its new contact import feature is ‘privacy-first’  Gemini 3 Flash is here, bringing a ‘huge’ upgrade to the Gemini app  The ChatGPT app store is here Alexa Plus’ website is live for some users  Meta pauses third-party Horizon VR headsets program  Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients.

And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcast of the Senate Commerce Committee. This is, we're just, we're going to.

That sucks so bad. You and I are going to sit here on the dais and we're going to yell at each other for three hours. Can I just tell a story when I was a baby and I worked at AOL? I'm David Pierce. He's Neil Lepatel. What's up? Let me tell you a story for my youth. So I'm a little baby.

I'm like, I don't know how I'm 25, 26. I work at AOL for Engadgett. And I'm covering like the early innings of net neutrality. like mobile broadband and I get the bright idea that I should testify in front of Congress. This becomes like a life goal. I was drinking a lot of the time. I was full of extreme confidence. And I was like, these dummies, they need to hear from like the consumers on the ground.

Like I will channel the Engadgett commenter base and tell Congress what's up. Actually, now that would have been sick. I should still do this. That would have been. So I'm like, how do I do this? And I was like, well, I work for AOL. So I get a meeting with like AOL's general counsel. And I'm like, I want to testify in front of Congress.

And legitimately they were like, about what? And I was like, internet access. And they're like, you know we run dial up internet? Like, no, absolutely not. And like, we went back and forth at the very end. They were like, what specifically is your ask? You have to ask me for something. And I was like, put me in front of Congress.

And they were like, that is not an ask. No. and sent me out of the room. I love the theory that you can just like apply to speak in foot. Like Congress has office hours. And then like once a week you can just go testify. I was like, this is great publicity for us. And he's like, you're going to tank our dial-up business that we don't want anyone to pay attention to.

It's like, no. Tank, but Congress. It was a good idea then. You know, now that I've said out loud, it would be a good idea now. It's pretty good. All right. We have a lot to get to you today. We have, I think, the surprise that will not be a surprise to anyone who has ever listened

this podcast before. First, one very quick piece of housekeeping. A lot of people have been asking, so I should tell you that we are, in fact, doing a live vergecast at CES. Neli, it's going to be you and me. We're going to be on stage. We're going to have a blast. It is going to be 3.30 p.m. in Vegas at the Brooklyn Bowl, which is like not on the

strip, but it's a cool place near the street. Yeah, it's great. You'll figure it out. You want to get away from the vibes of the strip and come to where we are. It was great last year. It was so much fun last year. It was really fun. And we have a link.

You can RSVP. You can come. And if you're a verge subscriber, I have on good authority that you're going to get to go bowling with us after the show. David keeps making this promise and I think he's just trying to make it true.

It's in the invite. David, you can just say stuff, Pierce. This is full effect right now. I am just speaking, it's 2026. David speaks all of his desires into existence. This is what we're doing here. There have been pitches for

what if we bowl during the show. And I think a series of people have made clear that that's not a good idea. So anyway, Wednesday, January 7th, 330, Brooklyn Bowl. If you're going to be in Vegas, come hang out. We would love to see you. All the infos in the show notes, we finally have a page for it. So come hang out. If you have questions, you know how to find this. Nelai, this is the last Vergecast you and I are doing together in 2025. We're going to disappear into the holidays for a while. We have the spectacular coming next week, but we've already recorded that. So that's done. This is the last time you and I are going to make a podcast together

for a couple of weeks. I have a number of notes for you. It's time for your performance conversation. Someone that we talk about a lot on this show did us an enormous favor. Oh, no. Because this, you could call the season finale of the Vergecast, which means it is the season finale of America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

And Brendan Carr, for us, went in front of the Senate Commerce Committee and said a bunch of insane things. The people have demanded that we talk about this. They have demanded that we talk about this. So we need to talk about it. So it is my friends, once again time for Brennan Carr's dummy. Nilai. Oh, boy.

Welcome, my friend. He was a real dummy this week. He was an explosion of Brendan being stupid this week. For three out of Congress. In a row. Yeah. Can I just preface this? Can I just try to lay a foundation here for all of the names I'm about to call

Brennan Carr? By the way, you know it's hot when we get more emails about Brendan Carr than party speakers in a week. We get a lot of emails about party speakers. There's one particular clip that we're going to get to in a minute that a bunch of people sent us and they were like, this is, this is perfectly packaged for David and Eli and the Vergecast. And it is like, it's one of those moments where it's like, well, we've built something here. If you understand this as Vergecast fodder, we have accomplished something. Look, if I have a criticism of the Democrats as a whole, it's that they have no idea about how to create or shape public opinion. And I'm telling you, it's just

repetition. And if you just say a person's a dummy every week for a year, you're like, oh, that guy's a dummy. You can just do it. Anyhow, let me lay the foundation, because I'm going to call them a lot of names. And I think, you know, people have whatever feelings about my politics or the virtuous politics that they want to have. But I'm going to point everyone, before we begin, to an interview I did in 2012, 13 years ago with Michael Powell, who was at the time the head of NICTA, which is the big cable television lobby. And before that was the Republican chairman of the FCC. Michael Powell. It's Colin Powell's son. His name might as well be Steve Republican.

And, you know, 13 years ago, I had a lot of ideas with the internet and a lot of ideas about how, you know, cord cutting would take over and everything should be streaming and Apple should make a TV. And we talked about all this stuff in this interview. And I'm reading again today. And I'm going to tell you that 13 years ago, the former Republican head of the FCC and the at the time head of the cable industry lobbying association, was right about everything. Like, dead on accurate about how everything would play out and what would happen for consumers. And the point that he made to me over and over again, which I disagreed with him at the time, and you can read that interview and you can see us go back and forth in this. The point he kept making to me was that regulating broadcast television differently than regulating cable and internet was stupid in causing problems in the markets for consumers. I'll just read you this quote. This is from Michael Powell to me in 2012.

There are entirely different regulatory benefits and burdens applied to distribution that are meaningless to the consumer. Under the law today, a cable company is required to let broadcasters onto their platform, not because the market says so, not because you want to buy it, but because the government says that's what has to be in the dial. The government says I'm not allowed to sell you subscription tiers until I provide you the basic tiers. My criticism from a consumer perspective is why is the government placing so much regulatory

emphasis on one kind of distribution to the detriment of another. And that's wonky. I understand that's wonky. But what he was saying that entire time was you're all watching the internet anyway. Right. Treating the broadcasters differently than Netflix or HBO Max or whatever is stupid. And we should stop it. And his point was that the user experience of those things is so functionally and fundamentally the same that treating them differently is a total waste of time and energy. Yeah. It's fundamentally same and it's meaningless for it to be different to the user. And this is a fundamentally. conservative thing to say. Because what he was arguing to me was, we should deregulate this, right? We should deregulate it and let the market pick what they want to pay for, and that will be fine. And at the very end of this, he goes, the a la carte model where you just pick your services, it's deceptively attractive until you do math. He said, you've done a good job writing with this. I read your piece about the Apple TV, which after my own heart, good politician. And he said, unless you're really

disciplined in what you subscribe for, I will get you to your cable bill and beyond really fast. That's the price is a benefit from the cable subsidy. He was right about that, too. He was right about that, too. Right. And I want to start here because I'm going to call Brendan a lot of names. But 13 years ago, the Republican chairman of the FCC had a conversation with me, and I'm just telling you right now, he was more right than wrong about the fact that we treat broadcasts differently and regulate it differently than cable and internet distorted the market. And he was absolutely right that unbundling and going to streaming would lead to prices that were higher than cable in the end. And his argument was we should deregulate the broadcast, let it compete fairly with cable. And if people pick cable over broadcast, that's fine. We'll do something else without those airways. I'm saying all of this because we're going to go through Brendan's testimony in front of Congress today, 13 years later in 2025. And all of his argument sums up to, I have the power to treat broadcast differently and I am going to use it.

And I, first of all, you can just see that's not what. Michael Powell, Colin Powell's son, the Republican chair of the FCC and the head of the cable lobby. That's not what he was saying 13 years ago. So this is a massive sea change in Republican policymaking and conservative policymaking towards regulation and control of speech. It is also so stupid. Yeah. So, okay, let's get into some of the stupid here. So the setup is this.

It's the Senate Commerce Committee. They brought all three FCC commissioners, Brendan Carr, Olivia, trust. and Anna Gomez and sat them down and asked them questions. I think they mostly were there pretty clearly to talk to Brendan Carr, but everybody would also throw a question at the other commissioner that they, who was on the same side as them politically, just to sort of score points, which is the thing that I always enjoyed. They would like, ask Brendan Carr a question.

Brendan would say something insane. And then they'd be like, Anna Gomez, what do you think? And she'd be like, that's insane. And this is like the whole tenant of this. There's a reason we're not going to run all the clips. Yeah. It's because all the clips are kind of like long and like theatrical. and whatever.

And like so many hearings that a lot of it is just politicians not even pretending to ask a question, but just sort of grand standing in front of him for three minutes and then really encouraging their time. But anyway, the topics that came up were kind of what you'd expect. It was a lot of Jimmy Kimmel. It was a lot of stuff about rural broadband. It was a lot of stuff about 6G, which really bummed me out. Some questions about satellite, internet, a lot of stuff about spectrum allocation, just sort of the things you would talk to the FCC about.

But I think if you had to pick a theme for this, it was Jimmy Kimmel. Like Jimmy Kimmel's name came up over and over and over again. And so the very brief backstory here is that Jimmy Kimmel went on his show after Charlie Kirk was killed and said, let me just quote this. He said the MAGA gang was desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them. This became a whole thing. Brennan Carr comes out and says essentially Disney should get rid of Jimmy Kim. Kimmel and they should stop airing his show. We can either do this the easy way or the hard way.

It's what he said, I believe on Benny Johnson's podcast. Still the weirdest fact of all of this to me. This becomes like the undercurrent of this whole thing, right? Am I overstating the extent to which this was kind of a hearing about Jimmy Kimmel? No, you're not at all. I mean, they came back to it over and over again. I think, you know, Carl Bodie, who is a friend of The Verge, has written for us many times. He pointed out, there's a bunch of other stuff that could have asked him.

They could have asked them about totally dismantling all consumer protection in broadband. Which like one person did. Yeah. And that stuff, I think, just doesn't grab the attention. These hearings are, you know, performances for TikTok more than anything these days. And so asking the questions about Kimmel and doing the back and forth, gotcha stuff, all of that is made for social media now. And why do you dismantle consumer protection? It just isn't going to get the views.

You can talk about Taylor Swift or you can talk about censoring Jim and Kimmel and that's what gets you the views. And I think you can see that in our own content strategy. Yeah. So the way we're going to do this is, do you remember the Kegan Michael Key's like Obama anger translator thing where Obama would say something and Kegan Michael Kee would like explain what he was really trying to say? We're going to do that in reverse. And I'm going to make you do something impossible, which is make sense out of words that come

out of Brendan Carr's mouth. This is that the thesis of the show. America's favorite podcast with our podcast is not, Here's why Brendan made sense. What do you do? This is the season finale. This is a bottle episode. You know what I mean?

But first, I think there are two useful things to understand as we get into some of the specifics here. One is what you just said, which is this idea that Brendan Carr gets to regulate broadcast differently from anything else because it is broadcast television. That's a fact that comes up over and over. We're going to get into that more. But that is one thing that is very important. The other is. that Brendan Carr believes himself to be a stooge doing Donald Trump's will. And to just, this clip is not really germane to a lot of the rest of what we're going to talk about,

but this is the clip that everybody sent to us. And I just feel the need to very briefly play it so that everyone can understand what we're doing here. You're Senator Lujan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Carr, yes or no, and please, yes or no, is the FCC an independent agency? Senator, thanks for that question. I think that yes or no is all we need, sir. Yes or no, is it independent?

Well, there's a test for this in the law, in the key portion of that test. Yes or no, Brendan? The key portion of that test is. Okay, I'm going to go to Commissioner Trustee. So just so you know, Brendan, on your website, it just simply says, man, the FCC is independent. This isn't a trick question. Okay, the FCC is not, is not, is not an independent. Is your website wrong?

Is your website line? Possibly. The FCC is not an independent agency. Okay. Hey, can I read this to you? The FCC's mission on the homepage of the FCC, man. First of all, props to Center, Lujan, for just calling him Brendan. This goes on for a while.

Yeah. It's delightful. This turns, he ends up regretting how long he spent talking about a website because he doesn't get to ask Brendan Carr his other questions. But the other thing that happened here is the word independent has now disappeared from the FCC's website. Within minutes. I think it happened in real time during that back and forth. Yeah. Like Brendan's various stooges were like, edit the website.

Yeah. And Carr's argument is essentially, Trump can fire me whenever he wants without cause, thus it is not an independent agency, which is like on its face insane. I mean, currently being litigated to Supreme Court that seems very excited about buying that idea. Not the law as it stands today. Sure. Soon to be the law, I would say. That's how we do laws here. I can try to make this to make sense.

