The Vergecast - How to vibe-write a country hit

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

Technically, the Netflix / Warner Bros. news is almost a week old, but what a week it has been! And so, after some follow-up on smart shades and CES, Nilay and David talk through all that’s at stake in the fight between Paramount and Netflix — and whether it’s even possible for someone to win this deal. After that, Charlie Harding, co-host of Switched on Pop and honorary Vergecast intern, explains how AI is taking over the country music scene in Nashville. He also makes us a song, and it’s a jam. Lastly, the hosts talk about font news (with a special guest), Brendan Carr, smart rings, garage wars, and more. Further reading: The Verge subscription turns one  Netflix is buying Warner Bros. for $83 billion  Paramount launches a hostile $108 billion bid to snatch Warner from Netflix  David Ellison pitches Paramount’s $108 billion hostile bid for WBD as “pro consumer.”  Behind Paramount’s Relentless Campaign to Woo Warner Discovery and President Trump New Paramount Speaks: Theatrical Films, Streaming Investment and Tech Upgrades Are Top Priorities Netflix CEO made a visit to the White House before buying Warner Bros.  Trump isn’t sold on the Netflix-Warner Bros. deal Netflix’s leadership thinks the Warner Bros. deal won’t be like other big media mergers. Welcome to the big leagues, Netflix  There are no good outcomes for the Warner Bros. sale OpenAI’s billion-dollar Disney deal puts Mickey Mouse and Marvel in Sora Get ready for an AI country music explosion Brendan Carr is a Dummy Chamberlain’s new technology blocks aftermarket controllers from working with its garage door openers The Pebble Index 01 is a smart ring with a built-in microphone Calibri is too woke for the State Department | The Verge Gruber got a copy of the thing 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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This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the first cast, flagship podcast of Hostile Takeovers. Our podcast now owns your podcast. I don't know how it works, but we did it. And if I say it loudly enough, it's just going to happen. I've launched a hostile takeover of Wayform.

I'll be bidding $50 a share, and whatever phone wins the Smart Phone Awards. You each get one. I get Wayform. I'm a friend David Pearson-N-O-Hip. Tell us here. Yo. Hello, sir. How's it going on? We have, like, a lot going on this week.

A lot. Just a tremendous amount going on. But before we get into all the news, we have Netflix stuff. Our friend Charlie Harding is going to come on, and we're all going to play AI music at each other in a way that I'm very excited about. We have a bunch of lightning around stuff to do. But we have two housekeeping things, and then you have some very important follow-up. Yes. Housekeeping thing, number one, we are doing an event at CES this year.

We're going to do a live Vurgast and a live decoder. We're going to be at the Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas on January 7th, which is the Wednesday. Wednesday of CES. We have a lot more details to come. We'll eventually have like a big fancy web page with all this stuff. But come out, come hang out. We're also going to bowl this year. We were in a bowling alley and we didn't bowl last year. We're going to bowl this year. It's going to be unbelievable. Are you just making promises? Yes. I'm confident in my promises, but I'm also, I'm speaking this into existence as we sit here right now. I see what's happening. So January 7th, Las Vegas, Brooklyn Bowl come out. Yeah. It's going to be great. We did this last year,

Brooklyn Bowl there and it was so much fun. It was so fun. Yeah. And we actually have the place like the whole day this time and we're going to get to hang out even more. It's going to be great. Thing number two, this is the one year anniversary of the verge subscription. Lots of stuff is renewing for people. A lot of people are getting hopefully very happy credit card charges. So thank you to everybody. We've gotten a lot of questions. You wrote something for the site about how things are going, but just update the people here. How is how is VARG subscription going a year in? That's what I got about. We hit our goal.

We set a goal of how many subscribers we wanted. We hit that goal a year ago. You know, Helen, our publisher, who versus us right now, she comes on a show from time and time. She's in charge of our business. Her point is always the subscription business operates in year two. Like year one is you just try to get it started. Year two is where the money happens.

So we have really aggressive goals for year two. And we've heard a lot of feedback about how the paywall works in particular. And the number. one piece of feedback is we don't know what's free and we know what's paid. And the answer is, well, the paywall is dynamic and so we can never tell you. That's a part one of the answer. Right. And the way it works is if the paywall thinks you've read a lot of verge stories and you're back a lot, it'll hit you with the paywall. And so the people who see the paywall the most are the people that the paywall is like, you should pay you're here every day. And the people who don't complain are the

people who are like drive by search visitors. I don't know if that's fair enough, but that's how paywalls work. That's the industry standard. That's what we're doing. I think that's very frustrating. I understand everyone's frustration. So what we are trying to do is make our homepage really valuable, even if you don't pay us. And so if you just have an account, you're just a verge member of the community, just a listener. You come. The whole story stream feed is free, as quick posts and everything.

That's going to stay free. Decoder transcripts are free. I think our live blogs should be free. There's a bunch of stuff that's free. And then we're going to take three stories a day and just make them free. So at the very least, if you come to our homepage at noon every day, right now it's just me picking. I'm drunk with power.

I will take your suggestions on what to pick. But I am just picking three cool stories a day that I think are fun and interesting to read. It's kind of a fun process because there's no rhyme or reason to it yet. There's no data to shape our decision making. So I'm just like pulling old features out of a hat. I'm like, Lauren Grush went to the SpaceX town.

We wrote a huge feature about it. Remember that? You should read that for free today. Like there's obviously new tech news. We put the MCP feature that Hayden wrote in the free box. So the idea is every single day for 24 hours, we will just window three stories. And I am personally picking them because I want those three really valuable. Just be worth visiting every day.

So you have the stream. You get the three stories. You still have the metered paywall, which will probably drive you bunkers. But that is the life of a paywall business. Like that is the industry standards. So that's what we're doing. And we have a lot more ideas on what to do next year to make that even clearer and even better. Our model, just to say things into existence like David is doing, the model is Spotify in a very specific way, which is Spotify free is really valuable for a lot of people.

And that's a big ad-supported business. And over time, all of the people who sign up for Spotify premium come from Spotify free. So where I would like the verge to get is we are a really valuable, really important free service for everyone. And that when we are looking for people to pay us, it comes from that group of users, not we put links, on social media and then you hit the paywall because the headlines really clicky and we trick. Like, I don't, I think that feels bad. But it is just a fact that inside of that model is we do have to slightly annoy you

into giving us money. And for that, we are sorry. But in exchange, we will also give you ad-free podcasts. In exchange, we'll also give you ad-free podcasts. And the single most important thing, which is no one can tell us what to do. What you are buying from us is an ethics policy. No brand deals, no influence from our investors. None of that stuff.

that's what you buy from us. That's our business. We are very clear that that is the heart of what we sell. I think full text RSS, right next to it in terms of importance. Absolutely. It's like, yes, ethical journalism, also full text RSS, like on the surveys. So it's going well. We're excited.

We're going to keep pushing on it. I do think we have to make a great product. And we have big plans to improve the product this year. And in particular, take that feedback that the payable needs to be more clear. Yeah. Theverge.com slash become ungovernable. No, sorry. Theverge.com slash subscribe.

subscribe to The Verge. You, before we get into the news, and by the news, I mean Netflix, which has been brewing. We haven't been able to talk about this for a week, and it's been driving me insane. You have some important smart shades information to convey to the people here on the Verge.

I think I mentioned it in passing in one of the year-in show. It was like one of my favorite things I bought this year. Yeah. So everyone wants to know what smart shades I bought. So I bought Matter over-thread smart shades. And I'm not saying I did a ton of research here. I'm saying that I asked friend of the Vergecast, Steven Robles, who reviews all of them on his YouTube channel, which ones to buy.

And he was like, buy these Canistaya ones from Amazon. And I went on Amazon and I did the measurements. I did buy the $4 swatch of fabric samples. So that came first and we looked at that. And then I just bought them. I just typed in some measurements and I made some guesses on what some of the options mean because there's infinite options. And they showed up.

And I am 100% certain they are just rebranded Smart Wings shades. Interesting. because of the logo on there. Are you serious? Oh, my gosh. It's not like. So this is one of those. This is not just like a shot in the dark.

I'm like, this is like there's one factory. It's a smart wing shape. But they're Canistayo, C-A-N-I-S-T-E-O. Stephen has a review on his YouTube channel. They should watch them. They're great. They do not screw up.

It is impossible. Matter is bad in like specific ways. So the idea that you can add them to both Apple Home and Google Home and whatever else requires you to do like incantations and maybe turn off the thread network on your, Euro routers, just a, just a thing I'm saying for no reason whatsoever. But once you get it all going, we have smart shades. They, I can control them with all of our assistants and they are rock solid. And they are great.

Do you just scream darkness and the shades all go down? That's the only way I'm getting smart shades is if I can do that. I think you can make that happen if you set a scene called darkness, but you, you have to take the affirmative steps. You have to choose to live that life, David. it can't it's not going to do it out of the law. Stephen Robles, build me a shortcut and I'll do it. It'll be great.

I do, I do recommend getting the physical remote. Yeah. Because having an actual button to move the shades, very convenient. But yeah, they're literally, I asked Stephen. He was like, buy these ones. I watched this video. I was like, he seems smart. No regrets whatsoever.

Easily one of the top. And they're so much cheaper than the Lutron ones or if you go to the shade store or wherever else. And they're mad or with that. They're great. there we go. All right, we'll put a link in the show notes.

Thank you to Stephen for end of the show. All right. This is like the story of the week, right? This is the thing everybody's talking about. The deal that Netflix

was going to buy Warner Brothers, this broke like right after the podcast published last week. And I don't know how you feel, but there is nothing that infuriates me more than really fascinating news dropping on a Friday morning because it's like people should know

that you and I don't speak to each other except for the podcast. So we just completely separate lives. And then we come together. It's like Penn and Teller secretly hate each other. That's right. Exactly.

