CES 2026: Part Ten (Epilogue)

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 our CES epilogue, Ed is joined by author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow, tech bubble newsletter writer Ed Ongweso Jr. and CES bartender Phil Broughton to talk about this year’s coverage, the upcoming venture apocalypse, and what we expect from 2026. 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 Cory Doctorow: http://pluralistic.net/ https://www.eff.org/ Phil Broughton: https://bsky.app/profile/funranium.bsky.social/ The Tech Bubble Newsletter: https://thetechbubble.substack.com/ Matt Osowski: https://www.mattosowski.com/ 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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• 0:36Speaker 02

  Welcome to the Better Offline Afterparty Epilogue from CES. It is like 11 a.m. on the Saturday. We are, I actually slept pretty well, weirdly, but we're all, this is the thing we do at the end of the show, where the remaining people join us, we relax. And we have to my right, Mr. Philip Broton.

• 0:58Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  This is our bartender for the week, Phil. You've been, I don't, so I want to give Phil immense credit for what he's been doing all week. So the way this works, we have the, we've got the main suite, which is where people come. They come sit down. It's got the, the big daddy bedroom where I, where I just kind of like sleep or like talk to myself.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  Roll around a lot.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  I roll around on the floor going, ah. But then in the main room, we have the bar that Phil has set up. And during the recordings, Phil will come in and ferry in usually a Diet Coke or a little thing of Sotul, which is close to mezcal. Jesus Christ, my voice just broke there. I'm of course Ed Zittrum, by the way, the host of Better Offline. And Phil has been bringing me drinks all week and bringing everyone drinks, just kind of ferrying around the recording. He wouldn't know it to hear it, but he's been an incredible bartender.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  I finally learned how to not walk into things after last year.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  You were pretty good. You, you give yourself more credit. To our left, of course, is Mr. Corey Doctor, activist, author, journalist. Hello. And of course, Mr. Edward Onguoso Jr.

• 1:59Speaker 04

  Hello, my friends.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  My, my man, another year, another day, another year.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  Another Ed.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh yeah, I should really have my book written by next year. No, it's, we were just talking about games and relaxing afterward because you'd think after a week long podcast, we'd go completely ape shit crazy. By which I mean, I think all of us were in bed by eleven.

• 2:19Speaker 04

  I mean, hey, there's.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  Before then.

• 2:21Speaker 04

  Tonight.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, then Edward and Guaso Junior and I gotta go.

• 2:24Speaker 04

  I'm scheming.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Twelve oh one AM is the plan. We're gonna, we're gonna go really crazy.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Raging.

• 2:29Speaker 04

  I got, I've got, I feel like we're getting the Avengers together. I've been people from different walks of life to come and party with you tonight.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  I did see there's Avengers Doomsday now. They're doing a three hour, forty five minute one and they got, they got the X-Men in it and the real just key jangling.

• 2:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's either gonna be okay or horrible.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's either gonna be amazing in the sense that like Patrick Stewart, if Patrick Stewart does start, just does X-Men shit, I'm fine. But yeah, this is, this is what happens at the end of CES. Our brains are reduced to a fine simmer.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  You're gonna do a courtesy sniff on me for Doomsday, aren't you?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  I, I, I'm going to, if I manage to watch that fucking movie, I will actually.

• 3:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, let's watch.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  You'll courtesy sniff at me for.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  Let's go see Avatar three way, fire and ash right now.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  I've not seen any of the Avatar movies, man.

• 3:20Speaker 04

  I'll show you all, let's go to Pandora.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  If it was, if it was on the sphere, I'd watch it.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Let's go to Pandora. But no, the history of the suite is such that Phil has been, so when was, when we first do this week, Phil?

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Twenty fifteen.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Twenty fifteen, we would have it, it was from a PR firm, we'd all sit around, we'd have the journalists, we'd have drinks, but died in twenty twenty because of, actually not because of the pandemic, just because we were, I think it was like, there was something weird that CES and then, then COVID happened.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  We, people were already scared of COVID at CES.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Well, people were just sick, like people were ambient, I was sick.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  I was getting a lot of questions about, is this okay? And I went. Well, the other part of the worry is parts of China had already locked down at that point in January. So there were missing parts of the show, which were starting people to worry about, are we okay here?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  I was also just like, I got, I knock on wood, I have done pretty well not getting sick at CES, largely because the first few days when the show's the most crowded, I'm masked up immediately. Just to, just I have my big, I put my Bane mask on. And yeah, that, that was a weird one, but we brought it back last year for the first time. It was good. I think this is the best one yet. And we were already scheming for 2027. We've, we've got Vice President JD Vance now.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  I'm gonna go, do you even say please? Do you even say please if I'm you?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  No, I, it's this year, the lesson I've learned is that I could use a, I could use help. I could use them, not to say I didn't have it. I could use like an organizing document person. So.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  I have physics degrees, but I can't keep up with what you need to do for a show.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Also, neither could I. I was kind of putting it together as we went. But Corey.

• 5:12Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  This is your first CES in what, 20?

• 5:15Speaker 05

  20, so it's 2003. So 23 years. Hail, hail to Gordia.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  I'm really very grateful you came out here because it was, I know that we laughed about the Amazon, the Amazon thing where you like asked the simplest questions and they freaked out. But it was quite nice watching you bring me in front of stuff that I otherwise wouldn't have got excited about, like the, the four nanometer microscope and such.

• 5:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love, I love the, the stuff that's kind of makery and, and then the other end of that, which is, I think we were talking about this yesterday, the, the hall where.

• 5:51Speaker 05

  You know, Chinese designers have taken a standard board that is for a point and shoot camera.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:56Speaker 05

  And come up with 75 form factors for it. And like 73 of them are garbage and two of them are just really pretty.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:02Speaker 05

  They look like something, you know, you'd, you'd have gotten out of a mid-century designer or something. You know, it's very striking. If you saw it in MoMA, you'd go, oh yeah, I get why that's a classic.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  I, and, and I kind of, I mean, you, you stopped at one point in a wall of plugs as well.

• 6:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  That was, no, it was, that warmed my heart. I was like, that's my friend, man. No, it was just like a wall of like data center level plugs with the ones that you'd usually put in the back, back of the computer.

• 6:28Speaker 05

  Yep, yep.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think that that's the, the unseen magic of CES is that while we can complain about a lot of things, there are still little companies doing weird little shit at the side.

