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

22:25And heads-up display would be good. But it's almost like they shouldn't be trying for 15 years. They need to get to a completely different level of chip plus display plus everything else and then do it really well. It's just because they are all so desperate to be the next iPhone. Hyper-growth. I think everybody in this room currently has an iPhone. They're very good devices. They're great devices. Yeah. And everybody wants to be the next one because then they get the 30 % lock-in. They get just all – All the cultural cachet. Yeah, it just makes you the next big thing. And so Meta has been doing that.

23:02Google has been doing that poorly. Samsung, you know, a lot of these people do it. And they all fail at it because the tech is 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. And most importantly, that you don't look stupid wearing. Yes. Like if I want to give you a wedgie, you've lost the plot. And I'm liberal with the wedgies. So actually it's like a high bar. That's the Kranz factor. I'm going to move my chair over a little bit. I'm going to keep myself a little more room here.

23:35The urge. Put my sunglasses on the entire time. You would have to. No, but I would – what I'd then do is hopefully take them off by the second pair. you gotta get some with the decals of the flames on them little guy fieri moment

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27:28so it feels like augmented reality is at least where there could be fun now yeah but it feels like it's not 27 what 2015 when they had that weird burst of them it feels like they've all stepped back from it which sucks because it feels like we actually need r &d money there yeah yes because i feel like that's the thing i see 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 Ray-Bans are close and they're planning apparently to put a lot more, like invest a lot more there, right?

28:02Like 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 Ray-Bans, they're like, okay, this is like, this is our focus. They've got, plans for some glasses in the next couple of years that are like much more involved we've heard like google bought 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 called the rock-on bubble yeah where i think what they're doing right now is freaking out yeah because they don't have and they all want to be the next iphone but what they realize is there is no next iphone right now there is no next google or facebook or anything So they're chasing AI.

28:54They'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 for the next iPhone. Any time – again, Pierce wrote that little blurb about the season of AI gadgets is here before any of the humane and rabbit stuff came out. And I was like crossing my fingers.

29:30Because 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 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 Pim, 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 ago at 11 in the morning.

30:04Yeah, 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 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 busted that was? No, but that's actually a bad thing you have to say, dude. And everybody's saying that because they're like, don't worry about it.

30:38Don't worry about it. Meanwhile, the researchers are like, actually, law 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 Huang can make money. Yeah, Jensen Huang, when he's not serving PC gamers like me. But that's the thing, though. That's something you were saying there, Michael. It was 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?

31:14You've got a charger right here. I've got this anchor charger. I'm so excited. I've got two, so I've got redundancy. I'm 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 excited for and then excited after. and kind of the Vision Pro. Oh, interesting. But it's like there's always a but, and the but 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.

31:52And it's just frustrating because there was a time, I think this is just like the rock-con bubble, there was a 20-year period where you just got new stuff, new stuff, new stuff, Even the bad stuff was kind of funny. Yeah. Even all this dorky Indiegogo bullshit, like the coolest cooler, which had a speaker and 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. But you stopped getting fun. Like, there wasn't something to look forward to. Like, the Vision Pro, the reason I brought it up is my first hour with it was so exciting.

32:27And 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 is great. Then I tried to watch on a plane. How'd that go? I got a migraine. And I have yet to finish June. People say this and 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.

33:05Yeah. 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, wore their Vision Pro, watched Dune 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 have been playing a player. 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.

33:37And that's why VR is a dead end, and that's why Meta now has, like, been like, you go over here. We tried it. 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 canceled. Yeah, where they released it, and everybody's like, this is garbage, and they're like, yeah, it's garbage. No, they released it. I think what it was was they released it at the same time as the Quest 2, which was like 300, 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 but was more powerful?

34:11Well, 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 friends, like, product managers are ruining the segment. I don't disagree with that. And even if you take it above the PM, like, it's like companies have realized that if they do enough marketing to create artificial demand, then that is a way to make money in the short term and you can keep the business growing while you're there.

