Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Baratunde Thurston On The Apple Vision Pro

Episode Date: January 27, 2024

The great Baratunde Thurston join Chris and Brian to talk about his hour-long in-person demo with the Apple Vision Pro. In the second half, we discuss the idea of whether or not Google Search (and maybe the web) is doomed in the era of AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. along for the ride home. Oh, boy. That was good.

I think that's the first time that's been used. Yeah. I'm going to clip that and put that at the cold open in the beginning. But you got to get myself congratulatory. Don't worry. I can't just do a good thing. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the TechMeme Right Home, another TechMeme Ride Home experience.

I am your host, as always, Brian McCullough. We have, as always, well, when when we can do it on a more regular basis, your usual co-host, Chris Messina. Hi, Chris. Hey, how's it going? We have an unusually special guest, the great Baratunde Thurston. Baratune, you and I actually have been friendly online for a little while now because apparently you've been a listener to this show. So this is probably belated, but thanks for coming on the show and thanks for being a friend of the pod. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for having a show, first of all, giving me something to do

without you. I'd be more lost. And thanks for having me on. It's good to be inside of the podcast that I listen to almost every day. Kind of you to say. And hey, Chris. Hello, hello. So the other reason for having you on is you were one of those lucky folks that got a chance to get a demo of the Apple Vision Pro. It was one of those 30-minute demos, right? About an hour. Oh, really? Did you post a video or a picture like everyone else did of me standing,

but making sure that the battery cable was hidden? They had such consistent framing over at Apple in more ways than one. I actually haven't posted my photo yet. I'm deciding the best time, the best platform. I didn't want to be a part of that wave of everybody else posting there. So I'm thinking two, three years from now, I'll get that right up the internet. Well, go ahead and frame either the demo, but more importantly, we want to hear what it is like to use this thing. Yeah.

So, first of all, I am a long-time listener, first-time joiner, and it's really cool to be here. And I care about a lot of things. I care about our relationships with nature, with other people, and with technology. I write a lot about my tech thoughts over in Puck. And when Apple announced this in summer of 23, I, like everybody, wrote long words without having used it. And that is my right as a writer. That's part of what writing is. It comes with rights.

And I was pretty consistent in my experience of the thing once I had it. I think, you know, I had some positives. I had some negatives. And most of those played out. It is an extraordinary piece of technology. Just the resolution jumps out immediately to have apps floating right in front of you or windows floating right in front of you with no hint that this isn't as good as the monitor that I'm used to looking at. And in some ways, it is better. It's technically more resolution.

And I wrote that and I've read that. But to actually see it was like, Kianu, whoa. Okay, this is a new paradigm. It is heavy. It is heavy. And I could not imagine using this all day. And even sitting at it, maybe if I'm lying on my back and I throw the screens on the ceiling, then I could just, you know, kind of live in a vat in a cage or live in a drawer and just be connected by Ethernet to the back of my head.

That would be, you know, the comfortable way, but super dystopian. So there's, it's still, it's not as light as the ski goggles that it sort of looks like. like. And I think until it gets to that point, there's going to be a lot of physical fatigue associated with this. Other headlines. I was wrong about something I thought that they missed in my initial write-up. And the thing that deeply disturbed me about the vision pro was the solo nature of the vision, the idea that this is going to cut us off from the people we are physically in spaces with. Because if they don't have one of these on, they can't share our vision. And if they do, they get their own vision disconnected from ours. They weren't able to

demo this for me. So I haven't experienced this firsthand, but I asked repeatedly, can you and I, fellow human, in the same physical room, both have these headsets on and look at the same virtual screen, i.e., can I have Netflix watch parties? Well, that's a sore point because Netflix doesn't have an app experience in here. But can I watch Netflix in a safari browser with my wife, which is what every husband wants to really, really make his marriage strong. It's like, here, honey, let's put on our ski goggles together and look at it on the couch. Not really here, but do it. Let's disconnect together.

And that's how we'll know we are together. So those were, that's like a few of the top lines. Oh, one last thing. And I'll let your editors clean some of this up. But when it comes to the film experience or kind of like the moving image experience, it is a leap. There is something like the jump from black and white to color or the jump from standard deaf to like true HD or maybe 4K level HD where it pops and hits different. And the depth, like I was sitting at a table with a random family who I assume they paid and I felt like I was

at the table. And this little girl looked at me and I thought, oh my God, I'm a ghost in this little girl's life, am I dead? Like, or is it just that, like, the sense of depth adds depth to the visual experience? And so how do you tell, if you're a filmmaker and a storyteller and TV, etc., how do you shoot for this medium and how do you tell stories when there's so much freedom of eye motion? That's an open question to me. So I'll pause there. That's a few of the top results. I have a little notepad with a few more things, but thanks for giving me a stab at this. No, no, no. First of all, I don't know what editors you speak of. You know it's just me. Yeah, I was going to say, there are no editors on the show. But as a in another life, a film school graduate, I'm curious about what you just said, about like the switch from black and white to color or whatever.

