CES 2026: Part Seven (Thursday)

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 Thursday’s second episode, Ed is joined by actress and standup comedian Chloe Radlciffe, Garrison Davis of It Could Happen Here, writer Westin Lee, Robert Evans of Behind The Bastards, Ed Ongweso of the Tech Bubble Newsletter, and tech writer Rob Pegoraro to talk about how this CES feels like something is missing, building things for actual people, how everybody is talking about “incremental” improvements in AI, OpenAI’s similarities to Theranos, and the problematic nature of mass-automation. EXCLUSIVE CES SALE! Get a *permanent* $10 off an annual subscription to my newsletter through January 13 2025: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/cue848p5sc Ed Ongweso Jr.: https://bsky.app/profile/bigblackjacobin.bsky.social Rob Pegoraro: https://bsky.app/profile/robpegoraro.com Westin Lee: https://bsky.app/profile/westinlee.bsky.social The Tech Bubble Newsletter: https://thetechbubble.substack.com/ Chloe Radcliffe: https://www.instagram.com/chloebadcliffe/?hl=en https://punchup.live/chloeradcliffe Donate in Sean-Paul’s honor: https://www.perc-epilepsy.org/ Here’s the robot we talked about: https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social/post/3mbwvlat7dc23 --- 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

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• 0:37Ed Zitron?

  Damn, they got me feeling like white Michael Clayton. I'm Ed Zitron and this is Better Offline's coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show.

• 0:55Ed Zitron?

  We are, as we have been all week, here in the beautiful Palazzo Hotel in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, bringing you yet another episode covering CES with a crazy assortment of guests from the tech industry. We've got an open bar, tacos, and places to sit down for the members of the media, whether they join us on the microphone or not. This is our second episode of the day, it's Thursday, and we've got two more on Friday and an epilogue on Saturday, then they're gonna roll me into one of the aqueducts here and flush me into the sewer. But before they do that, it's time to introduce the latest contestants on the CES Challenge. Joining me, as ever, is stand-up comedian and star of Is This Thing On?, Chloe Radcliffe.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:31Ed Zitron?

  No? No, not anymore.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Unfortunately.

• 1:34Ed Zitron?

  No, not unfortunately, they love you.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  No, very fortunately. I'm still here, you can't get rid of me.

• 1:39Ed Zitron?

  And we will not be. And of course, it could happen, here's Garrison Davis.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  Hello, good morning.

• 1:44Ed Zitron?

  And tech writer Rob Pegoraro, joining us once again. It's good to be back. It sure is good to have you, lovely to see you. So, Gare, what have you been up to? What have you seen today?

• 1:54Speaker 03

  I've been at the LVCC all day.

• 1:56Ed Zitron?

  What did you LVCC?

• 1:58Speaker 03

  Oh my goodness. And I realize I said good morning because the CES time distortion's starting to kick in.

• 2:02Ed Zitron?

  Oh absolutely, well you were in like Tokyo a week ago, so your time is...

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Woo! The best, best is an interesting word. The most interesting thing I saw today is I happened to arrive at the LG booth right as their home assistant robot demo started for the first time. Cloyd. Cloyd. Cloyd. Cloyd rage. So I got to see that in action. Right. For their first demo. Walk me through the action part of this. Action? Like, how was the action? Yeah, maybe it's maybe more proper to say, I got to see Cloyd in. It was, it was.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Action is generous.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  It was breathtaking because it's gonna change so many people's lives.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  How so? So they gave us three different scenarios. One is you have this clumsy dad who always forgets his keys and the robot is able to find the keys, then put them somewhere else, which is an interesting solution to the problem of losing your keys. Because it was framed. So this clumsy father of two left his keys on the couch. Then the robot walks into the couch and grabs them from the couch and moves them to a different location in the house, which seems like a machine that just makes you lose your keys. The Jester AI, I am here to add chaos to your life. So it was framed as losing your keys, but it's just the robot moving keys around. Right. And what was, at what speed did it do this, would you say?

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Uh, glacial. It just like reels like. It's very slow. Nice. We, its second segment was like a rich, single guy who doesn't have anyone living with him. Nice. Who has this robot as a quote unquote roommate. And the roommate mostly does laundry and I watched this robot spend, I kid you not, 90 seconds putting a single shirt in the washing machine.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  And then also spent, I would say about two minutes attempting to fold a towel.

• 4:06Ed Zitron?

  How'd it do?

• 4:07Speaker 03

  I, again, I used the word attempting.

• 4:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Um, it, it got about half the towel folded after two minutes and then was directed towards the next part of the demo. So it, it could not finish the folding a single towel task. Um, I'm sure if you give it five minutes, it could fold a towel.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  I, that's actually a high amount of confidence base on everything you've described.

• 4:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we trained it entirely on stoner data.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. It moves, it moves like someone who's had way too much weed.

• 4:34Ed Zitron?

  Uh, just forget what you're doing.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  By the time, the time the third demo started, I had, I had to go, I had enough.

• 4:40Ed Zitron?

  Uh, but you've been there seven hours watching it fold one thing.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  It was like a middle aged woman who's, who's robot was like trying to get her to like work out more.

• 4:48Ed Zitron?

  I saw that one and I mentioned it earlier. It was like, here you go. And it's got like one pound weights. And she goes, thanks, Claude. If you didn't give me this, I wouldn't even move.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  The most, the most interesting part of the demo was, and like I, I got to see like the robot, you know, tried to do a lot of these things that wasn't just on the screen. Um, but it was, the presenter kept reiterating that Claude knows what you want before you even have to say anything.

• 5:14Speaker 04

  Oh, that's not creepy at all.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  And that was, that was the thing because the cloud gets to observe you and learn your patterns and learn your habits, what you like. And you can also input this data. Um, and it was, during the towel folding segment, he even made a joke because it, because it was, because it was taking too long. It was like, ah, yes, Claude was able to fold the towel exactly, exactly like I like it.

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Is this Claude the robot or Claude the AI?

• 5:36Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, sorry, Claude, Claude, sorry.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  Does Claude run Claude?

• 5:39Ed Zitron?

  I mean, I probably not. I mean, it's slow and expensive, so I guess, and also just from my understanding, this thing is fucking huge.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Oh, it's big.

• 5:48Ed Zitron?

  It's giant.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  It's big, yeah.

• 5:49Ed Zitron?

  You just have this offensively large.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  It's like, it's like, it's like my, it's like me sized, yeah.

• 5:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's, but also super wide, like a, like a big scooter, like the kind of scooter you see.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  It's like a sort of stormtrooper turned butler, I guess.

• 6:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but yeah, it learns what you need other than like.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Like C3, if C3PO was worse.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Any rapidity whatsoever.

• 6:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, like a towel folded faster than seven minutes or correctly.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, and, and if it's in. The presenter made a joke is that because Claude, Cloyd, Cloyd wasn't able to fully fold the towel, he made a joke about how that's how he actually prefers his towels being folded. Because this was, this was like an on, an, an, an ongoing statement he kept making. He was like, you know, Cloyd knows how long I want my croissants cooked, so he can, he can bake my croissants. As they're left, left undercooked. So he can bake my croissants exactly how long I want to. And he also, uh, Cloyd prepared a snack during the demo, and the snack was taking milk out of the fridge and putting the milk carton down on the counter. Because I do not know if the robot fingers were able to unscrew the milk. Loves my snack of milky's. Like the, the milk carton, actually. So it was just taking the milk, putting it

• 6:57Speaker 03

  on the counter. But for, for the, for like the wife and, and father of, of two, wife and father, for, for the couple and, and, and their kid demo, the, the robot was like, you know, if, if you're too busy, the robot can make breakfast for your family in the morning.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Can it?

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Well, the, the robot can put a tray of, of croissant dough that's pre-prepared in the oven.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  So you have to put the croissant dough on?

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, you have to put the croissants on there. Unclear. On, no, the, the robot can ta, as long as the dough magically exists.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Claude, Cloyd can walk towards the oven. The oven will automatically open with the new LG smart oven. Right. And then put the tray in.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  But as in, it can't, you still have to line the croissants.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you also have to unroll those tubes.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  It can do, it can do the easiest part.

• 7:41Speaker 04

  If you can afford the robot, can't you afford drone delivery of croissants from a really good bakery?

• 7:45Speaker 03

  The part that we saw was moving tray into oven. Um, how the, how the croissant dough got on the tray, complete mystery. Um, how the, how the milk got from the carton into the glass also, we'll, we'll, we'll never know.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  My question is, did the, did the nice actor who they hired to lie seem?

• 8:05Speaker 03

  Well, a, acting is lying.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. And, and he is good at his job. Seem, uh, like, self-aware at all?

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Yes, a little bit.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Like, he seemed a little embarrassed.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Um, he, he did, he did a good job. Yeah, this is also Vegas, like, people humiliate themselves money all the time.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  Just think about the paycheck.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, when he, when, when the robot spent 90 seconds putting a shirt in, in, in, in the wash, in the washing machine, uh, it was framed as Claude being extremely thorough. Look, look, look how thorough.

• 8:38Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Floyd is being.

• 8:39Ed Zitron?

  It knows my specifications. I like shit done wrong and slow. I like my stuff done poorly. It's like if I needed someone to do something slowly and poorly, as I said, I would do it myself.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  The odd thing is like, and there was so much robotics in LVC this year. Like, like North Hall, full, full of robotics. Um, and it's robotics that I, that if you've seen it say yes before, but it's always been, they've always been kind of janky. And you haven't seen like big companies like LG really mess with it because it's all kind of janky. And I was just kind of surprised that LG is actually like dipping their toes into this. Cause it's not, it's not necessarily new technology, but it's, it's at the same level of jank as it was like a year and a half ago. But for some reason they decided to like go for it this year.

• 9:20Ed Zitron?

  They got nothing else. I genuinely, it's just headline grabs. It's just, I fucking read a Wall Street Journal story to them, not even gonna name the reporter because he should know better. But it's like, yeah, this is the year of the robots. And one of the, I swear to God, most of the robots they mentioned didn't exist. It was like Floyd, I think they mentioned Floyd. I feel like it's irresponsible for anyone to report on Floyd as if it's real. Like it's real in the sense it's physically there.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  It's physically in the Las Vegas Convention Center, Central Hall, LG booth.

• 9:49Ed Zitron?

  But it's like, this is not something that can be purchased or is sold or even does like.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  It does anything.

• 9:56Ed Zitron?

  The very simple thing.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  I mean, I.

• 9:58Ed Zitron?

  I feel like I'm going insane.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  I made this point last time we were talking about, we were talking about Claude on some other episode. I can't remember.

• 10:04Ed Zitron?

  Several years ago.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, truly. Um, but I, so I know that this is a repeat point for anybody for, for the real ad heads out there. But the keys finding thing, for the robot to be able to find the keys, that means that the keys must have some kind of air tag chip on them.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Like that's how the robot.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Maybe it's possibly.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  In which case you go, how about you just put an air tag on your keys?

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Sure. I, I think Floyd might be able to find the keys via just visual recognition. Like Floyd was like sorting laundry by color. Floyd was washing certain items, but not washing others.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  It just feels like if, if I can't visually see my keys.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Well, you know, you're you're a busy dad. You don't have time.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  I am a busy dad.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  You don't have time.

• 10:49Ed Zitron?

  Dad and wife are busy with AI, but doing productivity. A woman, and a woman is, because at CES 2026, she was given pink battery pack.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  I was, I was, I was walked around a little, a little power bank thing and he pointed to the pastel colors and was like, this is, it, it looks like a foundation. It looks like a makeup. And I was like, ah, yes, that's for girls. And I, and I pointed to the black one and I was like, that make me go, no, bad, but this make me go, yes. And he was like, could not see. He just kept, kept telling me power banks for girls.

• 11:26Ed Zitron?

  It's.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  Woke, woke is truly good, truly dad.

• 11:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. No, but woke two in CES 2027 is gonna be fucking.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  It's gonna be intense.

• 11:33Ed Zitron?

  They're gonna be the gender forcing machine.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, they, they already have like the, the like accessibility stage this year. It's woke two is gonna be big.

• 11:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's gonna be like the, the caliphate section and the gender section, the forced transgender section. That's gonna be fucking great.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 11:49Ed Zitron?

  We're all changing genders next year. It's happening, folks.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  But that means you get a power bank that's whatever color.

• 11:55Ed Zitron?

  I can get a pink power bank. That sounds fucking great. We're all changing our genders next year. No, I, it's, what else just see?

• 12:03Speaker 03

  I mean, it's honestly, what was more interesting to me at Central Hall was what I didn't, didn't see.

• 12:08Ed Zitron?

  What was that?

• 12:09Speaker 03

  I didn't see Nikon. I didn't see Canon. I didn't, I didn't see Samsung.

• 12:12Speaker 04

  They were not there?

• 12:13Speaker 03

  They're, they don't have booths this year.

• 12:15Ed Zitron?

  Holy shit.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  The Panasonic booth, very bare, not really any product. There's, there's like, there's, there's like enterprise products. There's like, you know, energy efficiency products, like software, there's chips, but there's, there's, there's not, not many physical products. There's no like Panasonic cameras.

• 12:30Ed Zitron?

  That's.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  The Sony booth.

• 12:32Ed Zitron?

  Samsung isn't there? No, I'm sorry.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  The Sony booth just has cars in partnership with Honda.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  They've been weird the last several years. Like it used to be they.

• 12:39Ed Zitron?

  Samsung?

• 12:40Speaker 03

  But Sony used to-

• 12:41Speaker 04

  Well, they do have, Samsung has that exhibit somewhere in the wind.

• 12:44Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but usually they have like the Samsung Megalopolis thing.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  Like a giant booth, yeah. Not, not, not there. And Sony's exhibits is very small this year. It's just cars.

• 12:53Ed Zitron?

  And no Nikon. Well Nikon.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  And no Nikon, which has, has, has had huge booths at CES the past like three, four years.

• 12:59Ed Zitron?

  Yes. I get this weird feeling about this show that something is up.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Something is really weird this year.

• 13:04Ed Zitron?

  Something doesn't feel right because I saw like a chunk of a casino just with nothing there, no tables open. I think it was even at the Palazzo, which is just fucking strange, but something feels missing. It doesn't feel like there are less televisions like last year.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  There is less televisions.

• 13:19Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, there was like a television verand you could stride around.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:23Ed Zitron?

  Like looking at all the various giant TVs that all look and sound the same. And that was fun. This year it's smaller, weirder. And I mentioned this in another episode. Usually they keep the country based stuff in the basement in Eureka Park.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:36Ed Zitron?

  It was topside.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  It's a topside.

• 13:38Ed Zitron?

  It's top, you, okay, so I'm not going insane.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  There was some topside stuff last year, um, but it was much smaller. But there's, there's, there's way, way bigger topside pavilions.

• 13:48Ed Zitron?

  Very strange.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Above, above Eureka this year.

• 13:50Ed Zitron?

  This is a bad sign.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  There's a lot of, a lot of shifts. No, this, this CES definitely feels, feels, feels very different. Um, and I, I don't wanna be just like cynical for the sake of being cynical. Like I, I wanna have a fun time at CES.

• 14:05Ed Zitron?

  I, I actually am serious. I would love that. I would love to see some shit that makes me go, cool. I would love that.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  And yeah, I don't know, like the, we, I tried on some new, new, new to me auto translating earbuds today. I know, I know I've done a lot of auto translation stuff so far, but, uh, these ones were really good. Um, these ones were fast.

• 14:24Ed Zitron?

  Do you know who they were by?

• 14:25Speaker 03

  Um, let me, let me, uh, let me look through my notes.

• 14:28Ed Zitron?

  It's, no, I must say though, I'm not just-

• 14:30Speaker 03

  They were, they were in, they were in North Hall.

• 14:33Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Um, I'm trying to find them.

• 14:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I don't think any of us are trying to be reflexively cynical. Why are you looking up, Rob? What have you seen? Let's, let's bring you in here.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  So, so yeah, I've, I've now sort of completed my inspection. I'm flying home this evening. And, um, yeah, so. West Hall is the usual weird exhibit of things with wheels and sometimes tank treads. It's all the mobility stuff, which was never part of CES. First year, I came here in, God help me, 1998. Yeah, yeah, there's lots of interesting stuff being done with, you know, portable solar power.

• 15:05Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  Like if we had balcony solar legalized in the US, that's where you'd see it in the North Hall.

• 15:10Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  Central Hall is, you know, that's still some exhibits with TV vendors. Companies like Hi-Sense and TCL were sort of devoting more space to that. And Samsung has sort of moved off site. And yeah, Panasonic, half of their stuff was like, here's what we do for data centers.

• 15:27Ed Zitron?

  Yep.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  Which are, speaking as a Virginian, they're not that popular. People do not like these things.

• 15:32Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I imagine you've seen quite a few of those recently.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  Every time I fly out of Dulles Airport, can't miss them. And today I finally got over to the Venetian to look at the sort of smart home exhibits upstairs. Downstairs is Eureka Park, which is all the, the real sort of cats and dogs, random international exhibits.

• 15:49Ed Zitron?

  The stray dogs that walk around Eureka Park.

• 15:51Speaker 04

  That's where you have the weirdest stuff, definitely.

• 15:53Ed Zitron?

  I think they need to lean into that with Eureka Park. They need to make it dirtier. They need to have like a dive bar in the corner, let a few stray, like, like the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode where they go to Atlantic City and there's just like dogs walking around. I think like, they need to make it weird and gross because I think that's the only thing that will make it interesting.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  I had the unfortunate order of going to Eureka Park first. I went, I, the first day that I got here, I, I just had an hour before the show floor closed. And so all I could do was be in the Venetian, Venetian. And Ed had been like, oh, the downstairs is, is the weirdest. And so I, I like wandered around the, the upstairs of Venetian a little bit. And then I was like, I gotta hit the downstairs, whatever. So basically that was my intro and I was like, this stuff fucking rocks.

• 16:37Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  I mean, it's insane.

• 16:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  It's bat shit. It's 99% unnecessary.

• 16:44Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  But it's so funny. And I was just having a ball, having the time of my life, even even upstairs at Venetian has been great. And then the last two days at the at the convention center, I've been like, the fuck is this? Is this useful shit that you think I'm going to actually incorporate into my life? Get the fuck away from me. I want the weird shit that I can make fun of.

