Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Al Zome Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed Zittron,
otherwise known today as Woke Joe Rogan. Good. We are
live kind of from the iHeartRadio studios in New York. Today.
(00:26):
I am joyed by mister Mobile himself, Michael Fisher, and
of course Alex Krantz from The Verge.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Thank you for coming, thanks for having to be here,
Thanks for having us.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
So today is about where the magic's gone in tech.
Got two great tech journalists with me and I myself
have done some writing on tech, I guess and the
Big Thing. And this kind of started actually from a
conversation between you and me, Michael, where it was about
kind of like what are we even looking at in
tech anymore? Why things aren't fun? Like what like it
feels like we've stopped getting the most fun thing I
(00:56):
have found is I'm actually gonna pull it out in
my pocket and there's no video, so you're never gonna know.
Like this anchor charge, it's like thirty bugs. I mean,
that's a sick no. Like battery packs are cool, but
otherwise everything that comes out that's meant to be exciting,
like the Humane pin and the Rabbit are one which
obviously we're bad from the beginning. Sorry anyone who thought otherwise,
you were wrong, And like the Daylight tablet, which will
(01:18):
get to of course, these things just have turned out
to be just not even fun, not you can be
kind of shitty, but fun, like there's something you can
look at. Even some of the great tech failures, like
that weird frame that you could upload things to from
like twenty to fifteen, like a few of these weird
Indiegogo things, there was a cute weirdness to it, but
now it's just almost just nothing.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
There's a lot of reasons for that.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
There are.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah, I feel like there are like a lot of
compounding problems that have like that have deposited us here today.
But I will say that I think that there are
some of those examples you gave are still could have
been fun. I think I think Rabbit is still trying
to like salvage the situation and make it, say any work.
But I mean, and I think you know, it took
it took a giant swing, which was this this thing
(02:04):
that we've learned I think you shouldn't do at this point,
which is try to replace the smartphone call the smartphone
the enemy and say we're going to replace it with
this wearable thing. And when you deliver a product that's
so undercooked, I think that's the problem, Like when I
undercook can't even get there.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
And I think also just everybody's in this big quest
to beat the smartphone, right, Like everybody wants to make
the next smartphone so they can make all the money
the way Apple did, and what is it? And so
they're all like, throw it at the wall? Is this it?
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Even like you, I mean, I think you're right when
you say, like the rabbit and you look at these
AI devices and stuff where there feels like there's sort
of a mus cynicism. Yeah, to these products where you're like, oh,
you're just out here to make money. There's not like
something fun and exciting here. Like the Daylight Computer is
a good example. They're like, yeah, we're going to you know,
make computing black and.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
White, just just for the listeners. You might not know
about it. Can you describe the day loge?
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Yeah, the Daylight Computer.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
You just reviewed it, right, Yeah, I just came off
the back of it. Yeah. It's like I think I
called it an ordinary Android tablet with an extraordinary display,
because the special thing about it is the display. And
David Pierce said, you know, yeah, like he thinks, uh,
this is this is a display company. This isn't necessarily
a consumer product.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
But what is it though?
Speaker 3 (03:17):
It's like an LCD display that only does black and white.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Correct, And the special thing is that it has a
fast refresh rate that makes it very smooth. So when
you're manipulating it, it's like using a black It's like
using an iPad from the Fallout world, yeah right, where
it's also is Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
It's kind of like using an e ink Android tablet
if the e ink could go fast, right.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
That's why I was excited about it. So what's bad
about it?
Speaker 3 (03:42):
I mean the problem for me, fundamentally, I've used a
lot of Android e Ink tablets. I'm a nerd about
these things, and fundamentally the problem is they're built for
black and white, which is cool. The Internet isn't. Oh
so you're like, Okay, I'm going to download this app,
I can't see any of the buttons.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Cool, So they just did not prepare for people use
the device.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
You can like, I mean.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
That's true of the of those e readers. No, that
that is true, but I think daylight. Like to their credit,
they have come out and said, look, we don't want color.
You know, it's this very granola very like if you
watch the coverage of the.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Yeah, I've seen I've seen the Instagram ads.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Yeah, yeah, and like that is their pitch, that is
their whole thing is like, your screen is too colorful
and too addictive, and you should you should be able
to use your tablet outside in in daylight, and it
should function as you expect. You should be able to
do whatever you want. But at the end of the day,
ideally you're not, as you know, drawn into this vortex
of of of TikTok end list feeds because you know,
(04:37):
you don't want to watch YouTube on it. You do
someone the reading delivery, right, which which is a whole
industry now, isn't it right?
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Like the light phone is another example where people are
just like, what if we took all the cool capabilities
of your phone and then like turned off a bunch
of it.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Yeah, I've seen the ads for that, that weird phone
where it's like, oh, we we block out all the
things you use your phone for, so the thing that
you wouldn't use your phone. It's just very confusing, and
I love posting. I love looking at my phone ninety
two hours a way.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
You are an online.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
I will die if I don't go online. But also
it doesn't feel like any of these companies. Same thing
with Rabbit, same thing with Daylight. It doesn't feel like
they've actually talked to a person, like an actual person,
like a normal person, someone who uses Facebook and Instagram
to talk to their friends or get a I spam
and someone who has like a regular job, someone who
(05:33):
isn't in tech at all, and just said what do
you think? And then when that person said, I don't know,
why do I have this? What do I do? They
should have gone, oh shit, I shouldn't have released it.
But it doesn't. It doesn't feel what Rabbit I think
is a separate thing because I think they're fully cynical.
I think that they just.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Don't give a shit. It has to be held out separately.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Out Daylight. It almost feels like they just focus the
simple people who chose to Well, but you were you
said there was there was something cynical about it, So yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
I mean I think for me, like I said, I've
used a lot of similar tablets to this. So when
they reached out and were like, hey, we have this device.
It's it's electronic paper. And they're very careful of saying
electronic paper, not eat ink, because that's like an actual
branded thing and eat ink will descend from the heavens
to just slap you down if you use it inappropriately.
And they said they're eat ink, and they they said
(06:24):
they were electronic paper, really cool refresh rate, and they
wanted to like do this whole daylight thing and the
warm light stuff, and I thought all of it. I
think the warm light stuff is very unproven science. That
is just what is where It's like, the idea is
if you look at an orange light before you go
to bed, that'll make you sleepy. Blue light wakes you
up and makes you just wasn't the case.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Yeah, that was bad timing for daylight for sure because
required came out with that thing. It's like, yeah, like,
all these studies are not conclusive and also some new
ones have proven very cool. Yeah, It's just.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Like and so that's also right, it's eight hundred dollars.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
That's the problem for me. So here's the thing I
don't think the CEO is I had some time to
talk to the CEO and I in a vacuum in absentia.
I kind of was like, this guy's got to be
a Charlatan, right, he's got to be gone for a
cash grab.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
What he is?
Speaker 1 (07:14):
What my takeaway was is that no, he's he's a
he's a display nerd who really cares about making this
particular kind.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Of display tex.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
He looks and the display is cool, and they like,
they didn't take an off the shelf component from Sharp,
which I also thought, and stuff it into a white
label Android tablet, which is what I thought they did.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
Like this is that it's Android, but the hardware is
they built?
Speaker 2 (07:37):
But did they make an effort with the software?
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Yeah? The thing is that the devices they see that
you know, it's it's early. And this is the thing
we complain about with almost every product where it's like, yeah,
well this is just Niagara Lundren top of Android. But
we have all these ideas. I'm like, great delivery ideas
before I have a press like, aren't you It's very frustrating.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
I wish I could do that with the bank. Yeah,
I've got the money this month, However, right I will
one day and I'll have lots of it. Well, I
mean that's how I'm not sure.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
That's it called a credit card. And then the understanding is, okay,
you have to pay extra because you borrowed it. Whereas
these companies are like, hey, give us your money. We're
gonna give you a product. It's not going to be
a good product, but if you just wait, and I'm like, no,
you can pay me bad product, pay me to wait,
pay me to wait, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
I think the uncertain thing for me is like, it's
the price. The thing that for Daylight, if Daylight was
down at at you know, two hundred and three hundred bucks,
three hundred four hundred, put that in a premium and
I'm like, look, okay, it's an intentional product for a
very specific market and and that's that's great. So I
hit them on that a lot. I was like, you've
got to make me understand why this is seven hundred
and twenty nine dollars and to hear them tell it,
it's the work that went into the display, plus the
(08:49):
tiny you know, minimum water quantities they have to they
have to hit.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
So it's like so it's basically, bitch, you gotta eat.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
No. No, it's like to make it, maybe gonna make
a big margin on each tablet. That's the thing they're
like they are No, I assume that at least with
that from the factory.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
They just put in a lot of effort. And these
things are much more expensive to make than they have,
which one.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
I can see that side of it now, Like I'm
on clicked, like I've gotten some experience with that, and
I'm like, okay, I get it. I don't know if
it's true. I'm not. I don't know enough to know. No,
eight hundred dollars, Yeah, that's right. Yeah, today the click
i phone is now a thousand dollars accessory.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Listeners at home. So Michael is using this case on
his on his iPhone. It's called a click size. It
is clicks for iPhone phone and this allows you to
type with your with your figure a nice click.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
To it, got a little keyboard.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
What does that cost?
Speaker 1 (09:37):
This is one twenty nine or excuse me, one thirty
nine or one like it? I do like it. And
I'm not just saying that because I am I so founder.
I'm very biased.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
You can't trust me, God damn it. So the thing
is with something like that is it actually feels useful
because people type stuff on their phone. Sometimes I'm just
like fucking around with that. Actually that's the word thing,
it's they feel like less fun things to fuck around
with these days, and that's something even like CS for
years has been like this. Everything. I'm sure next year
(10:08):
is just gonna be all AI again, but even the
years before it felt like they were less fun things.
There's the kind of exterior ring of security camera, toilet
light and dildo companies or from China, and they're raasally
they're called like the Shengzong Chang zong Dong romance company
and they sell eleven different products, many batteries, and they're
(10:31):
all the very nice people. Then you've got like the
cat litter company that always turns up. You've got the
Wi Fi grail company that always turns in, that one
folding machine, the one folding machine that will never launch.
But even then the folding machine are kind of like that.
It's like a folksy dumb product that will never launch.
But otherwise it's like where's the magic, Like when was
the last time we had something fun?
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Even I mean, i CES is a weird one because
it is so I think most of the people coming
there are coming to sell things in American markets, right,
and if you don't need that, if you sell online,
you don't necessarily need to go to cees and have
that big presence. Because you don't. You can just sell
directly to the consumer. You can just skip it. And
we see that with stuff like like the stuff I'm
really into right now is I in Ao I think
(11:13):
is how you say it, which is like a gaming console.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
It looks like a giant sidekick, right, yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
About one. It's called the I in Ao. It's a
y A n eo. I'm absolutely malacring the name A
y A n eo. The flip ds and this thing
is the dumbest, most fun thing I've used in a while.
It's like a steam Deck. But if the steam Deck
ran on Windows and therefore sucked.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Two screens, why do you enjoy it?
Speaker 3 (11:43):
I think I like it because it's different. It's doing
something new, and there's like like, Okay, the software is garbage,
but that's kind of their fault because it's hard to
do software, and like you shouldn't launch things with garbage software.
