May 10, 2024 ยท 2024 #16. Read the transcript grouped by speaker, inspect word-level timecodes, and optionally turn subtitles on for direct video playback
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Hating the Future
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Speaker 4
hello everybody it is friday may the 10th 2024 uh it's been an interesting tech week um a lot of it was associated with the apple's introduction of a new team of ipads uh significant upgrade they haven't upgraded the product for a couple of years In technological terms, Verge talked about the seven biggest announcements, but the biggest announcement of all wasn't intended by Apple. It was a consequence of an ad they ran called Crush, which has aroused enormous anger. TechCrunch, which is supposedly the voice of Apple, online tech media described this ad as disgusting and even inspired Keith Teer, our technology maven, the author of That Was The Week newsletter, a technology newsletter that summarizes weekly events. to build his editorial around it. Keith is joining us, as always, from Palo Alto, the heart of tech country. Keith, before we get to it, let's run the ad. I'm sure most people have seen it, but let's watch it first, and then we can talk about why it's aroused so much anger.
So Keith, not everyone will have been able to watch that. A lot of our viewers aren't viewers, they're listeners. Describe the ad and then explain why, in your view, it's aroused so much anger and hostility and controversy.
So what Apple does is it piles up lots of things into a crushing machine, like those machines that crush old cars into boxes. You know, the variety of things but it includes a piano a guitar uh some some plastic toys uh lots of pots of paint of varying colors and a little and a little guy a crush guy who gets crushed that's the plastic toy yeah that's the plastic toy and it also includes i don't know how many people notice this but some old ipads um so it's basically saying here's all the stuff that we wanted to put inside the iPad. That's my interpretation. And then at the very end, after the crushing is done, it lifts up and there's a new iPad that presumably is the product of what you might think.
Oh, yeah. So it's a great, I thought it was a very good ad. They've since withdrawn it. We'll talk about why, which seems also very odd. Why, again, going back to this TechCrunch headline in your editorial, you said it's been an interesting 72 hours at TechCrunch. We also joked before we went live that if Mike Arrington still ran TechCrunch, devin coldaway who wrote that the apple crash ad is disgusting would have already been fired but what offends people about this well to try to empathize with the
detractors i i i think they're sitting in um in a in in like the royal box at the theater observing the proles down below and reflecting on, you know, from the position of high culture, you know, looking at this as the destruction of tradition. They don't like the destruction of tradition or the way things used to be done. And they are reacting to Apple's assertion that the iPad can replace, for most people, all of those things that get contained within the iPad. I don't think crushed is the right word. They used a crusher to create a containment.
Let's give TechCrunch, to be fair, let's explain what they argue. And I'm quoting the TechCrunch piece. What we all understand, though, because unlike Apple ad executives, we live in the world, is that the things being crushed here represent the material, the tangible, the real. And the real has value, value that Apple clearly believes it can crush into yet another black mirror. Is this just hardcore anti-tech stuff, Keith? from TechCrunch of all places.
It's rhetorical flourish really, because of course an iPad is real as well. An iPad isn't pretend, it's real. So what they're really saying is they prefer the old version of reality rather than the new version of reality but they're trying to masquerade that as this difference between real and not real well that's a false proposition right at the core and he and by the way devin does a few false propositions through this piece which is clearly driven by uh animal emotion not by
intellect he also says and this comes back to the issue of of media itself he said what Apple is doing is destroying these things to convince you that you don't need them all you need is the company's little device which can do all that and more and no need for annoying stuff like strings keys buttons brushes or mixing stations we're all dealing with the repercussions of media moving wholesale towards the digital and always on online. Is this a journalist just nostalgic for newspapers?
Well, I think nostalgic and angry because what he's saying there is a few things. Firstly, Apple isn't saying you don't need the things it's crushing. It's saying it can put them inside an iPad and give you another way of using them. For someone like me, who doesn't play guitar or piano, Actually, the iPad is probably the only way I get to be creative using piano sounds and guitar sounds. So the false proposition there is that Apple is seeking to replace. It isn't. It's seeking to incorporate. That's what it's doing.
