Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of iHeart Podcasts and Kaleidoscope.
Speaker 1: I'm Mas Valoshian and today Cara Price and I will
Speaker 1: bring you the headlines this week, including the future of
Speaker 1: search on the web, Ukrainian drone striking deep within Russia, and.
Speaker 2: The very real security risks of vibe coding.
Speaker 1: Then on tech Support you'll talk to Dexter Thomas of
Speaker 1: the kill Switch podcast all about Nintendo, its history and
Speaker 1: where it's a new console. The Switch too fits into
Speaker 1: its legacy.
Speaker 3: Google Yokoy is the person who may Nintendo what it
Speaker 3: is today without him, if they still existed, they would
Speaker 3: still be making playing cards.
Speaker 1: All of that on the weekend. Take It's Friday, June
Speaker 1: sixth Cara Price.
Speaker 2: It is good to be back.
Speaker 4: I don't even recognize that voice.
Speaker 2: What hell, it's better now, but my voice. I lost
Speaker 2: my voice. I had laryngite. It's like this.
Speaker 4: Which is a nightmare for a podcast host in heaven.
Speaker 1: For your wife, well, I get even more needy when
Speaker 1: I can't speak. It turns out read me exactly, and
Speaker 1: she has read notes. In fact, I was on a
Speaker 1: flight back from London on Monday last week and.
Speaker 2: My voice was literally couldn't speakers like this.
Speaker 1: And it was freezing cold on the flight, and I
Speaker 1: already wrapped one blanket around my neck and to try
Speaker 1: and kind of preserve the last hint of whisper. So
Speaker 1: I wrote a note on my phone for the airs
Speaker 1: tudors and said, it's very cold. Do you have any
Speaker 1: more blankets? And I handed it to her and she
Speaker 1: went from quite stern to totally lit up and so
Speaker 1: talking to me in sign language. She was so excited
Speaker 1: to show off the sign and you were like, it
Speaker 1: was like, I felt so ashamed that I couldn't speak
Speaker 1: sign language at that moment.
Speaker 4: But that's another that's for another day.
Speaker 1: Actually, And actually I was nervous were landing because you know,
Speaker 1: obviously you hear all these stories about your non US
Speaker 1: citizens crossing the border. I was like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: imagine if this is the day they choose to interrogate me.
Speaker 1: I literally can't speak. I'm gonna be there for a
Speaker 1: long hass the time.
Speaker 4: It'll also be the best excuse. Sorry I can't do it,
Speaker 4: but you were somehow last week given the gift of speech.
Speaker 1: Gift of technology gave me the gift of speech. So
Speaker 1: I found this app called WISP, And.
Speaker 4: While I was asking, did you just google this?
Speaker 1: I googled apps that can turn whispers into speech.
Speaker 2: And that would go figure. There is one.
Speaker 1: It's called WISP. And obviously I was at home feeling
Speaker 1: sorry for myself being able to speak, so I was like,
Speaker 1: how can I get some attention? I made a video
Speaker 1: of myself in WISP and it revoiced me, and I
Speaker 1: put it in our slack.
Speaker 5: So you've lays, So I'm going to play it again,
Speaker 5: ais As you know, I can literally only talk in
Speaker 5: a whisper. Right now, I just got a lot of writers,
Speaker 5: but maybe something we could lead next week's episode with.
Speaker 1: So I was right, we are leading this week's episode,
Speaker 1: and here we are leading the episode.
Speaker 4: You sound sort of like a Dutch survivor after a
Speaker 4: very long mission being rescued. Only it's true the end
Speaker 4: of a mission.
Speaker 2: It's a Dutch app.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so I think you can train it on
Speaker 1: your voice to sound like you, but I didn't have
Speaker 1: a voice to train it all, so I had to
Speaker 1: use the default, which was indeed Dutch.
Speaker 2: There's two options.
Speaker 1: You can make a selfie video whispering that revoices you,
Speaker 1: or you can call on the phone, and of course.
Speaker 4: Were you speaking in real time?
Speaker 2: I was speaking like this and it was translating in.
Speaker 4: Real in real time. That's incredible.
Speaker 2: I called my mum with it. She said, I hate this.
Speaker 2: Never do this to me again.
Speaker 4: It was I mean, I just think it was incredible
Speaker 4: that you could do. Because if you remember when we
Speaker 4: did sleep, we had to pre record.
Speaker 2: This was our podcast that we hosted together six years ago.
Speaker 4: Six years ago now, and basically I had to train
Speaker 4: an AI model on my voice and then I couldn't
Speaker 4: do it in real time.
Speaker 2: Yes, obviously I'm lucky. I normally have a voice.
Speaker 1: Yes, as you know, yes I do. I do, but
Speaker 1: there are some people who don't. And you know, I
Speaker 1: think Whispy isn't really designed for the laryngitis sufferer who
Speaker 1: needs some extra attention. It's designed for people who've actually
Speaker 1: lost their voices, either to cancer or to trauma or
Speaker 1: to other illnesses. And you know, with that in mind,
Speaker 1: the modifications required to make this slightly better and more
Speaker 1: functional feel pretty achievable.
Speaker 2: And what a miracle.
Speaker 4: Frankly, yeah, absolutely, but it's always a but.
Speaker 2: But my next story is a turn in the other direction.
Speaker 1: And are you familiar with Cory Doctor Rowe and this
Speaker 1: concept he came up with of in shitification.
Speaker 4: Yes, I read about it in the Financial Times.
Speaker 2: And what did you take away from it?
Speaker 4: That the Internet has become a slop festival?
Speaker 1: The Internet has become a slop festival. That is better
Speaker 1: put even than Doctor himself about it.
Speaker 4: As a sort of the Internet as a slime, sort
Speaker 4: of cascading down.
