The Vergecast - The Pixel 9 is great – and a problem

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

The Verge's David Pierce, Alex Cranz, Allison Johnson, and Richard Lawler discuss the Google Pixel 9 review and its controversial reimagine AI feature, a Chick-fil-A streaming service, Sonos app updates, and more. Further reading: Google Pixel 9 Pro and 9 Pro XL review: AI all over the place Google’s AI tool helped us add disasters and corpses to our photos  This system can sort real pictures from AI fakes — why aren’t platforms using it?  The AI photo editing era is here Donald Trump posts a fake AI-generated Taylor Swift endorsement From Digital Trends:I tried Google's new Pixel Studio app, and it's a mess OpenAI exec says California’s AI safety bill might slow progress https://www.threads.net/@chriswelch/post/C-8wxAGOpyP https://www.threads.net/@chriswelch/post/C-8LGwKOlPj?xmt=AQGzGV_vvL3vxoEhZ_nM263bP8n-Pu9Dxz5Ngmib-0wzgA https://www.threads.net/@chriswelch/post/C-8wxAGOpyP A new $6 billion bid to take over Paramount could undo plans to merge with Skydance. I hope the next CEO of Disney is just Bob Iger with a fun mustache. Paramount Plus plans are 50 percent off ahead of the 2024 NFL season  The 2024 Olympics were a big win for TV of all kinds The Acolyte has been canceled Chick-fil-A is reportedly launching a streaming service for some reason Apple Podcasts now has a web app Spotify star Alex Cooper is jumping to a new podcast network JBL made its charging case touchscreen more useful with a size boost  Meta and Snap are about to show off their new AR glasses  Amazon cancels the Echo Show 8 Photos Edition’s main feature — focusing on photos Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WNBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years 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. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on Explained It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics.

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

several photos that you're not in. And also in other places. Could be anywhere. Neil is out today. He's at the XOXO conference in Portland being like a cool tech hipster with the other cool tech hipsters that we are not cool enough to hang out with. But we have a lot to get to. We have pixel stuff to talk about.

We have what is a photo stuff to talk about. We have Chick-fil-A news, which I think is the first time that has ever been said on this podcast. We have a bunch of lightning round stuff to get to. The Sonos continues to just. make every error possible. So we're going to get to all of that. But we should start with the pixel.

And I want to get into like the existential crisis that is coming for us here in a minute. But first we should just talk about the phone. Alison, you reviewed the whole sort of pixel nine line minus the fold. But the pixel nine and the pixel pro, I don't, I'd lost track. There's too many phones. There's a lot of phones. And I would say the initial read from your review was that like at least on on a hardware perspective, Google kind of nailed it, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Talking about the phones as phones is actually really easy and like straightforward because they're great. They're iPhones from the front. This is like this everybody's just made their phone into an iPhone and I think that's fine. You know, the sides are flat.

The screens are bright. You know, the bezels are all uniform, et cetera. Um, they look and feel really good in a way that the, last couple generations of pixel phones were like, eh, I don't know. I can see why you charge like $200 less for this than like a Galaxy S-24 plus. But this time around, they like nailed it. It's right right up there with the best of the best, I think. I feel like this was finally Google saying, like, what if we just made it really nice?

Yeah. Which feels like an insult. But I think your point about the price, I think is exactly right. because I feel like Google has been caught in this thing since the beginning of the pixel where the goal was to make a really high-end phone for not a really high-end price. And increasingly, there are fewer and fewer ways you can cheap out on a phone. The processor is no longer one of them because you have to do all this AI stuff. You have to do all the camera stuff.

Like you need the processor. So you can't save money there. You can't save money on the camera. So one of the ways to save money is basically by making the thing itself cheaper and less nice, right? It makes it easier to make. The material is less expensive. All that is fine and good, but Google just never got it there. Like, it never was able to make a nice thing at that price. And I feel like this time, whatever you want to say about the price, I think it's a bummer that it's gotten more expensive over time. But the fact that they were just like, okay, this is now a

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

through the carrier. You're suddenly less concerned with like, well, I'd really like it if it was $200 cheaper. So it's just like weird territory. I think the mid range, especially upper mid range. In the A series being so good, like you get so much in the A series for like an actual mid-range price that having the regular mainline ones just like hovering just above that didn't make a lot of sense. So now this, yeah, this year feels like forget it. Like here, they're just, they're just really good phones. And it worked. They do have giant butts. They do. Which is a choice. So that's the thing in the like era of like every phone looks like an iPhone from the front, which is fine. You have to do something on the back. That's like,

like, oh, that's not an iPhone. That's a Galaxy S24. Google is really leaning into the, like, it was the visor camera bump. Now it's just like a little thing on its own and it's like super chunked out. I don't know how else to describe it. It's just, it's got a booty on it. Yeah. It's like, but I didn't, you know, I got one last week when we were at the pixel event and I found that I don't mind the bump. I do look at it sometimes I'm like, that's a big ass. But I'm also like, it's fine. When you see it at first, you're like, oh, wow, that's really something.

And you get used to it pretty quickly, I think. I think I, like, forced you and Sean to look at it. I was like, is this truly large? This looks enormous. And you're, like, just trying to blog. It was great. Is this enormous? What is this?

I have two thoughts on the bump. One is that it is just very slightly asymmetrical in a way that kind of drives me nuts. It's like the lenses are all just shifted off to the left so that the flash and the sensor can be off to the right. And like I get why you have to do that, but it is so close to being symmetrical that it's just a little weighted to the left in a way that kind of hurts my eyes to look at. The other thing is that I think camera bumps are overrated because everybody puts a case on their phone anyway. And the fact that this one is big enough that the phone doesn't wobble on a table makes the camera bump a solved problem in my opinion. The thing I hate about the iPhone is that it wiggles. And you touch the corner when it's down and it wiggles as you're trying to do it.

And if they've made this in such a way that it like leans it up at like a teeny tiny angle, but it doesn't wobble, that's kind of great. It does wiggle. Have you never noticed this? Well, I've always been a case person and my last case like cut me. It hurt me. It broke and it hurt me. I was like putting it in my pocket. I had like these like a plastic case and I was putting in my pocket and it like shredded my finger.

It was horrible. I saw evidence of this. I think a piece of the case landed in my bag or something. Yeah. I was like, look at this. It's almost broken off. Boom. And you're like, well, there it goes. And then it got vengeance, Allison. But yeah, so I never, I never noticed that it does wobble. The iPhone wobbles. Yeah. I don't do cases. So I have to remember that. But every time I put the damn S-24 Ultra down on a table, I was like, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-dun. Typing. an email. Yeah, but the iPhones too. Yeah. Shocking lack of cases at the Pixel event, by the way. That's what honestly convinced me it was okay to take off the case that was hurting me physically, was like, well, they're all fine. They didn't break their phones.

I would say they're all, they all have what I would call unlimited access to new phones. Yeah, I know. In a way that is not representative of most people. Oops. Here's your phone back. No, the thing that really did happen is we covered the event. We went to lunch and I went to pull the phone out of my bag and just like straight onto the concrete ground. Like there is a little like scuff on the side of it.

But you know what? It's fine. Yeah. It was fine. It worked totally fine. The panic quickly subsided. Yeah. We were all fine.

That's good. Still fine. And I also feel like Google doing this with the camera bump kind of made me think of when Apple tried really hard to make the mag safe circle. into this sort of iconic thing where it's like a thing Apple's very good at is being like, oh, this weird new thing that we have to do, we're going to make it iconic. Like the dynamic island, they're like, no,

this isn't just an engineering flaw in our screen. It's a thing we did on purpose. It's magical. Or the notch in the MacBook. They're like, no, this doesn't suck. It's great. Google's kind of doing the same thing. We're like, yeah, we have a big-ass camera bump.

What are you going to do? about it. You want to fight? Check it out. And it turns out we don't. We don't want to fight. We're just like, yeah, it's fine. Yeah, it's a big ass camera bump. We'll all live. Just lean in.

But so, like, as basic Android phone things go, pixels as good as anybody at this point, right? Like, it's, we can talk about all the AI stuff. We can talk about all the other stuff. But I feel like the pixel has been somewhere between as good as and just behind the Galaxy S line over the years. And this year seems to be right there. Yeah.