• 17:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I I'm sorry for that. I wish the show was more dopey, but it's kind of it's sad. I want I like the novelty stuff, or I want like, big and stupid. I hear there's a giant tractor I somehow missed. That's very me.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  I saw the tractor today.

• 17:17Ed Zitron?

  What?

• 17:18Speaker 04

  Wait, the the

• 17:18Ed Zitron?

  What was

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Just the John Deere tractor.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  The John Deere combine, or was there another one?

• 17:22Speaker 03

  No, the combine.

• 17:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's

• 17:23Ed Zitron?

  It could be fun if there were two.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  Big green machine. They actually imported some some corn from some farm in Iowa to plant in front of it to show you what it actually does.

• 17:31Ed Zitron?

  Interesting. Yeah. Wonder why? Like, I feel like if you're if you have a farm, you probably know about tractors.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I don't know that the people here looking at that tractor are people who have farms.

• 17:43Ed Zitron?

  Right. But my point is, then why did you put the tractor there?

• 17:47Speaker 02

  It sounds like it's

• 17:48Speaker 04

  Because you can. It's a giant green machine with huge wheels.

• 17:51Ed Zitron?

  The thing is, if their reason was just like, we can, fine. I love that. That's great. But yeah, so these these head bud, head buds?

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Time kettle.

• 18:01Ed Zitron?

  Wow.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  Time kettle.

• 18:03Ed Zitron?

  You could you could have given me seven million years, I wouldn't have come up with that name.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, they were very fast, like nearly leg free conversational translation.

• 18:15Ed Zitron?

  That's awesome. Do you know how much they cost or anything like that? Did they tell you? Because so many so many of these places just don't. It's like, when can I get it? Oh, no. No, no, not. We don't do that here. We don't sell things or put prices on things. We are simply, we are simply showing you something so we can raise money and then run away. I don't know.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, they definitely they definitely have been selling them the past few months. And I will, I will also go through my notes.

• 18:43Ed Zitron?

  No, it's okay.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Rob, can I ask solar balcony solar?

• 18:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I was actually, this was in the back of my mind, too.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Is that where somebody, is that where you have, you know, tiny little baby solar panels on your porch? And you can sell the electricity back to the electric company?

• 18:58Speaker 04

  Well, the whole idea is you don't. So this is something that's very popular in Germany. I was in Eifan September in Berlin.

• 19:03Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  And if you walk around the city, you'll see solar panels on balconies next to flags and flowers and everything all over the place. And the whole idea is it's very cheap. It's not enough to like power your whole flat, but it will, it's enough. You put two, maybe three solar panels outside, you plug them into an outlet and that's it. And they sort of found some way to legalize it.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  And they flow back.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  That, so the whole term outlet is apparently wrong because it is bidirectional.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  An inflow.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:31Ed Zitron?

  Also an inlet.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Oh, wait, you mean what we, what I think of as an outlet, that thing?

• 19:36Speaker 04

  We've been lied to our entire lives. I'm sorry.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Are also inlets?

• 19:39Ed Zitron?

  Yep. And Phil just stepped in, which is to say they're lying to you about those plugs that have two spikes.

• 19:44Speaker 04

  He's very big on the electrical safety.

• 19:46Ed Zitron?

  Phil, you, you agree with this?

• 19:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, the, the ones with the two plugs on the end, you plug them in, they're legal, right?

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Mail to mail?

• 19:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Mail to mail is illegal in most, in most states. Mail to mail is legal.

• 19:57Ed Zitron?

  Due to woke electricity people who don't want you to die.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  Maybe not Alabama.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  They're trying to overturn it now.

• 20:03Ed Zitron?

  In Texas, they are, it's the state flag. It's, it's a 50 cal rifle just wrapped in mail to mail. Yeah. So that.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  $400.

• 20:13Ed Zitron?

  $400 for that.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  That's not bad.

• 20:16Ed Zitron?

  I can see, I can see.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  And do they need to be wifi connected?

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Phone conducting, uh, no, I mean, I think, no, the Bluetooth of the phone. So like your.

• 20:25Ed Zitron?

  Your phone will need. But I feel like.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  But that's what I'm asking. They're, they're running the computer through the phone.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  But, but I'm asking, does the phone need a wifi can, need, need?

• 20:31Speaker 03

  It's probably needs cell.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  It's not an on-device LLM. Listen to me.

• 20:35Ed Zitron?

  There we are.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  I know what I'm talking about.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  No, it is, it is, it is not on-device.

• 20:39Ed Zitron?

  I will say with that one.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  It uses other LLMs.

• 20:42Ed Zitron?

  I will say with that one, if it's immediate, then the situation you'd be using that is like international business. So I can kind of get it.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was, it was fine.

• 20:50Ed Zitron?

  But I'm kind of getting worried about like LLM translation, though.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 20:54Ed Zitron?

  Because it's. Like, how would I possibly know it's like, it gets things wrong in the language I understand. Imagine the one I don't.

• 21:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:01Ed Zitron?

  But at the same time, I like this text. So you know that who knows if that will. I want, I want that to work, but it's like, because the pebble watch we're talking, uh, the pebble ring we're talking about earlier. That's on device somehow.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  Right. That's.

• 21:14Ed Zitron?

  And that's cool. It's just like, but the thing is on device is very difficult. It's not, I can understand why people are doing it. It's just, what happens if this becomes more expensive, which it most certainly will. I don't know. But Rob, you've been going to CES since 1998, as we've just established.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  I, I think a lot about the life choices that put me in.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  What do you think about those?

• 21:37Ed Zitron?

  No, seriously. How do you feel about this CES? Like, how does it compare to even last year or the year before?

• 21:41Speaker 04

  So honestly, I would say.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  And how does it compare to 1998?

• 21:44Speaker 04

  Well, um, in 1998, this was a show about TVs and stereos and it was the dawn of digital TV.

• 21:50Ed Zitron?

  Look what they took from us.

• 21:51Speaker 04

  People were very excited about the prospect of being able to spend like $4,000 on some 30 inch CRT that would weigh 400 pounds, but it would display.

• 22:00Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 22:00Speaker 04

  1080i resolution. Whoa. Yeah. And, and along the way, it's become this, the show about all these different parts of technology. So there's all these, you know, electric cars, solar panels, AI household robots. So I mean, like, I complain a lot about the logistics because it is such a pain in the ass to get around. But yesterday, in the span of like four hours, walking around LVCC North, I talked to a company developing, building a test fusion power plant in Massachusetts.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  Who else? Let me take a look at my notes. It was a bizarre sequence of events. All right, let's.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Wait, sorry. Say that, that as in a new nuclear power plant in.

• 22:41Speaker 04

  Nuclear fusion power plant. Oh, wow.

• 22:43Ed Zitron?

  Oh, this is non-existent.

• 22:45Speaker 04

  It's, it's been 20 years away my entire life.

• 22:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, no, it's, that's my favorite thing about all the nuclear stuff. It's like nuclear power is real, but it's like fission. Yep, we are just, we are mere decades away from this 20, like.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Fusion, fusion. Yeah.

• 22:59Ed Zitron?

  There's the whole fission fusion thing. I don't want to get Phil on it. He's, he actually knows what he's talking about. We don't do that on this show.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  The only reason I know is because last night, Phil spent an hour explaining this.

• 23:10Ed Zitron?

  And I was suffering a podcaster's concussion. So I was. Which I have no other anymore.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  So other random conversations I had during this little tour, just LVCC North.

• 23:22Speaker 04

  Guy with a battery company in Singapore where they're they're building much of the battery out of paper.

• 23:26Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Robert was mentioning this.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's that's really neat.

• 23:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I tried on an exoskeleton to assist my legs.

• 23:36Ed Zitron?

  We've heard a few people.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Which one?

• 23:37Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, which one?

• 23:38Speaker 04

  This was Hypershell X.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  I was wearing Hypershell today as well.

• 23:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so it it's sort of like, you know, when you get on an e-bike and it's it's almost like the hand of God is pushing you down the street. Sam started wearing this up your legs.

• 23:50Ed Zitron?

  How's it feel?

• 23:51Speaker 04

  Honestly.

• 23:52Ed Zitron?

  You've both used them.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  It feels good.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  I mean, anything to make my feet hurt less at the show, so maybe I should roll up wearing that thing next time.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  I got really into the settings.

• 24:03Ed Zitron?

  And tell me more.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  They they have an app and they have three different modes. I'm not sure if it's Robert's already talked about Hypershell.

• 24:09Ed Zitron?

  He talked about it a little bit, but he hadn't like really used it.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  I we me and someone else have been trading trading off wearing it all day. And so there's this like eco mode, which is like the regular mode that that you can operate it and you can change like the percentage of how much power is getting directed to it. That changes how much it assists you. There's hyper mode, which if you have hyper mode on and all the way, you are like bounding. It is it is it is it is really pushing you forward. It is fun. It's uncomfortable if you are walking slowly. You have to be like walking fast, but if you're walking fast with it, it's it's like really good.

• 24:41Ed Zitron?

  I grew up in London. I live in New York as well. That sounds amazing.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  For a fast walker, it's great and you can you can change the intensity of it. But you can you can change like the torque from like one leg to another to make to make a different.

• 24:52Ed Zitron?

  Is that if you have like an injury in one leg or something?

• 24:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:55Ed Zitron?

  That's really that's actually fucking great.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  You can change like how much like input delay there is, how much it's gonna like like how fast the acceleration is for when it starts moving. Something that I was using to like mess with, the person who was walking around with today is they have on their for their experimental feature, they have something called fitness mode, which does the opposite of the main features.

• 25:20Ed Zitron?

  Oh, it's like resistance?

• 25:21Speaker 03

  It restricts movement. And this was really fun because I could have them, I could see them like running around on hyper mode and via my phone, I can change it to fitness mode to completely stop their bodies from moving.

• 25:35Ed Zitron?

  Like the wrong trousers with Wallace and Gromit?

• 25:37Speaker 03

  So I could just completely like like like force force them to a standstill.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  And it works great.

• 25:45Ed Zitron?

  I can't listen, drum it.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  I could do it from like, I could do it from like thirty feet away on the app. Uh, and it was fantastic. It was really fun.

• 25:54Ed Zitron?

  I've, I've been looking for more bits. That's really, I've.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  I've, I've been doing this for like eight hours. I've, I've been so annoying with this.

• 26:03Ed Zitron?

  I love that they got wrong trousers mode. That's so good. And honestly, I'm not cynical. I love these things. I fucking.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  It was fun.

• 26:09Ed Zitron?

  I fucking love these. I know so many people with mobility issues. I myself have a fucked up ankle. I love this. I love that the, this feels like future tech.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  And it's small. It, it doesn't, it doesn't get, like, I've tried on many, many an exoskeleton in my, at, at, at the CESs I've been to. Uh, this one was very compact, but still, still functional. It's, it's.

• 26:30Speaker 04

  And so it's only wraps around your, your waist and your leg. So it's not really an exoskeleton. I'm like, what do you, what's it called?

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Mobility suit. I don't know.

• 26:38Speaker 04

  Add on.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  But like, it's basically just like an extra set of hips, kind of, right?

• 26:41Speaker 04

  I could use one of them.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  And it, it, hips that help, that help and, uh, that help like, that help push your knee up.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Well, they're artificially assisted hips, so they do in fact lie.

• 26:50Ed Zitron?

  The hips, they're finally, we've found hips that lie. Yeah, it's, I love that. I love that they've got these, especially with like so much useless shit here. A way to like, help people walk feels almost like the platonic ideal of CES, like other than a giant television. A television so large you can't see all of it.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  Hundred sixty-three inches.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  They go, oh my god, yeah, I saw that. I saw that too. Way too big.

• 27:11Ed Zitron?

  They just got a big ass, big ass TV. Hell yeah.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:15Ed Zitron?

  Do you, do you know what the price was?

• 27:16Speaker 03

  It wasn't transparent.

• 27:18Ed Zitron?

  Uh, yeah, fuck it then. No, I.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, LG had the transparent TV.

• 27:21Ed Zitron?

  Here's the thing, they're the useful TVs, but every year I think they should try and make a bigger one. Like just like every year they're like, here he goes, two hundred inches now. Now we've got one where we have to bypass the wall. Like, yeah, just, escalate constantly. And I saw on the very first day, a wireless TV situation, where they were like, yeah, it's for trade shows. You can get four of them and clip them into one thing. I'm like, oh, you could be a sports freak. And they just fucking looked at me. They just look, I'm like, what? I mean, like when I was getting my place here in Vegas, I went to look at a house where the guy had just four CRTs, all just playing different NFL games. And I also walked during that tour of the house, didn't actually get in the end. Um, I was just enamored with that.

• 28:02Ed Zitron?

  And honestly, it was all I could think about. It's like, you could just pop up one of them, those sports TV things, like Back, Back to the Future Two. You get fired by a guy from Japan. It'd be great. Like I'm not Martin Butfly's dad in the future. Anyways, uh, yeah, it's, I like the exec.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  Hypershell's good.

• 28:20Ed Zitron?

  I need to, I need them to reach out to, they reached out to you, they reached out to Robert. They, they don't like me there. People at Hypershell don't like me very much.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're, they're afraid that you're gonna get on your podcast and talk about them.

• 28:31Ed Zitron?

  Uh, positively. Yeah. You know what? Actually, based on the last 12 hours, I don't fucking blame them.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  If I was Hypershell, I'd be like, I don't know.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  I, I, I don't think Hypershell involves AI in any way. So you're probably, that should be safe.

• 28:44Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  You, you do have stats. You can see how many miles you walked, how many steps you've walked.

• 28:49Ed Zitron?

  That's fun.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  The battery was great. Like we, we, I've.

• 28:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. How long?

• 28:52Speaker 03

  We've had this thing on since like, since like eight AM. Um, I got back to my hotel to drop it off uh, about an hour ago and we still had 50% of the battery left.

• 29:01Ed Zitron?

  That's really, that's better than my phone's been doing.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  And, and no, it was, it has, it is, it is better than the phone. And like, we're walking in a convention center. Like that's a lot of walking.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  The fitness mode, who, are there, is it the same?

• 29:14Speaker 03

  10,000 steps.

• 29:15Ed Zitron?

  That's not bad.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  I, it's funny because so much of our podcasting has been looking at products that are unnecessary and pointing out the unnecessary parts of them and, and rightfully laughing at those.

• 29:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  And this is a product that clearly like can help a ton of people and is, is a wonderful technology and very worthwhile. And so I don't mean to apply the same logic, but is the person who's buying Hypershell going to use the fitness mode? Those feel to me like two different use cases.

• 29:44Ed Zitron?

  It feels like something that's probably not difficult to add.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  It's an extra add-on. That's the thing. It is, it is an experimental feature. It is not, they are not, I do not think they're selling them with fitness mode enabled right now.

• 29:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  It is, it is an experimental feature that you have to like, like click like agree and okay to.

• 30:00Ed Zitron?

  All right. We're going to rotate, of course. Now, uh, this following ad is not for Hypershell. It's for something else that you should buy without reservation. Just credit cards out, please, everyone. If it's a podcast, you must listen to.

• 30:20Speaker 00

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• 30:49Ed Zitron?

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• 33:06Speaker 06

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• 33:17Ed Zitron?

  Superstition, fear and jealousy. Welcome back to Better Offline, the literal best podcast ever made. I'm Rob Zombie, slamming things in the back of my Dracula, is stand-up comedian and star of Is This Thing On? Chloe Radcliffe.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  Where is she? I'll kill her.

• 33:29Ed Zitron?

  There she is. It could happen. Here's Garrison Davis.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  Good evening.

• 33:33Ed Zitron?

  And take right to Rob Pegoraro. Hello. I like the fitness mode. I heard the moment you said that, I'm like, I want to fucking go for it. Like, I've been really, I've been getting into more cardio stuff. I'm like, I kind of want to fuck, I want to see how this fucks me up a bit.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  It's really cool. No, it's.

• 33:48Ed Zitron?

  So how does, did you try the fitness mode yourself?

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:51Ed Zitron?

  How does, how does it exert the pressure? Like, is it the, is walking more difficult?

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's more difficult. You can't, you have to really strain to like, step more than like, maybe like half a foot.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  Is it just that it sort of like binds up the mechanism of the?

• 34:07Speaker 03

  I think so. I think it's, I think it's like, it's like locking the motor or applying resistance to the motor.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  So you have to then push hard.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  It takes, it takes way more effort.

• 34:15Ed Zitron?

  Because I mean, you've already got like weighted pants and stuff. I know this sounds like I'm doing it, but you do, you actually do have these things. You have like sweat suits as well.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  Well, that's sort of what I, that's where I wind up coming to is like, this feels.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  You can change the, you can, you have like, you have like, um, like, like a slider, like you can change the settings for it.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  I totally follow. I totally follow. And. The if if we were not so positive on the rest of the product.

• 34:40Ed Zitron?

  No, you can trash it up.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  I just am like this. I'm thinking of Conover, of Adam Conover saying, this is a solved problem. You know, where I'm like, we have weighted vests or we have.

• 34:50Ed Zitron?

  My thing is with fitness.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  You know how people bought the like Nordic tracks? Do you remember those? The cross, the internal cross country ski machines? And that there was like a year where everybody's like, everybody's got to get a Nordic track.

• 35:00Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  And then now, and then a bunch of people just have a Nordic track sitting in their basement that they don't need.

• 35:06Ed Zitron?

  I think the difference with this is not only is an experimental feature, it's not trying to be a one size fits all thing. Cause I.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  You can, you can use it while hiking.

• 35:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  So if you, if you want to have a more of a workout while hiking and there's settings for going uphill, downhill, and it changes the way that it like how, how the motorcycle functions.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  It, it, it does have a lot of like.

• 35:26Ed Zitron?

  It's not being sold on this. Pardon? It's not being sold on this idea. This is an experimental.

• 35:30Speaker 04

  I don't think they even told me about the fitness mode. I tried eco mode and.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  They took one look at you.

• 35:34Speaker 04

  Hyper mode, one like fifty five year old guy. I have enough trouble getting around already.

• 35:39Ed Zitron?

