CES 2026: Part Two (Tuesday)

33:11I have years of sleep data, and I cannot tell you anything. Just more data, Ed. You're almost there. just one more data bro i swear one more data one more data it's all i mean please bro but that's the thing it's like all of this time they're like well when we get all this data we'll be able to do this when motherfucker i have the data now can you not tell me when my best sleep times are can you not tell me how what i could do differently like i'm i'm not sure what to do with this information and then like what with the power of ai you could do something i'm like what is it uh no we're not there yet i'm the apparently aura is here showing something off and it's like and luna and luna it's just like and all these rings it's what could you do with them we're having victoria's song on later and she put it where it's like yeah if you use an llm connected to it you can sometimes get a useful out just fucking just stop stop yeah stop pretending i asked him i was like what is the difference are there a few rings i want to stop by and i was like what is the difference between me collecting all this data myself with a bunch of janky things and i'm putting it into some it's literally disabled and then asking a chatbot about it versus whatever you guys are doing well you know actually like we have other people's data that we are looking at i don't know if that's the answer you should have told me but it's also like human bodies are varied things certain things work for different people i imagine that there should be trends within workout data that could nothing nothing nothing that i would love it if they could tell me what would be the most effective workout what would be the best but like but see this is why you make products for children is they don't ask questions like this they ask why isn't it working yeah they're like what what your data is not providing enough actionable insights it's time one your kid says that your data does not work for me father fix it father the analytics father father my analytics papa papa please can I have some - I do not have enough actionable insights before I go to bed.

35:11It just feels like, I really think they're just trying to work out ways to give us subscriptions to everything. Yeah. I can't play just Pokemon regularly. I got subscribed to Pokemon Plus. I mean, oh my God, I forgot with the AI Agentic kitchen or oven, one thing they added, it's not just an oven. You can't actually get it to just cook the food. You have to have a delivery subscription. Are you - Are you still taking a Chucero oven? oh yes oh yes is that sous vide that's one of those i during during covid i had tavala no i really shouldn't say it's called briskets fuck off like what's a terrible terrible seo yeah i'm just gonna look up this company oh 150 000 articles actually i do want a brisket yeah that sounds fucking good i bet that's one thing you can't cook it in but then i also asked them who we're your delivery partners they said oh we're not there yet are you are you serious yeah yeah are you that was so sick i said okay weird we had a tech media to go it's just like i i do wonder why there is no legal recourse with people going to this like if just like you get lied to for several days market is the legal recourse you don't go to market if you don't so true so true I also think we need less electronics in things as well.

36:32I know Matt Bender likes the Lego brick and I can see it's fine but it's like, I don't need a fucking microchip in the Lego brick. If it needs to go you can just do that with your mouth. I don't want my extra pictures to talk to me. Part of the fun as a kid was talking for them. We're going to spoil the next generation of voice actors. It's really devastating. Also, we're going to turn children. I'm like wishy-washy when it comes to how bad scream time is. But you know what i actually think it is bad making every single toy and some individualized autonomous ar even though that's complete bullshit some llm driven bullshit and like they make the noises for you because it's like one of the joys of being a job was like having an imagination yeah 100 % and it's like i don't know what like they want to take that away so they can put a subscription into it but it gets back to the thing we're saying yesterday as well where it's like these are just products made by people that don't interact with anyone it's like what are my biggest problems?

37:25Oh, fuck. My kid keeps wanting to talk to me. I was going to say, what better way to tell your kid that you hate them than giving them a chatbot? I mean, it makes sense because they're selling this to people who are upper middle class, upper class. They don't have time to spend with their kids. That's what these products are targeting. Both parents are working. They probably have some kind of live-in nanny. Kids probably relatively isolated. That's what these products are really for. it's for these like relatively wealthy parents to buy for their kids because they don't spend time with their kids because people who are like working class aren't buying these things.

38:02They can't afford them because they're insanely expensive. Yeah exactly One of the most unexpected use cases for autonomous vehicles actually now is people putting their kids in Waymos. No! And like this is a real thing and they will not. Uber has a whole thing for this Uber and Lyft now right? Oh do they? Yeah they have advertising for now you can just send your kid off and they're safe. Your kid will be safe. Which they had to massively mark on the safety because adult passengers are safe. We need like a new QAnon to shut this thing down. They're like Wayfair trafficking children in Waymos. The right wing is just like no we need to attend.

38:40Straight to Trump's house. They're sending these kids in Waymos to Mar-a-Lago. Take it to Comet Pizza. yeah like yeah it's so so wait wait okay completely off ces for a second so you put your child in the autonomous vehicle at which point your child is alone in a in a car yeah and it drives around yeah what if something goes wrong that's a great great question um okay this is for you know like aren't you a journalist you should be asking these questions yeah i i am i'm on the podcast i mean i think i think the magic of of like ces and and stuff is that like technology does make people turn their brains off like people are so conditioned to believe that a machine is somehow better than them we're so surrounded by machine like you know the um and and i think that's like a perfect example right like like why pay someone who is like trained to take care of your child when like a robot will be just as fine yeah you know i still think we need to my big socialist thing is i think we need to create like a state-funded nanny system and like for like working families and just make it the best paid thing.

39:45You know, I agree. No, just turn it into like an incredible... The care economy, because that's a good one on this. Hopefully they'll do that in New York. But like, you see parts of the tech industry seize that kind of want, but they want to fill it with like agentic childcare or whatever. Finally. I mean, that's also the thing with the age tech, right? I mean, it's like, okay, so look, we have a large scale problem in our society where a lot of people are aging. They don't have support infrastructure. A lot of ways we can handle this how are we going to handle it well since we don't really do technological innovation we're gonna do uh the lowest bottom denominator thing which is you know we let the private financiers drive the development of what the care infrastructure is going to be yeah and a lot of that just means bullshit so that they can scale up to then get into some other business model right uh so it's just not it's just it's like same with the child care same with the elderly care all of this shit It sucks.

40:39And it's also not even seen as the end point. It's like a stepping stone so that they can get into some real business. The thing is, I don't think that there's as much intention behind it is my thing. I don't think there's a master plan. I just think they're like, fuck, what my biggest problem? My old fucking dad keeps calling me. My kid, Klauge, won't stop asking me for things. My home is sometimes dirty between the eight cleaners. What do I do? What would a robot? What do people deal with in regular life? Dirt? Old? And by the way, I mean, Japan has been, you know, because of their demographic situation, the aging population, and, you know, technological prowess, they've been developing robots for seniors and various kinds of, you know, aging assistants.

41:23And the reality is, is that, like, despite huge investment and huge support from the government and, like, everything that they could possibly want, the results are not, like, that impressive, basically. Well, it's because ultimately, you know what, my poor grandmother when she passed like 10 or 11 years ago, 94 year old granny passed Marion. She liked being called on the telephone. People. Yeah. It's like someone's my dad going and visiting her. Like, it's like, what's going to help your kid talking to them and asking questions? Or if they're curious about something you can use Google, but you can talk to them about it.

41:59And there's another piece to, so in a past life, I was actually a caregiver for development to disabled people. You know, it's one of those jobs where like there's a lot of time where you just sort of sit there, you know, and there's just like nothing happening. And then there will be, you know, I mean, like I had a client who, you know, smear feces every once in a while. And then you had, and that was when you were really, you know, earning the pay. The point I'm getting at is that, you know, the majority of work, of the value of the work that people do, especially in service type jobs like that, is in what you would call an edge case.

42:32Right. And again, following the autonomous vehicle space has been really useful for understanding this stuff where 90 % of driving is just boring and just sit there and anyone could do it. And what makes someone a good driver is how you deal with it when shit goes sideways, right? Which is very rare and very sudden and very challenging to negotiate. It's the same thing with a lot of customer service jobs and then other kinds of service caregiving type jobs. The value is created when things start to break down. And that's when automation doesn't work. And no amount of large models is going to change that.

43:08Because ultimately, as soon as you see something out of distribution, out of your training set, it's useless. And again, that's where caregivers earn their money. Yeah. It's just deeply sad as well, because there are very straightforward problems that people have. It's just you can't really solve them with technology. gee, oh, well, we have the edge cases in customer service. You want to know what increases customer service calls? The fact that products fucking suck now. The products aren't very good. They get released in alpha or beta stages. The fact that they require a subscription for certain features, or the support documents are dog shit, or the guide to put them together is dog shit.

43:46It's like the actual problems are the companies are fucking things up regularly. And they're like, what if we had more customers? Well, no, no, no, no, no. Actually, that would involve paying someone. And what if we just had an AI, I guess, and maybe it could say a slur occasionally, but sometimes it could even answer a question. SoftBank had a robot called Pepper. Are you familiar with Pepper? No, I just love SoftBank. And you're supposed to call it, yeah, of course, anything they touch is a Yoshi song. Oh, that's the golden egg. Come on the show, man. But Pepper was this, it was a customer service robot.

44:19And it was like, you know, sort of vaguely humanoid, but it sort of rolled around on wheels. And they use it in like shopping centers and stuff. Anyway, I don't remember how much money SoftBank sunk into this. I think it was a French company or something. It didn't, it did like, it did not work. I loved it because everyone expects the headlines of like the robots are taking their jobs and like every, everywhere this pepper robot went, it would lose its job. It was like the headline was always like robot fired, replaced by humans because, and again, it's because customer service is fundamentally about helping people, right?