Steam Deck it's fine, but it's also cool because like
there's like it's just got a good display. There's like
a really good thought behind it, and it's like, you
(12:04):
know what, there's gonna be people who really really like
this thing and are going to have fun with it,
and it's mainly gonna be nerds who want to play
Nintendo DS ROMs. Yeah, and I'm like, yes, cool, I want.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
That feels like the first weird thing I've heard of
in it while other than like the Rabbit.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, And I think the ones that become a success
are like almost unavoidably not as weird. Like the thing
that jumps to my mind was, what's the last time
I was really impressed by something that I kept after
the review period or bought after the review period. It
was the Meta ray bands. It's like, wow, oh my god.
They stuff really good speakers yeah, and a really and
a pretty good camera into sunglasses and a bunch of
AI stuff that you really shouldn't talk about, but yeah,
(12:40):
it's like it's it's a really great accessory I've heard good.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
Thing because they just they just work like on the
train a lot, yeah, and it just sounds good and
like everybody in the train car gets to listen to
my music with me. But then I sound really good
on phone call, so I don't.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Care how you can use some vocals. Yeah, so that's
vergin on useful.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
It is absolutely extremely useful. Except for Meta.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
They make that.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
They made it because they have like Meta has this
big vision for AR and VR, right, so they have
they have the whole the quest and all of that junk,
and then they were like, well, we need to do
AR stuff and we need to start normalizing what AR
is going to look like. So we're going to start with.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
These glasses so you can't see anything in them, you can't.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Know and so it's all audio. Bos was doing this
a couple of years ago. There's a few people who
have done this, and it's like, you know, when BOS
did it was a stupid concept and even the first
set of ray bands were really stupid. And then this
time the quality was just good enough where you're like, okay,
I get it now. How much of those they're like
two fifty or something?
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Oh god, yeah, between two and three hundred and something.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
They're fairly. It's one of those things where you're like,
I just got paid, I don't got any bills, do
anytime soon, Let's do.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
This, And they actually accomplished something that like a lot
of these AI companies that we've touched on earlier, have
tried to do and sort of failed to do, which
is get you out of your phone. So for me,
I don't know. Well, I'm a stupid influencer videot like
thirty percent of the time it's just bad. But like
I'm firing up the camera, right, That's why I got
my phone out, just to use the camera for something. Yeah,
and when you have a camera built into your glasses,
(14:09):
you can just literally hit a button on it.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
And how the lens that you're looking at, well the
human and I is thirty five millimere right.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Yeah, I have no I don't know what. I don't
remember what the spect what the perspective is.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
Like, it's weird because it's off because.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Of New York Times. He does lovely videos of him
cooking using them. Oh Tony, he's got his berman's mount
and dog. But Bruno love Yeah, and he'll be like
talking to Bruno and like making stuff. He's got his name.
That's fun. I actually really enjoy that stuff. It feels
bad the meta is doing it though, like the idea,
but also how it feels also weird that meta made
something good. I'm just very confused because all right. The
(14:45):
VR stuff with Quest, I know we're like ment to
like most people like, oh Quest is good. It isn't good.
I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. Casey, my very close friend,
Casey's gonna hear it's gonna get pissed off and get
a signal message the Quest's fine. But even the new one,
I still get sick. Yeah, I still feel weird. It
(15:07):
still doesn't go on my face.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
Right. That's why they did the glasses is because they
know there's there's.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Kind of glasses.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
I'm coming back to the glasses because they like they
did they did these headsets and everybody was like, oh wait,
this is not the future for AR and VR. People
look stupid. Like I saw my nephew come Like one day,
I went over and I'm visiting. I'm saying hi to everybody.
I'm like, oh, where is he And they're like, oh,
he's upstairs. And I go upstairs and there's just a
little kid all alone in a room, like wagging the
sticks around. And that's the dumbest thing I've ever seen.
(15:37):
Like I wanted to give like I wanted to give
him a wedgie, right, And I'm like, that's that's a
bad response. For an aunt, just like put my hand
in my pocket and walk away. And and but that's
the way it is for everybody. And so they're like, Okay,
we got to do these glasses because if we do
these glasses, then that won't be as dumb and stupid looking.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
And I should just give a shout out to a
company that not a lot of people remember, and I
bet you do, but we remember Focals by North.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
I wonder the name. I don't remember what they did.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
They shipped a pair of glasses that were very like
they were a little chunk here. They were obviously something
a little a little off about these glasses. Horrible display,
but no, but they had a display, and when you
put them on your face, all of a sudden, what
materialized in your vision was a little trom like heads
up display and you could see your text messages from
your phone. You could get drive driving directions, term by
turn directions, little points of interest things, and it was
(16:28):
like it was appearing in your eyeball. Of course, it
was very strange because when you're talking to somebody you'd
see it. They'd look kind of above your eyebrow, and
then you'd be like, are you are you checking your
messages while.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
I'm talking to you.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
No, no, no, that's where you get the sunglass version, right.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
But like, this was a great idea. The technology was
very fascinating, and then, as often happens, they were purchased
by Google, and Google either mismanaged it or killed it, and.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
It killed it probably both.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Yeah, it's just brutal, I mean, and that was the
last time I felt like we were on the cusp
of maybe the next chapter of Personal Mobile Computer.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
I yeah, Google Glass look cool. I never got to
play with it. And I think Robert Scobel has done
a lot of bad things, But that weird picture of
him in the shower I genuinely of the show. So
list there's a really disgusting fellow called Robert Scobull, famous
for reasons I'm not actually sure. He kisses up to
Elon Musk now wants to marry his tesla. I believe
(17:26):
I haven't really checked that fact and its opinions, so
you can't sue me. So Robert Scobel took a picture
wearing his Google Glass while what looks like screaming in
the shower, and I mean, just.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
A lot of people talked about that photo.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
It was very the inverse of pornography. But that moment
was really unfortunate because Google Glass was too expensive and
all that, and I don't think anyone should have ever
looked at it as the future arriving that day. But
the idea of a heads up displays cool. I think
heads up displays a cool think. Yeah, I don't agree
with thee. We need to get away from our phone's thing.
What we need is better society so that it's worth
(18:05):
looking away. Sam, that's the actual This is an escapism.
We made a tool to escape from the world. It
rules kind of ripping off Paris marks from tech one
save us there. He made a similar point about the
vision pro to distract us from real life, which is
a bit much, but he's not totally off Boom. It's
weird like heads up displays feel like a future. I
don't know if it's the big capital T, but that's
(18:28):
a way that they could be useful while getting us
away from constantly staring. Because there are times where I'd
like to walk through New York City and just listen
to music but also know where I'm going because I
don't ever and heads up display would be good. But
it's almost like they shouldn't be trying for fifteen years,
that they need to get to a completely different level
of chip plus display plus everything else and then do
(18:50):
it really well.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
It's just because they are all so desperate to be
the next iPhone hyper like, like I love you know,
I think everybody in this room currently has an iPhone.
They're they're they're very good devices. Yeah, and everybody wants
to be the next one because then they get the
thirty percent lock in they get. They just all just
cultural cachet. Yeah, it just makes you the next big thing.
(19:13):
And so Meta has been doing that. Google has been
doing that poorly. Uh, Samsung, you know a lot of
these people do it, and they all fail at it
because the text is not there yet, right, Like glasses,
You're not gonna get glasses until you have actually good displays.
They can also pass.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Through and can turn off and make way with you.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
And most importantly, that you don't look stupid wearing yes, Like,
if I want to give you a widge Weggie, you've
you've lost the plot. And I'm I'm liberal with the Wedgies.
So actually it's like a fact room the urge.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
So with my song glasses on the entire time. You
would have to know, but I would, Well, then there
is half they take them off by the second pat.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
You gonna get some of the details of the flames on.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Them, well guy Fieri moment.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
So it feels like augmented reality is at least where
there could be fun now. Yeah, but it feels like
it's not twenty seven twenty fifteen when they had that
weird burst of them. It feels like they've all stepped
back for it, which sucks because it feels like we
actually need R and D money there.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Ye, yes, because I feel like that's the thing. The
point you were just making, Alex, is that the technology
needs to catch up to the aspiration, right, And we've
seen a lot of the stemo and again the most
promising one got bought and killed. Yeah, and I've never
seen anything get close.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
I mean, I think I think the ray bands are close,
and they're planning apparently to put a lot more like
invest a lot more there, right Like they just this
week I think did a whole reorg the week we're
recording this, did a whole reorg of this of the
meta division. And so they're like Oculus, you go over
here and you go over like an under an ad
sales guy who I don't remember the name, and then
(21:04):
the ray bands. They're like, Okay, this is like this
is our focus. They've they've got plans for some glasses
the next couple of years that are like much more involved.
We've heard like Google bought Vocal and we haven't heard
anything there and so it could be dead. But also
like everybody's talking about AR right now, so it feels
like maybe they're coming back.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
I think that. So I had an episode about this
rock calm bubble. Yeah, well, I think what they're doing
right now is freaking out because they don't have and
they all want to be the next iPhone. But what
they realize is there is no next iPhone right now. Yep,
there is no next Google or Facebook or anything.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
So they're chasing AI.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
That's the chasing AI. But come on, come on.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
I was gonna say, you've done a very good job
in the past three weeks, so demonstrating on this very
show why AI is not as exciting.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
But that's a good point to bring up.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Though.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
How do you two feel about AI?
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Well, I feel I'll say this details with what you
were just saying, I the company are not the only
ones desperate for the next iPhone. I am desperate anytime again. Pierce,
you know, wrote that little blurb about, you know, the
season of AI gadgets is here before any of the
Humane and Rabbit stuff came out, and I was like
crossing my fingers as somebody who covers the stuff and
(22:17):
as somebody who has loved the stuff for as long
as I can remember. I love the excitement of new
things coming out and introducing new possibilities, and I feel
like the AI. I have an increasingly severe grudge against
the AI bubble, the hype cycle for raising my hopes
actually putting some pretty cool hardware in my head. Say
what you want about the Humane payment. That hardware rocks
(22:39):
and then absolutely cutting its legs out from under it
because most of its functionality is based on an LLM
that you can't trust because it tells you the sun
is going to set forty minutes ago at eleven in
the morning.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
Yeah, I think like AI is. You know, I'm super
excited about Apple Intelligence, mainly because I'm going to be
able to make the best ship posts to send my
friends because you can do image generation and it's hideous,
it's terrible looking, and I'm so excited to just troll people.
But otherwise, like you know, AI is one of those things,
like we've built lying machines, and as far as large
(23:11):
language models go, they're really bad at it, to the
point where Tim Cook's like, well, I wouldn't say one
hundred percent get it right, And I believe that's actually
a bad thing you to say, dude. And everybody's saying
that because they're like, don't worry about it, don't worry
about it. I Meanwhile, the researchers are like, actually, language
models aren't the thing. Don't you should worry about it.
But everybody's like, but we can make money now, and
(23:33):
so we can't well.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Jenson Wong wang when he's not serving PC gamers like me.
But that's the thing though, That's something he was saying
that Michael was actually kind of the impetus of us
being here today. Something in this show that people say,
people say about me all the time is oh, you're
just a pessimist, you and all this stuff. I love
(23:55):
this shit. Do you know how excited I am when
I get a new dumb gadget I can mess around.
You've got a charger, I right here, anchor charger. I'm
so excited. I got two, so I've got redundancy. So
happy with that stuff. I love my little gizmos and gadgets.
I love this stuff, and I haven't really had anything
to The steam deck was the last time I was
really like excited for and then excited after. Yeah, and kind.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
Of the vision pro oh interesting, but it's.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Like there's always a but, and the butt is usually Yeah.
But the people who made it, they didn't really give
it to real people. Yeah, they gave it to a
focus group and it was a McKinsey one, so three
quarters of them were paid to say whatever they wanted
to hear and the rest didn't turn up. And it's
just frustrating because there was a time I think it's
(24:42):
just love the rock kombabb but there was a twenty
year period and we've got new stuff, new stuff, new stuff.
