CES 2026: Part Two (Tuesday)

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 Tuesday’s first episode, Ed is joined by Ed Niedermeyer of the Autonocast, Henry Casey of CNN Underscored, Gare Davis of It Could Happen Here and Ed Ongweso Jr. of The Tech Bubble newsletter to talk about smart glasses, wireless TVs, and the big lie of consumer robotics. 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 The Tech Bubble Newsletter: https://thetechbubble.substack.com/ Gare Davis: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:jm6ufvsw3hg5zgdpnd3zb4tv Henry Casey - https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/about/henry-t-casey https://bsky.app/profile/henrytcasey.net Ed Niedermeyer of The Autonocast: https://www.autonocast.com/https://bsky.app/profile/niedermeyer.online Donate in Sean-Paul’s honor: https://www.perc-epilepsy.org/ LG’s robot: https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/lg-brought-a-robot-that-cooks-folds-laundry-and-empties-the-dishwasher-to-ces/ The Aura TV with a soundbar built in: https://global.dreametech.com/products/dreametv-s100 Displace Wireless TV: https://displace.tv/ --- 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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• 0:33Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm Steph and I work at United Healthcare. When I think about United Healthcare's members, I think of my own family. My niece was diagnosed with an ultra-rare genetic disorder. I know how hard it is for families at United Healthcare. We can make it easier.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  I'm Brian. I care because I know what it's like to not speak the language. It's not easy. Health insurance is complicated. I would say our job is to make everything easy for our UAC members. I work for United Healthcare. I'm committed to care.

• 1:08Ed Zitron?

  You were bearing witness to a great becoming. We're back. It's Better Offline.

• 1:24Ed Zitron?

  That's right. It's our second day of coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show here in beautiful, scenic, rustic glass Vegas. And we're here for two two-hour-long episodes today, this being the first of course. And I am, of course, your host, Ed Zitron, the king of pigs, the Dale Cooper of podcasting. We've got an open bar, we've got tacos and places to relax with journalists. And good lord, have we all seen some crap. Our first contestants are the remarkable Edward Onguessa of the Tech Bubble Newsletter. Ed?

• 1:49Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 1:50Ed Zitron?

  And of course, we've got Ed Niedemeyer, the author. And of course, he's the co-host of the Autonocast. Howdy. And we've got Gare Davis. It could happen here. Gare, how you doing?

• 1:58Speaker 05

  The only non-Ed present.

• 2:00Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you've got three Eds and one Gare. And I think that the mathematics works there. I was at the convention center today. I power walked through two halls in the space of a morning. I pray for death. But I'm going to start with the fact that I think smart glasses are evil. I tried several ones of them. And there was one where I put them on and it's meant to be, you're meant to look at your photos in there. You're meant to listen to music and all this. And it was blur. I just go, yeah, it's really blurry. And he goes, yeah. And just looks at me, I'm like, you know, he's like, yeah, you know, I'm like, how much is it? $1,200. I'm like, oh, great. He's like, yeah, but that's with discounts. And it's just like, who the fu- I know that there's the whole thing about assistive technologies that's cool and all, but it's like, who the fuck is this actually for? I'm just kind of lost.

• 2:45Speaker 04

  I, I had a similar feeling. There was a lot of times I would come across assistive tech that'd be like, this is interesting. And then I get introduced to the rest of the ecosystem, which uh itself is, is dubious. Or there are other, there are other additions or features that don't really need, seem to need to be grafted on. I mean, I think similarly with smart glasses, you know, I feel like the only ones I saw that I was interested in were some that allowed you to hear better and functioned as like a hearing aid. But then almost, yeah, and it's like, you know, okay, if you, if you really don't want to wear a hearing aid, you know, if you're really self-conscious about that, even though we have invisible ones, but.

• 3:25Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I, I saw these even.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  Then there's an app and the, and an ecosystem you have to get locked into.

• 3:30Ed Zitron?

  The worst ones I saw, and I hate to shit talk specific company, but I'm gonna do it, is the even G2As. And what they were, you put them on and they had like a, looked like the pit boy. It was like gr- green and black.

• 3:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:42Ed Zitron?

  And I had this ring, you had to put a ring on and control it. And the ring didn't work, like you had to like violently smack your, smack your finger, like you, I'm, you can't see this, you're listening to a podcast, but I'm just like smashing my aura ring with my thumb and it wasn't working. And I turned to them and went, yeah, it's not really working. They just went, yeah, you know. It's, it, it rocks to about our technology. We're just like, ah, you know, ah, mate, you know, it just, they're fucking so, I don't know, mate, what to tell you.

• 4:09Speaker 06

  But like, technology is not cutting edge unless it's janky, right? I mean, that's kind of part of the deal, like, like cutting edge has become this term that we think of as just like good. But really the, the definition of it, it is that it, it's like not fully developed.

• 4:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And it's, it used to be, maybe I'm just, I'm, I'm having some nostalgia here, maybe it's not true, but it felt like about 10 years ago at CES, you'd see something here and then when it came out, it'd be complete. Now it's just they release everything in alpha.

• 4:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're, we're living in the world that, that Elon Musk created. I mean, not to, not to be reductive, but.

• 4:39Ed Zitron?

  I was literally gonna say, you're an Elon Musk head, a big, a big Elon's, Elon stan. And um, yeah, he really has ushered in the era of just bullshit.

• 4:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, like, like, I mean, i- if we live in a world where you can promise, you know, specifically like your car will be able to do level five autonomous, this is like a very specifically, you know, defined thing, and you can get away with with saying end of the year 10 years in a row, which is where we're at now, um, it'll be, it'll actually be the 10 year anniversary in, in the fall.

• 5:08Ed Zitron?

  That's, that's nice.

• 5:09Speaker 06

  Like, these are the people, people see these things happen and they're like, well, why not me?

• 5:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and why should I fucking bother?

• 5:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:16Ed Zitron?

  So Ed, you've been on the floor, what'd you see today? What, what kind of, what kind of crap?

• 5:20Speaker 04

  I mean, I saw a lot of stuff that was, uh, categorized around, let's say, age tech, you know?

• 5:27Ed Zitron?

  Like what?

• 5:28Speaker 04

  Uh, so the, so the goal here is you have AI companion bots or chat bots that you speak to. You have, uh, smart homes and surveillance systems that constantly log your information and give people away from you.

• 5:43Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 5:43Speaker 04

  Inside into your home. Uh, you're generating as much data as possible to feed into something that can analyze it.

• 5:50Ed Zitron?

  I saw, I saw like a Boston Dynamics looking ass dog robot thing, and it was by this very, I think you should leave style thing of like a guy who'd fallen out of a hospital bed. I'm gonna pull this up just so you can see this. So if you see here, like this guy has fallen out of his bed and the dog is just looking at him. And it says, decloak brain. He's just sitting, just lying on the floor. Now, I get that there's probably a reason like this, but are you saying that every hospital is just gonna be stalked by Boston Dynamics dogs going?

• 6:17Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 6:18Ed Zitron?

  He's dead. He's fallen out of it. Is that cheaper than a person, I am?

• 6:23Speaker 06

  Are there, so is this, is this being aimed at hospitals or is that like consumers?

• 6:27Ed Zitron?

  It was not clear because there were tons of other use cases as well that were very vague, like, oh, old person, uh, neighborhood watch. What's that dog gonna do to me? I'll kick it so hard it flies.

• 6:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:38Ed Zitron?

  Was it, I'll send it to hell.

• 6:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, like, the whole thing of selling robots to consumers is really interesting because, you know, all of the successful robots that, that exist really are, are not consumer facing.

• 6:48Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 6:49Speaker 06

  They, they exist in factories, these are very like controlled environments, they do the same task over and over and over again. We know how to make money.

• 6:55Ed Zitron?

  Straightforward, right?

• 6:56Speaker 06

  On mission. Yeah, exactly. And like, a human home is not. You know, a constraint, I mean, it's constrained, right? But like, a lot of random stuff happens are relative to, say, a factory. And like, a Roomba is something that you can kind of work if all your floors are perfectly flat and you don't have transitions. And, you know, but even that, like, that's a successful product class, relatively speaking. And it's really the only one in, in consumer-facing robots. And actually, I robot went, went under. So.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Right. Why, why do you think, why is there this constant attempt to reinvent it or to re, you know, rediscover this path that ends in, that goes down the dead end?

• 7:33Speaker 06

  So, well, so I, I think, what, the reason, the reason that, that robots are being sold to consumers is because they know that consumers don't understand them. I think, you know, you, you mentioned all this age tech, like selling sophisticated data-driven technology to old people. Why do you do that? Yes, there, there are some needs there. But also, you know, wealthy people will, will buy it without really thinking too, too hard about it.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. When I talked with them, they were, you know, with a lot of these firms, they're like, well, actually, it's supposed to only be sold to, like, nursing homes and larger businesses. But yeah, sometimes people buy them individually because they're really concerned about their family members. So I think, yeah, that's similar dynamic where it's like, you know, if you know it, and also if you want to take advantage of it, you probably just can't buy one for your, you know, for your home, for your grandparent.

• 8:19Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Do you see any robots? See any, anything robotic today?

• 8:22Speaker 05

  I walked past the robot that, that you showed, but I've not really been looking for products on show floor. I've been mostly been going back and forth to panels and keynotes.

• 8:30Ed Zitron?

  What'd you see? Tell me about some panels.

• 8:32Speaker 05

  I, I went to the, like, the CTA, the Technology Association.

• 8:37Ed Zitron?

  Sure.

• 8:38Speaker 05

  I'm a professional.

• 8:38Ed Zitron?

  I also don't know.

• 8:39Speaker 05

  I know, I know who runs this convention. I, I went, I went to their keynote this morning, and they brought on like, a few, like, CEOs from other, other, other companies. Like, they, they had, they had the Nvidia guy on at the end.

• 8:51Ed Zitron?

  What is, anything interesting? Or is it just like, a lot of words, a lot?

• 8:54Speaker 05

  No, he, he was, he was talking with the CEO of, I'm going to say Siemens?

• 9:00Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 9:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 05

  And they were talking about like digital, the use of digital trends in manufacturing for like, so like these large, these large like the complex simulations.

• 9:13Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 05

  So they, they, they talked a bit, they, they were also talking a lot about the, the movement towards quantum, how this is, this is, this is the next thing because we're kind of getting tired with the AI stuff, right?

• 9:27Speaker 05

  So quantum is, is where they're going to be moving to like the new hype thing. I'm guessing next CES, we're going to see a lot more quantum stuff, but they, they have this CES Foundry event space set up specifically about merging AI and quantum and that, that opens on Wednesday. So we're going to have to check that out.

• 9:43Ed Zitron?

  Oh my God.

• 9:45Speaker 05

  But no, and they, they did mention smart glasses during the keynote.

• 9:48Ed Zitron?

  Yes, yes.

• 9:49Speaker 05

  One of the few, one of the few products that the actual, like the, the CES like guy, like Gary, I think is the name, uh, who like actually mentioned was a persona smart glasses for tutoring. And like, I've tried on smart glasses at this show before. I haven't tried, not this year yet. Like the auto translation ones were always kind of interesting.

• 10:06Ed Zitron?

  Those ones always seem like useful, but it's like, you never really fucking see them in real life.

• 10:11Speaker 05

  They're very limited. You don't see them in real life. They're usually, the resolution's pretty low. These things are going to get better over time, but there, there was another CEO that they, they brought on and I, I apologize, I can't, can't remember his name, but it was, it was during the, the first keynote Tuesday morning. And talking a lot about how wearable tech is going to make a big, is going to make a big comeback. Because all of these wearables are now smart enabled and you're going to have the AI in your ring, in your glasses, in, in everything you're, you're wearing, your watch. Is it going to start learning more about your life and those AIs are going to learn about how the real world actually works, which allows them to be smarter and more useful and help us out in a whole bunch of new ways. Um, and so he's, they were, they were talking about how like, you know, Fitbit first was a CES like, you know, thing

• 10:53Speaker 05

  years ago and, and wearables since then of, you know, some success, but have kind of, kind of, but has kind of been more gimmicky. Um, and they're talking about how like wearables are going to become like a major, a major, a major thing now with, with, that's with the smart enabled stuff.

