A growing number of startups and full-fledged companies are looking to bring their smart technology into your mouth. A toothbrush that uses AI to monitor your brushing, dental floss as a subscription service, wearables for teeth—oral hygiene is a booming business for tech companies, who see dollar signs every time you flash your pearly whites. But who does this actually help? Do we really need to spend $200 on a high-powered toothbrush? Meanwhile, as if coming along to undo all that cleaning, a computational chemist has finally worked out the formula for the perfect espresso.
This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with WIRED senior correspondent Adam Rogers about the latest in mouth tech and how to brew coffee with math.
Read Adam’s story about the science behind espresso here. Read Lauren’s story about mouth tech here. For more coffee tips, check out our favorite portable coffee makers and our best latte and espresso machines.
Adam recommends Star Trek: Picard. Lauren recommends Little Women. Mike recommends buying and selling tickets on Cash or Trade.
Adam Rogers can be found on Twitter @jetjocko. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our consulting executive producer is Alex Kapelman (@alexkapelman). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Michael Calore: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Michael Calore, a senior editor here at WIRED, and I am joined by my usual cohost, WIRED senior writer Lauren Goode.
Lauren Goode: Hello.
MC: And also with us is WIRED senior correspondent Adam Rogers. Hi Adam. Welcome back to the show.
Adam Rogers: Thank you very much. Always a pleasure. Glad that we are also senior around the table. It's a bunch of seniors.
MC: Today on the show, we're going to be talking about mouths. We are mouthing off so to speak.
LG: Uh. Huh. I put that in there.
MC: Yeah, Lauren wrote that joke. You can claim it. It's yours.
LG: I'm really proud of it.
AR: We have an allegiance to the tooth.
MC: Oh no. See I told you this is not the crowd.
LG: Hey, the tooth will set you free.
MC: All right, stop everybody. Later on. Later on in the show, Adam's going to be talking to us about the complicated science of brewing the absolutely perfect, objectively perfect shot of espresso.
But first, let's take a deeper look at your mouth, specifically how you clean it. A growing number of companies are coming out with new technologies or updating old staples like the toothbrush to give your mouth a high tech clean. Lauren, you wrote about this on WIRED.com. Why don't you tell us more?
LG: The era of the smart toothbrush has arrived, and the thing is, I'm not 100 percent sure that you need it. I started to notice late last year that I was getting pitched a lot on mouth tech, and I was like, this is so interesting because it's happening in the physical space, in the sense that a lot of the everyday goods that we would normally use as part of our oral care routines are now being infused with smarter technology to make your experience smarter.
But in the online world too, the internet is enabling this new era of targeted advertising and marketing and a direct-to-consumer selling that's making it, I guess making mouth products seem a little bit sexier in some ways. And then when I went to CES, which already feels like it was three years ago, but in reality it was only a couple of weeks ago, at the beginning of January, I noticed I was getting pitched on a lot of different toothbrushes and stuff, and some of them were radio-frequency toothbrushes that supposedly send charge molecules to the surface of your enamel.
And then another one, I think this one was from Colgate, was using optical sensors to measure the buildup of plaque on your teeth. And then this one toothbrush from Oral-B called the iO, which I ended up trying very briefly. It's not shipping until August. That is a toothbrush that is using AI, the buzzword AI, to tell you which zones of your mouth you're cleaning and how efficient your cleaning really is.
And then also I received a package of floss at my desk not long ago. Yes, dental floss from a company called BURST Oral Care that is this mouthful of buzzwords. Everything you could possibly imagine. It's a distributed company with an entirely remote workforce. They're boasting about eco-friendly, sustainable products, they're a subscription business. They use ambassadors who act as influencers to promote their product. You know, it's got charcoal in it. I was like uh-huh. OK, OK. It's venture capital funded, and then I ended up using the floss and ended up really liking the floss, but I was wondering why all of this mouth tech was just suddenly being put in front of our faces.
AR: Shoved down our throats, if you will.
LG: Thank you very much! I was just going to say why we're being asked to invest so much in mouth tech, so I wrote a story about it.