In two ways. You are describing it as like being present in the room. So like then the, if it, if it, if it, if it, If you were looking at me, behind me, the screen of like your Mac desktop would be as clear as like my jacket or my hair or the books behind me? Yeah. So I described it to the people running the demo who insisted I don't use their name. So they shall remain anonymous Apple employee one and two. And so these AEs, anonymous employees, they, I said to them, I feel like I'm in two rooms. The difference with putting this headset on versus the Quest 2, which is my most recent experience, is that when I put that thing on, the pass-through video is so garbage that I already feel like

I've left the room. It's a grainy, black and white. It's not intended to be realistic anyway. It was just sort of a- Murder surveillance video, right? It's not the life I want to be a part of anymore. So I opt for full cartoon mode. With Apple, when I put that headset on, the pass-through is pretty much as good as what I see

with my own eyes. Like, it is that clear. And so when I see that my fellow humans, before I kind of dial in an experience, we're just in the room together. And then with the dial that they've copied from the watch, the digital crown, I can turn up or down the level of opacity of that augmented reality experience. And so I can be like, goodbye, Apple employee. I am now in Hawaii. Or I can be like, for some reason, I don't like Hawaii anymore. I'm going to be back in this Truman Show like soulless living room that you've set up for me. And so that was a very smooth transition

from virtual to actual and back again, and then they have a focus mode where they're sensitive to where your eyes are focused. So if I just look at the human who's present in my physical reality, they kind of fade in like an apparition. It's like Scrooge in a fairy tale. And then if I shift my attention back to the video or whatever is on the virtual screen,

then they kind of fade into the background. And it's a very elegant, non-suton thing. And apparently they'll see my digital eyes if I've set that eyesight feature up. So long way back to saying, I think that they've done a really stellar job of the integration and the transition from one to the other. and the colors of the environments even that they set up, they try to tap into the colors in your room. I recently bought one of those LED backlight systems for my home television.

Govi, I think is the company. And it kind of on the TV to match it. It's cool. Great for action movies. Apple's done something kind of like that. So again, there is a level of acknowledgement of the room you're in, which makes leaving it less dramatic and less stark. Let me do the flip side of this because I then want to unify these ideas.

So then you were talking about the picture with the child and feeling the depth. So it's not 3D. What is, can you give me any more sense of what it feels like? It feels like you are there in what sense? All right. So one scene that I was in, I was sitting in a kitchen at an island. And partly it has to do with the field of view. One shortcut sort of code word I have for this is personal IMAX.

And so you just have this wrap around cinema, but it wraps around your face, which evokes images of Lexagorny Weaver and Alien with the tentacles and what, which Apple's probably not going for. But in a positive sense, it's a personal IMAX theater. So there's the peripheral vision also puts me in the room in a way that I feel more connected and immersive, no matter how big my monitor, and the one I'm using right now is a 40-inch semi-curved LG, and I'm like, I have a great monitor. And it's not relative to the face computer. So the peripheral and the height of it puts me more in the room. And there is a sense of depth.

And I didn't ask them, and I haven't looked up the tech specs on, is it actually 3D video or multi-cam capture? But there's something happening. that is different in the immersive video that they shoot relative to like a panoramic shot that I could also look at in the photos app there and be like, oh, I'm inside of a photo. But it feels like a photo. The video feels more present

than just I'm looking at a big old screen. And it reminded me of like those 3D IMAX experiences, maybe not quite as popping off the screen. But there was something where I felt like I was sitting at the table. And I felt connected. they also took me on a little tour and I visited maybe like wild boars somewhere in Africa

I was flying on a drone shot over a river somewhere and those gave me that IMAX type experience without, pardon me, they gave me that IMAX type experience but in a more personal sense and it just felt more connected I started care about these strangers

and I couldn't understand why and I think it's just the trick of progress that this video makes me think it's more like a visit than a viewing. I'm tempted to upgrade my iPhone this next cycle so that I can get, so I can start shooting videos with that for my children because if God forbid this is the future and they could feel like they're in a room when they were 10 years old, like we'd all kill for that. So like, I mean, that's one of the things that I've thought about in terms of like future proof it. But okay, so to unify the two sides of it, if gunned to your head, Brian says to you,

what is the most compelling thing in terms of the experience? Because the, the AR, like there's those, what is it, and real, they changed their name. There's like $500 glasses that weigh about the same as glasses that can overlay in your real world a screen from your Mac. They can do that right now and they're cheaper. What I'm saying between those two things, the AR where it's like, oh my God, this is fidelity. in real life, this is really impressive, versus the immersion, which to you was the most compelling? Gun to my head, I'm already dead. It's taken me too long. And these violent threats are terrible. The AR versus the immersion. This is actually really challenging, but I'm going to say it's the

immersion. And part of the simplest thing that, the thing that affected my body the most, was the one minute I spent in the meditation app. And they had gotten me all, like, agitated with the dinosaurs. And I knew that there was going to be dinosaurs. Harris Swisher told me there was going to be dinosaurs. So I'm ready for dinosaurs. I've been doing training, right? I've been doing, like, airboxing in case this dinosaur wants some of this,

I got you. And so they opened the portal, and there's dinosaurs, and one tries to bite my hand off, and my reflexes are pretty tight. But my heart rate is really up. And I've been flying, and my heart rate is up. And then they're just, like, launched this, meditation experience, and I've used a lot of guided meditation, and I do meditation twice a day and most of the days in my life. And this thing, it just, like, the whole room became dark,

and there's this floating orb of pedals. We all saw the video. Like what I'm describing, we saw on YouTube. But there is a difference between looking at a video of a peaceful scene or of something, you know, that coincides with your breath. Even the Siri ball was, like, like very elegant, this orb floating, and I could kind of put my hands around it. And so when this thing was coaching me to breathe and the pedals are expanding when I inhale and they're contracting when I exhale, I know my blood pressure dropped, my heart rate dropped, my respiratory rate dropped, my voice and shoulders dropped. And it affected my physicality much more quickly than the guided audio only or even, you know, YouTube videos that I sometimes watch.

chill out or go to a different place. And my button on this is that that environment's feature, there will be great games and apps and I just deconstructed an F1 car and that was nerdy and cool. But when I work at home, I tend to try to create a virtual environment. I've got great music. I've got some YouTube environment running in the background of like 4K snowfall video or lo-fi hip-hop animated beats. And they showed that you can create your own workspace, like your desktop, but it's actually your workspace. Like it has a sense of depth to it. So I imagine being in a hotel room, which is a non-inspiring space,

and then knowing where I know how to be in a flow state as a writer, which is right where I am right now, my studio in L.A. And I could bring it with me, right? I could like travel with my home studio or with a cabin in the woods or right on a mountaintop. And that to me is psychologically, like really powerful. and maybe dangerous. But I think of the two experiences, it doubles my vote for the immersion as the thing that's more impressive than the screens floating in the room that I'm in.

