CES 2026: Part Eight (Friday)

24:04His sculptures are gorgeous. His static sculptures are amazing, but his kinetic sculptures, the pocket-sized ones, are insanely good. So Chris Bathgate. I'm going to remember that one. And he's written a book. If only you had an AI ring to take a note with. Yeah, if only I could press a button. So I published a book about them too. I just sent a message to Corey to make sure that's in the episode notes. And I'm about to send a text to Michael right now. That sounds good. While you're doing that, I'm going to fidget with my own fidget slider. No, I already typed it saying he's a wonderful broadcaster and I hope to have him on again as well as sending me the link to that.

24:37This is an emotionally on this show. But do you see anything else fun? Because I'm genuinely like, I want to, everyone's like, Ed, it's next. Actually, no one's being like, everyone's like, yeah, fuck CES. Okay, well. Right, settle down. Settle down, everyone. That's my job. I'm the one who gets too angry I don't like doing this because it is I don't like to cross the streams between sponsored content and not but I will say that something was genuinely cool that is like in a sea of technology that is conceptual or maybe never come to market or has no value one of the John Deere things I was paid to promote was an automated road paver I learned about paving for like a half hour and I will also say This makes it possible for fewer people to do this job and for fewer skilled people to be required to do this job.

25:27Yeah, but that's also less labor. Oh, it's so scary, though. Look, here's the thing. The fact that this solves a problem is my least favorite part of it. And the problem is no construction workers can find enough labor. I mean, you could also hire more people. Well, no, I know this is what I was saying, but apparently that was the starting point. So I'm watching this robot thing do its thing, like hot asphalt and pouring stuff. I'm like, yeah, this is what I want. I want to be dirty jobs. This is why I got into it, to go see some cool stuff. Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I talk to a microphone, so I see a job like that.

25:58I'm like, never take that job from those people. Well, I agree. But I mean, that's the thing. There's not enough of those people. That's the thing. Sure, you could train them. But no, I get your point. And I'll also be clear. Michael Fisher is one of the fewer people who's more anxious than I am about any kind of thing like this. So Michael is like squirming here when it comes to like mentioning a sponsor. Do not think that he's doing this with joy. I didn't even notice that. Yeah, you're right. My concern with John Deere, and I don't want to blow up your sponsorship here, but my concern with John Deere is they're a rapacious monopolist, and they have led the war against repair.

26:33And they use the fact that it's illegal to bypass an access control. This is this law, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that establishes a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a$500 ,000 fine for tampering with an access control to make it illegal for farmers to fix their tractors. And Ed, you know, you're a Briton. Did you ever go to Beamish outside of Norfolk? No. Outside of Newcastle, rather. No, I'm not making you go to sleep. It's the largest open-air museum in Europe. We would call it Pioneer Village here, except it's not pioneers. It's oldie-timey English people.

27:07And they have transported Georgian coal town with a colliery, Victorian High Street, all kinds of weird old vehicles. And there's a farmhouse on a Roman foundation. And on the Roman foundation, there is a forge because farmers have fixed their own farming implements since fucking roman times enter john deere saying no no we have declared the end of history farmers no longer fix their farm implements that's our job no it's no it's my fault and uh you know here's the thing this this entire debate played out in my comments every single time i covered john deere organically and i got so fucking tired of it that i was like i will never cover this brand again because i'm I'm tired of getting in the middle of having this conversation and like being the mediator between them and things.

27:51You don't have to be the mediator. And I don't cover them organically. Now they're my sponsor. I am going to aggressively segue away from this because I don't want. That's a good idea. Yeah, but I want to get to the final thing, which is. Can I make. No, please. Can I, because I want to build on one thing you said that I find fascinating. The Roman Foundation. Right. The thing that's been unchanged forever. As we talk about yet another show where people are like, what's the next smartphone? What's the replacement for the smartphone? All this stuff. I had a wonderful moment at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.

28:21Have you been here? No. It has a lovely maritime history museum, and you can wander, and you can see all kinds of things. And there is a pocket watch case, because of course there is. Sure. And I saw one that was really beautiful, and I asked the curator. I'm like, what is this from? Perhaps 1905? And he's like, 1789. Sure, Christ. And I said, wait, what? and then I kind of looked at the history and I'm like, this form factor did not change meaningfully for 200 years. We figured something out, it was great, and then we kept it around until somebody figured out how to strap it onto a wrist. That is how I feel about the smartphone these days.

28:55I'm like, look, there will be augmented things in the personal area network. There will be more accessories for them, but we are still going to carry these boxes in our pocket. This is the principal struggle of CES right now, though. It's all people trying to be like, what if you had a smart glasses and it could do this? And then you're like, well, as a human being, this is not how i experienced life and they're like shit you're right nobody actually uses but what if you changed your entire existence so you had a weird grainy green thing that could sometimes be correct which requires an internet connection and the smart glasses stuff is really the smart i'm auto translation or so you write down what you're saying you translate your business trip and you just slop me as stick me gun to my head.

29:40It's just, I'm almost really happy to hear about, oh, I got thinner and lighter laptops with longer batteries. Brilliant, brilliant. But it almost feels like we're reaching a point where everyone's just saying, fuck, we're out of interfaces. We don't have a new one. To your point about that pocket watch case. Right. Do you know what I would love would be this huge design trend. From now on, we're putting black text on white backgrounds or sometimes white text on black backgrounds. And we fired all the 22 year old designers who put 10 % gray on white backgrounds. And we've sent them north for re-education where they are forced to endure long struggle sessions about the things they've done to people with poor low contrast vision.

30:21Yeah, I just think liquid glass is one of - That's immediately where my brain went. Liquid glass, liquid ass is truly, and I am like an Apple pay pig at this point. I have tolerated many an insult from this company, including the Vision Pro and I gotta be honest there is one thing that bothers me the most about this and it's for some reason on one of the windows there's just like a blob in like one of the things, there's just like a weird reflective thing that looks like it's hard to see but it looks like an error in the LED panel in my phone because of how like the weird reflective animation if you worked on liquid glass were you forced to?

31:05were you forced to do this? They do talk about it as part of the UI. That sort of the way you move your phone and then how it reflects light. It's supposed to be that way. I don't want that. I want my phone to work. I think you can turn it off. Liquid glass? Not all. I would love to. I would love to go back to iOS 8 or something. Give me the phone normal. I want the phone UI that actually like puts fake scratches on your screen. You're like, oh, did I? Or like fake. I think there's an app right now. No, I will say, and we can wrap this in a bow. It's why I kind of like the Clix Communicator because it's just a finger.

31:39Nice callback. Flawless. No, and I say this as someone who like, if you don't like it, I don't give a shit if you buy it or not. Sorry. That's not my job. But I like it because it's like, what do I want from a device that takes people thingy to use message app, talk place, look at website thingy. You do the thing on it. A handful of very important features, but just a handful of them. I didn't think that I'd ever get on board Is there a web browser on it? Oh yeah, I mean it's Android 16 You can run whatever you want on it But it's a matter of intention I never thought I'd get on board The digital detox train or anything like that And that's not what Communicator is for to be clear But just personally Until I used the light phone for two weeks this past summer And you were a real one Because when you did the light phone thing You actually fucking did it You turned off everything It was amazing And I wish I could have survived in that world because it turned out in order to live that way, doing what a lot of us do, I had to carry an iPad for the sessions that invariably required me to be online for a second or a laptop.

32:40And then I was like, damn it, I can't live this life. But what stuck with me were two or three lessons that lived past July. And I was like, every time I pull out my phone now, I'm like, am I doing this for a purpose or am I doing this because I'm bored? Every time I pull out my phone to check a notification, I'm able to better resist the bypass of the DoorDash. Like, isn't it time to order a pizza? It's 3 p.m. All the shitty notifications that you get all the time. You leave notifications on? No, I turn them off, and then I miss my DoorDash deliveries. You have to do this horrible seesaw back and forth.

33:14I aggressively police those. But Michael, it's so good having you as we wrap up this half an hour. I just want to say, the listeners want you back, and I'll have you back. But also, you have made me look at phones differently. And I put aside the Clix Communicator. I think you have the right way of looking at it. where it's like, why am I using this device? Thank you. And why am I doing this? What is this for? Now, I am built different in the sense that I am really, like I was mentioning yesterday, like the infinite feeds don't work on me. They give me anxiety. Like I get to the, I'm like, where's the end?

33:42Where's the end? I want to finish reading this. Oh, I can't finish it. No, but it's the opposite. Most people are like, oh, I'll keep looking. I'm like, no. You want to be done. You want to be like, I'm just like, fine. You want to do, and the moment I feel anything being done to me, i like reject it angrily sure no i just watched this happen on the train with a contrarian impulse though no no it's no it's pure autism it's just like my brain just like doesn't want to do anything other than what it insists on doing which is a wikipedia or like a very long conversation about one specific thing which is why we are here on better offline so michael thank you so much for joining us thank you we will bring you back sooner than this i would love that and uh i'm looking I might actually pick one up, put a link to stuff.

34:26You can have a look at it. Judge your own judgment. That's not a phrase. We now move to an ad break for something that I either say you should buy or listen to. Yeah, and iHeartRadio has said, no, actually, I can't say that. So we're just going to pretend I never said that.

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35:25It means giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help. I'm Mike Della Rocha, host of Sacred Lessons. This podcast is a space for men to talk openly about mental health, grief, relationships, and the patterns we inherit, but don't have to repeat. Here, we slow down. We listen. we learn how vulnerability becomes strength and how healing happens in community, not in isolation. If you're ready to let go of what no longer serves you and step into the year with clarity, compassion, and purpose, Sacred Lessons is your companion on your healing journey.

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38:24And we're back in the room. We've got Sherlyn Lowe from Engadget. Yes, hi. And we've got Ed-Ongueso Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter. Hello, hello. Oh. We've got author, activist, and journalist, Corey Doctorow. And this time I know I'm supposed to reply. Hello. Nailed it. Flawless. No, and I have had a few people say, like, email me, be like, why do you do this? I'm like, because I get to hang out with my friends and do cool shit for, like, an entire week. Why are we alive? But we're here at CES, and I mean, there's also the question of why are we at CES. That is a reasonable one, because it's a peculiar show.

38:55Corey, we had the best time at Amazon, though. We need to talk about this Amazon experience. because to be clear, we're walking into the show floor for the first time. Actually, CS customer service got his badge immediately. And then we walk in, I'm like, oh, there's Amazon. Why not? And last year, by the way, Amazon, I had the picture of the smiling man on my badge and the woman outside grabbed it and went, wow, which is, I don't think it was a good one. But anyway, walk in there with Corey, we immediately walk up to this$5 ,000 like truck pulled surveillance tower pole thing with like, it's like a big, big thingy with like a pole and like just a ring of cameras.

39:33And Corey just walks over and starts asking questions. Well, no, I mean, I didn't even ask any questions. The guy walked up and said, hi, I'm the product manager for this. Do you have any questions? I wasn't going to, you know, bollock him out of the blue. I didn't go in there looking for, you know, a victim. You are not that type. But I was like, since you ask, and I was like, well, so I know that there was, that the original ring camera, the doorbell camera, you guys took the posture that that footage was only available to the police in the event that the owner authorized the transfer to the police.

40:06But there had been this persistent rumor that there was warrantless access to this footage, even against the wishes of the ring owner, which you initially denied and later had to walk back. I know this because I got into a big fight with Amazon PR when I published the story and then they said it's not true. And then later on, it was proved to be true. What's the deal with this? Can the police access it? Because this is a thing that's meant to go into like a parking lot at a job site or whatever. And it had some, as you pointed out, some racial overtones. Yeah, the video behind it was, of course, two guys breaking in.

