CZM Rewind: Where Did Tech's Magic Go? feat. Alex Cranz & Michael Fisher

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Cauzone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello friends, it's me your host ed Zeitron, the host
of Better Offline. Now, of course it's Christmas weeks or
we're all taken a week off here at cool Zone Media.
So I'm rerunning one of my favorite episodes, where did
text Magic Go for You? During Alex Crowanz and Michael Fisher.
Now you're going to hear a lot more like this.
It's recorded in the awesome iHeartRadio studios in New York.
We're going to be doing way more of this next year.

(00:26):
But also the theme of this one is about where
text magic is gone, and I think this is a
formative theme of Better Offline but also going to be
a big thing in twenty twenty five for us.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
So please enjoy.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
This is a wonderful episode full of laughs and larks,
and honestly those two are way more funny than I am. Anyway,
please enjoy and have a happy Holidays.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed Zitron,
otherwise known today as Woke Joe Rogan. Good. We are
live kind of from the iHeartRadio studios in New York. Today.

(01:11):
I am joyed by mister Mobile himself, Michael Fisher and
of course Alex Krantz from the Verge.

Speaker 4 (01:16):
Thank you for coming, thanks for having to be here,
thanks for having us. 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.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
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 have found is I'm actually gonna pull it
out of my pocket and there's no video, so you're
never gonna know. Like this anchor charge, it's like thirty bugs.
I mean, like battery packs are cool, but otherwise everything

(01:52):
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, We're wrong,
And like the Daylight tablet, which we'll get to of course,
right these things just have turned out to be just
not even fun. You can be kind of shitty, but fun,
like there's something you can look at even some of

(02:12):
the great tech failures, like that weird frame that you
could upload things to from like twenty fifty and look
a few of these weird Indiegogo things. There was a
cute weirdness to it, but now it's just almost just nothing.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
There's a lot of reasons for that.

Speaker 5 (02:27):
There are.

Speaker 6 (02:28):
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 Rabbit is still trying to like
salvage the situation and make it work, but I mean humane,
I think you know, it took a giant swing, which

(02:48):
was this this thing 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.

Speaker 5 (02:57):
And when you.

Speaker 6 (02:58):
Deliver a product that's so undercooked, I think that's the problem.
Like when I mean undercook, I can't even get there.

Speaker 7 (03:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
What is it? And so they're all like, throw it
at the wall? Is this it?

Speaker 3 (03:18):
Yeah?

Speaker 7 (03:20):
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 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.

Speaker 3 (03:39):
And white, just just for the listeners. You might not
know about it.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
Can you describe the Daylight Yeah, the Daylight Computer.

Speaker 5 (03:44):
You just reviewed it, right, Yeah, yeah, I just came
off the back of it. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:47):
It's like I think I called it an ordinary Android
tablet with an extraordinary display because a special thing about
it is the display.

Speaker 5 (03:53):
And David Pierce said, you know, yeah, like.

Speaker 6 (03:56):
He thinks, uh, this this is this is a display
company necessarily a consumer product, but what is it though?

Speaker 7 (04:02):
It's like an l CD display that only does black
and white.

Speaker 6 (04:06):
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
like it's is.

Speaker 7 (04:17):
Yeah, it's kind of like using an e ink Android
tablet if the e ink could go fast.

Speaker 3 (04:23):
Right, That's why I was excited about it. So what's
bad about it?

Speaker 7 (04:27):
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 3 (04:42):
Cool, So they just did not prepare for people use
you can like I mean that's.

Speaker 5 (04:48):
True of the of those e readers.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
No, that is true.

Speaker 6 (04:50):
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 3 (04:59):
Yeah I've seen I've seen the Instagram ads.

Speaker 6 (05:01):
Yeah yeah, and like that is their pitch, that is
their whole things, Like your screen is too colorful and
too addictive, and you should you should be able to
use your tablet outside 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 TikTok endlest feeds because you know you don't want

(05:22):
to watch YouTube on it.

Speaker 5 (05:23):
You want to do someone.

Speaker 6 (05:24):
They made reading deliberate, right, which which is a whole
industry now, isn't it right?

Speaker 7 (05:29):
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 3 (05:39):
Yeah, I've seen the ads for that, that weird phone
where it's like, oh, we block out all the things
you use your phone for, right, 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 1 (05:54):
You are an online.

Speaker 3 (05:56):
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

(06:18):
isn't in tech at all, yeah, 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 I think that they just.

Speaker 5 (06:35):
Don't think give a shit.

Speaker 3 (06:36):
It has to be held out separately daylight. It almost
feels like they just focus the simple people who chose
to well, well you said they were Alex. You said
there was there was something cynical.

Speaker 7 (06:47):
About it, So I'm yeah, 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 eating, 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

(07:08):
they they said 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 the where it's like, the
idea is if you look at an orange light before
you go to bed, that'll make you sleepy.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
Blue light wakes you up and.

Speaker 3 (07:28):
Makes you just proved this wasn't the case.

Speaker 6 (07:30):
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 it isn't really very cool.

Speaker 7 (07:40):
Yeah, it's just like and so that's also eight hundred
dollars right right, it's eight hundred dollars.

Speaker 6 (07:46):
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 5 (07:58):
What he is? My take way was is that no,
he's he's a he's a.

Speaker 6 (08:02):
Display nerd who really cares about making this particular kind
of display text 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, Like this is that's that's just it was.

Speaker 5 (08:20):
It's Android. But the hardware is they they built.

Speaker 3 (08:22):
But did they make an effort with the software? Yeah?

Speaker 6 (08:25):
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 Laundra on top of Android.

Speaker 5 (08:34):
But we have all these ideas.

Speaker 6 (08:35):
I'm like, great delivery ideas before I.

Speaker 5 (08:38):
Have a press like, aren't you It's very frustrating.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
I wish I could do that. With the bank. Yeah,
I've got the money this month. However I will one
day and I'll have lots of it. Well, I mean
that's how I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
That's a called a credit card.

Speaker 7 (08:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (09:07):
You should pay bad product.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
Pay me to wait, pay me to wait?

Speaker 6 (09:12):
Right, Yeah, 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 three hundred
bucks 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.

Speaker 5 (09:26):
So I hit them on that a lot.

Speaker 6 (09:27):
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 tiny you know, minimum water quantities
they have to they have to hit.

Speaker 1 (09:38):
So it's like so it's basically bit you got to eat.

Speaker 5 (09:41):
No, No, it's like make it maybe even to make
a big margin on each tablet. That's the thing.

Speaker 6 (09:45):
They were like, they are, No, I assume that at
least with that from the factory.

Speaker 7 (09:48):
They just put in a lot of effort and these
things are much more expensive to make than they have to.

Speaker 6 (09:52):
Which one I can see that side of it now,
Like I'm on clicks, like I've gotten some experience with that,
and I'm like, okay, I get it.

Speaker 5 (09:58):
I don't know if it's true. I'm not. I don't
know enough to know.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
No, eight hundred dollars, Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 5 (10:03):
Yeah, today the click iPhone is now one thousand dollars eccessory.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
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, and this allows you to type
with your with your figure. It's a nice click to
it a little keyboard. How much that cost?

Speaker 5 (10:22):
This is one twenty nine or excuse me, one thirty
nine or one like it.

Speaker 6 (10:26):
I do like it. And I'm not just saying that
because I am I so founder. I'm very biased.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
Just like fucking around with it.

Speaker 3 (10:43):
But 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 is just going to 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

(11:07):
or from China, and they're amazingly. They're called like the
Shengzong Chang Zong Dong romance company and they sell eleven
different products, many batteries, and they're 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.

Speaker 1 (11:23):
That one folding machine, the one.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
Folding machine that will never launch. But even then the
folding machine a 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 7 (11:36):
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 CES and have
that big presence.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
Because you don't. You can just sell directly to the consumer.

Speaker 7 (11:54):
You can just see it and we see that with
stuff like like the stuff I'm really into right now
is ian Eo I think is how you say it,
which is like gaming console.

