CES 2026: Part Six (Thursday)

Welcome to Better Offline’s coverage of the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show - a standup radio station in the Palazzo Hotel with an attached open bar where reporters, experts and various other characters bring you the stories from the floor. In Thursday’s first episode, Ed is joined by Devindra Hardawar of Engadget, actress and standup comedian Chloe Radlciffe, Edward Ongweso of the Tech Bubble Newsletter and Matt Binder of Mashable to talk about the anti-consumer electronics show, how AI buying up all the RAM is going to make computing unaffordable, Dell’s quasi-reversal on AI, why you should be buying all your tech used, and why it’s time to use tech to tell people you love their stuff. EXCLUSIVE CES SALE! Get a *permanent* $10 off an annual subscription to my newsletter through January 13 2025: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/cue848p5sc Ed Ongweso Jr.: https://bsky.app/profile/bigblackjacobin.bsky.social The Tech Bubble Newsletter: https://thetechbubble.substack.com/ Devindra Hardawar: https://www.engadget.com/about/editors/devindra-hardawar/ http://thefilmcast.com/ Matt Binder: https://mashable.com/author/matt-binder Chloe Radcliffe: https://www.instagram.com/chloebadcliffe/?hl=en https://punchup.live/chloeradcliffe Donate in Sean-Paul’s honor: https://www.perc-epilepsy.org/ --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:36Ed Zitron?

  Enter the mind gym and pick up some brain weights. It's time for better offline's coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show and I am your host Ed Zitron.

• 0:56Ed Zitron?

  We're back here in the Palazzo in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, bringing you another episode. It is Thursday and we're still covering CES. We are still here with an amazing assortment of guests from the tech industry. We've got an open bar, we've got tacos, a place to sit down for members of the media, whether or not they join us on the microphone. And of course, we've got some new contestants and some old contestants revisiting guests. My first is of course, Chloe Radcliffe, standup comedian and actress from Is This Thing On? You're never gonna get rid of me. I'm like bedbugs. I love it. I'm here forever. With Cradley Booper. And of course, Matt Binder of Mashable joins us again. Hey, three times in a row. What's up? Yeah. And then the wonderful Devendra Hardwar of Engadget.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  Hello, let's go.

• 1:35Ed Zitron?

  And you said you wanted to talk shit on Dell, so let's start there.

• 1:38Speaker 03

  Oh, hell, yeah.

• 1:39Ed Zitron?

  What is, give us, give us the history.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  So last year Dell did this, the dumbest thing I've seen a tech company do in a very long time. They're like, hey, we, all these brands, you know, and love XPS, that thing that's been selling for decades. People love it. Let's kill all that.

• 1:53Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Let's call all computers Dell, Dell Pro, Dell Pro Max. Those names may sound familiar. They're a little appley.

• 2:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:01Speaker 03

  And when that was announced last year, I was at a press conference and Michael Dell was there announcing all of this. And my first question to him was like, what do you have to gain by copying Apple? Like, what are you doing here?

• 2:10Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  He did not have a good response to that. Fast forward a year. Every other PC manufacturer shipment's growing. Dell, down.

• 2:17Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:18Speaker 03

  Because nobody knew what the hell Dell was producing this year, especially the people who wanted an XPS.

• 2:22Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  So they turned, they, they turned around. They brought back the XPS brand. They're actually doubling down on it. And also fixing all the stupid issues we've brought up in our reviews over the last few years too. So it's double vindication. XPS is back.

• 2:38Ed Zitron?

  What are the things that they messed up and what have they fixed?

• 2:41Speaker 03

  Have you seen the XPS lately?

• 2:42Ed Zitron?

  I've not.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  So they did this thing, sometimes designers go a little crazy. They're like, what if, what if you couldn't see a track pad? What if it was just all wrist pad? So they did that. They made an invisible track pad that works and it looks cool, but it's hard to use because you can't tell where it begins and ends.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  It's hard to use because a huge part of using a track pad is being able to see.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Or at least feel it. At least feel where it begins and ends.

• 3:07Ed Zitron?

  I have a problem with my MacBook Pro because the track pad is slightly bigger than usual and my nasty clammy wrists. Get on it. But an invisible one, I would snap that thing into.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  But also at least with a MacBook, right? You have an edge.

• 3:18Ed Zitron?

  You can see where it is. You can see the track pad.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  You don't even need to see it. You need to feel it, right? Cause you're not looking at the track pad when you're using it.

• 3:25Speaker 04

  I could see, I could see an invisible track pad working if they made like the technology to just extend it so that whole area is a track pad. But what you're saying is that's not the case.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  A lot of it is a track pad, but the very edges aren't. Anyway, what they did with the new redesign, they put just little, little notches. So you feel it.

• 3:41Ed Zitron?

  Wow.

• 3:41Speaker 03

  And these are just like basic usability things to think about.

• 3:45Ed Zitron?

  They could have very easily done that first.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  They could have done that first. But anyway, and also the function row on the Dell XPS is for the last couple of years was this like capacitive touch thing. They weren't real keys. They were buttons that kind of changed when you hit a button and they disappeared in bright sunlight. You couldn't see them. So like your function keys, the volume button, all that stuff just disappeared. And I talked to them. I was like, did you guys not go outside? Did you not bring this computer outside and see?

• 4:11Speaker 04

  You're talking to a computer engineer. They didn't go outside.

• 4:14Ed Zitron?

  But like, wait, but did they say whether they did?

• 4:17Speaker 03

  They were like, it was COVID and we were designing, you know, it was like a, the excuses were it was kind of a rough time to design. I think sometimes some companies let their designers go crazy. We're gonna out Apple, Apple. The thing about Apple is that they at least tend to think about usability and practical functionality.

• 4:35Ed Zitron?

  The company best known for its usability, like very consumer facing. They don't like changing things up. Other than liquid glass, which fucking sucks.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  You could argue about liquid glass. They're charging the mouse on the bottom. That's like Johnny I bullshit, but Apple itself doesn't tend to do that. So anyway, that's, they're just keys. Now they're just keys. And they, these new, the XPS 14, 16 are lighter than ever. This XPS 14 is like about three pounds, which is pretty great for a 14 inch laptop. So yeah, total vindication. They fixed a lot of the issues. The branding is back. It is funny talking to people at Dell because all the executives and the marketing people like, yeah, yeah, this rebranding is going to go great. And all the underlings, like all the people who've been working on these computers and have dedicated decades of their lives to it. They're like, what, what is happening here? Like I, I built XPS machines, you know, and they felt really bad about it. So on every level, the branding,

• 5:28Speaker 03

  the rebranding was a failure. XPS is back and I'm happy about that. And we just got to tell Dell for like that whole, when I saw them again. Yeah, we were right. We told you. We told you this.

• 5:38Ed Zitron?

  Well, there's misinformation going on around Dell as well as, because everyone's saying, oh, Dell claimed that they're backing off AI branding and people don't like AI. Apparently David Gerard, he chased this journalist, Jervid Gerard, Jesus Christ. Apparently that was never said. And Dell is full scale AI. Like anyone who thinks that they're not. They have forecasted $25 billion of AI server sales this year. Do not believe Dell's lies. Do not let them lie to you and claim this isn't the case. They, they are fully AI pelt and will be punished by the dark gods when the AI bubble bursts.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  I've had some interesting conversations with people at Dell who are pissed off at Microsoft, pissed off about the AI PC push because it's literally all marketing bullshit, as you've covered extensively, that has not led to actually useful features for your people. So yeah, Dell is invest in AI. What I have noticed is that they're not saying AI PC. They're not out there shipping. They're not saying like, hey, we got the latest Copilot Plus systems because nobody cared. Nobody cared about Copilot Plus, which was

• 6:37Speaker 05

  Did they try saying?

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Last year they did. And now it's just like, hey, you know what's great? A computer. A computer that works.

• 6:45Ed Zitron?

  What if a computer turned on?

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:48Speaker 05

  What if, what if a computer was a thing that you could see the things on it?

• 6:53Speaker 03

  You could feel the trackpad.

• 6:55Speaker 05

  I will say that from my now, you know, this is my first year at CES. From my relative limited exposure to the kind of products that get shown at CES. Somebody being like, hey, do you want a laptop that you have no idea where you're touching on it? Do you want a laptop that has a bunch of buttons, but you're going to have to use it in pretty limited facilities to make sure that you know exactly what you are clicking? That's the new product.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  The whole world can be described by like, I think you should leave sketches, right?

• 7:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we've been saying.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Car sketches. I want a car where the steering wheel doesn't fly off. And that's basically what we're saying.

• 7:32Ed Zitron?

  No, no, it's, it's literally, there's two, CES is two, I think you should leave sketches. It's that. And it's also a guy who just walks around going, what the hell is that? What the hell is that? Who needs smart glasses that goes, that's a flower pot. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Who walks into his pantry and goes, oh, what the fuck do I cook?

• 7:51Speaker 03

  The I've got too much shit on me sketch.

• 7:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  I just can't survive.

• 7:55Ed Zitron?

  That's Victoria's song.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:56Ed Zitron?

  From the verge. Just too many wearables.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Too many wearables, although we, we had a good chat with the guy from Pebble, who's back.

• 8:03Ed Zitron?

  Everyone likes Pebble.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  Good wearables. Actually, I, I said, I said smart rings were bullshit last year, and I still believe that. Sorry, Victoria. But the Pebble Smart Ring, kind of cool.

• 8:12Speaker 05

  What do you think?

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Is bullshit about smart rings. The form factor means they can never really do much. The battery life is always going to be. And sorry, form factor, you mean it's a ring. It's a ring where it can never have like a big battery. It can never be that you so like, it's very limited in terms of what you can do. And all the rings we've seen, I know you've worn a couple of it like they're just, they're fine. But you know what's better is just a smart watch that is not as, not as, it doesn't feel.

• 8:38Speaker 04

  I will push back on you on that. I find smart watch is very annoying and I, I agree.

• 8:43Ed Zitron?

  Like my weird fucking like oddly dainty wrists mean that like the.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  I see muscle there.

• 8:49Ed Zitron?

  I got muscle upwards.

• 8:51Speaker 03

  You are being generous.

• 8:54Ed Zitron?

  Thank you, Chloe. Thank you, Chloe.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Compared to my wrist.

• 8:57Ed Zitron?

  Just destroying me and this annihilate me.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  No, no, no.

• 9:00Ed Zitron?

  My Apple watch for some reason just doesn't get a full connection. No matter how tight I get.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  That's interesting.

• 9:06Ed Zitron?

  And like this ring, for the most part works, but even then, like it's, I still don't get a full connection. Sometimes, sometimes it doesn't.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 9:13Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, even then it doesn't recognize a full workout sometimes. It's, it kind of.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Wearables are personal. Like that's the thing.

• 9:20Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  We're all weird, like what, what we like to touch, what textures we like. I think I've learned I just don't like ring stuff.

• 9:25Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  You know, so like that's just.

• 9:26Ed Zitron?

  Right. It's hard to make a generous product in that way.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  And the thing is too, you have to be the type of person who wears whatever that wearable is. Like the non-tech version of it too. Like I don't wear watches, so I want to wear a smart watch. I don't wear rings. I want to wear a smart ring. I don't wear glasses, so I want to wear smart glasses.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  That's a big one too. Smart glasses also kind of bullshit. But the Pebble thing is kind of cool because the Pebble guy is always like, first off, their thing was E Ink. Smart watches like back in 2014.

• 9:52Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Those are coming back. He's bringing that back.

• 9:54Ed Zitron?

  I like those.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  What are those? So Pebble used to have these smart watches that lasted for weeks and just, they were very basic. They could like upload notifications.

• 10:03Ed Zitron?

  You use the Kindle.

• 10:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:05Ed Zitron?

  So it's like, it's like that, but on a watch.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  Not really an LCD screen, but more like papery.

• 10:10Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah. It's the, it's the paper screen.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  And I can read my book on my watch.

• 10:14Ed Zitron?

  Well, I mean, I don't think you'd.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  You could read your notifications on your watch for sure. But he's bringing back that because what happened was. Fitbit bought Pebble, Google bought Fitbit. And he went to Google and was like, hey, you're my, my software, my Pebble software. Nothing's happening. Can you open source that? And Google, for once, did a good thing and was like, yes, they open sourced it.

• 10:33Ed Zitron?

  That's nice.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  Now, now the Pebble guy can go back and make hardware using that software. So the Pebble watches are back, but he has a ring that looks really cool.

• 10:42Ed Zitron?

  But the thing is with the ring, from what I've heard is you have to physically hold it down when you're recording.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  So the ring, all it does, it does one thing.

• 10:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  Supposed to do it really well. You hit a button on the ring, it takes notes.

• 10:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. But do you have to physically hold it down the entire time?

• 10:55Speaker 05

  I don't know. I don't know if you have to physically. We looked this up and I was saying that I, cause I, as a comedian, literally, my phone background says document everything. I, my, I record every single set that I do in stand up in my voice memos. Like I use the notes and the voice memos in my phone are the two things that like

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:12Speaker 05

  unlock my entire life.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Perfect for you.

• 11:14Speaker 05

  It'd be perfect for me.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Supposedly will last two years.

• 11:17Speaker 05

  Except.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 05

  Also, I, I love to, like, sometimes I'll just record a meeting and not tell the other person.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  Now that's, yeah.

• 11:25Speaker 05

  Illegal in the state that I live, but it's a way for me to be like, okay, I remember. Like if I'm practicing a pitch for a show that I'm trying to sell or whatever, I'm like, I just want to be able to be in the moment, but also remember how I did this and how they reacted and what, what questions they asked, whatever. Anyway, this ring sounds like a thing that I would use.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:45Speaker 05

  Then I looked up what it looks like and it really does look like

• 11:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:49Speaker 05

  my ring that definitely does not have a microphone in it.

• 11:52Ed Zitron?

  So I did just look this up. You just have to click it once to record it and it's 75 bucks. I hate to say it, I actually kind of want this because I'm not trying to surreptitiously record people.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:02Ed Zitron?

  But I absolutely like, usually

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Got an idea.

• 12:05Ed Zitron?

  30 seconds before I meant to fall asleep, I remember 13 things I would like a reminder for.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 12:10Ed Zitron?

  Now perhaps I wouldn't be wearing a ring at that time, but facetally I'll walk around and be like, shit, I need to remember this shit. I need to remember this. Or even just if I could say an idea and it says here, it's an on-device LLM.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 12:21Ed Zitron?

  And that I find quite interesting because

• 12:23Speaker 03

  Not going to the cloud.

• 12:24Ed Zitron?

  Not going to the cloud.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Processing.

• 12:27Ed Zitron?

  Melting giraffes as a means of powering GPUs.

• 12:30Speaker 05

  On which device? On a ring or on your phone?

• 12:32Ed Zitron?

  That's kind of what I'm trying to work out.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  We do, we do. Yeah, I don't, we, I just got out of.

• 12:36Speaker 05

  Fit a whole L L M on a ring?

• 12:37Ed Zitron?

  No, that's kind of what.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  We're gonna get there.

• 12:40Speaker 05

  I'm asking such like podunk hillbillies.

• 12:46Speaker 04

  You fit a whole robot on that ring?

• 12:48Ed Zitron?

  I actually will push back. That's not a podunk question. That's a perfectly fucking reasonable one. Because especially when we're being told we need eighty nine data centers.

• 12:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:57Ed Zitron?

  We must knock down entire neighborhoods and put up a data center the size of, I don't know, New York City for Meta. I understand the question. I'm going to assume that this thing needs, you need to connect it to your phone and your phone. It has, I, I don't.

• 13:11Speaker 05

  Can you fit a whole A I on your phone?

• 13:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 13:14Ed Zitron?

  Yes, but I, I'm guessing it's a very simplified transcription specific one, but I do not know.

• 13:20Speaker 04

  It might, it might, it might store the recordings on the ring in case you don't have the connectivity to your phone in the moment.

• 13:26Ed Zitron?

  No, it says completely on device. You don't require an internet connection.

• 13:30Speaker 04

  Oh, okay. Perfect. I, I'm finding out about this ring right here, right now. I had no idea.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Device of the show.

• 13:35Ed Zitron?

  Seventy five bucks, uh, March twenty twenty six.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  Lasts two years. Now that's the thing. It's not rechargeable. So.

• 13:42Ed Zitron?

  What?

• 13:43Speaker 03

  Once you, once, once it's done, you send it, you send it back to them.

• 13:47Speaker 05

  Why?

• 13:47Speaker 03

  Because he is very much like, I, I think this is true. We have too much shit to charge. Like, I'm, I'm just tired of it. So he's like, okay, what if a ring lasts two years? And if you actually are still using it by then, send it back and maybe get a replacement at this kind of a cost.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, that actually rocks.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Probably better than holding on to a charger that you will lose.

• 14:07Ed Zitron?

  I actually, I actually gotta say.

• 14:09Speaker 04

  What happens a year and a half in though, if it's got less of a charge and not lasting?

• 14:13Ed Zitron?

  It can record roughly twelve to fifteen hours of recording and it lasts for two years. I'm sorry. I, I don't know. If you're a journalist.

• 14:22Speaker 05

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

• 14:23Ed Zitron?

  It runs out.

• 14:24Speaker 05

  Twelve to fifteen hours.