• 6:38Speaker 05

  Well, this is like what I was saying about the British charger adapter, the collapsible charger.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:43Speaker 05

  Yesterday, is that the stuff that you interact with every day that has like moving parts that you have to plug and unplug that, you know, like the, so much of your quality of life is in that stuff.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:57Speaker 05

  And, you know, there's a, a, a really remarkable pair of books. There's a book called The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. That's a design classic and it's this very austere book. Norman's a designer and it's very austere book. Austere book aimed at designers saying, um, stop sacrificing functionality for aesthetics.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:20Speaker 05

  And everyone read it and this completely was, it was, it's impossible to overstate how important this was in how people think about design. And like 25 years later, he wrote another book called Emotional Design where he was like, I was totally wrong. Nearly everything that you use in a high-tech society is nearly always broken. And the role of the user is actually the troubleshooter. And to be a troubleshooter is to be expansive. And to be expansive, you can't be frustrated and angry. When you're frustrated and angry, you tunnel down and you just keep like clicking the button over and over again and hoping it starts

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Sorry, just when you say a troubleshooter, what exactly do you mean?

• 7:56Speaker 05

  Well, think about your average day, right? Where you you, you know, plug in your computer and you try to do a thing that you've done before and it just doesn't work the way it's supposed to work. You know, the app doesn't load correctly, the little charge light doesn't come on, the plug doesn't work, the latch doesn't work, something

• 8:13Speaker 02

  App closes.

• 8:14Speaker 05

  Something's broken, the app closes, the you get a weird cryptic timeout bug, you know, all kinds of that. I'm the last Tumblr user on earth, but Tumblr changed their HTML editor a few years ago, about a year ago. And I only just figured out that the reason I can't type in it unless I flip it to HTML mode and write raw HTML is that the first character you enter into it has to have style data. It has to be like bold or italic or have a font size associated with it. So you have to copy it out of an app that has style data,

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  Paste it in and then and I don't know why, right? But like now I can reliably type in the Tumblr compositor. And that's a that's a troubleshooting thing, right?

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:54Speaker 05

  And we all do this all day long with everything we use. And it's not just gnarly Linux shit. It's like my my LG electric stove top, my induction stove top.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Exactly. Like the beginning of my my book, Why Everything Stopped Working, coming out next year. It's I think I counted 131 within the space of a day of just shit that went wrong.

• 9:13Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Things like I went on Reddit to try and look at someone, but when I went to click it, the entire thing stopped responding to touch.

• 9:22Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Or the many, the many times that just my email just decides to reset itself or Google Calendar has locked me out. I'm sorry, not just gone like, yeah, mate, log in again. And the funniest one, by the way, I've done it. Has any this has this happened to you? Have you logged into Google Calendar? As in like, and it said login place you log in? And then you go to edit it and it logs you out again? Yes, I have Google dysfunction. Instantly. Well, you don't use Google at all.

• 9:49Speaker 05

  I know I use Gcal because I have to share a calendar with a bunch of heterogeneous environments.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 05

  But the point being that everyone's a troubleshooter all the time.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:56Speaker 05

  And if you're angry and frustrated and you're just like, you know, you've got the incipient aneurysm throbbing in your temple.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:03Speaker 05

  And you know, your fists are clenched and you're, you've got the, you know, black halo contracting around your vision, you can't fix stuff.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:09Speaker 05

  You need to be able to kind of step back. Like, have you ever been trying to cook something with a couple of friends? Do you cook?

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:15Speaker 05

  Yes. So you're cooking something with, say, a friend and it's not quite gelling, you know, maybe literally it's not gelling. Something's not right. And you just like, if you're kind of bopping around the kitchen, there's good music and you go, taste this, what does it need? Oh yeah, I know. Maybe try a little salt.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 05

  Right? But like, if you're in a panic and you've got 10 people coming over.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Traveling, what have you.

• 10:35Speaker 05

  And you're trying to cook and you're like, how do I get this to work? You're frustrated, you're angry, it's hard to think creatively. So his point is that beautiful things make you happy.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 10:45Speaker 05

  And when you're happy, you're a better troubleshooter. And so for things to work well, they have to be beautiful.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  I, I love that because I lit my eyes immediately as you said that draw to the Roadcaster Pro 2. And I will definitely say there is a level of like, you look at it and you go, damn, I'm, I'm, I'm make production. Me, me Mr. Broadcast. And it sounds silly, but yeah, it does kind of make you, you kind of feel that way. You feel like a professional, you feel like, and so when shit's going wrong, you kind of look at it and go, no, but I'm a professional. I'm doing cool shit. And I know I sound silly, but every, to quote Carl McLaughlin in Twin Peaks. Every day give yourself a little present, which sometimes means setting things up to make yourself feel a little important.

• 11:26Speaker 05

  I love things that are quietly functional in my daily life. So I travel a lot. So I found a cable bag that, that I keep all my cables in and it sits flat when you open it instead of tipping over. And I get.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Oh, so you can just leave it on a table?

• 11:42Speaker 05

  And it just sits open.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Lovely.

• 11:44Speaker 05

  Holy moly, is that very nice. And obviously like a bag that sits flat is not an innovation, right? It's like, it's a thing that's existed forever, but someone made it into a cable bag.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  That reminds me.

• 11:54Speaker 05

  So good.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  That reminds me of another one exactly like that, which is a company called Pact, P A K T.

• 11:59Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  I love them. They have a slightly dodgy design in this bag, but still. It's a one that's like, it's a regular bag that slips over your, um, your suitcase, which by the way is the worst part of it because you pack it too much. It's a little hard to get on there. But the killer instinct thing is it opens from the top, not the side. So when you're, when you're sliding it under, you're on a Southwest flight. You plug a Burbank flight, for example, and you need to get in there instead of having to like get a backpack and looking from the top. The whole thing, the whole thing flips open so you can delve into it and easily close it again. This sounds very minor.

• 12:35Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  It's this is the, the ability to just take a gander in there and plop it back in is immense.

• 12:42Speaker 05

  And, and it kind of explains like this is the, this is the non pathological version of everyday carry, right? You find a thing that you love.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  That works perfectly well. You, you know, like I, I, I'm the kind of person who's on the road like a hundred and 150 days a year. And I have a fully set up travel package.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 05

  You know, with duplicates of everything I need to travel with and, and whatever. And when you, when you dial it all in perfectly and the bag is great and the, the accessories are great and the way it's organized is great. And you always, you know, you get somewhere and something's broken and you can fix it again. I love, I have a set of titanium chopsticks that break down.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  All that wrong.

• 13:20Speaker 05

  I've been able to like eat food in a hotel room without having to use the shitty plastic fork.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Oh, that's bloody good. I should get some, I should get some cutlery that.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  We ran out of forks.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is, yeah, this is the thing like in a, in a somewhat like grim CES for not useful things. I feel like I would, I would love a trade show where it was just like useful shit.

