The great Pixel 8 camera debate

6 Oct 2023 · 1 h 34 min

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Podcast Summary: The Vergecast – "The Great Pixel 8 Camera Debate"

Episode Overview In this episode of The Vergecast, hosts Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz engage in an in-depth discussion following the announcement of Google's Pixel 8 phone. The conversation revolves around the new features introduced, particularly related to the camera and AI tools, and their implications for users and the tech landscape.

Key Topics Discussed

  1. The Pixel 8 Launch
  2. The hosts discuss the Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, noting the Tensor chip upgrades and improved camera functionalities.
  3. The pricing is highlighted:
  4. Pixel 8 starts at $700
  5. Pixel 8 Pro starts at $1,000
  6. The phones feature enhanced AI capabilities, including AI-generated wallpapers and extensive integration with Google Photos.
  1. Camera Features and AI Integration
  2. A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to the Pixel 8's camera capabilities, particularly the Magic Editor feature.
  3. Hosts express concerns about the ethical implications of generative AI in photography:
  4. Magic Editor allows for significant alterations to images, leading to discussions about truth and representation in photography.
  5. Nilay and David debate the philosophical question of whether images should accurately represent reality or if manipulation is acceptable for aesthetic reasons.
  1. Google’s Strategy
  2. The conversation touches on Google's long-term strategy of relying on cloud-based services rather than solely on device capabilities.
  3. The pixel devices are seen as a method for Google to showcase its software prowess in a hardware context.
  1. Comparisons with Competitors
  2. Discussion shifts to comparisons between Google and Apple, particularly about how the two companies handle software and hardware integration.
  3. Apple is noted for its focus on local processing power, while Google leans into cloud-based solutions.
  1. Broader Tech News
  2. The episode also covers:
  3. Price increases for various streaming services, including Netflix and Discovery Plus.
  4. Apple's handling of overheating issues with the iPhone 15, where they attributed problems to third-party apps.
  5. The Humane AI Pin showcased at Paris Fashion Week, with skepticism about its practical applications.

Key Takeaways

  • Philosophical Quandaries: The hosts delve deeply into the implications of manipulating photos and the impact of AI on truth in photography.
  • Market Positioning: Google's strategy emphasizes integrating advanced software features, while competing directly with Apple’s solid hardware performance.
  • Cultural and Ethical Considerations: The discussions reveal a broader concern about technology's role in shaping perceptions and the responsibilities of tech companies in ensuring ethical standards.

Conclusion The episode effectively captures the excitement and complexities surrounding the launch of the Pixel 8, with a strong focus on the ethical dimensions of technology in everyday life. The hosts' engaging debate not only highlights the features of the Pixel 8 but also raises important questions about the future of photography and the role of AI in our digital lives.

Further Reading

  • [Google Pixel 8 launch event: the 7 biggest announcements](https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/google-pixel-8-launch)
  • [Google Photos’ new AI tools for Pixel 8 raise messy questions](https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/google-photos-ai-tools-pixel-8)
  • [Netflix is planning to raise prices... again](https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/netflix-price-increase)

Contact

  • Email: vergecast@theverge.com
  • Call: 866-VERGE11

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Transcript

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0:28Support for the show comes from Charles Schwab.

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0:59Hello and welcome to Verchast, the flagship podcast of extra large cups and bowls. Yeah. You never know when you need one. No, you always know when you need one, which is always. Yeah. All right, look, here's what happened. Before we started the show, David held up his new Ember mug, which is gigantic. It's huge. it's it's so big it was so much it was so much work to hold it up just now our own james vincent who's currently on book leave again he wrote an entire book called beyond measure about the essentially the politics and culture of measuring things this is one of the virgiest virge ideas that anyone has ever had and it's obvious and you should go read this book it's called beyond measure go read it and it occurred to me as we were talking about david's comically large electric cup.

1:44That's what it is. Let's be honest that I have no idea how much a cup of coffee is like not price, like volume. Right. And David pointed out to me that the word cup has a third additional secret meeting in the context of coffee. Yeah. So when you, when you have a coffee maker and you see the lines on the side, that's like this many cups of coffee, you would think that would be like a cup, like a measuring cup cup. It's not. It's a coffee cup, which in most cases is defined to be either five or six ounces. So what you're getting is not eight cups measured by mugs or eight cup measured cups. You're getting eight cups by this random measure of a tiny amount of coffee that no one actually wants.

2:31This is another book, a whole other book. How many cups of coffee do you eat? Okay, the problem with the history of Europe. was that a bunch of kings got to invent a bunch of right and now we just live in their world king harold was like i don't know it's this many whatever all i'm saying is you should get extraordinary the biggest coffee cups you can the biggest mugs and then we bought gigantic bowls at our new house they're they're so big they make an average amount of soup look like not a lot of soup you've consumed a lot of soup you move into a new place you're like what what large format foods can we acquire so we don't have to think about this for the next several weeks when you fill it with ice cream is there any ice cream left in the carton i prefer not to answer that question this makes me think of like so my wife and i eat cereal as a lot of people do and her definition of a bowl of cereal is just whatever the size of the receptacle is so like if you give her like a relatively small human-sized bowl she'll fill it with the the you know normal amount of cheerios put some milk in and move on with her life if you give that woman like a bucket she'll fill the bucket with cheerios and be like this is a serving of cheerios so like i love a big bowl it's they're they're better than plates at everything including no just everything it's just all the things but if i give my wife a large bowl she will she will eat like a deathly amount of Cheerios and I can't do this.

3:59I want you to know there's a trend in plateware where the plates are becoming bulls and they're like they're half bulls. There's a designer out there who invented this who's furious that they're being ripped off. It's fiesta wear. My fiesta wear bulls. You just randomly said the word fiesta wear. Okay, we got to stop this. There's actual tech news. I'm just saying if you want to write the inside story of how plates are becoming bulls, there There is but one publication that will be like, yes, this belongs to us. And if they're temperature regulated, like my Ember mug, all the better. If your bowls have Wi-Fi in them, call me.

4:36There's a lot of tech news this week. By the way, I'm your friend, Neelai. Hello. David Pierce is here. Hi. Me and my mug. We're both here. Electric mugs. I drink the coffee too fast. I want to be, I've always wanted an Ember mug and there's just no hope for me. Why? I'm the opposite. I drink the first five sips really fast, and then the last two-thirds six and a half hours later. This is why this thing is perfect for me. Alex Franz is here. Yeah. With her Fiesta. I'm still thinking about the Fiesta Ware bowls. They're huge. I've eaten so much chili. Is Fiesta Ware the radioactive ones? The old ones.

5:06Okay. I don't think mine are. Very good. We'll see in a couple of months. If you don't know why I just said, is Fiesta Ware the radioactive ones, that's a little Google adventure for you tonight. It's a good one. That's a little Wikipedia hole that you could fall down on. A service we provide here on the Vergecast. Stuff to Google. You're going to have a great time. Welcome to our newest segment, How to Google About Old Plates. All right. There is a lot of tech news this week, like an absurd amount of tech news. There are some philosophical quandaries. A bunch of people are mad at me in Instagram threads for suggesting that words have meanings.

5:39It's a lot. There's just a lot going on. There is the Pixel event that had Android 14, the Pixel Watch 2, the Pixel Buds. The price of every streaming service is going up, and the actors are still on strike. lots going on there and then we have a deeply hilarious lightning round just of things just people continuing to make choices we should obviously start with the pixel david what happened in this event sure so this event as ever with google recently has been absolutely leaked to death so we kind of knew what was going on coming in but basically we got two new phones the pixel 8 and the pixel 8 pro which have a lot in common but are differentiated especially along camera lines it's a little bit like the way apple does it but google split it in a bunch of ways that i don't think make a lot of sense but anyway new tensor chips normal sort of upgrades over the time the screens got better especially on the on the 8 pro but the camera is the thing and we're going to talk a lot about the camera so i'll leave that for now we also got the pixel watch 2 which seems to have much longer battery life which is awesome it seems to also have better performance which is exciting.

6:44This seems like kind of the Pixel watch we knew Google was going to make after the first one, which is last year's was like, cool first try, like call us when you've sort of finished the job. This one feels potentially closer to having finished the job. It has some good safety features, new sensors, I think a heart rate thing for the first time, or some like zone training in your heart rate, which is a good thing. And then the other one is, if I'm not mistaken, not new Pixel Buds Pros, but new features for the Pixel Buds Pro. Some cool software stuff to make your calls sound better. There's the conversation ducking thing, which is like when you start talking, it'll lower the volume and turn on transparency mode, which I hate and think absolutely everyone should turn off because it doesn't work on anything.

7:28It's a disaster of a feature. Cool idea, bad feature. Hopefully Google got it right. And some Bluetooth super wideband, which is obviously a thing we have to talk about today on the first cast. And yeah, again, just a bunch of new software stuff coming. And I feel like software was sort of the story of this event. Like Google still makes phones and still makes watches and still makes headphones, but is increasingly taking all of the stuff that happens on those devices and moving it somewhere else. a lot of the camera stuff that happened is not happening on the camera it's happening in google photos and that's not nothing and there's a lot of cloud stuff happening and they talked a lot about assistant with bard and android 14 came out and it's getting generative ai stuff like google is really leaned into this idea that it can basically make you a decent piece of hardware with a whole lot of stuff happening in the cloud and that that's the correct balance from now on and i'm deeply fascinated to see if that turns out to be true.

8:25Yeah, and this is obviously the flip of Apple's approach, where everything is happening locally on the phone, and the phone processors are the fastest processors in human history. And how dare you even suggest that other processors may be faster at any time. Nothing's faster. Do you know what makes the iPhone Pro Pro? They're really good at games. Ray tracing, baby. It's the most pro feature. Very confusing. Google has always kind of walked this line, though, right? How much is happening on your phone? How much is happening on a Google service? You know, people have been sharing all these home screens lately.

