Speaker 1: Cauzone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello friends, it's me your host ed Zeitron, the host
Speaker 2: of Better Offline. Now, of course it's Christmas weeks or
Speaker 2: we're all taken a week off here at cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: So I'm rerunning one of my favorite episodes, where did
Speaker 2: text Magic Go for You? During Alex Crowanz and Michael Fisher.
Speaker 2: Now you're going to hear a lot more like this.
Speaker 2: It's recorded in the awesome iHeartRadio studios in New York.
Speaker 2: We're going to be doing way more of this next year.
Speaker 2: But also the theme of this one is about where
Speaker 2: text magic is gone, and I think this is a
Speaker 2: formative theme of Better Offline but also going to be
Speaker 2: a big thing in twenty twenty five for us.
Speaker 3: So please enjoy.
Speaker 2: This is a wonderful episode full of laughs and larks,
Speaker 2: and honestly those two are way more funny than I am. Anyway,
Speaker 2: please enjoy and have a happy Holidays.
Speaker 3: Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed Zitron,
Speaker 3: otherwise known today as Woke Joe Rogan. Good. We are
Speaker 3: live kind of from the iHeartRadio studios in New York. Today.
Speaker 3: I am joyed by mister Mobile himself, Michael Fisher and
Speaker 3: of course Alex Krantz from the Verge.
Speaker 4: Thank you for coming, thanks for having to be here,
Speaker 4: thanks for having us. So today is about where the
Speaker 4: magic's gone in tech. Got two great tech journalists with
Speaker 4: me and I myself have done some writing on tech,
Speaker 4: I guess.
Speaker 3: And the Big Thing. And this kind of started actually
Speaker 3: from a conversation between you and me, Michael, where it
Speaker 3: was about kind of like what are we even looking
Speaker 3: at in tech anymore? Why things aren't fun? Like what
Speaker 3: like it feels like we've stopped getting The most fun
Speaker 3: thing I have found is I'm actually gonna pull it
Speaker 3: out of my pocket and there's no video, so you're
Speaker 3: never gonna know. Like this anchor charge, it's like thirty bugs.
Speaker 3: I mean, like battery packs are cool, but otherwise everything
Speaker 3: that comes out that's meant to be exciting, like the
Speaker 3: Humane pin and the Rabbit are one, which obviously we're
Speaker 3: bad from the beginning. Sorry anyone who thought otherwise, We're wrong,
Speaker 3: And like the Daylight tablet, which we'll get to of course,
Speaker 3: right these things just have turned out to be just
Speaker 3: not even fun. You can be kind of shitty, but fun,
Speaker 3: like there's something you can look at even some of
Speaker 3: the great tech failures, like that weird frame that you
Speaker 3: could upload things to from like twenty fifty and look
Speaker 3: a few of these weird Indiegogo things. There was a
Speaker 3: cute weirdness to it, but now it's just almost just nothing.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of reasons for that.
Speaker 5: There are.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I feel like there are like a lot of
Speaker 6: compounding problems that have like that have deposited us here today.
Speaker 6: But I will say that I think that there are
Speaker 6: some of those examples you gave are still could have
Speaker 6: been fun. I think Rabbit is still trying to like
Speaker 6: salvage the situation and make it work, but I mean humane,
Speaker 6: I think you know, it took a giant swing, which
Speaker 6: was this this thing we've learned I think you shouldn't
Speaker 6: do at this point, which is try to replace the smartphone,
Speaker 6: call the smartphone the enemy, and say we're going to
Speaker 6: replace it with this wearable thing.
Speaker 5: And when you.
Speaker 6: Deliver a product that's so undercooked, I think that's the problem.
Speaker 6: Like when I mean undercook, I can't even get there.
Speaker 7: And I think also just everybody's in this big quest
Speaker 7: to beat the smartphone, right, like everybody wants to make
Speaker 7: the next smartphone so they can make all the money
Speaker 7: the way Apple did, and.
Speaker 1: What is it? And so they're all like, throw it
Speaker 1: at the wall? Is this it?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 7: Even like you, I mean, I think you're right when
Speaker 7: you say, like the rabbit and you look at these
Speaker 7: AI devices and stuff where there feels like there's sort
Speaker 7: of a cynicism. Yeah, to these products where you're like, oh,
Speaker 7: you're just out here to make money. There's not like
Speaker 7: something fun and exciting here. Like the Daylight Computer is
Speaker 7: a good example. They're like, yeah, we're going to you know,
Speaker 7: make computing black.
Speaker 3: And white, just just for the listeners. You might not
Speaker 3: know about it.
Speaker 1: Can you describe the Daylight Yeah, the Daylight Computer.
Speaker 5: You just reviewed it, right, Yeah, yeah, I just came
Speaker 5: off the back of it. Yeah.
Speaker 6: It's like I think I called it an ordinary Android
Speaker 6: tablet with an extraordinary display because a special thing about
Speaker 6: it is the display.
Speaker 5: And David Pierce said, you know, yeah, like.
Speaker 6: He thinks, uh, this this is this is a display
Speaker 6: company necessarily a consumer product, but what is it though?
Speaker 7: It's like an l CD display that only does black
Speaker 7: and white.
Speaker 6: Correct, And the special thing is that it has a
Speaker 6: fast refresh rate that makes it very smooth, So when
Speaker 6: you're manipulating it, it's like using a black It's like
Speaker 6: using an iPad from the Fallout world, Yeah right, where
Speaker 6: like it's is.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's kind of like using an e ink Android
Speaker 7: tablet if the e ink could go fast.
Speaker 3: Right, That's why I was excited about it. So what's
Speaker 3: bad about it?
Speaker 7: I mean the problem for me fundamentally, I've used a
Speaker 7: lot of Android e Ink tablets. I'm a nerd about
Speaker 7: these things, and fundamentally the problem is they're built for
Speaker 7: black and white, which is cool. The Internet isn't. Oh,
Speaker 7: so you're like, Okay, I'm going to download this app.
Speaker 7: I can't see any of the buttons.
Speaker 3: Cool, So they just did not prepare for people use
Speaker 3: you can like I mean that's.
Speaker 5: True of the of those e readers.
Speaker 3: No, that is true.
Speaker 6: But I think Daylight, like to their credit, they have
Speaker 6: come out and said, look, we don't want color. You know,
Speaker 6: it's this very granola very like if you watch the
Speaker 6: coverage of the.
Speaker 3: Yeah I've seen I've seen the Instagram ads.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, and like that is their pitch, that is
Speaker 6: their whole things, Like your screen is too colorful and
Speaker 6: too addictive, and you should you should be able to
Speaker 6: use your tablet outside in daylight, and it should function
Speaker 6: as you expect. You should be able to do whatever
Speaker 6: you want. But at the end of the day, ideally
Speaker 6: you're not, as you know, drawn into this vortex of
Speaker 6: of TikTok endlest feeds because you know you don't want
Speaker 6: to watch YouTube on it.
Speaker 5: You want to do someone.
Speaker 6: They made reading deliberate, right, which which is a whole
Speaker 6: industry now, isn't it right?
Speaker 7: Like the light phone is another example where people are
Speaker 7: just like, what if we took all the cool capabilities
Speaker 7: of your phone and then like turned off a bunch
Speaker 7: of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've seen the ads for that, that weird phone
Speaker 3: where it's like, oh, we block out all the things
Speaker 3: you use your phone for, right, so the thing that
Speaker 3: you wouldn't use your phone. It's just very confusing, And
Speaker 3: I love posting, I love looking at my phone ninety
Speaker 3: two hours a way.
Speaker 1: You are an online.
Speaker 3: I will die if I don't go online. But also,
Speaker 3: it doesn't feel like any of these companies, same thing
Speaker 3: with Rabbit, same thing with Daylight. It doesn't feel like
Speaker 3: they've actually talked to a person, like an actual person,
Speaker 3: like a normal person, someone who uses Facebook and Instagram
Speaker 3: to talk to their friends or get a I spam
Speaker 3: and someone who has like a regular job, someone who
Speaker 3: isn't in tech at all, yeah, and just said what
Speaker 3: do you think? And then when that person said, I
Speaker 3: don't know, why do I have this? What do I do?
Speaker 3: They should have gone, oh shit, I shouldn't have released it.
Speaker 3: But it doesn't. It doesn't feel what Rabbit I think
Speaker 3: is a separate thing because I think they're fully cynical.
Speaker 3: I think I think that they just.
Speaker 5: Don't think give a shit.
Speaker 3: It has to be held out separately daylight. It almost
Speaker 3: feels like they just focus the simple people who chose
Speaker 3: to well, well you said they were Alex. You said
Speaker 3: there was there was something cynical.
Speaker 7: About it, So I'm yeah, I mean I think for me,
Speaker 7: like I said, I've used a lot of similar tablets
Speaker 7: to this. So when they reached out and were like, hey,
Speaker 7: we have this device, it's it's electronic paper. And they're
Speaker 7: very careful of saying electronic paper, not eating, because that's
Speaker 7: like an actual branded thing and eat ink will descend
Speaker 7: from the heavens to just slap you down if you
Speaker 7: use it inappropriately. And they said they're eat ink and
Speaker 7: they they said they were electronic paper, really cool refresh rate,
Speaker 7: and they wanted to like do this whole daylight thing
Speaker 7: and the warm light stuff, and I thought all of it.
Speaker 7: I think the warm light stuff is very unproven science.
Speaker 7: That is just what is the where it's like, the
Speaker 7: idea is if you look at an orange light before
Speaker 7: you go to bed, that'll make you sleepy.
Speaker 1: Blue light wakes you up and.
Speaker 3: Makes you just proved this wasn't the case.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that was bad timing for daylight for sure because
Speaker 6: required came out with that thing. It's like, yeah, like
Speaker 6: all these studies are not conclusive and also some new
Speaker 6: ones have proven it isn't really very cool.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's just like and so that's also eight hundred
Speaker 7: dollars right right, it's eight hundred dollars.
Speaker 6: That's the problem for me. So here's the thing I
Speaker 6: don't think the CEO is. I had some time to
Speaker 6: talk to the CEO and I in a vacuum in absentia.
Speaker 6: I kind of was like, this guy's got to be
Speaker 6: a charlatan, right, He's got to be gone for a
Speaker 6: cash grab.
Speaker 5: What he is? My take way was is that no,
Speaker 5: he's he's a he's a.
Speaker 6: Display nerd who really cares about making this particular kind
Speaker 6: of display text looks and the display is cool, and
Speaker 6: they like they didn't take an off the shelf component
Speaker 6: from Sharp, which I also thought, and stuff it into
Speaker 6: a white label Android tablet, which is what I thought
Speaker 6: they did, Like this is that's that's just it was.
Speaker 5: It's Android. But the hardware is they they built.
Speaker 3: But did they make an effort with the software? Yeah?
Speaker 6: The thing is that the devices they see that you know,
Speaker 6: it's it's early. And this is the thing we complain
Speaker 6: about with almost every product where it's like, yeah, well
Speaker 6: this is just Niagara Laundra on top of Android.
Speaker 5: But we have all these ideas.
Speaker 6: I'm like, great delivery ideas before I.
Speaker 5: Have a press like, aren't you It's very frustrating.
Speaker 3: I wish I could do that. With the bank. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I've got the money this month. However I will one
Speaker 3: day and I'll have lots of it. Well, I mean
Speaker 3: that's how I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: That's a called a credit card.
Speaker 7: And then the understanding is Okay, you have to pay
Speaker 7: extra because you borrowed it. Whereas these companies are like,
Speaker 7: hey give us your money. We're gonna give you a product,
Speaker 7: it's not going to be a good product. But if
Speaker 7: you just wait, and I'm like, no.
Speaker 3: You should pay bad product.
Speaker 1: Pay me to wait, pay me to wait?
Speaker 6: Right, Yeah, I think the uncertain thing for me is like,
Speaker 6: it's the price the thing that for daylight, if Daylight
Speaker 6: was down at at you know, two hundred three hundred
Speaker 6: bucks hundred four hundred, put that in a premium and
Speaker 6: I'm like, look, okay, it's an intentional product for a
Speaker 6: very specific market and and that's that's great.
Speaker 5: So I hit them on that a lot.
Speaker 6: I was like, you've got to make me understand why
Speaker 6: this is seven hundred and twenty nine dollars and to
Speaker 6: hear them tell it, it's the work that went into
Speaker 6: the display, plus the tiny you know, minimum water quantities
Speaker 6: they have to they have to hit.
Speaker 1: So it's like so it's basically bit you got to eat.
Speaker 5: No, No, it's like make it maybe even to make
Speaker 5: a big margin on each tablet. That's the thing.
Speaker 6: They were like, they are, No, I assume that at
Speaker 6: least with that from the factory.
Speaker 7: They just put in a lot of effort and these
Speaker 7: things are much more expensive to make than they have to.
Speaker 6: Which one I can see that side of it now,
Speaker 6: Like I'm on clicks, like I've gotten some experience with that,
Speaker 6: and I'm like, okay, I get it.
Speaker 5: I don't know if it's true. I'm not. I don't
Speaker 5: know enough to know.
Speaker 1: No, eight hundred dollars, Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, today the click iPhone is now one thousand dollars eccessory.
Speaker 3: Listeners at home. So Michael is using this case on
Speaker 3: his on his iPhone. It's called a click size. It
Speaker 3: is clicks for iPhone, and this allows you to type
Speaker 3: with your with your figure. It's a nice click to
Speaker 3: it a little keyboard. How much that cost?
Speaker 5: This is one twenty nine or excuse me, one thirty
Speaker 5: nine or one like it.
Speaker 6: I do like it. And I'm not just saying that
Speaker 6: because I am I so founder. I'm very biased.
Speaker 3: You can't trust me, God damn it. So the thing
Speaker 3: is with something like that is it actually feels useful
Speaker 3: because people type stuff on their phone sometimes I'm.
Speaker 1: Just like fucking around with it.
Speaker 3: But actually that's the word thing. It's they feel like
Speaker 3: less fun things to fuck around with these days. And
Speaker 3: that's something even like CS for years has been like this.
Speaker 3: Everything I'm sure next year is just going to be
Speaker 3: all ai again. But even the years before it felt
Speaker 3: like they were less fun things. There's the kind of
Speaker 3: exterior ring of security camera, toilet light and dildo companies
Speaker 3: or from China, and they're amazingly. They're called like the
Speaker 3: Shengzong Chang Zong Dong romance company and they sell eleven
Speaker 3: different products, many batteries, and they're all the very nice people.
Speaker 3: Then you've got like the cat litter company that always
Speaker 3: turns up. You've got the Wi Fi grail company that
Speaker 3: always turns.
Speaker 1: That one folding machine, the one.
Speaker 3: Folding machine that will never launch. But even then the
Speaker 3: folding machine a kind of like that. It's like a
Speaker 3: folksy dumb product that will never launch. But otherwise it's
Speaker 3: like where's the magic, Like when was the last time
Speaker 3: we had something fun?
