Speaker 1: A Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Better Offline after party epilogue from CS.
Speaker 2: It is like eleven am on the Saturday. We are
Speaker 2: I actually slip pretty well weirdly, but we're all. This
Speaker 2: is the thing we do at the end of the
Speaker 2: show where the remaining people join us. We relax and
Speaker 2: we have to my right, mister Philip Broughton. Hello, this
Speaker 2: is our bartender for the week. Phil, You've been so
Speaker 2: I want to give Phil immense credit for what he's
Speaker 2: been doing all week. So the way this works, we
Speaker 2: have the We've got the main suite, which is where
Speaker 2: people come and they come sit down. It's got the
Speaker 2: big daddy bedroom where I sleep, where I just kind
Speaker 2: of like sleep or like talk to myself.
Speaker 1: Roll around the lot, I roll around on the floor.
Speaker 2: But then in the main room we have the bar
Speaker 2: that Phil is set up and during the recordings, Phil
Speaker 2: will come in and ferry and usually a diet coke
Speaker 2: or a little thing of stool just close to mens cow.
Speaker 2: Jesus crist my voice just broke down, I'm of course,
Speaker 2: said Zi Tromp. By the way, the host of Better Offline,
Speaker 2: and Phil has been bringing me drinks all week and
Speaker 2: bringing everyone drinks, just kind of ferrying around the recording.
Speaker 2: You wouldn't know what to hear it, but he's been
Speaker 2: an incredible bartender.
Speaker 1: I finally learned how to not walk into things after
Speaker 1: last year.
Speaker 2: You were pretty good. You give yourself more credit to
Speaker 2: our left. Of course is mister Corey, doctor, activist, author, journalist. Hello,
Speaker 2: and of course mister Edward and Grayso Junior, Hello, my friends,
Speaker 2: my man, another year another day. Ye yeah, oh yeah,
Speaker 2: I should really have my book written by next year. No,
Speaker 2: it's we were just talking about games and relaxing after it,
Speaker 2: because you'd think after a week long podcast we'd go
Speaker 2: completely ape shit crazy, by which I mean I think
Speaker 2: all of us were in bed by eleven oh yeah,
Speaker 2: Junior and I got to go out to scheming twelve
Speaker 2: oh one.
Speaker 3: Am is the plan. We're gonna We're gonna go really crazy.
Speaker 4: I've got I feel like I gave me a just
Speaker 4: together people from different walks of life to party with
Speaker 4: you tonight.
Speaker 3: I did see there's Avengers Doomsday.
Speaker 2: Now they're doing three hour, forty five minute one and
Speaker 2: they got they got the X Men in it and
Speaker 2: the real just ty jangling.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's either gonna be okay or horrible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's going to be amazing in the sense that,
Speaker 2: like Patrick Stewart, if Patrick Stewart does just does X
Speaker 2: Men ship, I'm fine. But yeah, this is this is
Speaker 2: what happens at the end of CESR. Brains are reduced
Speaker 2: to a fine simmer.
Speaker 1: You're gonna do a courtesy sniff on me for Doomsday,
Speaker 1: aren't you.
Speaker 2: I'm going to if I managed to watch that fucking movie,
Speaker 2: I will actually.
Speaker 4: Courtesy sniff at me for the Avatar three Way fire
Speaker 4: and ass right now, I've not seen any of the Avatar.
Speaker 3: Let's got a Pandora if it was.
Speaker 1: Literally watch it.
Speaker 3: It's got a Pandora.
Speaker 2: But no, the history of the suite is such that
Speaker 2: Phil has been so when we first do This Week
Speaker 2: Phil fifteen, twenty fifteen, we would have it. It was from
Speaker 2: a PR firm. We'd all sit around, we'd have the
Speaker 2: journalists without drinks. But died in twenty twenty because of
Speaker 2: actually not because of the pandemic, just because we were
Speaker 2: I think it was like there was something weird that
Speaker 2: cees and then then COVID happened.
Speaker 1: We people were already scared of COVID at.
Speaker 3: C well, people were just sick, like people were ambient.
Speaker 3: I was sick.
Speaker 1: I was getting a lot of questions about is this okay?
Speaker 1: And I went well.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 1: The other part of the worry is parts of China
Speaker 1: had already locked down at that point on January, so
Speaker 1: there were missing parts of the show which were starting
Speaker 1: people to worry about are we okay here?
Speaker 2: I was also just like I got I a knock
Speaker 2: on wood. I have done pretty well not getting sick
Speaker 2: at CES, largely because the first few days when the
Speaker 2: show's the most crowded, I'm massed up immediately just to
Speaker 2: just I have my big I put my Bain mask
Speaker 2: on and yeah, that that was a weird one. But
Speaker 2: we brought it back last year for the first time.
Speaker 3: It was good. I think this is the best one. Yeah,
Speaker 3: m hmm.
Speaker 2: And we were already scheming for twenty twenty seven. We've
Speaker 2: We've got Vice president JD.
Speaker 3: Vansner. I'm good and good. Do you even say please?
Speaker 3: Do you even say please?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 2: I it's this year. The lesson I've learned is that
Speaker 2: I could use a slug. I could use help. I
Speaker 2: could use them not to say I didn't have it.
Speaker 2: I could use like an organizing document person.
Speaker 1: So I have physics degrees, but I can't keep up
Speaker 1: that is what you need to do for a show.
Speaker 2: Also, neither could I. I was kind of putting it
Speaker 2: together as you went. But Corey, yes, this is your
Speaker 2: first CS in what twenty.
Speaker 6: Twenty, so it's two thousand and three, so twenty three
Speaker 6: years held Discordia.
Speaker 2: I'm really very grateful you came out here because it
Speaker 2: was I know that we laughed about the Amazon the
Speaker 2: Amazon thing where you like asked the simplest questions they
Speaker 2: freaked out.
Speaker 3: But it was quite nice.
Speaker 2: Watching you bring me in front of stuff that I
Speaker 2: otherwise wouldn't have got excited about, like the fulln animeter
Speaker 2: microscope and.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love I love the the stuff
Speaker 6: that's kind of makery. And and then the other end
Speaker 6: of that, which is I think we were talking about
Speaker 6: this yesterday, the hall where you know, Chinese designers have
Speaker 6: taken a standard board that is for a point and
Speaker 6: shoot camera and come up with seventy five form factors
Speaker 6: for it, and like seventy three of them are garbage
Speaker 6: and two of them are just really pretty. They looked
Speaker 6: like something you know, you'd have gotten out of a
Speaker 6: mid century designer or something. You know, it's very striking.
Speaker 6: If you saw it in moment, you go, well, yeah,
Speaker 6: I get why. That's a classic.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, I and I kind of you stopped at
Speaker 2: one point in a wall of plugs as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was no, it was that warmed my heart.
Speaker 3: That's my friend, Matt.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 3: It was just like a wall.
Speaker 2: Of like data set level plugs with the ones that
Speaker 2: you'd usually put in the back of the computer.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think that that's the the unseen magic
Speaker 2: of CS is the well, we can complain about a
Speaker 2: lot of things, there are still little companies doing with
Speaker 2: little shit the side.
Speaker 6: Well, this is like what I was saying about the
Speaker 6: British charger adapter, the collapsible charger yah yesterday. Is that
Speaker 6: the stuff that you interact with every day that has
Speaker 6: like moving parts that you have to plug and unplug,
Speaker 6: that you know, like so much of your quality of
Speaker 6: life is in that stuff. And you know, there's a
Speaker 6: really remarkable pair of books. There's a book called The
Speaker 6: Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman that's a design classic,
Speaker 6: and it's this very austere book.
Speaker 3: Norman's a designer, and it's very.
Speaker 6: Steer book, a Steer book aimed at designers, saying stop
Speaker 6: sacrificing functionality for aesthetics, and everyone read it and this
Speaker 6: completely was it was It's impossible to overstate how important
Speaker 6: this was in how people think about design. And like,
Speaker 6: twenty five years later you wrote another book called Emotional Design,
Speaker 6: where he's like, I.
Speaker 3: Was totally wrong.
