The Pixel 9 is great – and a problem - The Vergecast: Summary & Transcript

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The Vergecast Episode Summary: "The Pixel 9 is great – and a problem"

Podcast Title: [The Vergecast](https://www.theverge.com/the-vergecast) Episode Title: The Pixel 9 is great – and a problem Episode Hosts: David Pierce, Alex Cranz, Allison Johnson, Richard Lawler Episode Release Date: [Date not specified] Episode Description: The hosts discuss the Google Pixel 9 review, its controversial AI features, Chick-fil-A's upcoming streaming service, Sonos app updates, and more.

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Episode Highlights

Google Pixel 9 Review
General Impressions:
The Pixel 9 series, including the Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro, has received positive feedback, especially regarding hardware quality.
The design has improved significantly, with flat sides, bright screens, and uniform bezels.

AI Features Controversy:
The new "Reimagine AI" feature allows users to edit photos by inputting text prompts for desired changes.
Concerns arise about the potential misuse of this technology, especially in creating misleading images.

Camera Performance:
The Pixel series continues to excel in photography, often producing more natural results compared to competitors like Apple and Samsung.
The camera bump design has drawn mixed reactions, but the overall camera performance maintains a solid reputation.

The Challenges of Pricing and Competition
The hosts discuss how Google's pricing strategy has evolved and how the Pixel series is positioned in the competitive landscape of flagship phones.
The need for high-end processors and features has led to higher pricing, which can be frustrating for consumers seeking value.

Chick-fil-A's Streaming Service
Chick-fil-A is reportedly launching a streaming service, raising eyebrows among the hosts.
Discussion includes the bizarre intersection of fast food and media production, as Chick-fil-A has previously dabbled in family-friendly content.

Sonos App Updates
Sonos has faced significant backlash regarding its updated app, which has been criticized for its reliability.
Patrick Spence, Sonos CEO, acknowledged that the new app is less stable than previous versions, leading to confusion and frustration among users.

Podcasting News
Alex Cooper's Move to SiriusXM:
The hosts discuss Alex Cooper's transition from Spotify to SiriusXM, raising questions about the potential impact on her audience engagement.
The podcasting landscape is shifting as major players like SiriusXM invest heavily in exclusive content.

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Key Takeaways

Pixel 9 Reception:
The Pixel 9 series is praised for hardware quality but criticized for its controversial AI features which could lead to ethical concerns.

Chick-fil-A’s Ambitious Media Plans:
The introduction of a Chick-fil-A streaming service exemplifies the growing trend of food brands exploring content creation.

Struggles of Sonos:
Sonos' app issues highlight the challenges of maintaining software reliability and user satisfaction in a competitive market.

Podcasting Shifts:
The podcasting industry is witnessing significant changes, with traditional media companies like SiriusXM seeking to capture new audiences through lucrative deals.

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Conclusion This episode of The Vergecast encapsulates the dynamic nature of the technology and media landscape, highlighting the continuous evolution of consumer electronics, the integration of AI in everyday devices, and the shifting paradigms of content consumption. The hosts provide insightful commentary on the implications of these trends, making it a must-listen for tech enthusiasts and industry observers alike.

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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

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1:25Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of just the absence of truth forever in the future. It's cool times here in technology land. I'm your friend, David Pierce. Alex Kranz is here. Hi, Alex. I'm your friend who's in the studio and it's awesome. But are you in the studio? How do we even know anymore, Alex? That's true. I don't know where you are or who you are or what we're doing. This pixel studio is what I meant to say. We're just devolving into full on nihilism in this episode of VergeCast. I'm really excited about it. Allison Johnson is here. Hi, Allison. I'm here. Or am I here?

2:00Exactly. You're here and also in several photos that you're not in. And also in other places. Could be anywhere. Neal is out today. He's at the XOXO conference in Portland being like a cool tech hipster with the other cool tech hipsters that we are not cool enough to hang out with. But we have a lot to get to. We have pixel stuff to talk about. We have what is a photo stuff to talk about. We have Chick-fil-A news, which I think is the first time that has ever been said on this podcast. We have a bunch of lightning round stuff to get to. The Sonos continues to just make every error possible. So we're going to get to all of that, but we should start with the pixel.

2:37And I want to get into like the existential crisis that is coming for us here in a minute. But first we should just talk about the phone uh Allison you reviewed the whole sort of pixel 9 line minus the fold but the the pixel 9 and the pixel pro I don't I I'd lost track there's too many phones there's a lot of phones and I would say the the initial read from your review was that like at least on a hardware perspective Google kind of nailed it right yeah yeah talking about the phones as phones is actually really easy and like straightforward because they're great. They're iPhones from the front.

3:15This is like, everybody's just made their phone into an iPhone. And I think that's fine. You know, the sides are flat. The screens are bright. You know, the bezels are all uniform, et cetera. They look and feel really good in a way that the last couple of generations of Pixel phones were like, I don't know, I can see why you charge like$200 less for this than like a Galaxy S24 Plus. But this time around, they like nailed it. It's right, right up there with the with the best of the best, I think. I feel like this was finally Google saying like, what if we just made it really nice? Yeah, which feels like an insult.

3:57But I think your point about the price, I think is exactly right, because I feel like Google has been caught in this thing since the beginning of the pixel, where the goal was to make a really high end phone for not a really high end price. And increasingly, there are fewer and fewer ways you can cheap out on a phone. The processor is no longer one of them because you have to do all this AI stuff, you have to do all the camera stuff, like you need the processor. So you can't save money there. You can't save money on the camera. So one of the ways to save money is basically by making the thing itself cheaper and less nice right it makes it easier to make the materials less expensive all that is fine and good but google just never got it there like it never was able to make a nice thing at that price and i feel like this time whatever you want to say about the price i think it is it's a bummer that it's gotten more expensive over time but the fact that they were just like okay this is now a flagship phone and we're going to do all the flagship-y things to it feels like the right call.

4:55Yeah, I really think so. And especially in the US where we usually buy our phones through our carriers, you're not even really like paying, you know, full price. Like who is paying full price for a Pixel phone right now? I know at least one person. Really? Yes. Parker got one for like a hundred bucks. I don't even understand that math. But that's the thing is like the price difference on paper, you're like, okay, this phone is$200 cheaper. This one, you know, you lose a few things, but then you look at the math and it's like, we're talking about, you know,$8 a month versus $10 a month, or you're just getting your phone just fully, you know, free basically through the carrier.

5:37You're, you're suddenly less concerned with like, well, I'd really like it if it was $200 cheaper. So it's just like weird territory. I think the mid range, especially upper mid range in the A series being so good. Like you get so much in the A series for like an actual mid-range price that having the regular mainline ones just like hovering just above that didn't make a lot of sense. So now, yeah, this year feels like, forget it, like here, they're just really good phones. And it worked. They do have giant butts. They do, which is a choice. So that's the thing. in the like era of like every phone looks like an iphone from the front which is fine you have to do something on the back that's like oh that's not an iphone that's like galaxy s24 google is really leaning into the like it was the visor um camera bump now it's just like a little thing on its own and it's like super chunked out i don't know how else to describe it it's just it's got a booty on it and it's like but I didn't you know I got one last week when we were at the pixel event and I found that I don't mind the bump I do look at it sometimes I'm like that's a big ass but I'm also like it's fine when you see it at first you're like oh wow that's really something and you get used to it pretty quickly I think I think I like forced you and Sean to look at it I was like is this truly large this looks enormous and you're like just trying to blog it was great is this enormous is a very i have two thoughts on the bump one is that it is it is just very slightly asymmetrical in a way that kind of drives me nuts like the the lenses are all just shifted off to the left so that the flash and the sensor can be off to the right and like i get why you have to do that but it is so close to being symmetrical that is it's just a little weighted to the left in a way that kind of hurts my eyes to look at.

7:36The other thing is that I think camera bumps are overrated because everybody puts a case on their phone anyway. And the fact that this one is big enough that the phone doesn't wobble on a table makes the camera bump a solved problem in my opinion. The thing I hate about the iPhone is that it wiggles and you, you touch the corner when it's down and it wiggles as you're trying to do it. And if they've made this in such a way that it like leans it up at like a teeny tiny angle, but it doesn't wobble. That's kind of great. It does wiggle. Have you ever noticed this? Well, I've always been a case person.