• 11:07Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 11:08Speaker 05

  But yeah, and it's. The other thing that both, both Gary, the CTA guy and the Siemens guy reiterated on a lot was like electricity defined the last, last generation.

• 11:21Ed Zitron?

  Jesus fucking crap.

• 11:22Speaker 05

  AI will illuminate the next. And this was, this was, I've heard this a lot this morning.

• 11:28Ed Zitron?

  So electricity defined the last generation?

• 11:30Speaker 05

  Like, like the last six century, like the last hundred years, like innovation was, was, was because of tech, like electricity. This was, this was like the thing.

• 11:36Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 11:37Speaker 05

  The next thing is, is AI. And the coolest thing happened during, during the Siemens opening keynote, where he was like, you know, 120 or however many years ago, there was no electricity. And then all the lights in the convention center like turned off, like for, for the, for the show. Everything went black, including, they didn't think of this, including the teleprompters.

• 12:02Ed Zitron?

  Oh no.

• 12:04Speaker 05

  So it was this like real like big drama, it was this big dramatic moment and like, and then he like paused for like 30 seconds because he didn't know what to say next. And someone ran on stage with a binder of his script so he could read the paper as he introduced how electricity like entered the world and like illuminated everything. And then the lights came back on and it was just this, it was this beautiful CES moment.

• 12:31Ed Zitron?

  See, I would have just, if I was there with you, I would have been like, quick, I'm gonna lie on the ground. I need you to scream at the top of your lungs, he's dead. He's been murdered. Who did this? Lock the doors. There's a murder that's, that's really good though. And like, no one thought this through.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was beautiful.

• 12:50Ed Zitron?

  Remember the fucking 15 words he needed to, he's, I just.

• 12:55Speaker 05

  And I love.

• 12:56Ed Zitron?

  I love that.

• 12:57Speaker 05

  It also just proved that, right, that like electricity is still actually quite important. It's very important. Also.

• 13:02Ed Zitron?

  The AI isn't gonna keep the lights on.

• 13:04Speaker 05

  As useful as, as all these AI things are, sometimes you need a binder with paper on it.

• 13:08Ed Zitron?

  Also, I just can't, like, can you not remember what you had to say next? It's not like. It's not like he was saying anything that mattered. It's just you, he went out, you'd electricity define the next generation, AI will.

• 13:22Speaker 05

  This is the industrial AI revolution, Ed.

• 13:24Ed Zitron?

  Uh huh.

• 13:25Speaker 04

  Physical AI, right?

• 13:26Speaker 05

  That's what there is, is like.

• 13:28Ed Zitron?

  World models.

• 13:29Speaker 05

  This is one of the interesting things, though, actually, I'm seeing is beyond, beyond like the, you know, lofty things about quantum. We are seeing, I think, a movement back towards the material in the way that AI is being talked about here. Cause like the past two years, AI was much, much more speculative. Now that in some ways they kind of have this cultural dominance, you use, you have this emphasis on like manufacturing. And this is something that like the CTA guys like talked about during their keynote is like this, for the first, for the first time in a few years, we're really emphasizing like the manufacturing side of things. And trying to like bring this, these like lofty AI things pretty down to earth on like, how is this actually going to help on like, like industrial like use cases?

• 14:07Ed Zitron?

  And could they explain?

• 14:08Speaker 05

  Well, that, see, that's the beautiful thing about, so yes, that's something that we get to all discover together throughout this week, Ed.

• 14:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and this is the, this world model shit, Elon's talking.

• 14:17Speaker 05

  The digital twin thing that, that, that's, that's really like, that's really what they were talking about, specifically with like the Nvidia and Siemens, like a conversation between their, their two guys. Specifically about the digital twin.

• 14:28Speaker 04

  What is spurring the, is spurring the interest in world models, this idea that, okay, there are limits to LLMs, even if we are LLM savior or fanatics? And we think it's going to save the world, we need to find another way to.

• 14:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  Embodied it without embodying it?

• 14:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, essentially. So Yann LeCun's whole thing is, is like, yeah, like, language is not like sufficient to create real general intelligence. Like, the whole thing is animated by the idea that AGI is, is a thing that we can achieve.

• 14:54Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 14:54Speaker 06

  And, and, and that basically LLMs have proven that like, language alone can, can create a, like a simulacrum of intelligence up to a certain point, but like.

• 15:02Ed Zitron?

  Child pornography.

• 15:03Speaker 06

  It has to understand the world around it, which is not just made up of language.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  It's so interesting that in a response to being like, oh, we reached all these milestones that we thought would open up the doors. The solution isn't that Uyghur Raga, we need to radically rethink it. It's like, actually, we need to, we just need a little bit more juice.

• 15:20Ed Zitron?

  Well, here's the thing, I think this world model bullshit and the digital, I've been hearing, so, great thing about running a PR firm in Texas, you hear a lot of terms repeatedly. I've had world models for 10 years. I've heard, sorry, not world models, digital twins. Digital twins was like. And like it was a simulation thing, kind of. I'm BU a little. Yeah, but then during the metaverse time, it was just like, it's a space that's the same. Yeah. World models are just, they're a scam. Like, I just like Fei-Fei Lee, everyone talks very fondly about her spatial intelligence and all that. Where the fuck, like, where's her product? Where's the thing she's done? Because world models, the reason they're pushing these in digital twins is because it's another use for GPUs. I was talking to an analyst this morning.

• 16:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's, that's why Nvidia was on stage when they were talking about this.

• 16:06Ed Zitron?

  Please, God, keep buying the GPUs, please, God. And Jensen Huang needs another leather jacket. Finally enough.

• 16:12Speaker 05

  He was wearing it.

• 16:13Ed Zitron?

  How shiny.

• 16:14Speaker 05

  It was so shiny.

• 16:16Ed Zitron?

  So he had the shiny one.

• 16:17Speaker 05

  It was shiny and it was firm, scaled.

• 16:19Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 16:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was, it was the scaly one. It was, it was very hard looking.

• 16:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's, it's just very sad as well because they're not saying that, though. Because with, with LLMs, they're like GPUs, we need more of these, we need more power. With world models, they're just like, digital twin, copy, simulation. And then the information mentioned this, yes, they put out a story saying that Nvidia's Omniverse software. Yeah, I love saying it. That it was not making much money and they had to shut down the cloud because nobody wanted it and the software sucked. And it's just like, they're running, they're out of ideas, but they're just getting up. It's like watching a pair of parents stay together for the kids like, yeah, we all love world models, digital twins. Yeah, that's, those are good, right? We both know what this means. Yep, we could model a warehouse, couldn't we, Mr. Seaman?

• 17:08Speaker 05

  They, they modeled an HD Hyundai shipyard.

• 17:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, so in the auto industry.

• 17:12Ed Zitron?

  What end is my question?

• 17:13Speaker 05

  Every nut and bolt.

• 17:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, but, but like, this is not, the, the problem is, is that, is that these digital twins for manufacturing, like, you only, there's only so much demand for it.

• 17:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 17:23Speaker 06

  Right? Like when you design a factory, like, that's a big effort. And you do one and then you usually, you know, reproduce it. And so you're not doing that design like a bunch, right? You want to get it right the first time because the tooling is so expensive as well.

• 17:33Ed Zitron?

  To answer actually the question you were on with robots, that, that what their thing is, and they kind of showed it with the Nvidia press yesterday where it's like, oh, you could put the robot in a digital simulation and then you could do that. And then they stop talking. They just stop describing because they're like, and then the robot will be smart and able to deal with the real world. They don't really seem to link those two things together so precisely, though.

• 17:56Speaker 05

  They talked a little bit about that specifically for the manufacturing those and being one of the uses for the for the digital twin stuff is that and even putting AI in all the wearables is once they have enough data, both in the digital manufacturing, the AIs will know how to do it enough that we can make them run all physical manufacturing. Then you have AIs building robots who are building robots and like all of that. That's sort of like automation stuff is kind of how they referred to it, but it wasn't something they like emphasized.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  I also, to your point, I hadn't thought about this until you said it, but yeah, what is actually the composition of demand going to look like where it's like, yeah, I actually just need to do it once because these are highly like, I need to know how to my robot should operate in a specific circumstance. I need to know what the factory looks like. And then after that, I'll just copy and paste it. Why should I use the software more than?

• 18:43Ed Zitron?

  But that's actually a good point. Like, what happens when you program the robot? Surely once the robot's done being programmed. Do they have any?

• 18:50Speaker 06

  So that's that's the whole point with with the humanoid thing. The whole idea behind the humanoid thing is that you create a physical embodiment that that has the versatility that a human body has, and then you can continuously evolve the software for it so that it can eventually do anything. Really, in a lot of ways, it's it's a way to write like, you know, with L L M's, people find the limits of of what, right, the hallucinations, the unreliability, all those problems. This is a way of sort of repackaging the dream of universal capability, but like in this physical form.

• 19:19Ed Zitron?

  It's a dream, though. It's it's a dream.

• 19:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, general robotics is not a thing. Generalized robotics is is a big talking point right now. And like, robots are getting more generally capable, but like, people, again.

• 19:31Speaker 05

  That's how they're talking about it. It's like, how do you how do you get like AI driven? Innovation, like how can AI like find new solutions that we wouldn't think of without the hallucination problem and specifically using these models are like if when these models run long enough, they'll be able to improve how these like factories or shipyards function in ways that LLMs simply like can't as a just a language model.

• 19:53Ed Zitron?

  It always seems like it's just they will like it's there because I feel like we've heard this robot digital twin thing for a while. I feel like we've heard about robots. Everyone's shifting to robots now, even China, just actually it was Hong Kong, pardon me, is the Hong Kong.

• 20:09Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 20:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I know. Just, yeah, I'm gonna get killed by someone. No, they just delayed a robot IPOing over there because there's a bubble growing. This shit hasn't even launched and they're like, yeah, mate, we're already a bubble. We speed ran this one, motherfucker. I just think I I saw the LG robot and they weren't, they didn't have the demo ready and it they showed this video of this woman being like, hey, robot, how are you doing? He goes, I'm great. You should work out. And it was just, and it was like, thank you. Thank you, Globo or whatever it was called. I do want my robot to make me a bath. No, it was funny. It was like, it walked over with like two pound dumbbells and it was like, yeah, you should do. Have you seen these lately? Yeah, it was close. And she was like, oh, if I didn't have you, I'd just be laying around all day.

• 20:54Speaker 05

  Should I order more Lay's potato chips for you?

• 20:56Ed Zitron?

  You, oh, hog, you look, you sweaty hog, get up off your arse. And then it was doing the squats with her and it was like a little bit more depth. And it's just, I swear there is regulation against lying like that. And LG is a public company, but it's just, what the fuck are you doing? Like, when is this thing gonna come out? What is the plan with it? And also. It's a forward looking vision. It's, it's what we talked about yesterday. It's like, who the fuck actually needs this? If I had a robot walk up to me in my house and go, you need to lift some weights, I'd beat the ever living shit out of it. I'm not a violent person, but if like a machine decided to impose its will upon me with pathetic two pound dumbbells, I'm at five. And just,

• 21:40Ed Zitron?

  yeah, it was so strange. And I tried to talk to someone over there about it and they didn't really have any answer. And they couldn't even tell me when the demo would start. Very sad.

• 21:48Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that like the leading sort of seller of right again, Elon Musk with Optimus like the man is a South African and a racist and like he's selling the idea of slavery like like that's that's literally the vision, right? It's that it's that we create these things. The software evolves to the point where it's human. It's essentially a mechanical human and it just does everything for us and it transforms our economy and everything. And like, it's like you are just, this is, this is slavery. I wonder how much of sort of the political tides that are happening right now are are sort of are sort of tied to this.

• 22:20Ed Zitron?

  I feel like, well, with the AGI conversation, no one ever wants to talk about the fact that it is just slavery. It's like, what if we had?

• 22:26Speaker 05

  Except they're not people.

• 22:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 22:28Speaker 05

  I mean, I will, I will be like, yeah, but like they are people though.

• 22:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, no, no, but it's like, if you make a conscious being.

• 22:34Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, but it's not conscious.

• 22:35Ed Zitron?

  But if, but if they made a conscious being with AI.

• 22:37Speaker 05

  Eventually.

• 22:38Ed Zitron?