• 14:25Ed Zitron?

  Recording total.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  No, no, no. You can.

• 14:27Ed Zitron?

  That's what it says here on their website.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 14:29Speaker 05

  You must be able to offload.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. We have not gone to the specifics of it, but it definitely, he wants you to like.

• 14:35Speaker 05

  Hold twelve to fifteen hours total and then you can dump that.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but you just.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  We have the technology to clear.

• 14:42Speaker 04

  This is why I found.

• 14:44Ed Zitron?

  I'll match.

• 14:44Speaker 04

  I found an article on, it's not my outlet, but Android Authority with it's expected to last for up to two years with normal usage and normal usage is described as 10 to 20 times per day, recording three to six second.

• 15:00Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 15:02Speaker 04

  Voice notes.

• 15:03Ed Zitron?

  I wanted to love this. I wanted to love this so bad, but if you're thinking a journalist and you do what? What? So 15 to equal like 30, 30 minute interviews? That sucks.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  Seventy five dollars a week.

• 15:15Speaker 05

  You're never gonna, you're never gonna record.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  This is not for interviews.

• 15:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're not gonna record a full interview. That, that.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  This is for you on the toilet. This is for you in the shower.

• 15:23Ed Zitron?

  I do have a lot of thoughts there.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  It's toilet thoughts. It's shower thoughts. The storage thing, we have the ability to boot data. Like that, that could be solved.

• 15:31Ed Zitron?

  Sure, but I'm just kind of like, if this is, if this is meant to be for quick thoughts, fine, but I'm just like, as someone, especially because it does the transcription, I'm just like, that would be really useful. But I guess you can do that with the Apple Watch.

• 15:42Speaker 04

  But also three to six second voice notes. I mean, is that really saving you the time that you couldn't just whip out your phone and type it yourself?

• 15:50Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, exactly. I'm kind of like my iPhone.

• 15:52Speaker 05

  That does add up. Yeah, I do actually think that being able to say like a very quick thing.

• 15:57Ed Zitron?

  Captain's log.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, I do think that that is cool.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  It's.

• 16:01Speaker 05

  My, the use case that I would be using it for is if I, I am always like writing down in, in a conversation, if somebody says a very smart thing or like analyzes something in a really cool way, I'm always like, hold on, I want to write that down.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 05

  And so if I could just be like, hey, can you explain, like, explain to me why this movie didn't, wasn't, wasn't effective in the way that we both felt that it wasn't effective, but I am not articulate enough to be able to put this into words, but you, my boyfriend, who is a smart director can say it into my ring. And, but that explanation is going to take 60 seconds. Like I, I do think that there's a use case.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  And it.

• 16:41Speaker 05

  That is well under interview.

• 16:43Speaker 04

  Though is your, a 60 second note is your entire use case for the day.

• 16:46Speaker 05

  That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  If you want this to last two years.

• 16:49Speaker 05

  That's what I'm saying.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  I would be doing that in my mind, too. If you give me a timeframe like this, if you want this to last two years, you need to use it no more than six to 10 times a day.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  You're still gonna have your phone.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  But every time I use it, I'd be like, oh, this was use number six. Do I really want to go and push it for the next note?

• 17:04Speaker 05

  And that is how you know that you did not grow up with money.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I still did not have money, yes.

• 17:10Speaker 05

  That is a very clear class marker.

• 17:13Ed Zitron?

  I will give them credit in that they specifically say, this is not designed to record your whole life or meetings. It is very much a reminder thing. I can kind of see it. And there are numerous times where I will just be sitting there and be like, oh, I have an idea. Like, what if Benoit Blanc interrogated Cuba, for example? But like, the useful ones, too. But it's, I also like typing, but again, I can see, but I can see different strokes, different folks. Like, that's fine. And also, Chloe does literally do this. She's like, can you say that again so I can write it down?

• 17:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:45Ed Zitron?

  So this might be a Chloe Radcliffe approved device, potentially.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  How, the way I do reviews is often I'm like out, just like dictating thoughts into my phone. So that's like often a thing. The other thing I'll point out is that, you know, we, the lifespan is the thing. Like, will people want basically a disposable device? But what if, I think you send it back to them, it gets recycled, the battery gets recycled.

• 18:06Ed Zitron?

  Good for them.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Electronics recycling, not that great, but better than just letting it live in your drawer.

• 18:11Ed Zitron?

  You just need to put it in the mail. Like, it's just, see, the moment I'm told I have to mail something, I just want to, I want to jump off a fucking bridge. Like, I'm just like, oh, you want me to go to the post office? Let me just, let me go bug Dwyer mode.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  You get a self, self, you know, label or whatever. You drop it in a thing.

• 18:30Ed Zitron?

  No, no, no, no.

• 18:31Speaker 05

  But then that means, what, you got a print? You got a print? Self-label? No way.

• 18:35Ed Zitron?

  Shoot me in the goddamn head.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  You know, they have, there's that startup that does the thing for returns right now where you get a barcode and you just bring it to like Bed Bath & Beyond.

• 18:42Ed Zitron?

  And that shit rocks. Yeah, yeah.

• 18:44Speaker 05

  Oh, wait, what's that? Tell me about that.

• 18:46Ed Zitron?

  With like Amazon returns and, um.

• 18:48Speaker 04

  As long as you go to the UPS store.

• 18:50Ed Zitron?

  You can do it with Kohl's as well, I think.

• 18:52Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Amazon. There's also another company that just does returns.

• 18:56Ed Zitron?

  Um, I got Amberjack. Amberjack is a shoe company I used and they have it where it was just you scan it. It was like you could take it to Kohl's or something, which is cool. Like, it's weird. Like, there are little things like that which are really useful.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  Right.

• 19:07Ed Zitron?

  I said this is a dyspraxic, a physical coordination disability. Putting together, like, opening a package isn't fun. Packing a package sucks is like the pain box for me. It's like, if you're like, return this with a label, I'm like, you want me to touch the thing with the knife on it and the tape?

• 19:25Speaker 03

  It's also like, that's where millennial breakdown happens. It's like, oh, this is a task. This is a task that takes time.

• 19:31Ed Zitron?

  Well, let me explain dyspraxia, though.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:33Ed Zitron?

  It's not like it's like a task. It's picking up a box and putting tape in a straight line is genuinely difficult. Like, my brain, it's in like, the more complex it is, like, it actually like is upsetting. Like, it's meant, like, I'm sure that few dyspraxics who listen are like, yeah, fuck yeah, dude. Boxes suck, but it is really like that. And it's hard to describe because it sounds like I'm just being a baby. I wish I was. I wish this was just me being like, ooh, I can't put a box together. No, it's really fucking difficult. It's really, it's so difficult for me. So it's like, oh, I gave you a label. You gave me a death sentence.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  To the point of what you're saying, there, we have the technology.

• 20:10Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, which is cool.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  You have a QR code, you bring it to a store, they're like, I'll deal with this problem for you.

• 20:14Ed Zitron?

  Which is great.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  And you walk away happy millennial.

• 20:16Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 20:16Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 20:17Speaker 05

  I was, okay, I want to, in defense of millennials, are you a millennial?

• 20:19Ed Zitron?

  I'm a millennial.

• 20:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. In defense of millennials, I think the reason, I, I don't want to do a task, for sure. You're not wrong. I'm not, yeah, duh.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  The things that, the simple things that pile up that take five minutes to do, right?

• 20:31Speaker 05

  Yes, totally. But I think the reason that we, this is sort of off topic and I'm finding it in the moment. So come, come with me on this.

• 20:38Ed Zitron?

  All right.

• 20:38Speaker 05

  But I think the reason that we are so, uh, that tasks are, are, feel like so alienating and so off putting is because. We, we are, oh boy, she's taking a swing here.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Let's go.

• 20:53Speaker 05

  I think we are, because of our generation's interaction with the internet's like rapid expansion and social media's rapid expansion, we're sort of the first generation that was expected to do suddenly like twice as much in a career in raising a family, in whatever, that like, we are the generation, the first generation where it's like you're expected to be your own whole small business.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:19Speaker 05

  And I think that prior generations, excuse me, had more, she's taking a swing, had more free time?

• 21:26Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 21:26Speaker 05

  No, absolutely. Life was slower and so that like you could say, and 45 minutes once a week, I do my little tasks. And like, even if you can be like, I don't like doing them, but it's like you have that 45 minutes and there's not this like constant hammering in the back of your head that is, you could be doing these higher scale things for your job or for your life that are made possible because of the constant access to the internet.

• 21:55Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and your job is also not in your pocket all the time.

• 21:58Speaker 05

  Right, that's what I mean, that's what I'm saying.

• 22:00Ed Zitron?

  And it's like also boomers and Gen, well, Gen X is of course, hearing this will say, well, when I grew up, my parents just left me at home and we had just entertained ourselves. And yeah, we just are all so cynical. And of course, we could buy houses and college actually guaranteed you a job and college was cheaper and housing was cheaper, I guess not in the 90s, but even then it was easier to get a house and I mean, it was just.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  You're starting a millennial, you're starting a generational war here.

• 22:24Ed Zitron?

  I don't fuck it, boomers, boomers.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  No, the Gen Xers got us here, by the way.

• 22:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, Gen X, we need you, we need you.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  We do need them, but also they got us here because they're in action, you know.

• 22:33Ed Zitron?

  Yes, Gen Xers are the problem. There we are, war, war.

• 22:38Speaker 05

  More than boomers?

• 22:39Ed Zitron?

  I think both of them had their hand. I think boomers and their shitty decisions, but Gen Xers are the ones with their inaction when they chose, and there were Gen Xers who did.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  And they tilted right, a lot of Gen Xers.

• 22:48Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, even if you look at like, the like, how like the generations fall politically now, like, you know, the, the cliche is like, oh, boomers were the worst or whatever. But if you look, there's a lot of. Boomers who are very like anti-Trump and I don't see the same with Gen X. In fact, Gen X is the one that went the other way during the pandemic. Like, well, everyone else was like, oh, I can't believe how Trump is doing the, what Trump is doing during the pandemic. Gen X was going like, oh, I can't believe I have to steal it. My shitty kid who I can't send off to school. I'm right wing now. I mean, that's literally.

• 23:20Ed Zitron?

  And also boomers will do the whole thing. We're just gonna get people.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 23:24Ed Zitron?

  I'm gonna get some emails. There are a lot of boomers who are like, ah, back in my day, I could just walk into a store and say, good sir, I'd like a job. And they'd say, I like the cut of your gem, boy. But the same time, and there was a lot of like old people who were like, just go and get a job. It's that easy. The Gen Xers, if you make a post on Blue Sky and I've done this several times, just be like, make fun of Gen Xers being like, yeah, I get home, my parents weren't there, so I'd make myself dinner and I'd entertain myself all day, every day. And I was so independent. There will be Gen Xers who respond and be like, yeah, that's actually true. And you should, like, they get very personal about it. I don't know. You live through some of the best music as well. Like, fucking stop.

• 24:02Speaker 04

  I mean, we're at CES. I mean, all the super rich fucking tech assholes are Gen Xers. Like, yeah.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  To your idea, what you, what you were saying about like.

• 24:12Speaker 05

  Back to me.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  Back to the millennial.

• 24:14Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  I think you're absolutely right, but also there's other aspects of it and people talk about it. It's the way millennials went to school because we went to school in this like real, in America, in this really optimized, like the sort of goals that you had to chase were very specific. The whole gifted and talented crowd, like we are seeing basically.

• 24:34Speaker 05

  Of which I was one.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  Yes, same.

• 24:36Ed Zitron?

  Of which I was not.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:39Ed Zitron?

  I really was not.

• 24:40Speaker 05

  Neither gifted nor talented.

• 24:41Ed Zitron?

  No, no, I was not.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  You see on my, like, the, the gifted and talented adults, um, we're like, oh, that, that was kind of wrong. Like, maybe kind of broke us in terms of how we.

• 24:53Speaker 05

  Do you mean, you mean like the high expectations placed on it, us and the expectation of perfectionism? Or like how that metastasizes into perfectionism?

• 25:01Speaker 03

  Exactly. All that. Like, we were built for school and for taking tests and then sent to the real world. It's like, oh, ooh.

• 25:07Speaker 05

  And do you think more so than other generations?

• 25:09Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you think about it, like, why, why did all the first internet culture come from millennials? And that's because, like, Gen X was at the age where...

• 25:19Speaker 03

  There's history there. There's history.

• 25:21Ed Zitron?

  That's, I mean, there's no, there's no, the incident was done by Gen X.

• 25:24Speaker 04

  I don't know, because we're cooler. No, but I'm talking about, like, meme culture and stuff like that.

• 25:28Ed Zitron?

  Our lives, sorry, that's, I think I know what you're saying, which is that our lives were digital in a way theirs were not.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 25:36Speaker 03

  Here, here's what's interesting, is that we're getting too millennial, like us, because we're all millennials, I guess. But also, we knew what the world was.

• 25:44Speaker 05

  Not me, I'm very young.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Okay, thank you. Good to know.

• 25:47Speaker 05

  Hollywood, cast me in things.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  We knew what the world was before the internet. We saw what the world became with the internet. And we're expected to be experts at it post-internet. So we saw the full breadth of it.

• 26:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  So that's why, like, Gen Z-ers and young kids do not know the world before. And it's kind of tough to describe what that was.

• 26:10Ed Zitron?

  We also were children during 9/11 and we entered the workforce in like...

• 26:14Speaker 03

  Children and teenagers, but yes, the world fell apart.

• 26:16Ed Zitron?

  Teenagers are still children. 2008 as well, like, I think that it's understated, like, because 2008, I moved to America that year. And it was very much like, welcome, welcome to Amer- no, it happened as I moved, not because of...

• 26:28Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 26:30Ed Zitron?

  I moved and it was just like, oh, hey, you know that whole thing you were told about, you go to college, everything will be fine? Fuck you.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  It's exactly.

• 26:37Ed Zitron?

  And I don't think other older generations realize how stark that was, how hard, like, they're, Gen X boomers probably remember before the Department of Homeland Security existed, like, and I just think, and the expectations of hyper digitization and the constant expectation and notifications, stuff like that, I think it's really easy to color millennials, like, oh, you're so, oh, you want your little treats and all this. Oh, we're being harassed by, I mean, everyone is now harassed by everything all the time.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  And we're aware of it.

• 27:08Ed Zitron?

  Yes, and we know and we remember it could have been different, but we don't remember when. It's frustrating as well because by the way, Michael Dell, Gen X.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:17Ed Zitron?

  Just.

• 27:18Speaker 05

  And we're, and just to be clear, this is Mr. Dell of the Dell company.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Hey, one of the richest men in the world, by the way, like he's up there. He's also the guy behind Trump bucks.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  How have I never heard of Michael Dell?

• 27:27Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 27:28Speaker 05

  Is he the guy who founded Dell?

• 27:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:30Ed Zitron?

  And yeah, he's, it's weird because Dell went through this thing is, and we'll rotate shortly, but it's this weird thing where Dell went through this real shithouse era. When they were just complete dog shit, their computers sucked and then they went, took themselves off of the public markets, private again. Fixed things, everyone loved them again, then they went public again. And then they appeared to be like thinking about being shit, but they're back to being okay. And they bet their whole future on AI. It's just.

• 27:55Speaker 04

  One of my earliest computers were Dell and I remember they were really big and, and then they sort of, everyone else beat them in everything. And then no one wanted it. And they had that really, to me, they had that time period where they were the computer that at least I did. I automatically associated with like the older crowd, older people, because especially as like the gaming PC became big. And then building your own PC became big. Dell was still out there. I feel like doing like old school type marketing to specific audiences.

• 28:24Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 04

  During a time period where like everyone was moving beyond that.

• 28:27Ed Zitron?

  And then they bought Alienware, which was this insane company where they'd be these, I had a day, my dad, my dad bought me an Alienware once and I fucking loved it. It was this insane, like, I don't know how, like three foot tall, giant thing with like a swinging door and a big alien head in there. For like a teenage boy with no friends. It was the, it was, this is my.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  This is your friend.

• 28:47Speaker 05

  And sorry, what does the alien in the?

• 28:49Ed Zitron?

  It's literally just a gaming PC, but it looked, it looked like a tube. It was more tubes.

• 28:54Speaker 04

  It's why, it's why his wrists are so muscular.

• 28:57Ed Zitron?

  No. God damn it, they just get body shaming me. No, it's it's interesting though, because hearing them, it just. And as we'll we'll transition into the next episode, obviously, but it's like, it feels like all these companies are having a midlife crisis. And I think, you know what? We're Gen Xers.

• 29:17Speaker 05

  I was gonna say, I mean, like, maybe they are, they are.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Well, now is the time of the millennial midlife crisis. It's like, give us room.

• 29:22Speaker 05

  Now, for me, I'm very young.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Okay. But yes, as I was getting there.

• 29:27Ed Zitron?

  And coming up now, an ad just for Gen Xers. It's gonna be for something called latchkey.biz. It's gonna allow you to have a social network where you crow about how you were such an independent child and how you remember when MTV was good.

• 29:42Speaker 05

  And is actively losing subscribers.

• 29:44Ed Zitron?

  No, Gen Xers will email me now and be like, actually, you know what? I watched Liquid Television and I was cool.

