A Zone Media.
Welcome to the Better Offline after party epilogue from CS. It is like eleven am on the Saturday. We are I actually slip 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, mister Philip Broughton. Hello, this is our bartender for the week. Phil, You've been 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 and they come sit down. It's got the big daddy bedroom where I sleep, where I just kind of like sleep or like talk to myself.
Roll around the lot, I roll around on the floor.
But then in the main room we have the bar that Phil is set up and during the recordings, Phil will come in and ferry and usually a diet coke or a little thing of stool just close to mens cow. Jesus crist my voice just broke down, I'm of course, said Zi Tromp. 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. You wouldn't know what to hear it, but he's been an incredible bartender.
I finally learned how to not walk into things after last year.
You were pretty good. You give yourself more credit to our left. Of course is mister Corey, doctor, activist, author, journalist. Hello, and of course mister Edward and Grayso Junior, Hello, my friends, my man, another year another day. Ye yeah, oh yeah,
I should really have my book written by next year. No, it's we were just talking about games and relaxing after it, 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 oh yeah, Junior and I got to go out to scheming twelve oh one.
Am is the plan. We're gonna We're gonna go really crazy.
I've got I feel like I gave me a just together people from different walks of life to party with you tonight.
I did see there's Avengers Doomsday.
Now they're doing three hour, forty five minute one and they got they got the X Men in it and the real just ty jangling.
Yeah, it's either gonna be okay or horrible.
Yeah, it's going to be amazing in the sense that, like Patrick Stewart, if Patrick Stewart does just does X Men ship, I'm fine. But yeah, this is this is what happens at the end of CESR. Brains are reduced to a fine simmer.
You're gonna do a courtesy sniff on me for Doomsday, aren't you.
I'm going to if I managed to watch that fucking movie, I will actually.
Courtesy sniff at me for the Avatar three Way fire and ass right now, I've not seen any of the Avatar.
Let's got a Pandora if it was.
Literally watch it.
It's got a Pandora.
But no, the history of the suite is such that Phil has been so when we first do This Week Phil fifteen, twenty fifteen, we would have it. It was from a PR firm. We'd all sit around, we'd have the journalists without 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 cees and then then COVID happened.
We people were already scared of COVID at.
C well, people were just sick, like people were ambient. I was sick.
I was getting a lot of questions about is this okay? And I went well.
Well.
The other part of the worry is parts of China had already locked down at that point on January, so there were missing parts of the show which were starting people to worry about are we okay here?
I was also just like I got I a 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 massed up immediately just to just I have my big I put my Bain 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. Yeah, m hmm.
And we were already scheming for twenty twenty seven. We've We've got Vice president JD.
Vansner. I'm good and good. Do you even say please? Do you even say please?
No?
I it's this year. The lesson I've learned is that I could use a slug. 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 I have physics degrees, but I can't keep up that is what you need to do for a show.
Also, neither could I. I was kind of putting it together as you went. But Corey, yes, this is your first CS in what twenty.
Twenty, so it's two thousand and three, so twenty three years held Discordia.
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 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 fulln animeter microscope and.
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 hall where you know, Chinese designers have taken a standard board that is for a point and shoot camera and come up with seventy five form factors for it, and like seventy three of them are garbage and two of them are just really pretty. They looked like something you know, you'd have gotten out of a
mid century designer or something. You know, it's very striking. If you saw it in moment, you go, well, yeah, I get why. That's a classic.
Yeah yeah, I and I kind of you stopped at one point in a wall of plugs as well.
Yeah, that was no, it was that warmed my heart. That's my friend, Matt.
No.
It was just like a wall.
Of like data set level plugs with the ones that you'd usually put in the back of the computer.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I think that that's the the unseen magic of CS is the well, we can complain about a lot of things, there are still little companies doing with little shit the side.
Well, this is like what I was saying about the British charger adapter, the collapsible charger yah 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 so much of your quality of life is in that stuff. And you know, there's 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.
Steer book, a Steer book aimed at designers, saying stop sacrificing functionality for aesthetics, 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, twenty five years later you wrote another book called Emotional Design, where he's 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 working.
Just when you say a troubleshooter, exactly do you mame?