  Eventually, they can't do it like, but I'm saying, but if you ever mention this to AGI people, they get really upset. It's like, it's not slavery. I'm like, you trapped a conscious being and bent it to your will. What do you, what would you call that? And they're like, computer. And but with robots, I just think that they're just throwing shit at the wall. They're just like, I guess. Because the actual robot you'd want is something that can handle anything, which is an impossible idea. And also I will train it to be articulate and competent like a human. Have you met more than one person? Because people vary in their abilities to do stuff. Humanoid, the humanoid form is also not particularly efficient for the every task.

• 23:13Speaker 06

  No, and like creating a human, I mean, like the engineering of a human hand, which is what we get a lot of our versatility from is like absolutely insane.

• 23:20Ed Zitron?

  But I mean, I, I have a coordination disability, dyspraxia. And it's like, yeah, I don't know. If you're doing a bunch of training data, which they are like, oh, that's how we're going to do it. Training data. Great. Are you going to make, what's a perfect human? Are you going to get like eugenics level data? Like what the fuck, how do you get perfect data? Are you going to get very data? What is good data? And no one ever asks these questions at the panels and no one ever gives an answer anyway.

• 23:43Speaker 06

  I think I think the way to think about like the consumer market for like the the attempt to develop a consumer market for humanoid but other other robots in general is like slop.

• 23:52Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 23:53Speaker 06

  Because like it the whole thing with right it's it's really hard to sell a robot to a car company like I went to Toyota and I went to the place where they test all of their robotics is a few years ago now. Um, but like they're like, yeah, we buy every time a company comes out with a new robot, whatever, almost any kind like we test the shit out of it.

• 24:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:10Speaker 06

  And the thing is, is that they they and I'm like, so like, how many robots do you adopt? They're like, well, not that many, really. I said, why? And they're like, well, once you start a car factory operating, if something breaks down, one piece breaks down, like the whole thing just stops. And all of a sudden, you're burning like millions of dollars a second. Um, and and then you have to fly someone from the other side of the world. So like robustness to to get value out of automation, it has to be really, really robust. And, you know, that's why it's really hard to sell this stuff to to companies is because they don't want to become dependent on something that's just going to break down and then they can't operate for like days. With a consumer, you can sell them slop because it's part of it is the spectacle, the prestige. I have I'm an early adopter. I have the new tech thing. The fact that it's janky and it doesn't work, this is exactly what's happening with Tesla Autopilot.

• 24:54Speaker 06

  It's something that looks self-driving and has this prestige, but it doesn't actually deliver the robustness and safety that that, you know, you need to like take a nap in the backseat.

• 25:02Speaker 05

  This is the real this is the real tension of the consumer electronics showcase.

• 25:06Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 25:06Speaker 05

  Because you have half of it trying to be directed, you know, for for industries, right? A lot of these a lot of like, you know, AI automation stuff is like for for manufacturing. But it's it's the other side is the consumer electronics part where they're selling kind of kind of janky things that don't work to a little bit like gullible people or people who want to believe in this like Jetson's vision.

• 25:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 05

  And you have both these things kind of working in tandem. And when they rub up against each other, it creates these like these like cognitive frictions.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, one one thing that's also been interesting this year and last is seeing the stuff that would not be able to snap, uh, pass the sniff test for uh, business to business or even regulatory oversight that is sold to consumers with almost, you know, like, uh, we're getting up to the edge of what might be a Theranos in the sense that they're saying, okay, with digital information, we can approach the limits of what's physically impossible and deliver that to you with a little bit of analytics, with a little bit of artificial intelligence instead of relying on. Really sophisticated technology that uh or biomedical tech that we just don't have.

• 26:08Ed Zitron?

  I just think it's funny though, because if the robots did what they said it they did, it'd be kinda cool. I'd love a robot butler. I think I think we can all agree. I just want a robot that brings me a diet coke and be honest, but like.

• 26:19Speaker 05

  You could you could you could have a regular butler.

• 26:22Ed Zitron?

  I don't wanna like like that's the thing. We get into the AGI conversation. I just wanna I just wanna wrote but even then it's like.

• 26:29Speaker 04

  Age old thing, you know, even in Aristotle.

• 26:31Speaker 05

  Have you seen Black Butler?

• 26:33Ed Zitron?

  What's that? Oh, no, I have actually seen Black Butler, the anime.

• 26:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:36Ed Zitron?

  I would love, you know, like a butler that would kill people for beat people up for me. That'd be fucking sick.

• 26:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:41Ed Zitron?

  And it's best you didn't expect me to have seen Black Butler.

• 26:43Speaker 05

  No, I I figured.

• 26:44Ed Zitron?

  We baby. Um, but this is the thing as well. It's like, even though I'm like joking around, oh, that'd be fun. It's like, not really. I can get I can get off my ass and grab a diet.

• 26:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:53Ed Zitron?

  Oh, no, no, I've got a vacuum. It'll take me fucking five minutes. It's not that bad.

• 26:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's something I was seeing on the floor. It felt like a lot of use cases that people were offering for agents were actually.

• 27:03Ed Zitron?

  Oh, hell.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  You know, it was just like convenience via a chat bot interface. You know, I would talk to people. They'd be like, this is AI agentic cooking. And it's like, what's the what's the agentic part of it?

• 27:14Ed Zitron?

  Not you, but them.

• 27:15Speaker 04

  I know. That's what I said. You know, I was like, what's the agentic part? And they're like, oh, well, like it had, you know, there's a camera inside and it can see what food you have there. And then you have a list of recipes. I'm like, that's not an agent, but word, okay. Uh, you know, we have other agents that are saying we do, you know, agentic uh health analysis. And it's like, what's the agent part? Well, it's like, well, you can talk to it about different things. What's like, oh, that's not.

• 27:35Ed Zitron?

  It's a chat bot.

• 27:35Speaker 05

  I will I will not be happy until there's an AI in my Vitamix that tells me how to make this smoothie, what this smoothie is gonna do to my body.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:42Speaker 05

  Um, and what ingredients I need to get from the store.

• 27:44Ed Zitron?

  I need a robot to tell me I'm fat.

• 27:46Speaker 04

  I saw.

• 27:46Ed Zitron?

  Cause my mind doesn't do that already.

• 27:48Speaker 04

  So one of my mortal enemies, well, a recent mortal enemies, it's, you know, the makers of the OmniPod and.

• 27:54Ed Zitron?

  What's the OmniPod?

• 27:55Speaker 04

  Uh, it's a it's for a it's a diabetes piece of wearable tech that allows you to. You know, pump, uh, yeah, insulin and, um, they were, you know, they didn't, they didn't say, hey, we, you know, we got AI in here. They were just there to advertise themselves.

• 28:09Ed Zitron?

  Right, right.

• 28:10Speaker 04

  But, you know, one reason I hate them, but I also think of them in contrast with everyone else is, is, you know, my partner's diabetic and I see up close how often the device fails every single fucking day.

• 28:23Ed Zitron?

  And that feels like a thing that we know about and should be able to solve.

• 28:27Speaker 04

  But it's also like, I, as far as I can tell, they are never going up and saying, with AI, we can make it a little bit better.

• 28:32Ed Zitron?

  That's nice.

• 28:33Speaker 04

  You know, but with every single other, you know, not, not to be a fucking insulin, uh, show, but, you know, with almost every single piece of biomedical tech I saw to this year so far and last year, everyone was saying, well, yeah, you know, like there are a lot of inaccuracies, there are a lot of physi- physiological limitations. There's some physical limits, there's some chemical limits, but with artificial intelligence and with data, enough data collection, we can transcend those.

• 28:56Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing, how much data? How much data? Next time, like, if you are listening to this and you're at CES or any of you three, and next time someone says with enough data, ask them how much and ask them to get specific because they don't have a fucking answer. And the answer is they also don't know what data they need.

• 29:12Speaker 06

  Well, so, and, and the amount of data that you have is only part of it. The other part is constraining the problem space. And we know that's from the autonomous vehicle space, right? Like where Tesla says, well, this is going to work everywhere and we have all this data from all these cars and so it's going to work. And people buy it, it's a narrative that makes intuitive sense to a lot of people.

• 29:26Ed Zitron?

  Makes sense to a person, even though it's not true.

• 29:28Speaker 06

  But it, it really isn't, whereas, you know, at Zooks, they're now, you know, last year I got a ride on the strip and, and now they're like all over the place. And they do, they're able to do that because they constrain the operating space. And, and especially with driving where it's like safety critical, like you have to be able to validate that safety to like a high degree. And if it's just operating everywhere, how do you do that? Like you can only do it by constraining the level of, of complexity by constraining the, the problem space. And so, and so like for all of these AI things, the question to ask is like, right? Like i- if someone is saying like, we're just going to solve all the problems, you're going to solve it none, right? And, and for me, like the test of, of any AI product is like, how focused are you?

• 30:05Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing, you can't really, you can't solve every problem with every, with the Nvidia thing yesterday, the panel, where it goes like one, one robot for all things.

• 30:13Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah, like we were talking about with these generalized robotics.

• 30:15Ed Zitron?

  You can't generalize anything, unless of course you're listening to the following advertisement. This will solve every single problem you have ever faced. Don't be mad at me if it doesn't, be mad at them.

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• 31:05Ed Zitron?

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• 31:48Ed Zitron?

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• 32:05Speaker 07

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• 32:37Speaker 08

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

• 32:51Speaker 09

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

• 33:02Speaker 08

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

• 33:08Speaker 10

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

• 33:13Speaker 08

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

• 33:37Ed Zitron?

  All right, we're back. We've got, of course, the great Edward Onguoso Jr. of the Take Bubble Newsletter.

• 33:43Speaker 04

  Hello, folks.

• 33:44Ed Zitron?

  Ed Niedermeyer of the Autonocast. Hello. And Gare Davis, if it could happen here. Now, here's the thing. I was also seeing some terrifying AI children's products.

• 33:54Speaker 05

  Oh, I love those. Yeah, I love those.

• 33:56Ed Zitron?

  There was one, I'm just gonna pull this up, because there was one that just all I could think of was kicking. You know, AI me land.

• 34:03Speaker 05

  What, what, what, you should put AI and child into your search bar right now.

• 34:08Ed Zitron?

  I'm not, no, I'm not, I don't use X.

• 34:11Speaker 05

  For some, for some, for some great news stories.

• 34:13Ed Zitron?

  AI plus love, A live, AI me can listen, speak and think powered by advanced AI. It senses your voice and presence reacts to emotion and learns through real interaction. Over time, sometime, something begins to grow inside AM. AI me, tiny feelings, gentle awareness and thoughts shaped by the world shares with you. Until AI me starts to feel alive, brackets, lean in and listen to AI me's inner voice. I could not get close enough to one of them, but I would love it if they just sit and go, I'll fucking kill you. Just like mutt, muttering cereal.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  Reinventing Chucky.

• 34:43Ed Zitron?

  I will kill them all. And I watched the demo of this woman and they were doing, they were really like the, the hogs watching me like, ooh. As the woman just did this demo that was so, it's like, wow, how did you remember that? That happened so long ago. And it's just, again, thought I saw that last year, pretty sure I did.

• 35:02Speaker 05

  We saw a lot of this stuff last year.

• 35:03Ed Zitron?

  And it's just this idea of handing a child an L M is insane as a parent. And also there was the one we talked about yesterday where it was like, it's like saying that Taiwan isn't part of China. It gets upset at you. It's just.

• 35:17Speaker 05

  B D S M tips.

• 35:17Ed Zitron?

  It's so fucking, yeah, exactly. It's like teaching your child poisons. It's just, and they keep saying these things like, I will grow over time. They won't.

• 35:27Speaker 05

  Especially if the company's defunct in like two years.

• 35:30Ed Zitron?

  When they run out of money in a month.

• 35:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:32Ed Zitron?

  Cause they spent it all on the booth.

• 35:33Speaker 04

  What's the rationale for not letting your kid just talk to themselves at their little figurine? I'm curious like how they offer.

• 35:42Ed Zitron?

  I'm curious about shareholder value.

• 35:45Speaker 05

  This is the, this is the, this, that's the kind of upsetting to me though, because like in, in, in the conversation about how AI is getting into all these wearables, like these people really want AI basically in every action figure, right? They want, they want like a, a gentic AI in every single toy so that like, it becomes like a normal thing. Like you're not, you're not just going to get like a, a bare piece of plastic ever again.

