The Vergecast - Millions of books died so Claude could live

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

AI companies want all the data, everywhere, to make their models bigger and better. That means a lot of questions about piracy and copyright, and at least in one case it means Anthropic systematically destroying countless books just to feed them to the model. The Washington Post's Will Oremus joins the show to explain how that worked, why Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI and others are doing it, and what the law has to say. Then, Puck's Julia Alexander helps David figure out whether Netflix is serious about showing movies in theaters, and what theaters need to do to survive in the entertainment business going forward. Further reading: From The Washington Post: Anthropic ‘destructively’ scanned millions of books to build Claude Anthropic wins a major fair use victory for AI — but it’s still in trouble for stealing books Meta’s AI copyright win comes with a warning about fair use Did AI companies win a fight with authors? Technically From Puck: Why Netflix Needs Warner Bros. Welcome to the big leagues, Netflix 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

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of hydraulic powered cutting machines, a very cool phrase that is going to make sense in 10 minutes or so. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am currently phone shopping. So I have this iPhone 16, which is fine. It's blue, which is why I bought it, if we're being honest with each other. And the problem with it now is that I miss having some camera power, but what I really miss is having a battery that isn't awful. This battery is awful. Like I'm at like 3 p.m. every day, and I'm having to charge my battery. So there's a world in which I could just, you know, replace the battery or upgrade to an iPhone 17.

But I figure I'm a tech journalist. So what if I just go out and experience a bunch of phones? So I'm going to try a bunch of stuff. I have a pixel here. I think I need to get a foldable phone. But I actually want your help, which is, A, what phone do you think I should get? I'm in that phase of being sort of unusually willing to switch from iOS to Android. Switching operating systems has traditionally been very hard.

People largely don't do it. I'm very willing to do it. I don't know if the answer is, like, I should go get the, the Samsung Z trifold for $3,000, or buy one of the flip phones that everybody's excited about, including me, or if the answer is just shut up and go by the orange iPhone 17 Pro,

which I will like very much. I don't know. If you have thoughts, especially like weird thoughts about what phone I should get, I want to hear them. The hotline is 866, V-11. The email is Vergecast at theverge.com.

Get at me. I'm going to do a bunch of weird phone experiments on this show over the next couple of months, and then I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm going to break eye message forever. I know that for sure. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. Today, we're here to talk about two things.

First, we're going to talk to Will Oremis, a reporter at the Washington Post, about a big story he and a couple of his colleagues wrote about the way Anthropic and other companies are training their AI models using books in particular. There's some really fascinating details and some really big questions about how we're supposed to feel about AI inherent and all of that. So we're going to talk about it. Then Julia Alexander, our old colleague at The Verge, who is now at Puck, is going to come on and we're going to talk about Netflix and movie things. theaters. We've been talking a lot about Netflix recently, but I think this company is important and fascinating and also kind of a way to talk about the whole entertainment industry all at once. After that, we have a hotline about the smart home. Gen 2 is back answering weird smart home questions. It's going to be awesome. All that is coming up in just a second, but I've just realized

that I have to go charge like 12 phones in order to do this experiment. So here I go. It's phone charging time. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security

built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion?

If you look at the back of the bottle, it could consider. contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. So over the last couple of years, there has been this slew of lawsuits against AI companies,

all about the way that they've trained their models. These AI models, these large language models, require just a vast amount of data. And to get all of that data, these companies are going and getting whatever they can. There was lots of reporting a couple of years ago about Open AI essentially transcribing every YouTube video on the planet and then feeding all of that into its models.

There's been a lot of talk about books in particular, a lot of authors and publishers suing these companies over the way that they are acquiring and then actually using that data to train their own models. So Will Aramis at the Washington Post wrote a story with a couple of his colleagues about this thing called Project Panama, which was an anthropic project to digitize and use just an unbelievably staggering amount of books to train its models. And it's not the only company doing this, but we have a lot of interesting data thanks to some newly unsealed documents in these cases. Will and his colleagues went through all of it. And so I'm going to make Will explain to me how this works and why it's become such a big part of our conversation about AI.

It's a really fun conversation. Let's get into it. Will Aramis, welcome to the Verkcast. Thanks for having me. It's snowy. It's icy. You've made it. We're all, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're just hanging on by a thread right now. I've, I've, I've, I'm joining you, I'm doing. Uh, it's all good. I'm ready to go. Yeah, my, my kids have been home from school a week and I am just very slowly coming outside of my brain and body as, as, as, as, as, as the days go on. Mine is, mine is, mine is in the house. Mine is in the house. as we speak. So if you hear any squeals of delight or cries of terror, it's him in the background. It's just don't worry about it. Everything's fine. Exactly. So you were part of a team that wrote this

story for The Watching Post about Anthropic and this big book digitization project they underwent that I think gets at a bunch of the most interesting things going on in AI. There's a piece of this that is like how AI models actually get made that I think people largely don't understand. understand that this, I think, elucidates in a really interesting way. And it also gets to a big galaxy brain theory I have about AI that we're going to talk about at the end. I'm very excited about it. I'm looking forward to that. Let's just start at the beginning here. What was Project Panama? And why is this something that Anthropic, a while back, threw real resources into? Project Panama was something that Anthropic started in late 2023 or early 2024 with the goal

to, quote, destructively scan all the books in the world. Such a brutal sentence. It's, yeah, it's really unfortunate. It sounds like something a Bond villain would set out to do. They didn't actually want to destroy all the physical books in the world. Just one copy, one copy of each. Sure. So what they were trying to do, though, is to scan the books.

And the destructive part comes in with the way that the books were scanned. It's more efficient to slice the spines off and scan them. So you've just got a stack of pages instead of, you know, you've ever tried to spread out a book on a Xerox? it's like a little difficult. So they just cut the spines off. I think there was some indication in the court documents that they would, you know, a recycling truck would come and back up to the warehouse afterwards and get what was left

of the books. But the point was that they wanted to digitize all the books. And the reason they wanted to do that is to feed the content of those books into their AI models, which power the popular chatbot claw. So why books? I think a thing you discovered in, and a lot of this information we should say came out in court documents based on, I mean, there's just a massive. million lawsuits about all things AI right now. But one of the big ones, I think, that you got a lot of these

documents from is a sort of broad suit from a bunch of publishers and authors saying that their books and works were used illegally in the creation of these models. Is that right? That's where this data comes from. Yeah, that's correct. So you said, you said why books? And I think the first answer to why books is because everything, right? It wasn't just books. They wanted to, you know, the AI companies wanted to vacuum up everything that's published on the internet, everything that's published in government records, every video, every photo, every piece of art, everything, right? They wanted it all because they're trying to build general superintelligence and they wanted to know everything. But the second answer to why books is because books were specifically seen as a source of

really high quality, on average. I mean, there's crappy books out there, as we all know, But like on average, books are high quality content. They've been vetted by someone. Someone went to a lot of effort to write them. Someone deemed them worthy of publishing. They might be fact checked. They might contain information that you can't get anywhere else. You know, that's not on the open internet.

And so Anthropic, there's some evidence that Anthropics executive saw books as a way to catch up. And backing up for a second, I mean, Anthropic is an underdog in this massive AI race to control the of technology with bigger dogs like OpenAI, like Microsoft, like Google, like meta, and Anthropics saw books as a way to kind of bootstrap their way to the state of the art in terms of the quality of their models. Okay. So I do, I find the quality piece of this really interesting because it does seem like if you were to just train a model on, I don't know, YouTube videos, which is a thing that has been talked about a lot, right? If you were just to transcribe and feed every YouTube video in existence into an AI model, it would learn to talk in kind of a very specific way.

And it would learn to talk in a very different, very specific way if you just fed it the content of social media posts or blogs. I'm just thinking about the things that are sort of readily available on the internet. Like if you just train a model on Tumblr, it would talk like Tumblr. And books, it occurs to me, are if you want something that speaks in coherent sentences, that maybe books are the right place to start with, that at the top of it you have something that is designed to be read and consumed and understood by lots of people that has been through a whole process to make sure that that's okay.

So in a way, it seems like it is kind of the pantheon idea of how you want to teach these chatbots to communicate, right? Yeah, I think so. And, you know, to be clear, Anthropic wasn't the only company. company that thought books were important. But I do wonder if the emphasis they put on books, and this is pure speculation on my part. I do wonder if the emphasis they put on books is one reason why a lot of people swear by a Claude as the best writer out of the chatbots. Interesting. Who want to use AI for writing often will say Claude's better than chat GPT or the other options out there. That's a good theory. So walk me through the process here.

