Transcript 0:00 Daisy, you wouldn't download a car. [laughs] If you were an iPod, you couldn't rent one either 'cause the iPod does turn twenty-five years old this year. I'm allowing this. 0:10 [laughs] I want our listeners to know that this was an allowance. [laughs] [upbeat music] Yeah. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the iPod is part of why we're doing this episode. 0:25 Part of why we're doing this episode is due to the popularity of Molly Mary O'Brien's piece, "25 Years of iPod Brain," that she wrote for Dirt. I also think it's a time of transition for Apple. They have a new CEO. 0:39 They're sort of grappling with what it means to maintain status rather than continually breaking the mold, I guess you could say, in terms of new devices. 0:49 And at the time the iPod came out, it genuinely was groundbreaking. Apple hasn't put out something super groundbreaking in a while. I think a lot of people would agree. Yeah. 0:59 2001, the iPod comes out, and it's this revolutionary thing, 1,000 songs in your pocket, right? It's, like, such a form factor jump from the Walkman, where now you can have this compressed thing in your pocket. 1:10 You hadn't really been able to have that before. The iPod, by the end of 2014, had brought in around sixty-five billion dollars in cumulative revenue since release for Apple with four hundred million units sold. 1:24 But the annual sales figure reached a peak in 2008 with almost fifty-five million units sold, which constituted, at the time, forty percent of Apple's total revenue. 1:35 It's fair to say that the iPhone killed the iPod, but the iPhone wouldn't exist without the iPod. 1:42 It was a proof of concept for the desire to carry not only your music in your pocket but also tons of data, including, like, the entire internet. Mm-hmm. 1:54 And looking back at the iPod is also a great way to talk about the future of hardware, which is something that we have touched on in certain Tasteland episodes, but we've never really had a unified conversation about it in the same way we were able to have about the iPod through three very distinct lenses. 2:11 [gentle music] Molly Mary O'Brien is a freelance video editor and writer living in Los Angeles, California. She is the writer behind the blog I Enjoy Music, and the host of a podcast called And Introducing. 2:24 She also, earlier this year, wrote a piece for Dirt titled "25 Years of iPod Brain" that kicked off this episode. Well, Molly, we were wondering if you actually remember buying your first iPod. I do. It was... 2:37 So it was white. It was a fourth generation, so that was the first one that had the slidey wheel. 2:44 It was like a touch wheel, um, as opposed to, like, the click wheel, which I think was, like, separated into four different buttons. And this was with the proceeds from your child labor job in Vermont. Uh, [laughs] 2:54 which was Jimbo's Subs, Wings, and Things, which, like, if I smell fry oil now, like, it immediately takes me back in a Proustian way to summer 2004. Liz Dohmen is a technologist, design engineer, and world wanderer. 3:09 She is a co-founder of Era, a company working to usher in a new era of computing with an intelligence layer for physical devices. I had an iPod Touch. 3:19 It was blue, um, and it had, like, the little pop-out thing where you can attach, like, string to it, so you can, like, hold it and not lose them. 3:25 So you can accessorize it and everything, so I had, like, a cute accessory there. But yeah, I was a 2000s baby. So I was seven years old when the iPhone came out. 3:34 Joy Howard is the chief marketing officer at Back Market, a global marketplace for refurbished electronics. Previously, she's held similar roles at Lyft, Sonos, Patagonia, Nike, and Coca-Cola. 3:45 Before she got her business degree, she was a vocalist in a shoegaze band, playing with acts like Cat Power and Modest Mouse in the '90s. I have had every single device that has been invented for playing music. 3:57 I had a eight-track tape player that looked like, you know, like a, you know, Wile E. 4:01 Coyote dynamite thing where you would, to change the channel, you would push the dynamite thing down to, like, listen to another channel of the eight-track. 4:08 I think that's, like, the first music playing device that I had. 4:10 And so I remember auto-reverse as this, like, unbelievable breakthrough, you know, because for a long time, you could only have forty-five minutes on a cassette, and that was the same length as an album. 4:22 So this is part of the cycles of technology, but I think with some distance, there's a ton of nostalgia for the iPod. 4:31 We kicked off this conversation with talking about the way that the iPod changed our brains and the way we related to music. Mm-hmm. I'm gonna read something from "25 Years of iPod Brain." 4:41 This is sort of where I see the definition of iPod brain as such. "But it wasn't long before I was approaching MP3 collecting with an almost deranged reverence for eclecticism. 4:50 I needed to max out the hardware's potential. I needed representation from as many genres as possible. Some of this desire came from the UX itself. 