It's time for episode 602 of the Clockwise podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, April the 23rd, 2025. Clockwise, four people, four tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast that'll be over and done before a late April rainstorm. I am one of your hosts, Micah Sargent, and I am joined across this vast and ever-changing internet. By the West Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. What? As well as maker of many a fine podcast. It's Jason Snell. Hello, Jason.
Hi, Micah. Clockwise co-host Emeritus is my favorite title for this show. And, you know, as Prince reminded us, sometimes it snows in April. Just keep that in mind if you're out there waiting for a rainstorm. There you go. While you wait for the snow, I will introduce one of our awesome guests to my left, partner at Lickability and host of Absolutely Crushed. It's MB Bischoff. Welcome back to the show, MB. I love being here Micah. Thanks for having me.
I have to introduce to you my fellow Jason blank blank E-L-L. It's not me. It's Jason Howell, the host of Android Faithful. Jason. Fellow Jason, welcome back to Clockwise. Hello, fellow Jason. I promise this podcast won't get very confusing. Because we keep it in order. That's why clockwise doesn't get confusing as we go in order. It'll be clear. Everybody. We love order here on this show. You know how it works. 30 minutes, four topics. And mine for you is this.
Do you have any interest in a humanoid robot for the home as we hear that this could be the year of the beginning of the humanoid robots? And what would be its primary purpose in your home? Sure. Well, I live in a very small one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, so I don't think I have space for a robot walking around if it's human size. I really have enough space for myself and my partners when they're here.
I do have one of the Roombas. It tucks under the couch. That's fine. So maybe if it could store itself really small, I would test it out. But I don't really have a purpose in mind either. Yeah, I mean, Micah, in the interest of keeping this to 30 minutes, I could just say no, I don't. But I don't want a humanoid robot, right? Like, I don't want it to be shaped like a human or be in the uncanny valley at all. I don't want that in my house. However, I will say.
Sure. If there was a little, I don't know, R2-D2 kind of thing that could move around and with... The real thing is like with arms and stuff, like if it was something that could like load the dishwasher, pick up dirty clothes, stuff like that. Well, wouldn't that be nice? That would be really, really nice. So I could see interest in robotic.
But I don't want it to look like a person. You know, I would much rather it be like a little trash can that rolls around with kind of some, you know, little stick arms that stick around. But like make it as not human as possible. That's what I think. jason stick arms that made me laugh uh humanoid i don't think i need a humanoid robot i'm right there with you uh other jason fellow jason um Not to mention, imagine waking up in the middle of the night and the house is dark.
And you walk downstairs to get yourself a glass of water and you bump into a humanoid thing like standing there like. That does not sound like a good time to me. So I don't need a humanoid robot. But that would be freaky, right? But I would love.
For a thing that can do all of those mundane things, kind of like what you said, Jason, you're doing the dishes or the laundry or the vacuuming. I don't think that it necessarily needs to be humanoid in order to do those things. I just want something robotic. To do the mundane things that I don't want to do so that I can do the things that I want to do. That's that's my. Fair all around. I am very much on side with everyone. Look, I'm I'm.
I'm a pretty tall guy and pretty scrappy, so I could fight back with a humanoid robot to a certain extent. But every time I see any of these robots or frankly, even any robots with arms, even if they are a robo vacuum that has an arm that promises to pick up your socks. I think about them trying to pick up my dogs who are very small, tiny little creatures and hurting them. And the thought that I would come downstairs and you hear beep, boop, bop.
And your dog has a broken leg because it tried to beep boop bop your dog into the sock bin is horrifying. So. I don't know if there's going to be a world in the short term that is going to have me in it with a robot in my home that could do anything more than the. Honestly, the... idea of the robo vacuum we do have sort of bumping up against one of my dogs right now. It's okay. But as they get older,
Even that's going to be terrifying. Leave the dogs alone. Yeah, leave the dogs alone is my point. Thank you all for your answers on that. Let's go to our next topic, which comes from MB. Yeah, so this week, Google might be forced to sell Google Chrome upcoming due to their recent antitrust ruling. Yesterday, OpenAI said they would consider making an offer to buy Chrome and making it an AI-first experience, whatever that means.