I think one of the things I just kept thinking about reading your story is like if I'm at the beginning of this journey. And I'm like, okay, I want to get a bunch of books into my model. I literally don't know how I would start. So where, how does one, first of all, I think, I assume step one is acquire many, many, many, many books and put them all somewhere. How do you do that if you're anthropic or anyone else? Well, I don't know if this is the best time to bring this in, but, but the way they actually started was not by acquiring real physical books. The way they started, which is the same way that, according to court documents, Open AI is alleged to have started, which is by pirating vast libraries of already digitized books. These are called shadow libraries.

They're available online and shady corners of the torrent world. And there are allegations in a separate case against Open AI that one of the Open AI executives named Ben Mann back, I think back in 2019, like way before the chat GPT boom, downloaded the entirety of this famous shadow library called Libgen from a torrent site. Right. Libgen, I should say, is like, if you imagine what the pirate bay is, it's that for books. Like, literally there's a pirate ship on the website. It's not unclear what this library is trying to do.

Right, right. And I mean, the backstory of Libgen in particular is fascinating. We don't need to go too deep into it, but it has its roots in Russian Samizdat. when academics were trying to get access to verboten materials to evade censorship. But nowadays, it's traded around online as this vast, like probably illegal repository of millions of digitized books. And so OpenAI allegedly downloaded this. And then the guy who allegedly downloaded it at OpenAI was one of the people who left OpenAI to co-found Anthropic. And so then he gets to Anthropic and he does it again.

He downloads all of LibGen again at Anthropic. and there's like the core documents, you know, there's screenshots of his browser with this, you know, with the Torrent site open and like LibGen partway downloaded. And so that's how they started. It's just straight up piracy. I don't know if I need a legend in there. I think they've like they're not really contesting it. It was basically straight up piracy. It's all over like their emails to each other that this is a thing that they're doing. Yes. And that is a fairly accurately stipulated part of what happened here. Yes. And again, our story is about anthropopical. because that's the company where we found newly unsealed court documents that shown a light on this big project Panama to acquire real books and scan them. But once again, I just want to emphasize that, like, as far as we know all of the AI companies were trying to get their hands on books, and there's evidence that more than one company was downloading these pirated shadow libraries and not just, not just anthropic. Okay. But you got to tell me about the physical books, Will, this is the thing I still cannot wrap my head around. I understand downloading lots of things illegal on the internet. I've done that. We've all done that, right?

Like, I get how to download things on the internet. I've never done that. No, I've never downloaded. That's right. We should be clear. This is not legal advice. But I literally, I just found myself being like, okay, if I, if you just came to me and were like, David, you have unlimited resources, go get me 100,000 books as fast as you. I straight up would not know where to begin. And one of the things I thought was so funny about this is, I think we're anthropological. began was by hiring the guy who had done it already, which leads me to believe there is like a how to buy books by the million expert out there in the world who is just running around doing

this for people. I love these venture-backed tech companies. They're like, okay, we need to figure out how to scan a ton of books. Let's go hire the guy who literally oversaw the Google Books project, like the biggest books project in the scanning project in the history of the world. Let's just go get that guy on the payroll and let him figure it out. So they hired this guy, Tom Turvey. This is why, David, this is why they did not hire David Pierce because you wouldn't know where to start. But Tom did. I would have not done a good job. I will say I got to the last round of interviews for that.

And then they were like, how do you do it? I'm like, I don't know. And then that was it. Man, next time. Next time. So Google books, by the way, non-destructively, as I understand it, non-destructively scanned books. They used this much slower process involving robots to go through and scan all the pages without breaking the spines. It's kind of, like, fascinating.

I went down many rabbit holes in the course of reporting this. story, and that was one of them. But in this case, they didn't feel like they had time for that. There's also a difference between Google Books was scanning books from libraries, right? And so this is going to include rare and valuable books. You don't, I mean, if you're a library, you don't really want a company going through and slicing the spines off all your books. In this case, what Anthropic did, there is some evidence that Turvey did a bit of outreach to publishers and authors like, hey, could we, what would happen if we wanted to license your work, you know, use it to train our AIs? Could we, would you be open to that? And pretty quickly, he decides that's not

viable. It's going to be too expensive. A lot of authors and publishers aren't open to it. Even if they are, like, it's not going to work at the scale and at the speed that anthropic needs, presumably the scale and the speed they need to compete in this, in this all-out race to build superintelligence first. And so instead, he turns to these vast, used book warehouses, like better World Books, which I believe has an agreement with the Internet Archive. There's another one called World of Books that I think is based in the UK. I apologize if I'm getting them mixed up. But these are places that actually literally have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of books, mostly not rare or super valuable books, I should say. So destroying them isn't,

you know, isn't necessarily a tragedy for humanity. And then they're super cheap. You know, he buys them in bulk in giant amounts and then finds these scanning shops. that can do it. It's super fast and get, you know, I think at the very least they got, there was one order in the court documents with a vendor who was supposed to supply them something like half a million used books at once. Wow. That is nuts. So, okay, let me, let me tell you the picture that's in my head of how this works and you tell me how correct I am. The way that I picture it is, do you know those those money counting machines that you just take a stack of bills and sort of stick it into and it just like threw through it really fast and

sorts them all out for you. I'm imagining that essentially, but for a book. And so you get a thing that slices off the binding. So what you have is just a giant stack of papers. You feed that stack of papers into this machine and it just rapidly slots them through and scans them one by one. And out you have a digitized OCR book. That is, that's my understanding as well. And I should say, I didn't observe this happening. I'm, you know, I think we're both extrapolating from what was in the in the court documents and the files. But it, that sounds basically. basically right to me. Okay. They called it a hydraulic powered cutting machine, which is another of the extremely good phrases that come up in this. We have we have shadow libraries,

we have destructive scanning, and we have hydraulic powered cutting machines. Like, there's just, this all feels very low stakes bond villainy. Like you said, there's a lot going on here. Right. Okay. So then you end up with whatever. It seems like somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of books worth of stuff that goes into these models at the end of the process. Yeah, that's there's, is that right? The exact numbers are still redacted, but we're extrapolating from the fact that some of these orders were for hundreds of thousands of books at a time. Okay, got it. And then, you know, fast forward to the small start to ship.

People start to use them and people start to find their own work in them. And then you get to these lawsuits. And so my biggest question for you here is we've talked over time about a lot of the different ways that these companies have gone and gotten material. And I think your point about Anthropics' experience of saying we went out and we asked people if we could buy it or license it and found it to not be expedient, ordinarily what happens is then you don't do the thing. And what they, all of these companies, and like Anthropic is not uniquely guilty of this. All of these companies just did it anyway. And it became the thing that happened. And I want to come back to that because I think this gets to the Galaxy Brain Theory.

I'm going to throw at you in a minute. But is there something different about what happened to and with? books than what happened with all of these other sources. We've talked a lot about, you know, source material from all kinds of different stuff on the internet being fed into these models. And there are a lot of questions about it. But it does feel like the way that books are being both discussed and actually litigated is different. Is it different? Yeah, I think it is a little different. And one of the reasons is because so much of what went into these AI models, particularly at first, was stuff that was just available on the internet, right? That was the low-hanging fruit.

And if your stuff was just available on the internet, it's not that you couldn't possibly have a case, a copyright case. There have certainly been lawsuits about that stuff. But I think that there's a sense that you have a stronger case. If you had something that was supposed to be bought, like you weren't supposed to be able to just get it for free. And they got it for free somehow anyway without your permission. That's seen as, I think, a stronger copyright case. And in fact, we can get into this a bit, but in some of the court rulings so far, that in fact has turned out to be the case. The judges in both the Anthropic and the META case, albeit for different reasons, both found that the actual training of the AI model on the book content was fair use.

Or at least that the plaintiffs, in META's case, at least that the plaintiffs had failed to show that it wasn't fair use. So the part that everybody thought that these lawsuits would really revolve around was this unauthorized training. And that's the part that at least two judges so far have been like, actually, that part was okay. The problem was how you acquired these books in the first place. So I think that is what makes books different is the fact that they're difficult to obtain and that you had to go to these wild lengths to get them in the first place. Interesting. As opposed to, you know, there's there's a thing that someone wrote that. is just at a publicly available link on the internet, that the legal definition notwithstanding,

that feels different from a book that you ordinarily would have to go to a store and buy. Yeah, exactly. And then there's in between stuff. So like one of the most high profile AI copyright cases is New York Times versus Open AI. And in that case, there's been a lot of discussion about how did Open AI get around the New York Times paywall, right? Like what did they do to circumvent that in order to get access to all the New York Times material? Okay. Suss out the difference here for me, because I could sort of see in the piece you spent a lot of time reckoning with the where we are on the legal spectrum here. Is it illegal to train the model on this information?

