Better Offline - CES 2026: Part Ten (Epilogue)

Episode Date: January 10, 2026

Welcome to Better Offline’s coverage of the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show - a standup radio station in the Palazzo Hotel with an attached open bar where reporters, experts and various other characters bring you the stories from the floor. In our CES epilogue, Ed is joined by author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow, tech bubble newsletter writer Ed Ongweso Jr. and CES bartender Phil Broughton to talk about this year’s coverage, the upcoming venture apocalypse, and what we expect from 2026.EXCLUSIVE CES SALE! Get a *permanent* $10 off an annual subscription to my newsletter through January 13 2025: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/cue848p5sc Ed Ongweso Jr.: https://bsky.app/profile/bigblackjacobin.bsky.social Cory Doctorow: http://pluralistic.net/ https://www.eff.org/ Phil Broughton: https://bsky.app/profile/funranium.bsky.social/ The Tech Bubble Newsletter: https://thetechbubble.substack.com/ Matt Osowski: https://www.mattosowski.com/ Donate in Sean-Paul’s honor: https://www.perc-epilepsy.org/ --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you. you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your

identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him. Listen to Season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month

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

they come sit down. It's got the big daddy bedroom where I just kind of like sleep or like talk to myself. Roll around a lot. I roll around on the floor, going, but then in the main room, we have the bar that Phil was set up. And during the recordings, Phil will come in and ferry and usually a Diet Coke or a little thing of Satool, which is close to Mezcal. Jesus Christ, my voice just broke there. I'm, of course, Ed Zittron, by the way,

the host of Better Offline. And Phil has been bringing me drinks all week and bringing everyone drinks just kind of ferrying around the recording. He wouldn't know it to hear it, but he's been an incredible bartender. 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 Mr. Corey Doctor, activist, author, journalist. Hello. And of course, Mr. Edelon, Grasso Jr.

Hello, my friends. My man, another year, another day, another year on the butt. Oh, 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 apeshit, crazy, by which I mean, I think all of us were in bed by 11. I mean, hey, there's before that night.

Oh, yeah. Then Edward and Guaiso Jr. And I got to go out to, I'm scheming. 12.1 a.m. is the plan. We're going to go. really crazy. Raging. I feel like we're going to get me Avengers together.

I've got people from different walks of life to come and party with you tonight. I did see there's Avengers Doomsday now. They're doing three hour, 45 minute one, and they got, they got the X-Men in it, and they're real just key jangling. Yeah, it's either going to be okay or horrible. Yeah, it's either going to be amazing in the sense that, like, Patrick Stewart, if Patrick Stewart just does X-Men shit, I'm fine. But yeah, this is

what happens at the end of CES. Our brains are reduced to a fine simmer. You're going to do a courtesy sniff on me for Domsday, aren't you? I'm going to, if I manage to watch that fucking movie,

I will actually... You'll courtesy sniff at me for... Let's go see Avatar three-way. Fire and ass right now. I've not seen any of the Avatar movies, man. Let's go to Pandora. If it was on the sphere, I'd 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? 2015. We would have it. It was from a PR firm. We'd all sit around. We'd have the journalist.

We'd have drinks. But died in 2020 because of, actually not because of the pandemic. Just because we were, I think it was like, there was something weird that CES and then COVID happened. People were already scared of COVID at CES. Well, people were just sick. Like, people were ambient. I was sick.

was getting a lot of questions about, is this okay? And I went, well, the other part of the worry is parts of China had already locked down at that point in January. So there were missing parts of the show, which were starting people to worry about, are we okay here? I was also just like, I got, knock on word, I have done pretty well not getting sick at CES, largely because the first few days, when the show's the most crowded, I'm masked up immediately. just to just i have my big put my bane mask on and yeah that 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 and we were already scheming for 27 we've we've got uh vice president jadey vansner I'm gonna go do you even say please do you say please and thank you

no I it's this year the lesson I've learned is that um 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. I have physics degrees, but I can't keep up with 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 CES in what, 20 years? So it's 2003. So 23 years. Hail Discordia. I'm really very grateful you came out here because it was, I know that we laughed about the Amazon,