  We don't need to do this.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Walking, race walking, uphill, downhill, upstairs, downstairs, gravel, cycling, running, mountain, backpacking. And sand dunes are the, are the adaptive motion recognition settings on the fitness.

• 35:52Ed Zitron?

  I would love to, cause my ankle gets fucked up if I walk more than a mile. I would love this.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:57Ed Zitron?

  Diaper shell reach, fuck. Hyper shell reach out to me like, I swear to God, I won't call.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  They're never going to know that you called them diaper shell.

• 36:03Ed Zitron?

  I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna call them diaper shell again. It'll be fine. That was the last time.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  As soon as you're like, you can't take it off when you're, when you need to use the bathroom. Diaper shell.

• 36:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Oh God. Yeah. So, okay. Rob, back to you.

• 36:17Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 36:17Ed Zitron?

  Anything else? Well, actually, was there anything you really loved during this? Was there anything you sort of like, fuck yeah?

• 36:22Speaker 04

  The story I'm most fascinated by, there's a company called Donut Lab that does not actually make, there's not, it's not a donut making robot. They, um, they introduced a solid state battery for electric vehicles.

• 36:33Ed Zitron?

  So we had a very brief conversation about this and then someone emailed me and said they want more. So guess fucking what? One listener. It's your lucky day.

• 36:41Speaker 04

  Reader's service. So it is kind of mystery how they've done it because this has traditionally been the holy grail. Supposedly if you can get the, the battery chemistry and everything in the physics to work, you have a much lighter battery that's cheaper, that charges faster, that has far more cycles. And they, they say they've done all these things, but they're being very cagey about them. And they also say the, the minerals are globally available widely. So not conflict minerals. Like. What's the catch? Is one of the other ingredients kittens? What are we, what's going on here? And so we'll have to see, like they, they showing off a motorcycle, which includes the battery.

• 37:15Ed Zitron?

  Did you use it? Was it?

• 37:16Speaker 04

  No, they just had it parked there. It's a $30,000 and up electric motorcycle. It looks great. But if they've cracked the code for that, and there's lots of other people working on solid state batteries. And given that EVs are already good, like, you know, you have this thing, you can charge it at home. You know, a fast charger, it's, it's enough time for me to take a nap, which I like doing.

• 37:38Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 37:40Speaker 04

  So address the other concerns people have.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Is it big enough to power a vehicle that's bigger than a motorcycle?

• 37:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Though like they, they showed off, there's some company that makes like an electric car chassis with the sort of skateboard thing where the batteries are right underneath the center. That's how most EVs are designed. So yeah, their whole aim is to have this in a lot of different cars. Like they say they'll have news soon about car partnerships. So big deal.

• 38:05Ed Zitron?

  But if this is true, it's like a revolution in all car battery techs.

• 38:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and not just that, I mean, like drones, trains for that matter, because we don't know how to build transportation infrastructure affordably in America. Lots of railroad operators would rather put the battery on the train than put the wires above the tracks.

• 38:24Ed Zitron?

  I just want to be clear, if this is true, I will be the most excited about this ever. If Donut Labs ends up being fake, I'm going to spend multiple episodes destroying this fucking company.

• 38:33Speaker 04

  So dirty.

• 38:34Ed Zitron?

  No, no, no, you won't because it's an exciting and cool thing. And if this is real, it's fucking amazing. If it's not, I will learn everything about this company and publish it on this fucking podcast.

• 38:43Speaker 04

  They're unnoticed.

• 38:44Ed Zitron?

  No, they genuinely are.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  But it also sounds like somebody is going to crack this.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, like there, there are enough other, there's enough money being put at solve, directed at solving the problem.

• 38:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  And.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  What's, what's it gonna do? I mean, is the, is the oil industry going to have an even bigger paroxysm than we've?

• 39:04Ed Zitron?

  The thing is with the oil industry is they're well, yeah, but they're also well invested in this stuff too. And they will find ways to make money off of this. They will not like it, but it's kind of hard to deny electricity. But nevertheless, they don't love it.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the whole trend, the trend has been going on for years and years. And it's just right now in the U.S. We have this president who has just some deranged notions of energy and affordability. And I think his head is stuck in 1986, which is why he thinks it's a good idea. You know, hijack Venezuela as if it's like sticking up a gas station.

• 39:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's I love living in I want to live. You know what I would love? I'd love to live in precedented times. I'd love to live in boring times. I'm I've had too many interesting events happen. I'd like to go back to boredom, but sadly, they're not going to allow me. I'd

• 39:57Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 39:58Ed Zitron?

  It's it's frustrating because I've been asking people genuinely, seriously, bring me stuff you're excited about. And everyone keeps coming back with like, ah, you know, it was kind of honestly, the exoskeletons are the one unilaterally other than big tractor. And again, I must be clear, big thing, big, huge thing.

• 40:16Speaker 03

  Big tractor, big TV.

• 40:17Ed Zitron?

  I know. I fucking love it. I'm I'm an ape.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  One of the best CES moments I've I've ever had is when I when we saw maybe two years ago, we saw the USPS's first one of those.

• 40:27Ed Zitron?

  The duck face truck, yes.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  Electric duck vehicles. And I was like, this is rad. This thing looks great. And like two years later, I saw them rolling around the city.

• 40:37Ed Zitron?

  And that fucking rocks. I I love that.

• 40:40Speaker 04

  So I Oshkosh, the company that makes it, they had a media day at their facility in Wisconsin, flew me out there. I got to drive it.

• 40:46Ed Zitron?

  Whoa.

• 40:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, tell me more about that.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  So I mean, so first of all, it looks the way it does, because you want something where people can stand up in the back.

• 40:55Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  And so, yeah, which you can't do right now in these 1980s vintage trucks, the postal services rolling around. It's got air conditioning, there's cup holders, all the modern conveniences. And and yeah, the Oshkosh took a long time to sort of get production ramped up. It seems like they're doing that now. And yeah, it was a neat. They also showed off like a battery electric garbage truck, which I got to drive.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 41:16Speaker 04

  It was the quietest garbage truck I've ever driven, also the only one, but whatever.

• 41:21Ed Zitron?

  I mean, I'm really, I just love the idea of driving a truck around. Yay.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  So

• 41:26Ed Zitron?

  garbage truck.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Here's a okay, here's a question that I had the thought of in an earlier episode and didn't wind up asking. Um, Oshkosh, the company that makes those trucks is a huge defense contractor.

• 41:37Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Makes a ton of military vehicles.

• 41:40Speaker 04

  They do indeed.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Uh, I was reading, uh, on X, the everything app, that, uh, ICE and CPB CBP was, um, has been seen using smart glasses to like, record protesters and stuff.

• 41:58Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  How much of? The tech that we see at CES winds up getting filtered into what I would consider nefarious action.

• 42:10Speaker 04

  Probably a lot. I mean, the fact that ISIS apparently using this sort of facial recognition system against some database that I didn't know the government internally had to see if someone is an American citizen, which, um, yeah, I have a lot of problems. Well, where do we start? I mean, maybe like, perhaps they could not murder American citizens

• 42:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that would be fantastic.

• 42:33Speaker 04

  And then try to cover it up.

• 42:35Ed Zitron?

  Oh, God, I'm gonna be-

• 42:36Speaker 03

  ISIS just shot two more people in.

• 42:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, CBP.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:39Ed Zitron?

  I'm gonna be, I'm gonna say something completely honest. People do email me and ask, why don't I ever say anything? Because I'm a fucking immigrant and I'm terrified of saying anything about it at all. And if you're ever wondering if I have opinions on this, I do, but I'm terrified to say anything. Do not think that I don't have thoughts or feelings about someone being shot to fucking death and mother, which is disgraceful and disgusting, but I have to like, I am very guarded about it. It's not that I don't care. It's that as an immigrant with a child in America, I die here. So, yeah, very fun fucking week for everyone.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  But this thing you're talking about, we see a lot of this with like the drone tech. Um, and like one of the, one of the first CSs I went to, and you still see this now on the show, is like, um, it was on like, you know, advancing drone technology. It was like half put on by Walmart and half put on by this, uh, police department, uh, in Southern California, who launched like the first like big drone program, which has now been copied around the country. And this was like a panel with like both of them talking about how Walmart's doing drone deliveries.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  And, uh, how the police are sending, are sending these drones to like surveil, uh, neighborhoods and go to, and go to crime scenes before officers and like, secure the area to like, you know, see, see what's going on. And yeah, you see this a lot with the drone stuff here in CES. There's across from the creator stage, which is in Central Hall.

• 44:05Ed Zitron?

  What is the creator stage?

• 44:06Speaker 03

  It's where it's where if you're a content, it's all things content creator in creator economy. Ed, you would love the creator stage.

• 44:13Ed Zitron?

  I'm going there tomorrow.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  I stood next to a panel where they talked about the changing, changing habits of gens of digital Gen Z life.

• 44:23Ed Zitron?

  A presentation created by people over the age of 40.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  All of them were, yes.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  What habits were changing?

• 44:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Again, I stood next to this panel because I just heard too many like things. Sometimes in panels, you know, like five minutes in, you're like, this is not going to be worth my time.

• 44:39Ed Zitron?

  You just start hearing the Charlie Brown paranoid.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  And then, and then, and then you have to leave. But it turns out they use TikTok to make purchasing decisions.

• 44:47Ed Zitron?

  What?

• 44:47Speaker 04

  Hell is that?

• 44:48Speaker 03

  But.

• 44:49Speaker 04

  Wow, that's so skibitty of them. Did I say that right?

• 44:54Speaker 02

  That rocks.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  But across from the creator stage.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  I've been podcasting for approximately 14 hours over the last three days. That's a top three moment.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  Across from the creator stage, there's a Chinese drone company that has these, they're called drone in the box systems, where basically you put it in the back of like a pickup truck and you can launch, you can launch a drone and it'll, you can like, you can launch an autonomous drone and it'll pilot, pilot around and then go back, back into the box. This, this already exists in this, we have, we have, we, police departments in the States already have this, but this was like a Chinese company that, that was making, making a lot of these. And I can pull up the name of that company shortly.

• 45:36Ed Zitron?

  drones here though. I feel like last year there was like various, there were more fun things. There was like a baseball thing.

• 45:43Speaker 04

  There was a drone soccer thing last year. Well, one thing is.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  GDU was the company with aerial surveillance and public safety where there are too many drone applications.

• 45:54Ed Zitron?

  See many consumer drone companies.

• 45:56Speaker 04

  No, not many. How many of them are now sort of banned by this order that has come out, which? They're targeting DJI, which without them, like, where are Americans going to buy drones?

• 46:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, they're targeting the the horse when the barn door's been open for a few years.

• 46:13Speaker 04

  Thought this through entirely?

• 46:14Ed Zitron?

  It's it's just that whole thing, that whole, all of that shit's so bizarre to me. It's just like, oh, what if the, what if we fill American full of Chinese products that could be used as a, oh, wait, we did that. We've done that for 10 straight years. We've just, Amazon has, with various letters put in random orders, shifted security cameras into every home for the, on the cheap. Oh, no, how will we stop this? Well, it doesn't start with the stores, it starts with China. The sneaky Chinese who are, I don't know, selling to America constantly, we don't stop that.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  You heard it here, folks.

• 46:47Ed Zitron?

  No, it's just very confused. I don't, don't really understand. I don't think anyone really understands what we're doing against China at this point. It's just like, we, we might let them buy stuff. Actually, that was an interesting story I saw today. Um, Nvidia with China with these GPUs, they're saying they have to be paid completely upfront, whether or not they can actually sell them. They're saying that regardless of how the, the, um, sanctions work out, if you buy them, you must pay completely fucking upfront. Whether or not you can, you can't change your order, you can't get a refund, you can't cancel, you can't reallocate. Fuck, yeah. Nvidia, doing great. That's the kind of shit you do when you're like, not doing well financially. Fuck, yeah.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  That's such a weird, like, why even?

• 47:29Ed Zitron?

  It's just because.

• 47:31Speaker 04

  You must think you have exceedingly captive customers.

• 47:33Ed Zitron?

  No, that's, yeah, it's like the kind of shit you do when you think that you can't die. And.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  But you also are a little worried about.

• 47:41Ed Zitron?

  Yes, exactly. You're like trying to pretend you're strong. And I say this in a town full of people that act like they can't die. This is the person who gets washed out first. Like, this is the person who, they have all the money until they get seven down on the craps table.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:54Ed Zitron?

  Little craps, little craps for everyone. Anyone play craps, you listen, email me at easierbetteroffline.com with like your craps tips. If you send me toilet related stuff, I'm gonna be really upset. It's a different kind of craps. Anyway, moving on. What else, Rob? What else did you see?

• 48:08Speaker 04

  Oh, let's see, um. So I've been trying to follow some of the the political discussions like every Washingtonian, I fly 2000 miles to hang out with people from DC. Yeah, exactly. And so there's really distinct panel about tariffs Tuesday morning where everyone was saying this is such a dumb idea. Like this is not helping. They are a tax paid by Americans, not the Chinese. They're not helping people build factories. The CEO of this kitchen robot company, Suvi, Robin Lewis was saying, you know, we've created a lot of jobs, not in the United States. They have a factory built in Mexico, one in Vietnam. Like, none of this stuff works. None of it makes any sense. Well, stupid question. Why would the tariffs make them put jobs in Mexico? And I say this genuinely not unsaid.

• 48:53Speaker 04

  So her answer was basically, first of all, a lot of the components to the stuff she makes is not made in the US and will not be made in the US at any time soon. And you can't make them here. And therefore, you need to import those things. And so why eat the tariffs on the stuff you need to bring to the US when you can just have them shipped to Mexico, pay a lesser tariff once that way? And it's just dumb. So it doesn't change the incentives at all? Yeah, like, we haven't suddenly magically made it reasonable for people to, you know, do all this factory work that was, you know, profitable 30 years ago. Yeah, we're not going to pay people like NAFTA, was it NAFTA? It's probably what caused the problem, not like, not like the tariffs people were paying.

• 49:37Speaker 04

  NAFTA, now it's USMCA, which now Trump thinks is terrible. It's just not, you know, it's not policymaking by grownups. And so the rest of the panel, I'm guessing everyone kind of agreed and? Yeah, yeah, I mean, it was, I don't imagine, the finding is, of course, a lot of people in the electronics industry seem to think that, oh, it's great that we're pushing ahead on AI, we're getting rid of the regulatory shackles.

• 50:04Speaker 04

  But the problem is the person who's doing that is also the one who's imposing the tariffs. It's the same guy.

• 50:08Ed Zitron?

  Also, we don't have regulatory shackles. You live in Virginia, you know that.

• 50:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:12Ed Zitron?

  There's nothing stopping data.

• 50:13Speaker 04

  Capital of the world.

• 50:14Ed Zitron?

  All you hear in Virginia is the screaming of the computer because the computer is in pain. The GPU is hurting the computer.

• 50:23Speaker 04

  We have a new governor getting sworn in in less than two weeks. Abigail Spanberger. And I think we will be seeing some things done about data centers that were not under.

• 50:31Ed Zitron?

  She's gonna save the, she's gonna save the computer from the GPUs.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  What, do you have a suspicion of what those things will be?

• 50:37Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, a lot of it is.

• 50:38Ed Zitron?

  She ran on that, didn't she?

• 50:39Speaker 04

  She was sort of, she said, we need to make sure that like large utility users pay their fair share. Which the previous governor Glenn Youngkin, who is, I think most people would say he is the most mediocre governor of Virginia in the 21st century.

• 50:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, back in London, we have a word for it, twap.

• 50:58Speaker 04

  So, yeah, like Youngkin, he vetoed like really small bore legislation saying like, you know, we need to have some standards for environmental review of data centers. Because these things are all over the place. If you take off from Dulles Airport, look to your left and right, you'll see these huge boxes with stuff on the roof. No parking lots around, nobody works in them. And they do provide a lot of property tax revenue for counties. So like, it's a huge chunk of the revenue of like Loudoun County, Prince William County, Western Exeter's of DC. But there's no benefit for people nearby. They don't generate jobs. They, you don't get faster internet because you have a data center one street away.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  In fact, you get more expensive electricity.

• 51:36Ed Zitron?

  And this is America, we don't feed those taxes into social services.

• 51:39Speaker 04

  And once a month, they've got to turn on the backup generators to make sure they work. So that's a lot of noise and pollution. Everyone hates them, they're really unpopular. And the whole idea that we need to do this because guys like Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman think that we're going to get superintelligence or AGI. So we have to sort of suck it up.

• 51:57Ed Zitron?

  We need those GPUs to lure, this is a true story, Jeff Horwitz from Reuters, lure a man with dementia to New York using a Kylie Jenner branded chatbot. And then he fell over and died.

• 52:11Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 52:11Ed Zitron?

  True story.

• 52:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, that grandfather.

• 52:13Ed Zitron?

  Mark Zuckerberg should be in fucking prison and everyone who worked on it should be in there with him. I'm deadly fucking serious. Everyone who worked on that, every single fucking person, fucking put Jenna in there as well. Her fucking face on it. Sorry, I have some like slightly aggressive views on this.

• 52:26Speaker 04

  You do have views.

• 52:26Ed Zitron?

  No, no, it's just, I don't know, I think it's just exploitative. But no, it's interesting hearing the data center conversation here as well because we have some CoreWeave bullshit. I should go and have a look, go and have a look at them.

• 52:36Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:37Ed Zitron?

  Of all the companies to be here in Vegas, CoreWeave.

• 52:42Ed Zitron?

  But did you see any other panels that are of interest? So I don't just talk about CoreWeave.

• 52:46Speaker 04

  So there's a bunch. Honestly, I'm gonna have to sort of catch up via VOD when I get back home. Like every year, I walk miles and miles through these exhibits, think I've covered it all. Come home, read other people's CES recaps, see all the stuff I missed and like.

• 53:00Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 53:01Speaker 04

  Did I go to the same show?

• 53:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, absolutely.

• 53:03Ed Zitron?

  No, I walk through, I've been here for days and there was like yesterday when I walked through stuff, nothing was affixing to my brain. It was all just this slop of my brain just going, won't exist, won't exist, GPT wrapper.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  Don't need to be remembered.

• 53:18Ed Zitron?

