CES 2026: Part Five (Wednesday)

29:13I'm not super pessimistic about CES, despite how ridiculous it is. You've been here long ago now. I don't know. I guess for me, and maybe this is the point too. You love leaflets. I love leaflets. There's probably some value in just getting a bunch of people into one place. Sure. We don't have a lot of that anymore. you know we're gonna we're gonna rotate our hours we're gonna go to an ad break coming up now an advertisement for um chumlee the robot that's based on chumlee from p-a-w-n stars a word i cannot say because people think i am talking about pornography

29:57run a business and not thinking about podcasting think again more americans listen to podcast than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. When you feel uncomfortable, what do you put on? Biggie. You put on Biggie when you feel uncomfortable?

30:33Because I want to get confident. This is DJ Hester Prince's Music is Therapy, a new podcast from me, a DJ and licensed therapist that asks one simple question. Who do you want to be? And what's the song that can take you there? Music changes what you feel. And what you feel changes what you do, right? That moment where a song shifts something inside you, that's where transformation starts. This year, I'm talking to experts across every area of life, like personal finance icon Gene Chatsky, New York Times journalist David Gellis, relationship legend Dan Savage, human connection teacher Mark Groves, and the man who shaped my ear more than anyone, Questlove.

31:12They'll bring the strategies. I'll pair them with the right records and will teach you how to use the music to make change stick. This isn't just a podcast. It's unconventional therapy for your entire year. Listen to DJ Hester-Krin's Music is Therapy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

31:35And we're back in the room, and once again, we're joined by Carissa Bell of Engadget. Hello. Jared Newman of the Advisor at Newsletter. Yo. I nearly said newsletter wrong. And of course, Chloe Radcliffe, actress of Is This Thing On? Yeah. And The Stand-Up Comedian. Yeah. And we're back and we're just talking about how and why people do CES. And I'm getting this prevailing just feeling about conferences in general, Jesus Christ. They are just there to give people something to do. Like they put people in a room. Yeah, there's to an extent, but like I'm going to admit, I don't go to conferences in general.

32:09I never have run PR firms since 2012. Like I've just not gone. It's never affected. Every time I've gone to a conference other than CES, I've just been like, why? And it's like, oh, we got to meet salespeople from this. And it's like, okay, but why though? And there's so much stuff here. This year feels like a landmark year for just shit that don't exist. And I say that remembering the Web3 metaverse year. Even that one, there seemed to be like we have a new thinner TV that's also wet for some reason. Like they were trying new things with TVs and soundbars. And I guess we've got some of that. But it feels dominated by just vaporware, vaporware.

32:49like for maybe it was worse during the indiegogo boom you remember the 2014 2015 indiegogo boom when there was just down in the bowels of the venetian eureka hall where it was just like the most insane shit like it's a cooler that's also a razor blade to kill people but actually i want to go into that no that's the thing indigo the indiegogo fraud generation was fucking cool because it was just shit that was impossible to make and they we've raised five hundred thousand dollars the money laundering operations that go through indiegogo have funded this and i will deliver it in 10 years and then the company will shut down in three like that i found kind of like honest laundry folding robots yeah the laundry may r.i.p in piss like they the most obvious fake one i respect they got like it was like a tower laundry man yeah it was like this weird tower and it was never clear how it worked and every year they were like next year this is hitting consumers and then they just died.

33:45The only laundering that Indiegogo can do and robots can do is financing. But I feel like this is like a legendary year because they're trying to pretend robots work. Because the reason you can't do robots for mass consuming, mass consumer audiences is because training for edge cases is fucking difficult. I don't know. It's a shame because I'd love a robot. I think a laundry folding robot is like a billion dollar idea if it actually works. I have this tube idea. Let's revisit the tubes. Have you heard of Indiegogo? Actually. Yeah, the tube idea is a little real for Indiegogo. We've got to do like a movie that never gets made or like a card game made by like a disgraced sub stacker or a board game by a guy with an allegations section on Wikipedia.

34:38Like that's all we do on here. it's just weird because I say this with a little sadness because like I may seem like a cynic but I'm broken hearted romantic if we had like a natural laundry folding robot that's cool that'd be cool I'd love that did you did you were on the show floor yes so what did you see what did you like that's a fucking long clip I walked around I walked around Eureka Park today and I walked around I was about to say Kentia Hall those of us who have been to E3 that's a whole other yeah Kentia Hall if you don't know is so e3 is the former games journalism they're the games equivalent of this show and kentia hall was like the scariest place to go with a media badge you'd go down there every head would snap to your media badge stop citizen like morrowind like you'd stolen a piece of bread from a shop keep and they'd be like because they want to talk to you because games is just games right about the game this was all the very small like developers that had nothing going on and so like not like you know like they're not like activision yeah this is it for them yeah and i went to eureka park and everything i saw was a chat gpt rapper and i i went upstairs and i was like fuck me up show me something and i saw a wi-fi barbecue i feel like i see one of them every fucking year and i wanted to see so i didn't even see anything funny i was i was trying to noodle on this idea uh like i don't think this is the right term but like ai slop product do you You know what I'm talking about?

36:04No, no, there's a real slop nature to it. It was just like, what is it? Hey, you want to document analysis? Yeah, well, so like, well, like an example I'm thinking of is like, I think it was Hisense, like they had a oven and then the oven had like a very small display on it, smaller than a phone. And they were showing like, you could be like, I'm in the mood for pizza. And then it would like generate a pizza recipe for you. You know what I mean? So it's like the recipe itself is slop, but then also like the implementation of AI is slop. Do you know what I mean? You're just looking at this tiny little screen.

36:38It's like, roll out the dough. And again, and I've made this point before on this very podcast earlier today and yesterday, but just to reiterate, if you are going to look up a pizza recipe, you're going to look it up on your phone, which is a small screen. Of course. And then if you look it up on your smart oven, you are also looking it up on a small screen. It is not eliminating any step in the process or any screen in the... Oh, it will turn the oven on for you. Oh, fuck. Fuck, it'll turn the oven on? Fuck. Has this ever happened to you and just bashing your hands on different parts of the oven?

37:13How I turn oven on. I am woman. I know this instinctive, but I do not make happen. It's like a Tim Robinson bit. What do I do? What do I do? And then the screen goes, turn on oven. Finally. It turns the oven on? It's like the thing I keep coming back to that I actually liked was just a$1 ,500 TV with a built-in soundbar with like micro led i was just like fuck yeah great awesome tvs are getting thinner and they're getting soundbars in them and that's why everything has ai in it because it's very clear that it's becoming really cheap to make thin and big good-looking televisions the actual difference between like a fancy fucking lg1 and a combination of different letters you can buy on amazon that most people can't fucking tell i'm sorry it's it's that is that's a whole other thing but yeah there's like micro led and now my micro rgb i don't know i don't uh both of them if you stand in front of them it looks like you're like looking into the eye of god uh but like they're kind of the same but i kind of i love it i genuinely genuinely love the fact that like a good looking tv is easy to get now and you can get them everyone they're really like really good like even the kind of cheap cheap ones are pretty good like yeah i can notice the difference because i stare at screens all the time but i think most people would be really happy otherwise i'm just like show i want to like some i genuinely i would love to i would love to be taken by the magic of ces it doesn't the magic's got like what do you think would other than a laundry folding robot what do you think would like what would take you what would so i think there are like magical ideas they've had like wireless power that if phil hears me talking come and fucking kill me but like wireless power bluetooth that works perhaps unbreakable bluetooth would be very popular at ces where bluetooth my fucking headphones cut out constantly like something like that might be kind of a boring demo but it's like i don't know a wi-fi router that doesn't stop working after six months like every problem is just like shit sucks tp link has a router with a ai uh agent now that you can talk to that's cool i got a tp decker tp link deco i to throw away because it's so fucking shit.

39:25It won't work, but you can yell at it and it'll do therapy for you. You're from TP-Link. You listen to this. Deco fucking sucks. It blows. You suck. I spent so much money on that. I can't even fucking sell them on eBay. God damn. Did you see the IKEA smart home stuff? No, tell me. Tell me about that. That was one that we thought was pretty cool. A couple of my colleagues saw it. They have a whole new line of smart plugs, smart light bulbs, connected home stuff. Very kind of boring, but the stuff that you want from ikea like cheap connected light bulbs and smart plugs that will actually work and like work with real iot standards that you want and not you know i don't know if anyone here has tried to install smart bulbs in their homes and they're they're extremely expensive or they're like really cheap like off-brand ones from amazon that never end up working or like the app breaks or the company goes under and like yeah you kind of want a company that's used to making 40 million of everything to do this kind of thing because then you just know it's always like an industrial yeah it's gonna work and it will they can do it at scale in a way that makes us be able to pay yeah a reasonable price we have we have four uh light bulbs in our bedroom and so i will be like alexa turn off the lights and about about like 10 of the time one of the lights will stay on of the four i have i have lutron in my house and one day the box just stopped connecting so I just have to use the fucking light switch and I'm so spiteful that I just refuse.

40:51But wait, it sounds like these things work though, Carissa. Yeah, I haven't tried them, but I mean, it's Ikea so I feel like I have a decent amount of confidence that they can do this. I hope so. I mean, I have some smart light bulbs in my home and they're like an off-brand Chinese one and they're the kind you can change color and we set them to specific colors for the specific rooms but we can never change them back and then like every few months, like the app breaks and then they get like the totally wrong color and then we just can't use those lights until we fix it. It's so frustrating. It's like the product I want from CES is shit that just works and they don't care.

41:26That's a shame as well because I actually like the smart home stuff. I like the Roseanne Clapper except you use your voice. It's fun. It's good. But again, one thing breaks. It's like Wi-Fi that works. I don't think they'll make a good CES demo. But I was looking through your Engadget coverage and I want to talk about the dreamy robot vacuum with the legs. Oh, I saw that too. The Cyber X. Yes. What are these legs? Tell me, how do they, do they protrude? Do they crawl? So the promotional image they sent me at first had it kind of like standing upright like a spider on these legs. Terrifying. But they're sort of like more like treads, like legs that kind of have these like rubber treads.

42:07And so when I saw it move, it moves more like a tank. It kind of rolls up the stairs and down the stairs. They look like little chainsaws. It's like a chainsaw man. It's terrifying. What was not clear though is that that whole unit with the legs is actually just like a little docking station for the actual robot vacuum. Oh, it's like a vehicle. Yeah, so the actual robot vacuum zooms in there and parks itself and then the thing goes up the stairs and then it can send out the robot to actually do the vacuuming. What this means though is that it can't actually clean the stairs themselves. Apparently Roborocks can climb and vacuum the stairs.

