CES 2026: Part Three (Tuesday)

29:26And we're like, oh. Have you heard about the more? Yeah. Yeah, but like the funniest thing about this show is that this is the largest tech show in the US. It's the big thing of the year. No one can get fucking Bluetooth or Wi-Fi correct at this show. And so all the demos fucking fail all the time. I just don't want to touch anymore. I don't want, when I go places, I don't want to, I like seeing people. You don't want to touch a robot? I don't want to touch any, I don't want to shake hands with someone when I go to the museum. Just the robot. To the point that I was asking the presenter I was talking to, like you.

30:02I'm fine with talking to people. I quite like, and I think if I just walked through a series of machines, like when I went to Korea, there was a lot of machines, but like still the occasional person. If it was just to your description, Adam, just a series of screens that I interacted with, that would fucking suck. I'd feel alone in a way that I quite like being solitary, but that would just be like, I feel like I'm going through tubes. Yeah. I think what it's going to be, the future that they're going to have, I described, you know, when I go to the Alaska terminal at LAX, they've specifically done this where like, there's no check-in counter.

30:36It's mostly kiosks. And there's like two people roaming around. So it's the self-checkout of airlines. And whenever I fly Alaska, there's always some fucking problem with my ticket. I don't know what it is with their system. And so every time I'm like, where's the person? And that's what it's going to be everywhere. And as I'm talking to this woman, she goes, well, I want people to have the choice. Maybe they want to use the automated system. I'm like, I don't think we'll have a choice. And she goes, yeah, we won't have a choice because it's going to be so much cheaper to automate everything they're going to do.

31:04Like the robo things. You call your bank and you just want to talk to someone. They're like, press one for the thing that you don't need to do. Oh, and I am British. Press two for the second thing you don't need to do. And you're just on the phone. You're pressing zero. And you're just like, give me a fucking question. Take that, and we're going to rotate to the next 30 in a second. But I just want to say, as a British person, every fucking single American voice-activated thing sucks for me. It's just like, okay, give me a reminder for 7 p.m. Calling your mother. Calling mom. Sending her your last link, which was the taint zapper.

31:40All right, we're going to rotate through. The next ad I fully endorse, and if you don't like it, Email me at god at gov dot biz.

32:15Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com.

32:29Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back. Zitron, we're back. It's the Consumer Electronics Show, Better Offline. And joining me in the room is Victoria Song of The Verge. Hello. Robert Evans of Behind The Bastards. Yeah, I got to do this real quick. Sorry. Yeah, I decided. Like on air was the best way. I've decided not to do that because I've drunk so many Diet Cokes already. And I've got like three more in me. And of course, Adam Conover, wonderful stand up and the host of the Factually podcast. You know, I stayed at your apartment once and I was frankly concerned at how much Diet Coke was in that apartment.

33:00And no coffee maker. You're one of those no coffee. Are you a Diet Coke in the morning pervert? I'm a Diet Coke whenever pervert. Oh, man. It was 10.30 p.m. and I went to bed half an hour later. and I drank one of those motherfuckers with my sleeping meds. Yeah. So caffeine doesn't affect you? It's fine, yeah. I have like ADHD and I take meds for that as well. It's your off prescription Adderall. But I also have Concerta. Wait. They give me that, but the doctor gives me that because I actually unsurprisingly have ADHD. You haven't worked that out from the tens of thousands of words. So Robert, you got the sea of Intuit to say something?

33:40uh the the cmo cmo of intuit yeah so i i started my day all i did really today was panels i was in like six different fucking panels um and the first one was about uh oh one sec i should probably have had this that's okay hold up intuit intuit's wonderful as well because they have this new chat gpt integration they've added that's exactly what i was talking this panel, which is like a leadership roundtable, sorry, on technology and advertising. Although the actual panel did not seem to have much to do with that. And the CMO of Intuit was there and talked about the integration that they've been doing with ChatGPT and talked about how they're partnering with OpenAI so that you have, when you're doing your taxes, you have access to like a chat bot basically to help do and you you can have an agent the idea is an agent will at some point be able to handle most of this task but just the chat bot though yeah well that's kind of the problem and like so there's there's a couple of issues with this when i first started uh like i had been reading about the intuit integration because they're putting like a hundred million dollars into uh open ai million not be i'm sure if i said that clearly um and And when that first happened, I read an article by a security researcher who was pointing out that they are giving – Intuit is giving read and write access to an LLM.

35:12Jesus Christ. Of your tax data, of any of the tax data that's integrated into that, which is a problem from a security point of view. One of the things this guy points out is that there's a kind of attack that you can execute against AI models. There's a kind of attack that you can execute against AI. Was it prompt injection? Yeah, prompt injection. And that's when you go to a website which tells the LLN to do something, right? Or a website. Or one of the things that this guy proposes is if you want to put in a fraudulent invoice. You could have an invoice that has text that's not like visible to the naked eye, but that the LLM would read and that text basically executes an exploit.

35:59And there's not a – like you can't defend against these really. Like there's not a functional way to stop this. The point he was making is that it's not a question of whether or not there will be a data breach of people's tax data because they're integrating it with this chatbot, but when. And the question that this researcher had that I thought was a really good question was, who is then responsible? This is Chris Black, published this in a website called Arapdas. But who is responsible if your data all gets leaked because of this integration? Is Intuit responsible? Is OpenAI responsible? Is whatever third party you're using that uses Intuit software responsible?

36:37responsible so i i asked the the thomas ranies who's the cmo of intuit that right when they had time for questions and i said i basically brought up what's in this article i said given the fact that this is an inevitability that attacks like this will be carried out and data will be uh uh leaked um who do you like who is responsible like who who should take legal responsibility in that instance and like what safeguards are you building to try and deal with the fact that this is going to happen. And the first answer he gave is that we're talking about it with open AI, which I viewed as a non-answer.

37:14So I came up to him after the panel and kind of cornered up a little bit and asked, like, you have to have more, you're the CMO, right? You're like the chief marketing officer of this entire company. Security is a pretty big marketing standpoint, right? Like, I would think you would know something about this. And he eventually got angry with me and said like i don't have any of that information that's not my job basically to care about this sort of thing i've got a recording of it we'll play at some point but but that that's literally all that i got from him was like we're talking about it with open ai and i don't really know um same thing with the ai browsers right yeah yeah browsers doing the same thing prompt they're so so so so vulnerable to the prompt injection stuff i really like that also they're trying to pretend ai browsers are useful they're not i tested five of them was that was that you That was me.

38:03I had to test five fucking AI browsers. All I wanted was a pair of fucking new balances, and it couldn't get me. I had to get my mother-in-law to get me the new balances. So what are you doing on the AI browser to try to get the new balances? So they're like, oh, Gentic AI, you can ask it to find you the fucking new balances or whatnot. And it's supposed to help you research this stuff, and all these tech CEOs are like, well, the future of computing is that you will not do anything on the computer. You'll talk. It's kind of like her, the movie Her, where you just talk to the computer and it goes beep, blah, blah, blah, blah, here you go.

38:40So all I wanted was a pair of fucking New Balance. Right. I take my shoes very seriously. Right. And I'm like, okay, I want a pair of New Balance. These are the parameters that I want. How am I going to get them? And my query kept getting longer and longer and longer and longer and longer because they can't intuit things. So I was like, my foot size is this. This is the stuff that I have to deal with. This is the color I want. This is the style that I want. These are the scenarios that I want to wear them in. These are the prices that I want to have. So it's like a fucking three-paragraph prompt that I have to give.

39:10And I'm asking all five of these different stupid AI browsers to just get me a pair of goddamn new balances. And it's just like, bleh. Can't do it. Also, I like browsing the internet. Not as much as I used to due to all the obstacles. But looking for a pair of shoes, looking for something in a store, that's kind of, you know, you fuck around, you learn some stuff. It's kind of fun. Yeah. No, I did ruin, again, cursed tech beat. I did ruin my mental health just trying to buy a pair of shoes. A 300-word essay. Yeah. I mean, part of the enjoyment of purchasing something is to know that you got the thing that you wanted.

39:47Yeah. You put the work in. You found the, like, I've been trying to buy the perfect set of towels for a little while. Right. Okay. And I was like, no, I don't want to get the onsen towels, like the fake Japanese towels. I want to find some real Japanese towels. And so I found out about a variety of towel that's only made in one town in Japan. I'm trying to find the right vendor. And I know when I get the towels, I'm going to be like, I went through something to get these. And that's how people, you want to feel about your new balances. These are so good. I got the ones, I put a little bit of sweat equity in.

40:21You want to just be like, I got some, The computer bought me some shoes. Also, the computer doesn't listen. I said, I already have the perfect running shoe, right? I found that. So these were stylistic. I want walking shoes. And what did it do? It gave me the fucking running shoes over and over and over again. I said, I didn't want the running shoes. I wanted the walking shoes. Right. It didn't listen to me. This is kind of like every one of these AI browsers I read about is kind of the same things. Like, imagine if you will. You're sitting there. you want to buy something and there's just no way to do that it's just like an alien an alien that's never used anything it's just like how do i do anything oh i'll type in and it's like yeah after three minutes it might do something right yeah it's like fucking yeah that's the that's the first oh that's the frustrating thing about sitting in all of these panels in particular is that it's like entering this alternate world where all of the technology works much better than it does.

41:19And people talk about it as if, like, yeah, we deployed 1 ,500 agents, right? That are, you know, they're doing great work. And it's like, okay, but I'm looking at, for example, the statistics that Copilot released last year that about, or that were released about Copilot last year, that about 70 % of work tasks that it's tasked with it fails at, right? Because the agents are not functional yet. So I, you know, I'm trying to tell Atlas, ChatGPT's thing to buy me these fucking new balances and it's just like oh crap there's a pop up let me try and close this pop up oh that didn't close the pop up let me click more precisely at the coordinates and it's listing the coordinates on the site let me try and close the pop up it took five it took five I'm watching it it took five attempts for the AI to close the pop up a minute and 30 seconds I'm just watching it and I'm just like Jesus fucking crazy close the pop up It's narrating as it's doing this?