  Money laundering, photonics panel, solar panel. And it was strange because usually there is like a good amount. And I should also be clear, cynic aside. There is a use for this. There are people who go here, buyers who are like, oh, I'm gonna, I'm building something or what have you. But it feels like it's either that or the like the slopification of CES.

• 53:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it reminds me of like when 3D printers just started.

• 53:43Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  Like getting popular. And then, and then you see 3D printed slop everywhere. And that is, this is interesting. I think the way that, you know, if you go to like a, like a, like a Comic Con or like a Ren Faire. Things that that used to be, you know, like handmade, cool, like novelty goods. Now it's just only 3D printed dragons because we can use these, we can use these, uh, use these devices just to like print out, print out this like, you know, plastic bullshit. And there's a similar thing happening with, with these GTP wrappers.

• 54:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  Where instead of, they are kind of new products, but it's all, it's all building some physical mechanism around this, the same, the same, like the same software service.

• 54:24Ed Zitron?

  It's the natural endpoint of CES. It's just like, half of this shit's never gonna exist anyway. So they're just like, nah, fuck it. It's connected to the magic API thing and then product, please invest. I genuinely, there is.

• 54:37Ed Zitron?

  Partly because of where I am in my life. I can't do this this year, but maybe next. I think I'm just if that they're not going to be here next year. But if there are still L L M companies next year, all I'm going to do is walk up to them and do the Radcliffe, as we call it. It's like, what, what's the point of this? Why do I care?

• 54:53Speaker 02

  And who gives a shit about that?

• 54:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, who cares? Who cares?

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Why does that matter?

• 54:56Ed Zitron?

  Who cares? Who cares? Because honestly, I don't think 90% of this show can answer that question. Last year, when I saw my favorite booth, which was the Korean baseball one, where it's just, it was like a golf tee thing, but for baseball. And the guys were like, no, you need to step up and hit the ball. I'm like, I cannot do it. I will be shit. And then when I finally did, they were like, oh, right. You can't hit it. I'm like, I fucking told you. But when I asked him, I was like, it's for people that can hit baseballs. I'm like, yeah, I know. And like professional baseball players who have their own like mansions and shit. I'm like, that makes sense. I get the people who play baseball. And you want to hit the ball at home and also just, it's fun to go to a batting cage.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 55:34Ed Zitron?

  This year, it's like, I went looking for stuff like that. I, I really wanted like a baseball cage, something like that. I want, I wanted something fun.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  There's a, there's a golfing, there's a golfing simulator.

• 55:45Ed Zitron?

  Okay, okay. What happened? Just golf?

• 55:48Speaker 02

  It, it pretty much, I think it's at the, you said it, Heisen, I want to say?

• 55:53Ed Zitron?

  Heisen?

• 55:54Speaker 02

  Heisen? Heisen's. I think it's at the Heisen's booth.

• 55:56Ed Zitron?

  That's nice.

• 55:57Speaker 04

  There, there is some.

• 55:58Speaker 02

  There, it's like a projected onto a screen.

• 56:00Speaker 04

  In, uh, in the Venetian Expo.

• 56:03Ed Zitron?

  The tennis thing?

• 56:03Speaker 04

  Out the middle of it. Yeah. You know, the idea is like, you're sort of like tennis coach. It will like, you know, serve right at you.

• 56:10Speaker 02

  I should try that tomorrow.

• 56:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I'm actually curious about the tennis. See, that's fun. We like that. That's, that's good. We like tennis. We love tennis.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  I had a little bit of human connection.

• 56:22Ed Zitron?

  That's great. Tell me, please, God.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  Um, I was, I had called a cab. Uh, so I'm staying at Harrah's and I had called a cab from Harrah's to the convention center. And that, you know, everybody just goes down to the little Uber.

• 56:36Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  Waiting zone. And there were, there were a handful of people and I just kept watching car after car drive up. One person get in, the rest of us are waiting there and it just felt insane.

• 56:47Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  And I, I think it would have felt insane, even if I didn't live in New York, but living in New York and.

• 56:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  And. You know, feeling so passionately about public transit. I'm like, this really is insulting. And I, my guy pulled up and I just turned to, there were two women who were next to me. And I was like, do you two want to get in the car with me? We don't have to talk. And one of them gratefully accepted and she was like, my Uber kept cancelling. I kept not being able to get a car. Thank you so much. And the other woman didn't, just looked up, didn't say anything, looked back down at her phone. I would just copy that.

• 57:20Ed Zitron?

  Now there's a New Yorker.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, truly. And uh, she, I'm not a hundred percent sure that she understood what I was saying.

• 57:28Ed Zitron?

  That's probably more likely.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  Um, but this woman and I got in the car and we wound up riding the whole way, I mean, or you know, or talking the whole way on the ride. And I asked what she did. I saw, I saw that her badge said Apple and uh, she was saying that she's a buyer for stores. And she said, I, you know, I didn't used to work in tech. And I said, what did you used to do? And she said, well, I used to be in supply chain management. And I went, oh, that's cool. I used to be in supply chain management. And she said, oh yeah, I used to work at Target. And I was like, oh, I used to work at Target. She said, oh, I was a business analyst. And I was like, oh, I was a business analyst at Target headquarters in Minneapolis.

• 58:00Ed Zitron?

  Were you?

• 58:01Speaker 02

  And yeah, yeah, yeah. For, yeah, for two years.

• 58:03Ed Zitron?

  I had no idea.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  For two years, uh, all soda, Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, all subsidiary brands that pass through all of the 1800 Target stores in the country pass through me. Which is insane that they let me, a twenty one year old.

• 58:17Ed Zitron?

  Queen of soda.

• 58:18Speaker 02

  Queen of soda. Um, I used to say pop until I worked in the soda industry. Yeah, yeah.

• 58:23Ed Zitron?

  Um. Pop.

• 58:24Speaker 02

  Pop. Oh yeah, have some pop. Um, and she, you know, what's even wilder, she uh, worked on the snacks desk. And I tr- in the snacks department and I trained on the cookie cracker desk.

• 58:37Ed Zitron?

  That's good.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  In the snacks department. We, it just was like this very weird, small world.

• 58:42Ed Zitron?

  Did you learn anything about Apple and anything?

• 58:44Speaker 02

  Absolutely nothing. No, I was like trying to have, I was try, I was like trying to get in a little bit more and I just was like, this is not, it's not, we're really just talking.

• 58:52Ed Zitron?

  You could have done a bit. You could have been like, what, a fruit? Just like stare at her with your mouth slayer.

• 58:58Speaker 02

  Fuck, that's gold. Shit.

• 59:00Ed Zitron?

  I know. The thing, the thing about having like, cause the, everyone in West London I grew up in, I can, I can sound fucking, I mean, I was about to say, I can sound fucking stupid, really obvious setup. People go, whoa, you really, huh?

• 59:12Speaker 02

  He's learning, he's learning what Joker plays.

• 59:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I'd see that one coming. No, but you go, all the fruit. You can just have your mouth.

• 59:21Speaker 02

  I'll find, I'll find her.

• 59:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. This is my simpleton friend. Spend enough time on a taxi line. He's a moron. No, I, oh my God, the idea of sharing my Uber with someone anywhere, but let alone Las Vegas.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  What was more interesting was the driver wound up talking about, the driver worked for over thirty years at a restaurant, at some restaurant in town.

• 59:43Ed Zitron?

  Oh, interesting.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  And just got laid off.

• 59:45Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  Um, lost, no severance, lost all of his benefits. Uh, now he's doing Uber and he, and he was like, there are no jobs. So many people are, are looking for jobs. Everybody's, everybody's out of work. And he said, I just got hired back at the exact same restaurant that I worked at for over thirty years. But I got hired back at the absolute lowest entry level and only for the holiday season. And so I don't have any vacation. I can't, he said, I can't even bump somebody working in the coffee shop. I like, he, it's, it's such an insult. And it was the, the most interesting thing he said. Um, he said, I think people in tech think that they are safe from it.

• 1:00:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  Cause she, also she was like, uh, she was very sweet, but she was like, you know, they should repurpose the workers. And I was like.

• 1:00:33Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I wanna fucking.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  I know. And I was like, yeah, but the whole point, literally the point of laying off these people is to not have the worker. Like, the point is to not repurpose the worker.

• 1:00:44Ed Zitron?

  But it seems like they are repurposing the worker as the worker they had, but then they just pay them less.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a little confusing. The, I mean, I mean, I think, I think both are happening. Um, and he wound up cutting in and he said, I think people in tech think that they're safe, but they are not safe.

• 1:00:59Ed Zitron?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  So many tech jobs are going to fold in the next, in the coming years. And he was saying like, AI is gonna take all the jobs. And you know, who knows?

• 1:01:08Ed Zitron?

  AI is going to take all the jobs because it's gonna destroy all the tech companies.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I think that there are going to be a lot of tech jobs. And he, and he was like, when, when tech people experience it, they will not, it will take until then for them to realize what other people experience.

• 1:01:23Ed Zitron?

  And it's kind of what you were saying earlier with Matt Binder, kind of an offhanded comment you meant like, oh, this is somebody who grew up.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  Without money, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:29Ed Zitron?

  No, because the scarcity mindset of like, oh, I can't use this ring enough because it will literally die on me. I drop money myself. It's like the sense that something can run out. And it is weird, these tech people, especially with the AI, the fucking smugness. And that comment is probably the most.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  Cutting.

• 1:01:47Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, no, it's also probably the most intelligent thought I've heard about the tech industry all week, other than on this podcast, because it's like, tech people really do think that they're insulated from this. Like, tech media, they know that they can be laid off, they're well aware. They well, like, they are not-

• 1:02:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, if you work at Meta and you've seen so many people fired, Microsoft, Google-

• 1:02:07Ed Zitron?

  But you think you're safe still.

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  I mean, it really felt like the, the, you know, first they came for the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist, so I did not say that-

• 1:02:15Ed Zitron?

  But it kind of is, it's like this condescension towards actual labor. Like, I always say, like, I can complain about my job, but I send little emails, I talk into the microphone, and I drink my little drinks. Like, I'm very fucking lucky. And I have a good amount of listeners who don't, like, have fucking manual labor jobs and working restaurants and so, it's like, fucking rocks to hear people. But it's like, if you don't speak to those people, you are gonna get surprised by this way of-

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  The way, the way that labor is completely cut out of a convention like this, and, you know, there's, there's, people, people talk about innovators, and like, ideas, and like, creatives, and how like, how like, you know, like, ideas and creatives, creative innovation is what, is what drives everything. And it drives a little bit, it has, it has, it has a little bit, but you still have to do the physical work, you still have to actually labor, and often you have to have labor to create the conditions that allow people to innovate, quote unquote.

• 1:03:08Ed Zitron?

  But that perspective-

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  And no one talks about the, like, the, the actual, like, labor part of, like, all of these things. Even, like, in the supply chain stuff, even, like, the focus on, like, manufacturing this year, the labor is, it gets, gets completely forgotten.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  It made me wonder what the broad socioeconomic background trends are for most people who work in tech. Like, it made me, it, it, it sort of made me feel like, I gotta imagine that some huge swathes of tech, of people who work in tech, and I don't know, this is me really, really, really taking a-

• 1:03:40Ed Zitron?

  No, please.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  This is not even necessarily an educated guess, this is just a vibe gut. But it feels like a lot of people, some high preponderance of people who work in tech, didn't grow up- Uh, in depressed areas in the middle of the country, didn't grow up um, under the poverty line, didn't grow up, you know, with with some that I think probably a lot of people in tech grew up with some relative amount of privilege, e- even if they're not white, even if they're, you know, even if they're South Asian, but maybe perhaps they come from a from a family where there is disposable income, whatever. And it ma- it made me be like, I think, like, I grew up with that, without a ton of money

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  in the Midwest. And I'm like, I feel like if I was working in an industry that was potentially hollowing out cities or potentially impacting impacting people with data centers, whatever, I think I would always, always have the in the back of my head, the people who I who I grew up around, the people who I came from.

• 1:04:38Ed Zitron?

  I am very lucky in the I didn't grow up with money, but my parents worked their fucking asses off. Like they my my mom and my dad worked their asses off, my mom, and me and three other children. So imagine that. And I'm probably not the most normal child. Definitely wasn't. I grew up around the corner from prison called Wormwood Scrubs and didn't grow up in a good area. My mom put food in the table, so you can ask for. And I feel like the people who are like, we need to build the biggest, most huge estate center to this, never had a fucking, they never missed a Christmas. They never had a Christmas where they go. And to be clear, my mom worked her ass off, my dad worked her ass off.

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:12Ed Zitron?

  But it's like those moments, there was one, and it was like, I think my parents felt worse about it than I did. I'm sorry if my dad's listening. Do not feel bad, dad, you worked your ass off. I love you. But it's like, those moments are what teach you to actually have fucking humility and love for others, because there is more than just stuff. But the idea of being like, we can repurpose this workforce really fills me full of angry bile, because it's like, this whole show feels at times like a monument against that, where it's just like, we don't solve real problems, because you don't fucking experience. The Michael and Traitor of Corvus doesn't know a fucking thing about that person driving Uber. Fuck Michael and Traitor, fucking. Pardon me, I'm trying to write a beep in there.

• 1:05:54Ed Zitron?

  Um, but yeah, it's just, it sickens me because it's like, we're gonna have Carl Chouard tomorrow, Las Vegas Sun, fantastic guy, for the labor angle tomorrow because it's, it's something really missing from here.

• 1:06:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Ed Zitron?

  And also, I'm gonna be honest, hearing a guy driving Uber here saying that restaurants are having trouble, like laying off people is actually genuinely scary.

• 1:06:17Speaker 04

  Concerning, yeah.

• 1:06:18Ed Zitron?

  For the Vegas economy specifically, because we usually

• 1:06:22Speaker 04

  Well, I've read about that.

• 1:06:23Ed Zitron?

  We usually print money here.

• 1:06:24Speaker 04

  I hear international tourism is down. I can't figure out why that would be.

• 1:06:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, something happened. Luke Winkle from, uh, Winky, I don't remember how to say his name, sorry Luke, uh, who, who wrote a piece for Slate, like Vegas is down and it's like, when that's bad, it's bad. We're gonna rotate now from this somewhat grim point, but I will, I wanna end this point by saying something which is important, which is, I have more fucking respect for anyone who works in a McDonald's or diner or the shittiest chip shop in London or any city in the world than I will ever have for anyone who works at fucking Google. And if you disagree with me, go and work a fucking day in a fucking restaurant. I've never done it. I'm lucky enough to never have to, but my whole fucking family has.

• 1:07:06Ed Zitron?

  And if you don't respect service workers, you're not welcome on this fucking show.

• 1:07:17Speaker 08

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• 1:07:45Ed Zitron?

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• 1:08:29Ed Zitron?

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• 1:10:14Ed Zitron?

  A Z Z Top once said, "How, how, how, how." We're back at Better Offline CES 2026 coverage and we've stuffed our face with tech and our face with guests. This was not a well-written one. Joining me is stand-up comedian Chloé Radcliffe.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  You won't let me leave.

• 1:10:30Ed Zitron?

  I won't let you leave. That's right. You've got two more episodes and then you can go.

• 1:10:34Speaker 09

  You won't let me leave. The CES story.

• 1:10:37Ed Zitron?

  Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards. I'm also not allowed to leave. He's not. And then we've got Weston Lee, the writer. Now, I must say, Weston Lee is an inspiration. Weston is one of the only people in the world who cares about annualized revenue. And you and I sat on, we are friends because we sat and went, "We've lined up all the anthropic reporting around their annualized revenues. We put them in the line and we've worked out how much they've made."

• 1:11:02Speaker 10

  You know, it's amazing what you learn about somebody sharing a spreadsheet with them.

• 1:11:06Ed Zitron?

  No, it's, I brought you here straight up to just like thank you in front of hundreds of thousands of people.

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  How old were you the first time you had sex?

• 1:11:14Ed Zitron?

  Wait, me?

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh-oh, we're getting too, we're getting too dark.

• 1:11:17Ed Zitron?

  Nineteen.

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:11:19Ed Zitron?

  I was five minutes before my 20th birthday.

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:11:22Ed Zitron?

  I had my first kiss when I was, like, a Halloween 2005?

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  I don't know how old that makes sense.

• 1:11:27Ed Zitron?

  I was nineteen at the time. I know, because I had sex like five minutes before.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:11:32Ed Zitron?

  Like a real like-

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  Kiss then sex. No, sex then-

• 1:11:34Ed Zitron?

  Oh, no, no, sorry, no. It was months later. Like, it was in 2006 when I had sex for the first time, yeah. See, I don't give a shit. Anyway, Weston, welcome to the show. Hey, happy to be here. A long time, first time. A long time, first time.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  Sorry, Weston, sorry to drop you in.

• 1:11:49Ed Zitron?

  True OpenAI hater. Sixteen.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:11:53Ed Zitron?

  Nice, three.

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ, this kid is cool.

• 1:11:56Ed Zitron?

  Comfortably.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  That is, that is so much, uh-

• 1:11:59Ed Zitron?

  I love that everyone said "cool."

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  And cooler than I would have expected from a man who said the sentence, "It's amazing what you learn about somebody from sharing a spreadsheet."

• 1:12:08Ed Zitron?

  Weston's a dog.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:11Ed Zitron?

  It's been a long time since then.

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, only once.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  That one time was nice.

• 1:12:16Ed Zitron?

  No, no, it was great. I too, and I'm lying, I've never had sex. No, okay, so putting my lack of sex aside, we have had to delete Robert's answer due to issues of national security. So Weston, what are you doing here at CES? What are you, what are you up to?

• 1:12:31Speaker 10

  So I'm a game writer and I'm a copywriter. And when I copyright, I work in like certain niches that are CES adjacent, like gear that content creators use to do podcasts and videos and stuff and film production equipment. And I've narrowly avoided working CES in my lifetime, like three, four different times. It's never been and I had the opportunity and I was like, well, I should come scope it out. And I wanted to see all the amazing gadgets on the trade show floor.

• 1:13:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and this was a bad year for that sadly.

• 1:13:06Speaker 10

  I, do you guys really live like this? Like every January, you just come here and do this?

• 1:13:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:12Speaker 10

  Go ham, fucking.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Drag them.

• 1:13:14Ed Zitron?

  Headshot.

