Brendan Carr is a dummy

24:35What was the complaint of the crypto industry about the SEC in 2020, 2021 when wild ideas were flying around? The single complaint. Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, made this complaint. Just down the line, everybody made this complaint. This is regulation by enforcement. right you're taking all these rules that existed and you're selectively applying them to us to kill our industry and if you want to regulate us that's fine write a bill that treats crypto like what it is in the market that it exists in and we will do our lobbying and we'll get the bill that we want written but regulation by enforcement is corruption pure and simple this is the crypto industry still says this to this day we don't want regulation by enforcement even though they're not even being regulated or enforced right now regulation by enforcement is bad that's why people say it.

25:22The idea that you have this wide power in the government to do a lot of things, and you selectively apply them, politically apply them to get the outcomes you want, goes against the rule of law. It makes the government less predictable, more political, and it certainly uses the power of the government in ways that an average public radio station cannot afford to fight. So Brendan is saying the law is finally being enforced would maybe hold up if he was enforcing it against the local Fox affiliates for distorting the news, the local Sinclair affiliates for distorting the news, there's a lot of ways you could point that arrow in the opposite direction politically.

25:56And maybe you should. Maybe you should. You can make that argument. And certainly there are people who make that argument every day that you should point this gun at Fox. But he's not doing that. He's not making that argument at all. He's saying when you criticize this government, when you criticize this president, and you happen to do it on the airwaves, which no consumer can distinguish from the internet, then I have the power and I can stop you. That is just not, I mean, like fundamentally it's not just stupid, it's like borderline traitorous because it flies in the face of the Constitution and the rule of law in such a direct way that everyone understands it.

26:30Should the cops arrest you because they don't like you? Should the cops arrest you for speeding just because they don't like you or should they arrest everyone for speeding? Or, in my case, should you argue the cops arrest no one for speeding so you can drive fast? I have fast cars. There's no less politics right there. It's like a weird combo platter of policies from the Patel campaign. Vote for me. It'll be fun regardless. All I'm saying is Brendan's argument is I have this power, and if you don't let me use it, that's wrong. And I would just say the real argument is you should never have this power, and even if you do, you should have the discretion to use it equally or not at all.

27:06Yeah. So to that end, here's another one for you that I would like you to make sense of. This question is long. So I will summarize it as they brought up what President Trump posted on Truth Social after Rob Reiner died. And basically what he said is Rob Reiner died because he had what I believe he said he called Trump derangement syndrome and he was a bad person. It's a truly heinous, awful response. And then he says, do you think that's appropriate for the president of the United States to do that? And if Jimmy Kimmel would have said that, would you have threatened to take him off the air? And to that, Brendan Carr says, Senator, look, Democrats on this day are accusing me of engaging in censorship.

27:44And now you're trying to encourage me to police speech on the Internet. I'm simply not going to do that. OK, so first of all, whoever asked that question is also done for not asking the obvious follow. Sorry, it's equal opportunity. I'm out here. I'm out here valorizing Michael Powell today. You have no idea what's coming. But there's an obvious follow-up to this question. And Brendan is dodging this question in such ham-fisted way that he's not even clever about doing it. He's saying, you want me to police speech on the internet? That's not the question. The obvious follow-up question is, I wasn't asking you about speech on the internet.

28:18I was saying, if Jimmy Kimmel said these words on broadcast television, would that rise to the level of news distortion? Because when Jimmy Kimmel said, I believe everyone in MAGA is trying to get away from the shooter. or pretend the shooter isn't one of them. You thought that was horrible and you were going to block a merger over it. That's the easy way or the hard way, right? So that's really bad. You can find a reason to enforce the rules on that. If Jimmy Kimmel repeated what Trump said, which everyone thinks is horrible, on the airwaves, would that meet your standard? And Carr, because he does not want to answer that question, ham-fistedly dodges out of it by saying, I'm not going to censor the internet.

28:57But no one's asking about censoring the internet. And whatever Democrat asked her, who was it? It was Amy Klobuchar, I think. Oh, Klobuchar. Look, Senator Klobuchar, she's one of the most. If she comes back on the show, I'll be like, you blew it. Because she blew it with that one. Because I wasn't the question. She's really better than that. But she blew it because the question is, no, no, no. You keep making this distinction between the internet and broadcast. So if you move these words from the internet to broadcast, the president's words, if you move them from internet distribution to broadcast distribution, would that make them illegal or subject to some investigation?

29:28because over and over again, he's saying when you do things on broadcast, I get to say whether or not they're true or not. Because over and over again, he's saying if you say these things on broadcast, I get a say. And the question is, and I think the heart of that question is if it's okay on the internet, why is it not okay on broadcast? Because you're the one who makes the rules over there. Yeah, there was a version of this question where they asked something about the difference between the 60 minutes interview that was quote unquote selectively edited that became a whole kerfuffle and a Fox News thing that did essentially the exact same thing.

30:03And he very matter-of-factly was like, the Fox News one was on cable. I have no jurisdiction. What are you talking about? So allow me to just briefly do something completely unthinkable and slightly quickly defend or say, give you a real worst person you know makes a good point moment in Brendan Carr's testimony. Brendan Carr says, we have a public interest standard that Congress has put into the law and there's a number of very specific rules and doctrines that flow from that. The broadcast hoax rule the news distortion rule. And my position, and I think the Trump administration position, is that we should be enforcing those rules and policies.

30:32If Congress wants to change it, you're free to change it. Is there not like a teeny tiny glimmer of a reasonable point there? Like 13 years ago, Michael Powell would have been right. We've had a Congress the whole time. Yeah. What are we doing? You know, do we have a Congress? That is a good first question. I mean, we have at various times had a Congress. You know, I think Brennan has gone far enough to irritate some Republican members of Congress. Bizarrely, to your point about the worst person you know makes a good point, Ted Cruz all over this hearing saying you've gone too far. There are ideological members of the Republican coalition who are like, government speech regulations are bad.

31:12I agree with them. That has been my position on this show forever. Government speech regulations are bad. And he's running into some of that across the Republican coalition. I think the Democratic coalition less interested in that idea, but also less interested in doing stuff. Now, there's one thing to learn from, you know, the first year of Trump 2.0. It's, boy, the government actually has a lot of power. It can do a lot of things. If the various people empowered to do things just decide to simply start doing things, it takes a lot to slow them down or stop them, including, you know, Trump just firing people at agencies.

31:53He just does. He's not supposed to be able to do that. No one's in his way. There are lawsuits. Some of the lawsuits are getting thrown out. Some lawsuits are continuing. Some lawsuits get stayed on the Supreme Court's emergency docket because they have to figure out how to throw out the laws that they're supposed to. Like, there's a lot going on there. Democrats have not learned that lesson. They don't just do things. And so, yeah, to the point where he's like, if Congress wants to change the law, you should change it. He's basically saying, fuck you. Right? Like, you won't do this thing. And so I'm just going to run crazy with the power they have.

32:23It comes from the Telecommunications Act of 1934. And that's the mistake, right? The reason you want these independent agencies is so that they have discretion that is divorced from politics. And they can look at the world as it exists today and make determinations about which power is actually in the public interest, which enforcement is actually going to get the results people want. and not, we have all of the power and we use it all the time. Because otherwise you would be beholden to the speed at which Congress can act. And you can have a lot of philosophical debates on this. This is the heart of political science, especially as it relates to like the American government.

33:01But Brendan is just putting a bulldozer through it without a second's hesitation. I think this is going to come back to bite all of us in the end because we've taught a generation of would-be mini dictators that can do whatever they want. and i don't think that's i don't think that's how it's supposed to work or at least they're supposed to be competing with each other for power which is sort of like how the framers designed it but that's not what we have today either yeah yeah all right i have two more for you um this one i worry is going to take you between four and six hours to wade through but i'm gonna i'm gonna do this anyway look the reason we cover policy diverge is because the iphone 3gs was dropping calls and to explain that you had to be like there's not enough spectrum and explain that you explain spectrum auctions on the fcc and now here i am being like this isn't what the framers intended.

33:44Oh, good. Once, I apologize. Let's briefly talk about spectrum auctions. There we go. Here's a long quote. I'm going to read you the whole thing. Democrats at the time, this is back in the Kimmel time, were saying that we explicitly threatened to pull a license if Jimmy Kimmel wasn't fired. That never happened. That was nothing more than projection and distortion by Democrats. What I am saying is any broadcaster that uses the airways, whether radio or TV, has to comply with the public interest and licenses are not sacred cows. Yes, you can do things to lose a license, but if we want to change that, that's up to Congress.

34:14And one idea, for instance, is why don't we put all the broadcast TV licenses up for auction? And if people want to buy them without the public interest obligation, they can do that. Neal Patel, your thoughts? How? First of all, how would you do that? You'd be like, here's my bid. I want less rules. I want you to enforce the power that you have less. I just don't know how you would mechanically do that today without even more acts of Congress or desire for the president to have less power. Again, I think what Brandon is saying is like, go, go fuck yourself. Like, and he can, because Congress is fundamentally incompetent at this moment in time and they won't do anything about it.

34:58And so he's issuing a dare that they can't even accomplish. And he's issuing a dare that he would, I agree with him. Do you know what I think we should do? we should probably get rid of broadcast TV, subsidize wireless service for more Americans, make it cheaper and more prevalent for them to access, and move the sort of like public interest local news functions to some sort of subsidized model that pays for local newsrooms around the country. This is a half-formed idea. I had it five seconds ago. Doesn't it sound better than Sinclair owns all of the broadcasters and does what the president wants?

35:30I don't know if that idea will work. But you can come up with some solution that's like, we need to make sure we support local newsrooms because they hold local parts of the government accountable. There are vast news deserts in this country. And people aren't watching broadcast TV anyway. They're watching their phones. Make the phones cheaper. I can get there. I can come up with some idea that gets you more of the way there than we need to make sure that Sinclair and Tegna do what we want or we won't let them merge. No one cares about that. And Brendan has lasered in on this thing that no one cares about because there's enormous amounts of money in letting big companies merge or not merge.

36:08There's enormous amounts of power in controlling the local news broadcasts all across this country at a time when local news is dying. And he gets to wield power and he gets to make himself appear to be the censorship police, even though his power is very, very deeply constrained. Right. Because to go all the way back to the beginning, my guy is absolutely obsessed with not getting fired by Donald Trump. I don't know about that. One more. And this is, I think, maybe one that is going to need a fair amount of Neelad translation here. He says, one of the things I'm trying to do with our media policy as a general matter is to re-empower those local broadcasters to invest in local news.