My question is, and you can go as serious or silly with this as you want to, what company would you want to buy and own Chrome and what would you want them to do with it? This is a really good question. And there are so many bad answers here because the ones who would do it would be the ones you wouldn't want to do it. They would be tech giants saying, oh.
It's a problem that a tech giant has the dominant browser. Let's give it to another tech giant. It's a bad idea. So I hate to say this, but I will give it a serious answer and say, I think it would need to be divested into its own company.
with its own revenue model that wasn't doing advertising, that could make deals with other with search providers and ai providers and whatever and i know that i'm essentially talking about firefox at this point but like i feel like I hate to say this, but I don't know another option here other than to treat a dominant browser platform as a public utility.
and have it be regulated and have it be on its own and not leveraged by whatever tech giant could write the big check to take it off Google's hands. I don't think that would solve any problem. So I would say... you know, node tech giants and push it out there on its own and make it sort of a public utility, I think I would say. You make a good case, other Jason. Yeah, that's good.
Ultimately, I think I would prefer that Google hold on to Chrome. And I think I believe that in the end, they probably will. There's going to be some concessions, but I don't think that Chrome. going to exit Google, but I could be completely wrong if Google had to sell Chrome. Now I'm starting to get swayed a little bit by what you were saying, Jason. But my initial thought was that I'm a huge fan of perplexity.
And I feel like open AI walks into the room and they suck the oxygen out of the room wherever they go right now when it comes to AI. And I don't think they really need any help to get to where they're already going. perplexity kind of plays by its own...
rules a little bit. They're doing things a little bit different than a lot of the other companies out there. Yes, they have the potential and probably will become another big tech giant over time, or maybe not. Maybe their mode isn't strong enough, as they say. But but I think that there's a lot of ways in which perplexity would. as an AI service is really built.
around being like search on steroids. At least that's how I've used it for the last year and a half. And I think they've done really good things there. I could see them doing some really interesting things, you know, kind of integrating that with the Chrome browser, their agentic search, their task automation, like real-time context.
built into the browser i think that there's a lot of ways that you could go in bringing ai edit more ai forward kind of presentation inside of the chrome browser i just think at the end of the day it's probably going to stick with google so yeah Uh, so I think that my answers would have been Firefox. I guess it is Firefox because this is clockwise and it's not a draft.
um i yeah exactly not yet who knows what'll happen um i think that the idea of a, yeah, sort of independent existence for the company or for the browser makes the most sense. Um, although there was a point when I wondered if You know, the thing about like the best leader is the one who doesn't want to be in charge. I just thought about Microsoft having the horrible past that it had with antitrust. And if it got saddled with Chrome, how it would be like.
OK, we're going to do this, but we're going to be very careful about it. And we really were reluctant to own it. But we'll, you know, just don't look at us, government. So yeah, ultimately, I think a sort of Firefox-esque rollout of its own thing makes the most sense. MB, what about you? Those are all great answers. And they're also smart, intelligent technologist answers. I just want to get silly with it. I think that it'd be fun if a company that.
could never really run something that large, just had Chrome and could do what they wanted with it from a design perspective. Like think about... Uh, uh, if you just gave panic Chrome and said, you know, make it beautiful or gave it to teenage engineering or, uh, or, or one of the, one of these other companies. Um, so that's, that's, uh, that's more the vibe, but if I had to, if I had to make a serious answer.
I really I still really love the arc and the browser that the browser company is working on right now is sort of interesting as well in this AI browsing space. And a lot of the effort that they put into it is building on top of Chromium. So what if they just had the whole engine and the whole browser themselves and all the users and could learn from all that? I think that would be interesting.