4:58 When I used my thumb to rotate the pale gray click wheel, I felt a strong desire to scroll through a long list of artists with each letter of the alphabet represented many times over. 5:08 So Blink-182 got nestled between Black Sabbath and Block Party, followed by Billy Joel and Blonde Redhead." 5:15 So I guess why I'm queuing this up is for a definition of iPod brain, which seems to be this need to collect and this need to, to manifest the vastness of your tastes. Yeah. 5:29 I think, you know, when I was writing this, I was just thinking about the kind of sweet spot when music was digital and therefore really easier to access than ever before, and you could literally, like, own more music than ever before. 5:43 But you hadn't yet outsourced things to streaming, where then there's just all music. 5:48 There was something specific about the hardware that made me want to be as broad of a collector as possible, and I do think some of that was the social aspect of the iPod. 6:00 I remember one of the most intensely social aspects of the iPod was going to a bar, moving the track wheel, and, like, you know, showing each other, like, what you had on your iPod. 6:09 It was, like, such a fun thing to do, and just the way it was categorized and, you know, how you could drill down into different genres that you had and stuff like that was so cool. 6:19 It was very common to, like, hand someone your iPod, and they would, like, go through it and judge it, and vice versa. And so it was like you wanted your mainstream shit, you wanted your indie shit. 6:28 I wanted to impress myself with my own collection, if that makes sense. That completely makes sense because I feel like I also have this disease, especially in college. 6:37 Every day, I would check like 10 music blogs and look for new songs to download and check 'em out, and I had to listen to every single one, and I had to know more about music than my friends. 6:46 And I, I haven't necessarily connected that to the iPod before, but it makes sense. You have this container, now you must fill it, and you don't wanna fill it with this monotony. 6:56 The juice stopped being as tasty when they were like, "Oh, we're gonna throw television shows," or like the iPod video or whatever it was called. 7:04 Like, that's just when it started getting that initial desire to be like a... You're a one-woman curator kind of fell off, and it was like, now I can just put a bunch of garbage on here. 7:17 [laughs] I wanted to read this David Byrne quote from How Music Works, which is a book that came out in 2012. Have you read it? I have not. Have you read it? 7:26 I'm actually staring at it right now, but I can't remember if I actually finished it. 7:30 [laughs] This was, like, the book that you photographed on your coffee table if you were a certain type of urban man before the Tom Ford book hit the streets, like- Is it right next to your Rick Rubin book? Yeah. 7:42 So I'm gonna read the quote: "The iPod, like the Walkman cassette player before it, allows us to listen to our music wherever we want. 7:51 Previously, recording technology had unlinked music from the concert hall, the cafe, and the saloon, but now music can always be carried with us. 8:00 We carry our own soundtrack with us wherever we go, and the world around us is overlaid with our music. Our whole life becomes a movie, and we can alter the score for it over and over again." 8:11 Makes me think of another detail from your piece, uh, that I think when the first Walkman came out, there was two headphone ports because they just didn't think that people would wanna listen to music alone. 8:21 And now to me, it's such a natural mode, and I think I'm paraphrasing someone else here, but the idea of, like, walking around feeling like you're the main character. You've got your songs queued up. 8:28 The idea of that being foreign is so foreign to me that you wouldn't be listening to music by yourself. It's crazy to think that that wasn't a thing that you would be used to, but 'cause, yeah, I agree. 8:41 I l- and I love the main character moment. I love listening to a song and feeling like you're in a movie. Like, that's great. 8:45 [laughs] Given that you were a professional musician, like, do you remember what your perception of the iPod was when it first came out? 8:53 [sighs] This is another thing that makes people nostalgic about tech, you know, because there was a culture of really caring about creativity in the early days of Apple. 9:01 There's that famous photo of Steve Jobs without any furniture in his apartment. He just has his record player and his Tiffany lamp. It's like, what more could you need, you know? You've got records. You got a mattress. 9:12 It's like you're... You know, you got light. You're good to go. And so I think Apple cared more about the quality of the sound. 9:18 And so actually, in the early days, I think iTunes was something that m- musicians were more open to because it seemed they were investing actually in quality sound. 9:28 Hopefully, this is not too long, but I'll give you like a, an overview of consumer electronics. No, I'm extremely down for this overview. So if we start off early days, landline phones. 9:37 Bell Telephone had a monopoly on all of telephony pretty much back in the day. If you wanted a Bell Telephone landline in your house, you had to rent it from Bell. 9:45 There was only two models of Bell telephones that you can have in your house. 