36:47Because what's happened over the years, we've had a consolidation of power into what are national programmers, Comcast, Disney, and others. I guess I should say here, disclosure, Fox Media is, Comcast is an investor in Fox Media through its subsidiary NBCUniversal. They're big fans of ours. It's all really fine. Brendan continues. I'm just going to go up on FCC coverage. So then Brendan continues. And effectively, a lot of local broadcast stations are just mouthpieces for that national programming made in New York and Hollywood. This feels like some crux of Brendan Carr's sort of theory of the case about media right now.

37:18Can you explain what's going on here? This is so rude that you keep framing all of this like that. I'm so mad at you. No, I can't make any sense of what he's saying. Okay, good. But I can translate from idiot to Vergecast. There you go. It's impossible to make sense of what he's saying because the consolidation of power into national programmers is the consolidation of all of the local news stations in many markets being owned by one company. Those are the mergers Brendan Carr keeps allowing. Those are the mergers. Sinclair Broadcasting owns a lot of broadcast stations. Tegna owns a lot of broadcast stations.

37:57They wanted to merge. There were markets in which they would have owned all of the broadcast stations in a given city. And those are supposed to be competitors, right? Your local ABC News is supposed to compete with your local CBS News. They're supposed to have more men on the street interviews than choppers. That's what they're supposed to do. They're supposed to be Anchorman. That's the competition you want, right? Competing for local news to be the best eyes and ears of your community that you can get. The internet has obviously broken this, right? It's no longer lucrative to be the best local news in San Diego.

38:30Right. And like, I think we've lost something for that. I think we all yearn for the simpler days of Anchorman, for sure. Bring us back, Ron Burgundy. Yeah. That's all gone, man. Those stations are underfunded. They are owned by private equity in a lot of different ways. are owned by Sinclair or Tegna, which have a bunch of private equity in them. The costs are being cut. The stations are being consolidated. They themselves are broadcasting enormous amounts of centralized news programming. Yep. You can't make this argument without being an idiot to reality. It's not Comcast and Disney and whoever else.

39:04Yes, they are producing a lot of the sitcoms. They produce the national news broadcasts, but the local news on these stations is centrally being produced by a handful of enormous conglomerates that most people don't know, can not possibly hold accountable, and quite honestly, have miserable taste. Like just horribly go to any local news station's website and be like, do these people have good taste? And the answer is no. They have private equity taste, right? It is the lowest common denominator slop across the board. And so you remember when Deadspin did that video ages ago and it was just the same broadcast on every single station, they're all reading the same script?

39:44That's the danger. Yeah. That was like some truly dystopian stuff too. And this is, I think even that's like a decade ago. Yeah. That's the danger, right? Is that you will consume this news that you perceive to be made in your community, but it is actually being made by a national broadcaster with national interests that is playing a culture war that is a million miles away from you, literally and figuratively. And so Brendan's saying, I'm protecting you from the big evil NBC and Comcast and Disney and ABC, whatever. but at least you can see those. Those are legible to you. Sinclair and Tegna are not legible to you.

40:21So when Brendan exerts his power over them, you might not even know it. You might not even know how to hold them accountable because they're running under the ABC News branding. And so, again, this is, to me, this is incoherent nonsense because the reality is nothing like what he's describing. It is also dangerous because he's continuing to assert his censorship authority over a thing that is diminishing the value every day because the people who own it are diminishing its value anyhow. And I just look at this. I'm like, why do you want to be known as the censor-in-chief? To what end? And maybe it's because, you know, he doesn't want Donald Trump to fire him.

40:55But I would say his next move, and he's got this comment here about Section 230. His next move is to say, hey, you know what else runs over the public airwaves? Mobile internet service. Do you know what else the government operates in the public trust? The internet. We should not have news distortion on YouTube. We should not have news distortion in the TikTok algorithm. This criticism of our nation's greatest ally, Israel, has gone over the top. We're going to make sure X shuts it down. That's all coming. There's a reason he's using this power now. He's saying, I have this power and I need to use it.

41:26The only next move is to say, I should have more power. And this line about 230 where he wants to reinterpret 230, that's his shade at it. Yeah, let me let me read this one to you. And then and then this can be the last one, because I do think this hints at the 2026 season of Brendan Carr is a dummy. He says, I think I've expressed concerns over the years about how courts have sort of misinterpreted and given expansive new readings to Section 230 that aren't in the statutory text. And I think there's some of those issues in your legislation as well that are worth looking at. This is in response to a senator who was basically like, am I doing a good job making Section 230 go away?

42:04And that's essentially what he says. My response to this was, why on earth are you talking about Section 230, Brendan Carr? And then I looked, and I guess there is some precedent for the FCC having some interest in Section 230. But I agree with you. It seems clear that— Oh, there's not some precedent. You know what there is? There's a chapter of Project 2025 written by Brendan Carr in which he says the FCC should be given jurisdiction over Section 230. Again, he's not a— This feels like where we're headed. He's not a savvy operator. Yeah. Like, I can just read his plans. I'm like, oh, these plans are stupid.

42:36And then he does them. Yeah. And I'm just telling you, it's coming. The reason that he's making this enormous stand about being able to regulate speech on broadcast is so that he can make the same argument about the Internet. And he will find the authority. And again, he keeps daring Congress to stop him. And I suspect Congress will remain as dysfunctional as ever. And they will not. And so 230 is one way into it. There are other ways into it, some of which run into his own policymaking from the past, as we've discussed. You know, Ajit Pai and the first Trump administration disclaimed a lot of authority about the internet.

43:11But I suspect Brendan is going to try to find a way next year to take it back and actually aggressively try to start regulating speech on platforms. Yeah, it's coming. All right. That is it. This has been - You're a real dummy, Brendan. Oh, yeah. As always, I'd like to welcome you onto our show. I know you're going to be at CES. You can be the surprise live guest at the Vergecast at CES. Fun fact, Brendan Carr doing a thing the morning after the Vergecast live at the Brooklyn Bowl. So we know confidently that Brendan Carr is likely to be in Vegas and not busy. I'm just saying. If you got a line on Brendan, tell him that he's always welcome.

43:45You a good bowler, Brendan? Hit us up. We'll bowl for free speech. But you know what? We can hang out in the casino. We can do it however you want. But as always, you're welcome on our airwaves. I just refuse to be polite because I'm an American. I have free speech, you big dummy. That's it. That's the end of the 2025 season of Brendan Carr as a dummy. Neal, it's been a pleasure hosting this podcast with you. I don't do much on this podcast, but it's a joy to be here with you. We actually, this veers perfectly into a bunch of streaming war stuff that has happened this week. So let's take a break and then we're going to come back.

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48:19Zoom ahead.

48:24All right, we're back. Neelai, weird week in the streaming wars. There's just a lot of stuff happening. You know what I mean? Everybody's just doing things. And there's a lot of stuff. Also, all of it proves my thesis, that broadcast is dead and the future is on the internet. Yes, and at the very least, that all of these things are becoming precisely exactly the same thing. So let me just run through some headlines here, and you can stop me when you find something interesting. Oh, boy. We're going to stop here very quickly because thing number one on my list is that YouTube will now be the streaming host of the Oscars starting in 2029.

49:01I was right. What else do you want me to say? This to me is actually like a perfect example of the thing we were talking about, because I think like other than live sports, I think the most TV TV thing continues to be award shows. Right. It's one of the few things that still commands like a big live audience at a specific time on a specific day. It's one of the it's it's just Hollywood people celebrating themselves. Like there are lots of these award shows. Netflix, I think, got the SAG award. So this is a thing that's been happening. But the Oscars is like the Oscars is a big TV moment every year in a in a winnowing list of big TV moments every year.

49:39And now it's just going to be on YouTube. Does that feel weird to you? It doesn't feel weird to me. Like you mentioned, Netflix took the SAG Awards. The Grammys moved to, quote, Disney platforms. Oh, right. We had the president of the Recording Academy, Harvey Mason, on Decoder a while back. And he was in the midst of changing from CBS. They've been on CBS for a million years. And he was basically like, I got to go where the kids are. And he hadn't announced it yet. And I was like, I'm on YouTube. And then he was like, Disney Plus. I'm like, okay, that's equally good. That's where the kids are.

50:08These awards need to be near the relevant audiences. Right. And the Oscars have a real problem, which is no one has ever watched any of these movies. And so you just like back into, should we give Endgame the Oscar for Best Picture again? Like, I think if they just gave Avengers Endgame an award every year, like more people would watch the Oscars. This, I just get such a kick out of this because like I did this big story about YouTube for its 20th anniversary, which was earlier this year. and one of the things they're very honest about is that a big next moment for YouTube is going to be to start winning some of these big Hollywood awards like it has the audience they got on the Nielsen ratings which was a huge deal and a real sort of legitimacy thing they have all the advertisers they wanted they were like we have all the pieces of this puzzle but we've never won an Emmy we've never won an Oscar and now it's like you just have to wonder if Neil Mohan just ran around and was like well okay we're never going to win an Oscar but we could do the Oscars we can buy the Oscars Does that count?

51:04So, you know, I have some questions about this, which we'll see. You know, Apple took over Major League Baseball. They were in charge of producing it, and they did a bad job. Yes. They might still be doing a bad job, but they got better. But initially, like, a horrible job. They're also going to take over Formula One. And a lot of people I know are, I would say, curious and nervous about how that's going to go. Although Formula One is owned by Liberty Media. I don't know if Apple is just a distributor there, but I think the actual show is still produced by Liberty. Yeah, we'll see. Amazon does Thursday Night Football.

51:34I would call that messy. Right? If you've ever wanted to hear Al Michaels taking that, you should watch Thursday Night Football on Prime. Or to see retired NFL players take their shirts off at the halftime show. Vastly more exciting than most of the games. So there's just some like, do you have the muscles to do this? Do you know how to do production in the way that the big broadcast networks do production, which is a big part of making these award shows feel big. But I think what this actually points to is that these award shows are declining assets. I think that's probably right because the broadcast networks will pay the money for sports.

52:06They are not going to lose the NFL until they are dead and gone. And so you see the sports leagues are creating more games to sell to the streamers. Like, fine, there's football on Thursday and Sunday morning in Brazil. Like, whatever it takes, you can buy it. But the core broadcast rights, you know, the big networks will continue to overpay for because that's all they have left. And I think they're all looking at the ratings for the Grammys and the Oscars and everywhere else and saying this isn't worth it to us. And so I do think until there's monoculture again, these award shows are basically going to devolve into we give an award to the movie most people have heard of.

