The Vergecast - The great Pixel 8 camera debate

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

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

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covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to Verchast. The flagship podcast of extra large cups and bowls. Yeah.

You never know when you need one. No, you always know when you need one, which is always. Yeah. All right, look, here's what happened. Before we started the show, David held up his new ember mug, which is gigantic. It's huge. It's so big.

It waits so much. It was so much work to hold it up just now. Our own James Vincent, who is currently on book leave again, he wrote an entire book called Beyond Measure about essentially the politics and culture of measuring things. This is one of the virgiest verge ideas that anyone has ever had. And it's obviously, 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. That I have no idea how much a cup of coffee is. Like, not price, like volume. Right. And David pointed out to me that the word cup has a third additional secret meeting in the context of coffee.

Yeah. So when you 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. 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. This is another book, a whole other book. How many cups of coffee? This is, okay, the problem with the history of Europe. Oh, boy.

Is that a bunch of kings got to invent a bunch of shit. 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 so big. They make an average amount of soup look like not a lot of soup. You've consumed a lot of soup. You're moving a new place. You're like, what large format foods can we acquire so we don't have to think about this for the next several weeks? When you fill it with ice cream, is there any ice cream left in the carton?

I prefer not to answer that question this time. 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, you know, normal amount of Cheerios, puts a 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. 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 eat like a deathly amount of Cheerios, and I can't do this. I want you know, there's a trend in plateware where the plates are becoming bulls, 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. Fiestaware. My fiestaware bulls are.

You just randomly said the word fiestaware. It's huge. Okay, we got to stop this. There's actual tech news. I'm just saying if you want to write the inside story of how plates are becoming bulls, there is but one publication that will be like, yes, this belongs to us. And if their temperature regulated, like my ember mug, all the better. 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, Neli. Hello, David Pierce is here. Hi, me and my mug. We're both here. Electric mugs. I drink the coffee too. fast. I want to be, I've always wanted an ember mug and there's just no hope for me. Why?

On 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. Nowx-Rance is here? Yeah, I'm still thinking about the Fiestaware bowls. They're huge. I've eaten so much chilling. Is Fiestaware the radioactive ones? The old ones. Okay. I don't think mine are. Very good. We'll see in a couple of months. If you don't know why I just said, is Fiestaware the radioactive ones, that's a little Google adventure for YouTube. That's a little Wikipedia hole that you could fall down on. A service we provide here on the Vergecast, stuff to Google. You're going to have a great time. Welcome to our newest segment, how to Google about old plates. All right, there is a lot of tech news this week,

like an absurd amount of tech news. There are some philosophical quandaries. A bunch of people are mad at me and 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. price of every streaming service is going up and the actors are still on strike lots going on there and then we have a deeply hilarious lightning round just of things just people continuing to make choices we should obviously start with the pixel david what happened in this event sure so this event as ever with google recently has been absolutely leaked to death so we kind of knew what was going on coming in but basically we got two new phones the pixel eight and the pixel eight pro

which have a lot in common, but are differentiated, especially along camera lines. It's a little bit like the way Apple does it, but Google split it in a bunch of ways that I don't think make a lot of sense. But anyway, new tensor chips, normal sort of upgrades over the time. The screen's 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. 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 PixelBuds 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. 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 is really leaned into this idea that it can basically make you a decent piece of hardware with a whole lot of stuff happening in the cloud and that that's the correct balance from now on. And I'm deeply fascinated to see if that turns out to be true. 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.

Yeah. Nothing's faster. Do you know what makes the iPhone Pro Pro? It's really good at games. Rate tracing, baby. It's the most pro feature. Very confusing. Google has always kind of walked this line, though, right?

How much is happening in 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. Wasn't that a coworker of ours? No.

I mean, I'm sure it's many coworkers of ours. like that. But I think Google recognizes this, that a lot of people have iPhones that are just vessels of Google services, and Google can just sell you a phone that is that thing. Yeah. I will say it doesn't give me great confidence in Google wanting to continue to make hardware for a long time, but I already didn't have great confidence in that, so whatever. 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 in the software

that's available. I disagree with that. Really? Fight me. I don't know. I think that might have been, I mean, we've been through 50 rounds of what is a pixel phone for. That's what the nexus line was for, 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. That's fair. Right? There's Samsung. Yeah.

And so I think the idea that Google needs to show Samsung how to do it is just not reality. I think Google needs to show Samsung that if Samsung screws up or steps out of line, that it will go and get the marketing deal with Verizon. But did it do that? Well, I think I think Samsung has stayed in line. Okay, wait, Nilai, go with me here. Google is to Samsung, what Bing is to Google. Like a substantially less successful thing that exists, both to try and be a good product,

but mostly as a check on the other thing, just saying, if you blow it, we will come for you. Yeah. Only the slight difference is that if Samsung didn't exist, Android would not be as important as it is. Yeah, that's fair. At least in this country. In Europe, in India,

In Africa, like, Android is a big deal all in its own. Like, my favorite thing about the Indian smartphone market is like 14 phones get released every single week. And people in Android there is expressed very differently. Like, Android is globally important whether or not Samsung does it. In this country, Android doesn't exist without Samsung. That's right. Which is just, at least in smartphones. That's crazy, right?

And I think a lot of the pixel is there to just repeatedly show Samsung, hey, we can do. do it to. 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 than the service. So you're saying the pixel is basically Google just staring Samsung in the eye and saying try it. Like just uncomfortable. To some extent. I think they also need a vessel for their services. They want to show people what it would be like. They also want to compete head on with Apple. Right. There's a, there's a, There's a lot there, but what is the thing it accomplishes the most?

It's not sales. Right. It's true. It is a lot of interest from phone nerds. It is crazy to me the disproportionate amount of traffic we get on pixel coverage versus Samsung coverage. Yeah. I think that's why I think of it like the surface devices, because it's the same thing.

Like, people care about the surface devices in the way they do not care about Assus, unless it's appearing in court. But yeah, like, that's really, because people really, passionately like the Google devices, but it's a very small group of people, according to the sales. Yeah. And that's right. We're not, we're fully into talking about this is the thing with talking about Pixel. It's more fun to talk about the concepts and the ideas embedded in the pixel lines, than the phones.

There was cool stuff this time. 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. 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 they seem like fine phones, but like that's all you got. And I kind of agree. Like, Google made a good phone here that really doesn't seem to make a particularly interesting case for itself outside of some of the camera stuff. And they also raised prices by $100. Yeah.

It's like a boring looking phone, extraordinarily boring. But the magic editor thing is cool, right? All right. The camera is such a six-hour brush. I know. I want to just go talk about it. Can you just read the specs of the phone? So we've done, we've done our job.

You've talked. Sure. I can do this. Okay. Okay, so main things to know. The pixel 8 starts at 700 bucks. The pixel 8 pro starts at $1,000. They both run Android 14.