on 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 four nanometer microscope and such. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love the stuff that's kind of makery. 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 they come up with 75 form factors for it. And like 73 of them are garbage and two of them are just really pretty. They look like something, you know, you'd, you'd have gotten out of a mid-century designer or something. You know, it's very striking. If you saw it in MoMA, you'd go, well, yeah, I get why that's a classic. Yeah. Yeah. I, and I kind of, I'm, you, 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, man. No, it was just like a wall of like data center level plugs, the ones that you'd usually put in a back of the computer. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that that's the, the unseen magic of CES is that while we can complain about a lot of things, there are still little companies doing weird little shit at the side. Well, this is like what I was saying about the British charger adapter, the collapsible charger 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 austere book aimed at designers saying,

stop sacrificing functionality for aesthetics. And everyone read it. And this completely was, it's impossible to overstate how important. this was in how people think about design. And like 25 years later, he wrote another book called Emotional Design where he was like, I was totally wrong. Nearly everything that you use in a high-tech society

is nearly always broken. And the role of the user is actually the troubleshooter. And to be a troubleshooter is to be expansive. And to be expansive, you can't be frustrated and angry. When you're frustrated and angry, you tunnel down and you just keep like clicking the button over and over again and hoping it starts working. Sorry, just when you say a troubleshooter,

what exactly do you mean? Well, think about your average day, right? Where 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's broken. The app closes. You get a weird cryptic timeout bug. You know, all kinds of things. I'm the last Tumblr user on Earth. But Tumblr changed their HTML. editor a few years ago, about a year ago.

And I only just figured out that the reason I can't type in it unless I flip it to HTML mode and write raw HTML is that the first character you enter into it has to have style data. It has to be like bold or italic or have a font size associated with it. So you have to copy it out of an app that has style data. Jesus Christ. Paste it in and I don't know why, right? But like now I can reliably type in the Tumblr Compositor.

And that's a that's a troubleshooting thing. Yeah, yeah. And we all do the. all day long with everything we use. And it's not just gnarly Linux shit. It's like my LG electric stove top, my induction stove top. Exactly. Like the beginning of my book,

why everything stopped working coming out next year. It's, I think I counted 131 within the space of a day of just shit that went wrong. Uh-huh. Things like I went on Reddit to try and look at someone, but when I went to click it, the entire thing stopped responding to touch. Sure.

Or the many, the many times that, just my email just decides to reset itself or Google Calendar has locked me out. I'm sorry, not just gone like, yeah, mate, log in again. And the funniest one, by the way, has done it? Has this happened to you? Have you logged into Google Calendar? That's in like, and it said log in place you lock in.

And then you go to edit it and it logs you out again. Yes, I have Google dysfunction. Instantly. Well, you don't use Google. I know I use GCal because I have to share a calendar with a bunch of heterogeneous environments. Yeah, that would be. But the point being that everyone's a troubleshooting all the time. Yes.

And if you're angry and frustrated and you're just like, you know, you've got the the insipient aneurysm throbbing in your temple. Yeah. And, you know, your fists are clenched and 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 jelling. You know, maybe literally it's not jelling. Something's not right.

And you just like, if you're kind of bopping around the kitchen, there's good music, and you go, taste this. What does it need? Oh, yeah, I know. Maybe try a little salt. Yeah, yeah. Right? But like, if you're in a panic and you've got 10 people coming over. You're traveling, what have you in.

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

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 all my cables in and it sits flat when you open it instead of tipping over. And I get, oh, so 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 forever, but 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 P-A-K-T. I love them. They have a slightly dodgy design in this bag, but still, it's a one that's a regular

bag that slips over your suitcase, which, by the way, is the worst part of it because you pack it too much, it's a little hard to get on there. But the killer instinct thing is it opens from the top, not the side. So when you're sliding it under a, you're on a south-west 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 it again. This sounds very minor. Sure. It's this is the, 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 know, like I, I, I'm the kind of person who's on the road like 100 and 150 days a year. And I have a fully set up travel package. Yeah. 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, 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 comes out of forks. Yeah. Yeah. This is, yeah, this is the thing like in 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. Right. 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 aisle. I'd love it. I'd love batteryville.