44:47Like if everything is in its right place on the shelf, you know, maybe in certainly badly like laid out in large stores, maybe someone needs a little bit of assistance finding like where the section is, where their thing is. But for the most part, like when people have a problem that they require customer service help with, like it's because something has gone wrong. The shelf is not stopped. Like something is bad. And again, like if it's an abnormal set of circumstances, the robot is, is almost never helpful. By definition. Yeah. And like, that's where, that's where the value should be created and the robots can't do it.

45:18I saw this good post on X, the everything app lately.

45:24which was this could go so many directions good engineers are building like an AI bar and they program every single possibility for someone ordering drinks at the bar ordering other things at the bar ordering a horse at the bar they have everything figured out for people to go to this bar and then a customer walks in and they ask where the bathroom is and the whole model breaks that's the thing though I love the idea of also a robot bartender. No bars are about ambiance and available diet cokes for me. And it's like, I like how it feels. And I like that being a person there, you have like a no conversation or some conversation.

46:04Each bar is a different bartender. That's part of the joy of going to a bar. I don't need a fucking robot arm to go. Here you go. Well, and then, and then the other failure mode is right. It's like, do you see the wall street journal thing where they have the vending machine with the LLM? Oh, that random. I haven't, I haven't seen this. I love Joanna Stern. I think she did a good job. But the whole thing is like, why are we not just like straight up saying this is broken dog shit? Why do we have to couch everything with, but it might work in the... No. Yeah. No. The idea is, right, you put a sort of agentic, you know, Claude sort of on the, you know, we've got to stop saying agentic.

46:39It's Nell that far. I'm sorry. But right then, like, oh, this will just magically cover all the edge cases. Well, it sort of did, but like people were able to get it to like buy a PS5. Or to like make everything. free. It basically just burned all this money because people were able to just say, just get me this thing. I would have literally just stood by it all day. I would have had that thing. This is a physical vending machine. With the software on. I mean, I remember one of the parts... They already perfected vending machines. It's a sole problem. Just go to Tokyo. It's perfect. Just go to a gas station sometime.

47:14What was the rationale, actually, for putting EA on this? What if we invented a machine that could then think like, it's just like, what if you could service things using like coins and cash again? You know, I would have kind of expected to do like surveillance pricing. Like what if we were able to make something like, yeah, it would measure a little bit and then figure out how much you would be willing to pay. But you don't need an LLM for that. Like it's the search for like, surely there must be some use for this. And it's like, you know, I mean, it's, it's part of this. Like we're trying to like ground quote unquote AI into these like physical things now, now that it's not just hype.

47:47Right. and you can see stuff like this where like they're trying but it's like yeah come on and it's a convenient band-aid to slap on something right you can sort of develop a robot to do certain things and it's like okay well as soon as we get out of you know out of our training set we'll just have an LLM just sort of swoop in and sort of magically solve it and the reality is that either it can't often or it solves it in ways that create like other totally unexpected problems I just like the idea of them being like what if we did oh yeah it doesn't work just like obviously broken doesn't work And this is the second time Anthropics done this.

48:19They did a store. And the way they wrote it was like, I'm doing air quotes because it was like, we had it run a store. Could it work? No. It made up meetings. It made up this. It did that. And it was just like, yeah, guess this doesn't work. But if it did, we'd have a vending machine. There are also people who like will use, they take all the models, they pay for the premium uses of them and they let them loose on the stock market. And they're like, oh, this is great. Let's see who does best. They all eat shit. Nightcap. but we already had that with Knight Capital in 2012, I think it was. I mean, algorithmic trading has been a thing for a while.

48:50I have not heard about the LLM trading. Oh, I will send you guys this. That's terrifying. I love that idea. It does not work. Well, it's because most stock advice online is bullshit. In fact, almost all stock advice is bullshit because if you actually knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't share that. You would not be talking about it. You would just trade. Yeah. Yeah, it's just, it's really good that they're working on ways to to do vending machines do you guys feel over the past two or even three years that you're also seeing a lot of times there's a product that actually has maybe some interesting improvement in how it functions and maybe in how a consumer can use it but they just feel I cannot actually get people interested in this unless I say there's AI and graft it onto this I've been trying to understand because I feel like I keep seeing products where it's like, I don't actually understand what the AI here is.

49:43I talk to you. You don't really seem to have a... Televisions. TVs. No, TVs. That's my answer. The smart TV thing. I've been walking around and it's like, oh, does it help with the picture? No, no, no. If you ask it what the capital of Washington State is, it can sometimes answer. It's like, great. Anything else? Could it control the TV's phone? Oh, God, no. It can't turn the volume up. And even if it could, it would be like, volume up. Volume, that's not it's... Honestly, I think that the thing for me actually, to circle back to where we started, maybe the smart glasses. Yeah. Smart glasses were kind of the same like three, four years ago and they're now trying to keep selling them by framing them as AI-powered smart glasses when the practical functionality is almost identical.

50:30And you have that one New York startup that was like that cheating smart glasses thing. Oh, clearly. So they're trying to find These ways to make smart glasses To find Ways to convince people to actually buy These things What freak would use them? That's the problem The only thing that's actually gotten people to buy Smart glasses is the covert recording That's the only thing That's actually gotten people to Buy and wear these things Is that you can secretly record people That more than the AI thing has actually been the thing that sold these glasses. I wonder if there's going to be more of it.

51:09I mean, I'm old enough to remember the glass backlash. How is that not - I mean, I've been seeing in New York, people break up. Yeah, okay. There was this amazing video of someone on the subway and he's got just like exactly the kind of white guy. He's being like, what? No, you're going to fucking do so? You're going to do so? And the woman is just staring dead-eyed at the camera. Just kind of like, come over here, see what happens. Still hasn't gotten in trouble. They should get the key to the city. the mandani caliphate should elevate them oh yeah we're looking into it no it's i just also like who is walking around i was saying this yesterday who's walking around being like what the fuck is going on what the fuck what is that it's curtain what kind of who is sitting around being like what kind of tree that would be a great that would be a great tim robinson character you know what is that is just what the fuck is going on a friend of the show casey newton once i think promoted something about how it was like this AI thing you could talk about and ask questions as you were on a drive about maybe you're driving over a bridge and you're asking how old is the bridge?

52:15And so I was like well you also can just ask yourself those questions or look it up or use your phone. It's taking away the American right to be driving while scrolling on your phone. It's just not for it. Which is also funny because it's like If they sold it as like a safety thing, I feel like it would have better standing than, actually, haven't you ever just looked at something and wondered what's going on there? How are they not marketing it as like a safety thing for like a hands-free enabled search while driving? Yeah, you want a shit post while you're driving? It's happening. Yeah, they have to do that.

52:52I also just don't walk around thinking things like that. Like I don't often walk around and be like, maybe if I'm like in a botanical garden, I'll be like, what kind of flower is that? I mean I do I just write down I'm on Wikipedia all day I mean when I'm walking around I do I just would either remember to look it up later or take down notes so I can enjoy the thing in person when I'm there if I want to learn about it I can get a coffee somewhere and look it up that's a separate experience and it's a good one too I think the thing I'm always surprised by is they're always trying to paint any non-AI mediated experience as a bad, inefficient, inferior experience.

53:36And that actually what you really want, what you don't really know you want is you want to have an interlocutor that is not real. This reminds me of the very first product that was mentioned during the CTA keynote. And this is something that I have not found on the show floor yet. And I have to look it up. I have to find it and talk to these people. It is. you're gonna love this, Ed. It is an AI holographic windshield display for your car. Wait, wait, wait. Let's talk about it. No, I'm actually not gonna be as cynical as you expect here because this is a fairly standard thing. Like BMW has their heads-up display, which is kind of useful.

54:21It's a digital interface on the windshield. They've kind of already got those? On the windshield. But the whole thing? all across the whole thing. Oh my God. Yeah. And so you have, you have like, you have like, you know, you have maps, you have all, all these random things. If you could, you could pair it with some kind of smart glasses thing. You can search and you can see results there. Oh my God. And so I, I need to actually find the company. I need to find the company's like location and like ask them about it. And like, talk to people like the, you know, the obvious like safety problems of like, if something goes wrong and the screen gets blocked.

54:54But, but yeah, it's, it's, it's so funny. This led by the car crash industry. Yeah. Like you said, There is versions of this thing which kind of work. I think keeping it away from the windshield, probably a good idea. Keep the display on the dashboard. But having it directly on the borders and emerging onto the center of the entire windshield. And above your eye level so you take your eyes off the road. You have to look to the corner. There was one picture of it during the keynote. And they have information all across the board. So yeah, your eyes are going to be darting to the other side, to the corner of the road.

55:29to read some kind of like pop-up thing on the screen i love being on my phone i want to be i love the computer so much i have so many screens but i don't know when i'm driving i quite enjoy not having that i enjoy i can listen to a podcast drive back from the moment girlfriend listen to last podcast on the left the other day that was lovely learned all about casey anthony horrible truly awful stuff didn't get that in england but it's like that and like the time when i was just facing forward and listening and spending some quality time with someone i love like when I'm driving on my own I get a chance to listen to podcasts or listen to music I don't want to bleep I don't I what's the way like I can look out the window I imagine I sound like fucking Dennis Leary like driving upstate I just want to know I just want a regular phone it's a beautiful road upstate and you get and you get an intrusive thought what year did Genghis Khan and you ask it and you and the screen lights up like someone threw a flashbang inside because every surface gets illuminated with information.