34:46Or 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. And 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?

35:13Right. Then I think we would have those glory days of gadgetry. But you can make the money and get out by doing something people want to buy. It's just frustrating. True. Alex, 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 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. It felt like there was something there that could be solved pretty quickly.

35:46But 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. Oh, 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 has never worked for anyone else. Yeah, it's like, guys, stop.

36:13Well, I mean, Amazon, it kind of works. 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 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. You ever use the Odin? The Odin. So there was this, it's an Android gaming console. Before the Steam Deck, so just to be clear, probably not as fun. But super fast. You could do PlayStation Remote on it. Almost like predecessor to the PlayStation Portal, which is literally just playing PlayStation.

36:46And it was great. and what they did this 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 like sold out Indiegogo did really well comes out of China and it's like this current xenophobic climate is fucking frustrating because let them please borrow the innovation from them they seem 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.

37:20And 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 buy our shit. I mean, they're also. They also have one monopoly. Yeah, right. That might be why. Yeah, it's like we all operate within this one monopoly. We're all controlled by Tencent, 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?

37:53They're like, what if you made a$50 million company? No. 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 got to give$100 million to Adam Neumann again so that he can make the next bad company. I think that happened, didn't it? It did. He got$250 million to a club. I want to fail that hard up. That sounds great. It was so good. Well, I don't mean to keep bringing it back to Humane, but that was the thing I kept saying in the Humane briefing. I was just like, guys, I know this is not what you want to hear, but this would be a great little accessory for the phone.

38:30You 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 it has to work. You didn't catch on fire. That's exactly – I'm still here. You're still here. But, like, 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 it. 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.

39:02Just a 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 was like shit or get off the pot. This is the question. I don't know. I asked that about.

39:35Is it just cynical? Rabbit's cynical. I 100 % believe. I think Rabbit had to launch before what we all knew was going to happen, which was Google was going to do Gemini. People used it. Apple was going to do the Siri thing. 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 boy's a sick. Okay, we're going to talk about the Rabbit. It's time. So those listeners who don't know about the Rabbit, it's this$200 AI device, and it claims to have something on it called a large action model.

40:07Large 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 are going to email me corrections. I'm very sorry. But in short, instead of running a large action model, an actual AI thing, it was triggering scripts using ChatGPT.

40:45Now, I could do a whole episode. I'm surprised I haven't over the whole thing that there used to be an NFT company. But putting all of the obvious horrible things aside, it just fucking sucks. Yeah. It's just really bad in a way that is almost unbelievable. I recommend you go look up. Dave3D did a whole thing about it before it came out that was very good. But go and look at Linus's. And Linus, I know people have problems with him, but his thing about the rapper was great because it was mostly him trying stuff and not working. He goes, what, what, what? Which was very entertaining. It was very funny.

41:17But 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. YouTube's like, this is the worst thing I've ever used. Investors are like, absolutely, yeah, I need to get in on this shit now. Yeah, yeah. Elon Musk 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.

41:58They think that's stupid. And then there's the rest of the world. And these people are so focused on money, they forget the rest of the world. They 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? I got one in my drawer next to my bed. What the hell, guys? I'm dying to know more about that.

42:31Wait, I didn't even put that together at all. Yeah, the rabbit is a very – like 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. I was like, do you? Oh, it's a different rabbit. Jesse Lou's like, and now bring out the rabbit. You're like, whoa. No, man. What's happening at CES? I knew you guys were doing sex tech now, but wow. I thought they moved the adult thing away from CES. All right. Depending on the ear. But I think that it is that, that there's the kind of disconnection from the real world. But there's also, I don't know if these people use stuff.

43:03I just don't think. I don't think they do. I don't know if they use it. Like, I really want to just get behind Marc Andreessen at one point and can't say the rest of that. But, I mean, look over his shoulder and see the font size on his iPhone. Right. Like, I want to see it because I don't think these people interact with the real world or touch grass. But I also don't think they, like, I don't think, well, 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?

