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

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

In a special live-to-tape episode of Better Offline, Ed is joined by The Verge's Alex Cranz and YouTube influencer Michael Fisher to talk about what they're actually enjoying in the tech industry - and why things don't feel quite as magical and exciting as they used to. https://www.youtube.com/@TheMrMobile https://www.theverge.com/authors/alex-cranz  Original Air Date: 6.26.24 --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me. Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media. Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show.

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Is somebody coming after me? Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, friends, it's me, your host, Ed Zittron, the host of Better Offline. Now, of course, it's Christmas weeks, so 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, featuring Alex Cranz and Michael Fisher? Now, you're going to hear a lot more like this. It's recorded in the awesome IHart Radio Studios in New York.

We're going to be doing way more of this next year. 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 2025 for us. So please enjoy it. 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.

Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron, otherwise known today as Woke Joe Rogan. We are live kind of from the IHart Radio Studios in New York. Today I am joined by Mr. Mobile himself, Michael Fisher, and of course Alex Cranes from The Verge, thank you for coming. Thanks for having us. I had 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. 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? Things aren't fun.

Like it feels like we've stopped getting. The most fun thing I have found is, I'm actually going to pull it out in my pocket, And there's no video, so you're never going to know. Like this anchor charger that's like $30. I mean, they're sick. That's a sick charger. No, like battery packs are cool.

But otherwise, everything that comes out that's meant to be exciting, like Humane PIN and the Rabbit R1, which obviously were bad from the beginning. Sorry anyone who thought otherwise. You were wrong. And like the daylight tablet, which we'll get to, of course. 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 the great tech failures like that weird frame that you could upload things to from like 2015, like a few of these weird Indiegogo things. There was a cute weirdness to it. But now it's just almost just nothing. There's a lot of reasons for that. There are. Yeah, I feel like there are like a lot of compounding problems that have like that have deposited us here today. I will say that I think that there are some of those examples you gave are still could have been fun.

I think I think Rabbit is still trying to like salvage the situation. situation and make itself. But, I mean, humane, I think, you know, took a giant swing, which was 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. And when you deliver a product that's so undercooked, I think that's the problem. Like, when a Star Trek can't even get there. 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 does.

And what is it? And so they're all like, throw it at the wall. Is this it? Yeah. But it's not even like, 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 miscise. 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 computers, a good example. They're like, yeah, we're going to, you know, make computing black and white. And just for the listeners you might not know about it. Can you describe the day? Yeah, the daylight computer, you just reviewed it, right? I did, yeah, it just came off the back of it. Yeah, it's like, I think I called it an ordinary Android tablet with an extraordinary display. Right.

The special thing about it is the display. And David Pierce, you know, your colleague said, like, thinks, this is a display company. Right. This isn't necessarily a consumer products. But what is it, though? It's like an LCD display that only does black and white, 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 blizzard.

It's like using an iPad from the Fallout world. Yeah. Right? Where you're like, it's all black and white. Yeah, it's kind of like using an E-ink Android tablet if the E-ink could go fast. Right. Exactly. And that's why I was excited about it.

So what's bad about it then? 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.

Cool. Oh, so they just did not prepare for people to use their device on the internet. Yeah, you have to make, like a, I mean, I'm, I don't use the daylight. Yeah, I think that's true of those e-readers. No, that is true. But I think daylight, like, to their credit, they have come out and said, look, we don't want color. You know, it's this very granola, very, like, if you watch the coverage of the, you know, I've seen the Instagram ads. Yeah, yeah.

And, like, that is their pitch. That is their whole thing. It's like, your screen is too colorful and too addictive, and you should be able to use your tablet outside in, in daylight. It's the name. 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 TikTok endless feeds because, you know, you don't want to watch YouTube on it. You want to do some work on some reading. So they made it bad deliberate. Right, which is a whole industry now, isn't it? Right. 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? Yeah. I've seen the ads for that, that weird phone where it's like. 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 92 hours a day. Well, you are an online person. 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. Right. Someone who uses Facebook and Instagram to talk to their friends or get AI spam and someone who has like a regular job, someone who isn't in tech at all. Yeah. And just said, what do you think?

And then when that person said, I don't know what this. 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 feel what, Rabbit, I think is a separate thing because I think they're fully cynical. I think that they just don't give a shit. Rabbit has to be held out separately. Daylight, it almost feels like they just are.

Foksy simple people who chose to... Well... But you said they were... Alex, you said there was something cynical about it, so I'm curious. 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 we're like, hey, we have this device, it's electronic paper. And they were very careful of saying electronic paper, not e-ink, because that's like an actual branded thing. And E-ink will descend from the heavens to just slap you down if you use it inappropriately.

And they said they were E-ink, and they said they were electronic paper. really cool refresh rate, and they wanted to, like, do this whole daylight thing in the warm light stuff. Right. And I thought all of, I think the warm light stuff is very unproven science. That is just like, what is the warm light stuff? Where it's like, the idea is if you look at an orange light before you go to bed, that'll make you sleepy. Blue light wakes you up and makes you angry. Didn't they just prove this wasn't the case?

Yeah, that was bad timing for daylight for sure. Not. Because Wired came out with that thing. It's like, yeah, like all these studies are not conclusive and also some new ones have proven. Yeah, it doesn't really. Very cool. Yeah. It's just like, and so that was a big part of the marketing.

Right. It's $800. 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 a going for a cash grab.

What he is, my takeaway was is that, no, he's a, he's a display nerd who really cares about making this particular kind of display technology. I mean, the display looks cool. 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. That's just what I assumed it was.

Is it their own operating? Well, their own baked Android? It's Android. But the hardware is they built. But did they make an effort with the software? Yeah. The thing is the devices they see to, you know, 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 Launcher on top of Android, but we have all these ideas. I'm like, great. Please deliver the ideas before. I am so tired of that. have a press cycle, aren't you? It's very frustrating. 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. How? I'm not sure. That's like...

That's called a credit card, and then the understanding is, okay, you have to pay extra because you borrowed it, whereas these companies are like, hey, give us your money, we're going to be your product. It's not going to be a good product, but if you just wait, and I'm like, no, you should actually pay me. Bad product. Yeah. Pay me to wait. Pay me to wait, 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, you know. 200, 300, 300, put that kind of premium. And I'm like, look, okay, it's an intentional product for a very specific market. And that's great. So I hit him on that a lot. I was like, you've got to make me understand why this is $729. And to hear them tell it, it's the work that went into the display plus the tiny, you know, minimum order quantities they have to hit.

So it's basically, bitch got to eat? No, no. They don't even make a big margin on each tablet. That's the thing. They're like, they are based with that from the factory. They just put in a lot of effort and these things are much more expensive to make than they have been in a while. 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. I don't know if it's true. I don't know enough to know if that's a true point. Is clicks now $800? Yeah, that's right. I'm announcing today. The clicks for iPhone is now a thousand dollar accessory. For the listeners at home, so Michael is using this case on his iPhone.

It's called a clicks, I assume. It is, clicks for iPhone. Clicks for iPhone. And this allows you to type with your, with your, you got a nice click to it. It's got a little keyboard. How does that cost? This is 129 or 139 or 159. I do like it.

And I'm not just saying that because I'm a co-founder. I'm very biased. You can't trust me. God damn it. No, so the thing is with something like that is it actually feels. useful because people type stuff on their phone sometimes. I'm just like fucking around with that. I'm sorry.

No, no, please do. It's just like over here typing myself. But actually, that's the wider thing. It's, they feel like less fun things to fuck around with these days. And that's something. Even, like, CES for years has been like this. Everything, I'm sure next year is just going to be all AI again. Mm-hmm.

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 all from China and they're amazing they're called like the Shenzong Shang Dong

Romance company and they sell 11 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 grill company that always turns up that one folding machine the one folding machine that will never launch but even then the folding machine are kind of like that

it's like a foxy 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 even? I mean, 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.

Because you don't, you can just sell directly to the consumer. You can just skip it. And we see that with stuff like, like the stuff I'm really into right now is AIA, I think is how you say it. What's that? Which is like a gaming console. Oh, it looks like a giant sidekick, right? Yeah. Yeah, they've got one.

It's called the I-N-A-O. It's A-Y-A-N-E-O. How you spell that? How do you spell that? How do you spell that? How do you spell? N-E-O. This is so professional.