9:48 One was the standard one, and the other one was slightly prettier, and it was called the Princess phone that you would pay, you know, an extra $25 a month or whatever it was. 9:56 And so for everyone in their house in the '70s, if you had a landline, you had the exact same phone literally as the person next to you. 10:03 And then in 1983, Congress broke up Bell Telephone on antitrust cases, and what that meant is that you do not need to have a Bell Telephone landline phone connected to your telephone cable. 10:15 And that coincided with the rise of plastics manufacturing in Asia, so places like Hong Kong, for example, became plastics hubs. And then that's when we saw the rise of novelty phones. 10:24 And so all through the '80s and into the early '90s, you had Barbie phones. You had princess phones. You had Disney phones. You had all this crazy Cambrian explosion of what's possible when it came to phones. 10:34 Banana phone, baby. [laughs] When we look at music players specifically, the iPod is actually not really novel in many ways because we actually saw this Cambrian explosion earlier with Walkmans. 10:45 And so if you look at the Sony playbook for making computing, Sony's actually much more open. So Sony's whole industrial design framework is at first when you're maturing the technology, you have one SKU of a device. 10:57 So if you look at the first, like two to four versions of Walkmans, every single time, it was the tech getting more and more mature, but then you had your iconic Walkman version. 11:06 And then once they perfected the technology, all of a sudden you had this interior core, but then you could put any shell around it. 11:12 And by that point, you had Philips, and you had Cinco, and you had all of these other producers starting to make their own cassette players. 11:19 And so what Sony was forced to do was it truly gave their industrial designers full reign to just go crazy and make every single SKU for every single subculture in the market to sell as many Walkmans as humanly possible. 11:31 And so you start seeing the splintering from this one iconic Walkman into the sports version, into the baby version, into the skateboarder version, into the one that looks really pretty if you're carrying a purse, like it looks like a pur- And then there's actually online museums of Walkmans where people have collections of like hundreds and hundreds of Walkmans, and they all look extraordinarily diverse. 11:49 And so the iPod in, if you look at it in the sense of comparing it to Walkmans, is actually not really that diverse. Like, yeah, the, the iPod came in many colors, like, I don't know, all 10 colors, right? 12:00 But it did not come in all these, like, crazy iterations of being for, like, certain types of subcultures. 12:06 Well, one thing I wanted to talk about was skeuomorphism around the iPod, where, you know, skeuomorphism originally was like hardware that resembled other things or software that resembled other things in the built environment or in the physical world, like a notes app that... 12:22 looks like paper and background looks like papyrus. But the iPod did borrow from certain things that already existed. 12:30 The code name for it was Dulcimer, which I thought was interesting because the dulcimer is a musical instrument. Mm-hmm. 12:36 And the wheel, the sort of iconic [chuckles] wheel that makes that clicking noise, was inspired by a telephone made by Bang & Olufsen called the BeoCom 6000. 12:46 And that tactile echo, it's called the tactile echo sound, that was programmed into the wheel to make that clicking noise on the B&O phone, they actually identified the designer of that, Henrik Soreg Thompson. 13:01 But I couldn't find out whether Apple's clicking, like that tick, tick noise as you scroll that wheel, was borrowed or stolen directly from B&O, or whether it's a slightly different proprietary [chuckles] clicking noise. 13:16 Listener, if you happen to have one of these phones, you should, uh, mail in and let us know. [laughs] There isn't a sound of music collection. 13:25 Like, I'm, I'm literally, I'm like imagining in my head, like flicking through vinyl records and being like, there's no, there's no sound at all. 13:32 Unless you're like really like whipping through your jewel tone CD cases, there's nothing in like a music collection that really s- like, clicks like that. 13:40 A lot of skeuomorphism was pretty much a crutch for people that never knew what a screen was, and all of a sudden they're using screens. 13:47 And so, um, when they were designing the iPhone, they needed to create these handholds in a way to enable people to learn these devices. And so now, of course, we look back and we're like, "This is stupid." 13:57 We think it's obvious how an iPhone is used. Um, but it's because we learned over the past 20 years exactly how to use an iPhone. 14:04 I think us going back to retro tech is very much us being nostalgic for like devices that you look at and you're like, "Oh, I know exactly what this is and how to use it." 14:12 I wanna read something from The Verge about the liquid glass OS update. 