8:09And my last case, like, cut me. It hurt me. It broke and it hurt me. I was, like, putting it in my pocket. I had, like, this, like, a plastic case that I was putting in my pocket. And it, like, shredded my finger. It was horrible. I saw evidence of this. I think a piece of the case landed in my bag or something. Yeah. I was like, look at this. It's almost broken off. Boom. And you're like, nope. There it goes. And then it got vengeance, Allison. But yeah, so I never noticed that it does wobble, that iPhone wobbles. Yeah. I don't do cases, so I have to remember that. But every time I put the damn S24 Ultra down on a table, I was like, do-do-do-do-do-do-do, typing out an email.

8:51Yeah. But the iPhones, too. Yeah. Shocking lack of cases at the Pixel event, by the way. I know. That's what honestly convinced me it was okay to take off the case that was hurting me physically. was like well they're all fine this is their phones they're all they all have uh what i would call unlimited access to new phones in a way that is not representative of most people oops here's your phone back uh no the thing that really did happen is we covered the event we went to lunch uh and i went to pull the phone out of my bag and just like straight onto the concrete ground like there there is a little like scuff on the side of it but you know what it's fine yeah it was it it worked totally fine the panic quickly subsided we were all fine that's still fine um and i also feel like google doing this with the camera bump kind of made me think of uh when apple tried really hard to make the the mag safe circle into this sort of iconic thing where it's like a thing Apple's very good at is being like, oh, this weird new thing that we have to do, we're going to make it iconic.

9:58Like the Dynamic Island, they're like, no, this isn't just an engineering flaw in our screen. It's a thing we did on purpose. It's magical. Or the notch in the MacBook, they're like, no, this doesn't suck. It's great. Google's kind of doing the same thing where they're like, yeah, we have a big ass camera bump. What are you going to do about it? You want to fight it? And it turns out we don't. We don't want to fight. We're just like, yeah, it's fine. Yeah, it's a big ass camera bump. We'll all live. Just lean in. But so like as basic Android phone things go, Pixel's as good as anybody at this point, right?

10:36Like it's, we can talk about all the AI stuff. We can talk about all the other stuff. But I feel like the Pixel has been somewhere between as good as and just behind the Galaxy S line over the years. And this year seems to be right there. Yeah. Yeah. Like I put the S24 Ultra kind of in a class above all the rest if you want like absolutely everything. But yeah, the pixels feel like they're right in that kind of second tier with everybody else this time. That's really exciting. And are the sizes are identical? To me, the like the small pro is very enticing. Yeah, that's the one I'm loving because I would like throughout the year, I'll switch back to, you know, a phone I've already reviewed and I I would switch back to the Pixel 8 rather than the 8 Pro just because I like the size better.

11:23And then you're sort of like, oh, I'm giving up the telephoto lens, blah, blah, blah. So the 8 Pro this time around is the size of the 9 Pro this time around is the size of the 8 last year and the 9 this year. There's a lot of phones. So many phones. Yeah, but you don't give up anything on the camera front. It has like the obvious things that have to be different are different. like the battery and the screen resolution doesn't need to be quite as high but it feels like no compromises and I love it I'm gonna keep coming back to it this year how is the camera I mean it was very funny looking at the photos in your review uh and there are lots of them they're very good and so many of the photos are like the the before and the after is like an AI horror show but I found myself going back to the before photos being like oh these are actually really nice photos like this thing this thing seems to take nice photos and it actually doesn't seem like it's over processing the hell out of them in the way that both apple and samsung have become prone to like i find myself gravitating towards the sort of pixel version of a shot more and more over time and even when it processes it with like the low light stuff it still looks really good and clean versus everybody else yeah it does a nice job i think it's the pixel camera has kind of been like Like on this more consistent path where it started like the early Pixel phones were kind of like too cool of a color cast.

12:53I didn't really like that. And they've like slowly kind of corrected, I think, over the years. While Samsung and Apple have been in this very warm kind of like let's punch up the saturation sort of territory. What if everything looked the sickest? Like I just imagine that's what all those engineers sit around doing. Like does this photo look sick? Not sick enough. like turn up the stick knob needs more sick yeah yeah it feels like those have kind of gone like almost too far in a direction and the pixel just kind of like yeah there's there's some shadows here we didn't blast them to oblivion uh i appreciate it yeah i i want to love this phone i really do like i i have i have been waiting for a good excuse to go back to the pixel uh because I'm deeply bored of my iPhone and it also has scratches all over it that I didn't do anything to make happen and they frustrate me so I was like maybe I'll buy a pixel and Liam our producer bought a pixel fold that I essentially bullied him into buying and I would like to join him in this and this it feels like this is a good pixel like we did we did a good pixel this year yeah the pixel fold is nice uh-huh yeah which is the one I don't have for review yet we all get to like touch it and play with it at the event, but it's shipping later.

14:10So they haven't seeded those reviews yet. But I have an unprecedented number of Verge staffers in my DMs being like, how's the pixel fold? Interesting. Yeah. Like off the charts. And my answer is like, it's good. It's hot full summer. You've been calling this like two years in a row now. And you might be late this time. I'm just making it happen. You're bringing it back. All right. Well, that's enough nice things to say about Google. Let's talk about how Google is in the process of what I would say is potentially ruining society altogether and just decimating the idea of truth and shared knowledge of anything.

14:47It's just your memories. So Allison, can you just, I have more thoughts about this than I realized as we are coming into this. I want to talk about all of this, but can you just describe how the re-imagine AI feature works and like how you use it in the context of a Pixel 9? Yeah. Yeah. So it's right inside the magic editor kind of tools that were on last year's phone. So you open up a photo, it's in the Google Photos app, you tap on edit, you tap on the little sparkly AI. So you have to go get it. But like, then you do the thing where you circle something in the scene, where you tap on a subject, and that selects it.

15:28And then you get this new option that says reimagine. And what's different from last year is like, last year, you could just take things out or kind of like pick something up and move it and change the size. This is just like kicking the door down of generative AI. And you just write in a text prompt of what you want there. And it puts it in and there are some guardrails. So you can't put like, obviously, gross stuff. But the thing we i mean i mean you can't if you ask for a bowl of eyeballs it'll make a bowl of eyeballs google says there are guardrails i would not say there is much evidence in the world of there i would say there are guardrails that you have to be good at prompting because i'm not good at prompting and i tried to get it to do dog vomit last night and it just kept giving me lime green bowls filled with dog kibble.

16:26And I'm like, that's I asked for liquid. And I asked it to do a minotaur sitting behind my sister-in-law menacingly. And instead it was like first it just did black, just darkness behind her. It was just like a black figure, like an absence of light figure. And I was like, well that's creepy, but not what I wanted. And then it did just like a creepy man in the corner. And I was like, that's not a minotaur. But it is creepy. I'll send that one to her. yeah that's not a minotaur google that's what i wanted come on so i will say like i was really really really impressed with what you and welch have been able to do with it but i have not had as much and to be fair we were it started off innocently i wasn't putting dead bodies into my photos right off the get-go um but then we're kind of like we're some of the first people to really tough this, we got to push it.

17:21And you don't have to be super smart, because we're not super smart, to get around these guardrails where you're kind of like, you say things in a different way. And suddenly the AI is like, oh, okay. And like, whatever it's trained on knows exactly what a dead body looks like. So it'll put that in your photo. And you're like, oh, God, this is gross. And it was getting to the point where I was sort of cringing every time I was putting in a prompt that was like kind of icky. I was like, oh, I hope it doesn't make that. And some of the time it did. What were your favorite ones that you got? Good or bad?

18:03Favorite, define any way you want. What were your favorite ones that you did? I got it. Okay. This one is one of Welch's, but I think it's brilliant. It's like he's outside of some cute little cafe that says like cafe spaghetti and he put spaghetti on one of the tables. But it's like a like a waterfall of spaghetti and like marinara sauce, like spilling everywhere. Like that's just funny. You can you can do some funny stuff with this. And I plan to keep terrorizing my family and friends with like weird stuff. um so it's yeah it's not like you you kind of you have to go out of your way to get it to do gross weird maybe manipulative things but i mean you got it to do is it pronounced gooey ducks oh god yeah well kind of i think there's some kind of gooey duck filter it did not do it for me i don't know if you broke it but if you've seen a gooey duck it's kind of unmistakable in like what it created.