So we have not had a chance to talk about this. But the good news is we've had a week of just unending insanity about this deal. And now we have a lot to catch up on. So just to lay the very basic groundwork here, there's been smoke for a long time that Paramount, which is now owned by David Ellison and Skydance, which is backed by Larry Ellison.

and there's just a lot of money tied up and Larry Ellison and Donald Trump are very good friends. It's the whole thing. The smoke has been that Paramount was going to also try to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. And Paramount has been making offers and these offers have been rebuffed. And then out of nowhere,

it started to sound like actually Netflix is a real possible bidder. And then last Friday, Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery announced that Netflix is buying Warner Brothers, not the whole company, but the important streaming bits. And we can talk about that in the moment. minute. We went into the weekend thinking that this deal was done. Netflix was going to do it, $83 billion, huge deal, lots of questions about what it's going to do to Hollywood. And then,

like, out of nowhere, off the top rope, Paramount decides what it actually wants to do is launch a hostile $108 billion bid to take over the whole company. It wants all of the assets, give us CNN, give us the game studios, give us everything. And now these two companies are, I, I want to say at war, even though they're not really, they're in this interesting competitive space where both sides are trying to argue that they are a better deal, even though they're buying different parts of the company at different prices. And there's also a lot of regulatory questions. There's a lot of political questions about how this is all going to go. So we're kind of, there's a lot happening and also it feels like not all that much happening

at this moment. Is that a reasonable summary of where we are? Yeah. I think, you know, the most galaxy brain read of this all is Netflix announced this bid to tie up Warner Brothers in drama for two years, and they were never serious about it. Mission accomplished. That is a conspiracy theory you see that I quite enjoy. It certainly will be an outcome that this is going to stretch on for years. Oh, yeah.

Just to, I think, back up, you know, I had this conversation on some of our own younger reporters. It feels important to say, like, this is some 80s corporate raider stuff. Like, we live in Donald Trump's America, so there's 80s corporate. writer stuff going on. And he likes it. And I think you can see some of that happening in how Paramount is talking about its bid in the very nature of a hostile takeover. There was a bidding process. Other companies were involved in the bidding process. I think Comcast was involved in the bidding process. Disclosure, Comcast is an investor in a parent company, but they lost this bid. So we're not going to talk with them anymore. That's the end of the podcast. There's other companies that were involved in it.

But I think always people thought Paramount would win because David Elson, Larry Elson, the Donald Trump of it all, suggested that they would be the ones who could overcome antitrust scrutiny. And I think it's also important to say, like, the regulatory process in this country right now is 1,000% political. Yes. We do a Brendan Carr segment on the show every single week because he has made the FCC regulatory process so deeply political. And we'll come to that, but it is already political to the idea that there should be antitrust scrutiny. that is not objective or legal. That is, hey, the government can stop it unless the government gets what it wants.

So that's all tied up in here. I think the most interesting part, though, is we saw the Netflix news. We went into the weekend, and Netflix was the villain. Right? Hollywood was furious that Netflix was going to buy Warner Brothers and take the Warner Brothers legacy

and turn it all on the streaming slot and that da-da-da-da. And then Paramount showed up and that Netflix seems really sympathetic because people trust Paramount even less. Yes. And there's something very important about that. Yeah, it's, it's,

Weird in the sense that I think there were, there has been a very long, sort of wary relationship between Netflix and Hollywood. Netflix is not quite completely a tech company run by goofaces who just want famous friends, but it's also not quite fully a Hollywood company. I mean, I have literally two CEOs. Greg Peters, the tech CEO has been on Decoder. Ted Sarandos, the Hollywood CEO, is like, I'm good. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, I need to talk to Hollywood people.

And it's like almost two different companies. Yeah. But I would say the biggest thing is Netflix has for many, many, many years made loud proclamations about the fact that it thinks the old way of doing Hollywood is dead. Right. It is completely uninterested in theatrical movies. It's completely uninterested in the way that movies get made. It changed the economics of all of this by like getting rid of the sort of back-end royalty

structures and just writing people gigantic checks up front. Like, it has blown up the economy of Hollywood already. And so the idea that now it's going to do that to one of the last remaining sort of functional parts of the old Hollywood made people really nervous. But then you're exactly right that David Ellison comes in having just bought Paramount with Skydance. And all they've talked about is the gigantic amounts of layoffs and redundancies and problems that they're going to cause for Hollywood. And of course, like there's all this politicization of it all. And this is just not a company that is like engendering a lot of faith in people who want to make beautiful art and movies and put them in movie theaters. Right.

So I think you're right that everybody now is like sort of stuck in a rock in a hard place. But we should also say it's not like David Zazlov and Co, which has been running Warner Brothers Discovery for the last few years, has been doing like a blisteringly great job. It's the same. It's the same disclaimer I will give whenever we talk about Elon running Twitter. Yeah, right. Right. Criticism of Elon running Twitter is in no way praise of the people who are in twaseringly. Twitter before Elon showed up. It's all bad.

They did a bad job. David Zazlov had effectively the same ideas as David Ellison. He's like, I'm going to buy all this stuff. I'm going to mash Warner Brothers and Discovery together. We'll have mountains of slop. I'll put all the back-end tech platforms together. And then I will run a cable business that has tonnage of

reality shows for ladies and then Batman for the dudes. And like literally we saw slides where that was David Ellison's pitch. And that didn't work. Like, he didn't do a good job at that. Well, he forgot a thing that David Ellison is very good at, which is having an unlimited money funnel of a father. It goes a long way. It's very important.

It really helps. So I think that we should start with some of the structure here. So Netflix just wants to buy Warner Brothers, the movie studio and some of the stream, and HBO Max, and, like, the modern part of the business that makes movies and TVs and puts someone streaming. It does not want any of the cable channels, including CNN, which is really, really interesting. We also live in a world where that kind of split is happening all over the place. Yeah. Did you know that that part of the company is just commonly known around Hollywood

as shitco? Oh, really? That's just what they're, that's like offhanded as what everybody calls it, which I think is so funny. So yeah, all of these, all of these like legacy cable networks, many of them still making a lot of money, but those are perceived to be like the rapidly dying businesses. And Wall Street hates them. We'll bring this up. I'll bring up Comcast again. And Concast just did this by spinning off MS Now and CNAC and a bunch of their cable channels. That company is now called a Versant. We've seen all that rebranding happen. That company is also known as a shitco before it was rebranded as a burst.

Yeah. So this is like a, again, I just come back to this is some 80s, Raider stuff. Yep. You take a company, you split up a part into a profitable part, and then a shitco, and you don't have to shit co. The private equity squeeze the shit co for parts. Pretty much. That's kind of what, that's what Zazlov is what he was trying to do. He had announced that he was going to split up Warner Brothers Discovery.

So he took the two companies, he matched them together. He kind of remixed them, and he's like, now we'll split them apart. So I have a good part and a bad part. Netflix is like, we want to buy a good part. The Netflix's bid is $83 billion. Paramount's hostile bid, which, again, you're allowed to do. You're allowed to just wake up one day and be like, shareholders of Warner Brothers Discovery, we have announced a bid and you should pick us.

And if they don't pick us, you can sue the company. Yeah. The Vergecast has announced a bid for Warner Brothers Discovery today for $108.1 billion. billion dollars. Yeah. And if they don't, if I don't get a call from David Zazlov, I think we should sue him. Sell us your shares. Let's go. That's how it works. That's the whole mechanism, by the way. You just, you just like the office. You're like, I announce a bid. The split here is $25 billion. So you think CNN and all those cable networks are worth just $25 billion, which Netflix could fund out of its couch cushions. Oh, yeah. They just don't want the garbage. So Paramount is basically saying we'll just buy the whole thing for slightly more money. I am not at all sure. that Paramount's big argument that Netflix is an antitrust disaster holds water when Paramount

plus Warner Brothers is also an antitrust disaster. But that is the argument they're basically making. Especially if it's the whole picture, right? Because I think it's easy to forget when we talk about the dying business that is all of these cable channels

that there's actually still a lot of money and a lot of viewership in them. And especially then when you look at like CBS, like we talk about Netflix a lot more when we talk about CBS, but like a hell of a lot of people still watch CBS. And yes, all those people are very old. And yes, that number is going down. But it's a hell of a lot of people still watch CBS.

And so if you, like, we talk way too much about market definitions on this show because in the guise of these trials. Because that's anti-trust law. If you think about it as like how people stream shows and movies on the internet, you're going to land in one very specific antitrust place. But if you think about it as like how people watch television, you end up in a very different kind of antitrust. place. And then if you define it as just like how people spend their time in front of screens,

which is increasingly what everybody wants these markets to be, it ends up very different again. So I think there seems to have been this sense from Paramount that they were going to be the only ones who could get this deal done because David Ellison and Larry Ellison are friends with the Trump administration and the Trump administration would block anything else. But then we saw this reporting last week that Ted Sarandos was like in the White House meeting with Trump. Netflix seems to be very confident that this is going to get done. Trump is, like on truth social posting weird stuff about that that kind of cuts in all directions where he's like he likes Ted Sarandos but then he's like I think CNN needs to be part of this deal in order for it to and it's just I we're at a point now where like I couldn't even begin to handicap who has the upper hand here do you have a do you have a read I'm sort of at the conspiracy theory which is this is two and a half years of noise the Trump administration is not good at executing You know, like, if you, if you, like Trump announces things on true social all day long and they just like happen or don't happen.

Everything it goes to court. Every court decision is like, I saw a blue sky post here. It's like every court opinion lately is a hundred year old Reagan appointee saying like democracy should be protected or the Supreme Court saying Trump is a king and we should listen to him. And those are your choices. And I, who knows? Who knows? Like the Trump administration getting this deal over the finish line and then all the attention. tenant litigation. I do think this is two to three years of noise. I will say that it's very funny

that it's Warner Brothers along the way, a company that has killed everything that has ever tried to acquire it, just killed it dead. Like one of the reasons it didn't work out for discovery is that when 18T bought Warner Brothers, they just saddled it with a bunch of like leverage debt. And then David Zazol was like, I'll deal with it. And he's like, whoops, that killed me. Never mind. AT&T, by the way, bought Warner. brothers so that it could compete with Netflix. That was its stated rationale for this deal. And it won its antitrust

lawsuit. The government, the Trump administration tried to block AT&T in the first term from buying Warner Brothers and AT&T won because it convinced a judge that AT&T owning Warner Brothers would somehow compete against Netflix. This is a

real thing that happened. You can rewind the clock. I wrote about it. It was insanity. I don't think that AT&T competed with Netflix at this time. And now Netflix is going to buy it. And we're like, that's an antitrust problem. And it's like, none of this makes any sense. I will say that just looking at all of the plans these companies have for what they want to do with Warner Brothers does not inspire confidence.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that on a call where Netflix announced it was going to buy Warner Brothers. They straight up asked Ted Sarandos, like, why won't Warner Brothers kill you two? Oh, yeah, we have this clip. Ted Sarandos's answer is so funny. Yeah, the question is basically. Every time somebody does this, it goes horribly. Why isn't this going to go horribly? Here's his answer.