56:24Genghis Khan was born in 1982. In 1258. For 10 years, though, the auto industry has been coming to CES and trying to do what I think all of these AI companies are trying to do, which is ultimately either replace Google or really your phone as the portal to the digital realm. And to this day, there's still this battle inside these OEMs of there's factions who believe that cars should be cars. And I think they're actually sort of, you're seeing sort of like physical buttons come back. Which I love. That pendulum is swinging back. And I think that's because the reality is, is that your phone is still the best way to do all this stuff.

57:02But they're working on making that worse. I will say it was exciting when I was at the Renaissance Hotel, I saw Faraday Future. Oh, they're still here. Yeah, they've got like these weird like dad wagons now. Tell me about what Faraday Future is. Oh, that's a long, long and sordid story. Tell me if I'm wrong. Faraday Future is a company that sometimes makes cars, but sometimes goes bankrupt. So they've managed amazing. They're one of these companies that like, no one is quite sure how they haven't gone bankrupt yet. I thought they did. I'm thinking of Fisker. Yeah, Fisker. We've gone through two Fiskers.

57:34Fuck yeah. Yeah, no, there's... I love this. Two different ones or two, one, they've gone bankrupt and then they're like, we're back. It was this guy started a second company. Sick. Fisker was the one with all the weird Chinese money. Yeah. So the first one was one that was sort of like, it was like a kind of like sexier model S sort of, but it was like a hybrid. So it wasn't quite like that electric. So that was sort of, you know, 2013, 14, 15, something that went bankrupt. And then he came back and made this car, the Fisker ocean. But wait, wait, Faraday future though. Yeah, Faraday future. Okay.

58:04So it's like, it's like this Chinese, I think money laundering operation. I'm really, you know, I'm not entirely sure. I'm not comfortable calling them an automaker. Well, they have costs. They have like three screens. No, I remember. They have a car. I think, was it 2017? They were one of the, in the peak sort of like Tesla-fueled car hype era. They had like a legendarily, it was them and Leico. I get the two of them mixed up. But both of them had like legendarily like bad, but like expensive and massive like spectacles here that like did not go well. My kind of car. And then like the next year they were like, they didn't even have a booth, but they would just sort of like brought their car and just sort of like parked it on the curb and hope that people would see it.

58:54And like, I think they have, they're supposed to have a factory here. I think there's like three different places where they're supposed to have factories. There's supposed to be one in Southern California and one here. And then I feel like they pivoted to AI at some point there too. But I genuinely like, there's only so much you can pay attention to. So it's the Hyundai Mobius, I guess. The Hyundai Mobius. That it is. The holographic windshield display, which is a transparent display system that transforms a vehicle's windshield into a digital interface. I don't, I want a window. The technology enables the display of navigation, driving data, and digital content while maintaining cockpit openness and visibility.

59:32Someone's watching porno on that immediately. Just my Uber driving. Being projected onto the windshield. Nice. I mean, I already like everything. What are we doing, guys? Look at the road. Have you seen the size of screens in modern cars too? It's not enough to have the They all have an iPad Why are they projecting a fucking movie on the right side of the windshield? So you can watch Avatar 3 It gets back to the thing though where these people don't have human experiences because these people all get car service You think any of these people are getting in their car to drive other than You think they're trying to be like how do we recreate what you want from first principles?

1:00:11No, it's like, what are those fucking pigs who drive around all day? I don't look at my driver, but like when he drives, he seems to be looking at that transparent thing. He's just looking off into nothing. He should be maximizing his efficiency. What if he was content maxing? Why don't we have LinkedIn on the windshield? But like, you know, there's like parts of this, like having like the navigation map, like right above the steering wheel. Maybe not a bad idea. Yeah. Maybe not a terrible idea. Kind of already happening. Having a movie, having digital content displayed on the right side of the windshield.

1:00:45Like, why? So I'll tell you, I think that I'm guessing, knowing the auto industry, sort of the thinking behind this is probably that this is like a software addressable thing, right? So in the same way that Tesla took all of these controls that used to be with knobs and buttons and dials and menus and this and that, and put it all onto basically like an iPad. This is sort of the next generation of that, where then you're no longer constrained to one screen. You can create like almost infinite variety. It's like modular. If it's sort of a projection-based system. It is a projection system. That's how I, so, so, and again, it's, you know, I think, you know, in the auto industry, you know, you want to make an investment in, in, in hardware that you can then maximize over a lot of time.

1:01:21And so, you know, software addressability is like the, or software defined, software defined vehicle is like the buzzword, right? Yeah. And, and the idea is that you can do what Tesla has done, which nobody in the industry thought was possible, which is make the same car for 10 fucking years and just, you know, throw, throw the plebs some like fresh software updates every, every six months or so. High brightness, full color images directly onto the glass. I love this. And we have to cut this. Well, we're cutting this 30 minutes there. And next ad for us is from Glunt, the slop for hogs. If you hear anything else, it's for Glunt, I promise you.

1:01:56But yeah, catch you in a minute.

1:02:32I'll see you next time. started. That's 844-844-IHEART.

1:02:40We are back on the show. It's the Consumer Electronics Show. I am, of course, Ed Zitron. I didn't identify myself in the last ones, but you know, I think he worked out by now. We've got Ed Niedermeyer of the Autonicast. Hello. And Edward Onguesso Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter. Hello. And we're joined by Henry Casey of CNN underscore Henry. Thank you so much for joining us again. And thank you for having me this year. So I actually, I'm going to start off by saying I saw something I kind of liked. Maybe it's kind of like there's a specific use case for this, like show floors, whatever. I saw a company that's doing wireless TVs.

1:03:13Like it's a wireless bracket. You put the TV on it and it charges it. You can charge it and they sell their own TVs. I thought it was cool. I thought it was fun that somebody did something new. And maybe this is just how beaten down I am from years of CES. I'm like, what if a TV was wireless, I guess. And it's like, yeah, I saw that. I talked to them for longer than I think they expect it. And then just walked off. And I think they expect that I was going to get business cards. I didn't. So it has like a battery pack and you have it on a charger and you pull it somewhere else or how wireless is it?

1:03:43You have to, you can put any TV on the thingy. You click it in and it powers the TV and they sell their own ones as well. I thought it was fun. I thought it was fun. I now, now saying it out loud, I see the kind of dead eyes of everyone looking at me. I'm like, Maybe I slightly had more fun with this than anyone else ever will. It sounds like it would kill with those people who are like obsessive about cable management. No, they did. They also may have, they didn't laugh when I said this, even though I thought it was very, I was like, they were like, oh yeah, you got the, you can do 110 inch with four TV screens.

1:04:14And they were like, yeah, sort of for like trade shows. I'm like, yeah, that's useful. Or you could be like one of those insane gambling guys with four TVs. And the woman just stared at me. She just fucking said, I'd love to watch four sports games. I love, like, that's part of the fun of Vegas. Or the ultimate Mario Kart tournament. Mario Kart tournament? Land party? Yep. Smash Brothers? Smash Brothers? Yeah. I did also see, actually, and this is a genuinely good thing, it was a company called Aura. It had a mini-LED 4K TV. It was 85-inch. It was$1 ,599. Sorry,$1 ,500. And it came with a soundbar built into it.

1:04:49That's nice. Mini-LED, big TV. Again, we're describing the things alike. It's just the thing that exists, but slightly better. I saw a big ass outdoor TV I mean I don't know It felt like 100 inches but I have no idea how large it was But at the same time I do think that when I saw The marketing and outdoor TV I was like I think it should be illegal for an individual to buy it But maybe we can let the businesses You know let them buy these outdoor TVs I mean if you have a TV in the garden Have the garden Have the garden in the hot tub Have the garden in the hot tub You want to have a smoke outside you don't think there would have been an outdoor television besides Tony Sopranos pool like come on they've also had them for a long time I'm just saying I'm coming in from New York we're good we're looking into it and we're gonna ban them in the mom donny caliphate okay we're looking into outdoor television mom donny's the struggle sessions for outdoor tv owners hey listen we're starting though for landlords yeah that's the good shit Henry what have you seen at the show Now that my two things I like to bond.

1:05:53Well, to bounce it off the wireless TV stuff, it's not exactly wireless. You can see the one wire connection going to it, but LG's new wallpaper TV is their new kind of take on what if an art TV was also an OLED TV? Art TV is for the uninitiated. Samsung's frame, so you can put art. This is like an OLED, so you don't really want to have a static image because you're going to ruin your television set with Burnin. Instead, you can have a slideshow mode of your art, but it's barely, it's like nine millimeters thick and there's one power cord coming out of the back corner. You can hide it. And Samsung has been doing similar with the Frame Pro.

1:06:28But the thing I'm most excited about is an$80, 10 ,000 milliamp power bank from Nimble. It breaks in half and one half has a USB connector that unfolds. The other half has a USB-C cable. So my best friend, when we go out, he never brings a portable charger. I do. Now, share the wealth. don't have to sit next to each other and it's like actually solving a problem yeah which is like the ces question like is this solving a shareholder dilemma and capitalism growth or is it doing something like my parents will really like because one of them will remember to bring it and the other one will never remember yeah and that's the thing like all like i saw an lg thing where it was again another wireless t there's a few of these things but it was basically you had the tv in one plug and then you could plug all the hdmi shit into it it was low latency no latency That's cool.

