CES 2026: Part One (Monday)

31:09This machine kills.

31:44I'll see you next time. 844-844-IHEART to get started. That's 844-844-IHEART. Diane, I'm entering the city of Las Vegas, Nevada for the Consumer Electronics Show. This is Ed Zitron. Of course, it's better offline. We're back here at CES, and I'm joined by the wonderful Scott Stein from CNET. Scott, how are you doing? Hey, great. Hey, great. I'm burnt out is how I'm doing. That's fine, man. I just watched two hours of Jensen Huang going off, so you're in good company. Matt Binder, of course, from Mashable. Great to be here. And Mr. David Rothman Defecta. Hello. So I'm actually going to start with you, Scott, because I want to talk about these X-Real glasses, complete subject change.

32:25We can get back to Lego in a little bit. But so you've been looking at a few different smart glasses. Any of these been actually interesting or useful? In bits. It's like the Kuretec thing. There are little bits that are interesting, and they're all striving to do more, and you're trying to see where they're going to interconnect. Like Xreal, I covered them way back when they were Nreal and they were trying to be like magically. And what do they do though? Right now they're display glasses. So really it's like a big virtual display, just flat screen. And you connect it to your phone? You connect it to your phone, your laptop, like anything that has standard USB video out, like a display port video out.

33:04Switch breaks that, but they sell a dock now that can get around that. So you connect that and you can play. So it's practical. The impractical part is that you have to spend several hundred dollars. And the question is, is that worth it? But what impressed me about what Xreal was doing in recent years and companies like Veacher is that I hadn't been following them for a few years. And the displays were getting really good. Like TV quality good. And I thought, oh, that's really interesting. And now they're striving. They're partnering with Google. They're trying to do more things. So it's interesting how they super focused on one area versus trying to do everything.

33:37But what are they trying with Google? What are they up to? So that's basically like Project Aura, which I tried in December, is like, can we make a VR mixed reality headset thing but shrink it on the glasses for basically the kind of same experience? So is it screens still? It's screens. It's 3D. But the field of view is limited because it's like glasses. So it's like 50. But it feels kind of like a big TV view. And it's projected. and it was running all of the Android XR apps that run on the Samsung Galaxy XR that's like$1 ,800. The Vision Pro, yeah. Yeah. Competitor. And this one, there's no price, but it's probably going to be a lot cheaper.

34:18And it has a little processor puck that you need to use. But other than that, they're regular X-ray glasses. So it's like relatively more practical. What I thought was interesting is you got like effectively the same, a lot of the same experience in selling a lot smaller that you might like stick in your bag. Right. I mean, where was the market for these though? Like, would you use them in your day-to-day? So I would use the display part. But the thing I want to get to that I kind of always fantasized about was like, could I get work done without a laptop? Could I like sit there and just type away in the little corner of CES with like my little keyboard or invisible keyboard in the glasses?

34:56That still hasn't happened. Like technically the Project Aura looks like you could do that because it runs a whole bunch of apps. but the question is how annoying that would be and at what cost and then are you just going to default to like even the glasses I think they're super interesting and I'll use them on flights but then there's a point where I'm like why don't I just use the iPad or like could I just look at my phone like there's a part at which you go do I really want to carry this around but I think it's you know if the price dropped or it became something that did more than that right now it's like display glasses and there are these other like like Meta Ray-Ban and Ray-Ban alike things.

35:33Right. Two different products, completely unrelated. And then you're like, how many of those are you going to buy? That's what I've covered Xreal before too. And I always thought it was interesting that they focused on the display thing. Because you come to CES and smart glasses, you can find like 20 different smart glass companies. They all want to do something with AI and augmented reality and audio recording, transcription, video recording. but xreal i i appreciated that they focused on what if we just give you a tv in your glasses so like when you're on long trips or something you can just be immersed and that's it right the fact that you're saying they now want to you know do some more things with google now i'm like ah i feel like xreal is losing that focus that made them that made them stick out for me as a company that, oh, I appreciate that they got their eye on the prize and that's all they want to do.

36:29Well, what's interesting is like there are parts that are practical that are interconnected because it's like there are companies like TCL and there's like there's a bunch of companies that have been making these like TVs for your face, like these display glasses. But the thing that started like Xreal backed off all that stuff and they started doing these like very focused glasses, but they started introducing stuff in the later ones. It's more practical. Like you can pin the display, which is actually useful because if you're trying to work with these as like a monitor, it used to be that you turn and it would keep following your face, which is awful because you can't ever look in the corner of the screen.

37:04It's like you just keep turning and it keeps moving. But they started pinning it in space so you could actually treat it like a monitor, which is practical. And then they started having transparency. So it's like you look at the display, everything is blacked out around you. But if you turn your head, everything goes transparent again. So it's like practical, but kind of a little AR-y, a little like, and I feel like what they're starting to do is like blend some of that and then be like, they had this partnership with a company called Spacetop too. They were trying to like float a lot of windows apps.

37:32What happened to them? I, they got absorbed into becoming a software moment there for you. What happened to space? I'm like crossing my legs aggressively as well. So, and then you said that was R-A-R related. I know. I don't know. I met with them last when they were debuting stuff in the spring, which was like they backed off hardware. They started pivoting to doing more software because they wanted to run it directly off laptops versus having to buy a whole different product. But then I also feel like in a lot of ways, that's what you're saying, who's the project or for? I feel like that if it runs eventually off a phone, it's like the Samsung Project Dex stuff they've been doing for years where it's like if you could make a thing and just carry your phone with you and carry glasses, that's more practical than carrying like a whole separate product.

38:20I just think that they're all trying to get away from admitting that they can't do this yet. Yeah, they can't do it yet. Yeah. I feel like they've just, they're like, well, we've added Gemini. Do you like this? What is this good? Do you like Gemini? The AI stuff is the weirdest. I mean, obviously there's, that's a whole, we're on the show or we can talk about that forever, but it's like, um, I see it like, yeah, that need to, to dump stuff like that. What interested me about that we're covering, I don't cover AI a lot because a lot of it, I don't find that interesting. but I do find the idea of new interfaces could they find something new to do with it interesting but they keep doing little party tricks versus something that's like really really practical I mean I like I'm a vision pro truther and people do not like me for this I've gotten it they're very unfair to me about this because I like the idea of like a like a like a different interface like you said like something you pop in the corner and I really wanted this in the vision Pro and I tried way too hard.

39:16I really tried to make that shit fit into my life. And it is an embarrassing device, even when you're alone. Yeah. You just like, you see yourself in it in any way like, oh, you've used it a lot. I've used it a lot, but what I use it for are two particular things. If I'm alone and I have it nearby, I will do work with it basically as a Mac monitor. And then I'll go, cause I don't have a monitor that's that big. And I go, oh, that's useful if I get into a flow with it. And then I'll watch movies cause I don't have a TV that looks as good like that in the moment i have an older tv and so i like that as a personal cinema but at that price no um and and i'll never carry it with me anywhere because i'm gonna whip that baby out on the plane no i can't i i tried to keep being people keep asking if i will i will not no i i had it i watched dune or like half of june on june on uh plane and i got the worst migraine i've had in my life and it kept freaking out it was like shaking because oh like with the travel mode yeah it was really mad at me there's also like i can never get it to focus right but i love the idea i love the idea of like a pop-up screen like i really i like that a lot like well that's why the aura thing was interesting because i felt like it was like okay let's take the practical not i mean practical relatively more practical and much lower cost of like a pair of glasses you take with you but there are another pair of glasses but it's like headphones for your eyes but then like could you do most of the Vision Pro stuff?

40:39The thing that I felt was like when I was at WWDC, as a test, I just kind of took the X-Rule 1 Pros with me and filed my stories while wearing them, which wasn't really painful at all. And it was nice because I could float the screen. It wasn't really painful at all. No, I'm sorry. I wasn't laughing at you. That's the endorsement. That's the nicest thing that anyone said about a pair of these glasses. But they actually held in there. I was in the heat, I floated the screen up and I was able to watch the keynote and work. And it was like, I didn't have to hunch over the laptop as much. I was like, oh, it's interesting.

41:12And like, that's something I would not ever be doing with a Vision Pro at all. So I thought, yeah. David, you wear glasses. I do. Why would you, I know that this is kind of a loaded question. Why would you not use these glasses? Like, it's fine to give just like the truth. I mean, I guess the idea of it is it's mostly a me issue. Like, it's just a question of sort of being like if I'm going to watch TV I'll watch it through my glasses and not upon but this is not one of those things there's a couple of you know like red lines in terms of like technology that I'm just simply not going to be comfortable using I'm not a young man and there's a bunch of things that like I don't need to like there was stuff like last year that there was like some you know like it's a thing that jerks off for you you know that is like it's mounted on an arm and it's like oh I thought you were talking about glasses first I was like, where's that birth from?

42:05No, but right. I'm sorry that you didn't sit around for me at the end of the demo today. But like all of that, the idea of like the glasses thing, I feel like it could be cool. Yeah. I just, I would wait until a trusted source was like, all right, it's actually cool. Yeah. Is the water fine? Right. And I don't think I would want to, I would want to use it for like recreation stuff. Like what you're talking about, the idea of just kind of like being able to watch a movie or like have it be like a non-embarrassing way to enjoy like a high quality television experience. Like that part's neat. I don't think I'd want to work on it.

42:39I don't know that like the invisible keyboard holds a great deal of appeal to me. I assume you'd use like a real keyboard, like the invisible keyboard never. Yeah, so like most of these are still use a real keyboard and nobody's cracked like virtual typing yet. They keep saying that they might. That's entirely based on me. Like seeing commercials on TV and being like, damn, look, Zuckerberg's typing on nothing. That's something made up. Even meta, like with the neural band, there's no idea of even getting close to typing yet, but they do have this handwriting on your leg thing that's going to come out.

43:07But I don't do handwriting, and I don't feel doing handwriting on my leg. I have a coordination disability called dyspraxia, and the idea of those services working is really funny to me. For years, I was told repeatedly, you have a doctor's handwriting, and I thought it was a compliment. It wasn't. It was not. It turns out I have a physical disability. but yeah it's even the metaglass is like when actually the episode with victoria i tried them on i was like wow these are cool and i was like now what like if i walked around with these not only would i look like a bellend which isn't a huge change but it's just like you're just staring in the corner for the directions it's like it it's like no it's like the people making them haven't walked around as a normal person before right and i think that's like the short answer to the question of like what would it take for me to use it yeah right like could i do it if i didn't have to like practice like you know the exact thing i can say for glasses is that i put them on every morning in the same i have the same user experience yeah every single time you know and all i have to do is look through the lenses and i can see things slightly better i'm curious about because this is something that like i don't you know cover this area i haven't like followed it as closely how much better is this and how long did it take for things to get as good as they are now that's a good question and thank you i feel like someone from the companies was like why are you more interested in this now?

44:26And I was like, I don't know, because I feel like they started getting a little better. But it's all relatives. Like, I think like smartwatches following, like I remember covering smartwatches in the world before the Apple Watch and the Google Watches emerged. And it was like, everyone's striving for random stuff and crap and some interesting things. But I find those territories before something goes mainstream interesting, because it's like striving for the moment that you're like, the water's fine. So I feel like that's why I love covering those zones is it's like you see ideas being thrown against the wall, thrown against the wall, and then you're like you get there.

44:58But now I feel like you could something crossed over where it's like the meta Ray-Bans became legitimately okay to wear if you're going on like vacation. I found them yeah. No, stylistically it's like the Roy Orbison machine. I know, but I already wear Roy Orbison glasses. You can pull them off. That's a thing, yeah. So I'm like, they literally are like the glasses I'm wearing now. Yeah, I think that's like the real breakthrough is that if you're the type of person that wears that type of frame, the water is indeed fine. The problem is solved. If you don't like that, there are some companies doing thinner.

45:30If you want to do the zoomer wire rim things where the lenses are the exact same size as your eyes, I'm sorry, you can't check your email. They can't. The closest thing to that is I've been testing out Even Realities, which is another company that makes the G2 glasses, and they're more of a metal, thin frame. But the only thing is that not only they weren't functioning that well on the floor here because everything interferes and stuff, but also they don't have audio. they don't do camera stuff, which also people might really like, they have a display, but only for a couple of functions. And you're kind of, and it goes to that, like, why am I doing this?

46:00But you might not notice their glasses. So everyone's like getting to these, like, like, would I tell a friend the water's fine there? No. I'd be like, and even smartwatches now, I still feel like if I was, I'm not reviewing them so much now, but I would say like, you don't need a smartwatch. You know, it's like they never got to the point where you needed them, but I would go, okay but if you want to get one they're okay you'll be okay with them and I feel like the problem with the Ray-Bans and all these things is that you have to recharge them so the Ray-Ban Gen 2s get up to 8 hours of battery but it's really like 4 to 8 so at least they don't they don't crap out at noon but they will go down at like 3pm and then you're like I have to put them in the case to charge so I don't have to bring out another pair of glasses you're like this is a broken you have to dual wheel to your glasses you have to dual wheel so I'm always swapping And glasses, but I say to me, they're like vacation glasses more where it's like, I've been to theme parks.

46:53I record on the rides for fun because it's like the more GoPro on your face. Yeah, that makes sense. And also if you're at a super busy event like this or you're like at an airport, like, and this is such a niche thing, but it's like someone's calling and you don't want to reach for your phone or your AirPods. But that's like a first super, that's like an ultra first world, too many gadgets problem. Right. But it is kind of nice to just be like, oh, I can answer them and not have to do something. But can I justify that? But people who have like vision impairment or other things that I've heard about that have been using that for that, that is interesting.