Speaker 1: What he said specifically is in certification is quote a
Speaker 1: theory about what happens when you have power without consequence,
Speaker 1: And he goes on to describe platforms that have hollowed
Speaker 1: themselves out where there's just no value left in them
Speaker 1: except this kind of awful look in So I mean
Speaker 1: that makes me think about what happens if you open
Speaker 1: your Instagram reels today, there's just tons of which is
Speaker 1: not even right.
Speaker 4: I generated it's like, you know, it's like Tom Cruise
Speaker 4: talking to Barack Obama.
Speaker 1: In my case, it's like worms eating dragons and then
Speaker 1: getting a sex back a reflecting my subconscious I mean,
Speaker 1: this concept of incentification, I think is one of the
Speaker 1: kind of great guiding constructs to think about what's happening
Speaker 1: right now. But I think concerningly it's actually happening right now,
Speaker 1: potentially the world Wide Web itself. Of course, I'm talking
Speaker 1: about AI summaries. We all know about them from chet
Speaker 1: GPT and how they're overlaid on Google, but now Internet
Speaker 1: browsers themselves are building them in this appointed to Axios, Firefox,
Speaker 1: Microsoft Edge. All you have to do is hover your
Speaker 1: mouse over a weblink and you get an automatic summary,
Speaker 1: which is kind of crazy, like the click through rate,
Speaker 1: the great metric, Yes of our age.
Speaker 4: Yes, it is going to be gone, It's going to
Speaker 4: be gone. Yeah.
Speaker 2: What does that means people.
Speaker 4: Are rolling their mouse over a link? Yeah, nobody's going
Speaker 4: to click through wild to your point about in sitification,
Speaker 4: the only reason that good content exists on the Internet
Speaker 4: that is even worth summarizing in the first place is
Speaker 4: because people had an incentive to create it. It would
Speaker 4: drive traffic and maybe even add dollars to their websites.
Speaker 4: But it's definitely a blow to creatives out there, Like,
Speaker 4: is there an incentive to publish on the web anymore?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Look to your point, I think a world where there's
Speaker 1: no reward for posting online will be a poorer world
Speaker 1: for us, but also ironically for AI. Because obviously AI
Speaker 1: needs new days to train on, and so a few
Speaker 1: people are posting news and opinions and arguments on the
Speaker 1: internet that will ultimately lead to a poorer AI.
Speaker 2: So this is like the opposite of a virtuous circle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, an AI is already so fast. It
Speaker 4: feels like every week I see an embarrassing story of
Speaker 4: a mistake that AI made.
Speaker 1: I mean, the pizza with the glue is obviously time classic, brilliant,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't end.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's the thing two years ago.
Speaker 4: And everything, and it's creating more interesting shit. Yeah, that's
Speaker 4: what keeps happening. And I think one of my recent
Speaker 4: favorites was the AI generated summer reading list that this
Speaker 4: is not AI's fault, that made its way to being
Speaker 4: published in the Chicago Sun Times. Like there's a photo
Speaker 4: of a librarian holding up a fake summer reading.
Speaker 2: List of fake books, of fake books.
Speaker 4: One by Isabelle a Ende, a very famous author, one
Speaker 4: by Percival Everett who just won the Pulitzer Prize.
Speaker 2: And these are fake titles of books they never read.
Speaker 4: Bake titles of books, no vetting. But I mean, that's
Speaker 4: not AI's fault. Actually, that's the fault of the Chicago
Speaker 4: Sun Times. I think in that one it definitely does,
Speaker 4: but it doesn't. I think what's so kind of upsetting
Speaker 4: is that it doesn't surprise me in the age of
Speaker 4: automation of everything, that we just sort of accept it
Speaker 4: to be real.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 1: And Google, which for as long as I can remember,
Speaker 1: has been the king of search, is doubling down on
Speaker 1: AI summaries. Essentially, it just released something called AI Mode,
Speaker 1: and this turns straightforward Google search queries into an AI
Speaker 1: chat conversation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, it sounds like how a lot of
Speaker 4: people are already using chat GPT but in your browser.
Speaker 1: Well exactly, that is designed to prevent them from using
Speaker 1: chatpt and instead staying in their browser. There was this
Speaker 1: article in the FT a couple of weeks ago with
Speaker 1: the headline can Google still dominate search in the age
Speaker 1: of AI chatbots? AI Mode shows you, in real time
Speaker 1: how they're trying to answer that question, which could ultimately
Speaker 1: be existential for them. Of course, to no unsurprised. Earlier
Speaker 1: reviews of AI mode have found some pretty unreliable information.
Speaker 1: A reporter at The New York Times actually used AI
Speaker 1: mode to plan his daughter's birthday.
Speaker 4: Party parenting presented by Google.
Speaker 1: Yes, and needless to say, it go very smoothly. The
Speaker 1: reporter asked Google AI mode to find parks in his
Speaker 1: area with picnic tables, and Google provided the reporter with
Speaker 1: a bulletedist of parks with some helpful information about each,
Speaker 1: and so he went out to scout two of the suggestions,
Speaker 1: but of course neither had picnic tables.
Speaker 4: So he basically was given nothing that he needed.
Speaker 1: Nothing of value, and thank goodness, I think he didn't
Speaker 1: have his disappointed kids in terms.
Speaker 2: So anyway he was during the scout, he was writing
Speaker 2: a story, so he soldied on.
Speaker 1: He went back home and told AI mode that the
Speaker 1: parks didn't have tables. AI apologized and spat out another list,
Speaker 1: but it included the same parks he'd already visited and
Speaker 1: knew that they didn't have a picnic table, so it
Speaker 1: didn't take on the new information.
Speaker 4: So getting Google's AI mode to plan your kid's birthday
Speaker 4: essentially at this point he should have just let his
Speaker 4: kid plan the kid's birthday.
Speaker 1: I guess less candy in Google ai mode, but yes.