40:40And would you be surprised to hear they were Hispanic? Yeah. Just fucking put white guys in there. Fuck you. And the AI caption was like two men removing things from trunk of red car. So I said, so can the cops access this footage without the owner? And he was like, well, I'm not sure. And I'm like, okay, fine. Who can access this footage? Is this footage end-to-end encrypted? Is it sitting as an encrypted blob that no one at Amazon can access on your servers so only I can access it as the owner of the device and so on? And he says, oh yes, that is the case, just like with the ring doorbell. And I'm like, well, wait, that's not true of the ring doorbell.

41:19So hang on a second. It is just like an incontrovertible fact. You go into any court docket for petty theft or whatever, there's a ton of footage that cops have subpoenaed from ring doorbells. And so if cops can subpoena it, then Amazon has to be able to decrypt it. And he's like, well, I'm not allowed to decrypt it. I'm the project manager and our product manager, I can't decrypt it. I'm like, well, that's good. You have some access controls, but you're still escrowing the keys. And then I'm like, well, is it all controlled by an app or is there a desktop interface? And if so, can I download my footage?

41:53And he's like, no, it's desktop just like with the doorbell camera. And I'm like, so I can just like grab all the MPEG files and keep them on my hard drive. And he's like, I don't think you can. And I'm like, so what if I stop paying the subscription fee? Do I lose all the footage? And he's like, no, we'll let you download it. I'm like, so wait, can I download it or can I not? And then he eventually says, well, you're asking all these technical questions. I just don't know the answer. And I'm like, well, I was just standing here minding my own business. When you came up and introduced yourself to me as the product manager for this product, is the product manager capable of answering what seems to me to be some pretty basic product questions?

42:32Does a website do something? Yeah, like, is the footage available to third parties? I mean, because, you know, just from a straight up security perspective, Amazon's not immune to insider threats if you've got 360 longitudinal video footage and that's what this thing is it has a tube that goes into the sky with a bunch of cameras and it was advertised as they had this video behind with a picture of neighborhoods with all these blue blobs where these things would be I'm so happy you guys got to see one of the new Sauron towers here's our palantir maybe they'll give you a little ring that could be tied to your biomechanics It's got this like telescoping mask, but you could imagine, right?

43:12If you've got, this is quite a honeypot, right? If you've got the internals of a whole bunch of job sites with a bunch of easily stolen things, and there's an insider threat at Amazon, they've got a lot of employees. And famously, Amazon went through a series of CISOs, chief security officers, because they had this product first orientation where anyone who had a product team could download the entire Amazon database. Jesus Christ. And they had no access controls and no logging. They did not know how many copies of the internal Amazon database were. And their CISOs would come in and say, okay, step one, we have to stop doing this.

43:46Did they ever figure out how many people? No, no, no. There's no census of how many copies, like multiple copies because they've got AWS, right? So copying the entire database of every SKU and every purchase on Amazon is like tractable within Amazon's own infrastructure. And so, you know, their CISO's first advice was always like, don't do this. And then, but the people who are in charge of like product nimbleness would say, well, we are able to spin up a product team and then figure out whether the product is any good by grabbing this giant data set, mining it for insights. So we're going to override the security person.

44:22And eventually they hired, they promoted someone internal who was too junior and didn't know well enough. And then they had a gigantic breach, right? So I think this is all Andy Greenberg at Wired did this report. Hell yeah. and so you know like they're famously like vulnerable to insider threats i will also say if you're a listener who works at amazon web services and you're able to click on that thing that says anthropic why don't you sell me send me more of them numbers i want to see i want to see their numbers my favorite part of this conversation though was right towards the end when he went yeah you you could buy one for your backyard you think he would and just you you were like so much nicer than i well to be fair to him i said like is this all being sold to business customers or are there people with McMansions who want it?

45:04And he said, well, do you want it for your mansion? And I was like, or do you have a mansion? And I was like, I don't have a mansion. So he was kind of, I think you missed that. After 10 minutes of speed bagging though, I would have just, I would have been like, I swear I'm dying. I need to leave. But we had a good toll around today. You got to see some CES. We saw some fun stuff. Yeah, we went to like the crap gadget room with all the international pavilions. And there was some good stuff. I'm trying to pull up my favorite. So from one of the universities around Tokyo, they have these tech transfer offices where they're trying to productize things being made in the labs.

45:38And there was a group called Integrated Electron Source who had a graphene electron emitter, which was basically a consumer electronics-style imaging system that could image down to four nanometers designed for visual inspection of chips. And I've just come from Hamburg where I saw Bunny Wang, who's the greatest hardware hacker in the world, present on his work on building system-on-a-chips that are open to visual inspection because Bunny is absolutely convinced that people are hiding bad shit in silicon. Especially when we're talking about a system-on-a-chip. When you say bad shit, what do you mean specifically?

46:13So, like, you know, all hardware is software etched in silicon, right? So any program, any malware you can imagine, you could hide in an SOC. And so when you use the chip in a piece of hardware, it will - It's doing something bad. It could backdoor it. Also, when he says he's convinced that people are hiding bad shit in hardware, is his belief that there's nothing stopping along the point of production to deliver. In the supply chain. Yeah, in the supply chain. So the thing to understand is that an SOC wafer is just a risk, like reduce instructions, a computing chip wafer. and the typical SoC is using like 25, 30 % of it.

46:54So most of that chip is dark matter. And when you're taping out the die and getting ready to nano lithograph the chip, you could just tape out a whole bunch of other stuff. And Bunny's talk at CCC was about how he convinced a chip maker to let him tape out some open source chips in the dark matter because it was like, you're going to run 10 million of these, do another 200 ,000, I'll pay for that part of it. everyone gets them really cheap because the product gets cheaper the more of these you run. He was able to fit five more processors on a processor, right? So it's super cool. It's called the Bow Chip, all open source and all visually inspectable.

47:32So you can take the chip, take the file that describes the chip, take the chip and put it in an optical inspection unit, and then it will produce a file and you can lay the two on top of each other and see if there's any extra gates that shouldn't be there. Is this chip the chip it says it is? Just like this incredibly important thing. You think about how much of our world is running on this uninspectable silicon and how many people in the supply chain could do something to sabotage that silicon. Is there a place I could read more and look more at his stuff? This is fascinating to me. On Pluralistic yesterday, I wrote a blog post about it.

48:08I'll check that out. He calls it piggybacking. This makes me curious about, But, you know, NVIDIA named their newest generation of chips the CPU and the GPU collaboration, the Verubon. And at first I thought it was just like a very vague gesture on a few superficial levels to Verubon, who discovered that we probably have some – either we have dark matter or we have some fundamental failure in our explanatory model for the universe. But also I'm curious, like, you know, is it just like a tongue-in-cheek also joke or reference to the fact that we have – We don't know what's in the chip. yeah i don't i don't know they know exactly what's in the chip and it's getting more expensive that's that's what oh god are they doing like a deal with um i i hate to do this but shirlin just aggressive segue what have you seen on the show just no just just to put a button on it one last thing i want to say no please four nanometers that was that that was the thing that just fucking blew my socks up yeah four nanometer imaging in commodity hardware holy shit this is amazing and And I'm pretty sure that's like four nanometers, what they built the latest NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs on.

49:12I'd have to check. Two in our lifetime. They couldn't get down to three nanometer, and that was a whole thing with the process. But, Sherlyn, what have you seen on the phone? Because you're only with us for this group, so I want to hear more. What have you seen this year that you liked? I mean, hearing all of you talk just reminds me how diverse this show is. It's a huge show. It covers such a broad scope. I mean, and I got lost in what you were talking about because it's fascinating, but it also makes me question the C in CES, consumer - Sure. We were saying this yesterday. What is for the consumer if it's all robots and AI?

49:43I mean - It's downstream. It's like eventually, but it's like this is the consumer. Where are the consumers? Where are they? Where's the thought for the consumer? Have you seen that in the show? Do you feel like the overall show has been less consumer? I think to the point we were making at the start of this episode, it's a physical manifestation of AI slop. And a lot of the ones that were here this year, the ones that braved the immigration risk to come here and share their wares. That just means that their motivation was what? To find partners? To find someone to buy them? Yeah. And that's the sense I'm getting of a lot of AI hardware out there.

50:20Because if you're still trying to make one at this point without a clear differentiator, then you are out here trying to get some kind of VC or a major company to buy you. Yeah, sure. And after Amazon bought B, it's just like, who's going to buy the next best one? And B was the one that records you - Victoria Song, cursed tape reporter in the world. Victoria Song, I champion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was talking to the founder of B at the CES as well. And I'm not going to dwell too much on that just because I think B lucked out in getting a home so quickly. Oh no, fucking get that paper, especially from Amazon.

50:53Go get that. But then the rest of them that are here, what is the end game? What is the goal? And to your point about e-waste, that's going to be e-waste. The ones that they make, the ones that they sell in limited quantities, but still massive quantities. Only smart watches that run on like AWS servers that will get taken down the moment the company stops paying for them, which will be quite quickly. Yeah. So I think it was just like a lot of wading through this like existential dread of all of this is going to end up in landfills. All of these robots, all of these AI wearables, all of these AI native devices.

51:22So we tried very hard to see things that we were interested in. And I don't know if you've talked about this yet, but we made a video of this device that has taken off on at least by our standards. It's got like millions of views at this point. It is called the Wheel Move. It is a wheelchair-based, it's an assistive device that you attach to the front of your wheelchair. And it provides sort of a motorized rugged wheel that props up the front of your wheelchair and helps you over like rugged terrain, uneven surfaces. This fucking rocks. And an extra boost. Yeah. That rocks. It's just so smart because it's simple, right?

51:58It's not a whole over-engineered wheelchair. it's just an attachment to the front. And I was talking to someone about it this morning who reminded me that not all wheelchair users are always in wheelchairs. Sometimes they're there temporarily and I forgot. Sometimes they're just recovering. Sometimes they're in rehab and they just need the assistance for a bit, but getting out there going - It's called wheel move. Wheel move. Yeah, going out on like a hike maybe or a walk. And sometimes you encounter, you know, not the smoothest pavement or sometimes - And just showing everyone what it looks like.

52:26It's like a wheel on the front of it. Yeah, I love shit. That was fun. And you know what? It's like we've seen a lot of exoskeletons. While we were on the floor, we saw like a kind of a skateboard. Yeah, so this is, I brought the brochure back. So we saw this thing called the stern board, which is the same thing, but it doesn't clip onto a wheelchair. It clips onto a motorized skateboard and turns it into an all-terrain motorized skateboard. It was this French dude, stern board, S-T-E-R-N board. Cool as shit. I love the mobility stuff because if you think about why technology exists, it's to make humans better and able to do more.

52:59It's to help, yeah. And what limitations we have can be surmounted with technology. The AI slot doesn't seem to be that. I mean, I can understand some of them, what they're saying and what they're trying to sell. But I sometimes you can see right through some of them. And I get there. There's a lot of cute robots and cute is fine. I'm so tired of robots. But what is the freaking point? Well, have you seen anything you liked? And I don't mean this sarcastic. The wheel move. If the point is you haven't, that's totally fine. No, no. I did see something interesting. And last year I came on this Better Off line, the CES edition as well, and talking about an LED mask.