• 13:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  It's like a bag that's great for this kind of traveler. If you want to make the useful shit convention, invite me. I'd love to cover it. Because I would love, they need to start thinking that way with this show. I'd love like Battery Isle. I'd love, I'd love Batteryville.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  Uh, that would be a problem with the fire marshal.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Okay, but you space them out a little bit.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  You would have to, yes.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, you space them out.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  On a positive note, I have not had to call the fire marshal this year.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  You haven't had to call them in years. You didn't call them last year.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  I didn't call them last year either. And for the previous four years, I didn't because we weren't here.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Every year.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, there was that prolonged period where it was like, hey, Phil, we found a completely functional laser on the and you're like, which kind? And they were like, well.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  MRI. The MRI in the middle of the electronics showed the worst.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  I think that's. How the fuck did they even get that in?

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Because they never told anyone and then rolled it onto the floor and good to go.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Ah, the perfect crime.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  You know, unlicensed medical use on random passersby and destroying of adjacent electronics in.

• 14:44Speaker 05

  It's a long tradition, right? The World's Fair, you used to be able to go and have your feet fluoroscoped in the shoe sales.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  You didn't have to go to the World's Fair, you just went to your local market.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Quick question, what's a fluoroscope?

• 14:56Speaker 05

  It's an X-ray. So you used to, so it used to be very common to sell shoes by putting your feet in a pair of shoes and then putting your foot in an X-ray.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  And then you can say, look how good your kid's foot fits in there.

• 15:06Speaker 05

  Not for a brief exposure, right? You leave it running like a, like a radiographically guided injection. You would leave it running for 10, 20 seconds and the shoe fitting salesperson.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  Or longer.

• 15:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, would be just like continuously bombarded.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  It's watching X-ray TV.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Phil, as an expert in this kind of thing, how bad was that and why?

• 15:28Speaker 03

  So it was a remarkable amount of dose to the foot, primarily of children. So you don't really want to drop dose on kids. But the worst and most exposed were the workers in the shoe store who are continually doing it. And also, more to the point, the way they had built it is the X-ray generator shot through your foot to the developing screen towards the lens for your face. So that you could see how good your shoes were. Incidentally, we still use fluoroscopes. They are medical.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  And they are the majority of the dose that doctors and nurses take.

• 16:07Speaker 05

  If you're getting radiographically guided injection.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  They, it's so they don't stab you or put the. Drugs where it shouldn't go.

• 16:16Speaker 05

  Get the steroid into your facet joint or whatever. Has a person with a lot of medical things. I've had a lot of radiographically guided procedures.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  They're useful, but you don't want to use them for bullshit like shoes.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, that's, that is some classic humanity there. They were just like, how the fuck we're gonna fit shoes on this x-ray?

• 16:36Speaker 03

  If you try hard, you can still find them in remote stores in Appalachia. But if you want to see one in person, there was one on display at the Bradbury Museum that they have now equipped with digital cameras to simulate the effect of what the fluoro unit for shoes used to be like.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Jesus.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  It's one of those, they seriously did this? Yeah, yeah, they really did.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  I'm not surprised anymore when I hear anything like that. I'm, I am honestly, I'm shocked they haven't had a ghost gun problem here. I'm shocked. Okay, think about it.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  That came to the floor in a prior year.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Yep. Well, really?

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Of 3D printing of firearms with.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Oh, the 3D printing era.

• 17:19Speaker 05

  That was before Cody, what's his name, got busted for having sex with a minor.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Oh, God, what?

• 17:25Speaker 03

  It's a deep, dark hole.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  Industry. Yeah, you've got, you've got the horrifying billionaires who are just talking about the 14 words and then you've got the makers.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  Printing them on their 3D gun.

• 17:39Speaker 05

  This was a guy who heard the phrase hard cases make bad law and he was like, I've got a hard case.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  I'll make it.

• 17:44Speaker 05

  Cause we were trying to figure out like our STL files, you know, so there's this principle in law that we established in 1992 when we sued the NSA for civilian access to crypto, which is that code is a form of expressive speech covered by the first amendment.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:56Speaker 05

  And so prior restraint on the publication of code is unconstitutional. It was narrowed in another case about the magazine 2600, but it's still a bedrock principle, code of speech. And then it's like, well, our STL file speech, I mean, they're code, right? And, and ideally what you'd want to have it about is something that has some nexus with privacy or political activity, like protected activity. And this guy was like, no, I'm gonna just start with guns because I think second amendment weirdos will have my back, which is probably true. But also like the court is gonna go. Okay, but like if we rule in favor of this, you got you're making guns at home.

• 18:39Speaker 05

  That I feel like that's a that I I the judge feel a little uncomfortable about it. So he was really, he was like, let's roll the dice on the entire idea that Coda's speech on my folk theory about guns and whether Second Amendment weirdos will be able to sway the court. And it sort of all fell apart because he had sex with a minor.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, that's that.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  There was a previous terrifying trip to Vegas where sit on the floors of floor of Caesars, we were playing craps, you had wandered off to bed.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  And I ran into a former student from one of my classes who was so excited to see me say, hey, Phil. And he was decked to the nines, heavy gold rings, clearly doing way better than I had seen him when he'd been laid off from Numi. And you're doing great.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  What is Numi?

• 19:31Speaker 03

  The it's now the Tesla plant in Fremont. Formerly, it was a cooperative between GM and Toyota.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  That gave birth to Saturn.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  But it folded and now it's Tesla and Elon bought it and that became their first factory. But I saw that student who had been working in all of the support machine shops that ring Numi. Bad economics, but he was looked like he was doing good.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Parallax from Green Lantern.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  I asked, how you doing? He said, you have no idea how great it is to be able to just print lowers and uppers, left, right, center all day long.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  So he was a gun.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  He reached out in into his pocket and said, here, I got a fresh one and just handed me a lower.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  No, thanks.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  And and for the On the floor of the casino with the craps table.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Uninitiated and through my very low gun knowledge, the lower is the part that actually makes a gun a gun, right? Like, that's that's the part that that is the actual thing that you require to make a gun shoot boom, boom.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  And it absolutely had no serial numbers and it was he handed me a ghost gun on the floor of a casino.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  You were required to put a serial number on a lower.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, you are.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  I'm saying this because I know sometimes I get the occasional email saying, hey, do you keep passing things out? The one thing, the one rule Sophie and Robert gave me.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Was to be like, yeah, what's that mean? Say what this means, say what this means, because otherwise no one knows anything, including me. But that's fucking insane. This person was just walking.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Vegas, baby.

• 21:06Speaker 00

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• 21:37Ed Zitron?

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• 23:12Speaker 08

  She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard. But then we found out she had agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult. So we asked her doctor for more help.

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• 24:02Speaker 08

  I'm glad I asked for help.

• 24:04Speaker 09

  Ask your loved one's doctor about Rexulti.