47:23But the companies I feel are not making enough. I can't speak to the assistive landscape, but I don't think there's enough effort being made to really have deeper, helpful use of that. I feel like everyone's still taking like bits and stabs at that. Yeah. And I imagine that's part of like you have to appeal to the people that have the money and that are like trying to get you to do this stuff. And so like that, I remember that being like a big through line. Last year is the first time I'd been to CES. and I remember there were all these technologies that seemed legitimately like miraculous to me like for people that have very little motion.

47:52It's like a non-invasive chip that makes it possible for you to like communicate and move about and it was really cool. But I remember like Ed and I were at, Ed Angueso were at that stand and it was until we talked to one of the like engineering people, they were trying to sell it as some sort of like a hack for like people working at fast food places. They're like, what if you've been touching chicken? and then you got to handle money. This way you don't have to do it. You can just make a series of micro gestures and that will open the cash register. And I was like, well, that's way dumber. And also - I'm making$15 an hour, but I will go under eight hours of surgery with a neurosurgeon costing me$85 ,000.

48:32It was not invasive, but it was the same sort of thing where it was just like, just say it's for fucking helping people, dude. Like it's not, is that so bad? But the thing is, it's everyone, it's like one leg in one place, one leg in the other, natural phrase there, where it's, yeah, it could be an assistive device, but also regular people could use it, but we're not really going to try for either because you really kind of have to choose because that was the smart cane last year, which at first I wanted, and I kind of made fun of, but it's actually like we can help people who are blind, like great stuff.

48:59That was a direct focused product for a problem. The glasses are like, do you want to record yourself making dinner? And you want this? And there's assistive features too if you've got something wrong with you, but it's just this weird thing where it's, they want to sell they want to find the next growth pig and it's like okay it's going to be glasses i fucking guess i mean the main thing about wearables is like you have to actually be someone who wears the non-technological version of it first for it to speak to you like i don't wear glasses whether it be prescription or sunglasses so i wouldn't buy a smart glass product i don't wear a watch so i wouldn't buy a smart watch because i just have no need for it you know it just it's it that's like the the main leap for it like i okay so right i went to a private razer demo the you know yeah and so they actually they were so they were they they have a project they're working on that's a prototype that's smart headphones yeah just what are those and now so their their selling point for it is you know if you aren't someone who wears glasses you know there's more people who do wear headphones everyone listens to music but not everyone wears sunglasses right so this they put all that like all those like uh smart features except the display because obviously it's a headset in the the headphones so basically the headphones have this little camera on the side and that's your ai assistant it can like you're looking at a menu like reading like a menu at a restaurant in like japan or something that was the demo they showed then the headphones can see the japanese writing and translate it to you in the headphones another thing they brought up is how smart glasses when they do translation features everyone in the vicinity could hear the smart glasses talk to you whereas the headphones because it's in the headphone set only you hear the ai assistant talk to you um another thing they brought up is how you know smart glasses can get hot and uncomfortable on your face the headphones are bigger and they're not on directly on your face so they're more comfortable to wear that was their selling point but again i i feel like in my opinion the the reason to use smart glasses is for specific use cases in the moment for display purposes right not ai assistant features but that's just my my because that's not my cup of tea right but i guess if you're you know trying to sell a product to as many people as possible smart headphones actually do sort of make more cents than smart glasses.

51:32It's very much in the prototype stage. They don't even have a - No price. They just said it would be competitive. I'm just kind of like, how many - It's always like, you're in a foreign country. You're going to look at a menu you don't understand. How often are you fuckers traveling? That sort of shows the bubble they're in. I bet a lot of these guys, because they work for tech companies with big budgets, they probably are traveling a lot. They're probably in Japan and China. What's the number one issue? Is it when you're in Singapore and you don't know what to eat yeah yeah there's no one of their number one issues though yeah yeah when your third vacation home you're the nearby places just don't have anything in english and you can't scream at the waiter until you understand so you've got your smart headphone and i guess do they even sound good like i've had a razor headset they sound fine it i get back to the thing i was saying last last chunk of this show it's like they're all fucking smart headphones.

52:27Fuck you. Make headphones look fit. None of my headphones ever fit in my fucking weird goblin ears. Like everyone, like that's the thing. They're over the ear headphones. They're not earbuds. Great. Okay. So now they can maybe come up with a reason. Because it's just like, okay, I can use Gemini with them or some such bullshit. And that's the other thing too that I find with these. It just made me think about this, going on this tangent. Think about AI in glasses. there's a lot that's frustrating, but like, first of all, the meta stuff always feels like a weird experiment that I'm never using.

53:01And when I do, I feel like I'm playing a weird, like immersive game where I'm just like talking to something and I have no idea if what it's saying is correct. And then it's mostly this conversation. It becomes, it really becomes like a, like a performance art where I'm sort of like, what type of tree, like I'll stand in my town. I'll be like, what type of tree is this? What? I don't know what to ask it when it's like, yeah. AI is like, you know, it's an open door. Ask it whatever you want. I'm like, I don't have any idea where to start. Like, is this, I ended up with things like, is that a bench?

53:32What is this? What is this? What is this shoe? And then I don't know. And then they'll say things like, you were in, a lot of it's descriptive, which could help like assistive to be like, you're in a, you're in a large room with a chair, but I don't need to know that. So it's like, it looks like a comfy red cushion is there and a person and it will get things wrong. and then it'll apologize. And then it's like this strange... I love the future. It's like a play. It's like a weird performance art piece. A lot of the demos that show off these AI features really do act like you're an alien that just came to Earth.

54:08It's like they're all babies. It's like, what the fuck is that? That's a bus. I feel like almost all of this technology, for as long as I've been... I mean, I don't write about it really, but just sort of observing it, is that a lot of it is solving problems that I consider to be just like basically solved. Like you go to the grocery store for it. Or just like, I don't walk around being like, if I don't know what something is, as long as it's not like a creature. The idea of getting it wrong and then being like, great point. Like that was rather, you know? It goes back to like, if you can't really see it and you want assistance, that's interesting.

54:43If you want to read something, which maybe if you're a bad vision, okay. But like, what am I doing? I don't trust. There's no advice it can give me. Like the whole, like there's, there's a continuing demo in glasses about like, look in a pantry and get cooking advice. That is a stock demo where you're like, am I ever staring at a bunch of cans and asking, and then what is it going to tell me? Like you could make a soup with the carrots and the tomato. If I'm looking at a pantry and I don't know what I want to make, I'm just the type of person who's going to go for the microwavable TV dinner. Yeah.

55:14I'm not going to use the AI to tell me what to make. Cause I don't cook if I don't know what I'm dealing with. It's a search on my phone. Like there's a phone. Yeah, exactly. it's also the other thing with with it is that you're you are more than anything else shoehorned you're funneled into using the ai and usually it's one ai it was like on your phone you've got a million or anything else you got a million ways to check stuff and so you're like why am i trapped in this one it's like i'm it's like i'm relying on a strange assistant friend to like do things for me and it makes me feel kind of helpless so i was like i just want to go do this thing and it's like i have to ask assistant person to kind of fumble a way to do it and like i'm just of course you're gonna take out your phone and they they do all these like over the top convoluted features and i just mentioned how i'm not a sunglass or eyeglass wearer so i have no interest in the smart glasses but i actually did for a specific use case look into the meta glasses yeah so when i my kids play soccer and when i go to a game i would love to not be able to not have to hold my phone to record their game.

56:15Yeah, that makes sense. I would love to have it all just record. But then you looked into the details of those video recordings. The meta sunglasses can't record longer than a 30 second clip at a time. Well, three minutes now. So they've gone for three minutes. Unfortunately, those soccer games are longer than three minutes. There's no reason they should allow you to do it until the battery runs out. Like an actual good use case for it that a lot of people, parents, would go apeshit over something like that yeah and they're spending their instead of spending the time on can we make the video record longer than three minutes they're spending their time on all these ai features that i can't think of any regular use case i think it makes sense though if you take it from the perspective it's a tech executive it's like what do people do when they cook well of course they walk into their pantry which they've not been in for some time and they go what the fuck is all this what why are the tomatoes in a can usually someone brings these how do i get them out just banging it and they're like oh Alexa free these tomatoes break open the it's also like okay how long how long will they need to do clips for well what do children do tiktoks tiktoks 30 seconds that's enough I mean that does speak to how much time these tech executives probably spend with their kids have they ever attended one of their kids soccer games How long do I spend with them?

57:39No one records a video for longer than 30 seconds. It's one soccer game, Michael. How long could it last? What are you, a monster making a 10-minute video? Three minutes and then I've got a call, Jimmy. It's sad. It's also like they don't, these glasses do not full, and this is the thing I was interested about with Google, with Project Door, is that they're trying to connect with your phone. The other part of this is that these things don't even do all the things to connect with your phone that you would expect to. There's a lot of broken paths where it's like, whether it's like, as much as you might not like Siri or Gemini or anything else, you're used to like earbuds on your phone doing some basic things that connect.

58:19These break that path. These will have another thing. You're using it with meta AI. And it's like the oldies of smartwatches where like the hook-ins are like, oh, it's got one thing for this, but not that. And this doesn't do that thing. And so you have to like discover like a puzzle because none of the phone companies have opened up good paths. It's also frustrating on that end, but that's like, how do you even, if you don't get to the point where you can at least work with the phone that you got, that's a big problem. Like it needs to do at least everything that you want. Even on the Samsung Galaxy XR, the AI was like, the Gemini live thing was kind of interesting in that it could see everything in the room in your screens.

58:56But then I would ask it to like close an app and it was like, okay, to do that, move an arrow over to the X and close it. And I was like, you're telling me how to close the app. You're the, what am I doing here? You're in there already, dude. Like you're right there. It's not like, it's more like they're testing it than they have an idea of what you should be doing with this. It's like, um, it's like, if I go to a restaurant, I want a menu of like interesting things that you're going to tell me, like, what are my choices? And here it's like in the AI land, it's like, what do you want in our magic kitchen?

59:26And it's like, I don't even know. don't give me choice paralysis i'm like what and then you ask and then sure enough it can't do some of those things so it's like why did you ask me i get mad i'm like just give me a menu of like five options i've been saying for a while it's like you know what the ai would be useful for getting through all the fucking menus they've added to my goddamn phone the 100 different options in the settings part of my iphone that is now like one part it's like do you need to subscribe to apple music like i'm already subscribed i'm already a pay pig you've already got me tim and it's just like no we can't close the menu but what if we looked in your pantry and came up with an idea maybe and it's just it does it work every time god no no no no no we don't do that here we just we we guess ish i don't know it's i wonder i genuinely i don't think they'll talk to me for many reasons but i kind of want to just grab one of them and scream i mean just talk to one of them and say have you ever existed like what do you what does your day look like because like i don't know when i cook i like go and see what's in the fridge it's like oh it's a challenge it's like a little chip like oh okay i'll work out what the fuck i'm gonna put together with whatever like the 18 diet cokes and the three pieces of old meat and they're like oh get some seasoning and just eat them raw but it's like you that's part of being a human it's like what if we remove the friction well not really the friction what if we added friction but an idea it's just very sad it's just sad it's sad well it feels like the like like many things ai is forcing the hand and kind of ruining the landscape it reminds me of like among many things in the metaverse i i thought it was interesting following the philosophy of the meta like i'm gonna say i thought the ideas in the metaverse were interesting but then you could see it turning over hyping cryptoifying becoming whatever and nobody knew what the hell it was and everything became this hype cycle and it blew out and I feel like AI is in that space where it's like beyond other things, nobody, everyone's so rushing that nobody's thinking about any philosophical ideas that, that are important.

1:01:25But the point is that glasses now feel like a place where all that AI hype is being forced in fast, as opposed to like, how are you going to use these on like a design area? VR for all the people would, would shit on it. I do admire thinking back that like VR headsets, you could really do a lot of things in them in terms of knowing how to navigate them and glasses are just like oh they're going to be in your life but nobody's really come up with any interface even the Orion things were like and that's the$10 ,000 meta ones right? yeah the one that doesn't exist yet but like even like Ray-Ban displays all of a sudden you're just swipe swipe swiping through apps and I'm like nobody came up with a better way to do that because it's like I don't want to swipe swipe swipe swipe like the idea of just being like it's just another way to jam you into our stack of shit that you're going to be spending all of our interface versus the other interface versus whatever.

1:02:18It doesn't have to be a new idea for new ideas sake, but it's like could it be less annoying than other stuff? And if it's not, so I feel like nobody has really solved that yet. I'm curious if it'll happen. That's why I love covering this. I'm just curious. Alright, we're going to wrap this 30 minute bit for now. Matt Bender from Mashable, of course, joining us. We've got Scott Stein from Sina and of course David Roth of Defecta. Of course. And I'm Ed Zitron and this next ad is from Gulpo, the cola that burns. So please buy Gulpo.

1:03:23iHeart That's 844-844-IHEART.

1:03:30And we're back, brought to you by Golpo, the cola that burns. This is the CES Experience, Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron. I'm joined by Matt Bender from Mashable. Hello. Scott Stein from CNAP. Hi. And of course, David Roth from Defecta. Hello. And we were just talking about Pepcom, which is a show that I can't remember if that's Showstoppers or Pepcom they wouldn't let me into. They're all very similar. So the media days, before even CES officially opens to the public, the first three nights of CES, there's this big exhibition-type event. First night's Unveiled, second night's Pepcom, third night is Showstoppers.