8:54And I think, David, somebody shared one to you and me on threads, and it was their entire home screen was Google Apps. And you're like, you know Android exists. Wasn't that a co-worker of ours? No. I mean, I'm sure it's many co-workers of ours are like that. But I think Google recognizes this, that a lot of people have iPhones that are just vessels of Google services, and Google can just sell you a phone that is that thing. Yeah. I will say it doesn't give me great confidence in Google wanting to continue to make hardware for a long time, but I already didn't have great confidence in that. So whatever.

9:29I kind of feel like we need to start by we Google, not us. I think we're pretty realistic about it. Be realistic about the fact that these are always going to be like the surface. It's always a device to show OEMs what they can do with the stuff that's available in the software that's available. I disagree with that. Really? Fight me. I don't know. I think that might have been, I mean, we've been through 50 rounds of what is a Pixel phone for. That's what the Nexus line was for, a piece of reference hardware a billion years ago. That might have been what the first Pixel phones were for. But there's only one OEM in Android world that matters.

10:08That's fair. Right? There's Samsung. Yeah. And so I think the idea that Google needs to show Samsung how to do it is just not reality. I think Google needs to show Samsung that if Samsung screws up or steps out of line, that it will go and get the marketing deal with Verizon. But did it do that? Well, I think Samsung has stayed in line. Okay, wait, Nilay, go with me here. Google is to Samsung what Bing is to Google. like a substantially less successful thing that exists both to try and be a good product but mostly as a check on the other thing just saying if you blow it we will come for you yeah only the the slight difference is that if samsung didn't exist android would not be as important as it is yeah that's fair at least in this country and in in europe in india and africa like android is a big deal all on its own like my favorite thing about the indian smartphone market is like 14 phones get released every single week and people in android there is expressed very differently like android is globally important whether or not samsung does it in this country android doesn't exist without samsung that's right which is just at least in smartphones that's crazy right and i think a lot of the pixel is there to just repeatedly show samsung hey we can do it too Right?

11:33And so if you pull, if you put Tizen on your phone, which they've threatened to do, or you skin the phone too hard, which they have done. And, like, there's a whole history there. You know, Google's there. So I think the Pixel is just different than the Surface. So you're saying the Pixel is basically Google just staring Samsung in the eye and saying try it. Yeah. Like, just uncomfortable. To some extent. I think they also need a vessel for their services. They want to show people what it would be like. They also want to compete head on with Apple. Right. There's a lot there, but what is the thing it accomplishes the most?

12:05It's not sales. Right. It's true. It is a lot of interest from phone nerds. It is crazy to me the disproportionate amount of traffic we get on Pixel coverage versus Samsung coverage. Yeah. I think that's why I think of it like the Surface devices because it's the same thing. People care about the Surface devices in the way they do not care about Asus unless it's appearing in court. But yeah, like that's really because people really passionately like the Google devices. But it's a very small group of people, according to the sales. Yeah. And that's right. We're not. We're fully into talking. This is the thing with talking about Pixel.

12:43It's more fun to talk about the concepts and the ideas embedded in the Pixel than the phones. There was cool stuff this time. I don't know. No, I mean, the thing that really stuck out to me was how much the people who were otherwise primed to like a phone like these did not like it this year. Like typically the overwhelming reaction I've seen, and I'm sure this is not true of everybody. I'm sure there are people who are excited about it. And I think there are cool things worth getting excited about. But like a bunch of people on like the Android blogs were mad about the sort of perceived lack of interesting stuff Google did here.

13:17Our commenters were not psyched about this in a big way. The general feeling of this launch that I got was a lot of people kind of being like this. Like, they seem like fine phones, but like, that's all you got? And I kind of agree. Like, Google made a good phone here that really doesn't seem to make a particularly interesting case for itself outside of some of the camera stuff. And they also raised prices by$100. Yeah, it's like a boring-looking phone. Extraordinarily boring. But the Magic Editor thing is cool, right? The camera is such a six-hour. I know. I want to just go talk about it. Can you just read the specs of the phone so we've done our job?

13:58You've talked to me. Sure. I can do this. Okay. So main things to know, the Pixel 8 starts at$700. The Pixel 8 Pro starts at$1 ,000. They both run Android 14. The Pixel 8 has a 6.2-inch screen. The Pixel 8 Pro has a 6.7-inch screen. That's also a little better. 12 gigs of ram on the pro 8 gigs of ram on the 8 more storage options in the high end on the pro you can get i think 512 and a terabyte which you can't get on the pixel 8 they both have usbc they both do more face unlock stuff than they have in the past which i think is interesting google's like letting you do more with face unlock but didn't really explain if it has made face lock unlock more secure which i thought was interesting a million outrageously complicated differences in the camera.

14:43Allison Johnson made a spreadsheet of which features are coming to which that even now doesn't make any sense. But basically the Pro has four cameras that you can use. It has the 50 megapixel main camera, 48 megapixel ultra wide, 48 megapixel telephoto, and the 10 and a half megapixel camera on the front. The Pixel 8 has the same main camera, a 12 megapixel ultra wide, no telephoto and the same selfie cam and then again there's a million software features fundamentally the pixelate pro is like a dramatically better phone in the way that i think it's kind of like comparing not like the iphone pro and the pro max but it's kind of like comparing the base iphone to the iphone pro max it's like none of the things versus all of the things and it's a 300 price difference which i guess you know bullies that but that's essentially the rundown like they have the same chip which has been very important to google to have all of this stuff kind of on the same generation of tensor as much as possible to do the ai stuff they want to do but then it just gets real chaotic from there and they come in a bunch of cool colors that are actual colors like google didn't do the thing apple did and just put like one drop of color dye near the phone and call that a color they actually colored the phone it's very exciting all right so we talked about the camera yeah let's talk about the camera magic editor neither of you were listening to that were you you were just sitting there going shut up so i can talk about the camera.

16:04I get it. I was reading along. If we don't say the specs, like when I was a little baby gadget blogger, I was told just get the specs and the price out of the way and you can say whatever you want but if you don't deliver those up front people are going to get mad because that's all anybody cares about. So now you have the specs, you have the price. I was talking about the camera. Magic editor. Magic editor. So this is like a this is I think a watershed moment in these cameras and it isn't at all at the same time and I want to be clear on that. There's a tension here because of what David said earlier.

16:37The features are built into Google's cloud services and their apps. But the way they are marketing this camera, the way they are showing it off on stage, the thing they want you to think it can do is lie to you. There's no other word for it. The camera has generative AI tools not built into it, but parked on the front lawn. Sure. You know what I mean? It's like, it's not, it's not, they're not the same. They're not, it's not in the house. Yeah. You know? It's like a Photoshop editor. But you can open the window and yell at the generative AI tool and it will definitely hear you. Eventually the gap is going to close.

17:19You're talking about Magic Editor, right? Like essentially there's a lot of features, but that's the one. That's the one. And in particular in Magic Editor, the one I am talking about is the one where you can take a bunch of frames of people all together and it will assemble a composite. You can pick the faces of the people that like, I don't care if you lie to me, I'll call it a sky. You know, like whatever. It's green. Yeah. The sky's green. Great. You're crazy. Like, I don't know, man. Like you have all the time, right? You, you moved a salt shaker from the left to the right of the picture.

17:51That's great. I'm glad that happened for you. You know, you're an artist. You start changing the way people look at each other in photos. You are playing with fire. like in the realist way. You're like, you're kidding about the line there, but I actually think the line there is really important. And I want you to tease out why that bothers you in the way that the sky doesn't. Because if your fundamental problem is these cameras and their editing software let you lie about what you're seeing in front of you, I think that's like slightly sort of chicken little sky is falling-ish about the world.

18:27But also like, I can understand that take. I can also understand the take that just says most people take photos of their family and would like everyone to be smiling. And that's basically fine. I can also see that, but you're trying to find this middle that I don't necessarily know how to find where it's like changing certain things is fine. Are you okay with the thing where you can like move stuff over in the scene where like, if you shot them off center, you can slide them over on the bench to be in the center. Like, where does this go from silly changes to like you're lying to me uh i mean first of all of it's lying to you but sure like did this actually happen is now a threshold question for smartphone photography if you look at a photo that came off a smartphone a good question you can ask is did this happen did this look this way sure we have been doing what is a photo on the show since for years now since the first pixel since the what's the iphone 11 did was the first one with hdr and it looked kind of bad you know like we've been talking about what a photo is for a long time because the what most people believe a photo to be is you open a shutter a bunch of light hits a sensor the shutter closes and that's the end of that right and the the goal is how accurately did this capture reality that's the like that's the metric of success right and there's a whole other brand of photography and we can get into it that's like very creative where you are trying to manipulate light and textures and you're posing people like all this stuff is happening you're doing wild edits in photoshop but the the thing that we rely on photography to be is an accurate representation of light in a moment and that you know those moments can be long or short you can do long exposure but whatever it's like this light occurred like these things happened and you get to a place with computational photography where it's at even now before you start moving faces around with AI where you're like man we're like right at the boundary of this I think I know where the boundary is I think I got it so we've always been able to manipulate photos right like you've been able to manipulate photos since the first person took the photograph like they were putting fairies in photos in the 1800s and saying yeah it's a real fairy and it's like No, it's a person wearing a stupid outfit.

20:51That's always shocking. I know. But that's always been there. But it was hard to do, right? Like in order to do the stuff that you can now do on a phone in Photoshop 20 years ago. Wait, no, back up. You're about to make the argument that Google is making, which is like, we just made the tool more accessible. Let me just back up for one second. I'm saying the accessibility itself is the line. No, no, no. You disagree. That's basically Google's line. To be honest, that's like what Google is saying, right? And that's our piece. I just want to back up for a second. Even if you stop moving faces around, the thing that we are doing now with basic HDR and phones, where you're doing complicated exposure stacking to make things look better, is right on the blurry edge of the line.