52:41And we are going to make up new categories for Beyonce to win every year. Yeah, I mean, it's like the Golden Globes added a achievement in box office category over the last couple of years. Literally just so that they could say, here's the biggest movie of the year and hopefully we'll get big A-list celebrities to come. Yeah. So, okay, so that's one. And then also this week, Netflix announced that it's making a FIFA game, which is a big deal to me personally, but is also, so Netflix has been sort of like dabbling in video games for a while now. They've done a lot of resurrecting of old games. They've done some sort of indie game stuff.

53:15But this, so EA, which had the license to make like the official global soccer game for years, lost its FIFA relationship last year. So now EA still makes a game, but it's called EAFC and not FIFA. And Netflix is now apparently going to make the FIFA game. Like they're just going to go try to make a rival sports game. Neal, to put this in terms you understand. No, I get it. I get it. You're saying they can make a Madden. I know where you're going. They're going to make a Madden. That's exactly right. Um, that is such a, like, several orders of magnitude leap from any of the gaming stuff Netflix has been doing in the past.

53:52And to me, it suggests that, like, you only do this if you're dead serious about really trying to compete in video games. Like, if they're going to make a AAA sports simulation game, you're not messing with that. I mean, are they going to make a AAA sports simulation game? We'll see. Do they even have to? Maybe not. Is the AAC any good? Like if you wanted to compete with Madden today, Madden 26, what I've been playing, which is so hard. You could just tell me that you've made Madden 2001 with the current rosters. I'm like, that's better. Yes. I play this game called Retro Bowl that is essentially that.

54:26The graphics are awful, but it has the NFL players' names right there. And I love it very much. And I play it all the time. Yeah. That's it. It's great. I get a lot of TikTok videos of legendary Packers backup quarterback, Kurt Benkert, two I've never played, but his legendary Packers quarterback, Kurt Benkert, and he's playing Madden. And I'm just like, I'm not playing that game. I don't know. I've never seen that game before. What are you doing? Amazing. And I get their skill levels and whatever. But I'm just saying, I think the market for some of these games that have been pretty lazy for a long time is huge.

55:03Yes. Plus, if the license in there, a lot of people know what FIFA is. And a lot of people, I think Netflix is very interested in being sports adjacent. Yes. Well, Netflix also is going to have the Women's World Cup starting in 2027. So it is like, it's starting to buy into this in a pretty real way. Yeah. And they're figuring it live. I would just say, if this game lives inside of Netflix, that is a huge mistake. I agree with that. They need to put this game where people play these games, in their own apps on phones, as standalone games on consoles. And we'll see. Did they say anything about that?

55:41They said it'll be available on mobile, but the exact machinations of it all, I think, remain to be seen. But I agree with you. And I think Netflix has done it kind of in all possible ways. Like there's some stuff that is buried, but then there's other stuff that you can just go get and you just log in with your Netflix account and that's fine. I have been of the mind for a couple of years now that this was like a fake thing that Netflix would eventually just kind of give up on the minute like it interest rates went up a little. That no longer seems to be the case. I actually think Netflix might be serious about doing games.

56:12Well, particularly we're going to get to this as YouTube encroaches more and more on Netflix. Netflix has to find stuff that YouTube won't do and YouTube is not going to publish games. Or can I interest you in Netflix just buying a bunch of stuff that used to be on YouTube? the other thing that happened this week was Netflix made deals with Barstool Sports and with iHeartRadio to get a bunch more video podcasts onto Netflix. And there's reporting out there that says the deal with Barstool is eight figures a year. Pardon my take, a big and very popular football podcast is moving exclusively to Netflix.

56:46This is like an ongoing thing. Again, there's a lot of sports here. this is like Netflix is spending an awful lot of money to get video podcasts off of YouTube and onto Netflix. And I just, I have two things to say about that. One is what the hell, why haven't we got a phone call? Like, what are we, what are we doing here? I feel like disclosure, I made a Netflix show that didn't make it to a second season. That's your disclosure. You're the problem. They're like, we're never working with Neelai again. but also like again we're in this moment where it feels like youtube has sort of conquered the world except for winning oscars and emmys right and netflix has conquered hollywood and now wants to go be youtube like these these two things are just running at each other so directly and so fast it's almost bizarre to watch i feel like there's some strategy confusion on netflix part here Video podcasts are great.

57:40Obviously, people are spending a lot of time on them. They dominate YouTube's time spent charts. A video podcast on Netflix without the YouTube commenting ecosystem feels way less valuable to me. I think I agree with that. There's some even, you know, our own show. Like, you can comment on our show on our site and you can comment on YouTube and you just look at the comments and you're like, well, there's more action on YouTube. Like, more people are incentivized to do it there. there's something about that that seems important in the context of a podcast which is you know before creators became creators we were podcasters before there was a creator economy and the relationship that we have with our audience was very direct in a way that the relationship of like netflix tv show runners is not as direct and so i think netflix wants to buy the time but they they can't get the relationship without the back and forth and i'll like i can i can say this very I can make this example very concrete.

58:34We launched the entire Verge off the back of the Engadget podcast. Yeah, fair. Right? We had Engadget. We were unhappy there. We had the podcast. We left. We didn't take the feed. I mean, this is ancient history now, but this is stuff that you see playing out over and again now. But in 2010, we were like, we're going to leave. Can we have our podcast feed? And AOL said no. And we told our audience on Twitter, we're leaving. Here's a new podcast feed called This Is My Next Podcast. and the entire verge is built off of that audience relationship, which is very direct, very two-way, right? It was a little community.

59:07That's not the relationship anybody has with Shonda Rhimes, I don't think, right? Like, it's just different. Like Netflix is Hollywood in that way. So they can buy all these video podcasts, but if they don't understand that what they're taking is the sort of direct parasocial audience relationship that creators have with their communities, I think they're going to make some missteps. I put that right next to them buying Warner and say, I think they actually might know what to do with Warner. The big, who knows? But like, you know what I mean? Like they're better at that than YouTube running a social network.

59:38Yeah. Some news on that front, by the way. This keeps just getting more and more bizarre. Netflix continues to say it is very serious about putting Warner Brothers movies in theaters. Like this thing where Netflix is going to destroy the movie economy continues to burble and Ted Sarandos has to keep saying, no, I like movies, I like Hollywood, we'll put stuff in theaters. I think I still believe that slightly more than you do, but they keep saying it. But then the other thing, I think the more important thing that happened this week is Warner Brothers is telling its shareholders to reject the hostile offer that is coming from Paramount.

1:00:15We talked through kind of what these deals look like last week, but essentially Paramount wants the whole company, thinks it can get the regulatory side of this done, has a lot of funky financing things going on. Had Jared Kushner involved, but even he now thinks the deal is out. It's a big mess. Jared Kushner dropping out of the Paramount bit is very funny. It's a tough look for Paramount, which is not a thing I ever thought I would say about getting out of business with Jared Kushner. But anyway, yeah, so Warner is essentially saying, we want to do the Netflix deal. We are going to do the Netflix deal.

1:00:51You should turn down this Paramount offer. There is a lot of continuing smoke. Elizabeth Warren was just on a podcast I Like the Town talking about why this is a total antitrust disaster and neither Netflix nor Paramount is a good home for Warner Brothers. This thing is going to keep being a mess, but it actually looks like it might pretty quickly become just Netflix's mess. Is that your read? Liz wrote a piece this week, great headline, Larry Ellison's big dumb gift to his large adult son. That was good. You know, the thing I don't understand about the Paramount bid for Warner is that it is backstopped by a bunch of Saudi money, but also fundamentally by the Ellison family's own stock in Oracle.

1:01:34Right. And, you know, if you are the CEO of Oracle, you have no choice but to pretend that H.U.I. is around the corner. And so saying, I'm willing to trade in my AGI valuable stock for your garbage Warner Brothers stock. It's crazy on its face. And that's Liz's piece. It's like, you can't believe this. Anyway, a lot of commentaries, a lot of people are responding, they just want to buy political influence, which is sort of like, well, then why Jared Kushner back out? But like, maybe. But also, they have plenty of political influence. Larry Ellison is not hurting for access to the Trump administration.

1:02:10Maybe what you want is culture war political influence, but you can just get it, especially if you're also trying to buy TikTok, which is arguably more influential than Warner Brothers. So it's just like unclear what Paramount's upside is. It's unclear why you would trade in Oracle stock for Paramount Warner Brothers stock, which already sounds like it's worth$0. And then you have to do the whole integration of these two things and not screwed up, which every single person that has ever bought Warner Brothers has done. So I do think it'll probably eventually be Netflix's mess. I just think we're two years of talking about regulation by enforcement, like two years of Trump administration concessions away, which is why Netflix doesn't want CNN.

1:02:49They don't want to be in that conversation. They want someone else to deal with that fight. Yeah. Netflix is very happy to have like sports podcasts and not interested in CNN. And I think the reason Ted Sarandos is running around saying he's committed to keeping movies in theaters is because Hollywood prefers him over Paramount, but still doesn't prefer him. Right. So he's trying to become the winner by saying, no, we're going to give you the things you want. Like you like us better than those guys, but like, let me sweeten the pot by saying we'll keep movie theaters alive. Right. Rather than just being the lesser of two evils, which at this point they are, but only like slightly.

1:03:22Okay. Two more things. And then I have a little game I want us to play here at the end of 2025. I have a bit of news that sucks and a bit of news that rules. um the bit of news that sucks um is peacock uh is is launching new ad format um i don't know if you've seen this they call them arrival ads and the idea is now when you open peacock you know that first screen you land on where you you pick your profile it's gonna have a big ass ad on it because that's what everybody wanted and i just like i keep saying these companies are dead they're already dead. Yeah. Yeah. That's death. And by the way, disclosure, NBC Universal and Comcast are investors in our parent company.

1:04:06They're dead. They're already dead. Yeah. I don't think our podcast will be on Peacock anytime soon. Let's just say that. I think I'm fine with that. I'm going to go ahead and doubt that. Look, the money in advertising is under such pressure. Connected TV is one of the few places where you can deliver good advertising or brand advertising, like fancy ads. And so the TV players are like, what if we increased our inventory of that? And they're not doing it by getting more people to sign up for their streaming services and watch more shows. They're doing it by just stuffing ads in more places. More ads, more fun.

