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Phones are convenient, powerful devices, but they sure do gobble up a lot of our attention. How much of your day do you spend just holding your phone, staring at the screen? Humane, a company founded by a pair of ex-Apple employees, wants to squash the tyranny of the touchscreen. The company has developed a tiny device that magnetically pins to your clothing, where it can replicate a phone’s core functions like answering calls, sending messages, and translating speech. It uses voice controls, touch controls, and a camera to sense the wearer’s intentions, and it crafts answers using machine intelligence and displays them on your outstretched hand using a tiny projector. It's a weird and audacious device that Humane hopes will free its customers from having to carry their phones everywhere.
This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior writer Paresh Dave joins us to talk about his hands-off experience with the Humane Ai Pin and the future phone alternatives.
Show Notes
Read Paresh’s story about his experience with the Humane Ai Pin.
Recommendations
Paresh recommends the show Kim’s Convenience on Netflix. Lauren recommends the biography of Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Mike recommends the new reissue of the Buddha Machine music box from FM3.
Paresh Dave can be found on social media @peard33. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
How to Listen
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Michael Calore: Lauren.
Lauren Goode: Mike.
Most PopularGearThe Top New Features Coming to Apple’s iOS 18 and iPadOS 18By Julian ChokkattuGearHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Polestar?By Carlton ReidGearEverything Apple Announced TodayBy Boone AshworthGearThe Best Hearing Aids We’ve Personally Tested and Vetted With an ExpertBy Christopher Null
Michael Calore: How often do you look at your phone every day?
Lauren Goode: Too often, unless I'm sleeping and then I'm not looking. Otherwise, I would say if I can go a full hour or two without looking at my phone, like if I'm in a yoga class, that is pretty notable. What about you?
Michael Calore: I look at it from the moment I wake up until the moment I fall asleep with it hitting my face. But I would say there's usually a couple of two to three hour blocks in the middle of the day when I'm working or exercising or playing music where I'm not looking at my phone.
Lauren Goode: But aren't you working on your phone and playing music from your phone?
Michael Calore: No, I mean playing music with a musical instrument that I'm holding in my hands.
Lauren Goode: Oh. Oh, the old-fashioned kind. OK, got it.
Michael Calore: Well, you also use technologies that are sort of designed to get you to look at your screen less, right? You wear smartwatches and you use Siri and you test smart glasses for your job.
Lauren Goode: Define using Siri. No, I do wear a smartwatch. I happen to not wear an Apple watch. I wear Garmin and I get notifications, but it doesn't feel like a little phone.
Michael Calore: Right.
Lauren Goode: And despite all that, I still look at my phone.
Michael Calore: Is there anything technology-wise that could get you to stop looking at your phone?
Lauren Goode: I could throw it in the ocean, except that would be bad for the ocean.
Michael Calore: It'd be very bad. Well, you're in luck. Today we're going to talk about an extremely bizarre product that might somehow help you look at your phone less.
Lauren Goode: I am not convinced, but let's do it.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]Michael Calore: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.
Lauren Goode: And I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calore: We are also joined today once again by WIRED senior writer Paresh Dave.
Paresh Dave: I'm delighted to be back so soon.
Michael Calore: Yes, it's great to have you.
Lauren Goode: We're thrilled to have you back. Like we said the last time, we were just giving you a 10-month warmup. Now that you've been on once, you're going to be on all the time.
Paresh Dave: That sounds wonderful to me.
Michael Calore: All right, well you've got a smartphone, you've got a smartwatch, you've got your smart glasses, you've got a sort of smart voice assistant living inside all of those things. What else could you possibly need to get through the day? How about an interactive pin?
Today we will be talking about a new piece of hardware that clips to your shirt and uses tap gestures and voice controls to do basic things for you. Like answer calls, translate speech, count calories, capture photos, search the web.
Most PopularGearThe Top New Features Coming to Apple’s iOS 18 and iPadOS 18By Julian ChokkattuGearHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Polestar?By Carlton ReidGearEverything Apple Announced TodayBy Boone AshworthGearThe Best Hearing Aids We’ve Personally Tested and Vetted With an ExpertBy Christopher Null
It's from a company called Humane, a startup founded in 2018 by two former Apple employees. After five or six years of working on this thing in secret, the company has emerged from the darkness and demonstrated its wearable device to the tech press. It's called the Humane Ai Pin.