Speaker 6: Nearly everything that you use in a high tech society
Speaker 6: is nearly always broken, and the role of the user
Speaker 6: is actually the troubleshooter. And to be a troubleshooter is
Speaker 6: to be expansive. And to be expansive you can't be
Speaker 6: frustrated and angry. When you're frustrated and angry, you tunnel
Speaker 6: down and you just keep like clicking the button over
Speaker 6: and over again and hoping it starts working.
Speaker 3: Just when you say a troubleshooter, exactly do you mame?
Speaker 6: Well, think about your average day right where you you
Speaker 6: you know, plug in your computer and you try to
Speaker 6: do a thing that you've done before, and it just
Speaker 6: doesn't work the way it's supposed to work. You know,
Speaker 6: the app doesn't load correctly, the little charge light doesn't
Speaker 6: come on. Yeah, the plug doesn't work. The latch doesn't work,
Speaker 6: something closes, something's broken, the app closes that you get
Speaker 6: a weird cryptic timeout bug, you know, all kinds of thing.
Speaker 6: I'm the last Tumbler user on Earth. But Tumblr changed
Speaker 6: their HTML editor a few years ago, about a year ago,
Speaker 6: and I only just figured out that the reason I
Speaker 6: can't type in it unless I flip it to HTML
Speaker 6: MO to write raw HTML is that the first character
Speaker 6: you enter into it has to have style data. It
Speaker 6: has to be like bold or italic, or have a
Speaker 6: font size associated with it. So you have to copy
Speaker 6: it out of an app that has style data, paste
Speaker 6: it in and then and I don't know why, right,
Speaker 6: but like now I can reliably type in the Tumblr compositor.
Speaker 6: And that's a troubleshooting thing. Yeah, And we all do
Speaker 6: this all day long with everything we use. And it's
Speaker 6: not just gnarly Linux shit. It's like my LG not
Speaker 6: electric stovetop, my induction stovetop.
Speaker 2: Exactly like the beginning of my book Why Everything Stopped Working,
Speaker 2: coming out next year. It's I think I count to
Speaker 2: one hundred and thirty one within the space of a
Speaker 2: day of just shit that went wrong. Aha, Things like
Speaker 2: I went on Reddit to try and look at someone,
Speaker 2: but when I went to click it, the entire things
Speaker 2: stopped responding to touch sure, or the many, the many
Speaker 2: times that just my email just decides to reset itself
Speaker 2: or Google Calendars lock me out of sorry, not just
Speaker 2: gone like, yeah, I might look in again. And the
Speaker 2: funniest one, by the way, I don't know any has
Speaker 2: this happened to you? Have you logged into Google Calendar
Speaker 2: as in like and it said log in place, you
Speaker 2: look in and then you go to it and it
Speaker 2: looks you out again.
Speaker 3: Yes, I had contysfunction instantly. Well, you don't use Google.
Speaker 6: I know, I use g kel because I have to
Speaker 6: share a calendar with a bunch of heterogeny environments. But
Speaker 6: the point being that everyone's a troubleshooter all the time. Yeah,
Speaker 6: And if you're angry and frustrated and you're just like,
Speaker 6: you know you've got the incipient aneurysm throbbing in your temple. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and you know your fists are clenched and you're you've
Speaker 6: got the you know, black halo contracting around your vision.
Speaker 6: You can't fix stuff, Yeah, you need to be able
Speaker 6: to kind of step back, Like, have you ever been
Speaker 6: trying to cook something with a couple of friends.
Speaker 3: Do you cook? Yes? Yes, So you're cooking.
Speaker 6: Something with say a friend, and it's not quite gelling,
Speaker 6: you know, maybe literally it's not gelling. Something's not right,
Speaker 6: and you just like if you're kind of bopping around
Speaker 6: the kitchen there's good music, you go taste this, What
Speaker 6: does it need?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah, I know, maybe try a little salt. Yeah, right.
Speaker 6: But like if you're in a pan and you've got
Speaker 6: ten people traveling what have you, You're trying to cook and
Speaker 6: you're like, how do I get this to work? You're frustrated,
Speaker 6: you're angry, it's hard to think creatively. So his point
Speaker 6: is that beautiful things make you happy, and when you're happy,
Speaker 6: you're a better troubleshooter. And so for things to work well,
Speaker 6: they have to be beautiful.
Speaker 2: I love that because I lit my eyes immediately as
Speaker 2: you said that. Drill to the road Coster pro too.
Speaker 2: And I will definitely say there is a level of
Speaker 2: like you look at it, you go, damn, I'll make
Speaker 2: production me, mister broadcast.
Speaker 3: And it sounds silly, but yeah, it does kind of
Speaker 3: make you.
Speaker 2: You kind of feel that you feel like a professional,
Speaker 2: you feel like and so when shit's going well, you
Speaker 2: kind of look at it and go, no, But I'm
Speaker 2: a professional. I'm doing cool shit, and I know it
Speaker 2: sounds silly, but every quote Calm mcgloughlin and twin Peaks,
Speaker 2: every day give yourself a little present, which sometimes means
Speaker 2: setting things up to make yourself feel a little bit.
Speaker 6: I love things that are quietly functional in my daily life,
Speaker 6: so I travel a lot. So I found a cable
Speaker 6: bag that I keep on my cables in and it
Speaker 6: sits flat when you open it instead of tipping over.
Speaker 2: And I get you can just leave it on a
Speaker 2: table and it just sits open. Lovely, Holy moly, is
Speaker 2: that very nice?
Speaker 6: And obviously like a bag that sits flat is not
Speaker 6: an innovation, right, It's like it's a thing that's existed
Speaker 6: for someone made it into a cable bag that reminds
Speaker 6: me so good.
Speaker 2: That reminds me of another one exactly like that, which
Speaker 2: is a company called Packed Pakt.
Speaker 3: I love them.
Speaker 2: They have a slightly dodgy design in this bag, but
Speaker 2: still it's a one that's slide It's a regular bag
Speaker 2: that slips over your your suitcase, which, by the way,
Speaker 2: is the worst part of it because if you pack
Speaker 2: it too much, it's little hard to get on there.
Speaker 2: But the killer instinct thing is it opens from the top,
Speaker 2: not the side, so when you're when you're sliding it
Speaker 2: under a you're on a Southwest flight like a Burbank
Speaker 2: flight for example, and you need to get in there
Speaker 2: instead of having to like get a backpack and looking
Speaker 2: from the top the whole thing, the whole thing flips
Speaker 2: open so you can delve into it and easily close. Again,
Speaker 2: this sounds very minor, sure, this is the ability to
Speaker 2: just take a gander in there and PLoP it back
Speaker 2: in is immense.
Speaker 6: And it kind of explains like this is the this
Speaker 6: is the non pathological version of everyday carry right. You
Speaker 6: find a thing that you love that works perfectly well.
Speaker 6: You you know, like I, I'm the kind of person
Speaker 6: who's on the road like one hundred and hundred and
Speaker 6: fifty days a year, and I have a fully set
Speaker 6: up travel package, you know, with the duplicates of everything
Speaker 6: I need to travel with and whatever, and when you
Speaker 6: when you dial it all in perfectly, and the bag
Speaker 6: is great and the accessories are great, and the way
Speaker 6: it's organized is great, and you always you know, you
Speaker 6: get somewhere and something's broken and you can fix it again.
Speaker 6: I love I have a set of titanium chopsticks that
Speaker 6: break down, and a number of times I've been able
Speaker 6: to like eat food in a hotel room without having
Speaker 6: to use the shitty plastic fork.
Speaker 3: Oh that's bloody good. I should get some I should
Speaker 3: get some cutlery that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this, yeah, this is the thing like it in
Speaker 2: a somewhat like grim ces for not useful things, I
Speaker 2: feel like I would. I would love a trade show
Speaker 2: where it was just like useful shit. It's like a
Speaker 2: bag that's great for this kind of traveler. If you
Speaker 2: want to make the useful Shit convention, invite me. I'd
Speaker 2: love to cover it because I would love it. They
Speaker 2: need to start thinking that way with this show. I'd
Speaker 2: love like battery Isle, I'd love it. I'd love Batteryville.
Speaker 1: That would be a problem with the fire Marshal.
Speaker 3: You would have to yes, yeah, you space map on
Speaker 3: a plasma. Note.
Speaker 1: I have not had to call the fire marcial this year.
