Presenting the Worst Products of All Time | Ep. 041 Lemonade Stand 🍋

17:43Atrioc:People were done by 2012.

17:45Aiden:And people were really done with phones already, which is funny. They were mostly getting rid of them. Oh, wait, wait, sorry, sorry. The exact opposite of that. Wait, sorry, yeah, yeah, my bad. My bad, my bad, my bad. It was 100 % the opposite. Right, right, right. That's... No, it was actually the opposite in that smartphones weren't even something that everybody you knew had yet. We were still at a time when, like, people had phones that weren't smartphones. A considerable amount of people. And I think the reason this video was so groundbreaking, and not just because it uses a lovely song, Lover's Carbots by Vivio, which I actually learned about that song from this video and I've had in my life since then.

18:20Aiden:But I remember being in high school and seeing this and thinking, wow, so many things about this are so incredible, the way it seamlessly seems to integrate with the person's day-to-day experience, the voice to text, even voice to text or Siri stuff at the time, right, is not that prevalent or good. It's worldwide non-functional at the time. It's a really good day. Yeah, exactly. So to see it pop up in something like this and then imagine this future in a video titled One Day, you're getting sucked into this idea of like, this is really going to be what the future looks like. And that future is, you know, a bunch of people walking around like this.

19:03Aiden:I like to walk down a beautiful memory lane of people like young MKBHD reviewing this product at the time. And this is the way it looked. Not like the, you know, embedded look of the products that are being developed that are similar now, right? This very obvious change to the glasses in the right-hand corner that kind of makes you look like Cyclops from X-Men. And they had, I think it was Sergey Brin, was all behind this product at the time. He started wearing it everywhere. This is going to be the project of the future. I am going to wear this to tech conferences and show it off. And the everyday guy in Silicon Valley is going to wear this.

19:46Aiden:Kids could wear this to like accentuate their learning in school. You will not get bullied. You will not get bullied and you won't cheat. Doctors will wear this during surgery to better teach medical students and also to give a window into patient surgeries after the fact or to their family members. To watch some subway surfers so they don't get bored on a physical on time. Or to have a little bit of subway surfers. I believe it was Temporon at the time. Temporon, Temporon. It's like, take off, take off. We're in 2012, don't forget it. And this device would be controlled through a combination of head nods, voice commands, and taps on the side.

20:23Aiden:That is like, so you would say like, hey Google, and like, fuck your head up, or like touch it on the side to scroll through menus. And obviously, this took over the world. It was a massive success. And we knew so much changed in 2012. the world ended we all got in that boat it saved us from the giant crashing tsunami waves there's a documentary about that you can watch uh and an estimated tens of thousands of them sold over many many years that they tried to continue pushing this product and so for all the time in marketing they put in they initially released this thing called the explorer edition in 2012 which is the product that mkbhd gets basically people who signed up to test the product for 1500 at the time and you would maybe be selected and then you would get it and then you would ideally be someone who's giving google like active feedback about the product It stayed in the zone from 2012 until 2015, where they briefly sold it for like a few months and then took it down off the public market because it wasn't doing well.

21:36Aiden:It was too good. They canned the project, but announced the 2017 Enterprise Edition that will be used by engineers at places like Boeing. Corporate clients. Corporate clients. But after they announced the Enterprise Edition 2 in 2019, they killed the supporting app that you use on your smartphone with it in 2020 and then fully closed out the project internally by 2023. I will say the one interesting thing about this, for how much it bombed in the public market, they did seem to have enough of a weird corporate niche demand that they managed to keep this project and projects somewhat relevant. And it went away until wildly recently, which I didn't know when I started looking into this.

22:19The fact that someone was still working on this at Google at 2023 is a massive shock to me. I did not, I would have said that's 10 years later than the last person stopped working on it.

22:28Aiden:But I remember this so specifically because I sat in the computer lab because I had no friends in high school and I saw this video come out at the time and thought it was going to be so revolutionary. Show your music taste from it. And it inspired my music taste. Go check out Bibio. But what actually happened during all of this? I found this lovely, lovely Wired article from 2013 by a guy named Matt Honan that was titled I, Glass Hole, that perfectly summarized what the core issue with this product was, which is that it's just fucking cringe. Nobody likes you if you wear Google Glass all the time.

23:10Aiden:And he said, people get angry at glass. They get angry at you for wearing glass. They talk about you openly. It inspires the most aggressive of passive aggression. They just call you an asshole. And then wearing glass separates you. It says, not only did I have$1 ,500 to plunk down to be a part of the Explorer program, glass is a class divide on your face. And then - That sounds cool. It's like an expensive watch. He starts off this article by describing how his first idea for the use of this product would be to wear it for the full duration for the birth of his child. To which his wife doesn't like.

23:51Aiden:And he tries to explain to his wife how having this available camera on my face is the perfect application of its tooling. And she simply says, I'm not comfortable with that. You can't do that. And he's like, this was my first interaction realizing that socially this just wasn't going to work. And boils down to this thing was creepy, clunky, and fucking boring. Not only is it something that people can clearly see that you're wearing and are worried you're recording it all the time, and not only is it kind of like weird looking and not really fashionable, but all of the use cases on it didn't really work.

24:33Aiden:So the things that you could, oh, whoops. The things that you could do with it, they were proudly, you have to remember, this is 2012. You can use this to do Google plus hangouts. Oh, finally. I'm in. Finally. You could supposedly use Google maps or to like Google search things. You could text with it. It had a five hour battery life. It just Ultimately The minimal feature set That it had available to it at the time Just wasn't very good So it could drive you to work And then you can't drive home So even if you were Somehow completely oblivious To all of the social consequences Of wearing it It ultimately didn't service its purpose very well Right It's way more useless than the phone That you got in your pocket Oh, and then it's interesting though, because recently we seem to culturally be revisiting this idea with the technology that we have available to us.

25:36Aiden:Kind of, I would say, leading the charge, at least in the public conversation, is Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. And, but you know, he still looks a little goofy, but drastically different performance with this recent product. Over 2 million of the Meta glasses have been sold, the Meta Ray-Ban crossover glasses, have been sold since the 2023 launch, which as you might be able to tell, is more than 10 ,000. That's good math. I think the underlying issue here, regardless of this product's success, there's a vision behind this on Meta's part, right? And what Google was hoping at the time, it's like, let's beat the next technology to the punch.

26:18Aiden:Let's get rid of phones and have everything attainable through something you wear and is comfortable and easily accessible. You don't even have to think about it. It's integrated directly into your life and vision. But then the underlying value proposition is this to truly become successful, it has to be better than this. And not just in a functionality way, which is important, but in a social stigma way as well.

26:46Atrioc:I just feel like, so if my wife is giving birth, it just feels intrusive and weird to be holding up a phone watching. I'd rather get in there with a wearable on my face. A wearable.

26:55Aiden:Right. And that's the use case. And I'm glad you're on board because I think we can transform culturally. I think this is big. With an influencer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the basic question you have to ask about the success of this type of product in the future and what maybe nobody was asking at the time at Google, Well, what Survey Boyan refused to ask himself is, does this product pass the vibe check? Because ultimately, I think it's a product that is very, it's disturbing to those around you. And not in like a horror movie type way, but just like it disturbs their day a little. It's like you're unsure if that person is like recording you or not.

27:33Aiden:There's something like hidden behind it. And I think it's a little more difficult to incorporate something that is like so fashionable and like tied to people's identities and get them to actively change like that part of their life up here especially as there's kind of a movement to like disconnect and get away from phones right and then also fail on the front of placing replacing your phone technologically that was like the other part of the equation you're losing out on right because personally i actually hate the way i'm tied to my phone in so many ways and i have i got a cellular apple watch like two years ago.

28:09Aiden:So it can text and call without my phone around. And I do like that feature. And it was in an effort to like leave my phone behind in so many places, right? But the main things I often use my phone for, which are taking notes and sending messages and using maps, the watch doesn't replace very well. And I haven't really been able to ditch my phone in this like what was my initial interest for this product. And if you can't match up all of those features easily through the glasses, plus not find a way to make it like creepy, disturbing, and intrusive to your day-to-day life. I have a hard time imagining this market ever truly breaking through at any scale that's even remotely similar to smartphones.

