2026.09.25: Soda Mode

0:00P-H-A-T. Pretty hot and tempting. Hey, we're recording the podcast. Cut up. Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is... Morning September. For September 25th, 2026, my name is Bernie Burns, sitting right over there. She's watching me fiddle with knob and dashy burns to head action. Hey fiddle with your knob on your own time. Are your headphones quiet right now? A little bit. What's going on? No, no, no. The music was quiet, but you're not quiet. Is that what it is? I'll fix that in post. We'll fix it in post. We'll do that. We always do. We'll do it live. Happy Friday. Happy Friday to you. We inadvertently head fat week here on the podcast in hindsight. We were talking about fat bears. GLP ones and stuff like that. It's like we're all like embracing our body positivity here at morning somewhere. That's what we're doing. Speaking of which, I need some help. I have a dilemma with fat bear week.

1:01Marshmallow got knocked out. Like first thing. Marshmallow got knocked out. I don't know why people are nagging on Marshmallow. But my bear got knocked out. First thing, I'm devastated about this. Marshmallow was obviously trying to appeal to the crowds with the name. That's why. Trying to be a people pleaser. And you think that people saw right through it and said, no, we don't accept this Marshmallow. People want a good chunk. So when your bear gets knocked out, right? Do you then have to switch allegiances to the bear, the beat your bear on the logic that if that bear goes on to win, then really, Marshmallow could theoretically have been a second place bear. I see what you're saying. We would have been the champion if we hadn't faced the champion so early. Right, exactly. Yes, it's just like there's nothing that could be done. We just got that spot in the bracket. We're like the first time we're going to be the champ. Okay, I got you. First, I was like, why would you switch allegiances to that?

2:03Now, I think you just lick your wounds and you go home and you like think about next year, right? You just, you just give up. We're just, we're just out of fat bear week. Yeah, you just like find airdrops and berries in there and, you know, try to see it a little bit better next time. I feel like the bear running back to the locker room going, yeah, we got to execute better next time. We just did some things in go our way today and, you know, we'll just look forward to the next season. This is Marshmallow like sitting down for like the press interview being like, yeah, you know, I just, I got acknowledged. I should have eaten more salmon. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't prep for this competition hard enough. I, I took the competition for granted and, well, let me go see who. Is that what you do though during a fat bear contest? Is that the way you analyze your performance or is it the opposite going? Yeah, I'd probably just work, work too hard in the off season, you know, I exercise too much, you know, I push myself a little too hard. I should have just sat around doing nothing, you know, this time around, I'll just lay on my ass more. I spent too much time on my gains and I accidentally cut.

3:05Yeah, Dave, you do too much prep work for the fat bear contest. You kind of become your own worst enemy, don't you? Right, because you got to, you got to burn and when you burn, you don't fat. Who beat your bear? Let me, let me look this up. Where's the, where's the stupid bracket? No, okay. Yeah. I pay zero attention to this during the week. Like this is my only exposure to fat bear week. The semi-finals are left. So they've been doing, they've got voting is happening today for the quarterfinals and then there's semi-finals left. And then the finals are going to be on September 29th. I think an interesting upset this year, I want to say, is I think chunk got knocked out. No, shut up. Yeah, I think a chunk got knocked out yesterday, but to Bucky. And this was pretty decisive. So we're both out. So we don't have to talk about this anymore. So Bucky got 118,000 votes to chunk, to chunk 46,000. Wow. So this was like, this was kind of like a wipeout here.

4:06Can I ask you a question? Did anyone else get more votes than the bearer that beat chunk? Is this just a take down approach? Yeah, actually. So in on the other side, the other matchup, there was Walker versus Golly and Walker got 134,000 votes. Golly only got 31,000. Wow, that's a fuck. So that's pretty decisive. The floor wipeout. And then there was a, you know, like go around the family side of the bracket. The 89 backpack got 140,000 votes. And the 610 family only got 20,000. So another decisive victory. I don't like the family thing. I don't like drawing kids into this competition. Did they get permission? Are they putting some of the money aside for them for the future? You know, or they're... You know what? Maybe it goes into a berry fund for the kids because God knows human kids go through tons of berries and get really expensive really fast. Imagine bear kids. I don't want to.