The flip-DS. And this thing is the dumbest, most fun thing I've used in a while. What is it? What is it? It's like a steam deck, but if the steam deck ran on Windows and therefore sucked. Okay. It's got two screens. Why do you enjoy it? I think I like it because it's different.

It's doing something new. And there's like, like, Like, okay, the software is garbage, but that's kind of their fault because it's hard to do software. And, like, you shouldn't launch things with garbage software. Steam Deck did it's fine. But it's also cool because, like, there's, like, it's just got a good display. There's, like, a really good thought behind it. And it's like, you know what, there's going to be people who really, really like this thing and are going to have fun with it.

Right. And it's mainly going to be nerds who want to play Nintendo DS ROMs. Yeah. And I'm like, yes, cool. I want that. But that feels like the first weird thing I've heard of in a while, other than. like the rabbit. 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? And it was the rep the meta ray bands. It's like, wow. Oh my God. They stuff really good speakers and a really, and a pretty good camera into sunglasses and a bunch of AI stuff that you really shouldn't talk about.

But yeah, it's like it's a really great accessory. Yeah, I've heard good thing. They just, they just work. I'll use them 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 calls, so I don't care.

Oh, so you can use some vocals? Yeah. So that's verging on useful. It is extremely useful, except for it's meta. How did they make that? They made it because they have, like, meta has this big vision for AR and VR, right? So they have the whole, the quest and all of that junk. And then they were like, well, we need to do AR stuff and we need to start

normalizing what AR is going to look like, so we're going to start with these glasses. But you can't see anything in them. You can't. No. And so it's all audio. Bose was doing this a couple of years ago. Yeah, that's right. There's a few people who have done this.

And it's like, you know, when Bose did it, it was a stupid concept. And even the first set of Ray bands were really stupid. And then this time, the quality was just good enough where you're like, okay, I get it now. How much of those? They're like, two-fifty or something? Oh, God. Yeah, between two and 300 to somewhere. Yeah.

It's one of those things where you're like, I just got paid. I don't got any. bills do anytime soon? Let's do this. And they actually accomplish 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 idiot. But like 30% of the time, I'm pulling out my phone. It's just bad. But like, I'm firing up the camera, right? That's why I got my phone out is 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 capture what you're looking at. Well, the humanized 35 millimeter, right? Yeah. I have no, I don't know what, I don't remember what the specs are I said. what the perspective is like. The perspective is weird because it's off to the side. Because Mike Kaiser of New York Times, he does lovely videos of him cooking using them. Oh. And he'll turn and he's got his Burmese Mountain dog, Bruno, who's lovely. And he'll be like talking to Bruno and 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, I just very confused because, all right, the VR stuff with Quist, I know we're like mentored. 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 is going to hear. This is going to get pissed off. I'm going to get a signal message. The quest's fine. But even the new one, I still get sick.

Yeah. I still feel weird. It still doesn't go on my face right. That's why they did the glasses. It's because they know there's some people. Can I play Half Life Alex on the glasses? I'm coming back to the glasses. Because they did these headsets, and everybody was like, oh, wait, this is not the future for AR and VR.

People look stupid. Like, I saw my nephew come. Like, one day I went over and I'm visiting. I'm saying hi to everybody. I'm like, oh, where is he? And they're like, oh, he's upstairs. And I go upstairs. And there's just a little kid all alone in a room, like, wagging the sticks around.

And that's the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Like, I wanted to give my – I was a kid. So you're like, yeah, you're a little loser. I was like, I wanted to give him a wedgy, right? And I'm like, 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. 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 Focles by North. I remember the name. I don't remember what they did. They shipped a pair of glasses that were very, like they were a little chunkier.

They were obviously something a little off about these 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. You could get driving directions, turn-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 were talking to somebody,

you'd see they'd look kind of above your eyebrow. And then you'd be like, are you checking your messages while I'm talking to you? Stop. Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah. No, no. That's where you get the sunglass version. Right. But like, this was a great idea. The technology was. It was very fascinating. And then, as often happens, they were purchased by Google, and Google either mismanaged it or killed it. Killed it. Killed it.

Probably both. It was 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. I thought Google Glass looked cool. I never got to play with that. And I think Robert Scoble has done a lot of bad things. But that weird picture of him in the shower, I genuinely think. I knew you're the shower picture.

So, this is. There's a really disgusting fellow called Robert Scobo. Famous for reasons I'm not actually sure. He kisses up to Elon Musk now. He wants to marry his Tesla, I believe. I haven't really checked that fact. It's opinion, so you can't sue me. So Robert Scobel took a picture wearing his Google Glass while what looks like screaming in the shower.

And I mean just... A lot of people talked about that photo. It was very... The inverse of pornography. But that moment was really unfortunate because Google's 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 are cool. I think heads-up displays are cool. I think, I don't agree with the, we need to get away from our phones thing. What we need is better society so that it's worth looking away. Same. That's the actual.

This is an escapism. We made a tool to escape from the world. It rules. Kind of ripping off Paris Marx from Tech Won't Save Us. There he made a similar point about the Vision Pro. to distract us from real life, which is a bit much, but he's not totally off. But it's weird.

Heads up displays feel like a future. I don't know if it's the big capital T, but that's 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 15 years. Like they need to get to a completely different level of chip plus display, plus everything else, and then do it really well. That's just because they're all so desperate to be the next iPhone. Like, I love the, you know, I think everybody in this room currently has an iPhone, they're very good devices. Yeah. And everybody wants to be the next one because then they get the 30% lock-in.

They get, they get just all, I mean, it just makes you the next big thing. And so meta has been doing that. Google's been doing that. Google's been doing that poorly. Samsung, you know, a lot of these people do it. And they all fail at it because the text's not there yet, right? Like, glasses, you're not going to get glasses until you have actually good displays that can also pass through. And can turn off in an intelligent way with you.

And most importantly, that you don't look stupid wearing. Yes. Like if I want to give you a wedge, you've lost the plot. And I'm liberal with the wedgies. So actually, it's like a high bar. That's the crans factor. I'm going to move my chair. I can't get myself a little more room here.

The urge. Okay. With my sunglasses on the entire time. You would have to. No, but I would, what I'd do is hardly take him off, but I have a second pet. You got to get some with the decals of the flames on them. A little Guy Fierry moment. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite.

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The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open.

Do you have a name suggestion? open. Since you guys are middle aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

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I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor the 4th.

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, Follow at Clifford and a TikTok podcast network on TikTok. So it feels like augmented reality is at least where there could be fun now. But it feels like it's not 2017, what, 2015 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&D money there. 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 this demo. And again, the most promising one got bought and killed. Yeah. And I've never seen anything get close. I mean, I think the Raybans are close and they're planning apparently to put a lot more, like invest a lot more there. Right?

Like they just this week, I think, did a whole reorg. The week we're recording this, did a whole reorg of the meta division. And so they're like, Oculus, you go over here and you go over like under an ad sales guy. Who? I don't remember the name. I'm going to look this up. And then the Raybans, they're like, okay, this is our focus. they've got plans for some glasses

in the next couple of years that are much more involved. We've heard like Google bot, focal, and we haven't heard anything there. And so it could be dead, but also like everybody's talking about AR right now. So it feels like maybe they're coming back. I think that, so I had an episode about this

could be a rock-com bubble. Yeah. Where I think what they're doing right now is freaking out. Yeah. Because they don't have. They all want to be the next iPhone, but what they realize is there is no next iPhone right now.

Yep. There is no next Google. or Facebook or anything. So they're chasing AI. They're chasing AI, but come on. I was going to say, you've done a very good job in the past few weeks of demonstrating on this very show why AI is not as exciting as everyone would like it to be. That's a good point to bring up, though. How do you two feel about AI?