Full stop. No, because it is transformative and fair use. And my sense from the reporting I've done and from the story that you wrote is that there are a lot of people who are like, okay, that is an early decision. That is kind of where the winds are blowing, but this is by no means settled law. Is that right? That's right. Yeah, it's very much still unsettled law. And the two big rulings that we looked at with the book authors are Anthropic and then this other case, Cadre v. Meta. And I think it was really interesting that the judges in the two cases, even though they both ruled that it was fair use to train the AI models on the book content, they had totally different reasoning. In fact, the judge in the meta case who ruled afterwards criticized the ruling of the judge in the anthropic case. So the judge in the anthropic case said, when you use books to train an AI, model, that is, quote, exceedingly transformative, end quote. And transformative is one of the key tests of whether something is fair use. So, like, you know, if you copied a million books and then you turned

around and sold them for 10 cents apiece, like, that's probably, I'm not a copyright lawyer, but that's probably a pretty clear cut copyright violation. But he's saying if you take a million books and then you feed them into this AI model and you put out a chatbot that like answers people's questions and doesn't produce entire books verbatim, which, by the way, there's nothing in the record that indicates that Claude would spit out, you know, these books verbatim, even if you asked it to. That's something different. It doesn't compete with the books. And so that's fair use. In the meta case, the judge was like, actually, I think you could probably give me lots of good arguments that using books to train AI models is going to end up hurting the market for books, right?

You're going to end up with AI models that can produce a book of their own, even if it's not exactly the same. You're going to end up, and we already have this. I mean, there are AI rip-offs of books all over Amazon. I mean, anybody who's published a book lately has probably seen some crappy AI clone of it turn up on Amazon. And the judge in Meta was like, you guys just didn't, you failed to argue that. Like, you didn't bring me the evidence of that, so I can't rule on that. But he left open the possibility that it might not be fair use. But in any case, what both companies are still, what Anthropic ended up having to settle over, rather than go to trial, and what meta is still facing litigation over is how they acquired

the books in the first place. And the thing I've never been able to figure out is why that fact doesn't kind of obviate and make it relevant the other fact. Like, I got this data illegally. Now I can legally use it. Just doesn't, I don't know, I have a hard time following from one to the other. Does that make sense? Yeah, and I did too.

I mean, it's completely counterintuitive. I don't know how deep we want to go on this, but the Anthropic ruling, as someone who's not a lawyer, was really counterintuitive to me. So actually, the books that Anthropic scanned, acquired legally, scanned, and then fed into commercially released models of Claude, that was ruled to be fair use. What the judge was not going to let them off the hook for and what they were going to face trial over in potentially tens of billions, maybe hundreds of billions in statutory damages had they lost in the worst way possible, was. the books that they did not use for training commercially released models. Because he's like, if your defense is that this was fair use, that the reason you acquired these books was to do something totally different with them, then the ones that you didn't use, that can't be fair use. It can't be fair use if there was no use. And so what they got in trouble for were the ones they

didn't use, ironically, and had just stored and decided not to put into their commercially released models. There are other legal experts who think this decision was like totally weird and backwards, but that was the ruling. And so Anthropic ended up settling with the authors in this case for $1.5 billion, which if you're Anthropic is a lot of money, probably not so much if you're like, if you're meta. Right. It is both a lot of money in raw terms and not a lot of money compared to, I think, the scale

some of the people against this are talking about. I mean, we've been hearing, I think it was Mark Andreessen a while back who was like, if we had to pay a fair price for all of this data, the AI industry would go out of business. And all these people were like, yeah, dude, that's our whole point. That is the thing we're trying to say. We agree on this fact. And so I think, again, all of this is unsettled. But this brings me to the thing that I've been thinking about a lot. And a thing I've spent a lot of time reporting on and talking to people about and just trying

to figure out is why the reflexive backlash to AI is so intense and where it originates from. And a theory that I've developed, and I'm just curious what you think about this, is I think there is a sort of original sin in the AI community. And I think it lays at the feet of Open AI for starting the race the way that it did. And there's a bunch of this in your story. But Open AI basically started as this sort of academic research team building things for academic research purposes, essentially. And they did a bunch of things that in academia are generally done, right? Like take a bunch of research papers and put them into your AI model. Less problematic when you're doing something to extend research than when you're doing it

to try to make billions and billions and billions of dollars. They did this thing. And then as Open AI became a commercial product, it didn't change the way that it acted to source and train its models. And I think, again, this is just a theory, but I'm increasingly convinced that I'm about this, that I think the way, the sort of cavalier way that Open AI approached, building and training its models, and then the fact that it released it and started this war where everyone had to catch up as fast as they possibly could, or risk being essentially left behind by this, like, train

that was already out of the station. So you get meta having to essentially run the same playbook and take the same shortcuts. You have Anthropic, essentially having to run the same playbook and take the same shortcuts. Anthropic, in many ways, it seems like actually tried to do this in a more upstanding way by actually going and buying some books in the world, which is something, right? Like, that adds to the fair use questions, but at least they bought the damn books. That counts for something. And to me, it's just like if you back it all the way up, if they had just come to the end of the, well, we can't do this, this will take a while and cost us a lot of money. And they had decided to take the time and spend the money. I think as a society, we might

feel really different about AI. I think that's a really compelling theory. I think a lot of people, I think some of the anti-AI sentiment does come from this feeling that there was a grand theft at the beginning of it, that nobody was asked for permission. And they just took everything anyway. And now they're making, you know, they're poised to make billions upon billions of dollars and transform, you know, replace, put people out of work with a product that was built on the back of those people's labor. I think that's, you know, that's at the root of some of the backlash against AI. I think there's probably even more to it than that. I should, a couple quick notes. I think you're right.

I mean, I think there is a way of looking at what Anthropic did where you're like, at least in the scheme of the different tactics that the AI companies took. I mean, Anthropic was doing it like almost relatively the right way, right? Like they started by pirating stuff. And then once Claude was out and commercial, they were like, let's try to find a more legal way to get these books and try to put ourselves on better legal footing. Yeah, there's a way in which what Anthropos is. was doing was like trying to do the relatively right thing. But I think there is a sense from the people

who created all these works in the first place, the books, the movies, even the blog posts, that the actual right way would have been to come and ask permission and maybe pay people to license, even if it's a little bit, you know, just pay the fair share. But so far, that's not the way the judges' rulings are going. So, but I want to come back to this sort of what does it look like to be the good guy here? Because, I think if I were to be unexpectedly slightly sympathetic to the Anthropic team here, it does seem like there's a lot of stuff in the documents that have been out, and there's been a lot of stuff in these trials that has essentially made it seem like

the people at these companies, including Anthropic and META and others, who have felt like they had no choice but to play this game this way, right? They looked at it and they said, okay, there is no good. good guy here. There is only winning and losing. And our opportunity is either to play this game the way that we have to play it or we lose. But you've been in these documents a lot more than I have. Do you have a sense of if there were folks inside of these companies who identified kind of the white hat way to go about building these things that might have actually worked? Was there an alternative? There is relatively little discussion in the documents I saw beyond what I've already described. of better and more ethical ways to do this. I think, you know, again, this is not coming directly from the documents. This is an inference, but I think you're right that there's a sense as you read these court files

that it was understood that, you know, we can't afford to lose this race. And, you know, let's try to get legal sign off. Let's try to get approval for what we can do. But losing isn't an option. Right. I mean, on the meta side, right, there's some implication that these, these debates went all the way up to Mark Zuckerberg. And he's the one, like, Mark Zuckerberg has made very clear that he feels it is an existential risk to lose the AI race.

So it's not surprising that he would push comes to shove, say, essentially by whatever means necessary. Yeah. And so what we have there is we can sort of infer that from a document where there's an internal chat between Facebook employees. And one of them says after prior escalation to MZ being presumably Mark Zuckerberg, you know, Gen AI has been approved to use LibGen, which is, again, the shadow library. And so, you know, we'd have to speculate about exactly what Zuckerberg knew. I mean, he said late, he said in a, I believe in a deposition that he didn't know what LibGen didn't, he said, I don't really know what that is. But, you know, you can make a meal out of what that sentence actually does and doesn't say.

You know what I mean? Yeah. And these are not direct quotes, by the way, but this is my recollection, my best recollection of what the documents said. And I think one more thing that's noteworthy here, is that in any field, you know, under capitalism, there are companies racing to try to be the winner because, you know, if you're the loser, it doesn't matter what your ethics are if you don't, if your company doesn't exist anymore, right? But in AI in particular, this industry is so shaped by this idea that we have to be first in order to save the world. Like, that's the founding principle of open AI. Like, we have to be, let's found a company that's going to build AI in an open way to save the world from these hypothetical other companies that would build AI in a closed way.

