CES 2026: Part One (Monday)

Welcome to Better Offline’s coverage of the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show - a standup radio station in the Palazzo Hotel with an attached open bar where reporters, experts and various other characters bring you the stories from the floor. In the first episode, Ed introduces you to Better Offline’s CES coverage, we talk about NVIDIA’s tepid press conference, smart glasses, LLMs on TV and Robert’s new exoskeleton. Featuring Ed Ongweso Jr. (The Tech Bubble Newsletter), David Roth (Defector), Scott Stein (CNET), Lisa Eadicicco (CNN) and Robert Evans (Behind The Bastards). We’ll be here all week - one episode from Monday, then two from Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and an epilogue from Saturday. David Roth, Defector: https://bsky.app/profile/davidjroth.bsky.social Defector: Defector.com It’s Christmastown Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/its-christmastown/id1407429849 Ed Ongweso Jr.: https://bsky.app/profile/bigblackjacobin.bsky.social The Tech Bubble Newsletter: https://thetechbubble.substack.com/ Matt Binder: https://bsky.app/profile/mattbinder.bsky.social https://mashable.com/author/matt-binder Scott Stein https://www.cnet.com/profiles/scottstein8/ Lisa Eadicicco https://www.cnn.com/profiles/lisa-eadicicco Robert Evans: https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social Donate in Sean-Paul’s honor: https://www.perc-epilepsy.org/ YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:36Speaker 02

  Call Zone Media.

• 0:38Ed Zitron?

  Beloved by some, hated by many, chosen by God and perfected by science, I'm Ed Zitron, and it's time for the better offline CS experience.

• 0:58Ed Zitron?

  We're back for our second goddamn year. Welcome to this year's incredible coverage of the Las Vegas-based Consumer Electronics Show, and I'm sitting in the Palazzo Hotel, and we've got a fully stocked bar, tacos, and the love and warmth that only comes from the power of friendship. We're going to be here all week, bringing you the news and views from the ins of the tech industry's largest conference, each day with a rotating cast of incredible people across multiple 30-minute blocks. My bartender Phil Broughton will keep me liquid, my producer Matt Asowski will keep me sane, and my editor Matt Hughes will feed me stories, along with my guests from the show floor and my own goddamn eyes. Now, our first contestants are, of course, the wonderful Mr. Edward Onguoso Jr.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Hello, my friends. How are you doing?

• 1:36Ed Zitron?

  And he writes the wonderful Tech Bubble newsletter. And of course, David Roth of Defector is joining us today.

• 1:42Speaker 04

  Hey, how's it going?

• 1:43Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah. And Matt Binder of Mashable. Welcome back, Matt.

• 1:46Speaker 05

  Hey, it's great to be here. This is like an annual thing now. Two years in a row is annual, yeah.

• 1:51Ed Zitron?

  It counts. It counts. So today, I thought the show floor was open, and it wasn't, but that just meant that Ed, David, and I went to watch the Jensen Huang CES keynote. And I must say, I have watched some shit in my time, and I was, I was quite, I was quite bored, but not because I didn't understand. I was bored because I did understand. I was sitting there just doing, what? No? What? There were things he said during it that did not make sense.

• 2:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, you were bored and upset, and I was bored and bored. Which is an important distinction.

• 2:24Ed Zitron?

  Now, for those of you who actually want content about the keynote, don't expect that. Do not expect that at all, because Jensen Huang did not actually announce anything new. Six new chips, Vera Rubin GPU, they're all, every single thing he announced today was either three or six months old, even the video of the dorky robot inside this thing called the Omniverse. Yeah, the Omniverse, by the way, and Ed is just looking at me, just like, just like, oh god, the Omniverse is Nvidia's little simulation space for robots. Imagination station. Yes. And yeah, they spent half the thing talking about, as David put it, what would, the things that would be nice if they existed.

• 3:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, there was a lot of stuff that, if it was real, which we saw no indication that it was, it would be super tight.

• 3:14Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing, like, Jensen Huang is a, he's a, he's a real, he's a showman usually, like, a year ago, he was like, like, screaming and dancing across the stage, he was doing a little Avengers bit with a shield with a Black Wall GPU, this year, it just looked kind of sad, he didn't seem happy.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  He didn't seem, he was, you don't want to use the phrase low energy, because it's got its political valence now, but he was, he seemed a little glum.

• 3:39Ed Zitron?

  A little sleepy.

• 3:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, a little sleepy.

• 3:41Ed Zitron?

  Sleepy Jen.

• 3:42Speaker 05

  Sleepy Jen, sleepy Jensen.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, they don't want me to say it, but should we say it? Should we say it, folks? He, but he was as shiny and like, sort of bouffant as I'd hoped, like, I was-

• 3:52Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, he had a very shiny jacket.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  As like a non-tech journalist, like, I just know him as being an extremely rich guy with a really, like, obvious aesthetic, and so the idea of going to see him, like, that's actually the most Las Vegas thing that I could have done. It was basically the same reason that people would go see, like, Wayne Newton here, where they're like, I don't really love his work, but I know that, like, when I see him on that stage, I'm gonna be like, damn.

• 4:16Ed Zitron?

  Or go to the speed.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  That's Wayne Newton as hell, and this was Jensen Huang as hell, like, for whatever that's worth.

• 4:21Speaker 05

  It's something you just do while you're in Vegas.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  Right, exactly.

• 4:23Speaker 05

  You go see Jensen Huang, right?

• 4:25Speaker 04

  You don't have, I don't have to be a big fan of Gwen Stefani to go see her residency, yeah, like, this is, which is- I don't know, very instant switching on the Vegas part of your brain for this.

• 4:35Ed Zitron?

  But that was the thing. There was a line of thousands of people to get in, thousands and thousands.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  And we cut a lot of them.

• 4:41Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and we we cut some lines and I'm very sorry if you were lining up to see the Jensen Huang Donkey Show and you you ended up not being able to sit down for two boobless hours.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  It was almost as long as Avatar three.

• 4:57Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and I understood it as much as well. I haven't seen any of that.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Don't slander my boy Cameron. I would let him run Nvidia, you know, I think he'd actually give us some.

• 5:07Ed Zitron?

  He knows how to build a submarine.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:10Ed Zitron?

  Which is a worrying fact I discovered during when the Titan submersible exploded.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  He's a sicko.

• 5:14Ed Zitron?

  Like he's an actual submarine fan. But yeah, this thing was, it was really weird because this is the largest company on the stock market. And it just felt, I don't want to say dull is the wrong word because he certainly wanted to pretend to be excited. But it was like half, what if we could do robots? We can't, but what if we could? And then it was like, we're Vera Rubin GPUs. What do you like this? What do you think of this? And then you may be thinking, listener, okay, at what point did he talk about AI? Barely. He was just like, yeah, you got agents, they're happening. And then he did like a two minute long demo of this guy building an agent, personal assistant that did stuff.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  And looked at a whiteboard and told him he had five things on it.

• 5:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and yelled, he connected to a hugging face robot.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:57Ed Zitron?

  That then told his dog to get off the couch.

• 5:59Speaker 04

  Potato. Potato, the dog was treated very rudely, very nasty.

• 6:02Ed Zitron?

  Very unfair to potato.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  You know, when I first saw that clip, I misread it and I was like, I, there's a readout where it says, your dog is on the couch and I know you don't like that. And I thought it said, your dog is here and I know you don't like it.

• 6:15Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 6:17Ed Zitron?

  Shall I eliminate the dog?

• 6:20Speaker 04

  Dog, kill the dog.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Some fucking Dalek.

• 6:23Ed Zitron?

  Jensen Huang getting up there. We finally worked out a way to kill dogs. Just someone off camera. No, Jensen, we took the dog killing part out. He's like, no, it's good. They love this. We've got tons of dogs. Like, there's like billions of dogs. We want $10 a dog. We're in business. That's like one quarter of GPU sales will be fine.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  You see this chart, the price of killing dogs has gone down exponentially. Here's 100, what it costs to kill 10 trillion dogs, the parameters. Are increasing over the years. The cost of each kill is dropping by by five orders of magnitude.

• 6:56Ed Zitron?

  I don't know if I think killing dogs is funny.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Ten trillion dogs.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  For the listener, he was talking about, at one point, he was talking about how much it costs to generate tokens or and to train models that were 10 trillion parameters.

• 7:10Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, they they said the parameters were going up and they had this great chart where it's like, well, you said it was the X axis was just dollars and the Y axis was latency. And the dollar, the line was down, but the latency was up. And he didn't really explain what that meant. He was just like, look, it's tempers, it's a 10th of the price.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  It was 100% like, do you hogs want to see a line go up? Like, do you like the stonks guy? Do you want me to bring him out?

• 7:35Ed Zitron?

  The hogs hated it. The hogs were sitting, they clapped.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  I was surprised by that.

• 7:39Ed Zitron?

  As they should. He brought up a picture of Vera Rubin, who I've completely forgotten what she did.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  She was the person who observed that, you know, Newtonian mechanics predicts that things in the farther orbit around the central object should take longer to go around it than closer to it. And the edge of the galaxy rotates faster than you would expect, which suggests that there's other matter, dark matter, which is making the the edge of the galaxy actually rotate at a higher velocity.

• 8:10Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  An interesting one, which we still haven't figured out what the fuck to do with. So, but more interesting than, you know,

• 8:16Ed Zitron?

  than anything they would do. But that was the one time people clapped and we we came back after just like mildly concussed, just like our brains just like humbled and we went and looked at the CES 2025 one. People were hooting and hollering and cheering and shit. This, because they were like, yeah, we're going to walk you through Blackwell and they tell a bunch of lies, but at least they had charts with the lies. This year it was just kind of like limply walking in, just going like, yeah, this is really heavy. I'm not even kidding. He like just lifted up.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was pretty dialed in last year for what it's, I mean, that's like the bit of it that I, you know, again, to me, the Wayne Newton comp. It's like, you don't have to like the songs to be like, damn, he's really got this patter down.

• 8:52Ed Zitron?

  Look, I've seen Metallica seven times and they put on a show well every time.

• 8:56Speaker 05

  Now, I'm the only person in this room, obviously, who was not, did not see the keynote. Do you think this came, did it come across to you like, um, like they may have had something they planned to show here, but it fell through or wasn't, or it didn't come across like they really like busted their load last year and couldn't live up to the hype this year?

• 9:16Ed Zitron?

  I think it's the second one. They didn't really seem to have anything because I mentioned it in passing, but it was, it was a lot of stuff from GTC, which is their big developers conference and like, or they did this whole thing, a lot of new black whale chips and every chip they, sorry, Vera Rubin chip, every chip was announced months ago. It just felt weird. It felt like they didn't have any, any keys to jingle anymore.

• 9:34Speaker 05

  Cause last year, the hype for that keynote was weeks in advance. People were talking, it was like the highlight of CES. It was like they, they had like some big musical artist or something showing up. It was that big.

• 9:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it wasn't that. This year legitimately, you could see people like, people were leaving. Yeah, there were walkouts. People just walking out after, after a thing took like, like last year, there was a two and a half hour long line before it opened. This year there was a long line, but it filed in. Then they told us it was full, but then they were like, actually there are seats now. It's just very weird. It was a 3800 person theater. Just feels like we're at the end of something, which is fun. I enjoy that.

• 10:14Speaker 05

  Which also, I don't think the rest of CES has got that message based on all the AI, everything, everywhere. Yeah.

• 10:20Ed Zitron?

  Matt, you've been, you went to CES and bailed yesterday, as you.

• 10:22Speaker 05

  Yes, yes.

• 10:23Ed Zitron?

  Did you see anything interesting? Anything that?

• 10:26Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, everything, the interesting thing is actually, you would think AI is the main thing. And I guess there's crossover here, but the, the really big thing this year is robotics.

• 10:35Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 10:35Speaker 05

  Everyone's got robots doing something. And obviously there is the AI like, uh, sort of angle there, but it's, it's not the same in terms of like how they hype it up. Like I remember a few years ago. Every company wanted to be a metaverse company.

• 10:50Ed Zitron?

  Hell yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 05

  Or a blockchain company. And I said this last year on this show that that seems to be dead and it seems like that's the case. It's just dead as Joe Trump coming back and crypto coming back in terms of these guys making all their money through insider training on crypto does not seem to have translated over back to the tech world.

• 11:09Ed Zitron?

  There is no. Do you see any crypto stuff?

• 11:11Speaker 05

  No, I've not seen any, no, not even blockchain is usually the way these tech companies try to like get their hold on that space and I've seen nothing.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Have you seen any prediction market stuff?

• 11:22Speaker 05

  No, no prediction market stuff. I mean, it's still early. This is the show floor hasn't even opened yet while we're talking, but I've seen none of that. Everything, there was a few AI stuff here and there. Wearables are big again this year.

• 11:35Ed Zitron?

  What kind?

• 11:36Speaker 05

  Uh, every wearable you could, that's, that's where the AI stuff is coming in. Everyone wants a wearable that you have around your neck where it records what you're saying and then gives you the transcription of your conversations.

• 11:48Ed Zitron?

  If only we had a way of recording our voices. If only they invented some way that I could talk and then they would save it.

• 11:58Speaker 05

  Right. It's a good thing everyone listening to this is in the room with us right now. Otherwise I'm just lost.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  I saw Victoria's song posed something of a wearable that is, is like a taint electrocute.

• 12:10Ed Zitron?

  Yes, she's gonna come on tomorrow.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, then I won't say anything more about it.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  It's a what now? Cause I heard you.

• 12:15Ed Zitron?

  It's a taint electrocute to think about.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  You know, maybe it's for kegels, maybe it's for edging. I have no idea.

• 12:20Ed Zitron?

  Look, what people do with their taints is not my business.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Well, it's someone's business now.

• 12:25Ed Zitron?

  Well, no, it's literally someone's business. It's big business.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  The previous time I was on this podcast, Victoria was on and she was wearing a wearable.

• 12:33Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  And it was one of the ones, I forget what it was called. It was advertised on the subway lap. Friend?

• 12:38Speaker 05

  The friend.

• 12:39Ed Zitron?

  It wasn't friend, it was now.

• 12:40Speaker 04

  Different though. Oh, whatever it was, it was.

• 12:42Speaker 05

  The rabbit?

• 12:43Speaker 04

  It was designed to be rude to you. Like, that seemed to be what the hack was.

• 12:47Ed Zitron?

  No, it's when you, sorry, this was, I think it was the friend, because this is a few months ago. It wasn't CES. It was just when you're in the studio.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  Just in New York.

• 12:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, it was just very rude.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it was, it got mad at her during our interview. Like, we like, asked how she felt about it. And she said, and she had like a name for it. She was like, it's blorbo. We don't always get along.

• 13:05Speaker 05

  I mean, there's a whole theme restaurant that does that, right? Where the waiter's rude to you. I mean, there is an audience for that, obviously.

• 13:12Speaker 04

  And bevyx you can wear around your neck. Just fucking scream at you.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  I love, I love it when AI is rude to me.

• 13:19Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  You know, that gets my juices going.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  It was, I guess the idea was that it was like, it, you know, it wasn't like the other AIs. Like, it was a little edgy.

• 13:27Ed Zitron?

  I do like the idea that they're like, yeah, we made an AI friend, and like all of my friends, it's very rude. Doesn't want to talk to me, doesn't like me. Just a guy who does not have friends. Just has a bunch of people who hate him.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is so lonely. I just wish I had someone to be mad at all the time while I'm at work. Like, just thinking my idle moments.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  There's this comic I love where it's like, you know, four panels. One panel's a scientist and he's like, hey, I made this robot and it screams the word cuck. And then it just keeps screaming cuck. And then someone's like, why'd you make this? And he's like, oh, I don't know.

• 13:58Speaker 05

  Screaming. I mean, listen, like, the week we're recording this, like, every AI we're gonna talk about, they all seem good compared to what Elon Musk's Grok is doing right now.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Oh, my god.

• 14:12Speaker 05

  Like, like.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  But when Grok gets lucidity, you know, when it drops the Mecha Hitler, you know, when it's super woke, when it's not the not a conceptual porn.

• 14:20Speaker 05

  It has its moments, like, like, I'm sure every pedophile has its moments.

• 14:26Speaker 04

  Like Grok's neighbors, remember? He was a quiet man.

• 14:28Ed Zitron?

  I'm gonna put that bit too bad now.

• 14:30Speaker 05

  We all think Trump is funny sometimes, right? Like, we all think Trump has his moments, where classic Trump comes through. But at the end of the day, he was friends with Epstein. Like, that's Grok now. Like. I mean, Grok is literally like, uh, uh, undressing photos of children.

• 14:49Ed Zitron?

  So you can go on, if you want to see a bunch of people who redacted, uh, go to r slash Grok on Reddit, and it's just. LLM generated pornography and you'll never, you'll be surprised to hear it's all woman. And what's crazy is I bet each one of those costs like five to 10 bucks a generation. So Elon Musk is just burning billions of dollars for like the most wretched perverts in the world. And what's great is you go on there and there will occasionally be a guy who's just like, this fucking thing's moderated and it's censored now, it's censored. I can't generate the pornography I want. Elon Musk has failed us. And it's just like, finding people who are more reactionary than Elon Musk is tough, but man, do they do it.

• 15:26Speaker 05

  Right. I mean, I don't even know that like, I'm sure he's put some sort of limits on some things, but people right now, we're like a week or two into this whole scandal with Grok creating literal child abuse material.

• 15:41Ed Zitron?

  Like sexual.

• 15:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, child sexual abuse material and they're still able to make it. And Elon Musk is on, on X right now, laughing about pictures people are sending of non-consensual undressing.

• 15:53Ed Zitron?

  Raffling to beat the band.

• 15:55Speaker 05

  You think it's funny?

• 15:56Speaker 02

  The last thing I saw Elon Musk post was someone made this long essay about how the reason why Africa can't manage itself is not because of colonialism, it's because of IQ or something. And then him quote tweeting it and going truth nuke.

• 16:07Ed Zitron?

  You know, hard truth. Well, I ever, I actually saved a screen.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Said the South African.

• 16:12Ed Zitron?

  A screenshot, yeah, Jesus. Screenshot from r slash Grok. Here we go again, space exclamation mark. Those XAI Grok motherfuckers back to fucking zombies in slow motion and constant over moderation. Thank fuck my subscription is nearly up. These word I won't say are fucking losers. Fuck you, Elon Musk, you fucking rock spider. They've updated again and made it even worse than before. And then someone responding with, what? My morning goon session went as usual.

• 16:37Ed Zitron?

  I just, and any other forum would be like, that's someone doing irony, but no. R slash Grok.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  What was the word? What was the word?

• 16:43Ed Zitron?

  It's a swear word that I'm not going to say on this show. It's not a slur, thankfully.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I was curious, how's it as a square, is it as a slur?

• 16:52Ed Zitron?

  Towards the beginning of the alphabet letter Y.

• 16:54Speaker 05

  But like the, the fact that Grok does this, like obviously every company who has an AI product now, their AI can do the same.

• 17:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 17:03Speaker 05

  Well, it seems like they have at least. Used the resources they have of like a trust and safety department.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 17:10Speaker 05

  To to think these things through and limit it or stop it from doing that before it actually is able to. They seem to not only be aware that it could do that and not want to stop it. They're loving that it's doing this.

• 17:23Speaker 04

  This is like, it makes me feel at the risk of making an extremely prosaic observation about something that I think I don't want to put words in anybody's mouth, but I think we all believe is bad.

• 17:32Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 17:33Speaker 04

  The fact that this has been going on for two weeks makes me feel like I'm losing my fucking mind.

• 17:37Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 17:38Speaker 04

  Like, I can't believe that there is a thing generating child sex abuse material on the social network that we all were on.

• 17:45Speaker 05

  That people are paying for.

• 17:47Speaker 04

  Years.

• 17:47Ed Zitron?

  People are paying forty dollars a month to access.

• 17:50Speaker 05

  Like, if if if an individual, a human being, went online right now and uploaded CSAM, a a single photo on on a social media site, they would have a knock on their door.

• 18:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:01Ed Zitron?

  They'd be going to jail.

• 18:03Speaker 05

  Whereas Elon Musk's creation is literally creating this en masse over and over again. An image per second, per minute, I don't know, but it's a lot. And it just keeps doing it and no one's, who whose job is it to step in and stop it?

• 18:19Speaker 04

  That's the bit that makes me feel most insane is that this is one of those things where it's like, there's not a great number of points of consensus in American culture at this point, right? But this is one that I think everybody's more or less on the same page on. So I thought, and it's also one of the things that like, say what you will about the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They've been pretty consistent in their approach to this issue through the years. The fact that this is somehow now just like raffle fodder, like all the rest of the shit.

• 18:46Speaker 05

  It's crazy.

• 18:47Ed Zitron?

  Well, the the only good news in it, and there really is none, is how much this is probably costing. Like, it's probably like, I reckon they're spending a couple million a day on this, just the pervert CSAM machine.

• 18:58Speaker 05

  I mean, but, but I mean, he's, he's getting government is the government, the US government is paying to use Grok.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  There like, I mean, there is like the money they're spending like on creating this stuff like the money is coming in to make up for it, at least for Elon Musk.

• 19:13Ed Zitron?

  But is it like, I'm pretty sure he's just losing money. It's insane that also he is building massive data centers to do more of this. This is the, this is the thing. This is the year we're walking into. This is 2026. We've got, what can L L M's do that they couldn't do a year ago? Well, guess what? It's child pornography. That is, that is the new thing that they can do. We watch fucking Jensen Huang be off for two hours. Not really, uh, if only, um.

• 19:37Speaker 05

  Think, think of the years it took Jeffrey Epstein to create this stuff. And now Grok can do it all in just one.

• 19:43Speaker 04

  With the power of AI, the future is at our fingertips.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  So in the metaverse, you can go make your own island with Grok. You know, you can make your own network.

• 19:51Ed Zitron?

  Right. That's the thing though. It's.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  I do like the idea that that's, that's the use case for the metaverse.

• 19:56Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  Is it like, if you want a little Saint James?

• 19:59Ed Zitron?

  No.

• 20:00Speaker 05

  And the temple, don't forget the temple.

• 20:01Ed Zitron?

  Oh my God. This is how we're beginning CES 2026. We're, Robert Evans isn't even here. And I'm like, okay, we've got to change the subject.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  Right. Created a version of the game, Mist, that would get me sent to jail for the rest of my life.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Or, or a job as a senior product manager.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. If you're willing to relocate to Austin, yes.

• 20:23Ed Zitron?

  Jesus fucking Christ. I thought this show would be normal. It wasn't.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  Did you catch that there was like Grok cameo in the Jensen Huang presentation? Like.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  It's multimodal.

• 20:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. He was so, he was using this as an example to like, show what the technology could do. And it was just like, sorry, the stomach sound.

• 20:40Ed Zitron?

  Hell yeah.

• 20:41Speaker 05

  Was it, was it the stuff that came out this week?

• 20:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. I love that. But it was funny to see it like, given that that is like, I think that everybody's first thought on what is this?

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Also bragging about working with Palantir. I mean, they.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  So many, all the fucking bad guys are getting name checked.