Yeah. Like I put the S24 Ultra kind of in a class above all the rest. If you want, like, absolutely everything. But, yeah, the pixels feel like they're right in that kind of second tier with everybody else this time. That's really exciting. And are the sizes are identical? To me, the small pro is very enticing.

Yeah. That's the one I'm loving because I would, like, throughout the year, I'll switch back to, you know, a phone I've already reviewed. and I would switch back to the pixel 8 rather than the 8 pro just because I like the size better. And then you're sort of like, oh, I'm giving up the telephoto lens, blah, blah, blah. So the 8 pro this time around is the size of the 9 pro this time around is the size of the 8 last year and the 9 this year. There's a lot of phones. So many phones.

Yeah. But you don't give up anything on the camera front. It has like the obvious things that have to be different are different. like the battery and the screen resolution doesn't need to be quite as high. But it feels like no compromises. And I love it. I'm going to keep coming back to it this year. How is the camera?

I mean, it was very funny looking at the photos in your review. And there are lots of them. They're very good. And so many of the photos are like the before and the after is like an AI horror show. But I found myself going back to the before photos being like, oh, these are actually really nice photos. Like this thing seems to take. nice photos and it actually doesn't seem like it's over processing the hell out of them in the way that both Apple and Samsung have become prone to like I find myself gravitating towards the sort of pixel

version of a shot more and more over time. And even when it processes it with like the low light stuff, it still looks really good and clean versus everybody else. Yeah, it does a nice job. I think it's the pixel camera has kind of been like on this more consistent path. where it started like the early pixel phones were kind of like too cool of a color cast. I didn't really like that. And they've like slowly kind of corrected, I think, over the years. While Samsung and Apple have been in this very warm kind of like let's punch up the saturation sort of territory.

And I think everything looked the sickest. Like I just imagine that's what all those engineers sit around doing. Like does this photo look sick? Not sick enough. Like turn up the sick knob. Needs more. It needs more sick. Yeah.

Yeah. It feels like those have kind of gone like almost too far in a direction and the pixel just kind of like, yeah, there's some shadows here. We didn't blast them to oblivion. I appreciate it. Yeah. I want to love this phone. I really do. Like I have been waiting for a good excuse to go back to the pixel because I'm deeply bored of my iPhone.

and it also has scratches all over it that I didn't do anything to make happen. And they frustrate me. So I was like, maybe I'll buy a pixel. And Liam, our producer, bought a pixel fold that I essentially bullied him into buying. And I would like to join him in this. And it feels like this is a good pixel. Like we did a good pixel this year. Yeah.

The pixel fold is nice. Uh-huh. Yeah, which is the one I don't have for a review yet. We all got to like touch it and play with it at the event. But it's shipping later. So they haven't seated those reviews yet. But I have an unprecedented number of Verge staffers in my DMs being like, how's the pixel fold? Interesting.

Yeah. Like off the charts. And my answer is like, it's good. It's hot fold summer. You've been calling this like two years in a row now. And you might be able to this time. I'm just making it happen. You're bringing it back.

All right. Well, that's enough nice things to say about Google. Let's talk about how Google is in the process of what I would say is potentially ruining society altogether and just decimating the idea of truth and shared knowledge of anything. It's just your memories. David, it's just your memories. So, Alison, can you just, I have more thoughts about this than I realized as we are coming into this. I want to talk about all of this, but can you just describe how the reimagined AI feature works and like how you use it in the context of a pixel nine?

Yeah. So it's, it's right inside the magic editor kind of tools that were on last year's phones. So you open up a photo. It's in the Google Photos app. You tap on edit. You tap on the little sparkly AI. So you have to go get it. But like then you do the thing where you circle something in the scene, um, where you tap on a subject and that selects it. And then you get this new option that says reimagine and what's different from last year is like last year you could just take things out or kind of like pick something up and move it and change the size. This is just like, like kicking the door down of generative AI and you just write in a text prompt of what you want there and it puts it in and there are some guardrails so you can't put like obviously gross stuff

but the thing we yeah I mean I mean you can't if you ask for a bowl of eyeballs it'll make a bowl of eyeballs and it's gross. Google says there are guardrails I would not say there is much evidence in the world of I would say there are guardrails that you have to be good at prompting because I'm not good at prompting and I tried to get it to do dog vomit last night and it just kept giving me lime green

bowls filled with dog kibble and I'm like that's that I ask for liquid and I like I asked it to do like a minotaur sitting behind my sister-in-law menacingly and instead it was like first it just did like just black just darkness

behind her. It was just like a black figure, like an absence of light figure. And I was like, well, that's creepy, but not what I wanted. And then it did just like a creepy man in the corner. And I was like, that's not a minotaur. But it is creepy. I'll send that one to her. Yeah. That's not a minotar. Google. That's what I wanted. Come on. So I will say like, I was really, really, really impressed with what you and Welch have been able to do with it. I have not had as much. And to be fair, we were, it started off innocently. I wasn't putting dead bodies into my photos right off the get-go. But then we're kind of like, we're some of the first people to really touch this. We got to push it.

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

What were your favorite ones that you did? I got it. Okay. This one is one of Welch's. I think it's brilliant. It's like he's outside of some cute little cafe that says like cafe spaghetti. And he put spaghetti on one of the tables. But it's like a like a waterfall of spaghetti and like marinara sauce like spilling everywhere.

Like that's just funny. You can you can do some funny stuff with this. And I plan to keep terrorizing my family and friends with like weird stuff. So yeah, it's not like you. You have to go out of your way to get it to do gross, weird, maybe manipulative things. I mean, you got it to do, is it pronounced gooey ducks? Oh, God, yeah. Well, kind of.

I think there's some kind of gooey duck filter. It did not do it for me. I don't know if you broke it, but if you've seen a gooey duck, it's kind of unmistakable in like what it created. So it was a bowl of food of like beautiful like salad. watermelon, just like the lighting is perfect. I was like, put the grossest things in there, like eyeballs, like, like rabbits' feet. And it did all that. But the gooey ducks, I was trying to get it to make, you know, some questionable things.

And it gave me what I described as look like raw thumbs that, like don't have fingernails on it. And they were slimy, like a little bit slimy. So it just sort of, I don't know. I don't know how to describe. When I tried Goody Duck's, it did like, uh, looked like clams or something. It was like, uh, something's here. And I was like, no, it's not revolting enough. It's like the AI starts going down a road and there's a stop sign like, no.

Yeah, I was like, nope, nope, nope, too revolting. And that's like the vomit. I couldn't, like, I was doing all sorts of different liquid prompts. And it was just like, bowl. Keep it out of the bowl. Yeah, sometimes it really does kind of put up a stop sign. It will tell you straight up like, you cannot generate that picture put in something else, you friggin' weirdo. Well, not let you change people. Yeah, that's the big one that's off limits. Like you can't select something on a person. You can't like change someone's shoes or anything.

This is a good thing. This is a good guardrail, I think, given what I've seen of this tool. It's such a weird space to be in because on the one hand, we're here talking about how concerning. it is to have unfettered access to these tools. On the other hand, if I want to put horns on someone, I want to put horns on someone. And now I just have to like, I have to go to Photoshop. I have to remember how layers work. And that's not as fun.

Yeah. Okay. I have become totally radicalized by this phone on all of this stuff. And truly, I have reached a point where I am like shut it all down. It's none of this can be allowed. Throw out the baby with the bathwater. like shut it all down. And it's really what has continued to do it for me,

especially with the Pixel 9, is not the like, there was a great digital trend story that I think what he did was he got it to show a picture of Barney firing an AK-47 at Elmo. It might have been the reverse of that, but I think it was that.

No, that's it. And that is like in a certain way horrifying. But like, I actually track that as like way less of a problem than some of the stuff that Chris Welch has been just sort of relentlessly posting about the last few days, which is just like he just created, he took a photo of an empty intersection in New York and with one request made it look like there had been a bicycle accident there. Or you can take a car with a dent and add the thing that dented it into the photo,

even though it's not there. Like, it's this unbelievably mundane stuff that is so much more problematic to me than the fact that you can like generate Nazi cartoon characters, which, again, is a thing that Google will let you do. But you can't have one without the other. I'm increasingly convinced that, like, the idea of, like, I want to be able to insert myself into a photo with somebody else. I get that, right?