That's the thing that I've been saying, too, that I try to say to Gruber as well, desktop or laptop replacement. But Chris, go ahead and jump in on here too. You know, this is super helpful. And your descriptions are very visual, which helps me as a visual person to kind of imagine these different things. And, you know, I'm sort of like left oscillating between kind of like the present and near present and then like the future. I kind of live in two different sort of time frames. You know, I dabble maybe in like the recent past, but mostly I'm sort of living in like the present and then seven to 10 years in the future. And so what I'm curious about, especially given like your interest in, you know, humanity and nature and kind of like having these connections to the real physical like lived life, I think is the degree to which what I'm hearing you say is.

thanks to things like parallax and other types of depth in the imagery that you are brought into this immersive experience that allows you to believe or suspend reality, so to speak, to come into belief that you are in this space interacting with whether it's these objects or these interactive things. Or EWOK. Yeah, in the order of like, you know, Ready Player 1, right? So like you're talking about, you can be in this uninspiring environment and yet have complete control over what your visual senses are telling you is happening. And like you had with the meditation

app actually have a physiological response to your environment in a way where not being in such an immersive environment, you're kind of like, you know, left kind of in between different things. You have like your flat screen perhaps or curved where you're doing your work. But then you know, if there's a lawnmower outside or if, you know, the kids are running around or whatever happens to be, that you're kind of like in between worlds. And this sounds like you go to a place. So I'm curious just to think, you know, you mentioned that it's heavy. A lot of people have said it's heavy. You know, you mentioned maybe like laying down and that could be like the way that you

experience this perhaps. Or maybe there's some suspension harness or someday, you know, that kind of like you step into and that's your experience. But even if you were to imagine this maybe, you know, in two to three years time, right, this is a significant purchase, at least for a lot of people, you know, as I think Brian has said many times, this could be the replacement for the laptop. But I don't know if that's going far enough. if it actually is a replacement for the laptop because of the way in which it demands an episodic

experience as opposed to working with it all day long. So I guess my thought, my question is, imagine that you are one of the people who buys this thing and you bring it home. You know, I've heard various reports about like the quest devices. How do we know he hasn't pre-ordered? I have not. Let's say he has. This is definitely imagine. Yeah. Imagine that or imagine somehow someone trips and falls and he receives an inheritance of one of these devices. I guess my question is, is you have it now at home. Is this something that you're looking to use on a regular basis? Or is it more for specific types of applications?

Like for movie viewing, like you said, you know, with your wife. Obviously, you've got $7,000 to buy more than one of them. And so you've got, you know, some great beefy cables to like, you know, internet experiences. But like I think that's the question that now that you've been inside of it, is it something that you're going to use on a regular basis, like on an hourly basis, or you're going to leave it until Friday. And that's when you're going to have it as like your entertainment sort of like destination. I couldn't use this version every day.

There is a strong case to be made for the field of the array of virtual monitors that is so much more customizable, resizable, and non-physically cluttering than what my desk looks like right now. I've got multiple screens, my phone's on a thing, my laptop is open, this external monitor, the iPad's open, the Home Hub thing. and it's just nasty. And so if in the future I just have like a surface and a physical keyboard, because the air keyboard is trash, typing in the air. I was going to ask that, yeah. At all. It was, and they were kind of embarrassed about it too.

Did you use a lot of voice as a result? Because it seems like falling back to Siri. But if you're in the past through, could you put a keyboard on your lap and type and Like, is that doable? They've talked actually about where there's sort of a mode where you can open up a laptop and the laptop actually appears in virtual space. Yes. And so essentially it's like screen sharing into like the heads up display, which or whatever,

the Division Pro. And that's interesting, but you're still not necessarily looking directly at the keyboards, I guess. Yeah. I would prefer, based on the experience I had with the thing and the risk, I would prefer a physical keyboard on my physical lap that is just low latency synced to this thing. through Bluetooth, probably. And that gives me specific control of all these characters.

Voice, it's not there. It just isn't. I mean, I tried to tell it to go to, oh, puck.com. News. I was just trying to navigate to a website. I can't even imagine what I heard you say. It busted that. And I was speaking clearly.

There was no background noise. This is an Apple controlled environment. I'm not on the streets of New York under a subway line. Right. So theory fails. in the most controlled environment ever. That's so funny that they still can't. They can't even do that and that.

Well, there's been some shuffling over there in the talent, I understand. So daily use, it's not quite, I can't produce with it. I can't create with it. A lot of my creation comes through fingertips and it's just too inefficient. So then it goes to the way you described episodic experience. I like that. And thinking about taking trips, which you can interpret psychedelically. Or travel.

This is a hybrid. It's like a virtual travel experience. I can't imagine doing psychedelics inside of the Vision Pro, but I got to imagine someone going to do it. Maybe it's a replacement for them. They are working on these digital psychedelic experiences that tick up our brains with specific intention. So taking a trip, dropping in to an experience, I want to de-stress and go on a dive.