• 20:57Speaker 05

  All the stars. Palantir, I don't know if they're here this year, but they've been at past CESs showing off their armed vehicles and everything. They, they're, they're.

• 21:05Ed Zitron?

  But they don't make armed vehicles. They're a fucking, they're evil sales force.

• 21:08Speaker 05

  I, I, I don't go to this Palantir booth, but the years I've seen them there.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Let's go to the Palantir.

• 21:13Speaker 05

  They were.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  With face masks.

• 21:17Ed Zitron?

  I'm gonna go over there and just be like, hey mate, you got any guns I could borrow? And they just start asking them for a gun.

• 21:23Speaker 05

  Can I see your phone real quick?

• 21:24Ed Zitron?

  Can I see your phone? I'm just downloading Grok.

• 21:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, just downloading Grok for real. Oh, it's already here. Oh, what are your last... Oh my god!

• 21:35Ed Zitron?

  But like, moving aggressively on from this subject.

• 21:38Speaker 05

  Speaking of children, I saw Lego.

• 21:42Ed Zitron?

  That was the segue I was trying to go for, but then we got into the little Saint James in the Omniverse, like. Simulate, Jesus. But Lego, so there's a small...

• 21:52Speaker 02

  He wouldn't have got caught if he had the Omniverse. I think that's probably what their salesperson would have been. I was surprised that Jensen Wong said that. And the people cheered so much. It was like, what is he... That was when they said, that was weird. You guys didn't want him to get caught?

• 22:06Ed Zitron?

  And the little robots came on and he... That was, before we move on to Lego, that was the strangest part of this thing. So Matt, you haven't seen this. There was a bit, and he apparently did this last year, where he had a little robot walk out. This year he had two. It was the same kind, he just had two of them. And it was bizarre, for 10 minutes, he was just like kneeling down and going like, "And this is how we're going to build you. This is how we're going to build robots in the Omniverse." It was so weird. And like, you are the CEO of the largest company on the stock market. Your company is like, got a $4 trillion market cap, everyone's buying these $70,000 GPUs from you. And you're sitting being like, "Hi, little robot. How are you doing? I'm wearing a $25,000 leather jacket."

• 22:50Speaker 02

  How much do you think he paid Disney for, to use those two robots from Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order?

• 22:54Ed Zitron?

  Were they from Star Wars?

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're Jedi Fallen Order.

• 22:57Ed Zitron?

  Jesus Christ, that was the cheapest, that like, he went and got like, wow.

• 23:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, from Lucasfilm, he probably rented them.

• 23:04Ed Zitron?

  What's the cheapest robot you'll give him?

• 23:07Speaker 05

  What makes that crazy is apparently Disney gave these random robots, whereas I got C3PO and R2-D2 and Chewbacca showing up at the Lego event.

• 23:15Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, so we got there, we got there, so we got there, the Mandalay Bay, thinking CS:GO was today, it was not. Flawless organization as usual from me. And I walk in, it's just the Chewbacca room.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  I peek through the door, I see Chewbacca, I see some rebels. C3PO's up there and we're like, alright, well, you know, sorry about that. It's like, we just like, accidentally open a door that isn't closed, like at a bar, be like, oh, sorry dude.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  The end of The Shining.

• 23:47Speaker 05

  Joey, no.

• 23:49Ed Zitron?

  Joey.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  So they just. Long brings out the blowjob bear from The Shining. Why would he do that? There's no reason for that bear to be on stage.

• 23:59Speaker 05

  He said it's multimodal, okay? That partnership with Grok is pulling through right now.

• 24:05Ed Zitron?

  Okay, please, let's talk about the smart brick from fucking Lego.

• 24:09Speaker 05

  So Lego, I will say, so Lego, who's making their CES debut, they've never done this before.

• 24:14Ed Zitron?

  Really?

• 24:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, so Lego actually had something pretty interesting. Where it's this, it's their new product, a smart brick in their smart play platform. And they basically took a silicon chip. That's small, is what they said, smaller than one stud on a Lego.

• 24:31Ed Zitron?

  That's cool.

• 24:31Speaker 05

  And they put it inside a brick and you connect this brick. Onto your Lego creations, your Lego characters. And this chip, basically, this, the smart brick basically has sensors and accelerometers. And it could track color and sound and distance and direction. And it basically brings your Lego creations and characters to life. So one example they gave in the demo was they put the smart brick on a little airplane Lego creation. And then they put a airplane pilot character on top of that plane. And when they were flying it around, the plane was making like whoosh and all like engine noises. And then the guy turns the plane upside down.

• 25:12Speaker 05

  And the airplane pilot starts to scream and this is the, the audio is coming out of this smart brick. I mean, it's.

• 25:19Ed Zitron?

  What?

• 25:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's, it's interesting. I mean.

• 25:22Ed Zitron?

  And from Lego, we're going to allow you to torture your Lego figures.

• 25:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, in, they, they were really playing that up too. They were saying, you know, if you run your Lego over with a, your Lego character over with a car. They'll like, there'll be sound effects for that. I mean, deadass serious. The guy was getting great joy out of mutilating these Lego characters with the smart brick.

• 25:44Ed Zitron?

  And the Lego saw collection will be coming out.

• 25:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  If you told me as a child, wow, um, wouldn't you love a computer inside of this? You told me my bionicle would be better if it had a computer and I would have set it on fire.

• 25:57Speaker 05

  I, I like the antithetical. But here's, here's. You know, I was thinking about this and like, I guess for like other toys where you just buy a toy and it's already built for you and then you add this other stuff. I guess you can argue it's taking away from kids imagination.

• 26:10Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 26:11Speaker 05

  But with Lego, they still have to build this stuff.

• 26:13Ed Zitron?

  I mean.

• 26:14Speaker 05

  So like the smart brick is just adding an extra like, I guess like feature to it that helps their imagination.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Screaming Lego is not going to take away from your imagination. Right. When I was a kid.

• 26:25Speaker 04

  It also has a kind of like, it feels like it's for adults more than it is for kids in a way. Oh yeah, that's also the other.

• 26:32Ed Zitron?

  This is for the man babies that are buying children's sets.

• 26:35Speaker 05

  Well, that's, that's the thing. They announced the first Lego smart play, playsets that come with these smart bricks. And that's where Chewie and C3PO and R2-D2 come in. The first playsets with this technology will be three Star Wars playsets. The Tie Fighter, the X-Wing and the Emperor's Throne room where you can have a lightsaber battle.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  George Lucas was not joking when he said that selling Star Wars to Disney was like selling his children to slavers. Cause they're gonna be working these guys.

• 27:04Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 05

  Well, speaking of that, the slave Leia playset will be coming out soon.

• 27:11Ed Zitron?

  Oh God, what sounds does that one make? First, I've always wanted to make my Lego figures scream in pain.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  There'll be a Jabba sound very lightly in the background of whatever Leia says.

• 27:23Ed Zitron?

  I, I, I'm just like, I think the theme of CES from everything I've read so far is we've run out of ideas. Like it kind of felt like that last year, but this year it's like Jensen Huang doing his, his just retread of everything. And Lego's like, oh, what the fuck? What do we put? Why don't we release more Legos? I guess they could make, what if the Lego figures could feel pain?

• 27:46Speaker 04

  What if you could reenact the, your witness to a great becoming scene from Manhunter with your Legos? You could do January 6th with your Legos.

• 27:57Ed Zitron?

  And in this place in the garden of the Vida in the background. Chewbacca after his changing, do you see?

• 28:04Speaker 04

  It's nice.

• 28:07Ed Zitron?

  Oh my God, I didn't think we, I thought we'd wait until Tuesday for the Manhunt.

• 28:11Speaker 05

  You could do like.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  I'm only here for one day. I gotta, I gotta get it in.

• 28:15Ed Zitron?

  I'm happy. I'm very happy to hear this. Most of the content, not so much. Like I didn't think we'd get to see Sam this quickly, but.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  The thing that's interesting though, to Matt's point, I don't want to skip you if you're trying to.

• 28:26Ed Zitron?

  No, no, don't worry.

• 28:27Speaker 04

  Is that it feels like, I agree that it feels like to a certain extent, there's a deficit of new ideas, but again, as like an Oof, who doesn't generally cover this? Like just as what it is, that's an impressive thing to me.

• 28:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. And also in a world where we just talked about everything we just talked about, like the Lego stuff actually feels like a breath of fresh air where it's a company that actually is focused on. I mean, obviously they want to make money, but it's also focused on let's build this stuff for kids and also adults that have this nostalgia love for Lego. And it's harmless and fun.

• 29:01Ed Zitron?

  I mean, harmless to the people, but Legos.

• 29:06Speaker 04

  Lego's great for terribly.

• 29:08Speaker 05

  Luckily Legos don't feel yet.

• 29:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Oh, that's what, that's one I like. And that would have been if I was in there putting my hand up. Can they feel the, no, sir, again.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  So you've got a Lego set, which has a massive computer at the center. It's going to do inference on device.

• 29:23Ed Zitron?

  On device pain for your Legos.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:26Ed Zitron?

  The suffering you can make your Legos experience is distinct and powerful.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Reenact any historical event where people felt pain.

• 29:34Ed Zitron?

  My line.

• 29:37Ed Zitron?

  I don't know. I, I want to be excited about it, but it's just, I look at it. I'm just like, you don't have, you, you could build literally anything. That's the point of Lego. And they're like, well, fuck, we can't build. We have no more ideas of that. We just have noises. I get, maybe I'm being too cynical.

• 29:53Speaker 04

  They're coming up with new ideas for like, you can build a big boat, you know, like there's stuff like that is in there. Trying to, I'm sorry, it's so gurgly. There's something about, like, that seems additive, I guess. It's like a little silly to me, but that's...

• 30:06Speaker 05

  I mean, it's the same, what is interesting is it's the same Lego brick for everything. Like, it's not like, oh, this is the specific smart brick for that Star Wars. That's not bad. You can, you can take the same brick and connect it to an airplane and it knows it's an airplane now. You take that same brick and connect it to Star Wars set, it knows which Star Wars character it's connected to, or what Star Wars vehicle it's on. It's this one brick that you could use for everything. If you have multiple bricks, they interact. One interesting thing I thought was like, if your kids are like racing their, their smart brick attached cars, and like, there's a smart brick, like a finish line creation, it'll, it'll track which one actually gets to the finish line first and let you know by the color of the vehicle. Like, it'll flash that color of the winning vehicle. So

• 30:51Speaker 05

  the kids can't argue and fight over who actually won, the smart brick tells them.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  That's a key part of any race is fighting over who.

• 30:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:59Ed Zitron?

  All right, we're gonna wrap this block for now. We've, of course, have Matt Binder from Mashable, Ed Unguoso Jr. from the Take Bubble Newsletter, and David Roth from Defector. We'll be right back after these ads, which I endorse all of. I am sure that they'll all be 100% aligned with my beliefs. Except for the Palantir one. Yeah, the Palantir one about the death machine, that's, that's... I endorse that. That's an Ed Zitron ad, right?

• 31:20Speaker 04

  That one was programmatic.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, they got, they got it mixed up. They did the other ad, which is me, instead of...

• 31:24Ed Zitron?

  This machine kills.

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• 32:36Speaker 07

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• 32:50Speaker 08

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• 33:34Ed Zitron?

  Diane, I'm entering the city of Las Vegas, Nevada for the Consumer Electronics Show. This is Ed Zitron, of course, it's Better Offline. We're back here at CES and I'm joined by the wonderful Scott Stein from CNET. Scott, how you doing?

• 33:47Speaker 10

  Hey, great. Hey, great. Ed, I'm burnt out is how I'm doing.

• 33:51Ed Zitron?

  That's fine, man. I just watched two hours of Jensen Huang going off. So you're in good company. Matt Binder, of course, from Mashable.

• 33:58Speaker 05

  Great to be here.

• 33:59Ed Zitron?

  And Mr. David Roth from Defector. Hello. So actually, I'm going to start with you, Scott, because I want to talk about these Exreal glasses. Complete subject change. We can get back to Lego in a little bit. But so you've been looking at a few different smart glasses. Any of these been actually interesting or useful?

• 34:16Speaker 10

  In bits. It's like the like Kurate Tech thing, like every, there are little bits that are interesting and they're all striving to like do more and you're trying to see where they're going to interconnect. Like Exreal. I covered them way back when they were N real and they were trying to be like magically.

• 34:32Ed Zitron?

  And what do they do though? Like are they?

• 34:34Speaker 10

  Right now they're display glasses. So really it's like a big, a big virtual display, just a flat screen.

• 34:39Ed Zitron?

  And you connect it to your phone?

• 34:41Speaker 10

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

• 35:20Ed Zitron?

  But what are they trying with Google? What are they up to?

• 35:22Speaker 10

  So that's basically like Project Aura, which I tried in December is like, can we make a VR mixed reality headset thing? But shrink it on the glasses for basically the kind of same experience.

• 35:34Ed Zitron?

  So is it not, so is it screens still? Or like, I'm a little confused.

• 35:38Speaker 10

  It's screens, it's 3D and, but the field of view is limited because it's like glasses. So it's like 50, but it feels kind of like a big TV view and it's projected. And it was running all of the Android XR apps that run on the Samsung Galaxy XR. That's like $1,800.

• 35:56Ed Zitron?

  The Vision Pro, yeah.

• 35:57Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 35:58Ed Zitron?

  Compete.

• 35:58Speaker 10

  And this one, there's no price, but it's probably going to be a lot cheaper. And it has a little processor puck that you need to use, but other than that, they're regular Exero glasses. So it's like relatively more practical. What I thought was interesting is you're, you got like effectively the same, a lot of the same experience. And selling a lot smaller that you might like stick in your bag.

• 36:18Ed Zitron?

  Right. I mean, where was the market for these though? Like, would you use them in your day to day?

• 36:23Speaker 10

  So I would use the display part, but the thing I want, the thing I want to get too, that I, I kind of always fantasized about was like, could I get work done without a laptop? Could I like sit there and just?

• 36:33Ed Zitron?

  Type away.

• 36:34Speaker 10

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

• 37:16Speaker 05

  Right.

• 37:17Speaker 10

  Two different products, completely unrelated. And then you're like, how many of those are you going to buy?

• 37:21Speaker 05

  That's what I, I've covered X real before too. And I always thought it was interesting that they focused on the display thing. Other like, because you come to CES and smart glasses, you can find like 20 different smart glass companies. They all want to do something with AI and augmented reality and audio recording, transcription, video recording. But actually, I appreciated that they focused on, what if we just give you a TV in your glasses? So like when you're on long trips or something, you can just be immersed and that's it.

• 37:53Speaker 10

  Right.

• 37:54Speaker 05

  The fact that you're saying they now want to, you know, do some more things with Google. Now I'm like, ah, I feel like X real is losing that focus that's made them, that made them stick out for me as a company that, oh, I, I appreciate that they got their eye on the prize. And that's, that's all they want to do.

• 38:13Speaker 10

  Well, what's interesting is like, there are parts that are practical that are interconnected. Cause it's like, there are companies like TCL and there's like, there's a bunch of companies that have been making these like TVs for your face, like these display glasses. But the thing that started like X real backed off all that stuff and they started doing these like very focused glasses. But they started introducing stuff in the later ones that's more practical. Like you can pin the display, which is actually useful because if you, if you're trying to work with these as like a monitor, it used to be that you turn and it would keep following your face, which is awful. Because you can't ever look in the corner of the screen. It's like, you just keep turning and it keeps moving. But they started pinning it in space. So you could actually treat it like a monitor, which is practical. And then they started having transparency. So it's like,

• 38:56Speaker 10

  You you look at the display, everything is blacked out around you. But if you turn your head, everything goes transparent again. So it's like practical, but kind of a little A R E. A little like, and I feel like what they're starting to do is like blend some of that and then be like. They had this partnership with a company called SpaceTop, too. They were trying to like float a lot of Windows apps. What happened to them? I they got absorbed into becoming.

• 39:19Ed Zitron?

  Very nearly a Jiminy Blick moment there for you.

• 39:24Speaker 10

  What happened to space?

• 39:25Ed Zitron?

  I'm like crossing my legs aggressively as well.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  So and it you said that was R A R related.

• 39:32Speaker 10

  I know, I don't know. I met with them last when they were debuting stuff in the spring, which was like they backed off hardware. They started pivoting to doing more software because they wanted to run it directly off laptops versus having to buy a whole separate product. But then I also feel like in a lot of ways, that's what you're saying. Who's the project or for? I feel like that, if it runs eventually off a phone, it's like the Samsung project deck stuff they've been doing for years. Where it's like, if you could make a thing and just carry your phone with you and carry glasses, that's more practical than carrying like a whole separate product.

• 40:03Ed Zitron?

  I just think that they're all trying to get away from admitting that they can't do this yet.

• 40:07Speaker 10

  Yeah, they can't do it yet.

• 40:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I feel like like they've just they're like, well, we've added Gemini. Do you like this? Do what is this good? Do you like Gemini?

• 40:16Speaker 10

  The A I stuff is the weirdest. I mean, obviously, there's that's a whole we're on the show or we're talking about that forever. But it's like, um, I see it like, yeah, that need to to dump stuff like that. What interested me about the work covering? I don't cover A I a lot because a lot of it I don't find that interesting. But I do find the idea of new interfaces. Could they find something new to do with it? Interesting, but they keep doing little party tricks versus something that's like really, really practical.

• 40:42Ed Zitron?

  I mean, I like I'm a vision pro truther and people do not like me for this. I've gotten it very unfair to me about this because I like the idea of like, um, like a like a different interface. Like you said, like something you pop in the corner. And I really wanted this in the vision pro and I tried way too hard. I really tried to make that shit fit into my life and it is an embarrassing device, even when you're alone.

• 41:05Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 41:05Ed Zitron?

  Like you just like you see yourself in it in any way like, oh, you've used it a lot as well.

• 41:10Speaker 10

  I've used it a lot, but what I use it for are two particular things. If I'm alone and I have it nearby, I will do work with it basically as a Mac monitor. And then I'll go, cause I don't have a monitor that's that big. And I go, oh, that's useful. If I get into a flow with it and then I'll watch movies because I don't have a TV that looks as good like that in the moment. I have an older TV and so I like that as a personal cinema, but at that price, no. And, and I'll never carry it with me anywhere.

• 41:37Ed Zitron?

  Ever gonna whip that baby out on the plane or something?

• 41:39Speaker 10

  I can't.

• 41:40Ed Zitron?

  I tried to watch Dune.

• 41:42Speaker 10

  People keep asking if I will, I will not.

• 41:44Ed Zitron?

  No, I, I had it. I watched Dune or like half of Dune on Dune on a plane and I got the worst migraine I've had in my life. And it kept freaking out. It was like shaking because it.

• 41:55Speaker 10

  Oh, like with the travel mode?

• 41:57Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it was really mad at me. There's also like, I can never get it to focus right, but I love the idea. I love the idea of like a pop up screen. Like I really, I like that a lot.

• 42:06Speaker 10

  Well, that's why the aura thing was interesting because I felt like it was like, okay, let's take the practical. Not, I mean, practical relatively, more practical and much lower cost of like a pair of glasses you take with you, but there are another pair of glasses, but it's like headphones for your eyes. But then like, could you do most of the vision pro stuff? The thing that I felt was like, when I was at WWDC, I, as a test, I just kind of took the X-Roll One Pros with me and filed my stories while wearing them, which wasn't really painful at all. And it was nice because I could float the screen. It wasn't really painful at all.

• 42:37Ed Zitron?

  No, I'm sorry. I wasn't laughing at you. Just like, that's the endorsement.

• 42:40Speaker 10

  Right. That's the endorsement.

• 42:41Ed Zitron?

  That's the nicest thing that anyone said about a pair of these glasses.

• 42:44Speaker 10

  But they, but they actually held, but they held in there. Like I was in the, in the heat. I floated the screen up and I was able to watch the keynote and work. And it was like, I didn't have to hunch over the laptop as much. I was like, oh, it's interesting. And like, that's like you, I would not ever be doing with a vision pro at all. So I thought, yeah.

• 43:01Ed Zitron?

  David, you have, you wear glasses. Would you? I do it. Why would you, I know that this is kind of a loaded question. Why would you not use these glasses? Like it's fine to give just like the truth.

• 43:11Speaker 04

  I mean, I guess the idea of it is it's, it's mostly a me issue. Like it's just a question of sort of being like, if I'm going to watch TV, I'll watch it through my glasses and not, you know, upon. But I'm, this is not one of those things. There's a couple of, you know, like red lines in terms of like technology that I'm just simply not gonna be comfortable using. I'm not a young man. And there's a bunch of things that like, I don't need to like.

• 43:36Speaker 04

  There was stuff like last year that there was like some, you know, like it's a thing that jerks off for you, you know, that is like it's mounted on an arm and it's like,

• 43:44Speaker 10

  Oh, I thought you were talking about glasses for a second.

• 43:47Speaker 04

  I was like, where's that from? No, but right. Yeah. I'm sorry that you didn't see the gram at the end of the demo today. But like all of that, the idea of like the glasses thing, I feel like it could be cool.

• 44:00Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 44:00Speaker 04

  I just, I would wait until a trusted source was like, all right, it's actually cool.

• 44:05Speaker 10

  Yeah. Is the water fine?

• 44:06Speaker 04

  Right. And I don't think I would want to, I would want to use it for like recreation stuff. Like what you're talking about, the idea of just kind of like being able to watch a movie or like have it be like a non embarrassing way to enjoy like a high quality television experience. Like that part's neat. I don't think I'd want to work on it. I don't know that like the invisible keyboard holds a great deal of appeal to me, but the-

• 44:26Ed Zitron?

  I assume you'd use like a real keyboard, like the invisible keyboard never-

• 44:30Speaker 10

  Yeah. So like you, most of these are still use a real keyboard and nobody's cracked like virtual typing yet. They keep, they keep saying that they might-

• 44:37Speaker 04

  That's entirely based on you like seeing commercials on TV and being like, damn, look Zuckerberg's typing on nothing.

• 44:42Speaker 10

  That's something I've even met at like with the neural band that there's, there's no idea of even getting close to typing yet, but they do have this like handwriting on your leg thing that's going to come out, but like, I don't, I don't do handwriting and I, I don't feel like I'm writing on my leg.

• 44:54Ed Zitron?

  I have a coordination disability called dyspraxia and the idea of those services working is really funny to me.

• 45:00Speaker 10

  Right.

• 45:00Ed Zitron?

  Like for years I was, I was told repeatedly, like you have a doctor's handwriting and I thought it was a compliment. It wasn't. It was not. It turns out I have a physical disability, but yeah, it's, I, even the meta glasses like when, actually the episode with Victoria, I tried them on and it's like, wow, these are cool. And I was like, now what? Like, cause if I walked around with these, not only would I look like a bellend, which isn't a huge change, but it's just like, you're just staring in the corner for the directions. It's like, it, it's like no, it's like the people making them haven't walked around as a normal person before.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  Right. And I think that's like the short answer to the question of like, what would it take for me to use it?

• 45:36Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  It's basically like, could I do it if I didn't have to like practice? Like, you know, the-

• 45:40Speaker 10

  Exactly.