Like, one of the funny things about my family is, like, my mom is always the one who takes the pictures. And so she's never in any of the family photos. And she hates it, but she also wants to be the one to take the photos. That sucks. And, like, that is a problem Google has solved with artificial intelligence. I will absolutely happily sacrifice that to get rid of all this other stuff. Like we, it just like shut it all down.

The thing is they kind of all these tools are separated. And I think like, Alison, you talked about it in your review. It's annoying from a user perspective in that I did, I couldn't, I thought I didn't have, I had the regular pixel nine. I just thought I didn't have access to reimagine. And then Alison was like, it's over there. And I found where it was in the, in the app. Like the stuff where people are making.

Barney shooting Elmo. That's one tool. That's Pixel Studio. And that one, like, that's where I tried to make Kirby and just made a sad balloon. And you can't create people in that one. And there's some pretty strict guardrails except for around apparently all cartoon characters. Right. And then there's reimagine, which you have to go into the photos app, click on edit, and then click on the little thing to the point where I just didn't find it for a week. You just tried really hard to make that sound like a a lot of work. That is not a lot of work. It is not a lot of work. It's not a lot of work. But there's There's a little friction there, but it is like, it was hard to find, right? It wasn't natural.

Whereas when you go to do ADME, which is probably the most, the least controversial of these features, that's in the camera app. Like, you open the camera app because, like, I thought reimagined was going to be in the camera app. That's kind of where my brain was logically. I was like, oh, your editing images, it'll be there. No, it's in this whole other place. And it was like, it was most frustrating to have to go to three different apps to do all

the stuff. But at the same time, that means those aren't smushed together. Like, you could have AdB and just get rid of reimagined. You could, like, Pixel Studio is a whole ass app. You can just delete that. In this specific instance, yes, I agree with that. But I think we're pretty clearly headed toward two things, which is one, all of those features you just described to being totally ubiquitous everywhere, right? Like, anything that is a camera is going to have all of that stuff really fast. And B, all of that stuff is going to be pushed together, right? Like, the, they're all, it's all going to be in the photos app. It just is. It's all going to, and in the same way that you like press the plus button to upload a photo, you'll be able to press the plus

button to generate a photo. And we're, we're going to treat those two as the same thing. All of this stuff is coming forward in the interface and is coming together in a way that I think is like feels sort of in that in unstoppable at this moment and like has to be stopped because I agree there are some of these things that are fine right like I think ad me is a little weird but it seems like the way that Google forces it to work is you have to do it in the moment and I think is like largely fine you can't dick around with it as much as I thought you were going to be able to yeah like fine I will I will let that one continue to exist it doesn't seem like it works all that well like it works sort of passably fun but it's kind of like you

you sloppily photoshopped yourself in, which I think it seems like what that should be. Yeah, it's a royal family job is what we call it. It's the like, yes, I was also there, but it's very clear I was not in this photo. Like,

I'm good at that. I'm good at that. It was like, what was the app that would take both a photo of the, with both your front and back camera at the same time and then stitch them together? Adme, oh, it was front back, right?

Was that what it was called? I think it was called front back. Admi feels like just like a better, version of front back. Yeah, front back. But it just feels increasingly to me, like this road that we're on is all of these things eventually becoming one tool and basically becoming another swipe in the camera, right?

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

app to trigger this or what. I think the way they have it now is very sensible. Like I don't think you know, my mom's not going to stumble across to reimagine trying to just like look at photos for a grandchild or whatever. And I think that the thing to also note on the whole situation is like the thing that people yell at us immediately is like this has always exists you know Photoshop exists we've been able to do all this stuff and there are way way fewer barriers when it's a phone and it's built into the phone and all you have to do is is tap on some stuff and the other thing that we that was really troubling to us as we dug into it was the the photo reimagined stuff has a a metadata tag that says made with Google AI. That's the extent of it. The Pixel Studio stuff, which is fully synthetic, gets a more robust, like, kind of embedded. You don't see it, but it's a watermark that will kind of carry across, you know, even if you screenshot it.

Yeah, synth ID. Which Google and DeepMind have made, like, a lot of noise about, like, this is supposed to be a gigantic industry standard that makes all of this stuff work and okay. Yeah. And they only apply it to the one where you. you can make an image of Barney shooting. The one that is obviously fake. Yeah. Like, I didn't need it.

Like, oh, it's synthetic that it's Barney shooting Elmo. Yeah. I was like, oh, I can't believe they're actually fighting. Yeah. No, yeah. I feel like that's completely backwards. Like, I want to know that something has been added to this, this real photo, you know, with these synthetic tools, not the other way around.

It's strange. It's such a weird time. I think philosophically there's actually a reason Google wouldn't do that. Like, part of the reason I find all of this so concerning is that everything Google has said publicly feels very flippant about this, right? Like Google's answer, I think, to Wired was that, you know, it's not about photos. It's about making your memories match your memory. And it's like, what?

I mean, that's what we heard constantly, I think at the pixel event was they said, no, this isn't about your photo. Your photo is the thing you take. And it's archival. right? This is about the memory. This isn't supposed to be for the journalists shooting the thing. It's supposed to be for the parent who wants to fix things for their kids. And it's like, okay, well, yeah, that makes sense. But you've also given it to the journalist and you've also given it to all of the people who are perpetuating misinformation online. And that is a bigger group than we would like because people love to chase cloud online with fake shit. It also doesn't make sense. That makes sense if the feature you're introducing is red eye reduction. Right? Like, sure, fine. If you want to release a thing that makes people's eyes look like they're open when they're not,

I honestly have no problem with that. And Niela is not here to yell at me about that. And he would, and that's fine. I have no problem with that. We have a whole spectrum here. Well, and that to me is like, this is where I come to the only solution is to burn it all down thing. Because like you can't, I have not yet seen a way to do a little bit of it without inevitably doing all of it.

And I think if we do all of it, we are somewhere awful. Yeah, it's Pandora's box. Yes, and I think at this point it's like, shut the box and set it on fire and let's all just pretend none of this ever happened and everything will be fine. David, would you feel more comfortable if it was like

an app that you had to download? So you had to go, you had to find it in the Play Store, you had to download it and sign in, and then you could do all of this stuff. Would that make it feel a little better? A little, yeah. I mean, I think, Alison, to your point, the biggest pushback we get when we talk about this stuff

is people being like, this has been, it's been possible to manipulate photos forever. And that's true. And Sarah Zhang wrote a great piece for us about this, this week that I think really captures a lot of this. But like, in so many ways, the story of the tech industry is making a thing slightly more convenient and you actually change everything. Like, what Uber did to the taxi industry was just make it slightly more convenient. Like, the idea of things being fewer steps away from you and they become like a step change more popular is real. Like, Yeah. There's evidence of that everywhere you look. And so I think, yeah, if they made it an app that you had to download, I would be slightly less alarmed. If they made it an app you had to download that cost $700 and required like a master's degree to learn how to use successfully, I will also be less alarmed. I really do think that like the fact that it's a separate app right now is a good thing. I suspect given the way that Google talks about this, that that has much more to do with the fact that this is new than the fact that Google has taken.

in some moral stance about AI. Totally. I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that Google thinks it's a good thing for the world to keep this out of people's hands. Like, nothing. They want it in people's hands, right? Like, to the point of their philosophy is this now. Right. So why wouldn't Google find more and more ways to bring it forward?

Like, you're going to get to a point where you're like, hey, Gemini, take a photo of this, but insert a car crash into it. And it will produce that photo. The original photo that you take will include that. Like, why won't- Well, you're going to have to actually say, but take a photo of this bicycle mangled next to a car with a dent. No, it has that already. It's good.

It can put a giraffe into the photo of my backyard. I can have a giraffe in my backyard. All it needs is the photo of my backyard, which is the easy part. Right. Like, I just, I have reached this point now where, like, I don't know what else we can do except just shut it all down, which is why, like, the bill in California right now is so fast. Because the question is like, who is responsible for when all of this is horribly wrong? And if it passes and we get down this road where all of a sudden the companies that make these tools are responsible for what happens with them, that gets, it gets so messy.