The pixel 8 has a 6.2 inch screen. The pixel 8 pro has a 6.7 inch screen. That's also a little better 12 gigs of RAM on the pro, 8 gigs of RAM on the 8. More storage options in the high end on the pro. You can get, I think, 512 and a terabyte, which you can't get on the pixel 8. They both have USBC. They both do more face unlock stuff than they have in the past, 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. Alison 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 10.5 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. It's like none of the things versus all of the things. And it's a $300 price difference, which I guess, you know, bullies that. But that's essentially the rundown. Like they have the same chip, which has been very important to Google, to have all of this stuff kind of on the same generation of tensor as much as possible to do the AI stuff they want to do. But then it just gets real chaotic from there.

And they come in a bunch of cool colors that are actual colors. Like Google didn't do the thing Apple did and just put like one drop of color dye near the phone and call that a color. They actually colored the phone. It's very exciting. All right, so we're talking about the camera? Let's talk about the camera. Magic editor.

Neither of you were listening to that word of you. You were just sitting there going, shut up so I can talk about the camera. I get it. I was reading along. 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 up front, people are going to 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. Magic editor. Magic editor. So this is like a, this is a, I think. 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 are showing it off on stage, the thing they want you to think it can do is lie to

you. Like, I, there's no other word for it. The camera has generative AI tools, not built into it, but parked on the front lawn. Sure. You know what I mean? It's like, it's not, it's not, it's not, they're not the same. They're not, it's not, it's not in the house. Yeah. You know? It's like a Photoshop editor. But you can open the window and yell at the generative AI tool and it will definitely hear you. Eventually the gap is going to close. You're, you're talking about magic editor, right? Like, essentially, there's a lot of features, but that's the one. That's the one. And in particular, in Magic Editor, the one I am talking about, is the one where you can take a bunch of frames of people 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 what I'll call it a sky is. You know, like, whatever. It's green. Yeah. The sky's green. Great. You're crazy.

Like, I don't know, man. Like, you have all the, 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. You're like, you're kidding about the line there, but I actually think the line there is really important. And I want you to tease out why that bothers you in the way that the sky doesn't. Because if the, if your fundamental problem is these cameras and their editing software let you lie about what you're seeing in front of the, 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. Are you okay with the thing where you can 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? I mean, first of all of it's lying to you. Sure.

Like, did this actually happen? Is now a threshold question for smartphone photography. If you look at a photo that came off a smartphone, a good question you can ask is, did this happen? Did this look this way? Sure. We've been doing what is a photo on the show since for years now, since the first pixel, since the, what's the iPhone 11 did, was the first one with HDR? It looked kind of bad.

You know, like, we've been talking about what a photo is for a long time because the, what most people believe a photo to be is is you open a shutter, a bunch of light hits a sensor, the shutter closes, and that's the end of that. Right. And the goal is how accurately did this capture reality? That's the metric of success. Right. And there's a whole other brand of photography, and we can get into it that's like very creative, where you are trying to manipulate light and textures and you're posing people. Like all this stuff is happening.

You're doing wild edits in Photoshop. But the thing that we rely on photography to be is an accurate representation of light in a moment. And, you know, those moments can be long or short. You can do long exposure. Whatever. It's like this light occurred. Like these things happened. and you get to a place with computational photography where it's at even now, before you start

moving faces around with AI, we're like, man, we're like right at the boundary of this. I think I know where the boundary is. I think I got it. So we've always been able to manipulate photos, right? Like, you've been able to manipulate photos since the first person took the photograph. Like, they were putting fairies in photos in the 1800s and saying, yeah, it's a real ferry. And it's like, no, it's a person wearing a stupid outfit. What?

That's always shocking, I know. But that's always been there. But it was hard to do, right? Like, in order to do the stuff that you can now do on a phone in Photoshop 20 years ago, wait, no, back up. You're about to make the argument that Google's making, which is like, we just made the tool more accessible. Let me just back up for one second. I'm saying the accessibility itself is the line.

No, no, no, I disagree. That's like, that's basically Google's line. To be honest, 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 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 evident. It's like a very verge-cast conversation about like, okay, it's a photo. And like, it's not, maybe not what you saw or maybe not what old film looked like. And, you know, we've had Mark LaVoy from the pixel team on the show talking about what artists the pixel was meant to evoke. And every year the art, like, we've done it.

And that's just exposure. Right. Right. We've done years of conversation about computational exposure manipulation and what that means for photography. And that's smart HDR in the iPhone, that's pixels computational photography. And all of that is just, boy, should there be shadows and photos? Yes. And literally years of conversation about the blurry line of computational and 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, like the New Yorker. Kyle Chika had a piece in The New Yorker about iPhone photos not looking real and they're being backlash against it. That's crazy. Just exposure. Computational manipulation of exposure is now a mainstream conversation about what photography means. So the line already is blurry before we get to adding theories in the 1800s.

Yeah. Now I'm going to tell you that inside the new phone, inside the pixel 8, it is marketed at having a tool where you can take a bunch of shots. It won't just stack exposure. It will change people's faces at your discretion to create a reality that now. I just like a thing that never happened. And I still see that as Photoshop. I still see that as the exact same. Fine, but this is where the accessibility, this is where your thing about accessibility comes in.

Okay, fine, that's Photoshop. But the camera is marketed as that thing. So I spent the morning on the train in coming up with like very silly examples. Go through them. Let's hear them. Like very silly examples. I'm so, I talked about fairies. It's okay.

Okay. You are at a Chiefs game. And you see the box with Taylor Swift and Ryan Reynolds and Blake lively and whoever else. Hugh Jack. Thank you. Can't erase Hugh Jackman from this. Please. He was there.

He was there. Okay. It looks like Travis Kelsey is going to score a touchdown. So they're all cheering with any fumbles in your ups of all. And they're all sad. Yeah. All right. Well, now you can just tweak the faces.

So you got happy Hugh, happy Ryan, happy Blake, sad Taylor. But I can do that in Photoshop. You can do that in Photoshop. up, but you wouldn't. Like, the accessibility is the thing. Like, now you can lie more easily right off your phone and send it. Right. Okay, should there be some norms about whether or not that tool should be widely available to you?

To anyone. I think there should be... 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 valuable memories are so you're gonna 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 A lot of people saying, well, you could never trust pictures. See, that's where I, I'm, I'm, I'm over there. When I say it's a watershed moment in cameras, this is the camera that is making people say you cannot trust pictures. I don't think that.

I think there was a bunch of memes about sharks swimming through the streets of Houston that said I can never trust pictures. But those people were, like, but that's like so obviously silly. Yeah, yeah. This is like, the camera is, it will be sold to you. so that when you take a bunch of frames of your family, it will synthesize a thing that never happened by design, and that is a selling point of the camera. And the market will not correct this.

The market will say, that's great, because I want better photos of my family. It does feel very like... Let me offer you this other very silly example. I love it. And this is based on a meme that I saw today. I'm so excited. It's really bad.

Can you pre-forgive me for this? Okay. It's a camera, and it takes a photo, They ingests the photo. It processes the photo and throws the original photo away. Yeah. And so it's gone. You can never recover that photo.