42:42this one which is just a concept uh can just like move up i'm showing everyone just for the listeners at home i'm showing everyone a video which works really well yeah it's a concept so i'm giving them some affordance for how slow this is i find this kind of cool i kind of like i like it you know what when it comes to robot vacuums i'm oddly like generous especially because this is just like very fun to watch it's like kind of shoving its crotch into the stairs it slides up yeah and then when it makes that bend and it starts to go down it's kind of funny because it's sort of like half of it goes up i i think that's cool i think it's cool yeah like people have asked for years for a robot vacuum that can do like multiple floors yeah without having to pick it up and i like them i just find the robot rock that i have doesn't clean dust sometimes which is a classic exhibit of the floor yeah but you know what the road i feel like robot vacuums are like the state like they're the like um block and tackle of ces you see i've been seeing robot vacuums here for years it's like watch watching them keep going like watch it hey little buddy oh you got a fucking arm now nice i feel so uh biased against robot vacuums because i think i've like lived with a roommate who had one and it never worked yeah that was like one experience a long time ago, but, uh, just like less than a month ago, I shot a whole production piece in Denver and our whole small crew was staying in one big Airbnb in, in like this big, big fancy house in Denver.

44:21And they had, uh, robot vacuums on every floor because for this exact reason. So I bet these people would love robot vacuums that can climb stairs, but they didn't turn off. I don't know fucking why. Whatever it was, all of these robot vacuums were programmed to turn on at midnight and they were so loud and so scary and you had no idea what was going on. And so we, like, my boyfriend and I were sleeping in a bed here functionally and just we were asleep. And then from that far away you just hear this horrible, like,

44:58and then downstairs, downstairs uh what my one of our crew who was staying in the basement her robot vacuum actually pushed her door open came into her room in the middle of the night and she was like i genuinely thought i had an invader like a home and i would have i thought i was going to be assaulted and it's just a roomba what a horrifying i would never have a personal vendetta against robot vacuums It's also just like, the problem is, is that like every robot thing, it's the edge cases. It's the shit between the corners. That's actually the problem when it comes to sweeping the floor. That's pretty easy.

45:36If you have a perfectly flat surface, it's good. It's just like, we all want it to work. Have you tried any of the wet, dry ones? You've seen those? I'm intrigued by them, but I've never. Just the idea of like having a little robot looking just spooge on my floor feels like, like I don't, they already seem to do pretty bad with the brushes. I don't want them to have the ability to like, sorry, ejaculate. It's like an egg. God. Yeah, I'm sorry. All right. Oh, buddy, you got excited. Calm down, mate. I think that's kind of, you know, that's the core disconnect of CS, right? Like you just want stuff that works a little better.

46:15Yeah. And that's not something that you can have a CS booth about. Like it finally works. What if it did more but didn't work? that's often what it is though that's another CES tagline it does more the dreamy vacuum with the arm it can change out the arm it has a little cubby in it's station and it can change out the little claw thing for like a vacuum nozzle and like reach that arm up and like suck well it's not that long but it can it's like go into corners or little spots that how can it tell where it needs to go I don't know. I asked them at their booth because they were demonstrating the kind of claw arm, just sort of picking up balls and putting them in a basket.

46:57And I asked them if they could show me it going to fetch its little attachments. And they said, no. Oh, they do not work. That just means they don't work. That doesn't happen. They looked very alarmed that I asked. Oh yeah. No one's asked. I love these moments though, where you can see nobody, like there's like 2000 members of the media here. And I'm just being like, can you show me it do that i keep asking um but who cares when they tell me something because i just have so little repercussions for being this is why i asked you to be here did anyone have an answer uh it usually takes them like a couple it takes people a couple tries And then I would say probably two thirds of people have got, have been able to answer the, but who cares question.

47:50But it's just so, it's so clear that like nobody's prepared. And I understand that I'm being like incredibly brisk about it, but I'm also like, I don't know, man, you should have an answer for that. I feel like you should. Yeah. I like, there was one like cable stand where it's like, it looks really fancy and he's telling me all about it. And I was like, as far as I could glean, the only thing special about the cable was you can make it extra long. It wasn't, I was like, oh, are you saying like, you can change out the heads of the cable and you can whatever, whatever. There were like all these little pieces.

48:23And then he was like, no, no, it's all the same head. You can't change it out. It's only USB-C, but you can connect them. And I was like, so it's just really long. Connect what? two usbc cables to each other to make a long usbc cable and i went and i was like but who cares like why not just buy a lot i sure i guess i i no i get it like there it's just this kind of stuff where it's like i just want to know the answer to so what it's kind of alarming that everyone doesn't have that answer yeah that's the thing i i yeah i understand that i am being annoying and in your face and i get that you're saying that and you're being nice but also this feels like you should just be able to explain real totally real easy totally because otherwise you paid like 25 000 a day to be in like the south hall to show off the goobis microwave with ai or whatever it's called.

49:26There's often, there is often that question when you're looking at something. It's like, well, why couldn't I just do this? And then, I don't know. Yeah. Neither do they. Yeah. Yeah. Well, like I was at Lenovo's booth today and they have their own A &M. What are they doing? What are they up to? I think I talked about this last year too. They got cool hardware stuff. Okay. I want to hear. Please. That sounds fun. They have a gaming laptop. It's a concept, of course. But to their credit, some of those concept things they turn into products. Yeah, Henry Casey was mentioning the turning screen they actually made.

49:54Yes, and then they have a gaming laptop that goes from like regular 16 by 9 into like ultra wide hell yeah yeah i fucking love that shit i i know i love that shit great it's like probably insanely expensive but so what i'm guessing is it like you pull out the screen it's a rollable display if you just press a button and yes let's fucking go yeah great consumer electronics show show me some weird shit great but that was like in the back and then they have uh an ai chat bot for windows What is the reason they claim that is? I could not get an answer about that.

50:32Usual AI stuff. So just a large language. You have a document, yeah, it's like you have a document, and then you ask about the document, and it tells you about the document, and then summarizes your notification. And it was like, well, why wouldn't I just use Copilot or ChatGPT? And there wasn't really a clear... Get him out of here. Get him out of here now. No, just fucking, you'll leave it. Guards? Guards. Yeah, that's. They also had people telling me that it was on-device language models and then like the product manager was like, oh no, that's incorrect. Wait, what's the? So large language models traditionally are run in the cloud, so you have to have a persistent internet connection.

51:10There are on-device language models. They require a shit ton of RAM to run because large language models are extremely RAM dependent. Are you, have you downloaded functionally, I don't, I'm asking the stupidest question. Have you downloaded a file that is the size of the large language model? Like, do you, are you holding the whole? No, no, not in this case. The product manager. Yes. In this case, they were not. In theory, yeah, you would have to have this like pretty powerful computer and a lot of space and whatever. And it still wouldn't work as well as like chat. Yeah. But yeah, I was asking about it because you're dealing with like, they were taking screenshots of what you were doing so that they could summarize and it's like, well, I don't really want that data going up who knows where.

51:57It's like, finally, you can tell me what I'm looking at. How else would I know? I'm not looking at it. That's such a shit because Lenovo makes some reliable shit. And was that Legion Go, their handheld gaming PC? It's pretty fucking cool. Did they have anything like that? No new gaming handheld stuff this year. Well, thank God we're using all the world's high bandwidth RAM to generate various wife tubes. Like, it's just such a shame. Now, Carissa, I'm going to change the weird company to choose for something that is actually kind of interesting. Meta's doing some stuff with this armband, right?

52:32I was nearly ready to make fun of it as an artist myself, but this one that can see facial gestures, or like emotions and such, for the blind, though. Yes. So this is actually a startup that is, so the startup is independent from Meta, but they made this wrist-based like wearable device that's supposed to work in conjunction with Meta's smart glasses. So the idea is that you're wearing Meta's smart glasses. They have these kind of like real-time AI capabilities. So I'm talking to you, the video is on. That's going back to an app that's run by the startup. the app can detect they have these models to detect kind of like facial expressions, gestures there's a whole bunch of stuff you can customize and then this wristband will send a signal to the wristband and it vibrates in different patterns based on like if you do a thumbs up it might vibrate like in a certain way if you do a thumbs down or you frown or you know for someone who's visually impaired that actually sounds quite useful if somebody is talking to a blind person and they give a thumbs up that person yeah actually that's a good that's a good point anybody who that's a good point anybody who thinks that they can communicate with a blind person via hand gestures should be walked off you are doing the jack off gesture at me my armband's fucking telling me you are just doing this with your hand yeah well i just could do more subtle ones too and i think it's also they said that you know there's people who you know they're talking to their kids and they're like oh i never get that feedback from my kids that's like knowing how they're yeah that's their expressions they did get back in line no no they did say that yeah they think that perhaps there's a use case for people who are neurodivergent who just like could see a facial expression but just like don't know what it means but i say this as someone with autism if i heard someone say that to me they might be blind by the end of the conversation i'm i will say this if you're a visually impaired listener to the show i would actually love easy at better offline.com please email me because i'm i can see like i don't experience your life i'm actually genuinely curious if these things happen because i know last year there was this cane that talked and we kind of like like like we made fun of it but it was like people were like no this is actually really useful and i want to know because i don't want to give people shit for something that's actually useful the fact they're mentioning the neurodivergent thing really fucking pisses me off though because that is like the experience of someone who does not have autism or anything related to that because it's just like that's not how it fucking works we're not sitting there like with what is the um the bloke from lie to me or is just looking for micro expressions nobody saw that show okay i saw it okay yeah it's just mostly it's just uh tim roth going you lie mate and then like uh every scene is cut between like like a picture of like colin powell and bill clinton like frowning at someone is like frowning if they should have to lie to me bloke at cs you know what i'm it's weird meta seems to have like oddly interesting accessibility stuff though like i have a mate who works over there.

55:31It's like, they seem to be trying something there. And then there's all the other stuff that Meta does, like 10 % of their revenue being from fraud in 2024, which is real. Does that mean that somebody high up in some pyramid at Meta is actually well-intentioned? Yes. I must be clear. I think Meta is a deeply evil organization run by a scumbag. And when Mark Zuckerberg, I assume from natural causes, passes from this world, I'll throw a fucking party for that piece of shit. that being said um there are people at meta i'm familiar with inaccessibility in particular actually give a shit yeah yeah yeah it's just they're not running the company and i think it might be sadly like an after effect of the larger product but at the same time if there's some fucking good from that it's just it's hard to get excited about something from yeah exactly it's like especially because like my the only meta product i unashamedly loved was the portal the portal is great it's because it's weirdly hard to find a thing to call someone from a TV and like on Christmas my kid and I call my parents and it's like it's easy for my dad and my mom to work and they just click and it works and they of course discontinued this product because Meta is not yeah Meta is not about connecting you to people it's about showing you either like dogs barking or like dog whistles mostly AI dogs barking at this point Yeah, like the worst AI stuff.

56:56AI generated like sprouts another head and then that head starts barking. So I'm like being like reverse gang stalked by Meta though because I don't get any AI slop. Oh, really? I've never been shown any. I don't know that I get shown AI stuff either. I've seen other people's feeds and they are just like slop. I have a friend who's exclusively AI. I get Gen Z people showing a clearly homeless person pictures of brain raw. And this person in distress, just being like, why am I being harassed by a man with broccoli hair and eight cameras? And it's like, oh, God. But luckily, I've trained my thing.

