Presenting the Worst Products of All Time | Lemonade Stand 🍋

Summary

---

Lemonade Stand 🍋: Presenting the Worst Products of All Time

Podcast: Lemonade Stand
Hosts: Aiden, Atrioc, and DougDoug
Date: December 11, 2025
Network: Vox Media Podcast Network

---

Episode Overview

This episode takes listeners on a hilarious and insightful journey through the history of the world’s most infamous product failures. The trio—Aiden, Atrioc, and DougDoug—play with the idea of what they could do with a surprise windfall of “hair money,” ultimately exploring which famously bad products might actually be worth a second try. Through in-depth presentations, lively debate, and their signature comedic banter, they break down the stories, missteps, and unintended hilarities behind such catastrophes as the Ford Edsel, Google Glass, Quibi, Microsoft Kin, Juicero, the Ouya, and more. The group closes with a discussion on which failed product reigns supreme as the funniest flop.

---

Key Discussion Points & Product Flops

1. The Ford Edsel: The $3 Billion Disaster

Timestamps: 03:41–16:02

• Background: Set in 1957 as the American auto industry boomed, Ford strived to innovate with a car featuring a vertical front grille and extensive pre-launch marketing.
• Naming Saga: Millions spent on branding research, culminating in naming the vehicle after Edsel Ford (Henry Ford’s son) almost by default.

  "After all that work and all that time... fuck it. We'll name it after the owner's kid." – Perry (06:44)

• Product Flaws: Overly complex, expensive, and “revolutionary” features like a confusing push-button transmission placed dangerously close to the horn, poor build quality, and design elements that were derided even at launch.
• Financial Meltdown: Huge marketing splurge ($3.1B in today’s money)—with launch day dubbed “E-Day”—and national TV specials featuring Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.
• Why It Failed:
  • Economic recession meant no one could afford premium-priced cars.
  • Consumers “rated every part of the product bad”; nobody liked the design, name, or the driving experience.
  • Massive cautionary tale of decision-making by committee and ignoring clear signals.

  "It is supposed to be a cautionary tale... What do you call it when you focus group to death?" – Perry (15:10)

---

2. Google Glass: Cool Idea, Social Nightmare

Timestamps: 16:08–38:37

• Hype Launch: In 2012, Google promised futuristic wearable tech with voice/text interface, navigation, and more—all seamlessly integrated into daily life.
• Why It Flopped:
  • Sky-high price ($1,500), geeky “Cyclops” look, and social stigma (including privacy invasion).
  • Features were sparse and clunky: poor battery life, minimal real-world use.
  • People were openly hostile:

    "Wearing Glass separates you. It says, not only did I have $1,500 to plunk down, Glass is a class divide on your face." – Doug, quoting Wired (23:57)

  • Even as smart glasses begin a comeback (Meta Ray Bans, etc.), the social “vibe check” remains tough to pass.
• Legacy: Inspired a string of better-sold smart glasses, but killer use case and mass appeal remain elusive.

---

3. Quibi: Two Billionaire Legends, Zero Viewers

Timestamps: 38:41–53:02

• Ambition: Hollywood and tech titans Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman launch a $1B mobile video app in 2020, promising “quick bites” (10-minute episodes) and vertical/horizontal video tech.
• Disaster:
  • Pandemic hits—the best possible era for streaming—but Quibi requires a subscription, lacked must-see content, and initially didn’t allow watching on TV.
  • Despite mega celebrities and prime ads, they peaked at 1.2M users (aimed for 7.2M) and cratered to 500k within months.
  • “Nobody gives a shit about watching a show on Vertical Mode.” – William (42:08)
• Afterlife: Roku bought the content library, but the brand became shorthand for tech hubris.

---

4. Microsoft Kin: Social Phone Without Social Apps

Timestamps: 53:18–57:29

• Microsoft’s Attempt at a Social Phone (2010):
  • Two phones (“Kin One” and “Kin Two”) targeted at “Generation Upload.”
  • Lacked basic smartphone essentials: no calendar, no contact sync, no app store, no instant messaging, and APIs constantly broke when social networks updated.
  • “Lasted 48 days on the market.” – Perry (57:02)
• Key Quote:

  "It is like one of the worst design products I've ever seen. Microsoft Kin—a true disaster." – Perry (56:20)

---

5. Juicero: The $700 Wi-Fi Juice Squeezer

Timestamps: 59:20–66:38

• Pitch: Silicon Valley’s “Tesla of juicers” required exclusive $5–$8 fruit pouches, a Wi-Fi connection, and $700 upfront (later, $400).
• Fatal Flaw: Bloomberg journalists showed you could get the exact juice by squeezing the branded bag with your hands.
• Investor Insanity: $120M burned—“Kobe Bryant, Oprah, Ivanka Trump” all backed it.
• CEO’s Response to Criticism:

  "They just got stuck on a narrative." – Juicero CEO, Doug Evans (63:06)
  "You couldn't open the bags unless you had the machine... your juice bag need wi-fi connected unlocking." – William (98:43)

• Consensus: Easiest pick for "dumbest flop.”

  "Juicero is so funny because if you get rid of the juicer it's kind of a business." – Doug (98:26)

---

6. Ouya: Kickstarter’s Microconsole Meltdown

Timestamps: 66:43–72:41

• Android-Based Console (2012): Raised $8.5M on Kickstarter, lauded for accessibility and price.
• Result: Crummy games, slow system, and a sticky controller designed by Yves Béhar—who also later designed Juicero!
• Noteworthy Moment:

  “There’s nothing special in here about the OUYA... but our controller is really great. Dog controller.” – William (71:59)

---

7. Nintendo Virtual Boy: The World’s Worst VR

Timestamps: 72:43–76:48

• VR in 1995: Red monochrome “helmet” on a tripod, no head strap.
• User Experience: Games like Mario Tennis were “playing tennis in hell”; induced extreme nausea (80%+ in reviews).
• Aftermath: Its legendary designer was pushed out of Nintendo forever.

  “Every gaming failure has a YouTube video... Virtual Boy is like the only one that doesn’t. Because it truly was that bad.” – Perry (75:07)

---

8. Google Stadia: Cloud Gaming’s Miss

Timestamps: 77:02–88:20

• The Pitch: Play games from any screen, no console.
• Problems: Required proprietary hardware at launch, awful latency even on fast internet, misleading 4K claims, small game library, and a pay-per-game model.
• Aftermath:

  “So it like, works with other stuff. And then the project was dead.” – Doug (84:45)
  “Nobody could play a game comfortably.” – Perry (85:34)

---

9. Other Notable Flops & Discussion

• Coors Water: Failed because nobody understood a beer company’s alcohol-free sparkling water—hosts wonder if it’d work now in a Liquid Death style. (88:42–90:47)
• NFTs: Bored Apes, CryptoPunks. Catastrophic value collapse—funny war stories on digital “apartments.” (91:20–94:04)
• Pets.com (Dotcom Bubble Legend): Lost money on every sale, burned cash on puppet commercials, became the ultimate “negative margin” case study. (95:08–97:16)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If you ask a big group of people to pick their favorite, collective, favorite ice cream flavor, they’re going to land on vanilla. That’s the danger of focus groups.” – William (15:44)
• “Wearing Glass... inspires the most aggressive of passive aggression. They just call you an asshole.” – Doug (23:57)
• “If you could record everything, you could just have it all the time!” – Perry (38:34)
• “Juicero is really funny and dumb. Of all the others, it’s a product that makes a modicum of sense—Juicero just doesn’t make any sense.” – William (98:16)
• “Having the idea of your juice bag need wi-fi connected unlocking to access the juice is so, so insane.” – William (98:52)
• “What was extra great about [the Kin]? Zero calendar, no contact list, no spell check... no apps.” – Perry (54:50)
• “I admit, I thought Tubi was Quibi at first.” – Doug (48:20)
• “My best friend got the Stadia founder’s edition just to get the right gamer tag.” – Doug (78:14)

---

Timestamps for Notable Segments

• Ford Edsel Story: 03:41–16:02
• Google Glass Deep Dive: 16:08–38:37
• Quibi’s Rise and Fall: 38:41–53:02
• Microsoft Kin Fiasco: 53:18–57:29
• Juicero Exposé and CEO Meltdown: 59:20–66:38
• Ouya Disaster: 66:43–72:41
• Virtual Boy Nightmare: 72:43–76:48
• Google Stadia Flop: 77:02–88:20
• NFT Burnout: 91:20–94:04
• Pets.com and the Dotcom Bubble: 95:08–97:16
• Wrap Up: Which is the Worst? 97:24–99:12

---

Final Reflections & Takeaways

Worst Product: Juicero

Unanimous decision among the hosts: the $700 wi-fi juicer is the silliest, most wasteful, and fundamentally useless product, perfectly emblematic of Silicon Valley excess.

Viable Resurrection?

Hosts joke that only products like water could work today—market conditions and cultural shifts mean some ideas (like Coors Water or smart glasses) might get a second act. But most remain spectacular cautionary tales.

Closing Thought

This episode isn’t just a comedy roast—it’s a sharp lesson in how hype, focus-group overkill, ignored feedback, and bad timing can doom even the most star-studded ventures.

---

“Let us know if you think there’s a worse flop we missed—or if you’d actually buy a Juicero!” – William (99:23)

---

For more deep dives and comedic breakdowns, catch Lemonade Stand weekly and support on Patreon if you want to join in on the product roasting!

Transcript

[Doug]

Support for this show comes from SC Johnson. We've all been there. Choosing not to wear your new white shoes because there's a 10% chance of rain.

[William]

Bending awkwardly over the tiny coffee table.

[Doug]

To enjoy a sip of your latte, not ordering the red sauce.

[William]

Those feelings of dread are what we call stainxiety.

[Doug]

But now you can break free from your stainxiety with Shout's triple acting spray that has stain fighting ingredients to remove a huge variety of stains so you can live in the moment and clean up later. Just breathe and Shout with Shout triple acting spray. Learn [e-mail].

[William]

Support for this show comes from Amazon ads.

[Perry]

Every business owner has been there.

[William]

You put a significant amount of money into an ad buy and then wonder did those ads actually have an effect? Luckily, there's Omnichannel metrics from Amazon ads. Omnichannel metrics helps advertisers understand how their.

[Perry]

Amazon ads can campaigns drive sales both.

[Doug]

On and beyond Amazon.

[William]

While campaigns are still mid flight, whether customers buy on Amazon or at a.