• 36:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, no. It's so they can subscribe you.

• 36:08Speaker 04

  Would have lost my mind if my Yu-Gi-Oh cards talked to me. Are you kidding me?

• 36:11Ed Zitron?

  Thing though, it's like, it's devices made for people that don't use stuff like, here's the thing, I use my Oura ring, I have an Apple watch, I've got a fucking eight sleep bed. And I've got like things that measure my sleep. I have years of sleep data and I cannot tell you anything. Just more data, Ed. No, but it's. Just one more data. Just one more data, bro, I swear. One more data. One more data. It's all I need.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  Please, bro.

• 36:35Ed Zitron?

  But that's the thing. It's like, all of this time, they're like, well, when we get all this data, we'll be able to do this. When, motherfucker, I have the data now. Can you not tell me when my best sleep times are? Can you not tell me how, what I could do differently? Like, I'm, I'm not sure what to do with this information. And then like, what with the power of AI, you could do something. I'm like, what is it? Uh, no, we're not there yet. Um, the apparently Oura is here showing something off and it's like.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  And Luna.

• 37:04Ed Zitron?

  And Luna, it's just like, and all these rings, it's what could you do with them? We're having Victoria Song on later. And she put it where it's like, yeah, if you use an L L M connected to it, you can sometimes get a useful out. Just fucking, just stop, stop, stop pretending.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  I asked them, I was like, what is the difference? Are there a few rings I want to stop by? And I was like, what is the difference between me collecting all this data myself with a bunch of janky things and I'm putting it into some.

• 37:26Ed Zitron?

  It's literally.

• 37:27Speaker 04

  And then asking a chatbot about it versus whatever you guys are doing. And they're like, well, you know, like, we have other people's data that we are looking.

• 37:38Speaker 04

  I don't know if that's the answer you should have told me.

• 37:41Ed Zitron?

  But it's also like, human bodies are varied things. Certain things work for different people. I imagine that there should be trends within workout data that could, nothing, nothing, nothing. I would love it if they could tell me what would be the most effective workout, what would be the best, but like. But see, this is why you make products for children is they don't ask questions like this.

• 38:01Speaker 04

  They ask, why isn't it working?

• 38:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, they're like, what, what, what? Your data is not providing enough actionable insights. Is Taiwan part of China?

• 38:09Speaker 04

  Kid says that, your data does not work for me, father.

• 38:14Speaker 04

  Fix it. Father, the analytics.

• 38:16Ed Zitron?

  Father, father, my analytics. Papa, Papa, please can I have some more?

• 38:20Speaker 04

  I do not have enough actionable insights before I go to bed.

• 38:24Ed Zitron?

  It just feels like, I really think they're just trying to work out ways to give us subscriptions to everything.

• 38:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:29Ed Zitron?

  But I, I can't play just Pokemon regularly. I got subscribed to Pokemon Plus.

• 38:33Speaker 04

  I mean, oh my God, I forgot with the AI agentic, um, kitchen or oven, one thing they, they added, it's not just an oven. You can't actually get it to just cook the food. You have to have a delivery subscription. Are you, are you serious?

• 38:48Speaker 06

  A Juicero, a Juicero oven? Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

• 38:52Ed Zitron?

  Is that Suvi? That's one of those, I, during, during COVID, I had Tavala.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  No.

• 38:58Ed Zitron?

  I really shouldn't say that.

• 38:59Speaker 04

  It's called brisket.

• 39:00Ed Zitron?

  Fuck off. Also terrible, terrible SEO.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:05Ed Zitron?

  I'm just gonna look up this company. Oh, 150,000 articles.

• 39:10Speaker 04

  Actually, I do want a brisket.

• 39:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that sounds fucking good. I bet that's one thing you can't cook it in.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  But then I also asked them, who are your delivery partners? They said, oh, we're not there yet. Are you, are you serious? Are you? That was so sick. I said, okay, weird.

• 39:25Ed Zitron?

  Funny, we had a tech media to go on. It's just like, I, I do wonder why there is no legal recourse with people going to this. Like if just like you get lied to for several days.

• 39:36Speaker 04

  The market is the legal recourse. You don't go to market if you don't have it. So true. So true.

• 39:42Ed Zitron?

  I also think we need less electronics and things as well. I still, I know Matt Binder likes the Lego brick and I can see it's fine. But it's like, I don't need a fucking market trip in a Lego brick.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:51Ed Zitron?

  I know if it needs to go, you can just do that with your mouth.

• 39:54Speaker 04

  I don't want my extra features to talk to me. Part of the fun as a, as a kid was talking for them. Absolutely. You know? We're gonna spoil the next generation of voice actors. It's really devastating.

• 40:04Ed Zitron?

  Also, we're gonna turn to like, I'm like wishy washy when it comes to how bad scream time is, but you know what? I actually think it is bad making every single toy in some individualized autonomous AI, even though that's complete bullshit, some LLM driven bullshit. And like, they make the noises for you because it's like, one of the joys of being a child was like, having an imagination.

• 40:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, 100%.

• 40:26Ed Zitron?

  And it's like, I don't know what, like, they want to take that away so they can put a subscription into it. But it gets back to the thing we're saying yesterday as well, where it's like, these are just products made by people that don't interact with anyone. It's like, oh, one of my biggest problems. Oh, fuck, my kid keeps wanting to talk to me.

• 40:40Speaker 06

  I was gonna say, what better way to tell your kid that you hate them than giving them a chatbot?

• 40:45Speaker 05

  I mean, it just makes sense because like, they're selling this to people who are like, upper middle class, upper class. They don't have time to spend with their kids. Like, that's what these products are targeting, is, you know, both parents are working, they probably have some kind of like, live-in nanny, that kid's probably relatively isolated. Like, that's what these products are really for. It's for these, like, relatively wealthy parents to buy for their kids because they don't spend time with their kids. Like, that's like, because people who are like, working class aren't buying these things.

• 41:14Ed Zitron?

  They can't afford them because they're insanely expensive.

• 41:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 41:17Speaker 06

  One of the most unexpected use cases for autonomous vehicles actually now is people putting their kids in Waymos.

• 41:22Ed Zitron?

  No!

• 41:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, and like, this is, this is a real thing.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  Uber has a whole thing for this. Uber and Lyft now, right?

• 41:28Speaker 06

  Oh, do they?

• 41:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, they have advertising for now, you can just send your kid off and they're safe. Your kid will be safe. Which they had to massively mark on the safety.

• 41:36Speaker 05

  This, this makes...

• 41:37Speaker 04

  Adult passengers.

• 41:38Speaker 05

  Oh my goodness. No, this, we need, we need, we need like a new QAnon to shut this thing down.

• 41:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know, I know.

• 41:44Speaker 05

  Like, way far, like, way far trafficking children in Waymos.

• 41:47Ed Zitron?

  The right wing is just like, now we need to attach...

• 41:52Speaker 06

  Take them straight to the pizza house.

• 41:54Speaker 05

  They're sending these kids in Waymos tomorrow, I'll go...

• 41:58Ed Zitron?

  Take it to Comet Pizza. Like, yeah, it's, so, wait, wait, okay, completely off CES for a second. So you put your child in the autonomous vehicle, at which point your child is alone in a, in a car.

• 42:10Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 42:11Ed Zitron?

  And it drives around.

• 42:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:13Ed Zitron?

  What if something goes wrong?

• 42:14Speaker 06

  That's a great, great question. This is for, you know, like,

• 42:17Speaker 05

  Ed, aren't you a journalist? You should, you should be asking these questions.

• 42:20Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I, I am, I'm on the podcast.

• 42:23Speaker 06

  I mean, I think, I think the magic of, of like CES and, and stuff is that like, technology does make people turn their brains off. Like, people are so conditioned to believe that a machine is somehow better than them. We're so surrounded by machine, like, you know, the, um, and, and I think this is like a perfect example, right? Like, like, why pay someone who is like trained to take care of your child when like a robot will be just as fine?

• 42:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:47Speaker 06

  You know?

• 42:48Ed Zitron?

  I, I still think we need to, my big socialist thing is I think we need to create like a state funded nanny system and like for like working families and just make it the best paid thing.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  Listen, you know, I agree. Reed, Reed Roberta, like an incredible. Economy, if you guys, that's a good one on this.

• 43:03Speaker 05

  Hopefully they'll do that in New York. Um, but like you're, you, you see, you see parts of the tech industry sees that kind of want, but they want to fill it with, with like agentic childcare or whatever, right?

• 43:15Ed Zitron?

  Finally.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  I mean, that's also the thing with the age tech, right? I mean, it's like, okay, so look, we have a large scale problem in our society where a lot of people are aging. They don't have, uh, support infrastructure. A lot of ways we can handle this. How are we going to handle it? Well, since we don't really do technological innovation, we're gonna do, uh, the lowest bottom denominator thing, which is, you know, we let the private financiers drive the development of what the care infrastructure is gonna be.

• 43:40Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 43:41Speaker 04

  And a lot of that just means bullshit so that they can scale up to then get into some other business model, right? Uh, so it's just not, it's just, it's like, same with the childcare, same with the elderly care. All of this shit sucks and it's also not even seen as the end point. It's like a stepping stone so that they can get into some real business.

• 43:58Ed Zitron?

  The thing is, I don't think that there's as much intention behind it, is my thing. I don't think, I don't think there's a master plan. I just think they're like, fuck, what are my biggest problem? My old fucking dad keeps calling me. My, my kid, Claude, won't stop asking me for things. My home is sometimes dirty between the eight cleaners. What do I do? What would a ro- robot, how do, what do people deal with in regular life? Dirt?

• 44:24Speaker 06

  And by the way, I mean, Japan has been, you know, because of of their demographic situation, the aging population, they've been and and, you know, technological prowess, they've been developing robots for for seniors and and and various kinds of, you know, aging assistance. And the reality is, is that, like, despite huge investment and huge support from the government and like everything that they could possibly want, the results are not like that impressive, basically.

• 44:45Ed Zitron?

  Because ultimately, you know what, my my poor grandmother, when she passed, like, ten or eleven years ago, ninety four year old granny, house Marion, um, she liked being called on the telephone.

• 44:56Speaker 05

  The people, yeah.

• 44:57Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's like someone's my dad going and visiting her.

• 45:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:00Ed Zitron?

  Like, it's like, what's gonna help your kid talking to them and asking questions? Or if they're curious about something, you can use Google, but you can talk to them about it. And it, yeah.

• 45:12Speaker 06

  There's another piece to, sorry, in a past life, I was actually a caregiver for development to disabled people. Um, you know, it's one of those jobs where, like, there's a lot of time where you just sort of sit there.

• 45:21Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 45:21Speaker 06

  You know, and there's just like nothing happening. And then there will be, you know, I I mean, like, I had a client who would, you know, smear feces every once in a while.

• 45:29Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 45:29Speaker 06

  And then you had, and then, and that was when you were really, you know, earning earning the pay. The the point I'm getting at is that, um, you know, the majority of work, of of the value of the work that people do, especially in service type jobs like that, is in what you would call an edge case.

• 45:44Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 45:45Speaker 06

  You know, and and again, like, following the autonomous vehicle space has been really useful for understanding this stuff where ninety percent of driving is just like boring and just sit there and anyone could do it. And what what makes someone a good driver is how you deal with it when shit goes sideways, right?

• 45:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 45:59Speaker 06

  Um, which is very rare and very sudden and and very challenging to to to negotiate. It's the same thing with a lot of consumer, uh, customer service jobs and then other kinds of just like service caregiving type jobs. The value is created in when when things start to break down, and that's when automation doesn't work. And and and no matter like no amount of like large, large models is going to change that because ultimately like as soon as you see something out of, out of distribution, right, out of your training set, I, you know, it's, it's useless.

• 46:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 46:28Speaker 06

  And and that, again, that's where caregivers like make, earn their money, right?

• 46:32Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's, it's just deeply sad as well because there are very straightforward problems that people have. It's just you can't really solve them with technology. Oh, well, we have the edge cases in customer service. You want to know what increases customer service calls? The fact that products fucking suck now. The products aren't very good. They get released in alpha or beta stages. The fact that they require a subscription for certain features, or the support documents are dog shit, or the guide to put them together is dog shit. It's like the actual problems are the companies are fucking things up regularly.

• 47:03Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 47:03Ed Zitron?