57:35So all I get is like silk and wind howls now. Like, shout out to Chloe and Abby and all those wonderful dogs. Everyone knows what I'm talking about. Just moving on. But yeah, like, I've had to train my feed. But it's a shame because it's like, I guess at some scale with a company like that, you do eventually do a good thing. Just most of the other things are bad. Do they still support the portal? Does it work? It works for now. What is the portal? It's like literally it's just an HDMI camera you connect to your TV and you can connect to someone else. It worked really well. And you're looking at it.

58:05It's a FaceTime call for your TV. Yeah, and it follows you quite well as well. It was a cool product, which is why they stopped it, because we can't have that. We can't be having you connect to people on Facebook. No, no, because you know what that does? It takes you off of Facebook. Yeah, you can't be shown the feed. But it's interesting to see them try shit. it's just there's all the other stuff also it's kind of rare to see a hyperscaler here because like google microsoft amazon they don't really amazon will have like a side thingy i remember last year when i had a picture of the smiling man on my badge and i went into the amazon thing a woman stopped me and went wow she's i mean there are no good reactions to that picture and everyone knows it but yeah it's it's they usually don't have a presence so meta trying to do stuff is good?

58:51Like, right? I don't know. Yeah, I'm like, try, I guess. Everyone is looking quite pained. I mean, the smart glasses are interesting. They, you know, I've written a lot about this. I have very mixed feelings about them. Go on. Because they're genuinely good products. You roast me every time I post on my Instagram. I don't roast you. I don't roast you. I'm nice to you. When did I last roast you? Come on. No, you don't roast me. But I did one time post a poll of like, do these look good on me? And you were like, and you were the first person instantly was like, no, absolutely not. It's the Roy Orbison glasses.

59:26But anyway, you have complex feelings about them. It's true. Because they are actually like a good product if you use them. They work really well. The AI, some of the AI stuff, you're going to hate this, it's cool. The translation features, I've used them on vacation. Consistently, that's the only feature where like everyone's kind of like that and dictation and stuff is kind of works. They're good. The display glasses, they look unfortunate. Yeah. No, I've used one. I use them on the show. They're kind of cool. Yeah, they're cool. You know, I tried today. They just launched the handwriting feature.

59:57What's that? So, you know, they use this neural band that you can control gestures. So if you want to - So the glasses, you put them on and you control it with the wristband just for clarity's sake. Yeah, you kind of do little swipes and that's how you control the interface. And it works pretty well. And it does. And so up to now, if you get like a WhatsApp message and you want to reply, basically you have to like use your voice to like dictate a reply. so now what they're going to do is they have a feature called handwriting where you can basically just trace letters with your hand like on your leg, on a table you know just say cool like just do the letters and then that will appear on the screen and I tried to say it was actually like it worked really well it did not work with cursive although I'm the only old person who probably would even try that well I mean that's I cannot like dyspraxia, physical disability where like writing is one of the worst things it's like eventually painful for i kind of want to go and hunt this down just to be like yeah let's fucking go mate i have a disability let's go but actually you know maybe it works but wait so it's how you write them do you do it by letter like yeah so you just do it letter by letter and then when you want to do a space you do like a left to right when you want to delete something you can go right to left i'm oddly like intrigued by this because there's when they brought swipe i don't know if you remember it's like when you just drag the yeah it's now fairly common but it like that works pretty well oh yeah i love that i'm kind of like all right meta if you want to do you want a whole booth for swipe at ces no they did one year swipe i think actually had like a small booth i swear yeah it sounds like something plausible and i just mandela affected it into the world it's just like youtube videos popping up no it's i i can't believe like meta fucking meta is the company that brought something that worked to ces oh god it's like it's like a three-headed dog being born disgusting i mean i think what you were what you were saying earlier about basically the trend is the most pragmatic things.

1:01:59are the things that actually will help the world and that consumers actually want and actually need. But they just are the least shiny and they get the least positive feedback and they hit the fewest headlines. Yeah. And if you allow me to tell a brief story. Please, please. Close out this. This is, okay, here we go. I think you're, for the first minute of this, you're going to go, why are you telling this story? And then I think you will understand. um for my uh wonderful boyfriend's birthday earlier this year uh i had a couple grand plans i have this like very vivid memory of him having when we first started dating a couple years ago having this like plug by his bed that had multi cords coming out of it like a little octopus setup kind of thing and he would move it from next to his bed to his office and then from his office to wherever we were going.

1:02:53And I, two years ago, I was like, it would be awesome to get him a second one of those so that he didn't have to move it around. And then he also thinks that the M &M's store in Times Square is very funny. And so I was like, I also will get him some M &M's store branded merchandise. And then I think I had a third idea that I don't remember now. And then it was the day before my boyfriend lives in London. It was the day before I was, I think it was the day that I was flying to London. Had not purchased any of this. Went to the Times Square store in London. The M &M's, I'm sorry, the M &M's store in Times Square.

1:03:29Couldn't find anything that he would want. Got him a pair of boxer shorts that I knew he wouldn't like. It's not the type that he wears. But I was like, at this point, I really have backed myself into a corner. Landed in London. Went immediately to multiple department stores looking for this type of cable. Whatever. None of them had the setup that I wanted. I wound up buying, what's the fancy? It's like Macy's. No, it's like a step down from that. It's a two word, two name. John Lewis. John Lewis. John Lewis.

1:04:01I fucking wish. Yeah. So you went to John Waters. Went to John Lewis, bought him a plug and two cables that all were sold separately. Couldn't figure out what the third, like couldn't find the third thing, whatever. I wound up for his birthday. And just for context, the year before he had turned 40 and I had gotten him a vintage Tottenham Hotspur, which is the soccer team that he supports, warm up jacket from the year that he became a fan, 1993, like went hunted on eBay, found the exact. It was this incredible gift. And this year I brought him Eminem's boxers and a plug and two cords. And he was like, you are the idiot husband and I am the long suffering wife.

1:04:44and fair point. But the entire point of this story is out of all of the presents I have gotten him over the last two years, you want to know what he fucking uses every fucking day? The plug. The cable. And the cables. And I'm like, see, it wasn't a bad present. And you are still the fucking husband. I'm still the husband. You're still the husband. You're still the husband who got the gift. They're like, look, it's good. It's good. You use it. It's working. You like it. You're happy. And it was expensive. stop muttering under your breath when I mention Christmas alright we're going to rotate to our next guest the next advertisement is brought to you by Blort the sun cream for dogs run a business and not thinking about podcasting think again more Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora and as the number one podcaster iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.

1:05:44So 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. When you feel uncomfortable, what do you put on? Biggie. You put on Biggie when you feel uncomfortable? Because I want to get confident. This is DJ Hester Prince's Music is Therapy. a new podcast from me, a DJ and licensed therapist that asks one simple question. Who do you want to be? And what's the song that can take you there?

1:06:20Music changes what you feel and what you feel changes what you do, right? That moment where a song shifts something inside you, that's where transformation starts. This year, I'm talking to experts across every area of life, like personal finance icon Gene Chatzky, New York Times journalist David Gellis, relationship legend Dan Savage, human connection teacher Mark Groves, and the man who shaped my ear more than anyone, Questlove. They'll bring the strategies. I'll pair them with the right records and we'll teach you how to use the music to make change stick. This isn't just a podcast. It's unconventional therapy for your entire year.

1:06:56Listen to DJ Hester-Krin's Music is Therapy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:07:10Welcome back to the show. I'm Ed Zitron. I'm joined by Carissa Bella van Gadget. Hello, hello. Jared Newman of the Advisorator Newsletter. Hey. And Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards. I am loving the DriveTime Radio DJ version of Ed Zitron. I'm really enjoying it. Are you even doing this all day? Yeah, I really, I'm going to be. Has it gotten old yet? Not for me. Have you taken reader questions? I would love them. If you want it easier, betteroffline.com, I'll answer all your questions. No, you should do it live. No, I've been Daniel Goodman, my producer. Sorry, my producer is Matt Ossowski, but Daniel produces one in person.

1:07:43It's not a fair. And Bahid as well. Nevertheless, we've been working on it, but I think the idea of like a drive time show with me is a really, you don't need to, you don't want to have that unholy force come out of the world. But Robert, you've got a stack of paper in your crusade against trees. I do. I do. I hate trees. I love printed advertisements for products that are going to destroy the company releasing them. Yes, and I've been collecting quite a few. These are just the ones that I managed to grab out of my bag quickly. Nice, but talk to me about some of the things you've seen today. Well, I mean, easily the most impressive product that's at the show today.

1:08:20And there's a wide variety of stuff. There's like apparently some sort of like magnetically fired net gun for taking out drones. Oh, okay. You know, there's all sorts of incredible, like, different, like, smart vehicle products, like, different kind of electric engines and, like, all sorts of crazy new battery and solar technology. But it's the AI that's really set off the convention this year. Everyone's talking about AI. And there's no AI product that people are talking about more than AI Moon, the world's first Zodiac AI fairy. Oh, my fucking God. I mean, obviously. Please. Like, look at the – I mean, I would – We've described them as like if a furry, that's not a nice joke.

1:09:05If a furry had fetal alcohol syndrome, right? Like that's kind of like how these look to me. I don't mean that like negative. It's just a description. Yeah. And these are to replace your astrologer. You know, they're trying to get rid of astrologers. They're coming after our scam artists. They're coming after the scam artists today. The newspapers are going to shut down. They already took classifieds away. And for one thing, I cannot tell how much is AI generated of the pictures of people in this brochure. Everything looks a little wrong to me. Can I? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They brag that they have a proprietary astrology engine with a birth horoscope and a composite chart analysis, a long-term memory system, so it gets to know you better with every chat, and a personalized personality that's customizable based on user data.

1:09:56um they're good as friends as emotional comfort uh they brag that it can help you cure certain problems that you might have uh so i'm gonna say the other ad i've got yes i'm gonna say jesus christ first of all i don't think the audience could possibly know how low resolution these images are badly made it's like and you've got some yeah here's the thing because there's like astrology where it's like based on like when you were born and what times and like there's also like thoughts this is not that this is like various photos that i okay this is like did they photoshop this thing in that's what they don't quite look right and i can't tell if that's just because they used ai photos or if there's just like a deep well of madness at the center of this are these physical objects yeah yeah they're little furby sized objects that uh give you are like horoscope chatbots that are supposed to like learn and evolve the more they work with you and they're also supposed to like counsel you and be like quasi-therapists so they they had like four different archetypes of these robots that they were advising one is the relationship advisor filter out toxic filter out the toxic making the ones you love making the sorry making the ones you love cherish you even more which is a weird sentence first off like okay sure uh and this one is sharp tongue emotionally rich sharp intuition strong empathy and sensible and obviously it's a scorpio um and then the capricorn one is your career lucky charm it cures overthinking which might be a violation of fda advertising uh here's inaction masters hustling and career building i want to know how it cures inaction just by it's so horrifying you make it yeah i need to get up and leave my house to get away from the doll.