• 29:58Speaker 06

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• 30:28Ed Zitron?

  All right, everyone, I'm back talking about Quince, one of my favorite clothing brands. And as we speak, I'm currently wearing one of their excellent cotton knit overshirts that wear like a jacket. Nice prefall piece to wear as things cool off a bit. I've also been eyeballing one of their heritage water resistant Harrington jackets too for later in the year to pair with their Mongolian cashmere sweaters I bought. And I have several of them and I really can't recommend Quince's stuff enough. I love Quince because they focus on high-quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials, jackets, pants, fitted tees and polos, activewear and even travel gear. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands and because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, you're getting more for less. Find the four pieces you'll reach for most at Quince.

• 31:12Ed Zitron?

  Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was on Better Offline. It's the best way to support the show.

• 31:29Speaker 07

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• 32:00Speaker 08

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 32:15Speaker 09

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 32:26Speaker 08

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 32:31Speaker 10

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 32:37Speaker 08

  So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

• 33:02Ed Zitron?

  We're back in the room. We're back with a wonderful cast, of course. Actress and stand-up comedian Chloé Radcliffe.

• 33:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:08Ed Zitron?

  Matt Binder of Mashable. Hey. And Davindra Hardwar of Engadget.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  What's up?

• 33:12Ed Zitron?

  And you know what? I do actually kind of like this Gen X and midlife crisis happening with AI. It kind of makes sense because it's like, you look at all these companies and they're all like, fuck, how do we keep growing the rot economy I've written and said about? But it's also a degree of like, wait, what do people want anymore? Because we got so rich, because Gen X is able to accumulate wealth in a way that millennials couldn't. Boomers too.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  It's all FOMO. It's all FOMO about what's next.

• 33:35Ed Zitron?

  But FOMO with disconnection from anyone like that.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:40Ed Zitron?

  I'm sorry. Oh, it was a rough time during COVID. We didn't go outside. Fuck off. You could still step outside just once, just be like, all right, let's go out.

• 33:49Speaker 05

  You know, it's also funny. I spent all of COVID outside because that's where you didn't get a germ.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  For a while, it was better to be outside.

• 33:56Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah. It's also just take the laptop outside or do you not have an overhead lamp?

• 34:01Speaker 03

  I do. It was, that was very stupid, but to, to what is happening to all these companies? Because I've, I've been covering them since 2010. I've been following the tech industry forever. They're all desperate. They're all desperate of missing out on the next big thing. Because Microsoft missed out on mobile. They tried desperately to kind of get that back, like Windows Mobile, all these things, making Windows 8. But no, that was Apple. That was smartphone era. That was tablets. They never quite got into that. But they also didn't realize people like PCs. People like computers. Maybe you should double down on that, which is what Windows 11 was. Windows 12 kind of became the thing. But that was the mobile era. Then there was like tablets and stuff. It's wearables for a while. People were hot. Like, oh, this is going to be the next big thing. It's a niche. It's a very small niche.

• 34:45Ed Zitron?

  Because you wear them and not everyone wears the same thing to Matt Binder's point.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  What's happened is that the world revolves around our phones. Because these are the most personal computers we have.

• 34:53Speaker 05

  It's my best friend.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  It's your best friend. It holds all of your deepest secrets and inner thoughts. It connects you to the world. So how do you go past phone? The next stage of computing to them is, okay, a thing that processes data at obscene levels that we don't fully understand, but it seems like black magic. And that's With AI.

• 35:10Ed Zitron?

  But it's so funny, though, because they're like, well, what do we replace a device that's all about personal stuff and our communication with others and our ability to condense our thoughts and access media we like. Well, what if we took away all personal choice and data entry of any kind? Would they like that? But I actually, what you were saying that I just had a thought. All these companies missed out on mobile. Microsoft didn't miss out on mobile. They made a shit mobile phone by acquiring Nokia and Windows Phone sucked. And it's like, why do people like the Mac so much? Cause it, cause it was good. Cause the UI was good. Why do people like the iPhone? Cause the UI was good. It took so long for Android to even be half assed. Was the T-Mobile G1 was the first?

• 35:52Speaker 03

  That was the first, yeah.

• 35:53Ed Zitron?

  And it was so far behind and they were so far behind for long. And Windows Phone was an insane it was just this like tiles. It was Windows eight, but in a phone.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  And I will say, it was cool. It was cool because it was different, but they, they again missed out on some practical functionality, like Windows Phone.

• 36:10Ed Zitron?

  Bjork is cool and different, but I would not like. She misses out on some. No, but I would not, I would not be like playing Bjork at an NFL game. Like I wouldn't be playing Bjork in a commercial. I'm saying that like there are journalists and specifics. And it's like something. But if we're, if we're connecting with broad, like middle America. Yeah, yeah. I don't think.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  So you're referencing Surface now, which is at the NFL games.

• 36:33Ed Zitron?

  Oh yeah. No, the Surface, it's so funny having Surface things there, especially with Aaron Rodgers just smashing them. But it's like, they don't, they, they're like, well, what do we do? Well, we'll do a half spin. It's like, make it good. Make it good.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  I can understand, we're going to go into history here for the kids, but Microsoft was making mobile shit for a very long time, right?

• 36:51Ed Zitron?

  Oh yeah. The IPAC as well, right?

• 36:54Speaker 03

  The IPAC, all that stuff, but it was BlackBerry era, right? Okay. Rewind to like late nineties. It was like personal assistants, right? PDAs, the Palm Pilots, um, all those things. Evolution of that was BlackBerry. Microsoft was doing stuff within Pocket PC and like they made a couple of ones, but they never really took.

• 37:11Ed Zitron?

  And they were like little laptops.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  They were, they really had like little keys or like little BlackBerry clones.

• 37:14Ed Zitron?

  You could, but you used like a little pen with some.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  You could use, some of them had like a stylus too. But the thing is BlackBerry was hot because data was bad and BlackBerry created the technology to have quick digital messaging to all your friends. Go watch the movie BlackBerry, which is not fully historically accurate, but gets the tech right.

• 37:30Ed Zitron?

  A Jimbo C A fan of the show. Sorry.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  But the movie BlackBerry, wonderful, amazing, has one of the guys from It's Always Sunny in there too, and he's just like wonderfully offensive and like really gives his all.

• 37:42Ed Zitron?

  Nice.

• 37:42Speaker 03

  Check out that movie. But BlackBerry innovated, innovator's dilemma came for them because they didn't believe you could have a phone that was all screen. And that was iPhone.

• 37:51Ed Zitron?

  Because it's difficult, genuine.

• 37:52Speaker 05

  What do you mean? Like they had considered, they were like, should we make phone all screen?

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, because BlackBerry.

• 37:57Speaker 05

  And they were like, no, no, we not make touchscreen all keyboard.

• 38:00Ed Zitron?

  Oh, my God.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:01Ed Zitron?

  Glenn Howerton, who's Dennis from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, plays my friend Jim Bastille. He reads my newsletter.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  What a glow up.

• 38:10Speaker 04

  I remember when I was in high school, the big phone at the time where those like the the screen that flips up, the Nokia Sidekick, I think it was called.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  Phones were so cool. Before the iPhone, phones had all this like cool stuff. I had I had a Helio Ocean, which which flipped up vertically.

• 38:26Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  And also flipped sideways like a sidekick. Amazing stuff. And then the iPhone came out and it was like, okay, all screen, but also apps. Your phone is now a computer. It's not just like a limited thing with garbage version of the internet. It's the full internet. And then cellular speeds got better. So like internet in your pocket, full computer in your pocket, you cannot deny that that's the best thing. So Microsoft just was never able, they didn't catch up to that quick enough. We talk about Android being shit early on. It was, but within a couple of years, they kind of did the Windows thing where Google just like had the software and had other people come and make the hardware. And Android took over the world. Like Android dominated cell phone, smartphones, pretty quickly, pretty quickly on. But it's hard to deny, everyone is chasing like, what is the next

• 39:11Speaker 03

  thing? They think AI is the next thing. And I'm glad that there are people out there like, we're looking at this like, this is bullshit. This is not good.

• 39:19Speaker 04

  But are they sure? Like, are they really convinced that AI is the thing?

• 39:23Speaker 03

  What's amazing is that they're not.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  Right. Because, because so, so Mashable published, I didn't do the interview, but we spoke to Lenovo CEO. And we asked him about people who are anti AI and AI skeptics. And his answer to that was basically, you can't avoid it. You just, you won't be able to avoid it. And it's like, that's not the.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  That's not an answer.

• 39:43Speaker 04

  But it's also not like a ringing endorsement.

• 39:45Speaker 05

  You won't be able to avoid AI.

• 39:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's not the ringing like.

• 39:49Ed Zitron?

  It's the whole thing of it's inevitable.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  Right, right. Do you believe in this product? Well, you can't avoid what's coming. I mean,

• 39:55Ed Zitron?

  you know, we all die.

• 39:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, that doesn't sell it. No, but it's.

• 39:59Speaker 05

  I think I, I, in having not read the interview, I could imagine being like, sort of having the attitude of like, I don't, who gives a shit if you, if you don't believe in this, it's happening.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  It's, we've invested billions of dollars and our stock is going up.

• 40:15Speaker 05

  Deal with it. And why, who, why is it on me to convince you? You, you can sit there and bang your drum as long as you, and I'm, I don't mean this to, I don't mean to be on AI's side, but like, I, I can imagine sort of being like, take it or leave it. Who gives a shit? It's gonna happen.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  I appreciate the honesty, the answer, but like.

• 40:32Ed Zitron?

  But if your job is literally to market it to a journalist.

• 40:34Speaker 04

  Like Apple, if, when the iPhone first came out and people asked about the iPhone, like, are people really good? I, Apple didn't go like, it's inevitable. They were like, try, try it and you'll, you'll see.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  I will say, Steve Jobs, famously an asshole.

• 40:47Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you're holding it.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Well, no, I'm not saying he was, but he had the product to back him up.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  The messaging was, you'll get used to it. Like the Apple way was, you'll get used to it. We know better.

• 40:56Ed Zitron?

  But that's not what AI is saying. They're saying it's happening. And the funny thing is about AI as well is if AI was, I can say to my computer, load this, do this, and it actually did it every time. That'd be fucking sick.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Well, that's what, that's what Microsoft's pitching you with the co-pilot voice man.

• 41:13Ed Zitron?

  They are lying. They are just like, I swear to fucking God. I thought public companies couldn't just fucking lie, but they can only do it about numbers.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  If you're all in the same grift, it doesn't matter, right? And also what we're learning is that rules don't matter. Laws don't apply to the rich and the powerful.

• 41:27Ed Zitron?

  But here's the thing, uh, gravity does. And I think they will all be punished. Mashallah. Like, uh, when, when the stock was, Nvidia's kind of down today, it's kind of fun to watch. It's also funny as well because none of it really clicks with what users desire. Cause what users desire right now is, I wish my phone just fucking worked. I wish every app didn't need to ping me 14 times a day to say, have you thought about using me?

• 41:51Speaker 03

  I think just work is the thing. Just do what I ask you to do.

• 41:55Speaker 05

  What's when you're saying that the companies themselves don't even fully believe what what's what more is there to that?

• 42:02Speaker 03

  I've talked to a whole bunch of I bring this question to every big company I talk to and early on, Microsoft was doing copilot was like, this thing doesn't work, right? Like you're you're making me you make me want to use copilot as like a search engine, but I cannot trust it. It's not always delivering correct information. If I bought a calculator that said two plus two equals five, I would throw it away because it's garbage. And the Microsoft people were like, it's a work in progress. We're gonna get better. And that that they're making you accept a certain level of bullshit because they they can't stop. They've invested too much in it. They practically are invested in half of OpenAI. So like, they can't stop. It's too big and their stock is being rewarded for it. So they can't say anything bad.

• 42:44Speaker 05

  Okay. And again, just to play devil's advocate and that this is not this doesn't the views reflected here are not my own. I can, you know, I look at what AI take image, take image production, for example, what the images that AI could create four years ago versus the images that AI can still still images that AI can create today are unrecognizable between the two.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  They're so much better.

• 43:11Speaker 05

  And when they were producing the dog shit images four years ago, if somebody was like, if I, you know, like, if you do the same calculator thing, and then they're like, well, yeah, it's a work in progress. And in four years, the calculator is going to say two plus two equals four every single time. Again, I think that that is a fair response.

• 43:29Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing. That's the thing, though. This is one I've answered a lot. This is one where I'm like, oh, so that made sense, maybe two years ago. So it made sense, like, I would say it stopped being rational to do that, like, maybe, I mean, at latest March last year, so 2025, I would say, right up until image generation with GPT, that was when you just went bonk. I know people can say nano banana, nano banana. I went an entire day without saying nano banana, which is now on televisions. Um, it's just like

• 44:04Speaker 04

  I do not know what that word is.

• 44:04Ed Zitron?

  Not a banana is

• 44:05Speaker 04

  It's a Google image generator.

• 44:07Ed Zitron?

  It's like the best, the best one on the market. And people like, look, it can generate a picture of a, a, um, a woman for some reason that I'm using.

• 44:15Speaker 04

  And she lives in a tube.

• 44:17Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, it's like tube generation.

• 44:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:20Ed Zitron?

  Um, oh, God.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  And they, they, they can't answer the basic question about the entire idea of imagery generation. Um, which is what I keep asking.

• 44:27Ed Zitron?

  But the thing is, it's not like it's, but the thing is, it's not having these meteoric jumps. Yeah. Four years ago, sort of in 20, yeah.

• 44:34Speaker 04

  You're saying, you're saying like the curve is leveling off.

• 44:36Ed Zitron?

  Yes. So we've reached the point of diminishing returns because the way these models get better is two ways. One, you feed data into them. Two, you tweak the models by they, you basically tweak their outputs. You say, don't do this, do this.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:48Ed Zitron?

  Thing is with images, you're right up against the wall now. Like they've got about where they can get. And their thing they'll say is like, look, we've made some realistic looking images. The problem isn't making one realistic image. It's doing the same thing more than once reliably, maybe twice, thrice, a hundred times. It's being able to have a consistent visual image. And you can kind of do that, but it takes a shit ton of computational power. And as we run up against the realm of running out of money, that's become the problem. But also most of them have hit diminishing returns because we've run out of data. We are out of data.

• 45:22Speaker 04

  You mean of feed?

• 45:23Ed Zitron?

  Of things to feed into the thingy.

• 45:25Speaker 04

  Slop for the pig.

• 45:26Ed Zitron?

  Slop, well, pig, food for the slop.

• 45:29Speaker 04

  Food for the pigs too, so they can make the slop.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But here's the basic question about image generation. Like, I don't care how much better it's getting.

• 45:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  I don't care. Who gives a shit about?

• 45:38Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's like

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Why does this exist?

• 45:40Speaker 04

  That's the thing, like with, with so much of this, like the, like when we, we talk about like the calculator that, you know, has to get the math problem correct. Well, there's a, the use case for that is it gets the, you need, you need to do math.

• 45:50Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 45:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. With AI generation and all, and AI video, image generation and video generation, it's sort of just like. Okay, you can do it, but what is the purpose?

• 45:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, like the TV guys are like, oh, you can make a wallpaper for your TV. I don't, I don't turn my TV on for a wallpaper. I don't care.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 46:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's like, who gives a shit?

• 46:06Speaker 04

  Who gives a shit? The point, for me, like, like, people like, oh, you could take a picture, a selfie of yourself and insert yourself in different. Well, for me, like, when I want to look at a picture of myself, it's because I want to remember that experience that I experienced.

• 46:19Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 46:19Speaker 04

  But what I, if I, I put myself in an AI image generator and it puts me in front of the pyramids in Egypt, why the fuck do I care?

• 46:26Ed Zitron?

  No.

• 46:26Speaker 04

  There's no memory there of me doing that.

• 46:28Ed Zitron?

  I saw a really evil one where it's like a guy showing his grandmother with dementia, like a picture of her with Jimi Hendrix. Parody, the following is parody. I think that person should be fucking tortured.

• 46:38Speaker 04

  No, I'm so glad you brought that up because I have.

• 46:41Ed Zitron?

  You should be in fucking, you disgusting fucking monster.

• 46:45Speaker 04

  Facebook consistently hammers me with recommendations of groups for people who are asking people to like, clean up their family photos and stuff. And those groups are now full of people who come in and go, oh, um, my daughter or grandma or whoever in my family died. And this is the only photo I have of them. Can you make it color or fix it? And now all the responses are people putting it through the AI image generators. And they, they spit out things that don't even look like the deceased family member. And some of these people love it. And some people even put them in like the deceased family member picture in a video generator that generates.

• 47:25Ed Zitron?

  Just yassifying their grandfather.

• 47:26Speaker 04

  But it's, but it's like, you know, at some point, these image generators are going to distort your memory of the actual person.

• 47:34Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 47:34Speaker 04

  Cause, cause if you only have one photo of someone and that photo was cleaned up, quote unquote, but it changed how your family member looks and you're constantly looking at that photo, it's gonna eventually actually fuck with your real memory of what that person looked like or, or sounded like, like the, the voice cloning stuff. And it's like, I think that's so fucking unhealthy that we're gonna have a world of people who remember their own ancestors as people who did not even exist. Because they, they don't have an actual, uh, like photo in their brain of how they actually looked. They had the AI generated photo of them.