43:33Like they announced the thing. They made these huge promises. They did a ton of pre-sales. And then it came out, and we haven't heard how the pre-sales have – or how the sales have been since then. 100 ,000 units. After? Oh, we don't. They don't. Yeah, 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, I'm with you. I think there are dubious business motivations to a lot of this, right? Yeah. 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.

44:07I would have been caught up in the ambition. I would have been caught up in the promise, especially when you consider that the design process of a lot of this stuff goes back to the time where we were – most of us are getting our first chance to interact with ChatGPT. And I'm like, make me a text adventure in the style of Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Yeah. 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 the world with this tech.

44:37I 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. So you were really like impressed by ChatGPT. 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 remember. Apologies to the audience. I'm sure you're all 12. hi why are you listening? I'm pretty sure I'm older than you. We're old people. But aimbots you'd go and you'd log in and you'd type and type back and then we've seen this so many times and this one I was like okay we're back to this the pattern recognition and recreation machine has gotten just really really good.

45:13And I was like that's fine. Yeah that's actually where I was as well like oh you can do a text based adventure and I think if I'd have heard that I would have gone cool alright and just kind of just say, because I run a PR firm. Yeah. I have clients in AI, but nothing that touches this show because I'm scared of that. And it's like, there's a few clients in AI who even just do AI things. That's the thing I don't, surprisingly enough, AI companies aren't super excited to work with me when I'm talking about them actually having to do stuff. But it's like with ChatGPT, for example, I know, I actually understand totally, Michael, why you were excited like that.

45:48I 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, but... 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 don't like it. I have a friend who is in a dot-com boom company.

46:29Yeah. 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. I can't do anything. I can't short shit. It's like the big short, but Steve Grohl's 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 has been ported directly, unchanged, and just rebranded as AI.

47:02Just 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. I had so many questions. Somebody brought up, 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 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.

47:37Because every time you would touch a new AI, I think the Plod note, that little self-contained AI voice recorder was like, this is very cool. I wish it were an alternate universe in the year 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. Have fun with that for now. Yeah, it's a bummer. Pivot to AR? Yeah, everybody. I mean, yeah, I think they're just going to pivot back and forth.

48:09Everybody'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's somewhere. And like right now it is all in 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 Blackwell 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.

48:41Can 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 at all costs for our 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 it comes to AI, part of my frustration comes back to that thing we were saying earlier about how we've been let down. Because I would actually love it if I could reliably tell my phone to take distinct actions. Send a calendar invite to Alex and Michael. Yes. 3 p.m. at the iHeartRadio studio and just fucking send it.

49:17And 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 could have it do the spreadsheets and the documents. It can't. It can't actually do these things. And this, please make that the future. No, it isn't the future. We need to, they can't even describe what it is. And it's just. Well, because they can't do that future yet, right? The things we have now, the thing that everybody got really excited about was they released GPT 3.5. Everybody went, oh, crap, this can write stuff.

49:52And it can write it not like garbage for once. And this is huge. And all of the researchers just rolled 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. And everybody was like, no. And then the downloads increased, the downloads increased. And everybody's like, wait, I think there's some money here. Right. And let's just, like, ride this hype just right into the ground as long as we can – or ride it as long as we can until it gets around. And that's pretty much what happened. Just – right? Yeah, I'm trying to – I'm still – I'm halfway between the stuff that we're all talking about and then the stuff that I see, again, in these little flashes of like – I'll be on a trip with – and Kevin Neither will be like, what are you doing?

50:39He'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 in 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 know, bookmark that. Yeah. And like generative fill stuff where it's not like I'm typing into mid-journey, like make me a photo of a high turtle eating macaroni and cheese while watching. It's like, no. 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.

51:11It'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 happen 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 into 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.