I want to revisit a memory for recent. on a project I'm doing. I want to prime myself in some way. I could see myself dipping into this as a more economical, at least time-wise, if not financially in the short term, an economical version of taking some kind of journey and getting inside of something. It is a useful is even a hardware, but it's a remarkable more than useful. The utility just has to be played out over time. I'm not sure it's useful yet, but it is remarkable and impressive. And so, like, what is the experience that I want to have on occasion that puts me in the driver's seat or puts me next to the pianist, you know,

Alicia Keys in this case, that was real cool to just hang out with her for a moment? I could see that as an occasional experience. The current price tag for me does not justify that. It is, you know, I spent the money on the Oculus and I stopped using it when I could go outside again. And this is a far superior technical experience, for sure. But the underlying challenge is still there. It's an awkward thing.

You strap to your face. And there's not a must-have experience. Like, all my friends aren't there yet. So there's no social, there's no network effect. And there's not yet a unique content experience where I was like, oh, I got to get back. It's like the island and lost. Like, I got to go back and get inside of there.

but I can start to imagine that there might be as an enhancement. I fear the seven to 10 year thing that you're talking about kind of between. I fear that despite my deep desire to be a part of this world, that where this is going is to disconnect us from this world and to offer us something so rich and so compelling that we would always choose it over the messy room that we're in and the messy people who are in our physical lives right now. where it's like, I just want to turn that dial up.

I'm out. Sorry, can't hear you. I'm back on Tatouine. I mean, I guess, so that leads me, I guess, to one quick follow-up question about this, which is, and this sort of also leads to some of the question that Brian has coming up. When it comes to thinking about the ultimate experience of this product and who it's for, you know, currently it's going to be for early adopters and folks you just want to get in to try it because they want to try all the devices.

But given that Netflix and YouTube and others are not actually producing apps for it, it raises a question as to what kind of content is going to be available. Even if you can install a million apps, you know, you really don't want to have the app store experience. I imagine in that environment, given how chaotic that is. And so my question is more about, you know, to your point and to you specifically, like about the opportunity for creators to create types of experiences that cannot be delivered through any other means than this type of device or with this type of depth. Now, I'm reminded of an exhibit

that I saw once at MoMA by Ragnar Gartson called The Visitors. And I don't know if you've had this experience, but essentially you walk onto this floor. And what unfolds is essentially a live music video that's being performed by performers and you walk amongst them. Now, the walls are all 2D screens, but the level of immersion and the sound is so clear and crisp that it is though you are sort of visiting a memory and walking spatially. Now, Brian also talked about a product today called the hollow tile floor, I think, which is very similar to the Ready Player 1 type floor. Yeah. The Disney thing, exactly. So my question is kind of to anticipate. Yeah. So we always had, you know, apps on desktop computers, but then it took kind of the app store and

providing some level of security and confidence to deliver that to a mobile device where it wasn't going to brick your phone with malware viruses, et cetera. We're in this moment where Apple may have to sponsor a lot of content to be produced in order for that platform to actually thrive. So as a creator, are you starting to see seeds of things that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do on any other platform that would make you want to create for it? I love this question so much. Oh my gosh.

This is the right choice for my use of time. right now. Thank you. That's just very thoughtful. It's very clever and it's not an easy thing to answer, but I do have some some thoughts. So one, short of my creativity, there is a type of experience which feels tailor made for this immersive experience. Like these are not apps. These are immersive experiences in terms of their key differentiation from what we already have today. And that's the point. What do they unlock that we can't already do? I can text on a phone or a tablet or a big monitor or in the Vision Pro, that's not a differentiated experience. But when I had the experience with the, I forgot the name of the app, but there was a design app,

a 3D design app and one of the modules was looking at a racing car and deconstructing it and having a life size model of it or shrinking it down to the size of like a micro machine. And what I've done for my own health, I've had some injuries and some pains and I use this anatomy app on my iPad that lets me drop a 3D body in the room. And I hold up the, I literally took it when I was at my doctor's office, I put a virtual human in the room and I held up the iPad as the viewfinder. And I said, it hurts right there. I don't know what that's called, but I can highlight it. And then he can read the Latin thing and she can read the Latin thing. I'm like, oh, versus me trying to use my ineffective words and say, maybe two centimeters below the surface. I don't know. So that

level of pinpointing and for diagnostics and for education, whether you are, you know, building machines, building cars, dealing with the human body, with plumbing, you know, there's so much vocational educational application to this. Just vocabulary. Okay. And the way that I learned, I mean, one of my primary YouTube uses is how to. And so for someone who's creating how-toes to shoot it with their iPhone 15 plus, you know, in spatial mode, or to strap the computer to their face and shoot it with the Vision Pro mounted,

then I got point of view tutorial on assembly, on patching, on installing, on welding, on painting, on ratcheting, like all these things. And it's far less translation. To read instructions is one thing. To watch somebody else doing it is another. shown, totally. The points of view, like in their body as they do, if you're a chef, right? If you're putting a puzzle, like there's so many things that we do with that.

To be inside the British baking bakeoff. Yes, be inside the Great British Bake Off. That's, I, that very much excites me. Now, the second, the heart of your question about, I don't make that kind of content myself, but I'm thinking about what is a artist residency look like when that artist is resident. in your residency. And so if I'm going to do like a comedy monologue or an interview, can that,

can that Johnny Carson couch be your couch? Can, can. Right on. Yeah. You know, Seth. Like the late show. Like you're actually there in studio. You're sitting one down from Ed.