• 48:07Speaker 05

  I, I completely agree and I, I'm sure that this is already happening. And then I, and this is where I get a little nihilistic. This is where I get a little depressive. I wind up going. My, my, my impulse as a millennial who experienced the world's pre-internet, you know, or pre-ubiquitous internet, my instinct is that like their brains are going to be fucked up by shit like that because, and, and it feels good in the moment and so they keep doing the drug and why wouldn't you? If the drug dealer keeps coming to your house, of course it is going to be very difficult to say no. It's much easier to say no when the drug is not inside your house all the time. And so they're gonna keep doing the drug, they're gonna fuck up the brain, they're, they're gonna have these insane relationship

• 48:51Speaker 05

  with memory and with emotion and with human connectivity. And then I want to say, and at some point, they will, in their heart of hearts, understand that this is bad, in years, decades. Like, I'm not, I'm not saying, you know, they'll wake up one week. But like, at some point in their old age or in their middle age, they will go, wow, this is, this is bad. I, I don't know how to describe this. I don't know how to articulate this, but I can feel in my heart that something is disconnected from what the human experience should be.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  I think that's partially what we're doing right now because people are using these tools and not fully thinking about it. And there are just so many philosophical questions about us. Like, how do we process information? How do we process memory? How does this work within our society? What's the anthropological impact of all this falsified information? Like, there's the immediate harms of nothing. We can't trust reality anymore. We can't trust anything because they can just make up facts. But also, the eventual harms is that the idea of memory is just gonna disappear.

• 49:49Speaker 04

  I mean, another thing I've seen, and this is the really, one really depressing one, like, someone will ask for something, like, they'll post a photo of their, you know, child who died at like, you know, nine months, three years, whatever. And they'll be like, oh, I'd love to see how they would look if they made it to like 40. And it's like, no, don't do that to yourself.

• 50:07Speaker 05

  Right, exactly.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  Don't do that. You have the, the actual image or videos of them when they existed and who they were and what they were. And just keep that in your memory. Don't look at this person who never will or did exist that they're generating. It's just odd.

• 50:22Ed Zitron?

  And the thing is, all of that photo editing stuff, and in particular, the new things where you can be like, okay. Add a sword to the photo, make him look like Captain America, give my grandmother giant abs, like all of the things that you can do with AI now.

• 50:36Speaker 05

  All right, now, now, now you've got my attention.

• 50:38Ed Zitron?

  Make my, yoke my grandma, a phrase to remember.

• 50:43Speaker 05

  CES twenty twenty six.

• 50:44Ed Zitron?

  Yoke my grandma. But here's the thing, I genuinely believe all of this is going away. No one, no one other than me is really willing to fully go. I think all of this goes away. I think everything dies within two years. I think all, I think that there is going to be the big egg face moment. And no one is real, no one wants to take the logical endpoint, which is the people who are dependent on these things are not going to have a thingy anymore. Unless they're going to put DeepSeek R1 on their laptop and make thirty seconds between responses. Because I think all of this is just, I think every image is like a few bucks. My theory, I'm just, this is gut instinct. I think it's like a few bucks per image. And I think, and I hear MIT Technology Review had an article middle of last year.

• 51:26Ed Zitron?

  Images are more, are cheaper than text, but they're still very expensive, but nothing's worse.

• 51:32Speaker 05

  Oh, I'm surprised images are cheaper than text.

• 51:33Ed Zitron?

  I was surprised too, but it, there's, I forget the actual thing, but all of this, like the video generation stuff, that's gone away first.

• 51:41Speaker 05

  So, and, and, and sorry, that couple of dollars per image or whatever is.

• 51:45Ed Zitron?

  For them to produce it.

• 51:46Speaker 05

  Being paid by OpenAI or it is being paid by Anthropic or it's.

• 51:51Ed Zitron?

  For the GPUs to run, yeah.

• 51:52Speaker 05

  Right, okay.

• 51:53Speaker 04

  And that's another thing though, most of the, the AI generated stuff you see out there, not professional work obviously, but like things people post on social media or whatever. They're just using like the free version of a lot of, because, because no one, no one wants to actually, unless you're using it again for professional purposes, no one is paying.

• 52:11Speaker 05

  It's yoke my grandma for free.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  No one wants to pay for the subscriptions.

• 52:15Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing, OpenAI has this big thing, ah, people love to email, be like, what if they did ads? If you are someone who's emailed me about it, that you're like seventy five thousand, wow, what if they did ads? Here's the problem, the information had a great story this week, where it's nine hundred million weekly active users, though they bullshit those numbers. Uh, eight hundred million of those are outside of the US, thus they're lower value advertising clients. So, yeah. Most of them are free, they're just, and the most, and the funny thing is, is even the ones that pay are the most enthusiastic who cost you the most money. OpenAI loses money even on their 200 buck a month one. So the more, the more you like something, the worse you are as a customer. It's usually the opposite. It's usually like your power user of Facebook doesn't cost them that much because it's basic.

• 53:00Ed Zitron?

  It's just, so the way a website works is like Facebook is.

• 53:04Speaker 05

  All right, Ed. I know I'm a lady and I know I'm not in tech. No, I'm kidding.

• 53:08Ed Zitron?

  No, no. So when you, when you should be in a box.

• 53:11Speaker 05

  So picture a computer.

• 53:13Ed Zitron?

  No, no, no, no.

• 53:14Speaker 05

  Machine that you.

• 53:14Ed Zitron?

  Chloe, don't maybe be sarcastic and be like, do you, do you know what Akamai is? So it's when you run a website like Facebook where you access a page with some videos, the streaming doesn't require, it's like a CPU and like requires storage and RAM like in a big server.

• 53:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:29Ed Zitron?

  That is intensive because they have shit tons of users, but because like shit tons of users, it's just because you have a lot of them. It's not because the process of serving you Facebook or Instagram is super expensive to do. It's expensive because they have so many people. The problem is with AI is that having one user who's particularly demanding is extremely expensive.

• 53:50Speaker 05

  Actually bearing costs on the company.

• 53:53Ed Zitron?

  Exactly. Because GPUs are extreme, they are cost intensive, they require a lot of energy, but they also put out a shit ton of heat.

• 53:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:00Ed Zitron?

  Which requires a bunch of cooling.

• 54:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:01Ed Zitron?

  And the bigger the data center, the more intensive the cooling. And I had someone email me the other day saying really big data centers can cause like, like gigawatt ones can cause like weather effects with the amount of heat that they're spending.

• 54:12Speaker 03

  And they're affecting the local like communities.

• 54:14Speaker 05

  And, and just to clarify what you were saying earlier, but when you're, when you're saying the logical endpoint of your pessimism about AI or whatever, however you want to frame it. The logical endpoint is that all of this goes away. You're saying it collapses from a financial standpoint.

• 54:32Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 54:32Speaker 05

  But what that, but then the logical endpoint of that is that. The companies, Anthropic, OpenAI, whatever, ChatGPT, go, well, we don't have the money anymore to run these data centers.

• 54:43Ed Zitron?

  Correct.

• 54:44Speaker 05

  And the data centers are what are required to, when somebody types in, yoke my grandma.

• 54:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:50Speaker 05

  We need the data center to be having, to have the electricity on and have the air conditioning running.

• 54:55Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 54:56Speaker 05

  And that when somebody's not paying those bills, then I can't get my grandma yoked.

• 55:00Ed Zitron?

  Correct. And there's no economic reason to do it because to Devindra's point, the only reason they're doing this right now is because their stock value is growing. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, they've seen their stock grow, not because of AI revenues, they don't talk about those, but because AI is so big, so huge and so yoked.

• 55:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:17Ed Zitron?

  Everyone's talking AI. But the moment, and the thing is, I've heard people say, oh, well, it's a ChatGPT bubble, it's not an AI bubble. Here's the thing.

• 55:25Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 55:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's a really.

• 55:26Speaker 05

  Why? How does somebody thread that needle?

• 55:28Ed Zitron?

  Because they're fucking stupid. Um, no, the argument is that, well, OpenAI is the worst business of all time. It burns money forever. They have no path profitability. But all the other ones will be okay. There will be other winners. The problem is, is that this is a vibes based thing.

• 55:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:43Ed Zitron?

  Now, what happens to the vibe when the main business that everyone knows, like 800, 900 million weekly active users, compared to everyone else where they have like 20? Now, you may think, you've heard Microsoft say they've got hundreds of millions of Copilot users, you've heard Google say hundreds of millions of Google Gemini, that's because they put them in their main products. But even then, their shareholders are just going to go, right, why are you spending all this fucking money on this? Why are you propping up these insanely expensive things? And if you wonder why I'm so confident about this, none of them talk about the revenues or the costs.

• 56:17Speaker 04

  Right. The thing also, though, is if AI was to disappear, what do customers, what do consumers lose out? Like, what?

• 56:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, nobody will care.

• 56:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. And the, and the things that people may use in their everyday life, like, like AI transcription or voice to text, we're at the point now where those models actually could just live on your personal computer. You don't need an outside server at all. You don't need a, a company to pay a monthly fee to. You could just download a model, it's a few gigs, and you have your own voice to text and your own transcription. It's that other more intensive stuff that are just like little toys that no one really needs that will just go away.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  To me, that, that, that is the logical outcome, by the way. It's like, the big AI will die off to a certain degree. That will lead to widespread economic devastation.

• 57:00Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  Like, that will be

• 57:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  Hard.

• 57:02Ed Zitron?

  It's gonna be worse than the great financial crisis, in my opinion.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  Could be worse than the financial crisis, could be a depression-level hit on the world economy. So that worries me, but in for when it comes because all these companies.

• 57:14Ed Zitron?

  No, I know, that was a joke.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. But the idea of local the idea of like local AI and stuff, that's just like, okay, my watch is a little better. My, I can transcribe to my computer that lives locally, that does happen.

• 57:28Ed Zitron?

  I have one piece of bad news, though. The only reason those models are being worked on right now is because of the big ones. And once those big ones go away, they're not gonna have any fucking reason to do them. They don't care about transcription. They don't care about the useful stuff.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  They still need, they still need a reason to sell you a new laptop every year.

• 57:44Ed Zitron?

  And I don't think this is gonna be enough of one. And I, yeah, my thing is like, I'm not sure how we're going to intellectually reckon reconcile with this because this is the world pant shitting competition.

• 57:56Speaker 03

  Well, it's also, everything is so fucking stupid right now. Like, every, at every level, if you, we've been in the CS bubble, but looking at the wider world right now.

• 58:03Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  So dumb.

• 58:04Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  It's so dumb. Like, we, Trump invading Venezuela was how we started this year. I was born in Guyana, South America, the country right next to Venezuela. And it's probably right next on like, because they just found oil. So Exxon is like, just out there, still taking all that stuff right now.

• 58:20Ed Zitron?

  Put it back, we didn't find anything.

• 58:21Speaker 03

  Things, things are so stupid right now. So that's why I do kind of feel like, yes, we're gonna see this.

• 58:27Ed Zitron?

  But this is, and I know this sounds hard to

• 58:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:30Ed Zitron?

  reconcile with. I think this is gonna be stupider, just because, hear me out. Every major CEO who's added AI has talked about AI. That's all they talk about is AI. Every major tech company, AI, AI, AI. And a bunch of people we work for, not me personally, but tons of people we work for, people have said that AI is the future, world leaders, AI is the future. Everyone said AI is the future. And I think all of them are wrong. What are we meant to do with that information? Because this is Trump politics. Okay, there's voting, there's like a process. This is like

• 59:01Speaker 03

  For now.

• 59:02Ed Zitron?

  The, sure, but the foundations of

• 59:06Ed Zitron?

  Economic movement, but also knowledge in the world and consensus reality and paradigms themselves have been based on the idea that the people running the money, people running businesses are somewhat intelligent, that would not be fucking wrong. And what's become obvious is almost nobody knows anything ever. And I don't mean this in the cutesy like, oh, bosses don't know stuff. I mean, these people have just been fucking wrong, like wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Just like AI will do this.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  But it's not, it's not just AI. I will tell you, like, when I started covering technology and doing journalism, I was mainly like writing about startups at the time. It's like, oh, cool. These guys, these guys, their ideas are so interesting. They've gotten billions of, usually millions of dollars of investment. I was talking to, you know, Kevin Systrom, the Instagram guys, when it was just four dudes. I was like, oh, man, they must be so smart and so interesting. No, usually, usually not. Usually it's just like, you have, you're a nerd who knows how to code, who came up with like one interesting idea, and the VCs were just throwing money at you. And, and even when it comes to like business, big business in general, people rise to the top, not often through their skill. It's through, they've been there long enough, or they're a good enough company, Shill.

• 1:00:16Ed Zitron?

  Well, I get that. My point is, imagine if the great financial crisis, Microsoft was in housing, Google was in housing, Amazon was in housing, Disney entered housing, everyone bought houses, and everyone was selling houses, and everyone was offering mortgages, everyone did mortgages. Mortgages were the future of every single business in the entire world. Everyone on LinkedIn was saying, I'm a housing expert now. That is it. Except when they said housing, they meant cat litter boxes. Because I'm joking, but it's like, what if everyone went, was like, wrong, wrong, wrong, in a way that's not political. It's just obvious that so many people we thought were smart were just like, able to do mad libs.

• 1:00:57Speaker 05

  I have a, I have a question about the leaders who have backed AI.

• 1:01:01Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:01:02Speaker 05

  Okay. As I see it, there's two categories that I understand, and I'm going to ask about what is the middle category, about the middle category. Category that I understand is. Tech CEO who has, whose company has some vested financial interest in AI being successful.

• 1:01:17Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:01:18Speaker 05

  Totally get it. Absolutely. Like, why would Google add Gemini to all of their products? Great, because they like, they are, they see a potential financial benefit. Fine.

• 1:01:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, they were also, Google's holding off. Google was trying to be cool and chill about it. And then OpenAI kind of blew the doors open and they had to brush everything out.

• 1:01:36Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:01:36Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36Speaker 05

  Okay, that category I understand. Then CEOs of companies who have been sold the lie of AI can make your whole company work better.

• 1:01:48Speaker 05

  That I also completely understand. Like, you know, Salesforce saying, I guess, this is sort of an example of the middle category. Somebody at Salesforce being like, we're going to add AI and AI is flashy and sexy and that's a new and it's, it's the best thing. And then turning to Home Depot and being like, now you should pay us extra because our new Salesforce category or our new Salesforce product has AI and that's going to make your life better. And Home Depot goes, great, awesome. We'll pay more for that. That I understand. I like, I understand the, the.

• 1:02:18Ed Zitron?

  But even those don't truly make sense, but keep going.

• 1:02:21Speaker 05

  Right, right, right, right. And I like disagree with the efficacy, but I understand the, the messaging. There, what CEOs or what companies have added AI, trumpeted AI, you know, championed AI

• 1:02:37Speaker 05

  that are not in the category of their company is a direct financial benefit benefactor to the technology? Or, or like a direct owner of the techno, of a version of the technology?

• 1:02:48Ed Zitron?

  Disney, Disney.

• 1:02:49Speaker 05

  Right, right, right. Okay.

• 1:02:50Ed Zitron?

  Being one of the most journalist outlets and they will claim, oh, AI will generate stories. They don't. And I'll actually push back on the things with Salesforce because there's a really cool thing. Well, Salesforce, I will choose another company in my head. Salesforce is so special, but like a software company in this case. The really simple thing I'll say to that is even they don't make sense because it don't work. It don't do the, like, it don't, it don't do it. It don't do thingy. Like you say, like the whole thing Copilot is sold on, doesn't work. It doesn't work. It's never worked.

• 1:03:16Speaker 05

  I do when I.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  It works enough.

• 1:03:18Ed Zitron?

  No, it doesn't.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  It is good enough for people to be using it. My issues are you're a computer. You should be, you should be.

• 1:03:27Ed Zitron?

  My man, I gotta push back. It doesn't. There have been like eight different stories in the last year where Microsoft's 365 Copilot can't do things like prepare PowerPoint.

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. It's like specific failures. Yes. But on the general.

• 1:03:39Ed Zitron?

  Failures.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. On the general. What's it like the general?

• 1:03:43Ed Zitron?

  What's general?

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  What I'm saying is like you ask Copilot or you ask Gemini like a question and it will get you a response that is good enough. It will use like, hey, make me a chart of this data. Hey, that actually worked. A lot of that stuff does.

• 1:03:55Ed Zitron?

  I've used it many times.

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  But it's untrustworthy. Like, that's the thing.

• 1:03:58Ed Zitron?

  That means it doesn't work.

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  No, no, no. But there are variations of how badly it doesn't work.

• 1:04:03Ed Zitron?

  But the thing is, if there's a variation of how well something works, that just means it doesn't work most of the time.

• 1:04:07Speaker 05

  Sure, but you're.

• 1:04:08Speaker 03

  There's a reason hundreds of millions of people are still like using them.

• 1:04:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, because they're being, they're being pushed into by everybody.

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  But people like using the, like for them, the degree of like as good enough as it can be for them, it's good enough. That's why we're pushing back though, and we're saying like, you can't trust this data. You can't trust this stuff. They're not thinking about that, but they're just using it.