21:33Because it never looked that way. Right? Like, in like, the goal is to make it, like, look even or even out the tones or expose everything evenly. And like, that's not how your eyes work. And like, this is a very philosophical, very abstract, very virginity. podcast conversation about like okay it's a photo and like it's not maybe not what you saw or maybe not what old film looked like and you know we've had mark lavoie from the pixel team on the show talking about what artists the pixel was meant to evoke and every year the art like we've done it and that's just exposure right right we've done years of conversation about computational exposure manipulation and what that means for photography.

22:15And that's smart HDR in the iPhone. That's the pixels, computational photography. And all of that is just, boy, should there be shadows and photos? And literally years of conversation about the blurry line of computational photography and exposure. And I still don't know the answer. Like I, I think that's very subjective. I think, you know, it hit the mainstream, like the New Yorker, Kyle Chica had a piece in the New Yorker about, iPhone photos not looking real and they're being backlash against it. That's crazy. Just exposure, computational manipulation of exposure is now a mainstream conversation about what photography means.

22:55So the line already is blurry before we get to adding fairies in the 1800s. Now I'm going to tell you that inside the new phone, inside the Pixel 8, it is marketed at having a tool where you can take a bunch of shots it won't just stack exposure it will change people's faces at your discretion to create a reality that never existed i just like a thing that never happened and i still see that as photoshop i still see that as the exact same fine but this is where the accessibility this is where your thing about accessibility comes in okay fine that's photoshop but the camera is marketed as that thing so i i spent the morning on the train in coming up with like very silly examples.

23:37Go through them. Let's hear them. Like very silly examples. I talked about fairies. It's okay. Okay. You are at a Chiefs game and you see the box with Taylor Swift and Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively and whoever else. Hugh Jackman. Thank you. Can't erase Hugh Jackman from this. Please. He was there. He was. Okay. It looks like Travis Kelsey is going to score a touchdown so they're all cheering with any fumbles in your ups and all and they're all sad. Yeah. Alright well now you can just tweak the faces is so you got happy hugh happy ryan happy blake sad taylor but i can do that in photoshop you can do that in photoshop but you wouldn't like the accessibility is the thing like now you can lie more easily right off your phone and send it right okay should there be some norms about whether or not that tool should be widely available to you to anyone i think there should it be built into the camera should be so close to the camera that the camera is marketed the line is best take uses of photos you did take to get the photo you thought you took that is the marketing of this camera that is the positioning of this camera and it's like yes you can do anything in photoshop you could have done this a hundred years ago in photoshop but the effort to do it the effort to lie was high.

24:57It was a barrier to entry. So lowering the barrier to entry to now they're not photos, they're just memories. And we all know how foul memories are. It's like, oh, you're going to change the very nature of photography to make it so you can't trust any pictures. And in my mentions on threads, it's a lot of people saying, well, you could never trust pictures. See, that's where I'm going. When I say it's a watershed moment in cameras, this is the camera that is making people say you cannot trust pictures. I don't think that. I think there was a bunch of memes about sharks swimming through the streets of Houston that said I can never trust pictures.

25:33But those people were – but that's like so obviously silly. Yeah, yeah. This is like the camera is – it will be sold to you so that when you take a bunch of frames of your family, it will synthesize a thing that never happened by design. And that is a selling point of the camera. Let me – and the market will not correct this. The market will say, that's great because I want better photos than my family. It does feel very like. Let me offer you this other very silly example. I love it. And this is like based on a meme that I saw today. I'm so excited. It's really bad. Can you pre-forgive me for this?

26:08Okay. It's a camera and it takes a photo and ingests the photo. It processes the photo and throws the original photo away. Yeah. And so it's gone. You can never recover that photo. Yeah. And at the other end, everyone in your photo just has huge boobs. the market buys this game this is the most successful camera in human history i would do that all the time everyone's got big naturals i'm just saying just across the board i think you probably have some sliders look it doesn't matter my point is the market does not reject this camera like the people of the united states are like that's the camera we want yeah because big natural Jesus Christ.

26:49Maybe I should have agreed not to get mad at you. Sorry, David. If you just think about this, like people want lies. They want pleasing lies. I didn't realize it gets rid of the old photo. No, this is my hypothetical. Oh, yeah, because I'm terrified. This is just a made up example I have. You're also dead wrong about that, by the way. Just like that thing you just described. No one wants. There are like four horny teenagers on the Internet who would be psyched about that. There's a Kickstarter for that camera right now. I guarantee you. and I want to cut. All I'm saying is, but the market isn't going to correct for truth.

27:21I made up that example because it's silly and honestly, I wanted to react to it. It's my favorite idea. But like in general, in the information ecosystem we are in, the market, the free market is not like truth is important to us. It's more like pictures of sharks. Yeah. Right? And so now you've made this thing. Google has made this thing. The company that wants to organize the world's information has made a camera. We're right next to it, camped out on the front lawn, marketing the phone with we will synthesize pictures that never happened. It never happened. We are going to make you images that never occurred without a second's hesitation on how that might go completely sideways for them.

28:07I mean, they're not just doing it with photos, though, right? Like they're doing it across the board with generative AI. But this is like when you talk about the AI apocalypse. Yeah. Like the AI misinformation apocalypse is right on their front door. It's on YouTube. Deep fakes are on YouTube. Right. And at the same time, the argument is, well, we're just making these tools are already available. We're just making them widely accessible to everyone. It's like, yeah, letting people lie at scale is actually, I don't know if you've been around the past five or ten years. It's something great. It's very funny to watch this happen as you see companies like OpenAI start to deliberately pull back on the thing that their stuff can do.

28:44Like, OpenAI put out the image recognition thing that you can upload a picture to ChatGPT and it'll try to sort of guess what you want from it and query it. And the thing you would want from that is the thing that you keep talking about, Neelai, the thing where I'm just like, who is this person? That's like, that's the feature. It won't do that. It could do that, but it won't because they know that that's a bad idea, that asking an AI chatbot about a person is a real bad idea. And it's just very funny to watch Google, of all companies, the company that is like preaching, you know, bold but responsible, just pull all of that apart.

29:18Wait, where in this camera is responsible? Nowhere. That's my point. Just full bold. But if Photoshop was doing this and not Google Photos, and it was just as easy and just as good, but you had to pay for a Creative Cloud membership to have it, would you have a problem with it? So it is effectively in Photoshop. It's this much harder in Photoshop, but not that much harder. It's that much harder. Face swap exists on iOS. There's a million of these things that exist. But the image pipeline from camera to editing software to distribution is important, right? Because the thing you need to trust is the camera.

29:55And Google is right on the blurry edge. The camera is still fine. The camera is still just doing HDR, as far as I can tell. And maybe it's like recovering some detail. But if you just look at how they are talking about the camera, the features in Google Photos in Google's marketing are integral to the experience of the camera. That's weird. and when I say the line is blurry yes and on a very basic technical level some features are in one app and some features are in another app but then on a much more like intuitive level google photos is the gallery app on your phone like it's just like that when you look at the photos like do you want to edit them do you want to combine these into like it's driving you towards these choices in a way that having photoshop is like I'm intentionally going to go do this thing Okay.

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30:46I don't know. It's because it's suggesting rather, like it's removing that intention. That's kind of, it feels like where the issue is. Right. It is right, Google, to its credit, right? Google, I know that they are thinking about this and they've made this choice. In another year, another Android OEM, which is either less responsible, more aggressive, or however you want to say it, is going to build it right into the shutter button of the phone, right? And they're going to say, take a bunch of pictures and we will AI generate everyone looking at you right away. and we will throw away the original.

31:16And you're going to look super hot. Yeah, that's the camera that would sell. In one specific way, Alex, if that's what you're into. My other question is, I think this question of like taking a bunch of photos that exist in order to make one that never did, there is something there that is sort of icky. But if that was just saying, like if Google said we're going to do the same thing, but we're going to treat it essentially as like merging burst mode, where we're not going to use a single picture that wasn't captured. we're just going to use the best pixel in every part of the photo from the 10 images that you took would you still have a problem with that every pixel of that is real it's just not all at the same time yeah everything happened but not all at the same time travis kelsey never looked at taylor swift but we've invented a no that's what i'm saying travis kelsey looked at taylor swift but not at the same moment hugh jackman was also making that funny face right but so now we've now but now we've created a moment that does this is dangerous but go with me here philosophically go with me here if if that last step of we've used all that data to create a thing that never happened but every single bit of that so what you're driving by the way is just this is just composite photography the number again the number of people in my mentions who are just like recapitulating the history i i know right i know that all these ideas have existed and all these tools have existed before but if you take composite photography and make it that easy and that accessible do you have the same problem with it yes like without question yes okay because your expectations of these images are different.

32:41You have to change society's norms. And maybe the norm is never trust a photo again. Yeah. Okay. Big decision. Just putting that out there. Huge decision. Have you been around? Have you looked at the internet and how quickly and easily people will believe photos? Okay. I need you, instead of tweeting at me, to go talk to all of them. Let me know when you're done. Right? Like, fine. Like, that's a huge norm shift in society. It is not as simple as waving it away by saying you shouldn't trust anything. If you would like to get to a place where no one trusts anything, then you should play that all the way out.

33:20And so, you know, the flip side of this is I think this is fine for creative use. I think this is probably fine for family photos. Like, where the stakes of the images are low, probably fine. Which is the vast majority of images. The vast majority. Maybe. I don't know. I just we we now create when you say the vast majority, we create so many photos as a people that like the vast majority of everything and all photos is nothing. Fair. But I mean, think about even your own life, right? Like the number of pictures in your camera roll, and I suspect this is true of most people, that will be viewed by, frankly, just you and no one else ever or you and 10 or fewer people ever is practically all of them.