AR: It does sound like that that package of floss came with some strings attached.
LG: Oh my goodness. Let's unspool this a little bit.
AR: There are some connections that are implicit in all of what you just laid out that really strike me. The idea first of all that measuring some behavior that you do with an oral care device, with a toothbrush, then tells you something about the condition of your mouth that then has some proxy value for telling you if you are healthy. If you presumably have too much tartar or if you have gingivitis, if you have cavities. Like the sort of clinical presentations that your oral hygienist tisk, tisks you about when you go to the dentist.
And I don't know, did any of those companies give you the documentation on that? Do they have receipts? Do they have papers? Have they done the studies that say, yeah, if you use this then you have fewer cavities, then you have less gum disease because those are the things, like we know that's true about fluoride. If you use a fluoride toothpaste, then you have less cavities. That's been shown, and people know it. And I know people have other opinions about fluoride in parts of the world too. But that's a thing, that's sort of peer-reviewed data. Is that the case with your AI-powered optical sensing radio-frequency toothbrush?
LG: I'm getting the sense from talking to some of these companies that they're just relying on the data sets and suggestions that have sort of been well established at this point in the world of dental care. So they'll say things like, well, you know you're supposed to brush for at least two minutes, right? Which is sort of just the established amount of time that most dentists agree upon that you're supposed to brush for.
Or some of the companies I spoke to—and actually one, a researcher of public health, dental public health who I spoke to—will say, yeah, there have been studies done that suggest that high-powered electronic toothbrushes are shown to be slightly more efficient at getting rid of plaque or helping to eliminate gingivitis over time, but that you can still get a lot of benefit from a manual toothbrush.
And so of course any company that's making a power toothbrush will say, well, you know, power toothbrushes are better, right? Because studies have shown this. So with flossing or something like that, they'll say like, well, you know, you're supposed to floss a couple of times a day, right? You brush and you floss. That's what you do. And I think they're sort of relying on the standard sets of information we already have available to us about how we're supposed to address oral care than they are necessarily showing that their own products show a certain efficacy that's beyond what you might get from a lesser good if you will.
So something like the AI toothbrush, I was surprised by it. I was pleasantly surprised by it. It has a little display on it that shows you a smiley, it shows you a countdown timer for how long you're brushing for, and then it has like a bunch of different modes you can set it to, and then it shows you a smiley face or a frown, frowny face, depending on how long you've brushed.
But then when you go into the app that it's sharing data to—because of course it's sharing data through an app. That's where you start to see, oh, OK, over time I'm only really brushing in these zones. It turns out that I'm spending like 71 percent of my brushing time focused on the front of my teeth and I'm not really getting the back sides of my teeth, or I'm hitting my chewing teeth but I'm not really hitting way in the back or things like that. And these are just things that I think, I know how to brush my teeth, right? And then it turns out that maybe I don't; maybe I'm a fully grown adult who doesn't really know the right way to brush her teeth.
MC: Yeah, like brushing your teeth is one of those things that's, like, you are doing it wrong. Everybody should go on YouTube and look for a video of exactly how to brush your teeth. There's a lot for kids, but there are some for adults, because adults sometimes need to be taught how to brush their teeth properly and time yourself, and I guarantee you, you're doing it wrong.
So these guided experiences though where you know, they sort of throw the app into it and the toothbrush talks to the app and tells you a little bit more about good brushing habits. I mean it seems fine, right? There are other ways to do that, like just watching a video and timing yourself. But it also feels to me a lot like another one of those great tech land grabs like for a very, very long time. For the last 20 years or so, at the onset of the internet of things, there's the phenomenon of "We put a chip in it," where somebody takes something that absolutely does not need to be connected to a smartphone or connected to the internet and makes it connected to the internet, and now it's just better, just magically better.
This has always struck me as one of those categories. We've seen augmented-reality toothbrushing and virtual-reality toothbrushing, and there is even one where it's a suction cup case for your phone, so you can suction-cup your phone to the mirror, and it shows you how to hold your hand properly and the proper angle of your elbow as you're brushing your teeth. If this is about making good habits, then it's something that you should be able to use for a month and then set aside and never think about again. So what's the long-term plan to keep you on the augmented-reality toothbrush?