• 1:04:28Ed Zitron?

  So we'll continue this debate. It's not really a debate. We're all agreeing. Shortly after this break, this next ad is for specifically boomers. It's called Where's My Pills? There's someone who will be really angry at this one. They're in the drawer, mate.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

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• 1:05:19Ed Zitron?

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• 1:06:03Ed Zitron?

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• 1:06:51Speaker 08

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• 1:07:06Speaker 09

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• 1:07:17Speaker 08

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• 1:07:21Speaker 10

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• 1:07:28Speaker 08

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• 1:07:51Ed Zitron?

  And we return to our scene. I'm now joined by Edward Ongrese Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter. Hello, my friends. Chloe Radcliffe, of course, the actress and stand-up comedian.

• 1:08:01Speaker 05

  Who?

• 1:08:01Ed Zitron?

  It's you. And of course, Davinder Hardaway of Engage. Hello. And I think we're in an interesting point in the in the show where we're all getting to the end and we're realizing we have to go back to the real world. And there's this thing of this AI thing and this whole this whole situation where, and to get back to the debate we were just having, it's like, yeah, it kind of works. But I don't think that people realize that because it only kind of works, when they start charging what it actually costs, which is like probably two to five to 15 times what they're charging, no one's gonna wanna pay for the half-assed thing anymore. And no, many will not be able to pay for it at all. Like I was saying yesterday, like, a lot of these companies that are just thing bolted onto LLM,

• 1:08:44Ed Zitron?

  die just immediately, like, just they will turn to dust. Because imagine if the core fuel of a car

• 1:08:52Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 1:08:52Ed Zitron?

  like doubled, tripled, quadrupled in value in cost.

• 1:08:56Speaker 05

  Of course. I, okay, interesting proposition here. Uh, do you think, two questions. Do you think that AI companies will start charging subscription rates before the financial implosion that you predict?

• 1:09:15Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I think that, well, you've already kind of seen signs, no, they're very unfair with this. No one likes this one. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have added priority processing to their API customers. API just refers to, instead of you or me using like ChatGPT or Claude, you as a company would connect your software with an API to their service and then run on top of it. Now, when you run something on top of these models, you're effectively just prompting them.

• 1:09:38Speaker 05

  A API stands for a pretty big interface.

• 1:09:44Ed Zitron?

  I

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  There you go. Yeah.

• 1:09:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that's the new one.

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  That's why you got me here.

• 1:09:47Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, my brain couldn't think of the real one, so I can't make fun of anyone. But it's like, those companies cannot survive with a product with a cost race. I had a reader, listener, listener and reader, reach out and actually tell me that you need priority processing if you're above a certain thing. So just your costs double there automatically. And I think the, the other thing that people will say is, oh, the cost of models is coming down. It's a classic talking point. Jensen Huang and his Nvidia thing, his press conference said, oh, the cost of models is coming down. Yeah, but it's kind of like if the cost of fuel came down a bit, but your journey to work took 15 times longer. Because now, when you use a new model, it isn't just spitting out an output.

• 1:10:28Ed Zitron?

  It's using models that use more computational power to give you slightly better results. So it may be cheaper.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  But it takes longer?

• 1:10:35Ed Zitron?

  It, well, it's not that it takes longer. It uses more tokens, just for simplification's sake.

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:10:40Ed Zitron?

  The thing that hap- that they generate to give you an answer.

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:10:44Ed Zitron?

  It uses a reasoning model which uses more tokens to do the output. So while it might be cheaper on a token basis, you're using more of the fuckers, so it's not cheaper at all. It's actually more expensive.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, we can argue a lot about the AI industry like that.

• 1:10:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  Unending thing. I will say, we are seeing the direct impacts of the rise of AI, right?

• 1:11:04Ed Zitron?

  Go on.

• 1:11:04Speaker 03

  Talk about memory in the PC market.

• 1:11:06Ed Zitron?

  Fucking HBR.

• 1:11:07Speaker 03

  The, the memory.

• 1:11:08Ed Zitron?

  I'd love to talk about this.

• 1:11:09Speaker 03

  RAM prices have increased by three to four times across the board.

• 1:11:13Ed Zitron?

  Which is insane.

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  And that'll affect everything. That affects phones, computers, whatever.

• 1:11:17Ed Zitron?

  Cause like this, every, like, everything has.

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  You mean because car is computer now? Car is computer, okay. So any device needs some sort of memory. What is interesting is like, we are seeing the direct impact of that already. Dell's XPS 14, which should be a computer that costs under $1,500 because of what it is, and that's what the competition is. And that was about the pricing Dell gave me when I first wrote my post. They said 1,600. Next day, an update. That thing is going to start at $2,050.

• 1:11:44Ed Zitron?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:11:45Speaker 05

  Because of RAM.

• 1:11:46Speaker 03

  Because they're not going to say why, but I would logically think like that is going to be the highest cost for a lot of new systems. That is insane. That is a, it's a premium ultra portable. Sure. That thing should cost under 1,500 bucks or about $1,500. So we are going to see similar premiums like that.

• 1:12:02Speaker 05

  Are you saying if you need to get a new computer, do it now because it's only going to get worse?

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  Uh, do it immediately and maybe buy used or refurbished, which is my recommendation for everything.

• 1:12:11Speaker 05

  Interesting.

• 1:12:11Speaker 03

  But yeah, buying a new system this year is going to suck.

• 1:12:14Ed Zitron?

  So we're going to do an episode on this next week with Steve Berg from Games Nexus.

• 1:12:18Speaker 03

  Oh, nice.

• 1:12:18Ed Zitron?

  So RAM, in random access memory.

• 1:12:21Speaker 05

  A website is.

• 1:12:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. No, no, no. This is the thing. There is.

• 1:12:25Speaker 05

  No, I want, I want this. I don't know.

• 1:12:27Ed Zitron?

  The best lesson Sophie and Robert gave me is explain everything because even if you think you know something, you don't. So RAM is when you quickly need information to do a task on a computer. So you couldn't access the hard drive. No matter how fast the hard drive is, it's not fast enough to get something immediately. AI services are extremely demanding on something called high bandwidth RAM, which is just allows you to keep a bunch of memory, uh, stuff in the RAM. So you can constantly access it because that's how LLMs work. Someone's going to email me and say, I truncated that. Shut the fuck up. Um, but it's nevertheless, because of the demands of Nvidia building GPUs, of Broadcom building their own bullshit GPUs, AMD building their own bullshit GPUs, the price of RAM across the world has increased. Now, eagle- eagle eared listeners may think,

• 1:13:12Ed Zitron?

  I heard a story, Edward, about OpenAI taking 40% of the world's RAM. This story is bullshit and everyone pushing it is a fucking liar. If you look on SK Hynix and so OpenAI did a deal, quote unquote, with SK Hynix and Samsung, two companies out in Asia, where they were going to get hundreds of thousands of wafers of RAM, just the things that you carve up into RAM, which is insane on its own. But it was a letter of intent, which is a concept of a deal. It's like if you and I email and say, why don't we do this?

• 1:13:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:42Ed Zitron?

  It means fucking nothing.

• 1:13:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:43Ed Zitron?

  And everyone's trying to blame that. No, what it is, is just every GPU, anyone doing anything with GPUs is just.

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  Did you see

• 1:13:50Ed Zitron?

  Buying all the RAM.

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  The new Nvidia supercomputer, the Vera Rubin thing. I hate that they're using these like

• 1:13:56Ed Zitron?

  Like actual scientists.

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  To to apply to these things. I it seems so disrespectful, but 1.5 terabytes of RAM in this Vera Rubin supercomputer. And that's that's this. So it's like Wait, say that again. AMD 1.5 terabytes of high bandwidth memory.

• 1:14:12Ed Zitron?

  How 1.5 terabytes per how many GPUs?

• 1:14:15Speaker 03

  I I'm gonna have to look into the specifics here. There's a lot of GPUs, but I believe it's in the full, this is the full thing.

• 1:14:21Speaker 05

  And sorry, not to be a woman who doesn't work in tech about this.

• 1:14:25Ed Zitron?

  No, this is a good voice.

• 1:14:26Speaker 03

  Very annoying.

• 1:14:27Speaker 05

  So supercomputer named after a lady and we think it's disrespectful. Yes. Tell me the name again.

• 1:14:31Speaker 03

  Vera Rubin.

• 1:14:32Speaker 05

  Vera Rubin. Okay. The Vera Rubin computer is a big box and it's really powerful. And inside, there's a smaller, there's a little shoebox that you can keep all the little random things.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. And like little smaller computers are all tied together.

• 1:14:44Speaker 05

  Yes, tied together. Okay. RAM is like one box where you have all sorts of random things that you might just need.

• 1:14:51Ed Zitron?

  It's a it's like a chip.

• 1:14:52Speaker 05

  I know, I know, but I'm it just I'm picturing it in my head.

• 1:14:55Speaker 03

  If you if you imagine like city block, right? Different blocks are different components. The RAM is the streets in between them to to deliver information.

• 1:15:03Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  So more RAM, bigger streets, high bandwidth RAM, faster streets, faster traffic, right?

• 1:15:08Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:15:08Speaker 03

  So like, that's the basic thing.

• 1:15:10Speaker 05

  Great.

• 1:15:10Speaker 03

  The it's just a shit ton of data. That's what AI needs.

• 1:15:13Speaker 05

  Why?

• 1:15:14Ed Zitron?

  Oh, my God, it's 1.5 terabytes per fucking rack.

• 1:15:17Speaker 03

  No, per rack. And there's a lot of racks in there. There's a lot of racks in there. Yeah.

• 1:15:21Ed Zitron?

  A fucking data center will be full of like hundreds of things.

• 1:15:25Speaker 05

  Racks on racks on racks.

• 1:15:26Ed Zitron?

  Literally.

• 1:15:27Speaker 05

  Okay, but hold on. Why is RAM a limited?

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  There are only three companies in the world that make it. Ed, you can have.

• 1:15:34Ed Zitron?

  No, no, please, please, no, you go.

• 1:15:36Speaker 03

  But that's basically it. There are only three companies and nobody expected. They were fine. We were fine. And nobody expected that. Why do you need so much goddamn RAM? Nobody was prepared to do this.

• 1:15:46Speaker 05

  Yeah. And is RAM a physical thing that somebody makes?

• 1:15:49Ed Zitron?

  Yes, it's a so the prepara it's I'm gonna fuck this up slightly. So, Davintra, please correct me if I get something wrong.

• 1:15:54Speaker 03

  I am not an architecture guy.

• 1:15:55Ed Zitron?

  So there is a company called TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. I think I get that. Also, I respect companies that are just like, what's your name? Business company. Like, fuck, yeah. Just tell me what you do. They have these things called fabs, and they basically build chips, and there's a whole fucking supply chain of how chips are made. You get wafers of RAM, you cut them up, sounds delicious, isn't it?

• 1:16:15Speaker 05

  Wait, wait, wait.

• 1:16:16Ed Zitron?

  You get, no, you get like a big sheet of, you get a big sheet of memory. Yeah, and then you cut them up. Making chips is fucking cool.

• 1:16:22Speaker 05

  But you're, but you're saying the wafer is a certain amount of chips. You print the sheet, you make, you make a sheet of a thousand chips, and then a wafer is a hundred chips.

• 1:16:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, a wafer is just the thing that you carp into chips. But really simple, just, just, you don't need to know that bit. Just really simple. There is a limited amount of machinery to build RAM. There are, what, there's SK Hynix, Samsung, and who else who makes them?

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  Micron.

• 1:16:47Ed Zitron?

  Marvel. Marvel. There's like three companies who make RAM.

• 1:16:50Speaker 05

  And we can't make more machines to make RAM.

• 1:16:52Ed Zitron?

  It is just limited space. They're expend.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  It's gonna take a long time to spin that up.

• 1:16:56Ed Zitron?

  One, one important detail. So making chips in general requires something called a clean room. So think about any scientific process that cannot be interfered with by any contaminants.

• 1:17:06Speaker 05

  Growing mushrooms in your garage.

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  Right. Pretty close.

• 1:17:10Ed Zitron?

  Take it 300 steps higher, where it's just like, if a single speck of dust gets in there, you fuck up millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. Like, it's really, you have massive things, and to run these machines requires very specific talent that we don't have enough of. But also, there's only a certain amount of space in the world. So we're just, we're at the limits. And while they're building more fabs, where you build these things, there's only so much. And right now, we have these fucking assholes who are like, I need 1.5 terabytes. To give you an idea, like, I think this iPhone Air has eight gigabytes of RAM. A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, am I correct?

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Ed Zitron?

  Correct. Great stuff. So it's just like, you have one big asshole taking all the chips. Now, back to my, I worry about the collapse thing. We're gonna have, we have all of this allocation being done for one company. What happens when those aren't selling anymore? We're gonna just have fucking chaos. But until then, the price of RAM is gonna keep going up. And it's going to be harder to get, which will make it more expensive, which will make every single consumer device more expensive without exception.

• 1:18:14Speaker 05

  And again, just to ask the stupid question.

• 1:18:16Ed Zitron?

  No stupid.

• 1:18:16Speaker 05

  When we say the price of RAM is going up, I could equivalently say the price per RAM chip is.

• 1:18:23Ed Zitron?

  Yes, exactly. Sure.

• 1:18:25Speaker 05

  Great.

• 1:18:25Ed Zitron?

  And it's kind, it's like, it's a very simple supply chain thing. It's like if the price of wheels went up, cars would become more expensive. I realize that's a silly, but like it's, it's a very simple thing and it's affecting everything. And I'm.

• 1:18:36Speaker 03

  That's what pisses me off.

• 1:18:38Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:38Speaker 03

  Because like we can debate about like how useful AI is, but the direct impact to consumers right now, people building PCs, anybody buying a new computer, you're going to be screwed in 2026. And I'm working on a piece right now about that because.

• 1:18:50Ed Zitron?

  Tell me, tell us more. Yeah.

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  It's the same thing. It's AMD also announced their new high end, uh, supercomputer.

• 1:18:55Ed Zitron?

  MI450 instinct.

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  Also gobs of RAM. So yesterday I sat down and I talked with one of the AMD executives about like, what is the state of the computing industry? Like, how do things look? And they admit like, you know, it's going to be rough. People are probably, if you're a PC owner and you're going to do an upgrade, you're probably not going to build a whole new PC this year. Maybe you'll just do a processor upgrade or GPU upgrade or something. Even those are going to get expensive, but I think they're expecting a slowdown in this industry too. So it's going to be, it's going to be tough.

• 1:19:24Speaker 05

  And the solution can't even just buy, be by used and refurbished because those prices.

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  Those prices.

• 1:19:29Ed Zitron?

  And we're seeing the after effects of that actually outside of this. So weird example, but we're running at, we also don't have enough power.

• 1:19:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:36Ed Zitron?

  So gas turbines, which they're using to power some of these data centers, which you should not do, but they're doing anyway, are actually sold out for seven years. So they're buying old used gas turbines. I wouldn't be surprised if the used RAM market gets fucked too.

• 1:19:49Speaker 03

  It's already getting bad.

• 1:19:50Ed Zitron?

  Hell yeah. I mean, who's the bigger worry? Someone stopped making consumer RAM, right? It was Corsair? Was it Corsair?

• 1:19:56Speaker 03

  Micron.

• 1:19:56Ed Zitron?

  Micron, my bad. Sorry.

• 1:19:58Speaker 03

  So, and I, I feel bad and Micron owned Crucial and I feel bad because Crucial was like the first RAM stick I bought when I was building a computer and like I have memories attached to that. My bigger worry though is they're lighting up nuclear power plants for this bullshit. And that's where it's like.

• 1:20:12Ed Zitron?

  I'm not worried about that. I'm worried more about the gas turbines.

• 1:20:15Speaker 03

  The gas is bad. The gas is bad.

• 1:20:16Ed Zitron?

  Because nuclear power, it will get filled with.

• 1:20:18Speaker 03

  That's a, that's going to be a big fight, but I, we should, we should have invested more in nuclear power. It may be too late, but I don't know.

• 1:20:25Speaker 05

  Hold on.

• 1:20:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:26Speaker 05

  You're saying bad to light up nuclear power plants because these are old things that might not be in good enough shape?

• 1:20:32Speaker 03

  Well, it's just more like.

• 1:20:33Speaker 05

  You're not saying you're not anti-nuclear power.

• 1:20:35Speaker 03

  I'm not anti-nuclear power. We need that power for other stuff. And this power should be going to like residential uses. And it's literally going to be sucked up by bullshit.

• 1:20:44Ed Zitron?

  But it's also.

• 1:20:45Speaker 05

  And you're and why are the gas turbines bad?

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  Gases.

• 1:20:47Ed Zitron?

  Because gas because gas turbines are basically car mode. No, they're not the same, but like they have the same after effect of belching out gas. And Elon Musk's data centers are already ruining black communities because of this very specific thing. They're poisoning water. It's really fucking horrible, but also this RAM thing I think is going to be everywhere. And the PC industry was already in decline, I believe they were.

• 1:21:09Speaker 03

  No, it was last year. It was.

• 1:21:12Ed Zitron?

  I thought they were having it. My bad. No, but.

• 1:21:14Speaker 03

  Only Dell was down.