Yeah. And at the other end, everyone in your photo just has huge boobs. The market buys this kid. This is the most successful camera on human history. I would do that all the time. Everyone's got big naturals. I'm just saying. Just across the board.

I think you probably have some sliders. Look, it doesn't matter. My point is the market does not reject this. camera. Like, the people of the United States are like, that's the camera we want. Yeah, because Big Natural. Jesus Christ, I should have agreed not to get mad at you. Yeah. Sorry, David. If you just think about this, like, people want lies. They want pleasing lies. I didn't realize it gets rid of the old photo. Like, no, this is my hypothetical example. Oh, yeah, because like terrifying. This is just a made up example I have. You're also dead wrong about that, by the way.

Just like that thing you just described, no one wants. They're like full. horny teenagers on the internet who would be psyched about that. There's a Kickstarter for that camera right now. I guarantee you. And I want to cut. All I'm saying is, but the market isn't going to correct for truth. I made it that example because it's silly and it honestly, I wanted to see. It's my favorite idea.

But like in general, in the information ecosystem we are in, the market, the free market is not like truth is important to us. It's more like pictures of sharks. Right? And so now you've made this thing. Google has made this thing. The company that wants to organize the world's information has made a camera. We're right next to it, camped out on the front lawn, marketing the phone with We Will synthesize pictures that never happened. It never happened. We're going to make you images that never occurred without a second's hesitation on how that might go completely sideways for them. I mean, they're not just doing it with photos, though, right? Like, they're doing it across the board with generative AI. I mean, but this is like when you talk about the AI apocalypse, like the AI misinformation apocalypse is right on their front door. It's on YouTube.

Deep fakes are on YouTube. Right. And at the same time, the argument is, well, we're just making these tools are already available. We're just making them widely accessible to everyone. It's like, yeah, letting people lie at scale is actually, I don't have you been around the past five or ten years. Well, and 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, Open AI put out the image recognition thing that you can upload a picture to chat GPT, 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, Nelai, 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. Wait, where in this camera is responsible? Nowhere. That's my point. Just full bold. But if Photoshop was doing this and not Google Photos,

and it was just as easy and just as good, but you had to pay for a Creative Cloud membership to have it, would you have a problem with it? So it isn't effectively in Photoshop. It's this much harder in Photoshop, but not that much harder. 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's 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.

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 when you look at the photos, like, do you want to edit them? Do you want to combine these? And like, it's driving you towards these choices in a way that having Photoshop is like, I'm intentionally going to go do this thing. Okay. I don't know.

It's because it's suggesting rather, like it's removing that intention. That's kind of, it feels like where the issue is. Right. It is right. Google, to its credit, right? Google, I know that they're 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. And you're going to look super hot. Yeah, that's the camera that would sell.

In one specific way, Alex, if that's what you're into. My other question is, I think this question of, like, taking a bunch of photos that exist in order to make one that never did, there is something there that is sort of icky. But if that was just saying, like if Google said we're going to do the same thing, but we're going to treat it essentially as like merging burst mode, where we're not going to use a single picture that wasn't captured. We're just going to use the best pixel in every part of the photo from the 10 images that you took.

Would you still have a problem with that? Every pixel of that is real. It's just not all at the same time. Yeah, everything happened, but not all at the same time. Travis Kelsey never looked at Taylor Swift, but we've invented a photo. No, that's what I'm saying. Travis Kelsey looked at Taylor Swift, but not at the same moment

Hugh Jackman was also making that funny face. Right. But now we've, but now we've created a moment that does, this is dangerous territory. Go with me here. Philosophically,

go with me here. If that last step of we've used all that data to create a thing that never happened. 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 of my mentions who are just like recapitulating the history. I know. I know that all these ideas have existed and all these tools

have existed before. But if you take composite photography and make it that easy and that accessible, do you have the same problem with it? Yes. Like, without question to say. Okay. 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.

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

I don't know. I just, we now create, when you say the vast majority of it, we create so many photos as a people that like the vast majority of everything in all photos is nothing. Fair. But I mean, think about even your own life, right? Like the number of pictures in your camera role, and I suspect this is true of most people, that will be viewed by, frankly, just you and no one else ever, or you and 10 or fewer people ever, is practically all of them.

Yeah. And you're a pretty public person in the scheme of things, right? Yeah, right now, most of the photos in my camera roll are of, like, light switches that I need to rewire, and I just need to remember what colors are going on. And it's like, boy, I hope the pixel doesn't lie to me about that. That seems like a fire hazard. Like, you know, like, whatever. You're not wrong.

saying like it'd be crazy right? Like the idea is like, you know what, that red like cable? That's not pretty. Yeah, exactly. Yellow. Oh. What do we? Brighten that up a little bit.

Sorry. Black wire. No, no, no. Right? Like, it's not going to do that. Fine. The revolution in photography is that more people use the tool than ever before in phones. Right?

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 here today. 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.

You have a tool. You can take photos. You can look at photos. Other people took on largely the same tool on your... That's very important. That's a shared... So if you break that for people and you say, you understand how unreliable your tool is, right?

That you are often using this tool to make things that never happened. Well, then you change everyone else's understanding of everyone else's tools. And that is like a long process, a slow process, ideally a very considered process. And like, here we are on the doorstep. And Google's answer is, well, we put some metadata in it. And sort of everyone else's responses, well, you could always do this with Photoshop. And it's like, yes, I could always lie.

What I did not do is culturally re-contextualized the very nature of lying spread across every phone in existence. Sure. And like, that's this moment. Like, we should just be honest with ourselves. The next phone or the phone after this is going to have it in the shutter button. And when it's in the shutter button, the camera becomes totally unreliable. an unreliable narrator of the events. And we are now just producing memories and not photographs.

And all of the norms around photos about what is acceptable editing, how much skin smoothing is acceptable? I don't know. What should people with darker skin tones? What should our complexions look like? All those norms get tossed away in favor of, well, what did you want? Yeah. And this camera will now deliver you what you want instead of what is true.

I mean, we've been seeing that for a while now. phones in China where they would light and skin and smooth everybody out automatically and you couldn't escape it. I think even one of the early iPhones did that. No, 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. Like exposure, just how bright and light are things. And then you add on top of that skin smoothing. And what you're, you're going to. 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 doesn't stop the people on TikTok from just using them all the time. But like, whatever. And so they've had to split the difference. But I'm saying that gives us like a framework as we go into this next phase with Google and people who follow out.

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. Yeah. We'll see. I mean, like should, again, this is my point. I agree with you. Like the market in this country, the market rejected the idea of aggressive skin smoothing.

Right. That's actually like maybe not what you would have expected. And you have another, you have a counter example where the market in Asian countries actually wanted it. And, you know, Samsung basically gives it to them. Apple kind of doesn't, you know, 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 face two. 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 going to say about the camera can swap faces around. I don't. 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. Like, if you know Allison, because her face just keeps switching, but her body doesn't change.