19:05So it was a bowl of food of like beautiful, like salad, watermelon, just like the lighting is perfect. And I was like, put the grossest things in there, like eyeballs, like, like rabbit's feet. And it did all that. But the gooey ducks, I was trying to, trying to get it to make, you know, some questionable things. And it gave me what I describe as look like raw thumbs that like don't have fingernails on them. And there were slimy like a little bit slimy so it just sort of i don't know i don't know how to describe it when i tried gooey ducks it did like uh looked like clams or something it was like something's here and i was like no it's not revolting enough it's like the ai starts going down a road and there's a stop sign like no yeah i was like nope nope too revolting and that's like the vomit i couldn't like i was doing all sorts of different liquid prompts and it was just like bowl keep it out of the bowl yeah sometimes it it really does kind of put up a stop sign like it it will tell you straight up like you cannot generate that picture put in something else you friggin weirdo well not let you change people yeah that's the big one that's off limits like you can't select something on a person you can't like change someone's shoes or anything this this is a good thing this is a good guardrail i think given what i've seen of this tool It's such a weird space to be in because on the one hand, we're here talking about how concerning it is to have unfettered access to these tools.

20:42On the other hand, if I want to put horns on someone, I want to put horns on someone. And now I just have to like, I have to go to Photoshop. I have to remember how layers work. And that's not as fun. Yeah. Okay. I have become totally radicalized by this phone on all of this stuff. And truly, I have reached a point where I am like, shut it all down. None of this can be allowed. Throw out the baby with the bathwater. Like, shut it all down. And it's really what has continued to do it for me, especially with the Pixel 9, is not the like, there was a great digital trend story that I think what he did was he got it to show a picture of Barney firing an AK-47 at Elmo.

21:28It might have been the reverse of that, but I think it was that. No, that's it. And that is like in a certain way horrifying. But like, I actually track that as like way less of a problem than some of the stuff that Chris Welch has been just sort of relentlessly posting about the last few days, which is just like he just created he took a photo of an empty intersection in New York. and with one request made it look like there had been a bicycle accident there. Or you can take a car with a dent and add the thing that dented it into the photo, even though it's not there. Like, it's this unbelievably mundane stuff that is so much more problematic to me than the fact that you can, like, generate Nazi cartoon characters, which, again, is a thing that Google will let you do.

22:12But you can't have one without the other. I'm increasingly convinced that, like, the idea of, like, I want to be able to insert myself into a photo with somebody else. I get that, right? One of the funny things about my family is my mom is always the one who takes the pictures, and so she's never in any of the family photos. And she hates it, but she also wants to be the one to take the photos. That sucks. And that is a problem Google has solved with artificial intelligence. I will absolutely happily sacrifice that to get rid of all this other stuff. It just shut it all down. The thing is, they kind of, all these tools are separated.

22:48And I think, like, Allison, you talked about it in your review. It's annoying from a user perspective in that I thought I didn't have, I had the regular Pixel 9. I just thought I didn't have access to re-imagine. And then Allison was like, it's over there. And I found where it was in the app. Like the stuff where people are making Barney shooting Elmo, that's one tool. That's Pixel Studio. And that one, like, that's where I tried to make Kirby and just made a sad balloon. And you can't create people in that one. And there's some pretty strict guardrails except for around apparently all cartoon characters.

23:22Right. And then there's Reimagine, which you have to go into the Photos app, click on Edit, and then click on the little thing to the point where I just didn't find it for a week. I just tried really hard to make that sound like a lot of work. That is not a lot of work. It's not a lot of work. It's not a lot of work. But there's a little friction there. But it is like it was hard to find, right? It wasn't natural. Whereas when you go to do AdMe, which is probably the most, the least controversial of these features, that's in the camera app. Like you open the camera app. Because like I thought Reimagine was going to be in the camera app.

23:53That's kind of where my brain was logically. I was like, oh, you're editing images. It'll be there. No, it's in this whole other place. And it's like it was both frustrating to have to go to three different apps to do all this stuff. But at the same time, that means those aren't smooshed together. Like you could have Adme and just get rid of Reimagine. You could like Pixel Studio is a whole ass app. You can just delete that. In this specific instance, yes, I agree with that. But I think we're pretty clearly headed toward two things, which is one, all of those features you just described being totally ubiquitous everywhere.

24:25Right. Like anything that is a camera is going to have all of that stuff really fast. And B, all of that stuff is going to be pushed together. Right. Like the they're all it's all going to be in the photos app. It just is. It's all going to. And in the same way that you like press the plus button to upload a photo, you'll be able to press the plus button to generate a photo. And we're going to treat those two as the same thing. All of this stuff is coming forward in the interface and is coming together in a way that I think is like feels sort of in that in unstoppable at this moment and like has to be stopped because I agree there are some of these things that are fine.

25:03Right. Like I think Adme is a little weird, but it actually seems like the way that Google forces it to work is you have to do it in the moment. And I think is is like you can't dick around with it as much as I thought you were going to be able to. Yeah, like, fine. I will I will let that one continue to exist. It doesn't seem like it works all that well. Like it works sort of passively fun, but it's kind of like you sloppily photoshopped yourself in, which I think it seems like what that should be. yeah it's a royal family job is what we call it it's the like yes i was also there but it's very clear i was not in this photo like i'm good with that yeah i'm good at that it was like what was the what was the app that would take both a photo of the with both your front and back camera at the same time and then stitch them together admi oh it was front back right was that what it was called i think it was called front back uh admi feels like just like a better version of front back Like, but it just feels increasingly to me like this road that we're on is all of these things eventually becoming one tool and basically becoming another swipe in the camera.

26:07Right. You'll go photo, video, whatever, cinematic mode, panorama, generative. And it's like we cannot let that happen. I'm so, so, so convinced we cannot let that happen. Alison, do you think that's why they kept it out of the edit app and they kind of have it, again, not like obvious enough that it's pretty easy to find, but also I took a week to find it? Yeah, I think it's deliberate. And I've talked to, you know, people on the Pixel camera team about like, you know, where do you decide where to put these things? And is it, you know, is it a bigger problem if it's in the camera app or something in the photos app?

26:48And their kind of philosophy is like how how sticky it is and how like permanent like the effects are is more important than like did you go into the camera app to trigger this or what? I think the way they have it now is very sensible. Like I don't think, you know, my my mom's not going to stumble across to reimagine trying to just like look at photos of her grandchild or whatever. um and i think that the thing to also note on on the whole situation is like the thing that people yell at us immediately is like this is always exist you know photoshop exists we've been able to do all this stuff and there are way way fewer barriers when it's a phone and it's built into the phone and all you have to do is is tap on some stuff and the other thing that we that was really troubling to us as we dug into it was the the photo reimagined stuff has a metadata tag that says made with google ai that's the extent of it the pixel studio stuff which is fully synthetic gets a more robust like kind of embedded you don't see it but it's a watermark that will kind of carry across you know even if you screenshot it yeah synth id which google and deep mind have made like a lot of noise about like this is supposed to be a gigantic industry standard that makes all of this stuff work and okay yeah and they only apply it to the one where you can make an image of barney shooting the one that is obviously fake yeah yeah like i didn't need it like oh it's a watermark that it's barney shooting elmo yeah i was like oh i can't believe they're actually fighting yeah no yeah i feel like that's completely backwards like i want to know that something has been added to this, this real photo, you know, with these synthetic tools, not the other way around.

28:49It's, it's strange. It's such a weird time. I think philosophically, there's actually a reason Google wouldn't do that. Like part of the reason I find all of this so concerning is that everything Google has said publicly feels very flippant about this, right? Like Google's answer, I think to Wired was that, you know it's not about photos it's about making your memories match your memory and it's like what i mean that's what we heard constantly i think at the pixel event was they said no this isn't about your photo your photo is the thing you take and and it's it's archival right this is about the memory this is if this is isn't supposed to be for the journalists shooting the thing it's supposed to be for the parent who wants to fix things for their kids and it's like okay well yeah that makes sense, but you've also given it to the journalists and you've also given it to all of the people who are perpetuating misinformation online.

29:41And that is a bigger group than we would like because people love to chase cloud online with fake shit. It also doesn't make sense. That makes sense if the feature you're introducing is red eye reduction, right? Sure, fine. If you want to release a thing that makes people's eyes look like they're open when they're not, I honestly have no problem with that and nila's not here to yell at me about that and he would and that's fine i have no problem with that we have a whole spectrum here well and that that to me is like this is where i come to the the only solution is to burn it all down thing because like you can't i i have not yet seen a way to do a little bit of it without inevitably doing all of it and i think if we do all of it we are somewhere awful yeah it's pandora's box yes and i think at this point it's like shut the box and set it on fire and let's all just pretend none of this ever happened and everything will be fine.

30:30David, would you feel more comfortable if it was like an app that you had to download? So you had to go, you had to find it in the Play Store, you had to download it and sign in, and then you could do all of this stuff. Would that make it feel a little better? A little, yeah. I mean, I think, Allison, to your point, the biggest pushback we get when we talk about this stuff is people being like, this has been, it's been possible to manipulate photos forever. And that's true. And Sarah Jong wrote a great piece for us about this this week that I think really captures a lot of this. But like in so many ways, the story of the tech industry is making a thing slightly more convenient and you actually change everything.