• 1:21:15Ed Zitron?

  But here's the thing.

• 1:21:16Speaker 03

  For reasons we discussed.

• 1:21:17Ed Zitron?

  Surely won't everyone be down because more expensive and Apple smartphone sales like every bit of this is going to be bad. And they are already running out of ways to sell you a phone. My biggest example being like this. Why else would they ship Apple intelligence? Which is the most mass radicalization event I've seen in tech. Just I've never met so many people like fuck AI than people who use Apple intelligence.

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:42Ed Zitron?

  Who are just like, fuck this shit. I fucking hate this. Why? I I don't know why my phone is like sparkly rainbows and just wrong all the time. And giving me a summary saying like eight Ubers are coming your way.

• 1:21:53Speaker 03

  The notifications are bad. Apple wouldn't be doing that if other people weren't chasing all this bullshit, but they're being forced into it. And, you know.

• 1:22:00Speaker 05

  But are they being forced?

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  They they are kind of being forced into it because.

• 1:22:03Speaker 05

  Like, why could they not be like?

• 1:22:05Speaker 03

  Because everyone talks.

• 1:22:06Ed Zitron?

  Shareholders.

• 1:22:06Speaker 03

  Stock price. Yeah. Shareholder stock price. Everyone's like, oh, man, Apple's slow to AI. I guess Apple doesn't have the the innovation, you know, charm anymore.

• 1:22:14Ed Zitron?

  Someone didn't shit their pants yet.

• 1:22:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Apple rushed that Apple intelligence. They got out there. They announced a super smart Siri thing, which was not, they couldn't ship it. So they took a hit for that. They took a hit for the intelligence issues. Again, they were forced into that in a way. And hey, I blame them for for the issues. But if Apple left its own devices as a company that is really slow about pushing and trying to change new things, I think they would at least try to make it less error prone.

• 1:22:39Ed Zitron?

  But the and the point I was making was that. Apple shoving Apple Intelligence in there was a sign that Apple doesn't really have anything else. And I will say this, people get so mad when I like my devices, people, I get little emails of people being like, fucking chill, when I'm just like, yeah, I like my phone. And they're like, fucking piece of shit. But it's like, Apple phone, good, use it. I don't know. I would love an Apple phone.

• 1:23:00Speaker 03

  There are great aspects of Apple Intelligence right now.

• 1:23:02Ed Zitron?

  Other than the liquid, liquid ass, the new operating system that is so bad, it makes me wanna scream. But it's like, it's just because we're, and it's not because of Apple being a bad company necessarily, it's just, there's only so much you can do with a certain form factor. Your phone can only do so much.

• 1:23:16Speaker 03

  But there are things like, hey, voice memos instantly transcribed now. That is sick, sick for notes.

• 1:23:22Ed Zitron?

  Text met to voice notes getting transcribed, that's fucking great. That's on Google as well.

• 1:23:25Speaker 03

  Record your calls now and those get transcribed. That's happening because of an on-device AI model. So that's great.

• 1:23:30Ed Zitron?

  And that shit's dope, but that shit don't make growth happen. Like you're not, but also everyone does that now. And that's the problem. It's like, how do you sell a new phone? So they're in this situation where, how do we sell a new phone at a time when they're gonna have to increase the prices on everything because RAM is more expensive. Because to make a new phone faster, you need RAM.

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  And also to fit models onto your phone, you need more RAM. You need more RAM because those models sit in memory and have to sit there and work all the time. They can't just like come off the storage disk.

• 1:23:59Ed Zitron?

  Do you remember in like 2020, 2021, the supply chain crisis? That was caused by like, basic goods being delayed.

• 1:24:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:06Ed Zitron?

  This is kind of like that for computer. And we're going to see how many things have computer in it, televisions, phones, cars. I mean, even the thing we're recording on right here, that that has RAM in it. That everything has RAM in it that has any electronics these days.

• 1:24:22Speaker 03

  That's my big worry of 2026 is basically we're screwed when it comes to consumer tech.

• 1:24:27Ed Zitron?

  But the thing is, it will.

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  Screwed for prices. Screwed for prices, screwed for all sorts of things.

• 1:24:31Ed Zitron?

  But when, yeah, oh, sorry, keep going.

• 1:24:33Speaker 03

  Well, companies may die out, like things, like things will just be bad. But yes, prices is gonna be where it starts.

• 1:24:39Ed Zitron?

  And the other thing is, is that we're at a point when they're, as you've seen, you're at the consumer electronics show. You've had a very egregious example of how these companies do not have a fucking clue what to sell you. They're still, they're half-heartedly coming up with ideas, like the death of a relationship. It's like, yeah, we're gonna go, put a recall guess on, we fucking hate each other. We're gonna go, we're just gonna be so happy. Everyone's trying to come up with a little idea to do something with. And at a time when they're struggling for ideas to sell more things to grow. The core thing they used to build the thingy is becoming more expensive in a way that you can't circumvent. There is no way to fix this. Good example would be, so Nvidia, I may have mentioned this in a previous episode, I can't remember if you were here.

• 1:25:22Ed Zitron?

  So Nvidia, crazy thing, eighty-eight percent of their revenue comes from selling these things for data centers. A much smaller percentage comes from selling GPUs for gaming devices. So, an Xbox, for example. The problem is with that is they've already raised the price on the Xbox. They're probably going to have to do it again. And those GPUs now, Nvidia also has deals with other companies where they can take an Nvidia GPU for gamers. And they can sell it, they can say it's an Nvidia GPU, but it's got our label on it and we do special things with it. Problem, Nvidia is no longer including RAM with it. So every single non-Nvidia GPU company has to now buy RAM separately. So their supply chain just got fucked up. Imagine if

• 1:26:04Ed Zitron?

  you're a car company and you buy a certain block of car and it has certain bits, but you customize it. And they're like, "Yeah, man, sorry, we just don't do steering wheels here anymore. They got real expensive. You're gonna have to buy them from the steering wheel guy." Who is now charging more?

• 1:26:16Speaker 03

  That's already happened, to some degree, to stuff like LiDAR and things like there was technology that was in Tesla's, like this is core to autopilot and self-driving. And then LiDAR got expensive.

• 1:26:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but here's the thing though, this is a really simple thing though. This is just the, like, part of the motor. This is the core component of the entire computing supply chain everywhere that is gonna go up. We're gonna see, to your point, Avindra, shit just get more expensive and see who can withstand that pain.

• 1:26:48Speaker 05

  I mean, what do you, what are you think the chances are that inflation actually causes some kind of spark conflagration before the financial collapse of the AIs?

• 1:27:05Speaker 03

  This will likely lead to the

• 1:27:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, this is a form of inflation, honestly, on the compute industry.

• 1:27:10Speaker 05

  That's what I'm saying. I'm saying, no, no, sorry, that's exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying like, you've talked about the financial collapse of the AIs system of borrowing money.

• 1:27:19Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:22Speaker 05

  That could go bad.

• 1:27:24Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 1:27:26Speaker 05

  If, if.

• 1:27:28Ed Zitron?

  No, keep going.

• 1:27:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:29Speaker 05

  Uh huh. Okay.

• 1:27:30Ed Zitron?

  No, no, don't be. No, this is good.

• 1:27:33Speaker 05

  This is, this is like playing a clarinet solo in front of everybody. Um, okay. Uh, that could, that financial collapse could trigger if Nvidia stops. Fuck, we were just talking about this last night.

• 1:27:47Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. If Nvidia stops, most of Nvidia's revenue comes from people borrowing money.

• 1:27:51Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:27:52Ed Zitron?

  With borrowed money.

• 1:27:53Speaker 05

  Yes. And if people, if, I mean, if, if the banks ever come calling for that borrowed money.

• 1:27:57Ed Zitron?

  They're, they're in doo doo, doo doo land.

• 1:27:59Speaker 05

  Yes. Or if Nvidia stop, if their, what is it? If their numbers go down, but what numbers?

• 1:28:06Ed Zitron?

  If their revenue stopped growing.

• 1:28:07Speaker 05

  If their revenue stopped growing. Okay. That's the like financial system collapse, potential collapse. What do you think the chances are that this inflation just hits like general populace? So severely before the actual, before the Nvidia financial.

• 1:28:24Speaker 03

  I mean, it's already happening.

• 1:28:25Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  With this computer.

• 1:28:26Speaker 05

  I understand, but like, but like so severely, you know, I mean, people are just, people are just.

• 1:28:30Ed Zitron?

  I think I get.

• 1:28:31Speaker 05

  Living through it right now.

• 1:28:32Ed Zitron?

  I think I get what you're saying. It will cause two, two gut punches. It will be likely before the AI bubble bursts. We will have a thing where anyone selling consumer electronics or even enterprise hardware. So just consumer electronics for the enterprise. Their costs go up, so they will probably sell less because their customers will be unable to afford as much, which will cause a bunch of tech companies to not make as much money, which will lower the values of their stocks. This will then lead them to go, AI, AI. And then their shareholders will go, great, you've been saying that AI bullshit for three years. You got any money? And they'll go, what if I told you I had less money because it lost me? And at that point, the world pan shitting competition will end. Like it's.

• 1:29:16Speaker 05

  I guess I, I listened to all of this and I actually get. My gut, which means almost nothing because I understand almost nothing of it. But my gut says that the, thank you, that the the inflationary effects are going to actually be more immediate than the AI bubble.

• 1:29:37Ed Zitron?

  I agree fully.

• 1:29:38Speaker 05

  And, and so, and I guess, I don't mean like, duh, yeah, they're happening now. But I mean, like, some degree of severity that, that people decide is not tolerable.

• 1:29:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:50Speaker 05

  Will happen before the AI bubble.

• 1:29:52Ed Zitron?

  Sorry, we badly brought you into that.

• 1:29:54Speaker 11

  No, no, no, you're good. I mean, I, I think, I, I mean, this raises me to something I've just been wondering where it feels like we just keep coming up into this problem where we are having structural limitations imposed or, you know, rushed up against because, you know, the sector in one way or another is forcing allocation of resources, allocation of capital.

• 1:30:17Ed Zitron?

  Demands of growth.

• 1:30:18Speaker 11

  Demands of growth, allocation of energy to satisfy it. So, you know, at what point does it end where, you know, we, we have a shortage of power, now we have a shortage of RAM that seems to be in the short and medium term fundamentally unfixable.

• 1:30:34Ed Zitron?

  It is, and it's the demands of eternal growth. It, it really, it's just, because here's the thing. We talk about a lot this week about we just want a computer that works. Yeah, that isn't going to grow the company guaranteed 20% year over year, every single quarter. And it sucks because you should just be able to have a company that grows 3% every quarter. The stock market should like that, but they don't. And as a result, when things consume, they must consume eternally, to your point.

• 1:30:59Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:59Speaker 03

  I mean, the best example of this recently is the Instant Pot, right?

• 1:31:04Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:04Speaker 03

  Love an Instant Pot. Everybody loves an Instant Pot. It's too good. It's so good, nobody needed to buy new Instant Pots. Instant Pot went out of business.

• 1:31:12Ed Zitron?

  Well, because they got bought by private equity.

• 1:31:14Speaker 03

  That too, but also, they could, they couldn't hit that mass growth because Instant Pot too good. It just works.

• 1:31:21Ed Zitron?

  A pressure cooker is a pressure cooker.

• 1:31:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they were one of the first digital ones, but it's still, it works and it works well. So, sorry, you couldn't grow fast enough. You're dead.

• 1:31:30Ed Zitron?

  And, yeah, and it sucks because. I don't know. They I have this somewhat. I don't know. Maybe this is not nihilistic.

• 1:31:36Speaker 05

  Would they have died if private equity hadn't bought them?

• 1:31:38Ed Zitron?

  No.

• 1:31:39Speaker 03

  Probably not.

• 1:31:40Ed Zitron?

  They were private.

• 1:31:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:41Ed Zitron?

  They were. They were private.

• 1:31:42Speaker 05

  They could just keep chugging along.

• 1:31:43Ed Zitron?

  They could keep. If you're a private company, don't have share. Well, I guess you have investors, but you don't have shareholders saying you have to grow. You don't have fucking Jim Cramer up your asshole.

• 1:31:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:51Ed Zitron?

  Um, and it's it's unfortunate, but I think that there is a level of this. Honestly, I'm glad you brought this up. I think the thing that happens before the AI bubble is just the the ultimate slowdown. Because

• 1:32:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:04Ed Zitron?

  What was it like? The fact that like, it's kind of insane. The Dell did such a big song and dance last year and then we're like, actually JK, I'm kidding. That was a bit.

• 1:32:17Speaker 03

  They hit him where it hurts.

• 1:32:18Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:19Speaker 03

  They directly saw falling sales because and they could draw the line to the rebranding because of that. They're like, oh shit, what do we do? We got to refocus on consumers.

• 1:32:27Ed Zitron?

  Which is

• 1:32:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:28Ed Zitron?

  So bizarre, though.

• 1:32:30Speaker 03

  If only people loudly told them that this was a mistake from the beginning.

• 1:32:33Ed Zitron?

  If only there were articles at engadget.com

• 1:32:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:36Ed Zitron?

  That they could have read in detail last year. But it's like, that's, that's really like, this is very bad. This RAM crisis.

• 1:32:45Speaker 03

  This is bad.

• 1:32:46Ed Zitron?

  It's so, I'm really glad you brought this up because it's so scary.

• 1:32:50Speaker 11

  What now then happens with, because I think something that we've talked about also is, I think, like, you know, kind of like what you were saying off the top. The financial element of the AI bubble is one that we can see it for what it is, but that there are multitude of ways in which they've been able to juggle. Find some new frontier of growth.

• 1:33:12Speaker 05

  Justify.

• 1:33:12Speaker 11

  Yeah, justify.

• 1:33:13Ed Zitron?

  And more dance.

• 1:33:14Speaker 11

  The structural issues that we keep coming across feel non-negotiable. So what effect? Do you guys see them as being risk of some sort of breaking point?

• 1:33:26Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 1:33:27Speaker 11

  Uh, in terms of the AI infrastructure overbuild, in terms of adoption amongst consumers. I mean, like, like, what, like, let's say for, let's say the, that nothing.

• 1:33:39Speaker 11

  Happens in terms of degradation of the financial conditions. Is the structural limitations that we're seeing now with the RAM sufficient to impose like a crisis?

• 1:33:49Speaker 05

  This is basically what I'm, you're saying it so much more eloquently than what I'm asking, but that's basically exactly what I'm asking.

• 1:33:55Ed Zitron?

  Chloe, you're too rude about yourself. You were completely on the money. You were also, Ed. Here's the thing, and I think, Devindra, you have some thoughts in this as well. It's you, you can get more debt. Money can be found elsewhere. Singaporean, what is the country's fund? I should remember the name for that. They invest it, they're going to invest in Anthropic. More money can be found. There's a limit, but we're not at it yet. There are limits to power. And here's the thing, 1.5 fucking terabytes per, I'm going to guess VR 200, 88 GP, whatever, the tower. That's what I was going to guess. Of course, you're constantly like, the GB 300 is $4.5 million, Ed. How the hell do the economics work? What do you mean, it's an REIT, Ed?

• 1:34:40Ed Zitron?

  I don't get this. People are saying that the cost of inference is going down. Ed, it's going up. Ed, let's talk about high bandwidth RAM. You're constantly in my text with this. Yeah, I won't get out of it. You just won't stop talking about models. No, but it's just real simple. Nvidia is saying, we're going to build the biggest fucking hugest tower ever. And by the way, it's full of more RAM than ever. They haven't announced the price of their new big enterprise GPUs. I think they're going to be catastrophically more expensive because they have more RAM than ever. It's like everything, including the thing that needs debt, the borrowed money to keep going, is going to get more expensive. Consumer devices are going to get more expensive.

• 1:35:24Ed Zitron?

  To your point, Ed, it's like, yeah, they've been able to get away with it because you can find more venture capital money. You can find more debt. You can find more assholes to loan you money. You can't find more RAM. You can't find more, power is not something, you don't just like plug into the fucking wall. There are literal limits.

• 1:35:42Ed Zitron?

  And it's like, we're now, we're now seeing the after that. I can't get over the fact they raised the laptop price five hundred bucks.

• 1:35:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:49Ed Zitron?

  That's fucking insane.

• 1:35:50Speaker 03

  Overnight is the

• 1:35:52Ed Zitron?

  That makes it unaffordable for most people. That's, that is a huge, and this is, this stops people upgrading and upgrade cycles are what make these companies live and die. At a time when there's less, you can get a laptop from you, even I could get like an M3 MacBook Air and be pretty fucking happy. I'm using a three-year-old MacBook Pro and it fucking bangs. That shit, that shit's, that shit's flying.

• 1:36:19Speaker 03

  It's a computer that works. Yeah.

• 1:36:21Ed Zitron?

  But the thing is, why would I upgrade? And that's actually, like, that sounds like a cutesy thing. That's actually a huge question because I'm like a, a tech pig. Like I, I'm a hog. I love my laptops and my dude, my dude ads and my gizmos and shit. And I'm like, I don't fucking need a new laptop. Why would I need that? It's going worse and worse.

• 1:36:39Speaker 03

  That is a good problem. Like that is usually

• 1:36:42Ed Zitron?