  And they're like, what if we had more customers? Well, no, no, no, no, no. Actually, that would involve paying someone. What if we just had an AI, I guess, and maybe it could say a slur occasionally, but sometimes it could even answer a question.

• 47:17Speaker 06

  SoftBank had a, had a robot called Pepper.

• 47:19Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah.

• 47:20Speaker 06

  That was, are you familiar with Pepper?

• 47:21Ed Zitron?

  No, I just love SoftBank.

• 47:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, and, and you're supposed to call it, yeah, of course, anything they touch is a Yashi song.

• 47:26Ed Zitron?

  That's the golden egg.

• 47:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:27Ed Zitron?

  Come on the show, man.

• 47:29Speaker 06

  But, but Pepper was this, it was a customer service robot. And it was like, you know, sort of vaguely humanoid, but it sort of rolled around on wheels. And, and they use it in like, uh, shopping centers and stuff. Anyway, I don't remember how much money SoftBank sunk into this. I think it was a fringe company or something.

• 47:41Ed Zitron?

  Hmm.

• 47:42Speaker 06

  It didn't, it did, like, it did not work. I loved it because everyone expects the headlines of like, the robots are taking their jobs. And like, every, everywhere this Pepper robot went, it would lose its job. It was like, the headline was always like, robot fired, replaced by humans. Because, and again, it's because customer service is fundamentally about helping people, right? Like, if everything is in its right place on the shelf, you know, maybe in certainly badly like laid out in large stores, maybe someone needs a little bit of assistance finding like where the section is, where their thing is. Uh, but for the most part, like when people have a problem that they require customer service help with, like, it's because something has gone wrong. The shelf is not stocked.

• 48:17Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 48:17Speaker 06

  Like, just something is bad. And, and again, like, if it's an abnormal set of circumstances, I, the, the robot is, is almost never helpful.

• 48:25Ed Zitron?

  By definition.

• 48:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, and like, that's where, that's where the value should be created. And, and the robots can't do it.

• 48:30Speaker 05

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

• 48:37Speaker 05

  Which was

• 48:37Speaker 06

  This could go so many directions.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, good.

• 48:42Speaker 05

  Engineers are building like an AI bar and they they they program every single possibility for someone ordering drinks at at the bar. Um, ordering other things at the bar or ordering a horse at the bar. They they have everything, everything figured out for for for people to to to go to this bar. And then a customer walks in and they ask where the bathroom is and the whole model breaks.

• 49:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:03Ed Zitron?

  That's the thing though. I love the idea of also a robot bartender. No, bars are about ambiance and available Diet Cokes for me. And it's like, I like how it feels and I like there being a person there. You have like a no conversation or some conversation. Each bar is a different bartender. That's part of the joy of going to a bar. I don't need a fucking robot arm to go, here you go.

• 49:23Speaker 06

  Well, and then and then the other failure mode is right. It's like, do you see the Wall Street Journal thing where they have the vending machine with the with the LLM?

• 49:29Speaker 04

  Oh, that that yeah, that random.

• 49:32Ed Zitron?

  Everyone's sending.

• 49:32Speaker 05

  I haven't I haven't seen this.

• 49:33Ed Zitron?

  I love Joanna Stern. I think she did a good job. But the whole thing is like, why are we not just like, straight up saying this is broken dog shit? Why do we have to couch everything with, but it might work? And no, no.

• 49:46Speaker 06

  The idea is right. You put a you put a sort of agentic, yeah, Claude sort of on the, you know.

• 49:50Ed Zitron?

  All right, we've got to stop saying agentic. It's Nell. I'm sorry.

• 49:54Speaker 06

  But but right then, like, oh, this will just magically cover all the edge cases. Well, it sort of did, but like, people were able to get it to like buy a PS5.

• 50:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, or to like make everything free.

• 50:03Speaker 06

  It basically just like burned all this money because people were able to just say like, just get me this thing.

• 50:06Ed Zitron?

  I would have literally just stood by it all day. I would have I would have had that thing.

• 50:11Speaker 05

  This is a physical vending machine.

• 50:12Ed Zitron?

  Yes, yes.

• 50:13Speaker 04

  With with the software on. I mean, I remember what one of the parts.

• 50:15Speaker 05

  They already they already perfected vending machine.

• 50:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:18Speaker 04

  What if they didn't? What if they didn't?

• 50:21Speaker 05

  Just just go to Tokyo. It's perfect.

• 50:23Ed Zitron?

  But just go to go to like a gas station sometime.

• 50:26Speaker 04

  What was the rationale actually for putting AI on this?

• 50:30Ed Zitron?

  What if we invented a machine that could vend things? Like, it's just like, what if you could service things using like coins and cash? Again?

• 50:37Speaker 04

  You know, I would have kind of expected to do like surveillance pricing. Like, what if we were able to make something?

• 50:42Ed Zitron?

  Well, like.

• 50:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, it would measure your score a little bit and then figure out how much you would be willing to pay.

• 50:46Speaker 06

  But you don't need an LLM for that. Like, it's the search for like, surely there must be some. And it's like, sure.

• 50:53Ed Zitron?

  And you know.

• 50:54Speaker 05

  I mean, it's part of this, like, we're trying to, like, ground quote unquote AI into these, like, physical things now, now that it's not just hype.

• 51:00Speaker 06

  Right.

• 51:00Speaker 05

  Um, and yeah, you can see stuff like this for like, they're, they're trying, but it's like, yeah, come on.

• 51:05Speaker 06

  And it's a convenient bandy to slap on something, right? You can sort of develop a robot to do certain things and, and, and it's like, well, okay. Well, as soon as we get out of, you know, out of our training set, we'll just have an LLM just sort of swoop in and, and sort of magically solve it. And the reality is, is that either it can't often, or, or it solves it in ways that create, like, other totally unexpected problems.

• 51:23Ed Zitron?

  I just like the idea of them being like, what if we did, oh, yeah, it doesn't work. Just like, obviously broken, doesn't work. And this is the second time Anthropic's done this. They did a store and the way they wrote it was like, I'm doing air quotes, because it was like, we had it run a store. Could it work? No. It made up meetings. It made up this, it did that. And it was just like, yeah, guess this doesn't work, but if it did, we have a vending machine.

• 51:45Speaker 04

  There are also people who like, will use, they take all the models, they pay for the premium matches, uh, uses of them and they let them loose on the stock market. And they're like, oh, this is great. Let's see who does best. They all eat shit.

• 51:56Ed Zitron?

  Night capital. We already had that with Knight Capital in 2012, I think it was.

• 52:00Speaker 06

  They had a, I mean, algorithmic trading has been a thing for a while. I haven't, I have not heard about the LLM trading.

• 52:05Speaker 04

  Oh, I'll send you guys this.

• 52:06Speaker 06

  That's terrifying.

• 52:08Ed Zitron?

  I love that idea.

• 52:09Speaker 04

  It does not work.

• 52:10Ed Zitron?

  No. Well, it's, it's because most stock advice online is bullshit. In fact, almost all stock advice is bullshit, because if you actually knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't share that.

• 52:20Speaker 05

  You would not be talking about it.

• 52:21Ed Zitron?

  You would just trade.

• 52:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's just, it's really good that they're working on ways to, to do vending machines. Jesus fucking.

• 52:28Speaker 04

  Do you guys feel over the past two or even three years that you're also seeing a lot of times, there's a product that actually has maybe some interesting improvement in how it functions and, and it's, and, and maybe in how a consumer can use it, but they just feel, I cannot actually get people interest in this unless I say there's AI and grafted onto this. I, I'm, I've been trying to understand, because I feel like I keep seeing products where it's like, I don't actually understand what the AI here is. I talked to you, you don't really seem to have a.

• 52:58Ed Zitron?

  Televisions.

• 52:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:59Ed Zitron?

  TVs, no TVs, that's my answer.

• 53:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, the, the, the smart TV thing.

• 53:04Ed Zitron?

  Every, I've been walking around, it's like, oh, does it help with the picture? No, no, no. If you ask it what, what the capital of Washington state is, it can sometimes answer. It's like, great. Um, anything else, like, could it control the TV's function? Oh, God, no. It can't turn the volume up. And even if it could, it would be like, volume up. Volume is not, it's.

• 53:23Speaker 05

  Honestly, I think that the thing for me, actually, to circle back to where we started, maybe the smart glasses.

• 53:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 53:29Speaker 05

  Smart glasses were kind of, kind of the same like three, four years ago. And they're now trying to keep selling them by framing them as, you know, AI powered smart glasses when the practical functionality is almost identical. And you have the, you had that one like New York startup. It was like that cheating smart glasses.

• 53:48Ed Zitron?

  Oh, clearly.

• 53:49Speaker 05

  Clearly, yeah, right? So like they're trying to find these, these ways to like make smart glasses to like find, find, find ways to convince people to actually buy these things.

• 53:59Ed Zitron?

  It's just like, what, what freak would use them?

• 54:02Speaker 05

  And that's the problem. The only, the only thing that's actually think got people to buy the smart glasses is the covert recording. That's the only thing that's actually gotten people to like buy and wear these things is that you can secretly record people. And that's that, more than the AI thing is actually been the thing that sold these glasses.

• 54:21Speaker 06

  I wonder if there's gonna be more of, I mean, like, I'm old enough to remember the glass backlash. Like, how, how is that not?

• 54:26Speaker 04

  I mean, I've been seeing in New York, people break them.

• 54:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, okay.

• 54:30Ed Zitron?

  There was this amazing video of someone on the subway and he's got just like exactly the kind of white guy. He's being like, what? No, you're gonna fucking do so? You're gonna do this? And the woman is just staring, dead eyed at the camera. Just kind of like, come over here, see what happens.

• 54:44Speaker 04

  Still hasn't gotten in trouble.

• 54:45Ed Zitron?

  They, they should, they should get the key to the city. The Mandani caliphate should elevate them.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, we're looking into it.

• 54:53Ed Zitron?

  No, it's, I just also like, who is walking around? I was saying this yesterday, who's walking around being like, what the fuck is going on? What the fuck? What is that? It's curtain. Who is sitting around being like, what kind of tree?

• 55:05Speaker 05

  That would be a great, that would be a great Tim Robinson character.

• 55:10Ed Zitron?

  That is just.

• 55:11Speaker 05

  What the fuck is going on?

• 55:13Speaker 04

  Friend of the show, Casey Newton, once I think promoted something about how it was like this AI thing you could talk about and ask questions as you were on a drive about, like maybe you're driving over a bridge and you're asking like, okay, like, how old is the bridge? Wow, why was it made? And so I was like, well, you also can just like. Ask yourself those questions or look it up or like

• 55:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, or you could use your phone.

• 55:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, use your phone.

• 55:35Speaker 05

  It's taking away the the American, the American right to be driving while scrolling on your phone.

• 55:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:42Speaker 05

  Not fair.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, which is also funny because it's like if they sold it as like a safety thing, I feel like it would be have better standing than actually, haven't you ever just want looked at something and wondered what's going on there?

• 55:53Speaker 05

  How are they not marketing it as like a safety thing for like for like how like like a you know, like hands free enabled like like search while driving?

• 56:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, you want to shitpost while you're driving.

• 56:02Speaker 05

  It has to. Yeah, they have to do that.

• 56:04Ed Zitron?

  I also just don't walk around thinking things like that. Like I don't often walk around and be like, what? Maybe if I'm like in a botanical garden.

• 56:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 56:12Ed Zitron?

  I'll be like, what kind of flower is that? But

• 56:14Speaker 05

  I mean, I I do. I just I just I just write down.

• 56:16Speaker 04

  Wikipedia all day.

• 56:17Speaker 05

  I just write down notes.

• 56:18Ed Zitron?

  No, but I mean, when I'm when I'm walking around.

• 56:21Speaker 05

  No, I I do. I just would either remember to look it up later or like or to take down notes to that because like so I can like enjoy the thing in person when I'm there. And then if I want to

• 56:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't want a disembodied voice being like

• 56:32Speaker 05

  If I want to learn about it, I can get like a coffee somewhere and like look it up. And that's that's like a separate a separate experience.

• 56:37Speaker 04

  It's just what And it's a good one, too. It's also a good. I think like the thing I'm always surprised by is they're always trying to paint any non AI mediated experience as a bad, inefficient, inferior experience. And then actually, what you really want, what you don't really know you want is you want to have an interlocutor that is not real.