• 1:13:14Speaker 09

  And they used to give out liquor on the show floor sometimes.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  Is that for real?

• 1:13:18Speaker 09

  Some of the booths would have bars.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  You know what?

• 1:13:21Speaker 09

  Oh, and E3 too.

• 1:13:22Ed Zitron?

  Did you say Comdex?

• 1:13:22Speaker 09

  Oh, my God.

• 1:13:23Speaker 10

  This is like, because that's what CES used to be, right?

• 1:13:25Speaker 09

  Yeah. That's horrible. You should see the Mobile World Congress, we were drunk. I was there the year Angry Birds came out and the Rovio guys rented out like a whole beachside cabana. And every Rovio employee I saw at the party they were hosting was like blacked out to near or past the point of vomiting.

• 1:13:43Ed Zitron?

  No, but that makes sense.

• 1:13:44Speaker 09

  The whole company, it was amazing.

• 1:13:46Ed Zitron?

  No, but that makes perfect sense because for a while they were like, Rovio is going public. Rovio is the next, Angry Birds are the next Marvel. Well, I guess it would be Disney at the time.

• 1:13:53Speaker 09

  There were a bunch of like 22 year old nerds who suddenly had like a $300 million company.

• 1:13:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:13:59Speaker 09

  And they went insane.

• 1:14:00Ed Zitron?

  Were they like German or something like Swedish? Like they were like a Nordic nation, maybe.

• 1:14:04Speaker 10

  They're Swedes, right?

• 1:14:05Speaker 09

  Yeah. No, I mean, at least.

• 1:14:07Ed Zitron?

  Because if they were Swedish.

• 1:14:08Speaker 09

  I met a couple of Americans, but I don't know. It may, it may just have been that their team had some, I don't, yeah.

• 1:14:12Ed Zitron?

  No, Peter Stormare, friend of the show, my mate, Peter, that man could drink me to death. I don't know, but like if it's Swedes, I'd be surprised if you could see the alcohol.

• 1:14:20Speaker 09

  Most of what I remember from that party is that there was a box of Cuban cigars that they just like had on a table. And at a certain point I was like, none of these kids smoke. They just took them.

• 1:14:31Ed Zitron?

  You took the whole box?

• 1:14:34Ed Zitron?

  You looted the Angry Birds?

• 1:14:35Speaker 09

  It waited like two and a half hours had gone by and no one's touched these fucking

• 1:14:39Ed Zitron?

  I think that's fair.

• 1:14:40Speaker 09

  Romeo and Julietas and I was like, fuck it, I'm taking them.

• 1:14:42Speaker 10

  So, this is my first CS, so what you're saying is in 2009, they had apps? Like, just a bunch of phones in a booth and you could play Angry Birds?

• 1:14:50Speaker 09

  Apps were huge, because it was a new idea.

• 1:14:51Speaker 10

  Yeah, because apps were like, rose to the new.

• 1:14:52Speaker 09

  Really sexy.

• 1:14:53Speaker 10

  That was the thing then.

• 1:14:54Speaker 09

  Well, it was, that was the, you had your, your waves, you had like first like smartphones and to an extent, the smartphone and app phone waves were at the same time, where it was like, every other booth is a new smartphone, or like, huge, Google used, Google had like this massive booth.

• 1:15:08Ed Zitron?

  And Google had a booth there?

• 1:15:09Speaker 09

  Second year after Andrew came, or Android came out, yeah, it had a slide one year.

• 1:15:13Speaker 10

  What?

• 1:15:14Speaker 09

  It was like three acres, because it was like, Android was like, a year or two new old.

• 1:15:18Ed Zitron?

  CS used to be so much fun!

• 1:15:20Speaker 09

  It was way better back then.

• 1:15:22Ed Zitron?

  But that's kind of the thing that I think is missing as well, like, putting aside the fact that there aren't useful stuff, it doesn't even feel like lighthearted, like they, they used to be something dorky, like E3 in its heyday, used to be kind of silly and also very sexist in a way that was reprehensible and remains that way, though E3's dead. It's like, there used to be a dorkiness to it's like, fuck it, we're Google, we're never fucking slide, like, the big tractor is the only bit of, this place is whimsyless.

• 1:15:47Speaker 09

  They had, one year I went to E3, they had like, 200 extras, all dressed as North Korean soldiers to, to, like, marching.

• 1:15:53Ed Zitron?

  For home fun?

• 1:15:54Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think it was for home fun.

• 1:15:55Ed Zitron?

  Hell yeah!

• 1:15:56Speaker 09

  It was a game about like, North Korea invading the US.

• 1:15:58Ed Zitron?

  Written by the Red Dawn guy.

• 1:15:59Speaker 09

  Yeah, written by Millius, I think it is.

• 1:16:01Ed Zitron?

  John Millius, fucking yarn.

• 1:16:03Speaker 09

  200 fucking North Korean soldiers marching around the fucking, it was, fuck, it was nuts, but it was cool.

• 1:16:09Ed Zitron?

  Little North Korean whimsy. No, this place is a bereft of whimsy, it's like a, a sexless goon cave, it's just, there's just, it's doing stuff for the sake of doing, with no level of like, self-effacing.

• 1:16:22Speaker 02

  Totally, there was no sense of humor, I, I-

• 1:16:24Ed Zitron?

  It's silly, and you should be silly about this stuff, it would be so much more fun.

• 1:16:27Speaker 09

  It's not silly, our pin that has a chatbot on it has to succeed against the 400 other pins that have chatbots on it, and on the glasses that have chatbots on it, and the chatbots that are actually three different chatbots, if you think about it.

• 1:16:39Ed Zitron?

  But no, I think, I think the general lack of whimsy here is just very sad, because- The whole thing about tech is it should be kind of fun. It is kind of, especially for something like this where it's like, it's ostensibly for consumers, but it's like, we're trying some shit out. It's like a concept car. Like I saw a concept car for an autonomous vehicle, which is a bit, everyone does every, like last year, TCL who makes TVs had a concept car. And it's like, this year I saw one. It's also half hearted. It's.

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  Now, I will say, what you're describing is tech that doesn't fully work, but is like taking a big swing with everybody knowing it doesn't fully work.

• 1:17:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  We all sort of forgive it. That actually describes a lot of what we've talked about. The laundry bot that doesn't fold laundry.

• 1:17:22Ed Zitron?

  But they're not admitting it.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  Find your keys, that doesn't find your keys. But there is no, there seems to be no uh, feeling of experimentation. There's no like.

• 1:17:32Speaker 09

  That's it. They're not big swings is I think the problem. Like something like a laundry folding bot is at least like that. That remains a high bar for a robot to breach. And so every attempt at it, even though the most, at least you're trying to do something that we don't really have it down. But most of by volume, the vast majority of like new shit I saw was, you know, this product that already exists, it's got a chatbot now. You can talk to it. It can transcribe your conversations. I saw like a million glasses and rings and pens. And like, but a bunch of different individual products that are all, it has a chatbot. It records your conversations. It has a camera.

• 1:18:08Ed Zitron?

  Translation.

• 1:18:09Speaker 09

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:18:10Speaker 10

  The coolest thing I saw today, it sounds like doesn't even normally exist at CES, which is a uh, an install, like an interactive install, like out of Comic Con for a movie.

• 1:18:20Ed Zitron?

  What, what?

• 1:18:20Speaker 10

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Rebecca Ferguson movie. We were talking about this earlier.

• 1:18:23Ed Zitron?

  But I saw the booth.

• 1:18:24Speaker 10

  Mercy. Now, and it totally fits this because it's dour as hell because it's a dystopian future sci-fi where an AI is Judge Jerry, an executioner for people on trial and stuff. And Rebecca Ferguson.

• 1:18:35Ed Zitron?

  So like Compass, the criminal justice system?

• 1:18:38Speaker 10

  The, the video that they had, so in the booth is blacked out like it's a defense booth. Like you're at a cop show or a military show. And um, so I just see this video playing on the side and it takes a second for me to register that it's Rebecca Ferguson in the video. And it's not just an ad for a real. Company. So yeah, Mercy coming out January 23rd.

• 1:18:57Speaker 09

  It's, it's very funny because you said, uh, that's the one with Chris Pratt. When I went up to the booth, I asked like, what is it? And she said, well, look inside and then I'll tell you. And I look inside and it's like a guy in a chair. Well, it looks like

• 1:19:08Speaker 10

  They have handcuffs to the chair.

• 1:19:10Speaker 09

  Where it's like, yeah, it's clearly this is a robots are judging us kind of movie or we have an AI judge. So I walk out and I'm like, I don't know. Is it like a game? And she said, no, it's a movie trailer. And I was like, oh, she was like, haven't you heard of the movie? And I was like, no, you haven't heard of Mercy? No. And she said, well, it's got Chris Pratt in it. And I was like, well, okay. That, that didn't, that, that didn't win me over.

• 1:19:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're not selling. Yeah. The, I think Chris Pratt, I think Rebecca Ferguson cancels out Chris Pratt, but she loses all of her, all of her draw is also canceled out by Chris Pratt.

• 1:19:40Speaker 10

  So it's just a flat line.

• 1:19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, she brings the movie to a zero.

• 1:19:44Ed Zitron?

  I'm, I'm fucking done with things like, what if AI takes over everything? Make a movie where it's like everyone bet on the wrong horse. Like make something where the dystopia is like societal failure based on stupid choices.

• 1:19:55Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:19:56Ed Zitron?

  That are not just political or what if the AI is so powerful?

• 1:20:00Speaker 02

  Is this, Ed, you're, are you saying one of your listeners should, should fund a movie that I write about this?

• 1:20:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, sure. Fuck it. Yeah. Only if I can be in it though.

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  Great.

• 1:20:08Speaker 09

  The idea I've had that I was thinking about since we were doing our episodes on nuclear war is, okay, you don't have Skynet gain control of the nukes, but instead you have the military adopt like an AI program that it links a bunch of its radar and listening stations to, to analyze incoming signal intelligence data, right? And that errantly says that there's an attack imminent. And so the humans decide that they're going to start by firing all of the missiles. And it's the job of our protagonists to convince all of these generals and politicians who are losing their minds over data that over what the conclusions of this AI, that like, we are not in danger and you do not need to fire all of the nukes.

• 1:20:46Ed Zitron?

  If you made that like an

• 1:20:47Speaker 09

  ticking clock.

• 1:20:48Ed Zitron?

  Like an Armand, a Ian Nucci, Death of Stalin style thing.

• 1:20:51Speaker 09

  Right.

• 1:20:52Ed Zitron?

  That would be really good because Mission Impossible, the last one, if you watched this fucking movie, great. If you didn't, it's so long and so bad and so, I don't know, but it's like the entity controls all of the nukes. And it's like, ah, who gives a fucking, I, I watched that movie. The whole time I was just like, I hope they all fucking die. Like, I'm just like, oh, all these people. I've, I've learned Angela Bassett, she's all right.

• 1:21:13Speaker 02

  Speaking of Rebecca Ferguson movies where somebody has to convince somebody to not fire preemptively.

• 1:21:18Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:21:19Speaker 02

  There is the movie that's on Netflix that came out a couple of months ago that is pretty much exactly that, but it's not, it's not exploring AI at all. It's that they pick up a signal that there's a, that there is something incoming and they can't figure out what it is. And that, I mean, you should watch that movie.

• 1:21:36Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The movie that just, yes, yeah.

• 1:21:38Ed Zitron?

  Rebecca Ferguson was actually, I didn't remember who she was, looked up, she was actually in Mission Impossible, Final Reckoning.

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Ed Zitron?

  She was very good.

• 1:21:45Speaker 02

  And my fucking boyfriend has a big fucking crush on her, so I, I hate her.

• 1:21:48Speaker 09

  Stuart.

• 1:21:50Speaker 10

  I kinda like her. I think she's fine.

• 1:21:51Ed Zitron?

  Stuart, come on the show. You're very funny. You're invited.

• 1:21:53Speaker 10

  What if in your Nuke movie, the nukes also had chatbots?

• 1:21:58Speaker 09

  Well, yeah, I mean, you gotta put, cause the nuke needs to be able to tell you like how, it needs to have a personality.

• 1:22:02Speaker 10

  It's like, like a Doctor Strangelove thing where like every Peter Sellers character is a chatbot.

• 1:22:06Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:22:07Ed Zitron?

  Each agent is like, you got this. You got this. It's gonna be okay.

• 1:22:11Speaker 09

  Yeah, it needs to be able to text the like bombardier who drops it. Like, hey, I just want to let you know that like, I think you did a really good job.

• 1:22:18Speaker 02

  You look fly today.

• 1:22:19Ed Zitron?

  It's not just heroic.

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  And I'm in fly as a joke.

• 1:22:21Speaker 09

  Yeah. People are gonna be angry at you for this, but you did the right thing.

• 1:22:26Ed Zitron?

  It's gonna be dangerous, but it's also gonna help. I ju, I, I think that we're approaching an Ian Uche verse far more than anything else at this point, where it's just very silly and bad, but not for like the nuclear holocaust ways. Just gonna be like, everyone, everyone shits their pants at once economically, but that's also bad.

• 1:22:46Speaker 09

  I mean, you maybe see some looming signs of that here with just the number of things that they're, they're like pulling back on. Like, I'm still seeing a lot of the same claims made about like what's, how self-driving is going to take off. And like what part, like that car you were talking about, Tensor, the world's first robo-car, that the, the PR lady was absolutely certain is definitely coming out in the next year.

• 1:23:11Ed Zitron?

  Tell me more.

• 1:23:11Speaker 09

  And it's, it's, it's level four self-driving. And I was like, okay.

• 1:23:14Ed Zitron?

  What does level four mean?

• 1:23:16Speaker 09

  Well, she said like a Waymo. And I said, well, Waymos are only allowed to drive in a really small set of areas. What about this? Cause it's, you're kind of advertising that you can self-drive it whenever you want. Is it just, you can self-drive it if you're in like downtown San Francisco? And she's like, well, whatever we do, it's going to be completely compliant with the law and safe. And I was like, that's simply not an answer about where, where your car can go.

• 1:23:42Ed Zitron?

  Where are you, where are you driving to today?

• 1:23:44Speaker 09

  I don't know.

• 1:23:47Speaker 09

  Depends on the law.

• 1:23:50Speaker 09

  Wait, was this, was this a booth person? This was a booth person. Now, to be fair, so I'm accurate. The car you can also drive. It has the first steering wheel that flips out. But I was, I was asking about like, well, the self-driving stuff. Because you show it driving in a lot of areas.

• 1:24:04Ed Zitron?

  I also feel like self-driving at this point, it's not a solved problem even remotely. But it's like, we've seen it. I'm not sure what else you can show here. Unless it's driving you around.

• 1:24:13Speaker 09

  It getting better, it being functional in other areas.

• 1:24:15Ed Zitron?

  Right. But how would you show that in the convention floor?

• 1:24:19Speaker 09

  They, they have a bunch of methods because a lot of the booths, they'll show you, here's what the camera sees. And here's like, the big thing this year was demonstrating, here's how much better the sensors are at cutting through fog. And cutting through like rain and snow and stuff, right? But yeah, it's, it's not the same as there being a bunch of new products. A lot of times you're looking at like a disembodied piece of an automobile. And it's like, here's how we.

• 1:24:43Ed Zitron?

  And a bunch of flashing thingies. And it's like, look, look at all the things we noticed. Look at a cat.

• 1:24:47Speaker 09

  Yeah. And I don't doubt that it's important, but I guess what I'm kind of gathering is that like, we're continuing to slowly figure out this technology. And maybe one day it'll get there before, you know, society collapses.

• 1:25:00Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. It's like the CES trough of disillusionment show. It's just, everyone's just kind of like, yeah, well, we're still working it out. You want to give me money?

• 1:25:09Speaker 02

  And that's what I want to reiterate is when we were talking about the whimsy, the kind of stuff that is like, it doesn't work and it's not going to be ready for a long time was acceptable when there is some kind of self-awareness of, it's not going to be ready for a long time. But when it is tried, when, when, when a company is trying to pass it off, is hoping that you don't ask the question of, and when will this be available? And how much money is it? And can it do this? And can it do? When, when they seem to sort of be hoping that you just buy the ruse, that's when it's frustrating.

• 1:25:40Ed Zitron?

  And that's like, that was very much, usually was reserved for like Kickstarter and Indiegogo shit. Where it's like, okay, you're kind of backing something vestigial and like, you usually wouldn't back the one that couldn't show you something because those ones will disappear with your money. But now like Nvidia is running things like Kickstarter because you can't get refunds or change things, which is. So cool.

• 1:26:00Speaker 09

  You apparently don't have to pay for anything now either.

• 1:26:02Ed Zitron?

  We love it, folks, but it's it's so strange as well because you, I mean, sure, you've got Huxton's CS, but there would be a level of mad scientist to it, like the LG Cloyd robot.

• 1:26:14Speaker 09

  Ah, Cloyd.

• 1:26:14Ed Zitron?

  Oh, Cloyd.

• 1:26:15Speaker 09

  Oh, Cloyd.

• 1:26:16Ed Zitron?

  Oh, Cloyd.

• 1:26:17Speaker 09

  Cloyd is your new best friend. He's a robot that can do your dishes very slowly.

• 1:26:22Ed Zitron?

  And also can't really do them.

• 1:26:24Speaker 09

  Not like well, and he can fold some kinds of very simple laundry, like towels, again, very slowly.

• 1:26:30Ed Zitron?

  And.

• 1:26:31Speaker 09

  They say he can cook.

• 1:26:33Ed Zitron?

  Said he can fold them properly.

• 1:26:35Speaker 09

  He didn't look good at it, no. And if you're kind of old and fading, it can remind you to eat fruit.

• 1:26:41Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:42Speaker 09

  Its name is Cloyd.

• 1:26:43Ed Zitron?

  But Cloyd, like, not a natural thing to say, but the thing is, like, something like Cloyd, they would be like, this is just a concept, like, you, Samsung a few years ago just had a giant, like, circle thing you could sit in it had giant screens and they were very much like, it's the Samsung crazy experiences, like, just some shit to show CS and everyone went in, went like, cool, Samsung's fucking around with screens, because Samsung makes screens. But this was like, yeah, it's the year of robots. Yeah, it's the year of robots in your home. Well, okay, not your home or a home. Anywhere. But this home we built here, it kind of doesn't work in. But what if it did, but it doesn't? Please don't. You can't buy it. When can you buy it? It doesn't exist. How much is it?

