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

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Speaker 5 Thank you for joining us on the lemonade stand. This week you've joined us at Atriox House.
Yes.

Speaker 5 This is what it's like.

Speaker 5 We recently came into a bit of money, specifically last week. Yeah.
Last week, we just somehow came into a lot of money. And we were trying to think of what we could do with all this extra money.

Speaker 5 to help out the stand. What kind of thing would kind of have a premium price? Something we'd get for dirt cheap, right?

Speaker 5 Anything come to mind?

Speaker 5 In this economy,

Speaker 5 revitalize Atriox hairline. Right.

Speaker 5 No, no, quite affordable with this amount of money.

Speaker 5 I've talked to people in Turkey, and it's a big deal. It's too big of a job.
It's too big of a job. It's hard to call the experts, and they said, I have to get more money.

Speaker 5 They've never seen a line like yours. I'm still working on it.
It's like a surface area. It's like

Speaker 5 putting hair on the moon. It's not possible.
It's an impossible task.

Speaker 5 Well, we could find maybe some old products that didn't pan out. We need something to invest in, Aiden.
We need to invest in something. Okay.
That's how you make your money grow.

Speaker 5 I don't want nine gold bars. I want 90.
Okay.

Speaker 5 And so everything now, as we've already mentioned, is guaranteed a bubble and you can't invest in it. Okay.
It's already too expensive. Right.

Speaker 5 So we need to look to the past and find some hidden gems that were perhaps underrated in their time that we can invest in to make a mint now. That's right.

Speaker 5 We found the biggest product flops of all time.

Speaker 5 And I think the three of us should take this massive stack of hair money that we've come into and decide what exactly we're putting this into and maybe just maybe some of these unironically we could buy i mean look at some of the pricing unironically

Speaker 5 unironically we could buy some of these i think the right my plastic gold bars might be enough for some of these for some of these products

Speaker 5 uh okay well what kind of products are there i wish somebody could present them to me in a suave way that makes me feel like they're cool and they're classy and they get what I would want, but they're future seeing.

Speaker 6 Hi, Perry from production here. I used a different mic setup to capture the presentations for this episode.

Speaker 6 Unfortunately, the audio was pretty scuffed and we had to do a lot of wizardry to try and save it.

Speaker 6 Shout out to Aidish and Jake for making it sound as good as it does, but I wanted to give you a heads up and apologize.

Speaker 2 Thank you for your understanding.

Speaker 5 Gentlemen and gentlemen, tonight.

Speaker 5 Oh my god, Elizabeth Holmes.

Speaker 5 Quiet, please. Frank from the audience.

Speaker 5 The year is 1957.

Speaker 5 It's the age of the American automobile. The auto industry is taking over.
It's creating jobs. It's creating opportunity.

Speaker 5 There's a growing middle class in America, and the one thing they use as a status signifier is a bigger and better car. Car.

Speaker 5 Automobile.

Speaker 5 Thank you.

Speaker 5 And as we go through this hustle and bustle lifestyle,

Speaker 5 people are noticing that their old Ford cars aren't keeping up with the newer, bigger, and better competitors.

Speaker 5 And there's a key reason. There's a key thing that people look around and say is wrong.
See if you can notice it. This car,

Speaker 5 what's wrong with it? Don't answer.

Speaker 5 This car, what's wrong with it?

Speaker 5 Don't answer.

Speaker 5 This car,

Speaker 5 what's wrong with it?

Speaker 5 Do not answer.

Speaker 5 Because we all know the answer in our hearts and in our minds. The grill

Speaker 5 is too horizontal.

Speaker 5 We need

Speaker 5 a vertical grill.

Speaker 5 That is what the American public wanted.

Speaker 5 A brand new vertical grill.

Speaker 5 And so today at Ford, we've invented the Edsel.

Speaker 5 Now, when you're thinking about the name Edsel, you're probably wondering, what a beautiful,

Speaker 5 what an incredible product name.

Speaker 5 A name that will charm and inspire millions. Where did it come from?

Speaker 5 Well, we hired one of the most expensive ad agencies in the world and paid them millions of dollars to come up with 6,000 different product names.

Speaker 5 Then we went around to all of our employees and surveyed them to rank which product name they liked the most.

Speaker 5 6,000 names. We made our own.
911s of names.

Speaker 5 Such a crazy way to phrase it.

Speaker 5 Throwing me off a bit there. Then,

Speaker 5 then,

Speaker 5 because the results were inconclusive from our internal Ford study, we paid millions more to do public research. We had people stand in front of movie theaters.
Remember those? This is why I buy Ford.

Speaker 5 This is what it's about. This is the effort it takes.
And we interviewed people coming out of movie theaters and had them rank hundreds of names each to come up with a new product research name.

Speaker 5 And after all that work and all that time, it was still inconclusive. So we paid millions more to hire Marianne Moore, a famous poet, to come up with a new name for our new key product.
What is it?

Speaker 5 What is it? And then, after she gave us suggestions, we thought about all this stuff and we said, fuck it, we'll name it after the owner's kid.

Speaker 5 This is Ensel Ford. This is the son of Henry Ford, founder of Ford, and it's named after him.
Was

Speaker 5 it so...

Speaker 5 I thought it was a, I assumed it would be an old woman with no teeth.

Speaker 5 That is what the name Ensel makes you think of. That included model manufacturing.
There was some sort of issue with the Gutenberg printing press where they wrote his name out. Is it a human name?

Speaker 5 It was. It was.
Okay. It was at the time.
Henry Ford named it after, I think, an old war buddy of his that he really liked.

Speaker 5 I'm assuming the product went on to become so successful that nobody names their kid that, it would be like naming your kid the iPhone. We'll see.

Speaker 5 A lot of questions from the audience today. I love that.
I love the passion you guys have for our products here in Ford. Look,

Speaker 5 continuing on. So the Ford Edsel.
is a revolutionary product. Not only does it have the trademark vertical front grille that everyone thinks is very aesthetically pleasing,

Speaker 5 our design extends to the back.

Speaker 5 Look at these beautiful rocket fin taillights.

Speaker 5 They serve zero aerodynamic purpose. It is purely for style's sake.
That is what you want in a new. I'm already moving some of the gold towards

Speaker 5 Gerald Ford. Let's not stop there because we don't want to revolutionize just design.
We want to revolutionize interface. What is the worst part about driving a car in 1957?

Speaker 5 This stick shift. It's on the floor.
It's a pain in the ass. I have to move my right hand.
I hate that. What if it was right in the center of the steering wheel? And automatic, right?

Speaker 5 No. Oh, okay.
What if while doing 60 miles an hour on the highway and you want to honk at somebody, you accidentally hit reverse

Speaker 5 and shift into reverse.

Speaker 5 Wouldn't that be a thrill? Wouldn't that be an exciting way to experience the world?

Speaker 5 Those buttons are really close. It looks like one of those spin dials.

Speaker 5 And that's reverse. And they are quite close, close enough to be dangerous, close enough to keep you on your toes, close enough to keep it exciting.

Speaker 5 We spent $250 million designing and marketing this product in 1957. In today's money, that is $3.1 billion

Speaker 5 on the Ford head soul.

Speaker 5 And it's all worth it.

Speaker 5 The day of the launch was so anticipated internally and externally with our marketing that we compared it to the recently done D-Day

Speaker 5 by calling it E-Day.

Speaker 5 And on the day of release, wait, so how many D-Days of cars did they sell?

Speaker 5 How many I-11s did I need to do?

Speaker 5 And on the release,

Speaker 5 we bought, and there's only three networks at the time, we bought prime time one-hour TV slot for the Edsel Show, starring

Speaker 5 famous celebrities like Frank Sinatra. Frank Sinatra.

Speaker 5 Ben Crosby and Frank Sinatra. had to do a full hour live Edsel show promo upon e-day on the release.

Speaker 5 the Edsel was of course an astronomical success except for one thing it didn't sell any cars

Speaker 5 it turns out that releasing a car that costs the equivalent around 50k current dollars and is bulky and big during a time that turned out to be the 1958 recession where car sales dropped more than they've ever dropped in American history.

Speaker 5 Something like an 80% decline. People actually traded down to smaller cars, and the Edsel was not the perfect car for the time, but I think it is the perfect car for today.

Speaker 5 And even if the Edsel doesn't live on, the legacy of a CEO shoehorning in a badly designed car against the will of everyone else lives on today.

Speaker 5 Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to invest in the Ford Edsel.

Speaker 5 Oh, my God.

Speaker 5 Mr. Henry Ford Jobs, Musk, what is the point of the grill in a car? And why is it so much better to have it be vertical?