Speaker 5 (12:01):
It looks like a giant sidekick, right, yeah, like that one.

Speaker 1 (12:04):
It's called the I n Ao. It's a y A
n EO.

Speaker 7 (12:08):
I'm absolutely massacring the name A y A n e
o the flip ds and this thing is the dumbest,
most fun.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
Thing I've used in a while.

Speaker 7 (12:20):
It's like a steam Deck. But if the steam Deck
ran on Windows and therefore sucked.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
Two screens, why do you enjoy it?

Speaker 1 (12:28):
I think I like it because it's different.

Speaker 7 (12:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
Steam Deck it's fine.

Speaker 7 (12:42):
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 know what, there's gonna
be people who really really like this thing and are
gonna have fun with it, and it's mainly gonna be
nerds who want to play Nintendo DS ROMs.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
And I'm like, yes, cool, Well, that feels like the
first weird thing I've heard of in it while other
than like the Rabbit.

Speaker 6 (13:04):
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 is, 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.

Speaker 5 (13:17):
It was like, wow, oh my god.

Speaker 6 (13:18):
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.

Speaker 5 (13:25):
But yeah, it's like it's it's a really great accessory.

Speaker 3 (13:29):
I've heard good things.

Speaker 7 (13:30):
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 care.

Speaker 3 (13:41):
How you can use some vocals. Yeah, So that's vergin
on useful.

Speaker 7 (13:44):
It is absolutely extremely useful. Except for Meta.

Speaker 3 (13:47):
How they make that.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
They made it because they.

Speaker 7 (13:51):
Have like Meta has this big vision for AR and VR, right,
so they have 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.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
So we're going to start with.

Speaker 3 (14:04):
These glasses so you can't see anything in them.

Speaker 7 (14:05):
You can't know and so it's all audio. BOS was
doing this a couple of years ago.

Speaker 5 (14:09):
That's right.

Speaker 7 (14:09):
It'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, I'm watch
of those they're like two fifty or something.

Speaker 5 (14:25):
Oh god, yeah, between two and three hundred and something somewhere.

Speaker 7 (14:27):
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.

Speaker 6 (14:32):
Let's do 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 but
like thirty percent of the time.

Speaker 5 (14:47):
It's just bad.

Speaker 6 (14:48):
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, you can just literally hit a button
on it and.

Speaker 5 (14:55):
How the land what you're looking at?

Speaker 3 (14:57):
The human ice thirty five millimeters?

Speaker 5 (14:59):
Right, Yeah, I have no I don't know what. I
don't remember what the spect.

Speaker 1 (15:01):
The perspective is like weird because it's off.

Speaker 3 (15:04):
Because of New York Times. He does lovely videos of
him cooking using them. He's got his Burmese mount and
dog Bruno, 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 that Meta
is doing it though, like the idea, but also how
it feels also weird that Meta made something good. Well,

(15:26):
I'm just very confused because all right, the VR stuff
with Quest, I know we're like meant to like most
people like, oh the 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,

(15:49):
I still get sick. Yeah, I still feel weird. It
still doesn't go on my face.

Speaker 7 (15:54):
Right. That's why they did the glasses is because they
know there's there's.

Speaker 3 (15:58):
Half Alex on the glasses.

Speaker 7 (16:00):
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 him 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.

Speaker 1 (16:22):
Like I wanted to give.

Speaker 7 (16:25):
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 6 (16:42):
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 Vocals by North.

Speaker 3 (16:50):
I wonder the name. I remember what they did.

Speaker 6 (16:52):
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.

Speaker 8 (16:58):
Glasses, right, 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
tron like heads up display and you could see your
text messages from your phone.

Speaker 6 (17:09):
You could get drive driving directions, term by turn directions,
little points of interest things, and it was like it
was appearing in your eyeball. Of course, it was very
strange because when you're talking to somebody, you'd see they'd
look kind of above your eyebrow, and then you'd be.

Speaker 5 (17:20):
Like, are you are you checking your messages while.

Speaker 3 (17:23):
I'm talking to you?

Speaker 8 (17:25):
No?

Speaker 1 (17:26):
No, no, that's where you get the sunglass version.

Speaker 3 (17:27):
Right.

Speaker 5 (17:28):
But like, this was a great idea.

Speaker 6 (17:31):
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 3 (17:39):
Killed it probably both.

Speaker 6 (17:40):
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 3 (17:49):
I yeah, Google gloss look cool. I never got to
play with Yeah, And I think Robert Scobel has done
a lot of bad things, But that weird picture of
him in the shower I genuinely the show. So there's
a really disgusting fellow called Robert Scobell, famous for reasons
I'm not actually sure. He kisses up to Elon Musk
now wants to marry his tesla. I believe I haven't

(18:11):
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.

Speaker 7 (18:25):
Just a lot of people talked about that photo.

Speaker 3 (18:30):
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 are cool. I 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

(18:50):
it's worth looking away. Sam, that's that's the Actually, this
is an escapism. We made a tool to escape from
the world rules, kind of ripping off paris marks from
tech one save us there. He made a similar point
about the pro to distract us from real life, which
is a bit much. 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

(19:13):
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

(19:35):
it really well.

Speaker 7 (19:36):
It's just because they're all so desperate to be the
next iPhone hyper like, like I love the you know,
I think everybody in this room currently has an iPhone.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
They're they're very good devices.

Speaker 7 (19:48):
Yeah, and everybody wants to be the next one because
then they get the thirty percent lock in they get They.

Speaker 5 (19:53):
Are just all just cultural cachet.

Speaker 7 (19:56):
Yeah, it just makes you the next big thing. And
so Meta has been doing that. Google's 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 that can also pass.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
Through and can turn off and make way with.

Speaker 7 (20:16):
You, and most importantly that you don't look stupid wearing
Like if I want to give you a widge Weggie,
you you've lost the plot. And I'm I'm liberal with
the wedgies. So actually it's like actorom the urge.

Speaker 3 (20:35):
So with my sung glasses on the entire time, you
would have to know, but I would, Well, then there's
halfway they take them off. By the second pat.

Speaker 6 (20:44):
You got to get some with the details of the
flames on them.

Speaker 1 (20:48):
Well, guy Fieri moment.

Speaker 3 (20:59):
So it feels like augmented reality is at least where
that 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 6 (21:14):
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.

Speaker 5 (21:25):
Yeah, and I've never seen anything get close.

Speaker 1 (21:27):
I mean I think that.

Speaker 7 (21:27):
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 we're recording this, did a whole
reorg of this of the meta division.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
And so they're like, Oculus, you go over here, and
you go over like.

Speaker 7 (21:43):
An under an ad sales guy who well, I don't
remember the name, And then the ray Bands they're like, Okay,
this is like this is our focus. They've got plans
for some glasses the next couple of years that are
like much more involved. We've heard like Google Bob Focal
and we haven't heard anything there and so it could
be dead. But also like everybody's talking about AR right now,

(22:06):
so it feels like maybe they're coming back.

Speaker 3 (22:08):
I think that. So I had an episode about this
rock com 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.
There is no next Google or Facebook or anything.

Speaker 1 (22:23):
So they're chasing AI.

Speaker 3 (22:24):
That's they're chasing AI. But come on, come on.

Speaker 6 (22:28):
I was going to say, you've done a very good
job in the past three weeks deistrating on this very
show why AI is not as exciting one would.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
That's a good point to bring up, though. How do
you two feel about AI?

Speaker 6 (22:40):
Well, I feel I'll say this deptails with what you
were just saying. I the companies 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
Cumane and Rabbit stuff came out, and I was like
crossing my fingers as somebody who covers the stuff, and

(23:02):
as somebody who has loved the stuff for as long
as I can remember.

Speaker 5 (23:06):
I love the excitement.

Speaker 6 (23:07):
Of new things coming out and introducing new possibilities, and
I feel like the A. I have an increasingly severe
grudge against the AI bubble, the hip cycle for raising
my hopes actually putting some pretty cool hardware in my head.
Say what you want about the humane pament that hardware
rocks and then absolutely cutting its legs out from under
it because most of its functionality is based on an

(23:30):
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 1 (23:35):
Yeah, I think like AI is.

