Dyson AI Toothbrush Defeated by Water

0:00College football is back. So, Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oho, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwicker call at 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See PayPal.com slash protection terms. Nicky Glazer, this stunning tour.

1:02The thoughts of death I don't like to dwell on them for longer than like 10 or 15 hours a day, so... November 19th, Yamabah Theater. No wonder women rushed to have kids were being trained for it since we were kids. They're like, here's a baby doll. Here's an easy-bake oven. I got one of those. I stuck my head in it. I was like, I want out of this narrowness. Tickets on sale now at Yamabah Theater.com. Don't miss Nicky Glazer. Yamabah Theater. Dyson recently pulled its new $499 camera jet AI-powered toothbrush from major retailers like Best Buy, because water leaked into the jet tubes. Right. It got defeated by water. Yeah, water in a bathroom sink. Which is, I mean, it is just difficult to invent a pure piece of irony. It really is. You have a device whose entire operational existence occurs inside a bathroom sink. And it fails because it gets wet. And we are not talking about a standard plastic stick with some nylon bristles here. No, definitely not. This is a highly complex, computationally heavy machine.

2:04It's essentially a computer you put in your mouth. Exactly. I look at the engineering effort required to build this and the volume of resources poured into a single consumer product. And it forces a question for you to consider as we look at this entire category of devices. Right. The broader category. How does a company invest endless resources into engineering a product only to be defeated by the most predictable element of its environment? Yeah. A toothbrush getting wet is not an anomaly. It is the absolute baseline assumption of the product category. It will get wet. Right. It will get dropped. It will be handled with slippery hands. Constantly. When you introduce high level electronics into something that simple, the environment stops being a passive backdrop. It becomes an active threat. Exactly. It becomes a hostile threat to the hardware. The raw numbers on the development give you a sense of the effort involved here. There were 661 engineers assigned to the camera jet project. Over 600.

3:04Yeah. And they filed 38 separate patents for this specific device. 38 patents. But the software side is where the numbers stop making sense to me. The toothbrush runs on 16 million lines of code. Which is just, I mean, that is staggering. Right. And for the features, there is a 100,000 pixel camera built directly into the brush head. A literal camera. A camera. You have Wi-Fi connectivity. You have Bluetooth. There is a dedicated app, of course. Naturally. And there is a local machine learning model designed to spot the microscopic gaps between your teeth, which then coordinates with precision through it pumps to shoot mouthwash into those exact gaps. 16 million lines of code for dental hygiene. Yeah. I struggle to accept that human brushing requires an operating system of that size. And it sounds like overkill. It is. The manual toothbrush has functioned perfectly well since the Ming Dynasty. Right. It is a mechanical solution to a mechanical problem. You have plaque. You apply friction. The plaque is removed. It's very straightforward. Yeah. So when you force the simple bathroom appliance to rely on software updates in local network hand shakes,

4:08you alter the daily routine entirely. You change the nature of the habit. Exactly. You are changing an autonomous habit into a tech management task. But if that camera can actually identify a pocket of plaque that you have missed for three weeks and it prevents a $2,000 root canal, I could argue that the code is entirely justified. Sure. The clinical goal makes sense. A manual brush relies completely on user competence. And frankly, most people are terrible at brushing. They are. So the technology is attempting to automate out the human error. Right. The intention might be preventing a root canal. But the reality is that you are standing in your pajamas holding a dead plastic tube because the firmware update hung at 99%. That is a very real scenario. It happens all the time with more devices. And the mental load of managing the technology starts to outweigh the clinical benefit. Because you just want to go to sleep. Yeah, you wake up, you are half asleep, and your toothbrush needs to authenticate with your router before you can clean your molars. Right.