LG: It's the brush heads. I mean, that's why you're seeing more companies wanting to push electric toothbrushes, powered toothbrushes. It's still a relatively small sliver of the market in the US, and so there's a huge opportunity for them to sell more powered toothbrushes, and then they get you into replacing the brush head every few months or so.
AR: This is the inkjet printer model.
LG: It's the inkjet printer model. Exactly. And you do wonder how much of it is just driven almost by aesthetics than it is by a true concern about oral care. Because we are living in the age of Instagram where we're constantly sort of, I don't know, thinking about how we're presenting ourselves through these social media platforms. Actually, when I spoke to Proctor & Gamble, who owns the Oral-B brand, they said that I think Crest White Strips are some of the most popular, if not the most popular whitening product in the US. A lot of people are just using white strips, but they're not necessarily taking good care of their teeth because they want their teeth to be whiter. But if you're not actually doing the things you need to do to clean them, then how good is that really for your teeth? So there's that.
AR: Kind of, this startup ecosystem is really poorly designed for health outcomes at some future date, because there's all this capital expenditure to build, to put a chip that talks to a phone into a toothbrush, but then also has some position indicator. Then also has all the software and UI, UX stuff that goes into the app. You have to build all that with a lot of money first, without really knowing if you're going to have somebody have fewer cavities.
LG: We kind of get back to the real heart—the real tooth—of the issue. Does that even work there? I don't know but, a lot of these products are—
AR: The root. The root of the issue.
LG: Thank you. The root of the issue. Didn't even really try that hard for that one. These things are expensive.
MC: How much is this toothbrush that you tested in Vegas?
LG: The Oral-B one has not been released yet, and they have not yet announced a price for it. But the predecessor, which is the Genius X AI toothbrush, that costs somewhere between $180 and $250.
MC: OK.
LG: Which is really, really expensive. It is incredibly inaccessible. I spoke to one dentist turned public health researcher, who I mentioned earlier—Lisa Berens at UCSF—who studies socioeconomically marginalized populations when it comes to dental public health. And the people that she's working with and researching, they can't afford $200 toothbrushes.
And dental care is really something of a crisis in the United States. Somewhere between 20 to 30 percent of people in the US don't have any type of formal dental care coverage. Millions of people live in places around the country where they don't have easy access to dental care. And what you see is that dental care sort of disproportionately affects lower income populations, right?
And then you kind of end up in this spiral where, if you happen to be in a lower income bracket where you don't get access to good dental care, you have dental caries, which is some type of decay, which then could lead to tooth loss. Or it could lead to just issues with your aesthetics. It affects everything. It affects the amount of time you're spending away from your job to get dental care for children. It's really detrimental to their schooling and their social experience. It can be hard for people to have successful job interviews if they're feeling self-conscious about their teeth. It's a totally compounded issue.
And when you talk about all the problems that surround dental care at a systemic level in the country, and then you go, oh, but there's a $200 AI toothbrush that's going to help you brush better. I think you really need to address that gap that exists too, and think about, well, how can you make dental care better for the masses and not just people who are, like, well, I want the new fangled gadget that I can put in my mouth.
AR: What you really want the most bang for this buck is to help a lot of people a little bit, with cheap toothbrushes and cheap dental floss that does it. That makes a huge difference in a lot of people's lives, but that's not where there's a market.
LG: I think the best that you can hope for is that there's some type of trickle-down effect with this technology, that eventually the same sensors or the same, I don't know, same type of mouth guards or floss or things that are just accessible to people with a lot of disposable income right now eventually become more accessible to the masses.
MC: Speaking of trickling-down technology, let's take a quick break, and when we come back we will talk to Adam about the perfect shot of espresso.
[Break]
LG: Welcome back to the show. Adam Rogers, this week on WIRED, you wrote a story about a scientist turned barista who says that he has learned the cheat code for pulling the perfect shot of espresso. Tell us more.