• 56:56Speaker 05

  This reminds me of the very first product that I I that was mentioned during the the CTA keynote.

• 57:03Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 57:03Speaker 05

  And this is something that I have not found on the show floor yet. And I I have to, I have to look it up. I have to. I have to find it and talk to these people.

• 57:10Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:11Speaker 05

  It is. You're you're you're lovely, Seth.

• 57:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:14Speaker 05

  It is an AI holographic windshield display for your car.

• 57:19Ed Zitron?

  Wait, wait, wait.

• 57:22Speaker 04

  Let's talk about it.

• 57:23Ed Zitron?

  No, I'm actually not going to be as cynical as you expect here because this is a fairly standard thing like BMW has their like, like heads up, heads up display, which is kind of useful. Like has the.

• 57:33Speaker 05

  It's, it's, it's, it's digital interface on, on the windshield. So.

• 57:38Ed Zitron?

  They've kind of already got those.

• 57:39Speaker 05

  On, on the windshield. So.

• 57:41Ed Zitron?

  But the whole thing.

• 57:42Speaker 05

  All across the whole thing.

• 57:43Ed Zitron?

  Oh, my God.

• 57:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so you have, you have like, what you have, like, you know, weather, you have maps, you have all, all these random things. If, if you could, you could pair it with some kind of smart glasses thing. You can search and you can see results there.

• 57:55Ed Zitron?

  My God.

• 57:55Speaker 05

  And so I, I need to actually find the company. I need to find the company's like location and like ask them about it and like talk about like the, you know, the obvious like safety problems of like, if something goes wrong and the screen gets blocked. Um, but, but yeah, it's, it's.

• 58:07Ed Zitron?

  It's so funny.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  They're, they're led by the car crash industry.

• 58:11Speaker 05

  Yeah. Like you said, like there is, there is versions of this thing, which, which kind of work. I think keeping it away from the windshield, probably a good idea. Keep, keep the display on like the dashboard.

• 58:20Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 58:20Speaker 05

  But having it directly on like, on like the borders and emerging onto the center of the entire.

• 58:26Ed Zitron?

  Fuck yeah. And above your eye level. So you take your eyes off the road.

• 58:30Speaker 05

  And you have, you have to like look to the corner and specifically on, on the, on the, we, we, there was like one picture of it during the keynote and they have information like all across the board. So yeah, your eyes are going to be darting to the other side to like the, the corner of the road to read some kind of like pop up thing on the screen.

• 58:44Ed Zitron?

  I mean, I love being on my phone. I want to be, I love the computer so much. I have so many screens, but I don't know. When I'm driving, I quite enjoy not having that. I enjoy, I can listen to a podcast, drive back from the moment with a girlfriend, listen to last podcast on the left. The other day, that was lovely. Learned all about Casey Anthony. Horrible. Truly awful stuff. Didn't get that in England, but it's like that. And like the time when I was just facing forward and listening and spending some quality time with someone I love. And like when I'm driving on my own, I get a chance to listen to podcasts or listen to music. I don't want to bleep. I don't, I, what's the way I like I can look out the window?

• 59:15Speaker 04

  Imagine.

• 59:16Ed Zitron?

  I sound like fucking Dennis Leary.

• 59:18Speaker 04

  You're driving upstate.

• 59:19Ed Zitron?

  I just want to know. I just want a regular phone.

• 59:21Speaker 04

  It's a beautiful road upstate and you get, and you get an intrusive thought. What year did Genghis Khan?

• 59:28Speaker 04

  And you ask it and you and the screen lights up like someone threw a flashbang inside because every surface gets illuminated with with information.

• 59:36Ed Zitron?

  Genghis Khan was born in nineteen eighty two.

• 59:39Speaker 04

  In twelve fifty eight.

• 59:41Speaker 06

  For ten years, though, like the auto industry has been coming to CES and and trying to do what I think like all of these AI companies are trying to do, which is ultimately either replace like Google or really like your phone as like the portal to the digital realm.

• 59:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:55Speaker 06

  And there was and and like to this to this day, there's still this like battle inside these OEMs of like of of there's factions who believe like that cars should be cars. And I think they're actually sort of you're seeing sort of like physical buttons come back.

• 1:00:07Ed Zitron?

  Which I love.

• 1:00:07Speaker 06

  That pendulum is swinging back. And I I think that's because the reality is is that your phone is still the best way to do all this stuff.

• 1:00:15Ed Zitron?

  And but they're working on making that worse. I will say it was exciting when I was at the Renaissance Hotel. I saw Faraday Future.

• 1:00:20Speaker 06

  Oh, they're still here.

• 1:00:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, they've got like these weird like dad wagons now.

• 1:00:24Speaker 04

  Tell me about what Faraday Future.

• 1:00:26Speaker 06

  So that's a long, long and sordid story.

• 1:00:30Ed Zitron?

  Tell me if I'm wrong. Faraday Future is a company that sometimes makes cars, but sometimes goes bankrupt.

• 1:00:36Speaker 06

  Uh, so they've managed amazing. They're one of these companies that like no one is quite sure how they haven't gone bankrupt yet.

• 1:00:42Ed Zitron?

  They did. I'm thinking of Fisker.

• 1:00:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, Fisker's Fisker. We've gone through two Fiskers.

• 1:00:47Ed Zitron?

  Fuck, yeah.

• 1:00:47Speaker 06

  Uh, yeah, no, there's.

• 1:00:49Ed Zitron?

  I love.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  Two different ones or two, one, they've gone bankrupt and then like we're back.

• 1:00:54Speaker 06

  It was this guy started a second company.

• 1:00:56Ed Zitron?

  Sick. I think Fisker was the one with all the weird Chinese money.

• 1:01:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. So the first one was one that was sort of like it was like a kind of like sexier Model S sort of, but it was like a hybrid. So it wasn't quite like that electric. So that was sort of, you know, twenty thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, something that went bankrupt. And then he came back and and made this car the Fisker Ocean.

• 1:01:14Ed Zitron?

  But wait, wait, Faraday Future, though.

• 1:01:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, Faraday Future. Okay, so it's like it's like this Chinese, I think, money laundering operation. I'm really, you know, I'm not entirely sure. I I'm not comfortable calling them an automaker.

• 1:01:27Ed Zitron?

  Well, they have cars.

• 1:01:28Speaker 04

  They have cars and they have like three screens.

• 1:01:30Speaker 06

  No, I remember.

• 1:01:31Ed Zitron?

  They have a car.

• 1:01:31Speaker 06

  I think, was it twenty seventeen? That they there was a there was a they they were one of the in in the peak sort of like. Post or so like Tesla fueled like car, car hype era. They had like a legendarily them. It was them and Laico. I get the, the two of them mixed up, but they, there were both of them had like legendarily like, like bad, but like expensive and massive like spectacles here that like did not go well.

• 1:01:58Ed Zitron?

  My kind of car.

• 1:01:59Speaker 06

  And then like the next year, they were like, they didn't even have a booth, but they would just sort of like brought their car and just sort of like parked it on the curb.

• 1:02:07Speaker 06

  And like, I think they have, they're supposed to have a factory here. I think there's like three different places where they're supposed to have factories. There's supposed to be one in Southern California and one here.

• 1:02:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Speaker 06

  And then I feel like they pivoted to AI at some point there too, but I genuinely like, there's only so much you can pay attention to.

• 1:02:20Speaker 05

  So it's the, it's the Hyundai Mobus, Mobius, I guess.

• 1:02:25Ed Zitron?

  The Hyundai Mobius.

• 1:02:27Speaker 05

  That it is. Holographic windshield display, which is a transparent display system that transforms a vehicle's windshield into a digital interface.

• 1:02:34Ed Zitron?

  I don't, I, I want to win the.

• 1:02:36Speaker 05

  The technology enables the display of navigation, driving data and digital content while maintaining cockpit openness and visibility.

• 1:02:43Ed Zitron?

  I, someone's watching porno on that immediate, just my Uber driver.

• 1:02:48Speaker 05

  For being projected onto, onto the windshield.

• 1:02:51Ed Zitron?

  Nice. I mean, I already like every.

• 1:02:53Speaker 05

  What are we doing guys? Look at the road.

• 1:02:55Speaker 06

  Well, have you seen the size of screens in modern cars too? Like you need.

• 1:02:58Ed Zitron?

  No, the Mercedes.

• 1:03:01Speaker 05

  Like why, you can see like, why, why, why are they projecting a fucking movie on the, on the right side of the windshield?

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

  So you can watch Avatar three.

• 1:03:08Ed Zitron?

  It gets back to the thing though, where like these people don't have human experiences because these people all get car service 100%. You think any of these people are like getting in their car to drive other than like their.

• 1:03:19Speaker 04

  I see. So you, you think they're trying to be like, how do we recreate what you want from first principles?

• 1:03:24Ed Zitron?

  No, it's like, what do those fucking pigs who drive around all day? I don't, I don't, I don't look at my driver. But like when he drives, he seems to be looking at that transparent thing.

• 1:03:34Speaker 05

  He's just looking off into nothing. He, he should be maximizing his efficiency.

• 1:03:37Ed Zitron?

  What if he was max, what if he was content maxing?

• 1:03:39Speaker 05

  Why don't we have LinkedIn on the windshield?

• 1:03:43Speaker 05

  But like, you know, there's, they, like parts of this, like, like having, having like the, the navigation map, like right above the steering wheel. Maybe not a bad idea.

• 1:03:50Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Speaker 05

  Maybe not a terrible idea.

• 1:03:51Ed Zitron?

  Kind of already happening.

• 1:03:52Speaker 05

  Having a movie, having digital content displayed on the right side of the windshield. Like, why?

• 1:03:58Speaker 06

  Well, so I'll tell you, I think the

• 1:04:00Ed Zitron?

  For a car crash.

• 1:04:00Speaker 06

  I'm guessing, knowing the auto industry, sort of the thinking behind this is probably that this is like a software addressable thing, right? So in the same way that Tesla took all of these controls that used to be with knobs and buttons and dials and menus and this and that, and put it all onto basically like an iPad. This is sort of the next generation of that, where then you have, you're no longer constrained to one screen. You can create like almost infinite variety.

• 1:04:21Ed Zitron?

  Like modular.

• 1:04:22Speaker 06

  If it's sort of a projection based system.

• 1:04:24Ed Zitron?

  It's a projection system.

• 1:04:24Speaker 06

  That's how I, so, so, and again, it's, you know, I think, you know, in the auto industry, you know, you want to make an investment in, in, in hardware that you can then maximize over a lot of time. And so, you know, software addressability is like the, or software defined, software defined vehicle is like the buzzword, right?

• 1:04:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:39Speaker 06

  And, and the idea is that you can do what Tesla has done, which nobody in the industry thought was possible, which is make the same car for 10 fucking years. And just, you know, throw, throw the plebs some like fresh software updates every, every six months or so.

• 1:04:51Speaker 05

  High, high brightness, full color images directly onto the glass.

• 1:04:56Ed Zitron?

  I love this and we have to cut this, well, we're cutting this 30 minutes there. And next ad for us is from Glunt, the slop for hogs. What, if you hear anything else, it's for Glunt, I promise you. But yeah, catch you in a minute.

• 1:05:19Speaker 11

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• 1:05:46Ed Zitron?

  All right, everyone, I'm back talking about Quince, one of my favorite clothing brands. And as we speak, I'm currently wearing one of their excellent cotton knit overshirts. I wear like a jacket, nice pre fall piece to wear as things cool off a bit. I've also been eyeballing one of their heritage water resistant Harrington jackets too for later in the year to pair with their Mongolian cashmere sweaters I bought. And I have several of them and I really can't recommend Quince's stuff enough. I love Quince because they focus on high-quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials, jackets, pants, fitted tees and polos, activewear and even travel gear. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands and because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, you're getting more for less. Find the four pieces you'll reach for most at Quince.

• 1:06:30Ed Zitron?

  Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was on Better Offline. It's the best way to support the show.

• 1:06:46Speaker 07

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• 1:07:18Speaker 08

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

• 1:07:32Speaker 09

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

• 1:07:43Speaker 08

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

• 1:07:49Speaker 10

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

• 1:07:55Speaker 08

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

• 1:08:18Ed Zitron?

