CES 2026: Part Nine (Friday)

26:36Jesus Christ. And the discount carriers are worse, right? Yeah, ultra low cost carriers are having a hard time. Spirit's kind of its own thing. No, I mean the Canadian discount, the charter flights, WestJet, and there's another one, I forget what they're called. I am Canadian. okay WestJet was 33.2 % decline Jesus Christ and that's just for Canadians there's actually have been that's been made up in some other countries coming to the United States but there's also all these policies coming down the pipeline where I believe it was Customs and Border Protection had a proposal of people coming into the country many of the folks who'd be coming into the country having to share five years of social media activity which I reached out to the Nevada a resort association and they're like, we are monitoring this because it's, I mean, I, I'm not going to, uh, um, speak for the country at all, but I think when you look at all this in totality, the United States is not being super welcoming, um, to people coming here.

27:38I mean, you know, mentioning the, um, Korea event earlier, uh, I talked to one of the organizers And he was talking to me about how after there was that ICE raid in, I think it was Georgia, at a Hyundai. Specifically against South Koreans. There were South Koreans. Many of them, not all. That he had to be convincing people that it was okay to come to the United States, that they can still come to CES. Now, to be fair to America, there is a class of migrant they're welcoming. if you are the former dictator of Honduras who's been convicted of multiple narcotrafficking charges. White South Africans?

28:15You will be. Yeah, you'll be honored and welcome. You'll be honored and welcome. You'll be honored and welcome. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, this is specifically a place that attracts you based on being free and easy and quick and simple. And it's all of these little roadblocks, these little additions that just make it like, you can't treat this like adult Disneyland. What happens in Vegas gets imprisoned indefinitely in Vegas? what happens in Vegas requires a long form now. It's just like, I don't know. And also the hotels are not as cheap as they used to be. It used to be, you could roll your ass into ballys for 45 bucks a night if you felt like it.

28:49Well, there's also resort fees that people are very angry about. Did you pay the no bed bug fee, by the way? I was wondering. No, I paid the extra bed bug fee. Oh, okay. You get that one special. That's the Canadian special, they call it. It's just frustrating as well because this place, I love Vegas. I love being here. It's a vending machine city. My addiction is Diet Coke, so that's been great for the Coca-Cola Corporation. But it's like adding these roadblocks fucks up a place like this so much, which is based on convenience. Yeah. I mean, I think when you look at the different narratives people are putting out about Las Vegas, I know local Democrats have labeled this the Trump slump.

29:24That's their big thing going into – we have a governor's race this year. And that is a big part is tying the current governor, Joe Lombardo, to the policies of the Trump administration. Um, I'm skeptical about how well that's going to work. Um, cause I think it's a lot more complicated than just Trump. Um, it's a larger administration thing. It's also this idea that Las Vegas is price gouging people, regardless of how true that is for a specific location. I mean, there's like the infamous$26 water bottle that's like, uh, I think was coming up from like a mini bar in someone's room that like Fox news is reporting on.

30:02But the thing is, we're in the Palazzo and I like staying here, but it's the fucking case here. There's a resort fee every night. And it's like, these resort fees kill people. Not literally. Well, the rest of Vegas does that maybe, but not really. It's like the little needling things that Vegas did. And it's not just post 2021, but it's like, if you're going to do this to a place where it's about just kind of like frictionless entertainment. And they've waved through so many mergers too. The casinos aren't really competing anymore. well there's that and also that some of them aren't they don't own the property the property itself in some cases right but even downtown vegas is more expensive now like i i haven't been to fremont street much before last year and i went it's more expensive in some cases than the strip and it fucking sucks i'm sorry it's like genuinely like it's a loud hostile place that when you go it's just like punishing it's like oh and now you used to go there because it was cheap now it's expensive and loud and bad if i wanted that i go to fucking charlotte yeah what's happening in reno is it just as bad as phil was mentioning the other day that reno is actually trying to like not reject the casinos but grow outside of them which i don't think i think it's a state that's a statewide is that state yeah i would say it's like pretty statewide no like housing and jobs oh wow i hate that that's crazy i know what what kind of a town runs on that when we have our big beautiful casinos and our loud slot machines buffalo slot machines they're so loud we've got the buffalo slot machines you've got the bullet farm you've got the water castle where jones joe lives you've got the we have the disgust on stars we have the most lifeless nfl team in the most lifeless nfl stadium i have always made actually i was at an event recently and mark davis sat next down next to me and i got i was man if he ever sat down next to me i got some fucking questions man i'm not gonna comment what the fucking offensive line they're all going to play out of position why'd you let pete carroll's son do the sorry but it's crazy because i mean it's so emblematic of the industry that you can have a successful in air quotes nfl franchise without winning i mean i mean even then i don't even think they're that successful we're going to transition to the next part the next ad is for the Las Vegas Raiders.

32:16We won three fucking times despite Pete Carroll, Geno Smith. I guess that's what happens when you don't have an offensive line playing in position. This next ad is for the Las Vegas Raiders. Any other is an error.

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36:12And we're back for the second quarter. We're back with, of course, Carl Chenard of the Las Vegas Sun. Hello. Mr. Edwin Anguays of the Take Bubble newsletter. Hello, hello. activist, journalist, and author, Corey Doctorow. Well, hello. I was on the radio earlier, and I was like, oh, Corey Doctorow's book. And they're like, you can say it. I'm like, in shittification, yay! They allow you to, your book has allowed people to say it on the radio now. Oh, no. They just allowed me to. What do you say then? So it depends. I was on Alexis Madrigal's show on NPR in San Francisco. It's the largest NPR station in the country, right after Brandon Carr, chair of the FCC, announced that he was going to pull three years of their underwriting.

36:56And their general counsel had said, you cannot even allude to the title of the book. And through the entire segment, we called it The Book Whose Title We Cannot Say. When I did On the Media, which is nationally syndicated, they called it In Poopification. Was that with Brooke? With Brooke, yeah. She's terrific. I love Brooke. Brooke Gladstone fucking rocks. She is a national treasure. And yeah, various other affiliates and radio stations have dealt with it in different ways. The Daily Show, they're cable, so they were like, it's fine. But anytime I'm on broadcast, we can't do it. And weirdly, I was just on a show in Toronto, and they decided not to let me say the title of the book.

37:44And so I was like, it's in somethingification, And the something is a word for poop that rhymes with snit. Nice. That's the word they use? Snit? I used it. Oh, okay. I was like, as in, I mean, it's great. It's a good example. As in your general counsel is having a, yeah. It is always funny. Like when I went on, on the media, I did like half an hour of just like I managed it because actually took Brooke Gladstone, older woman. And genuinely, if you can't explain something to her, she's very smart, but like she's a regular person, older woman. So if you can, if you can explain it to her, you can explain it to anyone.

38:17But if you can't, you can't explain. Normies won't understand you. I got so many emails, lovely emails. I heard from my good mate Peter Storm, everyone who was listening. It was great as well. But I heard so many people just being like, wow, you sounded so nice. You didn't say shit or fuck. I'm like, I can actually have a conversation with someone without swearing. You know, you just don't hear it. You need to take a nap afterwards, but sure. Yeah, yeah, I have to enter like my mind palace, like the stone will of the Buddha to like just three hours point. and just vibrating giant gong in the back you know how i feel about samuel one no i can i'm calm i'm normal yeah it's i want vegas to come roaring back but i think there is a degree of the post 2021 greed that came in i think that everyone jacked stuff up i think so i don't know how is samlin being received by tourism has it been a good tourism destination it's it's like 25 minutes away from everything which is in vegas far yeah i mean i would say in my own experience i don't even really see summerland as a specifically very touristy area does it not try and appeal what is it it's like this thing 25 minutes away which anywhere else would be like oh you get that 25 minutes away in vegas you're like no you you're just like oh i'll come visit you in new york city i guess i mean if they let you fire an automatic weapon maybe you'll go that far but you can do that 10 minutes off the strip there's like four different places bazooka then it's okay there's a place 15 minutes you can blow up a car for two grand here okay fuck vegas rocks it's a it's a very wealthy area and they got some really nice shopping and they got a triple a baseball team as well yes the aviators no it's fucking great as a person who doesn't like sports i like that ava is brilliant it is i would say at least in my experience a place that's like more designed for locals, I would say probably more affluent locals.

40:11Yes, yes. It's a master plan community. Yeah. Which I've got a couple times I had to go to an event at the Aviator Stadium. It's really nice. I just never really saw it as I was typically like serving the tourists. And it's kind of interesting with that is that the locals' casinos actually had a really good year. What would be, what you mean like? Red Rock, Green Valley. Well, all the stations' casinos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also Green Valley as well. is they doing all right i believe so that's one pretty close to me yeah i know i like all the local casinos they're just like yeah stations overall had a very good year it's good it's because they there's the asmr of just the slot machines they're always like somewhere between completely empty or just a few people but they somehow still make money i love them they're the best it's i also didn't realize before moving here that like all of the movie theaters that you would go to are in casinos yeah there's one in the orleans and uh took my parents there when they were in town and there's just these horrifying giant like chuck e cheese looking animals like a giant statue to them when you oh that's my jam i fucking love it no my parents thought it was one i'm a committed robosexual no sadly they're not robots they're just giant statues of rats no it's so strange i don't see a hockey tournament there i did not see the the rat i swear maybe i i just like hallucinated just these right just like oh yeah my mom gave me pot or something i I don't know.

41:33And that cab on the way down, Ed and I were talking about, Ed Anguesso and I were talking about my new favorite podcast, which is No Gods, No Mayors, which is a podcast about the oafs that are mayors. And on that, I learned that Las Vegas is not a city. Yeah. The city of Las Vegas is a suburb on the other side of the area. When you hear about the mayor of Las Vegas, that's generally - This is an unincorporated area, right? Well, you have paradise. Right. And then, yeah, when I first moved here, I was like being explained all the different government structures, like a lot of things in Southern Nevada run through Clark County just because it's encompasses the entire or not entire, but most of the population that lives around this area.