And you're like... Right. So here are some important caveats to this entire conversation. Yeah. 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, 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 little... lick of introspection here. There's Google saying we put some shit in the XF data to mark it as edited. And it's like, guys. Well, it's really funny that this is coming from Google, who's been

very vocal about like, we're doing AI but right. And it's like, okay, but you just, how is this any different than the, like, putting out a generative text AI that can just lie? 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. Yes. And first it was easy to lie in a text post and then it was easy to lie by making a website that looked like a news post. And then it was easy to lie because you were associated with the Russian government.

And now it's easy to lie in photos. So like I think the arc of that is not that different. It's just that it's getting sort of higher fidelity. And we're going to go through this with video in a very real way at some point very soon too, as all of these image generators get better. I mean, we should be talking about Dolly 3 and the fact that it's able to do things that look like photos now. Like, we are now past the point where you can quickly glance at a generated image that is wholly generated and immediately go, oh, that's AI. 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, 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 a, I go to Bing, and I can just do that. Right. So I think these big questions of, like, trust and rules, and I think, I think you posted about this earlier, but, like, I've been going back and rereading, like, the AP's rules about how they do photos and Getty's rules about how they do photos. And, like, for people who take the kinds of high-stake photos that you're talking about, there have always been rules about what you're allowed to edit and how, 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. If you look at the New York Times in sort of their

feature photography, the vignetting is out of control because it's the one knob that they can turn. Yeah. And so I think you're going to start to see these folks, like in the same way that we have more and more people being more and more outspoken about things that they're using like Chad GPD. People are coming out with policies about how they do and don't use it. I think I think you're going to start to see the same thing with images. I do wonder if the question is going to be, like, we're going from everything is now possible on a smartphone to, like, I wonder if smartphone photos get outlawed from some of these rules over time for exactly the reason you're describing. So you brought up Getty. So, you know, these high stakes image pipelines, you can't solve it in technology.

You have to solve it by getting a bunch of people to agree that this is what will have. Norms, right? You will do this. You will not do this. So if you are a Getty news photographer, 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 they're like, but only if it doesn't change the photo. And if you have a question, like ask us. So you can't enforce cultural norms in software. You just can't. You can influence them. You can do some stuff. But at the end of the day, it's just a bunch of people that have to agree on how things work. So that's the news side of it.

On the creative side, I think it's like wide open. Do it every one. Have Photoshop's great. Generate a cat. Like, have all the time. That was the demo they did with us on stage at code. Like, fine, I think that stuff is exciting. On the high stakes, are you representing the truth to a lot of people?

Is Donald Trump looking at the protesters or is you looking at his shoes and did you remove? Like, this matters, right? Some of these images really matter what they say. There is an entire like ecosystem of TikTokers who just look at people. pictures and tell you what Taylor Swift is thinking. It matters what the picture say. Okay. So on those high stakes pipelines, you have to set some rules.

So you mentioned Getty. Getty CEO, Craig Peters, was on the code stage with me talking about AI. Last week, I just hit him up and said, hey, do you look at the pixelate? What do you think of it? Would you ever, like, ban a camera? And he said, he obviously did not answer with Pixel 8. He's like, I haven't played with you yet. He said, we will largely continue to navigate along the following lines within our editorial

coverage, this is the editorial coverage of 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 the image as possible. So that's it. No changes. And then he said, within creative, the sort of artistic side of Getty, we allow for a bunch of stuff. He said, I see us allowing things within creative context, but we will not allow misrepresentation. So then my next question to him was, if there's a hypothetical, phone that just like aggressively smooth 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. So theoretically, they could be like next pixel phone. No, you can't. Or whatever. Unnamed, you know, OEM makes a phone and their big camera feature is like, you're always

beautiful. I'm not going to say it. God damn it. You know, like, Getty would be like this camera, this pipeline is not acceptable to us. Yeah. And I think just the fact that, one, I can ask the CEO of getting 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? Seems nice. Have a time. But go nuts.

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

Yeah. It's not to say photos, don't lie. It's not to say photos can't be bad. So 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 need to start training children from a young age to never believe their own eyes. I mean, I think we should do that anyway. Yeah, fine. I mean, if you want to, like, look, in the end, we're all going to mean headsets. I'm going to have a little seminar for five years. It's going to be great. But that's like, those are the stakes, you know, and I think there's a lot of people kind of like doing nihilism in my mentions that are like,

nothing was any air 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. Yeah. If I was like, I'm just making guns easier to buy. You wouldn't be like, well, everyone's always been able to buy. No, it actually means something to give everyone the tool where they can lie at scale. And to brush it off is these aren't photos. These are memories. And if that's what you want to say, then, okay, you haven't made a camera. But it's, it's, I'm not like outraged. We've been doing what is a photo for so long that I'm just like, oh, this is, this is the culmination of my life's work. And we're going to

keep going. Now, by the way, now I have to buy a Pixel 8. Yeah. Like, I have to have one just to be like, this is a watershed. We should all buy Pixel 8s. Pixel 8 sales 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. Honestly, that made me want to go buy one. I mean, can you imagine if like Verizon had a meeting where they're like, Pixel 8 sales are through the roof? And like, have we done any audience data?

and people, and they're like, is it battery life? Is it performance? And people are like, no, it's philosophical quandary. Boy, have we gone over. Sorry, David. He knew this was happening. I did.

I walked right into this, and I'm okay with it. We barely talked about it. The phone has a screen. It does. You can pay dollars for it, 100 more than last year. Tins are three. All right, we'll stop.

Can I just say one more cool thing about the phones, or about the Google announcement, and then we should move on. Google did this weird thing where they announced that BARD, the LLM powering Bard is going to be powering Google Assistant. And they did it in this very sketchy way that made it seem like they had 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 LLMs underneath Alexa to do more stuff. And I think if voice assistants are ever going to be good,

this is the moment we're going to start to see it. And the hope these people have is super high, the case for why this can work and why it can understand context better and why it can be more reactive is real. Like the chat GPT voice stuff is like alarmingly good. And so I think if suddenly this becomes baked into Google Assistant in a way that is like accessible and cool and useful and has the same control over your phone and access to the internet, that's all going to be really cool. They were super sketchy about the announcement. I have no idea how any of it's going to work or when any of it's going to come. But I think it could be a really big deal. I'm very excited.

especially if it can answer the cup question Eli had earlier. Like if it knows the difference between the cups for you, oh my God, game changer. When you ask Google Assistant, I'm trying to be kind to the audience. When you ask Google Assistant, how much is a cup? It's so confidently not used. Like in the context of a coffee machine, it's just like, a cup is an ounce? It's like, no, I know that's not the answer.

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

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All that stuff isn't going to be in a review cycle. So we will go into that stuff in detail when we've actually used it. I just can't resist a what is a photo. I'm like ready to keep talking. We could do another four hours. Anytime you want. That's why we made the website. Hey,

I guess what? Netflix is more expensive now. Oh my God. All right. Pivot. It's a streaming. Arnold and Alex talk the whole time. Alex,

what's up with your Plex server? It's doing fine. I watch Top Hat on it this weekend. It was lovely. Nice. Alex, your Plex server is like famous on the internet, by the way.