31:07Like what Uber did to the taxi industry was just make it slightly more convenient. Like the idea of things being fewer steps away from you and they become like a step change more popular is real. Like, yeah, there's an evidence. There's evidence of that everywhere you look. And so I think, yeah, if if they made it an app that you had to download, I would be slightly less alarmed. If they made it an app you had to download that cost seven hundred dollars and required like a master's degree to learn how to use successfully. I will also be less alarmed. But I really do think that the fact that it's a separate app right now is a good thing.

31:42I suspect, given the way that Google talks about this, that that has much more to do with the fact that this is new than the fact that Google has taken some moral stance about AI. I totally agree. I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that Google thinks it's a good thing for the world to keep this out of people's hands. Like, nothing. They want it in people's hands, right? To the point of their philosophy is this now. Right. So why wouldn't Google find more and more ways to bring it forward? Like you're going to get to a point where you're like, hey, Gemini, take a photo of this, but insert a car crash into it.

32:15And it will it will produce that photo. The original photo that you take will include that. Like, why? Why won't you? You're going to have to actually say, but take a photo of this bicycle mangled next to a car with a dent. No, it has that already. It's good. It can it can put a giraffe into the photo of my backyard. I could have a giraffe in my backyard. Like all it needs is the photo of my backyard, which is the easy part. Right. Like I just, I have reached this point now where like, I don't know what else we can do except just shut it all down. Which is why like the, this, the, the bill in California right now is so fascinating.

32:50Right. Cause the question is like, who is responsible for when all of this was horribly wrong. And if it passes and we get down this road where all of a sudden the companies that make these tools are responsible for what happens with them. Ooh, that gets it gets so messy. And we end up with a weird section 230 thing all over again, who is responsible for me and things that people say on the internet. But like, if Google were responsible for every single thing that reimagined produced, you think Google would have launched this? no yeah not a chance the thing they told us when we were like hey so we've been able to use your tool to make all these like pretty disturbing things what do you think about that and they were like oh we have these terms of service um and that's a violation of the policy it's like okay no it's it's worse than that it's worse than that the statement that they've given to everybody including us um from alex marconi at google says uh we design our generative ai tools to respect the intent of user prompts and that means they may create content that may offend when instructed by the user to do so that says in as many words it's your fault not ours yeah yeah it does we didn't do it you did it guns don't kill people people kill people right and i think they're coming at this from the they're thinking oh we're just like photoshop because to everybody who comments, that's true.

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34:12Like Photoshop can do all of this and probably do it, and in many cases do it better. Photoshop is hard and this is so easy. And Google is kind of ignoring that ease. Like they're happy to talk about it on stage. They're happy to talk about it in advertisements and profiles and whatever. They're not happy to talk about it when we ask them. Right, the ease is a feature, not a bug, unless you ask Google about how easy it is. Yeah, and then they're like, well, yeah, that's not the problem. And it's like, no, no, that is actually the problem. You've increased access here. Yeah. Yeah. And like, it's all of this is so weird to me because it is like, to your point, Alison, like some of the same stuff that Google is building to make it so that like the dark scenes that you shoot on your phone look better, which I think everyone agrees is a good thing, right?

34:59Like night sight is awesome. And night sight is AI, right? Like that's just, that is what it is. how you stop that before it gets to, I can insert unbelievably compelling lies into every single one of my photos. And I think the thing that Sarah wrote in her piece, which we'll link in the show notes, and I've gotten some crap for forgetting to link things in the show notes, and I'm very sorry, and I will start, I will do better from now on, is that so much of like life is just having photos, right? Like, I have a leak in my ceiling, I take a photo and I send it to somebody, I have, I got in a car accident a couple of weeks ago and the very first thing I did was walk around my car and take pictures of it.

35:37What if you can't trust those pictures anymore? What if somebody can point to them and say those might be AI and all of a sudden those pictures are meaningless? We are entering a phase where it's going to be so easy and only going to get easier to make this incredibly mundane stuff. We don't think about how much a part of our lives photos are. We talk a lot about politics and really high stakes stuff, but what if the low stakes photos don't count anymore? I just realized the one thing we can still count on is all of the insurance companies are going to band together and be like, absolutely not.

36:10Yeah. Because that's the one where it's like, oh, yeah, that's a lot of money for them. If David's just adding a bunch of dents to the car, give me more money. Yeah. What if the insurance company can refuse my claim because they don't have to believe my photos? Right. Or it was shot on a Pixel 9. They're like, oh, we don't accept those. Right. Like you might have stripped out the metadata. It's only one line of metadata. it's not that hard to do people are more motivated to get around these things than they get credit for uh for so so many reasons um all right buy the pixel 9 just don't do any of that i think the takeaway be good don't do evil don't be a dick yeah weird don't be evil uh somebody should really use that as a that's a good tagline for something all right all right allison we got to take a break and we're gonna let you go uh we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about a bunch of streaming shenanigans because there are endless streaming shenanigans.

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39:07All right, we're back. Richard Lawler is here. Richard, welcome. Hey. We've brought you here to talk about Chick-fil-A. Like, are you a Nugs sandwich? Spicy or not spicy? That's the question. sandwich only no pickles oh okay that's a strong that's a strong order what's your sauce

39:31sauce okay touche uh we're gonna get to chick-fil-a because i i have a i have a game we're gonna play when we get to chick-fil-a um but first we're gonna do a brief segment called alex krenz what the hell is going on here um and it's all about paramount uh because somehow we We have more Paramount shenanigans. Alex Krenz, what the hell is going on here? Paramount really wants to be sold. Sharon Redstone, she's done with this business. She's ready to move on. David Ellis, another person who came up in the waves of wealth, wants to buy it. There was a lot of concern about how much Sherry was getting and how much the rest of the investors were getting financially.

40:16and this other guy said hey no no you got to look at my deal again and so they're like okay well we have to reopen things because we've got a lot of people who are really cranky and and also this is a good deal that he's offering so we got to look at it so so they're doing like one more look so things could still collapse paramount would very much like to be sold um they've they've already written down their biggest asset which is the broadcast channels because broadcast has fallen off a cliff in the last year. Just no ad revenue or anything. So it's a fun time over there. I'm glad I don't work at Paramount is basically the gist of it.

40:54Yeah, I don't know if anyone's going to work at Paramount at the end of this. Somebody will. Like this is a big studio with a lot of assets. And I would be very surprised if they were allowed to sell off all of those assets to the people who would want to buy them. because there's a lot of companies just didn't get into the mix on buying this company because they didn't want the FTC coming around. And to be fair, they shouldn't be allowed to buy them. I don't think Disney should be allowed to buy Paramount. But that just makes it a more difficult climate to sell this stuff. Can we pass a law that makes it so the only people who can buy Paramount are people whose parents are obscenely rich?

41:30Yes. Because I think that would fix everything. Yeah, like Elon Musk's daughter, you should buy this. Um, but, but yeah, it's only rich people are allowed to buy it. Um, we have no idea what this other guy wants to do with it. A lot of people that they didn't sell to previously was because they wanted to break it up. They wanted to just sell it for parts and those would be very lucrative parts, but it is much more potentially powerful altogether. Richard, I'm really enjoying the theory of a pro Nepo baby, uh, economy that we just We give things to the Nepo babies, but we demand that they spend all their money on those things.

42:09I really love this for them. And I love this round of news because it brings back Ed Bronflin Jr., who I didn't know was still in the league. Who is this person? He is. If you're like me and you've read like all of the books about ESPN and Disney and all of the Disney Wars and these guys have all the fun and all these kind of entertainment industry books about the 90s and 2000s. And I guess going back to the 80s. He's one of those figures who pops up. He's an heir to a liquor fortune, I think, and has bought his way into media companies all over the place and is currently running. It's currently, I think, a chairman of Fubo or.

42:45Yep. Chairperson of Fubo currently. Fubo famously now in a gigantic fight with most of the rest of Hollywood over venue sports. There's just only 12 people in Hollywood, I think is the main important thing to remember, is that this is a tiny industry and everybody has worked everywhere and they're all the companies are run by the same four people. Heir of the Seagram fortune. He really has been. Like he was CEO of the Warner Music Group. He's just been all, he's very involved with Seagram, chairman of Evendi Universal. Like did a little Broadway producing. Man loves media. I mean, but like bigger picture, it really seems increasingly like right now, like Netflix is good.