53:35This year I've got another LED mask. That's fine. Like a beauty mask mask? Yeah, one of those that puts red light on your face. L 'Oreal came through with the LED masks that are flexible. So there's skin light in terms of texture. Instead of the rigid hard shells that you've seen Therabody, OmniLux, or Dr. Dennis Gross make. So it wraps on your face much better and it's transparent. Is it comfortable? Yeah, it's supposed to be more comfortable. L 'Oreal wasn't letting people put the full face version on their own faces for various like sanitary and FDA related reasons. I saw the person put them on.

54:12I saw it on the mannequin's head. I may have seen other things. And I can tell you that the proposition is interesting. Twin sun setting off the south. Tears in the rain. I can't say things. But I can tell you that it seems like it would fit better on most heads, right? Like I don't have the same nose another person might have. And I don't have the same eyes or eye socket shapes that another person might have. And I think that a more flexible shell for these LED masks would be a bit more inclusive. I think also much more comfortable because the button where it turns on the power running the LED lights is on the mask.

54:51So it sits on your forehead. So you press the power button there as opposed to like a cable dangling down the side of your face into a power like remote control thing. And then the fact that it's transparent is just wild. They've also made like under eye mask versions of it. And I am bringing like the health and wellness sort of like vibes here into this episode. That's good. I just like that idea. L 'Oreal also says it's very close to producing these for like, you know, actual sale. They're very close. So I think that is also another thing that's interesting because this is not vaporware. It's actually going to be made.

55:24And that's what we also look out for. Not just trash that's going to sit in a landfill someday. You've been to a lot of CESs and it feels like this is one of the more vaporware ones. I'm really like, I don't want it to be. No, I really don't. I know. Well, there's also like a lot of things that will come out. I mean, so this year Engadget took a risk. we went let's look at all our best of ces winners from last year and check out where they are now surprisingly pretty much like all of them are are like either on track or have already put their devices on sale or are like oh we will be at ces 2026 to show you the updates um one of them we did manage to locate so we're kind of like what's going on there so it is it is like a kind of risky endeavor to do that story because you want to know that as a publication we're only endorsing the right, the more legitimate types of businesses.

56:18At the same time, it's like we want to do the investigative work. We want to be very honest. If this company end up looking shady, would it be that they were shady or that they were out-competed by worse companies? It could also be that. Exactly. They could still be the best one. Thank you. That helps. It's something that just ends up not working. One thing that the last two years I've been really interested in is a technology that allows people who are deaf or who know sign language to communicate. My older brother is deaf. One of my greatest anxieties and fears is that he refuses to wear hearing aids and any sort of assistive tech.

57:00And, you know, there have been many times, you know, and thankfully, like we've had this protocol established before, but there have been many times where he's been stopped by cops. And he just like, you know, he's immediately when stopped by a cop reaching into the car to get a notepad and pen to write for them. So I've made him, you know, call me beforehand so that we can talk about it so that, you know, there's no misunderstanding or any sort of escalation of things. But, you know, technology that allows for immediate communication would be nice. But then, you know, a lot of times when I go to these booths and I sit down and I ask, OK, what are the scenarios in which they're interested in offering this sort of assistive tech?

57:35they're almost exclusively in one very narrow scenario which is in a workplace and in a business which i understand but it's like that is actually also not the uh space where i assume and from what i've seen from people i know who are deaf and from people and from you know my own brother you know are interested in but nonetheless you still have firms who maybe are you know they are created by people who are deaf or around people who are deaf who know that that's not the use case yeah but are not going to get funding yeah sure or yeah that's very depressing i will also say with like checking back up you're all humans yeah yeah like you can go here and this is the consumer electronics fraud show like i think i think it's all about there are people who come here with the intention of deceiving and i don't think there's anything wrong with being like yeah we thought this was really well.

58:30And I think about, I'm going to say, push back if you want to, having read Engadget since like the early, like the mid 2000s, what Engadget is now is really good. There's a reason I have a lot of Engadget people on is because it's just people who like tech and they go and look at stuff and they like it or they dislike it and you move on. And I say that as an honest reader. And it's like, yeah, if you go back and you say, yeah, we got fucking swindled by these people. I feel like anyone who gets mad at that is a moron. Sure. I just think if you're a dope, if you're like, wow, a publication was like, yeah, we got something wrong.

59:04Oh, I don't like that. Yeah. Deceive me more, daddy. And it's just like, I feel like every single publication should do that. It should not be something anyone is afraid of. And indeed, if you don't do that, it makes me deeply worried about the future. Yeah. Because you know what? if you come here and you end up writing about something that is just a lie or never makes it that's ces right and this particular ces there's a lot of that and in 2027 yeah we need to do this because right right the ai bubble is likely to burst in the next year and we're going to need to dig through the ditches so to speak and see what fucking happened yeah because there's so much ai rap a shit i was hoping you'd love more stuff but i did i mean i i'm i i loved some stuff Well, I think part of it was this CES more than others.

59:54I was kind of chained to my laptop running things rather than like going out there and seeing things. So I, okay. I saw something that I loved to hate on, if that helps. Have you heard about the Lollipop Star? Oh, yeah. So we gave it a Worst in Show. I did Worst in Show this year. So love to hate on, right? With Consumer Union and the Repair Coalition. Tell me why you gave it Worst in Show. Also what it is. It's exactly E-Ways. And then so we posted - Singing Lollipops. Tell me more about this because I did not see this. I have no idea what this is. Go ahead, Corey. I mean, it's just a sound chip and a SOC in a lollipop handle.

1:00:28And you put the lollipop on top. And through bone conduction, you hear a song while you eat a lollipop. It's just a lithium battery that goes in a landfill. You're a psycho. Yeah, because you can't reuse it. You can't like do. And the battery is not like rechargeable, which I guess makes sense. But it's kind of ridiculous. I don't know. I saw this offered at a white elephant that I was at two weeks before I came here. Wow. I just, I'm like, if I'm like... And I was wondering, everyone was like, this seems like a horrible idea. Was it, what flavor did you get? Acorn or White House? No idea. I did not get it.

1:00:57I tried, I was really hard. I was honing in on the lottery tickets. There's a stack of 50 lotto scratch-offs and I really wanted them. Did you get them? No. I got a bunch of books. The thing about the singing lollipop is, so my last time at CES was 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago, 2003. And before that, I came a few times in the 90s for Wired. And I have seen singing lollipops at CES before. Yes, exactly. They're not new. Also, speaking of which, though, on the floor today, me and Ed saw Smell-O-Vision. And Smell-O-Vision is another thing I've seen in every single season. Tell me about it.

1:01:31Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So that's what we're saying this year on my team is that it's kind of the comeback CES, the comeback of all these older technologies that we've seen with like Pebbles coming back, clicks with a communicator, Lego. It's not really a comeback, but it's adding tech. I saw something that said skateboard penguin. I'm your little sidekick I saw that I saw that too Skateboard Penguin This is a lot of ridiculous stuff Let's pop the stack just briefly Back to Cryptech Also to get back to the thing you were talking about The reason I was looking Was because they had the tagline Welcome to the era of pseudo reality Oh yeah that was the smell-o-vision people They had smell-o-vision And then they had an essential oil mister That made smoke for Steam.

1:02:16But on Cryptech, if anyone wants to follow a very good Cryptech influencer, Liz Henry used to be a build manager for Mozilla, now is just doing Cryptech, I think, full-time, bookmaniac.org, and I'll send you the link. Thank you. And she is in command of a small fund that she disperses in$1 ,000 and below grants to people doing cool Cryptech adaptation. What is Cryptech, though, for those? Accessibility technology. oh so wheelchairs i thought crypto tech yeah i don't know it was like security no no cryptech so yeah i get what it is i know yeah we saw an amazing uh four-line braille reader on the floor that was that was cool it was like a braille keyboard yeah and it was standards defined it plugged into your usbc as and showed up as a standard display it just just excellent and you know what i noticed about i wish i remembered the company name because they actually deserve it the guy was just like every like people people really try and do like a micro jobs being like imagine a world of what is it and this guy was just like yeah it connects regularly like a keyboard you can see it here that's not our software that's that he was very these are all standards defined and he was very clear to be like this is not our software this just plugs into anything that's awesome the people who need you don't need into friction right like that guy deserves the huge boots like every single blind person probably could you i'm not blind sweater I truly don't, sorry, visually impaired.

1:03:38So I don't know what the experience is, but I don't know. Seems like it fucking worked and the guy was not trying to like hawk anything. It was well built. It was standards defined. It was chunky and rugged. And it will outlive changes to the OS because it's built around open standards. It was just the USB connected place. Yeah. I think when you said Cryptech, I was reminded of something that we didn't see in person, but we heard or read about. There's a water heater. for your home that will crypto mine while you shower. Oh, I've heard about these. I think everyone who put that together is being in prison.

1:04:12There's a room heater as well that does this. This is like a gimmick, right? Yeah, there's a bathhouse in Williamsburg that does something like this. Oh, fuck off. That is the most Brooklyn thing ever. Yes, I know. Listen. Is it in that Muckashwax district? Oh, no. No, it's not us, though. Is that the same one where they all got legionnaires? Listen. I got it. I think I knew that one. Thankfully. Cherlyn's like, yeah. I know what you're talking about. You know, I'll slander them. Their name, it's nothing too special. Bathhouse, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the Legionnaire's one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:04:43I hear. Wait, so they do crypto mining? Yeah, so the guy who runs it, he loves crypto. And so you can pay in crypto. Classic Brooklyn. And he initially tried to market it as like, you know, like some of the heat generation is going to go, is coming from crypto. But then he removed that silently. And I don't know if he removed it because it was like, it's not actually, or because he doesn't want people to. No, I think it doesn't work. Yes. Mining difficulty has reached a point where all of these little. Just doesn't work. Cornel is dude. We go scuba diving on Roatan, which is the Island where Prospera, the crypto city is in Honduras.

1:05:21The future. Beautiful little like a dirt road Island, Afro-Caribbean Island. The food's amazing. The diving's amazing. It's, it's just a lovely place. And then the former dictator of Honduras, who was just pardoned by Trump, who was a narco trafficker, sold them the sovereign rights to a chunk of this Island. And you walk down the dirt road in the dive town and every shop has got a sign in the window that says we accept Bitcoin. And you walk in and you say, do you accept Bitcoin? And they're like, of course we don't accept Bitcoin. Are you kidding me? We don't even have reliable electricity. I don't have 15 minutes to wait for this to get here.

1:05:57I will say about these, These reactionaries, they know how to pick a spot. If I were going to make a future network state, that is one of the places I would do it. They don't have the actual stones to find a real place where there's truly no laws. Yeah, right. Well, yeah. Because all of the actual pirates and real criminals would kill them immediately. I mean, this is part of the thing with the Pirate Enlightenment book of David Graeber. You give fascists a lawless zone and you let other people come into the lawless zone and everyone else would go, why are there fascists here? Yeah, yeah. Well, do you know a libertarian walks into a bear, the story about that libertarian exit town in New Hampshire where they all moved in and then they ran for city council and then they abolished the school district and they abolished all the rules and then this one lady kept feeding bears and they were like, please stop feeding bears.

1:06:47She was like, I thought there were no rules. And then they were all being mauled by bears. But this Marxist gun nut weed grower moves in And he's like, I'm going to grow weed and collect guns and wait for the Marxist revolution. And they're like, but we're a libertarian town. He's like, well, what are you going to do? Actually, libertarian means you're nothing. No, it's my favorite. One of my favorite old school internet videos is the libertarian conference where it's like, well, I think the driver's licenses should exist. And there's like, I think there should be some competency in the driving.