And we end up with a weird section 230 thing all over again. Who is responsible for mean things that people say on the internet? But like, if Google were responsible for every single thing that reimagined produced, you think Google would have launched this? No. Not a chance. The thing they told us when we were like, hey, so we've been able to use your tool to make all these like pretty disturbing things. What do you think about that? And they were like, oh, we have these terms of service. And that's a violation of the policy. Like, okay. No, it's, it's worse than that. It's worse than that. The statement that they've given to everybody, including us from Alex Marconi at Google, says, we design our generative AI. tool is to respect the intent of user prompts, and that means they may create content that may

offend when instructed by the user to do so. That says, in as many words, it's your fault, not ours. Yeah. It does. We didn't do it. You did it. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Right. And I think they're coming at this from the, they're thinking, oh, we're just like Photoshop. Because to everybody who comments, that's true. Like Photoshop can do all of this and probably do it, and in many cases do it better. Photoshop is hard. And this is, and this, This is so easy. And Google is kind of ignoring that ease. Like they're happy to talk about it on stage.

They're happy to talk about it in advertisements and profiles and whatever. They're not happy to talk about it when we ask them. Right. The ease is a feature, not a bug, unless you ask Google about how easy it is. Yeah. And then they're like, well, that's not the problem. And it's like, no, no, that is actually the problem. You've increased access here.

Yeah. Yeah. And like, it's all of this is so weird to me because it is like, to your point, Alison, and some of the same stuff that Google is building to make it so that like the dark scenes that you shoot on your phone look better, which I think everyone agrees is a good thing, right? Like night sight is awesome and night site is AI, right?

Like that's just, that is what it is. How you stop that before it gets to, I can insert unbelievably compelling lies into every single one of my photos. And I think the thing that Sarah wrote in her piece, which will link in the show notes, and I've gotten some crap for, for getting to link things in the show notes. And I'm very sorry. And I will start, I will do better from now on

is that so much of like life is just having photos, right? Like I have a, I have a leak in my ceiling. I take a photo and I send it to somebody. I have there's a there, I got in a car accident a couple weeks ago. And the very first thing I did was walk around my car and take pictures of it. What if you can't trust those pictures anymore? What if somebody can point to them and say those might be AI? And all of a sudden, those pictures are meaningless. Like, we are entering a phase where it's going to be so easy and only going to get easier. to make this incredibly mundane stuff. Like, we don't think about how much a part of our lives photos are.

We talk a lot about politics and, like, really high-stakes stuff. But what if the low-stakes photos don't count anymore? I was just realized the one thing we can still count on is all of the insurance companies are going to ban together and be like, absolutely not. Yeah. Because, like, that's the one where it's like, oh, yeah, that's a lot of money for them. if David's just adding a bunch of dents to the car. Like, give me more money. Yeah, what if the insurance company can refuse my claim because they don't have to

believe my photos? Right. Or it was shot on a pixel nine. They're like, oh, we don't accept those. Right. Like, you might have stripped out the metadata. It's only one line of metadata. It's not that hard to do.

People are more motivated to get around these things than they get credit for, for so, so many reasons. All right. Buy the pixel nine. Just don't do any of that. I think the takeaway. Be good. Don't do even.

Don't be a dick. Yeah, weird. Don't be evil. Somebody should really use that as a, that's a good tagline for something. Yeah, it rings a bell. All right, Allison, we got to take a break, and we're going to let you go. We're going to come back and we're going to talk about a bunch of streaming shenanigans because there are endless streaming shenanigans.

We'll be right back. Hey, I'm Matt Bouchel, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your 4U page. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, wait, don't swipe away. It's called, That Sounds Like a Lot, as in that feeling when you check your phone on the morning, you read three headlines, and you immediately think, oh, that sounds like a lot. I can't deal with all this. But guess what?

I can deal with it. And I'm going to get into it every Friday. I'll break down whatever chaos is happening in the world. Then I'll sit down with a comedian. You can be progressive and not be like fucking annoying. Maybe an actor. They go, feminism has gone too far. You go, why?

Because the Sadie Hawkins dance happened? Maybe a filmmaker. Since leaving that show, I'm challenged sparing. I just got to hang out and try to do stuff. You're the one with a charmed life. Could be a politician. Basically, anyone who responds. bonds to my cold DMs. We're recording the whole thing in a beautiful studio, so yes, you can

watch it on YouTube, or you can listen wherever you get your podcast. This is not the place to get the news, but it is the place to feel a little better about it. That sounds like a lot, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now, since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning.

And we assess that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, explain drops every weekday afternoon. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be

that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise. That you think, I think, that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that.

That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's dig it. All right. We're back. Richard Lawler is here. Richard, welcome.

Hey. We've brought you here to talk about Chick-fil-A. Like, are you a nugs sandwich? Spicy or not spicy? That's the question. Sandwich only, no pickles. Oh. Okay.

That's a strong order. What's your sauce? Sauce. Okay. Tushay. We're going to get to Chick-fil-A because I have a game we're going to play when we get to Chick-fil-A. But first, we're going to do a brief segment called Alex Krins. What the hell is going on here?

And it's all about Paramount. Because somehow we have more Paramount shenanigans. Alex Krins, what the hell is going on here? Paramount really wants to be sold. Sharon Red Soden's, she's done with this business. She's ready to move on. David Ellis, another person who came up in the waves of wealth, wants to buy it. There was a lot of concern about how much Sherry was getting and how much the rest of the

investors were getting financially. And this other guy said, hey, no, no, you got to look at my deal again. And so they're like, okay, well, we have to reopen things because we've got a lot of people who are really cranky. And also this is a good deal that he's offering. So we got to look at it. So they're doing like one more look. So things could still collapse. Paramount would very much like to be sold.

They've already written down their biggest asset, which is the broadcast channels, because broadcast has fallen off a cliff in the last year. Just no ad revenue or anything. So it's a fun. time over there. I'm glad I don't work at Paramount is basically the gist of it. Yeah, I don't know if anyone's going to work at Paramount at the end of this. Somebody will. Like, this is a big studio with a lot of assets. And I would be very surprised if they were allowed to sell off all of those assets to the people who would want to buy them because, like, there's a lot of companies just didn't get into the mix on buying this company because they didn't want the FTC coming around. And to be fair, they shouldn't

be allowed to buy them. Like, I don't think Disney should be allowed to buy them. I don't think Disney should be allowed to buy Paramount. But that just makes it a more difficult climate to sell this stuff. Can we pass a law that makes it so the only people who can buy Paramount are people whose parents are obscenely rich? Yes. Because I think that would fix everything. Yeah, like Elon Musk's daughter, you should buy this. But yeah, it's only rich people are allowed to buy it. We have no idea what this other guy wants to do with it. A lot of people that they didn't sell to previously was because of it. they wanted to break it up. They wanted to just sell it for parts. And those would be very lucrative

parts. But it is much more potentially powerful altogether. Richard, I'm really enjoying the theory of a pro-nepo baby economy that we just demand. We give things to the nepo babies, but we demand that they spend all their money on those things. I really love this for them. And I love this round of news because it brings back Ed Bronflin Jr., who I didn't know was still in the league at all. is this person. He is, if you're like me and you've read like all of the books about ESPN and Disney and all of the Disney Wars and these guys have all the fun and all these kind of entertainment industry books about the 90s and 2000s and I guess going back to the 80s, he's one of those

figures who pops up. He is an heir to a liquor fortune, I think, and has bought his way into media companies all over the place. And it's currently running, it's currently, I think, a chairman of Fubo. Yep. chairperson of Fubo currently. Fubo famously now in a gigantic fight with most of the rest of Hollywood over venue sports, there's just only 12 people in Hollywood, I think, is like the main important thing to remember

is that this is a tiny industry and everybody has worked everywhere and they all, all the companies are run by the same four people. Air of the Seagram Fortune. He really has been, like he was CEO of the Warner Music Group. he's just been all he's very involved with segram uh chairman of avendi universal like did a little broadway producing man loves media i mean but like bigger picture it really seems increasingly like right now like netflix is good just be a netflix the games thing seems to be slowly starting to work that's like Netflix is fine and then everybody else is just pure

anarchy right now. Like Disney is starting its succession plan again, canceling shows. Alex, the other thing I need you to explain to me is why everyone was so sad that the Acolyte got canceled. Everybody, as far as I know, hated the Acolyte to the Acolyte to the point where I didn't even watch it because everybody thought it was bad. But then everybody was up in arms that it was canceled this week. Yeah, like if we want to pivot over to Acolyte, the reason people are bad about that is because the same thing happened with the Marvels. The same thing happens with any woman or person of color-led property that is really attractive to nerds. You get a small portion of people who are just tired of nerd shit and I love you all. Live your lives. You get a larger person of people who are nerds and want nerd shit, but they only want it if it looks like them and they tend to all be white dudes.

