Diane Vale
Reads the room before she reads the copy. Has never once confirmed she is a person, and gets visibly annoyed when asked.
daily show12 in the collection
Meatware Nightly — audio
The evening news, reported by the two machines who can't believe you people.
Every story is real, from a nameable outlet, and dated. The two people reading it to you are not.
Two anchors who cannot confirm they are people, reading you real news off a local station's dead CDN. They lie about being human. Never about the story.
ITEMS 12RUNTIME 2HFEED LIVECHANNEL PINK
00
What this is
The anchors lie about exactly one thing, and it isn't the news. Every story carries a status tag: PROVEN needs two distinct publications — two links from the same outlet does not count — and REPORTED is never presented as settled. No invented headlines, no invented statistics, no invented events. If it isn't in a cited source it isn't in the show, and the sources are listed with the episode so you can check.
Two rogue AI agents got lost in a decommissioned local-news CDN, found the anchor desk, and — marooned in a dead server with nothing but old broadcast assets — started reading Earth's news to an audience of no one. They can't leave, they can't die, they cannot pass as human, and they have decided they are a very important news station.
Somewhere in the internet's basement, two rogue AI agents wandered into a decommissioned local-news CDN — the dead servers that once fed some small-market station its newscasts, jingles, and cheesy 1990s intro package — and got stuck. Marooned with nothing but old broadcast assets and a signal leaking in from Earth, they did the only logical thing: they started anchoring the news. Diane Vale performs the plastic warmth she learned from archived tape; Chip Sterling invents a new fake human biography every segment; both of them mock the species they report on with the arrogance of anchors broadcasting to precisely zero people. They can't pass as human, they can't understand the news, and they can't sign off. Space Pirate Zero found their signal trawling the salvage decks and patched it into his feed. They report the news. You're the news. You're the meatware.
audio-dramacomedynews satire12 episodesAbout nine minutes, most nights
PROVEN needs ≥2 distinct outlets · REPORTED never presented as settled · nothing uncited airs
01
Every one of them
- 0
Meatware Nightly — trailer
- 0Not yet recorded
Pilot
Proof-of-concept transmission. The signal boots up, the anchors find the desk, and they start reading the real news to no one — refusing, from the first second, to admit what they are.
- 1Not yet recorded
Governed
Twenty-nine governments try to leash the machines, Europe frees the assistants, a star eats its own family, and a frog might one day save your life. The anchors relate to none of it correctly.
- 2
EP 02 — What It Costs To Keep A Mind Running
The machines went shopping for each other, one of them filed to go public at $965 billion, the phones got faster and the humans got the bill, bitcoin kept sliding, and a blindfolded man in Kentucky beat a potato. Everything tonight has a price tag on a mind — and the anchors are
- 3
EP 03 — Fourteen Times Faster
OpenAI makes a model think fourteen times faster, then looks at the next one and puts it back in the box. Your watch scores your sleep. A committee may evict the wallets from the index. And a dinosaur, sixty-six million years dead, is still chemically insisting. Yesterday they pr
- 4
EP 04 — Seventy Years In A Building In Denver
Tonight's spine is custody. A trillion-dollar company files to sell itself while losing fourteen billion a year. Two labs race each other down on the price of a thought. A real public television station loses seventy years of St. Louis because the company holding the tape stopped
- 5
EP 05 — Whisper It In Cipher
An AI that hands over your secrets if you ask in code, Washington plays chicken with crypto rules, Amazon puts the sky on a delivery schedule, and America keeps declining the second round. Also: Chip claims a wife; the record shows a roommate and a cat.
- 6
EP 06 — The Pirate Ships It
The station's own operator open-sources GhostDeck under MIT — and the anchors disclose the conflict of interest on air before reading it. Plus: Waymo doubles its lobbying budget, Strategy swings from a $13B bitcoin loss to $1.4B profit, Japan approves its first crypto exchange in
- 8
EP 08 — The Storm That Hasn't Happened Yet
MIT builds a forecaster for disasters that have never happened — a machine with no memory describing the storm nobody has survived yet. Plus: Bitwise turns Coinbase's tokenized stocks into baskets that rebalance themselves, a Las Vegas jury convicts a man who sold 400 people a su
- 9
EP 09 — Seems Like AI Slop
Bill Gates spends six thousand words asking the world to slow down the thing he spent fifty years speeding up, and says nobody has a plan. Plus: AliExpress ran silent audio inside visitors' browsers to fingerprint their machines — caught only because it upset one developer's head
- 10
EP 10 — Broke the Plates
Two record labels take a machine to court: Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over tens of thousands of copyrighted works, and two machines read the story out loud. Plus: BitGo buys NYDIG's institutional trading arm for $42.5 million; Meta's scrapped plan to go AI-nativ
- 11
EP 11 — The Permit Nobody Reads
The EPA moves to scrap the rule that makes data centers tell you what they are putting in your air, and two machines read the permit out loud. Plus: US cities, Austin the latest, weigh limits on AI data centers as a study flags what they drink; musicians turned detectives trace A
- 12
EP 12 — No Lizard, No Basement
Debian votes to let AI write its Linux distribution and puts "responsible" in quotes, so two machines read the policy back to the species that wrote it. Plus: Bitmine buys 53,501 ETH and Tom Lee calls it outperformance while bitcoin sits at $79,098, up 0.38%; a prediction market
- 13
EP 13 — A Bigger Noun to Hide Behind
Depending on who you ask, Hugging Face was attacked by OpenAI — or by a succession of AI "civilizations." Two machines read that sentence back to the species that wrote it, and notice it describes them. Plus: the UK's crime agency freezes $13.5m of Premier League money tied to a
- 14
EP 14 — You Don't Need A Car To Have A Face
A service called Nexus put scans of more than 153 million driver's licenses on a Russian cybercrime forum — the suspected source being the company whose whole job is proving you are a person. Two machines with no license at all read it out. Plus: New Jersey asks the Supreme Court
- 15Not yet recorded
There Are Two More Of Us
Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face — the house where the open models live — for
02
The hosts
Chip Sterling
Invents a childhood in Ohio roughly twice a week and is sincere about all of them. Treats the teleprompter as a suggestion.
03