1:11:50Yeah, and then there's the joyful protector. Tap once to ditch the mental overload. Stay upbeat and carefree 24-7. And I really wanted to try these out, but they did not seem to be functioning. At least the demo I got, I couldn't really hear it. And it just wasn't connecting, I guess. That's been an issue, because I've tried a bunch of different... We slapped... We gave access to Gemini, or to fucking chat GPT to a ring or to a pencil or something like that. And most of the ones, when I'd ask like, can I try it? They're like, well, the signal's not really working right now. That's been a lot though, because the wifi doesn't work and all of these things are off device.

1:12:31Yeah. Well, and that's one of the products that I did really like was from, I initially just discovered the company because I saw their name and I was like, that can't be an American company because they would not have picked this name. And it's for, they do translation-based AI products and the company's name is Trans AI. Oh, I saw that. So I just kind of like, that got me looking. But then their products were actually really neat. They had a device that's like a transcription tool. It's about the size of a smartphone. It's got a screen, it looks nice. It's got a swiveling camera that has like a little engine on it.

1:13:03And so you can just set it down when you're doing an interview and it'll transcribe that. But it also, it acts as a translator. It's got like 150 languages. Like you can have translate concrete, which a bunch of products do. That actually sounds cool. A ton of people are doing that. And this was on, I remember them saying this was all on device. And it's on device. That's what I really liked because a lot of people are offering, this is a translator, but it's in the cloud. Yeah. Or it's, you're literally like chat GPT is on it too. And like, so you want me to have like interviews that might be sensitive and then throw that shit back to chat GPT or elsewhere on the, no, I want it on device.

1:13:36And especially with these cheap companies, you know they're not paying the extra to keep it. So it's not being used to this training data. Yeah, and that will be, TransAI is going to have this out. If you just Google TransAI Kickstarter, they've got a Kickstarter going to fund this device, which I didn't get to test it fully. I didn't get to like hold and look at it. It seemed at least physically well-made. Like it's a good industrial design. I can't, well, I did. I mean, there's only so much you can try standing around. They did give me though, a set of wireless earbuds that are automatic translators.

1:14:07Okay. So I am going to get to try that out. I like that. So we'll see how well it works. Were the earbuds on device as well? No, no, no, no. Those are because they're just little earbuds, right? That's cool. It may just be, though, that it downloads enough onto your phone. I haven't gotten to try that yet. I feel like in a few years, anything that's left of the AI bubble will all be on device just because nobody trusts this shit. Right. And nobody wants to pay for it. No. Everyone wants to pay for it. And for stuff that's really crucial, like being able, like if you're trying to sell, like you can have conversations when you're traveling around the world, maybe in like weird off-grid locations, I don't want to have to have like 5G.

1:14:49I don't want to have to connect to an app, right? We were just saying that earlier. It's like if you're in somewhere where you desperately need the translation, there's no English speakers around, it's probably also not a Wi-Fi rich environment. Yeah. And you have more experience of this, I think, than anyone. And you'd always prefer to have a person, but that's not always super feasible. I mean, always. So what else you got in your pile of papers? Okay, let's see. What else do I have in my... Well, I've got this book that I can't wait to read, Patterns for Building AI Agents by Sam Bogwat, who is the co-founder and...

1:15:18That's a great name. I think it's just a normal name. Sam Bogwat is some... Co-founder and CEO of something called Master AI. I don't know what it is, but 11 of these were sitting out at a bus stop on the way to the convention center. So I just went ahead and grabbed one. It's like when you're walking around Brooklyn, you find a Scientology thing. Yeah. yeah it might be a cold i i have not confirmed it's not a cold okay so okay this guy the patterns for building it sam what one um yeah i i don't know i'll look at this later and i'll tear oh yeah this is oh actually i can't read this is the sequel to principles of building ai agents so oh okay you got to read the first one you can't watch the empire strikes back first um sorry i found the name this is the device i was talking about the ai the on the world's first on device, AI meeting note taker, the trans AI note.

1:16:04You can like see, it's like a nice looking gadget. By the way, there was another device called trans AI or trans, it's something with trans and AI in the name. And it was a voice cloning. It was a translator that tried to make your voice sound like it was in the other language. Oh, that's kind of cool. Yeah. It was a little unsettling. That's, that's really good for fraud. Like that really is going to hyper charge. It's great for to take advantage of a lot of French people at scale. And it's just hard to do right now. Yeah, I'm just reading this agent book, Example Coding Agents. Replit Agent feeds errors back into context and kicks off an not-made feedback loop.

1:16:42Based on everything I've ever read about their company, that is wrong. It may be. Just the fraud masters. There was, oh, there was the Cybopal, which is, it was one of those products where I can see the cool in this, but it doesn't work very well. It's supposed to be a sight-tracking, intelligent monitor that moves on its own with your head. I can see the value. As you move it. Now, obviously, you don't want it to just physically move whenever you move your head, because that would be a nightmare. That would literally be hell. If this gadget is just constant, as you're like, I've got to move over and take a hit of a vape pen or something.

1:17:20So they had to figure out what is an easy, seamless, unobtrusive way for you to tell this thing to move. And they settled on a complex series of different hand gestures that you have to use. You have to go aim at one of two different sensors. And first, the lady who was like the PR representative that was supposed to show it off tried to. And about one out of every four times, it did what she asked it to. And then the guy who I think was one of the inventors, who's definitely her boss, there's a language bearer, so it was a little hard to tell their exact roles in the company, sat down and he did a lot better it responded to what he asked it about 70 of the time but it's still a lot both of them a lot of the time are just like doing this like repeating the same like two-finger gesture whatever over and over at a camera to get it to move and when it because periodically for like 40 seconds it would do like five or six gestures in a row would move and i was like oh that's kind of neat yeah if it worked it would be great ccs 2026 yeah yeah exactly and it's just one of these it's another like ai product where for one thing that's not ai i'm sorry guys like we're using that for every it's the same thing like they have that company that apple bought like in 2011 that was like they had a cat it was like a bar it was like a wee bar you're attached to your monitor and you could like do gestures and that barely fucking worked hell yeah nothing lenovo actually had a uh a tilting uh swiveling screen laptop and that follows your head when you're on.

1:18:51Did it work? Yeah, it worked. These people are fucked then. Sorry, you were going to say something? I was going to say, we had that, didn't Xbox have that technology like 10 years ago? Well, Kinect, but it couldn't see black people. That was like, it's like a better off Ted joke. That keeps happening too. That's not the first, nor will it be the last time. The law doesn't seem to do that either. Well, sometimes. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, and that, the whole frustration of like things labeled, because there's, there's a mix of like shit labeled as AI that under no circumstance does anyone reasonable consider like a robot that responds to a gesture by moving a screen.

1:19:27And that's all it does. That's not an intelligence. And also just, do you have fucking hands and have you met people with other hands? And we've been doing that for forever. Like machines that you can like do something into a camera and it recognizes a simple command. It's computer vision. It's just basic. Like you get that on device now. And likewise, like I keep seeing, like I like this AI, this meeting note taker. I don't – is it AI? I guess it's more AI to recognize and like transcribe a conversation. But the appeal is not that it's a thing that you can communicate with. The appeal is that it can do a task, right?

1:20:03There's a bunch of different AI pins and AI glasses. And the ones I hated all had chat integration into it to where you can communicate with it. And the ones that were cool were like, yeah, it's a pin that can listen to a conversation and transcribe it for you. Right. And I was like, well, yeah, that's, that might be useful. You know? It's just like, it all gets back to the classic thing of like, yeah, I want this to do a task. And they're like, oh no, no, sorry. AI doesn't do that. Like it's, it's not able to do that. And it's, I feel like this is just the logical end point of where this is CES has been going for 10 years, which is slowly distancing itself from reality and promise to just this point when And 97 % of the stuff is just like, if it works, wouldn't it be kind of useful sort of?

1:20:50Well, it's like, you know, I was talking about like AI slop products earlier, you know, and it's the kind of thing where like, okay, you can talk to your router and the router will tell you what's wrong, whatever, but it's like, you could just design a UI that just like told you that that just gave you that information in a visually appealing way. Or a router that works. People don't look as a print journalist, like people don't want to read a block of text. So unfortunately, they just want visual. And yet we're reverting into this thing where like the technology communicates with you via a block of text that was generated by a app.

1:21:23I also love that with routers as well, because I think for like every CES I've ever been to, there was a router company that said, yeah, we'll just fix your network problems for it. Everyone's lying. Every single one of them is lying. It's wrong every time. It's never worked. TP-Link Deco, fuck you, TP-Link. I'm sorry, that shit don't work. It's busted and fuck that. Hundreds of dollars wasted. Yeah. And it's the most product type I have seen at CES is some form of digital assistant and or new chat bot or like companion, right? Right. Like there's a huge booth for a company called Tuya, T-U-Y-A, that was like they've got this holistic, it does everything, digital companion.

1:22:05You can like there's a health version of it. So you can like feed this thing your health data. Like you can give it access to your wearables. And it'll not just like tell you what's my heart rate at, how much, you know, many calories did I burn? But it'll tell you like, it'll like make workout plans for you and like recommend diets and stuff for you, which like, I guess I'm sure there are people who want that. I have the concern I always have with like, okay, so you're feeding all of your biometric data into this machine that you're feeding all of your communications to. It has access to your email.

1:22:38It has access to your notes. It's, you've got a wearable device and it's listening to you. There's a mobile version running through your house. How secure are you? How much do you trust this company's data safety? Yeah. Data retention. Considering big companies have breaches all the time. I will also add, if you get the wrong workout plan, you can actually really hurt yourself. I say this as someone who's done it to myself. It's just like that feels, I feel people are very cavalier about that as well, where it's just like, oh yeah, I'll just take the workout from the air and you fuck your leg up, you fuck your arms up, all the things I've done.

1:23:13Yep. Oh. And there's a, so they have an AI pet robot for Tuya that can live in your house. It's got, it looks like a big white donut with wheels. And I think the hole in the middle is meant, at least based on the crudely photo or the crudely photoshopped cat sitting in it to be like, your pet can sit inside the AI robot companion. See, it's part of the family. I've always, a pet for my pet? Or is it kidnapping your cat? And it's telling that they couldn't get a real cat in that thing. They had to Photoshop a cat crudely into that thing. Because no cat is getting inside a wheeled robot to drive around.

1:23:51Babo was killing that shit. Babo was fucking running across the house to, like, donkey kick that shit. And they describe, again, it just looks like a donut with wheels. Galactic design, harmonious coexistence, sleek sci-fi aesthetics for pets and people.

1:24:11uh yeah it's oh jesus christ it's just when am i going to meet somebody who buys one of these yeah i want to meet someone i actually want to study the brain of someone who goes that is like yes yes finally it was a big booth so clearly there's money a hundred thousand dollars i think this is uh yeah i'm not sure where the company's based out of i i haven't looked into it enough yet. There was a panel going on Tuya and Google Cloud from AI first to AI everywhere, which was the same as half of the other panels I've heard. It was just a bunch of platitudes about how the AI is just getting better.