1:04:06And basically these companies, a lot of them smaller tech startups, basically use these as an opportunity to get some attention because no one really seeks these companies out in advance because no one knows who the fuck they are before they get to CES and see them. um last year for example the big uh winner at unveiled and i covered it i think even spoke about it on this show last year was the salt spoon yes oh yeah yeah i saw the salt and we got very sarcastic and it turned out to actually be very useful for specific people yeah yeah but like it was for people don't know it was a spoon that basically for people who couldn't eat uh foods with salt yeah they have like a high sodium situation instead of just being stuck eating plain foods they they take a scoop of their soup with no salt and the the the spoon sent like a a zap that you can't feel into the spoon which like lights up your taste buds and makes it and like tricks your tongue into thinking the food tastes salty and it worked i tried it out i was pretty shocked that it worked but it worked and that's the an example of sort of the weird type stuff you could find at these like uh ces uh exhibition type shows yeah have you seen anything weird and unveiled at all uh there was a chess playing robot and you know you wonder like what's the market for that like who's gonna buy you can walk into any park in new york and find seven old men right for free yeah for free well well no they will hustle okay it's just like yeah sit down young blood the chess playing robot has not had nearly as interesting a life as whoever the guy that was at Dan Amora for 22 years and then takes$50 from you over the course of a few games of chess.

1:05:49It's also like there are so many programs to play chess. Like, why would you need the actual robot? It's chess.com. People don't know, like you just mentioned. It's only Windows 3.1. Why is this happening? You play against the robot regularly on your computer. This is a physical chess board with a robot that sits on the other side of you and physically has a claw that comes down and moves the pieces. Wow. Which is weird because I've seen technological chess sets that basically have a mechanism underneath the board that just slides the piece, which seems, I mean, if you absolutely need a physical robotic chess board, that seems like the more practical version than having this.

1:06:29Was it like a humanoid? Was it just an arm? It was like a BB-8 size robot sitting across from you with the mechanical arm that was moving the chess pieces. Yeah, and it was sort of like, first of all, this looks very expensive. So I don't know who you're going to sell this to. I guess people who want to show off their robot playing chess. Yeah, I mean, that's a great thing. Like a thing that would be in Drake's home. It's not like... All right, we already went over Grok's LLM. You're not doing great if you have this product. A bespoke chess robot. Hey, check this out. I don't care. like look at really how fast was it really slow as well please tell me it was really slow it wasn't very slow it was a normal speed no that's if i want one of those i want it to be like like really fucking like just barely like it takes like half a minute yeah or or like a an arcade claw machine and it sometimes just drops the piece like just randomly ruins the whole board i love this so but so the did you talk to them at all because i have way more questions for them than anyone else so far i did it because i thought that i looked at it and i was like i thought of the the chest that those chess boards that have the mechanism underneath them was like what is the point of this i don't know i should have maybe if i see them again i'll i'll inquire more for you yeah please do i i must know anything anything else weird like um there was this uh thing that like I don't even know how to explain it.

1:07:59I just saw it in motion. It was almost like a roller-type thing that you would lay down, and it rolls under your back. I guess it's to give you a massage or something. That actually sounds like a foam roller situation. It was weird looking, though, because in cartoons, when they go down one of those slides that have the up and down things, and the cartoon body goes in a way that your back can't go, This thing was making it look like cartoon people, the way their backs were contorting. I wanted to try it, but there was a pretty long line for it. I love that. I think one of our colleagues, Bridget, did a demo of that and was talking about it afterwards.

1:08:41And I was like, oh. Is it meant to fix your back? I think she found it fine. Yeah, I think she found it okay. That's the endorsement I want. CES. CES, I think it was fine. I mean, a lot of that stuff that I remember seeing last year, a lot of the sort of like robotic assistant things. Like it seemed like the, basically like the best you could hope for from it is like I did not experience whiplash from sitting in this gaming chair that moves at its own like a cord or whatever. No physical damage is a win. My spine functions fine. The robot did not harm me. If you want to put that on the poster, you can.

1:09:17We have a colleague wearing an exoskeleton walking around. Oh, but Evans has one of those too. I know. How's it going? I think he likes it. He actually got it for real therapeutic purposes for like his hip or something. But it's fascinating. I was like, we're at the show where I see people casually wearing exosyletons or whatever you would call them. And I think someone else is testing out one. I had a really hard time at Unveiled Finding Weird Tech. And that's actually my judging zone. I was supposed to look for weird tech. I had a sort of existential crisis where I wandered around. That's also hard.

1:09:52Maybe if you try to find it, it doesn't find you. I thought the same thing. And I think what happened this year was usually the weird tech is very visually appealing. Yes, there were no visually appealing. Amateur hour. You need to go to the corner of the convention center into like the Shenzhen Zhao Corporation. Where it's like cameras, cameras, batteries, dildos. Yeah. Every time. It's like this 18 word long thing. And it has like, it's just a printed white piece of paper. So visually unappealing how? Like what did it, yeah. Just kind of like feature less. So, so usually when we, we go to these things, we have a video team that comes with us and we try to find things that will basically translate on video.

1:10:32Like someone will, will, will see the thumbnail or, or a clip as they're scrolling by and be like, Oh, this looks really like, damn, I gotta see that thing play chess. Yeah. Yeah. But like, there really wasn't much of that this year in terms of visually like, you know, okay. Give me, I'll give you an example. Like, and this is another thing I wanted to bring up. So there's a lot of, I noticed a lot of baby related tech. But to me, I'm thinking like a lot of this stuff is for like very small, like newborn. And you're going to like spend this money on something that's going to last you like maybe six months.

1:11:03So there was one thing, I don't remember the name of the device, but it's this monitor that goes on your baby's ankle. Owlet? No, it was a different company. That might be Pokemon. But no, Owlet is a company that makes baby stuff. Yes. No, you're not wrong. But it's an ankle monitor for babies that track their alcohol intake. No, I'm just kidding.

1:11:27Deactivates the car so they can't drive. No, but it tracks their heartbeat. And the point of it. And that's useful. This is like SIDS and such. No, the way they were selling it was so parents know when the best, the optimal time is to place your baby in the crib so they don't wake up. Nice. Baby hacking. Yes. Finally. Yes. So I guess it tracks their heart rate and the optimal heart rate, I guess, when they're in a deep sleep, it lights up a certain color. And that's when the optimal time is to put your baby down. Psychotic. And like, I wouldn't buy something like that. I wouldn't put an ankle monitor on my baby.

1:12:03But I could see if you're a desperate parent who's having trouble there, maybe you would look into that solution. But also, like, unless it's priced very cheaply, I can't imagine buying something that you're going to use for just a few months. This sounds like something someone who remembers having kids built. Like someone who's like, yeah, you know, fuck, what my baby do is crying. It's fucking. Yeah. I mean, it is like definitely an experience that I mean, I'm not a man of child personally, but it is a man of child. But I'm just saying I'm an active uncle. You know, I'm a very engaged uncle.

1:12:32But it is one of those things. I'm yeah, I'm a chopped uncle and I'm not afraid to come on here and talk as such. No cap. Now that you bring that up, this does sound like a device that the uncle would buy. at Christmas time or something like that. This is Uncle Tech. I heard these things don't like to sleep, so I got you a thing that will tell you when it's asleep. You can maximize your baby. You're like, what does that mean? I hear you baby maxing. It's supposed to be good. It is funny, though, the idea. It's as funny, and it is very funny to me, the idea of being like, you must optimize your toddler.

1:13:09That is funny to me, but it's also like it's a reflection of who is like funding this shit and who is coming up with these ideas like in terms of what is the experience that you would want the most from your baby and it's like you want them to be healthy you want to be happy you want them to sleep but then there's this other element where it's like and you must excel as like a parent and like i think what it is is like the venture capitalist and this is not necessarily like therefore i guess but like a venture capitalist is by definition probably pretty well off so they probably have like a lot more parental support I feel like if you're funding baby tech, you should go and just talk to the most stressed baby owner.

1:13:46Yeah. I have a kid. I really shouldn't be like baby owners if I don't have one. But this was much older now. I kept thinking about last year. It's like, where is the consumer in the consumer electronics? Exactly. And there were devices that the stuff I remember from the floor most fondly last year were like old fashioned American inventions with a technological aspect. It was like it's a dog door that opens because your dog collar has a chip in it. So it recognizes that it's your dog and it's not letting in a raccoon or a prowler or whatever. And like, that's not, you know, groundbreaking, but it's like, all right, cool.

1:14:19Like, I get it. This is a machine that sits on your counter and makes soft serve ice cream. Sick. Fuck me up. My kitchen is way too small to have that, but it would be great if it were. We like ice cream. But yes, you can see where the consumer is in all of that. And then the ones that always kind of blew me away were like beyond the stuff that's just like kind of junk or like white label or just over abstracted. Yeah. is the stuff like this where it's like you have this miraculous technical capacity and no sense of what an ordinary person might use it for and you clearly didn't ask like you never tried to get that that's kind of what i'm getting at it's like have you talked to a parent i don't mean a fucking parent clearing a quarter of a million dollars a year i mean like a fucking parent who has got two children and a part-time job and is fucking suffering because the the outlet sock is like useful because it can like monitor the babies make sure that sudden infant death syndrome doesn't have like mental heart rate and breathing and such like useful things to make sure your kid is alive like very meaningful stuff it's only for six months but man you really want to make sure they're alive for all of the months ideally but it's like there's a real thing but it's just like yeah great you can make sure your baby's heart rate no you put the kid down when it fucking is ready like when the kid is ready to sleep and you just fucking sit there and go fuck it's just please please please just go to the fucking sleep please don't know this to me please matt you've got kids yes yeah i got you can learn i got three i got three but each each one of them was different about the sleep thing but i can't imagine using the the thing that on any of them simply because like is there is there really even an optimal time like my also wait so was this an ankle monitor yeah it goes it's it's a they you strap it on their their leg like around their ankle and it's like a circular device and it lights up red when it's definitely not time it lights up on their leg yes and then what's the fuck and then lights up green when it's almost time when they're drifting off can i just be clear you're talking about attaching a flashing light to a newborn's ankle yes yes and newborns my distinct experience from newborns is that sock just fucking comes off all the time right so you're like giving a flashing light to a baby You got to really clamp it on there.

1:16:28You got to get it on tight. You don't think the baby's going to see the flashing light, one of the only things it can recognize? In the complete darkness, too. And be like, just fuck with it constantly, because that's what a new... I want one of those for my 17-year-old, just to kind of be like, how you doing? Can I monitor your ankle? Yeah. Is that cool? Is it all right if I get a push alert to my phone that lets me know if you're actually sleeping or not? We could all have ankle monitors. No talking to the child. I'm 17 and 12. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And when you think about what the problems are, it's like they're emotional.

1:17:04So tech really can't fix that. They can add to them if you'd like. If you'd like the more problems, the social network apps will help with that. Well, this is an interesting thing too. It's like the over monitoring versus like personal experience. Like we didn't use a lot of tech raising our kids, but other than iPads, but like we, there's like personal experience. It's like, do you want something to tell you how to cook or do you want to just like mess around with trying to see what cooks well and what burns? And then you get natural experience that kind of gets ingrained and you go, oh, I know because I've been doing it over time.

1:17:38That's like parenting. You're like, I begin to get a general feel and sense of that kid and their behavior. It just happens. It happens when you pay attention. And that's the thing, like, I don't talk much about my kid on the show because I have a lot of people who listen to him it's his world but it's like yeah you learn from your child what their habits are when they are sleepy right when they will tell you i'm not tired you're going to sleep you're going to fall asleep in two fucking minutes brother you're going to get in that bed it's nice and cozy you're going to go right to sleep this is where that like the category error that we're talking about here where it's just like fundamentally being like do you want your phone to solve this thing that is like not your work like not your commute like the shit that like you have to do so that you can afford the other stuff it's like do you want us to take the experience like the actual pleasurable part of being alive like and for me like as like a you know again we don't have kids so we can afford to like make dinner most nights like me and my wife like that is like really fucking precious time to me i like i think about it you know like we go in with a game plan we enjoy like working and cooking together we're not exactly being like behind you chef like as we move through our but we're like closer than is probably you know healthy but the idea of like replacing that with being like i'm just gonna like let my phone either tell me what to do or eventually i mean this was like the big promise of a lot of the smart home shit last year was like just my house will do it like they'll make the coffee for me it's like making coffee is really important to me actually like that is part of how i remember that i'm a human before i like get on my computer and get really upset about shit all day long you know like and it's like they don't solve the actual things which are annoying like i i love my dinner with my girlfriend or it's not it's nice it's an experience together.

1:19:17It's something you do. I fucking hate laundry and cleaning. And they've barely fucking got like they've been, I think Scott, how long have you been going to CES? It has been a long, long time. So I went to my first CES, uh, for work purposes, probably 2004. Okay. How many times have you seen the laundry robot? Oh, the same fucking one. What the folding the laundry, the folding robot, like I think over a decade, like there is one company that just every year is like this is the fucking year folks there's one there's one laundry company probably but there's a few companies and i haven't been going anywhere near as long as you yeah it's been a long time this is either year four or five for me but i've already noticed there's companies that i feel like literally just exist to go to ces like they don't ever put anything out they always bring the same or a similar product and year after year it's just the same thing.

