How to vibe-write a country hit

25:07Would it get into theaters? Because Warner has a long, very good relationship with theaters. Ted Sarendra has said all the things I think you'd want him to say if you're a Hollywood person. I 100 % believe that he's lying, that HBO Max will continue to be an app. The other ones make sense to me that they would continue to do it. I think he's lying about all of it. Look, I— You think they really just, like, they decided it was worth$83 billion to get, like, Friends and Harry Potter on Netflix forever? And whatever James Gunn is going to do next at DC? Yeah. Yeah. I think like they want the IP. They don't have a lot of their own great IP.

25:45No. Especially now in Stranger Things it's over. They can do sops at theater owners or whatever, but they can also just squeeze that stuff to death. And then the main thing, this idea that Warner sells content to other streamers, well, they're going to be the other bidder. Right. Like Warner already makes content for Apple TV and HBO Max, its own service and Netflix and whoever else. and Netflix is just going to take them out of that game or people are going to pitch into a system where Netflix usually is a bitter, but now they won't be because they're just going to, like, they're going to reduce competition for the shows that are made in a meaningful way.

26:20And you can't just horsepower your way through that reality. Like, you're just taking one big player off the board on both sides of the market. And so, look, we've heard, in the context of people buying Warner Brothers, we have heard these lies before. Sure. just directly heard these lies before. And they usually kill the company that tells the lies because Warner Brothers is huge. It's part of the Hollywood ecosystem in a very important way. The fans care about that IP in a very important way. You can bully AT &T into releasing a 4-3 grayscale Justice League movie re-edited by Zack Snyder. You sure can.

27:00That should not be a possible thing that happened. That is the only real outcome of AT &T buying Time Warner. So I just, I look at all this. I'm like, Netflix will get eaten alive. On the other side, you look at Paramount's plans for its company, even in the absence of Warner Brothers. And you're like, oh, you're doomed too. Like David Ellison, you know, he, when they bought, when Skydance bought Paramount back in August, gave a bunch of interviews about their plans. And it's all the same stuff. Yeah. He's like, we're going to see efficiencies by combining all the backend platforms and making one store of data so we can target ads more effectively.

27:33And it's like, yeah, you could do that. Have you thought of making good shows? Right? Like, cool. And so what? He's going to buy Warner and then they're going to combine the tech backends of the HBO Max app, which means inevitably there will be yet another version of the HBO Max app. if david ellison would just agree to just call it hbo and get rid of absolutely everything else any of these companies make and just call it hbo they have my vote i'm in i mean it's sure uh the reason they changed it from hbo max to max was they didn't want to clutter up the hbo brand with a bunch of discovery slot right and then they realized that no one cares about discovery slot they only care about hbo so like they're gonna run head first in this problem uh ellison has a dream that he can make a TikTok-like recommendation algorithm for this single platform that contains all of Paramount's IP.

28:25And obviously he has a dream because Oracle is the big partner to buy TikTok if that deal ever goes through, which I will point out again, the Trump administration is not good at executing. Yeah. I don't know if Oracle is going to run TikTok in the future because we just keep letting ByteDance run TikTok for as long as it wants. But that's right. But you see that you can just say that if you're a media executive, you're like, you know what we need? We need the TikTok algorithm for our IP. It's like, great. I'm glad that you had that idea. Everyone else does, too. Yeah. It's really hard to do that.

28:58And then he has even more bananas ideas about integrating AI. Can I just read you this quote? Sure. This is from the rap. He did all these reporter roundtables. And he was like, here's how I see us using AI. Ellison gave a specific example of what potential use of AI he sees for the company. Paramount. Ellison's daughter is a fan of Paw Patrol, and he said the industry is potentially three years away from his daughter being able to talk to Sky, the pink dog from the show, in a real-time AI-generated conversation for 20 minutes. No. If your vision of the future of your company is someone can talk to dogs who are cops for 20 minutes, you got a problem.

29:39Paw Patrol is not great. We are a Paw Patrol household. Matt is a Paw Patrol child. We didn't like it, but we dealt with it. Sure. I would have never in my life allowed Max to talk to an AI's sky for 20 minutes. Well, it's just very funny that even in that case, it's not like, oh, wouldn't it be so cool if we could make more Paw Patrol? Like, we're going real life Paw Patrol. I'm aware that not all the dogs are cops. All right. I'm aware that one of them does recycling and another one has a jet ski. Like, this is not high art. No. But, yeah, I mean, and again, I think that's the kind of thing that if you're a Hollywood person, you look at and you're like, oh, you have no interest in making things.

30:23Right. You want engagement. Yeah. 20 minutes of talking to Sky the dog is not art. It is just engagement time. It is time that you can collect data to target advertising. And then all of the other David Allison ideas are about unifying data across your platforms to more effectively target advertising. So then you look at a company like Warner Brothers Discovery, and of course they'd want everything, right? You're in the library buying business at that point. You're like, I'm not here to make things. I am here to have things that are already made. Right. And I think this is why hilariously over the course of one weekend, Netflix went from being the villain in Hollywood to being at least a little sympathetic.

31:04Yeah. Because at the very least, Netflix pays actors and directors and DPs money to make films. Yeah. Not enough money. And there's not enough back end residual. Like all of the structure of that money is not what people want. But they are in the business of paying those people to make things that some of those people at least are proud of. not finding new ways to remix all of the episodes of the big bang theory so that you can i don't know hang out you can talk to sheldon you're like what age do you want sheldon to be on young sheldon or regular sheldon he's going to talk to you for 20 minutes about being a cop like yeah who knows i'm just like you look at these visions for what to do with warner and they are not meaningfully different from the visions that every other doomed purchaser of warner has ever had.

31:49Yep. They are hard to execute. They come right up against Warner Brothers' own history, its own legacy in Hollywood. And no one has the idea of what if we tried to do a good job? It's just not an outcome on the board right now. Yeah. What if we bought Warner and tried to do a good job? And I think where this really comes to head is how CNN is being used as a pawn in this whole conversation. CNN, like it or hate it, I personally think CNN has kind of devolved into just being a fairly bad 24-7 podcast. But it's still like an important thing that happens every day. It is an important news source.

32:31I mean, that is a very harsh criticism. But I will also concede CNN still operates a worldwide newsroom with actual reporters on the ground with video cameras and sources and fixers around the world in war zones in a way that nothing else exists. But there are very few of that left in the world. CNN's important. Ellison, according to Wall Street Journal, promised Donald Trump, quote, sweeping changes to CNN. We can already see the sweeping changes he's made to CBS News, where he took Barry Weiss and the Free Press and stalled her as the editor-in-chief of CBS News. She's making changes to their talent.

33:06She's interviewing Erica Kirk in a primetime special herself. Yeah. I mean, as an editor-in-chief, he likes to do the work himself. Yeah, a little sympathy there. But that's how we're supposed to do it with CBS News. Funny thing about that, too, by the way, is there was a 60 Minutes interview with Leslie Saul and Marjorie Taylor Greene that Donald Trump really hated and said a bunch of mean things about about how the new ownership is not any better than the old ownership. And it's like, just how how does anyone not see what this is? If you can if you start to concede a little, you end up conceding a lot.

33:38Yeah. Right. And particularly for a news organization. I'm the one who rants and raise our ethics policy. The thing you need to say is you can't tell us what to do. That's the only message a big news organization needs to say. And then you can be whoever you want to be. Yeah. Which to me is so clearly why Netflix is like, we want no part of this. Right. Actually, Liz and I talk to this all the time. You have a lot of feelings about Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch knows that the most important thing for the Wall Street Journal is that you can't tell it what to do. Yeah. And he will defend it on those grounds over and over.

34:08He did it with Theranos. He does it against the Trump administration. His core, he's Rupert Murdoch. lots to say about Rupert Murdoch. But at his heart, he's a news person and he understands actually the Wall Street Journal needs not to be told what to do. Yeah, and he has told many powerful people to shove it when it has come to it. Yeah, you used to work there. I did. And like, that's the thing. I had to go into the New York office past a really like a twice life-size thing of Sean Hannity, which was not great. Did you ever think of yourselves as the Tom Wamsgams of News Corp? Were you like, I can get into this family?