1:07:19But again, it's like everything we're describing doesn't feel like the future. Like I'm just, I'm saying these things out loud. I'm like, yay. What if something was like, oh. But that's like the bifurcation of the show is that it's either, right, these like small iterations that are actually useful or it's these like wild pie in the sky that will never actually. That just don't work. Yeah. And you kind of have to have both for a show. I mean, do you, you know what? I actually, you don't have to have the vaporware stuff. It would be nice if, because I don't know, maybe we're just out of ideas, but I know that it may seem like I'm a huge cynic.

1:07:51I would love to be wowed. I would love to be amazed, and I would love to see stuff that maybe go, wow, new thing that I like. I'll be the positive guy again. Please, please. Vaporware that becomes actual product, and it wasn't vaporware to begin with. We see the words concept product a lot at CBS. I think I might have mentioned last year that Lenovo's had a laptop that would rotate its screen to trash your face. That's actually going to be for sale. They announced, they showed off the finished version of it this year. How much? The price escapes me. I'm not even sure. Yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing.

1:08:24They never did. I didn't write the article. My coworker, my friend, Ronko did. CNN underscored. He's got a video on it. We covered it. But no, it's like you knock on the lid and it opens up on its own. That's fun. And if you're in the kitchen and you're wanting to watch or read a recipe on your laptop screen and you're moving your head around, I could see that being useful. also content creators twitch people like all the sorts of people there is like it's a weird you're gonna figure out who needs this but it's something that would seem like vaporware one year and actually is on sale then there's gonna come to sale the next so it's sort of like saying hey don't think ces is just for the next version of the humane human the friend pendant like stuff like that have you have you seen any friend pendants though i've been looking i'm looking for anything like that i want i want a sassy oh i think i saw i saw i did not get to go to the pendant but there's a there's a pendant on the venetian expo floor that i have to i have to chat with them about i was a little too taken with all the bio meds okay no i i really want to i want more ai that's hostile towards you yeah i want like when victoria was on a few months ago where it was just like no that's not true just gaslight me yeah it's like fuck me up because You know what?

1:09:36Stop pretending this is going to be my friend because I know it won't be. Yeah. I mean... I do love when they're like, hey, you know, we're going to have robots in these workplaces and they're just going to be your buddy. Yeah. They're not going to be your worker. They're not going to be your colleague. They're not going to be your slave. They're going to be your buddy. So I was going through my photos as well trying to find something useful, but I did find a booth where I could not work out what they did. It was just called Wow Now. And the tagline was, make your inside, outside. Make your inside, outside.

1:10:01Make your inside, outside. Sounds like a threat. At David Cronenberg. I'll take a pass. Thanks, but... That is actually the plot of Shrouds. One of the best movies of the year. Yes, yes, exactly. It's a defense against fairies when you turn your clothes inside out. That's the only way they don't get you. We will talk about that after. I saw a company called POM where the logo kind of looked like it said porn. That was nice. Yeah, it's... I really did look. I've been looking for stuff. I saw a company called Zeus that was claiming they had the only GPU designed for high-performance workloads. And it's like...

1:10:33They got Love Sense again. Awesome. What's Love Sense? Sex toys. That's nice. With a little, you know, maybe. Software to find. Yeah, yeah, right. So it's got some software. Power hat. I've got a power hat. Power hat. Power hat. You put the hat on, it's like a - And it gives you power. One of those floppy hats. It connects to like a solar charger, I guess. What? Yeah, and dual USB-A and dual USB-C ports. You know what? It's a solar charging hat. If I wear a hat, I'm doing a bit. No, that is the only permissible one is like, if you're like long distance hiking or a fisher but the people buying this might maybe they'll be outdoors people like robert evans i know does a bunch of bunch of like so i think he's done solar stuff where he's just like when he goes into the woods for a few months like to hunt the sasquatch i'll ask him about that later but it's like that makes sense but i just i see this i'm like i want to believe man but probably i'll i'll believe them when they do a solar bonnet when they do a solo for my people then i know this series about this solar sombrero yeah yeah you know the solar pharrell canadian mountie hat he's always gonna be the brand ambassador every other year like come on that big ass hat could probably fit playstation 5 out there we won't get grand theft Auto 6 anytime soon but yeah nor will we get another pop banger like happy no well not like we're getting a fucking another nrd album this year oh fly or die is a perfect album and he never made anything better than it farrell williams come on my show and talk specifically about 2005's fly or die classic album great album you should all listen to it email me if you've listened we're talking about his beef with the with the neptunes no not interested just just the album and then he can explain to me why he hasn't made anything good like that since you don't think the lego movie soundtrack was gonna be good i think that despicable me had a pretty good soundtrack i'll I will give him the fact that Despicable Me, Despicable Me 2, and Despicable Me 3, Nano Banana, fucking...

1:12:28I had not thought about Nano Banana all day. It's not my fault. So one of the things that makes this absurd stuff so interesting and so extra absurd to me is that there is legitimate technological innovation going on right now. One of the big announcements, if not arguably the biggest announcement in the mobility space, is this company called Donut Lab. um and they're they're basically beat all the major automakers and battery companies to the punch on a or at least they say they have to to a solid state battery um and this is something what that means yeah it just means so uh it just means that uh it's it's solid so it's like a completely the rather than using a a liquid or gel in the in the anode um it's it's just the whole battery is solid state yeah so just to be stupid because i really don't know regular batteries are full of like liquids yes i know that it's a it's an electrolyte yeah it's usually a fluid electrolyte and and the solid state is just a brick or something yeah that's cool it is and and it has like really specific uh advantages so like they claim 400 uh water hours per kilogram which is like you know not much denser than like modern you know uh like the the current state of the art but they they say you can charge it in five minutes i think what they said oh that's why the liquid ones charge slower yeah so and what happens too is with the liquid ones like they form dendrites and things and so it's it's what does that mean yeah sorry no i get i get above my own pay grade really fast with this stuff battery technology is like really complex but basically you can think of it as like sort of almost like crystalline structures right okay so things form inside it to slow them down yeah and and and it create friction and heat and then fire but they made the solid state one the solid state does not have that issue so it's like unaffected by temperature cool uh and and you can charge it really really fast that's actually like really good so that unlocks does that unlock new use cases then if it's like you don't have to worry about the internal temperature maybe you can run it a little bit hotter than well i mean it would yeah it would be it so i mean i like ideally this is this is the future right and and so like all the major automakers are are doing this and and they all make kind of somewhat similar claims so like right they say like uh you fully charge in 10 minutes 60 kilometers of combined range per minute of charging and up to 600 kilometers on a single charge.

1:14:44Sorry for the metrics. No, no, this is great. no, please. So, so I think like it's, this is something that, that right. Toyota has been working on talking about for a long time. Hyundai is doing it like the Chinese battery suppliers as well. I think this is like a little British consulting firm and their first use case is a motorcycle. So it's a little questionable. Yeah. So apparently the motorcycles are going to be shipping this year. So like, or like first quarter of this year. So they should have a guide. doing the 600 kilometers around CES the whole time. And with all this stuff, anything automotive, you've got to validate it over so many miles.

1:15:18And the idea that they're going to be able to build this at quality and then robustness, yeah. But this is the city of traffic and the frustration of getting around town. You talk to any journalist doing CES this year, you will see somebody who has been frustrated about how long it takes an Uber to blah, blah, blah, blah. And that is the kind of thing where hands-on or hands-off demos are the thing that would really sell it. and you'd have like... Even like an e-bike would be... Yeah. Yeah, I just read about it. I wasn't at their event or anything. I haven't been in touch with them. So they may be giving demos or something.

1:15:48But I think what I've read about it, like there's a little bit of like, how are these guys kind of the first... Yeah, that's my first thought. Like it's a little British consultancy. Never, ever trust the British. And also just, is Britain a hub for battery technology? It has been more so. Oh, okay, cool. I don't want this to be fake. I want this to be real. No, no. There are incredible British engineering outfits, especially in the automotive space. So a lot of Formula One engineering work takes place in the UK. Oh, of course. Yeah. And that's all heavily electrified now and becoming more so with the new 2026 rules.

1:16:23So you were in the car section as well, right? Do you see anything? Just very briefly, unfortunately. Yeah. I had to go to – I've listened to the NITS administrator talk, which is interesting. Oh, how was that? I mean, honestly, like for this administration, it was like sort of surprising. That's the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. I remembered all those words. Yeah. But anything good or just. Well, from that conversation. It was like a much higher level of sophistication than I expected from someone who works for Sean Duffy. Oh, okay. Yeah. It was like a pleasant, pleasant surprise.

1:16:58and clearly I think the administration wants to be seen as doing something to help autonomous vehicles. The problem is that regulation is not actually preventing autonomous vehicle deployment. That's not. It's kind of like AI. It's like we need less regulations around AI. It's like that's not. We don't have those. Oh we got one going through. No fuck off. The problem is you don't have enough power and no one wants to pay for it dickhead. With autonomous cars it seems like the problem is the edge cases like you were mentioning. Yeah. Yeah. So he was talking and this is interesting. So, so kind of the big challenge with AVs is that, right?