And then it turns out that in a lot of people's view, Open AI did move to a more closed way. And so you get people splitting off and forming Anthropic, for instance, saying like Open AI has strayed from its principles. We can't trust them to save the world from runaway superintelligence anymore. We've got to do it. We've got to be the saviors. But again, if you don't win the race, you don't get to dictate how the superintelligence turns out. And so it's this really, it's this sort of moral paradox where everybody's like, the ends justify the means. And so, you know, we might have to break some eggs along the way to save,

you know, because the ultimate goal here is to save the world. Yeah. And if you believe the stakes are that high, and I think a lot of people in this industry earnestly do, then, then yeah, the breaking a few eggs along the way is a pretty worthy sacrifice. And that's, that's why some Some critics believe that maybe some regulations would be in order in order to constrain that race in some way. Some critics, some reasonable people, some normal people. I'm an objective journalist, David. All right. We've got to take a break.

But, Will, if you ever get your hands on one of these book scanners, I demand that you come back and show me how it works. This is the only thing. I feel like I have a pretty decent picture of how this thing works. But I just need to know how big the scanner is, is part of it. Like, is it the size of a room? Is it a thing I could put on my... I just, I need to know everything about how to scan books very quickly. Now I have the big Lobowski line in my head.

Like, you need a scanner, David? I can get you a scanner. We'll see. You can have me back on if I get you the scanner. Deal. All right. Until then, Will, thank you for being here. This is great.

Thanks for having me. We've got to take a break. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools? I've really put my all into this.

One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce. They offer a host of helpful tools you can take advantage of, from payment processing to analytics to website design. Their design studio includes hundreds of templates to help you create the exact website you've been envisioning for your business. If you're wondering, what if I need help? Then no worries, because you're never left to FendFenton.

yourself. Shopify's award-winning customer support is available 24-7. It's time to turn those what-ifs into a thriving business with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. Go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all, all by yourself. are over. There's no romance in burning out while you're trying to scale. Instead, you can check out Upwork. Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialize talent across more than 125 categories so you can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale without committing to full-time headcount. And finding the right talent is easy. You can browse profiles,

review past work, and get help scoping the role so you can get started quickly. Seriously, you could connect with the right freelancer in just a few hours, especially when you sign up with Business Plus. Their AI-powered shortlisting pairs you with the top 1% of talent in under six hours. No endless search are required. You can visit upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-rk.com.

Upwork.com. 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. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates

and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist 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. All right, we're back. So now let's talk about Netflix. We talked last week about Netflix and podcasts. And now I want to talk about kind of the exact opposite end of the spectrum, which is big, huge, splashy movie theater movies from Netflix. Netflix has made a lot of noise about the way that it's going to think about movie theaters and movies as it tries to buy Warner Brothers. This has become a big part of this deal is what will happen to the movie studio and the movie theater movies that Warner Brothers makes.

And Netflix says all the things you would expect it to, but the question of what does Netflix want from movie theaters and movies in general, I think is really fascinating. And brings up a lot of questions about what are movie theaters even for anymore? What does it mean to make a movie theater movie in 2026 if you're Netflix or anybody else? So Julia Alexander, who was our former colleague here at The Verge, she was actually on Decoder last week, also talking about Netflix. We're all very good at planning here at the verge. She's now at Puck writing about all of this stuff there. I asked her to come on the show and just basically explain to me what Netflix is doing, whether we can fix movie theaters and whether any of it even matters. So we had a lot of fun, and I think we did fix movie theaters.

So let's get into it. Julie Alexander, welcome to the Vergecast. So excited to be back after many years away from being on this podcast. No one ever gets away. This is one of the things Neely always says is no one ever actually leaves. And I'm very happy to have you back. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. It's one of the few podcasts I sincerely listen to.

When people say I listen to your podcast, I do actually listen and watch Vergecast. Do you have a lot of thoughts about Brendan Carr? That's actually what we're going to do now. Yeah, yeah. That's when I'm not texting Neelai about the Greenbait hackers, it's just Brendan. in car. Perfect. So I brought you here because I want to talk about movies and I want to talk specifically about movie theaters. Um, because we're, we're in this interesting moment. You, you spend a lot of time thinking about sort of the machinations of the whole media business. And I think a lot has been said about what's happening to movie theaters. Movie theaters have obviously been in kind of a bad way for a minute here. But now with this, with this Netflix, Warner Brothers Discovery deal potentially happening. Movie theaters are being talked about again. And I think, The more I think about movie theaters, the more it makes me think about the whole structure of what we consume and how. And so I just want to dig into some pieces of this with you.

But my first question for you as somebody who pays a lot of attention to the business of movies and TV is, do you think Netflix is serious when it says that if it buys Warner Brothers Discovery and takes over one of the biggest studios in Hollywood and would suddenly become if it wanted to a huge player in the theater business? do you think it's serious about caring for movie theaters and being a real player in movie theaters? This is one of those annoying, weasily, yes, but answers. There's a lot to the Netflixification of theatrical. And the issue is that a lot of what they're saying, as you know, and as you've talked about before on the podcast is, they're just saying stuff to get this through the regulatory hurdle. So, of course, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters co-CEOs of Netflix are going to come out and say, like, we love theaters.

Actually, we've been thinking about theaters forever, which is what they said on the most recent earnings call. After years of publicly saying that they don't need to be in theaters, that their commitment is to their members, that they can build up just as much anticipation and excitement for film than a theatrical release can do. Now of a sudden, they're saying, actually, we've always loved theaters,

and we just didn't make it a priority. We were too busy making boggle or something for our streaming service. So the yes portion, is that we have a lot of data that does suggest theatrical movies perform better on streamers. And there's a lot of reasons for this. They spend a ton of money on marketing, so the awareness of these films is higher. We associate, if you look at kind of the qualitative studies being conducted by theatrical exhibitors, of course, but also studios and kind of audience survey, the sentiment around theatrical releases, that they are higher quality. people will typically go to theaters for IMAX film,

so they associate it with this really intense experience that they like. That's so interesting, by the way, just to pause on that one thing, I think that perception still being the case is so fascinating to me. And it makes me think of, you know, all those years ago you would have straight to DVD movies. And that was the sure kiss of death for a movie being bad. I was like, they didn't even put it in theaters. It was so bad. And now, in a time when,

In theory, there are lots of good strategic reasons to put a great movie, not in movie theaters. It's fascinating to me that people still associate if it's in theaters, there is some assumption of quality that comes with it. Yeah. And so that's the positive consumer sentiment. On the business side, the reason Netflix always argued against theatrical, and it's the sole argument I get from their point of view, is that you made back your revenue for a movie that you released in theaters, not in, theaters, you might break even, you might make some bit of profit, but it was through what we call pay one and pay two windows, which is just where the movie goes after it's on DVD, Blu-ray, which, of course, these films make a lot of money on there as well. And then they would go to HBO for nine months, right? Then it would go to CBS for nine months. And so if Netflix was not going to do

pay one and pay two windows, if it was just going to go directly to Netflix, then they would lose out on a huge chunk of profit that would then support. That would then, support a 10, 12, 15, 20 movie slate across the year. The reason why I think they're changing their two now is their engagement is slowing across the board on their platform. And so if you look at the most recent engagement report, Netflix puts out every six months, kind of like, here's what people are watching, 99% of all viewing. There was a 2% increase in engagement year over year, so between the second half of 2025, second half of 2024. But it was only a 1% a creative growth from the half prior. And this was a big half. This had stranger things. This had

Wednesday. This had a lot of really big things, NFL games. And they're not really growing that engagement. And so if you look at what people are kind of spending the most time watching, a lot of it is film, and a lot of it is a licensed film. And so it's those films that have theatrical releases. So I think if you're Netflix, the idea of doing another Harry Potter or a Batman or whatever it is, putting those in theaters, building up that sentiment, building up that fandom, And then bringing that to streaming where it's going to see that kind of increased growth arguably does help the business. The but is whether or not Netflix commits to releasing 15 movies in theaters, right? Last year, Warner Brothers had 21 or 22 percent of the total box office share, 25 films released.

They were just behind Disney. Is Netflix going to commit to that? That's the big question where we don't really know. We won't know until this deal goes through if it goes through. Okay, because the flip side would be something like the deal they made with Greta Gerwig for the Narnia movie, right? Which is to say you're making a huge blockbuster movie that deserves to be seen in huge screens. You're also a director with a lot of leverage. And from what I understand, directors with a lot of leverage by and large really want their stuff to be shown on large screens in movie theaters.