28:51Aiden:Google Ask was the first effort where it's like, I have this giant thing attached to it, and this is super obvious and looks clunky and weird, and we're whittling away at that part. But I don't feel like - is if we bring back Google Glass and change nothing, it'll be a big hit now.

29:09Atrioc:I was at the Streamer Awards this last weekend, and there were, I think, two or three times where I suddenly became uncomfortable realizing that someone near me was just IRL streaming. And I wasn't aware that my private conversation was just literally being streamed, and that made me feel pretty uncomfortable. And I'm glad that we can move away from that, and I just have to feel like that literally all the time, because everybody is streaming everything all the time on their face. Exactly, and that way we don't have to feel uncomfortable. That's it. The problem is the transition. I'm not being recorded I am being recorded if I'm just always being recorded if I'm always in fear yeah like I can always constantly like a low buzzing fear yeah that sounds really good

29:42Aiden:realizing that in this in the context here I was meant to like sell you on this and you're and you did and that's a great point and it seems like a half when I got a new car I thought my insurance premium would increase and empty my bank account like if a tween won the lottery I've invested most of my winnings in chicken tenders because they're bomb but bro I bought a house and it's sick, bro. I'm thinking the floor is going to be all trampoline, bro. With the helipad on the roof. The contractor said it's structurally unsound. They're just being babies. But switching to Geico saved me hundreds, so my bank account is safe.

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30:57Aiden:That's O-D-O-O dot com.

31:03Aiden:Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. that's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch so why not you try odoo for free at odoo.com that's o-d-o-o.com i mean so i mean you guys should really check out lover's car rinks it's like a good song

31:49Atrioc:it's by far the least interesting part of that whole presentation but i think the actual question

31:54Aiden:i wanted to ask you guys that i came out of this with was it's pretty obvious why that product failed at the time, but we're revisiting it now in a way that I think a lot of people still feel negative about. What do you think there's a realistic future here where 10 years from now, this or 20 years from now, this is a mainstream technology that is competing with phones?

32:18Atrioc:Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I think just for the kind of camera and streaming technology, it'll be fairly popular. And like, I don't know if you guys saw MKHB, whatever it is, 10 months, or 10 years later, two months ago, he reviewed Meta's smart glasses that are currently being prototyped and they are like way crazier and have insane features, which if Perry, you can pull this up and have like a HUD over your, oops, you have like a HUD like while you're watching and like, so the, on the tech, can you pause there? Do you see that light blinking? So I bought the Meta smart glasses, not the latest ones.

32:50It was Christmas last year. These aren't on sale yet. These are like,

32:53Atrioc:but this is going to be, essentially, it seems like Meta is about to make the leap from the glasses right now, which is have a light and they can take pictures, but the glasses themselves don't have anything on them. Like you're ultimately wearing glasses with a camera on the side. Whereas the Google glass like has this thing over your eye, like you're a weird sci-fi villain. Yeah. Yeah. And so this product, and you can look, you know, MKHB is weight. Smart glasses are suddenly good. It's like, he is essentially going, this is the lead. This is what it was promised to be all that time ago. And it looks, I wouldn't say cool, but way cooler.

33:22Atrioc:The Google glass. Absolutely. So here's the thing. As I tried using them, I bought them as like a Christmas gift, as a, you know, as a joke from my dad, my dad didn't really want them. so I used it for a few months. And I, anytime that light flashes, it is like you're wearing Google Glass. It is extremely uncomfortable for everyone else in the room. It becomes very noticeable and awkward. And so I heard some people are hacking them to remove the light, but that in itself is very unethical because now, you know what I'm saying? Now you're recording people surreptitiously. When the light is off, it's really hard to tell that it's not just a normal pair of glasses, which is kind of cool.

33:57and I did wear them playing basketball and get some fun highlights. You know, it's a cool POV and it's interesting. I think there's a way to set it up for streaming that could be cool. But for day-to-day life, I mean, this fell out of use for me really quickly and I don't know that a HUD would change it so dramatically. I do think there's some potential here. Clearly they're selling. They're selling a lot better than Glass ever did.

34:20Aiden:They have to, what I thought about was they have to get over the social hump to win because the technological aspect is going to catch up. Eventually voice commands, and they kind of already are good enough to do most of what you need to do with a phone on something like this, right? They're very close to that already. But it's the idea of the recording and the social stigma of anyone realizing that you have this on, it applies to regular clothes too. If you show up in like a really strange outfit to a certain type of event, yeah you won't be let in right and it and functionally i think uncomfortable people just look at you like it's noticeable and it's awkward and then additionally it's like uh you mentioned this in your presentation but like it's just not more useful than a phone

35:11Atrioc:and so i don't well i don't think it needs to replace the phone it's in the same way that did you know that airpods is bigger than mcdonald's netflix and nvidia combined that's So true.

35:21Aiden:Yeah, I mean, maybe you're right. And so I think it's an accessory. In the same... Complimentary like the watch.

35:26Atrioc:If you go to any tourist place, right? People are walking around with their fucking phone or a concert, whatever. People are recording everything on their phone. Those same people of which there are, I don't know, a billion, two billion are going to be stoked about the idea of not having to hold up a thing. They can tap a button and it's their POV and they can have all these things going on. And when they're in a car ride, it's playing music directly. I mean, I would argue... That was the best part. Yeah, the music is awesome. The bone conducting music or whatever was incredible. Like it literally no one around you can hear.

35:52And I'm listening to music with the glasses on and it's not in my ear. It's over my ear. It was incredible. That is the feature I show everybody. Everyone thought it was cool.

35:59Atrioc:I think it, I think it has the, in the, even the short term potential to replace the accessories, the tech accessories, replace AirPods and replace the Apple watch. And it becomes the thing that does both of those things, but just better and more convenient. And I, you know, it's not going to replace a phone just because of the way you interact with it. There's no way it can fully do that, but I think they're going to have a lot of success. And probably the biggest argument for that is it is having a lot of success. Meta is doing great. I mean, Google Glass failed. Two million is a lot. Super bad.

36:28Atrioc:I mean, it's crazy for a somewhat experimental product that doesn't look that good yet and does not have very many features. That's a ton of sales. Yeah, I think that's pretty. I mean, people clearly are in a more social recording era. People want to be able to get their POV and more things for Instagram. I get that there's a use case, and this might take off. I just want the ability to record fireworks so I can watch them later. I just want to record a concert because everyone wants that footage online and there's no way to get it so far. Nobody's been able to get a good crowd POV shot of a concert.

36:59Aiden:Yeah, and I think it would be good because I'll watch it a lot after. I'll probably watch it a bunch even though I've recorded it and then most... The demand online must be crazy. Have you guys ever

37:09Atrioc:actually gone and watched a video where you're like, I should probably record this just so I have it in the future? Like of a concert or a video or a speech at a wedding or like literally never, ever, ever. Never, not once. But now we can just have it all the time. Yeah, so the Google Glass is great.

37:26Aiden:Thank you, thank you. No, so I'm bringing back Google Glass. Yeah. All right, well, I think that's about all the gold to spend. There's probably no other. It's probably, those are the two products that have failed. Hold on.

37:38Atrioc:I've got something. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to change the future of entertainment. In the past, people watched shows like this on a big, ugly screen. Today is the future. People don't want to watch Liam Hemsworth's new show, The Most Dangerous Game, like this. They want to watch it like this. Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Quibi. Oh, he's gone. Quibi is a revolutionary new mobile-only entertainment application. Now, this was founded in 2018. As you can see here, they did analysts on the amount of interest there is in mobile-only content. It's very high. Now, this gets the attention of Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman.