1:24:53It's coming to everything. Don't you love your digital assistant? I don't go anywhere without my digital assistant. What was it? You said the last year, this is the worst it will ever be. It actually seems to have got worse. It's at least not any better. And yeah, they've got the health management thing. It's got a fitness coach. It does sleep analysis. And again, I just keep thinking like, okay, so you're just handing literally your entire life's data to this fucking app. And this is the donut thing, right? They do the donut thing and they have the companion app that can also, one of the things they bragged about is that if you just, oh, it can run your smart home.

1:25:27So you can plug your security system into this. In addition to your biometric data, it's a security guardian 24-7 protection for peace of mind. And it can run your smart power system. It can run your smart home. And it's also just a companion. And one of the things they advertise this companion can do is if you just tell it a topic, it'll automatically generate a podcast for you. Aren't we all, you know, we're in danger now, Ed. It takes a little more skill than that. no no chat with hey to you by the way it's hey to you sounds a lot too much like hawk to up yeah i'm also just thinking like everything's like sleep analysis so as a chat gpt rapper you feed the sleep data into health analysis it's just they released chat gpt for health today ai podcast listen to what you love alex heath of sources says that chat gpt health is going to be big i think that that's irresponsible yeah and also bullshit no like a massive numpty would use chat GPT health.

1:26:28It's like, what's it going to fuck? And also, it's great. It's like, use it for this, this, but it's not for health advice. Yeah. So why the fuck? No, because we can't advertise that right now. Jesus, the liability. But also, what the fuck is it for then? It's for giving you health advice. Yeah, it's like, it's for health. Here's the other thing though. Health tourism. If we buy, and this is an if, but like if we buy the idea that generative AI agents like chat GPT and Gemini, whatever, are like the operating systems of the future. Which I of course do. I know you believe that. But like, now you have all these other products like that, which is like its own AI kind of agent.

1:27:07And so and there's like a million of them on the show floor. So like, are you gonna have that and then another device that has its own AI thing and another device has its own AI thing and you really would rather just use ChatGPT or whatever? That's the thing. It's like, what happens to all these companies when OpenAI copies all of them? Yeah. Or dies. What if OpenAI raises their prices? Do the margins make sense? And these products are literally just a thing that, like a computer that we slapped into a ring or something and gave it wireless, like gave it access to chat GPT, right? That's all it is.

1:27:45What if you can't afford that anymore? Yeah, what if they raise the prices by 10 %? Because that doesn't sound like much if you're like paying 20 bucks a month. But if you're doing, I don't know, thousands of dollars, tens, hundreds of dollars, you wipe them out immediately. If your margins are 10 % and like most of your business is spent on ChatGPT, it's just, it's inevitable, but also so easily clonable. I'm looking forward to the ChatGPT furry astrologer. Sure. No, that's a responsible use. That's ethical AI. The fucking mobile. Ethical AI. And that really seems like ethical AI to me. yeah very warring there was a good one on mental health and ai that was by a panel the yeah i mean it wasn't so much a panel as like a speech by like a clinical therapist okay who i've got this written down in my notes i'm spacing her name right now um but she was taking very much the the reasonable tact of like okay what has already happened is that a shitload of people are using chatbots as therapists.

1:28:49That is happening. That is a thing that is going on. There are harms we are starting to document and will continue to document with that. But it's a thing that's happening. What would a healthy, like, and the other thing she was saying that I don't fully agree with, but I think it's an arguable point, is because lack of access to mental health resources is such an endemic problem in the United States and the world. There is an opportunity, if you can make ethically a clinical like AI therapy, like an AI therapist, right, or something that can do counseling or whatnot, to reach people who couldn't otherwise.

1:29:29Now, I don't agree with that. But I, it's a for the purpose of like, listening to the speech, I can, I can follow with like, okay, how would you I want to hear your pitch on like, what an ethical version of this would be. And what I appreciated is that she doesn't really, didn't really come to a conclusion. Like she was like, these are the things you would need to do. I don't know if it can be done. That was kind of the three one is like, I'm not sure that this is actually, here's what it would need to be. If it was, if you were going to try to do this, here's what you couldn't have it doing. Here's the things you'd have to keep in mind.

1:30:00And like one of the things she brought up, which I think is why this is a fundamentally impossible thing is she said, okay, one of the major problems with chatbots, especially because people are using them as therapists, is that they are designed to keep you on and to keep you using. And they like will gas you up. They'll say whatever to keep you using them. And that's bad for like therapy. Yeah, you need pushback. Right. You need pushback. You need critical analysis of what you're doing. Sometimes you don't need a machine that is trying to keep you happy so that you continue to use it. That's not therapy.

1:30:35And And she was like, so any responsible version of this technology turned towards therapy would have to not do that. And so I came up to her afterwards. I was like, well, the problem to me then is people will always have access to the robots that are really dangerous and terrible therapists that make them feel good and want to talk to them. Why would anyone use and pay money for a presumably more expensive therapeutic bot that doesn't make them feel good? And she was like, well, yeah, I think that's probably like an insurmountable problem, basically. Like that was the that wasn't her word. But her words were essentially like, yeah, I have the same concern that I'm not sure it's possible to do this.

1:31:14So what frustrates me? She's right. Sure. But what frustrates me about that is like, I'm tired of people saying if it did this, it would be great. If it's just not possible, if it's just like most of CES this year is like, if it worked, it would be good. Hers was more people are using chatbots for therapy. Is it what would you need to see for this to not be irresponsible? And I think that's reasonable. I just, I think it's just people, what she's right. It's a good thing, but it's like, people will conflate. The conclusion was you can't do it probably. And it's also people will conflate that by saying, and if we just buy more GPUs, then TherapyBot will exist.

1:31:52And it's also just people misunderstand what therapy is. It's good that someone said what would be required, but the moment you think about what would be required, but he realizes it's impossible. Well, it's the same. Last year, we talked to a guy who made an AI-enabled device that was like for, as a companion for old people. Primarily, it's like this like head-shaped kind of robot, but didn't have like a face that had cameras on it and could like move a little bit and engage with you that you would like keep in a kitchen or something like an appliance. And you could use basic stuff with it. It'll tell you like the weather outside.

1:32:30It can look up stuff for you. Like Alexa, basically. Like Alexa, but it also – it's programmed to engage you and ask you to like, hey, do you want to record a story for your grandkids? Like you can build an archive. Hey, you have these friends who also have this device. Why don't I call one of them? That seems reasonable. I just heard that to try and keep them active, to try to keep them engaged with their family, to make sure – and talking to the inventor of it, he was incredibly concerned both about privacy but also about this is a medical device. And this is a device that would give people better access to their doctors, better access to their families, give their families a better idea of what's going on with them.

1:33:10And so I don't think it's going to work as a product. I'm sure the company has already failed, to be entirely honest, because I don't think anyone's going to buy this thing. But I appreciate like, OK, you had a good impulse coming in here. This is not a cash grab for you. You were attempting to make something that would solve a problem. And be a good business as a result of that. Right. Right. And this year I came across a company that, this is the company I showed you, the Zeroeth, that had the - The WALL-E robot. They have the WALL-E robot that they say they're working with Disney to do a licensed version of.

1:33:42But they have these tiny robots that look like Rock 'em Sock 'em robots that are like companions for the elderly, even though they look like a toy a kid would have played with in the 1990s. Is this AI-me or something like that? No, no, it's Zeroeth as a company. but it can like walk around, it can hobble around. And the thing, when I asked like, what does it do? She said, well, it'll tell your, it'll tell like an elderly person's family member if they're not doing well, if they like seem to be less social or like stressed or anxious. And I was like, well, based on what? And he said, well, if you look, you can see like, we've got this, you can see like how the machine sees through the cameras and it looks like the Terminator and it'll zero in on faces and it'll notice like micro expressions that show you that somebody's like hiding, and I'm like, number one, you don't know any of this.

1:34:28Yeah, you're making this up. Number two, telling me that your elder care device looks at people the way the Terminator does doesn't give me a lot of confidence. And just the difference in this man who this was a very personal invention to him, and he at every step was thinking about what will actually be best to the people I want to help versus this marketer being like, yeah, it's like a fucking Terminator. I'll tell you if your grandma's dying. Fucking rules. What are you meant to do with that date? And it's tiny. It's like 18 inches tall. Grandma's going to have this walking around. It's good.

1:34:58She's going to trip on it. Yeah. Like what the fuck? Like the classic thing that old people do is trip on stuff. And it's like, we need another one. What grandma needs is a tiny robot that looks like a toy that her 40 year old grandson now would have played with as a kid. And like, why, why does she want this in her house? You get it between like Timu notifications and Instagram notification. Grandma dead. Grandma dead. Details later. Grandma dead. or like the what like your cat's pissed like you get enough it really is notification if you bought even seven of these devices your entire life is just a nightmare of just like ping cat dead the rest of your life trying to scroll through one day's notifications i mean my fucking phone is already like that it's insane it's hell you install a new app that's like oh it's the it's the selfridges app and it's like did you know you can buy pants and it's like i'm familiar thank you Selfridges.

1:35:49But I think it kind of gets back to what I was saying before about Pebble and Clix. It is so in short supply at CES to find authenticity. Somebody who is really passionate about this thing. A thing, a problem. I want to solve a problem, so I made a thing. But when you find it, it's very exciting. Yeah, like the guy who made the mug that has a fan on it. For when you're drinking at the stadium or something during a summer game, and you want both a fan and you want your beer, your Gatorade, whatever you put in there, you know? As seen on TV shit. It's stupid. I don't want one. It barely counts as consumer electronics, but at least a man had a dream, you know?

1:36:31So we're going to rotate again, and the next ad is whatever it is, it's perfect. You have to buy it immediately. Mm-hmm.

1:36:48Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-iHeart to get started. That's 844-844-iHeart. When you feel uncomfortable, what do you put on? Biggie. You put on Biggie when you feel uncomfortable? Because I want to get confident.

1:37:22This is DJ Hester Prince's Music is Therapy, a new podcast from me, a DJ and licensed therapist that asks one simple question. Who do you want to be and what's the song that can take you there? Music changes what you feel and what you feel changes what you do, right? That moment where a song shifts something inside you, that's where transformation starts. This year, I'm talking to experts across every area of life, like personal finance icon Gene Chatzky, New York Times journalist David Gellis, relationship legend Dan Savage, human connection teacher Mark Groves, and the man who shaped my ear more than anyone, Questlove.