14:18 It's all part of a trend within Apple right now toward a total collapse of the gaps between devices, an attempt to make everything be everything to everyone all the time. 14:28 This kind of feels like the opposite of the iPod, right? 14:32 Having some guardrails, restrictions, some compression around what you can do actually leads you to be like a more thoughtful curator and collector of your own taste. 14:43 This Verge article is against frictionlessness, right? Like, that's why we love a single use device is it is only for this one thing, and you can't... It doesn't make doing these other things easy. 14:55 The first versions of the iPod was like, you can't do... I don't even think you could make playlists on the iPod. Everything flowed through the computer. 15:02 And so, like, even that was a deliberate choice of being like, when you're doing your computer time, that's when you're doing your iPod management, and then you go out in the world or you go on your couch or whatever, and then you experience it. 15:13 The curation ha- had to be done at a different time than the enjoying of the product. 15:18 Went to see Lorde last weekend, and I was up in the cheap seats, and I could see a lot of people below me, and I was seeing what they were doing on their phones as they were waiting [laughs] for Lorde to start. 15:28 And I was seeing so much photo taking and editing in the moment to post immediately, and I was like, ooh, that feels like a generational divide, for me at least, because I feel like millennials were all about you live your life and you still, you're taking pictures and doing shit, and then you, like, go home, review the tape, and then, like, curate. 15:47 Versus now, because the devices are empowered to do all that shit, you can just, like, do it all out in front of everyone, but it reads as, like, weirdly compulsive behavior. 15:56 And so I feel like, just, like, to take it back to the iPod, like, you couldn't do that in person. 16:01 Like, the obsessive brain part of you had to be done in private, and then you can just go out and act like that foot loose and fancy free black silhouette dancing around without a care in the world. 16:12 I would love to dig into the aesthetics of those iPod commercials, because when I think about it, like, that specific time period, there is something very Y2K about the dancing silhouettes. 16:22 I feel like it kind of was a extension of Global Village Coffee House- [laughs]... in that we were supposed to be a global citizen body. We are all gonna get the YouTube album non-consensually at the same time. 16:39 I think, yeah, the fact that the silhouettes are, you can't, like, tell who it is other than, like, a vague allusion to gender. 16:45 And the motion in it is, like, very, obviously everyone in it is, like, a professional dancer. I think that has something to do with it, too. 16:51 And then I put in the, in my dirt piece, like, they were actively trying to pick eclectic music. They did such a good job of being like, "This is for everyone. This is not for, like, dorks." 17:03 Like, there's, [laughs] like, you know, there's something about the silhouette where it's like, okay, this is humanity, and you can self-insert, and we're all dancing together. 17:11 It does feel like a little bit of a vestige of that, like, pre-Y2K hope. The iPod was released almost, like, two months to the day after 9/11. Did you guys remember that? I did not. 17:24 See, I feel like so many launches of things in 2001 have the bad energy of being associated with 9/11, like famously Glitter, Mariah Carey's movie/soundtrack. And I feel like iPod didn't have that. 17:39 It was so good that it kind of... You weren't being like, "Wow, in this economy and geopolitical landscape, how dare you release a cool MP3 player?" Like, it was that good. What did Bush say? 17:49 He said something like, "The most American thing you can do right now is go shopping, go spend your money, go consume." So it kind of fits that spirit really well. 17:57 Post 9/11, what I do remember is the American population was incredibly vulnerable, emotional, patriotic. So you have to sort of put that mentality on and think, "Okay, this is the world that the iPod steps into." 18:10 But going into the year 2000, as the sort of anticipation of the new millennium is ramping up, we have this global village coffee house moment, which is identifiable, like aesthetically, so it's kind of like the old sort of folksy Starbucks, where like people are just borrowing from this hodgepodge of like, you know, what they think of as like African art, and you know, it's like Sting, and like, even like Peter Gabriel's stuff and, and Madonna's like Ray of Light. 18:37 You start to hear as the '90s go along, this intrusion of these sounds that really sound like a combination of like millennial sounds and like the sound of the whole globe being unified by the internet. 18:49 And we get this sense, like in the year 2000, like we're all gonna like blow up together or we're gonna join hands and sing Kumbaya. 