42:16Yeah, yeah, yeah. It narrates. It goes just like, let me think about the best way that I can close this pop-up. It didn't seem like I clicked hard enough. Let me look at the coordinates and click more precisely. Well, that didn't work. You know the compute on that is also bonkers. I boiled oceans to watch an AI struggle to close pop-ups for a minute and 30 seconds. Giraffes from the back of a truck into a furnace to make this like a gas turbine in a poor community in Texas. It's just many people got cancer and you didn't get the shoes you wanted. Yeah. And in between panels, a friend of mine back in Portland sent me a video that some guy, I think in Tennessee, recorded of like the sound of the data center that went up near its house.

43:00That's like this. I mean, for months has just been this like constant, like droning beep noise thing. Like, it just sounds awful. And so I'm going in between these people talking about like, you know, and really focusing on how like AI is going to augment human capability. And, you know, these agents are only getting more capable. And like, we're going to be using this to like really set human creativity on fire. And then I'm like watching a video where a guy's like, yeah, now it screams every day. The internet screams every day outside my house. The computer is in pain. They're hurting it. Yeah.

43:34And I'm looking at the statistics that show that like none of this stuff works as well as these people are saying it does, right? Like not to the extent that like I would want it doing a job that really matters. And I'm just so, in between that, the other thing that I read while I was going in between sessions was an article that came out today about a patent Sony filed last year to basically create, use an AI agent to play video games for you when you're trying to do something hard. Finally. If you can't beat a boss. Did you see Razer stuff? No. Yeah, well, and that's the other crate. I haven't seen the booth yet, but you want to talk about that?

44:12I saw. I was in that really sweaty Venetian suite where they were giving the preview of the Razer AI concept. You know it's real crazy in there. Oh, my God. So they had two crazy AI concepts. First is Project Ava. And the only way you can describe it is a little anime waifu that you stick on your – The wife tube. The wife tube. It's a little desktop wife tube where the holographic anime waifu named Kira – and there's a camera in the thing. And so she's watching you and she's going like – And it's based on Grok's Ani, if you know. Oh, God. Yeah. The pedo tube. They did tell us, like, specifically that it was based on Grok.

44:50And I'm like, oh. Did you ask if it was based on an adult? Well, I'll tell you what it's based on visually. If you ever watch the show Archer, there's, like, the creepy scientist who has the waifu hologram. Creegas anti-wife. It looks identical to that. Oh, my God, you're right. Like, it's smaller, I think. So, I was there with my colleague Antonio, who, Antonio, oh, God, sorry, Antonio. because he does listen to your podcast, Antonio DiBenedetto, and he's our laptop reviewer. And so they're like, you know, Kira can help you when you're playing your game. And so he's playing like this first-person shooter, but it's just like not an actual level, so you can't die in this section.

45:28And she's like, oh, this is the gun you're holding. It's not the correct gun. And it's like, oh, you died. And he didn't die. And then they programmed like, oh, so did you see anything? really cool at CES? And this is how she talks because it's based on Ani. Jesus Christ. He's like, no. And she's like, oh, that's cool. So you can have different avatars. It doesn't have to be an AI waifu. You can also have Zane, the AI husbando. And he has snake tattoos on there and he just goes like, yeah. Hang on, I'm stuck. I need to ask the wife tube how to get past this section. But that's the whole point of games is that you're strugs, right?

46:11Is that you're playing them? Is that you're playing them. You're using the problem solving and all that, and it's just like, no, tell me how to beat this level. And all the time I talk to these companies, and they're like, yeah, you're going to be able to ask the AI how to do the thing. It doesn't work. Well, yeah, because they're training it off of YouTube videos of people playing the game, too, which I also just don't know if I believe it's going to work. Well, it is a patent, so maybe Sony doesn't either. Are they showing the AI just the video frames, like the literal stats? The YouTube videos, maybe?

46:40That's what, from the patent, I haven't read the patent, I read an article about the patent application, but that's what it sounds like. Because, like, you could program an old-fashioned AI, what we used to call AI in video games, just like, you know, an NPC. You could just, when you're making a video game, you have the world state, you know how the game works, you could just, like... Have something in the game. Yeah, exactly, that, like, is part of the game. I think the idea is... It's an artificial world, why do you need to... This is an insult to game FAQs. I think this is like a service outside of a specific game.

47:10They didn't ask if we should actually fucking make Cortana. These losers just played Halo way too much when they were in their formative years. I think a big mistake that they're making, or just - Which one? Well, look, there's such a big difference between a tool that extends or enhances human capability, makes you more powerful, and you not doing it yourself and having someone else do it for you. I literally just for the first time hired an assistant because the perfect person who I knew would do such a great job for me is available for a couple months. She's awesome. Great. You've corresponded with her.

47:49She's wonderful. She's amazing, right? But it's because I have worked with her before in a different capacity. I know she's amazing. I trust her to do all these various things that I don't have to do myself anymore. um it but the moment that like i work with someone who fucks something up i'm like well i can never work with this person right i'm not going to assign things to them and like versus when i fuck something up with a tool that i'm using myself i'm like okay i need to do a little bit better or whatever like the experience of those things is so fundamentally different the use cases for them is different the sort of person who wants to do them is different and so like i don't know like for Intuit to be a company that goes from, you know, here's tax software that helps you do your own taxes.

48:31If you would really like to do that. And also we're lobbying to make it illegal. Yes. But like to go from that to now we will automate, we'll be an automatic accountant. Right. Is like, they don't understand the gulf that they're trying to jump. No, it's because they misunderstand. It's kind of the ongoing theme of CES. It's like people that don't experience the problems they're trying to fix. because a personal assistant, to your point, is someone that you kind of hand stuff up. Like my written editor, Matt Hughes, the whole reason Matt works so well with me is he can anticipate. Like he kind of gets my thing and he knows, and I can trust him to get it without me having to, I don't know, give a 300 word prompt to explain every nuance because - It's so much hand-holding.

49:14And I don't want to hand-hold an assistant. That's the whole fucking point. It's hand-holding and it's also like picking, having an assistant to do the things you wouldn't have an assistant do like I don't play a video game for you yeah um but there's so much of it is focused on like the the tasks that are deeply human like whenever I hear like this AI can help you brainstorm it's like well no it can't that's not how brainstorming works someone else can't brainstorm for you that's not you're just talking to yourself in the mirror yes that the mirror is a chatbot yeah and you were hoping to plagiarize a good idea from the chat bot that itself is built from plagiarism, which I also feel like is a mistake.

49:57Um, but regurgitating thought into your own brain in the hopes a new idea comes out. Yeah. I mean, like I've talked about this before. My, my most positive experience with chat GPT was I was trying to decide whether, uh, to get myself a little apartment in New York. I talked to you about this, right? Whether it's a good financial decision. And I plug into chat GPT. hey here's all the numbers and like is this a good find you know would this be a big mistake and it sort of goes no it wouldn't be a big mistake you could do that if you wanted you can do it and i'm like okay but what about the fact that i can't sublet it yeah oh that means it's bad now you shouldn't do it now you're fucked oh but what about the fact that it's kind of important to me well if it's really important to you you should do it and and i did actually find that clarifying like it did help me think through it but it ultimately just agreed with your last statement 100 because i was talking to myself in the mirror it's the only That's the most useful it is.

50:48It's like you need to talk out loud to yourself. I can do that to myself. You can, but sometimes some people. Yeah, because you answer all my texts for some reason. Because you're my friend and I love you. Like, that's why I do it. Because I care about you and want you to be happy. And the chatbot doesn't care. No, the chatbot doesn't care. I actually wonder if my latent, like, actual autism, because I'm outing myself on the show, like, that's why it doesn't work. Because every time I've tried anything like this, I'm just like, just talking to my fucking self. Why are you agreeing with me on everything?

51:18But I mean, that's because that's you. To be real, that's you. I know I'm talking to myself on that too. But it just doesn't work. I literally have tried to do the things. I'm just like, no. Just like there's a block. I'm just like, it's just repeating what I just fucking said. Yeah, no. You have to know the artifice in order to get to a point where you're like, if you understand that you're talking to yourself, you're just thinking aloud in a different format. it can be helpful if you understand that that's what you're doing. People don't understand that's what they're doing. That's why they're getting the AI psychosis.

51:51They're mistaking this for a friend. It's not a friend. It's literally a personality programming. Yeah. I will say one thing that was interesting to me, I did a panel that was intelligence through motion, AI takes physical form, and it was about robots, robots with AI in them. It was actually the better one of the day. There was not much that was silly, and I think it was a really good example of how you ought to be responsibly talking about and thinking about products like this. So one of the people who was there was Andrea Thomas, who's the co-founder and CEO of Diligent Robotics. And they've built a robot that is basically an assistant for doctors and nurses at the hospital, not doing medical stuff.

52:32But like the thing that she pointed out is when we – because we started, and this was the first thing they liked. We started not with a product idea but by talking to a bunch of doctors and nurses and figuring out like what are the different jobs you have. And one of the things they figured out is that nurses in particular spend a shitload of time every day running stuff back and forth through the hospital. And so like, well, if we have a robot that can move things and can potentially move refrigerated things or move things that you have to be very careful when carrying, then a skilled, trained human being isn't doing that bullshit work and they can do more medical work and there's not enough medical professionals.

53:08And that's effectively a conveyor belt. Right, right. Which is great. That's more maneuverable than a conveyor because it can go. No, but the point is like it's useful because it's moving stuff between places. Right, right. That's great. And I believe there was some talk about other – like they're looking at adding other capabilities. But the way that they were thinking about it were, well, first we're going to talk to the people who we want to – we want to be making products that will be used in hospitals. Let's talk to people who work in hospitals to see where it's useful. And then the other thing that they said during that, and this was something a couple other people pointed out, is that you have to, when you're talking about building products that human beings will be working alongside in an industrial capacity, you have to assume that there will be failures and build that in because otherwise you're taking risks with people's lives.

53:53Right. So you have to be figuring out we want this thing to fail when it does because it will in a way that doesn't endanger human beings. How do we build that in from the ground up? This is like a fundamental assumption. It will fail. We need to make sure it fails in a way that does not lead to it crushing or killing people because it's going to be around them. And so I really appreciate it. And it was such a – that was such a gap to me from how everyone else – I'm used to other people talking about this stuff. more in the health tech and the medical space because the stakes are so high. And you know, like all the tech people are like, break shit, disrupt, blah, blah.