I posted something on threads the other day, basically saying like the only possible response to the unending stream of streaming price hikes is just to delete all your streaming services and buy box sets of your four favorite TV shows that solves all your problems. And I mean a dozen different people were like, or just get on Alex Kranz's Plex server.

Yeah. Look, I worked really hard on that server. I'm not going to lie. I worked really hard when I was unemployed. Are you in like our home lab? Oh, you got to get into it. It's going to be bad. We got to get you like a rack-mount sonology situation.

That's what I want so bad. Yeah. I have to figure out where I put it. But what I'm not going to be doing is subscribing to Netflix. No, that's not true. I continue to subscribe to Netflix because I like it and there's a bunch of shows on it I like and I obsessively consume media. But Netflix is, there's a rumor that Netflix is going to be raising its prices again. It's waiting until after the SAG, after Strike is resolved, which is. Everybody on both sides seems pretty confident is going to happen fairly soon.

So that's lovely to hear. The reason it's doing that is not because, oh, they signed all these new contracts and they're spending way more money on actors and writers. They're spending a little bit more money on actors and writers, like a fraction, tiny, tiny fraction. The reason is because they were always going to have to raise the prices. Yeah. Because like zero percent interest rates are gone and you have to pay for things. So they need money. So, yeah, it's happening again.

And David and I were talking about this beforehand. We've seen a bunch of price hikes this year and we're going to keep seeing some. We saw another one this week, in fact. The ad-free version of Discovery Plus is also getting a big price hike. Sorry, David, one of the few people I know that subscribes. That's okay. How are you feeling? I'm fine.

We have finally moved all of our streaming to Max. So we just leave inside of Max now. Wait, leave her alone. She's fine. She's in elementary school now. She's got to let her own Plex server. She's got her own. She's had a little Raspberry pie, like a little five-year-old size box.

It's just bluey on the server all day. Yeah. It's just, just blue. No, right now we're, it's Minecraft videos on YouTube. This kid has taught herself, she's like building. Oh, wow. And it's all because of Minecraft videos on YouTube kids. And it's like, I'm worried about it.

It's fine. It's like, is my child going to fall down the radicalization funnel? But like right now it's like she's building houses. My God's son wants to be a dictator because of YouTube. It's fine. Look, there's an argument that we would be better served. He said he would be a gentle dick. He'd be like, don't trust photography.

He would. Like, you get in early with him. You'll be fine. Anyway, you continue. Yeah. Everything's on Max? Yeah. Have you watched the naked show?

No, naked attraction is not family friendly for my 10-month-old. I watched one episode. For journalism. Becky and I, like, sat there. We watched it together. And we both were like, do you want to keep going? You could stop you all. you want to keep going.

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 get around to naked attraction. But the thing... Don't. No, no, no, no, no. Run. Yeah, I will say the Golden Bachelor makes me feel

a lot of feelings about the world, but that's for a different podcast. The streaming prices thing, so I went back and like I made a story stream for us just like compiling all of the recent stories about the price hikes. And like, man, it's brutal. It's just everywhere you look, it's just like one, two, three dollars more expensive all the time. And I've been trying

to figure out, 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 a piece. Or, Everyone thinks ad plus cheap subscription is the future. So they are just going to keep pricing ad-free services through the roof until you go to the ads because they've realized that that's how they're going to make their money. This is my theory.

That's the one. That's the right one. Yeah, that's the one. This entire business was entirely ad-dependent until like 15 minutes ago. 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 back-to-earned.

seat as it's trying to roll out ads and Max is taking a backseat as it tries to roll out ads. Max famously, like, as 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 Zazloff did before this was very advertising place. And you watch like Paramount Plus and everything that they're doing right now. And those guys know ads. That was CBS. That was like the biggest network. And it was really, really good at taking all of your money. and wants to do that again. And watching this like sleeping giant slowly get out of bed because he's old, sorry, no, watching him slowly get out of bed and like go out and start to win back all those eyes as this whole landscape starts to shift from, got to be on Netflix to, God, we're just inventing cable again. And now we have to figure out what part of cable we are. Paramount's going to crush in this because that's what it's done for years. and it knows how to do it. Alex, that continues to be your craziest streaming take. It's my crazy thing.

Paramount Plus is good is your single wildest stance in the streaming wars. But then what did they do this week on TikTok? I don't know because who cares. Oh, they're the ones who did. Okay, never mind. I take it back. Paramount's good again. See?

See? You're seeing it. You're seeing it. You should explain what happened. But you're right. I take it all back. What did they do? So Paramount this week uploaded all of Mean Girls to TikTok.

Right. And so you can watch it in little sections because that's how everybody's been watching old shows. This is it'll go on TikTok. No, I've watched so many movies in what is essentially the Plex, Alex's Plex server of TikTok. You just watch, I've watched Sully Land that plan. I watched Whipash at what is obviously 2x Speed, which makes that movie, right? It was everywhere.

It was like, oh, we're going to, J.K. Simmons is going to be a dick, but super fast. The only one that didn't get me was inception where I was like, I didn't know what was happening in this movie when I was watching it in real time on a big screen. And I certainly do not know what is happening on TikTok. That was so smart. Paramount to do because everybody does it that way. That's the new like TV street. Like you go and you sit in front of your TV and you flip the channel. But they took it down. They took Mean Girls off of TikTok. It was just a one day marketing thing. Yeah, they did it as a one day marketing thing. And that's a really

smart marketing thing. Did they make any money on Paramount Plus? But it's Mean Girls Day. But it was all about the memes. Yeah. It was Mean Girls Day because October 3rd. And that's when he talked to her. It was October 3rd. So I watched that movie a lot. Clearly. Unfortunately. Oh, also almost all of the Oceans movies. Oceans 11, oceans 12, Ocean's... Almost fully, I think I watched all of Ocean's 11 on Texas. Your FYP is much nice.

Mine was just the Sully, landing the plane, and then Young Sheldon. That's worse. That's a lot. I watch so much Young Sheldon. Mine is people complaining about the lack of switch options for Phillips Hugh,

which I'm going to start making these TikToks. Yeah, it's on it. And like movies. Way more entertaining. But yeah, I think Paramounts, on to it. This is crazier than the time you said Big Naturals 50 times. Gotcha.

I don't know what you're not. I just, the tags we're going to get on, like, everybody does like automated transcriptions of these podcasts, and we're just going to 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 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 revenue streams away. And they did that. And it seemed very smart in a time when you could get infinity investment because you just kept showing user growth. 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,

It's like, oh, by making money twice. And they're just going to do the same thing again, except instead of paying one $70 bill and seeing nine minutes of ads every half hour, I'm going to pay $10,7 bills and see nine minutes of ads every half hour. But the user experience is going to be worse. We're literally in the middle of rebuilding worse cable, and it's starting to drive me totally nuts. Wait, but we don't have to deal with a cable box. I don't know that that's better. Oh, I do. Instead, I get to deal with my Roku TV, which sucks.