  It's good for consumers.

• 1:36:43Speaker 03

  It's good for consumers. It's a good, it's, you made a good product that lasts. Unfortunately, that is bad for your overall revenues, but that's good that you, you were capable of doing that. I wish more companies were capable of doing that. Honestly, I'm also thinking about like where we are. The climate crisis isn't, isn't slowing down, right? Like we're, all these companies that for so long, we're talking about, oh, we have all these climate goals. We're going to reduce energy. We're going to be more conservative. Once AI shit started happening, they shut up because all their, all their stuff blew away. That didn't matter anymore because it was all AI all the time. And yeah, what, what, the world right now is going to be more expensive when it comes to gadgets. The world in the future is going to be hard to live in because of all the stupid decisions happening right now.

• 1:37:27Speaker 03

  And I'm so angry about all of it.

• 1:37:29Ed Zitron?

  And we are now going to transition to our final 30 minutes of this episode. This next one is brought to you by Gen Z dot beers. Now, you, it's just a store where you can just buy Zen to your door. I don't actually know what Zen is. Please, if you're, if you're one of my three zoomer listeners, please email me what Zen is and how you consume it. And can you tell me what's cool as well? I haven't known what that was for 10 years.

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• 1:38:31Ed Zitron?

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• 1:39:14Ed Zitron?

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• 1:40:03Speaker 08

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:40:18Speaker 09

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:40:29Speaker 08

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:40:34Speaker 10

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• 1:40:40Speaker 08

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 1:41:05Ed Zitron?

  And we're back in the room. We're back in the room. We've got the Vindra Harwar from Engadget. We've got Edward Onguoso Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter. Hello, hello. And we've got Chloe Radcliffe, actress, star of this thing on. I got targeted on Instagram.

• 1:41:19Speaker 05

  Star is real generous. Doing a lot of heavy lifting.

• 1:41:22Ed Zitron?

  What's great was the clip I got was like Cradley Booper being talked to, sorry.

• 1:41:27Speaker 05

  We'll own it.

• 1:41:27Ed Zitron?

  We'll own it. Thank you, Christ. And going like, yeah, I'm in stand up. And Cradley Booper going, what? Anyway, stand up comedian Chloe Radcliffe. And yeah, we're back talking about RAM and the slowdown. And I'm going to be honest, I know it seems bad now, and it will be bad. The tech industry needs this. The tech industry needs to be punished for the growth lust, because there is no, there's no sustainable future doing this. And this was also inevitable. And I think it's scary.

• 1:41:58Speaker 11

  So they're just, I mean, so then is the, you know, if we, if ideally what delays on the products that are the most RAM intensive to give infrastructure a chance to fill a backlog and to give the next generation.

• 1:42:14Speaker 03

  There, there are rumors that they may revive old hardware. There's a rumor that Nvidia's RTX 3060, which is a two, three year old GPU, may be back in market soon because it's using older, slower RAM too. So it's not using the newest fastest stuff.

• 1:42:27Speaker 05

  Is it a less powerful GPU?

• 1:42:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, way less powerful, but it's also like.

• 1:42:30Ed Zitron?

  It's like two generations back.

• 1:42:32Speaker 03

  It is a sign that you have to bring back the past because the present is unaffordable and you cannot make it. So I don't know. That's never happened before.

• 1:42:41Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I've never heard of that.

• 1:42:43Speaker 03

  We don't know if this is true, but this is the rumor.

• 1:42:45Ed Zitron?

  I thought that, I thought that was confirmed. I'm glad, I'm glad you said it was a rumor.

• 1:42:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:49Speaker 05

  So I, okay, as my responsibility as a layperson, I then think about how do normal people experience this? Because normal people have heard AI a million times. We've heard RAM is getting more expensive, but like, I think I'm smart and I didn't know any of this shit. I've heard these words, but I don't know the details.

• 1:43:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:43:13Speaker 05

  And so as a, as a representative of normal people, as stuff gets more and more and more expensive, so far, the American population has just borne the load of more expensive life. People have, people complain about it. It's very frustrating. It negatively impacts people's physical health and their ability to enjoy life, but like pretty much everybody has just sort of gone.

• 1:43:40Speaker 03

  The people who can afford it eat the cost, but then we don't hear about the people who.

• 1:43:44Ed Zitron?

  But there's, there's also a limit. Finish your question.

• 1:43:47Speaker 05

  Yes. And, but, but I think the people who can't afford it eat the cost too. I mean, like.

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  In other ways.

• 1:43:52Ed Zitron?

  But here's the thing, here's the thing. You're saying that for now, there is a limit. And what it is, is people are eating the cost in as much as they can. At some point, there's a limit because uh, there are people who wear like um, Apple's AirPod Max. I don't really think that that's like a regular person thing. It's like 500 bucks, but those have RAM in them. Modern headphones have RAM in them. Like there are headphones that have RAM in them.

• 1:44:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:18Ed Zitron?

  Even cheap laptops have RAM in them. Everything has RAM in it. So, yes, the cost of everything already went up and never came down. There is a point when people will just stop buying new electronics at all.

• 1:44:32Speaker 05

  And I have a thesis. Okay, so there's a point where people will stop buying new electronics at all. And then there is some further point at which people will draw a line at inflationary prices. Overall, whether it's in electronic, whether it's in whatever, I'm because I'm sure that RAM shortages are going to affect things that don't have RAM in it because the things that are used to ship those things have RAM in it. You know, it's like, I, right, I can imagine that this, that this impacts prices overall. And what we have seen in trend lines is that once prices go up, they stay up. They don't come back down for the most part. So.

• 1:45:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:06Ed Zitron?

  That might actually not happen with RAM. I think because if they, my, my real crazy scenario and no one wants to think about is AMD, Nvidia buying all this RAM. What the fuck they do with it when no one wants to buy their bullshit anymore? All of these companies that have built massive allocations for RAM won't have any use.

• 1:45:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, but other like consumer goods, I think once those prices go up.

• 1:45:28Ed Zitron?

  The thing is if no one's buying them, they will have to, because what we're talking about here isn't just like the top crust. It's everything.

• 1:45:34Speaker 05

  But so far, people are still buying them.

• 1:45:37Ed Zitron?

  They are for now.

• 1:45:38Speaker 05

  People are tightening belts, but I think a lot of people are just spending way more money than they would have been.

• 1:45:45Speaker 03

  They're on the story.

• 1:45:46Speaker 05

  And not saving.

• 1:45:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:48Speaker 05

  And like, because, because.

• 1:45:49Speaker 03

  You're living paycheck to paycheck with no safety net.

• 1:45:52Speaker 05

  Right, but that's, but I think a lot of people are paying the higher prices rather than not buying the items. There are.

• 1:46:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, to a certain degree, like sometimes you need it, sometimes you need it. I do think. We gotta look at this culturally too, because people don't just sit down and read business news and make logical business decisions as economists think we do. Think we respond to culture, we respond to like, that's how things are reacting. And I think it is interesting that the youngs, the Gen Zs and all, are looking back to pre-smartphone culture, pre-social media.

• 1:46:25Ed Zitron?

  And how prevalent is this?

• 1:46:27Speaker 03

  I mean, it's just like, they grew up watching reruns of The Office.

• 1:46:31Ed Zitron?

  Right. But I've seen articles about this.

• 1:46:33Speaker 03

  Their theorizing is that this is a world they probably will never actually see, just like be having a simple office job that's like that. And there's a lot of like, looking back towards retro stuff. I think culturally, we will, we may regress a little. It's like going back to the old video cards, but like you regress back to, okay, uh, we gave too much of our lives to social media, we will just take a step back.

• 1:46:55Speaker 05

  Okay. So this is, I was thinking about this on the plane to CES, as I was like, sort of collating some of my thoughts about tech and AI and stuff. And I actually think, I lay much more of the sin at the feet of the constant entertainment feed.

• 1:47:10Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:47:11Speaker 05

  Than I do at the feet of AI. I, I think that social media and the constant input of entertainment has numbed us and has, has, uh, reduced people's interest in making statements or engaging with societal ills.

• 1:47:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:32Speaker 05

  By, you know, orders of magnitude. And so I actually, to me, I'm sort of like, yeah, AI is whatever bullshit it is, but I actually think that the core of the social ills is the constant drip feed of entertainment.

• 1:47:46Speaker 03

  Yes, sure.

• 1:47:46Speaker 05

  That, that just turns your brain, that just dulls you.

• 1:47:49Speaker 03

  And a lot of people are trying to take a step back from this information overload. And I think we will probably see more of that.

• 1:47:55Speaker 05

  I think we will see more of that. But, so my thesis winds up being that I think the breaking point for people, for people living in this inflationary environment, I think that breaking point will. Be a lot higher than it would be without social media. I think the breaking point will take a lot longer than it would be without.

• 1:48:16Ed Zitron?

  I.

• 1:48:16Speaker 05

  It feels bad, but you can just pick something up and scroll through things that make your brain go bing, bing, bing.

• 1:48:22Ed Zitron?

  I, I agree. My thing is, is they forced AI into every social networking app too. AI is everywhere. It's in your ear. I realize I'm doing my same bit that I always do, but it's like, when that disappears, gets weird, it kind of becomes obvious it was bullshit. That will filter into the feed. You're kind of already seeing it. You're seeing, you're seeing random people being anti AI now. People I, people I never talked about it.

• 1:48:46Speaker 05

  But two separate things. Yeah.

• 1:48:48Ed Zitron?

  But it, but it creates the kind of chaos that makes people be like, wait, why do I need new fucking app? So why don't I just go on eBay and buy an HP Omen from four years ago? Why don't I just buy a iPhone 16?

• 1:48:59Speaker 03

  Or enjoy what you have. Enjoy what you have.

• 1:49:01Ed Zitron?

  Or like, what you have is fine. Like this iPad is over a year old and I will probably use it for another three years or more. I don't know what they could possibly do.

• 1:49:10Speaker 03

  The iPad Pro, by the way, a stunning example of a product, Apple spent years being like, why does this exist? A super powerful iPad. Who will spend the money of a laptop to, to just get an iPad? And they spent so long figuring out not what to do. Like they had no idea what to do with anything. That's endemic of like another issue, like them trying to push into bigger categories and more expensive products. But it's all kind of part of the same thing. Like you gotta push more. You need more. The information overload. We were not, we didn't evolve to process this much, much information. So I think that has had a cultural impact on our brains. Covid has like rewired people completely. You, you would think it would push us to be more, you know.

• 1:49:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, socially supportive.

• 1:49:54Speaker 03

  Most of our social support, like try to come together and it just broke our brains in other ways. So it's just like, I don't know.

• 1:50:00Speaker 05

  But I, but I think that the reason it broke people's brains was facilitated by the entertainment feed. And I, and I want to differentiate that from a social media platform where you can go and, you know, talk to your friends and family. Truly to me, it is.

• 1:50:16Ed Zitron?

  They all kind of ended up becoming entertainment.

• 1:50:18Speaker 05

  This is, but, but it's why I'm specifically different, why I am using the words. Entertainment feed because I think that.

• 1:50:26Ed Zitron?

  How would you define that?

• 1:50:27Speaker 05

  A constant flow of entertainment that is instantly and always accessible.

• 1:50:36Ed Zitron?

  And this is this video or is text involved in this or is this only video?

• 1:50:39Speaker 05

  I think video is so much more poisonous than text. But I will say, I think text is, uh, I think text does a very similar thing.

• 1:50:48Ed Zitron?

  No, but video is much easier to cycle through and consume a bunch of video information fast.

• 1:50:53Speaker 05

  It's not even, it's not even just the cycle through. It's that like I opened Instagram, I opened Instagram this morning to do a work thing to like find a specific producer and look at who she follows and be like, do I know anybody who she, like it's like a, it's a networking. It's a useful tool. And I opened it and it's some.

• 1:51:11Speaker 03

  Two hours later.

• 1:51:12Speaker 05

  Truly, truly, truly. And it's because like I see in the little carousel, I see this little 15 second, like a girl being like, here's what my boyfriend expected on New Year's. And then here's what he actually got. And it's like a very funny video.

• 1:51:26Ed Zitron?

  And so going around and like looking at Gettysburg or something.

• 1:51:29Speaker 05

  My brain is like, I see, I see things move and that make me like, I like things like that.

• 1:51:34Ed Zitron?

  I am so fucking glad I'm autistic. I'm so fucking glad I see that. I'm like, I've got something else to do. I'm doing, I'm doing work. I just, it's so cool. I don't, I see that. I'm like, yeah, trying to fuck with.

• 1:51:44Speaker 03

  This happened to me last night.

• 1:51:46Ed Zitron?

  I like, I'm a pig, but I'm not that kind of hog.

• 1:51:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. Last night I was like, I had hours free for, for once and see I was like, I could watch a movie. I could do all this stuff. Sat down, started looking at TikTok. I was like, you know what? This is comfy. Yeah. This is nice. And also because my brain has been at like 200% the entire week. So it just needs to like cool down, but it is such a great.

• 1:52:05Speaker 05

  Cool it down with the like.

• 1:52:06Speaker 03

  With like the Bing brain massage.

• 1:52:09Speaker 05

  Then I'm going to put on a movie and cool down in front of the movie, which is one bigger.

• 1:52:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:13Ed Zitron?

  I, and I think the, the pressure is just increasing on people and will eventually pop. And I think the pressure is increasing from all sides.

• 1:52:23Speaker 05

  I just think it's going to take a lot longer now than it would have with the technology we had 20 years ago.

• 1:52:29Ed Zitron?

  I will say that. The problem is the, first of all, the real world was never meant to connect with finance this much. Most people were never meant to know what HB RAM was. No one was meant to know what a GPU was. Seven years ago, if you told, you asked someone what a GPU was, they would call the police. Like, they'd be like, why are you saying strange words to me? You're a witch. And no offense to witches, but it's just, now everyone's kind of aware of this, and it's in their head, and every boss in companies saying, AI, you must do AI now. You will, you are stupid. You're a pig and a moron. There's a great video of a comedian, I don't remember, who's just, try banana now, now. And it's just like, that's all I

• 1:53:10Ed Zitron?

  think of with this stuff, is just harassing people. I think you're right, in that it's gonna take a little longer, because people are so addicted to feeds, and the feeds are so intense.

• 1:53:19Speaker 05

  It just numbs them.

• 1:53:20Ed Zitron?

  But I think that there is a degree of harassment from the AI stuff, that means that when this starts to burst, it's gonna be like fucking Coruscant in Return of the Jedi. I think people are gonna be fucking excited to see this burn. I think people are just so fucking angry, and the fucking price of all electronics going up, at a time when we're most, the angriest we've ever been at the computer. I'm not saying, I don't know the order of events.

• 1:53:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:45Ed Zitron?

  But I think this is, I know this is kind of-

• 1:53:47Speaker 03

  The thing is, there's so much happening in the world, right? There's also the literal destruction of democracy, right in front of us, right? There is, we're being led by warmongers, and also, the economy is collapsing, all this stuff is happening. I tend to look at like, what will be the broad societal ways, like, we move through this? And the only way is like, we do have to like, step away from the tech a little bit. It's also like, I don't know, doing those social things that we didn't used to do, right? Or like, we kind of stepped away from. So, I love libraries.

• 1:54:17Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:54:18Speaker 03

  Libraries are great.

• 1:54:20Ed Zitron?

  Libraries, fucking wrong.

• 1:54:21Speaker 03

  We let, we let- A lot of people really shit on libraries and could also strip away their resources and stuff. It is things like that where we, you see the rest of your community, you can help each other, you learn together. That's the sort of thing I want to support moving forward and we need that.

• 1:54:37Ed Zitron?

  I will also say like, I said this yesterday on the episode, it's like, I am a rare thing of like, the internet has allowed me to become a person rather than maybe less of one.

• 1:54:47Speaker 03

  That's like, I was a socially anxious kid and technology and the internet did help me. Like, so, yeah.

• 1:54:53Ed Zitron?

  And the thing is, you just, I think there's just a level of intentionality where it's like, I, the feeds don't work on me. I get deep anxiety when I have an infinite scroll. Like I have the oppo, it has the opposite effect on me. I'm like, why won't this end? I can't watch anything, everything. I don't want to look at it because it's, it's worrying me. This is bothering, which is literally everyone else's different. It's so strange. But it's like, these tools also let me talk to everyone in this room in an instant. They let me put on an insane podcast for 20 hours in a week and nobody stops me. But there are actual beautiful things that technology can do. And what's great is you could use the same technology from five fucking years ago. I'm not even saying put your phone down and burn it. I'm saying use what you got now or use what just happened.

• 1:55:36Ed Zitron?

  Computers, putting aside all the growth capitalism stuff, computers are fucking great right now.

• 1:55:41Speaker 03

  Computers are great. People are going back to personal music players, just like a thing that plays music. You know what? That is beautiful. And the younger, the kids right now, the thing people are saying is like, they don't know if they're trusting an image. That's AI. That's an inherent distrust in AI and calling it out as a cultural object. I think that's fascinating too. So we are seeing the signs that there is going to be some sort of like pushback.

• 1:56:04Speaker 03

  I don't want there to be like the Battlestar Galactica thing, right? Where the dude.

• 1:56:07Ed Zitron?

  The barbarian jihad.