1:20:11And it's like, first of all, where are you getting the, like, I don't know how much it costs to show up with a booth at CES, but I'm guessing it's not cheap. Yeah. Like, what are you doing? The computer, the money laundering show. I've notes for CES unveiled, like things like that. Here's my note for it based on what I saw yesterday. I, it made me think about, I was a judge at MIT Reality Hackett last year, which was actually really interesting because it's like, it was a lot of students pitching random projects that involved like AR and XR. And you basically went around to a lot of tables and you had five minutes with each one and they had to come up with a pitch.

1:20:47And it was like, okay, I don't know what it could be, but it's like, we did this thing. We're going to come up with it. We're going to get you experience it. Get to understand it. And it's like speed dating. But a show like Unveiled is not speed dating. It's literally just find your way. If they made it, I don't think I'd want it to be a speed dating, but like you have a bunch of tables and if they're not, like you said, if they're not perfectly clear and grabby and they have a headline, there were a lot of companies that was like mercamioma and it's like okay there's like it's just an empty table with like an item on it and then it's like is the game that i'm supposed to talk to you and retrieve the information i'm like i can't i can't right now like and i don't it's it i'm not into that game right now and so i felt the pitches were not were not clear a lot of companies it also is like some it like you know it could be international whatever else but it's like maybe they're looking for components or things but this is a media more media focused thing unveiled and they pay extra for this don't they yeah and so you go why am i looking at that i just don't have time and it's overstuffed with too many things so and plus there are no like it's not like a grocery store where you're like here's the baking stuff here's the meats like i would like if they made categories where it's like the wrote the emotional robots that were like five of them it's just aisle 100 aisle 200 aisle 300 there were moments last year before i realized that was true.

1:22:03I kept walking through and being like, oh, I'm in the, like, this is the sex apps. This is the, like, weird. Right. But like, no, the sex apps are everywhere. They're all over the fucking place. And like, ditto for, the one bit that seemed actually coherent, I remember, was in like one of the basements last year that was like kind of the Hall of Nations. And then you would be going through and it's just like, here's like the Netherlands wants to talk to you about what it does. Yeah, that's the French zone. But it's the only bit that felt organized at all. But what's interesting is that, Unveiled is a scattershot.

1:22:32Yeah, that press event. Yeah. Whenever I go down to the nation thing, I actually usually get like a little bit angry about it because it's like, damn, this is like countries that actually support their startup companies with funding because that's why they're there representing their country. And there's like no United States section because the US doesn't do that. That's the fucking show. What do you think this is? No, they usually have like a US government section though. There's like - Oh, but it's just like, this is what the post office is doing it's the department of commerce but it's not like cia oh if there was a cia one i'd well that's the that's the palantir right i was gonna say you go down to the cia both hey uh what happened with jfk you do that was that was that us what do you do i will just watch the x-files mate like you you do that shit i think i could probably get killed at that booth 100 within five just asking annoying questions it is one that just to go back to what scott said that like it's funny and i remember this experience again like just because i you know i haven't been on on the floors this year i felt last year both like heartened and a little bit embarrassed by how much like a little bit of oaf mode curb appeal like showmanship would like win me over like the reason i knew about that dog door was that they had they had made it out of some metal substance that they had you know like whatever perfectly calibrated themselves.

1:23:56And there was a big mallet that you could swing and hit it into the door and it never dented. And so the reason I found it was that I was walking around with Jesse Farrar and we were like, what is that loud noise? And then just like a pair of dogs off leash wandered over and we're like, what does this do? And it was something I really liked learning about it. I found the people very pleasing, conversationalists, but it was 100 % something that I found because I was like, and that's why we're here. This is why we're here. It's like, this is why it's a physical show. It's like, there's the internet.

1:24:29Like there's information everywhere. You could always be looking up stuff or what people are here. You should be like, it goes back to that science fair type thing. It's like, is this, you got to come up with a, if you're going to be here, you've got to come up with an interesting picture. Like not, don't do a stupid one, but do like a, yeah, try to get something to catch our attention and explain it because that's the whole point. What's that? Were the dogs just walking? No, Jesse and I were the dogs in this scenario. What was interesting about you bringing up, we were talking about just two seconds ago, how nothing is like, the layout is not planned in categories.

1:25:03I'm dying to know if they do it again this year, if there's even enough companies to fill it out. But last year, there was one section, and I brought it up on the show too, and I thought it was so funny. There was a Web 3 section. And it was like, oh, these companies are now so embarrassing. we want like them off to the side like behind a curtain we want them all in a specific section where they can be avoided and it was like they were there was no like straight up crypto or blockchain companies but they were still these companies that believed in like the promise of without using the word NFT the promise of like the digital ownership of things and the metaverse type stuff and they actually did create a web 3 section that actually said the web 3 like arena or something.

1:25:50And it was like, there's no reason to do that unless you want people to know where they can actively avoid if they don't want that. Yeah. Or like the five perverts that need to go there. Right. I feel like you're keeping everybody away from everybody else the way that there's people that are like, I don't want to know. I don't have a fucking dog and I don't need a dog door. What I need is a picture of a dog that lives on the blockchain that's on my phone that I have most of my savings invested in. A collection of dogs. Where are those guys? The dog simulacra section. Yeah. Of It takes all kinds.

1:26:20It's a big market. Oh my God. There's supposed to be a holographic fish tank here. One of my colleagues... What the fuck? I'm actually trying to find the mean. I don't know, but my colleague said we were trying to look for weird tech. We've actually been on the hunt, and we said there's a holographic fish tank, and I said, I'm in, and apparently it's not here. Ed asked you for weird tech. How did it take you this long to bring it up? I want other people to talk. Oh, the fish holograms? Let me tell you, I don't know. I want there to be I want to believe it's in the web 3 area there's no such thing as a holographic fish it's NFT fish in the tank I don't know what it is but I do think the other thing is that last night we're talking about weird tech the thing that people had said to me caught their eye but I didn't see it this doesn't sound that weird was a vibrating knife I didn't get to use it it was apparently a knife you just like lightly hold over the vegetable or whatever you're trying to cut.

1:27:21And then just like barely any pressure and it just goes right through. It just wasn't visually appealing enough for me. I saw a knife and I skipped and I thought it already existed because I don't cover that beat and I was like it's probably the same vibrating knife that they had last year with a new feature. Tell me another one. Isn't this a Star Wars thing? Or like William Gibson novels. Yeah, I feel like there's like, it's like a cyberpunk. When I'm thinking of tech I want, I'm reading William Gibson. maybe it was in his the torment nexus section so you're telling me you've created it that's really interesting the cyberunk sprawl part it's so good I'm obsessed with this holographic fish tank I know can we put on an APB and just say if you are making a holographic fish tank tell us where it is I know everybody was getting your ass for not bringing it up I think it's very ethical that if you yourself have not seen a holographic fish tank you would sound weird if you were like I've heard tell of a holographic fish tank I need to know that you saw it.

1:28:20Like, yeah, to get a description of it. I need to know. I, I exactly need, I need, I need to see it myself. But, but then the other thing I saw there on the floor that thought, but apparently it already existed because again, I'm not looking at massage chair tech, but there was someone sitting in one of those giant moving massage chairs that was like, it looked at, they look like a transformer. Like they lifted her arm and the arm was coming with them and the leg was moving with them. But then I brought that up to people and they were like, ah, that's already been here. And I was like, okay, Well, that interested me.

1:28:47The man trapped in a - It was called like the best massage body's friend or something like that. They were just moving, but it was almost like you couldn't escape. It was like as they were moving, the chair pieces would move still with their arms. I think I saw that. I was like, that's interesting. Cyber sofa. I love the massage chairs. It's the greatest scam at CES. Every so often you run it, someone who's like, I just got best deal on a massage chair. It's like, no, you did not. You just got scammed. No, it's like, have you not heard about the scam? No, I haven't. They have these lines of massage chairs and they're like, I'll cut you a special deal.

1:29:26They're not cutting you a special deal. At CES, they do that? At CES. If you walk around the main convention center, there's usually a very... I didn't know that they were even trying to sell. There's a very sad section where you see the CES, the guys who have been here 25 since it was called Comdex. The people have been here forever and they're sitting in this chair just like fucking just like fucking just the only the only time i get away from my wife and kids just just sit in the fucking chair all day i i sell software man i just want to die and they just sit in these chairs but those people are not buying them they just know you can scam but no you i every few years i run and someone's like i just got the best deal it's like i paid seven thousand dollars for two chairs and like yeah the rrp is one thousand dollars each you've got fucking scammed it's like it's alibaba chair situation that massages you i did not know this was going on it's beautiful it's a i you know what it's part of the vegas experience being like swindled by yeah i mean i do know that a lot of i don't want to say a lot but there are companies that show up and like you could see on like the banners they have around their booth they go like oh ask us about our c s only special deal or whatever and i've i mean i'm here as media so i would never spend any money like that but i mean it always seems like is it is it really the best deal?

1:30:35You're in Las fucking Vegas. You think you're getting a deal here? You're getting dealt. I also like the idea of you're walking through the air purifier section where there's 50 identical products and you're being like, this is the one. Do you take Venmo? I did. One year I had a bit where I just lifted up stuff and asked if I could have it. And they really didn't like that. Especially with the TVs. I just like, can I have this? And they looked at me and paused and went, no. oh it's just like no sure yeah they don't they don't let me say it wasn't bolted down no exactly i'm pretty sure they do now yeah yeah i mean what the fuck was i gonna do you think there's gonna be a ghost like just walking out running away with the tv make your escape through this yeah if you can get out the door you can keep it that should be the rule they should they should is there swag is there any swag you saw they i mean on the show floor usually not but a lot of these companies when they see media they want to especially the smaller like startups yeah they will they want you to like give out review it like so they'll they'll just like they'll come back later and there's a thing for you i think i have an aura to me no one ever offers me anything like that sir you can't have this the thing i noticed this year though this happened to me a few times was they almost seem more interested in content creators now than like 100 yeah 100 like like like somebody actually said to me like oh what do you do and i was like oh i'm a reporter and they were like, where are you based out of?

1:31:59And I was like, New York. And I was like, oh, maybe you could be our content creator from New York. And I was like, well, I just said I'm a journalist. Right, no, I've got a real job, so yeah. Content creator. You see that at all the conferences where it's like there's been two different tracks, but also a lot of stuff, I feel like tech companies have clearly been pushing that focus to the content creator, influencer path. I mean, a lot of it overlaps, but it's a very different track. and then they're like, that's the primary thing. They just mean a guy, they just mean SpawnCon without the spawn.

1:32:32Yeah, I imagine that there's probably a lot of that of like people that like are on TikTok and like check out all these crazy things I saw. Right, they just won't listen to video. And the thing is, I love getting free shit, but I'm not changing my opinion at all. Oh, right, of course. That's the thing. You know, if you want to review, I'm happy to review it if I'm interested in the product and I think it's interesting or cool. But if it doesn't work or something's wrong or there are negatives, I'm going to be truthful about it. It's like I'll be truthful if I think it's cool and works. One interesting thing was one company actually said to me, when they asked what my outlet was, and I said Mashable, and they were like, oh, what's the social media for it?

1:33:07And I was like, oh, it's a website, Mashable.com. And they immediately pulled up their YouTube app on their phone and was like, let me see how many subscribers your YouTube channel has. Oh, wow. Right in your face. And then they saw it, and they were like, oh, oh. Okay. so like that's that's the example i'm like of what we're dealing with now in terms of like content creators mean more to these companies now than than actual outlets they didn't even respond to the website they didn't even bring up their safari and went to mashable.com it always makes me sad when people say like oh i've seen your it's nice to say oh i've seen all your videos but i'm like do you read any i write articles and they're just like huh i don't do that let's get that what you just said i don't want to hear that part so as we come to the end of this 30 i'm going to say, Matt Binder, you've been joining us from Mashable, of course.

1:33:54Thank you for being here. Always a pleasure. And, of course, Scott Stein from CNET. Hey, thank you. Thank you for being here. And David Roth from Defecta. You're going to be here for a couple more. Six more. And this next ad is just for birds. Just try them today, I guess. Birds. Whatever comes next, I think it's for birds.

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1:35:18want? What do you want from me? But yeah, so you've seen the trifold. What was it like? It was really cool. But I think my biggest criticism of it was that it didn't really provide a compelling reason to want this bigger screen that folds up and fits into your pocket. It's really cool when you hold it, like you open it up kind of like a brochure or a pamphlet. It, you know, has two folds. So you open it and it folds into threes. And then when it's open, And it's a really slim tablet. But then it's just, you know, it kind of feels like the Fold Plus in a way. Like I feel like you can get a similar experience with the Z Fold, which already exists.

1:35:56So that said, I only had a few minutes with it. How big was it though? Like how many, what was it like 10 inches, I guess? Yeah. So it's 10 inches. So it's more like the size of an iPad when it's open. It's slightly smaller than like an iPad Air. and then the Z Fold is more closer to the size of like an iPad mini when it's open so that's kind of the difference and then when it's closed it's I think around I think the screen is 6.5 inches I would have to double check that but you know the size of a plus phone or a pro max phone whatever did they give you a price no they didn't say pricing yet that thing should be two and off grand it's good yeah it's gonna be a lot I mean the Z Fold 7 is already like two thousand dollars Really?

