Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of iHeart Podcasts and Kaleidoscope. I'm Mas Valoshian and today Cara Price and I will bring you the headlines this week, including the future of search on the web, Ukrainian drone striking deep within Russia, and.
The very real security risks of vibe coding.
Then on tech Support you'll talk to Dexter Thomas of the kill Switch podcast all about Nintendo, its history and where it's a new console. The Switch too fits into its legacy.
Google Yokoy is the person who may Nintendo what it is today without him, if they still existed, they would still be making playing cards.
All of that on the weekend. Take It's Friday, June sixth Cara Price.
It is good to be back.
I don't even recognize that voice.
What hell, it's better now, but my voice. I lost my voice. I had laryngite. It's like this.
Which is a nightmare for a podcast host in heaven.
For your wife, well, I get even more needy when I can't speak. It turns out read me exactly, and she has read notes. In fact, I was on a flight back from London on Monday last week and.
My voice was literally couldn't speakers like this.
And it was freezing cold on the flight, and I already wrapped one blanket around my neck and to try and kind of preserve the last hint of whisper. So I wrote a note on my phone for the airs tudors and said, it's very cold. Do you have any more blankets? And I handed it to her and she went from quite stern to totally lit up and so
talking to me in sign language. She was so excited to show off the sign and you were like, it was like, I felt so ashamed that I couldn't speak sign language at that moment.
But that's another that's for another day.
Actually, And actually I was nervous were landing because you know, obviously you hear all these stories about your non US citizens crossing the border. I was like, oh my god, imagine if this is the day they choose to interrogate me. I literally can't speak. I'm gonna be there for a long hass the time.
It'll also be the best excuse. Sorry I can't do it, but you were somehow last week given the gift of speech.
Gift of technology gave me the gift of speech. So I found this app called WISP, And.
While I was asking, did you just google this?
I googled apps that can turn whispers into speech.
And that would go figure. There is one.
It's called WISP. And obviously I was at home feeling sorry for myself being able to speak, so I was like, how can I get some attention? I made a video of myself in WISP and it revoiced me, and I put it in our slack.
So you've lays, So I'm going to play it again, ais As you know, I can literally only talk in a whisper. Right now, I just got a lot of writers, but maybe something we could lead next week's episode with.
So I was right, we are leading this week's episode, and here we are leading the episode.
You sound sort of like a Dutch survivor after a very long mission being rescued. Only it's true the end of a mission.
It's a Dutch app.
Yeah, and so I think you can train it on your voice to sound like you, but I didn't have a voice to train it all, so I had to use the default, which was indeed Dutch.
There's two options.
You can make a selfie video whispering that revoices you, or you can call on the phone, and of course.
Were you speaking in real time?
I was speaking like this and it was translating in.
Real in real time. That's incredible.
I called my mum with it. She said, I hate this. Never do this to me again.
It was I mean, I just think it was incredible that you could do. Because if you remember when we did sleep, we had to pre record.
This was our podcast that we hosted together six years ago.
Six years ago now, and basically I had to train an AI model on my voice and then I couldn't do it in real time.
Yes, obviously I'm lucky. I normally have a voice.
Yes, as you know, yes I do. I do, but there are some people who don't. And you know, I think Whispy isn't really designed for the laryngitis sufferer who needs some extra attention. It's designed for people who've actually lost their voices, either to cancer or to trauma or to other illnesses. And you know, with that in mind, the modifications required to make this slightly better and more functional feel pretty achievable.
And what a miracle.
Frankly, yeah, absolutely, but it's always a but.
But my next story is a turn in the other direction.
And are you familiar with Cory Doctor Rowe and this concept he came up with of in shitification.
Yes, I read about it in the Financial Times.
And what did you take away from it?
That the Internet has become a slop festival?
The Internet has become a slop festival. That is better put even than Doctor himself about it.
As a sort of the Internet as a slime, sort of cascading down.
What he said specifically is in certification is quote a theory about what happens when you have power without consequence, And he goes on to describe platforms that have hollowed themselves out where there's just no value left in them except this kind of awful look in So I mean that makes me think about what happens if you open your Instagram reels today, there's just tons of which is not even right.