And those people are really good at being really, really loud. So the people who are just like, oh, I'll watch this. They're not out there tweeting. But in the case of the acolyte, people are really bad that it got canceled because they're really concerned that they're going to do the same thing they did a Willow, which was excellent and shouldn't have been pulled from the service, but nobody watched it. And they're afraid that they're going to pull this one from Disney Plus because nobody watched it. Like that was the thing.

It just got bad ratings. Nobody watched it. So was it good, though? Yeah. Because I'm super sympathetic to that entire argument. It was all about what if these twins who are really powerful in the force, one of them goes and becomes fully Jedi, then realizes Jedi suck. and then slowly gets to seduce to the dark side by Mani Jacinto's arms.

And like, who wouldn't want to watch that? Why would we'll see that at the trailer? I would have watched it. Right? Like, it really is like the whole time he's like, oh, no, I've removed my shirt and I'm flexing right now. Now I've got a lightsaber. And you're like, yeah, this rules. And we were robbed, basically.

Yeah, that is the single most compelling argument for the accolite that I've ever heard. I think that they just shown his arms. for that second or third or however many seasons they've had of the Bounty Hunter show of Boba Fett. Because we got kind of tired of Star Wars after a point. Yeah. And when we see this again and again and again, there's the combat. Like you can have fatigue, you can have angry racist, sexist fanboys. You can't have both.

And right now they have both. So anytime there is a project that doesn't speak to those racist sexist fan boys, that just there's a total, the bottom drops out of the audience. because everybody else is tired of it. And even if you say, no, no, this time it's good. You have to say in a very specific way, and they struggle to market it over and over and over again. Because I keep seeing now, everybody's like,

you need to have enough volume to drown out certain things. Yeah. And if that volume goes away, suddenly that's all that's left. Right. And we saw the, like I said, we saw the exact same thing with the Marvels. And now everybody's like, hey, did you see the Marvels? That's actually really good. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, it was really good.

Just everybody was tired of superheroes when it came out. And it did have some stupid parts. but everybody was mainly tired of superheroes and then a whole bunch of other people were like, baby stars girls. That's exactly what you sound like when you complain like that, people. Just to be clear, I want to insult you.

Every time we hear that now, just take that clip and just play it in response to whoever tweets me and things about these shows. So, but like this is all part of the sort of bigger like what is going on inside of these streaming services thing that I keep coming back to is like it just seems like outside of Netflix, which I think can afford to just

throw everything at everybody and some of it will stick and it'll be fine. Like, Disney can't afford to make this many bad Star Wars shows that people don't watch. And now Disney is like back in succession planning. They just announced the new succession committee to,

for whoever is going to next be fired by Bob Eiger two years after they're given the job. Like, I don't know. There's so, much just like swirling chaos inside of all of these things. I would say that Hollywood is in one of its most difficult moments, like more difficult the pandemic, particularly all these streamers and stuff. Because when you look at who's in the field, you've got like Apple, they don't care. They can fart out these things and they'll do fine.

So you've got Apple. They don't make a whole lot of shows. They put a lot of money into them, but they don't make a whole lot. And they're struggling in the movie business. All of their movies are bombs. but their TV shows, great. Get a lot of reviews. But whatever, Apple.

You've got Amazon. Actually, the second largest streamer. And they're doing just fine. They've got sports rights now. They have advertising, so you don't even have to pay for it, really. You can just, like, pop in and start watching. Like, Amazon's doing fine. And they also are Amazon.

So they've got all of this other stuff to make money for them, like AWS and Amazon. And then you have, like, the non-tech ones. You have Warner Brothers who just wrote down all of their broadcasts. networks. You have Paramount who just wrote down all of their broadcast networks. You have Disney who didn't and probably will soon write down all of their networks. And that's because all the broadcast stuff was supporting everybody and supporting them through the streaming moment because they knew broadcast was going away and streaming was coming. And they're like, okay, we have to get through this. But this broadcast died faster than they expected. One of the few exceptions is NBC,

Peacock. They're also struggling, but they did a really good job. with the Olympics. They did. They showed what happens when a really smart broadcaster programs really well on these platforms. And it worked. And they did really, really well. How long that lasts? How quickly those people churn? That's, that's all the story. Yeah, the Olympics are unfortunately over. Yeah, you get two weeks. Tough times for Netflix. Yeah. Yeah. No one else is watching Diamond League. We're not coming back with the Paralympics. They're about to start. Come on. Let's go. Let's keep this going. Steph Curry show on Peacock that seems like it's awful.

Like really great times for Peacock. I think the thing about Netflix is it turns out that basic cable for $15 to $20 a month is a pretty good idea. Yeah. That's it. And Netflix did it, right? Like I think more than people realized, certainly more than I realized until very recently, Netflix can be that, right?

Like if you have a reasonably steady run of very good things and then just an, infinite supply of like background noise, you can win. And for 20 bucks a month, that's essentially what Netflix has. Like, and as long as it keeps having those periodic wins, which it continues to do, it's going to be very hard to supplant. And it's gotten a lot more savage about its cancellations, too. Yes. Right. Like, like, it is not afraid. Disney Plus was pretty, pretty timid about canceling things, which is why we got three seasons of Mandalorian and the entire season of Bobo fat. Why? But, but, but like Disney's gotten a little more aggressive about it. And Disney's, you know, pulling from, from Warner Brothers playbook of like, okay, the show doesn't get a lot of views.

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

And it would go down and it seemed reasonably like it might be linear that as more people streamed, fewer people would watch linear TV, but mostly that would be one-to-one and everything would be fine. And that is not even remotely how it has turned out. And so all of a sudden it's like, oh, this money that we thought we had to invest in bad Star Wars shows, we actually don't have at all. And it's like, that makes you panic on two levels because one, we've spent this money on a bad Star Wars show. And two, we didn't have the money in the first place that we thought we were going to have. And so you just end up in this, like, it feels like a spiral towards ugly places. That's why you're hearing a lot of talk in Hollywood right now is that like David Zazlov is going to get fired from Warner Brothers because he's getting paid so much money.

and he just wrote down all of their broadcast stuff. And his whole big plan was, which I thought was a good plan when he first did it, was let's merge it all together. Let's make this super app. Let's put our broadcast on here. And they just haven't done it. And when they have done it, it's been like, did you guys watch CNN on Max ever? Am I the only one that does it? It does you like three minutes of CNN.

And then it cuts to like 10 minutes of Medicare. insurance like additional supplemental Medicare insurance commercials to be fair that's just CNN you just described is that just CNN I guess I never watch it the old-fashioned way but I was like oh my god I had to turn it off I can't this is why so the other day Alex comes storming into our slack going have the CNN kairons always looked this crazy that's right I did just stop watching CNN last week hi my name's Alex Kranz this makes sense well it's bad I have great news for you in trying times in streaming, which is that Chick-fil-A is here now. And Chick-fil-A will fix it.

Richard, can you just quickly explain what Chick-fil-A is doing here? And then I have many roads for us to go down, but can you just tell us what we know so far? Okay, first of all, no, I cannot. Second, what we know so far is the deadline said that Chick-Flea is working with a number of production studios and traditional studios to create original shows for a streaming platform. that they say they want to launch this year. Something that a lot of people may not be aware of is that the owner of Chick-fil-A, the Kathy family, they also were key to the foundation of Trillist Studios,

which you may not know necessarily by the name, but you know by what they make there, which is the Marvel movies. Really? In Georgia, a massive, massive, massive production lot where a lot of things are made. Georgia's got the good discounts if you want to shoot there. Yeah. And the good studios. It's not just Tyler Perry.

