The great Pixel 8 camera debate

The Verge’s Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the announcement of Google’s Pixel 8 phone, along with the new AI tools that raise lots of questions. Further reading: Google Pixel 8 launch event: the 7 biggest announcements Google Pixel 8 hands-on: a little bit smaller and a little bit smarter The Pixel 8 Pro hands-on: better cameras, a brighter screen, and new AI Google Pixel 8 will get seven years of Android updates Google Photos’ new AI tools for Pixel 8 raise messy questions Google releases Android 14 for Pixel phones Android 14 gets AI-generated wallpapers on Google’s latest Pixels Google Pixel Watch 2 hands-on: new sensors, longer battery, better accuracy Google announces new colors and features for its Pixel Buds Pro earbuds Netflix is planning to raise prices... again Streaming service price increases: the latest on Netflix, Disney Plus, Max, Hulu, and more Paramount uploads Mean Girls to TikTok across 23 video clips The Humane Ai Pin makes its debut on the runway at Paris Fashion Week https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/Cx8M6xqAWeC/ Apple addresses iPhone 15 overheating with a new iOS 17 update Paris Hilton gets special deal to post on X LG is dropping ATSC 3.0 from its TVs next year The Verge and dbrand have partnered on new skins for the Pixel 8, iPhone 15, and more iPhone 15 Pro Max camera: 1000 photos later, it’s still missing something Email us at [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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Ruchast, the flagship podcast of extra large cups and bowls. Yeah.

• 1:18Alex Cranz?

  You never know when you need one.

• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  No, you always know when you need one, which is always.

• 1:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  All right, look, here's what happened. Before we started the show, David held up his new Ember mug, which is gigantic.

• 1:28Alex Cranz?

  It's huge.

• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  It's it's so big.

• 1:30David Pierce?

  It weighs so much. It was so much work to hold it up just now.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  Our own James Vincent, who's currently on book leave again. He wrote an entire book called Beyond Measure about the pop, essentially the politics and culture of measuring things. This is one of the vergiest verge ideas that anyone has ever had. And it's obvious and you should go read this book. It's called Beyond Measure. Go read it. And it occurred to me as we were talking about David's comically large electric cup. That's what it is. Let's be honest. The I have no idea how much a cup of coffee is like not price, like volume.

• 2:05Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 2:06Nilay Patel?

  And David pointed out to me that the word cup has a third additional secret meaning in the context of coffee.

• 2:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, so when you, when you have a coffee maker and you see the lines on the side, that's like this many cups of coffee, you would think that would be like a cup, like a measuring cup, cup. It's not. It's a coffee cup, which in most cases is defined to be either five or six ounces. So what you're getting is not eight cups measured by mugs or eight cup measured cups. You're getting eight cups by this random measure of a tiny amount of coffee that no one actually wants.

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  This is another book, a whole other book.

• 2:46Alex Cranz?

  How many, how many cups of coffee?

• 2:48Nilay Patel?

  This is, okay, the problem with the history of Europe.

• 2:51Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 2:52Nilay Patel?

  Is that a bunch of kings got to invent a bunch of, right? And now we just live in their world. King Harold was like, I don't know, it's this many, whatever. All I'm saying is you should get extraordinary, the biggest coffee cups you can, the biggest mugs. And then we bought gigantic bowls at our new house. They're, they're so big. They make an average amount of soup look like not a lot of soup.

• 3:16Alex Cranz?

  You've consumed a lot of soup.

• 3:18Nilay Patel?

  You move into a new place, you're like, what, what large format foods can we acquire? So we don't have to think about this for the next several weeks.

• 3:26Alex Cranz?

  When you fill it with ice cream, is there any ice cream left in the carton?

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  I prefer not to answer that question this time.

• 3:32David Pierce?

  This makes me think of like, so my wife and I eat cereal, as a lot of people do, and her definition of a bowl of cereal is just whatever the size of the receptacle is. So like if you give her like a relatively small, human sized bowl, she'll fill it with the, the, you know, normal amount of Cheerios, put some milk in and move on with her life. If you give that woman like a bucket, she'll fill the bucket with Cheerios and be like, this is a serving of Cheerios. So like, I love a big bowl. It's, they're, they're better than plates at everything, including, no, just everything. It's just all the things. But if I give my wife a large bowl, she will, she will eat like a deathly amount of Cheerios and I can't do this.

• 4:12Nilay Patel?

  I want you to know there's a trend in plateware where the, the plates are becoming bowls and they're like, they're half bowls. There's a designer out there who invented this, who's furious that they're being ripped off.

• 4:22Alex Cranz?

  Fiesta ware. My Fiesta ware bowls.

• 4:24Nilay Patel?

  You just randomly said the word Fiesta ware. Okay, we gotta stop this. There's actual tech news. I'm just saying, if you want to write the inside story of how plates are becoming bowls, there is but one publication that will be like, yes, this belongs to us.

• 4:40David Pierce?

  And if they're temperature regulated, like my Ember mug, all the better.

• 4:44Nilay Patel?

  If your bowls have Wi-Fi in them, call me. There's a lot of tech news this week. By the way, I'm your friend Neelai. Hello. David Pierce is here.

• 4:52David Pierce?

  Hi, me and my mug, we're both here.

• 4:55Nilay Patel?

  Electric mugs. I drink the coffee too fast. I want to be, I've always wanted an Ember mug, and there's just no hope for me. Why?

• 5:02David Pierce?

  Oh, I'm the opposite. I drink the first five sips really fast, and then the last two thirds, six and a half hours later. This is why this thing is perfect for me.

• 5:10Nilay Patel?

  Alex Trance is here.

• 5:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm still thinking about the Fiesta ware bowls. They're huge. I've eaten so much chili.

• 5:16Nilay Patel?

  Fiesta ware, the radioactive ones?

• 5:18Alex Cranz?

  The old ones.

• 5:19Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 5:20Alex Cranz?

  I don't think mine are.

• 5:21Nilay Patel?

  Very good.

• 5:22Alex Cranz?

  We'll see in a couple of months.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  If you don't know why I just said is Fiesta ware, the radioactive ones, that's a little Google adventure for you tonight.

• 5:28David Pierce?

  It's a good one.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  That's a little Wikipedia hole that you could fall down on. A service we provide here on The Vergecast, Stuff to Google.

• 5:34Alex Cranz?

  You're gonna have a great time.

• 5:35Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to our newest segment, How to Google About Old Plates. All right, there is a lot of tech news this week, like absurd amount of tech news. There are some philosophical quandaries. A bunch of people are mad at me in Instagram threads for suggesting that words have meanings. It's a lot. There's just a lot going on. There is the Pixel event that had Android 14, the Pixel Watch 2, new Pixel Buds. The price of every streaming service is going up, and the actors are still on strike. Lots going on there. And then we have a deeply hilarious lightning round, just of things, just people continuing to make choices. We should obviously start with the Pixel. David, what happened at this event?

• 6:16David Pierce?

  Sure. So, this event, as ever with Google recently, has been absolutely leaked to death. So, we kind of knew what was going on coming in, but basically, we got two new phones, the Pixel 8 and the Pixel 8 Pro, which have a lot in common, but are differentiated, especially along camera lines. It's a little bit like the way Apple does it, but Google split it in a bunch of ways that I don't think make a lot of sense. But anyway, new tensor chips, normal sort of upgrades over time. The screens got better, especially on the 8 Pro. But the camera is the thing, and we're going to talk a lot about the camera, so I'll leave that for now. We also got the Pixel Watch 2, which seems to have much longer battery life, which is awesome. It seems to also have better performance, which is exciting.

• 6:57David Pierce?

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

• 7:40David Pierce?

  It's a disaster of a feature, cool idea, bad feature. Hopefully Google got it right. And some Bluetooth super wideband, which is obviously a thing we have to talk about today on the first cast. And yeah, again, just a bunch of new software stuff coming. And I feel like software was sort of the story of this event. Like, Google still makes phones and still makes watches and still makes headphones, but is increasingly taking all of the stuff that happens on those devices and moving it somewhere else. A lot of the camera stuff that happened is not happening on the camera. It's happening in Google Photos, and that's not nothing. And there's a lot of cloud stuff happening, and they talked a lot about Assistant with Bard. And Android 14 came out and it's getting generative AI stuff. Like, Google has really leaned into this idea that it can basically make you

• 8:26David Pierce?

  a decent piece of hardware with a whole lot of stuff happening in the cloud, and that that's the correct balance from now on. And I'm deeply fascinated to see if that turns out to be true.

• 8:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and this is obviously the flip of Apple's approach, where everything is happening locally on the phone, and the phone processors are the fastest processors in human history. And how dare you even suggest that other processors may be faster at any time?

• 8:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 8:50Alex Cranz?

  Nothing's faster.

• 8:51Nilay Patel?

  Do you know what makes the iPhone Pro Pro? It's really good at games.

• 8:56David Pierce?

  Retracing, baby.

• 8:56Alex Cranz?

  It's the most pro feature.

• 8:58Nilay Patel?

  Very confusing. Google's always kind of walked this line though, right? How much is happening on your phone? How much is happening on a Google service? You know, people have been sharing all these home screens lately. And I think, David, somebody shared one to you and me on threads. And it was their entire home screen was Google apps. And you're like, you know, Android exists.

• 9:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 9:16Nilay Patel?

  Wasn't that a coworker of ours? No, I mean, I'm sure it's many coworkers of ours are like that. But I think Google recognizes this, that a lot of people have iPhones that are just vessels of Google services. And Google can just sell you a phone that is that thing.

• 9:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 9:31David Pierce?

  I will say, it doesn't give me great confidence in Google wanting to continue to make hardware for a long time. But I already didn't have great confidence in that, so whatever.

• 9:41Alex Cranz?

  I kind of feel like we need to start, and by we, Google, not us. I think we're pretty realistic about it. Be realistic about the fact that these are always going to be like the surface. It's always a device to show OEMs what they can do with the stuff that's available and the software that's available.

• 9:58Nilay Patel?

  I disagree with that.

• 9:59Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, really? Fight me.

• 10:02Nilay Patel?

  I think that might have been, I mean, we've been through 50 rounds of what is a Pixel phone for. That's what the Nexus line was for, like a piece of reference hardware a billion years ago. That might have been what the first Pixel phones were for. But there's only one OEM in Android world that matters.

• 10:20Alex Cranz?

  That's fair.

• 10:21Nilay Patel?

  Right? There's Samsung.

• 10:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:23Nilay Patel?

  And so I think the idea that Google needs to show Samsung how to do it is just not reality. I think Google needs to show Samsung that if Samsung screws up or steps out of line, that it will go and get the marketing deal with Verizon.

• 10:38Alex Cranz?

  But did it do that to?

• 10:40Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think Samsung has stayed in line.

• 10:42David Pierce?

  Okay, wait, Neelai, go with me here. Google is to Samsung what Bing is to Google. Like a substantially less successful thing that exists both to try and be a good product, but mostly as a check on the other thing, just saying, if you blow it. We will come for you.

• 11:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, only the slight difference is that if Samsung didn't exist, Android would not be as important as it is.

• 11:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 11:10Nilay Patel?

  At least in this country and in Europe and India and Africa like Android is a big deal all on its own. Like my favorite thing about the Indian smartphone market is like 14 phones get released every single week. And people in Android there is expressed very differently like Android is globally important, whether or not Samsung does it in this country. Android doesn't exist without Samsung.

• 11:33David Pierce?

  That's right.

• 11:33Nilay Patel?

  Which is just at least in smartphones. That's crazy, right? And I think a lot of the pixel is there to just repeatedly show Samsung. Hey, we can do it too. Right? And so if you pull, if you put ties in on your phone, which they've threatened to do, or you skin the phone too hard, which they have done. And like, there's a whole history there. You know, Google's there. So I think the pixel is just different.

• 11:57Alex Cranz?

  So you're saying the pixel is basically Google just staring Samsung in the eye? And saying, try it.

• 12:05Alex Cranz?

  Like just uncomfortable.

• 12:06Nilay Patel?