And Paresh, you got to sit in on a demo. Can you tell us what you saw?
Paresh Dave: So the demo started with a tour of their studio. So they're here in San Francisco and they have a few office spaces nearby each other, one where they do all their engineering, all that magical stuff, wasn't allowed to see that. But I went into this studio and first they showed off the variety of colors.
So there's a darker version, a lighter version, something in between. Then they showed how it looks, the box, the packaging, and then once you open the packaging, all the different things that you would see. They were showing off their wonderful little charging cable. They're offering a charging brick.
And then from there I walked into a room where they had some of these pins set up on tripods, assume for photo shoots or some reason, but I wasn't allowed to take photos of anything.
Michael Calore: Right.
Paresh Dave: And then I was taken into where there's a bunch of desks and then they had set up these very white tables filled with different objects and things. But first before those tables were these tables where they had laid out each component of this pin. So I was able to touch the raw piece of aluminum from which they eventually carve out this pin.
I was able to touch the different sensors that are in it and then finally got around to these demos. So one of the most basic things that they showed me is you can get it to answer questions. So it has AI built into a just like ChatGPT. So it answered a question about the World Series. It answered a question about who the president was in 1900 here in the US.
It told me all about French president Emmanuel Macron's background. It was pretty useful, but sort of what you'd expect from anything that has that kind of capability at this point. Then they showed demos of translations. So me saying something in Spanish and it translating it to English for the other person. Same with Japanese. We also did this thing where you show it a bowl of almonds and say, "How many grams of almond should I be eating a day? How many calories are them?" Sort of ask these sort of food related questions and it's able to track how much you're consuming if you're activating the camera while doing so. And as a result it was able to tell the demoer that he had had about five grams of almonds today.
And Humane expects health to be a key thing in their service going forward, it sounds like.
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Michael Calore: I see. So you were not allowed to wear it, somebody else was wearing it and you were talking to this person and watching them use it.
Paresh Dave: Correct. But my voice was used as the input at times.
Michael Calore: Right.
Paresh Dave: I also saw them make a phone call. The speaker I thought was sort of crystal clear for the phone call, even better than the music that was demoed coming out of it. So I would say, I can see how people would want to use this as a phone, but this would mean talking aloud in public a lot. Although it does support headphones.
Lauren Goode: Paresh, there was supposed to be some kind of interaction where it projects onto your skin. Did you get to see that? What is that like?
Paresh Dave: Yeah, that's one of the main things that you should know about this device. One, it's standalone. You don't need to pair it to a phone. In fact, you can't even really pair it to a phone. It has LTE connectivity and there's a touchpad on the Pin, so you can tap on it to activate the microphone or activate the camera. It's not a screen. You can't really look at anything there.
So what they did is they put a laser projector into the Pin. So you hold your hand out and it projects what they call laser ink onto your hand.
Michael Calore: Which is just lasers?
Paresh Dave: Yes. It's sort of, to me it looked bluish green is how I guess I would describe the color. And you do a variety of gestures. So if you want to go back to see sort of like a menu, you push your hand out. If you want to click on a button, say the pause button or the play button while you're listening to music, you pinch your index finger and thumb together.
When you want to go to the home screen, you've clasp your hand together. So they've invented these gestures and they've made it one-handed, which was one of the big debates that they had as a company, was whether to make it something where you use your finger on your other hand to tap on it. And they decided that gestures in one-handed was the way to go to make it feel sort of quick and lightweight and easy.
Michael Calore: I see.
Lauren Goode: So they've taken some of the core components of a phone. They've offloaded it onto a pin that's on your body, and then instead of using a touchscreen for input, you're basically using some kind of skin put on the palm of your hand. I'm just curious, was this dreamed up at Burning Man? Did a bunch of Apple employees after toiling away at Infinite Loop for years and years and being siloed in secrecy, get to go to Burning Man one year and were like, "You know what? What if we just put it on your skin?"
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Paresh Dave: Well, it's not just that, you can also use your voice and they do expect people to use voice command a lot.
Lauren Goode: What if you could talk to it?
Paresh Dave: But we do that with our devices today, so that's not too different.
Lauren Goode: What if it had an artificial intelligence that's creeping toward general artificial intelligence?
Paresh Dave: I mean, I think the main—
Lauren Goode: I'm sorry, please continue.