Even the bad stuff was kind of funny. Yeah, even
all this dorky indieg Go bullshit, like the Coolest Cooler
which had a speaker at a margerite. You knew that
was never gonna work, but you kind of enjoyed them try.
And then they scammed a bunch of people. That was
also bad.
Speaker 5 (25:00):
Yeah, but you stopped getting fun, like there wasn't something
to look forward to. But the vision pro reason I
brought it up is my first hour with it was
so exciting, and then I realized that I had like
light bleeding in so I started fucking with it and
I couldn't get it on right, and I spent like
another hour trying to make it work, and it just
(25:22):
turned out that like I didn't have the right size thing,
which dramatically improved it, and I was using it fairly often.
I'm like, this is not there yet, but this is
different and cool and watching movies on its great.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
Then I tried to watch on a plane, how'd that go?
I got a migrant and I have yet to finish June.
People say this and Ultimore or whatever it is from
that to me all the time, but it's it's very
strange because it almost doesn't feel like anyone's trying.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Yeah, well go ahead.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
I was gonna say, like, the VR thing is a
weird one because it is so dependent on the person, right,
Like I had a friend who also just recently did
a cross country flight, wore their vision pro, watched June
and June two. Nice back to back and they were they.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Loved it, absolute legends.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Yeah, whereas you would have presumably thrown up everywhere and.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
They would My head just felt like it would explode it.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Uh and and and that's just because like your your
vestibular response is totally different than their vestibular response, and
it's that's what's gonna happen there. And that's why VR
is a dead end. And that's why Meta now has
like been like you go over here, we tried.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
It watchful hand of Baz, Yeah, we did that.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
What was it the Meta Quest pro was that?
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Was that the one where they had the Pro one
they canceled?
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Yeah, where they released it and everybody's like this is
garbage and they're like.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Yeah, no, they released it. I think what it was
was they released it at the same time as the
Quest two, which was like three hundred four hundred bucks.
People like, this is pretty good. Yeah, Like the expectations
were low, and they're like, but what if you paid
fourteen hundred dollars for something that wasn't as good? Yeah,
but it was more powerful?
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Well yeah, and that's you were saying a second ago,
like it doesnt feel like people trying anymore. I think
that's not it. I think people are trying at the
wrong thing. Yes, former journalists should be become a journalist
again because we miss him. David Ruddick was just complaining
about this on LinkedIn and he was just like, you know,
with respect to the product managers who I call my friend, Like,
(27:17):
product managers are ruining the segment because and even you
can take it out above the PMO. Like, it's like
companies have realized that if they do enough marketing to
create artificial demand, then that is a way to make
money in the short term and you can keep the
business growing.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Well, is that just what they believe is the case.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
It may well be right for the long term. It's
certainly not true. Yeah, but for the short term it
may be you get spike and it feels like there's
ten times as much of that as there is for
every ten examples of that, there's one example of a
company it's actually like, hey, we actually have a good idea.
Maybe it's a little weird idea, but we think enough
people buy it, will buy it and find delight in
it that we can make a business out of it. Right,
And if more people did that instead of like what,
(27:56):
how can we make money and get out as quickly
as possible, right then, I think we have those glory
days if.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
You can make the money and get up by doing
some people want to buy it. It's just frustrating, true, Alex.
It's are you enjoying any devices other than the strange
north White steam deck?
Speaker 3 (28:12):
Yeah, the garbage steam deck that I'm not even gonna score,
because you should buy it. It's it's it's not going
to be good for most people, but it's so much
fun to like fuck around with. I don't know, I
like that's one of the reasons I got really into
e ink because it felt like it was much closer
to like There's felt like there was something there that
could be solved pretty quickly. But that was like five
(28:33):
or six years ago, and it hasn't happened.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
What's slowing it down.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Because everybody wants to make money through vertical integration, so
they're like, well, I don't want you to actually get
anybody else's books on your device. I want you to
get my books.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
So everyone wants to do a platform play, right.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
So everybody's doing a platform play. So it's it's money again, right,
Like everybody's like I need all as much of the
money as I can get to my little side. Because
Apple did that and it worked really well for Apple.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
They never worked for anyone else.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Well, I mean Amazon, it kind of works on.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Amazon already had that scam going.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
Yeah, that's true, that's true.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
And you haven't seen that meaningful evolution in the kindle
with such an the scribe in a long time.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
Which is insane garbage compared to a lot of the
stuff because like China, and this is the other point
is there's a lot of innovation happening in China. A
ton do you ever.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Use the odin?
Speaker 3 (29:18):
The odin?
Speaker 2 (29:19):
So there was this It's an Android gaming console before
the Steam deck, so just to be clear, probably not
as fun, but super fast. You could do PlayStation remote
on it, almost like predecessor to the PlayStation porter, which
is literally just playing PlayStation and it was great. And
what they did is a crazy idea. They were like,
why don't we make it really easy to run the
specific gaming apps you like? And what if we made
the buttons good?
Speaker 3 (29:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (29:41):
And what are crazy?
Speaker 1 (29:42):
Like?
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Sold out? Indiegogo did really well. Comes out of China,
and it's like this current sinophobic climate's fucking frustrating. Because
let them in, please borrow the innovation from them. They
seem China seems to be fucking trying with tech right.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
And one of the reasons they're trying because I kind
of went down a rabbit hole with the eating thing
where I was like, why is nobody trying this, Like
you're getting all these really cool eat ink readers out
of China and nothing here, And it was because we're
so obsessed with that lock in. We're so obsessed with
how do we build that bigger model. We don't want
to just sell one thing. We want to sell you
the services, We want to sell you the platform, and
(30:15):
and America is just super hyper focused on that, where
China's like, yeah, I mean I don't care who you use, well,
I mean by our ship.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
I mean as they also have one monopoly.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Yeah, yeah, it's like we all operate within this one.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
We're all controlled by ten Cent. But yeah, but it's
frustrating because I feel like what it might also be
is that they're like, how do we make the next
trillion dollar company or billion dollar company? They're like, what
if you made a fifty million dollar company? No?
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Yeah, fuck that, Well you got you gotta you gotta
get your your your investors right, you gotta get your stockholders,
you gotta do all of that. And and apparently money
is not free. People don't just give money away.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Got to give one hundred million dollars to Adam Newman
again so that you can make the next bad company.
Speaker 3 (30:59):
I think that happened.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
It did. He got two hundred and fifty million dollars.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
Well, I just I want to fill that hard up.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
That sounds rate so good.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
Well, and like we I don't mean to keep bringing
it back to humane, but that was the thing I
kept saying in the Humane briefing. I was just like, guys,
I know this is not what you want to hear,
but this would be a great little accessory for the phone.
You could still do a lot of cool things and
have it linked to your phone, and then it wouldn't
be well, a bunch of things would.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
It did not work, but.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
You didn't catch on fire. That's that's exactly.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
I'm still here.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
You're still here.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
But like the it wasn't a bold enough vision. And
they didn't say this, I assume this. It wasn't a
bold enough vision one to get a bunch of people
motivated to do because if you're replacing the smartphone. Big
quotes around that. Well, that's a that's a mission that's
at least difficult. That's like a moonshot. And then B
you can't get enough investors excited to your point to
give you all the all the money that you just
want to put together.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Just a note for listeners. That's the humane AI pin
Google it. It's terrible. Seven one dollars twenty four dollars
a month, just the basic thing. But the human was
so weird though. And this is the thing that I
will never understand and they will never tell me, is
how did you put this out the door? How did
you look at this thing?
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (32:04):
It overheats in two minutes? Oh chat GBT sometimes doesn't work.
Basic shame. I mean I would not want to do it.
I would be like.
Speaker 3 (32:13):
They kind of had to write like they they kind
of hit their their point where it's like should to
get off the pot?
Speaker 1 (32:17):
This is the question I don't know I asked that
about it. It's just two x human is it rabbit?
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Cynical one believe.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
I think Rabbit had to launch before the what we
all knew was gonna happen, which was Google was going
to do us Apple was going to do.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
Yeah, people saw how it operated so that they could
say this, it looks cool.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
Yeah, it does look cool.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
He is on the board of teenage Engineering. He is
on the board. This boys are sick. Okay, we're going
to talk about the Rabbit.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
It's time.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
So those listeners who don't know about the rabbit. Is
this two hundred dollars AI device and it claims to
have something on it called a large Action model. Large
Action Model claims it was trained on six hundred plus
apps to distinctly control your raps, but for some reason
it only launch with four or five. Turns out that
when you ask the lamb to do something, it would
sometimes just not work. Sometimes you would say or to
(33:07):
me McDonald and it would go sorry, Uber isn't working.
And it turns out, due to some friendly hackers that
it turned out that it isn't actually using a large
action model. It's connected to playwright, a script thing. I'm
sure more technical listeners are going to email me corrections.
I'm very sorry. But in shut instead of running a
large action model an actual AI thing, it was triggering
(33:29):
scripts using chat GPT. Now I could do a whole
episode in surprise. I haven't over the whole thing that
there used to be an NFT company, but putting all
of the obvious horrible things aside, it just fucking sucks. Yeah,
it's just really bad in a way that is almost unbelievable.
I recommend you going look. Dave three D did a
(33:49):
whole thing about it before it came out that was
very good. But go and look at Linuses and Linus.
I know people have problems with him, but his the
thing about the rabbit was great because it was mostly
him trying stuff it not working, and it goes what
what what, which was very entertaining.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
It's very funny.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
But it's just broken.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Yeah, and they raised another thirty two million dollars in March.
It feels like I am living in a different universe
to the.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Rest of the world.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
I see this. It's bad. The YouTube's like, this is
the worst thing I've ever used. Investorsla absolutely, Yeah. I
need to get in on the shit now.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
Elon Musk has just sent them wrote them a check.
He did not, to my knowledge, for write them a check.
He wouldn't do that.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
It's an epic andvice device.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
Yeah, I don't think you're alone. I think there is
a weird tension happening where we have Silicon Valley. We
have all these investors in Silicon Valley who are all
just desperate to make money and never took a single
history English course like any liberal arts. They think that's stupid.
And then there's the rest of the world. Yeah, and
these people are so focused on money they forget the
rest of the world. They never touch grass. And so
(34:51):
they'll put on the vision pro and be like, this
is going to change the face of computing, and not
consider the billion of different other ways people use computers.
Or they'll see the the rabbit with the worst name
on the planet. By the way, a majority of women
I know the rabbit was coming.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Out, was like, why gonna pay two hundred dollars for that?