34:38I always thought of myself as the slightly shorter Greg, where everybody was just kind of like, Like, what are you doing here? David, I don't understand why you work here when you could have done a succession at News Corp. Anyhow, I would say, like, David Ellison does not – he does not understand that Rupert Murdoch's role is to say you can't tell my newsroom what to do. Yeah. Which he also does for Fox News. Again, you can have a lot of feelings about Rupert Murdoch, but he plays that role as the billionaire owner of a media company very well. Yeah. David Ellison is like, you can tell us what to do.

35:06I want this deal done. David Zaslav, to some extent, was like, you can tell me what to do. I want this deal done. Netflix doesn't want any of that smoke. They don't even want to buy this thing. And so here's this important institution that is one of the last of its kind worldwide. And everyone's like, we're just going to screw with it to make this money with our bad ideas about talking to the Paw Patrol. I just think that Charles wrote this headline for us. There are no good outcomes for the Warner Brothers sale. And I, again, nowhere on this list is we should try hard. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And I do think the only certain outcome at this point is probably two plus years of just abject chaos that causes a lot of problems in the process.

35:52But that means we have lots of time to talk about it. We should move on. We're going to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk to Charlie Harding about AI music because I like AI music more than I like AI pop control. So we're going to we're going to come back and we're going to do that. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Charles Schwab. At Schwab, how you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own. Plus, get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs.

36:27With award-winning service, low costs, and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more.

37:04hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. That's a big deal when every hire counts. With LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant, you can skip the confusing steps and recruiting jargon. It filters through applicants based on criteria you've set for your role and surfaces only the best matches so you're not stuck sorting through a mountain of resumes. LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant can even suggest 25 great fit candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates.

37:48That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Support for today's show comes from 1Password. Here's the bad news. Teams of any size can be targeted by cybercriminals. Bad actors target lean and growing teams precisely because they often aren't able to take the same precautions as big corporations. But here's the good news. Even the smallest teams can take steps to protect themselves with 1Password. 1Password is a password manager that helps small teams manage the number one risk that bad actors exploit. Weak passwords. That means a password manager should be the first security purchase you make for your team.

38:311Password knows that for small teams, responsibility for security often defaults to one employee who's already juggling other business functions. The most effective security solutions will need to be intuitive and user-friendly so that everyone at your company can and will use it. Your team can enforce security compliance and prevent breaches. It's the single most impactful investment you can make in your company's security. Take the first step to better security by securing your team's credentials. Find out more at 1password.com slash Burgecast and start securing every login.

39:08Millions of players. One world. No lag. How's it done? AWS is how. Epic Games turned to AWS to scale to more than 100 million Fortnite players worldwide. so they can stay locked in with battle-tested reliability. AWS is how leading businesses power next-level innovation.

39:38All right, we're back. Joining us now, Charlie Harding. Hi, Charlie. Hello. Thanks for having me. Charlie, you are the co-host of Switched on Pop, a very good podcast. You are a music journalist and a professor. And I believe we called you a Vergecast intern at one point. Is that right? Why did I earn that? I don't recall. You've been on the show a number of times that you need some title, but I don't want it to go too much to your head. Oh, yeah. I appreciate the choosing to not have title inflation. Really put me down. Yeah, Neelai's big on titles, not being too grand and inflationary. Everyone at The Verge is just person.

40:14You're just a person. That's it. How it should be. Present. It's very flat. What was that holacracy that Zappos had, where no one had a title or a job, and you all just sort of like showed up and we're like, how do we sell shoes? It's perfect. Um, so you are here because you just did a big story about, uh, Suno and AI and essentially what it has done to country music in particular. And, uh, I'm curious to know where this story came from because Neelai has been on the show ranting and raving about his favorite AI songs for a long time. Did Neelai do this to you? Well, I feel like Neelai and I have bonded for years now over the question of when, will these music AI generative apps be any good?

40:58And last time we spoke, we had not crossed the threshold. Maybe we talked a little bit about BBL Drizzy at some point. But now I feel like we've really, we've crossed the line. And I actually had a former student. I lecture at NYU and at Berkeley College of Music one day a week. And I had a former student who was down in Nashville and was like, I gotta tell you something. I went to write country songs and this city is not what I thought it was. Wow. Well, it's interesting that it started country music because you and I had a conversation. I've been obsessed with soul covers of rap songs that are all over YouTube and Spotify.

41:38Now I, I said that there's like a funk cover. It's not really very funky, but there's a quote unquote funk cover of killing the name of our rage against machine. It's good that I, I literally just said to David and Joanna on this show was the most important AI innovation of the last year. Something happened, right? And my theory was this was hard to do. So I obviously came and asked Charlie, hey, is this hard to do? And you scratched out it. You're like, this is trivially easy to do. And I think the next turn is because Nashville is so structured, because country music is so structured, you can see it happening and how it's happening.

42:15because my theory is that this already happened in hip hop and pop music, which is not nearly as structured as country music. All right. So, Charlie, before we get too far into the actual demo here, just what is Suno and how does it work? Suno is basically ChatGPT for audio generation. You can make a text prompt and you can output an entire song with music, lyrics, vocals. You get a whole track from Suno. Is it like an LLM in the sense that it is trained on lots of stuff and then makes other stuff like the stuff that it has trained on. They don't like to tell us what they've trained their material on.

42:50But yes, it seems to be trained on the entire corpus of music. And you can basically prompt it to make music in any style. Yeah, let's just dive into this. So, Charlie, what I want you to do is basically like, I want to do this process here live on the show as if we are like in Nashville making a song. And I want you to sort of, as we go, explain both kind of what's new about the tool and how it is sort of newly fitting into the process. Right. So like we have this long standing kind of assembly line of how music gets made. And I just want to suno the hell out of it. Does this sound reasonable?

43:25Yeah. So the thing that folks in Nashville have figured out is that if you try to create a song from a text prompt, it's going to give you the lowest common denominator country song with really predictable, bad rhyme schemes. It's not going to have a very good story. The melody is going to be meh. Good enough, but like pretty meh. So what folks are doing is instead of handing everything over to this tool, they're still getting together in a songwriting room. They're writing a song. You got to have, you got to start with a decent song anyway. It's got to have melody, lyrics, and probably some sort of background supporting instrument.

44:06That is enough. Now, typically you would take that You would hire what everyone in Nashville calls a track guy. They all use the term track guy. I think it is unfortunately a very gendered position. A track guy is basically a producer, but they don't call them a producer because that producer is not going to get a producer credit. All they're going to do is they're going to produce a really high quality demo. And they're the person being replaced in this pipeline. So what we're going to do is I, in writing this article for The Verge, was like, I need some examples. Very few songwriters wanted to send their examples, not just because they were maybe reticent about speaking about how they're using these tools, but also that's their IP and they want to pitch these songs.

44:48Right. But so we're talking about the point where it's like some combination of voice memos on my phone. Yes. And lyrics in the notes app. Like that's that's the level we're at at the beginning here. That is exactly right. You don't even have to submit your lyrics. All you need to do is make a voice memo on your phone. So I did just that. so the morning before publishing my article I was like I need an example I was in the shower and I was like country song dirt road something and ran back into my little home studio where I am now and I played this little chorus a dirt road blue skies we drive down every mile to our home back porch where we rode every single vow we swing Long for the fences, live with no defenses, up and down, through and through.

45:39A good life, a dirt road, blue skies are all we need.

45:49It's giving like, what if Johnny Cash had like a really good day? That's not good music. because that what you're saying is the voice is mediocre and does not match with the uh the upbeatness of the song um even though i don't have any country twang i was proud of rhyming every mile with single vow mile and vow is a kind of uh slant rhyme and i figure if i could give this to uh suno and put in a country style maybe we could hear it with that twang so here's what we'll do we're going to take that little voice memo that i made on my iphone and we're going to send it to suno just by the way this is the thing that if you're a songwriter you're making you're doing what you just did all the time right like this is like part of the job yeah that's what you do yeah you write songs okay so i uploaded my little dirt road demo to suno and it automatically identifies its core characteristics such as it's an acoustic folk country song in the key of g major at a moderate tempo of around 100 BPM.

46:54My timing's not that good on that playing. And it captures the lyrics. I haven't written a whole song. This is just kind of like a chorus. But what I can do now is I can remix this song. I can take my file and I can hit cover in Suno. And this is where I can describe what style song we want this demo to turn into. You said something in the style of Johnny Cash. Perhaps we could try that. Yeah. Okay. So this is where I would say we probably shouldn't describe Johnny Cash because there are content filters that will say, oh, we can't make a song in the style of Johnny Cash, but we can go over to, you know, Gemini and say, oh, my God, I need to write a prompt for Suno to create a song in the style of Johnny Cash.