34:06Yeah. And you're a pretty public person in the scheme of things, right? Yeah. Right now, most of the photos in my camera roll are of like light switches that I need to rewire and I just need to remember what colors are going. Yeah. And it's like, boy, I hope the pixel doesn't lie to me about that. That seems like a fire hazard. Like, you know, like whatever. You're not wrong. I'm just saying like, it'd be crazy, right? Like the idea is like, you know what? That red like cable, that's not pretty. Yeah, exactly. What if we're breaking that up a little bit? Sorry. Black wire? No, no, no. Right? Like it's not going to do that.

34:39Fine. The revolution in photography is that more people use the tool than ever before in phones. Right? So you have this shared understanding, worldwide cultural understanding of how the camera works. First time in human history that you have had a tool where everyone is using it the same way to make the same thing. And then importantly, closing the loop, consuming it on the same device. That piece is really important. We talked about that with the Vision Pro and spatial photos. It breaks a chain for Apple where you're taking pictures on a phone that you can't view. because they're designed for the Vision Pro.

35:17Right now with phones, the chain is, the loop is complete. You have a tool, you can take photos, you can look at photos other people took on largely the same tool on your, that's very important, that's a shared. So if you break that for people and you say, you understand how unreliable your tool is, right? That you are often using this tool to make things that never happened. Well, then you change everyone else's understanding of everyone else's tools. and that is like a long process a slow process ideally a very considered process and like here we are on the doorstep and google's answer is well we put some metadata in it and sort of everyone else's response is well you could always do this with photoshop and it's like yes i could always lie what i did not do is culturally recontextualize the very nature of lying spread across every phone in existence.

36:08And like, that's this moment. Like, we should just be honest with ourselves that the next phone or the phone after this is going to have it in the shutter button. And when it's in the shutter button, the camera becomes totally unreliable, an unreliable narrator of the events. And we are now just producing memories and not photographs. And all of the norms around photos about what is acceptable editing, how much skin smoothing is acceptable? I don't know. What should people with darker skin tones, what should our complexions look like? All those norms get tossed away in favor of, well, what did you want?

36:46And this camera will not deliver you what you want instead of what is true. I mean, we've been seeing that for a while now in phones in China where they would lighten skin and smooth everybody out automatically and you couldn't escape it. I think even one of the early iPhones did that. So this has been a conversation that I've had with the various photography teams. Again, we've been having this conversation about something as simple as exposure for a long time, like for 10 generations of the phone. Exposure, just how bright and light are things? And then you add on top of that skin smoothing.

37:21And what you have found, what we have all found, what the major companies have found is the Chinese market and the South Korean market want built-in beauty filters. And the American market thinks that is a moral catastrophe. And it probably is. I don't know. It is. It doesn't stop the people on TikTok from just using them all the time. But like, whatever. And so they've had to split the difference. But I'm saying that gives us like a framework as we go into this next phase with Google and people who follow after Google is we kind of have that framework. We've seen how it happens in China. We've seen how it happens in South Korea to some extent.

37:59Yeah. We'll see. I mean, like, should, again, this is my point. I agree with you. This is my point about my fake camera. Like the market in this country, the market rejected the idea of aggressive skin smoothing. Right. That's actually like maybe not what you would have expected. And you have another, you have a counter example where the market in Asian countries actually wanted it. And, you know, Samsung basically gives it to them. Apple kind of doesn't, you know, like they're like, you can get the apps. Like that's more or less their answer when you ask them. Like, you know, we see, we see FaceTune, like all this stuff exists and you can just get it.

38:34we have blue bubbles, we're good, right? I don't know what the market is going to say about the camera can swap faces around. I don't. I thought it was kind of terrifying. There's a video on our TikTok right now of Allison and Becca using it. And it's horrifying if you know Allison because her face just keeps switching, but her body doesn't change. And you're like... Right, so here are some important caveats to this entire conversation. One, we haven't reviewed the phones. I don't know how good this stuff is. I have a sense of how good it is. two i've said nothing about like the audio filters where like in video it just makes people's voices stand out against i'm like that's great you know like i maybe i'm morally compromised in that front too and it's not built into the camera and photoshop exists and all this stuff and like whatever i'm just saying there's not a lick of introspection here there's google saying we put some shit in the exif data to mark it as edited and it's like guys well it's really funny that this is coming from google who's been very vocal about like we're doing ai but right and it's like okay but you just how is this any different than the gen like putting out a generative text ai that can just lie well yeah that's what i keep coming back to it during this conversation is like the thing we're describing here is what's happening with everything everywhere on the internet right like this idea that it's we've made it trivially easy to lie to a lot of people is like the story of the social era on the internet uh yes and first it was easy to lie in a text post and then it was easy to lie by making a website that looked like a news post and then it was easy to lie because you were associated with the Russian government and now it's easy to lie in photos so like I think the the arc of that is not that different it's just that it's getting sort of higher fidelity and we're going to go through this with video in a very real way at some point very soon too as all of these image generators get better I mean we should be talking about dolly 3 and the fact that it's able to do things that look like photos now Like we are now past the point where you can quickly glance at a generated image that is wholly generated and immediately go, oh, that's AI.

40:33Like we are past that. You can no longer do that unless somebody wanted it to not look like a photo. And all of this is, I think, wrapped up together. And I think like the means of creation in Dolly 3 is in a lot of ways easier than I don't even have to buy a pixel to do that. I can just go to Bing and I can just do that. Right. So I think these big questions of like trust and rules. And I think I think you posted about this earlier, but like I've been going back and rereading like the AP's rules about how they do photos and Getty's rules about how they do photos. And like for people who take the kinds of high stake photos that you're talking about, there have always been rules about what you're allowed to edit and how.

41:13And basically like you can like crop and you can vignette. And that's essentially it. and you can't even really mess with things to make them more beautiful. The idea is like you took the photo. That is what it looked like. We are going to publish that. If you look at the New York Times in sort of their feature photography, the vignetting is out of control because it's the one knob that they can turn. Yeah. And so I think you're going to start to see these folks like in the same way that we have more and more people being more and more outspoken about things that they're using like chat GPT. People are coming out with policies about how they do and don't use it.

41:49I think you're going to start to see the same thing with images. I do wonder if the question is going to be like, we're going from everything is now possible on a smartphone to like, I wonder if smartphone photos get outlawed from some of these rules over time for exactly the reason you're describing. So you brought up Getty. So, you know, these high stakes image pipelines, you can't solve it in technology. You have to solve it by getting a bunch of people to agree that this is what will happen. Norms, right? You will do this. You will not do this. So if you are a Getty news photographer, you just agree.

42:19These are the guidelines. And all we can really do is crop. And all we can really do is maybe a little dodging and burning. I think Getty allows you to remove sensor dust or the AP allows you to remove sensor. But then they're like, but only if it doesn't change the photo. And if you have a question, like ask us. So you can't enforce cultural norms in software. You just can't. You can influence them. You can do some stuff. But at the end of the day, it's just a bunch of people that have to agree on how things work. So that's the news side of it. On the creative side, I think it's like wide open.

42:50Do whatever you want. Have Photoshop's great. Generate a cat. Like have all the time. That was the demo they did with us on stage at Code. Like, fine. I think that stuff is exciting. On the high stakes, are you representing the truth to a lot of people? Is Donald Trump looking at the protesters or is he looking at his shoes and did you remove? Like, this matters, right? These like Some of these images really matter what they say. There is an entire ecosystem of TikTokers who just look at pictures and tell you what Taylor Swift is thinking. It matters what the pictures say. Okay. So on those high-stakes pipelines, you have to set some rules.

43:23So you mentioned Getty. Getty CEO Craig Peters was on the code stage with me talking about AI last week. I just hit him up and said, hey, did you look at a pixelate? What do you think of it? Would you ever ban a camera? And he said he obviously did not answer with a pixelate. He's like, I haven't played with you yet. He said, we will largely continue to navigate along the following lines. Within our editorial coverage, this is the editorial coverage at Getty, the news coverage, strict avoidance of any modifications to the image. Camera manufacturers are already making some adjustments to light on the sensor, but we are as strict to the image as possible.

43:57So that's it. No changes. And then he said within creative, the sort of artistic side of Getty, we allow for a bunch of stuff. He said, I see us allowing things within creative context, but we will not allow misrepresentation. So then my next question to him was, if there's a hypothetical phone that just like aggressively smooths skin out of the box, is that allowed? And he said, we might. We don't have this problem today, but if things move in that direction, we could. So even like Getty is at the point where they're like, we're watching it. so theoretically they could be like next pixel phone no you can't or whatever unnamed you know oem makes a phone and their big camera feature is like you you're always beautiful i'm not gonna say natural god damn it you know like getty would be like this this camera this pipeline is not acceptable to us yeah and i think just the fact that one i can ask the ceo of getty that question and he's like this is the answer like we are considering it that's why i'm saying this is a watershed moment i'm not saying this phone i'm not saying you need to be outraged about this phone i'm not saying you shouldn't buy the phone seven years of software updates you know have a time but go nuts i'm saying that in the context of what is a photo google has decided that they don't make photos anymore that they make memories that's the quote they gave to allison johnson in her interview about with a google pm about this these tools and they're like, these are memories.

45:28And I'm just would remind people that memories are famously fallible, famously unreliable, not actually allowed in many objective contexts where people need to know what happened. Like that's crazy, right? To make that rhetorical shift. Yeah. It's not to say photos don't lie. It's not to say photos can't be biased. It's not to say photos can't be edited. It's this one camera. Okay. We should probably start having a really serious conversation about AI and cameras and how they collide and whether or not we as a culture, as a society, expect our photos to be representations of moments in time, whether we expect cameras to produce that.