51:43Yeah. I will lose what I am doing on my phone sometimes. I have 587 Safari tabs up. That doesn't surprise me. Because the UX on there is so wonky, and it's not like on a computer where you have like a... Actually, that would suggest I close Chrome tabs on my computer too. But I don't lose shit as much, but I still do on the computer. 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 that?

52:25Well, the other part of that is the security and privacy. Like we just saw as we were 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.

53:00I'm just going to know. And I'm like, 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 wrote it down?

53:32We 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 switched 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.

54:06No, I keep all of them. Don't worry, guys. Don't worry. You and I will go down together. Yeah, well, I'm taking everybody down. When you're indicted, it'll all 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. Blanket request.

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57:56So returning from a commercial break that I'll announce next time. um it's just i wonder if it's something to do with the venture capital climate but not just that they don't want to invest in things that aren't going to grow huge but also i think they're scared of hardware they just like the concept of hardware is just 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 money, right? With the exception of some hardware in this room currently.

58:34Thank you very much. Clicks for iPhone, bye. We just had an ad break, damn it.

58:42But for the most part, everybody is obsessed with this. And we saw this with video games. I think that was like 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. I mean, it cost them a little. I think it began with the game. It was in Morrowind or 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. Okay. Maybe in the Elder Scrolls Online. But nevertheless, that was the moment when it, but they were like, oh.

59:17And then we got the more microtransactions. They're like, oh, do you want to do a cool little like hand wave in Destiny? $5. And I paid it. I'm like you. I paid the$5. I was like, take my money, Bungie. 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 I've done the LimeWire, done the Kazaa. It ruined several computers. Yes. And then Napster comes out and is like, hey, we're going legit. Just pay us this very affordable monthly fee and you get unlimited music.

59:51I'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, so. Yeah, I don't pay for 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.

1:00:25Like phones are, the whole stop using your phone thing is stupid. Kate Initopoulos at BI had a really good piece where it's like, I love my phone. I love being on my phone. 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 multiple apps 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.

1:01:25we just finished this big developer conference season. And while it was ostensibly for developers and ostensibly for the rest of us, and it should have been developers because never has the relationship between these platforms and developers been more fraught. The stuff that's happening in Europe with 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?

1:01:55Sorry, the what? 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'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, forget that. AI. Yeah. Go on, Michael. No, no, no.

1:02:28That's it. I mean, like, it's – 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 I.O. talking about bots. Remember that? Oh, my God. I remember that. 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're like, we're going to revolutionize the world with chatbots in Facebook. Where are those? M. It was the M assistant, right, with Facebook?

1:03:01Was it? Was it after the Meta rebrand? It was so fucking stupid. But there's always that big overarching theme. And again, to your point, yes, it is to 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 egg on their face now because – 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.

1:03:37I'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 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.

1:04:10Google's probably the worst at it. Amazon's pretty bad at it. Apple is generally pretty good at it. But Apple's whole thing is just like the culture of the place can sometimes get in the way of it. It's cultish. Yeah. And Google's also a cult. But it's like, what if we were like a big kind of disorganized cult? They're also run by, I'm sure regular listeners will know, McKinsey, graduate, Sandar Pichai. What confuses me is like Liz Reed has been there like decades, the search chief now. But also her boss is Prabhupada Raghavan, former head of ads, who also used to run Yahoo. Please listen to the episode.

1:04:43Great episode. Arguably the weirdest thing I ever discovered, other than what I see in the mirror. Anyway, it's just frustrating as well because they must have no shame. They must legitimately just be like, who gives a shit? 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 rubric on that's being crossed. That's why someone like Panos Panay, who's now at Amazon, or Steve Jobs had these like big – Panis Panay was – Panis Panay ran the Surface – ran all of the Surface products at Microsoft for years.

1:05:22One 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 with it. And that's because he's going in like, Like, okay, we've got to fix Amazon's product lineup because it's pretty shit. What if it was good? Yeah, 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.