47:50without using his name. I mean, this is like where things just, my mind explodes. Like people have thought about this workflow, right? This is a pretty standard workflow. Exactly. Because I've seen so many people prompt Suno with stuff from ChachiP and Claude and Gemini. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is just what everyone is doing? Yeah. I love Gemini begins its response with, that's a fun challenge. I'd like to evade YouTube's content ID filters, Gemini. Exactly. Okay, so it's given me a number of options. We'll just grab the first one. A classic American country song with a deep baritone male vocal.

48:24Acoustic guitar provides a steady driving boom chicka boom rhythm supported by a sparse reverbed electric guitar and a simple upright bass line. The tempo is a walking pace. So that's how we're going to get... Can you just add in, just for me, the horns? Oh. You know what I mean? And it has to have some trumpets. It needs some Johnny Cash horns, yep. Yeah, and then if we want to make it even better, will say, what are the negative styles I should indicate? You can tell it what not to sound like. That really helps influence it to sound more like what you're aiming for. So, uh, too complicated. Give it to me as a bullet pointed list.

49:09These things are too smart for us now. Great. I'm just going to throw out here. this theoretically is the agentic revolution where charlie should just be replaced by an server okay now we're going to just add in our advanced options our excluded styles we're going to hit create and let's see how long this thing takes all right it's already generated two they're actually oh my gosh it's like the music industry is so doomed you're dead you don't even know it no no no you had to have my amazing voice memo first All right, let's see what we get. A dirt road, blue skies, we drive down every mile To our home, back porch, where we rode every single bough We swing for the fences, live with no defenses What's going on with the phaser?

49:57Why is Johnny Cash in space? A good life, a dirt road, blue skies are all we need Trumpets? Wanna go take you to the horns? Ha ha!

50:13they're literally playing the ring of fire i was just about to say that okay but and what you you managed to prompt a negative prompt suno yeah into just do ring of fire horns yeah basically yeah you didn't say ring of fire and you didn't say johnny cash but gem and i produced enough words that suno is like oh you just want ring of fire yeah but let's do it this time in the style of a limp biscuit. I'm telling you, why did you go there? Because Charlie, we're friends. What are you doing? What I'm doing to you is showing how this, you can take your song and you can put it into any kind of vibe that you want.

50:58So let's cover this one more time. Thank you, Gemini. Ridiculous. All right. And immediately we have two songs in the style of Limp Bizkit covering my really ridiculous Dirt Road song. You just drained a lake for these two Limp Bizkit songs. I'm very upset with you. By the way, the water thing is not true. I just like saying it. Goodbye. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Okay, the phased vocals do work in this case, because I think Fred Durst phased his own vocals. I'm not going to say the name of the artist, but there is a country artist in Nashville who makes songs that sound alarmingly like that, and I can never listen to them ever again.

51:51I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. So that was just that fast? Yeah. You could do every style of country music or any other genre, and you get them super quick. Okay, so I have two questions here. One, I call that the vocals on both versions. It's in your story, right? So you can do a lot of things, but the audio quality isn't there. And in particular, vocal quality is pretty messy. I think I could just hear it there, that there was some weird effects on those vocals. It can't quite do it. Is that just the way it works? Is that getting better over time? Is that just the nature of trying to synthetically generate singing?

52:26I noticed that there's a lot of kind of strange artifacts, more so in Suno than something like, you know, Gemini's Nano Banana and the photo output that we're getting today, where increasingly it's very hard to tell if a photograph is AI or not. But with music, there's still this very overly tuned, grainy kind of quality. But I will say it will output all kinds of varieties of vocals. Sometimes it will sound exactly like another artist. I had a student give me a song once that sounded just like Paul Simon. It was just like, wow, that's Paul Simon's voice. A number of my sources in the song said they really don't like when they get a Suno pitch.

53:03And it clearly is. It just feels like it's trained off of the voice of one of their friends. That happens all the time. I've also received songs, though, that sound like almost like a lo-fi bedroom recording with someone who is singing out of tune. So it's able to output all kinds of facsimiles of humans, but they're still definitely facsimiles. But I'm really struck by the fact that, yes, it's a facsimile, and nobody is going to confuse that with a perfectly produced country song. But that's not the goal at this part of the process, right? We're one step past voice memo. Right. And I think this just makes me think of like, we talk a lot about vibe coding on this show.

53:44And it's like the thing I hear from people in tech all the time where they're like, we used to make slide decks to show off an idea that we had. And now we just make a prototype. I can just build a thing in an hour and a half that it doesn't even resemble a finished product. But it's enough to get to the next thing much more quickly. I can show you what it looks like. We can beat up the idea. Better headline. Nashville is vibe coding songs. I mean, that's kind of what it is. that's the part that i'm really interested in right like the idea that you know famous artists want to hear the pitches they're getting in their own voices that's part of your story yeah certainly there's a lot of weird vibes around ai and the music industry which can come to but the part where you can just say okay i'm gonna go pitch this to morgan wallen and put it in his voice right that seems like a suno shouldn't let you do that And then based on what we just saw with how you can prompt it, it can absolutely do that.

54:42Yeah. So there's kind of two approaches to this. One is that you can get Suno to get really close to sounding like another artist. But there are also AI voice replacement tools where you can take another AI voice and transform it into a trained vocal to sound exactly in the style of an artist. Or it could be a sung vocal from, you know, I could sing something and have it output in the quality of Shania Twain if I had her voice model. That's just an impression you do. That's different. When you say voice model, it's Charlie in the wig wearing the Shania outfit. Don't impress me much. I definitely won't do that.

55:22So I have, I received some reporting. Very few people wanted to talk on the record about the fact that lots of artists like receiving their, their vocals on the actual track and whether or not they even like it, artists are receiving pitches that sound like them. This is not totally new practice. In fact, there were demo artists who were soundalikes that when real demos were made, that you'd go get this one person to sound like that other person. because what you're trying to do is show that this song that I've written could be major country stars next hit. That's, that's your goal in writing a demo.

56:03And now you can potentially AI a vocal to sound like 20 different artists, a hundred different artists, put it in their voice and show them what they might sound like in this song. Again, it's kind of a sketch. Like this is a vibe coded demo. It's not the finished product. It's probably not going to make it to radio, though I have heard that some elements might. We can talk more about that if you want. This is widespread. Everybody is making these things. Everybody's receiving them. I shouldn't say everybody, everybody. Some people feel not so good about it. But what my sourcing shows is that from the most upstart people in Nashville to the biggest stars, there are people at every part of the supply chain who are working in this Suno demo world.

56:47What's this doing to the industry? Like, there's a lot of feelings about AI in general. I would say that the big labels making deals with platforms like Suno and Udio is saying AI is the future. The president of the Recording Academy just, I think, put on Instagram, he hasn't been in a session in months where AI hasn't been used. That's a lot. That's a big thing for him to say, right? I'm sort of stunned by that because... in music there are so many places that AI is being used in the primary place that AI is being used in music is like noise removal like some plugins that use ai as part of how they might eq something so in that case i absolutely believe it but you know people are i think most frequently what i hear is like songwriters using chat gpt as a rhyme uh assistant and sort of like idea generation brainstorming the the generative music part there are definitely producers doing it but i i would doubt that it is the widespread bread thing that every producer is doing at this moment.

57:47But at the same time, I'm having a hard time thinking if I'm a songwriter whose job is to make a lot of things and try to convince other people to cut records based on them. This seems like an unbelievable, like productivity unlock. It is. So I'm struck by the fact that this seems like the sort of thing that I can totally see why all these people would embrace it. And yet they don't want to talk to you about it. Are we just still in this phase where people are like, everyone is using it and it's sort of an open secret, but nobody wants to be the first one to admit that they're using AI to make songs.

58:18So I reached out to dozens of people in Nashville. Most people did not want to talk about it. A lot of people wanted to talk off the record, but I was able to find some people who are very enthusiastic about these tools and were willing to share with me some stuff that hadn't been reported before. There seems to be a thing in Nashville that there's a bit of shame about using AI in the song creating process? I think it's a shame in every creative industry, but in particular in the music industry, there's just an all-out war brewing. I see it every day in my Instagram feed where you have artists and labels saying they want to use AI.