That would be a problem with the fire marshal. Okay, but you space them out a little bit. You would have to, yes. Yeah, you space them out. On a pause of note, I have not had to call the fire marshal 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 prior. There was that prolonged period where it was like, hey, Phil, we found a completely functional laser on the, and you're like, which kind? And they were like, well, MRI. The MRI in the middle of the electronics showed the worst fucking idea.

How the fuck did they even get that in there? Because they never told anyone and then rolled it onto the floor and good to go. The perfect crime. You know, unlicensed medical use on random passers-by and destroying a adjacent electronics and your neighbor base. It's a long tradition, right? The World's Fair used to be able to go and have your feet floriscoped in the shoe sales. You didn't have to go to the World's Fair. You just went to your local market.

Quick question, what's a floriscope? It's an x-ray. 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. And not for a brief exposure, right? You leave it running like a radiographically guided injection. You would leave it running for 10, 20 seconds. and the shoe-fitting salesperson.

Or longer. Yeah, would be just like continuously bombarded. Right. It's 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 were continually doing it. And also, more to the point, the way they had built it is the x-ray generator shot through your foot to the developing screen towards the lens for your face so that you could see how good your shoes were. Incidentally, we still use fluorescopes.

They are medical. And they are the majority of the dose that doctors and nurses take. Yeah, yeah. If you ever get a radiographically guided injection. It's so they don't stab you or put the, drugs where it shouldn't go. They are good. Get the steroid into your facet joint or whatever.

It 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 is some classic humanity there. They were just like, how the fuck we're going to fit shoes on the x-ray? If you try hard, you can still find them in remote stores in Appalachia.

But if you want to see one in person, there was one on display. at the Bradbury Museum that they have now equipped with digital cameras to simulate the effect of what the flora unit for shoes used to be like. Jesus. It's one of those, they seriously did this? Yeah, yeah,

they really did. I'm not surprised anymore when I hear anything like that. I'm, I'm shocked they haven't had a ghost gun problem here. I'm shocked, think about it with the dad came to the floor in a prior year. Yeah, well, really? 3D printing of firearms with...

Oh, the 3D printing era. That was before Cody Watts's name got busted for... That is correct. Yeah. Oh, God. What? It's a deep dark hole. The tech industry.

Yeah, you've got the horrifying billionaires who are just talking about the 14 words and then you've got the makers who... Printing them on their 3D 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 1992 when we sued the NSA for civilian access to crypto, which is that code is a form of expressive speech covered by the First Amendment.

Right. And so prior restraint on the publication of code is unconstitutional. It was narrowed in another case about the magazine 2600, but it's still a bedrock principle, code speech. And then it's like, well, our STL file speech, I mean, they're 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 Amendment weirdos will have my back, which is probably true. But also like the court is going to go, okay, but like if we rule in favor of this, you're making guns at home. that I feel like that's a that I the judge feel a little uncomfortable about it

right he was really he was like let's roll the dice on the entire idea that Cota's speech on my folk theory about guns and whether Second Amendment weirdos will be able to sway the court and it sort of all fell apart because he had sex with a minor right yeah that's that there was a previous terrifying trip to Vegas where sit on the floors of florida Caesar's. 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 him. He said, hey, Phil! And he was decked to the nine's heavy gold rings, clearly doing way better than I had seen him when he'd been laid off from Newmey. And you're doing great. What is Newmie? It's now the Tesla plant in Fremont.

formerly it was a cooperative between GM and Toyota that gave birth to Saturn. Yeah, 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 looked like he was doing good.

Parallax from Green Lantern. I asked, how are you doing? He said, you have no idea how great it is to be able to just, print lowers and uppers left, right, center all day long. 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 for the-

On the floor of the casino with the crafts table. Uninitiated and through my very low gun knowledge, the lower is the part that actually makes a gun, a gun, right? Pretty much. That's the part that that is the actual thing that you require to make a gun shoot boom, boom. And it absolutely had no serial numbers. And it was a, he handed me a go. gun on the floor of a casino. You were required to put the serial number on a lower.

Yeah, yeah, he are. I'm saying this because I know sometimes I get the occasional email saying, hey, you keep passing 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 otherwise, no one knows anything including me.

But that's fucking insane. This person was just working. Vegas, baby. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends. me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an

a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group.

The yarn herds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

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Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's Iheartadvertising.com. Hey, everyone. It's Ryder Strong and Will Fidel from PodMeets World. And now the Podmeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV,

who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some Survivor.