38:28Atrioc:You know them, Jeffrey Katzenberg. He is an executive at Disney. He did the Disney Renaissance of Animation. He founded DreamsWorks with Steven Spielberg. Meg Whitman founded eBay. let's ignore their many failures after those roles and yahoo but these guys come together and they say we're going to make a mobile only media company and because they have such incredible incredible reputation in the hollywood industry and the tech industry 2019 they start fundraising

38:53Aiden:they raise one billion dollars i'm i'm i'm so locked in right now doug sir doug doug jobs but I was wondering if you could put the presentation on the TV so I'm sorry it's a stupid idea why would you do that you think we're in Hemsworth audio listeners Doug is presenting his entire thing on a small mobile device from a distance and I'm locked in Aiden okay this is the future

39:23Atrioc:what's going to make this so different not only do we go to all the Hollywood executives and we get huge triple A celebrities like Kevin Hart and Liam Hemsworth and Jennifer Lopez and literally everybody that's crazy who spent a billion dollars on shows, right? We come up with technology where you're watching something and then you can do this. You can turn it vertical and watch the same show vertical. Quibi is going to revolutionize things, not only because of that, but because it's Quick Bites. Quibi, every show has 10-minute episodes and they commission 175 new shows for their launch year. This is going to be crazy.

40:02Atrioc:everybody's on board. This sounds huge. They sell out all the advertising for the first year in 2019. And in 2020, something huge happens in the world of media and our lungs. It's COVID. And so COVID starts on February 2020. Let's say that's when lockdowns happen. And oops, Quibi is actually going to launch in April of 2020. And I don't know if you can... Let me turn it right. I just said big. That looks good. We turn it like that. See, Quibi does extraordinarily bad. This product absolutely flops. Probably a lot of you guys remember how many YouTubers and shows and stuff were promoting Quibi, but this is literally like two months into the pandemic.

40:44Atrioc:This thing, they were shooting for 7.2 million subscribers, paid subscribers in the first year. That was their goal. That's what they sold everybody on. They don't do that. They get 1.2 million after two months. Yeah. I have a question, Doug Jobs. Yes. Uh... So the pandemic was notoriously a golden age of streaming and almost. No, no, no, no. Hold on. Let me cut you off there. So Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is, by the way, a Hollywood executive, says repeatedly everything that we ran into was a result of COVID. It was unfortunate timing. He states this in multiple interviews, and it's because of COVID that people do not want to watch content on their phones.

41:25It's like, all they did was watch content on their phones.

41:28Atrioc:There's some weird coincidence where TikTok and YouTube and Netflix and every other media conglomerate did phenomenally well. Unfortunately, people thought the shows were really bad and they didn't want to pay for another service. And nobody gives a shit about watching a show on vertical mode. But according to Jeffrey Katzenberg, the main time people are going to watch this was on their commute. If they're not commuting to work, they're literally never going to watch any content.

41:55Aiden:In Jeffrey's defense, I believe, you know, my memory says that everybody who was watching Netflix, Twitch, YouTube, all those things at the time, they were doing it on desktop. All of them. All of them. Yeah, phones are dead in COVID. Nobody was using the phones. Nobody used the phones.

42:11Atrioc:And I do want to be clear. If you paid for a monthly subscription for all of these shows, you could not watch it on a TV. They had to add that three months in because it was failing so badly. So they caved? they added a tv up and now the shows are just pointlessly framed so that they can be watched on vertical or horizontal so they literally filled everything so it's both vertical and horizontal and then you're watching the so sadly quibi failed after six months and they shut down billions of dollars raised thousands of episodes hundreds of shows and it all crumbles and burns But again, we have to remember what Jeffrey Katzenberg said It was COVID And gentlemen, we could literally buy the rights to Quibi A year later, they went to Roku For, we don't know the exact amount Under$100 million Roku has since relinquished the rights Because all the shows did so bad We could pick up Quibi And we could revitalize this thing Now that COVID's over, I think we got a shot Yes, that was the only thing stopping it

43:18Aiden:I've got a little cash laying around Go bars I got a little cash How long did it actually take the company to fold? Like, when did they give up on the Quibi dream?

43:28Atrioc:Six months. So they launch in April of 2020. The first day, they, like, get a decent amount of downloads on the app, and that just plummets afterwards. And by May, which is the next month, they have 1.3 million active users. That's like a third launch, and then it's all going wrong. Again, the quote from Jeffrey Katzberg, I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus. That's crazy. It's just so insane. It's the greatest thing they could have asked for. It's the most beneficial possible thing. Yes. It's a gigantic lifeline. And after six months in October, Quibi shuts down. And then Roku buys them in 2021.

44:04Dude, like every other online content service did gangbusters. They did so well.

44:09Atrioc:It's just so funny because this was pitched as like the perfect thing to any executive media company, tech company that's like, we want to get into the future of entertainment jeffrey katzenberg has a crazy successful track record meg whitman what he did shrek he did shrek it's not that he just did shrek he did you know all the best disney animated movies beauty and the beast aladdin lion king that was all like him he directed and started that division and did that very in a big there's an excellent book about this called disney war i recommend a lot but he then left started dreamworks like makes dreamworks it It gets Academy Awards.

44:46Atrioc:And then the dude is wildly successful and just completely missed on this thing. And then Meg Whitman, one of the most successful CEOs ever, eBay, she took from like 30 employees to 15 ,000 IPOs. They bought PayPal under her watch. And then she's just gone onto this string of failures. She's at Yahoo, right? She's like fucking bomb. I don't think Yahoo, not to my knowledge. Is Meg Whitman not at Yahoo? I think you're thinking of a different person. She ran for the governor of California. It was HP, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, she goes to HP. yeah uh she runs for the governor of california and uh as like a kind of hardline republican and is a big like anti-immigration anti-illegal immigrants kind of stance and then there's a big controversy when it turns out she's been paying uh like a housekeeper who's illegal for nine years and then she goes to hewlett packard become ceo splits the company into two parts her half fails The other half does really well.

45:43Atrioc:Then she goes to Quibi, fails horrifically. But happy news for Meg Whitman. She is now the U.S. ambassador to Kenya for some reason. I have no idea. I want to watch a Quibi about her life. I know. I want to watch a quick bite about Meg Whitman. Actually, excuse me. Joe Biden appointed her midway through his term. And unfortunately, Donald Trump did not have Meg Whitman continue to represent us in Kenya. I lost the opportunity.

46:07Aiden:I have a confession. because I do remember the ads behind this at the time and making fun of it.

46:15Atrioc:It's like unbelievable star power. I mean, it was like massive celebrities and doing like their own shows, like original stuff. It's crazy. Kevin Hart was like Die Hard, right? I think was one of them or maybe that was a show. But he had an original, like everybody had original Quibi shows. I don't know if you guys were around at the time, but like I was at ESL doing esports and they hit us up and we're like, we just need content for Quibi. A bunch of like video game journalist websites made Quibi. They were just, everybody was making Quibi content and it just.

46:44Aiden:Everybody was making Quibi.

46:45Atrioc:Yeah, but it was all crap, right? My understanding is like it was all crap. Nobody liked it, yeah. Yeah. There's basically no shows from that at all. There was no killer app of a show that everyone had to watch.

46:54Aiden:You were putting out Marketing Monday on Quibi. I would put that on Quibi, baby. I thought that they had successfully pivoted this company or turned it into something somewhat viable because I thought Tubi was the same thing. No. I really did at all. I thought Tubi, because I'd just been hearing about it and joking about it this year. You just heard the B and thought it must be Quibi's brother? And then in my head, I was like, oh yeah, Tubi, that like company that did short form, like weird short form mobile only video a few years ago. Okay, well you know. They must have spun it off. What's weird is, like Quibi must have been uniquely fucking stupid and bad because short form, even vertical video, is actually starting to take off.

47:38Not just like what you'd think of with reels and stuff, but like there's Chinese companies that are making Quibi style short form micro dramas that are like 10 minutes long.

47:48Atrioc:Yeah, it's the exact same pitch. And it's huge. It's huge in America. It's huge in China. Like those, I don't know what the app is called, but like they advertise on Facebook all the time and they are blowing up because people just watch these. It's like, if you've ever seen Darman, it's like all 10 minute movies where there's a villain and he gets owned. Someone does, some poor person beats a rich person or whatever. And they just, they farm those millions of them. They all get tons of views. So like Quibi had to be uniquely stupid and bad. One thing I do remember from when this came out, and you can tell me, this is way of memory, but it's like, it, the app took over your phone.

48:21So when you're watching a Quibi, you couldn't do anything else. So you're watching this stupid.

48:27Atrioc:Why would you want to do anything else? Why? Like, if you're watching slop content, the normal thing you do is take out your phone and you scroll while you're watching it. But Quibi required you to have your phone entirely focused on watching Chance the Rapper do Punk'd.