• 24:11Speaker 05

  So as a Canadian, I have a piece of gun lore for everyone. Nice. That I learned from John McDonald, or Jim McDonald, rather, is a science fiction writer, ex-military, writes military science fiction, very well-regarded. And he said, "When you write science fiction with a gun in it, or any fiction with a gun in it, someone out there who really cares about guns will find something that you said that was wrong, and they'll make fun of you." Yes. And if you want to avoid this, you just need to know one word: modified. And if you say, "He opened fire with his modified whatever, Walter PPK," no matter what it is you then make the gun do, the person out there who's a, you know, ammo-sexual musket fucker is going to be...

• 24:54Speaker 05

  Is going to be so interested in figuring out what modification you thought of to make this gun do this, and the weirder it is, the cleverer they'll think you are. No answer. And you'll just get emails going like, "I figured out the cool thing you thought of." Am I right?

• 25:09Speaker 02

  It's kind of like in Yeah, yeah, definitely, yes. This is a very specific reference. There's a show called Reaper where Ray Wise from Twin Peaks was the devil. And it's kind of like how they play a game of coin flip, I think it is. And they use a reflection on the on the tabletop to distract the devil because the devil is distracted by his own reflection. He's the key jingle for the musket fuckers, the homosexual musket fuckers. That's that's a good one, but also that's so funny. I know. I mean, with my work, when I'm doing my AI stuff, my favorite thing is like someone will take one of my shorter pieces, so they're like 29,000 ones and will say like, this guy doesn't know shit. And they will find one fucking line and they'll be like, look on that.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  And it will be the weirdest, smallest thing. And I'll always be like, so can you be specific about what this changes? They they block me. They block me every time. And actually, there was a so there is a big, this is a random aside. The rough lines LARPers are sickos. Well, no, this is I got sent a very funny one. So there's this guy on Twitter, real horrible website. Buko Capital bloke, who is like a weirdly popular guy, and he deleted this tweet, but an eagle-eyed reader caught it. It said, conflicted because if the AI trade blows up, then take him's head explodes, which would be very funny. But then Ed Zitch will be right, and that would not be funny at all.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  And I just to be just to be clear, this would be the funniest possible situation because that guy deleted it and thinks I didn't get it. Sadly, I got the screenshot. It's gonna be a great. It's gonna be a great year for stuff like that. I don't know about the rest of the world. But yeah, this actually, Corey, back to the ghost gun stuff. What happened with all that?

• 26:50Speaker 05

  I don't remember.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:51Speaker 05

  I mean, it just the

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Prison, prison happened. Yeah, not for that specific guy, but I mean,

• 26:56Speaker 05

  I don't remember what happened to Defense Distributed. I don't think we've had. Yeah, I don't think we've had a case that was litigated to final judgment about.

• 27:06Speaker 05

  The legality of shape files. I mean, the legality of the gun itself is pretty established.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:11Speaker 05

  But that's good. Shape files. And, and look, I just, I do think that making geometry illegal is dumb.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:17Speaker 05

  I, I, you know, as a like, a person who would throw all the guns into the sea or whatever.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 05

  Right. I still think making geometry illegal is dumb.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  And also, yeah, at that point, you can't build things.

• 27:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. You can't 3D print at all.

• 27:30Speaker 05

  And also impractical, right? Because like, what are you actually going to do? Because there are so many ways to express a file that will be that shape because STLs can express logic, right? They can be parametric. So you can, like, for example, you can have a shape file for a key.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:48Speaker 05

  Like a door key. And there are variables you can set in the shape file for where you want the teeth and how deep they're going to go.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:56Speaker 05

  So it's, it's a, it is a programmable piece of descriptive code, right?

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Right, yeah.

• 28:03Speaker 05

  And so there are like an infinitude of ways you could write a program in the STL description language that would, that would emit the illegal geometry. So how do you police the illegal geometry?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  You can't.

• 28:18Speaker 05

  You know, it just, it just feels like if it's, it's one thing to make a law that says something is illegal. It's another thing to make a law. And even if that thing is bad and you want to extinguish it, but if you have no way to administer that law, you are setting yourself up either for heartbreak or for something really bad where you just run around and you accuse everyone of having broken the law because no one can ever tell who's broken the law and who hasn't. Like, administrability is the single most important factor in policy design because

• 28:45Speaker 02

  And just administrability means being able to do something.

• 28:48Speaker 05

  Can you administer it?

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 28:49Speaker 05

  Can you figure out whether someone's violated it? Right? So to bring this to the internet, there are a lot of people who are very angry, and I think rightfully so, about harassment and hate speech on the platforms.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:58Speaker 05

  But a hate speech regime is very hard to police because you have a common definition of hate speech. You have to evaluate whether a given piece of speech rises to the definition. You have to make a technical determination about whether the firm took reasonable technical steps to address the hate speech. And, you know, this is, um, An offense that occurs on the platform 100 times a minute, but it's a question that takes five years to adjudicate.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 05

  So this, it's just not a good, you know, there are other fact intensive regimes in law, like, like probate law, right? But it's fine because the average person dies one or fewer times. And so the fact that it takes a minute to figure out what to do when they die, not a big deal.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Come build different.

• 29:38Speaker 05

  He never died.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  Say he will never die. I want to die three times.

• 29:41Speaker 05

  But you know, you could imagine another regime where like, if you, I don't know if you're a Mastodon user, but in.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  No.

• 29:46Speaker 05

  No. So in Mastodon, there's this feature, it's a beautiful piece of design where if you want to go from one Mastodon server to another, because you can access Mastodon from a lot of different servers run by lots of different people, you click a link and it exports all of your data about who you were following and who was following you. And then you click another link on the new server and it imports it and then just all that stuff moves over. So we could say to Elon Musk, like, yeah, we're still going to have some standards for hate speech and whatever, or we're going to worry about whether your, your chatbot is shitting out child pornography. But it, at the same time, what we're going to do is create, is create a mandate that you give people the data they need, that if they leave Twitter and go to another server, they can still talk to the people they left behind on Twitter.

• 30:29Speaker 05

  Because that way, if you don't like the way you're being treated on Twitter, you can leave one second later. And then this is very easy to administer because say, you know, you're running the server and I leave the server and I, and I don't get my file from you. I go to the regulator and, and the regulator comes to you and says, look, I know you told me that you gave Corey his file. He says you didn't give it to him. I don't care who's right or who's wrong. Give it to me and I'll give it to him.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:54Speaker 05

  And then you just resolve the whole question. So you could have like one person administering this policy for a billion users. And then they could all just leave the platforms where they're being abused without having to pay a high switching cost by exiting a community that means something to them.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:08Speaker 05

  Customers or audience members or family members or people who have the same rare diseases them that they're in a support group with, they could continue to talk with those people.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:17Speaker 05

  So this is a very administrable remedy. It's much, it's much more streamlined. It actually solves a great deal of the problem. It's not as good as eliminating hate speech, but I don't think you can.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  I just, I feel like with some of these platforms, I'm not talking about Blue Sky, but the original, the original Twitter problems of like slurs, for example, and it's like you can't unilaterally ban them.

