The Pixel 9 is great – and a problem

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 [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:28Speaker 01

  I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Nathan Lane. We talk about his critically acclaimed run in Death of a Salesman, Taking His Dog to Therapy, and winning an Emmy for Only Murders in the Building. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 1:05David Pierce?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of just the absence of truth forever in the future. It's it's cool times here in technology land. I'm your friend David Pierce. Alex Cranz is here. Hi, Alex.

• 1:19Alex Cranz?

  I'm your friend who's in the studio and it's awesome.

• 1:22David Pierce?

  But are you in the studio? How do we even know anymore, Alex?

• 1:25Alex Cranz?

  That's true.

• 1:25David Pierce?

  I don't know where you are or who you are or what we're doing.

• 1:28Alex Cranz?

  This Pixel studio is is what I meant to say.

• 1:31David Pierce?

  We're just devolving into full-on nihilism in this episode of The Vergecast. I'm really excited about it. Allison Johnson is here. Hi, Allison.

• 1:37Speaker 04

  I'm here, or am I here?

• 1:40David Pierce?

  Exactly. You're here and also in several photos that you're not in. And also in other places.

• 1:45Speaker 04

  Could be anywhere.

• 1:47David Pierce?

  Neelai 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. And 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. Allison, you reviewed the whole sort of Pixel 9 line minus the fold, but the Pixel 9 and the Pixel Pro.

• 2:32David Pierce?

  I don't, I had lost track. There's too many phones.

• 2:35Speaker 04

  There's a lot of phones.

• 2:36David Pierce?

  And I would say the initial read from your review was that like, at least on a hardware perspective, Google kind of nailed it, right?

• 2:46Speaker 04

  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. This 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 generations of Pixel phones were like, eh, 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.

• 3:29David Pierce?

  I feel like this was finally Google saying like, what if we just made it really nice?

• 3:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:36David Pierce?

  Which feels like an insult, but 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 are 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.

• 4:21David Pierce?

  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 flagshipy things to it feels like the right call.

• 4:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, 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 Right. 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, you're, you're suddenly less concerned with like,

• 5:19Speaker 04

  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 a, an actual mid-range price, that having the, the regular mainline ones just like hovering just above that didn't make a lot of sense. So now this, yeah, this year feels like, forget it. Like here, they're just, they're just really good phones. And it worked. They do have giant butts. They do. Which is a, 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

• 6:03Speaker 04

  the back. That's like, oh, that's not an iPhone. That's a Galaxy S24. Google is really leaning into the, like, it was the visor, 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.

• 6:21Alex Cranz?

  It's just, it's got a booty on it.

• 6:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:23Alex Cranz?

  It's like, but I didn't, you know, I got one last week when we were at the Pixel event and I've 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.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  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.

• 6:41Alex Cranz?

  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.

• 6:49David Pierce?

  Is this enormous? A very Alex Cranz's question.

• 6:55David Pierce?

  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.

• 7:16Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 7:16David Pierce?

  The 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.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  It is really nice.

• 7:31David Pierce?

  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.

• 7:43Alex Cranz?

  It does wiggle.

• 7:45David Pierce?

  Have you ever noticed this?

• 7:46Alex Cranz?

  Well, I, I've always been a case person and 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 these, like a plastic case that I was putting in my pocket and it like shredded my finger. It was horrible.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  I saw evidence of, I think a piece of the case landed in my bag or something.

• 8:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And like it broke. I was like, look at this. It's almost broken off. Boom. And you're like, whoop. And then it got vengeance, Allison. But yeah, so I never, I never noticed that it does wobble. The iPhone wobbles.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  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, and it's like, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, typing out an email. Yeah. But the iPhones too. Yeah.

• 8:33Alex Cranz?

  Shocking lack of cases at the Pixel event, by the way. 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. They didn't break their phones.

• 8:45David Pierce?

  I would say they're all, they all have what I would call unlimited access to new phones.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:51David Pierce?

  In a way that is not representative of most people.

• 8:53Speaker 04

  Oops. Here's your phone back. No, the thing that really did happen is we covered the event. We went to lunch and I went to pull the phone out of my bag and just like straight onto the concrete ground. Like, there is a little like scuff on the side of it, but you know what? It's fine. It was fine.

• 9:13Alex Cranz?

  It worked totally fine. The panic quickly subsided. We were all fine. Still fine.

• 9:20David Pierce?

  And I also feel like Google doing this with the camera bump kind of made me think of when Apple tried really hard to make the MagSafe circle into this sort of iconic thing, where it's like, I think 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. Like 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. Like, 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?

• 10:01Alex Cranz?

  And it turns out, we don't. We don't want to fight. We're just like, yeah, it's fine.

• 10:04David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's a big ass camera bump. We'll all live.

• 10:07Speaker 04

  Just lean in.

• 10:08David Pierce?

  But so like as, as basic Android phone things go, Pixel's as good as anybody at this point, right? Like 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.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  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.

• 10:44David Pierce?

  That's really exciting. And are the sizes are identical? To me, the like, the small Pro is very intense.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  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 would switch back to the Pixel 8 rather than the 8 Pro, just because I like the size better. And 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, 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.

• 11:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 11:19Alex Cranz?

  So many phones.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you don't give up anything on the camera front 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.

• 11:37David Pierce?

  How is the camera? I mean, it was very funny looking at the photos in your review. And there are lots of them. They're very good. And so many of the photos are like 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.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  And even when it processes it with like the low light stuff, it still looks really good and clean versus everybody else.

• 12:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, it does a nice job.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  I think it's, the Pixel camera has kind of been like on this more consistent path where it started like the early Pixel phones were kind of like too cool of a color cast. I 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. And I think

• 12:46David Pierce?

  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 sick knob.

• 12:55Speaker 04

  Needs more stick. Yeah.

• 12:58Speaker 04

  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. I appreciate it.

• 13:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, I, I want to love this phone. I really do. Like, I have, I have been waiting for a good excuse to go back to the Pixel, 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.