Speaker 5 The point of the grill previously is to cool the, use airflow to cool the radiator.

Speaker 5 Which is important. Which is important to the car.
However, really the grill is about aesthetics. Okay.
I do want to say, you know, I'm not a car guy, especially, but I did see for this product

Speaker 5 because it was so different from other Ford-manufactured products, that the people in the assembly line fucked it up all the time. And so there was like 20% error rates on every piece of the thing.

Speaker 5 Like the trunk leaked, the grill would often cause overheating. It was poorly attached.
So people buying this very, very expensive car often got terrible, terrible quality. But at least

Speaker 5 the honking and the reverse buttons both worked correctly, right? They worked great. The reverse button,

Speaker 5 many dangerous things from that. I'll slip you this gold bar and perhaps you can make it an EV.

Speaker 5 And then we don't have to worry about the... Yeah.

Speaker 5 I'll take the gold and we'll figure out what we can do at the Ford. One gold bar for the Edsel.
I like that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's pretty wild. It's considered one of the, I first heard about this product because Bill Gates recommended a book called Business Adventures.

Speaker 5 And it's just a, it's just stories about five major flops. And this is like one of the greatest flops in American history.
$3 billion, especially at that time, is like absurd.

Speaker 5 No, two, it's $3 billion in today's day.

Speaker 5 Which is still insane for one person

Speaker 5 for marketing, right?

Speaker 5 No, that was the product. That was like, oh, that was like all in all.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 It's insane. To spend it all on the Edson.
And it literally sold so poorly. It was out of commission in like two years.
And they like...

Speaker 5 The equivalent of whatever a Super Bowl ad would be, I don't know if the Super Bowl was around it, but they did a blanket full court press. They had like every dealer paid to push the Edsel.

Speaker 5 They did every primetime slot. I'm like everybody in the country knew about it and they all said

Speaker 5 imagine if Taylor Swift and LeBron James did an hour-long ad

Speaker 5 for a car on TV. I can't like there's only three networks.
It's the only thing you can watch. Right.
No, I mean it got millions of views. It's crazy.

Speaker 5 People knew about this car and they all collectively said no.

Speaker 5 It reminds me a little bit of the Starbucks olive oil coffee that they tried to release because my friend worked there at the time at Starbucks Corporate and she talked about how the whole thing was really forced internally

Speaker 5 because the CEO's friend's son had like an olive oil, had an olive oil brand that he wanted to get a big contract with.

Speaker 5 And everybody internally seemed to recognize that this wasn't a good idea, but it all moved forward anyway. And this the shoehorning like the name aspect,

Speaker 5 I felt like that part, it's like, let's spend all this money on like research to find out what direction we should go in. And then it's like, what if it was just my friend, my son's name?

Speaker 5 Literally like years, years of time and years of discussion. And they ignored all of that to him just say, yeah, name after my son.

Speaker 5 But if you had to pick the main factor, because you said like economic circumstances of the time may be a bad name, but also the car, you know, not being actually built very well.

Speaker 5 What is the main reason that sets this? The reason it failed instantly is because of an expensive car during a recession. It was like, there's no way anyone could afford it or buy it.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 But I would say it is considered to be a colossal failure in every aspect because consumers also rated every part of the product bad.

Speaker 5 They didn't like how it looked. They didn't like how it drove.
They had many error rates. The name was considered terrible.
So it wasn't winning on any fronts. No, it had nothing going for it.
And

Speaker 5 so it was a massive, massive flop. It is supposed to be a cautionary tale: the idea of the dangers of

Speaker 5 what do you call it when you like focus grouping or what like whenever you have a lot of people in a meeting and they all don't want to say anything controversial.

Speaker 5 So they all like you hold 50 meetings to if they had just read when everyone knows what everyone knows by Stephen Baker,

Speaker 5 then they would have been able to get some comments and establish the common knowledge of how this product was going to tank.

Speaker 5 There's a quote by Darren Aronowski, who's a movie director, and it's, if you ask a big group of people to pick their favorite, collective favorite ice cream flavor, they're going to land on vanilla, right?

Speaker 5 Which is like, yeah, that's the danger of focus groups. Because if everybody, if the goal is just try to make everybody happy, you just have a bland product that nobody likes.
Right.

Speaker 5 I think that's what happened here. I have an exciting product that I think I could pitch you guys on.
Something that everyone liked. I'm interested.

Speaker 5 Let me take you all back to the future.

Speaker 5 To the year 2012. Imagine 2012.
You wake up, you see this video.

Speaker 5 Way for me to get a lot of information.

Speaker 5 What?

Speaker 5 For our audio listeners, Mr. Aiden Jobs.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 as you can see,

Speaker 5 from this experience, you're looking at the first-person POV of someone waking up with, you know, something on their face that allows them to see notifications, navigate to places, send messages with their voice.

Speaker 5 And as you, have either of you seen that video? Do you remember when it came out? I don't. I think.
So if you can find, I believe,

Speaker 5 I believe you can find the original, original video on YouTube still, but it's unlisted. And I couldn't find the link, so I had to find like a secondary upload of it, right?

Speaker 5 But what we just watched for the audio listeners, especially, is this little two-minute trailer that was made for Google Glass.

Speaker 5 The glasses that Google was going to make and were going to presumably replace a lot of the functions of your smartphone at the time.

Speaker 5 And the reason this video was so remarkable at the time, we're going to stay here for a second. Okay.

Speaker 5 I can see you getting Nancy in the audience. No.
I can see you getting Nancy. I'm just shaking your leg.
Please. It's 2012 and I love Google.
And I'm excited to see what they have to announce.

Speaker 5 Look at the visual and appreciate it.

Speaker 5 It's funny you say that because genuinely, I think it was a different time for the way people looked at these companies and how they viewed themselves internally, where there was a lot of explorative efforts in segments of the company that could just kind of fuck around, spend a lot of money, and try to develop the product of the future.

Speaker 5 And phones were out the door. People were done by 2012.
And people were really done with phones already, which is funny. They were mostly getting rid of them.
Oh, wait, wait, sorry, sorry. Exactly.

Speaker 5 Wait, sorry. Yeah, yeah, my bad.
Bye, bye, bye. 100% the opposite.
Right, right.

Speaker 5 No, I get those confusions. No, it was actually the opposite in that smartphones weren't even even something that everybody you knew had yet.

Speaker 5 We were still at a time when like people had phones that weren't smartphones, a considerable amount of people.

Speaker 5 And I think the reason this video was so groundbreaking, and not just because it uses a lovely song, Lover's Congress by Vivio,

Speaker 5 which I actually learned about that song from this video and I've had in my life since then.

Speaker 5 But I remember being in high school and seeing this and thinking, wow, so many things are about this are so incredible.

Speaker 5 The way it seamlessly seems to integrate with the person's day-to-day experience, the voice to text,

Speaker 5 even voice-to-text or like Siri stuff at the time, right, is not that prevalent or good. It's warm-up and non-functional at the time.
Really good today. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 5 So, to see it pop up in something like this, and then imagine this future in a video of titled One Day,

Speaker 5 you're getting sucked into this idea of like this is really going to be what the future looks like. And that future is,

Speaker 5 you know, a bunch of people walking around like this.

Speaker 5 I left 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.

Speaker 5 Not like the, you know, embedded look of the products that are being developed that are similar now, right?

Speaker 5 This very obvious change to the glasses in the right-hand corner that kind of makes you look like Cyclops from X-Men.

Speaker 5 And they had, I think it was uh sergey brin was 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 uh kids could wear this to like accentuate their learning in school

Speaker 5 i will not get bored doctors 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 factor to their family members.

Speaker 5 To watch some Subway servers and they don't get bored on the surface.

Speaker 5 Or to have a little bit of Subway servers.

Speaker 5 I believe it was Tempo Hun at the time.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 That is like, so you would say like, hey, Google, and like flick your head up or like touch it on the side to scroll through menus. And obviously, uh, this took over the world.

Speaker 5 It was a massive success. And we knew so much changed in 2012.
The world ended. We all got in that boat that saved us from the giant crashing tsunami waves.

Speaker 5 There's a documentary about that you can watch.

Speaker 5 And an estimated tens of thousands of them sold

Speaker 5 over many, many years that they've tried to continue pushing this product.

Speaker 5 And so, for all the time and marketing they put in, they initially released this thing called the Explorer Edition in 2012, which is the product that MKBHD gets.

Speaker 5 Basically people who signed up to test the product for $1,500 at the time. And you would maybe be selected and then you would get it.

Speaker 5 And then you would ideally be someone who's giving Google like active feedback about the product.