• 1:27:22Speaker 09

  We won't sell it. Video of this robot with a woman we got, whose hair is like studiously gray, even though she she doesn't look like she's about out of her late 40s, but we clearly want you to think of her as old for the sections where it looks like it's a robot for helping an old person. But then here's some kids playing it. So you know that it's good with kids because we'd love it if families bought it too. But we don't really know what people want out of a robot that looks like a cross between the robot from a fucking, what's that 80s movie? Not Wally, the one before, way decades ago.

• 1:27:52Ed Zitron?

  Silent Running?

• 1:27:53Speaker 09

  No, no, no.

• 1:27:54Ed Zitron?

  Fuck.

• 1:27:54Speaker 09

  The nerdy. Batteries not included? Yeah.

• 1:27:59Ed Zitron?

  No, I will say email, if you remember the one, I'm just imagining my daily department.

• 1:28:03Speaker 09

  It's not a humanoid robot.

• 1:28:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, Marion, my daily department grandmother would have fucking hated these things like just the also old people, their brains still fucking work. They will feel the condescension of the world's slowest machine doing something. But on top of it, if they were just like, here are some shit we're trying out, like we found pistons and stuff like sensors, we're trying these new set, I would be like, fuck me up. Like, fine, show me the new things you're working on, but it's framed as and there are journalists writing, this is the CES of robots and you're being fucking played every single fucking one of you.

• 1:28:37Speaker 09

  Well, I mean, there's the, there's industrial robots, which like, it looks like some of them are getting bad. Like, I'm, I'm not great at it, but like, I've, I've seen like big robot arms that are like folding paper with a lot more dexterity than I used to seeing and stuff like that. And I'm saying even like, there was a humanoid robot with hands that was, could just do that. Um, and so I'll believe that there's some like industrial applications, but so much of the show is set on selling the idea of a home robot and none of those look like they can do anything useful and they all must be expensive. And I don't know why you think people want one.

• 1:29:10Ed Zitron?

  I just feel like the CEA who runs this show, how is there not like a fraudulent element to this? Because when most of the show appears to be deception, because like, I've been to a lot of these fuckers, I've been coming here since 2011. I've seen a lot of weird shit that was kind of vestigial and like, okay, we're working on this, maybe it will happen, maybe it won't, but not most of it. And it feels like the ultimate endpoint of just never fucking truly holding their feet to the fire and never asking, and I keep coming back to this, Chloe, I know, I will actually say this just on behalf of me and the listeners, you keep saying these derisive things about yourself that are incorrect, like, oh, as a layperson, oh, I'm stupid. You're not stupid. You're asking the questions that the journalist should ask, like, who cares? And it's like, well, who cares? But

• 1:29:55Ed Zitron?

  also, is this real? Will you ever make it? Does this do the thing you should do? The fact that the CEA themselves doesn't have this level is disgraceful.

• 1:30:06Speaker 09

  Well, I, yeah, they, I think they made the decision a long time ago that they were in the business of, number one, providing real estate to these companies.

• 1:30:13Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:14Speaker 09

  They're, they're, they're working for the company selling this schlock, right? Like, that's, that's their job. And it's not even, you would think, and I think maybe in the past, there was a broader understanding that part of their job was to ensure that the tech industry remained healthy and didn't become what it's turned into. But I, it's been a while since anybody in, in the business world felt like they had responsibility for anything.

• 1:30:35Ed Zitron?

  But even then, like, this feels like almost the beginning of the punishment. Because what happens when all of these companies with the LLM wrappers die? Who's gonna pay for these fucking booths? Because if there were other companies to pay them, they would have paid. I saw a fucking chunk of the Venetian or the Palazzo Casino closed off today because there weren't enough gamblers. Our pretty gamblers aren't here during a business week. What is going on? We can't con people from other countries into gambling?

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  I did wonder if...

• 1:31:09Speaker 09

  How many people from other countries are visiting as much?

• 1:31:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:11Ed Zitron?

  Well, that's probably because there aren't good enough catchers. I'm joking, I'm obviously joking. Chloe, what were you gonna say?

• 1:31:16Speaker 02

  I, I did wonder if this population is a, uh, like gambling partying population.

• 1:31:22Ed Zitron?

  Yes, 100%. People, it used to be CES, people would come get rip shit. They'd see, oh, oh, we'll stand at our beautiful craps tables. They'd be, they'd be going all the hard ways. They'd be doing big six, big eight, all the dumbest bets. These motherfuckers put so much money on midnight, which is 12 on the craps table. That's how you know you have a healthy Vegas, when you've got some dumb fucks at the craps tables.

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:45Ed Zitron?

  We've got empty craps tables. This is a bad sign.

• 1:31:47Speaker 02

  Only me making really smart bets.

• 1:31:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, what, you've got a system.

• 1:31:51Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:51Ed Zitron?

  That's why, I, I play, I, I haven't gambled in years and I live here, which is crazy. But no, I, I'm genuinely serious. Something's off. Something is genuinely off.

• 1:32:02Speaker 10

  So I don't.

• 1:32:03Speaker 09

  Oh, sorry.

• 1:32:04Speaker 10

  Well, I don't have the perspective with CES, but I gotta say, I don't know how many of the talks and panels you guys went to, but I spent a good amount of time.

• 1:32:11Ed Zitron?

  What did you see?

• 1:32:12Speaker 10

  Oh, I went to the ARIA and the, the main through line that I thought was a little odd because there's definitely execs doing, doing the lines, playing the hits, you know, use AI now, or your job is in jeopardy, you know? I know of companies where a hundred percent of the AI is written, when a hundred percent of the code is written, blah, blah.

• 1:32:30Ed Zitron?

  Right, Ryan.

• 1:32:31Speaker 10

  Here's the, and I've heard that stuff for years. So it's a little bit like we're, this is the same, like we're still doing this, but there's like these little glimmers of things that make me go, huh? Like the word incremental showed up in like three different talks where it's just like, what is, what does the next year mean to you? And it's like incremental, you need to, you need to be going to your customers that are using these tools, you know, in advertising and asking for incremental gains. And I'm like, not revolutionary gains, not barn burners.

• 1:32:59Ed Zitron?

  Mama and look.

• 1:33:00Speaker 10

  Going from here to here. There was a, there was a talk that with the, one of the guys who runs a spinoff company from Telus, which the Canadian telecommunications company, right? I think. And he's like, yeah, we, we saw a hundred, 250 million in savings, you know, using AI tools. And I'm like, all right, what's, what's Telus's revenue? And that's like, you know, point zero four eight percent.

• 1:33:21Ed Zitron?

  I also, sure you did. Sure you fucking did.

• 1:33:24Speaker 10

  Any details? No.

• 1:33:26Ed Zitron?

  I'm going to strap you to one of the fucking chairs from Saw. I'm going to fucking handcuff you to a radiator and I'm going to have Jigsaw extract from you how you save that money because I bet you didn't save a fucking penny with large language models, you lying sack of shit.

• 1:33:40Speaker 10

  It's a lack of specifics.

• 1:33:43Ed Zitron?

  Incremental. Well, it's specific. Get real incremental with a bone saw.

• 1:33:46Speaker 09

  And the big thing that you're seeing the shift here, I think, has been because there's not. Like previously, the thing about this was about consumer electronics. And there's always been, you know, software and apps and stuff. But it's been very focused on things that people will use, right? And that's what journalists are here to report. And I was like, here is all these companies vision of like what people want to buy and what they want to use. And what will delight them and what will be useful to them. And a lot more of the emphasis, since all this AI stuff has come to centralize it on, is here is a product that will allow you to hurt a customer. Here is a product that will allow you to extract money from people without providing really, or that you're sneaking into a service. There was a company I went to their booth and got to walk through, Soundhound AI.

• 1:34:30Speaker 09

  Oh, fucking Soundhound. Yeah, and their whole thing is we make agents. We make agents for companies. And one example they gave of an agent was like they basically in AI, doing the job of taking orders for Burger King, right? And like taking down orders and it also controlled the menu. And so the first thing that they showed, the guy demoing it showed was someone being like, tell me what burgers are good. While there was a menu up in front of them, instead of looking at the menu, asking it. And so it suggested a burger. And I was like, I don't think people will use it that way often. That's a weird thing for them to show. But then I understood why, because he was talking to this group of like three or four people. And he was talking to them about how, and obviously, you know, Burger King feels like, okay, we have this much stock that needs to get moved right now for whatever reason, because it's like close to expiring.

• 1:35:15Speaker 09

  We can make sure to like really push that to customers. Or if we want to sell more, you know, more Whoppers with cheese, we can, we can push the Whopper. We can, we can recommend that to people. We can even alter the menu if things are out or if we really want to push certain items. And he said, like, for example, if Coke wants to really sell Coke vanilla, we can start pushing large Coke vanillas. You can even push specific sizes. And I was wondering why they're talking about this, because again, people don't use it that way. And then I realized all of the gaggle of four people that the rep from Softhand was talking to, I looked at their badges, they all worked for Coca-Cola. And so this was a pitch of this is the future of ordering at fast food restaurants. And if you work with us, we will push Coca-Cola on customers.

• 1:35:58Speaker 10

  A lot of the marketing in this bubble, like, you know, like as a writer, I've spent years watching like creatives in Hollywood and games and stuff. Just feel like they're on the back foot because they're being threatened by this marketing. The marketing is not even aimed at them. When somebody says you have to learn this or else you're you're somebody's going to take your job. That's not actually aimed at that person. It's aimed at the investors.

• 1:36:19Speaker 09

  Yes, right.

• 1:36:20Speaker 10

  And that's one of the most it's bullying, you know, like, but.

• 1:36:23Ed Zitron?

  The funny thing is, is Soundham was a basically a Shazam competitor. What's really good about that is Adam brought this up yesterday and it's like, there is a famous tweet where it's like every Gemini commercial is, what should I eat for dinner? And he goes, sandwich.

• 1:36:36Speaker 10

  It's one of my favorite jokes.

• 1:36:37Ed Zitron?

  And it's literally that. It's literally what should what burger do I get? Burger. Holy fucking shit. That will be $150,000 a month.

• 1:36:46Speaker 09

  And they showed their like their car AI program where you can build your own agents in your car. And he gave it these capabilities and the demo that he ran it on was, oh, my car's making this weird noise. And he described the noise and the chat bot in the car first said, that sounds like it's this kind of problem. The average cost to repair is $700. Do you want me to find a place for you to get your car repaired? Yes, he said, I'll call the dealership. I've booked a I've booked a spot at the dealership. While you're there, do you want me to schedule a test drive and a new Nissan whatever type car? Yes, my wife loves that car. And it was all about like, first off, nobody, unless you're, I guess, I'm sure there are like rich people.

• 1:37:30Ed Zitron?

  There's one psychopath.

• 1:37:31Speaker 09

  Oh, problem, I'll take it to the dealership and pay whatever it costs. Most people are like, okay, well, I've got a guy who didn't rip me off too bad before. I'm going to see if he can diagnose it and like, can I? But this straight to the dealer, $700, okay. And like, yeah, I'll take a test drive. I'm always in the market for a brand new car. Like, yeah, it's just like, it's just my it it's all predatory for the person driving the car. It's all because everything that got the engineer excited, the only stuff he wanted to talk about was, and here's another place where it'll try to sell you something. That's that was it for the AI.

• 1:38:02Ed Zitron?

  The thing is, it's like. I think the tech industry has become guys selling stuff to guys that will not use it. It's just companies selling things to companies. Numbers you don't need. Exactly. Numbers you don't need to raise numbers that do money. Yeah.

• 1:38:15Speaker 09

  Well, and that, yeah, that's the, because one of two things will be true. Either all of these AI agents being integrated into these projects will drive sales significantly. And that will be the new thing advertisers fight over. And I'm not in love with that future. That said, it'll probably work better in banner ads.

• 1:38:30Ed Zitron?

  I don't think it'll work at all. I don't think it's gonna.

• 1:38:33Speaker 09

  It'll work for a while, at least until they get data on whether or not it drives sales.

• 1:38:37Ed Zitron?

  OpenAI tried to integrate shopping things. We're just gonna get onto that. But we're coming to the rotation point, so we're going to start rotating our hours. We're going to move on to the final section. And I must say, this upcoming ad, I don't, I don't know what we're doing.

• 1:38:52Speaker 09

  The Blades of Glory theme.

• 1:38:53Ed Zitron?

  I'm doing music under your clothes. I appreciate that, Chloe. It's now a flawless transition. Upcoming ad is probably for a podcast or some product or some shit. But I need you to click it or listen to whatever the fuck you do. I've never, I've never heard the ads. I don't know what they are. If you complain about the ads, please help me.

• 1:39:21Speaker 11

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• 1:39:51Ed Zitron?

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• 1:40:35Ed Zitron?

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• 1:42:07Speaker 06

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• 1:42:20Ed Zitron?

  Diane, I'm once again in front of a microphone inside the Palazzo Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, and everybody's staring at me because I keep saying strange things into the microphone. I'm on my 18th Diet Coke and feeling more alive than I've ever been. Joining me is actress and stand-up comedian Clory Radcliffe for sadly our final episode with her.

• 1:42:39Speaker 02

  Wow, this is it. We've come so far.

• 1:42:43Ed Zitron?

  Honestly, the listeners fucking love you and I need to bring you back because they're gonna be pissed.

• 1:42:47Speaker 02

  I'll come back anytime you want.

• 1:42:49Ed Zitron?

  And to your left is another person who, I need, Rob Pegoraro, the tech reporter who's been around for a while. 1998 was when he started. It's been a minute, yes. Genuinely, multiple people have emailed in being like, "We love you," and then one slightly horny person. One slight, it was like Rob Pegoraro ASMR, and then to your left is Rob, Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards.

• 1:43:14Speaker 09

  And who I have heard so-

• 1:43:15Ed Zitron?

  Two R names in the room right now. So many horny things I've heard. No, I mean quite literally, quite. I'm so sorry, but, and then, um, okay, we'll just move on. Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards, my boss.

• 1:43:28Speaker 02

  What about me? Anybody say anything horny about me? I got an olive in my mouth. Anyway, you guys wanna fuck me?

• 1:43:34Ed Zitron?

  I actually am just describing this. Chloe just has an entire, like-

• 1:43:37Speaker 02

  A jar of olives and one big spike.

• 1:43:40Ed Zitron?

  And I said to Phil- It looks pretty good.

• 1:43:42Speaker 09

  There's a Greek man sitting in a room that's nothing but jars of olives going like, "All right."

• 1:43:47Ed Zitron?

  Finally, I'm, finally podcast do this. That's more Russian.

• 1:43:51Speaker 02

  Is that your Greek?

• 1:43:52Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that was fucking terrible. I've not met any Greek people.

• 1:43:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, you wanna try that one again?

• 1:43:56Ed Zitron?

  I, no, my brain is like, "I don't know what Greek..."

• 1:43:59Speaker 12

  No, I can't.

• 1:44:00Ed Zitron?

  I truly don't know, like-

• 1:44:02Speaker 02

  Is Greek an accent that white people can do? White people are doing Greek all the time. They're white.

• 1:44:08Ed Zitron?

  They're called Greeks. Okay, well, let's move on from that one.

• 1:44:11Speaker 12

  This is a fun bit. I, one of my favorite bits, one of my first bits that got Europeans really mad at me. I read this article that was arguing that, okay, like Greeks got inducted into whiteness at the UN World Board too. And I shared it and the person who got the, a bunch of Germans really hated me sharing this article. This was around the time they were trying to make them pay for their debt back to them.

• 1:44:34Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that is Edward Onguoso Jr., the writer of the Tech Bubble newsletter and classic staple of the better offline experience. We were just talking about why people do CES and I know I did this.

• 1:44:46Speaker 02

  About why people do racist accents.

• 1:44:49Ed Zitron?

  Why, why people do.

• 1:44:50Speaker 02

  Because they're very fun.

• 1:44:51Ed Zitron?

  No, that's a joke. She is doing a bit. We are doing bands with band maxing. No, we were just talking about why people do CES and I've said earlier, it's like, okay, people do these shows because it's an excuse to get people together. That's completely true. I also think that there is something kind of magical about CES because you get like people, just people happen to be here and if you take it for what it is, which is a convention center full of bullshit, you can see people you love. Like everyone in this room, I'm really happy to see. Like everyone, everyone is in different places. Some of them are like Chloe, you're in New York. So I see you a decent amount, but Rob, you're in DC and Ed, I see you, but like people get busy and Robert's in Portland. It's like, it's nice to get people together. And yeah, the more you suffer, the funnier it is to

• 1:45:33Ed Zitron?

  talk about it. And also, I don't know, this podcast fucking rocks and it's kind of fun to do something weird and different every year. I wish there was more on the floor to be excited about though. Ed, what have you been up to today? We haven't heard much from you.

• 1:45:50Speaker 12

  Well, funnily enough, I found there's this AI voice synthesizer that'll let you do any accent that you wanted to do. And I was on the floor doing some of the worst you possibly could. And it was really.

• 1:46:06Speaker 02

  Was it good at anything?

• 1:46:08Speaker 12

  Yeah, no, I wish, you know.

• 1:46:11Speaker 02

  Because you're like, I'm not the one doing it. It's the robot doing it. And a robot technology.

• 1:46:16Speaker 12

  I'm not. No, to be clear, this is not real. This is just me.

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  A really fun bit?

• 1:46:22Speaker 12

  Yeah, this is me ripping. Could you imagine?

• 1:46:26Speaker 09

  But that totally sounds like a cancelable project at CES.

• 1:46:31Ed Zitron?

  There would just be a line out the door with guys just being like, guys with podcasts, guys with racist podcasts. But whoa, finally, gonna take our jobs. Like, yeah.

• 1:46:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, woke is not back quite yet.

• 1:46:42Speaker 12

  Because I'm not white.

• 1:46:45Ed Zitron?

  That's right. No, woke two CES is gonna be fucking great. We were talking about the gender reassignment section. It's gonna be fucking great. It's gonna be illegal to be white for one part of the convention. So it's gonna be fucking great. I cannot wait.