Speaker 3: You haven't had to call them in years. You didn't
Speaker 3: call them last year.
Speaker 1: I didn't call them last year either, and for the
Speaker 1: previous four years I didn't because we weren't here.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, every year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there was that prolonged period where it's like, hey, Phil,
Speaker 2: we found a completely functional laser on that and you're
Speaker 2: like which kind and they were like, well.
Speaker 1: MRI, the MRI in the middle of the electronics show
Speaker 1: the worst.
Speaker 3: I think, that's how the fuck did they even get
Speaker 3: that in.
Speaker 1: Because I never told anyone and then rolled it onto
Speaker 1: the floor in good time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the perfect crime.
Speaker 1: You know, unlicensed medical use on random passers bybe and
Speaker 1: destroying of adjacent electronics.
Speaker 6: And it's a long tradition, right, the World's Fairy used
Speaker 6: to be able to go and have your feet fluoroscoped,
Speaker 6: and the shoe sales.
Speaker 1: You didn't have to wear the World's Fair.
Speaker 3: We just went to your local market. Quick question, what's
Speaker 3: a florist scoop? It's an X ray, so you used.
Speaker 6: So it used to be very common to sell shoes
Speaker 6: by putting your feet in a pair of shoes and
Speaker 6: then putting your foot in an X ray.
Speaker 1: And then you can say, look how good your kid's
Speaker 1: foot fits in there.
Speaker 6: Not for a brief exposure, right, you leave it running
Speaker 6: like a radiographically guided injection. You would leave it running
Speaker 6: for ten twenty seconds and the shoe fitting sales person
Speaker 6: or longer. Yeah, would be just like continuously bombarded it.
Speaker 2: Right watching x ray TV, Phil as an expert in
Speaker 2: this kind of thing, How bad was that and why so?
Speaker 1: It was a remarkable amount of dose to the foot,
Speaker 1: primarily of children, so you don't really want to drop
Speaker 1: dose on kids. But the worst and most exposed were
Speaker 1: the workers in the shoe store who are continually doing it.
Speaker 1: And also, more to the point, the way they had
Speaker 1: built it is the X ray generator shut through your
Speaker 1: foot to the developing screen towards the lens for your face,
Speaker 1: so that you could see how good your shoes were instantly.
Speaker 1: We still use fluoroscopes. They are medical and they are
Speaker 1: the majority of the dose that doctors and nurses take.
Speaker 3: Getting radiographically guided injection.
Speaker 1: They it's so they don't stab you or put the
Speaker 1: drugs where it shouldn't go.
Speaker 6: They are good into your face at joint or whatever
Speaker 6: that has a person with a lot of medical things.
Speaker 6: I've had a lot of radiographically guided procedures.
Speaker 1: They're useful, but you don't want to use them for
Speaker 1: bullshit like shoes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, that's that is some classic human that they
Speaker 2: were just like, we're going to fit shoes on his X.
Speaker 3: Right. If it's hard.
Speaker 1: You can still find them in remote stores in Appalachia,
Speaker 1: but if you want to see one in person, there
Speaker 1: was one on display at the Bradbury Museum that they
Speaker 1: have now equipped with digital cameras to simulate the effect
Speaker 1: of what the floral unit for shoes used to be.
Speaker 1: Like Jesus, it's one of those they seriously did this. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they really.
Speaker 2: I'm not surprised anymore when I hit anything like that.
Speaker 2: I'm I'm honestly, I'm shocked. They haven't had a ghost
Speaker 2: gun problem here. I'm shocked. Okay, think about it.
Speaker 1: With the dad came to the floor in a prior year. Yep,
Speaker 1: what really three D printing of firearms with oh.
Speaker 3: The three D printing. It also came to his name
Speaker 3: got busted for Yeah, oh god what it's a deep
Speaker 3: dark industry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've got you've got the horrifying billionairess who were
Speaker 2: just talking about the fourteen words, and then you've got
Speaker 2: the macers.
Speaker 1: Printing them on their three D gun.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I mean, this was a guy who heard the phrase
Speaker 6: hard cases make bad law, and he was like, I've
Speaker 6: got a hard case. I'll make it because we were
Speaker 6: trying to figure out like our STL files, you know.
Speaker 6: So there's this principle in law that we established in
Speaker 6: nineteen ninety two when we sued the NSA for civilian
Speaker 6: access to crypto, which is that code is a form
Speaker 6: of expressive speech covered by the First Amendment right, and
Speaker 6: so prior restraint on the publication of code is unconstitutional.
Speaker 6: It was narrowed in another case about the magazine twenty
Speaker 6: six hundred, but it's still a bedrock principle code of speech.
Speaker 6: And then it's like, well, our STL file speech, I
Speaker 6: mean their code right, and ideally what you'd want to
Speaker 6: have it about is something that has some nexus with
Speaker 6: privacy or political activity, like protected activity. And this guy
Speaker 6: was like, no, I'm going to just start with guns
Speaker 6: because I think Second Amend went weirdos will have my back,
Speaker 6: which is probably true, but also like the court is
Speaker 6: gonna go okay, but like, if we rule in favor
Speaker 6: of this, you got you're making guns at home? Uh
Speaker 6: that I feel like that's a I the judge feel
Speaker 6: a little uncomfortable about it. So he was really he
Speaker 6: was like, let's roll the dice on the entire idea
Speaker 6: that code's speech on my folk theory about guns and
Speaker 6: whether Second Amendment weirdos will be able to sway the court. Ah,
Speaker 6: and it sort of all fell apart because he had
Speaker 6: sex with a minor.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, that's the There was.
Speaker 1: A previous terrifying trip to Vegas where sit on the
Speaker 1: floors of the floor of Caesars. We were playing craps.
Speaker 1: You had wandered off to bed, and I ran into
Speaker 1: a former student from one of my classes who was
Speaker 1: so excited to see it was a hit Phil and
Speaker 1: he was deck to the nines, heavy gold rings, clearly
Speaker 1: doing way better than I've seen it when he'd been
Speaker 1: laid off from.
Speaker 3: NU me and you're doing what is numi?
Speaker 1: Uh the it's now the Tesla plant in Fremont. Formerly
Speaker 1: it was a cooperative between GM and Toyota that gave
Speaker 1: birth to Saturn, Right, but it folded and now it's
Speaker 1: Tesla and Elon bought it and that became their first factory.
Speaker 1: But I saw that student who had been working in
Speaker 1: all of the support machine shops that ring knew me
Speaker 1: bad economics, but he was looked like he was doing good.
Speaker 1: Linked out from green Land, and I asked, how you doing.
Speaker 1: He said, you have no idea how great it is
Speaker 1: to be able to just print lowers and uppers left
Speaker 1: right center.
Speaker 3: So he was a gun.
Speaker 1: He reached out into his pocket and said here, I
Speaker 1: got a fresh one, and just handed me a lower
Speaker 1: No thanks, and on the floor of the casino, the state.
Speaker 2: Uninitiated and through my very low gun knowledge, the loa
Speaker 2: is the part that actually makes a gun a gun, right, Like,
Speaker 2: that's that's the part that that is the actual thing
Speaker 2: that you require to make a gun shoot boom boom.
Speaker 1: And it absolutely serial numbers. And it was which he handed.
Speaker 2: Me a fo you were required to put a serial
Speaker 2: number on a loa. Yeah, I'm saying this because I
Speaker 2: know sometimes I get the occasional email saying hey, you
Speaker 2: keep posting things out. The one thing, the one rule
Speaker 2: Sophie and Robert gave me was to be like, yeah,
Speaker 2: what's that mean?
Speaker 3: Say what this means? Say what this means?
Speaker 2: Because of wis no one knows anything, including me, But
Speaker 2: that's fucking insane.
Speaker 7: This person was just Vegas baby.
Speaker 6: So as a Canadian, I have a piece of gun
Speaker 6: lore for everyone. And I learned from John McDonald or
Speaker 6: Jim McDonald rather is a science fiction writer ex military
Speaker 6: writes military science fiction very well regarded, and he said,
Speaker 6: when you write science fiction with a gun in it,
Speaker 6: or any fiction with a gun in it, someone out
Speaker 6: there who really cares about guns will find something that
Speaker 6: you said that was wrong and they'll make fun of you.