• 13:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Pixel Fold is nice. Yeah, which is the one I don't have for review yet. We all got to like, touch it and play with it at the event. But it's shipping later, so 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?

• 13:59David Pierce?

  Interesting.

• 14:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, off the charts. And my answer is like, it's good.

• 14:06David Pierce?

  It's hot fall summer. You've been calling this like, two years in a row now, and you might be old this time.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  I'm just making it happen. You're bringing it back.

• 14:13David Pierce?

  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, and shared knowledge of anything.

• 14:27Speaker 04

  It's just your memories.

• 14:28David Pierce?

  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 reimagine AI feature works and like how you use it in the context of a Pixel 9?

• 14:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's, it's right inside the magic editor kind of tools that were on last year's phones. 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. And 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

• 15:23Speaker 04

  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

• 15:41Speaker 04

  I mean, you can't, if you ask for a bowl of eyeballs, it'll make a bowl of eyeballs.

• 15:47David Pierce?

  Google says there are guardrails. I would not say there is much evidence in the world of there.

• 15:53Alex Cranz?

  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. And I'm like, that's, that's, I asked for liquid. And I like, I asked it to do like a Minotaur sitting behind my sister in law menacingly. And instead, it was like, first, it just did like, just black, just darkness behind her. It was just like a black figure, like, 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.

• 16:33David Pierce?

  That's not a Minotaur.

• 16:35Alex Cranz?

  That's what I wanted. Come on. So I will say like,

• 16:39Speaker 04

  I was really, really, really impressed with what you and Welch have been able to do with it. 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. But then we're kind of like, we're some of the first people to really touch this. We got to push it. And you, 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, 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

• 17:21Speaker 04

  in your photo. And you're like, oh, God, this is gross. And I, 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.

• 17:38David Pierce?

  What were your favorite ones that you got? Good or bad? Favorite, define any way you want. What were the, what were your favorite ones that you did?

• 17:47Speaker 04

  I got, 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, 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. So it's, yeah, it's not like, you, you, you have to go out of your way to get it to do gross, weird, maybe manipulative things. I mean, you got it to do, is it pronounced gooey ducks?

• 18:29Speaker 04

  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. And like, what it created. So it was a bowl of food of like, beautiful, like salad, watermelon, just like, the lighting is perfect. I was like, put the grossest things in there, like eyeballs.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  Like rabbit's feet. Um, and it did all that, but the gooey ducks I was trying to, I'm trying to get it to make, you know, some questionable, um, things. And it gave me what I describe as looked like raw thumbs that like, don't have fingernails on them. And they were slimy, like a little bit slimy. So it just sort of, I don't know. I don't know how to describe it.

• 19:20Alex Cranz?

  When I tried gooey ducks, it did like, uh, looked like clams or something. It was like, so something's here. And I was like, no, it's not revolting enough.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  It's like the AI starts going down a road and there's a stop sign like, no.

• 19:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It's like, um, 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.

• 19:45Alex Cranz?

  Keep it out of the bowl.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, sometimes it, it really does kind of put up a stop sign. It's like, it, it will tell you straight up, like, we cannot generate that picture, put in something else. You frigging weirdo.

• 19:57Alex Cranz?

  Well, it won't let you change people.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  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.

• 20:12Alex Cranz?

  It, it's such a weird space to be in because on the one hand,

• 20:18Alex Cranz?

  we're, we're here talking about how concerning it is to have unfettered access to these tools. On 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, and that's not as fun.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:35David Pierce?

  Okay. I have become totally radicalized by this phone on, on all of this stuff. And, and truly I am, I have reached a point where I am like, shut it all down. It's none of this can be allowed. Throw out the baby with the bathwater, like shut it all down. Uh, and it, it's really what, what has continued to do it for me, especially with the Pixel nine is not the like, uh, there's 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. It might've been the reverse of that, but I think it was that.

• 21:10Speaker 04

  No, that's it.

• 21:11David Pierce?

  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. But you can't have one without the other. I'm increasingly

• 21:54David Pierce?

  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? Like, 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 like, that is a problem Google has solved with artificial intelligence. I will absolutely happily sacrifice that to get rid of all this other stuff. Like, we, it just, like, shut it all down.

• 22:25Alex Cranz?

  The thing is, they kind of, all these tools are separated. And I think, like, Alison, you talked about it in your review. It's annoying from a user perspective in that I did, I couldn't, I thought I didn't have, I had the regular Pixel 9, I just thought I didn't have access to Reimagine. And then Alison 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.

• 23:01David Pierce?

  Right.

• 23:02Alex Cranz?

  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.

• 23:10David Pierce?

  You just tried really hard to make that sound like a lot of work. That is not a lot of work.

• 23:14Alex Cranz?

  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. That'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.

• 23:56David Pierce?

  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 to being totally ubiquitous everywhere, right? 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, 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 unstoppable

• 24:38David Pierce?

  at this moment and like has to be stopped. Because I agree, there are some of these things that are fine, right? 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 like largely fine.

• 24:51Alex Cranz?

  You can't dick around with it as much as I thought you were going to be able to.

• 24:55David Pierce?

  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 passably fun, but it's kind of like you sloppily photoshopped yourself in, uh, which I think it seems like what that should be.

• 25:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's a royal family job is what we call it.

• 25:13David Pierce?

  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. I'm good with 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? AdMe, oh, it's front back, right? Was that what it was called? I think it was called front back. AdMe feels like, just like a better version of front back.

• 25:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, front back.

• 25:37David Pierce?

  But, 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. Right? You'll go photo, video, whatever, cinematic mode, panorama, generative. And it's like, we cannot let that happen. I'm, I'm so, so, so convinced we cannot let that happen.

• 25:59Alex Cranz?

  Alison, do you think that's why they kept it out of the, the edit app? And they, they kind of have it, again, not suit, like, obvious enough that it's pretty easy to find, but also I was, I took a week to find it.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I think it's deliberate. And I've talked to, um, you know, people on the Pixel Camera team about like, you know, where, 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? And their kind of philosophy is like, how, how sticky it is and how like, um, 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 reimagine trying to just like, look at photos for grandchild or whatever.