All right, we have reached halftime here on Clockwise, which means it's time for me to tell you about Four Geeks Academy, who are bringing you this episode of Clockwise. If you're looking for a career in tech, well, take this ad read as a sign because 4Geeks are here to help you get started. They offer unlimited coding mentorship via one-on-one sessions.
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And check out the link in our show notes for the full link. Our thanks to 4Geeks Academy for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. All right, we are back from the break, and that means it's time for Jason Snell's topic. Yay, subscription fatigue. It's a real thing. And there are so many streaming services out there. And, you know, I was going to ask.
what's the one streaming service that you would hold on to when you got rid of all the others? But I didn't think that was quite as interesting as saying, what's the first to go? What is a streaming service? that you currently subscribe to, that if I made you drop one, and I'm a very mean person, I'm going to make you drop one, which one goes? Which one gets the ass? I think this one's kind of easy for me because I'm feeling in this household, I'm feeling this growing, bubbling sentiment.
that resolves around kicking Amazon to the curb and trying to support, you know, go a little bit more local and everything. And as we know, Amazon Prime. you know, kind of bakes in their media streaming product into the Prime subscription. So I think this would be a byproduct of that. It's also the streaming service that I think, historically speaking, I've used absolutely the least compared to anything else. It's like the last resort streaming service, I feel. It's gotten a little better.
For me, it would definitely be Amazon Prime TV. Bye bye, Disney Plus. I don't watch. Oh, I don't watch anything on there. So, yeah, it would be honestly. It's hard to say I'd be the first to go because I just remembered that I like when it. when it goes to renew, it will not be renewing. So it was the first to go. It's like breaking news right in the middle of the topic. MB, what about you?
I'm currently paying for two music streaming services, Apple Music and Spotify. If I could get rid of one, I would get rid of Spotify. I'm not a huge fan of how they run their business and what the product in general has done to parts of the music industry. At the same time, like getting playlists, seeing playlist places and then like trying to use those playlist transfer tools doesn't work perfectly. And there's a lot of music that's only on there. So I feel like I'm kind of stuck.
Wow, these are good answers. I... I also have breaking news. I just paused Netflix during this segment. Netflix is at the bottom of my list. actually. I don't watch a lot there, but when I canceled it a couple months ago, I suddenly realized there were like three things I needed to watch so I could talk about them. And so I had to bring it back. So it's the bottom. The problem is...
That they're all getting very smart about programming enough so that it's hard to drop it. So like I could drop Paramount Plus. That would be an easy answer for me. But they have, because there's no Star Trek right now, not until later this summer. And that's the number one thing I watch on Paramount Plus. But they have the Champions League in soccer where my team is still in it. So I can't let it go.
And I feel that way about Peacock. Peacock has Premier League soccer that I watch, and so I can't lose it. And in the end, Netflix is the one that I find the weakest, although I could throw some, I mean, some other minor subscriptions out there too. I actually love Jason Howell's answer. Um, I should probably, I realize I order so much from Amazon and I wonder if I didn't have prime.
If I would be more mindful of what I get from Amazon and what I don't get from Amazon and, and the whole subscription would kind of come along with it. So that's a great answer too. Thank you all for being, I thought this would be harder, but everybody seems to have something on the chopping block. I think that says something about how we all feel about our subscriptions these days. Sorry, Disney Plus. Micah knows how to quit you and has. Jason Howell, take us home with the last topic.
Why don't we put a smile on our faces? What's your current go-to online spot, which is the site? that you go to when you want to feel good. It gives you a good feeling. Maybe it's nostalgia. Maybe it's inspiration. Maybe that site doesn't even exist right now, but there's one from your past that you remember fondly.
I'm curious to know what your answer is to that, Micah. Yeah, I'm going to have to go to the past for sure on this one, because I genuinely do not have like a social media site or website right now that. gives me those kinds of feels. Uh, but back in the day, um, there was, and we may have even talked about this. I can't remember, but there was a site called a daily booth.