54:28But like medicine is like, no, no, don't break the people. Please don't. Something's already broken. They're broken already. So, yeah. I think one of the barriers to that though, and this is not even me being cynical, is just you ask people what their problems are and then you go, oh, you're an LLM, can't do that, sorry. The answer is the problems that you have are not fixable with the technology we have. Like housing and health. Health stuff, it's like there are very big limitations because of medical device clearance, but also just... Well, technology is streamlining, right? If you think about the...

55:01I just remember this from a macroeconomic class in college, but all technology does is it moves the curve up. It doesn't change the angle of the curve or whatnot. It just allows you to do more. So it's about streamlining things. It's not about fixing problems. It's about finding things that you could do more efficiently. Being more efficient doesn't fix the problem. It's two different streams that you're approaching, but they're conflating it by being like, if you're efficient, you fix the problem. I was like, no, the problem isn't always efficiency. Yeah, and the thing I think about a lot is what I'm in any city, but especially New York or LA where I spent a lot of time, it's like the physical infrastructure is so bad, but everybody has cell phones.

55:47Right, right. Like no one's even like, oh, homeless people have cell phones. We know everybody has cell phones because the price of them is so cheap and you can do a lot with them, but there's potholes, the trains don't run. And those are the problems in society. And the fact that we have high technology in these particular areas, but not in the rest of our society is like a weird distortion. We all know this. We don't think about it often enough. But like what you're talking about is this AI will like push that distortion even further. Yeah. In the best case scenario. And people like, you know, Simon Willison or whatever will have like some crazy agentic shit happening.

56:27You know, like they'll be, you know, in some fucking matrix. And everybody else will be like, how do I buy food? Well, Simon Willison will be trying to draw a pelican on a bicycle. I think that's the one thing. That's literally the test he runs on every LLM. But even Willison is kind of realistic about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To your point, Robert, with that panel, it's like, yeah, we're talking about this fantasy land. Even when we saw during the NVIDIA conference, it was talking about, yeah, and now agents are getting even more powerful and doing this. No, they're not. Yeah, no, they're not. But also, gun to your head, explain what that means.

57:00Because I regularly am arguing with people about this online perpetually. They can't. the agents and the consumerism and the commerce aspect of agents just because that's the only way they have a chance of making their investment back. There's such a lack of specificity. Like that is the thing that is most like in like the first three panels I did, all of which were one way or the other talking about like agents and their ability to like improve productivity and creativity. There was an exact exactly one specific example of a thing that people used AI, like that a marketing company used AI to do for marketing, right?

57:34Because these were all fairly marketing-focused panels. And it was, specifically, it was the company that makes Allegra, had like a new non-drowsy formula, and they engaged in what the, I think it was a Deloitte, I forget who said this, it's in my notes, but what the person who was talking about it described as model hacking, to basically put out a bunch of content so that ChatGPT would repeatedly scrape articles or whatnot that talked about how Allegra was non-drowsy so that if people asked questions about it, the LLM would return both always would say Allegra is non-drowsy, would like put that before the word Allegra, and would like subtly talk shit about other allergy medicines causing drowsiness.

58:19And they were talking about like, and that's like a really great example of like, this is like a strategy developed using AI that like, we couldn't have done marketing like this before we couldn't possibly have come up with a way to remind people yeah first off like you're you're the most specific example of the use of this technology in advertising is disinformation yeah right basically you know or or at least on that yeah on that spectrum and that probably cost thousands of dollars like probably so thousands of articles or whatever and just fed into the training. Jesus fucking Christ. And at the same time, they're talking about how important trust is.

59:00And that like you have to be, you have to keep. As they lie. Yeah, as they lie. And they're like, well, you know, people only trust you, will only trust your AI as much as they trust your company. So it's really about like having a good right. So. Isn't it the other way around as well? That's kind of what I took it as them saying is that like, look, people don't trust AI, but they still have some trust for specific brands. So if you really want to like, there's a limited period of time for that trust to stay alive. It feels like AI psychosis is separate. We blow it up. Honest to God makes this show more boring.

59:33Yeah, it really... It's all fucking AI shit. The stuff I was popping for was there was a robot lawnmower that could go up a hill. You see that? All the robots are getting... Again, if you look up Jen's coverage it's just about how last year the robots had arms, this year the robots have legs. Next year, big old Willie. There was also a, there was, we were, I was talking about the jerk off robot last time. But first I saw, there was a robot called BeatBot. And it said, nothing beats BeatBot. And I was like, this is a masturbation robot. Turns out it's a little robot that swims in your pool and cleans your pool.

1:00:15And I think maybe also the Bluetooth speaker. And I was like, it's like a pool room. I was like, that's cute. It's nice. if there's any good call for a hybridized robot, a combination pool robot, orgasm robot, like make the sexy pool boy a robot. Cabanabot. Yeah, exactly. Cabanabot. And it's just doing that weird song from where it's like, you remember that one? Yeah. The offbeat song the guy was claiming he could only have sex to. No, no, no one remembers that. No, just, oh God. Cabanabot is great. Yeah, you can market it to rich men with like wives in their 20s where you're like, look, your wife is going to cheat on you with the cabana boy.

1:00:53Just make sure it's a robot. Just fuck the cabana bot. Come on, love, fuck the cabana bot. What? You look depressed, honey. Do you need some time with the cabana bot? I'll put on new music. Genuinely, one of the best use cases for generative AI is sex stuff. It's certainly one of the most uses for generative AI. I'm sorry. As someone who was subjected to testing Annie, the Grok sex bot, That was damaging. You might have a workman's comp. Yeah. Listen, I keep asking for hazard pay at theverge.com and for my title to change to Senior Cursed Tech Revealer. And it's not happened yet. It's not happened yet.

1:01:32But I did have to test Annie and boy, did she. And boy, was she racist. Like the only people who are really making good use of like Sora style videos are niche fetish communities on the internet who have been able to move from writing fan fiction for each other because that's a cheap thing where they can make media for each other. Now they can make little videos. No, they're not making them. And they're so happy. Okay, but AI doesn't know how to animate tongues. And I know this because, again, my job is cursed. You sent me. And I had to test these AI video generating things. You've shown me more men kissing than any man should see.

1:02:13I feel like the AI make people kiss each other. No, they don't. They don't. They don't understand how tongues work. It's just like... Jensen Huang said that the new generation Vera Rubin is four times more powerful for training. So maybe that's like Jensen Huang's bringing the tongues in. But sadly, we're going to have to end this 30 second. The next thing coming up is an ad for tongue training models. And if you hear something else, that's an error. Whatever it is, just ignore it because we're meant to, it's the tongue training app. But before we get to the tongue training app, Robert has a very important message.

1:02:50So I came across the booth during the brief time I spent on the floor today of a robotics company called Zeroeth, which I think is a reference to the laws of robotics. And, you know, you had the normal laws and there was the Zeroeth law, yada, yada, yada. Anyway, we don't need to get into Asimov right now. But they had a whole booklet. I actually thought these were like notebooks at first, but every page of this is printed. That's a big book. the vision for their company and the robots they make, the origin story. I'm just going to read a little bit from here, okay? The prevailing narrative in robotics has long been one of replacement and utility, robots as instruments of precision built for efficiency and stripped of warmth.

1:03:26Yet across the long memory of civilization, the impulse to create was never merely mechanical. From Yan Xi's graceful wooden automaton in ancient China to Talos, the bronze guardian of Crete, our earliest machines were not tools. They were mirrors, reflections of an ancient longing with reflections of an ancient longing to understand ourselves. Zeroeth emerges from that unbroken thread of imagination. And hearing that, and there's so much more flowery prose, I need you all to see the robot that they wrote this about. Okay, let's take it.

1:04:02Why is he wearing a little teal polo shirt? I love that that's your first question. So listeners at home, what they've got is a robot that looks kind of like a cross between Elon Musk's shitty robot and a guy in a fencing helmet. Yeah. That's accurate. It can't stand on its own power. They have like a sex harness built that's like standing it up. That's like so it doesn't fall on its ass. I want to die. And they put an awkward T-shirt on it, I think, to hide the straps from the thing that keeps it standing. Jesus fucking Christ. This is the Consumer Electronics Show, everyone. This is what they are lying to you.

1:04:39Any motherfucker that tells you that robotics or AI is coming, they're fucking lying. Anyway, if there's an AI ad after this, that's their fucking problem.

1:05:21I'll see you next time. That's 844-844-IHEART.

1:05:30Diane, I'm once again in scenic Las Vegas, and the locals are staring at me with daggers in their eyes as I insist on podcasting further. After rotating cubes in my head all day, I'm now rotating my guests. Joining me once again is Victoria's Song of the Verge. Are you sick of me yet? Not remotely. You're wonderful. And you're very popular. Listeners love you as well. It's important for you to hear this. Oh, not for my ego. You need it. You need the ego. Ed Angueso Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter. Hello, my friend. And the incredible, wonderful stand-up comedian and star of the movie is this thing on.

1:06:00Chloe Radcliffe is joining us. Yo. What is up? Hello. Your first CES. Yeah. What do you think? I'm a CES virgin. Oh, man. Wow, there's so many boys. It's crazy. But not the cute boys. No, no, no, no. There's so many hairlines is what I should say. A lot of balds. Yeah. A lot of combs. Yeah, a lot of combs, a lot of balds. Comb over ponytails. Do they offer any hair loss stuff over here? Yes, they do. Yes, they do. Go to Eureka Park. There's always someone who has some LED hairband situation. Yeah. That's good. Yeah, so Chloe, your first CS, have you seen anything that's stuck in your brain? Um, my biggest take has so far from being on the floor for a pretty limited amount of time, uh, is that the theme is numbers that you don't need.

1:06:57Okay. I stopped at a booth that had a smart dog cage. Oh, the, the smart pet crate. Yeah. Yeah. Smart pet crate. And it tells you your dog's, um, it tells you your dog's heart rate and breathing rate. and then it also tells you the distance between the top of the cage and the dog. Welcome to my beat. Useless numbers. Useless numbers. And I said to the guy, I stopped and was looking at it, and I was like, well, why do you need the distance from the top of the cage to the top of the dog? And he goes, well, that's how you know whether the dog is moving or not. And I was like, yeah, but can't you just look?