• 1:46:59Speaker 09

  Gotta open every day with the land acknowledgement.

• 1:47:00Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, exactly. Oh, no, a brand acknowledgement.

• 1:47:05Speaker 09

  But just for like, for fallen brands like Sony.

• 1:47:12Speaker 09

  Yeah, in ages past, Black Bear, R I M would operate this booth, but.

• 1:47:18Ed Zitron?

  At times Theranos would have been here, but they were cancelled.

• 1:47:23Ed Zitron?

  I do like that Elizabeth Holmes is now doing like epic, epic posting where it's just like.

• 1:47:28Speaker 09

  From jail, what the hell?

• 1:47:29Ed Zitron?

  Posting from jail and being like illegally, illegally cancelled for doing fraud.

• 1:47:36Speaker 12

  Actually, you know, my, my greatest fear about going to jail was not being able to tweet, but you know, this is, this is.

• 1:47:43Speaker 02

  Proving that you don't have to be afraid of that.

• 1:47:44Speaker 12

  Now I don't have to be afraid of it.

• 1:47:45Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, a prison where I post, that's just me at home.

• 1:47:48Speaker 12

  Right, exactly, exactly.

• 1:47:50Speaker 09

  You can launch your own version of Theranos, which is just people mailing you blood and you being like, Luke's got.

• 1:47:55Speaker 12

  I'm gonna be the first, I'm gonna be the first, uh, person in prison to have a fundraising round ongoing. Okay, they're gonna be clamoring for the, I don't know what'll, maybe it'll be for a, I can do like an A, uh, Potemkin AI thing. That's just like other prisoners and they're pretending to be.

• 1:48:13Speaker 02

  The, the Martin Luther King's letters from, from a Birmingham jail redux is like asking for VC funds. It's just, it's just pitching.

• 1:48:21Speaker 12

  Beware of the tech critic who tells you that you can't have a VC fund in prison.

• 1:48:26Speaker 09

  Series A from San Quentin. Chapter two begins, as a chatbot, I'm not allowed to hover and buy stocks.

• 1:48:34Ed Zitron?

  I need to read you this Elizabeth Holmes tweet from 123125. So New Year's Eve. Prisons are meant to rehabilitate prisoners and break crime cycles. Instead, comma, they shatter families and make better criminals. It won't break me or mine, but watching it happen daily is heartbreaking. Honestly, she this fucking rocks. I'm so, I'm sorry. If you're gonna post some prison just being like, I'm not fucking guilty of the fraud. I obviously did. Fuck you. Yeah, fuck. Yeah, let's just go for it.

• 1:49:01Speaker 09

  See, I interpreted that differently. I thought she was saying prison is meant to like, like breaks people and makes them into better and makes them into better criminals. That's not gonna happen to me. I'm gonna stay a shitty criminal.

• 1:49:18Ed Zitron?

  If you only knew my real story is so much more interesting than the one you have been told coming soon in 2026, and that is seven ellipses, nothing hidden, nothing left out. The time for the truth has come. No one can hide from the light. Woman, you did actual fraud.

• 1:49:33Speaker 09

  Oh, I'm, I'm, I'm ready for this.

• 1:49:35Ed Zitron?

  No, I wanna know. Elizabeth Holmes, you are invited on better offline.

• 1:49:39Speaker 02

  Here's my question. Did are there other people who are there men who have committed fraud as harmful as the fraud that Elizabeth Holmes committed? I'm not denying her.

• 1:49:50Ed Zitron?

  Sound back, I'm afraid.

• 1:49:51Speaker 09

  Yeah, well, I mean, Bernie Madoff, the guy, the Enron guy.

• 1:49:54Ed Zitron?

  But they didn't get culturally crucified in the same way.

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  Right. But they have been imprisoned.

• 1:50:00Speaker 09

  They have been imprisoned. Shkreli is the closest to getting that level of like notoriety, but it also worked out for him a lot better than her. Like, he built a little bit of a weird brand on it.

• 1:50:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think he's a DJ now.

• 1:50:14Speaker 09

  Right, really? Well, and that journalist slept with him too, which was weird.

• 1:50:19Ed Zitron?

  DJ allegations.

• 1:50:21Speaker 09

  Yeah, Bloomberg Journal, there's a Bloomberg Journal who ruined her life for Charlie.

• 1:50:26Speaker 09

  He's had a weird post-prison run.

• 1:50:28Speaker 02

  Um, are there, are there people who have committed? Fraud at an at a harmful level, at a like meaningfully harmful level who have not been, who have not gone to prison?

• 1:50:39Speaker 04

  I mean, the web three. I'm from DC. Where do I start? Yeah.

• 1:50:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, it's sorry.

• 1:50:44Speaker 04

  This will be a long podcast.

• 1:50:46Speaker 02

  I mean, specifically in startups, in startup culture.

• 1:50:48Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:50:49Ed Zitron?

  Clinkle.

• 1:50:49Speaker 02

  Not.

• 1:50:50Ed Zitron?

  Clinkle.

• 1:50:51Speaker 09

  This same way where they are literally starting a company on completely false pretenses and raising VC money.

• 1:50:56Ed Zitron?

  I actually disagree. Clinkle. Clinkle was this one where you could.

• 1:51:00Speaker 09

  How big was?

• 1:51:01Ed Zitron?

  Clinkle raised maybe a little bit less, but they were just as prominent. They were also on the cover of Forbes. They were also in Inc. Magazine.

• 1:51:07Speaker 09

  For some reason.

• 1:51:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:08Speaker 02

  What is it?

• 1:51:09Ed Zitron?

  Clinkle was a sound based payment thing. It's obviously fraudulent. I mean.

• 1:51:13Speaker 09

  Sound based payment?

• 1:51:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, they use like. Sounds like you have money in your pocket.

• 1:51:20Speaker 02

  Then that means we've paid you.

• 1:51:21Ed Zitron?

  He was a very damp looking white boy. So I bet no, it was a company where you could transfer money with like hypersonic. It was bullshit. But that's the thing like, ah, that that fuckwit didn't go to prison. None of the web three people who never did anything. Not fucking Doodles NFT, which ended up backing off NFTs. That Alex Ahoney, who was a fucking asshole, who should be crucified for his role in the racism and sexism of Reddit, let alone the amount of web three bullshit he put, put up a fucking hill, putting that aside. He like, nothing happened to all the web three people who did a bunch of criminal shit, like all of the blatant money laundering.

• 1:51:58Speaker 02

  And the question is.

• 1:51:59Ed Zitron?

  Fucking shouts, uh, what is this? Um, CZ from Binance.

• 1:52:02Speaker 04

  Change out.

• 1:52:03Ed Zitron?

  And also Adam Newman.

• 1:52:04Speaker 09

  Supposed to go to prison. He got pardoned.

• 1:52:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, Adam Newman already got fucking $300 million from, um, from, uh, Mark Andreessen.

• 1:52:12Speaker 09

  I did, because there's, there's two differences and we can debate which of them is more relevant and her getting penalized much more than a lot of other people who did similar things. But like, one is she's a woman, but the other is it was a health company. Like they were do people like.

• 1:52:28Ed Zitron?

  It was also.

• 1:52:28Speaker 09

  Had cancer tests that were live.

• 1:52:30Ed Zitron?

  It was actually fraud, fraud. It was like.

• 1:52:32Speaker 09

  It was like serious medical fraud.

• 1:52:33Ed Zitron?

  It also didn't do anything close. We work was just a terrible business.

• 1:52:39Speaker 02

  And that's why I'm asking like, who harmed people to the same degree that wasn't just.

• 1:52:43Ed Zitron?

  Actually, the question with Theranos is, I actually like, I know, like people did actually die. It was very bad. Just being clear.

• 1:52:49Speaker 09

  Fucking mortgage backed securities are a man like, and that hurt a lot of people.

• 1:52:53Ed Zitron?

  FTX did a lot more damage.

• 1:52:55Speaker 02

  I'm thinking specifically in tech.

• 1:52:56Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, no. Everyone involved with the great financial crisis, everyone who bet on this. And I'm gonna be fucking honest, I'm gonna say this. Every single company that invested in data centers that is gonna lead to the financial collapse that follows is worse than Theranos. Every single person who pushed OpenAI uphill is worse than Theranos for what's coming.

• 1:53:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I'm fucking going for it. I'm crazy. But yeah, and they will crucify Sam Altman. If what I think is happening over there is happening, where they're misleading investors, which is my personal belief and not those of the iHeartRadio Corporation. If that is true, Sam Altman should go to jail. If it's true, which we do not know if it is. He probably won't, because like if he was a white woman, he absolutely would. But would he have been able to raise the money? We're doing this. It's Elizabeth Holmes wasn't like an actual criminal. Like, we can't, we're not gonna whitewash this. She was an actual criminal who like talked with a deep Steve Jobs voice, which I think is a funny bit.

• 1:53:52Speaker 02

  The voice thing, okay, I will say this.

• 1:53:56Speaker 04

  Black turtleneck, the whole, the whole bit.

• 1:53:59Speaker 02

  I, that is where I think sexism is coloring the entire interpretation. Because truly, when I speak in a lower voice, I get treated differently.

• 1:54:09Ed Zitron?

  Do you?

• 1:54:10Speaker 02

  And when I speak in a, and like you listen to women who speak in baby voices. And, and, and we don't say it's fucked up that women speak in baby voices. And you run into these women all the fucking time. And that's not their natural voice. That's not that voice that if they were just left, grew up in the woods that they would be speaking with. That's a performed voice that they, that's an identity that they have. Sorry, we've got Chloe on.

• 1:54:29Ed Zitron?

  No, I wanna know everything about this.

• 1:54:30Speaker 02

  But, but like, how women are perceived in society is, our voices are a huge part of it, as, as they are with men. Think of gay men who sound gayer, like they get treated differently, right? Like, all of that is, is part of our performance of power in society, or our performance of how power and gender are knit together in society.

• 1:54:51Ed Zitron?

  Chloe.

• 1:54:51Speaker 02

  And so then, I do think, and like, her voice sounds insane. It sounds insane, but I also am like, that one, I, I fully fucking get it, and it drives me nuts.

• 1:55:02Ed Zitron?

  Can you tell me more about, have you had, like, as a woman, have you had to lower your voice? And in what scenarios have you had to?

• 1:55:08Speaker 02

  I have a very low voice.

• 1:55:10Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:55:11Speaker 02

  I just like speak in a very low voice naturally.

• 1:55:13Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:55:13Speaker 02

  So, I.

• 1:55:16Speaker 02

  It's more that I I I think the inverse is a much more common experience where women women baby like talking baby voices and that is a that is like a relinquishing of power and that is a submissive stance and for me it's like yeah if I talk if I speak to somebody on the street or in public if I'm speaking to a stranger and I'm like yo if I talk at that level like people people turn expecting a man

• 1:55:43Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:55:44Speaker 02

  And treat and then I

• 1:55:45Ed Zitron?

  This is like a this is an actual 30 Rock joke with the I'm a very sexy baby.

• 1:55:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, totally.

• 1:55:52Ed Zitron?

  The manipulation through no, it's just I mean, I'm a fucking white guy like what do I fucking know? But it's like the reason I ask is like, is this a commonplace thing in the workplace of woman? I'm like

• 1:56:00Speaker 02

  I don't think it's a commonplace. I don't think the voice thing. I don't think speaking in a low voice.

• 1:56:05Ed Zitron?

  Or like a higher voice even.

• 1:56:06Speaker 02

  A higher voice is all the fucking time. Like if you start listening to it, if you there's so many

• 1:56:10Ed Zitron?

  Once you hear it, it's like the FedEx arrow.

• 1:56:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, weird phony baby voices. Um, I don't I think that the idea that a woman like artificially lowers her voice like Elizabeth Holmes did.

• 1:56:22Ed Zitron?

  That's a little low.

• 1:56:23Speaker 02

  Is very uncommon, totally. And her voice sounds insane. Like I I don't dismiss that she sounds batshit.

• 1:56:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:29Speaker 02

  But it's also like what we it's it

• 1:56:33Ed Zitron?

  The fact it clearly worked.

• 1:56:35Speaker 02

  The thing that drives me nuts is like that we it we will uh we will find fault in however a woman presents.

• 1:56:44Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:56:44Speaker 02

  And that when she tries to then model after a male presentation in some way that we're like, well, that's wrong.

• 1:56:52Ed Zitron?

  But it worked though.

• 1:56:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:54Speaker 09

  What really frustrates me is you get a lot of people who will point out laughingly she was clearly trying to imitate Steve Jobs and the way that she dressed with the turtleneck and whatnot and point out like how and how like the style of her presentation is aching him. And what doesn't get brought up much like nearly as often in part because people don't like to think of Jobs or other like heroic figures like tech founder figures this way is the one of the other ways she ape him is Jobs was very famous, not so much at the big public announcement level, but like when he was talking to investors, when he was like Like putting together ideas with vastly overpromising, right? And part of like what he did was be incredibly anal retentive about like when a product was

• 1:57:35Speaker 09

  actually ready, but he had these like very specific, often pie in the sky demands for what this thing needed to do, how it needed to look, how it needed to feel, that he would promise could be done before they knew that they could do it. Yes. And he hired good people and Apple was able to square those circles. Apple was able to produce.

• 1:57:50Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:51Speaker 09

  There is a similarity with, because her attitude was very much similar, which is what I need to do is make the promise and I need to aesthetically make the case of how this is going to look and feel and what it can do. And as long as we can get enough money doing that, we can brute force the having a real product thing. And it's not exactly the same thing, but it's close enough because almost every founder at some point relies on, I don't fully know that what I can do meets what I am selling to the people who are investing money. And I don't fully know that the product that I am promising them I'm really going to be able to deliver, especially for the cost that I'm promising them.

• 1:58:29Speaker 09

  And that fundamental reality of how all this works, it gets obscured a lot because it's not, it makes it, it makes it sound like gambling and in a lot of ways it very much is. It is.

• 1:58:42Ed Zitron?

  I mean, what's the difference? I mean, there is a difference in that Theranos did not exist, but what you just described is large language models? Like it literally is.

• 1:58:51Speaker 09

  Well, yeah.

• 1:58:51Ed Zitron?

  It's, it's, look, this thing fucking sucks and it doesn't do what you want it to. But what if we spent more money than anything's ever been spent ever, ever, forever? What if it became something completely different? And people will try and differentiate because, okay, the first step with Theranos is bullshit. They just sent it to LabCorp. They didn't even have the beginning steps. That fucking sucks. But Sam Altman does not have the first steps to AGI. Fucking Wario Amade doesn't have the first steps to. A fucking shit in a hole in the ground like they're all doing only a few steps from Theranos and they will be colored very differently that they were just innovators risking if you end up writing

• 1:59:31Ed Zitron?

  that when this shit pops you're a mark in the same way that every single person who covered Theranos was because it's the same

• 1:59:40Speaker 09

  Not everyone, there was a, there was a real good reporter at the journal.

• 1:59:43Ed Zitron?

  John Carrero, yeah.

• 1:59:45Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:45Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, several years after all the major articles came out, John Carrero was several, yeah, 2015, I think that came out, there were Theranos articles for years, not, and there was several blogs before Carrero that were like, hey, I looked at the science, none of this made sense.

• 2:00:03Speaker 09

  Doesn't seem like it can work.

• 2:00:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and Carrero did, and to be clear, he did incredible reporting, a really great job, but it's like, there were very few people who did, and I think it's, I think when Sam Altman gets crucified as I expect, Evangelion style, it's not going to be the same way and it will, I think everyone needs to pre-prepare for, if you want to frame this as the innovator's dilemma, oh, you know, just he was just trying something, that is not a fair way to look at it, because there was never a guidance point from there to wherever AGI bullshit happens.

• 2:00:39Speaker 09

  It's also fundamentally really bad for innovation, like one of the big frustrations for me today was walking past probably a cumulative acre or two of different home robots, this is a robot servant, this is a robot, humanoid robot that you can have do tasks for you, you can have it watch your kids, you can have it take, watch, take your pets out, you know, here we've got one and we've got a robot dinosaur and they're trying to get past each other.

• 2:01:02Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I did see that, yeah.

• 2:01:03Speaker 09

  Everyone watch him, yeah.

• 2:01:04Ed Zitron?

  That was cute.

• 2:01:04Speaker 09

  And like, yeah, there's, some of it's cute, some of it's, there were a lot of like humanoid robots that were like, like awkwardly strung up like they were on a gibbet to keep them standing because like when they were on, either they couldn't, they'd broken or they wouldn't stay up on their own power, like I wasn't sure exactly what was happening there, but in the middle of all that, I come at like, after like an acre or two of this stuff, I come across a little booth where it's like two guys at like a desk, maybe two desks, um, and they've got just like a couple of like stringy looking little like fabric tubes hanging and then a couple of little like gizmos on the table, and I go up and I ask like what it is and it's a photonic muscle. Is what they're calling it. And the way it works is, I'm pulling up the picture right here.

• 2:01:49Speaker 09

  Areflex is the company. And yeah, it's a photonic muscle. And you have these little bundles that look kind of like this. And each of these bundles has an LED light in it. And there's like a kind of fiber or something inside it. And when the light turns on, it causes that that fiber to contract in a way that mimics a motor or functions the same way as a motor. And so you can put them in devices. And the example they had was, there's this, this device that's like, I think, like you call like an intake thing on like a car, right? Where you need these little flaps to open. And the flaps open and close by the use of these. And they take up like half as much space as a motor would take. Because instead of a motor, you have these little like

• 2:02:34Speaker 09

  synthetic photonic muscles that are much lighter, much less space, fewer moving parts.

• 2:02:39Speaker 04

  It's the chance to see stuff like that, which is why I keep coming back. And yet I miss this company, because there's a lot to take in.

• 2:02:45Speaker 09

  And you, you have to walk past, again, all these, these companies that have put how many, God knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars into humanoid robots, most of which never have a chance, really, of establishing themselves. And very, like, basically, none that I saw outside of like, the ones meant for specific manufacturing uses, seemed like they had a creative or intellectually interesting reason or solved a problem. And that so vastly outnumbers in funding and attention the like, somebody made a muscle with a light. That's kind of, that's kind of sweet.