I generated it's like, you know, it's like Tom Cruise talking to Barack Obama.
In my case, it's like worms eating dragons and then getting a sex back a reflecting my subconscious I mean, this concept of incentification, I think is one of the kind of great guiding constructs to think about what's happening right now. But I think concerningly it's actually happening right now, potentially the world Wide Web itself. Of course, I'm talking
about AI summaries. We all know about them from chet GPT and how they're overlaid on Google, but now Internet browsers themselves are building them in this appointed to Axios, Firefox, Microsoft Edge. All you have to do is hover your mouse over a weblink and you get an automatic summary, which is kind of crazy, like the click through rate, the great metric, Yes of our age.
Yes, it is going to be gone, It's going to be gone. Yeah.
What does that means people.
Are rolling their mouse over a link? Yeah, nobody's going to click through wild to your point about in sitification, the only reason that good content exists on the Internet that is even worth summarizing in the first place is because people had an incentive to create it. It would drive traffic and maybe even add dollars to their websites. But it's definitely a blow to creatives out there, Like, is there an incentive to publish on the web anymore?
Yeah?
Look to your point, I think a world where there's no reward for posting online will be a poorer world for us, but also ironically for AI. Because obviously AI needs new days to train on, and so a few people are posting news and opinions and arguments on the internet that will ultimately lead to a poorer AI.
So this is like the opposite of a virtuous circle.
Yeah, you know, an AI is already so fast. It feels like every week I see an embarrassing story of a mistake that AI made.
I mean, the pizza with the glue is obviously time classic, brilliant, but it doesn't end.
I mean, that's the thing two years ago.
And everything, and it's creating more interesting shit. Yeah, that's what keeps happening. And I think one of my recent favorites was the AI generated summer reading list that this is not AI's fault, that made its way to being published in the Chicago Sun Times. Like there's a photo of a librarian holding up a fake summer reading.
List of fake books, of fake books.
One by Isabelle a Ende, a very famous author, one by Percival Everett who just won the Pulitzer Prize.
And these are fake titles of books they never read.
Bake titles of books, no vetting. But I mean, that's not AI's fault. Actually, that's the fault of the Chicago Sun Times. I think in that one it definitely does, but it doesn't. I think what's so kind of upsetting is that it doesn't surprise me in the age of automation of everything, that we just sort of accept it to be real.
Yeah. Yeah, Yeah.
And Google, which for as long as I can remember, has been the king of search, is doubling down on AI summaries. Essentially, it just released something called AI Mode, and this turns straightforward Google search queries into an AI chat conversation.
Yeah, you know, it sounds like how a lot of people are already using chat GPT but in your browser.
Well exactly, that is designed to prevent them from using chatpt and instead staying in their browser. There was this article in the FT a couple of weeks ago with the headline can Google still dominate search in the age of AI chatbots? AI Mode shows you, in real time how they're trying to answer that question, which could ultimately be existential for them. Of course, to no unsurprised. Earlier reviews of AI mode have found some pretty unreliable information.
A reporter at The New York Times actually used AI mode to plan his daughter's birthday.
Party parenting presented by Google.
Yes, and needless to say, it go very smoothly. The reporter asked Google AI mode to find parks in his area with picnic tables, and Google provided the reporter with a bulletedist of parks with some helpful information about each, and so he went out to scout two of the suggestions, but of course neither had picnic tables.
So he basically was given nothing that he needed.
Nothing of value, and thank goodness, I think he didn't have his disappointed kids in terms.
So anyway he was during the scout, he was writing a story, so he soldied on.
He went back home and told AI mode that the parks didn't have tables. AI apologized and spat out another list, but it included the same parks he'd already visited and knew that they didn't have a picnic table, so it didn't take on the new information.
So getting Google's AI mode to plan your kid's birthday essentially at this point he should have just let his kid plan the kid's birthday.