Yeah, I just want to, yeah, there's a cable box in there. It's a Roku. It's an Apple TV. It has. Like, go get a better, get better system. Whatever. It's still 95,000 different user experiences and a series of video players that are not very good. Yeah, and I think that's what we're, like, at some point they're going to have to start reckoning with is right now everybody's big way of getting you on their service is, well, we've got this sport or we've got this TV show you really want to watch or this movie you want to really watch. Max has been very clear about we're going to sell our stuff. So you're seeing a whole bunch of Max products on Netflix this week. And if you log into Netflix this week, it feels like old school Netflix. You're like, oh, I can watch Dune.

Yeah. I can just do that. That's nice. So Casey Boy is on stage of code. And he was like basically saying what David is saying is. Oh, we used to sell our things like a lot of times. And that's everybody's wanting to get back to that. He called syndication the brass ring.

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

The big difference with cable, and I think it's important to say this out loud, there was value pre-internet in paying money for cable. one, it had all the stuff. Yeah. And you couldn't get the stuff at all unless you paid for cable. Like cable channels were not available to you in any way, shape, or form unless you paid for cable. Two, and I think we forget that this is where this industry came from, they were better than antennas. Yeah. Right?

Like the wild west of the early cable industry was a bunch of people who got in trouble from broadcast networks for setting up. big antennas and then running wires to everybody's houses. You know what they used to call cable cat TV, CATV? It was like community access television. Yeah, that was the good shit. Right. And there's like, there was a thing under there where they are like, we will centralize the hard part, which is getting the signal off the broadcast towers.

And then we'll make it good. And you were paying for that thing. Very specifically, like direct TV used to advertise that it was higher quality video than cable operators. Right. That's gone. It's like, no one gives a shit about that part anymore. So the part where you're paying twice is like you're paying for access and then you're

getting ads. Like, we should just demand that the access be great. Well, and the other part of this is cable didn't just die because Netflix. Like Netflix certainly participated in the death of cable that is still currently happening. But YouTube was a much bigger impact. Sure. Right. And YouTube hasn't gone away.

YouTube is still here. So these people are all going to be out here recreating cable. but they still aren't going to be they're not going to get the audience back 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 gray's anatomy because gray's anatomy season two that was still when cable was really strong and when gray's anatomy it was still really strong it's still really strong which is terrifying no like it does well in the nielsen's still well well yeah yeah yeah so like the nilsons back in like 2006 2007 for most watched episode episode would be like 30 million people tuned in. Nowadays, Graze 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. 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. Yeah. This is how I ended up buying a frame TV. This is like, I've talked to people like TV installers. Yeah. And then like some Samsung people who are like, the frame is a hit because people know that it will be off. They're just going to leave it off. And then I bought one because I was like, it'll be in our bedroom and we'll just leave it off, but I, now, it's currently our TV. Yeah. And I'm just like, this is not even local dimming. Why did I buy this TV?

I really want one for my bedroom just because it's pretty. Yeah, we're going to eventually be in the bedroom and, you know, in fact, you'll watch comedy specials on it. 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? Because at some point, you're going to turn it on. No, I want to be very clear.

No. No. It is. The, the, the, Matt, 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. Yeah. And then you turn it on. You're like, all right. It's just one big ass LED backlight. Like it's 1956. Yeesh. Viewing angles.

How's the bloom? The whole thing is bloom. It's just there's like one flashlight behind the, just I. It does not know the color black. It's just gray. Baby, why do I watch Whiplash on my phone? Phone can do True Blacks.

Well, the good news is it's really expensive. So you got that going for you? No, it's not. Actually, the little ones are cheap. I think this is the other reason. Because it's a cheap panel. Yeah, that's fair. So it's all priced on margin,

which means they get discounted like crazy. Okay, fair enough. But I was like, I should buy a gallery series LG, like a G2. It's real nice. Very thin. You can mount it just like a frame. But it doesn't have the mats 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 single backlight LCD in my home you can put it as a background for your podcast it's going to be great when it's on the wall

in the bedroom and we never watch it which is an insane thing to say about a TV it'll be great when we stop watching it just pictures of Max it's going to be pictures of Max and it's going to look great it's going to be great at that thing but as an actual television. It's like Samsung got me again. This is the second time I 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 going to have it for 15 more years. Got to go LG. No, we're going to buy where I'm waiting to buy. I think you can get them now, but the official on sale date is the Sony A95L. It's so expensive. It's pretty. But it's going to be in the wall for 15 years. So I'm like, I should spend the money. Yeah. And it's going to be great. It had better be great because I, after this frame experience, I don't know if I can take it. All right. Sorry, David. We were talking about the future of streaming.

All I know is I have a TCL TV back here. It's 40-some inches because I accidentally clicked the wrong button on Amazon. So you know what it is is it's fine. It is just fine. I'm still on my LGB7. No, see, I have a B-6. 2007, yeah. Yeah, I have a B-6, yeah.

14, whatever. Years ago. 2017. That's right. 17, because I bought the B-6 and 16. Okay, I was like, wow, my TV's old. TV's great, but it's going to be there for, I should upgrade. I'm like, why?

Spend the money. There's one thing you should spend the money on. It's a nice TV. And a mattress. You're going to have it forever. I do actually agree with that. This is the problem with streaming, is I'd rather talk about the TVs and the content. Good teaser for Monday's Vergecast, by the way, before we take a break, which we should do.

Our whole episode is with a person who would like to give you a television for free. Ooh. It's coming. I cannot wait for this episode. It's great. All right. You're right. We should take a break.

We should do a lightning round, and we should get out of here. And then after this, we'll have a bonus round of six more hours talking about the nature of photography. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in.

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Claude. com. All right. We're back. Lightning around. We're like already over. It's the craziest episode in a long time. People sitting in their cars waiting for us to finish.

The phone is good. It's a piece of hard. It's not just a bundle of philosophical quandaries. But you should buy it because it is that. Yeah. Please, I'm telling you, if you have the money, go to your local wireless care 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, move the needle, right?

It's not speed. It's not camera. It's, I want to be horrible at parties. All right. Lightning around, David. Okay, I have two because sometimes I'm allowed to do that. My first one is it appears we've now seen the entire humane AI pin. It was at Paris Fashion Week.

And Naomi Campbell and I think a couple of other people were wearing it on their, on their sort of breast pocket area. Lagerfelding the shit out of this thing. So we have now seen what it looks like. I think it was John Gruber who described it as an iPhone you would get in a happy meal. We still don't know anything about what this device does. 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 had a couple of videos from Paris Fashion Week

where it was another one of those like projecting it onto their hands as they were doing stuff, kinds of videos. I have never had so many questions about what something is than I do about this, but I find it deeply fascinating.

