Better Offline CES 2025: Day 4 - Pt. 1

23:50Yeah. That's actually really cool. That's awesome. That's very cool. And so from different things that you notice. So for me, it said, you have some issues with skin tone evenness. And yeah, I know that. I can see it. And it pisses me off. And I'm trying all these different things. And how do you deal with something like that? So it's called hyperpigmentation, and there are different ingredients that are said to fight that. So vitamin C is one. Another one is niacinamide. There's just like tranexamic acid and all of those. So, you know, like the girlies were on TikTok, and we are learning about all these ingredients that we are supposed to use in different serums, potions, potions.

24:23But this will tell you how, it will give you more direction? It'll give you more direction. And like when I was talking to them, they're like, it's going to help you know what not to buy. That's okay. Because when you have all these marketers and these skinfluencers, they're just telling you all these things. I was on there and I was like, do you know what the Koreans use? The Koreans use Bifida. And I'm like, what the fuck is Bifida? Do I need Bifida in my thing? Everything on social media. So the other thing is you go to Sephora or something and be like, help me out. And I have bad skin, so I have to look at this stuff too.

24:51And either you will get a good salesperson who's like, I got you. I will take care of you. Or you get somebody who wants to make a lot of money. And they will lead you to, oh, you need niacinamide. You need hyaluronic acid, all the fun stuff, plus retinol. And then your face is a mess. And then you end up with a 10-step skincare routine, which was popular like 10 years ago in Korea. It's like super nuts. Like my cousin's kid is like 11 years old. And she came to me. She's like, let me show you my skincare routine. I'm like, you're 11. The only thing you should be using is moisturizer and sunscreen.

25:21Like a Dexter-style setup. Yeah, no. And she was breaking out. And I was like, you know why you're breaking out? You're overloading your skin. And you're too young. You don't need any of this. All you need is a moisturizer and a sunscreen. So does this thing give direction or is it just like don't buy it? It does give you direction because for me, it's tough. So for me, it was telling me like, oh, you have hyperpigmentation, but technically the proteins, you're not prone to it. So there's something that's going on. What are the consequences there? So what could that mean even? That means like I should probably be using a vitamin C.

25:48I don't currently. So I'm like, oh, I was trying a different ingredient. Obviously it ain't working. So like I can look for a vitamin C. it told me I was responsive, like highly responsive to retinol, which means it will likely work better for me than someone who's intolerant of it. And so that means I should probably use a retinol. And the actual consequences here is saving hundreds of dollars. Hundreds of dollars because these things are not cheap to buy. If you know what Drunk Elephant is, it's a very premium brand. And Sephora, you walk in, one bottle, like 70 milliliters, it's like$150. These things can cost a lot of money.

26:24There's all this pressure on social media to buy, buy, buy, to fix every problem that you have. To fix every problem. Like during the pandemic, skincare just blew up. And then like Korean skincare is like super popular now because you look at the stars of Squid Game. How old do you think they are? They're like 55, 60, and their skin looks incredible. They do not look whatever. And it's because they take skincare so much more seriously. The tech that L 'Oreal did, it was actually paired with a Korean startup in microfluidics. So they're taking like protein. this product took them 10 years to build because of the science and all that.

26:57This reminds me of a booth I stopped by. It was a Korean skincare company with some tech. And they had like four pamphlets that had nothing to do with the tech and just talked about why skincare was so big as an industry in Korea. It's huge. Which I thought was really interesting because I feel like almost every single pamphlet I've read besides those ones has been trying to pitch me or sell me on the tech. which I suppose that probably was in a way. I mean, it's interesting too because there's an obsession with lighter skin too. Like whenever I go to Computex, the stuff you see on billboards and everything is like, you want a light complexion.

27:33You want a fair complexion. It all feels like this is all kind of, I was like, I see what you're up to guys. Like there is very clear colorism going on there. So you're like literally just, you know, scrubbing your face off, scrubbing skin off your face just to get a shade lighter, which is part of the marketing too, which is a shame. I'm really glad you brought that up, though, because the thing is with CES is it is very easy, as I will know, to be a bit cynical and definitely pessimistic. When you look around, it's just everything has AI on it. It is nice to hear, especially for the tech industry, something for a woman that is very helpful.

28:06This seems extremely helpful. It seems like it comes outside the tech industry, too, right? It's more of a L 'Oreal. No, it's like using technology to solve a problem, which is usually not the tech industry's idea. It is. The funny thing is that people hear L 'Oreal and they don't think they do tech. They have been a huge presence at this show for six, seven, eight years now. And they are doing interesting things with tech. And I hate the term femtech because they usually talk about it in a certain way. It usually has to do reproductive health tracking, yada, yada, yada. But they have a really high-tech hairdryer that uses infrared light to help you dry your hair.

28:39Why is that good? Because if you use – so most hairdryers – and hairdryers are gadgets, okay? Right, right. They are the second most power-intensive thing in your house. I think they use more power than a microwave. Really? Yeah. And you use them for a long period of time. They use heating coils. And that heating coil, you want your hair to dry fast. You put it really close to your head, it damages your hair. Of course, because there's a giant heat source. Yeah, there's a giant heat source. So you can hold it from further away, use less heat, use less damage, and save a lot of energy. So it's not the sexiest thing in the world per se.

29:12it's not things like oh my god we're going to revolutionize the world well unless you're dyson that was this different than the dyson because they did try to revolutionize so the dyson still is using airflow right it's like airflow versus um they did a lot of cool things with airflow and engineering with the motor this is like cool air but this is not actually applying heat to it no it is applying heat but it's applying heat from the light it's light so it's The way to describe it is when you have something rain and there's no sun, the next day the water will dry, but not quite as well because the wind and whatever will evaporate the water.

29:48But if you have rain and the next day there is sun and wind, it dries much faster. It's the same concept but applied to your hair. And I will respond to one thing you said. No, I actually think things for women's skin and hair dryers that are less damaging to hair are actually the real revolutions. If CES was all shit like this, it would actually be a really cool show. If it was all like ways to use less water in a tap that still gets you as wet as you need to be. I think it's because the press industry for tech is full of men. I mean, we kind of proved it at the beginning. I'm actively apologizing.

30:24I'm actively the only woman in this room at this point in time. No, I know. It's my favorite. No, but it's like they have a lipstick printer. That's pretty cool. That's fucking cool. You can take an app, you look at yourself, you can try out different colors, and then custom print the actual thing. If you have a celebrity whose makeup look you like, you can take a photo, you can color pick their exact shade of lipstick, and print it for yourself. And then take it on the go. It's very thoughtful. They have a hair dye wand that precisely applies dye so you don't destroy your bathroom. Hair dyeing is like a ritual where it's like your bathroom will never be the same.

30:59It takes forever to clean up. You can just brush your hair and you've dyed it. That's it. It's super cool. It's the real future. I wish all of CES was this. Sadly, we're wrapping this block. Devendra Hardaway, where can people find you? Find me at Engadget. I do the Engadget podcast there, and I podcast about movies and TV at The Filmcast at thefilmcast.com. Lovely. Victoria, where can people find you? I am at VicMSong on all social handles. God, we've got to find an alternative to Twitter. But then I'm also at The Verge, so you can find me there. Wonderful. And Mr. Anguaza? Newsletters, thetechbubble.substack.com, podcast, This Machine Kills, and BigBlackJacoBin on Twitter and Blue Sky.

31:38You can find me hanging from various banisters as I crawl into your room to make you listen to the podcast a second time. I need these downloads, everyone. We'll be right back after these insane advertisements that will blow your mind.

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35:22Toyota, the official automotive partner of the NFL. Visit toyota.com slash NFL now to learn more. And we're back. Buy the thing, download the thing, or else. We have now been joined by Mr. David Roth of Defector. Hello. He is fresh from the Hyperloop, which he described as thrilling. Yeah, it was amazing. I had no idea that you could take a car through a tunnel. Like that was something that... Yeah, how was the car ride? Oh, you did it too. I did it too. Yeah, did you actually? Oh my God. You know, in Dune, there's all this talk in Dune about ancestral memory, but nobody ever remembers what it's like to be that sperm swimming through the primordial ooze.