Speaker 1: The reporter also asked Aimo to find an affordable car wash,
Speaker 1: and it listed one business as having a twenty five
Speaker 1: dollar car whah. When he got there, the real cost
Speaker 1: was sixty five dollars. What's interesting, though, is that when
Speaker 1: the journalist did the same queries through regular, good old
Speaker 1: fashioned Google about the picnic tables and the car washes,
Speaker 1: guess what, go figure, he got the information he wanted
Speaker 1: and it was correct.
Speaker 4: You know, I don't like to be a doomer about this,
Speaker 4: but your reference to incertification makes sense to me. Like,
Speaker 4: here's Google, Yeah, the search engine that we've been all
Speaker 4: using for twenty five years, with a mode that's making
Speaker 4: Google worse.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, for all intents and purposes, Google works, We'll
Speaker 4: work pretty well, but they're trying to keep up with
Speaker 4: what the Internet is right now, and as such are
Speaker 4: in shitifying it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And of course the question I have is, in this
Speaker 1: new world, how long will normal people bother to post
Speaker 1: helpful information online if the default becomes an AI mode
Speaker 1: that is unreliable and that doesn't reward the content creator
Speaker 1: for their contribution. I was actually talking to a friend
Speaker 1: of ours the other day and she mentioned that she
Speaker 1: actually no longer used is Google, which I was pretty
Speaker 1: shocked by.
Speaker 4: That's such a bold class.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Specifically for search. She used this search engine called Kagi,
Speaker 1: which is Japanese for key. I learned thirty seconds ago Google.
Speaker 1: I googled it and it touts itself as being a
Speaker 1: quote premium search engine. Users can tailor their search results
Speaker 1: their own preferences, and they don't get shown ads because
Speaker 1: the service monetizes through subscription rather than ads.
Speaker 4: Interesting. Well, no offense to the Kagigs coagistas there, but
Speaker 4: I do think people will generally stick to the devil
Speaker 4: they know, and the devil they know is Google. You know.
Speaker 4: At the same time, progress is not linear right now.
Speaker 4: Should Google's AI mode be your preferred method for birthday
Speaker 4: party planning? Probably? Not. In a year, maybe it could.
Speaker 4: Maybe it will show you where the picnic table is,
Speaker 4: you know, lest we forget, I used to ask Jeeves.
Speaker 2: Well, was the last time you asked you something?
Speaker 4: I don't know? But you know, we actually live in
Speaker 4: a world where I could build my own ass, Jeeves,
Speaker 4: which is what are you talking about? Well, I wouldn't
Speaker 4: do it myself, but this has a lot to do
Speaker 4: with my headline of the week, which is, you know,
Speaker 4: I don't even know if I like vibe coating. I
Speaker 4: just like the term vibe coating. It's a great You know,
Speaker 4: there's this app called Lovable, and it's a sweetest startup
Speaker 4: that calls its product the last piece of software, the
Speaker 4: last of us. It might be, it might be. So.
Speaker 4: The way it works is that you basically, Lovable has
Speaker 4: a chatbot and you tell it to make an app
Speaker 4: for you, and you can say, can you build me
Speaker 4: an app where I can track all the hats that
Speaker 4: I own, so I will stop spending money on hats
Speaker 4: when I reminded of how many hats I own. Same
Speaker 4: thing with glasses, and maybe Lovable would generate an app
Speaker 4: where I can log my extensive hat or glasses collection.
Speaker 2: That does sound pretty cool.
Speaker 4: It is. There is a problem with it, though, which
Speaker 4: is that it's having some issues in the security department. Semaphore,
Speaker 4: you know, trust the old Semaphore. Yes, ran a headline
Speaker 4: the hottest new vibe coding startup maybe a sitting duck
Speaker 4: for hackers.
Speaker 2: You know, I saw that headline.
Speaker 1: I didn't actually read the story, but it was fascinating,
Speaker 1: so I'm glad you'll bring it today.
Speaker 4: There's always a whistleblower at a competing company and it's
Speaker 4: like your company is doing wrong. And so an employee
Speaker 4: at a competing vibe coding company called Replet not confused
Speaker 4: with Reddit Yes, release a report that shows some serious
Speaker 4: vulnerabilities for users, and on lovable site, the company showcases
Speaker 4: some of the apps and websites that users have made
Speaker 4: with the software. There's one called Can't Make This Stuff Up.
Speaker 4: There's one called scam.
Speaker 2: Nail, Scam nails, ay, hangnail but.
Speaker 4: Yeah, which is a community platform for users to get
Speaker 4: expert advice on whether or not they're dealing with a scam.
Speaker 4: There's another I mean, these names. I wonder if Lovable
Speaker 4: comes up with the names. There's another website called info rid,
Speaker 4: which promises to remove your personal information from around seventy
Speaker 4: data brokers so you receive less spam. That sounds good,
Speaker 4: I mean, they all sound like great ideas, but this
Speaker 4: report found that of the over sixteen hundred web apps
Speaker 4: featured on Lovable Site, one hundred and seventy of them
Speaker 4: had vulnerabilities.
Speaker 2: And when you say vulnerabilities, I know it.
Speaker 4: Sounds they're not emotional vulnerability. Things that I think people
Speaker 4: find very important, which is like their name, their email address,
Speaker 4: and most importantly financial information, like anything that's extremely personal.
Speaker 1: So the advice from parents and children that we used
Speaker 1: to be don't get into a stranger's car, it's now
Speaker 1: don't use software that you find online because what I say.
Speaker 4: You know, there are pitfalls. Even if AI can write
Speaker 4: flawless code, there can be security flaws. For example, when
Speaker 4: you tell Lovable that you want to make a website,
Speaker 4: it's just going to make the website plain and simple.
Speaker 4: But for a website to work, it has to be
Speaker 4: connected to a database that can store things like user
Speaker 4: accounts and payment information. And that's the work historically of
Speaker 4: seasoned software developers, who even season software developers can make mistakes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's I joked about don't go into
Speaker 1: strangers at but like, you know, it's going to get
Speaker 1: hard or not to use the web.