A lot of those failures that we've seen historically is because the company that was doing the acquisition didn't understand the entertainment business. They didn't really understand what they were buying. We understand the kiss of death that we're buying. The things that are critical in Warner Brothers are key businesses that we operate in and we understand. A lot of times the acquiring company, it was a legacy non-growth business that was looking for sort of a lifeline.

That doesn't apply to us. So incredible shade at AT&T there. Yeah. We understand the poison chalice for buying is an incredible argument. We're good at this is literally what that boils down. Netflix has promised they'll leave HBO Max as a separate app. I believe it. No way.

Are you kidding me? No, I don't believe that. What I do think, and Ted Zrandis has said this a bunch, is that what Netflix wants with all of those assets is both all of those assets, but also some of those business. And I think if you're Netflix and you've been looking at movie theaters going, oh, maybe we actually need a way into this business in a way that makes some sense. It would be ridiculous to stop doing movies for theaters. But there are lots of open questions, right? Like if you're, one of the things that Warner Brothers Discovery does is make tons of shows

for other streaming networks, right? Like HBO is the flagship, but Warner Brothers Studios makes tons of stuff. And would Netflix just take it all for itself? or is it going to like enter the business of just being a studio that makes things for others? Would it get into theaters? Because Warner has a long, very good relationship with theaters. Ted Serendos has said all the things I think you'd want him to say if you're a Hollywood person. I 100% believe that he's lying that HBO Max will continue to be an app.

The other ones make sense to me that they would continue to do. I think he's lying about all of it. Look, I... You think they really just like, they decided it was worth $83 billion to get, like friends and Harry Potter on Netflix forever. And whatever James Gunn is going to do next at DC, yeah. I think like they want the IP. They don't have a lot of their own great IP.

No, especially not as Stranger Things that's over. They can do soaps at theater owners or whatever, but they can also just squeeze that stuff to death. And then the main thing, this idea that Warner sells content to other streamers, well, they're going to be the other bidder. Right. Like, Warner already makes content for Apple TV and HBO Max, its own service, and Netflix and whoever else. And Netflix is just going to take them out of that game or people are going to pitch into a system where Netflix usually is a bitter, but now they won't be because they're just going to, like, you're going to reduce competition for the shows that are made in a meaningful way. And there's, you can't just horsepower your way through that reality. Like, you're just taking one big player off the board on both sides of the market. And so, look, we've heard, in the context of people buying Warner Brothers, we have heard these lies before. Sure.

It's like just directly heard these lies before. And they usually kill the company that tells the lies because Warner Brothers is huge. It's part of the Hollywood ecosystem in a very important way. The fans care about that IP in a very important way. You can bully AT&T into releasing a 4-3 gray scale Justice League movie re-edited by Zach Snyder. You sure can. Like that should not be a possible thing that happened. That is the only real outcome of 18T buying time Warner.

So I just, I look at all this and like Netflix will get eaten alive. On the other side, you look at Paramount's plans for its company, even in the absence of Warner Brothers. And you're like, oh, you're doomed too.

Like David Ellison, you know, when they bought, when Skydance bought Paramount back in August, give a bunch of interviews about their plans. And it's all the same stuff. Yeah. Right? He's like,

we're going to see efficiencies by combining. all the backend platforms and making one store of data so we can target ads more effectively. And it's like, yeah, you could do that. Have you thought of making good shows? Right? Like, cool. And so what? He's going to buy Warner. And then they're going to combine the tech backends of the HBO Max app, which means inevitably there will be yet another version of the HBO max app. If David Ellison would just agree to just call it HBO and get rid of absolutely everything else any of these companies make and just call it HBO, they have my vote. I'm in. I mean, sure. The reason they changed it from HBO Max to Max was they didn't want to clutter up the HBO brand with a bunch of Discovery Slop.

And then they realize that no one cares about Discovery Slop. They only care about HBO. They're going to run head first in this problem. Allison has a dream that he can make a TikTok-like recommendation algorithm for this single platform that contains all of Paramount's IP. And obviously he has a dream because Oracle is the big partner to buy TikTok if that deal ever goes through, which I will point out again, the Trump administration is not good at executing. Yeah. I don't know if Oracle is going to run TikTok in the future because we just keep letting Bite Dance run TikTok for as long as it wants. But that's right.

You can just say that. If you're a media executive, you're like, you know what we need? We need the TikTok algorithm for our IP. It's like, great. I'm glad that you had that idea. Everyone else does too. Yeah.

It's really hard to do that. And then he has even more bananas ideas about integrating AI. Can I just read you this quote? This is from the rap. He gave this, he did all these reporter roundtables. And he was like, here's how I see us using AI. Ellison gave a specific example of what potential use of AI he sees

for the company Paramount. Ellison's daughter is a fan of Paw Patrol, and he said the industry is potentially three years away from his daughter being able to talk to Sky, the pink dog from the show, in a real-time AI-generated conversation for 20 minutes. No. If your vision of the future of your company

is someone can talk to dogs who are cops for 20 minutes, but you've got a problem. Like, Paw Patrol is not great. Like, we are a Paw Patrol hassle. Matt, who's a Paw Patrol. filed. We didn't like it, but we dealt with it. Sure. I would have never in my life allowed Max to talk to an AI sky for 20.

Well, it's also, it's just very funny that even in that case, it's not like, oh, wouldn't it be so cool if we could make more Paw Patrol? Like, we're going real life Paw Patrol. I'm aware that not all the dogs are cops, all right? I'm aware that one of them does recycling and another one has a jet ski. Like, this is not high art. No. But, yeah, I mean, and again, I think that's the kind of thing that if you're a Hollywood person, you look at and you're like, oh, you have no interest in making things. Right. You want engagement. Yeah. 20 minutes of talking to Sky the dog is not art. It is just engagement time. It is time that you can collect data to target advertising.

And then all of the other David Allison ideas are about unifying data across your platforms to more effectively target advertising. So then you look at. a company like Warner Brothers Discovery, and of course they'd want everything, right? You're in the library buying business at that point. You're like, I'm not here to make things. I am here to have things that are already made. And I think this is why,

hilariously over the course of one weekend, Netflix went from being the villain in Hollywood to being at least a little sympathetic. Yeah. Because at the very least, Netflix pays actors and directors and DPs money to make films. Yeah. not enough money

and there's not enough back end residual like all of the structure of that money is not what people want but they are in the business of paying those people to make things

that some of those people at least are proud of. Not finding new ways to remix all of the episodes of the Big Bang Theory so that you can I don't know hang out with you can talk to Shelvin

you know like what age do you want Sheldon to be young Sheldon or regular Sheldon he's going to talk to you for 20 minutes about being a cop like who knows I'm just like you look at these visions for what to do with Warner,

and they are not meaningfully different from the visions that every other doomed purchaser of Warner has ever had. They are hard to execute. They come right up against Warner Brothers' own history, its own legacy in Hollywood. And no one has the idea of, what if we tried to do a good job? It's just not an outcome on the board right now.

What if we bought Warner and tried to do a good job? And I think where this really comes to head is how CNN is being used as a pawn in this whole conversation. CNN like it or hate it. I personally think CNN has kind of devolved into just being a fairly bad 24-7 podcast. But it's still like an important thing that happens every day. Right. It is an important news source. I mean, that is a very harsh criticism.

But I will also concede CNN still operates a worldwide newsroom with actual reporters. on the ground with video cameras and sources and fixers around the world in war zones in a way that nothing else exists. There are very few of that left in the world. CNN's important. Ellison, according to Wall Street Journal, promised Donald Trump, quote, sweeping changes to CNN. We can already see the sweeping changes he's made to CBS News, where he took Barry Weiss in the free press, installed her as the editor-in-chief of CBS News. She's making changes to their talent. she's interviewing Erica Kirk in a primetime special herself.

I mean, as an editor-in-chief likes to work himself. Yeah, a little sympathy there, but that's how we're supposed to do with CBS. Funny thing about that, too, by the way, is there was a 60 Minutes interview with Leslie Saul and Marjorie Taylor Green that Donald Trump really hated and said a bunch of mean things about how the new ownership is not any better than the old ownership. And it's like just how does anyone not see what this is at this point? If you can, if you start to concede a little, you end up conceding a lot. Yeah. Right. And particularly for a news organization, I'm the one of ransom raised or ethics policy, the thing

you need to say is you can't tell us what to do. That's the only message a big news organization needs to say. And then you can be whoever you want to be. Yeah. Which to me is so clearly why Netflix is like, we want no part of this. Right. Actually, Liz and I talk about us all the time. You have a lot of feelings about Rupert Murdoch.

Rupert Murdoch knows that the most important thing for the Wall Street Journal is that you can't tell it what to do. Yeah. And he will defend it on those grounds over and over. He did it with Theranos. He does it against the Trump administration. His core, he's Rupert Murdoch. What's to say about Rupert Murdoch.

But at his heart, he's a news person. And he understands, actually, the Wall Street Journal needs not to be told what to do. Yeah. And he has told many powerful people to shove it when it has come to. Yeah, you used to work there. I did. And like, that's the thing. I had to go into the New York office past a really like a twice life-sized thing of Sean Hannity, which was not great.

Did you ever think of yourselves as the Tom Wamsgams of News Corp? Where you're like, I can get into this family. I always thought of myself as the slightly shorter, Greg, where everybody was just kind of like, what are you doing here? David, I don't understand why you work here when you could have done a succession at News Corp. Anyhow, I would say, like, David Ellson does not understand that Rupert Murdoch's role is to say you can't tell my news from what to do. Yeah. Which he also does for Fox News. Again, you can have a lot of feelings of Herbert Murdoch, but he plays that role as the billionaire or an urban media company very.

well. David Ellison is like, you can tell us what to do. I want this deal done. David Zazlov, to some extent, was like, you can tell me what to do. I want this deal done. It, Netflix doesn't want any of that smoke. No. They don't even want to buy this thing. And so here's this important institution that is one of the last of its kind worldwide. And everyone's like, we're just going to screw with it to make this money with our bad ideas about talking to the Paw Patrol. I just think that Charles wrote this headline for us. There are no good outcomes for Warner Brothers sale. And Again, nowhere on this list is we should try hard. Yeah.

