Latest / The Daily Sarcast / September 8th, 2026: The Chai Has Changed, CDs Are Cool Again And My 16 Hour Travel Home

Transcript

September 8th, 2026: The Chai Has Changed, CDs Are Cool Again And My 16 Hour Travel Home · The Daily Sarcast

• 0:00
  Today's episode is sponsored by Airline Hell.
• 0:04
  Getting across four time zones should be simple. Hopefully you only have one flight.
• 0:09
  Sometimes maybe a layover. Instead, enjoy the all-new airline experience with
• 0:15
  three separate flights, stop in every single time zone possible,
• 0:20
  and never really know what's going on during all of that time.
• 0:23
  Three planes, one destination, zero dignity.
• 0:28
  Because why fly home when you can turn getting home into an all-day-and-night travel event?
• 0:33
  Airlines, making the journey home unnecessarily complicated since whenever.
• 0:39
  He loves to build. This is what he enjoys. So late at night,
• 0:42
  11 o'clock at night, he calls me and wants to talk about things he's building
• 0:46
  because it's fun for him. Howard Lutnick on Trump.
• 0:50
  Insert theme song here. This is the Daily Starcast. I give you the news and media laughs.
• 0:55
  I'm Lindsay Vernick, and today, September 8th, 2026.
• 0:59
  It feels so good to be back on my couch in New York doing the pot again.
• 1:04
  It almost feels like nothing has changed, but everything has at the same time. It's crazy.
• 1:11
  But yeah, let's get into the news. So let's start off with the latest scandal
• 1:16
  to hit the glamorous world of television.
• 1:19
  It involves the Wheel of Fortune, an airplane, yet again, and a disturbing website,
• 1:25
  and what seems like a made-up story.
• 1:27
  So Jim Thornton, the longtime announcer for Wheel of Fortune,
• 1:31
  has been fired by Sony after there was an incident on an American flight back in May.
• 1:37
  So Thornton has been the announcer on Wheel of Fortune since 2011.
• 1:41
  So this isn't just some like random guy who wandered onto set yesterday.
• 1:45
  He's been on the show for a while.
• 1:47
  So back in May, Jim Thornton was on the flight and he took out his laptop and
• 1:52
  he put it on the tray for all to see. And he goes on this like really creepy,
• 1:57
  weird website and somebody noticed and said something.
• 2:02
  So when the plane landed at LAX, police were waiting for him.
• 2:06
  But the important part here is that he did not get arrested and he was not charged
• 2:12
  with a crime because like you can't just get arrested and be charged for going
• 2:16
  on a creepy website even though it's just you know it's just creepy,
• 2:21
  so his attorney says that he was just trying to find this like suicide prevention
• 2:25
  or mental health website and accidentally clicked the wrong link and immediately
• 2:30
  left once he realized what it was like okay that's literally what they all sides.
• 2:35
  So Sony looked into this and ultimately fired him.
• 2:39
  And now we get to the part that makes this a particularly spectacular shitshow.
• 2:44
  Wheel of Fortune has already filmed episodes for the new season with Thornton
• 2:48
  doing all of the announcing.
• 2:50
  So now production has to go back into those episodes and replace his voice.
• 2:54
  It really sucks to have to be in post for that one and have to do basically a voice exorcism.
• 2:59
  Getting fired in any other job is fine. You just pack up your desk and leave, right?
• 3:06
  But in television, when someone gets fired, suddenly a massive team of people
• 3:10
  have to figure out how to surgically remove their existence from episodes that were already finished.
• 3:15
  And after 15 years on the show, Jim Thornton's biggest contribution to Wheel
• 3:19
  of Fortune may now be giving an entire generation of television editors a very specific new skill.
• 3:25
  How to erase a man from a game show without touching anybody or anything else.
• 3:31
  Starbucks has now found a way to piss people off before they've even had their coffee.
• 3:35
  The company recently refreshed its menu, a.k.a.
• 3:39
  We changed something you liked and we're now going to pretend it's an exciting
• 3:42
  improvement, and customers are not having it.
• 3:45
  The biggest casualty here is the chai.
• 3:48
  Starbucks changed the chai concentrate it uses and its drinks,