Speaker 7: Even I mean I CES is a weird one because
Speaker 7: it is so I think most of the people coming
Speaker 7: there are coming to sell things in American markets, right,
Speaker 7: And if you don't need that, if you sell online,
Speaker 7: you don't necessarily need to go to CES and have
Speaker 7: that big presence.
Speaker 1: Because you don't. You can just sell directly to the consumer.
Speaker 7: You can just see it and we see that with
Speaker 7: stuff like like the stuff I'm really into right now
Speaker 7: is ian Eo I think is how you say it,
Speaker 7: which is like gaming console.
Speaker 5: It looks like a giant sidekick, right, yeah, like that one.
Speaker 1: It's called the I n Ao. It's a y A
Speaker 1: n EO.
Speaker 7: I'm absolutely massacring the name A y A n e
Speaker 7: o the flip ds and this thing is the dumbest,
Speaker 7: most fun.
Speaker 1: Thing I've used in a while.
Speaker 7: It's like a steam Deck. But if the steam Deck
Speaker 7: ran on Windows and therefore sucked.
Speaker 3: Two screens, why do you enjoy it?
Speaker 1: I think I like it because it's different.
Speaker 7: It's doing something new, and there's like like, Okay, the
Speaker 7: software is garbage, but that's kind of their fault because
Speaker 7: it's hard to do software, and like you shouldn't launch
Speaker 7: things with garbage software.
Speaker 1: Steam Deck it's fine.
Speaker 7: But it's also cool because like there's like it's just
Speaker 7: got a good display. There's like a really good thought
Speaker 7: behind it, and it's like, you know what, there's gonna
Speaker 7: be people who really really like this thing and are
Speaker 7: gonna have fun with it, and it's mainly gonna be
Speaker 7: nerds who want to play Nintendo DS ROMs.
Speaker 3: And I'm like, yes, cool, Well, that feels like the
Speaker 3: first weird thing I've heard of in it while other
Speaker 3: than like the Rabbit.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I think the ones that become a success
Speaker 6: are like almost unavoidably not as weird. Like the thing
Speaker 6: that jumps to my mind is, what's the last time
Speaker 6: I was really impressed by something that I kept after
Speaker 6: the review period or bought after the review period. It
Speaker 6: was the Meta ray bands.
Speaker 5: It was like, wow, oh my god.
Speaker 6: They stuff really good speakers, yeah, and a really and
Speaker 6: a pretty good camera into sunglasses and a bunch of
Speaker 6: AI stuff that you really shouldn't talk about.
Speaker 5: But yeah, it's like it's it's a really great accessory.
Speaker 3: I've heard good things.
Speaker 7: They just they just work like on the train a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 7: and it just sounds good and like everybody in the
Speaker 7: train car gets to listen to my music with me.
Speaker 7: But then I sound really good on phone call, so
Speaker 7: I don't care.
Speaker 3: How you can use some vocals. Yeah, So that's vergin
Speaker 3: on useful.
Speaker 7: It is absolutely extremely useful. Except for Meta.
Speaker 3: How they make that.
Speaker 1: They made it because they.
Speaker 7: Have like Meta has this big vision for AR and VR, right,
Speaker 7: so they have they have they have the whole the
Speaker 7: quest and all of that junk, and then they were like, well,
Speaker 7: we need to do AR stuff and we need to
Speaker 7: start normalizing what AR is going to look like.
Speaker 1: So we're going to start with.
Speaker 3: These glasses so you can't see anything in them.
Speaker 7: You can't know and so it's all audio. BOS was
Speaker 7: doing this a couple of years ago.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 7: It's a few people who have done this, and it's like,
Speaker 7: you know, when BOS did it was a stupid concept
Speaker 7: and even the first set of ray bands were really stupid.
Speaker 7: And then this time the quality was just good enough
Speaker 7: where you're like, Okay, I get it now, I'm watch
Speaker 7: of those they're like two fifty or something.
Speaker 5: Oh god, yeah, between two and three hundred and something somewhere.
Speaker 7: They're fairly It's one of those things where you're like,
Speaker 7: I just got paid, I don't got any bills, do
Speaker 7: anytime soon.
Speaker 6: Let's do this, And they actually accomplished something that like
Speaker 6: a lot of these AI companies that we've touched on
Speaker 6: earlier have tried to do and sort of failed to do,
Speaker 6: which is get you out of your phone. So for me,
Speaker 6: I don't know, well, I'm a stupid influencer videot but
Speaker 6: like thirty percent of the time.
Speaker 5: It's just bad.
Speaker 6: But like I'm firing up the camera, right, That's why
Speaker 6: I got my phone out, just to use the camera
Speaker 6: for something. Yeah, and when you have a camera built
Speaker 6: into your glasses, you can just literally hit a button
Speaker 6: on it and.
Speaker 5: How the land what you're looking at?
Speaker 3: The human ice thirty five millimeters?
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, I have no I don't know what. I
Speaker 5: don't remember what the spect.
Speaker 1: The perspective is like weird because it's off.
Speaker 3: Because of New York Times. He does lovely videos of
Speaker 3: him cooking using them. He's got his Burmese mount and
Speaker 3: dog Bruno, and he'll be like talking to Bruno and
Speaker 3: like making stuff. He's got his name. That's fun. I
Speaker 3: actually really enjoy that stuff. It feels bad that Meta
Speaker 3: is doing it though, like the idea, but also how
Speaker 3: it feels also weird that Meta made something good. Well,
Speaker 3: I'm just very confused because all right, the VR stuff
Speaker 3: with Quest, I know we're like meant to like most
Speaker 3: people like, oh the Quest is good. It isn't good.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. Casey, my very close friend,
Speaker 3: Casey's gonna hear it's gonna get pissed off and get
Speaker 3: a signal message. The quest's fine, But even the new one,
Speaker 3: I still get sick. Yeah, I still feel weird. It
Speaker 3: still doesn't go on my face.
Speaker 7: Right. That's why they did the glasses is because they
Speaker 7: know there's there's.
Speaker 3: Half Alex on the glasses.
Speaker 7: I'm coming back to the glasses because they like they
Speaker 7: did they did these headsets and everybody was like, oh wait,
Speaker 7: this is not the future for AR and VR. People
Speaker 7: look stupid. Like I saw my nephew come like one day.
Speaker 7: I went over and I'm visiting him saying hi to everybody.
Speaker 7: I'm like, oh, where is he And they're like, oh,
Speaker 7: he's upstairs. And I go upstairs and there's just a
Speaker 7: little kid all alone in a room, like wagging the
Speaker 7: sticks around. And that's the dumbest thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 1: Like I wanted to give.
Speaker 7: Like I wanted to give him a wedgie, right, And
Speaker 7: I'm like, that's that's a bad response for an aunt,
Speaker 7: just like put my hand in my pocket and walk away.
Speaker 7: And and but that's the way it is for everybody.
Speaker 7: And so they're like, Okay, we got to do these
Speaker 7: glasses because if we do these glasses, then that won't
Speaker 7: be as dumb and stupid looking.
Speaker 6: And I should just give a shout out to a
Speaker 6: company that not a lot of people remember, and I
Speaker 6: bet you do, but we remember Vocals by North.
Speaker 3: I wonder the name. I remember what they did.
Speaker 6: They shipped a pair of glasses that were very like
Speaker 6: they were a little chunk here. They were obviously something
Speaker 6: a little a little off about these.
Speaker 8: Glasses, right, horrible display, but no, but they had a display,
Speaker 8: and when you put them on your face, all of
Speaker 8: a sudden, what materialized in your vision was a little
Speaker 8: tron like heads up display and you could see your
Speaker 8: text messages from your phone.
Speaker 6: You could get drive driving directions, term by turn directions,
Speaker 6: little points of interest things, and it was like it
Speaker 6: was appearing in your eyeball. Of course, it was very
Speaker 6: strange because when you're talking to somebody, you'd see they'd
Speaker 6: look kind of above your eyebrow, and then you'd be.
Speaker 5: Like, are you are you checking your messages while.
Speaker 3: I'm talking to you?
Speaker 8: No?
Speaker 1: No, no, that's where you get the sunglass version.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: But like, this was a great idea.
Speaker 6: The technology was very fascinating, and then, as often happens,
Speaker 6: they were purchased by Google, and Google either mismanaged it
Speaker 6: or killed it and.
Speaker 3: Killed it probably both.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's just brutal, I mean, and that was the
Speaker 6: last time I felt like we were on the cusp
Speaker 6: of maybe the next chapter of Personal Mobile Computer.
Speaker 3: I yeah, Google gloss look cool. I never got to
Speaker 3: play with Yeah, And I think Robert Scobel has done
Speaker 3: a lot of bad things, But that weird picture of
Speaker 3: him in the shower I genuinely the show. So there's
Speaker 3: a really disgusting fellow called Robert Scobell, famous for reasons
Speaker 3: I'm not actually sure. He kisses up to Elon Musk
Speaker 3: now wants to marry his tesla. I believe I haven't
Speaker 3: really checked that fact and its opinions, so you can't
Speaker 3: sue me. So Robert Scobel took a picture wearing his
Speaker 3: Google Glass while what looks like screaming in the shower,
Speaker 3: and I mean.
Speaker 7: Just a lot of people talked about that photo.
Speaker 3: It was very the inverse of pornography. But that moment
Speaker 3: was really unfortunate because Google glass was too expensive and
Speaker 3: all that, And I don't think anyone should have ever
Speaker 3: looked at it as the future arriving that day. But
Speaker 3: the idea of a heads up displays cool. I think
Speaker 3: heads up displays are cool. I think yeah, I don't
Speaker 3: agree with thee. We need to get away from our
Speaker 3: phone's thing. What we need is better society so that
Speaker 3: it's worth looking away. Sam, that's that's the Actually, this
Speaker 3: is an escapism. We made a tool to escape from
Speaker 3: the world rules, kind of ripping off paris marks from
Speaker 3: tech one save us there. He made a similar point
Speaker 3: about the pro to distract us from real life, which
Speaker 3: is a bit much. He's not totally off Boom. It's
Speaker 3: weird like heads up displays feel like a future. I
Speaker 3: don't know if it's the big capital T, but that's
Speaker 3: a way that they could be useful while getting us
Speaker 3: away from constantly staring. Because there are times where I'd
Speaker 3: like to walk through New York City and just listen
Speaker 3: to music but also know where I'm going because I
Speaker 3: don't ever and heads up display would be good. But
Speaker 3: it's almost like they shouldn't be trying for fifteen years,
Speaker 3: that they need to get to a completely different level
Speaker 3: of chip plus display plus everything else and then do
Speaker 3: it really well.
Speaker 7: It's just because they're all so desperate to be the
Speaker 7: next iPhone hyper like, like I love the you know,
Speaker 7: I think everybody in this room currently has an iPhone.
Speaker 1: They're they're very good devices.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and everybody wants to be the next one because
Speaker 7: then they get the thirty percent lock in they get They.
Speaker 5: Are just all just cultural cachet.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it just makes you the next big thing. And
Speaker 7: so Meta has been doing that. Google's been doing that poorly. Uh, Samsung,
Speaker 7: you know a lot of these people do it and
Speaker 7: they all fail at it because the text is not
Speaker 7: there yet, right, Like glasses, You're not gonna get glasses
Speaker 7: until you have actually good displays that can also pass.
Speaker 3: Through and can turn off and make way with.
Speaker 7: You, and most importantly that you don't look stupid wearing
Speaker 7: Like if I want to give you a widge Weggie,
Speaker 7: you you've lost the plot. And I'm I'm liberal with
Speaker 7: the wedgies. So actually it's like actorom the urge.
Speaker 3: So with my sung glasses on the entire time, you
Speaker 3: would have to know, but I would, Well, then there's
Speaker 3: halfway they take them off. By the second pat.
Speaker 6: You got to get some with the details of the
Speaker 6: flames on them.
Speaker 1: Well, guy Fieri moment.
Speaker 3: So it feels like augmented reality is at least where
Speaker 3: that could be fun now. Yeah, but it feels like
Speaker 3: it's not twenty seven, twenty fifteen when they had that
Speaker 3: weird burst of them. It feels like they've all stepped
Speaker 3: back for it, which sucks because it feels like we
Speaker 3: actually need R and D money there.
Speaker 6: Ye, yes, because I feel like that's the thing. The
Speaker 6: point you were just making, Alex, is that the technology
Speaker 6: needs to catch up to the aspiration, right. And we've
Speaker 6: seen a lot of the stemo and again the most
Speaker 6: promising one got bought and killed.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I've never seen anything get close.
Speaker 1: I mean I think that.
Speaker 7: I think the ray Bands are close, and they're planning
Speaker 7: apparently to put a lot more like invest a lot
Speaker 7: more there right Like they just this week, I think,
Speaker 7: did a whole reorg we're recording this, did a whole
Speaker 7: reorg of this of the meta division.
Speaker 1: And so they're like, Oculus, you go over here, and
Speaker 1: you go over like.
Speaker 7: An under an ad sales guy who well, I don't
Speaker 7: remember the name, And then the ray Bands they're like, Okay,
Speaker 7: this is like this is our focus. They've got plans
Speaker 7: for some glasses the next couple of years that are
Speaker 7: like much more involved. We've heard like Google Bob Focal
Speaker 7: and we haven't heard anything there and so it could
Speaker 7: be dead. But also like everybody's talking about AR right now,
Speaker 7: so it feels like maybe they're coming back.
Speaker 3: I think that. So I had an episode about this
Speaker 3: rock com bubble. Yeah, well, I think what they're doing
Speaker 3: right now is freaking out because they don't have and
Speaker 3: they all want to be the next iPhone. But what
Speaker 3: they realize is there is no next iPhone right now.
Speaker 3: There is no next Google or Facebook or anything.
Speaker 1: So they're chasing AI.
Speaker 3: That's they're chasing AI. But come on, come on.
Speaker 6: I was going to say, you've done a very good
Speaker 6: job in the past three weeks deistrating on this very
Speaker 6: show why AI is not as exciting one would.
Speaker 3: That's a good point to bring up, though. How do
Speaker 3: you two feel about AI?
Speaker 6: Well, I feel I'll say this deptails with what you
Speaker 6: were just saying. I the companies are not the only
Speaker 6: ones desperate for the next iPhone. I am desperate anytime again. Pierce,
Speaker 6: you know, wrote that little blurb about you know, the
Speaker 6: season of AI Gadgets is here before any of the
Speaker 6: Cumane and Rabbit stuff came out, and I was like
Speaker 6: crossing my fingers as somebody who covers the stuff, and
Speaker 6: as somebody who has loved the stuff for as long
Speaker 6: as I can remember.
Speaker 5: I love the excitement.