• 31:42Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Other than the fact you could kind of lean that way, I feel like you could be like, you will have to have a little more nuance than that, you will have to, but I feel like starting from there and working back, I'm sure you'll push back on this, is just, they usually go the other way. It's like, well, let people do everything will work out later. I just feel like it's just a half-assed attitude. I run those better offline Reddit with a dread hand.

• 32:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  In the sense, but I think-

• 32:05Speaker 04

  The iron law of the mods is a beautiful thing.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  But the smaller communities you could do that with, but a large social network you can't.

• 32:10Speaker 05

  And you understand the context, right? Like the understanding the difference between, and then I called him this slur and made him really sad, ha, ha, ha. And then I got called this slur and I was sad, please come and give me comfort, requires a lot of context knowledge. And, and you know, oftentimes the people using the slurs are like, that's their hobby and they're really good at, you know, working the ref. And so what, it's much more common that they're figuring out how to use the slur in a way that doesn't get them kicked off and getting the people they're using the slur against kicked off for complaining about it.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the classic one being like reporting people for death threats, but it's, it's friends being like, I'mma kill you, man. I'mma kill, that's not the classic, like I, I don't know how social networks still fall for this shit, but it's like they will be the, the people doing lighthearted stuff that get banned and then the people with the 14 words and saying 88 gets, get to keep around. I-

• 33:06Speaker 04

  I'm boosted.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  I really, I am excited to see though, how the world reacts to Twitter becoming the CSAM generator, because if Keir Starmer fucking bans X, that'd be the funniest thing I've seen in my fucking, he won't do it.

• 33:20Speaker 05

  That man doesn't have a spine.

• 33:22Speaker 04

  Have you been seeing, this came up on my feed today that the right and the left in the UK are having dueling protests about who hates Keir Starmer more.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. That's, that is, you know what?

• 33:36Speaker 04

  Finally brought together.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  That's the most British thing I've ever heard. We all know we don't agree about who's human.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  Protest is called, we know, we hate Keir Starmer more than you.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  That's so British. That's the most British thing I've ever heard in my life. Like, no. And then someone's gonna have a protest saying that we shouldn't have a protest about anything. That we need like at least four more protests. It's the fucking bit for the people's front of Judea from Life of Brian. I, I love that. I don't love Keir Starmer, not gonna lie. Doesn't seem to, it, I didn't know that we could get a Conservative, Labour, Conservative, just a guy who's like, no one's happy. He doesn't really have policies.

• 34:16Speaker 05

  He has the lowest approval ratings of any Prime Minister since measurement began. He has a lower approval rating than Boris Johnson during the pandemic after it was discovered that he was having parties while everyone else was locked down, not able to go to their grandmother's funerals.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  We found the least popular.

• 34:33Speaker 05

  And Rachel Reeves is even less popular than he is.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  What about, what about Theresa May?

• 34:39Speaker 05

  Less popular than Theresa May? Less popular than Liz Truss?

• 34:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was just about to ask.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  Who is lettuce?

• 34:44Speaker 02

  Oh my fucking god. I'm gonna say, I hate the lettuce thing. I hate the lettuce thing so much. It's the most boring, corny, wanky, quirk-chungus bullshit from the UK. We're a country where we used to have, when Spitting Image used to have teeth and it wasn't just like poop and bug, doing homo, homo, like that's actually, that really bothered me. I heard of a Spitting Image thing the other day, which is this puppet show in England where they do like political stuff and all it is now is just like outright homophobia. It's just like, what if, what if Trump was gay? What if, what if Trump did something to beat us? Fucking lame ass pieces of shit.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  We're a long way from the land of confusion video.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it, oh god. But it's, I can't believe Keir Starmer's that unpopular though, but actually I can, the only thing that Labour does reliably is produce people that are less popular than the Conservative there. Cause it's just like, well, Conservatives are superb, we'll give a Labour party in. And they're like, right.

• 35:38Speaker 04

  Historic fumble.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  Historic fumble. Every fucking, when you watch like Gordon Brown and you're like, god, I miss him. You know things.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  They should have let my boy Corbyn win it.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. Jeremy Corbyn.

• 35:50Speaker 05

  He is also screwing up very badly. What's interesting, you know.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Party of his.

• 35:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, with.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Oh, what the fuck is?

• 35:56Speaker 05

  What, you know, the Greens are circling. So after World War Two.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 36:01Speaker 05

  There was a, there was a reboot of British politics. The Liberal Party collapsed. So a party that had been around forever, the Whigs, just ceased to exist. Labor came into existence. That was happening to the Conservatives as of the last election and the Reform Party were about to basically scoop up all the Conservative voters who didn't like the way that the party was being run. But it looks like it's also happening to Labor.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 05

  And there is, there are two potential places where the left is going to go. The Greens have not been great historically. They've had a lot of bad policies. They were into homeopathy for a while, whatever. But they have got a terrific new leader, Zach Polanski, who is basically young charismatic Corbyn.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 36:40Speaker 05

  And, and Corbyn himself is not charismatic Corbyn.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  And her husband.

• 36:45Speaker 05

  And just very bad at organizing and Polanski is an organizer. It's, I'm very bullish on the British Greens.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  That'd be nice. I mean, we did lose Scott Galloway. Sorry, we've got, they sent Scott Galloway there, I mean. Like they sent Scott Galloway to England, I thought, or maybe he moved from England to Florida. I can't remember which direction they sent that.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  He came to Florida.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's okay. By the way, just want to, just a completely blunt statement. If you move from England to Florida.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  They should put you on a list.

• 37:16Speaker 05

  I know what you are.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  As a Floridian, we have a very long tradition of accepting the garbage of the world and making it our own.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  It's like the Staten Island to Florida thing, except it's not just because you're old and hate everyone. It's because you're horny in a new way they haven't quite identified yet.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  But we welcome you.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Check that out. Yeah. The male loneliness crisis is solved in Palm Beach, Florida, isn't it?

• 37:41Speaker 03

  No, it's Ebor City.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  Is it? What's that?