  To some extent, I think they also need a vessel for their services. They want to show people what it would be like. They also want to compete head on with Apple.

• 12:13Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 12:14Nilay Patel?

  There's a, there's a lot there, but what is the thing it accomplishes the most? It's not sales.

• 12:19David Pierce?

  Right.

• 12:19Alex Cranz?

  It's true.

• 12:20Nilay Patel?

  It is a lot of interest from phone nerds. It is crazy to me, the disproportionate amount of traffic we get on pixel coverage versus Samsung coverage.

• 12:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think that's why I think of it like the Surface devices. Cause it's the same thing like people care about the Surface devices in the way they do not care about Asus, unless it's appearing in court. But yeah, like, like that's, that's really, cause people really passionately like the Googled devices. But it's a very small group of people, according to the sales.

• 12:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and that's right. We are not, we're fully into talking about, this is the thing with talking about pixel. It's more fun to talk about the, the concepts and the ideas embedded in the pixel line than the phones.

• 13:01Alex Cranz?

  There was cool stuff this time.

• 13:02David Pierce?

  I don't know. I mean, the thing that really stuck out to me was how much the people who were otherwise primed to like a phone like these. Did not like it this year. Like typically, the overwhelming reaction I've seen, and I'm sure this is not true of everybody. I'm sure there are people who are excited about it. And I think there are cool things worth getting excited about. But like, a bunch of people on like the Android blogs were mad about the sort of perceived lack of interesting stuff Google did here. Our commenters were not psyched about this in a big way. The general feeling of this launch that I got was a lot of people kind of being like, this, like that's, they seem like fine phones, but like that's, that's all you got? And I kind of agree, like, Google made a good phone here that really doesn't seem

• 13:47David Pierce?

  to make a particularly interesting case for itself, outside of some of the camera stuff.

• 13:51Nilay Patel?

  And they also raised prices by a hundred bucks.

• 13:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, it's like a boring looking phone, extraordinarily boring. But the magic editor thing is cool, right?

• 14:01Nilay Patel?

  All right, we, we, the camera is such a six hour.

• 14:04Alex Cranz?

  I know, I want to just go talk about it.

• 14:06Nilay Patel?

  Can you just read the specs of the phone? So we've done, we've, we've done our job.

• 14:11Alex Cranz?

  You've talked.

• 14:11David Pierce?

  Sure, I can do this. Okay, so, main things to know. The Pixel 8 starts at 700 bucks. The Pixel 8 Pro starts at a thousand dollars. They both run Android 14. The Pixel 8 has a 6.2 inch screen. The Pixel 8 Pro has a 6.7 inch screen. That's also a little better. 12 gigs of RAM on the Pro, 8 gigs of RAM on the 8. More storage options in the high end on the Pro. You can get, I think, 512 and a terabyte, which you can't get on the Pixel 8. They both have USB-C. They both do more face unlock stuff than they have in the past, which I think is interesting. Google's like letting you do more with face unlock, but didn't really explain if it has made face lock, unlock more secure, which I thought was interesting. A million outrageously complicated differences in the camera.

• 14:56David Pierce?

  Allison Johnson made a spreadsheet of which features are coming to which, that even now doesn't make any sense. But basically, the Pro has four cameras that you can use. It has the 50 megapixel main camera, 48 megapixel ultra wide, 48 megapixel telephoto, and the 10 and a half megapixel camera on the front. The Pixel 8 has the same main camera, a 12 megapixel ultra wide. No telephoto and the same selfie cam. And then again, there's a million software features. Fundamentally, the Pixel 8 Pro is like a dramatically better phone in the way that I think it's kind of like comparing, not like the iPhone Pro and the Pro Max, but it's kind of like comparing the base iPhone to the iPhone Pro Max.

• 15:40David Pierce?

  It's like none of the things versus all of the things. And it's a $300 price difference, which I guess, you know, bullies that. But that's essentially the rundown. Like, they have the same chip, which has been very important to Google, to have all of this stuff kind of on the same generation of sensor as much as possible to do the AI stuff they want to do. But then it just gets real chaotic from there. And they come in a bunch of cool colors that are actual colors. Like, Google didn't do the thing Apple did and just put like one drop of color dye near the phone and call that a color. They actually colored the phone. It's very exciting.

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  All right, so we're talking about the camera?

• 16:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, let's talk about the camera. Magic editor.

• 16:13David Pierce?

  Neither of you were listening to that, were you? You were just sitting there going, "Shut up so I can talk about the camera." I get it.

• 16:18Alex Cranz?

  I was reading along.

• 16:19Nilay Patel?

  If we don't, if we don't say the spec, like, when I was a little baby gadget blogger, I was told, "Just get the specs and the price out of the way, and you can say whatever you want, but if you don't deliver those upfront, people are gonna get mad because it's all anybody cares about." So now you have the specs, you have the price. I was talking about the camera.

• 16:35Alex Cranz?

  Magic editor, magic editor.

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  So this is like a, this is, I think, a watershed moment in these cameras. And it isn't at all at the same time. And I want to be clear on that. There's a tension here because of what David said earlier. The features are built into Google's cloud services and their apps. But the way they are marketing this camera, the way they're showing it off on stage, the thing they want you to think it can do is lie to you. Like, there's no other word for it. The camera has generative AI tools, not built into it, but parked on the front lawn.

• 17:16David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 17:16Nilay Patel?

  You know what I mean? It's like, it's not, it's not, they're not the same. They're not, it's not in the house.

• 17:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Nilay Patel?

  You know?

• 17:23Alex Cranz?

  It's like a Photoshop editor.

• 17:25Nilay Patel?

  But you can open the window and yell at the generative AI tool and it will definitely hear you. Eventually, the gap is gonna close.

• 17:32David Pierce?

  You're talking about Magic Editor, right? Like essentially, there's a lot of features, but that's the one.

• 17:36Nilay Patel?

  That's the one, and in particular, in Magic Editor, the one I am talking about, is the one where you can take a bunch of frames of people altogether, and it will assemble a composite. You can pick the faces of the people. That, like, I don't care if you lie to me, I'll call it a sky. You know, like, whatever.

• 17:54Alex Cranz?

  It's green.

• 17:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the sky's green, you're great. You're crazy. Like, I don't know, man. You have all the, right? You moved a salt shaker from the left to the right of the picture, that's great. I'm glad that happened for you. You know, you're an artist. You start changing the way people look at each other in photos. You are playing with fire. Like, in the realest way.

• 18:17David Pierce?

  You're kidding about the line there, but I actually think the line there is really important, and I want you to tease out why that bothers you in the way that the sky doesn't. Because if your fundamental problem is, these cameras and their editing software let you lie about what you're seeing in front of you. I think that's like, slightly sort of Chicken Little Sky Is Falling-ish about the world, but also like, I can understand that take. I can also understand the take that just says, most people take photos of their family and would like everyone to be smiling, and that's basically fine. I can also see that, but you're trying to find this middle that I don't necessarily know how to find, where it's like, changing certain things is fine.

• 19:00David Pierce?

  Are you okay with the thing where you can like, move stuff over in the scene, where like, if you shot them off-center, you can slide them over on the bench to be in the center? Like, where does this go from silly changes to like, you're lying to me?

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I mean, first of all, all of it's lying to you.

• 19:15David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 19:16Nilay Patel?

  Like, did this actually happen is now a threshold question for smartphone photography.

• 19:22Alex Cranz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:23Nilay Patel?

  If you look at a photo that came off a smartphone, a good question you can ask is, did this happen? Did this look this way?

• 19:31David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 19:32Nilay Patel?

  We have been doing what is a photo on the show since, for years now, since the first pixel. Since the, what's the iPhone 11 was the first one with HDR, and it looked kinda bad. You know, like, we've been talking about what a photo is for a long time, because the... What most people believe a photo to be is you open a shutter, a bunch of light hits a sensor, the shutter closes, and that's the end of that.

• 19:58David Pierce?

  Right. And the the goal is how accurately did this capture reality? That's the like, that's the metric of success.

• 20:04Nilay Patel?

  Right. And there's a whole other brand of photography, and we can get into it. It's like very creative, where you are trying to manipulate light and textures and you're posing people. Like, all this stuff is happening. You're doing wild edits in Photoshop. But the the thing that we rely on photography to be is an accurate representation of light in a moment. And that, you know, those moments can be long or short. You can do long exposure, but whatever. It's like, this light occurred, like, these things happened. And you get to a place with computational photography where it's where it's at even now, before you start moving faces around with AI. We're like, man, we're like, right at the boundary of this.

• 20:43Alex Cranz?

  I I think I I think I know where the boundary is. I think I I think I got it. I think so. We've always been able to manipulate manipulate photos, right? Like, you've been able to manipulate photos since the first person took the photograph. Like, they were they were putting fairies in in photos in the 1800s and saying, yeah, it's a real fairy. And it's like, no, it's a person wearing a stupid outfit.

• 21:03David Pierce?

  What?

• 21:03Alex Cranz?

  That's always shocking, I know, but that's always been there. But the it was hard to do, right? Like, in order to do the stuff that you can now do on a phone in Photoshop 20 years ago.

• 21:15Nilay Patel?

  Wait, no, back up. You're about to make you're about to make the argument that Google's making, which is like, we just made the tool more accessible. Let me just back up for one second.

• 21:21Alex Cranz?

  I'm saying this, the accessibility itself is the line.

• 21:23Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no, I just.

• 21:24Alex Cranz?

  You disagree.

• 21:25Nilay Patel?

  That's like, that's basically Google's line. To be honest, like, that's like what Google is saying, right? And it's our piece. I just want to back up for a second. Even if you stop moving faces around, the thing that we are doing now with basic HDR and phones, where you're doing complicated exposure stacking to make things look better, is right on the blurry edge of the line, because it never looked that way. Right? Like, in like, the goal is to make it like, look even, or even out the tones, or expose everything evenly. And like, that's not how your eyes work. And like, this is a very philosophical, very abstract, very Vergecast conversation about like, okay, it's a photo. And like, it's not, maybe not what you saw, or maybe not what old film looked like. And,

• 22:07Nilay Patel?

  you know, we've had Mark Lavoie from the Pixel team on the show, talking about what artists the Pixel was meant to evoke. And every year, the art, like, we've done it. And that's just exposure.

• 22:18Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 22:19Nilay Patel?

  Right? We've done years of conversation about computational exposure manipulation, and what that means for photography. And that's smart HDR in the iPhone, that's the Pixel's computational photography. And all of that is just, boy, should there be shadows in photos?

• 22:37Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 22:37Nilay Patel?

  And literally, years of conversation about the blurry line of computational photography and exposure. And I still don't know the answer. Like, I think that's very subjective. I think, you know, it hit the mainstream at The New Yorker. Kyle Chikka had a piece in The New Yorker about iPhone photos not looking real, and there being backlash against it. That's crazy. The, just exposure, computational manipulation of exposure.

• 23:04Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 23:04Nilay Patel?

  Is now a mainstream conversation about what photography means. So that, the line already is blurry, before we get to adding various in the 1800s.

• 23:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:13Nilay Patel?

  Now, I'm going to tell you that, inside the new phone, inside the Pixel 8, it is marketed in having a tool where you can take a bunch of shots. It won't just stack exposure. It will change people's faces, at your discretion, to create a reality that never existed.

• 23:29Alex Cranz?

  I just...

• 23:29Nilay Patel?

  Like, a thing that never happened.

• 23:32Alex Cranz?

  And I still see that as Photoshop. I still see that as the exact same...

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  Fine. But this is where the accessibility, this is where your thing about accessibility comes in. Okay, fine. That's Photoshop. But the camera is marketed as that thing. So I spent the morning on the train in coming up with like very silly examples.

• 23:50Alex Cranz?

  Go through them. Let's hear them.

• 23:51Nilay Patel?

  Like very silly.

• 23:52Alex Cranz?

  I'm so, I talked about fairies. It's okay.

• 23:55Nilay Patel?