• 45:41Speaker 04

  The thing I can say for glasses is that I put them on every morning in the same, I have the same user experience every single time, you know? And all I have to do is look through the lenses and I can see things slightly better. I'm curious about, cause this is something that like, I, I don't, you know, cover this area. I haven't like followed it as closely. How much better is this and how long did it take for things to get as good as they are now?

• 46:03Speaker 10

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

• 46:44Speaker 10

  crossed over where it's like, the Meta Ray-Bans became legitimately okay to wear, if you're going on like, vacation. I found them to be, yeah.

• 46:53Ed Zitron?

  No, stylistically, it's like the Roy Orbison machine, like.

• 46:57Speaker 10

  I know, but I already wear Roy Orbison glasses.

• 46:59Ed Zitron?

  You can pull them off.

• 46:59Speaker 10

  That's the thing. Yeah. So I'm like, they literally are like the glasses I'm wearing now.

• 47:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's, that's like, the real breakthrough is that like, if you're the type of person that wears that type of frame, like, the water, the water is indeed fine, the problem is solved.

• 47:11Speaker 10

  If you don't like that, there are some companies doing.

• 47:13Speaker 04

  If you want to do the zoomer wire rim things where the lenses are the exact same size as your eyes, I'm sorry, you can't check your email.

• 47:19Speaker 10

  They can't. The closest thing to that is like, I've been testing out even realities, which is another company that makes the G2 glasses, and they're like, more of a metal thin frame. But the only thing is that not only, they weren't functioning that well on the floor here, because everything interferes and stuff, but also, they don't have, they don't have audio, they don't do camera stuff, which also people might really like. They have a display, but only for a couple of functions, and you're kind of, and it goes to that, like, why am I doing this? But you might not notice their glasses. So everyone's like, getting to these like, like, would I tell a friend, the water's fine there? No, I'd be like, and even smartwatches now, I still feel like if I was, I'm not reviewing them so much now, but I would say, like, you don't need a smartwatch. You know, it's like, they never got to the point where you needed them. But I would go, okay, but if you want to get one.

• 48:04Speaker 10

  They're, they're okay. You'll be okay with them. And I feel like the problem with the Ray-Bans and all these things is that you have to recharge them. So the, the Ray-Ban Gen 2s get up to eight hours of battery, but it's really like four to eight. So at least they don't, uh, they don't crap out at noon, but they will go down at like 3pm. And then you're like, I have to put them in the case to charge. So I don't have to bring out another pair of glasses. You're like, this is a broken.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  You have to dual wield your glasses.

• 48:29Speaker 10

  You have to dual wield. So I'm always swapping glasses, but I say, to me, they're like vacation glasses more where it's like, I've, I've been to theme parks. I record on the rides for fun. Cause it's like.

• 48:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 10

  And, and also if you're at a super busy event like this, or you're like at an airport, like, and this is such a niche thing, but it's like, someone's calling and you don't want to reach for your phone or your, or your AirPods, but that's like a first super, that's like a ultra first world. Too many gadgets problem.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 48:54Speaker 10

  But it is kind of nice to just be like, oh, I can answer them and not have to do something, but can I justify that? People who have like vision impairment or other things that I've heard about that have been using that for that, that is interesting, but the companies I feel are not making enough. I can't speak to the assistive landscape, but I don't think there's enough effort being made to really have deeper helpful use of that. I feel like everyone's still taking like bits and stabs at that.

• 49:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I imagine that's part of like, you have to appeal to the people that have the money and that are like trying to get you to do this stuff. And so like that, I remember that being like a big through line. Last year is the first time I'd been to CES. And I remember there were all these technologies that seemed legitimately like miraculous to me, like for people that have very little motion. It's like a non-invasive chip that makes it possible for you to like communicate and move about and, and it was really cool. But I remember like Ed and I were at, Ed Anguoso, were at that, that stand and it was until we talked to one of the like engineering people. They were trying to sell it as some sort of like, uh, like a hack for like people working at fast food places. They're like, what if you've been touching chicken and then you got to handle money?

• 50:00Speaker 04

  This way you don't have to do it. You can just make a series of micro gestures and that will open the cash register. And I was like, well, that's way dumber.

• 50:07Ed Zitron?

  I'm, I'm making $15 an hour, but I will go under eight hours of surgery with a neurosurgeon costing me. Eighty five thousand dollars.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  It was not invasive, but it was the same sort of thing where it was just like, just say it's for fucking helping people, dude. Like, it's not, is that so bad?

• 50:22Ed Zitron?

  But the thing is, it's everyone, it's like, one leg in one place, one leg in the other, natural phrase there. Where it's, yeah, it could be an assisted device, but also regular people could use it. But we're not really going to try for either. Cause you really kind of have to choose, cause there was the smart cane last year, which at first I wanted, and I kind of made fun of. But it's actually like, we can help people who are blind, like great stuff. That was a direct focused product for a problem. The glasses are like, do you wanna record yourself making dinner? And you want this, and there's assisted features too, if you've got something wrong with you. But it's just this weird thing where it's, they wanna sell, they wanna find the next growth pig. And it's like, okay, it's gonna be glasses, I fucking guess.

• 51:02Speaker 05

  I mean, the, the main thing about wearables is like, you have to actually be someone who wears the non-technological version of it first. For it to speak to you, like, I don't wear glasses, whether it be prescription or sunglasses. So I wouldn't buy a, a smart glass, a, a product. I don't wear a watch, so I wouldn't buy a smart watch, cause I just, I have no need for it.

• 51:26Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 51:26Speaker 05

  You know, it does, it's, it, that's like the, the main leap for it, like I, okay, so I, I went to a, a private razor demo, the, you know, video game company.

• 51:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 51:35Speaker 05

  And so they actually, they were so, they, they were, they, they have a, a project they're working on, that's a prototype, that's smart headphones.

• 51:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I just saw this.

• 51:44Ed Zitron?

  What, what are those?

• 51:45Speaker 05

  And now, so their, their selling point for it is, you know, if you aren't someone who wears glasses. You know, there's more people who do wear headphones, everyone listens to music, but not everyone wears sunglasses.

• 51:58Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 51:59Speaker 05

  So this, they put all that, like, all those, like, uh, uh, smart features, except the display, because obviously it's a headset. In the headphones. So basically, the headphones have this little camera on the side, and that's your AI assistant. It can like, you're looking at a menu, like reading like a menu at a restaurant in like Japan or something. That was the demo they showed. Then the headphones can see the Japanese writing and translate it to you in the headphones. Another thing they brought up is how smart glasses, when they do translation features, everyone in the vicinity could hear the smart glasses talk to you. Whereas the headphones, because it's in the headphone set, only you hear the AI assistant talk to you.

• 52:40Speaker 05

  Another thing they brought up is how, you know, smart glasses can get hot and uncomfortable on your face. The headphones are bigger and they're not on directly on your face, so they're more comfortable to wear. That was their selling point. But again, I feel like, in my opinion, the reason to use smart glasses is for specific use cases in the moment for display purposes.

• 53:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 53:02Speaker 05

  Not AI assistant features, but that's just my, my, because that's not my cup of tea. But I guess if you're, you know, trying to sell a product to as many people as possible, smart headphones actually do sort of make more sense than smart glasses. It's very much in the prototype stage. They don't even have a...

• 53:18Speaker 04

  No price. They just said it would be competitive.

• 53:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:21Ed Zitron?

  I'm just kind of like, how many, it's always like, oh, you're in a foreign country, you're gonna, you're gonna look at a menu you don't understand. How often are you fuckers traveling?

• 53:32Speaker 05

  That sort of shows the bubble they're in, because I bet a lot of these guys, because they work for tech companies with big budgets, they probably are traveling a lot. They're probably in Japan and China.

• 53:41Speaker 04

  What's the number one issue? Is it when you're in Singapore and you don't know what to eat?

• 53:46Speaker 05

  That's probably one of their number one issues, though. Yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:49Ed Zitron?

  When your third vacation home, you're, the nearby places just don't have anything in English, and you can't scream at the waiter until you understand. So you've got your smart headphone, and I guess, do they even sound good? Like, I've had a Razer headset, they sound fine. I get back to the thing I was saying last, last chunk of this show. It's like, they're all fucking smart headphone. Fuck you. Make headphones that fit. None of my headphones ever fit in my fucking weird goblin ears. Like, everyone, like, that's the thing, like...

• 54:19Speaker 05

  Well, they're over the ear headphones. They're not AirBuds.

• 54:21Ed Zitron?

  Great. Okay. So now that they can maybe come up with a reason... Because it's just like, okay, I can use Gemini with them or some such bullshit.

• 54:31Speaker 10

  Like, yeah. Well, and that's the other thing, too, that I found with these, like, to go, it just made me think about this, going on this tangent. Think about AI in glasses. There's a lot that's frustrating, but like, first of all, the meta stuff always feels like a weird experiment that I'm never using. And when I do, I feel like I'm playing a weird, like, immersive game where I'm just like, talking to something. And I have no idea if what it's saying is correct. And then it's mostly this conversation. It becomes, it really becomes like a, like a performance art where I'm sort of like, what type of tree? Like, I'll stand in my town, I'll be like, what type of tree is this? What, I don't know what to ask it.

• 55:06Ed Zitron?

  That's a bus.

• 55:07Speaker 10

  Yeah, AI is like, you know, it's an open door, ask it whatever you want. I'm like, I don't have any idea where to start. Like, is this, I end up with things like, is that a bench? What is this? What is this? What is this shoe? And then, I don't know. And then, and then they'll say things like, you were in, a lot of it's descriptive, which could help, like, assistive, to be like, you're in a, you're in a large room with a chair. But I don't need to know that. So it's like, it looks like a comfy red cushion is there and a person, and it will get things wrong. And then it'll apologize. And then it's like, this strange.

• 55:40Ed Zitron?

  I love the future.

• 55:42Speaker 10

  It's like a play, it's like a weird performance art.

• 55:44Speaker 05

  A lot of the demos that show off these AI features really do act like you're an alien that just came to Earth.

• 55:50Ed Zitron?

  That's like so many, it's just, it's like they're all babies. It's like, what the fuck is that? That's a bus.

• 55:56Speaker 10

  I mean, I feel like almost all of this technology, like, for as long as I've been, I mean, not even, I don't write about it really, but like, just sort of observing it. Is that a lot of it is solving problems that I consider to be just like, basically solved. Like, you go to the grocery store for it.

• 56:09Ed Zitron?

  Or just like, I don't walk around being, like, if I don't know what something is, as long as it's not like a creature.

• 56:15Speaker 10

  The idea of getting it wrong and then being like, great point. Like, that was rather, you know?

• 56:23Speaker 10

  Goes back to like, if you can't really see it and you want assistance, that's interesting. If you want to read something, which maybe if you have bad vision, okay, but like, what am I doing? I don't trust, there's no advice it can give me, like, the whole, like, there's, there's a continuing demo in glasses about like, look in a pantry and get cooking advice. That is a who the fuck demo, where you're like, am I ever staring at a bunch of cans and asking, and then what is it going to tell me? Like, you could make a soup with the carrots. Yeah. And the tomato.

• 56:50Speaker 05

  If I'm looking at a pantry and I don't know what I want to make. I'm just the type of person who's gonna go for the microwaveable TV dinner.

• 56:57Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:57Speaker 05

  I'm not gonna use the AI to tell me what to make, because I don't cook if I don't know what.

• 57:01Speaker 10

  Right, if I search on my phone, like, there's a phone, you're, yeah, exactly. It's also the other thing with with it is that you're you are more than anything else. Shoehorned, you're funneled into using the AI, and usually it's one AI. It was like on your phone, you've got a million or anything else, you had a million ways to check stuff. And so you're like, why am I trapped in this one? It's like I'm it's like I'm relying on a strange assistant friend to like do things for me, and it makes me feel kind of helpless. So I was like, I just want to go do this thing. And it's like, I have to ask assistant person to kind of fumble a way to do it. And like, I'm, of course, you're gonna take out your phone.

• 57:37Speaker 05

  And they they do all these like, over the top, convoluted features. And I just mentioned how I'm not a sunglass or eyeglass wearer, so I have no interest in the smart glasses. But I actually did, for a specific use case, look into the meta glasses.

• 57:50Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 57:50Speaker 05

  So when I my kids play soccer, and when I go to a game, I would love to not be able to not have to hold my phone to record their game.

• 57:58Speaker 10

  That makes sense.

• 57:58Speaker 05

  I would love to have it on, just record. But then you looked into the details of those video recordings. The meta sunglasses can't record longer than a 30 second clip at a time.

• 58:08Speaker 10

  Well, three minutes now, so they've gone to three minutes.

• 58:11Speaker 05

  Unfortunately, those soccer games are longer than three minutes. Like, we.

• 58:15Speaker 10

  There's no reason they should they should allow you to do it till the battery runs out.

• 58:18Speaker 05

  Like, an actual good use case for it, that a lot of people, parents, would go ape shit over something like that.

• 58:25Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 58:25Speaker 05

  And they're spending their, instead of spending the time on, can we make the video record longer than three minutes? They're spending their time on all these AI features that I can't think of any regular use case for.

• 58:36Ed Zitron?

  I think it makes sense, though, if you take it from the perspective, it's a tech executive. It's like, what do people do when they cook? Well, of course, they walk into their pantry, which they've not been in since sometime. And they go, what the fuck is all this? What, why are the tomatoes in a can? Usually, someone brings these.

• 58:52Speaker 10

  How do I get them out?

• 58:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, just like, bag it. Just bagging it against, and they're like, oh.

• 58:57Speaker 10

  Alexa, free these tomatoes.

• 59:00Ed Zitron?

  Jim and I break open the case. No, but it's also like, okay, how long, how long will they need to do clips for? Well, what, what do children do? Tik toks, Tik toks, thirty, that, that's enough.

• 59:11Speaker 05

  I mean, it does.

• 59:12Speaker 10

  It is, it's Instagram focused.

• 59:13Speaker 05

  How much, how much time these tech executives probably spend when their kids? Have they ever, have they ever attended one of their kids soccer games?

• 59:21Speaker 10

  How long do I spend with them? No one records a video for longer than thirty seconds. It's one soccer game, Michael. How long could it last? Yeah. What are you, a monster making a, a ten, ten minute video?

• 59:32Ed Zitron?

  Three minutes and then I've got a call, Jimmy.

• 59:36Speaker 10

  It's sad. It's also like they don't, these glasses do not full, and this is the thing I was interested about with Google, with Project Dora, is that they're trying to connect with your phone. Like the other part of this is that these things don't even do all the things to connect with your phone that you would expect to. There's a lot of broken paths where it's like, whether it's like Siri, as much as you might not like Siri, or, or Gemini or anything else, you, you're used to like earbuds on your phone, doing some basic things that connect. These break that path. These will have another thing because you're using Meta AI. And it's like the oldies of smartwatches where like the Hookins are like, oh, it's got one thing for this, but not that. And this doesn't do that thing. And so you have to like discover like a puzzle because none of the phone companies have opened up good paths. It's also frustrating on that end.

• 1:00:20Speaker 10

  But that's like, how do you even, if you don't get to the point where you can at least work with the phone that you got, that's a big problem. Like it needs to do at least everything that you want. Even on the Samsung Galaxy XR, the AI was like, that Gemini Live thing was kind of interesting in that it could see everything in the room in your screens. But then I would ask it to like, close an app. And it was like, okay, to do that, move an arrow over to the X and close it. And I was like, you're telling me how to close the app? You're the, what am I doing here? Dude, like you're right there. It's not like, it's more like they're testing it than they have an idea of what you should be doing with this. It's like, um, It's like if I go to a restaurant, I want a menu of like interesting things that you're gonna tell me like, what are my choices?

• 1:01:05Speaker 10

  And here it's like in the AI land, it's like, what do you want in our magic kitchen? And it's like, I don't even know. Don't give me choice paralysis. I'm like, what? And then you ask, and then sure enough, it can't do some of those things. So it's like, why did you ask me? I get mad, I'm like, just give me a menu of like five options.

• 1:01:20Ed Zitron?

  No, I've been saying for a while, it's like, you know what the AI would be useful for? Getting through all the fucking menus they've added to my goddamn phone. The 100 different options in the settings part of my iPhone. There is now like one part, it's like, do you need to subscribe to Apple Music? Like, I'm already subscribed. I'm already a pay pig. You've already got me, Tim. And it's just like, no, we can't close a menu. But what if we looked in your pantry and came up with an idea? Maybe. And it's just, does it work every time? God, no. No, no, no, no, no. We don't do that here. We just, we guess-ish. And I don't know, it's, I wonder, I genuinely, I don't think they'll talk to me for many reasons, but I kinda wanna just grab one of them and scream, I mean, just talk to one of them and say, have you ever existed?

• 1:02:04Ed Zitron?

  Like, what do you, what does your day look like? Cause like, I don't know, when I cook, I like go and see what's in the fridge. It's like, oh, it's a challenge. It's like a little, like, oh, okay, I'll work out what the fuck I'm gonna put together with whatever, like the 18 Diet Cokes and the three pieces of old meat in there. Like, oh, get some seasoning and just eat them raw. But it's like, you, that's part of being a human. It's like, what if we remove the friction? Well, not really the friction. What if we added friction? Bah, an idea? It's just very sad. It's just sad. It's sad.

• 1:02:32Speaker 10

  But it feels like the, like, like many things, AI is forcing the hand and kinda ruining the landscape. It reminds me of like, among many things in the metaverse, I, I thought it was interesting following the philosophy of the meta, like, I'm gonna say, I thought the ideas in the metaverse are interesting, but then you could see it turning, overhyping, cryptoifying, becoming whatever, and nobody knew what the hell it was, and everything became this hype cycle, and it blew out. And I feel like AI is in that space where it's like, beyond other things, nobody, everyone's so rushing that nobody's thinking about any philosophical ideas that, that are important. But the point is that glasses now feel like a place where all that AI hype is being forced

• 1:03:13Speaker 10

  in fast, as opposed to like, how are you gonna use these on like a design area? VR, for all the people would, would shit on it, I do admire thinking back that like VR headsets, you could really do a lot of things in them in terms of knowing how to navigate them. And glasses are just like, oh, they're going to be in your life, but nobody's really come up with any interface, even the Orion things were like.

• 1:03:36Ed Zitron?

  And that's the $10,000 Meta ones, right?

• 1:03:38Speaker 10

  The one that doesn't, yeah, the one that doesn't exist yet, but like even like on Ray-Ban displays, all of a sudden you're just swipe, swipe, swiping through apps. And I'm like, nobody came up with a better way to do that because it's like, I don't want to swipe, swipe, swipe.

• 1:03:49Speaker 04

  There's something kind of sad about that. Like the idea of just being like, it's just another way to jam you into our stack of shit.

• 1:03:54Speaker 10

  The future is just swipe, swipe, swipe.

• 1:03:55Speaker 04

  That you're going to be spending all of, you know, like whatever, our interface versus the other interface versus whatever.

• 1:04:00Speaker 10

  Right. You want to have like some new idea, like it doesn't have to be like a new idea for new ideas sake, but it's like, could it be less annoying than other stuff?

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:04:08Speaker 10

  And if it's not, so I feel like nobody has really solved that yet. I'm, I'm curious if it'll happen. That's why I love covering this. It's just curious.

• 1:04:16Ed Zitron?

  All right, we're going to wrap this, this 30 minute bit for now. Matt Benner from Mashable, of course, joining us. We've got Scott Stein from CINA and of course David Roth of Defector.

• 1:04:25Speaker 10

  Of course.

• 1:04:26Ed Zitron?

  And I'm Ed Zetrill and this next ad is from Golpo, the cola that burns. So please buy Golpo.

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• 1:05:42Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:05:57Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:06:08Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you are not alone.

• 1:06:13Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:06:19Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 1:06:42Ed Zitron?

  And we're back, brought to you by Golpo, the cola that burns. This is the CES experience, better offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron. I'm joined by Matt Bender from Mashable.

• 1:06:50Speaker 05

  Hello.

• 1:06:50Ed Zitron?

  Scott Stein from CNET. Hi. And of course, David Roth from Defector. Hello. And we were just talking about Pepcom, which is a show that I can't remember if that's Showstoppers or Pepcom they wouldn't let me into.

• 1:07:01Speaker 05

  They're all very similar. So the media days, when before even CES officially opens to the public, there's the first three nights of CES, there's like this big like exhibition type event.

• 1:07:13Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:07:14Speaker 05

  First night's unveiled, second night's Pepcom, third night is Showstoppers. And basically, these companies, a lot of them smaller tech startups, basically use these as an opportunity to get some attention, because no one really seeks these companies out in advance, because no one knows who the fuck they are before they get to CES and see them.

• 1:07:31Ed Zitron?

  Yep.

• 1:07:32Speaker 05

  Last year, for example, the big winner unveiled, and I covered it, I think even spoke about it on this show last year, was the salt spoon.

• 1:07:41Ed Zitron?

  Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I saw the salts. And we got very sarcastic and it turned out to actually be very useful for specific people.

• 1:07:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, but like it was for people who don't know is a spoon that basically for people who couldn't eat foods with salt.

• 1:07:55Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, they have like a high sodium situation.

• 1:07:57Speaker 05

  Instead of just being stuck eating plain foods, they they take a scoop of their soup with no salt. And the the spoon sent like a zap that you can't feel into the spoon, which like lights up your taste buds and makes it and like tricks your tongue into thinking the food tastes salty. And it worked. I tried it out. I was pretty shocked that it worked, but it worked. And that's the example of sort of the weird type of stuff you could find at these like CES exhibition type shows.

• 1:08:25Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Have you seen anything weird and unveiled at all?

• 1:08:28Speaker 05

  Uh, there was a chess playing robot and you you wonder like, what's the market for that? Like, who's gonna buy?

• 1:08:35Ed Zitron?

  You can walk into any park in New York and find seven old men to play you at chess.

• 1:08:40Speaker 05

  For free. Yeah, for free.

• 1:08:41Ed Zitron?

  Well, well, no, they will hustle.

• 1:08:45Ed Zitron?

  Just like, yeah, sit down, young blood.

• 1:08:49Speaker 04

  The chess playing robot has not had nearly as interesting a life. Whoever the guy was at Dannemora for 22 years and then takes $50 from you over the course of a few games of chess.

• 1:09:01Speaker 10

  It's also like, there are so many programs to play chess. Like, why would you need the actual robot?

• 1:09:05Speaker 05

  Chess.com.

• 1:09:06Speaker 10

  Like, why does there?

• 1:09:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a, yeah, people don't, I don't know, like you just mentioned, yeah. It's on Windows 3.1. Right. Why is this happening? You play against the robot regularly on your computer. This is a physical chessboard with a robot that sits on the other side of you and physically like has a claw that comes down and moves the pieces. Which, which is weird because I've seen technological like chess sets that basically they have like a mechanism underneath the board. Yeah, right. That just like slides the piece, which seems, I mean, if you absolutely need a physical robotic chessboard, that seems like the more practical version than having this.

• 1:09:41Ed Zitron?

  Was it like a humanoid? Was it just an arm?

• 1:09:43Speaker 05

  It was like a BB8 sized robot sitting across from you with the mechanical arm that was moving the chess pieces. Yeah, and it was sort of like, first of all, like this looks very expensive. So I don't know who you're gonna sell this to. I guess people who want to show off their robot playing chess. Yeah, I mean, I was a great thing.