• 1:56:10Speaker 03

  This is how you get a barbarian jihad.

• 1:56:14Ed Zitron?

  We're gonna get just the guy who just like.

• 1:56:15Speaker 11

  A lot I revolt of jihad, I'll, you know?

• 1:56:18Ed Zitron?

  No, it's like.

• 1:56:18Speaker 11

  We don't have to go all the way.

• 1:56:19Ed Zitron?

  It's the tweet where the guy's like, uh, what's the highest number? One million. It it's it. But at the same time, my pushback, not, uh, sorry, this is not a pushback. I'm agreeing with everything, but it's the way through this is to just be a little bit more fucking intentional with it. I know it's don't look at this. You're gonna look at it. Don't hate yourself, but be aware that something's being done to you with it. And also, remember, you can call any of your friends using these things. You can talk to any of your friends. If you're feeling lonely and sad, use Signal or iMessage.

• 1:56:50Speaker 03

  They brought the landline back. One of the most interesting products of like, uh, that was in the holiday season. I think it's more like uppity, rich parents are doing this, but they're like, there's a startup that made handset and you can program like your friends to it. So your kids' friends. It's a handset. They pick it up, they dial their friends.

• 1:57:07Speaker 05

  Is there a cord?

• 1:57:08Speaker 03

  I think there is a cord. I think I think there may be a cord.

• 1:57:10Speaker 05

  But it's it's basically, you don't have to have people's phone numbers memorized.

• 1:57:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's more like, these are your trusted contacts. That's all this thing can call. It's back to the days where we were just like.

• 1:57:20Speaker 05

  Is it plugged into your wall or is it a cell phone that just has a cord on it?

• 1:57:23Ed Zitron?

  Cause we can be quite cynical about CES and my God, have we got another two hours today and four hours tomorrow and one hour on Saturday. So we will be. But there's also a degree of like, as much as we complain, I got to hang out with my friends all week.

• 1:57:37Speaker 03

  Well, that's the human connection. That's the human part. Yeah.

• 1:57:40Ed Zitron?

  I got to do it and I got to record using a weird Rodecaster Pro 2.

• 1:57:43Speaker 03

  Look at this thing. It's amazing.

• 1:57:45Ed Zitron?

  And we can record the audio. I have wonderful Matt Asowski produce it and such.

• 1:57:48Speaker 11

  Can I make a beat on that? It looks like I can make a beat on that.

• 1:57:51Ed Zitron?

  You have a soundboard as well. You can do all sorts of noises, but it's like, you can do really cool shit with a computer now. And you can talk to your friends with it. It's, but the reason that things are shit is the people that are making the interfaces, the social interfaces are getting in the way. Understanding that and starting from that position is what makes things better for you. They're not gonna make it better for you. They're fucking assholes. Mark Zuckerberg is overseeing a fraudulent operation. 10% of their revenue in 2024 from Meta was from scams and fraud. That is a fucking reported thing from Jeff Horwitz of Reuters. Like, that should tell you everything. It does not mean that their computer is inherently bad. What they have done. The computer is bad and what we can do with the computer is the solution in the you can pull together a bunch of people

• 1:58:35Ed Zitron?

  just using text and email. I fucking just did it this week. There are great things. You can do it. Text, text, text. Go meet in real life. You can take fucking photos on your phone. Awesome. There are still good things to be done. I know this is so hokey. But I think it's

• 1:58:49Speaker 03

  It's a good point. It's it's not about being completely anti tech. It's about intentional.

• 1:58:54Ed Zitron?

  It's about being anti tech industry at the moment. Because it's like, we like Pebble, because Pebble's like, what if a device had a use case? And everyone's like, fuck this shit. What do you mean? You won't grow by 22% year over year, every quarter, you piece of, except he's private, doesn't matter. And it's just by years at the moment. That's my big, that's actually my better offline 2026.

• 1:59:14Speaker 03

  I love by you.

• 1:59:15Ed Zitron?

  By use, by shit.

• 1:59:15Speaker 03

  By refurb.

• 1:59:16Ed Zitron?

  By refurb, by you. Don't give these fucking companies another fucking dollar until they can prove that they can earn it. Because that is the real problem. They want to grow forever. You want to grow forever? Make useful shit. But the actual internals of the computer, I also will address something that people email me occasionally, which is, oh, the computer industry used to be good. Whatever. I don't know if it used to be good, but it used to be better. But there are beautiful things in the computer.

• 1:59:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Part of how we got here is that we didn't ask cultural questions, right? We didn't push back against certain elements like I was there when social media was just starting out. And it was like, oh yeah, look at this feed of information.

• 1:59:51Ed Zitron?

  It was so cool.

• 1:59:52Speaker 03

  But it was also, we knew Mark Zuckerberg was a piece of shit from the beginning.

• 1:59:56Ed Zitron?

  But did we? Most people did not.

• 1:59:59Speaker 03

  Most people did not, but there were enough stories about, oh, look at this kid who dropped out of Harvard and like did this thing. But there were stories about what he did before. How like the shitty sexist like proto social network he made.

• 2:00:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:09Speaker 03

  Who he was, like those stories were out there. And I watched this kid who didn't finish college, but also had no real awareness of the world. Be propped up by VCs and the entire industry as some sort of like boy king. And what he did was create a thing that just generated money, right? And that the entire point of Facebook. Two thousand, you know, late 2000s to 2010s was just as much engagement as possible. It was, it was just that farming and then everybody copied that and that broke us because they didn't want to create something good. They just wanted to create something that addicted us. So it's like cigarettes.

• 2:00:43Ed Zitron?

  It's that and the scourge of neoliberalism and the idea that

• 2:00:47Speaker 03

  So many things.

• 2:00:47Ed Zitron?

  Everything that the market is dominant, the market would never incentivize something bad. Again.

• 2:00:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:53Ed Zitron?

  Everyone talks about

• 2:00:54Speaker 03

  Lack of regulations in the 2010s, that that didn't help.

• 2:00:57Ed Zitron?

  You talk about killing baby Hitler, that's great. I think baby Milton Friedman and baby Ronald Reagan, put them on the top of the pile.

• 2:01:03Speaker 11

  Don't get me started on that.

• 2:01:04Ed Zitron?

  Yes, we got all sorts of babies.

• 2:01:05Speaker 03

  There's a lot of babies, there's a lot of babies.

• 2:01:07Ed Zitron?

  A lot of baby. No, but it's, but the thing is, it's like, the incentives are the problem. And the only thing we can do as consumers is don't stop using tech. You, I think that that's an unrealistic thing. Like Chloe, it's your luck. Like you have to use tech, especially as a stand up. You're kind of a slave.

• 2:01:21Speaker 05

  I have to use social media.

• 2:01:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you have to. There's just no other way around it. Don't buy a new phone. I'm done buying new fucking shit. I'm, I'm going on

• 2:01:30Speaker 05

  You haven't seen how broken my phone is.

• 2:01:32Ed Zitron?

  No, but go and, go and buy a, Chloe, Chloe, go and buy a refurb.

• 2:01:39Speaker 03

  Refurb iPhones.

• 2:01:41Ed Zitron?

  I actually think, I actually think I am done buying new phones. I'm going to buy the refurb forever.

• 2:01:48Speaker 03

  I buy my, my parents refurb iPhones every couple of years from Amazon. Perfect for them. It works great. They, the hardware lasts and then they're still like

• 2:01:56Ed Zitron?

  No new shit, no new shit unless it's cool. Unless it's fucking new and cool and good. Fuck CES, fuck.

• 2:02:05Ed Zitron?

  It's like, but really though, if you can buy new, buy used, go on eBay, go on whatever, go on Craigslist, like go and buy from a regular person, get, circulate that money in the real world, take it out of the fucking stock market, cash, cat. Okay, I'm going a little insane, but it's like, I, I stand by it because it's like, all of the new prices are going to go up.

• 2:02:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. And when it comes to social media, I think we can be more intentional, right? It's like, for the longest time, people were making arguments like, okay, I'm going to stay on X, even though Elon Musk bought it and destroyed Twitter, I'm going to stay on this thing. Now it's a freaking CSAM generating garbage machine. And it's like, I think we can start to make those moral choices where it's like, I, career wise, I would be better off staying on X probably, but. You have to have some sort of like moral center. And I think we're, we need to ask more of that of ourselves right now. So get off of X.

• 2:02:53Ed Zitron?

  I'm working, I'm honestly working like, I want to stay on there for my fucking publisher and I might talk to them about it. It's just like, it's a horrifying pedo generator.

• 2:03:00Speaker 03

  You don't want to be there. And there are literally, nobody's doing anything about the pornography and the CSAM being generated on it. And that just exists. And they just got a bunch of new funding. They got rewarded for this.

• 2:03:11Ed Zitron?

  Well, they did that so they could buy GPUs. Now, actually, I want to end with a fun idea. Here's a fun idea that I think everyone's gonna love. So here is how Elon Musk ruins his life using AI. So Elon Musk is doing, they just raised $20 billion. Most of that is going to go to GPUs for AI for Grok.

• 2:03:27Speaker 05

  And where did they raise that from? VCs?

• 2:03:29Ed Zitron?

  VCs, oh, fuck, I forget like who exactly were the venture capitalists.

• 2:03:33Speaker 05

  But is it mostly VCs?

• 2:03:34Ed Zitron?

  It's mostly VCs in debt and Nvidia. So they're doing that to build more data centers. They're losing over a billion dollars a month just on the current thing. They're going to build more data centers, which will lose them even more money. Elon Musk's money mostly comes from leverage, which means just borrowing on his current holdings. What hap- he's not particularly liquid. And he's added the most money losing thingy ever to a social network, which already loses money. And r slash Grok on Reddit, everyone there should be redacted. It's mostly just people generating horrifying things of woman.

• 2:04:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:07Ed Zitron?

  Here's the thing, every time he does that, it's probably five to 10 bucks. And it's happening millions of times a day. This could actually lead, AI could lead to the destruction of someone like that. And people say, oh, Elon Musk always finds more money. There are actual limits to Ed's point.

• 2:04:21Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:04:22Ed Zitron?

  There are actual limits to things.

• 2:04:23Speaker 03

  I would say for normal people, yes, he is still, he is the world's richest man.

• 2:04:27Ed Zitron?

  He's finding ways to do it because he's the richest man on paper.

• 2:04:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:31Ed Zitron?

  And he got so much, like the Twitter deal's $13 billion. That's fucking nothing compared to the bullshit data centers. I want everyone to just think about and laugh about the idea that this man is building big ass data centers that just are losing money.

• 2:04:46Speaker 03

  He keeps talking about Mars. Let him go to Mars. Let him go to Mars. Let him be hoisted by his own rocket.

• 2:04:52Speaker 11

  Yeah. If you've read the beginning of Red Mars, you know? There's uh.

• 2:04:56Speaker 03

  It's totally great.

• 2:04:57Speaker 11

  There's some ideas there.

• 2:04:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:59Speaker 11

  On uh then that first prologue about what might happen to Elon Musk.

• 2:05:03Speaker 03

  I love Kim Stanley.

• 2:05:04Speaker 11

  Yes.

• 2:05:04Speaker 03

  He's so good.

• 2:05:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's and I realize that it's tough and I know as we come to the end of this blog, I know we've been quite cynical. This is so hokey and I do this every CS. The best thing you can do when you hear this stuff, when you're like, I'm upset with this is. Love your friends harder, tell them you love everyone in this room, genuinely so happy to have everyone here. But it's like that little thing that you think is so immaterial. We'll save lives, we'll make people's lives happier, tell people you love their shit, go online, use social media to say. I think, Club, you're insanely funny and I've watched you only get funnier. Devindra, I've followed your work for like a decade. Edward Anguoso Jr. An insanely talented man and I love reading your work and I love having you on the mic. These things are actually very easy to do and easier because of digital. There is never go, you're listening to this, go and fucking do that to literally anyone you know.

• 2:05:50Ed Zitron?

  Family member, friend, creator, tell them you love them, love their shit and why? That is actually something that digital communication allows you to do today that will make the world better. Buy used, buy used now. If you want a new thing, buy a used one. It's probably fine. That is the only way we begin fixing things and these moral choices like Devindra mentioned.

• 2:06:10Speaker 11

  What if I want a chat GPT rapper to tell me what color my shit is and if that is gonna be indicative of a health problem?

• 2:06:17Ed Zitron?

  You could just use Microsoft Copilot, which will be in a Windows laptop from a year ago.

• 2:06:20Speaker 11

  Microsoft three sixty five Copilot app.

• 2:06:24Speaker 05

  And you have to turn the laptop around and point at your poop in the toilet and then take a photo.

• 2:06:28Ed Zitron?

  And then also at the same time, look at the chat bar and be like, is this working? You've got, you've got this.

• 2:06:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. We're gonna see some cool stuff like these with these local L L L M's. We're gonna go back to punk tech, right? People building their own cool little models, their own little cool things like we're, we're gonna be back there. Their own little gadgets powered by punk tech. I want to see that more.

• 2:06:47Ed Zitron?

  I, and the thing is, I know it's fucking grim out there and it really is. We are still, one of the problems in society is we're hyperconnected and full of technology. One of the cool things is we are as well. And there is a ton of tech that exists today that you don't need to worry about the future, that will do what you want to do by use. And also tell your friends and family you love and tell creators you love their work. Share their shit.

• 2:07:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, give me a little compliment.

• 2:07:10Ed Zitron?

  Give, give, no, I'm actually deadly serious though. Give friends little compliments that you can do that in seconds now. Doesn't matter where they are in the world, as long as they got an internet connection. It's so fucking hokey, but I think it's easy to miss. And I think like as we come to an end, as we come to the end here, as come to the end of this blog, it's worth saying that. And you know what? I'll let everyone plug something. Davindra, what are you working on at the moment? What do you want people to read?

• 2:07:33Speaker 03

  Engadgets where I'm doing this stuff. Check out RCS coverage. I also do a movie podcast, The Film Cast at thefilmcast.com. Can't wait to see your movie, Chloe, but maybe don't listen to my review. I don't know. I don't know.

• 2:07:45Ed Zitron?

  Edwin Grasso Jr., what are you excited about writing? What are you writing at the moment?

• 2:07:50Speaker 11

  Um, working on this very weird essay for, um, for a print magazine.

• 2:07:55Ed Zitron?

  Tell me.

• 2:07:56Speaker 11

  Um, it's, uh, I mean, yeah, it's, I've pitched the same idea. You're not supposed to do this. I pitched the same idea to two places, but I know one is gonna, one is gonna actually say yes and the other won't. Um, and it's, uh, one of my favorite speeches is MLK's A Letter to Christians. It's, um, from the perspective of Paul writing to American Christians and warning and kind of like sussing out the society they have and warning about it. But I wanted to invert it. So I wrote like a letter from a future where fascists won. And it's, um, a letter from the fascists who won to the fascists now as a way to reverse talk about, uh, stuff that's going on now.

• 2:08:36Ed Zitron?

  Fuck yeah.

• 2:08:37Speaker 05

  That sounds amazing.

• 2:08:38Speaker 11

  Yeah, I, I, I don't, I don't like, uh, researching it, but yeah, well, it's, it's, it's been interesting. It's a fun experiment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So stuff like that. I've been trying to do a lot more fiction experiments because I've been doing more readings lately. So excited for that.

• 2:08:52Ed Zitron?

  Fucking great. Chloe, what are you planning with then?

• 2:08:55Speaker 05

  I'm doing Cincinnati this weekend, uh, the ninth and 10th or 10th and 11th, whatever the Friday, Saturday is.

• 2:09:01Ed Zitron?

  Link will be in there.

• 2:09:01Speaker 05

  Then, uh, Washington DC, the next weekend, MLK weekend, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And then that following week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, not a weekend. I'm doing my solo show Cheat. In Philadelphia, uh, come on out to that. After that, Vermont, Fort Collins, yada, yada, yada. Yeah. On our road. Fargo.

• 2:09:23Ed Zitron?

  And I have been putting a link to getting a permanent discount to my newsletter in these things. I've not done my paid newsletter. It's a chunk of my income. Please fucking God subscribe to my paid newsletter. I really, if I can, in a year's time, if I can double from here, I can just do this.

• 2:09:38Speaker 11

  Yeah, so.

• 2:09:39Ed Zitron?

  It's really happy.

• 2:09:40Speaker 11

  Also subscribe to mine.

• 2:09:41Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:42Speaker 11

  We'll figure out a special. We can do an ad, an ad, ad.

• 2:09:44Ed Zitron?

  Two ads are better than one discount.

• 2:09:46Speaker 11

  Head squared. Yeah.

• 2:09:46Ed Zitron?

  Head squared. But really though, if you're gonna put your money into anything, Sean Paul Adams, who is a friend of the show, friend of the suite, he passed sadly last year. His son is epileptic, so we are honoring him by getting you to donate to the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium. Uh, his family and friends would deeply appreciate you doing so, and so would I. Thank you so much. We'll be back for two hours in a few hours. This has been incredible. I love doing this show. I love you all.

• 2:10:18Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot app to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 2:10:50Speaker 12

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:11:23Speaker 07

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• 2:12:25Speaker 13

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• 2:13:21Speaker 14

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• 2:13:25Speaker 00

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