[Doug]

Brick and mortar store, you'll understand the full impact of your campaigns.

[William]

Head to advertising.Amazon.com to learn more.

[Doug]

That's advertising.Amazon.com thank you for joining us on the lemonade stand this week. You've joined us at Atriox House. Yes, welcome to my house.

[Perry]

We recently came into a bit of money.

[William]

Specifically last week.

[Perry]

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 to help out the stand.

[William]

What kind of thing would kind of have a premium price? Something that we get for dirt cheap. Right. Anything come to mind. Revitalize.

[Doug]

Revitalize. Atriox Hairline.

[William]

Right.

[Perry]

Quite affordable with this amount of money.

[William]

Just.

[Perry]

I've talked to people in Turkey and it's a bigger job.

[Doug]

Too big of a job.

[William]

It's too big of a job.

[Perry]

All the experts and they said I have to get more money.

[Doug]

They've never seen a line like yours.

[William]

I'm still working surface area. It's like it's just putting hair on the moon. It's not possible. It's an impossible task.

[Doug]

Well, we could find maybe some old products that didn't pan out.

[Perry]

We need to invest in Aidan. We need to invest in something. Okay? That's how you make your money grow. I don't want nine gold bars. I want 90. Okay. 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.

[William]

Right.

[Perry]

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 amend now.

[William]

That's right. We found the biggest product flops of all time. 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've been looking at some of the pricing. Unironically. Unironically, we could buy some of these.

[Doug]

My plastic gold bars might be enough for some of these.

[William]

For some of these products.

[Perry]

Okay, well, what kind of products are there?

[William]

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.

[Perry]

Hi, Perry from production here. I used a different mic setup to capture the presentations for this episode. Unfortunately, the audio was pretty scuffed and we had to do a lot of.

[William]

Wizardry to try and save it.

[Perry]

Shout out to Adish and Jake for making it sound as good as it does, but I wanted to give you.

[Doug]

A heads up and apologize.

[Perry]

Thank you for your understanding. Gentlemen and gentlemen, tonight.

[Doug]

Oh, my God. Elizabeth Holmes.

[Perry]

Quiet, please. Back in the audience. The year is 1957. It's the age of the American automobile. The auto industry is taking over. It's creating jobs. It's creating opportunity. There's a growing middle class in America, and the one thing they use as a status signifier is a bigger and better car.

[William]

Car.

[Perry]

Automobile. Thank you. And as we go through this hustle and bustle lifestyle, people are noticing that their old Ford cars aren't keeping up with the newer, bigger and better competitors. 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, what's wrong with it? Don't answer, this car, what's wrong with it? Don't answer, this car, what's wrong with it? Do not answer. Because we all know the answer in our hearts and in our minds. The grill is too horizontal. We need a vertical grill. That is what the American public wanted. A brand new vertical grill. And so today at Ford, we've invented the Edsel. Now, when you're thinking about the name Edsel, you're probably wondering what a beautiful, what an incredible product name. A name that will charm and inspire millions. Where did it come from? 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. Then we went around to all of our employees and surveyed them to rank which product name they liked the most.

[Doug]

Ranked 6,000.

[Perry]

6,000 names of names. Such a crazy way to phrase it, Throwing the Alphabet there. Then. Then, 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?

[William]

This is why I buy Ford. This is what it's about.

[Perry]

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. 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.

[William]

What is it? What is it?

[Perry]

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. This is Edsel Ford. This is the son of Henry Ford, founder of Ford, and it's named after him.

[William]

Was.

[Doug]

Well, I thought it was. I assumed it would be an old woman with no teeth.

[Perry]

That is what the name Edsel makes.

[Doug]

You think of that.

[Perry]

In clogged auto manufacturing, there was some.

[William]

Sort of issue with the Gutenberg printing press where they wrote his name out. Is it a human name?

[Perry]

It was.

[William]

It was. Okay.

[Perry]

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

[William]

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.

[Perry]

A lot of questions from the audience today. I know that. I love that. I love the passion you guys have for our products here at Ford. 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, our design extends to the back. Look at these beautiful rocket front fin tail lights. They serve zero aerodynamic purpose. It is purely for style's sake. That is what you want in a new.

[William]

I'm already moving some of the gold towards Gerald Ford.

[Perry]

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? This stick shift. It's on the floor. It's a pain in the ass. I have to move my right hand. What if it was right in the center of the steering wheel and automatic, right? No.

[William]

Oh, okay.

[Perry]

What if while doing 60 miles an hour on the highway and you want to honk at somebody, you accidentally hit reverse and shift into reverse? Wouldn't that be a thrill? Wouldn't that be an exciting way to experience? Experience the worst.

[William]

Those buttons are really close.

[Doug]

It looks like one of those spin.

[Perry]

To dial, 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. We spent $250 million designing and marketing this product in 1957. In today's money, that is 3.1 billion on the Ford head sole. And it's all worth it. The day of the launch was so anticipated internally and externally with our marketing that we compared it to the recently done D day by calling it E day. And on the day of release.

[William]

Wait, so how many D days of cars did they sell?

[Perry]

How many 9 11s am I gonna do? And on the release we bought, and there's only three networks at the time, we bought prime time, one hour TV slot for the Edsel show starring famous celebrities like Frank Sinatra. Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra had to do a full hour live Edsel show promo upon E day on the release. The Edsel was of course, an astronomical success. Except for one thing. It didn't sell any cars. 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. 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. And even if the Ansel doesn't live on, the legacy of a CEO shoehorning in a badly designed car against the will of everyone else lives on today. Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to invest in the Ford Epson.

[Doug]

Oh my God.

[William]

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

[Perry]

The point of the grill previously is to cool the. Use airflow to cool the radiator. And which is important. Which is important to the car. However, really, the grill is about esthetics. Okay, I do want to say, you know, I'm not a car guy especially, but I did see for this product that 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. Like the trunk leaked, the grille would often cause overheating. It was poorly attached. So people buying this very, very expensive car often got terrible, terrible quality.

[William]

But at least honking and the reverse buttons both worked correctly, right?

[Perry]

They worked great. The reverse button. Many dangerous things from that.

[Doug]

I'll slip you this gold bar and perhaps you can make it an ev and then we don't have to worry about the.

[Perry]

Yeah, 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. 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. 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 2.

[Doug]

It's 3 billion in today's.

[William]

For marketing. Right?

[Perry]

So that was the product that was like. That was like all in all.

[William]

Yeah, yeah.

[Perry]

Saying to spend it all on the ads. And it literally sold so poorly, it was out of commission in like two years. And they like the equivalent of whatever a Super bowl ad would be. I don't know if the super bowl was around, but they did a blanket full court press. They had like every dealer paid to push the Edsel. They did every primetime slot. Like everybody in the country knew about it. And they all said, imagine if Taylor.

[William]

Swift and LeBron James did an hour long ad for a car on tv. I can't like, and there's only three.

[Perry]

Networks is the only thing you can watch.

[William]

Right.

[Perry]

It got millions of views. It's crazy. People knew about this car. And they all collectively said, nah.

[Doug]

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 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. And everybody internally seemed to recognize that this wasn't a good idea. But it all moved forward anyway. And this shoehorning, like the name aspect, 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. And then it's like, what if it was just my friend, my son's name?

[Perry]

Literally, like years, years of time and years of discussion and they ignored all of that. To him just say, yeah, my son.

[Doug]

But if you had to pick the main factor because you said, like economic circumstances at the time, yeah, maybe a bad name. But also the car, you know, not being actually built very well. What is the main reason that sets.

[Perry]

The reason it failed instantly is because an expensive car during a recession, it was like, there's no way anyone could afford it or buy it.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Perry]

But I would say it is considered to be a colossal fear on every aspect because consumers also rated every part of the product bad. They didn't like how it looked. They didn't like how it drove many error rates. The name was considered terrible.

[Doug]

So it wasn't winning on any front.

[Perry]

No, they had nothing going for it. And. And so it was a massive, massive flop. It is supposed to be a cautionary tale is the idea of the dangers of. What do you call it when you like, focus grouping or what? Like whenever you have a lot of people in a. In a meeting and they all don't want to say anything controversial, so they all, like you hold 50 meetings to.

[Doug]

If they had just read When Everyone knows what Everyone Knows by Stephen Baker, then they would have been able to get some common knowledge, establish the common knowledge of how this product was going to take.

[William]

There's a. Yeah, 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.

[Perry]

Right.

[William]

Which is like, you know, 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.

[Perry]

Right. I think that's what happened here.

[Doug]

I have an exciting product that I think I could pitch you guys on something that everyone liked.

[Perry]

I'm interested.

[Doug]

Let me take you all back to the Future. The year 2012. Imagine 2012. You wake up, you see this video.

[William]

It's a way for me to see a lot of information.

[Perry]

Ooh.

[William]

What for our audio listeners, Mr. Aiden Jobs.

[Doug]

So as you can see from this experience, you're looking at the first person POV of someone waking up with something on their face that allows them to see notifications, navigate to places, send messages with their voice. And as you. Have either of you seen that video? Do you remember when it came out?

[William]

I don't I think so.

[Doug]

If you can find.

[William]

I'm not watching these.

[Doug]

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. But what we just watched for the audio listeners especially is this little two minute trailer that was made for Google Glass. 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. And the reason this video was so remarkable at the time. I'm gonna stay here for a second.

[Perry]

Okay.

[Doug]

I can see you getting antsy in the audience. I can see you getting antsy. You're shaking your leg. Please.

[Perry]

2012. And I love Google and I'm excited to see what they have doing now.

[William]

Look at the visual and appreciate it.

[Doug]

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.

[William]

And phones were out the door. People were done by 2012 and people.

[Doug]

Were really done with phones already, which is funny. They were mostly getting rid of them.

[William]

Oh, wait, wait.

[Doug]

Sorry, sorry.

[William]

The exact same. Wait, sorry. Yeah, my bad, my bad.

[Perry]

100% the opposite.

[Doug]

Right, Right.

[Perry]

No, I get those confused.

[Doug]

No, it was actually the opposite in that smartphones weren't even something that everybody you knew had yet. We were still at a time when like people had phones that weren't smartphones. A considerable amount of people. And I think the reason this video was so groundbreaking and not just because it uses a lovely song Lovers Car by Vimeo, which I actually learned about that song from this video and I've had in my life since then. But I remember being in high school and seeing this and thinking, wow, so many things about this are so incredible. The way it seamlessly seems to integrate with the person's day to day experience. The voice to text, even voice to text or like Siri stuff at the time. Right. Is not that prevalent or good. It's borderline non functional at the time.