• 1:10:03Speaker 04

  Like, thing that would be in Drake's home.

• 1:10:06Speaker 05

  It's not like.

• 1:10:07Ed Zitron?

  All right, we already went over Grox LLM. You're not doing great if you have this product.

• 1:10:11Speaker 04

  A bespoke chess robot.

• 1:10:13Ed Zitron?

  Hey, check this out. I don't care. Like, look, it really, how fast, was it really slow as well? Please tell me it was really slow.

• 1:10:21Speaker 05

  It wasn't very slow. It was normal speed.

• 1:10:24Ed Zitron?

  No, that's, if I want one of those, I want it to be like, like really fucking like, just barely, like it takes like half a minute. Yeah.

• 1:10:33Speaker 05

  Or, or like an arcade claw machine and it sometimes just drops these, like just randomly.

• 1:10:40Speaker 04

  Ruins the whole board.

• 1:10:41Ed Zitron?

  I love this. So, but so the, did you talk to them at all? Because. I have way more questions for them than anyone else so far.

• 1:10:48Speaker 05

  I didn't because I thought that I looked at it and I was like, I thought of the, the chess that, the, those chess boards that have the mechanism underneath that. I was like, what is the point of this? I don't know. I should have, maybe if I see them again, I'll, I'll inquire more for you.

• 1:11:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, please do. I, I must not, but anything, anything else weird like?

• 1:11:07Speaker 05

  There, there was this thing that like, I don't even know how to explain it. It was like, I, I just saw it in motion. It was like this, this, almost like a roller type thing that you would lay down and it rolls under your back. I guess it's like to give you a massage or something.

• 1:11:22Ed Zitron?

  Sounds like a foam roller situation.

• 1:11:25Speaker 05

  It was weird looking though, cause like, if, you know, like in like cartoons, when they go down, like one of those like slides that have like the up and down things. And the cartoon like body goes like, yeah, in a way that your back can't go. This thing was like making it look like cartoon people, the way they were, their backs were, were contorting.

• 1:11:44Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:44Speaker 05

  I, I wanted to try it, but there was a pretty long line for it.

• 1:11:48Ed Zitron?

  I love that.

• 1:11:48Speaker 04

  I did, I think one of our colleagues, Bridget, did a demo of that and was talking about it afterwards. And I was like, oh.

• 1:11:54Speaker 05

  Is it, is it, is it like meant to like give you, like to fix your back? I didn't really get.

• 1:11:57Speaker 04

  I think she found it fine.

• 1:12:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think she found it okay.

• 1:12:01Ed Zitron?

  The endorsement I want.

• 1:12:03Speaker 05

  CES.

• 1:12:04Ed Zitron?

  CES.

• 1:12:05Speaker 05

  It was fine.

• 1:12:05Ed Zitron?

  I think it was fine.

• 1:12:06Speaker 04

  I mean, a lot of that stuff that I remember seeing last year, a lot of the sort of like robotic assistant things, like it seemed like the. Basically, like, the best you could hope for from it is like, I did not experience whiplash.

• 1:12:17Speaker 05

  From sitting in this gaming chair that moves at its own, like, accord or whatever.

• 1:12:22Speaker 10

  No physical damage is a win.

• 1:12:23Speaker 04

  My spine functions fine. The robot did not harm me. If you want to put that on the poster, you can.

• 1:12:28Speaker 10

  We have a colleague wearing an Exoskeleton, walking around.

• 1:12:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but Evans has one of those too.

• 1:12:33Speaker 10

  I know.

• 1:12:34Ed Zitron?

  How's it going?

• 1:12:35Speaker 10

  I think he likes it. He actually got it for real therapeutic purposes, for like, his hip or something. But, um, it's fascinating. I was like, we're at the show where I see people casually wearing Exoskeletons, or whatever you would call them, like, um, and I think someone else is testing out one. I had a really hard time at Unveiled finding weird tech, and that's actually my judging zone. I was supposed to look for weird tech. I had a sort of existential crisis where I wandered around. That's also hard. Like, maybe if you try to find it, it doesn't find you.

• 1:13:06Speaker 05

  I thought the same thing, and I think that what happened this year was usually the weird tech is very visually appealing.

• 1:13:12Speaker 10

  Yes, there were no visually appealing.

• 1:13:13Ed Zitron?

  Amateur hour. You need to go to the corner of the convention center into like, the Shenzhen Zhao Corporation.

• 1:13:20Speaker 10

  Right, that's in the short.

• 1:13:21Ed Zitron?

  Where it's like, where it's like, cameras, cameras, batteries, dildos.

• 1:13:25Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Ed Zitron?

  Every time, it's like this 18-word-long thing, and it has like, it's just a printed white piece of paper.

• 1:13:33Speaker 04

  So visually unappealing, how? Like, what did it, just kind of like, featureless?

• 1:13:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, so usually when we go to these things, we have a video team that comes with us, and we try to find things that will basically translate on video. Like, someone will see the thumbnail or a clip as they're scrolling by and be like, oh, this looks really crazy.

• 1:13:50Speaker 04

  Damn, I gotta see that thing play chess.

• 1:13:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. But like, there really wasn't much of that this year, in terms of visually, like, you know, okay, I'll give you an example, like, and this is another thing I wanted to bring up. So there's a lot of, I've noticed a lot of like, baby-related tech. But to me, I'm thinking like, a lot of this stuff is for like, very small ba-, like newborns.

• 1:14:09Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:14:09Speaker 05

  And you're gonna like, spend this money on something that's gonna last you like, maybe six months?

• 1:14:14Speaker 10

  Right.

• 1:14:15Speaker 05

  So there was one thing, I don't remember the name of the device, but it's this monitor that goes on your baby's ankle.

• 1:14:21Ed Zitron?

  Is that Owlet?

• 1:14:23Speaker 05

  No, it was a different company. Uh, I can't even remember.

• 1:14:26Ed Zitron?

  That might be Pokemon.

• 1:14:26Speaker 05

  But, no, Owlet is a company that makes baby stuff, yes. No, you're not wrong. But, um, it's an ankle monitor for babies that tracks their alcohol intake. No, I'm just...

• 1:14:37Speaker 04

  Deactivates the car so they can't drive.

• 1:14:40Speaker 05

  No, but it was, it tracks their heartbeat and the point of it.

• 1:14:44Ed Zitron?

  And that's useful. Like this, this is like the set, like um, SIDS and such.

• 1:14:48Speaker 05

  No, the way they were selling it was so parents know when the best, the optimal time is to place your baby in the crib so they don't wake up.

• 1:14:55Speaker 04

  Nice. Baby hacking.

• 1:14:57Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:14:57Speaker 04

  Finally.

• 1:14:58Speaker 05

  Yes. So it like, I guess it tracks their heart rate and the optimal heart rate, I guess, when they're in a deep sleep, it lights up a certain color and that's when the optimal time is to put your baby down.

• 1:15:08Ed Zitron?

  Psychotic.

• 1:15:09Speaker 05

  And like, I, listen, I, I, I wouldn't buy something like that to put, I wouldn't put an ankle monitor on my baby, but I could see if you're a desperate parent who's having trouble there, maybe you would look into that solution. But also like, unless it's priced very cheaply, I can't imagine buying something that you're gonna use for just a few months.

• 1:15:24Ed Zitron?

  This sounds like something someone who remembers having kids built. Like someone who's like, yeah, you know, fuck, what my baby do? It's crying.

• 1:15:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is like definitely an experience that, I mean, I'm not a man of child personally, but it is like. I ain't a man of child. But just saying, I'm an active uncle. You know, I'm a very engaged uncle.

• 1:15:45Speaker 04

  But it is one of those things. I'm, yeah, I'm a chopped unk and I'm not afraid to come on here and talk as such. No cap.

• 1:15:52Speaker 05

  Actually, now that you bring that up, this does sound like a device that the uncle would buy at Christmas time or something like that.

• 1:16:00Speaker 04

  This is Uncle Tech.

• 1:16:01Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:16:02Speaker 04

  I heard these things don't like to sleep, so I got you a thing that will tell you when it's asleep.

• 1:16:06Speaker 05

  You can maximize your baby. You're like, what does that mean?

• 1:16:10Speaker 04

  Hey, I hear you're baby maxing.

• 1:16:13Speaker 05

  It's supposed to be good.

• 1:16:14Speaker 04

  It is funny though, like the idea, I mean, like it's as funny and it is very funny to me, the idea of being like, you must optimize your toddler. Like that is, that's funny to me, but it's also like, it's a reflection of who is like funding this shit and who is coming up with these ideas. Like in terms of what is the experience that you would want the most from your baby? And it's like, you want them to be healthy, you want them to be happy, you want them to sleep. But then there's this other element where it's like, and you must excel as like a parent. Like.

• 1:16:41Ed Zitron?

  I think what it is, is like the venture capitalist, and this is not necessarily like therefore, I guess, but like a venture capitalist is by definition probably pretty well off. So they probably have like a lot more parental support. I feel like if you're funding baby tech, you should go and just talk to the most stressed baby owner.

• 1:16:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:58Ed Zitron?

  I have a kid. I really shouldn't be like baby owners if I don't have one, but this was much older than that.

• 1:17:02Speaker 04

  I kept thinking about last year is like, where is the consumer in the consumer electronics show a lot of the time?

• 1:17:07Ed Zitron?

  Exactly.

• 1:17:07Speaker 04

  And there were devices that the stuff I remember from the floor most fondly last year were like old fashioned American inventions with a technological aspect. It was like, it's a dog door that opens because your dog collar has a chip in it. So it recognizes that it's your dog and it's not letting in a raccoon or a prowler or whatever. And like, that's not, you know, groundbreaking, but it's like, all right, cool. Like, I get it. Like, this is a machine that sits on your counter and makes soft serve ice cream. Sick. Fuck me up. My kitchen is way too small to have that, but it would be great if it worked.

• 1:17:38Ed Zitron?

  We like ice cream.

• 1:17:39Speaker 04

  But yes, you can see where the consumer is and all of that. And then the ones that always kind of blew me away were like beyond the the stuff that's just like kind of junk or like white label or just over abstracted.

• 1:17:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:50Speaker 04

  Is the stuff like this where it's like, you have this miraculous technical capacity and no sense of what an ordinary person might use it for. And you clearly didn't ask. Like you never tried to get that.

• 1:18:03Ed Zitron?

  That's kind of what I'm getting at. It's like, have you talked to a parent? I don't mean a fucking parent clearing a quarter of a million dollars a year. I mean, like a fucking parent who has got two children and a part-time job and is fucking suffering because the the outlet sock is like useful because it can like monitor the babies, make sure that something from death syndrome doesn't have like mental heart rate and breathing and such like useful things to make sure your kid is alive. Like very meaningful stuff. It's only for six months, but man, you really want to make sure they're alive for all of the months ideally. But it's like, there's a real thing, but it's just like, yeah, great. You can make sure your baby's heart rate. No, you put the kid down when it fucking is ready. Like when the kid is ready to sleep and you just fucking sit there and go, fuck it. Just please, please, please just go to fuck's sleep. Please don't do this to me, please. Matt, you've got kids.

• 1:18:49Speaker 05

  Yes. Yeah.

• 1:18:50Speaker 04

  Kind of learn.

• 1:18:51Speaker 05

  I got three, but each, each one of them was different about the sleep thing, but I can't imagine using the, the thing that on, on any of them. Simply because like, Is there, is there really even an optimal time like?

• 1:19:02Ed Zitron?

  Why also, so was this an ankle monitor?

• 1:19:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, it goes, it's, it's a, they, you strap it on their, their leg, like around their ankle and it's like a circular device and it lights up red when it's definitely not time.

• 1:19:16Ed Zitron?

  It lights up on their leg?

• 1:19:17Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:19:18Ed Zitron?

  What the fuck?

• 1:19:20Speaker 05

  And then lights up green when it's almost time, when they're drifting off.

• 1:19:24Ed Zitron?

  Can I just be clear? You're talking about attaching a flashing light to a newborn's ankle?

• 1:19:29Speaker 05

  Yes, yes.

• 1:19:29Ed Zitron?

  And newborns, my distinct experience from newborns is that sock just fucking comes off all the time.

• 1:19:34Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:19:35Ed Zitron?

  So you're like giving a flashing light to a baby?

• 1:19:38Speaker 04

  You gotta really clamp it on there. You gotta get it on tight.

• 1:19:41Ed Zitron?

  You don't think the baby's gonna see the flashing light, one of the only things it can recognize?

• 1:19:45Speaker 05

  In the complete darkness too.

• 1:19:47Ed Zitron?

  And be like, oh, oh, just fuck with it constantly. Cause that's what a new.

• 1:19:54Speaker 10

  I want one of those for like my 17 year old. Just to kind of be like, how you doing?

• 1:19:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, mate.

• 1:19:59Speaker 10

  Can I monitor your ankle?

• 1:20:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. Is that cool? Is it all right if I get a push alert?

• 1:20:04Speaker 10

  For our whole family.

• 1:20:04Speaker 04

  Lets me know if you're actually sleeping or not.

• 1:20:07Speaker 05

  We could all have ankle monitors.

• 1:20:08Ed Zitron?

  No talking to the child.

• 1:20:10Speaker 05

  Seventeen and 12.

• 1:20:11Ed Zitron?

  Right. Yeah. And when you think about what the problems are, it's like they're emotional. So tech really can't fix that. They can add to them.

• 1:20:18Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:20:18Ed Zitron?

  If you'd like, if you'd like the more problems, the social network apps will help with that.

• 1:20:23Speaker 10

  Well, this is an interesting thing too. It's like the over monitoring versus like personal experience. Like we didn't use a lot of tech raising our kids, but other than iPads, but like, um, we, there's like personal experience. It's like, do you want something to tell you how to cook? Or do you want to just like mess around with trying to see what cooks well and what burns? And then you get natural experience that kind of gets ingrained and you go, oh, I know because I've been doing it over time. That's like parenting. You're like, I begin to get a general feel and sense of that kid and their behavior. It just happens. It happens when you pay attention.

• 1:21:00Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing, like, I don't talk about much about my kid on the show because I have a lot of people who listen to him. I want to keep him, it's his world, but it's like, yeah, you learn from your child, what their habits are when they are sleepy.

• 1:21:11Speaker 10

  Right.

• 1:21:11Ed Zitron?

  When they will tell you, I'm not tired. You're going to sleep, you're gonna fall asleep in two fucking minutes, brother. You're gonna get in that bed. It's nice and cozy. You're gonna go right to sleep.

• 1:21:19Speaker 04

  This is where the, the category error that we're talking about here, where it's just like fundamentally being like, do you want your phone to solve this thing that is like? Not your work, like not your commute, like the shit that like you have to do so that you can afford the other stuff. It's like, do you want us to take the experience, like the actual pleasurable part of being alive? Like, and for me, like, as like a, you know, again, we don't have kids, we can afford to like make dinner most nights, like me and my wife. Like, that is like really fucking precious time to me. I like, I think about it, you know, like we go in with a game plan. We enjoy like working and cooking together. We're not exactly being like, behind you chef, like as we move through our shitty little kitchen. But we're like closer than is probably, you know, healthy. But the idea of like replacing that with being like, I'm just gonna like let my phone either tell me what to do.

• 1:22:04Speaker 04

  Or eventually, I mean, this was like the big promise for a lot of the smart home shit last year was like, just my house will do it. Like they'll make the coffee for me. It's like making coffee is really important to me, actually. Like, that is part of how I remember that I'm a human before I like get on my computer and get really upset about shit all day long, you know?

• 1:22:21Ed Zitron?

  And it's like, they don't solve the actual things which are annoying. Like, I love making dinner with my girlfriend. It's nice. It's nice. It's an experience together. It's something you do. I fucking hate laundry and cleaning and they've barely fucking got, like they've been, I think, Scott, how long have you been going to CES?

• 1:22:36Speaker 04

  Like, it has been a long, long time. So I went to my first CES for work purposes, probably 2004.

• 1:22:42Ed Zitron?

  Okay. How many times, how many times have you seen the laundry robot?

• 1:22:47Speaker 04

  Oh, there have been so many.

• 1:22:49Ed Zitron?

  Fucking one.

• 1:22:50Speaker 04

  With the folding the laundry.

• 1:22:51Ed Zitron?

  The laundry, the folding robot. Like, I think over a decade, like, there is one company that just every year is like, this is the fucking year, folks.

• 1:23:01Speaker 05

  There's one laundry company probably, but there's a few companies and I haven't been going anywhere near as long as you.

• 1:23:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's been a long time.

• 1:23:06Speaker 05

  This is either year four or five for me, but I've already noticed there's companies that I feel like literally just exist to go to CES. Like, they don't ever put anything out. They always bring the same or a similar product. And year after year, it's just the same thing. And it's like, first of all, where are you getting the, like, I, I don't know how much it costs to show up and as with a booth at CES, but I'm guessing it's not cheap.

• 1:23:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:30Speaker 05

  Like, what are you, what are you doing?

• 1:23:32Ed Zitron?

  The computer, the money laundering show.

• 1:23:34Speaker 10

  I have notes for CES unveiled, like, things like that. Here's my note for it, based on what I saw yesterday. I, it made me think about, I was a judge at MIT Reality Hack last year, which was actually really interesting, because it's like, it was a lot of students pitching random projects that involved like AR and XR. And you basically went around to a lot of tables, and you had five minutes with each one, and they had to come up with a pitch. And it was like, okay, like, I don't know what it could be, but it's like, we did this thing, we're gonna come up with it, we're gonna get you experienced, get you to understand it. It's like, and it's like speed dating. But a show like Unveiled is not speed dating, it's literally just find your way. If they made it, I don't think I'd want it to be a speed dating, but like,

• 1:24:15Speaker 10

  you have a bunch of tables, and if they're not, like you said, if they're not perfectly clear and grabby, and they have a headline, there are a lot of companies that was like, mercamio ma, and it's like, okay, there's like, it's just an empty table with like an item on it. And then it's like, is the game that I'm supposed to talk to you? And retrieve the information? I'm like, I can't, I can't right now, like, and I don't, it's, I'm not into that game right now. And so I felt the pitches were not, were not clear. A lot of companies, it also is like, some, you know, it could be international, whatever else, but it's like, maybe they're looking for components or things, but this is a media, more media-focused thing at Unveiled. And they pay extra for this, don't they? Yeah, and so you go, why am I looking at that? I just don't have time, and it's overstuffed with too many things. So, and plus, there are no, like, it's not like a grocery store where you're like, here's the

• 1:25:01Speaker 10

  baking stuff, here's the meats. Like, I would like if they made categories where it's like, the ro, the emotional robots, that were like five of them.

• 1:25:08Speaker 05

  It's just aisle 100, aisle 200, aisle 300.

• 1:25:12Speaker 04

  There were moments last year before I realized that that was true. I kept walking through and being like, oh, I'm in the, like, this is the, the sex apps, this is the like, we're, right. But like, no, the sex apps are everywhere, they're all over the fucking place. And like, ditto for, the one bit that seemed, Actually, coherent, I remember was in like one of the basements last year that was like kind of the hall of nations and then you would be going through and it's just like, here's like the Netherlands wants to talk to you about what it does.

• 1:25:38Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, there's the French zone.

• 1:25:39Speaker 04

  But it's the only bit that felt organized at all.

• 1:25:41Speaker 10

  But what's interesting, that's a scattershot. Yeah, that, that press event. Yeah.

• 1:25:44Speaker 05

  Whenever I go down to the nation thing, what I, I actually usually get like a little bit angry about it. It's like, damn, this is, this, this is like countries that actually support their, their startup companies with funding. Cause that's why they're there representing their country. And there's like, no United States section because US doesn't do that.

• 1:26:03Ed Zitron?

  That's the fucking show.

• 1:26:06Speaker 04

  What do you think this is?

• 1:26:07Ed Zitron?

  No, they usually have like a US government section though. There's like,

• 1:26:10Speaker 05

  Oh, but it's just like, this is what the post office is doing.

• 1:26:13Ed Zitron?

  It's the Department of Commerce.

• 1:26:15Speaker 05

  But it's not like,

• 1:26:16Ed Zitron?

  Oh, if there was a CIA one.

• 1:26:19Speaker 05

  Well, that's the, that's the Palantir.

• 1:26:21Ed Zitron?

  Right. I was gonna say, you go down to the CIA both, hey, what happened with JFK? You do that? Was that?

• 1:26:29Speaker 04

  Was that us? Hot damn.

• 1:26:30Ed Zitron?

  What, what'd you do? I would just watch the X-Files, mate. Like you, you do that shit? I think I could probably get killed at that both 100% within fight, just asking annoying questions.

• 1:26:40Speaker 04

  It is one bit, just to go back to what Scott said, that like, it's funny, and I remember this experience again, like just cause I, you know, I haven't been on, on the floors this year. I felt last year, both like heartened and a little bit embarrassed by how much like a little bit of oaf mode curb appeal, like showmanship would like win me over. Like the reason I knew about that dog door was that they had, they had made it out of some metal substance that they had, you know, like whatever perfectly calibrated themselves. And there was a big mallet that you could swing and hit it into the door and it never dented.

• 1:27:13Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:27:13Speaker 04

  And so the reason I found it was that like, I was walking around with, with Jesse Farrar and we were like, what is that loud noise? And then just like a pair of dogs off leash wandered over and we're like, what does this do? And like, it was something I really liked learning about it. Like I found the people very pleasing, uh, you know, conversationalists, but it was 100% something that I found because I was like,

• 1:27:34Speaker 05

  It's the visually appealing factor.

• 1:27:36Speaker 04

  Exactly that.

• 1:27:36Speaker 05

  This is why we're here. It's like, this is why it's a physical show. It's like, there's the internet. Like there's information everywhere. You could always be looking up stuff or what people are here. You should be like, it goes back to that, um, science fair type thing. It's like, does this, you gotta come up with a, if you're going to be here, you've gotta come up with an interesting pitch. Like not, don't do a stupid one, but do like a, Yeah, try to get something to catch our attention and explain it because that's the whole point.

• 1:28:01Speaker 10

  What's up? Were the dogs just walking?

• 1:28:02Speaker 04

  No, Jesse and I were the dogs in this scenario.

• 1:28:06Speaker 05

  What was interesting about you bringing up, we were talking about just two seconds ago, the, how nothing is like, the layout is not planned in like categories. What I'm dying to know if they do it again this, this year, if there's even enough companies to fill it out. But last year, there was one section, and I brought it up on the show too. And I thought it was so funny. There was a web three section. And it was like, oh, these companies are now so embarrassing. We want like them off to the side.

• 1:28:33Speaker 04

  Behind a curtain.

• 1:28:34Speaker 05

  We want them all in a specific section where they can be avoided. And it was like, they were, they were, there was no like straight up crypto or blockchain companies, but they were still these companies that believed in like the promise of, without using the word NFT, the promise of like the digital ownership of things and, and the metaverse type stuff. And they actually did create a web three section that, that actually said the web three like arena or something. And it was like, there's no reason to do that unless you want people to know where they can actively avoid if they don't want that.