Yeah. I agree. And I do think the only certain outcome at this point is probably two plus years of just abject chaos that causes a lot of problems in the process. But that means we have lots of time to talk about it. We should move on. We're going to take a break. And then we're going to come back and we're going to talk to Charlie Harding about AI music. Because I like AI music more than I like.

like I pop control. So we're going to, we're going to come back and we're going to do that. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work?

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apply. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter.

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Oh, yeah. I appreciate the choosing to not have title inflation. Like, really put me down. Yeah, Nilai's big on titles, not being too grand and inflationary. Okay. Everyone at the verge is just person. Just a person. That's it.

How it should be. Present. It's very flat. What was that holocracy that like Zappos had where no one had a title or a job? And you all just sort of like showed up. And we're like, how do we sell shoes? It's perfect. So you are here because you just did a big story about Suno and AI and essentially what it has done to country music in particular.

And I'm curious to know where this story came from because Neely has been on this show ranting and raving about his favorite AI songs for a long time. Did Neelai do this to you? Well, I feel like Neely and I have bonded for years now over the question of when will these music AAI generative apps be any good? And last time we spoke, we had not crossed the threshold. Maybe we talked a little bit about B.B.L. Drizzi at some point. Yeah. But now I feel like we've really, we've crossed the line. And I actually had a former student. I lecture at NYU and at Berkeley College of Music one day a week. And I had a former student who was down in Nashville. It was like, I got to tell you something.

I went to write country songs and this city is not what I thought it was. Wow. Well, it's interesting that it started with country music because you and I had a conversation. I've been obsessed with soul covers of rap songs that are all over YouTube and Spotify now. I said that there's like a funk cover. It's not really very funky, but there's a quote unquote funk cover of killing the name of by Rage Against Machine. It's good. that I literally just said to David and Joanna on this show was the most important AI innovation of the last year.

Something happened, right? And my theory was this was hard to do. So I obviously came and asked Charlie, hey, is this hard to do? And you scratched out of you. This is trivially easy to do. And I think the next turn is because Nashville is so structured, because country music is so structured, you can see it happening and how it's happening. Because my theory is that this already happened in hip hop and pop music, which is not nearly as structured as country music. All right. So Charlie, before we get too far into the actual demo here, just what is Suno and how does it work?

Suno is basically chat chippy T for audio generation. You can make a text prompt and you can output an entire song with music, lyrics, vocals. You get a whole track from Suno. Is it like an LLM in the sense that it is trained on lots of stuff and then makes other stuff like the stuff that it. has trained on. They don't like to tell us what they've trained their material on, but yes, it seems to be trained on the entire corpus of music. And you can basically prompt it to make music in any style. Yeah, let's just dive into this. So Charlie, what I want you to do is basically like, I want to do this process here live on the show. Okay. As if we are like in Nashville making a song. And I want to, I want you to sort of as we go explain both kind of what's new about

the tool and how it is. sort of newly fitting into the process, right? So, like, we have this longstanding kind of assembly line of how music gets made, and I just want to soon-o-the-hell out of it. Does this sound reasonable? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the thing that folks in Nashville have figured out is that if you try to create a song from a text prompt, it's going to give you the lowest common denominator country song with really predictable bad rhyme schemes. It's not going to have a very good story. The melody is going to be meh. Good enough, but like pretty meh. So what folks are doing is instead of handing everything over to this tool, they're still getting together in a songwriting

room. They're writing a song. You got to have, you got to start with a decent song anyway. It's got to have melody, lyrics, and probably some sort of background supporting instrument. That is enough. Now, typically, you would take that. You would hire what everyone a Nashville calls a track guy. They all use the term track guy. I think it is unfortunately a very gendered position. A track guy is basically a producer, but they don't call them a producer because that producer is not going to get a producer credit.

All they're going to do is they're going to produce a really high quality demo. And they're the person being replaced in this pipeline. So what we're going to do is I, in writing this article for The Verge was like, I need some examples. Very few songwriters wanted to send their examples, not just. because they were maybe reticent about speaking about how they're using these tools, but also that's their IP and they want to pitch these songs, right? But so we're talking about the point where it's like some combination of voice memos on my phone and lyrics in the notes app. Like,

that's, that's the level we're at at the beginning here. That is exactly right. You don't even have to submit your lyrics. All I need to do is make a voice memo on your phone. So I did just that. So the morning before publishing my article, I was like, I need an example. I was in the shower and I was like a country song, dirt road something, and ran back into my little home studio where I am now, and I played this little chorus. A dirt road, blue skies, we drive down every mile to our home back porch where we rode every single vow. We swing for the fences, live with no defenses, up and down through and through a good life, a dirt, It's giving like, what if Johnny Cash had like a really good day. That's not good music.

Because what you're saying is the voice is mediocre and does not match with the upbeatness of the song. Even though I don't have any country twang, I was proud of rhyming every mile with single vow. mile and vowel is a kind of slant rhyme. And I figure if I could give this to Suno and put in a country style, maybe we could hear it with that twang. So here's what we'll do. We're going to take that little voice memo that I made on my iPhone and we're going to send it to Suno. Just by the way, this is the thing that if you're a songwriter, you're making, you're doing what you just did all the time. Right?

Like this is like part of the job. Yeah. That's what you do. Yeah. You write songs. Okay. So I uploaded my little dirt road demo to Suon. And it automatically identifies its core characteristics, such as it's an acoustic foot country song in the key of G major at a moderate tempo of around 100 BPM. My timing is not that good on that playing. And it captures the lyrics. I haven't written a whole song. This is just kind of like a chorus. But what I can do now is I can remix this song. I can take my file and I can hit cover in Suno. And this is where I can describe what style song we want this.

this demo to turn into. You said something in the style of Johnny Cash. Perhaps we could try that. Yeah. Okay. So this is where I would say we probably shouldn't describe Johnny Cash because there are content filters that will say, oh, we can't make a song in the style of Johnny Cash. But we can go over to, you know, Gemini and say, oh, my God. I need to write a prompt for Suno to create a song in the style of Johnny Cash without using his name.

I mean, this is like where things just my mind explodes. Like people have thought about this workflow, right? This is a pretty standard workflow. Because I've seen so many people prompt Suno with stuff from Chachy P and Cloud and Gemini. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is just what everyone is doing? Yeah. I love Gemini begins its response with, that's a fun challenge.

I'd like to evade YouTube's content ID filters, Gemini. Exactly. Okay, so it's given me a number of options. We'll just grab the first one. A classic American country song with a deep baritone male vocal, acoustic guitar provides a steady driving boom chikabum rhythm supported by a sparse, reverbed electric guitar and a simple upright bass line. The tempo is a walking pace. So that's how we're going to get. Can you just add in, just for me, the horns?

Oh, you know what I mean? And it has to have some trumpets. It needs some Johnny Cash horns, yep. Yeah. And then if we want to make it even better, we'll say, what are the negative styles I should indicate? You can tell it what not to sound like. That really helps influence it to sound more like what you're aiming for. So too complicated.

Give it to me as a bullet pointed list. these things are too smart for us now. Great. I'm just going to throw out here. This theoretically is the agentic revolution where Charlie should just be replaced by an MCP server. Okay. Now we're going to just add in our advanced options, our excluded styles. We're going to hit create.

And let's see how long this thing takes. All right. It's already generated two. They're actually. Oh, my gosh. It's like the music industry is so doomed. You're dead. You don't even know it.

No, no. No, no. You had to have my amazing voice memo first. All right, let's see what we get. A dirt road, blue skies. We drive down every mile to our home back porch where we rode every single vow. We swing for the fences, live with no defenses up and down. Why is Johnny Cash in Space?

A good life. A dirt road. Blue skies are all we need. Trumpets? Want a guy to get you to the horns. They're literally playing the ring of fire. I was just about to say that. Okay.

But, wait, you, you manage to prompt and negative prompt Suno into just do ring of fire horns. Yeah, basically. Yeah.

You didn't say Ring of Fire and you didn't say Johnny Cash, but Gem and I produced enough words that Suno is like, oh, you just want Ring of Fire. Yeah, but let's do it this time in the style of limp biscuit. I'm telling you Why did you go there? Because Charlie, we're friends.

What are you doing? What I'm doing to you is showing how this, you can take your song and you can put it into any kind of vibe that you want. So let's cover this one more time. Thank you, Gemini. Ridiculous. All right.

And immediately we have two songs in the style of Limp Biscuit covering my really ridiculous dirt road song. You just drained a lake for these two limp visits songs. I'm very upset with you. By the way, the water thing is not true. I just like saying it. Goodbye. Okay, the phased vocals do work in this case.

Because I think Fred Durst phased his own vocals. I'm not going to say the name of the artist, but there is a country artist in Nashville who makes songs that sound alarmingly like that. And I never listen to them ever again. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. So that was just that fast.

Yeah. You could do every style of country music or any other genre and you get them super quick. Okay. So I have two questions here. One, I call that the vocals on both versions. It's in your story, right? So you know, can do a lot of things,

but the audio quality isn't there. And in particular, like, vocal quality is pretty messy. I think I could just hear it there, That there was some weird effects on those vocals. Like, it can't quite do it. Is that just the way it works? Is that getting better over time? Is that just the nature of trying to synthetically generate singing?

I noticed that there's a lot of kind of strange artifacts more so in Suno than something like, you know, Geminized Nanobanana and the photo output that we're getting today where increasingly it's very hard to tell if a photograph is AI or not. With music, there's still this very overly tuned, grainy kind of quality. quality, but I will say it will output all kinds of varieties of vocals. Sometimes it will sound exactly like another artist. I had a student give me a song once that sounded just like Paul Simon. It was just like, wow, that's Paul Simon's voice.

A number of my sources in this song said they really don't like when they get a Suno pitch, and it clearly is, it just feels like it's trained off of the voice of one of their friends. That happens all the time. I've also received songs, though, that are what's that sound like almost like a lo-fi bedroom recording with someone who is singing out of tune. So it's able to output all kinds of facsimiles of humans, but they're still definitely facsimiles. Well, but I'm really struck by the fact that yes, it's a facsimile.