And Daily Booth was interesting because you would, as the name would suggest, post a photo every day if you can. You're not required to, but you're only allowed to post one per day. And the neat thing about it was there was a global stream of these photos. So when you post a photo.
it shows up in this just stream of photos that are coming through from all around the world. And then you go to that main page and you see other people's photos coming through and then you see yours finally make it onto the page. And then you end up meeting people from all over the world. And I, to this day, still have two friends, one in the US, one outside of the US that I met via daily booth.
And I just the idea that there were all of these people all over the world and that it was small enough to where you could actually see your photo come through. It all was just really like magic early web kind of stuff. And I very much appreciate it and can look back on it fondly. MB, what about you? Yeah, I love this question. This is a new website that my friend actually just launched that's been taking up that first tab slot in my browser. It's called Hypertext TV.
And what it is, is this gorgeously rendered like CRT screen that has a channel guide and different channels that you can flip through. And on each channel, there's one website sort of playing at a time. So for the 30 minutes or the hour that you're on that channel, you can just browse that one website. It's filtered through this sort of CRT visual effect, and it just feels so fun to play with.
Uh, and there's always new things to discover. It sort of reminds me of like early stumble upon kind of vibes, but more limited because you have to wait to see what's going to come next. So, um, shout out to Ava for hypertext TV. Wow, really nice. Today, mostly my comfort area is probably something like I have a sports list on Blue Sky. I used to have one on, I mean, I still do have one on Twitter, but...
I mostly use the Blue Sky one now and I just like go in there and it's like my little sports writers and journalists and stuff are talking about sports stuff and it makes it's just a nice place. But I have two kind of classics that I want to mention.
One of them is called TVTattle.com. I used to go there all the time. That was the thing I would literally type into my web browser when I didn't know what was going on. It's a guy named Norman Weiss, who since the year 2000 has been chronicling sort of like... what shows got canceled, what shows got renewed, what's news going on in like the world of television, which I've always been interested in.
And I am delighted to report that Norman Weiss still does it. It's a sub stack now, but Norman Weiss is still compiling television news and posting it. And I think that that's great. And a site that is gone from the internet that always delighted me. I used to teach. web design at UC Berkeley at the Graduate School of Journalism. It was like web and information design and architecture. And there was a site called Carviat Emptor, which was about buying a used car. And it was genuinely the worst.
site ever terrible design terrible organization it was one long page that just scrolled forever. It was not like multiple pages. It was just one long page of a rant of a guy who was angry about how cars are sold. And we used it as the what not to do and had our students redesign it. It's long gone from the internet, but boy, I love visiting that site. And just every time I looked, there was something new that I could not believe was on a webpage. And so I kind of missed that one. Jason Howell.
Uh, this one is pretty easy. I'm going with the current and it's not like I go there all the time, but every once in a while I find myself there and I'm happy every time I do. And that's the internet archive. I love going to that site and just going down a rabbit hole, be it. You know, be it old web pages that I, you know, on a spur of the moment, you know, randomly remember. Oh, yeah, I used to go there. I wonder what it looked like kind of reliving the web page.
Or going back and checking out all the emulated like Commodore 64 games or the like old, old video game magazines that they have there. I mean, it's just. It's a like it's a treasure is what it is. And I hope it never goes away because boy, is it. a valuable, not only a resource, but just like a fun way to spend time remembering and recognizing and appreciating kind of how this internet thing that we all rely so deeply upon.
how it's evolved over the last few decades and everything. And man, I hope nothing ever happens to the internet archive. I absolutely love it. Same. All righty, folks, we are just about to the end of this episode, but I do want to take a moment to remind you about our swag. Uh, our clockwise swag is available at clockwise dot social. When you head there and you, uh, see your lovely hosts. Oh, we're going to get a photo of Jason on there. Uh, you of course can, uh, click.
to buy our clockwise hat, our clockwise tote, our clockwise mug, our clockwise shirt, and our clockwise phone case. I've collected four out of five. The phone case is not on my list, but the rest... I have, and they're all delightful, well-made products. When you buy those products, you are helping to support the work we do here on this show, you know, helping us pay the Zoom bill. So we appreciate it. Head to clockwise.social to get your clockwise swag.