36:05And you know what? If you want to know what that is, get in one of these Teslas and travel through these patchy white ooze looking walls and the fake rocks and the Disney World colors. Travel a very short distance. Like a very useless distance. It feels overwrought. I cannot emphasize enough how walkable this is. Some of the basically a football field. You're in the thing for like less than two minutes. They spent years digging into the ground to do this. I spent minutes thinking about why I did it. The first time I went in it and the only time I went in it, we had a traffic jam and I just started to panic, I'm going to be honest.

36:47Yeah, it's a nightmare. I was very claustrophobic. I was like, ah, I was doing like the Tina from Bob's Burgers sound. It's like whenever you go in any underground tunnel, like into Manhattan or something, you're like, this could be bad. There's nowhere else to go. You're just in the tube. And so. Yeah, that's the thing. I never loved – I'm not like a big heights guy. I'm not a big confined spaces guy. I'm just a real cowardly guy. I'm always afraid every moment of my life. But in those tunnels, it's like it's a big – there's other cars in there. It feels like it should exist. We're in it together.

37:19Right. There's a whole movie about that. There's also – There's a Stallone movie, Daylight or Daybreak. If you get out of the car in a tunnel, theoretically you can walk around the cars. In this one, I don't know where you'd get out. You'd be meat. The tunnel is the size of the car, which I didn't care for. also very steep getting in and out. Even by the sort of degraded standards of what we're talking about here, which is basically getting in a car with one or two other people you don't know and then traveling the distance of two football fields. It's still like it shouldn't be as unsafe feeling.

37:53I feel like we got to clown the Hyperloop more. Just how dumb and useless and expensive it was and how it only existed to stop the... By all means, there's some journalism. I will say Defector has we have taken that torch and run with it, but there's also only so many things you can say about it. It's only so far it goes. You got to remind people, this was the thing Elon Musk used to kill the high-speed rail. Yes. You don't need to get to a rail. You got a car in tunnel. You don't need a train. This is all it took. It cost$53 million to build. Yep. And it cost, oh wow, yeah, $53 million to build, and then$47 million for the two tunnels and three stations.

38:31That's awesome. Work every fucking penny. Yeah, especially as somebody who frequently rides the subway where one car can hold, like a train can hold like 1 ,200 people. Like in this case, it's like a car where there's a guy that helps you get into it and then there's a guy that drives it. So the ratio of people helping to people riding is either one-to-one or very nearly one-to-one. And also it doesn't work. Like every time people get out, they're just like, please exit like ahead of the car. and I would say that in the times that I was watching that worked like maybe 30 % of the time. Amazing.

39:05Yeah. Super stuff. Great shit. This is the modern day Tony Stark. Yeah, he's amazing. He's so good. So what did you see on the floor exactly? So I tried to see as much as I could in terms of like I wanted to see the sort of the high and low of it because I know that when we were talking about it yesterday I had only been to the sort of the space here in the Venetian And a lot of that was like, you know, sort of their products, like they're identifiably like things that, you know, in many cases, they're like, you know, you're making it so you buy it. And like, in some cases, it's like, it's a vibrator or it's like a dog door or whatever.

39:42But it's like it has a practical use. Right. Which is incredible. Yes. There was one that we talked about. This was the air purifier, which we should probably go back to. Oh, God. Still some confusion. But the in this case, it's like so the convention center. I know you all have been over this a million times on the podcast. We can say it again. All right. cool uh it is like the biggest of the big brands have their sort of like lg experience yeah stuff and this is like a huge like 20 000 square foot yeah big awesome deep pile carpet like it's like a pleasure to experience but then if you go upstairs it's like all the white label chinese electronic brands nice like sell on amazon and so i got to see i wanted to see both of those and like the there's also this sort of area where um the first is like bleeding into the second where there's like brands that are doing ambitious stuff you know where they're like they make a robot or whatever the kid is supposed to play with or something but it like also kind of sucks like it's not like the lg shit was interesting to me because like as much as i mean i sort of as we discussed yesterday that like some of the ai elements are like so misbegotten uh as to like almost be poignant right but then you give an example of one like a just a stupid one the smart home stuff really like kind of was weird to me because that was so i ran into a co-worker of of yours and in gadget guy up on the chinese electronics floor uh dan is dan cooper dan cooper yeah great dude uh very happy to talk to him and he uh was sort of telling me about an ad so i was struck by the smart home stuff in the lg space like all the products themselves like as a product are cool the oled oled screens blew my mind they were incredible there were stuff where you could like basically have a sort of more or less dirt free home garden thing and like it looks sick dude like it looked like something from the jetsons like i was legitimately thinking that it would be a nice thing to have a home garden yeah it was like and it looked it was the size of like a boom box basically like there were these little slots with plants growing up through it and they said you could grow vegetables in it i don't think i would do that but it's like a bunch of those already like those those like self-continues but one can eat vegetables certainly that's a useful thing that's a practical that's a thing that something does yes and so so all of those items were neat to me but then the smart home thing was basically like the most degrading thing imaginable where they're like is this what you hogs want you want a robot to pick your clothes for you and then map your commute i bet you want that, right?

42:19Do you think that, what if we told you that the robot cared for you? There was a lot of stuff. He was your best friend. Yeah, there's so, that language, especially LG had it. There's this affectionate intelligence. Affectionate intelligence. Jesus Christ. Empathetic AI. Two years later it dies because the cloud service died. Right, I was kidding. Your friend is dead now. You killed him. And it's going to make you feel like shit about it. You should have made for our premium plan that would have allowed you to be independent of class. You killed him. You killed the guy that picks your pants every day.

42:45But you can bring him back to life for 79 extra dollars a month. Did you guys hear about the robot for kids, Moxie? Yeah, the one that, tell us the story. I mean, Moxie was this like very expensive robot for kids developed by the iRobot CTO. So somebody who like really wanted to build a companion, especially for kids who are maybe special needs or autistic kids, and just something for them to interact with, learn language. A year or two later, that thing dies. Now you have to tell your child that their robot best friend is dead because this company couldn't get funding in time and the cloud services is dead.

43:18So now you just have a really expensive, I think it was like$1 ,500 at the beginning, plus a$50 monthly price. That's so cool. Growing up for me has been realizing I'm the guy in like these sci-fi movies, you'd be like, I better not fucking see you with a cyborg. Yeah. They had, there's like a new version of what you're describing. Amy, A-I-M-E. What was this? Similar thing, looked like a Furby. It blinked and it talked in a childlike voice and it was a companion. So this is, again, one of those things where you kind of do got to hand it to him in the sense that it's cute. People were lining up to get their picture taken with it.

43:56There was a lot of... I watched three different guys just walk up, get handed the thing, whatever, the Stanley Cup or whatever, just hit the soy face while someone took a picture of them and then pass it to the next dude that did the same thing. People want cute robots. We've seen a lot of those categories. There was one that just stares at you. On a technically level two. It just looks up at you and it's like, hi, hello. That's all it exists for. I don't need an aggroed NPC from Morrowind just snapping to me as I walk into the room. On some level, it is technically impressive to be able to figure out a way to hack into what we view as cute, figure out a way to get something that you're going to let into your home like that.

44:36But then it immediately brings you to the next question, do you need it? Yeah, and that's exactly where I was going with it too. that it's like as a design thing it's like it's a triumph. That's an idea. Like I thought it was I wanted to pet it. You know I wouldn't have minded holding that thing. And yet like the idea of it like talking to my child like no fucking mess. No. Like that's just not a thing where I mean again this is the other aspect of what you were saying like there are other needs and applications for this stuff. And so when I look at something and I'm like well I wouldn't use that.