And the irony of all this, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that This new announcement or this new cycle of products, the iPad products, aren't very revolutionary. They're just another upgrade. I'm not talking about radically reinventing media.
Yeah, at the end of the day, and this was said by, I forget the guy's name on YouTube that does all the reviews recently that have been hammering various AI things, the African-American guy, I'm blanking on his name. But he said, at the end of the day, it's still an iPad. And an iPad is a device searching for a use case. I use it for reading mostly, to be honest. sometimes i use it for email but rarely you know so i think the ipad is still just an ipad i don't use it for final cut pro i use my desktop for that because it's easier to use so i think at the end of the day this is uh i use the word snowflake
maybe you can put up that graphic yeah i knew you would somehow manage to squeeze in your your right-wing views, Keith, on this. Snowflake. Why is this snowflake?
Well, you know, this term snowflake was almost created for this moment. It says that a snowflake is a person that has an inflated sense of uniqueness, an unwarranted sense of entitlement, or are overly emotional, easily offended, and unable to deal with opposing opinions.
that basically is a definition of people we don't agree with but is devin a tech crunch is he a snowflake i mean the thing is i what what i don't understand is is how i can see people being irritated by something like this but how could you be
offended i showed it to my kids just to test and my kids are you know from 17 to 23 and you would imagine very much of the modern age Every single one of them liked it. I used a lot of tweets in my editorial that were very positive about it as well, many from creative people. So, yeah, it's a puzzle. Actually, Andrew, even for me, it's a puzzle. You alerted me to it. I wasn't aware of the backlash.
Well, you shouldn't forget people, Keith, especially people of other colours or genders. So what about Apple's response? I have to admit, I was rather disappointed. I think in the Steve Jobs age, he never would have backed down on this, would he?
You know, I... It is shocking that Apple has also become a bit snowflake, or at least they're scared of snowflakes, which you're right. It is shocking that they apologized. But on the other hand, Is it shocking? It's kind of like to be expected in this day and age where nobody wants to be controversial.
I mean, it's not even a controversial ad. It's anything but controversial. It's just some nice videos and good music. and some paint spewing out, and that's the end of it.
It definitely doesn't augur well for Apple's decision-making internally that they apologize, because that implies that they're prepared to allow their products and marketing to be influenced by outlier sensitivity.
And you didn't have this in this week's newsletter, but... It does contrast vividly with some of the decisions of other big tech companies. Google comes to mind, the CEO there, who pushed back decisively when some of the Google employees decided to occupy one of the offices. They were having none of that. So there's no snowflakes in some of the bigger other companies. Well, they probably are, but they're not winning right now, at least in Google. Maybe it's the marketing people who are particularly sensitive and easily swayed. I'm not sure if they're snowflakes. They just don't like controversy.
Well, look, if you contrast this to Apple's 1984 ad, which was aggressively against the past, the object of that ad was the establishment Yeah, we should show it, but we don't have it on. And the establishment was defined as IBM. So they wanted to destroy IBM PCs. That was the core of that ad. And at that time, everyone loved it because everyone was anti establishment. What's happened now is the mood of the nation or the world has become highly individualistic and oversensitized. And so an ad which is essentially...
And that's the title. Of course, it comes with your dreadful AIR, which certainly speaks of the past being worse than the future. But... The title of your editorial is Hating the Future. I mean, the other problem here, Keith, is anytime anyone's critical of technology, people like you come along and say, oh, they just hate the future. I mean, you can be critical of the future without hating it.
Well, I think you can also love guitars and pianos without hating this ad. i agree so so i love guitars and pianos i wish i could play them um i i would love that and i'd have one in my house and i'd play it but i can't so i'm i'm not against uh artifacts of the past i love them but i'm not neither against incorporating their functionality into something i can use that seems great to me
yeah and what's interesting is what's left out of here the two most important things in terms of the And we've talked about this endlessly on the show, the economic crisis of the creative class. Firstly, the... the reality, the dark reality of AI on the horizon. And secondly, the business models. At least Apple sell their stuff. They don't sell it off advertising. They're not undermining guitarists or pianists or filmmakers in the sale of iPads.