I guess less candy in Google ai mode, but yes. The reporter also asked Aimo to find an affordable car wash, and it listed one business as having a twenty five dollar car whah. When he got there, the real cost was sixty five dollars. What's interesting, though, is that when the journalist did the same queries through regular, good old fashioned Google about the picnic tables and the car washes, guess what, go figure, he got the information he wanted and it was correct.
You know, I don't like to be a doomer about this, but your reference to incertification makes sense to me. Like, here's Google, Yeah, the search engine that we've been all using for twenty five years, with a mode that's making Google worse.
Yeah.
I mean, for all intents and purposes, Google works, We'll work pretty well, but they're trying to keep up with what the Internet is right now, and as such are in shitifying it. Yeah.
And of course the question I have is, in this new world, how long will normal people bother to post helpful information online if the default becomes an AI mode that is unreliable and that doesn't reward the content creator for their contribution. I was actually talking to a friend of ours the other day and she mentioned that she actually no longer used is Google, which I was pretty shocked by.
That's such a bold class.
Yeah.
Specifically for search. She used this search engine called Kagi, which is Japanese for key. I learned thirty seconds ago Google. I googled it and it touts itself as being a quote premium search engine. Users can tailor their search results their own preferences, and they don't get shown ads because the service monetizes through subscription rather than ads.
Interesting. Well, no offense to the Kagigs coagistas there, but I do think people will generally stick to the devil they know, and the devil they know is Google. You know. At the same time, progress is not linear right now. Should Google's AI mode be your preferred method for birthday party planning? Probably? Not. In a year, maybe it could. Maybe it will show you where the picnic table is, you know, lest we forget, I used to ask Jeeves.
Well, was the last time you asked you something?
I don't know? But you know, we actually live in a world where I could build my own ass, Jeeves, which is what are you talking about? Well, I wouldn't do it myself, but this has a lot to do with my headline of the week, which is, you know, I don't even know if I like vibe coating. I just like the term vibe coating. It's a great You know, there's this app called Lovable, and it's a sweetest startup that calls its product the last piece of software, the
last of us. It might be, it might be. So. The way it works is that you basically, Lovable has a chatbot and you tell it to make an app for you, and you can say, can you build me an app where I can track all the hats that I own, so I will stop spending money on hats when I reminded of how many hats I own. Same thing with glasses, and maybe Lovable would generate an app where I can log my extensive hat or glasses collection.
That does sound pretty cool.
It is. There is a problem with it, though, which is that it's having some issues in the security department. Semaphore, you know, trust the old Semaphore. Yes, ran a headline the hottest new vibe coding startup maybe a sitting duck for hackers.
You know, I saw that headline.
I didn't actually read the story, but it was fascinating, so I'm glad you'll bring it today.
There's always a whistleblower at a competing company and it's like your company is doing wrong. And so an employee at a competing vibe coding company called Replet not confused with Reddit Yes, release a report that shows some serious vulnerabilities for users, and on lovable site, the company showcases some of the apps and websites that users have made with the software. There's one called Can't Make This Stuff Up. There's one called scam.
Nail, Scam nails, ay, hangnail but.
Yeah, which is a community platform for users to get expert advice on whether or not they're dealing with a scam. There's another I mean, these names. I wonder if Lovable comes up with the names. There's another website called info rid, which promises to remove your personal information from around seventy
data brokers so you receive less spam. That sounds good, I mean, they all sound like great ideas, but this report found that of the over sixteen hundred web apps featured on Lovable Site, one hundred and seventy of them had vulnerabilities.
And when you say vulnerabilities, I know it.
Sounds they're not emotional vulnerability. Things that I think people find very important, which is like their name, their email address, and most importantly financial information, like anything that's extremely personal.
So the advice from parents and children that we used to be don't get into a stranger's car, it's now don't use software that you find online because what I say.
You know, there are pitfalls. Even if AI can write flawless code, there can be security flaws. For example, when you tell Lovable that you want to make a website, it's just going to make the website plain and simple. But for a website to work, it has to be connected to a database that can store things like user accounts and payment information. And that's the work historically of seasoned software developers, who even season software developers can make mistakes.
Yeah, I mean it's I joked about don't go into strangers at but like, you know, it's going to get hard or not to use the web.