1:36:38So, yeah. I can't be mad. See, this is the thing. This is my weak point. I'm going to get so many emails. People got so legitimately, people got really upset at me when Lisa was on because I was like, I like the idea. And they're like, Ed, you need to hate everything. I'm full of joy and love. You can like things sometimes. You can have opinions. No, they won't allow me. They won't. I don't want Ed to have his screen time. No, yeah. He takes it away from you. Make me read more books. No, it's, but I kind of like that they're doing something. it like i i love the idea of a giant foldable i yeah i'm a freak i guess but it's like it's sad they haven't when you say it isn't like they haven't thought through why you'd need it what do you mean exactly i i was kind of hoping that the software would do something a little different and interesting um but that said to your point i'm happy that samsung's doing something because they have been showing these concepts for years of different kinds of foldables that fold in funky weird ways and they keep saying yeah we're working on something we're working on something and then we just had no idea if any of those concepts would actually ever come to fruition so I'm glad to see that they're experimenting and they're still doing that but to me my immediate reaction was like oh wow this is really cool but it doesn't it feels almost like the fold did a couple of years ago when it's closed because it's kind of thick right um so it just didn't feel as different as I thought it would I guess and I think part of that is because when you open it it's like you have the bigger screen or the front screen you don't have the in-between and that's kind of what I wanted what do you mean by that so um I think and I'd have to double check but I think it was either some of Samsung's concepts or like maybe the Huawei phone like you can kind of use um the different panels as like their own individual screens and have like oh yes you have different apps on them yeah like almost have like three screens in one and like this doesn't really do that.

1:38:28It just has like the open state where it's a tablet and then the closed state where it's a phone, which is still useful, but it doesn't feel that different. Yeah, but if you're paying three grand for a phone. Yeah. And the one thing that I thought was interesting that Samsung is kind of thinking of is this being not just like a phone and a tablet, but maybe a phone, a tablet, and also like a mini PC if you like hook it up with like a Bluetooth keyboard and a mouse and whatever. yeah they're still trying that but yeah I don't know it's interesting but I feel like this thing is probably going to be expensive so the use case has to be really compelling and their Z Fold phones are only just starting to take off a little bit so I feel like it's going to be a long road ahead for something like this but I'm glad they're doing it at least someone's doing something new yeah I feel like we're already the show hasn't officially started yet we're already jaded But just from the three episodes that I've been on, everybody's sort of like, well, you know what?

1:39:25Like, obviously, I would never use this, and I don't think that'll ever really get made. But I really appreciate that they're rolling the dice and having fun out there. I mean, that's CES in a nutshell. It is. It does feel like that's what it is. And so, like, what you're describing is, like, this was something that, you know, as somebody who doesn't generally follow this, like, part of the fun of it for me last year was, like, legitimate idiot awe at sort of, like, the fuck it, we're doing five blades stuff. where they're just like, we figured out how to do like, the TV is so good that you couldn't actually watch anything on it.

1:39:57But it's like, fine, at least you're doing something. It's better than them just sort of like spackling some, you know, notional AI modality over it and being like, and it's going to make friends for you while you sit at home. I did see they have added Nano Banana to televisions now. And I feel like what a thrill to hear you say those syllables that was. That's what it's all about. You can do deep dives. I hate saying Nano Banana. I think it's a fucking terrible name. I think whoever came up with the name should be electrocuted. Can I share a stupid accent thing that I heard on the plane last night?

1:40:29By all means. A guy behind me, an Australian guy, ordered Sprite with ice in an Australian accent. Sprite with ice? Just something to think about what that might sound like. Do I know anyone Australian? If you're an Australian listener, please record. The only one I know is my boy, Jathan, my co-host. Yeah, get Jathan to record it. In fact, just email me at easyatbetteroffline.com if you record yourself as an Australian saying it. I'm going to ask my Australian friends from CNET to say it now. Yeah, let's get the Australians on. There's one thing that people love. It's being like, your voice is all fucked up.

1:41:01You mind saying a few phrases for me? Yeah, I'd know nothing about that. That happened to me when I was on vacation in Ireland last year. A cashier at a convenience store was like, can you say this? And I was like, why? And it was just really bizarre. Yeah, this is my life. this is my life is people people turning to me and saying i can't help myself i have to do my accent if you can't help yourself you can't no if you've ever said this to me you're a fucking liar oh i have a thing no you don't you think your british accent is good and you want me to tell you it's good it's never good it's never been good stop and to be clear this is no your british accent's funny yeah if you just to be clear if you're making fun of england bully for you i'm right there with you.

1:41:45I don't really have one. I just periodically be like, what? Or like, mate. Exactly. And that's all I've got. And that's fine. I do that too. But it's just, yeah. Sprite with ice. It doesn't sound good when I say it. Do you want to give us a demonstration? It was basically like Sprite with ice. No, it wasn't. That wasn't. That was British. That wasn't bad. It wasn't. That was pretty good. Sprite with ice? Sprite with ice? Sprite with ice? Yeah, were there any? Did the vowels go to the ceiling? No, he was two hours into the CES coverage. And this is... This is what Gemini generate sounds back and forth to each other.

1:42:17It's just pure whale song. But no, I like the idea that like someone is generating images on their tech. Like what fucking freak did that? And was like, you know what people want to do? Generate an image. No, no, no one has ever been like, I wish I could generate something on my tech. Add some friends to this photo of me alone on the couch. I think part of it is a lot of these tech companies have been trying to make tv is something that they're not for a long time like trying to make them all these different types of ambient computers and whatever and i feel like that's just part of that effort and ces is the hub of all of that i was saying in the cap earlier it's just like at some point it's a fucking television right people just want a really nice screen well yeah that they want to look at there was the thing of like oh you won't have to plug devices into it now you can do netflix on it great okay now you can play games and i saw someone announce you can do xbox gaming yeah Yeah, Game Pass.

1:43:11Which kind of makes, and that's, I'm kind of like, fine, that makes sense. It's streaming. And now what? And they're like, fucking banana. Now when you get home drunk at night and the TV's a little too dim, you could go, TV. Yeah, me too. Gemini, Pikachu, 911.

1:43:31Gemini. Just like, please. Gemini, Star Wars, Pikachu, 911. Ed, are you sure? calling your mother. No, no. No, but you can't do that from a television though. You actually can't. Like calling people, like Facebook, Facebook portal is weirdly enough, like the only product that can reliably do that. It's really weird. Is that true? Yeah. It's really hard to find a television, because honestly, a TV, a TV with a camera in it is bad. But at the same time, it's like a weirdly rare product. Weirdly enough, the Facebook portal is actually good. That's like one of the few products I've actually have never tried.

1:44:08Don't worry. they killed it yeah that much i know they're like no no no no no we need to we you can't find your friends on facebook oh facebook port allows you to talk to your family not so fast you want some glasses you want some glasses they kind of work what if it let you talk to a local restaurant that like has a lot of weirdly racist posts is that what you want yeah let me call them during rush hour right now hey guys uh what the fuck's my food yeah it's just trying to get away from the core function because there's not really many reasons to buy a new TV anymore. Because, I mean, I have like a, like I'm an upgrade pig.

1:44:46I love upgrading my phone. I love the slightly faster, better experience. I'm not going to upgrade my TV until it breaks. It's 4K. It's HDMI 2.1. I mean, people just want bigger TVs that look nice that don't cost as much. That is what everybody wants. I have a really big, like 85 inch Sony Bravia. Ooh, 85. It was$1 ,700 six years ago, I think. And it's like, why would I upgrade? What possible reason? And the TV companies are sitting there just being like, because there really isn't. It's like, oh, I can have Gemini on my TV. I'd pay for it not to be on there. Right. Yeah. Like funny to your point, like the way that this is like the purpose of CES versus the purpose of like consumer entertainment as you like would consume it or consumer electronics as you would consume it.

1:45:29It's basically like you want the good TV, but they would be bored and they probably sense that you as a CES attendee would be bored if they're just like showing you a dope new TV that's showing a movie on it. That's like, yeah. What if it had one key feature that worked 30 % of the time? Yeah. Would that be new? Would that seem intriguing to you? Yeah. But that is 100 % like, it feels like that is, I don't know what percentage of the stuff here. But they even, they have a TV section where it's just showing you nice stuff. Great. Every, they have micro LED or mini, they have new stuff and the TVs are thinner.

1:46:00There's a very thin LG. Last year I saw TVs you could bend and I was like, I love that. I love, no, I own a bender. Like what's going on? I just get over my, thank God I got the beddable TV. I was last night would have gone different. I was trashed. I wanted to fight by television. We're marketing this exclusively to fans of bad NFL team.

1:46:26I'm a Cowboys fan. How many nights have I wanted to break my TV? I'm a Raiders fan. I don't even turn it on. there's just no need oh they lost I knew they were done after the second game they won three of them don't worry one day we're going to win a Super Bowl each yeah I actually don't know which of us has the worst chance you're probably not old enough to remember a Cowboys Super Bowl win are you no well I am and the worst guys in America are going to be celebrating right alongside you when it happens I'm not old enough to remember a Raiders Super Bowl win but I'm sure it'll be very nice. Yeah.

1:47:05I'll get Gemini to generate. No banana banana. I can't do that. It's too unrealistic. Reality check. You're trying to spread misinformation. They would never win. And the thing is, I can think of ways my life could be, like the laundry bot we were talking about last time. All of those fall down because it's like the actual way that people experience laundry is a large pile of stuff. Like, it's just like, hey, the sock is in within the Katamari of shit that I've left for too long. I want to be able to chuck the Katamari into a box and then laundry comes out. There are also services that do that you could do.

1:47:45There's wash and folds in New York. It's kind of like, could do that. It's like, or you could spend$5 ,000 on something that I assume you need to like neatly thread the thing into. And the TV problem is a lot of things look weird. Like you, to customize like different situations and like sports games look different to movies and such. TVs don't seem to be trying to fix that. Like the fact that every show is incredibly dark now. That's what they should be using AI for, honestly. Yeah, but no, no, no, no, no, no. Do you need Nano Banana? Nano Banana? You need the Nano Banana on your television? Fucking Pikachu 9-11?

1:48:19What do you want? Want your TV to look better? You want Stranger Things to look good? Fuck you. Yeah. There's an Eminem verse in there somewhere. Yeah, seriously. He was kind of spitting there for a minute. I'll be wrapping by the end of this show. Did you see anything? What else have you seen at the show other than phones? Yeah, so, yeah, other than phones. Lots of robots, I would say. That's always a big - What kind of robots? One that plays chess and it's like absurdly expensive. How much was it? Did you find out? I, you know what? I forget. I just remember being like, wow, that's a lot. It was kind of something I saw in passing.

1:48:54I don't know if it was thousands, but it was something that was marketed as like, hey, buy this if you really love to play chess but you don't have anyone to play with or you want your kid to learn how to play chess or something like that. And you don't want to use any of the computer chess. Right, exactly. Like there's whole... Yeah. I think that again is like another one of those kind of classic CES things. Right, that's the other thing. Another thing I saw was a robot or it's really just more of a machine that sits on your countertop but everything's a robot at CES that can cook for you if you like, almost like a Keurig for food where you put ingredients in and it knows...

1:49:29It extrudes a room temperature stew for you. It's so nice. I do like your silent now. Here's your slop, pig. Yeah, it was a lot of things where it's just like, okay, nobody wants to do anything, but none of these alternatives seem that good. But it's somehow more degrading than any of the other options. The idea of being like, well, I don't want to call someone and have them deliver something to my home. I'm just going to stuff a bunch of celery into this hole and see what happens. It's like really dark. And maybe I'm oversimplifying it again. This is like me just walking around CES Unveiled last night and being like, oh, there's a lot of people at this station.

1:50:05So let me see what everyone's looking at. And yeah, that was just like the impression that I got, though. It seems similar to like a Keurig, but for food. Like you put the ingredients in, it knows the recipes or whatever. And yeah, I don't know. It was really bizarre. But how does the food get in there? Do you just throw a bunch of carrots in? Yeah, you have ingredients that you like put in and it knows what the ingredients are and it has recipes or something. There's a cocktail, one of those. Now it's like you see commercials for it on TV. Yeah, I've used it. It's not bad. It's not bad. Is it like, okay, I put the ingredients in there.

1:50:43It knows or you got to sit there being like, okay, I put in celery. No, no, no. There's like recipe packs and stuff or something like that, a recipe book or something. Again, I'm like probably botching the details. No, no, no. That makes sense. No, no. You're not watching the details. Something like that. I have lots of questions. I'm the guy that was initially like, will you just fucking put carrots in it? What you're saying makes a lot more sense than what was coming out of my mouth. But also, there are startups out there that would do, yeah, you put a fucking carrot in there. I did. I could glorify juicer, kind of.

1:51:13The Samsung fridge, though, with Gemini in it, I did see that earlier. Yeah. The Gemini fridge, where it's like - Oh, I haven't seen that yet. It's so good. You read the product demonstration thing, and it's like, yeah, you can use your voice to open and close the door. and it's like, okay, just, you've never opened a fridge. It's like, finally, a way to open the fridge. That's not the problem that needs solving here. Their argument is like, oh, well, not like the voice element, but like, didn't LG, haven't they been showing fridges for years that have motion sensors if your hands are full or something?

1:51:43One of those things where it's like, as an accessibility technology, it's probably existed for a long time, and now they're just sort of like, people are forgetting how to open the fridge. It's one of the big problems facing our society. Where are we as a society where people don't know how to open I'm just sitting at home, just like, what do I do? What do I do? Imagine if we had a screen on the fridge that you could talk to and it would tell you what's inside. You don't ever have to, you know, the touches. I love that. That feels very, I think you should leave. Like, what do I do? Exactly, just Tim Rums.