In fact, they pay them a lot of money for streaming on Apple Music. And they promote developers producing fantastic music. sketching tools or painting tools and so on so that so apple genuinely is very pro
creator um so yeah there you have it anyone from apple watching uh you can you can advertise on that was the week keith what should we charge him a million dollars an hour you know just because they're apple i think it should be two million Yeah, well, we might accept a million, so we'll take calls after. So leaving aside this, which is an interesting story, but I don't think it has much legs. What else happened this week, Keith? Anything interesting?
Yeah, I sent you that FT piece on the pandemic-era winners suffering... $1.5 trillion fall in market value. And some of the companies, a couple of them surprised me. Pinterest is included. And Tesla is the largest. One would assume Zoom. None of this is surprising. I mean, wasn't that inevitable?
yeah i mean in the same way that when the world changes there's always winners and losers i mean there's the change that's happening now which is um the the growing nationalism is feeding a military sector that really wasn't even in existence during covid so when the world changes there are winners and there are losers and those companies destiny is tied to what's going on in the underlying world so absolutely it was very predictable uh you know a friend of mine uh john callahan is at true ventures they were one of the first if not the first investor in peloton which is mentioned in this article yeah we talked about i mean peloton's the
Actually, if you look at the math on that, Tesla has lost the least. So the bigness of the chart is to do with its retention of value. And so they've lost the least because Tesla has grown massively. I'm going to sneeze, I think. Tesla has grown massively, excuse me, predictive. since COVID. I think it more or less doubles production every year. So Tesla's the least of the losers, but it still is marginally lost since COVID because people during COVID started buying things. I don't know if you remember that, but people started buying.
And it comes back to the ad about we've returned to the real world for all the All the Apple haters of the iPad, well, and the defenders of the real, we've returned to reality. We don't mostly spend all our time now on Zoom. And that was inevitable. Agreed.
And Zoom's a big loser as well. Huge loser. Although, if you look at the value of Zoom from pre-COVID to now, it's still growing significantly and it's still a great company. So all of these things have to... We don't use it.
We still use Restream. Yeah. Steve Gilmore still uses it. If Steve Gilmore uses it, it must be good. Another couple of pieces in your newsletter this week that intrigued me, something about Jack Dorsey, looking very much like Jack Dorsey, claims that Blue Sky is repeating all the mistakes he made at Twitter, and I think he's quit the board, maybe got pushed out. we don't hear much anymore about X or Twitter or social media. Maybe it's, is that one going away? Keith is blue sky. There was a lot of promise of blue sky for about 20 minutes a year or two ago. And we haven't heard anything since.
He basically is. That's why I put it in. He's reacting against snowflakes as well. And he's making the point that Blue Sky is now run by snowflakes. and therefore trying to control the content. And that's the reason he left Twitter. Yeah,
and I have to say, I mean, for people who are listening, we have a photo of Jack Dorsey looking like Rasputin with a very long grey beard. He is on a snowflake, although sometimes he sounds a little like one. Maybe his voice is a bit snowflakey. To me, he looks like, is it Voldemort? Oh, out of Lord of the Rings, probably. That's it. he could also be lord of the rings yeah well we've gone away and we never hear about mastodon anymore keith i mean these some of these things are inevitable
aren't they well i mean if we stand back and just treat the subject seriously um the somebody trying to build a software version of the public square if that's their goal it's a reasonable goal what comes with that is a diversity of opinions i mean david hornick this morning who is one of the most yeah old friend a very smart guy he wrote a piece on i think it was facebook defending the right of anti-semites to speak and and david is against anti-semitism but he said you you he's jewish and he made the point that free speech is more important than antisemitism or the opposite. You have to support free speech. Then you give them enough rope that what comes out is how obnoxious they are. So we're living in a moment where David Hornick's very correct views, in my point of view,
I'm not the dominant... I take your point, but that's got nothing to do with the failure of Blue Sky and Mastodon, is it? Or are they actually... Is Jack Dorsey saying that Blue Sky is trying to censor what people can say? On the other side, you've got Trump now with his own social media platforms that are doing the reverse in some ways.
Jack's only point is what I just said. That's why he left. Now, you're right as well that If you wanted to analyze why Blue Sky isn't very popular, it's not related to that. It's for other reasons. And we can discuss that separately. But he's not leaving because it's a failure. He's leaving because it's trying to stop various points of view from existing on his platform.