This one I can make, I can try to make sense because Sarah John and I talk about it all the time. Please. And the idea embodied in the Trump administration and very importantly in our Supreme Court, which is full of justices, conservative justices that worked for George W. Bush and in some cases like Nixon and Reagan is of a theory called the unitary executive where there's like one line in the Constitution that says the executive power shall be vested in the president. And that means every single agency is the executive and it's unitary. It's one order chart, like decoder or phrase, right? And that is pretty controversial. The idea is if you don't like how it's going, you can fire the president and he'll restaff all the agencies. And that means that's how the agencies are accountable to you.

The unitary executives. The FCC is just another part of the presidency. The FTC is just another part of the presidency. And on and on not. There's a lot of law, like case law that says that is not the case, that our current Supreme Court, which really believes in the unitary executive, is slowly dismantling. Yes. Also, that's not how Congress

set these things up or necessarily even how you would interpret the Constitution. Like, this is a big fight. Who is more accountable to you? The Congress, where the House gets voted in every two years, or the president gets voted every four years and has much more power than an individual

member of Congress. I don't know. I do know that what you don't want is to change the censorship police at the whim of the president, if the president feels bad. And that's, that is the best argument for the FCC being independent and having the the structure it has where you have three members of the majority and two members of the minority party. And the reason you set all this up is to insulate it from political pressure because

you don't want control of communications to be political. But that's not what Brendan thinks, because Brendan is a dummy who wants to keep his job. And in this Trump administration, being a stooge, is an easier way to keep your job than abiding by the ideals that set up the agency that you currently run. Right. All right. So let's get into some. of these. I did make that make sense. I just call them a dummy along the way. I can do this. Things can make sense. Do I get points? How are we doing this? I'm going to do this. Imagine this like around the horn on ESPN where I'm just kind of randomly giving you points for no reason. The first one I want to read you is Brennan Carr answering a question, a thing that came up a lot is a thing that he tweeted, I believe, in 2019, saying essentially comedy and satire are a key bit of free speech and should be protected at all cost, more or less.

this has been thrown back in Brendan Carr's face many times as he has done the opposite to people over and over and over again professionally. But this is, this I think gets to what you were talking about at the very beginning. He was asked the question, do you still agree that political satire should be protected speech? And he says, whenever that satire or any other programming is over the public airways for broadcasters, there's a public interest standard and there's a news distortion rule, a broadcast hoax rule, and then he got cut off because everybody kept talking. But this is, this is the foundation of the argument, right? Yes, the argument is think of all of the inputs on your TV and you've got the cable input and then I think it's marked antenna. And then you've got your HTML ports and your HTML ports are probably hooked up to some box that gets video over the Internet.

Right. This is almost certainly how it works. And anything that comes over the air, the government gets to interfere with and anything that comes over the other stuff, whether that's cable or whether that's, you know, the Internet through your HTML ports gets treated differently. If you put that in front of a consumer, they would not believe you. I'm just realizing literally for the first time that I've never processed that you literally actually mean over the air versus over a cable. You don't mean cable, the sort of idea of a cable. You mean literally the mechanism via which it arrives at my house. Yes, that is what we regulate because that used to be the only mechanism.

And I understand why when it was the only mechanism, we put a lot of rules in place. public airwaves are a scarce resource owned by the citizens of the United States. We don't sell them to AT&T and Verizon and whoever else. We lease them. And you have to buy the leases and the leases expire and we can reform them.

For now. We'll come to that. 2013 or 14, we, whenever LTE was coming out, we took the 700 megahertz spectrum away from television broadcasters and said, this is for LTE now. And we sold it.

We resold it. To AT&T and Verizon and whoever else could buy it. This is a big deal. right, that we own the airwaves, the people, you and me, we own it. Brendan is the steward of that ownership. That's his job is to act in our public interest in managing those airwaves. Now, you can make a lot of arguments about what the public interest here is, but I would just submit to you in 2025 going to anyone, any random consumer of media,

and saying, hey, because Jimmy Kimmel comes over your TV antenna, the government gets a say in what he can do. and because whoever, Joe Rogan comes over IP through Spotify, the government can't say what he can do. First of all, they're like, what's an antenna? Right. That's just the first thing that's going to happen. Second, they're going to say, well, Joe Rogan is way more powerful in Jimmy Kimmel.

He has vastly more reach. And also, I watch Jimmy Kimmel on YouTube. Does that change anything? Right. It just like doesn't matter. Yeah. So he just keeps asserting this authority that was designed for a world in which all media was only distributed over the airwaves.

And sure, maybe at that time when there's only three stations, you have some big public interest in saying, okay, well, you have to cover both parties, right? You can't actually just buy the local TV station, which is the only media anyone can consume and distort it your way. And we have some interest in letting people sue you for that. Sure, maybe. But over time, as more and more media sources proliferated,

that became stupid. We stopped enforcing those laws. In fact, in many cases, the only times those laws were, enforced, there were lawsuits, the FCC was ruled against. Like, this is stuff, this is power that we give the government that we have decided over time that we don't want the government to use. And what Brendan has been doing is finding these little bits and bobs of unused power and consolidating them to say, I have this power over broadcasters, and I'm going to use it

to shape the content how I want. And it's going to come up over and over again in this hearing that he keeps saying that he's not doing that. But it's obvious that every time he brings up news distortion or public interest, what he's saying is, I am the person who understands the public interest. I understand what the news should be and when it's being distorted. And because I have this power over this distribution, I will use it. And I'm just saying over and over again, the idea that the broadcaster should be treated differently than any YouTuber makes no sense to anyone anymore. And it's why I keep saying Brendan is a dummy, because if you rewind the clock to Michael Powell in 2012 to me,

me, he was saying, this makes no sense. If you are actually a conservative, you would deregulate this and that all this content compete freely because that will actually equalize the market. And Brendan, 13 years later, is saying, no, I have this power and I don't want to give it up, even though it's causing this massive distortion in the market. Yeah, he had a really interesting back and forth with Ed Markey, where Senator Markey was basically like, you're leaning on this, you know, public interest broadcast TV thing to let you do whatever you want. And he goes, yeah, I'm enforcing the rules. And Markey goes, no, you're weaponizing the rules.

And that's back and forth I've been thinking about a lot. I think Marky, he practiced that line of attack on Decoder the week before. It's pretty good. And there's another one. So Brendan Carr was they continue to like make threats at local news stations, essentially. And the question is, this is government censorship plain and simple. Was it a mistake in retrospect for you to instigate an investigation of that San Francisco radio station? Was that a mistake?

And Brennan Carr says, Senator, broadcasters understanding. perhaps for the first time in years, that they're going to be held accountable to the public interest to broadcast hoax rules to the news distortion policy. I think that's a good thing. Like these are these, he just, he keeps leaning on the idea of these are the rules they haven't been enforced. Now they're being enforced. Thank God. Yeah. Let me, uh, let me, uh, let me in comparison to the crypto industry.

Every Virtcast listener's favorite industry. What was the complaint of the crypto industry about the SEC, you know, in 2020, 2021 when, when wild ideas are flying around. The single complaint. Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase made this complaint. Just down the line. Everybody made this complaint.

This is regulation by enforcement. Right? You're taking all these rules that existed and you're selectively applying them to us to kill our industry. And if you want to regulate us, that's fine. Write a bill that treats crypto like what it is

in the market that it exists in and we will do our lobbying and we'll get the bill that we want written. But regulation by enforcement is corruption, pure and simple. The crypto industry still says this to this day. We don't want regulation by enforcement, even though not even being regulated or enforced right now. Regulation by enforcement is bad. That's why people say it. The idea that you have this wide power in the government to do

a lot of things and you selectively apply them, politically apply them to get the outcomes you want, goes against the rule of law. It makes the government less predictable, more political, and it certainly uses the power of the government in ways that an average public radio station cannot afford to fight. So Brendan is saying the law is finally being enforced would maybe hold up if he was enforcing it against the local Fox affiliates for distorting the news, the local Sinclair affiliates for distorting the news.

There's a lot of ways you could point that arrow in the opposite direction politically. And maybe you should. Maybe you should. You can make that argument. And certainly there are people who make that argument every day that you should point this gun at Fox. But he's not doing that.

He's not making that argument at all. He's saying, when you criticize this government, When you criticize this president and you happen to do it on the airwaves, which no consumer can distinguish from the internet, then I have the power and I can stop you. That is just not, I mean, like, fundamentally, it's not just stupid. It's like borderline traitorists because it flies in the face of the Constitution and the rule of law in such a direct way that everyone understands it. Should the cops arrest you because they don't like you? Should the cops arrest you for speeding just because they don't like you or they arrest everyone for speeding? Or in my case, should you argue the cops arrest no one for speeding so you can trust us.

I have fast cars. There's New York politics right there. It's like a weird combo platter of policies from the Patel campaign. Vote for me. It'll be fun regardless. All I'm saying is Brendan's argument is I have this power. And if you don't let me use it, that's wrong. And I would just say the real argument is you should never have this power.

And even if you do, you should have the discretion to use it equally or not at all. Yeah. So to that end, here's another one for you that I would like you to make sense of. This question is long. So I will summarize it as they brought up what President Trump posted on truth social after Rob Reiner died. And basically what he said is Rob Reiner died because he had what I believe he said he called Trump derangement syndrome. And he was a bad person. And it's truly heinous, awful response. And then he says, do you think that's appropriate for the President of the United States to do that? And if Jimmy Kimmel would have said that, would you have threatened to take him off the air? And to that, Brendan Carr said. says, Senator, look, Democrats on this dais are accusing me of engaging in censorship. And now you're trying to encourage me to police speech on the internet. I'm simply not going to do that. Okay.

So first of all, whoever asks that question is also done for not asking the obvious follow. Sorry, it's an equal opportunity. I'm out here valorizing Michael Powell today. You have no idea what's coming. But there's an obvious follow-up to this question. And Brendan is dodging this question in such ham-fisted way that, he's not even clever about doing it. He's saying you want me to please speech on the internet.

That's not the question. The obvious follow-up question is I wasn't asking you about speech on the internet. I was saying if Jimmy Kimmel said these words on broadcast television, would that rise to the level of news distortion? Because when Jimmy Kimmel said, I believe everyone in MAGA is trying to get away from the shooter or pretend the shooter isn't one of them, you thought that was horrible. And you were going to block a merger over it. That's the easy way or the hard way, right? So that's really bad. You can find a reason to enforce the rules on that.

If Jimmy Kimmel repeated what Trump said, which everyone thinks is horrible on the airwaves, would that meet your standard? And Carr, because he does not want to answer that question, Ham fistedly dodges out of it by saying, I'm not going to censor the Internet. But no one's asking about censoring the Internet. And whatever Democrat asked her, who was it? I was Amy Klobuchar, I think. Oh, Clobes. Look, Senator Klobuchar, she's honest. If she comes back on the show, I'd be like, you blew it.

Because she blew it with that one. Because I wasn't the question there. She's really better than that. But she blew it because the question is, no, no, no, you keep making this distinction between the internet and broadcast. So if you move these words from the internet to broadcast, the president's words, if you move them from internet distribution to broadcast, would that make them illegal or subject to some investigation? Because over and over again, he's saying when you do things on broadcast, I get to say whether or not they're true or not. Because over and over again, he's saying if you say these things on broadcast, I get to say. And the question is, and I think the heart of that question is if it's okay in the internet, why is it not okay on broadcast? Because you're the one that makes the rules over there.

Yeah. There was a version of this question where they asked something about the difference between the 60 Minutes interview that was quote unquote selectively edited that became a whole kerfuffle and a Fox News thing that did essentially the exact same thing. And he very matter of factly was like the Fox News is on cable. I have no jurisdiction. What are you talking about? So allow me to just briefly do something completely unthinkable and slightly quickly defend or say, give you a real worst person you know makes a good point moment in Brendan Carr's testimony. Brennan Carr says, we have a public interest standard that Congress has put into the law and there's a number of very specific rules and doctrines that flow from that. The broadcast hoax rule, the news distortion rule. In my position, and I think the Trump administration position, is that we should be enforcing those rules and policies. If Congress wants to change it, you're free to change it. Is that, is there not like a teeny tiny glimmer of a reasonable point there? Like 13 years ago, Michael Powell would have been right.

We've had a Congress the whole time. Yeah. What are we doing? You know, I, do we have a Congress? That is a good first question. I mean, we have at various times had a Congress. You know, I think Brandon has gone far enough to irritate some Republican members of Congress. Like, bizarrely to your point about the worst person, you know, makes a good point.

Ted Cruz all over this hearing. Yep. saying you've gone too far. There are, you know, there are ideological members of the Republican coalition who are like, government speech regulations are bad.