Speaker 3 (35:11):
I got one in my drawer next to my bed.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
What the hell, guys, I'm dying to know more about
that weight. I didn't even put.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
That the rabbit is a very notorial, like that's that's
a term for a whole type of sex toy that is.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Yeah, I had no idea.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Yeah, And so like when they were like, we've got
the rabbit, and I was like, do you oh it's
a different rat Like now bring out the ra You're like, whoa,
what's happened to Cees? I knew you guys were doing
sex text now.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
But wow, so I moved the thing away from c
That's depending on But I think I think that it
is that that there's the kind of disconnection from the
real world, but there's also I don't know if these
people use stuff. I just don't.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
I don't think they do.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
I don't know if they use it. Like I really
want to just get behind Marc Andreeson at one point
and can't say the rest of that, but I mean,
look over his shoulder and see the funds eyes on
his iPhone right like I want to see it because
I don't think these people interact with the real world,
will touch gross. But I also don't think they like
I don't think well app vision pro is different because
(36:11):
public company whatever. Yeah, but like the Rabbit, for example,
I don't think they fucking can I like, these little
pigs will buy this.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Well, they'd already bought it, right like, like they announced
the thing, they made these huge promises, they did a
ton of pre sales, and then it came out and
we haven't heard how the pre sales or how the
sales have.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Hundred thousand units after Oh we don't they don't.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Yeah, well, well, and I don't know what we're gonna
hear about that, right, like we.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Are not it's coming from I think, you know, I mean,
if they I'm with you. I think there are dubious
business motivations to a lot of this, right. But I
can't help but think that if I was inside one
of these organizations that I wouldn't look No, I know,
I would have been caught up in it. I would
have been caught up in the ambition. I would have
been caught up in the promise, especially when you consider
(36:56):
that the design process of a lot of this stuff
goes back to the time where we were most of
us are getting our first chance to interact with chat GPT,
and I'm like to make me a text adventure in
the style of Star Trek Deeps Race nine. Yeah, and
it did it, And I was like, oh, oh my god.
You know, I remember where I was when that happened.
It was like the first time I put on a
VR headset. I remember the first time I was actually
(37:17):
blown away by AI. And if I was in an
inside a company or a recently hybrid companies, like we're
going to change the world with this tech. I think
I would have I probably would have been on that
boat for like a year before I started getting real
internally by.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
Chat GPT initially, yeah, yeah, I like for me, I
used it, and it just reminded me of the aim
bots from like I'm old here, I'm an apologies to
the audience. I'm sure you're all twelve, Hi, why are
you listening?
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Sure, I'm older than you.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
Yeah, we're old people. But the AIME bots, you'd go
and you log in and you type and and type back,
and then there's we've seen this so many times and
this one I was.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
Like, Okay to Eliza, yeah, we're back to this.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
We're back to this, Like the pattern recognition and recreation
machine has gotten just really really good, and I was like,
that's fine.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Yeah, that's kind of That's actually where I was as well, like, oh,
you can do a text bace adventure, and I think
i'd have heard that. I would have gone cool, all right,
and just kind of just say because I run a
PR firm, yeah, I have clients in AI, but nothing
that touches this show because I'm scared of that. And
it's like it's a few clients night who have even
(38:21):
just do a I think that's the thing. I don't
surprisingly enough AI companies aren't super excited to work with
me when I'm talking about them actually having to do stuff.
But it's like with chat GPT, for example. I know,
I actually understand totally Michael, why you were excited like that.
I can understand why others might have been excited by that.
I just don't understand how they're still that way because
(38:41):
nothing has happened.
Speaker 3 (38:43):
Money, honey, I guess, But I mean money is a
very powerful driver.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
If you work for a financial institution. I get, But
like gadgetw even just regular people don't seem excited. It's
just so weird. It feels like living in two realities
at once.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
And like there was a sign that someone posted on
blue Sky was like we put the AI in an
inn I p A. It was a Dell advert what. Yeah,
I just I feel like I like it. I have
a friend who is in a dot com boom company, yeah,
like a textbook related one, and I'm really tempted to
call him and be like was it like this was
(39:20):
it like this, and if he says yes, I'm gonna
do nothing because I can't invest in anything now because
I run a bloody podcast. I can't do anything. You
can't short ship. It's like the big short. But Steve
Goss just like, well, I'll just go home.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
I guess I think like we have to give give
credit to the to the entire thing. First of all,
the marketing approach to AI has been really frustrating because
everything is a I know, stuff that was that existed
before in its has been ported directly, unchanged and just
rebranded as as AI, just much in the same way.
I think somebody brought up to me at the at
the John Deere event. I was just at could we
(39:53):
will not be talking about okay?
Speaker 3 (39:56):
I had so many questions somebody brought up.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
I was like, yeah, it's like slapping a non GMO
label on an unchanged box of weed. Things like. It's like, okay, well,
AI is just being marketed much too aggressively, So you
have stuff stuck in here kind of getting caught in
the in the flat. That's like, that's really useful, but
it's it's these it's a seasoning that you put on
something that is already used. Yeah, it's not in itself
a self contained thing capable of driving a whole new
(40:19):
range of especially gadgets, which again makes me very sad,
because every time you would touch a new AI, I
think the plot a the plod note, that little self
contained AI voice recorder was like, this is very cool.
I wish it were an alternate universe in the year
two thousand and I could actually get excited about this
because what this is is a feature that belongs in
the Google recorder And oh sorry, I just finished this
(40:41):
video and that's exactly what Google built in to their
recorder when that was done, and I.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Was like, okay, well home with that for now.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Yeah, it's bummer pivots A.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
Yeah, everybody, I mean yeah, I think they're just going
to pivot back and forth. Everybody's gonna be constantly oscillating
until like something sticks because they're so desperate for that
next thing. They're so eager that everybody's just looking for
the money. They know it somewhere and like right now
it is all in n video stock and they're hoping
that it will somehow come to them at some point.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
Why not you, I don't know, It's like why not
build some fucking hardware to put video stuff in. I
realized those black bell chips aren't what we're talking about,
But I don't know. It's almost as if no one
wants to do the work in the middle. They're like,
I've got an idea and I need to make a product.
Can I skip the middle part? It's boring, it's expensive,
it takes forever. I need to have this shit on
the market in six months, and it can't be. And
(41:34):
I it is the growth that all costs for rot
economy ever in about one hundred times. But it's also
frustrating because I actually think, if they put in the effort,
this would be cool. When it comes to AI. Part
of my frustration comes back to that thing we were
saying earlier about how we've been let down, because I
would actually love it if I could reliably tell my
phone to take distinct actions. Send the calendar invite to
(41:57):
Alex and Michael, Yes, three pm at the iHeartRadio studio,
and just fucking send it and it would know how
maybe it goes. Do you want eastern a Pacific time?
Or wait? I said, New York you already know. And
it sends the invites and they find your emails. That
would be useful. I wish in my regular email job
I could have it through the spreadsheets and the documents.
(42:17):
It can't, it can't actually do these things. Yeah, and
this please make that the future. No, it isn't the future.
We need to They can't even describe what it is.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
And it's just because it can't do that future yet, right, Like,
there's the thing we have now. The thing that everybody
got really excited about was they released GPT three point five.
Everybody went, oh, crap, this can write this can write stuff,
and it can write it not like garbage for once,
and this is huge. And all of the researchers just
roll their eyes because they'd seen this for ages. They
(42:46):
were like, yeah, it's a lare language bottle. That's what
they do. They calm down, and everybody's like no, And
then the downloads increased. The downloads increase, and everybody's like, wait,
I think there's some money here, right, and let's just
like rye, this hype just right into the ground as
long as we can write it, as long as we
count until it gets it around. And that's pretty much
(43:08):
what happened just right.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Yeah, I'm trying to im like I'm still you know,
I'm halfway between like the stuff that that we're all
talking about and then the stuff that I see again
in these little flashes of like what I'll be on
a trip with and Kevin neither will be. I'll be like,
what are you doing? He's like, well, I have a cold,
so I can't do voiceover for my video. But I
built a model of my own voice, so now all
I have to do is type in something and script
(43:32):
in the model in my voice reads into the audience.
And I'm like, well that's useful. Cool, all right, Well
you don't bookmark that like generative fill stuff where it's
like it's not like I'm typing into mid journey, like
make me a photo of a high turtle eating macaroni
and cheese while watch. It's like, no, I mean that
is yeah, but like when you wroteate a photo right
(43:52):
in it and you have to fill in the stuff
with with fake scenery just to make it look okay,
so you can run a blog post, It's like that's useful.
So there's these little a lot of.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
These smaller things that it could be super super useful,
but that's not what they want to focus on because
that takes actual work. That takes there's more development than
need to happen.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
You're already big enough that you've bought whatever little company
came up with that, and you built like you're Adobe.
You built it in a Photoshop.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
Yeah, so then everybody hates you because you're Adobe.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
I think it's almost like they are really good at
features but terrible at products like these aren't useful because
the actual user interface of phones is really good and
also very bad. I will lose what I am doing
on my phone sometimes. I have five hundred and eighty
seven Safari taps up.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
That doesn't surprise because.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
The UX on there is so wonky and it's so
like it's not like on a computer where you have
like like a Actually that was just like close crum
taps on my computer too. But I don't lose shit
as much, but I still do on the computer.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
Yea.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
I I don't miss meetings because I generally forced myself
to be on time, as I was not today, and
it's the fact that I have to moderate so much
of this stuff. Yeah, everyone's talking about AI. That really
pisses me off. Why can the phone if AI is
the goddamn future. Why are we so far from well.
Speaker 3 (45:11):
The other part of that is the security in privacy,
Like we just saw as we're recording this earlier today,
Apple said, actually, a bunch of these features that we
announced at WWDC, like Apple Intelligence, which is gonna make
Siri like do a lot of the stuff we all
want it to do. They're not coming to Europe because
the DMA, and they're like, oh, you know, we're worried
(45:32):
it's gonna like do something about the privacy. Recall is
another example that was the Windows feature where it was like,
what if we just to me. I was editing our
postport and I was like, this rules. I didn't even
think about the security because I was like, oh, it's
going to take a picture and I'm just gonna know.
And I'm like, I'd recently been trying to look for
a text message from ten years ago. So it is
feeling very like this is perfect for me specifically, and
(45:53):
then everybody's like, this is the worst thing to ever
happen in my life.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
What's great is they didn't actually solve the real problem,
which was search searching for things. Spotlight is actually really good, yeah,
but it's not good enough. No, it could just be
a little bit better. Searching for stuff on your messages
could be better. That would require them to make that better.
They're like, no, if we just what we did, which
is what we just call it, like, just wrote it down. Well,
(46:18):
just wrote down literally everything you've ever done, got.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
In a plain text file, and then we'll just use
AI to train on that and it'll be great. Yeah,
And I'm like, yeah, that is definitely a solution.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
It's reminding me of something. I switched to a text
message provider like fifteen years ago, and I was intoxicated
by the prospect of being able to search all of
my text messages for all time, which took down a
few times, and over the course of the past like
two years, I've been like, I must delete that entire archive. Yeah,
just a massive liability.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
I have all wait emails, but not my text Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:52):
No, I keep all of them. Don't worry.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
I guess you and I will go down together.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
Yeah, well I'm taking everybody.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
You're indicted in all kinds.
Speaker 3 (47:01):
Yeah, I hopefully please don't indict me.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
Please don't indict anyone who's on Better off line.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 6 (47:07):
Request so.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
Returning from a commercial break that I'll announce next time.
It's just I wonder if it's something to do with
the venture capital climate, but not just that they don't
want to invest in things that aren't going to grow huge,
but also I think they're scared of hardware. They just
the concept of hardware is expensive. It's expensive. But also,
(47:41):
like you've been saying, there's not really a platform like
there is if you own the hardware device, but you
need to come up with some noxious way to charge
them more.
Speaker 3 (47:50):
Yeah, everybody is obsessed with how do we get that
extra that extra money right With the exception of some
hardware in this room currently.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
Thank you very much that we just had an addrec.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
But for the most part, everybody is obsessed with us.
When we saw those with video games, I think that's
one of that was like one of the first ones
we saw it with where they're like, what if we
charge you just to play online with your friends even
though it doesn't cost us anything to do that? Really well,
I mean customer.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
I think it became with it became Jesus Christ began
with the game. It was Moro wind or Oblivion that
they had the horse armor. That was the big moment.
They charged two ninety nine for some armor for your horse.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
Did you get it? No?