Speaker 7 (23:37):
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 language models go, they're

(23:58):
really bad at it, to the point where Tim Cook's like, well,
wouldn't say one hundred, get it right. I believe that's
actually a bad thing you to.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
Say, dude.

Speaker 7 (24:06):
And everybody's saying that because they're like, don't worry about it,
don't worry about it. Meanwhile, the researchers are like, actually,
at language models, aren't the thing. Don't you should worry
about it. But everybody's like, but we can make money now.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
And so we can't.

Speaker 3 (24:20):
Well 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 like this stuff. I love this ship. Do

(24:41):
you know how excited I am want to get a
new dumb gadget? I can mess around you.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
You've got a charger right here.

Speaker 3 (24:46):
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 be The steam Deck was
the last time I was really like excite and then
excited after yeah, and kind of the Vision Pro.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
Oh, interesting, but.

Speaker 3 (25:06):
It's 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

(25:27):
think it's just love the rockkombabble. There was a twenty
year period and you'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 Marguerite. You knew that
was never gonna work. You kind of enjoyed them try,
and then they scammed a bunch of people that was
also bad. Yeah, but you stopped getting fun, like there

(25:50):
wasn't something to look forward to, like the Vision Pro.
Reason they 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 turned out that like I didn't have the
right size thing, which dramatically improved it, and I was

(26:11):
using it fairly often. I'm like, this is not there yet,
but this is different and cool and watching movies on
its great. Then I tried to watch on a plane.

Speaker 1 (26:20):
How'd that go?

Speaker 3 (26:21):
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 5 (26:35):
Yeah, well go ahead.

Speaker 7 (26:37):
I was gonna say, like, the VR thing is a
weird one because it is so dependent on the person.

Speaker 5 (26:42):
Right.

Speaker 7 (26:42):
Like I had a friend who also just recently did
a cross country flight, wore the vision pro watched June
and June two nice back to back, and they were
they loved.

Speaker 3 (26:52):
It, absolute legends.

Speaker 7 (26:53):
Yeah, whereas you would have presumably thrown up everywhere and
they would My.

Speaker 3 (26:58):
Head just felt like it would explode it.

Speaker 5 (26:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (27:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:06):
Gonna happen there?

Speaker 7 (27:07):
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 it.

Speaker 3 (27:14):
Did watchful Hand of Baz?

Speaker 1 (27:16):
Yeah, we did that. What was it the Meta Quest pro?
That was that the one.

Speaker 3 (27:20):
Where they had the pro one they've canceled.

Speaker 7 (27:22):
Yeah, where they released it and everybody's like this is
garbage and they're.

Speaker 3 (27:25):
Like, 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 6 (27:42):
Well yeah, and that's you were saying a second ago,
like it doesn't feel like people are trying anymore.

Speaker 5 (27:45):
I think that's not it. I think people are trying
at the wrong thing.

Speaker 6 (27:48):
Yes, former journalists, uh should be become a journalist again
because we miss him. David Reddick 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 product managers are ruining the segment because and even
if you take it out above the PM like, it's

(28:08):
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 3 (28:17):
Well, is that just what they believe is the case?

Speaker 6 (28:19):
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 it
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 it will buy it and
find delight in it that we can make a business
out of it, right Yeah. And if more people did

(28:40):
that instead of like, what, how can we make money
and get out as quickly as possible, Right, then I
think we would have those glory days.

Speaker 3 (28:47):
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, Yeah.

Speaker 7 (28:57):
The garbage steam deck that I'm not even going to
or 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

(29:17):
five or six years ago, and it hasn't happened.

Speaker 3 (29:21):
What's slowing it down.

Speaker 7 (29:23):
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 on.

Speaker 3 (29:30):
So everyone wants to do a platform play, right.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
So everybody's doing a platform play.

Speaker 7 (29:33):
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.

Speaker 1 (29:38):
Because Apple did that and it worked really well for Apple.

Speaker 3 (29:41):
It's like they never worked for anyone else.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
Well, I mean Amazon, it kind of works.

Speaker 3 (29:45):
Amazon already had that scam going.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
Yeah, that's true, that's.

Speaker 5 (29:48):
True, and you haven't seen that meaningful evolution in the
kindle with such the scribe in a long time.

Speaker 7 (29:53):
Which isn't insane garbage compared to a lot of the
stuff because like China, and this is the other point
is there's a lot of it happening in China.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
A ton do you.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
Ever use the odin the odin? So there was this
It's an Android gaming console before the Steam deck. So
just to be clear, okay, probably not as fun, but
super fast. You could do PlayStation remote on it almost
like predecessor to the PlayStation portal, 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

(30:22):
you like? And what if we made the buttons good?

Speaker 1 (30:25):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (30:26):
And what are crazy? You like? Sold out? Indigogo 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 7 (30:40):
And one of the reasons they're trying because I kind
of went down a rabbit hole with the e inc
thing where I was like why is nobody trying this,
Like you're getting all these really cool e 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.

(31:00):
And America is just super hyper focused on that, where China's.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
Like, yeah, I mean I don't care who he used, well,
I mean by our ship.

Speaker 3 (31:06):
I mean as they also have one monopoly.

Speaker 7 (31:09):
Yeah, yeah, it's like we all operate within this one.

Speaker 3 (31:13):
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?

Speaker 7 (31:25):
No, yeah, fuck that, Well, you got you gotta you
gotta get your your your investors, right, you gotta get
your stockholders.

Speaker 1 (31:32):
You gotta do all of that.

Speaker 7 (31:33):
And apparently money is not free. People don't just give
money away.

Speaker 3 (31:38):
Got to give one hundred million dollars to Adam Newman
again so that you can make the next bad company.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
I think that happened.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
It did.

Speaker 3 (31:46):
He got two hundred and fifty million dollars as well.

Speaker 7 (31:48):
Just I want to fail that hard up that sounds
rate so good.

Speaker 6 (31:51):
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 human briefing. I was just like, guys,
I know this is not what you want to hear,
but this would be a great little scessary for the phone.
You could still do a lot of cool things and
have it glink to your phone, and then it wouldn't
be well a bunch of things.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
It did not work, but.

Speaker 1 (32:09):
You didn't catch on fire. That's that's exactly.

Speaker 5 (32:11):
I'm still here.

Speaker 1 (32:12):
You're still here.

Speaker 5 (32:13):
But like the it wasn't a bold enough vision. And
they didn't say this, I assume this.

Speaker 6 (32:18):
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.

Speaker 5 (32:27):
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 just a.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
Note for listeners. That's the humane AI pin Google it.
It's terrible. Seven 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 8 (32:49):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (32:49):
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 7 (32:58):
They kind of had to write, like they kind of
hit their their point where it's like, shoul or get
off the pot.

Speaker 5 (33:02):
This is the question. I don't know. I asked that
about it.

Speaker 3 (33:06):
Is it rabbit cynicle one believe?

Speaker 6 (33:09):
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 5 (33:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
People saw how it operates so that they.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
Could say this is it looks cool?

Speaker 5 (33:21):
Yeah, it does look cool.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
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. It's time, 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 raps, but for some reason it only launched with

(33:45):
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 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

(34:06):
are going to email me corrections. I'm very sorry. But
in short, instead of running a large action model an
actual AI thing, it was triggering 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

(34:28):
bad in a way that is almost unbelievable. I recommend
you going look Dave three d did a 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 goes what what what, which was
very entertaining.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
It's very fun.

Speaker 3 (34:48):
But it's just broken. Yeah. Yeah, and they raised another
thirty two million dollars in March. It feels like I
am living in a different universe to the rest of
the world. 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. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (35:07):
Yeah. Elon Muska just sent them, wrote them a check.
He did not, to my knowledge, write them a check.
He wouldn't do that.

Speaker 3 (35:14):
It's an epic advice device. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:16):
I don't think you're alone.

Speaker 7 (35:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (35:29):
They think that's stupid. And then there's the rest of
the world.