1:52:08I don't know what any of this shit is. Yeah, exactly. I didn't ask for this. I don't know what I'm doing. I do love the ones where it's like, we will use AI to tell you what's in your fridge. It's like, fuck, mate, I had no idea. I know something else that'll do that. No, I was going to say, there are so many times when I overbuy because I'm at the store and I'm like, oh, I'm probably low on this, but I don't know. So I do feel like that could be actually helpful. Yeah, but like you're saying you're going to save five dollars on carrots. That's what I mean. But then you end up with so many carrots and you're like, oh, man, I bought too many carrots again.

1:52:41I have to feed them into this thing that I keep on my counter that turns them into creme brulee somehow. I love my slop machine. of this. It does feel like there's a certain degree, though, of just like, what are human concerns? Well, there's poverty, and there's a living situation, and there's healthcare. Hmm, no. That's just, how do you open a fridge? Wouldn't you like a butler? What is in fridge? Would you like a butler? That's a ghost. Someone that can clean up for me, and someone could do my laundry. Oh, no. No, we can't do that. What if nano-banana? It always comes back to Nana Bananas. All roads lead to Gemini.

1:53:23And it's just like, I'm just, I'm really looking forward to seeing deep into the depths of this show and just being like, what reason have you come up with? Like last year, I remember there was this air purifier with a big spike underneath him. And I walked up to the person, I'm like, what's with the spike? And they took a second to register because no one had spoken to them in that manner. And they're like, oh no, it's really obvious. I'm like, sure. Not that obvious. No, you'll never believe this. It's like, no, it's for dogs. I'm like... What? Yeah, it was a hair thing. I remember this product.

1:53:57No, no. I have more questions. It was an air purifier where the dog, and then they pour something, or a cap could use it to scratch themselves. Oh, my God. I'm like, and I just like, do you have a dog? And they're like, no. I'm like, great, because, well, I don't know when a dog, like a dog's just walking around looking for places to scratch. No. This is like someone who one time had their cat or dog go on the air purifier and they're like. Whoa. Yeah. Whoa. What if we put something for them? You never know when inspiration will strike. Except if it's like, your cat's a little weirdo. It's also like, how do you scratch a cat?

1:54:36Like, actually, one of the most pleasant things in the world is like, petting a cat. It's like, nah. I don't want something that does that for you. Yeah. That's like apex level, like solving a problem that you don't have stuff. Right. It's like, are you wasting too much time that you could be spending sending emails? Listen, you don't. Touching your pet that you love. Don't want to pet your pet. Don't want to teach your kid how to play chess. Don't want to use your TV. Don't want to use your fridge. Don't want to cook. That's time you could be on work calls. Yeah. You know what, actually, let's just imagine all of these.

1:55:04You could be boosting shareholder values all that time. Keep your eyes on the prize. What are you fucking doing when all of this stuff is automated? Just sitting inert, waiting for the next email. It's Wally. That's what we're having to work. I'm getting a promotion, brother. I'm moving up the corporate ladder as my slot machine burps out carrot puree you're on a zoom call and it's the loudest background ever I got a ninja creamy one of the worst name things of all time and it is you feed stuff into it you have to freeze it and you turn it on and it makes more noise than I have ever heard is it a soft serve machine?

1:55:43no it just makes ice cream that's like sometimes the right texture. I love it. Yeah, when I think of ice cream, I think of ice cream shops. It's never heard loud noises in an ice cream shop. And it's so loud. It sounds like... Everyone knows you're making ice cream right now. So embarrassing. The first time I used it. It's like the third time today. It could be a different incident right there. And it shakes violently. It's like... Is this real? Yes. It's so loud. I remember the first time I turned out, I'm like, this must be something. I looked on YouTube and there's people being like, yeah, I've got the creamy on.

1:56:22As you can hear. It's like$250. It's just one of the many times the wallet inspector has visited me. I love it. You know that it was so loud and they were like, should we reduce it? And they're like, nah, they want their ice cream. These little hogs. These hogs. They'll do anything for ice cream. They have no idea what these people are willing to put up with for their little treats. And it's, no, it's aimed at people who want to like lose weight. Okay. Yeah, because you can make sugar-free ice cream. Okay. But it's like the insult. Because it makes ice cream so unpleasant to consider. It's just like you have loves you into thinking.

1:56:58I'm like, bam. Ice cream is when I have a headache really bad. No, I shit you not. I put it in another room. I closed the door. My kid was asleep. I had to move it. Don't go in there It's the ice cream room All the things that go in your kitchen Now get to be in another room Because they're so fucking loud We're disrupting the kitchen The only things in that room Were like a drum set And a ninja cream Lisa did you see anything else Were they loud What was the loudest gadget The loudest gadget Oh gosh I don't know It's always so loud Just at CES everybody's screaming everywhere like I just like it's true everyone's shouting like I can't hear myself think I don't think I've heard anyone screaming not screaming but everyone's trying to film videos so everyone's like shouting over each other and trying to ask questions yeah the level of ambient noise is insane yes exactly although the other bit that I remember from I mean I didn't exactly love the experience but last year going to the convention center to the entire floor that was just like white label electronics from China USB cables and it was silent.

1:58:14Yeah. Totally. Like you could hear the HVAC system going and like hear the sound of someone sleeping softly in one of the booths and that was it. They're both pretty unsettling, honestly. If I had to shoot video, I would do it in the hall of USB cables. The hall of silence. Like I also don't want to go back there. No, it's great. You go in there with a media badge and like everyone's eye, like every head switches to look at you like you've hit someone in Morrowind. It's like, stop citizen. let me show you my would you like to see my wares every booth is trying to send you on a side quest and you're like I can't trying to find the big LG thing sorry I'm not interested you got any ice cream machines that are very loud like I no but we have an LLM for pets can you help me reduce the sound of this device LLM for pets was last year really disappointing because it was just like a health app versus something to translate my cat's noise and when I posted about it the company fucking emailed me they were like um actually please don't i just was like no no i'm not taking down my post fucking soup i didn't say that but if they're being so if i called my lawyer i'm like i'm being sued by an llm pets company he would be like he would not be surprised you gotta send him a video of your cat meowing really aggressively yeah like translate babu lost me too much babu treats me with with adoration yeah yeah the only time my cats really get down like that is like if i sleep in and didn't feed them at 6 a.m you know as opposed to 7 a.m my cats just graze yeah they happily graze and they don't get fat they're too they're just perfect the mine have started grazing but they used to not and they're still on the like oh my god i need food right now kind of mindset and then you give them their food and they're like i'll have two bites and then i'll go back to it later sometimes they scream to make me watch them eat.

2:00:03They'll scream and then they make me follow them down. And then I'm like, okay, what's up? You got your food and then they start. I have seen a few links to pets that people have here. Before the show, there was this one that makes noise and purrs and is warm. Those ones, again, not going to be cynical about those because there's old people, people with dementia who can't look after a pet. Except they made one that has needs. What does that mean? As in like you have to like take it like a like a Tamagotchi. And it's like, okay, so I get none of the benefits of a living creature, but most of the problems.

2:00:41This is something I don't think they'll have at CS, but I've been seeing in New York vapes with Tamagotchi in them that you have to keep hitting to keep them alive. Because the problem with vapes is people don't want to use them. We need to make nicotine more addictive. We're gamifying the addiction space. Yeah, steal your friend's vape and see what happens 30 seconds later. You killed it. They should have it in their own. You killed my vape. It's dead. I truly know someone who's very stoned just crying their eyes out. My vape died. So what did I do? I killed my vape. And I can't find my keys.

2:01:22They're in your hand. Tell I'll learn to help you process the death of your vape machine. The loud, loud machine. yeah it's gonna be an interesting week here in ces because i've been i've been trying to like read it last year was just completely off the top of my head i just made this up as i went along no one knows uh but this year i've like tried to read ahead thinking oh i'll catch no it seems to be most of the stuff from last year again yeah it's hard to plan ahead for ces like you can plan as much as you want but then the thing that you plan for is going to end up to be really boring and everyone's going to be chasing this other thing that you've never heard of.

2:01:58Like the omniverse. I'm a big omniverse head. There's a huge omniverse. And I was really happy to see the half an hour that Jensen Huang spent talking about it today. Yeah. But yeah, it's just, I'm hoping that I'm really, if you, easy at Better Offline, email me if you find any weird shit or if you want to just say, what was it? Sprite and Ice? Sprite and Ice. I'm going to get a lot of wavs in my email, I think. No, it's, I hope that there's something weird, but i get the sense that this year just feels cobbled together in a very strange way like last year was not quite half-hearted but off but this one's just like what's your fucking ai i guess are you on this what are you looking forward to anything lisa you got anything fun um i mean at the show there's anything i'm looking forward to i feel like i'm just kind of keeping an eye out for like what some of the smaller companies are doing in the show um i mean i'm not a little bit of a little bit um i'm not a little bit um i'm not i'm not i'm not i'm not i'm not i'm not i'm not that um there's the new pebble ring does that i don't know if you guys saw that at all what's pebble do you remember pebble yeah so they're they're back um they have new form yeah they were at ces unveiled last night right um and they had some new watches which were interesting i didn't really look at those though but i was really interested in this ring because again it's just kind of like fun and different what's it do though is it like a health tracking one no it doesn't do any health tracking it does one thing like it has a button on it and you can press it if you want to just like record a reminder or something that you want to remember later it's almost like a like a diary is it lm powered or is it just a ring is it just recording um so there's i think some ai that happens on the back end in the app because it'll like transcribe the things that you record and whatnot um i just thought it was kind of interesting um how much is it i think 75 or something like that all right we're in the realm of not useless yet I swear to God I want one thing I actually like at this show I'm not even trying to be a hater make my heart sing please like a mechanical Turk that's what I would like I haven't actually seen this yet but have you guys heard about the Clix communicator Michael Fisher is joining us Friday he's both a creator and an innovator but yes the Clix communicator it's like a little phone thing it's supposed to be like a second phone So if you want a phone just to like actually keep in touch with people and not to like fall down a rabbit hole on TikTok or Instagram or talk to Nano Banana or whatever, it has a built-in keyboard.

2:04:47It kind of looks like a BlackBerry. And yeah, I mean, it runs on Android, I think. So you probably could do other things on it if you really wanted to. Basically, you can send texts on it, but you can't do other stuff? I don't know. I have not seen it yet. I was just kind of seeing it in the headlines. but since it runs on Android presumably you can do other stuff on it I think it's just designed to be like hey this has a smaller screen there's a built in keyboard you know something if you just want to actually talk to people and not you know be immersed in a screen all day every second of every day you can still use your like psychosis induction device on your own time but like this is a little bit quieter experience I thought it was an interesting idea and like it's being pitched as like a secondary phone almost like you know how we have work phones and personal phones So I guess in that case, it would be a third phone.

2:05:34It's funny. I have Michael on as a creator, but I'm just going to bug him about his device this time. I don't think he'll listen to this, but Michael, that's what you've got coming. But we're going to wrap it there. Lisa Edichico at CNN, of course. Thank you so much for joining us. Of course. Thanks for having me. Edward Angueso Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter. My pleasure. And David Roth of Defector, of course. And yeah, we're going to have one more bit. And then, yeah, we'll be wrapped for the day. Thanks for listening, everyone. I don't know what the next ad is, but I fully endorse it.

2:06:29across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com.

2:06:45Welcome back to the Better Offline coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show. We're back, folks. And this is the last part of this episode, but tomorrow we're going to have two two-hour episodes. It's going to be full of fun and laughs and giggles. Don't know why I'm making so much talking happening. That's normal, Ed. Anyway, today I'm joined, of course, by David Roth of Defecta. Hello. Ed Ongueso, Jr. of the Tech Bubble newsletter. Hello. And Mr. Robert Evans, the magnificent Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards. It could happen here. Hello. So we're all doing that, right? Yeah, we were just, we were literally just talking about doing voices.

2:07:17Yeah, right. Yeah. Culturally appropriating. Yeah. Yeah. I, there are British people who get really offended by it. And it's so funny, the idea of a British person being like, you can't, you can't be racist. Did you just say what to me, mate? Are you having a laugh? No, there's a level of imperialism. And obviously, Americans crossed this long ago, where you can't get angry at people making fun of the way you talk. Yeah. And this is still true of Italians. It's been 2000 years or whatever. I mean, it depends on when you call 1500, whatever 1000, depending on when you call the end of the Roman Empire, but you can still make fun of Italians.

2:07:51Yeah, it's never racist. I saw him. We know that it's true. Were Robins talking like that? Like, was Julius Caesar getting stabbed? Be like, hey, hey. Oh, it's Brutus. His last words were oof, Madone. Brutus, you fuck. Hey, what are you doing? I wish I knew any other Italian history. Like, just like, dude. That's it. Caesar and pasta. Caesar and pasta. That's most of it. Now, you can make fun of British people as much as you want. Sure. You're welcome to. I get enough emails about it. But let's talk about consumer electronics. And Robert, you were using an exoskeleton. Yeah. So like a couple of weeks before we left for the show, this company, HyperShell, reached out to me and said, hey, we make these different exoskeleton products.