Speaker 2: You've got AI summaries overlaid everywhere, and.
Speaker 1: Then when you do get to a website or an
Speaker 1: app that you want to go into, you know, you
Speaker 1: have to think about whether or not it's been VIBE
Speaker 1: coded and whether the security on the back end will
Speaker 1: be functional. I mean, it's just like it's kind of
Speaker 1: a little bit of a headspin there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know, Lovable does offer an easy way
Speaker 4: to connect to a properly managed database to store payment
Speaker 4: information and like it's a service called sounds a lot
Speaker 4: like a Nicki Minaj song super Base. But the vulnerability
Speaker 4: report found that on some of these Lovable made apps,
Speaker 4: the super base database was not configured correctly, which led
Speaker 4: to the security flaws. So that might be pointing to
Speaker 4: the issue that you're flagging as that people don't really
Speaker 4: know how to check their work yet and that doing
Speaker 4: that takes some creative thinking and actually a little bit
Speaker 4: of paranoil, like how might my passion project be vulnerable?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I.
Speaker 1: Guess a lot of software developers do this red teaming,
Speaker 1: like they try and get into the headspace of an
Speaker 1: attacker and the attack their own product.
Speaker 2: Most vibe coders are not self.
Speaker 4: Not necessarily coders, No exactly.
Speaker 1: So repltu replit raised their hand and said, heyre's the
Speaker 1: problem over there? Yeah sevenphore around the story. Yes, how
Speaker 1: did Lovable respond?
Speaker 4: Lovable responded on x formerly known as Twitter, saying, quote,
Speaker 4: we're not yet where we want to be in terms
Speaker 4: of security, and we're committed to keep improving the security
Speaker 4: posture for all Lovable users. It just reminds me if
Speaker 4: like all of a sudden, someone who didn't work at
Speaker 4: Nike was like, I'm going to be Nike today and
Speaker 4: I'm going to make these sneakers.
Speaker 1: Well, that happens, right, I mean, as a whole, this
Speaker 1: company spend billions of dollars on pattern and protection and
Speaker 1: infringement on their copyright and stuff because they don't want
Speaker 1: to erode trust in their brand by having knockoffs, injured.
Speaker 2: People, a hut and whatever it is.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly, but now we're in this weird error on
Speaker 1: the Internet where you know, we've developed this shared sort
Speaker 1: of status quo understanding of about like you can trust
Speaker 1: an app that you find in the App Store or
Speaker 1: an Android or like most legit seeming websites probably are legit.
Speaker 1: You know, obviously have to be have a spearfishing and stuff,
Speaker 1: but like this whole kind of shared basis of like
Speaker 1: being able to input your data with some degree of
Speaker 1: confidence online. And of course there's amazing things that you
Speaker 1: can do with vibe coding. It's pretty cool that you
Speaker 1: can make a functional prototype for an idea and get
Speaker 1: people excited within just a few moments or a few days,
Speaker 1: and that really is cool, but at the same time,
Speaker 1: like at the cost of blowing up this security architecture
Speaker 1: that we built over the last twenty.
Speaker 4: Years, right, and security has actually been a key concern
Speaker 4: ever since the beginning of the Internet, and security measures
Speaker 4: and hackers have gotten more sophisticated, so it's kind of
Speaker 4: unreal that the big fad is to make products that
Speaker 4: are less sophisticated.
Speaker 2: Totally.
Speaker 1: I really really want to get one of the vibe
Speaker 1: coding people on the show, whether it's Cursor or Replet
Speaker 1: or Lovable, it'd be very interesting to have someone from
Speaker 1: those companies, So Will maybe.
Speaker 4: We should have Replet and Lovable in a Frost Nixon
Speaker 4: wow of.
Speaker 2: So we'll work on that. But in the meantime, we've
Speaker 2: got some brief headlines.
Speaker 4: So if you're someone who thinks that ring doorbells are
Speaker 4: a step too far in the direction of surveillance, I
Speaker 4: would like to present to you the world of New
Speaker 4: York City Facebook mom groups, which I'm very familiar with
Speaker 4: because a lot of my friends are in them. According
Speaker 4: to the Daily Mail me some nannies in New York
Speaker 4: City's Upper East Side are paranoid that they are being
Speaker 4: spied on, and this reminds me spy cam has been
Speaker 4: a thing with Nanni's for a long time, Like this
Speaker 4: is not people used to embed them in like stuffed animals.
Speaker 4: But in a Facebook group aptly titled maybe embarrassingly titled
Speaker 4: Moms of the Upper east Side, members have posted pictures
Speaker 4: of Nanny's with captions like if you recognize this blonde
Speaker 4: girl with pigtails I saw yesterday afternoon around seventy eighth
Speaker 4: and Second Avenue, Please dm me. I think you will
Speaker 4: want to know what your nanny.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, it's like a horror movie.
Speaker 4: It's pen out decks. There are posts claiming to have
Speaker 4: seen nanny's harshly handling children in public, amongst other allegations
Speaker 4: of mistreatment. Some members have responded critically, saying that the
Speaker 4: posts lack context and should be handled cautiously. The big
Speaker 4: takeaway is that Facebook groups for moms are actually a
Speaker 4: really thriving hot zone for Facebook.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 1: Last story today is a moresemble one. For the last
Speaker 1: eighteen months, Ukraine planted drones secretly in mobile homes and sheds,
Speaker 1: staged on flatbed trucks and part near military runways in Russia,
Speaker 1: and on Sunday they attacked drones flew out of their
Speaker 1: enclosures and destroyed at least thirteen Russian aircraft and damage others.
Speaker 1: That's according to Ukrainian officials, who said that some of
Speaker 1: the destroyed aircraft were actually capable of launching nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1: These attacks took place two and eight hundred miles from
Speaker 1: Ukraine's border with Russia. That's more or less a distance
Speaker 1: from here as in New York City, London. Given that
Speaker 1: these drones targeted Russia's nuclear capacity, some in Russia have
Speaker 1: said that this triggers a nuclear response under their doctrine.