• 1:29:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:09Speaker 10

  Or like the five perverts that need to go there.

• 1:29:11Speaker 04

  Right. I feel like you're keeping everybody away from everybody else. The way that there's people that are like, I don't want to know, I don't have a fucking dog and I don't need a dog door. What I need is a picture of a dog that lives on the blockchain that's on my phone that I have most of my savings invested in.

• 1:29:25Speaker 10

  A collection of dogs.

• 1:29:27Speaker 05

  The dog simulacra section.

• 1:29:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:29Speaker 05

  Of CES.

• 1:29:30Speaker 04

  It takes all kinds. It's a big market.

• 1:29:33Speaker 10

  Oh my God.

• 1:29:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's, there's supposed to be a holographic fish tank here. One of my colleagues.

• 1:29:37Speaker 10

  What, what, okay, what the fuck?

• 1:29:39Speaker 05

  I'm actually trying to find.

• 1:29:41Speaker 10

  What the fuck?

• 1:29:41Speaker 05

  I mean, I don't know, but my colleague said, we were trying to look for weird tech. We've actually been on the hunt and we said, there's a holographic fish tank. And I said, I'm in. Okay. And apparently it's not here. How did it take you this long to bring it up? I've been, I've been, I want other people to talk.

• 1:29:56Speaker 10

  Oh, the fish holograms?

• 1:29:58Speaker 05

  Tell you, I don't know. There, I want there to be. I want to believe. It's in the web three area.

• 1:30:04Speaker 10

  Mulder, there's no such thing. There's no such thing as a holographic fish, Mulder.

• 1:30:08Speaker 05

  It's NFT fish in the tank. I don't know what it is, but I do think, um, also, all the other thing is that last night, we were talking about weird tech, the, being that people had said to me, it caught their eye, but I didn't see it. This doesn't sound that weird, was a vibrating knife. Oh, I saw the vibrating knife.

• 1:30:24Speaker 10

  I didn't get to use it. Yeah, ultrasonic.

• 1:30:26Speaker 05

  It was apparently a knife you just like lightly hold over

• 1:30:30Speaker 10

  Ultrasonic, yeah.

• 1:30:30Speaker 05

  Over the vegetable or whatever you're trying to cut.

• 1:30:32Speaker 10

  It just melts through.

• 1:30:34Speaker 05

  Like barely any pressure and just goes right through. It just wasn't visually appealing enough for me.

• 1:30:39Speaker 10

  I saw a knife and I skipped and I thought it already existed because I don't cover that beat. And I was like, it's probably the same vibrating knife that they had last year with a new feature.

• 1:30:47Speaker 04

  Tell me another one.

• 1:30:48Speaker 10

  Right.

• 1:30:49Speaker 05

  Isn't this a Star Wars thing?

• 1:30:50Speaker 10

  Or like, um, William Gibson novels. Yeah, I feel like there's like, it's feeling like a cyberpunk.

• 1:30:54Ed Zitron?

  And when I, when I'm thinking of tech I want, I'm reading William Gibson.

• 1:30:59Speaker 10

  Maybe it was in his, wasn't it?

• 1:31:01Ed Zitron?

  The torment nexus section.

• 1:31:04Speaker 04

  So you're telling me you've created it? That's really interesting.

• 1:31:07Speaker 10

  The cyberpunk sprawl.

• 1:31:09Ed Zitron?

  It's so good. It's so good that I'm obsessed with this holographic fish tank. I'm gonna fuck it.

• 1:31:13Speaker 10

  I know. Can we put out an A P P and just say, if you are making a holographic fish tank, tell us where it is?

• 1:31:18Speaker 04

  I know everybody was getting your ass for not bringing it up. I think it's very ethical that if you yourself have not seen a holographic fish tank. You, you would sound weird if you were like, I've heard tell of the holographic fish tank around.

• 1:31:30Speaker 04

  I need to know that you saw it. Like, and to get a description of it.

• 1:31:33Speaker 10

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

• 1:32:01Speaker 05

  It was called like the, the, the, the, the best massage body's friend or something like that.

• 1:32:06Speaker 10

  They were just moving, but it was like, it was like you, almost like you couldn't escape. It was like the, as they were moving, the chair pieces would move still with their arms.

• 1:32:14Speaker 05

  I think I saw that.

• 1:32:15Speaker 10

  I was like that. I, that's interesting. Cyber sofa.

• 1:32:20Ed Zitron?

  I love the massage chairs. It's the greatest scam at CES. Every time you run into someone, it's like, I just got the best deal on the massage chair. It's like, no, you did not.

• 1:32:29Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:32:29Ed Zitron?

  You just got scammed. No, it's like, have you not heard about the scam?

• 1:32:32Speaker 05

  No, I haven't.

• 1:32:33Ed Zitron?

  So they have these lines of massage chairs and they're like, I'll give you, I'll cut you a special deal. They're not cutting you a special.

• 1:32:38Speaker 05

  At CES, they do that.

• 1:32:40Ed Zitron?

  If you walk around the main convention center, there's usually a very.

• 1:32:42Speaker 05

  I didn't know that they were even trying to sell.

• 1:32:44Ed Zitron?

  There's a very sad section where you see like the CES, like the guys who have been here 25, since it was called like Com, not like Comdex, like the people have been here forever and they're sitting in this chair, just like fucking, just like fucking, just the only, the only time I get away from my wife and kids, just, just sit in the fucking chair all day. I, I, I sell software, man, I just want to die. And they just sit in these chairs, but those people are not buying them. They just know you can scam. But no, you will, I, every few years I run into someone's like, I just got the best deal. It's like, I paid $7,000 for two chairs. And I'm like, yeah, the RRP is $1,000 each. You've got fucking scam. It's like, it's Alibaba chair situation that massages you.

• 1:33:19Speaker 05

  I did not know this was going on.

• 1:33:21Ed Zitron?

  It's, it's, I, you know what? It's part of the Vegas experience being like swindled by.

• 1:33:26Speaker 05

  I mean, I do know that a lot of, I don't want to say a lot, but there are companies that show up and like, you could see on like the banners they have around their booth, they go like, oh, ask us about our CES only special deal or whatever. And I, I mean, I'm here as media, so I would never spend any money like that. But I mean, it always seems like, is it, is it really the best deal?

• 1:33:46Ed Zitron?

  It's not. You're in Las fucking Vegas. You think you're getting a deal here? You're getting dealt.

• 1:33:51Speaker 04

  I also like the idea of you're walking through the like air purifier section where there's 50 identical products and you're being like, this is the one. Like, do you, can I, you take Venmo?

• 1:34:00Ed Zitron?

  I did.

• 1:34:00Speaker 04

  Like, it's just like.

• 1:34:01Ed Zitron?

  One year I had a bit where I just lifted up stuff and asked if I could have it. And they really didn't like that. Like, especially with the TVs. I just like lifted, can I have this? And they looked at me and paused and went, no. It's just like, no. Yeah, they don't, they don't.

• 1:34:16Speaker 04

  Amazing it wasn't bolted down.

• 1:34:18Ed Zitron?

  No, exactly. I'm pretty sure they do now.

• 1:34:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:20Ed Zitron?

  I mean, what the fuck was I gonna do? You think there's gonna be a ghost like just walking out, running away with the TV?

• 1:34:26Speaker 04

  Make your escape through this.

• 1:34:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, if you can get it out the door, you can keep it. That should be the rule.

• 1:34:31Speaker 05

  They should let, they should, is there swag? Is there any swag you saw? They, I mean, on the show floor, usually not, but a lot of these companies, when they see media, they wanna, especially the smaller like startups. Yeah, they will. They want you to like review it. Like, so they'll, they'll just like. They'll come back later and there's a thing for you.

• 1:34:52Ed Zitron?

  I think kind of an aura to me. No one ever offers me anything like that. Sir, you can't have this.

• 1:34:57Speaker 05

  The thing I noticed this year though, and this happened to me a few times, was they almost seem more interested in content creators now than like journalists. A hundred percent. Like, like, like, somebody actually said to me like, oh, what do you do? And I was like, oh, I'm a reporter for, and they were like, where are you based out of? And I was like, New York. And like, oh, maybe you could be our content creator from New York. And I was like, well, I'm a, I'm a, I just said I'm a journalist.

• 1:35:17Speaker 04

  Right, no, I've got a real job. So, yeah.

• 1:35:18Ed Zitron?

  But the content creator.

• 1:35:20Speaker 05

  You still, you see that at like, yeah, at all the conferences where it's like, there's, there's been two different tracks, but also like a lot of stuff. I feel like tech companies have clearly been pushing that, that focus to like the content creator influencer path. I mean, a lot of it overlaps, but like, it's a very different track. And then they're like, that's the primary thing.

• 1:35:40Ed Zitron?

  They just mean a guy, they just mean spawn con without the spawn.

• 1:35:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I imagine that there's probably a lot of that of like people that like are on TikTok and like, check out all these crazy things I saw.

• 1:35:48Speaker 05

  No, it's right. They just want to listen to video.

• 1:35:50Ed Zitron?

  And the thing is, I love getting free shit, but I'm not changing, I'm not changing my opinion at all.

• 1:35:54Speaker 05

  Right, of course. No, no, that's the thing. It's, you know, you, you want to review. I'm happy to review it if I'm interested in the product and I think it's interesting or cool. But if it doesn't work or something's wrong or there are negatives, I'm gonna be truthful about it. It's like, I'll be truthful if I think it's cool and works. Yeah. You know, one interesting thing was one company actually said to me, like, when they asked where I, you know, what my outlet was, and I said Mashable. And they were like, oh, what's the social media for it? And I was like, oh, it's a website, mashable.com. And they immediately pulled up their YouTube app on their phone and was like, let me see how many subscribers your YouTube channel has.

• 1:36:28Speaker 04

  Wow, right in your face.

• 1:36:29Speaker 05

  And then they saw it and they were like, oh, oh.

• 1:36:34Speaker 05

  So like that's, that's the example I'm like of what we're dealing with now in terms of like content creators mean more to these companies now than, than actual outlets. They, they didn't even respond to the website. They didn't even bring up their Safari and went to Mashable.

• 1:36:47Speaker 10

  It always makes me sad when people say like, oh, I've seen your, it's nice to say, oh, I've seen all your videos, but I'm like, do you read any, I write articles and they're just like, huh.

• 1:36:56Speaker 05

  I don't do that.

• 1:36:57Speaker 10

  Let's skip that, what you just said. I don't want to hear that part.

• 1:37:00Ed Zitron?

  So as we come to the end of this 30, I'm going to say, Matt Binder, you've been joining us from Mashable, of course. Thank you for being here.

• 1:37:06Speaker 05

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:37:07Ed Zitron?

  And of course Scott Stein from CNA.

• 1:37:09Speaker 10

  Hey, thank you.

• 1:37:10Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for being here. And David Roth from Defector, you're going to be here for a couple more.

• 1:37:13Speaker 10

  Six more.

• 1:37:14Ed Zitron?

  And this, and this next ad is just for birds. Just try them today, I guess. Birds. Whatever comes next, I think it's for birds.

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• 1:38:33Speaker 07

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• 1:39:34Ed Zitron?

  Welcome back to the better offline CS experience. I'm, of course, your host, Ed Zitron, and now I'm joined by, of course, David Roth of Defector. Hello. Edward Unguaso Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter. Hello. And Lisa Edigico of CNN. Thanks for joining us, Lisa.

• 1:39:47Speaker 11

  Of course. Thanks for having me.

• 1:39:48Ed Zitron?

  So you saw a trifold Samsung Galaxy phone, and the listeners got mad at me last time for being excited about something. What do you little pigs want? What do you want from me? But yeah, so you've seen the trifold. What was it like?

• 1:40:01Speaker 11

  It was really cool, but I think my biggest criticism of it was that it didn't really provide a compelling reason to want this bigger screen that folds up and fits into your pocket. It's really cool when you hold it, like you open it up kind of like a brochure or a pamphlet. It, you know, has two folds, so you open it, it folds into threes.

• 1:40:21Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:40:22Speaker 11

  And then when it's open, it's a really slim tablet. But then it's just, you know, it kind of feels like the fold plus in a way. Like, I feel like you can get a similar experience with the Z Fold, which already exists. So that said, I only had a few minutes with it, of course.

• 1:40:38Ed Zitron?

  How big was it, though? Like, how many, what was it, like 10 inches, I guess, at that?

• 1:40:42Speaker 11

  Yeah, so it's 10 inches, so it's more like the size of an iPad when it's open, slightly smaller than like an iPad Air. And then the Z Fold is more closer to the size of like an iPad Mini when it's open. So that's kind of the difference. And then when it's closed, it's, I think... Around, I think the screen is 6.5 inches. I would have to double check that, but you know, the size of a plus phone or a Pro Max phone, whatever.

• 1:41:07Ed Zitron?

  Did they give you a price?

• 1:41:08Speaker 11

  No, they didn't say pricing yet.

• 1:41:10Ed Zitron?

  That thing should be two and a half grand.

• 1:41:12Speaker 11

  It's good. Yeah, it's gonna be a lot. I mean, the Z Fold 7 is already like $2,000. So yeah.

• 1:41:18Ed Zitron?

  I can't, I can't be mad. See, this is the thing. This is my weak point. I'm gonna get so many emails. People got, people got so legitimately, people got really upset at me when Lisa was on because I was like, I like the idea. And then like, Ed, you need to hate everything. I'm full of joy and love.

• 1:41:31Speaker 11

  You can like things sometimes. You can have opinions.

• 1:41:33Ed Zitron?

  They won't allow me. They won't.

• 1:41:35Speaker 04

  They don't want Ed to have his screen time. They're trying to take it away from you.

• 1:41:39Ed Zitron?

  Make me read more books. No, it's, but I kind of like that they're doing something. Like I, I love the idea of a giant foldable. I, I'm a freak, I guess, but it's like, it's sad. They haven't, when you say it isn't like they haven't thought through why you'd need it. What do you mean exactly?

• 1:41:55Speaker 11

  I, I was kind of hoping that the software would do something a little different and interesting. Um, but that said, to your point, I'm happy that Samsung's doing something because they have been showing these concepts for years of different kinds of foldables that fold in funky weird ways. And they keep saying, yeah, we're working on something. We're working on something. And then we just had no idea if any of those concepts would actually ever come to fruition. So I'm glad to see that they're experimenting and they're still doing that. But to me, my immediate reaction was like, oh, wow, this is really cool, but it doesn't, it feels almost like the fold did a couple of years ago when it's closed because it's kind of thick.

• 1:42:35Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:42:35Speaker 11

  Um, so it just didn't feel as different as I thought it would, I guess. And I think part of that is because when you open it, it's like you have the bigger screen or the front screen. You don't have the in-between and that's kind of what I wanted.

• 1:42:46Ed Zitron?

  What do you mean by that?

• 1:42:47Speaker 11

  So, um, I think, and I'd have to double check, but I think it was either some of Samsung's concepts or like maybe the Huawei phone. Like you can kind of use, um, The different panels as like their own individual screens and have like

• 1:43:01Ed Zitron?

  Yes, you have different apps on them?

• 1:43:03Speaker 11

  Yeah, like almost have like three screens in one and like this doesn't really do that. It just has like the open state where it's a tablet and then the closed state where it's a phone, which is still useful, but it doesn't feel that different.

• 1:43:15Ed Zitron?

  Three grand for a phone.

• 1:43:17Speaker 11

  Yeah. And the one thing that I thought was was interesting that Samsung is kind of thinking of is this being not just like a phone and a tablet, but maybe a phone, a tablet, and also like a mini PC. If you like hook it up with like a Bluetooth keyboard and a mouse and whatever. Yeah, they're still trying that. Um, but yeah, I don't know. It's interesting, but I feel like the this thing is probably going to be expensive. So the use case has to be really compelling and their Z Fold phones are only just starting to take off a little bit. So I feel like it's, you know, it's going to be a long road ahead for something like this, but I'm glad they're doing it.

• 1:43:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, at least someone's doing something.

• 1:43:55Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:43:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I feel like there's like, we're already like, the show hasn't officially started yet. We're already jaded. But just from the three episodes that I've been on, everybody's sort of like, well, you know what? Like, obviously I would never use this and I don't think that'll ever really get made, but I really appreciate that they're rolling the dice and having fun out there and making plays.

• 1:44:12Speaker 11

  In a nutshell.

• 1:44:13Speaker 04

  It does feel like that's what it is. And so like what you're describing is like, this was something that, you know, as somebody who doesn't generally follow this, like part of the fun of it for me last year was like legitimate idiot awe at sort of like the fuck it, we're doing five blades stuff where they're just like, we figured out how to do like, the TV is so good that you couldn't actually watch anything on it.

• 1:44:36Speaker 04

  But it's like, fine, at least you're doing something. It's better than them just sort of like spackling some, you know, notional AI modality over it and being like, and it's going to make friends for you while you sit at home.

• 1:44:47Ed Zitron?

  I did see they have added Nano Banana to televisions now.

• 1:44:51Speaker 04

  And I feel like what a thrill to hear you say those synonyms that was.

• 1:44:56Speaker 02

  You could do deep dives.

• 1:44:57Ed Zitron?

  I hate Google TV. I hate saying Nano Banana. I think it's a fucking terrible name. I think whoever came up with the name should be electrocuted.

• 1:45:05Speaker 04

  Can I share a stupid accent thing that I heard on the plane last night?

• 1:45:07Ed Zitron?

  By all means.

• 1:45:08Speaker 04

  A guy behind me, an Australian guy, ordered Sprite with ice in an Australian accent. Just something to think about what that might sound like.

• 1:45:17Ed Zitron?

  Do I know anyone Australian? If you're an Australian listener, please record.

• 1:45:21Speaker 02

  The only one I know is my boy Jathan, my co-host.

• 1:45:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, J- get Jathan to record it. In fact, just email me, easy at betteroffline.com if you record yourself as an Australian saying it. If you're a-

• 1:45:31Speaker 11

  I'm gonna ask my Australian friends from CNET to say it now.

• 1:45:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, let's get the Australians on.

• 1:45:37Speaker 04

  One thing that people love, it's being like, "Your voice is all fucked up." You mind saying a few phrases for me?

• 1:45:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I'd know nothing about that.

• 1:45:43Speaker 11

  That's funny. That happened to me when I was on vacation in Ireland like last year. Like a cashier at a convenience store was like, "Can you say this?" And I was like, "Why?" And it was just like really bizarre.

• 1:45:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, this is my life. This is my- my life is people, people turning to me and saying, "I can't help myself. I have to do my accent."

• 1:46:01Speaker 11

  You can help yourself, actually.

• 1:46:03Ed Zitron?

  No, if you've ever said this to me, you're a fucking liar. "Oh, I have a thing." No, you don't. You think your British accent is good and you want me to tell you it's good. It's never good. It's never been good. Stop.

• 1:46:15Speaker 02

  I'm guilty of this.

• 1:46:16Ed Zitron?

  And to be clear, this is- no, your British accent's funny.

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:19Ed Zitron?

  If you're just doing- to be clear, if you're making fun of England, bully for you. I'm right there with you.

• 1:46:24Speaker 04

  I don't really have one. I just periodically be like, "What?" Or like, "Mate."

• 1:46:27Ed Zitron?

  Exactly.

• 1:46:27Speaker 04

  And like, that's all I've got.

• 1:46:29Ed Zitron?

  And that's fine. I do that too. But it- it's just, yeah. Sprite with ice. It doesn't sound good when I say it.

• 1:46:36Speaker 02

  Do you want to give us a demonstration?

• 1:46:37Speaker 04

  It was basically like Sprite with ice. No, it wasn't. That wasn't. That was British. That wasn't bad. It wasn't.

• 1:46:42Speaker 11

  That was pretty good, I was gonna say.

• 1:46:43Ed Zitron?

  Sprite with ice.

• 1:46:45Speaker 02

  Sprite? Yeah, were there any mouths go to the ceiling?

• 1:46:48Speaker 04

  No, he was two hours into the CES coverage and this is-

• 1:46:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:52Speaker 04

  This is Gemini, generate- making sounds back and forth to each other. It's just pure whale song.

• 1:47:00Ed Zitron?

  But no, I like the idea that like someone is generating images on their tele- like what fucking freak did that and was like, "You know what people want to do? Generate an image." No. No. No one has ever been like, "I wish I could generate something on my-

• 1:47:14Speaker 02

  Jarvis, add some friends to this photo of me alone on the couch.

• 1:47:18Speaker 11

  I think part of it is, a lot of these tech companies have been trying to make TVs something that they're not for a long time. Like trying to make them all these different types of ambient computers and whatever. And I feel like that's just- Part of that effort and CES is the hub of all of that.

• 1:47:34Ed Zitron?

  I was saying in the cab earlier, it's just like, at some point, it's fucking television.

• 1:47:38Speaker 11

  Right. People just want a really nice screen that they want to look at.

• 1:47:41Ed Zitron?

  There was the thing of like, oh, you won't have to plug devices into it. Now you can do Netflix on it. Great. Okay. Now you can play games. And I saw someone announce you can do Xbox gaming.

• 1:47:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, game pass.

• 1:47:50Ed Zitron?

  Which kind of make, and that's, I'm kind of like, fine, that makes sense. It's streaming. And now what? And they're like, fucking banana.

• 1:47:58Speaker 02

  Now, when you get home drunk at night and the TV's a little too dim, you could go to the TV.

• 1:48:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, me too. Gemini Pikachu nine eleven.

• 1:48:11Ed Zitron?

  Please. Gemini Star Wars Pikachu nine eleven.

• 1:48:16Speaker 04

  Ed, are you sure?

• 1:48:19Ed Zitron?

  Calling your mother. No, no. No, but you can't do that from a television though. You actually can't, like calling people on like Facebook. Facebook portal is weirdly enough, like the only product that can reliably do that. It's really weird.

• 1:48:32Speaker 11

  Is that true?

• 1:48:32Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's really hard to find a television because honestly, a TV, a TV with a camera in it is bad. But at the same time, it's like a weirdly rare product. Weirdly enough, the Facebook portal is actually good.

• 1:48:44Speaker 11

  That's like one of the few products I've actually have never tried.

• 1:48:47Ed Zitron?

  Don't worry, they killed it.

• 1:48:48Speaker 11

  Yeah, that much I know.

• 1:48:49Ed Zitron?

  They're like, no, no, no, no, no. We need to, we, you can't find your friends on Facebook. Oh, Facebook portal allows to talk to your family? Not so fast, fuck with. You want some glasses? You want some glasses? They kind of work.

• 1:49:00Speaker 04

  What if it let you talk to a local restaurant that like has a lot of weirdly racist posts?

• 1:49:06Speaker 04

  Is that what you want?

• 1:49:08Speaker 02

  Let me call them during rush hour right now. Hey guys, uh, what the fuck's my food?

• 1:49:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's, it's just trying to get away from the core function because there's not really many reasons to buy a new TV anymore. Because I mean, I have like a, I know, like I'm an upgrade pick. I love upgrading my phone. I love the slightly faster, better experience. I'm not going to upgrade my TV until it breaks. It's 4K, it's HDMI 2.1.