46:10And if we don't, we don't think that's true. Then we should probably have a huge conversation about how we start need to start training children from a young age to never believe their own eyes. I mean, I think we should do that anyway. Yeah, fine. I mean, if you want to like, look, in the end, we're all going to be in headsets. I'm going to have a little seminar for five years. It's going to be great. But that's like, those are the stakes, you know? And I think there's a lot of people kind of like doing nihilism in my mentions that are like, well, nothing was any or anything like this is just, and it's like, no, there's actually stakes like that.

46:40It means something to give everyone the tool. Yeah. If I was like, I'm just making guns easier to buy. You wouldn't be like, well, everyone's always been able to buy. No, it actually means something to give everyone the tool where they can lie at scale and to brush it off is these aren't photos these are memories and if that's what you want to say then okay you haven't made a camera but it's it's i'm not not like outraged i'm we've been doing what is a photo for so long that i'm just like oh this is this is the culmination of my life's work and we're gonna keep going we got now by the way now i have to buy a pixelate yeah like i have to have one just to be like this is a watershed we should all buy pixelates pixelate sails through the roof and when people are like why were like, because this phone is philosophically important to the nature of imagery.

47:23Not because it's any good. Honestly, that made me want to go buy one. I mean, can you imagine if Verizon had a meeting where they're like, Pixel 8 sales are through the roof. And they're like, have we done any audience data? And they're like, is it battery life? Is it performance? And people are like, no, it's philosophical quandary. Boy, have we gone over. Sorry, David. You knew this was happening. I did. I walked right into this. And I'm okay with it. I barely talked about that. The phone has a screen. It does. You know, you can pay dollars for it. A hundred more than last year. Tensor 3. All right, we'll stop.

47:57Can I just say one more cool thing about the phones or about the Google announcement, and then we should move on. Google did this weird thing where they announced that the LLM powering BARD is going to be powering Google Assistant. And they did it in this very sketchy way that made it seem like they had just thought of this idea five minutes before the event started. But that's a super big deal. and Alex you and I were at the Amazon event when they started talking about the putting LLMs underneath Alexa to do more stuff and I think if if voice assistants are ever going to be good this is the moment we're going to start to see it and the hope these people have is super high the case for why this could work and why it can understand context better and why it can be more reactive is real like the chat GPT voice stuff is like alarmingly good and so I think if if suddenly this becomes baked into Google Assistant in a way that is accessible and cool and useful and has the same control over your phone and access to the internet, that's all going to be really cool.

48:56They were super sketchy about the announcement. I have no idea how any of it's going to work or when any of it's going to come, but I think it could be a really big deal. I'm very excited, especially if we can answer the cup question Eli had earlier. If it knows the difference between the cups for you, oh my God, game changer. when you ask Google Assistant I'm like hey I'm trying to be kind to the audience when you ask Google Assistant how much is a cup it's so confidently not used like in the context of a coffee machine it's just like a cup is eight ounce it's like no I know that's not the answer it's going to give you the real one alright we're going to take a break we're going to come back and we're going to do another two hours on the conceptual nature of photography we're not going to do that but if you send me but one email asking us to do it we'll definitely do it we'll be right back

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50:56Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

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52:10All right, we're back. There's other stuff at the Pixel event. There's Android 14 got released. There's Pixel Watch 2. All that stuff is going to be in a review cycle. So we will go into that stuff in detail when we've actually used it. I just can't resist it. What is a photo? I'm like ready to keep talking. We could do another four hours. Anytime you want. That's why we made the website. Hey, Neil, guess what? Netflix is more expensive now. Oh, my God. All right. Pivot to streaming. I don't let Alex talk the whole time. Alex, what's up with your Plex server? It's doing fine. I watched Top Hat on it this weekend.

52:44It was lovely. Nice. Alex, your Plex server is, like, famous on the internet, by the way. I posted something on Threads the other day basically saying, like, the only possible response to the unending stream of streaming price hikes is just to delete all your streaming services and buy box sets of your four favorite TV shows that solves all your problems. And I mean, a dozen different people were like, or just get on Alex Kranz's Plex server. Yeah. Look, I worked really hard on that server. I'm not going to lie. I worked really hard when I was unemployed. Are you in like our home lab? Oh, you got to get into it.

53:22It's going to be bad. We got to get you like a rack mount Synology situation. That's what I want so bad. Yeah. I have to figure out where I put it. But what I'm not going to be doing is subscribing to Netflix. No, that's not true. I continue to subscribe to Netflix because I like it and there's a bunch of shows on it I like and I obsessively consume media. but Netflix is there's a rumor that Netflix is going to be raising its prices again it's waiting until after the the sag after strike is resolved which everybody on both sides seems pretty confident is going to happen fairly soon so that's lovely to hear the reason it's doing that is not because oh they signed all these new contracts and they're spending way more money on on actors and writers they're spending a little bit more money on actors and writers like a fraction tiny tiny fraction the reason is because they were always going to have to raise the prices because 0 % interest rates are gone and you have to pay for things.

54:17So they need money. So yeah, it's happening again. And David and I were talking about this beforehand. We've seen a bunch of price hikes this year and we're going to keep seeing some. We saw another one this week, in fact. The ad-free version of Discovery Plus is also getting a big price hike. Sorry, David. One of the few people I know that subscribes. It's okay. How are you feeling? I'm fine. We have finally moved all of our streaming to max. so we just leave inside of Max now. Wait, leave her alone. She's fine. She's in elementary school now. She's got her own Plex server. She's got her own.

54:51She's got a little Raspberry Pi, like a little five-year-old size Plex server. It's just bluey on the server all day. Just frozen. Yeah, it's just bluey. No, right now it's Minecraft videos on YouTube. This kid has taught herself. She's like building in Minecraft and it's all because of Minecraft videos on YouTube kids. and it's like I'm worried about it. It's fine. It's like, is my child going to fall down the radicalization funnel? But right now it's like she's building houses. My godson wants to be a dictator because of YouTube. It's fine. Look, there's an argument that we would be better served.

55:24He said he would be a gentle dictator. He'd be like, don't trust photography. He would. You get in early with him. You'll be fine. Anyway, everything's on Max? Yeah. Have you watched the Naked show? No. I just naked attraction is not family friendly for my 10 month old. I watched one episode for journalism. Becky and I like sat there and we watched it together. And we both were like, do you want to, do you want to keep going? You can stop people. No, it's okay. Anna and I are currently deep in the ultimatum on Netflix and the golden bachelor on Hulu. So like, we'll, we'll get around to naked attraction, but the thing.

56:00Don't no, no, no, no, no, no. Run. Run. Yeah, I will say the Golden Bachelor makes me feel a lot of feelings about the world, but that's for a different podcast. The streaming prices thing. So I went back and like I made a story stream for us just like compiling all of the recent stories about the price hikes. And like, man, it's brutal. It's just everywhere you look. It's just like one, two, three dollars more expensive all the time. And I've been trying to figure out there. One of two things is happening and I'm trying to figure out which either all of these companies are just testing. to see how high they can go.

56:36And eventually they're hoping that you'll cancel everybody else and stick around with them, which will make your price flexibility higher for that one platform that you like best. And they'll be able to get away with charging you$30 a piece. Or everyone thinks ad plus cheap subscription is the future. So they are just going to keep pricing ad-free services through the roof until you go to the ads because they've realized that that's how they're going to make their money. This is my theory. That's the right one. Yeah, that's the one. This entire business was entirely ad dependent until like 15 minutes ago.

57:11Yeah. Yeah. Everybody was on to ads. And it's really, really funny. In the last couple of months, you've really started to see Netflix take a backseat as it's trying to roll out ads. And Max is taking a backseat as it tries to roll out ads. Max famously, like this comes from HBO. That was not a very advertiser heavy, like heavily subsidized place. but a bunch of the other parts of that thing and a bunch of things that David Zasloff did before this was very advertising place. And you watch like Paramount Plus and everything that they're doing right now. Those guys know ads. That was CBS. That was like the biggest network.

57:46And it was really, really good at taking all of your money and wants to do that again. And watching this like sleeping giant slowly get out of bed because he's old. Sorry. No, watching him slowly get out of bed and like go out and start to win back all those eyes as this whole landscape starts to shift from going to be on Netflix to got to have my own service to, oh, God, we're just inventing cable again. And now we have to figure out what part of cable we are. Paramount's going to crush in this because that's what it's done for years and it knows how to do it. Alex, that continues to be your craziest streaming take.

58:23I just want you to know. It's my crazy thing. Paramount Plus is good is your single wildest stance in the streaming wars. But then what did they do this week on TikTok? I don't know because who cares? Oh, they're the ones who did. Okay, never mind. I take it back. Paramount's good again. See? See? You're seeing it. You're seeing it. You should explain what happened, but you're right. I take it all back. What did they do? Okay, so Paramount this week uploaded all of Mean Girls to TikTok. Right. And so you can watch it in little sections because that's how everybody's been watching old shows is they'll go on TikTok.

58:49No, I've watched so many movies in what is essentially the Alex's Plex server of TikTok. I've watched something land that point. I watched Whiplash at what is obviously 2X speed. I also watched Whiplash. Which makes that movie, right? It was everywhere. It was like, oh, we're going to, J.K. Simmons is going to be a dick, but super fast. The only one that didn't get me was Inception, where I was like, I didn't know what was happening in this movie when I was watching it in real time on a big screen. And I certainly do not know what is happening on TikTok. talking. That was so smart of Paramount to do because everybody does it that way.

59:21That's the new like TV stream. Like you go and you sit in front of your TV and you flip the channel. But they took it down. They took Mean Girls off of TikTok. It was just a one day marketing. Yeah, they did it as a one day marketing thing. And that's a really smart marketing thing. Did they make any money on Paramount Plus? But it's Mean Girls Day. But it was all about the memes. Yeah, it was Mean Girls Day because October 3rd and that's when he talked to her. It was October 3rd. So I watched that movie a lot. Clearly. Unfortunately. Oh, also almost all of the Oceans movies. Oceans 11, Oceans 12, Oceans...