I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it? Like what was just because we? Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion in the 50th season, from the final attempts at gameplay, to the desperate pleas of finalists, to a bunch of ha, ooh, ha, ooh, ha, ha, ooh, again, we are experts. So make sure to tune into Pod Meets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes.

Listen to PodMeets Twirled on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about, and they are experts at everything. Here, the Nick Dick and Poll show, we're not afraid to make mistakes. What Coogler did that I think was so unique. He's the writer-director. Who do you think he is? I don't know.

You mean it to like the president? You think Canada has a president. You think China has a president. Those law crusette. God, I love that thing. I use it all the time. I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it at night. It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.

It was a good one. I like that snake. It is an actual Polish saying. It is an actual Polish thing. Better version of Play Stupid Games, win stupid prizes. Yes. Which, by the way,

wasn't Taylor Swift, who said that for the first time. I actually, I thought it was. I got that wrong. Listen to the Nick, Dick, and Paul show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So as a Canadian,

I have a piece of gun lore for everyone. Nice. And I learned from John McDonald's, 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.

And if you want to avoid this, you just need to know one word, modified. And if you say he opened fire with his modified whatever, Walter PPP, no matter what it is, you then make the gun do, the person of the person. there who's a, you know, ammo, ammo-sexual 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. No answer. Just get emails going like, I figured out the cool thing you thought of. Am I right? It's kind of like in, yeah, yeah, definitely.

This is a very specific reference. There's a show called Reaper where Ray Wise from Twin Peaks was the devil. And it's kind of like how they play a game of coin flip, I think it is. And they use a reflection on the, on the tabletop to distract the devil. Because the devil is distracted by his own reflection. You just need to key jingle for the musket fuckers. The amosexual musket fuckers.

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 29,000 ones. and will say like, this guy doesn't know shit. And they will find one fucking line. And they'll be like, look on that.

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 big, this is a random aside.

The better offlines, LARPERS or sickos. Well, no, this is, I got sent a very fond of one. So there's this guy on Twitter, real horrible website. Bucco Capital bloke, who is like a,

a weirdly popular guy, and he deleted this tweet, but an eagle-eyed reader caught it. It said, conflict it because if the AI trade blows up, then Tay Kim's head explodes, which would be very funny. But then Ed Zitchin won't be right, and that would not be funny at all. And just to be, just to be clear, this would be the funniest possible situation, because that guy deleted it and thinks I didn't get it. Sadly, sadly, I got the screenshot. 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?

I don't remember. I mean, it just prison. Prison happened. Yeah, I mean, not for that specific guy, but I mean. I don't remember what happened to defense distributed. I don't think we've had. Yeah, I don't think we've had a case that was litigated to final judgment about the legality of shape files. I mean, the legality of the gun itself is pretty established.

Right. But that's good. Shape files. And look, I just, I do. think that making geometry illegal is dumb. Yes. I, 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. Yeah. You can't 3D 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? They can 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. Right. So it's a, it is a programmable piece of descriptive code, right? 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 illegitimate the illegitimate. illegal geometry. So how do you police the illegal geometry? You can't. You know, it just, it just feels like if it's, it's one thing to make a law that says something is illegal. It's another

thing to make a law. And even if that thing is bad and you want to extinguish it, but if you have no way to administer that law, you are setting yourself up either for heartbreak or for something really bad where you just run around and you accuse everyone having broken the law because no one can ever tell who's broken the law and who hasn't. Like, administrability is the single most important factor in policy design because... And just admissibility means being able to do something. Can you administer it? Right, right.

Can you figure out whether someone's violated it? Right. So to bring this to the internet, there are a lot of people who are very angry and I think rightfully so about harassment and hate speech on the platforms. Yeah. 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 100 times a minute, but it's a question that takes five years to adjudicate.

Yeah. 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 Bill different. You never die. But I want to die three times.