• 1:49:33Speaker 11

  I mean, people just want bigger TVs that look nice, that don't cost as much. That is what everybody wants.

• 1:49:37Ed Zitron?

  I have a really big, like 85 inch Sony Bravia.

• 1:49:40Speaker 11

  Ooh, 85.

• 1:49:42Ed Zitron?

  It was $1,700 six years ago, I think. And it's like, why would I upgrade? What possible reason? And the TV companies are sitting there just being like, fuck. Because there really isn't. It's like, oh, I can have Gemini on my TV. I pay for it not to be on there.

• 1:49:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:49:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:57Speaker 04

  It's also like funny to your point, like the way that this is like the, the purpose of CES versus the purpose of like consumer entertainment as you like would consume it or consumer electronics as you would consume it. It's basically like, you want the good TV, but they, they would be bored and they probably sense that it you as a CES attendee would be bored if they're just like showing you a dope new TV that's showing a movie on it. That's like.

• 1:50:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. What if it had one key feature that worked 30% of the time?

• 1:50:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. Would that be new? Would that seem intriguing to you? Yeah. But that is a hundred percent like, it feels like that is, I don't know what percentage of the stuff here. Yeah.

• 1:50:31Ed Zitron?

  But they even do, they have a TV section where it's just showing you nice stuff. Great. Every, they have micro LED or mini, they have new stuff and the TVs are thinner. There's a very thin LG TV.

• 1:50:40Speaker 02

  I saw TVs you could bend and I was like, in what situation am I bending my TV?

• 1:50:45Ed Zitron?

  I love, no, I understand.

• 1:50:46Speaker 02

  I'm not a bender? Like what's going on?

• 1:50:48Ed Zitron?

  I just get home and like.

• 1:50:51Speaker 02

  Thank God I got the bendable TV. I was last night, would have gone different.

• 1:50:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I was trashed. I wanted to fight my television.

• 1:50:57Speaker 04

  We're marketing this exclusively to fans of bad NFL teams.

• 1:51:05Speaker 02

  I am a Cowboys, I'm a Cowboys fan. How many nights have I wanted to break my TV?

• 1:51:10Ed Zitron?

  I'm a Raiders fan. I don't even turn it on. It's probably, there's just no need. Oh, they lost. I knew they were done after the second game. They won three of them.

• 1:51:20Speaker 02

  Don't worry. One day we're going to win a Super Bowl each.

• 1:51:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Yeah. I actually don't know which of us has the worst chance.

• 1:51:27Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. You're probably not old enough to remember a Cowboys Super Bowl win, are you?

• 1:51:30Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:51:31Speaker 04

  That's, well, I am. And the worst guys in America are going to be celebrating right alongside you when it happens. I'm not old enough to remember a Raiders Super Bowl win, but I'm sure it'll be very nice.

• 1:51:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. I'll get Gemini to generate.

• 1:51:47Ed Zitron?

  It's like, no banana.

• 1:51:49Speaker 04

  I can't do that.

• 1:51:51Ed Zitron?

  It's too unrealistic.

• 1:51:52Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:51:54Speaker 02

  News, yeah, reality check, you're trying to spread misinformation. They would never win.

• 1:51:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. That it's, and the thing is, it's, I don't, I, I can think of ways my life could be like the laundry bot we were talking about last time. All of those fall down because it's like, the actual way that people experience laundry is a large pile of stuff. Like, it's just like, hey, the sock is in within the catamaran of shit that I've left for too long. I want to be able to chuck the catamaran into a box and then laundry comes out. There are also services that do that. You could do this wash and folds in New York. That's, it's kind of like, could do that. It's like, or you could spend $5,000 on something that I assume you need to like neatly thread the thing into. And the TV problem is, a lot of things look weird, like you, to customize like, different situation, like sports games look different to movies and such.

• 1:52:43Ed Zitron?

  TVs don't seem to be trying to fix that, like the fact that every show is incredibly dark now.

• 1:52:47Speaker 11

  That's what they should be using AI for, honestly.

• 1:52:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but no, no, no, no, no, no. Do you need nano banana? Nano banana, you need the nano banana, your television, why do you, freaking Pikachu 911? What do you, what do you, what do you want? You want TV to look better? You want Stranger Things to look good? Fuck you.

• 1:53:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:53:03Speaker 02

  There's an Eminem verse in there somewhere.

• 1:53:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, seriously, he was kind of spitting there for a minute.

• 1:53:09Ed Zitron?

  I'll be rapping by the end of this show. Did you see anything, what else have you seen at the show other than?

• 1:53:15Speaker 11

  Yeah, so, yeah, other than phones. Lots of robots, I would say, that's always a big.

• 1:53:20Ed Zitron?

  What kind of robots?

• 1:53:22Speaker 11

  One that plays chess and it's like absurdly expensive.

• 1:53:26Ed Zitron?

  How much was it? Did you find out?

• 1:53:27Speaker 11

  I, you know what, I, I forget, I just remember being like, wow, that's a lot. It was kind of something I saw on testing. I don't know if it was thousands, but it was something that was marketed as like, hey, buy this if you like, really love to play chess, but you don't have anyone to play with, or you want your kid to learn how to play chess or something like that.

• 1:53:43Ed Zitron?

  You don't want to use any of the computer chess.

• 1:53:45Speaker 11

  Right, exactly.

• 1:53:46Speaker 04

  Like, there's whole.

• 1:53:47Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:53:47Speaker 04

  I think that this, that again, is like another one of those kind of classic CES things.

• 1:53:52Speaker 11

  Right, that's the other thing. Another thing I saw was a robot, or it's really just more of a machine that sits under countertop, but you know, everything's a robot at CES, that can cook for you if you like, almost like a carig for food where you put ingredients in and it knows.

• 1:54:08Speaker 04

  Extrudes a room temperature stew like for you. So nice.

• 1:54:13Ed Zitron?

  Finally.

• 1:54:15Speaker 02

  He's your slop pig.

• 1:54:17Speaker 11

  Yeah, it was a lot of things where it's just like, okay, nobody wants to do anything, but none of these alternatives seem like good.

• 1:54:23Ed Zitron?

  But it's like a

• 1:54:23Speaker 04

  It's somehow like more degrading than any of the other options, like the idea of being like, well, I don't want to call someone and have them deliver something to my home.

• 1:54:31Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:54:32Speaker 04

  I'm just gonna stuff a bunch of celery into this hole and see what happens. It's like really dark.

• 1:54:37Speaker 11

  And maybe I'm oversimplifying it again. This is like me just walking around CES unveiled last night and being like, oh, there's a lot of people at this station. So let me see what everyone's looking at. And yeah, that was just like the impression that I got, though. It seems similar to like a Carrig, but for food, like you put the ingredients in, it knows the recipes or whatever. And yeah, I don't know. It was really bizarre, but.

• 1:54:59Ed Zitron?

  But how does, like, how does the food get in there? Do you just throw a bunch of carrots?

• 1:55:05Speaker 11

  Yeah, you have ingredients that you like put in and it knows what the ingredients are and it has recipes or something.

• 1:55:10Speaker 04

  Or it's like there's a cocktail, one of those. It's like at the level of now, it's like you see commercials for it on TV.

• 1:55:15Speaker 11

  Yeah, I've used it. It's not, it's not bad.

• 1:55:17Ed Zitron?

  I'm sure it's good.

• 1:55:18Speaker 04

  CES, it's not bad.

• 1:55:20Speaker 02

  Is it like, okay, I put the ingredients in there, it knows? Or you gotta sit there being like, okay, I put in celery, I put in.

• 1:55:26Speaker 11

  No, no, no. There's like, there's like recipe packs and stuff or something like their recipe book or something. Again, I'm like probably botching the details.

• 1:55:33Ed Zitron?

  No, no, no, that makes sense. No, no, you're not botching the details.

• 1:55:35Speaker 11

  Something like that. I have lots of questions.

• 1:55:37Speaker 04

  I'm the guy that was initially like, will you just fucking put carrots in it? What you're saying makes a lot more sense than what was just coming out of my mouth.

• 1:55:43Speaker 02

  Also, there are startups out there that would do, yeah, you put a fucking carrot in there.

• 1:55:48Ed Zitron?

  I did.

• 1:55:49Speaker 11

  Glorified juicer, kind of like.

• 1:55:52Ed Zitron?

  The Samsung fridge, though, with Gemini in it, I did see that earlier. Yeah. Gemini fridge where it's like.

• 1:55:57Speaker 11

  Oh, I haven't seen that yet.

• 1:55:58Ed Zitron?

  It's so good. You read the product demonstration thing and it's like, yeah, you can use your voice to open and close the door. And it's like, okay, I just, you've never opened a fridge.

• 1:56:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:56:07Ed Zitron?

  Like, it's like, finally, a way to open the fridge.

• 1:56:10Speaker 11

  That's not the problem that needs solving here.

• 1:56:11Ed Zitron?

  It's also, their argument is like, oh, well.

• 1:56:14Speaker 11

  That's also been around, like, not like the voice element, but like, didn't LG, haven't they been showing fridges for years that have motion sensors if your hands are full or something?

• 1:56:22Speaker 04

  One of those things where it's like, as an accessibility technology, it's probably For a long time, and now they're just sort of like, people are forgetting how to open the fridge. It's one of the big problems.

• 1:56:30Speaker 11

  Where are we as a society where people don't know how to open their fridge?

• 1:56:33Ed Zitron?

  Just staying at home, just going, what do I do?

• 1:56:36Speaker 02

  Imagine if we had a screen on the fridge that you could talk to and it would tell you what's inside. You don't ever have to, you know, to touch it.

• 1:56:43Speaker 11

  I love that. Very, I think you should leave. Like, what do I do?

• 1:56:46Ed Zitron?

  Exactly, just Tim Robbins.

• 1:56:47Speaker 02

  I don't know what any of this show is.

• 1:56:51Speaker 02

  I didn't ask for this.

• 1:56:53Speaker 11

  I don't know what I'm doing.

• 1:56:54Ed Zitron?

  I do love the ones where it's like, we will find, we'll use AI to tell you what's in your fridge. It's like, fuck mate, I had no idea.

• 1:57:01Speaker 02

  I know something else that'll do that.

• 1:57:03Speaker 11

  No, I was gonna say, there are so many times when I overbuy because I'm at the store and I'm like, oh, I'm probably low on this, but I don't know. So I do feel like that could be actually helpful.

• 1:57:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but like, you're saying, you're gonna save $5 on carrots then?

• 1:57:15Speaker 11

  That's what I mean, but then you end up with so many carrots and you're like, oh man, I bought too many carrots again.

• 1:57:20Speaker 04

  I have to feed them into this thing that I keep on my counter that turns them into creme brulee somehow.

• 1:57:27Ed Zitron?

  I love my slot machine. That really, it does feel like there's a certain degree though of just like, what are human concerns? Well, there's poverty and there's a living situation and there's healthcare. Hmm, no, that's just, how do you open a fridge?

• 1:57:42Speaker 02

  Wouldn't you like a butler?

• 1:57:43Ed Zitron?

  What is in fridge? Would you like a butler? Okay, so someone, someone that can clean up for me and someone could do my laundry. Oh, oh, no, no, we can't do that. What if nano banana?

• 1:57:57Speaker 11

  It always comes back to nano bananas.

• 1:58:00Ed Zitron?

  All roads lead to Gemini. And it's just like, I'm just, I'm really looking forward to seeing deep into the depths of this show and just being like, what, what, what reason have you come up with? Like last year, I remember there was this air purifier with a big spike underneath it. And I walked up to the person, I'm like, what's with the spike? And they took a second to register because like, no one had spoken to them in that manner. And they're like, oh no, it's really obvious. I'm like, sure. No, you'll never believe this. It's, it's like, no, it's for dogs.

• 1:58:33Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:58:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was like, it was a hair thing.

• 1:58:35Ed Zitron?

  No, no, it was, it was an air purifier where the dog, and then they pause one, or a cat could use it to scratch themselves.

• 1:58:44Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 1:58:45Ed Zitron?

  I'm like, and I just like. Do you have a dog? And they're like, no. I'm like, great, because, well, I don't know when a dog, like a dog's just walking around looking for places to

• 1:59:00Speaker 02

  This is like someone who one time had their cat or dog go on the air purifier and they're like.

• 1:59:05Speaker 04

  Whoa, yeah.

• 1:59:06Speaker 02

  Whoa. Put something for them.

• 1:59:08Speaker 04

  You never know when inspiration will strike.

• 1:59:10Speaker 02

  It's a little weirdo.

• 1:59:12Ed Zitron?

  It's also like, how do you scratch a cat? Like, actually, one of the most pleasant things in the world is like petting a cat. It's like, nah.

• 1:59:20Speaker 11

  I don't want something that does that for me.

• 1:59:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's like apex level, like solving a problem that you don't have stuff. Where it's like, are you wasting too much time that you could be spending sending emails?

• 1:59:29Speaker 02

  Listen, you don't.

• 1:59:30Speaker 04

  Touching your pet that you love.

• 1:59:31Speaker 02

  Don't want to pet your pet. Don't want to teach your kid how to play chess. Don't want to use your TV.

• 1:59:36Speaker 11

  Don't want to cook.

• 1:59:38Speaker 04

  That's time you could be on work calls.

• 1:59:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. You know what? Actually, let's just imagine all of these.

• 1:59:43Speaker 11

  Shareholder values.

• 1:59:45Speaker 04

  Keep your eyes on the prize.

• 1:59:46Ed Zitron?

  What are you fucking doing when all of this stuff is automated? Just sitting inert, waiting for the next email.

• 1:59:52Speaker 11

  It's Wally. That's what we're heading to.

• 1:59:53Speaker 02

  Promotion, brother.

• 1:59:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I'm moving up the corporate ladder. As my slot machine spit, like burps out carrot puree.

• 2:00:02Speaker 02

  You're on a Zoom call and it's the loudest background ever. It's all your devices.

• 2:00:07Ed Zitron?

  No, I got, I got a ninja creamy, one of the worst named things of all time. And it is, you feed stuff into it, you have to freeze it and you turn it on and it makes more noise than I have ever heard.

• 2:00:20Speaker 04

  Is it a soft serve machine?

• 2:00:22Ed Zitron?

  No, it just makes ice cream that's like sometimes the right texture.

• 2:00:27Speaker 02

  I love it. Yeah. When I think of ice cream, I think of ice cream shops. Never, never heard loud noises in the ice cream shops.

• 2:00:34Ed Zitron?

  And it's so, it's so loud. It sounds like.

• 2:00:39Speaker 11

  Everyone knows you're making ice cream right now.

• 2:00:42Ed Zitron?

  I literally.

• 2:00:42Speaker 04

  So embarrassing.

• 2:00:43Ed Zitron?

  The first time I used it.

• 2:00:44Speaker 04

  It's like the third time today.

• 2:00:45Speaker 02

  It'll be a different one. It's a bit right there.

• 2:00:48Ed Zitron?

  And it shakes violently. It's like.

• 2:00:51Speaker 02

  This, is this real?

• 2:00:53Ed Zitron?

  Yes. It's so loud. I remember the first time I turned on, I'm like, this must be something. I looked on YouTube. There's people being like, yeah, I've got the creamy on. I just couldn't hear.

• 2:01:04Ed Zitron?

  It's like two hundred and fifty dollar.

• 2:01:05Speaker 11

  Oh my gosh.

• 2:01:06Ed Zitron?

  Just one of the many times the wallet inspector has visited me.

• 2:01:09Speaker 02

  I love it. You know that it was so loud and they were like, should we reduce? And they're like, nah, they want their ice cream.

• 2:01:16Ed Zitron?

  These hogs.

• 2:01:17Speaker 11

  They'll do anything for ice cream.

• 2:01:18Speaker 04

  You have no idea what these people are willing to put up with for their little treats.

• 2:01:23Ed Zitron?

  And it's no, it's aimed at people who want to like lose weight.

• 2:01:26Speaker 02

  I agree. Okay.

• 2:01:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, because you see you can make sugar free ice cream.

• 2:01:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:01:30Ed Zitron?

  But it's like the insult.

• 2:01:31Speaker 04

  It makes ice cream so unpleasant to consider.

• 2:01:35Ed Zitron?

  It's just like.

• 2:01:36Speaker 02

  It's like avlops you into thinking of like.

• 2:01:41Speaker 04

  Ice cream is when I have a headache really bad.

• 2:01:44Ed Zitron?

  No, I shit you not, I put it in another room. I closed the door. My kid was asleep. I had to move it like.

• 2:01:52Speaker 02

  What if all your kitchen.

• 2:01:53Speaker 11

  The ice cream room.

• 2:01:55Speaker 02

  Let me just go make ice cream. Kitchen now get to be in another room because they're so fucking loud.

• 2:02:00Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:01Speaker 02

  We're disrupting the kitchen.

• 2:02:02Speaker 04

  Okay, the only thing that ever like a drum set and a ninja creamy.

• 2:02:09Ed Zitron?

  Lisa, did you see anything else? Was it, were they loud?

• 2:02:13Speaker 11

  I mean, it's hard to.

• 2:02:14Speaker 04

  What's the loudest gadget?

• 2:02:16Speaker 11

  The loudest gadget? Oh gosh, I don't know. It's, I mean, it's always so loud just at CES. Everybody's screaming everywhere. Like I just can't, like it's true. Everyone's shouting. Like I can't hear myself think.

• 2:02:28Speaker 02

  I don't hear anyone screaming at CES.

• 2:02:31Speaker 11

  Screaming, but everyone's trying to film videos. Everyone is like shouting over each other and trying to ask questions.

• 2:02:36Speaker 04

  The level of ambient noise is.

• 2:02:38Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:38Speaker 11

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:02:39Speaker 04

  Although the other bit that I remember from, I mean, I didn't exactly love the experience, but last year going to the, the convention center to the, the hall, entire floor that was just like white label electronics from China, USB cables. And it was silent.

• 2:02:53Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:02:53Speaker 04

  Totally. Like you could hear the HVAC system going and like hear the sound of someone sleeping softly in one of the booths and that was it. They're both pretty unsettling, honestly. If I had to shoot video, I would do it in the hall of USB cables.

• 2:03:05Ed Zitron?

  The hall of silence.

• 2:03:07Speaker 04

  I also don't want to go back there.

• 2:03:08Ed Zitron?

  No, it's, it's great. You go in there with a media badge and like everyone's eye, like every head switches to look at you like you've hit someone in Morrowind.

• 2:03:18Ed Zitron?

  Stop citizen. Let me show you my, my.

• 2:03:21Speaker 02

  Would you like to see my wares?

• 2:03:25Speaker 04

  Every booth is trying to send you on a side quest and you're like, I can't.

• 2:03:28Speaker 11

  I can't right now.

• 2:03:29Speaker 04

  Trying to find the big LG thing.

• 2:03:31Speaker 02

  Sorry, I'm not interested.

• 2:03:33Ed Zitron?

  You got any ice cream machines that are very loud? Like, I, no, but we have an LLM for pets.

• 2:03:38Speaker 02

  Can you help me reduce the sound of this device?

• 2:03:40Ed Zitron?

  LLM for pets was last year and really disappointing because it was just like a health app versus something to translate my cat's noise. And when I posted about it, the company fucking emailed me. They were like, actually, please don't. I just was like, no, no, I'm not taking down my post. Fucking soup. I didn't say that. But if they being, if I called my lawyer, I'm like, I'm being sued by an LLM pets company. He would be like, he would not be surprised.

• 2:04:06Speaker 02

  You gotta, you gotta send them a video of your cat meowing really aggressively.

• 2:04:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:09Speaker 02

  Translate that.

• 2:04:10Ed Zitron?

  Babu loves me too much. Babu treats me with, with adoration.

• 2:04:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. The only time my cats really get loud like that is like if I sleep in and didn't feed them at 6 a.m. You know, as opposed to 7 a.m.

• 2:04:24Ed Zitron?

  My cats just graze.

• 2:04:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:26Ed Zitron?

  They happily graze and they don't get fat. They're too, they're, they're just perfect.

• 2:04:30Speaker 11

  The mine have started grazing, but they used to not, and they're still on the like, oh my God, I need food right now kind of mindset. And then you give them their food and they're like, I'll have two bites and then I'll go back to it later.

• 2:04:39Speaker 02

  Sometimes they scream to make me watch them eat. They'll, they'll scream and then they make me follow them down. And then I'm like, okay, what's up? You got your food and then they start.

• 2:04:49Ed Zitron?

  I have, I have seen a few links to like pets that people have here. Like I, I saw before the show, there was this one that makes noise and purrs and is warm, which sounds, and like those ones, again, not going to be cynical about those because there's old people who,

• 2:05:04Speaker 11

  Right.

• 2:05:05Ed Zitron?

  people with dementia who can't look after a pet, except they made one that has needs.

• 2:05:09Speaker 02

  What does that mean?

• 2:05:10Ed Zitron?

  As in like, you have to like,

• 2:05:11Speaker 04

  Oh no.

• 2:05:12Ed Zitron?

  Take it like a pet.

• 2:05:13Speaker 04

  Like a big, like a big tamagotchi.

• 2:05:14Ed Zitron?

  And it's like, okay, so I get none of the benefits of a living creature, but most of the problem.

• 2:05:20Speaker 04

  The obligation.

• 2:05:21Speaker 02

  This is something I don't think they'll have at CS, but I've been seeing in New York, uh, vapes with tamagotchi in them that you have to keep hitting to keep them alive.

• 2:05:27Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 2:05:28Speaker 11

  Oh God.

• 2:05:28Speaker 02

  What would, what would?

• 2:05:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, because, because the problem with vapes is people don't want to use them.

• 2:05:35Speaker 04

  We need to make nicotine more addictive. We're gamifying the addiction space.

• 2:05:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Take, yeah, steal your friend's vape and see what happens 30 seconds later.

• 2:05:44Speaker 04

  You killed it.

• 2:05:46Speaker 02

  They should have.

• 2:05:46Speaker 04

  You killed my vape. It's dead.

• 2:05:51Ed Zitron?

  I truly know someone who's very stoned, just crying their eyes out. My vape died. What did I do? I killed my vape and I can't find my keys there in your hand.

• 2:06:02Speaker 02

  That's LLM to help you process the death of your vape.

• 2:06:06Ed Zitron?

  The LLM machine. Yeah, it's it's gonna be an interesting week here in CES because I've been I've been trying to like read it last year was just completely off the top of my head. I just made this up as I went along. No one knows. Uh, but this year I've like tried to read ahead thinking, oh, I'll catch them. No, it seems to be most of the stuff from last year again.

• 2:06:27Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's hard to plan ahead for CES. Like you can plan as much as you want, but then the thing that you planned for is gonna end up to be really boring and everyone's gonna be chasing this other thing that you've never heard of.

• 2:06:37Ed Zitron?

  Like the omniverse. I'm a big omniverse head.

• 2:06:40Speaker 04

  There's a huge omniverse.

• 2:06:41Ed Zitron?

  And and I I was really happy to see the half an hour that Jensen Huang spent talking about it today.

• 2:06:46Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:06:47Ed Zitron?

  But yeah, it's just, I'm hoping that I'm really, if you easy about offline, email me if you find any weird shit, or if you wanna just say, what was it? Sprite and ice?