Speaker 6: Of new things coming out and introducing new possibilities, and
Speaker 6: I feel like the A. I have an increasingly severe
Speaker 6: grudge against the AI bubble, the hip cycle for raising
Speaker 6: my hopes actually putting some pretty cool hardware in my head.
Speaker 6: Say what you want about the humane pament that hardware
Speaker 6: rocks and then absolutely cutting its legs out from under
Speaker 6: it because most of its functionality is based on an
Speaker 6: LLM that you can't trust because it tells you the
Speaker 6: sun is going to set forty minutes ago at eleven
Speaker 6: in the morning.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think like AI is.
Speaker 7: You know, I'm super excited about Apple Intelligence, mainly because
Speaker 7: I'm going to be able to make the best ship
Speaker 7: posts to send my friends because you can do image
Speaker 7: generation and it's hideous. It's terrible looking, and I'm so
Speaker 7: excited to just troll people. But otherwise, like you know,
Speaker 7: AI is one of those things like we've built lying
Speaker 7: machines and as far as large language models go, they're
Speaker 7: really bad at it, to the point where Tim Cook's like, well,
Speaker 7: wouldn't say one hundred, get it right. I believe that's
Speaker 7: actually a bad thing you to.
Speaker 1: Say, dude.
Speaker 7: And everybody's saying that because they're like, don't worry about it,
Speaker 7: don't worry about it. Meanwhile, the researchers are like, actually,
Speaker 7: at language models, aren't the thing. Don't you should worry
Speaker 7: about it. But everybody's like, but we can make money now.
Speaker 1: And so we can't.
Speaker 3: Well when he's not serving PC gamers like me. But
Speaker 3: that's the thing though, That's something he was saying that
Speaker 3: Michael was actually kind of the impetus of us being
Speaker 3: here today. Something in this show that people say, people
Speaker 3: say about me all the time is oh, you're just
Speaker 3: a pessimist like this stuff. I love this ship. Do
Speaker 3: you know how excited I am want to get a
Speaker 3: new dumb gadget? I can mess around you.
Speaker 1: You've got a charger right here.
Speaker 3: Anchor charger. I'm so excited. I got two, so I've
Speaker 3: got redundancy. So happy with that stuff. I love my
Speaker 3: little gizmos and gadgets. I love this stuff, and I
Speaker 3: haven't really had anything to be The steam Deck was
Speaker 3: the last time I was really like excite and then
Speaker 3: excited after yeah, and kind of the Vision Pro.
Speaker 1: Oh, interesting, but.
Speaker 3: It's like there's always a but, and the butt is
Speaker 3: usually Yeah. But the people who made it, they didn't
Speaker 3: really give it to real people. Yeah, they gave it
Speaker 3: to a focus group and it was a McKinsey one,
Speaker 3: so three quarters of them were paid to say whatever
Speaker 3: they wanted to hear and the rest didn't turn up.
Speaker 3: And it's just frustrating because there was a time. I
Speaker 3: think it's just love the rockkombabble. There was a twenty
Speaker 3: year period and you've got new stuff, new stuff, new stuff.
Speaker 3: Even the bad stuff was kind of funny. Yeah, even
Speaker 3: all this dorky indieg Go bullshit, like the Coolest Cooler
Speaker 3: which had a speaker at a Marguerite. You knew that
Speaker 3: was never gonna work. You kind of enjoyed them try,
Speaker 3: and then they scammed a bunch of people that was
Speaker 3: also bad. Yeah, but you stopped getting fun, like there
Speaker 3: wasn't something to look forward to, like the Vision Pro.
Speaker 3: Reason they brought it up is my first hour with
Speaker 3: it was so exciting, and then I realized that I
Speaker 3: had like light bleeding in so I started fucking with
Speaker 3: it and I couldn't get it on right and I
Speaker 3: spent like another hour trying to make it work, and
Speaker 3: it just turned out that like I didn't have the
Speaker 3: right size thing, which dramatically improved it, and I was
Speaker 3: using it fairly often. I'm like, this is not there yet,
Speaker 3: but this is different and cool and watching movies on
Speaker 3: its great. Then I tried to watch on a plane.
Speaker 1: How'd that go?
Speaker 3: I got a migrant and I have yet to finish June.
Speaker 3: People say this and Ultimore or whatever it is from
Speaker 3: that to me all the time. But it's it's very
Speaker 3: strange because it almost doesn't feel like anyone's trying.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well go ahead.
Speaker 7: I was gonna say, like, the VR thing is a
Speaker 7: weird one because it is so dependent on the person.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 7: Like I had a friend who also just recently did
Speaker 7: a cross country flight, wore the vision pro watched June
Speaker 7: and June two nice back to back, and they were
Speaker 7: they loved.
Speaker 3: It, absolute legends.
Speaker 7: Yeah, whereas you would have presumably thrown up everywhere and
Speaker 7: they would My.
Speaker 3: Head just felt like it would explode it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Uh, and and and that's just because like your your
Speaker 7: vestibular response is totally different than their vestibular response, and
Speaker 7: it's that's what's.
Speaker 1: Gonna happen there?
Speaker 7: And that's why VR is a dead end, and that's
Speaker 7: why Meta now has like been like you go over here,
Speaker 7: we tried it.
Speaker 3: Did watchful Hand of Baz?
Speaker 1: Yeah, we did that. What was it the Meta Quest pro?
Speaker 1: That was that the one.
Speaker 3: Where they had the pro one they've canceled.
Speaker 7: Yeah, where they released it and everybody's like this is
Speaker 7: garbage and they're.
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, no, they released it. I think what it
Speaker 3: was was they released it at the same time as
Speaker 3: the Quest two, which was like three hundred four hundred bucks.
Speaker 3: People like, this is pretty good. Yeah, Like the expectations
Speaker 3: were low, and they're like, but what if you paid
Speaker 3: fourteen hundred dollars for something that wasn't as good? Yeah,
Speaker 3: but it was more powerful?
Speaker 6: Well yeah, and that's you were saying a second ago,
Speaker 6: like it doesn't feel like people are trying anymore.
Speaker 5: I think that's not it. I think people are trying
Speaker 5: at the wrong thing.
Speaker 6: Yes, former journalists, uh should be become a journalist again
Speaker 6: because we miss him. David Reddick was just complaining about
Speaker 6: this on LinkedIn and he was just like, you know,
Speaker 6: with respect to the product managers, who I call my friend,
Speaker 6: like product managers are ruining the segment because and even
Speaker 6: if you take it out above the PM like, it's
Speaker 6: like companies have realized that if they do enough marketing
Speaker 6: to create artificial demand, then that is a way to
Speaker 6: make money in the short term and you can keep
Speaker 6: the business growing.
Speaker 3: Well, is that just what they believe is the case?
Speaker 6: It may well be right for the long term. It's
Speaker 6: certainly not true. Yeah, But for the short term it
Speaker 6: may be. You get spike and it feels like there's
Speaker 6: ten times as much of that as there is it
Speaker 6: for every ten examples of that, there's one example of
Speaker 6: a company it's actually like, hey, we actually have a
Speaker 6: good idea. Maybe it's a little weird idea, but we
Speaker 6: think enough people buy it it will buy it and
Speaker 6: find delight in it that we can make a business
Speaker 6: out of it, right Yeah. And if more people did
Speaker 6: that instead of like, what, how can we make money
Speaker 6: and get out as quickly as possible, Right, then I
Speaker 6: think we would have those glory days.
Speaker 3: You can make the money and get up by doing
Speaker 3: some people want to buy it. It's just frustrating, true, Alex.
Speaker 3: It's are you enjoying any devices other than the strange
Speaker 3: North White steam Deck, Yeah.
Speaker 7: The garbage steam deck that I'm not even going to
Speaker 7: or because you should buy it. It's it's it's not
Speaker 7: going to be good for most people, but it's so
Speaker 7: much fun to like fuck around with. I don't know,
Speaker 7: I like that's one of the reasons I got really
Speaker 7: into e ink because it felt like it was much
Speaker 7: closer to like there's felt like there was something there
Speaker 7: that could be solved pretty quickly. But that was like
Speaker 7: five or six years ago, and it hasn't happened.
Speaker 3: What's slowing it down.
Speaker 7: Because everybody wants to make money through vertical integration, so
Speaker 7: they're like, well, I don't want you to actually get
Speaker 7: anybody else's books on your device, I want you to
Speaker 7: get my books on.
Speaker 3: So everyone wants to do a platform play, right.
Speaker 1: So everybody's doing a platform play.
Speaker 7: So it's it's money again, right, Like everybody's like, I
Speaker 7: need all as much of the money as I can
Speaker 7: get to my little side.
Speaker 1: Because Apple did that and it worked really well for Apple.
Speaker 3: It's like they never worked for anyone else.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean Amazon, it kind of works.
Speaker 3: Amazon already had that scam going.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true, that's.
Speaker 5: True, and you haven't seen that meaningful evolution in the
Speaker 5: kindle with such the scribe in a long time.
Speaker 7: Which isn't insane garbage compared to a lot of the
Speaker 7: stuff because like China, and this is the other point
Speaker 7: is there's a lot of it happening in China.
Speaker 1: A ton do you.
Speaker 3: Ever use the odin the odin? So there was this
Speaker 3: It's an Android gaming console before the Steam deck. So
Speaker 3: just to be clear, okay, probably not as fun, but
Speaker 3: super fast. You could do PlayStation remote on it almost
Speaker 3: like predecessor to the PlayStation portal, which is literally just
Speaker 3: playing PlayStation and it was great. And what they did
Speaker 3: is a crazy idea. They were like, why don't we
Speaker 3: make it really easy to run the specific gaming apps
Speaker 3: you like? And what if we made the buttons good?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: And what are crazy? You like? Sold out? Indigogo did
Speaker 3: really well. Comes out of China, and it's like this
Speaker 3: current sinophobic climate's fucking frustrating because let them in, please
Speaker 3: borrow the innovation from them. They seem China seems to
Speaker 3: be fucking trying with tech right.
Speaker 7: And one of the reasons they're trying because I kind
Speaker 7: of went down a rabbit hole with the e inc
Speaker 7: thing where I was like why is nobody trying this,
Speaker 7: Like you're getting all these really cool e ink readers
Speaker 7: out of China and nothing here. And it was because
Speaker 7: we're so obsessed with that lock in. We're so obsessed
Speaker 7: with how do we build that bigger model. We don't
Speaker 7: want to just sell one thing. We want to sell
Speaker 7: you the services, We want to sell you the platform.
Speaker 7: And America is just super hyper focused on that, where China's.
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, I mean I don't care who he used, well,
Speaker 1: I mean by our ship.
Speaker 3: I mean as they also have one monopoly.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, it's like we all operate within this one.
Speaker 3: We're all controlled by ten Cent. But yeah, but it's
Speaker 3: frustrating because I feel like what it might also be
Speaker 3: is that they're like, how do we make the next
Speaker 3: trillion dollar company or billion dollar company? They're like, what
Speaker 3: if you made a fifty million dollar company?
Speaker 7: No, yeah, fuck that, Well, you got you gotta you
Speaker 7: gotta get your your your investors, right, you gotta get
Speaker 7: your stockholders.
Speaker 1: You gotta do all of that.
Speaker 7: And apparently money is not free. People don't just give
Speaker 7: money away.
Speaker 3: Got to give one hundred million dollars to Adam Newman
Speaker 3: again so that you can make the next bad company.
Speaker 1: I think that happened.
Speaker 2: It did.
Speaker 3: He got two hundred and fifty million dollars as well.
Speaker 7: Just I want to fail that hard up that sounds
Speaker 7: rate so good.
Speaker 6: Well, and like we I don't mean to keep bringing
Speaker 6: it back to humane. But that was the thing I
Speaker 6: kept saying in the human briefing. I was just like, guys,
Speaker 6: I know this is not what you want to hear,
Speaker 6: but this would be a great little scessary for the phone.
Speaker 6: You could still do a lot of cool things and
Speaker 6: have it glink to your phone, and then it wouldn't
Speaker 6: be well a bunch of things.
Speaker 3: It did not work, but.
Speaker 1: You didn't catch on fire. That's that's exactly.
Speaker 5: I'm still here.
Speaker 1: You're still here.
Speaker 5: But like the it wasn't a bold enough vision. And
Speaker 5: they didn't say this, I assume this.
Speaker 6: It wasn't a bold enough vision one to get a
Speaker 6: bunch of people motivated to do. Because if you're replacing
Speaker 6: the smartphone, big quotes around that, well, that's a that's
Speaker 6: a mission that's at least difficult, that's like a moonshot.
Speaker 5: And then B, you can't get enough investors excited to
Speaker 5: your point to give you all the all the money
Speaker 5: that you just want to put together just a.
Speaker 3: Note for listeners. That's the humane AI pin Google it.
Speaker 3: It's terrible. Seven dollars twenty four dollars a month, just
Speaker 3: the basic thing. But the human was so weird though.
Speaker 3: And this is the thing that I will never understand
Speaker 3: and they will never tell me, is how did you
Speaker 3: put this out the door? How did you look at
Speaker 3: this thing?
Speaker 8: Oh?
Speaker 3: It overheats in two minutes. Oh chat GBT sometimes doesn't work.
Speaker 3: Basic shame. I mean I would not want to do it.
Speaker 3: I would be like.
Speaker 7: They kind of had to write, like they kind of
Speaker 7: hit their their point where it's like, shoul or get
Speaker 7: off the pot.
Speaker 5: This is the question. I don't know. I asked that
Speaker 5: about it.
Speaker 3: Is it rabbit cynicle one believe?
Speaker 6: I think Rabbit had to launch before the what we
Speaker 6: all knew was gonna happen, which was Google was going
Speaker 6: to do us, Apple was going to do.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: People saw how it operates so that they.
Speaker 1: Could say this is it looks cool?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it does look cool.
Speaker 3: He is on the board of teenage Engineering. He is
Speaker 3: on the board This boys are sick. Okay, we're going
Speaker 3: to talk about the rabbit. It's time, so those listeners
Speaker 3: who don't know about the rabbit. Is this two hundred
Speaker 3: dollars AI device and it claims to have something on
Speaker 3: it called a large Action model. Large Action Model claims
Speaker 3: it was trained on six hundred plus apps to distinctly
Speaker 3: control raps, but for some reason it only launched with
Speaker 3: four or five. Turns out that when you ask the
Speaker 3: lamb to do something, it would sometimes just not work.
Speaker 3: Sometimes you would say or to me McDonald and it
Speaker 3: would go, sorry, Uber isn't working. And it turns out,
Speaker 3: due to some friendly hackers that it turned out that
Speaker 3: it isn't actually using a large action model. It's connected
Speaker 3: to Playwright, a script thing. I'm sure more technical listeners
Speaker 3: are going to email me corrections. I'm very sorry. But
Speaker 3: in short, instead of running a large action model an
Speaker 3: actual AI thing, it was triggering scripts using chat GPT.