You know, you could imagine another regime where like if you've, I don't know if you're a Mastodon user, but in, no, so in Mastodon there's this feature. It's a beautiful piece of design where if you want to go from one Mastodon server to another, because you can access Mastodon from a lot of different servers run by lots of different people. You click a link and it exports all of your data about who you were following and who is following you. And then you click another link on the new server and it imports it and then just all that stuff moves over. So we could say to Elon Musk, like, yeah, we're still. going to have some standards for hate speech and whatever. We're going to worry about whether your chatbot is shitting out child pornography. But at the same time, what we're going to do 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 or 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. Yeah. Yeah. or audience members or family members or people have the same rare 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 sky, but 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 nuance than that. You will have to, but I feel like starting from there and working back, I'm sure you'll push back on this is just, they usually go the other way.

It's like, well, let people do everything and we'll work out later. I just feel like it's just a half-ass attitude. I run those better off-line Reddit with a dread hand. Yeah. In the same, but I think- The Iron Law of the mods is a beautiful thing. But the smaller communities you could do that with, but 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 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 against kicked off for complaining about it.

Yeah. And the classic one being like reporting people for death threats, but it's friends being like, I'm a 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 people doing lighthearted stuff that get banned. And then the people with the 14 words and saying 88 gets get to keep around. I'm boasted.

I really, I am excited to see, though, how the world reacts to Twitter becoming the CSAM generator, because if Kier Stama fucking bans X, that'd be the funniest thing I've seen in my fucking. He won't do it. That man 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 are having dueling protests about who hates Kirstarmer more. Oh, yeah. That is, you know what? Finally brought together.

That's the most British thing I've ever heard. We all don't agree about who's human. Protests is called, no, we hate Kirstarmer more than you. That's so British. That's the most British thing I've ever heard in my life. Like, no. And then someone's going to have a protest saying that we shouldn't have a protest about anything. 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 Keistama, not going to lie. It doesn't seem to. 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. He has the lowest approval ratings of any prime minister since measurement began.

He has a lower approval rating than Boris Johnson during the pandemic after it was discovered that he was having parties while everyone else was locked down. I fucking did it, folks. We found the least popular. And Rachel Reeves is even less popular than he is. What about, um, uh, Theresa May? Less popular than Theresa May. Less popular than Liz Truss.

Yeah, it was just about us. Who is lettuce? Oh, my fucking God. Yeah, no, no, no. I'm going to say, I hate the lettuce thing. I hate the lettuce thing so much. It's the most boring, corny, wanky, quirk chungus bullshit from the UK. We're a country where we used to have, when spitting image used to have teeth and it

wasn't just like poop and boat, doing homophiles. 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, outray homophobia. It's just like, what if Trump was gay? What, Trump did suck to be just me a fucking lame-ass pieces of shit. We're a long way from the Land of Confusion video.

Yeah. And it, oh, God. But it's, I can't believe Kirstom was that unpopular, though, but actually, I can, the only thing that Labor does reliably is produce people that are less popular than the conservative. if they're, because it's just like, well, the Conservatives is a bad, we'll give a labor party in. And they're like, right. Historic fumble. Historic fumble.

Every fucking, when you watch like Gordon Brown and you're like, God, I miss him. You know things. They should have let my boy Corbyn win in. Oh, yeah. Jeremy is Corbyn. He is also screwing up very badly. What's interesting, you know. With that new party of his.

Yeah, with our party. Oh, what the fuck is? But, you know, the greens are circling. So after World War II, there was a, there was a reboot of British. politics, the liberal party collapsed. So a party that had been around forever, the Whigs, just ceased to exist. Labor came into existence. That was happening to the conservatives as of the last election and the Reform Party were about to basically scoop up all the conservative voters who didn't like the way the party was being run. But it looks like it's also happening to labor.

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

Yeah, that's, okay, by the way, just a completely blunt statement, if you move from England to Florida, they should put you on a 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 in a new way they haven't quite.

quite identified. Yeah, but we welcome you. 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 has a place they need to make mistakes. I thought that that was just Tampa.

No, even Tampa has a place to go, to go make life errors. Yeah. And that is Ebor City. Oh, God. Yeah, I'm, and as we look into this year, I got to admit, I realize things are quite bad and things are going to get a lot more chaotic. But I think the chaos is necessary. Coming out of this week, all I can feel in my gut is like destruction from this show.