1:17:32Like you can't just create a, right. We have a driver's test, right? You go out and you do some basic things and you prove that you have the sort of like general capability and they sign off. You didn't almost kill anyone and, and, and you can be a driver now. That doesn't work with this technology because right. All you do is train for the test. Yeah. Right. And then you get vehicles to train for the test and then they pass the test and they go out and they're like totally useless in the real world. So this is actually like a non creating regulation for AV is actually much less trivial of a problem than people think.

1:18:01People are very quick to say, oh, we'll just regulate it. Well, when you get into the weeds of how to do it, it's actually quite complex. And again, I was shocked that the guy at NHTSA is actually has like a. Yeah. And like a kind of a sophisticated sense of like, okay, you need to have a test, but you can't have it be some static thing. And, and like, the fact is like, you know, we have this sort of self certification system anyway. And that like, if you're faking compliance with a, with a safety standard, that that's sort of illegal already. And so, so it was like sort of encouraging. The problem is, is that, is that this is also being used as like a, a power grab at the federal level because states, right.

1:18:39So like historically cars are regulated by the federal government. that drivers are regulated by the state. You get your driver's license from the state DMV. Well, so that's a huge problem, right? The AV companies absolutely do not want the patchwork of regulation. And so they're trying to get a test at the federal level so that they can kind of preempt the state's right to regulate these systems as drivers. Yeah, because I guess it's regulating a technology, but kind of regulating a driver as well. These two separate things have become one. And in a real sense, it is much more of regulating a driver How do you regulate something when you have the, because from my understanding with these autonomous cars, you actually have an overlord watching as well.

1:19:19You have a customer service rep. How does that play into it? So, yeah, this is one of the most misunderstood. And, you know, different companies do things differently. Different companies have different levels of transparency around this. So, you know, no one description is going to be true of everything. But like, for example, with Waymo, what they say, and I think they have like pretty good credibility on it, is that, right, like for a vehicle to be autonomous, and this is sort of the established like, you know, engineering view of it. For a vehicle to be autonomous, when it encounters something that it cannot deal with, it has to perform what's called fallback autonomously.

1:19:52It has to return to what's called a minimal risk condition. And this is like not a defined thing. It just means the safest place to sort of pull over. Right. And if you're not doing that autonomously, it's not autonomous. So like Teslas are not autonomous because when they fail, the human has to step in and intervene. Right. A lot of people believe that because there is this link that every AV has to either a remote operator or the ability to send new guidance to the vehicle, that that is somehow remotely intervening to prevent a crash. That's physically not possible. It's not possible. Because I didn't imagine they had the joystick.

1:20:31Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that folks have tried it and it just doesn't work. So what happens is that, right, system encounters something you can't deal with. It performs a fallback autonomously. The new guidance is just to sort of get it through. Yeah, to get it out of danger. And then it takes back over again. Okay. So changing gears, Henry, have you seen anything interesting laptop-wise? You mentioned a concrete keyboard, which sounds good for hitting people. Yeah, Keychron actually is doing really fun stuff with the materials that their keyboards, wireless keyboards are made out of. There was one that was porcelain, like one of those concrete.

1:21:08And I was thinking, even the most angry Redditors won't be able to move this by typing, like you might use it for self defense if you're that kind of person. But what I was just talking about that made me really think was building something for the test. And while, okay, laptops at CES, there is a big story sort of happening with Dell and pricing. But did people see the LG laundry folding robot thing? No, I saw the robot. I didn't see it fold anything. I didn't see it folding anything. I saw it moving one thing to another. and I was like, is this being designed to do the test of the convention center and then do everything else later?

1:21:46So that's why I'm just like, it's also doing it at the slowest. It's the sloth in the Zootopia trailer. So that's the thing. In laptops, one of the most interesting things is a year ago, Dell said the XPS brand was dead. It was replacing Dell XPS 14 with Dell Premium 14 and tech journalists everywhere were like, what are you doing i love my xps people love it and then this year they literally an exec came out and said i owe you an apology you guys were right um and then they released the del xps it's back and here's the weird thing though they got rid of all the things we hated about it the function keys are actually physical keys again they had a weird capacitive touch thing god but it was light up it wasn't an OLED like the touch bar on the max but the problem is that I believe let me just check right now I believe it's um they had a last second price change on it and I believe it's going to be 2050 for the starting price at first for the 14 inch XPS no and it's going to in February there will be lower priced much lower price under$2 ,000 versions and they didn't say why this is we can all assume one of two things what is tariffs or memory shortage yeah the ram thing is fucking everything up i don't know if you've talked to anyone else at the show but i've i've been hearing from quite a few people this is just fucking up everything now because of ai that it's just smart for the samsung mentioned they're going to raise the price of phones because of because of fucking ai and ram kill me people are saying that the iPhone 18 not coming until next year supposedly is due to that because Apple wants to wait for the lowest costing phone.

1:23:30They want to wait a year to wait out this freaking memory shortage problem because that's the rumor at least. They're moving to a spring year cadence for the main phone. Laptops from here on out, we're a little bit concerned about if there's going to be a good amount of RAM or it's going to be overpriced. I'm glad I have my M1 14-inch MacBook Pro and that's going to last me forever hopefully but it kind of feels like it's going to price people out of electronics soon because tariffs already raised things now ram is going to raise things also that we can generate sexier waifus i guess like it it's very strange and i don't think i've never seen anything like it in the history of tech like we've seen shortages around covid and then post covid but i don't remember just like the i remember the price of everything going up the price things becoming harder to get in general but not like one thing within the computing world yeah and and to be fucking up a business that makes money in order to build a business that doesn't well the business is making tons of money well sure yeah but every other business that's what that's what i'm saying like devices broadly are going to take a hit because of pc sales are already down i think i do not keep track of that thankfully yeah it's just it's i just i keep coming to this show expecting the future, but it just kind of feels dystopian, but not in the cyberpunk way, but just in a everything's more expensive and slowing down way.

1:24:55Well, okay, this is the funniest part. Of all things I never expected to get faster, Amazon's revealed that the Fire TV interface is getting an update, and it's getting faster. They're making new Fire TVs, Amazon Store? Well, they're just updating the OS, basically, and they've updated a couple things recently, but I was watching it today, and it was loading smoothly and it looked a little cleaner yeah if you've never used these tvs they are fuck it it's like you what you hit you hit the button it takes like three seconds for the box to move across five years that broke only because i was uh i had a bunch of people in my room and one of them rammed up into it because it was getting routed then it smashed into the floor indestructible otherwise yeah you you what you mean is you were wearing your freezer costume for halloween and And the tail bumped it.

1:25:40And I may have been a little lit, and then someone hit it. And that someone was my tail. And it gets worse if you just bought the Prime Day cheapest Fire TV stick. And who knows how low-powered that is trying to run whatever. But they showed it off on a demo on a regular TV that was running their Fire OS. And I was just watching going, I've been recommending Roku to my parents for a lot of people for a while. It's simple. It's easy. from people just want a grid of tiles like i nobody can afford not everybody can afford an apple tv i wish they could and i think a lot of people think google tv is content overload it is like you're just getting uh black mirror episode two i think um is that is that is there a black mirror time with that or no just all the ads oh yeah once no i i have to remember it's the million credits episode and not uh i've not seen any of it sorry charlie charlie charlie does read my work I'm sorry, Charlie.

1:26:37But yeah, no, Amazon actually is answering the credit. I've been writing in for years. Like, why is this so, so, so slow and stuttery? And so I can't wait to update the Nike shoe box of streaming sticks I have at home because I've been reviewing this stuff for how many years now I've collected everything just to make sure I can cross reference and back reference. Do you see anything you really like, though? Anything exciting? Anything good? Okay. I don't have the space for it in my home, but if you're a projector nerd for watching stuff okay samsung's freestyle plus that keeps auto adjusting to whatever space you put it on it it projected against curtains and it was clear it was clear first of all but it took a second you saw it like ripple and then it auto corrected around to a rectangle on top of the curtain that's actually fucking cool that is cool but it gets better because they had two different size projector screens that it was on and if you moved it from one to the other it recognized the black outline of the projection screen and it really automatically resized.

1:27:35I like that. And then they did it on a three-corner corner of a wall and it resized. I would go to Samsung's Villa of its first look every year. Samsung Villa. They have a minor city almost. If you think Caesars is a state, this is Vegas, this is a minor city. And the Freestyle Plus projector is the thing that I was like, whoa. Again, how much though? I don't even know if they have announced pricing because a lot of these stuff they don't announce pricing. But the other weird thing from Samsung, and I'm still trying to get to the bottom of it, in the corner of their experience, there was an S95H OLED TV that they're claiming can be an art TV.

1:28:12But they had one static image on it for the entire multiple hours I was there. And I was like asking everybody, did you guys beat Burnin? What is going on here? How is this happening? I haven't gotten an answer yet. I don't know if it was just for the show of it all, like showing it can do it. but if they've somehow done it and they were quietly not explaining it i have more questions for their pr team in that process than i do their technical team good luck on those though because they don't look from what i hear of their pr team they're not particularly helpful with answers to questions they're responsive to email they're they're a nice group of people okay okay maybe they've changed over the years but no i mean everybody's had trouble with different pr different outlets it's not that's it all depends on who's what your history of who but that's the thing though with these art tvs they're always a lovely idea but it's like i don't fucking know if i want some art on my wall i just put up art and even i saw one of these e-ink things as well i'm going to show you there was like an entire hall of e-ink things that just broke it's just it's very artistic actually it's like the future yeah that's not one yeah it's just it's like a nice idea but you're like okay but again i think i saw those at the club last night oh the club yeah that was just too late for you.