Speaker 3: Now I could do a whole episode in surprise. I
Speaker 3: haven't over the whole thing that there used to be
Speaker 3: an NFT company, but putting all of the obvious horrible
Speaker 3: things aside, it just fucking sucks. Yeah, it's just really
Speaker 3: bad in a way that is almost unbelievable. I recommend
Speaker 3: you going look Dave three d did a whole thing
Speaker 3: about it before it came out that was very good.
Speaker 3: But go and look at Linuses and Linus I know
Speaker 3: people have problems with him, but his the thing about the
Speaker 3: rabbit was great because it was mostly him trying stuff
Speaker 3: it not working and goes what what what, which was
Speaker 3: very entertaining.
Speaker 1: It's very fun.
Speaker 3: But it's just broken. Yeah. Yeah, and they raised another
Speaker 3: thirty two million dollars in March. It feels like I
Speaker 3: am living in a different universe to the rest of
Speaker 3: the world. I see this. It's bad. The YouTube's like,
Speaker 3: this is the worst thing I've ever used. Investorsla absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I need to get in on the shit now. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Elon Muska just sent them, wrote them a check.
Speaker 7: He did not, to my knowledge, write them a check.
Speaker 7: He wouldn't do that.
Speaker 3: It's an epic advice device. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't think you're alone.
Speaker 7: I think there is a weird tension happening where we
Speaker 7: have Silicon Valley. We have all these investors in Silicon
Speaker 7: Valley who are all just desperate to make money and
Speaker 7: never took a single history English course like any liberal arts.
Speaker 1: They think that's stupid. And then there's the rest of
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and these people are so focused on money they
Speaker 7: forget the rest of the world. They'd never touch grass.
Speaker 7: And so they'll put on the vision pro and be like,
Speaker 7: this is going to change the face of computing and
Speaker 7: not consider the billion of different other ways people use computers.
Speaker 1: Or they'll see the rabbit with the worst name on
Speaker 1: the planet.
Speaker 7: By the way, a majority of women I know the
Speaker 7: rabbit was coming out was like.
Speaker 3: Why wouta pay two hundred dollars for that?
Speaker 1: I got one in my drawer next to my bed.
Speaker 5: What the hell, guys, I'm dying to know more about
Speaker 5: that weight. I didn't even put that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the rabbit is a very notorio like that's that's
Speaker 7: a term for a whole type of sex toy.
Speaker 5: That's what is. Yeah, I had no idea.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and so like when they were like, we've got
Speaker 7: the rabbit, and I was like, do you oh, this
Speaker 7: is a different rat.
Speaker 3: Like now I'll bring out the app.
Speaker 1: You're like, whoa, what's happened to cees. I knew you
Speaker 1: guys were doing sex tech now.
Speaker 3: But wow, so I moved the adult thing away from
Speaker 3: c That's depending on but I think I think that
Speaker 3: it is that that there's the kind of disconnection from
Speaker 3: the real world. But there's also I don't know if
Speaker 3: these people use stuff. I just don't.
Speaker 1: I don't think they do.
Speaker 3: I don't know if they use it. Like I really
Speaker 3: want to just get behind Marc Andreeson at one point
Speaker 3: and can't say the rest of that. But I mean,
Speaker 3: look over his shoulder and see the font size on
Speaker 3: his iPhone right like I want to see it because
Speaker 3: I don't think these people interact with the real world
Speaker 3: or touch grass. But I also don't think they like
Speaker 3: I don't think well app vision pro is different because
Speaker 3: public company whatever. Yeah, but like the rabbit, for example,
Speaker 3: I don't think they fucking cared like these little pigs
Speaker 3: will buy this.
Speaker 7: Well, they'd already bought it, right like, like they announced
Speaker 7: the thing, they made these huge promises, they did a
Speaker 7: ton of pre sales, and then it came out and
Speaker 7: we haven't heard how.
Speaker 1: The pre sales or how the sales have.
Speaker 3: Been thousand units after Oh we don't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, and I don't know what we're going to
Speaker 1: hear about that.
Speaker 3: Right, like we are not it's coming from.
Speaker 6: I think, you know, I mean, if I'm with you,
Speaker 6: I think there are dubious business motivations to a lot
Speaker 6: of this right. But I can't help but think that
Speaker 6: if I was inside one of these organizations that I
Speaker 6: wouldn't look no, I know, I would have been caught
Speaker 6: up in it. I would have been caught up in
Speaker 6: the ambition. I would have been caught up in the promise,
Speaker 6: especially when you consider that the design process of a
Speaker 6: lot of this stuff goes back to the time when
Speaker 6: we were most of us are getting our first chance
Speaker 6: to interact with chet GPT and I'm like to make
Speaker 6: me a text adventure in the style of Star Trek
Speaker 6: Deep Space nine.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it did it, and I was like, oh,
Speaker 5: oh my god.
Speaker 6: You know, I remember where I was when that happened.
Speaker 6: It was like the first time I put on a
Speaker 6: our headset. I remember the first time I was actually
Speaker 6: blown away by AI. And if I was in an
Speaker 6: inside a company or a recently hybrid companies like we're
Speaker 6: going to change the world with this tech, I think
Speaker 6: I would have I probably would have been on that
Speaker 6: boat for like a year before I started getting really internally.
Speaker 7: Initially, Yeah, yeah, I like for me, I used it
Speaker 7: and it just reminded me of the aim bots from
Speaker 7: like I'm old here. I'm some apologies to the audience.
Speaker 7: I'm sure you're all twelve. Hi, why are you listening.
Speaker 3: To be sure I'm older than you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're old people.
Speaker 7: But the AIME bots, you'd go and you'd log in
Speaker 7: and you type and the type back and then there's
Speaker 7: we've seen this so many times and this one I
Speaker 7: was like, Okay, yeah, we're back to this. We're back
Speaker 7: to this, Like the pattern recognition and recreation machine has
Speaker 7: gotten just really really good, and I was like, that's fine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's kind of That's actually where I was as well, like, oh,
Speaker 3: you can do a textpace adventure. And I think if
Speaker 3: I'd have had that, I would have gone cool, all
Speaker 3: right and just kind of just say because I run
Speaker 3: a pofhe yeah, I have clients in AI, but nothing
Speaker 3: that touches this show because I'm scared of that. And
Speaker 3: it's like it's a few clients night who have even
Speaker 3: just do a I think that's the thing I don't.
Speaker 3: Surprisingly enough, AI companies aren't super excited to work with
Speaker 3: me when I'm talking about them actually having to do stuff.
Speaker 3: But it's like with jat GPT, for example, I know
Speaker 3: I actually understand totally Michael, why you were excited like that.
Speaker 3: I can understand why others might have been excited by that.
Speaker 3: I just don't understand how they're still that way because
Speaker 3: nothing has happened. Money, money, I guess.
Speaker 1: But I mean money is a very powerful driver if.
Speaker 3: You work for a financial institution, I get, But like
Speaker 3: Gadget review, even just regular people don't seem excited. It's
Speaker 3: just so weird. It feels like living in two realities
Speaker 3: at once.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And like there was a sign that someone posted on
Speaker 3: Blue Sky was like we put the AI in an
Speaker 3: I n ipa. It was a Dell advert.
Speaker 8: What.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I just I feel like I like it. I
Speaker 3: have a friend who is in a dot com boom company,
Speaker 3: like a textbook related one, and I'm really tempted to
Speaker 3: call him and be like, was it like this? Was
Speaker 3: it like this? And if he says yes, I'm gonna
Speaker 3: do nothing because I can't invest in anything now because
Speaker 3: I run a bloody podcast. Can't do anything. You can't
Speaker 3: short ship. It's like the big short. But Steve Goss
Speaker 3: just like, well, I'll just go home.
Speaker 5: I guess. I think like we have to give give
Speaker 5: credit to the to the entire thing.
Speaker 6: First of all, the marketing approach to AI has been
Speaker 6: really frustrating because everything is a I know, stuff that
Speaker 6: was that existed before in its has been ported directly
Speaker 6: and unchanged and just rebranded as AI, just much in
Speaker 6: the same way.
Speaker 5: I think somebody brought up to me at the at
Speaker 5: the John Deere event I was just at because we
Speaker 5: will not be talking about okay.
Speaker 1: I had so many.
Speaker 5: Questions somebody brought up.
Speaker 6: I was like, yeah, it's like slapping a non GMO
Speaker 6: label on an unchanged box of wheat.
Speaker 5: Things like.
Speaker 6: It's like, okay, well, AI is just being marketed much
Speaker 6: too aggressively, so you have stuff stuck in here, kind
Speaker 6: of getting caught in the in the flat.
Speaker 5: That's like, that's really.
Speaker 6: Useful, But it's it's these It's a seasoning that you
Speaker 6: put on something that is already Yeah, it's not in
Speaker 6: itself a self contained thing capable of driving a whole
Speaker 6: new range of especially gadgets, which again makes me very
Speaker 6: sad because every time you would touch a new AI,
Speaker 6: I think the a the plod note, that little self
Speaker 6: contained AI voice recorder, was like, this is very cool.
Speaker 6: I wish it were an alternate Universe in the year
Speaker 6: two thousand and I could actually get excited about this
Speaker 6: because what this is is a feature that belongs in
Speaker 6: the Google recorder and oh sorry, I just finished this
Speaker 6: video and that's exactly what Google built in to their
Speaker 6: recorder when that was done, and I was like, okay,
Speaker 6: well with that for now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's bummer pivots A.
Speaker 7: Yeah everybody, I mean yeah, I think they're just going
Speaker 7: to pivot back and forth. Everybody's gonna be constant oscillating
Speaker 7: until like something sticks because they're so desperate for that
Speaker 7: next thing. They're so eager that everybody's just looking for
Speaker 7: the money. They know it somewhere, and like, right now
Speaker 7: it is all a Nvidia stock and they're hoping that
Speaker 7: it will somehow come to them at some point.
Speaker 3: Why not you, I don't know, It's like, why not
Speaker 3: build some fucking hardware to put video stuff in? I
Speaker 3: realized those black mail chips aren't what we're talking about,
Speaker 3: But I don't know. It's almost as if no one
Speaker 3: wants to do the work in the middle. They're like,
Speaker 3: I've got an idea and I need to make a product.
Speaker 3: Can I skip the middle part? It's boring, it's expensive.
Speaker 3: It takes forever. I need to have this shit on
Speaker 3: the market in six months and it can't be. And
Speaker 3: if it is, the growth that all costs for our
Speaker 3: economy over in about a hundred times. But it's also
Speaker 3: frustrating because I actually think, if they put in the effort,
Speaker 3: this would be cool. When it comes to AI. Part
Speaker 3: of my frustration comes back to that thing we were
Speaker 3: saying earlier about how we've been let down, because I
Speaker 3: would actually love it if I could reliably tell my
Speaker 3: phone to take distinct actions. Send the calendar invite to
Speaker 3: Alex and Michael, Yes, three pm at the iHeartRadio studio,
Speaker 3: and just fucking send it and it would know how
Speaker 3: Maybe it goes do you want Eastern apecific time? Or wait?
Speaker 3: I said, New York you already know. And it sends
Speaker 3: the invites and it finds your emails. That would be useful.
Speaker 3: I wish in my regular email job, I can have
Speaker 3: it through the spreadsheets and the documents. It can't. It
Speaker 3: can't actually do these things. Yeah, and this please make
Speaker 3: that the future. No, it isn't the future. We need
Speaker 3: to They can't even describe what it is, and it's just.
Speaker 7: Well, because it can't do that future yet, right, Like,
Speaker 7: there's the things we have now. The thing that everybody
Speaker 7: got really excited about was they released GPT three point five.
Speaker 7: Everybody went, oh, crap, this can write this can write stuff,
Speaker 7: and it can write it not like garbage for once,
Speaker 7: and this is huge. And all of the researchers just
Speaker 7: roll their eyes because they'd seen this for ages. They
Speaker 7: were like, yeah, it's a larg language bottle.
Speaker 1: That's what they do.
Speaker 7: They calm down and everybody's like no, And then the
Speaker 7: downloads increased, the downloads increase, and everybody's like, wait, I
Speaker 7: think there's some money here, right, and let's just like
Speaker 7: ride this hype just right into the ground as long
Speaker 7: as we can write it as long as we can
Speaker 7: until it gets it around.
Speaker 1: And that's pretty much what happened just right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm trying to im like I'm still you know,
Speaker 6: I'm way between like the stuff that that we're all
Speaker 6: talking about and then the stuff that I see again
Speaker 6: in these little flashes of.
Speaker 5: Like what I'll be on a trip with and Kevin
Speaker 5: neither will be. I'll be like what are you doing?
Speaker 6: He's like, well, I have a cold, so I can't
Speaker 6: do voiceover for my video, but I built a model
Speaker 6: of my own voice, so now all I have to
Speaker 6: do is type in something and script and the model
Speaker 6: in my voice reads into the audience.
Speaker 5: And I'm like, well that's useful. Cool, all right, Well.
Speaker 6: You don't bookmark that like generative fill stuff where it's
Speaker 6: like it's not like I'm typing into mid journey, Like
Speaker 6: make me a photo of a high turtle eating macaroni
Speaker 6: and cheese while watch It's like, no, I mean that
Speaker 6: is al yeah, but like when you wrote it a photo, right,
Speaker 6: and you have to fill in the stuff with with
Speaker 6: fake scenery just to make it look okay, so you
Speaker 6: can run a blog post.
Speaker 5: It's like, that's useful. So there's these little Yeah, there's.
Speaker 7: A lot of these smaller things that could be super
Speaker 7: super useful, but that's not what they want to focus
Speaker 7: on because that takes actual work. That takes there's more
Speaker 7: development than needs to happen.
Speaker 6: You're already big enough that you've bought whatever little company
Speaker 6: came up with that, and you've built like you're Adobe.
Speaker 5: You build it in a.
Speaker 1: Photoshop, so then everybody hates you because you're Adobe.
Speaker 3: I think it's almost like they are really good at
Speaker 3: features but terrible at Products like these aren't useful because
Speaker 3: the actual user interface of phones is really good and
Speaker 3: also very bad. I will lose what I am doing
Speaker 3: on my phone sometimes I have five hundred and eighty
Speaker 3: seven Safari taps up. That doesn't surprise because the UX
Speaker 3: on there is so wonky and it's so like It's
Speaker 3: not like on a computer where you have like like
Speaker 3: a Actually that was just like close crum taps on
Speaker 3: my computer too. But I don't lose shit as much,
Speaker 3: but I still do on the computer. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 3: miss meetings because I generally force myself to be on time,
Speaker 3: as I was not today. And it's the fact that
Speaker 3: I have to moderate so much of this stuff. Yet
Speaker 3: everyone's talking about AI. That really pisses me off. Why
Speaker 3: can the phone? If AI is the goddamn future, why
Speaker 3: are we so far from well.
