When Tech Adds Friction Instead of Value

`2:01:53`

It's amazing, like, you can't do that today. That's actually not even a possible thing. You turn it on, and you're back to some menu with all the options again. It's like, "How do we go backwards?" I call this the great regression. Thermostats have gotten worse. Nest, maybe, is an exception. I'll grant them that. Good product. A really good product. Big alarm panels, a lot of panels, a lot of third-party products with big glass screens, bad. Touchscreens, often bad. In fact, car manufacturers, with the exception of Tesla, because Tesla's is outstanding, but everyone else who put a bunch of screens in their cars, they're starting to move back to dials again and buttons again, because people are like, "This sucks." Software is hard, and a big piece of glass; there's no tactile feedback. I can't do it, and I have to look at it.

`2:02:38`

There's no muscle memory, because I'm not sure I'm just confirming what I'm doing. Like, these are bad things. So, the technology can get worse, and then it can slide back, and hopefully, it can get better again, and new lessons can be learned. But it was a revelation to me to go into new home with the state-of-the-art stuff, and see how backwards it was. And I'm in technology. Again, I'm not a Luddite. I'm not afraid of this stuff, I get it. But to see how bad it's gotten, like the light switches, literally... When we rented the place, my agent, who found it and whatever, and did the negotiations and stuff, he's like, "Hey, they want to do a walk-through with you." And I go, "Cool, I'll be there tomorrow." And I thought the walk-through was going to be just like, "Here's the house," but it was like, "No, here's how you use the lights."

`2:03:25`

You're like, "I have to... What? What?" The best interface ever, was the switch. — It's ON, OFF. — It works. — ON, OFF. Beautiful! It's almost like, the way I see it, it's like that has not been discovered yet, because, I mean, it had been, but then it had been forgotten. This is like an old technology from the Romans or something. Like, how do they build concrete so well? We still don't know today how the Romans built concrete so well that it lasted so long. Like, there's a lost art there. I feel like the light switch is a lost art. It's just gone. And it will be rediscovered one day, and people will be like, "Oh, my God, this is so much better than this damn technical shit," you know? There's a room and a place for all sorts of advancements, but there also are regressions. And it's unfortunate that the industry I'm in, is the one that tends to sell many of these to people.