42:15But Las Vegas itself is not the strip. And then you have North Las Vegas and Henderson. It's, but the part of Las Vegas you see as a visitor to Las Vegas is an unincorporated County land, right? Largely. Yeah. So I also just want to be clear. It wasn't rats. It was giant kind of stoned looking crocodiles. Like they're just like, they all look like absolutely. They look fucking alligators. But they're not animated? No. Like what is the point? No, they're like zoos. These things look like. We sound very disappointed. Yeah, they look like they are just, I don't want to know. They're very Splash Mountain looking.

42:55Yes. Little alligator minstrelsy. Oh God. I wonder if they have their own shredder, you know? What do you mean? Like a shredder, like their enemy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like instead of, you know, Teenage Mutant Ninja Alligators and they've got to have, like, would it be a rat? Who's their sensei? Yeah, yeah. It's the people that collect unemployment taxes. Like they're just constantly at war with them. It's like a dude who's just hanging in the sewer. One thing I'll say is like, I know this sounds strange, but Vegas doesn't also seem that welcoming to CES. Like it's, you'd think that they cater to it more.

43:27Like when Raiders games are going on, there's a shit ton of pop-up events. With this, it's like the only specific drinking specials or anything like that are just Lenovo has bought a restaurant. I mean, it's pretty crazy to see though, as you know, I come to the strip probably a lot less than people would think. But I mean, CES, maybe not getting drink deals, but it is everywhere on the strip. It is, but it's events where people have bought them. it's not like they are Vegas usually like opens their arms to people in like a just a kind of a can I have your money please thing and I don't know whether it's just CES doesn't treat them with respect or something it's just something they haven't forgiven them from disaggregating from AVN I think yeah that's what it is that's the thing I they should never have done I don't I still don't understand have them because of fucking purity I mean yeah you know I that I understand but I understand intellectually they should have them in the same conference hall yes actually yeah it's now at virgin hotels which i kind of very funny so the other event i come to in vegas most years is defcon and talk about an event that vegas does not roll out the red carpet we just keep getting turfed out of hotels and conference centers so yeah it's just it's weird there's this combative relationship with it as well it's like okay you're here you're going to spend a lot of money but weirdly we don't love it it's i have i feel like both sides need to come together and do something but i guess vegas is a city of honest cons and ces isn't ah no i mean like that's kind of what i love it here it's like everyone's weird so no one's weird and also we're like very human labor focused yeah i mean there's that i mean i think like we talked about last year there's a huge union culture and union participation here in nevada that for a i think a state that has a republican governor and it was the first time in 20 something years um voted for trump very union heavy um that there is a big focus on the people who make up the city which i really have appreciated learning about that and that kind of the culture around work i mean just like there is a in my opinion like i don't know growing up in new york maybe i people would look down on some like service jobs i don't think that's as much of a thing at least in my experience talking to people.

45:50And splitting time between both, I would say New York has got a hell of a lot better at that. Like most people I talk to. And also if you have a disrespect for service, people chop your hands off for 37 to a review piece of shit. But I like, yeah, the city is very pro labor. And I guess the current state of the tech industry isn't. Well, I was going to, yeah, I was going to have like. An entire conference where it's like, what if we didn't have people? Well, there is like a, this like overarching theme of, feels almost like anti-human. yeah like we are trying to and i mean like tech innovations forever i've been like how do we minimize the the labor cost of whatever but it feels like we're taking it to such a degree everyone's so excited everyone's like oh i can't wait i mean yeah there are people who are like excited to see people lose their jobs and the thing is as well like vegas one of the best things here is go and fucking talk to the people working at the restaurants at the door and your cab there's so many everyone in no one comes here by accident everyone like ends up here because they had a few choices they needed to make and it's like i'm here you talk to like one of my good mates i know aaronstein used to work uh casapallia now in um s &p in new york one of my dearest friends and it's because just vegas people fucking will talk to you and there's never a case i've never talked to anyone here and it just happened in new york where there was like the look up and down like who are you what do you do no one everyone's like what are you like yeah you're doing all right there's a genuine everyman culture here and i i don't know if this is the case it probably isn't at a large scale but yeah i can imagine if you're here there's a certain degree of fuck off oh you want to replace me and everyone i know and everything i do yeah i'm not sure how um ingrained or like supremely aware people are of that sentiment within the tech industry for like people who are just like going about their day but i think like it's always funny to see how the ads change in vegas based on what conferences in town yeah i think i mean i've certainly picked up on when there's like a tech show like some of them are like um the human need not apply right i mean not literally that but no it's but that's the intonation yeah i mean there are literal i don't know if they ran them here but there's a oh in the bay that one i saw in the I don't think I saw that one in Vegas.

48:09And they did that specifically to drama about rich, right? Because that if people are running around saying this AI company is so good at what it does, that it's going to replace humans that investors are like, Oh, that's the advertising campaign for LLMs in general. Well, it's going to say like the, the fear you're putting people into is making them take your product seriously. Yeah. Even though it doesn't. It's just another chat GPT rapper. exactly. It's just, And I had this conversation on the radio earlier about like, oh, the MGM's chatbot is replacing concierges. No, it isn't. They just wanted to lay some people off.

48:45Also, I feel like concierge culture here is kind of dead. Because everyone interacts with it enough. No, but it's like 10, 15 years ago, you would talk to the concierge and they'd be able to get you into a show or a restaurant. Now there's so many people. It's just like, can you get me a reservation? Just use OpenTable, mate. There was this story I did a while back about this website called restaurant trader oh yeah that was and one of the little nuggets of information that i got out of it that i wanted to make into a bigger thing but i just wasn't able to was that there were concierge folks who were getting reservations it would sound like through their job to then put on restaurant trader that people would pay for on the side dastardly oh wow where like, I think there was an option on the website where you could like pretty much request to work with a concierge.

49:42Wow. So yeah, it's, that's a little anecdotal. appointment trader like is like banned in multiple New York restaurants, New York city. Sorry. It was the New York assembly that passed a law. Fuck yeah. That was like restricting it. I think there was a, there was a similar effort here in Nevada. That's why I was writing about it. I genuinely think it should be an actual crime to resell appointments. The most disgusting version of this was there was a bro who was paying people to call the IRS when the lines opened at eight in the morning and sit in the hold queue and then sell their positions in the IRS hold queue to people who wanted to figure out what's going on with their taxes.

50:25That should be a jailable offense. Well, he was eventually shut down, but I don't think he was ever put in jail, much as he absolutely 100%. Like holding a place in line for you? That's right. He should be put in the box they put Captain Jack in Torchwood. The hand massage one? No, I'm talking about that. Anyone watch Torchwood? Torchwood when they put Captain Jack in the concrete box? Oh, go and watch that. Look that up. Yeah, that's where that guy should go. Can I tell you my best Vegas story? Please, please. No, please, please. So my sister-in-law's good friends started a guide to places, to romantic hotels called the Mr.

51:01and Mrs. Smith Guides. And what was the romantic hotel in this case? So we were asked to come and review a hotel. And the way that it works is they ring up ahead and they said, we're the Mrs. and Mrs. Smith Company. We're thinking about putting you in the guide. We're going to send some anonymous reviewers. What we would like is a voucher from the manager to present at checkout that says, these people should be comped. But they will book the reservation as per normal. The staff won't know until you check out. So we stayed in the high roller suite at the MGM. Nice. So it was an$1 ,800 a night, 1 ,400 square foot, two-story suite with a butler.

51:33And it was the first time we ever interacted with a concierge. It was very good. This was in 2005. It was the weekend we got engaged. So we came here and got engaged and we stayed in the hotel. I was teaching in LA and my wife had come over and was working for BBC America. And it was so great. And like the concierge culture and they had lots of perks. The best thing they had was they came in, they gave us a menu of newspapers. And we were like, how do you get these newspapers? Because it was the Singapore Straits Times and Minimi. The Las Vegas Sun. The Las Vegas Sun as well. But no, but international papers.

52:10And they would print it on 11 by, they had a facsimile newspaper service. They printed on 11 by 17 inch heavy stock and bind it in silk ribbon. What? And so we ordered like 11 newspapers, and we would come out in the morning, and the butler would have laid them out in a fan on the coffee table from all over the world that morning's paper. That's beautiful. International Hero Tribune, whatever, on creamy 11 by 17 with like a sort of pinkish silver silk ribbon in the corner. Was that an additional cost? No, it was all bundled in with the room. Huh. I mean, the margins there when you're getting someone.

52:51Oh, yeah, of course. $2 ,500 to$10 ,000 a night. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's the thing. Vegas is a service culture place. Like, shit, we're going to Spago tonight. Roberto Garcia over at GM there. Fantastic place. You look over at Abelagio Fountain. I mean, formerly Pazami, I don't have my thoughts on that. But there are so many great restaurants here with lovely service. The great Palazzo is brilliant. And even Main Street Station is fucking great, too. You can get a pretty good pastrami sandwich at New York, New York. there's a great margarita deal at the station's casinos but main street station is a microbrewery doesn't it oh i'm just saying overall no no but that's the thing like you can go you can have a laugh or if you want to do the fancy stuff you can go any number of places i mean like the whole thing about this city is it's relatively accessible affordable and if you want to spend some money or you can spend some money and like have a luxury experience and it's not as expensive as doing it in other cities and i just it's weird how i will just fucking say this i don't think people who come to ces are grateful enough for how accessible the city is in part because ces fucks it up yeah it's pretty difficult to get into that building like they the convention center i mean you can go to the renaissance hotel and then they ubers will be like i'm being told to go somewhere else and you're like mate i don't know where to go because that cea doesn't know how to wipe their asshole at this point how many ces has we done with uber around fucking anyway i'm a big fan of the monorail for during what's that word again monorail yeah is there a chance the track could bend i mean hopefully not considering i don't want to diet outside harris but it it's like i will say also that harris was cheaper this year even on like an expensive night it was 300 bucks night which doesn't sound cheap but it is for ces and which makes me wonder if ces attendance was down i so i'm mad at caesar's harrow for kicking defcon out i i wouldn't stay there again and that's the thing.