You've got AI summaries overlaid everywhere, and.
Then when you do get to a website or an app that you want to go into, you know, you have to think about whether or not it's been VIBE coded and whether the security on the back end will be functional. I mean, it's just like it's kind of a little bit of a headspin there.
Yeah, and you know, Lovable does offer an easy way to connect to a properly managed database to store payment information and like it's a service called sounds a lot like a Nicki Minaj song super Base. But the vulnerability report found that on some of these Lovable made apps, the super base database was not configured correctly, which led
to the security flaws. So that might be pointing to the issue that you're flagging as that people don't really know how to check their work yet and that doing that takes some creative thinking and actually a little bit of paranoil, like how might my passion project be vulnerable?
Yeah, I mean, I.
Guess a lot of software developers do this red teaming, like they try and get into the headspace of an attacker and the attack their own product.
Most vibe coders are not self.
Not necessarily coders, No exactly.
So repltu replit raised their hand and said, heyre's the problem over there? Yeah sevenphore around the story. Yes, how did Lovable respond?
Lovable responded on x formerly known as Twitter, saying, quote, we're not yet where we want to be in terms of security, and we're committed to keep improving the security posture for all Lovable users. It just reminds me if like all of a sudden, someone who didn't work at Nike was like, I'm going to be Nike today and I'm going to make these sneakers.
Well, that happens, right, I mean, as a whole, this company spend billions of dollars on pattern and protection and infringement on their copyright and stuff because they don't want to erode trust in their brand by having knockoffs, injured.
People, a hut and whatever it is.
Yes, exactly, but now we're in this weird error on the Internet where you know, we've developed this shared sort of status quo understanding of about like you can trust an app that you find in the App Store or an Android or like most legit seeming websites probably are legit. You know, obviously have to be have a spearfishing and stuff, but like this whole kind of shared basis of like being able to input your data with some degree of
confidence online. And of course there's amazing things that you can do with vibe coding. It's pretty cool that you can make a functional prototype for an idea and get people excited within just a few moments or a few days, and that really is cool, but at the same time, like at the cost of blowing up this security architecture that we built over the last twenty.
Years, right, and security has actually been a key concern ever since the beginning of the Internet, and security measures and hackers have gotten more sophisticated, so it's kind of unreal that the big fad is to make products that are less sophisticated.
Totally.
I really really want to get one of the vibe coding people on the show, whether it's Cursor or Replet or Lovable, it'd be very interesting to have someone from those companies, So Will maybe.
We should have Replet and Lovable in a Frost Nixon wow of.
So we'll work on that. But in the meantime, we've got some brief headlines.
So if you're someone who thinks that ring doorbells are a step too far in the direction of surveillance, I would like to present to you the world of New York City Facebook mom groups, which I'm very familiar with
because a lot of my friends are in them. According to the Daily Mail me some nannies in New York City's Upper East Side are paranoid that they are being spied on, and this reminds me spy cam has been a thing with Nanni's for a long time, Like this is not people used to embed them in like stuffed animals.
But in a Facebook group aptly titled maybe embarrassingly titled Moms of the Upper east Side, members have posted pictures of Nanny's with captions like if you recognize this blonde girl with pigtails I saw yesterday afternoon around seventy eighth and Second Avenue, Please dm me. I think you will want to know what your nanny.
Oh my god, it's like a horror movie.
It's pen out decks. There are posts claiming to have seen nanny's harshly handling children in public, amongst other allegations of mistreatment. Some members have responded critically, saying that the posts lack context and should be handled cautiously. The big takeaway is that Facebook groups for moms are actually a really thriving hot zone for Facebook.
There you go.
Last story today is a moresemble one. For the last eighteen months, Ukraine planted drones secretly in mobile homes and sheds, staged on flatbed trucks and part near military runways in Russia, and on Sunday they attacked drones flew out of their enclosures and destroyed at least thirteen Russian aircraft and damage others. That's according to Ukrainian officials, who said that some of the destroyed aircraft were actually capable of launching nuclear weapons.