• 26:57Speaker 04

  And I think that the thing to also note on, on the whole situation is like, the, 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,

• 27:28Speaker 04

  The the photo reimagine 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. Yeah, synth ID.

• 27:52David Pierce?

  Which Google and DeepMind 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.

• 27:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And they only apply it to the one where you can make an image of Barney shooting.

• 28:04David Pierce?

  The one that is obviously fake. Yeah.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Like, I didn't need it.

• 28:09David Pierce?

  Like, oh, it's synthetic that it's Barney shooting Elmo?

• 28:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. I was like, oh, I can't believe they're actually fighting.

• 28:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  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. It's it's strange. It's such a weird time.

• 28:32David Pierce?

  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?

• 28:52Alex Cranz?

  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 journalist 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 journalist, and you've also given it to all of the people who are perpetuating misinformation online. And that is a bigger group than we would like, because people love to chase clout online with fake shit.

• 29:27David Pierce?

  It also doesn't make sense. That makes sense if the feature you're introducing is red eye reduction, right? Like, 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 Neil is not here to yell at me about that, and he would, and that's fine. I have no problem with that.

• 29:44Alex Cranz?

  We have a whole spectrum here.

• 29:45David Pierce?

  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 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.

• 30:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's Pandora's box.

• 30:02David Pierce?

  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.

• 30:10Alex Cranz?

  David, 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?

• 30:24David Pierce?

  A little, yeah. I mean, I think, Alison, to your point, we, 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 Jeong 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. Like, what Uber did to the taxi industry was just make it slightly more convenient. Like, the, the idea of things being fewer steps away from you, and, and they become like a step change more popular, is real. Like, there's an, 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

• 31:08David Pierce?

  slightly less alarmed. If they made it an app you had to download that costs $700 and required, like, a master's degree to learn how to use successfully, I would also be less alarmed. I really do think that, like, the fact that it's a separate app right now is a good thing. I 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.

• 31:32Alex Cranz?

  Totally.

• 31:32David Pierce?

  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.

• 31:40Alex Cranz?

  They want it in people's hands, right? Like to the, to the point of their philosophy is this now.

• 31:44David Pierce?

  Right. So why wouldn't Google find more and more ways to bring it forward? Like you, 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. And it will, it will produce that photo. The original photo that you take will include that. Like, why, why?

• 31:59Alex Cranz?

  Well, you're gonna have to actually say, but take a photo of this bicycle mangled next to a car with a dent.

• 32:07David Pierce?

  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.

• 32:17Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 32:18David Pierce?

  Like, I just, I have reached this point now where like, I, 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, right? 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. That gets, it gets so messy and we end up with a weird section 230 thing all over again. Who is responsible for mean things that people say on the internet? But like, if Google were responsible for every single thing that reimagine produced, you think Google would have launched this?

• 32:59Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 33:00David Pierce?

  Not a chance.

• 33:02Speaker 04

  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. And that's a violation of the policy. It's like, okay.

• 33:18David Pierce?

  No, it's, it's worse than that. It's worse than that. The, the statement that they've given to everybody, including us, um, from Alex Morikone at Google says, 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.

• 33:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it does.

• 33:40David Pierce?

  We didn't do it, you did it. Guns don't kill people, people kill people.

• 33:44Alex Cranz?

  Right. And I, I think they're coming at this from the, they're, they're thinking, oh, we're just like Photoshop. Because to, to everybody who comments, that, that's true. Like 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 they're happy to talk about it on stage. They're happy to talk about it in advertisements and profiles, whatever. They're not happy to talk about it when we ask them.

• 34:11David Pierce?

  Right. The ease is a feature, not a bug, unless you ask Google about how easy it is.

• 34:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And then 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.

• 34:22David Pierce?

  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? Like, 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,

• 35:07David Pierce?

  right? Like, I have a, I have a leak in my ceiling. I take a photo and I send it to somebody. I have, there's a, there, 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. What 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. Like, 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. Like, we don't think about how much a part of our lives photos are. We talk a lot about politics and like, really high stakes stuff, but what if the low stakes photos don't count anymore?

• 35:41Alex Cranz?

  I was 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.

• 35:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:50Alex Cranz?

  Because, because like, like, 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, like, give me more money.

• 35:59David Pierce?

  Yeah. What if the insurance company can refuse my claim because they don't have to believe my photos?

• 36:03Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 36:03Speaker 04

  Or it was shot on a Pixel 9. They're like, oh, we don't accept those.

• 36:07David Pierce?

  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. For so, so many reasons. All right. Buy the Pixel 9, just don't do any of that. I think the takeaway. Be good. Don't do evil.

• 36:26Alex Cranz?

  Don't be a dick.

• 36:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, weird. Don't be evil. Somebody should really use that as a, that's a good tagline for something. Yeah, rings a bell.

• 36:34David Pierce?

  All right, Allison, we gotta take a break and we're gonna let you go. We're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about a bunch of streaming shenanigans, because there are endless streaming shenanigans. We'll be right back.

• 36:45Speaker 05

  Everyone's talking about the prospect of a democratic wave in the midterm elections. But here's something that matters just as much. The battle to control state legislatures.

• 36:55Speaker 06

  That's the most important thing we should be focusing on right now.

• 36:58Speaker 05

  The GOP has a trifecta in 23 states, which means they control the governor's seat, plus the state house and the state senate. For Democrats, it's 16 states.

• 37:09Speaker 06

  Meaning that the opportunity to pass the policies that the majority of our state supports, things like increasing minimum wage, legalizing marijuana, codifying abortion.

• 37:20Speaker 05

  If Democrats flip just a handful of state legislatures, the majority of Americans will now live in a state under full democratic control, which could have big policy implications.

• 37:32Speaker 06

  That's all on the table with the Democratic trifecta.

• 37:34Speaker 05

  This week on America Actually, we're in Wisconsin and we talked to Francesca Hong.