[Perry]

Barely hear today.

[Doug]

Yeah, exactly. So to see it pop up in something like this and then imagine this future in a video titled one day you're getting sucked into this idea of like this is really going to be what the future looks like. And that future is a bunch of people walking around like this. I got to walk down a beautiful memory lane of people like young MKBHD reviewing this product at the time. And this is the way it looked. Not like the embedded look of the products that are being developed that are similar now, right? This very obvious change to the glasses in the right hand corner that kind of makes you look like Cyclops from X Men. And they had. I think it was Sergey Brin was all behind this product at the time. He started wearing it everywhere. This is going to be the project of the future. I am going to wear this to tech conferences and show it off. The everyday guy in Silicon Valley is going to wear this. Kids could wear this to like accentuate their learning in school. Doctors will wear this during surgery to better teach medical students and also to give a window into patient surgeries after the fact. Or to their family members to watch.

[Perry]

Some subway surfers so they don't get.

[Doug]

Bored or have a little bit of subway surfers in there. I believe it was Temple Hut at the time.

[Perry]

Temple hut. Temple hut. 2012. 2012.

[Doug]

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 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 this took over the world. It was a massive success. And we knew so much changed in 2012. The world ended. We all got in that boat. It saved us from the Jacques flying, crashing tsunami waves. There's a documentary about that you can watch. And an estimated tens of thousands of them sold over many, many years that they tried to continue pushing this product. And so for all the time and marketing they put in, they initially released this thing called the Explorer edition in 2012, which is the product that MKBHD gets. Basically people who signed up to test the product for $1,500 at the time and you would maybe be selected and then you would get it and then you would ideally be someone who's giving Google like active feedback about the product. It stayed in the zone from 2012 until 2015, where they briefly sold it for like a few months and then took it down off the public market because it wasn't doing well. They can the project but announce 2017 Enterprise Edition that will be used by engineers at places like Boeing, corporate clients. Corporate clients. But after they announced the Enterprise Edition 2 in 2019, they killed the supporting app that you use on your smartphone with it in 2020. And then fully close out the project internally by 2023. I will say the one interesting thing about this for how much it bombed in the public market. 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.

[Perry]

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

[Doug]

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.

[Perry]

Stole your music taste from it and.

[Doug]

Inspired my music taste. Go check out Vivio. But what, what actually, you know what, what actually happened during all of this? I. I found this lovely, lovely wired article from 2013 by a guy named Matt Honan that was titled I Glass Hole that perfectly summarized what the core issue with the this product was, which is that it's just fucking cringe. 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. It inspires the most aggressive of passive aggression. They just call you an asshole. And then wearing Glass separates you. It says, not only did I have $1500 to plunk down to be a part of the Explorer program, Glass is a class divide on your face.

[Perry]

That sounds cool. It's like an expensive watch.

[Doug]

He starts off this article by describing how his first idea for the use of this product would be to wear it for the full duration for the birth of his child, to which his wife doesn't like. And he tries to explain to his wife how having this available camera on my face is the perfect application of its tooling. And she simply says, I'm not comfortable with that. You can't do that. And he was like, this was my first interaction realizing that socially this just wasn't going to work. It boils down to this thing was creepy, clunky and fucking boring. Not only is it something that people can clearly see that you're wearing and are worried you're recording them 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. So the things that you could.

[William]

Whoops.

[Doug]

Whoa. The things that you could do with it they were proud that you have to learn this is 2012. You can use this to do Google hangouts.

[Perry]

Finally, I'm in.

[Doug]

Finally. You could supposedly use Google Maps or to like Google search things you could text with had a five hour battery life. It just ultimately the minimal feature set that it had available to it at the time just wasn't very good.

[William]

So it could drive you to work and then you can't drive home.

[Doug]

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.

[Perry]

Right. It's way more useless than the phone that you had in your pocket.

[Doug]

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. Kind of, I would say leading the charge, at least in the public conversation is Meta and Mark Zuckerberg and but you know, he still looks a little goofy, but drastically different performance. With this recent product to over 2 million of the Meta glasses have been sold. The Meta Ray Ban crossover glasses have been sold since the 2023 launch, which as you might be able to tell, is more than 10,000.

[Perry]

Good math.

[Doug]

I think the underlying issue here, regardless of this product's success, there's a vision behind this on Meta's part. Right. And what Google was hoping at the time, it's like, let's beat the next technology to the punch. Let's get rid of phones and have everything attainable through something you wear and is comfortable and easily accessible. You don't even have to think about it. It's integrated directly into your life and vision. But then the underlying value proposition is this, to truly become successful, it has to be better than this.

[Perry]

Right.

[Doug]

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

[William]

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.

[Perry]

Right.

[William]

I'd rather get in there with a wearable on my face.

[Doug]

Right. That's the.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Doug]

And I'm glad you're on board because I think we could transform culturally.

[Perry]

I think this is big with an influencer.

[William]

Yeah.

[Doug]

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 time at Google, what Sergey Brin refused to ask himself is, does this product pass the vibe check? Because ultimately I think it's a product that is very, it's, it's disturbing to those around you and not in like a horror movie type way, but just like it disturbs their day a little. It's like you're unsure if that person is like recording you or not. 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.

[Perry]

Right.

[Doug]

And then also fail on the front of replacing your phone technologically. That was like the other part of the equation you're losing out on. Right. Because personally I actually hate the way I'm tied to my phone in so many ways. And I have, I got a cellular Apple watch like two years ago so it can text and call without my phone around. And I do like that feature. And it was in an effort to like leave my phone behind in so many places. Right. But the main things I often use my phone for which are taking notes and sending messages and using maps, the watch doesn't replace very well. And I haven't really been able to ditch my phone in this, like what was my initial interest for this product? And if you can't match up all of those features easily through the glasses, plus not find a way to make it like creepy, disturbing and intrusive to your day to day life. I have a hard time imagining this market ever truly breaking through at any scale that's even remotely similar to smartphones. 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. But I don't feel like what you're.

[Perry]

Saying is if we bring back Google Glass and change nothing, it'll be a big hit.

[William]

Now I was at the Streamer Awards this last weekend and there were I think two or three times where I suddenly became uncomfortable realizing that someone near me was just IRL streaming and I wasn't aware that my private conversation was just literally being streamed. And that made me feel pretty uncomfortable. And I'm glad that we can move away from that. And I'm just have to feel like that literally all the time. Because everybody is streaming everything all the time on their face.

[Doug]

Exactly. And that you don't have to feel comfortable.

[Perry]

The problem is the transition. Like I'm not being recorded. I am being recorded. If I'm Just always being recorded.

[William]

I'm always in fear. Yeah.

[Perry]

Like, I could always, like a low buzzing fear.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Perry]

That sounds really good.

[Doug]

I'm realizing that in this, in the context here, I was meant to, like, sell you on this and you're.

[Perry]

And you did.

[Doug]

And that's a great. And I'm giving you a half. You guys know that my gut is filled with, like, gears and critters, right? It's just filled with gears and wheels. And I. I recently started mixing in these little Ag one packs into my water because, you know, they have like vitamins and probiotics. Yeah. But I just liked it for the taste, if I'm being honest with you. But then I've been gear free. It got rid of all the gears and critters inside me, which I think. But to be honest, it's mostly about the taste. Like, I take the gears back any day to just keep trying.

[William]

Yeah. Immune health support. But this is really good. And that's not even a bit.

[Perry]

I don't know.

[William]

I don't have a funny way of presenting. It's just very.

[Doug]

I'm not joking. I have been drinking it for like two weeks.

[Perry]

You are joking because you don't have.

[Doug]

Actual gear and I actually have gears inside me.

[William]

I don't know. Like, I've looked in there. Okay. I've taken a peek.

[Perry]

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

[William]

If you head to drink ag1.com lemonade.

[Perry]

Then you'll get the welcome kit, a morning person hat, a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2, an AG1 flavor sampler, and a new sleep supplement, AGZ for free. That's drink ag1.com lemonade for $126 in free gifts for new lemonade stand subscribers.

[William]

Cheers.

[Perry]

Cheers.

[William]

What do walking 10,000 steps every day, eating five servings of fruits and veggies, and getting eight hours of sleep have in common?

[Doug]

They're all healthy choices.

[William]

But do all healthier choices really pay off with prescription plans from CVS Caremark, they do. Their plan designs give your members more choice, which gives your members more ways.

[Perry]

To get on, stay on and manage their meds.

[William]

And that helps your business control your costs because healthier members are better for business. Go to CMK Co Access to learn more about helping your members stay adherent.

[Doug]

That's CMK coacss.

[William]

What do walking 10,000 steps every day, eating five servings of fruits and veggies and getting eight hours of sleep have in common?

[Doug]

They're all healthy choices.

[William]

But do all healthier choices really pay off with prescription plans from CVS Caremark. They do their plan designs give your members more choice, which gives your members.

[Perry]

More ways to get on, stay on and manage their meds.

[William]

And that helps your business control your costs because healthier members are better for business. Go to CMK Co Access to learn more about helping your members stay adherent.

[Doug]

That's CMK COAC accession. I mean, so, I mean, you guys should really check out Lovers Car Rings is like a good song.

[William]

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

[Doug]

Okay, 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. What do you think there's a realistic Future here where 10 years from now, this or 20 years from now? This is a mainstream technology that is competing with phones?

[William]

Absolutely, yes. Yeah. I mean, I think just for the kind of camera and streaming technology, it'll be fairly popular. And like, I don't know if you guys saw MKHB, whatever it is, 10 months or 10 years later, two months ago, he reviewed Meta's smart glasses that are currently being prototyped. And they are like, way crazier and have insane features, which. Perry, you can pull this up and have like a HUD over your. Oops.

[Perry]

Right?

[William]

You have like a hud, like while you're watching. And like. So the. On the.

[Perry]

Can you pause?

[Doug]

Right.

[Perry]

Do you see a light blinking? So I bought the Meta smart glasses. Not the latest ones. It was.

[William]

These aren't on. These aren't on sale yet. 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 is have a light and they could take pictures, but the glasses themselves don't have anything on them. Like, you're ultimately wearing glasses with a camera on the side. Whereas the Google Glass, like, has this thing over your eye, like a weird sci fi villain. Yeah, yeah. And so this product, and you can look, you know, MKHB is weight. Smart glasses are suddenly good. It's like he is essentially going, this is the lead. This is what it was promised to be all that time ago. And it looks, I wouldn't say cool, but way cooler than Google Glass.