5:08I have it relies on being frictionless. This introduces a massive layer of friction. The natural assumption when a device fails this quickly in the hands of consumers is that the company rushed it. People assume they skipped quality assurance. Which is usually a fair assumption. But the analysis of the development cycle points in a completely different direction here. They tested it. The testing process was exhaustive. They used advanced robotic rigs to simulate human use. Right. They had mechanical arms brushing synthetic teeth millions of times. The engineers pushed prototypes in environmental chambers until the materials failed. So they did the work. They did. The failure was eventually isolated to a process problem in an early production batch of the jet tubes. Right. But robotic testing rigs offer an illusion of assurance. How so? Well, they give you perfect data about a perfectly controlled scenario. The problem is that robots do not capture human unpredictability. Right. Humans are messy. Exactly. Humans do not interact with objects the way testing rigs do.

6:11Customers find enthusiastic ways to break devices through the normal chaos of living. They always do. There are historical examples of this exact gap between engineering and reality. Like the watches? Yeah. Swiss watchmakers built these precision waterproof chronometers a century ago, and then acted completely surprised when people actually washed their hands while wearing them. Because they only tested pure water. Right. The soap degraded the rubber seals in a way pure water testing never predicted. That makes perfect sense. Or you look at a company like Gravitonus, which built a specialized ergonomic standing chair. Oh yeah, I know about this. Customers immediately tried to sit on it like a normal chair, totally defeating the geometry of the design. They saw a chair and their brain simply said, I will sit. They didn't read the manual. Exactly. The flaw in quality assurance for complex devices is failing to anticipate what a tired, distracted human will do on a random Tuesday morning. Because a robotic arm applies consistent pressure at a mathematically perfect 45 degree angle.

7:12Right. Every single time. But a human drops the brush in a tile floor, picks it up by the weakest point of the plastic housing, gets abrasive toothpaste jam directly into camera lens, and then rinses the entire motorized unit under high pressure, scalding hot water, which is exactly how you break a seal. The thermodynamics of the sink explain exactly how that water gets in. It's just basic physics. Yeah, when a user runs a plastic device under hot tap water, the outer housing expands slightly. Right. But the rubber gas gets might still be cold from the ambient room temperature, so they don't expand at the same rate. Creating a gap. A microscopic gap forms in the seal. Capillary action pulls the water into the gap. And once it's in, it's over. Exactly. Once the water touches the printed circuit board, the entire device starts out. Yeah. It doesn't matter how many patents you hold on the fluid pump if the outer casing breathes in water. You also have to contextualize what 16 million lines of code actually means for a device of the size. It is a lot of code. The void your space probes required a fraction of that code to leave the solar system and navigate interstellar space.

8:17Right. Boiger one is running on about 65,000 lines of code. Wow. And this toothbrush has 16 million. To be fair though, Voyager isn't doing real time image processing. That is true. The camera in the toothbrush is trying to maintain focus on a molar from two millimeters away. While moving. While moving. It has to filter out the visual obstruction of foaming toothpaste and saliva, run that distorted image through a neural network, and trigger a mechanical pump in milliseconds. It is incredibly computationally heavy. It requires a heavy computational load. But that just reinforces how hostile the environment is. Right. Trying to use a neural network to find plaque while you are actively brushing is like trying to use facial recognition software in a car wash. There's just too much interference. Yeah. There is too much foam, too much water, and too much chaotic movement for the sensors to make sense of anything reliably. And Dyson did restart production and they claimed to have fixed the specific manufacturing defect with the tubes. Right. They patched the leak. But adding a camera and a Wi-Fi radio inherently limits the durability of the product.

9:21It just adds failure points. It creates an absurd scenario where your toothbrush might suffer a catastrophic software crash right before you go to bed. Yeah. You are at the sink your home Wi-Fi drops out and the machine learning algorithm can't process the visual data. The entire process halts. Over brushing your teeth. Or the camera lens gets occluded by calcium build up from hard tap water. Oh sure. Suddenly the precision jets miscalculate the target and fire mouthwash directly into your gums instead of the gaps between your teeth. Ouch. The complexity makes the device incredibly fragile. This connects to a distinct pattern of heavily funded consumer technology missteps. We see it over and over. I look at something like Juicero. Investors poured over $100 million into building an internet connected juice press. Juicero is the perfect comparison here. The machine applied four tons of force to proprietary bags of diced fruit. And the engineering inside the machine was legitimately impressive. It was over engineered to an insane degree. They used aerospace grade aluminum and custom gearboxes.