54:44Vegas, I'm not going to be romantic, but it used to be, but it feels like that's a, that's a dollar to be made to work with the people at DEF CON and be like, okay, we have security concerns. What are some things that people at DEF CON could do to make you comfortable? And then we can make you comfortable too. Also the last time I stayed at Harrah's, they gave me a room that not only didn't have a desk, it didn't have a closet. Oh. I was like, where do I hang up my stuff? And they're like, if you want a room with a closet, that's an extra charge. Jesus Christ. What year was that? That was two years ago at DEF CON.

55:16That's supremely fucked up. It was really fucked up. That is insane. No, it was three years ago at DEF CON. Three years ago at DEF CON. In relation to what you were just saying, I thought I'd pull this up. The average daily room rate on the Strip, this is year to date comparing November 2025 to November 2024. On the Strip, it's actually fallen 4.7 % and downtown 6.2%. Interesting. Yeah. I just everything's out of sorts but that's the rack rate and they're piling it up with junk fees so the rack rate is not the price right you have to add in the junk fees I believe that's inclusive that's the room rate itself that's a one to one comparison last year I'm not positive I just feel like there is an ocean of opportunity here for the CEA if they could do one thing right and just like, Gary Shapiro come on the show.

56:10CTA? CTA. CTA. Is that CTA? CTA. I don't know who fucking runs this shit. They certainly don't want to talk to me. But it's like - So I have to say, I've known Gary Shapiro for 20 years. I've never had a bad interaction with him. I don't know all the dealings of the CTA. Yeah. But I've never had a, I get the impression that he is someone who is in charge of an industry association with several large, important members that like to throw their weight around. And he is the peacemaker and coalition binder of this big disparate organization. I'm not going to defend CEA and its members, but I do think that Gary Shapiro is holding together a very fractious group.

56:51Well, I've been saying CEA incorrectly for days, so I apologize there. Also, Ben is not your son. I think they were the CEA. I think they changed the name to CTA because electronics sounds a little outmoded. I just feel like the CTA, now I'm saying it correctly, could work directly with Vegas and do way more. It feels like they could streamline this whole thing and make it a little bit better because it's been here long enough that it's still too chaotic. Yeah, I'm not sure about the exact relationship they have, but they do have a pretty close working relationship, especially when it comes down to construction and renovations within the convention center.

57:28How about getting people to and from the convention center? Oh, I think it, I mean, there was, there's another reporter, um, Alan Snell who had a, uh, I'm just going to call it a tweet. I don't care. Um, that was about like the difficulty of biking to the convention center. It's really, really hard. I'm so sorry. You're a psychopath. If you buy to that convention, you know, I was thinking about e-bikes when we were stuck in traffic today and thinking I, this would be fast. It's difficult. I mean, biking throughout Vegas is, is quite hard. Yeah. I would never. Is that because bikes aren't allowed on the, I mean, There's no infrastructure.

58:03I mean, there is infrastructure, but there's not a lot of infrastructure for bikes. I mean, the way it was today, you would have been moving five times faster than anything else on the road. But it's like, we've had this convention here for a while and it's still insanely difficult to get around. And it's not, and they'll probably say, well, you know, it's a big convention. It's a lot of people. I fucking got around. I went to dinner during the F1. It was not that different. What if they had helicopters that came in and skyjacked any car that moved into the junction when they didn't have time to complete their turn.

58:36I like that. Uber Blade. And block the grid. Yeah. Just take those cars and then take them out to the Grand Canyon. And just leave them at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Or a big arm that just took them. You're on timeout. You got to stay there. There was a little viral clip of the new Zooks car. Oh, did one get stuck? It didn't get stuck because it moved eventually. but it was like in the sorry that's not that doesn't sound great for them not your company um but they were just like in the middle of a turn in a giant like strip intersection for like a good little bit of time and everyone around was like what are they doing i'm like oh no cab drivers are just saying the most ugly shit of all time well i just can't imagine being like the visitor in that it's completely freaking out in this transparent box as everyone stares at you like the homer simpson thing where he gets stuck and has to be craned out right i mean this is a town bereft of shame but even that that's a new kind of shame we invented here in las vegas it's your fault i've fallen in love with waymos as an angelino because you can make a left turn into their path and they'll just defer to you and they won't even honk oh no they're yeah and i'm just like fuck you right the code roads for people not robots like fuck yourself it's my shit my streets Last time I was in San Francisco and I took a Waymo, I got out of it, watched as a Waymo in front of it got stuck at the intersection.

59:56I watched it get stuck at the intersection. Then another Waymo gets stuck behind it. And I checked back half an hour. It was still fucking sick. Just like stare, like by the W Hotel in San Francisco, just staring out into nothingness. As people were like, nah, this thing isn't fucking hearing you. It can only see. Was it San Francisco where a bunch of people just kept calling Waymos to one spot until it just concluded? No, sorry. Yes, that was actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And people putting like traffic cones on top of them. I think it was really funny when that was happening and people were like, you can't deface Waymo.

1:00:29It's like, this is domestic terrorism. Did people fucking say that? Okay. Property damage is domestic terrorism. It is illegal to smash up a car. I will accept that. Property damage is illegal. I mean, is it though? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. Ask the cops. maybe i don't think they'd have the answer yeah cops are like well ask a lawyer i think it's correct in 40 of cases google 40 cops yeah and see what comes up the boy right the truth the truth about this specific situation yeah it's it's unfortunate i feel like that everything feels out of sync here i feel like the cta could work with vegas and make this a little bit easier i also think the cta needs to fucking kick companies out from renting restaurants in the venetian i think it's fucking stupid i don't think we should lose an entire restaurant because lenovo needs to do the slop hour where they're like we added an llm to your fucking laptop you disgusting pig you you nasty pig yeah they did that they didn't call you a nasty pig though if they did that i'd be fine if they were like you nasty hogs do you like your slop you pigs i'd be like fine it's so what i want is for lenovo to distribute badge flare that's a little adhesive backed uh point pointer red pointer nub oh yeah yeah think pad and that like everyone can can go to the lenovo party and then have the red lenovo pointer on their badge yeah but if you have a green one well then you can do anything to them i yeah it's sorry it's vegas um yeah it's it's weird it's just weird i don't know i i love living in vegas and then this this week it's just all of the vegas stuff that's fun kind of turns off we've had less fun off strip vent like things no one's blown up a car there's not been any like interesting stunts it's like they everyone forgot to have fun or make anything this year ah it's it's really sad it's sad i'm upset that like ces is kind of not having fun and neither is Vegas.

1:02:30We're all just kind of sitting here rolling around in our filth, or at least I am. Everyone's just staring at me. I'm not filthy. I've been showering every day. We're just little piggies. When I was on this show earlier, I felt bad for them, but they were like, well, what about Lenovo's AI assistant? I'm like, yeah, that's just an LLM. And they're like, yeah, but what if it in the future? I'm like, what if it did what in the future? And they're like, what would be... What if we breed these horses to run so fast that eventually one of the mares gives birth to a locomotive? Listen, Leland Stanford was on to something.

1:03:05Okay. What if we all shit ourselves enough and maybe our horses will wipe themselves? We need more hay than currently exists on the planet. That's right. We've thrown a ball so fast that it now flies. We've discovered unprecedented reserves of hay in other countries. That we're not invaded. No. we're gonna we're gonna we're just gonna run them for a few years it'll be beautiful big beautiful hay yeah big beautiful the big we love them that's the uh that's the sister town to hay on y and whale big beautiful oh god like the whole week my brain has been broken someone sent me a video of someone doing trump was going i made a boom boom i mean the biggest boom boom i've ever seen they're saying it's quite beautiful yeah and but this specific week it's like even the like the trump voice just i don't know if this is the week to do it very sad but you know is he dead yet trump yeah he's still alive chicken yeah i mean screaming yeah he's still going now the upcoming ad you're gonna get is uh for nothing political nothing weird everything's normal here we're all the most normal people to ever do a podcast in history and you too can be the most normal person ever if you buy and or listen to the following advertisement just throw your fucking credit card at your phone, you pig!

1:04:24I'm sorry, you're not a pig. Please don't stop listening to my show. I desperately need the downloads.

1:04:46уть

1:05:03And as the number one podcaster That's 844-844-IHEART. Every January, we're encouraged to start over. But what if this year is about slowing down and learning how to understand ourselves more deeply? What if this year is about giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help? I'm Mike DeLaRocha, host of Sacred Lessons. This is a podcast for men navigating stress, emotional health, fatherhood, identity, and the unspoken pressures we're taught to carry alone. We talk honestly about mental health, about healing generational wounds, and about learning how to show up with more presence and care.

1:05:48If you want a healthier relationship with yourself and the people you love, then Sacred Lessons is the podcast for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLaRocha on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike De La Rocha and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today. Hey everyone, it's Ed Helms. And I'm Cal Penn and we are the hosts of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart audiobook club. This week on the podcast, I am talking to film and TV critic, radio and podcast host, and Harry Potter superfan, Rihanna Dillon, to discuss Audible's full cast adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

1:06:33What moments in this audiobook capture the feeling of the magical world best for you, or just stood out the most? I always loved reading about the Quidditch matches, and I think the audio really gets it because it just plunges you right into the stands. You have the crowd sounds all around you. It is surround sound, especially if you're listening in headphones. Listen to Ear Say, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:07:27I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened. These are just a few of the moving and important stories I'll be holding space for on my upcoming 13th season of Family Secrets. Whether you've been on this journey with me from season one or just joining the Family Secrets family, we're so happy to have you with us. I'll dive deep into the incredible power of secrets, the ones that shape our identities, test our relationships, and ultimately reveal who we truly are. Listen to Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:08:14Diane, I'm once again finding myself in front of a microphone in beautiful, sunny Las Vegas, Nevada, even though it's nighttime. Where I've been for what feels like weeks and I'm surrounded by several wayward travelers that I adore. Starting with another journalist and activist, I think, author, Cory Doctorow. Well, hello, Ed. It's nice to be here. That's him. And we've got Garrison Davis of It Could Happen Here. I apologize. We had a podcasting emergency. No, it's fine. We are doing it now. And Carl Chouinard of the Las Vegas Sun. Hello. And of course, Edward Ingueso Jr. Hello. Who is, who's Diane?