Speaker 5 It stayed in this 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.

Speaker 5 They can the project but announced the 2017 enterprise edition that will be used by engineers at places like Boeing. Corporate clients.
Corporate clients.

Speaker 5 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 close out the project internally by 2023.

Speaker 5 I will say the one interesting thing about this, so how much it bombed in the public market.

Speaker 5 Yeah, they did seem to have enough of a weird corporate niche demand that they managed to keep this project and project somewhat relevant all the way until mildly recently, which I didn't know when I started looking into this.

Speaker 5 The fact that someone was still working on this at Google at 2023 is a massive shock to me.

Speaker 5 I would have said that's 10 years later than the last person started working on it.

Speaker 5 But yeah, 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.

Speaker 5 And inspired my music taste. Go check out Vibeo.

Speaker 5 But what

Speaker 5 actually, you know, what actually happened during all of this?

Speaker 5 I found this lovely, lovely wired article from 2013 by a guy named Matt Honen 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.

Speaker 5 Nobody likes you if you wear Google Glass all the time. And he said, people get angry at glass.
They get angry at you for wearing glass. They talk about you openly.

Speaker 5 It inspires the most aggressive of passive aggression. They just call you an asshole.
And then wearing glass separates you.

Speaker 5 It says, not only did I have $1,500 to plug down to be a part of the Explorer program, glass is a class divide on your face.

Speaker 5 And then

Speaker 5 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. And to which his wife doesn't like.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 and he's like this was my first interaction realizing that socially this just wasn't going to work

Speaker 5 it boils down to this thing was creepy clunky and fucking boring.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 So the things that you could, whoops,

Speaker 5 the things that you could do with it,

Speaker 5 they were proud that you have to remember this is 2012. You can use this to do Google Plus Hangouts.

Speaker 5 Finally! I'm in.

Speaker 5 Finally. You could supposedly use Google Maps or to like Google search things.
You could text with it.

Speaker 5 It had a five-hour battery life.

Speaker 5 It just,

Speaker 5 ultimately,

Speaker 5 the minimal feature set that it had available to it at the time just wasn't very good. So you can drive you to work and then you can't drive home.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 way more useless than the phone that you had in your pocket.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Kind of, I would say, leading the charge, at least in the public conversation, is Meta and Von Zuckerberg.

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 but, you know, he still looks a little goofy, but drastically different performance with this recent product.

Speaker 5 Over 2 million of the Meta glasses

Speaker 5 have been sold. The Meta Ray-Ben crossover glasses have been sold since the 2023 launch, which, as you might be able to tell, is more than 10,000.
Hmm. That's good math.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It's like, let's beat the next technology to the punch. Let's get rid of phones and have everything attainable through something

Speaker 5 you wear and is comfortable, easily accessible. You don't even have to think about it.
It's integrated directly into your life and vision.

Speaker 5 But then the underlying value proposition is this, to truly become successful, it has to be better than this.

Speaker 5 And not just in a functionality way, which is important, but in a social stigma way as well.

Speaker 5 I just feel like, so if I, 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 and wearable

Speaker 5 year. And that's the yoke.

Speaker 5 And I'm glad you're on board because I think we can transform culturally. I think this is big.

Speaker 5 With an influencer.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 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, what Sergey Boyd refused to ask himself is, does this product pass the vibe check?

Speaker 5 Because ultimately, I think it's a product that is very...

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It's like you're unsure if that person is like recording you or not uh there's 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

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 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.
So it can text and call without my phone around.

Speaker 5 And I do like that feature. And it was in an effort to like leave my phone behind in so many places, right?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And I haven't really been able to ditch my phone in this, like what was my initial interest for this product.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Google Last 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.

Speaker 5 But I don't feel like

Speaker 5 we bring back Google Glass and change nothing, it'll be a big hit now.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And I wasn't aware that like my private conversation was just like literally being streamed. And that made me feel pretty uncomfortable.

Speaker 5 And I'm glad that we can move away from that and I'm just have to feel like that literally all the time because everybody is streaming everything all the time on their face.

Speaker 5 Exactly, and that way we don't have to feel like that.

Speaker 5 The problem is the transition. Like, I'm not being recorded, I am being recorded.
If I'm just always being recorded, I'm always in fear. Yeah, like I can always.

Speaker 5 I'm constantly like a low-buzzing fear. Yeah, that sounds really good.
I'm realizing that in this context here, I was meant to like sell you on this, and you're

Speaker 5 and that's a great argument. It seems like a half.

Speaker 3 You guys know that my gut is filled with like gears and critters, right? It's just filled with gears gears and wheels.

Speaker 5 And I recently started mixing in these little AG1 packs into my water because, you know, they have like vitamins and probiotics.

Speaker 5 Yeah, but I just liked it for the taste, if I'm being honest with you.

Speaker 3 But then I've been gear-free. It got rid of all the gears and critters inside of me, which I think, but

Speaker 8 to be honest, it's mostly about the taste. Like I take the gears back any day to just keep trying out.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you get immune health support, but this is really good. And that's not even a bit.
I don't know. I I don't have a funny way of presenting.
It's just very funny. No, I'm not joking.

Speaker 3 I have been drinking it for like two weeks.

Speaker 5 You are joking because you don't have actual gears inside me.

Speaker 3 And I actually have gears inside me. I don't know.
Look, I've looked in there, okay? I've taken a peek.

Speaker 5 Look, all I'm saying is AG1 now has their best offer ever.

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Speaker 2 Cheers.

Speaker 3 Cheers.

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Speaker 9 Los preces el promosión pueden en sermenores que los de las comidas.

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Speaker 5 I mean, so I mean, you guys should really check out Lover's Car Rings. It's like a a good song.

Speaker 5 It's by far the least interesting part of that whole presentation.

Speaker 5 So I think the actual question 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.

Speaker 5 Do you think there's a realistic future here where 10 years from now, this or 20 years from now, this is a mainstream

Speaker 5 technology that is competing with phones? Absolutely is. Yeah.
I mean, I think just for the kind of camera and streaming technology, it'll be fairly popular.

Speaker 5 And like, I don't know if you guys saw MKHB,

Speaker 5 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, Perry, you can pull this up and have like a HUD over your

Speaker 5 HUD like while you're watching. And like, so the, on the television.
Can you pause here? Do you see a light blinking? So I bought the the meta smart glasses, not the latest ones.

Speaker 5 It was these aren't on, these aren't on sale yet.

Speaker 5 These are like, but this is going to be essentially, it seems like meta is about to make the leap from the glasses right now, which just have a light and they can take pictures, but the glasses themselves don't have anything on them.

Speaker 5 Like you're ultimately wearing glasses with a camera on the side, whereas the Google Glass has this thing over your eye like a sci-fi villain. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 And so this product, and you can look, you know, MKHB is weights, smart glasses are suddenly good. It's like he is essentially going, this is the leap.

Speaker 5 This is what it was promised to be all that time ago and it looks i wouldn't say cool but way cooler than 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 them for a few months and i

Speaker 5 uh

Speaker 5 anytime that light flashes it is like you're wearing google glasses it is extremely uncomfortable for everyone else in the room. It becomes very noticeable and awkward.

Speaker 5 And so I heard some people are hacking them to remove the light, but that in itself is very unethical. Yeah.
Because now, you know what I'm saying? Now you're recording people surreptitiously.

Speaker 5 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. And I did wear them playing basketball and get some fun highlight.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 this fell out of use for me really quickly. And I don't know that a HUD would change it so dramatically.

Speaker 5 I do think there's some potential here. Clearly, they're selling.
They're selling a lot better than Glass ever did.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 But it's the idea of the recording and the social stigma of anyone realizing that you have this on. it's, it, it's, applies to regular clothes too.

Speaker 5 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 don't know, it's just uncomfortable.

Speaker 5 People just look at you like it's noticeable and it's awkward. And then additionally, it's like, uh,

Speaker 5 you mentioned this in your presentation, but like, it's just not more useful than a phone. And so I, I don't, well, I don't think it needs to replace the phone.

Speaker 5 It's in the same way that, did you know that AirPods is bigger than McDonald's, Netflix, and Nvidia combined? That's so, yeah. I mean, maybe you're right.

Speaker 5 And so, I think it's an accessory in the same like complimentary. Like, you go to any tourist place, right? People are walking around with their fucking phone or a concert, whatever.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Yeah, the music is awesome. The conducting music or whatever was incredible.
Like it literally no one around you can hear.

Speaker 5 And I'm listening to music with that 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.