Can I just, I'm going to start with a baseline question. There's a, look at our post and we'll go look at, look at the post. It's in the show notes. Pull over in your car. And I want you to look at the picture of it mounted on the lady's pants. Okay. How much is this thing way? Because it is not pulling on this fabric. Because it is not pulling on this fabric. Because it is not pulling it. Because it is not pulling so much as like a boot and air. It's like high school and you're like, oh, this is kind of saggy. Right? Like you have to think about it. I'm just saying, have you ever, anything. You're ever, anything. thing, like has any weight, it's going to pull on, and here it's not doing it. And you think she's pulling that fabric top. Oh, yeah. She's pulling it top. 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

Yeah, it's on the lapel. And she's also, again, styling and posing herself. And this was all coming from the Copernie show, which Coperni apparently loves to do some little fashion stuff. So, like, their previous, a recent show was like all the robot dogs running around on the stage. And pretty good. Like my dogs. So like they, they love to do like weird tech stuff. Our reporter Mia Sato is a big fashion nerd. And I was like, oh, Keperni's doing it.

She's like, of course it's Keperni that would do the humane thing. I still have a number of questions. For example, how do you load contacts into this phone? It's their phone app? Real question. How do you interact with it? Well, you just talk to it with your handout in front of you. Okay.

We got no hand. Just to me it was very funny that this came out the same week that I, Apple announced it's no longer supporting and repairing the $17,000 Apple Watch. And it's like those two things, it's like the beginning of one thing in the end of a very similar thing. It's like you can just see Humane trying to go this like cool, fashiony, make this a luxury item route, which is a thing I think people try to do before they have a product that's good. I was like, how did that work for Google Glass?

Badly. It works pretty badly for. everybody because it turns out it's very hard to make something fashion i just i want to take you back to the photo of the lady in the pants every time i look at this product i have more questions okay we've seen how the thing works right you can call bethany you can hold that where if you have it mounted on your pants you can see her knuckles whatever whatever look weight aside i i still don't know how this works i think i think there's cardboard in the pants is what i'm trying Let's say. Let's say this is an acceptable mounting position for the humane eye pin.

Not a dorky one. Well, let's say this is where they think you should have it. Okay. And you need to call Bethany. Where are you going to put your hand? Squatting. Yeah, like you're holding your hand out. Yeah.

All right. Just the basics of this product are so confusing to me. Maybe you pop a squat and maybe that's like part of their. Oh, you're like doing fashion rap squats. And they're like, pop a squat. Call your friend. Pop a squat. Check the mail.

If you mean's marketing slogan is Papa squat, I'm all in. All in. All right. Right? I'm just saying look at the photo where it's on the pants and just be like, how would you just run that to its logical conclusions? You have to. One of the ways in which you use it is that you talk to it and it talks to people in French. And suddenly it's like, da-da-da-da.

And it's like, wah-wa-wa-wa. in French, from your pants pocket. From your crotch, basically. What happens when you sit down? Does French sound like the adults in Charlie Brown? Is that what that just was? Try not to be racist. All right, just checking.

You know. There you go. My other lightning around 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 apps fall. which is like a delightful follow-on to you're holding it wrong from, you know, all those years ago. Apple then released an iOS update that it said, quote, addresses an issue that may cause iPhone to run warmer than expected.

But also said that it was the app's fault and a bunch of apps updated and supposedly solved the problem. So what is going on here? It's whatever it is, it seems like it's been fixed. Terrific. The overheating problem from some of these apps that were running wild. seems to be solved. But whose fault was this and how did they fix it? We don't know and it's driving me nuts. I just want to know what's going. It's very weird because it's a point update that doesn't like ordinarily when Apple adds new features in like a 0.0.3 update,

it's like little bug fixes and security updates and stuff. Like this is not a moment you do much, but they named this one. No, because I think there was a new cycler on it. But I guess my guess here is it with iOS 17 there came some new frameworks at Instagram and Uber and a bunch of other apps relied on. They updated to use those frameworks. That was causing the problem. 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 very funny that they're like, I don't know, Instagram. Everybody made a boo-boo.

All right. Cranz, what's yours? LG is dropping ATSC 3.0 from its TVs next year. I got a lot of messages about this over the weekend. This is the RIP crayons story of the week. Yeah, and 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 converting over to it.

So I had a conversation with a fancy person that code. Okay. about television. Not the person who was on stage, not Byron Allen, who, by the way, a superstar at Code, overshadowed by Linda Eckering.

He was like, here's what I'm doing. I'm Sua McDonald's because they're racist. Every French tries racist. Like, it was crazy. But he's trying to buy ABC. Yeah. And one of the reasons

that he was trying to buy ABC is he thinks cessations are probably a man. 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, the local stations have to do it. Yep. And they won't. Yep. They just, like, there is not a single, less innovative part of the media ecosystem.

Nobody wants. Local television stations. Yeah, and everybody who's been buying up the local stations, because they're largely, 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. And run the profits out. 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 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 ATS3, 3.0. know 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 of resources to continue to use this. If nobody's adopting it. Like, you know, come back in a couple years. But by then broadcast TV will effectively probably be dead. So that's a, it's just a real bummer. Right at the end, the text is all over. Yeah, they got it. They're like, we made it. And I was

like, yeah, you're 10 years too late. You should have done this a while back. But this is, you know, there's a, there's a balance here. Remember Vizio took the tuners out of its TVs? And there was huge backlash and then put them back. Because that was too soon. If they did it now, nobody would care. I think that's right. I mean, well, Vizio was cheap, though. Vizio, that was the whole get of Vizio is you'd get a really good TV for really an expensive 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?

Just right to us. I need to know the answer. We're both guessing. Yeah. We're guessing. I think a lot of people still use their tuners a lot, especially our audience. Our audience does. Because I use my tuners still.

That's why I said. But we got, because we're the small. Asked us to talk about ATSC 3.0. I have a feeling. I know. I'm sorry, guys. I want it to, but I don't be forgetting it.

ATS3.0 is going to perform upstate. It's going to be very happy there. It's going to be really pleased. All right. I have two as well, but my two are like the same thing. Okay. So one, X,

the platform formerly known as Twitter, announced a deal with Paris Hilton. I would just, I would describe this press release is calorie-free. It contains no information. It's a lot of work. It's so. many words. One thing I learned about

Linda Akarino is she loves words. Just loves words. And you can see why she was a great marketing executive at NBC. Because she had NBC. She had the Olympics. And if you just want to wander around talking about how people feel inspired and communities are brought

together and look at the world and here's a young girl singing and buy an amex. NBC is a great platform to be that personality. When you have Twitter, it's like, what are you talking about it. Like, you've got nothing. And it's all the same sort of like, hopey changing language for lack of a better word. So anyway, so they've announced to

Ceil Paraseltin where 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-at browser. Okay, this could be cool. And I'm going to give you the word. Unless Paris Hilton is actually selling ecstasy on this platform, zero people will bite anything. Paris is super into radios.

This is like the lore about Paraselton. Is she super into traditional radios? Can I mean CB radio? One of the stores just CB radio stuff. All right. That would be cool. If Ferris Hilton does a CB radio activation, that would be great. X will work to secure brand sponsorship to support each of the activations.