1:07:34And he goes, well, but you're looking at your app and so you want to know maybe if the number has stayed static for a little while, maybe the dog has died. And I said, yeah. But wouldn't you know that from the other numbers, like heart rate and breathing? No. This is a patented dog death detector. Is your dog dead? They're going to ramp up to 400 biometrics at some point. Just a notification. Your dog is dead. The Lena Dunham indicator. Someone's going to be mad at me for that one. I love that as well because it's like, oh, if the dog's moving, couldn't a motion sensor? I mean, there's so many things.

1:08:20Couldn't. We already have pet cams. Whoever is buying a smart pet crate also already has a video camera trained on that dog's crate. That person is not doing smart crate over pet cam. They're like, hey, can you look at this graph? Do you think he's... I've got two cats and a lot of cat tech. I don't need a crate. No, no. What do you need a crate? I got an auto feeder. It has a little camera. Yeah. And we did that because when we went to Italy, I was just like, I got to make sure these dumb cats are eating in between pet sitter visits. And literally day one, I'm in Italy. I watch my cat look at me through the camera.

1:09:00It's pissed. Knocks the feeder over. Cat rage. Cat rage. And I do need to ask, if the cats were not eating between feeders, between pet sitters, what were you going to do for a million? Nothing. Nothing. I was going to call the pet sitter and be a crazy lady and be like, my extremely rotund 19.5 pound cat Pablo is not eating. Is now living off its own body fat. And it will be fine. And it has enough calories to support itself. But. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. I think that like all of these numbers that my theme of numbers that you don't need, what they wind up filtering into is anxiety. It's like too much information leads to anxiety.

1:09:45Senior curse tech reviewer. Cause I test wearables. So I have useless numbers for humans all the time. And just, I'm completely overwhelmed and over inundated and yeah, it's very accurate. It would drive me insane. All of the sleep tech. I'm, The thing is that I'm like sort of the wrong person to be here because I'm like, stay away from me with your cameras and your vibrations. Having you here is good. We need that kind of energy because there's too many perverts here. Like, actually, we need another number. So we know how the space between your dog and the ceiling of the crate. But what about the sides?

1:10:23Yeah. How are they going to get that? Also, just I love the idea of getting a notification. What does the notification say? Your dog is this tall. We've measured your dog. Like the smart litter robots, they're now having cameras, so you can watch your cat go into the litter robot to piss. Why? For the freaks. They already weigh the cats as well, so you can see how much my – I can literally look into an app and go like, oh, you lost like 0.5 pounds on that dookie. Good for you, Pablo. Damn, Pablo. What you been eating, brother? What you been eating, brother? How much you been pooping? The only exception is if I have a cat with a urinary thing, how am I beautiful, big, beautiful, and annoying, just like daddy.

1:11:07But he is this beautiful cat who occasionally has pee problems. But you can mostly just get that by looking at your cat. Like you're just checking occasionally be like, oh, okay, he hasn't peed in a while. I don't need a$450 Wi-Fi connected thing to be like, are you sure? $450? I think that's how much they are. No, they're like$800. Fuck off. Sorry, not to you, but the cat thing. Jesus Christ. How much do you love your cat? I love my cat so much. But I could get him a beautiful Armani suit, I assume. God, he'd look fetching. He's a big white and ginger cat suit. Armani bow tie. Oh, my God. No, I did get him a bow tie at one point.

1:11:46Gotta get an Armani bow tie. He chewed it off. I hear it. Yeah, I used to get my cat, I had the bow ties with bells so I could hear them because they would disappear in dismayances. I didn't know we're in the house and they always would rip them off and leave them. Yeah. Like a real fuck you. Like just like, that's where that shit goes. Don't put bills on me. Yeah. I put a little tie on him as well once. There's so many good things you can do with a cat. None of which involve an$850 piss measurer. One time I tied a balloon around a tortoise. Did it? Why? Because we kept losing it. I lived with my roommate and had a tortoise and it kept getting stuck onto the radiator.

1:12:27But then we wouldn't find it for a couple days. She was fine, but we kept being like - It's when this tortoise was just walking around the apartment with a fucking balloon. Yeah, yeah. Like a tortoise version of Up. Yeah, that's innovation. She was trying to get taken away. That's innovation. Yeah, that should be at the Consumer Electronics Show. No, but like, no, at the Consumer Electronics Show, it would probably be like a wearable tortoise tracker with Bluetooth and it would measure. It's like, no, no, you can steal a balloon from a kid. You can ruin a kid's day to get your tortoise found. It would have like an optical tracker to read the tortoise's temperature and its heart rate.

1:12:57So you go to an app and be like, is my reptile alive? Has this ever happened to you? It's just the tortoise slowly walking on something. Yeah, it'd be$700 a piece of shit. There's a video from an account I follow because of this video where they have a tortoise and they have a cat. And the tortoise has a skateboard to follow the cat around all day and harass him. That's the tech I would get. You know, a little skateboard for my little guys. Someday we're all going to go back to analog. Yes, you're right. You're just saying before the show. Tautos, cats, and skateboards. That's the real technology we need.

1:13:30Did you get any other numbers that don't matter and make you upset? There was a sleep bot. Nice. I think I'm calling it the right thing. It's a smart pillow. Oh, I've tested those before. Okay. What's it do? It seems like the actual useful thing is that it's filled with these little like pneumatic air sacs that inflate or deflate based on your snoring to stop you from snoring. Okay, I already do that in beds. Yeah, okay. That seems right. Like I can buy that. It's like that passes the sniff test. But this pillow also, when it senses your head is on the pillow, it turns off your lights. It turns off your speaker, if you have a speaker playing.

1:14:13It closes your curtains for you automatically. And then it, this is not a lie. texts your family that you are asleep. And I took pictures of... Is this a pillow for a prison? I just want to let you know I'm going to sleep. I'm reading the example text that it has. Sending a message to the family. Cassie, Oscar has been detected lying down. Period. Oh, wow. That's so wisdom. Jimmy, Oscar has been detected lying down. Period. I am not making this up. Dr. Larry Calabresi, Oscar has been detected lying down. Texting my doctor. He has lied. This is a prison pillow. What would you do if you got that text?

1:15:05I would be horrified. That'd be so funny. I mean, everyone, and of course, everyone who comes to CES with me has to use this pillow. I love the idea as well that you're just going to bed, your blinds are open, all of the lights are on, you're just blaring corn, I assume. Yeah, definitely. And I have no way of doing any of this myself. So just my pillow will take. What fucking psychopath? I know. Sleep tech is all about like optimization. That's why my newsletter is called Optimizer. This whole beat of health tech and all that is just about having the most optimal something. Right. So they're like, oh, science shows that if you sleep in like XYZ conditions, you'll sleep so good.

1:15:46So have a pillow, close all of these things. So you're in the most optimal sleep environment, whatever. And like, yeah, it is good to have an optimal sleep environment. It is good for you to do all that stuff. But you don't need to fucking text your Dr. Calabrasis about your sleeping. That would be such a strange text to receive. like he is and especially the way it was written like galactus has been detected also the smart pillow doesn't like smooth out your bed sheets for you you know like all of the stuff that actually makes everything that actually makes sleeping good yeah which is like wear the right clothes for you to sleep in and have the right bed.

1:16:32You know, it's like the, the, the, I've done so much sleep tech testing. And the only thing that's really worked for me and my spouse is unfortunately a$5 ,000 smart mattress cover, which is what does it do? It's the A sleep. Yeah. I burn, I, I pay for one as well. And like people made fun of it because of the AWS thing. When it went down, your bed wouldn't work. Yeah. No, that, that happened to me too. That didn't happen to me. It definitely happened to us. But I need to sleep in an ice coffin. Like I just, my poor girlfriend, just like, even for her it was too cold. I'm just like, yeah, I sleep at 50 degrees, like Dracula.

1:17:10But it saves marriages and relationships because you could sleep at different temperatures. I need to be a cozy little gal. Like warm or warm. Yeah, I need to be a little bug in a rug. I need to be like toasty. And my spouse also needs to be a corpse. So we can set different temperatures. I need to sit to Dracula. Yeah. And, you know, they snore. And it used to be a thing where every day I would hear them snoring and I'd be like, wake the fuck up so I can sleep. But now the bed actually just lifts when it detects him snoring. Oh, that's nice. Only on his side? No, on our side. So sometimes I go like, oh, it's moving.

1:17:44And then I fall right back asleep. But, you know, ever since that happened, he doesn't wake me up snoring anymore. That's good. Like, it saved our marriage. Wow. This is lovely. Unfortunately, you're selling me on this podcast. But unfortunately, it also comes with useless numbers. Like how often I see the most useless number. Here's my psychopath thing, though. I have my numbers for my eight sleep, and I have my numbers for my aura ring, and they disagree all the time. Same. I love it. Same. This is like long-term testing that I do. My favorite thing was I posted, because I also use Somni, which is the thing that electrocutes.

1:18:14Actually, I love it. It's this thing that you electrocute your head. It sounds insane. Just best not to think too hard. But like I posted my numbers on Blue Sky once, which was a mistake. And someone was immediately like, you're not getting enough deep sleep. You should be really concerned. I'm like, I really had to stop myself being like, kill yourself. To be clear, the Oura Ring is like, they do a lot of science. They do a lot of research. They're only about like, I want to say 79 % correlation between the cold standard of polysomnography. So that's a 20 % difference. Are you guys dreaming a lot?

1:18:45No. I do have medications. Y 'all dreaming a lot? My new medications are giving me night terrors. It's really bad. My roommate, I heard him go, what? Just in the middle of the night. I was like, are you good? I started. No, no, he was listening to Disturb, but he lied down on his pillow and he cut the music. You bet, I'm cool. He has night terrors? Yeah. He strikes me as the kind of guy who just wake up like, la, la, la, la, la. Yeah, I used to think when he went to sleep, he would just be in his memory palace. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like regarding it. Yeah, that's the thing as well. It's like the basic things for sleep are like, is it light in there or dark in there?

1:19:22Are you the right temperature? Are you comfortable? And it's like, yeah, but what if the pillow did all this shit that you already did? I asked the people at the booth. I was like, but what if I want to lay in bed and not have the lights out? Yeah. And he goes, well, you'd have to put another pillow on top.