Speaker 5 I think it, I think it has the, in the even the short term, a potential to replace the accessories, the tech accessories. It can replace AirPods and replace the Apple Watch.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I mean, Google Glass, 2 million is a lot. Super bad.
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.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think that's pretty. I mean, people clearly are in a more social recording era.
People want to be able to like.

Speaker 5 get their POV and more things for Instagram or what like 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.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 a crowd POV shot of a concert, yeah. And I think it's just it would be good because I'll watch it a lot after, like, I'll probably watch it a bunch, even though I've recorded it.

Speaker 5 And then, and then, most the demand online must be crazy. Have you guys ever actually gone and watched a video where you're like, I should probably record this just so I have it in the future?

Speaker 5 Like, of a concert or a video or a speech at a wedding, or like literally never, ever, ever, over now.

Speaker 5 But now we can just have it all the time. But yeah, so Google Glass is great.

Speaker 5 Thank you, thank you. No, so I'm bringing back Google Glass.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 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 problems.
Hold on.

Speaker 5 I've got something. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to change the future of entertainment.
In the past, people watched shows

Speaker 5 like this on a big, ugly screen. Today is the future.
People don't want to watch Liam Hemsworth news show, The Most Dangerous Game, like this. They want to watch it

Speaker 5 like this.

Speaker 5 Ladies and gentlemen, introducing

Speaker 5 Quibby.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It's very high. Now,

Speaker 5 this gets the attention of Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman. You know them.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, he is an executive at Disney. He did the Disney renaissance of animation.

Speaker 5 He founded Dreamsworks with Steven Spielberg, Meg Whitman, founded eBay. Let's ignore their many failures after those roles.

Speaker 5 But these guys.

Speaker 5 come together and they say, we're going to make a mobile only media company.

Speaker 5 And because they have such incredible, incredible reputation in the Hollywood industry and the tech industry, 2019, they start fundraising. They raised $1 billion.

Speaker 5 I'm so locked in right now, Doug, sir,

Speaker 5 Doug Jobs.

Speaker 5 But I was wondering if you could put the presentation on the TV.

Speaker 5 So I'm sorry. Is this

Speaker 5 idea? It's a sorry. Why do you have revolutionary features?

Speaker 5 Ian Hemsworth. What is that? Audio listeners, Doug is presenting his entire thing on a small mobile device from a distance.
And I'm locked in, Aiden. Okay.

Speaker 5 This is the future.

Speaker 5 What's going to make this so different?

Speaker 5 Not only do we go to all of the Hollywood executives and we get huge AAA celebrities like Kevin Hart and Liam Hemsworth and Jennifer Lopez and literally everybody who's crazy who spent a billion dollars on shows, right?

Speaker 5 We come up with technology where you're watching something and then you can do this.

Speaker 5 You can turn it vertical and watch the same show vertical. Quibby is going to to revolutionize things, not only because of that, but because it's quick bites.
We

Speaker 5 every show has 10-minute episodes and they commissioned 175 new shows for their launch year. This is going to be crazy.
Everybody's on board. This sounds huge.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And so COVID starts on February 2020 let's say that's when lockdowns happen and oops uh quibby is actually going to launch in april of 2020 and i don't know if you can let me turn it i do see a big

Speaker 5 that looks good we turn it like

Speaker 5 as you can see quibby does extraordinarily bad this product absolutely flops probably a lot of you guys remember how many youtubers and shows and stuff were promoting quibby but this is literally like two months into the pandemic 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

Speaker 5 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 covet it was unfortunate timing He states this in multiple interviews, and it's because of COVID that people do not like to watch content on their phone.

Speaker 5 I was like, all they did was watch content on their phone. There's some weird coincidence where TikTok and YouTube and Netflix and every other media conglomerate did phenomenally well.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 All of it, 100% of them. Yeah, phones are dead.

Speaker 5 Nobody was using it. Nobody used the phones.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 They had to add that three months in because it was failing so badly.

Speaker 5 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 every iPad block.

Speaker 5 So it's both vertical and horizontal. And then you're watching the.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 sadly,

Speaker 5 Quibi failed

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It was COVID. And gentlemen, we could literally buy the rights to Quibi.
A year later, they went to Roku

Speaker 5 for, we don't know the exact amount, under $100 million.

Speaker 5 Roku has since relinquished the rights because all the shows hit so bad. We could pick up Quibi.
And we could revitalize this thing. Now that COVID's over, I think we got a shot.

Speaker 5 Yes, that was the only thing stopping it.

Speaker 5 I've got a little cash laying around. Gold 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? Six months.

Speaker 5 So they launch in April of 2020.

Speaker 5 The first day, they 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.

Speaker 5 That's like at their launch, and then it's all going wrong.

Speaker 5 Again, the quote from Jeffrey Katzberg: I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus it's just so insane it's the greatest like thing they could have asked for it's the the most beneficial possible thing the old yes it's a gigantic lifeline and after six months in october quibby shuts down and then roku buys them in 2021 dude like every other online content service did gangbusters they did so well 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 megman

Speaker 5 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 uh in a big there's an excellent book about this called disney war that i recommend a lot but he then left started dreamworks like makes dream works it gets academy awards and then the dude is wildly successful and just completely missed on this thing.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And then she's just gone onto this string of failures. She's like Yahoo, right? She like fucking bombed.

Speaker 5 Don't think Yahoo, not to my knowledge. Meg Whitman not a Yahoo? I think you're thinking of a different person.

Speaker 5 She ran for the governor of California. She goes HP.
I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, she goes to HP.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 She runs for the governor of California and as like a kind of hardline Republican and is a big like anti-immigration, anti-illegal immigrants kind of stance.

Speaker 5 And then there's a big controversy when it turns out she's been paying like a housekeeper who's illegal for nine years. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 5 And then she goes to Hewlett-Packard, becomes CEO, splits the company into two parts. Her half fails.
The other half does really well. Then she goes to Quibby, fails horrifically.

Speaker 5 But happy news for Meg Whitman. She is now the U.S.
ambassador to kenya for some reason

Speaker 5 i have no idea

Speaker 5 about her life i know i want to watch a quick bite

Speaker 5 actually excuse me joe biden appointed her midway through his term and unfortunately joe uh donald trump did not have meg whitman continue to represent us in kenya a lost opportunity i have a confession uh because i do remember the ads behind this at the time and making fun of it.

Speaker 5 It's like unbelievable star power. They, I mean, mean, it was like massive celebrities and doing like their own shows, like original stuff.
It's crazy. Like Kevin Hart was like diehart, right?

Speaker 5 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...

Speaker 5 uh like it i was at esl doing esports and they hit us up and we're like we just need content for quibby a bunch of like video game journalist websites made quiet they were just everybody was making quibby content and it just everybody was making quibby yeah but it was all crap right my understanding is like it was all crap nobody liked it yeah

Speaker 5 there's basically no shows from that at all there was no killer app of a show everyone had a watch you were putting out marketing monday on quibby i would put that on quibby baby i i thought that they had successfully pivoted this company or turned it into something somewhat viable because i thought tubi was the same thing

Speaker 5 no

Speaker 5 i i thought tubi because i had just been hearing about it and joking about it

Speaker 5 this year

Speaker 5 and then in my head i was like oh, yeah, Tuvi, that like company that did short form, like weird, short form, mobile-only video a few years ago.

Speaker 5 They must have spun it off. What's weird is like Quibi must have been uniquely fucking stupid and bad because

Speaker 5 short form, even vertical video is actually starting to take off.

Speaker 5 Not just like what you'd think of with wheels and stuff, but like there's Chinese companies that are making Quibi style short form micro dramas that are like 10 minutes long.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's the exact same pitch. And it's huge.
It's huge in America. It's huge in China.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It's like, if you ever seen Dar Man, 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 One thing I do remember from when this came out, and you can tell me this is way bemery, but like it, the app took over your phone. So when you're watching a Quibi, you couldn't do anything else.

Speaker 5 So you're watching this stupid.

Speaker 5 Why would you want to do anything else?

Speaker 5 If you're watching slop content, the normal thing you do is take out your phone and you scroll while you're watching it.

Speaker 5 But Quibi required you to have your phone entirely focused on watching Chance the Rapper do punked.

Speaker 5 Nobody has ever sat down and actually watched Emily in Paris. Nobody's done that.

Speaker 5 Some say it's impossible.

Speaker 5 What's funny now, I went and watched a little bit of the one I said, the most dangerous game with Liam Hemsworth.

Speaker 5 All the shots are just like, there's just a lot of room on the sides.

Speaker 5 Because again,

Speaker 5 that was the whole thing. Like every single show needed to be shot so you can turn it vertical.
It's just like, dude, this is,

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 how uh

Speaker 5 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 does extraordinarily well during this time, right?