18:57 And that doesn't happen because Bush [laughs] invades Afghanistan, and we enter a decade of oil wars. 19:07 But all of this optimism needed a place to go, and so this really colorful global village coffee house borrowing from all these different cultures and bags of coffee at the co-op that have like quilted textures and like reductive tribal patterns on them. 19:23 We enter a new version of globalism, which is Apple's version of globalism, and that's the Helvetica font. It's Bono. 19:31 It's Bono's RED campaign, which was getting everyone to care about AIDS and doing campaigns with like the biggest global brands like Coca-Cola and Gap. 19:41 So we had this version of the new millennium that was like a lot more folksy going through the '90s. 19:47 And then in the early 2000s, it's like, boom, we're getting globalism, but we're not getting globalism 'cause we all care about world peace. We're getting globalism because we all are gonna own an iPod. 19:57 [laughs] Smooth aluminum globalism. Smooth aluminum exploitative supply chain globalism. [laughs] Exactly. Helvetica globalism. 20:10 Those old iPod ads with the black silhouettes dancing across the colored backgrounds, what do you think of those like now as a marketer? 20:18 Yeah, I remember them super, super clearly, and the other thing I remember is, and they've done this over and over again, is that the white cables look dorky. 20:27 Like in the beginning, everybody was like, "What, what kind of nerd core shit is this?" You know? And if you even got an iPod, you wouldn't, wouldn't be walking around with the white headphones. 20:36 You know, it's like telegraphing what a nerd, tech nerd you are. I always put them down my shirt. Yeah, [laughs] of course. But now they're back. 20:42 Actually, this is another thing that started popping up for us that got us into this space, and I think that's another, another way to say like, yeah, I'm just trying to resist everything being so high tech and so new and pizzazy. 20:55 You know, people do buy newer models on our platform, but we really make our money on older models. That's really the bread and butter of the business. And so our enemy is fast tech. It is upgrade culture. 21:06 Like, that's what we're fighting against. Can you tell us more about, like, this Right to Repair activism, both the work that Back Market is doing and anything else interesting going on in that world that you know about? 21:15 Oh God, it's such a fascinating movement, and I'm so inspired and energized to be a part of the Right to Repair movement because it's really fighting against this idea that you never own anything. [laughs] You know? 21:26 Even if you plunk down, you know, fifteen hundred bucks on the latest device, you don't actually own it because first of all, obsolescence is engineered in, and second, you're gonna have to pay a software subscription to keep it running. 21:36 Coming from the environmental movement, one of the things that they had a lot of success with were these animals that are called charismatic megafauna. Have you heard that phrase before? No. 21:46 I imagine it's like an elephant, a whale, these, these animals that we all love. Yeah. Yeah. Panda, you know? Yeah, yeah. Charisma- I, myself, am a bit of a charismatic megafauna, I like to think. 21:57 [laughs] You are a charismatic megafauna. Totally, dude. I would, I would like start a movement to keep big hunters away from you. Thanks, Joy. 22:06 [laughs] But anyway, the Right to Repair movement has its own kind of like charismatic megafauna, okay? And two of them are tractors. 22:14 So John Deere is like one of the worst offenders, you know, when it comes to, like, engineered obsolescence, forcing you to pay a subscription for whatever you buy, and people love farmers. 22:23 So we've made a big deal about John Deere and, you know, how that is screwing over family farmers. 22:28 And then the second is actually people who are in wheelchairs, because wheelchairs are very difficult to repair, and the wheelchair manufacturers have gotten on to this kind of like engineered obsolescence way of making more money. 22:40 And so as a result, people have really suffered from their inability to get their wheelchairs repaired. 22:44 But, you know, it's a way to drive profits, and so it's really caught on all across hardware, and we're trying to turn that back because there was a time, actually, when people repaired things, and people like repairing things. 22:53 Let's talk about the afterlife of the iPod. You know, I think one of the first things we noticed were, like, girls using Shuffles as, like, hair barrettes online. 23:00 And as soon as we saw that, we started to realize, "Wow, okay, what's going on with this, like, retro tech boom? What's it all about?" 23:07 But what really sent this over the line, obviously, was Tony Fadell tweeting it and, you know, sharing it on LinkedIn. 23:14 Tony Fadell, who used to work with a lot of the people that I used to work with, who's considered a father of the iPod behind the scenes, he wrote this incredible LinkedIn post about the Back Market campaign, saying that it's so interesting that people actually want single-use devices and more colorful devices, and that in some ways, as we look into the future, we actually yearn for the past. 23:35 We're looking into the past. 23:36 And I think it's just so fundamental to this era that we're living in, where we feel stuck, where we can't see the future in many ways because we're stuck in this, like, one-dimensional box with a bunch of apps that's aluminum that looks the same for everyone. 