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  and chai fanatics immediately noticed.
• 3:55
  Like, literally, these people have the palate of a sommelier who have been trained
• 3:59
  exclusively on cinnamon.
• 4:02
  Customers have been calling Starbucks headquarters, emailing executives,
• 4:05
  signing petitions, complaining to chatbox, and trying to reverse engineer the old recipe.
• 4:12
  One customer actually emailed eight Starbucks executives demanding that they
• 4:16
  turn this unnecessary mess around.
• 4:18
  And one particularly dedicated chai drinker, a 58-year-old cybersecurity worker,
• 4:25
  investigated the new formula and emailed Starbucks about it.
• 4:28
  Starbucks, of course, responded with their corporate language about evaluating
• 4:32
  the impact of the change.
• 4:34
  And this guy responded perfectly, it's not refreshed. Because,
• 4:39
  you know, they tried to refresh the menu.
• 4:42
  Starbucks says the changes are part of an effort to simplify its menu and improve
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  the customer experience.
• 4:47
  Which is what they literally always say like nobody at starbucks is waking up
• 4:51
  and saying how can we make america furious today they just want to streamline everything,
• 4:57
  but then a couple hours later there's this 58 year old man in a cyber security
• 5:01
  office conducting a forensic investigation into a fucking chai latte,
• 5:06
  that is america in 2026 nobody trusts the government we definitely don't trust
• 5:12
  any corporations but we will trust the guy on reddit who figured out the cinnamon
• 5:16
  to ginger ratio is different.
• 5:19
  And in news that will make millennials and everybody else feel a million years
• 5:23
  older, Gen Z is bringing back CDs.
• 5:26
  Yes, young people are rediscovering compact discs.
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  Apparently Gen Z likes CDs because they're physical, collectible,
• 5:33
  and they actually own the music. Like what? That's crazy.
• 5:38
  I guess we've just reached the point where people are romanticizing the things
• 5:42
  millennials spent their entire childhood begging their parents to replace with an iPod.
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  They're finally understanding that there's something very satisfying about having something physical.
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  You can hold it. You can look at the artwork. You can put it on a shelf.
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  You can also accidentally scratch it, lose it, or just not be able to play it
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  because your car doesn't have a CD player.
• 6:04
  Welcome back, CDs. We missed you. Well, technically we didn't.
• 6:07
  We threw you away, but you know what we mean.
• 6:10
  I'm Lindsay Life. Well, I'm officially home.
• 6:13
  Home it it was a long it was a long travel day it took about like 15 16 hours,
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  I flew on the wonderful Southwest Airlines and took three flights to get home,
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  I'm pretty sure I broke my suitcase my mom is not going to be happy because
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  this is the second suitcase I broke in the past I don't know a year or two,
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  and I spilled laundry detergent all over my clothes but it was all my dirty
• 6:41
  clothes I spilled it over.
• 6:43
  So that's good because I didn't spill any laundry detergent on the clothes that
• 6:49
  I had cleaned at the Ritz-Carlton for $300 because I didn't do laundry for a
• 6:54
  really long time and I had to do it.
• 6:56
  Lindsay lessons, a lesson by Lindsay. If you tell people that you're really
• 6:59
  bad at keeping secrets and aren't good at keeping like the mid-level secrets,
• 7:05
  no one will ever expect that you're hiding a really, really big one.
• 7:09
  Cooking tip of the day. You can't cook if you don't have anything in your fridge.
• 7:14
  Feedback, comments, questions, a nice Jewish boy looking for a date?
• 7:18
  Email me at lindsay at thedailystarcast.com. Thanks so much for listening.
• 7:22
  Talk to you guys tomorrow.