45:03Like I don't want to be in a robot that exercises for me. Like well I don't have like a unilateral. I don't have like issues. I have a child and a lot of experience with special needs kids as well. And guess what? This stuff's fucking repugnant to me. It is disgusting to me, the idea that, and I understand it's like, yeah, companionship, what have you, but it's like anytime, I don't mean you, Demindra, any of these companies that try and suggest, oh, this is the, we're going to use the computer to fix your sons. Because that's what the actual suggestion is. It's not that they're like, this is really going to help you.

45:35And there are examples of things that can. Even for like older people with dementia, for example, they had these kind of companions that were literally just like effectively like fluffy toys that kind of purred like a cat and it just made them feel like that was a cs robot the headless cat and it was just very but that had a very specific thing but these robots is this kind of catch-all if something's wrong with your child because that really is what they're saying and it's just but i'm also not buying your head off because it's like theoretically the idea of one of these things is sensible like yeah i'm a loser and i'm lonely and i could use some company or like a child would like a teddy bear that could talk to it, theoretically, but it feels like none of these people have got beyond that stage ever.

46:16They're not like, and how would this operate with a person? For more than now? So the thing that kind of left me feeling sad-ish leaving the convention center was that aspect of it. That all of it is sort of not just, so the smart home was bizarre to me because it was infantilizing. But there's also, and this was the bit that that Dan told me about was that he was like, this is also great to talk to more people with that like thousand yard stare. They've been to 13 fucking CESs. Dan is scarred. Yeah. And so he was like, oh, this is probably six CESs ago. Drag on a cigarette. Pre-pandemic times.

46:56Yeah. You have to imagine this is actually just like a perfectly cheerful man with a British accent. He's also British. But he was talking about an LG ad that they had that clearly had stayed with him. Do you know the video that I'm talking about? I don't. I think so. So this is, it's like, it was, this was their like sort of smart home thing that they were working with then. And it seems like an important distinction that this is like a pre-pandemic thing because so much of this stuff feels like it's designed to be like, are you so lonely and you never see anybody? Right. Which I think is an experience that's now like more current than, or like at least more, you can kind of like put your finger on a time.

47:31It's within the zeitgeist. Yes. Whereas like, I feel like six years ago, there's a part of me, it's like, no man, I just go to the store. like I don't have to like if I want to see another person I just do it but in this case so the video he was describing was like it's the life of a guy who's got like an LG AI support that is sort of taking care of everything. Is this the one that talks about his kid? No this so here he wakes up the thing is like hey good morning like you know it's 71 degrees outside would you like me to pick your outfit out for you and you just say thank you and then it does and then it comes out of like a steamer that's like built that's in your home you know so everything you're fresh and flies you leave the home you get in a car the same robot drives you to work then it turns out that it's arranged a blind date for you based on the fuck right this is where it starts getting darker based on like your preferences presumably based on the same sort of algorithms that tell you you know that like today is not a day to wear linen pants today's a day to wear cotton pants the so then the video follows the guy he's on this blind date with this woman it's it's working and then the AI takes because it can control the projection on the light of the windows of the building across the street changes to like show that it's a heart and so that shows you that robot is just an Indian mother yeah wake up my son here's your outfit here's your clothes I found a date for you like it's all it is so the bit that was like striking me about like there's no agency in any of this He was like, Dan's words on it, he was like, this guy just gets bullied all day by his fucking AI.

49:04He's just being manipulated by a robot. He doesn't make a single choice all day long. That actually sounds great, though. Yeah. I'd love to wake up with that. I think a lot of people would want, they would find some solace in reducing choices. I am mostly kidding, by the way, the idea of waking up and the, well, look, look, look, look. There's going to be a big market for pro-dom AI. Look, look, look. Yes. I am nothing like this. I just wake up and read three different apps that tell me how to feel every day. Like I just go and read pages of stuff that twangs my emotions. And then I go and like use the text app to text my therapist.

49:39I read a post again. Yeah, it's totally different. That's the bit that's weird about this too, though, is that like, so there's something that, so what made me sad about it was the idea of just being like a foie gras goose and like your whole life is just piped down your throat like butter. and you're just like, oh, thank you. I feel so full. This really is the hog era. This is what you guys like. Just eat out this trough. We've taken care of it. All you need to do is - This is the WALL-E future we're moving towards. WALL-E predicted everything. It's going to be a shit one. It is. It doesn't even work this well.

50:11But I do feel like, the fact that it doesn't work is funny to me, but it is also, the fact that they're promising this, that was the part that was uncanny about it. Like the idea of you want to take all of this mastery that you have that's made your products so unfathomably cool and like project it across every spectrum of somebody's life. Like to a certain extent, like I would want to be asked my consent. Yeah. But also, you know, you see how good those OLED screens are. And there's a part of me that's like, I don't know, man. That's because. Like you guys do cars? We're moving beyond OLED. We're in micro LED now.

50:48And that stuff is, it's wild. You don't need a girlfriend where we're going. No pixels. You see no pixels. It's just so dense. That's the idea of it, though, is that sort of like I don't want to be protected from every aspect of being alive. There's another thing that pisses me off about this. First of all, they're lying. First of all, they're lying. But two, if you look at how the tech industry actually treats customers, do you think that any of this would, even if it did work, be good? it's like i'm going to meet with a woman who is actually a pig butchering scam waiting to happen and my car ends up pulling over to the side of the road because there was a traffic cone in the in the road and i'm late for the day and now the woman's threatening to kill me but don't worry the trousers i have on have a giant stain on them from the lg cabinet right which and i also will admit i have the lg steam cabinet because i actually use it like i genuinely like i go to meetings i use suits a lot so i'm like this is an audio medium but uh ed looks amazing thank you thank you david steaming right now i am just steaming here but even then that thing works mostly but it just doesn't get all the wrinkles it's like they can't even get the fucking steamer right yeah the the problem is these companies think all we want is no friction in our lives they think we want to glide through life like we're fully lubricated right you know it's just like oh no problems I don't want to think about clothes.

52:16I don't want to think about choices. But also they don't remove the friction. This is my one regret for CES. I didn't get to visit the fintech section because— The fraud section. That's where they believe in removing friction, and they do. Whether or not they do so is—whether or not doing so is good or bad, you know? Let's see. It's almost always—not almost always. It is always bad. You know, usually when one of these fintech firms removes friction, in making a transaction or a trade. But that's like one place I think of when we're talking about removing friction, making your life more of some coherent engine towards some end, and that's where they've done it.

52:56And it's been disastrous. But also these companies don't remove that. I would like, perhaps I don't need to be fully looved, but partially looved. Like I would like less friction. Instead, as you heard in one of the previous episodes, it's like there's more friction than ever. And even with these companies, they sell this stream and lg i think is one of the more guilty ones they have all the apps in the i think i have i forget which washer i have but i think i have an lg washer and it's like there's an app they make the best appliances the appliances are good but notice that there's never like they like those things don't like the ways they change are just like clothes are more reliably clean yeah the the extensions from there have never worked because i feel like i've been to multiple ces's where there has been some form of demo where someone goes like lg intelligence please warm up my bagel I've already put it in the toaster Michael it's already in there and don't worry I already emailed your wife and it's like these things are meant like they've been promising this but they don't fucking work it's just make believe it's pure fantasy but the thing about the friction thing which I've noticed since I've been since 2010 I've just had a four year gap because of pandemic stuff and I had kids I didn't want to leave my wife alone with young kids you never have to explain why you didn't come to see it I got it.

54:08I got it. This is my duty. It should have to explain why you're here for. I didn't come here for 28 years. But the whole, the rise of startups. The rise of startups, what Consumer Electronics has been trying to do for the past 15 years is just remove that friction. And I think we've only really started to realize you remove friction, you remove humanity. Yeah. And to a certain extent, we need a little friction in our lives. We grow with challenges. We grow with challenges, but maybe it's better for you to not have an automatically prepared cup of coffee when you walk into the kitchen. maybe you should just go outside and like go to the neighborhood cafe or something.