So they gave her an IMAX only, but real run. It's not the nominal. Like it's going to be in three theaters for three days kind of thing Netflix always does. It's getting like a real theatrical window, but only. on IMAX and for a pretty short amount of time. And Netflix could ostensibly do that two times a year and be like, well, look, we have a theatrical strategy. Right. Yeah, they're going to go beyond the one week release to get them into Oscar contention. I mean, you have theater owners and exhibitor owners coming out and making that exact point, David. Like they've said, Netflix,

if you're committed to this, do it with your movies now. You have big movies coming out. Put them in theaters. Give them 45-day-wide releases. Ted and Greg over at Netflix to argue they don't have the department and manpower and expertise to do this, which is ostensibly true. These are significant parts of these studios as kind of figuring out the theatrical releases, the exhibitor relationships, the tracking of it all to see if you should go 45 days, 30 days, 17 days, which is what Universal has done since 2020 when they kind of really started taking advantage of the fact that they could collapse the theatrical window a little bit and go straight to VOD and streaming. But, you know, I don't know if Netflix sees the importance of doing this for films that are much trickier. And I think this is where you get

someone like David Ellison, who's the CEO of Paramount, who's obviously also in this argument and argues that Paramount is much more committed to the theatrical release than Netflix ever will be. You look at the films that Warner Brothers had last year that did really, really well. One battle after another, sinners, these were original risks. These were risky bets that they went out at Warner Brothers and said, we think these are going to be really great. We're going to with it. Would Netflix do the same thing? I don't know. And I think that's where you get a lot of this trepidition from the industry, which is that the supply of films have steadily decreased. So if you look at the overall box office revenue, especially domestic, you know, we're up 800% compared

to 2020, but only 30% compared to 2021. And last year we saw just about 5% increase in overall box office revenue. And we're seeing that kind of collapse in the overall revenue compared to the 1990. in the early 2000s and even the early 2010s, but you're also seeing the supply greatly diminish. So the exhibitors, to your point, David, as we're going to get into about, like, what could save movie theaters, are basically saying to companies like Netflix,

if you're not going to give us movies to put into theaters, we cannot rely on having two or three mega hits to keep us paying our property tax every single month of the year. Do you think it's possible that Netflix is looking at that graph of basically supply is going down? The money is not what it once was. the pay one, pay two window is gone. This whole kind of theatrical pipeline doesn't exist the way that it used to.

And basically just say, we don't have a grand thesis against movie theaters. We just don't think it's worth the time and energy and maybe not be entirely wrong. It is the proverbial chicken and egg question in this industry. It's fair, right? And actually, there was a really interesting study conducted last year by civic science. asked people about 2,000 theater goers for the survey, why don't you go to see more movies, right? And we know that the average movie goer now sees less movies per month than they have since like the early 1990s. Like we're at that level. And the answer kind of surprised me because it wasn't cost. Cost was second and it was close.

But the first one was just the type of movies that were there, they weren't interested in. And I think if you're Netflix, to your point exactly, that is far. more jarring? Because it's not even like, okay, we put more movies in theaters and more people will go. It is, well, the type of movies that people want are extremely expensive to make. They're like Christopher Nolan movies. The type of movies that we thought people were interested in are no longer guaranteed bets. And you can have a whole conversation about Marvel and DC. And kind of this idea of like, if you spent $500 million on a film, you're going to reap it at $1.1 billion. And like, that's just not true anymore. And so this question for Netflix is, how much are we going to invest in a 12 to 15

film slate if one to two films are going to perform? And historically, that's always been the case. Like, films are really rough business to be in because you're kind of hoping you've got one or two mega hits that pay off for the other ones that might break even or might not perform as well. But now because they have the streaming component and they're investing in that, and as they're watching ways to introduce new formats to compete with YouTube and Instagram. And now they've got that concern playing at them too. The question of do we invest in a space that is slowly decaying without proof that putting more films in theaters will help with that decay?

I mean, you can see why it's a bit of a coin toss. It seems to me, and you've written about kind of all sides of this, that one of two things is going to happen. And I have a hard time handicapping which one it's going to be. on one side, we develop what I would call a theater movie that becomes, we lean even harder into this very specific sort of eventized kind of movie that right now it's like James Cameron and Christopher Nolan and like a couple of other people maybe who are consistently making these things that feel and are so big that people kind of intuitively understand. and I need to see this with the biggest screen and the biggest speakers and the most experience possible. Either we need to make a much bigger industry out of that, which strikes me as dangerous and maybe impossible for all the reasons you just described, that like you you miss it once and your company is out of business. Or there's a future where like YouTube shorts and TikTok start playing on movie theater screens.

And that actually that strikes me as not crazy. You've written a bunch about how these things have come to televisions and become a real part of people. media consumption. Is it that outrageous to think that movie theaters might start to figure out ways to integrate this kind of short form content? And Alamo Draft House instead of playing a marathon of Indiana Jones movies is playing a marathon of TikToks, it sounds awful, but totally plausible to me. I think it absolutely could exist. The question is, are people willing to go for that type of experience? And what we do know from some of the data around alternative screenings in theaters is that it's really based on fandom. So if you look at what performs exceptionally well for limited runs or for the kind of screens that they're allocated, anime films do exceptionally well.

Like it brings people out. They go out. Alamo is now owned or majority owned. I can't remember which one by Sony, which also owns Funimation, which owns PlayStation. So there is like that group where they can kind of experiment with this. But something like Demon Slayer does huge in theaters. If you look at what does exceptionally well in terms of an experience that people want to have together, horror. Horror always overperforms.

It overperms the amount of money that they spend on those films, they get far more revenue on average than any other genre. And so this idea of turning movie theaters into a colloquial hangout placed, for lack of a better term, where you're partnering fandom with a type of experience that elevates. a movie theater into something that becomes a communal event, fodder for your own TikTok or Instagram. I often talk about the social long-tail capital of a theatrical experience like Barbenheimer. Like you buy the shirt, you go with your friends, you take the selfie, you watch the movie, people to record parts of the screen. And we can get into the cell phone debate. But that idea of like, I'm going to spend my money on this and I'm going to get this long-tail social capital reward, that is a component where this comes into play.

And if you combine that with fandom, you can start to fill in the gaps. that the major studios are not going to be able to because they're pulling back and making, yeah, the Christopher Nolan, the Greta Gerwig, the James Cameron movie. And that's, they're making more of those. So you need to fill the gap for the $5 million to $10 million movie. And that does not necessarily need to be a movie. It just needs to be something that will get people into a shared space and pay $20. Yeah, I feel like the thesis there spiritually is not that different from a sports bar. Right. Right. Like it's a sports bar where everybody is quieter. I guess. But the idea behind why it's worth going to this thing as opposed to being home is not very different. Exactly. Yeah. And people, we know, I mean, God, you and I spent a lot of time on the internet. The amount of stories that we've read about the rise in isolation and kind of social alienation and the links to depression and all that stuff is also tied, as we all know, to this lack of shared third spaces. And the movie theater used to be that to some extent. Like the theater, the theater. I grew up with when I was in the suburbs had DDR, right? You'd go and you'd hang out and there was the arcade and then you might watch a movie. But even if you weren't, you were spending money at the theater so the exhibitors could pay the property tax. They could pay the employees. Like they could have that be a system. They were less reliant on the films themselves,

although obviously that is where the reason people go and then spend 100 bucks on popcorn. So if you can find a way to replicate that, I think this is partially why I, I am in favor, and I realize it's controversial, of having designated phone OK screenings. Interesting. It has to be designated. It can't just be in a screening with people who do not want a phone by any means, and I get how distracting that is. But the experiences I go when I watch horror movies, it's a lot of teenagers, as it always is. It's a lot of teenagers who are having fun or yelling who are like, whatever, and they're on their phones.

But they're paying for the movie. They're going out. They're like having a good time with it. That creates intimate memories. is that then spurs on the next time you want to go to the theater, you've got this great memory and you kind of build off that. If the goal is to convince more people that they should go watch Hamnet in theaters, because Chloe Zhao is a great director.

And they're just not going to because they can either watch it on whatever streaming service it comes to in three weeks, or they'll have it on Plex through some server. Like they don't need to go and you don't need to try and convince them to go for that movie. You do need to provide an alternative that people are going, oh, that is worth, in my opinion, the $30? Because the films themselves, even though we might disagree with this take, as we can see in the data,

people just don't associate the value of that film to $30 anymore. They're just saying, well, I can get it on my streamer that I already pay $15 for. Yeah, I think I agree about the phone thing. I like the idea of it being a specific type of theater that you go into. Because we've seen, I forget who it was, but one of the chains at one point did. They had a sort of, it was like a smoking section of the theater, basically,

but that was where you were allowed to have your screens on. I don't like that. No. But I think you see these every once in a while where musicals will have the sing-alongs or kids movies will have kid-friendly ones that are, it's designed to be loud and chaotic, and you go knowing what it's going to be and to participate. I think that should be ubiquitous and everywhere.

And that's the sort of thing to me that is like, okay, what we have to offer is something more than just, watching the movie, right? And in some ways that's a very comfy chair is actually a thing. Like, one thing I really like is the theaters with a really great recliner. Good food is one of those things. Alamo is very good at that. That somebody comes and brings you a nice dinner while you eat is a victory. But again, you have to have this additional experience on top of it for me. And the number of movies that do that by themselves is vanishingly small, right? I think everybody thought that was going to be 3D. That was like, you have to go see the 3D movie because it's

in 3D, you get a new experience, and most people were just like, this is, this does nothing for me. I'm good. But maybe the big theater for, I remember seeing Dunkirk was a good example of like, that movie hits different in a theater than it does anywhere else. And so I'm glad I saw that in theater. So that reason, most movies are not like that. And I think realistically for most people, for most movies, you just need to find a way to have some other thing that you can offer that isn't just, you have to leave your house and pay $30 to see it in a slightly. they come for your chair on a slightly larger screen. That's a really high bar.