  Okay. You are at a Chiefs game. And you see the box with Taylor Swift and Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively and whoever else. Hugh Jackman. Can't erase Hugh Jackman from this, please. He was there, right? Okay. It looks like Travis Kelsey is going to score a touchdown. So they're all cheering with any fumbles in your as well. And they all, they're all sad.

• 24:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, now you can just tweak the faces. So you got happy Hugh, happy Ryan, happy Blake, sad Taylor.

• 24:24Alex Cranz?

  But I can do that in Photoshop.

• 24:25Nilay Patel?

  You can do that in Photoshop, but you wouldn't like the accessibility is the thing like now you can lie more easily right off your phone and send it.

• 24:34Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 24:35Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Should there be some norms about whether or not that tool should be widely available to you, to anyone?

• 24:42Alex Cranz?

  I think there should be.

• 24:43Nilay Patel?

  Should it be built into the camera? Should it be so close to the camera that the camera is marketed? The line is best take uses of photos you did take to get the photo you thought you took. That is the marketing of this camera. That is the positioning of this camera. And it's like, yes, you can do anything in Photoshop. You could have done this a hundred years ago in Photoshop, but the effort to do it, the effort to lie was high. It was a barrier to entry. So lowering the barrier to entry to now they're not photos or just memories. And we all know how foul memories are. So, oh, you're going to change the very nature of photography to make it so you can't trust any pictures. And in my, my mentions on threads, it's a lot of people saying, well, you could never trust pictures.

• 25:27Alex Cranz?

  See, that's where I, I'm, I'm.

• 25:29Nilay Patel?

  Okay. When I say it's a watershed moment in cameras, this is the camera that is making people say you cannot trust pictures.

• 25:38Alex Cranz?

  I don't think that. I think

• 25:39Nilay Patel?

  I don't think

• 25:40Alex Cranz?

  I think there was a bunch of memes about sharks swimming through the streets of Houston that said, "I can never trust pictures."

• 25:46Nilay Patel?

  But those, but those people were like, but that is like so obviously silly.

• 25:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:50Nilay Patel?

  This is like, the camera is, it will be sold to you so that when you take a bunch of frames of your family, it will synthesize a thing that never happened by design, and that is a selling point of the camera. Let me off, and the market will not correct this. The market will say, "That's great, because I want better photos of my family."

• 26:10Alex Cranz?

  It does feel very like...

• 26:11Nilay Patel?

  Let me offer you this other very silly example.

• 26:13Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 26:14Nilay Patel?

  And this is like based on a meme that I saw today.

• 26:16Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited.

• 26:18Nilay Patel?

  It's really bad. You're gonna, can you pre-forgive me for this?

• 26:20Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 26:21Nilay Patel?

  It's a camera,

• 26:22Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 26:22Nilay Patel?

  and it takes a photo, and it adjusts the photo.

• 26:24Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 26:26Nilay Patel?

  It processes the photo and throws the original photo away.

• 26:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:29Nilay Patel?

  And so it's gone. You can never recover that photo.

• 26:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:31Nilay Patel?

  And at the other end, everyone in your photo just has huge boobs.

• 26:37Nilay Patel?

  The market buys this camera. This is the most successful camera in human history.

• 26:40Alex Cranz?

  I would do that all the ti- everyone's got big naturals.

• 26:44Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying.

• 26:44Alex Cranz?

  Just across the board.

• 26:46Nilay Patel?

  I think you probably have some sliders. Look, it doesn't matter. My point is, the market does not reject this camera. Like, the people of the United States are like, "That's the camera we want."

• 26:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because big natural.

• 27:00Nilay Patel?

  Jesus Christ. Maybe I should have agreed not to get mad at you.

• 27:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Sorry, David.

• 27:06Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, like, if you just think about this, like, people want lies. They want pleasing lies.

• 27:12Alex Cranz?

  I didn't realize it gets rid of the old photo, like...

• 27:14Nilay Patel?

  No, this is my hypothetical example.

• 27:15Alex Cranz?

  Okay, yeah, because like terrifying.

• 27:16Nilay Patel?

  This is just a made up example I have.

• 27:17David Pierce?

  You're also dead wrong about that, by the way. Just like that thing you just described, no one want, there are like four horny teenagers on the internet who would be psyched about that.

• 27:26Nilay Patel?

  There's a Kickstarter for that camera right now, I guarantee you. And I want a cut. All I'm saying is, if you, but the market isn't gonna correct for truth. I, I made up that example because it's silly and it honestly, I wanted to see how I should react to it.

• 27:39Alex Cranz?

  It's my favorite idea.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  But like, in general, in the information ecosystem we are in, the, the market, the free market is not like truth is important to us. It's more like pictures of sharks.

• 27:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Nilay Patel?

  Right? And so now you ma- you've made this thing. Google has made this thing. The company that wants to organize the world's information has made a camera. We're right next to it, camped out on the front lawn, marketing the phone with, we will synthesize pictures that never happened. It never happened. We are gonna make you images that never occurred without a second's hesitation on how that might go completely sideways for them.

• 28:19Alex Cranz?

  I mean, they're not just doing it with photos though, right? Like, they're doing it across the board with generative AI.

• 28:24Nilay Patel?

  I mean, but this is like, when you talk about the AI apocalypse.

• 28:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Nilay Patel?

  Like, the AI misinformation apocalypse is right on their front door. It's on YouTube. Deep fakes are on YouTube.

• 28:33Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 28:34Nilay Patel?

  And at the same time, the argument is, well, we're just making, these tools are already available. We're just making them widely accessible to everyone. It's like, yeah, letting people lie at scale is actually, I don't know if you've been around the past five or 10 years.

• 28:46David Pierce?

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

• 29:30Nilay Patel?

  Wait, where, where in this camera is responsible?

• 29:33David Pierce?

  Nowhere. That's my point. Just full bold. But if Photoshop was doing this and not Google Photos, and it was just as easy and just as good, but you had to pay for a Creative Cloud membership to have it, would you have a problem with it?

• 29:44Nilay Patel?

  So it isn't effectively in Photoshop.

• 29:46David Pierce?

  It's this much harder in Photoshop, but not that much harder.

• 29:49Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's that much harder. There's, Face Swap exists on I, there's a million of these things that exist. But the image pipeline from camera to editing software to distribution is important, right? Because the thing you need to trust is the camera. And Google is right on the blurry edge. The camera is still fine. The camera is still just doing HDR, as far as I can tell, right? And maybe it's like recovering some detail. But if you just look at how they are talking about the camera, the features in Google Photos in Google's marketing are integral to the experience of the camera. That's weird.

• 30:29Nilay Patel?

  And when I say the line is blurry, yes, and on a very basic, technical level, some features are in one app and some features are in another app. But then on a much more like intuitive level, Google Photos is the gallery app on your phone. Like, it's just like that when you look at the photos, like, do you want to edit them? Do you want to combine these into a thing? Like, it's driving you towards these choices in a way that having Photoshop is like, I'm intentionally going to go do this thing.

• 30:58Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 30:58Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 30:59Alex Cranz?

  It's because it's suggesting rather like, like it's removing that intention. That's kind of, it feels like where the issue is.

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  Right. It is right, Google, to its credit, right? Google, I know that they are thinking about this and they've made this choice. In another year, another Android OEM, which is either less responsible, more aggressive, or however you want to say it, is going to build it right into the shutter button of the phone, right? And they're going to say, take a bunch of pictures and we will AI generate everyone looking at you right away. And we will throw away the original.

• 31:28Alex Cranz?

  And you're going to look super hot.

• 31:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's the camera that would sell.

• 31:31Nilay Patel?

  In one, in one specific way, Alex, if that's what you're into.

• 31:34David Pierce?

  My, my other question is, I think this question of like, taking a bunch of photos that exist in order to make one that never did. There is something there that is sort of icky. But if, if that was just saying, like, if Google said, we're going to do the same thing, but we're going to treat it essentially as like merging burst mode, where we're not going to use a single picture that wasn't captured. We're just going to use the best pixel in every part of the photo from the 10 images that you took. Would you still have a problem with that? Every pixel of that is real. It's just not all at the same time.

• 32:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, everything happened, but not all at the same time. Travis Kelsey never looked at Taylor Swift, but we've invented a photo.

• 32:12David Pierce?

  No, that's what I'm saying. Travis Kelsey looked at Taylor Swift, but not at the same moment Hugh Jackman was also making that funny face.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  Right, but so now we've now, but now we've created a moment that does, this is dangerous territory.

• 32:23David Pierce?

  Go with me here philosophically, go with me here. If, if that last step of we've used all that data to create a thing that never happened.

• 32:30Nilay Patel?

  But every single bit of that data. So what you're describing, by the way, is just, this is just composite photography. The number, again, the number of people that I mentioned who are just like recapitulating in history. I, I know, I know that all these ideas have existed and all these tools have existed before.

• 32:41David Pierce?

  But if you take composite photography and make it that easy and that accessible, do you have the same problem with it?

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  Yes, like without question, yes. Because your expectations of these images are different. You have to change society's norms. And maybe the norm is never trust a photo again. Yeah. Okay. Big decision. Just putting that out there. Huge decision. Have you been around? Have you looked at the internet and how quickly and easily people will believe photos? Okay, I need you, instead of tweeting at me, to go talk to all of them. Let me know when you're done, right? Like, fine. Like, that's a huge norm shift in society. It is not as simple as waving it away by saying you shouldn't trust anything.

• 33:26Nilay Patel?

  If you would like to get to a place where no one trusts anything, then you should play that all the way out. And so, you know, the flip side of this is I think this is fine for creative use. I think this is probably fine for family photos, like where the stakes of the images are low. Probably fine.

• 33:44David Pierce?

  Which is the vast majority of images. The vast majority.

• 33:48Nilay Patel?

  Maybe, but I don't know. I just, we, we now create, when you say the vast majority, we create so many photos as a people that like the vast majority of everything in all photos is nothing.

• 34:01David Pierce?

  But I mean, think about even your own life, right? Like, the, the number of pictures in your camera roll, and I suspect this is true of most people, that will be viewed by, frankly, just you and no one else ever, or you and ten or fewer people ever, is

• 34:16Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 34:17David Pierce?

  practically all of them.

• 34:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:19David Pierce?

  And you're a pretty public person in the scheme of things, right? Like,

• 34:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right now, most of the photos in my camera roll are of like, light switches that I need to rewire, and I just need to remember what colors are going there.

• 34:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 34:30Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, boy, I hope the pixel doesn't lie to me about that. That seems like a fire hazard. Like, you know, like, whatever. You're, you're not wrong. I'm just saying, like, it'd be crazy, right?

• 34:40Alex Cranz?

  Like, the idea is like, you know what? That red, like, cable, that's not pretty.

• 34:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:44Alex Cranz?

  Yellow.

• 34:45Nilay Patel?

  What if we write that up a little bit?

• 34:47Alex Cranz?

  Sorry.

• 34:48Nilay Patel?

  Black wired? Mm-mm. No, no, no. Right? Like, it's not gonna do that. Fine. The revolution in photography is that more people use the tool than ever before in phones. Right? That, that's just, so you have this, like, shared understanding, worldwide, cultural understanding of how the camera works. First time in human history that you have had a tool where everyone is using it the same way to make the same thing. And then, importantly, closing the loop, consuming it on the same device. That piece is really important. We talked about that with the Vision Pro and Spatial Photos the other day. Like, it breaks a chain for Apple, where you're taking pictures on a phone that you can't view because they're designed for the Vision Pro. Right now, with phones, the chain is, the loop is complete.

• 35:33Nilay Patel?

  You, you have a tool, you can take photos, you can look at photos other people took on largely the same tool on, on your... That's very important. That's a shared... So if you break that for people, and you say, you understand how unreliable your tool is, right? That you, you are often using this tool to make things that never happened. Well, then you change everyone else's understanding of everyone else's tools. And that is like, a long process, a slow process? Ideally, a very considered process. And like, here we are on the doorstep, and Google's answer is, well, we put some metadata in it, and sort of everyone else's response is, well, you could always do this with Photoshop. And it's like, yes, I could always lie. What I did not do is culturally recontextualize the very nature of lying

• 36:18Nilay Patel?

  spread across every phone in existence.