[Doug]

Absolutely.

[Perry]

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, anytime that light flashes, it is like you're wearing Google Ads and it is extremely uncomfortable for everyone else in the room. It becomes very noticeable and awkward and so I heard some people are hacking them to remove the light, but that in itself is very unethical. Yeah, because now, you know what I'm saying now you're recording a little surreptitiously. When the light is off, it's really hard to tell that it's not just a normal pair of glasses, which is kind of cool. And I did wear them playing basketball and get some fun highlight, 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 I, I, this fell out of use for me really quickly and I, I don't know that a HUD would change it so dramatically. I do think there's some potential here. Clearly they're selling, they're selling a lot better than Glass ever did.

[Doug]

They have to. What, what I thought about was they have to get over the social hump to win because the technological aspect is going to catch up eventually. Voice commands and they kind of already are good enough to do most of what you need to do with a phone on something like this. Right. They're very close to that already. But it's the idea of the recording and the social stigma of anyone realizing that you have this on. It applies to regular clothes too. If you show up in a really strange outfit to a certain type of event, you won't be let in it. Right. And it, and functionally I think uncomfortable.

[Perry]

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

[William]

Don'T think it needs to replace the phone. It's in the same way that, did you know that AirPods is bigger than McDonald's, Netflix and Nvidia combined?

[Perry]

That's so true.

[Doug]

Yeah, I mean maybe you're right.

[William]

And so I think it's an accessory.

[Doug]

In the same, like complimentary, like you.

[William]

Go to any tourist place, right? People are walking around with their fucking or concert, whatever. People are recording everything on their phone. Those same people, of which there are, I don't know, a billion, two billion are going to be stoked about the Idea of not having to hold up a thing. They can tap a button and it's their POV and they can have all these things going on and when they're in a car ride, it's playing music directly. I mean, I, I would argue that.

[Perry]

Was the best part.

[William]

Yeah, the music is awesome.

[Perry]

The bone conducting music or whatever was incred like it. Literally no one around you can hear. And I'm listening to music with the glasses on and it's not in my ear, it's over my ear. It was incredible. That is the feature I showed everybody. Everyone thought it was cool.

[William]

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

[Perry]

Yeah, I think that's pretty. I mean, people clearly are in a more social recording era. People want to be able to like get their POV and more. More things for Instagram or what. Like, I get that there's a use case and this might take off.

[William]

I just want the ability to record fireworks. I could watch them later.

[Perry]

I just want to record a concert because everyone wants that footage online and there's no way to get it. So far nobody's been able to get a good doing it crowd POV shot of a concert.

[Doug]

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. And then, and then most the demand online must be.

[William]

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. Like of a concert or a video or a speech at a wedding or like literally never ever, ever, ever.

[Doug]

Not once.

[William]

But now we can just have it all the time.

[Perry]

But yeah. So Google Glass is great.

[Doug]

Thank you.

[William]

Thank you.

[Doug]

No, so I'm bringing back Google Glass.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Doug]

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.

[William]

I've got something. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to change the future of entertainment. In the past people watch shows like this on a big ugly screen. Today is the future. People don't want to watch Liam Hemsworth new show the Most Dangerous Game like this. They want to watch it like this. Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Quibi.

[Perry]

Oh, he's got it.

[William]

Quibi is a revolutionary new mobile only entertainment application. Now this was founded in 2018. As you can see here. They did analysts on the amount of interest there is in mobile only content. It's very high. Now this gets the attention of Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman. You know them. Jeffrey Katzenberg, he is an executive at Disney. He did the Disney renaissance of animation. He founded dreamsworks with Steven Spielberg. Meg Whitman founded ebay. Let's ignore their many failures after those roles and Yahoo. But these guys come together and they say we're going to make a mobile only media company. And because they have such incredible, incredible reputation in the Hollywood industry and the tech industry, 2019 they start fundraising. They raised $1 billion.

[Doug]

I'm so locked in right now. Doug Sir Doug Jobs. But I was wondering if you could put the presentation on the tv. So I'm sorry. It's a good idea.

[Perry]

Why would you?

[William]

Revolutionary features.

[Doug]

Audio listeners. Doug is presenting his entire thing on a small mobile device from a distance.

[Perry]

And I'm locked in. Aiden. Okay, our proposal.

[William]

Technology. What's going to make this so different? Not only do we go to all of the Hollywood executives and we get huge celebrities like Kevin Hart and Liam Hemsworth and Jennifer Lopez and literally everybody. It's crazy. Who spent a billion dollars on shows, right? We come up with technology where you're watching something and then you can do.

[Perry]

This.

[William]

You can turn it vertical and watch the same show vertical. Quibi is going to revolutionize things. Not only because of that, but because it's quick bites.

[Doug]

Quibi.

[William]

Every show has 10 minute episodes. And they commissioned 175 new shows for their launch year. This is gonna be crazy. Everybody's on board.

[Perry]

This sounds huge.

[William]

They sell out all the advertising for the first year in 2019. And in 2020 something huge happens in the world of media and our lungs. It's Covid. And so Covid starts on February 2020. Let's say that's when lockdowns happen. And oops, Quinny is actually gonna launch in April of 2020. And I don't know if you can. Let me turn it vertical.

[Doug]

I do see a big.

[Perry]

That looks good when you turn it like that.

[Doug]

Can you turn it vertical?

[William]

See, Quibi does extraordinarily bad. This product absolutely flops. Probably a lot of you guys remember how many youtubers and shows and stuff were promoting Quibi. But this is literally like two months into the pandemic. 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.

[Perry]

I have a question, Doug Jobs.

[William]

Yes.

[Perry]

So the pandemic was notoriously a golden age of streaming, and almost.

[Doug]

No, no, no. Hold on.

[William]

Let me cut you off there. So Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is, by the way, a Hollywood executive, says repeatedly, everything that we ran into was a result of COVID It was unfortunate timing. He states this in multiple interviews. And it's because of COVID that people do not like to watch content on their phones.

[Perry]

All they did was watch content on their phone.

[William]

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

[Doug]

In Jeffrey's defense, I believe, you know, my memory says that everybody who was watching Netflix, Twitch, YouTube, all those things at the time, they were doing it on desktop. All of 100%.

[Perry]

Yeah. Phones are dead.

[William]

Phones nobody was using.

[Perry]

Nobody used the phones.

[William]

And I do want to be clear. If you paid for a monthly subscription for all of these shows, you could not watch it on a tv. They had to add that three months in because it was failing so badly. So they caved.

[Doug]

They added a TV app, and now.

[William]

The shows are just pointlessly framed so that they can be watched on vertical or horizontal. So they literally filled everything so it's both vertical and horizontal, and then you're watching the. So, sadly, Quibi failed after six months, and they shut down. Billions of dollars, raised thousands of episodes, hundreds of shows, and it all crumbles and burns. But again, we have to remember what Jeffrey Katzenberg said. It was Covid and gentlemen, we could literally buy the rights to Quibi. A year later, they went to Roku for. We don't know the exact amount. Under $100 million. Roku has since relinquished the rights because all the shows did so bad. We could pick up Gwiby and we could revitalize this thing. Now that Covid's over, I think we got a shot.

[Perry]

Yes. That was the only thing stopping it.

[Doug]

I've got a little cash laying around. Go bars.

[Perry]

I got a little cash.

[Doug]

How long did it actually take the company to fold? Like, when did they give up on the. On The Quibi dream?

[William]

Six months. So they. They launch in April of 2020. The first day, they, like, get a decent amount of downloads on the app, and that just plummets afterwards. And by May, which is the next month, they have 1.3 million active users. That's like a third launch. And then it's all going wrong again. The quote from Jeffrey Katzberg, I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus.

[Perry]

So it's the greatest, like, thing. They could have asked for the most beneficial possible thing.

[Doug]

The.

[William]

Oh, yes. It's a gigantic lifeline. And after six months, in October, Quibi shuts down. And then Roku buys them in 2021.

[Perry]

Do like every other online content service did. Gangbusters. They did so well.

[William]

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 Katzberg has a crazy successful track record. Meg Whitman. What?

[Perry]

He did Shrek.

[William]

He did Shrek. It's not that he just did Shrek. He did, you know, all the best Disney animated movies. Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King, that was all like him. He directed and started that division and did that very. In a big. There's an excellent book about this called Disney War that I recommend a lot. But he then left, started DreamWorks, like, makes DreamWorks, gets Academy Awards, and then the dude is wildly successful and just completely missed on this thing. And then Meg Whitman, one of the most successful CEOs ever. EBay.

[Perry]

She.

[William]

She took from like 30 employees to 15,000 IPOs. They bought PayPal under her watch. And then she's just caught onto this string of failures.

[Perry]

She had Yahoo, right? She like, fucking bomb.

[William]

Don't. Don't think Yahoo. Not to my knowledge. Women out of Yahoo. I think you're thinking of a different person. She ran for the governor of California.

[Perry]

Hp.

[Doug]

I'm sorry.

[William]

Yeah. She goes to hp. Yeah. 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. And then there's a big controversy when it turns out she's been paying, like, a housekeeper who's illegal for nine years.

[Perry]

Christ.

[William]

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 Quibi, fails horrifically. But happy news for Meg Whitman. She is now the US Ambassador to Kenya for some reason. I have no idea. I know. I want to watch a quick bite, actually. Excuse me, Joe Biden. Biden appointed her midway through his term. And unfortunately, Joe, Donald Trump did not have Meg Whitman continue to represent us in Kenya.

[Perry]

A lost opportunity.

[Doug]

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

[William]

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

[Doug]

Just, Everybody was making.

[Perry]

Yeah, but it was all crap, right? My understanding is, like, it was all crap.

[William]

Nobody liked it.

[Perry]

Yeah, yeah.

[William]

There's basically no shows from that at all.

[Perry]

There was no killer app of a show that wanted to watch.

[Doug]

You were putting out marketing Monday on Quib.

[Perry]

I want to put that on Quibi, baby.

[Doug]

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.

[Perry]

At all.

[Doug]

I, I, I thought tubi because I just been hearing about it and joking.

[Perry]

About it and thought it must be Quib.

[Doug]

And then in my head I was like, oh, yeah, Tuby. That, like, company that did short, short form, like weird short form mobile only video a few years ago. Okay, well, you know, they must have spun it off.