And like, nobody is going to confuse that with like a perfectly produced country song. But that's not the goal at this part of the process, right? Like, we're one step past voice memo. And I think that this just makes me think of like, we talk a lot about vibe coding on this show. And it's like the thing I hear from people in tech all the time where they're like, we used to make slide decks to show off an idea that we had. And now we just make a prototype. I can just build a thing in an hour and a half that it doesn't, it doesn't even resemble a finished product.

But it's enough to get to the next thing much more quickly. I can show you what it looks like. It's a better headline. Nashville is vibe coding songs. I mean, that's kind of what it is. Well, that's the part that I'm really interested in, right? Like the idea that, you know, famous artists want to hear the pitches they're getting in their own voices, that's part of your story. Yeah.

Certainly, there's a lot of weird vibes around AI in the music industry, which you can come to. But the part where you can just say, okay, I'm going to go pitch this to Morgan Wallen and put it in his voice. Right. That seems like, A. Suno shouldn't let you do that. And then based on what we just saw with how you can prompt it. It can absolutely do that. Yeah. So there's kind of two approaches to this.

One is that you can get Suno to get really close to sounding like another artist. But there are also AI voice replacement tools where you can take another AI voice and transform it into a trained vocal to sound exactly in the style of an artist. Or it could be a sung vocal from, you know, I could sing something and have it output in the quality of Shania Twain if I had her voice model. But that's just an impression you do. That's different. When you say voice model, it's Charlie in the wig wearing the Shania outfit. That's don't impress me much. I definitely won't do that. So I have, I received some reporting, very few people wanted to talk on the record about the fact that lots of artists like receiving their vocals on the actual track. And whether or not they even like it, artists are receiving pitches that sound like them. this is not totally new practice. In fact, there were demo artists who were sound-alikes that when real demos were made,

that you'd go get this one person to sound like that other person, because what you're trying to do is show that this song that I've written could be major country stars next hit. That's your goal in writing a demo. And now you can potentially AI a vocal to sound like 20 different artists, 100 different artists, put it in their voice and show them what they might sound like in this song. Again, it's kind of a sketch. Like, this is a vibe coded demo. It's not the finished product.

It's probably not going to make it to radio, though I have heard that some elements might. We can talk more about that if you want. This is widespread. Everybody is making these things. Everybody's receiving them. I shouldn't say everybody, everybody. Some people feel not so good about it. But what my sourcing shows is that from the most upstart people,

in Nashville to the biggest stars, there are people at every part of the supply chain who are working in this Suno demo world. What's this doing to the industry? Like, there's a lot of feelings about AI in general. I would say that the big labels making deals with platforms like Suno and Udio is saying AI is the future. The president of the Recording Academy just, I think,

put on Instagram. He hasn't been in a session in months where AI hasn't been used. That's a lot. That's a big thing for him to say, right? I'm sort of stunned by that because in music, there are so many places that AI is being used. And the primary place that AI is being used in music is some like really Benigan things like noise removal, like some plugins that use AI as part of how they might EQ something. So in that case, I absolutely believe it. But, you know, people are, I think most frequently what I hear is like songwriters using chat GPT as a rhyme assistant and sort of like idea generation.

brainstorming. The generative music part, there are definitely producers doing it, but I would doubt that it is the widespread thing that every producer is doing at this moment. But at the same time, I'm having a hard time thinking if I'm a songwriter whose job is to make a lot of things and try to convince other people to cut records based on them, this seems like an unbelievable productivity unlock. It is. So I'm struck by the fact that this seems like the sort of thing that I can totally see why all these people would embrace it. And yet they don't want to talk to you about it. Are we just still in this phase where people are like, everyone is using it and it's sort of an open secret, but nobody wants to be the first one to admit that they're using AI to make songs.

So I reached out to dozens of people in Nashville. Most people did not want to talk about it. A lot of people wanted to talk off the record. But I was able to find some people who are very enthusiastic about these tools and were willing to share with me some stuff that hadn't been reported before. There seems to be a thing in Nashville that there's a bit of shame. about using AI in the song creating process. I think it's shame in every creative industry, but in particular in the music industry,

there's just an all-out war brewing. I see it every day at my Instagram feed, where you have artists and labels saying they want to use AI. You have big producers from the past, like Timboen saying, it's here, get over it. You have all these catalog sales where big name artists are selling their catalogs for millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think the reason,

that they're being purchased is the purchasers of the catalogs are like, well, we'll just have AI remix the entire Rolling Stones catalog, and we'll sell those songs. And that that's just a big tension in this industry, that it feels like the young songwriters can use AI as a tool to play the lottery and try to get a hit, and that's good for them. And the biggest players can sell their catalogs, and the labels can get more AI music because the labels are fundamentally exploitative.

And the middle is just getting squeaked. Is that what you're saying as well, Charlie? Yeah, everybody's pissed right now. It's like, where was this stuff trained on? Why are we draining lakes? Why are we making a bunch of covers of slop that nobody needed? Is this real organic music? Why is this stuff flooding my playlists?

There's so much tension about whether or not this is providing any real value. I think in the Nashville system, this idea of demoing a song to figure out what it might sound like if we really properly recorded it, there's probably a lot more argument. it, there's probably a lot more arguable value that it's creating in just this one little piece of the supply chain. And yet, I think just given all of the meh press about, is it the right way of saying about artificial intelligence? I agree with you. There's a lot of anti-AI coverage.

We do it. Then there's what you're talking about, which is this is a huge creative unlock, particularly for people who are just trying to make it, who are basically in a volume game, right? It sounds like if you're a songwriter Nashville, like, it's a volume game. You're just taking shots until you hit. But it seems like the people at the bottom of the food chain who are in the volume business and the people at the top of the food chain are benefiting from AI and everyone else is getting squeezed in the middle.

And I just don't know how that plays out. How is that playing out from who you're talking to? Well, it makes me think about the early stage of chat chit in the early LLMs where it was easier to prompt them to output things that were clearly built off of their training data, right? Like, I'm not happy that every LLM basically took my book from me and used it in its training data without my permission, right? Like, I would have loved to have like received some kind of royalty around that. Maybe I'll get some kind of settlement at some point. But with music, it is, as we saw, quite easy to make a really strong copy of someone else's sound. All of a sudden, the like blurred lines, Pharrell Williams, Robin Thick case feels like it's coming back into the conversation because, I don't like that someone is making something that is so similar to my art that clearly was trained on my art. That sounds like my voice. It sounds like we literally just got the horn solo from Ring of Fire.

Not the exact same one, but the thing that you ask any person, they're like, yeah, that's the Ring of Fire horn solo. So I think there's, I think there's a that kind of reaction of feeling, you know, my work is being cheap in because it can be copied so, so obviously. That's certainly part of how people are feeling. but I think there's a lot of feelings that are going around. And we are in a moment where there's a lot of embrace with these tools, but also, you know, when I first started sourcing this article, nobody wanted to talk. And why are you doing this thing ravenously in your business

and yet feel so ashamed of it? There's a lot of that going on right now. Should I feel bad listening to and liking these songs? I can't give you, I can't be the guardian angel on your shoulder telling you Please. I need this, Charlie. I like how David started by calling you an intern and ended with like, can you provide the moral absolution for using AI?

That's what we ask of our interns here at Theverge.com. Oh, my God. David Pierce, would you like to come and confess something? I listen to an AI cover, Rage Against the Machine. It's one of the most blatantly capitalistic things I've ever done. Oh, my gosh. I think that's actually, Mike, do you think, you said people don't care? One of my tropes on the show has been people don't care about quality, right?

They will listen to music at 64 kilobits on AirPods as long as it's the song they want. They don't care. They're going to listen to 15th generation YouTube like bootlegs. It's just a thing as long as it's the song they want. Yeah. I think the question here is do they care that it's people making the music? Right. Because that's a big next step up in people don't care.

I've always been skeptical of the audio quality wars. Like, people enjoyed music through AM radio. It was great because it was your favorite song. Songs matter. You know, I'm surrounded by amazing musical equipment that helps me make really high-fi cool recordings. Most of the time, I'm listening through terrible AirPods that just sound like, but they, it seems to be my word of the day.

But they help me go on the subway. and the subway is quiet. I can hear the song that I like. It takes me to a special moment. I'm happy. So I think the audio quality thing, all that's mostly nonsense. Most people can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a wave file. I hardly can.

And despite that, music is where we go to, I think music serves like two core purposes. One, to either enhance or to change how we are feeling. And two, to commune and to be a part of something. or to be seen in who we are. And I think that hearing a rage against the machine AI cover song can maybe help change or enhance how you're feeling. I think it doesn't do a good job of the helping you feel seen in the world. Most of pop music is built off of the relationship to the fans, to the artist.

When you love Charlie XX like I do and you go to the brat, concert, you are a part of a thing. I don't just mean to be making a plea for live music, but experiencing her of music is about being a part of a thing. That just, I think that that cannot be, I don't think that gets replaced. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's a part of that, the Raging Against Machine cover where I know it's a Rage Against Machine song that makes it really important.

Yeah. But also, the thing is like, Neely, if you heard, like right now, it's novel. And if you hear 17 more of those covers. You're going to get bored of it. Yeah. I think that's right. So, all right, we need to take a break here. But Charlie, can you do, can you do us a favor?

What are we going to do next? Can we do Dirt Road in the style of rage against the machine? I'd like you to play us after break. Give me a second. We need a prompt first. I'm terrified what this is going to sound like. It's not going to be good. Here's Dirt Road.

And the genre is heavy political funk metal. That sounds right. There we go. A dud road and blue skies We drive down every mile There's that face vocal again It's bad You can hear it

All right This is horrible Can we just turn this off Somewhere Tom Mrollo just threw his laptop Out of window Listen that's a Pepsi commercial in 12 months You heard it here first Zach Dilaroka is so fucking mad at you

All right Charlie I just need to say this very clearly Based on that example, the music industry is in no danger from soon. None at all. You should sleep well tonight, my friends. If rage against the machine, you're going to be just fine. All right, Charlie, thank you. They just did Limp Biscuit again.