Speaker 7: The other part of that is the security and privacy,
Speaker 7: like we just saw as we're recording this earlier today,
Speaker 7: Apple said, actually, a bunch of these features that we
Speaker 7: announced at WWDC, like Apple Intelligence, which is gonna make
Speaker 7: Siri like do a lot of the stuff we all
Speaker 7: want it to do. They're not coming to Europe because
Speaker 7: the DMA and they're like, oh, you know, we're worried.
Speaker 7: It's gonna like do something about the privacy recall is
Speaker 7: another example that was the Windows feature where it was like,
Speaker 7: what if we just to me.
Speaker 1: I was editing our post for it, and I was like,
Speaker 1: this rules.
Speaker 7: I didn't even think about security because I was like, oh,
Speaker 7: it's going to take a picture and I'm just gonna know.
Speaker 7: And I'm like I'd recently been trying to look for
Speaker 7: a text message from ten years ago.
Speaker 1: So it is feeling very like this is.
Speaker 7: Perfect for me specifically, and then everybody's like, this is
Speaker 7: the worst thing to ever happen in my life.
Speaker 3: What's great about as well is they didn't actually solve
Speaker 3: the real problem, which was search searching for things. Spotlight
Speaker 3: is actually really good, yeah, but it's not good enough. Nope,
Speaker 3: it could just be a little bit better. Searching for
Speaker 3: stuff on your messages could be better. That would require
Speaker 3: them to make that better. They're like, now, why feature?
Speaker 3: What we did is what we just call it, like,
Speaker 3: just wrote it down, Well, just wrote down literally everything
Speaker 3: you've ever done I got in a.
Speaker 1: Plain text file, and then we'll just use AI to
Speaker 1: train on that and it'll be great. Yeah, and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that is definitely a solution.
Speaker 5: It's reminding me of something.
Speaker 6: I switched to a text message provider like fifteen years ago,
Speaker 6: and I was intoxicated by the prospect of being able
Speaker 6: to search all of my text messages for all time,
Speaker 6: which I've done a few times, and over the of
Speaker 6: course of the past like two years, I've been like,
Speaker 6: I must delete that entire archive.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's just a massive liability.
Speaker 3: I have all white emails, but my text Yeah, no,
Speaker 3: I keep all of them.
Speaker 5: Don't worry, guys and I will go down together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well I'm taking everybody.
Speaker 3: You're indicted all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I hopefully please don't indict me.
Speaker 3: Government, Please don't indict anyone who's own better off line. Yeah,
Speaker 3: thanks you request. So, returning from a commercial break that
Speaker 3: I'll announce next time. It's just I wonder if it's
Speaker 3: something to do with the venture capital climate, but not
Speaker 3: just that they don't want to invest in things that
Speaker 3: aren't going to grow huge, but also I think they're
Speaker 3: scared of hardware. They just the concept of hardware is expensive.
Speaker 3: It's expensive. But also, like you've been saying, there's not
Speaker 3: really a platform like there is if you own the
Speaker 3: hardware device, but you need to come up with some
Speaker 3: noxious way to charge them more.
Speaker 7: Yeah, everybody is obsessed with how do we get that
Speaker 7: extra that extra money. Right with the exception of some
Speaker 7: hardware in this room currently, thank you very much that
Speaker 7: we just had an ad break, But for the most part,
Speaker 7: everybody is obsessed with us. When we saw those with
Speaker 7: video games, I think that's one of that was like
Speaker 7: one of the first ones we saw it with where
Speaker 7: they're like, what if we charge you just to play
Speaker 7: one with your friends even though it doesn't cost us
Speaker 7: anything to do that?
Speaker 1: Really well, I mean customer.
Speaker 3: I think it became with it became Jesus Christ began
Speaker 3: with the game. It was Moro wind Or obliving that
Speaker 3: they had the horse armor. That was the big moment.
Speaker 3: They charged two ninety nine for some armor for your horse.
Speaker 1: Did you get it?
Speaker 3: No, maybe the oldes scrolls online, but nevertheless, that was
Speaker 3: the moment when it But they were like and then we.
Speaker 1: Got the more micro transactions.
Speaker 7: They're like, oh, do you want to do a cool
Speaker 7: little like handwave and Destiny five dollars and I paid it,
Speaker 7: Unlike you, I paid the five dollars. I was like,
Speaker 7: take my money, Bungee.
Speaker 6: I'm sorry, since we're talking about old timey things. The
Speaker 6: first time I encountered this was with Napster, when Napster
Speaker 6: went legit.
Speaker 5: Do you remember that very brief moment.
Speaker 1: You were still with Napster when it went No, I MOVEDND.
Speaker 5: To it now because you know, I'd done the linewired
Speaker 5: and because I ruined several computers. Yes, And then Napster
Speaker 5: comes out and it's like, hey, we're going legit. Just
Speaker 5: pay us this very affordable monthly fee and you get
Speaker 5: onlimited music. I'm my great.
Speaker 6: And then I got to the part of the you know,
Speaker 6: front page. It's like, yeah, and if you ever stop
Speaker 6: paying us, you will lose access to all that music.
Speaker 5: I'm like, what, Yeah, it's two thousand and six and
Speaker 5: what is this?
Speaker 1: And now that's how Spotify works exactly.
Speaker 3: Yes, now you have a free account.
Speaker 7: So yeah, I don't pay for Spotify because I'm an influence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I pay for Apple Music.
Speaker 7: I'm like, really, I get it through my phone bill
Speaker 7: for some reason.
Speaker 3: That's good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's great. So I'm like, I do I pay
Speaker 1: for it? But unclear?
Speaker 3: But it's just weird because it feels like there are
Speaker 3: very obvious problems that people have, Like phones are the
Speaker 3: whole stop using your phone thing is stupid. Okay in
Speaker 3: the top list that b I had a really good piece,
Speaker 3: or it's like I love my phone, I love being
Speaker 3: on my phone. Yeah, the problem is there's too much
Speaker 3: shit in it. And that doesn't mean Google, I need
Speaker 3: you to search for me. You're also not good in it.
Speaker 3: But it's the I feel like they are selling us
Speaker 3: back the idea of interfaces, except they're not even doing it.
Speaker 3: They're not actually automating anything. That's the thing with the
Speaker 3: AI That is the problem of aither than all the
Speaker 3: other ones, which is it's not doing anything for me.
Speaker 3: What is it doing when even the Apple Intelligence thing
Speaker 3: just did an episode on excited about the prospect of
Speaker 3: what they could do, but also they didn't actually say
Speaker 3: much Siri can do actions across multiplaps.
Speaker 1: And also it's not coming until well after.
Speaker 3: Launch, right is it Jesus Christ?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 7: Or some of the features they were really like they
Speaker 7: weren't clear on which features are coming immediately, which or later.
Speaker 3: Just this obfuscation and it's almost I mean, because that
Speaker 3: was WWTC Google Io.
Speaker 7: We just finished this big developer conference season. And while
Speaker 7: it was ostensibly for developers and ostensibly for the rest
Speaker 7: of us, and it should have been developers, because never
Speaker 7: has the relationship between these platforms and developers been more.
Speaker 7: Fraud stuff that's happening in Europe with the DMA has
Speaker 7: made it really, really difficult, And instead it was for
Speaker 7: investors m hm and saying here, we've got we've got
Speaker 7: our AI thing too.
Speaker 1: We are in on the hype and you don't have
Speaker 1: to be like.
Speaker 7: We talked about I'm gonna do a little plug here.
Speaker 7: We talked about this on the Verge cast the Verges Sorry,
Speaker 7: what what where? Where I sometimes talk about stuff too,
Speaker 7: And we talked about it over there, and it was
Speaker 7: really really clear that they just they'd done this for
Speaker 7: the investors and if they hadn't been doing AI this year,
Speaker 7: and it was really clear that that was kind of
Speaker 7: bolted on. Everybody would be talking about how stupid and
Speaker 7: dumb and delightful your phone looks because you can change
Speaker 7: the color on it now, right, like you can change
Speaker 7: the user in our face, and like there was these
Speaker 7: cool moments that happened and they just were like no, no, no,
Speaker 7: forget that AI.
Speaker 3: Yeah, go go on.
Speaker 5: No, no, man, that's it.
Speaker 6: I mean like, it's that And that has been the
Speaker 6: case since I got into this business. Right, It's like
Speaker 6: you go to a show and well, what's the theme
Speaker 6: this year? You know, and I think, well, saw the
Speaker 6: seeds of this soone in twenty seventeen when Google first spent.
Speaker 5: Like half of Google io talking about bots.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what are you doing here?
Speaker 7: I think it was the same year that Facebook when
Speaker 7: they did f eight was it fate?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 7: And they're like, we're going to revolutionized the world with
Speaker 7: chat bots in Facebook?
Speaker 1: Where are those?
Speaker 3: Was the m assistant right with with Facebook?
Speaker 6: It was so but there's always there's always that big,
Speaker 6: you know, overarching theme, and it's again to your point, Yes,
Speaker 6: it is to you know, curry favor with with investors
Speaker 6: and make sure no, Google's not being left behind. We
Speaker 6: can't afford to be seen as being left behind. And
Speaker 6: then you know, you get the search query that the
Speaker 6: glue on pizza stuff, the go eat rocks thing, and
Speaker 6: of course they've got an egg on their face now
Speaker 6: because and I cannot, for the life of me understand
Speaker 6: why no one internally said hey stop, let's let's actually because.
Speaker 7: Google is one of the biggest companies in the world,
Speaker 7: and it is.
Speaker 1: A nightmare to work in.
Speaker 5: I've heard that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Tony Fiddell, who built like Nest and all of that stuff,
Speaker 7: he wrote a book that was all about how he
Speaker 7: he knows business and one of the really actually interesting
Speaker 7: parts in it is how his just relationship with Google
Speaker 7: collapsed after he was was acquired. They acquire a Nest
Speaker 7: and then like immediately, you know, his boss is like, actually,
Speaker 7: I'm not your boss anymore. This guy over here is
Speaker 7: your boss. You're doing this, And then that guy's like, oh,
Speaker 7: actually you're doing this. And it was just constantly changing
Speaker 7: because it's such a big amorphous, right thing. Yeah, And
Speaker 7: like a lot of these companies are that way. Google's
Speaker 7: probably the worst at it. Amazon's pretty bad at it.
Speaker 7: Apple is generally pretty good at it. Apple's whole thing
Speaker 7: is just like the culture of the place can sometimes
Speaker 7: get in the way. It's a cultish, yeah, and Google
Speaker 7: is also a cult. But it's like, what if we
Speaker 7: were like a big kind of disorganized.
Speaker 3: There also run By Show regular listeners and now McKenzie
Speaker 3: graduate sound off as shy. What confuses me is like
Speaker 3: Liz Reid has been there like decades search chief now
Speaker 3: but also her boss is probably a Ragavan who form
Speaker 3: ahead of ads who also used to run Yahoo. Please
Speaker 3: listen to the episode.
Speaker 5: Great episode.
Speaker 3: Arguably the weirdest thing I ever discovered off of them
Speaker 3: what I see in the mirror. Anyway, It's just it's
Speaker 3: frustrating as well, because you can they must have no shame,
Speaker 3: They must legitimately just be like who gives this ship?
Speaker 3: Like the only way you you are able to release
Speaker 3: products this bad is when you just to your point,
Speaker 3: it was for investors, but now the company is for investors. Yeah,
Speaker 3: because I think that that is the rootic on that's
Speaker 3: being crossed.
Speaker 7: That's why like someone like Panos Pinet who's now at
Speaker 7: Amazon or or Steve Jobs had these like was Panas
Speaker 7: pine used to ran the Surface department, ran all of
Speaker 7: the surface products at Microsoft for years.
Speaker 5: One of the gifted presenters at press events.
Speaker 7: I mean, he knows how to present things, and he
Speaker 7: really understands how to build these things, and and it
Speaker 7: like I think he made a real moment with the
Speaker 7: Surface because he cares about the products. And he's now
Speaker 7: at Amazon and they won't let me talk to him.
Speaker 1: And it's fine. I'm okay with it.
Speaker 7: But and that's because he's going and like, okay, we've
Speaker 7: got to fix Amazon's like product lineup, because.
Speaker 3: It's it's what if it was good?
Speaker 1: Yeah, what if it was good?
Speaker 7: And and and you see that and but those are
Speaker 7: the rare guys, right, Like the reason these people are
Speaker 7: so beloved is because they do care. Jony I have
Speaker 7: terrible ideas a lot of times. Apparently it was like
Speaker 7: his idea to put the eyes in the vision pro.
Speaker 3: Oh really, yeah, I would be lies. Yeah, what if
Speaker 3: what if the watch was a triangle? No?
Speaker 1: No, that's the rest of it.
Speaker 3: By the way, I want to see Jony I have
Speaker 3: Apparently Sam Wrtman really badly wants to make a device
Speaker 3: with them. Yeah, honestly, give them as much money as
Speaker 3: they want. I will see what I want. I want
Speaker 3: to see the homomobile. Ask Gadget that these idiots passed.
Speaker 1: Zero ports, zero display.
Speaker 3: Call it the hexagon.
Speaker 1: You just think at it.
Speaker 3: It's a new new type of Bluetooth device. You can
Speaker 3: connect your Bluetooth devices. I think, oh shit, it just
Speaker 3: looks gorgeous. I'm fine if things look good, but if
Speaker 3: they just completely useless.
Speaker 7: Yeah, no, no, I mean and and but that was
Speaker 7: the thing is like he's kind of like a lesser
Speaker 7: example because he does have some bad ideas. He's so
Speaker 7: about the minimalism and weirdness that it goes to like
Speaker 7: somebody tell him no. But that's why Steve works, That's
Speaker 7: why or Steve Jobs works.
Speaker 1: I don't know Steve Jobs. He's dead. That's why Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs works.
Speaker 7: That's why that's why panels work was because they they
Speaker 7: can actual they actually.
Speaker 1: Care about the products. They actually want to make something good.
Speaker 7: And most of the time now, like Tim Cook, I'm
Speaker 7: sure he cares about the product because he is the
Speaker 7: CEO and he has to make money and and and
Speaker 7: please his investors and stuff. But he is a supply
Speaker 7: chains guy.
Speaker 3: Right Like I also feel like apples laptops have been
Speaker 3: really good.
Speaker 7: Their phones they have gotten They've gotten really good because
Speaker 7: everybody was like slagging on the laptops being like their garbage.
Speaker 7: You haven't updated the MacBook Air, your most popular device
Speaker 7: in half a decade, do something, and they're like, oh,
Speaker 7: we we probably should and then but they only really
Speaker 7: did it when they actually had they could put their
Speaker 7: own process.
Speaker 6: Which is right, and silicons great that's the thing I
Speaker 6: think I'm my problem as I'm discovering in the middle
Speaker 6: of this conversation.