[Perry]

What's weird is like, Quibi must have been uniquely fucking stupid and bad because short form, even vertical video is actually starting to take off. Not just like, what you'd think of with reels and stuff, but, like, there's Chinese companies that are making Quibi style short form micro drum. They're like 10 minutes long.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[William]

It's the Exact same pitch.

[Perry]

And it's huge. It's huge in America, it's huge in China. Like those, I don't know the app is called. But like they advertise on Facebook all the time and they are blowing up because people just watch these. It's like if you ever seen Dhar Mann, it's like all 10 minute movies where there's a villain, he gets owned, someone does some poor person, beats a rich person or whatever and they just, they farm those millions of them, they all get tons of views. So like Quibi had to be uniquely stupid and bad. One thing I do remember from when this came out, you can tell me this is way memory was like it. The app took over your phone. So when you're watching a Quibi you couldn't do anything else. So you're watching this stupid.

[William]

Why would you want to do anything else?

[Doug]

Like.

[Perry]

If you're watching slop content, the normal thing you do is take out your phone and you scroll while you're watching it. But Quibi required you to have your phone entirely focused on watching Chance the Rapper do punk.

[Doug]

And like nobody, nobody's ever sat down and actually watched Emily in Paris. Nobody's done. Yeah, it's in my, some say it's impossible.

[William]

What's funny now, I went and watched a little bit of the one I said the, the Most Dangerous Game with Liam Hemsworth. Yeah, all the shots are just like, there's just a lot of room on the sides because again they, they, that was the whole thing. Like every single show needed to be shot so you could turn it vertical. It's just like, dude, this is, I, there's, there's so many things I wonder. One is just like, how shitty were all the shows because I didn't watch them as most people did not. Secondly, how 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. And it's. How do you contend those two things? I don't know.

[Doug]

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, etc. Right. You launch the product during COVID it becomes successful. But most people are just watching on.

[Perry]

TV regular, big blank space on every shot.

[Doug]

I, I, is there even A way to go watch the content now, like I imagine.

[William]

Yeah, it's so the shows have like dispersed into different areas. So some of them, for example, the one I looked at, you can watch for free on Amazon Prime. The Most Dangerous game featuring Liam's Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz.

[Doug]

Can I still watch it the old fashioned way?

[William]

No, I looked. I know I have to watch this ridiculous, ridiculous widescreen with this tiny vertical phone. This is unbelievable. I even tried to turn my laptop like this and it wouldn't work. Okay, that's Quibi.

[Doug]

Okay, well, Quibi, it's, it's just we've had such an all star lineup and it's hard to pick what we, what we put our money into. But I think we have a few others we wanted to touch on.

[Perry]

Dude. Okay. Speaking of phones, I got one for you.

[William]

Dude. This bit of us spending money makes. No, these are so bad and unpurchable. We have to make the bit somehow connect to this again. Technically, we could probably literally buy the rights to a Quibi show.

[Perry]

I literally think we should do that.

[William]

Okay.

[Perry]

If it's under a thousand dollars.

[William]

Okay, that's a bit. All right. That's a bit much. I think the amount of effort other lawyers it would take.

[Perry]

I was going to make enough money.

[Doug]

We buy the Quibi show and then just upload it to Patreon.

[Perry]

Okay. You know, be interesting. I legitimately. Quibi year 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.

[William]

Absolutely, yes.

[Doug]

Wait, they had a million? Hold on. You said they peaked at a million subscribers. That's so pretty crazy. They had 1.2 million for sure.

[William]

They spent a billion dollars.

[Doug]

Yeah, but that's better than YouTube ads.

[William]

Do you know how much we get a million? Like, I don't know. That's just, it's still insane.

[Doug]

That's better than YouTube assets.

[William]

That's, that's. It's 175 shows. It's a billion dollars. Celebrities.

[Perry]

You know what's better than that?

[William]

Oh, 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. Anyway.

[Perry]

We love smartphones, don't we folks?

[William]

We have keep coming back to how much we love smartphones and don't want.

[Perry]

To replace taking down everything else because we love smartphones, but sometimes they do too much. You Know, there's too many apps, there's too many distractions. You're trying to be social, but you're stuck doing work. What if a company could strip all that away in the year 2012, well after smartphones are a thing, and create a device purely for the social generation, AKA what they called can you pull my screen up? Generation upload. This is the Microsoft Kin. They saw a new wave of millennials, young millennials at the time, and they were using their phones and the Internet for social media and they said, we need to make a phone just for that. So they created the Microsoft Kin. Now there's two versions of the Microsoft Kin. 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.

[Doug]

Wait, is this. This is two different models. It's not the same that you slide out.

[Perry]

No, no, this is a different. This is. I mean this. But this might be the slide. But there is two. There's a Kin one.

[Doug]

Okay.

[Perry]

There's a small clamshell and akin to which is a bigger.

[William]

Wait, what year is this?

[Perry]

2010, when it first launched. 2012, by the time it shut down.

[William]

Okay, so this is also around the time that like Android is a thing.

[Perry]

Yep.

[William]

Because I know Android is a thing.

[Perry]

Also, separately, a Windows Phone is being developed that is entirely different OS and design than this.

[William]

Yeah, yeah.

[Perry]

So Microsoft launches this and some unique things about it. Zero Calendar app of any sort on the phone. You cannot track the date or time.

[William]

At all, but it helps you disconnect.

[Perry]

Okay. No contact list helps you disconnect. No ability to sync with your Outlook, Calendar or Google Calendar. Unable to instant message or use any IM clients, including at the time very popular Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AOL Instant Message.

[William]

Perfect for a vacation where you want to get away from it all.

[Perry]

There was no spell correct or predictive text inputs. You had to type it all out. So these are all problems. It's also priced equivalent to a premium iPhone and requires you to pay a $30 a month fee to have the highest end cellular network work. So these are all problems. But what was extra great about it was that they invent to get to all the social apps that it was all about, you had to use an. An app on or not an app. Sorry, there is no apps on this phone. This phone decided that apps were not a thing. There's no app store, you can't download or add anything. There's only Software that Microsoft has already created. That's the only thing you can use. And one of the things is called Microsoft Spot. And Spot contains sub software that they've created to pull from the API of Facebook and and all the major social networks. If any of those social networks update their. Their software at all, those services would be out of use until Microsoft fixed their API update. So very frequently in 2010 you would not be able to access any of the social apps constantly in fact.

[Doug]

Which is the main thing.

[Perry]

This is the main thing. And additionally Microsoft Spot, to save them costs, would only update with the Internet every 15 minutes. You might post. You couldn't actually post a tweet that wasn't one of their features. Twice on there you post a Facebook status update and you could not see the reactions to it for 15 minutes. It would not update on your phone, but you're still paying the full iPhone price. It is like one of the worst design products I've ever seen. Microsoft can a true disaster. It lasted 48 days on the market.

[William]

Wow.

[Perry]

And they spent quite a bit of money on this. And then it was pulled up. It's. 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 been a big way. This was such a failure that like people don't even. They even heard of I.

[Doug]

Before you brought it up for this. Yeah. I had never heard of it.

[Perry]

Like you've heard of the Zoom. The Zoom was like the same time. Is this similar design philosophy at Microsoft was this in the Zune but people.

[Doug]

Kind of knew about the Zun because the Zune sold more than people think.

[Perry]

Yes.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Perry]

My brother had a Zune. He loved his Zune. Like it. It did what it needed to do. This was a disaster. And I think I didn't fully understand this, but apparently a lot of infighting at Microsoft between the Windows team, Windows Phone team and this that like sabotaged it. So it like it was dead from arrival. So yeah, I don't think we should invest in this one.

[Doug]

I don't know.

[William]

Let's. Let's get back to it.

[Doug]

Let's not.

[William]

I don't. You haven't seen the Quibi shows like.

[Doug]

Coca Cola for the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers, risk takers for the optimists, pessimists for long distance love for introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and the doers for old friends and new Coca Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca Cola at a store near you.

[Perry]

Ford BlueCruise Hands Free highway driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel, allowing you to relax and reconnect while also staying in control. Enjoy the drive in BlueCruise enabled vehicles like the F150 Explorer and Mustang Mach E available feature on equipped vehicles Terms apply. Does not replace safe driving. See Ford.com BlueCruise for more details.

[William]

This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels.

[Perry]

Jack Daniels and music are made for each other.

[William]

They share a rhythm in the craft.

[Perry]

Of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas.

[William]

There'S a song in every toast.

[Perry]

Please drink responsibly.

[William]

Responsibility.org Jack Daniels and Old Number 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee I have.

[Doug]

A question for you too. Either of you like, like juice?

[Perry]

Oh, oh, I like me some juice.

[William]

I just. The problem with juice is it takes so much work, right? Juice kind of prepared and squeezed into a mug.

[Doug]

Well, Doug, what if you had the Tesla of juicers? Ooh, that sounds pretty nice, doesn't it?

[William]

So what is it kind of like.

[Doug]

The Tesla we saw? At the end of the day, I'm not clear.

[Perry]

Like a beautiful cybertruck driving the juice.

[Doug]

Silicon Valley has saved you, Doug, because they came out and made the juicer for everyone. Juicero, a $700 juicing machine that could squeeze proprietary bags of. Of fruits or vegetables that you put in the machine and had to buy for a subscription and make one cup of juice each.

[William]

Nice.

[Perry]

Fucking love Juicero. And it's such a fun.

[William]

I have it up here if you want to. If you want to pull up and then there's a.

[Doug]

So this product is. It's kind of insane at the surface level, right? Juicer that can only squeeze these bags, these bags of juice that you also have to buy from the same company. The each bag is five to eight dollars each, and you have to pay a monthly subscription to receive them. And then you pick your flavors, they arrive in the mail.

[William]

This is back when this is five to seven dollars is completely insane for a drink.

[Doug]

Yeah, yeah. This is in 2017. And this lasted. Juicero managed to make it a year and a half before folding. This company raised a lot of money In Silicon Valley, $120 million for this juicer company. And while they initially priced at $700, they quickly caved, I think within a few months, dropping the price to just $400.

[Perry]

Right. Well, that's a steal.

[Doug]

And the. And this thing had features like you could connect it to WI fi and operate it remotely, thank God.

[William]

And.

[Doug]

But you still had to be there physically to put juice packing it. And then. And then they had a bunch of celebrities back in the product. You know, Kobe Bryant, Oprah, Ivanka Trump.

[Perry]

And Kobe pushed the Juicero.

[Doug]

Kobe Bryant, Kobe, God bless him, Kobe pushed it.