54:42There are other things you can do. I mean, a consumer is not a person, right? And this is a key part of, I think, the quest to remove friction. A consumer is someone who is anxious or eager to move from one transaction to the next. And any time in between those transactions, any time between transforming labor into some sort of productive end is wasted. and I think what it is is they are removing friction just not for us it's just between us and the purchase and that's again like sort of this brings us back to like the sort of the uncanny aspect of it in terms of being like it's not necessarily making my life any easier it is simply making it easier for me to like it's more transactable to like be productive and to consume more effectively or whatever but it's not adding value in any way like I think about with these chatbots that are coming in for therapy.

55:36It's like, is the therapy that they're offering going to actually help? No. But now it's actually a more transparent and quantifiable market. So you can search out for whatever product you think is going to be a fit for your specific issue. Whether or not it's going to help you is another question. But you can find it and identify it. It's one less human you have to deal with. Which is also the other thing. Less humans. It's part of using apps instead of calling a restaurant or something. I will fully admit a mental health thing with me. I've loved that for years and I found it because I got my various issues with anxiety and not wanting to go outside and being scared of talking to people long story short I got over that but also there was a certain level of like yeah the internet is really and tech is really good at selling you those abstractions between people so you can live a weird hermit life and I absolutely did it and then you think society is you and these tech products exactly you become more less experiences you don't grow this is why I hate the stupid the Google thing where it'll call a restaurant and make a reservation for you.

56:37I do like that for my accent. I hate it so much because it's like, what burden are you putting on this restaurant? It's like, oh, I'm busy. Like I'm dealing with real customers, real reservations. This fucking robot calls me. I will argue slightly on this one. Yep.

57:19I, Rather than, that's a case where you don't need to call the manager of the restaurant to do all this stuff. And that's a case where an app-based thing could be better. But now we're abstracting it to the point where a robot is calling a number and talking to this human. This human does not know. It's a robot talking to them. Then they're expecting a conversation. It's confusing for them. I hate that whole thing. Because you as a user are just throwing that at home. And this is something that's been a recurring theme in the conversations that I've been a part of for this. where it's like they invented a solution to like a pretty minor problem and now are sort of like i mean not to no no no live experience whatever also minors are like minor in comparison to like but yes and so in this case it's like there's and you know something like that it can't be easy right i mean like that's there's a lot of of moving parts i mean i don't understand any of them but it does feel like the sort of thing where that is a in its way you know like an impressive achievement and yet at the same time and this is the real recurring part like it's a very labor intensive presumably very expensive solution to a problem that like probably is more urgent for like a like somebody who doesn't have anything else to worry about but making restaurant reservations yeah you know and ditto for the idea of being like a robot makes your coffee for you a robot picks your whatever like some secret computers your clothes makes your food because corey doctor i made this point last year on the podcast he said that algorithms are inherently conservative they move people towards the norm that is actually culturally dangerous i think it will eradicate people of color or eradicate culture that made america and made many countries the way they are and something that you're seeing on a much well not necessarily a smaller scale with social media with what's popular what's popular on tiktok the influences of that but when you add in that algorithmic side not that i think that any of this bullshit spot i don't think they'll ever have a thing that picks your outfit for you but if they ever do that is slightly like there is something kind of darker about right because every i mean like everybody's gonna wind up dressing the same yeah like and that's exactly it and that's presumably based on the training data that it's given which will probably lean more white right but this is also like one of those things where there's like this is again like a very labor-intensive solution yeah problem.

59:37They're really breaking the back of this one. If you're somebody that just has, sometimes you've got stripes and plaids on, you can fix that. Someone can just tell you that that doesn't look like that. You can learn that lesson once in your life and apply it moving forward. I'm still waiting for them to, hey, I think most home tech is kind of garbage, even though, yes, I also there was a sale in the LG fridges with the little windows, and I got an LG fridge with the window because it looks cool. You knock on it, you have double doors, whatever, great for kid snacks but i spend an hour every night cleaning my kitchen and i hate it yep like every single night it's like okay give me yes rosie the robot forget these companion robots yeah give me a robot to do the things that really suck in our lives and i think open gives you more time to be with your family right do other things that possibility is still there but nobody nobody's doing that because lg is just like hey i want to yeah i want to control your life rather than do the simple tasks that nobody likes.

1:00:31But also, there's something quite joyful about when you're like, it took me until like the last end of last year to really enjoy dressing myself. Yeah. And there's something fun about it. It's to quote Derek Gaia, clothing is like social language. Forgive me if I misquoted you, Derek. It's like, there's something about it and it takes a while. And before you've worked it out, you feel very self-conscious. I don't think an AI telling you what to wear fixes that problem. It's just, hey, do this. So we have decided what looks good versus you. There's always an in-between, right? Yeah, yeah. You don't have to be like, maybe we don't need an AI dictator, but hey, you have these clothes.

1:01:05Suggestions. Try this. Just try this. And there's nothing wrong with that. And maybe actually, I think you would be looking, like having a friend who's supportive to be like, hey, try this. I know you don't normally wear it, but maybe it would look good on you. That's an important distinction, I think. Shout out to McLevine, by the way. He does that for me on text. Very nice. Yeah. So I was talking to Philip before when you guys were recording Block A about his experience with Pandora, which I didn't use, but was always the one that like my friends did. That's the music recommendation one. And he was sort of explaining what it was like as it got worse.

1:01:33Like how did, I'm talking about you, dude. Philip just walked in the room. Basically, that was a sort of like, of all the sort of algorithmic musical recommendation applications that have existed. That's the one that I think anybody ever had good feelings about. Spotify is easy to use, but I don't think anybody. But is it good? No, right. I don't think anybody's like, I love Spotify. It's like, I think of it as. The early on. And when the Europeans only had Spotify, they lorded that over everybody in America. When I go to England, I was like, ooh. Americans can't stream music. Yeah, all right.

1:02:07So that makes sense, the convenience aspect of it. So what Pandora did was basically you would, and maybe, Philip, you can even just grab the mic if you want to talk about it because it actually understands how this stuff works. But I thought this was interesting in terms of how it got worse is what I was talking about. Lay it on us. All right. So the exciting thing for Pandora for me was the seeding, where it was actually looking for a flavor of what you were interested in, looking for the sound you were after, not, oh, you like Rockabilly. Let me give you an entire catalog of Rockabilly. It would ask you for what is your inspiration point, and the best inspiration point I gave it was Tom Waits, Black Hole Sun, Pink Floyd's Echoes.

1:02:52okay so uh to deeply confuse the algorithm forever for and i'll claim dr jones try to figure out what to give me for that and it did but my goal behind that was and what pandora did a great job doing was finding things i'd never heard of that i might like that fit in that gap yeah i found so many bands i never knew i have found and it is something that will both age me and piss some people off my favorite comment i remember my pandora experience in i was at penn state and i put in like a bunch of bands i got cave in a band called cave in they did some book called anchor i think it was of a band of an album called antenna just fucking up every word in that sentence and i remember being like this is so good now the funny thing is that this is cave in's one alt rock album surrounded by hardcore music that was just impossible to listen to for me and so i stopped using pandora because every other cave-in album i listened to was completely insane for me and i assumed that there were two cave-ins for years anyway the point is after this point i have never had a recommended band on any system ever not spotify apple music anything that has ever made me feel anything it's always been shit apple music wants me to listen to burden in my hand by sound god whatever song i'm listening to it's like hey have you remember pretty noose by sound you ever heard black hole sun by sound this shit i it's just so frustrating so you should say the oh my god that was your experience like how it broke down so where it broke down and pandora itself fell apart is the seeds started bleeding into each other and it basically learned me better and better and stopped recommending anything new.