5:06They got to go through so many berries. I'm hearing we should put our kids into contest. The popularity contest on the internet. Make that very budget. Yeah, exactly. Hey, since we're talking about paying for stuff, please explain to me what the fuck this thing is that's in the group chat where you can now, or there's a patent out there where you can use your playstation controller to tap to pay for stuff with your card or your phone. So it's not a patent that's been approved yet. This is a patent that Sony has applied for. And they applied for it. I want to say like last year, but it was just published. So people are now seeing this patent in progress. And the idea is think of tap to pay, but you tap a card or your phone on your playstation controller. How would that possibly be more convenient than just like using the card one time on a playstation? Am I out with a controller that I don't normally use? You got a loaner controller or something? I don't know.

6:06So on one hand, I can kind of see if you don't have your payment information saved, this would prevent you from having to then manually enter your card details every time you want to buy something. Or it could be like a quick way to do that or to use a different card than you usually use. Or in this day and age where we don't always carry the cards around all the time sometimes. We use our phones for tap to pay instead. That's the way that you could pay for stuff. The interesting thing I'm finding about the patent is that the articles are talking a lot about tap to pay. And I'm like, I get it because imagine if your kid just starts tapping and buying a bunch of in-game stuff without permission, that would be a concern. But it would also be a concern if your payment information is already saved in the account. It's not just for payments though. The patent is for, let me look at the exact name of the patent.

7:06The patent is actually for just transfer of information. It's a video game controller driven information transfer. So that doesn't could payment information, but it could include other stuff as well potentially. It's like using NFC, it could transfer information. An interesting application of that could be, interestingly, imagine if you could tap in. Like if, let's say you had your PlayStation account saved in your phone wallet or whatever. And you could tap into a controller on a console that you don't normally play on. And you could log in and access all your stuff on that console. Oh, I see. That could be really interesting. Well, now it sounds less like tapping to pay and more just like they reinvented the memory card. Or yeah, yeah, kind of. Or like their version of a mebo. Right. Right. You could tap like a card with an NFC chip on the controller and then unlock something in the game. Yeah, these are things like even when people would go over to people's houses for like land parties and stuff like that.

8:07I felt like a very small section of the people did that, you know? And there was a thing years and years ago. I want to say it was like an NFL football game that was in arcades. And you could plug in your Xbox memory card and use your Xbox profile to like keep your record and all that stuff. And I thought that is so cool. And then I never saw anybody use that ever. The only game I've ever seen where people do that kind of thing with a persistent login in an arcade is the golden T games that like you either know what those are. No, they're whole life or you know nothing about it whatsoever. I think it would actually be a really interesting way to bring back the memory stick profile. So to give you like a practical example of when this would have been really handy for us. So we just had a bunch of like Finn's friends over. They all have their own Xbox accounts. But now that you can't just take your Xbox profile with you on a memory card, they have to basically just be on a guest account over here because either their parents would have to trust us with their log in details to log their accounts in here.

9:18Or they would have to remember them. They're seven. They're not going to do that. Yeah. And so they end up playing on guest accounts. If instead they had like a little card or something with their you know their gamer tag on it and they could just like tap it on a controller and it would log them in for like this one time. And they could play that would be great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The new system they've got now, which I get logged out of everything all the time. I've always said you should have the confidence of the did you unsubscribe from our email list by accident. Oh no, you're right. I did. Please let me back in. Yeah. It's so much confidence that like someone's going to click that button and go. Yeah. I accidentally went through all the hoops. Yeah. You know what? Oops. I also have just enough white lies in your life of the remember me button or check box on a log in because that doesn't work for me on anything. It's like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. The remember me check box. It's going to be like the save icon in the future for kids. It's going to be a whole generation people go, what is that box supposed to do?