Speaker 1: The moment is being widely compared to Russia's Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 1: And actually I interviewed Jake Sullivan, the former National Security Advisor,
Speaker 1: this week, and we talked about this exact story and
Speaker 1: also about how the US is preparing for a similar
Speaker 1: type of attack. I mean, could this happen here? The
Speaker 1: answer is yes if we don't prepare, And we'll publish
Speaker 1: that interview. By the way, this is a tease next Wednesday.
Speaker 4: As the story, We're going to take a short break.
Speaker 4: But when we're back, the rise, then fall, the rise,
Speaker 4: then fall, then rise again. Of Nintendo and how the
Speaker 4: switch to could be another make or break moment.
Speaker 5: Stay with us.
Speaker 4: So for our next segment, we're going to talk about
Speaker 4: a company that's released some pretty iconic games and hardware
Speaker 4: over the years. No, not Hasbro Nintendo as one was
Speaker 4: the last time you played a Nintendo game?
Speaker 1: You know, I haven't played a Nintendo game for a
Speaker 1: very long time. I briefly lusted after a Wii. I
Speaker 1: like the idea of playing tennis.
Speaker 4: But to say that you lusted after a.
Speaker 2: Please.
Speaker 1: I did have a game Boy when I was eleven
Speaker 1: or twelve years old, and I probably spent two or
Speaker 1: three hundred hours playing Pokemon and wanted to beat both
Speaker 1: the red and blue version of Pokemon on my game Boy.
Speaker 4: And we know what happens when you set your mind
Speaker 4: to something.
Speaker 2: And I did catch them all.
Speaker 1: But you know what, we batted around some ideas this
Speaker 1: week in our production meeting out what to do for
Speaker 1: our weekly tech support segment, and I actually wasn't immediately
Speaker 1: sold uncovering Nintendo.
Speaker 4: No, you were not, And then we had to be like,
Speaker 4: Nintendo has unbelievable cultural clout in the IP space. You
Speaker 4: just mentioned Pokemon, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Super Mario the most
Speaker 4: successful movies right now are coming from IP that is
Speaker 4: based on games.
Speaker 1: You know, when you're like not thinking about something and
Speaker 1: then you start thinking about something and then you see
Speaker 1: it everywhere.
Speaker 4: It's called synchronicity, is what it's called.
Speaker 1: Yes, well it happened to me because I was watching
Speaker 1: the Formula One this weekend and Max Vstappen bashed into
Speaker 1: George Russell and the drivers were hanging out afterwards in
Speaker 1: the like chill out room, and Lando Norris from McLaren
Speaker 1: f one said, I've done that before, but only a
Speaker 1: Mario cut, okay. And then I was watching the French
Speaker 1: Open and Yanick Sinner, the number one tennis player in
Speaker 1: the world, was wearing this cute blue and green outfit
Speaker 1: and everyone was chanting Luigi in the crowd, and then
Speaker 1: he posted a picture of himself saying, Luigi plays again.
Speaker 1: So this is like you can't avoid it, and I
Speaker 1: think it's totally fundamental to our culture. So I'm very,
Speaker 1: very glad that you and Eliza and Torri alerted me
Speaker 1: to the era of my ways. There's also an interesting
Speaker 1: business story here. I remember back in twenty seventeen when
Speaker 1: Nintendo released Switch one. All of this coverage about if
Speaker 1: Nintendo didn't succeed with this console, this one hundred year
Speaker 1: old Japanese business might fail. Not only did they succeed,
Speaker 1: the switch became the third best selling console of all time,
Speaker 1: and now eight years later, at last, there's a new
Speaker 1: Nintendo console, the Switch To. It's super interesting moment because, weirdly,
Speaker 1: despite all the obsession with Nintendo IP, there hasn't been,
Speaker 1: at least in my corner of the Internet, a huge
Speaker 1: amount of buzz about this release. So today we have
Speaker 1: somebody with us who is perfectly placed to help us
Speaker 1: understand the history of Nintendo's placed in our culture and
Speaker 1: what the Switch To could mean for the company. Is
Speaker 1: our friend next to Thomas. He took over the Sleepwalkers
Speaker 1: podcast from us and renamed it kill Switch. It's a
Speaker 1: great podcast rename.
Speaker 2: We do as on.
Speaker 1: The Collioscope and the iHeart Network, and it's all about
Speaker 1: our technology charged lives. Dexter has spent the last couple
Speaker 1: of weeks learning all about Nintendo and how it became
Speaker 1: the company is today for an upcoming episode, Dexter, Welcome
Speaker 1: to tech stuff.
Speaker 3: What's going on?
Speaker 1: Nice to be here, so I want to get into
Speaker 1: kind of what draws you to the Nintendo story, But
Speaker 1: what is the role of Nintendo in our culture and
Speaker 1: how has it shaped the way we interact with technology?
Speaker 3: You know, Nintendo is I mean for people of a
Speaker 3: certain age and older. You'll remember when any video game
Speaker 3: you had in the house, it was Nintendo. You could
Speaker 3: have a Sega genesis. You know, your moms would say,
Speaker 3: turn off that Nintendo. Mom was not a Nintendo business Sega, right.
Speaker 3: I think that if Nintendo were to announce that they
Speaker 3: were going out of business, I mean, just think about
Speaker 3: that for a second, you'd actually feel something which is
Speaker 3: not something that you can say about almost any company.
Speaker 3: It's an unusual company, you know. I compare it honestly
Speaker 3: to Disney, just in how much work they've done to
Speaker 3: build up a kind of mystique that ties itself to
Speaker 3: your childhood. But they're a very interesting company.
Speaker 1: Can you tell us a bit though, about the background
Speaker 1: of Nintendo, because I think it's at least one hundred
Speaker 1: years old, right, and it didn't even begin as a
Speaker 1: games company.