1:04:35And you're done. I mean, after I had found the Dreadnoughts, which was a really great band, which then led me to a handful of other bands I'd never heard before, that was pretty much the last thing Pandora found for me that was new and exciting. Since then, the closest I've come is SoundCloud, but SoundCloud does not work well for discovery, to find things for you. So as we wrap up the episode, Devendra, I know you have to go in a minute. I would like to know, is there anything that really made you smile at the show? Is there anything that brought up to you? Yeah, I'll show you. I like a computer.

1:05:12A simple computer. The Asus ZenBook A14. This thing, it weighs under 2.2 pounds. And I hold this thing in my head. What is that? That's a real computer? That's a real computer. That weighs less than a hardback book? There we go. It weighs half a pound less than a MacBook Air. And I'm like, Asus, how did you do this? because Asus is normally the company that's out there copying Apple, basically. And I think they've gotten to the point where they've innovated. They do stuff like dual-screen computers. I don't think those are as useful. This is just a simple, really, really light computer. It has an OLED screen.

1:05:41MacBook Air doesn't have OLED. It has ports. It has all the goddamn ports you want. USB-A, USB-C, HDMI. In a thing smaller than the MacBook Air, it's like, Apple, what is your excuse? What was the keyboard like on it? It's not bad. It's not bad. Asus makes okay keyboards. The trackpad is pretty good. Subscription model. Yeah. I think it's going to be like 1 ,200. It's Aces. They don't go too hard, but this is a Snapdragon CPU, so it has that thing where it's... What's the limitation there? It's going to be emulating some older Windows apps. Last year, from what we saw on the surfaces, it's actually gotten better than it has been in years, so I think for most people it would be fine.

1:06:14But man, a 2.2-pound computer. Just like a little laptop that basically feels like a tablet and can do everything. Did you write this up? I wrote it up. It's up there. It is one of our Best of CS awards. Hell yeah. Okay, where can people find you, Devendra? Yeah, I'm at Devendra on Blue Sky and all the fun places at thefilmcast.com, where I podcast about movies and TV and Engadget, and Engadget podcast. Check me out there. Lovely. David? Defector.com is the website. The Distraction is the Defector podcast. There's a Hallmark movie podcast. I'm mentioning it every other time. I'm linking it every time now.

1:06:49So this is called It's Christmastown. Thank you. And yeah, I'm David J. Roth on Blue Sky. Mr. Alguesa. This Mission Kills is my podcast. thetechbubble.substack.com is my newsletter Big Black Jack have been on X the Everything site and Blue Sky is where I live online you can find me on Google type in what happened to Google search or who is Prabhagar Raghavan and I should pop up now after I stop speaking you must start purchasing you are a consumer as Ed said follow this by consuming what's next Don't think, especially if it's one of the ones that embarrasses me.

1:07:54and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-iHeart to get started. That's 844-844-iHeart. Jan Marselech was a model of German corporate success. It seemed so damn simple for him.

1:08:34Also, it turned out, a fraudster. Where does the money come from? That was something that I always was questioning myself. But what if I told you that was the least interesting thing about him? His secret office was less than 500 meters down the road. I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all? certain things in my life since then have gone terribly wrong. I don't know if they followed me to my home. It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.

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1:11:07And we're back. And now we are joined by Mr. Philip Broughton, the health physicist that we know and love that has been giving us drinks all the time. How are you doing, Phil? Hello. I think it's funny, though, that story about Pandora and this recommendation system that used to work but doesn't, yet the company seems to still, it feels symbolic of everything. It feels like everything's just kind of slowed down, and even CES doesn't even seem that willing to convince us anymore. Based on everything you guys, Ed and David, have seen, it feels like there's a lot of just, this is what you want, rather than, hey, we're fucking selling you something, right?

1:11:41Yeah, it's interesting, right? Does that sound about right to you? Yeah, you know, and if I'm wrong, please correct me. And I also think I've, you know, today I tried to shift gears and instead be like, okay, let's pretend the things I'm coming into are like for a real person. Right. And kind of falling into like a drain around the smart home stuff and being like, I'm not, and most human beings are not the target audience for this in a way that feels like a snake eating its own tail. I mean, like, you know, I went to a lot of the, there's a section that's pretty much just like how to build your own power grid, you know, for your own home or if you're going camping and you can't be offline.

1:12:22Oh, yeah. The Anchor stuff. Anchor EcoFlow. I like that. Sort of cool to me. But yeah, go on. No, I mean, it's like it is fascinating that you're able to literally power the equivalent of like a home out in the woods. but then it raises the question especially with their marketing where they're like this is the sustainable way to uh be technologically progressive and it's like what in the sustainable way to be like maybe we don't consume even more in some spaces and and so stuff like that is really interesting to me paying attention to advertising being like oh okay like they're the they're for like homes that are built like crypts and mausoleums like just massive empty spaces filled with nothing other than consumer electronics.

1:13:07Wow. Heaven. Yeah. I mean, for a lot of people at this conference, it is. And I think that's been important in constructing a better sense of who a lot of these things are for beyond investors. Seeing like, okay, there are things that consumers who might not normally have something like this be interested in, but they're also, I think the other day we were talking about status symbols, and it's like, one, what other way to kind of also signal that flag than to be able to go out in an RV in the middle of the woods and still have the equivalent of a house. Yeah. And there's some of these people who, just to be clear, there are plenty of people who go camping and do that, and it's like, I want to power a grill.

1:13:45I want to power this, but it's not like - You don't need 6 ,000 watts to have a grill. You need a portable nuclear reactor. That's what I'm surprised no one's trying to sell you. That was the thought that I had looking at that stuff too, because there's a part of me that's like, oh, that's cool. You couldn't do that. Yeah. You know, like whatever, five, 10 years ago. and then to see like i guess this is the sort of thing where it's like you find the solution to i mean it's not a super pressing problem but it's a it's a solution like you went from a thing that didn't work to a thing that does work but then all you can do is like make it bigger yeah like that's the only solution is just sort of like yeah now it's like 6 000 watts now you could like have like basically like a red rocks performance yeah to be fair i have an anchor charger on me because like all of their dense chargers are really cool because like the gallium nitrate stuff, which, Phil, I will have you explain in a moment.

1:14:32No, no, you won't. You don't know what that means either? It batteries. It does a battery at you. I will explain gallium nitrate as a thing where I don't know the science stuff, and I assume the flipping science guy might... Now I'm... F. It's really more of a bartender if you think about it. You should riff. Tell us what you think. No, I can actually tell you what it does more than what it is. That's what I'm doing with the subject of this podcast every time I come on it. No, it basically allows them to make more powerful charges in a much smaller form, which has led to battery chargers that can charge more powerfully and they're much smaller.

1:15:05And it's really cool. But then you get to this stuff where it's like, what if you had 600 ,000 mAh and you could power a house and you could power your friend's house, you could live... Who is the... What is the customer base there? Because it feels like at a certain point, you just don't need more. Yeah, that's the customer base thing, to Edward's point, that I thought was really... This was the thing that was very much on my mind looking at a lot of the smart home stuff was, like, I think a lot of people, I mean, not to say that this is, like, you know, it's obviously it's elite stuff. This is, like, concept car shit.

1:15:36I don't think that, I don't know how many LG smart homes exist in the wild, but is it, like, is it 1 ,000? Is it 100, you know? But whatever, I think most people, and maybe I don't actually know what most people's experience is, don't have especially reliable wireless internet service. It's expensive. It's not very good. The amount of connectivity that would be required to make this all-seeing robot that helps you with every aspect of your life, that would have to be reliable. Electricity isn't reliable. I mean, it's the thing where, obviously, it would be a bummer about this stuff. If Southern California is fucking on fire, that's where I see a lot of these mansas in my mind.