10:20It doesn't do. It doesn't do anything. I check that box and nothing happens whatsoever. I think for me a lot of that's kind of self-inflicted because I so carefully go through and tell everything that it cannot save any cookies on me. Yeah. As a result, I get no longer. I've tried to poke holes for stuff and everything like that for very specific things. Like there's some things that I don't want to enter my login information for. That dates just even if it does remember you every like 30 days, you're like, nah, I don't know who the fuck you are. And then you got to redo it, which is okay if you've got a PC in front of you in a keyboard. It's all right. If you're on a phone, it's a fucking nightmare. If you're on a television and you're doing QR code shit every couple of months, you have to redo the QR codes and it's like, god damn it. Or if you have to log in on anything less than keyboard. Like if you have to log in with a remote where you have to use the arrow buttons to go like letter to letter. Nightmare. Nightmare actually. Whatever I was going to do, I'm not going to do it now. Now imagine if you could just tap your phone on it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We'd be good for that kind of thing. You tap your phone on your remote or say, just give me a goddamn retinal scan.

11:22You know, that's fine. I'll look at that. We give up. All right. You can have my privacy. Yeah, that'll be fine. That'll be fine. You got to watch out for that though because so that smart stuff is still so stupid. I read an article that there was a batch of Samsung smart fridges that got bricked in the middle of a firmware update. And instead of just becoming dumb fridges, like just doing the fridge and freezer thing, you know, just what they're meant to do. Instead, they just didn't work at all. Ash, can I tell you something? This is a category of consumers that I kind of want them to suffer a little bit. I don't know why. It's like if you're buying a smart fridge for your home, I get it. I get enamored by technology stuff too all the time. I just feel like if people who bought this, they're constantly being suckered into some kind of like data collection. Too much technology in the wrong place scheme or something. I'm fine with this. I'm fine with if they're miserable. I can see like there are certain types of smart fridges that I could see being beneficial. Like if you're like, oh, well, this one is all full of cans of soda or something.

12:25So you put it on soda mode. Right? So if you have like multiple modes, kind of like how like with washing machines, you can be like this one is all colors. This this load is going to be all whites and it's going to wash it differently. What if it chills it differently? Right? I could see. Imagine being like, let's put it in this mode or like this. What is it? You want all soda? You want all you want it? You want all soda refrigerators? That would you want? Or just be like put it in soda mode. Yeah, like we've got a party and so like, yeah, the fridges full of soda. So go into soda mode or when we have parties, do you throw out all the food in the refrigerator? Okay. Then what if let's make it even smarter and say like this crisper drawer is full of vegetables. This crisper drawer is full of, I don't know, the deli meats. And yeah, the shelves are all soda today. The crisper drawer. Have you ever put anything into the crisper drawer and it came out crisper than it went in? I don't know. I don't think so. You know what? I still religiously put my vegetables into the crisper so that they stay crisp. In the little drawer at the bottom?

13:25Absolutely. I have never my entire life. You know, the forget me drawer. Ben Cure, yeah, exactly right. That is the remember me of the refrigerator shelves. That's come back when I'm soggy and leaking drawer. I've never I've what is that supposed to do in there? Right? What is that supposed to do? Yeah, the I I'm okay with these people suffering with this technology. I mean, you know, if a smart fridge person says like, oh, this this didn't work out the way I planned to back. Oh, really? It'd be like if you read a headline about like, I don't know, company that builds AI data centers is struggling to make ends meet. It's like, good. Right. I'm fine with that. Speaking of which, have you heard that the data centers are now. They're now encountering a new issue, which is that they have so much waste heat that they're actually heating up the neighborhoods around them. The neighborhoods around them around them are they're all haunts in neighborhoods. First of all, what's the what's the purpose? Why do they keep building them in states that have no water? I don't know. That's fucking crazy. I thought we were going to make robots, right?