Speaker 3: That's right. Yeah, So Nintendo started out in eighteen eighty nine.
Speaker 3: It is a very long running company with some shall
Speaker 3: we say, murky origins. But yeah, Nintendo was. For most
Speaker 3: of Nintendo's lifespan, I guess you could say it was
Speaker 3: a not very successful company which mostly made playing cards.
Speaker 3: So they started making the kind of playing cards that
Speaker 3: you know, most of our listeners might be familiar with.
Speaker 3: You know that how the Jack King, Queen Ace kind
Speaker 3: of thing. They also made a game called Hanahuda, which
Speaker 3: is kind of like a traditional Japanese card game. The
Speaker 3: cards are a little bit smaller, they're pretty intricately designed,
Speaker 3: and the game's actually still played today, although it's more
Speaker 3: well known in Japan than anywhere else.
Speaker 4: I would say, yeah, so I do want to know
Speaker 4: about the murky origins, because, as you said, it is
Speaker 4: a lot like Disney. You think Nintendo, you think family friendly,
Speaker 4: you think of your childhood. So I'm curious what was
Speaker 4: so murky?
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, so the president of Nintendo was basically willing
Speaker 3: to do anything to make money. For a while they
Speaker 3: were selling instant ramen, they ran taxis, love hotels, which,
Speaker 3: if you're not familiar with love hotels, Japanese apartments are
Speaker 3: pretty small. If you would like to go on a
Speaker 3: date and the date goes very well, and you and
Speaker 3: your partner would like to spend some time in the
Speaker 3: evening together, you go to a love hotel. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: they were involved in basically anything that could turn a profit.
Speaker 3: Some of these things work, some of these didn't. But
Speaker 3: their mainstay was cards. So gambling in Japan or most
Speaker 3: gambling is illegal, and gambling definitely was illegal then, but
Speaker 3: Nintendo's hung off of the cards were known for being
Speaker 3: pretty decent and they were very widely available, and so
Speaker 3: one of Nintendo's actually big customer bases was illegal gambling houses.
Speaker 3: So you would find their cards at you know, these
Speaker 3: kind of dodgy places where people would go and try
Speaker 3: to make money.
Speaker 1: But how did Nintendo go from gambling to video games?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is where things get interesting. There's a
Speaker 3: few stories about how they got started, but basically it
Speaker 3: all revolves around this kind of not very serious college
Speaker 3: student named goompe Occoy. So this electrical engineering student, he's
Speaker 3: just graduated and he gets a job at again, this
Speaker 3: card company called Nintendo, which all his friends were much
Speaker 3: more successful students. He's kind of at this second, third
Speaker 3: rate company. Again, Nintendo is making gambling cards. They're making cards,
Speaker 3: are using gambling, and anybody who's been to Vegas you
Speaker 3: know that gamblers take their cards very seriously. If there's
Speaker 3: any kind of manufacturing defect, if there's a divot in
Speaker 3: the side or anything like that, you can tell what
Speaker 3: the other side of the card is. This is a
Speaker 3: bad thing. And so gamblers, or especially these gambling houses,
Speaker 3: needed the cards to be made perfectly. Well, most cards
Speaker 3: at this point, this is sixties, a lot of these
Speaker 3: traditional cards are still made by hand. Nintendo gets some
Speaker 3: bright idea, well, let's do this stuff with a machine.
Speaker 3: But the machine they have isn't working perfectly. So what
Speaker 3: do you do if your machine doesn't work. You get
Speaker 3: an engineer. So they hire this guy who not a
Speaker 3: very serious student. Darn't hear, a college drop out. But
Speaker 3: they hire this guy for their card company to fix
Speaker 3: their glue machine. He goes in, takes a look at it,
Speaker 3: and pretty quickly he figures out what the problem is
Speaker 3: and he just says, okay, yeah, well fix the paddles
Speaker 3: on the glue machine and you're good. And he goes
Speaker 3: in the back room and just starts messing around and
Speaker 3: doing his own thing. And the way that he tells
Speaker 3: it is, after he fixes his glue machine, he kind
Speaker 3: of goes in the back room and he starts making
Speaker 3: toys just for fun as a hobby. This is something
Speaker 3: he did as a kid. And one of the first
Speaker 3: toys he makes is it's this. If you imagine old
Speaker 3: Warner Brothers cartoons, you know, there would be the kind
Speaker 3: of like a punching glove on a spring. Basically, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: So he makes something kind of like that, except instead
Speaker 3: of a punching glove on a spring, he makes a
Speaker 3: grabbing hand on a spring where it expands and if
Speaker 3: you push one end of it together, it reaches out
Speaker 3: and grabs something. And he calls it the Ultra hand.
Speaker 3: And as the president of Nintendo is walking by, looks
Speaker 3: in the room says, hey, dude, what are you doing
Speaker 3: And he says, uh, making a toy, And the president,
Speaker 3: according to legend, looks at it and says, huh, you
Speaker 3: know what, let's sell that put in production. He puts
Speaker 3: it in production and it sells like crazy, and that
Speaker 3: toy does very well. It's one of those big fad toys,
Speaker 3: kind of like the slinky here in the US, right,
Speaker 3: and President goes back to yukoy and he says, Okay,
Speaker 3: that was good. Do it again, and he does it again,
Speaker 3: and he does it again, and he just keeps doing it.
Speaker 3: This guy just keeps cranking out hit after hit. It
Speaker 3: becomes clear that toys are a good line of income
Speaker 3: for Nintendo. They basically make him the head of the
Speaker 3: research and development department, put some engineers under him and say, man,
Speaker 3: just keep doing your thing, keep doing your thing, and
Speaker 3: he does.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 3: The important thing is, goop a Yakoy really thought of
Speaker 3: himself as a toy maker, and I think that's something
Speaker 3: important to understand about Nintendo. Nintendo functionally is a toy company.