10:24Right. But users quickly realized they could just hold the bag in their bare hands and squeeze the juice out. They didn't need four tons of force. They also didn't need the Wi-Fi connection. No. Not at all. The Tyro machine literally had a digital rights management ship on a bag of squish carrots. It sounds so ridiculous when you say it out loud. It is ridiculous. The machine used an optical scanner to read a code on the bag, connected to your home Wi-Fi, and pinged a remote server to verify that the juice was authentic and hadn't expired. Right. Checking a database for juice. If the server said yes, the gear is engaged. If your router was restarting, you couldn't squeeze your juice. It is a perfect parallel to the toothbrush. The engineering works perfectly to solve a problem that nobody actually had. There is a framework for the cycle. It is the innovation trap. Explain that. A clever engineering team builds something genuinely impressive. The technology works, the patents are filed, the prototype functions beautifully. Right.

11:24Then, the entire company goes searching for a customer who actually has that exact problem. College football is back. So, Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oho, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwink up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that. But for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started.

12:25See PayPal.com slash protection terms. Nikki Glazer, this stunning tour. The thoughts of death I don't like to dwell on them for longer than like 10 or 15 hours a day. So... November 19th, Yamabah Theater. No wonder women rushed to have kids were being trained for it since we were kids. They're like, here's a baby doll. Here's an easy-bake oven. I got one of those. I stuck my head in it. I was like, I want out of this narrative. Tickets on sale now at Yamabah Theater.com. Don't miss. Nikki Glazer, Yamabah Theater. They work backwards. Yes. They build the solution first and then try to reverse engineer human need. You see it with the Segway? Exactly. The Segway. The self-balancing gyroscopic technology in the Segway was brilliant. It worked flawlessly. It was an engineering marvel. But it completely failed to align with how humans actually want to move through a physical environment. Or how they want to be perceived by others.

13:25Right. Nobody wanted to ride one to work. Google Glass followed the exact same trajectory. Yes. That is another great example. Putting a camera and a prison projection screen on a pair of glasses was a massive technical achievement. Getting the interface to float in your peripheral vision took years of development. Incredible hardware engineering. But there was no clear daily use case for a normal person to wear it. Society actively rejected the idea of constant, visible surveillance in casual settings. Or consider apples round USB mouse from the late 90s. The hockey puck mouse. The hockey puck. It had a perfectly symmetrical geometric design. It looked visually beautiful on a desk. It looked great next to the iMac. But it was nearly impossible for a human hand to hold correctly for eight hours a day. Because it was a circle. Exactly. Because it was perfectly round, you never knew which way the cursor was going to move when you grabbed it. You couldn't feel the orientation without looking at it. Right. It was a very engineering work. But it did not align with human biomechanics. And the camera jet falls into this exact category.

14:27It absolutely does. The engineering works. It really can identify gaps with the camera. But nobody was asking for a camera in their mouth. No one woke up wishing their toothbrush had a lens. If you shift the perspective away from pure utility and look at the broader corporate strategy, the logic starts to become visible. It's about positioning. Dyson committed half a billion pounds to beauty and personal care research. With the plan to develop 20 new products. It is a massive investment. They are not just selling household appliances. They are engaged in a strategy of making technology aspirational. Right. They take invisible engineering like fluid dynamics or digital motors, and they turn it into a tactile experience. You can feel the quality. You can hear the motor spinning at 100,000 revolutions per minute. It doesn't sound like a plastic rattle. It has the acoustic profile of a tiny jet engine. It sounds expensive. Exactly. You can feel the precision of the machine materials. That completely changes consumer behavior. It does. People are willing to spend 8 to 10 times more on a Dyson hair tool compared to a standard drugstore hair dryer.