1:07:20No, allow us to die in car crashes. uh we're approaching the break right now but i really have been trying all week listeners i swear to god i've been trying to get people to talk to me about awesome stuff the ces is weird this is a broken ces there's something wrong i do think that uh one plus i would say for the ces is it is actually a really great spot for you to come through and think about the way in which technological products are offered as and the role they play in your life you know like are you satisfied with tech products that are solely around convenience or solely around you know assistive tech or solely around health or you know like what is it that you want and do you think that the industry and the sectors are interested in developing yeah i think this is a great what are they interested in building rather than what are your problems i think there's a very good place for coming and talking to people and getting a sense of whether or not other people share those priorities with you.

1:08:19You and I saw something that we went away and bought, which was that Wococo espresso maker. Yeah. You add hot water, pump it up, it gets to nine atmospheres, it ejects a shot of espresso, it has no batteries. It's like, yeah, another thing is like, do you like coffee? Right. Imagine if you could have coffee on the go and it worked. The coffee was delicious. As a guy who flies around with an Aeropress, but whose wife prefers espresso to coffee concentrate. I just like literally walked off the trade floor and bought one because now it's small enough I could put both of them in my bag and my wife can have an espresso and I can have a coffee concentrate.

1:08:53If only all products were that good. Now the upcoming advertisement I assume will be for a product that's even better than that and even more useful. If it's a podcast, you need to listen with complete attention. Put down your phone or else.

1:09:35I'll see you next time. dot com. That's iHeartAdvertising dot com. Every January, we're encouraged to start over. But what if this year is about slowing down and learning how to understand ourselves more deeply? What if this year is about giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help? I'm Mike DeLaRocha, host of Sacred Lessons. This is a podcast for men navigating stress, emotional health, fatherhood, identity, and the unspoken pressures we're taught to carry alone. We talk honestly about mental health, about healing generational wounds, and about learning how to show up with more presence and care.

1:10:22If you want a healthier relationship with yourself and the people you love, then Sacred Lessons is the podcast for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLaRocha on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLaRocha and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today. Hi, I'm Dani Shapiro, host of the hit podcast Family Secrets. We were in the car, like a rolling stone came on, and he said, there's a line in there about your mother. And I said, what? What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is choose an identity that other people can't have.

1:10:59I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened. These are just a few of the moving and important stories I'll be holding space for on my upcoming 13th season of Family Secrets. Whether you've been on this journey with me from season one or just joining the Family Secrets family, we're so happy to have you with us. I'll dive deep into the incredible power of secrets, the ones that shape our identities, test our relationships, and ultimately reveal who we truly are. Listen to Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:11:43Hey, everyone. It's Ed Helms. And I'm Cal Penn, and we are the hosts of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am talking to film and TV critic, radio and podcast host, and Harry Potter superfan Rihanna Dillon to discuss Audible's full cast adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. What moments in this audiobook capture the feeling of the magical world best for you or just stood out the most? I always loved reading about the Quidditch matches. And I think the audio really gets it because it just plunges you right into the stands. You have the crowd sounds like all around you is surround sound, especially if you're listening in headphones.

1:12:32Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:12:48And we're back to the Better Offline CES experience. And we've got author, activist and journalist Corey Doctorow. Hello. And Gadget's Sherlyn Lowe. Hi. And Garrison Davis of It Could Happen Here. How are you doing, Garrison? Oh, it's another beautiful CES morning. In beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. What have you seen today? Today, I finally did Hall D. I've been neglecting Hall D. What did you see?

1:13:15And that's CES. Hall D is fun. I guess I also had fun in the Amazon booth. Yeah, we've been punishing them. Yeah, I assumed. I assumed you've been punishing them. We went in there to punish them. Yeah, no, if you lose your dog, you can use all the Ring cameras in your neighborhood to find your pet. I have a$5 ,000 surveillance tower from a trailer that now will tell me if anyone walks near my house in any way so that I can dial 911 and claim there's a prowler. But will it measure their skull with calipers to tell you whether they are likely criminals? Only on Ring Plus. with their new lidar system nice maybe no there's also this like ring like mesh network I'm not sure if you saw that oh they're doing this nest bullshit ring sidewalk I think is what it's called yeah it's on by default I think if there is a wifi outage they will act as a mesh to still be able to notify you if there's like movement around your house there's no live video because of how weak bandwidth constraints So it uses like 1 % of a home's Wi-Fi system to communicate peer-to-peer to send messages.

1:14:33My experience of those is they don't work very well. Like the Nest one, if you ever try and install the Nest product and it tries to connect to another Nest product, it will break in my experience. But the thing that I found interesting about the Pet Finder is that it's basically making a consumer product based on the capacity that police have been using Ring for already, right? Being able to find people and have nearly immediate access to footage. And now they're just turning that into a consumer-side product. So how does it work? You request that you send a message to some Amazon app about your pet being missing, and then it searches through all the Ring cameras in the neighborhood to see if it can find the pet.

1:15:15I think that is completely and utterly evil. I don't think regular people... The answer is the question, can you access people's footage? No, because they have it on. They immediately have it, right? They're talking about how this footage is secured and encrypted and no one can see it. Meanwhile, they're offering products based on everybody having Ring. And that's another interesting thing is how all the new features are like useless if you only have one Ring camera. The features are built or based on total societal acceptance that everyone already has these things. and the fact that everyone has these things enables all these extra features to work.

1:15:51So the actual individual products of these things, not very useful, but as long as your whole neighborhood has it, then it's like a really great product. The surveillance society taught a labrific with university. I mean, it's sacrificing privacy for convenience. That's the entire gamble with this style of product. The last scene of the conversation, just like ripping up the sideboards in everyone's houses to try and find the ring cameras. very horrible so wait but you were in hall d what'd you see in there hall d again more more more llm rapper uh robots a lot of smaller smaller like robots not not like the big the big ones the robots doing we i looked at a few robots for like you know like learning robots for kids for it's like kind of a toy and it's also like supposed to be some kind of learning assistant kids see through that so quickly i must be clear they get tired of it in like two minutes.

1:16:46Yes. No, it definitely looked, the ones that I saw, including from this company, their product was called Yanbo, Yanbo X1, which they thought - Rolls off the tongue. I mean, it's a - It looks like Chinese. It's Chinese for, it sounds similar to the word for hug. Right. But this is - Yong Bao? Yeah. Oh, okay. I don't speak any other language. This is for natural language prompting. This is to help, allegedly, according to them, will help kids learn another language. The US side product just is ChatGPT. So if you're wanting to learn another language through ChatGPT, this is what it'll do. The Wi-Fi and Hold-D is kind of off, so it's hard to get a good baseline for how good the product is, which everyone would assert to me.

1:17:41What were you going to say, Sherlyn? I was going to say kind of off was a understatement of the Wi-Fi situation at the Venetian this year. It was freaking terrible. It's always just bad. It's worse this year because even the Wi-Fi was down. It was always the signal. It's always bad. By the time you approach the Venetian, you have no more 5G or LTE. But like in the Expo, their own in-house Wi-Fi was... The irony of that was just ridiculous. I wonder if that's because everyone has these GPT wrappers. It's because everyone's just pummeling AWS. It's worse than ever, yeah. just beating the fuck out of it.

1:18:12But yeah, we tried to, you know, they try to give a demonstration where it would teach us like a Chinese word. And so like, yeah, if you can learn a word. Speak a little Chinese. But you can't, you can't actually, like you can't like learn grammar and they can't like correct a child to actually improve language. And you can't actually, you can actually learn to speak a language. You can learn individual words, but that's not, that's not language learning, right? You can do that. You can do that in like Duolingo and that's not teaching you a language. if you were just looking for a word. And Duolingo is already something that people who teach languages are like, this is not great.

1:18:43All the features that make Duolingo sticky cut against the pedagogical value of it as a language training tool. So there was a lot of stuff like that. I did ask them about what their plans are if the API for ChatGPT gets more expensive. They said they do not expect that in the near future. But they have five other LLMs that they work with, specifically their product is mostly in China right now. So Gwen or what have you. They can swap the LLM whenever they want to. Which like, doesn't that kind of impact the quality of the experience? Yes, because each LLM is prompted differently. Yes. I love that though.

1:19:24It's like, what if something bad happens? What if it doesn't? What if it doesn't? And even if it does, we'll just use DeepSeek or whatever. I have a slightly different gloss on this though, because we were saying before that all these products seem undifferentiated. And if they're all undifferentiated because they're just a wrapper on top of ChatGPT and they're vulnerable to changes, that's one thing. And it maybe speaks well for ChatGPT in that they'll have whatever companies among these are successful, it'll have them over a barrel and it can jack up the price on threat of bricking their products and making their customers angry at them.

1:19:55But if the case is that ChatGPT is a commodity backend and there's 50 companies in China that can do the same thing at a tenth of the price and ChatGPT's future plan is someday there will be so many people so reliant on us that we can charge$200 for something we're charging$2 for. The answer is the minute they start charging$200, there will be 50 Chinese companies that will charge you$2. A Brian Chesky of Airbnb even, who's like a disgusting booster who was specifically involved in making sure Clammy Sam Altman managed to become CEO again. He literally has said, I'll use Chinese LLMs every day.

1:20:31Yeah. Which is really funny. So really, it's one of the two. It's going to be either, but I also don't think because their API sales are like a small part of their revenue. It's just, actually, here's a question, general question. Anyone hear about anyone using Anthropics models? Even once? I have not heard Anthropics mentioned. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean specifically on the floor as powering. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you know what? Oh, Pebble. Pebble uses Claude. Oh, really? Interesting. But to just do the... For the ring AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For the answering. But they said that was on device.

1:21:00There is no on-device version of Claude. Oh, Pebble, I was so nice about you. Now I have to go and look into your innards. I can go. We should go ask the founder. No, I'm genuinely curious about that because there is no on-device version of GPT or any of the... Now you're making me question if I should double check who I'm talking about. I think that that's worthwhile. But the thing is, I'm a horrible freak that looks at this stuff constantly. So my natural thought was like, what do you mean? And I will admit, the$75 Pebble Ring, supposedly on device as well, that did seem a little rich to me.

1:21:36What do you mean by rich? As in like an on device model and a tiny ring? It's not on the ring, to be clear. It's on the phone, yes. But they're saying it's, if it needs to go through Claude, that's not, I don't know. There's something weird there. And again, that's something that will increase in price. Another alleged on-device product is the Luna Pendant, which is real-time AI emotion tracking. Okay. Oh, well, because it's not doing anything real, you can put a random number. Well, it's not, actually it is. It is listening to every single thing you say and building emotional assessments based on what you say, as well as whatever kind of biometrics they can connect from a pendant resting on your chest.

1:22:18Did they mention what the customer might be? No, not really. Because this always immediately goes to, yeah, people with autism. We already ran into someone with a dog toy today who was like, it could help autistic children. This was not marketed to that. What is this for then? This is for, I wouldn't say women. That was what they said. The classic doesn't understand emotion. Women love to be told what are we feeling. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We finally found a device to be sexist without the need of a man. Without the man telling me it. All of the design was going that way to me. That's pretty femme-coded, yeah.

1:22:56Yes. And it measures like six or seven. Oops, that was a mistake. I'm sorry. Oh, is that like a young people? It does like six or seven different emotions. But it's mostly done just through listening. on device though they do not upload to the they do not upload the audio to the cloud nice okay it is on device so no biometric data just listening that's unclear I know when it's unclear it was it was mostly listening because again I'm some do you want me to have a look I honestly I honestly slight language barriers when trying to talk with some of these boots here I would respect them so much if it was for guys if it was just like you guys never seem to know so it does HRV yeah It's a sound tone, HR, hearty variability, breathing and movement.