48:44Aiden:Like nobody's ever sat down and actually watched Emily in Paris. Nobody's done it. In my, some say it's impossible.

48:55Atrioc:What's funny now, I went and watched a little bit of the one I said, the most dangerous game with Liam Hemsworth. Yeah. All the shots are just like, there's just a lot of room on the side. because again they they that was the whole thing like every single show needed to be shot so you could turn it vertical it's just like dude this is i i there's there's so many things i wonder one is just like how shitty were all the shows because i didn't watch them as most people did not secondly um how uh would the thing have succeeded more if they launched on tv because i do think that during covid fewer people are watching stuff on their phone and certainly had less of a sense of Like I want something that's five minutes right now, but at the same time, TikTok doesn't extraordinarily well during this time.

49:38Atrioc:Right. And it's, how do you contend those two things? I don't know.

49:41Aiden:It would be so funny to like spend all the marketing in like a similar way, but leave a widescreen or like desktop version available for TVs, for laptops, et cetera. You launch the product during COVID it becomes successful, but most people are just watching on TV on regular big blank space on every fucking shot. Is there even a way to go watch the content now? Like, I imagine...

50:07Atrioc:Yeah, so the shows have, like, dispersed in different areas. So some of them, for example, the one I looked at, you can watch for free on Amazon Prime. The most dangerous game featuring Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz.

50:19Aiden:Can I still watch it the old-fashioned way?

50:22Atrioc:No, I looked. The way my mom wanted me to watch it. I know, I have to watch this ridiculous widescreen sound with this tiny vertical phone. This is unbelievable. I even tried to turn my laptop like this and it wouldn't work. Okay. That's Quibi.

50:35Aiden:Okay. Well, Quibi, it's just we've had such an all-star lineup and it's hard to pick what we put our money into. But I think we have a few others we wanted to touch on. Dude, okay. Speaking of phones, I got one for you.

50:48Atrioc:Dude, this bit of us spending money makes no... These are so bad and unpurchasable. We have to make the bit somehow connect to this again. Technically, we could probably literally buy the rights to a Quibi show. Unironically. I literally think we should do that. Okay. If it's under$1 ,000. Okay, that's a bit, all right. That's a bit much. I think the amount of effort of lawyers it would take.

51:11Aiden:I don't think the video is going to make enough money. We buy the Quibi show and then just upload it to Patreon. Okay, you know what would be interesting? I legitimately think if April 2020, they just took all of the shows, didn't have an app, and just made a YouTube channel. They would have made more money and had more success. Absolutely. Wait, they had a million? Hold on. You said they peaked at a million subscribers. That's still pretty crazy. They had 1.2 million for a short period of time. They spent a billion dollars.

51:39Atrioc:They spent a billion dollars.

51:40Aiden:Yeah, but that's better than YouTube ads.

51:42Atrioc:Do you know how much we get a million? I don't know. That's just, that's still insane. That's better than YouTube ads. It's 175 shows. It's a billion dollars. It's all the A-list celebrities. You know what's better than that? By the way, I should say they peaked at 1.2. By the time they were shutting down, they had 500 ,000. so it's like it was it was plummeting over just a couple months uh anyway we love smartphones don't we folks we have keep coming back to how much we love smartphones and don't want to replace them taking down everything else because we love smartphones but sometimes they do too much you know there's too many apps there's too many distractions you're trying to be social but you're stuck doing work what if a company could strip all that away in the year 2012 well after smartphones are a thing and created advice purely for the social generation aka what they called can you pull my screen up generation upload this is what the microsoft kin they saw a new wave of millennials young millennials at the time and they were using their phones and the internet for social media And they said, we need to make a phone just for that.

52:54So they created the Microsoft Kin. Now there's two versions of the Microsoft Kin. One, the Kin 1 is shaped like a makeup clamshell case and it's very small. And the other is kind of like a stumpy BlackBerry. This is, again, three to five years after the iPhone. Wait, is this, this is two different models?

53:15Aiden:It's not the same phone that you slide out. No, no, no, this is a different, I mean, this might be the slide, but there's a Kin 1, a small clamshell, and a Kin 2, which is a bigger... Wait, what year is this? 2010 when it first launched, 2012 by the time it shut down.

53:28Atrioc:Okay. So this is also around the time that Android is a thing. Yep. Because I know. Android is a thing. Also, separately, a Windows phone is being developed that is entirely different OS and designed than this. Yeah, yeah. So Microsoft launches this and some unique things about it. Zero calendar app of any sort on the phone. You cannot track the date or time at all. It helps you disconnect. Okay. No contact list. It helps you disconnect. No ability to sync with your Outlook calendar or Google calendar. Unable to instant message or use any IM clients, including at the time very popular Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger.

54:09Atrioc:Perfect for a vacation where you want to get away from it all. There was no spell correct or predictive text inputs. You had to type it all out. So these are all problems. it's also priced equivalent to a premium iphone and requires you to pay a 30 a month fee to have the highest end cellular network so these are all problems but what was extra great about it was that they invent to get to all the social apps that it was all about you had to use an an app on or not an app i'm sorry there is no apps on this phone this phone decided that apps were not a thing. There's no app store. You can't download or add anything.

54:45There's only software that Microsoft has already created. That's the only thing you can use. And one of the things is called Microsoft Spot. And Spot contains sub software that they've created to pull from the API of Facebook and all the major social networks. If any of those social networks update their software at all, those services will be out of use until Microsoft fixed their API update. So very frequently in 2010, you would not be able to access any of the social apps constantly. In fact, which is the main thing, which is the main thing. And additionally, Microsoft spot to save them costs would only update with the internet.

55:28Every 15 minutes, you might post it. You couldn't actually post a tweet. That wasn't one of their features. You had post a Facebook status update and you could not see the reactions to it for 15 minutes. It would not update on your phone. But you're still paying the full iPhone price. It is like one of the worst design products I've ever seen. Microsoft can. A true disaster. It lasted 48 days on the market. Wow. And they spent quite a bit of money on this. Holy shit. And then it was pulled off. It's such a big failure. It's like we've heard of Google Glass because it's a failure, but it's been a big way.

56:02This was such a failure that people don't even – they didn't even heard of. Before you brought it up for this, Yeah.

56:09Aiden:I had never heard of it. Like, you've heard of the Zune. The Zune was, like, the same time. It's a similar design philosophy at Microsoft. Was this in the Zune? But people kind of knew about the Zune because the Zune sold more than people think. Yes. Yeah. My brother had a Zune. He loved his Zune. Like, it did what it needed to do. This was a disaster. And I think, I didn't fully understand this, but apparently there's a lot of infighting at Microsoft between the Windows phone team and this that, like, sabotaged it. So it, like, it was dead from arrival. So, yeah. I don't think we should invest in this one.

56:38Atrioc:I don't know. No, let's get back to it. Let's not. You haven't seen the Quibi shows. We've all been there. You pop into the shop for five minutes, and all of a sudden you've forgotten where you parked. Car? Car? Unfortunately, that lost feeling is what it's like trying to manage your policy with other insurers.

56:58Aiden:Here, car. Come out, come out, wherever you are. Please. With GEICO, you can use the app

57:04Atrioc:to easily manage all your policies in one place. Did this parking lot have a waterfall? I think you've wandered too far, mate. It feels good to find what you're looking for. It feels good to Geico.

57:15Aiden:This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18+. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more.

57:53Aiden:Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. I have a question for you, too. Either of you like juice?

58:15Atrioc:Oh. Oh, I like me some juice. I just, the problem with juice is it takes so much work to get the juice kind of prepared and squeezed into a mug.

58:24Aiden:Well, Doug, what if you had the Tesla of juicers? Ooh.

58:28Atrioc:That sounds pretty nice, doesn't it? So what is it?

58:30Aiden:Kind of like the Tesla we saw at the end of the...

58:31Atrioc:I'm not clear. Like a drive? Beautiful Cybertruck. Am I driving the juice? Self-driving? Self-juicing?

58:35Aiden:Silicon Valley has saved you, Doug, because they came out and made the juicer for everyone. Juicero. A$700 juicing machine that could squeeze proprietary bags of fruits or vegetables that you put in the machine and had to buy for a subscription and make one cup of juice each. Nice. Fucking love Juicero. It's such a fun...