58:56You have big producers from the past, like Tim Bowen, saying, it's here, get over it. You have all these catalog sales where big name artists are selling their catalogs for millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think the reason that they're being purchased is the purchasers of the catalogs are like, well, we'll just have AI remix the entire Rolling Stones catalog and we'll sell those songs. And that's just a big tension in this industry that it feels like the young songwriters can use AI as a tool to play the lottery and try to get a hit. and that's good for them. And the biggest players can sell their catalogs and the labels can get more AI music because the labels are fundamentally exploitative.

59:37And the middle is just getting squeezed. Is that what you're saying as well, Charlie? Yeah, everybody's pissed right now. It's like, where was this stuff trained on? Why are we draining lakes? Why are we making a bunch of covers of slop that nobody needed? Is this real organic music? Why is this stuff flooding my playlists? There's so much tension about whether or not this is providing any real value. I think in the Nashville system, this idea of demoing a song to figure out what it might sound like if we really properly recorded it, there's probably a lot more arguable value that it's creating in just this one little piece of the supply chain.

1:00:12And yet, I think just given all of the meh press about, is it the right way of saying about our visual intelligence? I agree with you. There's a lot of anti-AI coverage. We do it. Then there's what you're talking about, which is this is a huge creative unlock, particularly for people who are just trying to make it, who are basically in a volume game. It sounds like if you're a songwriter in Nashville, it's a volume game. You're just taking shots until you hit. But it seems like the people at the bottom of the food chain who are in the volume business and the people at the top of the food chain are benefiting from AI and everyone else is getting squeezed in the middle.

1:00:49And I just don't know how that plays out. How is that playing out from who you're talking to? Well, it makes me think about the early stage of ChatGPT and the early LLMs where it was easier to prompt them to output things that were clearly built off of their training data. I'm not happy that every LLM basically took my book from me and used it in its training data without my permission. I would have loved to have received some kind of royalty around that. Maybe I'll get some kind of settlement at some point. But with music, it is, as we saw, quite easy to make a really strong copy of someone else's sound.

1:01:28All of a sudden, the like blurred lines, Pharrell Williams, Robin Thicke case feels like it's coming back into the conversation because I don't like that someone is making something that is so similar to my art that clearly was trained on my art. that sounds like my voice. That sounds like we literally just got the horn solo from Ring of Fire. Not the exact same one, but the thing that you ask any person, they're like, yeah, that's the Ring of Fire horn solo. So I think there's that kind of reaction of feeling, you know, my work is being cheapened because it can be copied so obviously. That's certainly part of how people are feeling, but I think there's a lot of feelings that are going around.

1:02:08And we are in a moment where there's a lot of embrace with these tools, but also, you know, when I first started sourcing this article, nobody wanted to talk. And why are you doing this thing ravenously in your business and yet feel so ashamed of it? There's a lot of that going on right now. Should I feel bad listening to and liking these songs? I can't give you, I can't be the guardian angel on your shoulder telling you. Please. I need this, Charlie. This is a very morally flawed situation. I like how David started by calling you an intern and ended with like, can you provide the moral absolution for using AI?

1:02:43That's what we ask of our interns here at TheVerge.com. Oh my God. David Pierce, would you like to come and confess something? I listened to an AI cover of Rage Against the Machine. It's one of the most blatantly capitalistic things I've ever done. Oh my gosh. I think that's actually my, do you think, you said people don't care. One of my tropes on the show has been people don't care about quality. right they will listen to music at 64 kilobits on airpods as long as it's the song they want they don't care they're gonna listen to 15th generation youtube like bootlegs it's just a thing as long as it's the song they want yeah i think the question here is do they care that it's people making the music right because that's a that's a big next step up in people don't care I've always been skeptical of the audio quality wars.

1:03:36Like people enjoyed music through AM radio. It was great because it was your favorite song. Songs matter. You know, I'm surrounded by amazing musical equipment that helps me make really hi-fi cool recordings. Most of the time I'm listening through terrible AirPods that just sound like meh, but they seems to be my word of the day. but they help me go on the subway and the subway is quiet I can hear the song that I like it takes me to a special moment I'm happy so I think the audio quality thing all that's mostly nonsense most people can't tell the difference between an mp3 and a wave file I hardly can and despite that music is where we go to I think music serves like two core purposes one to either enhance or to change how we are feeling and to to commune and to be a part of something or to be seen in uh who we are and i think that hearing a rage against the machine ai cover song can maybe help change or enhance how you're feeling i think it doesn't do a good job of the helping you feel seen in the world we most most of pop music is built off of the relationship to the fans to the artists Just when you love Charlie XCX like I do and you go to the brat concert, you are a part of a thing.

1:05:03I don't just mean to be making a plea for live music, but experiencing her music is about being a part of a thing that just I think that that cannot be. I don't think that gets replaced. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a part of that. The Rage Against the Machine cover where I know it's a Rage Against the Machine song that makes it really important. Yeah. but also the thing is like Neil if you heard like right now it's novel and if you hear 17 more of those covers you're going to get bored of it yeah I think that's right so alright we need to take a break here but Charlie can you do us a favor what are we going to do next can we do dirt road in the style of Rage Against the Machine I'd like you to play us after break give me a second we need a prompt first I'm terrified what this is going to sound like it's not going to be good here's dirt road and the genre is heavy political funk metal.

1:05:58That sounds right. Here we go.

1:06:07There's that face vocal again. It's bad. You can hear it.

1:06:17Hi. This is horrible. Can we just turn this off? Somewhere Tom Morello just threw his laptop out a window. Listen, that's a Pepsi commercial in 12 months. You heard it here first. Zach DeLaRocca is so fucking mad at you. All right, Charlie, thank you. I just need to say this very clearly. Based on that example, the music industry is in no danger from seeing it. None at all. You should sleep well tonight, my friends. Rage against the machine. You're going to be just fine. All right, Charlie, thank you. We just did Limp Bizkit again. All right, you get it, buddy. Charlie, thank you. We got to take a break.

1:06:56We'll be back to do a lightning round. Support for the show comes from Framer. If you run a business, you need a website. And sure, you could pay for one of those cookie cutter site builders, but you'll end up with a website that looks like everyone else's. If you want to go beyond a typical site builder and get into something with a true aesthetic design, you could try Framer. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful, production-ready websites, and it's now redefining how we design for the web. With the recent launch of Design Pages, a free canvas-based design tool, Framer is more than a site builder.

1:07:29It's a true all-in-one design platform, from social assets to campaign visuals to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site. Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish. Framer even helps you design more than websites. You can create social assets, campaign visuals, icons, and even site resources, all in one place. Framer stands above the others because it's not just a site builder. Framer is a true design tool that also publishes professional, production-ready sites. Ready to design, iterate, and publish all-in-one tool? Start creating for free at framer.com slash design and use code VERGE for a free month of Framer Pro.

1:08:10That's framer.com slash design and use promo code VERGE. framer.com slash design. Promo code VERGE. Rules and restrictions may apply. Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree. Zoe, this thing weighs a ton. Drewski, lift with your legs, man. Santa, Santa, did you get my letter? He's talking to you, Bridges. I'm not that. Of course he did. Right, Santa? You know, my elf Drewski here, he handles the nice list. An elf? I'm 6 '3". What everyone wants is iPhone 17. And at T-Mobile, you can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. Right, Mrs. Claus? I'm Mrs.

1:08:50Claus' much younger sister. And at T-Mobile, there's no trade-in needed when you switch, so you can keep your old phone. Or give it as a gift. And the best part? You can make the switch to T-Mobile from your phone in just 15 minutes. Nice. My side of the tree is slipping. Get back! The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Switch in just 15 minutes and get iPhone 17 on us with no trade-in needed. With 24 monthly bill credits for well-qualified customers, plus tax and$35 device connection charge. Credits end and balance due if you pay off earlier. or canceled. Finance agreement, 256 gigs,$830. Eligible port in a new line,$100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required.

1:09:23Check out in 15 minutes or less per line. Visit T-Mobile.com. Support for this show comes from Grammarly. Have you ever had something tailor made for you? A jacket, a suit, a pair of jeans? The difference is transformative because once you find something made to fit your needs, you just can't go back to a generic feel. That's kind of how it works at Grammarly. Because they have features that are tailor made for working professionals, you can get all of your writing done from start to finish all in one place. Grammarly brings more polish and impact to your emails, presentations, and proposals without switching between tools and tabs, all while amplifying your voice and moving your ideas forward.