Speaker 6: If you to avoid this, you just need to know
Speaker 6: one word modified And if you say he opened fire
Speaker 6: with his modified whatever walter p PK, no matter what
Speaker 6: it is, you then make the gun do The person
Speaker 6: out there who's a you know, amosexual musket fucker is
Speaker 6: going to be is going to be so interested in
Speaker 6: figuring out what modification you thought of to make this gun?
Speaker 6: Do this, And the weirder it is, the cleverer they'll
Speaker 6: think you are going like, I figured out the cool
Speaker 6: thing you thought of?
Speaker 3: Am I right? It's kind of like this is a
Speaker 3: very specific reference.
Speaker 2: There's a show called Reapa where Ray Wise from Twin
Speaker 2: Peaks was the devil and it's kind of like how
Speaker 2: they play a game of coin flip I think it is,
Speaker 2: and they use a reflection on the on the tabletop
Speaker 2: to distract the devil because the devil is distracted by
Speaker 2: his own reflection. You need a key jingle for the
Speaker 2: musket fuckers, the homosexual musket fuckers. That's that's a good one,
Speaker 2: but also that's so far.
Speaker 3: I know. I mean with my work.
Speaker 2: When I'm doing my AI stuff, my favorite thing is
Speaker 2: like someone will take one of my shorter pieces so
Speaker 2: they're like twenty nine thousand ones, and we'll say like,
Speaker 2: this guy doesn't know shit, and they will find one
Speaker 2: fucking line and they'll be like, look on that, and
Speaker 2: it will be the weirdest, smallest thing. And I'll always
Speaker 2: be like, so, can you be specific about what this changes?
Speaker 2: They block me. They block me every time. And actually
Speaker 2: there was a so there is a beer. This is
Speaker 2: a random side.
Speaker 1: But this make rough lines, LARPers or sickos.
Speaker 3: Well, no, this is I got sent very fun one.
Speaker 2: So there's this guy on Twitter, real horrible website Buco
Speaker 2: capital bloke who is like a weirdly popular guy, and
Speaker 2: he deleted this tweet, but an egleo i'd reader caught it.
Speaker 2: He said, conflict it because if the AI trade blows up,
Speaker 2: then take Kim's head explodes, which would be very funny.
Speaker 2: But then exitual will be right and that would not
Speaker 2: be funny at all. And I just to be just
Speaker 2: to be clear, this would be the funniest situation because
Speaker 2: that guy deleted it and thinks I didn't get it.
Speaker 3: Sadly, I got the screen show it's going to be
Speaker 3: a great it's going to be a great year for
Speaker 3: stuff like that.
Speaker 2: I don't know about the rest of the world, but yeah,
Speaker 2: this actually Corey back to the ghost gun stuff, what
Speaker 2: happened with all that because I don't remember, yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean it just that, yeah, I mean a specific guy,
Speaker 2: but I mean.
Speaker 3: I don't remember what happened to Defense Distributed. I don't.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I don't think we've had a case that was
Speaker 6: litigated to final judgment about the legality of shape files.
Speaker 6: I mean the legality of the gun itself is pretty established, right,
Speaker 6: but that's good shape files and and look, I just
Speaker 6: I do think that making geometry illegal is dumb. Yes,
Speaker 6: you know, as a like a person who would throw
Speaker 6: all the guns into the sea or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right,
Speaker 6: I still think making geometry illegal is dumb.
Speaker 2: And also yeah, at that point you can't build things, Yeah,
Speaker 2: you can't three D print at all.
Speaker 6: And also impractical, right, because like what are you actually
Speaker 6: going to do because there are so many ways to
Speaker 6: express a file that will be that shape because STLs
Speaker 6: can express logic, right, I think it'd be parametric. So
Speaker 6: you can, like, for example, you can have a shape
Speaker 6: file for a key, like a door key, and there
Speaker 6: are variables you can set in the shape file for
Speaker 6: where you want the teeth and how deep they're going
Speaker 6: to go. So it's it's a it is a programmable
Speaker 6: piece of descriptive code. And so there are like an
Speaker 6: infinitude of ways you could write a program in the
Speaker 6: STL description language that would that would emit the illegal geometry.
Speaker 6: So how do you police the illegal geometry?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 6: It just it just feels like if it's it's one
Speaker 6: thing to make a law that says something is illegal,
Speaker 6: it's another thing to make a law. And even if
Speaker 6: that thing is bad and you want to extinguish it,
Speaker 6: but if you have no way to administer that law,
Speaker 6: you are setting yourself up either for heartbreak or for
Speaker 6: something really bad where you just run around and you
Speaker 6: ques everyone having broken the law, because no one can
Speaker 6: ever tell who's broken the law and who hasn't. Like,
Speaker 6: administerability is the single most important factor in policy design because.
Speaker 3: And just administability means being able to do can you
Speaker 3: administer it? Can you figure out whether someone's violated it? Right?
Speaker 6: So to bring this to the internet, are there a
Speaker 6: lot of people who are very angry and I think
Speaker 6: rightfully so about harassment and hate speech on the platform.
Speaker 6: But a hate speech regime is very hard to police
Speaker 6: because you have a common definition of hate speech. You
Speaker 6: have to evaluate whether a given piece of speech rises
Speaker 6: to the definition. You have to make a technical determination
Speaker 6: about whether the firm took reasonable technical steps to address
Speaker 6: the hate speech. And you know, this is an offense
Speaker 6: that occurs on the platform one hundred times a minute,
Speaker 6: but it's a question that takes five years to adjudicate.
Speaker 6: So this it's just not a good You know, there
Speaker 6: are other fact intensive regimes in law, like like probate law, right,
Speaker 6: but it's fine because the average person dies one or
Speaker 6: fewer times, and so the fact that it takes a
Speaker 6: minute to figure out what to do when they die
Speaker 6: not a big deal.
Speaker 3: But I'm build different. You never say, but I'm going
Speaker 3: to die three times.
Speaker 6: But you know, you could imagine another regime where like
Speaker 6: if you I don't know, if you're a maskeet on user,
Speaker 6: but in no so in mastet on, there's this feature.
Speaker 6: It's a beautiful piece of design where if you want
Speaker 6: to go from one masted on server to another, because
Speaker 6: you can access mast it on from a lot of
Speaker 6: different services run by lots of different people, you click
Speaker 6: a link and it exports all of your data about
Speaker 6: who you were following and who is following you, and
Speaker 6: then you click another link on the news server and
Speaker 6: it imports it and then just all that stuff moves over.
Speaker 6: So we could say to Elon Musk, like, yeah, we're
Speaker 6: still going to have some standards for a hate speech
Speaker 6: and whatever, or we're going to worry about whether your
Speaker 6: your chatbot is shitting out child pornography. But at the
Speaker 6: same time, what we're going to do is create is
Speaker 6: create a mandate that you give people the data they
Speaker 6: need that if they leave Twitter and go to another server,
Speaker 6: they can still talk to the people they left behind
Speaker 6: on Twitter. Because that way, if you don't like the
Speaker 6: way you're being treated on Twitter, you can leave one
Speaker 6: second later. And then this is very easy to administer
Speaker 6: because say you know you're running the server and I
Speaker 6: leave the server and I don't get my file from you.
Speaker 6: I go to the regulator, and the regulator comes to
Speaker 6: you and says, look, I know you told me that
Speaker 6: you gave Corey his file. He says, you didn't give
Speaker 6: it to him. I don't care who's right who's wrong.
Speaker 6: Give it to me and I'll give it to him right,
Speaker 6: And then you just resolve the whole question. So you
Speaker 6: could have like one person administering this policy for a
Speaker 6: billion users, and then they could all just leave the
Speaker 6: platforms where they're being abused without having to pay a
Speaker 6: high switching cost. By exiting a community that means something
Speaker 6: to them, customers or audience members or family members or
Speaker 6: people are the same way disease as them that they're
Speaker 6: in a support group with, they could continue to talk
Speaker 6: with those people.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So this is a very administrable remedy. It's much more streamlined.
Speaker 6: It actually solves a great deal of the problem. It's
Speaker 6: not as good as eliminating hate speech. But I don't
Speaker 6: think you can.