1:04:43This is a death spiral. This is the same death spiral as the Samsung Frame TV. Eventually you're going to be happier when the TV is off and eventually you're not going to have it at all. Yeah. I mean, this is a way of suggesting that like, okay, we can't actually win this game on its merits. So we're just going to bleed you on the way out. Yeah. And that's a bummer. Better news. HBO Max rolled out a new thing that it calls channels, which is basically just endless feeds of your favorite show. This is the best idea I've ever heard in my entire life. So I'll just read you the lists of the shows.

1:05:18So there are 12 themed channels. some are themes like adult animation true crime and holiday specials but then the ones that i'm very excited about are just endless running 24-hour feeds of shows like friends the lord of the rings rick and morty the sopranos game of thrones the big bang theory it's basically this is the hotel room experience where you roll into a hotel room and you're like okay what episode of the office is on i'm gonna watch it that is ideal television neil as we've discussed most of my tv watching is just i i like six shows and i will watch any episode of them at any time just inject this into my veins i'm gonna turn on hbo max it's gonna be like we have an episode of friends for you do you want to watch it and i'm gonna say yeah and it's gonna say do you care which one i'm saying no i don't it's the dream this is cable again we're just doing cable but what if it's only shows I like.

1:06:14It's capable. It's just vastly more expensive. This is like MTV just canceled Ridiculousness, which they were just showing over and over again for five years. I think they've only shown Ridiculousness. And it's because they did the math and spending money on any new show was too risky compared to the guaranteed audience of people who are just like, screw it, Ridiculousness. And then I think they got mathematically the point where even buying new episodes of Ridiculousness was less worthwhile than just running their enormous existing catalog ridiculous test speaking of death spirals yeah very good but this i just want to say we're i think we're about to say some mean things about hbo max but i just want to say hbo max has done two three very good things this year as part of a total disaster of a company um they went back to being called hbo max kudos they switched to the correct reviews format on the internet which is two thumbs up one thumbs up and thumbs down that is the only review system that should exist on the internet.

1:07:11Love it, like it, meh. Perfect. And this, the channels. Great job, HBO Max. I'm so sorry you're going to be dead in six months. I would say, again, in the sense that everything just proves that I'm right. One strategy... It's the thesis of the broadcast. Everything is confirmation bias. That's my 2026 editorial strategy. Trying hard is an option. It's a choice you could make. you could try hard. I would point to AT &T tried to buy T-Mobile. The government blocked it. T-Mobile did receive a giant breakup deal and then they tried hard. They hired John Ledger and they tried hard and now they are, in fact, everyone's favorite Wallace carrier because they tried hard.

1:07:53Whereas if they'd been purchased by AT &T, I think maybe that would have not happened. In fact, I can guarantee that would have not happened. It is really true that do a good job is a remarkably unexplored option in most markets. All of this. Every time. we're going to talk about Amazon buying iRobot here and like do a good job which is not on the table yeah okay so all of this can I just connect that to one other headline here yeah Instagram is putting the Reels app on TV because everyone just wants to be on their TV one of these companies is going to figure out that the actual experience is building a TikTok discovery app on your phone that you're just like get into the middle of some movie that's in their catalog and you push a button and it starts playing on your TV that's all i want yes 100 i don't want the hbo max app on my phone to have hbo max in it i want it to be a tiktok feed of clips of movies that are on hbo max and i'm like screw it i'm watching the dark night again i find 100 agree i could i literally could not agree anymore with that take and netflix is probably best set up to do this and there are like glimmers that netflix actually might get this they've done some of this stuff in various places but like yeah forget the guide forget showing me the icons.

1:09:08I want to open the thing up and I'm just going to flip through clips until I find something that seems cool and then I press play and it shows up on my TV. That's the remote of the future, man. That's the game. I'm so in. Someone's going to figure it out. Yeah. It's not going to be Paramount+. I was going to say it's super warpy. Paramount +, hasn't figured out starting the stream within five minutes of pressing play. Yeah, tell me about it. They also haven't figured out what any of the characters on Landman should be doing here in season two. I'm just going to set that aside. There is your argument against letting Paramount +, White Warners, Watch this season of Landman and be like, this company was like Taylor Sheridan knows how to write a TV show.

1:09:45All right. Let's get to the game I want to play here. It's been a minute since we have revisited the Go90 scale of streaming services. And we're just going to do that. Here's my question. Do Billy Bob Thornton and Allie Lutter like each other on that show? It's unclear. Yet they just keep banging away. Go ahead. Go ahead. I have to tell you, your pitch for Landman Recaps as our new podcast within a podcast has been resoundingly rejected. They might hate each other. I will, however, accept a pitch more geared around the various goings on of Billy Bob Thornton. But that's, we'll come back to that in 2026.

1:10:21For now, Travis Larchuk, our producer, come join us, Travis. Hello. Hi. So we have not revisited the Go90 streaming scale. Oh, man. In a while. And it is time for us to do that here at the end of 2025. Maybe we should have been doing this every week. So, Travis, you, as you are one to do, are not only our producer, but you are the vibe coder in chief of the Hurgcast, I would say. You've made something for us today. I've done more for vibe coding than anyone making vibe coding has done. I have made a Go90 scale that we can interact with. So here it is for the listeners. We have eight streaming services here.

1:11:07And the scale, Neil, do you want to describe the origins of the Go90 scale? So Verizon once started a streaming service. It's called Go90. Their pitch was that you would join a gang. I believe it was a gang. And that these gangs would roam their service. And then when you started watching a video, you would rotate your phone to fully experience the video, thus going 90. Go90 failed. immediately, it went 90. It went... And so you see the scale is from zero, which is alive, to 90, which is dead. Degrees. You understand? You got 90 degrees, you're dead because you're lying down. That's the Go90 scale of Doom streaming services.

1:11:45It's very good. It has been very useful for us over time. And here at the end of 2025, we're going to put, let's see, eight streaming services on that list. So the eight are, in no particular order, HBO Max, Peacock, Netflix, Paramount +, Apple TV, YouTube, Prime Video, and we're doing the Disney bundle, the Disney Plus, Hulu, ESPN as all one thing. So just to reiterate, zero is alive and 90 is dead. And the closer you are to 90, the closer you are to death. That's correct. Many services have hit 90 over the years. Famously, Quibi went 90 in just under 10 minutes. Yep. Quibi, there was a time that we needed to rename this the Quibi scale of streaming services, but Go90 is just too good a vision.

1:12:25So let's start with the HBO Max because we were just talking about it. Travis, where would you put this on the Go90 scale streaming services? Knowing everything we know. Not streaming, no, no, of doomed streaming services. Doomed streaming services. Get my branding right, Pierce. Listen, there's been a lot of doom and gloom around HBO Max, but a few weeks ago, they debuted a new TV show that is sweeping the internet called Heated Rivalry about two professional hockey players who are secretly in a relationship with each other. And let me tell you, as a person who's been gay his whole life, this has been crazy to watch.

1:13:09And so I cannot in good conscience put this anywhere past 60 on the scale. So that's where I'm starting it. So I have not watched one second of the show, but it has been everywhere. And it's one of those shows that shows up all over my various feeds and it's all just like two hockey players sort of smoldering. Like I couldn't tell you anything about the show. Wait, is this a reality show? No, this is a drama. Okay. So it's a soap opera. It appears to just be nonstop sexual tension between hockey players. It's more than tension. It is full on Skinemax style butts in every episode. And the internet loves it.

1:13:53Yes. Okay. I guess you're skating. I always think of hockey players as a shoulder situation. It's both. I guess I've revealed a lot about how I think about hockey players. You have. I grew up in like, you know, Wisconsin's like Minnesota adjacent. There's a lot of hockey floating around. It's true. I lost to a number of hockey players in my youth is what I'm trying to say. Okay. So Travis, Travis is capped it at 60. I kind of feel like 60 is as low as I am interested in going. Because if this is all in the guise of going to Netflix, Netflix keeps saying that it's going to keep HBO Max alive, that it'll keep being its own thing.

1:14:28I have a very hard time imagining that's going to be the case. But I suppose it's going to be a while. Whatever will kill HBO Max is probably not going to happen in the next, let's say, 12 months. 85. So Travis is 60. I'm at 85. David, that means you get the final call. I think we're going to split the difference. We're going to put it at like 75. because I think there is, it has begun its inevitable demise, but it's going to take a while. Right, because 90 is actually dead. So we agree that it's not 90. Correct. It's not currently dead. Let us know if HBO Max is currently dead. You can only go 90 the once.

1:15:10You can live at 89 for a long time. So my argument is that death is imminent, but I think death actually will take several years. Yeah, I think death is looming, but it's not yet in the room with us. 75 is a good looming? Yeah. All right, fine. Heated Rivalry did get picked up for season two, so, you know, I'm holding out hope. That buys you at least another 12 months. Yeah, exactly. All right, next on the list. Let's do one that definitely isn't going to be as high or higher. Let's go with YouTube. YouTube is at zero. Right? It's default alive forever. we were talking about this earlier like the the sequence of things that i would have to imagine in order for youtube to be above like a 20 seems essentially impossible yeah there's no way like you'd have to you'd have to break up google there would have to be some gigantic economic catastrophe like so many the the heat death of the universe would have to be in range before youtube would go away from zero travis any any disagreement there no disagreement on this end okay what's the hockey player situation on youtube there are no gay hockey players on youtube so you know what for that reason i'm gonna put it at one

1:16:34i'll allow it um all right next up let's do let's do peacock next the other one we were just talking about um neil where do you land on this peacock is over a 45 but it is under 75 it's it's in the like you're not default alive really i would have thought you wanted this to be in like the high 80s well no because they have the olympics they do have the olympics right and it's also like nbc just split up the company comcast just split off all the cable channels into ms now and whatever CNBC rebrand exists that honestly makes it look like a healthcare services firm. I don't know what that is. And they think the business is Peacock.

1:17:20Universal Studios and NBC Television and Peacock is the business and the cable networks are left to... When they do these splits in Hollywood, they refer to these ancillary businesses as shitcos which is very funny. And so Peacock is more alive than not because they have executed the split. They got rid of the stuff they don't want. They're all in on this as the future. But then they have the taste that they have and they are still subscale, right? They're not as big as Netflix. They're not as big as YouTube. And they're going to put arrival ads on the home screen and basically bully you into watching the Olympics on it.