Paresh Dave: I think the main thing to keep in mind is that there were companies trying to do this with smart glasses already, right? Use these sort of projector systems like Magic Leap to put a screen in front of your face. And Humane is trying to say that there's no humanity in that, that we don't want to have screens in front of us all day long and you can't really right now get smart glasses to last all day long because they require so much batteries and then you end up having something like Apple's Vision Pro with this battery pack or whatever.
So the idea here is it's lightweight enough, it's low powered enough that it can hopefully last you through the day for the most part and it takes away that screen, which is sort of Humane's founding principle.
Lauren Goode: Right. In all seriousness, did you find it compelling when you were seeing it? Were you thinking, I wish I had this instead of my phone?
Paresh Dave: I don't know. The AI smarts are coming to our phones. There's been rumors that Google with their next Pixel phone, certainly Apple with an iPhone somewhere in the near future will have a much better Google Assistant—will have a much better Siri—that have a lot more capabilities that we've become accustomed to with ChatGPT.
So from that angle, these AI Smarts are coming to other devices, so that doesn't feel like a compelling cell. And there's watches that do a lot of what this device already does. I appreciate the hands-free nature of it for many uses, but just, I don't know, I can't see where it fits into my life just yet.
Michael Calore: What do we know about pricing and availability?
Paresh Dave: Well, that's one of the reasons why I don't know where it fits into my life. It'll cost you at least $699 and that's just the start of it because for that LTE connection and you'll get a phone number with it. It'll also get you access to all these AI services and other sort of apps.
They're not calling them apps, but services that are going to be built into the Pin, that'll cost you $24 a month. So that's a big investment. It's basically like adding a cell phone to your cell phone plan.
Michael Calore: Yeah. So yeah, it's like you're adding another phone to your life, but a phone that you wear in your shirt with a camera that's always facing out. What's the vibe when you're standing in front of somebody who's wearing it and there's a camera pointing at you? Is there a light that comes on? Is there any indication that the camera is on or off?
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Paresh Dave: There is. So there's what they call it, what Humane calls a trust light that lights up different colors depending on what mode it's in. So it does tell people around you when it's recording, it tells people around you when it's filming.
So from the very beginning, Humane made this promise that they wanted to build a more trustworthy device than exists today. They wanted those elements because right now when you're holding up a phone, it's never sort of clear whether someone's recording you or not. But I would say it is a bit jarring when you walk into their office and everyone is wearing one of these pins. I mean that's a lot.
But there are elements of it that sort of make it sneaky and sort of fall back into the world in a way because the speaker can be tuned so quietly that they say that people use it in the office to listen to music or whatever, and the person next to them can't really hear it. So there are things like that that are kind of nice but also could be sneaky. But the main thing is that light, that trust light is designed to be tamper resistant.
The device becomes inoperable if someone tries to mess with that. So it is important to note that they've tried to build privacy from the very beginning.
Michael Calore: Right. But still walking around with camera on your lapel is not necessarily a privacy forward business plan.
Paresh Dave: Correct. And they have angled the camera such that it actually does conform to various body types and will sort of film what is in front of you rather than filming the sky. Because you can imagine if something is sitting on your chest, it'll kind of point upward. So they've designed this curvature to address that. So it can take pretty good photos. I was able to see some of the photos taken by it. They weren't too bad. It's a 13 megapixel resolution that comes off and you can preview the photos in this weird laser ink on your hands.
It wouldn't say it's too clear, but from a user perspective, that's probably good because you don't have to deal with any shoulder surfers.
Michael Calore: Right, right. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll come back and talk more about Humane and its Ai Pin.
[Break]Michael Calore: We've been hearing about Humane for years. The company has been taking meetings around Silicon Valley and speaking sort of vaguely about this technology since before the pandemic. And then in April of 2023, one of the cofounders got on stage at TED and gave sort of a proto-demo similar to what you saw this week.
That was a long journey to get from the first inklings of this device to something that sort of works. And now here we are several months later with something that actually works and is ready for the world. What took the company so long to get this device out?
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Paresh Dave: They say they've gone through a lot of user testing. So first they had to figure out that curvature needed to be designed into the system to allow it to capture images properly, figure out how it could work with a lot of different body shapes.
They had to do drop testings as sort of a ground up device. So they say that took a lot of time to rethink what a phone can look like in that shape. And then it took a long time to miniaturize the technology. So they say they spent about 18 months once they had all these components to make them as small as possible. So that's a considerable amount of time and they've been testing the device that you see today for about a year and a half with employees and other early testers. So I think that plays into it as well.