1:23:44That's what it was. Yeah. So there is some sense. It's resting on your chest. So it can have some, some heart, some breathing, but most, mostly it's just through listening to everything. The reason I ask is that's the only thing that differentiates it from like the halo tone wearable from ages ago by Amazon. That's already doing the same thing. I'm, I'm very, like I have a good memory for all the devices that try to tell me what I'm feeling and tell me to chill out, calm down. So like this, this is the sort of device that reminds me. And there was another product that was at CES that was like clearly men made this for women.

1:24:12It was like a bra insert to like be wearable to detect your, detect your boobs. Well, no, your, your metrics are like, it's kind of for gym purposes when you're working out. And I was just like, if you've paid any attention to the women's sports bra industry discourse at all, it's that we've been asking for these bra inserts to be removed or sewn in. We don't want them to be removable or fall out when they're drying. we just want them to remain in place or just be done with. One of those classic situations of did you talk to a woman before or after you made this? Or anything else, right? Like if you're designing a product for someone in a wheelchair have you worked with someone who's actually using a wheelchair?

1:24:50Well, the saying is nothing about us without us which I discovered goes back to the Polish equivalent of the Magna Carta in the 16th century and it was what the barons made the king agree was that nothing about them would be done without them. It didn't rhyme in Polish. Yeah. And that's also definitely not how CES works. CES is like, without you, we will sell to you. Yeah. It's Henry Ford, right? If I asked people what they wanted, they'd say a faster horse, right? And so we're here to tell you what you want. Yeah. Yeah. But these people would sell you like horseshoes to make the horses faster.

1:25:23It's like these people don't connect to anything. I'm still sitting there trying to work out what that pendant is for. I'm going to be honest. Like what alien. Well, sometimes it's useful to know if you're calm or if you're angry. Oh, I know when I met. Your lips are moving. I'm breathing. I recently started somatic therapy. And so I think I can understand the idea of the benefits of knowing when you're feeling something, identifying it and kind of like staying with it. But I don't think a pendant is going to tell me in real time. And it's not built for that. Exactly. Or with any of that. I mean, what are you supposed to be doing?

1:26:00Like looking down and going, oh no, I'm angry. And then why? And then breathe. It does connect to an app where it has like analysis of how you're feeling, how often you're feeling, you know, heart rate. This reminds me of Victoria's song posting the aura ring thing, which is like stressed. Like collective bargaining, seven hours, stressed. Oh, God. So what? You got a lot of paper there. I just like collecting these papers. That's fine. Anything else you regarded? Oh, I guess I'll talk about the one that I feel the weirdest about. Awesome. This is another CES Innovation Award winner. Oh, dear. Okay.

1:26:42This is from South Korea. This is the Self-Insight Therapy Resolve XR. Oh. Okay. Well, I've got most of it from the name. I'm glad they've got up to the XR. This is a VR experience to give you a final goodbye to a deceased friend. Oh, Jesus. So the Black Mirror episode. So we have seen stuff like this before. We have seen these kind of like VR experiences that are either fully scripted or done with like an AI. And I thought that's what this was. I thought this was just another one of those. And I was surprised why it won an innovation award because we've seen this stuff years ago. The reason why it's different is that this is not an AI.

1:27:24This is not an AI system. This is not a pre-recorded movie either. this is a avatar puppeted by a therapist as a part of a as a part of like a therapy program where you enter into it for a short amount of time to give this like visual like therapeutic like exercise to someone when they weren't able to say goodbye to a family member usually after some kind of accident is what this was and they talked about a few instances of like this really bad plane crash last year and that was like the the main use case that we've seen. It's right now just available in Korea. They're trying to expand to Japan and the United States where they would need to partner with therapists in those countries.

1:28:09So yeah, I feel really odd about these types of products, obviously. Specifically like the digital avatar nature of it. If you have a recording of your deceased loved one's voice, it can try to clone the voice. So it does use AI. So it doesn't use AF for the voice, but the person – there's a therapist – The puppeteer. Puppeting it who will do text-to-speech. So they will text-to-speech in whatever the person will say. It's text-to-speech as well? No, it is text – that's what it is. It is text-to-speech. So the therapist that's puppeting it, the words coming out of the avatar are from a therapist who's typing out the words as a part of this therapeutic exercise.

1:28:54that then will come out in a cloned voice of the deceased person. Are they also controlling the gestures? When you say puppeting... Yes, there is a pre-recorded set of movements that they can initiate. This sounds traumatizing. They said that the people who have used it have liked it and there is a video of... Of course, they're going to say that, obviously. Yeah, people hate it. But that's, you know, and I saw, I saw a footage of, of, of someone using it. Um, I think it is, it is good that this isn't just an AI LLM who's just talking as your, as your, as your dead granny. And it's not pretending to be that.

1:29:35It is a therapeutic experience and it is an exercise. Where you type in. Similar, similar, well, the, you know, you're, you're wearing VR goggles. So like you see the avatar in like a setting and you like say goodbye and get some kind of closure as a part of a therapeutic experience. and like there's versions that we already just do this in therapy like you already can do these sort of exercises with therapy this is putting in kind of an avatar over it i don't feel great about the avatar um but this is this is certainly better and more thoughtful than just talking to and just talking to an llm the fact that it's you are partnering with a therapist who you you've already been working with who already knows you yeah for people in like an extreme emotional grief Yeah, I can see that.

1:30:16They did stress that. This isn't for everybody. This is for people dealing with an extreme emotional grief. And I asked, why did you choose? Why is this not just an AI? And they're like, well, I mean, these people are very traumatized and you actually need a skill. I give them some credit. If that's their reaction to it, I'm less, I'm not mad at it. Because if they're very much like, this is very specific, I'm all right with that. And this is my experience at the booth. because I went in very hostile because I was very hostile. And they didn't necessarily win me over, but I understood why the product exists over time more.

1:30:51And I was like, yeah, I feel very odd. Not odd. I think digital necromancy is bad. Every CES I've been to, I've done some report on digital necromancy. The fact that it's cloning the voice I don't love, but the product's not for me. right it's i would not want to hear an ai voice of my dead friend but that is me who within i'm you know as a gen z canadian american i don't want this for some people who are using using this product that might help them in certain settings um with an awareness that like you're this is you know this is an avatar this is a replica i'm just talking to a therapist i'm not a therapist but my view on that is like there are certain things where it's leading you to get to conclusions and i feel like adding a disembodied digital avatar controlled by a keyboard i'm like if this helps someone brilliant but it's also just like that's just it's adding a layer of something that probably will get in the way of feeling better because it's like like change comes from within like yeah this is this is this is the gestalt empty chair technique that's that's the therapy technique i want to raise another point so hagen blicks was on this machine kills talking about chat therapists and how the temptation on the firms that are delivering therapy over chat is to pile more chat windows on a single therapist and to get them to multitask and then multi-multitask.

1:32:20And so I'm not saying this firm is doing it. I'm saying that this is a mode of therapy that is uniquely amenable to speed-ups that are anti-patient and anti-therapist. I have also a thought, right? Which is when I was mostly furious about this until you mentioned this was for extreme scenarios, extreme cases of grief. And I was like, okay, I can imagine if someone is so deep in their grief that they wouldn't respond to anything but an avatar. Yeah, you need anything. You need anything. But then I think about like even myself thinking about going through the process of anyone that has, you know, a friend died in a car accident two years ago.

1:32:53Like if the thought of talking to an embodied version of him and hearing his voice just get me out of my grief is already dubious. but then you have to I was like oh but all kinds of therapy there's a little resistance to that sort of grief therapy anyway so I was like I was trying to make my peace with that then I remember this is XR you're going to have to convince the person who's in extreme grief to put on a headset just strap this brick to your face stop crying for five seconds and strap this brick to your face trap yourself in the thingy this is something that you're going to I don't think they're getting convinced into doing this I think it's something that they will you know this is an option that they can choose from and I think also specifically this is not like an extended thing this isn't something you like go to talk to your friend it is to give you like a closure one time like good like closure exercise I'm also just like you also have it for a pet they also have a okay now I'm now fully against this because now it's like closure isn't always clean yes that's why are they gonna voice the pet life is messy but also you don't get closure on things.

1:33:59Therapy is about finding a way through when you don't. It's a gift you give yourself. It's not a thing you get from someone else. That's the more larger existential resistance that I have to this. Hearing the pet thing really feels me full of angry bile. Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow. Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow. No, it's just also like, you lost your pet. What the fuck does seeing like a 3D cat or dog... One of Canada's most beloved prime ministers, John Diefenbaker, used to go get advice for running the country from his dog's ghost. What? That was dead air there. It's true.

1:34:32Is the pet solution different from the human? When the Cleveland Browns drafted Johnny Bansiel based on a homeless person's idea. I love this. Tell me everything. That's all I know. We learned it in history. I was 14 years old. That's all I remember. It's literally the only thing I know about Chantifa Baker. My dog's ghost. Except there's a lot of buildings named after him as well. But did you learn this? Did you grow up in Canada? I did grow up in Canada. Did you learn this in ninth grade history? I did not. No, by then I was already in the States. Okay. Okay. So you didn't get a full year about just the Canadian Pacific Railroad, World War I, and John Diefenbaker's dead dog.

1:35:02We got a little bit of the railroad, but that's it. You missed the year of Canadian education around dog ghosts. I did. I did miss that one. We're going to put them on the new 50, the dog ghost. That's good. Shudeau had a lot of them.

1:35:18Supreme Leader Carney will get right on that. I just see this stuff and hearing the pet thing. I'm like, because my thought process with this was like, okay, extreme situations. But then I'm like - The pet thing, I don't, yeah. No, I hear pet and I'm like, so it's not extreme situation. Because my thought was, okay, if this is very specific, like deep in the box of tools, we've tried everything. Fuck yeah. Okay. But we'll help you with your pet. And also if your favorite flavor of ice cream is sold out at Baskin Robbins, we've got a model for that. But it's also preparing you. I don't know. some of the most difficult things in therapy for me have been accepting there is no such thing as closure in some cases you will never have that the other thing i don't like about the pet thing is that it is that is a reoccurring feature you can visit the yeah it's like you create a space more than once which i i will say now that i'm reading the brochure um it is not just about the grief i think there's parts of this that sound like they make sense so the resolve xr part of it that's talking about the gestalt empty chair thing it's also like not just about grief but it's about like confronting difficult like conflict moments that one i could learn to deal with because like whenever i'm dealing with like a manipulative talker and i don't know how to like respond and i have these emotional reactions bubble up sure a bit of practice into dealing with the thing is the you are completely correct i sound like another lm there but this these are the soft edges where these people work their ways in right it's like well there could be a situation where it makes sense they're not preparing for a situation if they have i can revisit my dead dog they're just like fuck it can I say enough of this it's a structural problem with small batch products you just want to expand the market I'll also point out that on the brochure this you should have said it yeah but they are calling the grief part of it good morning with a U and I'm just like no I love having good morning that's very good that tells me this is a shtick that's hairdresser hairdresser business name grade pun it's right it would curl up and die good morning Like a bike shop called Bike Curious.

1:37:17Like, Jesus fucking Christ. That to me is bad. That's the thing. I'm really trying here, folks. I'm trying to find some stuff. I'm trying to look not cynically about it. Well, there's a bajillion AI cooking products. I did see. We saw one which was just a giant box. No, they're all boxes. And the thing is, you still have to do all the prep work yourself. You still have to assemble the ingredients in most cases. It's an oven. It's a quote-unquote smart oven, right? That's all these AI cooking products that like, that like take the effort out of cooking. You're like, well, yeah, that's just putting something in the oven.