Speaker 1: I love this.
Speaker 6: That is good is that my problem is not with
Speaker 6: the devices because everyone who buys them, the millions of
Speaker 6: people who give Apple whatever it's three trillion dollar market
Speaker 6: cap or whatever it is right now, are very happy
Speaker 6: with them because they're very good products, and anytime they
Speaker 6: try something that I would like, Like, you know, for example,
Speaker 6: I thought the touch bar was kind of a fun idea. Yes, fun,
Speaker 6: but it creters and it's not supported in whatever you
Speaker 6: get this developer thing. But there are no options anymore
Speaker 6: for these types of products. Like your phone has to
Speaker 6: look like that.
Speaker 5: I'm pointing at Ed's iPhone fifty. Your phone has to
Speaker 5: look like that.
Speaker 6: And even if you go crazy and you make something
Speaker 6: that I really appreciate, like a foldable, which is one
Speaker 6: of the big reasons I still use Android phone because
Speaker 6: foldables change the way I use phones, and they're great,
Speaker 6: they still have to unfold into vaguely something that vaguely
Speaker 6: reminiscent of that rectangle and a laptop.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, we just saw qualcom.
Speaker 6: You know, processors introduced into like I don't know, seventeen
Speaker 6: new laptops from a bunch of new new companies, and
Speaker 6: they all look like the existing Intel powered laptops that
Speaker 6: they've been shipping forever.
Speaker 1: Because in most cases they just.
Speaker 7: Think, right, think, Microsoft and HP were like the only
Speaker 7: companies that do something new, but.
Speaker 6: Even that's not new, like you can get asues. God
Speaker 6: bless them. They make these.
Speaker 5: Crazy, weird laptops with multiple screens.
Speaker 6: You get these foldable screens, and honestly, those do they're
Speaker 6: not just they're not gimmicks, like they change the way
Speaker 6: you compute, and in some cases they are very very useful,
Speaker 6: but no one wanted to take a risk. No one
Speaker 6: wanted to take the affordance of all that space freed
Speaker 6: up by this arm based chip and like.
Speaker 5: The reduction of fan size and everything.
Speaker 6: No, they're just everyone's just being very conservative because same
Speaker 6: reason that phone makers only make white and black phones
Speaker 6: in quantity, because that's all people buy. We make clicks
Speaker 6: in a very fetching yellow color and that's thirty percent
Speaker 6: of them or something like that, because those people want
Speaker 6: white or black, right, And I get it, but I
Speaker 6: don't like it.
Speaker 5: I would encourage people to remember that fun can be
Speaker 5: a reason to consider a piece of technology. When did
Speaker 5: we decide that fun is not a priority in our
Speaker 5: in our like buying.
Speaker 7: When we decided selling more products matter more than selling
Speaker 7: cool products.
Speaker 3: And shareholder supremacy?
Speaker 1: Yeah likes.
Speaker 6: I agree with you both on the business side, but
Speaker 6: as consumers like when did when when did we just
Speaker 6: go like pick up a phones? Like I don't know,
Speaker 6: maybe I'm.
Speaker 3: Serious, it's but I think I think that is you.
Speaker 3: I don't say this in a bad way. You're right, Like,
Speaker 3: I understand what you feel that way. But it's their
Speaker 3: job to sell these things. It's their job to make
Speaker 3: these things us exactly. Like the two screen laptop is Lenovo,
Speaker 3: So these things are crazy. Like you've got the you've
Speaker 3: got the screen where your keyboard is, and then you
Speaker 3: have another screen. Make have a go at it, do
Speaker 3: a proper national campaign, make some weird choices for it,
Speaker 3: because that's not a mass device. But guess what, there
Speaker 3: are cool things you can do with it. Many people
Speaker 3: use two screens. Do a big enterprise push, do a
Speaker 3: big business push. When I see the AI, I p
Speaker 3: a ad that should be the double screen one's And
Speaker 3: what's weird is like Dell, for ex. That company was
Speaker 3: dog shit for a long time and now they're pretty
Speaker 3: good because they weren't. Why if we make good good computers,
Speaker 3: here's our computers you see. Yeah they dogshit, Well if
Speaker 3: they were good nah. And it's just and I think
Speaker 3: it's this disconnection of the company from the product on
Speaker 3: both a business and just a culture level, like the
Speaker 3: people building things like it's so weird to me that
Speaker 3: Meta made the ray bands because all of the people
Speaker 3: who run Facebook now so it's Mark Zuckerberg, Javier Olivant Coo,
Speaker 3: you've got Boz the ultimate growth, all costs, ass whole
Speaker 3: every terrorist attacks are justifiable for growth. Literally he said that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's really grim thing. Alex Schultz form of growth guy,
Speaker 3: all these a growth people. I'm shocked that there's anyone
Speaker 3: building anything in Facebook other than the Torment nexus and
Speaker 3: it's plugins. Well, that's because.
Speaker 1: Mark said built.
Speaker 7: You have to build me a hardware because nobody wants
Speaker 7: nobody like everybody hates us because we're terrible at software.
Speaker 7: You've got to go build me some cool hardware so
Speaker 7: I can get as far away from the phones as far.
Speaker 3: So I'm well for know only because you said he
Speaker 3: could build build me a hardware. But I could imagine
Speaker 3: Mark Zuckerberg, just like his cold dead eyes, looking to build.
Speaker 7: Me a hard I assume that is exactly just leaves.
Speaker 3: Yeah, killed it for me, slams the door.
Speaker 5: Honestly, I think if they brought back the HDC church
Speaker 5: it would do pretty well.
Speaker 3: Read church.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 6: That was a physical quirity keyboard android phone with a
Speaker 6: Facebook button on it that would let you directly share.
Speaker 3: Tens of them.
Speaker 5: So absolutely it could be the new minimalist phone for
Speaker 5: the Facebook friendly. It could be the boomer phone.
Speaker 7: Oh my god, that's the boomer phone.
Speaker 3: The great call has one with just giant numbers still around, right,
Speaker 3: They're still around, owned by like a private equity phone,
Speaker 3: so not for long.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was like, that's that's a They'll be sold.
Speaker 3: To a barbecue company also buy a private equity.
Speaker 1: Marina will buy it next year. I don't worry about it.
Speaker 3: Great things. What's funny though, is that see yes with
Speaker 3: the grill stuff. So, as some of you may know,
Speaker 3: I make excellent barbecue at home, I do smokers. I
Speaker 3: admit I got in a little bit of trouble at
Speaker 3: ce Yes Lustmora is there because I went up to
Speaker 3: these people, I started asking them grilling questions, not like
Speaker 3: being an asoer. I was like, so, how does this
Speaker 3: help with the cooking? Yeah, they're like, well, you see
Speaker 3: you go on the app and you can see recipes.
Speaker 3: I'm sure, but the device pause, Uh, well, you can
Speaker 3: connect it and Wi Fi. I'm like, excellent, then what
Speaker 3: And that's because you can't really innovate that anymore other
Speaker 3: than the combustion thermometer, which is incredible. It's made by
Speaker 3: a guy made a video a few years ago called
Speaker 3: your oven is a Liar and it's got eight I'm
Speaker 3: not connected with this. It's just excellent. I have too,
Speaker 3: has eight sensors in it so it can find the
Speaker 3: coldest point in your food. What like all my hate
Speaker 3: the various caters use my detractors on and you're saying
Speaker 3: I don't like anything. The combustion thermoters excellent, is so good.
Speaker 3: I finally got my bee ribs down with it. But
Speaker 3: that's the thing that one's a great example of solving
Speaker 3: an actual problem that most people they use the thermometer,
Speaker 3: they don't know where to put it and they don't
Speaker 3: know if they're in the right place. And there I
Speaker 3: personally and deeply anxious person, so constant anxiety, which is
Speaker 3: great for a twelve hour cook. With this, it works
Speaker 3: and it works really well, and there's not a bunch
Speaker 3: of other bullshit. It costs like one hundred and sixty
Speaker 3: nine bucks, so it's not cheap, but it solves a problem. Now,
Speaker 3: It's like you think with all of this money in
Speaker 3: AI or AR or all these things, they solve a problem.
Speaker 3: We've had very similar problems for like ten years.
Speaker 7: I think part of it is a lot of these
Speaker 7: people do not they think they're solving a problem, right right, Like,
Speaker 7: I think everybody in this room is probably a good
Speaker 7: We're good writers, right like, well that's part that's part
Speaker 7: of how.
Speaker 1: We make our living. Like when you're doing a video, yeah,
Speaker 1: you write the script like, we're good writers, right Like,
Speaker 1: this is a skill we have and we can do.
Speaker 7: If somebody sends us a horrible text message, we will
Speaker 7: grown because we don't want to answer it emotionally, but
Speaker 7: we'll still respond, like and we'll respond the hell out
Speaker 7: of it. It will be well written, right, well written. But
Speaker 7: these people don't value that because they think that's just
Speaker 7: that's a thing they can surmount with AI, right, like
Speaker 7: that's that is the thing for him. And I run
Speaker 7: into this like I was talking to a woman the
Speaker 7: other day who gave me the first legitimately good use
Speaker 7: for large language models.
Speaker 1: She had a really bad blind date and the guy sent.
Speaker 7: Her like a long, long email and she's like, read
Speaker 7: this email for me because I'm not going to read
Speaker 7: it because I don't want to go on another date
Speaker 7: with a guy. Then respond to it like politely saying saying, no,
Speaker 7: I don't want to see you again. And I was like,
Speaker 7: you figured it out that because like if you did
Speaker 7: that to me at work, I would be furious.
Speaker 1: Blind date, Yes, go, that's.
Speaker 6: No that that you're right and that is the more
Speaker 6: specifically than the only good example for it, Like it's
Speaker 6: the only good version of that demo that every company
Speaker 6: insists on thinking. It was just like, who's send a
Speaker 6: text to my wife and tell her that I'm going
Speaker 6: to be late for dinner.
Speaker 5: Now make me sound more sad about it. No, apologize, just.
Speaker 3: Text your wife. Just start why you start it? It's
Speaker 3: like more effort to do. It's ridiculous, And how do
Speaker 3: you even know what good is? You can't write right? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: And I must also say, just as a note, there
Speaker 3: are people out there who have like cognitive disorders and
Speaker 3: learning learning disability called dyspraxia for example. It's physical, but
Speaker 3: there are people with dyslexia. Those are not When I
Speaker 3: say you should be able to write email, just to
Speaker 3: be really clear, not the people. I mean, you have
Speaker 3: an individualized problem. And I also must be clear, none
Speaker 3: of the AI companies give a rap fuck about you.
Speaker 3: They do not care that it's not you are not
Speaker 3: the person they are selling accessibility. They are selling to
Speaker 3: someone who does not exist that they made up right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: that is who it is. Because the rewrite stuff is crazy.
Speaker 3: And then the oh, I have these five ingredients in
Speaker 3: my kitchen.
Speaker 7: That's my favorite one something ever happened to someone you
Speaker 7: just only have.
Speaker 3: I mean, you can't work out what you like unless
Speaker 3: you've got I've got an onion, one piece of ham
Speaker 3: three nine of a human GPT. Like what is the
Speaker 3: situation where you can't look at it and go all right, fine,
Speaker 3: like I'll make a sandwich.
Speaker 1: Like because you're you're.
Speaker 7: You're imagining what they imagine when they're doing this is themselves.
Speaker 7: They're just like looking in the mirror and they're being like, Okay,
Speaker 7: I put on my little pad in your vest. I
Speaker 7: put on my little Bluetooth head set. I haven't looked
Speaker 7: at my spouse in three weeks. I'm gonna have my
Speaker 7: assistant text them. Oh ship, my assistant got laid off. Okay,
Speaker 7: I really wish I had an AI assistant who could
Speaker 7: text them so that they don't leave me, because they probably.
Speaker 3: Divorce would be quite messy, it would.
Speaker 1: Be expensive, they will take all of my stock, but
Speaker 1: I don't care. So yeah, and like that, I mean,
Speaker 1: that is a gross, gross exaggeration.
Speaker 7: There many of you lovely human Yeah, there are plenty
Speaker 7: people who have lovely relationships there, but that is like
Speaker 7: the thing there. They are they are very cynically going
Speaker 7: after this one group who to your.
Speaker 1: Earlier they're not talking to real people.
Speaker 7: They're not going out to like fucking middle of nowhere
Speaker 7: rule Nebraska and being like what do you think of this?
Speaker 7: Because they'll be like can it connect to the internet? Yeah,
Speaker 7: it needs the internet to do everything. Cool, I can't
Speaker 7: use it at all because I don't have internet.
Speaker 6: I wonder and I have a real question here, and
Speaker 6: like is it that so many problems have already been solved,
Speaker 6: that it's harder to find new ones like or that
Speaker 6: the new ones we find are too niche.
Speaker 5: And too narrow and too low because you can't dedicate
Speaker 5: Google's resources to solving like a.
Speaker 7: Fixable problem is I would love to just say, fix
Speaker 7: my schedule for the week.
Speaker 1: Oh, I mean same, right, Like that should be easy.
Speaker 3: Motion has been lying about this. I'm calling you out, Motion,
Speaker 3: you ossholes, all right, you motherfuckers. I see you on
Speaker 3: Instagram every goddamn day. I've supertaged my adhday with Motion.
Speaker 3: Fuck you, it's not how it works. You're a bunch
Speaker 3: of scumback. I'm so sorry. That's a little much. But you,
Speaker 3: like I loaded your goddamn product. It's like, I'll rearrange
Speaker 3: your schedule. I'm like, oh, it like tries to like
Speaker 3: suggest they do something once like that does not work?
Speaker 3: What the fuck you? And I just don't trust anymore
Speaker 3: and it doesn't do it. And I cannot find any
Speaker 3: real uses. I'm sure they exist, but that's the thing.
Speaker 3: It's that is a problem to be solved. But I
Speaker 3: also think you're right in the there are no big problems, right,
Speaker 3: I feel like no more lands the Conka.
Speaker 6: Tens of thousands of little problems and little niche like issues,
Speaker 6: and certainly stuff that I run into every day that
Speaker 6: shouldn't be a problem now that Google Home is what
Speaker 6: you know, over a decade old, and those things.
Speaker 5: Are just absolutely trash. But like, those are little things.
Speaker 6: There's one light in my room doesn't go off with
Speaker 6: the rest of it goes like no one's gonna those
Speaker 6: are troubleshooting bug fixes. Like we we're not doing this
Speaker 6: whole maps thing again.
Speaker 5: We're not.
Speaker 6: We're not saying like, hey, you know how it's hard
Speaker 6: to get around the city, or you know how you
Speaker 6: got to print out map quest directions, like no, we
Speaker 6: drove down every road on.
Speaker 5: The planet and now you have Google Maps.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Like I feel like those big ambitious problems just don't
Speaker 6: don't obviously present themselves.