14:26How did we skip over robots to AI? Are we supposed to get the robots first? Well, this way we don't have to bother with all the like physical stuff. Everyone just wants digital anyway, Bernie. Right. I don't want to robot telling me how to wash dishes better. Right? That's not what I want. I want the robot to wash dishes and fold laundry. That's the next phase of a smart dishwasher. Is it just tells you how to wash dishes? It's right. Right. I can dance. Let me tell you, I can service my needs a little bit better. They would be, God damn, all this stuff is so ridiculous. You know what, this dish is too dirty. I'm going to need you to take it out, wash it, and then put it back inside. Maybe you can have a tap to pay terminal on my God damn smart fridge whenever I want to put it in soda mode. Whatever people are doing with their fridges. I was trying to think of like all the ways you could be smart besides having a screen on the fridge or whatever. We had a little party get together at the house last night, so I'm moving a little bit slower today. But I always think every single time. You said you always wanted to have in your life a refrigerator that has the ice in the water in the door.

15:28When I was young, I was like, that's how you know you've made it. You still have that. That's your, that's where you've made it. You're successful in life. You have a fridge that has an indoor ice maker and water dispenser. Right. And the soda mode, apparently. I'm the same soda mode. So yeah, I haven't made it yet, but I'm confident the one day I will. Well, I always wanted to look at what is the economics of just having a dedicated ice maker. Like one of the ones in our old house. We had something that came with the house that I didn't buy, which was a trash compactor. That seems like a very like 80s thing. Yes. Well, and remember we laughed at it and then we used it all the time. Yeah, but then we get to the thing where nobody wanted to change it. And that's kind of a normal thing with a, you know, kitchen garbage can or something like that. But then if with a trash compactor, you run the risk of like making this like super dense like neutron star that collapsed on itself because then you go to take it out and you got a brick of trash. Yeah. Have you, have you ever accidentally generated a black hole?

16:30Because I think we might have. Yeah. We managed to get it in the, the trash eventually, but it was still that black hole caused a lot of trouble. Right. Right. We had a singularity. There was time dilation like you were taking the trash out for two weeks. It's like, I've been going through six months. Six months. But that slot in the under the counter, I always thought an ice maker would be a way better use of that area. And it was right next to the sink. So plumbing could reach it as well. I just have for whatever reason, I've always like needed a nice maker like once every couple of months when we have a get together or something like that. But it's just like, it seems like, I don't know, I just never priced one out. I wonder what that cost in my head. It's like $2,000 or something. It's probably like a $400. That's something that you would only see in like an industrial scale fridge. When I was in college, we had a nice maker and I found the documents for it, the manual and everything. And this is when I first learned about the horrors of like service industry capitalism. And it made this type of ice cube.

17:30It's hard to describe. It's like a flat square. That's flat square. That's kind of it's like a little, like it's a little square, but then it's going to kind of dome to the middle like that. It's a little flat like, and they they they. Well, like a little like the half circles. No, I mean, I have to look it up and you know, it's all the different types of ice. I'm describing exactly what it looks like. It's like a little square of ice and it's like domed in the middle as it like goes across the plane. Okay. It looks like a little flat square. It looks like a rice check a little bit like that kind of. Okay. And by the way, rice checks is at the default. I guess. Yeah. Is it wise? You mean, like, it's supposed to like corn checks? Yeah, I think rice checks are the rice checks. Rice checks are great. Yeah, I can't find those. You can eat a lot of rice checks without realizing it. You can eat that. Rice checks are dangerous because that's the kind of cereal that I do where to end up fat week here at the podcast. Where I would do this thing and I've done this my whole life is I don't eat cereal with milk anymore because I fillable with cereal and put in some milk. And I either have some cereal left or some milk left. It's usually some milk left.

18:31So I add some cereal. The ratio. Yeah, the ratio is never quite right. And then you find out you went through a whole box of cereal and entire carton of milk. Why can you eat an entire box of cereal and a half gallon of milk in one go? Why can a human do that? I think that's called a problem. That's a huge problem. It's probably because I put my fridge in cereal mode. And I did not know how to get it out of cereal mode. What's that? But it looks like that. And in the documentation for the ice machine. It's specifically talked about this shape was great because it showed how the ice like laid on top of it. It's like laid on top of each other. And you could pour way less drink. So it was meant for a commercial application, right? Like a bar restaurant. And they were showing you how you could serve way less coke or I assume alcohol or whatever. But it would look like you used a bunch filled the glass. But actually you were saving money in big time. And they which they showed their version of the ice versus with the same amount of fluid. And then they put their ice in. Then they had the same amount of fluid in a different glass. And they put like the round ice with the whole in the middle.