All right, you get a buddy. Charlie, thank you. We've got to take a break. We'll be back to do a lightning round. 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. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers.

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that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics.

But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being 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. And unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembark, asymptomatic. 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 assess 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, I believe we've a sponsor today. Indeed, we do. This week's lightning round is presented by AWS.

How leading businesses use AI for next level innovation. That's great work. Nailed it. All right. So there's a lot of stuff to get to here. Neely, we're going to do. It's Brendan. Brennan has a dummy every week.

We'll get to that. But first, Neely, there is the most unusual thing, which is breaking typeface news. Yes. This week, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State of these United States, declared that the State Department no longer use Calibri. and it would start using Times New Roman again, he chalked this up to being like anti-D-EI and anti-Woke. I was reading about it. I was all set to be all mad,

and then I started reading John Gruber's blog post about it. And I thought to myself, why am I going to read Gruber on the Vergecast when I can just summon John Gruber? Hey, John, how's it going? Here I am. On my beat, as usual. When I need people to be mad about fonts,

I immediately turn to John. Yeah, it's like the Yankees' fonts, James Bond. and like a side of Apple. And on top of it, you're also like, the New York Times got this story wrong, which is the choice. Yes, yes. It's a real swirl of things that I enjoy.

So Rubio puts out this, I think they call it, like a memo, and he says, all paper at the State Department needs to be in Times New York now, which is a great word for just describing stuff. And then you're like, actually this makes sense. Explain what you mean. Oh, where to start. How much time do we have? Five minutes.

Five minutes. So I think that the, 2023 decision. So the State Department, as you might expect, is a slow-moving organization and is tradition-bound. And they didn't even adopt, it seems, word processing until fairly late in a game, like 2004. And so for 20 years, I think they were a Microsoft Word PC shop. And they said, everything should be set in Times New Roman 14. And before that, it was like Courier. It was our courier new, which is god awful. And we could talk about that separately compared to regular courier because courier new is thin and wispy and terrible. Un-American, you could say.

And but their current font guidelines at the State Department are that anything that they produce that the president needs to sign needs to be in time or a courier new, not Times New Roman. And that never changed even with the other thing. But in 2023, then Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken. And I just love that his name is Anthony. And because it just sounds like you're kind of playing up. They'll call him Tony. I know some people to know them.

Everyone just calls him Tony. Yeah. Well, Blinken put out a memo with the, which again, who, I'm sure Rubio didn't write this new one. I'm sure Blinken didn't write the other one, but somebody put out a memo and signed their name to it.

And they changed the font from Times New Roman to Calibri. And the reasons for it were bogus. It was in the name of accessibility and blah, blah, blah, But it's, and again, Calibri is not a terrible font. And for a while, it was Microsoft's default font for documents. But the state, to show how slow moving they are, they change their default font to Calibri after Microsoft went through a very high profile. Hey, we're going to change from Calibri to something else.

And we're going to have our users have a contest and vote for the top five entries. So after Microsoft, that bastion of taste decided to move away from Calibri, the State Department I was like, oh, now that's what we're going to switch to to be hip and modern and appeal to the kids. If they had never changed from Times New Roman, ever, nobody would ever talk about it and nobody, nobody, not even somebody, somebody who doesn't even know what Times New Roman is or somebody like me who could get a couple thousand words out of it and a guest spot on the Verge cast. Well, so this is one I want to ask you. Nobody would think twice if they had stuck with Times New Roman and used it for the next hundred years because Times New Roman looks like the title. of font the State Department should use for diplomatic documents. So this is part of the point in your blog post,

which people should read, and it's one of the main questions I want to ask you. These fonts, these typefaces, we're picking them for aesthetics, for style, right? A lot of the Trump administration is about weird style decisions, right? Bringing back the luster of America. Here's a ballroom that gets bigger every single way until I fire the architect.

Right. They can't start building it because it can't grow, if it was real, it couldn't possibly grow fast enough to keep up with his imaginary needs. So it needs to be in a constant state of planning so that it can keep getting bigger. And that's how we're picking fonts, too. Like, there's like an aesthetic.

Yeah. But your point is, all of this is all aesthetic because the accessibility concerns raised by Blinken and the body administration are fake. Like, they're not technologically real. Can you explain what you mean? It's, there's, and trust me, after what I've written,

if there were scientific studies or actual, you know, reproducible studies, that showed that there is an accessibility gain for using Calibri versus Times New Roman, people would be pointing me to the studies. And there's not. The font people read John is, I think, what you're trying to say. It's just a bit of voodoo. Now, there is an argument. And this is why my website is set in Verdana and always has been. And I think the Verge is set mostly in sans-serifants. Most websites are set in san-serifants. And it kind of stems from the idea that on a

computer screen sans seraphans are more readable. But I kind of think that's a vestige, I believe, of the pre-retna era. And so you can make an argument that it's a little easier on your eyes to use the sancerophon for on screen reading. And a lot of State Department people read this stuff on screen. The Secretary of State themselves probably do get their stuff on paper. And if you go to a bookstore, just go if you don't know anything about fonts, if you're listening to this somehow and still listening to me, go to a bookstore, just go to any Barnes and Noble and just go to the front of the store and pick up like five random books, novels, nonfiction, just a couple of, you know, new, new books at Barnes and Noble and just flip

through and see if the book is set in a serifant or a sans serifant. The odds are very good that if you pick up a stack of ten random books at the front of a Barnes and Noble, brand new books in the year 2025, they're all set in seraphons because it's just sort of what you do for long form text, and it looks a little more serious. It's the connotation that's, you know, and they're not all set and it's not like there's one font that everybody sets books or documents in, but they all, you know, for long-form stuff that is supposed to look serious, serifants just sort of have that feel because they are older and more tradition-bound. And I think it is appropriate. Put the politics of everybody's feelings about the Democrats and the Republicans and Trump in

particular in these numnuts in this administration. It just is true that the State Department probably ought to use a seraphant. And then it runs into the nerdy problem of, of they're a PC shop using Microsoft Word, and they kind of have to stick to the default fonts in Microsoft Word because Word really freaks out if one person who touches a document doesn't have a font installed. Yeah. So actually, really funny,

The Verge started off when we launched in 2011 with Serif's and his pre-retna and everyone got mad at us and we switched to San Seris. And then with the last redesign, we finally switched back to Saras because we assumed everyone had retina screens. And this was an entire conversation we had. Yeah, I guess that is true.

I'm not looking at the Verge right now, but I guess I do know that the little white-on-black blurbs that you guys have now, the little social media type posts that, to me, define the new modern verge design are set in that. Yeah, and they have ink traps in them, which is very funny for a digital font. This is all font nerdery. Yes, it's all font nerdery, but actually the reasons for ink traps kind of make sense with anti-aliasing, too. Kind of the same type of graphic tricks that look good for making sure that ink that bleeds into a paper remain readable are actually kind of similar tricks to what typographers do for body text size to deal with anti-aliasing.

There's one point that I just want to hit on real quick. There's some amount of argument that Calibria is better for screen readers, which makes no sense to me because I'm assuming the screen readers are just reading the underlying Unicode. Is Calibia better for screen readers? There's no truth to it at all, A. but B, you don't even have to be, I don't even know the, I'm not intimately familiar with the exact format of the documents that get passed around within the State Department. But it's probably like if you can just run your cursor over it and select and copy, it's probably just actual text. But we're now at a point like, and I'm not familiar with the latest version of Windows, but on the Mac, you can do that with images now too, right?

like the difference between live text that you can select copy or even edit and an image of text is actually going away. Because why is that? Because even that when you take a screenshot on your iPhone or on a Mac or whatever. And even if it's a screenshot, you can select and copy the text because OCR is everywhere. And it has conquered all fonts. It can even do a really good job with handwriting, even bad handwriting. But certainly if it can even do a. a passable job with chicken scratch human handwriting. Times New Roman is not a problem and has not been a

problem, whether the text is actually a series of characters, in which case the screen reader doesn't even have to care about the font. And even if it's an image, if somebody print something out at the State Department in Times New Roman and scans it and it's just an image of a document, the OCR software will ace it 100% of the time. This is a completely solved problem and has been for a long time. Anybody who has like a low vision problem or for whatever reason wants to use software that will reformat a document in bigger fonts or read it aloud or something like that will have zero difference between whether it's in Times New Roman or Vodana or Calibri or probably anything up to and including James Cameron's favorite papyrus. No. Now, okay, that's it. We've now officially gone too far.

I can't do this anymore. Yeah, I'm going to get emails. You're not going to get emails about this. We're going to get emails. He did, though. But Cameron sent a memo to the projectionist showing the new Avatar movie, telling them how he wants the movie projected and where to set the sound. And the memo is set in papyrus. All right.

Spectacular. Well, let's get the Secretary of State on that. It's the most important. John, we should let you go here. But before we do, this is your opportunity. Can we do better than Times New Roman 14? So I don't know that you can. if you're going to live within the limits of the default fonts of Microsoft Word.

And so if so, then fine. I actually think that gets to the broader question of how have we let the IT overlords rule everybody's lives? And if the IT department says, no, no, there's no possible way that we can guarantee that everybody working at the State Department has a custom font installed in their machine. And that's the end of the discussion. Pick one of these default fonts. Why are we letting IT department limit our font choices? This is also a solved problem, but that's an entirely separate question. So, A, if we're going to live within the world of default fonts and Microsoft Office,

Times New Roman 14 is probably the best choice. Fair enough. B, we shouldn't live within that world and they should pick something else. Dream big, people. This is what we do here. All right, John, thank you. This is my dream. This is exactly what I wanted.

Thanks, buddy. It's a Christmas miracle a couple weeks early. All right, that was great. All right. That was everything I hoped it would be in more. And much more, I think. Having people come and just randomly yell at us about things they care about on the Vergecast is precisely what we are here. I do like that the answer was Marker Rubio is right, but for all the wrong reasons and he's still kind of an idiot. Listen, worst person you know has a good opinion.