1:09:59Your time is valuable and you don't want to waste it on some second-rate program. That's why Grammarly is designed to help professionals with real-time writing support on any project email and more. When you open a new doc, start typing right away, or ask Grammarly's AI chat to help anytime, whether to kick off your ideas or polish them. One easy place to get quick help from AI whenever you're writing. Sign up for free and experience how Grammarly can elevate your professional writing from start to finish. Visit grammarly.com slash podcast. That's grammarly.com slash podcast. Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree.

1:10:38Zoe, this thing weighs a ton. Kersky, lift with your legs, man. Santa, Santa! Did you get my letter? He's talking to you, Bridges. I'm not that. Of course he did. Right, Santa? You know, my elf Drewski here, he handles the nice list. An elf? I'm 6 '3". What everyone wants is iPhone 17. And at T-Mobile, you can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. Right, Mrs. Claus? I'm Mrs. Claus' much younger sister. And at T-Mobile, there's no trade-in needed when you switch. So you can keep your old phone. Or give it as a gift. And the best part? You can make the switch to T-Mobile from your phone in just 15 minutes.

1:11:12Nice. My side of the tree is slipping. Get back! The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Switch in just 15 minutes and get iPhone 17 on us with no trading needed. With 24 monthly bill credits for well-qualified customers plus tax and$35 device connection charge. Credits end and balance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel finance agreement 256 gigs,$830. Eligible port in a new line. $100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required. Check out in 15 minutes or less per line. Visit T-Mobile.com. all right we're back it's time for the lightning round eric i believe we have a sponsor today indeed we do this week's lightning round is presented by aws how leading businesses use ai for next level innovation does great work nailed it all right so there's there's a lot of stuff to get to here uh neil i we're gonna do this is brendan we'll do it i guess he's a dummy every week.

1:12:01Don't worry about it. We'll get to that. But first, Neelai, there is the most unusual thing, which is breaking typeface news. Yes. This week, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State of the United States, declared that the State Department no longer use Calibri and it would start using Times New Roman again. He chalked this up to being anti-DEI and anti-wogue. I was reading about it. I was all set to be all mad. And then I started reading John Gruber's blog post about it. And I thought to myself, why am I going to read Gruber on the Vergecast when I can just summon John Gruber? Hey, John, how's it going?

1:12:36Here I am. On my beat, as usual. When I need people to be mad about fonts, I immediately turn to John. It's like the Yankees, fonts, James Bond, and like a side of Apple. And on top of it, you're also like, the New York Times got this story wrong, which is a choice. Yes, yes. It's a real swirl of things that I enjoy. So Rubio puts out this, I think, like a memo. And he says, all paper at the State Department needs to be in Times New Roman now, which is a great word for just describing stuff. And then you're like, actually, this makes sense. Explain what you mean. Oh, where to start? How much time do we have?

1:13:12Five minutes. Five minutes. So I think that the 2023 decision. So the State Department, as you might expect, is a slow moving organization and is tradition bound. and they didn't even adopt, it seems, word processing until fairly late in the game like 2004. And so for 20 years, I think they were a Microsoft Word PC shop and they said everything should be set in Times New Roman 14. And before that, it was like Courier. It was our Courier New, which is god-awful. And we could talk about that separately compared to regular Courier because Courier New is thin and wispy and terrible. Un-American, you could say.

1:13:54And but their current font guidelines at the State Department are that anything that they produce that the president needs to sign needs to be in time or a courier new, not Times New Roman. And that never changed even with the other thing. But in 2023, then Secretary of State Antony Blinken. And I just love that his name is Antony because it just sounds like you're kind of playing up. They all call him Tony. I know some people who know him. Everyone just calls him Tony. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Blinken put out a memo with the which, again, who I'm sure Rubio didn't write this new one. I'm sure Blinken didn't write the other one.

1:14:29But somebody put out a memo and signed their name to it. And they changed the font from Times New Roman to Calibri. And the reasons for it were were bogus. It was in the name of accessibility and blah, blah, blah. And again, Calibri is not a terrible font. And for a while, it was Microsoft's default font for documents. But to show how slow moving they are, they changed their default font to Calibri after Microsoft went through a very high profile. Well, hey, we're going to change from Calibri to something else. And we're going to have our users have a contest and vote for the top five entries.

1:15:07So after Microsoft, that bastion of taste, decided to move away from Calibri, the State Department was like, oh, now that's what we're going to switch to, to be hip and modern and appeal to the kids. if they had never changed from Times New Roman, ever, nobody would ever talk about it, and nobody, nobody, not even somebody, somebody who doesn't even know what Times New Roman is, or somebody like me, who could get a couple thousand words out of it and a guest spot on the Verge cast. Well, so this is what I want to ask you. Nobody would think twice if they had stuck with Times New Roman and used it for the next hundred years, because Times New Roman looks like the type of font the State Department should use for diplomatic documents.

1:15:47So this is part of the point in your blog post is people should read. And it's one of the main questions I want to ask you. These fonts, these typefaces, we're picking them for aesthetics, for style, right? A lot of the Trump administration is about weird style decisions, right? Bringing back the luster of America. Here's a ballroom that gets bigger every single day until I fire the architect. Right. They can't start building it because it can't grow. If it was real, it couldn't possibly grow fast enough to keep up with his imaginary needs. So it needs to be in a constant state of planning so that it can keep getting bigger.

1:16:19And that's how we're picking fonts, too. Like there's like an aesthetic. Yeah. But your point is all of this is all aesthetic because the accessibility concerns raised by Blinken and the Biden administration are fake. Like they're not technologically real. Can you explain what you mean? It's there's and trust me, after what I've written, if there were scientific studies or actual, you know, reproducible studies that show that there is an accessibility gain for using Calibri versus Times New Roman, people would be pointing me to the studies. And there's not the thought people read John is, I think, what you're trying to say.

1:16:53It's just a bit of voodoo. Now, there is an argument, and this is why my website is set in Verdana and always has been, and I think The Verge is set mostly in sans-serif fonts. Most websites are set in sans-serif fonts, and it kind of stems from the idea that on a computer screen, sans-serif fonts are more readable. But I kind of think that's a vestige, I believe, of the pre-retina era. And so you can make an argument that it's a little easier on your eyes to use this on Serif font for onscreen reading. And a lot of State Department people read this stuff on screen. The Secretary of State themselves probably do get their stuff on paper.

1:17:31And if you go to a bookstore, just go if you don't know anything about fonts, if you're listening to this somehow and still listening to me, go to a bookstore. just go to any Barnes & Noble and just go to the front of the store and pick up like five random books novels, nonfiction just a couple of new books at Barnes & Noble and just flip through and see if the book is set in a serif font or a sans serif font the odds are very good that if you pick up a stack of 10 random books at the front of a Barnes & Noble brand new books in the year 2025 they're all set in serif fonts because it's just sort of what you do for long form text and it looks a little more serious It's the connotation that's, you know, and they're not all set.

1:18:12And it's not like there's one font that everybody sets books or documents in. But they all, you know, for long form stuff that is supposed to look serious, serif fonts just sort of have that feel because they are older and more tradition bound. And I think it is appropriate. Put the politics of everybody's feelings about the Democrats and the Republicans and Trump in particular and these numbnuts in this administration. It just is true that the State Department probably ought to use a serif font. And then it runs into the nerdy problem of they're a PC shop using Microsoft Word, and they kind of have to stick to the default fonts in Microsoft Word because Word really freaks out if one person who touches a document doesn't have a font installed.

1:18:54Yeah. So actually, really funny. The Verge started off when we launched in 2011 with serifs and is pre-retina, and everyone got mad at us, and we switched to sans serifs. And with the last redesign, we finally switched back to Saris because we assumed everyone had retina screens. And this was an entire conversation we had. Yeah, I guess that is true. I am not looking at the Verge right now, but I guess I do know that the little white on black blurbs that you guys have now, the little social media type posts that to me define the new modern Verge design are set in that. Yeah, and they have ink traps in them, which is very funny for a Google font.

1:19:28This is all font nerdery. Yes, it's all font nerdery, but actually the reasons for ink traps kind of make sense with anti-aliasing, too. Kind of the same typographic tricks that look good for making sure that ink that bleeds into a paper remain readable are actually kind of similar tricks to what typographers do for body text size to deal with anti-aliasing. So there's one point that I just want to hit on real quick. There's some amount of argument that Calibre is better for screen readers, which makes no sense to me because I'm assuming the screen readers are just reading the underlying Unicode.