• 37:39Speaker 06

  We have an opportunity through Wisconsin to actually start improving the brand for Democrats.

• 37:45Speaker 05

  Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 37:52Speaker 07

  What if we told you there was one thing you could eat to reduce your risk of death by about a quarter? Interested?

• 37:58Speaker 08

  And what if we added that this magical substance can dramatically lower your cholesterol, improve your mood, and keep your weight stable?

• 38:06Speaker 07

  No, it's not protein. It's actually fiber, the least sexy, most overlooked nutrient of all.

• 38:12Speaker 08

  But what is fiber? How could one nutrient do all those amazing things? And how can you get enough? Is a powder you stir into some water gonna do it for you?

• 38:21Speaker 07

  All that, plus the strange tale of the gorilla poop-obsessed father of cornflakes in the latest episode of Gastropod. Find Gastropod and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:36David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Richard Lawler is here. Richard, welcome.

• 38:40Speaker 09

  Hey.

• 38:41David Pierce?

  We've brought you here to talk about Chick-fil-A.

• 38:45Alex Cranz?

  Like, are you a nugs sandwich?

• 38:48David Pierce?

  Spicy or not spicy? That's the question.

• 38:50Speaker 09

  Uh, sandwich only, no pickles.

• 38:52Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 38:53David Pierce?

  Okay, that's a strong, that's a strong order. What's your sauce?

• 38:57Speaker 09

  Sauce.

• 39:00David Pierce?

  Touche. Uh, we're gonna get to Chick-fil-A because I have, I have a game we're gonna play when we get to Chick-fil-A. But first, we're gonna do a brief segment called Alex Krins, what the hell is going on here?

• 39:12David Pierce?

  And it's all about Paramount, because somehow we have more Paramount shenanigans. Alex Krins, what the hell is going on here?

• 39:20Alex Cranz?

  Uh, Paramount really wants to be sold. Sharon Redstone's, she's done with, with this business. She's, she's ready to move on. David Ellis, another person who, who came up in the, 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. And this other guy said, hey, no, no, you gotta 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 gotta 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.

• 40:02Alex Cranz?

  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. Um, just no ad revenue or anything. So it's a, it's a fun time over there. I'm glad I don't work at Paramount is, is basically the gist of it.

• 40:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't know if anyone's gonna work at Paramount at the end of this.

• 40:25Alex Cranz?

  Somebody will. Like, like this is a big studio with a lot of assets. And I would be very surprised if they're allowed to sell off all of those assets to the people who would want to buy them. Because, uh, like, 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. Like, I don't think Disney should be allowed to buy Paramount.

• 40:49Alex Cranz?

  But that just makes it a more difficult climate to sell this stuff.

• 40:53Speaker 09

  Can we pass a law that makes it so the only people who can buy Paramount are people whose parents are obscenely rich?

• 40:58Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 41:01Speaker 09

  Because I think that would fix everything.

• 41:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like Elon Musk's daughter, you should buy this. But, but yeah, it's only rich people are allowed to buy it. 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.

• 41:25David Pierce?

  Richard, I'm really enjoying the, the theory of a pro Nepo baby economy.

• 41:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:31David Pierce?

  That we, we just demand, we give things to the Nepo babies, but we demand that they spend all their money on those things. I really love this for them.

• 41:39Speaker 09

  And, and I love this round of news because it brings back Ed Bronfman Jr., who I didn't know was still in, in, in the league.

• 41:44Alex Cranz?

  Who is this person?

• 41:46Speaker 09

  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 kinds of entertainment industry books about the nineties and 2000s and all, I guess, going back to the eighties. He's one of those figures who pops up. He is the heir to a liquor fortune, I think.

• 42:05Speaker 09

  And has bought his way into media companies all over the place. And is currently running, is currently, I think, a chairman of Fubo or.

• 42:13Alex Cranz?

  Yep, chairperson of Fubo currently.

• 42:16David Pierce?

  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 like the main important thing to remember is that this is a tiny industry and everybody has worked everywhere. And they are, they're all the companies are run by the same four people.

• 42:35Alex Cranz?

  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 Avendi Universal. Like did a little Broadway producing.

• 42:52Alex Cranz?

  Man loves media.

• 42:54David Pierce?

  I mean, but like bigger picture, it really seems increasingly like right now, like Netflix is good. Just be a 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 Acolyte got canceled. Everybody, as far as I know, hated the Acolyte 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.

• 43:28Alex Cranz?

  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, and those people are really good at being really, really loud. So the people who are just like, oh, I'm, I'll 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 Willow, which was excellent and shouldn't

• 44:11Alex Cranz?

  have been pulled from the service, but nobody watched it. And they're afraid that they're going to pull this one from Disney plus because nobody watched it. Like that, that was the thing. It just got bad ratings. Nobody watched it.

• 44:20David Pierce?

  So was it good though?

• 44:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:23David Pierce?

  Cause I'm, I'm super sympathetic to that entire argument.

• 44:26Alex Cranz?

  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. And then slowly gets to seduce to the dark side by Manny Jacinto's arms. And like,

• 44:43David Pierce?

  I'm really enjoying Richard's face as you described it.

• 44:45Speaker 09

  Why wasn't that the trailer? I would have watched it.

• 44:47Alex Cranz?

  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.

• 44:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, that is the single most compelling argument for the Acolyte that I've ever heard.

• 45:03Alex Cranz?

  I think that they had just shown his arms.

• 45:05Speaker 09

  For that second or third, or however many seasons they've had of the Bounty Hunter show of Boba Fett. Because we got kind of tired of Star Wars after a point.

• 45:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And, 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 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,

• 45:45Speaker 09

  You need to have enough volume to drown out certain things.

• 45:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:48Speaker 09

  And if that volume goes away, suddenly that's all that's left.

• 45:51Alex Cranz?

  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 he stars girls. That's exactly what you sound like when you complain like that, people. Just to be clear, I want to insult you.

• 46:15David Pierce?