  We are back on the show. It's the Consumer Electronics Show. I am, of course, Ed Zitron. I didn't identify myself in the last ones, but you know, I think you've worked it out by now. We've got Ed Niedemeyer of the Autonocast. Hello. And Edward Onguoso Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter. Hello. And we're joined by Henry Casey of CNN underscore Henry. Thank you so much for joining us again.

• 1:08:38Speaker 12

  And thank you for having me this here.

• 1:08:40Ed Zitron?

  So I actually, I'm going to start off by saying I saw something I kind of liked. Maybe it's kind of like, there's a specific use case for this, like show floors, whatever. I saw a company that's doing wireless TVs. Like it's a wireless bracket. You put the TV on it and it charges it. You can charge it and they sell their own TVs. I thought it was cool. I thought it was fun that somebody did something new. And maybe this is just how beaten down I am from years of CES. I'm like, what if a TV was wireless, I guess? And it's like, yeah, I saw that. I talked to them for longer than I think they expected and then just walked off. And I think they expected I was going to get a business card. I didn't.

• 1:09:16Speaker 12

  So it has like a battery pack and you have it on a charging and you pull it somewhere else or how wireless is it?

• 1:09:21Ed Zitron?

  You have to, you can put any TV on the thingy. You, you click it in and it powers the TV. And they sell their own ones as well. I thought it was fun. I thought it was fun. And now, now saying it out loud, I see the kind of dead eyes of everyone looking at me. I'm like, maybe, maybe I slightly had more fun with this than anyone else ever will.

• 1:09:39Speaker 06

  It sounds like it would kill with those people who are like obsessive about cable management.

• 1:09:43Ed Zitron?

  No, they, they did. They also may have, they, they didn't laugh when I said this, even though I thought it was very, I was like, they were like, oh yeah, you got the, you can do 110 inch with four TV screens. And they were like, yeah, so for like trade shows. I'm like, yeah, that's useful. Or you could be like one of those insane gambling guys with four TVs. And the woman just stared at me. She just fucking stared. I'd love to watch four sports games. I love, like, that's part of the fun of Vegas.

• 1:10:06Speaker 12

  Or the ultimate Mario Kart tournament.

• 1:10:08Ed Zitron?

  Mario Kart tournament, LAN party?

• 1:10:10Speaker 12

  Yep.

• 1:10:10Ed Zitron?

  I'm kind of. Smash Brothers. Smash Brothers. I did also see, actually, and this is a genuinely good thing. It was a company called Aura. They had a mini LED 4K TV. It was 85 inch. It was 1,599.

• 1:10:24Ed Zitron?

  Uh, sorry, fifteen hundred dollars and it came with a soundbar built into it. That's nice. Mini LED big TV. Again, we're describing the things I like. It's just a thing that exists, but slightly better.

• 1:10:33Speaker 04

  I saw, I saw a big ass outdoor TV. What was it? Hundred, hun- uh, I mean, I don't know. It felt like a hundred inches, but I have no idea how large it was. But at the same time, I, I do think that when I saw the marketing and outdoor TV, I was like, I think it should be illegal for an individual to buy it. But maybe we can let the bus- businesses, you know, let them buy these outdoor TVs.

• 1:10:51Ed Zitron?

  I mean, if you've got, you have a TV in the garden.

• 1:10:55Speaker 04

  For the garden, have the garden. If Tony's. Garden in the hot tub. Have the garden in the hot tub. Nice, you wanna have a smoke outside?

• 1:11:03Speaker 12

  You don't think there would have been an outdoor television besides Tony Soprano's pool? Like, come on.

• 1:11:09Ed Zitron?

  They've also had them for a long time.

• 1:11:11Speaker 04

  I'm, I'm just saying, I'm coming in from New York. We're go- we're looking into it and we're gonna ban them in the Mandani Caliphate. Okay, we're looking into outdoor television.

• 1:11:20Ed Zitron?

  Mandani's the struggle sessions for outdoor TV owners.

• 1:11:23Speaker 04

  Hey, listen, we're starting though for landlords.

• 1:11:25Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that's the good shit. Henry, what have you seen at the show? Now that, now that my two things I liked have bombed.

• 1:11:31Speaker 12

  Well, to bounce it off the wireless TV stuff, um, it's not exactly wireless. You can see the one wire connection going to it, but LG's new wallpaper TV. Is their new kind of take on what if an art TV was also an OLED TV? Art TVs for the uninitiated, Samsung's frames, you can put art. This is like an OLED, so you don't really wanna have a static image because you're gonna ruin your television setup with burning. Instead, you can have a slideshow mode of your art, but it's barely, it's like a nine millimeters thick. And there's one power port coming out of the back corner. You can hide it and Samsung's been doing similar with the Frame Pro. But the thing I'm most excited about is an eighty dollar, ten thousand milliamp power bank from Nimble.

• 1:12:13Speaker 12

  It breaks in half and one half has a USB connector that unfolds. The other half has a USB C cable. So my best friend, when we go out, he never brings a portable charger. I do. Now, share the wealth, don't have to sit next to each other. And it's like actually solving a problem, which is like the CES question of like. Is this solving a shareholder dilemma and capitalism growth? Or is it doing something that like my parents will really like? Cause one of them will remember to bring it and the other one will never remember.

• 1:12:43Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and I that's the thing like all like I saw an LG thing where it was again, another wireless TV. There's a few of these things, but it was basically you had the TV in one plug and then you could plug all the HDMI shit into it. It was low latency, no latency. That's cool. But again, it's like everything we're describing doesn't feel like the future. Like I'm just, I'm saying these things out loud. I'm like, yay, what if something was like, oh.

• 1:13:04Speaker 06

  But that right, that's like the the bifurcation of the show is that it's either right? These like small iterations that are actually useful, or it's these like wild pie in the sky that will never actually.

• 1:13:13Ed Zitron?

  That just don't work.

• 1:13:14Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, and you kind of have to have both for a show.

• 1:13:17Ed Zitron?

  I mean, do you know what? I actually, you don't have to have the vaporware stuff. It would be nice if, cause I don't know, may maybe we're just out of ideas, but I, I don't, I know that it may seem like I'm a huge cynic. I would love to be wowed. I would love to be amazed and I would love to see stuff that made me go, wow, new thing that I like.

• 1:13:37Speaker 12

  I'll be the positive guy again, cause okay, vaporware that becomes actual product and it wasn't vaporware to begin with. We see the words concept product a lot at CES. Um, I think I might've mentioned last year that Lenovo's had a laptop that would rotate its screen to track your face. That's actually going to be for sale. They announced, they showed off the finished version of it this year.

• 1:13:57Ed Zitron?

  How much?

• 1:13:57Speaker 12

  Um, I, the price escapes me, I'm not even sure.

• 1:14:00Ed Zitron?

  But yeah, that's the thing, that's the thing they never do.

• 1:14:03Speaker 12

  I didn't write the article, my coworker, my hand rock, he did CNN underscored, he's got a video on it. We covered it, but no, it's, it's, it's like you knock on the lid and it opens up on its own.

• 1:14:12Ed Zitron?

  That's fun.

• 1:14:12Speaker 12

  And if you're in the kitchen and you're wanting to watch or read a recipe on your laptop screen and you're moving your head around the, it, I could see that being useful. Also, content creators, Twitch people, like all the sorts of people, there is like, it's a weird, you're going to figure out who needs this. But it's something that would seem like vaporware one year and actually is on sale and is going to come to sale the next. So it's sort of like saying, hey, don't think CES is just for the next version of the humane, human, the friend pendant, like stuff like that.

• 1:14:41Ed Zitron?

  Have you, have you seen any friend pendants though?

• 1:14:44Speaker 12

  Not in the wild.

• 1:14:44Ed Zitron?

  Looking, I'm looking for anything like that. I want, I want a sassy O.

• 1:14:49Speaker 04

  I think I saw I saw I did not get to go to the pendant, but there's a there's a pendant on the Venetian Expo floor that I have to I have to chat with them about. I was a little too taken with all the biomed.

• 1:15:00Ed Zitron?

  Oh, okay. No, I I really wanna I want more AI that's hostile towards you. I want like when Victoria was on a few months ago where it was just like, no, that's not true. Just gaslight me. It's like fuck me up because you know what? Stop pretending this is gonna be my friend because I know it won't be.

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:18Ed Zitron?

  I mean.

• 1:15:18Speaker 04

  I do love when they like, you know, like we're gonna have robots in these workplaces and they're just gonna be your buddy.

• 1:15:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:24Speaker 04

  They're not gonna be your worker. You're not gonna be your colleague. They're not gonna be your slave. They're gonna be your buddy.

• 1:15:27Ed Zitron?

  So I was going through my photos as well, trying to find something useful, but I did find a booth where I could not work out what they did. It was just called Wow Now. And the tagline was make your inside outside.

• 1:15:38Speaker 04

  Make your inside.

• 1:15:39Ed Zitron?

  Make your inside outside. At David Cronenberg.

• 1:15:43Speaker 04

  Thanks, but. Yeah, that is actually the plot of Shroud.

• 1:15:48Ed Zitron?

  It's one of the best movies of the year.

• 1:15:50Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, exactly.

• 1:15:51Ed Zitron?

  It's a defense against fairies when you turn your clothes inside out. That's the only way they don't get you.

• 1:15:56Speaker 04

  We will talk about that after.

• 1:15:58Ed Zitron?

  I saw a company called Pom where the logo kind of looked like it said porn. That was that was nice. Yeah, it's I really, I really did look. I've been looking for stuff. I saw a company called Zeus that was claiming they had the only GPU designed for high performance workloads. And it's like.

• 1:16:11Speaker 04

  They got love sense again.

• 1:16:12Ed Zitron?

  Also, what's love sense?

• 1:16:14Speaker 04

  Um, sex toys.

• 1:16:15Ed Zitron?

  That's nice.

• 1:16:16Speaker 04

  With a little, you know, maybe.

• 1:16:19Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 1:16:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It's got some software.

• 1:16:22Ed Zitron?

  Power hat. I found a power hat. Power hat. You put the hat on. It's like a.

• 1:16:27Speaker 04

  And it gives you power.

• 1:16:28Ed Zitron?

  One of those floppy hats. It connects to like a solar charger, I guess.

• 1:16:31Speaker 04

  What?

• 1:16:32Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and dual USB A and dual USB C ports. You know what?

• 1:16:36Speaker 04

  It's a solar charging hat.

• 1:16:38Ed Zitron?

  No, that's that is the only permissible one is like if you're like long distance hiking or a fisher. But the people buying this might maybe they'll be outdoors people like Robert Evans. I know does a bunch of bunch of like so I think he's done some of the stuff where he's just like when he goes into the woods for a few months, like to hunt the Sasquatch. I'll ask him about that later, but it's like that makes sense, but I. Just, I see this, I'm like, I wanna believe, man, but probably.

• 1:17:02Speaker 04

  I'll, I'll believe them when they do a solar bonnet. When they do a solar bonnet for my people, then I know they're serious about this.

• 1:17:09Speaker 11

  The solar sombrero?

• 1:17:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:10Speaker 12

  No, the solar Pharrell Canadian Mountie hat. That's, he's always gonna be the brand ambassador every other year. Like, come on.

• 1:17:17Ed Zitron?

  That big ass hat could probably fit, fit a Playstation five out there.

• 1:17:21Speaker 12

  We won't get Grand Theft Auto VI anytime soon, but yeah.

• 1:17:24Ed Zitron?

  Nor will we get another pop banger like Happy. No, well, not like we're getting a fucking another N R D album.

• 1:17:31Ed Zitron?

  Fly or Die is a perfect album and he never made anything better than it. Pharrell Williams, come on my show and talk specifically about two thousand and five's Fly or Die. Classic album, great album, you should all listen to it. Email me if you've listened.

• 1:17:43Speaker 04

  We're talking about his beef with the, with the Neptunes.

• 1:17:45Ed Zitron?

  No, not interested. Just, just the album. And then he can explain to me why he hasn't made anything good like that since.

• 1:17:51Speaker 04

  You don't think the Lego Movie soundtrack was gonna be good?

• 1:17:54Ed Zitron?

  I think that Despicable Me had a pretty good soundtrack. I'll give, I will give him the fact that Despicable Me, Despicable Me two and Despicable Me three, Nano Banana, fucking. I had not thought about Nano Banana all day.