• 2:06:56Speaker 11

  Sprite.

• 2:06:58Speaker 04

  Anyone wants?

• 2:06:58Ed Zitron?

  I'm gonna get a lot of wavs in my email, I think. No, it's it's I hope that there's something weird, but I get the sense that this year just feels cobbled together in a very strange way. Like last year was not quite half hearted, but off, but this one's just like, oh, what's your fucking AI, I guess? Are you on this? What are you looking forward to? Anything, Lisa? You got anything fun?

• 2:07:21Speaker 11

  Um, I don't know if there's anything I'm looking forward to. I feel like I'm just kind of keeping an eye out for like what some of the smaller companies are doing in AI. Cause there's a couple of interesting, um, I think one small trend I'm seeing a little bit already are like wearables that aren't actually for health tracking, but are more for like life logging sort of because um, like you press a button and it'll, you know, you can talk into it and record a reminder or something like that. Um, there's the new Pebble ring does that. I don't know if you guys saw that at all.

• 2:07:52Ed Zitron?

  What's Pebble? Pebble?

• 2:07:53Speaker 11

  Do you remember Pebble?

• 2:07:54Ed Zitron?

  I don't remember Pebble.

• 2:07:55Speaker 11

  Yeah, so they're they're back. Um, they have new.

• 2:07:57Ed Zitron?

  Old form.

• 2:07:58Speaker 11

  Yeah. They were at CES Unveiled last night.

• 2:08:01Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:08:01Speaker 11

  And they had some new watches, which were interesting. I didn't really look at those though, but I was really interested in this ring because again, it's just kind of like fun and different.

• 2:08:09Ed Zitron?

  What's it do though? Is it like a health tracking one?

• 2:08:10Speaker 11

  No, it doesn't do any health tracking. It does one thing, like it has a button on it and you can press it if you want to just like record a reminder or something that you want to remember later. Almost like a, like a diary.

• 2:08:22Ed Zitron?

  Is it L M powered or is it just a ring? Is it just recording?

• 2:08:26Speaker 11

  Um, so there's I think some A I that happens on the back end in the app because it'll like transcribe the things that you record and whatnot. Um, so I just thought it was kind of interesting.

• 2:08:37Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. How much is it?

• 2:08:39Speaker 11

  I think seventy five dollars or something like that.

• 2:08:41Ed Zitron?

  Right. We're in the realm of not useless yet.

• 2:08:45Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:08:45Ed Zitron?

  I just, I swear to God, I want one thing I actually like at this. I'm, I'm not even trying to be a hater.

• 2:08:50Speaker 11

  No, I know.

• 2:08:51Ed Zitron?

  Make my heart sing, please. Like a mechanical Turk. That's what I would like.

• 2:08:55Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:08:55Speaker 11

  Oh, I haven't.

• 2:08:56Speaker 04

  Some great news there.

• 2:08:56Speaker 11

  I haven't looked at, I haven't actually seen this yet, but um, have you guys heard about the clicks communicator?

• 2:09:01Ed Zitron?

  Uh, Michael Fisher is joining us Friday, who is both a, a creator and an innovator. But yes, the clicks communicator that's like.

• 2:09:09Speaker 04

  What does it do?

• 2:09:09Ed Zitron?

  It's like a little phone thing.

• 2:09:11Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's supposed to be like a second phone. So if you want a phone just to like actually keep in touch with people and not to like fall down a rabbit hole on Tik Tok or Instagram or what, or talk to Nano Banana or whatever.

• 2:09:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:24Speaker 11

  You, um, it, it has a built in keyboard. It's kind of looks like a BlackBerry and um, yeah, I mean, it runs on Android, I think. So you probably could do other things on it if you really wanted to.

• 2:09:34Speaker 04

  You can send texts on it, but you can't do other stuff?

• 2:09:36Speaker 11

  Um, I don't know. I have not seen it yet. I was just kind of seeing it in the headlines. Um, but since it runs on Android, presumably you can do other stuff on it. I think it's just designed to be like, hey, this has a smaller screen. There's a built in keyboard, you know, something if you just want to actually talk to people and not, you know, be immersed in a screen all day, every second of every day.

• 2:09:57Speaker 04

  Like psychosis induction device on your own time, but like this is a little bit quieter experience.

• 2:10:02Speaker 11

  I thought it was an interesting idea and like it's being pitched as like a secondary phone, almost like, you know, how we have. Work phones and personal phones. I guess in that case it would be a third phone, but

• 2:10:12Ed Zitron?

  I'm gonna, it's funny. I had Michael on as a creator, but I'm just gonna like bug him about his device this time. He's, I don't think he'll listen to this, but Michael, that's what you've got coming. But then we're gonna wrap it there. Lisa Edichiko at CNN, of course. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 2:10:26Speaker 11

  Of course. Thanks for having me.

• 2:10:27Ed Zitron?

  Edward Angrezo Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter. A pleasure. And David Roth of Defector, of course. And yeah, we're gonna have one more bit. And then, yeah, we'll be wrapped for the day. Thanks for listening, everyone. I don't know what the next ad is, but I fully endorse it.

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• 2:12:06Speaker 08

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• 2:12:17Speaker 07

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• 2:12:52Ed Zitron?

  Welcome back to the better offline coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show. We're back, folks. And this is the last part of this episode, but tomorrow we're going to have two, two hour episodes. It's going to be full of fun and laughs and giggles. Don't know why I'm making so much talking happening. That's normal, Ed. Anyway, today I'm joined, of course, by David Roth of Defector. Hello. Ed Onguessa Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter. Hello. And Mr. Robert Evans, the magnificent Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards. It could happen here.

• 2:13:18Speaker 12

  Hello. Figured we're all doing that, right?

• 2:13:21Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we were just, we were literally just talking about doing voices.

• 2:13:24Speaker 12

  Yeah, right. Which is culturally appropriating.

• 2:13:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. I, there are British people who get really offended by it. And it's so funny, the idea of a British person being like, you can't, you can't be racist.

• 2:13:35Speaker 04

  Did you just say what to me, mate? Are you having a laugh?

• 2:13:38Speaker 12

  No, there's, there's a level of surrealism. And obviously, Americans crossed this long ago where you can't get angry at people making fun of the way you talk.

• 2:13:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:47Speaker 12

  Like, and this is still true of Italians. It's been 2,000 years or whatever. I mean, it depends on when you call 1,500, whatever, 1,000, depending on when you call the end of the Roman Empire. But you can still make fun of Italians.

• 2:13:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:58Speaker 04

  It's never racist.

• 2:13:59Ed Zitron?

  I saw.

• 2:14:01Speaker 04

  Know that it's true.

• 2:14:02Speaker 02

  Were Romans talking like that? Like, was Julius Caesar getting stabbed being like, "Hey, ooh, not a good one."

• 2:14:08Speaker 04

  His last words were "Oof, madone."

• 2:14:13Ed Zitron?

  Brutus, you.

• 2:14:15Speaker 02

  What are you doing?

• 2:14:17Ed Zitron?

  I wish I knew any other Italian history. Like, just like, dude.

• 2:14:21Speaker 12

  That's it. Caesar and pasta.

• 2:14:23Ed Zitron?

  Caesar and pasta. That's most of it. Now, you can make fun of British people as much as you want.

• 2:14:27Speaker 12

  Sure.

• 2:14:29Ed Zitron?

  You're welcome to. I get enough emails about it. But let's talk about consumer electronics. And Robert, you were using an exoskeleton.

• 2:14:35Speaker 12

  Yeah. So like a couple of weeks before we left for the show, this company Hypershell reached out to me and said, hey, we make these different exoskeleton products. Several different companies have come out with them that are just now hitting. They've been in industrial uses for a while. There's been varying forms for really the last like 10 or 15 years that I've seen increasingly that are meant to do a mix of things. Some of them initially, and initially, these were very separate product categories. There were ones that were meant for people who were having mobility issues, right? To like allow people with a disability to move more easily. And then there were ones that were more designed for like industrial use, right? Like you have people working like an Amazon facility and they're going to be lifting packages and walking them repeatedly. And

• 2:15:20Speaker 12

  you want something that reduces the stress to their body and thus reduces like workman's comp. Cool. Right? So those are kind of like the two different.

• 2:15:28Ed Zitron?

  Of course, not for the humans. It's the workers.

• 2:15:35Ed Zitron?

  All right, we're back. We got disconnected due to the Amazon hit squad that was sent in because we were discussing workers comp. And while we were off mic, we're discussing, I do not think it's reasonable to suggest that every dog is a good boy. I don't think you should go in.

• 2:15:47Speaker 12

  Wow.

• 2:15:48Ed Zitron?

  I just don't think.

• 2:15:49Speaker 12

  You just drop that. Like we're all supposed to roll right past it.

• 2:15:52Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, just, I just want to just put this thought out.

• 2:15:54Speaker 04

  We're also anxious to get back to talking about the exoskeleton stuff.

• 2:15:58Ed Zitron?

  Just seeing.

• 2:15:58Speaker 04

  Oh, we have the ones that are active duty police officers.

• 2:16:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. If I gotta walk by you at the airport, I don't know. I don't know if you're a good boy.

• 2:16:05Ed Zitron?

  We can't understand how dogs talk. We don't know what they're really thinking. So that's all I'm saying.

• 2:16:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe he's saying, I fucking hate this dog.

• 2:16:10Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, just cursing. Anyway, exoskeletons. Back to you, Robert.

• 2:16:15Speaker 12

  Sure. Yes. So yeah, I mean, they, they reached out and asked if I wanted to try this thing at CES because people walk around a lot at CES, I guess. This is not really meant as a product for journalists who get their feet tired walking around a trade show.

• 2:16:29Speaker 04

  This is mostly a blogging aid.

• 2:16:31Speaker 12

  Yeah, this is to help you blog. Finally. I thought it was interesting. Like, I'm a nerd. I grew up playing Warhammer, so I'm interested in anything that is like a little step on the road to power armor, which was my immediate thought. I was like, powered exoskeleton. I'm gonna strap some body armor into this thing and see if it works. So I did, I did that. I mean, I played around with it at home. I've got like a sled that's like an exercise. It's like a sled that you load weights on to like push and to shove it because that's a thing that you can do to exercise. It's an awesome exercise. I love it. Yeah, and I threw on like my, my level four plates on a vest and my helmet with ear pro and stuff, just like, I don't know, 25 pounds maybe of armor and loaded the sled

• 2:17:15Speaker 12

  up to about 200 pounds and pushed and pulled it until I got to, well, I did it first without any armor or with, with armor on, but without the exoskeleton to see how long I could go. And then I waited like a day or so to recover and then I did it with the exoskeleton. Right. I noticed, and I think this may just be down to how it works because it's not meant for those motions. I noticed that when I was pushing it, I felt the machine assistance like pulling my legs effectively, but when I was pulling it backwards, I didn't really feel much of anything at all. Right. So I think it may just be sort of a factor of like when the thing functions, but I didn't really notice a benefit from that. I have noticed it does seem to like

• 2:17:57Speaker 12

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

• 2:18:41Speaker 12

  And I don't even know like how you would verify stuff like. Well, I see like they say there's like a forty two percent decrease in the average heart rate of people using it. That's

• 2:18:50Ed Zitron?

  That seems measurable, yeah.

• 2:18:51Speaker 12

  But there's like a thirty nine percent decrease in physical exertion. I'm not fully sure how Using all the classic metrics for

• 2:18:59Speaker 12

  What are you doing and how hard is it? Yeah, and they're saying it's something like a forty percent reduction in like how much like you like weight that you feel basically. So theoretically, you could carry a load that's fifty percent heavier or carry your additional load with like about half the strain, right? Like that's kind of the claim that they're making. And this thing is supposed to have like a thirty kilometer battery range when walking. Now, there's different settings, including like an eco and a power one. You can up or down the the like intensity, the power of the assistance motor. So I assume that decreases substantially when you've got it on like level four because it goes from one to four, but I have not used it enough to like determine that.

• 2:19:44Ed Zitron?

  That's exciting, though.

• 2:19:45Speaker 12

  Yeah, it's a cool product idea. I've tested a I think they emailed me because I've tried some of these previous CESs, just like walking around at the actual booths. It's a really cool idea, both for people who actually have like a physical disability and you know, I obviously none of these companies are interested in stuff like this for people who are working in factories for their own sake. But if it does reduce the amount of wear and tear on human bodies, that's a good thing.

• 2:20:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I got a fucked up ankle. It sounds kind of nice.

• 2:20:13Speaker 12

  Yeah, that's so I'm interested in how well it actually works for that. And I'm not like a hype. Hyper shell has been nice to me. I'm hoping that the product works well, but I simply don't have enough time with it.

• 2:20:24Ed Zitron?

  How much does it cost?

• 2:20:26Speaker 12

  It varies. Their lowest inversion costs like nine hundred bucks. The one they sent me costs about two thousand. But three years ago or so, I think we were looking at like five to ten grand for most of these. So it does look like prices have been coming down a lot.

• 2:20:40Ed Zitron?

  And what makes the more expensive? What is it? Big battery or something?

• 2:20:43Speaker 12

  I think bigger battery, they the one of the upgrade version says carbon. So I'm guessing some of them are carbon fiber and some aren't. Mine definitely is. But yeah, so I think it's just a matter of like what kind of extras there are on it. But the prices have been decreasing pretty substantially. And from the reading I have done for previous years, there does seem to be some evidence that some products in this category do reduce like strain and injury. For people who are working, doing jobs where you're like lifting and carrying stuff. So I, you know, I think there's some evidence to be optimistic here. I'm interested in how well, I don't actually think a convention is the best way to test a product like this out. But I understand why Hyper Shell's doing it that way, right?

• 2:21:28Speaker 12

  And I'm sure other companies in the space are because like it at least gives you a situation where journalists are going to be walking around a while and can try it out. So I'll see how I think about it, but I am most interested in like, can I make me into a space marine?

• 2:21:42Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:21:42Speaker 12

  Right?

• 2:21:43Ed Zitron?

  And I mean, that's the ultimate dream.

• 2:21:44Speaker 12

  Of course.

• 2:21:45Ed Zitron?

  This is, it's interesting because we spent most of the rest of the episode just saying, nothing feels new. But everything's kind of just a series of different, like coming up with reasons to buy stuff that don't actually appear to be human. This is strangely useful and just not used to.

• 2:22:00Speaker 12

  It's the kind of thing I'm always most interested in at a CES. And it never makes it more than like 10% of the products you see where it's like, well, this is like a cool thing that I've known we'd eventually make as a species at some point. Like we all knew they're going to have robot exoskeletons someday.

• 2:22:16Ed Zitron?

  They're going to be hoping for.

• 2:22:17Speaker 12

  Like it's, it's, it's not like.

• 2:22:19Speaker 04

  They had them on the Nostromo.

• 2:22:20Speaker 12

  Right.

• 2:22:20Speaker 04

  How hard it is.

• 2:22:21Speaker 12

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:22:23Speaker 04

  At a store, they can get it in a store.

• 2:22:24Speaker 12

  It really seemed like they were cutting corners on that operation.

• 2:22:26Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, like, remember how wet that ship was? There was a lot of issues there.

• 2:22:30Speaker 12

  Although I think Nostromo was the first one, but I forget what the, so the Sulaco.

• 2:22:34Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:22:34Speaker 12

  Was the second, was the marine ship. People will get angry at us.

• 2:22:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's my fault. The factory regrets the error.

• 2:22:40Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:22:40Speaker 04

  I apologize to Ian Holm.

• 2:22:41Ed Zitron?

  Alien?

• 2:22:43Speaker 12

  James Cameron is on a flight right now to fight you.

• 2:22:46Speaker 04

  And I can't even argue with him.

• 2:22:49Ed Zitron?

  Luckily we're landlocked, otherwise he'd come with us from the sea.

• 2:22:52Speaker 12

  His greatest power is, is, doesn't involve the ocean.

• 2:22:55Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, he would rise from the sea like an.

• 2:22:56Speaker 04

  Like, like Aquaman.

• 2:22:58Speaker 02

  He's looking at air power with his newest movies, looking at air power.

• 2:23:02Speaker 04

  Rising from one of the canals at the Venetian and absolutely beating that ass.

• 2:23:09Speaker 02

  Running like one of the Terminator stories.

• 2:23:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. The whole time, I'm just like, you're such a visionary, sir. Like whatever you see fit to do.

• 2:23:15Ed Zitron?

  He's a pro AI guy, though.

• 2:23:17Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, I think he's he's he made the statement that I I think a lot of older guys in Hollywood are making without really thinking it through, which is like, oh, yeah, I'm sure it has some applications that I want to explore and thinking about like the broader socio-cultural things that are going on with AI. He's just accurately being like, yeah, it's got some uses. I'll look into it, you know?

• 2:23:39Speaker 04

  If it makes it easier for me to for me to almost drown an actress than like, yeah.

• 2:23:44Speaker 12

  What can most effectively let me nearly kill Ed Harris? Yeah. Is AI going to revolutionize my ability to nearly kill Ed Harris?

• 2:23:52Ed Zitron?

  At least he didn't do what it tells me to do. Natasha Lyonne, who was like, yeah, David Lynch loved this. That may be. No, I was saying the other day that

• 2:24:00Speaker 12

  Yeah, that bummed me out.

• 2:24:01Ed Zitron?

  Media stuff doesn't usually enrage me that much, but if I fucking hear about Twin Peaks remake.

• 2:24:06Speaker 02

  You have to put it in through the algorithm. I'm not gonna use Nano Banana. Listen, this wouldn't a different pro coop. I don't want to see Nano Banana. Fix your heart or die. Hell, yeah. That'd be that'd be heartbreaking.

• 2:24:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, no, no. Anyone who if you're trying to remake Twin Peaks, I will make war with you. I'll turn every media property I have against you.

• 2:24:29Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna remake it. I'm gonna do a new season.

• 2:24:32Ed Zitron?

  We already I'm not. I haven't finished season two. Don't fuck. Don't ruin it for me.

• 2:24:35Speaker 12

  Because I've always thought the the real problem with Twin Peaks was there were no doback lizards, like moving around in the background. And there's there's a couple of scenes that could really used an ATS tape, you know?

• 2:24:45Speaker 02

  I'm on the same page.

• 2:24:47Ed Zitron?

  Bob shot first.

• 2:24:48Speaker 04

  This is why I think it's good that the Duffer Brothers got the rights to the next. Someone would this was something that I've been laughing about for like two days. I did not watch the Stranger Things the last season. So I haven't watched the last, I guess, four or five seasons of it.

• 2:25:00Ed Zitron?

  I just call it Things.

• 2:25:01Speaker 04

  But the someone pointed out that all the effects in the finale look like the Tried So Hard video by Linkin Park.

• 2:25:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, no, it's it's that and the corn corn as well.

• 2:25:12Speaker 02

  SNL sketches.

• 2:25:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's falling away from me. I saw a clip from that and it looked it looked really bad. But it was like one of them jumping and punching a big horrible CGI alien through. And it's just like, doesn't this show have the budget of like Ethiopia's GDP or something?

• 2:25:28Speaker 04

  Hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 2:25:29Ed Zitron?

  And it looks like dog shit. It's so I love slot. And people like, well, this is just them preparing to give you LM. No, it's not. It's just fucking Netflix. It's just Netflix destroying money.

• 2:25:40Speaker 02

  Aren't you excited? They're about to acquire Warner Brothers?

• 2:25:43Ed Zitron?

  Fucking just.

• 2:25:44Speaker 12

  Yeah, I I don't know. Like, I haven't seen the new Stranger Things because after season one, I was like, I think I'm good.

• 2:25:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was basically.

• 2:25:52Speaker 12

  I think I got what I wanted to.

• 2:25:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I didn't mind it either.

• 2:25:55Speaker 12

  Yeah, I liked it.

• 2:25:56Speaker 04

  We never even talked about watching the house. We were like, it's the second season. Good for them.

• 2:26:00Speaker 12

  I'm good.

• 2:26:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:26:01Speaker 12

  Yeah, I'm glad they're getting their their their bag. I'm not interested here.

• 2:26:06Ed Zitron?

  Well, most of the the current season is apparently just like 21 people in a room standing around folding their arms.

• 2:26:11Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:26:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. Sounds like Avengers.

• 2:26:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, get them in an airplane hangar, put them in a motion capture suit and then have them talk about what just happened.

• 2:26:19Speaker 12

  She just big building.

• 2:26:20Speaker 04

  We can get them in.

• 2:26:21Ed Zitron?

  Well, talking about real things, we, as we were discussing at the beginning of the episode, we saw the Jensen Huang thing. Robert, you missed nothing.

• 2:26:28Speaker 12

  Oh, good. Yeah, you're talking about the Nvidia keynote speech. Yeah, that I thought was tomorrow.

• 2:26:33Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah, you really missed nothing, though. And I went, and I kind of mentioned this at the beginning. I went and I looked and the six new chips they announced, all announced in like either June, October or November, like they're all old.

• 2:26:45Speaker 02

  But they're new.

• 2:26:45Ed Zitron?

  Then you see it again for the first time.

• 2:26:48Speaker 02

  They're new. This is the first time they've been together.

• 2:26:49Speaker 04

  And it's like. They're actually making one of them. Did you see that on the video that they're making it?

• 2:26:53Ed Zitron?

  They're actually going to manufacture it now.

• 2:26:54Speaker 04

  They're going to manufacture it.

• 2:26:54Speaker 02

  It's in production.

• 2:26:56Ed Zitron?

  It's like, and I just saw before we went on that AMD had and really disappointed Greg Brockman for the COO of OpenAI went on. It's so called. He went on, they did this big fucking speech about how oh, this is just like compute is the new oil or something. Just blow my brains out whenever I hear this shit.

• 2:27:12Speaker 12

  That's a great statement.

• 2:27:13Ed Zitron?

  It's so fucking cool. But what's great about it, though, is like, they didn't talk about the fact that they meant to build a gigawatt of data centers by the end of this fucking year. It's just like, it's the farce.

• 2:27:24Speaker 02

  I don't think we'll talk about that again.

• 2:27:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we don't need, we don't need to talk about the thing we agreed on.

• 2:27:29Speaker 02

  We you're you're a Sixers fan now. Trust the process.

• 2:27:32Speaker 04

  Right, you're locked in.

• 2:27:34Ed Zitron?

  Who's the James Harden of?

• 2:27:37Speaker 04

  Commit to like.

• 2:27:37Ed Zitron?

  Oh, no, no, that's Jay Perique. He got fired. He moved from, no, Jay Perique, he went from Lace Works, a company that was most famous for buying $30,000 worth of Lululemon gift cards to get people to use their software, to Meta, to Microsoft to run their AI group. Like, that's the James Harden. But he doesn't, but you don't have anyone who like, stropily quits. We don't have any like, people like that. That's what we needed. We need more like. Characters.

• 2:28:03Speaker 04

  A Ben Simmons.

• 2:28:04Ed Zitron?

  We need a Ben.

• 2:28:05Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, it's like, I'm not taking layups. That's beneath me. I don't do that anymore.

• 2:28:08Ed Zitron?

  It's the Ben Simmons thing. That's like the three basketball listeners.

• 2:28:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, sorry.