Can you imagine how blue sky erupted over this Apple ad? I'm sure X as well. Everyone was outraged. These platforms, though, exist on outrage. If people aren't outraged, then people don't post and people don't read it.
Yeah. I am pretty old, Andrew. I'll be 70 in August.
Words and timings
Yeah.Iamprettyold,Andrew.I'llbe70inAugust.
Speaker 4
Is this the kind of reactionary... the reactionary sourness of a, of a 70, almost 70 year old saying threads is where snowflakes lives. Threads is where young people live. So is. No, it is not.
Isn't it? Which young, none of my young people in my family. You've got three boys. I mean, they're not necessarily. Jeff Jarvis is the icon for threads and Jeff's certainly not. He might be older than me. Okay.
decoration snowflakes do trend um both old and young interestingly because a lot of the hippie generation have turned into snowflakes but um i think it's hard to define snowflakes by age it's not it's more by you when threads came out you were
critical we did a show it's probably a year or two ago saying that shreds was you were disappointed because threads was avoiding politics but you're saying it's in its own way quite political
Who's they? You mean the other Threads users? Yeah. They'd send you to jail, maybe, Keith, as our old friend Sam Bankman-Fried was sent to jail. And yet the headlines this week is that the FDX... so-called victims crypto fraud victims are getting their money back plus interest so did did the media misrepresent the ftx story well you and me have debated this
back and forth and i always said that bankman freed did what he did emotionally in order to try to save the company um he was trying to preserve assets not steal them and in in trying to preserve them he crossed lines. So I don't think emotionally he was a criminal, but he in fact was doing criminal things, but he wasn't emotionally a criminal. And the fact that the money is now being returned and then some, by the way, which won't satisfy everyone because the reason that's possible is because Bitcoin and other kinds have gone up in the meantime. And they would argue that If they were fully paid out, they would get all the games from day one to today. They're not getting that. They're getting their original money as it was then, plus some interest. So they still would argue that they've lost in total value. But that said, it is evidence that Bankman Freed trying to play a long game with the assets, had he not been arrested, probably would have worked out.
Yeah, I mean, he's, I think he is inevitably going to be. quote-unquote rehabilitated. Michael Milken was also rehabilitated. Were you down in LA for the Milken event?
Okay, well, you had an interesting story about the Milken event this week, his new power players. What's Milken suggesting? He's another big finance guy who has successfully been rehabilitated.
So the Milken Conference is a private equity conference, meaning all kinds of assets other than public stocks are under discussion. It's also some public discussions, but it's mainly private equity. And venture capital is a subset of private equity. And the point of this article, which The Information wrote, by the way, it's a very good article, is that venture capital is so much in the doghouse now, from the point of view of investors in assets, that it was relegated to the last session of the conference on day three when most people had already gone home. And the key narrative was that venture capital only produces fictional games called MOIC or TVPI. It doesn't produce distributions, that is to say actual cash going back to the investors. And so venture capital is in that environment, which is a super important environment,
year and next year and the year after are going to be the best times to have invested in venture at the very time when nobody wants to wow but not for snowflakes keith snowflakes are still greedy so that's that that's the ambiguity of a snowflake
um and then before we get to our startup of the week and our x of the week you said you're also down in la what were you doing there which event so i i was actually
doing two events simultaneously one was virtual the other was physical the physical one in la was cog x charlie muirhead is a british entrepreneur trying to reproduce a ted-like combination of entertainment design and tech um and attracted a crowd of well over a thousand like i had i had lunch with the cfo of sony entertainment and the head of biz dev and also the person in charge of marketing amazon prime video i also met the founder of epic games were you a speaker or you were an attendee i was only an attendee there i was meeting some of my investors who were there attending any snowflakes there Oh, lots. It's LA. I mean, basically, I went to a restaurant on on the last evening, and 90% of the menu was vegan. So you mean, by the way, with this announced vegan, vegan, by the way, this was an Italian restaurant,
I will give people a space to do whatever they want, but I will judge them. And I think not eating meat, unless it's for ethical reasons, is certainly not for health reasons.