Speaker 5 And it's, how do you contend those two things? I don't know.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 You launch the product during COVID. It becomes successful, but most people are just watching on TV regular.

Speaker 5 Big blank space on every fucking shot.

Speaker 5 Is there even a way to go watch the content now? Like, I imagine. Yeah, so the shows have like dispersed into different areas.

Speaker 5 So some of them, for example, the one I looked at, you can watch for free on Amazon Prime. The most dangerous game featuring

Speaker 5 Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz. Can I still watch it the old-fashioned way? The way I'm doing it.

Speaker 5 The way I looked. The way the only one wanted me to watch.
I know. I have to watch this ridiculous widescreen sound with this tiny vertical phone.
This is unbelievable.

Speaker 5 I even tried to turn my laptop like this, and it wouldn't work.

Speaker 5 Okay. That's Quibby.
Okay. Well, Quibby, it's just, we've had such an all-star lineup, and it's hard to pick

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 dude this bit of us spending money makes no these are so bad and unpurchasable

Speaker 5 we have to make the bit somehow connect to this again technically we could probably literally buy the rights to a quibby show i literally think we should do that okay if it's under

Speaker 5 a thousand dollars okay that's a bit all right that's a bit much

Speaker 5 I think the amount of effort of lawyers it would take

Speaker 5 enough money we buy the quibby show and then just upload it to patreon okay you know what will be interesting i I legitimately

Speaker 5 in 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.

Speaker 5 They had a million. Hold on.
You said they peaked at a million subscribers. That's still pretty crazy.
They had 1.2 million per second.

Speaker 5 They spent

Speaker 5 a billion dollars. Yeah, but that's better than YouTube ads.
Do you know how much we get a million like, I don't know. That's just, that's still insane.
That's better than YouTube ads.

Speaker 5 That's, that's, it's 175 shows. It's a billion dollars.
It's all daylight celebrities. You know what's better than that?

Speaker 5 Oh, 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.

Speaker 5 Anyway.

Speaker 5 We love smartphones, don't we, folks?

Speaker 5 We have keep coming back to how much we love smartphones and don't want to replace them. We're taking down everything else because we love smartphones.

Speaker 5 But sometimes they do too much.

Speaker 5 You know, there's too many apps. There's too many distractions.
You're trying to be social, but you're stuck doing work.

Speaker 5 What if a company could strip all that away in the year 2012?

Speaker 5 Well, after smartphones are a thing, and create a device purely for the social generation, aka what they called, can you pull my screen up?

Speaker 5 Generation upload. This is

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And they said, we need to make a phone just for that. So they created the Microsoft Kin.
Now, there's two versions of the Microsoft Kin.

Speaker 5 One, the Kin one, 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.

Speaker 5 Wait, is this, this is two different models? It's not the same. It's two different models.
It's a phone that you slide out. No, no, no.
This is is a different.

Speaker 5 I mean, this might be the slide, but there is two different. There's a kin one which is a small clamshell and a kin two, which is a bigger.
Wait, what year is this?

Speaker 5 2010 when it first launched, 2012 by the time it shut down. Okay.
So this is also around the time that Android is a thing. Yep.
So I know. Android is a thing.

Speaker 5 Also, separately, a Windows phone is being developed that is entirely different OS and design than this. Yeah, yeah.
So the Microsoft launches this.

Speaker 5 And some unique things about it. Zero calendar app of any sort on the phone.
You cannot track the date or time at all. Good.
It helps you disconnect.

Speaker 5 No contact list.

Speaker 5 It helps you disconnect.

Speaker 5 No ability to sync with your Outlook calendar or Google Calendar.

Speaker 5 Unable to instant message or use any IM clients, including at the time very popular Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It's also priced equivalent to a premium iphone and requires you to pay a thirty dollar a month uh 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 app on or not an app i'm sorry there is no apps on this phone

Speaker 5 This phone decided that apps were not a thing. There's no app store.
You can't download or add anything. There's only software that Microsoft has already created.
That's the only thing you can use.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 If any of those social networks update their software at all, those services will be out of use until Microsoft fixed their API update.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And additionally, Microsoft Spot, to save them costs, would only update with the internet every 15 minutes.

Speaker 5 You might post, you couldn't actually post a tweet. That wasn't one of their features.

Speaker 5 You might 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.

Speaker 5 It is like one of the worst design products I've ever seen.

Speaker 5 Microsoft Cana, a true true disaster it lasted 48 days on the market wow and they spent quite a bit of money on this and then it was pulled off it's like it's why it's such a big failure it's like we've heard of google glass because it's a failure but it's like a bit a big way this was such a failure that like people don't even

Speaker 5 heard of i before you brought it up for this yeah i had never heard of it like you've heard of the zoom the zoom was like the same time it's a similar design philosophy at microsoft was this and the zoom but people kind of knew about the zoom because the zune sold more than people think.

Speaker 5 Yes. Yeah.
My brother had a Zoom. He loved his Zune.
Like it, it did what it needed to do. This was a disaster.

Speaker 5 And I think I didn't fully understand this, but apparently there's a lot of infighting at Microsoft between the Windows team, Windows phone team, and this that sabotaged it.

Speaker 5 So it like was dead from arrival. So yeah, I don't think we should invest in this one.

Speaker 5 I don't know. Let's get back to this.

Speaker 5 What's on?

Speaker 5 You haven't seen the Quibi shows.

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Speaker 5 i have a question for you too either of you like uh like juice oh

Speaker 5 oh i like me some juice i just the problem with juice is it takes so much work right to get the juice kind of prepared and squeezed into a mug

Speaker 5 the tesla of juicers oh that sounds pretty nice doesn't it so what what is it? Kind of like the Tesla we saw at the end of the. I'm not clear, like a beautiful cyber character.

Speaker 5 Self-driving the juicer? Self-driving? Self-juicing? Silicon Valley has saved you, Doug, because they came out and made the juicer for everyone. Juicero.

Speaker 5 A

Speaker 5 $700

Speaker 5 juicing machine that could squeeze proprietary bags of

Speaker 5 fruits or vegetables that you put in the machine and had to to buy for a subscription

Speaker 5 and make one cup of juice each. Nice.
Fucking love juicero. And it's such a fun.
I have it up here if you want to pull up. And then there's a

Speaker 5 so this product is it's kind of insane at the surface level, right?

Speaker 5 Juicer that can only squeeze these bags, these bags of juice that you also have to buy from the same company.

Speaker 5 Each bag is $5 to $8 each, and you have to pay a monthly subscription to receive them.

Speaker 5 and then you pick your flavors they arrive in the mail this is back when i was this is five to seven dollars is completely insane for a drink yeah yeah this is in 2017 okay 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 dollars for this juicer company and uh while they initially priced at 700 they quickly caved i think within a few months dropping the price to just four hundred

Speaker 5 Well, that's a steal.

Speaker 5 And this thing had features like, ah, you could connect it to Wi-Fi and operate it remotely. Thank God.

Speaker 5 But you still had to be there physically to put

Speaker 5 the juice back in.

Speaker 5 And then they had a bunch of celebrities back in the product, you know, Kobe Bryant, Oprah, Ivanka Trump. And

Speaker 5 Kobe pushed the juicero.

Speaker 5 Kobe Bryant pushed it. Kobe, God bless him.
Kobe. Pushed it.

Speaker 5 I'll I'll buy one. I'll buy one.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 the real blow to the juicer's reputation was

Speaker 5 it was supposed to like perfectly squeeze the proprietary bag to give you the maximum amount of fresh juice possible or whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And then

Speaker 5 Bloomberg publishes an article and a video of someone buying the bags at Bloomberg and just squeezing them by damn.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And so you could 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.

Speaker 5 At 334, this is an interview that the Doug Evans who was the like founder and CEO of the company who had raised the money this was his response in this video I remember seeing this years ago I loved this video

Speaker 7 either in the home or in offices or in stadiums and theaters I mean we had the best investors in the world we had Google Ventures we had Kleiner Perkins we had Campbell soup why do you think people are wrong when they say drucero is the embodiment of silicon valley excess they because they they 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

Speaker 7 over time. So they just got stuck on a narrative.

Speaker 6 What do you think the media got wrong about Juicero?

Speaker 7 Everything.

Speaker 7 They just had no clue.

Speaker 3 Tell me more.

Speaker 7 I mean,

Speaker 7 it's not even worth.

Speaker 5 I'm done.

Speaker 7 I'm not going to talk about it.

Speaker 5 What did they misunderstand about? Everything.

Speaker 7 William, William, I'm done.

Speaker 5 Next.