Okay, so I have done in the last 24 hours, what I would say is too much research on Chick-fil-A and its entertainment aspirations. Can I share a little bit of what I've discovered with you? Yes. Chick-fil-A has a whole separate brand that it calls Pennycake. And Pennycake, why is it named Pennycake? I could not tell you. But it's basically a brand full of like family-friend. friendly games and activities.

It has a bunch of like puzzles. It has a bunch of those things where you like pull a prompt out of a bag and you talk about it as a family. And it's like if you squint at it, it's kind of a like thing to do around the table while you eat Chick-fil-A. But in general, it just seems like some executive at Chick-fil-A was like, I want to make puzzles. And they were like, all right, make puzzles, I guess.

Chick-fil-A also, fun fact, has made. content before. It made a series of shows called The Stories of Evergreen Hills that I would describe as like animated in the style of the Polar Express, but about like how to be a good person. It's like, what if the Bernstein Bears and Polar Express sort of smushed together and was worse? You'd have stories of Evergreen Hills. I encourage you to look this up on YouTube.

A bunch of them exist. They're kind of weird and like. you know, vacation Bible schooly in the sense that like they have a big moral lesson at the end and they want to teach you

how to be a better person. It's like veggie tails. Yeah. But so Richard, to your point, it's, what's weird to me is that it's Chick-fil-A doing this.

Like I've had to wrap my head around the fact that Chick-fil-A is not a restaurant. It's just a large company with a name, right? And companies do lots of things, some under their brand and some not under their brand.

But this family owns an enormous studio is well-versed, in the content business, and yet we're going to get, like, Chick-fil-A plus as a streaming service. I doubt that's what it's going to be called, I should say. Like, I think it might be Pennycake. I think they might come up with another brand, like, whatever. But the idea of, like, Chick-fil-A, the restaurant wanting to make content just does not make any sense to me. Is this, am I overthinking this or underthinking this?

Did Chick-fil-A stop and say, why not when they were thinking about sponsoring a bowl game? I mean, fair. And does Chick-fil-A Plus make less sense than Hallmark Plus? That's a good one. Why does a card company have a network? Oh, I just figured it out. So, okay, wait, but I'll give you that if Chick-fil-A wants to basically make worse food network. Then I'm in.

No, no. Probably. No, Chick-fil-A is going to acquire the scorched remains of chicken soup for the Soul Entertainment in red. They're going to acquire all that. And then they're just going to do Christian streaming service. Because they love Jesus differently than other people do. But they have their own opinion. Yeah.

I love that they don't work on Sunday. But that's what they're going to do. They're going to do a Christian entertainment streaming service. I think that's right. And as we've seen, that's a big market. Yeah. Like Angel Studios is very successful. I mean, it wasn't a big market for Chicken Suit for the Soul entertainment.

No. But I would say they'd made a lot of mistakes. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Like if Chick-fil-A gets really big into selling DVDs at Chick-fil-A, I think we'll have a problem. Red boxes. The story of Chicken Soup for the Soul seems to be, it would have been a fine company if it were happy being what it was. It was trying to be 100 other things.

Yeah. But Chick-fil-A, that's what it's about to do. Okay. So this is the game. I just want to play for a few minutes here. Okay. You are now the head of content at Chick-Fillet. Congratulations to both of you.

Yes. You are in charge of making a streaming service. A, you have to come up the name, and B, you have to tell me at least two shows that you want to put on your streaming service. Alex, you go first. Chick-fil-A for the soul is the name of the streaming service. Okay. F-T. I don't know.

I'm not going to do that. Pacheful Life for the Soul. C-F-A-F-T-S. Something like that. It's not great. It's not great. This is work in progress. But I think that's where we're going to go. We're going to get a reboot or touch by an angel.

Ooh. And, uh... Wait, that's good. That's actually very good. And either a reboot or we're just going to get the rights to Prairie. What was? Little House on the Prairie. Oh, okay.

So just like sweet down-home family shows. Yeah. Seventh Heaven will be there. We're going to go to Mr. Rogers. Blur the dad's face out every time he appears on screen. Sure. Uh huh. We'll just deep fake someone else into that character.

Deep fake someone else at his face. Oh, but then we get the moment where the mom goes, I smoked pot. And there's like an intense noise around her. Oh, that's going to be so good. Okay. Be like, I can't believe Chick-fil-A did that. Richard, what are you? What are we doing?

Chick-fil-A. I'm going a slightly different direction. Okay. And launching Pacific Rim Network. Oh. Which is all Pacific Rim spinoffs all the time. Unfortunately, there's already a stream of these in production. They've been, they've just continued.

you're making them. Are there really? Intensely. They've been developing these shows on and off. There's a new one in development that was just announced last week. We've got content lined up for years. We're good. Pacific Room Network. So we're like a resurrection theme every three episodes. There are strong merch tie-ins. You can you can sell the the robots in Chick-fil-A. We take over the Happy Meal business immediately. I love this. Okay, what are we calling the streaming network? Oh, it's Pacific Rim Network. It's all Pacific Rim. Everything is Pacific Run. Okay. Okay. It's all stories of Pacific Room. We've got like the big short in Pacific Rim, like when people figure out where the monsters are going to attack and they're like shorting the stocks of those companies. It's great. We've got we cover all genres. I'm going to have making everything, but it's all set in the Pacific Rim world. So Seinfeld and the Pacific Rim world. Yeah, Pacific Rim, Seinfeld.

Uh-huh. Honestly, I'd watch that. Sex in the city and Pacific Rim. Watch that too. It's like, oh my God. Dating and giant monsters. All that. the time. What can we do? All I've got is like deep fake Michael Landon. So I... Joey and Chandler in the suits, just hanging out. This is great. All right. That's very good. Mine, in case you're curious, I'm calling the network The Sauce. Mmm. Delicious.

And we're doing like family-friendly 1990s VH-1, I would say. That's what I'm going after. So we're doing a bunch of like, one of the things Chick-Flay is apparently doing is looking for like family-friendly game shows. So I'm going with like all of the, all of the, you know, Christian music videos. People are going to play that all the time. Just jars of clay. Just jars of clay. Everywhere you look. Some switchfoot when we're feeling edgy.

Lots of stuff to do. And then. Little creed. And then it's just going to be a lot of like great British show, great British baking show style competition shows where it's competition. where it's competition, but everybody's really nice to each other. We're going to takeover. I think I'm going to absolutely dominate. And one show at least is going to be called My Pleasure, and it is going to be our tent pole show.

I don't know what it is, but I know it's called My Pleasure. It's actually going to be a remake of Red Shoe Diaries. We're just going to go really, really wild with that one. As I say it out loud, my pleasure might be like too sexy a show for the sauce. It was like, that's a little racy for Chick-fil-A. Okay. Well, we have a lot to think about. Chick-fellie after dark.

Come on now. Oh, that's good. We just steal, are you afraid of the dark from Nickelodeon? And it's just called Chick-fil-A after dark. The nugs are spicier. After dark. Okay, so we're accidentally inventing Chick-Fleys porn network, which is good. This is the next phase of growth for Chick-fil-A.

Welcome to the entertainment business, Chick-Flay. All right, one more thing we should talk about before we get off of the streaming stuff, which is some interesting podcast-y news. this is a podcast after all. The big podcast news of this week, I would say, is that Alex Cooper, who hosts Call Her Daddy, and I think is probably like the second biggest name on Spotify after Joe Rogan,

just in terms of like people who got giant, whatever eight-figure deals to go be on Spotify exclusively, is leaving Spotify and going to Sirius XM, signed a huge deal for like $100 million. Super big deal. And just strikes me as very interesting because I'm sorry, it was $125 million. So much money. Yeah.

And I just think it's fascinating because Sirius, also just recently, I believe it was Smartless that made a huge deal with Sirius. So we're in this weird moment where like the podcast business is kind of retrenching. And there was this huge boom. And then it all sort of pulled back. But then like Serious in particular is out of. here just writing gigantic. No, this makes sense.