15:30Which is wild when you think about it. They are not doing that for the basic utility of drying wet hair. Hot air is just hot hair. Right. They pay that premium to own something genuinely different. They are buying a feeling of participation in cutting edge design. It's a luxury good. The Cambridge at Toothbrush is attempting to replicate that exact psychological trigger. For oral care. Yes. It opens up an ultra premium tear in oral care that relies almost entirely on status and the perception of advanced technology, rather than the basic utility of removing plaque. If you're not subscribed yet, take a second and hit follow on whatever podcast app you're using. It helps us keep making this. We appreciate you being here. You see that status element in how the product is presented. The unboxing is an event. Yeah, the unboxing experience, the density of the materials, the sound, the liquid jets. It is designed to be displayed on a bathroom counter. It is not designed to be hidden in a drawer. No. But there is a serious physical limitation to this approach, which brings in the reality of ergonomics. This is where it falls apart for a lot of people.

16:32If you look at the physical realities of the actual act of brushing, it requires a surprising amount of coordination. That's a complex motion. Research into the mechanics of brushing, breaks down grip, dexterity, strength, movement, and posture. The physical act of holding a brush and maneuvering it around the complex geometry of the human jaw requires your wrist to constantly supinate and pronate. Yeah, you are constantly twisting and turning it. And this is where the over-engineering creates a physical barrier. Because of the weight. Yes. When you add a camera, a machine learning processor, a Wi-Fi antenna, fluid pumps, and the heavy lithium ion battery required to power all the way up. And if you are tired to power all of that computation, you add significant weight to the handle. You are putting a heavy cylinder in your hand. That actively limits who can use the device. Right. If a user has arthritis, limited grip strength, or lacks fine motor dexterity, a heavy bulky toothbrush creates a dangerous amount of torque on the wrist. It becomes physically difficult to hold. It becomes a hazard rather than a help. True innovation in this space would not mean adding more technology.

17:35What would it look like? Well, if the goal is actually improving oral health, an inclusive design would look completely different. Right. It would mean a handle that requires less grip strength to hold. It would be better weight distribution so the brush doesn't feel top heavy in the hand. Making it easier to use. Exactly. It would mean designing a tool that works with the natural limitations of human anatomy, rather than fighting against those limitations to accommodate a circuit board. This touches on a very real social impact issue. The cost. When a company releases a health product at a $499 price point, they are only improving health metrics for a very specific, wealthy subset of the population. The people who can afford a $500 toothbrush. Right. And they leave vulnerable communities completely behind. The technology creates a divergence in public health outcomes based purely on disposable income. Designing better oral health for everyone means addressing the root causes of inequalities for overlooked communities. It's not about the hardware. No. It means figuring out how to distribute effective, durable, and accessible hygiene tools to rural or coastal areas where dental care spars.

18:41Where people really need the help. Yeah. Filtering product development exclusively for the demographic with maximum disposable income does not solve the public health problem. It just creates a luxury hardware tier for a basic human necessity. Exactly. We also need to look at the biological reality of what this luxury tier is actually doing to the mouth. The clinical side of it. The clinical feedback on these devices is fascinating. Yes. The camera jet markets itself by treating the human mouth like a sterile environment that needs to be conquered. Like it's a war zone. Right. The entire premise is focused intensely on pristine plaque control. The camera hunts the plaque, the jets blast it away. It inherently demonizes the natural bacteria in the mouth. But the mouth is not a surgical theater. No. It requires a balance of good and bad bacteria to function. The oral microbiome is a complex ecosystem. You need that bacteria. You need specific bacteria to begin the digestion process and break down food. Right. If you attempt to sterilize that environment with high pressure fluid jets guided by a camera, you disrupt the microbiome.

19:45You're doing more harm than good. Genuine oral health is shaped by diet, basic consistent brushing habits, and professional support. Not a gadget. It is not shaped by an algorithm identifying microscopic gaps. The heavy technology actually distracts from the modifiable risk factors that actually matter. Like sugar. Exactly. If a user has a diet extremely high in processed sugar, a neural network in their toothbrush is not going to save their mammal. No, it won't. The sugar feeds the bacteria, the bacteria produce acid, and the acid erodes the tooth. The camera does not stop that chemical reaction. It just watches it happen. The technology creates a false sense of security. You think you are healthy because your phone app gives you a high brushing score while you ignore the biological fundamentals. There is also the physical life cycle of the device itself to consider. The environmental impact. The environmental concerns regarding this type of product development are severe. Yeah. The camera jet includes a large lithium ion battery. It has a heavy motorized charging dock.