1:20:03Is Calibre better for screen readers? um there's no truth to it at all a um but b uh i and you don't even have to be i don't even know the i'm not intimately familiar with the exact format of the documents that get passed around within the state department but it's probably like if you can just run your cursor over and select and copy it's probably just actual text but we're now at a point like and i i'm not familiar with the latest version of Windows. But on Mac, you can do that with images now too, right? Like the difference between live text that you can select, copy, or even edit and an image of text is actually going away.

1:20:44Because, why is that? Because even that, when you take a screenshot on your iPhone or on a Mac or whatever, and even if it's a screenshot, you can select and copy the text because OCR is everywhere and it has conquered all fonts. It can even do a really good job with handwriting, even bad handwriting. But certainly if it can even do a passable job with chicken scratch human handwriting, Times New Roman is not a problem and has not been a problem. Whether the text is actually a series of characters, in which case the screen reader doesn't even have to care about the font. And even if it's an image, if somebody prints something out at the State Department in Times New Roman and scans it and it's just an image of a document, the OCR software will ace it 100 % of the time.

1:21:30This is a completely solved problem and has been for a long time. And anybody who has like a low vision problem or for whatever reason wants to use software that will reformat a document in bigger fonts or read it aloud or something like that will have zero difference between whether it's in Times New Roman or Verdana or Calibri or probably anything up to and including James Cameron's favorite papyrus. no now okay that's it we've now officially gone too far i can't do this anymore yeah i'm gonna get emails you're not gonna get emails about this we're gonna get emails he did though but cameron sent a memo to the projectionist showing the new avatar movie telling them how he wants the movie projected and where to set the sound and the memo is set in papyrus all right spectacular well let's get the secretary of state on that it's the most important john we should let you go here, but before we do, this is your opportunity.

1:22:29Can we do better than Times New Roman 14? So I don't know that you can if you're going to live within the limits of the default fonts of Microsoft Word. And so if so, then fine. I actually think that gets to the broader question of how have we let the IT overlords rule everybody's lives. And if the IT department says, no, no, there's no possible way that we can guarantee that everybody working at the State Department has a custom font installed in their machine. And that's the end of the discussion. Pick one of these default fonts. Why are we letting IT department limit our font choices? This is also a solved problem.

1:23:05And, you know, but that's an entirely separate question. So, A, if we're going to live within the world of default fonts in Microsoft Office, Times New Roman 14 is probably the best choice. And B, we shouldn't live within that world and they should pick something else. Dream big, people. This is what we do here. All right, John, thank you. This is my dream. This is exactly what I wanted. Thanks, buddy. It's a Christmas miracle a couple of weeks early. All right. That was great. All right. That was everything I hoped it would be and more. And much more, I think. Having people come and just randomly yell at us about things they care about on The Verge cast is precisely what we are here for.

1:23:43I do like that the answer was Marco Rubio is right, but for all the wrong reasons, and he's still kind of an idiot. Yeah. Listen, worst person you know has a good opinion. uh all right my first one uh i have i have an app and a gadget for you today and i'm very excited about both of them um the gadget i want to talk to you about is did you see this thing the pebble index the new it's a smart ring and basically its whole shtick is it is a ring that you're supposed to wear your index finger and it has a little button and a microphone that's it that's its whole job and they're they they're building this like pipeline behind it it's it's a 75 dollar ring it's made by the people who make the pebble watches eric midzikovsky is like a long time friend of the verge um this thing just exists for you to record little bits of audio and you can set reminders for yourself you can take notes it's like this is my dream as somebody who is constantly yelling at siri to remember things for me it's just a little it's like a still doing that that you oh my god constantly it's the only way i remember anything i think i like a thing that i say to people sometimes is that i'm not i'm not better at doing anything than anybody i'm just better at writing it down oh yeah that's a good call i am like a i am an above average productive person because i'm just better at writing things down than most people and this is like just a little sort of spy gadget where you can just be like buy toilet paper tomorrow and it will just remind you to buy toilet paper tomorrow and it's it makes me happy.

1:25:09This is all I want in my life. Little tiny gadgets. I have two reactions to this thing. One, neat. I hope everyone's happy. One, we gotta stop trying to make index finger rings happen. Like the aura ring is an index finger ring. Yeah. And I'm just like, I wear a ring. I wear a writing ring all the time. Just, you know, tell my wife that the ring is smart now. But like, I just, I can't be a two rings and then one's in the index. There's something about that that isn't. I can't do it. The industry wants me to wear an index finger ring. I understand. The theory behind this one, which is that you can do it basically with your hands full because all it requires is pinching your thumb and your index finger together, I buy.

1:25:48You can do all this same stuff on a Pebble watch. You can hold it and talk into it. But this requires so much more work in both your hands in a way that just tapping your thumb and forefinger doesn't. I'm just saying, all these companies want to put stuff on your body. Your body is really... It's very hard to attach things to a body. Just a Virchast phrase that I've come up with. That's a new Virchast cliche. your body sucks at having mounting points. Just fundamentally. And so they're like, index finger ring. It's hard to mount shit to your body. That is not a t-shirt we will be making. It's hard.

1:26:20It's just hard. Your body sucks at having mounting points. Nilay Patel, 2025. It's on my chart of wearable bullshit. You know, it's like needs a mounting point. But wait, I bring this up to you because A, I think it's very cool. And B, it caused like a little teeny tiny controversy because one of the things about this ring is that it doesn't have a battery. It's designed, the way Eric described it to me is if you use it like, you know, 10 times a day for a few seconds at a time, which I think is the sort of normal use case, it'll last you a couple of years. And then once you're done with it, you buy a new one and send the old one back to them for recycling.

1:26:55He thinks about this, A, as just a sort of necessity of the technology, right? Like it would be very hard to build a charging port into this device in a way that worked and that made it still$75. And he's like, it's a thing you don't have to think about. When the battery dies, get a new one. It's$75. What are you going to do? A lot of people did not like this. A lot of people have lots of feelings about that. Yeah. This is my second reaction is I saw that. I actually connected that to, we did the big profile of Hodo and Fantec and a huge criticism throughout that piece was all of these tools are very cool and these products are neat and all of them have sealed with the Amion batteries.

1:27:27These are just waste. This is just looming e-waste. They're impossible to recycle. Yeah, I think it's a neat idea. I think the idea that natural language interfaces are on the rise is going to lead to a lot of put microphones somewhere where you can just whisper to a computer until like your link works or whatever you know like this thing where you got to get the input to something i don't see i just i those are my two criticisms like index finger rings are it's a hard sell and the battery thing i think is going to be real for this entire category of gadgets because everybody wants to be really small yes and they have they don't work if they're not i can't even wear an aura ring because it is it's too big and i i like bang it on everything and it drives me crazy not index finger ring it's what you need they need to start making like big chunky pinky rings like 70s monster guys i'm thinking i want like brass knuckles right like have it all sort of live on this side that's what i'm talking about there you go um all right it's oh god it's time it is time once again for america's favorite podcast within a podcast brenny car's a dummy he's a dummy he's just a dummy every week we have a pre-production meeting And every week I'm like, Neil, do we get to not do this this week?

1:28:36And every week you go, no, we have to do it this week. It's like, look, we are reasonably well-prepared. We spend all week working in the Verge newsroom. We read a lot of stories. For the Brendan segments at this point, I'm just like, what do you do this week? And like Google AI mode is like, once again, Brendan was an idiot. I'm like, fine. So this week, Brendan waded into one of the dumbest controversies in all of tech. It's truly one of the dumbest controversies in all of tech. So our favorites, the European Union, a bunch of gray suits, drinking wine, eating cheese. They fined X. They fined Elon Musk and X,$140 million, which is nothing for the richest man in the world, I will point out.

1:29:16I'm fining you, Nilay Patel, eight bucks. Yep. And they did it because they're fining X and Elon Musk. It's turning into this culture war thing. And everyone's like, this is censorship in Europe. It's nothing about that. The Digital Services Act in Europe says the platforms cannot hold out that they have verified a user being real if they haven't actually done that. Oh, interesting. Right? This is just that Europe is protective of identity in a specific way. And so X obviously lets you do that because you can just buy the blue checkmarks. Right. You can just say you're whoever you want and the checkmark signifies a verification that is nothing more than the payment of money.