• 37:44Speaker 03

  Because even Tampa has a place they need to make mistakes.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  I thought that that was just Tampa.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  No, even Tampa has a place to go, to go make life errors.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  And that is Ebor City.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Oh, God. Yeah, I'm, and as we look into this year, I got to admit, I realize things are quite bad. And things are going to get a lot more chaotic, but I think the chaos is necessary. Coming out of this week. All I can feel in my gut is like destruction from this show, not literally, but this feels like a reckoning of like, and Corey, you'll have some good historical knowledge of like 20 years of hubris in the tech industry of moving away from, we made a thing that people could use towards, actually, random question, Corey, you ever read The Case for the Fat Startup?

• 38:34Speaker 05

  No.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  By Ben Horowitz? It was a piece he wrote actually before Software is Eating the World.

• 38:39Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  The Horowitz even. It was basically saying the worst thing hell was having a startup that was not the leader in the market.

• 38:47Speaker 05

  Oh, I know this, this, I've not read the paper, but I've heard it described.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  It's just, it's a, it's a guy, one of the Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz, early on 2010, I think. And I think ever since then, we have been leading to this point where you chase out the companies that are like, okay, we'll build something cool and we'll compete in a market. And you chase them out in favor of companies like, we will win the market, even if it means changing the market materially, even if it means using means such as monopolistic tendencies, or just race to the bottom, or using funding to chase people out, Uber, to your point, Ed. And I think what we're seeing this CES is what happens when you just chase growth, because the thing about all these companies is, yeah, you can judge them

• 39:35Speaker 02

  and you should judge them and they fucking suck. And I think all of these LLM rappers deserve to go in the trash along with their founders. But at the same time, it's like Scorpion the Frog, it's when you incentivize bringing things to a show that do not exist, when you give them awards, when you write them up and act like they're real, year after year, regardless of whether the fucking thing actually exists, of course, you're going to get a CES predominantly made of things that don't. And the things that exist only to get invested in, from the normie people who came here, like Chloe Radcliffe, to the extreme technical people like Corey, it's the same thing of like, this is just a company that's here to jingle the keys in front of the investors or the, not even the buyers,

• 40:16Speaker 02

  just investors, invest in me and, or in front of the press. And I think in this next year, we're going to see what happens when you do that everywhere. And we're going to see the collapse of these AI startups that never had a point and were never built for anything other than selling to someone else or dumping onto the public markets. Except none of them can chase that, all the smart people, in favor of people who can't count.

• 40:40Speaker 05

  So I think if you want to identify something over 20 years that's monotonically increased, it's the way that incumbents are able to block new market entry. Mm hmm. So, you know, historically, if you're going to make something new, you would make it work with the thing that already existed. Right. Canonical example, like when we opened up AT&T after the breakup in 1982. Yeah. The modem just plugged into their shit, right? You didn't need to make a phone network. You just needed to make a modem. Right. And that, everything exploded. Right. And that happened, right? It's sometimes called permissionless innovation. Sometimes it's called disruption. All, both of those terms have got into bad odor.

• 41:20Speaker 05

  But, you know, this idea that you don't create a market de novo, you raid the high margin lines of sclerotic, you know, legacy companies that are dominating the market. And you, you, you know, this is what Jeff Bezos said to the publishers when he launched Amazon infamously. He went to a boardroom full of publishers and he said, your margin is my opportunity. Right? So you take those high margins, you make them your opportunity. And so when AT&T gets broken up and they lose the ability to control what you plug into the phone jack, we see modems, we see an explosion of answering machines, PBX, it's just all this stuff that is just like built, layered on top of the existing stuff. But you can't do that anymore. You know, when Facebook launched, they had this problem that everyone who could have

• 42:05Speaker 05

  used Facebook had a MySpace account. And so he gave, you know, Zuck gave everyone who had a MySpace account a bot that you fed your MySpace credentials to, and it would go to MySpace several times a day and impersonate you, scrape everything waiting for you and put it in your Facebook feed. I didn't know about that. And you could reply to it, right? So you didn't have to choose between your friends and a superior service. Facebook's initial pitch was, we're like MySpace, but we're not run by an evil billionaire and we never spy on you. Thank God. Yeah. And, and Thank God. And so you could have this, you could eat your cake and have it too. And, you know, you do this to Facebook, they will nuke you till you glow. It's not technically challenging and it's not hard to think of cool things to do. So, you know, 2024, there was a startup from two teenagers called OG App.

• 42:50Speaker 05

  Say almost the same thing. You gave it your Insta credentials. It logged in as you. It grabbed everything Insta had waiting for you. It discarded all the suggestions, all the ads, all the recommendations, all the boosted content and all the clickbait and showed you things from people you followed from, uh, in reverse chronological order.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:07Speaker 05

  And Oh, the Facebook I want. Yeah. And that day it hit the top 10 of both app markets and that night Meta sent a takedown notice to Apple and Google and they removed it.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Nice. And that's, that's, they won't remove X though.

• 43:21Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  No, but that's, no, but that's

• 43:23Speaker 05

  There's honor, there's honor among thieves.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 43:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. No, no. These guys are not really competitors. They all sat behind Donald Trump on the dais.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  But that's the thing though. The egregious version of that is large language models. Hear me out. So none of these companies can be run on cash flow. I know I'm doing the bit, but you can't compete with OpenAI. You can't compete with Anthropic. You can't because to train these models requires the at best millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars and access to infrastructure. At a scale, why I mean, if you want to compete with them, you need hundreds of millions of dollars and you need the talent.

• 44:00Speaker 05

  They have a big capital moat.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Well, the capital moat, but also the talent moat.

• 44:03Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  And the RSU moat. They can just offer stock. So it's impossible to enter there, but even as an AI startup, you can't compete with the venture capital industry. There is no scrappy AI startup.

• 44:15Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  You can say, oh, well, we've, you know, we scraped by with how much hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 44:20Speaker 05

  I think you're right. I think AI has got formal characteristics that make it attractive to VC. And one of them is that it looks like it tends towards a winner take all market, which is a thing VC is very, obviously love. This is, you know, zero to one, all of those, all the VC nonsense. I think the other one is that, um, the jobs that they think AI will take are, are, uh, capital P professional jobs in the sense that a professional is someone, yeah, a professional is someone who is, uh, bound to a code of ethics that not only permits them, but requires them to tell their boss to fuck off if their boss asks them to do something that's not moral. And so you have this whole class of people, teachers, nurses, rad techs, you know, whatever, who are like obliged to say fuck off to their bosses and

• 45:06Speaker 05

  No wonder they're having such an easy time selling this otherwise vaporous technology because bosses have been furiously fantasizing about firing everyone who's allowed to tell them to fuck off since the idea of a profession emerged. And so, you know, you have all these different formal characteristics, the winner take all dynamic, the we fire all the people who get to tell us to fuck off dynamic, you know, like it's, it's very exciting.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  And the fight to maintain the codes of ethics. It also often teaching students that this is why I demand this of them and why they should demand it.