1:19:43Fuck yeah, dude. What's great is, what's so good about that is likely no one has asked them that. You're the first person to be like, what if I am in bed but not sleeping yet? He's like, fuck. How much was this? Did he give you a price? I didn't even ask. I should have asked. It's probably like. It's probably. My estimate is$675 or something like that. It's always a stupid number. Because you could go on eBay and get some really nice sheets that were some crisp percale, perhaps. I've tested smart pillows in the past, but it was a very different smart pillow. I was testing like my breathing rate.

1:20:21why not? But it was also like it had a speaker in there so you could listen to your podcast to fall asleep in your smart pillow. And I was like, this is dumb. It's so dumb. I'm someone who, you know, I'm not trying to optimize sleep, but I do value the dream portion of it. So is there, is for someone like me, who's just like, I, you know, I'm interested in deeper sleep. Does it make sense to go on the journey of trying out the smart tech or is it, or should I just invest in? Melatonin. Really nice. Melatonin. I don't dream on melatonin. What about Tracidone? Really? Usually melatonin will make your dreams super intense.

1:20:57No, I just wake up. I wake up. What about magnesium, the one that doesn't make you poop? I haven't done, what is it? No, I haven't tried a magnesium. I think it's magnesium glycinate makes you sleep and magnesium citrate makes you shit. L-theanine relaxes you, magnesium L-theanine. And then there's also, well, you could try a GLP because one of the side effects of that is intensely vivid dreams. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, I lucid dream regularly, which is why I'm like, okay, I'll do anything except whatever goes and infringes on that. But I've never thought too much about doing the tech beyond like, I'll just invest in really nice sheets, you know, and get myself really comfy.

1:21:38The sleep measurement stuff sucks, but I really love the heat. I love the cold. I love the fact - I mean, the control over the environment sounds really nice on a level. I burn hot. I sleep in, I look inside. I have like a full scale, like blackout eye mask. I have a giant sheet. I like curl myself up in a bowl. It's probably not great. Like, there's probably not a great sign. And I'm just like cold and like wrapped in this thing. Like I'm just blacked out. Like, and I wake up when my alarm goes off and not a moment earlier. It's fucking great. I mean, I write constantly. I think like this is the only reason I can.

1:22:06Just like endless sleep. but it's again the numbers do fucking nothing for me i wake up feeling like shit it's like you didn't sleep enough thank you yeah for me the numbers make it so much worse because mostly if i'm having trouble sleeping then a huge proportion of my brain is fixated on i am not sleeping and that is bad and so then to have when they're like this is gonna help you sleep better i'm like no no it's gonna remind me how badly i'm sleeping and that's gonna make me sleep so much worse because every night when i lay down it's going to be like well tonight has to be the night that it is good now yeah and you get your loved ones get a text saying she's not sleeping chloe has been detected lying down but has not been detected unconscious yet chloe has violated the the rules of the pillow that that metric is called sleep latency and it fucking sucks yeah what's the what how long it takes you to sleep how long until you try to go to sleep and how when you actually fall asleep it's called sleep latency and you can kind of measure certain things by that it's it's bullshit it's not bullshit but it's bullshit i occasionally really like i'll get like a two minute one i'll be like fuck yeah well like all it does all it does is if you have a sleep latency under 15 minutes it just means you're real fucking tired and that's bad interesting yeah wait you mean like healthy people have About 15 minutes to fall asleep.

1:23:30Interesting. That's like a normal moment. Take that, boyfriend. Yeah. He falls asleep in 45 seconds. It's like if - And then I lay there angry. But he's healthy. I lay there listening to him get this peaceful rest that I should be enjoying. And I'm like - You fall asleep too quickly. One hour yesterday. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Okay. 17, six minutes two days ago, 13, 16. 16, 7, 7, 16, 28, 8, 33, 1. Fucking last Friday, one minute. Just fucking done. I think I was like in Vermont with my girlfriend and very happy. That's nice. That's lovely. Send her that later. All you need is like a baseline. And like the only point of these numbers is to build a long-term baseline.

1:24:20And when you're off the baseline, you go like, oh, okay. Maybe something's happening. To me, it's yet again, And to go back to sort of the theme of earlier, don't you know when you're off the baseline by, I'm having trouble sleeping lately? Yeah. I'm having trouble getting to sleep. Like the whole point of this is that they're trying to do something like illness prediction. And there is science that they can do that. Like during COVID, they were doing all of that stuff. Yeah, but Aura is not great at that. It actually is. It hasn't been great for me. I've gotten it where like the symptom radar is just like, you're getting sick and then I would get sick.

1:24:54So like, but you know, it's not that helpful because it's like a 48-hour window. But again, I know. I know. My throat has a tiny tickle. I'm about to get sick. Like all of this stuff came from like when they were doing COVID research because it's asymptomatic. So you could get like that sort of like. But this is the thing with all this wellness shit. It's like, well, you can't be mad at us that it isn't really useful because once it was. Snake oil. That's my beat, snake oil. The snake oil cursed, the cursed amulet beat. Yeah. I just sit here and go like, no, that's not true. No, that's not true.

1:25:28Here's the nuance, and everyone yells at me, and they're like, you're a big pharma shill. And I'm like, no, I'm not. What the fuck does that mean? What do you mean, big pharma shill? Oh, I wrote a story recently about the Wellness Wild West. It's kind of like a storyline that I've read about a lot, and I was talking about how people shouldn't be injecting unapproved drugs into their bodies. Ideally not. As in peptides? Yes. Chinese peptides. Don't do that. Don't take GLP-3. It's not actually a GLP-3 because the only people with access to the proprietary components to that is Eli Lilly. So whatever you're getting from China is almost 100 % not a GLP-3.

1:26:02And you're not saying GLP-3 is a problem, just getting it from an unlicensed Chinese pharmacist. Yes, getting it from an unlicensed Chinese pharmacist is not a great idea, bub. Reconstituting it yourself, you are not a pharmacist. I don't see any of you on TikTok using fucking sterile ingredients or sterile instruments or whatnot. I said that, and they were like, you fucking big pharma shill. I can't believe me saying don't use unapproved drugs is me being a big pharma shill. This week, I'm using the new viral GLP from China. They're calling it Retta and Ratatouille because the videos are like, oh my god, here's week one on Retta.

1:26:37I'm like, first of all, you're not on Retta. You're on some other fucking cocktail bullshit. What's Retta? the thing that they're calling GLP3, which is also like not the correct way to call it, is Red Hatru Tide. I feel like if you describe this like a hunt, like I went to a mysterious man who handed me some pills. You'd be like, yeah, that sounds bad. You should go to the doctor. But this is like, well, no, because I got it from the internet. Yeah. I just was reading an article about peptides because not because I was like, would those make my life better? Not, certainly not that. Not because I was thinking about trying them.

1:27:12And I read an article and somebody was quoted. Somebody was just saying like, they're all over Silicon Valley. And like this crew, you know, crypto loves them. AI loves them, whatever else. This other thing loves them. And whoever was quoted said, the only group that's a little more skeptical is anybody who works in biotech is a little bit more skeptical. But they're just so in the pocket of the FDA. Or they're so, they like bow down to the FDA. And I was like, well, the other interpretation is they, this is the world that they work in. And they're steeped in way, way, way more information than somebody who works in crypto is about peptides specifically.

1:27:54So maybe their skepticism is like healthy and rational. It's partly like the FDA doesn't want you to have that. And I get where that's coming from because, you know, healthcare sucks in our country. It's expensive. These things could be helpful, but you're getting blocked from it. They are trying to, you know, make sure that they're making the most amount of money of it. Those are all true things. But the FDA exists. We have these regulations because people fucking died. People died before. Like, this is how people die or get really adverse effects. I don't know. But Dr. Matt on TikTok, who is most certainly not an actual doctor, telling you how to dose gray market Chinese peptides from like things you bought from Amazon.

1:28:39I'm sorry when you're in the comments and you're like, oh, yeah, I was vomiting uncontrollably. Oh, I wonder why. I wonder why. I'm just doing weight loss meth. Well, I guess that's just meth. I had such a distant sense of the GLP ones because I've been learning about them from the way in which they're displacing insulin production in a lot of places and hadn't had a good sense of the extent to which I was like, oh, why are they calling them Chinese peptides so incessantly? And that piece was interesting in laying out, one, Silicon Valley's obsession with them, and also making click into sense to the fact that I feel like we're seeing other subcultures be like, well, yeah, of course you got to do it yourself.

1:29:25Of course you got to Luxmax. Of course you got to, yeah, you know, like - It's their optimization curse. Yes, exactly. I also just want to be abundantly clear about something, by the way. We're not saying GLP-1 is a bad thing. It's fine if you take, like, it's totally fine. I just want to be really abundantly clear about it. I mean, one of the use cases is for, like, you know, if you have, for example, diabetes. You know, that's one of the proven use cases. Or if you use it for weight loss. Yeah, weight loss. As long as a doctor gives it to you. Yeah, as long as you're not doing it in your bathtub.

1:29:57Dr. Matt, a PhD in philosophy who's teaching you how to. It has been so fascinating to see the extent to which people are, like, throwing a lot of reason out of the door. just to be like, no, this is fine. This is okay, actually. And you are a big pharma shell if you are pushing up against it. Maybe bodybuilders who already are very lean taking so-called GLP-3, maybe that's not a great idea because they've actually never studied what this medication does in people with low body fat. You don't know what it'll do. How many times are we going to do a wave of a drug that does seem to have a really miraculous impact on people And then, you know, the crusading group of power users maybe will say, you know, who are like, you know, well, if you're not supporting everyone using it as widely as possible, then you're in the pocket of the corporation.

1:30:52I mean, side effects are real. A lot more times. Yes, no, exactly. Side effects are real. You may not actually want to have those side effects. And like these drugs are so new, we don't know what the long-term effect is. And it's not bad to say like, you know, you're always doing a weighing a pro and con. Like I'm willing to do the side effect because the alternative is worse. And like, those are conversations you need to have with a real fucking doctor. Oh my God. Not a comment section. Not a comment section. Not some Billy Bob, Dr. Boo on Tik TOK. It seems it's a thought that I was having on the plane here is it feels like society as a whole, and particularly like the sections of society that are more online, that are more techified, that are more, you know, whatever, sort of forward in that kind of progression, have plenty of room for skepticism when it comes to systems of like social support, but do not have room for skepticism about tech.