Speaker 3: They're not really a video game company. They're a toy company.
Speaker 3: It just so happens that they're best selling toys are
Speaker 3: video games.
Speaker 4: When does the pivot happen though, and video games start
Speaker 4: to be their business?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so goope. Yukoy had again continued to make games,
Speaker 3: and some of these are electronics. He's an electrical engineer,
Speaker 3: so he's interested in electronics. And at some point he
Speaker 3: gets the idea that arcades are doing very well. Can
Speaker 3: we make this more portable? And they come up with
Speaker 3: something called The Game and watch this thing comes out
Speaker 3: in nineteen eighty and the real innovation here is that
Speaker 3: this is not the most technologically advanced machine in the world.
Speaker 3: It's actually very very simple. It's about identical to a
Speaker 3: literal calculator. But these had very very simple games on them,
Speaker 3: and one of them was it's just called ball and
Speaker 3: all you're doing is it's literally just called ball, and
Speaker 3: you are juggling a ball back and forth and trying
Speaker 3: to keep it from dropping. And the ball moved was
Speaker 3: back and forth and it kind of beeps, and it
Speaker 3: kind of goes.
Speaker 2: Beep beep, beep, beep beep.
Speaker 3: So it's very simple, it's very slow, but this was
Speaker 3: really a cheap way to bring the concept of the
Speaker 3: game you play in the arcade. It's not quite that,
Speaker 3: but it's in your pocket and it was cheap, which
Speaker 3: was pretty amazing for the time. And these things again
Speaker 3: so like hotcakes.
Speaker 2: What is this idea of lateral thinking with withized technology.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is truly I think what goombe okoy
Speaker 3: did that sets them apart from everyone else. So that
Speaker 3: is the literal translation. Kai heiko literally translates out to
Speaker 3: lateral thinking of withered technology. I might translate it as
Speaker 3: something more like sideways thinking with mature technology.
Speaker 2: So you're good American capitalist after all, Well.
Speaker 3: This is the thing I mean, Goomyakoi was. You know,
Speaker 3: he was an innovator, He was a toy maker. He
Speaker 3: was a guy who just liked messing around. But he
Speaker 3: was also a very smart businessman, right, and so he
Speaker 3: would look at what was available, and he would not
Speaker 3: try to use the most technologically advanced device that was
Speaker 3: out there. He would purposefully pick old technology that was proven,
Speaker 3: sometimes a decade old technology, decade old chips, five year
Speaker 3: old chips, and say, okay, what can I do with this.
Speaker 3: Great example of this is the Lefty RX classic Goompeyakoy product.
Speaker 3: So this is a remote control car. The RX stends
Speaker 3: remote control that only turns left, hence the word lefty.
Speaker 3: So they just lean into it, yes, which sounds like
Speaker 3: a terrible idea, but if you think about it, you know,
Speaker 3: sixties going into the seventies, Japan not a rich country
Speaker 3: at this point, a lot of poor kids, and not
Speaker 3: everybody can afford a remote control car, radio control car, right,
Speaker 3: And so what he did was he said, okay, how
Speaker 3: can we strip this down? Well, if you watch NASCAR,
Speaker 3: if you watch Formula One, I hate to say it,
Speaker 3: all they do is go left, No offense. That's skill
Speaker 3: sport and again my deepest respect to all the F
Speaker 3: one fans out there. It is a sport which involves
Speaker 3: primarily going straight and then occasionally left, and that is it.
Speaker 3: And he said, okay, well let's do it. And so
Speaker 3: the car basically has two buttons. You turn it on,
Speaker 3: it goes straight. You push another button and it goes left.
Speaker 3: And this toy was a quarter of the price something
Speaker 3: like a normal remote control car. And so now kids
Speaker 3: can have this car. Again, it's not an act of
Speaker 3: charity to the children of Japan. This is the money making,
Speaker 3: you know operation after all. But he was able to
Speaker 3: strip things down to their essence and again take mature
Speaker 3: technology technology, the worked that was out there, and think
Speaker 3: a little bit sideways.
Speaker 4: So just to pivot a little bit and talk a
Speaker 4: little bit more about the actual console. Yukoi passed away
Speaker 4: in nineteen eighty seven. They obviously continue to make games
Speaker 4: in hardware. They have some ups and downs. I thought
Speaker 4: GameCube was, you know, the second coming because of crazy
Speaker 4: Taxi and those little discs those I mean, it was
Speaker 4: everything to me. Yeah, the market apparently disagreed. Other consoles
Speaker 4: like we which I also ruined my tennis game, the
Speaker 4: switch has done very well. What do you think sets
Speaker 4: apart some consoles from other consoles.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, Nintendo's got an interesting up and down
Speaker 3: pattern which we could probably connect some dots on. Basically,
Speaker 3: the pattern is since the early two thousands, when Nintendo
Speaker 3: tries to make a sophisticated machine, a technologically advanced machine,
Speaker 3: it usually flops. When they ease back and just make
Speaker 3: something that is just interesting. Again, I would argue, leaning
Speaker 3: back on goompe Yacoy's philosophy of sideways thinking, with mature
Speaker 3: technology they do better. So if you look at the GameCube,
Speaker 3: they actually were trying to compete with the more powerful systems.
Speaker 3: It didn't do so well. Yeah, the Wei, which functionally
Speaker 3: uses the same insides as the GameCube, really released years later.
Speaker 3: It's not an advanced machine, it's not competing against the
Speaker 3: PlayStation three, but somehow it starts out selling everything else.
Speaker 3: Then they come out with the WIU, which is the
Speaker 3: successor to the Wei, and they are trying to play
Speaker 3: this game of all right, we got the good graphics,
Speaker 3: we got everything everybody else has, and it flops, flops
Speaker 3: really badly. Actually, they're in trouble. The Switch comes out.
Speaker 3: The Switch is not an advanced machine. The Switch is.