1:16:18You know, like these sort of like technologically, like you were describing, like just basically like a vast, stylish, spare space with like perfect connectivity and technological things. Yeah, so Palm Springs. Yeah, basically, right. But also like, oh, go ahead. Oh, no, I was going to say, we live in New York. You know, it's like in New York, you know, we've had all these private public partnerships to expand connectivity. And have they done jack shit? I mean, to the extent that like you, you know, you, it's not until something else happens, you realize how bad you have it and how much at the mercy of the firms you are to get any sort of fix going on.

1:16:57Right. So the thing that comes to mind immediately as you're telling me about these ridiculous generator, not generators, battery packs, there's generator substitutes is the experience of the most recent fires that happened in Santa Cruz. since Los Angeles is in mind, has left PG &E service in the Santa Cruz Mountains deeply fractured and fragile. So they offered to do power walls for a whole bunch of people because they said, we can't promise you we're going to give you power and that the power will be reliable and we will be shutting you off regularly anytime the breeze so much as blows. So what these battery packs tell me is an admission of fragility.

1:17:43Yep. I mean, that's kind of where we're approaching. Yeah. But they're not selling it for that, though. It seems like the marketing is still recreational. Yeah, I understand why they're not. I wonder if next two. No. It's like a bummer to think about that. Yeah, but this is CES. But they are also selling it to an audience that is thinking about it. Sure, but I'm saying that we're one year away from CES. Preppers also come to mind for off-grid living. But I think there's going to, this is my one CES prediction for 2026, preppers. I think there's going to be more prepper sales. The idea of being able to live off of grid, the idea of being able to not rely on the power grid, which is so cool.

1:18:20Some of the marketing felt like a probe there, what was like explicitly on grid, but also off grid. Yeah. And not just like RV living, but just if you, for some reason, happened to have a home that was off the grid and needed to be powered like it was a four-bedroom apartment in a city, you know, then this is a place. But that is interesting too, because I could definitely see that sort of, because I got that sense of it, that there was this sort of, like, it's a non-political version of the idea of being, like, fully self-reliant. Like, you could do whatever you want to do. You'll never be inconvenienced because of this technology that you have.

1:18:56And yet, like, the next step from that, like, the political version of that is like you will never be inconvenienced by whatever agents of the state by the feds by the if the atf is laying siege to your homestead or whatever you know that like yeah we'll have like classic nevada activity yeah loudspeakers will continue to warn them yes get off your property you are trespassing i am a sovereign citizen my name is lg sovereign citizen like but also it's going to branch off from there i think in a year and be like disaster relief it's going to be like, hey, when shit starts breaking, and this is both a political and a non-political, like, this is something the American power grid, the AI thing, has been pushing.

1:19:37The generative AI and the data centers associated have been pushing the grid to its brink. It was already old as shit. And so we're in this weird thing where I'm just predicting this for next year. I bet they start marketing on that. And it's so dark. And also, there will definitely be the insane people sales as well. It appears that every single one of the modular nuclear power startups that have popped up in the last decade and change. What did you just fucking say? Modular nuclear startups. I don't care for that at all. Pocket-sized reactors. In all seriousness, please spell out what those mean, though.

1:20:15Okay, people are looking for sub-gigawatt reactors that they can treat effectively as nuclear batteries. This is... To what end? So that you can go ahead and power just a neighborhood with your private nuclear reactor that belongs to you and the co-op. And you have nuclear power as a service, so NAS, where they will regularly come in and swap fuel out for you to keep your Enclave perfectly powered. Not Enclave from Fallout. That's a totally different thing. And no, I'm going to talk about something more evil, HOAs. That actually is the overriding people who would be paying for it and administering it Somehow with a license with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, unless – and this hasn't happened yet.

1:21:02The Nuclear Regulatory Commission wanted to generally license one of these pocket nuclear reactors. Except all of them have pivoted off this idea to we're going to make the power that supplies to make crypto happen or make your AI happen because the grid is not stable enough to do it. Are these reactors real? Are there any of these actually out in or is this just marketing? Marketing. They do exist. We have built them before at experimental levels at the national labs and have never licensed them to be real. Can you imagine these dipshits who would actually buy one for an enclave actually having a nuclear?

1:21:41That's actually a real dystopian. Like the free private nuclear reactor is sending me so fucking hard right now. That is just an unbelievably perverse concept. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about... No, sorry. It is a perverse concept, just to be clear. I'm talking about an HOA having one of these, and judging by every HOA I've ever seen, they would blow this thing up immediately. This is one of the hopes to get them to generally license, so you can't touch it. It goes in the ground. Your nice service people from Microsoft Nuclear will show up, and that is a subscription fee. I told you, as Nukes is a service, that's how you get them.

1:22:19They will go ahead and do the swaps. All you can do as part of your neighborhood is just hook into your local grid. And that's all you should do as a consumer. Right. That is correct. Honestly, that's still, like, that, again, hate it. Want to be clear, getting it on the record. Don't approve that as a business. That said, it's still better than giving it to, like, the single most disagreeable and ambitious person in your neighborhood. Like, just the idea of, like, whoever your HOA president is. Like, I trust Microsoft Nuclear over, like, Stacy. Oh, you just made my asshole clench. But I don't like either of them.

1:22:55I could do that all day. The idea of being a health physicist beholden to the head of the HOA. Oh, yeah. Just getting some super-efficious email. And that's why I drink. This sounds like Fallout DLC. Yeah, this sounds like a James Bond movie. Actually, this could be a really banging movie. We're cooking here. Isn't that like Mission Impossible 3? Like Suitcase Nuke? No, no, no. I'm thinking just like a country-wide blackout or something. Just do a date. I need to write this goddamn thing. Spectre was good. Pitch the family that runs the Bond thing because they don't want to touch it with Amazon.

1:23:33I'll be James Bond. The broccoli. Fucking idiots. You ever had a James Bond that occasionally smokes weed? No? Yeah. I'm kind of lazy. He calls a reefer. Dank Bond. He is British. What if James Bond smoked weed is probably the first real podcast idea we've had or show? just like I need Candy Flips that's another good GoFundMe Indiegogo project John, you're act two of the movie Candy Flips and it's to his detriment they use it to kidnap his love interest money petty this is a sativa anyway, please let's talk about tech again that is tech weed is not tech but Acid and Molly disagrees with you for previous years that's innovative yeah is there weed innovation here if you hear about this email me at easy at better offline dot com I want to hear about I had the experience today.

1:24:20I know you all talked about it yesterday, but when I was getting off the bus from the convention center, I discovered a whole other floor under the floor at the Venetian that I was at yesterday. Of the mole people. Yeah, the Eureka Zone or whatever, which is the one that you were talking about yesterday, which is basically just somebody. Where they're scaven? You went to Tech Tech. Yeah, but it's also apparently that is the one where it's just like if you can fit in the room, they'll let you hang out. Yeah. I guess it's like whatever. So I'm going to go down there and check that shit out either tomorrow or later today.

1:24:48It would be a laser bong for you to see if there's any weed tech. Yeah, that's where the weed tech is being, you know. The funny thing is with weed tech, not saying I smoke it or not, but they have not really fixed grinders yet. That is just a weird industry where there's one that only kind of works. It's very strange, but I guess, and some of them, not saying from personal experience, when you put the cone on, it's actually quite fiddly. And when you're using them, not quoting my specific experience or anything, because I'm being very clear about who uses this or not. How the fuck do stoners use these very fiddly little tools?

1:25:23Is it just like stoners enter hitman-level folk? They go into bullet time when making one. I think yes. Because I wouldn't if I used one, which I haven't. If you did smoke weed, would you be a roller? Would you purl your joints? In this hypothetical scenario, I found one where you can just put the cone and then the grinders on top of it. It's like 50 bucks. It changed my theoretical life. It would have. in this fan fiction we're talking about. In this simulation. I think I've even said it in another episode. I don't know what I'm doing. Ed 2. Yeah, this is - Parody. Earth 2 Ed. Parody. But it's, you would think that there would be more of that though.