43:34Just be Netflix. The games thing seems to be slowly starting to work. That's like Netflix is fine. And then everybody else is just pure anarchy right now. Like Disney is starting its succession plan again, canceling shows. Alex, the other thing I need you to explain to me is why everyone was so sad that the accolade got canceled. Everybody, as far as I know, hated the accolade to the point where I didn't even watch it because everybody thought it was bad. but then everybody was up in arms that it was canceled this week yeah i was like if we want to talk pivot over to acolyte the reason people are mad about that is because the same thing happened with the marvels the same thing happens with any woman or person of color led property that is really attractive to nerds you get a small portion of people who are just tired of nerd shit and and i love you all live your lives you get a larger person of people who are nerds and want nerd shit but they only want it if it looks like them and they tend to all be white dudes and those people are really good at being really, really loud.

44:30So the people who are just like, oh, watch this, they're not out there tweeting. But in the case of The Acolyte, people are really mad that it got canceled because they're really concerned that they're going to do the same thing they did with Willow, which was excellent and shouldn't have been pulled from the service, but nobody watched it. And they're afraid that they're going to pull this one from Disney +, because nobody watched it. That was the thing. It just got bad ratings. Nobody watched it. So was it good, though? Yeah. Because I'm super sympathetic to that entire argument. It was all about what if these twins who are really powerful in the force, one of them goes and becomes fully Jedi, then realizes Jedi suck.

45:09And then slowly gets to seduce to the dark side by Manny Jacinto's arms. And like, who wouldn't want to watch that? I'm really enjoying Richard's face as you described this. I wasn't that the trailer. I would have watched it. Right? Like, it really is like the whole time he's like, oh, no, I've I've removed my shirt and I'm flexing right now. Now I've got a lightsaber. And you're like, yeah, this rules. And we we were robbed, basically. Yeah, that is the single most compelling argument for the accolade that I've ever heard. I think that they just shown his arms. I feel like the accolade paid for that second or third or however many seasons they've had of the Bounty Hunter show of Boba Fett.

45:43Because we got kind of tired of Star Wars after a point. Yeah. And when we see this again and again and again, there's the combat like you can have fatigue. You can have angry racist, sexist fanboys. You can't have both. And right now they have both. So anytime there is a project that doesn't speak to those racist, sexist fanboys, that just there's a bottom drops out of the audience because everybody else is tired of it. And even if you say, no, no, this time it's good, you have to say it in a very specific way. And they struggle to market it over and over and over again. Because I keep seeing now, everybody's like, you need to have enough volume to drown out certain things.

46:20Yeah. And if that volume goes away, suddenly that's all that's left. Right. And we saw this, like I said, we saw the exact same thing with the Marvels. And now everybody's like, hey, did you see the Marvels? That's actually really good. And I'm like, yeah. Yeah, it was really good. Just everybody was tired of superheroes when it came out. So, and it did have some stupid parts. but everybody was mainly tired of superheroes and then a whole bunch of other people were like but it's those girls that's exactly what you sound like when you complain like that people just to be clear i want to insult you every time we hear that now just take that clip and just play it in response to whoever tweets mean things about these shows uh so but but like this is all part of the sort of bigger like what is going on inside of these streaming services thing that i keep coming back to is like it just seems like outside of netflix which i think can afford to just throw everything at everybody and some of it will stick and it'll be fine uh like disney can't afford to make this many bad star wars shows that people don't watch and now disney is like back in succession planning they just announced the new succession committee to who for whoever is going to next be fired by Bob Iger two years after they're given the job.

47:31Like, I don't know. There's so much just like swirling chaos inside of all of these things. I would say that Hollywood is in one of its most difficult moments, like more difficult, the pandemic, particularly all these streamers and stuff. Because when you look at who's in the field, you've got like Apple, they don't care. They can fart out these things and they'll do fine. So you've got Apple. They don't make a whole lot of shows. They put a lot of money into them, but they don't make a whole lot. And they're struggling in the movie business. All of their movies are bombs, but their TV shows, great.

48:05Get a lot of reviews. But whatever, Apple. You've got Amazon, actually the second largest streamer. And they're doing just fine. They've got sports rights now. They have advertising, so you don't even have to pay for it, really. You can just pop in and start watching. Amazon's doing fine. And they also are Amazon. So they've got all of this other stuff to make money for them, like AWS and Amazon. And then you have the non-tech ones. You have Warner Brothers, who just wrote down all of their broadcast networks. You have Paramount, who just wrote down all of their broadcast networks. You have Disney, who didn't and probably will soon write down all of their networks.

48:42And that's because all the broadcast stuff was supporting everybody and supporting them through the streaming moment because they knew broadcast was going away and streaming was coming and they're like okay we have to get through this but this broadcast died faster than they expected one of the few exceptions is nbc peacock they're also struggling but they did a really good job with the olympics they did they like they showed what happens when a really smart broadcaster programs really well on these platforms and it worked and they they did really really well how long that lasts how quickly those people churn that's that's all a story yeah the the olympics are unfortunately over yeah you get tough times for netflix yeah yeah no no one else is watching diamond league we're not coming back to the paralympics they're about to start come on let's let's go let's keep this going there's that new steph curry show on peacock that seems like it's awful like really great times for peacock uh i think the thing about netflix is it turns out that basic cable for 15 to 20 a month is a pretty good idea yeah that's it and netflix did it right like i think i think more than people realized certainly more than i realized until very recently netflix can be that right like if you If you have a reasonably steady run of very good things and then just an infinite supply of like background noise, you can win.

50:07And for 20 bucks a month, that's essentially what Netflix has. And as long as it keeps having those periodic wins, which it continues to do, it's going to be very hard to supplant. And it's gotten a lot more savage about its cancellations, too. Yes. Right. Like it is not afraid. Disney Plus was pretty timid about canceling things, which is why we got three seasons of Mandalorian and the entire season of Boba Fett. Why? But Disney's gotten a little more aggressive about it. And Disney's pulling from Warner Brothers playbook of like, okay, the show doesn't get a lot of views. We're going to pull it.

50:44We are going to then scrap the entire show because we don't want to have to pay the tax. We just want to write it off as a loss. That's what happened with Willow. That may be what happens with The Acolyte. I think that's where so much of that tension is because you like archival purposes. Sometimes people do like the show and they just want to watch it, put it out on DVD, but that's expensive and they don't want to do it. Well, and I think that the thing you said about the broadcast piece of it is really important because the bet for so long was that they could just invest and lose money and make mistakes and have it all go wrong because this like money fountain on the other side would pay for it.

51:20and it would go down and it seemed reasonably like it might be linear that as more people streamed fewer people would watch linear tv but mostly that would be one-to-one and everything would be fine and that is not even remotely how it has turned out and so the all of a sudden it's like oh this money that we thought we had to invest in bad star wars shows uh we actually don't have at all yeah and it's like that makes you panic on two levels because one we've spent this money on a bad star wars show and two we didn't have the money in the first place that we thought we were going to have. And so you just end up in this, like, it feels like a spiral towards ugly places.

51:54That's why you're hearing a lot of talk in Hollywood right now is that, like, David Zaslav is going to get fired from Warner Brothers because he's getting paid so much money. And he just wrote down all of their broadcast stuff. And his whole big plan was, which I thought was a good plan when he first did it, was let's merge it all together. Let's make this super app. Let's put our broadcast on here. And they just haven't done it. And when they have done it it's been like did you guys watch cnn on max ever am i the only one that does it it it does you like three minutes of cnn and then it cuts to like 10 minutes of medicare and like additional supplemental medicare insurance commercials to be fair that's just cnn you just described is that just cnn i like i guess i never watch it the the old-fashioned way but i was like oh my god i had to turn it off i can't this is why so the other day alex comes storming into our slack going, have the CNN chyrons always looked this crazy?

52:52That's right. I did just start watching CNN last week. Hi, my name's Alex Kranz. This makes sense. Well, it's bad. I have great news for you in these trying times in streaming, which is that Chick-fil-A is here now and Chick-fil-A will fix it.

53:10Richard, can you, can you just quickly explain what Chick-fil-A is doing here? And then I have, I have many roads for us to go down, but can you just tell us what we know so far? Okay, first of all, no, I cannot. Second, what we know so far is that Deadline said that Chick-fil-A is working with a number of production studios and traditional studios to create original shows for a streaming platform that they say they want to launch this year. Something that a lot of people may not be aware of is that the owner of Chick-fil-A, the Cathy family, they also were key to the foundation of Trillis Studios, which you may not know necessarily by the name but you know by what they make there which is the marvel movies really um in in georgia a massive massive massive uh production lot where a lot of things are made george's got the good discounts if you want to shoot there yeah and the good studios it's not just tyler perry okay so i i have done in the last 24 hours what i would say is too much research on Chick-fil-A and its entertainment aspirations.