These attacks took place two and eight hundred miles from Ukraine's border with Russia. That's more or less a distance from here as in New York City, London. Given that these drones targeted Russia's nuclear capacity, some in Russia have said that this triggers a nuclear response under their doctrine. The moment is being widely compared to Russia's Pearl Harbor.
And actually I interviewed Jake Sullivan, the former National Security Advisor, this week, and we talked about this exact story and also about how the US is preparing for a similar type of attack. I mean, could this happen here? The answer is yes if we don't prepare, And we'll publish that interview. By the way, this is a tease next Wednesday.
As the story, We're going to take a short break. But when we're back, the rise, then fall, the rise, then fall, then rise again. Of Nintendo and how the switch to could be another make or break moment.
Stay with us.
So for our next segment, we're going to talk about a company that's released some pretty iconic games and hardware over the years. No, not Hasbro Nintendo as one was the last time you played a Nintendo game?
You know, I haven't played a Nintendo game for a very long time. I briefly lusted after a Wii. I like the idea of playing tennis.
But to say that you lusted after a.
Please.
I did have a game Boy when I was eleven or twelve years old, and I probably spent two or three hundred hours playing Pokemon and wanted to beat both the red and blue version of Pokemon on my game Boy.
And we know what happens when you set your mind to something.
And I did catch them all.
But you know what, we batted around some ideas this week in our production meeting out what to do for our weekly tech support segment, and I actually wasn't immediately sold uncovering Nintendo.
No, you were not, And then we had to be like, Nintendo has unbelievable cultural clout in the IP space. You just mentioned Pokemon, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Super Mario the most successful movies right now are coming from IP that is based on games.
You know, when you're like not thinking about something and then you start thinking about something and then you see it everywhere.
It's called synchronicity, is what it's called.
Yes, well it happened to me because I was watching the Formula One this weekend and Max Vstappen bashed into George Russell and the drivers were hanging out afterwards in the like chill out room, and Lando Norris from McLaren f one said, I've done that before, but only a
Mario cut, okay. And then I was watching the French Open and Yanick Sinner, the number one tennis player in the world, was wearing this cute blue and green outfit and everyone was chanting Luigi in the crowd, and then he posted a picture of himself saying, Luigi plays again. So this is like you can't avoid it, and I think it's totally fundamental to our culture. So I'm very, very glad that you and Eliza and Torri alerted me to the era of my ways. There's also an interesting
business story here. I remember back in twenty seventeen when Nintendo released Switch one. All of this coverage about if Nintendo didn't succeed with this console, this one hundred year old Japanese business might fail. Not only did they succeed, the switch became the third best selling console of all time, and now eight years later, at last, there's a new
Nintendo console, the Switch To. It's super interesting moment because, weirdly, despite all the obsession with Nintendo IP, there hasn't been, at least in my corner of the Internet, a huge amount of buzz about this release. So today we have somebody with us who is perfectly placed to help us understand the history of Nintendo's placed in our culture and what the Switch To could mean for the company. Is our friend next to Thomas. He took over the Sleepwalkers
podcast from us and renamed it kill Switch. It's a great podcast rename.
We do as on.
The Collioscope and the iHeart Network, and it's all about our technology charged lives. Dexter has spent the last couple of weeks learning all about Nintendo and how it became the company is today for an upcoming episode, Dexter, Welcome to tech stuff.
What's going on?
Nice to be here, so I want to get into kind of what draws you to the Nintendo story, But what is the role of Nintendo in our culture and how has it shaped the way we interact with technology?
You know, Nintendo is I mean for people of a certain age and older. You'll remember when any video game you had in the house, it was Nintendo. You could have a Sega genesis. You know, your moms would say, turn off that Nintendo. Mom was not a Nintendo business Sega, right. I think that if Nintendo were to announce that they were going out of business, I mean, just think about that for a second, you'd actually feel something which is not something that you can say about almost any company.
It's an unusual company, you know. I compare it honestly to Disney, just in how much work they've done to build up a kind of mystique that ties itself to your childhood. But they're a very interesting company.