Like, I agree with them. That has been my position on the show forever. Government speech regulations are bad. And he's running into some of that across the Republican coalition. I think the Democratic coalition less interested in that idea,

but also less interested in doing stuff. Now, there's one thing to learn from, you know, the first year, of Trump 2.0, it's, boy, the government actually has a lot of power. It can do a lot of things. If the various people empowered to do things just decide to simply start doing things, it takes a lot to slow them down or stop them, including, you know, Trump just firing people at agencies. He just does. He's not supposed to be able to do that. No one's in his way. Right. There are lawsuits. Some of the lawsuits are getting thrown out. Some lawsuits are continuing. Some of the lawsuits get stayed on the Supreme Court's emergency docket. Because they have to figure out how to throw out the laws that they're supposed to put. Like, there's a lot going on there.

Democrats have not learned that lesson. They don't just do things. And so, yeah, to the point where he's like, if Congress wants to change the law, you should change it. He's basically saying, fuck you. Right? Like, you won't do this thing. And so I'm just going to run crazy with the power they have. It comes from the Telecommunications Act of 1934.

And that's the mistake, right? The reason you want these independent agencies is so that they have discretion that is divorced from politics. and they can look at the world as it exists today and make determinations about which power is actually in the public interest, which enforcement is actually going to get the results people want. And not we have all of the power and we use it all the time. Because otherwise you would be beholden to the speed at which Congress can act. And you can have a lot of philosophical debates on this. This is the heart of political science, especially as it relates to like the American government. but Brendan is just putting a bulldozer through it

without a second's hesitation. I think this is going to come back to bite all of us in the end because we've taught a generation of would-be many dictators that can do whatever they want. And I don't think that's how it's supposed to work. Or at least they're supposed to be competing with each other for power, which is sort of like how the framers designed it. But that's not what we have today either.

Yeah. Yeah. All right, I have two more for you. This one, I worry, is going to take you between four and six hours to wait. through, but I'm going to do this anyway. Look, the reason we cover policy of the verge is because the iPhone 3GS was dropping calls. And to explain that, you'd be like, there's not a spectrum, and explain that you to explain

spectrum auctions on the FCC. And now here I am being like, this isn't what the framers intended. And I'm at once, I apologize. Let's briefly talk about spectrum auctions. There we go. Here's a long quote. I'm going to read you the whole thing. Democrats at the time, this is back in the Kimmel time, were saying that we explicitly

threatened a polo license if Jimmy Kimmel wasn't fired. That never happened. That was nothing more than projection and distortion by Democrats. What I am saying is any broadcaster that uses the airways, whether radio or TV, has to comply with the public interest and licenses are not sacred cows. Yes, you can do things to lose a license, but if we want to change that, that's up to Congress. And one idea, for instance, is why don't we put all the broadcast TV licenses up for auction? And if people want to buy them without the public interest obligation, they can do that.

Nila Patel, your thoughts? How? First of all, how would you do that? like you would be like here's my bid I want less rules I want you to enforce the the power that you have less I just don't know how you would mechanically do that today without even more acts of Congress or desire from the president to have less power again I think what Brandon is saying is like go go fuck yourself like yeah and he can because Congress is fundamentally incompetent at this moment in time and they won't do anything about it and they won't do anything about it and And so he's issuing a dare that they can't even accomplish. And he's issuing a dare that he would, I agree with him. Do you know what I think we should do? We should probably get rid of broadcast TV, subsidize wireless service for more Americans,

make it cheaper and more prevalent for them to access, and move the sort of like public interest, local news functions to some sort of subsidized model that pays for local newsrooms around the country. This is a half-formed idea. I had it five seconds ago. Doesn't it sound better than Sinclair owns all of the broadcasts? and does what the president wants. I don't know if that idea will work, but you can come up with some solution

that's like we need to make sure we support local newsrooms because they hold local parts of the government accountable. There are vast news deserts in this country. And people aren't watching broadcast TV anyway. They're watching their phones. Make the phones cheaper. I can get there. I can come up with some idea that gets you more of the way there

than we need to make sure that Sinclair and Tegna do what we want or we won't let them merge. No one cares about that. And Brendan has lasered in on this thing that no one cares about because there's enormous amounts of money in letting big companies merge or not merge. There's enormous amounts of power in controlling the local news broadcasts all across this country at a time when local news is dying. And he gets to wield power. And he gets to make himself appear to be the censorship police, even though his power is very, very deeply constrained. Right.

Because to go all the way back to the beginning, my guy is absolutely obsessed with not getting fired. by Donald Trump. I don't I love that. One more. And this is, I think, maybe one that is going to need a fair amount of NELA translation here.

He says, one of the things I'm trying to do with our media policy as a general matter is to reempower those local broadcasters to invest in local news. Because what's happened over the years, we've had a consolidation of power into what are national programmers, Comcast, Disney, and others. I guess I should say here, disclosure, Fox Media is Comcast is an investor in Vox Media

through its subsidiary NBC Universal. They're big fans of ours. It's all really fine. Let me tell you up my OCC coverage. So then Brendan continues. And effectively, a lot of local broadcast stations are just mouthpieces for that national programming made in New York and Hollywood.

This feels like some crux of Brendan Carr's sort of theory of the case about media right now. Can you explain what's going on here? This is so rude that you keep framing all of this like that. I'm so mad at you. No, I can't make any sense of what he's saying. Okay, good. But I can, I can, I can translate from idiot to, to Vergecast.

There you go. It's impossible to make sense of what he's saying because the consolidation of power into national programmers is the consolidation of all of the local news stations in many markets being owned by one company. Those are the mergers. Those are the mergers. Sinclair Broadcasting owns a lot of broadcast stations. Tegna owns. owns a lot of broadcast stations.

They wanted to merge. There were markets in which they would have owned all of the broadcast stations in a given city. And those are supposed to be competitors, right? Your local ABC News is supposed to compete with your local CBS News. They're supposed to have more men on the street interviews than choppers.

Like, that's what they're supposed to do. They're supposed to be Anchorman. That's the competition you want, right? Competing for local news to be the best eyes and ears of your community that you can get. The internet has obviously broken this, right? It's no longer lucrative to be the best local news in San Diego. Right.

And like, I think we've lost something for that. I think we all yearn for the simpler days of Anchorman, for sure. Bring us back, Ron Burgundy. Yeah. That's all gone, man. Those stations are underfunded. They are owned by private equity in a lot of different ways. They're owned by Sinclair, Techno, which have a bunch of private equity in them.

The costs are being cut. The stations are being consolidated. They themselves are broadcasting enormous. amounts of centralized news programming. Yep. You can't make this argument without being an idiot to reality. It's not Comcast and Disney and whoever else. Yes, they are producing a lot of the sitcoms.

They produce the national news broadcasts, but the local news on these stations is centrally being produced by a handful of enormous conglomerates that most people don't know, can not possibly hold accountable, and quite honestly, have miserable taste. like just horrible, go to any local news station's website and be like, do these people have good taste? And the answer is no. They have private equity taste, right? It is the lowest common in honor slop across the board.

And so you remember when Deadspin did that video ages ago and it was just the same broadcast on every single station. They're all reading the same script. That's the danger. Yeah. That was like some truly dystopian stuff too. And this is, I think even that's like a decade ago. Yeah. That's the danger.

right, is that you will consume this news that you perceive to be made in your community, but it is actually being made by a national broadcaster with national interests that is playing a culture war that is a million miles away from you literally and figuratively. And so Brendan's saying, I'm protecting you from the big evil NBC and Comcast and Disney and ABC, whatever, but at least you can see those. Those are legible to you. Sinclair and Teague are not legible to you. So when Brendan exerts his power over them, you might not even know it.

You might not even know how told and accountable because they're running under the ABC news branding. And so, again, this is, to me, this is incoherent nonsense because the reality is nothing like what he's describing. It is also dangerous because he's continuing to assert his censorship authority over a thing that is diminishing the value every day because the people who own it are diminishing its value anyhow. And I just look at this. I'm like, why do you want to be known as the censor? chief to what end? And maybe it's because he doesn't want Donald Trump to fire him. But I would say his next move, and he's got this comment here about Section 230, his next move is to say, hey, you know what else runs over the public airwaves? Mobile internet service. Do you know how else

the government operates in the public trust? The internet. We should not have news distortion on YouTube. We should not have news distortion on the TikTok algorithm. This criticism of our nation's greatest ally Israel has gone over the top. We're going to make sure X shuts it down. That's all coming. there's a reason he's in using this power now. He's saying, I have this power and I need to use it. The only next move is to say, I should have more power. And this line about 230 where he wants to reinterpret 230, that's his shade at it. Yeah, let me read this one to you.

And then this can be the last one because I do think this hints at the 2026 season of Brendan Carr as a dummy. He says, I think I've expressed concerns over the years about how courts have sort of misinterpreted and given expansive new readings to Section 230 that aren't in the statutory text. And I think there's some of those issues in your legislation as well that are worth looking at. This is in response to a senator who was basically like,

am I doing a good job making Section 230 go away? And that's essentially what he says. My response to this was, why on earth are you talking about Section 230, Brendan Carr? And then I looked and I guess there is some precedent for the FCC having some interest in Section 230. But I agree with you. It seems clear that...

Oh, there's not some precedent. You know what there is? There's a chapter of Project 2025 written by Brendan Carr in which he says the FCC should be given jurisdiction over Section 230. Again, he's not, like, where we're headed. He's not a savvy operator. Yeah. Like, I can just, I can just read his plans.

I'm like, these plans are stupid. And then he does them. Yeah. And I'm just telling you it's coming. The reason that he's making this enormous stand about being able to regulate speech on broadcast is so that he can make the same argument about the internet. And he will find the authority. And again, he keeps daring Congress to stop him. And I suspect Congress will remain as dysfunctional as ever, and they will not.

And so 2.30 is one way into it. There are other ways into it. Some of which run into his own policymaking from the past, as we've discussed, you know, a G-Pai in the first Trump administration disclaimed a lot of authority about the internet. But I suspect Brendan's going to try to find a way next year to take it back and actually aggressively try to start regulating speech on platforms. Yeah. It's coming. All right, that is it.

This has been... You're a real dummy, Brendan. As always, I'd like to welcome you on to our show. I know you're going to be at CS. You can be the surprised live guest at the Vergecast and CS. Fun fact, Brendan Carr doing a thing the morning after the Vergecast live at the Brooklyn Bowl. So we know confidently that Brendan Carr is likely to be in Vegas and not busy. I'm just saying.

If you got a line on Brendan, tell him that he's always welcome. You a good bowler, Brendan? Get us up. We'll bowl for free speech. But you know what? We can hang out in the casino. We can do it however you want. But as always, you're welcome on our airwaves.

I just refuse to be polite because I'm an American. I have free speech, you big dummy. That's it. That's the end of the 2025 season of Brendan Carr's a dummy. Eli, it's been a pleasure hosting this podcast with you. I don't do much on this podcast, but it's a joy to be here with you. We actually, this, this veers perfectly into a bunch of streaming war stuff that has happened this week. So let's take a break and then we're going to come back.

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Neelai, weird week in the streaming wars. There's just a lot of like stuff happening. You know what I mean? Everybody's just doing things. And there's a lot of stuff. Also, all of it proves my thesis that broadcast is dead in the future is on the internet. Yes. And at the very least that all of these things are becoming precisely exactly the same thing.

So let me just run through some headlines. here and you can stop me when you find something interesting. Oh boy. We're going to stop here very quickly because thing number one on my list is that YouTube will now be the streaming host of the Oscars starting in 2020. I was right. What else do you want me to say? This to me is actually like a perfect example of the thing we were talking about because I think

like other than live sports, I think the most TV TV thing continues to be award shows. Right? It's one of the few things that still commands like a big. live audience at a specific time on a specific day. It's one of the, it's, it's just Hollywood people celebrating themselves. Like there are lots of these award shows. Netflix, I think, got the SAG Awards. So this is a thing that's been having.

But the Oscars is like, the Oscars is a big TV moment every year in a, in a winnowing list of big TV moments every year. And now it's just going to be on YouTube. Does that feel weird, do you? It doesn't feel weird to me. Like you mentioned, Netflix took the SAG Awards. The Grammys moved to, quote Disney platforms.

Oh, right. We had the president at Recording Academy Harvey Mason on Dakota a while back and he was in the midst of changing from CBS. They've been on CBS for a million years and he was basically like,

I gotta go where the kids are. And he hadn't announced it yet. And I was like, I'm on YouTube. And then he was like Disney Plus. I'm like, that's equally good. That's where the kids are. Like these awards need to be near

the relevant audiences. Right. And the Oscars have a real problem which is no one has ever watched any of these movies. And so you just like back into should we give game the Oscar for Best Picture again.

Like, I think if they just gave Avengers Endgame an award every year, like more people would watch the Oscars. This, I just get such a kick out of this because, like, I did this big story about YouTube for its 20th anniversary, which was earlier this year. And one of the things they're very honest about is that a big next moment for YouTube is going to be to start winning some of these big Hollywood awards. Like, it has the audience. They got on the Nielsen ratings, which was a huge deal in a real sort of legitimacy thing.