Yeah. And you're just looking over. Yeah. And so you start to marry, like just bring it closer. Right. So you're putting someone inside the TV. But then if you. add technology, right? You add the personalization. You add a little large language model

customization. So there is a template and framework for the conversation, but then there's a way to have it reflect this person in some way or even pseudo interact with them. You know, the live edition. I mean, move over Twitch. I know they're having challenges. That's right. They need to like switch into this. And only fans is a whole thing, right? Like, That's just the original news case. Just the concept of connecting with a creator, part of what people go for with these creator connections. And as we lose trust in every institution of any kind of, religious, business, political,

and we're shifting toward these individual relationships through substack, through YouTube, through TikTok, through only fans, what does it mean to enhance that connection? And how do you take a creator relationship and make it immersive? and then preserve the psychological safety and health of both parties in that, because the parissocial connections that people already feel through their phones is through the roof. What is it going to be like when it's strapped to their faces? I want to shift topics, but I got to hit something that's been very important to me. So real quick, you said it was too heavy.

I can use my quest two for about a half an hour max. Is that you feel like maybe a similar-ish thing? Yeah, I think, you know, my appointment was a full hour. I probably had the thing on for 40 something minutes. And within the first 15, I was like, okay, this, maybe I need to make an adjustment. Maybe they need to make an adjustment. And I didn't have the Zeiss lenses in. I didn't need the extra weight of that glass. So I probably had the lightest version that they offer. I think I could push myself to two to three hours if I'm like, like really in something. But I have to kind of adjust or lean back on a cushion, you know, on the couch or at a computer desk. Yeah, we're going to have like these ripped decks, you know, we're just going to be a different type of computer neck.

Like we have. Yeah. Yeah. And those of us who had the keyboard era desk days have a whole carpal tunnel thing going on. And so this is going to, you know, create, we'll need some neck warmups. There will probably some custom. heated and cooling pillow solutions to wrap. We should be investing in chiropractic.

It's about the shovels and the picks, right? Not about the full. I re-threaded a thread today about somebody wondering, how come they don't take the design queue from headphones? Why is all the weight on your brow? Like, it could be sort of like those, that Star Trek or Star Wars style, like put it here. We're used to having chunky head.

chunky headphones. So the way to it's centered on your reveret. Right. So the screen is the lightest part and the battery can be here

and all that. Yeah, I don't know. AirPods Max would have given them some insight about that. Look for my thread. Yeah.

Over the head band, you know, when I just think about like what people have done for thousands of years and I have this image of women around the world walking with things on their head,

right? Yeah, totally. Boles and things. And they're so, we're capable of, if it's, line. Oh, yeah. You could wear it as a hat. Put the battery up here. Yeah. The Apple cat.

Okay, I'm going to, I'm going to transition and then indulge me for a bit, both of you, if you will, because this was literally a shower thought that I've been thinking a lot recently about the existential threat to Google, Google search, but then to the entire web that is presented by And I had a shower thought that was, oh, Google search will be deprecated within a decade. And I'm not trying to do a Stephen A. Smith hot take sort of thing like Bill Simmons says. But as I'm starting to piece this together, I don't know that that's wrong. And there's two channels to this. There's the Google business channel.

And then there's how the web and the internet itself is evolving. So let me start with the Google. business channel, which is, for years, I've been stupid and said, you know, Google can only go so far. I've been hearing insiders at Google complain. Oh, it's only about the quarter, only about the quarter. There's been so many stories in the last couple of weeks of people bitching at Google about how this isn't the company it used to be and things like that. And there's only so many ads you can throw in a thing.

So I've been burned before by saying, okay, Google's reached its limit. law of larger numbers, you can only put so many ads in a thing. But it occurs to me that we all know, and Google knows, that the existential threat is why do you search when you can get an answer? And Chris, you and I had a conversation about a startup recently or startup idea that your point to me was like, people don't want to curate themselves. They want the feed. They want it delivered. And, you know, to Google's credit, YouTube has been a pioneer in this in sort of foie gras style force feeding us the things that keep us watching. TikTok has now taken that to another level. But so from the Google side, and I'll start here and then take your questions.

But take your input on this. Google has YouTube. YouTube is replacing television. And they're growing their cloud offerings, still not exactly on the level of AWS or whatever, but growing and competitive. The web is becoming and shouldified as the word of 2023 was. Ory Dr. O. And so their growth is going to be in the Flaug-Ross-style sort of algorithm. delivering of information. Chris is raising his eyebrows, but this is what I'm going to take your

input. The cloud is going to be the thing. And then you can see a scenario within a couple years where the only reason you go to Google search is when you want to shop, which would be so ironic because Larry and Sergey's paper in college before they founded Google was that there's no way a search engine, the incentives of a search engine, if there's pay to play, will never align with the users. And so I'm like, within five years, because all of the information is now in algorithmic feeds, all of the things that people go to,

Google will just be like, we'll become what we stole, which was go to an overture, Google search will be a shopping destination. Or I need something that I'm going to pay for. Not necessarily buying a shirt or whatever, but something that I'm going in the end do a transaction. Because then everything else, as the web is insuredified, is not worth searching for anyway. Let me pause there and then we can get into the larger things. Go Chris. Go, Chris.

Well, okay. So I guess like where I would start is understanding like the job to be done that Google originally had, which is that in the early days of the web, it was quite difficult to publish. You had to be quite knowledgeable. And getting content online, you know, it was as easy as setting up a web server, but of course, how many people actually knew how to operate and run a web server and get that content out there. In the last 10 to 15 years, it's been made incredibly easy to the point where, obviously, Twitter's contribution was allowing people to use SMS as a publishing platform that opened

up publishing for so many more people. So in the beginning, the need was once that content was starting to get online, it needed to be indexed so that you could find and discover it. Hence the early altavistas and search engines like that, right? Now that it's so easy and we've basically reduced the cost of publishing and distribution to zero, now the problem is finding useful and good information. The inshidification is happening in kind of a bidirectional path. You've essentially tilled the soil, you've put down your manure or whatever.

