I’m worlds better than I used to be, but I’m still not anything close to what you’d call a champion sleeper. Even now, there are nights when it’s just not happening for me no matter what I do. Sometimes the problem is too much noise outside. Sometimes it’s weird dreams. Sometimes it’s headaches or my plugged nose, which have given me trouble my whole life. And sometimes I have no idea what the matter is.
But you know what the matter has never, ever been? My stupid, overpriced, AI-ridden bed being too cold for comfort because the app isn’t working.
YouTuber Theo “t3.gg” Browne had a bizarre — and hilariously 21st-century — reason for suffering through a sleepless night.
“Woke up because my AI-controlled bed is too cold,” the San Francisco-based content creator wrote in a tweet that has since gone viral.
Browne owns an intelligent mattress cooling system called Pod3, created by sleep tech company Eight Sleep. It boasts a host of sensors that track biometrics, including heart rate and sleep stages. An optional cooling cover cycles cooled or heated water through embedded coils, allowing sleepers to either raise or lower the temperature as needed.Unsurprisingly, things don’t always go according to plan, especially given the level of technical complexity involved.
“Went to adjust temperature and I can’t because the Eight Sleep app is currently broken,” Browne wrote, seething that the situation was “unacceptable.”
“Now I am stuck in a cold bed,” he added. “This feels dystopian.”
At present, I am grappling with two thoughts. I am, of course, angry that this exists and that someone spent thousands of dollars worth of perfectly good money including a monthly subscription on it instead of doing something helpful like donating to charity. But I also must confess that I might sleep the tiniest bit easier tonight knowing that no matter what might have gone wrong for me today or how badly I may feel about myself because of it, I am far from the dumbest fuck in the world and that a far dumber one is having a more miserable time than I am simply because he is dumb. We spend entirely too much time rewarding dumbfuckery these days especially when it’s rich, so while this is a small victory, I’ll happily take one where I can get one.
Just describing all the coils and the water makes me imagine dollar signs in front of my eyes if I were a repair dude for these beds.
And that’s if you can even repair them. All of the sensors and crap in there could make that next to impossible. That’s becoming a problem with everything now, often intentionally.