They have all the advertisers. They were like, we have all the pieces of this puzzle. But we've never won an Emmy. We've never won an Oscar. And now it's like, you just have to wonder if Neil Mohan just ran around and it's like, well, okay, we're never going to win an Oscar. But we could do the Oscars. Does that count? So, you know, I have some questions about this, which we'll see, you know, Apple took over Major League Baseball.

They were in charge of producing it and they did a bad job. Yes. They might still be doing a bad job. But they got better. But initially, like a horrible job. They're also, let's take over Formula One. And a lot of people I know are, I would say, curious and nervous about how that's going to go. Although, the formula is owned by Liberty Media.

So I don't know if Apple's just a distributor there, but I think the actual show is still produced by Liberty. Yeah, we'll see. Amazon does Thursday night football, I would call that messy. Right. Like, if you've ever wanted to hear Al Michaels taking that, you should watch Thursday Night Football on Prime. Or to see retired NFL players take their shirts off at the halftime show. Vastly more exciting than most of the games. So, like, there's just some, like, do you have?

the muscles to do this. Do you know how to do production in the way that the big broadcast networks did production, which is a big part of making these award shows feel big? But I think what this actually points to is that these award shows are declining assets. I think that's probably right, because the broadcast networks will pay the money for sports. They are not going to lose the NFL until they are dead and gone. Right. And so you see the sports leagues are creating more games to sell to the streamers. Like, fine, there's football on Thursday. And Sunday morning in Brazil, like, whatever it does. Whatever it takes, you can buy it.

But the core broadcast rights, you know, the big networks will continue to overpay for because that's all they have left. And I think they're all looking at the ratings for the Grammys and the Oscars and over else and saying, this isn't worth it to us. Yeah. And so I do think until there's monoculture again, these award shows are basically going to devolve into we give an award to the movie most people have heard of. And we are going to make up new categories for Beyonce to win every year. Yeah, I mean, it's like the Golden Globes added a achievement in box office. category over the last couple of years, literally just so that they could say, here's the biggest movie of the year, and hopefully we'll get big A-list celebrities to come. Yeah. So, okay,

so that's one. And then also this week, Netflix announced that it's making a FIFA game, which is a big deal to me personally, but is also, so Netflix has been sort of like dabbling in video games for a while now. They've done a lot of resurrecting of old games. They've done some sort of indie game stuff. But this, so EA, which had the license to make like the official global soccer game for years, lost its FIFA relationship last year. So now EA still makes a game, but it's called EAFC and not FIFA. And Netflix is now apparently going to make the FIFA game. Like they're just going to go try to make a rival sports game. Nelai, to put this in terms of you understand. No, I get it. I get it. You're saying they can make a Madden. I know where you're going to

make a Madden. That's exactly right. that is such a like several orders of magnitude leap from any of the gaming stuff Netflix has been doing in the past. And to me, suggest that like you only do this if you're dead serious about really trying to compete in video games. Like if they're going to make a triple A sports simulation game, you're not messing up.

Are they going to make a AAA sports simulation game? We'll see. Like, do they even have to? Maybe not. Is he a great question? Any good? Like, if you wanted to compete with Madden today, Madden 26, what I've been playing, which is so hard.

You could just tell me that you've made Madden 2001 with the current rosters. I'm like, that's better. Yes. I play this game called Retro Bowl that is essentially that. The graphics are awful, but it has the NFL players names right there, and

I love it very much, and I play it all the time. It's it. It's great. I get a lot of TikTok videos of legendary Packers backup quarterback, Kurt Benkirt. Two never played, but is legendary Packers quarterback Kurt Benkirt. And he's playing Madden. And I'm just like, I don't, I'm not playing that game.

I don't know. I've never seen that game before. Like, what are you doing? Amazing. And so like, and I get there's skill levels and whatever. But like, I'm just saying, I think the market for some of these games that have been pretty lazy for a long time is huge. Yes. Plus, if the license in there, a lot of people know what FIFA is.

And a lot of people, I think Netflix is very interested in being sports adjacent. Yes. Well, Netflix also is going to have the win. Women's World Cup starting in 2027. So it is like, it's starting to buy into this in a pretty real way. Yeah. And they're figuring out live. I would just say, is if this game lives inside of Netflix, that is a huge mistake.

I agree with that. They need to put this game where people play these games in their own apps on phones and as standalone games on consoles. And I, we'll see. Did they say anything about that? Just the, they said it'll be available on mobile, but the exact. machinations of it all, I think, remain to be seen. But I agree with you.

And I think Netflix has done it kind of in all possible ways. Like there's some stuff that is buried, but then there's other stuff that you can just go get and you just log in with your Netflix account. And that's fine. I have been of the mind for a couple of years now that this was like a fake thing that Netflix would eventually just kind of give up on the minute. Like interest rates went up a little. That no longer seems to be the case. I actually think Netflix might be serious about doing games. Well, particularly, we're going to get to this.

As YouTube encroaches more and more on Netflix, Netflix has to find stuff that YouTube want to. And YouTube is not going to publish games. Or can I interest you in Netflix just buying a bunch of stuff that used to be on YouTube? The other thing that happened this week was Netflix made deals with Barstool Sports and with IHeartRadio to get a bunch more video podcasts onto Netflix. And there's reporting out there that says the deal with Barstool is eight figures a year. pardon my take a big and very popular football podcast is moving exclusively to Netflix

this is like an ongoing thing again there's a lot of sports here this is like Netflix is spending an awful lot of money to get video podcasts off of YouTube and onto Netflix and I just have two things to say about that one is what the hell why haven't we got a phone call what are we doing here

I feel like disclosure I made a Netflix show that didn't make it to a second season you're the problem we're never working with Neil I again. But also, like, again, we're in this moment where it feels like YouTube has sort of conquered the world except for winning Oscars and Emmys, right? And Netflix has conquered Hollywood and now wants to go be YouTube.

Like, these two things are just running at each other so directly and so fast. It's almost bizarre to watch. I feel like there's some strategy confusion on Netflix part here. video podcasts are great. Obviously, people are spending a lot of time on them. They dominate YouTube's time spent charts. A video podcast on Netflix without the YouTube commenting ecosystem feels way less valuable to me. I think I agree with that.

Even, you know, our own show. Like, you can comment on our show on our site and you can comment on YouTube and you just look at the comments. And you're like, well, there's more action on YouTube. Like, more people are incentivized to do it there. There's something about that that seems important in the context of a podcast. which is, you know, before creators became creators, we were podcasters before there was a creator economy. And the relationship that we have with our audience was very direct in a way that

the relationship of like Netflix TV show runners is not as direct. And so I think Netflix wants to buy the time, but they can't get the relationship without the back and forth. And I can say this very, like, I can make this example very concrete. We launched the entire verge off the back of the Engadgett podcast. Yeah, fair. Yeah. Right?

We had Engadgett. We were unhappy there. We had the podcast. We left. We didn't take the feed. I mean, this is ancient history now, but this is stuff that you see playing out over and again now. But in 2010, we're like, we're going to leave. Can we have our podcast feed?

And AOL said no. And we told our audience on Twitter, we're leaving. Here's a new podcast feed called This is My Next Podcasts. And the entire verge is built off of that audience relationship, which was very direct, very two-way, right? It was a little community. That's not the relationship anybody has with. Shonda rhymes, I don't think, right? Like, yeah.

It's just different. Like, Netflix is Hollywood in that way. So they can buy all these video podcasts, but if they don't understand that what they're taking is the sort of direct parasycial audience relationship that creators have with their communities, I think they're going to make some missteps. I put that right next to them buying Warner and say, I think they actually might know what to do with Warner. The big, who knows? But, like, you know what I mean? Like, they're better at that than YouTube running a social network. Yeah.

Some news on that front, by the way. This keeps just getting more and more bizarre. Netflix continues to say it is very serious about putting Warner Brothers movies in theaters, like this thing where Netflix is going to destroy the movie economy continues to Burble and Ted Sarandos has to keep saying, no, I like movies, I like Hollywood, we'll put stuff in theaters. I think I still believe that slightly more than you do, but they keep saying it. But then the other thing, I think the more important thing that happened this week is, Warner Brothers is telling its shareholders to reject the hostile offer that is coming from Paramount. We talked through kind of what these deals looked like last week, but essentially Paramount wants, the whole company thinks it can get the regulatory side of this done, has a lot of funky financing things going on.

Had Jared Kushner involved, but even he now thinks the deal is out. It's pretty good. It's a big nest. And Jared Kushner dropping out of the Paramount bit is like very funny. It's a tough look for Paramount. Which is not a thing I ever thought I would say about, you know, getting out of business with Jared Kushner. But anyway, yeah, so Warner is essentially saying we want to do the Netflix deal. We are going to do the Netflix deal.

You should turn down this Paramount offer. There is a lot of continuing smoke. Elizabeth Warren was just on a podcast I like the town talking about why this is a total antitrust disaster. And neither Netflix nor Paramount is a good home for Warner Brothers. this thing is going to keep being a mess, but it actually looks like it might pretty quickly become just Netflix's mess. Is that your read?

Liz wrote a piece this week. Great headline. Larry Ellison's big, dumb gift to his large adult son. It was good. You know, the thing I don't understand about the Paramount bid for Warner is that it is backstopped by a bunch of Saudi money, but also fundamentally by the Ellison family's own stock in Oracle.

Right. And, you know, if you are the CEO of Oracle, you have no choice but to pretend that AGI's around the corner. And so saying I'm willing to trade in my AGI valuable stock for your garbage Warner Brothers stock is crazy. It's a crazy on its face. And that's Liz's piece. It's like, you can't believe this. Anyway, a lot of commentaries on people are swanning.

They just want to buy political influence, which is sort of like, well, then why I tried Kushner back out? But like, maybe. But also, they have plenty of political influence. Larry Ellison is not hurting for access to the Trump administration. Right. Like maybe what you want is culture war political influence, but you can just get it, especially if you're also trying to buy TikTok, which is arguably more influential than Warner Brothers. So it's just like unclear what Paramount's upside is.

It's unclear why you would trade in Oracle stock for Paramount Warner Brothers stock, which already sounds like it's worth $0. And then you have to do the whole integration of these two things and not screwed up, which every single person that has ever bought Warner Brothers has done. So I do think it'll probably eventually be Netflix's mess. I just think we're two years of talking about regulation by enforcement, like two years of Trump administration concessions away, which is why Netflix doesn't want CNN. They don't want to be in that conversation. They want someone else to deal with that fight.

Yeah. Netflix is very happy to have like sports podcasts and not interested in CNN. And I think the reason Ted Sarandos is running on saying he's committed to keeping movies in theaters is because Hollywood prefers him over Paramount, but still doesn't prefer him. Right. So he's trying to become the winner by saying, no, we're going to give you the things you want. Like, you like us better than those guys, but like, let me sweeten the pot by saying, we'll keep movie theaters alive. Right. Rather than just being the lesser of two evils, which at this point they are, but only, like, slightly. Okay, two more things. And then I have a little game I want us to play here at the end of 2025. I have a bit of news that sucks and a bit of news that rules.

The bit of news that sucks is Peacock, is launching a little bit of news. new ad format. I don't know if you've seen this. They called them arrival ads. And the idea is now when you open Peacock, you know that first screen you land on where you pick your profile, it's going to have a big ass ad on it because that's what everybody wanted. And I just like...

Yeah, keep saying these companies are dead. They're already dead. Yeah. That's death. And by the way, disclosure NBC Universal and Comcastor, investors are repairing company. they're dead. They're already dead. Yeah.

I don't think our podcast will be on Peacock any time soon. I'll just say that. I think I'm fine with that. I'm going to go ahead and doubt that. Look, the money in advertising is under such pressure. Connected TV is one of the few places where you can deliver good advertising or brand advertising, fancy ads. And so the TV players are like, what if we increased our inventory of that? and they're not doing it by getting more people to sign up for their streaming services and watch more shows.

They're doing it by just stuffing ads in more places. More ads, more fun. This is by this is, this is a death spiral. This is the same death spiral as the Samsung frame TV. Eventually, you're going to be happier when the TV is off and eventually you're not going to have it at all. Yeah, I mean, this is a way of suggesting that like, okay, we can't actually win this game on its merits. So we're just going to bleed you on the way out. Yeah.

And that's a bummer. Better news. HBO Max rolled out. a new thing that it calls channels, which is basically just endless feeds of your favorite show. This is the best idea I've ever heard in my entire life. So I'll just read you the lists of the shows. So there are 12 themed channels.