Lauren Goode: How much funding have they raised?
Paresh Dave: They've raised about $230 million, including a $100 million dollars that they announced raising earlier this year. So that's a substantial chunk of money and they're reportedly valued at about $850 million as well. And this money comes from a lot of big technology companies, a lot of partners that they've used or the partners that they've worked with to help develop this technology like Qualcomm and LG and Microsoft and Volvo.
There's also a very notable investor in OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, who's one of Humane's earliest investors.
Michael Calore: And he is reportedly working on an AI hardware product with Apple's former head of design, Jony Ive, right?
Paresh Dave: Yes, there's been rumors about that. So I think Humane's take on it is that it's great that there's excitement in the space that people are trying to rethink what a smartphone can look like. There's ideas out there about necklaces, different form factors like that. Things may be similar to a smartwatch, but the idea is it's sort of like an AI first product.
Michael Calore: And you can probably wear an Ai Pin as a necklace if you want to?
Paresh Dave: You could. I don't think it has any place you can easily strap it on, but it is magnetic. So the way that it straps onto your clothing is through a magnet on the other side.
Lauren Goode: And then maybe it would make some of that projection technology, the laser tech a little bit more awkward as opposed to pinning it in a place where it very clearly shoots the lasers at your hand. But we're going to have to try this when we can actually get our hands on the thing.
Paresh Dave: But they do include a clasp that you can use to pin the Pin onto a bag, for example. And they say that's sort of like a normal use case because they are trying to make this into sort of a product that works for everyone and that is kind of fashion forward.
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Michael Calore: Right, and they did debut it, I believe this version was debuted at Paris Fashion Week. Is that right? New York Fashion Week?
Paresh Dave: Yeah, they've done a couple fashion shows. I don't see the fashion in this myself. The first thing I think about when I see a device like this is the body-worn cameras that police officers wear. It is not as clunky as one of those, but it's still not something I can imagine being worn at a very fancy cocktail party.
Lauren Goode: I think our big boss here at Condé Nast would have to be the arbiter of whether or not this is fashion forward. Would be curious to hear her thoughts. But Paresh, I'm wondering if there are any broader market forces here that are making hardware any more appealing than it typically is.
Because the thing that we hear from hardware startups a lot is that hardware is hard. It's hard to imagine. It's hard to build and engineer, it's hard to prototype, it's hard to launch, it's hard to get the funding for it. Even then there's a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong. It's hard, right? It's hard on all levels.
And so I'm wondering, when you see something like this, you talk to the folks at Humane or you hear that Sam Altman who presumably doesn't really need to do much beyond what he's currently working on at OpenAI with ChatGPT and making the next powerful iterations of that. What is the appeal of making hardware right now?
Paresh Dave: A few things to say on that. One, the Humane cofounders, husband and wife duo, came from Apple where they worked on things like the Apple keyboard and a lot of software projects as well. But they come from this hardware background working at this giant hardware company.
So having that expertise helps a little bit. And why Humane wants to take this on and why others from hardware backgrounds are taking this on to the AI revolution. What we've seen over the past year with ChatGPT, there's a lot of excitement about having the ability now to have way more information and knowledge at our fingertips and how do we deliver it and how do we get it to normal people.
And one of the things that's available now is these really robust voice interfaces that weren't as good 12 months ago until these large language models came around. So there's an opportunity to really think things through from the ground up and that's part of why you see this excitement right now and the investment coming through.
Lauren Goode: And to be clear, the competition is good, right? We should have more choices when it comes to buying hardware products that can fit into our lives that come from companies that are not trillion dollar companies necessarily. But it sounds like what you're saying is that actually it's the developments and software that are happening right now that are driving more interest in this space?
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Paresh Dave: I would think so. Certainly some of the experts I've spoken to say that they give Humane a lot of credit for trying something different. Everyone for the last, you two probably know better, but let's say five years have been talking a lot about smart glasses and virtual reality headsets, things that still take you kind of out of this world and don't really allow you to interact naturally.
I wouldn't say that the Pin gets you quite there. It's still this thing that's kind of in the way. When you're translating, you kind of have to wait for it. They did this demo where they sent a text message and it still reads the text message back to you the same way that a voice assistant on your phone does. It's not like you can trust the AI completely. I would love to get to the point where I say send a message to Michael that we need to record this show and I can just trust it to send it off without reading it back to me and asking for sort of my OK.
