YouSaid · the spoken record

Benedict Evans

lines on the record: 119
first: 2018-05-03
most recent: 2018-05-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So that actually might be a good way of me framing my technology determinism piece. Because it's a sort of, I mean, the other thing people talk about a lot in venture capital is patent recognition. This sort of looks like things that work, this looks like things that never work and why. And of course, the thing that never work, eventually they do work, and that's where there's a hundred billion dollar outcome. So that's also an interesting kind of fruitful topic of conversation. But it sort of understanding those patterns of, okay, you have to think, okay, how is this going to fit within this ecosystem? This is what is the timing for this? It's those sorts of mechanics of the process that are interesting, I think.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't sound like fun. I hope he's paid a lot for that. But he's interested in the argument and the explaining and the discussion. The fact that it's insurance is kind of neither him nor there, really. So, I think you have to just kind of work out what are the things that fascinate you and what are the kind of mental processes that fascinate you.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, but that's all that effectively is. And it's a completely different profession. And I have contemporaries who are barristers. And I could have done that. I could have gone and argued for a living. And you go and you look at the problem and you pull it apart and you work out what story to tell and how to place that into the law and try and persuade the judge and the jury. So, in a sense, I have those skill sets. On the other hand, I look at these contemporaries and it says, you know, Charlie is probably the leading up-and-coming advocate in complex offshore maritime insurance disputes. And I think, well,”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I sort of struggle to give advice partly because my career has been a series of random lurches and kind of companies going out of business. I won't apply for a job at Bloomberg, don't worry. I think the only thing I've sort of observed is there is the kind of things that you are good at doing and the kind of mental processes that you are good at. Are you good at people or not? Are you good at process and project management and making sure everything gets done right or is that not what interests you? Are you good at trying to kind of empathizing with people? Are you good at trying to explain and discuss and argue with people and persuade people? What are the things that you're good at doing? And those are not necessarily what was your degree in and they don't necessarily specific to jobs. So like I have contemporaries who went off and become what in England we call a barrister, which is basically a lawyer who only goes to court. England the law is split. Solicitors do the paperwork barristers go to court.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The interesting thing that comes out of that is that when light was expensive, the state of symbol was to stay up all night. So rich people would get up at lunchtime and go to bed at light five in the morning because they could afford to afford candles.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want the light in, and of course, as we all sort of know, light was really expensive and used to be a luxury, and now it's not. But I just thought that was a really revealing way of thinking about how your whole sense of the world changes when lighting is cheap. Why would you have curtains?”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To gaslights to early electric lights, which weren't very bright and then used tungsten filament. And so the evolution of light, this observation that stuck in my mind, and I now need to go and check, which is an assertion that Dutch 70th century Dutch pictures have windows but no cons.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. I think those sorts of, I mean, coming back to why is this interesting, I do think those sorts of how did stuff happen and why did the thread of causation and how things can be completely random is sort of interesting and how does this stuff change how we think about it? So on the flight here, I read a book about kind of lighting, the evolution of lighting technology in the 18th and 19th century. As we go from candles to kind of lamps that hold a candle and produce five times more light.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you get oblong pieces. And then you fold them up and that produces an oblong book. And so when you go from papyrus to parchment, you go from square books to oblong books. And here we are 1500 years later, and the books are still oblong.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's loads of books that have color illustrations all the way through but aren't art books, which is kind of interesting. And it's just sort of about how books evolved. So there's this fascinating observation that books or codices used to be rectangular because you made them out of papyrus. And so you would lay your sheets, you know you lay the strips of plant kind of crossways like plywood and you'd make them square-shaped because you had the strips of all the same length. So that produced a square-shaped piece of papyrus. And then you move to... What's it called? Animal skin. What's the word? I've forgotten the word. My mind's can't blank now too. You move to Parchment. From animal skins. And there's this great line animals tend to be oblong.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Iliad really stood out for me. That was a couple of weeks ago. I read this fascinating book about medieval manuscripts called Encounters with Fascinating Manuscripts or something like that by a college librarian in Cambridge. And it's one of these sort of new kind of genre of books which kind of look like a big hardback nonfiction book, but they're all in color all the way through, which has something to do with the development of printing technology, which is...”