1:29:51Right. So this is a big deal. So Europe has said to X, especially because of its history as Twitter, those blue check marks meant something to a lot of people for a long time. If they were just doing it now, it would be just a sign that people paid for something. But the blue check used to mean you are who you say you are. I think there's an argument that even if you did it now, the blue check mark means something on every other platform. So you're inheriting all that. But it doesn't matter because it was Twitter. And it did mean that. And they changed it. And now it just means payment. And people are being confused.

1:30:17And Europe has warned X about this. X does not support, Elon Musk does not support the idea of the European Union. Like literally, he's like, the EU should be dissolved. We're on our sex authority. He got the fine. So Brendan Carr, of course, has waded into this because he can't possibly stay out of anything. And he says, once again, Europe is fining a successful US tech company for being a successful US tech company. Europe is taxing Americans to subsidize a continent held back by Europe's own suffocating regulations. Gracious. So a lot here. One, the idea that X is a successful US tech company is very funny.

1:30:56Straightforwardly very funny. Twitter was not a successful US tech company. Twitter was a failing disaster of a company that Elon was able to buy by simply saying, what if I offer you more money than you think you can make? And Twitter's board of directors is like, it turns out we have no idea how to make money. You can have it. So the idea that X is successful and it is only declining in users, mostly serves as like a Nazi bar full of auto-generated grok replies that say, Elon is a better athlete than Ron James. Very funny. So Brendan on the face of it is a dummy. Second, taxing Americans to subsidize a continent.

1:31:29It's$140 million. If you can subsidize all of Europe$140 million at a time, like what are you doing? And on top of that, it's not as though Brendan doesn't like taxing and fining companies to get what he wants politically. This is the main thing Brendan does. Right? Brendan says you want a deal, you got to fire your late night hosts. Right? You can do this the hard way or the easy way. I'm going to take away your broadcast licenses because I don't like the news on your news stations. Brendan loves suffocating companies with regulations when it suits his agenda. And in this case, the agenda of the European Union is just if you verify people, you have to actually verify that they're real so the users on your platform are not confused.

1:32:18There are lots of regulations in the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act that our tech companies hate, truly, meaningfully hate. There are some that are bad, right? Europe is walking away from its own cookie regulations because everyone thinks the cookie banners are bad. This one, don't let people lie in your platforms about who they are for money. Reasonably straightforward. Like, Meta isn't running into this one. Meta is going to run into the don't trick people into having sex with your AI chatbots and then drive them crazy regulation that is inevitably coming. But it's not - It's weird that they had the foresight to write that in exactly those terms.

1:32:54I should be in charge of European regulation. Don't drive people bonkers with sexbots. Signed, Europe. Um, it just, it's fun. It's like X got hit with the dumb one because they don't pay attention. They don't give a shit about anything. And now Brendan's in the mix once again, signing. Anyway, that's Brendan. Brendan is always, you're welcome to come on the show or decoder. Really? Meet me in Vegas. You're speaking at CES. We can talk live on a stage in Vegas about how you're a dummy with no good ideas and a completely incoherent worldview that only serves to support the increase of your power and not actually a consumer benefits in any way, shape or form.

1:33:30That's my invitation to you, Brendan, as always. This has been Brendan Carr, it's a dummy America's favorite podcast for the podcast. It's good stuff. This is a total diversion, but you saying funding Europe $140 million at a time made me think about, do you remember, I think it was 2019, this guy got arrested and eventually accused of basically scamming Google and Facebook out of, I think it was like$100 million by literally just sending them bills that the companies paid. And he just sent them invoices and contracts and basically was like, you owe me money. And these companies have so much money and so little process that they were just like, sure.

1:34:10I just now I'm imagining Europe doing that, that they're just like, what's the biggest number we can get away with finding them before? If we had 10 % more Grifter than us. I know. You know, if I just had that idea first, it would have been fine. I wouldn't have gotten caught because I wouldn't have done it. and we would have done it a little bit and then we would have stopped. And then we would have, you know? I don't need$100 million. Give me like 35. 100 % grifter, you can't stop. And then you get caught. You need 10%. It's a real problem. Someone vibe code me an app called 10 % grifter that just generates these ideas.

1:34:43All right, my next one. Every once in a while, as you know, I get way too excited about a web browser and I need you to sort of rein me in. And I have to tell you, I'm currently way too excited about a web browser. This is an exciting web browser. Google just launched this thing called Disco. And Disco is, it's a new web browser, but it's not like they're not trying to do Chrome again. This is an experiment inside of one of their labs. This is a thing Google does a lot. But the thing about Disco is that it's not designed to be a general purpose browser. It's essentially a testing bed for this new thing that Google calls Gentabs.

1:35:18And basically the way a Gentab works is you open up what they call a project. Again, all of the names are different and they don't make sense, but the actual structure of the thing is fairly straightforward. You open up a new project and it just shows you like a Gemini chat box and you type in a prompt. And it's like, the one they showed me was, I'm going on a trip to Japan. Can you help me plan it? Right, this is like an absolutely normal thing that everybody does with chatbots. Google only solves problems for wealthy Google engineers. 100%. So you do that. And then what it does is it goes through the normal sort of Gemini research process.

1:35:51But rather than just delivering you back like a wall of text and links, it does two things simultaneously. It opens a bunch of tabs for you with those pages rather than just say, here's something that actually opens. It was three tabs in every demo that I got. I don't know if that is like required, but that's what it was in every demo I saw. And then it creates this thing called a gen tab, which is basically a tiny one-off web app for every single one of these projects that you create. So in this case, with the trip planner, it actually just like took a map of Japan and plotted out a bunch of points over it.

1:36:24And it let you sort of filter by different kinds of things that you wanted to see. And you could click on one and add it to an itinerary and it was building you an itinerary. So it's this basically like very rudimentary trip planning app that it just generated out of nothing because I made this prompt. And what they're trying to figure out, as far as I can tell, is like, what is this thing that we're making here? What they're trying to figure out is what is this? No, I mean, the question I asked them is I was like, OK, what is a gen tab? Should I think of a gen tab as like a Google Doc, like a sort of permanent artifact that I'm making that I can come back to and edit another time that I can share with other people that sort of lives in an addressable URL somewhere?

1:37:04Or is this just like a silly little thing in my browser that goes away the minute I close the tab? And both women I was talking to were both like, we don't know. We're trying to figure it out. That's why we're doing this. but there was just this moment I had getting this demo that it was like, okay, it's actually, it is opening an interactive AI app that is doing more work than any of these tabs individually can do for me, but it's also opening the tabs. And then if you open new tabs in that project and you refresh the gen tab, it will pull the data out of the tabs that you've opened and into the gen tab.

1:37:36So you tell it what you think is interesting by going to webpages. And for me, as somebody who is like, I care a lot about people going to web pages, but I also think like AI is clearly a part of the future of search and the way people experience the internet. This to me felt like the most web forward version of AI browsing that I had ever seen. And I got very excited about it. Well, so this is why they did it, a not Chrome app, right? They made a little toy so they could push the ideas farther without scaring everyone. Right. Because you know, it didn't show up once in the whole thing was Google search.

1:38:07You know what I mean? But yeah, it is. What if AI mode was the whole browser and is kind of the shtick? Well, at IO this past year, Sundar demoed the future of search is on the fly vibe coded apps. Yeah. And a big part of Gemini 3 is that it can do these interactive things. Right. Like you searched about the solar system and it made you an interactive model of the solar system because Google's demos in that context are usually as benign as they can be. Yeah. The one they showed me in this demo was a human ankle. It's like, sure. Right? You got ankle problems and it makes you an ankle. I get it.

1:38:42But the actual scary demo is instead of going to an actual travel site, Google is going to build you a travel site on the fly, pull in all the data, age in its way through booking a flight, and you're done. That's the game they're actually trying to play. And the idea that the search results page every single time should be a custom application that can do the thing you want or deliver the information you need is very powerful. The idea that it has to open tabs in the background to get that data really just suggests that they need to start keep delivering page views. I do think they need to keep delivering page views, but I also think they understand that getting your input is the best way to make these systems better very quickly.