AR: Well, the scientist is a computational chemist at the University of Oregon named Chris Hendon, and he has carved out, that's the wrong metaphor probably, but has carved out kind of a side career as, what University of Oregon press materials call him, Dr. Coffee.
MC: Oh boy.
LG: Mr. Coffee was already taken.
AR: You don't spend five years in coffee medical school … It’s the worst of the BBC children's shows, Dr. Coffee.
[Laughter]
AR: He's a chemist, and he primarily studies electrochemistry, making batteries, and there actually is some overlap between that and coffee, because a battery is to some extent, closely packed particles that you're trying to move things through. And that's what coffee is too. So he became a coffee aficionado. He ended up on a couple of barista championship teams—it's the World Cup of Coffee, which is also a joke that doesn't quite work, but you see what I mean. And he got really interested in trying to figure out why, as he says, you would pull four shots of espresso for the four judges, and they would be the most amazing shots of espresso you'd ever have, but they would be different. So you'd nominally be the best espresso shot puller, one of the best in the world, and you still couldn't make each one of those be the same, and he got obsessed with that as a chemist.
The thing about coffee is that, as a matter of chemistry, it is an incredibly complicated flow process. There's this botanical ingredient, the coffee bean that you dry, you roast to a different amount of temperature and time. Then you grind it so that it exposes more surface area to a solvent, which is hot water in this case that comes in contact with that surface area for a different amount of time at different temperatures, at different pressures.
When you're making an espresso, there's a compaction that I mentioned that forces the water through. You can have different-size particles, fines versus boulders. There are just a tremendous number of variables that you're trying to deal with if you think about this as a chemical process. And so what Hendon wanted to try to do was not exactly reduce the number of variables. The articles on this are 40 pages of partial differential equations trying to figure out all the different things that can happen when you're making an espresso cup of coffee.
Yeah. Fascinating stuff. It's funny, because you need the coffee to get through the article about the coffee. But he wanted to kind of do some metaphoric calculus here. Reduce all of those variables to get to a place where you could repeatably make a very good shot of espresso. And by the end of his paper, Hendon says, here's sort of the way to get to a place where you can make the shot that you want and do it again and again.
And essentially it has to do with starting with a much, much coarser grind than the real pros would get. To control either overextraction or underextraction of the flavors that people like in coffee with a lot less time exposed to that hot water and then play with just that variable of how much water and how much coffee you're using until you get to the right set point.
MC: So you start with the coarse grind.
AR: Yeah.
MC: And then that makes sort of watery coffee.
AR: Yeah.
MC: And then you get smaller and smaller and smaller with the grinds to the point where you get a cup of coffee that you like.
AR: Yeah, his process is you start with that course grind until you get to a specific extraction yield, which is a very specific measure of how much dissolved solids you can get out of that coffee. And when you get to that extraction yield, you'll have the right number. Extraction yield of 23 percent is what they're looking for. That's a Specialty Coffee Association kind of prescribed measurement.
MC: Sure. The governing body of coffee snobs.
AR: Coffee's world governing body. Yes, right. And then once you're there, it still won't taste good, because the surface area is not right. The grind is too coarse. You haven't had enough time in contact with water. But once you're there, you can start to change the grind or change the amount of coffee that you're actually using. Because if you use less coffee, that's kind of like using more water because of the ratio. So you get a different extraction until you find a place where you like the flavor of that cup. Oh, but you stayed with that extraction yield.
MC: [Laughter]
LG: The thing that I just have a quick question about. So he's not saying this is the perfect shot. He's saying, I have found a way to make this process repeatable so that when you feel you've landed on the perfect shot, this is how you repeat it? Without all of the factors that typically go into it.
AR: That's right. That's super important. So what you were talking about is the organoleptic qualities of the ultimate shot that you come up with-
MC: Oh boy.
LG: Yes. Hang on, I’m just going to Google something really quickly.
AR: And that's super subjective. Well, I guess I would say that to someone not as professional about this, like me, that seems completely subjective. If you talked to a person who ran a high-end cafe, they would probably say no, you and I will maybe even agree that that's a bad cup of coffee, and that's a good cup of coffee. So there's kind of broad ranges of things we say that's not good and that is good. But once you're in the, that is really good. What's good to you and what's good to me might be very different.