Well, I feel, I'll say, this dovetails with what you were just saying. The companies are not the only ones desperate for the next iPhone. I am desperate to the next iPhone. Anytime, again, Pierce wrote that little bloat. about, you know, the season of AI gadgets is here before any of the Humane and Rabbit stuff came out. And I was like crossing my fingers. Because as somebody who covers the stuff and as somebody who has loved the stuff for as long as I can remember, I love the excitement of new things coming out and introducing new possibilities. And I feel like the AI, I have an increasingly

severe grudge against the AI bubble, the hype cycle, for raising my hopes, actually putting some pretty cool hardware in my head. Say what you want about the humane. That hardware rocks. And then absolutely cutting its legs out from under it because most of its functionality is based on an LLM that you can't trust. Because it tells you the sun is going to set 40 minutes to go at 11 in the morning. Yeah, I think like AI is, you know, I'm super excited about Apple Intelligence, mainly because I'm going to be able to make the best shit 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. is one of those things like we've built lying machines. And as far as large language models go, they're really bad at it to the point where Tim Cook's like, well, I wouldn't say 100% get it right. How cost it that way? No, but that's actually a bad thing you to say, dude. And everybody's saying that because they're like, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it.

Meanwhile, the researchers are like, actually large language models aren't the thing. You should worry about it. But everybody's like, but we can make money now. Except we can't. Well, Jensen Wong can make money. Yeah, Jensen Wong. when he's not serving PC gamers like me. But that's the thing, though.

That's something you were saying there, Michael. It's actually kind of the impetus of us being here today. Something in this show that people say about me all the time is, oh, you're just a pessimist. You don't like this stuff. I love this shit. Do you know how excited I am when I get a new dumb gadget that I can mess around with? You've got a charger right here.

I got this anchor charger. I'm so excited. I've got two. So I 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 excited for and then excited after. Yeah. And kind of the Vision Pro. Oh, interesting. But it's like there's always a butt. And the butt is usually, yeah, but the people who made it, they didn't really give it to real people. Yeah. They gave it to a focus group.

And it was a McKinsey one. So three quarters of them were paid to say whatever they wanted to hear. and the rest didn't turn up. And it's just frustrating because there was a time, I think this is just like the Rockcom bubble, there was a 20 year period when we just got new stuff, new stuff, new stuff,

and even the bad stuff was kind of funny. Yeah. Even all this dorky Indiegogo bullshit like the coolest cooler, which had a speaker at a margarita machine. You knew that was never going to work, but you kind of enjoyed them trying. And then they scammed a bunch of people.

That was also bad. Yeah. But you stopped getting fun. Like, there wasn't something. something to look forward to. The vision pro, the reason I brought it up is my first hour with it was so exciting. And then I realized that I had like light bleeding in, so I started fucking with it. And I couldn't get it on right.

And I spent like another hour trying to make it work. And it just turned out that like I didn't have the right size thing, which dramatically improved it. And I was using it fairly often. I'm like, this is not there yet, but this is different and cool. And watching movies on it. It's great. Then I tried to watch on a plane. How'd that go?

I got a migraine. And I've yet to finish June. People say Nissan, Altima, or whatever it is from that to me all the time. But it's very strange because it almost doesn't feel like anyone's trying. Yeah. Go ahead. I was going to say, like, the VR thing is a weird one because it is so dependent on the person, right? Like, I had a friend who also just recently did a cross-country flight,

War their Vision Pro, Pro, watched June and Dune 2. Nice. Back to back. And they loved it. Absolute legend. Yeah. Whereas you would have presumably thrown up everywhere and they would Oh no, my head just felt like it would explode.

Yeah. And that's just because like your vestibular response is totally different than their vestibular response. And that's what's going to happen there. And that's why VR is a dead end. That's why meta now has like been like, you go over here. We tried it. Under the watchful hand of Boz.

Yeah. We did that, what was it, the meta quest pro? Was that the one where? The pro one, they were canceled. Yeah, where they released it. And everybody's like, this is garbage. And they're like, yeah, it's garbage. I think what it was was they released it at the same time as the Quest 2,

which was like 300, 400, 400 bucks. People were like, this is pretty good. Yeah. Like the expectations were low and they're like, but what if you paid $1,400 for something that wasn't as good? Yeah, it was more powerful. Well, yeah, and you were saying a second ago, like it doesn't feel like people are trying anymore.

Yeah. I think that's not it. I think people are trying at the wrong thing. Yes. Former journalist should become a journalist again because we miss him. David Ruddock 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. Product managers are ruining the segment.

I don't disagree with that. And even if you take it above the PM, it's like companies have realized that if they do enough marketing to create artificial demand, then that is a way to make money in the short term and you can keep the business growing. Or is that just what they believe is the case? It may well be. Right. For the long term, it's certainly not true.

Yeah. But for the short term, it may be. You can get a spike. It feels like there's 10 times as much of that as there is. For every 10 examples of that, there's one example of a company that's actually like, hey, we actually have a good idea. Maybe it's a little weird idea. But we think enough people will buy it and find delight in it that we can make a business out of it. Right.

Yeah. And if more people did that instead of like, how can we make money and get out as quickly as possible? Right. Then I think we would have those glory days of gadget. But you can make the money and get out by doing something. people want to buy it. It's just frustrating. True. Alex, it's, are you enjoying any devices other than the strange, not quite steam deck? Yeah, the garbage steam deck that I'm not even going to score because you shouldn't buy it.

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. That's one of the reasons I got really into E-ink because it felt like it was much closer to like, there's felt like there was something there that could be solved pretty quickly. but that was like five or six years ago and it hasn't happened. What's slowing it down? 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 your device.

So everyone wants to do a platform play. Right. So everybody's doing a platform play. So it's money again, right? Everybody's like, I need all as much of the money as I can get to my little side because Apple did that. It worked really well for Apple. It's never worked for anyone else. Spotify.

Well, I mean, Amazon, it kind of worked. Amazon already had that scam going, though. Yeah, that's true. That's true. And you haven't seen meaningful evolution in the Kindle with the exception of the scribe in a long time. Which is insane. It's just like garbage compared to a lot of the stuff. Because, like, China, and this is, the other point is, there's a lot of innovation happening in China. A ton.

Have you ever used the Odin? The Odin? So there was this, it's an Android gaming console. Before the Steam decks, so just to be clear, probably not as fun. But super fast, you could do PlayStation Remote on it. Oh, yeah, yeah. 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 you like? And what if we made the buttons good? Yeah. And what a crazy idea. You like sold out and Indigo did really well. Comes to China. And it's like this current xenophobic climate is fucking frustrating because let them in a please borrow the innovation from them.

China seems to be fucking trying with tech. Right. And one of the reasons they're trying because I kind of went down a rabbit hole with the e-ink 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. And America's just super hyper-focused on that where China's like, yeah, I mean, I don't care who you use just, like, buy our shit. I mean, they're also. They also have one monopoly. Yeah, right. Yeah, it's like we all operate within this one monopoly.

We're all controlled by 10 cent, 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 $50 million company? Nope. Yeah. Fuck that. Well, you got to get your investors, right? You got to get your stockholders. You got to do all of that.

And apparently money is not free. People don't just give money away. You've got to give $100 million to Adam Newman again. so that he can make the next bad company. I think that happened. It did. He got $250 million to flow. I just,

I want to fail that hard up. That sounds great. It was so good. Well, I don't mean to keep bringing her back to Humane, but that was the thing I kept saying in the Humane briefing. I was just like, guys, I know this is not what you want to hear,

but this would be a great little accessory for the phone. You could still do a lot of cool things and have it linked to your phone, and then it wouldn't be, well, a bunch of things would be better. It also did not work, but. You didn't catch on fire. That's exactly.

I'm still here. You're still here. But it wasn't a bold enough vision. And they didn't say this. I assume this. It wasn't a bold enough vision, one, to get a bunch of people motivated to do. Because if you're replacing the smartphone, big quotes around that, well, that's a mission that's at least difficult. That's like a moonshot.

And then, B, you can't get enough investors excited, to your point, to give you all the money that you want to put together. Just this note for listeners, that's the humane AI pin. Google it. It's terrible $700, $24 a month. Just the basic thing. But the humane 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? Oh, it overheats in two minutes.

Oh, chat GPT sometimes doesn't work. Basic shame? I mean, I would not want to do it. I would be like... They kind of had to, right? Like, they kind of hit their point where it's like, shitter get off the pot. This is the question. I don't know.

I asked that about rabbit too. Is it just cynical? Rabbit's cynical. I 100 believe. I think Rabbit had to launch before the... What we all knew was going to happen, which was Google was going to do Gemini. People used it. Apple was going to do serious things.