1:29:23No, it's really frustrating as well because some of these ideas are like, all right, that's a nice one. How much? Oh, just out of the range of most people. Oh, an e-ink screen. Okay, I guess. But how much? Hundreds of dollars. They should have a cheap section. They should literally have a cheap section of this show. Like below 300 bucks. I looked up the projector. I think they typically have cost around 900 bucks. Oh, that's... They haven't announced this particular one. That's not the worst I've heard. And for a projector. Yeah, I mean, like the Nebula X1 Pro, the tall thing's like five grand, and the X1 little box is like two.

1:29:57And this is like a small tube-like. That's kind of cool. It is a cute-looking, I want to call it Pixar-esque, but it is a nicely designed. I was like, this is fun to use. I have a TV, and I don't care that it's a black rectangle sometimes. I'm not the audience for the art TV, and I'm not really a projector audience. but while we were watching this freestyle plus doing thing i was like okay this is cool this is the article headline this is like the actual but also that's something you could use in an apartment potentially because it adapts to any surface finally something that sounds useful yeah well i think also it's like a i think a little bit of a premium thing too it feels like screens tvs have gotten so cheap and so big yeah yeah it's like having your tv like having it be either like disguised as art or like hidden as a projector like this sort of like a i'm too good to even have a tv tvs are for like you know yeah yeah i did see like the most limp story it was like amazon's used tvs have rounded corners i'm just like at this at this point mate just just don't you don't need to post about it mate who cares it's got rounded corners it gives you nice yeah it's just like and also i went and looked they looked pointy they looked they looked actually pointy why not a circular tv they're around give me a circular yeah i want a round i want i want a beam it into my skull a rhomboid television yeah everything has to be filmed at the fisheye lens yeah i just know if you want to do something weird great send it my way don't pretend like it's for everyone if you just want to this is for perverts the pervert section they know it's just pervert tv pervert tv i think we have that i think we have pervert the palmas like you know Edson John is.

1:31:33Ed's television pervert. New from YouTube. My name is Brian De Palma. I've been watching pervert TV for the past 40 years. I'm proud to introduce it to CES. Yeah, I was going to make a liquid television joke, but that could get gross real quick. Well, we're going to wrap up this 30 minutes. Made by Siemens. Yeah, there we go. Siemens AI television, pervert television. It's physical. Coming up next, an ad from pervert television, the new streaming service by perverts for perverts. And if you're the advertiser that comes next, I am very sorry. I am very sorry. And if this is one of the ones where it's my voice recorded, that's even better.

1:32:09I'm not running pervert TV, I swear.

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1:32:55And we're back. We're back with an incredible group of people. Edward Ngueso Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter, Ed Niedermeyer of the Autonicast, and Henry Casey of CNN Underscored. And we've just been looking at fake stuff for a few minutes because I wanted to talk briefly about this thing called the pickle. Now, the pickle. The pickle is yet more fucking smart glass bullshit. But what it is, is they call it a soul computer. And I think we can start at this point. If you call anything a soul computer... Straight to jail. Straight to jail. Yeah, just fucking right down you go. But what's great is this thing is these glasses that project images across the glasses, the transparent OLEDs.

1:33:37And then it has some mystical AI in it that remembers everything. I'm just going to read this. For a better life in every dimension, we need an intelligence that sees with you, remembers your life, and learns to understand you. A new soul. A new soul. It talks to you. It can teach you like guitar stuff. And it claims it has like memories of stuff you've seen before now this has caused some sort of scandal online first of all because it's blatantly fucking fake and there's got matt dowd i think has gone completely nuts about it it's just like that's fucking fake and now the ceo of pickle is now arguing with him i love that i just got to say the ceo of pickle why is the company called pickle i don't fuck it to be extra special annoying and alex heath was like it's completely fake it's stupid it's wrong but wouldn't it be cool if it was real what if your soul was a pickle what if yours what if you well first of all if you make a company called pickle with a fake device you probably don't have a soul i have such a negative association with pickles because i had a roommate who would buy so many pickles and not touch them that they would fill up the fridge and it broke all the shelves kept just just the putting jars the compound weight of pickles yes like open the door and it's like an avalanche literally literally and and then glass also and pickle juice what was the justification for purchasing so many of them i like pickles but would get so fucking high they'd forget that all the pickles in the fridge how do You forget.

1:34:53You smoke a lot of weed, and then you go into our basement, a very spacious basement. Right. And you smoke more weed, and you just... But you get to the pickle dispensary, your fridge, and you see a resplendent... One of them got the pickles. No, not you. No, but that's what I'm saying. His mind was like, at least one of their pickles. The answer is he didn't have a smart device. He remembered his needs. You don't need to buy more pickles. You have more pickles than you could ever desire. Yeah. but this is now a scandal because basically everyone's saying this is fake and bullshit and the guy is just on x the everything app just fucking going to town with people it's so cool i i'm fine with that that this existing but he has to post is it is it sort of like a people are trying to do like a marcus brownley with what was the the device that he sort of like oh the humane pin humane pin yeah i the reason i bring this up though is i like that every last two ces's we've had oh no maybe it was 2024 we had the rabbit r1 that was 24 yeah 24th rabbit that i was there for that one i was no it was before better offline i was a much larger setter person so i didn't really have as much fun as i could with it but that was the one where like everyone fell for it because it was kind of real yeah and it's just like that company is still rolling around its own filth didn't it get acquired by like hp or somebody oh my no that was the humane pin oh yeah HP bought another company with the palm pre, I guess.

1:36:16It's just really... I think every year we need a fake thing. We need something that's aggressively just... I got handed a bunch of fake things. You got handed fake stuff? What you got there? They just look like boxes. Yeah, they're boxes that hold things that remind me, now that you said it, they look like the rabbit. There's supposed to be AI agents that can... They're AI agents, but they're in cardboard boxes. Yeah, they're cardboard boxes that look like fridge magnets. Let's see what you got in there because I'm quite curious to know what's in this box. If there's an AI agent in there. Podcasting is a visual medium.

1:36:50Yeah, yeah. It's like a children's toy. I see some paper. I see a flap. There's two boxes and I'm opening one right now. It's like a little green box. A little green magnet. I said, what is the... It's agentic AI. I said, what's the agent part? He's like, oh, you know, if you want a girlfriend. Can I see this? Can I see this? Thank you. AI pie. okay this is just a box with a connector on it that's the other memory card we're about to see this is just a battery man i'm gonna be honest no it is there's no agent in there like well i'm disappointed looking hard enough down now the rabbit r1 was an nft project that i wrote like a huge piece about because they're a fucking fake nft thing but i like that we have we should have you want if you want to do fake you have to go all the way because this is pickle has the most glossy website it's like the most like sheen filled website it looks so professional on mobile it just keeps going yeah it's an endless fucking and they're just like yeah it'll do everything now i you fucking pig but it's it just made me look at it you look at that and you're like wow this looks very is it just this is another battery he's just opening the box again and there's just there's something on there's it looks like another battery but it's blue yeah but it's blue it's got a screen a tiny little tamagotchi screen let me see this now we're cooking okay so this thing is i'm just going to describe this to you it says x x origin z origin yeah z origin they're calling it z origin is z original not to be confused which one okay i hit the button and it's like flashing blue and it is doing nothing else so you have to uh you have you gotta put them together I put them together.

1:38:26Okay, you put them together. And then when the API, AIPI, when the AIPi is connected only to the battery module, press the power button briefly. Okay, I press the power button briefly and it went blue. Release it after the white light turns on. Oh, the white light turns on. Okay. So this is great for a audio medium, I realize. But the thing is about this is it's like, this is just too... It looks like we're playing with smart Legos. Yeah. Which is a thing of TES. it's really hard to describe how underwhelming it is just like a clean box it's just the crap show now because but when you read about the pickle it's funny especially after a day of looking at actual smart glasses where everything is just blurry and the guy was like oh what are you seeing and it was i i think what were those ones was that the tcl booth i think i saw them is that one was it was like 1200 and it didn't really work very well you had to control it by these people don't use products i think because it's like yeah you just like rub your finger across the top right part of it and it was like a picture of leonardo da vinci and it was like photos and you could take video with it and i had to walk away because all i could think in the back of my head was i just want to ask him what the fucking point of any of this is but i think i would have turned into a werner herzog make me put this design device on my face and it takes me away from humanity and then you steal my money for it.

1:39:49I was just decided not to do the bit there. It's just, I'm really, this whole time I've been trying to rack my brains of why I would ever want, because I like the idea of a heads up display. I think the idea of walking around and being able to pull one up, but all of these things seem to run into the same thing, which is they want to be constantly on. They don't want to, they don't seem to want to be like things you briefly look at. They want to absorb your attention fully. And it just doesn't feel like any device does that other than the phone, and the phone doing it doesn't seem to be for good reasons either.