All right. My first one, I have an app and a gadget for you today. And I'm very excited about both of them. The gadget I want to talk to you about is, did you see this thing, the pebble index, the new, it's a smart ring. And basically, its whole shtick is it is a ring that you're supposed to wear in your index finger and it has a little button and a microphone. And that's it. That's its whole job. And they're building this like pipeline behind it. It's a $75 ring. It's made by the people who make the pebble watches. Eric Mijikovsky is like a long time friend of the verge. This thing just exists for you to record little bits of audio and you can set reminders for yourself, you can take notes. It's like,

this is my dream as somebody who is constantly yelling at Siri to remember things for me. It's just a little, it's like aspiring. You're still doing that? That you hold, oh my God, constantly. It's the only way I remember anything. I think I, like, a thing that I say to people sometimes is that I'm not, I'm not better at doing anything than anybody. I'm just better at writing it down. Oh, yeah. That's a good call. I am like a, I am an above average productive person because I'm just better at writing things down than most people. And this is like just a little sort of spy gadget where you can just be like, buy toilet paper tomorrow.

And it will just remind you to buy toilet paper tomorrow. And it makes me happy. This is all I want in my life. Little tiny gadgets. I have two reactions to this thing. One, neat. I hope everyone's happy. One, we got to stop trying to make index finger rings happen.

Like the aura ring is an index finger ring. Yeah. And I'm just like, I wear a ring. I wear a red ring all the time. Just, you know, tell my wife that. The ring is smart now. But like, I just, I can't be a two rings and then ones in the index. There's something about that that isn't.

I can't do it. The industry wants me to wear an index finger ring. I understand. The theory behind this one, which is that you can do it basically with your hands full because all it requires is like pinching your thumb and your index finger together. I buy, right? Like, you can do all this same stuff on a pebble watch. You can, like, hold it and talk into it. But this requires so much more work and both your hands in a way that just tapping your, your,

thumb and forefinger. I'm just saying all these companies want to put stuff on your body. Your body is really, it's very hard to attach things to a body. Just a vert chest phrase that I've come up with. That's a new virtual chisely. Your body sucks at having mounting points. Fundamentally, and so they're like, index finger ring. It's hard to mount shit to your body.

That is not a t-shirt we will be making. It's hard. It's just hard. Your body sucks at having mounting points. Eli Patel, 2025. It's like, it's on my chart of wearable bullshit. it, you know, it's like needs a mounting point. But wait, I bring this up to you because A, I think it's very cool.

And B, it caused like a little teeny tiny controversy because one of the things about this ring is my second thing is that it doesn't have a battery. Yep. It's designed. The way Eric described it to me is if you use it like, you know, 10 times a day for a few seconds at a time, which I think is this sort of normal use case. It'll last you a couple of years. And then once you're done with it, you buy a new one and send the old one back to

them for recycling. He thinks about this A as just a sort of, sort of. sort of necessity of the technology, right? Like, it would be very hard to build a charging port into this device in a way that worked and that made it still $75. And he's like, it's a thing you don't have to think about. When the battery dies get a new one, it's $75. What are you going to do?

A lot of people did not like this. A lot of people have lots of feelings about that. This is that my second reaction is I saw that. I had actually connected that too. We did the big profile of Hoto Infantic. And a huge criticism throughout that piece was all of these tools are very cool and these products are neat and all of them have sealed with the amy in batteries. These are just waste.

This is just looming e-waste. They're impossible to recycle. Yeah, I think it's a neat idea. I think the idea that natural language interfaces are on the rise is going to lead to a lot of put microphones somewhere where you can just whisper to a computer until the neural link works or whatever. You know, like this thing where you've got to get the input to something. I don't know, it's neat.

I just, those are my two criticisms. It's like index finger rings are, it's a hard sell. And the battery thing, I think, is going to be real for this entire category of gadgets because everybody wants them to be really small. Yes. And they don't work if they're not. I can't even wear an aura ring because it's too big and I like bang it on everything and it drives me crazy. Not a fan. Index finger ring. They need to start making like big chunky pinky rings like 70s monster guys. I'm thinking I go to the, I want like brass knuckles, right? Like have it all sort of live on this side. That's what I'm talking about. There you go. All right. It's, oh God, it's time. It is time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brennan Carr's a dummy. He's a dummy. He's just a dummy.

Every week we have a pre-production meeting, and every week I'm like, Neelai, do we get to not do this this week? And every week you go, no, we have to do it this week. It's like, look, we are reasonably well prepared. We spend all week working in the Verged Newsroom. We read a lot of stories. For the Brennan segments at this point, I just like, what do you do this week? And like Google AI mode is like, once again, Brendan was an idiot.

And like, fine. So this week, Brendan waded into one of the dumbest controversies. in all of tech. It's truly one of the dumbest controversial in all tech. So our favorites, the European Union, a bunch of gray suits,

drinking wine, eating cheese. They find X. They find Elon Musk in X, $140 million, which is nothing for the richest man in the world, I'll point out. I'm finding you,

Neely Patel, eight blacks. Yep. And they did it and, you know, because they're finding X in, the Loss is turning to this cultural thing,

and everyone's like, this is a censorship in Europe. It's nothing about that. The Digital Services Act in Europe says the platforms cannot hold out that they have verified a user being real if they haven't actually done that. Oh, interesting. Right. This is just that Europe is protective of identity in a specific way. And so X obviously lets you do that because you can just buy the blue checkmarks.

Right. You can just say you're whoever you want and the checkmark signifies a verification that is nothing more than the payment of money. Right. So this is a big deal. So Europe has said to X, especially because of its history. as Twitter, those blue checkmarks meant something to a lot of people for a long time. If they were just doing it now, it would be just a sign that people paid for something. But the blue check used to mean you are who you say you are.

I think there's an argument that even if you did it now, the blue checkmark means something on every other platform. So you're inheriting all that. But it doesn't matter because it was Twitter. And it did mean that. And they changed it. And now it just means payment. And people are being confused. And Europe has warned X about this.

X does not support Elon Musk does not support the idea of the European Union. Like literally he's like the EU should be. dissolved. Rural Section already he got the fine. So Brendan Carr, of course, has waded into this because he can't possibly

stay out of anything. And he says, once again, Europe is finding a successful U.S. tech company for being a successful U.S. tech company.

Europe is taxing Americans to subsidize a continent held back by Europe's own suffocating regulations. Gracious. So a lot here. One, the idea

that X is a successful US tech company is very funny. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Like, straightforward. orderly very funny. Twitter was not a successful U.S. tech company. Twitter was a failing disaster of a company that Elon was able to buy by simply saying, what if I offer you more money than you think you can make? And Twitter's board of directors is like, it turns out we have

no idea how to make money. You can have it. So the idea that X is successful and it is only declining in users mostly serves as like a Nazi bar full of auto-generated groc replies that say Elon is a better athlete than Ron James. Very funny. So Brennan, on the face of it is a dummy. Second, taxing Americans who subsidize a continent, it's $140 million. If you can subsidize all of Europe, $140 million at a time, like, what are you doing? And on top of that, it's not as though Brendan doesn't like taxing and fining companies to get what he wants politically. This is the main thing Brendan does, right? Brendan says you want a deal, you got to fire your late night hosts.

Right? You can do this the hardware or the easy way. I'm going to take away your broadcast licenses because I don't like the news on your news stations. Brendan loves suffocating companies with regulations when it suits his agenda. And in this case, the agenda of the European Union is just if you verify people, you have to actually verify that they're real. So the users on your platform are not confused. There are lots of regulations in the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act that our tech companies hate. Truly, meaningfully hate.

There are some that are bad, right? Europe is walking away from its own cookie regulations because everyone thinks the cookie banners are bad. This one, don't let people lie in your platforms about who they are for money. Reasonably straightforward. Like, meta isn't running into this one. Meta is going to run into the don't trick people into having sex with your AI chatbots and then drive them crazy. crazy regulation that is inevitably coming. It's not...

It's weird that they had the foresight to write that in exactly those terms. I should be in charge of European regulation. Don't drive people bonkers with sex bots. Signed Europe. It's fun. It's like X got hit with the dumb one because they don't pay attention. They don't give a shit about anything. And now Brendan's in the mix.

Once again, sign it. Anyway, that's Brendan. Brendan, as always, you're welcome to come on the show or Decoder. Really, meet me in Vegas. You're speaking at CES. We can talk live on a stage of Vegas about how you're a dummy with no good ideas and a completely incoherent worldview that only serves to support the increase of your power and not actually consumer benefits in any way, shape, or form. That's my invitation to you, Brendan, as always. This has been Brennan Carr's a dummy America's favorite podcast for the podcast.

That's good stuff. This is a total diversion. But you saying funding Europe $140 million at a time made me think about, do you remember, I think it was 2019, this guy got arrested and eventually accused of basically scamming Google and Facebook out of, I think it was like $100 million by literally just sending them bills that the companies paid. And he just sent them invoices and contracts and basically was like, you owe me money. And these companies have so much money and so little. process, then they were just like, sure. Yeah. It's like, I just now I'm imagining Europe doing that, that they're just like, what's the

biggest number we can get away with finding them before? If we had 10% more grifter in us. I know. You know? If I just had that idea first, it would have been fine. I wouldn't have gotten caught because I wouldn't have done it. And we had to done it a little bit and then we got to stop. And they wouldn't, you know?

I don't need $100 million. Give me like $35. 100% grifter, you can't stop. And then you get caught. You need 10%. It's a real problem. Someone vibe code me an app called 10% Grifter that just generates these ideas. All right.

My next one, every once in a while, as you know, I get way too excited about a web browser. And I need you to sort of rein me in. And I have to tell you, I'm currently way too excited about a web browser. This is exciting web browser. Google just launched this thing called Disco. And Disco is, it's a new web browser, but it's not like they're not trying to do Chrome again. This is an experiment inside of one of their labs. this is a thing Google does a lot.

But the thing about Disco is that it's not designed to be a general purpose browser. It's essentially a testing bed for this new thing that Google calls Gen Tabs. And basically, the way a Gen Tab works is you open up what they call a project. Again, all of the names are different and they don't make sense. But the actual structure of the thing is fairly straightforward. You open up a new project and it just shows you like a Gemini chat box. And you type in a prompt. And it's like I, the one they showed me was, I'm going on a trip to Japan.

Can you help me plan it? Right? This is like an absolutely normal thing that everybody does with chatbots. Google only solves problems for wealthy Google engineers. 100%. So you do that.

And then what it does is it goes through the normal sort of Gemini research process. But rather than just delivering you back like a wall of text and links, it does two things simultaneously. It opens a bunch of tabs for you with those pages. Rather than just say, here's something that actually opens.