[Perry]

I'll buy one.

[Doug]

And the real blow to the juicer's reputation was it it was supposed to, like, perfectly squeeze the proprietary bag to give you the maximum amount of fresh juice possible or whatever.

[William]

Yeah.

[Doug]

And then Bloomberg publishes an article in a video of someone buying the bags at Bloomberg and just squeezing them. And in the same amount of time that it takes the machine to squeeze the bag and make the juice for you, you could squeeze the bag into a cup with your own hands and produce the exact same amount of juice. And so you 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. At 3:34, 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, and I love this video.

[Perry]

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's Soup.

[Doug]

Why do you think people are wrong.

[William]

When they say Juicero is the embodiment of Silicon Valley excess?

[Perry]

Because they really don't understand what the mission was and the facts and how any new technology starts off expensive. And then as you innovate and you iterate over time. So they just got stuck on a narrative.

[Doug]

What do you think the media got wrong about Juicero?

[Perry]

Everything. They just had no clue.

[William]

Tell me more.

[Perry]

I mean, it's not even worth. I'm done. I'm not going to talk about.

[Doug]

What did they misunderstand about every.

[Perry]

Everything. William. William, I'm done. Next.

[William]

You're not gonna type in.

[Perry]

No, no, we're done with Juicero.

[William]

No Juicero.

[Perry]

No more Juicero. I'm gonna count to three and I'm gonna walk. I'm gonna walk away.

[Doug]

So this video, Vice News put this out a few years ago. And I remember watching it at the time because I already knew about Juicero. I thought it was really funny. And then was watching this, the CEO who ran an organic health food store in New York For a while and then managed to raise $120 million for this company that totally bombs. And then in this video, it's like getting into raw water where he takes like, you know, unfiltered water from nature and then packages it to like. And it wasn't selling it yet. I don't know if he ever got into that, but he's just like taking in the video. It's like him and his friend from Burning man, they find a pipe on the side of the street.

[William]

You can't.

[Doug]

And they're filling jugs of water from the pipe and. And these are like, yeah, this is what we drink. It's natural water.

[William]

From a pipe. From a natural pipe.

[Perry]

That's a natural thing.

[Doug]

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, like, houses.

[William]

I don't know by him.

[Perry]

My friend from Burning man and I are going to get raw water. And he's like, there's no Silicon Valley excess.

[Doug]

What are you talking about, Doug Evans? And so he, he clearly. This was a few years ago, but. But still was a little bitter on how he. He says, quote, juicero was killed in the first inning because. And there were eight more innings to go.

[Perry]

I think that Bloomberg video talking about is one of the greatest pieces of tech journalism. Here it is.

[William]

You just put it in the background. It's so. It's just a one minute video that says, here's the Juicero. When it launched, it cost $700. You put a pack of juice into it and then you press a button and it squeezes juice. But here's us just squeezing it with our hands and it's the exact same thing. And there's just like, it's the most like, irrefutable. There's no defense against this. Oh, it's squeeze it with up to 4 tons of force.

[Doug]

Yeah. I was, I was just impressed that they, they managed to make it the year and a half.

[William]

It's not even squeezing very hard. Oh my God. It's so funny. It's literally faster than the juicer. Oh my God.

[Doug]

I think the juice probably tasted good.

[Perry]

Oh, funny.

[Doug]

Oh, I do like the idea of becoming such a big fan of the taste that you just buy the packs.

[Perry]

Yeah, dude.

[William]

I mean, maybe they could have been.

[Perry]

The business pack delivery service is not the most insane thing. Like things like that do exist.

[William]

Yeah.

[Perry]

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 squeezes.

[Doug]

$700 is so tight, dude, it just squeezes it. That's like two PlayStations at the time.

[William]

Okay.

[Perry]

It's like not that hard to get juice if you. I don't know.

[Doug]

So what do you.

[Perry]

If you're gonna pay $7.

[William]

What I got actually, it actually connects to Jicero very strangely. So I want to tell you guys about a little console you might have heard of called ouya. Okay. Oh yeah, launch. I know Ouya launched in crap, I believe, 2012.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[William]

Y. So middle of 2012. A lot of these products around the same time frame. It seems like people are just trying like weird hardware. And the Android and mobile stuff's going really well. And so this little company appears on Kickstarter and their pitch is, this is a $100 micro console. Now back then, this is still 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 and, you know, some were starting to get good. You know, it's like Endless Runners. Yeah, it's like Temple Run. Right? These aren't like great games.

[Doug]

Everybody's playing Temple.

[William]

It's like my doctor was playing my teachers Triple Town. I was looking back at the old games. There were some banger games back then. This was great. This. That's when what's the Monument Valley came out. Anyways, so this pitch comes out at a time where, you know, we're still on the PS3, Xbox 360. It's like just progressing the next one and, and, and 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. We're going to have this amazing controller designed by this dude here who's this like super famous Swiss designer. I don't know how to say his name. Yves Bihar, something like that. Hey, you're a boy, you don't say it's. So this comes out. They're like, we got a sick team. We got a sick controller. The console's working, it's live, you can buy it. It's going to come out in a year. I was stoked about this. I was like, damn, this sounds cool.

[Perry]

Did you kickstart this?

[William]

I didn't Kickstart it, but the Kickstarter happens. They needed $950,000 to do it. They raised eight and a half million dollars. And for those who remember, this is right around the time that Kickstarter first started becoming a thing.

[Perry]

Oh yeah.

[William]

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 they launched this and turns out it's not very good. There's really 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. 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. They'll include things like just rain and it's a gif of rain. And that's one of their games that they've pitched you on if this is what they're going to do. And the controller that they kept saying, this is one of our big things. Our award winning designer Yves Bahar, in his firm Fuse Project, you know, he's designed the controller and it's incredible. The controller feels awful and the buttons are sticky and it feels cheap and plasticky. It starts to get worn out really quickly. There's all these different, you know, stories that come out of people being super upset with how it, how this thing actually plays.

[Doug]

Sorry guys. Yves just spilled a bit of beer in it before he shipped it to you.

[William]

I decided to buy one back in 2013.

[Perry]

Bought an.

[William]

Oh yeah, I bought an Ouya. This is my senior of college and I bought one. I was like, you know, this would be fun. Like I do, I have, I was doing an internship. I was like, I have a little money, let me like buy this thing and it'll probably be fine a year.

[Perry]

After it came out. So you were well aware that this.

[William]

Is not it at this point. The consensus again, this is early Internet. So there wasn't like this immediate flood of attention. You know, people weren't reviewing things on YouTube right away at that same level. And I was like, this seems fun, like for 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 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 22, Douglas reading this is to OUYA support. I expect a full refund for my OUYA order. I've not gotten my order. Have not gotten any tracking information about my order, despite multiple attempts to contact the support team and have read countless stories on the Internet on the ouya. Taking months to ship. I would like a refund for my purchase. If I do not get one in the next 30 days, I will be filing an FTC complaint charging for an order, giving no information whatsoever and having no customer support is completely unacceptable. And I will be doing whatever is necessary to make sure that my money is returned to me. Thank you for the help.

[Doug]

And they.

[William]

And then one day later, it got delivered. So, you know, not too much to say here. This was a console was all hyped up. It was like, ooh, a micro console. This would be cool. It turns out a micro console doesn't have the power to run cool things. This is early where apps were not cool enough. And now people can do their. You know, your phone can do this far, far better. So it all kind of failed. It lasted for a year or two. Eventually they were bought by Razer randomly who kind of scrapped them for parts. And then in terms of where everybody went, the kind of lead co founder of. Or lead founder of this, she kind of petered away, but now runs a soccer team in Los Angeles. So, you know, good. Good for her. And that famous designer went on to make the Juicero.

[Doug]

You're. You're not kidding.

[Perry]

You went from the.

[Doug]

Oh, yeah.

[Perry]

To the Juicero, back to back.

[William]

The lead designer of the Ouya controller, which was supposed to be the big key selling point because according to the CEO, there's nothing special in here about the ouya. The point being, like, anybody can, you know, it's like, that's what's so cool about it. But our controller is really great. Dog controller.

[Perry]

Maybe it was sticky because he kept spilling juice in it.

[William]

It's like, well, there was a machine that could make my juice superly.

[Perry]

I'm squeezing it too tough.

[William]

Yeah, he's.

[Perry]

I need to control one hand on.

[William]

A juice packet, the other on the controller. This shit is wild.

[Perry]

Squeeze.

[William]

Massive, massive, massive failure. And if I look at my timeline real briefly. Yeah, dude. So not the craziest story, but a nice little funny that era.

[Perry]

Oh, sorry.

[Doug]

I was gonna say what. Could we jump over to one other video game one that I. I also.

[Perry]

Have a video game one, but I'm down.

[Doug]

You do? What's your video game one?

[Perry]

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 either. Even though there's a lot of flops like that, like the Ouya. There was like the Nokia, like the early mobile Internet.

[William]

People were trying a lot of weird.

[Perry]

A lot of stuff was getting tried. Weird hardware. Everyone wanted to have like a piece of that pie. I remember I'm not going to mention this one, but the Nokia Engage was like a Game Boy competitor. Remember, that was like a phone, slash, Game Boy. Huge flop. In fact, is the second worst performing console of all time, the Nokia Engage, of a certain degree of size from a major company, but the worst performing console of all time. You could pull it up, Perry, is the Nintendo Virtual Boy.

[William]

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

[Perry]

I want to give you some of the details, Doug, because nowadays people see him wearing the new Apple Vision Pro.

[William]

Or Google Glass.

[Perry]

Or Google Glass in some way. There's a. It's a step, it's a continuum. And everyone is sort of coming around to the idea. Mark Zuckerberg changed his company name that, hey, we might want to have some virtual reality in one day. A metaverse could be a thing. And maybe the tech wasn't quite there, but was this a good idea? Well, if you look into it, the Virtual Boy had a couple things working against it. Number one was that it wasn't even a headset. You had to put it on a tripod on your desk with no strap and then push your face into this neoprene outer area and it blocked off all vision. And that was how you experience virtual reality. Secondly, to save money on the LEDs in it, in 1995, they only used red ones.

[William]

Nice.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Perry]

You are pressing your face. This is Mario Tennis.

[Doug]

I was going to say that looks like tennis.

[Perry]

A red, all red world review describing.

[William]

Like a black mirror episode, not a fun product.

[Perry]

So reviews described it as playing tennis in hell because it's just this all black and red dystopian.