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. Yeah, the plug doesn't work. The latch doesn't work, something closes, something's broken, the app closes that you get a weird cryptic timeout bug, you know, all kinds of thing.
I'm the last Tumbler 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 MO to 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, 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 troubleshooting thing. Yeah, And we all do this all day long with everything we use. And it's not just gnarly Linux shit. It's like my LG not electric stovetop, my induction stovetop.
Exactly like the beginning of my book Why Everything Stopped Working, coming out next year. It's I think I count to one hundred and thirty one within the space of a day of just shit that went wrong. Aha, Things like I went on Reddit to try and look at someone, but when I went to click it, the entire things stopped responding to touch sure, or the many, the many times that just my email just decides to reset itself or Google Calendars lock me out of sorry, not just
gone like, yeah, I might look in again. And the funniest one, by the way, I don't know any has this happened to you? Have you logged into Google Calendar as in like and it said log in place, you look in and then you go to it and it looks you out again.
Yes, I had contysfunction instantly. Well, you don't use Google.
I know, I use g kel because I have to share a calendar with a bunch of heterogeny environments. But the point being that everyone's a troubleshooter all the time. Yeah, And if you're angry and frustrated and you're just like, you know you've got the incipient aneurysm throbbing in your temple. Yeah, 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, Yeah, 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? Yes? 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, you go taste this, What does it need?
Oh? Yeah, I know, maybe try a little salt. Yeah, right.
But like if you're in a pan and you've got ten people traveling what have you, 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, and when you're happy, you're a better troubleshooter. And so for things to work well, they have to be beautiful.
I love that because I lit my eyes immediately as you said that. Drill to the road Coster pro too. And I will definitely say there is a level of like you look at it, you go, damn, I'll make production me, mister broadcast.
And it sounds silly, but yeah, it does kind of make you.
You kind of feel that you feel like a professional, you feel like and so when shit's going well, you kind of look at it and go, no, But I'm a professional. I'm doing cool shit, and I know it sounds silly, but every quote Calm mcgloughlin and twin Peaks, every day give yourself a little present, which sometimes means setting things up to make yourself feel a little bit.
I love things that are quietly functional in my daily life, so I travel a lot. So I found a cable bag that I keep on my cables in and it sits flat when you open it instead of tipping over.
And I get you can just leave it on a table and it just sits open. Lovely, 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 for someone made it into a cable bag that reminds me so good.
That reminds me of another one exactly like that, which is a company called Packed Pakt.
I love them.
They have a slightly dodgy design in this bag, but still it's a one that's slide It's a regular bag that slips over your your suitcase, which, by the way, is the worst part of it because if you pack it too much, it's 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 a you're on a Southwest flight like 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. Again, this sounds very minor, sure, this is the ability to just take a gander in there and PLoP it back in is immense.
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 that works perfectly well.
You you know, like I, I'm the kind of person who's on the road like one hundred and hundred and fifty days a year, and I have a fully set up travel package, you know, with the duplicates of everything I need to travel with and whatever, and when you when you dial it all in perfectly, and the bag is great and 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, and a number of times I've been able to like eat food in a hotel room without having to use the shitty plastic fork.
Oh that's bloody good. I should get some I should get some cutlery that.
Yeah, this, yeah, this is the thing like it 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. 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 it. They need to start thinking that way with this show. I'd love like battery Isle, I'd love it. I'd love Batteryville.
That would be a problem with the fire Marshal.
You would have to yes, yeah, you space map on a plasma. Note.
I have not had to call the fire marcial this year.
You haven't had to call them in years. You didn't call them last year.
I didn't call them last year either, and for the previous four years I didn't because we weren't here.
Yes, yes, every year.
Yeah, yeah, there was that prolonged period where it's like, hey, Phil, we found a completely functional laser on that and you're like which kind and they were like, well.
MRI, the MRI in the middle of the electronics show the worst.
I think, that's how the fuck did they even get that in.
Because I never told anyone and then rolled it onto the floor in good time.
Yeah, the perfect crime.
You know, unlicensed medical use on random passers bybe and destroying of adjacent electronics.