And we're just not there yet. So I think they have a ways to go, but that's sort of part of the appeal and why they're trying at it and why people give them credit for trying.
Michael Calore: And you can see where they're going with this, right? I mean the name of the company is Humane. It conjures for people who are familiar with the technology industry of recent years, it conjures a lot of the conversation around Humane technologies, technologies that don't try to suck you into an app and keep you there for as long as possible. Technologies that allow you to gain back a little bit of your brain and a little bit of your waking hours.
So how much of that is in their product messaging? How much of that is in the design of this thing? How much is it encouraging you to not carry your phone when you walk out of the house?
Paresh Dave: It's a huge part of the messaging. I don't think they're quite at the point where they're saying don't carry your smartphone out at the house as well. The same way we haven't all ditched laptops completely for work purposes. Laptops tend to be useful for a lot of workers out there.
In that same way, that's why they've created this complement for the time being.
Michael Calore: I do like the fact that it's complementary to your phone and is not reliant on your phone because it means that it's platform agnostic. I can use it with an iPhone or I can use it with an Android phone.
Paresh Dave: Good for us Android users. It's also notable that the foundation for the software is the Android operating system for the Humane Ai Pin, which for some reason they lowercase the I in Ai, just to let you know.
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Michael Calore: So it's like Ai.
Paresh Dave: I mean it's still Ai Pin, but it's lowercase. They're really into that. So yeah, it's based on Android, which should make it easier for the Instagram's and Spotify's the world to develop connections to the Ai Pin. It won't be super easy because there's these gestures and all these new input types, but it does mean that at least developers out there won't have to be starting from complete scratch, which is important to creating this ecosystem, which could be a pretty significant driver of revenue for Humane, assuming that they're taking a cut of some of these services that they'll be offering.
Michael Calore: Yeah, and assuming they sell millions of them.
Paresh Dave: They could get there.
Michael Calore: All right, well, that seems like a good place to end. Let's take a quick break and we'll come right back with our recommendations.
[Break]Michael Calore: OK, this is the third part of our show where we go around the table and ask everybody to recommend something our listeners might like. Paresh, as our guest, you get to go first. What's your recommendation?
Paresh Dave: Man, putting me on the spot right off the bat. I would say my recommendation is Kim's Convenience, which is a show that was broadcast on Canadian television, made its way over to Netflix a few years ago. So it's been around a while, but just been catching up on it in the house. And I would say it's a portrayal of a Korean convenience store and the family behind it.
It's very wholesome. It's very nice to see.
I would say that since it's aired and since it came out and since it got canceled, people involved have raised concerns about problematic behavior on the set and some racist stereotypes that were in the storylines and later seasons. But I think those are important things to keep in mind, but still watch the show because it sort of teaches you to think critically about what you're watching and the jokes being made and those portrayals and what that says about different groups representation in the media.
And at the end of the day with the heightened conflict that's happening in the world right now, not to get too deep, I think it's important to sort of watch shows like this that expose yourself to other cultures. And while we're on Canadian shows, there's also another old Canadian show Burden of Truth that aired in the US on CW that I also enjoyed back in the day.
Michael Calore: Nice. And where can you watch Kim's Convenience now? Netflix, you said?
Paresh Dave: It's available on Netflix at least in the US.
Michael Calore: Awesome. All right, thanks for that. Lauren, what's your recommendation?
Lauren Goode: My recommendation is Oppenheimer, the book. We've already talked about the movie on the show back in July, and then I said, you know what? I'm going to read the book. American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, which is the giant tome that the film was largely based on. And folks, it is months later and it's now November, I first picked up the book in July. I've worked through a few other books in that time. And now I'm finally in the final portion of this giant book about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. It is an incredibly thoroughly researched book. The primary author spent something like 25 years on it, writing it.
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So many sources, so many documents, so much thought went into reporting out this book. And it's really not just about the invention of the atomic bomb, but the political climate in which it was invented. And the fallout from that on Oppenheimer who was basically targeted as a communist during the Red Scare because of some of the political activity that he was involved in his younger years.
And how after doing this thing that was seen as heroic on behalf of the US government was then effectively torn down by that same government for his political affiliations and it's a fascinating book. And if you're at all interested in the topic to begin with, I recommend it.