• 36:20Alex Cranz?

  Sure.

• 36:21Nilay Patel?

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

• 36:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:58Nilay Patel?

  And this camera will not necessarily deliver you what you want instead of what is true.

• 37:02Alex Cranz?

  I mean, we've been seeing that for a while now in, in phones in China, where they would lighten skin and smooth everybody out automatically, and you couldn't escape it. I think even one of the early iPhones did that.

• 37:13Nilay Patel?

  No, so, so this has been a conversation that I've had with the various photography teams. And all these, again, we've been having this conversation about something as simple as exposure for a long time, like, for 10 generations of the phone.

• 37:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:27Nilay Patel?

  Like, exposure? Just how bright and light are things? And then you add on top of that skin smoothing. And what you have found, what we have all found, what the major companies have found, is the Chinese market and the South Korean market want built-in beauty filters. And the American market thinks that as a moral catastrophe. And it probably is, I don't know. It is. It hasn't, doesn't stop the people on TikTok from choosing them all the time, but like,

• 37:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Nilay Patel?

  whatever. And so they've had to split the difference.

• 37:58Alex Cranz?

  But I'm saying, that gives us like a framework as we go into this next phase with Google and, and, and people who follow after Google, is we kind of have that framework. We've seen how it happens in China. We've seen how it happens in South Korea, to some extent.

• 38:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see. I mean, like, should, again, this is my point.

• 38:14Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I, I, I agree with you.

• 38:15Nilay Patel?

  This is my point about my fake camera. Like, the market in this country, the market rejected the idea of aggressive skin smoothing.

• 38:23Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 38:25Nilay Patel?

  That's actually like, maybe not what you would have expected. And you have another, you have a counter example where the market in Asian countries actually wanted it. And, you know, Samsung basically gives it to them. Apple kind of doesn't, you know, like they're, they're like, you can get the apps. Like, that's more or less their answer when you ask them, like, you know, we see, we see FaceTune, like, all this stuff exists and, like, you can just get it. We have blue bubbles, we're good, right? I don't know what the market is gonna say about the camera can swap faces around. I don't.

• 38:55Alex Cranz?

  I thought it was kind of terrifying, and there's a video on our TikTok right now of Allison and Becca using it. And it's horrifying if you know Allison, because her face just keeps switching, but her body doesn't change, and you're like...

• 39:08Nilay Patel?

  Right, so here are some important caveats to this entire conversation. One, we haven't reviewed the phones. I don't know how good this stuff is. I have a sense of how good it is. Two, I've said nothing about, like, the audio filters, where, like, in video, it just makes people's voices stand out against, I'm like, that's great. You know, like, I, maybe I'm morally compromised in that front, too. And it's not built into the camera. And Photoshop exists, and all this stuff, and like, whatever. I'm just saying, there's not a lick of introspection here. There's Google saying, "We put some shit in the X if data to market as edited." And it's like, guys...

• 39:39Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's really funny that this is coming from Google, who's been very vocal about, like, "We're doing AI, but right." And it's like, okay, but you just, how is this any different than the, like, putting out a generative text AI that can just lie?

• 39:52David Pierce?

  Well, yeah, that's what I keep coming back to during this conversation is like, the thing we're describing here is what's happening with everything everywhere on the internet. Right? Like, this idea that it's, we've made it trivially easy to lie to a lot of people is like the story of the social era on the internet.

• 40:08Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 40:09David Pierce?

  And first, it was easy to lie in a text post, and then it was easy to lie by making a website that looked like a news post, and then it was easy to lie because you were associated with the Russian government. And now, it's easy to lie in photos. So like, I think the arc of that is not that different. It's just that it's getting sort of higher fidelity. And we're gonna go through this with video in a very real way at some point, very soon, too, as all of these image generators get better. I mean, we should be talking about Dolly 3 and the fact that it's able to do things that look like photos now. Like... We are now past the point where you can quickly glance at a generated image that is wholly generated and immediately go, oh, that's AI. Like, we are past that. You can no longer do that unless somebody wanted it to not look like a photo. And all of this is, I think,

• 40:53David Pierce?

  wrapped up together. And I think, like, the means of creation in Dolly 3 is, in a lot of ways, easier than, I don't even have to buy a pixel to do that. I can just go to, I go to Bing and I can just do that. Right? So I think, yeah, these big questions of like, trust and rules. And I think, I think you posted about this earlier, but like, I've been going back and rereading like, the AP's rules about how they do photos, and Getty's rules about how they do photos. And like, for people who take the kinds of high-stake photos that you're talking about, there have always been rules about what you're allowed to edit, and how, and basically, like, you can like, crop, and you can vignette, and that's essentially it. And you can't even really mess with things to make them more beautiful. The idea is like, you took the photo, that is what it looked like, we are going to publish that.

• 41:38Nilay Patel?

  If you look at the, the New York Times, in sort of their feature photography, the vignetting is out of control, because it's, it's the one knob that they can turn.

• 41:48David Pierce?

  Yeah. And so I think you're gonna start to see these folks, like, in the same way that we have more and more people being more and more outspoken about things that they're using, like, ChatGPT. People are coming out with policies about how they do and don't use it. I think you're gonna start to see the same thing with images. I do wonder if the question is going to be, like, we're going from, everything is now possible on a smartphone, to like, I wonder if smartphone photos get outlawed from some of these rules over time, for exactly the reason you're describing.

• 42:16Nilay Patel?

  So you brought up Getty. So, you know, these high-stakes image pipelines, you can't solve it in technology. You have to solve it by getting a bunch of people to agree that this is what will happen. You, norms, right? You will do this, you will not do this. So if you are a Getty News photographer, you, you just agree, these are the guidelines. And all we can really do is crop, and all we can really do is maybe a little dodging and burning. I think Getty allows you to remove sensor dust, or the AP allows you to remove sensor. But then they're like, but only if it doesn't change the photo. And if you have a question, like, ask us. So you can't enforce cultural norms in software. You just can't. You can influence them. You can, you can do some stuff, but at the end of the day, it's just a bunch of people that have to agree on how things work.

• 42:58Nilay Patel?

  So that's the news side of it. On the creative side, I think it's like wide open. Do whatever you want. Have Photoshop's great. Generate a cat. Like have all the time. That's what they, that was the demo they did with us on, on stage at Code. Like, fine. I think that stuff is exciting. On the high stakes, are you representing the truth to a lot of people? Is Donald Trump looking at the protesters? Or is he looking at his shoes? And did you remove? Like, this matters, right? These like really, do some of these images really matter what they say? There is an entire, like, ecosystem of TikTokers who just look at pictures and tell you what Taylor Swift is thinking. It matters what the pictures say. Okay. So on those high stakes pipelines, you have to set some rules. So I, you mentioned Getty, Getty CEO Craig Peters was on the Code stage with me talking about AI last week.

• 43:41Nilay Patel?

  I just hit him up and said, hey, do you look at a pixelate? What do you think of it? Would you ever, like, ban a camera? And he said, he obviously did not answer the pixelate. He's like, I haven't played with it yet. He said, we will largely continue to navigate along the following lines. Within our editorial coverage, this is the editorial coverage at Getty, the news coverage, strict avoidance of any modifications to the image. Camera manufacturers are already making some adjustments to light on the sensor, but we are as strict to the image as possible. So that's, that's it. No changes. And then he said, within creative, the sort of artistic side of Getty, we allow for a bunch of stuff. He said, I see us allowing things within creative context, but we will not allow misrepresentation. So

• 44:22Nilay Patel?

  then my next question to him was, if there's a hypothetical phone that just like aggressively smoothed skin out of the box, is that allowed? And he said, we might. There aren't, we, we don't have this problem today, but if things move in that direction, we could. So even like Getty is at the point where they're like, we're watching it.

• 44:44Alex Cranz?

  So theoretically, they could be like next pixel phone. No, you can't.

• 44:48Nilay Patel?

  Or whatever unnamed, you know, OEM makes a phone and their big camera feature is like you. You're always beautiful. I'm not gonna say it.

• 44:56Alex Cranz?

  Big natural.

• 44:57Nilay Patel?

  God damn it. You know, like Getty would be like this, this camera, this pipeline is not acceptable to us.

• 45:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:03Nilay Patel?

  And I think just the fact that one, I can ask the CEO of Getty that question. And he's like, this is the answer. Like we are considering it. That's why I'm saying this is a watershed moment. I'm not saying this phone, I'm not saying you need to be outraged about this phone. I'm not saying you shouldn't buy the phone. Seven years of software updates, you know, buy.

• 45:20Alex Cranz?

  Seems nice.

• 45:21Nilay Patel?

  Have a time, but go nuts. I'm saying that in the context of what is a photo? Google has decided that they don't make photos anymore, that they make memories. That's the quote they gave to Alison Johnson in her interview about with the Google PM about this, these tools. And they're like, these are memories. And I'm just would remind people that memories are famously fallible, famously unreliable. Not actually allowed in many objective contexts where people need to know what happened. Like, that's crazy, right? To, to make that rhetorical shift.

• 45:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:58Nilay Patel?

  It's not to say photos don't lie. It's not to say photos can't be biased. It's not to say photos can't be edited. It's this one camera. Okay, we should probably start having a really serious conversation about AI and cameras and how they collide. And whether or not we as a culture, as a society, expect our photos to be representations of moments in time, whether we expect cameras to produce that. And if we don't, we don't think that's true. Then we should probably have a huge conversation about how we start, need to start training children from a young age to never believe their own eyes.

• 46:33Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I think we should do that anyway.

• 46:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, fine. I mean, if you want to like, look, in the end, we're all going to be in headsets.

• 46:38Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna have a little seminar for five year olds. It's gonna be great.

• 46:41Nilay Patel?

  But, but that's like, those are the stakes, you know, and I think there's a lot of people kind of like doing nihilism in my mentions that are like, nothing was any or anything. Like this is just, and it's like, no, there's actually stakes like that. It means something to give everyone the tool.

• 46:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Nilay Patel?

  If I was like, I'm just making guns easier to buy. You wouldn't be like, well, everyone's always been able to buy like, no, it actually means something to give everyone the tool where they can lie at scale. And to brush it off is these aren't photos, these are memories. And if that's what you want to say, then okay, you haven't made a camera. But it's, it's, I'm not, not like outraged. I'm, we've been doing what is a photo for so long? That I'm just like, oh, this is, this is the culmination of my life's work.

• 47:19Alex Cranz?

  And we're gonna keep going. We got reviews.

• 47:20Nilay Patel?

  Now, by the way, now I have to buy a Pixel eight.

• 47:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:23Nilay Patel?

  Like, I have to have one just to be like, this is a watershed. We should all buy Pixel eights. Pixel eight sails through the roof. And when people are like, why? We're like, because this phone is philosophically important to the nature of imagery. Not because it's any good.

• 47:38Alex Cranz?

  Honestly, that, that made me want to go buy one.

• 47:40Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that, can you imagine if like Verizon had a meeting? Where they're like, Pixel eight sails through the roof. And like, have we done any audience data? And people, and they're like, it's, it's, is it battery life? Is it performance? And people are like, no, it's philosophical quandary. Boy, have we gone over. Sorry, David. You knew this was happening.

• 47:58David Pierce?

  I did. I said, I walked right into this and I'm okay with it.

• 48:01Nilay Patel?

  We barely talked about, the phone has a screen.

• 48:04David Pierce?

  It does.

• 48:04Nilay Patel?

  You know, you can pay dollars for it. A hundred more than last year.

• 48:07Alex Cranz?

  Tensor three.

• 48:08Nilay Patel?

  All right, we'll stop.

• 48:09David Pierce?

  Can I just say one more cool thing about the, the phones or about the Google announcement? And then we should move on. Google did this weird thing where they announced that Bard, the, the L L M powering Bard is going to be powering Google Assistant. And they did it in this very sketchy way that made it seem like they had like just thought of this idea five minutes before the event started. But that's a super big deal. And Alex, you and I were at the Amazon event when they started talking about the putting L L Ms underneath Alexa to do more stuff. And I think if, if voice assistants are ever going to be good. This is the moment we're gonna start to see it. And the hope these people have is super high. The case for why this can work and why it can understand context better and why it can be more reactive is real.