And it's a long tradition, right, the World's Fairy used to be able to go and have your feet fluoroscoped, and the shoe sales.
You didn't have to wear the World's Fair.
We just went to your local market. Quick question, what's a florist scoop? It's an X ray, so you used.
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.
And then you can say, look how good your kid's foot fits in there.
Not for a brief exposure, right, you leave it running like a radiographically guided injection. You would leave it running for ten twenty seconds and the shoe fitting sales person or longer. Yeah, would be just like continuously bombarded it.
Right watching x ray TV, Phil as an expert in this kind of thing, How bad was that and why 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 shut through your foot to the developing screen towards the lens for your face, so that you could see how good your shoes were instantly.
We still use fluoroscopes. They are medical and they are the majority of the dose that doctors and nurses take.
Getting radiographically guided injection.
They it's so they don't stab you or put the drugs where it shouldn't go.
They are good into your face at joint or whatever that has a person with a lot of medical things. I've had a lot of radiographically guided procedures.
They're useful, but you don't want to use them for bullshit like shoes.
Yeah, Yeah, that's that is some classic human that they were just like, we're going to fit shoes on his X.
Right. If it's 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 floral unit for shoes used to be. Like Jesus, it's one of those they seriously did this. Yeah, yeah, they really.
I'm not surprised anymore when I hit anything like that. I'm I'm honestly, I'm shocked. They haven't had a ghost gun problem here. I'm shocked. Okay, think about it.
With the dad came to the floor in a prior year. Yep, what really three D printing of firearms with oh.
The three D printing. It also came to his name got busted for Yeah, oh god what it's a deep dark industry.
Yeah, you've got you've got the horrifying billionairess who were just talking about the fourteen words, and then you've got the macers.
Printing them on their three D gun.
Yeah.
I mean, this was a guy who heard the phrase hard cases make bad law, and he was like, I've got a hard case. I'll make it because we were trying to figure out like our STL files, you know. So there's this principle in law that we established in nineteen ninety two 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 right, and so prior restraint on the publication of code is unconstitutional.
It was narrowed in another case about the magazine twenty six hundred, but it's still a bedrock principle code of speech. And then it's like, well, our STL file speech, I mean their code right, 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 going to just start with guns because I think Second Amend went 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? Uh that I feel like that's a 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 code's speech on my folk theory about guns and whether Second Amendment weirdos will be able to sway the court. Ah, and it sort of all fell apart because he had sex with a minor.
Right, Yeah, that's the There was.
A previous terrifying trip to Vegas where sit on the floors of the floor of Caesars. We were playing craps. You had wandered off to bed, and I ran into a former student from one of my classes who was so excited to see it was a hit Phil and he was deck to the nines, heavy gold rings, clearly doing way better than I've seen it when he'd been laid off from.
NU me and you're doing what is numi?
Uh the it's now the Tesla plant in Fremont. Formerly it was a cooperative between GM and Toyota that gave birth to Saturn, Right, 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 knew me bad economics, but he was looked like he was doing good. Linked out from green Land, and 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.
So he was a gun.
He reached out into his pocket and said here, I got a fresh one, and just handed me a lower No thanks, and on the floor of the casino, the state.
Uninitiated and through my very low gun knowledge, the loa 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.
And it absolutely serial numbers. And it was which he handed.
Me a fo you were required to put a serial number on a loa. Yeah, I'm saying this because I know sometimes I get the occasional email saying hey, you keep posting things out. The one thing, the one rule Sophie and Robert gave me was to be like, yeah, what's that mean?
Say what this means? Say what this means?
Because of wis no one knows anything, including me, But that's fucking insane.
This person was just Vegas baby.
So as a Canadian, I have a piece of gun lore for everyone. And 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.
If you to avoid this, you just need to know one word modified And if you say he opened fire with his modified whatever walter p PK, no matter what it is, you then make the gun do The person out there who's a you know, amosexual musket fucker is going to be 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 going like, I figured out the cool thing you thought of?
Am I right? It's kind of like this is a very specific reference.
There's a show called Reapa 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. You need a key jingle for the musket fuckers, the homosexual musket fuckers. That's that's a good one, but also that's so far.