Things have started to grow, including weeds. And the weeds are now overtaking things such that now you have to invent, you know, the sort of arms race in response to that. And that is why we're moving into these sort of, even their private or premium channels in context that people are paying for to basically take back some sense of control over the channel. Can I interject and suggest that, again, the TikTokification of media has solved that for the majority of people

because they don't see very often stuff that they don't. Again, they don't need to curate. They don't want to curate. Okay, also let me pause you there. and also add something to this, and then we'll bring in their attendee. Both Google and then eventually TikTok kind of are riding a wave of consumer adoption of these technology platforms, where if you remember 15, 20 years ago, like, it wasn't everyone having a device on them all the time.

And, you know, to our friend Tristan Harris, you know, talking about the idea that now there's essentially kind of this simulation engine on Google's backend for, you know, you and people like you, and it just runs a simulation to say, here's the content that you and people like you would like, that algorithmic sorting of all this content also wasn't possible before. So while I agree with you in a way where, and I remember when I was working at Google, one of the concepts that we were working on at the time was that the person becomes the query. Why should I have to type a query? Based on everything that I do, everything that I interact with, all the things that I promote

to the network, it should start to know and understand me and anticipate what I want because there are people who are further down the path that are going to have already discovered the things that I'm eventually going to want. And so all these platforms are doing is bringing me down a path where someone else has already sort of pioneered it. So in some ways, that's great. However, that does lead to, one, a lack of, let's say, diversity of experience or a lack of plurality. And so the way to combat that is with a type of inborn curiosity or a desire to explore outside of the what the algorithms will show you. And so given that, I guess I would ask Peritundi, what is Google's role, you know,

was 2024 now that we're at this inflection point. And if you were to take over from Sundar, what is it that you would actually do? Unplug all the machines. No. No gun to your head. I think, you know, I agree with much of what you just said, Chris. And I had a phrase that I thought I came up with many years ago at an old Web 2.0 conference when I was on some kind of panel.

and I was like, we're seeing the birth of the anticipatory web. And it was like, the idea that these platforms will become better and better at anticipating our needs such that we don't need to ask. I feel like I literally wrote about that. So, you know, one of us, you know, inspired each other. I won't claim to have created it. But we, you know, these ideas occur to people. And then I was one of those people, as were you.

So there is, for me, the idea that Google is trying to organize the world's information and and help us make a way through the week. to find the real good food, the quality edible stuff, that need is still very high. In fact, it's higher. There's more web, more data, more information, quote unquote, to sort through and disinformation. It's like low quality information calories. Yeah. So the noise is higher.

And so the value of signal growth. And I don't think that the solely. we will not be satisfied enough in our, even in our basic needs or aspirational ones with the algorithmic, like passive consumption of a TikTok model. That itches a big scratch, but it doesn't solve for like, how do I get across town? It doesn't solve for I'm looking for an accountant. Except. And I don't, forgive me for interrupting. But this is where the AI could come in and change the paradigm of how people expect. Because, again, you just say,

said, how do I get across town? And as opposed to going to an app and putting in things, you just ask. And so once people's sense of computing is, I just ask and I get the info. It feels like the algorithms where it's like, I said to Chris the morning that those two planes collided in Japan was it or something.

And on TikTok, within a half an hour, there were people doing standups in front of the news talking about it. So like those people that woke up like I did and got the news about the plane crash didn't necessarily have to then go and like, oh, I'll search out more. I know that this happened. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah. And if AI is like if it trains everyone to feel like that's how you interact with computing, then curation goes away. I'm afraid of this.

I'm not advocating for it. And I don't take it as an advocacy, but I think curation doesn't go away, but it does transform. And so you've both, I assume, nod your heads, if I'm correct, you've used perplexity AI for searching. Okay, great. To me, that is a step forward in the search experience. But it's still a search experience. Like I ask a question and it goes and co-pilots and synthesizes and curates all this information and puts a little story together, puts a narrative with footnotes and integrates them in a way that is far more reliable than the chat GPT version or currently than the Bard version. There's no reason Google can't do that.

The idea of conversation and chat being a primary interface to all the world's knowledge, I get that. There'll be some anticipatory digest. We might still get emails. But if we want to know something, it won't be the laborious process of like, let me grab my weighted supercomputer and launch specific search app and tap with my meaty human thumbs, my query translating from my brain to my fingertips to carry. Is it a machine?

Well, I'll just talk out loud or I'll whisper it or it'll kind of know based on my eyes are looking that I want to know the price on that thing. Perfect. Yeah. So Google is smart, right? They know this. They've got the Gemini model on the Gemini Ultra. They have a lot of pieces of the puzzle to ride that wave, same as they rode or captured

the wave of video with YouTube that they didn't quite with social media and rest in peace, Google Wave. Look, I work. Yeah. Well, and then there was plus and all the rest, yes. But if they, if it's going to be a battle of, you know, your conversationalist, they've got a pretty good claim to say, like, we're a trusted conversationalist and a provider of that value and of that translation. How are they going to get paid? And how are they going to continue to insert an ad experience into that flow of conversation? And will your personalized bot pitch you on products and shoes and all kinds of things? to make the experience you're looking for even better. Okay.

In chat purchases to like enhance the result even more. This was not me saying Google's going to die. No. But this is me saying that Google search within a decade will be deprecated or be only, because again, what you're saying is, is then I pay a subscription to, chat or opening eyes. So Brian, let me, let me, I think I can see like the way through here. Okay.