• 48:53David Pierce?

  Like, the ChatGPT voice stuff is alarmingly good. And so I think if suddenly this becomes baked into Google Assistant in a way that is accessible and cool and useful and has the same control over your phone and access to the internet, that's all gonna be really cool. They were super sketchy about the announcement. I have no idea how any of it's gonna work or when any of it's gonna come, but I think it could be a really big deal.

• 49:14Alex Cranz?

  I'm very excited, especially if we can answer the cup question Eli had earlier. Like, if it knows the difference between the cups for you. Oh, my God, game changer.

• 49:24Nilay Patel?

  When you ask Google Assistant, hey, I'm trying to be kind to the audience.

• 49:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:30Nilay Patel?

  When you ask Google Assistant, how much is a cup? It's so confidently not used. Like, in the context of a coffee machine, it's just like, a cup is an answer. It's like, no, I know that's not the answer.

• 49:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's gonna give you a real one.

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back and we're gonna do another two hours on the conceptual nature of photography. We're not gonna do that. But if you send me but one email asking us to do it, we'll definitely do it. We'll be right back.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

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• 51:01Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. There's other stuff at the Pixel event. There's Android 14 got released, there's Pixel Watch 2. All that stuff is in, gonna be in a review cycle. So we will go into that stuff in detail when we've actually used it. I just can't resist a, what is a photo? I like, still want to, I'm like, ready to keep talking.

• 51:19Alex Cranz?

  It's like, we could do another four hours.

• 51:20Nilay Patel?

  Anytime you want. That's what, that's why we made the website.

• 51:24David Pierce?

  Hey Neela, guess what? Netflix is more expensive now.

• 51:26Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god, all right. Pivot to streaming. We're not letting Alex talk the whole time. Alex, what's up with your Plex server?

• 51:32Alex Cranz?

  It's doing fine. I watched Top Hat on it this weekend. It was lovely.

• 51:35Nilay Patel?

  Nice.

• 51:35David Pierce?

  Alex, your Plex server is like, famous on the internet, by the way. I posted something on Threads the other day, basically saying like, "The only possible response to the, the unending stream of streaming price hikes is just to delete all your streaming services and buy box sets of your four favorite TV shows." That solves all your problems. And I mean, a dozen different people were like, "Or just get on Alex Cranz's Plex server."

• 51:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:59Alex Cranz?

  Look, it's like, I, I worked really hard on that server. I'm not gonna lie. I, I worked really hard when I was unemployed.

• 52:08Nilay Patel?

  Are you in like, our home lab? There's, oh, you gotta get, you gotta into it.

• 52:12Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be bad.

• 52:13Nilay Patel?

  We, we gotta get you like, a rack mount Synology situation.

• 52:16Alex Cranz?

  That's what I want so bad.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:18Alex Cranz?

  I have to figure out where to put it. But, um, what I'm not gonna be doing is subscribing to Netflix. No, that's not true. I continue to subscribe to Netflix because I, I like it and there's a bunch of shows on it I like and I obsessively consume media. But Netflix is, there's a rumor that Netflix is gonna be raising its prices again. It's waiting until after the, the SAG after-strike is resolved, which everybody on both sides seems pretty confident is gonna happen fairly soon. So that's lovely to hear. The reason it's doing that is not because, oh, they signed all these new contracts and they're spending way more money on, on actors and writers. They're spending a little bit more money on actors and writers, like a fraction. Tiny, tiny fraction. The reason is because they were always gonna have to raise the prices.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:02Alex Cranz?

  Because like, 0% interest rates are gone and, and you have to pay for things. So, they need money.

• 53:10Alex Cranz?

  So, so yeah, it's, it's happening again. And David and I were talking about this beforehand. We've seen a bunch of price hikes this year and, and we're going to keep seeing some. We saw another one this week, in fact. The ad-free version of Discovery Plus is also getting a big price hike. Sorry, David. One of the few people I know that subscribes.

• 53:26David Pierce?

  It's okay.

• 53:26Alex Cranz?

  How are you feeling?

• 53:27David Pierce?

  I'm fine. We, we have finally moved all of our streaming to Max. So we just, we just live inside of Max now.

• 53:34Nilay Patel?

  Wait, leave her alone.

• 53:37Nilay Patel?

  She's fine. She's in elementary school now.

• 53:39Alex Cranz?

  She's got her own Max server.

• 53:41Nilay Patel?

  She's got her own, she's got a little Raspberry Pi, like a little, a little five-year-old sized Max server.

• 53:45David Pierce?

  It's just bluey on the server all day.

• 53:47Alex Cranz?

  Just frozen.

• 53:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just, just bluey. No, uh, right now we're, it's Minecraft videos on YouTube. She, this kid has taught herself, she's like building in Minecraft.

• 53:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:56Nilay Patel?

  And it's all because of Minecraft videos on YouTube, kids. And I, it's like, I, I'm worried about it, you know?

• 54:01Alex Cranz?

  It's fine.

• 54:03Nilay Patel?

  It's like, is my child gonna fall down the radicalization funnel? But like, right now, it's like, she's building houses.

• 54:07Alex Cranz?

  My godson wants to be a dictator because of YouTube. It's fine.

• 54:11Nilay Patel?

  Look, there's an argument that we would be better served.

• 54:14Alex Cranz?

  He said he would be a gentle dictator.

• 54:15Nilay Patel?

  He'd be like, don't trust photography.

• 54:18Alex Cranz?

  He would. Like, you get in early with him, you'll be fine.

• 54:20Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, can you, wait, everything's on Max?

• 54:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 54:24Nilay Patel?

  Have you watched the Naked show?

• 54:25David Pierce?

  No, I, Naked Attraction is not family-friendly for my 10-month-old.

• 54:30Nilay Patel?

  I watched one episode.

• 54:32David Pierce?

  For journalism?

• 54:33Nilay Patel?

  Becky and I like, sat there, we watched it together, just, and we both were like, do you wanna, do you wanna keep going? You can stop if you want to.

• 54:41David Pierce?

  No, it's okay. Anna and I are currently deep in The Ultimatum on Netflix and The Golden Bachelor on Hulu. So like, we'll, we'll get around to Naked Attraction. But the, the thing-

• 54:50Nilay Patel?

  Then don't. No, no, no, no, no, don't. Run. Run.

• 54:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, I will say The Golden Bachelor makes me feel a lot of feelings about the world, but that's for a different podcast. The, the streaming prices thing, so I went back and like, I, I made a story stream for us, just like compiling all of the recent stories about the price hikes. And like, man, it's brutal. It's just everywhere you look, it's just like $1, $2, $3 more expensive all the time. And I've been trying to figure out, there, one of two things is happening. And I'm trying to figure out which either all of these companies are just testing to see how high they can go. And eventually, they're hoping that you'll cancel everybody else and stick around with them, which will make your price flexibility higher for that one platform that you like best. And they'll be able to get away with charging you $30 apiece.

• 55:39David Pierce?

  Or everyone thinks ad plus cheap subscription is the future. So they are just going to keep pricing ad free services through the roof until you go to the ads, because they've realized that that's how they're going to make their money.

• 55:53Nilay Patel?

  This is my theory.

• 55:54Alex Cranz?

  That's the right one. Yeah, that's the one. This entire business was entirely ad dependent until Netflix.

• 56:01David Pierce?

  Like 15 minutes ago.

• 56:02Alex Cranz?

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

• 56:42Alex Cranz?

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

• 57:11David Pierce?

  Alex, that continues to be your craziest streaming take. I just want you to know.

• 57:15Alex Cranz?

  Crazy thing.

• 57:15David Pierce?

  Paramount Plus is good is your single wildest stance in the streaming wars.

• 57:20Alex Cranz?

  But then what did they do this week on TikTok?

• 57:21David Pierce?

  I don't know. Cause who cares? Oh, they're the ones who did. Okay, never mind. I take it back. Paramount's good again.

• 57:26Alex Cranz?

  See, see, you're seeing it. You're seeing it.

• 57:28David Pierce?

  You should explain what happened. But you're right. I take it all back.

• 57:31Nilay Patel?

  What did they do?

• 57:31Alex Cranz?

  So, so Paramount this week uploaded all of Mean Girls to TikTok.

• 57:35David Pierce?

  Right.

• 57:36Alex Cranz?

  And so you can watch it in little sections because that's how everybody's been watching old shows is they'll go on TikTok.

• 57:40Nilay Patel?

  No, I've watched so many movies in. What is essentially the Plex, Alex's Plex server of TikTok?

• 57:47Alex Cranz?

  You just watch, I've watched Sully land that plane.

• 57:48Nilay Patel?

  I watched Whiplash at what is obviously 2X Speed.

• 57:50David Pierce?

  I also watched Whiplash.

• 57:52Nilay Patel?

  Right? It was everywhere. It was like, oh, we're gonna, J.K. Simmons is gonna be a dick, but super fast. The only one that didn't get me was Inception, where I was like, I didn't know what was happening in this movie when I was watching it in real time on a big screen. And I certainly do not know what is happening on TikTok.

• 58:08Alex Cranz?

  That was so smart of Paramount to do because everybody does it that way. That's the new like TV stream. Like you go and you sit in front of your TV and you flip the channel.

• 58:16Nilay Patel?

  But they took it down. They took Mean Girls off of TikTok. It was just a one day marketing.

• 58:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they, they did it as a one day marketing thing and that's a really smart marketing thing like.

• 58:23Nilay Patel?

  Did they make any money on Paramount Plus?

• 58:25David Pierce?

  But it's Mean Girls Day.

• 58:26Alex Cranz?

  But it was all about the memes. Yeah, it was Mean Girls Day because October 3rd and that's when he talked to her. It was October 3rd. So I watched that movie a lot.

• 58:34Nilay Patel?

  Clearly.

• 58:35Alex Cranz?

  I, unfortunately.

• 58:36Nilay Patel?

  Oh, also, almost all of the Ocean's movies. Ocean's 11, Ocean's 12, Ocean's, almost fully. I think I watched all of Ocean's 11 on TikTok.

• 58:44Alex Cranz?

  Your FYP is much nice. Mine was just the Sully landing the plane and then young Sheldon.

• 58:51Nilay Patel?

  My, yeah, that's a lot.

• 58:54Alex Cranz?

  I watched so much young Sheldon.

• 58:56Nilay Patel?

  Mine is people complaining about the lack of, uh, switch options for Philip's Hugh, which I, I'm gonna start making these TikToks.

• 59:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's like on it.

• 59:04Nilay Patel?

  And like movies.

• 59:06Alex Cranz?

  Way more entertaining.

• 59:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:07Alex Cranz?

  But yeah, I, I think, I think Paramount's on to it.

• 59:10Nilay Patel?

  That's, this is crazier than the time you said Big Natural's 50 times a show. I don't know what she happens.

• 59:14David Pierce?

  I just, I, the, the tags we're gonna get on like, everybody does like automated transcriptions of these podcasts and we're just gonna instantly get banned from every podcast platform. Like, we're toast. But I think the thing that's so funny about this to me is everybody has discovered how good a business cable was. And, and like a bunch of people have been talking about this recently with the way the economics changed that have led to a lot of the stuff in the writer's strike is they made money from you twice. You paid a lot of money for your cable bill. And then they showed you ads and that was, that was the deal we made and agreed to for decades. And then a bunch of people thought it was a super good idea to just take one of those revenues. New streams away and they did that and it seemed very smart in a time when you could

• 59:57David Pierce?

  get infinity investment because you just kept showing user growth and then we come to the last two years and all of a sudden it's like you have to start making money again and they're like, well, how did we make money the last time? And it's like, oh, by making money twice and they're just going to do the same thing again, except instead of paying one $70 bill and seeing nine minutes of ads every half hour, I'm going to pay 10 $7 bills and see nine minutes of ads every half hour. But the user experience is going to be worse. We're literally in the middle of rebuilding worse cable and it's starting to drive me totally nuts.