1:31:57Or science. Yeah. Yeah. Just like medicine, like, oh, medicine, vaccines. Why would we do that? despite hundreds of years of evidence. Like they can't possibly be right because Coach Matt told me on TikTok and it seems right. And I mean, I say this from a perspective of I've been very overweight in my life. Like I used to be like 350 pounds a while back. And it's like, I get the desperation. Yeah. I get the desperation, especially when it's like GLP one is like very, or GLP three, I'm sorry. But it's like very expensive. You have to go to a doctor and all that. And just being like, maybe I could do this cheaper.

1:32:31Maybe my doctor won't give it to me. Maybe whatever. and I get that fucking desperation. You'll try it. Like when I've had weight problems, like you're fucking scratching at the walls, trying to find some cheat code around the actual hard thing of changing lifestyle, which I should be clear, it's very fucking difficult. I have sympathy with everyone. I've been through it multiple cycles in my life. I get it, but it's like, to your point, Victoria, it's like, yeah, you're going to get side effects. I'd rather roll the dice on the doctor who's using the thing that they know the side effects. They've done trials and such versus - The doctor, it's hard because you go to doctors and doctors don't listen to you.

1:33:05I have PCOS. I have metabolic conditions. I'm on a GLP, actually, for PCOS and fatty liver. And getting to that point was over a 10-year-long journey. But these are conversations I was having, and I had to fire five doctors because one was like, listen to the Huberman lab. No. Jesus fucking Christ. Or like, maybe you should be a vegan. Fuck off. Not to say anything about vegans, But like that's not the solution I was looking for or just being like, well, you know, Picos causes weight gain. Also, the solution is weight loss. But also your body will not let you lose the weight. So just lose some weight.

1:33:44And like I understand that desperation like from a very personal level. But at the same time, you have to believe in science. You have to believe in like the process exists because people have died. Because side effects are also debilitating to quality of life. The worst part about being on a GLP for me is that I like food. I don't have a lot of food. I actually genuinely don't have food noise. My liver just wants to fuck me over. And so, like, I can't eat. It sucks. That sounds fucking terrible. It takes the joy out of eating for me. I don't enjoy it at all. I'm sorry. Yeah, no. And, like, I'm tired.

1:34:20I get fucking clown nightmares. I literally had a nightmare that my spouse's ex came running after me, and I was like, oh, this hoe. and then she turned into Pennywise the fucking clown, the Bill Skarsgård version. I woke up screaming. Like, this is a side effect that I have. It's your ex and a clown. Yeah. No, that's a side effect I have. This is a thing, you know, and you have to weigh those pros and cons for health. But, you know, in the pursuit of optimization, and that's rampant here at CES, people are like, yeah, numbers that don't matter. Do this, do that. And it's like, this is why I have mental health problems doing my job.

1:34:55But now you have numbers to help. Yeah. Yeah, now you have so many numbers. I want to go back to one thing that you said, which is you said you have to believe in science because people have died, we've done this, whatever. I think that there's just a huge swath of the population, which is heavily represented here, of people who would just say, no, you don't have to believe in science. It is lies. It is bunk. It is biased. It is whatever. And that fracture is where I'm like, oh, no. we've not just about science particularly but sort of like the the like communal agreement on some like really foundational social pillars consensus reality yeah consensus reality is is like seems to be crumbling and it doesn't help that the leader of the fda sounds like a fucking cyber man oh you know he should be a ces yeah yeah no we can't make fun of him it's a physical condition we can't make fun of him for that we can make fun of that for the fucking worm in his brain the worm in his brain and the whale corpse and the bear corpse i i he keeps me up at night because in june he was like in four years i want every american wearing a wearable and as one of the most quantified people on the earth wearing three to four wearables continuously 24 7 365 no don't do that so at that point we can rotate our guests one last time thank you so much for listening.

1:36:18The upcoming ad, I assume, is not for weight loss drugs. If it is, well, I guess you know how we feel about that now, but that's not really my goddamn problem.

1:37:11Welcome back to the Better Offline CS experience. We were just talking about wanking, I guess. Be more specific. I was saying the fleshlights, they're just okay. And so why would you even need them to be motorized? And I was saying, interesting take. I must be clear. Oh, what? Because I admit to using a sex toy? This is a sex negative podcast, Adam. Oh, a man who uses a sex toy. Women are. Vibrator, vibrator, vibrator. Yeah, because men are inadequate. Because men, and if you say that women are inadequate, I will take deep offense, Adam. introducing the next generation of sex toy. Welcome to Better Off Line.

1:37:51You complained last year we didn't have enough women, which was true. Now we've got one that's just immediately created a fracture. We got you for two more days as well. It's going to be great. I'm going to cause chaos. And truthfully, having an amazing team as the core Better Off Line team for the show as well. And I'm actually like both you, Adam and Chloe, you both kind of were like, Adam, you've done a bit of tech. Chloe, you've not done really. And you're like, Oh, is this, am I going to be a right to do this? Cause like, I haven't done it. This is the perfect view because I think the really tech poison people are incapable of just being like, that sounds fucking useless.

1:38:26That sounds dumb as shit. Even the Jackoff machine. It's like, you're going to attach this heavy looking, looks pretty heavy. It didn't, it didn't look useful or necessary. It's a, it's basically, yes, we've already, we've already talked about it in a previous segment. We see a big banner that says CES. It doesn't look useful or necessary. 2026. To describe, because we talked about the Handy and Handy 2 in the previous segment. We didn't describe what it is. Oh, that's the name. It's basically the, yeah, it's called the, it's a joke product. They're just there to make people laugh. It's like the inner core of a fleshlight, which is like, okay, a fleshlight, if you're not familiar.

1:39:07You know the sticky hand from the vending machine at the supermarket? Jesus Christ. is that the material? that's the material inside of a fleshling you put lube in it and it's squishy and again just okay as an experience it's been in a drawer for years and I got it for free by the way because I used to do a comedy show in a sex shop in Los Angeles at the Pleasure Chest but I didn't pay for it I would have it was on my list I support the industry I actually genuinely support this stuff. It's the squishy core of a fleshlight, and then it's attached to a Velcro harness, which is attached to a big piece of metal machinery that moves it up and down.

1:39:52And I'm like, I have hands. Here's my pitch. Here's my pitch for an analog version of that, is take one of the actual sticky hands that you actually stick on the window and put some lube on that and just hold that on the palm of your hand. And check that out. That's going to feel like somebody else's hand. Here's what I would like. I would like a woman to stand across the room and be like, whoosh. A big stick to that right on my dick. I must also be clear, by the way. So I looked up the Handy 2. I just want to be clear. There are two SKUs. And there is the standard, which is one hour of battery life.

1:40:33Save$60 launch price. And it's regularly$299. And then there's the five hours of battery. Oh, the Gooner. The Gooner package. $379 down from$499. And you scroll down, it's like, we recommend the fast charger handy. And I just got to ask, how much are you doing that? Yeah. Purchase the award-winning VR-compatible automatic stroker. Sometimes it takes a while. But isn't the point of it, it's VR compatible? Come on. I mean, you're watching the pornos and all that. But isn't the point of the device that it's supposed to be very fast? It's supposed to make you cum fast. Really? I would think so. They should put a screen on it.

1:41:15But it's got four hours of battery life. Yeah, I know. They should use most of that battery life for a little screen where you can watch some porn on it while you're going at it. It's just really like people that don't have sex or jack off. It sounds like just like these sexless people. I would love to know the man who is horny enough to want to use the jack off machine, but so dedicated to tech that when he goes to pick up his Jackoff machine and the battery's dead, he goes, oh, I have to put it on my fast charger now and wait for seven minutes for it to gain the battery life to make me come.

1:41:50Tapping his foot like Sonic the Hedgehog. Sitting on his hands being like, there's no other way to do this. Does this ever happen to you? It's just, I must be clear, this is a sex positive podcast. it's great sex wonderful it's a great thing between consenting adults and waifu tubes i guess and it's just very strange to look at another product on the show it's just like an alien made this like what what do you need you can't jack off i guess or you really want to and also i just feel like just there's a masturbator that's a great thing to say um i just feel like picking this thing up i would just be consumed with shame immediately the only thing that would make me more ashamed would be if it was out of battery you're like oh fuck i've used it yeah just like i'm too into this see now this this is my pet peeve because i think when you say be consumed with shame you're ashamed of your own sexuality yet that's what's happening god no is you is you are ashamed of the idea of masturbating with a device why why because my hands can do it perfectly fine that's right i can have sex with my but why shame yeah why shame why not why not amusement if your hands can do it perfectly fine.

1:43:02Like, I'm just, well, already we're in this weird world where I wouldn't buy it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, so it's just, would you feel ashamed? Not, not ashamed. Would you feel shame if you picked up a flashlight, if you were going to use a flashlight or is the machine worse? No, I just feel like she laughing at you. I just have never seen this. We're now going on the show. I just, everyone's like, how does it jack off? No, it's just like the idea of the listeners is unnecessary to me. I don't like if someone else used it. That's because the male sex toy is not a jerk off device because we can do that perfectly fine.

1:43:37It's a novelty item. The real male sex toy is a butt plug and men won't buy them. That's the real, it's prostate stimulation. Yeah, that is true. And you know what, if you like that, that's fucking cool. My problem is, and you know what, maybe there's a guy who just like, he's like a sex guy and he likes all the different kinds. Fine, that sounds fine. I just think like if I got a machine that was out of batteries to jack it off and it was unpowered, I'd be like, oh, I've been doing this a lot, haven't I? Do the sex toys have big useless numbers too? Oh my God, I wonder if they do. You haven't been cumming lately.

1:44:13You haven't sexed. Your cum latency. The distance of time between when you begin to jack off. It's like a little prompt. Are you okay? You haven't cum this time. Establish a baseline, and when you are off the baseline, that is when you will love. Oh, God. I'm actually looking now to see if there's any metrics that come. Discreet delivery. I mean, sure. Discreet delivery. What if Withings made a sex toy, and then it tracked your, you know what I mean? It gave you some stats. The Gooners might like that. Yeah. Some jerk-off. Yeah, like, oh, how about like a special watch for jerking off that, like, you know?