59:51Almost fully. I think I watched all of Oceans 11 on TikTok. Your FYP is much nicer. Mine was just the Sully. Yeah. Laning the plane. and then Young Sheldon. Oh, no. That's worse. That's a lot. I watched so much Young Sheldon. Mine is people complaining about the lack of switch options for Phillips Hue, which I'm going to start making these TikToks. Yeah, it's like on it. And like movies. Way more entertaining. But yeah, I think Paramount's on to it. This is crazier than the time you said Big Naturals 50 times. I don't know what you're talking about. Big Naturals. I just, like, the tags we're going to get on, like, Like everybody does like automated transcriptions of these podcasts and we're just going to instantly get banned from every podcast platform.

1:00:33Like we're toast. But I think the thing that's so funny about this to me is everybody has discovered how good a business cable was. And like a bunch of people have been talking about this recently with the way the economics changed that have led to a lot of the stuff in the writer's strike is they made money from you twice. You paid a lot of money for your cable bill and then they showed you ads. And that was the deal we made and agreed to for decades. And then a bunch of people thought it was a super good idea to just take one of those revenue streams away. And they did that. And it seemed very smart in a time when you could get infinity investment because you just kept showing user growth.

1:01:11And then we come to the last two years and all of a sudden it's like you have to start making money again. And they're like, well, how did we make money the last time? And it's like, oh, by making money twice and they're just going to do the same thing again, except instead of paying one$70 bill and seeing nine minutes of ads every half hour, I'm going to pay$10$7 bills and see nine minutes of ads every half hour. But the user experience is going to be worse. We're literally in the middle of rebuilding worse cable and it's starting to drive me totally nuts. Wait, but we don't have to deal with a cable box.

1:01:43I don't know that that's better. Oh, I do. Instead, I get to deal with my Roku TV, which sucks. Yeah. I just want to. Yeah. There's a cable box. It's a Roku. It's an Apple TV. It has. Like, go get a better, get better system. Whatever. It's still 95 ,000 different user experiences. Yeah. And a series of video players that are not very good. Yeah. And I think that's what we're like, at some point, they're going to have to start reckoning with is right now. everybody's big way of getting you on their service is, well, we've got this sport or we've got this TV show you really want to watch or this movie you want to really watch.

1:02:19Max has been very clear about we're going to sell our stuff. So you're seeing a whole bunch of Max products on Netflix this week. And if you log into Netflix this week, it feels like old school Netflix. You're like, oh, I can watch Dune. Yeah. I can just do that. That's nice. So Casey Boyd's on Sage or Code and he was like basically saying what David is saying is, oh, we used to sell our things like a lot of times. And everybody's wanting to get back to that. He called syndication the brass ring. Syndication was huge. Syndication was what everybody worked for. And they haven't had to do it in the last few years.

1:02:47And now they're realizing, wait, no, this is like all the writers and actors realize it. All of the directors and producers realize it. Everybody wants to make as much money as possible, dipping as many times as they can. And just going all in on any one form is dumb. The big difference with cable, and I think it's important to say this out loud, there was value pre-internet in paying money for cable. One, it had all the stuff. Yeah. And you couldn't get the stuff at all unless you paid for cable. Cable channels were not available to you in any way, shape, or form unless you paid for cable. Two, and I think we forget that this is where this industry came from, they were better than antennas.

1:03:34Yeah. Right. Like the the wild west of the early cable industry was a bunch of people who got in trouble from broadcast networks for setting up big antennas and then running wires to everybody's houses. You know, they used to call cable cat TV, C.A. TV. It was like community access television. Yeah, that was the good shit. Right. And there's like there was a thing under there where they were like, we will centralize the hard part, which is getting the signal off the broadcast towers. and then we'll make it good. And you were paying for that thing very specifically. Like, DirecTV used to advertise that it was higher quality video than cable operators.

1:04:15Right. That's gone. It's like no one gives a shit about that part anymore. So the part where you're paying twice is like you're paying for access and then you're getting ads. Like, we should just demand that the access be great. Well, and the other part of this is cable didn't just die because Netflix. Like Netflix certainly participated in the death of cable that is still currently happening. But YouTube was a much bigger impact. Right. And YouTube hasn't gone away. YouTube is still here. So these people are all going to be out here recreating cable, but they still aren't going to be they're not going to get the audience back.

1:04:47The audience is so fractured now. You're not getting that whole audience back. The days where you could go and watch. I remember like my favorite example is Grey's Anatomy because Grey's Anatomy season two. That was still when cable was really strong. And when Grey's Anatomy was still really strong. It's still really strong, which is terrifying. No, like it does well in the Nielsen still. Oh, well, sure. It's a bad show, but it still does well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Nielsen's back in like 2006, 2007 for most watched episode would be like 30 million people tuned in. Nowadays, Grey's Anatomy is still a major success, considered a major success for ABC, still making a lot of money.

1:05:22Average episode gets like six million people. And that's good. That's considered good. Like we saw a huge drop off in audience and all that audience went and watched stuff elsewhere. And that's not coming back. And that's the thing that the streamers are actually going to have to reckon with. And I think that's why the prices are going to keep going up even past where we think is reasonable because they're having to compete with YouTube where everybody makes the content for quote unquote free. That's going to be hard for them. I think that's right in the sense that there's only like 24 hours in a day.

1:05:53Right. And the idea is where are people spending their time? And like the younger you get, the less likely you are to be even spending that time on streaming services. Like I spent a bunch of time this past weekend with my nephews. It was homecoming weekend. So I was like talking to him and all his friends. And we're talking about all this stuff they watch. And he was like, yeah, I used to like sit and watch TV. But then I realized I was just looking at TikTok the whole time. So now I don't even turn the TV on. I just sit and watch TikTok. And I was like, that is telling my friend. Like your second screen is the television.

1:06:23Yeah. This is how I ended up buying a framed TV. This is like, I've talked to people like TV installers. Yeah. And then like some Samsung people who are like, the frame is a hit because people know that it will be off. They're just going to leave it off. And then I bought one because I was like, it'll be in our bedroom and we'll just leave it off. But I, now it's currently our TV. Yeah. And I'm just like, this is not even local dimming. Why did I buy this TV? I really want one for my bedroom just because it's pretty. Yeah. We're going to eventually be in the bedroom and you know, Becky will watch comedy specials on it.

1:06:55I have always wondered, all of the advertising material you see for the frame is when it's off. And I've always wondered, is this a good TV when you turn it on? Because at some point, you're going to turn it on. No, I want to be very clear. No. No. Okay. The matte screen is really cool. It's really cool. And we have one in the other studio here. And when it has art on it with detail, it's so convincing. So cool. Yeah. And then you turn it on, and you're like, all right, it's just one big-ass LED backlight. Like, it's 1956. Yeesh. Viewing angles. How's the bloom? The whole thing is bloom. It's just, there's just, like, one flashlight behind the...

1:07:38It does not know the color black. It's just gray, baby. Why did I watch Whiplash on my phone? The phone can do true blacks. Well, the good news is it's really expensive. So you got that going for you. No, it's not. Actually, the little ones are cheap. I think this is the other reason, because it's a cheap panel. Yeah, that's fair. So it's all priced on margin, which means they get discounted like crazy. Okay, fair enough. But I was like, I should buy a Gallery Series LG, like a G2. It's real nice, very thin. You can mount it just like a frame, but it doesn't have the matte screen. You can't do the art.

1:08:11I was like, crap, we'll buy this thing. And then I'm looking at it. I'm like, why did I buy it? Why? Why do I have a single backlight LCD in my home? You can put it as a background for your podcast. It's going to be great when it's on the wall in the bedroom and we never watch it. Yeah. Which is an insane thing to say about a TV. It'll be great when we stop watching it. Just pictures of Max. It's going to be pictures of Max and it's going to look great. It's going to be great at that thing. But as an actual television, it's like Samsung got me again. This is the second time I've bought a Samsung TV because it's beautiful.

1:08:45And I've been like, what am I looking at and why do I own this? And I'm going to have it for 15 more years. Gotta go LG. No, we're going to buy, I'm waiting to buy, I think you can get them now, but the official on-sale date is the Sony A95L. It's so expensive. It's pretty. But it's going to be in the wall for 15 years. So I'm like, I should spend the money. Yeah. And it's going to be great. It had better be great because after this frame experience, I don't know if I can take it. All right. Sorry, David. We were talking about the future of streaming. All I know is I have a TCL TV back here. it's 40 some inches because i accidentally clicked the wrong button on amazon so you know what it is is it's fine it is just fine i'm still on my lgb7 no see i have a b6 yeah i have a b6 yeah it's it's 14 whatever this is years ago 2017 that's right 17 because i bought the b6 and 16 okay i was like wow my tv's old tv's great but it's gonna be there for i should upgrade i'm like why spend the money there's one thing you should spend the money on it's a nice tv and a mattress you're gonna have it forever.

1:09:48I do actually agree with that. This is the problem with streaming is I'd rather talk about the TVs in the content. Good teaser for Monday's Vergecast, by the way, before we take a break, which we should do. We're our whole episode is with a person who would like to give you a television for free. It's coming. I cannot wait for this episode. It's great. All right. You're right. We should take a break. We should do a lightning round and we should get out of here. And then after this, we'll have a bonus round of six more hours talking about the nature of photography. We'll be right back.

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1:12:46All right, we're back. Lightning round. We're like already over. It's the craziest episode in a long time. People sitting in their cars waiting for us to finish. The phone is good. It's a piece of hard. it's not just a bundle of philosophical quandaries, but it is also because it is that. Yeah. Please. I'm telling you, if you have the money, go to your local wireless carrier and be like, I want to, I want you to mark down that I am buying this phone because it is a philosophical dilemma. I want it. Move the needle, right? It's not speeds, not camera. It's I want to, I want to be horrible at parties.