Speaker 2: I just I feel like with some of these platforms,
Speaker 2: I'm not talking about Blue Scyt, but the original the
Speaker 2: original Twitter problems of like slurs, for example, and it's
Speaker 2: like you can't unilaterally ban them. Sure, other than the
Speaker 2: fact you could kind of lean that way, I feel
Speaker 2: like you could be like you will have to have
Speaker 2: a little more nuanced than that. You will have to
Speaker 2: but I feel like starting from there and working back,
Speaker 2: I'm sure you'll push back on this is just they
Speaker 2: usually go the other way. It's like, well, let people do,
Speaker 2: everything will work out later. I just feel like it's
Speaker 2: just a half fss attitude. I run the better offline
Speaker 2: reddit with a dread hand. Yeah in the sense, but
Speaker 2: I think the beautiful but the smaller communities you could
Speaker 2: do that.
Speaker 3: With a large social network you can't.
Speaker 6: And you understand the context, right, like the understanding the
Speaker 6: difference between and then I called him this slur and
Speaker 6: made him really sad. Ha ha ha, and uh then
Speaker 6: I got called the slur and I was sad, please
Speaker 6: come and give me comfort. Requires a lot of context knowledge,
Speaker 6: and you know, oftentimes the people using the slurs are
Speaker 6: like that's their hobby and they're really good at, you know,
Speaker 6: working the ref and so it's much more common that
Speaker 6: they're figuring out how to use the slur in a
Speaker 6: way that doesn't get them kicked off and getting the
Speaker 6: people they're using the slur agains kicked off for complaining
Speaker 6: about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the classic one being like reporting people for
Speaker 2: death threats, but it's it's friends being like I'm gonna
Speaker 2: kill you man. That's not the classic. Like, I don't
Speaker 2: know how social networks still fall for this shit, but
Speaker 2: it's like they will be the the people doing lighthearted
Speaker 2: stuff that get banned, and then the people with the
Speaker 2: fourteen words and saying eighty eight gets get to keep around.
Speaker 3: I'm boasted, I really.
Speaker 2: I am excited to see though, how the world reacts
Speaker 2: to Twitter becoming the c SAM generator, because if kiss
Speaker 2: Starmer fucking bans X, that'd be the funniest thing I've
Speaker 2: seen in my fucking He won't do it.
Speaker 3: It doesn't have a spine.
Speaker 4: Have you been seeing this came up on my V
Speaker 4: today that the right and the left in the UK
Speaker 4: having dueling protests about who hates Kiers Starmer more.
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah, that that is you know.
Speaker 2: What, that's the most That's the most British thing I've
Speaker 2: ever heard.
Speaker 3: We although we don't agree about.
Speaker 4: His humor is called we know we hate Kis Starmer
Speaker 4: more than you, So British.
Speaker 2: That's the most British thing I've ever heard in my life.
Speaker 2: But no, and then someone's gonna have a protest saying
Speaker 2: that we shouldn't have a protest about.
Speaker 3: Anything that we need, like at least four more protests.
Speaker 2: It's the fucking bit for the People's Front of Judea
Speaker 2: from Life of Brian. I love that, I don't love
Speaker 2: kiss Darma. Not gonna lie doesn't seem to it. I
Speaker 2: didn't know that we could get a conservative, labor conservative,
Speaker 2: just the guy who's like, no one's happy.
Speaker 3: He doesn't really have policies.
Speaker 6: Yes, it's again lowest approval ratings of any prime minister
Speaker 6: since measurement began. He has a lower approval rating than
Speaker 6: Boris Johnson during the pandemic, after it was discovered that
Speaker 6: he was having parties while everyone else was lockdown nine.
Speaker 3: He did it for funerals.
Speaker 6: We found the least popular, and Rachel Reeves is even
Speaker 6: less popular than his.
Speaker 3: What about there's a May.
Speaker 6: Less popular than Theresa May, less popular than Liz Trust.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was just about Oh my fucking goun Now
Speaker 2: I'm gonna say I hate the Lettus thing.
Speaker 3: I hate the Lettus thing so much. It's the most.
Speaker 2: Boring, corny, wanky sh quirk youngus bullshit from the UK.
Speaker 2: We're a country where we used to have when spitting
Speaker 2: image used to have teeth and it wasn't just like
Speaker 2: Boop and Bow doing home Homer Like that's actually that
Speaker 2: really bothered me. I heard of a spitting image thing
Speaker 2: the other day, which is this puppet show in England
Speaker 2: where they do like political stuff, and all it is
Speaker 2: now is just like outright homophobia.
Speaker 3: It's just like what is Trump? Was good? Who have true?
Speaker 3: Did mere fucking laymark pieces as ship?
Speaker 1: We're a long way from the Land of Confusion video.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and god but it's I can't believe kissed is
Speaker 2: that unpopular though? But actually the only thing that labor
Speaker 2: does reliably is produced people that are less popular than
Speaker 2: the conservative because it's just like, well the Conservatives, we'll
Speaker 2: give a live in and they're like, right, historic fumble,
Speaker 2: historic football every fucking when you watch like Gordon Brown
Speaker 2: and you're like, god, I miss him, you know things.
Speaker 4: My boy Corbyn win in Oh yeah.
Speaker 6: He is also screwing up very badly. What's interesting, you know? Yeah,
Speaker 6: all what the fuck is?
Speaker 5: What?
Speaker 3: You know? The Greens are circling.
Speaker 6: So after World War Two there was a there was
Speaker 6: a reboot of British politics. The Liberal Party collapsed, so
Speaker 6: a party that had been around forever, the Whigs, just
Speaker 6: ceased to exist. Labor came into existence. That was happening
Speaker 6: to the Conservatives as of the last election, and the
Speaker 6: Reform Party we're about to basically scoop up all the
Speaker 6: Conservative voters who didn't like the way that the party
Speaker 6: was being run. But it looks like it's also happening
Speaker 6: to Labor. Yeah, and there is there are two potential
Speaker 6: places where the left is going to go. The Greens
Speaker 6: have not been great historically. They've had a lot of
Speaker 6: bad policies. They were into homeopathy for a while whatever.
Speaker 6: But they have got a terrific new leader, Zak Polanski,
Speaker 6: who is basically young, charismatic Corbin interesting, and Corbin himself is.
Speaker 3: Not charismatic Crown and.
Speaker 6: Just very bad at organizing, and Polanski's an organizer. I'm
Speaker 6: very bullish on the British Greens.
Speaker 2: That'd be nice. I mean, we did lose Scott Galloway. Sorry,
Speaker 2: we've got they sent Scott Galloway there. I mean like
Speaker 2: they sent Scott Galloway to England. I thought or maybe
Speaker 2: he moved from England to Florida. I can't remember which
Speaker 2: direction they sent that piece to Florida. Yeah, that's okay.
Speaker 2: By the way, just want to just a completely blunt statement,
Speaker 2: if you move from England to Florida, they should put
Speaker 2: you on the list.
Speaker 3: I know what you are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as a Floridian, we have a very long tradition
Speaker 1: of accepting the garbage of the world and making it
Speaker 1: our own.
Speaker 2: It's like the Staten Island to Florida thing, except it's
Speaker 2: not just because you're old and hate everyone. It's because
Speaker 2: you're horny and a new way they haven't quite identified.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you're welcome. Check that out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the male loneliness crisis is solved in Palm Beach, Florida,
Speaker 2: isn't it.
Speaker 1: No, it's Ebor City, is it.
Speaker 3: What's that?
Speaker 1: Because even Tampa and has a place they need to
Speaker 1: make mistakes.
Speaker 3: I thought that that was just Tampa.
Speaker 1: Now even Tampa has the place to go to go
Speaker 1: make life errors. Yeah, and that is Ebor City.
Speaker 3: God.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm And as we look into this year, I
Speaker 2: gotta admit I realized things are quite bad and things
Speaker 2: are going to get a lot more chaotic. But I
Speaker 2: think the chaos is necessary. Coming out of this week.