And again, for Hamnet, I don't know what that thing is. And I don't want to stop making movies like Hamnet because we can't make them sing-alongs. But that's where this gets really tricky to me. Yeah. And I think that gets into the studios component. So we were just talking about having a TikTokathon. That does not help the studios, right? The studios themselves are still not making the money off that.

If anything, it's helping now. They're competitors who are coming for all of these other screens. that the studios have kind of always commandeered, like the movie theaters and TV screens. But I think if you look at what the studios have to contend with, they know that a Nolan movie, a James Cameron movie, is going to do exceptionally well on IMAX.

The problem is that IMAX makes up, like, less than 1 or 2% of total screens domestically and internationally, and they have huge percentage of viewership on those screens for select movies. So if you look at Oppenheimer, Dunkirk would have been a good one. If you look, obviously, Avatar, any type of new Star Wars, any type of new Marvel, those films are always going to do exceptionally well on IMAX. But if they only command one to two percent of the screens, you're not going to make as much money off it just through lack, just through the scarcity problem of it all.

Right. And there's more, there's actually like heated competition for IMAX screens, right? Yes. My impression is there are more movies wanting to be on IMAX screens than there are IMAX screens to show those movies. That's precisely right. And it's because they're making movies in part that perform well on iMacs. So if you think to your point, everyone's trying to make these big movies, they want the IMAX experience because they know that, I don't know, Dune 3. A lot of people are going to want to go watch that on IMAX. Well, if there's only a limited amount and you're getting close to the release date for

another Avatar or another Star Wars or another Marvel movie, now you've got studios competing and they're paying for it, right? And so this idea of like, okay, well, now we're still losing money on this potential bet. This is where people often say that studios need to recreate the $10 million movie where the potential upside is much higher than any potential loss. My argument is that they should lean far more into the nostalgia side of the event-driven thing. And I'll give you an example. This was not the nostalgic part of it, but the last movie I saw before COVID hit was a Alamo rowdy screening of cats. Tom Hooper's cats. And it was the greatest experience of my life. Like, I'm married. It was the

greatest experience in my life. And that type of situation happens a lot with nostalgic films. Mean Girls, every Christmas Nightmare Before Christmas does exceptionally well in theaters. People go back out to it. If the new fresh films are something people watch at home on their own. They watch, I don't know, Six Underground's the Netflix movie I always think about or Red Notice. and they're watching that on Netflix. What's really going to get them out to theaters is that experience with their friends. It's that kind of Barbenheimer moment

where they can post about on Instagram, where they can have this memory, they can go to dinner before or after. And the incentive is like everyone already has this shared experience of seeing this film and loving this film. And there's that fandom intertwined with that community and social-driven aspect.

And the reprints of these movies are not that costly. And so if studios just reprinted a lot of these, films that have, they would have to do analysis on this, the sentiment analysis, but where there's like, oh, people would go to theaters to watch, I know, the original Freaky Friday or what, Mamma Me, or whatever it is, because they love that experience and they love the movies. You could again, fill out the exhibitor calendar, which may help the exhibitor pay bills, which may in turn bring down the price of movies, which is the other, you know, the second biggest reason that people

cited in that civic science study for not going. So if you can get people to go for a movie they like and they may already just like it, and this is just a reason to go and experience it again, if you can get the average cost of a ticket to come down, then you might be able to produce more of these bigger movies, even if they don't have the IMAX screens, to then get people back into seeing these kind of explosive blockbusters. I love that. So instead of thinking about, you know, much has been made of the death of the $40 million movie, right? That kind of sweet spot, middle that most movies used to be that doesn't really exist anymore, that maybe the sort of theatrical future of those movies is not that they start in theaters and we hope that they work,

but that they start somewhere else and the ones that do work then get to have a life in theaters, that the theater becomes kind of a lagging indicator of popularity, not the very first place that they land. That's a really fun way to think about it. Yeah, and it's just about filling the gap. It's funny, if you think about it from the streaming side, what that strategy is basically like having friends allowed us to pay for, I was going to say he did rivalry, but that was easy. Like the new game of Thrones, right? Like, oh, we have friends. That's fine. People are not going to cancel their streaming service. So the lifetime value of a customer, which is a boring equation you trying to figure out to look at the health of a streaming company,

is much higher. And so friends allows us to go and do the new thing. It's the same equation you could bring to the theatrical component. The idea of just re-releasing, Why am I thinking of John Carter? That would not work. If you just re-release... I know. I was like, oh, my God. If you just re-release, though, a toy story or whatever it is, something that people would go watch.

Or a cult classic that people would go. You know what I've been thinking about is the Devil Wears Prada. Because the Devil Wars Prada, too, is coming out. The Devil's Prada is having sort of a weird nostalgic return anyway. That, to me, is a movie. I think you could plug back into theaters tomorrow and it would work. A hundred percent. That's a much better one than John Carter.

Yeah. Listen to him. Not me. Sorry, Disney. But that idea of like, it's just enough to pat it to then let you do the other thing, which is what the $30, $40 million movie doesn't always allow for because of the marketing, because of the cast. You get into all these other expenses and then you have to license the film out. This way, you don't have to license a film out. You're not reliant on a pay one, pay two window.

It's just something that you're going to release in order to generate some additional income to pay for the other big things you want to do. I like that. So let me throw one more thing to you before I let you go here, which is I'm sure you've seen all this stuff around Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on Joe Rogan talking about the future of everything. Matt Damon, by the way, one of the people who has bemoaned the death of the $40 million movie. I think it was on Hot Ones years ago that he gave this beautiful speech about how movies make money. It's very good. I'll link it in the show notes. But talking about this same kind of thing making the rip for Netflix, they were on Joe Rogan talking about this movie.

And I'm just going to read you a quote. and then I'm going to connect this back to what we've been talking about, and I want to know what you think. He said, the standard way to make an action movie that we learned was you usually have three set pieces, one in the first act, one in the second, one in the third, and the big one with all the explosions, and you spend most of your money on that one in the third act.

That's your kind of finale. Now, Netflix is like, can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay tuned in. Then he said that Netflix was telling them that it wouldn't be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they're watching. You talk about chicken and eggs,

problems. And this to me for Netflix in particular feels like maybe the worst possible sort of death spiral of movies where Netflix is sort of deliberately and loudly making movies that are not really designed to be watched. And frankly, a lot of the movies that end up on Netflix bear that out. How do you square that with what we actually need to do is go all the way the other way and make movies that are extremely designed to be watched? Because that's the only thing that is going to bring people to movie theaters. Like, Netflix is just so rapidly running away from the thing that would work that we've been talking about in order to make the reality of the Netflix experience work for people.

Is it even possible to square those things? I've been thinking about this a lot. And I've been thinking about one person in particular. And it's on the TV side. But I think you could also apply it to Mike DeLuca and Pam over on the Warner Brothers film. side. I'm thinking about Casey Blois, he's the head of HBO. And if you're Netflix and you acquire HBO, you talk about how important it is to have HBO, do you let Casey do what Casey does? Something like the chair company might get produced at Netflix because they did, I think you should leave.

Also might not. HBO famously made kind of big shows for a small audience. It was never going to be CBS. It was never going to be big bang theory. And that was okay because people would pay the $15 a month. And they said, great. Like, I'm, this is what I want and I love it and I'll pay the price increase and that's okay. And I keep thinking about if Netflix buys HBO, do they let Casey be Casey? Or does Casey have to start making Netflix shows? Does Casey have to focus more on doing a Green Lantern's spinoff that feels like stranger things because that's what the Netflix audience wants? And on the film side of the equation, it's the same thing is do you have Pam and Mike come in and say, we're going to let you do what you do. Clearly it worked with sinners. Clearly it worked with one battle after another.

You guys seem to have an idea. There are films that will play well on here. Minecraft's a great example of what this can be. But in order to have the type of movies that make people really excited about movies, you have to let movie executives work with movie directors and film writers and just say like, this is what we're going to do. And my hope is that the arrogance of Ted and Greg do not outweigh the concern they have about ruining the product they're buying. And I think that's probably true. I think if they end up really acquiring Warner Brothers Discovery, this goes through, the regulatory hurdles are figured out. If they keep movies in theaters and if they keep making the type of movies that Warner Brothers has made for 100 years, 100 years plus, it will be reliant on them not trying to Netflixify an experience that Netflix has never had ownership of. And I think they understand that and we'll step aside, at least for the first few years, to just let that continue happening. So any other thoughts? Any other? I asked you to come and

fix movie theaters with me. Any other big ideas you want to throw out before we get out of here? Something that I think about a lot is it's a Neli quote, so of course it is. And he was giving an interview kind of about the state of media. And he was like, not all websites are going to exist forever, Not all companies are going to exist forever. Like companies come and companies go. And I've been thinking a lot about the impact of generative AI on content and what we're seeing happening in this kind of moment of great restructuring and great change in consumer behavior and stuff that you guys talk about in the pot all the time and think about.