1:37:50Like, right. It's still to do a lot of work. It's going to have hoses that are just full of congealed schmutz. Oh yeah. At some point, like three days in, it's going to just be congealed. Cleaning is going to be a nightmare. It's, it's easier just to cook. Like it's like, it reminds me of those videos where like the, the influencers going, these are my simple meals. No cook, simple meals. Step one, cut some garlic. And it's just like, no, no, no, no. You're cooking. You're cooking. No, like you put a piece of cardboard in the microwave. Like that's going to be more efficient if you really want to live a lifestyle where you don't cook.

1:38:21Hey, enough about British cooking. I just learned from Garbage Ryan about Kitchen Cells, which is the Reddit forum for incels who cook elaborate meals and then feel bad about themselves. That's fun. Yeah. Good for them. Yeah. That's a better name than Good Morning Kitchen Cells. Say love from someone else. sorry that was a bitchy thing to say but no wait so these people are like incels who are just they're like I'm gonna make a fucking so the two varieties are very elaborate meal I cooked with a caption that is just like I wanna die or like someone who's literally microwaved a piece of cardboard and the caption is I'm a piece of shit that's funny that second one is really funny I mean actually no the idea of doing like a five course tasting menu and doing that is actually really good no that's pretty that's pretty good but are they serious or is this?

1:39:10So this was the thing Garbage Ryan said is he wasn't sure to what extent it was a bit. He thinks for some of them it's a bit and for some of them it's not. It's like R slash male living space. Like everything to do with incel. Yeah, like male living space. I love those where it's just like a TV, like a Hisense TV on top of the box that the Hisense TV came in and like an Apple TV and a PlayStation 5 with like bent cables because like straight out the box plugs. I love that. My favorite one was the guy who bought a church And he had a bed and a little table in a church. And his caption was, any suggestions for what else to do with this room?

1:39:52Do an exorcism. I mean, the thing you're going to do in six months involving a new... Sorry. It's... Why did you buy a church? There is this guy on Instagram. John Scalzi bought a church. They're cheap. Religion is failing in America. I don't know if that's good or bad. Now, I did see this guy on Instagram that I've been following for like a while where he bought like a house in Eastern European country for 5 ,000 euro. And he has put so much money into it just making it. And he's actually got like walls now. He's like, day 5 ,000 to buy my 5 ,000 euro house. My friend Kujuk came down and he's just like this Eastern European guy who you could shoot with a gun and it would just bounce the fuck off.

1:40:32Boris the bullet catcher. Yeah, it's all of these guys who are just like actual work and stiffs who are like, this is going to get me promo because they all make money off of it, which is cool actually. Actually in a weird way, likely helps the local economy. But it is funny watching just the American guys being like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Infrastructure doesn't work some places. Yeah, well, as we wrap up this half an hour section, I'm going to advertise something now. It's called Stuff Buyer. Go to StuffBuyer.biz and whatever you hear next, ignore that URL. That's not where you're going to buy your next products.

1:41:06Thank you, please.

1:41:27So 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. Every January, we're encouraged to start over. But what if this year is about slowing down and learning how to understand ourselves more deeply? What if this year is about giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help? I'm Mike De La Rocha, host of Sacred Lessons.

1:42:07This is a podcast for men navigating stress, emotional health, fatherhood, identity, and the unspoken pressures we're taught to carry alone. We talk honestly about mental health, about healing generational wounds, and about learning how to show up with more presence and care. If you want a healthier relationship with yourself and the people you love, then Sacred Lessons is the podcast for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLaRocha on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLaRocha and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today. Hi, I'm Dani Shapiro, host of the hit podcast, Family Secrets.

1:42:49We were in the car, like a rolling stone came on, and he said, there's a line in there about your mother. And I said, what? What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is choose an identity that other people can't have. I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened. These are just a few of the moving and important stories I'll be holding space for on my upcoming 13th season of Family Secrets. Whether you've been on this journey with me from season one or just joining the Family Secrets family, we're so happy to have you with us.

1:43:27I'll dive deep into the incredible power of secrets, the ones that shape our identities, test our relationships, and ultimately reveal who we truly are. Listen to Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it's Ed Helms. And I'm Cal Penn, and we are the hosts of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am talking to film and TV critic, radio and podcast host, and Harry Potter superfan, Rihanna Dillon, to discuss Audible's full cast adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. What moments in this audiobook capture the feeling of the magical world best for you, or just stood out the most?

1:44:20I always loved reading about the Quidditch matches, and I think the audio really gets it because it just plunges you right into the stands. You have the crowd sounds all around you. It is surround sound, especially if you're listening in headphones. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:44:52I am being gang stalked. Welcome back to Better Offline. I'm Ed Zitron and we have wonderful crowd with us, of course, journalist, activist, and of course, I was... Author? Yeah, author. We're keeping it. It's fine. Author, Cory Doctorow. Hello. I'm so sorry. That's okay. Garrison Davis, if it could happen here. There's been a white van outside this hotel the entire time. Yeah, and they're only looking for me. Sherlyn Lowe of Engadget. And we're going to actually start with some Engadget things. What are Engadget's best of CES? Like, what was the stuff that Engadget actually liked? I don't know if you'll hate us for this, because we talked earlier in the episode about this.

1:45:25We as a team awarded the Lego SmartPlay SmartBrake system. Totally fine. The best in shows. It was a show of hands type of vote by the time we had gotten around to the last one. And like we were doing rank choice voting too. So like we had to go around everyone. Very well. We were ready to stay. I know. Thank you. We were, we've been progressive for a very long time. We, we were dedicated. We're like, however long this takes to find the best in show, we're going to stay all through the night. And then we got through the first few candidates and we got to Lego and then like more than half, way more than half hands went up and we're like, oh, well, good thing we don't need to stay the rest of the night then.

1:46:00It's quite obvious. some quick math was done. So anyway, I think Engadget's Best of CES Awards are going to reflect Engadget's choice, Engadget's taste. That's good. Right, I'm glad. I think it shows that we're a bunch of childish kids, nerds, and that sort of thing. And I like that about my team. And also then we had other winners. You'll see our list of winners include things like TVs, laptops, concept devices. I've got to look at this thrown toilet-mounted health tracker. That's not an award. To be clear, that's the weirdest gadgets. All the coolest techs are on the show floor. When you said thrown, I heard T-H-R-O-W-N, and I'm like, is it a shuriken?

1:46:39Ed, I love that you got confused because that's very good feedback for the team that I've been trying to fight with about the headlines. Yeah, that completely confused me because the piss measure up. Yeah, put it, I'm just going to show them. You've only been drinking Diet Cokes for seven years. That will tell you. No, we did not give that. Okay, so your best of CES. I will stop trying to anticipate your denim on. Ooh, okay. Okay. I mean, I do that too. Our best of CES includes like the LG wallpaper TV that was shown. There's a very classic CES type of product. What's good about it? Yeah. It's very thin, very impressive.

1:47:12It just lost that soundbar base that used to be what it came out of. And then there's no cables except for the power cord because it's got the wireless control center that you use. Oh, is that the brick that is kind of - Yeah, the little - Yeah, you could tuck it away out of sight. Low latency. Yeah, exactly. Because I saw that and I was kind of like, I love that. It's like super expensive out of the range of most people, but it's cool tech. Yes. Also, so wait, does the thing go on? It plugs in the wall still? There's still a power cord for the TV itself. But HDMI and such comes out the little box.

1:47:40In the wireless and the communication. Did you get the price on the wallpaper one or have they not set it yet? I have had so many numbers in my head. That's okay, don't worry about it. It's hard to remember. And do they do the surveillance that is endemic to smart TVs or is it like a dumb TV when it comes to sending information about what you're watching back to LG? Yeah, I don't know that either. I had our TV experts cover it. I just know that. I mean, Consumer Union, every time they look at TVs, they're like, oh, every one of these is. Very good one for us to look into. The stuff like the wallpaper TV and the transparent TV aren't even really marketed towards most like homes.

1:48:10Like they're kind of for like hotel lobbies or for like business. Could be one day. It feels like more like something eventually a person might buy rather than the transparent one, which, you know what? Keep fucking that chicken. Like bring that weird shit with you. I love that. I love it. Speaking of weird shit, Lenovo, this year we're like, we really like this thing. We want to give it an award. Let's think about like how - Which Lenovo Pro? The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i rollable concept. Is that the one that kind of rolls out? It's a gaming laptop, but its screen can expand by rolling out into like 23.8 inches of space.

1:48:43And so you can stop in between at 21.5 inches or so. So you get like different aspect ratios when you're gaming and you just want to like drill in or you want to have Discord show up on the ride or whatever. That's pretty. And the OS knows to what extent you've unrolled it. And that has always been the trick, right? Not understanding how to place these items on the screen, but it's gotten there. That's cool. So we're very interested in that. And that's just the concept though for now, right? Yeah, it's just a concept. But last year they had a concept with the Swivel, which ended up being real.

1:49:09Actually, the AutoTwist, they're calling it this year. Very cool. But it's a laptop? Yeah, it's a gaming laptop. So this is like butterfly keyboard, but butterfly screen. But it like slowly rolls out. Yeah, it rolls out. It's not like a fold out. Oh, you press a button and it goes. Yeah. And it's like, oh my God, I need to show you a video. You don't unroll it like a - No, not by hand. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I like that. I also think that we're approaching the point where we're limited by form factors, so that is cool. Yes. I hope they're able to do it in anything approaching affordability. Right, I know.

1:49:39But at the same time, for like a decade, we've talked about like rollable screens, pendable screens. It's nice to see that in a consumer tech housing. And not janky. And not janky. Yeah, sure. It had a little wobble, like Robert Evans mentioned. It has a little bubble, but I'm kind of like, it's a concept. It's a concept. For a concept. I've seen more - For a concept, you're not talking about selling it. I kind of like it. But what else you got on the list? I want to shout out the IXI autofocus slash adaptive eyewear. What's that? So they're not officially at CES. I think they parachuted, they dropped in.

1:50:08They were like, let's take some meetings. These are, you know how multifocal slash bifocal glasses right now are very clunky. I don't know that. I don't know that. So some people might know, but they get very clunky and very chunky because you have like, just the technology isn't there yet. I have a stupid question. Bifocal. What is like - So the top half, so some people have both nearsighted and farsighted as you age. And so one prescription doesn't cut it. You need one like, and sometimes they cut your lens so that the top half is for your long sighted. And the bottom half is for you to look at close by things.

1:50:39That's what I have in this lens. Oh, okay. And mine is progressive. So it's not a sharp line. It gets more magnified the further down it goes. Oh, okay. So those are like multifocal. So IXI has technology. I'm very curious what you think about this, Corey. where it's using a mix of like LEDs around the lens to detect your gaze and where you're looking. And then a liquid crystal lens layer that changes the prescription of the lens. So wherever you're looking at something, it's just detecting the right prescription and just working the way it should. Does it work? Or was there no way to test it?

1:51:15Well, so we did see a demo. Our Matt Smith took a demo and he was impressed. We've already interviewed IXI in September. We've known this tech was coming, but now they're at CES with a working demo. I love them. It worked. So what I want to know is like, so this sounds amazing. I had cataract surgery last year. Okay. And I got what's called, oh God, I can't remember, monofocus. So this eye is focused at, monovision rather. This eye is focused at 23 inches. This eye is focused at 25 feet. My brain switches between them depending on what I'm looking at. Whoa. And then this is the only corrective region of my glasses.