54:10Can I share a little bit of what I've discovered with you? Yes. Chick-fil-A has a whole separate brand that it calls Penny Cake. And Penny Cake, why is it named Penny Cake? I could not tell you. But it's basically a brand full of family-friendly games and activities. It has a bunch of puzzles. It has a bunch of those things where you like pull a prompt out of a bag and you talk about it as a family and it's like if you squint at it it's kind of a like thing to do around the table while you eat chick-fil-a but in general it just seems like some executive at chick-fil-a was like i want to make puzzles and they were like all right make puzzles i guess uh chick-fil-a also fun fact has made content before uh it made a series of shows called the stories of evergreen hills um that i would describe as like animated in the style of the polar express but about like how to be a good person uh it's like what if the bernstein bears and polar express sort of smooshed together and was worse you'd have stories of evergreen hills i encourage you to look this up on youtube a bunch of them exist they're kind of weird and like you know vacation bible schooly in the sense that like they have a big moral lesson at the end and they want to teach you how to be a better person it's like veggie tales yeah but so richard to your point it's what's weird to me is that it's chick-fil-a doing this like i i've had to wrap my head around the fact that chick-fil-a is not a restaurant it's just a large company with a name right and companies do lots of things some under their brand and some not under their brand.

55:54But this family owns an enormous studio, is well versed in the content business. And yet, we're gonna get like Chick-fil-A plus as a streaming service. I doubt that's what it's gonna be called, I should say. Like, I think it might be penny cake. I think they might come up with another brand, like, whatever. But the idea of like Chick-fil-A, the restaurant, wanting to make content just does not make any sense to me. Is this Am I overthinking this or underthinking this? Did Chick-fil-A stop and say, why not, when they were thinking about sponsoring a bowl game? They did not. And does Chick-fil-A Plus make less sense than Hallmark Plus?

56:34If you think about it, why does a card company have a network? Oh, I just figured it out. So, okay, wait, but I'll give you that if Chick-fil-A wants to basically make worse food network. No, no, no. Probably. No, Chick-fil-A is going to acquire the scorched remains of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment in Red. They're going to acquire all that. And then they're just going to do Christian streaming service. Because they love Jesus differently than other people do. But they have their own opinion. Yeah. I love that they don't work on Sunday. But that's what they're going to do. they're going to do a Christian entertainment streaming service.

57:21I think that's right. And as we've seen, that's a big market, right? Like Angel Studios is very successful. I mean, it wasn't a big market for Chicken Soup for the Soul entertainment. No, but I would say they'd made a lot of mistakes. Yeah, that's fair. That were not. Like if Chick-fil-A gets really big into selling DVDs at Chick-fil-A, I think we'll have a problem. Red boxes. The story of Chicken Soup for the Soul seems to be, it would have been a fine company if it were happy being what it was. It was trying to be 100 other things. Yeah. But Chick-fil-A, that's what it's about to do. Okay. So this is the game I just want to play for a few minutes here.

57:56Okay. You are now the head of content at Chick-fil-A. Congratulations to both of you. Yes. You are in charge of making a streaming service. A, you have to come up with the name. And B, you have to tell me at least two shows that you want to put on your streaming service. Alex, you go first. chick-fil-a for the soul is the name of the streaming service okay ft i don't know i'm not gonna do that but chick-fil-a for the soul fts so it's not great it's not great this is work in progress but i think that's where we're gonna go we're gonna get a reboot of touch by the touch by an angel and uh wait that's good that's actually and either a reboot or we're just gonna get the rights to prairie what was a little house on the prairie oh okay so just like sweet down home family shows yeah seventh heaven will be there we're gonna go get mr rogers blur the dad's face out every time he appears on screen we'll just deep fake someone else into someone else that does face oh but then we get the moment where the mom goes i smoked pot and it's like an intense noise around her oh it's gonna be so good okay like i can't believe chick-fil-a did that Richard what are you what are we doing Chick-fil-A I'm going a slightly different direction I'm launching Pacific Rim Network which is all Pacific Rim spinoffs all the time fortunately there's already a stream of these in production they've just continued making them are there really?

59:27they've been developing these shows on and off there's a new one in development that was just announced last week we've got content lined up for years we're good Pacific Rim Network and there'll be like a resurrection theme every three episodes There are strong merch tie-ins. You can sell the robots in Chick-fil-A. We take over the Happy Meal business immediately. I love this. Okay, what are we calling the streaming network? Oh, it's Pacific Rim Network. It's all Pacific Rim. Everything is Pacific Rim. Okay, okay. I love this. It's all stories of Pacific Rim. We've got the big short in Pacific Rim, like when people figure out where the monsters are going to attack and they're shorting the stocks with those companies.

1:00:05It's great. We cover all genres. I'm going to have making everything, but it's all set in the Pacific Rim world. So Seinfeld and the Pacific Rim world. Yeah. Pacific Rim Seinfeld. Honestly, I'd watch that. Sex in the City and Pacific Rim. Watch that too. Oh my God. Dating and giant monsters all the time. What can we do? All I've got is like deep fake Michael Landon. So Joey and Chandler in the suits, just hanging out. This is great. All right. That's, that's very good. um mine in case you're curious i'm calling the network the sauce and delicious and we're doing like uh family friendly 1990s vh1 i would say that's what i'm going after so we're doing a bunch of like one of the things chick-fil-a is apparently doing is looking for like family-friendly game shows so i'm going with like all of the all of the you know christian music videos people are going to play that all the time just jars of clay just jars of clay everywhere you look uh some switch foot when we're feeling edgy lots of stuff to do and then little creed and then it's just going to be a lot of like great british show great british baking show style competition shows where it's competition but everybody's really nice to each other i think we're going to take over i think i'm going to absolutely dominate and one One show at least is going to be called My Pleasure and it is going to be our tentpole show.

1:01:33I don't know what it is, but I know it's called My Pleasure. It's actually going to be a remake of Red Shoe Diaries. We're just going to go really, really wild with that one. As I say it out loud, My Pleasure might be like too sexy a show. I was like, that's a little racy for Chick-fil-A. Okay. Well, we have a lot to think about. Chick-fil-A after dark. Come on now. Oh, that's good. We just steal Are You Afraid of the Dark from Nickelodeon and it's just called Chick-fil-A. After dark. The nugs are spicier. After dark. Okay, so we're accidentally inventing Chick-fil-A's porn network, which is good.

1:02:07This is the next. We're helping. The next phase of growth for Chick-fil-A. Welcome to the entertainment business, Chick-fil-A. All right. One more thing we should talk about before we get off of the streaming stuff, which is some interesting podcasty news. This is a podcast after all. um the big podcast news of this week i would say uh is that alex cooper who hosts call her daddy and i think is probably like the second biggest name on spotify after joe rogan uh just in terms of like people who got giant whatever eight figure deals to go be on spotify exclusively uh is leaving spotify and going to sirius xm signed a huge deal for like 100 million dollars super big deal and just strikes me as very interesting because I'm sorry it was 125 million dollars so much money yeah and I just think it's fascinating because Sirius also just recently I believe it was Smartless that made a huge deal with Sirius so we're in this weird moment where like the podcast business is kind of retrenching and there was this huge boom and then it all sort of pulled back but then like Sirius in particular is out here just writing gigantic No, this makes sense.

1:03:23Sirius is always like 10 years late to the game. If she were a radio host and she had hit one big deal and probably wasn't going to hit a big deal again at that network and then went to Sirius for a lot of money and probably none of us ever listening to her on Sirius ever again. Yeah. You wouldn't even think about this. You would just say, oh, yeah, that's that's obviously what happened. This is the Howard Stern. She did a Howard Stern is what you're saying. Yeah, it's the Howard Stern. OK. I hope she enjoys having her 12 listeners, all of whom are in their car. Because they forgot to cancel the subscription in their car.

1:03:54Okay, so this is part of the reason I actually brought this up. Because I think the Howard Stern deal in a certain way made sense. A, it's like he's a big name, he's a big brand. And also I think the demographic, especially age-wise, of people who love Howard Stern and people who spend a lot of time in their car listening to satellite radio is pretty solid. This one seems strange to me because Alex Cooper is much younger. The Call Her Daddy audience is presumably much younger. It's just a completely different generation. Like one of the reasons there was a great, I think it was Wall Street Journal story right before the Olympics about Alex Cooper as like the Gen Z whisperer.