And will movie theaters be something that survives or will it give way to a new form of entertainment that is consumed communally and en masse that we haven't encountered yet? I don't know. But I think it's worth protecting for as long as we can protect it. So if that means that we're all watching like reruns of movies that we love watching at home, but we're watching with our friends at 10 o'clock in the morning instead before brunch, we should probably be doing that much, much more. Yeah, it does, it just seems to me that if I get out of having little kids who go to bed really early

and go back to seeing movie theaters, there is a strong chance I'm going to be seeing very different things in movie theaters than the last generation of my movie theater experience. Yeah. I think that's okay. Christopher Nolan will still be there. You know what I mean? As long as Christopher Nolan's still there doing stuff, it's fine. I'll be there every 18 months for whatever weird thing Christopher Nolan ended up to.

Same, brother. Same. All right, we've got to take a break. Julia, thank you for doing this. It's super fun. Thank you for having me. We'll be right back. 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. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems?

Get started with Claude today at cloud.ai slash vergecast. That's clod.aI slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. 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. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process

from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist 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. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm.

We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. they are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. Welcome back. All right, let's do a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866 Verge1.

The email is Vergecast at theverge.com. We're easy to find. Just reach out to us. Jen, Tooie, it's been a minute since you've been here to do this. Welcome. Thank you for doing this with us. Always happy to be able to help with some smart home conundrums. It remains true that like 60% of the Vergecast hotline is people with

mysterious problems with their smart home. So here we are. So this week actually have this question we got last week happens to be perfect timing because you, I believe, are in the middle of testing a bunch of the new IKEA smart home gadgets, right? All of them. Yeah, you got a bucket of them. Okay. Okay. Yes. All the unpronounceable, very inexpensive, matter of a thread, IKEA devices. So couch plats to Belizeas and Delegia's, it's very exciting. Yes. So you just, You just named the reason we have both been very excited about it, right? It's Matter Over Thread. It's IKEA, which tends to be very accessible to lots of people for lots of reasons.

And it's cheap. To me, the thing I think you and I have spent the most time talking about is like, dear God, when is any of this going to be affordable to regular people? Yes. And IKEA, I think a lot of this got announced last fall and it's been shipping recently. And I think this is like, my hope was this is going to be a moment. So let me just read you this question and then we're going to get into it. This comes from Mike.

And it says, after you excitedly talked about the Bill Reza buttons from IKEA, I ordered five of them to control my home lights. As a parent of young children, whenever we have someone babysit, they can't navigate our smart lights with our Google Home Hub. Finally, with Gemini. Invariably, this leads to everything offline, and I spend 10 minutes walking around manually turning everything back on slash resetting things just so they function again.

I just want to say, by the way, normally when people send as long emails, I don't read the whole thing. But this is so perfectly relatable to everyone's smart home experience that I'm just going to read the whole thing. Zeni says, imagine my excitement when my IKEA package arrived yesterday, immediately turning into dismay as I realized that Bill Reza buttons simply won't work with Google Home. They were immediately detected by my Pixel 10, but are just dumb devices that report back their battery life. As I searched through Google Help Thread after Reddit post on this, my dismay turned to outright anger that people have been waiting, wanting basic buttons to work with Google Home for years.

I even turned on public preview and tried writing scripts, but alas, no function seems to exist to actually control the buttons. Is this really the case? What do I do? Do I need to buy a hub to talk to? my Google Home Hub feels like smart home hell. Gen Tui, if Smart Home Hell is the name of your podcast, you realize this, right? When we do this, it's going to be called Smart Home Hell. So there's a specific question in here that I think you have a clear answer to. And then I want to talk about your IKEA experience more broadly. But the buttons thing, if I understand, is not specifically an IKEA problem.

Oh, that is not an IKEA problem. That is a big old Google problem. And has been since Matter launched, I'm very sorry. Mike, that I didn't make this clearer. I have mentioned this in many of my articles about IKEA, but I'm really sorry that you didn't know that Google Home does not support buttons in Matter. And this has been the case since Matter launched, and why it's the case is still a mystery. I have asked Google directly numerous times, even on stage twice at CES panels. And the answer at the time last year was we, you know, if you're familiar, Google Home has gone through a huge restructuring over the last 18 months.

And just, I guess, three or four months ago, they announced, you know, the new platform was completely finished. And so things like specific device types were sort of pushed a little bit off, they said. You know, we needed to get our platform firm and foundation sorted before we devoted resources to add. newer device types. They have the smallest, the slimmest support for Matter devices of all of the platforms, the least devices work on Google Home than they do on all the others. And just for people that aren't familiar, Matter, which is the new smart home standard that uses thread and Wi-Fi, doesn't require a platform to support every device type.

So, you know, a platform could choose to just support light bulbs and not support light switches. It's they can do that, which is, it makes sense to some extent, but it's also one of the reasons that matter has become so frustrating because you buy something that's matter enabled. And, you know, everyone, myself included, has said the benefit of matter is it works with everything with a few asteris. And this has been one of the large asterisks that I, that we've been talking about. The problem is no one really cared that much about buttons before IKEA released a $6 button. Interesting. Because before, there are some great buttons out there. I've reviewed a number.

So the Wemo, the Belkin Wimo scene controller is a button. That one, unfortunately, Wimo's just actually last week, went completely dead. But you can still use it because it's matter over thread. Phillips Hue tap dial is a button. There's a number of companies that have buttons that you can buy, not very well-known ones, but basically a button is a remote control. So it's a wireless switch that you can stick on a wall, and this is probably why Mike wanted it,

so that he would stop people from turning his lights on and off manually. You use a button, you stick it on the wall, you press it just like a light switch, and it turns your lights on and off without breaking your smart home and leaving you in smart home hell. I bought a bunch of these, I bought a bunch of Phillips hue buttons for my hue lights for that exact problem.

And they now sit next to the switch, and I put tape over the switch. Don't touch the switch, only touch the buttons. tape, David. Listen, I'm not, someday when I'm feeling ambitious, I'll take off the wall plate and put one of the blank ones over,

but until then, like a little piece of blue painter's tape really does the job. That's true. It doesn't look great, but it does the job. Yes. So Phillips Hugh Dimmer switches,

they call them. They call them switches. This is another reason this space is confusing because every company has a slightly different name for it. But yeah, the hue buttons that have the kind of brightness bulb

bulb at the top and on and off, those remote controls are buttons. are buttons. Lutron Kiseta, their PICO remotes, that's a button. And none of those are supported in any way in Google Home. Google Home just supports switches, which is an on-off state. But it doesn't support what in matter is called a generic switch, which is essentially a wireless remote control. It just doesn't. So I'm very sorry. The more you explain this, the angrier this explanation is making me. I'm very sorry, Mike, but it's not going to work. And actually at CES this year, I hosted another panel with the head of IKEA's smart home, David Granith, and one of the Google Home leads, Matt Vanderstay, along with a couple other people from Amazon and Samsung and Akara.

And the first question was basically, I said to the IKEA gentleman, David Granth, I said, what's one of the biggest frustrations you've had implement? matter across your product line. And it was just teeing them up to say Google Home doesn't support buttons because it is a huge problem. He didn't take the bait, sadly. But he did bring up the issue that there isn't support for certain device types across all platforms. And then I said to Matt Van der Stey, such as buttons on Google Home.

Matt, why do we not have buttons on Google Home? Same answer. We're working on it. It's still not there. But David Granath made the point, which I think is very true, is that once he said, and, you know, once Google, he thinks Google will start to support buttons once these hundreds and thousands of remotes are in people's homes. Because it's mass adoption, right? Once there are people out there saying, why Google, why can I not use my $6 button to control my lights? More and more people like Mike complaining will hopefully kick Google in the butt to get this moving.

because it can't be that complicated. I mean, it really, you wouldn't think. Yeah. Leaving aside the fact that you just described like the fundamental chicken and egg problem with the smart home, which is that nobody will do it until everybody has it, but nobody's going to buy it until it works. Tell me more about your IKEA experience in general because I have, I bought three of these buttons when they first came out.

Yeah. So far I have set up one. I had a very specific routine I wanted to do, which is I have this light behind me connected to a smart switch. and I have a light here with a Phillips hue bulb in it that I want to glow purple. It does the purple light against the wall. It looks nice when I'm recording stuff. And I just wanted a thing that I can press one button and this light will turn on and turn purple and this light will turn on.