• 45:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  For themselves may often be the first time they've ever heard of the concept of a code of ethics, which is depressing, but also it warms my heart for I get to be the person who teaches you to care about yourself.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  The thing is though, I also think there's something quite simple, which is all of that's true. And none of these people know what their people actually do. Like the people they want to fire, the people they want to fire, they truly do not understand what it is they do. Like I'm going to choose like a random public business insider. All of the layoffs they did there. And it's like, oh, we'll replace them with AI. Well, we won't. That didn't work, but you know, we're gonna, we're gonna say we're AI first. What does that mean? Um, well, I can't really, stop asking so many fucking questions, you asshole.

• 46:39Speaker 01

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• 47:07Ed Zitron?

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• 47:51Ed 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.

• 48:07Speaker 07

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• 48:38Speaker 08

  She'd throw things, wander and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard, but then we found out she had agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult. So we asked her doctor for more help.

• 48:58Speaker 09

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• 49:32Speaker 08

  I'm glad I asked for help.

• 49:35Speaker 09

  Ask your loved one's doctor about Rexulti.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  Everyone around here talk about worker replacement and that I feel this is the thing that actually drives me the craziest all the time. It's the people like, yeah, worker replacement, worker replacement. Have you fucking used one of them? They don't work. They just don't work. They don't work. Occasionally I'll see someone on Twitter be like, my, my wife, who's a special doctor at the most genius hospital, New York City, she put in a thing and it came up with a differential diagnosis that usually, and it's just fuck off, you fucking lying sack of shit. And it's, but everyone I've been talking to this week outside of the, this room, of course, who talks about worker replacements, like, yeah, and you know, of course, right now it's replacing workers.

• 50:23Speaker 05

  Well, I think you need to differentiate between the AI can do your job and an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you, replace you with AI that can't do your job.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  That's the point. That's exactly it. It's like the, it's almost like they, they, actually no, that's it. They finally created an economy where you've cut out like efficacy or like what a thing does to just like, finally we created a thing for salespeople to sell to CEOs. No one knows what's going on with the actual product or whether it works, whether it's good or bad. Just like the vibes, baby.

• 50:58Speaker 04

  But then also there are, there are bosses who could give less of a fuck about whether it works or not. They know that what their headcount reduction for the year has to be. And they're just gonna be like, well, hey, you know what I can do?

• 51:10Speaker 02

  This is a good excuse.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  I can do this.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  You know, Microsoft, for example, aren't they, they're like rumored to be doing a massive layoffs again and they keep doing layoffs every single year. Why they do them? They just fuck them up.

• 51:21Speaker 05

  Because they can.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  Well, actually, Microsoft, I think, has genuine brain madness, though, because I talk to people that I have a ton of my, if you work for Microsoft, always reach out, easy at betteroffline.com, ezitron.76 and signal. It's funny, every time I hear from them, I never hear from anyone who's like, I fucking love this. AI is actually huge. It's always people being like, my product manager, who does not appear to do any work, has told me that AI and Copilot must be used. And it's ju- it's people, again, senior people too, being like, I don't know what the fuck is going on. Jay Perig, who's over at Microsoft, real loser guy, went from a company called MoveWorks, which was famous for buying thirty thousand dollars worth of Lululemon gift cards to give to people to buy their software, went to Meta, then went to Microsoft to

• 52:05Speaker 02

  run AI. It's just like, there are these business idiots who bounce around and just go, AI, baby, we're here, it's time. And then the sales team goes out, tries to sell it, and they're like, yeah, it turns out that people want something that works, that actually does the job. And you keep saying it's digital labor, but, but that, it don't do, don't do that at all. And it gets back to the point I was making. It's like, we're at the natural endpoint when you start removing the product from the sale.

• 52:31Speaker 05

  Sure. I have a bit of Lululemon trivia for you.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Oh, by all means.

• 52:34Speaker 05

  The guy who founded Lululemon, giant piece of shit, Ayn Rand, worshiping libertarian edgelord.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 52:40Speaker 05

  The reason he called it Lululemon, he thought it would be fun to hear Japanese tourists in Vancouver try and say Lululemon. So he picked a word with as many L's in it as possible.

• 52:49Speaker 02

  I fucking hate that so much.

• 52:51Speaker 05

  He also had a no fact checks policy for quite some time. It's like, no, we don't do plus sizes.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  No fact checks policy, huh?

• 52:58Speaker 05

  No fact checks.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  What is this platformer, the newsletter?

• 53:00Speaker 03

  No, not fact, not fact checks.

• 53:03Speaker 05

  Not fact checks, fat chicks.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Oh, my bad. Yes. I'd say I really misheard that one. It's usually, usually the other way around. I'll say something in an Amer- sorry, Canadian, won't understand.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  Would you like to go to the pawn store?

• 53:16Speaker 02

  No, we're not talking about P A W N stars. I would, I'm serious. If I could get Chumley from that show on this.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  You'd have to get him out of prison.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  Is he in jail?

• 53:27Speaker 03

  He may have had a teensy bit of a CCM problem.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Ma, I mean, I hate to say it, but look at him, then listen to how he talks.

• 53:35Speaker 04

  He'll fix it.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  And look, yeah, yeah, Jimmy.

• 53:39Speaker 03

  Jingle, jingle.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, none of that. Yeah, it's gonna be an interesting year because I just think it's a reckoning of every, like the 20 years of dumb fuck decisions, the Iraq war, DHS, and then the venture capital era. I think the venture capital era is coming to an end. I'm not saying VC will go away, but I don't think people.

• 54:00Speaker 04

  But Ed, A16Z just raised their biggest fund and to get their return, they're gonna make the tech industry multiples larger.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  The funniest thing I saw, though, was someone posting about, wow, look how great Andreessen is. Look at these vintages and they stop at 2017. It's just like, ah, yeah, look how good this is. And as we, as we all know, time stopped.

• 54:21Speaker 04

  Listen, I believe in Conehead. I think he can do anything. He sets that point, too.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  That's the thing, like, even he can be wrong. And the whole thing, the whole reason that VCs like that have done well is not because of them being geniuses. It's because when the really obvious things that will obviously sell, they just go to them first. They just go and.

• 54:40Speaker 04

  Or at a later round.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  Or, yeah, they, they will always know that they can get in there and that company will help.

• 54:46Speaker 04

  That's a big thing of theirs is that, you know, if you fuck up and you don't get in on the winner, then get in on the winner on the, on the next round and crowd everyone out.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  Yep. And the thing is, though, venture capital's running out of money. $15 billion go to Andreessen Horowitz. That's gonna drain it from all the other people that need it. The other thing is, is who the fuck they gonna sell these startups to, Aquaman? Like, what's going on?