• 2:28:13Ed Zitron?

  They're just fucking loving it.

• 2:28:14Speaker 02

  Whatever happened to the strong, loud type like Steve Ballmer?

• 2:28:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what we need. Yes, somebody that I honestly had that thought when we were watching.

• 2:28:21Ed Zitron?

  Develop us, develop.

• 2:28:22Speaker 04

  We were watching Wong Kong. I was like, I know how much more energy can be involved in this. Like, he's not even sweating a little bit.

• 2:28:28Ed Zitron?

  If I had billions of dollars, I would be fucking losing it out there. I'd be going insane. Be like, well, you can't do anything to me. I can buy this. I'd buy this entire place.

• 2:28:40Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but yeah, it was so limp. It was so sad. It's like, they barely seem to be fucking trying anymore.

• 2:28:47Speaker 12

  Well, what is there for Nvidia to really say at a keynote, right? Like, it's not, their products are really exciting to people who are in, like, the business of utilizing them, but it's not like a consumer product that they're hyping up right now.

• 2:29:02Ed Zitron?

  But this was all like analysts and media and such.

• 2:29:04Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:29:05Ed Zitron?

  And it had, there was a line out the door. It was like.

• 2:29:08Speaker 12

  Cause they're making all the money in the world. That's what's exciting.

• 2:29:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that was the little bit from the guy that I talked to who was sitting next to me was just like, part of it was like, he just wanted to be in a room with a guy that rich.

• 2:29:17Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:29:17Speaker 04

  Like, not even in like a way that I'm like.

• 2:29:19Speaker 12

  That makes sense.

• 2:29:19Speaker 04

  That I'm like dissing the guy for. He's just like, I've never been in a room with a guy this rich before. It's crazy. Like.

• 2:29:24Ed Zitron?

  You're in Vegas, go to a strip club. Like, like.

• 2:29:28Speaker 12

  That is the beauty of Vegas. If you stay up late enough, you will get to watch a Saudi shake.

• 2:29:33Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:29:33Speaker 12

  Lose thirty thousand dollars at a craps table.

• 2:29:36Ed Zitron?

  Just go to a craps table in like the Venetian or the Palazzo. You will run into someone with too much money if that's really what you desire.

• 2:29:43Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:29:43Ed Zitron?

  But no, I mean, I saw John McCain once in the Venetian.

• 2:29:48Speaker 12

  Wild cut.

• 2:29:50Ed Zitron?

  But that's like, but otherwise it's just people that shouldn't have that much money that you've never met.

• 2:29:54Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:29:55Ed Zitron?

  Just burning it. Yeah.

• 2:29:56Speaker 02

  Maybe, didn't he have a lot of money? Wasn't his wife like?

• 2:29:59Speaker 04

  His wife is very rich.

• 2:29:59Speaker 12

  Oh, yeah, his wife is crazy rich.

• 2:30:01Ed Zitron?

  She is now.

• 2:30:01Speaker 04

  I think it's like, I think it's like regional liquor wholesale money, like one of those like classic American gentry things where it's like.

• 2:30:08Speaker 12

  I'm thinking hides. It's not hides.

• 2:30:09Speaker 04

  No, that's John Kerry's.

• 2:30:10Speaker 12

  Yes, right.

• 2:30:11Speaker 04

  Oh, you said hides. I was like, I don't know that people get rich off hides anymore.

• 2:30:16Ed Zitron?

  John McCain.

• 2:30:17Speaker 04

  They were big in pounds.

• 2:30:19Ed Zitron?

  John McCain was a fur trapper. I look forward to the CES fur trapping section.

• 2:30:25Speaker 12

  I prefer that background for him.

• 2:30:28Ed Zitron?

  I would love it if there was a

• 2:30:30Speaker 12

  He was kidnapped by beavers in the middle of a fur trapping expedition. They tortured him for five years.

• 2:30:36Speaker 02

  Turns out they don't like what we're doing to their dams.

• 2:30:39Speaker 12

  Not happy with it.

• 2:30:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, the word Vietnam was really just ungorgeing and ripping up those dams. That's what it was.

• 2:30:46Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I wish tech was actually this fun though, because it's just like Greg Brock when going and talking to Lisa Su from AMD, just fucking just wobbling around mumbling shit about compute and data centers that they can't build because they don't have credit.

• 2:31:00Speaker 12

  Like, what is there exciting to say other than look at how much money we're worth and look at how much money we're making?

• 2:31:05Ed Zitron?

  But that was the thing with Nvidia. They didn't talk about any any products. Like, they didn't even talk about their own products. It's like, it's the most egregious kayfabe I've ever seen because gun to the head, I don't think any of these, that's not a threat. Gun to the head, I don't think these people are like actually have an answer.

• 2:31:23Speaker 12

  No, I mean, because it like, there's not a solution financially to the sheer amount of money that's been invested. And like Nvidia is in the the enviable position of like their the money they've made is like real. People are actually buying chips that they made. But the industry supporting it, there's a lot of vapor and everyone's kind of aware that like at some point it's going to come crashing down to earth. And we had like a reality check in the last quarter of last year on Nvidia, not all the way down, but like their their bubble got certainly deflated partially.

• 2:32:01Speaker 12

  And there's, I think, a growing awareness that like, well, whatever happens with this, you know, even if the bubble never pops, even if AI doesn't like get sort of punctured in the way that people, including a lot of us, think it's going to. Nvidia is not going to keep riding this high forever. And I don't know, there's not a graceful way for them to deal with that.

• 2:32:24Ed Zitron?

  But they're trying. They're trying. They're doing this thing called the Omniverse. Yeah, it's so, yeah, yeah. It's called the Omniverse. They're calling it, they're calling it, they're calling it the Omniverse. Very, we love the Omniverse, but it's, it's, it's just, it's this whole bullshit thing. World models is another thing. It's just a made up thing for we'll do simulations using GPUs.

• 2:32:45Speaker 02

  Not to be confused with the Metaverse.

• 2:32:46Ed Zitron?

  Which is very different.

• 2:32:47Speaker 12

  This is way.

• 2:32:48Speaker 02

  The Metaverse is bad. Omniverse is good.

• 2:32:50Ed Zitron?

  It reminds me, and this is a really deep cut, and anyone who remembers this, please email me. There was a thing called, the DC did called Death Metal, where like the Batman who lost, who's a Joker Batman, just best to get past that. Uh, there's a bit in it where they meet a guy from, there's a thing above the multiverse called the Omniverse, and he's just a guy with a pumpkin head. And I remember reading the Omniverse and that, just being like, fuck off, just fuck you. And then, but what it is, is they buy compute from like Microsoft or Meta, or, uh, sorry, Microsoft, Google or Amazon. And then rent it to people so they can run simulations using their Omniverse software. The information, credit to them, put out a story today, just being like, yeah, it's not making any money and everyone hates it.

• 2:33:27Speaker 12

  Right.

• 2:33:27Ed Zitron?

  And it was the first half of a two hour long presentation. And they're just like, and they've put it really well. It was like, yeah, here's a bunch of stuff. If we could do this, how good would that be? And it's like, none of it's real.

• 2:33:39Speaker 12

  Right.

• 2:33:40Ed Zitron?

  It's so cool. And I think what they're trying to do is be like, look, you bought all these GPUs. What if you could do this? Well, you can't. You can't do that. We cannot do this. But what if you could? And it was so straight, because I, everyone was, you could hear people coughing in there.

• 2:33:56Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:33:56Ed Zitron?

  People were leaving, people were, it was really strange. And then there was a tiny bit of AI stuff. It's really, truly bizarre.

• 2:34:04Speaker 12

  I mean, it does feel like people are starting to get sort of fed up with the lack, the things that have not materialized, that should have by now.

• 2:34:13Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:14Speaker 12

  Right? And I find you get a lot of, you get a lot of pushback if you're like, this is fake and this is bullshit, which is like my emotional opinion, but you get a lot less pushback if you're like, I just don't see how this can be worth as much money as it needs to be for the industry. And you get a pretty broad agreement of like, yeah, something like, there's something fucky with that.

• 2:34:34Speaker 04

  That was the bit that I wound up coming out of it. Like, I think the, the big feeling that I felt afterwards beyond like bored and hungry was that I felt kind of sad about it. Cause it's like, it's clear that there's like, there is all of this capacity to do all of this like computational stuff that you couldn't really do before. But there's not any sense of like, what that's for or what you're gonna do. It's just compute for compute's sake.

• 2:34:57Speaker 12

  And I, I think, and this is me, there's a degree to which I'm not even fully confident what I'm saying here, but I, I get the.

• 2:35:05Speaker 04

  I'm a sports writer, man. So fucking go off.

• 2:35:08Speaker 12

  The feeling and have read some accounts that make me believe that there are applications for a lot of this, a lot of like, A, what gets broadly lumped in on as AI. In like different kinds of like medical science.

• 2:35:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. But nothing that's gonna make this company worth fifteen trillion dollars or whatever.

• 2:35:27Speaker 12

  And nothing that does anything on its own. It's not the AI will come up with the medicine. It's like, no, the AI is capable of like brute forcing its way through. Analyzing, doing a lot of like theoretical tests or analyzing like a huge amount of data. And if you build. A, a model specifically to deal with like this kind of medical data, that it can be. A time-saving tool that allows you to do other things, which is not a sexy thing in the way that like AI is going to cure cancer is. And it's not sexy to be like, well, AI will allow us to prototype more efficiently, different kinds of like. Materials to make holes of spacecraft out of, and maybe that will speed up the process of developing these things, which is like a thing that theoretically might happen.

• 2:36:12Speaker 12

  And that's not as sexy as like, AI is gonna figure out how to take us into space.

• 2:36:16Speaker 04

  And this conversation is also so fucking old at this point.

• 2:36:19Speaker 12

  Right.

• 2:36:19Speaker 04

  That bit of it where it's sort of like, I'm so aware of the thing where it's like, it's going to be able to think for itself and it's gonna like fix. We're not going to need to have jobs anymore.

• 2:36:27Speaker 12

  Right.

• 2:36:28Speaker 04

  But then like eventually like you work your way back from that to like protein folding.

• 2:36:32Speaker 12

  Right.

• 2:36:32Speaker 04

  I don't know what protein folding is. Apparently AI is extremely good at it.

• 2:36:35Speaker 12

  Sure.

• 2:36:35Speaker 04

  But it's like, you can't talk about that because nobody knows what protein folding is. But when you talk about the other shit, it makes me, for one thing, doubt that it's any good at protein folding.

• 2:36:43Speaker 12

  Right.

• 2:36:44Speaker 04

  You know?

• 2:36:44Ed Zitron?

  Well, it's because protein folding is a totally like, it's not even LLM driven. It's not even GPU driven.

• 2:36:49Speaker 04

  It's machine learning shit, right?

• 2:36:50Ed Zitron?

  And it's the thing is with like the medical example as well, they're doing that already. Again, it's only kind of LLMs, but not really. And it's just, I did to your point about, we've had this one before. I'm pretty sure I heard this conversation, not even from us, like, I've heard some version of this. We're sitting around being like, yeah, you know, it might be good for this. When? Because before the Nvidia thing, we had this panel with these people who were just saying stuff that slowly was driving me insane and I was getting ready. I was, I eventually just started muttering to myself like a crazy person, but there was this, the CEO of a bridge, which is an AI scribe for doctors.

• 2:37:27Speaker 12

  I thought you were saying a bridge. And I was like, how do you get that job? Just a single bridge. Easy work.

• 2:37:33Ed Zitron?

  And he kept trying to sell me.

• 2:37:34Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:37:35Ed Zitron?

  And he was just talking about, he was just word salad on word salad, trying to get around the fact that his AI just transcribes what doctors say. And it's just like, who fucking care?

• 2:37:46Speaker 04

  Great. Well, it's one of those things where it's like, I think doctors would like that, but you can't, for his business to be worth, which I believe you looked it up, was like $5 billion.

• 2:37:55Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, 5.5 billion.

• 2:37:56Speaker 04

  It's like, in order for it to work, it also has to like, to justify that valuation. It has to make evaluations. Like, no doctor wants it to fucking do that. They're doctors.

• 2:38:05Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:38:06Ed Zitron?

  And it's, it's just, and it's almost cliche. It's like, yeah, it's being forced into anything I was mentioning on the earlier. It's like,

• 2:38:11Speaker 12

  Fucking Microsoft today. It's no longer Office. It's Copilot. Like, fuck you. How many times have I said, no, I'm not using Copilot. You're trying to force me.

• 2:38:21Speaker 04

  That's amazing that they just like, they've got such a debt on their hands that they're like, uh, the Batman movies. Are now the Avengers or whatever, like to some other like.

• 2:38:31Ed Zitron?

  Google did that already. They changed Google Assistant to Google Gemini and they're like 400 million activists.

• 2:38:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they're gonna do the same thing with fucking Copilot where it's like, look at all these people. No, we're all using fucking Word and Excel.

• 2:38:42Ed Zitron?

  Well, what's funny though is they're not going to be able to do that because I have fucking Microsoft's numbers. I have Microsoft revenues. I'm coming out with it at the end of January. Frank Shaw, you fucking want some? Email me.

• 2:38:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:38:50Ed Zitron?

  Um, and I already have GitHub Copilot's revenue too, fucker. That's the thing, like these, I'm fucking sick of this because people are being lied to. And I'm just doing an episode of, I guess this is the show I'm recording, but it's just walking around, hearing they put, the thing that made me actually snap on this trip was they put Nano Banana in a television and I'm just.

• 2:39:09Speaker 12

  You gotta go back. What is a Nano?

• 2:39:12Ed Zitron?

  Nano Banana is an image.

• 2:39:13Speaker 04

  It's an image. Three straight episodes.

• 2:39:15Ed Zitron?

  It's an image generator model from Google that they called the world's dumbest fucking name because they insist on making me angry.

• 2:39:21Speaker 12

  Literally its name.

• 2:39:22Ed Zitron?

  Yes, Nano Banana and Nano Banana Pro.

• 2:39:25Speaker 12

  I gotta go.

• 2:39:26Ed Zitron?

  Nano Banana, um.

• 2:39:28Speaker 04

  Nano Banana Pro is dumber. They should make a, the version that you have to pay for should just have a normal.

• 2:39:32Speaker 12

  Nano Banana Pro 3 plus.

• 2:39:35Ed Zitron?

  I think it's just, it just shows loathing for the customer. Like you little pigs are calling anything Nano Banana, you fucking pigs.

• 2:39:43Speaker 12

  Well, I think they're probably, it's probably jealousy and some FOMO at Elon Musk where well, he gives his stuff really funny, stupid names. Maybe that's why, that's the secret. Maybe we'll get some of that.

• 2:39:54Ed Zitron?

  We can be epic too.

• 2:39:55Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:39:56Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. I did, maybe they'll.

• 2:39:57Speaker 12

  Throw a 420 in there?

• 2:39:59Ed Zitron?

  Maybe they can copy the other things that.

• 2:40:01Speaker 02

  What was up with Mercedes and then?

• 2:40:03Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:40:03Speaker 02

  Calling their things plus plus.

• 2:40:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, Mercedes.

• 2:40:06Speaker 12

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, they had a whole thing with a panel with Mercedes and this guy from Skilled AI. Who was like one robot, one brain, one purpose or something.

• 2:40:19Speaker 04

  One cop. He was also sitting up there. He was.

• 2:40:21Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. All I need is one bike, one robot, one brain. It was just one panel. It was just a panel of just people just like all in varying stages of concussion protocol. Just like saying shit to each other and Sarah Gro, the species. So when AI is powerful and large language models, would that be interesting? And the guy going, I agree. They would be powerful and indeed robots. Yeah, I it was just in and people around going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:51Speaker 04

  That is interesting.

• 2:40:52Speaker 02

  Little chat when this was going on, um, where the guy was like, you know, we're making base layers by watching.

• 2:40:59Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:40:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:41:00Speaker 02

  And then practicing that's. Where you learn to do any real task, as everyone knows.

• 2:41:05Ed Zitron?

  And it's just.

• 2:41:06Speaker 02

  You watch a YouTube video three thousand times.

• 2:41:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I can't think of any other.

• 2:41:09Speaker 04

  Not now, I'm base layering.

• 2:41:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:41:12Speaker 04

  I'm watching Jamal Crawford's sickest buckets.

• 2:41:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:15Speaker 04

  Twenty two minutes.

• 2:41:16Speaker 02

  I'm watching unexpected LeBron edits.

• 2:41:20Speaker 02

  Forty five minutes.

• 2:41:21Ed Zitron?

  Oh, it's just so strange as well because I I've been fucked with a lot in my life. It just feels like we're being fucked with.

• 2:41:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:41:29Ed Zitron?

  It's just like a weird, we're not even con at this point, just like everyone's just like.

• 2:41:33Speaker 04

  It's taunting.

• 2:41:34Speaker 12

  Well, that's the thing that's so dispiriting is that, like, I can tell you're not even you you're you're past the point where you think you have to even work to.

• 2:41:42Ed Zitron?

  Exactly.

• 2:41:43Speaker 12

  Like, you're just being lazy. Like, we all know everyone, like, the majority of people found Copilot annoying and said no repeatedly. And you want to be able to claim everyone using an office product is using AI to trick your shareholders. So you're just fucking changing it and like, there's nothing, there's not any more thought to it than that. You're not at all scared of regulators. You don't give a fuck about what the people paying to use your product. And that's just, it's dispiriting because like, yeah, there is nothing I can do. Right? Like, I could, I could switch my operate, my, my, like, uh, my word processor, I guess. Um, and probably will at some point this year. It just means embracing a pain in the ass of like switching a bunch of stuff around.

• 2:42:26Speaker 12

  But at this point, I think it's worth it because I'm annoyed at you. Like, you've annoyed me enough, and I don't think that's going to impact Microsoft's bottom line. I don't think enough people are going to switch for it to matter. It's just, again, dispiriting.

• 2:42:37Ed Zitron?

  Also, no one's gonna call it Copilot.

• 2:42:40Speaker 12

  No, it's a stupid name.

• 2:42:42Ed Zitron?

  They're gonna call it Microsoft Office because you're gonna say it to like a grandma.

• 2:42:45Speaker 12

  I'm using word, not using fucking.

• 2:42:47Ed Zitron?

  Copilot.

• 2:42:48Speaker 12

  You dipshit.

• 2:42:49Ed Zitron?

  It is so cool. We now have software that's deliberately annoying. It's just like, hey, hey, do you want to, you want to use Copilot? You want to, you want this to write? I'm fucking writing it. I'm writing it. Please leave me alone. No. I use Apple Notes now, not because I like it, but because it doesn't. Want help generating the document?

• 2:43:06Speaker 12

  The problem is every big player in consumer technology right now has attained and is expressing the exact vibes of like a guy that you would cover your drink around.

• 2:43:19Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:19Speaker 12

  Right? Yeah. Where it's like, they're just, it's just this constant pressure and constant like, hey, hey, hey.

• 2:43:24Ed Zitron?

  What are you doing later?

• 2:43:25Speaker 12

  Yeah, you know what? Why don't you come sit with me? I'm just gonna sit down next to you. I'm just gonna hang out with you. Like, it's, it's this, I've said no so many times and you are not at all listening.

• 2:43:35Ed Zitron?

  Nope.

• 2:43:35Speaker 12

  And that's how using technology feels and I hate it.

• 2:43:41Ed Zitron?

  I mean, that is, and that's a good, good way to kind of like wrap up the episode as well. But I think that's what the theme of CES appears to be this year. It's just like obtrusive stuff. How like the, I know I keep saying Nano Banana. The reason this has driven me insane is it's like, I don't need the TV to generate images. Are you sure? I'm watching the television.

• 2:44:01Speaker 04

  Why don't you try it?

• 2:44:01Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:44:02Speaker 04

  Maybe you'd like it.

• 2:44:02Ed Zitron?

  What if your TV was a computer too, though? I don't.

• 2:44:05Speaker 04

  Nano Banana Pro offers many features that aren't available.

• 2:44:08Ed Zitron?

  Nano Banana can generate a winning season of The Raiders. It's just like Nano Banana, like, and also what kind of fucking freak is sitting there being like, I want my television to generate an image? No, if you try and do that, your television should break. Yes.

• 2:44:22Speaker 12

  Hey, I know you're putting on a torrented copy of Star Trek: The Next Generation to watch while you cry yet again. What if Riker's dick was out the whole episode? Would that improve this for you in any way?

• 2:44:35Speaker 04

  Fucking Frank.

• 2:44:39Speaker 04

  Would that get you to start saying Gemini?

• 2:44:41Speaker 12

  We call it Gemini if we show you Riker's hog.

• 2:44:47Speaker 12

  Emotional blackmail and it's wrong.

• 2:44:49Ed Zitron?

  And before we wrap as well, Robert, I've said this earlier in the episode as well, but there was a bit where Nvidia's Jensen Huang was talking to two robots. Like just like, and he was like, this is how we make you. This is from, and it turns out it was from like. The fucking Fallen Order, like the second of the games with the With Kyle Kestis. With the, yeah, with the guy from, uh, what Shameless? Oh, yeah. Isn't Shameless? The Joker? Yes. Um, yeah, that guy. And it's like, I did not, and I'm a big Star Wars head, but of like the actual Star Wars stuff. And it's like, okay, and how much did you pay like a million dollars for that? But you know that they were like, what's the cheapest one? Yeah. What's the cheapest?

• 2:45:32Speaker 12

  We gotta get one of the games.

• 2:45:33Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we gotta get one. We'll give you one of the

• 2:45:35Speaker 12

  What's that guy from the N64 game? I bet he's cheap.

• 2:45:38Ed Zitron?

  Kyle Catan?

• 2:45:41Ed Zitron?

  Immediate. Don't remember anything but Kyle Catan. Uh, let's sign off for that. All right. David Roth, thank you so much for joining us.

• 2:45:49Speaker 12

  Pleasure to be here.

• 2:45:49Ed Zitron?

  From Defector. We'll have you in the episode notes. Robert Evans, you'll be back. We'll be back.

• 2:45:55Speaker 12

  Yeah, I'll be here all week.

• 2:45:56Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah. And Edward and Grayside Jr. Who also be here all week. I will, I will. And then to wrap the episode, so before we go, I want to talk about something we'll be doing at the end of every episode. So back, so just a little history on the suite. Back with PR firm, used to have this suite and have journalists come in. And back since the late 2010s, we did this. We had journalists come in and there was a bloke called Sean Paul Adams who came to visit. He was a good mate of mine, good mate of my friend, Tachar, as he passed last year. I want to honor him by encouraging you to donate to the Pigeat Trick Epilepsy Research Consortium. Sean Paul's son is epileptic and his family would deeply appreciate it. He was awesome. He'd be, he's deeply missed by his friends and family. He's one of the highlights of the suite when he visited. So yeah, I'll have a link in the show notes. We'll be here all week, everyone. Thank you so much for sticking with us from this episode.

• 2:46:39Ed Zitron?

  And yeah, we'll have two more tomorrow and every day, other than Saturday, we'll just have one. Cheers, everyone.

• 2:46:45Speaker 12

  Bye. Go with God.

• 2:46:55Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 2:47:27Speaker 11

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 2:50:02Speaker 06

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