• 1:00:31Alex Cranz?

  Wait, but we don't have to deal with a cable box.

• 1:00:34David Pierce?

  I don't know that that's better.

• 1:00:35Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I do.

• 1:00:36David Pierce?

  Instead, I get to deal with my Roku TV, which sucks.

• 1:00:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just want to, yeah, there's a cable box in there. It's a Roku.

• 1:00:43Alex Cranz?

  It's an Apple TV. That's like, go get a better, get better system.

• 1:00:46Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. It's still 95,000 different user experiences.

• 1:00:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:51Nilay Patel?

  And a series of video players that are not very good.

• 1:00:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And I think that's what we're like, at some point, they're going to have to start reckoning with is right now, everybody's big way of getting you on their service is, well, we've got this sport or we've got this, this TV show you really want to watch or this movie you want to really watch. Max has been very clear about, we're gonna sell our stuff. So you're seeing a whole bunch of Max products on Netflix this week. And if you log into Netflix this week, it feels like old school Netflix. You're like, oh, I can watch Dune.

• 1:01:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Alex Cranz?

  I can just do that. That's nice.

• 1:01:21Nilay Patel?

  Casey Boyles on Sage your Code and he was like, basically saying what David is saying is, oh, we used to sell our things like a lot of times.

• 1:01:27Alex Cranz?

  And, and that's that everybody's wanting to get back to that.

• 1:01:30Nilay Patel?

  He called syndication the brass ring.

• 1:01:32Alex Cranz?

  Syndication was huge. Syndication was what everybody worked for. And they haven't had to do it in the last few years. And now they're realizing, wait, no, this is like, all the writers and actors realize it. All of the, the directors and producers realize it. Everybody wants to make as many, much money as possible, dipping as many times as they can and just going all in on any one like form is dumb.

• 1:01:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The, the big difference with cable, and I, it's, I think it's important to say this out loud. There was value pre-internet in paying money for cable. One, it had all the stuff.

• 1:02:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09Nilay Patel?

  And you couldn't get the stuff at all unless you paid for cable. Like the cable channels were not available to you in any way, shape or form unless you paid for cable. Two, and I, I think we forget that this is where this industry came from. They were better than antennas.

• 1:02:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Nilay Patel?

  Right, that like the, the wild west of the early cable industry was a bunch of people who got in trouble from broadcast networks.

• 1:02:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Nilay Patel?

  For setting up big antennas and then running wires to everybody's houses. You know, they used to call cable cat TV, CATV. It was like community access television.

• 1:02:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that was the good shit.

• 1:02:45Nilay Patel?

  Right, and this, there's like, there was a thing under there where they were like, we will centralize the hard part, which is getting the signal off the broadcast towers. And then we'll, we'll make it good. And you were paying for that thing very specifically. Like DirecTV used to advertise that it was higher quality video than cable operators.

• 1:03:06Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:03:07Nilay Patel?

  That's gone. This is like, no one gives a shit about that part anymore. So the part where you're paying twice is like, you're paying for access and then you're getting ads. Like, we should just demand that the access be great.

• 1:03:16Alex Cranz?

  Well, and the other part of this is cable didn't just die because Netflix. Like Netflix certainly participated in the death of cable that is still currently happening. But YouTube is a mu- was a much bigger impact.

• 1:03:27Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:03:27Alex Cranz?

  Right, and, and YouTube hasn't gone away. YouTube is still here. So these people are all going to be out here recreating cable, but they still aren't going to be, they're not going to get the audience back. The audience is so fractured now, you're not getting that whole audience back. The days where you could go and watch, I remember like, my favorite example is Grey's Anatomy, because Grey's Anatomy, season two, that was still when cable was really strong.

• 1:03:49David Pierce?

  And when Grey's Anatomy was still really strong.

• 1:03:50Alex Cranz?

  It's still really strong, which is terrifying. No, like it does well in the Nielsen still.

• 1:03:54David Pierce?

  Oh, well, sure, it's a bad show, but it still does well.

• 1:03:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Nielsen's back in like 2006, 2007, for most watched episode would be like 30 million people tuned in. Nowadays, Grey's Anatomy is still a major success, considered a major success for ABC. Still making a lot of money. Average episode gets like 6 million people. And it's, that's good, that's considered good. Like, we saw a huge drop off in audience and all that audience went and watched stuff elsewhere. And that's not coming back. And that's the thing that the streamers are actually going to have to reckon with. And I think that's why the prices are going to keep going up. Even past where we think is reasonable because they're having to compete with YouTube, where everybody makes the content for quote unquote free. That's going to be hard for them.

• 1:04:41David Pierce?

  I think that's right, in the sense that there's only like 24 hours in a day, right? And the idea is where are people spending their time? And like the younger you get, the less likely you are to be even spending that time on streaming services. Like I spent a bunch of time this past weekend with my nephews. It was homecoming weekend, so I was like talking to him and all his friends. And we're talking about all this stuff they watch and he was like, yeah, I used to like sit and watch TV, but then I realized I was just looking at TikTok the whole time. So now I don't even turn the TV on, I just sit and watch TikTok. And I was like, that is telling, my friend, like your second screen is the television.

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is how I ended up buying a Frame TV. This is like, I've talked to people like TV installers.

• 1:05:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Nilay Patel?

  And then like some Samsung people who are like, the Frame is a hit because people know that it will be off. They're just going to leave it off. And then I bought one because I was like, it'll be in our bedroom and we'll just leave it off. But I now it's currently our TV.

• 1:05:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Nilay Patel?

  And I'm just like, this is not even local dimming. Why did I buy this TV?

• 1:05:39Alex Cranz?

  I really want one for my bedroom, just because it's pretty.

• 1:05:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're going to eventually be in the bedroom and, you know, in fact, he'll watch comedy specials on it.

• 1:05:45David Pierce?

  I have always wondered, they like all of the advertising material you see for the Frame is when it's off. And I've always wondered, like, is this, is this a good TV when you like turn it on? Cause at some point you're going to turn it on.

• 1:05:56Nilay Patel?

  No, I want to be very clear.

• 1:05:58Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 1:05:58Nilay Patel?

  No. It is, the matte screen is like really cool. It's really cool and we have one in the other studio here. And when it has like art on it with like detail, it's so convincing, so cool.

• 1:06:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:14Nilay Patel?

  And then you turn it on, you're like, all right, it's just one big ass LED backlight. Like it's 1956.

• 1:06:21David Pierce?

  Yeesh.

• 1:06:21Nilay Patel?

  Viewing angles.

• 1:06:23Alex Cranz?

  How's the bloom?

• 1:06:23Nilay Patel?

  The whole thing is bloom. It's just, there's just like one flashlight behind the, just I-

• 1:06:29Alex Cranz?

  It does not know the color black.

• 1:06:31Nilay Patel?

  It's just gray, baby. Yeah, why did I watch Whiplash on my phone? Phone can do true blacks.

• 1:06:37David Pierce?

  Well, the good news is it's really expensive. So you got that going for you.

• 1:06:40Nilay Patel?

  No, it's not. They're, actually, the little ones are cheap. I think this is the other reason, because it's a cheap panel.

• 1:06:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  So it's all priced on margin, which means they get discounted like crazy.

• 1:06:49David Pierce?

  Okay, fair enough.

• 1:06:50Nilay Patel?

  I, but, but I was like, we should buy, I should buy a gallery series LG, like a G2. It's real nice, very thin. You can mount it just like a frame. But it doesn't have the matte screen, doesn't, you can't do the art. I was like, crap, we'll buy this thing. And then I'm looking at it, like, why did I buy it? Why? Why do I have a, a single backlight LCD in my home?

• 1:07:11Alex Cranz?

  You can put it as a background for your podcast.

• 1:07:14Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be great when it's on the wall in the bedroom and we never watch it.

• 1:07:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17Nilay Patel?

  Which is an insane thing to say about a TV. It'll be great when we stop watching it.

• 1:07:21Alex Cranz?

  Just pictures of Max.

• 1:07:24Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be pictures of Max and it's gonna look great. It's gonna be great at that thing. But as an actual television, it's like Samsung got me again. This is the second time I bought a Samsung TV because it's beautiful. And I've been like, what am I looking at and why do I own this? And I'm gonna have it for 15 more years.

• 1:07:41Alex Cranz?

  Gotta go LG.

• 1:07:42Nilay Patel?

  No, we're gonna buy, I'm waiting to buy, I think you can get them now, but the official on sale date is the Sony A95L. It's so expensive.

• 1:07:51Alex Cranz?

  It's pretty.

• 1:07:51Nilay Patel?

  But we're gonna, it's gonna be on the wall for 15 years. So I'm like, I should spend the money.

• 1:07:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Nilay Patel?

  And it's gonna, it's gonna be great. It had better be great because after this frame experience, I don't know if I can take it. All right. Sorry, David. We were talking about the future of streaming.

• 1:08:05David Pierce?

  All I know is I have, I have a TCL TV back here. It's 40 some inches because I accidentally clicked the wrong button on Amazon. So you know what it is, is it's fine. It is just fine.

• 1:08:18Alex Cranz?

  I'm still on my LG B7.

• 1:08:20Nilay Patel?

  No, see, I have a B6.

• 1:08:21Alex Cranz?

  2007, yeah.

• 1:08:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I have a B6, yeah, it's, it's.

• 1:08:23Alex Cranz?

  14, whatever. This is years ago. 2017.

• 1:08:26Nilay Patel?

  That's right, 17, because I bought the B6 in 16.

• 1:08:29Alex Cranz?

  Okay, I was like, wow, my TV's old.

• 1:08:30Nilay Patel?

  TV's great, but it's gonna be there forever. I should upgrade. I'm like, why? Spend the money. There's one thing you should spend the money on, it's a nice TV.

• 1:08:37Alex Cranz?

  And a mattress.

• 1:08:37Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna have it forever.

• 1:08:38David Pierce?

  I do actually agree with that.

• 1:08:39Nilay Patel?

  This is the problem with streaming, is I'd rather talk about the TVs and the content.

• 1:08:42David Pierce?

  Good teaser for Monday's Virg Cast, by the way, before we take a break, which we should do. Where our whole episode is with a person who would like to give you a television for free.

• 1:08:50Alex Cranz?

  Ooh.

• 1:08:51Nilay Patel?

  It's coming. I cannot wait for this episode.

• 1:08:53David Pierce?

  It's great.

• 1:08:53Nilay Patel?

  Alright, you're right. We should take a break, we should do a lightning round, and we should get out of here. And then after this, we'll have a bonus round of six more hours talking about the nature of photography. We'll be right back.

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

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• 1:10:11Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Lightning round. We're like already over. It's craziest episode in a long time.

• 1:10:18Alex Cranz?

  People sitting in their cars waiting for us to finish.

• 1:10:20Nilay Patel?

  The phone is good. It's a piece of hard. It's not just a bundle of philosophical quandaries.

• 1:10:27Alex Cranz?

  But you should buy it because it is that. Yeah.

• 1:10:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, please. I'm telling you, if you have the money, go to your local wireless carrier and be like, I want to, I want you to mark down that I am buying this phone because it is a philosophical dilemma. I want it. Move the needle, right? It's not speeds, not camera. It's, I want to, I want to be horrible at parties. All right, lightning round. David.

• 1:10:53David Pierce?

  Okay, I have two because sometimes I'm allowed to do that. My first one is, it appears we've now seen the entire humane AI pin. It was at Paris Fashion Week and Naomi Campbell and I think a couple of other people were wearing it on their, on their sort of breast pocket area.

• 1:11:10Nilay Patel?

  Lagerfelding the shit out of this thing.

• 1:11:13David Pierce?

  So we have now seen what it looks like. I think it was John Gruber who described it as an iPhone you would get in a Happy Meal. We still don't know anything about what this device does. Their original launch date was the 14th, which is just next week. But there's been some reporting out there that says that has slipped to November. So I'm not exactly sure what's going on there, but we've now seen the pin. Is it real? Does it do anything? Who's to say? We have had many questions about this for a very long time. I think if they, they had a couple of videos from Paris Fashion Week where it was another one of those like projecting it onto their hands as they were doing stuff kinds of videos. I have never had so many questions about what something is than I do about this, but I find it deeply fascinating.