1:17:52Like, that's closer to death than not, right? It's not a given that it will survive. But it is, they have more assets in their favor than not. Travis, what's your, what's your peacock stance? My Peacock stance, they have the most popular reality TV show called The Traitors. So that's something. Is it Love Island also on Peacock? Yes, it is on Peacock. There you go. They've got Love Island. They've got The Traitors. Yeah, but do they have gay hockey players? My personal experience with Peacock is very weird because I watch Peacock a lot because it has horrible taste in television. Well, no, it's because there was that run of NBC sitcoms that was like 30 Rock, The Office, Community, The Good Place, New Girl.

1:18:41Like they had this run of shows that are now on Peacock. And so I watched them a ton because it's like easy background viewing while I'm doing other stuff. I literally don't think I could name you a thing that has premiered on Peacock in the last like three years. It just doesn't. It's purely a library streaming service for me, which is very strange. Let me ask you the other, the most important. What are you doing when you need New Girl on in the background? You say this a lot, and I think about my day-to-day. I'm never like, I'm doing something that requires New Girl. So, I mean, this is all going to reveal a lot about my personality.

1:19:17I generally will, like, when a lot of people would listen to music, I will often just watch a show. So, like, if I'm cooking, instead of listening to music or a podcast, I'll often just, like, put a show on. I usually play video games with the sound off and I'll watch a show I do it while I'm cleaning it's just like it's background noise and I would actually in a funny way this has changed since we had kids so we do less TV so there's a lot more music in our house than there used to be but like Anna with downtime will fill it with episodes of Law & Order SVU and for me it's NBC sitcoms from like the 2000-ish era so that's where okay here's my recommendation my wholehearted recommendation and advice stop doing the TV shows while you play the video games instead play very dramatic instrumental music playing Madden with explosions in the sky in the background is like ah it's very good I used to exclusively write with the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack playing and it made everything feel so sick that's a streaming service I could get behind that's incredible just he's a pirate on repeat makes every blog post seem unbelievable um uh all right i'm i'm good with i'm good with peacock in the 60s travis any any objection this feels about it no objection i think this is a great spot okay uh i think it is a less good streaming service than hbo max but it has many fewer corporate shenanigans so this feels about right um all right let's do uh prime video next This is a weird one.

1:20:54I'm putting Prime Video at 70. Really? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Higher than Peacock. There's just a chance they get bored. Yes, that's the case. Meaningful chance that Amazon is like, whatever, we resell Apple TV and Peacock here. We do not need to make any of our own stuff. So I guess I'm splitting this. The idea that Prime Video exists as a reseller of content and video store. No, we're talking like original streaming service. Like Prime Video, the thing that makes Fallout? Yeah. It's definitely 70. There's a very high probability that Amazon just gets bored of being in this business. It sucks.

1:21:27But they just paid all this money. They paid all this money for MGM and they paid a bunch more money for Bond. Like for James Bond alone, you would think Prime Video would have some runway. This is like 10 minutes of Amazon retail sales. Who cares? I mean, that is true. I never watch Prime Video. Travis, do you? I do watch some Prime Video. I will tell you that they had a movie called Red, White, and Royal Blue about the president's son getting into a relationship with a Prince Harry type figure in the UK. We had to start a show where Travis just recommends what to watch. This is our new podcast.

1:22:06Not hockey players, though. Oh, I see. So I would put them a little bit higher on the scale, maybe a 72. You get like the two point penalty for not hockey players. All right. That's amazing. If they made a show that was about like incestuous royal family shenanigans, but like some of them were hockey players. I'd watch that. And it would instantly bring you down five points on the scale. I also don't like that Mr. Beast has a show on Prime Video. I'm not a huge fan of that. So I'm happy with them where they are there. I will say that I went to watch the first episode of the new season of Fallout.

1:22:48I really enjoyed the first season of Fallout. And I watched it and I was like, I have no recollection of what happened during this first season. So now I have to watch all the first season again because bizarrely all the recaps are bad. That's how I feel about Stranger Things. Yeah. And there's something there where they make these shows and their events in the minute that they're live and then they just vanish from your brain. Yeah, every time I watch an episode, I'm like, this is really good. And then like four hours later, if you were like, what happened in that episode? I don't know. I got nothing.

1:23:16Yeah, I just I could not tell you what happened in the first season of Fallout. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, that's the argument that they survived. Like, just people being like, that show is good, right? I should watch it again. I'll keep them alive. Yeah, I would have put it lower just because Amazon so thoroughly doesn't need to worry about the money from Prime Video. But the risk of like, and this has been true forever, that at some point, if Andy Jassy ever needs to cut budgets, this is the obvious one he will cut. I say seven. We've been moving between 67 and 72. We split the difference. Split it at 70.

1:23:51Yeah. All right. All right. Deal. Love it. Next on the list, Paramount Plus.

1:24:01Travis. Yeah, I will hear nothing lower than about 85. Travis just immediately put it at 89. Yeah. Yeah, based, again, just on the total incoherency of Landman Season 2. And on top of that, they lost Taylor Sheridan. They took history's greatest writer of women and lost him somehow. 89. This is a company. They're lost. They don't know what they're doing. and even like you know I have like very conservative family that's like what is going on with the show it sucks now that's all I'm saying no taste zero taste yeah this is the thing that like the it's backer has so much money and is so much pride right like David Ellison is will will keep this thing alive as long as he possibly can but like what what on earth is there on Paramount Plus for anybody at this point.

1:24:50I'm sure we're going to get notes from people who watch Prankham Plus all day. There's a universe of There's Star Trek. We always hear from people who love Star Trek. Star Trek is there. There's apparently there was a Matlock reboot. They have the Mission Impossible movies. Sure. Top Gun is there. But there they have the smallest catalog, the smallest service. Yep. The. It is not yet clear whether they can execute well and make much watch things. They don't have the Olympics. it's messy over there, man. Yeah, I agree. 89 feels right to me. I think 89 is a little too high. As you said, you can live at 89 for a long time, but like 89 suggests that to me that there is no, there is no path back.

1:25:34Like you are, this is, it's not getting better, but you can stay at this place for a long time. And that's how I feel about Paramount Plus. I would give them the 80. 89 suggests like tomorrow it's going to die. No, as you said, you can live at 89 for a long time. Travis Travis we're in the 80s what's the hockey player situation on good old well in terms of Star Trek they did just announce that Strange New Worlds which I think is widely agreed to be the best new Star Trek content ever since they started putting things back on television is ending after its fifth season so it seems like we have maybe two years left there so I would I would put it at an 85.

1:26:20Sure. Okay. There are no hockey players on Star Trek. Taylor Shaden's gone. Again, this is the Star Trek reboot I would watch. We've landed on a planet of hockey players. I don't, I'm not, I'm not tracking by any stretch of the imagination. Beam me up. Fun.

1:26:42Why did this get me so bad? We gotta end the show. Oh, boy. All right, three more to do here. We're all going to recover. It's going to be okay. Let's do the Disney bundle. Great. Which I think is also very - I'm down from beat me up. I think it's unfair that you bundled these. Really? Why? Because Hulu is at 89. Yeah, that's why I bundled it. Like, I'm, like - Disney Plus is at zero and Hulu is at 89. Like, how do you - It's at 45. Hulu - I think Hulu is at like 89.8. Even Disney would tell you Hulu is a dying entity and will eventually just become a tile on the Disney Plus app. So I'm just saying in your thing, you have one thing that's at 89 and one thing that's at zero.

1:27:27How do you place this tile? Okay, fine. Then we'll just call this Disney Plus. And then you can be annoying because technically you can watch Hulu inside of Disney Plus. Like, sure. But this is Disney Plus. We will just call this Disney Plus. Zero. Zero. I think that's... It's at zero. I think that's right. Again, it's their business. Now, Bob Iger is making some astonishingly stupid moves lately. Yes. I think licensing the IP to OpenAI, paying OpenAI a billion dollars in investment money and then giving the IP up is as stupid a move as I've ever encountered in all of our years of covering this business.

1:28:06At the same time, sending Google a cease and desist. Like, you know it's worth some money, right? That's why you're threatening Google. You want to get paid. Right. But then idiotically, you've paid open AI to use your IP is nonsensical. If anything, you should do that in reverse. You should invest in Google, which is good at making money. So then you will get some money back. Investing in open AI is like, Sam, we're going to buy you some more runway to do nothing. But it's like cool and fancy. And I think Bob Iger really likes being cool and fancy. I don't know. Usually he's smarter. Like if you were like David Zaslav, it's like Sam Altman can have a billion of my dollars.

1:28:44and all of the rights to Batman. You'd be like, yep, he's an idiot. Iger's usually a little bit smarter than that. Yeah. Yeah. That's the argument away from zero for Disney +, but it's their whole business. There's not another bet. It's at zero until they waver from that bet. And for what we were talking about earlier, like you could just do a good job. Disney continues to do a good job, right? Like there is just, Disney owns Hollywood in a pretty meaningful way still. Travis, you just made a face. I don't know. Have you poked around Disney Plus lately? Just wait till it's full of weird Sora slop.

1:29:18I guess if you have kids, it's great. I know. Yeah. I mean, if you like Disney movies and you like Marvel and you like Star Wars, great. Otherwise, there's not a lot of original stuff on there. If you're a young American. This is Taylor Swift six-part Eras Tour documentary Erasure, and I will not stand for it. Fair enough. Should we have an entire conversation about how that documentary completely suffers from the lack of any critical distance whatsoever? I can do that for you all day and all night. That's the Verge cast, everybody. That's what we do. All right. Two more. Let's blast through this and get out of here because I actually think both of these are pretty easy.

1:29:54Let's do Apple TV next. Apple TV, I think, kind of has to go next to Prime Video for exactly the same reasons. It is the exact same thesis. No, it's a little lower. It's over 45 for the thesis. but you know they just redid the sounds pluribus is a hit eddie hugh seems happy you know like they're not gonna get bored because they they like it sure but again for for the same reason apple is is a couple of executive turnovers away in a season full of executive turnover from all of the people who believe in this thing maybe not being there anymore yeah but those like if eddie q leaves apple does apple tv still exist like i will move the number if Eddie Hugh leaves Apple.