Some are themes like adult animation, true crime, and holiday specials, but then the ones that I'm very excited about are just endless running 24-hour feeds of shows like friends, the Lord of the Rings, Rick and Morty, the Sopranos, Game of Thrones, the Big Bang Theory. It's basically, this is the hotel room experience where you roll into a hotel room and you're like, okay, what episode of the office is on? I'm going to watch it. That is ideal television. Neely, as we've discussed, most of my TV watching is just, I like six shows and I will watch any episode of them at any time. Just inject this into my veins. I'm going to turn on HBO Max. It's going to be like, we have an episode of, friends for you, do you want to watch it? And I'm going to say, yeah. And it's going to say, do you care which one? I'm saying, no, I don't. It's the dream. This is cable again. We're just doing cable,

but what if it's only shows I like? It's cable. It's just vastly more expensive. This is like MTV just canceled ridiculousness, which they were just showing over and over again for five years. I think they've only shown ridiculousness. And it's because they did the math and spending money on any new show was too risky compared to the guaranteed audience of people are just like screw it ridiculousness. And then I think they got mathematically the point where even buying new episodes of ridiculousness was less worthwhile than just running their into-existing-existing catalog of ridiculous tests. Speaking of death spirals. Very good. But this, I just want to say, I think we're about to say some mean things about HBO Max.

But I just want to say HBO Max is on three very good things this year as part of a total disaster of a company. They went back to being called HBO Max. kudos. They switched to the correct reviews format on the internet, which is two thumbs

up, one thumbs up and thumbs down. That is the only review system that should exist on the internet. Love it,

like it, ne. Perfect. And this, the channels. Great job, HBO Max. I'm so sorry

you're going to be dead in six months. I would say, again, in a sense that everything just proves that I'm right.

One strategy. The thesis of the broadcast. Everything is confirmation bias. That's my 2026 editorial strategy. Trying hard is an option. It's a choice you could make.

You could try hard. I would point to AT&T tried it by T-Mobile. The government blocked it. T-Mobile did receive a giant breakup deal. And then they tried hard. They hired John Lodger and they tried hard. And now they are, in fact, everyone's favorite while it was scarier because they tried hard.

Whereas if they had been purchased by AT&T, I think maybe that would have not happened. In fact, I can guarantee that would have not happened. It is really true that do a good job is a remarkably unexplored option in most markets. Every time. We're going to talk about Amazon buying IROB out here and like do a good job was just not on the table. Yeah. Okay.

So all of this brings me too. Wait, can I just connect that to one other headline here? Yeah. Instagram is putting the Reels app on TV because everyone just wants to be in her TV. One of these companies is going to figure out that the actual experience is building a TikTok discovery app on. your phone that you're just like get into the middle of some movie that's in their catalog and you push a button and it starts playing on TV. That's all I want. Yes, 100%. I don't want the HBO Max app on my phone to have HBO Max in it. I want it to be a TikTok feed of clips of movies

that are on HBO Max and I'm like, screw it. I'm watching The Dark Night again. I find 100% agree. I literally could not agree anymore with that take. And Netflix is probably best set up to do this. And there are like glimmers that Netflix actually might get this. They've done some of this stuff in various places. But like, yeah, forget the guide, forget showing me the icons. I want to open the thing up and I'm just going to flip through clips until I

find something that seems cool. And then I press play and it shows up on my TV. That's the remote of the future, man. That's the game. I'm so in. Someone's going to figure it out. Yeah. It's not going to be Paramount Plus. I was going to say it. It's super warm. Paramount Plus hasn't figured out starting the stream within five minutes of pressing play.

Yeah. Tell me that. They also haven't figured out. what any of the characters on Landman should be doing here in season two? I'll just set that aside. There is your argument against letting Parap Plus White Warner's. Watch this season of Landman and be like, this company was like Taylor shared and knows how to write a TV show. All right, let's get to the game I want to play here.

It's been a minute since we have revisited the Go-90 scale of streaming services. And we're just going to do that. Here's my question. Do Billy Bob Thornton and Allie Lutter like each other on that show? It's unclear, yet they just keep banging away. Go ahead, go ahead. Okay, I have to tell you, your pitch for Landman recaps as our new podcast or the podcast has been resoundingly rejected. They might cheat each other.

I will, however, accept a pitch more geared around the various goings-on of Billy Bob Thornton. But that's, we'll come back to that in 2026. For now, Travis Thorchuk, our producer, come join us, Travis. Hello. Hi. So we have not revisited. the Go 90 streaming scale. Oh, man.

In a while. And it is time for us to do that here at the end of 2025. Maybe we should have been doing this every week. So, Travis, you as you or want to do are not only our producer, but you are the vibe coder in chief of the Hodgecast, I would say. You've made something for us today. I've done more for vibe coding than anyone making vibe coding. I have made a Go-90 scale that we can interact with. So here it is for the listeners.

We have eight streaming services here. And the scale, Neil, do you want to describe the origins of the Go-90 scale? So Verizon once started a streaming service. It's called Go-90. Their pitch was that you would join a gang, I believe, was a gang. And that these gangs would roam their service. And then when you started watching a video, you would rotate your phone to fully experience the video, thus going 90. Go 90 failed

Immediately It went 90 And so you see the scale is from zero Which is alive to 90 Which is dead Degrees You're understanding 90 degrees

You're dead because you're lying down That's the Go 90 scale of doom streaming services It's very good It has been very useful for us over time And here at the end of 2020-25 We're going to put Let's see

Eight streaming services on that list So the eight are in no particular order HBO Max, Peacock, Netflix, Paramount Plus Apple TV, YouTube, Prime Video, and we're doing the Disney bundle, the Disney Plus Hulu ESPN, as all one thing.

So just to reiterate, zero is alive, and 90 is dead, and the closer you are to 90, the closer you are to death. Many services have hit 90. Yes. Over the years. Famously, Quibi went 90

in just under 10 minutes. Yep. Quibi, there was a time that we needed to rename this, the Quibi scale of streaming services. But Go 90 is just too good a vision. So let's start with the HBB. Because we were just talking about it.

Travis, where would you put this on the Go 90 scale at service services? Knowing everything we know. Not true. No, no, of doomed streaming services. Doomed streaming services. Get my branding right, Pierce. Listen, there's been a lot of doom and gloom around HBO Max, but a few weeks ago, they debuted a new TV show that is sweeping the internet called Heated Rivalry.

about two professional hockey players who are secretly in a relationship with each other. And let me tell you, as a person who's been gay his whole life, this has been crazy to watch. And so I cannot, in good conscience, put this anywhere past 60 on the scale. So that's where I'm starting it. So I've not watched one second of the show, but it has been everywhere. And it's one of those shows that shows up all over my various feeds. and it's all just like two hockey players sort of smoldering. Like, I couldn't tell you anything about the show.

Wait, is this a reality show? No, this is a drama. Okay. But is it just, it appears to just be nonstop sexual tension between hockey players. It's more than tension. It is full on Skinimack style butts in every episode. Are hockey that's good? Yes.

Okay. I guess you're skating. I always think of hockey players as a shoulder situation. It's both. I guess I've revealed a lot about how I think about hockey players. You have. I grew up in Wisconsin's like Minnesota adjacent. There's a lot of hockey floating around.

That's true. I lost to a number of hockey players in my youth, is what I'm trying to say. Okay, so Travis, Travis has capped it at 60. I kind of feel like 60 is as low as I am interested in going. Because if this is all in the guise of going to Netflix, Netflix keeps saying that it's going to keep HBO Max alive, that it'll keep being its own thing. I have a very hard time imagining that's going to be the case.

But I suppose it's going to be a while. Whatever will kill HBO Max is probably not going to happen in the next, let's say, 12 months. 85. So Travis at 60, I'm at 85. David, that means you get the final call. Yeah, I think we're going to split the difference. We're going to put it at like 75. because I think

I think there is it has begun its inevitable demise but it's going to take a while Right because 90 is actually dead so we agree that it's not 90 Correct. It's not currently dead.

Let us know if HBO Max is currently dead. You can only go 90 the one. You don't go back. You can live at 89 for a long time. So my argument is that death is imminent but I think death actually will take several years.

Yeah, I think death is looming, but it's not, it's not yet in the room with us. Yeah. All right, fine. He did rivalry. Did get picked up for season two, so, you know. That buys you at least another 12 months. Yeah, exactly.

All right, next on the list. Let's do one that definitely isn't going to be as high or higher. Let's go with YouTube. You do it's zero. Right? It's, okay. It's default alive forever. We were talking about this earlier.

Like, the sequence of things that I would have to imagine in order for YouTube to be above, like, a 20 seems essentially impossible. Yeah, there's no way. Like, you'd have to, you'd have to break up Google. There would have to be some gigantic economic catastrophe. Like, so many, the heat death of the universe would have to be in range before YouTube would go away from zero. Travis, any disagreement there? No disagreement on this end. Okay.

What's the hockey player situation on YouTube? There are no gay hockey players on YouTube. So you know what? For that reason, I'm going to put it at one. I'll allow it. All right. Next up, let's do Peacock next. The other one we were just talking about.

Nelai, where do you land on this? Peacock is over a 45, but it is under 75. It's in the, like, you're not default alive. Really? I would have thought you wanted this to be in, like, the high 80s. Well, no, because they have the Olympics. They do have the Olympics. Right.

And it's also, like NBC just split up the company, a Comcast just split off all the cable channels into MS now and whatever CNBC rebrand exists that honestly makes it looks like a health care services firm. I don't know what that is. and they think the business is peacock right right like universal studios and NBC television and peacock is the business and the cable networks are left to I mean when they do these splits in Hollywood they refer to these like ancillary businesses as shitcoes which is very funny and so peacock is more alive than not because they have executed the split they got rid of

the stuff they don't want they're all in on this is the future but then they have the taste that they have and they are still subscale, right? They're not as big as Netflix. They're not as big as YouTube. And they're going to put arrival ads on the home screen and basically bully you into watching the Olympics on it. Like, that's closer to death than not, right? It's not a given that it will survive. Yeah. But it is, they have more assets in their favor than not. Travis, what's your, what's your peacock stance? My peacock stance, they have the most popular reality TV show called The Traders. So that's, Something.

Isn't Love Island also on Peacock? Yes, it is on Peacock. There you go. They've got Love Island. They've got the traders. Yeah, but do they have gay hockey players? My personal experience with Peacock is very weird because I watch Peacock a lot because it has. You have horrible taste in television?

Well, no, it's because there was that run of NBC sitcoms that was like 30 Rock, the Office, community, the Good Place, New Girl. Like, they had this run of shows. that are now on Peacock, and so I watch them a ton because it's like easy background viewing while I'm doing other stuff. I literally don't think I could name you

a thing that has premiered on Peacock in the last like three years. It just doesn't, it's purely a library streaming service for me, which is very strange. Let me ask you the other, the most important. What are you doing when you like need new girl on in the background?

You say this a lot, and I think about like my day to day, I'm never like, I'm doing something that requires new girl. So I mean, this is all going to reveal a lot about my personality. I generally will, like when a lot of people would listen to music, I will often just watch a show. So like if I'm cooking, instead of listening to music or a podcast, I'll often just like put a show on.

I usually play video games with the sound off and I'll watch a show. I do it while I'm cleaning. It's just like it's it's background noise. And I would actually, you know, funny way this has changed since we had kids. so we like we're trying we do less TV so there's a lot more music in our house than there used to be but like Anna with downtime we'll fill it with episodes of Law & Order SVU and for me it's NBC sitcoms from like the 2000-ish era so that's where okay here's my recommendation my my wholehearted recommendation and advice stop doing the TV shows while you play the video games instead play very

dramatic instrumental music Madden with explosions in the sky in the background is like, ah, it's very good. I used to exclusively write with the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack playing. It made everything feel so sick. That's a trading source I could get behind. That's incredible. Just he's a pirate on repeat makes every blog post seem unbelievable. All right, I'm good with Peacock in the 60s.

Travis, any objection? This feels about it. No objection. I think this is a great spot. Okay. I think it is a less good streaming service than HBO Max, but it has many fewer corporate shenanigans. So this feels about right.

All right, let's do Prime Video next. This is a weird one. I'm putting Prime Video at a 70. Really? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, higher than Peacock. There is just a chance they get bored. Yes, that's the case.

Meaningful chance that Amazon is like, whatever. We resell Apple TV and Peacock here. We do not need to make any of our own stuff. So I guess I'm splitting this. The idea that Prime Video exists is a reseller of content and video store. No, we're talking like original streaming service. Like Prime Video, the thing that makes fallout, it's definitely 70. There's a very high probability that Amazon just gets bored of being in this business.

It sucks. But they just paid all this money. They paid all this money for MGM and they paid a bunch more money for Bond. Like for James Bond alone, you would think Prime Video would have some runway. This is like 10 minutes of Amazon retail sales. So who cares? I mean, that is true. I never watch prime video.

Travis, do you? I do watch some prime video. I will tell you that they had a movie called red, white, and royal blue about the president's son getting into a relationship with a Prince Harry type figure in the UK. We have to start a show where Travis just recommends what to watch. This is our new podcast with our podcast. Not hockey players, though. Oh, I see. So I would put them a little bit higher on the scale, maybe a 72.