• 2:03:17Ed Zitron?

  Well, the problem is, is like, the idea, a robot that does one thing is not what people expect from a robot. Everyone wants to have one robot that is just a person, a slave. Just, let's just, let's just cut straight to it.

• 2:03:28Speaker 04

  LG's whole sales pitch was the zero labor home, which, I mean, like, big if true.

• 2:03:33Speaker 09

  Right.

• 2:03:34Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, but it's like.

• 2:03:35Speaker 04

  I don't live in that home.

• 2:03:36Speaker 09

  From some light, didn't you see the cloyed?

• 2:03:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's a

• 2:03:40Speaker 09

  He's gonna find your keys.

• 2:03:41Speaker 04

  Willing servant, yeah.

• 2:03:42Speaker 09

  Find your keys, bring your fruit when you're demented?

• 2:03:45Speaker 02

  You are right that it is what people want as a slave.

• 2:03:48Speaker 12

  Yeah, it's a slave. It's you either want a completely faceless machine, and I'm sure, I want to make sure as the rear is the black guy, like, come on.

• 2:03:58Speaker 02

  Say it.

• 2:04:02Speaker 02

  As the what? As the guy with rings?

• 2:04:05Speaker 12

  As the guy with, you know, you can't see, but I got some hot tap rings on. So I know something about slaves, I know something about slaves. You know, in my newsletter, I wrote, um, there's this essay I wrote that was talking about how the roots of automation are go back to slavery, right? So part of the, part of the, the thing that developed impetus for automation is that, you know, you had the abolition of slavery and you had the British Empire being like, oh, my fucking God, how are we gonna keep, you know, plantations are incredibly profitable. How are we gonna keep these sort of profits? Because they're also integral to our empire, like for funding our navies and fielding our armies.

• 2:04:45Speaker 12

  And so the idea was like, okay, well, you have to make the factory resemble a plantation as much as possible. And I think most people, when they think of plantations, they think like, okay, you know, it's outside, it's disorganized a little bit, you have an overseer, but they were like very highly regimented and they developed very specific methods of extracting and terrorize as much labor as possible and terrorizing people. And so the automation that was developed by this guy Charles Babbage was like an attempt to do early divisions of labor and create machines that would be able to, you know, self surveil workers, or workers would be able to self surveil themselves or quantify their work or divide it into pieces, like some of the very foundational theories of

• 2:05:23Speaker 12

  how labor should be organized going into, okay, well, how do we get a non-human along a division of, uh, of labor where we're separating as much work as possible to discrete, repeatable, substitutable parts, you know, uh, which we already designed to resemble slavery, how do we get that in this like embodied thing that is also just happens to look like a person without a face that's, um, we want everywhere in the house? I don't know, I feel like the heart and the soul of it does link back to it and it goes back even further, right? But I think then also the other question is like, how much do you think this is also colored by experiences maybe some of these people have where?

• 2:06:06Speaker 12

  You know, they're they're like, yeah, why shouldn't I? You know, why shouldn't I have um, a person or a thing in my house? And how can I convince other people to do it if only by having a robot do it, right?

• 2:06:18Ed Zitron?

  And I think that there's, well, there's two parts to that. It's one, they might have hired help and they're like, well, I have to pay some fucking piece of shit human, Jesus Christ. But also, there is, I feel like there's a division in automation with some people, where there's some people where it's like, I see this as an, as a kind of, as like an amplification of who I am, like an, like an extra arm, like an arm that moves one thing to one thing, which is not a thing I command, but it's just a a thingy that does an action. That's not a sexy thing you can raise funding on. You can't be like, I got an arm that moves a thing from a thing, which is most industrial machinery. It's just like repeating one task again and again and again. The reason that replaces humans is that's a repetitive action. It fucks up humans, but it's not about the subjugation of a person. It's an action. Yeah. It's not about controlling someone. It's about making a thingy happen.

• 2:07:03Ed Zitron?

  Then there are the people who are like, wouldn't it be awesome if every fucking whim I had was perfectly solved and I could order someone or to quote Adam Conover, yes, they dance, know the way I like it. And it's this idea of this aggy bot yesterday, oh, it can do the TikTok dance. Why do you want someone to dance for you? And that's a fucking peculiar instinct.

• 2:07:27Speaker 09

  Part of what's so difficult, though, is that these are, it's this, it's this, it's a version of the same problem that you have with a lot of like genetics and like fertility and, and technology, right? Where do you want to make sure if you can find out in the womb that a child's going to be born with its lungs outside its body? And you could just kind of snip that out. So the lungs are inside the body.

• 2:07:50Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:07:50Speaker 09

  Do we want that? Everyone's pretty much like, oh yeah, that's probably good if kids have lungs. Yeah. Do you want to be able to tell if someone has autism and snip that? Whoa, suddenly, suddenly, or any of the other horrible eugenics questions, right? So everyone's like, yeah, there's certain things we want to be able to do with genetics technology. But if you say this is okay, all people are going to start immediately pushing for all and like drawing a line. Is something that like the fact that you're drawing a line means there's going to be strong lobbies of people pushing for stuff that is really bad. Right. And with automation, everyone's like, like I saw a product today, that's one of a, I've seen a couple like this where it's a big,

• 2:08:31Speaker 09

  basically like a big cart on wheels that can go off road and can be fully autonomous and you can set, here's where wounded guys are gonna be, here's where the hospital is, drive up to the front line, people throw wounded guy in, drive to the, to the, the medical area.

• 2:08:46Speaker 12

  Which sounds good.

• 2:08:47Speaker 09

  Right. And you don't necessarily, like, it's better if a robot does that because people can get blowed up. Right. If you can, and so, and there's also like, obviously, I'm sure we all have individual pain in the ass tasks that we're like, well, yeah, I'm fine if a robot washes my dishes like.

• 2:09:01Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:09:02Speaker 09

  But once you, once you're saying, well, we do want to automate some stuff, you're having then a conversation, where is the line? And right now, everything's on the table, including like the creation of like art and beauty.

• 2:09:16Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:09:16Speaker 09

  And the raising of children.

• 2:09:17Speaker 12

  The stuff they're meant to do when we're not working.

• 2:09:19Speaker 09

  Basic cognition. And that's the fact, but you can't, if you're going to talk about some of it, all of it's going to be on the table at some point. And right now it is.

• 2:09:28Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think that's also the other thing, right? Where it's like, you know, to your point, there's automation that's, saves you labor and enhances productivity around the home, you know, and around certain workplaces, that reduces the drudgery of tasks we have to do. And then there's automation that is deployed in a way to squeeze as much as possible out of people. Beyond what they might in of themselves want to do if they had control over, to what degree am I going to augment my workplace or myself with this stuff? Right? And I think that ends up also being the line with a lot of these technologies where it's like, you know, how, if we were designing genetic technologies, if we were designing,

• 2:10:08Speaker 12

  you know, assistive automation or assistive artificial intelligences and grafting them onto our lives. I feel like the, the points in which we would let them and not let them look different than what your concerns and interests are if you're like, okay, well, I'm looking to get a return, or I'm looking to organize the workplace in a certain way, or I'm looking to just meet a very specific need in this or that context, right? In a battlefield, in a hospital, you know, in a public space. So I think. So I, you know, part, part of this is like, you know, downstream a consequence of the fact I feel like we're almost all technical decisions have nothing to do with, with anyone other than these private investors.

• 2:10:50Speaker 02

  Totally. I mean, a thought that I have had this whole last few days is what does it mean to be optimized? Or to have your life optimized? What is the actual outcome of that?

• 2:11:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:07Speaker 02

  What are we optimizing for? And if the optimization is we're going to remove all of the annoying tasks so you can enjoy life? That sounds like an awesome answer that I could totally get behind. On the ground, that's not, that doesn't seem to be what any of the products need to.

• 2:11:23Ed Zitron?

  I was just thinking of something very simple, which is like, I'm lucky to live a really good life. And the reason I can is I have a, I have a washing machine and a dryer that works really well. And I have a good dishwasher. Like, it's like, it's all.

• 2:11:38Speaker 12

  Refrigerator.

• 2:11:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Like, it's like, the shit that sucks isn't like, I can afford to use Uber. I can get around like, a $50 dishwasher that's really good feels like it would be more innovative than anything on this floor because most people can't afford to have a good one. Like, like the things that get in the way of existing are labor as in having to do your horrible fucking job that doesn't pay you enough, or the shitty, like, how the fuck do you look after the children you have? There aren't really, there's not really tech. You can't buy more time unless you have actual labor help.

• 2:12:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:12:14Ed Zitron?

  Which requires more money. And you can't really replace that with a robot because the reason they need an everyman robot is because problems are complex. The problems of even dishes are complex.

• 2:12:27Speaker 02

  And decision making is.

• 2:12:29Ed Zitron?

  Exactly. You know, that is exactly it. It's like, it's not the problems themselves. It's the decisions around them.

• 2:12:35Speaker 09

  I mean, and, and that's why the most responsible technologies at CES stick to doing the things where there's no real downside if it's not done perfectly, like raising children. Um, which I saw a really good, uh, child companion robot, uh, today, which I look for at every one of these. I love them.

• 2:12:54Ed Zitron?

  Everybody else.

• 2:12:57Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I wasn't sure you were going with that.

• 2:12:58Speaker 09

  Oh, no. So there was a really good one that it's one of my favorite CES categories, where it's like Southeast Asian tech company marketing to Americans that doesn't fully understand our culture.

• 2:13:09Ed Zitron?

  Fuck me up.

• 2:13:10Speaker 09

  And so they have like a whole, they have a set of bleachers erected and like 50 of these like little robot dolls sitting in them. I'll show you guys, but they're like, they're all wearing like sleeveless shirts. Let's, let's. And like. Oh, I did walk by that yesterday. Yeah, they're all wearing sleeveless shirts and like little beanie hats, basically, that have the name of the robot on it, which is Booster? Or is it Booster? Yeah, it's Booster. But then in front, they had one robot that was dressed differently. And I didn't realize at first, it looked like it had like a suit and a black hat on. And then the video starts playing and I realize that fucking robot is Michael Jackson. And it's dancing to Billie Jean. Yeah. Alongside what I believe is a kid. Sadly, I know exactly where in the north hall that was. And it was.

• 2:13:55Ed Zitron?

  Well, that did happen.

• 2:13:56Speaker 09

  Could not get across them. Hey, guys, maybe Michael Jackson's not the best robot mascot for a children's toy. Ooh. You might have. Ugh, yikes. But immediately, what I gotta show you guys, and this is what I was telling you about.

• 2:14:10Ed Zitron?

  We might cut this in, we might just let it fly.

• 2:14:13Speaker 09

  I want the reaction. This is what happens in that video immediately after it's the robot's dancing to Billie Jean.

• 2:14:20Ed Zitron?

  I'm gonna put a link to this in the notes.

• 2:14:21Speaker 09

  Yeah, so this is right after Billie Jean.

• 2:14:29Speaker 09

  What?

• 2:14:32Ed Zitron?

  That is identical to the.

• 2:14:33Speaker 09

  Oh, wait.

• 2:14:37Speaker 09

  What?

• 2:14:38Ed Zitron?

  So weird.

• 2:14:39Speaker 09

  So what happens in that video?

• 2:14:41Ed Zitron?

  What?

• 2:14:41Speaker 09

  The instant that finishes doing like dancing to Billie Jean while like moonwalking, there's immediately a man runs into another version of the robot and starts beating it with a wooden stick, which then switches to a guy putting cinder blocks on top of it and smashing it with a fucking mallet. And then right after that, a dude comes in with a liquor bottle and shatters it over the robot's head.

• 2:15:05Ed Zitron?

  If you are protecting your your children from the homeless.

• 2:15:09Speaker 09

  Or from the robots. Like, what else is that saying?

• 2:15:13Speaker 02

  And then the robot stands up after it seems fine.

• 2:15:15Ed Zitron?

  You can't stop it. You can't stop. I love that because it all looked almost identical to those things. I don't know if you remember the modeling experiment, like the regularly disproved thing about how children will copy anything. And it's just children hitting a clown with a stick. And it looked identical. It's the same fucking thing. That CES, baby, just like. I I I want to be in the room when they were recording that. It's like, hit it again. Hit it again. Get a get a liquor. Get a liquor bottle. Fuck it up.

• 2:15:44Speaker 09

  It was unclear.

• 2:15:45Ed Zitron?

  I'd do that for free.

• 2:15:46Speaker 09

  What the selling point? Because it goes from it can dance like Michael Jackson. You can beat the shit out of it and it's fine. It'll walk with your little girl and help her learn languages. It's like quizzing her over her homework.

• 2:15:56Ed Zitron?

  You will never stop Don Spott dancing.

• 2:16:00Speaker 09

  Why is the and I I kind of think maybe they just sort of incompetently realized something that is a brilliant idea, which is if you if you market and build a robot entirely on Terminator two logic, where you just show that this robot can't be killed, it's loyal to your child, it'll never get drunk and hit them, it'll never not come home after staying out late at the bar at night. Yeah. Like the whole the whole Sarah Connor speech from T two.

• 2:16:27Speaker 04

  Important to note, I did not see any robots built out of liquid metal.

• 2:16:31Speaker 09

  Not not.

• 2:16:31Speaker 04

  But I mean, I missed some corners of the Venetian Expo, so maybe, and that's the South Hall this year.

• 2:16:37Speaker 12

  I want the AI bubble burst. We'll get to what we really need to get to, which is building Terminators.

• 2:16:42Ed Zitron?

  All right. As we approach the end of this, Chloe Radcliffe, what do you think of CES?

• 2:16:49Speaker 02

  It's, um, uh, I mean, truly, I go back to numbers you don't need.

• 2:16:55Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:55Speaker 02

  Uh, I go back to, so what does that do? You know what's funny? Or or so who gives a shit? Um, it's it's so, uh, unnerving to think about how how much of our society feels like there's no money.

• 2:17:13Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:14Speaker 02

  And then to come to a place where there is all the money.

• 2:17:18Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:19Speaker 02

  And it's that that I think is disturbing.

• 2:17:21Speaker 04

  Try going to an AI industry conference.

• 2:17:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And and like I I work in entertainment and such a common refrain in entertainment is like, ah, we just don't have the budgets to do that anymore. We used to have those kind of budgets and we don't anymore. And I'm like, there is money fucking sloshing around, hitting the sides, coming out people's noses. Like, there is so much money. And I it's infuriating to me that, you know, I'm taking a very narrow view right now.

• 2:17:49Ed Zitron?

  Actually, I will actually push back. You're not.

• 2:17:51Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:17:52Ed Zitron?

  You're taking a very reasonable.

• 2:17:53Speaker 02

  Well, here, here, the narrow, the narrow part of the view is like, I'm putting aside the fact that it's infuriating that people are living very difficult lives amidst all this money floating around. But but like even I'm just thinking about my job. You know, it's like in the entertainment industry, the fact that there is relatively little money, that money is tight. And I'm like, it's not, it's also, it's it's especially relevant. Sorry, and then one second, it's especially pertinent in entertainment because so much of entertainment is now owned by the things that own the tech.

• 2:18:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:24Speaker 02

  Where all the money lives. And so I'm like, what the fuck do you mean? There's no money in entertainment.

• 2:18:29Speaker 09

  You couldn't, you couldn't be more right because like, number one, like, the other thing is that it's entertainment makes as much money as ever. It's not no longer making money, but like you said, the companies that now own all of these fucking are taking those profits and they're currently pouring them into the shit that you're seeing, the broken shit on the floor here.

• 2:18:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:49Ed Zitron?

  And when all of this is dead and bleeding on the floor, you're gonna give it to Chloe Radcliffe.

• 2:18:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. That's right.

• 2:18:57Ed Zitron?

  We're gonna wrap here and I just wanna say on behalf of all the listeners and myself, thank you, Chloe. Thank you for joining us.

• 2:19:02Speaker 02

  It's been an honor. I've had a great time.

• 2:19:04Ed Zitron?

  I really hope you join us next year.

• 2:19:05Speaker 02

  God, I've had a fucking blast.

• 2:19:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's been a genuine pleasure to have you. Where can people find you?

• 2:19:09Speaker 02

  Uh, I am at Chloe Badcliff on all platforms, like my last name Radcliffe, but bad. Uh, and I'm in Cincinnati this weekend. I'm in DC next weekend. I'm in Philly the week after. Uh, follow me, sign up for my mailing list. Yada, yada, yada.

• 2:19:27Ed Zitron?

  Rob Pegora, we'll have your links in there, but thank you so much for joining us. You are.

• 2:19:31Speaker 04

  You're welcome.

• 2:19:32Ed Zitron?

  You are one of the best. I love having you here.

• 2:19:34Speaker 04

  I try.

• 2:19:35Ed Zitron?

  And you are at everything I'm at, which is genuinely a pleasure. Robert Evans, my boss behind the bastards. Thank you for joining us. And of course, the other red, Edongueza, love you, buddy.

• 2:19:46Speaker 12

  Thank you for having me. Love you too bud.

• 2:19:49Ed Zitron?

  And I love you all for listening. We will be back tomorrow for four more hours. Yeah, I forgot for a second.

• 2:19:55Speaker 02

  You fucking psychos. I can't believe you're listening to all this shit.

• 2:19:58Ed Zitron?

  Nah, all of the men I'm radicalizing and the woman that listens as well and the trans people and everyone on non-binary and everyone who listens, I don't care who you are, but I care that you are who you are. It has been a very long day and it's a very long week, but I love you listening. We will be back four hours tomorrow, an hour epilogue on Saturday, and then they are going to shoot me in the head parody. I'm Ed Zitron. Please subscribe to my newsletter. I did not do premium this week, so please use the link in the thing. I desperately need that. Thank you to Matt Osowski, my wonderful producer who has been working his fucking ass off all week. Amazing show. More amazing stuff to come. We're also dedicating these episodes to Sean Paul Adams, who is a friend of the show and the suite.

• 2:20:41Ed Zitron?

  Sadly, he passed last year. Sean Paul absolutely rocked, so we're honoring him by donating to the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium. Sean Paul's son is epileptic and his family and friends would deeply appreciate your donations, as would I. Thank you.

• 2:21:03Ed 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.

• 2:21:35Speaker 07

  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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