Not literally, but this feels like a reckoning of like, and Corey, you'll have some good historical knowledge, of like 20 years of hubris in the tech industry, of moving away from, we made a thing that people could use towards, actually, random question, Corey, you ever read The Case for the Fat Startup by Ben Horwitz? It was a piece he wrote actually before Software is Eating the World, the Horowitz even. It was basically saying the worst thing, hell was having a startup that was not the leader in the market.

Oh, I know this. Yeah. I've not read the paper, but I've heard it describe. It's just, it's a guy of one of the Horowitz of Andresen Horowitz, early on 2010, I think. And I think ever since then, we have been leader. 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 anti-monopolistic tendencies or just race to the bottom or using funding to chase people out, Uber, to your point, Ed. And I think what we're seeing this CES is what happens when you just chase growth. because the thing about all these companies is, yeah, you can judge them and you should judge them and they fucking suck. And I think all of these LLM rappers deserve to go in the trash along with their founders. But at the same time, it's like, Scorpion the Frog, it's when you incentivize bringing things to a show that do not exist when you give them awards, when you write them up and act like they're real year after year, regardless of whether the fucking thing actually exists. Of course, you're going to get a CES predominantly made of things. that don't and the things that exist only to get invested in from the normy people who came here

like Chloe Radcliffe to the extreme technical people like Corey. It's the same thing of like, this is just a company that's here to jingle the keys in front of the investors or the, not even the buyers, 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 were never built for anything other than selling to someone else or dumping onto the public markets, except none of them can. Chase out all the smart people in favor of people who can't count.

So I think if you want to identify something over 20 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. Right. Canonical example, like when we opened up AT&T after. the breakup in 1982. Yeah.

The modem just plugged into their shit, right? You didn't need to make a phone network. You just needed to make a modem. Right. And that, everything exploded when 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 de novo. You raid the high margin lines of sclerotic, legacy companies that are dominating the market. And you, you know, this is what Jeff Bezos said to the publishers when he launched Amazon infamously. He went to a boardroom full of publishers and he said, your margin is my opportunity. Right. So you take those high margins, you make them your opportunity.

And so when AT&T gets broken up and they lose the ability to control what you plug into the phone jack, we see modems, we see an explosion answering machines, PBX is just all this stuff that is just like, layered on top. of the existing stuff, but you can't do that anymore. You know, when Facebook launched, they had this problem that everyone who could have 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, and you could reply to it, right? So you didn't have to choose between your friends and a superior service. Facebook's initial pitch was, we're like MySpace, but we're not run by an evil billionaire, and we never spy on you. Thank God. Yeah. And 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, 2024,

there was a startup from two teenagers called OG app. Almost the same thing. You gave it your Insta credentials. It logged in as you. It grabbed everything Insta had waiting for you. It discarded all the suggestions, all the ads,

all the recommendations. all the boosted content and all the clickbait and showed you things from people you followed from uh in reverse chronological order right and oh the facebook i want yeah and that day it hit the top 10 of both app markets and that night met us had to take down notice to apple and Google and they removed it nice right that's that's they won't remove x though sure no but that's no there's honor there's honor among thieves exactly yeah yeah no these guys are not really competitors. They all sat behind Donald Trump on the dais. But that's the thing, though. The egregious version of that is large language models. Hear me out. So none of these companies can be run on cash flow.

I know I'm doing the bit, but you can't compete with 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 of dollars and access to infrastructure. At a scale, I mean, if you want to compete with them, you need hundreds of millions of dollars. Sure. And you need the talent. They have a big capital mode. Well, the capital moat, 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 is obviously love 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 are capital P professional jobs in the sense that a professional is someone,

yeah, a professional is someone who is 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, the we fire all the people who get to tell us. us to fuck off dynamic. You know, like it's,

it's very exciting. And the fight to maintain the codes of ethics. It also, often teaching students that this is why I demand this of them and why they should demand it for themselves may often be the first time they've ever heard of the concept of a code of ethics, which is depressing, but also it warms my heart for,

I get to be the person who teaches you. 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 fire, the people they want to fire, they truly do not understand what it is they do. Like, I'm going to choose, like, a random public business insider.

All of the layoffs they did there. And it's like, oh, we'll replace them with AI. Well, we won't. That didn't work. But, you know, we're going to say what AI. first. What does that mean? Um, well, I can't really, uh, stop asking so many fucking questions, you asshole. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman,

help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an Acapella band with their between songs banter. There's that more singer in the green. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group.