Can you tell us a bit though, about the background of Nintendo, because I think it's at least one hundred years old, right, and it didn't even begin as a games company.
That's right. Yeah, So Nintendo started out in eighteen eighty nine. It is a very long running company with some shall we say, murky origins. But yeah, Nintendo was. For most of Nintendo's lifespan, I guess you could say it was a not very successful company which mostly made playing cards. So they started making the kind of playing cards that you know, most of our listeners might be familiar with. You know that how the Jack King, Queen Ace kind
of thing. They also made a game called Hanahuda, which is kind of like a traditional Japanese card game. The cards are a little bit smaller, they're pretty intricately designed, and the game's actually still played today, although it's more well known in Japan than anywhere else.
I would say, yeah, so I do want to know about the murky origins, because, as you said, it is a lot like Disney. You think Nintendo, you think family friendly, you think of your childhood. So I'm curious what was so murky?
Sure, yeah, so the president of Nintendo was basically willing to do anything to make money. For a while they were selling instant ramen, they ran taxis, love hotels, which, if you're not familiar with love hotels, Japanese apartments are pretty small. If you would like to go on a date and the date goes very well, and you and your partner would like to spend some time in the evening together, you go to a love hotel. Yeah, so they were involved in basically anything that could turn a profit.
Some of these things work, some of these didn't. But their mainstay was cards. So gambling in Japan or most gambling is illegal, and gambling definitely was illegal then, but Nintendo's hung off of the cards were known for being pretty decent and they were very widely available, and so one of Nintendo's actually big customer bases was illegal gambling houses. So you would find their cards at you know, these kind of dodgy places where people would go and try to make money.
But how did Nintendo go from gambling to video games?
Yeah, so this is where things get interesting. There's a few stories about how they got started, but basically it all revolves around this kind of not very serious college student named goompe Occoy. So this electrical engineering student, he's just graduated and he gets a job at again, this card company called Nintendo, which all his friends were much more successful students. He's kind of at this second, third
rate company. Again, Nintendo is making gambling cards. They're making cards, are using gambling, and anybody who's been to Vegas you know that gamblers take their cards very seriously. If there's any kind of manufacturing defect, if there's a divot in the side or anything like that, you can tell what the other side of the card is. This is a bad thing. And so gamblers, or especially these gambling houses,
needed the cards to be made perfectly. Well, most cards at this point, this is sixties, a lot of these traditional cards are still made by hand. Nintendo gets some bright idea, well, let's do this stuff with a machine. But the machine they have isn't working perfectly. So what do you do if your machine doesn't work. You get an engineer. So they hire this guy who not a very serious student. Darn't hear, a college drop out. But they hire this guy for their card company to fix
their glue machine. He goes in, takes a look at it, and pretty quickly he figures out what the problem is and he just says, okay, yeah, well fix the paddles on the glue machine and you're good. And he goes in the back room and just starts messing around and doing his own thing. And the way that he tells it is, after he fixes his glue machine, he kind of goes in the back room and he starts making toys just for fun as a hobby. This is something he did as a kid. And one of the first
toys he makes is it's this. If you imagine old Warner Brothers cartoons, you know, there would be the kind of like a punching glove on a spring. Basically, yeah, exactly. So he makes something kind of like that, except instead of a punching glove on a spring, he makes a grabbing hand on a spring where it expands and if you push one end of it together, it reaches out and grabs something. And he calls it the Ultra hand.
And as the president of Nintendo is walking by, looks in the room says, hey, dude, what are you doing And he says, uh, making a toy, And the president, according to legend, looks at it and says, huh, you know what, let's sell that put in production. He puts it in production and it sells like crazy, and that toy does very well. It's one of those big fad toys, kind of like the slinky here in the US, right, and President goes back to yukoy and he says, Okay,
that was good. Do it again, and he does it again, and he does it again, and he just keeps doing it. This guy just keeps cranking out hit after hit. It becomes clear that toys are a good line of income for Nintendo. They basically make him the head of the research and development department, put some engineers under him and say, man, just keep doing your thing, keep doing your thing, and he does.
So.