23:51 And to actually look ahead, we have to look back to a past where it was much more expressive, and we actually had choice in our devices. 23:58 And I would say the iPod also was not much choice in, in our devices, but at least you can choose the color, versus now you can't even choose the color of an iPhone anymore. It's all pretty much black and white. 24:07 On March first, twenty twenty-six, New York Times published this piece by Kelly Wong, "Bring on Defunct: The iPod Enthrals Young Music Listeners," and there's one... little bit. I simply must read from this. 24:20 "Other young people have been attracted to the aesthetics of the iPod. 24:23 Maxime Ehrlinger, a first-year student, university student in, in Montpellier, France, has about 20,000 followers on TikTok and was offered a gift last year from Rakuten, a Japanese shopping app. 24:35 He hadn't known that Apple made iPods with both clips and touchscreens, but then he chose the sixth generation iPod Nano." But here's the kicker. "'I find this modern, even though it's really old,' Mr. 24:48 Ehrlinger, 18, said. 'I knew it, but I didn't know it was that cool,' he added." It's really old. [laughs] "I find this modern, even though it's really old." 24:58 So this piece came after Molly's piece, but we kinda knew this was bubbling up in the zeitgeist because in the time that Molly was working on this piece, I heard from a friend that her niece had an iPod stolen on the playground. 25:13 So there was obviously some sort of fascination among young people with this. 25:18 The bundling of music into the phone is probably the worst thing that ever happened to parents and children, because music is such an important part of your life when you're young. 25:26 I mean, it just defines every aspect of your experience, you know? You hear a song and you think, like, "It's about me," you know? 25:32 It's like your emotions are so big and overwhelming, you just feel like music is, like, articulating this thing that, you know, nothing else could articulate. So you can't keep it away from a teenager or a young person. 25:44 You- they have to have music, and so we have a lot of parents that are buying them for their kids. And in fact, 25:49 when phones were first around and my daughter would go to camp, I would load up an iPod for my daughter to take to summer camp, and she can still remember the words to every song that was on that iPod. 25:59 One fact to bring from this piece, in 2025, some generations of the iPod sold at an average price 60% higher than in 2023, with some sellers asking for nearly $600 for a refurbished iPod. Damn. 26:13 This seems so obvious that they should bring it back. I feel like, I, I don't know what the, the numbers need to say for them to do that, but, like, the demand feels like it's there. 26:22 As I was working on this piece, a song called iPod Touch by Nina Girachi started popping off, and I was like, oh, [laughs] like, clearly this is, like, in the air. 26:30 And then also the artist had been marketing her album by saying it was iPod music, and there's a shot of her listening to an old iPod. 26:39 I associate iPod music with Starbucks music because of the time period that they were giving out the iTunes cards for certain singles that they also played in the store. 26:50 Didn't they do, like, a free song of the week on iTunes? They did, yeah. 26:55 This guy documented every song of the day that Starbucks did between October 2007 and November 2007, and it says Starbucks distributed 1.5 million music cards each and every day. 27:07 It looks like the first ever [laughs] Starbucks song of the day was Joker Man by Bob Dylan. That's awesome. Wow. On October 2nd, 2007. That was pre-revival of the concept of Jokermanism, yeah. Pre The Jokerman Podcast? 27:23 Yes. Yeah. [laughs] They were first, way first. Extremely ahead of his time. [singing] Joker Man by the light of the moon. Wow. I was surprised reading your dirt piece that you didn't buy an iPod in it. 27:35 I was so sure that it was gonna end with you buying an iPod and then using it. What happened there? Oh, okay. First, I, I bought an MP3 player. 27:44 It's from a Chinese company called Hiby, and it's, uh, it was, like, 80 bucks, and it is, like, raw. It is... There's nothing... 27:52 You know, all of the beautiful design and intentionality of the iPod that made it such an iconic piece of hardware, not really he- This is basically just, like, a little chunk of plastic, and you literally just, like, upload to a micro SD card. 28:05 There's not really, like, a interim thing that you have to do. 28:08 But for my birthday, I think two years ago, my husband bought me a first generation iPod, like, refurbished from eBay or something, and it was loaded with a bunch of songs. It worked. 28:20 They replaced the battery, like, all this stuff. 28:22 It's, like, beautiful, but I have been, like, too scared to try to update it with my own shit, because you have to get, I swear to God, an old FireWire to a newer FireWire to a USB-C to your computer, and I was like, "That's too many cords." 28:41 [laughs] I just don't b- And I... 28:42 Like, it's, it's beautiful as it is, and so I was like, "I really don't wanna mess with it," 'cause I'm worried that I'm going to, like, fry it by plugging it into three different cables. 