19:32And they're like, look, it doesn't even look full. R's looks full and you save so much money by buying our ice machine. It was like, this is like somebody should report them. They're putting this in writing. You know, I was like, young person was like, oh yeah, but that's what businesses do, right? Of course. Want to serve you a drink. Have you seen the new trend? Like in, it's not new. But do newer since then. Okay, new since like 1995. Go ahead. Yeah, they give you like a stick. A nice stick. It's like a stick like a bar of ice. And they put it the drink and then people in these fancy New York bars like take this gigantic ice stick in the middle of their cocktail and pull it out. And then their drink is half full. It's like a one and a half inch drink or something like that. It's like nothing whatsoever. In this gigantic like high ball glass. It's crazy. I have seen the version of ice sticks where it's made for like bottles. So you can like drop it into say like a soda bottle. And it'll like fit through the the narrow mouth of the soda bottle and cool your soda down for it.

20:33Yeah. If you forgot to put your fridge in soda mode and your soda is the wrong temperature. Yeah, it was I mean, smarter. Some of the technology is good. Like the automatic ice makers, one of the greatest inventions ever because I remember ice trays as a kid. And I had to deal with ice trays all the time. And those got better over time too. They used to be a nightmare. Like if I if I lived in the 50s with those metal ones with a giant handle, you would crank up. Do you know what I'm talking about? Vagely. Yeah. Well, we'll see if I can find a like video of that because it's like, wow, this was the way that this was like the future. My teeth hurt talking about this. That squelching noise it would make. A grandmother had one of those like metal ice trays and everything. Yeah, the automatic ice makers are great addition. And I've had an automatic ice maker and most of the fridges I've had, most of them. In fact, it's caused problems in some of them. Yeah. Well, the nice thing is about the, I guess dumb ice maker is that it, it's the lever system, right? It fills itself up and then as it fills itself up, it pushes a lever up and says, I'm full now and stops making ice. Right. And then you can grab that thing and lift it all the way up.

21:34It's a weird system. It's like they designed it once with that wire, right? It's like a wire that like goes in a loop. And it went, that's good. It worked good enough. We don't need to fuck with this anymore. And we don't know why it works, but it continues to work. So it's why. But now you know that the future is going to be like, oh, the firmware update messed things up. So it either makes ice forever or also nothing in your house works now. Right. The ultrasonic detector, something blocked the eye. I guess what blocked it, frozen water. And now it couldn't tell how much ice was in the fridge. And so now it just made ice forever since it couldn't tell it was full ice already. You pull out the freezer drawer and it just fills your entire house thanks to the reverse effect of the black hole. How many sodas are in this fridge that needs to go into soda mode? I went in your head. I'm just fascinated by this. So it's just a giant... I know a couple dozen sodas. It's a giant fridge filled with soda. Maybe you have a lot of friends. And you need to chill the sodas in a different way. Okay, fair enough, fair enough.

22:34I mean, if you have, if you can open a soda and it's chilled to the point where it's still liquid, but there are like a couple little like icy flex in it, like it was thinking about freezing. No. But didn't get that far. That's like a really special soda. Okay, okay. No, no, no, no. Now you're on board. Now I want soda mode. Now you want soda mode. I want soda mode. File a patent actually for soda mode. See what I can do. For refrigerate. That's a great way to end the fat week here at the park cat. All right, Ashley, who is joining us in converting our fridge to soda mode this weekend? I shout out to Wuppass stew and garex. And thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at Patreon.com such morning somewhere and Rister Cheatsuck. We've got to do the stupid name second. All right, that does it for us this week ending September 25th. Two thousand dollars a week we'll be back to talk to you on Monday. We hope you will be here as well. Bye everybody.