Speaker 2 (48:35):
Maybe the eldestcrolls online. But nevertheless, that was the moment
when it but they were like uh.
Speaker 3 (48:40):
And then we got the more micro transactions. They're like, oh,
do you want to do a cool little like handwave
and destiny five dollars and I paid it, un like you,
I paid the five dollars. I was like, take my money, Bungee.
I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
Since we're talking about old timey things. The first time
I encountered this was with Napster, when Napster went legit.
Do you remember that very brief moment.
Speaker 3 (49:01):
You were still with Napster when I went I moved.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
One to it? Nouse. You know I've done the linewired
and because I ruined several computers. Yes, And then Napster
comes out and it's like, hey, we're going legit. Just
pay us this very affordable monthly fee and you get
on limited music. I'm like great. And then I got
to the part of the you know, front page. It's like, yeah,
and if you ever stop paying us, you will lose
access to all that music. I'm like, what, Yeah, it's
two thousand and six, and what is this and.
Speaker 3 (49:23):
Now that's how Spotify works exactly?
Speaker 1 (49:26):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (49:26):
Now or do you have a free account?
Speaker 3 (49:28):
So yeah, I don't pay for Spotify neither.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Because I'm an influence.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
I pay for Apple Music.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
I'm like, I really I get it through my my
my phone bill for some reason.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
That's good.
Speaker 3 (49:40):
Yeah, it's great. So I'm like, I do I pay
for it? But unclear?
Speaker 2 (49:43):
But it's just weird because it feels like there were
very obvious problems that people have, Like phones are the
whole stop using your phone thing is stupid. Can't you
in the top list Thatt b I had a really
good piece. It's like I love my phone. I love
being on my phone. Yeah, the problem is there's too
much shit in it and that doesn't Google I need
you to search for me. You're also not good in it.
But it's the I feel like they are selling us
(50:07):
back the idea of interfaces, except they're not even doing it.
They're not actually automating anything. That's the thing with the AI.
That is the problem of AI other than all the
other ones, which is it's not doing anything for me.
What is it doing when even the Apple Intelligence thing.
We just did an episode on Excited about the prospect
of what they could do, but also they didn't actually
(50:28):
say much Siri can do actions across multiplaps.
Speaker 3 (50:31):
And also it's not coming until well after launch, right.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Is it Jesus Christ?
Speaker 3 (50:36):
Yeah? Or some of the features they were really like
they weren't clear on which features are coming immediately, which
or later.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
Just this obfiscation and it's almost I mean, because that
was WWTC Google Io.
Speaker 3 (50:48):
We just finished this big developer conference season. And while
it was ostensibly for developers and ostensibly for the rest
of us, and it should have been developers, because never
has the relationship between these platforms and developers more fraud
the stuff that's happening in Europe with the DMA has
made it really really difficult, and instead it was for
investors and saying here, we've got we've got our AI
(51:09):
thing too. We are in on the hype, and it's like,
you don't have to be like we talked about I'm
gonna do a little plug here. We talked about this
on the Verge cast the verges Sorry, what what where?
Where I sometimes talk about stuff too, And we talked
about it over there, and it was really really clear
that they just they'd done this for the investors and
(51:29):
if they hadn't been doing AI this year, and it
was really clear that that was kind of bolted on.
Everybody would be talking about how stupid and dumb and
delightful your phone looks because you can change the color
on it now, right, Like you can change the user interface,
and like there was these cool moments that happened and
they just were like, no, no, no, forget that AI.
Speaker 1 (51:49):
Yeah go buck, No, no, man, that's it. I mean
like it's that that And that has been the case
since I got into this business. Right, It's like you
go to a show and well, what's the theme this year?
You know? And I think we saw seeds of this.
Soone in twenty seventeen when Google first spent like half
of Google io talking about bots. What are you doing here?
Speaker 3 (52:08):
I think it was the same year that Facebook when
they did f eight was it fate? Oh, and they're like,
we're going to revolutionize the world with chat bots in Facebook?
Speaker 2 (52:18):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (52:19):
Where are those?
Speaker 2 (52:20):
M was the m assistant right with me? With Facebook?
Speaker 1 (52:26):
It was so fucking But it's always there's always that big,
you know, overarching theme, and it's again to your point,
yes it is to you know, curry favor with with
investors and make sure no, Google's not being left behind.
We can't afford to be seen as being left behind.
And then you know, you get the search query that
the glue on pizza stuff, the go eat rocks thing,
and of course they've got the egg on their face
(52:47):
now because and I cannot, for the life of me
understand why no one internally said, hey, stop, let's let's
actually because.
Speaker 3 (52:56):
Google is one of the biggest companies in the world
and it is a nightmare to work in.
Speaker 1 (53:00):
I've heard that.
Speaker 2 (53:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (53:01):
Tony Fidell, who built like Nest and all of that stuff,
he wrote a book that was all about how he
knows business and one of the really actually interesting parts
in it is how his just relationship with Google collapsed
after he was Nest was acquired. They acquire Nest and
then like immediately, you know, his boss is like, actually,
I'm not your boss anymore. This guy over here is
(53:22):
your boss. You're doing this. And then that guy's like, oh,
actually you're doing this. And it was just constantly changing
because it's such a big amorphous, right thing. Yeah, And
like a lot of these companies are that way. Google's
probably the worst at it. Amazon's pretty bad at it.
Apple is generally pretty good at it. Apple's whole thing
is just like the culture of the place can sometimes
get in the way. It's a cultish yeah uh, and
(53:44):
Google is also a cult. But it's like what if
we were like a big kind of disorganized there was.
Speaker 2 (53:49):
A run by show regular listeners, and now McKenzie graduate
sound off as shy Well confuses me, is like Liz
Reid has been there like decades such chief now, but
so her boss is probably a ragavan who form ahead
of ads who also used to run Yahoo. Please listen
to the episode. Great episode, arguably the weirdest thing I
ever discovered of them what I see in the era. Anyway,
(54:12):
It's just it's frustrating as well, because you can they
must have no shame, They must legitimately just be like
who gives this ship? Like the only way you are
able to release products this bad is when you just
to your point, it was for investors, but now the
company is for investors. Yeah, because I think that that
is the rubicon that's being crossed.
Speaker 3 (54:32):
That's why like someone like Panos Ponee who's now at Amazon,
or Steve Jobs had these like panas Pine used to
ran the Surface department, ran all of the surface products
at Microsoft for years.
Speaker 1 (54:45):
One of the most gifted presenters at press events.
Speaker 3 (54:48):
I mean, he knows how to present things favorite and
he really understands how to build these things, and and
it like, I think he made a real moment with
the Surface because he cares about the products. And he's
now at Amazon and they won't let me talk to him.
And it's fine, I'm okay with it. But and that's
because he's going and like, okay, we've got to fix
Amazon's like product lineup, because.
Speaker 2 (55:06):
It's what if it was good?
Speaker 3 (55:07):
Yeah, what if it was good? And and and you
see that and but those are the rare guys, right,
Like the reason these people are so beloved is because
they do care. Jony I have terrible ideas a lot
of times. Apparently it was like his idea to put
the eyes in the vision pro Oh really, yeah.
Speaker 2 (55:23):
It would be lies. Yeah, what if what if the
watch was a triangle?
Speaker 1 (55:30):
No?
Speaker 3 (55:30):
No, that's the rest of it.
Speaker 2 (55:34):
By the way, I want to see Jony I. Apparently
Sam Woman really badly wants to make a device with them. Yeah, honestly,
give them as much money as they want. I will
see what I want. I want to see the homomobile.
Ask Gadget that these idiots past.
Speaker 3 (55:46):
Zero ports zero display.
Speaker 2 (55:48):
Call it the hexagon.
Speaker 3 (55:50):
You just think at it.
Speaker 2 (55:51):
It's a new new type of Bluetooth devices. You can
connect your Bluetooth device.
Speaker 7 (55:56):
I think, oh, ship, it's it looks gorgeous, which is
I'm fine if things look good, but if they just
completely useless.
Speaker 3 (56:06):
Cards Yeah, no, no, I mean and and But that
was the thing is like he's kind of like a
lesser example because he does have some bad ideas. He's
so about the minimalism and weirdness that it goes to
like somebody tell him no. But that's why Steve works.
That's why or Steve Jobs works. I don't know if
Steve jobs, he's dead. That's why Steve Jobs works. That's
why that's why Panels work was because they can actually
(56:27):
they actually care about the products. They actually want to
make something good. And most of the time now, like
Tim Cook, I'm sure he cares about the product because
he is the CEO and he has to make money
and and and please his investors and stuff. But he
is a supply chains guy.
Speaker 2 (56:42):
Right, Like I also feel like Apples, laptops have been
really good, their phones have been they have.
Speaker 3 (56:46):
Gotten They've gotten really good because everybody was like slagging
on the laptops, being like their garbage. You haven't updated
the MacBook Air, your most popular device in half a decade,
do something, and they're like, oh, we we probably should.
And then but they only really did it and they
actually had you could put their own process.
Speaker 2 (57:01):
Which is right, and silicons great.
Speaker 1 (57:04):
That's the thing I think I'm my problem as I'm
discovering in the middle of this conversation, I love this,
this is good, is that my problem is not with
the devices, because everyone who buys them, the millions of
people who give Apple whatever it's three trillion dollars market
cap or whatever it is right now, are very happy
with them because they're very good products, and anytime they
(57:24):
try something that I would like, Like, you know, for example,
I thought the touch bar was kind of a fun idea. Yes, fun,
but but it it creters and it's not supported in
whatever you get this developer thing. But there are no
options anymore for these types of products, Like your phone
has to look like that. I'm pointing at Ed's iPhone fifty.
Your phone has to look like that. And even if
you go crazy and you make something that I really appreciate,
(57:46):
like a foldable, which is one of the big reasons
I still use Android phone because foldibles change the way
I use phones and they're great. They still have to
unfold into vaguely something that vaguely reminiscent of that rectangle.
And a laptop, Oh my god, we just saw a
Qualcomm you know, processors introduced into like I don't know,
seventeen new laptops from a bunch of new new companies
and they all look like the existing Intel powered laptops
(58:09):
that they've been shipping forever.
Speaker 3 (58:10):
Because in most cases they just something I think. I
think Microsoft and HP were like the only companies that
do something.
Speaker 1 (58:18):
New, but even that's not new, like you can go asues.
God bless them.
Speaker 4 (58:23):
They make these crazy, weird laptops with multiple screens. You
get these foldable screens, and honestly, those do they're not
just they're not gimmicks, like they change the way you
compute it, and in some cases they are very very useful.
Speaker 1 (58:35):
But no one wanted to take a risk. No one
wanted to take the affordance of all that space freed
up by this arm based chip and like the reduction
of fan size and everything. No, they're just everyone's just
being very conservative because same reason that phone makers only
make white and black phones in quantity, because that's all
people buy. We make clicks in a very fetching yellow
color and that's thirty percent of them or something like that,
(58:57):
because those people want white a black and I get it,
but I don't like it. I would encourage people to
remember that fun can be a reason to consider a
piece of technology. When did we decide that fun is
not a priority in our in our like buying, when.
Speaker 3 (59:15):
We decided selling more products matter more than selling cool products?
Speaker 2 (59:20):
And shareholder supremacy?
Speaker 1 (59:21):
Yeah, like the business I agree with you both on
the business side, but as consumers like when did when
when did we just go like pick up a phone?
Like I don't know, maybe it's I think, I think
that is you.