The important thing is, goop a Yakoy really thought of himself as a toy maker, and I think that's something important to understand about Nintendo. Nintendo functionally is a toy company. They're not really a video game company. They're a toy company. It just so happens that they're best selling toys are video games.
When does the pivot happen though, and video games start to be their business?
Yeah, so goope. Yukoy had again continued to make games, and some of these are electronics. He's an electrical engineer, so he's interested in electronics. And at some point he gets the idea that arcades are doing very well. Can we make this more portable? And they come up with something called The Game and watch this thing comes out in nineteen eighty and the real innovation here is that this is not the most technologically advanced machine in the world.
It's actually very very simple. It's about identical to a literal calculator. But these had very very simple games on them, and one of them was it's just called ball and all you're doing is it's literally just called ball, and you are juggling a ball back and forth and trying to keep it from dropping. And the ball moved was back and forth and it kind of beeps, and it kind of goes.
Beep beep, beep, beep beep.
So it's very simple, it's very slow, but this was really a cheap way to bring the concept of the game you play in the arcade. It's not quite that, but it's in your pocket and it was cheap, which was pretty amazing for the time. And these things again so like hotcakes.
What is this idea of lateral thinking with withized technology.
Yeah, so this is truly I think what goombe okoy did that sets them apart from everyone else. So that is the literal translation. Kai heiko literally translates out to lateral thinking of withered technology. I might translate it as something more like sideways thinking with mature technology.
So you're good American capitalist after all, Well.
This is the thing I mean, Goomyakoi was. You know, he was an innovator, He was a toy maker. He was a guy who just liked messing around. But he was also a very smart businessman, right, and so he would look at what was available, and he would not try to use the most technologically advanced device that was out there. He would purposefully pick old technology that was proven, sometimes a decade old technology, decade old chips, five year old chips, and say, okay, what can I do with this.
Great example of this is the Lefty RX classic Goompeyakoy product. So this is a remote control car. The RX stends remote control that only turns left, hence the word lefty. So they just lean into it, yes, which sounds like a terrible idea, but if you think about it, you know, sixties going into the seventies, Japan not a rich country at this point, a lot of poor kids, and not everybody can afford a remote control car, radio control car, right, And so what he did was he said, okay, how
can we strip this down? Well, if you watch NASCAR, if you watch Formula One, I hate to say it, all they do is go left, No offense. That's skill sport and again my deepest respect to all the F one fans out there. It is a sport which involves primarily going straight and then occasionally left, and that is it. And he said, okay, well let's do it. And so the car basically has two buttons. You turn it on, it goes straight. You push another button and it goes left.
And this toy was a quarter of the price something like a normal remote control car. And so now kids can have this car. Again, it's not an act of charity to the children of Japan. This is the money making, you know operation after all. But he was able to strip things down to their essence and again take mature technology technology, the worked that was out there, and think a little bit sideways.
So just to pivot a little bit and talk a little bit more about the actual console. Yukoi passed away in nineteen eighty seven. They obviously continue to make games in hardware. They have some ups and downs. I thought GameCube was, you know, the second coming because of crazy Taxi and those little discs those I mean, it was everything to me. Yeah, the market apparently disagreed. Other consoles like we which I also ruined my tennis game, the
switch has done very well. What do you think sets apart some consoles from other consoles.
Yeah, you know, Nintendo's got an interesting up and down pattern which we could probably connect some dots on. Basically, the pattern is since the early two thousands, when Nintendo tries to make a sophisticated machine, a technologically advanced machine, it usually flops. When they ease back and just make something that is just interesting. Again, I would argue, leaning back on goompe Yacoy's philosophy of sideways thinking, with mature
technology they do better. So if you look at the GameCube, they actually were trying to compete with the more powerful systems. It didn't do so well. Yeah, the Wei, which functionally uses the same insides as the GameCube, really released years later. It's not an advanced machine, it's not competing against the PlayStation three, but somehow it starts out selling everything else.
Then they come out with the WIU, which is the successor to the Wei, and they are trying to play this game of all right, we got the good graphics, we got everything everybody else has, and it flops, flops really badly. Actually, they're in trouble. The Switch comes out. The Switch is not an advanced machine. The Switch is.