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Think IHeart. streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Hey, everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Will Ferdell from PodMeets World. And now the PodMeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, traitors,

and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some Survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it?

Yeah. Just because we... Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion of the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of

ha, who. Ah, ha, ooh. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune to Pod Meets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to Pod Meets Twirled on the IHeard Radio app,

Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about, and they are experts at everything. Here, the Nick Dick and Poll Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes. What Coogler did that I think was so unique. He's the writer-director. Who do you think he is?

I don't know. You mean the president? You think Canada has a president. You think China has a president? the La Crozette. God, I love that thing. I use it all the time. I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it at night.

It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus. It was a good one. I like that saying. It is an actual Polish saying. It is an actual Polish saying. Better version of Play Stupid Games, win stupid prizes.

Yes. Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift, who said that for the first time. I actually thought it was. I got that wrong. Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul show on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Everyone around here talk about worker replacement. And this is the thing that actually drives me the craziest all the time. It's the people like, yeah, worker replacement, worker replacement. Have you fucking used one of them? They don't work. They just don't work. They don't work.

Occasionally I'll see someone on Twitter be like, my wife who's a special doctor at the most genius hospital, New York City, she put in a thing and it came up with a differential diagnosis that usually, and it's just fuck off, you fucking lying sack of shit. And it's, but everyone I've been talking to this week outside of the, this room, of course, who talks about worker replacement.

It's like, yeah, and you know, of course, right now it's replacing workers. Well, I think you, coders on, um, you need to differentiate between the AI can do your job and an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you, you replace you with the AI that can't do your job. That's the point. Yeah. That's exactly it. It's like the, it's almost like they, they, they, actually, no, that's it.

They finally created an economy where you've cut out, like, efficacy or like what a thing does to just like, finally we create a thing for salespeople to sell to CEOs. No one knows what's going on with the actual product or whether it works, whether it's good or bad. Just like the vibes, baby. But then also, there are bosses who could give less of a fuck about whether it works or not. They know what their headcount reduction for the year has to be. And they're just going to be like, well, hey, you know what I can. This is a good excuse. 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 they keep doing layoffs every single year. Why they do them? They just fuck them. Because they can. Well, actually, Microsoft, I think, has genuine brain madness, though, because I talk to

people that I have a ton of my, if you work for Microsoft, always reach out, easy at better offline.com, EZtron. com, it's it's true. 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 co-pilot must be used. And it's people, again, senior people too, being like, I don't know what the fuck is going on.

Jay Parig, who's over at Microsoft, real loser guy went from a company called MoveWorks, which was famous for buying $30,000 worth of Lulu Lemon 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 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 Lulu Lemon trivia for you. Oh, by all means. The guy who founded Lulu Lemon, giant piece of shit, Einran worshipping Libertarian, Edgelord. The reason he called it Lulu Lemon, he thought it would be fun to hear Japanese tourists in Vancouver try and say Lulu Lemon. So he picked a word with as many Ls in it as possible. I fucking hate that so much.

He also had a no, fat checks policy for quite some time. It's like, no, we don't do plus sizes. No fact checks policy, huh? No fact checks. What is this platformer, the newsletter? No, not fact checks. Not fact checks. Not fact checks.

Oh, my bad. Yes. I'd say I'd really misheard that one. It's usually the other way around. I'll say something in an American, sorry, Canadian, won't understand it. Would you like to go to the pawn store? No, we're not talking about P-A-W-N stars. I would, I'm serious, if I could get Chumley from that show on this.

You'd have to get him out of prison. Is he in jail? He may have had a tainty bit of a CSAM problem. I mean, I'm, I hate to say it, but look at him, then listen to how he talks. Jim will fix it. And look, yeah, yeah, is Jimmy. Jimmy, uh. Jinkle, jankle, no, no, no.

None of that. Yeah, it's going to be an interesting year because I just think it's a reckoning of every, like the 20 years of dumb fuck decisions, the Iraq war, the DHS and 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... Ed, A16C just raised their biggest fund. And to get their return, they're going to make the tech industry multiples larger. The funniest thing I saw, though, was someone posting about, wow, look how great Andresa is. Look at these vintages and they stop at 2017.