1:51:47It's on the distance eye and it's a closeup region so that if I'm reading on this side, I don't have to turn my head. Right. But I can get it. Like I just went skiing without my glasses on for the first time in my life. It's fucking amazing. Oh, wow. No fog, nothing. Like just so great. Yeah. Scuba diving, just terrific. The thing I'd be worried about as a man who has dropped his glasses 14 million times is what happens when these things fall off your face. Well, I don't know yet. I think it has to depend on who they team up with on the like frames as well and how they build these into like retail ready products.

1:52:19I don't have all the details yet because it was a late entrant to our like CS Awards discussions. It's an amazing idea. But also as far as - And the fact that they made it work is incredible. And is there anything more consumer tech than that? Right, right. Glasses. And also one more thing, spectacle technology, eyeglasses technology hasn't changed, has been stagnant since the 1950s. So for something like this to happen, it'd be cool. And also imagine getting like one pair of lenses that you theoretically, hypothetically don't need to keep changing as your eye worsen or changes. That could be sustainable.

1:52:51Could be just for your cost, for your budget. That would be great too. So I just think there's so much potential. We're so excited about it. That's really cool. Multiple people could wear the glasses, I guess. Could be. I can't say because I think for them, they can't say things. The FDA needs to approve things. I'd love to know, like, can you put it in, I'm painting D &D minis mode and have it ratchet up? Like a macro lens, yeah. Hypothetically, why not? My grandfather was a watchmaker and he wore a jeweler's loop his whole professional life and he had a Popeye squint, right? If he could just be like, no, I'm on the job now.

1:53:23I'm fixing a watch movement and it just suddenly zooms up. That'd be pretty dope. That's so cool. That's just really cool technology. So we were very glad we were able to see it here. And then we talked about the wheel move earlier in the episode. We gave the wheel move an award. We just didn't see enough sustainable slash transport related technologies to have something for those categories. Wait, you literally just... There were things. They just weren't good. No, no. I mean, you didn't have anything you could give an award to. I mean, all those personal helicopters, I think, could serve a great public service.

1:53:54Oh, there's personal helicopters here? Oh, yeah. Did you see Richter? Yes. So Richter is from last year. I talked with Richter last year. I saw two personal helicopters this year. One of them is Richter. Yeah, I think we should be giving those out to... Me? No, not to you. You're not rich enough. I think we should be giving the personal helicopters to like maybe the top like 0.5 % of people. Everyone should have it. Free. In a room with whirling blades on the ceiling. Free. No, I think they should all, we should all, as a victory trophy for, you won. You won. You won society. Instead of the Nobel Peace Prize, you get the victory.

1:54:30Here, we're going to give you this personal helicopter. It's going to work great. It'll be fine. Just fly it as much as you want. That pairs very nicely with this thing we saw. Oh, God. We saw a personal airbag for old people worried about breaking their hips. And it sounds like - Or when you fall? Yeah. It sounds like a good idea until you learn the details. Well, the business model. Yes. So the business model is, so if you fall over, they call the emergency services. Yeah. That's a$40 a month subscription. Which is like, and I said to the guy like, is Twilio that expensive? Because like, that's how you're paying like, like tiny amounts of money for one text.

1:55:06There's so many fall detection. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, there's no fucking way in hell. And you can't repack the airbag after you use it. So it's a single use. You get$800 for two airbags. What? And$40 a month. Otherwise, all it does is the airbag thing. Then why are you paying? They're trying to scam money out of people. They're trying to scam it for Medicare. Yeah, they were trying to get Medicare approval. I have to say, as a man who's also had a hip replacement, but two hip replacements, and was the youngest person on the ward when I had it done, that like, you know, a$40 a month subscription from an 80 year old does not generate that much revenue over the entire year.

1:55:45Over time, yeah. How many months are you going to be paying the subscription? But also like 40 bucks. Fuck you, man. It's a Twilio thing. You're just paying Twilio. Also, then wouldn't you want to like make sure the airbag is repackable because then you have a longer subscription. Well, their argument was we don't know if it's going to work. If the old person with the arthritis repacks it, then we're worried that they'll break a hip. Well, but then they stop paying the$40 a month once they deploy it. Well, their argument is if you get saved from breaking a hip twice in a row, you'll happily buy another set of airbags.

1:56:15That may be true. Yeah. But it's just, I'm like, the more I think about it, it's like, oh, yeah, it's 40 bucks a month for the texts, which costs like a tenth of a cent. Yeah. Which will also only have happen ideally never. Twice in the life of the product, right? Like ideally never. But if you use them, this will cost them 15 cents. So if you own it for 10 years, right? Yeah, what are you actually paying for? You have paid several thousand dollars to send at most two texts. And what was the upfront cost again? 800 bucks for two. 800 and then 40 a month? That's right. That's right. And he was like, there's no Medicare code for this yet.

1:56:50We're working on it. I'm sure. I'm sure that's all they're working on. I could see the Medicare case for it, right? If you're starting to get inner ear problems or if you're old and brittle or whatever you balance. I can see the point. I can see why Medicare would buy you a set of airbags. Just not the fucking subscription. Fuck you. make the subscription five bucks a month. Even then you're like, you're still making insane margin. My guess, these things, they're manufacturing them in small runs. It's costing them more than 800 bucks that they're losing money on the 800 bucks. And they're like, this is how we will make a profit is we'll sell a loss leader and we'll...

1:57:24Sounds like a bad business to me. It does. Well, it sounds like a case for like public investment in medical technology. Whoa, whoa. What a normal idea. We need more knife drones. Very true. Is that what we're calling the person a helicopter now? No, no. Hey, ideally, in a perfect world. No, the personal helicopters are very safe, and you're very rich, and you need one. Yes. Try them out. You don't need training. There's an app for that. No, you're smart. You're rich. And look at your phone. Just let AGI run it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've built an obstacle course for it. You can fly it over lava and acid and broken glass.

1:58:02And you'll be fine. You have the lathe of heaven. you'll be the mandate of heaven even sorry i like the lathe of heaven my brain just like what words do you need i don't fucking know we just laid that into existence that's leguin the lathe of heaven there we go yes thank you look for too much farming in earth see yeah it's i'm actually a little sad you don't have more i'm not saying this is a criticism it's like but it's like even last year in those categories right yeah even last year it felt like there was more yucks there was more square footage is taken up by the LLM rappers and by robotics and sometimes combined sometimes it's a robot that is an LLM rapper did you see the Project Ava thing by Razor?

1:58:45yeah we've talked about the wife tube a lot I haven't I've been waiting to see the Project Ava thing I have not seen it yet it's this tube with an LLM in it with a hentai wife and you talk to the hentai wife so it's like Asuka in there or something I don't know the name of the Oh, Kira, I guess is the name of? It's Project Ava. Kira is apparently some anime thing. And then you can have a guy with tattoos or you can have a woman in a business suit. Got it. It's like - Yeah, we talked about this. Yeah. And it's just like, I feel like if you try and, not that they're selling it, it's a concept. If you try and buy one, they should put you on a fucking list.

1:59:19No, I did walk by that really gross sex robot. Oh, LaVence's Emily, right? I actually did not see this sex bot. Tell me everything. I had a hard time looking at it. I walked up to the side and I tried looking at its hands and it just looked like a corpse. Let's start simple. What is this? This is a robot that looks kind of like a woman. And you meant a sexy... So we're talking real doll style. Yes. Yes, okay. And allegedly this is something that you can have... intercourse with. and I walked up to the side and it has a very realistic looking skin texture but its head moves like an old Disney animatronic and it has like an LLM that's 69 nights trying to talk and move its mouth and I stood there for about 10 seconds and I had to leave I walked around the corner and they had the little AI avatar section which wasn't working because of the wifi but it's like the AI avatar that you can talk to which is synced to the little jack-off robot.

2:00:20So you can talk to the AI, and then it can jack you off. That is a hell of a Goon Cave accessory. Yeah, well, and also the jack-off robot. This company's been around since 2014. Well, no, this is still the Love Sense booth. They've been around for a while. It did not look that good, but yes. But it connects to games as well. It connects to online gaming. Oh, wow. So it really is a Goon Cave. You want to fuck Tetris? Well, you know, if they can connect that to... They've been trying to find a way into making the Tetris movie for years. That bitch is coming on. I thought you were going to be like, they've been trying to fuck Tetris for years, but we never worked it.

2:01:00Well, this is the plot of the Tetris movie, finally. If they can connect it to Final Fantasy VII remake and have Cloud, then maybe they could have a real product on their hands. Well, maybe they should do that because Cloud has a wonderful cross-dressing section and also Cloud, completely autistic and not horny at all. that whole game is him trying to avoid having sex I think he would be a great addition this is so I'm not going to judge him for the sex but whatever but it's also just like the idea that you looked at it and immediately faced revulsion it made me feel not in just like a Christian moralism way not in a judgment way mostly well a little bit but mostly in like an uncanny valley way if I was engaged in this thing it would feel kind of like necrophilia oh god and realistic skin is not a phrase that i like saying i know like sex dolls have been a thing for a while yeah yes it's just the ai side it's just the ai thing it's yeah which which but for me that increases the uncanny valley if it's just a limp object yes then that is a necrophilia thing but it's simple yeah you just the fact that it's trying to kind of behave human i think makes makes more makes that reaction that makes that negative uncanny valley reaction a bit stronger Very strange.

2:02:12And also, they put them in odd places, it sounds like. Do they have a sex pavilion here? No, not at - It's in like the health tech section of Hulgi. Yeah, it's Hulgi. Notoriously, right, there was a Bastion show that was rescinded for a - Yeah, Bastion show. Yeah, for a woman sex toy. That was not Lioness. It was Laura DiCarlo. That's it. Yeah. And so they've had this love-hate relationship. I mean, when I was coming 20-some years ago, this was - Oh, my bod was always a thing. well and it was being held at the same time as the adult show well AVN yeah and so people would there would be this kind of crossover and you could go to the party sometimes at AVN and stuff you had to see I had to walk past some of the AVN like expo areas and the booths to get to a Lenovo briefing one time wow that rules it was fun better times I'm so sad I'm so sad I missed it I like the idea that these all these stayed kind of like tech executives having to walk past their arse blaster 5000 or what have you people do with their bums is fine No, it's just very strange to have it like sticking in the middle of like the various health tracking LLMs.

2:03:14Was it LLM powered by any chance? It says AI powered. Yeah, absolutely. Was it AI or LLM powered? It's an LL. I mean, at least like the anime one was more interactable. Oh, so the Project Ava was. Yeah, I meant the sex bot. No, I'm talking about that. Yeah, because it has the AI avatar hooked up to the jacking off machine. And yeah, it is. You got this. So this is like in the NES where you had the robot that would pick up the spinning top and it would match the action on the screen. So you had a physical robot. You had a virtual robot. It's just like the original NES. Yeah. But basically. With fucking.

2:03:51Cock hunt. And it's like right next to like three like smartwatch booths. That was the thing I was saying. That's exactly it. It's like you've got the Bonamax 5000. Can you imagine paying for the smartwatch booth and showing up? It's like, guys, boss, I'm really sorry. They have to stare at this next door. You need to find us. Yeah, we're right by the boner max. The CMO really wants pictures of the booth frontage before we tear down. Can you make sure you get a picture of this? Try not to get the fuckbot in the shot. But to your point, Corey, the CTA has struggled with what it wants to do with this sex technology because we know that with everything sex sells, right?