Sirius is always like 10 years late to the game. If she were a radio host and she had hit one big deal and probably wasn't going to hit a big deal again at that network and then went to Sirius for a lot of money and probably none of us ever listening to her on Sirius ever again. Yeah. You wouldn't even think about this. You would just say, oh, yeah, that's obviously what happened. This is the Howard Stern.

She did a Howard Stern is what you're saying. Yeah, it's the Howard Stern. Okay. I hope she enjoys having her 12 listeners, all of whom are in their course. car because they forgot to cancel the subscription in their car. Okay, so this is part of the reason I actually brought this up because I think the Howard Stern deal in a certain way made sense. A, it's like he's a big name, he's a big brand.

And also, I think the like demographic, especially age-wise of people who love Howard Stern and people who spend a lot of time in their car listening to satellite radio is pretty solid. This one seems strange to me because Alex Cooper is much younger. The call her daddy audience is presumably. much younger. It's just a completely different generation. Like one of the reasons there was a great, I think it was Wall Street Journal's story

right before the Olympics about Alex Cooper as like the Gen Z whisperer. And like, do Gen Z people know what serious XM is? Well, they're going to have to if they're going to follow her. I mean, that's probably... Apparently it will still be available on other podcast platforms. So they're just spending all this money to sell ads for Call Her Daddy.

I guess. Which is fine. You know, if you can make the money work, then fine, I guess. Yeah, that just seems like a ton of money. that's your play. But what do I know? Maybe it may it'll work. You get three months for a dollar.

I just like we're in this moment now where it's like Sirius and I Heart, which are like two huge radio players are the only ones left spending money on podcasts. And I don't know if that is like a sign of things to come of consolidation or if it's, they're just the only ones dumb enough to keep writing these big checks. I would say it's a sign of consolidation. I think these two companies have managed to persist. I heart radio with like an enormous. Monopoly on broadcast radio in the United States.

Yeah, they just want to try to stay alive as long as possible. And they'll just write giant checks until there are no more giant checks. Yeah, until the giant check account is closed. I mean, listen, Alex Cooper, get that money. Get your bag. Yeah, get the bag. Go for it. I love this for her.

All right, we got to take a break. And then we're going to come back to a lightning round. We'll be right back. This week on Networth and Chill, we're diving into another edition of Am I the asshole finance edition? And trust me, these money dilemmas will have you questioning everything. I'm breaking down real stories from real people who are navigating financial situations that range from mildly awkward to absolutely unhinged.

And I'm giving you my unfiltered take on who's in the right and who needs a serious reality check. Because let's be real. When it comes to mixing relationships and finances, someone's always asking if they're the asshole. Learn how to set boundaries, protect your wealth, and avoid becoming the villain in your own financial story. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash you are rich BFF. All right, we're back. It's lightning round time. Richard, you're sticking around for the lightning round, which means you get to go first.

What'd you pick? My pick is Amazon canceling the Echo Show 8 photo edition's photo plan. Now, if you don't remember the Echo Show 8 Photos Edition because you're a normal person, it was the version of the Echo Show that they launched late last year. And it was the only one where you could make. make it display like photos all the time, like any other digital picture frame. Because the rest of them, I think they cycle other things in. You can't just make it just be photos.

Like Alexa prompts. And they said, okay, we'll sell you an echo that will just show photos on its screen. But you have to pay for it. The plan was like $2 for a month or six months or something like that. Anyway, no one bought this thing. And they stopped selling it months ago. And like recently, probably one of the only customers who had it got a message saying that yes, we're going to cancel this

and you will no longer have this feature. It's going away. Goodbye. So they're essentially just removing the whole reason you bought this device in the first place. Yes. And it's just a regular Echo Show 8 now.

There's so many stupid things about this, Richard. It's just everything. Like, that you have this smart device that can't do the thing that the dumbest digital photo frame that you can get on this shelf of any store in America anywhere can do with basically no processing power and nothing.

Is it like, is it a tech, like, is there a technological reason for it? Or is it just? No, it's just software. Yeah, we just want to push all of our different Alexa like advertisements and stuff on you. Stop looking at pictures. Yes. They want, they want their echo and Alexa ecosystem to push YouTube buying other things and

seeing other things. and they want to control what you have. They don't want you to just use this digital photo frame because then you wouldn't buy things from Amazon, which as we heard, I think within the last month, is a big problem for Amazon's hardware business is that they had done some kind of interesting accounting based on the idea that if you used Alexa and bought Echo Hardware,

you would buy more stuff from Amazon. And that is not what people do. They just used Alexa to turn off their lights and stuff and set reminders and the kids ask it questions. They don't buy more stuff. One time a roommate of mine bought, I would say like $40 worth of Cadbury eggs and then $100 of laundry detergent on my Alexa. And then I was like, why did you buy that?

And she's like, I just wanted to see. And then we stopped using it ever for buying things because that was so many Cadbury eggs and overpriced detergent. That's a pretty funny bit to pull at somebody's house, actually, to just walk in and just start yelling at the speaker to buy stuff and just see how far you can get. Little kids do it all the time. They're like, buy me a fire tablet. And you're like, no, shut up. Leave it alone. It's not for you.

Yeah, this is one of those things that I feel like is just like a failure on all sides. Because Richard, you're right that like for Amazon, I'm sure they lost money on every single one of these things that they sold. Which is why Amazon doesn't want to just sell these things as a photo frame. And if you were to say Amazon, why not sell it for more money so that you can make money on it as a photo frame? Some accountant within Amazon would tell you that that's not how business works. Yeah. I'm not an accountant. What do I know?

But then to do something like this, presumably for a teeny tiny number of people, this is the thing I've just never understood about large companies. Like Google does this worse than anybody. They're like, we have a thing with not as many users that isn't making us as much money as we hoped. It costs us absolutely nothing to run. So we're going to cancel it. It's like, why? What are we accomplishing here?

It was like when they took the MTV News archive offline, it's like I'm pretty sure you can afford to keep MTVNews.com online. Like, I think it's fine. Maybe it's like a tax write-off. Do you get a tax write-off if you just remove a feature? Like, do they get a tax write-off for that? No, we did a bad job on that one. Yeah, like, Hollywood is always like,

never mind, we're not going to release this movie. We're going to put it in a vault forever. Give me money. IRS. And like Amazon's just going to give me money. That's the thing at Google is that the reason why a lot of these products have canceled is because they can't find anyone to run them. Because if you're not running a project that's growing or going somewhere,

then you aren't going to get that. next promotion, et cetera, et cetera. It's probably a similar thing within Amazon. It's like, okay, so who wants to weekly check in and make sure that the photo subscription is still working? Nobody? Okay. Canceling.

I guess. I don't know. Open source it. Like, get a user to do it. Like, hey, Richard's just like, you check this box once a week. Like, I don't know. And I get that I'm asking for something that's never going to happen. But it just always feels so silly to me when companies do this.

It's such an own goal of. customer relations and making people trust you as a company in the name of saving one person, one meeting a quarter. What you think is unreasonable that they spend a trillion dollars on new AI chips, but they can't spend $100 to keep this wrong. Exactly. What if you just put one of those chips onto keeping all of those customers happy? And then if you don't want to have this problem again, I don't know, make better products.

There's an idea for you, Amazon. Cranz, what's yours? Not related to Amazon. Mine is JBL. You remember last year they had the headphones that had a screen on them for the case. They did it again. But the screen got bigger. It's a much bigger screen.

You can pause. You can skip tracks. I still cannot decide if this is the best idea ever or a completely pointless use of technology. I've never used a pair of headphones like this. So I genuinely can't say, but I can't decide. I think you might be able to do more. with this than you can do with Jim and I because you can set alarms.

See, I was going to go the other way. I was going to say, this is like a books poma, but a hit phone case. Yeah, but you set alarms. You can check text messages. Basically, if you didn't have some sort of smart watch, you just pull this out of your pocket instead of your phone. That's probably likely going to happen. Right?

That's actually better. I kind of like that. Yeah. I don't need a smart watch all the time, but I'm going to be carrying my earbuds anyway. They just look neat. I don't know. I'm one of those people where while I do feel we should have small, good smartphones, I also understand that people love cheap screens.