1:05:53Joni, I have terrible ideas a lot of times. Apparently it was his idea to put the eyes in the Vision Pro. Oh, really? Yeah. And we'd be able to see their little eyes. Yeah. What if the watch was a triangle? No, no. So, Joan. That's the rest of the show. By the way, I want to see, Jodi Ive, apparently Sam Altman really badly wants to make a device for them. Yeah. Honestly, give them as much money as they want. That's what I want. I want to see the homomobile-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 type of Bluetooth device.

1:06:30You can connect your Bluetooth device. Just do anything. Oh, shit. But it looks gorgeous. Which is – I'm fine if things look good, but if they're just completely useless, come on. 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 if Steve Jobs. He's dead. That's why Steve Jobs works. That's why Panos worked was because they actually care about the products.

1:07:06They 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. They've 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 had – it could put their own process.

1:07:38Which 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. No, this is good. – is that my problem is not with the devices, because everyone who buys them, the millions of people who give Apple whatever, it's$3 trillion market cap or whatever it is right now, are very happy with them because they're very good products. And any time 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.

1:08:11You 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 Pro. 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 phones because foldables change the way I use phones and they're great. They still have to unfold into something that's vaguely reminiscent of that rectangle. And a laptop, oh, my God, we just saw Qualcomm processors introduced into like, I don't know, 17 new laptops from a bunch of new companies.

1:08:42And they all look like the existing Intel-powered laptops that they've been shipping forever. Because in most cases, they just subbed it in. I think Microsoft and HP were like the only companies that actually launched new products. But even they – 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.

1:09:20No, 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 percent 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. When 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.

1:09:57And shareholder 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? It's like, I don't know. I feel like that's blaming the victim. I'm serious. I say this a lot about. 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, right? Asus and Lenovo. So these things are crazy. Like you've got the screen where your keyboard is, and then you have another screen.

1:10:32Have 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. Absolutely. Many people use two screens. Do a big enterprise push. Do a big business push. When I see the AI IPA ad, that should be the double screen one. 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 say, 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.

1:11:11Like the people building things. like it's so weird to me that Meta made the Ray-Bans because all of the people who run Facebook now so it's Mark Zuckerberg Javier Ollivan COO you've got Boz the ultimate growth at all costs arsehole 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 it's plugins well that's because Mark said build me a hardware because nobody wants everybody hates us because we're terrible at software.

1:11:51You've got to go build me some cool hardware so I can get as far away from the phones as possible. I'm laughing 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 hardware. I assume that is exactly what it is. And it just leaves. Yeah, build it for me. Slams the door. Honestly, I think if they brought back the HTC Cha-Cha, it would do pretty well right now. What's the HTC charger, everyone? That was a physical QWERTY keyboard Android phone with a Facebook button on it. That would let you directly share to Facebook.

1:12:19Tens of them sold. Absolutely. Could be the new minimalist phone for the Facebook friendly. It could be the boomer phone. Oh, my God. That's the boomer phone. They sell a boomer phone. Great call. It has one with just giant numbers on it. Jailbugs still around, right? It's still around. They're owned by a private equity firm, so not for long. Yeah, I was like, that's a... They'll be sold to a barbecue company. It also won't buy a private equity firm. Green egg will buy it next week. Don't worry about it. Great things. What's funny, though, is that CES with the grill stuff. So as some of you may know, I make excellent barbecue at home.

1:12:49I 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 started asking them grilling questions. Not like being an us. 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. where you can connect it on wifi. 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.

1:13:23And it's got eight, I'm not connected with this. It's just excellent. I have two. It has eight sensors in it so it can find the coldest point in your food. What? Like all my hate, the various haters. Excuse me, I've got a... on, and you're saying I don't like anything. The 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. That 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. I personally am a deeply anxious person, so constant anxiety, which is great for a 12-hour cook.