Speaker 5 You're not going to tie them up. No, yeah.
No.

Speaker 7 We're done with Juicera. No Juicera.
No more Juicera. I'm going to count to three, and

Speaker 7 I'm going to walk away.

Speaker 5 This video, Vice News put this out a few years ago.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 The CEO who ran an organic health food store in new york for a while and then managed to raise 120 million dollars 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

Speaker 5 and then 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

Speaker 5 and they're filling jugs of water from the pipe.

Speaker 5 And this is like, yeah, this is what we drink. It's natural water.

Speaker 5 From a pipe.

Speaker 5 From a natural pipe. That's it.
Natural thing.

Speaker 5 It's from a pipe, but I think the pipe might be, you know, in the, you know, in forests where they have like pipes that go through the ground and help like drain water out of the water.

Speaker 5 How can you ever like

Speaker 5 buy him? My filling from Burning Man and I are going to get raw water. And he's like, there's no Silicon Valley excess.

Speaker 5 What are you talking about? Doug Evans. And so he clearly, this was a few years ago, ago, but still was a little bitter on how he says, quote, Juicero was killed in the first inning

Speaker 5 and there were eight more innings to go. I think that Bloomberg video talking about is one of the greatest pieces of tech journalism.

Speaker 5 It was put out in the background.

Speaker 5 It's just a one-minute video that says, here's the Deucero. When it launched, it costs $700.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And there's just like it's the most like irrefutable, there's no defense against this. Oh, it could squeeze it with up to four tons of force.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I was, I was just impressed that they managed to make it in a year and a half. It's not even squeezing very hard.
Oh, my God, it's so funny.

Speaker 5 That's such a funny thing. Shout out to it.

Speaker 5 It's literally faster than the juicer. Oh, my God.
I think the juice probably tasted good. So funny.
Oh, I do like the idea of becoming such a big fan of the taste that you just buy the packs. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Dude, I mean, maybe they could have been the business. The juice pack delivery service is not the most insane thing.

Speaker 5 Things like that do exist. Yeah.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 $700 is so tight, dude. It just squeezes it.
That's like two PlayStations at a time.

Speaker 5 Okay. It's like not that hard to get juice.

Speaker 5 I don't know. So what do you if you're going to pay $7.

Speaker 5 What I got, actually, it actually connects to Jucero very strangely.

Speaker 5 So I want to tell you guys about a little console you might have heard of called Ouya. Okay.

Speaker 5 Ooya launched.

Speaker 5 I heard about Ouya. It's so long.
I know. Ooh launched in

Speaker 5 crap, I believe 2012. Yeah, yeah, it's 2012.
So middle of 2012, a lot of these products are on the same timeframe. It seems like people are just trying like weird hardware.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Now, back then, this is still of an era for you young kids where you don't just have video games everywhere all the time. We had like early shitty mobile games on our phone.

Speaker 5 And, you know, and some were starting to get good, but, you know, it's like endless runners.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's like Temple Run, right? These aren't like great games. Everybody's playing Temple Run.
It's like my doctor was playing Temple Run.

Speaker 5 My teachers were playing temple round triple town i was looking back at the old games i was like ah they're worse than banger games back then this was great uh this that's when um what's the monument valley came out

Speaker 5 anyways So this pitch comes out at a time where, you know, we're still in the PS3, Xbox, 360. It's like just progressing the next one.
And

Speaker 5 they pitch $100 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.

Speaker 5 We're going to have this amazing controller controller designed by this dude here, who's this like super famous Swiss designer. I don't know how to say his name, Yves

Speaker 5 Biar, something like that. Hey, you're a boy.
Yves. You know how to say it?

Speaker 5 So this comes out. They're like, we got a sick team.
We got a sick controller. The console is working.
It's live. You can buy it.
It's going to come out in a year. I was stoked about this.

Speaker 5 I was like, damn, this sounds cool. Did you kickstart this? I didn't kickstart it, but the Kickstarter happens.
They needed $950,000 to do it. They raised $8.5 million.

Speaker 5 And for those who remember, this is right around the time that Kickstarter first started becoming a thing.

Speaker 5 And so this was not only like, you know, Tech Valley silliness, it also was like a Kickstarter where people are going, oh my God, this is going to be the next big thing. So

Speaker 5 they launched this. And

Speaker 5 turns out it's not very good. It's really like not that much to say on it other than this came out and everybody sort of went, okay, hold on.
The games on here suck ass. These are cheap Android ports.

Speaker 5 The thing is incredibly slow. It's not a good, like it takes super long for anything to load.
You talked about how you have 500 games to play.

Speaker 5 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.
And this is what they're going to do.

Speaker 5 And the controller that they kept saying, this is one of our big things. Our award-winning designer, Yves Bahar,

Speaker 5 in his firm Fuse Project, you know, he's designed the controller and it's incredible.

Speaker 5 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 yves just spilled a bit of beer in it before he shifted to you

Speaker 5 um i decided to

Speaker 5 buy one back in 2013 and bought an ouya i bought an ouya this is my senior year of college hell yeah and i bought one i was like you know this would be fun like i do i have a i was doing an internship i was like i have a little money let me like buy this thing.

Speaker 5 It'll probably be fun. It was a year after it came out.
So you were well aware that this is not.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And I was like, this seems fun, like 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. So I order it.

Speaker 5 And they don't send me a tracking number. And they don't.
send me any information. So I actually looked through my emails yesterday.
From July 22nd, Douglas Reed. this is to Oya support.

Speaker 5 I expect a full refund for my Ouya order.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I would like a refund for my purchase.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And I will be doing whatever is necessary to make sure that my money is returned to me. Thank you for the help.

Speaker 5 And then one day later, it got delivered.

Speaker 5 So, you know, not too much to say here. This was, as a console is all hyped up.
It was like, ooh, a micro console. This would be cool.

Speaker 5 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 can do this.

Speaker 5 This is everything far, far better. So it all kind of failed.

Speaker 5 It lasted for a year or two. Eventually, they were bought by Razor randomly, who kind of scrapped them for parts.

Speaker 5 And then in terms of where everybody went the kind of lead co-founder of or lead founder of this she it kind of petered away but now runs a soccer team in Los Angeles so you know good good for her

Speaker 5 and that famous designer went on to make the juicero you're you're not kidding you went from the ouya to the juicer 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.

Speaker 5 Dog shit controller. Maybe it was sticky because he kept spelling juice in it.

Speaker 5 It's like, oh, there's a machine that could make my juice superly. I'm squeezing it too tight.
Yeah, he's

Speaker 5 one hand on the juice packet, the other on the controller.

Speaker 5 This shit is wild.

Speaker 5 Controlled squeeze. Massive, massive, massive failure.
And if I look at my timeline real briefly,

Speaker 5 yeah, dude, so not the craziest story, but a nice little funny thing,

Speaker 5 that era. Oh, sorry.
You got one? Oh, 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?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Even though there was a lot of flops like that, like the Ouya, there was like the Nokia, like the early mobile internet.

Speaker 5 A lot of weird

Speaker 5 stuff was being tried. Weird hardware was getting, everyone wanted to have like a piece of of that pie.

Speaker 5 I remember, I'm not going to mention this one, but the Nokia Engage was like a Game Boy competitor. Do you remember that? It was like a phone/slash Game Boy, huge flop.
And in fact, it is the

Speaker 5 second worst performing console of all time, the Nokia Engage, of a certain disagree of size from a major company.

Speaker 5 But the worst performing console of all time, if you could pull it up, Perry, is the Nintendo Virtual Boy.

Speaker 5 Now, I've heard about this, and I've never learned the details. I'm curious.

Speaker 5 I want to give you some of the details, Doug, because nowadays people see him wearing the new Apple Vision Pro or Google Glass. Or Google Glass in some way.
It's a step, it's a continuum.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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. Number one was that it wasn't even a headset.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Secondly, to save money on the LEDs in it in 1995, they only used red ones.

Speaker 5 Nice. Yes.

Speaker 5 You are pressing your face. This is Mario tennis.
I was going to say that looks like tennis. A red, all-red world.
Reviews. You're describing like a black mirror episode, not a fun product.

Speaker 5 So, reviews describe it as playing tennis in hell

Speaker 5 because it's just this all black and red dystopian. Now, this is unironically what we should put our goal towards.
Let's get a virtual boy and let's play it on this podcast.

Speaker 5 Let's do a Patreon episode where 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.

Speaker 5 Oh, so I was reading about it.

Speaker 5 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 doesn't because it truly was that bad man everything you use vr for nowadays people i 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.

Speaker 5 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. Let's villain chair.
What about that 20%? They loved it.