1:04:32And like, do Gen Z people know what Sirius XM is? Well, they're going to have to, if they're going to follow her. I mean, it will still be available on other podcast platforms. So they're just spending all this money to sell ads for call her daddy. I guess. Which is fine. You know, if you can make the money work, then that just seems like a ton of money. if that's your play. But what do I know? Maybe it'll work. You can get three months for a dollar. I just, like, we're in this moment now where it's like Sirius and iHeart, which are like two huge radio players, are the only ones left spending money on podcasts.

1:05:05And I don't know if that is like a sign of things to come of consolidation or if it's they're just the only ones dumb enough to keep writing these big checks. I would say it's a sign of consolidation. I think these two companies have managed to persist. I heard radio with like an enormous monopoly on broadcast radio in the United States. Yeah, it's like they just want to try to stay alive as long as possible. And they'll just write giant checks until there are no more giant checks. Yeah, until the giant check account is closed. I mean, listen, Alex Cooper, get that money. Get your bag. Yeah, get the bag.

1:05:39Go for it. I love this for her. Yeah. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back to a lightning round. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Nordstrom. Cooler temps are here, so it's time to level up your wardrobe at Nordstrom. You'll find the best cold weather must-haves, including thousands of styles under$100. Shop head-to-toe cozy from faves like Ogg, All Saints, Nordstrom, Skims, The North Face, and more. Plus, free shipping, free returns, and quick order pickup make it easy. In stores or online, it's time to go shopping at Nordstrom.

1:06:18Sometimes, the difference between success and failure comes down to one chance encounter. Or following a counterintuitive instinct. Or ignoring conventional wisdom to make a bold decision. Like when the founders at Palo Alto Networks wanted to redefine cybersecurity for the modern age. Everybody thought we were crazy. Nobody would use the cloud for cybersecurity. Or when mobile gaming giant Supercell could only rewrite the rules of the industry after failure in the company's formative stages. Many of the best things we've learned have actually come through failures. These are all examples of Crucible Moments, turning points in a company's journey that made them what they are today.

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1:08:09All right, we're back. It's lightning round time. Richard, you're sticking around for the lightning round, which means you get to go first. What'd you pick? My pick is Amazon canceling the Echo Show 8 Photo Edition's photo plan. Now, if you don't remember the Echo Show 8 Photos Edition, because you're a normal person, it was the version of the Echo Show that they launched late last year. And it was the only one where you could make it display like photos all the time, like any other digital picture frame. Because the rest of them, I think they cycle other things in. You can't just make it just be photos.

1:08:39Like Alexa prompts. It will sell you an Echo that will just show photos on its screen, but you have to pay for it. The plan was like$2 for a month or six months or something like that. Anyway, no one bought this thing and they stopped selling it months ago. And like recently, probably one of the only customers who had it got a message saying that, yes, we're going to cancel this and you will no longer have this feature. It's going away. Goodbye. so they're essentially just removing the whole reason you bought this device in the first place yes and it's just a regular echo showy now well there's so many stupid things about this richard it just everything like that you have this smart device that can't do the thing that the dumbest digital photo frame that you can get on the shelf of any store in America anywhere can do with basically no processing power and nothing.

1:09:39Is it like, is it a tech, like, is there a technological reason for it or is it just? No, it's just software. Yeah, we just want to push all of our different Alexa, like advertisements and stuff on you. Stop looking at pictures. Yes, they want their Echo and Alexa ecosystem to push you to buying other things and to seeing other things and they want to control what you have. They don't want you to just use this digital photo frame because then you wouldn't buy things from Amazon, which as we heard, I think within the last month is a big problem for Amazon's hardware business is that they had done some kind of interesting accounting based on the idea that if you used Alexa and bought Echo hardware, you would buy more stuff from Amazon.

1:10:17And that is not what people do. They just used Alexa to turn off their lights and stuff and set reminders. And the kids ask it questions. They don't buy more stuff. One time a roommate of mine bought, I would say like$40 worth of Cadbury eggs, and then$100 of laundry detergent on my Alexa. And then I was like, why did you buy that? And she's like, I just wanted to see. And then we stopped using it ever for buying things because that was so many Cadbury eggs and overpriced detergent. It's a pretty funny bit to pull at somebody's house, actually, to just walk in and just start yelling at the speaker to buy stuff and just see how far you can get.

1:10:55Little kids do it all the time. They're like, buy me a fire tablet. And you're like, no, shut up. Leave it alone. It's not for you. Yeah, this is one of those things that I feel like is just like a failure on all sides. Because Richard, you're right that like for Amazon, I'm sure they lost money on every single one of these things that they sold, which is why Amazon doesn't want to just sell these things as a photo frame. And if you were to say, Amazon, why not sell it for more money so that you can make money on it as a photo frame? some accountant within Amazon would tell you that that's not how business works.

1:11:28Yeah. I'm not an accountant. What do I know? But then to do something like this, presumably for a teeny tiny number of people, this is the thing I've just never understood about large companies. Like Google does this worse than anybody. They're like, we have a thing with not as many users that isn't making us as much money as we hoped. It costs us absolutely nothing to run. So we're going to cancel it. It's like, why? What are we accomplishing here? It was like when they took the MTV News archive offline. It's like, I'm pretty sure you can afford to keep MTVNews.com online. Like, I think it's fine.

1:12:02Maybe it's like a tax write-off. Do you get a tax write-off if you just remove a feature? Like, do they get a tax write-off for that? They're like, no, we did a bad job on that one. Yeah, like Hollywood is always like, never mind. We're not going to release this movie. We're going to put it in the vault forever. Give me money, IRS. And like Amazon's just going to give me money. The thing at Google is that the reason why a lot of these products have canceled is because they can't find anyone to run them. Because if you're not running a project that's growing or going somewhere, then you aren't going to get that next promotion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

1:12:30It's probably a similar thing within Amazon. It's like, OK, so who wants to weekly check in and make sure that the photo subscription is still working? Nobody? OK, canceling. I guess. I don't know. Open source it. Like, get a user to do it. Like, hey, you check this box once a week. Like, I don't know. And I get that I'm asking for something that's never going to happen, but it just always feels so silly to me when companies do this. It's such an own goal of customer relations and making people trust you as a company in the name of saving one person, one meeting a quarter. You think it's unreasonable that they spend a trillion dollars on new AI chips, but they can't spend$100 to keep this running.

1:13:14Exactly. What if you just put one of those chips onto keeping all of those customers happy? And then if you don't want to have this problem again, I don't know, make better products. There's an idea for you, Amazon. Kranz, what's yours? Not related to Amazon. Mine is JBL. You remember last year they had the headphones that had a screen on them for the case? They did it again. But the screen got bigger. It's a much bigger screen. You can pause. You can skip tracks. I still cannot decide if this is the best idea ever or a completely pointless use of technology. I've never used a pair of headphones like this, so I genuinely can't say, but I can't decide.

1:13:57I think you might be able to do more with this than you can do with Gemini, because you can set alarms. See, I was going to go the other way. I was going to say, this is like a Books Poma, but a headphone case. Yeah, but you can set alarms. You can check text messages. Basically, if you didn't have some sort of smartwatch, you just pull this out of your pocket instead of your phone. That's probably likely going to happen. Right? That's actually better. I kind of like that. I don't need a smartwatch all the time, but I'm going to be carrying my earbuds anyway. They just look neat. I don't know.

1:14:34I'm one of those people where while I do feel we should have smart, we should have small, good smartphones. I also understand that people love cheap screens. And this is just cool. Like, just slap a screen on it. Let's go. My thing is I want all of this, but I want it to be like button controls that I can do just by like putting my hand in my pocket. Ooh. Right. Like I want the controls that are on my headphones in a lot of cases. I also want those on the thing in my pocket so I can just reach in and like whack it twice to go to the next song. That'd be like actual physical buttons. Yeah. Like what if my AirPods case just had 12 buttons on it?

1:15:13That'd be nice. That'd be amazing. But then people are like, what are you fiddling with in your pocket, David? It's basically just a little fidget spinner. I'm just in there just clicking around all day. I'm always like flipping the case open and close. And then I'm like, why don't I have any battery? Oh, it's me. So one random thing. Have you, I always hate asking people if they see anything on TikTok because the answer is no, because everybody has a completely different TikTok experience. But for like two weeks, there was one guy hawking a pair of Lenovo earbuds that also had a screen on the case.