Speaker 2: All I can feel in my gut is like destruction
Speaker 2: from this show. Not literally, but this feels like a
Speaker 2: reckoning of Like, Corey, you'll have some good historical knowledge
Speaker 2: of like twenty years of hubris in the tech industry,
Speaker 2: of moving away from we made a thing that people
Speaker 2: could use towards Actually, random question, Corey, you ever read
Speaker 2: the case for the Startup by Ben Horwitz? It was
Speaker 2: a PC roade actually before software is eating the world,
Speaker 2: Horrowitz even it was basically saying the worst thing hell
Speaker 2: was having a startup that was not the leader in
Speaker 2: the market.
Speaker 3: I know this. I've not read the paper, but I've
Speaker 3: heard it described.
Speaker 2: It's just it's a it's a guy one of the
Speaker 2: Horowitz of Andres and Horowitz early on twenty ten, I think,
Speaker 2: and I think ever since then, we have been leading
Speaker 2: to this point where you chase out the companies that
Speaker 2: are like, Okay, we'll build something cool and we'll compete
Speaker 2: in a market, and you'll chase them out in favor
Speaker 2: of companies like we will win the market, even if
Speaker 2: it means changing the market materially, even if it means
Speaker 2: using means such as and to monopolistic tendencies, or just
Speaker 2: race to the bottom, or using funding to chase people
Speaker 2: out uber to your point ed, and I think what
Speaker 2: we're seeing this CEES is what happens when you just
Speaker 2: chase growth. Because the thing about all these companies is, yeah,
Speaker 2: you can judge them, and you should judge them, and
Speaker 2: they fucking suck. And I think all of these LLM
Speaker 2: rappers deserve gone the trash along with their founders. But
Speaker 2: at the same time, it's like scorpion the frog. It's
Speaker 2: when you incentivize bringing things to a show that do
Speaker 2: not exist, when you give them awards, when you write
Speaker 2: them up and act like they're real year after year,
Speaker 2: regardless of whether the fucking thing actually exists. Of course
Speaker 2: you're going to get a CES predominantly made of things
Speaker 2: that don't and that things that exist only to get
Speaker 2: invested in from the normally people who came here like
Speaker 2: Chloe Redgcliff to the extremely technical people like Corey. It's
Speaker 2: the same thing of like, this is just a company
Speaker 2: that's here to jingle the keys in front of the
Speaker 2: investors or the not even the buyers, just investors invest
Speaker 2: in me or in front of the press. And I
Speaker 2: think in this next year, we're going to see what
Speaker 2: happens when you do that everywhere, and we're going to
Speaker 2: see the collapse of these AI startups that never had
Speaker 2: a point and we're never built for anything other than
Speaker 2: selling to someone else or dumping onto the public markets.
Speaker 3: Except none of them can chase that, all the smart
Speaker 3: people in favor of people you can't count.
Speaker 6: So I think if you want to identify something over
Speaker 6: twenty years that's monotonically increased, it's the way that it
Speaker 6: comments are able to block new market entry. So you know, historically,
Speaker 6: if you're going to make something new, you would make
Speaker 6: it work with the thing that already existed. You know,
Speaker 6: canonical example, like when we opened up AT and T
Speaker 6: after the breakup in nineteen eighty two, the modem just
Speaker 6: plugged into their shit, right. You didn't need to make
Speaker 6: a phone network, You just needed to make a modem, right,
Speaker 6: and that everything exploded and that happened, right. It's sometimes
Speaker 6: called permissionless innovation. Sometimes it's called disruption. Both of those
Speaker 6: terms have got into bad odor. But you know this
Speaker 6: idea that you don't create a market denovo, you raid
Speaker 6: the high margin lines of sclerotic you know, legacy companies
Speaker 6: that are dominating the market. And you you, you know,
Speaker 6: this is what Jeff Bezos said to the publishers when
Speaker 6: he launched Amazon. Infamously, he went to a boardroom full
Speaker 6: of publishers and he said, your margin is my opportunity, right,
Speaker 6: so you take those high margins, you make them your opportunity.
Speaker 6: And so when AT and T gets broken up and
Speaker 6: they lose the ability to control what you plug into
Speaker 6: the phone jack, we see modems, we see an explosion
Speaker 6: of answering machines PBX. It's just all this stuff that
Speaker 6: is just like built layered on top of the existing stuff.
Speaker 6: But you can't do that anymore, you know. In Facebook launch,
Speaker 6: they had this problem that everyone who could have used
Speaker 6: Facebook had a MySpace account, and so he gave you know,
Speaker 6: Zuck gave everyone who had a MySpace account a bot
Speaker 6: that you fed your MySpace credentials to and it would
Speaker 6: go to MySpace several times a day and impersonate you,
Speaker 6: scrape everything waiting for you and put it into your
Speaker 6: Facebook feed. It then you could reply to it, right,
Speaker 6: so you didn't have to choose between your friends and
Speaker 6: superior service. Facebook's initial pitch was We're like Myspaceboar were
Speaker 6: not run by an evil billionaire and we never spy
Speaker 6: on you.
Speaker 3: Thank god.
Speaker 6: Yeah, uh and thank god. And so you could have this.
Speaker 6: You could eat your cake and have a two. And
Speaker 6: you know, you do this to Facebook, they will nuke
Speaker 6: you till you glow. It's not technically challenging, and it's
Speaker 6: not hard to think of cool things to do, so
Speaker 6: you know. Twenty twenty four, there was a startup from
Speaker 6: two teenagers called og app say almost the same thing.
Speaker 6: You gave it your Insta credentials. It logged in as you,
Speaker 6: It grabbed everything Insta had waiting for you. It discarded
Speaker 6: all the suggestions, all the ads, all the recommendations, all
Speaker 6: the boosted content, and all the clickbait, and showed you
Speaker 6: things from people you followed from in reverse chronological order.
Speaker 6: Right and oh the Facebook I want Yeah, And that
Speaker 6: day it hit the top ten of both app markets
Speaker 6: and that night met us at a takedown notice to
Speaker 6: Apple and Google and they removed it.
Speaker 3: Nice, and that's that's they won't remove x though. Sure no,
Speaker 3: but that's no.
Speaker 6: But there's honor among thieves exactly, yeah, yeah, no, No,
Speaker 6: these guys are not really competitors they all sat behind
Speaker 6: Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: On the dayas But that's the thing though, the egregious
Speaker 2: of that is large language models, hear me out. So
Speaker 2: none of these companies can be run on cash flow
Speaker 2: doing the bit. But you can't compete with open AI.
Speaker 2: You can't compete with Anthropic. You can't because the train
Speaker 2: these models requires that at best, millions and millions and
Speaker 2: millions and millions of dollars and access to infrastructure at
Speaker 2: a scale. What I mean, if you want to compete
Speaker 2: with them, you need hundreds of millions of dollars, and
Speaker 2: you need the talent a big capital mote, well the
Speaker 2: capital mote, but also the talent mode sure, and the
Speaker 2: RSU mode.
Speaker 3: They can just offer stock. So it's impossible to enter there.
Speaker 2: But even as an AI startup, you can't compete with
Speaker 2: the venture capital industry.
Speaker 3: There is no scrappy AI startup.
Speaker 2: Sure you can say, oh, well we've got you know,
Speaker 2: we scrape by with how much hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 3: I think you're right.
Speaker 6: I think AI has got formal characteristics that make it
Speaker 6: attractive to VC, and one of them is that it
Speaker 6: looks like it tends towards a winner. Take all market,
Speaker 6: which is the thing VC's very obviously loved. This is,
Speaker 6: you know, zero to one, all of those all the
Speaker 6: VC nonsense.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 6: The other one is that the jobs that they think
Speaker 6: AI will take our capital p professional jobs in the
Speaker 6: sense that a professional is someone, yeah, a professional, someone
Speaker 6: who's bound to a code of ethics that not only
Speaker 6: permits them but requires them to tell their boss to
Speaker 6: fuck off if their boss asks them to do something
Speaker 6: that's not moral. And so you have this whole class
Speaker 6: of people teachers, nurses, rad techs, you know whatever, who
Speaker 6: are like obliged to say fuck off to their bosses.