Speaker 5 Okay, okay. There we go.

Speaker 5 One in five guys a loving virtual boy, Mario Tennis.

Speaker 5 So I forget this guy's name.

Speaker 5 Shigeru Miyamoto. No, he's actually his boss.
He's his mentor. I'm not going to give his name.
This guy is a Nintendo legend.

Speaker 5 One of the earliest engineers in Nintendo, created the Game Boy, created the Game and Watch, inspired Miyamoto. He

Speaker 5 spearheaded the Virtual Bed products. They forced him to release it early because they needed something between the SNES and the N64.
So he does.

Speaker 5 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 company.

Speaker 5 Even after all of the wins. All of the wins, he did this and he's gone from Nintendo.
You can have one virtual boy and then get back up on your feet. That's what you'd think.

Speaker 5 I don't know if Japan was too harsh on him or what, but he should be up there with me and mode like he is an inspiring legend nintendo and he's gone so that's that's the that's the virtual boy total flop i don't know if you have any questions or other gaming example i think i i learned about the virtual boy growing up because of nintendo power magazine and it was a punch the glove they had the glove

Speaker 5 oh yeah the nes power glove nintendo has a bunch of crazy from back then that is really fun to just go and look up They've always been fucking crazy with hard.

Speaker 5 I guess that's kind of, they throw out the weird shit so they get the Switch and the Wii, right? Yeah. yeah.
I mean, that's that's the other end of it, right?

Speaker 5 Is like them taking a big risk and trying something. I think I could have looked you in the eye in you know the 1980s, 90s, and told you that, hey, man, this isn't gonna work.

Speaker 5 Well, here's like, I could have gotten that across. Do you think it could replace phones?

Speaker 5 So that was my problem with the Apple Vision Pro was that it showed me all the regular colors that I see on today. Like

Speaker 5 me going, me going to

Speaker 5 Tom, Tim Cook, going to Tim Cook,

Speaker 5 And just be like, what if it was all red? There's just too much blue, too much green. But

Speaker 5 my last example is a gaming one as well.

Speaker 5 The Google Stadia,

Speaker 5 which is a little more recent.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 a loser.

Speaker 5 and oh, you're gonna love the reason so that he could get the gamer tag that he wanted.

Speaker 5 Because, like, as soon as a gamer tag is chosen, the cringiest thing I've ever heard, Nick, he's not gonna watch it, but

Speaker 5 so he wanted to make sure he could get the tag before it was taken.

Speaker 5 Let me give Google a $300 founder's edition so I can make sure I get Falco on stadia. Fuck you, fuck you.

Speaker 5 So, what is this commercial? So, Stadia, the appeal.

Speaker 5 Also, who is is it? That's Reggie

Speaker 5 Fisa May? No, no, no. That'll be that.
He's a commercial. Reggie Watts? Reggie Watts.
Reggie Watts.

Speaker 5 Reggie Watts and Hasme Gold? This is like an Asmin Gold knock. Okay, so

Speaker 5 the appeal of the Stadia was that it was going to be a cloud gaming service.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 to you, and you would pay a monthly subscription fee, presumably for access to a database of available games.

Speaker 5 And no one, people had talked about cloud gaming, but I don't think anybody had really

Speaker 5 poured a bunch of money or had

Speaker 5 had a had a true offer on the table. Like Google.
They were starting to come out around this time, right? But Google is like the powerhouse that's expected to do this well for us. That's what it was.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah. That's what the announcement was.
Have to have a look at when PlayStation did theirs because they came out with one that was pretty good. Anyway, sorry.

Speaker 5 And they

Speaker 5 announced this.

Speaker 5 And then on day one,

Speaker 5 the available product is the founder's edition, the one that Nick bought, which includes

Speaker 5 the controller that they're selling and also

Speaker 5 the Google Chromecast model model that you need to use to like 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 yeah 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 it like a console right still not particularly expensive um and also included in that was three months of the subscription service that you needed to access and and use the service.

Speaker 5 Right, right. But what users quickly realized

Speaker 5 is that you still had to pay full price for games.

Speaker 5 Only a small pool of like 22 games were available through the subscription service. And most of the core like AAA titles that you would want to play via the Sadia were not available that way.

Speaker 5 And you just had to buy them outright still. So already a bit of a disagreement in like, oh, I expect this to be different.
Because that does match up with what Xbox or PlayStation do, kind of, right?

Speaker 5 You have to pay a week, you know,

Speaker 5 I would genuinely say not that bad still. Okay.

Speaker 5 But, but, upon the we arrive at the launch day, similar to your customer experience with OYA, a bunch of people don't actually get the products in the mail that they need to play. So it's launch day

Speaker 5 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 is sent in tandem with the package that you have.

Speaker 5 Oh, you need the mail to do that. So there's a bunch of,

Speaker 5 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.
So you can't play on day one.

Speaker 5 You've got to be careful not to let too many customers use the product they paid for. What is the reason?

Speaker 5 I'm flum lost. And eventually, you know, within that first week, delayed packages, stuff starts arriving.
But now people actually have the product.

Speaker 5 And the number one you know, problem with cloud gaming is that it's so reliant on what internet you have available to you.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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, that is being used, right?

Speaker 5 So it's just your inputs are still being like put into the game without you being able to see it. Creates this really choppy, horrific experience.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 A bunch of the games weren't actually being run at that resolution.

Speaker 5 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 streaming a 4K feed of a 1080p game.

Speaker 5 The game is playing in 1080p, and they're just giving you a 4K feed of that. It's just so fucking slimy.
Way unnecessary amounts of data for no reason.

Speaker 5 Yeah, just to, just to 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.

Speaker 5 Most people's experiences playing are just really, really bad. And then this

Speaker 5 launched in 2019, like I said, and it manages to run for a few years.

Speaker 5 And then in September 2022, Google announces that they were shutting down the program with it completely going offline in January of 2023.

Speaker 5 And then also everybody that bought the controller got like anybody who bought it got refunded for the equipment that they bought.

Speaker 5 And then also they pushed a software update that allowed the controller to be compatible with like all devices. That's nice.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And I would walk into his room or his office, and there's just a shelf where the stadia stadia sits and never got used. And Nick got his username.
He digitally got shit. This happened in 2023.

Speaker 5 Nobody took that from him. Wow.
Good, good buying. So let's be clear.
Google did take that. It's not in the servers anymore.

Speaker 5 I remember this very vividly because I was working at NVIDIA at the time and NVIDIA has a competitor called GeForce Now. Yeah.
And I did some marketing for that on that team for a bit.

Speaker 5 And the big three was Stadia, which we thought was going to be the dominant one, Amazon Luna,

Speaker 5 and then NVIDIA GeForce Now, and they all Amazon had one called Luna.

Speaker 5 And I tested, I don't remember if I played Luna or Stadia, but I tried this game, Deus Ex Human Revolution, and I tested it on Luna or Stadia.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Nobody could play a game comfortably. And that's you in what, San Francisco, right?

Speaker 5 In San Jose. So, okay.
okay, so it's not like you have dog shit. You're not out in the rural world.
No, we had great internet. I was at the corporate office.
Like, it was just bad.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I though I do think if we had to buy one that would like the idea makes sense, this will be big. Yeah, eventually, it could be good enough.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Like, there's no point owning a gaming bc if you can stream 4k hd anywhere there's just no point like it

Speaker 5 so but the technology isn't there yet it's just not yeah and it needs a bunch of internet upgrades as well yeah talking about especially in the us i can't get fiber in la let alone you know some of the things 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 the multiplayer doesn't work for 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.

Speaker 5 I remember playing it because I played some of their, I think, PS3 games on a PS4 because that was the only way to play them. And it worked decently well.
It was like not enjoyable latency.

Speaker 5 It was still better than a 2025 Nintendo game, but it was an actual cloud service. I thought that was just a subscription service to pay to play like a pool of games.

Speaker 5 No, it's 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

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Something similar to it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's

Speaker 5 Game Pass, but I don't know if that has anything to do with it. I think Game Pass has a cloud gaming component.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Because it can upscale and predict the next frame,

Speaker 5 it is the thing a lot like you can basically stream almost no data, like blocks, like a very, very low res thing.

Speaker 5 And then AI locally can upscale it and make it so that once this is advanced, you can actually do this technology.

Speaker 5 I don't know enough about either of these things to confirm, but this sounds vaguely like editing footage using proxies, like proxy. Right.
You know about that? I don't. I mean, they're sending a...

Speaker 5 Like, 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.