Speaker 2 (59:36):
I don't say this is a bad way. You're right,
I understand what you feel that way. But it's their
job to sell these things. It's their job to make
these things us exactly like the two screen laptop is
issues and Lenovo so these things are crazy, Like you've
got the you've got the screen where your keyboard is,
and then you have another screen. Make have a go
(59:56):
at it, do a proper national campaign, make some weird
choices for because that's not a mass device. But guess what,
there are cool things you can do with it. Many
people use two screens. Do a big enterprise push, do
a big business push. When I see the ai IPA ad,
that should be the double screen one's. And what's weird
is like Dell, for example, that company was dog shit
(01:00:17):
for a long time and now they're pretty good because
they weren't. Why if we make good good computers, use
our computers you see, Yeah they dogshit? Well if they
were good nah. And it's just and I think it's
this disconnection of the company from the product on both
a business and just a culture level, like the people
building things like it's so weird to me that Meta
(01:00:38):
made the ray bands because all of the people who
run Facebook now so it's Mark Zuckerberg. Javier Olivan Coo,
you've got boz the ultimate growth, All costs, ass whole
every terrorist attacks are justifiable for growth. Literally he said that. Yeah,
it's really grim thing. Alex Schultz form of growth guy.
All these are growth people. I'm shocked that there's anyone
(01:01:00):
building anything in Facebook other than the Torment Nexus and
it's plugins.
Speaker 3 (01:01:04):
Well, that's because Mark said, build you have to build
me a hardware because nobody wants nobody, like everybody hates
us because we're terrible at software. You've got to go
build me some cool hardware so I can get as
far away from the phones as far.
Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
So I'm lot for only because you said he could
build build me a hardware. But I could imagine Mark Zuckerberg,
just like his cold dead eyes looking build.
Speaker 3 (01:01:25):
Me a hard I assume that is exactly. It just leaves, yeah,
killed it for me, slams the door.
Speaker 1 (01:01:31):
Honestly, I think if they brought back the HDC Chacha
it would do pretty well. Read Chacha right, that was
a physical quirity keyboard Android phone with a Facebook button
on it that would let you directly share.
Speaker 2 (01:01:42):
Tens of them.
Speaker 1 (01:01:43):
So absolutely it could be the new minimalist phone for
the Facebook friendly. It could be the boomer phone.
Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
Oh my god, that's the boomer phone.
Speaker 2 (01:01:49):
The Great Coal has one with just giant numbers.
Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
Still around, right, They're still around, owned.
Speaker 2 (01:01:57):
By like a private equity phone, so not for long yeah,
I was, that's that's a they'll be sold to a
barbecue company or so by a private equity.
Speaker 3 (01:02:04):
Marina will buy it next year. I don't worry about it.
Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
Great things. What's funny though, is that see yes with
the grill stuff. So, as some of you may know,
I make excellent barbecue at home, I do smokers. I
admit I got in a little bit of trouble at
ces lustmor Is there because I went up to these people.
I start asking them grilling questions, not like being an ASO.
I was like, so, how does this help with the cooking?
Speaker 3 (01:02:23):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
They're like, well, you see you go on the app
and you can see recipes. Sure, but the device pause, Uh,
well you can connect it and wife, I'm like, excellent,
then what And that's because you can't really innovate that
anymore other than the combustion thermometer, which is incredible. It's
made by a guy who made a video a few
(01:02:44):
years ago called your Raven is a Liar and it's
got eight I'm not connected with this. It's just excellent.
I have to has eight sensors in it so it
can find the coldest point in your food. What like
all my hate the various caters use me. I've got
my detractors on these saying I don't like anything. The
combustion thermotos excellent, is so good. I finally got my
(01:03:05):
b F Ribs down with it. But that's the thing
that one's a great example of solving an actual problem.
That most people they use the thermometer, they don't know
where to put it and they don't know if they're
in the right place, and they're I personally and deeply
anxious person so constant anxiety, which is great for a
twelve hour cook. With this, it works, and it works
really well, and there's not a bunch of other bullshit.
(01:03:25):
It costs like one hundred and sixty nine bucks, so
it's not cheap, but it solves a problem.
Speaker 3 (01:03:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
Now, it's like you think with all of this money
in AI or AR or all these things, they solve
a problem. We've had very similar problems for like ten years.
Speaker 3 (01:03:41):
I think part of it is a lot of these
people do not they think they're solving a problem, right right,
Like I think everybody in this room is probably good.
We're good writers, right like. We all's part that's part
of how we make our living. Like when you're doing
a video, Yeah, you write the script like, we're good, Like,
this is a skill we have and we can do.
(01:04:02):
If somebody sends us a horrible text message, we will
grow because we don't want to answer it emotionally, but
we'll still respond, like and we'll respond the hell out
of it. It will be real written, well written. But these
people don't value that because they think that's just that's
a thing they can surmount with AI, right, like, that's
that is the thing for him. And I run into
(01:04:23):
this like I was talking to a woman the other
day who gave me the first legitimately good use for
large language models. She had a really bad blind date
and the guy sent her like a long, long email
and she's like, read this email for me because I'm
not going to read it because I don't want to
go on another date with a guy. Then respond to
it like politely saying saying no, I don't want to
(01:04:45):
see you again. And I was like, you figured it
out that because like if you did that to me
at work, I would be furious. Blind date, Yes, go, yep.
Speaker 1 (01:04:54):
That's no that that you're right, and that is the
more specifically than the only good example for like it's
the only good version of that demo that every company
insists on thinking. It was just like, who send a
text to my wife and tell her that I'm going
to be late for dinner? Now make me sound more
sad about it? No, apologize, just text.
Speaker 3 (01:05:14):
Your wife you start.
Speaker 2 (01:05:17):
It's like more effort to do.
Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
It's ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
And how do you even know what good is? You
can't write right? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (01:05:22):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (01:05:25):
And I must also say, just as a note, there
are people out there who have like cook disorders and
learning learning disability called dyspraxia for example. It's physical, but
there are people with dyslexia. Those are not When I
say you should be able to write email, just to
be really clear, not the people. I mean, you have
an individualized problem. And I also must be clear, none
of the AI companies give a rap fuck about you.
(01:05:47):
They do not care that it's not You are not
the person they are selling accessibility. They are selling to
someone who does not exist that they made up right, Yeah,
that is who it is. Because the rewrite stuff is crazy.
And then the oh, I have these five ingredients in
my kitchen.
Speaker 3 (01:06:02):
That's my favorite one. I'm like, ever happened to someone
you just only have.
Speaker 2 (01:06:08):
I mean, no, you can't work out what you like
unless you've got I've gone onion, one piece of ham,
three knives of a cuman check GPT. Like what is
the situation where you can't look at it and go
all right, fine, Like I'll make a sandwich.
Speaker 3 (01:06:24):
Like because you're you're imagining what they imagine when they're
doing this is themselves. They're just like looking in the
mirror and they're being like, Okay, I put on my
little padic.
Speaker 2 (01:06:33):
In your vest, I put on my clothes, put on.
Speaker 3 (01:06:35):
My little bluetooth headset. I haven't looked at my spouse
in three weeks. I'm gonna have my assistant text them.
Oh shit, my assistant got laid off. Okay, I really
wish I had an AI assistant who could text them
so that they don't leave me, because they probably.
Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
Because the divorce would be quite messy.
Speaker 3 (01:06:53):
Yeah, it would be expensive. They will take.
Speaker 2 (01:06:55):
All of my stock, but I don't care.
Speaker 3 (01:06:57):
So yeah, and like that, I mean, that is a gross,
gross exaggeration. Are many of you lovely human being? Yeah,
there are plenty of people who have lovely relationships there,
but that is like the thing there. They are they
are very cynically going after this one group who to
your point earlier, they're not talking to real people. They're
not going out to like fucking middle of nowhere rule
(01:07:20):
Nebraska and being like what do you think of this?
Because they'll be like can it connect to the internet? Yeah,
it needs the internet to do everything? Cool. I can't
use it at all because I don't have Internet.
Speaker 1 (01:07:30):
I wonder and I have a real question here, and like,
is it that so many problems have already been solved
that it's harder to find new ones, like or that
the new ones we find are too niche and too
narrow and too because you can't dedicate Google's resources to
solving like a.
Speaker 3 (01:07:46):
Fixable problem is I would love to just say, fix
my schedule for the week? Oh, I mean same, right,
Like that should be easy.
Speaker 2 (01:07:55):
You shouldn't have been lying about this. I'm calling you
out Motion, you ossholes, all right, you motherfuckers. I see
you on Instagram every goddamn day. I've supercharged my adhday
with motion. Fuck you, it's not how it works. You're
a bunch of scumbag. I'm so sorry that's a little much,
but you light I loaded your goddamn product, and it's
like I'll rearrange your SCHEDULEM like go, and it just
(01:08:16):
it like tries to like suggest I do something once
like that does not work. What the fuck you do?
And I just don't trust it anymore and it doesn't
do it. And I cannot find any real users. I'm
sure they exist, but that's the thing. It's that is
a problem to be solved. But I also think you're
right in the there are no big problems, right, I
feel like no more lands to.
Speaker 1 (01:08:35):
Conker, tens of thousands of little problems and little niche
like issues and certainly stuff that I run into every
day that shouldn't be a problem. And Google Home is
what you know, over a decade old, and those things
are just absolutely trash. But like those are little things.
There's one light in my room doesn't go off with
the rest of it goes like no one's gonna Those
are troubleshooting bug fixes. Like we were not doing this
(01:08:58):
whole maps thing again. We're not. We're not saying like, hey,
you know how it's hard to get around the city,
or you know how you got to print out map
quest directions, Like no, we drove down every road on
the planet, and now you have Google Maps. Yeah. Like
I feel like those big ambitious problems just don't don't
obviously present themselves.
Speaker 2 (01:09:15):
We do need to go back to this idea that
there are no more lands to conquer. It's the thing
I've talked about before, that there are no more big problems.
And I think we're finally maybe this is the first
time in history we're really being made to reckon with
the fact of how these companies make money because it
consumers are perhaps dealing with a death by a thousand
cuts right now. It's the ten ten million little problems
(01:09:37):
we face, which are usually a response, sorry, a result
of technical debt. It's just things built on top of things.
People I've talked to inside of Google have said this,
that they just build shit on top of other shit.
Google Home one of the most evil apps of all times,
invented by the devil to separate you from your thermostaff
But that is a result of them being like, Okay,
(01:09:59):
we've brought net Tony Foddell. Yeah, genius, genius guy. They've
got these amazing They've revolutionized the smart I'm not sure
if any of you remember when the Nest came in.
That was a huge deal. You had this shitty honeywell
thing and Nest actually worked and it worked, did exactly
what you wanted to look. It looked cool, but it
also very satisfying. And guess what, it worked. It actually worked,
and they went, Wow. So we just bought Nest and
(01:10:21):
they've got these cameras and they've got these thermostats and
they work really well and the software pretty reliable. People
like that, But we also have another app that people hate.
What if we added the thing people liked to the
thing people hate, then they will love it instead. I
(01:10:42):
don't know what happened what actually happens to thing I'm
just describing, which is someone from Google absorbed Nest and
then said, you are run by Steve. Now don't know
if it's or her name was Steve, but you are
run by this department, and we'll build on top of it,
will connect all the bits of Nest into this app,
because we must have everything in one place. When you're
(01:11:02):
not really solving problems other than company apps and making
a feature work rather than a suite of things work.
This is the result. And I think we're finally reaching
a point where just there's not enough exciting stuff to
hide from the fact that most computing experiences are cluttered
and bad. Well that's many, many times of the day.