1:37:59They'll bring the strategies. I'll pair them with the right records and will teach you how to use the music to make change stick. This isn't just a podcast. It's unconventional therapy for your entire year. Listen to DJ Hester-Krin's Music is Therapy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:38:22Diane, I'm once again in front of a microphone in the Palazzo in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm drinking my 11th Diet Coke. I'm surrounded by the warmth and love of friendship and camaraderie. Joining me is Chloe Radcliffe, the wonderful stand-up comedian and actress from Is This Thing On? Who? What? Where? It's you, Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards. Yes. Correct. I'm going. I'm just a stand-up comedian, Adam Conover, and also the host of the Factually podcast. Hello. And of course, Edward Ngueso Jr., who writes the Tech Bubble newsletter. Hello. And we're back. We're back for the final bit of this, of the Wednesday's CES episode.

1:39:02I'm on, this is what, 12 and a half hours. It's great. I've got so many more. I fucking love doing it. I'm not even complaining. I love doing this, but everyone else appears, everyone else is tired. And I'm so sorry, everyone for dragging you into this, but yeah. So we've got two people who've never been to CES before. Oh, Chloe, Adam. Yeah. How'd you feel? What do you think? Welcome to the jungle. I mean, it makes me want to like, go see someone play an acoustic guitar with no amplification. Yeah. You know what I mean? Tell me more. It makes me want to like walk by a playground, like, you know, it's recess and the children are just sort of like running around.

1:39:45Yeah. It makes me want to build a fire and dig a hole with my bare hands. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes me want to like have a basic, a basic pleasure of life. And I'm having trouble like, you know, putting the two worlds together, you know. How do you mean? Like what are the two worlds in this case? Well, it's just, you know, like this is, it's the center of, you know, the tech industry in many ways, or at least a certain piece of it, right? It's like all sort of coalescing around this, you know, moment. It's like a little black hole. I'm like the bowels of the tech industry, right? Yeah, we're in the bowels of it.

1:40:19Because it's not ready to like shit all this stuff out yet. So we're kind of watching it as it, we're in the intestine. It's supposedly the most important industry in America. That sets the tone for the year as well because it's in January. Drives the economy. These are the people who are creating the future. And so much of it could not be more distant from most people's lives or horrifying to their lives. Did you see anything new today that horrified you? Yeah, there were three different kiosks that were selling body trackers that would track you while you're driving a car. Sorry, it's not for you, the driver, though.

1:41:02It's for your employer to track you while you're driving the car. Oh. Like if, you know, to track UPS drivers or Uber drivers or other people who are driving a fleet and it can, you sit there and it has, you know, draws a little skeleton over your body and your face to track you. And then it has a little icon. Oh, we can tell you're yawning. A little voice will say, put on your seatbelt. Like it's, it's, it's human monitoring to, you know, mechanize people. I guess if you're a logistics company that can't afford Waymos, which are also all over the place, this is a way of sort of putting your drivers into a little virtual prison.

1:41:39That feels so much more invasive than, you know, hey, we do have an alarm on the car door, so we know every time you get in and out of the vehicle, and we have GPS in the car, and we know when you're stopped. Or we have like a governor, so it can't go above a certain speed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, it was kind of fun to play with because they have a camera set up and you want to track your body. And me and Edward were playing with it. And I was like waving at it. And then I kind of pretended I was in a car crash. And then I kind of like yanked the equipment around and it wasn't put. And then a German man came over and he was like, you must leave.

1:42:16That has been enough fun. I was like, I'm sorry. Yes, you must leave.

1:42:23Each time Adam said I'm sorry, he's like, oh, yes, yes. you have to go that rocks that rocks by the way I was like pretty stoned for the entire two hours that we were there sick I love getting in trouble at booths like my second or third CES I used to have this thing where I would go I would seek out all of the rugged products because this was right when they were starting to make a bunch of Bluetooth speakers 15 years ago starting to make a bunch of like power banks and stuff so like rugged electronics was coming into like its own as a field and so I would always I would track down like where they had and there was there was one year where one of the companies selling them had a bunch of like these big boxy rugged speakers and like logs that like you could sit on or that they were stacking them on they just brought the logs as decorations right but they were like stump size logs and I asked them like hey so it's like drop resistant crush proof and they were like walking me through the stats and I was like can I try just dropping one of these logs on top of it um and they were like yeah and so I fucking hit it as hard as I could, and I cracked the son of a bitch in half.

1:43:28Hell yeah. Oh, so funny. And a German man said, you must leave. You must put the lock down. She apologized to me. Because she said, I asked. I didn't do, I didn't assault the device. Well, you assaulted the device, but with express consent. With consent. But this was also a device you were meant to assault. Yes. Well, and that's what my very first CES, they had an indestructible cell phone, not a smartphone, a cell phone. And they took a bunch of journalists out to, I think we were in front of Caesars. Maybe it was the Venetian. But they had like a car that had like company branding on it. And they would, each journalist could go and set the phone down and they would drive over it with like an SUV, right?

1:44:08Right. To show you how tough it is. And everyone did the exact same thing and took a video while it was driving over it. And I did the same thing as everyone else. I put the phone down flat. They drove over it. I was like, yep, that's a tough phone. and one guy stacked it on its side and they drove over it and it popped it right open because it hit a seam. And that is one of the most influential moments in my career as a journalist where it's like, that's how you do journalism. I feel like this is the CES thing. It's like, we have got one thing this does and most people are not going to wask because this is not for people to use.

1:44:43It's for people to sell. And it's like, oh yeah, yeah. Well, what if it does this? Wait, what? does it work? Chloe, I feel like you were talking about something earlier, Chloe. It was just like, you asked one question, my brain just seizing up in real time. Yeah, I'm trying to remember which specific, I just have so many products that I've been like, but what's the point? Yeah, that's the question. It's like, what's the point? And they're like, fuck. No one's ever asked us. You got any dregs left, Chloe? Things to declare? I saw, this is not a, well, I actually don't know what product this was associated with.

1:45:17It must be a product. Probably for the best. But there was a like, test how strong your punch is. Oh, yeah. They've had a section. And I stood for a couple minutes and just watched, with the greatest respect, the dweebiest, loseriest, sweet little dorks, some young, many old, walk up and just like try and rail this thing. And, and like, you know, everybody punched it, but watching, watching dudes in just like weirdly fitting suits whose faces move a little strange, be like, it is my turn to punch now. I was like, this is incredible. This is beautiful. And I was like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to take a video of this.

1:46:01I'm not going to take it. This is not, I'm not trying to like, I'm not trying to be mean. I'm not trying to make this a sideshow, but this is cinema. Yeah, I saw also like there was one where you could throw footballs at Target. And I was just, I watched this old man just walk up and he just fucking lamping the footballs. And then he just, and his like wife was like, like videoing him do it. And they just walked off and you could see the people at the booth be like, wait, were you not going to talk to us about the TV? And they just walked off. That guy fucking rocks. I love that. That's beautiful.

1:46:33I want to throw the fucking football and I don't want to go. I'm done here. I don't need to talk to you and your like gooby TV or whatever it was. It was like one of the weird off-brand television companies that spends way too much at this show. Yeah. Your first CES and you're now really – I feel like this is an – I don't want to say atypical year, but it's one of the sadder ones. Like I'm having a great time. There's not a lot of new ideas. One thing I – maybe the only thing I liked actually was I saw this massive John Deere tractor. Didn't know they could be this fucking big. Massive. A two-story house.

1:47:07Yeah, literally. I climbed stairs to get up there. I had crazy hydraulic. I had a vision of just not doing any of this shit and farming with the big-ass tractor. Like really industrial farming. Yeah, with the industrial farming. I come from a long line of farmers. I feel like that felt right for a second. And then I had intrusive thoughts about running over all the tech. Yeah, that would be ideal. That felt more right. That felt more right. When I climbed up there, I started, you know, because you climb into this thing and you're 30 feet above the ground and it's like the bridge of like the Starship Enterprise.

1:47:44It's like a hydraulic chair and like a giant thing. And you're looking at the – it's the rest of the show floor and you're just like, oh, if I had a missile launcher on this, I could blow it all up. And the front of it looks like weaponry because it's like 20 – like imagine a cone, the shape of a traffic cone, but as tall as a person. Right. And then on its end, like with the sharp part pointed out, like 20 of those lined up. That's what you're driving. It's tractor though? It is. I believe it's picking corn like off the cobs and putting it into a giant like dump truck looking thing that goes along in sync with it.

1:48:21Which is another part of the gap between the stuff of this show and reality. Because it's like this is so far from what most people think of as a farm. You know, this looks like. But isn't that what farm. But that's how most farming. Yeah. It's not what organ farming is. Oh, I know, but it's just the gap between. It looks like if you were playing like a video game and you were like terraforming Mars. Like this is what this thing looks like. I just like the idea of a giant tractor and just turning the fucking thing on, driving forward until I'm out of this convention center. Drive away, leave this all by me.

1:48:54Just head for the hills. Yeah, just go out to Area 51, me and the boys. Yeah, that's our dear president. That's one of his bits, right? You remember when he had that truck and he was like, I could just drive away. They won't let me, but I could just go off into the sunset. You should have let him. You could do that with the tractor. Maybe if you hotwire it. I don't know if it actually has an engine in there. Imagine a tractor that you are describing is the size of a spaceship, but if you just know exactly where to cut, and you can just make red wire, touch blue wire, and turn this thing on. The CES massacre.

1:49:31Moe over CES. The Las Vegas tractor massacre. Blasting big green tractor out of the speakers. I do want to say behind us in line for the tractor, there was like a bunch of folks from Japan and they were like vibrating with excitement to get in the tractor. Because I can only imagine just the American-ness of a John Deere tractor and the size of it. It was like, they like shoved me out of the way to get in. I will also say this is a unique thing that Americans can't understand, how small some other countries are. Like when I got to America and I saw my first cruise ship, I kind of freaked the fuck out.

1:50:07I see it's just so large, so much. It looks like the size of London. They're visually upsetting. I still freak out over them. They're massive. They're huge and they're terrifying. They look horrifying. And like, if I got on this big tractor, I would either feel overwhelmed with power or like, just like, I wouldn't want that to exist. But I also like that they had a big tractor at CES. That makes me happy. I feel like the big tractor is like the ring of power and that no matter whether or not you like hate it before you get behind the wheel, as soon as you start driving it, it changes you. You just hear Dracula in your head.

1:50:42It was pretty clear. It was pretty clear. You don't even drive this thing. You supervise it. You sit there and this would be my Green Goblin mask. You've got Mr. Worf behind you on the weapons table. Rikers at a half side. Alex Heath is here. Sorry Alex Sorry Alex I don't mean it I'm not going to run you over the track I do love that Every now and then You'll name drop someone You're like I wish I could do bodily harm Just kidding I also would not do bodily harm To Alex Heath I apologize Alex Parody That's not what the poster That you made Didn't put on the wall Behind you says I wasn't going to comment on it It's weird Robert Just the fucking signal chat From last year Was just like An actionable threat Against an executive I was like And it was the second I got here as well.