1:26:05There would be more like, maybe you'll see it when you go and look. Maybe I would love to hear the weed stuff for someone else. But also, that's also one that feels solved as well. Like at some point. To a certain extent. Although, again, it's like that's the type of shit that I liked that I saw here, especially in the Venetian yesterday, is the attempt where it's just like it's inventor stuff. Which I love. It's like taking a practical problem and then like working out some way to, you know, fix it or make it, you know, it's not always affordable or whatever. But if the practical problem in question is like no soft serve in my house.

1:26:39Yeah. Like someone made a machine that fixed it. You know, like it's$2 ,500 after the discount here. But it's still like I had the soft serve. It was pretty good soft serve. Like these things can be fixed. I went to a coffee station and they were like, oh, it's AI powered. And so I went, so I got the coffee and I'm like, how is it AI powered? And they're like, oh, well, this is a generator. I was like, what? Yeah. What do you mean this is a generator? And so then I'm actually gave the coffee station a real look. And I was like, oh, okay. You have the coffee thing here. That's very small. And then right next to it is a massive generator you've stacked on here that kind of looks like it's the coffee machine, but it isn't.

1:27:17What is it? It's called EcoFlow. It's one of the ones I was talking to you about, which is like, or your home, thousands and thousands and thousands of watts. But they were just using it as an example to be like, oh, you like the coffee? Well, the coffee is plugged into a system that would be able to figure out whether it should draw from the grid or the solar power. Is it waste heat from AI calculation to make coffee? No, the AI has nothing to do with coffee, but they say it has to do with coffee, What it has to do is it's supposed to plug into your home to figure out energy efficiency. And if you got one of their coffee things, you'd happen to be able to take advantage of that so that you wouldn't be using the more expensive amelion for energy.

1:27:59Another subscription service. Once again, one of those things that everything that you described there sounds okay enough to me. I just don't know why you have to say AI when you're saying all the rest of it. Yeah, me either. Yeah, it's just confusing. It's actually fun because I asked him a bunch about the AI. I couldn't really find it. Then we spent like 10, 15 minutes talking about my locks. Cause he was like, oh my God, what are these dreadlocks? How do you grow them? I've heard that they're so complex. What is the color of this person's skin? He had so many questions. It was fun. Was he a white guy?

1:28:33No, no, he's from China. Okay. That's also good. Still not a great question. But you know, I was being empathetic. Cause I'm like, these are probably the first ones. I've seen six other black people on the floor after four days. Have you learned other names already? We nod to each other every time we see each other. How was the coffee? It was regular, degular black coffee. Okay. That's so funny. You've had better. Yeah. You've also had black coffee. I've made better and I don't drink coffee like that. By the way, I'm still mad just sitting here. I thought of a better use case for AI to actually heat water to make coffee with than their actual product.

1:29:13Yeah, we're not in the business of fixing problems. Shit, that's what I do. Yeah, that's not why we come here. You're a consumer. You must consume. Now, if I can help, may I offer you something you can go troll people with if you happen to find the laser bone? I don't like to do that kind of thing. Hey, we don't troll in this family. So you go ahead and ask them, so when you're using the laser on the weed, how is it burning? Does it burn it enough? Because that's a problem. I feel like there would be people. that's one of those spaces where sometimes you'll go someplace and the person that's selling it is just like they're doing their best.

1:29:48They're not like in love with it. I'm just fucking him. It is kind of amazing though. I've seen less weed tech than crypto. I've seen crypto three or four times now but weed, zero? Because I feel like if you had to pick one of those things to still exist in five years I mean they're probably both going to exist. That's a flip from the previous CES. There was weed tech. Maybe it's dying. Maybe they forgot. So one was this healthcare management device that was on the blockchain. And the other was an AI trader that was not financial advice, but it would make decisions for you. Every time there's any financial thing, they're like, not financial advice.

1:30:29I love the AI trader one because it gets back to a conversation I had with my mate Casey. It's like, if the AI trader was so good, why would you fucking sell it? Wouldn't it be so good you just turn this shit on and off you're on your yacht. Yeah. It can't be that fucking good. It also feels like, again, one of those things where it's like, for all the promise of AI, ostensibly, you know, all the promise of it, like everybody that uses it knows it doesn't work very well. And so the idea of being like, well, I'm not going to like, as part of my participation in the work of building an AI that works, I'm going to let it control my money while I do.

1:31:06Yeah. This is all the others. This goes back to like some of the stuff about the smart house. It's like all of these things that give you extra time to do what. Like none of these - More trading. Yeah, and it basically does - That is it. Like all the time in your house that you'd be spending preparing food or showering, which is basically the part of my life that I like because it's the part of my life when I'm not working. I like when you bathe too. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. I also love taking a shower. No, but that is a good point, right? Like all of these, a lot of AI is structured to be anti-bureaucratic, cutting through the supposed layers of filth that prevent you from living your life.

1:31:42But then when you get down to it, what's left? More space for them to commodify? Well, now you don't have to write or create anything. So you can focus on consuming. Part of that filth. But that's like this observation, I don't remember who said it, that was basically like the idea that like, because of it, maybe because of the people that invented it or just maybe this is what it is most practically applied to, that it's like it's doing all of the stuff that like is your life to give you more time to work when i think realistically like most people would be if you ask them they'd be like well can it do my work for me because like i want to learn how to paint or whatever you know and you don't have to paint yeah you can just ask for it to do the it'll draw you whatever you want to do that you can't you can't imitate picasso why would you want to i like but it can make the best dick butts I like when people tell me I'll write my blogs for me I don't know what I'm writing when I sit down That's the muse I let the power of Christ consume me and I write five and a half thousand words in two hours and I research a while as I go I send it to my editor, all caps, is this good?

1:32:49And Matt Hughes then doesn't respond immediately because it's two in the morning there and then I send him three more messages saying I changed a bit, I changed a bit I don't love it and he has to explain to me why it's good That is the creative process What if an algorithm did that for you and you sat perfectly still for those three hours, having no thoughts of any kind? Wouldn't that be nice? Having ADHD and tinnitus, that sounds great. Yeah. And that's the thing. None of these things seem to take away suffering. Well, no. It doesn't seem like they're reducing pain. They get a little bit of what it means to be a person, but not the whole lot.

1:33:24I've been saying this a lot. It's hard to suggest that the people involved, that these things that are minor inconveniences for most people are the idea of having to do the dishes. That's the worst thing in the life of the person that is trying to sell you this. No, no, no. Those people don't do the dishes. What they've done is they've gone, shit, what do people do? Yeah. Fuck, what are regular people? Food. What do they do? Oh, they love that stuff. They can't dress themselves. They're idiots. They can't date. And what do they do? Dishes? Yes. My cleaner does those. They charge their devices.

1:33:57Yeah, they need to charge stuff. Oh, they love their devices. Oh, most definitely. They don't have time to spend with their stupid little kids. Yeah, their wife and their stupid child, their moron child. But they haven't even got one of those because they're inferior. Don't worry. LG will get you there, and you will now meet a woman thanks to Lucky Gold Star Corporation. Right. That's what the future. And I keep going back to this point. It's like, what are the problems you solve? Is that what LG stands for? Lucky Gold Star. Yes, it does. Wow, cool. I didn't know that. I learned something today.

1:34:24I could have made that up. Oh, shit. Yeah. The thing that they have it on the signs is life's good. And I was like, I mean, again, that's one of those things where it like, I don't think that's the real name of the company. Lucky Gold Star makes more sense because that has the sort of, where it just feels like they used to be like a ready mix concrete company or like an international shipping line, you know? And then at some point they've like discovered. I actually think they might have made concrete. Like, you know, Color Star did. ColorStar, the LG concrete ink. Super. Good. Well, that's where it begins.