59:07Atrioc:I have it up here if you want to pull up. And then there's a...

59:10Aiden:So this product, it's kind of insane at the surface level, right? Juicer that can only squeeze these bags of juice that you also have to buy from the same company. Each bag is$5 to$8 each. And you have to pay a monthly subscription to receive them. And then you pick your flavors. They arrive in the mail.

59:32Atrioc:This is back when$5 to$7 is completely insane for a drink.

59:36Aiden:Yeah, yeah. This is in 2017. And this lasted, Juicero managed to make it a year and a half before folding. This company raised a lot of money in Silicon Valley,$120 million for this juicer company. And while they initially priced at$700, they quickly caved, I think within a few months, dropping the price to just$400. Right, well, that's a steal. That price. And this thing had features like you could connect it to Wi-Fi and operate it remotely. Thank God. But you still had to be there physically to put the juice back in it. And then they had a bunch of celebrities backing the product, you know, Kobe Bryant, Oprah, Ivanka Trump.

1:00:22Aiden:Kobe pushed the Juicero? Kobe Bryant pushed it. Kobe, God bless him. Kobe. Pushed it. I'll buy one. And the real blow to the juicer's reputation was it was supposed to like perfectly squeeze the proprietary bag to give you the maximum amount of fresh juice possible or whatever.

1:00:47Atrioc:Yeah.

1:00:48Aiden:And then Bloomberg publishes an article and a video of someone buying the bags at Bloomberg and just squeezing them by hand. And in the same amount of time that it takes the machine to squeeze the bag and make the juice for you, you could squeeze the bag into a cup with your own hands and produce the exact same amount of juice. and so you can cut the$400 to$700 juicer out of the picture entirely and then after all of this shit hits the fan, the company bombs obviously nobody fucking wants this at 334 this is an interview that Doug Evans who was the founder and CEO of the company who had raised the money, this was his response in this video, I remember seeing this years ago and I loved this video either in the home or in offices or stadiums and theaters.

1:01:45I mean, we had the best investors in the world.

1:01:48Aiden:We had Google Ventures, we had Kleiner Perkins, we had Campbell Soup. Why do you think people are wrong when they say Juicero is the embodiment of Silicon Valley excess? Because they really don't understand what the mission was and the facts and how any new technology starts off expensive and then as you innovate and you iterate over time. So they just got stuck on a narrative. What do you think the media got wrong about you, Sarah? Everything. They just had no clue. Tell me more. I mean, it's not even worth it. I'm done. I'm not going to talk about it. What do they misunderstand? Everything. Well, William, I'm done.

1:02:36next.

1:02:38Atrioc:You're not going to tell you that we're done with Juicera. No Juicera. No more Juicera. I'm going to count to three and I'm going to walk

1:02:47Aiden:over. So this video Vice News put this out a few years ago and I remember watching it at the time because I already knew about Juicera. I thought it was really funny. And then was watching this. The CEO who ran an organic health food store in New York for a while and then managed to raise $120 million for this company that totally bombs and then in this video it's like getting into raw water where he takes like you know unfiltered water from nature and then packages it to like for and it wasn't selling it yet I don't know if he ever got into that but he's just like taking in the video it's like him and his friend from Burning Man they find a pipe on the side of the street and they're filling jugs of water from the pipe and they're like yeah this is what we drink it's natural water From a pipe!

1:03:37Aiden:From a natural pipe! That was a natural thing! It's from a pipe, but I think the pipe might be, you know, in the forest where they have like pipes that go through the ground and help like drain water out of like... How can they be like, by hand, filling chunks? My friend from Burning Man and I are gonna get raw water and he's like, there's no Silicon Valley excess here. What are you talking about? So Doug Evans, so he clearly, this was a few years ago, but still was a little bitter on how... He says, quote, Juicero was killed in the first inning. And there were eight more innings to go. I think that Bloomberg video he's talking about is one of the greatest pieces of tech journalism.

1:04:12I think it actually vaporized. He was put it in the background.

1:04:15Atrioc:It's just a one-minute video that says, here's the Juicero. When it launched, it cost$700. You put a pack of juice into it, and then you press a button, and it squeezes juice. But here's us just squeezing it with our hands, and it's the exact same thing. And there's just like, it's the most like irrefutable. There's no defense against this. Oh, it's going to squeeze it with up to four tons of force.

1:04:40Aiden:Yeah, I was just impressed that they managed to make it the year and a half.

1:04:45Atrioc:It's not even squeezing very hard. Oh my God, it's so funny. It's faster. It's literally faster than the juicer. Oh my God. I think the juice probably tasted good. It's so funny.

1:04:58Aiden:I do like the idea of becoming such a big fan of the taste that you just buy the packs yeah dude I mean maybe they're going to be the business pack delivery service is not the most insane thing things like that do exist but going up there in a fucking Steve Jobs style turtleneck and pitching the great technology of your Juicero$700 machine is fucking crazy when all it does is squeeze it $700 is so tight dude it just squeezes it that's like two playstations at the time okay it's like not that hard to get juice if you i don't know so what do you if you're gonna pay

1:05:35Atrioc:what i got actually it actually connects to sarah very strangely okay okay so i want to tell you guys about a little console you might have heard of called oh yeah okay oh yeah launch i know oh yeah launched in uh crap i believe 2012 yeah yeah it's 2012 so middle of 2012 a lot of these products around the same time frame it seems like people are just trying like weird hardware and the android and mobile stuff's going really well and so this little company appears on kickstarter and their pitch is this is a 100 micro console now back then this is still of an era for you young kids where you don't just have video games ever all the time we had like early shitty mobile games on our phone um and you know and some were starting to get good but you know it's like endless runners yeah it's like temple run right these aren't like great games

1:06:25Aiden:everybody's playing temple it's like my doctor was playing my teacher triple town i was looking

1:06:32Atrioc:back at the old games like oh there were some banger games back then this was great uh this that's when um what's the monument valley came out anyways so this pitch comes out at a time where you know we're still on the ps3 xbox 360 it's like just progressing the next one and uh and and they pitch hundred dollar console it's going to run on android the whole thing is that anybody can kind of make games for it because it's android really accessible super cheap we're gonna have this amazing controller designed by this dude here who's this like super famous swiss designer i don't know how to say his name yves bar something like that hey you're a boy you know how to say it so this comes out they're like we got a sick team we got a sick controller the console's working it's live you can buy it it's gonna come out in a year i was stoked about this i was like damn this sounds cool did you kickstart this i didn't kickstart it but the kickstarter happens they needed uh nine hundred fifty thousand dollars to do it they raised eight and a half million dollars and for those who remember this is right around the time that kickstarter first started becoming a thing oh yeah and so this was not only like you know tech valley silliness it also was like oh kickstarter where people are going oh my god this is gonna be the next big thing so uh they launched this and um turns out it's it's not very good like it's really like not that much to say on it other than this came out and everybody uh sort of went okay hold on the games on here suck ass these are cheap android ports the thing is incredibly slow it's not a good like it takes super long for anything to load yeah you talked about how you have 500 games to play they'll include things like just rain and it's a gif of rain and that's one of their games that they've pitched you on if this is what they're going to do and the controller that they kept saying this is one of our big things our award-winning designer eves bahar um in his firm fuse project uh you know he's designed the controller and it's incredible the controller feels awful and the buttons are sticky and it feels cheap and plasticky it starts to get worn out really quickly there's all these different uh you know stories that come out of people being super upset with how it how this thing actually plays sorry guys you best just spilled a bit of beer in it before he shipped it to you um i decided to buy one back in 2013 you bought an ouya i bought an ouya this is my senior of college hell yeah and i bought when i was like you know this would be fun like i do i have a doing an internship i was like have a little money let me like buy this thing and it'll probably be a year after it came out so you were well aware that this is not it at this point the consensus again this is early internet so there wasn't like this immediate flood of attention you know people weren't reviewing things on youtube right away at that same level and i was like this seems fun like for for a group of friends and at this point i'm also like making my own video games and android and whatnot so it felt relevant um so i order it and they don't send me a tracking number and uh they don't send me any information so i actually looked through my emails yesterday from july 22nd douglas reading uh this is to ouya support i expect a full refund for my order.