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 twenty nine thousand ones, and we'll say like, this guy doesn't know shit, and they will find one fucking line and they'll be like, look on that, and it will be the weirdest, smallest thing. And I'll always be like, so, can you be specific about what this changes? They block me. They block me every time. And actually there was a so there is a beer. This is a random side.
But this make rough lines, LARPers or sickos.
Well, no, this is I got sent very fun one.
So there's this guy on Twitter, real horrible website Buco capital bloke who is like a weirdly popular guy, and he deleted this tweet, but an egleo i'd reader caught it. He said, conflict it because if the AI trade blows up, then take Kim's head explodes, which would be very funny. But then exitual will be right and that would not be funny at all. And I just to be just to be clear, this would be the funniest situation because that guy deleted it and thinks I didn't get it.
Sadly, I got the screen show it's going to be a great it's going to 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 because I don't remember, yeah, I mean it just that, yeah, I mean a specific guy, but I mean.
I don't remember what happened to Defense Distributed. I don't.
Yeah, I don't think we've had a case that was litigated to final judgment about the legality of shape files. I mean the legality of the gun itself is pretty established, right, but that's good shape files and and look, I just I do think that making geometry illegal is dumb. Yes, you know, as a like a person who would throw all the guns into the sea or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, I still think making geometry illegal is dumb.
And also yeah, at that point you can't build things, Yeah, you can't three D print at all.
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, I think it'd be parametric. So you can, like, for example, you can have a shape file for a key, 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. So it's it's a it is a programmable
piece of descriptive code. 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?
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 ques everyone having broken the law, because no one can
ever tell who's broken the law and who hasn't. Like, administerability is the single most important factor in policy design because.
And just administability means being able to do can you administer it? Can you figure out whether someone's violated it? Right?
So to bring this to the internet, are there a lot of people who are very angry and I think rightfully so about harassment and hate speech on the platform. 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 an offense that occurs on the platform one hundred times a minute, but it's a question that takes five years to adjudicate. 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.
But I'm build different. You never say, but I'm going to die three times.
But you know, you could imagine another regime where like if you I don't know, if you're a maskeet on user, but in no so in mastet on, there's this feature.
It's a beautiful piece of design where if you want to go from one masted on server to another, because you can access mast it on from a lot of different services run by lots of different people, you click a link and it exports all of your data about who you were following and who is following you, and then you click another link on the news 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 a hate speech and whatever, or we're going to worry about whether your your chatbot is shitting out child pornography. But 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. 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 don't get my file from you. I go to the regulator, 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 who's wrong.
Give it to me and I'll give it to him right, 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, customers or audience members or family members or people are the same way disease as them that they're in a support group with, they could continue to talk with those people.
Yeah.
So this is a very administrable remedy. 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.
I just I feel like with some of these platforms, I'm not talking about Blue Scyt, but the original the original Twitter problems of like slurs, for example, and it's like you can't unilaterally ban them. Sure, 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 nuanced 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 fss attitude. I run the better offline reddit with a dread hand. Yeah in the sense, but I think the beautiful but the smaller communities you could do that.
With a large social network you can't.
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 uh then I got called the slur and I was sad, please
come and give me comfort. Requires a lot of context knowledge, 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 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 agains kicked off for complaining about it.
Yeah, and the classic one being like reporting people for death threats, but it's it's friends being like I'm gonna kill you man. That's not the classic. Like, 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 fourteen words and saying eighty eight gets get to keep around.
I'm boasted, I really.
I am excited to see though, how the world reacts to Twitter becoming the c SAM generator, because if kiss Starmer fucking bans X, that'd be the funniest thing I've seen in my fucking He won't do it.
It doesn't have a spine.
Have you been seeing this came up on my V today that the right and the left in the UK having dueling protests about who hates Kiers Starmer more.
Oh? Yeah, that that is you know.
What, that's the most That's the most British thing I've ever heard.
We although we don't agree about.
His humor is called we know we hate Kis Starmer more than you, So British.
That's the most British thing I've ever heard in my life. But 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 love that, I don't love kiss Darma. Not gonna lie doesn't seem to it. I didn't know that we could get a conservative, labor conservative, just the guy who's like, no one's happy.