1:30:37Interesting. Okay. Do you know what I mean? Sure. When Tim Cook and Eddie Hugh leave, and that's why I'm moving, that's why Prime Video's up. Because I think Jeff Bezos liked having a movie studio. Oh, yeah. I think Annie Jassy likes cloud computing. Yep. Apple, I think Tim Cook likes that he can summon Oprah. He can just do it. Very few people can summon Oprah, and Tim is one of them. It's true. Travis, you were saying a bunch of really mean things about Ted Lasso before we started recording. What do you think? I think the third season of Ted Lasso was bad. I am not excited for the fourth season of Ted Lasso.

1:31:14I will say on Apple TV, there is a fantastic animated show for kids called Shape Island. If you haven't checked it out, definitely worth checking out. And the video that they put out about how they made the new Apple TV motion graphic that appears. Have you seen this video? It's very cool. They actually made it physically. so that thing that you see when you turn on Apple TV the Apple logo going like that happened in real life which is pretty cool yeah and they got Phineas to do that little sound yeah I mean they're not bored they're like having a good time they're having fun they do seem to be having a good time I will give you that alright so this puts Apple TV to 60 I feel alright about a 60 Travis you feel good about a 60?

1:31:58I feel great about a 60 alright and then last but not least and I think maybe the single easiest one on the board we have Netflix Okay, so here's what I would say about Netflix. Based on the fact that we moved YouTube to a one due to its lack of hot hockey players, you put Netflix at zero. There's hotties on Netflix. And then I think you got to scoot D plus to one. Yeah. Right. Netflix is less dead than both YouTube and Disney plus. Yes. Or you remove the penalty from YouTube. You put YouTube at zero and you put both Netflix and Disney plus at one. no i think i think netflix is for sure a zero um and then i think it's a zero then i think youtube is a zero minus the hockey penalty this was my assumption as we were coming in was that it was going to be netflix and and youtube all the way at one end of the spectrum and then mostly a fight on the other side of the spectrum like the the fascinating takeaway to me about this and if you're listening we'll post this graphic in the in the show notes so you can see it but there's nothing in the middle the and this has been true for a while now there is like this stuff is so stratified now like the we we have the winners of the streaming wars it is i think it's netflix and it's youtube and then disney realistically in this world should probably be like a five just because it hasn't it hasn't sort of set the world on fire in the way that netflix and youtube have.

1:33:24They have more resources. They have more stuff. They have broader ambitions. When Disney makes a move, it's not like, ooh, right? It doesn't reshape the industry. But Disney has Andor. You should sign up to Disney Plus just to watch Andor. It's very good. For sure. And yeah. And so I think I'm fine with Disney plus landing at a one. I'm not upset about that. But it is very clear, and this is the stuff we were doing this week, that not only are YouTube and Netflix ahead, they're now sort of playing a different game than everybody else is. Well, to be fair, this list does not have the usual suspects in the middle, right?

1:33:57Your Tubi and your Crunchyroll, which sort of like live at 45, aren't on here. Sorry, did you just call Crunchyroll a usual suspect in the streaming wars? When we've done this chart, Crunchyroll has been on the chart a long time. I don't even know if Crunchyroll's still alive. Did Crunchyroll go 90? This is why it's not on the list, buddy. Can you Google Crunchyroll? Crunchyroll is still around. So is Tubi, for that matter. And no, you're right, there are a bunch. But this is, these are the players, right? Like for a long time, this has been the perceived kind of A-list group of streaming services.

1:34:30Sure. Yeah, I agree with that. I'm just saying the usual things in the middle are not here, which is all the mid-tier stuff that is just sort of puttering along. Yeah, that's fair. I'll give you that. All right, Travis, any objections to any of this before we get out of here? Well, you got to read it off for people. I will. Let's lock it in, David. Okay. so on the go 90 scale of doom streaming services we have netflix and youtube at a zero we have disney at a one we we penalized and then unpenalized youtube for its hot hockey players and i feel okay i'm confident you can find hot hockey players please send travis links to hot hockey players don't do that this is a workplace everyone uh we have apple tv to 60 we have peacock at a 64.

1:35:16We have Prime Video at a 70. We have HBO Max at a 75. Those four together, by the way, feels very right to me. I actually like that both as a group together and in the specific order. That feels good. And then we have Paramount Plus, I would say generously, at an 85. And that is the list of the Go90 scale of Doom streaming services at the end of 2025. That's right. Thank you both. Travis, your vibe coding, it gets better every time. Travis, the next test is to make these games playable for everyone. I would love a version of this where everyone could play and there's like consensus. We invite all the listeners live in real time to move these things around the chart.

1:35:55Yeah, we can get there by the end of next year so that everyone can open up a Giffon app and move the things around. And at the end, we like display it at a live show. Choice. Subscribe to The Verge. That's a good idea. Yeah. All right, we're going to take a break and we're going to come back and do a lightning round. We'll be right back. Bye. Bye. 300 sensors. Over a million data points per second. How does F1 update their fans with every stat in real time? AWS is how. From fastest laps to strategy calls, AWS puts fans in the pit. It's not just racing. It's data-driven innovation at 200 miles per hour.

1:36:36AWS is how leading businesses power next-level innovation.

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1:39:09All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Eric Gomez, I believe we have a sponsor this week. That is correct. This week's lightning round is presented by AWS. How leading businesses use AI for next level innovation. Neelai, we don't have to do Brendan anymore. Are you so excited? We did Brendan already. It's always one of my lightning round ones, right? I know. So you go first. What's outside of Brendan Carr as a dummy? Open your mind once again. Okay, this is a true lightning round item. All right. In a piece of only the Verge cares enough to break this story. Sure. A bunch of people who own LG TVs recently noticed that an icon for Microsoft Copilot appeared in their, like, webOS doc.

1:39:58What? And they couldn't delete it. Ugh. So this is obviously very bad. Like, first of all, your TV maker just, like, installing apps you can't delete is bad. Installing them without asking, all very bad. Installing Copilot on your TV is, like, so dumb. So... You start a show, it's like, did you want to make a spreadsheet out of this? So this story breaks, I kid you not, on the R mildly infuriating subreddit, which is perfect. That's so good. It has 36 ,000 upvotes and people just want to get rid of this thing. So what is Average for? We do the reporting. We get the companies on the record. They say what they say and they have to stand by it.

1:40:37That's what the money's for. That's why I pay this subscription. So we reached out to LG and they confirmed to us that they had, in fact, put Copilot on all these TVs. But, and this is so sad, it's not actually an app. It's just like a browser shortcut, like a bookmark that opens the TV's built-in browser and goes to co-pilot on the web, which is just the saddest, saddest AI integration of all time. First of all, can you imagine being on your TV and be like, what I really want to do right now is open the TV's built-in browser to go and use co-pilot on the web? And also the company that sold me this TV He thinks that should be on the home screen by default.

1:41:19Second, this is the worst outcome for webOS in history. If you recall, webOS, remember Palm reinvented itself with webOS. They were like, the whole internet is the web. Our application environment is the web. This is the future of the phone. They collapsed, and now LG runs webOS. It's a tough beat for web apps, that one. You know what I mean? It's real bad when you're like, well, it's webOS. Just do a web link. Anyhow, because we asked LG and we pushed them and they saw this stuff, LG has also confirmed, and I'm just going to read the quote. LG, quote, respects consumer choice and will take steps to allow users to delete the shortcut icon if they wish.

1:41:54So you can't delete it now, but due to LG's respect for consumer choice, they will take steps to allow you to delete the co-pilot bookmark that opens the built-in browser on your LG TV that they have placed in your dock by default. This is such Tim Robinson in a hot dog suit going, we're all trying to find out who did this energy. It's so bad. Oh my God. I love that they're like, we just, people want, they just want to open Copilot on the web. This is also on the heels of a bunch of news about how all of Microsoft's AI tools are bad and nobody likes them. And it's just, it's a tough times. Antonio did another round for us.

1:42:30Microsoft put out a Copilot on Windows ad. It's always during football, so I always see it. They put out a holiday one where people are asking Copilot a bunch of questions about like putting together IKEA furniture. And there's one specific one where someone says, here's my HOA rules. Here's a picture of my holiday light display. Tell me if the light display meets the rules. And I saw that in the middle of just a devastating, heartbreaking Packers loss and thought to myself, that can't do that. And you should not trigger that reaction to me in the middle of a Packers game. I shouldn't be thinking Microsoft is lying in the middle of a Packers game.

1:43:07We're losing in which Micah Parsons got hurt. I was like, Antonio, you're writing about this now. And it just absolutely can't do that. In fact, it can't do it to the point where one of the demos in the ad is, how do I make my light sync to the music? And Copilot in the ad goes and opens an app called like Rella Cloud, which is a fake company. Oh, Jesus. It's one of Microsoft's, like Microsoft has all these fake companies that they famously use in demos. We use like Contoso and all this stuff. And it's one of those. so Microsoft is showing Copilot do a thing that you literally cannot do because it is just abstract nothing this is all very bad like I don't know what Microsoft is thinking like not only can I not do it what it's showing the ads can literally not be done because it's showing things that are not real Microsoft is like not the only company that does this it's everybody does this Google runs ads that are like concept videos Apple got in trouble because they did the Siri video with Bella Ramsey in which they did a bunch of stuff that you can't do with Siri.

1:44:09This is a problem and everybody needs to stop doing this. Because in particular, the AI companies are just all in on pretending the AI is so much more capable than it is to the point where it's trivial for us to assign the, can co-pilot do this? Because we just ask the same questions and it is obvious that it cannot do these things. Yeah. All right. My first lightning round item is one of the most wacky controversies of the week. I don't know how much you saw this, but Blue Sky rolled out a new thing where you can import your contacts and see who else is on Blue Sky. This is the sort of thing that like every social network does.

1:44:47If you go on TikTok, it will relentlessly try to get you to upload your contacts to find people on TikTok. So this became sort of a mini controversy. Again, I don't know how much this like crossed your path, but there were a lot of people who were like, don't do this. This is gross. I hate this. Why would you make me upload my contacts? I don't want to do that. Don't be like these other social networks. And Blue Sky then had to go way, way, way out of its way to be like, no, we've done this in a way that is useful and also privacy preserving. And basically, Blue Sky's case is the way that their system works, it only works if you've both uploaded each other's numbers.