1:09:33Atrioc:I've not gotten my order, have not gotten any tracking information about my order, despite multiple attempts to contact the support team and have read countless stories on the internet on the OUYA taking months to ship. I would like a refund for my purchase. If I do not get one in the next 30 days, I will be filing an FTC complaint, charging for an order, giving no information whatsoever and having no customer support is completely unacceptable and I will be doing whatever is necessary to make sure that my money is returned to me. Thank you for the help. And they, and then, uh, one day later it got delivered.

1:10:03Atrioc:so yeah you know not too much to to say here this was a console was all hyped up it was like oh a micro console this would be cool turns out a micro console doesn't have the power to run cool things this was early where apps were not cool enough and now people can do their you know your phone could do this everything yeah far far better so it all kind of failed the it lasted for a year or two eventually they were bought by razor randomly who kind of scrapped them for parts And then in terms of where everybody went, the kind of lead co-founder of or lead founder of this, she kind of petered away, but now runs a soccer team in Los Angeles.

1:10:38Atrioc:So, you know, good, good for her. And that famous designer went on to make the Juicero. You're not kidding. You went from the Ouya to the Juicero back to back? the lead designer of the OUYA controller, which was supposed to be the big key selling point, because according to the CEO, there's nothing special in here about the OUYA. The point being like anybody can, you know, it's like that's what's so cool about it, but our controller is really great. Dog shit controller. Maybe it was sticky because he kept smelling juice in it. It's like, well, there was a machine that could make my juice separately.

1:11:13Atrioc:I'm squeezing it too tough. Yeah, he's one hand on a juice packet, the other on the controller. This shit It is wild. Yeah. Controlled squeeze. Massive, massive, massive failure. And if I look at my timeline real briefly. Yeah, dude. So not the craziest story, but a nice little funny. I mean, that era. Oh, sorry.

1:11:33Aiden:I was going to say, could we jump over to one other video game one that I? I also have a video game one, but I'm down. You do? What's your video game one? Well, I want to set it up. Because I want to say that era of time that you're talking about was, I kind of miss it. even though there's a lot of flops like that, like the Ouya, there was like the Nokia, like the early mobile internet. People were trying a lot of weird, a lot of stuff was getting tried. Weird hardware. Everyone wanted to have like a piece of that pie. I remember, I'm not going to mention this one, but the Nokia N-Gage was like a Game Boy competitor.

1:12:05Do you remember that? It was like a phone slash Game Boy, huge flop. In fact, is the second worst performing console of all time, the Nokia N-Gage, of a certain degree of size from a major company. But the worst performing console of all time, if you could pull it up, Perry, is the Nintendo Virtual Boy. Now -

1:12:27Atrioc:I've heard about this, and I've never learned the details. I'm curious. I want to give you some of the details, Doug, because nowadays people see them wearing the new Apple Vision Pro. Or Google Glass. Or Google Glass in some way. It's a step, it's a continuum. And everyone is sort of coming around to the idea, Mark Zuckerberg changed his fucking company name, that, hey, we might want to have some virtual reality in one day. A metaverse could be a thing. And maybe the tech wasn't quite there, but was this a good idea? Well, if you look into it, the virtual boy had a couple things working against it.

1:12:54Number one was that it wasn't even a headset. You had to put it on a tripod on your desk with no strap and then push your face into this neoprene outer area and it blocked off all vision. And that was how you experienced virtual reality. Secondly, to save money on the leds in it in 1995 they only used red ones nice yeah you are pressing your face this is mario tennis i was gonna say that looks like tennis a red uh all red world you're describing like a black mirror episode not a fun product so reviews described it as playing tennis in hell because it's just this all black and red dystopian now this is unironically what we

1:13:44Atrioc:should put our gold towards let's get a virtual boy and let's play it on this podcast let's do a patreon episode we're all in the virtual boy verse i wonder i bet you might need a gold bar to get a mint virtual boy in the box dude unopened psa 10 oh so i was reading about it they've said like almost every gaming failure has a youtube video come out later being like this wasn't that bad actually what why this flop game or this flop console wasn't that bad actually virtual boy is like the only one that does it because it truly was that bad and everything you use vr for nowadays people i still get motion sickness i did hitman vr it's like i get motion sickness the motion sickness you get for something at this level of tech is absurd the the articles describe it as like 80 nausea rate people could not get through a game of this without feeling sick or hold on hold on it's villain chair what about that 20 they loved it okay okay there we go uh one in five guys a loving virtual boy mario tennis so i i forget this guy's name uh shigeru miyamoto no he's actually his boss he's his mentor i'm not gonna give his name this guy is a nintendo legend one of the earliest engineers in nintendo created the game boy created the game and watch inspired miyamoto he spearheaded the virtual bed product they forced him to release it early because they needed something between the snes and the n64 so he does it's such a colossal flop but he has to commit corporate seppuku basically and leaves nintendo oh and he's never he's gone from the cup like even after all of the wins all of the wins he did this and he's gone from nintendo you can't have one virtual boy and then get back up on your feet that's what you'd think i don't know if Japan was too harsh on him or what, but he should be up there with Miyamoto.

1:15:30Like he is an inspiring legend of Nintendo and he's gone. So that's the virtual boy. Total flop. I don't know if you have any questions or other gaming examples.

1:15:39Aiden:I think I learned about the virtual boy growing up because of Nintendo Power Magazine and it was a punchline all the time. The glove. They had the glove. They had the NES Power Glove. Nintendo has a bunch of crazy shit from back then that is really fun to just go and look up. They've always been fucking crazy with horror. I guess that's kind of, they throw out the weird shit so they get the switch and the we right yeah yeah i mean that's that's the other end of it right is like them taking a big risk and trying something i think i could have looked you in the eye and you know the 1980s 90s and told you that hey man this is gonna work well here's like i could have gotten that across do you think it could replace phones so that was my problem with the apple vision pro was that it showed me all the regular colors that I've seen in my day life.

1:16:23Me going to Tim Cook,

1:16:27Aiden:me going to Tim Cook and just be like, what if it was all red? It's just too much blue, too much green. But my last example is a gaming one as well. All right. The Google Stadia, which is a little more recent. And the reason I hung on to this one so well in my memory was because my best friend and roommate, Nick Versillo Gaming from the yard ordered this product, the founder's edition of this product so that he could get - What a rube. What a loser. And oh, you're going to love the reason. So that he could get the gamer tag that he wanted. Because like as soon as a gamer tag is chosen - That's the cringiest thing I've ever heard.

1:17:08Nick, he's not going to watch it. That's so fucking lame.

1:17:12Aiden:So he wanted to make sure he could get the tag before it was taken. Let me give Google$300 Founders Edition so I can make sure I get Falco on Stadia. Fuck you. Fuck you, man. What is this commercial? So Stadia, the appeal... Also, who is it? That's Reggie...

1:17:32Atrioc:Fisame? No, no, no. Dude, that would be a commercial. Reggie Watts? Reggie Watts. Reggie Watts. That's what's in Asmongold.

1:17:39Aiden:Reggie Watts is in Asmongold? It's like an Asmongold knockout. Okay, so the appeal of the Stadia was that it was going to be a cloud gaming service. Wherever you are, you would be able to stream games at 4K, 60 FPS, play them on your phone, play them on your laptop, play them on your TV, and through the power of the internet, the game would be streamed to you, and you would pay a monthly subscription fee, presumably for access to a database of available games. right and no one people had talked about cloud gaming but i don't think anybody had really poured a bunch of money and had a few had had a had a true offer on the table like google they

1:18:25Atrioc:were starting to come out around this time yeah but google is like the powerhouse that's expected

1:18:30Aiden:to do this well that's what was started yeah that's what the announcement kind of was when

1:18:34Atrioc:playstation did theirs because they came out with one that was pretty good um anyway sorry um and

1:18:39Aiden:And they announced this. And then on day one, the available product is the Founders Edition, the one that Nick bought, which includes the controller that they're selling and also the Google Chromecast model that you need to use to play the games on your TV, which is ironic because all of the marketing is about you don't need any hardware from us to play anything. it's going to be available on whatever you have but out the gate you need their Google products to play it at least initially and those together were$130 which compared to like a console still not particularly expensive and also included in that was three months of the subscription service that you needed to access and use the service but what users quickly realized is that you still had to pay full price for games only a small pool of like 22 games were available through the subscription service and most of the core like triple a titles that you would want to play via the stadia were not available that way and you just had to buy them outright still so already a bit of a disagreement in like oh i expected this to be different because that does match up with what xbox or playstation do kind

1:20:01Atrioc:of right you have to pay a week you know i would genuinely say i would genuinely say not that bad

1:20:07Aiden:still okay but but upon the we arrive at the launch day yeah similar to your customer experience with oh yeah a bunch of people don't actually get the products in the mail that they need to play so it's launch day and they're not receiving anything and also you can only access the platform on that launch day if you have a code that is sent in tandem with the package that you You need the mail. So there's a bunch, it's, it's, imagine you've waited all these months. It's officially Stadia launch day, but you just don't have the code to log into Stadia that they're supposed to mail you.