1:13:59With this, it works, and it works really well, and there's not a bunch of other bullshit. It costs like$169, so it's not cheap, but it solves a problem. Now it's like, you think with all of this money in AI or AR or all these things, they'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 write. Oh, I always write the script.

1:14:34Yeah, 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, 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 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.

1:15:07Go 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 another date with a guy. Then respond to it like politely 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, you're right. And that is more specifically than the only good example for AI. It's the only good version of that demo that every company insists on thinking is good. Rewrite my email. It's just like, send a text to my wife and tell her that I'm going to be late for dinner.

1:15:47No, make me sound more sad about it. No, apologize more. Just text your wife. Just text my 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. Right. Exactly. And I must also say, just as a note, there are people out there who have, like, cognitive disorders and 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 an 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.

1:16:24They 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. Right. Yeah. That is who it is. Because the rewrite stuff is crazy. And then the, oh, I have these five ingredients in my kitchen. 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've got an onion, one piece of ham, three knives. I've got cumin, check GPT. Like, what is the situation where you can't look at it and go, all right, fine. Like, I'll make a sandwich.

1:17:02Because 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 in your vest. 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.

1:17:33But 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. I'm sure many loving husbands and wives. 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.

1:18:04Cool. I can't use it at all because I don't have internet. I wonder – and I have a real question here. And, like, is it that so many problems have already been solved that it's harder to find new ones? Or that the new ones we find are too niche and too narrow and too, like – No, because – You can't dedicate Google's resources to solving, like, a – The true fixable problem is I would love to just say fix my schedule for the week. Oh, I mean, same. Right? Yeah. 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.

1:18:40I've supercharged my ADHD with motion. Fuck you. It's not how it works. You're a bunch of scumbag. I'm so sorry. That's a little much. But you lied. I loaded your goddamn product. It's like, I'll rearrange your schedule. I'm like, go. And it just tries to suggest I do something once. I'm like, that does not work. What the fuck are you doing? 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 that there are no big problems. Right. No more lands to conquer.

1:19:13Tens of thousands of little problems and little niche issues and certainly stuff that I run into every day that shouldn't be a problem now that Google Home is, what, over a decade old and those things are just absolutely trash. But, like, those are little things. One light in my room doesn't go off where the rest of it goes. 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.

1:19:45Yeah. 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 a thousand cuts right now. It's the 10 ,000, 10 million little problems we face, which are usually a result of technical debt. It's just things built on top of things.

1:20:22People I've talked to inside of Google have said this, that they just build shit on top of other shit. Google Home, one of the most evil apps of all 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. Yeah. Genius, genius guy. They've got these amazing, they've revolutionized the smart home. I'm not sure if any of you remember when the Nest came in, that was a huge deal. You had this shitty Honeywell thing and Nest actually worked and it did exactly what you wanted. It looked cool. It looked cool, but it also, very satisfying.

1:20:53And 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.

1:21:33We'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 to hide from the fact that most computing experiences are cluttered and bad in many, many times of the day. That's where the fix is, 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.

1:22:08It is so much worse now. I'm using Kagi, the paid one at the moment. Is it good? Is it worse? 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 boon, 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 or maybe not accurately conveying it back to you. I liked a Google I.O. Westland up a show. So I was like, and then you will be able to use search to find your UPS tracking number.

1:22:47And it will tell you. And then when you're trying to do a return, it will automatically generate that. That could happen. Don't know when. 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?

1:23:21And 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 the eternal growth machine could keep growing. But also, like search, I've done the episode.

1:23:54That's a whole thing. It just feels like they're not building things for people. 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. You'd take a lot of vacations. Yeah, I would... Vacation. But it's just someone, like, in a sane society, Sandar Pashai would have been fired. Yeah. Immediately. Immediately. Liz sent off. Prabhupada Raghavan would have been sent off. These people would have been fired, not just for... They've already not been fired for making search bad, but for publicly breaking the probably the biggest contribution tech has made ever.