[William]

Now this is on, ironically, what we should put our goal towards. Let's get a Virtual Boy and let's play it on this podcast. Let's do a Patreon episode. We're all in the Virtual Boy verse.

[Doug]

I wonder. I bet you might need a gold bar to get a mint Virtual Boy in the box, dude.

[William]

Unopened PSA 10.

[Doug]

Oh.

[Perry]

So I was reading about it. They've said, like, almost every gaming failure has a YouTube video come out later. Being like, this wasn't that bad, actually. 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. And everything you use VR for nowadays, people. I still get motion sickness. I did Hitman VR. It's like I get motion sickness. The motion sickness you get for something at this level of tech is absurd. The articles describe it as like 80% nausea rate. People could not get through a game of this without feeling sick or.

[William]

Hold on, hold on. It's a villain chair. What about that? 20%.

[Perry]

They loved it.

[William]

Okay, okay, there we go.

[Doug]

One in five guys. A loving Virtual Boy. Mario Tennis.

[Perry]

So I forget this guy's name.

[William]

Shigeru Miyamoto.

[Perry]

No, he's actually his boss. He's his mentor. I'm not gonna give his name. This guy is a Nintendo legend. One of the earliest engineers in Nintendo. Created the Game Boy. Created the game and Watch inspired Miyamoto. He spearheaded the Virtual Bed product. They forced him to release it early because they needed something between the snes and the N64. So he does. It's such a colossal flop. But he has to commit corporate seppuku basically and leaves Nintendo. And he's never. He's gone from the company.

[Doug]

Even after all of the ways, all of the wins.

[Perry]

He did this and he's gone from Nintendo.

[William]

One Virtual Boy and then get back up on your feet.

[Perry]

That's what you'd think. I don't know if Japan was too harsh on him or what, but he should be up there with Miyamoto. Like he is an. 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 examples.

[Doug]

I think I. I learned about the Virtual Boy growing up because of Nintendo Power magazine. And it was a punch.

[Perry]

The Glove. They had a glove.

[Doug]

Oh, yeah, the NES Power Glove. Nintendo has a bunch of crazy shit from back then that is really fun to just go and look up.

[Perry]

They've always been fucking crazy with heart. I guess that's kind of. They throw out the weird shit. So they get the Switch and the Wii, right?

[Doug]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's. That's the other end of it. Right? Is like them taking a big risk and trying something. I think I could have looked you in the eye and, you know, the 1980s, 90s and told you that, hey, man, this is going to work. Well, here's like, I could have gotten that across.

[William]

Do you think it could replace phones?

[Doug]

So that was my problem with the Apple Vision Pro was that it showed me all the regular colors that I.

[William]

See in my day to day life.

[Doug]

Me going, me going, going to Tim Cook, going to Tim Cook and just be like, what if it was all red?

[Perry]

Just too much blue, too much green.

[Doug]

But I, I, my last example is a gaming one as well. All right, the Google Stadia, which is a little more recent and the reason I hung onto 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 loser. And oh, you're gonna love the reason. So that he could get the gamer tag that he wanted. Because like as soon as a gamer.

[Perry]

Tag is chosen, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard. Nick. He's not gonna watch it.

[Doug]

But I, so, so he wanted to make sure he could get the tag before it was taken.

[Perry]

Let me give Google $300 founders edition so I can make sure I get Falco on stadium. You, you.

[William]

So what is this commercial?

[Doug]

So stadia, the appeal also. Who is it? That's Reggie.

[William]

Visa. May.

[Perry]

No, no, that'll be a commercial.

[William]

Reggie Watts.

[Doug]

Reggie Watts, Freddie Watson, asmongold.

[Perry]

It's like an asthma gold knock.

[Doug]

Okay, so the appeal of the Stadia was that it was going to be a cloud gaming service. Wherever you are, you would be able to stream games at 4K 60fps, play them on your phone, play them on your laptop, play them on your tv. And through the power of the Internet the game would be streamed to you and you would pay a monthly subscription fee, presumably for access to a database of available games. And people had talked about cloud gaming, but I don't think anybody had really poured a bunch of money, had, had had a true offer on the table like Google.

[William]

They were starting to come out around.

[Doug]

This time frame, but Google is like the powerhouse that's expected to do this. Well, that's what it was. Yeah, yeah, that's what the announcement had.

[William]

A look at when PlayStation did theirs because they came out with one that was pretty good. Anyway, sorry.

[Doug]

And they, they announced this and then on day one, the available product is the Founders Edition, the one that Nick bought, which includes a, the, the controller that they're selling and also the Google chromecast 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 like a console. Right. Still not particularly expensive. And also included in that was three months of the subscription service that you needed to access and use the service.

[William]

Right, Right.

[Doug]

But what users quickly realized is that you but you still had to pay full price for games. Only a small pool of like 22 games were available through the subscription service. And most of the core like AAA titles that you would want to play via the stadia were not available that way and you just had to buy them outright. Still. So already a bit of a disagreement in like oh, I expected this to.

[William]

Be different because that does match up with what Xbox or PlayStation do kind of. Right. You have to pay a week.

[Perry]

You know, on Xbox you might have a score.

[Doug]

I would genuinely that bad still. Okay, but, but upon the. We arrive at the launch day similar to your customer experience with oh yeah, a bunch of people don't actually get the products in the mail that they need to play. So it's launching and they're not receiving anything. And also you can only access the platform on that launch day if you have a code that is sent in tandem with the package that you need the mail. So there's a bunch. 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.

[William]

You gotta be careful not to let too many customers use the product they paid for. What is the reason I'm lost.

[Doug]

And eventually, you know, within that first week delayed packages stuff starts arriving. But now people actually have the product. And the number one, you know, problem with cloud gaming is that it's so reliant on what Internet you have available.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Doug]

And the latency was horrific. Videos of like people clicking the button and then their character jumping like a full second and a half later. And then the frame rate being awful. But keep in mind the frame rate being awful is a reflection of the stream of the game. So the game keeps moving on the server or like hardware at Google that it's. That is being used. Right. So it's just, just your inputs are still being like put into the game without you being able to see it creates this really choppy horrific experience. And then upon further inspection, because their big brag was that you're going to be able to play at 4K 60fps if you pay for the right tier of subscription, a bunch of the games weren't actually being run at that resolution. So certain games like, might be run at 1080 on the Google game servers that are meant to be in streaming to you, but they're only streaming. They're streaming a 4K feed of a 1080p game.

[Perry]

The game is playing in 1080 and they're just giving you a 4K feed of that, which is so fucking slimy.

[William]

Way unnecessary amounts of data for no reason.

[Doug]

Yeah, just. 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. Most people's experiences playing are just really, really bad. And then this, this launched in 2019, like I said, and it manages to run for a few years. And then in September 2022, Google announces that they were shutting down the program with it completely going offline in January of 2023. And then also everybody that bought the controller got like, anybody who bought it got refunded for the equipment that they bought. And then also they pushed a software update that allowed the controller to be compatible with like all devices. That's nice because another huge complaint was that the controller only worked properly via Bluetooth with like Google devices and you otherwise had to plug it in via USB C. So at the end they're like, we all know you still have this. Here's a software update. So it like works with other stuff. And then the project was dead. And this has been sitting. It's so funny because I lived with Nick for a long time, right? Even after we moved out of the of the house with Ludwig, we kept living together and I would walk into his room or his office and there's just a shelf where the Stadia sits and never got used. And Nick got his username until he got shut down in 2023.

[Perry]

Nobody took that from him. Wow. Goodbye there.

[William]

So let's be clear, Google did take that. It's not in the servers anymore.

[Perry]

I remember this very vividly because I was working at Nvidia at the time and Nvidia has a competitor called GeForce Now. Yeah, I did some marketing for that on that team for a bit. And the big three was Stadia, which we thought was going to be the dominant one. Amazon, Luna and then Nvidia GeForce now and they all Amazon. I went called Luna and I tested. I remember I played Lunar Stadia, but I tried this game, Deus Ex Human Revolution, and I tested it on Luna or Stadia and I remember just trying to move around and it was just like, like it was like, so obviously, like, how did anyone let this through at all? I don't unders you. Nobody could play a game comfortably.

[William]

And that's you in what, San Francisco.

[Perry]

Right, In San Jose.

[William]

So, okay, so it's not like you have dog. You're not out in the rural.

[Perry]

No, we had great Internet. I was at the corporate office. Like, it was just bad. It's like the frame rate mixed with the lag made it unplayable for like anyone wanting to enjoy the game. So. Yeah, disaster. Though I do think if we had to buy one that like, the idea makes sense. This will be big.

[William]

Yeah. Eventually.

[Doug]

Eventually it could be good enough.

[Perry]

At Nvidia, all the time they would talk about how, like, we can't push this too much because if this takes off, nobody buys GPUs anymore. Like, there's no point owning a gaming PC if you can stream 4K HD anywhere. There's just no point like it. So. But the technology isn't there yet.

[William]

Yeah. And it needs a bunch of Internet upgrades as well.

[Perry]

Yeah. Especially in the us I can't get fiber in la, let alone, you know, some of these things.

[William]

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.

[Perry]

Yeah. Multiplayer doesn't work for. Yeah, there's. Yeah.

[William]

And also just your. Because I, I looked this up. PlayStation had one. They launched in 2014, a streaming gaming service. I remember playing it because I played some of their, I think PS3 games on a PS4 because that was the only way to play them. And it worked decently. Well, it was like not enjoyable. Latency. It was still better than a 2025.

[Doug]

Nintendo game, but it was an actual cloud service. I thought that was just a subscription service to play like a pool of games.

[William]

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 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. It competently for a decade.

[Perry]

Something similar.

[William]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's, there's.

[Doug]

I mean, they have Game Pass, but I don't know if that has anything to do with that.

[Perry]

I think Game Pass has a cloud gaming component. But anyway, my, my understanding is that AI, if you want to throw that to Doug, we Didn't mention. We haven't mentioned it today. It because it can like upscale and predict the next frame. It is the thing a lot like you can basically stream almost no data like blocks like a very, very low res thing and then AI locally can upscale it and make it so that once this is advanced you can actually do this technology.

[Doug]

I don't know enough about either of these things to confirm but this sounds vaguely like editing footage using proxies like proxy.

[Perry]

Right?

[Doug]

You know about that?

[Perry]

I don't. I mean they're sending a 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. And then the AI locally upscales it back to 4K by predicting what it looks like in 4K.

[William]

Your example is if the AI didn't upscale it and you were just looking at low res footage.