Speaker 3: It's like a cell phone, man. And this is a
Speaker 3: time when the Place four, the Xbox one is on
Speaker 3: the market, and it works for them because they're not
Speaker 3: playing this game of chasing graphics, of chasing processing power.
Speaker 3: They're really in their own lane, which is this fun?
Speaker 3: Does it work? Is it cheap enough for us to
Speaker 3: make a bunch of these and still make it fun?
Speaker 1: Why do you think the Switch did so well and
Speaker 1: eight years later, what can we expect from its successor.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I mean I think there's a combination
Speaker 3: of things. I think they actually went back to their
Speaker 3: roots Nintendo. Did you know what the funny thing about
Speaker 3: the Switch is they're thinking of it as a toy
Speaker 3: you can take to a bar and play with your friends.
Speaker 3: Also another kind of black swan thing. Can't predict quarantine,
Speaker 3: people are locked down. Animal Crossing comes out. Everybody's playing
Speaker 3: Animal Crossing. It is a not very technologically advanced game,
Speaker 3: but it lets you play with your friends.
Speaker 1: Try to say, it's really clarifying for me what you said,
Speaker 1: because I didn't really understand the distinction between a toy
Speaker 1: and a console. But this is like tech that sort
Speaker 1: of mobilizes you in the world rather than sucks you
Speaker 1: into a private world exactly.
Speaker 3: And you know, let's not forget that the Game Boy,
Speaker 3: one of its major features was the fact that you
Speaker 3: could link two of them up or four of them
Speaker 3: up actually, so Tetris you could play against somebody. So
Speaker 3: really the idea of it is you're supposed to go
Speaker 3: outside and play with your friends. That's actually what goumpe
Speaker 3: Ukoy wants. I think he wanted you to play with
Speaker 3: the toy with your friends. The switch is another version
Speaker 3: of that. And I was asking somebody that who actually
Speaker 3: got the opportunity to play it before most people did,
Speaker 3: you know, got to play it as a member of
Speaker 3: the press. And he said, well, do you have a switch?
Speaker 3: And I said yeah, And he said you've played your switch, right,
Speaker 3: I said yeah, And he said, well, you've basically played
Speaker 3: the switch too. It's more the same. Is there a
Speaker 3: slight bump in graphic capability? Sure? Is the fit and
Speaker 3: finish of the machine a little bit better, absolutely, But honestly,
Speaker 3: it's another switch. And if you want to play the
Speaker 3: new games, eventually you're going to have to get the
Speaker 3: new switch because it's a little bit more advanced. But
Speaker 3: this is just them realizing I think that truly, if
Speaker 3: it ain't broke, don't fix it. And again, they're using
Speaker 3: slightly older hardware, simple to program for, They're not chasing graphics,
Speaker 3: and it's more of the same for better for worse,
Speaker 3: it's more the same.
Speaker 4: I mean in that way, you have to expect that
Speaker 4: it will do well right, that it won't go the
Speaker 4: way of something that's newer that is not a safe bet.
Speaker 3: Well, so this is where it gets a little bit
Speaker 3: complicated because the switch too is kind of expensive. The
Speaker 3: games are also quite expensive. Games are eighty bucks. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: so ok, But I think price things aside them sticking
Speaker 3: to more of the same honestly as or in Nintendo,
Speaker 3: and that for them, it's hard to argue against that
Speaker 3: being the best choice. I think that really is where
Speaker 3: they do best is just stick with what works, make
Speaker 3: more fun toys.
Speaker 1: Just to close, you know, we start off the conversation
Speaker 1: talking about valuable IP that Nintendo owns, I mean, Mario
Speaker 1: and Zelder and others. How much of an inducement will
Speaker 1: that be for people to buy the switch to and
Speaker 1: how much of that IP is living elsewhere in the
Speaker 1: world now, whether it's movies and theme parks, like how
Speaker 1: much on Nintendo relying on the console business too be Disney.
Speaker 3: I think they're a bit of a crossroads for that
Speaker 3: because for the longest time they were very, very protective
Speaker 3: of their intellectual property. I think that what Nintendo has
Speaker 3: going for them is that you cannot interact with any
Speaker 3: of their intellectual property unless it's in an environment that
Speaker 3: they've sanctioned it, you know. I mean, they've made the
Speaker 3: theme park, They're very judicious and careful about that, They've
Speaker 3: made the movie. They're very judicious and careful about that.
Speaker 3: You will not be playing Mario on your computer. You
Speaker 3: have to buy the consoles. So they have such a
Speaker 3: draw to their intellectual property, Zelda, Mario that they really
Speaker 3: are banking on the fact that people still want Mario
Speaker 3: and they will pay whatever price it is that we
Speaker 3: set for access to that. So, you know, I think
Speaker 3: they are diversifying in some ways, but they are probably
Speaker 3: still betting that having Mario out there in a movie
Speaker 3: and Zelda potentially out there in a movie is going
Speaker 3: to bring people back to play the game. And if
Speaker 3: you want to play the game.
Speaker 4: You got to buy the hardware, YEP, buy the hardware exactly, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2: Tank to thank you so much. This was really fascinating.
Speaker 3: I loved it absolutely absolutely, Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 4: Thank you. That's it for this week for tech Stuff.
Speaker 4: I'm Karra Price and.
Speaker 2: I'm Oz Valushian.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Victoria Domingez.
Speaker 1: It was executive produced by me, Kara Price and Kate
Speaker 1: Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norval for iHeart Podcasts. The
Speaker 1: Engineer is Beheth Fraser and Jack Insley mixed this episode.
Speaker 2: Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Speaker 4: Join us next Wednesday for Textuff the Story when we
Speaker 4: will share an in depth conversation with Jake Sullivan, national
Speaker 4: Security advisor under Biden. We'll talk all things competition with
Speaker 4: China and autonomous weapons.
Speaker 1: Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech
Speaker 1: Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2: It really helps us to know what you're thinking.