This is the perfectly uncomplicated. Yeah, it's all it is is it's an Alexa routine and I want this thing to initiate an Alexa routine every time I press the button. Oh my God, the amount of work that it took to even get that set up like in theory. The routine worked fine. I can go on my phone and hit the routine and it works every time. But the button, it was trying to connect to my Echo.com max, which I bought, again, specifically for this purpose, which should work, but was wacky and all the thread stuff was weird. It also turns out that my ERO routers are a thread network. So I eventually just bailed on the Amazon one and now I'm using the ERO router, the ERO's thread network.

And that all kind of works. So in theory, all of this was set up. And yet I press the button after I set it all up and it works. one time and then never again. And this is this is the IKEA Bill Reza experience that I'm having so far. And based on your reaction when I sent you this question this morning, I am not the only one having this problem. You're not. And so you mentioned Alexa that this is something I should say. Google Home does not support buttons, but all the other platforms do. So if, so Mike, you have to switch platforms. Sorry. But yes, also not that sorry. Like Google Hope sucks. Yeah, you can use buttons

in theory, in Amazon Alexa, in Apple Home, Smart Things, Home Assistant. And yes, I have, so I had the same issue with the Bill Razor and also with the bucket of other IKEA smart home devices I have here that I'm trying to connect. Sometimes, well, I had the initial issue of actually just getting them paired into the platforms. And I, as part of testing, I will try pairing to different platforms. I tried pairing to the Delajira Hub, which is Ike. Keyers Hub. I tried Home Assistant and Alexa and Google, well, I didn't try Google because I knew that wasn't going to work, an Apple Home. And I had very mixed results. I did eventually get it going through Home Assistant and it was and it was working fine,

but then I had the same issue of it disconnecting. And then I also connected it through Alexa. And for some reason, when it went through the steps, it gave me the option to add in my thread network key. Did you get that option when you went in? Okay, that popped up the thing asking for my thread network password. And Jen, the amount of time I spent looking for my thread network key, I never found it. It might be a thing that exists. But I literally, I probably spent hours in the Alexa app on Reddit everywhere looking for this mythical key. And all of the Amazon forum responses are just like, it'll automatically connect.

And all the people are like, that's the problem is it didn't Amazon. So doing this is always very cathartic because you understand that. lots of people are having the same problem that you are. But it is. It's this very basic, like when it works, it is like three taps and it feels incredible. Yeah. And you're like, I just, I took this thing. It found the thing.

I pressed the button at the time it told me to and everything is connected and it's great. And when it breaks, it is immediately impossible. Because it's obtuse. And this has been the problem with thread since day one. They were trying to make it just work, but they didn't really take into account when it doesn't just work that you then can't just fix it. And so in the last, in thread 1.4, spec, they did say they were going to release sort of the tools to create more easier troubleshooting. But it's on a company or an app to now create that.

It's not something the thread group's going to pass out to everyone. So no one's really come up with a good solution. I think, again, what's so interesting here about IKEA is this is the first big mass market manufacturer to really go all in on a thread. matter over thread products. So I think this is going to start, kickstart a lot of solutions to some of these problems. The biggest problem that you were probably having here is that Amazon thread networks do not connect to other thread networks. So this is an issue about thread border routers. They have to connect. You don't have to have an Amazon thread border router in order to connect a thread device to your Amazon system. You just need a thread border router of any type. So I connected mine through

my Apple Home thread network, which has lots of different thread border browsers from different companies on. And then I have a separate Amazon Alexa and a separate ERO thread network because neither of those will connect to my main thread network because Amazon still doesn't support merging thread networks. So the fact that I have Amazon and ERO is actually not, it's not a solution to a problem. It's actually the problem. What I have is two sort of overlapping thread networks and they should be able to work together, especially. actually Amazon and Eero, but they still haven't implemented that. And then, yeah. And so what happened to me when I set mine up the first time is it tried to connect to my Amazon thread network, which I wouldn't need a network key for. So that was fine. And then when I started using it, it had connected to my Echo Pop, which is not a thread device. I was like, no wonder you're not working because you're, so then I managed to connect it to my Apple Home thread network. But I had to use Claude Code to find my thread network key. Because, yes, it's not easy.

So, yeah, in trying to make it simple, it's become almost impossible. But to be fair, most people don't have multiple thread networks. As long as you have one threadboarder out of it, you should be fine. So what the issue seems to be here is, and this is, we are not alone. I have seen a number of people online, and I've spoken to a few people who have been having issues connecting these new IKEA devices, not just the button, but other ones. even to IKEA's own hub. So there seems to be some kind of, not everyone, because some people have had no problems,

but a number of issues with this connectivity. And I think it goes to the point that I just made that this is the first mass market manufacturer to put out in bulk a lot of thread devices at once. Because, you know, if you buy in smart locks or if you're buying smart light bulbs from Phillips Hugh, those are big companies, but they're not big IKEA big. So there's a huge, I think they're, I don't know, I'm trying to dig into it to find out exactly what's gone on here.

But if you are having issues with setting up any of your remotes or any of your IKEA devices, stay tuned because I'm hoping to write something about it this week. But the good news is IKEA has a great return policy. So I would return it and get a new one and hopefully that one will work. Is your sense? And again, we can come back to this after you've really sort of finished reporting this out. But is your sense that this is like normal first generation product problems? This is, and we've seen IKEA go through this a few times, right? When it was first doing speakers, they weren't great and they have progressively gotten better.

IKEA iterates very well as a company. Yeah. And it does seem to be sincerely committed to this thing. So I actually have a fair amount of faith that IKEA will figure this out over time. But what I can't figure out is, is there something wrong with IKEA's sort of initial implementation of this idea? or are we exposing something broken about the system? And it sounds like what you're describing is a little bit of both. So there's the two issues here.

There's the initial pairing, which has been more of my issue. And then there's your issue, which is the thread network. And so the initial pairing, my guess here is that's IKEA's problem. And it is something that they should be able to fix. And hopefully with firmware, so not necessarily requiring new devices. But I don't know. But your issue with the thread network is the system. And that is, you know, I've reported about this a lot that thread in general, when you get devices on thread, normally they're pretty rock solid.

But you've obviously been having that issue. I think this one could be an Amazon issue with their thread network because I had the similar weird experience with Amazon. But the thread network in general and matter of a thread is still relatively untested in large implementation. So yeah, I think it's a combination. You know, it's new technology. It's coming to mass scale, and we're going to start to see the hiccups and the bloopers and the problems. Hopefully, this will make people pay attention and fix them. But right now, it's, yeah, it's frustrating for everyone who is very excited about $6 buttons to control their smart home, which I am still excited.

And the pricing is one of the big benefits here. I'm not, I don't want to be all doom and gloom. I do think this will be resolved, but I think it's important that we, you know, bring to light all of these issues. So hopefully it can get resolved because IKEA has a second wave of products coming out in April. So this was their first wave with the buttons and a couple of other devices like the humidity, temperature sensor, indoor air quality monitors. And then their smart bulbs and a few other devices are coming out in April. So, yeah, I think we're just going to have to wait and see if there's a fix in the works here. But in the meantime, Mike, I don't think there's a fix for you anytime soon. Sorry, this was a long answer to your question.

Google Home, I mean, they've said they will support buttons. But right now, I'm afraid you're out of luck. Your long-term strategy is get Jen to keep bullying Google executives into supporting buttons, which is good news. This is what we're here for. That's what we're here for. All right, Jen, thank you. Mike, I'm sorry we couldn't be more helpful, but come back. to us when it works out. Thanks, Jen. You're welcome. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Julia and to Will and to Jen for being here. Thank you to everybody who calls the hotline. As always, it's 866, Verge 1-1 and Vergecast at the verge.com. Thank you also to everybody who sent us notes about last week's show. We've heard from a lot of people with thoughts about our coverage on Minneapolis

and Tim Cook and all of the stuff going on in the world. There's a lot more happening right now. Those stories continue. We're still talking about how to cover some of the stuff in the Epstein files. more on that later this week. There's a lot going on and we're going to keep doing our best and I'm very grateful to everybody who reaches out with thoughts and feelings and appreciating what we're trying to do here.

It means a lot to us that y'all are on this ride with us. Keep calling the hotline. It's 66-6-Vorge-11. It's the Slack channel at the verge that everybody wants to be in. So keep calling the hotline, keep telling us how you're feeling. Also, everybody who reached out with vibe-coding projects,

I got like 100 emails from people who have vibe-coded weird stuff. Keep those coming. I'm working on some fun stuff. I want to know every weird thing that you have built with ClaudeCode or Cortex or any of these other tools. Keep them all coming. Until then, we're going to get out of here. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Friday again to talk about all of the news. Hopefully most of it gadgets. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.