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so there's this great line from Italo Calvino where he says something like the number of essential works is so great that nobody, no matter how much they're reading, has read more than a fraction. Literature is a sample. You can't read all the books. There was a period when you could have seen all the movies. Now you can't see all the movies. You can't listen to all the music. You just have to take samples and do things that stimulate you or make you think in interesting ways, particularly things that aren't about what you work on. So”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that too, perhaps. I know, I think I read things that intrigue me and interest me. The last thing I read was the Iliad, which I'd never read before.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's their entire over. Well, I feel like if you've written 15 business books on the same theme, then you're either a very bad writer or a very good writer, depending on your objectives.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I'm always reading and I'm always buying books in those two processes are completely independent. I read almost no business books or technology books, partly because I feel that all business books are basically a short magazine article padded out to me. 350 pages”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that was 200 years later. But, like, who is more? Is he actually more powerful? William the Conqueror can tell people to do stuff and they have to do it. And the king before the conquest, King of England was like, yeah, no one really paid any attention to what he said except for the coined. So my point is not so much that someone told me how this is how to think about technology. It's more how to sort of think systematically and try and break up problems and try and look for piece components and try and kind of look at things in those kinds of ways”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't have to go to lectures. And so I think my first essay was the one that, of course, everyone screws up. And it was like, was the King of England more or less powerful after 1066? And, you know, I gave the wrong answer and my professor said, look, you have to think about this as what does it actually mean to be powerful? And power is the ability to get people to do something they don't want to do. And so you can give all this other stuff about all the sophistication of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy and they had their own much more sophisticated coinage and blah, blah, blah. No, no, no. Magna Cornon.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say it's not really about how I look at technology. It's more sort of mental processes and ways of thinking about things and ways to try and answer questions. And so the stuff I did at university, you know, people talking to me about medieval history. And it's not, this is no, it's not that didn't happen. This didn't happen. It's more, okay, how do you actually understand what we're trying to think about here? So I remember my first or second, like, you know, the first way Cambridge history works is you do get given an essay title in a reading list and you come back in a week with your essay and that's it.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“occasionally there is a joke that the most secure form of encryption is anything you say in the second hour of a podcast that's exactly so here we are i can say it now anyway nobody”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“True, I don't know. I kind of looked at this email this. I'm puzzled by these kind of questions. I don't know. What is it that people who work with me have no idea? They probably don't know. I have a dog.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's what machine learning gives. It gives you this step change in capability. So one of the ways, I'm sort of giving you a stack of metaphors here, I think a really good way to think about what machine learning gives us is it's like thinking about relational databases. So relational databases give you this amazing step change in what you can do with computers. Suddenly you can say, show me x by y. Bloomberg would not exist without this. SAP would not exist without this. Just-in-time supply chains would not exist without this. Totally transformed our world. But everything you use now is a relay, but it's not AI. Oh, it is, but it's like if it's AI, then everything is AI. It doesn't get you Hal 9”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what machine learning gives you. It gives you a washing machine. It gives you washing machine that can recognize family pictures. It gives you a washing machine that can tell me, is there strange behavior happening on this network? It gives your washing machine that can recognize handwriting. It gives you washing machine that can do X. But it can only do that one thing. It can't do anything else. And it can't clean your dishes.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, what you've built is you've built an enormous spreadsheet with a million if statements meshed together and linked together, and you can give this spreadsheet a picture of a cat and a picture and it will tell you whether the cat in it or not. And that's all it will do. So, another way of thinking about this is like we have this fantasy of domestic robots that will walk around your home and do the housework. We have domestic robots. It's called a washing machine.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then what machine learning does is say, no, no, no, no. You give it a million pictures labeled cat and a million pictures labelled dog and you let the machine write the rules. That's what machine learning means. The machine generates a million if statements that will allow it to calculate this difference between a cat picture and a dog picture with 22%. that gives us a breakthrough of a whole class of problem it solves image recognition it solves speech it solves language it solves a whole kind of level of pattern recognition what it doesn't do is give you a human 10 year old it doesn't give you general intelligence”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same thing with AI. What people tried to do with AI until a couple of years ago was they would try and write rules. So if you wanted to recognize a cat, what you do is you do edge detection and you do texture analysis and you try and make something that looks for two eyes in roughly the right place relative to two ears and you try and make something that tries to look for legs. And hopefully you try and work out how the hell are we going to tell the difference between a cat and a dog. And it would sort of work like three quarters of the time, but it would never really work for the same reason that the mechanical horse would sort of work, but never actually work.