1:40:20Or with good results. Or with good results, yeah. So I've been using the Xreal 1S, I believe. Okay, what's that like? It's the newest, and it's good. What I like about it is it will meet you where your posture is, especially if your posture is, like, let's say I'm in my hotel, and I want to play a video game on my, like, whatever portable, the Legion Go S, Steam OS, but I don't want to hold this thing. I was just on a flight for a while. Yeah, right. I'm tired. But I put these glasses on. I have the... And it's just a TV screen, effectively? It basically puts the screen above you, and you can move it, and you can just have the controller in your hands.

1:40:53And sure, I feel like I'm in Wally's origin story at some point. But in that case, and if I had managed to pack it correctly on the airplane, which I couldn't because everybody goes to CS over packs, it's a problem. But no, I think Xreal is one of these companies, and they're doing a bunch of different partnerships. they're working with seemingly everybody possible which you sort of want if like you want cross compatibility right i wouldn't but i went to the x real booth and i was i was kind of excited to go over there because i thought these are just going to be glasses that are little tvs in your eyes and i'm like way less there are way more offensive things on the show and i get there and there's just a fucking thing that says vibe agent and i try and they're like you could book a demo i'm like you don't want to see you don't want to put me in a box with this fucking thing only one of us is leaving i don't know i'm gonna survive and vivance agent it's a vivance agent i take methylphenidate it's it's fine i'm trying to find this thing because it was so bizarre to me that they're just putting these words to it's like vibe description at this point like ai agent glasses fucking fucking slop and then i just say it's just tech slop and i saw a guy one of the demo guy's very overly eager fella was like yeah i call these my tony stark glasses and i tried to use them as like sir there's a line and there was like a 25 person line i'm just like oh god this is just i don't lining up for anything feels deranged here yeah and i always think the same thing which is if you had double the amounts of these you would be fine maybe they're trying to do like they're trying to make it so that scarcities that you're like oh why is everyone lining up for this maybe they're just trying to put friction between people and the products they just don't fucking work that well is there a there must be AI shit in this it said agents no no I wonder was the whether where was this because like were there two boots in the um it was in the uh what's it called the south hall I believe because I've been going because I've been they are I will say the words AI slop as many times as I feel like it and I don't think I've seen that much AI, if any, in their stuff.

1:43:01Reddit thread here saying that instant translation, visual assistant, object recognition, productivity boost, quickly access charts, reminders, or instructions while you do something else. Yeah, and it's an Xreal project. Here we go. Project Aura, it feels like tomorrow. Jesus fucking Christ. It's on Android XR, hands-free control. Feels like tomorrow. Oh, yeah, I see it, yeah. It's an unlock early access Yeah, this is not something I have gotten my hands on yet Why didn't they say it looks like tomorrow? I don't know Wouldn't that be better? Because feel is something you feel Oh, yeah, I see Looks could be deceiving Yes, it might not look like tomorrow Also, look is the signature weasel word When you're not really able to commit to anything yet Yeah It looks like OpenAI looks like it could be a company that isn't lying to us But then why doesn't feels get that?

1:43:55it's just like i keep seeing this thing of like this they have this imaginary person who is just looking around going what's that what's that what's that what's that dude what's that what's that object what's that but then you come here and you do see that person that the person is on the floor or hordes of that yeah like that photo that ed posted of of just like the horde trying to like break in at 10 a.m oh my god yeah did i did i send you guys a picture like that you posted the photo of the people like trying to break into the the show floor oh yeah yeah yeah all the hogs the same thing i was like is it always like this no i and i said out loud i'm like what are you so excited about i saw a crowd the largest crowd i've seen yet in necs around a room but a new room but device that wasn't a room but like a room room but s and i was like what the heck at least that's a proving part yeah i mean like you said you know that is something that works Every year.

1:44:50And like last year, I didn't check out the robot vacuums this year, but I remember last year they were like, we've got little arms that can pick stuff up. I did. That actually led me to one of the funniest things. I'm sure that this was for like legitimate reasons. There was a robot vacuum company where you could pick up a cleaning struggle. It said, one, pick your struggle. Two, drop your coin. Three, get your magnet. You are now entering the cleaning struggle zone. And then it just said, A, dust always hides under low furniture. Hair always gets tangled in the brush too busy no time to clean cleaning requires too much disassembly i there are times when i want to know more and there are times when i just read something i'm like yeah that's all i need you know but like this is the issue is that you can fully automate a task but like the robot will need to be maintained yeah like do you want to you're sort of trading one thing for the other and again with like consumers people will buy the thing because they're like oh i'm lazy i don't want to i don't want to you know i totally get that but they don't think that what they're doing is they're trading like the occasional sweep or vacuum of their floor for like you know maintaining this complex machine with like lidar and like i have a fucking robo rock if you're listening from robo rock your shit sucks that's what it was it was robo rock it was big giant black and red pavilion yeah yeah yeah i i have a quite expensive robo rock and the dust that that shit doesn't pick up i didn't do that shit with a fucking switch the fact i have to clean up after my robot at this point just make it do little turds make it a game let's have an ai lawnmower an ai lawnmower isn't that interesting see that's one where i'm like i could almost imagine the industrial applications if you just take ai away because robotics yes has been doing ai for a while that's fine another one of things where it's like you know what might be an interesting innovation that could be sold into or pitched they glom ai onto it and then i'm like i don't know yeah i don't want to touch even though Because you've already had iRobot doing gutter cleaners and shit.

1:46:42Yeah, I mean, anything like that, whether it's the lawnmowers or pool cleaners is another class of actually useful robots. I mean, that was AI before. Yes. They just didn't have to call it AI in order to... I saw hearing aids that were literally just hearing aids and they made some improvements and they are throwing AI, but then you ask them about it And it's like the technology that, like you said, last generation, they're already using algorithmic systems to try to improve your ability to hear things at distance. It's just like, I'm now thinking you just chop the word AI off and it would be fine.

1:47:20But did you see any robot vacuums or I'm going to have to chase these fuckers down myself? I am not the one covering the robo vacuum on the team. I just saw the dancing AGI robot. Okay. Talk to me about this goddamn thing. A poop company. It danced like me at the first wedding. I ever went to when I was 10 years old. And it was unfortunately named AGI Bot. And I'm like, no, this isn't actually, this is doing a pre-rehearsed routine. Like, why are we words have meaning, or at least they should. So it's like, I... I will kick that thing so hard it flies. There were two of them, so they might try to come at you from both sides.

1:47:55And I've been boxing for years. I'll take those fuckers out, no problem. And we have weapons. Robots don't have weapons. Robots don't have weapons, and they don't have friends. They don't have dance moves, apparently. But the bot and dynamics people have made people afraid, which is the whole thing where this... They've made some people afraid. No, that's the thing where most people engage with the idea of the robot that will do anything. One social video, they saw the Boston Dynamics thing three years ago. And then that informed them to think, oh, shit, I've got to be careful about everything from now on.

1:48:25But when you look at it, it's like, oh, it's trying to serve a press demo. Yeah, those are all highly rehearsed as well. What's it a demo for? What is the purpose of the dancing robot? to disarm you impressing you and getting your money to invest in it so the very first chatbot was created in the in the 60s and eliza yeah and so there's the eliza effect i think so much of what we see here is driven by sort of different versions of that which is where you show people something doing a task that they've only ever seen a human do before right it's dancing or mowing a lawn or whatever else and because like our only metaphor for intelligence is humans we automatically leap to this must be a human level of intelligence right this is what this is what has fueled tesla's autopilot yeah that makes sense that yeah it's like if we make it seem human adjacent they'll just fill in the gaps that's what they've done with llms and exactly right and what this does is this it locks you into this mode again we've seen 10 years of this with tesla autopilot where it's like it's getting better it's getting better it's getting better it's getting better it's getting better but like what's getting better is the illusion yes and and And what is completely left out of this entire framework for engaging with any kind of automation technology is the fact that at some point it becomes actually useful.

1:49:43There's actually real value. And with autonomous vehicles, it's really simple when that point is. It's when the company says, we take legal responsibility for this system. And they never will. Well, Waymo does. Zoox does. Do they actually take legal? Of course. I didn't know that. Yeah, there's no human in them. I mean, the Zoox's that are running on the Strip and the Waymos that are all over the bay, there's no human in them to take responsibility. Oh, I suppose that's right. Yeah, I mean, what about the RoboTaxis in Austin? Oh, they still got people in them? Those have someone in the passenger seat.

1:50:15But no, I mean, in Texas, like those are technically considered to be autonomous vehicles. By Texan autonomy laws. Yeah, which are essentially non-existent. Nice, that's good. That's really... it's funny when you actually pull up the Tesla robot taxi app, it says if your ride is in Texas, it's autonomous. If your ride is in California, it's not. And it's the same experience. I mean, it's the same thing. Yeah. Very fucking cool. Have you used, have you used Zooks? Yeah. Yeah. So I had a ride with Zooks a year ago at CES. Right. So I haven't, so that was cool, but I was, you know, it was with the, with the CTO.

1:50:48It was like sort of a whole thing. And to be perfectly honest, like at the time I was like, it's a very, it's, it's the only product that you can kind of write in right now that is designed from the ground up to not just be a car. Cause it's like an empty room with wheels. Yeah. And so that's good. That's kind of cool. So the Docklands light railway. And it's perfect for the strip. And like for a long time, the AV space was like, like AV companies were like, ah, we can't like market on the novelty of this because it's like such a serious thing. We're going to conquer the world. And like, one of the cool things that's happened is that there's been so much like struggle to get this stuff to market that now it's sort of like, well, fuck it is.