And I think the real challenge is the conflict of interest. and the notion and the word fiduciary comes to mind, which basically means taking on the responsibility for the person that you're ostensibly trying to help. So Baratonda, you talked about this idea of kind of bringing, let's say, imagine in Vision OS, you're able to go to the VisionOS doctor's office and you're able to create a digital twin of your body

and move your body around in 3D space to then pinpoint the thing where you need some help. And then whoever is in there, the doctor supposedly, well, they've taken the Hippocratic Oath and they are essentially responsible to make sure that they're not manipulating you into a treatment that is way more, you know, expensive, but actually totally irrelevant to you, right?

So there's already failed that test without Applevision progress. I'm sorry. The person health system has already failed. I'm sorry. I know it's triggering. I apologize for bringing that up. We'll go do some meditation after this. But the point being, to Brian's point, is that the reason why Google search, as we sort of

understand it, is coming to a point, an inflection point, is that the level of trust that people place in it, where there isn't, whether it's an adversarial, or, or, whether it's an adversarial or sort of a sort of protected or hallowed relationship where, you know, if you think about whatever Chrome is, the browser is meant to be the user agent. What does that mean? You delegate responsibilities to the browser to load pages for you and then it comes into your space. In theory, right?

Like in theory. On Google's side, they're supposed to be looking at everything that's out there and then providing you with the best possible results. But to Brian's point, at some point, they started taking money and saying, well, you know, this is going to become an ad or an auction where we can put things in front of you based on how much people are willing to pay to get your attention and to offer you things. And so the lack of, even if it's transparent, right, if the entire search result page or their recommendations are all paid for, well, now you don't have an agent on your side anymore. Instead, you're just sort of a recipient

to, you're the duck being turned into flaw graph for the advertisers, I guess. So moving forward, I think there is a question whether it's regulation or not in terms of, what should and how much can Google or these gatekeepers know relative to the amount of information that they have from advertisers that are trying to manipulate you to some outcome, whether that's a commercial outcome, whether it's buying something, whether it's seeing something. And that's why that trust relationship is so important and we really struggle to talk about it in a way that makes sense. I mean, this question about the Vision Pro, you're inside this space that's entirely curated by Apple. I've used the Quest Pro

periodically. And the meta app store makes it feel like I'm in kind of a red light district someplace and I'm a little bit on my own and there's like no police around and it's sort of like a little more sketch. And so that is I think the transitional moment that we're coming to because these seductive technologies are becoming increasingly lifelike and able to cause us to feel and respond in ways that we haven't been able to, that we have to reexamine how we trust these devices and what allows them to be trustworthy. But, but Brian, is your expectation slash prediction around the death of Google search around its loss of trust or, or its loss of business opportunity?

Business opportunity. Because they'll give up the ghost and say, as people's expectation of search evolves, essentially what they will say is, you know, and they'll hope. that they own the bot that you pay $30 a month for to do all the stuff, right? And they'll say, okay, fine, for this specific use case, you're going to go search for when you need a hotel in Marietta, Georgia, or something. And so they'll, but they'll also, that'll happen to them because it'll, because people's, the user's expectations will change and what the value of the web will be will change.

Again, everyone has had these ideas before, the idea that the web is going away. in the sense that what was the web for 30 years, it was all of us putting all of humanity's collective knowledge online and digital form so that the AIs could learn it and become self-aware. But also, most of us didn't sign up for it, but yes, that is. No one signed up for that. It was some sort of. I mean, if you watch Terminator, you knew what was coming.

Like you said, the Matrix, you know, 99. We had plenty of warning. But so the users will be like, well, I don't do search like that anymore because the web isn't that anymore. I don't go to the web to learn things. I go to my chatbot to learn things. I go to my algorithmic feed to learn things. We'll all have our own personal Dan Rathers delivering the news of, yeah, go ahead, Bartone.

Well, I think then this is, I'm almost getting a mental image of like a symbolic landscape to borrow language from my friend, Dr. Sam Rader. You credited, you know, the inshidification creator. Corey, yeah, Corey. So, Mr. Dr. O. There will be for a while, there will be humans. And we are an example of those. There will be knowledge and information at some removed from us. And there will be interfaces that we go to to acquire knowledge and experience,

whether for pleasure or for profit or for enlightenment, we will seek knowledge. and we will go to a trusted place to do that. Before there was anything called Google, there was encyclopedias, and there were librarians. And we looked things up in the Dewey Decimal system, and then the index, and then the card catalogs, and then the table of contents. And it was slow, and it was literally analog,

and you turned actual pages. And then we virtualized the pages, and we outsource a lot of library function to a search engine, index first, then web crawling version. And now it's getting more abstracted. and all those pages, which we didn't necessarily celebrate every moment of that experience. I wasn't like, yay, I get to load another web page.

Like, that was not the goal. The goal was what was on that page. Right. And also clicking five or six different pages until you got to the goal. Right. Exactly. And as we made those clicks, we dropped some sense. And we supported the existence of those pages and the livelihoods of those people.

And a whole economy sprung up around webpages. infrastructure as a fuzzy gateway to the information on those pages. The robots crawled it and Google front-loaded it, even the answers you get currently now. Before search regenerative experience, there's just the short answer with the tabs and other people are kind of searching for this. So we've definitely been heading here the whole time. Even without the explicit non-agreement around AI models sucking in all this stuff, someone was going to do it. Maybe it was Google the whole time. They were in probably the best position to do it, having scanned every book and known every song and hosted every video that people watch today.