And then you're talking about something very different than what he's doing, which is to try to get something reproducible. It becomes more important. Hendon would say it becomes more important if you have one of those cafes, so maybe because you want your baristas to be able to make the same thing every time, because that's what people are arriving for, nominally. And because if you can use less coffee, if you can use 25 percent less coffee in every shot, he says that could actually save over a billion dollars a year to the industry.
These are the kinds of things that I went and talked to one of the coffee big shots in the Bay Area about this, and that sort of stuff just makes him nuts. It was like, no, that's yield. It's something that Folgers worries about. That's not our thing. You can imagine Starbucks worrying about it.
MC: Yeah. I'm sure that that part of his report really perked up the ears of big coffee. Right?
AR: Exactly. And I see you on perk. Yes. I'm sure that they they pored over this with great interest.
LG: So that's a good segue. Is there a way that you can use this reproducible process with other types of coffee? Like pour-over or your standard drip coffee? Your Mr. Coffee, Dr. Coffee.
AR: If only we can find a way for people to fall down a rabbit hole for how they make their coffee!
MC: [Laughter]
LG: No one's done that before.
AR: This office especially is full of, you know, coffee snobs, nuts, kooks, and everything.
MC: We have opinions.
AR: We do. We have capital “O” opinions. So sure, maybe not his exact methodology for pulling an espresso shot. Not all of us have espresso machines at home for example. And that makes a difference because you're using very hot water under pressure, a different thing than a pour over or an arrow press. But the idea that you could start with a coarse grind and go from there and say like, OK, well now I can get the course grind to a certain level of thin flavor. But the flavors that I like. So kind of dilute. But I sort of liked the taste and then start to mess with the parameters in a more controlled way. I mean, sure, if that's how you want to spend your mornings with the coffee, none of which takes into account by the way, where you buy the coffee from or what level of roast it's at, which is a whole other mess of variables.
MC: Well I particularly enjoy this story because it validates something that I've been telling people for years or I suppose I should say when people ask me about coffee, it's something that I advise them. I don't just walk up to people and say you're doing it wrong. But anyway, when friends ask me about my coffee thing, I always tell them you need a good grinder, you need a better grinder than the one that you have. Particularly because if you just use a spice grinder with a button with the blade that spins around, you're just going to get dust and large chunks. But if you use a burr grinder that lets you dial in the grind size, that's ideal. Right? Because you can do that. You can use his method, Hendon's method.
You can start with a coarse grind and then make it gradually finer until you're pouring a cup of coffee that you really like. And people argue about what's superior, whether it's Chemex or pour over or AeroPress and really that is sort of secondary to using really good beans and having a really good grinder where you can control its output.
AR: I think it is definitely true that outside of a food science lab where you can measure extraction yield with reliability and control for temperature and all that stuff, then the thing that you would do at home if you really, if you were to decide, no, I gotta up my coffee game, man. The thing you would do before you would buy the gadgetry to actually make the coffee is start with better beans.
MC: Yeah, start with better beans.
AR: And then getting a grinder. When I got a coffee grinder I was like now, my coffee's better because I got this grinder. I don't have a lot of counter space in my house. It didn't make the people I share my house with particularly happy that now there was another appliance on the counters, but I'm very happy to grind those beans.
LG: How big are most coffee grinders?
MC: Ehh, they're about yea big.
[Laughter]
LG: OK, for the rest of the podcast listeners … You know what we'll do, actually, we'll include in the show notes, links to some of the products that Mike is referring to here.
MC: I would say there are about 6 by 6 and about a foot tall. Six inches by six inches, maybe a little skinnier, and about a foot tall, 10 inches tall.
LG: So that's probably, that's about the size of my Nespresso little barista machine.
MC: Yeah, maybe a little taller and a little shallower. But you know, it's, it's important because if you think about it, like if you're drinking coffee, the coffee is the content, right? And the content and the method are two different things. I've always said that it's roughly analogous to bands that argue about whether or not they're going to record their album on tape or whether they're going to record it digitally to Pro Tools, and there's big arguments about that. And really what they should be arguing about is are the songs good enough? Because the content is going to determine the quality of the final product. It's going to have much more influence over the quality of the final product then the method by which you make the product.