  Every time we hear that now, just take that clip and just play it in response to whoever tweets mean things about these shows. So, 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. 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

• 46:58David Pierce?

  they're given the job. Like, I don't know, it just, there's so much just like swirling chaos inside of all of these things.

• 47:05Alex Cranz?

  I would say that Hollywood is in one of its most difficult moments, like more difficult than the pandemic, particularly all these streamers and stuff. Because when you look at 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, get 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 like pop in and start watching.

• 47:47Alex Cranz?

  Like, 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 like the non-tech ones. You have Warner Brothers, who just wrote down all of their broadcasts 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. And 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.

• 48:32David Pierce?

  They did.

• 48:33Alex Cranz?

  They like, they showed what happens when a really smart broadcaster programs really well on these platforms. And it worked. And they did really, really well. How long that lasts? How quickly those people churn? That's all a story.

• 48:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, the Olympics are unfortunately over.

• 48:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you get two weeks.

• 48:53David Pierce?

  Tough times for Netflix.

• 48:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:55Speaker 09

  No one else is watching Diamond League? We're not coming back for the Paralympics? They're about to start. Come on, let's go, let's keep this going.

• 49:01David Pierce?

  There's that new Steph Curry show on Peacock that seems like it's awful. Like, really great times for Peacock.

• 49:06Speaker 09

  I think the thing about Netflix is, it turns out that basic cable for $15 to $20 a month is a pretty good idea.

• 49:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:15Alex Cranz?

  That's it.

• 49:16David Pierce?

  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. And for 20 bucks a month, that's essentially what Netflix has. Like, and as long as it keeps having those periodic wins, which it continues to do, it's gonna be very hard to supplant.

• 49:47Alex Cranz?

  And it's gotten a lot more savage about its cancellations, too.

• 49:50David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 49:51Alex Cranz?

  Right? Like, like, it is not afraid. Disney Plus was pretty, pretty timid about canceling things, which is why we got three seasons of Mandalorian, and the, the entire season of Boba Fett. Why? But, but like, Disney's gotten a little more aggressive about it. And Disney's, you know, pulling from, from Warner Brothers playbook of like, okay, the show doesn't get a lot of views, we're gonna pull it, we are gonna 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. And that, 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.

• 50:33David Pierce?

  Well, and I think that the thing you said about the broadcast piece of it is really important, because the, 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. And 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, we actually don't have at all.

• 51:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:10David Pierce?

  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 gonna have. And so you just end up in this, like, it's, it feels like a spiral towards ugly places.

• 51:22Alex Cranz?

  That's why you're hearing a lot of talk in. In Hollywood right now is that like David Zaslove is gonna 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, when he first did it, was let's merge it all together. Let's make this super app. Let's, let's like 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 that? 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.

• 52:04David Pierce?

  To be fair, that's just CNN. You just described CNN.

• 52:06Alex Cranz?

  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.

• 52:13David Pierce?

  This is why, so the other day Alex comes storming into our Slack going, have the CNN Chyrons always looked this crazy?

• 52:20Alex Cranz?

  That's right. I did just start watching CNN last week. Hi, my name's Alex Cranz.

• 52:25David Pierce?

  This makes sense. Well,

• 52:26Alex Cranz?

  It's bad.

• 52:27David Pierce?

  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.

• 52:38David Pierce?

  Richard, 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?

• 52:47Speaker 09

  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 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 Kathy family, they also were key to the foundation of Trilith Studios, which you may not know necessarily by the name, but you know by what they make there, which is the Marvel movies.

• 53:15Alex Cranz?

  Really?

• 53:15Speaker 09

  In, in Georgia, a massive, massive, massive production lot.

• 53:21Speaker 09

  Where a lot of things are made.

• 53:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, George George's got the good discounts if you want to shoot there.

• 53:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:27Alex Cranz?

  And the good studios. It's not just Tyler Perry.

• 53:30David Pierce?

  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. Can I share a little bit of what I've discovered with you?

• 53:41Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 53:42David Pierce?

  Chick-fil-A has a whole separate brand that it's that it calls Penny Cake. And Penny Cake, why is it named Penny Cake? I could not tell you, but it's basically a a brand full of like family friendly games and activities. It has a bunch of like puzzles. It has a bunch of those things where you like pull a a prompt out of a bag and you talk about it as a family. And it's like, i- 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. Chick-fil-A also, fun fact, has made content before.

• 54:28David Pierce?

  It made a series of shows called The Stories of Evergreen Hills that I would describe as like animated in the style of the Polar Express, but about like how to be a good person. It's like, what if the Berenstein 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.

• 55:03Alex Cranz?

  It's like Veggie Tales.

• 55:05David Pierce?

  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 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. But 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, am I overthinking this or underthinking this?

• 55:51Speaker 09

  Did Chick-fil-A stop and say, why not, when they were thinking about sponsoring a bowl game?

• 55:57David Pierce?

  I mean, fair.

• 55:59Speaker 09

  And does Chick-fil-A plus make less sense than Hallmark plus? If you think, if you think about it, why does a card company have a network?

• 56:06Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I just figured it out.

• 56:08David Pierce?

  So, okay, wait, but I'll give you that if Chick-fil-A wants to basically make worse food network. Then I'm in.

• 56:14Speaker 09

  Probably.

• 56:15Alex Cranz?

  No, Chick-fil-A is gonna acquire what the scorched remains of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment in red. They're gonna acquire all that and then they're just gonna do Christian streaming service.

• 56:32Alex Cranz?

  Cause they love Jesus differently than other people do, but they have their own opinion. Yeah. Um, I love that they don't work on Sunday, but that's what they're gonna do. They're gonna do a Christian entertainment streaming service.

• 56:49David Pierce?

  I think that's right. And as we've seen, that's a big market, uh, right? Like Angel Studios is very successful.

• 56:55Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it wasn't a big market for Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment.

• 56:57David Pierce?

  No, but I would say they'd made a lot of mistakes.

• 57:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's, that's fair.

• 57:04David Pierce?

  Like, if Chick-fil-A gets really big into selling DVDs at Chick-fil-A, I think we'll have a problem.