It was three tabs in every demo that I got. I don't know if that is like. required, but that's what it was in every demo I saw. And then it creates this thing called a gen tab, which is basically a tiny one-off web app for every single one of these projects that you create. So in this case, with the trip planner, it actually just took a map of Japan and plotted out a bunch of points over it, and it let you sort of filter by different kinds of things that you wanted to see, and you could click on one and add it to an itinerary, and it was building you an itinerary. So it's just basically like very rudimentary trip planning app that it just generated

it out of nothing because I made this prompt. And what they're trying to figure out as far as I can tell is like how what, what is this thing that we're making here? What they're trying to figure out is what is this? No, like, I mean, what the question I asked them is I was like, okay, what, what is a gen tab? Should I think of a gen tab as as like a Google Doc, like a sort of permanent artifact that I'm making that I can come back to and edit another time that I can share with other people that sort of lives in an addressable URL somewhere? Or is this just like a silly little thing in my browser that goes away the minute I close the tab. And the both women I was talking to were both like, we don't know. We're trying to figure it out. That's why we're doing this.

But there was just this moment I had getting this demo that it was like, okay, it's actually, it is opening an interactive AI app that is doing more work than any of these tabs individually can do for me. But it's also opening the tabs. And then if you open new tabs in that project and you refresh the gen tab, it will pull the data out of the tabs that you've opened and into the gen. tab. So you tell it what you think is interesting by going to web pages. And for me, as somebody who was like, I care a lot about people going to web pages, but I also think like AI is clearly a part of the future of search and the way people experience the internet. This to me felt like the most web forward version of AI browsing that I had ever seen. And I got very excited about it.

Well, so this is why they did it a not Chrome app, right? They made a little toy so they could push the idea as far without scaring everyone. Right, because you know it didn't show up once in the whole thing was Google Search. You know what I mean? But yeah, it is, what if AI mode was the whole browser is kind of the shtick? Well, at I.O.

this past year, Sundar demoed the future of search is on the fly vibe coded apps. Yeah. And a big part of Gemini 3 is that it can do these interactive things. Right. Like you searched about the solar system and it made you an interactive model of the solar system because Google's demos in that context

are usually as benign as they can be. Yeah. The one they showed me in this demo was a human ankle. Yeah. Sure. Right. You got ankle problems and it makes you an ankle

to show you. Like, I get it. But like the actual scary demo is instead of going to, you know, some, an actual travel site,

Google is going to build you a travel site on the fly, pulling all the data agent in its way through booking a flight and you're done. Right? I mean,

that's like, that's the game they're actually trying to play. Yes. And the idea that the search results page every single time should be a custom application that can do the thing you want

or deliver the information you need. is very powerful. The idea that it has to open tabs in the background to get that data really just suggests that they need to start keep delivering page views. I do think they need to keep delivering page views, but I also think they understand that getting your input is the best way to make these systems better very quickly, right?

Like what every one of these things needs is to generate the first version of this app and then have me make it better. And everyone is struggling how to do, that next turn because when you ask me to make some like aggressive product change to the app, you've made me do a lot of like actually very complicated work. So one of the things they have is they have a bunch of like suggested refinements that show up at the top of the gen tab that's just like, here are ways you might want to change this thing. Just in theory. Give it a, give it a world. Or you can type in whatever you want it to be, you know, change the colors, show it in some different

way, whatever. But what they also really want you to do is they're like, you need to give us the data to make this thing useful. And one way you do that is by going to websites and looking at what the data is. And it was just like, it was the first time it's been like, oh, Google understands that actually me using the internet is a good and useful thing.

It's glad to know that maybe not everyone has forgotten this fact. I'm very curious about this. I think the notion of like the Google search experience being custom developed applications on the fly, it's a big idea. It is a big idea. I'm less certain that a bunch of people at tech companies and Silicon Valley in particular

understand that not everybody cares about the world in the context of applications. You can see this disconnect where you're like, I could just build myself an app to do a thing. And then you leave the bubble and you tell someone that you can automate your smart home to turn on the lights when you unlock the door

and their minds are just like, what are you talking about? And there's just a huge distance between those ideas. Agreed. That, like, computer programs are a thing that you should do.

Shortcuts. You've done, like, how many episodes about shortcuts now? Too many. You have not gained one user of shortcuts.

You've not created one additional user of shortcuts on iOS. Sorry, I'm just saying, like, there's something about this idea that, like,

the computer is going to develop applications to be on the fly that's really powerful that runs right into the reality of, like, people do not care about that thing.

No, and it's a, like, fundamental misunderstanding of what people actually do with Google search, which is type Facebook. You know what I mean? But I do think,

so I think the idea that this is like extremely the future of browsing is, is not correct. But I also think what everybody is trying to do with AI is bring it closer to the activities people are already doing, right? It's like the, what if I can have the chat bot have some awareness of the tab that you're looking at so that it can start to do stuff. And I think, and we may disagree on this,

but I think there is actually a ton of useful stuff to do. in there. Summarization stuff is really useful. Data manipulation stuff is really useful. There's just a lot you can do if the AI and the tab can see each other. And this to me just feels like the next step of that without removing the tab, which is what everybody is trying to do. They're like, chat GPT is not interested in you opening web pages. It'll let you if you have to, but it would love for you to not open any web pages. And I think Google, more than most companies, has a incentive to, make you look at web pages, but B should also be the one understanding that, yes, webpages are good and valuable things that we should look at.

Google built its empire by tracking you across the web. They're like a deep level. They understand this. I'm curious. Is it out? Can I get this? I want to play with it. You can get on the wait list, but I, not to brag, but I know some people. We can maybe make this happen. I like it. All right. What's your last one? We got to end by covering the only thing we cover here at the Vergecast. Everything else is just a build to us covering girls. door technology. Oh, God. It kind of is.

Why do we exist to cover garage door? To ask Craig Federigi how his garage doors open and close. We've been on the speed a lot. Gen 2E has been on the speed very closely. There is a garage door monopoly in this country. And it's the Chamberlain group, which definitely sounds like a group of government mercenary contractors. But the Chamberlain group owns all the garage door openers. And they continually try to block third-party garage door openers.

from working with their motors so they can lock you into the MyQ system which requires a subscription. This is true. Oh, that's awful. The only third-party thing they consistently work with is the Home Link buttons in cars

because they get a license fee. Money. It's all money. That's the most, like, nakedly gross tech thing you've described to me in a while. The garage door opener market is dirty, it's gross. This is the mob doing mob stuff

in garage doors because they're a huge monopoly. So they had Security Plus and then Security Plus 2.0 And they've been in this fight with garage door opening systems. So like I think Joanna Stern and I both have M. Ross things, which literally just, they just close the contact at the motor itself. So you just wire it into the terminals on the motor that go to the button on the wall that closes that contact. That's out now because Chamberlain is getting rid of all wired controls for its garage door openers. and with Security Plus 3.0 going to wireless only, which is encrypted,

if only its buttons, can use that protocol. So, like, the entire ecosystem of smart home hacks to open chamberl and garage doors is, like, under threat. They shut it down. Jen has talked to everyone because she knows all the garage door people. My favorite third-party garage opener is Ratko, which stands for rage against the garage door opener. Amazing. All of this is shut down. The only option is what some of them do, which is they will sell you,

a actual physical garage drawer opener button and they have just wired those contacts in the button to their thing. So they're faking, pressing the button. Good Lord. Very funny. This is an official M-Ross hack, by the way. And then there's my favorite of these things,

which is called the third reality. And it is of the motor. And you put your opener in it and a big button comes down and pushes the button. This sucks, man. It's very good. It's very good. The third reality is it's $50.

It is matter compatible. So it works with everything. And it is literally just a thing that pushes the garage to opener button. And that is the only way to get around Chamberlain's dominant monopoly. I'm really imagining like a huge foam finger just sort of dangling from the ceiling to press this one button for you. It's not not what it is. Do you know what I mean? A lot of incredible comments on this post, including Chamberlain having to find ways to block the third reality button masher requiring fingerprint authentication.

My God. There are competitors in market. Ryobie is coming out with one. There are other garage or opener vendors. But changing your garage or opener motor is a very hard thing to do. Yeah. That's not a Neil is going to screw around. An excellent latest house on fire DIY.

That's if you get it wrong, the spring snaps and kills you. So people are very reticent to do this on their own. You should not do this on your own. But there are competitors. This is why Chamberlain has a monopoly, because no one thinks are replacing these things. I'm sorry, it's not Robbie. Robbie had one.

Quickset is launching a matter-at-compatible garage drope in our motor. And I think that means we're all Quickset fan boys now. Yeah. Hell yeah. Go Quickset. This is not important, but if you have a product called Security Plus 3.0, I immediately don't like you as a company. Versus I'm out.

It's very bad. I mean, they killed Homebridge integration. People were doing all kinds of stuff to get MyQ to work nice. And Chamberlain is like, no, you've got to pay us money to use our shit app. You should really, I encourage everyone to read Jen's story about this, which has a headline that sounds like it's about the news. And then the first subhead is just in large text, the garage door wars. That's what we're doing.

It's very good. All right, we need to get out of here. We have gone way over. I mostly blame John Gruber for that. but it's worth it. It's really Marco Rubio's fault. Yeah, I'm going to write a memo about that to Marco. But that's it.

That's it for the show. Thank you to all of you for watching and listening. Thanks to Charlie for being here. If you want to hear more versions of Charlie's song, I'm going to try to convince him to upload it somewhere where we can all do horrible things with it and destroy it. Remember to subscribe to The Verge. Our subscription is now a year old.

You can get ad-free podcasts, this one and version history, Andy Coder. Speaking of which, Version History this weekend, Nilai is you and me and Walt Mossberg talking about the iPhone 4. That's a great time. And it's as much fun as I've had talking about phones in a very long time. It's a really good episode. Everyone will enjoy it.

You can email us, Virgcast at theBurge.com. Call the hotline 866 version 1-1. We're doing more year-end, year-ahead stuff with Joanna this weekend. All kinds of fun stuff. The Vergecast is just like full chaos until the end of the year, and then we're all going to go not speak to each other for a week, and it's going to be terrific. Until then, the Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you on Sunday. Nelai, rock around.