He doesn't really have policies.
Yes, it's again 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 lockdown nine.
He did it for funerals.
We found the least popular, and Rachel Reeves is even less popular than his.
What about there's a May.
Less popular than Theresa May, less popular than Liz Trust.
Yeah, it was just about Oh my fucking goun Now I'm gonna say I hate the Lettus thing.
I hate the Lettus thing so much. It's the most.
Boring, corny, wanky sh quirk youngus 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 Boop and Bow doing home Homer 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 is Trump? Was good? Who have true? Did mere fucking laymark pieces as ship?
We're a long way from the Land of Confusion video.
Yeah, and god but it's I can't believe kissed is that unpopular though? But actually the only thing that labor does reliably is produced people that are less popular than the conservative because it's just like, well the Conservatives, we'll give a live in and they're like, right, historic fumble, historic football every fucking when you watch like Gordon Brown and you're like, god, I miss him, you know things.
My boy Corbyn win in Oh yeah.
He is also screwing up very badly. What's interesting, you know? Yeah, all what the fuck is?
What?
You know? The Greens are circling.
So after World War Two 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 we're 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. Yeah, 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, Zak Polanski, who is basically young, charismatic Corbin interesting, and Corbin himself is.
Not charismatic Crown and.
Just very bad at organizing, and Polanski's an organizer. I'm very bullish on the British Greens.
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 piece to Florida. Yeah, that's okay. By the way, just want to just a completely blunt statement, if you move from England to Florida, they should put you on the list.
I know what you are.
Yeah, as a Floridian, we have a very long tradition of accepting the garbage of the world and making it our own.
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 and a new way they haven't quite identified.
Yeah, but you're welcome. Check that out.
Yeah, the male loneliness crisis is solved in Palm Beach, Florida, isn't it.
No, it's Ebor City, is it.
What's that?
Because even Tampa and has a place they need to make mistakes.
I thought that that was just Tampa.
Now even Tampa has the place to go to go make life errors. Yeah, and that is Ebor City.
God.
Yeah, I'm And as we look into this year, I gotta admit I realized 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, Corey, you'll have some good historical knowledge of like twenty 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 Startup by Ben Horwitz? It was a PC roade actually before software is eating the world, Horrowitz even it was basically saying the worst thing hell was having a startup that was not the leader in the market.
I know this. I've not read the paper, but I've heard it described.
It's just it's a it's a guy one of the Horowitz of Andres and Horowitz early on twenty ten, 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'll 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 and to 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 CEES is what happens when you just chase growth. Because the thing about all these companies is, yeah, you can judge them, and you should judge them, and they fucking suck. And I think all of these LLM rappers deserve gone 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 that things that exist only to get invested in from the normally people who came here like
Chloe Redgcliff to the extremely 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, just investors invest
in me 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 we're 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 you can't count.
So I think if you want to identify something over twenty years that's monotonically increased, it's the way that it comments are able to block new market entry. So you know, historically, if you're going to make something new, you would make it work with the thing that already existed. You know, canonical example, like when we opened up AT and T after the breakup in nineteen eighty two, 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 and that happened, right. It's sometimes called permissionless innovation. Sometimes it's called disruption. Both of those terms have got into bad odor. But you know this idea that you don't create a market denovo, 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 and 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. In Facebook launch, they had this problem that everyone who could have 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 into your Facebook feed. It then you could reply to it, right, so you didn't have to choose between your friends and
superior service. Facebook's initial pitch was We're like Myspaceboar were not run by an evil billionaire and we never spy on you.
Thank god.
Yeah, uh and thank god. And so you could have this. You could eat your cake and have a two. 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. Twenty twenty four, there was a startup from two teenagers called og app 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 in reverse chronological order. Right and oh the Facebook I want Yeah, And that day it hit the top ten of both app markets and that night met us at a takedown notice to Apple and Google and they removed it.
Nice, and that's that's they won't remove x though. Sure no, but that's no.
But there's honor among thieves exactly, yeah, yeah, no, No, these guys are not really competitors they all sat behind Donald Trump.