1:45:22So it's essentially a sort of like half-baked two-way authentication system, right? So if I upload my contacts, it will only ping you that I'm on Blue Sky and me that you're on Blue Sky if you also upload your contacts with my number in it. So if we have each other's phone numbers and we both upload our contacts to Blue Sky, Blue Sky will make the assumption that we probably want to connect because we are probably in some way also connected. that is one full leap better than all of the other services it just is right like if you upload your stuff to tiktok or snapchat or whatever it will snitch on all of those people and tell you who is there and what they're doing i also don't think this is great still like i don't i just a i think on principle you should never upload your contacts lists to a service just period i just don't think you should do that.

1:46:12But I also think like me, I don't know. What's your read on this? Is this the best you could do if you're blue sky or is this just a bad idea that they should stop doing? I think they did it in weird ways. Like you opened the app and it showed up in a way that reminded a lot of people of Facebook in the beginning. And so I think what people are reacting to is they don't want blue sky to be the big social platforms and make all those mistakes and act with the dark, same dark patterns. And you can explain how technically it's different. and Blue Sky is always in the trap of explaining how it's technically different.

1:46:43It just is. And because it hasn't meaningfully federated yet, like there isn't another service on that protocol that's as big as Blue Sky. You know what I mean? Like until the thing happens and they've proven out that their decentralized model actually enables all this other stuff and if you hate them, you can leave, then they're just running Twitter again and they're inheriting all Twitter's problems. And like that sucks. And I don't think they want to. I think they're actively trying to make people so mad at them that they go and build other protocols or other apps on that protocol. But, yeah, this one's weird.

1:47:16They need to grow. Like, in a very real way, they need to grow. They're small. They're not growing as fast as they were before. I heard a rumor that every single day Threads onboards one full Blue Sky. Yeah. But Threads is just not relevant in any way. But Blue Sky has some relevance. So they need to grow. They need to grow faster. This is one way to do it. But I think, as you and I have both mentioned on the show dozens of times now, all the growth in social network is not by people finding their friends. It's by finding other interesting accounts. That's not what public social networking is for anymore.

1:47:43Your friends are all in your DMs. So I just don't know why this was their idea. They should make discovery across the network much more interesting because that's where I think you'll get growth. And you'll get what you want, which is organic growth by people saying, I saw this in Blue Sky. And a lot of people saying, OK, I need to sign up for a Blue Sky account. Yeah, I agree. And Blue Sky has had good ideas about this, right? Like it did the starter packs thing that everybody has since copied. Like this sort of how do you find stuff on this network thing is actually something Blue Sky seems to have some aptitude for.

1:48:11And I totally agree. It's like find me good stuff. Lean into this idea of lots of different algorithms and lots of different feeds and like show me more things on Blue Sky. Don't try to like make me find my high school friends. I don't know. The real win, right, is when Blue Sky is more connected to the other networks and when other networks are more connected to Blue Sky. because what you want is for Threads and Blue Sky to actually be one big network that all work together and they're not close. Someday, Neil. It's coming. Someday. All right, what's your next one? It's CES time, David, which means we are but weeks away from Will.i.am, America's foremost tech innovator, Will.i.am, announcing yet more products.

1:48:52And so it is only befitting that we check in on Will.i.am's previous CES announcements from last year. And so you might recall America's foremost car audio innovation, Will.i.am's MBUX SoundDrive. No, I don't. Where have you been? What rock have you been sleeping on? I know, it's crazy. How did I miss this? MBUX SoundDrive, announced at CES last year, was a feature in Mercedes-Benz EVs whereby every time you accelerated or braked, the car, the MBUX system, would dynamically generate orchestral music as you drove. what so yep this is a real thing they announced this with great fanfare will.i.m's mbux sound drive um that sounds will.i.m said the feature turned the whole car into its own orchestra you selected sound drive through the infotainment screen uh and then you would in car signals would enable the music playing to react to the car in real time so so driving a movie that was the idea on the mount rushmore of solutions looking for a problem we might have to make room for M-Bucks Sound Drive.

1:49:58That's for no one ever. It launched with 30 pre-selected tracks, although Mercedes wanted it to be an open music platform for other artists to participate in. In the context of our ongoing review and further strategic development of our portfolio of digital extras, we have decided to deactivate M-Bucks Sound Drive and remove it from our offerings at the end of this year. This adjustment allows us to continuously optimize our offerings and focus on developing future-oriented innovations. You have been killed in the most corporate way possible, M-Bucks Sound Drive. I'm sorry. Andy Hawkins wrote about this for us, and I'm just reading his story now.

1:50:32And Andy calls it a fun but superfluous gimmick and then writes this. For example, if you slow down, the vocals would fade. And when you accelerate, the bass kicks harder. Andy, I love you. That is neither fun nor superfluous. That sounds awful. That sounds like actively unpleasant. Be like, oh, I'm stopping at a stoplight and the music's going to get quiet. That's not what I want. There's a notable friend of the show who I love very much. They know who they are. And they are the ones who forwarded me the email from Mercedes saying it was canceled. And I was like, dude, you had this?

1:51:04It's very good. That's awesome. Also, I didn't realize this. M-Bucks Sound Drive was not running locally in the car. It was streaming from the internet, which is why Mercedes killed it. Like, think about this. Will.i.am was like, here's my idea. When you drive, the bass kicks in harder when you accelerate, which is a perfectly Will.i.am thing to say. Yes, it is. Fine. And Mercedes was like, the way we're going to implement this is not by making that happen on the car. We're going to send data about your car to the cloud where we will dynamically generate music and then stream it back to the car.

1:51:41That is an open platform that artists will participate in. less than one year later. They were like, that was stupid. And they shut it down because no one was using it. Do you think someone at Suno is looking at this and being like, we can do this with AI? What if like... Look, Will.i.am is going to be at CES and he's going to say some AI stuff and, you know, anything can happen. Like we talk a lot about, you know, the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks of the world who are like, maybe their greatest skill is just being able to raise money at all times. will.i.am deserves a spot in that conversation we've been doing this for so long people keep letting him do this we've run multiple will.i.am is the kiss of death stories like over the past 15 years I'm guessing it's at least three don't let will.i.am near your tech product stories yeah all right my next one is so one of the stories you and I have been talking about that I think is like a big theme of 2026 is basically how do we computer if there's this big bet happening on all these new interfaces and all of these new app store like things and all these new services if the question is how is AI going to change our computers if you grant the premise that it's going to what is it going to look like and there is just like an infinite number of ideas but all of them right now are chatbots and so there was a bunch of news this week the Alexa.com website is live.

1:53:13You can now do a bunch of Alexa plus interacting on Alexa.com. It's not live for everybody, but it's live for a bunch of folks on our team, which suggests that it's probably live for a lot of folks. It's not for me. It's just a chatbot. It's just out there. It is just a chatbot. You can do some Alexa things through it. Part of the idea is you can control your house through the website in the same way that you would through the app or on the speaker. That's a good idea. Sure. These things are fine. There's also the chat GPT app store is now out. There's a bunch of like Instacart and DoorDash and a bunch of other things you can now do inside of chat GPT.

1:53:48The biggest one of all, I think I've been talking to a lot of people about like, how do you put AI into your app? And over and over people keep telling me, we spend all of our time talking about the pro models and the stuff at the high end of things and the really expensive things. But it's the small, eventually local AI models that are going to be the thing that actually work for everybody everywhere. Like it's going to run on your device, it's going to run offline and whoever builds that good first is going to be the one who wins. Yeah. And so in that vein, Google launched Gemini 3 Flash, which is the little version of Gemini.

1:54:22Much cheaper to run, much faster, can run on more things. Developers are going to be able to use it for a lot of stuff. That from what I hear is going to be a big deal. Everybody I talk to is still very excited about Gemini. and um i think we're about to hit a point next year where we have at least a set of models that is going to start to get better less quickly um so if you like are happy with gemini you're probably going to stay with gemini and claude is out there doing stuff and chat gpt is out there doing stuff and mcp the model context protocol that's being turned into a true standard and sort of used across the industry and now i keep talking to these app developers who are like okay now we know what the technology is.

1:55:04Now we can just go build stuff with it and see what it can actually do rather than just constantly like reinventing our whole tech stack because somebody put out a new model. So I think all of this is like, we're still just doing chatbots, but we are like very slowly pointing at something that might be after chatbots. Hayden wrote a piece for us this week and noted that all the big tech companies will stop talking about AGI or at least they rebranded it because they can't do it. You missed the most important one. What did I miss? that Amazon is integrating Alexa Plus with Ring doorbells. So it can recognize who you are and then the person at your door will end up talking to a chatbot through your doorbell, which is at once dystopian.

1:55:44I'll grant you the dystopia of that. Also, the funniest thing I can possibly think of. Like the endlessly cheery chatbot voice being like, that's a great idea, but have you considered to look at the door? Like you might've been thinking about getting in, but have you considered getting the hell out? Are you going to take David's package? Please don't do that. I'd love it if you wouldn't. It's very good. So in rings, visually, I can already do this. So it can distinguish a person, deliver a uniform from someone casually stopping by, and then it can talk to them differently. I'm dying to try this out.

1:56:18I'm also dying to invite Kevin Roost to my house to see if he can get my doorbell to fall in love with him. Kevin, you heard it here first. We'll have you anytime. I can give you Nealize address. This is kind of what you mean. They're like, Amazon's in the, like, let's put a chatbot in it phase. Everyone else is like, okay, we have a thing that can do natural language interface and natural language output. We're going to put it in our app in the smallest, cheapest way we can, and that will enable some new things. Right. And that might be as far as this goes. That might be how the bubble pops. Might be.

1:56:47Because all this agentic stuff, even this chat, GPT App Store, is like, all next year, we're going to write about app developers doing the, like, small AI stuff. to make their apps more interesting and the big model companies like on the risk of crashing the economy. Yeah. An experiment I'm very excited to run is I'm going to have ChatGPT buy me groceries. I don't know what your household is like, but Anna, my wife, is very particular about groceries. She is the type who will like stand there and read the ingredients on every bag of granola to decide which granola to buy, even though we've bought the same one the last 25 times we went to the grocery store.

1:57:25So I'm just going to go on Instacart and just be like, I want a bunch of stuff. can you buy me some groceries and we're just going to see what appears at my house and i could not be more excited about it it's going to be i'm excited for you you know well it's great because when i grocery shop i get sort of a point-by-point review on all of the things that i bought when i get home and now that's going to be instacart's problem it's gonna be great i'm thrilled this is gonna go so badly i will report back in the new year don't you worry all right what's your last one uh i just want to briefly talk about ford kind of pulling back from evs you know they announced this new stuff um jim farley put out a thing he's like i'm restructuring the company we're putting all of our sort of battery capacity in a new energy storage division which is like the thing you do when you invest in battery capacity but you're pulling back in evs do you have to kind of do the same thing and they're saying they're going to do more hybrids and all this stuff but the one thing i want to call out is they they quote unquote canceled the f-150 lightning and they're going to put out a new one in this new fashion called er evs extended range evs okay And everyone is like, they're giving up on the lightning and they're going to put an engine in the new lightning.