It's just like, ah, yeah, look how good this is. And as we all know, time stopped. Listen, I believe in Conehead. I think he can do anything. He sets that point too. That's the thing like, even he can be wrong. And the whole thing, the whole reason the 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. 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. Yep. And the thing is, though, venture capital is running out of money.

$15 billion go to Andreessen Horowitz. That's going to drain it from all the other people that need it. The thing is, who the fuck they're going to sell these startups 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 arrives by streaming cable or satellite. They're all encrypted. It's against the law to break the encryption because of the DMCA. The recording is legal. The breaking the encryption to do the recording isn't. Right.

Tivo. Who would not, like, I think you could sell every person in America a PVR for streaming. What, just like recording? Recording the stuff you watch. Interesting. So, you know, everyone's like, oh, I hate streaming because they take away the shows I love. You should just record them. You should just record them the way you did off your television. It is legal in exactly the same way it was legal to record it off your TV.

I think this company called Play-on I worked with like 15 years ago, so it's okay. Like, it's, I can just, I can say that does that. They seem to exist. Were they using the analog outputs? I got no idea. So you're now seeing downsampling on the, there's a thing called selectable output control that we fought really hard in cable card and lost on where they downsample the analog outputs.

And so the analog outputs are just garbage. So what you record off of it is like a posted stamp. And so, you know, that was like the, there were, Elgado did this for a long time. There were a bunch of companies that had analog stuff. There's actually a name for what they want to. to do about this, they called it plugging the analog hole, which is like the people who cried 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.

Nice. Yeah. And I wrote something about it that got translated to German. I learned my most useful German phrase, which is plugging the analog hole in German, which is that analogy lochstofen. And so now if I ever need, I can order tap water, I can ask if there are any hotel rooms,

and I can tell you I want to plug your analog hole in German. That's my journey vocabulary. A very common German conversation. Sex clubs all the time. I just think, I'm... Where is the Unz, Unz?

Well, is our Kit Kat. Oh my God. We're gonna, and I just think entering this year, I'm just, I'm excited for it because I live in cash. But it's, I will say, every day I keep seeing people

increasingly more frantic about this market and about VC. And also, we can't sell any AI companies. No one's buying them. They have to do these weird, like,

deals where it's like, yeah, we're not hiring you. We're signing a license and we're not going to pay all the people off. We're going to pay 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 aqua hire. Yes. But the thing is aquilers were traditionally, I don't know, I'm old enough to remember back in like 2013 when an aqua hire was you losing. Yeah.

It was like when you 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 head hunter. 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, uh, They get hired 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 form of my stock being bought by the company.

It's just the shittiest way to run an executive recruiting. And the company gets the patent. But the thing is, though, that's not even happening anymore because there are no patents. Yeah. No, you can't patent prompt engineering. It's true. Like, 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 very, it's very, uh, uh, 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, 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, um,

We killed this patent. The Trump admin is now moving to make it harder to get patent reexamination. So if a bullshit patent issues, it's harder to challenge the patent. So I think we're going to see a lot more garbagey patents, more patent trolling. There's a town in East Texas where they have a made judge and all of the, all the patent cases go there to die. There's like 700 companies that are headquartered in like one dusty building and it's just a bunch of mailboxes with, you know, brass keys. 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. It's 150 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 will fuck you up big time. All right. I think we're going to wrap this up. It has been such a wonderful show.

It's been fun. It's been really great. Enjoyed having all of you here. Thank you, Corey, for making the trip out. Thanks, Ed. Thanks, Phil. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Matt Asowski, our incredible producer, Mr. Onguoso, Jr. Thank you for joining me once more. Thank you for having me. Mr. Philip Broughton, thank you so much. I do my thing. Thank you for bartending. And thank you for everything.

one who came through these doors and thank you to the incredible listeners. We've stuck with us. We're an incredible show. We have done incredibly well. It's a great show. We will be back next week with Mr. Stephen Burke of Gamers Nexus. We're going to have a post-sear show with him. Sadly, not in person.

It'll 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. Remembered that for the first time. In the show notes, thank you all. It's been incredible. Later.

Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattersowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattersowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's Your Ed.at to visit the Discord

and go to our slash Better Offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app,

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