1:44:53You have like a stat line, you know? Yeah, it's a stat. It lets you know how efficient you're being and how much time you spend. Or it's like, you know how on treadmills you can follow the little workouts where it like shows it's like it's going to get faster now. And then the treadmill goes faster. You have to run faster. And then it's like now it's slower. If you're if you had a little like if you had a little gooning workout line where it could be like go faster now. And then it's like slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down. And you like follow your little workouts. I mean, this is a wrap up.

1:45:21You're describing JOI videos. jack-off instruction video. I just want to read something from the website. Which is a really good form of video porn. I think those are like, it's very kind of wholesome because it's sort of like, I want someone to instruct me. There's a relationship. There's a relationship about the jerking off. I just want to be clear. There is a button on this website to lead you to various videos. It says, explore the handy verse. The handy verse. I don't feel great having read that. The greatest sin that Mark Zuckerberg has committed on the face of this planet he's giving us blank verse nothing else he's done has come close we got the handy verse with Earth 69 what else what's going on what is handy feeling there's like a whole thing and I'm like coming around to this like this isn't for me but I'm like okay if someone's a real beat offerer like this is quite nice I don't know the reason I feel shame is because I feel like we're falling for it because this is a gag product and we're talking about it no this is real this is like a real thing they're charging for it exists but I don't think it serves it's to laugh at at CES I just don't know if I agree like here's the thing woman sex toys very well documented and used and talked about quite right we've seen pictures of them also like woman discuss them I feel like Adam you're like one of the only men I've talked to about sex who's just not immediately like yeah I've had it like 1 million times but I can't discuss it at all but it's like I believe that there are men who jack off in this manner good on them as long as it's like normal and consensual and like i i could be wrong i just don't believe in this product i believe in sex toys for men i believe they're underrepresented category but i believe where this product is situated in the hall and the way that they have designed it yeah yeah at c yes okay it's welcome to the pod i thought we were just talking about the only one i saw was the love sense one which was the vibrators i was like okay i saw that last year also so i was like okay that's the one i know it's in the eureka hall and it's sort of position it's like meant to make you laugh and and i think it's a 500 bachelor party gift but was it a big was it a big booth they had a big booth then then that's a real company because well i mean look men called it big women yeah it was just a regular size but nice um yeah it's but that's the thing if they have a regular sized booth it's a perfectly normal sized booth okay it's a good size it gets bigger during the show um if like that's a real company because otherwise it's just like yeah we put a hundred thousand dollars in the jack-off booth i do i do like the idea of just walking over can i have a go hey come on over to the jack-off booth come in uh anyway booth anyway in the booth for you we're a segue away from this right now.

1:48:12Here's a question that is sort of off of this theme. As a CES virgin, not to really lean into this kind of language, how many of these products, like there are a lot of products that seemed absolutely fucking useless. And what I don't know is how many of the people who are here earnestly believe that what they are hawking is going to make the world better in some way and how many people like what what is the percentage split between earnest believers uh people who are here for a paycheck because they need a job and this happens to be the job they're doing and people who are totally disillusioned but are still doing it for the paycheck but like are are totally jaded i i would be curious i think what it is is like you get a job it's hard getting a job and you get the product and it's like well i gotta fucking believe in something so you learn the talking points and you're like the pillow thing you were talking about last last piece it's like that person clearly had never had a conversation with someone who was like, yeah, but what if I want to lie in bed without falling asleep?

1:49:13Because they've memorized the talking points, and they've internalized them. I'm sure that there are a percentage of cynical people, but I think a lot of these people are just like, not thought about it too much. They're like, yeah, the air purifier with the spike on it, the dog scratches itself on, that makes perfect sense, because I've been forced to believe it, because this is how I make money. And I think that there's something kind of sad about it, because you have to believe, I mean, working PR, like there's a certain degree at times when you get a product, I don't do consumer electronics, but like in the past where I've had to be like, yay, here we go.

1:49:44It's like, that's how I'm going to pay my mortgage. Like, I think that there's a degree of that. And I think some people are just fucking stupid. I think there's some people who are just like, yeah, it's a pillow. Isn't it cool it can do this? And they focus on how cool it is. And then when they think for two seconds, they go, oh, fuck, this is what an alien would use. This is like, it's just like Star Trek, except nothing like it. I also think a lot of them are just happy to do the job. When I went to the Orb thing, my Orb debacle, a lot of the people I – well, whatever. People know about it or they don't.

1:50:16But when I talked to people who work for this horrible product, some of them seemed kind of enthusiastic. Some of them sort of had thousand-yard stares. I was talking to them going like, ah, they're making like 300 grand a year probably. working for like a Sam Altman company doing interesting work. Like they wanted to be an engineer. They're a software engineer. They're working on something that's technically interesting. They would like for it to work. They sort of have to drink the Kool-Aid. In the same way that someone who's like working on a shitty movie is like, I'm living the dream. Oh, the movie kind of sucks, but I'm living the dream.

1:50:52But it's going to be good. It's going to be good. I'm making movies. Like it's this suspension of disbelief. But I respect people in movies way more. I just want to be clear. Learning about how movies are made recently, it's insane a single movie has ever been made. I do not understand how any movie is made. Well, they're not made anymore. Well, yeah, that's also the other thing. No, they're either$100 million or$1 million. There's no other movies. When you watch movies now, I was watching Rob Reiner movies because he passed away, of course. When you watch Harry Met Sally or another movie like that, it's like walking through the ruins of a Roman coliseum In the dark ages, look at what humans used to be able to do.

1:51:33And then you watch Stranger Things and there's a big crab and Winona Ryder punches it to death. I don't watch that show. None of it has any weight. My life's strange enough already. And it's just sad. But I think movies are going to be okay. I'm choosing to be optimistic for no reason. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's sort of a whole other conversation. But I do think that there's a lot of people who would say, like the same people who are who are who see movies as sort of the dinosaurs the things of the past are the people who see a lot of shit at ces at who sort of willingly drink the kool-aid of a lot of the shit at ces and are like this is the stuff of the future without actually even being paid three hundred thousand dollars by the company because they want to be first they want to be first to this they sort of have gotten on the roller coaster of they're addicted to the high of the possibility of success.

1:52:28The newness. Yeah. I mean, I remember when it was over 10 years ago now, but I was working at College Humor and stuff like Google Glass would come out. And my coworkers would be like, it's going to be the future. And just based on the premise alone, and I have to be like, I don't think so. And I was right. Same thing happened with VR. Just you wait, Adam, Google Glass is coming. Ray-Ban meta glasses. People were so, they had the script in them and they want it to be true they just want something new that's going to be fun I'd be curious what you think because you've been coming to see us for a while how much of it is also people at a firm that tried to sell something to another business and it failed and now they're doing consumer because I feel like I would talk to some people especially in Eureka Park and they wouldn't say it but you could hear in the conversation that there was a much more ambitious plan and that fell through and now they're narrowing it down to something else that a consumer might be able to use.

1:53:26It's the rot economy, baby. It's growth at all costs. Because if you solve a small, boring problem for a million people, that fucking rocks. Is that going to be worth$10 billion? No. Are you going to be able to take that public? No. Are you going to sell it to another company? No. But if you say, I'm going to solve fucking everything forever, you'll get hundreds of millions of dollars because you've just overpromised. And being part of this newness, futuristic thing and vaguely attaching yourself to it, If you're wrong, you can say, oh, it was experimental. If you're right, you can say, I was first.

1:53:55Yeah. And that's sort of to what Adam was saying about, you know, wanting, it's my language now, like wanting the possibility of success, addicted to the high of that possibility. But, Edward, what you were saying, I think you're saying like, when you're saying that they had a more ambitious plan, do you mean they had a more ambitious plan for what the tech itself could be capable of? Or do you mean like they've figured out a tech that is capable of whatever it is, and the ambitious plan was to use it in a much broader use case or a much higher scale use case. And now they've sort of been like shunted down to a booth at CES where they're trying to make somebody pay$600.

1:54:31Sometimes it feels like they thought the idea was worth 10x what it actually is. Do you have an example? I mean, I saw it a lot more last year where it would be people talking about tech that would be, that's helpful, assistive tech, but their initial formulation of it seemed to be we are going to apply this at scale in workplaces. to augment your productivity as a worker. Like that chip for standing up, the thing for opening the cash register. Yes, right. Something like that where it's not even really clear that would be adopted at an individual scale. Also, that one really pissed me off because it's like, you don't give a fuck about anyone working at McDonald's.

1:55:08You don't look them in the eye. No. You were excited about touching a screen to order your treats, your little pig. It feels like we wanted to sell this at scale to McDonald's at a bunch of other fast food restaurants and that didn't work. So now we are cobbling together some of the IP to figure out another approach that might be usable in smaller settings. And I feel like... you know when i talk with people especially in some of the assistive uh tech you know it where they're not really talking about it in the way of we're helping people who are disabled, helping people who need mobility aid.

1:55:41It's almost adjacent to or sounding just like how we talk about convenience. Yeah. But did you see anything today that was of note? I mean, most of the stuff that I saw today in Eureka Park was more a misuse of agentic language. Yes, give it to me. And saying, you know, let's, you know, What if you had a chat bot that managed your home Google calendar and told you when to pick up your kids because you forgot or when to get the shit? Yeah, because you don't give a shit. What if you had somebody that would look at your shit and tell you when you're sick or not sick? You mean literally your poop?

1:56:22Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, literally, yeah, your poop. That was one thing that Victoria, we didn't get to the piss poop. We got to the cum, sadly. But it was like there's many different toilet measures now. Yeah. Oh, I saw a good product. Yes. And I would describe it. I walked, I saw this product. I looked at it. I immediately recognized what it was. I walked up to them. I said, Fitbit for your cat. And they said, I guess that's what you would like. No, it's Fitbit for your cat. You're going to sell that. And it's like a little food dish, a food dish and a bubbler for your cat. And then it like, I don't know, has some stats about your cat.