You get like the two point penalty for not hockey players? Yep. All right. That's amazing. If they made a show that was about like incestuous royal family shenanigans, but like some of them were hockey players, I'd watch that. And it would instantly bring you down five points on the scale. I also don't like that Mr. Beast has a show on Prime Video.

I'm not a huge fan of that, so I'm happy with them where they are there. I will say that I went to watch the first episode of the new season of fallout. I really enjoyed the first season of fallout. And I watched it, and I was like, I have no recollection of what happened during this first season. So now I have to watch all the first season again, because bizarrely all the recaps are bad. That's how I feel about Stranger Things. Yeah. And there's something there where they make these shows and their events in the minute that they're alive, and then they just vanish from your brain.

Yeah, every time I watch an episode, I'm like, this is really good. And then like, four hours later, if you were like, what happened in that episode? I don't know. I got nothing. Yeah, I just could not tell you what happened in the first season of fallout. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, that's the argument that they survived. Like, just people being like, that show is good, right?

I should watch it again. I'll keep them alive. Yeah, I would have put it lower just because Amazon so thoroughly doesn't need to worry about the money from Prime Video. but the risk of like, and this has been true forever, that at some point, if Andy Jassy ever needs to cut budgets, this is the obvious one he will cut. I say seven. We've been moving between 67 and 72.

We're just split the difference. Split it at 70. Yeah. All right. All right. Deal. Love it. Next on the list, Paramount Plus.

Yeah, I will hear nothing lower than about 85. Travis is immediately put it at 89. Yeah. Yeah, based, again, just on a total incoherency of Landman season two. And on top of that, they lost Taylor Sheridan. They took, you know, history's greatest writer of women and lost him somehow. 89. This is a company, they're lost.

They don't know what they're doing. And even, like, you know, I have, like, very conservative family. That's like, what is going on with this show? It sucks now. That's all I'm saying. No taste. Zero taste. Yeah.

This is the thing that, like, the, it's backer has so much money and is so much pride, right? Like, David Ellison will keep this thing alive as long as he possibly can. But, like, what on Earth is there on Paramount Plus for anybody at this point? I'm sure. We're going to get notes from people to watch Paramount Plus all day. There's a universe of... There's Star Trek. We always hear from people who love Star Trek.

Star Trek is there. Apparently there was a Matlock reboot. They have the Mission Impossible movies. Sure. The Top Gun is there. But they have the smallest catalog, the smallest service. Yep. It is not yet clear whether they can execute well and make much watch things.

They don't have the Olympics. It's messy over there, man. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I think 89 feels right to me. I think 89 is a little too high. As you said, you can live at 89 for a long time. But, like, 89 suggests that, to me, that there is no, there is no path back.

Like, you are, this is, it's not getting better, but you can stay at this place for a long time. And that's how I feel about Paramount Plus. I would give them the 80. 89 suggests like tomorrow it's going to die. No, as you said, you can live at 89 for a long time. Travis, we'll let the, yeah, Travis, given the 80s. What's the hockey player situation on good old 30s? Well, in terms of Star Trek, they did just announce that strange new worlds,

which I think is widely agreed to be the best new Star Trek content, ever since they started putting things back on television is ending after its fifth season. So it seems like we have maybe two years left there. So I would put it at an 85. Sure. Okay. There are no hockey players on Star Trek.

Taylor Shadden's gone. This is the Star Trek reboot I would watch. We landed on a planet of hockey players. I don't, I'm not tracking by any sort of. stretch the imagination. Beam me up. Why did this get me so bad? We got to end the show.

Oh, boy. All right, three more to do here. We're all going to recover. It's going to be okay. Let's do the Disney bundle. Great. Which I think is also very... I think it's unfair that you bundled these.

Really? Why? Because Hulu is at 89. Yeah, that's why I bundled. it. Like, I'm, I'm, I'm, like, Disney Plus is at zero and Hulu is at 89. Like, how do you, it's at 45. Hulu, I think Hulu is at like 89.8. Even Disney would tell you Hulu is a dying entity and will eventually just become a tile on the Disney Plus app. I'm just saying, in your thing, you have one thing that's at 89 and one thing that's at zero. How do you place this tile? Okay, fine. Then we'll just call this

Disney Plus. And, and then you can, you can, you can be annoying because technically you can watch Hulu and so it of Disney Plus. Like, sure, but this is Disney Plus. We will just call this Disney Plus. Zero. I think that's... It's zero. I think that's right.

Again, it's their business. Now, Bob Iger is making some astonishingly stupid moves lately. Yes. I think licensing the IP to Open AI, paying Open Eye a billion dollars in investment money and then giving the IP up is as stupid a move as I've ever encountered in all of our years of covering this business. at the same time sending Google a cease and desist. Like, you know it's worth some money, right?

That's why you're threatening Google. You want to get paid. Right. But then idiotically, you've paid OpenAI to use your IP is nonsensical. If anything, you should do that in reverse. You should invest in Google, which is good at making money. So then you will get some money back. Investing in Open AI is like, Sam, we're going to buy you some more runway to do nothing.

But it's like cool and fancy. And I think Bob Iger really likes being cool and fancy. I don't know. Usually he's smarter. Like if you were like David Zazelot, it's like Sam Altman can have a billion of my dollars and all of the rights to Batman. You'd be like, yep, he's an idiot. Iger's usually a little bit smarter than that. Yeah.

Yeah. But that's the argument away from zero for Disney Plus, but it's their whole business. They don't, there's not another bet. It's at zero until they waver from that bet. And for what we were talking about earlier, like you could just do a good job. Disney continues to do a good job, right? Like, there is just, Disney owns Hollywood in a pretty meaningful way still. Travis, you just made a face.

I don't know. Have you poked around Disney Plus lately? Just wait till it's full of weird Sora Slop. I guess if you have kids, it's great. I know. Yeah. I mean, if you like Disney movies and you like Marvel and you like Star Wars, great. Otherwise, there's not a lot of original stuff on there.

If you're a young American, This is Taylor Swift six-part eras tour documentary erasure, and I will not stand for it. Fair enough. Should we have an entire conversation about how that documentary completely suffers from the lack of any critical distance whatsoever? I can do that for you all day and all might. That's the verge cast, everybody. That's what we do. All right, two more.

Let's blast through this and get out of here because I actually think both of these are pretty easy. Let's do Apple TV next. Apple TV, I think, kind of has to go next to Prime Video for exactly the same reasons. It is the exact same thesis. No, it's a little lower. It's over 45 for the thesis. But, you know, they just re-did the sounds. Pluribus is a hit.

Etychew seems happy. You know, like they're not going to abort because they like it. Sure, but again, for the same reason, Apple is a couple of executive turnovers away in a season full of executive turnover from all of the people who believe in this thing maybe not being there anymore. Yeah, but those...

Like if Eddie Q leaves Apple, does Apple TV still exist like this? I will move the number if Apple, if Eddie Hugh leaves Apple. Interesting. Okay. Do you know what I mean? Like, when Tim Cook and Eddie Hugh leave, and that's why I'm moving, that's why Prime Video's up. Because I think Jeff Bezos liked having a movie studio. Oh, yeah.

I think Annie Jassy likes cloud computing. Yep. Apple, I think they, I think Tim Cook likes that he can summon Oprah. He can just do it. Like, very few people can summon Oprah and Tim is one of them. That's true. You were saying a bunch of really mean things about Ted Lassau before we started recording. What do you think?

Not enough hockey players. The third season of Ted Lassau was bad. I am not excited for the fourth season of Ted Lassau. I will say on Apple TV, there is a fantastic animated show for kids called Shape Island. If you haven't checked it out, definitely worth checking out. And the video that they put out about how they made the new Apple TV motion graphic that appears. Have you seen this video? It's very cool.

They actually made it physically. So that thing that you see when you turn on Apple TV, the Apple logo going do-do-do-do, do, do. Like that happened in real life, which is pretty cool. Yeah, and they got Phineas to do that little sound. Yeah. They're not bored. They're like having a good time.

They're having fun. They do seem to be having a good time. I will give you that. All right. So this puts Apple TV to 60. I feel right about a 60. Travis, you feel good about a 60? I feel great about a 60.

All right. And then last, but not. least, and I think maybe the single easiest one on the board, we have Netflix. Okay, so here's what I would say at Netflix. Based on the fact that we moved YouTube to a one, due to its lack of hot hockey players, you put Netflix at zero, there's hoties on Netflix, and then I think you got to scoot D plus to one. Yeah, right.

Netflix is less dead than both YouTube and Disney Plus. Yes. Or you remove the penalty from YouTube. you put YouTube at zero and you put both the Netflix and Disney Plus at one. No, I think Netflix is for sure a zero. If Netflix is a zero, then I think YouTube is a zero,

minus the hockey penalty. This was my assumption as we were coming in, was that it was going to be Netflix and YouTube all the way at one end of the spectrum, and then mostly a fight on the other side of the spectrum. Like, the fascinating takeaway to me about this, and if you're listening, we'll post this graphic in the show notes, you can see it.

But there's nothing in the middle. And this has been true for a while now. There is like, this stuff is so stratified now. Like, we have the winners of the streaming wars. It is, I think it's Netflix and it's YouTube. And then Disney realistically in this world should probably be like a five, just because it hasn't sort of set the world on fire in the way that Netflix and YouTube have. They have more resources.

They have more stuff. They have broader ambitions. When Disney makes a moment. move. It's not like, ooh, right? Like, it doesn't reshape the industry. But Disney has and or, like, you should sign up to Disney Plus watch and or. It's very good. For sure. And yeah, and so I think I'm fine with Disney plus landing at a one. Like, I'm not, I'm not upset about that. But it is very clear. And this is like the stuff we were doing this week that not only are YouTube and Netflix ahead, they're now sort of playing a different game than everybody else is.

Well, to be fair, this list does not have the usual suspects in the middle, right? You're to be in Crunchyroll, which sort of like live at 45 aren't on here. Sorry, did you just call Crunchyroll a usual suspect in the streaming wars? When we've done this chart, Crunchyroll has been on the chart a long time. I didn't even have Crunchyroll still live. Did Crunchyroll go 90? This is why it's not

on the list, buddy. Can you Google Crunchyroll? Crunchyroll is still around. So is To Be, for that matter. And no, you're right. There are a bunch, but this is these are the players, right? Like, for a long time, this has been the perceived kind of

a list group of streaming services. Sure. Yeah, I agree with that. I'm just saying the usual things in the middle are not here, which is all the mid-tier stuff that is just sort of puttering along. Yeah, that's fair. I'll give you that. All right, Travis, any objections to any of this before we get out of here? Well, you've got to read it off for people. I will.

Let's lock it in, David. Okay. So, on the go-90 scale of doom streaming services, we have Netflix and YouTube at a zero. We have Disney at a one. We penalized and then unpanelized YouTube for its hot hockey players. And I feel okay about that. I'm confident you can find hot hockey players.

I'm sure. Please send Travis links to hot hockey players. Don't do that. This is a workplace, everyone. We have Apple TV at a 60. We have Peacock at a 64. We have Prime Video at a 70. We have HBO Max at a 75.

Those four together, by the way, feels very right to me. I actually like that, both as like a group together and in the specific order. That feels good. And then we have Paramount Plus, I would say generously, at an 85. And that is the list of the go-90 scale of doom streaming services at the end of 2025. That's right. Thank you both. Travis, your vibe coding is getting, it gets better every time. Travis, the next test is to make these games playable for everyone.

I would love a version of this where everyone could play and there's like consensus. We invite all the listeners live in real time to move these things around the chart. Yeah. We can get there by the end of next year so that everyone can open on a GIFone app and move the things around. And at the end, we like display it at a live show. Choice. Subscribe to the verge. That's a good idea.

Yeah. All right. We're going to take a break and we're going to come back and do a live in a little. We'll be right back. Bye. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited.

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

That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America actually. Let's begin. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend,

prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. they are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon.

This week on Networth and Chill, we're diving into another edition of Am I the Asshole, Finance Edition? And trust me, these money dilemmas will have you questioning everything. I'm breaking down real stories from real people who are navigating financial situations that range from mildly awkward to absolutely unhinged. And I'm giving you my unfiltered take on who's in the right and who needs a serious reality check. Because let's be real, when it comes to mixing relationships and finances, someone's always asking if they're the asshole. Learn how to set boundaries, protect your wealth, and avoid becoming the villain in your own financial story. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash you are rich BFF.

All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Eric Gomez, I believe we have a sponsor this week. That is correct. This week's lightning round is presented by AWS. How leading businesses use AI for next level innovation. Nilai, we don't have to do Brendan anymore. Are you so excited? We did Brendan already. It's always one of my lightning round ones, right?

I know. So you go first. Outside of Brendan Carr as a dummy, open your mind once again. Okay, this is a true lightning round item. All right. In a piece of only the verge cares enough to break this story. Sure. A bunch of people who own LG TVs recently noticed that an

icon for Microsoft co-pilot appeared in their, like, WebOS doc. What? And they couldn't delete it. Oh. So this is obviously very bad. Like, first of all, your TV maker just, like, installing apps you can't delete is bad. Insoling them without asking, all very bad. Installing co-pilot TV is like so dumb.