• 57:09Alex Cranz?

  Red boxes and all the Chick-fil-A.

• 57:10Speaker 09

  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.

• 57:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. But Chick-fil-A, that's about it's about to do, so.

• 57:20David Pierce?

  Okay, so this, this is the game I just, I just want to play for a few minutes here.

• 57:24Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 57:24David Pierce?

  Um, I'm, you are now the head of content at Chick-fil-A. Congratulations to both of you.

• 57:29Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 57:29David Pierce?

  You are in charge of making a streaming service.

• 57:34David Pierce?

  A, you have to come up with a 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.

• 57:44Alex Cranz?

  Chick-fil-A for the Soul is the name of the streaming service.

• 57:47David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 57:49Alex Cranz?

  FT, I don't know, I'm not gonna do that. But Chick-fil-A for the Soul.

• 57:53David Pierce?

  CFA FTS?

• 57:55Alex Cranz?

  Something like that. It's not great. It is a 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.

• 58:03David Pierce?

  Wait, that's good. That's actually very good.

• 58:05Alex Cranz?

  And either a reboot, or we're just gonna get the rights to Prairie, what was, uh, Little House on the Prairie.

• 58:12David Pierce?

  Oh, okay. So just like sweet, down home, family shows?

• 58:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Seventh Heaven will be there, but they're just gonna like blur the dad's face out every time he appears on screen.

• 58:23David Pierce?

  We'll just deep fake someone else into.

• 58:25Alex Cranz?

  Deep fake someone else into his 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, that's gonna be so good. Okay. Be like, I can't believe Chick-fil-A did that.

• 58:38David Pierce?

  Richard, what about you? What's, what are, what are we doing? Chick-fil-A?

• 58:43Speaker 09

  I'm going a slightly different direction and launching Pacific Rim Network.

• 58:46Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 58:47Speaker 09

  Which is all Pacific Rim spinoffs all the time. Unfortunately, there's already a stream of these in production. They've been, they've just continued making them.

• 58:54David Pierce?

  Are there really?

• 58:55Speaker 09

  Intensely. They'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 we're making like a resurrection theme every three episodes.

• 59:06David Pierce?

  There are strong merch tie-ins. You can, you can sell the, the, the robots in Chick-fil-A. We, we take over the Happy Meal business immediately. I love this. Okay. What are we calling the streaming network?

• 59:20Speaker 09

  Oh, it's, oh, it's Pacific Rim Network. It's all Pacific Rim. Everything's Pacific Rim.

• 59:24David Pierce?

  Okay, okay.

• 59:25Speaker 09

  It's all stories of Pacific Rim. We've got like the big short in Pacific Rim. Like when people figure out where the monsters are gonna attack and they're like shorting the stocks of those companies. It's great. We've got, we cover all genres.

• 59:35Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna have-

• 59:36David Pierce?

  Remaking everything, but it's all set in the Pacific Rim world.

• 59:40Alex Cranz?

  So Seinfeld in the Pacific Rim world.

• 59:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, Pacific Rim, Seinfeld.

• 59:45Alex Cranz?

  Honestly, I'd watch that.

• 59:46David Pierce?

  Sex in the City and Pacific Rim.

• 59:48Alex Cranz?

  Watch that too. Like, 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.

• 59:59David Pierce?

  Joey and Chandler in the suits, just hanging out. This is great. Alright, that's, that's very good. Mine, in case you're curious, I'm calling the network The Sauce.

• 1:00:09Alex Cranz?

  Mmm.

• 1:00:10David Pierce?

  And-

• 1:00:11Alex Cranz?

  Delicious.

• 1:00:11David Pierce?

  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 gonna play that all the time.

• 1:00:34Alex Cranz?

  Just jars of clay.

• 1:00:35David Pierce?

  Just jars of clay, everywhere you look. Some Switchfoot, when we're feeling edgy, lots of stuff to do. And then-

• 1:00:43Alex Cranz?

  Little Creed.

• 1:00:43David Pierce?

  And then it's just gonna 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. And I think we're gonna take over. I think I am going to absolutely dominate. And one show at least is going to be called My Pleasure, and it is going to be our tent pole show. I don't know what it is, but I know it's called My Pleasure.

• 1:01:04Alex Cranz?

  It's actually gonna be a remake of Red Shoe Diaries. We're just gonna go really, really wild with that one.

• 1:01:08David Pierce?

  As I say it out loud, My Pleasure might be like, too sexy a show.

• 1:01:12Alex Cranz?

  I was like, that's a little racy for, for Chick-fil-A.

• 1:01:16David Pierce?

  Okay, well, we have, we have a lot to think about.

• 1:01:18Speaker 09

  Chick-fil-A After Dark, come on now.

• 1:01:20David Pierce?

  Oh, 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.

• 1:01:28Alex Cranz?

  The nugs are spicier. After Dark.

• 1:01:32David Pierce?

  Okay, so we're accidentally inventing Chick-fil-A's porn network, which is good. This, this is the next-

• 1:01:36Alex Cranz?

  We're helping, we're helping.

• 1:01:37David Pierce?

  Phase of growth for Chick-fil-A.

• 1:01:40Speaker 09

  Welcome to the entertainment business, Chick-fil-A.

• 1:01:43David Pierce?

  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. The big podcast news of this week, I would say, is that Alex Cooper, who hosts Call Her Daddy, and I think is probably like the second biggest name on Spotify after Joe Rogan, just in terms of like people who got giant, whatever, eight-figure deals to go be on Spotify exclusively, is leaving Spotify and going to Sirius XM, signed a huge deal for like $100 million, super big deal. And just strikes me as very interesting because, I'm sorry, it was $125 million.

• 1:02:28Alex Cranz?

  So much money.

• 1:02:30David Pierce?

  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

• 1:02:49Alex Cranz?

  checks. No, this makes sense. Sirius is always like 10 years late to the game.

• 1:02:53Speaker 09

  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.