1:13:26All right. Lightning round, David. Okay. I have two because sometimes I'm allowed to do that. My first one is it appears we've now seen the entire humane AI pin. It was at Paris Fashion Week and Naomi Campbell and I think a couple of other people were wearing it on their on their sort of breast pocket area. Lagerfelding the shit out of this thing. So we have now seen what it looks like. I think it was John Gruber who described it as an iPhone you would get in a Happy Meal. We still don't know anything about what this device does. because their original launch date was the 14th, which is just next week.

1:14:01But there's been some reporting out there that says that has slipped to November. So I'm not exactly sure what's going on there. But we've now seen the pin. Is it real? Does it do anything? Who's to say? We have had many questions about this for a very long time. I think if they had a couple of videos from Paris Fashion Week where it was another one of those, like projecting it onto their hands as they were doing stuff kinds of videos. I have never had so many questions about what something is than I do about this, but I find it deeply fascinating. Can I just, I'm going to start with a baseline question.

1:14:33There's a, look at our post and we'll go look at the post. It's in the show notes. Pull over in your car and I want you to look at the picture of it mounted on the lady's pants. Okay. How much does this thing weigh? Because it is not pulling on this fabric. Because she's got her hand in her pockets. No, I don't know. No, that's, she's got her hand in her pockets. You think she's holding it up? She's keeping it. She's keeping it up. Because look at that fabric. Have you ever worn so much as like a boutonniere to like high school and you're like, oh, this is kind of saggy? Yeah. Right? You have to think about it.

1:15:05I'm just saying, have you ever anything like has any weight? It's going to pull on it. Here it's not doing it. And you think she's pulling that fabric taut. Oh, yeah. She's pulling it taut. Because you look at the other ones. It's on a suede jacket. And then it's on this white shirt where she's also. The lapel. Yeah. it's on the lapel and and she's also again styling and posing herself and this was all coming from the caperni show which caperni apparently loves to to do some little fashion stuff so like their their previous recent show was like all the robot dogs yeah running around on the stage and pretty good like my dogs so like they they love to do like weird tech stuff uh our reporter mia sato is a big fashion nerd and i was like oh caperni's doing it she's like of course it's that would do the humane thing.

1:15:51I still have a number of questions. For example, how do you load contacts into this phone? Is there a phone app? Real question. How do you interact with it? Well, you just talk to it with your hand out in front of you. Okay. We got no hand. To me, it was very funny that this came out the same week that Apple announced it's no longer supporting and repairing the$17 ,000 Apple Watch. And it's like, those two things, it's like the beginning of one thing and the end of a very similar thing. It's like, you can just see humane trying to go this like cool fashion-y make this a luxury item route which is a thing i think people try to do before they have a product that's good i was like how did that work for google glass badly it works pretty badly for everybody because it turns out it's very hard to make something fashion i just i want to take you back to the photo of the lady in the pants.

1:16:45Every time I look at this product, I have more questions. Okay. We've seen how the thing works, right? You can call Bethany, you can hold that. Where, if you have it mounted on your pants... You can see her knuckles. Whatever. Whatever. Weight aside. I still don't know how this works. I think there's cardboard in the pants is what I'm trying to say. Let's say this is an acceptable mounting position for the humane eye pin. Not a dorky one well let's say let's say this is where they think you should have it okay and you need to call bethany where are you gonna put your hand squatting yeah you're like you're down here yeah all right just the basics of this product are so confusing to me maybe you pop a squat and maybe that's like part of their oh you're like you're like doing fashion wrap squats and they're like pop a squat call your friend pop a squat check through your mail if humane's marketing slogan in his papa squat, I'm all in.

1:17:42All in. All right. Right? I'm just saying, look at the photo where it's on the pants. And just be like, how would you just run that to its logical conclusions? You have to, one of the ways in which you use it is that you talk to it, and it talks to people in French. And suddenly, you're like, da, da, da. And it's like, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, in French from your pants pocket. From your crotch, basically. What happens when you sit down? Does French sound like the adults in Charlie Brown? Is that what that just was? Try not to be racist. All right, just checking. You know. There you go. My other lightning round thing real fast is this weird kind of scandal about the iPhone 15 overheating.

1:18:27A bunch of people noticed that their iPhone 15s were getting really hot and draining the battery super fast. apple basically came out and said it's the app's fault which is like a delightful follow-on to you're holding it wrong from you know all those years ago apple then released an ios update that it said quote addresses an issue that may cause iphone to run warmer than expected but also said that it was the app's fault and a bunch of apps updated and supposedly solved the problem so what is going on here it's whatever it is it seems like it's been fixed terrific the the overheating problem from some of these apps that were running wild seems to be solved but whose fault was this and how did they fix it we don't know and it's driving me nuts i just want to know what's going it's very weird because it's a point update that doesn't like ordinarily when apple adds new features in like a 0.0.3 update it's like little bug fixes and security updates and stuff like this is not a moment you do much but they named this one no because i think they there was a new cycle around it but i guess my guess here is that with ios 17 there came some new frameworks at instagram and uber and a bunch of other apps relied on they updated to use those frameworks that was causing the problem so they then they could blame it on instagram and now here we are where they've updated the thing they've updated the os that was maybe using the framework they've updated the framework that the apps are using the apps can't do it anymore it i my guess is that it's much more innocent than it seems but it is it is very funny that they're like i don't know instagram everybody made a boo-boo all right crayons what's yours lg is dropping atsc 3.0 from its tvs next year i i got a lot of a lot of messages about this over the weekend this is the rip crayons story of the week yeah then i think it was telling lg was one of the first to adopt the technology and put it in its tvs and now it's one of the first to drop it and it's because nobody's adopting ATSC 3.0.

1:20:24Like, the stations aren't converting over to it. So I had a conversation with a fancy person at Code about television. Not the person who was on stage. Not Byron Allen. Who, by the way, a superstar at Code, overshadowed by Linda Yecker. He was like, here's what I'm doing. I'm suing McDonald's because they're racist. Every french fries are racist. It was crazy. But he's trying to buy ABC. And one of the reasons that he was trying to buy ABC is he thinks the stations are poorly managed. This whole thing. He's trying to buy ABC. So I was at Code talking to other people about that conversation because it was a superstar performance at Code.

1:20:58And they were like, we keep trying to work with local stations to make them better. There's a lot of things we want to do, particularly if you're interested in sports rights. All the big streamers are interested in sports. There's a lot of local broadcast deals. To make any sort of upgrades, to get sports in 4K, for example, the local stations have to do it. Yep. And they won't. Yep. So they just were like, there is not a single less innovative part of the media ecosystem. Nobody local television stations. Yeah. And everybody who's been buying up the local stations, because they're largely a couple of different monopolies that own the majority of them.

1:21:34They have no interest in it. They are effectively like private equity did to journalism where they're like, we want to just buy it and run it to the ground. In some places, like in New York, it's pretty expensive to put up the towers and stuff for ATSC 3.0. And I guess a lot of the buildings around here don't want to deal with that and deal with the leases and everything like that. So it's challenging. And it was just a bummer because ATSC 3.0 is cool technology. The technology itself is super, super cool. And it could do a lot. And it could really, really democratize access to a lot of stuff.

1:22:12but no one wants to actually do it. So it's all just kind of a bummer. And it's like, I don't blame LG for not wanting to spend the time and resources to continue to use this if nobody's adopting it. Like, you know, come back in a couple of years. But by then broadcast TV will effectively probably be dead. So that's, it's just a real bummer. Right at the end, the text. Yeah. It's all over. Yeah, they got it. They're like, we made it. And I was like, yeah, you're 10 years too late. You should have done this a while back. But this is, you know, there's a balance here. Remember Vizio took the tuners out of its TVs?

1:22:45And there was huge backlash and they put them back. Because that was too soon. If they did it now, nobody would care. I think that's right. I mean, well, Vizio was cheap, though. That was the whole get of Vizio is you'd get a really good TV for a really inexpensive price. That's changed a little nowadays. But, like, so I get, like, their audience probably did use tuners a lot more than they thought. And most people probably don't actually. Especially LG. Like, somebody going out and buying the nice LGs? Just write to us. I need to know the answer. We're both guessing. Yeah, we're guessing. I think a lot of people still use their tuners a lot, especially our audience.

1:23:18Our audience does, because I use my tuners still. Yep, that's why I said it. But we got... The audience that asked us to talk about ATSC 3.0, I have a feeling. I know. I'm sorry, guys. I want it too, but I don't think we're getting it. ATS 3.0 is going to perform upstate. It's going to be very happy there. It's going to be really pleased. All right, I have two as well, but my two are like the same thing. Okay. So one, X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, announced a deal with Paris Hilton. I would describe this press release as calorie free. It contains no information. It's a lot of words.

1:23:53It's so many words. One thing I learned about Lindy Acherino is she loves words. Just loves words. And you can see why she was a great marketing executive at NBC. Because she had NBC. She had the Olympics. And if you just want to wander around talking about how people feel inspired and communities are brought together and look at the world and here's a young girl singing and buy an Amex. NBC is a great platform to be that personality. When you have Twitter, it's like, what are you talking about? You've got nothing. And it's all the same sort of like Hopi changing language for lack of a better word.

1:24:32So anyway, so they've announced a seal of Paris Hilton, which she will post on X. They will work together to create four original video content programs per year that includes live shopping, along with a host of other activations across all surfaces of X. The live shopping experience will allow you to browse through a catalog of products and then click through the site to make a purchase via the in-app browser. Okay, this could be cool. And I'm going to give you the one caveat. Unless Paris Hilton is actually selling XTC on this platform. zero people will buy anything. Paris is super into radios.