So... You start a show. It's like, did you want to make a spreadsheet out of this? So this story breaks, I kid you not, on the R mildly infuriating sub-right. Which is perfect. That's so good. It has 36,000 upvotes and people just want to get rid of this thing.

So what is the verge for? We do the reporting. We get the companies on the record. They say what they say, and they have to stand by it. That's what the money's for. That's why they pay this subscription. So we reached out to LG, and they confirmed to us that they had, in fact, put co-pilot on all these TVs.

But, and this is so sad. It's not actually an app. it's just a like a browser shortcut, like a bookmark that opens the TV's built-in browser and goes to co-pilot on the web, which is just the saddest, saddest AI integration of all time. First of all,

can you imagine being on your TV and be like, what I really want to do right now is open the TV's built-in browser to go and use co-pilot on the web. And also, the company that sold me this TV thinks that should be on the home screen by default. Second, this is the worst.

outcome for WebOS and history. If you recall WebOS, remember Palm reinvented itself with WebOS. The whole internet is the web. Our application environment is the web. This is the future of the phone. They collapsed and now LG runs WebOS. It's a tough beat for Web Apps, that one. You know what I mean?

It's real bad when you're like, well, it's WebOS. Just do a web link. Anyhow, because we asked LG and we pushed them and they saw all this stuff, LG has also confirmed, and I'm just going to read the quote, LG, quote, respects consumer choice and will take steps to allow users to delete the shortcut icon if they wish. So you can't delete it now, but due to LG's respect for consumer choice, they will take steps to allow you to delete the copilot bookmark that opens the built-in browser on your LGTV that they have placed

in your dock by default. This has such Tim Robinson in a hot dog suit going, we're all trying to find out who did this energy. It's so bad. Oh my God. I love, I love that they're like, we just, people want, they just want to open co-pilot on the web. This is also, on the heels of a bunch of news about how all of Microsoft's AI tools are bad and nobody likes them and it's just, it's a tough times. Antonio did another round for us.

Microsoft put out a co-pilot on Windows ad. It's always during football, so I always see it. They put out a holiday one where people are asking co-pilot a bunch of questions about like putting the other IKEA furniture. And there's one specific one where someone says, here's my HOA rules,

here's a picture of my holiday light display, tell me if the light display meets the rules. And I saw that in the middle of just a devastating, heartbreaking Packers loss and thought to myself, that can't do that. And you should not trigger that reaction to me in the middle of Packers game. Right. Like, I shouldn't be thinking Microsoft is lying in the middle of Packers game. We're losing in which MicroParsons got hurt.

Like, I was like, Antonio, you're ready about this now. And it just absolutely can't do that. In fact, it can't do it to the point where one of the demos in the ad is how do I make my light sync to the music. and co-pilot in the ad goes and opens an app called like RELA Cloud, which is a fake company. Oh, Jesus. It's one of Microsoft's, like Microsoft has all these fake companies that they famously use in demos for years like Contoso and all this stuff.

And it's one of those. So Microsoft is showing copilot do a thing that you literally cannot do because it is just abstract, nothing. How? This is all very bad. Like, I don't know what Microsoft is thinking. Like, not only can I not do it, what it's showing the ads, can literally not be done

because it's showing things that are not real. Microsoft is like not the only company that does this. It's everybody does this. Google runs ads that are like concept videos. Apple got in trouble because they did the Siri video with Bella Ramsey in which they did a bunch of stuff that you can't do with Siri. Like this is a problem and everybody needs to stop doing this.

Because in particular, the AI companies are just all in on pretending the AI is so much. much more capable than it is to the point where it's trivial for us to assign the can co-pilot do this because we just ask the same questions and it is obvious that it cannot do these things. Yeah. All right. My first lightning around item is one of the most wacky controversies of the week. I don't know how much you saw this, but Blue Sky rolled out a new thing where you can import your contacts and see who else is on Blue Sky. This is the sort of thing that like every social network does. If you go on TikTok, it will relentlessly try to get you to upload your contacts to

find people on TikTok. So this became sort of a mini controversy. Again, I don't know how much this crossed your path. But there were a lot of people who were like, don't do this. This is gross. I hate this. Why would you make me upload my contacts? I don't want to do that. Don't be like these other social networks. And Blue Sky then had to go way, way, way out of its way to be like, no, we've done this in a way that is useful and also privacy preserving. And basically, Blue Sky's case is the way that their system works, it only works if you've both uploaded each other's numbers. So it's essentially a sort of like half-baked two-way authentication system, right? So if I upload my contacts, it will only ping you that I'm on Blue Sky and me that you're on Blue Sky,

if you also upload your contacts with my number in it. So if we have each other's phone numbers and we both upload our contacts to Blue Sky, Blue Sky will make the assumption that we probably want to connect because we are probably in some way also connected. That is one full leap better than all of the other services. It just is, right? Like if you upload your stuff to TikTok or Snapchat or whatever, it will snitch on all of those people

and tell you who is there and what they're doing. I also don't think this is great still. Like I don't, I just, A, I think on principle, you should never upload your contacts lists to a service. Just period. I just don't think you should do that. But I also think, like, I don't know, what's your read on this? Is this the best you could do if you're Blue Sky?

Or is this just a bad idea that they should stop doing? I think they did it in weird ways. Like, you opened the app and it showed up in a way that reminded a lot of people of Facebook in the beginning. And so I think what people are reacting to you is they don't want Blue Sky to be the big social platforms and make all those mistakes and act with the dark, same dark patterns. And you can explain how technically it's different. And Blue Sky is always in the trap of explaining how it's technically. different. It just is. And because it hasn't meaningfully federated yet, like, there isn't another service on that protocol that's as big as blue sky. You know what I mean? Like, until the

thing happens and they've proven out that their decentralized model actually enables all this other stuff. And if you hate them, you can leave, then they're just, they're just running Twitter again. And they're hearing all Twitter's problems. And like, that sucks. And I don't think they want to. I think they're actively trying to make people so bad at them that they go and build other protocols or other apps on that protocol. But yeah, this one's weird. They need to grow. Like, in a very real way, they need to grow.

They're small. They're not going as fast as they were before. I heard a rumor that every single day threads onboards one full blue sky. Yeah. But threads is just not relevant in any way, but blue sky has some relevance. So they need to grow. They need to grow faster. This is one way to do it.

But I think, as you and I have both mentioned on the show dozens of times now, all the growth in social network is not by people finding their friends. It's by finding other interesting accounts. Yes. Like that's not what public social networking is for anymore. Your friends are all in your DMs. So I just don't know why this was their idea. They should make discovery across the network much more interesting

because that's where I think you'll get growth. And you'll get what you want, which is organic growth by people saying, I saw this in Blue Sky. I don't have people saying, okay, I need this out for Blue Sky account. Yeah, I agree. And Blue Sky has had good ideas about this, right? Like it did the starter packs thing that everybody has since copied. Like this sort of how do you find stuff on this network thing

is actually something Blue Sky seems to have some apt to. for it. And I totally agree. It's like, find me good stuff. Lean into this idea of lots of different algorithms and lots of different feeds and like show me more things on Blue Sky. Don't try to like make me find my high school friends. I don't know. The real win, right, is when Blue Sky is more connected to the other networks and when other networks are more connected to Blue Sky. Because what you want is for threads and Blue Sky to actually be one big network that all work together and they're not close. Right. Someday, Neel. Someday. All right. What's your next one?

It's CES time, David, which means we are but weeks away from Will I.M. America's foremost tech innovator, Will I.m., announcing yet more products. And so it is only befitting that we check in on Will I.M's previous CS announcements from last year. And so you might recall America's foremost car audio innovation, Will I.M's M. Bucks Sounddrive. No, I don't. Where have you been? What rock have you been? I know, it's crazy.

How did I miss this? M-Buck Sound Drive announced at CS last year was a feature in Mercedes-Benz EVs, whereby every time you accelerated or braked, the car, the M-Bucks system, would dynamically generate orchestral music as you drove. What? Yep, this is a real thing.

They announced this with great fanfare. Will I.M.'s M.B.Sound. Will I.M. said the feature turned the whole car into its own orchestra. You selected sound drive through the infatement screen, and then you would, in-car signals would enable the music playing to react to the car in real-time. So I drive in a movie, that's the idea.

On the Mount Rushmore of solutions looking for a problem, we might have to make room for M-Bucks sound drive. That's for no one ever. It launched for 30 pre-selected tracks, although Mercedes wanted it to be an open music platform for other artists to participate in. In the context of our ongoing review and further strategic development of our portfolio of digital extras,

We have decided to deactivate NBucks SoundDrive and remove it from our offerings at the end of this year. This adjustment allows us to continuously optimize our offerings and focus on developing future-oriented innovations. You have been killed in the most corporate way possible, M-Bucks Sound Drive. I'm sorry, Andy Hawkins wrote about this for us, and I'm just reading his story now. And Andy calls it a fun but superfluous gimmick, and then writes this. For example, if you slow down, the vocals would fade, and when you accelerate, the bass kicks hard. Andy, I love you. That is neither fun nor superfluous.

That sounds awful. That sounds like actively unpleasant. Be like, oh, I'm stopping at a stop plate and the music's going to get quiet. That's not what I want. There's a notable friend of the show who I love very much. They know who they are. And they are the ones who forwarded me the email for Mercedes saying it was canceled. And I was like, dude, you had this?

It's very good. That's awesome. Also, I didn't realize this. M Buck's Sound Drive was not. running locally on the car. It was streaming from the internet, which is why Mercedes killed it. Like, think about this. Will I Am was like, here's my idea. When you drive, the base kicks in harder when you accelerate, which is a perfectly Will I Am thing to say. Yes, it is. Fine. And Mercedes, is like, the way we're going to implement this is not by making that happen on the car. We're going to

send data about your car to the cloud where we will dynamically generate music and then stream it back to the car. That is an open platform that artists will participate in. Less than one year later, they were like, that was stupid. And they shut it down because no one was using it. Do you think someone at Suno is looking at this and being like,

we can do this with AI? What if, like... Look, Will I.M. is going to be at CES. And he's going to say some AI stuff. And, you know, anything can happen. Like, we talk a lot about, you know, the Sam Altman's and Elon Musks of the world who are like, maybe their greatest skill

is just being able to raise money at all times. Will I. am deserves a spot in that conversation. We've been doing this for so long. People keep letting him do this. We've run multiple Will I.M. is the kiss of death stories. Like over the past 15 years,

I'm guessing it's at least three. Don't let Will I.m. Near your tech product stories. Yeah. All right. My next one is, so one of the stories you and I've been talking about that I think is like a big theme of 2026

is basically how do we computer? If there's this big bet happening on all these new interfaces and all of these new app store-like things and all these new services, if the question is how is AI going to change our computers, if you grant the premise that it's going to, what is it going to look like? And there is just like an infinite number of ideas.

But all of them right now are chat ones. And so there was a bunch of news this week. The Alexa.com website is live. You can now do a bunch of Alexa plus interacting on Alexa.com. It's not alive. It's not live for everybody, but it's live for a bunch of folks on our team, which suggests that it's probably live for a lot of folks. It's not for me. It's just a chat bot.

It's just a chat bot. You can do some Alexa things through it. Part of the ideas, like you can control your house through the website in the same way that you would through the app or on the speaker. That's a good idea. These things are fine. There's also the, the ChatGBT-GPT app store is now out. There's a bunch of like Instacart and DoorDash and a bunch of other things you can now do inside of chat GBT.

The biggest one of all, I think, I've been talking to a lot of people about like, how do you put AI into your app? And over and over people keep telling me, we spend all of our time talking about the pro models and the stuff at the high end of things and the really expensive things. But it's the small, eventually local AI models that are going to be the thing that actually work for everybody everywhere. Like it's going to run on your device. It's going to run offline. And whoever builds that good first is going to be the one who wins. Yeah. And so in that vein, Google launched Gemini 3 Flash, which is the little version of Gemini,

much cheaper to run, much faster, can run on more things. Developers are going to be able to use it for a lot of stuff. That from what I hear is going to be a big deal. Everybody I talked to is so very excited about Gemini. And I think we're about to hit a point next year. where we have at least a set of models that is going to start to get better, less quickly. So if you are happy with Gemini, you're probably going to stay with Gemini, and Cloud is out there doing stuff, and chatypD is out there doing stuff.

And MCP, the model context protocol, that's being turned into a true standard and sort of used across the industry. And now I keep talking to these app developers who are like, okay, now we know what the technology is. Now we can just go build stuff with it and see what it can actually do, rather than just constantly like reinventing our whole tech stack because somebody put out a new model. So I think all of this is like, we're still just doing chatbots, but we are like very slowly pointing at something

that might be after chatbots. Hayden wrote a piece for us this week and noted that all the big tech companies was stop talking about AGI, or at least they rebranded it because they can't do it. You miss the most important one. Where did I miss? That Amazon is integrating Alexa Plus with ring doorbells.