2:04:28And sex tech will advance faster than any other kinds of tech. Forget about people with accessibility needs, right? And so the CTA knows it needs to cover up some space, but it won't give you a dedicated booth because it somehow wants to be family friendly. Yeah. It's so ridiculous. For all of the kids attending. Right, exactly. Well, now we've turned into basically the games fest or the toy fest that's in New York because of all the robots. I wish. No, I will push back. I agree with you. There's not enough. If you want to make this the goofy dipshit show, I would love to. I would love to see some useless crap that's just kind of funny.

2:05:02But that's the international pavilions because they are like the country of Turkey sponsors 20 entrepreneurs to show up. They're each weirder than the last. A lot of them are really delightful. Shout out to the Singapore. But a lot of those, to give them credit, were not toys. They were like, we made a photonic cell. We made a solar panel thing. We made specific software for this, that, and the other, which is awesome and those people rock. Not fun to talk about on a podcast, but very funny to look at and be like, oh, cool, someone's useful here. And then the rest is just stuff. It is. And the listeners are already like, oh, it's hours of just saying there's nothing here.

2:05:37you fucking come to this and you do a podcast asshole but it's just frustrating because I love a doodad like having Michael on to show us the clicks was nice because it was a thingy and it was so cool actually and also I really do like it and I love Michael and if it was bad I would have been in a real if it was like actually shit I would have genuinely been sad because I would have had to find a way to trash it I did avoid him for a year after trying the first clicks keyboard oh damn oh yeah brutal clicks was that show was show stoppers again this year yeah we just had michael on and we like the clicks thing personally the case not for me yeah but nevertheless it's like at least you're fucking trying to and the other thing that pisses me off is clicks proves that other people could just because android can fit into all sorts of things you could be trying all sorts of weird fucking smartphone shit you could have weird like a tube smartphone girls kinds of tubes at this one when we have a smartphone tube but no it's like how do we charge you for using the chat gpt api i mean there was a time where you go to like guanjo and you go to the big mall and there'd be the phone that was shaped like a marlboro package and hell yeah or sun sun or yeah yeah and that shit rocks we should have more of that but no it's like it's it feels like the most nihilistic ces ever it's just people being like i fear it gets worse from here i feel like this is the beginning so my theory is it actually gets better from here, but the apocalypse is so much worse.

2:07:02Because if you look at this and you realize how much LLM crap there is... Yes, then they'll realize. I think this is a dip here. Yeah, like this will be because, Corey, to your point, oh, the commodity of LLMs. Just because the Chinese models are cheaper doesn't mean that they're margin positive. That's also true. Zupi, Zujin, I forget which one, went public and they spent$300 million in, or 200 and something million dollars in six months and made 27 million dollars in revenue. Not great. I could do that. Yeah, I mean, like, if you want me to lose 200 million dollars, call me. Well, look, if you have$3 million and you're expecting a 27 million dollar return, tell you what, I'll give you a 28 million dollar return.

2:07:42Nice. How would you do it? I will just keep all the 28 million. Right, right, okay. Give 28 million back to you. No, it's like investing in, like, vineyards. Yeah, sure. Yeah. No, it's, and it's like all of these companies that rely on LLMs are going away because they're going to get more expensive. And it's going to be apocalyptic. I think 2027 could be like a really fucked up year for many reasons. But CES 2027. Might be really fun. Might be really, but really empty. You just reminded me what I wanted to talk about before. Which is Pete Wharton. We were talking about him yesterday. So Pete Wharton is an old school hardware hacker specializing in machine learning.

2:08:16And finding cool, like one of the people who was like figuring out that you could use GPUs to do machine learning. a million years ago. And he just demoed on his blog a local AI voice agent running on a system on a chip that costs less than$10. So he's got an SOC. It's like an$8 SOC. And you can put it in one ever. The demo he built was a button on your dishwasher. And you smack the button and you say, my filter is clogged. And it goes through the manual and it finds the relevant passages. Which is just on the chip. And it's all on chip. And we are, again, total cost of goods under$10. He built a whole model for this?

2:08:53It's his own model? Yeah. And all it does is reference a manual? That is the scale of task it can do. So he can make it do other kinds of tasks. But he's like, I can build you an$8 SoC with a model running on it that will help you build your IKEA furniture, whatever. All this kind of, there's a lot of room at the bottom here is what I'm saying. And he has this other post. When I was looking for the post, I found another one, which the title says it all. I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me crying emoji. So here's a guy who does real things that are absolutely sustainable. Like, could you be revenue positive shipping AI models that run on hardware that costs less than$10?

2:09:34I bet you fucking could. Yeah. Right? And like everyone's like, yeah, but the way we raise money is from punters who don't understand the technology and whose only way of assessing the upside is how much money we spend on it. This is the pile of shit big enough has a pony underneath it. Right? And so we have to spend a lot of money to prove to them that we will make a lot of money. If we show them a thing that is profitable because it's very cheap to make, they'll be like, well, there's no upside. I'm just really worried because even in the Indiegogo years, Indiegogo was not everything. This is like AI has taken everything.

2:10:09And people, anyone listening to this being like AI is this or that and the other, like AI is taking over. No. The thing I can remember that most closely mirrors this year was the year that was about the internet of things. Everything was internet of things. It was so freaking annoying. I was so annoyed. I was just like, stop saying fucking internet of things. I'm tired. What's the term? I'm for the - Internet of shit? No, the beacons. I think I had eye beacons 1 million times. It's like, we'll put an eye beacon in it. That year I wanted to vomit. Like fucking Howard, we'll put an eye beacon here.

2:10:39Like it's fucking ridiculous. And where has it gone? Nowhere. It's just smart home now. No, it was just like Mad Libs, like 5G, autonomous, IoT, Bluetooth. But IoT is similar in the sense that it's also wrappers for things. It's also like small little gadgets that don't do much and they're all e-waste now. It doesn't cost as much because of the like none of the LOL side of it. Well, because there's not a GPU service running in the fucking cloud for it. It's just very unfortunate. I think NextCES could be kind of barren because of this, because it's very clear. Like if there were other options, they'd be buying boots.

2:11:14And I don't think there are. Or maybe they were like priced out because there was so much AI stuff. That's very possible. But the thing is, it didn't, it looked kind of sparse too. Like there was a lot more walking room than ever. I feel like - 2003 after the dot-com crash was pretty good. This is actually, how was it? It was full of people doing weird and interesting things. None of which made a mark, I think. But it was a time in which if you came to CES, it was because you had done something very improbable in a time in which there was no tech money. That might be 2027 for real though, because even like LG with this cloyed robot, it's like, hey, check this out.

2:11:55We're doing this thing. Well, we're not doing this thing. And you may be wondering if it does the thing we're talking about. It doesn't, but it's very slow at it. And why do you want this? Well, you can't have it. I have a question for you. By all means. When you say as far as, do you mean specifically some hall, some booths or LVCC in general? The top of the expo center was fucking empty. And I don't just mean like it's the last day. I mean like there were just less things. There was less density. The usual dildo battery security camera area was really not present in the main hall in the same way.

2:12:26In fact, I found way more of those top side in a way that like I wouldn't usually. It's just very strange. And I think there's a strain on venture capital money and private equity money. Well, South by Southwest last year, the trade floor was a quarter of the size. And there was an entire row that was just massage guns. Oh my gosh. I saw a area of the Palazzo where gambling would usually happen that was completely empty. That's more worrying to me than any - Oh, I saw that spot. Yeah. With the velvet ropes around it and they're like vacuuming. I wondered, the reason I asked you - Usually that's vacuuming wallets.

2:12:59The reason I asked you is because the West Hall and the LVCC Central Hall got this whole facelift. I don't know if you've seen it yet. I've been there. Right. This year? Does it look different? It's so different from last year. It is still kind of a slot, but because Central Hall is where Samsung and LG used to have their gigantic booth. But Samsung isn't there. Right. Samsung isn't there. It's doing the win. So I think that contributes to feeling like there's not that much going on in the convention spaces, especially since Central Hall now too with the sort of remodel looks much bigger. And so, you know, consequently like emptier and then has a lot more like glass windows, letting in light, which I love.

2:13:35It's nice. It's nice, but then also makes you feel like you can see daylight and therefore it doesn't feel as packed and crowded. And on top of the fact that a lot of the things are just like... Gone, the LG wall display. Yeah, LG was so muted this year. Usually there's like this, like last year we had that giant transparent motherfucker. I like the year with the big like curved screen. Yes, the canyon of walls. There's no spectacle unless you're a tractor. There's none. It's just, I feel like we're years into just the hubris fest where it's just like, what if we didn't provide anything useful and jumped on the latest trend?

2:14:10It's a shame. And as we come to the end of this first two-hour block, I will just say, I want to find cool stuff. And when we're back next year, which we will be, I hope we find more of it. And if you are someone with the CEA, when you're someone putting stuff here, please think of actual people because it's getting a little sad. But final words, Sherlyn. What is your takeaway from the CES in general? Big question. Huh. Yeah, I thought I had something to say and it's out of my brain now. So I think I've run out of RAM, which everyone will. That's fine. Well, everyone's running out. Davindra was just on talking about the RAM crisis.

2:14:43But thank you for joining us. Thank you for having so many Engadget people on. We've had Carissa. Thanks for having them on, yeah. And no, it's fucking great to actually talk about consumer electronics. And we've, of course, had Garrison Davis and it could happen here. Thank you, Garrison. Of course. And Corey Doctorow will be joining us for the next episode as well. Excellent. Looking forward to it. And I am Ed Zitron. You can please subscribe to my newsletter. Good Lord, I'm not doing a premium this week, so I need the money. More important than that, of course, our dearly departed Sean Paul Adams, who's a friend of the suite, friend of the show, passed last year.

2:15:12We're honoring him by getting you to donate to the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium. His son is epileptic and his family would deeply appreciate your donations. Thank you for listening. We'll be back for one more two-hour episode today, but I guess it'll be towards the end of the day. Either way, thank you for listening. You've all been so wonderful. Send me your feedback. Go to the Reddit. I'm Ed Zitron. Goodbye.

2:15:38Thank 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.

2:16:42A new year doesn't ask us to become someone new. It invites us back home to ourselves. I'm Mike Della Rocha, host of Sacred Lessons, a space for men to pause, reflect, and heal. This year, we're talking honestly about mental health, relationships, and the patterns we're ready to release. If you're looking for clarity, connection, and healthier ways to show up in your life, Sacred Lessons is here for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike Delaroach on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. It's Ed Helms. And I'm Cal Penn, and we are the hosts of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.

2:17:23This week on the podcast, I am talking to film and TV critic, radio and podcast host, and Harry Potter superfan, Rihanna Dillon, to discuss Audible's full cast adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. What moments in this audiobook capture the feeling of the magical world best for you, or just stood out the most? I always loved reading about the Quidditch matches, and I think the audio really gets it because it just plunges you right into the stands. You have the crowd sounds all around you. It is surround sound, especially if you're listening in headphones. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get your podcasts.

2:18:17Everyone needs to take care of their mental health, even running back Bijan Robinson. When I'm on the field and feeling the pressure, I usually just take a deep breath. When I'm just breathing and seeing what's in front of me, everything just slows down. It just makes me feel great before I run the play. Just like Bijan, we all need a strong mental game on and off the field. Make a game plan for your mental health at loveyourmindplaybook.org. Love your mind. Brought to you by the Huntsman Mental Health Foundation, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, and the Ad Council. I'm Maria Hinojosa, host of Latino USA.

2:18:50Venezuelans around the world are celebrating the takedown of former President Maduro, but inside the country there is fear and silence. And in the United States, people are concerned about Donald Trump's rogue tactics. Listen to Latino USA, The Fall of Maduro, and The Rise of an Unconstrained Trump. That's on your iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.