LG: Wow. I just feel like, are we in Portland right now?
MC: This is my real beard. I grew it myself. It is artisanal. It's not store bought.
AR: Is it too much of a record scratch, head snap, to go from like, how do we make sure that poor people have good dentistry to also here's how to get your exquisite cup of artisanal coffee in the morning?
MC: Yes.
AR: Yeah, sure. I contain multitudes.
MC: I would just say just get an AeroPress and use Medaglia D'Oro. AeroPress is $30, $35, and the can of Medaglia D'Oro ground coffee is like $10, $15, and there you go. Under $50 and you've got great coffee for a month.
AR: That's a good cup of coffee.
MC: It is. All right, well let's take another break and when we come back we will go through our recommendations.
[Break]
MC: OK. Adam, you are our guest so you get to go first. What's your recommendation?
AR: My recommendation is a Star Trek: Picard. Started streaming this week. I've watched the first episode and it did all of the things that I needed a new Star Trek show to do, which is to say it, it made me go say, "Oh, I recognize that," and it made me cry and Star Trek's back and Captain Picard's back and I feel like he's the Starfleet officer we need right now.
MC: What has he been doing all these years?
AR: He retired to the vineyard. He's all mad. The Starfleet's not his, not the Starfleet he remembers anymore, and he's got to come back for one last mission.
MC: Does he wear a "Make Starfleet Great Again" hat?
AR: He's a legend, but there's an interview with the terrible reporter who springs an awful question on him, which makes me feel bad because I'm like, I would never do that to him as a reporter. We would never do that. He's Admiral Picard. But he's lost. He's lost the faith in the ideals. And of course the thing about Captain Picard is that he's an idealist, and so him losing that faith and then trying to get it back is what I'd like out of a TV show.
MC: So how do people find it?
AR: It is on CBS All Access, which is the CBS streaming service. So it costs them money. Star Trek sort of famously over the years has been a vehicle that TV networks have used to try to drive new modes of delivering television content. Next Generation was one of the first hour-long syndicated shows that was only syndicated. Voyager launched UPN because they know that there are people out there like your correspondent who will sort of do anything to watch Star Trek. It's like, we'll make them do this for Star Trek to see if we can goose CBS All Access. So Star Trek Discovery is also on that, and they're making, I don't know, three dozen new Star Trek shows. I can't keep up. I'll watch them all.
MC: So you could say that in a way they are boldly going where television has never gone before again and again?
LG: Oh my God.
AR: I mean, you could say that.
MC: OK, I will say that.
LG: Did you cry?
AR: Yeah, totally. And judging by what's in the trailers, I will all the way through it. And partially that's because, this now becomes a character who we ... I say we, this is a character who Star Trek fans had been with for four decades, almost. Three decades. So you do feel that relationship. The heartstrings on which it plucks are more vulnerable. I'm looking forward to watching it with my kids.
MC: Great. Speaking of heartstrings, Lauren, your recommendation?
LG: Last week, you might recall if anyone listened to last week's episode that I recommended a podcast with John August called Script Notes, and he had Greta Gerwig on the podcast to talk about Little Women, and I mentioned at the time that I had not yet seen the Little Women movie, the one that was recently released that's written and directed by Greta Gerwig. And I saw it last weekend myself and a couple other folks here from WIRED. We went and saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse, and that is my recommendation now. Officially. Go see the movie. That's it.
MC: That's it?
LG: Oh, it's great. I really, really liked it.
MC: Don't you want to spoil it a little bit for us?
LG: Anybody who's read the book, there won't be too many spoilers packed into this recommendation, but I really—
MC: Wait, there’s a book?
AR: Aww. Aww.
LG: Google Louisa May Alcott. I'll just leave you with that. But yeah, I really liked what Greta Gerwig did with the timeline, and she talked about this in the podcast interview with John August, where she said she thinks that movie audiences have a tough time once they see two characters together that are supposed to be some type of romantic relationship, movie audiences, and I'm paraphrasing a bit, have a tough time sort of disassociating those two people.