1:20:43Atrioc:So you can't play on day one. You gotta be careful not to let too many customers use the product they paid for. What is the reasoning? I'm lost.

1:20:51Aiden:And eventually, you know, within that first week, delayed packages, stuff starts arriving, but now people actually have the product. And the number one, you know, problem with cloud gaming is that it's so, reliant on what internet you have available to you. And the latency was horrific. Videos of like people clicking the button and then their character jumping like a full second and a half later. And then the frame rate being awful. But keep in mind, the frame rate being awful is a reflection of the stream of the game. So the game keeps moving on the server or like hardware at Google that it's being used, right?

1:21:28Aiden:So it's just your inputs are still being like put into the game without you being able to see it. It creates this really choppy, horrific experience. And then upon further inspection, because their big brag was that you're going to be able to play at 4K 60 FPS if you pay for the right tier of subscription, a bunch of the games weren't actually being run at that resolution. So certain games like might be run at 1080 on the Google game servers that are meant to be in streaming to you, but they're only streaming, they're streaming a 4K feed of a 1080p game. Like the game is playing in 1080 and they're just giving you a 4K feed of that, which is so fucking slimy.

1:22:08Atrioc:Way unnecessary amounts of data for no reason.

1:22:12Aiden:Yeah, just to sell the idea of 4K gaming when it wasn't actually the case. So the game library is limited. The rollout is horrific. Most people's experiences playing are just really, really bad. And then this launched in 2019, like I said, and it manages to run for a few years. And then in September, 2022, Google announces that they were shutting down the program with it completely going offline in January of 2023. And then also everybody that bought the controller got, like anybody who bought it got refunded for the equipment that they bought. And then also they pushed a software update that allowed the controller to be compatible with like all devices.

1:22:58Aiden:That's nice. Because another huge complaint was that the controller only worked properly via Bluetooth with like Google devices and you otherwise had to plug it in via USB-C. So at the end, they're like, we all know you still have this. Here's a software update so it like works with other stuff. And then the project was dead. And this has been sitting, it's so funny because I lived with Nick for a long time, right? Even after we moved out of the house with Ludwig, we kept living together and i would walk into his room or his office and there's just a shelf where the stadia sits and never got used and nick got his username until it got shut down in 2023 nobody took that from him wow good goodbye don't be clear google did take that it's not in the servers anymore i remember this very vividly because i was working at nvidia at the time and nvidia has a competitor called g-force now yeah i did some marketing for that on that team for a bit and uh the big three was stadia which we thought was going to be the dominant one amazon luna oh and then nvidia g-force now and they all amazon i want called luna and i i tested i remember i played luna or stadia but i tried this game deus x uh human revolution and i tested it on luna or stadia and i remember just trying to move around and it was just like it was like so obviously like how did anyone let this through at all i don't understand nobody could play a game

1:24:24Atrioc:comfortably and that's you in what san francisco right in san jose so okay so it's not like you have dog shit you're not out in the rural area great internet i was at the corporate office like it was just bad it's like the frame rate mixed with the lag made it unplayable for like anyone wanting to enjoy the game so uh yeah disaster i do i do think if we had to buy one that like the idea makes sense this will be big eventually it could be good enough at nvidia all the time they would talk about how like we can't push this too much because if this takes off nobody buys gpus anymore like there's no point owning a gaming bc if you can stream 4k hd anywhere there's just no point like so but the technology isn't there yet it's not yeah and it needs a bunch of internet upgrades as well yeah especially in the u.s i can't get fiber in la let alone you know but even with that there's just a degree of like there's just a there's a degree of latency that's inherent if you're you know playing with somebody across the world yeah there's yeah and also just sure because i i looked this up playstation had one they launched in 2014 a streaming gaming service i remember playing it because i played some of their i think ps3 games on a ps4 because they that was the only way to play them and it worked decently well it was like not enjoyable latency it was still better than a 2025 nintendo game but it was an actual

1:25:44Aiden:cloud service? I thought that was just a subscription service to play like a pool of games.

1:25:50Atrioc:No. Well, I mean, it technically is that too, but it's a pool of games that you play through the cloud. You don't actually have it local. So that does exist, but the fact that neither of you know about it leads me to believe it's not hugely successful. But it is technically, PlayStation has done it competently for a decade. I think Xbox has done something similar to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they have Game Pass, but I don't know if that has anything to do with cloud games. I think Game Pass has a cloud gaming component. but anyway my understanding is that ai if you want to throw that to doug we didn't mention we haven't mentioned it today it because it can like upscale and predict the next frame it is the thing a lot like you can basically stream almost no data like blocks like a very very low res thing and then ai locally can upscale it and make it so that once this is advanced you can actually

1:26:36Aiden:do this technology i don't know enough about either of these things to confirm but this sounds vaguely like editing footage using proxies. Proxy. You know about that? I mean, they're sending a... Basically what I'm saying is they downscale the game to like 800p or whatever, the lowest thing. They send that data over the internet super fast because it's very small. And then the AI locally upscales it back to 4K by predicting what it looks like in 4K.

1:27:03Atrioc:Your example is if the AI didn't upscale it and you were just looking at low-res footage. Which is missing the entire premise. No, it's close. It's close. It's probably close. Xbox Cloud Gaming. Xbox has their own version. No, I did not know that. And you can get that as part of Game Pass. It's probably the most successful one, actually. Ultimate. Because Game Pass is huge.

1:27:22Aiden:So I have a last product that I know less about, but I wanted to take slightly more seriously by the title of it as the one that I actually would pick to bring back. Okay. And in the 1990s, Coors announced that they wanted to do, they released a sparkling water. and the coors the coors the beer company and it was themed after you know the mountains in the background of course because it's like cold cores natural water natural raw water raw water and did you sarah guys on this one too yeah and the very basic water the very basic reason this didn't succeed is people just didn't understand that it didn't have any alcohol in it like they didn't get it because of the brand that it's coming from right but i think two cultural things have changed in that uh you i think they have two directions they could re-announce or push this product through now uh which is that non-alcoholic like drinks from beer brands are popular now like you can drink alcohol free beer from like heineken or something like that right so i feel like that is a maybe an approachable angle to bring it back, but just sparkling water in general is way more popular than it used to be.

1:28:40Aiden:And they could re-announce this product into a market that is like more accepting of it. I mean, Liquid Death did this, right? Liquid Death is kind of like people thought it was an alcohol. It's a water. They made a ton of money. But it's a market that I think exists now, whereas in the 90s, I can understand maybe people being a little more confused.

1:28:57Atrioc:Of everything we've talked about.

1:28:59Aiden:It's not my number one, but it was out of mine? Of everything, you would want to get into water.

1:29:05Atrioc:You would just lose the liquid debt. You would want to get into selling water.

1:29:08Aiden:You would just lose the liquid debt.

1:29:09Atrioc:You don't think you could just make a competitor? Like, probably. You think the unique advantage you would have is having Coors do it? You're saying we'd bring back the Coors water.

1:29:18Aiden:No, no, no. I'm saying that of the things that I put time into, this feels the most viable to me, genuinely. It's just water. That's what I'm saying, but people sell... I mean, think about that. Think about how people sell just water all the time. It's incredibly profitable. No, you're right. It's just also just water. You're just turning into the Juicero guy. Just water. You just pivoted the raw water. No, no. I wouldn't charge$700. I'll put chemicals. I wouldn't charge$700. Is it hand-squeezed water? Is it raw hand-squeezed water? It's hand-squeezed, but it's not raw?