You're going to drive off our significant vegan audience, Keith. They're all going to be offended. You're going to get posted. You're going to have a witch hunt against you on threads. Of course, you won't watch. And speaking of vegan, your startup of the week is called... wave. Maybe they borrowed it from wave. What's wave up to an interesting company? Are they allowed to use that term given that the Israeli company that got acquired by Google? The map company?
Yeah, well, obviously, they are allowed because they did and they're in the same business. not really in the same business so what way what wave does is it does what there's a couple of subtleties here um there's a huge debate in the self-driving car tech community about whether you need radar called lidar or lidar in order to be good at creating a self-driving car. And Elon Musk says, you do not. And he stripped all the LIDAR out of Teslas. And all he uses is cameras and computers. Which is why they crash all the time. Actually, the new ones are fantastic. The new version of the Tesla self-driving, you could go on YouTube and do a search. It is actually exceptionally good. And what Wave are doing is the same thing. They have the same opinion as Elon, but they have an open source approach, which is to say that they're offering their technology to any car company. And because all new cars come with surround cameras, they can just plug in their models in a computer leveraging the cameras in the car and produce an equally good experience as as the as the new tesla software if not better and they're getting a lot of traction they just raised money uh over a billion dollars of new money from softbank and this is a uk-based company it is
it's uk because mike butcher reported on it for tech crunch so this is this is all good news keith what with the What would the critics of the future say? We still want to keep our hands on the steering wheel?
Yeah, that's a picture of a Ford Mach-E there, by the way, which is, I own that car, and it does not do something. I bet you don't have it in orange, though. I would never buy a car in orange or yellow or green.
Well, you accused me before we went live of being gay because I want to buy the purple iPad. So are you suggesting that anyone who buys it in orange is gay?
Well... That looks like an interesting company. I don't think that will be the last we hear of it. It's good news. It's good news for the UK economy, for innovation, isn't it? Absolutely.
hope not because that means it won't become this generalized platform for all cars um i i think the answer will only be yes if they fail to get customers and
presumably the bigger players i mean google bought ways uh of course that they would be interested the googles the amazons the apples would be interested in this
company too yeah and by the way all the car companies have bought companies that roughly in this space but they technically different they're using lidar this is the first company that doesn't use lidar that claims excellent uh excellent results and by the way their platform supports robotics as well it's not just the car well
last week we had a robotics company and finally we'll end where we began our x of the week is from our old friend tim cook the ceo of apple who talks about meet the new ipad pro the thinnest product we've ever created the most advanced display we've ever produced with the incredible power of the m4 chip just imagine all the things it'll be used to create including a lot of controversy absolutely
and and the fact that he used the word create tells you what the intent is in the ad that's why i put it in um it it the intent's clear um i I'm interested that Apple has not deleted either the video or this tweet. Yeah, because they're not stupid.
They don't care. Yeah. The thing that always annoys me about Apple is that every time they come out with something, they always say, the thinnest, the most advanced we've ever produced. Do they always have to say that?
Makes total sense, Andrew. What about this idea of Apple always saying, the biggest, the best, the fastest, the smartest, the... Why should they drop that? Because doesn't it get boring? It's inevitable. If it isn't, then they wouldn't announce it.
Well, as a user, I'll tell you, I have the 11-inch iPad Pro 4th Gen, and I use it for reading in bed before I go to sleep, and it's quite heavy. So your wrists definitely feel that you're holding something. So thinner and lighter appeals to me as a buyer. So I think they just must know that from their surveys.
And you and I are very opposite kinds of consumers. We'll end here. We should announce what we're buying next week when the iPad comes out. You've already ordered. What are you buying, Keith?
I would have the bigger screen if I was replacing my laptop with it, but I'm not. I use it for very specific things where the smaller screen is better. Reading books is probably my biggest use.
Well, I'm always obsessed with value, so I'm going for the iPad Air 13-inch, which... It's not going to cost me a great deal once I trade in. So there you are, Apple. You've got a lot of free advertising. Next time we talk about you, you're going to be our advertiser. Have a good week, everyone. We'll see you next week. Thank you, Keith.