Speaker 7 (35:32):
Yeah, and these people are so focused on money they
forget the rest of the world. They'd never touch grass.
And so 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.

Speaker 1 (35:43):
Or they'll see the rabbit with the worst name on
the planet.

Speaker 7 (35:49):
By the way, a majority of women I know the
rabbit was coming out was like.

Speaker 3 (35:54):
Why wouta pay two hundred dollars for that?

Speaker 1 (35:56):
I got one in my drawer next to my bed.

Speaker 5 (35:58):
What the hell, guys, I'm dying to know more about
that weight. I didn't even put that.

Speaker 7 (36:03):
Yeah, the rabbit is a very notorio like that's that's
a term for a whole type of sex toy.

Speaker 5 (36:07):
That's what is. Yeah, I had no idea.

Speaker 7 (36:09):
Yeah, and so like when they were like, we've got
the rabbit, and I was like, do you oh, this
is a different rat.

Speaker 3 (36:14):
Like now I'll bring out the app.

Speaker 1 (36:16):
You're like, whoa, what's happened to cees. I knew you
guys were doing sex tech now.

Speaker 3 (36:22):
But wow, so I moved the adult 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 1 (36:34):
I don't think they do.

Speaker 3 (36:35):
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 font size on
his iPhone right like I want to see it because
I don't think these people interact with the real world
or touch grass. But I also don't think they like
I don't think well app vision pro is different because

(36:56):
public company whatever. Yeah, but like the rabbit, for example,
I don't think they fucking cared like these little pigs
will buy this.

Speaker 7 (37:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:11):
The pre sales or how the sales have.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
Been thousand units after Oh we don't.

Speaker 1 (37:17):
Yeah, well, and I don't know what we're going to
hear about that.

Speaker 3 (37:19):
Right, like we are not it's coming from.

Speaker 6 (37:23):
I think, you know, I mean, if 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 that the design process of a
lot of this stuff goes back to the time when

(37:44):
we were most of us are getting our first chance
to interact with chet GPT and I'm like to make
me a text adventure in the style of Star Trek
Deep Space nine.

Speaker 5 (37:54):
Yeah, and it did it, and I was like, oh,
oh my god.

Speaker 6 (37:57):
You know, I remember where I was when that happened.
It was like the first time I put on a
our headset. I remember the first time I was actually
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 really internally.

Speaker 7 (38:15):
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 some apologies to the audience.
I'm sure you're all twelve. Hi, why are you listening.

Speaker 3 (38:26):
To be sure I'm older than you.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
Yeah, we're old people.

Speaker 7 (38:28):
But the AIME bots, you'd go and you'd log in
and you type and the type back and then there's
we've seen this so many times and this one I
was like, Okay, yeah, we're back to this. 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 3 (38:45):
Yeah, that's kind of That's actually where I was as well, like, oh,
you can do a textpace adventure. And I think if
I'd have had that, I would have gone cool, all
right and just kind of just say because I run
a pofhe 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

(39:06):
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 jat 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

(39:26):
nothing has happened. Money, money, I guess.

Speaker 1 (39:30):
But I mean money is a very powerful driver if.

Speaker 3 (39:33):
You work for a financial institution, I get, But like
Gadget review, even just regular people don't seem excited. It's
just so weird. It feels like living in two realities
at once.

Speaker 1 (39:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (39:43):
And like there was a sign that someone posted on
Blue Sky was like we put the AI in an
I n ipa. It was a Dell advert.

Speaker 8 (39:53):
What.

Speaker 3 (39:53):
Yeah, I just I feel like I like it. I
have a friend who is in a dot com boom company,
like a textbook related one, and I'm really tempted to
call him and be like, was it like this? Was
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. Can't do anything. You can't

(40:14):
short ship. It's like the big short. But Steve Goss
just like, well, I'll just go home.

Speaker 5 (40:17):
I guess. I think like we have to give give
credit to the to the entire thing.

Speaker 6 (40:22):
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
and unchanged and just rebranded as AI, just much in
the same way.

Speaker 5 (40:34):
I think somebody brought up to me at the at
the John Deere event I was just at because we
will not be talking about okay.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
I had so many.

Speaker 5 (40:42):
Questions somebody brought up.

Speaker 6 (40:43):
I was like, yeah, it's like slapping a non GMO
label on an unchanged box of wheat.

Speaker 5 (40:47):
Things like.

Speaker 6 (40:47):
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.

Speaker 5 (40:54):
That's like, that's really.

Speaker 6 (40:55):
Useful, But it's it's these It's a seasoning that you
put on something that is already Yeah, it's not in
itself a self contained thing capable of driving a whole
new range of especially gadgets, which again makes me very
sad because every time you would touch a new AI,
I think the a the plod note, that little self
contained AI voice recorder, was like, this is very cool.

(41:16):
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
video and that's exactly what Google built in to their
recorder when that was done, and I was like, okay,
well with that for now.

Speaker 5 (41:33):
Yeah, it's bummer pivots A.

Speaker 7 (41:36):
Yeah everybody, I mean yeah, I think they're just going
to pivot back and forth. Everybody's gonna be constant 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 a Nvidia stock and they're hoping that
it will somehow come to them at some point.

Speaker 3 (41:58):
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 mail 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

(42:19):
if it is, the growth that all costs for our
economy over in about a 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

(42:42):
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 apecific time? Or wait?
I said, New York you already know. And it sends
the invites and it finds your emails. That would be useful.
I wish in my regular email job, I can have
it through the spreadsheets and the documents. It can't. It

(43:03):
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, and it's just.

Speaker 7 (43:10):
Well, because it can't do that future yet, right, Like,
there's the things 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

(43:31):
were like, yeah, it's a larg language bottle.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
That's what they do.

Speaker 7 (43:33):
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
ride this hype just right into the ground as long
as we can write it as long as we can
until it gets it around.

Speaker 1 (43:50):
And that's pretty much what happened just right.

Speaker 6 (43:57):
Yeah, I'm trying to im like I'm still you know,
I'm way between like the stuff that that we're all
talking about and then the stuff that I see again
in these little flashes of.

Speaker 5 (44:06):
Like what I'll be on a trip with and Kevin
neither will be. I'll be like what are you doing?

Speaker 6 (44:10):
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 and the model
in my voice reads into the audience.

Speaker 5 (44:20):
And I'm like, well that's useful. Cool, all right, Well.

Speaker 6 (44:22):
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 al yeah, but like when you wrote it a photo, right,
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.

Speaker 5 (44:42):
It's like, that's useful. So there's these little Yeah, there's.

Speaker 7 (44:44):
A lot of these smaller things that 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 needs to happen.

Speaker 6 (44:54):
You're already big enough that you've bought whatever little company
came up with that, and you've built like you're Adobe.

Speaker 5 (44:58):
You build it in a.

Speaker 1 (44:59):
Photoshop, so then everybody hates you because you're Adobe.

Speaker 3 (45:03):
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. That doesn't surprise because the UX

(45:23):
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. Yeah, I don't
miss meetings because I generally force myself to be on time,
as I was not today. And it's the fact that

(45:46):
I have to moderate so much of this stuff. Yet
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 7 (45:56):
The other part of that is the security and 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.

(46:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (46:25):
I was editing our post for it, and I was like,
this rules.

Speaker 7 (46:27):
I didn't even think about 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.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
So it is feeling very like this is.

Speaker 7 (46:36):
Perfect for me specifically, and then everybody's like, this is
the worst thing to ever happen in my life.

Speaker 3 (46:43):
What's great about as well 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. Nope,
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, now, why feature?
What we did is what we just call it, like,
just wrote it down, Well, just wrote down literally everything

(47:05):
you've ever done I got in a.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
Plain text file, and then we'll just use AI to
train on that and it'll be great. Yeah, and like, yeah,
that is definitely a solution.

Speaker 5 (47:15):
It's reminding me of something.

Speaker 6 (47:16):
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 I've done a few times, and over the of
course of the past like two years, I've been like,
I must delete that entire archive.