• 1:03:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Speaker 09

  You wouldn't even think about this. You would just say, oh, yeah, that's, that's obviously what happened.

• 1:03:10Alex Cranz?

  This is the Howard Stern.

• 1:03:11David Pierce?

  She did a Howard Stern, is what you're saying.

• 1:03:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's a Howard Stern.

• 1:03:14David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:03:15Alex Cranz?

  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.

• 1:03:22David Pierce?

  Okay. 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 like 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. And like, do Gen Z people know what Sirius XM is?

• 1:04:04Alex Cranz?

  Well, they're gonna have to if they're gonna follow her. I mean,

• 1:04:07Speaker 09

  will still be available on other podcast platforms.

• 1:04:10David Pierce?

  So they're just spending all this money to sell ads for Call Her Daddy?

• 1:04:13Speaker 09

  I guess.

• 1:04:14David Pierce?

  Which is fine.

• 1:04:15Speaker 09

  You know, if you can make the money work.

• 1:04:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, that just seems like a ton of money if that's your play. But what do I know? Maybe, maybe it'll work.

• 1:04:22Alex Cranz?

  Three months for a dollar.

• 1:04:25David Pierce?

  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. And 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.

• 1:04:41Alex Cranz?

  I would say it's, it's a sign of consolidation. I think the, the, these two companies have managed to persist. iHeart Radio with like, an enormous monopoly on broadcast radio in the United States. Yeah, that's like, they, they just wanna try to stay alive as long as possible.

• 1:04:57David Pierce?

  And you'll, they'll just write giant checks until there are no more giant checks.

• 1:05:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, until, until the giant check account is closed.

• 1:05:03David Pierce?

  I mean, listen, Alex Cooper, get that money.

• 1:05:05Alex Cranz?

  Get your bag. Yeah, get the bag. Go for it. I love this for her.

• 1:05:09David Pierce?

  Yeah. All right, we gotta take a break. And then we're gonna come back to a lightning round. We'll be right back.

• 1:05:18David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. It's lightning round time. Richard, you're sticking around to the lightning round, which means you get to go first. What'd you pick?

• 1:05:24Speaker 09

  My pick is Amazon cancelling 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.

• 1:05:47Alex Cranz?

  Like Alexa prompts.

• 1:05:48Speaker 09

  We'll sell you an Echo that will just show photos on its screen. But you have to pay for it.

• 1:05:54Speaker 09

  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.

• 1:06:15David Pierce?

  So they're essentially just

• 1:06:18David Pierce?

  Removing the whole reason you bought this device in the first place.

• 1:06:21Speaker 09

  Yes, and it's just a regular Echo Showay.

• 1:06:26David Pierce?

  No. Why? There's so many stupid things about this, Richard.

• 1:06:31Speaker 09

  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 this shelf of any store in America anywhere can do with basically no processing power and nothing.

• 1:06:47Alex Cranz?

  Is it like, is it a tech, like, is there a technological reason for it? Or is it just?

• 1:06:53Speaker 09

  No, it's just.

• 1:06:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we just want to push all of our different Alexa, like advertisements and stuff on you. Something to pictures.

• 1:07:01Speaker 09

  Yes, they, they want, 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. And 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, they don't buy more stuff.

• 1:07:36Alex Cranz?

  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.

• 1:07:57David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:08:04Alex Cranz?

  Little kids do it all the time. They're like, buy me, buy me a fire tablet.

• 1:08:07David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Alex Cranz?

  You're like, no, shut up. Leave it alone. It's not for you.

• 1:08:12David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:08:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37David Pierce?

  I'm not an accountant. What do I know? But 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's like when every when the they took the MTV News archive offline. It's like, I'm pretty sure you can afford to keep MTV news.com online. Like, I think it's fine.

• 1:09:10Alex Cranz?

  Maybe it's like a tax write off. Do you get a tax write off if you just remove a feature? Like, like, do they get a tax write off for that?

• 1:09:16David Pierce?

  They're like, no, we did a bad job on that one.

• 1:09:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like Hollywood is always like, never mind, we're not going to release this movie. We're going to put it in a vault forever. Give me money. IRS. And like, Amazon's just going to give me money.

• 1:09:28Speaker 09

  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, etc., etc., etc. It's probably a similar thing within Amazon. It's like, okay, so so who wants to weekly check in and make sure that the photo subscription is still working? Nobody? Okay, cancel.

• 1:09:49David Pierce?

  I guess. I don't know. Open source it. Like, get get a user to do it. Like,

• 1:09:55Alex Cranz?

  Richard's just like,

• 1:09:56David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:10:15Speaker 09

  What you think is unreasonable. They spend a trillion dollars on new AI chips, but they can't spend $100 to keep this running.

• 1:10:22David Pierce?

  Exactly. 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. Uh, Cranz, what's yours?

• 1:10:36Alex Cranz?

  Um, not related to Amazon. Mine is JBL. You remember last year they had the, the headphones that had a screen on them for the case? They did it again, but the, the, the screen got bigger. It's a much bigger screen. You can like, you can pause. You can, you can skip tracks.

• 1:10:55David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:11:05Alex Cranz?

  I think you might be able to do more with this than you can do with Gemini, because you can set alarms.

• 1:11:13Speaker 09

  See, I was gonna go the other way. I was gonna say, this is like a box poem, but a headphone case.

• 1:11:17Alex Cranz?

  But yeah, but you can set alarms, you, you can check text messages. Basically, if you didn't have an, some sort of smart watch, you just pull this out of your pocket instead of your, your phone. That's probably likely gonna happen.

• 1:11:32David Pierce?

  I don't, I don't dislike this.

• 1:11:33Speaker 09

  That's actually, that's actually better. I, I kinda like that. Like, I don't need a smart watch all the time, but I'm going to be carrying my earbuds anyway.

• 1:11:40Alex Cranz?

  They, they like, they just look neat. I don't know. I'm, I'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.

• 1:11:57David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:12:05Alex Cranz?

  Ooh.

• 1:12:06David Pierce?

  Uh, right? Like, I want the, 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.