20:47It contains multiple electronic sensors, a camera module, and a proprietary plastic refill system for the mouthwash jets. A lithium ion battery operates by moving ions between an anode and a cathode. Right. Basic chemistry. Every time you charge it, the internal structure degrades. After 500 to 1,000 charge cycles, the capacity drops significantly. It holds less power. In a toothbrush that sits on a charging dock permanently, the battery is held at maximum voltage constantly, which accelerates that chemical degradation. It's the worst way to treat a battery. Within two or three years, the battery will barely hold a charge. Which completely changes the life cycle of a daily hygiene product. It makes it disposable. Yeah. You take a simple tool, traditionally made of plastic and nylon, and you transform it into long-term electronic waste. Right. When that battery inevitably dies, you cannot replace it. The housing is sealed to prevent water ingress. So you throw it away. You cannot easily recycle a plastic handle that is fused with a camera lens, a Wi-Fi radio, and a degraded lithium cell.

21:50It's impossible to separate those materials. Instead of a small piece of plastic, you generate a heavy brick of toxic electronic waste that sits in a landfill. Preventative models offer a much more sustainable approach. They do. Initiatives that focus on simple, recyclable materials and early childhood education actualize the concept of green dentistry far better than throwing high-tech sensors at the problem. Like using bamboo. A bamboo brush and a lesson on how to hold it reduces carbon footprint and improves health metrics simultaneously. The environmental cost is just one symptom of this broader tech culture obsession. The obsession with AI. We are seeing a completely sideways steer toward artificial intelligence and complex computation in every conceivable sector. It's everywhere. Just as the toothbrush gets 16 million lines of code, you see the White House announcing an AI super intelligence force. Right. You see Apple having to actively patch privacy loopholes in their operating systems to defend against autonomous AI agents scraping user data.

22:50It's an arms race. The compulsion to insert computation into simple environments is everywhere. It leads directly to an exhaustion of complexity. People are tired. Consumers are facing an invasion of data collection and algorithmic optimization in every aspect of their lives. Even fast food. You look at recent moves by Walmart and McDonald's experimenting with dynamic pricing. The price changes constantly. The price of a burger changing based on the time of day, the weather and algorithmic demand. It's exhausting to think about. Or the blurred lines and communication where workers spend half their day trying to figure out what is human writing and what is AI-generated text. The cognitive load of navigating these systems is compounding daily. That is why the smart toothbrush feels so egregious. It invades a quiet space. Your bathroom sink is supposed to be a low-stakes environment. You just want to scrub your teeth and go to sleep. Exactly. When your toothbrush requires a dedicated app, an account log in, a Wi-Fi connection, and a privacy policy agreement just to activate a water pump, it represents the absolute peak of complexity exhaustion.

23:53The consumer is simply tired of managing machines. Inserting millions of lines of code into a basic human routine ultimately serves as an engineering flex, rather than a solution to a real problem. It's just showing off. It proves that the company has the technical capability to build it, but it completely fails to answer why it should be built in the first place. The failure of that early production batch due to water leakage is just the physical manifestation of a fundamentally flawed design philosophy. As you look around at the smart devices in your home right now, ask yourself how many of them actually make your daily life easier. And how many are just highly complex, fragile machines waiting for their eventual opportunity to break? Call us footballers back. So, Hilton called on me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oho, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwink up call it 555 and 55 seconds.

24:53Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See PayPal.com slash protection terms. Nikki Glazer, this stunning tour. The thoughts of death I don't like to dwell on them for longer than like 10 or 15 hours a day, so... November 19th, Yamavath Theater. No wonder women rushed to have kids were being trained for it since we were kids. They're like, here's a baby doll. Here's an easy-bake oven. I got one of those. I stuck my head in it. I was like, I want out of this narrative.

25:54Tickets on sale now at Yamavathether.com. Don't miss Nikki Glazer. Yamavathether.