1:08:52Twin Peaks. Are you serious? It's a Twin Peaks reference. Oh, my God. I thought it was a Cheers reference. No. I never watched Cheers. And that's Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards. Yeah, and famous Cheers fan. Famous Cheers head. Yeah. And Robert is very excited Because we have the pieces to make What was it? We've got a C We've got a CD Cory Doctorow We've got a CD We've got a Robert We've got Angueso I have to use his last name Because there's not an O first name here And the editor is Matt Also some other people's names You have to add other names What's a CD-ROM? When you have an ISO and you want to convert it to optical media.

1:09:37You take that ISO and you take some optical media and you toast the one onto the other. Yeah, when you've pirated Cyberpunk 2077 and you have to make your computer think that you've put a CD in. When a daddy CD and a mother CD. I haven't played with that in a minute. I miss pirating and getting the little ISO burner. I miss when the only way I had Microsoft Office was a pirated version that never touched the internet and didn't ask me to use Copilot every fucking five minutes. Yeah, it really is sickening. I remember when I started reading classified ads and it was like, you know, SWF, ISO, SWM.

1:10:14And I was like, a straight white female is an ISO for a straight white male? I don't understand. Yeah, but Garrison, was that a legit question? No, I know. They know it, I'm sorry. That would have been, no, honestly, if it was honest, that would have been fine. It was barely though, My dad used it for the music he purchased legally on the internet and transferring it to CDs when I was a kid. But I got the last bit of CD-ROM. Right, the very edge. My younger siblings don't know what a CD-ROM is. Meanwhile, I once owned a Zip Drive. I had a Zip Drive. I had a Jazz Drive too. You had a Jazz Drive?

1:10:48Oh, hell yeah. No, this is the kind of kid I was. I had a drawer full of Scuzzy Terminators. Jesus Christ. It took me a minute to remember what Scuzzy referred to. So that was the one where you screwed it into, like it had literal screws on it. You had to set dip switches on the back. And if you gave two SCSI devices the same ID, all of your drives would go south forever. Hell yeah. I love it. Computers used to have to fight with the computer. And then they'd administer a lethal shock. We used to be a proper country. You know, we used to have jazz drives, zip drives. Now just Dropbox gives you a whole terabyte to any, all sorts and sundry.

1:11:26with unlimited access for the US government without a warrant. But also unlimited access for the chatbots that they sign deals with. You know, let's be fair. I did see earlier that ChatGPT apparently is doing a HIPAA-compliant ChatGPT, which just is a lie. What? It's a lie. That's so funny. It's a fucking lie. Imagine how many ChatGPTs we've seen in health, like wearable products, just like these past few days. Again, we were talking about this on the other show, but you can tell one of the things that you can divide the people with AI products between is the 90 % for whom, if you ask them, what happens if somebody, like if there's a data breach with all of this biometric data you've put in the cloud, they go, what?

1:12:12Or we're really concerned with safety, right? They'll give you one of those two answers, but they don't actually have an answer. And then there's the much smaller 10 to 20 % of people bringing products who will tell you right up front the second you come to their booth this does not touch the cloud it never goes online it is entirely on device i'm just i'm trying to work out how anything chat gpt can be hipaa compliant though it can't i mean based on my understanding of hipaa i'm sure they're working out a deal with i mean now that the government's run by who it's run by but like in so i can kind of sketch out a way that it could be hipaa compliant so hipaa uh although it's commonly called a consumer privacy law is not a consumer privacy law because it only affects your rights as a patient and not as a consumer.

1:12:57And so if you were to construct a kind of matrioshka where the inside doll is a consumer company that is providing you with consumer medical services and the outside of the doll is a medical company that does nothing except kind of exist as a fig leaf like the MD whose name is on the private equity owned practice, then what you could say is, well, you haven't given us any medical data. You've only given us consumer data. Therefore it is HIPAA compliant. Like we have structured HIPAA compliance through the compliance regime and not through the HIPAA regime. Okay. Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. I just think if you feed your healthcare data into this, you deserve whatever comes out.

1:13:40Like it's just - I would, I would, like, it's easy to take that attitude. I know, I know. People are being conned into it and claimed it's more - And it's going to be, it's, they're going to be conduit into it the same way a lot of people who are conned into getting addicted to painkillers where they will be at their doctor's office. Their doctor will have gotten flown out for a vacation or put on a cruise where they were pitched on this. And their doctor will say, there's a wearable that can help you keep track of your cholesterol. And this 65-year-old person will not immediately think, like people who professionally worry about this stuff, is my data safe?

1:14:13What is it being safeguarded? Can a prompt injection attack reveal all of my biometric data? They'll think, you know, I am not special enough. They'll not understand the nature of targets of opportunity. The thing I'm worried about is more that it will give you the wrong advice more than anything. I mean, in terms of objective health realities, that is the big concern. But also, I mean, and that's part of what I'm saying is that when people, the majority of people I suspect who come into these devices will not have made a choice to go out into the world and buy something. They will have been advised by a medical professional they trust that this is a good product for them.

1:14:51And that's part of what worries me in terms of it hallucinating, in terms of it not being reliable. Because the doctors probably will not be competent to judge whether or not the AI is reliable. But I also think it's that no one can afford health care anyway. Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing with like AI therapy that I always say. It's like it's obviously evil, obviously bad, terrible. It's going to reinforce things. But at the same time, therapy is extremely expensive. Yeah. And when it's covered by health care plans, which it's often not, and I don't even think therapy is covered under the NHS, or if it is, it's extremely fucking limited.

1:15:23No, it is. When I was there, I could not find a therapist that would actually see. It is hard to find a therapist, but it is covered under the NHS. Then it may as well. The thing is, then it may as well not be. And I say this as a big NHS defender and lover of the NHS. Mental health is this weird bifurcated thing where everything's too expensive. So, yeah. Well, I mean, and that was, I went to a panel that was about AI and the future of mental health. And I went there hoping that or expecting it to be a normal panel where I harass whoever is up there during the Q &A. But no, it was one very earnest clinical therapist who was talking about people are already using AIs for therapy.

1:15:58We have data on how often that's being done, and we have data on the harms. And one of the reasons why it's harmful is because the AIs are programmed to keep you using them as long as possible and that there's certain behaviors that they exhibit that are bad for people. So if it's possible to make a healthy therapeutic AI, these are the things it would need to do and not do. And one of the things is it would need to not work the way AI chatbots work in terms of constantly – and my question for her after the show was like, well, but that seems like people won't use it and will just keep using the chatbots they're addicted to.

1:16:30I don't know if that's true. I think people – journaling is a well-understood therapeutic modality. Journaling with prompts is a well-understood therapeutic modality. I think those prompts don't have to be very sophisticated. And I think that there are lots of people who would find it nice to have a thing where when you type some stuff, gave you a response and said, you know, tell me more. I think you've kind of like Rosebud or something. Like there are ones like that as well. It's just when it comes to therapeutic stuff. I guess more my concern was that I don't deny that there is a market and there are people who would get utility and you probably could make a device that could handle that responsibly.

1:17:06but I don't see that as solving the societal issue of huge numbers of people use it because the chatbots are addictive right and that's what like that was my and to be very clear to her I liked this person and her answer was when I brought that up I have that concern too and I think it might not be really possible for this to help that well the good news is is that none of this is remotely profitable in any way and healthcare data is extremely extremely token intensive and so anyone using this is just working on borrowed time and and in defense of chatbots and medical applications they are reliably good at up coding things in ehr so you can rip off which is great and hey no and i've heard that's the one that is the one llm use i have heard where it's just like yeah find if you're being overcharged in this which is you know what the one oh no i mean overcharging they're very good at like epic which is the ehr electronic health record monopolist, which is a cult basically.

1:18:06Yes, yes. They've basically redesigned the chatbots in their EHR systems around upcoding so that they can rip off insurers. Wow. So that you go in and you say, I have an X and a Y and a Z, and they're like, well, that infers, I can infer that you have an A and a B and a C. And also that we can treat X as this category for reimbursement in that category for reimbursement. I will prompt the clinician to enter a few more details that will allow us to, this is why clinicians spend two hours doing data entry for every hour they spend doing clinical care. And that makes me think a product I might want, because there's a lot of agentic AI here, and I legitimately don't want an AI agent to handle stuff like booking flights or booking my car to get repaired or whatever for me.

1:18:55But what could be useful is if somebody coded an AI agent that you could have call companies that you need to call on the phone and fight through their chatbot. And like, this is an optimized chatbot for fighting through other chatbots. We have that. Maybe that's a product. GetHuman.com. They've had that for a while. It's funny. It's like even the good idea. It's kind of already done. Also, if you use Walgreens, I think if you just type 771 the moment you call, you'll immediately go to the pharmacist. That's interesting. Yep, just do that. That's a little tip for you all. Just if you'd work with Walgreens, fuck chatbots.

1:19:28yeah it's i also just think that it's irresponsible to have a chatbot talk about any health care thing just because the nuance of what i even i might my further radicalization of that is i think all the fitness stuff is unhealthy too because you can fuck yourself up over training so easily and what we're walking out cory from uh the venetian earlier today there are a bunch of these ai training things and it's like you'll fuck your your shit and i'm like oh we'll get your age and your weight and that will tell us everything not really oh all these fucking i did uh i went to a company called smart eye who uh they have an optical recognition program and it worked in that they had it read my eyes and then when i walked in front of it in the future it would identify me by the name i gave it and the other people by the name they gave it um but the thing that it was meant for is number one like several products i saw at ces if you are distracted If you're looking at your phone or if you fall asleep while driving, it will try to wake you up or it will say, hey, look away from your phone.

1:20:30And I guess that could be useful. But the other side of it was most of the products that I saw were built into these huge smart dashboards that were like giant screens in the front of the car. And we know that when people are manipulating a big screen in a car, they are as bad as a drunk driver. Right. Yeah. And so it's like, well, you're offering a solution to the problem that was created by cramming unnecessary crap into cars. The other thing that they were showing is that we can see if you're drunk based on the way your eyes look, which they said they got a lady drunk on a closed track and had it identify her.