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, what you could actually do is you could make a bicycle in a steam engine. And a bicycle is a lot simpler than a horse, and it can't do everything that a horse can do. But it turned out that was kind of useful anyway.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that is a description of So let me answer this question another way. So imagine in the 19th century someone tries to make a mechanical horse. There's no, I mean, you've seen the pattern drawings for these things. There's no law of physics that says you can't make a mechanical horse. It's just that the degree of complexity required to get that to work was impossible in the nineteen century and arguably it's impossible now. I mean Boston dynamics are now trying to do this. Pretty close. But that's like 150 years later. Right.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a bunch of things. And so that's the gap. You know, we have a way to get the transcription and the NLP to work completely accurately. Well, we don't have it is a way to get to automatically make a system that could answer any question you could possibly answer. How for a human being to think of what all of those would be?”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell me whether my flight is delayed. Someone had to write that and every single one of those some human being has to sit down and spend an afternoon writing those. And the problem with this is it doesn't scale. And in a sense, if you could do that, you'd have made Howl9000. And Howline 1000 is not the aggregate of somebody sitting and writing those one at a time. That's the other thing. That's me.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it doesn't have is a way to have somebody at that number automate what that person at that number will do. And so you have to create those dialog boxes one by one. So give you an example. Siri learns how to do cricket. No, no, it didn't. Somebody at Apple sat down and wrote the cricket module. Okay, now say we can do Hurling. Okay, well, somebody at Siri at Apple had to sit down and write that. And then Siri can call me a Uber. Well, someone at Uber had to write that. And then it can do...”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How many of those get really complex really quickly? Like, can you rebook my meeting this afternoon? Okay, that's not a simple query. That's like 500 things that you need to know. And so the problem is, as I said, what you have with a voice assistant is you have an IVR that will always understand what you asked. Machine learning means it will always correctly route you to the right number.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you're going to ask something realistic, the curve gets really, really steep, really quickly. And you don't know what you can ask. So you can ask, you can get the top five things and you can say you can ask for weather, you can ask for timer, you can ask for a unit conversion, you can ask for the time in a different city, you can ask me to play music and you'll get the music right roughly half of the time. You ask it to play an album and it plays you like a weird cover of it because it doesn't understand. But then there's like, what are the thousand things you might ask your EA to do?”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what we don't have, machine learning gives us a way of automating the transcription and getting the natural language processing to work. But you might ask it any one of three or four million things. And so effectively what I mean when I say a structured query is you can fill in a dialog box by talking to the computer and the computer can work out which dialog box you are asking for. But somebody has to have made the dialogue box by hand”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is the problem, which is what you've actually got here as an IVR. You've got a voice tree. Press one for this, press two for that. Machine learning means you can now, and we've all kind of experienced this thing, you phone the airline and they say, tell us what you want to ask about. And there's only 15 things you could ask. So they can recognize it, the text, and then they can work out what you're asking about, and they can rout you to the right number inside the company. They're pretty awesome.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Machine learning also made that work way, way, way, way better. Then you have the third problem, which is, okay, I've created this structured query. Do I have anything to give it to?”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually speaking, it sort of worked three quarters of the time. And it would get better like half a point every year. And machine learning comes along and it goes from working three quarters of the time to working 95% of the time, 96%, 97%, 98% of the time. And so machine learning gives you this radical change in that. It also, then there's a second piece which is you needed to go from the text to a structured query. You need to actually work out what the verb and the noun is and what is this asking, which is a completely different computation. And so, when you talk to a computer, there's those two very almost unrelated things going on machine learning also, this is called natural language processing.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, it was, and this is something where it used to work okay like three quarters of the time. I mean, you remember using dictation apps like 20 years ago.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's talk about voice for a minute. Okay. We have this thing called machine. So, okay, the right way of putting this. So when you talk to your computer, the three things that are going on, step one is it is taking the audio waveform and turning that into text. So it's just transcribing it and turning it into words.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that used to mean like you plug the printer in, the computer should know what the printer is. It shouldn't ask you what printer it is. Then it means your phone doesn't ask where you are when you call a car because it's got GPS and it knows. Then it means like the light should know what the time zone is. So the light should just go on and off.