2:08:41Several different companies have come out with them that are just now hitting. They've been in industrial uses for a while. There's been varying forms for really the last like 10 or 15 years that I've seen increasingly that are meant to do a mix of things. Some of them – and initially these were very separate product categories. There are ones that were meant for people who are having mobility issues to like allow people with a disability to move more easily. And then there were ones that were more designed for like industrial use, right? Like you have people working like an Amazon facility and they're going to be lifting packages and walking them repeatedly.

2:09:13and you want something that reduces the stress to their body and thus reduces like workman's comp. Cool. So those are kind of like the two different... Of course, not for the humans. It's the workers' comp.

2:09:27All right, we're back. We got disconnected due to the Amazon hit squad that was sent in because we were discussing workers' comp. And while we were off micro-discussing, I do not think it's reasonable to suggest that every dog is a good boy. I don't think you should go in. Wow. I just don't think... You just dropped that. Like we're all supposed to roll right past it. Yeah, I just want to just put this thought. I was also anxious to get back to talking about the exoskeleton stuff. Oh, the ones that are active duty police officers? If I got to walk by you at the airport, I don't know. I don't know if you're a good boy.

2:09:58We can't understand how dogs talk. We don't know what they're really thinking. So that's all I'm saying. Yeah, maybe he's saying, I fucking hate this dog. Just cursing. Anyway, exoskeletons. Back to you, Robert. Sure, yes. So yeah, I mean, they reached out and asked if I wanted to try this thing. at CES because people walk around a lot at CES, I guess. This is not really meant as a product for journalists who get their feet tired walking around a trade show floor. This is mostly a blogging aid. Yeah, this is to help you blog. Finally. I thought it was interesting. Like, I'm a nerd. I grew up playing Warhammer, so I'm interested in anything that is like a little step on the road to power armor, which was my immediate thought when I was like, powered exoskeleton.

2:10:40and I'm going to strap some body armor into this thing and see how it works. So I did that. I mean, I played around with it at home. I've got like a sled that's like an exercise. It's like a sled that you load weights on to like push and to shove it because that's a thing that you can do to exercise. That's an awesome exercise. I love that. Yeah, and I threw on like my level four plates on a vest and my helmet with Earpro and stuff, just like, I don't know, 25 pounds maybe of armor and loaded the sled up to about 200 pounds and pushed and pulled it until I got to, well, I did it first without any armor, or with armor on, but without the exoskeleton to see how long I could go.

2:11:17And then I waited like a day or so to recover, and then I did it with the exoskeleton. And I noticed, and I think this may just be down to how it works because it's not meant for those motions. I noticed that when I was pushing it, I felt the machine assistance, like pulling my legs effectively. But when I was pulling it backwards, I didn't really feel much of anything at all. So I think it may just be sort of a factor of like when the thing functions, but I didn't really notice a benefit from that. I have noticed it does seem to like you're exerting less when you're like running or walking on it.

2:11:54So I'm interested in how I feel. I'm going to tomorrow probably hump around like a backpack heavier than I would normally take and keep it on and see how that feels and then probably do the same thing with. I don't know how else to do it other than do a control group experiment. It goes around, it fits around your hips and your thighs. It ends right above the knee. And there's like a waistband thing for it. And so it's just meant to kind of alleviate weight, I think, on your lower back and your legs. They've got some statistics that they have on their website that I have no idea how I would begin to verify.

2:12:34And I don't even know how you would verify stuff. Well, I see they say there's a 42 % decrease in the average heart rate of people using it. That seems measurable, yeah. But there's a 39 % decrease in physical exertion. I'm not fully sure how they're - Using all the classic metrics for it. Right. What are you doing and how hard is it for you? Yeah. And they're saying it's something like a 40 % reduction in how much weight that you feel, basically. So theoretically, you could carry a load that's 50 % heavier or carry your additional load with like about half the strain, right? Like that's kind of the claim that they're making.

2:13:14This thing is supposed to have like a 30-kilometer battery range when walking. Now there's different settings, including like an Eco and a Power One. You can up or down the like intensity, the power of the assistance motor. So I assume that decreases substantially when you've got it on like level four because it goes from one to four. But I have not used it enough to like determine that. That's exciting, though. Yeah, it's a cool product idea. I've tested. I think they emailed me because I've tried some of these previous CESs just like walking around at the actual booths. It's a really cool idea both for people who actually have like a physical disability.

2:13:51and obviously none of these companies are interested in stuff like this for people who are working in factories for their own sake. But if it does reduce the amount of wear and tear on human bodies, that's a good thing. Yeah, I got a fucked up ankle. It sounds kind of nice. Yeah, so I'm interested in how well it actually works for that. Hypershell has been nice to me. I'm hoping that the product works well, but I simply don't have enough time with it. How much does it cost? It varies. Their lowest-end version costs like$900. The one they sent me costs about$2 ,000. But three years ago or so, I think we were looking at like$5 ,000 to$10 ,000 for most of these.

2:14:31So it does look like prices have been coming down a lot. And what makes the more expensive? Is it a bigger battery or something? I think bigger battery, one of the upgrade versions says carbon. So I'm guessing some of them are carbon fiber and some aren't. Mine definitely is. but yeah so I think it's just a matter of like what kind of extras there are on it but the prices have been decreasing pretty substantially and from the reading I have done for previous years there does seem to be some evidence that some products in this category do reduce like strain and injury for people who are working doing jobs where you're like lifting and carrying stuff so I you know I think there's some evidence to be optimistic here I'm interested in how well I don't actually think a convention is the best way to test a product like this out.

2:15:18But I understand why Hypershell is doing it that way, right? And I'm sure other companies in the space are, because it at least gives you a situation where journalists are going to be walking around a while and can try it out. So I'll see how I think about it. But I am most interested in, can I make me into a space marine? Right. And I mean, that's the ultimate dream. Of course. And this is interesting, because we spent most of the rest of the episode just saying nothing feels new that everything's kind of just a series of different like coming up with reasons to buy stuff that don't actually appear to be human this is strangely useful i'm just not used to it's the kind of thing i'm always most interested in at a ces and that never makes it more than like 10 of the products you see where it's like well this is like a cool thing that i've known we'd eventually make as a species at some point like we all knew they're gonna have robot exoskeletons someday.

2:16:09I mean, I'd be hoping for him. Like, it's not like... If they had them on the Nostromo. Right. How hard could it be to build one at a store that you can get in the store? It really seemed like they were cutting corners on that operation too. remember how wet that ship was? There was a lot of issues there. Although I think Nostromo was the first one. But I forget what the... So the Sulaco was the second, was the marine ship. People will get angry at us if we're wrong. that's my fault. Defector regrets the error. Yeah. I apologize to Ian Holm. So is this alien? Yeah, alien and then aliens. flight right now to fight you.

2:16:39And I can't even argue with him. Luckily, we're landlocked. Otherwise, he'd come with us from the sea. His greatest power does involve the ocean. Yeah, he would rise from the sea like Aquaman. He's looking into air power with his newest movies, looking into air power. Rising from one of the canals at the Venetian and absolutely beating that ass. Running like one of the Terminators towards you. The whole time, I'm just like, you're such a visionary, sir. Like, whatever you seem fit to do. What role was it? He's a pro-AI guy, though. Yeah, I mean, I think he made the statement that I think a lot of older guys in Hollywood are making without really thinking it through, which is like, oh, yeah, I'm sure it has some applications that I want to explore.

2:17:23And I'm thinking about the broader sociocultural things that are going on with AI. He's just accurately being like, yeah, it's got some uses. I'll look into it. If it makes it easier for me to almost drown an actress, than like, yeah. What can most effectively let me nearly kill Ed Harris? Is AI going to revolutionize my ability to nearly kill Ed Harris? At least he didn't do what it tells me to do. Natasha Lyonne, who was like, yeah, David Lynch, love this. That may be, no, I was saying the other day that media stuff doesn't usually enrage me that much, but if I fucking hear about a Twin Peaks remake - You have to put it in through the algorithm.

2:18:01I'm not going to use Nano Banana. Listen, put in a different prompt. Coop, I don't want to see Nano Banana. Mix your heart or die. But that would be heartbreaking. No, no, no. If you're trying to remake Twin Peaks, I will make war with you. I'll turn every media property I have against you. I'm not going to remake it. I'm going to do a new season. I haven't finished season two. Don't ruin it for me. I've always thought the real problem with Twin Peaks was there were no dewback lizards moving around in the background. and there's a couple of scenes that could really use an ATS team. I'm on the same page.

2:18:39Bob shot first. This is why I think it's good that the Duffer Brothers got their rights to the next. This is something that I've been laughing about for like two days. I did not watch the Stranger Things the last seasons. I haven't watched the last, I guess, four or five seasons of it. I just call it things. But someone pointed out that all the effects in the finale look like the Tried So Hard video by Linkin Park. which is funny to me. It's that and the corn as well. SNL sketches. Yeah, it's falling away from me. I saw a clip from that and it looked really bad, but it was like one of them jumping and punching a big horrible CGI alien through.

2:19:16And it's just like, doesn't this show have the budget of like Ethiopia's GDP or something? It cost hundreds of millions. And it looks like dog shit. I love slot. And people are like, well, this is just them preparing to give you LLM. No, it's not. It's just fucking Netflix. It's just Netflix destroying money. Aren't you excited they're about to acquire Warner Brothers? Fucking just. Yeah. It, I don't know. Like I haven't seen the new stranger things because after season one, I was like, I think I got what I wanted to. I didn't mind it either. It was just when we never even talked about watching the house.

2:19:51We were like, second season. Good for them. Good for those kids. I'm glad they're getting their, their, their bag. I'm not interested here. most of the current season is apparently just like 21 people in a room standing around folding their arms so like Avengers get them in an airplane hangar put them in a motion capture suit and then have them talk about what just happened we can get them in talking about real things as we were discussing at the beginning of the episode we saw the Jensen Huang thing Robert you missed nothing you're talking about the Nvidia keynote speech that I thought was tomorrow oh yeah you really missed nothing though And I went, and I kind of mentioned this at the beginning, I went and I looked, and the six new chips they announced, all announced in either June, October, or November.

2:20:36Like, they're all old. No, but they're new. See it again for the first time. They're new. This is the first time they've been together. They're actually making one of them. Did you see that on the video, that they're making it? They're actually going to manufacture it now. They're going to manufacture it. It's in production. It's like, and I just saw before we went on, that AMD had, and really disappointed Greg Brockman, the COO of OpenAI, went on. It's so cool. went on they did this big fucking speech about how oh this is just like compute is the new oil or something just blow my brains out whenever i hear this that's a great it's it's so fucking cool but what's great about it though is like they didn't talk about the fact that they meant to build a gigawatt of data centers by the end of this fucking year it's just like it's the farce i don't think we'll talk about that again yeah we don't need we don't need to talk about the thing we agreed on you're you're you're a sixers fan now trust the process right you're locked in who's the James Harden of commit to like oh no no that's Jay Parikh he got fired he moved from no Jay Parikh he went from Laceworks a company that was most famous for buying$30 ,000 worth of Lululemon gift cards to get people to use their software to Meta to Microsoft to run their AI group like that's the James Harden but he doesn't but you don't have anyone who like stroppily quits we don't have any like people like that that's what we needed we need more like characters of Ben Simmons yeah we need a bench well i mean yeah that's like i'm not taking layups that's beneath me i don't do that anymore it's the ben simmons that's like the three basketball listeners sorry they just fucking loving it happened to the strong loud type like steve bomber yeah that's what we need yes somebody that i honestly had that thought when we were watching developers we were watching wong i was like i know how much more energy can be involved in this yes he's not even sweating a A little bit.

2:22:21If I had billions of dollars, I would be fucking losing it up there. I'd be going inside and be like, well, you can't do anything to me. Buy this entire place. But yeah, it was so limp. It was so sad. It's like they barely seem to be fucking trying anymore. Well, what is there for NVIDIA to really say at a keynote, right? Like it's not, their products are really exciting to people who are in like the business of utilizing them, but it's not like a consumer product that they're hyping up right now. But this was all like analysts and media and such. Yeah. And it had, there was a line out the door.

2:23:00Because they're making all the money in the world. Right. That's what's exciting. Yeah, I think that was the little bit from the guy that I talked to who was sitting next to me. It was just like, part of it was like, you just wanted to be in a room with a guy that rich. Yeah. Like not even in like a way that I'm like, that I'm like dissing the guy for. He's just like, I've never been in a room with a guy this rich before. It's crazy. like you're in vegas go to a strip club like like that is the beauty of vegas if you stay up late enough you will get to watch a saudi shake yeah yeah lose thirty thousand dollars at a craps table just go to a craps table in like the venetian or the palazzo you will run into someone with too much money if that's really what you desire yeah but no i i mean i i saw john mccain once in the venetian wild cut yeah but that's like but otherwise it's just people that shouldn't have that much money that you've never met.

2:23:48Just burning it. Didn't he have a lot of money? Wasn't his wife? His wife is very rich. I think it's like regional liquor wholesale money. One of those classic American gentry things where it's like... No, that's John Kerry's. Yes, right. I was like, I don't know if people get rich anymore. John McCabe is a fur trapper. I look forward to the CES fur trapping section. I prefer that background for him. I would love it if there was a fur trapping section. He was kidnapped by beavers in the middle of a fur trapping expedition. They tortured him for five years. Turns out they don't like what we're doing to their dams.