1:21:08And I have no way of evaluating whether this works. But people, when I posted a video of it, pointed out in the comments, I have this issue, right, with my eyes. I wonder if it's going to just point out call me drunk and I kind of wonder are we going to also see that certain people they did not groups of people of different ethnicities they didn't test it widely enough and so it just decides everyone of this ethnicity is drunk. I mean if you're a drunk American if you're a drunk American if that's your ethnicity which I am but also people drive on the different side of the road so their eyes would possibly look in different directions and I always think and I mentioned it earlier, Microsoft Connect, which could not see black people.

1:21:51Quite literally, Better Off Ted. Anyone remember Better Off Ted? Great show. Literally, we see you. And that was the, and I don't know that Smart Eye has this. I have, because I can't evaluate it. There's no way to. I can't really, I did show up. I had ripped a shitload of my CBG joint, which is like hemp. What is CBG? It's one of the many different cannabinoids they figured out how to extract and that's federally legal for the next couple of months. so I was high as hell and I'd taken a shitload of my Kratom pills and it didn't notify that I was fucked up but I wasn't drunk so you can drive on CBG and Kratom and I should not have been driving driving high is fine I mean if you take a little K just get to the edge of the K hole when you're on the Kratom well that's when I drive best you can become the richest man in the world that.

1:22:42Yeah, I was going to say you can run. It turns out you can use nitrous in multiple ways in your car. Look, some of us may have done car nitrous before, and if so, as long as you don't do a double, it's safe. Better Offline brought to you by Carmageddon. Steve Jackson's Car Wars. Jesus Christ. That's a blast from the past. Oh my God. No, they're doing a new Carmageddon now. It's going to be nice. Yeah, it's... I can't stop thinking of the eye thing now. It's really bothered me because that feels like this how would you possibly ever get enough data that i don't look that's the thing is they had a video of it recognizing a drunk person but nothing that they had at the show i cannot test they should just get every journalist rip shit uh-huh and just to be like yeah this is there used to be bars at some of the uh yeah yeah and that's what they should have had they should have been like take three shots and get in front of this thing and see if it can tell like that's responsible no they should have like a driving simulator and they should have like shots and you should be able to go up, do some shots, get in the driving simulator and see if it can tell if you're drunk driving.

1:23:46This is why CES needs to be moved to Minneapolis. Right? No. Absolutely not. In January? Are you insane? No, that would mean a drunk driving city. In January? It's going to be ice everywhere. Well, there's currently ice all over. There literally is ice everywhere. Oh, God. Yeah. Now, they should move it somewhere more punishing, though. I agree. Vegas is too nice. Let's send this to fucking, like, Merced, California. There we go. There we go. Black Rock Desert. There we go. No, no, no. That's too nice. You need to merge Burning Man and CES. Dallas. Yeah, Dallas. Dallas would be bad. Don't even joke about that.

1:24:29Yeah, that would be to Orlando, Florida. Oh, yeah. The most painful place in the world. the most, I'm not super spiritual, but that place is bathed in evil. And I live in Las Vegas. Yeah, you live in Vegas. You have very little room to stand on. I have a lot of experience. I mean, if we're going to Florida, how about Clearwater, right? Clearwater, the world's headquarters for FlexiDisc manufacturing and Scientology. Yeah, and to be honest, a lot of people don't like the culty aspects of FlexiDisc, but I think there's a lot of difference. What is FlexiDisc? What is that? I don't know, actually.

1:25:07You ever buy a magazine that had a floppy, printed 45 RPM record that you tore out of the magazine and put on your turntable? No. That is a flexi-disc. Well, when was this a thing? It was a thing from like the 50s through the early 2000s. Really? Wow. Garrison, that's basically like a CD-ROM, but big. Oh, I got it. That makes sense, yeah. I worked on one of them. It's like a DVD for your ears.

1:25:41That might be what finally broke me on this show. I mentioned on an earlier installment of this that one of my Christmas gifts was this Olivetti typewriter, but one of my other Christmas gifts was a Mad Magazine from 1981 with a flexi disc. It's the Great Big Beautiful Day flexi disc that had a, they recorded eight different endings to the track and they had a, groove that has a hard stop that caused the needle to pop up and it would land in one of eight random tracks. That's cool. That's actually cool as shit. That's cooler than anything I've seen at CES. Technically, based on the standards of CES, that's AI enabled.

1:26:21That's a smart record. And actually quite literally more reliable than any LLM. It's all on device, doesn't connect to the cloud. It's everything we've been looking for in products. And it's customizable and user-centric. I love this. This is the only company I respect that I've heard about this week. In terms of good products we saw, Gare and I, we talked about this on our show. I talked about it in the first episode with you. There are a lot of exoskeleton products out that are a mix of, and often they're meant for both, but a mix of therapeutic for people who have different disabilities where they might need the extra assistance offered and also for like laborers for people working and i'm also like people doing uh working like factories i saw a shoe one that i didn't get to see as well there's some upper body ones yeah the hip ones um and some they're now being also marketed as like this is really useful for people who are hiking who are carrying who are out in the way we're carrying weights and we got to test one they they sent me they gave me hypershell gave me one of their units that retailed for about two grand they're they they they range from about two grand or about one a thousand dollars to a couple of thousand dollars.

1:27:30But the one we've got is about a two grand unit. Gary and I both wore it. I have some data on it, by which I mean, I tracked how fast I was moving. I walked from the Venetian to the LBCC. And normally when I'm just walking and I'm not in a particular hurry, it's about a 19, 20 minute mile. If I'm just kind of like walking and not go, which is more or less normal. And my heart rate's usually between like 95 and like 103 or something like that if I'm walking. And when I had the exoskeleton on, my pace was between 1530 and like 1620 as a general. And my heart rate was never more than like one or two higher than normal.

1:28:07With the same amount of effort? Yeah. Yeah. Same amount. Like again, my heart rate. Yeah. Because you can feel it like lifting your legs, basically. It is kind of moving you. I didn't have any less foot pain. Like by the end of the day, 14 ,000 steps or so, like my feet were sore because it doesn't do anything to your feet but my knees didn't feel strained and my lower back didn't feel strained that's um you know what i found it pretty cool yeah i like this i like in this in a quite cynical ces yeah i actually really love that these are everywhere these are actually future tech that fucking rocks i actually i literally thanked the rep who had given them to me not for giving me to them but just like thank you guys for bringing a real thing to the show yes what happened when you went through the entrance metal detector it was fine they didn't even notice it really that's not good no no is it all like carbon fiber or something yeah yeah yeah oh wow hyper show should let me have one i'm sure we can get you one try i want to try and gary used it too similar response yeah yeah no we we talked about it like yesterday yeah on the show i think it's really cool that like again i've been trashing this show with good fucking reason uh but i like that they're doing this i like that we're finally because that i've seen like kind of like shreds of across the years and they're everywhere in a show that otherwise should be shut down uh no maybe not the entire thing but there is that's part of what's frustrating is there are people doing innovative stuff like i've talked about the photonic muscles right where it is like a a device that replicates the way physical muscles work yeah that was interesting yeah where you like you shine a light and it causes it to constrict and you can use it as like a motor and it takes up less space than a motor but they're not being like and this is going to be in everything they were like we see this as having applications and different like automotive things for small motors and it can make things lighter.

1:29:52And I was like, you are, you've made something that's cool and you, you're not promising this is going to be the future of everything. You're not trying to show me how this is a$3 billion industry. You're trying to be like, and now your car will be a little lighter and this motor will break less often than the previous kinds of motors that were used in this application. I'm like, that's the thing. Thank you. Garrett, you and Robert are different shapes to be, to, you know, to broadly. I would say that. Hurt to wear the same XO? Or were you wearing different XOs? Yeah, we are slightly different in size.

1:30:25Yeah. Hurtful. The same XO. Same XO. So it has the back. You can adjust it. The carbon fiber slides on both sides, so it can get wider for the hips. I did have it at the smallest option, but in terms of my hips, I'm kind of the smallest adult size there is. One of nature's ectomorphs. Yes, I am an ectomorph. and then the leg straps also have some pretty strong nylon so you can tighten in two places for it to go above your knee. I definitely if I was considerably smaller it may not have fit on as well but it's difficult because I have a very twinkish form with some people who are smaller than me.

1:31:04Twinkomorphic? Twinkomorphic. Which is going to be in Ridley Scott's new Alien film. But no, certain people who are smaller than me in a lot of ways might have bigger hips, it would fit on them fine. If someone's hips were considerably smaller than mine, then they might have a problem. But it worked for my size. There is an app which gives you more control over the device. You can control it all in the fitness mode. You can control it all with a button. But with a button, you're kind of like, there's four levels. And with the app, you could be like, I wanted it 31 % or whatever. So you have a little more adjustment ability.

1:31:45And what does upping the power on it do? You can feel it lifting your legs as you walk. So it's physically lifting your body. Is it like just turning your e-bike from three to four? Yeah, kind of. But it lifts your physical... But it also, when you install it, you put in your weight and your height, and it will tell you this is probably where you want to adjust it. There's like numbers when you like whiten it. This is probably what will work best for your body. I like that this actually works. It's a good product, yeah. I wish more things were like that. $2 ,000 is not a casual purchase for most people, but it's not like insanely out of reach for a normal person.

1:32:20And for a business. And it's certainly reasonable for a business. And I think it's worth what they're charging. If you need it. Their last model from last year is like$1 ,000. This is their new pro version. And this is a weird thing. I know that this is a weirdly optimistic thing. I can imagine them being cheaper in two or three years. I'm sure they will be. Yeah. And I think I see this is like$2 ,000 to be able to walk regularly when you can't. Yeah. Fucking cool. Big deal. Well, and the other thing that I'm working on, and I'm trying to get one of the companies that makes a full body, the upper body one too, because I have experimented putting on my body armor, like my, my, my bullet, my, my plate carrier and my helmet.

1:32:59And I, I think that there's an opportunity to create your own, like jerry-rigged power armor out of this. And like every American boy, all I've ever wanted to do is be a space marine. So I really do think, I think there's a potential to do this. So you could be Matt Damon in Elysium? No. No? No. I loved Elysium. Space marine. Warhammer style. Hams, yeah. Do you know, they have a fucking trademark they took out on Space Marine. They sure did. They sure did. I mean, Warhammer's called a fuck games workshop. Oh, they are, they're, this is a whole separate cut, but like their attitude towards like intellectual property law has been crazy.