On the dayas But that's the thing though, the egregious of that is large language models, hear me out. So none of these companies can be run on cash flow doing the bit. But you can't compete with open AI. You can't compete with Anthropic. You can't because the train these models requires that at best, millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars and access to infrastructure at
a scale. What I mean, if you want to compete with them, you need hundreds of millions of dollars, and you need the talent a big capital mote, well the capital mote, but also the talent mode sure, and the RSU mode.
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.
Sure you can say, oh, well we've got you know, we scrape by with how much hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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 the thing VC's very obviously loved. This is, you know, zero to one, all of those all the VC nonsense.
I think.
The other one is that the jobs that they think AI will take our capital p professional jobs in the sense that a professional is someone, yeah, a professional, someone who's 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 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, we fire all the people who get to tell us to fuck off dynamic, you know, like it's very exciting.
And the fight to maintain the codes of ethics. It also often t ching students that this is why I demand this of them, and why they should demand it for themselves may often be the first time they've ever heard for 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.
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 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 inside all of the layoffs they did there, and it's like, oh, well replace them with AI.
Well we won't. That didn't work.
But you know we're going to say we're AI first. What does that mean? Well, I can't really stop asking so many fucking questions you ask everyone around here talking about worker replacement and that This is the thing that actually drives me the craziest all the time. It's the people like, yeah, work a replacement, worker replacement, Have you fucking used one of them? They don't work. They just
don't work. They don't work. Occasion, 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 second shit. Ah, And it's but everyone I've been talking to this week outside of this room, of course, who talks about worker replacements like yeah, and you know, of course right now it's replacing workers where well, I think coders are you need to.
Differentiate between the AI can do your job and an a salesman can convince your bastard fiery replace that's that can't do your That's the point, that's exactly it.
It's like they say, it's almost like they find actually know that's it. They finally created an economy where you've come out like efficacy or like what a thing does to just like finally we create a thing for salespeople to sell to CEOs.
No one knows what's going on with.
The actual product, whether it works, whether it's good or bad, just like the vibes baby.
But then also 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 house to be. Yeah, and they're just gonna be like, well, hey, you know what, I yeah, I can do this. You know Microsoft, for example, aren't they They're like rumored to be doing a massive layoffs again, and then they keep doing layoffs every single year.
Why they do them? They just fucking the well.
Actually, Microsoft I think has genuine brain madness though, because I talk to people that I have a ton of mine. If your work for Microsoft always reach out? Is it a better off lining dot com?
Is it fro?
I'm not seventy six in the 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 just it's people again, senior people too, being like, I don't know what the fuck is going on with Jay Perig's other
at Microsoft. Real Loser Guy went from a company called move Works, 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 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 that it don't don't do that at all. And it gets back to the point I was making. It's like, we're at the natural end point when you start removing the product from the sale.
Sure.
I have a bit of a little Lemon trivia for the guy who found a little lemon giant piece of shit Iron ran worshiping libertarian edge Lord.
Yep.
The reason he called it Lululemon. He thought it would be fun to hear Japanese tourists in Vancouver try and say lemon, so he picked a word with as many l's in it as possible.
I fucking hate that so much.
He also had no fact checks policy for quite some time. It's like, no, we don't do plus sizes, no fact checks policy. What is this platform of the newsletter?
Checks?
Not fact checks? Fat checks?
Oh my bad, Yes, I really misheard that one. It's usually usually the other way around. I'll say something in an America, Sorry Canadian won't understand.
Do you like to go to the Pond Store?
No, we're not talking about Bawn Stars. I would.
I'm serious if I could get Chum Lee from that show on this.
Prison is he in jail?
You may have had a teensy bit of a cum problem.
I mean, I hate to say it, but look at him. Then listen to every tour and look, yeah, yeah Jimmy, no, 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 twenty years of dumb fuck decisions, the Iraq War, the 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 add a six things.
He just raised their biggest fun and they get their return. They're gonna make the tech industry multiples larger.
The funniest thing I saw though, was someone posting about, Wow, look how great Andrew says. Look at these vintages and they stop at twenty seventeen. I'm just like, ah, yeah, look how good this is and as we was, we all know the time stopped.