Speaker 3: We do need to go back to this idea that
Speaker 3: there are no more lands to conquer. It's the thing
Speaker 3: I've talked about before, that there are no more big problems.
Speaker 3: And I think we're finally maybe this is the first
Speaker 3: time in history we're really being made to reckon with
Speaker 3: the fact of how these companies make money because it
Speaker 3: consumers are perhaps dealing with a death by a thousand
Speaker 3: cuts right now. It's the ten ten million little problems
Speaker 3: we face, which are usually a response, sorry, a result
Speaker 3: of technical debt. It's just things built on top of things.
Speaker 3: People I've talked to inside Google have said this, that
Speaker 3: they just build shit on top of other shit. Google
Speaker 3: Home one of the most evil apps of all time,
Speaker 3: invented by the devil to separate you from your thermostaff
Speaker 3: But that is a result of them being like, Okay,
Speaker 3: we've bought Nest Tony Fodell, Yeah, genius, genius guy. They've
Speaker 3: got these amazing They've revolutionized the smart I'm not sure
Speaker 3: if any of you remember when the Nest came in.
Speaker 3: That was a huge deal. You had this shitty honeywell
Speaker 3: thing and Nest actually worked and it work. It did
Speaker 3: exactly what you want to look. It looked cool, but
Speaker 3: it also they're very satisfying and guess what, it worked.
Speaker 3: It actually worked, and they went, wow, So we just
Speaker 3: bought Nest and they've got these cameras and they've got
Speaker 3: these thermostats and they work really well and the software
Speaker 3: pretty reliable. People like that, but we also have another
Speaker 3: app that people hate. What if we added the thing
Speaker 3: people liked to the thing people hate, then they will
Speaker 3: love it instead. I don't know what happened, what actually
Speaker 3: happens to thing I'm just describing, which is someone from
Speaker 3: Google absorbed Nest and then said, you are run by Steve.
Speaker 3: Now don't know if it's or her name was Steve,
Speaker 3: but you are run by this department, and we'll build
Speaker 3: on top of it. We'll connect all the bits of
Speaker 3: Nest into this app because we must have everything in
Speaker 3: one place. When you're not really solving problems other than
Speaker 3: company apps and making a feature work rather than a
Speaker 3: suite of things work. This is the result. And I
Speaker 3: think we're finally reaching a point where just there's not
Speaker 3: enough exciting stuff to hide from the fact that most
Speaker 3: computing experiences are cluttered and bad. Well that's many, many
Speaker 3: times of the day.
Speaker 1: That's for the fixes.
Speaker 7: Right, Like Google, I think we can all agree, is
Speaker 7: not doing great as far as like search goes. Right,
Speaker 7: Like you go and you search something on Google, it
Speaker 7: is so much worse.
Speaker 1: Now I'm using Coggy, the paid one.
Speaker 5: At the moment, it's.
Speaker 1: Like it's interesting.
Speaker 7: I'm still trying it out, but it doesn't feel measurably worse.
Speaker 1: Which is not great for Google.
Speaker 7: H And then that is something that could be solved
Speaker 7: and that would be a huge boot, right, Like, like,
Speaker 7: it is hard to find things, and these companies have
Speaker 7: all decided that they were going to solve it by
Speaker 7: just taking all of the content and then maybe or
Speaker 7: maybe not accurately con.
Speaker 3: Google I was like, and then you will be able
Speaker 3: to use such to find your UPS tracking number and
Speaker 3: it will tell it when you're going to tell you,
Speaker 3: and then when you're trying to do a return, it
Speaker 3: will actually generate that could happen. Yeah, you know when.
Speaker 1: Then it just moved away, Yeah, don't worry.
Speaker 3: That was actual.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot. There are these useful things.
Speaker 7: They're nowhere close to ready, and then they go and
Speaker 7: they promise them way too early, and then like AI
Speaker 7: is getting poisoned. There's so much really interesting things that
Speaker 7: can happen space for a while, and there has.
Speaker 1: Been for a very long time.
Speaker 7: And instead they're like, what if we just make a
Speaker 7: bunch of money by pushing lying bots out into the
Speaker 7: world and that won't backfire in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 7: And it's like, no, it's already backfiring, and it's just
Speaker 7: gonna get worse. Like Google, you shot yourself in the foot,
Speaker 7: Microsoft with being you shot yourself in the foot because
Speaker 7: you're like, what if we release these lying machines at
Speaker 7: the same time we have our garbage search engines that
Speaker 7: can't see the lies and it'll be fine. No, you've
Speaker 7: just made the web like almost impossible to navigate.
Speaker 3: And that one is very much like it was a
Speaker 3: way to sell cloud computer space. It was a way
Speaker 3: to promise, Yeah, the eternal growth machine could keep growing.
Speaker 3: But also like Search, I've done the episode. It' that's
Speaker 3: a whole thing. It just feels like they're not building
Speaker 3: things for people like it. Really like if I worked
Speaker 3: on Google Search and I saw them launch that, I
Speaker 3: probably wouldn't quit if I had a mortgage, but I
Speaker 3: would take my LinkedIn offline. Yeah, I wouldn't want to
Speaker 3: be associated with it.
Speaker 1: It you like, yeah, de face the line, vacations.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would, yeah, vacation. But it's just someone like
Speaker 3: in a in a sane society, suned up as Shy
Speaker 3: would have been fired, yeah, immediately, immediate. Liz sent off,
Speaker 3: brabagar Ragavan would have been sent off. These people would
Speaker 3: have been fired not just for but they've already not
Speaker 3: been fired for making search bad, but for publicly breaking
Speaker 3: the probably the biggest contribution tech has made ever, like
Speaker 3: at least in software.
Speaker 1: And instead it's like a little hiccup and they're like,
Speaker 1: don't worry. AI is going to fix this out.
Speaker 3: Just AI is going to fix the AI.
Speaker 1: Pro Well, you know that's the other part of it.
Speaker 7: They're like, well, AI will fix it because AI just
Speaker 7: needs to learn more stuff and if it learns more
Speaker 7: stuff will do that. Okay, but didn't you just there
Speaker 7: was just I think The Atlantic wrote a really great
Speaker 7: story about how they run out of stuff to see
Speaker 7: AI on and so they're like, what if we just
Speaker 7: make more machines that make a content from AI synthetic
Speaker 7: content data.
Speaker 3: So if you go back to the PKI episode, this
Speaker 3: is a big problem the synthetic data. And by the way,
Speaker 3: did you know that that will break them?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's gonna be great.
Speaker 3: Habsburg GAI as well. Jathan Sadowski calls it one of
Speaker 3: the funniest terms ever. But it's so funny as well
Speaker 3: because there are so many times, there's so many things
Speaker 3: to fix, and just using the phone is kind of
Speaker 3: a ball like it. It's like you have this clickie
Speaker 3: keyboard company. Yeah, I'm surprised that that didn't come out
Speaker 3: like one of the weird like not quite works for Apple,
Speaker 3: but seems to get all their revenue through the Apple Store.
Speaker 3: Companies like these, these ones that have just kind of
Speaker 3: bubbled up and hung around in a good way, like
Speaker 3: it's just solving a very specific need.
Speaker 5: Right right, for a very but then like specific, there
Speaker 5: are plenty.
Speaker 3: People who don't like clickie who want a clickie keyboard,
Speaker 3: people who like keyboards, like that's a thing that you
Speaker 3: can connect to a person who does not about.
Speaker 7: Kim Kardashian bowl one, right, that is famously a thing
Speaker 7: she loves.
Speaker 5: One of the first things I learned about being on
Speaker 5: the side of the business. And I'm not allowed to
Speaker 5: talk about the customers, not giving me the permission, but yeah, no, I.
Speaker 3: Hear Henry clutching his clicks as he his last words,
Speaker 3: well I like the device, No, I it's it sucks
Speaker 3: as well, And getting back to something of saying earlier
Speaker 3: as well, I want to be excited about this stuff
Speaker 3: I loves.
Speaker 1: Is there anything you're excited about?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's a good like.
Speaker 3: The steam Deck. The next I genuinely believe, and I
Speaker 3: know the old was the second one. No, that's not
Speaker 3: what I'm talking about. Whenever they do the next steam Deck,
Speaker 3: I'm so excited for that.
Speaker 1: It's going to be cool.
Speaker 3: I love the steam Deck. I think it's one of
Speaker 3: the coolest things I've ever used. It is like a
Speaker 3: really great PC gaming console. PC gaming consoles, they've tried
Speaker 3: them a few times, never quite work, but this works.
Speaker 3: It's a bit too big.
Speaker 5: Play isn't great, but yeah, don't worry about it.
Speaker 7: It's cool and it's it's customizable in a way that
Speaker 7: you don't generally get with products nowadays, and it's just
Speaker 7: it's fun to use. Like that's that's what I got. Like,
Speaker 7: I got into the I n EO. I got into
Speaker 7: these weird like Steam Deck replacements because there's a place
Speaker 7: where I'm like, oh, something's happening.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Game is kind of immune from this, from this thing,
Speaker 6: because like you can go back to a Nintendo sweach.
Speaker 6: I mean, I still love my switch and Razor kicks
Speaker 6: out a new gaming accessory every ces. You got this
Speaker 6: crazy ridiculous webcam that like most people don't need, but
Speaker 6: streamers love and yeah.
Speaker 5: Rgbnable lights and stuff like. There are a lot of
Speaker 5: gadgets to be had in the gaming world. I feel
Speaker 5: like if I were.
Speaker 3: Beginning with a I'm completely blanking. They do the lights well.
Speaker 3: Gatto they make really good Danield producer there, it's Gato.
Speaker 3: They make great ship.
Speaker 6: As well, and production gear and camera and NERD's like,
Speaker 6: there are still gadgets out there for specific niches.
Speaker 1: But it's definitely niche.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they're also little professions, but they're like it's specialized gear.
Speaker 6: It's not really a gadget.
Speaker 5: There is just yeah, it's the best plan I got.
Speaker 5: This weird thing.
Speaker 3: There is something exciting happening where the normalization of photography
Speaker 3: written large is pretty magnificent. The photos I can take
Speaker 3: on my iPhone with portrait mode are not my DSLRT.
Speaker 3: I've got an Alpha three, I got a Canon five DS.
Speaker 3: I've done a lot photography, got some nice glass too,
Speaker 3: And yeah, when I take them out and I get
Speaker 3: the right lightning lighting and I've I've made sure I
Speaker 3: do the settings.
Speaker 1: Right, you feel like you've earned.
Speaker 3: And I nailed it, and I nailed it. Sure, it's
Speaker 3: great nine eight percent. The other time, though, my phone's
Speaker 3: in my pocket and I can get a really good
Speaker 3: photo and it's easy. I can upload it somewhere. It's
Speaker 3: easy to share with a friend. I could do a
Speaker 3: little editing. I can make a podcast at home in
Speaker 3: my pajamas in Las Vegas. I can have it edit.
Speaker 3: Did there are actual things that happen that are so
Speaker 3: good in tech And they see these things and they're like, shit,
Speaker 3: all right, what problems the humans happen? Like I don't know,
Speaker 3: And they go to their assistant and like, what problems
Speaker 3: do you have? And they start talking like yeah, sure,
Speaker 3: And it's just it's frustrating because if the tech industry
Speaker 3: would realize this was happening, they actually have a lot
Speaker 3: of good stuff to do, the normalization of whatever professional
Speaker 3: things are. You can record a podcast that sounds really
Speaker 3: good from home now in a way that you couldn't
Speaker 3: four years ago.
Speaker 5: Absolutely. Yeah. Also, I think like some of this is
Speaker 5: just it is. I don't know if you want to
Speaker 5: call it, like I've victimless. Crime is not the word.
Speaker 6: It's like, this was, this was, this was inevitable right
Speaker 6: when stuff got this good, and when when you got
Speaker 6: able to do those things that you just talked about
Speaker 6: on your phone, right, you have a production studio in
Speaker 6: your pocket, Like we had to get here. There was
Speaker 6: there's no longer any reason for Motorola to make a
Speaker 6: phone that with double action hinges.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we figured it out.
Speaker 7: And the same thing happened in Hollywood, right, Like they
Speaker 7: were like, oh, superhero movies make money.
Speaker 1: What if we only Didero?
Speaker 7: And that was really cool for me, a superhero nerd
Speaker 7: for two days, and then I was.
Speaker 3: Like, that's a really good example because they saw that
Speaker 3: superheroes did well. What they didn't realize was the movies
Speaker 3: were good and the actors were good in the roles.
Speaker 3: Iron Man didn't do well because people love the concept
Speaker 3: of Tony Stark. It's because Robert Downey Junior.
Speaker 1: Nobody I fucking knew who Tony Stark was.
Speaker 3: Whatever it came out, I don't know. Guardians the Galaxy
Speaker 3: was good, not because of Guardians of the Galaxy but
Speaker 3: because the actors are very good at So that's excellent.
Speaker 3: Scimora like, yeah, I forget who plays Pete Quill, but
Speaker 3: the guy from the Office, there's gonna be someone who's
Speaker 3: so pissed.
Speaker 1: That wasn't incredible. The guy from the Office.
Speaker 3: I'm like a huge Guardians the Galaxy foud have a
Speaker 3: bunch of comic artwork from it. But they saw that,
Speaker 3: and that's why, yes, there you go. I have the
Speaker 3: guy from that show with person Trace Williams. Yeah, treat Williams. Sorry.
Speaker 3: So the thing is they see that, and then they
Speaker 3: spill out all these ship ones. They're like, what what
Speaker 3: don't you like about it? They're all three hours long,
Speaker 3: that's more superhero You fucking ingrades.
Speaker 1: And just take your slop. You don't want your slot.
Speaker 3: Take your slop. And I guess that maybe we are
Speaker 3: in tech slop era.
Speaker 1: We are in tech slop era.
Speaker 3: Oh no, we're actually in tech slop era. That's the
Speaker 3: title of this episode.
Speaker 7: But it is, we're in this moment where it's like
Speaker 7: we are. They are more focused on their bottom line.
Speaker 7: They're more focused on pleasing people who don't care about
Speaker 7: the technology than actually making good technology. And there's there's
Speaker 7: a lot of good examples where that's not the case.
Speaker 7: We've talked about a lot of those here, but a
Speaker 7: lot of it is just garbage. And so for me,
Speaker 7: that's why I go and I mess with these steam
Speaker 7: Deck competitors and eat ink devices, because that's the areas
Speaker 7: where it feels like, yeah, there is the slop, like
Speaker 7: right now, and tell Panos do something about the Kindle
Speaker 7: garbage device.
Speaker 1: I do not want one in my house. Sorry to
Speaker 1: everyone at Amazon. Fix it. But these other Onyx books is.