1:51:20It is novelty, right? Like this is just a cooler way to ride down the strip to the club or to the, you know, casino or to this, that, to the guns shop. Yeah. And, and like, I think that's fine. I don't know. I don't know how they're making money doing it. And I don't know. That's actually a quick, are any of these companies making any money? No, the robot taxi companies are not yet making money. Why are they bleeding so much? Well, because it's extremely expensive. I mean, each one of these, well, so each one of the vehicles. So like, you know, we, we work with estimates, but you know, the best estimates for a Waymo is, you know, two to$300 ,000 a vehicle.

1:51:51Right. And then the operating costs are very high. We don't, we know very little about like how many, how many miles can they go? Right. Because there are these electric vehicles. Right. And they're powered by, you know, they're powering not just the drive, but also all this LIDAR and radar and compute and all these other things. So like the utilization, how many rides can it give before it has to go back and charge? Well, I mean, apparently they're, they're burning somewhere on the order of$2 billion a year. Jesus fucking Christ. Is that from purchasing more of them? They're scaling very aggressively.

1:52:24And they're also continuing to use most of the – so they were ready to sort of start bringing in this vehicle from China, which was using fewer sensors, and so really bringing the cost down. And then, of course, tariffs screwed that up. I think they've got that back on track based on my conversations here. So I think they're – look, I think Waymo will get to a point where they will have a viable business. I think they're raising, I've heard,$15 billion right now. to get to IPO. We're running out of money. We're running out of money. I swear to fucking God, but we're going to run out of money. Liquidity in 2026 is going to be wild because Waymo is not the only company that needs to raise money.

1:52:59There's huge IPO. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Topic, all supposed to - OpenAI is not going to fucking IPO. I don't know that any of them are. I don't think SpaceX is going to IPO next year. I think SpaceX could. I'm pretty, I mean, we'll see. You'd know better than I would. Prove me wrong. I mean, look, you know, I think, I think SpaceX, like Tesla has the kernel of a real business there with the, with the, the Falcon nine launch program. It's the most cost effective way to get into orbit. Right. The basic critique that I have. And again, like, you know, make the numbers public. I go, I hope they go public because we'll see the numbers.

1:53:32This is why I want it. I want Anthropic and open AI to go public. So bad. No, to just file. I mean, look, I just know. Let me look under the hood. Yeah. Let me, let me see how much you're burning because I bet it's a lot. I mean, I was talking to you about this off, off air. But there's two Chinese AI companies that go in public. Zuchi and Minimax, the thing they're called? I saw someone on Lee Man Sam wrong on that one. But I think one of them makes like$35 million in revenue a month and spends$200 million even. You've got to. Yeah, and you've got to spend money to lose money, I guess. But I think that, you know what, if this is the year when we finally get some clarity over that, I'd be really happy.

1:54:12Well, and I mean, just in terms of Elon Musk, I mean, like XAI burned, what, like$14 billion,$13 billion? Did they? Nice. Yeah, and like he's made his whole thing work for a long time by, you know, he's really good at raising money, but then also - They just raised around today. Did they? Yeah. That's nice. The level of burn that XAI itself, which has no profitable business to it, is like dramatically higher. Tesla's always lost, or not always, but almost always lost money. but like they could mitigate that loss and they could kind of string it along and go a couple of years between fundraising rounds.

1:54:49But this is, yeah, 10 plus billion dollars a year. Elon's empire is really fragile even without that kind of cash burn. And so I think 2026 is a fascinating year. Yeah, they raised$20 billion. Series E. Vela, Equity Partners, SAI? Yeah. Fidelity Management, Fell for it again award. Oh. Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and baron capital group among other key partners investors in the round include nvidia and cisco we're doing the doc we're doing the dot com boom again folks we love the dot com boom okay well so they love raising money they got a couple years of burn now and guess what uh do they well maybe 20 billion dollars data centers xii continues to expand its decisive compute advantage with world's largest ai super computers at colossus one barely built and colossus two not built at all ending the year with over 1 million H100 GPU equivalents.

1:55:44Now, for the non-technical audience, that's just a lot of GPUs so they can generate CSAM, I guess. But my favorite part of this is Grok 4 series, our frontier language models, are built on the best-in-class training infrastructure powered by Colossus. They've pushed reinforcement learning training to unprecedented levels, refining Grok's intelligence, reasoning, and agency using pre-training scale compute. What do you train on? You've been train-orating child porn. I mean... No, that's the... But what's the product? What's the revenue? Oh, sorry. They don't have that here. They don't have that.

1:56:16They will say, though, our reach spans approximately 600 million monthly active users across the X and Grock apps. Bull fucking shit. Getting scales easy when it's free. Also, Twitter doesn't fucking have that many users. Yeah. Like, I genuinely don't think they've done that. Are you suggesting that Elon Musk might be lying? I know, Ed. I know you're a big Elon Musk fan. I mean, it's hurtful. to have his credibility question this way. He is charting a path that will spread the light of civilization beyond our planet. Yeah. I wish the listener could see everyone's faces when I said that. He just took a drink when you said that.

1:56:54No, it's... I just feel like this is a year of reckonings. I think that that's the thing, because sure, they've got$20 billion, but he needs to build fucking Colossus and Colossus 2. I mean, it's either that, or we're gonna get getting blitzed and in december being like it's all fucking fraud but the thing is as i've been saying we're running out of money yeah like we're running 20 billion dollars whatever he wouldn't be talking about a spacex ipo if he wasn't desperate yeah he's the value elon always has to have the thing that he dangles out in the deep future and like the mars he said so many times it's like a really important part of the fanboy orthodoxy that like the mission to Mars is so important that we cannot compromise it by allowing, you know, shareholder value to become an issue with it.

1:57:42And as long as Elon's the richest guy in the world, like that was totally like that worked. The moment he started is fascinating because the vibe has been getting wrecked in the Tesla subreddits for like years now for a number of reasons. The SpaceX ones really fell this last year and the IPO, they were crumbling already just the number of times Starship was exploding. Yeah. But the IPO news was the thing that really, I saw these forums start to like actually melt down because the whole point of all of this is now like Elon can't guarantee it. Right. Like if he turns SpaceX over to shareholders, there's no guarantee that the mission happens.

1:58:18I mean, because it was definitely happening before. I wonder how they react also because, you know, didn't he, he said they weren't also doing a series E fundraising round. Yeah. He said that this isn't happening, but it's also an upside around now. it's a you know it's even bigger than before so what happened to that big nvidia data center deal though the the spv but that was going to do a special purpose vehicle we don't talk about we don't talk about that spv shit talk about previous deals we don't need to valor the valor the valor yeah it was the no it's the 20 billion dollar two billion from nvidia yeah valor was the middleman or they're doing the lease back or something but it's all private so you don't know like yeah but did it close i think i think so yeah but that's the thing like this or now just getting back into my regular bullshit there's a 38 billion dollar deal that oracle has been talking about doing for months that's disappeared off the thing i just think the banks are running out of money it's so sick also that that deal was uh talked about so loudly it's like is it this is going to be a cornerstone of the coming overbuilt for compute this is gonna allow us to be able to put ourselves and a lead and ahead of any other competitor.

1:59:22I remember people from banks saying after the Twitter deal that that dead debt that they weren't able to get off the books was really starting to impact their ability to fund new deals. And it was really starting to sound like, especially with banks that have been historically very close, I won't name any names, but with Elon, it sounded like the magic was sort of over. But then AI. It seems like, yeah, there's still a little juice. No, it's data centers bullshit. shit like it really it's just the everyone's so goo goo for data centers these days that they're just like what if he builds more it's also so funny to close this the same week as the fucking c-sam thing you're like like i don't know if i'm a business journalist and i have any chance of asking anything i'm like hey fidelity are you investing in the data centers or the child porn because that's the thing it's like i'm not even being like i'm not trying to be crass it's a fucking question yeah yeah like bryce elder legend from the ft did a great piece today where it was like oh it's like the the pornography generator connected to a social network and it was just a list of all the staff at x but with clown makeup on so good the ft bryce elder alphaville legends no it's it's very funny watching this and i he doesn't usually do anything at ces i wish never i wish he did i wish the big companies would fuck this place up a little bit more just to make it more chaotic listen one year you're gonna notice that there's gonna be a south africa section and you're gonna see all your favorite all the stars peter thiel all the all the famous south africans mark andreessen is not south africa all right it's uh it's the other motherfucker that i oh my god the other bald motherfucker i always forget his name will come to me i'm sure we'll i'm sure the listeners can fill in the gaps grumple schultz that's his name i'm calling in that but i'm gonna look them up now it's gonna bother me all right i think we're gonna wrap it there though now we've talked about elon musk a little bit this has been such a lovely episode thank you all for listening ed on ed on grace jr of the tech bubble newsletter ed niedermeyer of the autonomic cast and of course henry casey of cnn underscored and as ever please donate to the pediatric epilepsy research consortium in honor of sean paul adams who is a wonderful friend of the suite sean paul's son is epileptic and his family deeply appreciate it thanks so much for everyone for listening.

2:01:47We will be back in a few hours.

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