Speaker 5 (47:33):
Yeah, it's just a massive liability.

Speaker 3 (47:34):
I have all white emails, but my text Yeah, no,
I keep all of them.

Speaker 5 (47:38):
Don't worry, guys and I will go down together.

Speaker 1 (47:41):
Yeah, well I'm taking everybody.

Speaker 3 (47:43):
You're indicted all.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
Yeah, I hopefully please don't indict me.

Speaker 3 (47:49):
Government, Please don't indict anyone who's own better off line. Yeah,
thanks you request. So, returning from a commercial break that
I'll announce next time. It's just I wonder if it's

(48:11):
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, 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

(48:32):
noxious way to charge them more.

Speaker 7 (48:35):
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, thank you very much that
we just had an ad break, 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

(48:55):
one of the first ones we saw it with where
they're like, what if we charge you just to play
one with your friends even though it doesn't cost us
anything to do that?

Speaker 1 (49:04):
Really well, I mean customer.

Speaker 3 (49:06):
I think it became with it became Jesus Christ began
with the game. It was Moro wind Or obliving that
they had the horse armor. That was the big moment.
They charged two ninety nine for some armor for your horse.

Speaker 1 (49:18):
Did you get it?

Speaker 3 (49:19):
No, maybe the oldes scrolls online, but nevertheless, that was
the moment when it But they were like and then we.

Speaker 1 (49:26):
Got the more micro transactions.

Speaker 7 (49:27):
They're like, oh, do you want to do a cool
little like handwave and Destiny five dollars and I paid it,
Unlike you, I paid the five dollars. I was like,
take my money, Bungee.

Speaker 6 (49:37):
I'm sorry, since we're talking about old timey things. The
first time I encountered this was with Napster, when Napster
went legit.

Speaker 5 (49:44):
Do you remember that very brief moment.

Speaker 1 (49:46):
You were still with Napster when it went No, I MOVEDND.

Speaker 5 (49:49):
To it now because you know, I'd 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
onlimited music. I'm my great.

Speaker 6 (50:00):
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.

Speaker 5 (50:05):
I'm like, what, Yeah, it's two thousand and six and
what is this?

Speaker 1 (50:08):
And now that's how Spotify works exactly.

Speaker 3 (50:11):
Yes, now you have a free account.

Speaker 7 (50:13):
So yeah, I don't pay for Spotify because I'm an influence.

Speaker 3 (50:17):
Yeah, I pay for Apple Music.

Speaker 7 (50:20):
I'm like, really, I get it through my phone bill
for some reason.

Speaker 3 (50:24):
That's good.

Speaker 1 (50:25):
Yeah, it's great. So I'm like, I do I pay
for it? But unclear?

Speaker 3 (50:28):
But it's just weird because it feels like there are
very obvious problems that people have, Like phones are the
whole stop using your phone thing is stupid. Okay in
the top list that b I had a really good piece,
or 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 mean 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

(50:52):
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 aither than all the
other ones, which is it's not doing anything for me.
What is it doing when even the Apple Intelligence thing
just did an episode on excited about the prospect of
what they could do, but also they didn't actually say

(51:13):
much Siri can do actions across multiplaps.

Speaker 1 (51:16):
And also it's not coming until well after.

Speaker 3 (51:18):
Launch, right is it Jesus Christ?

Speaker 1 (51:21):
Yeah?

Speaker 7 (51:21):
Or some of the features they were really like they
weren't clear on which features are coming immediately, which or later.

Speaker 3 (51:26):
Just this obfuscation and it's almost I mean, because that
was WWTC Google Io.

Speaker 7 (51:33):
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 been more.
Fraud stuff that's happening in Europe with the DMA has
made it really, really difficult, And instead it was for
investors m hm and saying here, we've got we've got

(51:54):
our AI thing too.

Speaker 1 (51:54):
We are in on the hype and you don't have
to be like.

Speaker 7 (51:57):
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 if they hadn't been doing AI this year,
and it was really clear that that was kind of

(52:18):
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 in our face, and like there was these
cool moments that happened and they just were like no, no, no,
forget that AI.

Speaker 3 (52:34):
Yeah, go go on.

Speaker 5 (52:36):
No, no, man, that's it.

Speaker 6 (52:36):
I mean like, it's 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, well, saw the
seeds of this soone in twenty seventeen when Google first spent.

Speaker 5 (52:48):
Like half of Google io talking about bots.

Speaker 3 (52:51):
Yeah, what are you doing here?

Speaker 7 (52:53):
I think it was the same year that Facebook when
they did f eight was it fate?

Speaker 3 (52:57):
Oh?

Speaker 7 (52:58):
And they're like, we're going to revolutionized the world with
chat bots in Facebook?

Speaker 1 (53:04):
Where are those?

Speaker 3 (53:06):
Was the m assistant right with with Facebook?

Speaker 6 (53:11):
It was so but there'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 an egg on their face now

(53:32):
because and I cannot, for the life of me understand
why no one internally said hey stop, let's let's actually because.

Speaker 7 (53:41):
Google is one of the biggest companies in the world,
and it is.

Speaker 1 (53:44):
A nightmare to work in.

Speaker 5 (53:45):
I've heard that.

Speaker 3 (53:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (53:46):
Tony Fiddell, who built like Nest and all of that stuff,
he wrote a book that was all about how he
he knows business and one of the really actually interesting
parts in it is how his just relationship with Google
collapsed after he was was acquired. They acquire a Nest
and then like immediately, you know, his boss is like, actually,
I'm not your boss anymore. This guy over here is

(54:07):
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, and Google

(54:30):
is also a cult. But it's like, what if we
were like a big kind of disorganized.

Speaker 3 (54:34):
There also run By Show regular listeners and now McKenzie
graduate sound off as shy. What confuses me is like
Liz Reid has been there like decades search chief now
but also her boss is probably a Ragavan who form
ahead of ads who also used to run Yahoo. Please
listen to the episode.

Speaker 5 (54:50):
Great episode.

Speaker 3 (54:51):
Arguably the weirdest thing I ever discovered off of them
what I see in the mirror. Anyway, 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 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,

(55:15):
because I think that that is the rootic on that's
being crossed.

Speaker 7 (55:17):
That's why like someone like Panos Pinet who's now at
Amazon or or Steve Jobs had these like was Panas
pine used to ran the Surface department, ran all of
the surface products at Microsoft for years.

Speaker 5 (55:30):
One of the gifted presenters at press events.

Speaker 7 (55:33):
I mean, he knows how to present things, 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.

Speaker 1 (55:44):
And it's fine. I'm okay with it.

Speaker 7 (55:46):
But and that's because he's going and like, okay, we've
got to fix Amazon's like product lineup, because.

Speaker 3 (55:51):
It's it's what if it was good?

Speaker 1 (55:52):
Yeah, what if it was good?

Speaker 7 (55:54):
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.

Speaker 3 (56:07):
Oh really, yeah, I would be lies. Yeah, what if
what if the watch was a triangle? No?

Speaker 1 (56:15):
No, that's the rest of it.

Speaker 3 (56:19):
By the way, I want to see Jony I have
Apparently Sam Wrtman 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 passed.

Speaker 1 (56:31):
Zero ports, zero display.

Speaker 3 (56:33):
Call it the hexagon.

Speaker 1 (56:35):
You just think at it.

Speaker 3 (56:36):
It's a new new type of Bluetooth device. You can
connect your Bluetooth devices. I think, oh shit, it just
looks gorgeous. I'm fine if things look good, but if
they just completely useless.

Speaker 7 (56:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (57:05):
I don't know Steve Jobs. He's dead. That's why Steve
Jobs works.

Speaker 7 (57:09):
That's why that's why panels work was because they they
can actual they actually.

Speaker 1 (57:13):
Care about the products. They actually want to make something good.

Speaker 7 (57:15):
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 3 (57:27):
Right Like I also feel like apples laptops have been
really good.

Speaker 7 (57:30):
Their phones they have 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 when they actually had they could put their
own process.

Speaker 6 (57:46):
Which is right, and silicons great that's the thing I
think I'm my problem as I'm discovering in the middle
of this conversation.