Yeah. People saw how it operated so that they could say this. It looks cool. Yeah. It does look cool. 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 $200 AI device, and it claims to have something on it called a large action model. Large Action Model claims it was trained on 600. plus apps to distinctly control your apps. But for some reason, it only launched with four or five. Turns out that when you ask the lamb to do something,

it would sometimes just not work. Sometimes you would say, order 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 is 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, I'm surprised I haven't over the whole thing that they used to be an NFT company. But putting all of the obvious, horrible things aside, it just fucking sucks. Yeah. It's just really bad in a way that is almost unbelievable. I recommend you go look up. Dave 3D did a whole thing about it before it came out. It was very good.

but go and look at Linus's and Linus, I know people have problems with him, but his thing about the rap, it was great because it was mostly him trying stuff at not working and he goes, what, what, what? Which was very entertaining. It's very funny. But it's just broken.

Yeah. And they raised another $32 million 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. Investors are like, absolutely, yeah, I need to get in on.

of shit now. Yeah, yeah. Elon Musk has just sent them, wrote them a check. He did not, to my knowledge, write them a check. He wouldn't do that. It's an epic and base device. You know, I don't think you're alone. I think there is a weird tension happening where we have Silicon Valley.

We have all these investors in Silicon Valley who are all just desperate to make money and never took a single history, English course, like any liberal arts. They think that's stupid. And then there's the rest of the world. Yeah. And these people are so focused on money, they forget the rest of the world. They'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.

Or they'll see the rabbit with the worst name on the planet, by the way. A majority of women I know who heard the rabbit was coming out was like, why would I pay $200 for that? Yeah, like I got one in my drawer next to my bed. What the hell, guys? I'm dying to know more about that. Wait, I didn't even put that together. The rabbit is a very notorious. That's a term for a whole type of sex toy that women use.

Yeah. Oh, I had no idea. Yeah. And so, like, when they were like, we've got the rabbit. And I was like, do you? Oh, it's a different rabbit. Jesse Lewis, like, and now I'll bring out the rabbit. You're like, whoa.

No, man. What's happening? CES. I knew you guys were doing sex tech now, but wow. I thought they moved the adult thing away from CES. It is all right. Depending on the year. But I think that it is 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. I don't think they do. I don't know if they use it. Like, I really want to just get behind Mark Andreessen at one point, and I 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, Vision Pro is different because public company, whatever. Yeah. But, like, the rabbit, for example, I don't think they fucking cared. They'll be like, these little pigs will buy this. Well, they'd already bought it, right? Like they announced the thing, they made these huge promises. They did a ton of pre-sales. And then it came out, and we haven't heard how the sales have been since then.

100,000 units. After? Oh, we don't. They don't. And I don't know what we're going to hear about that, right? We are not. It's coming from Jesse Lou. I think, you know, I mean, if they, I'm with you, I think there are dubious business

motivations to a lot of this, right? But I can't help but think that if I was inside. one of these organizations that I wouldn't. Look, no, I know I would have been caught up in it. I would have been caught up in the ambition. It would have been caught up in the promise, especially when you consider that the design process of a lot of the stuff goes back to the time

where most of us are getting our first chance to interact with chat GPT. And I'm like, to make me a text adventure in the style of Star Trek Deep Space Nine and it did it. And I was like, oh, my God. You know, I remember where I was when that happened. It was like the first time I put on a VR headset.

I remember the first time I was actually blown away by AI And if I was inside a company or recently hired a company, I was like, we're going to change a 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 skeptical about it internally. Yeah. Yeah. Initially, yeah. Yeah. Like, for me, I used it and it just reminded me of the aim bots.

Yeah. From like, I'm old here. I'm apologies to the audience. I'm sure you're all 12. Hi, why are you listening? Pretty sure I'm older than you. Yeah. We're old people.

But the aim bots, you'd go and you'd log in and you type and type back. And then we've seen this so many times. And this one I was like, okay. All the way back to Eliza, 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. Yeah, that's kind of, that's actually where I was as well.

I'm like, oh, you can do a text-based adventure. And I think if I'd have heard that, I would have gone, cool, all right. And just kind of just say, because I run a Pia offer. Yeah. I have clients in AI, but nothing that touches this show because I'm scared of that. And it's like, there's a few clients tonight, who even just do AI things. That's the thing. Surprisingly enough, AI companies aren't super excited to work with me when I'm just talking about them actually having to do stuff.

But it's like with Chad 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 nothing has happened. Money. Money, I guess. I mean, money is a very powerful driver of people. If you work for a financial institution, I get it.

But like gadget, even just regular people don't seem excited. It's just so weird. It feels like living in two realities at once. Yeah. And like there was a sign that someone posted on Blue Sky. It was like, we put the AI in an IPA. It was a Dell advert. What?

Yeah. I just, I feel like, I have a friend who is in a dot-com boom company. Yeah. Like a textbook-related one. And I'm really tempted to call him and be like, was it like this? Was it like this? And if he says, yes, I'm going to do nothing because I can't invest in anything now because I run a bloody tech podcast. Can't do anything.

Can't short shit. It's like the big short, but Steve Grohl is just like, well, I'll just go home, I guess. I think we have to give credit to the entire thing. First of all, the marketing approach to AI has been really frustrating because everything is AI now. Stuff that existed before in its – has been ported. directly, unchanged and just rebranded as AI. Just much in the same way, I think somebody brought up to me at the John Deere event I was just at, which we will not be talking about.

Okay. I had so many questions. Somebody brought up as like, yeah, it's like slapping a non-GMO label on an unchanged box of wheat thins. Like, it's like, okay, well, AI is just being marketed much too aggressively. So you have stuff stuck in here kind of getting caught in the flack that's like, that's really useful. But it's these, it's a seasoning that you put on something that is already,

useful. 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 plot note that little self-contained AI voice recorder was like, this is very cool. I wish it were an alternate universe in the year 2000 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, it's bad. Have fun with that for now.

Yeah, it's bummer. Pivot to AR? Yeah, everybody's, I mean, yeah, I think they're just going to pivot back and forth. Everybody's going to be constantly oscillating until, like, something sticks because they're so desperate for that next thing. They're so eager. Everybody's just looking for the money. They know it somewhere, and, like, right now it is all an NVIDIA stock, and they're hoping that it will, somehow come to them at some point.

Why not? I don't know. It's like, why not build some fucking hardware to put Nvidia stuff in? I realize those blackmail 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. It is the growth that all costs for a economy ever in about 100 times. But it's also frustrating because I actually think if they Put in the effort, this would be cool. When that 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 Alex and Michael 3pm at the IHeart Radio Studio and just fucking send it. And it would know. Maybe it goes, do you want Eastern or Pacific 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 do the spreadsheets and

the documents. It can't, it can't actually do these things. Yeah. And this, the, please make that the no, it isn't the future. We need to, they can't even describe what it is. And it's just, well, because they can't do that future yet, right? Like, there's, they, the things we have now, the thing that everybody got really excited about was they released CHPT 3.5. 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 were like, yeah, it's a large language model. That's what they do. That's what they do. Calm down down down. And everybody's like, no. And then the downloads increase. The downloads increase. And everybody's like, wait. I think if there's some money here. Right. And let's just like ride this hype just right into the ground as long as we can, or write it as long as we can until it gets around. And that's pretty much what happened. And just, right? Yeah, I'm trying to, like, I'm still, you know, I'm halfway between, like, the stuff that we're all talking about and then the stuff that I see, again, in these little flashes of, like, what I'll be on a trip with, and Kevin neither will be like, I'll be like, what are you doing?

He's like, well, I have a cold, so I can't do voiceover for my video, but I built a model of my own voice. So now all I have to do is type in something and script and the model in my voice reads it to the audience. And I'm like, well, that's useful. Cool. All right. Well, you don't bookmark that. And like generative fill stuff, or 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, like, fill in. I mean, I didn't type that in. I mean, that is a cool photo. Yeah. But like when you rotate a photo, right, and you have to fill in the stuff with fake scenery just to make it look okay so you can run a blog post. It's like, that's useful. So there's these little things. Yeah, there's 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.

There's more development that needs to have it there. You're already big enough that you've bought whatever little company came up with that and you've built like your Adobe. You build it in a Photoshop. Yeah. Then everybody hates you because you're Adobe. I think it's almost like they are really good at features but terrible at products. These aren't useful because the actual user interface of phones is really good and also very bad.