1:33:36Like for the last 30 years, there hasn't been any movies or TV despite the massive demand for it. And they would sue anyone who created like fan ones. Like there was a German full-length fan movie that they had scrubbed from the internet because the argument was that German intellectual property laws would mean that they would not have full control of their IP if they allowed this fan project to exist. Which is – I mean this is the trademark argument. It's a story that trademark lawyers tell their children when they're worried about not having enough money to pay for college. It's nonsense. This trademark genericization, generic side argument, it is bullshit.

1:34:11But Games Workshop is otherwise kind of a cool company, I thought. I mean, they pay people well, I think. And they've got good lore. Yeah. They've got good lore. They've got good minis. They're a weird company. I'll say that. I enjoy the fact also that they don't even try and romanticize any of it. They're just like, no, they fucking suck. They bring enormous pleasure to Riley Quinn, who is a force for good on them. Riley, coming up better offline. we're doing a thing with trash futures coming up in the future that's me announcing it that's all you're getting no i love hams we'll be doing it launching a hams podcast this year hams what like the that's what the kids call it uh what what hams what just like the warhammer oh warhammer sorry for a second you're british this is your culture yeah i did i hung out like the one happy place in in hammersmith london where it was the local games workshop thing i i found the space marine game kind of shit though the new one yeah it was just repetitive no orcs no no no they went with they went with tyranids and chaos orcs we'll get orcs i wanted like yobbo orcs like so i could feel at home like being beset with men going my favorite piece of warhammer lore is that games workshops orcs which started out in fantasy and then when they created 40k mitigated that were initially largely created to be a parody of the diggers.

1:35:29As in? Like the anarchists? Yes. Oh my God, what? One of their games was specifically based on the coal mine protests during the Thatcher era with orcs that were standing in for the different sites, including an orc that was like basically Margaret Thatcher. What? Like large parts of early Warhammer lore were critiques of Thatcherism because it was a bunch of punks in the 80s who were angry about Margaret Thatcher. That's all been jettisoned long since. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there is in early games, like Games Workshop games, there's a lot of weird Margaret Thatcher references. There is an alternative.

1:36:07Awkward Thatcher. I love the idea that like - New York, New York. Oh my God. No, I really should have known that one, but no, The Diggers would have been just before my time. So 1986 I was born. Yep. So like just before that era, but I did grow up with two parents who were just like, yeah, Margaret Thatcher fucking sucks. Fuck Margaret Thatcher. We're all Neil Kinnick stans here. Well, we're going to rotate to our final rotation, our final half an hour. Whatever is coming up, you must look at it. You must listen to it. You must click it forever. Otherwise, this show will simply expire. Please subscribe to the newsletter too.

1:36:41We're going to an ad break and then we'll be back for the final quarter.

1:37:19I'll see you next time. 844-844-IHEART. Every January, we're encouraged to start over. But what if this year is about slowing down and learning how to understand ourselves more deeply? What if this year is about giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help? I'm Mike DeLaRocha, host of Sacred Lessons. This is a podcast for men navigating stress, emotional health, fatherhood, identity, and the unspoken pressures we're taught to carry alone. We talk honestly about mental health, about healing generational wounds, and about learning how to show up with more presence and care.

1:38:03If you want a healthier relationship with yourself and the people you love, then Sacred Lessons is the podcast for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLaRocha on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLaRocha and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today. Hey everyone, it's Ed Helms. And I'm Cal Penn and we are the hosts of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am talking to film and TV critic, radio and podcast host and Harry Potter superfan Rihanna Dillon to discuss Audible's full cast adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

1:38:48What moments in this audio book capture the feeling of the magical world best for you or or just stood out the most? I always loved reading about the Quidditch matches, and I think the audio really gets it because it just plunges you right into the stands. You have the crowd sounds like all around you is surround sound, especially if you're listening in headphones. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:39:25Hi, I'm Dani Shapiro, host of the hit podcast Family Secrets. We were in the car, like a rolling stone came on, and he said, there's a line in there about your mother. And I said, what? What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is choose an identity that other people can't have. I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened. These are just a few of the moving and important stories I'll be holding space for on my upcoming 13th season of Family Secrets. Whether you've been on this journey with me from season one or just joining the Family Secrets family, we're so happy to have you with us.

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1:40:29Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Mattisowski.

1:40:51Welcome back to Bear Offline for the final core of our CS experience. That was the one for Mr. Matt Oselstead. I mean, that was fine, Ed. But what if instead of a human being, a chatbot had played guitar for you? That's not just music. It's sound. They make my favorite holiday song. What is it? The Coca-Cola holidays are coming song, which has lyrics that really stick with me. Yeah. That include holidays are coming. Wow. Holidays are coming. Are they? Holidays are coming. holidays are coming ominous it's a threat whether you like it or not literally threatened me with a good time yeah i i i love the coca-cola ad where the truck changes size several times i see i'm glad you said that because we are going to make so much money by just cutting that audio out and having like put throwing that in as an ad of just ed the Trump saying, I love the Coca-Cola.

1:41:45That's like the Homer Simpson thing. I love Coca-Cola. I love LLM. My voice is my passport. Verify me. You're real good at turning me on. Yeah, this is CES. We're here for the final. It's fine. CES this year has been so strange. And I mean this, even the metaverse CES, which was kind of like weird. I miss the metaverse CES. I miss the metaverse in general. The good old days. everything was so simple back then NFTs that was a weird CES because there was not one in 2021 they did the virtual one 2022 was their first CES and Gary and I thanks to the metaverse made a lifelong friend for the last four years every year we go to Morimoto's and MGM which is a really good restaurant with our friend Andrew who is the CEO of Owlcat Games nice um alchemy alchemy labs is part of i think al wait sorry is it yeah you're right roca shit is it alchemy it's alchemy al roca game sorry um anyway uh we go and we eat and we hang out because in 2022 we met in the metaverse yeah there was a metaverse party in the meta side the bellagio oh where everyone showed up outside the bellagio and then at a certain time there was like a qr code that you scanned and you went into a browser.

1:43:12It wasn't even an app. It was an in-browser metaverse party. In-browser metaverse experience? That crashed immediately and no one was able to use your fountain. It was supposed to sync up to the fountain and nobody could get it to work. And the whole thing completely crashed. It was a massive dud. And there were guys who worked for the company there who fled. They left. They ran away. But the real metaverse was the friends you made along the way. That's what it actually was. So we went to the beer garden, which was across the street, and then we met Andrew, who now we have. Yeah, now we hang out.

1:43:43And now we hang out every year at CES. Again, the metaverse brings people together. This was Mark Zuckerberg's beautiful vision all along. This was my first CES miracle. The first of many. I love the idea of going outside the Bellagio fountains, like a very analog thing full of pistons that works beautifully. I thought you were just going to say piss, but yeah, probably pistons too. I don't think you can piss in there. Oh, you can piss in anything. Oh, I could. Oh, yes. Let me rephrase this. I don't think you could piss in it without getting arrested. No, no, you pee in a bottle and you just toss the bottle in.

1:44:16You would get arrested for that. They would absolutely fucking come. Not if you run. One time I was watching those fountains and I watched them kill a bird. They've got one of those Amazon surveillance masks. We had dinner outside the Bellagio Fountain a few years ago. And we talked about all the birds who were flying into the water. And once one just get, just like, just like, because the fountains are fucking huge. Yeah. Like they look like you see him on the video, the giant and they're just pistons and just a bird, just a fucking endangered bird. When I taught a special ed, one of my, cause you know, there were a bunch of different kids and like one of my kids who I worked with was this kid who was like 17 years old.

1:44:54So he's about to graduate. He had at the time what they called Asperger's syndrome. Obviously that's not a diagnostic term now, but that's how I was introduced to him. and he was obsessed with pumps, with like water pumps, like fountains and stuff and incredibly knowledgeable. He had self-trot himself and had gotten so good that he had just mailed to whatever company built the Bellagio fountains and builds a lot of fountains. They're a fountain company. He had sent them schematics to designs that he had, and they were good enough that they flew the VP of the company out to tell him like, when you graduate, apply to work with us.

1:45:26We will hire you. Did he work there? I don't, I mean, I have not, but this was 18 years ago. I hope so he was in high school when I knew him well as an artist with oddly specific likes and dislikes I fucking love that it's a beautiful story he was a great kid but no you're right I hope he's still a great kid I don't know this is the weirdest CES since the metaverse it's so strange because yeah go on no I they're both they're both they both have this hollowness to them yes because at least last year AI was still like ascendant exactly It was still going up. Thank you. And now it ascended and now it's going down and you can tell because the only thing they can imagine as like a new thing is combining these models, which haven't really improved the last year, really, combining them with like kind of years old robotics.

1:46:18It's on a ring. This is the only new thing they have is combining two old technologies in a way that kind of makes it look new, but it really isn't. And even Jensen Huang kind of felt like lost. No, it's like absent and hollow in a way that I've only felt before while inside the metaverse, which is also absent and hollow. You know what it needs, though? It needs to be appreciated on a Segway because that was the truly transformative technology of 2002. We were going to change the world with the Segway. I don't even remember the last time I walked around without using a Segway. Do you remember life before the Segway?

1:46:54No. I was born in 2002. I said you've only ever known a segway. You've never known a time without segways. Garrison's feet have never touched the ground. Yeah, it's just segway to segway. I've never been on a segway, I'm going to be honest. Oh, man, it's like being on a segway. It's like standing, but different. I see the tours and I'm just like, I look like a bellend. I don't need to emphasize this. Steve Wozniak used to play segway polo, which is apparently the sport of kings. my man i am a british polish guy do you understand how difficult it is to find a way to be more white than me like jesus christ segue polo segue polo i did me i mean was is also polish i am also i am also polish and also technically british so segue racquetball oh segue pickleball jesus christ kill me i i segue technical i i what segue technical that's what you got on that some bit oh someone has that's just when you're open carrying on a segue that's that's the only way i ride that's just texas man my wife gave me a tabasco holster for christmas last year and that is my open carry nice yeah i i i met was once and you know what he's one of the few tech people i've met who i wasn't just like revolted by he's a manch i met him once i sat down and i talked to him and we talked for like half an hour and he was like you know you've got to try icab but i'm like all right what's he talking about he's like no it's a share what it's um a shareware run by a single german developer it's completely secure and it was you can just give this random developer 25 euro and i took it what else does the app do though no it's just a fucking working browser okay yeah it just works yeah which is unusual for browser that doesn't have and i used it i'm like oh i i need to ask a question i emailed the developer thinking immediate response like very sternly telling me that i wasn't using it correctly but what the fuck is the internet for and that browser is more useful than anything i've seen here i do garrelson you've you've given i've been trying to find the words for this but yeah it's like last year it was ah we're gonna do ai folks now you're excited about all the AI we're going to fucking do.