Speaker 1 (57:55):
I love this.

Speaker 6 (57:56):
That 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 dollar market
cap or whatever it is right now, are very happy
with them because they're very good products, and anytime they
try something that I would like, Like, you know, for example,
I thought the touch bar was kind of a fun idea. Yes, fun,

(58:16):
but 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.

Speaker 5 (58:24):
I'm pointing at Ed's iPhone fifty. Your phone has to
look like that.

Speaker 6 (58:28):
And even if you go crazy and you make something
that I really appreciate, like a foldable, which is one
of the big reasons I still use Android phone because
foldables 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.

Speaker 5 (58:43):
Oh my god, we just saw qualcom.

Speaker 6 (58:45):
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 that
they've been shipping forever.

Speaker 1 (58:55):
Because in most cases they just.

Speaker 7 (58:59):
Think, right, think, Microsoft and HP were like the only
companies that do something new, but.

Speaker 6 (59:04):
Even that's not new, like you can get asues. God
bless them. They make these.

Speaker 5 (59:09):
Crazy, weird laptops with multiple screens.

Speaker 6 (59:11):
You get these foldable screens, and honestly, those do they're
not just they're not gimmicks, like they change the way
you compute, and in some cases they are very very useful,
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.

Speaker 5 (59:27):
The reduction of fan size and everything.

Speaker 6 (59:28):
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, because those people want
white or black, right, And I get it, but I
don't like it.

Speaker 5 (59:49):
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.

Speaker 7 (01:00:00):
When we decided selling more products matter more than selling
cool products.

Speaker 3 (01:00:05):
And shareholder supremacy?

Speaker 1 (01:00:06):
Yeah likes.

Speaker 6 (01:00:08):
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 phones? Like I don't know,
maybe I'm.

Speaker 3 (01:00:18):
Serious, it's but I think I think that is you.
I don't say this in a bad way. You're right, Like,
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 Lenovo,
So these things are crazy. Like you've got the you've
got the screen where your keyboard is, and then you

(01:00:38):
have another screen. Make have a go at it, do
a proper national campaign, make some weird choices for it,
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, I p
a ad that should be the double screen one's And
what's weird is like Dell, for ex. That company was

(01:01:02):
dog shit for a long time and now they're pretty
good because they weren't. Why if we make good good computers,
here's 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

(01:01:23):
Meta made the ray bands because all of the people
who run Facebook now so it's Mark Zuckerberg, Javier Olivant 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,

(01:01:43):
all these a growth people. I'm shocked that there's anyone
building anything in Facebook other than the Torment nexus and
it's plugins. Well, that's because.

Speaker 1 (01:01:50):
Mark said built.

Speaker 7 (01:01:52):
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 3 (01:02:03):
So I'm well for know only because you said he
could build build me a hardware. But I could imagine
Mark Zuckerberg, just like his cold dead eyes, looking to build.

Speaker 7 (01:02:10):
Me a hard I assume that is exactly just leaves.

Speaker 3 (01:02:13):
Yeah, killed it for me, slams the door.

Speaker 5 (01:02:16):
Honestly, I think if they brought back the HDC church
it would do pretty well.

Speaker 3 (01:02:19):
Read church.

Speaker 5 (01:02:21):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:02:21):
That was a physical quirity keyboard android phone with a
Facebook button on it that would let you directly share.

Speaker 3 (01:02:27):
Tens of them.

Speaker 5 (01:02:28):
So absolutely it could be the new minimalist phone for
the Facebook friendly. It could be the boomer phone.

Speaker 7 (01:02:33):
Oh my god, that's the boomer phone.

Speaker 3 (01:02:34):
The great call has one with just giant numbers still around, right,
They're still around, owned by like a private equity phone,
so not for long.

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
Yeah, I was like, that's that's a They'll be sold.

Speaker 3 (01:02:47):
To a barbecue company also buy a private equity.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
Marina will buy it next year. I don't worry about it.

Speaker 3 (01:02:52):
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
ce Yes Lustmora is there because I went up to
these people, I started asking them grilling questions, not like
being an asoer. I was like, so, how does this
help with the cooking? Yeah, they're like, well, you see
you go on the app and you can see recipes.
I'm sure, but the device pause, Uh, well, you can

(01:03:17):
connect it and Wi Fi. 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 made a video a few years ago called
your oven is a Liar and it's got eight I'm
not connected with this. It's just excellent. I have too,
has eight sensors in it so it can find the
coldest point in your food. What like all my hate

(01:03:41):
the various caters use my detractors on and you're saying
I don't like anything. The combustion thermoters excellent, is so good.
I finally got my bee 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 there I

(01:04:02):
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. It costs like one hundred and sixty
nine bucks, so it's not cheap, but it solves a problem. Now,
It's like you think with all of this money in
AI or AR or all these things, they solve a problem.

(01:04:22):
We've had very similar problems for like ten years.

Speaker 7 (01:04:26):
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 a good
We're good writers, right like, well that's part that's part
of how.

Speaker 1 (01:04:39):
We make our living. Like when you're doing a video, yeah,
you write the script like, we're good writers, right Like,
this is a skill we have and we can do.

Speaker 7 (01:04:47):
If somebody sends us a horrible text message, we will
grown 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 well written, right, 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

(01:05:08):
into this like I was talking to a woman the
other day who gave me the first legitimately good use
for large language models.

Speaker 1 (01:05:15):
She had a really bad blind date and the guy sent.

Speaker 7 (01:05:18):
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 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.

Speaker 1 (01:05:37):
Blind date, Yes, go, that's.

Speaker 6 (01:05:40):
No that that you're right and that is the more
specifically than the only good example for it, Like it's
the only good version of that demo that every company
insists on thinking. It was just like, who's send a
text to my wife and tell her that I'm going
to be late for dinner.

Speaker 5 (01:05:55):
Now make me sound more sad about it. No, apologize, just.

Speaker 3 (01:05:59):
Text your wife. Just start why you start it? It's
like more effort to do. It's ridiculous, And how do
you even know what good is? You can't write right? Yeah, exactly.
And I must also say, just as a note, there
are people out there who have like cognitive disorders and
learning learning disability called dyspraxia for example. It's physical, but

(01:06:19):
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.
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,

(01:06:40):
that is who it is. Because the rewrite stuff is crazy.
And then the oh, I have these five ingredients in
my kitchen.

Speaker 7 (01:06:48):
That's my favorite one something ever happened to someone you
just only have.

Speaker 3 (01:06:53):
I mean, you can't work out what you like unless
you've got I've got an onion, one piece of ham
three nine of a human 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 1 (01:07:09):
Like because you're you're.

Speaker 7 (01:07:11):
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 pad in your vest. I
put on my little Bluetooth head set. I haven't looked
at my spouse in three weeks. I'm gonna have my
assistant text them. Oh ship, my assistant got laid off. Okay,
I really wish I had an AI assistant who could

(01:07:33):
text them so that they don't leave me, because they probably.

Speaker 3 (01:07:37):
Divorce would be quite messy, it would.

Speaker 1 (01:07:39):
Be expensive, they will take all of my stock, but
I don't care. So yeah, and like that, I mean,
that is a gross, gross exaggeration.

Speaker 7 (01:07:47):
There many of you lovely human Yeah, there are plenty
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.

Speaker 1 (01:08:00):
Earlier they're not talking to real people.

Speaker 7 (01:08:01):
They're not going out to like fucking middle of nowhere
rule 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 6 (01:08:15):
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.

Speaker 5 (01:08:26):
And too narrow and too low because you can't dedicate
Google's resources to solving like a.

Speaker 7 (01:08:31):
Fixable problem is I would love to just say, fix
my schedule for the week.

Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
Oh, I mean same, right, Like that should be easy.