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My finger went fine. So the other extreme is, like, the other way to think about this is this old saying that basically a computer should never ask a question that it ought to be able to work out.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. It pings the satellite and gets it. I think there's a kind of question of where will the complexity sit. And this is like the electric carving knife. There will be stuff that just doesn't make sense.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My apartment, I have an infrared sensor in the bathroom. I walk into the bathroom, the light comes on. Fantastic. My parents hate it because they get up at 4 o'clock in the morning. So they don't want the light to come on. Yeah, but can't you program?”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to do with this. And as with electric carving knife versus the blender, like some of this stuff will make sense and some of it won't. It would be quite nice to be able to say to my oven, okay, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. As opposed to”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was some, and like Sony Group had said everything has got to have a memory stick, and some bits of Sony thought this is great, and some bits were like, God damn it.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, then you, so it's great you see this at CES because you can see the fridge people thought this was a fantastic, I mean, metaphorically speaking, the fridge people thought this is a fantastic idea. The dishwasher people are like, god damn it. Okay, we'll put the voice assistant in the dishwasher. But who needs to speak to the dishwasher? But A, that, and B, they want to sell it to people who also own an LG fridge and a sub-zero fridge. So they've got the Samsung Voices distance and they've got HomeKit and they've got Alexa in it because they only need to sell dishwashes. They don't care about the group strategy. It's like when every Sony product had a memory stick.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe have a toaster, you may have a kettle, you have a blender. Nobody has all of those things. Everyone in East Asia has a rice cooker. Everyone in the UK has a kettle. In America, you maybe don't have a kettle, but you have a coffee machine. But nobody has an electric carving knife. And so what happens is there are those underlying components as cheap commodities. We're in this period of trying to work out what you should do with them and how they should all get plugged together. And should they all be the same system or not? Should they all talk to Alexa or not? Everything. And then you've got like the industrial logic. So the Samsung board sat down and said everything we sell must have the Samsung Voice Assistant because then people will be more likely to buy the Samsung fridge because it sorts for the Samsung dishwasher and it talks to the Samsung this.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But those are big and they're heavy and they need mains power, they need power and so on. Smartphone components much cheaper, much smaller, much lighter. So suddenly you can make it connected door lock and like you can get the parts really easily plus Ubiquitous internet plus machine learning means that like a camera can actually be able to tell if there's something moving or not. So you've got all this stuff. Suddenly this stuff will start working. I think the best analogy for this is like our grandparents could have told you how many electric motors they owned. There was one in the car. They had a vacuum cleaner. There was one in the fridge. They owned maybe five electric motors in total. There was only one electric motor in the car, their starting motor. That was it. Today, who has a clue how many electric motors are in your car? There's like 20. And if you tell your grandfather that you can press a button to adjust your ring motor, he'd hit you on the back of the head, but that's just how it worked because that's just how the technology got deployed. The same thing in your home. There was a period when everything was going to have a DC motor. Now everybody has, like, you have a microwave.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so three or four blocks to talk about here. The first block is smartphone supply chain, one and a half billion smartphones sold last year. All of those chips are available as like a fire hose of stuff to make stuff with. So before smartphones, if you wanted to put computing into something, you had to use PC components. So an ATM is a PC.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just sit there staring at the road all day. So, where do you live? Where do you commute? Where does retail go? All those sorts of changes that happen, like the stuff that happened as a result of cars, which is basically what I'm talking about. There's this great saying that it was easy to predict mass ownership of cars, but harder to predict Walmart. It's hard to predict drive-through ATMs. That kind of stuff, those second and third order consequences will flow out of this stuff.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember, and then you can go home and you can drink as much as you like. I mean, remember all those photographs of European and East Coast cities from before cars and you think, whoa, the streets are all twice as wide because you don't have cars parked down both sides of the street. It's what we could go back to. And so you have like kind of radical change in how we think about what a city is. Therefore, in what does a gas station mean, very obviously, but also what does big box retail mean? Where are you willing to shop? What does your commute look like today? So I live in San Francisco, which calls itself a city, and I work in Manlow Park, which is an office park 45 minutes drive south if there's not much traffic. I should say an hour. I'll admit to 45 minutes south. Now, supposing there really is no traffic, well then I can get there in half an hour. But supposing I'm able to read instead of drive, I might be able to live further away and spend longer in the car because I don't need to...”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source