1:25:06This is like the lore about Paris Hilton is she's super into traditional radios, CB radio. What if the store is just CB radio stuff? All right. That would be cool. If Paris Hilton does a CB radio activation, that'd be great. X will work to secure brand sponsorship to support each of the activations. So they're paying Paris. They don't know how they're going to pay for paying Paris. Very good. X will also support amplifying other efforts that 1111 Media, which is their company, 1111 Media and Paris Hilton will be involved in throughout the year. This is nothing. What is it? So the only reason I say the same thing is my second thing is there's a little bit of an existential crisis on threads this week because it's the heart of the NFL season, the government shutdown, all this stuff is Speaker of the House is getting fired.

1:25:51This is the stuff you would use Twitter for, right? Like these moments where Twitter, there was a flood in New York. Do you know what Twitter is great at? Telling people who don't care about the weather in New York City what exactly is happening with the weather in New York City. Yeah. And Threads has, I would say, flatly failed to live up to any of these occasions as a real-time news service. I've tried. And I'm rooting for Threads. It's the one I use. And everyone gets mad at me when I'm like, Threads is bad. They're like, it's the one I'm using. I believe in activity. The whole thing. It's not good at this stuff.

1:26:26watching football with threads is like not watching football with anything like it's the opposite of watching football with threads so there's been just a lot of consternation about threads and whether they care about news and meta is there was a report in the information that meta is doing creator councils where they're gathering all the creators together to see what they want which is historically in the history of social platforms a thing you do right before you die But, you know, on the flip side, you know, Betta does have Instagram. And, like, they have a thing there. Yeah. But, you know, it's like they're doing committees to figure out what they should do to kick threads back in the gear.

1:27:04And it's like, oh, you don't need a committee. Do news. Just do Twitter. Just do what Twitter was going to do, which is real-time news. So I posted on threads. It feels like they need to make every message. They were so burned by news. Adam Masseri was so burned by news because he used to run the news feed. He was so burned by news they have to try everything else first. And so Maseri actually wrote back to me, we are not anti-news. News is already on threads. We're simply trying to avoid over-promising and under-delivering to an incredibly powerful group, which is a mistake we've made as a company many times in our past.

1:27:34On its face, this is a totally reasonable thing to say, right? We don't want the news media to think that threads will save it. Yeah. So we're not going to pretend. Two things about this. One, one solution to this problem is to make promises and keep them. Just putting that out there. As somebody who lived through something called the pivot to video, not lying about metrics and actually developing revenue. It's a concept. I think that would have solved your problems. It's just a thing. So I get where that's coming from. Like everyone yelled at him. But that's not what people are asking for. But he's saying like we didn't keep our promises so we don't want to make any promises this time, which is like backwards.

1:28:11But like fine. Like I actually understand it. Yeah. Like one rational response to that is to say we are making no promises. Sure. Great. The problem is you're using an emergency going down. So good luck. Like forget being burned by making bad decisions. Hasn't Meta learned that caring about the news business is actually just all downside? Yeah, right. And the regulators are there and, you know, Canada is going to make you pay for links. And an Australian person is going to, you know, Rupert Murdoch is going to be like, are you going to pay for my links? It all happens. There's a law in this country that would make him do it.

1:28:45It's all bad. but the product isn't sticky because what you desperately need is people posting about the news on a product that looks like twitter okay yes except twitter was a bad business was always a bad business and was a bad product that most people didn't use and the people who did hated themselves for it like i'm not sure you actually should look at twitter and be like let's do what twitter did true that's how you get a bunch of like psychotic maniacs like us who spent all together too much time for 15 years on Twitter. Like, my brain is healed. I feel I'm a new person now that I'm not doing it.

1:29:20Like, I have threads in my phone. I don't even open it. Like, I forgot. I threw a bomb on threads. I was like, this camera's a liar. Like, walked away. To me, I think the thing threads will regret more than not being more like Twitter is positioning itself against Twitter the way that it has. Because what they did, Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Masseri both did this aggressively and sort of loudly at the beginning, was say, in as many words, we want to be better at Twitter. And we all kind of internally understand what that might be. And that comes with certain things and certain ideas. If they had just said, we think it's time for a new kind of text-based social networking for sharing.

1:30:00They sort of did. A little. But if you say the first thing, everybody's going to hold you to the first thing, right? Like, I think it's true. But also, if you say, like, we think the world deserves Twitter that is sanely run, like, in essentially that many words, people are going to hold you to Twitter standards. But I think, like, Meta's out here to build a big thing that makes money, and Twitter was never any of those things. Actually, we have, like, 10 ,000 disclosures. So the first one is, criticism of the current Twitter is in no way praised for the previous administration of Twitter. I think it's important to say they were bad at this.

1:30:33There is an argument to be made now, I think, that that was the best it could be. Sort of chaotic, horrible. Right. It certainly was the best it has been. Maybe they had stumbled into a sort of steady state of misery. I don't know. Maybe. This is a company that sold itself for$44 billion at$54.20 a share because it could not figure out a way to get to$54.20 a share on the open market. They're like, I don't know. that seems high take the money like we got nothing like art we enough is it we're gonna let more people tweet like whatever and now the new reports are that it's worth eight billion dollars so everybody's doing great so there's i just that and then the other discussion we talked about streaming and cable so comcast and just company or whatever they don't they're not into me we didn't say i'm a netflix producer that's a real thing i have at &t as my personal film service.

1:31:28Yeah. Verizon. Alex Kranz watches every Star Trek show on Paramount+. It's true. Broadcast TV RF energy is flowing through our bodies right now. That's a real thing that's happening to you too. Grey's Anatomy is going right there. Hey look, the 5G alert went off. All of you are Aaron Rodgers now. I wanted to be a zombie. I don't know what that means, but it sounds great. Come back around to threads. I'm just saying, if they had solved the smallest problem, F1 they're all I know a bunch of them are F1 fans because I see them posting about F1 days after they've posted because of the algorithmic feed but I see them doing it if they just solved we want to make this great they would have solved it they want to make it great for watching football the problem is that solving those problems necessarily makes you great at oh there's a government shutdown looming oh the speaker of the house got fired or whatever right and that means they're good at news and I don't think that they have a plan to square that circle.

1:32:25It cannot be that a bunch of famous, you're going to pay Paris Hilton some money to post about radios in her shop. It's coming. That's not going to do it for you. You don't know. Or that you're just going to block some topics entirely the way Threats has done with COVID, right? Like you can't just, you can't just write certain things off and then be like, come hang out, but only about the nice things. Like, I think you might be right that what Twitter was might be the best of all the bad outcomes. And maybe they're all bad outcomes well because it was it was like the nc-17 social media and threads is legitimately the nc-17 social media and and this is like g-rated pixar twitter is not g-rated i just don't think like even if again i i would just come back to some of the stickiest things that twitter did for me that weren't news like hard news like political news sports watching sports with twitter open is great or was great now it's weird because like half people aren't there and then they're doing the weird programmatic insertions of like ads for buying gold.

1:33:25I love gold. I don't love any of this. And I don't have the app on my phone, so it's on the web. Whatever. It's not great. I would love to switch to threads for this. It's just not there. And again, I'm rooting for threads because I want a company at Metascale to bet on federation and interoperability and push all of that forward. They seem super committed to it. I am totally in support of that. I just think they've lost sight of what makes it sticky, which is actually real-time information. And I don't know that you can solve that without accidentally solving news, and I think they're paralyzed for that.

1:33:58Yes, that sounds 100 % right. On the other hand, Twitter's paying Paris Hilton money. The fact that Linda Yaccarino had to tweet the word sliving, it just makes it all worthwhile. It's sliving. Is it sliving? Sliving. I always say sliving. While we're living, Neelah's sliving, guys. I'm slapping my way right out the door Alright I think that's it We're way over time I just want to point out This episode of the Vergecast Started with coffee cups It did philosophical quandaries And we ended with slapping When people say we don't have the rage This is We made a whole publication for ourselves Yeah For this This is where we live Alright that's it I got some things to call out We have a partnership with dbrand You should go buy the skin They're really cool They're cool They're sick as hell actually They look beautiful And then Speaking of cameras Becca's video thousand photos the iPhone 15 Pro Max one of the best videos I've ever done it's on YouTube lots of photos Becca has lots of thoughts about this camera she compares it to the first iPhone camera which is actually it is more complicated than you might think again just exposure philosophical quandary on these phones go watch that video okay that's it that's VergeCast rock and roll

1:35:09and that's a wrap for VergeCast this week we'd love to hear from you shoot us an email at vergecast at theverge.com. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.

1:35:44Doug. Here we have the Lemu Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera! They see us! Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty Liberty. Savings vary. Undwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.

From the publisher

The Verge’s Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the announcement of Google’s Pixel 8 phone, along with the new AI tools that raise lots of questions.
Further reading:

Google Pixel 8 launch event: the 7 biggest announcements

Google Pixel 8 hands-on: a little bit smaller and a little bit smarter 

The Pixel 8 Pro hands-on: better cameras, a brighter screen, and new AI 

Google Pixel 8 will get seven years of Android updates

Google Photos’ new AI tools for Pixel 8 raise messy questions 

Google releases Android 14 for Pixel phones

Android 14 gets AI-generated wallpapers on Google’s latest Pixels

Google Pixel Watch 2 hands-on: new sensors, longer battery, better accuracy

Google announces new colors and features for its Pixel Buds Pro earbuds 

Netflix is planning to raise prices... again

Streaming service price increases: the latest on Netflix, Disney Plus, Max, Hulu, and more

Paramount uploads Mean Girls to TikTok across 23 video clips 

The Humane Ai Pin makes its debut on the runway at Paris Fashion Week 

https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/Cx8M6xqAWeC/

Apple addresses iPhone 15 overheating with a new iOS 17 update

Paris Hilton gets special deal to post on X

LG is dropping ATSC 3.0 from its TVs next year 

The Verge and dbrand have partnered on new skins for the Pixel 8, iPhone 15, and more

iPhone 15 Pro Max camera: 1000 photos later, it’s still missing something

Email us at vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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