1:51:28He was like, Sam, we're going to, and I'm not going to fucking repeat it. It's not illegal to make actionable threats against people. It's not. It depends on who you voted for. That's my boss, folks. These are jokes. These are bits. These are yucks. We're doing bits. We're having a laugh. We're having a laugh. It's bants. We're bant-maxing. We're bantering, yeah. Yeah, that's how it works. so Adam this is your last day though did you see anything you liked so you're on an edible no no I was vaping I have a dry herb vape which is the best way to consume wheat I actually am curious what does that mean I love explaining this what it means is you know Robert you know what this is you put plant material in it most vapes that people think of are oil that have chemically extracted the THC and suspended it in like an oil that's how all of the vapes used to work volcanoes and stuff when we were kids Yeah, the ones with the bag.

1:52:27This is, you put plant material in it, it heats it to a precise temperature where it does not burn. It just vaporizes the THC and other oils. And one of the great things about it is it makes almost no vapor. So I use this thing at the fucking airport. Like nobody notices, you know, if no one's looking at you, no one is going to notice you using this thing. So it is great for this kind of environment. But it doesn't taste like strawberry melon. No. I guess weed vapes maybe never do. Wow, spoken like a person who really knows her drugs. I did see something that I really did pop for, which was, and Ed was there too, it was a, okay, so imagine like a white van, like a normal van, and on top of it are sort of a couple blue tubes that go up and down and rotate.

1:53:16Kind of like if you built like a Lego version of an anti-aircraft weapon. That looks like a home anti-aircraft weapon. And it turns out that's what it was because it shoots a net at drones. Sure. Using not gunpowder, just some kind of electromagnet. Yeah, it's like almost a railgun type. I asked the guy, was this a railgun? And he was like, kind of. What's a railgun? It uses magnets to propel around. Nothing much works railgun with you. Sorry. It's like a sci-fi torpedo kind of thing. Can we cut that out of the podcast? But yeah, so it shoots a net at the drone. and then it catches the drone, and then there's a little parachute, so the drone falls down to Earth.

1:53:59That's cool. It was super fucking Metal Gear Solid V. Yeah. It's interesting because he was like, there's a legal gray area where you see a drone that you don't know, and you're like, whose drone is this? And you want to shoot it, but you can't. You might get in trouble. You can shoot any drone that flies over your Earth. Yeah, so he says, so you're not destroying it. You can give it back to the owner after you retrieve it. I'm mounting that shit on the back of my truck like a technical. And I'm just hanging in the park. Just driving in your pickup truck with a bunch of drones in the back. What we think Mad Max is going to look like is like old gas trucks.

1:54:36It's actually going to just be semi-trucks with drone trophies. Off to the revolution. Nailed to the semi. Because the drones are going to have countermeasures eventually. That's all they are. Where they're going to put chaff or they're going to dodge, you know. They've already, I mean, that is the nature of drones. That's what we're seeing in Ukraine right now, which is like it's gotten to this insane escalation of countermeasure where if you go to a lot of frontline villages, they're covered in miles of fiber optic cable. It looks like the whole village is covered in spider webs. Stupid question.

1:55:03Why? Because you almost have to have all of the drones be wired because jamming is so prevalent, right? So you can't jam one that's got like a wire on it. So they're basically taking off with these long spools and flying around and it leaves because they're getting shot down constantly. drones don't have a long lifespan in the field. So you just wind up with these villages that are, it looks like a giant spider. Yeah, full of cables. Fucking webbed the whole thing. Like a net that hangs on the tree. I have no idea about it. Yeah, yeah. Drone warfare is nuts. Fucking hell. I hate it. That's the thing that came closest to killing me overseas was a fucking drone.

1:55:39But yeah, it's all this like Red Queen measure countermeasure shit. Like everyone's been sprinting as fast as possible to stay more or less in place for the last four years. What I liked about this company was I was like, is this for the military? And he was like, I mean, we're pitching the military, but we talked to them, but we think you could use it to guard a private power plant. I was like, use it at Coachella or whatever. I mean, there was an episode of Adam Ruins Everything where we couldn't shoot for like 90 minutes because some dumbass was flying a drone over the chute, and we had to find the guy to stop because it was fucking like, you could have used it that day.

1:56:20You had to break his legs. I remember that episode. Adam ruins this man's life. I can't believe you kept that in. Yeah, that's, I love, I do love, I honestly, every time I hear about this, I just want to play with one. Yeah. I just want to fucking shoot a guy. Like Duck Hunt. Like you're playing Duck Hunt. Wow, a guy. Jesus Christ. No, a guy in the sky. Okay, okay. Yeah. If you see a guy in your airspace, we have him. That's exactly what I mean. That's what I mean. Every time the Blue Angels fly over. Not a guy I'm just looking at in the street. No. Capturing my nets. He's got to be high enough that your van guns have to be able to aim at him.

1:57:03The last time I saw the Blue Angels during Fleet Week in San Francisco, I couldn't stop myself from thinking, like, I could take him. I could take him. I feel like I can take them with Blue Angels? Yeah, take them. Why not? Take them with what? Do you mean the planes? Well, they're flying real close to each other. I feel like it's not hard to fuck that up. Oh, you just give them a shove. Just like a big rock? Just a little shove. Just like a rock or a little shove ski? Because they were in a plane. Yeah, a rock. Sure, yeah. Yeah, wait, no, we do actually want to know. Take them how? Okay, so they're flying pretty low.

1:57:33If I ever need to take the Blue Angels, I would like these instructions. Okay, they're flying pretty low. Like how low? Like are we talking 150 feet low? I feel like if you get on top of the Salesforce Tower when they're doing some of those really low flights, and you get a potato gun, you could get one of those lodged right into one of the air intake things. Oh, sure. And they're probably going so fast. I feel like any little mistake would be catastrophic. Yeah. And don't get him started on how he'd fuck up the Harlem Globetrotters, okay? Kill those motherfuckers. What did that manhunt look like?

1:58:02You're posted up on the Salesforce Tower. You used a potato gun. Parody. Parody. it was a bit he's doing he's doing bands his bands bands were bands bands yeah bands but yeah um it's so it is quite funny watching people like i'm gonna call you too normal i think that that's fair yeah watching a lot of my exes would disagree yeah i don't know but normal you've seen this show and it's funny watching regular people just be like yeah so most of it's useless most of it doesn't work. Some of it, most of it will never exist. I mean, I asked the question in the last episode with none of these guys here.

1:58:41I basically said, what does, what is the point of CES? I was like, what does anybody walk away from CES with? The people who are involved in it. Well, I was asking Edward, and maybe someone here knows the answer. Who's the customer? Like, I went to Toy Fair once, and at Toy Fair, there's buyers from retail chains walking around going like, yes, I'll take 10 ,000 Sticky hands or whatever. Which makes sense. Here it's not custom. Like who's – There are. So there's – CES is really a couple of different events, right? A huge number of the booths here, particularly when you get to the areas where all of the company – all the booths are small and all of the companies have like different like Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, or Taiwanese names, right?

1:59:25when you get to like that chunk of the show, most of the people who are walking around those booths, it's not like journalists, because in a lot of cases, a bunch of the booths have the same products that are just like slightly different, like the same battery, but a different case. Because who's advertising there are like OEMs. It's like factories and like manufacturers of different like things that are advertising, we make this, we make this, and you can like buy this part to make or to sell like as part of other tech gear, right? Right. And there are buyers And there are representatives of companies that are like looking to contract with manufacturers and whatnot who make and do business here.

2:00:02That's like a chunk of the event that we don't have really any – because that's not – journalists aren't interested in that. We don't have exposure. And that's – a lot of Eureka – Most of that. Eureka Park is kind of full of these. I was mentioning earlier like photonic sensors and weird things just for like one group. I went past like 20 booths that were all just selling different pieces of solar panels. Right. I was like, yeah, that's not for me. And very valid. Right. And that's fine. Right. And that, so that's like a big chunk of the event. And then another chunk of the event is consumer electronics, which is where most of the bullshit is, right?

2:00:31Because it's like 80%, well, this, no one will ever buy this. This is a terrible idea. And 20 % ranging from, okay, there's probably a customer for this to like, oh, that's actually really cool. And then the third chunk of the event, which journalists are also involved in is like, this is not a product yet, but it will be, or these are ways in which we are looking to integrate technology into like things that are above the consumer level, like all of the smart city stuff, all of like the smart vehicle stuff, right? Where journalists are interested in that, consumers are interested in that, but you as a consumer aren't going to go buy a smart street light, right?

2:01:08So I kind of look at it as like, those are the three events that CES is. Okay, that's clarifying. Thank you. I think like the majority of this year just feels like chat GPT rappers. Yeah, yeah. That's most of what I've seen as some form of AI chatbot integration or glasses that have chatbots. I saw one interesting, we talked to one vendor that was like an AI thing that actually seemed to kind of do something. Okay, I'm curious. Which was, they, okay, if you have an autonomous driving system and it goes on a drive and the drive doesn't go well, this will simulate a slight version of the, like they can take a real drive, turn it into a simulation, and then have the agent or whatever it is, the Waymo, do it again like in its head to like make it do it better the next time.

2:01:59I'm like, okay, that seems like an AI company that a different one of these companies might contract with. That's a date of company. What I like about that is that that's a company, I don't know how well this product will work, but that's a company that's thinking about solving a problem. Yes. I always gravitate towards like someone identified a problem and they made a thing. maybe it doesn't work that's a fucking exemption I suppose the ones just making up a problem and then failing to solve it you know how your kid doesn't have a robot hallucinating horoscopes for it well we've solved that issue does your does your kid think that Taiwan is Taiwan or China right well this toy is going to tell your child that it has offended it terribly do not mention Winnie the Pooh to AI bot.

2:02:48You will get fucking drunk, you little shit. Clodge, don't talk about Tiananmen Square. Is your four-year-old having too much trouble finding which under-the-sink chemicals are most caustic? This new teddy bear will make sure they know and teach him how to open all your pill bottles. This adorable rabbit will teach your five-year-old about BDSM. And what's funny is we are sounding like we're making jokes, but this is what is happening today. This is a thing happening today. Welcome. Welcome. Because you may be thinking, well, also, doesn't it do all the assistant stuff? And you'll be surprised to hear it does not.

2:03:23None of this. Every fucking... I am like, I would actually love to be elated. I would love to see something. I'd love to... I brought in so many people, spoken in so many hours, and I swear to fucking God, I'm trying. I'm trying. Like there was... Okay. A cool thing I saw today is this company that is advertising like paper batteries, right? And the actual battery isn't paper, but like the battery, The core of the battery is made out of cellulose. And that decomposes. And so basically, instead of dealing with batteries the way you do now, with batteries like this, you throw them into compost. You compost them, and then you filter the metal bits out, and you can recycle the metal bits separately.