1:49:08But you know, it's not there, but we're all excited. This year it's, ah, fuck, you know, do you want a chatbot in your oven? AI is in the physical world now. It's the potential is always more interesting than the real thing. This is why the right is only interested in potential babies, but not actual babies. Because they're full of fucking, like they make noise. Actual babies like want things and have agency, whereas babies that don't exist, imaginary babies in pizza parlor restaurants or women's uteruses are worthy and important. No, and it's the mix of AI is entering the physical world. This is going to be in everyone's house.

1:49:46Everyone is always going to be communicating with and listened to by one or more chatbots. That is the vision. And that is the vision that every time I talk to one of the people who works at these companies, especially the engineers and the C-suite people, every time I listen to them in a panel, The default assumption is you will never not be connected to some form of AI. You will always be listening, and everyone wants a chatbot that is always listening, that they can always talk to. And people do not want to use browsers. They do not want to use the internet. They want to have the digital world be entirely – and that was the – there were a couple of different points in the different panels I went to where people would express their belief.

1:50:31that the internet now, we are making content specifically to be scraped by bots. Websites are to be visited by bots, not people. The most important thing is getting your article to get summarized in an AI because no one's reading the actual article anymore. They're just reading either the Google summary or they're reading the chat GPT summary. And so trying to like engineer for AI, for AI to grab and use the content. They're calling it generative. four hours on Monday just doing marketing panels about AI and advertising. Jesus Christ. What was the term that they used for this? Which one? For trying to do like search engine optimization.

1:51:13That's what I'm building too. No, no, no, no, no. The term that they used was model hacking. Model hacking. Because in the, again, four hours of listening to people who were like C-Sweets, the CMO of Intuit, right? People in like one of Google's heads of marketing, The only specific, and there was one in all of these panels specific of this is an AI augmented marketing plan that we executed. There was one specific example given in all of these, and it was the people who make Allegra wanted to really push the non-drowsy aspect of Allegra. So they used model hacking to ensure that whenever AIs were asked what allergy medicine should I get, they were more likely to pull up Allegra and would always say that it's a non-drowsy Allegra.

1:51:58Allegra is a non-drink and also would insinuate, this was the other part of it, via model hacking, they got the chatbots to start insinuating that other allergy meds would make you drowsy. And I was like, that's the one example. Have we replaced SEO with model engine optimization? That is my takeaway. Is this all meow? Jesus fucking God. Fuck. There's another term, but now we're calling it meow. And it's model engine optimization for the web, right? now nice i mean that's a very classic and that that was when i when i got to what is the actual because everyone would say ai is supercharging the way that we do advertising and marketing it's completely changed the game that was the actual specific is that we are basically replacing seo with model hacking right with me out the thing is that's that's it that's that's the idea they've got and people do say about this a lot but it's like oh no we're gonna start changing articles to appeal to a shadowy algorithm what could possibly happen oh it's like we lit we're in a regression it's like oh what is the big new hot thing chat bots well there were knowledge management systems doing this crap 10 years ago or more they've got data and i i some of the data i can say is is very inconsistent and not they're not uh representing it accurately some of the data I don't know fully how viable those studies are, but the data does suggest that especially Gen Z people are very commonly using ChatGPT when they're trying to make purchases.

1:53:28It's just new SEO. Right. And so at the moment, it does seem as if there is value for advertisers. And you can, in fact, drive sales this way. But that's my question. Is it driving sales or clicks? Because as many news outlets find, those are not the same thing. No, they are not. They are convinced that it's driving sales. Do we all know Gresham's Law? I don't. So bad currency drives out goods. So Gresham's Law dates back to when Newton was the exchequer. And there was enormous debasement of the currency. And so people would like shave down coins. They would sweat them. Clipping. They would clip them.

1:54:10And what would happen is... What is clipping? I'm sorry. It's where you literally clip a piece off the coin. Fuck yeah. It's like pieces of eight. you were literally break could break into eight. So you have this debased currency in the stream of commerce. And if you are past a bad note, the thing that you want to do is, or a bad coin rather, is pass it on to someone else. Because if you're holding onto it, then it's worthless. And so people preferentially spend bad money and they hoard good money. And so the bad money eventually takes over the economy. But what does this manifest in this way?

1:54:44So in this case, what you have is the bad driving out the good. So if you have a good product that you just list and you put on your website or if you have factual information. I mean, one way that we express it more recently is the truth is paywalled and the lies are free. Right. The bad drives out the good over and over again. On Amazon's so-called advertising network. So when I wrote the chapter in a shitification about Amazon advertising, which is where they auction off search results, that was a$32 billion a year business. It went to a$58 billion business. It was on target to be over a$70 billion business.

1:55:27It is worth three times the annual revenue of all newspapers in the world. Jesus Christ. The winner of the auction for Amazon search results is the company that spends the most on search result placement, which means that they have less money to spend on either fair pricing or product quality or both. So the top results on Amazon are always going to be the worst products, either the most expensive or the worst quality or both. And we are living through an era of Gresham's Law, right? The bad dries out the good over and over and over again. I think what's funny is you're completely right. That was sounding like an LLM there.

1:56:09But it's like, no, but - And I'm very smart for saying it. You're not just right. You're smart, but it's - And that snazzy blazer makes you look powerful. And it's also - Have you considered having a Coca-Cola with vanilla? I think that you might really benefit from some Coca-Cola with vanilla right now. I heard you sniffle. It's non-drowsy. uh kyle kyle and i both they're in the same moment but it's also it's the ultimate point of that with these llms it's like we've reached the precipice where it's like we can control the search engine the results the everything yeah except they attached it to the one thing that you're not meant to do with a search engine which is make it expensive it's just a fucking well i mean but what what they're going what they see is the utility here like i've talked a bit about soundhounds booth this is a company that makes ai agents that are largely meant to drive sales for other people.

1:56:59But... one of the things I didn't bring up that the representative very excitedly told me is that they will be make they're making deals with different manufacturers with you know hotels with you know hotels with you know hotels with you know hotels you know hotels you know hotels you know hotels you know hotels you know financial relationship with, right? So if you want a restaurant, it will send, it will put forward restaurants that have paid them and will suggest restaurants or a mechanic that has paid them. It will suggest when you go, if you say, oh, what is this problem with my car? And it'll tell you, oh, you need to replace this belt.

1:57:42I'll book you an appointment at the dealership. A jiffy loop. Right. Would you like to do a test drive of a new car? And like, so there's no, that, that is the, what they, that is what they want. They want a world where every time anyone uses a map app, it's owned by somebody who is basically, if you say, I need to go to the nearest gas station, it is instead marketing you, this is the gas station, we have a deal with the company. So I published a story where this was the plot in 2005. It was called Human Readable. It was published in an anthology by Ernest Lilly called Future Washington's. It's been reprinted many times since.

1:58:18Like, cyberpunk is a warning and not a suggestion. Yeah. the torment nexus we're bringing you say that but i mean the cyberpunk i was raised on but was shadow run and i do feel like if i had a troll friend with a machine gun a lot of my problems would go away i also agree but i will say none of this works like this is the i i understand separately from a troll with a machine gun the troll machine gun would work flawlessly i actually think it would solve many of the problems i have with this current absolutely yeah almost immediately but the important thing to say is these are necessary fears and discussions that do not exist and cannot exist with llm technology they don't work they do not work there's there's so little thought about the seams right like when i was talking to that guy about their map that sends you to places i was like well what if i'm in like a country because he talked about it'll work in other countries like what if i'm in a country that you have no deals with any of the the businesses there right like because there's a lot of countries and that's or what if I'm in the middle, I live out in the sticks what if I'm in the middle of nowhere and he was confused and it took him a while to figure out an answer because he kept saying well again, we partner with what if you're not partnered with anyone in this town because it's a small town and his answer was, I'm sure it'll be able to pull up companies that we don't haven't set up an arrangement with and I was like, out of what database?

1:59:43You're sure? It became clear to me, no one at SoundHound had ever thought about that. But that's because like Is this a yes? Like my mom's And it's a map app. Like It feels like it should just do that. It's for going places. Like my mother's from like a very small town in like rural Canada in the middle of like Saskatchewan where it's just it's just like prairies and farm towns. And there's not like there's not like big companies. It's all like locally owned like small No Saskatchewan is like Canadian Texas. Yeah it's like Alberta. Is it just not gonna be able to help me navigate anywhere if I'm like driving to go see my family for Christmas and I need to like find like a gas station.

2:00:22There's a great gas station that we have an arrangement with 1600 miles away. Yeah. The gas is what it's worth the trip. It just says fly home, fly back to receive immediately. But that's the funny thing. This is like a classic CES theme as well. It's just like the Chloe Radcliffe. Yeah, but why? Or why does this matter? Or who cares? And they look at you like they are experiencing latency i went to the the way no they do they do it looks like it looks like they're like loading yeah they're not they're not expecting anyone to not want this this is the fucking fault of the tech press i'm sorry this is this is the funniest part about walking through with you cory oh yeah you'll ask like very basic like data privacy questions and they'll just like look at you kind of confused yeah they they are not ready for cory doctorow swag I mean, my questions are pretty basic.