Their role as the intermediary, I do not think, is under major threat. There's new threats. There's new possibilities where a disruptive moment. But their role as the interface between me as a webpage viewer and them as a web page sorcerer and deliverer of links to webpages, absolutely that goes away. and in that transition to, okay, well, I'm still going to have questions, and the answer's out there, the truth is out there. It's like the X-Files. You know, who's the agent that I trust now? Will it still be called Google Search? They're already starting to call it Bard, right? And giving it other names. The last piece that I'm, this bears another session, another time with you to, but the embedding of all of these knowledge, agents, these AIs, away from any single interface that looks like a chat prompt to begin with, also explodes the idea of, you know, a chat GPT prompt is not very much different from the

Google homepage, right? It's an open prompt saying, what do you want? Or a command line from the very early date. So that's the distribution of the command line into multiple interfaces and points presence throughout our lives, like in our refrigerators, in our kettles, in our wrists, in our cars, that is also, you know, that decentralization of the prompt itself is a challenge to the concept of quote unquote Google search. And for them to survive, they'll have to position themselves in all the new real estate and offer the same value, which is like we're going to close the gap between you and the information you're looking for in the interface of the moment and somehow get paid. It's a great challenge. I don't have the answer, but I think it's a good prompt.

Yeah, I'm going to close this by saying, I don't think Google is going away, but I think that they will know to pivot in the other direction because what are you going to 15 years from now, what are you going to keep Google search around like Cannical for Leibowitz style of like these were these were the learnings of the olden times that no one needs anymore because you just ask your AI bot or whatever. I don't know. I thank you for thinking all that out with me because it's not a fully formed idea in my head yet. And again, the web is changing. Everything changes. This is life. But I just have a certainty that Google will be like such a minimal product within 10 years.

You know, I think the better like question to try to put a bowl on this for you, like is to think about like your children growing up and the degree to which they expect to do something similar to we did, which was to bear a Tunday's point, a series of abstractions that were necessary to be able to synthesize information from the real world, written, you know, pages and content into a digital form that could then be easy. easily published and then discovered through these crazy URLs. All of those steps are leveled. And now instead, you take all of that content, you run some crazy algebra over it,

you turn it into this cascading table of things. And, you know, to use Alan Watts's concept. So you kind of run that through an algorithm that generates the most likely thing that's going to come next in a logical sequence. And you provide an answer or guide based on all of human knowledge. clearly the next set of things that we're going to build and create, whether it's in Vision OS or whether it's through a type of web browser or user agent is going to have to be different because it doesn't make sense to continue to produce those raw materials that really don't

serve a function in the same way moving forward. So I think it's more important to think about what people are going to do, why they're doing it and what they're pursuing to bear attendees point, like whether it's pleasure or profit or finding calories or whatever it is, and that's more likely to predict where we're going to go. And the home for that, You know, the underlying, the premise that we are going to publish objects into an indexable age-based universe, when there's no economic incentive to do that, right? And that's not how we get discovered anymore. Well, it depends on what those objects are and how deep they are and how hard they are to

create. Where will those objects live and how will they get covered into the new intelligence discovery platform, which then delivers it back to others who want that knowledge, or we just go hang out by the campfire, you know, tell stories around the campfire mediated only by Earth itself. Well, then back to the Vision Pro of Bart Tune's Dreams. Chris, go first. Is there anything you want to talk about before we sign off? No, this is great, man.

I mean, like, I would love to follow up. You know, we didn't even really get into like the whole GPT store and disrupting the app Baratunday has been making GBT's. He said me as making drinks. Dude, I made a cocktail with Bar Tunday's bar, bar Tunday, GPT. And it was really, you know, pretty good. It made me a, um, a Mexical logical discourse, uh, was the name of the cocktail. It had, uh, some, I was, I was impressed by the specificity of this cocktail.

It had Cotigo 1539 mescal, Jovin, which might be completely hallucinated. I don't know if that's actually. No, no, that's real. It's on my shelf. Oh, it. Oh, perfect. Okay. So you actually put in your.

Wow. We've got to share some recipes. Anyways, lavender, shrub, Chinar, Aztec chocolate bitters. Sounds delicious. Yeah,

I built this GBT informed by my literal liquor cabinet, my tastes, and my voice. So you get a toast and it made a recipe with a naming of it inspired in some way

by my sense of humor. Though it's still worth. Did you write this down anywhere? Like how you did this? Because I once actually built a messenger bot that had my cocktail recipes in it. And I would love to reprise that thing. And that was, you know, it's dead as of 2016.

But yeah, I would love to learn more. I will, I'll share not fully. I wrote a puck piece. That's fine. I didn't break down the process yet. Okay. And I need to update it because we'll see. Now, this is the object that we need to learn how to share so we can actually gap sure our knowledge in context. Yes. Yes. Yes. There's our mini AIs on whoever platform is going to host them best. Brian, kind of wrap this show. Yes. I know. Very tuned. Please, uh, tell us where we should find you on Puck, of course, which don't try to say that to the Vision Pro because it might misunderstand it. Yeah, you can find me at Puck.

That news and old school, despite all the trash talking apparently of webpages, I still own and operate baritunde.com. And it is the gateway. I'm baritundee on all the socials. So wherever you live, we can stalk each other there. And there are links to my custom GPs there, as well as on the other end of the spectrum, which we didn't get into either, but the actual physical world. I host a show about connection to nature on PBS called America Outdoors,

and it is a great balancing act to so much of what we're spending our time with here. Without it, we are just brains and a vet, and that is not my ideal future. Maybe PBS needs to put one of their apps, their video app on the Vision Pro. So it would be a beautiful travel log sort of thing to be there with baritending. Travel with me. Yes. As the sirens are going by, I'm going to wrap this in the way that Chris and I used to do when we used to do those spaces and things like that. I love everybody. Thank you for coming on. And we'll talk to you again soon. Thanks.