Listen. I believe in cone Hen. I think he can do anything he sets that point to. It'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, is because when the really obvious things that will obviously sell, they just go to them first. They just go and or at a later round or Yeah, they will always know that they can get in there and that company will help.
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 next round and crowd everyone out.
Yeah.
And the thing is, though venture capitals running out of money, fifteen billion dollars go to Andresen Horowitz.
That's going to drain it from all the other people that need it. The thing is is why the fuck they're going to sell these stops to Aquaman? Like what's going on?
See, I think there's so much money to be made out there if we can.
Unlock 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 rise by streaming, cable or satellite. They're all encrypted.
It's against the law of break the encryption. Because of the DMCA, the recording is legal, the breaking the encryption to do the recording isn't.
Who who would not like?
I think you could sell every person in America a PVR for streaming, Well, just like recording.
Recording the stuff you watch.
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 and exactly the same way it was legal.
To record it off your TV.
Seeing this company called play On I worked with like fifteen years ago, so it's okay, likes I just I can say that does that they seem to exist?
Were they using the analog outputs? I got no idea.
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 the Elgado did this for a long time. There were a bunch of companies that had 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 ride themselves and 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 ice.
Yeah, And I wrote something about it that got translated into German. I learned my most useful German UH phrase, which is plugging the analog hole in German, which is dust analogy lostoffen. 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 which is a very common German conversation.
Clubs all the time.
I just think.
That, oh my god, we're gonna and I just think entering this year I'm just I'm excited for 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 going to pay all the people off. We're going to play the top brass off who will then join our company the IP.
Yeah, we're going to license it. We don't really care, We're just getting the talent. Yeah, it's just acquhirer. Yes. The thing is aquahias traditionally.
I don't know, I'm old enough to remember back in like twenty thirteen when an aquhi was you losing?
Yeah, it was like when we sort of I mean, there were a lot of startups that were effectively just like there were a lot of vcs who said, really what I am as a headhunter? And I go out and I get a bunch of promising people, maybe people who are already working a big tech I give them some money to build what amounts to a postgraduate project, and then they get high. You're back at either their former employer or a new employer, and they get a hiring bonus in the form of their stock being bought
by the company. I get a finder's fee in the forum of my stock being bought by the company. Was just the shittiest way to run an executive recruiting.
The thing is, the company gets the patent.
But the thing is, though, that's not even happening anymore because there are no patents. Yeah no, what you can't patent prompt engineering. You can't patent the fuck it because that's all it is.
I haven't looked into it.
So the USPTO is not issuing a ton of it's a shitty AI patents.
Also, they damaged deeply the USPTO with doge.
Oh that's funny.
And it's also just I don't think you can patent Yeah, I mean maybe you can try, but I haven't seen people patenting prompts.
Well, the USPTO has historically been very bad about granting bullshitty patents. You know, 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 we we killed this patent. The trumpetman is now moving to make it harder to get patent re examination. So if a bullshit patent issues, it's harder to challenge the patent. So I think we're going to
see a lot more garbagee patterns, more patent trolling. There's a town in East Texas, yeah, where they have a made judge and all of the all the patent cases go there to die. There's like seven hundred companies that are headquartered in like one dusty building and it's just a bunch of mailboxes with you know, brass keys. 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 I think it's West Texas. In like it's one hundred and fifteen degrees in the summer and they have a year round outdoor ice skating rink that Samsung pays for.
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.
Samsung. Samsung will fuck thank you what big time? All right, I think we're gonna wrap this up. It has been such a wonderful show. It's been fun, great enjoyed having all of you here. Thank you Cory for making the trip out.
Thanks Ed, Thanks Phil, thank you, thank you, Thank you Mattasowski, our incredible producer, mister Longuso Junior, Thank you for joining me once more. Thank you for having me. Mister 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 have stuck with us on an incredible show. We have done incredibly well. It's a great show. We will be back next week with mister Stephen Burke of Gamers. Next is going to have a post yes show with him said not in personal beil, but 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 Epilepsy Research Consortium. Remember that for the first time in the show notes. Thanks thank you all, it's beat incredible.
Later, thank you for listening to Better Offline The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O S O W s ki dot com. You can email me at easy at Better offline dot com or visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast links and
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