It's like a cell phone, man. And this is a time when the Place four, the Xbox one is on the market, and it works for them because they're not playing this game of chasing graphics, of chasing processing power. They're really in their own lane, which is this fun? Does it work? Is it cheap enough for us to make a bunch of these and still make it fun?
Why do you think the Switch did so well and eight years later, what can we expect from its successor.
Yeah, you know, I mean I think there's a combination of things. I think they actually went back to their roots Nintendo. Did you know what the funny thing about the Switch is they're thinking of it as a toy you can take to a bar and play with your friends. Also another kind of black swan thing. Can't predict quarantine, people are locked down. Animal Crossing comes out. Everybody's playing Animal Crossing. It is a not very technologically advanced game, but it lets you play with your friends.
Try to say, it's really clarifying for me what you said, because I didn't really understand the distinction between a toy and a console. But this is like tech that sort of mobilizes you in the world rather than sucks you into a private world exactly.
And you know, let's not forget that the Game Boy, one of its major features was the fact that you could link two of them up or four of them up actually, so Tetris you could play against somebody. So really the idea of it is you're supposed to go outside and play with your friends. That's actually what goumpe Ukoy wants. I think he wanted you to play with the toy with your friends. The switch is another version
of that. And I was asking somebody that who actually got the opportunity to play it before most people did, you know, got to play it as a member of the press. And he said, well, do you have a switch? And I said yeah, And he said you've played your switch, right, I said yeah, And he said, well, you've basically played the switch too. It's more the same. Is there a slight bump in graphic capability? Sure? Is the fit and finish of the machine a little bit better, absolutely, But honestly,
it's another switch. And if you want to play the new games, eventually you're going to have to get the new switch because it's a little bit more advanced. But this is just them realizing I think that truly, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And again, they're using slightly older hardware, simple to program for, They're not chasing graphics, and it's more of the same for better for worse, it's more the same.
I mean in that way, you have to expect that it will do well right, that it won't go the way of something that's newer that is not a safe bet.
Well, so this is where it gets a little bit complicated because the switch too is kind of expensive. The games are also quite expensive. Games are eighty bucks. Oh yeah, so ok, But I think price things aside them sticking to more of the same honestly as or in Nintendo, and that for them, it's hard to argue against that being the best choice. I think that really is where they do best is just stick with what works, make more fun toys.
Just to close, you know, we start off the conversation talking about valuable IP that Nintendo owns, I mean, Mario and Zelder and others. How much of an inducement will that be for people to buy the switch to and how much of that IP is living elsewhere in the world now, whether it's movies and theme parks, like how much on Nintendo relying on the console business too be Disney.
I think they're a bit of a crossroads for that because for the longest time they were very, very protective of their intellectual property. I think that what Nintendo has going for them is that you cannot interact with any of their intellectual property unless it's in an environment that they've sanctioned it, you know. I mean, they've made the theme park, They're very judicious and careful about that, They've made the movie. They're very judicious and careful about that.
You will not be playing Mario on your computer. You have to buy the consoles. So they have such a draw to their intellectual property, Zelda, Mario that they really are banking on the fact that people still want Mario and they will pay whatever price it is that we set for access to that. So, you know, I think they are diversifying in some ways, but they are probably still betting that having Mario out there in a movie and Zelda potentially out there in a movie is going
to bring people back to play the game. And if you want to play the game.
You got to buy the hardware, YEP, buy the hardware exactly, exactly, exactly.
Tank to thank you so much. This was really fascinating.
I loved it absolutely absolutely, Thanks so much for having me.
Thank you. That's it for this week for tech Stuff. I'm Karra Price and.
I'm Oz Valushian.
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Victoria Domingez. It was executive produced by me, Kara Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norval for iHeart Podcasts. The Engineer is Beheth Fraser and Jack Insley mixed this episode.
Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Join us next Wednesday for Textuff the Story when we will share an in depth conversation with Jake Sullivan, national Security advisor under Biden. We'll talk all things competition with China and autonomous weapons.
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