Speaker 3 (01:11:22):
That's for the fixes. Right, Like Google, I think we
can all agree, is not doing great as far as
like search goes right. Like you go and you search
something on Google, it is so much worse. Now I'm
using Cogy, the paid one. At the moment, it's like
it's interesting. I'm still trying it out, but it doesn't
(01:11:42):
feel measurably worse, which is not great for Google. And
that is something that could be solved and that would
be a huge boot, right, Like, it is hard to
find things, and these companies have all decided that they
are going to solve it by just taking all of
the content and then may maybe or maybe not accurately
convey Google.
Speaker 2 (01:12:03):
I was like, and then you will be able to
use such to find your UPS tracking number and it
will tell it when you'll get to tell you, and
then when you're trying to do a return, it will
automatically generate that that could happen. Yeah, you know when
it just movedy.
Speaker 3 (01:12:20):
Don't worry that. Yeah, there's a lot there are these
useful things. They're nowhere close to ready and then they
go and they promise them way too early, and then
like AI is getting poisoned. There's so much really interesting
things that could have paid for a while, and there
has been for a very long time, and instead they're like,
what if we just make a bunch of money by
(01:12:41):
pushing lying bots out into the world and that won't
backfire in any way, shape or form. And it's like, no,
it's already backfiring, and it's just gonna get worse. Like Google,
you shot yourself in the foot. Microsoft with being you
shot yourself in the foot because you're like, what if
we release these lying machines at the same time we
have our garbage search engines that can't see the lies
(01:13:02):
and it'll be fine. No, you've just made the web
like almost impossible to navigate.
Speaker 2 (01:13:07):
And that one is very much like it was a
way to sell cloud computer space. It was a way
to promise the eternal growth machine could keep growing. But
also like Search, I've done the episode that's a whole thing.
It just feels like they're not building things for people
like it. Really like if I worked on Google Search
and I saw them launch that, I probably wouldn't quit.
(01:13:28):
If I had a mortgage. But I would take my
LinkedIn offline. Yeah, I wouldn't want to be associated with it.
If you like, yeah, I deface the line vacations, Yeah,
I would, yeah, vacation. But it's just someone like a
in a sane society suned up. A shy would have
been fired immediately, immediate. Liz sent off, Brabagar Ragavan would
(01:13:53):
have been sent off. These people would have been fired,
not just for but they've already not been fired for
making search bad, but for publicly breaking the probably the
biggest contribution tech has made ever, like at least in software, and.
Speaker 3 (01:14:06):
Instead it's like a little hiccup and they're like, don't worry.
AI is going to fix this.
Speaker 2 (01:14:10):
Cow just AI is going to fix the AI pro
how well, you know.
Speaker 3 (01:14:15):
That's the other part of it. They're like, well, AI
will fix it because AI just needs to learn more stuff,
and if it learns more stuff, we'll do that. Okay,
but didn't you just there was just I think The
Atlantic wrote a really great story about how they run
out of stuff to tach the AI on and so
they're like, what if we just make more machines that
make a content from AI synthetic content data.
Speaker 2 (01:14:35):
So if you go back to the PKI episode, this
is a big problem the synthetic data. And by the way,
did you know that that will break them?
Speaker 3 (01:14:41):
Yeah, it's gonna be great.
Speaker 2 (01:14:43):
Habsburg Gai is well. Jaythan Sadowski calls it one of
the funniest terms ever. But it's so funny as well
because there are so many times, there's so many things
to fix, and just using the phone is kind of
a ball Like it's it's like you have this click
click keyboard company. I'm surprised that that didn't come out
(01:15:03):
like one of the weird like not quite works for Apple,
but seems to get all their revenue through the Apple store.
Companies like these, these ones that have just kind of
bubbled up and hung around in a good way. Like
it's just solving a very specific knee.
Speaker 1 (01:15:14):
Right right, very like specific.
Speaker 2 (01:15:18):
There are plenty of people who don't like clickie, who
want a clickie keyboard, people who like keyboards, like that's
a thing that you can connect to a person who
does not about.
Speaker 3 (01:15:26):
Kim Kardashian bowl one, right, that is famously a thing
she loves.
Speaker 1 (01:15:31):
One of the first things I learned about being on
the side of the business and I'm not allowed to
talk about the customers stuff. Give me the permission.
Speaker 2 (01:15:39):
But yeah, I hear Henry clutching his clicks as his
last words. Well, I like the device. No, it's it
sucks as well. And getting back to something of saying
earlier as well, I want to be excited about this
stuff I loves.
Speaker 3 (01:16:00):
Is there anything you're excited about?
Speaker 2 (01:16:02):
Right? Yeah, that's a good like the steam Deck. The
next I genuinely believe, and I know the o led
was the second one. No, that's not what I'm talking about.
Whenever they do the next steam Deck, I'm so excited
for that.
Speaker 3 (01:16:14):
It's gonna be cool.
Speaker 2 (01:16:15):
I love the Steam Deck. I think it's one of
the coolest things I've ever used. It is like a
really great PC gaming console. PC gaming consoles, they've tried
them a few times that never quite work, but this works.
It's a bit too big.
Speaker 1 (01:16:30):
Play isn't great, but yeah, don't.
Speaker 3 (01:16:32):
Worry about it. It's cool and it's it's customizable in
a way that you don't generally get with products nowadays,
and it's just it's fun to use. Like that's that's
what I got.
Speaker 1 (01:16:43):
Like.
Speaker 3 (01:16:43):
I got into the I in Ao, I got into
these weird like Steam Deck replacements, because there's a place
where I'm like, oh, something's happening.
Speaker 1 (01:16:49):
Yeah, game play is kind of immune from this, from
this thing, because like you can go back to a
Nintendo Sweat right now. I still love my switch and
Razor kicks out a new gaming accessory every cees. You've
got this crazy, ridiculous webcam that like most people don't
need but streamers love, and the RGB nabled lights and
stuff like that. There are a lot of gadgets to
be had in the gaming world. I feel like if
I were one.
Speaker 2 (01:17:10):
Beginning with e I'm completely blanking.
Speaker 3 (01:17:11):
They do the lights, El Gato, they make.
Speaker 2 (01:17:17):
Really good Dane producer there, it's Eato. They make great
ship as well.
Speaker 1 (01:17:23):
And production gear and camera NERD's like, there are still
gadgets out there for specific niches.
Speaker 3 (01:17:28):
But it's definitely niche.
Speaker 1 (01:17:29):
Yeah, they're also little professions, but they're like it's specialized gear.
It's not really a gadget. There is just yeah, plan,
I got this weird thing.
Speaker 2 (01:17:37):
There is something exciting happening where the normalization of photography
written large is pretty magnificent. The photos I can take
on my iPhone with portrait mode are not my ds
A lot. I've got an Alpha three, I got a
Canon five DS. I've done a lot of photography, got
some nice glass too. And yeah, when I take them
out and I get the right lighting, lighting, and I've
I've made sure I do the settings.
Speaker 3 (01:17:57):
Right, you feel like you've earned.
Speaker 2 (01:17:59):
And I nailed and I nailed there. Sure it's great
ninety eight percent. The other time, though, my phone's in
my pocket and I can get a really good photo
and it's easy. I can upload it somewhere, it's easy
to share with a friend. I could do a little editing.
I can make a podcast at home in my pajamas
in Las Vegas. I can have it edited. There are
actual things that happen that are so good in tech,
(01:18:19):
and they see these things and they're like, shit, all right,
what problems to humans happen? Like I don't I don't know, yah,
And they go to their assistant and like, what problems
do you have and they start talking like yeah, sure,
And it's just it's frustrating because if the tech industry
would realize this was happening, they actually have a lot
of good stuff to do. The normalization of whatever professional
(01:18:40):
things are. You can record a podcast that sounds really
good from home now in a way that you couldn't
four years ago.
Speaker 1 (01:18:45):
Absolutely. Yeah. Also, I think like some of this is
just it is. I don't know if you want to
call it, like I've victimless. Crime is not the word.
It's like this was, this was, this was inevitable. Right
when stuff got this good, and when when you got
able to do those things that you just talked about
on your phone, you have a production studio in your pocket,
like we had to get here. There was there's no
(01:19:08):
longer any reason for Motorola to make a phone that
with double action hinges.
Speaker 3 (01:19:13):
Yeah, we figured it out. And the same thing happened
in Hollywood, right like they were like, oh, superhero movies
make money. What if we only did? And that was
really cool for me, a superhero nerd for two days,
and then.
Speaker 2 (01:19:26):
I was like, that's a really good example because they
saw that superheroes did well. What they didn't realize was
the movies were good and the actors were good in
the roles. Iron Man didn't do well because people love
the concept of Tony Stark. It's because Robert Downey Junior.
Speaker 3 (01:19:43):
Nobody I f icking knew who Tony Stark was whenever it
came out.
Speaker 2 (01:19:47):
I don't know. I Guardian's the Galaxy was good, not
because of Guardians of the Galaxy, but because the act
is a very good that's excellent. Scimora like, yeah, I
forget who plays pee Quill, but the guy from the Office,
there's gonna be someone who's so pissed and.
Speaker 3 (01:20:01):
It wasn't incredible.
Speaker 2 (01:20:02):
The guy from the Office, I'm like a huge guyianso
the gag because he found have a bunch of comic
artwork from it. But they saw that, and that's why, Yes,
there you go. I have the guy from that show
with person Trace Williams. Yeah, treat Williams. Sorry. So the
thing is they see that, and then they spilled out
all these ship ones. They're like, what what don't you
(01:20:23):
like about it? They're all three hours long. That's more
superhero you fucking ingrades.
Speaker 3 (01:20:29):
And just take your slop.
Speaker 2 (01:20:30):
You don't want your slot, take your slop. And I
guess that maybe we are in tech slop era.
Speaker 3 (01:20:34):
We are in tech slop era.
Speaker 2 (01:20:36):
Oh no, we're actually in tech slop era. That's the
title of this episode.
Speaker 3 (01:20:45):
But it is we're in this moment where it's like
we they are more focused on their bottom line. They're
more focused on pleasing people who don't care about the
technology than actually making good technology. And there's there's a
lot of good examples where that's not the case. We've
talked about a lot of those here, but a lot
of it is just garbage. And so for me, that's
why I go and I mess with these steam deck
(01:21:06):
competitors and eat ink devices because that's the areas where
it feels like, yeah, there is the slop, like right now,
and tell Panos does something about the Kindle garbage device.
I do not want one in my house. Sorry to
everyone at Amazon. Fix it. But these other Onyx books
is making like really really cool interesting stuff here. It's
not great yet, but they're trying. And every time, like
(01:21:29):
I write a review, then the next thing comes out
and it changes little and I'm like okay, then I
feel very powerful, and then I just want to like
write a hole like here's what I want actually from it,
and then I'm worried that I'm got too close, I
got too into it.
Speaker 2 (01:21:43):
It's funny though, that you're afraid to write that, right,
just be like fix it, yeah, because like you're afraid
the company would be mad when the company should.
Speaker 3 (01:21:51):
Like, yeah, no, then I'm no. I'm more afraid that,
like I'm doing labor and not getting paid for it.
I mean, I'm getting paid for it, but like.
Speaker 1 (01:21:57):
Right, the unpaid consulting check is not.
Speaker 3 (01:22:00):
Yeah it where's my consulting check now?
Speaker 1 (01:22:02):
But I wonder about the Actually, that's what I've been
thinking about kind of weirdly for the past few minutes.