1:34:57You start with that. And steel. Anyway, we learned a lot today. Now, it's just frustrating because I'm not asking, I just want to be clear for the listeners, I'm not asking, did you see anything good to be facetious? I genuinely, like, I was so happy that DaVindra had found a laptop he liked. It sounded cool. I'm so excited about that. And the skin products that Victoria was talking about, the fact that you can actually make these, and that's what tech should do. It should be like, hey, here's an actual friction point. You spend hundreds of dollars on skincare. Now you don't have to do that because you can spend theoretically hundreds on the stuff that actually works so you don't have to spend more in the future.

1:35:35And then it's like, okay, that's one company who knows one thing. But the overarching thing is a CEO saying, fuck, what do people do at jobs? What do people do during their job that they do? They wash dishes and they answer emails and they read them. yeah that i don't like little bit of disconnection to me seems like i think it's like the root of like so much of what is like not working about a lot of this that there's because the ones that it seems to me and maybe this is just my own bias for like small over large or whatever you know i'm like gonna own my my preferences here the stuff that is like clearly designed to like fix a specific thing or improve a specific thing is better to me than and like much more easy for me to sort of like understand as uh you know just an idiot standing in front of a demo or whatever i need you to stop saying that well it's a little term that i like to use to describe myself but the like so that but anyway but i get it in that way whereas the idea of like a thing that fixes or improves everything or that is like right that like sort of global idea of it i understand why these companies which are you know their job is to grow into like sort of a bigger thing that will then grow right and yet like not only does it become like sort of hard to see like what the actual vision is it gets not just like more abstracted but it like it gets weirder this is the thing that we keep sort of coming back to that like you're not fixing the problem like by like devising a house that does all my decisions for me it does not in any way diminish the fact that I'm still paying too much money for skincare products.

1:37:19Right. You know, and I guess like, this is something that Ed Niermeier was saying last night about the idea of like all of these sort of like individual solutions to broader structural problems and that like the idea of just like continuing to throw the idea of being like, well, this is like a better way of getting around. And it's like, it might even be a better way of getting around. And yet like when the systems themselves are sort of not working in your favor, it doesn't matter that much how like down to the last decimal point efficient your experience of it is because you're still going to be stuck on the road with everybody else.

1:37:57It kind of reminds me of what Ed was saying about fintech and removing friction. Oh you'll be able to trade better and do this. The real structural problem there is it's very very hard to accumulate wealth as a regular person. The actual, that is more of a symptom of a problem than it is. And also as I understand it that all of these things, like the one there's one that was either Andreessen or Thiel or one of the fucking super friends, but that thing that was like basically like not FDIC backed. Like that was the whole, they were like, finally, like you can bank without big government being involved.

1:38:29Then it's like, and it collapsed right away. Thank goodness there's no insurance to help save minds. But that's like one of those things where like understanding the idea that like this is a part of a bigger system is like, it's just not something that computes for them. And so what you wind up with instead is like, the worst invention of all time. Like a bank that ruins you. Something that might have been invented by like a rich dilettante in the 1830s. Yes. Like at a time when there wasn't really a system. And so they're sort of, yeah, like just the Rube Goldberg. There's so many of the crypto things that do feel like an insane thing that a guy would do in a cult.

1:39:03Yeah. Yeah, it's a coin about this woman who talked about what she used to do with a willy. And you should invest in the Hawk to a coin who has a podcast for some reason. this is your god now i have a few friends who have made a lot of money from crypto and they're the the way that they approach it is like they're like i am deeply cynical about it but everyone here is an idiot and if you make enough money to begin with then you get plugged into the networks of people who are actively manipulating people so what you mean is that they believe no they believe no it's it's every every grift ever which is i'm being scammed but what they don't know is i'm scamming them better yes that's the bit that i always am curious about with like because this is i think it's been like demonstrated that like absent any other of the like sort of many factors that could make somebody become like that like made people vote for trump or that like push people to the right that like crypto is the single most powerful indicator there that it is like the thing that like owning crypto is associated with voting like often to the very hard to the right in a way that nothing else is.

1:40:11And I think that there's an aspect of that where, like, the idea of being like, all right, it's a scam. I'm scamming somebody. I'm probably being scammed, but I know enough to get out. That seems to be true, not just at the people, like you were saying, like, your buddies who are, like, plugged into the people that are actually, you know, like, in the whale community and, like, know when it's time to bail on the Hawk 2 coin or whatever. Or shit coin. Yeah. If it's fast, you know, whatever the fuck. Right. Yeah, that's like everything. Trickishly cold frog. All of these things that basically are like the most obvious, like do not buy this.

1:40:42This is a gag sort of thing. And yet, like, I think everybody that is involved in that at every level, right down to like just some like manosphere shut in 19 year old on a gaming computer. Right. Doing all this stuff. All of those guys somehow still believe that they're like, yeah, I know it's bullshit, but like, I'll know when it's time to get out. But that's, I think you're right. No, it's the ultimate con, which is to pretend to give people industry, to give people hope, to give people a feeling of more control while controlling them and probably being controlled by someone else. It's deeply cynical.

1:41:17I've tried to talk with them about this because I'm like, I really do think for y 'all, it comes down to luck. You know, it's like you said, it's literally everyone believes that and everyone believes that in so many industries, right? The difference between you and some other bloke is like maybe you heard about it an hour earlier or you just like there's like something that you got for no other reason other than luck. It's important to note that we're saying this inside of a casino. Yeah. Yeah. Right. No, an honest. Everyone thinks they have a system to play. and the true beauty of sitting casino is sit there, cross your arms, watch, and try to figure out what system they think they're using and watch it fail.

1:42:02So we're gambling tonight, right, boys? Not for me. I'm trying to lose$500 in 20 minutes. So we're wrapping this episode up, but I will say the Friday episode, the show floor closes today, by the way, guys. So there's nothing tomorrow? No, just podcasting. Oh, wow. Only Zool. So we're going to wrap this one up, but tomorrow we can talk about gambling. I haven't even been to the Eureka Vault yet. You're going to the Eureka Vault immediately following this. What the hell is the Eureka Vault? That's the one under the one. That's where you're going. I don't know. That's where the scaven art. I am sending you to the rat nest.

1:42:33Oh, my God. We'll talk gambling tomorrow, though, of course. Oh, yes. How dare you ever think to compare the dishonest crooks of cryptocurrency with our six-way parlance? No. the Las Vegas sorry the Nevada Gaming Commission I'm very sorry for anything I implied the swindlers in the sports book but you know we love our odds there but you know the truth is our beautiful slot machines and our honest tables that have the odds on the table how dare you compared to cryptocurrency but we have to wrap up I apologize we're doing a six way parlay no six way stuff no it's good that's how you make not after the Wario thing that's how you make big money you'd make tens of thousands okay for your craps table Phil we're can people find you?

1:43:18Sorry. I'm Phil Broughton. You can find me on Blue Sky at Funranium. And you can find me at my blog, FunraniumLabs.com. David. Defector.com is the website. Distraction is the podcast. And It's Christmas Town is the Hallmark podcast. You messed up. You said you were going to do it every other time. So you have to do it every time. Damn it. Kablammo. Annette. Newsletter. TheTechBubble.Substack.com. Podcast. Yeah, so this machine kills. And X the Everything site in blue sky, Big Black Jacobin. You can find me on the new social network, Hawk Tour Social, and everywhere else. And you're going to complain after this.

1:44:00You can say, Ed, it's the thing that you were meant to re-record and Manisowski told you a month ago, and then actually two months, and Ian Johnson also told you, and you need to be sorry for those people. Anyway, I'm going to re-record the bit at the end. You've got one more episode today, and then tomorrow another two episodes, and then Saturday there's just one. These are going to be the real magic ones. These are going to be where people are really deteriorating mentally. Is this where I get to be mad about regulators? I'm going to make you mad somehow. I believe in you. I'm just going to be Googling annoying things.

1:44:30Not even about the show. You don't need to Google it, you just do it. Yeah, it's a natural thing, I'm generative. Anyway, thanks for listening to this episode. More to come from the Consumer Electronics Show.

1:44:47Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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