2:01:12It's like, where's the data held? Where's that? Like, can I change the battery? Computer? It's very simple. Like, get all of the battery questions. And then they'll like eventually say, no, you can't change the battery. And they'll look kind of disappointed in themselves. And it's like, oh, well. I liked, we talked to this woman who had a dog companion for old folks, which was a relatively - It was fine. It was an innocent product. but like jenny it was called she sat there and stand there even and was like yeah you know i just think that if i see a doll on the ground i'd pick it up we need to just show we need to train people to respect these things it was a little mary condo ish like you should apologize to your socks she was suggesting that like we need to start treating ai better and i would like to start this year by saying we need to start treating ai worse we need to you see a fucking ai thing wants me to anthropomorphize it i'm gonna show yeah the the waymo is waiting to go straight and you're waiting to make a left turn, fuck the way home.

2:02:10The way home will defer to you. I am updating the Herman Goering quote to when I hear the word chatbot, I reach for my gun. Yeah. Like that's where I am. Ed O and I had a funny event where we were walking along as the trade floor was shutting down and we passed by this booth and I saw on their very weird sign the phrase differential privacy, which is a subject I'm very interested in. it's an abstruse mathematical way of making uh of making data that might be non-private more private and so i stopped and said tell me about your differential privacy and the guy was like you know about differential privacy and i'm like i know a lot about differential privacy and then he proceeded to explain his product which was the most incoherent nonsense i've ever heard and they were doing um so-called federated learning so there's no federal and eventually like it transpired they want to take robot dogs and use it for facial recognition to find people who are brawling in public this is just mad lips this is just madly that's the definition of differential privacy though it was it was genuinely nuts just just this a bit um what does differential privacy mean so there's this problem with um data sets that you've de-identified so say you've got like a record of everyone in a territory who's had um interacted with the hospital system.

2:03:35And you replace their names with a number. And you give it to medical researchers and you say, go find like correlates. Go find out like what two factors correlate. Like people who get pneumonia are more likely to have had a fall or something. And the problem with that is that it's very easy to re-identify these de-identified data sets. So Ben Goldacre, who has done the most important work on this in the United Kingdom, always points out that Tony Blair had two heart surgeries while he was in office we know what dates he had those heart surgeries we know how old he was when he had them so if you have a data set of a de-identified data set of all of the nhs data you can find tony blair you just find the person who is this age who had these two heart procedures on these days and that's tony blair and you can follow him through history right up to this moment nice and differential privacy injects noise into these data sets and you there's a kind of very elegant set of mathematics that i do not understand that uh can allow you to quantify how hard it will be to re-identify someone based on how much false information you've injected into the data set and the more false information you inject the less useful that information is but the more um so it's like a balancing act between injecting stuff to de-anonymize and and so i'm i mean it's a thing i'm interested in as i was saying to ed o uh You know, there's a lot of wish casting here.

2:05:00People would really like de-identification to work because then you could do a lot of things that would otherwise be really shitty and make people angry. You could just say, oh, no, we're respecting your privacy. It probably doesn't, like, it's probably the case that in most applications, de-identification doesn't work even with differential privacy. But it's like, when I see the words differential privacy, you know, like... I just feel it's a very specific thing to not be doing and you're like, oh yeah, what are you actually doing? I don't know if a robot could see a person we could chase black people that's really where it's like, how do we chase down people of color?

2:05:40this is why I prefer the booth that's in the same section maybe a few booths over in Central Hall which I think is a South Korean company called Dreamy with two E's but their motto is all dreams in one dream that's fucking beautiful beautiful this actually reminds me i've got some really good like names uh mr cool dr boss astrocytus pet goo goo planned emoji yangaroo uh fucking just fk i was i was a legitimate fan of a company uh something and fucking fucking fucking tapo uh let's see i've got my there's more. I think what's so representative over this, like, I think it's so representative of this whole CES and the whole, like, current, like, AI smart moment is all dreams in one dream, really.

2:06:34All dreams in one dream. All dreams in one dream. It gets to the point. You wanted to have a wedding ring. But what if your wedding ring could tell you how to make thermite? Here's a good one. Also, the wedding ring tells you if you're stressed or calm. Yeah. You want someone to watch your kid. What if that person could tell your kid how to hang themselves. So here's a nice one that is for an app, but could be for Lockheed Martin. Make your inside outside. Oh, hey. Pretty good. And that's for a company called WowNow. Cyberspace is everted. WowNow. I love the, and they're usually foreign companies who did not think about some of the implications of their branding or their American name.

2:07:11There was one booth I saw, and I don't know what the company did, but I took a picture of it because it just said, making it easier to edge with AI. and there was another and I talked about they had a legitimately good product it's like a AI enabled goon cave AI enabled goon cave that exists here by the way no I I wrote down the phrase sexless goon cave while here and that now we're gonna have AI and they're gonna be fucking and sucking but I feel like CES is the sexless goon cave it's just a bunch of activity oh people are fucking at this CES the robot with the with the with the handy with the pair bottle yeah No, there's a robot with a fleshlight attached.

2:07:50That's nice. And so the chatbot will talk to you as you have sex with a tube. One of the best bits I ever saw at Burning Man was that someone hung a, hanged a fleshlight from a signpost that said public fleshlight. Yeah. And it was completely not intended for you. It was just a bit. Public fleshlight. But this dusty kind of clanging pendulous fleshlight, just waving back and forth in the wind and the dust storms. If I saw anyone walking up, I'd be like, oh, are you going to go? No, you want to wait just to see if they do. That would have been a better bit, would have been fucking the public fleshlight.

2:08:29But the public fleshlight, it's unto itself, was the photo op of all photo ops. I just like the idea if you see anyone walk up to it, you're like, oh, can I, do you want to go? No, you first. I insist. I was going to send this episode to my grandma. Did I get you fired from your talking about fleshlights on a podcast job? I just want to be clear that the one of them where I talked about my dad's horny level from last year, I mentioned it again, and it was the episode my father listened to. That's good. And he has not brought it up. He just said he liked the episode. Ed's dad, very rarely on podcasts do we talk about your libido.

2:09:05No. Privately a lot. i honestly text me almost daily about it uh just as nothing weird nothing today robert just no feelings just completely empty no that's my my favorite burn art project cory was at a the regional texas burn flip side someone built a giant bug zapper that was like a big uh like like uh like rectangular prism and they had a bunch of so it was all metal and it was all electric and there were a bunch of like different little alcoves in it that had like whippets or joints or little bags of drugs so in order to get drugs you had to like navigate your way in and get electrocuted that is actually that is kind of what it feels like to be at c yeah yeah trying to get to like anything worthwhile but it's like just getting zapped the llm thing oh god well as we wrap this up i have to thank everyone in this room robert garrison from it could happen here behind the bastards you've been incredible the support of everyone here Carl Chouinard from the Las Vegas Sun.

2:10:07I was about to say the New York Sun, which is a newspaper that collapsed when I was moving to this country. And at one point, claimed that they'd found life on the moon. And that's why they got shut down. They got shut down for, fired for truth, I think. No, that's a different guy. No, we've been doing so well. Of course, Edward Angueso Jr. Thank you so much, sir. Thank you for having me. I truly love you all. You've done an incredible job and all of you listeners have done one too. And thank you to Manisowski, the producer of the hour, the guitarist, Philip Broughton, our incredible bartender.

2:10:42He will be here for our epilogue tomorrow. Thank you to every single guest we've ever had. We're also dedicating these episodes to Sean Paul Adams, friend of the show, passed sadly last year. Please donate to the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium. And Corey Doctorow, of course, thank you for joining us for today. Thank you, Ed. You've been awesome. Thank you for helping us terrorize people. yeah it's been really great we'll be back next year and of course we'll be back next week got steve burke coming on talking about some ces stuff and gamers nexus this is an incredible show and we've changed the definition of what a tech podcast could be almost said cod passed just gonna move right past that changing the definition again yeah there we go oh god i love doing this show thank you all so much you'll get an epilogue tomorrow be a little more chill but we are out thanks to the city of las vegas thank you with this we're not in the city of las vegas we're in the county of Las Vegas.

2:11:32Right, Clark County. Well, Clark County, right. We've established the city of Las Vegas is an area you've never been to on the other side of the airport full of houses. This is not a city. This is unincorporated LA County. Thanks to the Las Vegas Strip. There you go. Which has, I would say, less vomit and trash cans than last year. Yeah. You know? Fewer. Fewer. And yeah, I'm truly out of thanks to gear, but thank you to the listeners who have come with us for this 20-hour adventure. we will be back next week and we'll be back next year as well thank you thank you for listening to better offline the editor and composer of the better offline theme song is matt osowski you can check out more of his music and audio projects at matt osowski.com M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com.

2:12:27You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

2:13:19A new year doesn't ask us to become someone new. It invites us back home to ourselves. I'm Mike De La Rocha, host of Sacred Lessons, a space for men to pause, reflect, and heal. This year, we're talking honestly about mental health, relationships, and the patterns we're ready to release. If you're looking for clarity, connection, and healthier ways to show up in your life, Sacred Lessons is here for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike De La Rocha on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. It's Ed Helms. And I'm Cal Penn, and we are the hosts of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.

2:14:00This week on the podcast, I am talking to film and TV critic, radio and podcast host, and Harry Potter superfan Rihanna Dillon to discuss Audible's full cast adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. What moments in this audiobook capture the feeling of the magical world best for you? or just stood out the most. I always loved reading about the Quidditch matches and I think the audio really gets it because it just plunges you right into the stands. You have the crowd sounds like all around you is surround sound, especially if you're listening in headphones. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

2:14:54Everyone needs to take care of their mental health, even running back B. John Robinson. When I'm on the field and feeling the pressure, I usually just take a deep breath. When I'm just breathing and seeing what's in front of me, everything just slows down. It just makes me feel great before I run the play. Just like B. John, we all need a strong mental game on and off the field. Make a game plan for your mental health at loveyourmindplaybook.org. Love your mind. Brought to you by the Huntsman Mental Health Foundation, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, and the Ag Council. I'm Maria Hinojosa, host of Latino USA.

2:15:27Venezuelans around the world are celebrating the takedown of former President Maduro, but inside the country there is fear and silence. And in the United States, people are concerned about Donald Trump's rogue tactics. Listen to Latino USA, the fall of Maduro and the rise of an unconstrained Trump. That's on your iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.