If you're like, I'm not really interested in learning about that, but I'm going to try to get through this 600-page book. You're not going to enjoy it. But because it's a lot of broccoli, but it's, yeah, it's great. I have a lot of admiration for the authors of this book and the book itself. So that's my recommendation. Have you guys read it?
Paresh Dave: I have not.
Michael Calore: No, it's far too long for me to read.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, it's long. And the type spec, it's really small. This book that I've got … yeah, those of who follow me on Instagram now, I've been Instagramming it lately. This is endless. This just keeps going. It just keeps going, but I'm enjoying it. I'm a glutton for punishment.
Michael Calore: I think that you have to finish it before the end of the year, and if you don't, then you make finishing the book your 2024 New Year's Resolution.
Lauren Goode: I'm definitely going to finish it before the end of the year. I actually feel confident I'll finish it before the end of this week.
Michael Calore: All right.
Lauren Goode: So yeah, that is my recommendation. Mike, what's yours?
Michael Calore: I'm going to recommend a piece of hardware. It's a cool little piece of hardware. I actually have it here and since this is an audio medium, I will describe it to you. It is the FM3 Buddha Machine, also just known as the Buddha Machine. What would you say, Paresh? It's about the size of a pack of smokes?
Paresh Dave: Pretty much. It's just a little bigger than a Pin.
Michael Calore: It's a little bit bigger than a Pin. It's a plastic box, it has a speaker on it and two buttons and a headphone jack and that's it. And it's an audio device. Stored on the Buddha Machine are a bunch of ambient sound loops that were created by a couple of artists. An artist from Europe and an artist from China about 20 years ago. And FM3 Buddha Machine went out into the world and I snatched one up a very long time ago.
It has since stopped working. So I was thrilled to see that somebody has officially rereleased the original Buddha Machine and updated the internals and the audio and the case and everything about it. It still looks the same. It functions a little bit nicer and it sounds a little bit better. So yeah, it's the 2023 edition of the OG Buddha Machine.
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Paresh Dave: How did you find out that this went on sale?
Michael Calore: I subscribed to a newsletter, my friend Mark Weidenbaum, it's called Disquiet. And he was like, "Hey, the Buddha Machine is back," and posted a link and it was an immediate buy. So I would say that if you have any weirdo sound art friends or musician friends or friends who like to meditate and use white noise machines and things like that, it makes a great gift.
Lauren Goode: This is awesome. It's so cute.
Michael Calore: It is very cute.
Lauren Goode: There's so many different colors.
Michael Calore: Do you want to hear what it sounds like?
Lauren Goode: Yeah. How long does the battery—it's two AA batteries. How long does it last for?
Michael Calore: Oh, years. It lasts years, at least the old one did. The old one lasted years. Let me turn it on. And it has a bunch of different loops.
[Soft soothing music plays from the Buddha Machine.]Michael Calore: All right, so yeah, it just plays loops. And you turn it on and you set it down, you find a loop you like and you can either put headphones in or you can just leave it sitting on your desk and it just makes noise and it's very calming.
It's very calming. I love that about it.
Lauren Goode: I love this thing.
Michael Calore: Yeah, it's really neat.
Paresh Dave: Sorry, did you say how much it was?
Michael Calore: It's like after tax and shipping, it's about $40. Yeah, I think it is like $31, $32, something like that. But yeah, it's an under $40 gift pick.
Paresh Dave: I don't know how much normal white noise machines cost, but it feels like a lot.
Michael Calore: This is no normal white noise machine. It's a beautiful piece of art.
Lauren Goode: Mike, I kind of want that for Christmas.
Michael Calore: OK, noted.
Lauren Goode: Can you make it happen?
Michael Calore: I can, yeah, sure.
Lauren Goode: OK cool.
Michael Calore: All right, well that is our show for this week. Excellent picks everybody. Paresh, thanks for coming on and telling us about this new radical computing device.
Paresh Dave: It was quite pinteresting.
Lauren Goode: Interesting. Paresh, if you just buy a $37 Buddha Machine and you pin it to your chest, is that essentially the same thing as the Humane Pin?
Paresh Dave: Probably not quite, I think you're missing about $500 worth of sensors.
Michael Calore: OK. No cameras. No cameras, everybody. All right, and thank you all for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on the social medias. Just check the show notes to find our handles. Our producer is Boone Ashworth. We will be back next week with a new show and until then, goodbye.
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