• 1:11:56Nilay Patel?

  Can I just, I'm going to start with a baseline question. There's a, look at our post and we'll go look at the post. It's in the show notes. Pull over in your car. And I want you to look at the picture of the, of it mounted on the lady's pants. Okay. How much does this thing weigh? Because it is not pulling on this fabric.

• 1:12:13Alex Cranz?

  Because she's got her hand in her pockets.

• 1:12:14Nilay Patel?

  No, I don't know.

• 1:12:15Alex Cranz?

  No, that's, she's got her hand in her pockets.

• 1:12:18Nilay Patel?

  You think she's holding it up?

• 1:12:19Alex Cranz?

  She's, she's keeping it, she's keeping it up. Because look at that, that fabric.

• 1:12:22Nilay Patel?

  Have you ever worn so much as like a, a boutonniere? To like, high school and you're like, oh, this is kind of saggy.

• 1:12:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:29Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 1:12:29Alex Cranz?

  Like, you have to think about it.

• 1:12:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, have you ever, anything like has any weight? It's going to pull on, and here it's not doing, and you think she's pulling that fabric taut?

• 1:12:36Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah, she's, she's pulling, pulling it taut. Because you look at the other ones, it's on a, it's on a suede jacket. And then it's on this, this white shirt where she's also.

• 1:12:44Nilay Patel?

  The lapel.

• 1:12:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's on the lapel and, and, and she's also again styling and posing herself. And this was all coming from the Koperny show, which Koperny apparently loves to, to do some little fashion stuff. So like, their, their previous, recent show was like, all the robot dogs.

• 1:13:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Alex Cranz?

  Running around on the stage.

• 1:13:01Nilay Patel?

  Pretty good.

• 1:13:02Alex Cranz?

  Like, my dogs. So like, they, they love to do like weird tech stuff. Uh, our reporter Mia Sato is a big fashion nerd. And I was like, oh, Koperny's doing it. She's like, of course it's Koperny that would do the humane thing.

• 1:13:15Nilay Patel?

  I still have a number of questions. For example, how do you load contacts into this phone? Is there a phone app? Real, real question.

• 1:13:22Alex Cranz?

  How do you interact with it?

• 1:13:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, you, you just talk to it with your hand out in front of you.

• 1:13:26Alex Cranz?

  Okay. Well, you got no hand.

• 1:13:28David Pierce?

  I just, to me, it was very funny that this came out the same week that Apple announced it's no longer supporting and repairing the $17,000 Apple Watch. And it's like, those two things, it's like the, the beginning of one thing and the end of a very similar thing. It's like, you can just see humane trying to go this like, cool, fashion-y, make this a luxury item route, which is a thing I think people try to do before they have a product that's good.

• 1:13:56Alex Cranz?

  I was like, how did that work for Google Glass?

• 1:13:58David Pierce?

  Badly. It works pretty badly for everybody because it turns out it's very hard to make something fashion.

• 1:14:05Nilay Patel?

  I just, I want to take you back to the photo of the lady in the pants. Every time I look at this product, I have more questions. Okay. We've seen how the thing works, right? You can call Bethany or hold that. Where, if you have it mounted on your pants.

• 1:14:22Alex Cranz?

  You can see her knuckles.

• 1:14:24Nilay Patel?

  Whatever, whatever. Weight aside, I still don't know how this works. I think there's cardboard in the pants is what I'm trying to say. Let's say this is an acceptable mounting position for the humane eye pin.

• 1:14:37Alex Cranz?

  Not a dorky one.

• 1:14:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, let's say, let's say this is where they think you should have it.

• 1:14:41Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:14:41Nilay Patel?

  And you need to call Bethany. Where are you gonna put your hand?

• 1:14:46Alex Cranz?

  Squatting. Yeah, you're like, you're holding your hand out. Yeah.

• 1:14:49Nilay Patel?

  All right. Just the basics of this product are so confusing to me.

• 1:14:53Alex Cranz?

  Maybe you pop a squat and maybe that's like part of their.

• 1:14:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you're like, you're like doing fashion rap squats.

• 1:14:58Alex Cranz?

  And they're like, pop a squat, call your friend, pop a squat, check your mail.

• 1:15:02David Pierce?

  If Humane's marketing slogan is pop a squat, I'm all in, all in.

• 1:15:09Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:15:09Alex Cranz?

  Right?

• 1:15:10Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, look at the photo with the, where it's on the pants. And just be like, how would you, just run, just run that to its logical conclusions. You have to, one of the ways in which you use it is that you talk to it and it talks to people. In French. And suddenly it's, you're like, da, da, da. And it's like, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, in French from your pants pocket.

• 1:15:32Alex Cranz?

  From your crotch, basically.

• 1:15:34Nilay Patel?

  What happens when you sit down?

• 1:15:35David Pierce?

  Does French sound like the adults in Charlie Brown? Is that what that just was?

• 1:15:40Nilay Patel?

  Try not to be racist.

• 1:15:42David Pierce?

  All right, just checking.

• 1:15:44Nilay Patel?

  You know.

• 1:15:44David Pierce?

  There you go. My other lightning round thing, real fast, is this weird kind of scandal about the iPhone 15 overheating? A bunch of people noticed that their iPhone 15s were getting really hot and draining the battery super fast. Apple basically came out and said it's the app's fault, which is like a delightful follow on to You're Holding It Wrong from, you know, all those years ago. Apple then released an iOS update that it said, quote, "addresses an issue that may cause iPhone to run warmer than expected." But also said that it was the app's fault and a bunch of apps updated and supposedly solved the problem. So what is going on here? It's whatever it is, it seems like it's been fixed.

• 1:16:26David Pierce?

  Terrific. The overheating problem from some of these apps that were running wild seems to be solved. But whose fault was this and how did they fix it? We don't know and it's driving me nuts. I just want to know what's going. It's very weird. Because it's a point update that doesn't, like ordinarily when Apple adds new features in like a 0.0, 0.3 update, it's like little bug fixes and security updates and stuff. Like, this is not a moment you do much, but they named this one.

• 1:16:50Nilay Patel?

  No, because I think there was a news cycler on it. But I guess, my guess here is that with iOS 17, there came some new frameworks that Instagram and Uber and a bunch of other apps relied on. They updated to use those frameworks. That was causing the problem. So then they could blame it on Instagram. And now here we are where they've updated the thing, they've updated the OS that was maybe using the framework, they've updated the framework that the apps are using, the apps can't do it anymore. My guess is that it's much more innocent than it seems. But it is, it is very funny that they're like, I don't know, Instagram.

• 1:17:22Alex Cranz?

  Everybody made a boo-boo.

• 1:17:24Nilay Patel?

  All right. Cranz, what's yours?

• 1:17:26Alex Cranz?

  LG is dropping ATSC 3.0 from its TVs next year. I got a lot of, a lot of messages about this over the weekend.

• 1:17:34David Pierce?

  This is the RIP Crans story of the week.

• 1:17:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, then I think it was telling LG was one of the first to adopt the technology and put it in its TVs. And now it's one of the first to drop it. And it's because nobody's adopting ATSC 3.0. Like, the stations aren't, aren't converting over to it.

• 1:17:52Nilay Patel?

  So I had a conversation with a fancy person at Code.

• 1:17:55Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:17:56Nilay Patel?

  About television.

• 1:17:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:59Nilay Patel?

  Not the person who was on stage, not Byron Allen, who by the way, a superstar at Code, overshadowed by Lynda Yekker. But he was like, here's what I'm doing. I'm suing McDonald's because I'm racist. Every French fries racist. Like, it was crazy. But he's trying to buy ABC.

• 1:18:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:10Nilay Patel?

  And one of the reasons that he was trying to buy ABC is he thinks the stations are probably managed, this whole thing. He's trying to buy ABC. So I was at Code talking to other people about that conversation, because it was a superstar performance at Code. And they were like, we keep trying to work with local stations to make them better. There's a lot of things we want to do, particularly if you're interested in sports rights, all the big streamers are interested in sports, there's a lot of local broadcast deals. To make any sort of upgrades, to get sports in 4K, for example, that the local stations have to do it.

• 1:18:41Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:18:42Nilay Patel?

  And they won't.

• 1:18:43Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:18:44Nilay Patel?

  They just were like, there is not a single less innovative part of the media ecosystem.

• 1:18:50Alex Cranz?

  Nobody wants to.

• 1:18:51Nilay Patel?

  Local television stations.

• 1:18:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and everybody who's been buying up the local stations, because there are largely a couple of different monopolies that own the majority of them, they have no interest in it. They are effectively like private equity did to journalism, where they're like, we want to just buy it.

• 1:19:05Nilay Patel?

  And run the profits out.

• 1:19:07Alex Cranz?

  See what we can get out, run it to the ground. In some places, like in New York, it's pretty expensive to put up the towers and stuff for ATSC 3.0. And a lot of the, I guess a lot of the buildings around here don't want to deal with that and deal with the leases and everything like that. So it's challenging. And it was just a bummer, because like ATS 3.0 is cool technology. Like, the technology itself is super, super cool. And it could do a lot. And it could really, really democratize access to a lot of stuff. But no one wants to actually do it. So it's all just kind of a bummer. And it's like, I don't blame LG for not wanting to spend the time and resources to continue to use this if nobody's adopting it. Like, you know, come back in a couple of years.

• 1:19:52Alex Cranz?

  But by then, broadcast TV will effectively probably be dead. So that's a, it's just a real bummer.

• 1:19:58Nilay Patel?

  Right at the end, the tech's good.

• 1:20:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:00Nilay Patel?

  It's all over.

• 1:20:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they got it. They're like, we made it. And I was like, yeah, you're 10 years too late. You should have done this a while back.

• 1:20:06Nilay Patel?

  But this is, you know, there's a balance here. Remember, Vizio took the tuners out of its TVs? And there was huge backlash, and they put them back.

• 1:20:12Alex Cranz?

  Because that was too soon. If they did it now, nobody would care.

• 1:20:14Nilay Patel?

  I think that's right.

• 1:20:15Alex Cranz?

  I mean, well, Vizio was cheap, though. Vizio, that was the whole get of Vizio, is you'd get a really good TV for a really inexpensive price. That's changed a little nowadays. But like, so I get like, their audience probably did use tuners a lot more than they thought. And most people probably don't actually, especially LG. Like, somebody going out and buying the nice LG?

• 1:20:34Nilay Patel?

  Just write to us. I need to know the answer. We're both guessing.

• 1:20:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we're guessing.

• 1:20:38Nilay Patel?

  I think a lot of people still use their tuners a lot, especially our audience.

• 1:20:43Alex Cranz?

  Our audience does. Because I use my tuner still.

• 1:20:45Nilay Patel?

  That's why I said.

• 1:20:46Alex Cranz?

  But we got, we're a small.

• 1:20:48Nilay Patel?

  The audience that asked us to talk about ATSC 3.0. I have a feeling.

• 1:20:51Alex Cranz?

  I know. I'm sorry, guys. I want it too, but I don't think we're getting it.

• 1:20:55Nilay Patel?

  ATS 3.0 is going to perform upstate. It's gonna be very happy there.

• 1:20:59Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be really close.

• 1:21:01Nilay Patel?

  All right, I have two as well, but my two are like the same thing.

• 1:21:03Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:21:04Nilay Patel?

  So, one, X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, announced a deal with Paris Hilton. I would just, I would describe this press release as calorie-free. It contains no information. It's a lot of words. It's so many words. And one thing I learned about Lynda Accarino is she loves words. Just loves word. And you can see why she was a great marketing executive at NBC. Cause she had NBC. She had the Olympics. And if you just wanna wander around talking about how people feel inspired and communities are brought together and look at the world and here's a young girl singing and buy an Amex. NBC is a great platform to be that personality. When you have Twitter, it's like, what are you talking about?

• 1:21:50Nilay Patel?