And then if people end up with somebody else, then you're sort of indignant and, like, wait? What happened? I thought they were supposed to be together, and this isn't supposed to happen this way, because turns out our brains are actually quite simple and especially when it comes to ingesting fictional movies.
And so when she was sort of reworking the timeline of the Little Women story, the book, she made it so that in the film, one of the March sisters sees one of the male characters first and then another March sister, our heroine Jo March, sees another male first. And then ultimately those are the ones that they sort of end up with at the end. But the end has a little bit of a wink too, in which the character of Jo March becomes sort of, her life becomes intertwined with the life of Louisa May Alcott, the author of the original book.
And there's like a wink in there about marriage and what happened to women in that day and age if they didn't get married and how they were considered a spinster and whether or not they could actually make a living for themselves. And so I think it's very cleverly done. I think Greta Gerwig did a fantastic job with it.
MC: Nice. Cannot wait to see it.
LG: Yeah, it's really great.
MC: So my recommendation is a service for buying and selling concert tickets. It's called Cash or Trade, and it's a website and it's also an app that you can download. It is really nice because the emphasis is on selling tickets at face value. So you can't scalp tickets on this platform. So if the act is selling its tickets for $50, you're allowed to sell your ticket for $50 plus the fees that you paid to acquire the ticket, if any, or less. So you can give tickets away, you can sell it for $20, you could sell like a pair for $100, or you could sell it at face value.
The fees are also much lower. So if you go there to buy tickets, you're paying a 10 percent fee, which is much lower than what you pay if you go to a site like StubHub, which is sometimes as high as 30 percent that you pay as a buyer.
LG: Oof. Brutal.
MC: And also you know, sites like StubHub and other sort of ticket apps will allow you to sell tickets for whatever the market rate price is. So you can sell a $50 ticket for $500 if you want. So Cash or Trade is trying to do away with all of that. And of course, because of that it's particularly popular among the hippie crowd, the types of shows where people might be more left leaning and communist about spending money to see concerts. And also the other thing that I like about it is that it is not first come first served. So you put up a pair of tickets and three or four people hit you up for them. You decide who you want to sell them to, and it's not a highest bidder kind of thing. You can sort of test to see if the person is really a fan or if they may be just buying them so they can put them on StubHub to flip them.
You can click on their profile, you can see what other shows they've sold, what other shows they're going to. So it's really like a community experience when you're selling a ticket. It's also much safer than Craigslist. It's much safer than StubHub. Anyway, that's my recommendation.
AR: What's the incentive to sell other than, oh, I can't make it to that concert? Because you're not going to make any money off it yourself. Are there other reasons that a fan would have to sell tickets that they had bought?
MC: Yeah, you can trade. So for example, if the floor is general admission and you're seated in the back, and you want to be on the floor, you can trade down. So you can say, like, I will trade you my seats for a spot standing on the floor, because there might be somebody who's in the opposite situation.
You can also trade one night for another, and because of the community aspect, you know that if you have tickets to the show, and that's a popular show on Cash or Trade, you will be able to make that deal. I've been using it a lot over the past five, six months, and I think it's just, it's great because it's a slice of the internet that is still good and not gouging everybody.
LG: That's pretty cool.
MC: All right, that's our show. Thank you all for listening. Adam, thanks once again for joining us on the show.
AR: Always a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
MC: If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter, just check the—
LG: I was just going to make another joke.
MC: Oh, what was that?
LG: I was going to say thank you, Adam, for joining us with your acidic wit. I mean acerbic wit.
MC: Oh. That's not the same thing, though.
LG: Acidic, because coffee!
MC: Ohh.
AR: I come on here, and I just have no filter, Lauren. That’s what it’s like.
MC: Oh no. [sigh] OK.
[Laughter]
LG: All right, back to the grind!
[Laughter]
MC: This show is produced by Boone Ashworth, and our consulting executive producer is Alex Kapelman. Thanks everybody for joining us.
LG: Thank you.
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