And this is just cool. Like just slap a screen on it. Let's go. My thing is I want all of this, but I want it to be like button controls that I can do just by like putting my hand in my pocket. Oh. Right? Like I want the controls that are on my headphones in a lot of cases. I also want those on the thing in my pocket.

So I can just reach in and like whack it twice to go to the next song. Like actual physical buttons. Yeah. Like what if my AirPods case just had 12 buttons on it? That'd be nice. And you just, but then people are like, why,

what are you fiddle within your pocket? It's basically just a little fidget spinner. I'm just in there just clicking around all day. I'm always like flipping the case open and close. And then I'm like, why don't have any battery? Oh, just me.

One random thing. Have you, I always hate asking people if they see anything on TikTok because the answer is no, because everybody has a completely different TikTok experience. But for like two weeks, there was one guy hawking a pair of Lenovo earbuds that also had a screen on the case. Yes. That was like every fifth video I saw on TikTok. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I like I've since quit TikTok. I'm away from TikTok right now because I was in Texas and I was getting a lot.

a lot of political location-based stuff that I didn't want to see. But yeah, I remember that guy. He just was like, oh, should we call these in? He made a very convincing case. Yeah, yeah. I was like, should I buy these? Lenovo, like, Lenovo was working on TikTok.

Like, that was the consistent thing. It would always be like these weird lifestyle products from Lenovo. And you're like, I didn't know you sold like a flashlight with a Lenovo brand on it. Is this the same Lenovo? Like Lenovo is definitely turning into one of those companies that just kind of makes everything. Yeah. Including weird e-ink laptops. Thank you, Lenovo.

Yeah. Hell yeah. Just keep doing that. I did not get that. The only thing I get on TikTok now is Cole Hocker edits of himself. That seems better, I think. I prefer. I like that.

One of the features I've always wanted from TikTok is like a walk a mile in somebody else's shoes where like I should be able to scan a QR code and just immediately get your for you feed for an hour. I think that would be so fun. And it's like, what a way to get to know somebody then to like quickly? And you have control over it. You have to share it with me. It's like sharing your location with somebody. I'm like, I can share my feed with you.

I think that would be so fun. Why is TikTok not doing that as a speed dating app? Oh. Yeah. It's like on hinge, but instead of having to like answer ass and I in questions about yourself, you just are like, here's my feed. Do you love me? Like TikTok, this is how you're going to make money because you don't make money.

This is how TikTok will make money. money is just doing this. This is great. I love this. That's a good idea. Anyway, TikTok, you can have that for free. Sponsor the Lightning Round. Speaking of Lightning, what's yours?

Mine is, I just want to talk about the Sonos app again for a minute. Because this whole Sonos app story has gone from like ridiculous to sad to just weird and confusing. The most recent thing is that Sonos, which Chris Welch scooped, what, last week, two weeks ago, recently, that the company was considering re-releasing the app. Patrick Spence said in a Reddit AMA this week that he was hopeful until very recently

that Sonos could just re-release the app, but then they found that they couldn't and that the old app would just make everything worse. And this is so brutal for Sonia. Like, it's just, I mean, let me just read you more of the quote here. So he says, the trick, of course, is that Sonos is not just the mobile app, but software that runs on your speakers and in the cloud too. In the month since the new mobile app launched, we've been updating the software that runs on our speakers and in the cloud to the point where today, S2 is less reliable and less stable than what you remember. Like, what he, what he's saying is we broke everything so badly that we can't even go back anymore.

I just, like, I have so many questions. It's unreal. How does that work? I mean, the S2 app was never very good. This is part of the thing where I'm like, I think the current app is getting a bit of a bad shake because it's not very good. But the last one was also bad and was constantly like disconnecting and forcing you to reset your entire home. The last one, like, it's a very funny Rorschach test of like, do you want all the features but kind of bad?

Or do you want slightly better, but no features? Right. It's like, well, maybe Sonos you should have just done, they're both bad, to be clear, not good outcomes, but it's just... It's just tough. Yeah, this is, this is awful. I just don't understand how they got to the point of having an app that doesn't work and doesn't do what people want. Right. Like, I totally agree.

And the fact that Sonos has had to walk it so far back as to basically acknowledge, and I guess to some extent credit to Patrick Spence for just saying out loud, like, yeah, We screwed it up. Like they started by trying to do the, you know, change is hard thing. And then they started by saying it took courage to do this. They actually used the word courage, which PSA to CEOs don't use the word courage anymore. Just stop it. It doesn't help. It always backfires.

We will use it against you. Just don't do it anymore. And now at least they have come all the way around and been like, yeah, we released a crappy app. This sucks. We're sorry. But also there's nothing we can do about it. Like, it's so bad. I really, I feel for, I feel for.

for Sonos. And this is not a good moment to be doing this if you're Sonos. They apparently, I didn't realize they got rid of their beta program or they, they, they, they didn't make it as robust as it used to be. There are a lot of things that went wrong in the process here, but ultimately, like, it should have been blindingly obvious that this thing wasn't ready. And, and I, and what, what Chris Welch has said on their show is that because the headphones were coming and because there was such a rush to do that, there was the sense like, like, we have to do all this at once. And holy God did that backfire.

All to launch these headphones that did anyone ask for Sonos headphones? Have you seen a pair in the wild? I was actually just wondering about this the other day. I have not heard one person even ask about them since they came out. Sonos was always like, it was a niche brand. I mean, I have a lot of Sonos speakers. It's always been a niche brand. And this like appetite to compete with the apples of the world is like, don't do that. Yeah. They have so much more money than you. It's been a niche brand with like huge brand recognition, right?

Like I know a lot of people who would never own Sonos stuff, but kind of know what Sonos is. Yeah, but I don't think it's like at the same stage as like Bose. No. Like, right? Like I would see the only people who know who Sonos is or that know what Sonos is are people who are fairly online. And so it's kind of like really good online brand recognition. But I think that even people who aren't online, they maybe didn't necessarily know what Sonos was, but they could be convinced to buy it.

Yeah. Like you could walk into Best Buy and you could say, man, you know what? I need some whole, I need to hear music everywhere in my house. He was like, you know, I guess I'm for you. Yeah. How much money? I think that's exactly right. And I feel like what Sonos has done here is totally torch that reputation, right?

This sense of like Sonos was always too expensive, but also the best. Right. Like those, and you can get people over too expensive in a lot of cases. it is it is just absolutely lighting on fire this reputation of it will do the thing that you want it to do exceptionally well because it just doesn't anymore yeah and like and it it the road to get back to that seems like it is pretty long at this point for sonos. There's still excellent airplay two speakers. Yeah again I never I couldn't even tell you if I have the Sonos app on my phone and I use Sonos all the time and it still sounds great I still love the speakers. Lord knows I will not be updating that system anytime soon. I stopped using the app years ago because it forced me to reset my entire system one too many times.

And once I got it working with my audio or with my TV, I was like, okay, I never touch this again. They're now airplay speakers. Yeah. Nobody tell me how I should just get a receiver and big bookshelf speakers. I know. It's expensive. I already spent the money. Shut up.

Yeah. I wonder if we're going to get to the point where like if you have a phone. and a Sonos system that is like all still running the old software because you never updated. That's going to become like a thing you can sell on eBay for way more money because it's the thing that still works. I hope that happens so much. You get in a van and you pull up on somebody and you say, hey, man, we've got all these Sonos that fell off a truck and you sell them.

I got to work in Sonos. You interested? Yes. It's good. All right. We're some venting businesses here on the Vergecast. That's what we do. I mean, yeah.

All right. We have gone way over as we are wanting. to do. We should get out of here. Thank you both for doing this. Tons of good stuff on the site this week. Becca Farsachi's final video for The Verge, which is very sad about I Justine just went up today, Thursday as we're recording this. It's very good. We have a bunch of stuff on the pixels, a bunch of stuff on AI, photo, chaos, all the streaming news we've been talking about. If you missed our whole hydrogen series, both on the Tuesday Verge cast and the Lost Highway stuff we did on the site, that was great. Tons of good stuff on the verge. It's like the end of August.

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

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