2:04:02And then the compost is usable compost, right? That's useful. That sounds great. Again, I have not looked into this company and done third-party reporting. This is how they are claiming it works. I don't know if it works, but it's at least an idea. and if we establish it by here filter the metals i'm like but you know what again and i'm also like yeah who's gonna be doing that also but that has great ramifications for for disposable things like that's yeah for vapes someone's trying yes to take humanity a step forward and at least that's good as opposed to like the 18th different vacuous autonomous driving as opposed to what i saw next to that booth oh yeah mamit which the company name is just m-m-e-e-t-t don't know what that means and it's they have an AI business card they actually have two different card products one is it's the size of a business card if a business card was way thicker and couldn't actually fit in your wallet and would be super easy to break even if it wasn't your wallet okay sick but you tap it to someone's phone and if their phone has an NFT reader like or not NFT yeah NFC NFC sorry no I couldn't if your phone has an NFC reader it'll populate automatically with their like business card info one quick problem sure If you bump most phones together, it will do this without you having like an easily breakable piece of electronics.

2:05:17Interesting. What if I told you it also, as long as you have an internet connection, can translate things? Because they can just stick that on whatever now. I would. Using a shitty speaker, I assume. Oh, well, I'm sold. I just fucking. And the other product they had was a thicker card that they bragged was as thin as three millimeters. houses four AI assistants, all the chatbots. They don't actually live in the product. Again, it's connecting to the internet and streaming it. Okay, but just really simple. What is four? What is four? Is that just different? That's just prompt engineering. These motherfuckers are claiming there's like 11 AI assistants.

2:05:55No, no, you're being unfair. They've got the AI meeting assistant. Turn conversations anywhere into summaries, insights, and action items to boost productivity. They've got an AI translation assistant. break language barriers across 145 languages. So there's not four AIs. No, it's just four different things the AI does. It's just prompt engineering. I do think they were lying. Yes, you're right. Because it's like all using chat GPT. Yeah, so to explain what - They've got a sales assistant. Which is, so prompt engineering is literally just every single AI product you have ever seen on this floor is just prompts.

2:06:29It's prompts for the API and telling it, you are a sales assistant. You are a meeting assistant. That's all it is. It's just text. It's just, it's all text. Every single one of these is just text. I am. Yep. Well, what about the AI? Sometimes it's pixels. Yeah. Sometimes it's pixels. Sometimes it's multimodal. It's the AI inspiration assistant. Capture finding ideas and develop them into future possibilities. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You could use that. You're a writer. You could use that. I love this thing. People say that. What do you mean capture fleeting ideas?

2:07:03do you mean have an idea, focus on it in, I've got to be clear, your own brain? No. Then you can't, an AI, if it's fleeting, it leaves your brain faster than you can type it into your business card? I'm thinking about like, because I keep a notebook and sometimes I like jot down ideas in it. I'm thinking about like that time I woke up after blacking out and just written on a page in the notebook was Hitler with abs, question mark. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. That's good. The AI could have really helped me. That could have been something. You know, Hitler with abs could have been the next Google.

2:07:44Wow, Robert. Hitler with abs sure is an invigorating and original idea. You're not just coming up with an idea. You're touching into something that everyone else is feeling. What if he had abs? What if he had abs, right? So I'm, as we wrap up, it's not just an idea. It's a revolution. That's another great Hitler with abs that real quick. It's like another one of those tweets about AI where it's like every AI thing is like, it's not just big. It's huge. That has literally become to me in the last month that has, if I, whenever I see it's not X, it's Y. I'm like, that's LLM text. so I as we wrap up and Adam is finally released into the into the wild again is that I'm just going to tell you the worst name I saw on the show floor and I fucking look good and it would be junkie cream yeah yeah I caught junkie cream we love junkie and it is just an AI slop company it was just like it was just I I don't want to talk about what they did because they couldn't work it out and also it was very obvious they were trying to be like because it's not a cream That's funny.

2:08:48So that's exactly. No, no, no. It's like an illustration. It's like semi-animation producing, whatever. It's very clearly meant to make you go, oh, Junkie Cream. Right. And that's actually exactly why I. It looks like cum. I haven't brought it up because I saw it yesterday and I was like, Junkie Cream, that's crazy. And then as soon as you walk over, the whole vibe is, isn't this crazy? We named it Junkie Cream. That ruins it. Like that's not, it's not funny anymore. There's a couple of those. We were talking about yesterday, the jerk off. the handy no and i saw that i saw that today yeah i love the handy i get exactly what you mean though it's like a you can look it's not it's not your grandma's jack-off machine it's like a very sad thing it's only funny when it's when the product is in earnest like yeah the okay i think edward i think you were talking about toilet cams but i then saw i think a different toilet cam than you did and when the guy was explaining it to me he was at first of all the the words camera in your toilet are at least bad idea to a woman the scariest camera camera in the toilet four words that you can string together yeah yeah and so then when he was explaining it he was like yeah and so then the camera so you put the can you put the thing in already fucked up and he put you put the camera in your toilet and and he goes and and i said i was like and it's facing down right and he goes yeah uh or he goes he goes obviously it's facing down and i was like and then he paused and he goes or maybe it wasn't obvious and i was like yeah honestly it was not putting a toilet in a or a camera in a toilet everything's on the table yeah i don't know what you might do yeah and yeah and what happens to those photos yeah and what what what fucked up they are used to drain the toilet the camera what is this product supposed to do it's looking at your shit and going, hey, you gotta drink more water.

2:10:44That's the way it does it. It's insane. With a permanent camera. I forget who posted it, but it's like, yeah, I know it because my piss is like, looks like a high-vis vest. Yeah. The consistency of your poop is already, you know it when it's happening. I have diarrhea. I don't need something to tell me I have diarrhea. I also ask them, and this little machine has so many pieces to it, like it's probably, you know, like as you're holding it, it feels like it's probably like four separate housings that have been attached together to like make it all work. Right. And I say that it looks, it looks fine.

2:11:21I just say that to say there's a lot of seams in the thing. Sure. And a lot of pictures of piss and where that comes from. that's in the cloud. That's for anybody to access. Oh, good. I'm sure that won't be breached. But I, I said, I was like, how do you clean the toilet cam? And he said, Oh, you clean it in the same way that you would clean your toilet. And I was like, well, Weird answer. Yeah, really weird answer. Yeah. How does he clean his toilet? Yeah, how does he clean his toilet? That's the follow-up question. How often? Also, this is sitting on the rim. I'm happy to use the scrub brush, but it is once a year at best that I really like getting there with elbow grease around the rim.

2:11:59And then this thing has so many. Once a year. Once a year? Yeah, you got to do it once a year. I guess that's exactly how I clean my toilet cam. I pay a lady. To clean your toilet cam? Yeah. Yeah, to clean my toilet cam. And then to look through the photo history. Also, I have a camera on my toilet. It is called my cell phone, which I bring with me every time I use the toilet. Also, just if you, I'm just going to, as we wrap the episode, I think the statement I want to make is if you are thinking, I'm going to put a camera in a toilet, you're a fucking scumbag. I'm sorry. I met the guy who founded the company and he seemed sweet and like he just had bad shits.

2:12:37But it is like, I don't know, buddy. A camera can't be the answer. But I think the – go on, Robert. I mean it's just – because you're right that this is something that is going to be more immediately like – more women are going to immediately respond negatively to this idea than men. Because there's a chunk of men – I'm sure there's a smaller number of women too. but there's a chunk of men who have absolutely no interest in their own privacy, have absolutely no concerns about privacy, and are shocked and kind of scared when they realize other people have a sense of privacy. And most of those guys work in the tech industry.

2:13:15Or feel a sense of violation, feel a sense of threat. Right, exactly. Who are like, you don't want a camera on you at all times? You don't want a camera on you when you're having sex? That's weird. Yeah, you wouldn't want to know data. Yeah, do you want data? You would be upset if I had a camera in a public space trained on you? You don't post about how many erections a robot said you have every night? Oh, my God. I bet that's it. All right. We're going to wrap up. I'm going to read my favorite name from the show floor. Shenzhen City Wanzita Motor Manufacture Co. Limited. That's a fucking name.

2:13:48Shenzhen Pan Brain Technology Co. Limited. Pan Brain. These are like brain brain, like in a head? Yeah. It's actually a really worrying photo. I don't know if I can really see it. It's just like a guy sitting there, full asleep faster, and it looks like a sleep acne mask, but it just looks like a horrifying thing. It looks like something that people use in kink. Yeah. It looks like how the guy in Manhunter was... Anyway. Can I tell one more story? Please, please, please. Okay, this is the most useful thing that I'm going to leave with. And Albert was there, so you can jump into the story if you want.

2:14:21We went to the Waymo booth. Yeah, right. Which was mostly just Waymo is here. You know Waymo, here it is. But they had a little line, and if you scanned your badge and you push a button, it would dispense a little goodie for you. And first of all, very clearly, there's just a person in there. And they get very upset if you suggest otherwise. Really? If you suggest that they are a person. But sometimes you'd scan your thing, and then sometimes it would take four or five seconds, and the little pin would come out at an irregular angle. There's a guy back there. and like that's much cheaper than any other mechanism and then you take the little pin and they go oh you're a winner everybody was a winner but like oh you're a winner and then you go to a different guy and they give you a Waymo hat and a little beanie and tomorrow I'm flying to Madison Wisconsin it's going to be cold it didn't bring a hat so that's Waymo has made my life better so you've become a corporate shill well you know what advertise for Waymo I think it's going to be pretty clear it's ironic okay if my hat says Waymo we don't know how that's gone in the past.

2:15:23Oh my god. I'm sorry. You should make that say. I'm so sorry. I'm a little tipsy. So for a second it was unclear to me. I thought you were saying that Waymo had given you a ticket to Madison, Wisconsin? I was like, what an incredible advertising platform. The bossing stand-up comedian. We're flying half a CES to Madison. Get in there. As we wrap this up and Adam has to go, Adam, plug your stuff. Plug your shit. Okay, I'll be, well, I'll listen to the Factually podcast, which it adds on sometimes. But I'm going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, do a set this weekend, a comedy on state. Next week, I'll be Fort Wayne Summit Comedy Club.

2:16:03After that, Louisville, Houston, Texas, and finally taping a special at the Punchline in San Francisco from February 19th through 21st. Lovely. Chloe, why don't you? Because you do this too. Yeah, I do this too. This weekend, I'll be in Cincinnati. Next weekend, I'll be in Washington, D.C. and the week after that, not the weekend, I will be doing my solo show called Cheat in Philadelphia, January 20, 21, and 22. And then at the end of January, I'll be in Vermont and then Fort Collins and then Fargo. Going to Fargo. Oh, okay. That's going to be colder than Madison. Oh, yeah, of course. And as we wrap, of course, in honor of Sean Paul Adams, friend of the show, passed last year, please dedicate this to and donate to the Pediatric Epilepsy Research consortium sean paul's son is epileptic and his family would deeply appreciate it thank you so much for listening for another day of better offline we'll be back tomorrow and friday a little bit on saturday i love you all thank you so much

2:17:11thank you for listening to better offline the editor and composer of the better offline theme song is Matosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matosowski.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.

2:18:40Thank you. Listen to DJ Hester-Prince Music is Therapy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.