And I remind you, love to see the photos of you rocking your clockwise swag. So be sure to share those with us as well, if you want. Alrighty, folks, my bonus question for you is this. What is a show or movie you're currently watching or have watched recently that you've enjoyed? MB, we'll start with you. Yeah, this is an obscure pick. But a month ago, I went and saw a screening of this movie called Castration Movie Part One. There will be more parts.
And it was incredible. It's by Louise Weird. She shot the entire film on her family's like 25 year old mini DV camcorders. The whole thing has this sort of like. home movie quality to it. It makes everything feel really, really realistic. And it's screening in some cities occasionally, but more easily than that, you can get a copy of it on her Gumroad. Just be aware that it is 4.5 hours, so just make sure you have some time. Wow.
Wow. I am going to recommend Ludwig, which is a TV show from Britain. It's now also on BritBox in the U.S. It stars David Mitchell, the comedian. It is a cozy mystery about a puzzle creator who's... police detective brother goes missing. And through a series of very unlikely events, it doesn't matter. They're just setting up a great premise. He is, he is forced to pose as his brother.
with no history of solving crimes, but you know what he does like is a good puzzle. And it turns out he's great at solving crimes in an unorthodox way. There are six episodes. It is amazing. It exactly is what I want. from television it's funny it's clever uh it's just enjoyable to watch And the premise is the show knows that that premise is ridiculous and it addresses it as it goes along. But like really fun show that not enough people have heard about Ludwig. Check it out.
I'm not going with an obscure show that nobody's heard about because I don't watch much TV right now. It's hard to find the time. When I do, I'm always catching up on the things that are obvious. Maybe it's not obvious, but White Lotus Season 3.
on HBO Max. I'm just a huge, huge fan of this series. It's just... an oddball series if you haven't heard about it so you know it's like one of those shows where uh people's different intersecting lives kind of You know, it tells each of their stories, but it's always based around a particular like exotic vacation destination tied to a like resort franchise called the White Lotus. And there's a lot of mystery, a lot of intrigue, very inappropriate at certain points.
So you got to kind of like a lot of black humor, but it is wonderful. And then I can also say in advance, Black Mirror, the new season, even though I haven't seen it yet, I know for a fact I'm going to enjoy it. Love, love, love The White Lotus. For me, if you are a fan of Survivor, And you are particularly a fan of old school survival, survivor before the new school came around.
Um, might I interest you in the most amazing survivor in, I just love it. It's Australian survivor. Um, it is available on 10 play. And so you need to, open quote, be in Australia, close quote, to be able to watch it. But it is just... Amazing. And it will take you back to the old days where you were out there the whole time instead of these short little seasons.
And Jonathan LaPaglia is the host, and he does a fantastic job. And you just get these really great storylines, these really great players. And my partner and I just finished the... latest season of the show when we visited Australia. And it was very, very, very, very, very good. So yeah, check out Australian Survivor if you have a means to do so. Micah, thank you. I'm a huge Survivor fan, and I had no idea. Oh, Jason, you're going to love it. You're going to love it. I'm telling you.
And there's like now 12 seasons of it or something like that. So yeah, there's no reason to not start at the beginning. Like it's great. All right. If you out there would like to get ad-free episodes with an extra unwound episode every week, you could become a member of Clockwise. You just go to relay.fm slash Clockwise and sign up. It's just $7 a month.
$70 a year, and you will help support the show. With that, we have reached the end of this episode of Clockwise. All that's left is to thank our awesome guests. M.B. Bischoff, thank you so much for being here with us this week. And Jason Howell, thanks for being another Jason on the podcast because eventually we'll have all four. Thanks for being here.
We're taking over this podcast, us Jasons. Thank you for inviting me. And thanks to everybody out there for listening to this episode of Clockwise. Until next time, we remind you, watch what you say. And keep watching the clock. Bye, everybody.