28:50 We've talked a lot about, on, on this podcast, in the previous iteration too, about, like, optimization culture and, and frictionlessness and how, like, you know, there's, there's too much frictionlessness, and we need more friction, friction maxing, et cetera, et cetera. 29:03 Yeah. That's why people do it is because they don't wanna be interrupted by their phones, and they just wanna have this immersive listening experience. 29:08 The friction maxing thing in general is about reducing distraction and having a deeper and more focused experience of whatever you're doing, but certainly, like, listening to music untethered from your phone. 29:20 Just leaving the house without your phone is like tripping on mushrooms, you know? If you, if you really go out for, like, a day without your phone, you know, it's a very different experience. 29:28 The friction maxing thing, you just... Like, the way you just described it, like, friction maxing is about maximizing the friction between profit-seeking entities and yourself. Yeah. Well, there's nothing... 29:38 You know, capital wants to be fluid. It doesn't like any borders. You know, it wants to be, you know, completely fungible, and I remember when big data first started taking off. 29:47 Everybody's like, "Ooh, you know, it's the new black crude." It's just, like, such a ridic- You know, you know, The Economist had, like, a oil, you know, drawing on the cover about big data. 29:56 And if you think about what is that data, it's your actual attention span, you know? 30:00 So after we extracted fossil fuels, the next frontier for capital extraction is your brain, your soul, your psyche, your attention span, your identity, every aspect of how you express and interact, voila. 30:14 This upgrade culture, though, I feel like with- tech, with hardware, with personal devices, that we're in this sort of, like, end of history of hardware. Oh my God. 30:23 [chuckles] You know, this last campaign, like, we have an ad that has a PlayStation, and it's like, "One terabyte of storage, zero grams of protein." 30:30 We have, like, Game Boy, where it's like, "AB is," you know, "greater than AI." 30:34 And what I realized actually about all that stuff, after Sam Kriss wrote his cover story for Harper's, which I don't know if you guys have read it yet, but it's really hilarious, so good. 30:42 And I realized actually after reading that, that that's what we're lampooning actually is just tech culture, and people are sick of it. 30:48 Do you see any new consumer devices that do something interesting, like, just personally? 30:53 Like, I had an Oura Ring like most people working in tech, you know, early on, and I accidentally lost it and, you know, I was with my family at breakfast, and I was like, "Guys, I lost my Oura Ring." 31:03 And they all started giving each other high fives, and I was like, "Wait, what?" [chuckles] I was annoying them so much with that. Like, I had no idea how annoyed they were. 31:12 They were literally like, "Please don't replace it 'cause we're so sick of it," you know? I am so still just married to the phone as a form factor. 31:22 What is the bull case for the iPhone, the smartphone dying out and being replaced by something that we don't yet really understand? What is the bull case for that happening in the next 10 to 20 years? 31:34 Three main reasons, which I'm super, super excited about. 31:37 So the first is that this whole new world of agents is unblocking us from the closed ecosystems and closed gardens that iOS and Android have made around applications. 31:47 What I find really interesting, and what's now really exciting, is that all of these apps are slowly becoming agentified, which means that instead of needing an app and needing to download an app from an app store, you can actually access these via, you know, MCP and whatever other A2A, like, all these other agent protocols that are, that are coming out, and that all the parties that are making these types of apps will actually be incentivized to make these more agentified in order to connect them to different systems, whether that's to something like Era or to ChatGPT or to Anthropic systems, to any, any of these, like, huge systems that people are now using to take action and get information. 32:24 So we can finally unhook ourselves from these closed ecosystems of app stores. And that's really exciting because from a human perspective, I actually really, really love AI devices. 32:33 And by AI devices, I'm actually gonna change that to intelligent objects, because AI is a bit of a scary term these days, and there's a lot to be skeptical about in the AI world, especially with the powers that be. 32:42 It actually is a much more natural interface. 32:44 So I would say right now, um, something that takes me 20 taps to do on an iPhone, and then I get distracted because I get a notification, and then I end up going into Instagram, will actually take me just one phrase to actually say out loud to a device, and then that can just go do it for me. 32:59 So one of the joys of an AI pin, for example, uh, back when I was working on it, was I did actually use my phone much, much less. 33:06 And so for small tasks like searching up common information, for example, checking the weather every morning, right? It's something that the majority of us do. 33:14 And then, of course, we get distracted and go down a rabbit hole in email and whatever else. Um, I would just check the weather every single day and just get on with, with my life just through the AI pin. 33:23 Um, and so interfaces and these AI interfaces are actually much more natural, and they bring computing closer to us, and they actually make us feel more present and feel more in the flow of our lives. 