Speaker 7: Making like really really cool interesting stuff here. It's not
Speaker 7: great yet, but they're trying. And every time, like I
Speaker 7: write a review, then the next thing comes out and
Speaker 7: it changes little and I'm like Okay, then I feel
Speaker 7: very powerful, and then I just want to like write
Speaker 7: a hole like here's what I want actually from it,
Speaker 7: and then I'm worried that I'm got too close, I
Speaker 7: got too into it.
Speaker 3: It's funny though, that you were afraid to write that,
Speaker 3: right just be like fix it, yeah, because like you're
Speaker 3: afraid the company would be mad when the company should like.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, then I'm no.
Speaker 7: I'm more afraid that, like I'm doing labor and not
Speaker 7: getting paid for it. I mean, I'm getting paid for it,
Speaker 7: but like righte.
Speaker 5: The unpaid consulting check is not yeah it.
Speaker 1: Where's my consulting check now?
Speaker 6: But I wonder about the Actually That's what I've been
Speaker 6: thinking about kind of weirdly for the past few minutes.
Speaker 6: It's just like, there is still obviously really good reporting
Speaker 6: out there, there are still really good gadget reviews out there,
Speaker 6: there's still people calling companies to account for all the
Speaker 6: stuff we've been talking about for two hours. But I
Speaker 6: do wonder how much disruption is actually being introduced by
Speaker 6: this kind of like rise of influencer marketing that kind
Speaker 6: of like just clouds of the whole thing, and nobody
Speaker 6: can tell the difference.
Speaker 5: I found.
Speaker 6: I started to find fifteen years or twelve years ago
Speaker 6: that people could not tell the difference between sponsored content.
Speaker 3: And even when you lead in quite aggressively.
Speaker 6: Yeah, because well, oh, I'm like I tweet and someone
Speaker 6: replies asking a question that I've answered.
Speaker 5: In the original tweet.
Speaker 6: You know, because nobody pays attention. It's it's it's it's
Speaker 6: it's an attention span problem that I don't I don't know.
Speaker 6: We could spend another two hours talking about the changes
Speaker 6: that would need to happen in the media world to
Speaker 6: actually kind of make it close to good, but I
Speaker 6: don't know that it would make a difference. Yeah, it's
Speaker 6: based on people's willingness to actually listen or ability to listen.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's wild how many times we'll put a review
Speaker 7: up and you know, the Vergeon, we do not accept units.
Speaker 7: We send them back after we review them. We've got
Speaker 7: very strict policy. Used to we wouldn't even eat food.
Speaker 5: One of the strictest, and I love it.
Speaker 7: And nowadays, like we get people being like, oh, you
Speaker 7: just spawn con for Apple and I'm like, rude. I'm
Speaker 7: mainly just offended more than annoyed, because I'm just like,
Speaker 7: but it's it's the same thing. There's this assumption that
Speaker 7: everyone has paid to play. And you see that even
Speaker 7: with PR. You get a lot of these younger PR
Speaker 7: people being like, hey, how much can we pay you
Speaker 7: to get our product on your site.
Speaker 3: I'm like, well, nothing, absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's it's shockingly common.
Speaker 6: Mark has running, you know, a really great review on
Speaker 6: i'm k b HD and then we have two weeks
Speaker 6: of discourse because somebody on Twitter with a large audience said,
Speaker 6: you know, I just don't think it's right that can
Speaker 6: kill a can kill a company, you know with this
Speaker 6: with this thoughtless headline. I'm like, no, that's a review
Speaker 6: of a product that didn't That's how this works.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that there is a problem. Yeah, within
Speaker 3: the media that there is a fear that if you
Speaker 3: step outside of the lines in gaming for good reason.
Speaker 3: I was in there before all of that horror show happened,
Speaker 3: and now it's those people you will actually get fucked,
Speaker 3: especially so much worse for a woman. But in gadgets
Speaker 3: there's a fear of losing access. But I also think
Speaker 3: no one wants to say anything that's particularly different because
Speaker 3: I don't know what if they're wrong, And the answer
Speaker 3: is you've been wrong plenty of fucking times. Why stop now? Like,
Speaker 3: no one wants to make the step and say this sucks.
Speaker 3: I mentioned Dave three D earlier, great YouTube Dave two
Speaker 3: D pardon.
Speaker 5: Three D is yeah, ten years from.
Speaker 3: Now there are And he did this thing about the gap,
Speaker 3: about the rabbit and about the pin, and he was
Speaker 3: just saying, what are these companies doing? Like what is this?
Speaker 3: I looked around, Really, no one said that. There was
Speaker 3: a thing in Bloomberg being like, so, why is it
Speaker 3: so good that you're doing this? It was like a
Speaker 3: month before it came out. It's just completely insane. And
Speaker 3: I understand that when you see the world, everyone's saying AI,
Speaker 3: everyone's saying this is gonna be big everyone's saying the
Speaker 3: same thing. It's scary to step out. But also my
Speaker 3: Keith Olbman, have you no shame? But it really is like,
Speaker 3: do you not want to just say what you see?
Speaker 3: If you believe this, I actually am fine with it.
Speaker 3: Please explain yourself because in the case of the rabbit,
Speaker 3: the case of the humane, I know the argument is,
Speaker 3: are it's just for affluent people. Whatever, It's still a
Speaker 3: lot of money. It's still who knows whether someone didn't
Speaker 3: actually save for the rabbit or save.
Speaker 1: A lot of people.
Speaker 3: Two hundred bucks isn't screw you if you think two
Speaker 3: hundred bucks isn't a lot. If that is your response
Speaker 3: to something as a justification for it being shit, that's unconscionable.
Speaker 6: I always said that wasn't an excuse, especially since it
Speaker 6: was being like compared directly to the to their humane
Speaker 6: and I'm like, well, yeah, it's a cost less but.
Speaker 5: It still doesn't do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, in fact, it did even much less. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's you can put an Android phone on it.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 5: I wanted to do that for my video. It didn't
Speaker 5: come out in time.
Speaker 3: It's just frustrating that guy who was like, oh, he
Speaker 3: killed the product no, they killed the products out. Mancus
Speaker 3: just said what was in front of him, right. Yeah.
Speaker 7: I had a friend, Sharie Smith, who would review laptops
Speaker 7: and sometimes she'd give him a bad score, and the
Speaker 7: companies would call and be like, well, why why did
Speaker 7: you give us.
Speaker 1: A bad store? And you made a bad product. Make
Speaker 1: a good product and I'll give you a good score.
Speaker 1: It's that easy.
Speaker 6: Just talking about this off air, it's just like, no, look,
Speaker 6: I will tell you why, and I'll take you through
Speaker 6: the process and oh, I've just narrated my whole video
Speaker 6: for you again.
Speaker 3: Just going and if I like it, I'm gonna lose
Speaker 3: my shit over this. I'll be emphatic about how much
Speaker 3: I like it. When I like something, I love it.
Speaker 3: I get into the guts values, How was I really
Speaker 3: enjoy it? And I want to do that again with tech,
Speaker 3: like I actually really miss it and.
Speaker 6: I think people What people don't get is that that's
Speaker 6: actually that makes it easier. Like when I run a review,
Speaker 6: that's that's good. Yeah, it's great because I get to
Speaker 6: geek out the product. The product people are happy, which
Speaker 6: like I doesn't what I do.
Speaker 5: But they're not yelling at me. And the commenters aren't
Speaker 5: aren't yelling at me either. You get the occasion like
Speaker 5: how much they padio for this bab and like everyone
Speaker 5: else is just like, oh yeah, I was geeking out
Speaker 5: about this too. I'm glad it's not a dumpster fire.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Great, cool, it's it's much more of a hassle to
Speaker 5: do a bad review.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a bad review.
Speaker 7: I mean the Vergie this year we did three that
Speaker 7: were like lower than average, and people were like, what
Speaker 7: because we give the rabbit a really low score. I
Speaker 7: believe we give it like a three or four. No,
Speaker 7: we give it a three because the Humane Pin got
Speaker 7: a four because it did slightly more. And then the
Speaker 7: vision Pro got a seven, and we all joke now
Speaker 7: and say it probably should have been a six. But
Speaker 7: but even then it was pretty like like the vision
Speaker 7: Pro actually still did the thing right, it.
Speaker 5: Was, Yeah, but seven should be out lowed. I'm just
Speaker 5: gonna say seven should be retired.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but you know, it's very uncommon in our space,
Speaker 7: and a lot of times if you are using the
Speaker 7: garbage products, you don't want to talk about them, and
Speaker 7: then you're using the mediocre products and you're like, how
Speaker 7: do I make that sound interesting?
Speaker 5: Oh my god, yes, now we're just talking.
Speaker 1: We're just over here talking about no no, no, we
Speaker 1: have a great time.
Speaker 3: Sorry, no, no, no, no, I'm hat that's why you're here.
Speaker 3: And so it's funny. I've been asked recently to do
Speaker 3: more review stuff. But that's the thing. It's like, what
Speaker 3: if I hate it, man, just say you hate it,
Speaker 3: It'll be the most and I can do no. But
Speaker 3: I can absolutely rip something a pop. Also, do I
Speaker 3: want to like if it's like something I truly despise, fine,
Speaker 3: absolutely the injustice inside me. But it's like something that's
Speaker 3: just kind of shit, like a six out of ten
Speaker 3: review that sounds horrid.
Speaker 1: I mean, I definitely.
Speaker 7: When I first I went from from one place that
Speaker 7: had a very kind of strict tone, and then I
Speaker 7: went to a place with a much looser tone, which
Speaker 7: was Gizmodo at that point owned by Gawker. And I
Speaker 7: started there and I was ready to go, and I
Speaker 7: got a product in and I think, I mean, I
Speaker 7: gave it really bad review, and it was mainly because
Speaker 7: I was just I was like, it was not very
Speaker 7: good and I was like, I'm gonna dig in. And
Speaker 7: it was the meanest thing I've ever written in my life.
Speaker 7: I even think about it now and I cringe a
Speaker 7: little bit because it was so mean, but it was
Speaker 7: also so fun to write. And you you get older
Speaker 7: and you learn and you temper things, and so you're like, well,
Speaker 7: maybe I don't need to compare it to like a
Speaker 7: baby dropped on its head and a target, Like, maybe
Speaker 7: that is not appropriate.
Speaker 3: So we're approaching the end now. Yeah, So for both
Speaker 3: of you, what is actually something you really really really
Speaker 3: love in tech? There you go everyone on Reddit you
Speaker 3: want something positive? Jeez, you got first. You mean it,
Speaker 3: like like like a gadget you just really really love.
Speaker 5: I have a question, like a currently available one or one.
Speaker 3: One that us the history of yea, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: even from history.
Speaker 6: I don't mind, I will get I'll blend the two.
Speaker 6: I'll give you where where I think a company really
Speaker 6: got something right and it didn't do very well. Motorola,
Speaker 6: as you know, revived the Razor for twenty nineteen. It
Speaker 6: brought back the Razor as a foldable Android phone and
Speaker 6: it was it was pretty cool, but I had some
Speaker 6: stuff wrong with it on the greatest. Then the next
Speaker 6: year they brought out the Razor of twenty twenty and
Speaker 6: I tell you for somebody who is terminally nostalgic, this
Speaker 6: thing maintained the industrial design of one of the most
Speaker 6: famous phones of all time and concealed within it a
Speaker 6: really quite good Android phone with a bad camera because
Speaker 6: it's made by Motorola, but you know it's and it
Speaker 6: was very fragile in whatever.
Speaker 5: But it was beautiful.
Speaker 6: I still I very few gadgets that I don't just
Speaker 6: throw in a drawer or return or whatever. This one
Speaker 6: I didn't have the heart. It sits there on my
Speaker 6: shelf in the back. It's out of focus in most
Speaker 6: of my videos. And it's a masterpiece.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And I love it when a company just absolutely nails it,
Speaker 6: and I hate it when it either doesn't have the
Speaker 6: ability to market it enough or it just doesn't capture
Speaker 6: the public's imagination.
Speaker 5: And I don't think it did very well, but I
Speaker 5: loved it.
Speaker 3: Cool.
Speaker 5: The Razor year is the coolest, one of the coolest
Speaker 5: things I've every year.
Speaker 1: That was a cool fucking phone. Yeah, I think me
Speaker 1: right now.
Speaker 7: It's arc the Browser. Oh wow, I recently switched to it.
Speaker 7: I won't shut up about it anywhere I go. So
Speaker 7: you guys have to listen to it too. You're talking
Speaker 7: about all your tabs earlier. I'm also a tab monster,
Speaker 7: and it just works it better, like collates the stuff
Speaker 7: for me, so like it does the job. I waited
Speaker 7: like two years to use it, and now it's got
Speaker 7: a bunch of AI features that I think are kind
Speaker 7: of stupid. But you ignore the AI features and you
Speaker 7: just focus on the core product and it rules.
Speaker 1: And it just came out.
Speaker 7: The iPad version came out the week we're recording this.
Speaker 5: I've heard that a lot. I've heard a lot of people.
Speaker 7: It's one of those things where you do have to
Speaker 7: take a minute. It's not something immediately like I get it.
Speaker 7: You have to kind of sit with it a second
Speaker 7: because the first time I looked at it was like
Speaker 7: this is stupid and immediately.
Speaker 3: All right, welcome people find you, Michael.
Speaker 6: If people can find me at Captain two phones, mostly
Speaker 6: on threads, it's Captain the Number two Phones. I'm also
Speaker 6: still on X you know, I have no choice and
Speaker 6: Instagram and I make YouTube videos at the Mister Mobile.
Speaker 7: And you can find me at alex h Pran's I
Speaker 7: think on threads and Twitter exists, but I don't check
Speaker 7: it very often. It's also Alex Hcrans and then I'm
Speaker 7: at the Verge. I write and edit at the Verge.
Speaker 7: I'm on the Verge cast every Friday and sometimes on Tuesdays.
Speaker 3: All Right, my name's Ed Zichron. You can find me
Speaker 3: at w W anyway. Sorry, you've been listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 3: We've been recording this in the beautiful iHeartRadio studios here
Speaker 3: in beautiful New York City, Daniel and my producer, Thank
Speaker 3: you so much, Daniel. I'm calling this thing Better off Live.
Speaker 3: Now We're going to do this in multiple cities. I'm
Speaker 3: proud and happy that we did this. Thank you, Michael,
Speaker 3: Thank you Alex. This has been one for and thank
Speaker 3: you all for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 2: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
Speaker 2: is Mattawsowski. You can check out more of his music
Speaker 2: and audio projects at Mattasowski dot com m A T
Speaker 2: T O S O W s KI dot com. You
Speaker 2: can email me at easy at Better offline dot com,
Speaker 2: or visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast
Speaker 2: links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend
Speaker 2: you go to chat dot where's youread dot At to
Speaker 2: visit the discord and go to our slash Better Offline
Speaker 2: to check out I'll Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 1: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 7: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 7: zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 7: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.