1:24:41Yeah. 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? Just AI is going to fix the AI problem. 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 a content from ai synthetic content data so if you go back to the pki episode this is a big problem the synthetic data and by the way did you know that that will break them yeah it's gonna be great habsburg ai is what uh jathan sadowski calls it one of the funniest terms ever but it's so funny as well because there are so many there's so many things to fix and just using the phone is kind of a ball like Yeah.

1:25:34It'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, 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. For a very small, like niche. 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.

1:26:03Kim Kardashian bought one, right? That is famously a thing she loves. One of the first things I learned about being on this side of the business, I'm not allowed to talk about the customers that have not given me the permission to talk about them. But, yeah, no, no, no. I hear Henry Kissinger clutching his clicks as he passed off. His last words were, I like the device.

1:26:28No, it sucks as well. And getting 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 question. The Steam Deck, the next, I genuinely believe, and I know the OLED was the second one. No, that's not what I'm talking about. Whenever they do the next Steam Deck, I'm so excited for that. 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 is like a really great PC gaming console. PC gaming consoles, they've tried them a few times.

1:27:02They never quite work, but this works. It's a bit too big. But I can play with this. Battery isn't great, but yeah. Don't worry about it. It's cool, right? It is cool, yeah. And it's customizable in a way that you don't generally get with products nowadays. And it's just fun to use. That's what I got. I got into the INAO. I got into these weird 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 you can go back to a Nintendo Switch. I still love my Switch. And Razer kicks out a new gaming accessory every CES.

1:27:37You've got this crazy, ridiculous webcam that most people don't need but streamers love. And these RGB-enabled lights and all that stuff. What's the other one? 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. Elgato. Elgato. Oh, yeah. They make really good stuff. Dan will produce it there with the wind. Yeah, Elgato. They make great shit as well. No, and production gear and camera nerds, like, there are still gadgets out there for specific niches. But it's definitely niche, yeah. Yeah, or little professions.

1:28:08But they're like, it's specialized gear. It's not really a gadget. There is just like, yeah, I spent 100 bucks at Best Buy and 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've got an Alpha 3. I've got a Canon 5 DSLR. I've done a lot of photography. I've got some nice glass, too. And yeah, when I take them out and I get the right lighting and I've made sure I do the settings right. You feel like you've spent the menu well. And I nailed it.

1:28:38Sure, 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 do humans have? And they're like, I don't know. And they go to their assistant and like, what problems do you have? And they start talking like, yeah, sure. And it's just, it's frustrating because if the tech industry would realize this was happening, they actually have a lot of good stuff to do.

1:29:15The 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 know, a production studio in your pocket, like, we had to get here. There was no longer any reason for Motorola to make a phone with double action hinges.

1:29:50Yeah, we figured it out. Right. And the same thing happened in Hollywood, right? Like 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 days. And then I was like, shit, this sucks. 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.

1:30:24I 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 Skamora. Yeah. I forget who plays Peter Quill, but the guy from The Office. Yeah. There's going to be someone who's so pissed when they get it. That was an incredible, the guy from The Office. I'm like a huge Guardians of 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. Parks and Rec. Trace Williams. Treat Williams, sorry. So the thing is, they see that and then they spill out all these shit ones.

1:30:58They'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.

1:31:22But it is. We're in this moment where it's like they are more focused on their bottom line. They're more focused on pleasing people who don't care about the technology than actually making good technology. And there's 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 and tell Panos does something about the Kindle. Garbage device. I do not want one in my house.

1:31:55Sorry 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 a little and I'm like. Okay. 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 just be like, yeah.

1:32:29No, 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? Well, I wonder about the tax. Actually, that's what I've been thinking about kind of weirdly for the past few minutes. It's just like there is still obviously really good reporting out there. There are still really good gadget reviews out there. There are 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.

1:33:06And nobody can tell the difference. I started to find 15 years or 12 years ago that people could not tell the difference between sponsored content and organic content. And it's gotten way worse. Even when you lead in quite aggressively? Yeah. Because, well, 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 kind of 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.