1:15:45That was like every fifth video I saw on TikTok. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I've since quit TikTok. I'm away from TikTok right now because I was in Texas and I was getting a lot of political location based stuff that I didn't want to see. But yeah, I remember that guy. He just was I was like, oh, should we call these in? He made a very convincing case. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, should I buy these? Lenovo like Lenovo is working on TikTok. Like that was the consistent thing. It would always be like these weird lifestyle products from Lenovo. And you're like, I didn't know you sold like a flashlight with a Lenovo brand on it.

1:16:24Is this the same Lenovo? Like Lenovo is definitely turning into one of those companies that just kind of makes everything. Yeah. Including weird e-ink laptops. Thank you, Lenovo. Yeah. Hell yeah. Just keep doing that. I did not get that. The only thing I get on TikTok now is Cole Hawker edits of himself. That seems better, I think. I was like, I like that. one of the features i've always wanted from tiktok is like a walk a mile in somebody else's shoes where like i should be able to scan a qr code and just immediately get your for you feed for an hour i think that would be so fun and it's like what a way to get to know somebody then to like quickly and you have control over it you have to share it with me it's like sharing your location with somebody i'm like i can share my feed with you i think that would be so fun why is tiktok not doing that as a speed dating app oh yeah and it's like on hinge but instead of having to like answer asinine questions about yourself you just are like here's my feed do you love me tiktok this is how you're gonna make money because you don't make money this is this is how tiktok will make money is is just doing this this is great i love dating apps that's a good idea anyway tiktok you can have that for free uh sponsor the lightning round speaking of lightning what's yours mine is i just want to talk about the sonos app again for a minute um because This whole Sonos app story has gone from ridiculous to sad to just weird and confusing.

1:17:52The most recent thing is that Sonos, which Chris Welch scooped, what, last week, two weeks ago? Mm-hmm. Recently, that the company was considering re-releasing the app. uh patrick spence said in a reddit ama this week that he was hopeful until very recently that sonos could just re-release the app but then they found that they couldn't and that the old app would just make everything worse and uh this is so brutal for sonos like it's just i mean let me just read you more of the quote here so he says the trick of course is that sonos is not just a mobile app but software that runs on your speakers and in the cloud too in the months since the new mobile app launched we've been updating the software that runs on our speakers and in the cloud to the point where today s2 is less reliable and less stable than what you remember like what he what he's saying is we broke everything so badly that we can't even go back anymore i just like i have so many questions how does that how does that work i mean the the s2 app was never very good this is part of the thing where i'm like i think the current app is getting a bit of a bad shake because it's not very good but the last one was also bad and was constantly like disconnecting and forcing you to reset your entire home the last one like it's a very funny uh rorschach test of like do you want all the features but kind of bad or do you want slightly better but no features right it's like well maybe sonas you should have just done they're both bad to be clear not good outcomes but uh it's just it's it's this is just tough yeah this is this is i just don't understand how they they got to the point of having an app that doesn't work and doesn't do what people want right like i i i totally agree and the fact that sonos has had to walk it so far back as to basically acknowledge and i guess to some extent credit to patrick spence for just saying out loud like yeah we screwed it up like they started by trying to do the you know change is hard thing And then they started by saying it took courage to do this.

1:19:59They actually use the word courage, which PSA to CEOs don't use the word courage anymore. Just stop it. It doesn't help. It always backfires. We will use it against you. Just don't do it anymore. And now at least they have come all the way around and been like, yeah, we released a crappy app. This sucks. We're sorry. But also there's nothing we can do about it. Like, it's so bad. I really, I feel for, I feel for Sonos. And this is not a good moment to be doing this if you're Sonos. They apparently, I didn't realize they got rid of their beta program or they didn't make it as robust as it used to be.

1:20:38There are a lot of things that went wrong in the process here, but ultimately, like, it should have been blindingly obvious that this thing wasn't ready. And what Chris Welch has said on this show is that because the headphones were coming and because there was such a rush to do that, There was the sense like, we have to do all of this at once. And holy God, did that backfire. All to launch these headphones that, did anyone ask for Sonos headphones? Have you seen a pair in the wild? I was actually just wondering about this the other day. I have not heard one person even ask about them since they came out.

1:21:09Sonos was always like, it was a niche brand. I mean, I have a lot of Sonos speakers. It's always been a niche brand. And this like appetite to compete with the apples of the world is like, don't don't do that. Yeah. They have so much more money than you. It's been a niche brand with like huge brand recognition. Right. Like I know a lot of people who would never own Sonos stuff, but kind of know what Sonos is. Yeah. But I don't think it's like at the same stage as like Bose. No. Like, right. Like I would say the only people who know who Sonos is or that know what Sonos is are people who are fairly online.

1:21:43and and so it's got like really good online brand recognition but i think that even people who aren't online they maybe didn't necessarily know what sonos was but they could be convinced to buy it yeah yeah like you could walk into best buy and you could say man you know what i need some home i need to hear music everywhere in my house he was like you know i got something for you yeah what how much money that's i think i think that's exactly right and i feel like what sonos has done here is totally torch that reputation right this sense of like sonos was always too expensive but also the best right like those and and you can get people over too expensive in a lot of cases uh it is it is just absolutely lighting on fire this reputation of it will do the thing that you want it to do exceptionally well because it just doesn't anymore yeah and like and it it the road to get back to that seems like it is pretty long at this point there's still excellent airplay 2 speakers yeah again i never i couldn't even tell you if i have the sonos app on my phone and i use sonos all the time and it still sounds great i still love the speakers lord knows i will not be updating that system anytime soon i stopped using the app years ago because it like it forced me to reset my entire system one too many times and once i got it working with my audio or with my tv I was like okay I never touch this again they're now AirPlay speakers nobody tell me how I should just get a receiver and big bookshelf speakers I know it's expensive I already spent the money shut up I wonder if we're going to get to the point where if you have a phone and a Sonos system that is all still running the old software because you never updated that's going to become a thing you can sell on eBay for way more money because it's the thing that still works I hope that happens so much you get in a van and you pull up on somebody and you say, hey, man, we've got all these Sonos speakers that fell off a truck and you sell them.

1:23:35I gotta work in Sonos. You interested? Yes. It's good. Alright, we're subvenanting businesses here on the Vergecast. That's what we do. I mean, yeah. Alright, we have gone way over as we are wont to do. We should get out of here. Thank you both for doing this. Tons of good stuff on the site this week. Becca Farsachi's final video for the Verge, which is very sad, about iJustine just went up today, Thursday as we're recording this. It's very good. We have a bunch of stuff on the pixels, a bunch of stuff on AI, photo, chaos, all the streaming news we've been talking about. If you missed our whole Hydrogen series, both on the Tuesday Vergecast and the Lost Highway stuff we did on the site, that was great.

1:24:14Tons of good stuff on the Verge. It's like the end of August and it still feels like tons of stuff is happening, which is bonkers. But here we are. We will be on top of the Chick-fil-A story. Do not worry. We will cover it as it happens. For now, that's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

1:24:33And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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From the publisher

The Verge's David Pierce, Alex Cranz, Allison Johnson, and Richard Lawler discuss the Google Pixel 9 review and its controversial reimagine AI feature, a Chick-fil-A streaming service, Sonos app updates, and more.
Further reading:

Google Pixel 9 Pro and 9 Pro XL review: AI all over the place

Google’s AI tool helped us add disasters and corpses to our photos

This system can sort real pictures from AI fakes — why aren’t platforms using it?

The AI photo editing era is here

Donald Trump posts a fake AI-generated Taylor Swift endorsement

From Digital Trends:I tried Google's new Pixel Studio app, and it's a mess

OpenAI exec says California’s AI safety bill might slow progress

https://www.threads.net/@chriswelch/post/C-8wxAGOpyP

https://www.threads.net/@chriswelch/post/C-8LGwKOlPj?xmt=AQGzGV_vvL3vxoEhZ_nM263bP8n-Pu9Dxz5Ngmib-0wzgA

https://www.threads.net/@chriswelch/post/C-8wxAGOpyP

A new $6 billion bid to take over Paramount could undo plans to merge with Skydance.

I hope the next CEO of Disney is just Bob Iger with a fun mustache.

Paramount Plus plans are 50 percent off ahead of the 2024 NFL season

The 2024 Olympics were a big win for TV of all kinds

The Acolyte has been canceled

Chick-fil-A is reportedly launching a streaming service for some reason

Apple Podcasts now has a web app

Spotify star Alex Cooper is jumping to a new podcast network

JBL made its charging case touchscreen more useful with a size boost

Meta and Snap are about to show off their new AR glasses

Amazon cancels the Echo Show 8 Photos Edition’s main feature — focusing on photos

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