Speaker 6: And no wonder they're having such an easy time selling
Speaker 6: this otherwise vaporous technology because bosses have been furiously fantasizing
Speaker 6: about firing everyone who's allowed to tell them to fuck
Speaker 6: off since the idea of a profession emerged. And so,
Speaker 6: you know, you have all these different formal characteristics. The
Speaker 6: winner take all dynamic, we fire all the people who
Speaker 6: get to tell us to fuck off dynamic, you know,
Speaker 6: like it's very exciting.
Speaker 1: And the fight to maintain the codes of ethics. It
Speaker 1: also often t ching students that this is why I
Speaker 1: demand this of them, and why they should demand it
Speaker 1: for themselves may often be the first time they've ever
Speaker 1: heard for the concept of a code of ethics, which
Speaker 1: is depressing, but also it warms my heart for I
Speaker 1: get to be the person who teaches you to care
Speaker 1: about yourself.
Speaker 2: The thing is, though, I also think there's something quite simple,
Speaker 2: which is all of that's true, and none of these
Speaker 2: people know what their people actually do, like the people
Speaker 2: they want to the people they want to fire, they
Speaker 2: truly do not understand what it is they do. Like
Speaker 2: I'm going to choose like a random public business inside
Speaker 2: all of the layoffs they did there, and it's like, oh,
Speaker 2: well replace them with AI.
Speaker 3: Well we won't. That didn't work.
Speaker 2: But you know we're going to say we're AI first.
Speaker 2: What does that mean? Well, I can't really stop asking
Speaker 2: so many fucking questions you ask everyone around here talking
Speaker 2: about worker replacement and that This is the thing that
Speaker 2: actually drives me the craziest all the time. It's the
Speaker 2: people like, yeah, work a replacement, worker replacement, Have you
Speaker 2: fucking used one of them? They don't work. They just
Speaker 2: don't work. They don't work. Occasion, I'll see someone on
Speaker 2: Twitter be like my my wife who's a special doctor
Speaker 2: at the most genius Hospital New York City. She put
Speaker 2: in a thing and it came up with a differential
Speaker 2: diagnosis that usually and it's just fuck off, you fucking
Speaker 2: lying second shit. Ah, And it's but everyone I've been
Speaker 2: talking to this week outside of this room, of course,
Speaker 2: who talks about worker replacements like yeah, and you know,
Speaker 2: of course right now it's replacing workers where well, I
Speaker 2: think coders are you need to.
Speaker 6: Differentiate between the AI can do your job and an
Speaker 6: a salesman can convince your bastard fiery replace that's that
Speaker 6: can't do your That's the point, that's exactly it.
Speaker 2: It's like they say, it's almost like they find actually
Speaker 2: know that's it. They finally created an economy where you've
Speaker 2: come out like efficacy or like what a thing does
Speaker 2: to just like finally we create a thing for salespeople
Speaker 2: to sell to CEOs.
Speaker 3: No one knows what's going on with.
Speaker 2: The actual product, whether it works, whether it's good or bad,
Speaker 2: just like the vibes baby.
Speaker 4: But then also there are bosses who could give less
Speaker 4: of a fuck about whether it works or not. They
Speaker 4: know that what their headcount reduction for the year house
Speaker 4: to be. Yeah, and they're just gonna be like, well, hey,
Speaker 4: you know what, I yeah, I can do this. You
Speaker 4: know Microsoft, for example, aren't they They're like rumored to
Speaker 4: be doing a massive layoffs again, and then they keep
Speaker 4: doing layoffs every single year.
Speaker 3: Why they do them? They just fucking the well.
Speaker 2: Actually, Microsoft I think has genuine brain madness though, because
Speaker 2: I talk to people that I have a ton of mine.
Speaker 2: If your work for Microsoft always reach out? Is it
Speaker 2: a better off lining dot com?
Speaker 3: Is it fro?
Speaker 2: I'm not seventy six in the signal. It's funny every
Speaker 2: time I hear from them. I never hear from anyone
Speaker 2: who's like, I fucking love this. AI is actually huge.
Speaker 2: It's always people being like my product manager, who does
Speaker 2: not appear to do any work, has told me that
Speaker 2: AI and Copilot must be used, and it's just it's
Speaker 2: people again, senior people too, being like, I don't know
Speaker 2: what the fuck is going on with Jay Perig's other
Speaker 2: at Microsoft. Real Loser Guy went from a company called
Speaker 2: move Works, which was famous for buying thirty thousand dollars
Speaker 2: worth of Lululemon gift cards to give to people to
Speaker 2: buy their software, went to Meta, then went to Microsoft
Speaker 2: to run Ai. It's just like there are these business
Speaker 2: idiots who bounce around and just go AI, baby, we're here,
Speaker 2: it's time, And then the sales team goes out tries
Speaker 2: to sell it, and they're like, yeah, it turns out
Speaker 2: that people want something that works, that actually does the job,
Speaker 2: and you keep saying it's digital labor, but that it
Speaker 2: don't don't do that at all. And it gets back
Speaker 2: to the point I was making. It's like, we're at
Speaker 2: the natural end point when you start removing the product
Speaker 2: from the sale.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 6: I have a bit of a little Lemon trivia for
Speaker 6: the guy who found a little lemon giant piece of
Speaker 6: shit Iron ran worshiping libertarian edge Lord.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 6: The reason he called it Lululemon. He thought it would
Speaker 6: be fun to hear Japanese tourists in Vancouver try and
Speaker 6: say lemon, so he picked a word with as many
Speaker 6: l's in it as possible.
Speaker 3: I fucking hate that so much.
Speaker 6: He also had no fact checks policy for quite some time.
Speaker 6: It's like, no, we don't do plus sizes, no fact
Speaker 6: checks policy. What is this platform of the newsletter?
Speaker 1: Checks?
Speaker 3: Not fact checks? Fat checks?
Speaker 2: Oh my bad, Yes, I really misheard that one. It's
Speaker 2: usually usually the other way around. I'll say something in
Speaker 2: an America, Sorry Canadian won't understand.
Speaker 1: Do you like to go to the Pond Store?
Speaker 3: No, we're not talking about Bawn Stars. I would.
Speaker 2: I'm serious if I could get Chum Lee from that
Speaker 2: show on this.
Speaker 3: Prison is he in jail?
Speaker 1: You may have had a teensy bit of a cum problem.
Speaker 2: I mean, I hate to say it, but look at him.
Speaker 2: Then listen to every tour and look, yeah, yeah Jimmy, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: none of that. Yeah, It's gonna be an interesting year
Speaker 2: because I just think it's a reckoning of every like
Speaker 2: the twenty years of dumb fuck decisions, the Iraq War,
Speaker 2: the DHS, and then the venture capital era. I think
Speaker 2: the venture capital era is coming to an end. I'm
Speaker 2: not saying VC will go away, but I don't think
Speaker 2: people add a six things.
Speaker 4: He just raised their biggest fun and they get their return.
Speaker 4: They're gonna make the tech industry multiples larger.
Speaker 2: The funniest thing I saw though, was someone posting about, Wow,
Speaker 2: look how great Andrew says. Look at these vintages and
Speaker 2: they stop at twenty seventeen. I'm just like, ah, yeah,
Speaker 2: look how good this is and as we was, we
Speaker 2: all know the time stopped.
Speaker 3: Listen. I believe in cone Hen. I think he can
Speaker 3: do anything he sets that point to. It's the thing like,
Speaker 3: even he can be wrong.
Speaker 2: And the whole thing, the whole reason that vcs like
Speaker 2: that have done well is not because of them being geniuses,
Speaker 2: is because when the really obvious things that will obviously sell,
Speaker 2: they just go to them first. They just go and
Speaker 2: or at a later round or Yeah, they will always
Speaker 2: know that they can get in there and that company
Speaker 2: will help.
Speaker 4: That's a big thing of theirs is that you know,
Speaker 4: if you fuck up and you don't get in on
Speaker 4: the winner, then get in on the winner on the
Speaker 4: next round and crowd everyone out.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And the thing is, though venture capitals running out of money,
Speaker 2: fifteen billion dollars go to Andresen Horowitz.
Speaker 3: That's going to drain it from all the other people
Speaker 3: that need it. The thing is is why the fuck
Speaker 3: they're going to sell these stops to Aquaman? Like what's
Speaker 3: going on?
Speaker 6: See, I think there's so much money to be made
Speaker 6: out there if we can.
Speaker 3: Unlock the silos.