  You've got nothing. And it's all the same sort of like hoppy, changing language, for lack of a better word. So anyway, so they've announced the sale of Paris Hilton, which she will, she will post on X. They will work together to create four original video content programs per year that includes live shopping across, along with a host of other activations across all surfaces of X. The live shopping experience will allow you to browse through a catalog of products and then click through the site to make a purchase via the in-app browser.

• 1:22:17Alex Cranz?

  Okay, this could be cool. And I'm gonna give you the one caveat.

• 1:22:21Nilay Patel?

  Unless Paris Hilton is, is actually selling ecstasy on this platform. Zero people will buy anything.

• 1:22:28Alex Cranz?

  Paris is super into radios. This is like the lore about Paris Hilton is she's super into, to traditional radios, like CB radio. One of the stores does CB radio stuff.

• 1:22:39Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:22:40Alex Cranz?

  That would be cool.

• 1:22:40Nilay Patel?

  If Paris Hilton does a CB radio activation, that'd be great. X will work to secure brand sponsorship to support each of the activations. So they're paying Paris. They don't know how they're gonna pay for paying Paris. Very good. X will also support employing other efforts that 1111 Media, which is their company, 1111 Media and Paris Hilton will be involved in throughout the year. No, this is nothing.

• 1:23:01Alex Cranz?

  What is it?

• 1:23:02Nilay Patel?

  So I, the only reason I say it's the same thing is my second thing is there's a little bit of an existential crisis on Threads this week. Because it's the heart of the NFL season, the government shutdown, all this stuff is, Speaker of the House is getting fired. This is the stuff you would use Twitter for. Right, like, these moments where Twitter, there was a flood in New York. Do you know what Twitter is great at? Telling people who don't care about the weather in New York City what exactly is happening with the weather in New York City.

• 1:23:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:32Nilay Patel?

  And Threads has, I would say, flatly failed to live up to any of these occasions as a real-time news service. I've tried, and I'm rooting for Threads. It's the one I use. And everyone gets mad at me when I'm like, Threads is bad. They're like, you, ah, it's the one I'm using. I believe in activity, the whole thing. It's not good at this stuff. Watching football with Threads is like not watching football with anything. It's the opposite of watching football with Threads. So there's been just a lot of consternation about Threads and whether they care about news. And Meta is, there was a report in the Information that Meta is doing creator councils where they're gathering all the creators together to see what they want, which is historically in the history of social platforms, a thing you do right before you die.

• 1:24:17Nilay Patel?

  But, you know, on the flip side, you know, Meta does have Instagram and like they have a, they have a thing there.

• 1:24:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:23Nilay Patel?

  But, you know, it's like they're, they're doing committees to figure out what they should do to kick Threads back in the gear. And it's like, oh, you don't need a committee.

• 1:24:30Alex Cranz?

  Do news.

• 1:24:31Nilay Patel?

  Just do Twitter. Just do what Twitter was good at, which is real-time news. So I posted on Threads. It feels like they need to make every miss. They were so burned by news. Adam Mosseri was so burned by news, because he used to run the news feed. He is so burned by news, they have to try everything else first. And so Mosseri actually wrote back to me. "We are not anti-news. News is already in Threads. We're simply trying to avoid over-promising and under-delivering to an incredibly powerful group, which is a mistake we've made as a company many times in our past." On its face, this is a totally reasonable thing to say, right? We don't want the news media to think that Threads will save it.

• 1:25:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:05Nilay Patel?

  So we're not going to pretend. Two things about this. One, one solution to this problem is to make promises and keep them. Just putting that out there.

• 1:25:16David Pierce?

  A little what?

• 1:25:17Nilay Patel?

  As somebody who lived through something called the pivot to video, not lying about metrics and actually developing revenue.

• 1:25:24David Pierce?

  It's concept.

• 1:25:24Nilay Patel?

  I think that would have solved your problems.

• 1:25:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Nilay Patel?

  It's just a, it's just a thing. So I get where that's coming from. Like everyone yelled at him.

• 1:25:31David Pierce?

  But that's not what people are asking for.

• 1:25:31Nilay Patel?

  But he's saying like, we didn't keep our promises. So we don't want to make any promises this time, which is like backwards. Fine, but like, fine, like I actually understand it.

• 1:25:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:39Nilay Patel?

  Like one rational response to that is to say, we are making no promises.

• 1:25:43David Pierce?

  Hmm, sure.

• 1:25:45Nilay Patel?

  Great. The problem is you're using them, mercy going down. So good luck.

• 1:25:49David Pierce?

  Like, forget being burned by making bad decisions. Hasn't Meta learned that caring about the news business is actually just all downside?

• 1:25:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. And the regulators are there and you know, Canada is going to make you pay for links. And an Australian person is going to, you know, Rupert Murdoch is going to be like, I need you to pay for my links. Like it all happens. There's a law in this country that would make him do it. It's all bad, but the product isn't sticky. Because what you desperately need is people posting about the news on a product that looks like Twitter.

• 1:26:19David Pierce?

  Okay, yes, except Twitter was a bad business, was always a bad business and was a bad product that most people didn't use and the people who did hated themselves for it. Like, I'm not sure you actually should look at Twitter and be like, let's do what Twitter did.

• 1:26:32Nilay Patel?

  True.

• 1:26:33David Pierce?

  That's how you get a bunch of like psychotic maniacs like us who spent altogether too much time for 15 years on Twitter, like.

• 1:26:40Nilay Patel?

  So my brain is healed. I feel I'm a new person now that I'm not doing it.

• 1:26:45David Pierce?

  Mine's.

• 1:26:45Nilay Patel?

  Like I have threads on my phone. I don't even open it. Like I forgot. I threw a bomb on threads. I was like, this camera is a liar. They walked away.

• 1:26:53David Pierce?

  To me, I think, I think the thing threads will regret more than not being more like Twitter is positioning itself against Twitter, the way that it has.

• 1:27:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:03David Pierce?

  Because what they did, Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, both did this like aggressively and sort of loudly at the beginning was say, in as many words, we want to be better Twitter. And we all kind of internally understand what that might be. And that comes with certain things and certain ideas. If they had just said, we think it's time for a new kind of text based. Social networking for sharing.

• 1:27:25Nilay Patel?

  They sort of did.

• 1:27:27David Pierce?

  A little, but you, if you say the first thing, everybody's going to hold you to the first thing, right? Like, I, I, I think it's true, but also if you, if you say like, we, we think the world deserves Twitter that is sanely run. Like, in essentially that many words, people are going to hold you to Twitter standards. But I think like Meta's out here to build a big thing that makes money and Twitter was never any of those things.

• 1:27:48Nilay Patel?

  Actually, we have like 10,000 disclosures. So the first one is criticism of the current Twitter is no way praise for the previous administration of Twitter. I think it's important to say that they were bad at this. There is an argument to be made now, I think, that that was the best it could be. Sort of chaotic, horrible, right, was like the best.

• 1:28:08David Pierce?

  It certainly was the best it has been.

• 1:28:09Nilay Patel?

  Maybe, maybe they had stumbled into a sort of steady state of misery. Like, I don't know, maybe. So, I mean, like, this is a company that sold itself for $44 billion, it's 5420 a share, because it could not figure out a way to get to 5420 a share on the open market. Like, they're like, I don't know, that seems high, take the money. Like, we got nothing. Like, all right, we, nothing, is it, we're, we're going to let more people tweet, like, whatever.

• 1:28:35David Pierce?

  And now the new reports said that it's worth $8 billion. So everybody's doing great over there.

• 1:28:38Nilay Patel?

  So, there's, I just, that. And then the other disclosure, we talked about streaming and cable, so Comcast and just a company, whatever, they don't, they're not into me.

• 1:28:47Alex Cranz?

  We didn't say anything nice.

• 1:28:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm a Netflix producer. That's a real thing. I have AT&T as my personal phone service.

• 1:28:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm Verizon.

• 1:28:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:55David Pierce?

  Alex Cranz watches every Star Trek show on Paramount Plus.

• 1:28:58Alex Cranz?

  It's true.

• 1:28:59Nilay Patel?

  Broadcast TV RF energy is flowing through our bodies right now.

• 1:29:05Nilay Patel?

  That's a real thing that's happening to you too.

• 1:29:08Alex Cranz?

  Grey's Anatomy is going right.

• 1:29:09Nilay Patel?

  Hey, look, that, the, the 5G alert went off. Huh? All of you are Aaron Rodgers now.

• 1:29:14Alex Cranz?

  I wanted to be Saul B.

• 1:29:16Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what that means, but it sounds great. Coming back around to threads, I'm just saying, if they had solved the smallest problem. F1, they're all, I know a bunch of them are F1 fans, because I see them posting about F1 days after they've posted because of the algorithmic feed, but I see them doing it. If they had just solved, we want to make this great, they, they would have solved it. They want to make it great for watching football. The problem is that solving those problems necessarily makes you great at, oh, there's a government shutdown looming, oh, the Speaker of the House got fired, or whatever, right? And that means they're good at news. And I don't think that they have a plan to square that circle. It cannot be that a bunch of famous, you're gonna pay Paris Hilton some money to post about radios in her shop.

• 1:29:57Alex Cranz?

  It's coming.

• 1:29:58Nilay Patel?

  That's not gonna do it for you.

• 1:30:00Alex Cranz?

  You don't know.

• 1:30:01David Pierce?

  Or that you're just gonna block some topics entirely, the way Threads has done with COVID, right? Like, you can't just, you can't just write certain things off and then be like, "Come hang out," but only about the nice things. Like, I, I think you may be right that what Twitter was might be the best of all the bad outcomes, and maybe they're all bad outcomes.

• 1:30:18Alex Cranz?

  Well, cuz it was, it was like the NC 17 social media, and Threads is like-

• 1:30:22Nilay Patel?

  Seriously, legitimately the NC 17 social media.

• 1:30:25Alex Cranz?

  And, and this is like G-rated.

• 1:30:27David Pierce?

  Pixar Twitter.

• 1:30:28Alex Cranz?

  And news is not G-rated.

• 1:30:29Nilay Patel?

  I just don't think, like, even if, again, I, I would just come back to some of the stickiest things that Twitter did for me that weren't news, like hard news, like political news. Sports, watching sports with Twitter open is great, or was great. Now it's weird. Cuz, like, half the people aren't there, and then they're doing the weird programmatic insertions of, like, ads for buying gold.

• 1:30:50Alex Cranz?

  I love gold.

• 1:30:51Nilay Patel?

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

• 1:31:22Alex Cranz?

  Yes, that sounds 100% right.

• 1:31:24Nilay Patel?

  On the other hand, Twitter's paying Paris Hilton money.

• 1:31:27David Pierce?

  The fact that Linda Iaccarino had to tweet the word "sliving" is just, it just makes it all worthwhile. It's sliving.

• 1:31:33Nilay Patel?

  Is it sliving?

• 1:31:35Alex Cranz?

  Sliving.

• 1:31:35Nilay Patel?

  I always say "sliving."

• 1:31:37David Pierce?

  While, while we're living, Neil is sliving, guys.

• 1:31:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm sliving my word out the door. Alright, I think that's it. We're way over time. I just wanna point out, this episode of the Vergecast started with coffee cups. It, it did philosophical quandaries, and we ended with sliving. When people say we don't have the rage, this is, we made a whole publication for ourselves.

• 1:31:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:57Nilay Patel?

  For this. This is where we live. Alright, that's it. I got some things to call out. We have a partnership with D-Brain. You should go buy the skin.

• 1:32:03Speaker 06

  They're really cool.

• 1:32:04Nilay Patel?

  They're cool. They're sick as hell, actually. They look beautiful. And then, speaking of cameras, Becca's video, Thousand Photos, the iPhone 15 Pro Max, one of the best videos ever done. It's on YouTube, lots of photos. Becca has lots of thoughts about this camera. She compares it to the first iPhone camera, which actually, it is more complicated than you might think. Again, just exposure, philosophical quandary on these phones. Go watch that video. Okay, that's it. That's Vergecast.

• 1:32:35Speaker 06

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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