[Doug]

Okay.

[William]

Which is missing the entire premise.

[Doug]

No, it's close. It's probably close.

[William]

Xbox cloud gaming, they Xbox has their own version and that's. You can get that as part of.

[Perry]

It's probably the most successful one ultimate. Because Game Pass is huge.

[Doug]

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.

[Perry]

Okay.

[Doug]

And it's. In the 1990s Coors announced that they wanted to. They released a sparkling water and Coors.

[William]

The Coors beer.

[Perry]

The beer company.

[Doug]

And it was themed after, you know, the mountains in the background of Coors beers. And it's like cold Coors.

[William]

We're talking natural water.

[Doug]

Natural raw water. Raw water. Raw water.

[Perry]

And the Juicero guys on this one too.

[William]

And the very basis on water.

[Doug]

The very basic reason this didn't succeed is people just didn't understand that it didn't have any alcohol in it. Like they didn't get it because of the brand that it's coming from. Right. But I think two cultural things have changed in that you. I think they have two directions they could re announce or push this product through now which is that non alcoholic like drinks from beer brands are popular now. Like you can drink alcohol free beer from like Heineken or something like that. Right. So I feel like that is a. Maybe an approachable angle to bring it back. But just sparkling water in general is way more popular than it used to be. And they could re announce this product into a market that is like more.

[Perry]

I mean liquid death did this right. Liquid death is kind of like people thought it was an alcohol. Yeah, it's a water. They made a ton of money.

[Doug]

But it's a market that I think exists now. Whereas in the 90s, I can understand maybe people being a little more confused.

[William]

Of everything we've talked about.

[Doug]

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

[William]

Of everything we. You would want to get into water that you would just lose the liquid death selling water.

[Doug]

What?

[Perry]

That you would just lose the liquid death.

[Doug]

You don't think you can just make a competitor, like probably you think the.

[William]

Unique, the unique advantage you would have is having Coors do it. You're saying we'd bring about the Coors water?

[Doug]

No, no, no. I'm saying that of the things that I put time into, this feels the most viable to me. Genuinely, it's just water. That's what I'm saying. But people sell. I mean think about. People sell just water all the time. It's incredibly.

[William]

No, you're. No, you're right.

[Perry]

It's just also just water turning into the Juicero guy. Just, just water just pivoted the raw water.

[Doug]

No, no, I wouldn't charge $700. I would charge $700.

[William]

Is it hand squeezed water? Raw hand squeezed water.

[Doug]

It's hand squeezed, but it's not raw.

[William]

Fresh, never frozen raw water.

[Doug]

Because I don't think it's like, I'm not going to relaunch stadia. That doesn't fucking work right now.

[Perry]

What if it's Juicero but we emphasize the hand squeeze?

[Doug]

Hand squeezed hand. Can you.

[Perry]

You squeeze it by hand. You pay someone to come and squeeze it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's money there. Do you have any more?

[William]

Okay, super quick bites.

[Perry]

I have a very quick buy one too, but we can.

[William]

Okay, all right, real quick, check in. How are NFTs doing? NFT?

[Perry]

Great, great.

[William]

Bored Ape Yacht Club. These are one of the most popular NFTs of all time. They hit a market cap of, let's see, about $4 billion. And that was in 2022. And unfortunately they have dropped down to about 174 million in value.

[Perry]

Still too high.

[William]

It's about, I believe, 4% of what they were originally worth.

[Perry]

It is a picture of a fucking ugly looking. How dare you?

[William]

This is the future and anyone can profile pictures. Crypto punks, those have gone down about 76%. What shocked me about both of these though is like nobody really talks about NFTs anymore. Crypto punks still selling like, like every day. Every, like you Know, multiple times a day for $100,000.

[Perry]

There's like, wash trading. People like, set it up so it automatically goes back and forth to keep.

[William]

Probably, yeah, the, these board apes are going for 18,000.

[Perry]

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. They all just w. Change their profile picture back.

[William]

A bunch of. I had like, several friends who either did crypto launches or were like, like, hey, everybody, check out whatever zany tigers. And it's like, it was really kind of shocking to be like, really?

[Perry]

You're really, really, you believe in zany tigers as a. It's gonna bring us together. It's part of the community building of the Internet.

[Doug]

I, I, I, I know this guy. And we, when the Yard went to Italy a few years ago, there was these two other people that are friends with Cutie that came with us. And we're chatting on the trip. It's our first time getting to know them. Do you know about an NFT series called Just Rocks Rocks. And it was one of the ones that like, blew up or something. Right. And he explained how him and his brother had pooled together their savings to buy one of the rocks for 20k and then it ballooned to like 2 million in a couple months and they sold it. And he was traveling. He had been traveling Europe for like six months with his rock money and, and they were just hanging out with us in Italy on that trip.

[Perry]

That's the best use of crypto I've ever heard.

[William]

Wonder what. I would love to know what's happened to the guy who paid $2 million for a rock. Yeah. The NFTs have not done well. This, this. I looked at some of the other like, you know, successful ones that, that at least had a moment where people were going, this might be one of the big ones. Like, let's get into it.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[William]

Me Bits was launched by the same as crypto. That's down also.

[Doug]

Yeah, it was a really big, like, it was like an apartment one with like, Solana and, and like a bunch.

[Perry]

Of people bought a digital apartment.

[Doug]

A bunch of people?

[Perry]

No, not a bunch of people. He bought an NFT picture of a digital apartment.

[Doug]

No, no, it was like some, it was like my brother.

[William]

It was.

[Perry]

No, it was you.

[William]

Yeah. How much you pay for?

[Doug]

I believe I paid $950.

[Perry]

$900. Don't, don't do that. Don't give him that.

[William]

No, I put 500 into Doge, but to me. It was, it was, that's a bet.

[Perry]

On stupidity that might pay off. Like that's.

[William]

No, no, no. It was investment.

[Doug]

That's what I was doing. I was. Hold on, think about it.

[William]

Like.

[Doug]

No, no, no, I didn't, I've never talked about this. This is what you imagined how I talked about it?

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Doug]

About the apartment.

[Perry]

It's going to change revolution.

[Doug]

Have I ever said anything even remotely close to that? I, I, from the day I bought it, I was like, I'm going to the casino and I'm trying to win.

[Perry]

Remember it differently.

[Doug]

But I wasn't like, I'm going to live in my apartment one day.

[Perry]

You said, this is my family's future. This is where grow here.

[William]

I don't understand why kids are talking about expensive housing we've given them.

[Perry]

You can get it for 950.

[Doug]

I can go move into mine anytime I want. You know what?

[Perry]

Very last one.

[William]

Yeah, we don't need any more NFTs. They're doing bad. They're doing real bad.

[Perry]

Very last one. Okay. Early days of the Internet, 1999. Internet is popping off the way AI is now. It's getting fucking big. OK? Jeff Bezos famously says, all right, I see the Internet growing 10,000% a year. I need to figure out out how to take advantage of that. 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 and turns up and he discovers books. What is a better product? What is a product that is. I'm sorry. Yeah, well, whatever.

[Doug]

What is this?

[Perry]

He 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. So they can. It's a good business for what he's doing. What about a business where the product you're selling is really, really fucking heavy and really, really low margin, AKA dog food. What if you made a dog food shipping service called pets.com in the early days of the Internet when shipping logistics are not very well advanced and the cost of running website is very high. What if you lost significant amount of money on every single sale? That's acquisition strategy had negative gross margins. Yeah.

[William]

Once you get it like a high user base of dogs, then you can up the price. We'll figure theoretically.

[Perry]

Theoretically you could do that. That's not insane. The problem was if you are Burning that much money on every sale. And you are spending even more money on a series of absolutely expensive of super bowl ads featuring your sock puppet pet that you're burning through money hand over fist. Very quickly you run out of cash. Which is exactly what Pets.com did. They're considered the most egregious example of the dot com bubble. They were valued very highly despite not only making no money but as they grew making less money because every additional sale was so expensive them to service. So they failed spectacularly. And they're like a kind of an example of the dot com bubble. They're the nft of their day.

[William]

Unironically I would buy pets.com.

[Perry]

I bet nowadays you kind of do it right.

[William]

We should look at the pricing of pets dot com. I think we. We blow the money on.

[Doug]

I think this is not. 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.

[Perry]

Missed. Let us know.

[William]

But are you asking me or the audience?

[Perry]

No, I'm asking the audience if they have ones we missed and they want to let us know.

[Doug]

I was asking you guys.

[Perry]

Oh, you guys. What we should pick. Oh, I thought you were doing an outro.

[Doug]

I just wanted to know. I want to get your question.

[William]

So awesome to ask your friends something. He's like, yeah, let us know.

[Perry]

That's what I do. My wife's talking to me and chat. What do you think? What do you think we should give her Chat. What's she talking about?

[William]

Dude? Honestly, I'll just. I'll say a quick Juicero. It's one. It's the most egregiously stupid thing I've seen.

[Doug]

I just. It's.

[Perry]

It's Juicero is really funny and dumb.

[William]

All of the others are like a product that makes a modicum of sense. Like if the techno but it's just nothing about it makes no sense.

[Doug]

It's Juicero is so funny because if you get rid of the juicer it's kind of a business.

[William]

Yes.

[Doug]

Like. Like the main. That is the Juicero is the Juicero part. But if you just sold bags of.

[William]

Squeeze, by the way, I don't know if you said you admit you kind.

[Doug]

Of have an angle.

[William]

You couldn't open the bags unless you had the machine. They were like it's for security purposes or whatever.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[William]

You can't just buy the juice packets. By the way. Having the idea of your juice bag need wi fi connected unlocking in order to access the juice is so, so insane. I literally. Guys, I would go in on a Juicero. I think we can find one line. We should have it in the lemonade statue. We absolutely should buy a Juicero.

[Perry]

We're putting our money towards a Juicero.

[Doug]

Thank you for watching this week's episode of Lemonade Sin. You can catch us soon on the Patreon episode this week if you want to check that out. Patreon.com lemonade sand and we'll see you.

[William]

There and would actually love to let us know. I would love to hear if you have any other products we missed that are notable. Thank you so much.

[Perry]

Bye bye.

[Doug]

Support for this show comes from Odoo.

[Perry]

Running a business is hard enough, so.

[Doug]

Why make it harder?

[Perry]

With a dozen different apps that don't.

[Doug]

Talk to each other. Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e commerce, and more. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you try Odoo for [e-mail] that's o d o o dot com.