Where Did Tech's Magic Go? feat. Alex Cranz and Michael Fisher
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 688 Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2024
⏱️ 94 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a special live-to-tape episode of Better Offline, Ed is joined by The Verge's Alex Cranz and YouTube influencer Michael Fisher to talk about what they're actually enjoying in the tech industry - and why things don't feel quite as magical and exciting as they used to.
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMrMobile
https://www.theverge.com/authors/alex-cranz
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:06.7 | Hello and welcome to Better Offline. |
| 0:10.6 | I'm your host, Ed Zittron, otherwise known today as Woke Joe Rogan. |
| 0:24.5 | Better Online. Yeah. We are live. |
| 0:30.2 | We are live kind of from the IHartRadio studios in New York. |
| 0:35.6 | Today I am joined by Mr. Mobile himself, Michael Fisher, and of course, Alex Cranes from The Verge. |
| 0:36.3 | Thank you for coming. |
| 0:36.9 | Thanks for having us. I had to be here. Thanks for having us. So today is about where the magic's gone in tech. Got two great tech journalists with me and I myself have done some writing on tech, I guess. And the big thing, and this kind of started actually from a conversation between you and me, Michael, where it was about kind of like, what are we even |
| 0:54.8 | looking at in tech anymore? |
| 1:27.7 | Things aren't fun. Like, it feels like we've stopped getting. The most fun thing I have found is, I'm actually going to pull it out in my pocket, and there's no video, so you're never going to know. Like this anchor charger that's like 30 bucks. I mean, they're sick. That's a sick charger. Yeah, like battery packs are cool, but otherwise everything that comes out that's meant to be exciting, like the Humane Pin and the Rabbit R1, which obviously were bad from the beginning, sorry anyone who thought otherwise, you were wrong. And like the Daylight Tablet, which we'll get to, of course. These things just have turned out to be just not even fun. You can be kind of shitty but fun. |
| 1:30.3 | Like there's something you can look at. |
| 1:31.6 | Even some of the great tech failures like that weird frame that you could upload things |
| 1:35.8 | to from like 2015, like a few of these weird Indiegogo things. |
| 1:39.2 | There was a cute weirdness to it. |
| 1:41.2 | But now it's just almost just nothing. |
| 1:45.2 | There's a lot of reasons for that. There are. Yeah. I feel like there are like a lot of |
| 1:48.8 | compounding problems that have like that have deposited us here today. I will say that I think |
| 1:53.4 | that there are some of those examples you gave are still could have been fun. I think right. |
| 1:59.1 | I think rabbit is still trying to like salvage the situation and make itself. |
| 2:03.6 | But I mean, Humane, I think, you know, took a giant swing, which was this thing we've learned, I think, you shouldn't do at this point, which is try to replace the smartphone. |
| 2:12.9 | Call the smartphone, the enemy, and say, we're going to replace it with this wearable thing. |
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