It's just like, there is still obviously really good reporting
out there. There are still really good gadget reviews out there,
there's still people calling companies to account for for the
the stuff we've been talking about for two hours. But
I do wonder how much disruption is actually being introduced
(01:22:23):
by this kind of like rise of influencer marketing that
kind of like there's clouds the whole thing, and nobody
can tell the difference. I found I started to find
fifteen years or twelve years ago that people could not
tell the difference between sponsored content and.
Speaker 2 (01:22:40):
Even when you lead in quite aggressively, yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:22:42):
Because well, oh, I'm like I tweet and someone replies
asking a question that I've answered in the original tweet,
you know, because nobody pays attention. It's it's it's it's
an attention span problem that I don't I don't know.
We could spend another two hours talking about the changes
that would need to happen in the media world to
actually kind of make it close to good, but I
(01:23:03):
don't know that it would make a difference. Yeah, it's
based on people's willingness to actually listen or ability to listen.
Speaker 3 (01:23:09):
It's wild how many times we'll put a review up
and you know, the Vergeon, we do not accept units.
We send them back after we review them. We've got
very strict policy. Used to we wouldn't even eat food one.
Speaker 6 (01:23:22):
And I love it.
Speaker 3 (01:23:24):
And nowadays, like we get people being like, oh, you
just spawn con for Apple, and I'm like, rude. I'm
mainly just offended more than annoyed, because I'm just like,
but it's it's the same thing. There's this assumption that
everyone has paid to play, and you see that even
with PR, you get a lot of these younger PR
people being like, hey, how much can we pay you
(01:23:44):
to get our product on your site. I'm like, well, nothing, absolute, yeah,
And it's it's shockingly common.
Speaker 1 (01:23:54):
Mark is running, you know, a really great review on
MKBHD and then we have two weeks of discourse because
somebody on Twitter with a large audience said, you know,
I just don't think it's right that can kill a
can kill a company, you know with this, with this
thoughtless headline, I'm like, no, that's a review of a
product that didn't.
Speaker 2 (01:24:13):
That's how this works. I think that there is a
problem within the media, that there is a fear that
if you step outside of the lines in gaming for
good reason. I was in there before all of that
horror show happens, and now it's those people you will
actually get, especially so much worse for a woman. But
in gadgets there's a fear of losing access. But I
(01:24:36):
also think no one wants to say anything that's particularly
different because I don't know what if they're wrong, And
the answer is you've been wrong plenty of fucking times.
Why stop now? Like, no one wants to make the
step and say this sucks. I mentioned Dave three D earlier,
great YouTube, Dave two D pardon us.
Speaker 1 (01:24:55):
I think three D is yeah, ten years from.
Speaker 2 (01:24:57):
Now there are And he did this thing about about
the rabbit and about the pin, and he was just saying,
what are these companies doing like, what is this? I
looked around, really no one said that there was a
thing in Bloomberg being like, so, why is it so
good that you're doing this? It was like a month
before it came out. It's just completely insane. And I
(01:25:17):
understand that when you see the world, everyone's saying AI,
everyone's saying this is gonna be big. Everyone's saying the
same thing. It's scary to step out. But also my
Keith Olbman, have you no shame? But it really is like,
do you not want to just say what you see?
If you believe this, I actually am fine with it.
(01:25:39):
Please explain yourself because in the case of the rabbit,
the case of the humane I know the argument is
are it's just for affluent people. Whatever, It's still a
lot of money. It's still who knows whether someone didn't
actually save for the rabbit or save.
Speaker 3 (01:25:51):
A lot of people.
Speaker 2 (01:25:53):
Two hundred bucks isn't screw you if you think two
hundred bucks isn't a lot. If that is your response
to something as a justification for being shit, that's uncomfortable.
Speaker 1 (01:26:02):
I always said that wasn't an excuse, especially since it
was being like compared directly to the to their humane
and I'm like, well, yeah, it's cost less, but still
doesn't do it.
Speaker 3 (01:26:09):
It wasna yeah, yeah, in fact, it did even much less. Yeah,
and it's you can put an Android phone on it now.
I know.
Speaker 1 (01:26:18):
I wanted to do that for my video. It didn't
come out in the time.
Speaker 2 (01:26:20):
It's just frustrating that guy who was like, oh, he
killed the product. No, they killed the products. Marcus just
said what was in front of him, right.
Speaker 1 (01:26:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:26:28):
I had a friend, Sharie Smith, who would review laptops
and sometimes she'd give him a bad score, and the
companies would call and be like, well, wh why did
you give us a bad store? And you made a
bad product. Make a good product and I'll give you
a good score.
Speaker 1 (01:26:40):
It's that easy just talking about this off air. It's
just like, no, look, I will tell you why, and
I'll take you through the process and oh, I've just
narrated my whole video for you again.
Speaker 2 (01:26:50):
Just go and if I like it, I'm gonna lose
my shit over this. I'll be emphatic about how much
I like it. When I like something, I love it,
I get into the guts. Val Use, how was I
really enjoy it? And I wanted to do that again
with take, like I actually really miss it.
Speaker 1 (01:27:05):
And I think people What people don't get is that
that's actually that makes it easier. Like when I run
a review, that's that's good. Yeah, it's great because I
get to geek out the product. The product people are happy,
which like I doesn't know what I do, but they're
not yelling at me, and the commenters aren't aren't yelling
at me either. You get the occasional like how much
they padio for this, and like everyone else is just
(01:27:25):
like oh yeah, yea, I was geeking out about this too.
I'm glad it's not a dumpster fire.
Speaker 3 (01:27:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:27:30):
Great, cool, it's it's much more of a hassle to
do a bad review.
Speaker 3 (01:27:33):
Yeah, a bad review. I mean the Vergion. This year,
we did three that were like lower than average, and
people were like, what because we give the rabbit a
really low score. I believe we give it like a
three or or four. You know, we give it a
three because the Humane Pin got a four because it
did slightly more, and then the vision pro got a
seven and we all joke now and say it probably
should have wit a six. But but even then it
(01:27:55):
was pretty like like the Vision pro actually still did
the thing right.
Speaker 2 (01:27:59):
It was those moments.
Speaker 1 (01:28:01):
Yeah, but seven should be outlined. I'm just gonna say
seven should be retired.
Speaker 3 (01:28:05):
Yeah, but you know, it's very uncommon in our space,
and a lot of times if you are using the
garbage products, you don't want to talk about them, and
then you're using the mediocre products and you're like, how
do I make that sound interesting?
Speaker 1 (01:28:17):
Oh my god, yes, now we're just talking.
Speaker 3 (01:28:20):
You're just over here talking about no no, no no,
we have a great time.
Speaker 2 (01:28:22):
Sorry, no no, no, no, I'm hat that's why you're here.
And so it's funny. I've been asked recently to do
more review stuff. But that's the thing. It's like, what
if I hate it? Man, just say you hate it.
Speaker 1 (01:28:36):
It'll be the most and I can do no.
Speaker 2 (01:28:39):
But I can absolutely rip something a pop. Also, do
I want to like if it's like something I truly despise, fine,
absolutely the injustice inside me. But it's like something that's
just kind of shit, like a six out of ten
review that sounds horrib.
Speaker 3 (01:28:55):
I mean I definitely. When I first I went from
from one place that had a very kind of strict tone,
and then I went to a place with a much
looser tone, which was Gizmoto at that point owned by Gawker.
And I started there and I was ready to go,
and I got a product in and I think, I mean,
I gave it a really bad review, and it was
(01:29:16):
mainly because I was just I was like, it was
not very good, and I was like, I'm gonna dig in.
And it was the meanest thing I've ever written in
my life. I even think about it now and I
cringe a little bit because it was so mean, But
it was also so fun to write. And you you
get older and you learn and you temper things, and
so you're like, well, maybe I don't need to compare
it to like a baby dropped on its head and
a target, Like maybe that is not appropriate.
Speaker 2 (01:29:37):
So we're approaching the end now. Yeah, So for both
of you, what is actually something you really really really
love in tech? There you go, everyone on Reddit you
want something positive? Jeez, you got you mean, like like
a gadget you just really really love.
Speaker 1 (01:29:51):
I have a question, like a currently available one or one.
Speaker 2 (01:29:54):
One that used the history of yea yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
even from history. I don't mind.
Speaker 1 (01:30:00):
I will get I'll blend the two. I'll give you
where I think a company really got something right and
it didn't do very well. Motorola, as you know, revived
the Razor for twenty nineteen. It brought back the Razor
as a foldable Android phone, and it was pretty cool,
but I had some stuff wrong with it. One of
the greatest. Then the next year they brought out the
Razor of twenty twenty, and I tell you, for somebody
(01:30:20):
who is terminally nostalgic, this thing maintained the industrial design
of one of the most famous phones of all time
and concealed within it a really quite good Android phone
with a bad camera because it's made by Motorola, but
you know it's and it was very fragile in whatever,
but it was beautiful. I still I very few gadgets
(01:30:41):
that I don't just throw in a drawer or return
or whatever. This one I didn't have the heart. It
sits there on my shelf in the back. It's out
of focus in most of my videos, and it's a masterpiece.
And I love it when a company just absolutely nails it,
and I hate it when it either doesn't have the
ability to market it enough or it just doesn't capture
the public imagination, and I don't think it did very well,
(01:31:01):
but I loved it. Was the coolest, one of the
coolest things I've ever reached.
Speaker 3 (01:31:06):
That was a cool fucking phone. Yeah, I think me
right now, it's arc the browser. I recently switched to it.
I won't shut up about it anywhere I go. So
you guys have to listen to it too. You're talking
about all your tabs earlier. I'm also a tab monster,
and it just works. It better, like collates the stuff
for me, so like it does the job. I waited
(01:31:28):
like two years to use it, and now it's got
a bunch of AI features that I think are kind
of stupid, But you ignore the AI features and you
just focus on the core product and it rules. And
it just came out. The iPad version came out the
week we're recording this.
Speaker 1 (01:31:41):
I've heard that a lot. I've heard a lot of people.
Speaker 3 (01:31:43):
It's one of those things where you do have to
take a minute. It's not something immediately like I get it.
You have to kind of sit with it a second
because the first time I looked at it was like,
this is stupid, and immediately all.
Speaker 2 (01:31:53):
Right, Well, from people find you Michael.
Speaker 1 (01:31:56):
If people can find me at Captain two Phones mostly
on Threads, it's Captain the Number two Phones. I'm also
still on X you know, I have No Choice and
Instagram and I make your YouTube videos at the Mister Mobile.
Speaker 3 (01:32:08):
And you can find me at Alex Hcrans. I think
on threads and Twitter exists, but I don't check it
very often. It's also Alex Hcrans. And then I'm at
the Verge. I write and edit at the Verge. I'm
on the Verge cast every Friday and sometimes on Tuesdays.
Speaker 2 (01:32:26):
All Right, my name's ed Zychron you can find me
a w W anyway. Sorry, you've been listening to Better Offline.
We've been recording this in the beautiful iHeartRadio studios here
in beautiful New York City. Daniel my producer, Thank you
so much, Daniel. I'm calling this thing Better off Live.
Now We're going to do this in multiple cities. I'm
proud and happy that we did this. Thank you, Michael,
(01:32:46):
thank you Alex. It's been one for and thank you
all for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T
(01:33:08):
T O S O W s Ki dot com.
Speaker 6 (01:33:12):
You can email me at easy at better offline dot
com or visit better offline dot com to find more
podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really
recommend you go to chat dot where's youreaed dot at
to visit the discord, and go to our slash.
Speaker 2 (01:33:25):
Better Offline to check out our reddit.
Speaker 1 (01:33:27):
Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a
production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3 (01:33:32):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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