Yeah. I will lose what I am doing on my phone sometimes. I have 587 Safari Tats up. That doesn't surprise me. Because the U.S. on there is so wonky, and it's not like on a computer where you have like a, like a, actually that would suggest I close crime tabs 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 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, 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 going to 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. It's going to like do something about the privacy. recall is another example that was the Windows feature where it was like, what if we just, to me,

I was editing our post for it. I was like, this rules. I didn't even think about security because I was like, oh, it's going to take a picture, and I'm just going to know. And I'd recently been trying to look for a text message from 10 years ago, so it was feeling very like, this is perfect for me specifically.

And then everybody's like, this is the worst thing to ever happen in my life. What's great about recall 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, nah, what if we just... What if we did a new teacher? What we just wrote it down? Well, we just wrote down literally everything you've ever done.

Put it in a plain text file, and then we'll just use AI to train on that. And it'll be great. Yeah, and I'm like, yeah, that is definitely a solution. It's reminding me of something. I switch to a text message provider, like 15. years ago. Right. 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 course of the past, like, two years, I've been like, I must delete that entire archive. Yeah. This is a massive liability. I have all my emails, but not my texts. Yeah. No, I keep all of them.

Don't worry, guys. Don't worry. You and I'll go down together. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm taking everybody down. When you're indicted, it'll come out. Yeah. Hopefully, please don't indict me.

No. Federal government. Please don't indict anyone who's on better off-line. Yeah, thanks. Thanks. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guide. Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

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I wonder if it's something to do with the venture capital climate, but not just that they don't want to invest in things that aren't going to grow huge. But also, I think they're scared of hardware. They just, the concept of hardware is just, it's 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 noxious way to charge them more. 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. Click for iPhone. Bye. We just had an ad break down. But for the most part, everybody is obsessed with those. We saw this with video games. I think that's one of the first ones we saw it with,

where they were like, what if we charge you just to play online with your friends, even though it doesn't cost us anything to do that, really? Well. I mean, it cost them a lot. I think it became, Jesus Christ, began with the game, it was a Moro ander oblivion that did the horse armor.

That was the big, moment. They charged $2.99 for some armor for your horse. Did you get it? No. Maybe in the Elder Scrolls online. But nevertheless, that was the moment when it. But they were like, oh.

And then we got the more micro transactions. They're like, oh, do you want to do a cool little like handwave and destiny? $5. And I paid it. I'm like, you, I paid the $5. I was like, take my money, Bungee. I'm sorry. Since we're talking about old-timey things, the first time I encountered this was with Napster.

When Napster went legit. Do you remember that very brief moment? You were still with Napster when it went? No, I returned to it. No, because, you know, I've done the lime wired 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 unlimited music.

I'm like, great. And then I got to the part of the front page. It's like, yeah, and if you ever stop paying us, you will lose access to all that music. I'm like, what? Yeah. It's 2006. And what is this? And now that's how Spotify works.

Exactly. Yes. Now we're used to it. But you have a free account. Yeah. I don't pay for it. Spotify. I don't either because I'm an influencer.

I pay for Apple Music. I'm like, I really like it. I get it through my phone bill for some reason. That's good. Yeah, it's great. So I'm like, do I pay for it? Unclear. 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. Kate In the Toplist at BI had a really good piece where 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 at it.

But it's the, I feel like they are selling us back the idea of interfaces, except they're not even doing it. They're not actually automating anything. That's the thing with the AI. That is the problem of AI other than all the other ones, which is it's not doing anything for me. What is it doing? When?

Even the Apple Intelligence thing, we just did an episode on, excited about the prospect of what they could do, but also they didn't actually say much. Siri can do actions across Motelps. And also it's not coming until well after launch, right? Is it?

Jesus Christ. Yeah, or some of the features they were really like, they weren't clear on which features are coming immediately, which are later. Just this obfuscation. And it's, it almost,

I mean, because that was WWDC, Google I.O. 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 have been more fraught. The stuff that's happening in Europe with the DMA has made it really, really difficult. And instead, it was for investors and saying, here, we've got our AI thing too. We are in on the hype. And it's like, you don't have to be.

Like, we talked about, I'm going to do a little plug here, we talked about this on the Verge cast, the Verges. The what? Sorry, the what? The what? 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 bolted on, everybody would be talking about how stupid and dumb and delightful your phone looks because you can change the color on it now, right? Like, you can change the user interface. And, like, there was these cool moments that happened, and they just were like, no, no, no, no, forget that. AI. Yeah, go on, Michael. No, no, no, I mean, that's it. 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 oh, well, what's the theme this year?

You know, and I think we saw like seeds of this zone in 2017 when Google first spent like half of Google IO talking about bots. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. What are we even doing here, guys? I think it was the same year that Facebook, when they did F8, was it fate or whatever? And they were like, we're going to revolutionize the world with chat bots in Facebook. Yeah. Where are those?

M. It was the M assistant, right, with Facebook? Oh, was it? Was it? Was it? It was after the meta rebrand. It was so fucking stew. But 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 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, the glue on pizza stuff, the go eat rocks thing. And, of course, they've got an egg on their face now because I, and I cannot, for the life of me, understand why no one internally said, hey, stop. Let's actually... Because Google is one of the biggest companies in the world, and it is a nightmare to work in. I've heard that.

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

And Google's also a cult, but it's like, what if we were like a big kind of disorganized? They're also run by, I'm sure, regular listeners and no, McKinsey graduate, Sondar Peshai. What confused me is, like, Liz Reid has been there, like, decades, the search chief now. But also her boss is Prabagall Ragavan, who form a head of ads, who also used to run Yahoo. Please listen to the episode. Great episode. Arguably the weirdest thing I ever discovered, other than 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 a shit? Like, the only way you are able to release products this bad. is when you just, to your point, it was for investors, but now the company is for investors? Yeah. Because I think that that is the Rubicon that's being crossed. That's why someone like Panos-Penay, who's now at Amazon or Steve Jobs, had these, like, big. Panis-Pen-A was-Pan-Spanay used to ran the surface products at Microsoft for years.

One of the most gifted presenters at press events. I mean, he knows how to present things. A crowd favorite, for sure. And he really understands how to, like, build these things. And I think he made a real moment with the surface because he cares about the products. And he's now at Amazon and they won't let me talk to him. And it's fine. I'm okay, that's because he's going and like, okay, we've got to fix Amazon's like product lineup because it's pretty good.

What if it was good? And you see that. But those are the rare guys, right? Like the reason these people are so beloved is because they do care. Joni, I have terrible ideas a lot of times. Apparently it was like his idea to put the eyes in the Vision Pro. Oh, really? Yeah.

Yeah. We'd be able to see their little lies. Yeah. What if the watch was a triangle? No, no. That's the rest of the show. By the way, I want to see Johnny Ive, apparently Sam Altman really badly wants to make a device to them.

Yeah. Honestly, give them as much money as they want. That's what I want. I want to see the homo-mobile-ass gadget that these idiots put out. Zero ports, zero display. I call it the hexagon. You just think at it. It's a new, new type of Bluetooth device.

But you can connect your Bluetooth device. It's doing anything. Oh, shit. It's just... But it looks gorgeous. Which is, I'm fine if things look good, but if they're just completely useless, come. Yeah. No, no.

I mean, 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 the weirdness that it goes, like, somebody tell him no. But that's why Steve works. That's why, or Steve Jobs works. I don't know. Steve Jobs, he's dead. That's why Steve Jobs works. That's why Panos worked was because they actually care about the products and they actually want to make something good.

And most of the time now, like Tim Cook, I'm sure he cares about the product because he is the CEO and he has to make money and please his investors and stuff. But he is a supply chains guy. Right? I also feel like Apple's laptops have been really good. Their phones have been really good. They have gotten really good because everybody was like slagging on the laptops being like they're garbage. You haven't updated the MacBook Air, your most popular device in half a decade, do something. And they're like, oh, we probably should.

But they only really did it when they actually could put their own process. Which is right. And silicon's great. Yeah. That's the thing. I think my problem, as I'm discovering in the middle of this conversation. I love this. 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 $3 trillion market cap or whatever it is right now, are very high. happy with them because they're very good product. 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. Yeah, I like it. I thought it was fun. But it craters, and it's not supported and whatever. You get this developer thing.