• 55:07Speaker 05

  See, I think there's so much money to be made out there if, if we can unlock the, the silos, right? So like, just think about some of those fast adopted technologies in the history of the world, like the VCR, right? People love home recording. We don't have VCRs anymore because it's illegal to break DRM. So it's still legal to record shows. It's just every show that arrives in your house either arrives by streaming cable or satellite. They're all encrypted. It's against the law to break the encryption because of the DMCA. The recording is legal. The breaking the encryption to do the recording isn't.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  Lot of TiVo.

• 55:37Speaker 05

  Who, who would not? Like, I think you could sell every person in America a PVR for streaming.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  What, just like recording?

• 55:45Speaker 05

  Recording the stuff you watch.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 55:48Speaker 05

  So, you know, everyone's like, oh, I hate streaming because they take away the shows I love. You should just record them. You should just record them the way you did off your television. It is legal in exactly the same way it was legal to record it off your TV.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  I think this company called PlayOn I worked with like 15 years ago, so it's okay. Like, I can just, I can say that does that. They seem to exist.

• 56:07Speaker 05

  Were they using the analog outputs?

• 56:09Speaker 02

  I've got no idea.

• 56:09Speaker 05

  So, you're now seeing downsampling on the, there's a thing called selectable output control that we fought really hard in cable card and lost on, where they downsample the analog outputs. And so the analog outputs are just garbage. So what you record off of it is like a postage stamp. And so, you know, that was like, there were, Elgato did this for a long time. There were a bunch of companies that had analog stuff. There's actually a name for what they wanted to do about this. They called it plugging the analog hole. Which is like, the people who pride themselves in their ability to communicate with the public, coming up with, we will now plug everyone's analog holes, was just a moment of just incredible.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 56:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. And I, I, I wrote something about it that got translated to German. I learned my most useful German

• 57:01Speaker 05

  phrase, which is plugging the analog hole in German, which is das analoge Loch stopfen. And so now if I ever need, I can order tap water, I can ask if there are any hotel rooms and I can tell you I want to plug your analog hole in German. That's my German vocabulary.

• 57:15Speaker 02

  A very common German conversation.

• 57:17Speaker 03

  Sex clubs all the time.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  I, I just think, I'm.

• 57:21Speaker 05

  Wo ist die uns uns?

• 57:24Speaker 02

  Where is uns a Kit Kat?

• 57:28Speaker 02

  Oh my God. We're gonna, and I just think entering this year, I'm just, I'm excited for it because I live in cash. But it's, I will say, every day I keep seeing people increasingly more frantic about this market and about VC. And also, we can't sell any AI companies. No one's buying them. They have to do these weird like deals where it's like, yeah, we're not hiring you, we're signing a license and we're not gonna pay all the people off. We're gonna pay the top brass off who will then join our company. The IP, yeah, we're gonna license it. We don't really care. We're just getting the talent.

• 58:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's just aqua hire. Yes.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  But the thing is, aqua hires were traditionally, I don't know, I'm old enough to remember back in like 2013, when an aqua hire was you losing.

• 58:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  Well, it was like when you.

• 58:15Speaker 05

  Sort of. I mean, there were a lot of startups that were effectively just like, um, there were a lot of VCs who said, really what I am is a headhunter and I go out and I get a bunch of promising people, maybe people who are already working at big tech. I give them some money to build what amounts to a postgraduate project. And then, uh, they get hired back at either their former employer or a new employer. And they get a hiring bonus in the form of, uh, their stock being bought by the company. I get a finder's fee in the form of my stock being bought by the company. It's just the shittiest way to run an executive recruiting. But the thing is.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  And the company gets the patent.

• 58:47Speaker 02

  But the thing is though, that's not even happening anymore because there are no patents.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  No, you can't patent prompt engineering.

• 58:54Speaker 03

  It's true.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  Like you can't patent the fuck it because that's all it is.

• 58:57Speaker 05

  I haven't looked into it. So the USPTO is not issuing a ton of

• 59:00Speaker 02

  Nah, it's very.

• 59:01Speaker 05

  Bullshitty AI patents.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  Also, they damaged deeply the USPTO with, uh, Doge.

• 59:08Speaker 05

  Oh, that's funny.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  And it's also just, you can't, I don't think you can patent. Yeah, I mean, maybe you can try, but I haven't seen people patenting prompts.

• 59:16Speaker 05

  Well, the USPTO has historically been very bad about granting bullshit patents. Uh, you know, we, we fought and killed a patent that effectively would have allowed one company to control all podcasting. So like the reason this podcast is on the air is that we, um, we, we, we killed this patent. Uh, the Trump admin is now moving to make it harder to get patent reexamination. So if a bullshit patent issues, it's harder to challenge the patent. So I think we're going to see a lot more garbagey patents, more patent trolling. There's a town in East Texas.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:48Speaker 05

  Where they have a made judge and all of the, yeah, all the, all the patent cases go there to die. There's like 700 companies that are headquartered in like one dusty building and it's just a bunch of mailboxes with, you know, brass keys. Uh, and then all the big companies that get sued by patent trolls, try to sweeten the jury by putting money into public work. So Samsung built them a year round outdoor ice skating rink in. Uh, I think it's West Texas in like, it's 115 degrees in the summer and they have a year-round outdoor ice skating rink that Samsung pays for.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  This is like a capitalist libertarian paradise. This is just like, what if actually like, this is the world that the libertarians think that they could build, but you'll never beat Samsung.

• 1:00:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Samsung, Samsung will fuck you up big time. All right. I think we're gonna wrap this up. It has been such a wonderful show. It's been fun. It's been really great. Enjoyed having all of you here. Thank you, Corey, for making the trip out.

• 1:00:45Speaker 05

  Thanks, Ed. Thanks, Phil.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Matt Osowski, our incredible producer, Mr. Unguoso Jr. Thank you for joining me once more. Thank you for having me. Mr. Philip Broughton, thank you so much. I do my thing. Thank you for bartending and thank you for everyone who came through these doors and thank you to the incredible listeners who've stuck with us. One incredible show. We have done incredibly well. We have, it's a great show. We will be back next week with Mr. Stephen Burke of Gamers Nexus. Gonna have a post-show with him. Sadly, not in person. It'll be, it will be remote. I can speak flawlessly. Please subscribe to my newsletter and of course, in dedication to Sean Paul Adams, we will have a link to the Pediatric

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  Epilepsy Research Consortium. Remembered that for the first time in the show notes. Thank you all. It's been incredible. Later. Bye-bye.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:02:18Speaker 10

  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.

• 1:02:51Speaker 07

  Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

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• 1:03:52Speaker 11

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• 1:04:48Speaker 12

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• 1:04:52Speaker 07

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