So it can recognize who you are and then the person at your door will end up talking to a chatbot through your doorbell, which is at once dystopian. I'll grant you the dystopia of that. Also, the funniest thing I can possibly think of. Like the endlessly cheery chatbot voice being like, that's a great idea, but have you considered like a door? Like, you might have been thinking about getting in,

but have you considered getting the hell out? Are you going to take David's package? Please don't do that. I'd love it if you wouldn't. It's very good. So it, for example, in rings visually, I can heard either. So it can distinguish a person in delivery uniform from someone casually stopping by. And then it can talk to them differently.

I'm dying to try this out. I'm also dying to invite Kevin a roost to my house to see if he can get my doorbell to fall in love with him. Kevin, you heard it here first. We'll have you anytime. I can give you Nelai's address. This is kind of what you mean. They're like, Amazon's in the like, let's put a chatbot in it phase. Everyone else is like, okay, we have a thing that can do now.

language interface and natural language output. We're going to put it in our app in the smallest, cheapest way we can, and that will enable some new things. Right. And that might be as far as this goes. That might be how the bubble pops. Might be. Because all this agentic stuff, even this chat, GPT app store is like,

we're all next year we're going to write about app developers doing the like small AI stuff to make their apps more interesting and the big model companies like on the risk of crashing the economy. Yeah. An experiment I'm very excited to run is I'm going to have Chad Shp.T. Buy me groceries. I don't know what your household is like, but Anna, my wife is very particular about groceries. She is the type who will, like, stand there and read the ingredients on every bag of granola to decide which granola to buy, even though we've bought the same one the last 25 times we've got to the grocery store. So I'm just going to go on Instacart and just be like, I want a bunch of stuff. Can you buy me some groceries? And we're just going to see what appears at my house. And I could not be more excited about it. It's going to be a disaster. I'm excited for you. You know. Well, it's great because when I grocery shop, I get sort of a point-by-point review on all of the things that I bought when I get home. And now that's going to be Instacart's problem. It's going to be great. I'm thrilled.

This is going to go so badly. I will report back in the new year. Don't you worry. All right. What's your last one? I just want to briefly talk about Ford kind of pulling back from EVs. You know, they announced this new stuff. Jim Farley put out of a thing.

He's like a more restructure in the company. We're putting all of our sort of battery capacity in their new energy storage. division, which is like the thing you do when you invest in battery capacity, but you're pulling back on EVs, GM to kind of do the same thing. And they're saying they're going to do more hybrids and all this stuff. But the one thing I want to call out is they quote unquote canceled the F-150 lightning, and they're going to put out a new one in this new fashion called ER EVVs, extended array GVs. And everyone is like, they're giving up in the lightning and they're going to put an engine in the new lightning. And this is just wrong. And the reason it's wrong is they're doing the thing that I think.

all of the pickup truck makers should have done with their pickup trucks in the beginning they're going to put an engine in the truck as a generator for the electric power train. So the engine is never going to drive the wheels. And there's been other hybrids that worked this way in the past. Actually, the cyber truck was going to do this. You know, they had to spend their engineering hours

on the wiper instead or whatever happened with that thing. RAM was going to do this. But this is like a big idea that actually you need the range, you need the towing capacity in these pickups and people have all kinds of feelings with pickups and maybe you're never going to tow anything, but you still care about the towing capacity. I don't care.

There's a reason people buy these trucks, and these are the stats that people care about. And so the idea is you get vastly more efficiency from an electric power train. You're probably on it most of the time. But when you actually need to go on a road trip or you need to tow, you spin up the engine.

You run the engine at the most efficient part of its power band, and you make electricity to charge battery and run the power train. And this is like a genius, idea. And I know it's a genius idea because this is how every diesel electric locomotive in the world works. Right? Like, this is actually a very solved problem. There's a really interesting company in Canada called Edison Motors. It's a startup that is like retrofitting semi trucks this way. Right. And they're running into like weird regulatory problems because the Canadian government wants to like regulate the engines as engines and not generators. And there's no framework for them being generators. And like it's fast. You should follow them on TikTok. It's a fast thing to watch them figure out. But this is the idea. And so I actually would look at this and say Ford is finding a way to park a bunch of its EV investment into energy storage because, you know, the regulatory environment has changed. And they have done the thing that they should have done and managed to play it off as walking back from EVs in a way that probably makes the Trump administration happy and whatever political noise, culture war about EVs, like calm down. But they're actually still shipping an electric truck.

They're just adding the feature to it. that they maybe should have had from the beginning that everyone else has been circling. Scout Motors, other startup truck company, they're going to do an ER EV with a generator powering the electric power train. That's the solution to the range. And you just get to run the engine way more efficiently,

which obviously helps with emissions, all this other stuff. But it's like, you can see a lot of cars are going to get there instead of being true hybrids. I think it's super fascinating. That seems like, yeah, that seems like a good outcome. It's definitely a less ambitious version of the EV, but it also seems like we've spent the last few years realizing maybe we overshot on the idea of what we were going to be able to do out of the gate.

I think a lot of people are going to end up buying these E.R. EV trucks and never run that engine. And then they might realize they don't need the engine at all. Yeah. All right. My last one is just a tiny bit of news that has made me think about our predictions conversation from the other day. The news is that meta is pausing its word, pausing its program to license out its VR operating system to other manufacturers. I find this very funny because this suggests that there are other hardware manufacturers who are interested in licensing META's VR operating system. But it's also just a fascinating moment in sort of the whole Metaverse project at Meta.

Right? Like, Meta built out a huge amount of resources and infrastructure to make the Metaverse happen. They were all in. They did Horizon. They bought Game Studios. they started doing the hardware. Like, for a really long time, meta was not only the company most invested in doing the Metaverse,

it was kind of propping up the rest of the industry by itself. It was making the hardware. It was making the software. It was building the games. It was buying any good game that came out. Like, meta was just determined to brute force this thing happening. And then the Meta-Rabans were a hit, and AI started to happen.

And it feels like all of the momentum for the Metaverse, both in and out of meta, is just gone. And so now I'm like, okay, if I had thought about it, one of my 2026 predictions should have been that the whole metaverse idea is just going to die. Because it feels like, again, like we were talking about with the streaming services, like if you eventually have to look around and be like, oh, look at this thing we're spending a lot of money on. It's that is completely ancillary to our business. Let's spend our money on something else. It would have to be the metaverse, right? Like at what point does Mark Zuckerberg just say we're doing glasses and we're doing AI and let that be enough?

Goodbye. I mean, they will tell you, Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of Meadow, who runs Reality Lab, will tell you that it's still going strong. Yeah. I mean, that's what they, even in their statement pausing the thing, they say, we're going to, you know, re-investigate this as the category changes. Sure. Yeah, no, you're right. It's dead. They just, Mark Zuckerberg can't lose that much face that fast.

Right? Because that would put a lot of heat on his AI investments. because everyone will be like, well, you just sell all this on the Metaverse are you going to be right about AI? Isn't this bubble popping? So I think he's got to keep face over here. I will continue to say,

I think everyone is deeply confused about why the meta glasses are popular. They just like having a camera that's convenient. They do not like talking to Mark Zuckerberg's AI. I agree with that. But I think Meta's deeply confused about that. I think they can shoehorn in an AI assistant to their camera glasses

in a way that is just not going to have. happen. Well, and what's funny is I think I think a display will add something in a meaningful way. And I think that will confuse everybody even further that actually what everybody wants is AI on that display. And I think they're wrong. Yeah. I mean, I know people have bought the display glasses and they're like, why did I do this? So they're not any good. Right. But that's that's that's a solvable problem. Is it? Yeah. I know. Let's go through this stack once again. To make the display glasses. No, I want to do it. We're two hours into this first casting. We don't have time for this. Put up the vibe coded chart. Let's go. But no, I agree that you're right. This is a hard problem to solve, and there is no guarantee that they will solve it anytime soon. But I just think, like, even if you think at this point at the end of 2025 that you're Mark Zuckerberg, you have unlimited power and unlimited resources and you want to skate to where the puck is going, it's obviously not the metaverse anymore.

Like, it just clearly, there's no case to be made anywhere that the metaverse is the next thing. So I have this underlying theory that Silicon Valley just desperately wants us all to be brains and vats. If they want it real bad. In a way that they talk about it more. Well, and eyes. You have to have eyes. No. They have to show you stuff.

They can screw with your optic nerds. Brains and bats. That's fair. They want the matrix. Yeah. And then, you know, then your entire life is just a series of databases they can control. Right. This is another show.

Anyway, the point of all this is the metaverse was the ultimate sort of pandemic fueled brains and bats fantasy. Yeah. Like, everyone's home all day long. They're using the computer. All the numbers are up. What if I put them in a reality that I can control. And now they'll just be brains and vets. And it's like, yeah, then we all went back outside, bro.

Like, sorry. Like, I have no interest in this. Yeah. And the one good thing that they bought was Supernatural, the fitness app, which people are still using and they're still sort of iterating on. But it's just sad to me that because they bought that company, that company isn't fighting for relevance anymore. Do you know what I mean?

Like, if they hadn't bought Supernatural, would Supernatural be actually driving some sort of, like, more awareness of VR Fitness? Would they be marketing? Would they be doing stuff? And like, meta is just like, we're not, you're fine. You're not spending a job. dime. Or would Supernatural have, like, loudly gone out of business and hurt the whole project for meta? I feel like we should end here by calling out Jen's incredible reporting on Irobot this

week, which failed because both the American and European governments did not let Amazon buy it. Then they didn't do the thing they should have done, which is try to do a good job, and now they're being sold to a Chinese company. Yep. Jen, every ounce of that story, Jen has broken. You should go read all of it on the verge. Yeah, it's very good. And it's a super sad story. We'll have to come back to that as that continues. And if you want to argue about the effects of antitrust law, it's all there for you. It's an inkblot test of how you feel about antitrust. Yeah.

Yeah, that's real. All right, but we need to get out of here. It's the end of 2025. This has been our longest vergecast in a while, which feels good. Thanks, Brendan. This is the right thing to end on. Yeah, seriously. I'll see you in Vegas, bro.

Yeah, we're going to stalk Brendan along the strip in Vegas and just see what happens. I'll out drink Brendan any time anywhere. And I haven't been drinking for a minute. So it's going to get messy. Listen, I'm getting three hours of sleep at night. I'm ready for whatever you got for me, Brendan. I'm going to get so drunk I only referred him as the chairman derisively. I love that.

But a couple of housekeeping things before we go. Again, Virchcast Live at CES in Vegas, January 7th, 3.30 in the afternoon at the Brooklyn Bowl. We'll put the link to RSVP with all the information in the show notes. Please come out. It's going to be really fun. And a big part of it is just to hang. Like, the Vergecast is fine. We like doing it.

We'll talk about CES, but like being there with all of you is the point. And that is very fun. It's one of the most fun things we did this year. I'm very excited to do it again. We're going to have a blast. Also, we are going to be gone. As of Tuesday, we have the holiday spectacular coming up on Tuesday, which was a super fun episode that I'm very excited for everyone to watch and listen to.

But you and I are done professionally forever. This is it. Get out of my face, Pierce. But there is, there's lots of decoder to catch up on. if you all haven't listened to Neely's mailbag decoder in which he tells you all of his feelings about everything, it's delightful. I enjoyed it very much. I've known you a long time

and actually learned some instructive things listening to that episode. Also, some Virgin History coming out. There's going to be a couple of Virgin History episodes on this feed, but all of the episodes are on the version history feed and on the Virgin's YouTube channel. So there's lots of stuff for you to do over the holidays. We're ending Virgin History, can I say it?

We're ending with TiVo. Yeah, which I don't have favorites. I love all my children equally, But that, I have never had more fun making a version history. I mean, Walt with the iPhone 4 is a high, it's a high, like, it was, it was very good. I mean, I'm just saying the ones I was on. Tivo, Tivo was a blast. It's a really good episode.

I think you will, you will really enjoy it when it comes out in a few weeks. But until then, Neely, we're out of here. It's been, it's been a year. God has it been a year. Brendan. We both had kids this year. We did both of us. They're, and the kids are good.

Just seen it in case you're wondering. They're fine. Yeah, things are good. I think neither of our kids like sleeping right now. So apologies for whatever that has done to us on this show and in general. But now we're going to go hang out with our families for the holiday. I hope all of you have good holidays too. You can always email us, Virgcast to Burge.com.

Call the hotline 866 Verge11. If Brendan Carr keeps being a dummy while we're out, we require you to tell us. You need to keep the information coming because the holidays may come, but Brendan Carr never stops. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and part of the Vox Media podcast. Podcast Network. Show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Lurchuk. We will see you on Tuesday, and then in 2026, Nilai.