Speaker 6: Right, So, like just think about some of those fast
Speaker 6: adopted technologies in the history of the world like the VCR, right,
Speaker 6: people love home recording. We don't have VCRs anymore because
Speaker 6: it's illegal to break DRM. So it's still legal to
Speaker 6: record shows. It's just every show that arrives in your house,
Speaker 6: either rise by streaming, cable or satellite. They're all encrypted.
Speaker 6: It's against the law of break the encryption. Because of
Speaker 6: the DMCA, the recording is legal, the breaking the encryption
Speaker 6: to do the recording isn't.
Speaker 3: Who who would not like?
Speaker 6: I think you could sell every person in America a
Speaker 6: PVR for streaming, Well, just like recording.
Speaker 3: Recording the stuff you watch.
Speaker 6: So you know everyone's like, oh, I hate streaming because
Speaker 6: they take away the shows I love. You should just
Speaker 6: record them. You should just record them the way you
Speaker 6: did off your television. It is legal and exactly the
Speaker 6: same way it was legal.
Speaker 3: To record it off your TV.
Speaker 2: Seeing this company called play On I worked with like
Speaker 2: fifteen years ago, so it's okay, likes I just I
Speaker 2: can say that does that they seem to exist?
Speaker 3: Were they using the analog outputs? I got no idea.
Speaker 6: You're now seeing downsampling on the There's a thing called
Speaker 6: selectable output control that we fought really hard in cable
Speaker 6: card and lost on where they downsample the analog outputs
Speaker 6: and so the analog outputs are just garbage. So what
Speaker 6: you record off of it is like a postage stamp.
Speaker 6: And so you know, that was like there were the
Speaker 6: Elgado did this for a long time. There were a
Speaker 6: bunch of companies that had that had analog stuff. There's
Speaker 6: actually a name for what they wanted to do about this.
Speaker 6: They called it plugging the analog hole, which is like
Speaker 6: the people who ride themselves and their ability to communicate
Speaker 6: with the public. Coming up with we will now plug
Speaker 6: everyone's analog holes was just a moment.
Speaker 3: Of just incredible ice.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And I wrote something about it that got translated
Speaker 6: into German. I learned my most useful German UH phrase,
Speaker 6: which is plugging the analog hole in German, which is
Speaker 6: dust analogy lostoffen. And so now if I ever need,
Speaker 6: I can order tap water, I can ask if there
Speaker 6: are any hotel rooms, and I can tell you I
Speaker 6: want to plug your analog hole in German.
Speaker 3: That's which is a very common German conversation.
Speaker 1: Clubs all the time.
Speaker 3: I just think.
Speaker 8: That, oh my god, we're gonna and I just think
Speaker 8: entering this year I'm just I'm excited for because I
Speaker 8: live in cash.
Speaker 2: But it's I will say, every day I keep seeing
Speaker 2: people increasingly more frantic about this market and about VC.
Speaker 2: And also we can't sell any AI companies. No one's
Speaker 2: buying them. They have to do these weird like deals
Speaker 2: where it's like, yeah, we're not hiring you, we're signing
Speaker 2: a license and we're not going to pay all the
Speaker 2: people off. We're going to play the top brass off
Speaker 2: who will then join our company the IP.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're going to license it. We don't really care,
Speaker 3: We're just getting the talent. Yeah, it's just acquhirer. Yes.
Speaker 3: The thing is aquahias traditionally.
Speaker 2: I don't know, I'm old enough to remember back in
Speaker 2: like twenty thirteen when an aquhi was you losing?
Speaker 6: Yeah, it was like when we sort of I mean,
Speaker 6: there were a lot of startups that were effectively just
Speaker 6: like there were a lot of vcs who said, really
Speaker 6: what I am as a headhunter? And I go out
Speaker 6: and I get a bunch of promising people, maybe people
Speaker 6: who are already working a big tech I give them
Speaker 6: some money to build what amounts to a postgraduate project,
Speaker 6: and then they get high. You're back at either their
Speaker 6: former employer or a new employer, and they get a
Speaker 6: hiring bonus in the form of their stock being bought
Speaker 6: by the company. I get a finder's fee in the
Speaker 6: forum of my stock being bought by the company. Was
Speaker 6: just the shittiest way to run an executive recruiting.
Speaker 1: The thing is, the company gets the patent.
Speaker 2: But the thing is, though, that's not even happening anymore
Speaker 2: because there are no patents. Yeah no, what you can't
Speaker 2: patent prompt engineering. You can't patent the fuck it because
Speaker 2: that's all it is.
Speaker 3: I haven't looked into it.
Speaker 6: So the USPTO is not issuing a ton of it's
Speaker 6: a shitty AI patents.
Speaker 1: Also, they damaged deeply the USPTO with doge.
Speaker 3: Oh that's funny.
Speaker 2: And it's also just I don't think you can patent Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean maybe you can try, but I haven't seen
Speaker 2: people patenting prompts.
Speaker 6: Well, the USPTO has historically been very bad about granting
Speaker 6: bullshitty patents. You know, we fought and killed a patent
Speaker 6: that effectively would have allowed one company to control all podcasting.
Speaker 6: So like, the reason this podcast is on the air
Speaker 6: is that we we we killed this patent. The trumpetman
Speaker 6: is now moving to make it harder to get patent
Speaker 6: re examination. So if a bullshit patent issues, it's harder
Speaker 6: to challenge the patent. So I think we're going to
Speaker 6: see a lot more garbagee patterns, more patent trolling. There's
Speaker 6: a town in East Texas, yeah, where they have a
Speaker 6: made judge and all of the all the patent cases
Speaker 6: go there to die. There's like seven hundred companies that
Speaker 6: are headquartered in like one dusty building and it's just
Speaker 6: a bunch of mailboxes with you know, brass keys. And
Speaker 6: then all the big companies that get sued by patent
Speaker 6: trolls try to sweeten the jury by putting money into
Speaker 6: public work. So Samsung built them a year round outdoor
Speaker 6: ice skating rink in I think it's West Texas. In
Speaker 6: like it's one hundred and fifteen degrees in the summer
Speaker 6: and they have a year round outdoor ice skating rink
Speaker 6: that Samsung pays for.
Speaker 3: This is like a capitalist libertarian paradise.
Speaker 2: This is just like what if actually, like this is
Speaker 2: the world that the libertarians think that they could build.
Speaker 3: But you'll never beat Samsung.
Speaker 2: Samsung. Samsung will fuck thank you what big time? All right,
Speaker 2: I think we're gonna wrap this up. It has been
Speaker 2: such a wonderful show. It's been fun, great enjoyed having
Speaker 2: all of you here. Thank you Cory for making the
Speaker 2: trip out.
Speaker 3: Thanks Ed, Thanks Phil, thank you, thank you, Thank you Mattasowski,
Speaker 3: our incredible producer, mister Longuso Junior, Thank you for joining
Speaker 3: me once more. Thank you for having me. Mister Philip Broughton,
Speaker 3: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: I do my thing.
Speaker 2: Thank you for bartending, and thank you for everyone who
Speaker 2: came through these doors. And thank you to the incredible
Speaker 2: listeners have stuck with us on an incredible show. We
Speaker 2: have done incredibly well. It's a great show. We will
Speaker 2: be back next week with mister Stephen Burke of Gamers.
Speaker 2: Next is going to have a post yes show with
Speaker 2: him said not in personal beil, but it will be remote.
Speaker 3: I can speak flawlessly.
Speaker 2: Please subscribe to my newsletter and of course, in dedication
Speaker 2: to Sean Paul Adams, we will have a link to
Speaker 2: the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium. Remember that for the first
Speaker 2: time in the show notes. Thanks thank you all, it's
Speaker 2: beat incredible.
Speaker 5: Later, thank you for listening to Better Offline The editor
Speaker 5: and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski.
Speaker 5: You can check out more of his music and audio
Speaker 5: projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O
Speaker 5: S O W s ki dot com. You can email
Speaker 5: me at easy at Better offline dot com or visit
Speaker 5: Better Offline dot com to find more podcast links and
Speaker 5: of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go
Speaker 5: to chat dot Where's youreaed dot at to visit the discord,
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Speaker 3: Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 6: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
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