But there are no options anymore for these types of products. Like, your phone has to look like that. I'm pointing at Ed's iPhone. iPhone 15 permits. Your phone has to look like that. 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 use phones and they're great, they still have to unfold into

something that vaguely reminiscent of that rectangle. And a laptop, oh my God, we just saw Qualcomm, you know, processors introduced into like, I don't know, 17 new laptops from a bunch of new companies. And they all look like the existing Intel powered laptops that they've been shipping forever. Because in most cases, they just stopped a day. I think Microsoft and HP were like the only companies

that actually launched new products. Even late, that's not new. Yeah. Like, you can go, Asus, God bless them, they make these crazy weird laptops with multiple screens. You get these foldable screens. And honestly, those do, they're not just, they're not gimmicks. Like, they change the way you compute. 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, the reduction of fan size and everything. No, they're just, everyone's just being very conservative. Because same reason that phone makers only make white and. black phones in quantity because that's all people buy. We make clicks in a very fetching yellow color and that's 30% of them or something like that because most people want white or black. Right. Yeah. And I get it, but I don't like it. It's boring. I would encourage people to

remember that fun can be a reason to consider a piece of technology. One did we decide that fun is not a priority in our, like, buying? When we decided selling more products mattered more than selling cool products. And shareholder's supremacy. Yeah. On the business side. I agree with you both on the business side. But as consumers, like, when did we just go, like, pick up a phone?

I don't know. I feel like, I'll just get, that's brilliant. That's blaming the victim. I'm serious. I say this a lot about it. 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 important. To titillate us. Exactly. Like the two-screen laptop is Lenovo. Asos and Lenovo. So these things are crazy. Like you've got the screen where your keyboard is.

And then you have another screen. 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 IPA, that should be the double screen one. And what's weird is like Dell, for example, that company was dog shit for a long time. And now they're pretty good because they went, why if we make good computers? Use our computers. We see, yeah, they're dog shit.

What if they were good? Nah. And it's just, and I think it's this disconnection of the company from the product on both a business and just a culture level. Like the people building things, like it's so weird to me that Meta made the Raybans because all of the people who run Facebook now, so it's Mark Zuckerberg, Javier Olivan, the C-O-O,

you've got Boz, the ultimate growth, all costs assholes. Terrorist attacks are justifiable for growth. Literally, he said that. Yeah, it's a really grim thing. Alex Schultz, former growth guy, all these are growth people. I'm shocked that there's anyone building anything in Facebook

other than the torment nexus and its plug-ins. Well, that's because Mark said, 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 possible. often only because you said he could build me a hardware,

but I could imagine Mark Zuckerberg just like his cold, dead eyes looking like, build me a hard one. I assume that is exactly what. And it just leaves. Yeah, build it for me. Slams the door. Honestly, I think if they brought back the HDC Chacha, it would do pretty well read now. What's the HDC Chacha? That was a physical quirky keyboard Android phone with a Facebook button on it.

That would let you directly share to Facebook. Tens of themselves. Yeah, absolutely. Could be the new minimalist phone for the Facebook friendly car. It could be the boomer phone. My God, that's the boomer phone. They sell the boomer for it. A great call has one with just giant numbers on it.

Geraldog's still around, right? They're still around. They're owned by like a private equity firm, so not for long. Yeah, I was like that's a... They'll be sold to a barbecue company, also owned by a private equity firm. Green A will buy it next week. Don't worry about it. Great things.

What's funny, though, is at CES with the grill stuff. So, as some of you may know, I make excellent barbecue at home. I do smokers. I admit I got in a little bit of trouble at CES, last time I was there, because I went up to these people. I start asking them grilling questions. Not like being an answer. 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 like, sure,

but the device. Pause. Uh, where you can connect it on 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 who 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 two.

It has eight senses in it so it can find the coldest point in your food. Oh. What? Like all my hate, the various haters. Excuse me. I've got a... My detractors on the, and you're saying I don't like anything. Combustion thermometer's excellent.

It's so good. I finally got my beef ribs down with it. But that's the thing. That one's a great example of solving an actual problem. But most people, they use a thermometer. They don't know where to put it. And they don't know if they're in the right place. and I personally and deeply anxious person.

So constant anxiety, which is great for a 12-hour cook. With this, it works, and it works really well. And there's not a bunch of other bullshit. It costs like 169 bucks, so it's not cheap, but it solves a problem. Yeah. Now it's like, you think with all of this money in AI or AI or all these things, they'd solve a problem. We've had very similar problems for like 10 years.

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, we all, that's part of how we make our living. Like, when you're doing a video, you, I always write the script. Yeah, you write the script. Like, we're good writers, right?

Like, this is a skill we have and we can do. If somebody sends us a horrible text message, we will groan because we don't want to answer it emotionally, but we'll still respond. Yeah, yeah. And we'll respond the hell out of it. It'll be well-written. That's 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.

Yeah. Right? Like, that's, that is the thing for them. And I run into this, like, I was talking to a woman the other day who gave me the first legitimately good use for large language models. Go ahead. She had a really bad blind date. And the guy sent her, like, a long, long email.

And she's like, read this email for me because I'm not going to read it because I don't want to go on a 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. Because if you did that to me at work, I would be furious. Blind date, yes, go. No, that you're right. And that is more specifically than the only good example for like AI.

It's the only good version of that demo that every company insists on thinking is good. Rewrite my email. Who's just like, send a text to my wife and tell her that I'm going to be late for dinner. No, make me sound more sad about it. it. No, apologize. Just text your wife. Stop it. I love that as well.

It's like more effort to do. It's ridiculous. And how do you even know what good is? You can't write. Yeah. Exactly. And I must also say, just as a note, there are people out there who have like cognitive disorders and learning, I have a learning disability called dyspraxia, for example.

It's physical, but there are people with dyslexia. Those are not, when I say you should be able to write email, just to be really clear, not the people I mean. You have an individualized problem, and I also must be clear, none of the AI companies give a rat fuck about you. They do not care. You are not the person they are selling to. Accessibility is not. They are selling to someone who does not exist that they made up.

Yeah. That is who it is. Because the rewrite stuff is crazy. And then the, oh, I have these five ingredients in my kitchen. That's my favorite one. Has that ever happened to someone? You just only have, I mean. You can't work out what you, like, unless you've got, I.

I've got an onion, one piece of ham, three knives. I've got cumin, chat GPT. What is the situation where you can't look at it and go, all right, fine. Like, I'll make a sandwich. Because 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 paddock gang of ass. I put on my clothes. I put on my little Bluetooth headset.

I haven't looked at my spouse in three weeks. I'm going to have my assistant text them. Oh, shit, my assistant got laid off. Okay, I really wish I had an AI assistant who could text them so that they don't leave me because they probably will. Because the divorce would be quite messy. Yeah, it would be expensive. They will take all of my stock. But I don't care.

So. Yeah. And, like, I mean, that is a gross, gross exaggeration. I'm sure many of you in Silicon Valley are lovely human beings. Yeah. There are plenty of people who have lovely relationships there. But that is the thing. They are very cynically going after this one group who, to your point earlier, they're not talking to real people.

They're not going out to like, fucking middle of nowhere rural 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. I wonder. And I've a real question here. And like, is it that so many problems have already been solved that it's harder to find?

new ones, like, or that the new ones we find are too niche and too narrow and too, like, you can't dedicate Google's resources to solving, like a... Fixable problem is, I would love to just say, fix my schedule for the week. Oh, I mean, same. Right? Like, that should be easy. Motion has been lying about this. I'm calling you out, motion, you assholes.

All right, you motherfuckers, I see you on Instagram every goddamn day. I've supercharged my ADHD with motion. Fuck you. It's not how it works. You're a bunch of scumbay. I'm so sorry, that's a little much. But you lied. I loaded your goddamn product.

And it's like, I'll rearrange your schedule. I'm like, go. And it just, it like tries to, like, suggest I do something once. Like, that does not work. What the fuck you do? And I just don't trust it anymore and it doesn't do it. And I cannot find any real users. I'm sure they exist.

But that's the thing. That is a problem to be solved. But I also think you're right in the there are no big problems. Right. No more lands to conquer. Tens of thousands of little problems. little niche 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 are just absolutely trash.