1:56:53And it said like, here's how much food is left. Here's the temperature of your cat. And then it just said, healthy. yes and that's that's like really all the cat owners want is is like what could it could the box say my cat's healthy and it'll relieve my my anxiety you're a cat owner yes i i don't know like and it's not the only measurement is like how beautiful they are it's like yeah which i remind them constantly i just how hot my cat is is very funny yeah i got two cats and it's like when i learned i got a i got one of the letterboxes is those automatic ones when i learned there was an app i asked them can i do i need the app can i delete that they're like yes and i was like okay i will never look at this shit again yeah and it works out you know that anything that even wears other or has a little motor other than the litter box they destroy they swat it they throw it down the stairs they push it they literally push it to the stairs and throw it down so i can't get anything smart for them i get a fit bit for a dog though because you like walk them i would love to actually just for my sick pleasure know how fast barbou runs because him and his sister pokey two bangles no they just they will be sleeping all day and then just ran just like bam just fucking like across the entire house gone bam back i they're trying to get their steps in yeah exactly like napping all day just cats like don't experience the same things that human being like they're not sitting there being like do i run around a lot they get the instinct like i need to fucking run so fast in a straight line faster than i've ever but it's not because they're like i need to be healthy.

1:58:21They're just fucking cats. Stop trying to optimize my cat, bro. Cats are not optimal, other than how beautiful and fancy they are. How great they are. And how beautiful. Oh, I miss them. Anything else? It's just this. You're going to be here for another two days. You're going to see more stuff like this. But I'm genuinely... I saw something we all do need. Impression. Ads inside of AI. They're figuring out how to put ads inside of chatbots, how to put ads inside of any sort of interface or product that might use a generative AI. It's so cool. They haven't worked that out yet. I know. Yeah, that's also something.

1:58:59Like the most obvious thing that they needed, the way that they would monetize this fucking thing. The one way to make money. The one way that every, I get three emails a week from someone being like, have you thought that they could put ads in chat GPT? Yes, motherfucker. I fucking thought every single time you've emailed me about this. I've thought about it. Do we know why they have it yet? Because it's very hard to guarantee. The whole thing with ads is you need to have replicability and reliability and accountability. You cannot have your, you can't have like an ad for a children's thing by someone looking up sex and vice versa.

1:59:33And the best example we have that this doesn't really work is perplexity. Their ads chief left a few months ago and they made$20 ,000 selling ads in 2024 on perplexity. Yeah, I mean, the needs of advertisers like determine everything it's like you know why does youtube work the way it works 90 of youtube is to please advertisers and to make sure that you know age verification like content warnings like all of it is just for them and like they'll sort of run the show but also isn't part of the problem that like advertising is not enough money for you know the massive amount of investments these companies are taking on like you put ads in chat gpt it's still not enough yeah yeah it won't sustain that.

2:00:16And they still need trillions. Well, the other problem they have is the information I had a good story about this, where it's like 900 million weekly active users-ish. Even though OpenAI double counts people all the time, they admit this in their own academic papers. But nevertheless, only 100 million of those are in America, which is a large number, whatever. But that means they're mostly overseas who are lower value advertising clients. Because there's a very big difference between advertising someone in America versus in India or Indonesia where they release chat GPT Go, which is a cheaper one, which will inevitably be advertising supported.

2:00:49And it's just like, I do love that there are like different booths of people being like, what if we could solve the problem that OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, and multiple other companies just haven't been able to touch. It feels like watching the end of the world in a very boring way at times. Well, so that's what brings me back to my, that brings me back to my question about how earnestly do these people believe in what they're pushing? Like, are there people who are like yeah yeah yeah we are the we have the secret key we are the geniuses and sure would i be hired at google if i was really a genius maybe but that's not what we're talking about right now i think they've they at the very least consider themselves to have be the holder of a lottery ticket yes maybe it'll work and if it works i'm a billionaire and if i can convince someone it kind of works maybe i get aqua hired by google and then i make half a million dollars yeah you know And I only have to get to next month to make that happen.

2:01:48I just got to convince some dope who's here right now. I believe all the TV people believe it fully, and I get it. And I'm a big dumb ape. I see a giant screen. I'm like, yeah, baby. Oh, yeah. I want to see the TVs, actually. And I got mad because I saw, I think I was looking at the Verges coverage or something, and there's a new TV technology that's better than OLED. Mini LED or micro LED? I just bought the best OLED. I bought the, I bought the, you know, the one, the one really good Sony one. I got the really good Sony. I'm like, I don't want a fucking better TV. This is as good as TVs need to be.

2:02:19It's 77 inches. It's true black. Stop. I don't know. Just to be clear, you're, you're fine. They haven't really made better than that. Like, I know it'll be in 10 years. I'm still just like, stop it. I don't know if you're going to have kids, but I've heard a couple dad sentences, both in this TV discussion and earlier when you were like, now I saw a good product. But I was able to buy this TV because I'm not as price sensitive as a real dad. Because I don't have the kids. That's why I got to get the good one. And as a child have, that's the normal way to say it. Big screen. Big screen's fine.

2:02:56As long as you've got a big screen, that's the coolest thing to play. Big screen. Giant screen to play Minecraft on. You're fucking set. Best father in the world. Two so you can both play it. No. In separate rooms so you don't have to talk to each other. Exactly. That's what they want. One of those cherished things is watching my son play Minecraft. Are you explaining shit to me? But we're not talking about a normal thing. We're talking about what the consumer wants. What the consumer wants to separate themselves. We're talking about what that guy who did the tweet about how he gets boiling mad if he spends more than 10 minutes with his children.

2:03:26Did you see this? Some dad was like, am I normal? If I spend more than 10 minutes, was it day with my children? My blood boils. That's normal, right? And everybody was like, hey, buddy, that's not totally normal but like we totally get it that being a dad is hard you're valid 10 minutes should not because you have a lot more of those in the day with the child than that it seems like this guy doesn't have to it reminds me of when the COVID lockdown first happened and all the parents I knew and the ones on the internet were suddenly like someone needs to help me from being around my kids I thought you liked having the kids now you're mad that you gotta be around the kids why do you have the kid if you don't want to be around them and it also makes you realize that like oh yeah the main purpose of school was not education it was just child care so people could go to work that's why they're complaining like I need to go to work well that's you've just revealed the fucked up thing about school and parenting all at once I actually think that's the lens I'm gonna go through everything tomorrow I'm just gonna look around the expo center being like okay what's the shit where it's just people like i need to get away from my obligations like i've made these fucking decisions throughout my life i got a fucking fat ass unhealthy bitch of a cat i got a fucking we were all waiting on what that last word was gonna be yeah oh we were on the edge of our seats and there were some options there were falls and falls no it's like and it's just cat okay he's saying cat okay great wasn't referring to any of my perfect fucking angels but it's like Like these people were just like, okay, I need to find out if my cat's healthy because I don't want to look at it or use it.

2:05:11Can I keep my child in a separate room? Can I give it an action figure that will talk? Can I give it a robot and an action figure that will talk to each other and it? And also, if you want any of these things, don't worry. They don't fucking work. They don't even do the thing that we're promising you. But it's funny just imagining this guy's walking around being like, please fucking get me away from all this. Is this robot going to be? Oh, the robot's going to fall over. oh it's all over it's gonna kick me in the nuts do you see that video the guy just getting fucking hoofed in the nuts by a verbal that was great if you've got a booth who's being kicked in the balls i don't care what you're selling me fucking lockheed martin i'll buy it yeah i mean some of them made me kind of sad like there was one that was i don't want to say the name of it because it did make me sad but it was a little it was like a little toy like a little hello kitty type toy and it was, you know, you could talk to it.

2:06:03Was it the one that was like the future of Robot Friend? Something like that. It was a fuzzy brown thing. I know exactly what you're talking about. And it was also like it'll watch everything that you do and remember it. And I was like, all right. And I walked up and I was like, all right, what was it doing? And I was like, here it is. I was like, oh, can I talk to it? And she was like, no, you know, the Wi-Fi is in here. In here is bad. And it uses chat GPT, so it can't connect to chat GPT right now. and I'm like this is just some somebody put like a couple hundred grand of their own money into like a little doll that connects to the chat GPT API and is here thinking that's anything like why would we want such a thing why would anybody here be excited by just a front end to chat GPT a product that already exists but that's the thing I feel like as we wrap up the episode it's a good way to put it it's like there are two real cons with AI there's the con of the consumer being told it will do this for you or that for you'll be a personal assistant and then there's for companies where like yeah if we put chat gpt in this it'll be smart no motherfucker he's not gonna do that at all yeah and it's like it's you don't want to name the company which is fine but it's like there are so many that were there last year as well it's like oh it's an agent it's like it's just a fucking chatbot and you've poorly trained it and it's like gonna tell you that taiwan is part of china or like bdsm shit like and it's just quite sad it's like everyone is being conned by these companies yeah both the consumer and the companies themselves i can't wait to catalog them i'm looking forward to watching the sadness but it's just it's it is quite sad i'm so glad i'm here all week this is great my dark my joker like it it's a shrug it's a shrug economy like everyone's just sort of hoping like i was talking to people about the the disney open ai deal because that's like a bunch of people in hollywood are like freaked out about it especially writers who are worried about IP and stuff like that.

2:07:54But like my take on it, if you look at the deal is nobody even knows why they're doing it. Like, like open AI has the idea that like we need licensed characters for Sora and Disney just doesn't want to be left out. Yeah. But like they think they appear to think maybe it's marketing for Disney plus open AI has some idea. Maybe people will want to create scenes of Deadpool hanging out with Elsa or whatever. How does that result in money? Question mark. Nobody knows. yeah it loses money but like disney is just like not getting left out of a thing that's maybe the future open ai is making a deal that makes their business look better to whoever the fuck is going to give them money next and they didn't even pay disney for it like they're doing a licensing deal where they pay disney in open ai stock which disney already bought more of and in fact disney has the option to buy more stock it's just you gotta wonder what happens when open ai collapses because it's going to fucking happen.

2:08:53And it's just like these companies will change the Chinese models, I guess, or what remains of Anthro. It's just - Yeah, everyone can use Quan. Yeah, the K2, K2, that's the coding model. Yeah, K2, Deep Sea, it'll be fun. Well, all right, I'm going to wrap it there so I don't just launch into a rant about AI as per fucking usual. Thank you so much. We've got the core three here. It's going to be joining us for the next day or two. It's going to be wonderful. Thank you so much for traveling in with us. We're going to end the episode as we have, dedicated to Sean Paul. He's a wonderful fellow, came in 2020.

2:09:24Donate to the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium. Link will be in there, dedicated to his son. Thank you so much, everyone, for listening. We'll be back tomorrow. Thank you so much.

2:09:41Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matasowski.com, M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

2:10:45This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.