Speaker 5 And then the AI locally upscales it back to 4K by predicting what it looks like in 4K. Your example is if the AI didn't upscale it and you were just looking at low res footage,

Speaker 5 which is missing the entire

Speaker 5 premise. No, it's close.
It's close. It's probably close.
Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Speaker 5 Xbox has their own version of the game. It's just cloud.
And you can get that as part of

Speaker 5 Ultimate. Yes, Game Pass is huge.
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.

Speaker 5 And in the 1990s, Coors announced that they wanted to, they released a sparkling water.

Speaker 5 Coors the Coors the Beer Company. Coors the beer company.
And it was themed after, you know, the mountains in the background of Coors beers. And it's like cold Coors,

Speaker 5 sparkling water. Natural, raw water.
Raw stream.

Speaker 5 And the Juicero guys on this one, too.

Speaker 5 And the very basic

Speaker 5 water.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 But I think two cultural things have changed in that

Speaker 5 I think they have two directions they could re-announce or push this product through now,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 So I feel like that is maybe an approachable angle to bring it back. But just sparkling water in general is way more popular than it used to be.

Speaker 5 And they could re-announce this product into a market that is like more. I mean, liquid death did this, right? Liquid Death is kind of like people thought it was an alcohol.
It's a water.

Speaker 5 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. Of everything we've talked about.

Speaker 5 It's not my number one, but it was out of mine.

Speaker 5 Of everything we

Speaker 5 you would want to get into water. That you would

Speaker 5 lose the liquid selling water. What? That you would just lose the liquid down.
You don't think you can just make a competitor?

Speaker 5 Like, probably. You think the unique, the unique advantage you would have is having Coors do it? You're saying we'd bring out the Coors water.
No, no, no.

Speaker 5 I'm saying that of the things that I put time into,

Speaker 5 this feels the most viable to me, genuinely. It's just water.
That's what I'm saying. But people sell it.
I mean, think about this. Think about it.
People sell just water all the time.

Speaker 5 It's incredibly.

Speaker 5 No, you're right. It's just also just water.
You're just turning into the Juicero guy. Just water.
He's pivoting the raw water. No, no.
I wouldn't charge $700.

Speaker 5 But we're selling the water. I wouldn't charge $700.
Is it hand squeezed?

Speaker 5 Is it raw, hand squeezed water? It's hand squeezed, but it's not raw.

Speaker 5 Fresh, never frozen. Raw water.
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?

Speaker 5 Hand squeezed.

Speaker 5 You squeeze it by hand. You pay someone to come and squeeze it.
Yeah,

Speaker 5 yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 There's money there.

Speaker 5 Do you have any more? Okay, super quick bites.

Speaker 5 I went very quick by one too, but we can. Okay.
All right.

Speaker 5 Real quick check-in. How are NFTs doing? NFTs.
Great, great, great. Board 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.

Speaker 5 And that was in 2022. And unfortunately, they have dropped down to about $174 million in value.
Still too high. It's about, I believe, 4% of what they were originally worth.

Speaker 5 It is a picture of a fucking ugly looking money. How dare you, Jay Penny?

Speaker 5 This is the future. And anyone can see that profile pictures.
There's no

Speaker 5 crypto punks. Those have gone down about 76%.

Speaker 5 What shocked me about both of these, though, is like nobody really talks about NFTs anymore. Crypto Punks still selling every day,

Speaker 5 multiple times a day for $100,000. There's like wash trading.
People like set it up so it automatically goes back and forth to keep. Probably.
Yeah. These board apes are going for 18,000.

Speaker 5 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 and how it's,

Speaker 5 they all just. I quietly changed their profile picture back.
A bunch of, I had like several friends who either did crypto launches or were like, hey, everybody check out whatever Zany Tigers.

Speaker 5 And it's like, it was really kind of shocking to be like, really? You're really? Don't really? You believe in Zaney Tigers? It's going to bring us together.

Speaker 5 It's part of the community building of the internet.

Speaker 5 I know this guy. And

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Do you know about an NFT series called Just Rocks? Rocks. And it was one of the ones that blew up or something, right?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And he was traveling. He had been traveling Europe for like six months with his rock money.
Wow. And they were just hanging out with us in Italy on that trip.

Speaker 5 Dude, that's the best use of crypto I've ever heard.

Speaker 5 Wonder what happened. I would love to know what's happened to the guy who paid $2 million million for a rock.

Speaker 5 Yeah, the NFTs have not done well.

Speaker 5 I looked at some of the other

Speaker 5 successful ones that at least had a moment where people were going, this might be one of the big ones. Let's get into it.
MeBits was launched by the same as Crypto that's down.

Speaker 5 Yeah, like a really big, 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.

Speaker 5 It was an NFT.

Speaker 5 He bought an NFT picture of a digital apartment. No, no, it was like some, it was like my brother.
How much was it? No, it was you. Me? Yeah.
how much paper i believe i paid 950

Speaker 5 900 no no don't don't do that don't give him that no i i put 500 into doge but to me it was it was that's a bet on stupidity that might pay off like that's no no that's what i it was investment by you that's what i was doing i wasn't holding

Speaker 5 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 yeah and no state

Speaker 5 and he would go and he would go around

Speaker 5 the apartment it's going to change revolution he's not talking about

Speaker 5 Have I ever said anything even remotely close to that?

Speaker 5 From the day I bought it, I was like, I'm going to the casino and I'm trying to win. Remember it differently, but I wasn't like, I'm going to live in my apartment one day.

Speaker 5 You said, this is my family's future.

Speaker 5 My children will grow here. I don't understand why kids are talking about.
expensive housing. We've given them

Speaker 5 you can get it for $950. I can go move into mine anytime I want.
You know what's going on? Very last one?

Speaker 5 We don't need more NFTs. 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 He does a really smart analysis and he goes, okay, what is a 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.

Speaker 5 And he discovers books. What is a better product? What is a product that is, I'm sorry, yeah, well, whatever.
Yeah. What is this?

Speaker 5 You figured out what books were. No, but because books are, they're relatively lightweight, so you can ship them really easily and there's high margin.
They cost a lot more than that.

Speaker 5 So you can, it's a good business for what he's doing.

Speaker 5 What about a business where the product you're selling is really, really fucking heavy and really, really low margin, aka dog food?

Speaker 5 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 websites is very high?

Speaker 5 What if you lost a significant amount of money on every single sale?

Speaker 5 That's it. Acquisition strategy.
Had negative gross margins. Yeah.
Once you get like a high user base of dogs, then

Speaker 5 you can up the price.

Speaker 5 Theoretically, theoretically, you could do that.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 They're considered the most egregious example of the dot-com bubble.

Speaker 5 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 them to service so they failed spectacularly and they're like a kind of an example of the dot-com bubble they're the nfts of their day unironically i would buy pets.com i bet we should nowadays you can kind of do it right but we should we need to look at the pricing of pets.com i think we we blow the money on pets.com 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 the glowing opportunity in the book and ones we missed let us know but are you asking me or the audience i'm no i'm asking the audience if they have ones we missed and they want to let us know i was asking you guys

Speaker 5 oh you guys what we should pick oh

Speaker 5 i thought you were doing an outro

Speaker 5 i just wanted to know i want to get your question

Speaker 5 to ask your friend something he's like yeah let us know

Speaker 5 i do it my wife's talking to me and chat what do you think

Speaker 5 what do you think we should give her in her chat. What's she talking about? Dude, honestly, I'll just say a quick juicero.
It's one, it's the most egregiously stupid thing I've seen.

Speaker 5 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 technology, but it's just nothing about

Speaker 5 it makes no sense. It's juicero is so funny because if you get rid of the juicer, it's kind of a business.
Yes.

Speaker 5 Like, like the main thing

Speaker 5 is the juicero part. But if you just sold bags of squishy,

Speaker 5 you admit you kind of have an angle. You couldn't open the bags unless you had the machine.
They were like, it's for security purposes or whatever.

Speaker 5 It was just to make you have to use the. Yeah, you can't just buy the juice packets, by the way.

Speaker 5 Having the idea of your juice bag need Wi-Fi connected unlocking in order to access the juice is so insane.

Speaker 5 I literally, guys, I would go in on a juicer. I think we can find one online.
We We should have it on one in the back of it. In the lemonade station, we absolutely should buy a juicer.

Speaker 5 We're playing on money towards a juicero. Thank you for watching this week's episode of Lemonade Stand.
You can catch us soon on the Patreon episode this week.

Speaker 5 If you want to check that out, patreon.com slash lemonade stand. And we'll see you there.
And would actually love to let us know. I would love to hear.

Speaker 5 Do you have any other products we missed that are notable? Thank you so much. Bye.
Bye.

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