But like those are little things. There's one light in my room doesn't go off what the rest of it goes out. Like no one's going to, those are troubleshooting bug fixes. Like we're not doing this whole maps thing again. We're not saying like, hey, you know how it's hard to get around a city or you know how you got to print out MapQuest directions? Like no, we drove down every road on the planet and now you have Google Maps. Yeah.

Like, I feel like those big ambitious problems just don't obviously present themselves. 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 consumers are perhaps dealing with a death by 1,000 cuts right now. It's the 10,000, 10 million little problems we face, which are usually a response, a result of technical debt.

It's just things built on top of things. People I've talked to inside of Google have said this, they just build shit on top of other shit. Google Home, one of the most evil apps of all time. Horrible. Invented by the devil to separate you from your thermostat. But that is a result of them being like, okay, we bought Nest. Tony Fidel. Genius, genius guy.

They've got these amazing. They've revolutionized the smart. I'm not sure of any of you. Remember, when the Ness came in, that was a huge deal. You had this shitty Honeywell thing, and Nest actually worked, and it did exactly what you wanted. It looked cool. It looked cool, but it also very satisfying.

And guess what? It worked. It actually worked. And they went, wow, so we just bought Nest. And 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 actually happens to the thing I'm describing, which is someone from Google absorbed NEST and then said, you are run by Steve now. I don't know if his 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 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 behind from the fact that most computing experiences are cluttered and bad in many, many times of the day. That's where the fixes, right? Like Google, I think we can all agree, is not doing great as far as, like, search goes, right? Like, you go and you search something on Google. It is so much worse now. I'm using Kagi, the paid one at the moment. It's pretty much the same.

Is that good? No, it's not. It's interesting. I'm still trying it out, but it doesn't feel measurably worse, which is not great for Google. And that is something that could be solved, and that would be a huge boom, right? Like, it is hard to find things. And these companies have all decided that they are going to solve it by just taking all of the content and then maybe, maybe. or maybe not accurately conveying it back to you.

I like to Google IOS on the show, I was like, and then you will be able to use search to find your UPS tracking number, and it will tell it when you get, tell you. And then when you're trying to do a return, it'll automatically generate that. That could happen. Yeah. Don't know when, bye, and it just moved on. Don't worry.

That was actually useful. Yeah. There's a lot, there are these useful things. They're nowhere close to ready, and then they go and they promise them way too early, And then, like, AI is getting poisoned. There's so much really interesting things that can happen with AI. There has been for a while. There has been for a very long time.

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 going to get worse. Like, Google, you shot yourself in the foot. Microsoft with Bing, you shot yourself in the foot. Because you're like, what if we release these lying machines?

At the same time, we have our garbage search engines that can't see the lies, and it'll be fine. No, you've just made the web almost impossible to navigate. 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, that's a whole thing. It just feels like they're not building things for people.

Yeah. If I worked on Google Search and I saw them launch that, I probably wouldn't quit if I had a mortgage, but I would take my LinkedIn offline. I wouldn't want to be associated with it. It feels like, yeah, I'd deface the library of Alex. You'd take a lot of vacations. Yeah, I would, yeah, vacation. But it's just someone, like in a sane society,

Sondar Peshai would have been fired. Yeah. Immediately. Liz, Liz, Rigg, sent off. Prabagar Raghavan 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

the probably the biggest contribution tech has made ever. Like, at least in software. And instead it's like a little hiccup and they're like, don't worry, AI is going to fix this. How? It's just AI is going to fix the AI.

How? Well, you know, that's the other part of it. They're like, well, AI will fix it because AI just needs to learn more stuff. And if it learns more stuff, we'll do that. Okay, but didn't you just, there was just, I think the Atlantic wrote a really great story about how they run out of stuff to teach the AI on.

And so they're like, what if we just make more machines that make content from AI, synthetic data? So if you go back to the PKII episode, this is a big problem, the synthetic data. And by the way, did you know that that will break them? Yeah. It's going to be great. Habsburg AI is what Jathan Sadowski calls it, one of the funniest terms ever. But it's so funny as well because there are so many things to fix. And just using the phone is kind of a ball like that.

Yeah. It's, it's, like, you have this click, clicky keyboard company. Yeah. I'm surprised that that didn't come out. 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 ones that have just kind of bubbled up and hung around in a good way. Like, it's just solving a very specific need.

Right, right, right, for a very small, like niche, yeah, very, very specific. There are plenty of people who don't like clicky, who want a clicky keyboard, people who like keyboards. Like, that's a thing that you can connect to a person who does not live in Silicon Valley. I assume, Kim Kardashian. she involved one, right? That is famously a thing she loves. One of the first things I learned about being on this side of the business

and I'm not allowed to talk about the customers that have not given me the permission to talk about them. I hear Henry Kissinger clutching his clicks as he passed off his last words were, I like the device. No, it sucks as well

and came back to something I was saying earlier as well. I want to be excited about this stuff. I love my Gizmos, my doodads. Is there anything you're excited about right now? Yeah, that's a good quick, like, the Steam deck, the next, I genuinely believe, and I know the OLED was the second one. Yeah. No, that's not what I'm talking about. Whenever they do the next Steam deck, I'm so excited for that. It's going to be cool. I love the Steam deck. I think it's one of the coolest things I've ever used. It, it is like a really great PC gaming console. PC gaming consoles, they've tried them a few times. They never quite word, but this works.

It's a bit too big. But I can play. That's great. And so worry about it. It's cool. It is cool. And 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 what I got, like, I got into the INAO. I got into these weird, like, steam deck replacements because there's a place where I'm like, oh, something's happening. Yeah, exactly. Gaming is kind of immune from this thing because, like, you can go back to Nintendo Switch. Yeah. I still love my Switch.

And Razor kicks out a new gaming accessory every CES. You've got this crazy, ridiculous webcam that, like, most people don't need, but streamers love. And these RGB-enabled lights and all this stuff. There are a lot of gadgets to be had in the gaming world. I feel like if I were a... What's the one beginning with E? I'm completely blanking. They do the lights. Elgado.

Oh, yeah. They make really good stuff. Dano, Daniel, a producer there with the weird. It's... Elgado. They make great shit as well. And production gear and camera nerds. Like, there are still gadgets out there for specific niches.

But it's definitely niche, yeah. But also. Little professions. But they're like, it's specialized gear. It's not really a gadget. There's just like, yeah, it's been a hundred bucks the best plan. I got this weird thing. There is something exciting happening where the normalization of photography writ large is pretty

magnificent. The photos I can take on my iPhone with portrait mode are not my DSLR. I got an alpha three. I've got a Canon 5 DSR. I've done a lot of photography. Got some nice glass too. And yeah, when I take them out and I get the right lighting, lighting. and I've made sure I'd do the settings right.

You feel like you've earned, you spend the menu well. And I nailed it. Sure, it's great. 98% of the other time, though, my phone's in my pocket and I can get a really good photo. And it's easy. I can upload it somewhere. It's easy to share with a friend. I could do a little editing.

I can make a podcast at home in my pajamas in Las Vegas. I can have it edited. There are actual things that happen that are so good in tech. And they see these things and they're like, shit. All right. What problems to humans? humans have. 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 four years ago. Absolutely. Yeah. Also, I think like some of this is just, I don't know if you want to call it like a victimless crime is not the word. It's like, This was inevitable, right? When stuff got this good and when you got able to do those things that you just talked about on your phone, you have a production studio in your pocket, like we had to get here. There's no longer any reason for Motorola to make a phone with double action hinges.

Yeah, we figured it out. The same thing happened in Hollywood, right? They were like, oh, superhero movies make money. What if we only did superhero movies? And that was really cool for me as superhero nerd for two. two days. Yeah. And then I was like,

shit. He's like, oh, no, but 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 Jr. Nobody fucking knew who Tony Stark was before that movie came out. I don't know. Guardians of the Galaxy was good, not because of Guardians of the Galaxy, but because the actors are very good at so. Excellent Scamora. Yeah.

I forget who plays Peter Quill, but the guy from the office. There's going to be someone who's so pissed on it. That was an incredible. The guy from the office. I'm like a huge guardian as the galaxy fan. I have a bunch of comic artwork from it, but they saw that. And that's why, yes, there you go. I have a guy from that show with Trace Williams.