1:58:29And this is just wrong. And the reason it's wrong is they're doing the thing that I think all of the pickup truck makers should have done with their pickup trucks in the beginning. They're going to put an engine in the truck as a generator for the electric powertrain. So the engine is never going to drive the wheels. And there's been other hybrids that work this way in the past. Actually, the Cybertruck was going to do this. You know, they had to spend their engineering hours on the wiper instead or whatever happened with that thing. Ram was going to do this. But this is like a big idea that actually you need the range.

1:59:00You need the towing capacity in these pickups. And people have all kinds of feelings about pickups. And maybe you're never going to tow anything, but you still care about the towing capacity. I don't care. There's a reason people buy these trucks. And these are the stats that people care about. And so the idea is you get vastly more efficiency from an electric powertrain. you're probably on it most of the time but when you actually need to go on a road trip or you need to tow you spin up the engine you run the engine at the most efficient part of its power band and you make electricity to charge battery and run the powertrain and this is like a genius idea and i know it's a genius idea because this is how every diesel electric locomotive in the world works right like this is actually a very solved problem there's a really interesting company in Canada called Edison Motors.

1:59:45It's a startup that is like retrofitting semi-trucks this way. And they're running into like weird regulatory problems because the Canadian government wants to like regulate the engines as engines and not generators. And there's no framework for them being generators. And like, it's fast. You should follow them on TikTok. It's fast. You can watch them figure it out. But this is the idea. And so I actually would look at this and say Ford is finding a way to park a bunch of its EV investment into energy storage because, the regulatory environment has changed. And they have done the thing that they should have done and managed to play it off as walking back from EVs in a way that probably makes the Trump administration happy and whatever political noise culture war about EVs, like calm down.

2:00:28But they're actually still shipping an electric truck. They're just adding the feature to it that they maybe should have had from the beginning that everyone else has been circling. Scout Motors, other startup truck company, they're going to do an ER EV with a generator powering the electric powertrain, that's the solution to the range. And you just get to run the engine way more efficiently, which obviously helps with emissions and all this other stuff. But it's like, you can see a lot of cars are going to get there instead of being true hybrids. I think it's super fascinating. That seems like a good outcome.

2:00:57It's definitely a less ambitious version of the EV, but it also seems like we've spent the last few years realizing maybe we overshot on the idea of what we were going to be able to do out of the gate. I think a lot of people are going to end up buying these EREV trucks and never run that engine. and then they might realize they don't need the engine at all. Yeah. All right. My last one is just a tiny bit of news that has made me think about our predictions conversation from the other day. The news is that Meta is pausing, its word, pausing, its program to license out its VR operating system to other manufacturers.

2:01:35I find this very funny because this suggests that there are other hardware manufacturers who are interested in licensing Meta's. VR operating system. But it's also just a fascinating moment in sort of the whole metaverse project at Meta, right? Like Meta built out a huge amount of resources and infrastructure to make the metaverse happen. They were all in, they did Horizon, they bought game studios, they started doing the hardware. Like for a really long time, Meta was not only the company most invested in doing the metaverse, it was kind of propping up the rest of the industry by itself. it was making the hardware it was making the software it was building the games it was buying any good game that came out like meta was just determined to brute force this thing happening um and then the meta ray-bans were a hit and ai started to happen and it feels like all of the momentum for the metaverse both in and out of meta is just gone and so now i'm like okay if i had thought about it, one of my 2026 predictions should have been that the whole metaverse idea is just going to die.

2:02:42Because it feels like, again, like we were talking about with the streaming services, like if you eventually have to look around and be like, oh, look at this thing we're spending a lot of money on that is completely ancillary to our business. Let's spend our money on something else. It would have to be the metaverse, right? Like at what point does Mark Zuckerberg just say we're doing glasses and we're doing AI and let that be enough? Goodbye. I mean, they will tell you, Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of Meta, who runs Reality Lab, will tell you that it's still going strong. Yeah. I mean, even in their statement pausing the thing, they say, we're going to reinvestigate this as the category changes.

2:03:17Sure. I'd say, eh. Yeah, no, you're right. Right. It's dead. Mark Zuckerberg can't lose that much face that fast. Right? Because that would put a lot of heat on his AI investments. Because everyone would be like, well, you just said all this on the metaverse. Are you going to be right about AI? Isn't this bubble popping? So I think he's got to keep face over here. I will continue to say I think everyone is deeply confused about why the meta glasses are popular. They just like having a camera that's convenient. They do not like talking to Mark Zuckerberg's AI. I agree with that. But I think Meta is deeply confused about that.

2:03:54I think they can shoehorn in an AI assistant to their camera glasses in a way that is just not going to happen. Well, and what's funny is I think a display will add something in a meaningful way. And I think that will confuse everybody even further that actually what everybody wants is AI on that display. And I think they're wrong. Yeah. I mean, I know people have bought the display glasses and they're like, why did I do this? Well, they're not any good, right? But that's a solvable problem. Is it? Yeah. Let's go through this stack once again to make the display glasses. No, we won't do it. We're two hours into this first casting.

2:04:28We don't have time for this. Put up the vibe coded chart. Let's go. But no, I agree that you're right. This is a hard problem to solve and there is no guarantee that they will solve it anytime soon. But I just think, like, even if you think at this point, at the end of 2025, that you're Mark Zuckerberg, you have unlimited power and unlimited resources and you want to skate to where the puck is going, it's obviously not the metaverse anymore. Yeah, probably not. Like, it just clearly, there's no case to be made anywhere that the metaverse is the next thing. So I have this underlying theory that Silicon Valley just desperately wants us all to be brains and vats.

2:05:01Like, they want it real bad. Oh, yeah. In a way that they talk about it more. Well, and eyes. You have to have eyes. No. They have to show you stuff. They can screw with your optic nerds. Brains and vats. That's fair. Okay, brains and vats. Yeah. And then, you know, then your entire life is just a series of databases they can control. Yeah. This is another show. Anyway, the point of all this is the metaverse was the ultimate sort of pandemic-fueled brains and bats fantasy. Yeah. Like, everyone's home all day long. They're using the computer. All the numbers are up. What if I put them in a reality that I can control, and now they'll just be brains and bats?

2:05:33And it's like, yeah, then we all went back outside, bro. Like, sorry. Like, I have no interest in this. Yeah. And the one good thing that they bought was Supernatural, the fitness app, which people are still using, and they're still sort of iterating on. But it's just sad to me that because they bought that company, that company isn't fighting for relevance anymore. Do you know what I mean? Like if they hadn't bought Supernatural, would Supernatural be actually driving some sort of like more awareness of VR fitness? Would they be marketing? Would they be doing stuff? And like Meta is just like, we're not, you're fine.

2:06:00You're not spending a dime. Or would Supernatural have like loudly gone out of business and hurt the whole project for Meta? I feel like we should end here by calling out Jen's incredible reporting on iRobot this week. Yeah. which failed because both the American and European governments did not let Amazon buy it. Then they didn't do the thing they should have done, which is try to do a good job. And now they're being sold to a Chinese company. Jen, every ounce of that story, Jen, has broken. You should go read all of it on TheVirg.com. Yeah, it's very good. And it's a super sad story. We'll have to come back to that as that continues.

2:06:30And if you want to argue about the effects of antitrust law, it's like it's all there for you. It's an inkblot test of how you feel about antitrust. Yeah. Yeah, that's real. All right. But we need to get out of here. it's the end of 2025 this has been our longest Vergecast in a while which feels good thanks Brendan this is the right thing to end on yeah seriously I'll see you in Vegas bro yeah we're gonna stalk Brendan along the strip in Vegas and just see what happens I'll out drink Brendan anytime anywhere and I haven't been drinking for a minute so it's gonna get messy listen I'm getting three hours of sleep at night I'm ready for whatever you got for me Brendan I'm gonna get so drunk I only refer to him as the chairman derisively I love that But a couple of housekeeping things before we go.

2:07:12Again, Vergecast Live at CES in Vegas, January 7th, 3.30 in the afternoon at the Brooklyn Bowl. We'll put the link to RSVP with all the information in the show notes. Please come out. It's gonna be really fun. And a big part of it is just to hang. Vergecast is fine. We like doing it. We'll talk about CES, but being there with all of you is the point. And that is very fun. It's one of the most fun things we did this year. I'm very excited to do it again. We're gonna have a blast. also we are going to be gone as of Tuesday we have the Holiday Spectacular coming up on Tuesday which was a super fun episode that I'm very excited for everyone to watch and listen to but you and I are done professionally forever this is it get out of your face Pierce but there is there's lots of decoder to catch up on if you all haven't listened to Neelai's mailbag decoder in which he tells you all of his feelings about everything it's delightful I enjoyed it very much I've known you a long time and actually learned some like instructive things listening to that episode also some version history coming out there's going to be a couple of version history episodes on this feed but all of the episodes are on the version history feed and on the virgin's youtube channel so there's there's lots of stuff for you to do over the holidays we're ending version history can i say it we're ending with ti-vo yeah which i i i don't have favorites i love all my children equally but that i have never had more fun making a version history i mean the wall with the iphone 4 is a high it's a high it was it was very good uh i mean i'm just saying the ones i was on.

2:08:37TiVo, TiVo was a blast. It's a really good episode. I think you will, you will really enjoy it when it comes out in a few weeks. But until then, Neelai, we're out of here. It's been, it's been a year. God, has it been a year. Brendan. We both had kids this year. We did both of us. And the kids are good. Just saying in case you're wondering, they're fine. Yeah, things are good. I think neither of our kids like sleeping right now. So apologies for whatever that has done to us on this show and in general. but now we're going to go hang out with our families for the holiday I hope all of you have good holidays too you can always email us vergecasttheverge.com call the hotline 866-VERGE-11 if Brendan Carr keeps being a dummy while we're out we require you to tell us you need to keep the information coming because the holidays may come but Brendan Carr never stops the Vergecast is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network shows produced by Eric Gomez Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk we will see you on Tuesday and then in 2026, Neelai, rock and roll.

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