Speaker 3 (01:08:40):
Motion has 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 supertaged my adhday with Motion.
Fuck you, it's not how it works. You're a bunch
of scumback. I'm so sorry. That's a little much. But you,
like I loaded your goddamn product. It's like, I'll rearrange
your schedule. I'm like, oh, it like tries to like

(01:09:02):
suggest they do something once like that does not work?
What the fuck you? And I just don't trust anymore
and it doesn't do it. And I cannot find any
real uses. 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 the Conka.

Speaker 6 (01:09:21):
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 now that Google Home is what
you know, over a decade old, and those things.

Speaker 5 (01:09:31):
Are just absolutely trash. But like, those are little things.

Speaker 6 (01:09:35):
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 we're not doing this
whole maps thing again.

Speaker 5 (01:09:44):
We're not.

Speaker 6 (01:09:44):
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.

Speaker 5 (01:09:51):
The planet and now you have Google Maps.

Speaker 3 (01:09:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:09:53):
Like I feel like those big ambitious problems just don't
don't obviously present themselves.

Speaker 3 (01:10:00):
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

(01:10:22):
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 Google have said this, that
they just build shit on top of other shit. Google
Home one of the most evil apps of all time,
invented by the devil to separate you from your thermostaff
But that is a result of them being like, Okay,

(01:10:44):
we've bought Nest Tony Fodell, 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 work. It did
exactly what you want to look. It looked cool, but
it also they're very satisfying and guess what, it worked.
It actually worked, and they went, wow, So we just

(01:11:05):
bought Nest and 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 don't know what happened, what actually

(01:11:29):
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. We'll connect all the bits of
Nest into this app because we must have everything in
one place. When you're not really solving problems other than

(01:11:49):
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 1 (01:12:07):
That's for the fixes.

Speaker 7 (01:12:08):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:12:17):
Now I'm using Coggy, the paid one.

Speaker 5 (01:12:20):
At the moment, it's.

Speaker 1 (01:12:23):
Like it's interesting.

Speaker 7 (01:12:25):
I'm still trying it out, but it doesn't feel measurably worse.

Speaker 1 (01:12:29):
Which is not great for Google.

Speaker 7 (01:12:32):
H And then that is something that could be solved
and that would be a huge boot, right, Like, like,
it is hard to find things, and these companies have
all decided that they were going to solve it by
just taking all of the content and then maybe or
maybe not accurately con.

Speaker 3 (01:12:48):
Google 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're going to tell you,
and then when you're trying to do a return, it
will actually generate that could happen. Yeah, you know when.

Speaker 1 (01:13:04):
Then it just moved away, Yeah, don't worry.

Speaker 3 (01:13:06):
That was actual.

Speaker 1 (01:13:07):
Yeah, there's a lot. There are these useful things.

Speaker 7 (01:13:11):
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
can happen space for a while, and there has.

Speaker 1 (01:13:21):
Been for a very long time.

Speaker 7 (01:13:23):
And instead they're like, what if we just make a
bunch of money by 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

(01:13:44):
can't see the lies and it'll be fine. No, you've
just made the web like almost impossible to navigate.

Speaker 3 (01:13:52):
And that one is very much like it was a
way to sell cloud computer space. It was a way
to promise, Yeah, the eternal growth machine could keep growing.
But also like Search, I've done the episode. It' 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

(01:14:13):
probably wouldn't quit if I had a mortgage, but I
would take my LinkedIn offline. Yeah, I wouldn't want to
be associated with it.

Speaker 1 (01:14:20):
It you like, yeah, de face the line, vacations.

Speaker 3 (01:14:23):
Yeah, I would, yeah, vacation. But it's just someone like
in a in a sane society, suned up as Shy
would have been fired, yeah, immediately, immediate. Liz sent off,
brabagar Ragavan would 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

(01:14:46):
the probably the biggest contribution tech has made ever, like
at least in software.

Speaker 1 (01:14:51):
And instead it's like a little hiccup and they're like,
don't worry. AI is going to fix this out.

Speaker 3 (01:14:57):
Just AI is going to fix the AI.

Speaker 1 (01:14:58):
Pro Well, you know that's the other part of it.

Speaker 7 (01:15:01):
They're like, well, AI will fix it because AI just
needs to learn more stuff and if it learns more
stuff will 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 see
AI on and so they're like, what if we just
make more machines that make a content from AI synthetic
content data.

Speaker 3 (01:15:20):
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 1 (01:15:26):
Yeah, it's gonna be great.

Speaker 3 (01:15:28):
Habsburg GAI as well. Jathan 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. It's like you have this clickie
keyboard company. Yeah, I'm surprised that that didn't come out

(01:15:48):
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 need.

Speaker 5 (01:15:59):
Right right, for a very but then like specific, there
are plenty.

Speaker 3 (01:16:04):
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 7 (01:16:11):
Kim Kardashian bowl one, right, that is famously a thing
she loves.

Speaker 5 (01:16:16):
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, not giving me the permission, but yeah, no, I.

Speaker 3 (01:16:25):
Hear Henry clutching his clicks as he his last words,
well I like the device, No, I 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 1 (01:16:45):
Is there anything you're excited about?

Speaker 3 (01:16:47):
Right?

Speaker 5 (01:16:47):
Yeah, that's a good like.

Speaker 3 (01:16:48):
The steam Deck. The next I genuinely believe, and I
know the old 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 1 (01:16:59):
It's going to be cool.

Speaker 3 (01:17:00):
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, never quite work, but this works.
It's a bit too big.

Speaker 5 (01:17:15):
Play isn't great, but yeah, don't worry about it.

Speaker 7 (01:17:18):
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. Like,
I got into the I n EO. I got into
these weird like Steam Deck replacements because there's a place
where I'm like, oh, something's happening.

Speaker 3 (01:17:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:17:35):
Game is kind of immune from this, from this thing,
because like you can go back to a Nintendo sweach.
I mean, I still love my switch and Razor kicks
out a new gaming accessory every ces. You got this
crazy ridiculous webcam that like most people don't need, but
streamers love and yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:17:49):
Rgbnable lights and stuff like. There are a lot of
gadgets to be had in the gaming world. I feel
like if I were.

Speaker 3 (01:17:55):
Beginning with a I'm completely blanking. They do the lights well.
Gatto they make really good Danield producer there, it's Gato.
They make great ship.

Speaker 6 (01:18:08):
As well, and production gear and camera and NERD's like,
there are still gadgets out there for specific niches.

Speaker 1 (01:18:13):
But it's definitely niche.

Speaker 6 (01:18:14):
Yeah, they're also little professions, but they're like it's specialized gear.
It's not really a gadget.

Speaker 5 (01:18:19):
There is just yeah, it's the best plan I got.
This weird thing.

Speaker 3 (01:18:22):
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 DSLRT.
I've got an Alpha three, I got a Canon five DS.
I've done a lot photography, got some nice glass too,
And yeah, when I take them out and I get
the right lightning lighting and I've I've made sure I
do the settings.

Speaker 1 (01:18:42):
Right, you feel like you've earned.

Speaker 3 (01:18:44):
And I nailed it, and I nailed it. Sure, it's
great nine 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 edit.
Did there are actual things that happen that are so
good in tech And they see these things and they're like, shit,

(01:19:08):
all right, what problems the humans happen? Like I don't know,
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
things are. You can record a podcast that sounds really
good from home now in a way that you couldn't

(01:19:30):
four years ago.

Speaker 5 (01:19:30):
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.

Speaker 6 (01:19:39):
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, right, you have a production studio in
your pocket, Like we had to get here. There was
there's no longer any reason for Motorola to make a
phone that with double action hinges.

Speaker 1 (01:19:58):
Yeah, we figured it out.

Speaker 7 (01:20:00):
And the same thing happened in Hollywood, right, Like they
were like, oh, superhero movies make money.

Speaker 1 (01:20:05):
What if we only Didero?

Speaker 7 (01:20:07):
And that was really cool for me, a superhero nerd
for two days, and then I was.

Speaker 3 (01:20:11):
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 1 (01:20:28):
Nobody I fucking knew who Tony Stark was.

Speaker 3 (01:20:30):
Whatever it came out, I don't know. Guardians the Galaxy
was good, not because of Guardians of the Galaxy but
because the actors are very good at So that's excellent.
Scimora like, yeah, I forget who plays Pete Quill, but
the guy from the Office, there's gonna be someone who's
so pissed.