Treat Williams, sorry. So the thing is, they see that and then they spilled out all these shit ones. They're like, what? What don't you like about it? They're all three hours. long, that's more superhero, you fucking ingrates. And you just take your slop. You don't want your slop?

Take your slop. And I guess that maybe we are in tech slop era. We are in tech slop era. Oh no, we're actually in tech slop era. That's the title of this episode. Yes. Fuck yes. Well done.

Well done. There we are. One points of crap. 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. Yeah.

actually making good technology. And there's a lot of good examples where that's not the case. We've talked about a lot of those here. But a lot of it is just garbage. And so for me, that's why I go and I mess with these Steam Deck competitors and E-ink devices, because that's the areas where it feels like, yeah, there is the slop, like right now until Panos does something about the Kindle. Garbage device. I do not want one in my house. Sorry to everyone at Amazon. Fix it. But these other Onyx books is making like really, really cool, interesting stuff here. It's not great yet, but they're trying. And every time, like, I write a review, then the next thing comes out and it changes little.

And I'm like, then I feel very powerful. And then I just want to, like, write a whole, like, here's what I want actually from it. And then I'm worried that I got too close. I got too into it. It's funny, though, that you're afraid to write that. Right. Just be like, fix it. Yeah, because, like, you're afraid the company would be mad when the company should

No, no, no, I'm more afraid that, like, I'm doing labor and not getting paid for it. I mean, I'm getting paid for it, but like. Right, the unpaid consulting check is not. Yeah. Where's my consulting check now? I wonder about the tax. 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 the stuff we've been talking about for two hours. But I do wonder how much disruption is actually being introduced by this kind of like rise of influencer marketing that kind of like just clouds the whole thing. And nobody can tell the difference I found. I started to find 15 years or 12 years ago that people could not tell the difference between sponsored content and organic content. Even when you lead in quite aggressively? Yeah. Because well, oh, like I tweet and someone replies asking,

a question that I've answered in the original tweet. You know, because nobody pays attention. It's an attention span problem. 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 make it close to good. But I don't know that it would make a difference based on people's willingness to actually listen or ability to listen. Yeah, it's wild how many times we'll put a review up. And, you know, the verge, 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 at events Yeah, you're one of the strictest Yeah, we're one of the strictest Ross Miller And I love him 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 you annoyed Because I'm just like But 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 to get a product

on your site. I'm like, well, nothing. Absolutely, yeah. Ooh, that isn't legal. Stop that. And it's shockingly common now this. And you get Marquez running, you know, a really great review on MKBHD. And then we have two weeks of discourse because somebody on Twitter with a large audience said,

you know, I just don't think it's right that a YouTuber can kill a company, you know, with this thoughtless headline. I'm like, no, that's a review of a product that didn't do what a setup was going to do. That's how this works. Yeah. I think that there is a problem. Yeah. Within the media, that there is a fear that if you step outside the lines,

in gaming for good reason, I was in there before all of that horror show happened. And now it's awful. You will actually get, especially so much worse for a woman. But in gadgets, there's a fear of losing access. But I also think no one wants to say anything that's particularly different because, I don't know, what if they're wrong? And the answer is, you've been wrong plenty of fucking time. Why stop now?

No one wants to make the step and say, this sucks. I mentioned Dave 3D earlier. Great YouTube. Dave 2D. David 2D. Pardon me, Jesus Christ. He's his predecessor. I think 3D is, yeah, 10 years from now.

There we are. And he did this thing about the rabbit and about the pin. And he was just saying, what are these companies doing? Like, what is this? I looked around, really no one said that. There was a thing in Bloomberg being like, so why is it so good that you're doing this? It was like a month before it came out?

It's just completely insane And I understand That when you see the world Everyone's saying AI Everyone's saying this is going to be big Everyone's saying the same thing It's scary to step out But also

My Keith Oldman 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 Please explain yourself Because in the case of the rabbit

The case of the humane I know the argument is Oh this is 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. A lot of people save for the rabbit. Two hundred bucks, two hundred bucks isn't enough. 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. Yeah, I always said that wasn't an excuse, especially since it was being like compared directly to the to the humane

and I'm like, well, yeah, it has it cost less, but it still doesn't do what it said it was going to say. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, it did even less. Much less. Yeah. And it's, But you can put an Android phone on it now. I know. I wanted to do that for my video, but it didn't come out in time. It's just frustrating. That guy was like, oh, he killed a product. No, they killed the product.

Marcus just said what was in front of him. Right. Yeah. I had a friend, Cherie Smith, who would review laptops, and sometimes she'd give him a bad score. Right. And the companies would call and be like, well, why did you give us a bad store? And she was like, you made a bad product. Make a good product, and I'll give you a good score.

It's that easy. We were just talking about this off air. It was 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. Just go watch it. And if I like it, I'm going to 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 of it. I use it for hours. I really enjoy it. And I want to do that again with tech. Like, I actually really miss it. And I think what people don't get is that that's actually, that makes it easier. Like, when I run a review, that's good. Yeah.

It's great. Because I get to geek out. The product, the product people are happy, which, like, doesn't dictate what I do, but they're not yelling at me. And the commenters aren't yelling at me either. You get the occasional, like, how much they pay you for this? Yeah. You block them. Yeah.

And, like, everyone else is just like, oh, yeah, yeah, I was geeking out about this, too. I'm glad it's not a, you know, dumpster fire. Yeah. Great. Cool. It's much more of a hassle to do a bad review. Yeah, a bad review. I mean, the verge of this year we did three that were, like, lower than average, and people were, like, what?

because we gave the rabbit a really low score, I believe we give it like a three or a 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 even then it was pretty like the Vision Pro actually still did the thing, right? It was, I'm not really expensive. Yeah. Seven should be outlawed. I'm just going to say seven should be retired.

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? Oh, my God, yes. No, no, no, we're just talking about reviewing. No, no, no. We're having a great time.

Sorry. No, no, no, I'm happy. 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? You just say you hate it. It'll be the most epic bad review anyone's ever heard.

And I can do. No, but I can absolutely. rip something apart, but also do I want to? Like, something that 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 horrible. I mean, I definitely, when I first, I went 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 a really bad review, and it was mainly because I was just, I was like, it was not very good. And I was like, I'm going to 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, because it was so mean. But it was also so fun to write. And 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. So we're approaching the end now. 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? No, you go first, Mike. You mean like a product? Like a product you just really, really love?

I have a question. Like a currently available one or one from the vast history of? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Even from history, I don't mind. I will get, I'll blend the two. I'll give you where I think a company really got something right and it didn't do very well. Motorola, as you know, revived the Razor for 2019. It brought back the Razor as a foldable Android phone, and it was pretty cool.

But it had some stuff wrong with it, one of the greatest. And the next year they brought out the Razor 2020, and I tell you, for somebody who is terminally nostalgic, this thing maintained the industrial design of one of the most famous phones of all time and concealed within it a really quite good Android phone with a bad camera, because it's made by Motorola, but it's aside. And it was very fragile and whatever. it, but it was beautiful. I still, there are 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. Yeah. 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. And I don't think it did very well. But I loved it.

I thought it looked cool. It was very cool. It was very cool. One of the coolest things I've ever used to. That was a cool fucking phone. Yeah, I think me right now, 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 were talking about all your tabs earlier. I'm also a tab monster, and it just works. It better, like, collates this stuff for me. Okay, I'll give it a good one. It does the job. I waited, like, two years to use it, and now it's got a bunch of AI features that I think are kind of stupid, but you ignore the AI features, and you just focus on the core product, and it rules.

And it just came out, the iPad version came out the week we're recording this. I've heard that a lot. I've heard a lot of people enjoy that. 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 I installed it.

All right. Where can people find you, Michael? 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 Mr. Mobile.

And you can find me at Alex H-Kranz, I think, on threads. And Twitter exists, but I don't check it very often. It's also Alex H-Kran's. 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. All right. My name's Ed Zittron.

You can find me in WW. Anyway, sorry. You've been listening to Better Offline. We've been recording this in the beautiful I-Hart Radio Studios here in beautiful New York City. Daniel, my producer, thank you so much, Daniel. I'm calling this thing Better Off Live now. We're going to do this in multiple cities. I'm proud and happy that we did this.

Thank you, Michael, thank you, Alex. This has been wonderful, and thank you all for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com. or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter.

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