2:24:31Not happy with it. Yeah, the war in Vietnam was really just un-gorging and ripping up those dams. That's what it was. I wish tech was actually this fun, though. because it was just like Greg Brock when going and talking to Lisa Sue from AMD just fucking just wobbling around, mumbling shit about compute and data centers that they can't build because they don't have credit. Like what is there exciting to say other than look at how much money we're worth and look at how much money we're making? But that was the thing with NVIDIA. They didn't talk about any products. Like they didn't even talk about their own products.

2:25:04It's like it's the most egregious kayfabe I've ever seen because gun to the head, I don't think any of these people, that's not a threat. Gun to the head, I don't think these people actually have an answer. No, I mean, because there's not a solution financially to the sheer amount of money that's been invested. And NVIDIA is in the enviable position of the money they've made is real. People are actually buying chips that they made. But the industry supporting it, there's a lot of vapor. And everyone's kind of aware that at some point it's going to come crashing down to Earth. And we had a reality check in the last quarter of last year on NVIDIA.

2:25:47Not all the way down, but their bubble got certainly deflated partially. and there's I think a growing awareness that well whatever happens with this even if the bubble never pops even if AI doesn't get sort of punctured in the way that people including a lot of us think it's going to NVIDIA is not going to keep riding this high forever and I don't know there's not a graceful way for them to deal with that but they're trying they're doing this thing called the omniverse yeah What? Yeah, yeah. It's called the Omniverse. They're calling it the Omniverse. We love the Omniverse. What is... Okay. It's just...

2:26:31It's this whole bullshit thing. World models is another thing. It's just a made-up thing for we'll do simulations using GPUs. Not to be confused with the metaverse. Which is very different. This is way... The metaverse bad. Our metaverse good. It reminds me... This is a really deep cut. Anyone who remembers this, please email me. There was a thing that DC did called Death Metal where like the Batman who laughs, who's a Joker Batman, just best to get past that. There's a bit in it where they meet a guy from, there's a thing above the multiverse called the Omniverse. And he's just a guy with a pumpkin head.

2:27:01And I remember reading the Omniverse and that just being like, fuck off, just fuck you. And then, but what it is, is they buy compute from like Microsoft or Meta, sorry, Microsoft, Google or Amazon, and then rent it to people so they can run simulations using their Omniverse software. The information, credit to them, put out a story today just being like, yeah, it's not making any money and everyone hates it. and it was the first half of a two hour long presentation and they're just like and dave put it really well i was like yeah here's a bunch of stuff if we could do this how good would that be and it's like none of it's real right it's so cool and i think what they're trying to do is be like look you bought all these gpus what if you could do this well you can't you can't do that we cannot do this but what if you could and it was so straight because i everyone was you could hear are people coughing in there yeah people leave it people actually it was really strange and then there was a tiny bit of ai stuff it's really truly bizarre i mean it does feel like people are starting to get sort of fed up with the lack the things that have not materialized that should have by now yeah right and i find you get a lot of you get a lot of pushback if you're like this is fake and this is bullshit which is like my emotional opinion but you get a lot less pushback if you're like i just don't see how this can be worth as much money as it needs to be for the industry and you get a pretty broad agreement of like yeah something like there's something fucky with that that was the bit that i wound up coming out of it like i think the the big feeling that i felt afterwards beyond like bored and hungry was that i felt kind of sad about it because it's like it's clear that there's like there is all of this capacity to do all of this like computational stuff that you couldn't really do before but there's not any sense of like what that's for or what you're going to do it's just compute for compute's sake well and i i think and this is me there's a degree to which i'm not even fully confident what i'm saying here but i i get the i'm a sports writer man so fucking go off i get the feeling and have read some accounts that make me believe that there are applications for a lot of this a lot of like a what gets broadly lumped as AI in different kinds of medical science.

2:29:14Yeah, exactly that. But nothing that's going to make this company worth$15 trillion or whatever. And nothing that does anything on its own. It's not the AI will come up with the medicine. It's like, no, the AI is capable of brute forcing its way through doing a lot of theoretical tests or analyzing a huge amount of data. And if you build a model specifically to deal with this kind of medical data, that it can be a time-saving tool that allows you to do other things, which is not a sexy thing in the way that like AI is going to cure cancer is. And it's not sexy to be like, well, AI will allow us to prototype more efficiently different kinds of like materials to make holes of spacecraft out of.

2:29:59And maybe that will speed up the process of developing these things, which is like a thing that theoretically might happen. And that's not as sexy as like AI is going to figure out how to take us into space. um and this conversation's also so fucking old at this point right that bit of it where it's sort of like i'm so aware of the thing where it's like it's going to be able to think for itself and it's going to like fix we're not going to need to have jobs anymore right but then like eventually like you work your way back from that to like protein folding right i don't know what protein folding is apparently ai is extremely good at it sure but it's like you can't talk about that because nobody knows what protein folding is but when you talk about the other shit it makes me for one thing doubt that it's any good at protein folding right you know it's because protein folding is a totally like it's not even llm drew it's not even gpu it's machine learning shit yeah and it's the thing is with the like the medical example as well they're doing that already again it's only kind of llms but not really right and it's just i do your point about we've had this one before i'm pretty sure i heard this conversation like not even from us just like i've heard some version of this was sitting around being like yeah you know it might be good for this when because before the nvidia thing we had this panel with these people who were just saying stuff that slowly was driving me insane and i was getting ready i was i eventually just started muttering to myself like a crazy person but there was just the ceo of a bridge which is an ai scribe for doctors i thought you were saying a bridge and i was like how do you get that job just a single bridge easy work And he kept trying to sell me.

2:31:28And he was just talking about, he was just word salad on word salad, trying to get around the fact that his AI just transcribes what doctors say. And it's just like, who fucking cares? Great. Well, it's one of those things where it's like, I think doctors would like that, but you can't, for his business to be worth, which I believe you looked it up, was like$5 billion. Yeah, 5.5 billion. It's like, in order for it to work, it also has to like, to justify that valuation. It has to make evaluations. like no doctor wants it to fucking do that they're doctors yeah and it's it's just and it's almost cliche it's like yeah it's being forced into anything i was mentioning on the earlier it's like in microsoft today it's no longer office it's co-pilot like fuck you i have many times have i said no i'm not using co-pilot you're trying to force me that's amazing that they just like they've got such a doubt on their hands that they're like uh the batman movies are now uh the Avengers or whatever.

2:32:23Google did that already. They changed Google Assistant to Google Gemini and they're like 400 million activities. They're going to do the same thing with fucking Copilot where it's like, look at all these people. No, we're all using fucking Word and Excel. Well, what's funny though is they're not going to be able to do that because I have fucking Microsoft's numbers. I have Microsoft's revenues. I'm coming out with it at the end of January. Frank Shaw, you fucking want some? Email me. And I already have GitHub Copilot's revenue too, fucker. There's the thing. I'm fucking sick of this because people are being lied to.

2:32:52I'm just doing an episode of, I guess this is the show I'm recording, but it's just walking around, hearing they put the thing that made me actually snap on this trip was they put Nano Banana in a television. You gotta go back. What is a Nano? Nano Banana is an image. Three straight episodes. It's an image generator model from Google that they called the world's dumbest fucking name because they insist on making me angry. That's literally its name. Yes. Nano Banana and Nano Banana Pro. I gotta go. Nano Banana. Nano Banana Pro is done. It's now in a television. They should make a, the version that you have to pay for should just have a normal.

2:33:25Nano Banana Pro 3 Plus. I think it's just, it just shows loathing for the customer. Oh yeah. Like you little pigs are called anything. Nano Banana, you fucking pigs. I think they're probably, it's probably jealousy and some FOMO at Elon Musk where he gives his stuff really funny, stupid names. Maybe that's why, that's the secret. Maybe we'll get some of that. We can be Epic too. Yeah. Yeah. Can we throw a 420 in there? Maybe they can copy the other things. What was up with Mercedes and then they're pulling their things plus plus? Yeah, Mercedes. Yeah, they had a whole thing with a panel with Mercedes and this guy from Skilled AI who was like one robot, one brain, one purpose.

2:34:10One mic. He was also spinning up there. All I need is one mic, one robot, one brain. It was just one panel. It was just a panel of just people just like all in varying stages of concussion protocol. Just like saying shit to each other. And Sarah Groh, this research, so when AI is powerful and large language models, would that be interesting? And the guy going, I agree. They would be powerful. And indeed, robots. Yeah, and it was just in, and people around going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I loved our little chat when this was going on where the guy was like, you know, we're making bass layers by watching YouTube videos and then practicing.

2:34:54That's how you learn to do any real task as everyone knows. You watch a YouTube video 3 ,000 times. I can't think of any other... Not now, I'm bass layering. I'm watching Jamal Crawford's Sickest Buckets, 22 minutes. I'm watching unexpected LeBron edits with a compilation of 45 minutes. It's just so strange as well because I've been fucked with a lot in my life. It just feels like we're being fucked with. It's just like a weird, not even con at this point, just like everyone's just like - It's taunting. Well, that's the thing that's so dispiriting is that like I can tell you're not even, you're past the point where you think you have to even work to light on this.

2:35:35Like you're just being lazy. Like we all know everyone, like the majority of people found Copalette annoying and said no repeatedly. And you want to be able to claim it. Everyone using an office product is using AI to trick your shareholders. So you're just fucking changing it. And like, there's nothing, there's not any more thought to it than that. You're not at all scared of regulators. You don't give a fuck about what the people paying to use your product. And that's just, it's dispiriting because like, yeah, there is nothing I can do. Right. Like I could, I could switch my operate, my, my, like my word processor, I guess.

2:36:11And probably will at some point this year, It just means embracing a pain in the ass of switching a bunch of stuff around. But at this point, I think it's worth it because I'm annoyed at you. You've annoyed me enough. And I don't think that's going to impact Microsoft's bottom line. I don't think enough people are going to switch for it to matter. It's just, again, dispiriting. Also, no one's going to call it Copilot 365. No, it's a stupid name. They're going to call it Microsoft Office because you're going to say it to a grandma. I'm using Word. Now I'm not using fucking Copilot. I'm writing, you dipshit.

2:36:41It is so cool. we now have software that's deliberately annoying. It's just like, hey, do you want to use Copilot? You want this to write? I'm fucking writing it. I'm writing it. Please leave me alone. I use Apple Notes now, not because I like it, but because it doesn't prompt you. Want help generating the document? The problem is every big player in consumer technology right now has attained and is expressing the exact vibes of a guy that you would cover your drink around. Yeah. right yeah where it's like they're just it's just this constant pressure and constant like hey hey hey what are you doing like yeah you know what why don't you come sit with me i'm just gonna sit down next to you i'm just gonna hang out with you like it's it's this i've said no so many times and you are not at all listening and that's how using technology feels and i hate it i mean that is and that's a good good way to kind of like wrap up the episode as well but I think that's what the theme of CES appears to be this year.

2:37:40It's just like obtrusive stuff. How like that. I know I keep saying Nano Banana. The reason this has driven me insane is it's like, I don't need the TV to generate images. Are you sure? I'm watching the television. Why don't you try it? Yeah. Maybe you'd like it. What if your TV was a computer too though? I don't know. Nano Banana Pro offers many features that aren't available. Nano Banana can generate a winning season for the Raiders. It's just like Nano Banana. And also, what kind of fucking freak is sitting there being like, I want my television to generate an image? No, if you try and do that, your television should break.

2:38:15Hey, I know you're putting on a torrented copy of Star Trek The Next Generation to watch while you cry yet again. What if Riker's dick was out the whole episode? Would that improve this for you in any way? Fucking freaks. Do we in Google? Would that get you to start saying Gemini? Yeah, would you call it Gemini? If we show you Riker's hog. Would you pay$40 a month for that? Oh my God. Emotional blackmail and it's wrong. And before we wrap as well, Robert, I've said this earlier in the episode as well, but there was a bit where NVIDIA, Jensen Huang was talking to two robots. And he was like, this is how we make you.

2:38:54And it turns out it was from like the fucking Fallen Order, like the second of the games. With Cal Kestis. Yeah, with the guy from, what? Shameless? oh yeah this is in shameless right that is the joke the joker yes um yeah that guy and it's like i did not know i'm a big star wars head but of like the actual star wars stuff and it's like okay and how much did you pay like a million dollars for that but you know that they were like what's the cheapest one yeah what's the cheapest we gotta get one of the games yeah we'll give you one of what's that guy from the n64 game i bet he's cheap Kyle Katarn Kyle Katarn bring his ass in just immediate don't remember anything but Kyle Katarn oh let's sign off with that alright David Roth thank you so much for joining us pleasure to be here from Defecta we'll have you in the episode notes Robert Evans you'll be back you'll be back yeah I'll be here all week hell yeah and Edward Ungreso Jr.

2:39:51who'll also be here all week I will I will and then to wrap the episode so before we go I want to talk about something we'll be doing at the end of every episode so back so just a little history on the suite back with the PR firm used to have this suite and have journos come in and back since the late 2010s we did this we had journos come in and there was a bloke called Sean Paul Adams who came to visit he was a good mate of mine good mate of my friend Tachana's he passed last year I want to honour him by encouraging you to donate to the Pagiatric Epilepsy Research Consortium Sean Paul's son is epileptic and his family would deeply appreciate it he was awesome he's deeply misplaced friends and family he's one of the highlights of the suite when he visited so yeah I'll have a link in the show notes we'll be here all week everyone thank you so much for sticking with us from this episode and yeah we'll have two more tomorrow and every day other than saturday we'll just have one cheers everyone bye go with god 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 You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter.

2:41:09I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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