So they're paying Paris. They don't know how they're going to pay for paying Paris. Very good. X will also support amplifying other efforts that 1111-11 media, which is their company, 11-11 media and Paris Hilton will be involved in throughout the year. This is nothing. What is it? So 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 shut down, all the stuff is speaker, the house is getting fired. this is the stuff you would use Twitter for. Right? Like these moments were where Twitter, there was a flood in New York. Do you know Twitter is great at telling people who don't care about the weather in New York City

what exactly is happening with the weather in New York City? Yeah. And threads has, I would say, flatly failed to live up to any of these occasions as a real-time news service. I've tried, and I'm rooting for threads. It's the one I use. And everyone gets mad at me when I'm like, Threads is bad. They're like, you, nah,

What'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 just a lot of consternation about threads and whether they care about news. And meta is, there was a report in the information that meta is doing creator councils where they're gathering all the creators together to see what they want, which is historically in the history of social. platforms, a thing you do right before you die. But, you know, on the flip side, you know,

Betta does have Instagram. And like they have a thing there. Yeah. But, you know, it's like they're doing committees to figure out what they should do to kick threads back in the gear. And it's like, oh, you don't need a committee. Do news. Just do Twitter. Just do what Twitter is get out, 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 Massaro was so burned by news because he used to run the news feed. He is sober in my news. They have to try everything else first. And so, Missouri 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. Yeah. So we're not going to pretend. Two things about this.

One, one solution to this problem is to make promises and keep them. Just putting that out there As somebody who lived through something called The Pivot to Video Not lying about metrics And actually developing revenue It's a concept I think that would have solved your problems

It's just a thing So I get where that's coming from Like everyone yelled at him But that's not what people are asking for But he's saying like we didn't keep our promises So we don't want to make any promises this time Which is like backwards. But like fine

I actually understand it Yeah Like one rational response to that Is to say we are making no promises Sure. Great. The problem is you're using an emergency way down. So good luck.

Like forget being burned by making bad decisions. Hasn't meta learned that caring about the news business is actually just all downside? Yeah, right? And the regulators are there. And, you know, Canada is going to make you pay for links. And an Australian person is going to, you know, Rupert Murdoch is going to be like, I even want to pay for my links. It all happens.

There's a law in this country that would make him do it. It's all bad. But the product is. sticky because what you desperately need is people posting about the news on a product that looks like Twitter. Okay. Yes. Except Twitter was a bad business, was always a bad business, and was a bad product that most people didn't use and the people who did hated themselves for it. Like, I'm not sure you actually should look at Twitter and be like, let's do what Twitter did. True. That's how you get a bunch of psychotic maniacs like us who spent all together too much time for 15 years on

Twitter. Like, my brain is healed. I feel I'm a new person now. that I'm not doing it. Like, I have threads on my phone. I don't even open it. I'm like, I forgot. I, like, threw a bomb on threads.

I was like, this camera's a liar. Like, walked away. 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. Yeah. Because what they did, Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Asherry both did this, like, aggressively and sort of loudly

at the beginning, was say, in as many words, we want to be better Twitter. 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. They sort of did.

A little. But if you say the first thing, everybody's going to hold you the first thing, right? Like, I think it's true. But also if you say, like, we think the world deserves Twitter that is sanely run, like, in essentially that many words, people are going to hold you to Twitter standards. But I think like meta's out here to build a big thing that makes money and Twitter was never any of those things. Actually, we have like 10,000 disclosure. 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 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. It certainly was the best it has been. Maybe they had stumbled into a sort of step. steady state of misery. Like, I don't know. Maybe.

I mean, like, this is a company that sold itself for $44 billion at $54.20 a share, because it could not figure out a way to get to $5420 a share on the open market. Like, they're like, I don't know. That seems high. Take them on. Like, we got nothing. Like, we're, we're not. Is it, we're going to let more people tweet.

Like, whatever. And now the new reports said that it's worth $8 billion. So everybody's doing great. So there's, I just that. And then the other discosures we talked about streaming and cable. So Comcast and Best Company, whatever. They don't, they're not into me. We didn't say anything nice.

I'm a Netflix producer. That's a real thing. I have AT&T as my personal phone service. Yeah. Verizon. Alex Cranes watches every Star Trek show on Paramount Plus. It's true. Broadcast TV RF Energy is flowing through our bodies right now.

That's a real thing that's happening to you too. Gray's Anatomy is going right now. Hey, look, the 5G alert went off. All of you are Aaron Rogers now I want to be a zombie 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 at 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 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 shut down 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 going to pay Paris Hilton some money to post about radios in her shop. It's coming. That's not going to do it for you.

You don't know. Or that you're just going to block some topics entirely the way threats is done with COVID, right? Like you can't just write certain things off and then be like, come hang out, but only about the nice. things. Like, I think you might be right that what Twitter was might be the best of all the bad outcomes. And maybe they're all bad outcomes. Well, because it was, it was like the NC-17 social media and Threads is like legitimately the NC-17 social media. And this is like G-rated. Pixar Twitter. And news is not G-rated. I just don't think like even if, again, I would just come back to some of the stickiest things that Twitter did for me that weren't news, like hard news, like political

news. Sports. Watching sports with Twitter open is great or was great. Now it's weird because like half people aren't there and then they're doing the weird programmatic insertions of like ads for buying gold. I love gold. I don't love any of this. And I don't have the app on my phone so it's on the web. Whatever. It's not great. I would love to switch to threads for this. It's just not there. And again, I'm rooting for threads because I want a company at Metis scale to bet on federation and interoperability and push all of that. forward. They seem super committed to it. I am totally in support of that. I just think they've lost sight of what makes it sticky, which is actually real-time information. And like, I don't

know that you can solve that without accidentally solving news, and I think they're paralyzed for that. Yes. That sounds 100% right. On the other hand, Twitter's paying Paris Hilton money. The fact that Linda Yakorino had to tweet the word sliving is just, it just makes it all worthwhile. It's sliving. Is it sliving? Sliving. I always say sliving. While we're living, Nela's sliving, guys. I'm sliving while right out the door. All right, I think that's it.

We're way over time. I just want to point out, this episode of VersaCast started with coffee cups. It did philosophical quandaries, and we ended with sliving. When people say we don't have the rage, we made a whole publication for ourselves. Yeah. For this. This is where we live. All right, that's it.

I got some things to call out. We have a partnership with D-Brand. You should go buy the skin. They're really cool. They're cool. They're sick as hell, actually. They look beautiful. And then, speaking of cameras, Becca's video,

1,000 photos with the iPhone 15 Pro Max, one of the best videos we've ever done. It's on YouTube, lots of photos. Beck has lots of thoughts about this camera. She compares it to the first iPhone camera, which is actually, it is more complicated than you might think. Again, just exposure, philosophical quandary on these phones. Go watch that video.

Okay, that's it. That's Vergecast. Recreggone. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The 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 Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.