• 1:12:16Alex Cranz?

  Like, actual, physical buttons.

• 1:12:18David Pierce?

  Yeah. Like, what if my AirPods case just had 12 buttons on it?

• 1:12:22Alex Cranz?

  That'd be nice. You just, then people are like, why, what are you fiddling with in your pocket?

• 1:12:25David Pierce?

  It's basically just a little fidget spinner. I'm just in there just clicking around all day.

• 1:12:30Alex Cranz?

  I'm always like flipping the case open and close, and then I'm like, why don't I have any battery?

• 1:12:34David Pierce?

  So one random thing, have you, I always hate asking people if they've seen a thing 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. That was like every fifth video I saw on TikTok. Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 1:12:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I like, 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, he just was, I was like, oh, should we call these in?

• 1:13:14David Pierce?

  He made a very convincing case.

• 1:13:15Alex Cranz?

  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.

• 1:13:32David Pierce?

  Is this the same Lenovo? Like Lenovo is definitely turning into one of those companies that just kind of makes everything.

• 1:13:38Alex Cranz?

  Yep. Including weird e-ink laptops. Thank you, Lenovo.

• 1:13:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, hell yeah. Just keep doing that.

• 1:13:44Speaker 09

  I did not get that. The only thing I get on TikTok now is Cole Hocker edits of himself.

• 1:13:50David Pierce?

  That seems better, I think.

• 1:13:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was like, I like that.

• 1:13:53David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:14:16Alex Cranz?

  Why is TikTok not doing that as a speed dating app?

• 1:14:19David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. And it's like on Hinge, but instead of having to like, answer ask and I'm questions about yourself, you just start like, here's my feed. Do you love me?

• 1:14:28Alex Cranz?

  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.

• 1:14:36David Pierce?

  I love this.

• 1:14:37Alex Cranz?

  Dating apps.

• 1:14:37David Pierce?

  That's a good idea. Anyway, TikTok, you can have that for free. Sponsor the lightning round.

• 1:14:43Alex Cranz?

  Speaking of lightning, what's yours?

• 1:14:45David Pierce?

  Mine is, I just want to talk about the Sonos app again for a minute. Because this, this whole Sonos app story has gone from like,

• 1:14:55David Pierce?

  Ridiculous to sad to just weird and confusing. The most recent thing is that Sonos, which Chris Welch scooped, what, last week? Two weeks ago? Recently, that the company was considering re-releasing the app. 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 this is so brutal for Sonos. Like, it's just, I mean, let me just read you more of the quote here.

• 1:15:37David Pierce?

  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's saying is we broke everything so badly that we can't even go back anymore.

• 1:15:59Alex Cranz?

  I just, like, I have so many questions. How does that, how does that work? I mean, 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.

• 1:16:19David Pierce?

  The last one, like, it's a very funny Rorschach test of like, do you want all the features but kind of bad? Or do you want slightly better but no features?

• 1:16:30Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:16:31David Pierce?

  It's like, well, maybe Sonos, you should have just done, they're both bad, to be clear, not good outcomes, but it's, this is just tough.

• 1:16:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this is, this is awful.

• 1:16:42Speaker 09

  I just don't understand how they got to the point of having an app that doesn't work and doesn't do what people want.

• 1:16:47David Pierce?

  Right. Like 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. They 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.

• 1:17:32David Pierce?

  And this is not a good moment to be doing this, if you're Sonos.

• 1:17:36Alex Cranz?

  They apparently, I didn't realize they, they got rid of their beta program, or they, they, they didn't make it as robust as it used to be.

• 1:17:46David Pierce?

  I'm, there 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, and, and what, 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 a sense like, like, we have to do all of this at once. And holy God, did that backfire.

• 1:18:05Speaker 09

  All to launch these headphones that, did anyone ask for Sonos headphones?

• 1:18:10David Pierce?

  Have you, 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.

• 1:18:17Alex Cranz?

  Sonos was always like, it was, 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. They have so much more money than you.

• 1:18:32David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:18:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but I don't think it's like, at the same stage as like Bose.

• 1:18:44David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:18:45Alex Cranz?

  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. And, and so it's got like, really good online brand recognition, but.

• 1:18:55Speaker 09

  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.

• 1:19:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:03Speaker 09

  Like you could walk into Best Buy and you could say, man, you know what? I need some hall. I need to hear music everywhere in my house. He was like, you know, I got some for you.

• 1:19:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Alex Cranz?

  Well, how much money?

• 1:19:12David Pierce?

  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. 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. Cause it just doesn't anymore.

• 1:19:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:39David Pierce?

  And like, and it, it, the road to get back to that seems like it is pretty long at this point for Sonos.

• 1:19:45Alex Cranz?

  Excellent AirPlay 2 speakers.

• 1:19:48David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:19:57David Pierce?

  Lord knows I will not be updating that system anytime soon.

• 1:20:00Alex Cranz?

  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. It's, they're now AirPlay speakers.

• 1:20:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:14Alex Cranz?

  Nobody tell me how I should just get a receiver and, and big bookshelf speakers. I know. It's expensive. I already spent the money. Shut up.

• 1:20:22David Pierce?

  Yeah. If you, I wonder if we're going to get to the point where like, if you have a phone and a Sonos system that is like all still running the old software, because you never updated, that's going to become like a thing you can sell on eBay for way more money.

• 1:20:32Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:20:32David Pierce?

  Cause it's the thing that still works.

• 1:20:34Alex Cranz?

  I hope that, I hope that happens so much.

• 1:20:36Speaker 09

  You, 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.

• 1:20:43David Pierce?

  I gotta work this Sonos. You interested?

• 1:20:46Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 1:20:48David Pierce?

  It's good. All right. We're just inventing businesses here on the Vergecast. That's what we do.

• 1:20:51Alex Cranz?

  I mean, yeah.

• 1:20:53David Pierce?

  All right, 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 Farsaci's final video for The Verge, which is very sad, about I just seen, 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. Tons 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.

• 1:21:42David Pierce?

  And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. 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.