Speaker 1 (01:20:46):
That wasn't incredible. The guy from the Office.

Speaker 3 (01:20:48):
I'm like a huge Guardians the Galaxy foud 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
spill out all these ship ones. They're like, what what

(01:21:08):
don't you like about it? They're all three hours long,
that's more superhero You fucking ingrades.

Speaker 1 (01:21:14):
And just take your slop. You don't want your slot.

Speaker 3 (01:21:16):
Take your slop. And I guess that maybe we are
in tech slop era.

Speaker 1 (01:21:20):
We are in tech slop era.

Speaker 3 (01:21:21):
Oh no, we're actually in tech slop era. That's the
title of this episode.

Speaker 7 (01:21:30):
But it is, we're in this moment where it's like
we are. 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

(01:21:51):
Deck 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 do something about the Kindle
garbage device.

Speaker 1 (01:22:01):
I do not want one in my house. Sorry to
everyone at Amazon. Fix it. But these other Onyx books is.

Speaker 7 (01:22:08):
Making like really really cool interesting stuff here. It's not
great yet, but they're trying. And every time, like 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 3 (01:22:28):
It's funny though, that you were 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 like.

Speaker 1 (01:22:36):
Yeah no, then I'm no.

Speaker 7 (01:22:38):
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 righte.

Speaker 5 (01:22:43):
The unpaid consulting check is not yeah it.

Speaker 1 (01:22:46):
Where's my consulting check now?

Speaker 6 (01:22:47):
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 all the
stuff we've been talking about for two hours. But I
do wonder how much disruption is actually being introduced by

(01:23:09):
this kind of like rise of influencer marketing that kind
of like just clouds of the whole thing, and nobody
can tell the difference.

Speaker 5 (01:23:15):
I found.

Speaker 6 (01:23:15):
I started to find fifteen years or twelve years ago
that people could not tell the difference between sponsored content.

Speaker 3 (01:23:23):
And even when you lead in quite aggressively.

Speaker 6 (01:23:27):
Yeah, because well, oh, I'm like I tweet and someone
replies asking a question that I've answered.

Speaker 5 (01:23:32):
In the original tweet.

Speaker 6 (01:23:34):
You know, because nobody pays attention. It's 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
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 7 (01:23:53):
Yeah, 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.

Speaker 5 (01:24:05):
One of the strictest, and I love it.

Speaker 7 (01:24:09):
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

(01:24:29):
to get our product on your site.

Speaker 3 (01:24:30):
I'm like, well, nothing, absolutely yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:24:36):
And it's it's shockingly common.

Speaker 6 (01:24:39):
Mark has running, you know, a really great review on
i'm k b HD 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 That's how this works.

Speaker 3 (01:24:59):
Yeah, I think that there is a problem. Yeah, 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 happened,
and now it's those people you will actually get fucked,
especially so much worse for a woman. But in gadgets
there's a fear of losing access. But I also think

(01:25:21):
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.

Speaker 5 (01:25:40):
Three D is yeah, ten years from.

Speaker 3 (01:25:42):
Now there are And he did this thing about the gap,
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

(01:26:02):
I 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.

(01:26:24):
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 1 (01:26:36):
A lot of people.

Speaker 3 (01:26:38):
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 it being shit, that's unconscionable.

Speaker 6 (01:26:47):
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 a cost less but.

Speaker 5 (01:26:54):
It still doesn't do it.

Speaker 1 (01:26:55):
Yeah, yeah, in fact, it did even much less. Yeah,
it's you can put an Android phone on it.

Speaker 2 (01:27:02):
Now.

Speaker 5 (01:27:02):
I wanted to do that for my video. It didn't
come out in time.

Speaker 3 (01:27:05):
It's just frustrating that guy who was like, oh, he
killed the product no, they killed the products out. Mancus
just said what was in front of him, right. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:27:13):
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, why why did
you give us.

Speaker 1 (01:27:20):
A bad store? And you made a bad product. Make
a good product and I'll give you a good score.
It's that easy.

Speaker 6 (01:27:27):
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 3 (01:27:35):
Just going 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 values, How was I really
enjoy it? And I want to do that again with tech,
like I actually really miss it and.

Speaker 6 (01:27:50):
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 what I do.

Speaker 5 (01:28:01):
But they're not yelling at me. And the commenters aren't
aren't yelling at me either. You get the occasion like
how much they padio for this bab and like everyone
else is just like, oh yeah, I was geeking out
about this too. I'm glad it's not a dumpster fire.

Speaker 3 (01:28:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:28:15):
Great, cool, it's it's much more of a hassle to
do a bad review.

Speaker 1 (01:28:19):
Yeah, a bad review.

Speaker 7 (01:28:20):
I mean the Vergie 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 four. No,
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 been a six. But
but even then it was pretty like like the vision

(01:28:42):
Pro actually still did the thing right, it.

Speaker 5 (01:28:44):
Was, Yeah, but seven should be out lowed. I'm just
gonna say seven should be retired.

Speaker 7 (01:28:50):
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 5 (01:29:02):
Oh my god, yes, now we're just talking.

Speaker 1 (01:29:05):
We're just over here talking about no no, no, we
have a great time.

Speaker 3 (01:29:07):
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,
It'll be the most and I can do no. But
I can absolutely rip something a pop. Also, do I

(01:29:28):
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 horrid.

Speaker 1 (01:29:41):
I mean, I definitely.

Speaker 7 (01:29:42):
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 Gizmodo 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 really bad review, and it was mainly because
I was just I was like, it was not very

(01:30:03):
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 3 (01:30:22):
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 first. You mean it,
like like like a gadget you just really really love.

Speaker 5 (01:30:36):
I have a question, like a currently available one or one.

Speaker 3 (01:30:39):
One that us the history of yea, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
even from history.

Speaker 6 (01:30:43):
I don't mind, I will get I'll blend the two.
I'll give you where 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 it was pretty cool, but I had some
stuff wrong with it on the greatest. Then the next
year they brought out the Razor of twenty twenty and
I tell you for somebody who is terminally nostalgic, this

(01:31:08):
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.

Speaker 5 (01:31:23):
But it was beautiful.

Speaker 6 (01:31:24):
I still I very few gadgets 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.

Speaker 1 (01:31:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:31:35):
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's imagination.

Speaker 5 (01:31:45):
And I don't think it did very well, but I
loved it.

Speaker 3 (01:31:48):
Cool.

Speaker 5 (01:31:48):
The Razor year is the coolest, one of the coolest
things I've every year.

Speaker 1 (01:31:51):
That was a cool fucking phone. Yeah, I think me
right now.

Speaker 7 (01:31:55):
It's arc the Browser. Oh wow, 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
like two years to use it, and now it's got

(01:32:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:32:23):
And it just came out.

Speaker 7 (01:32:23):
The iPad version came out the week we're recording this.

Speaker 5 (01:32:26):
I've heard that a lot. I've heard a lot of people.

Speaker 7 (01:32:28):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:32:38):
All right, welcome people find you, Michael.

Speaker 6 (01:32:41):
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 YouTube videos at the Mister Mobile.

Speaker 7 (01:32:53):
And you can find me at alex h Pran's 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 3 (01:33:11):
All Right, my name's Ed Zichron. You can find me
at 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 and 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,

(01:33:31):
Thank you Alex. This has been one for and thank
you all for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

Speaker 2 (01:33:44):
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
is Mattawsowski. You can check out more of his music
and audio projects at Mattasowski dot com m A T
T O S O W s KI dot com. 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

(01:34:06):
you go to chat dot where's youread dot At to
visit the discord and go to our slash Better Offline
to check out I'll Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 1 (01:34:14):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 7 (01:34:17):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Host

Ed Zitron

Popular Podcasts

40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season

Dateline NBC

The Bobby Bones Show

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}CZM Rewind: Where Did Tech's Magic Go? feat. Alex Cranz & Michael Fisher