1:29:48Atrioc:Fresh, never frozen, raw water.

1:29:50Aiden:Because I don't think... It's like I'm not going to relaunch Stadia. That doesn't fucking work right now. What if it's Juicero, but we emphasize the hand squeeze? Hand squeezed. You squeeze it by hand. You pay someone to come and squeeze it by hand. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's money there. Do you have any more?

1:30:11Atrioc:Okay, super quick bites. I have a very quick bite one too, but we can, okay. All right, real quick check-in. How are NFTs doing? NFTs. Great, great, great. Bored Ape Yacht Club. These are one of the most popular NFTs of all time. They hit a market cap of, let's see, about$4 billion. Jesus Christ. And that was in 2022. And unfortunately, they have dropped down to about$174 million in value. That's still too high. That's about, I believe, 4 % of what they were originally worth. It is a picture of a fucking ugly-looking monkey J-Pag. How dare you? This is the future of profile pictures. And anyone can steal it.

1:30:47And there's no...

1:30:48Atrioc:Crypto punks, those have gone down about 76%. What shocked me about both of these, though, is like nobody really talks about NFTs anymore. Yeah. Crypto punks still selling like every day, like, you know, multiple times a day for$100 ,000. There's like wash trading. People like set it up so it automatically goes back and forth. They keep probably. Yeah. These board apes are going for 18 ,000. When Twitter had like a lot of people with these profile pictures who were like seriously talking about how this is going to change the world. Now, it's all just I had to change their profile picture bag. I had several friends who either did crypto launches or were like, hey, everybody, check out whatever Zany Tigers.

1:31:27Atrioc:And it was really kind of shocking to be like, really? Really? You believe in Zany Tigers? It's going to bring us together? It's part of the community building of the internet?

1:31:36Aiden:I know this guy. And when the yard went to Italy a few years ago, there was these two other people that are friends with Cutie that came with us. and we're chatting on the trip. It's our first time getting to know them. Do you know about an NFT series called just Rocks? Rocks. And it was one of the ones that like blew up or something, right? And he explained how him and his brother had pooled together their savings to buy one of the rocks for 20K and then it ballooned to like 2 million in a couple months and they sold it. And he was traveling. he had been traveling europe for like six months with his rock money wow and and they were just hanging out with us in italy on that trip that's the best use of crypto i've ever heard

1:32:26Atrioc:wonder what i would love to know what's happened to the guy who paid two million dollars for a rock yeah the nfts have not done well this this i looked at some of the other like you know successful ones that that at least had a moment where people were going this might be one of the big ones. Like, let's get into it. MiBits was launched by the same as Crypto that's down 90%. Yeah, it was a really big,

1:32:46Aiden:like, it was like an apartment one with like Solana and like a bunch of people. He bought a digital apartment. A bunch of people bought that one. No, not a bunch of people. It was an NFT. You fools. He bought an NFT picture of a digital apartment. No, no. It was like some, it was like my brother. How much did you pay? No, it was you. Me? Yeah, how much did you pay for it? I believe I paid$950. 900. No, don't do that. Don't give him that.

1:33:05Atrioc:No, I put 500 into Doge. But to me, it was... That's a bet on stupidity that might pay off. No, no, no. It was investment.

1:33:14Aiden:That's what I was doing. You talked about it like... No, no, no, I didn't. I've never talked about this. This is what you imagined how I talked about it. At no stage... And he would go around and say, I'm too busy. It's going to change revolution. One time have I ever said anything even remotely close to that. I, from the day I bought it, I was like, I'm going to the casino and I'm trying to win. Remember it differently. I wasn't like, I'm going to live in my apartment one day. You said, this is my family's future. My children will grow here.

1:33:50Atrioc:I don't understand why kids are talking about expensive housing. We've given them the better. You can get it for$950. I can go move into mine anytime I want. You know what? Very last one. We don't need more. They're doing bad. They're doing real bad. Very last one. Okay, early days of the internet. 1999, internet is popping off the way AI is now. It's getting fucking big, okay? Jeff Bezos famously says, all right, I see the internet growing 10 ,000 % a year. I need to figure out how to take advantage of that. He does a really smart analysis and he goes, okay, what is the one product that is like cheap to produce and high margin enough that I could catalog it online and make an online store for this one thing to get my name out there in terms of?

1:34:31And he discovers books. what is a better product like what is a product that is i'm sorry yeah well whatever yeah what you figured out what books were no but because books are they're relatively lightweight so you can ship them real easily and they're high margin they cost a lot more than that so they can it's a good business for what he's doing what about a business where the product you're selling is really really fucking heavy and really really low margin aka dog food what if you made a dog food shipping service called pets.com in the early days of the internet when shipping logistics are not very well advanced and the cost of running the website is very high what if you lost significant amount of money on every single sale that's its acquisition stretch had negative gross

1:35:19Atrioc:margins yeah wait once you get like a high user base of dogs then you can up the price we'll figure theoretically theoretically you could do that that's not insane the problem was if you are burning that much money on every sale and you are spending even more money on a series of absolutely expensive super bowl ads featuring your sock puppet pet that you're burning through money hand over fist very quickly you run out of cash which is exactly what pets.com did they're considered the most egregious example of the dot-com bubble they were valued very highly despite not only making no money, but as they grew, making less money because every additional sale was so expensive for them to service.

1:36:01So they failed spectacularly, and they're like kind of an example of the dot-com bubble. They're the NFTs of their day.

1:36:08Atrioc:Unironically, I would buy Pets.com. Well, nowadays, you can kind of do it, right? We should look at the pricing of Pets.com. I think we blow the money on Pets.com.

1:36:15Aiden:I think this is the note we close on because I want to know what you guys genuinely think is the worst failure, obviously was the worst product from the get-go, and what do you think is genuinely the glowing opportunity in the box? And ones we missed. Let us know. Are you asking me or the audience? No, no, I'm asking the audience. If they have ones we missed and they want to let us know. I was asking you guys. Oh, you guys, what we should pick? Oh. I thought you were doing an outro. I just wanted to know. I want to get your quick thoughts. That's so awesome to ask your friend something and he's like, yeah, let us know.

1:36:54That's what I do. My wife's talking to me. And chat, what do you think? What do you think we should give her in her chat? What's she talking about?

1:37:01Atrioc:Dude, honestly, I'll just, I'll say a quick Juicero. It's one, it's the most egregiously stupid thing I've seen. I just, it's, it's. Juicero's really funny and dumb. I love it. All of the others are like a product that makes a modicum of sense. Like if the tech, but it's just nothing about, it makes no sense.

1:37:17Aiden:It's juicero is so funny because if you get rid of the juicer, it's kind of a business. Yes. Like the main thing. That is the juicero. Is the juicero part.

1:37:30Atrioc:But if you just sold bags of squeezable juice. By the way, I don't know if you said this.

1:37:34Aiden:You admit you kind of have an angle.

1:37:35Atrioc:You couldn't open the bags unless you had the machine. They were like, it's for security purposes. It was just to make you have to use the machine. Yeah, you can't just buy the juice packets, by the way. having the idea of your juice bag need wifi connected unlocking in order to access the juice is so insane I literally guys I would go in on a juicer I think we can find one line we should have it in the lemonade stand too we absolutely should buy a juicer we're putting on money towards a juicer

1:38:04Aiden:thank you for watching this week's episode of lemonade stand you can catch us soon on the patreon episode this week if you want to check that out patreon.com slash lemonade stand and we'll see you there

1:38:14Atrioc:and would actually love to let us know I would love to hear if you have any other products we missed that are notable. Thank you so much. Bye. Bye. When I scraped my car in that parking garage, I was worried that it could be a long process to take care of it. Like a landscaper's first day trimming a hedgeman. I have definitely already been here. Now, was it left, right, or right, left? Well, maybe I'll cut a path out and find my way back later. But it wasn't like that. I filed a claim in under two minutes on the Geico app, and they handled it from there. It was taken care of almost as quickly as it happened.

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