33:34 And so that's really exciting. The second thing is because of this, you actually do not need these rectilinear screens where you have to interact with information using your finger. 33:42 Like, I think in 20 years we're gonna look back at this time where all of us staring at our phones and be like, "Who are these dinosaurs?" You know? 33:48 And so because these devices are becoming more wearable, they are also inherently becoming fashion, which is why you see, like, Sandbar, for example, caring a lot about fashion. 33:57 It's why you saw the Humane AI pin on the runway, um, and Naomi Campbell, for example, opening up the Coperni show with it. And it's also why you see Meta partnering with Ray-Bans and partnering with Oakleys. 34:07 You see Google partnering with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. These are brands that never thought about technology, but now they're being used as tools and as, like, you know, ways to make tech desirable. 34:17 The really interesting interplay between our conversations with Joy and with Liz for me was in the conversation with Joy, we're talking about this consumer hardware end of history, right? 34:26 Where, like, there's nothing new. Everything that we need has already been made, and it's for sale on Back Market, and people don't necessarily need the latest and greatest piece of tech. 34:35 But then with Liz, she is looking towards this future and trying to make this new Cambrian explosion of consumer hardware, trying to make that happen. And I perhaps lack that vision, and I find it so hard to see that. 34:46 It's, it's just hard to grasp, and maybe that's why I'm not the co-founder of a company ushering in the new era of computing, right? Yes. And then I, I do have to say, I do not think screens are going to go away. 34:56 I just think screens are gonna change. And so a thought experiment is if you take your iPhone, can you separate out your screen from everything else? 35:03 So everything else being the LTE connection, so the connectivity, because we still need connectivity to do anything on the web or anything that relates to information, and the battery you can split in half. 35:14 Um, and, like, you make that two separate things. And so where I think the world is going is actually it's less anti-screen, but I think it's a chosen screen type of future. 35:24 We created 100 of these little X-shaped devices that we call pucks, and so pucks are a minimum viable intelligent device. It's super simple, very cheap to make. All it is is a button, a mic, and a speaker. 35:37 And so when you hold down the button and you speak to it, that audio gets transferred to our servers. Then we have an AI orchestration system that reasons on that behalf and then returns back a stream. 35:47 But what's cool is that we actually allowed people to vibe code their devices in the sense that they can do this in two ways. The first is on the software side. 35:55 So you can say, "I want my device to have a British accent and make a bunch of puns and encourage me to go outside and go on runs as much as possible." And so the second thing you can customize is the exterior. 36:05 And so we made it super easy for people to actually embed this puck into any exterior that they wanted. 36:11 And so we got this Cambrian explosion of everything from the highly practical, you know, artist aids, for example, which is very common, to stuff that tells you about your chi and how do you regulate, you know, your chi in many ways. 36:23 As the conversation with Liz shows, the futuristic part is not the physical part. It's the software part which isn't visible. It's the software and the artificial intelligence that allows you to program that object. 36:38 The problem with voice-prompted technology is you have to use your voice. It's not very discreet. Yeah. 36:43 I think this goes back to what former Teasle and guest Joe Wiesenthal has talked about with the return of orality, that maybe being a text-based culture and a reading-based culture was kind of just a flash in the pan of humanity, and who we really are are storytellers. 36:58 But instead of telling ourselves stories in order to live or telling each other stories around the campfire, we will be using our storytelling power to talk directly to hardware devices. 37:10 I don't think I like that vision of the future either. I was thinking of that Donald Trump line where he gets in the Tesla and he says, "Everything's computer." 37:19 That you compress data into a thing that you put in your pocket and you carry around, right? In that way, everything is iPod, right? The, the iPhone is iPod. It's all iPod. 37:31 I would love to call the episode Everything is iPod. Everything is iPod. That's the name. [laughs] I'm really tired. I need to eat a quesadilla. [upbeat music]