1:33:45Yeah, 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 spawned con for Apple. And I'm like, rude. I'm mainly just offended more than annoyed because I'm just like – but it's the same thing. There's this assumption that everyone is pay 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 our product on your site?

1:34:22And I'm like, well, nothing. Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, that isn't legal. Stop that. And it's shockingly common now, it is. And you get Marquez running 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 with this thoughtless headline. I'm like, no, that's a review of a product that didn't do what it said it was going to do. That's how this works. Yeah. I think that there is a problem 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.

1:35:04And now it's awful. Those people, you will actually get fucked, especially so much worse for a woman. But in gadgets, there's a fear of losing access. But I also think no one wants to say anything that's particularly different because, I don't know, what if they're wrong? And the answer is, you've been wrong plenty of fucking times. Why stop now? Like, no one wants to make the step and say, this sucks. I mentioned Dave3D earlier. Great YouTube. Dave2D. Dave2D. 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.

1:35:39And 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 I 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.

1:36:17Because in the case of the rabbit, in 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 saved for the rabbit. $200 isn't enough. Screw you. If you think$200 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 compared directly to the humane. And I'm like, well, yeah, it costs less, but it still doesn't do what it said it was going to do.

1:36:47Yeah. In fact, it did even less. Much less. Yeah. 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 the product. No, they killed the product. Exactly. 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 score? And she's like, you made a bad product. make a good product and I'll give you a good score.

1:37:17It's that easy. We were just talking about this off air. It's just like, no, look, I will tell you why and I'll take you through the process. And, oh, I've just narrated my whole video for you again. 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, it's great because I get to geek out.

1:37:50The 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. You block them and it's fine. You ignore it. Everyone else is just like oh yeah, yeah, I was geeking out about this too. I'm glad it's not a dumpster fire. Yeah. Great. Cool. It's much more of a hassle to do a bad review. Yeah, a bad review. You got to know. I mean the Verge 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.

1:38:20I believe we gave it like a three or a four. No, we gave 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 not very expensive. And there were those moments. Right. 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.

1:38:50And then you're using the mediocre products and you're like, how do I make that sound interesting? Oh, my God, yes. Now we're just talking. He and I. Oh, no, no, no. We're just over here talking about reviewing stuff. No, no, no. We're having a great time. Sorry. No, no, no. 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 I truly despise, fine, absolutely.

1:39:25The injustice inside me. But it's like something that's just kind of shit. Like a 6 out of 10 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.

1:40:00I 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 in a Target. Like, maybe that is not appropriate. 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? Geez. No, you go first, Mike. You mean like a product? Like a gadget you just really, really love. I have a question.

1:40:29Like a currently available one or one from the vast history of – One that you use all the time. 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 Razer for 2019 it brought back the Razer as a foldable Android phone and it was it was pretty cool but it had some stuff wrong with it one of the greatest then the next year they brought out the Razer 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 And concealed within it a really quite good Android phone with a bad camera because it's made by Motorola.

1:41:13But, you know, it's outside of that. And it was very fragile and whatever. 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 hard. 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. So the Razer 5G was the coolest – one of the coolest things I've ever used.

1:41:43That 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 collates this stuff for me. Okay, I'll give it a go. So 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 were recording this.

1:42:18I'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, I was like, this is stupid, and immediately I installed it. I did. 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.

1:42:48Kranz, I think, on threads. And Twitter exists, but I don't check it very often. It's also Alex H. Kranz. 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 Zitron. You can find me at WW... Anyway, sorry. You've been listening to Better Off Line. We've been recording this in the beautiful iHeartRadio studios here in beautiful New York City. Daniel, my producer, thank you so much, Daniel. I'm calling this thing Better Off Live now. We're going to do this in multiple cities. I'm proud and happy that we did this.

1:43:23Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Alex. This has been wonderful. And thank you all for listening.

1:43:34Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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