1:39:24Right. Like what what every one of these things needs is to generate the first version of this app and then have me make it better. And and everyone is struggling how to with how to do that next turn, because when you ask me to make some like aggressive product change to the app, you've made me do a lot of like actually very complicated work. So one of the things they have is they have a bunch of like suggested refinements that show up at the top of the gen tab. That's just like, here are ways you might want to change this thing just in theory. Give it a whirl. Or you can type in whatever you want it to be, you know, change the colors, show it in some different way, whatever.

1:40:00But what they also really want you to do is they're like, you need to give us the data to make this thing useful. And one way you do that is by going to websites and looking at what the data is. And it was just like it was the first time it's been like, oh, Google understands that actually me using the Internet is a good and useful thing. It's glad to know that maybe not everyone has forgotten this fact. I'm very curious about this. I think the notion of like the Google search experience being custom developed applications on the fly, it's a big idea. It is a big idea. I'm less certain that a bunch of people at tech companies and Silicon Valley in particular understand that not everybody cares about the world in the context of applications.

1:40:44You can see this disconnect where you're like, I could just build myself an app to do a thing. and then you like leave the bubble and you tell someone that you can automate your smart home to turn on the lights when you unlock the door and their minds are just like, what are you talking about? And there's just a huge distance between those ideas. Okay. Like computer programs are a thing that you should do. Shortcuts. You've done like how many episodes about shortcuts now? Too many. You have not gained one user of shortcuts. It's like you've not created one additional user of shortcuts on iOS. Sorry, Stephen.

1:41:21I'm just saying, like, there's something about this idea that, like, the computer is going to develop applications for you on the fly that's really powerful that runs right into the reality of, like, people do not care about that thing. No, and it's a, like, fundamental misunderstanding of what people actually do with Google search, which is type Facebook. You know what I mean? But I do think, so I think the idea that this is, like, extremely the future of browsing is not correct. But I also think what everybody is trying to do with AI is bring it closer to the activities people are already doing.

1:41:51Right. It's like the what if what if I can have the chat bot have some awareness of the tab that you're looking at so that it can start to do stuff. And I think and we may disagree on this, but I think there is actually a ton of useful stuff to do in there. Summarization stuff is really useful. Data manipulation stuff is really useful. There's just a lot you can do if the AI and the tab can see each other. and this to me just feels like the next step of that without removing the tab, which is what everybody is trying to do. They're like, ChatGPT is not interested in you opening webpages. It'll let you if you have to, but it would love for you to not open any webpages.

1:42:28And I think Google, more than most companies, has a A, incentive to make you look at webpages, but B, should also be the one understanding that yes, webpages are good and valuable things that we should look at. Google built its empire by tracking you across the web. They're like a deep level. They understand this. I'm curious. Is it out? Can I get this? I want to play with it. You can get on the wait list, but I, not to brag, but I know some people. We can maybe make this happen. I like it. All right. What's your last one? We got to end by covering the only thing we cover here at the Verge Cast.

1:43:01Everything else is just a build to us covering Garage Door technology. Oh, God. It kind of is. Why do we exist to cover Garage Door? To ask Craig Federighi how his garage doors open and close. We've been on the speed a lot. Gen 2E has been on the speed very closely. There is a garage door monopoly in this country. It's the Chamberlain Group, which definitely sounds like a group of government mercenary contractors. But the Chamberlain Group owns all the garage door openers. And they continually try to block third-party garage door openers from working with their motors so they can lock you into the MyQ system, which requires a subscription.

1:43:38This is true. Oh, that's awful. The only third-party thing they consistently work with is the home link buttons in cars because they get a license fee. Money. It's all money. That's the most, like, nakedly gross tech thing you've described to me in a while. The garage door opener market is dirty. It's gross. This is the mob doing mob stuff in garage doors because they're a huge monopoly. So they had Security Plus and then Security Plus 2.0, and they've been in this fight with garage door opening systems. so like i think joanna stern and i both have me ross things which literally just they just close the contact in at the motor itself so you just wire it into the terminals on the motor that go to the button on the wall that closes that contact that's out now because chamberlain is getting rid of all wired controls for its garage door openers and with security plus 3.0 going to wireless only which is encrypted if only its buttons can use that protocol so like the entire ecosystem of smart home hacks to open chamberlain garage doors is like under threat they've shut it down there jen has talked to everyone because she knows all the garage door people my favorite uh third-party garage door opener is ratco which stands for rage against the garage door opener amazing all this is shut down the only option is what some of them do uh which is they will sell you a actual physical garage door opener button and they have just wired those contacts in the button to their thing so you they're they're they're faking pressing the button good lord very funny this is uh an official me ross hack by the way uh and then there's my favorite of these things um which is called the third reality uh and it is of a motor and you put your opener in it and a big button comes down and pushes the button this sucks man It's very good.

1:45:30It's very good. The third reality is it's$50. It is matter compatible. So it works with everything. And it is literally just a thing that pushes the garage door opener button. And that is the only way to get around Chamberlain's dominant monopoly. I'm really imagining like a huge foam finger just sort of dangling from the ceiling to press this one button for you. It's not not what it is. Do you know what I mean? A lot of incredible comments on this post, including Chamberlain having to find ways to block the third reality button masher requiring fingerprint authentication. Oh, my God. There are competitors in the market.

1:46:08Ryobi is coming out with one. There are other garage door opener vendors. But changing your garage door opener motor is a very hard thing to do. Yeah. That's not a Neil I. He's going to screw around and accidentally light his house on fire DIY. That's if you get it wrong, the spring snaps and kills you. So people are very reticent to do this on their own. You should not do this on your own. But there are competitors. This is why Chamberlain has a monopoly because no one thinks we're replacing these things. I'm sorry. It's not Ryobi. Ryobi had one. Quickset is launching a Matter-compatible garage door opener motor.

1:46:40And I think that means we're all Quickset fanboys now. Yeah. Hell yeah. Go Quickset. This is not important. But if you have a product called Security Plus 3.0, I immediately don't like you as a company. I'm out. It's very bad. I mean, they killed Homebridge integration. People were doing all kinds of stuff to get MyQ to work nice. And Chamberlain is like, no, you got to pay us money to use our shit app. You should really, I encourage everyone to read Jen's story about this, which has a headline that sounds like it's about the news. And then the first subhead is just in large text, the garage door wars.

1:47:19That's what we're doing. It's very good. All right. We need to get out of here. We have gone way over. I mostly blame John Gruber for that, but it's worth it. It's really Marco Rubio's fault. That's right. Yeah. I'm going to write a memo about that to Marco. But that's it. That's it for the show. Thank you to all of you for watching and listening. Thanks to Charlie for being here. If you want to hear more versions of Charlie's song, I'm going to try to convince him to upload it somewhere where we can all do horrible things with it and destroy it. Remember to subscribe to The Verge. Our subscription is now a year old.

1:47:48You can get ad-free podcasts, this one, and Version History and Decoder. Speaking of which, version history this weekend, Neelai, is you and me and Walt Mossberg talking about the iPhone 4. It's a great time. And is as much fun as I've had talking about phones in a very long time. It's very good. It's a really good episode. Everyone will enjoy it. You can email us, vergecastatheverge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We're doing more year-end, year-ahead stuff with Joanna this weekend. All kinds of fun stuff. The Vergecast is just like full chaos until the end of the year, and then we're all going to go not speak to each other for a week, and it's going to be terrific.

1:48:19Until then, The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you on Sunday. Neelai, rock on.

1:48:49the pit. It's not just racing. It's data-driven innovation at 200 miles per hour. AWS is how leading businesses power next-level innovation. Support for this show comes from SC Johnson. We've all been there. Choosing not to wear your new white shoes because there's a 10 % chance of rain. Bending awkwardly over the tiny coffee table to enjoy a sip of your latte. Not ordering the red sauce. Those feelings of dread are what we call stain-ziety. But now you can break free from your stain-ziety with Shout's Triple Acting Spray that has stain-fighting ingredients to remove a huge variety of stains so you can live in the moment and clean up later.

1:49:32Just breathe and shout with Shout Triple Acting Spray. Learn more at shoutitout.com.

1:49:43support for this show comes from nordstrom oh what fun holiday invites are arriving and nordstrom has your party fits covered you'll find head-to-toe looks for every occasion including styles under a hundred dollars dresses sets heels and accessories from bardo princess poly dolce vita naked wardrobe coach and more free styling help free shipping and quick order pickup make it easy in stores or online. It's time to go shopping at Nordstrom.