• 1:18:10Speaker 06

  It's not my fault. So, one of the, the things that, that makes this like absurd stuff so, so interesting and so extra absurd to me is that there is like legitimate technological innovation going on right now. Like, one of the big announcements, if not, kind of arguably the biggest announcement in the mobility space, is this company called Donut Lab. Um, and they're, they're basically beat all the major automakers and battery companies to the punch on a, or at least they say they have, to, to a solid state battery. Um, and this is something.

• 1:18:38Ed Zitron?

  Explain what that means.

• 1:18:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, it just means, so, uh, it just means that, uh, it's, it's solid, so it's a completely, the, rather than using a, a liquid or gel in the, in the anode, um, it's, it's just, the whole, the whole battery is solid state.

• 1:18:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, so just to be stupid, because I really don't know. Regular batteries are full of like liquids.

• 1:18:56Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:18:57Ed Zitron?

  I know that.

• 1:18:58Speaker 06

  It's a, it's an electrolyte, yeah, it's a fluid electrolyte and.

• 1:19:01Ed Zitron?

  And a solid state is just a brick or something?

• 1:19:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Ed Zitron?

  That's cool.

• 1:19:04Speaker 06

  It is, and, and it has like really specific, uh, advantages. So like they claim four hundred, uh, watt hours per kilogram. It's like, you know, not much denser than like modern, you know, uh, like the, the current state of the art, but they, they say you can charge it in five minutes.

• 1:19:19Ed Zitron?

  Ooh.

• 1:19:19Speaker 06

  I think what they said like.

• 1:19:20Ed Zitron?

  That's why the liquid ones charge slower.

• 1:19:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, and, and what happens too is with the liquid ones, like they form dendrites and things and so it's, it's not.

• 1:19:28Ed Zitron?

  What does that mean?

• 1:19:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's I know I get I get above my own pay grade really fast with this stuff. Battery technology is like really complex, but basically you can think of it as like sort of almost like crystalline structures.

• 1:19:37Ed Zitron?

  Right. Okay. So things form inside it to slow them down.

• 1:19:40Speaker 06

  Yeah. And and and it create friction and heat and then fire.

• 1:19:44Ed Zitron?

  Hmm. But they made the solid state one.

• 1:19:46Speaker 06

  The solid state does not have that issue. So it's like unaffected by temperature.

• 1:19:51Ed Zitron?

  Cool.

• 1:19:51Speaker 06

  Uh, and and you can charge it really, really fast.

• 1:19:54Ed Zitron?

  That's actually like really good.

• 1:19:55Speaker 04

  And so that unlocks, does that unlock new use cases then? If it's like, you don't have to worry about the internal temperature, maybe you can run it a little bit hotter than.

• 1:20:02Ed Zitron?

  Well, I mean, it would, yeah, it would be.

• 1:20:04Speaker 06

  It's so, I mean, I like ideally, this is this is the future, right? And and so like all the major automakers are are doing this and and they all make kind of somewhat similar claims. So like, right, they say like, uh, you fully charge in 10 minutes, 60 kilometers of combined range per minute of charging. And and up to 600 kilometers on a single charge. Sorry for the metrics.

• 1:20:23Ed Zitron?

  No, no, this is great. No, this is no, please.

• 1:20:25Speaker 06

  So so I think like it it's this is something that that right Toyota has been working on, talking about for a long time. Hyundai is doing it like the Chinese battery suppliers as well. I think this is like a little British consulting firm and their first use case is a motorcycle. So it's a little questionable about how. So apparently the motorcycles are going to be shipping this year. So like or like first quarter of this year. So.

• 1:20:47Speaker 04

  They should have a guy just doing the 600 kilometers around.

• 1:20:49Ed Zitron?

  That's the thing.

• 1:20:51Speaker 06

  Well, and and with all this stuff, anything automotive, you got to validate it over so many miles. And and the idea that they're going to be able to build this at at at the quality and then and the robustness. Yeah.

• 1:21:01Speaker 12

  But this is the city of traffic and the frustration of getting around time. You talk to any journalist doing CES this year, you will see somebody who has been frustrated about how long it takes an Uber to. And that is the kind of thing where hands on or hands off demos are the thing that would really sell it. And you'd have like.

• 1:21:18Ed Zitron?

  Even like an e-bike would be. Yeah.

• 1:21:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, I just read about it. I wasn't at their event or anything. I haven't been in touch with them. So they may be getting done or something, but I think that what I've read about it, like, there's a little bit of like, how are these guys like kind of the first?

• 1:21:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, my, my, that's my first thought. Like, it's a little British consultancy. Never, ever trust the British. And also just, is Britain a hub for battery technology?

• 1:21:41Speaker 06

  It has been more so.

• 1:21:42Ed Zitron?

  Oh, okay, cool.

• 1:21:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, so like.

• 1:21:44Ed Zitron?

  I don't want this to be fake. I want this to be real.

• 1:21:46Speaker 06

  No, no, like, there are incredible British engineering outfits, especially in the automotive space. So like, a lot of Formula One engineering work takes place in the UK.

• 1:21:54Ed Zitron?

  Right, oh, of course.

• 1:21:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, and so, and that's all heavily electrified now and becoming more so with the new 2026 rules.

• 1:22:01Ed Zitron?

  So you were in the car section as well, right? Do you see anything?

• 1:22:04Speaker 06

  Just very briefly, unfortunately. Yeah, I had to go to a, I've listened to the, the, um, the NHTS administrator talk, which is interesting.

• 1:22:12Ed Zitron?

  How was that?

• 1:22:13Speaker 06

  I mean, honestly, like, for this administration, it was like sort of surprisingly.

• 1:22:17Ed Zitron?

  And that's the National Highway?

• 1:22:19Speaker 06

  Traffic Safety Administration, yeah.

• 1:22:22Ed Zitron?

  I remember all those words. Yeah, but anything good or just?

• 1:22:26Speaker 06

  Well, from that conversation, it was like a much higher level of sophistication than I expected from someone who works for Sean Duffy.

• 1:22:34Ed Zitron?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:22:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is like a pleasant, pleasant surprise. And, and like clearly, like, you know, I think, I think the administration wants to be seen as doing something to help autonomous vehicles.

• 1:22:45Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:22:45Speaker 06

  The problem is that, like, regulation is not actually preventing autonomous vehicle deployment. Like, that's not.

• 1:22:50Ed Zitron?

  It's kind of like AI. It's like, they're like, oh, we need less regulations around AI. It's like, that's not, we don't have those.

• 1:22:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:22:57Ed Zitron?

  Oh, we got one going through. No, fuck off. The problem is you don't have enough power and no one wants to pay for it, dickhead. With autonomous cars, it seems like the problem is the edge cases, like you were mentioning.

• 1:23:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. So he was talking, and this is interesting. So, so kind of the big challenge with AVs is that, right, like, you can't just create a, right, we have a driver's test, right? You go out and you do some basic things and you prove that you have the sort of like general capability and they sign off. You didn't almost kill anyone and, and you can be a driver now. That doesn't work with this technology because right, all you do is train for the test.

• 1:23:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:26Speaker 06

  Right. And then you get vehicles to train for the test and then they pass the test and they go out and they're like totally useless in the real world. So this is actually like a non-creating regulation for AV is actually a much less trivial of a problem than than people think.

• 1:23:39Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:23:39Speaker 06

  People are very quick to say, oh, we'll just regulate it. Well, when you get into the weeds of how to do it, it's actually quite complex. And and again, I was shocked that that the guy at NHTSA is actually has like a

• 1:23:50Ed Zitron?

  An articulate view.

• 1:23:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, like a kind of a sophisticated sense of like, okay, you need to have a test, but you can't have it be some static thing. And and like the fact is like, you know, we have this sort of self certification system anyway. And that like, if you're faking your compliance with a with a safety standard, that that's sort of illegal already and so.

• 1:24:07Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:24:08Speaker 06

  So it was like sort of encouraging. The problem is is that is that this is also being used as like a a power grab at the federal level. Because states, right, so like historically, cars are regulated by the federal government.

• 1:24:20Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:24:20Speaker 06

  Drivers are regulated by the state.

• 1:24:21Ed Zitron?

  Oh, oh, yeah.

• 1:24:22Speaker 06

  You get your driver's license from the state DMV. Well, so that's a huge problem, right? Like, like, uh, the AV companies absolutely do not want the the patchwork of of of regulation. And so they're trying to get a test at the federal level so that they can kind of preempt the state's right to to regulate.

• 1:24:39Ed Zitron?

  Interesting. Yeah, because I guess it's regulating a technology, but kind of regulating a driver as well.

• 1:24:44Speaker 06

  These two separate things have become one and and in a real sense, i- is much more of regulating a driver than it is of a car.

• 1:24:50Ed Zitron?

  Regulate something when you have the, because from my understanding with these autonomous cars, you actually have an overlord watching as well. You have a customer service rep. How does that play into it?

• 1:25:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. So, yeah, this is one of the the most misunderstood and and, you know, uh, different companies do things differently. Different companies have different levels of transparency around this. Um, so, you know, no one description is going to be true, true of everything. But like, for example, with Waymo, what they say, um, and I think they have like pretty good credibility on it is that, right? Like for a vehicle to be autonomous, and this is sort of the established, like, you know, engineering view of it. For a vehicle to be autonomous, when it encounters something that it cannot deal with,

• 1:25:27Ed Zitron?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:28Speaker 06

  it has to perform what's called fallback autonomously. It has to return to what's called a minimal risk condition. And this is like not a defined thing. It just means the safest place to sort of pull over.

• 1:25:40Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:25:40Speaker 06

  Um, and, and if you're not doing that autonomously, i- it's not autonomous. So like Teslas are not autonomous because when they fail, the human has to step in and intervene.

• 1:25:50Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:25:50Speaker 06

  A lot of people believe that because there, there is this link that, that every AV has to, uh, either a remote operator or the ability to send new guidance to the vehicle, that that is somehow remotely intervening to prevent a crash. That's physically, it's not possible.

• 1:26:07Ed Zitron?

  That's why, because I didn't imagine they had the joystick or something.

• 1:26:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that folks have tried it and it, it's, it just doesn't work. So, uh, so what, what happens is that, right? System encounter, something you can't deal with, it performs a fallback autonomously. The, the new guidance is just to sort of get it through.

• 1:26:24Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. To get it out of danger. Yeah.

• 1:26:25Speaker 06

  And then, and then it takes back over again.

• 1:26:27Ed Zitron?

  Okay. So changing gears, Henry, what if, have you seen anything interesting laptop wise? And you mentioned a concrete keyboard, which sounds good for hitting people.

• 1:26:35Speaker 12

  Yeah. Keychron actually is doing really fun stuff with the materials that their keyboards, wireless keyboards are made out of. There was one that was porcelain, like a, and then one of those concrete. And I was thinking even the most angry Redditors won't be able to move this by typing. Like you might use it for self-defense if you're that kind of person. But like, I was, but you were, I was just talking about that made me really think was building something for the test. And while, okay, laptops, yes, there is a big story sort of happening with Dell and pricing, but did people see the LG laundry folding robot thing?

• 1:27:11Ed Zitron?

  No, it, I saw the robot. I didn't see it fold anything.

• 1:27:14Speaker 12

  I didn't see it folding anything. I sort of thought moving one thing to another. And I was like, is this being designed to beat the, to do the test of the convention center?

• 1:27:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23Speaker 12

  And then do everything else. Like, that's why I'm just like, it's also doing at the slowest. The, it's the, the sloth in the Zootopia movie trailer. Like, I'm like, so that's the thing. But so in laptops, one of the most interesting things is a year ago, Dell said the XPS brand was dead. It was replacing Dell XPS 14 with Dell Premium 14. And tech journalists everywhere were like, what are you doing?

• 1:27:47Speaker 06

  I love my XPS.

• 1:27:49Speaker 12

  People love it. And then this year. They literally, an exec came out and said, I owe you an apology. You guys were right. Um, and then they released the Dell XPS is back. And here's the weird thing, though. They got rid of all the things we hated about it. The function keys are actually physical keys again. They had a weird capacitive touch thing.

• 1:28:08Ed Zitron?

  Oh, God.

• 1:28:09Speaker 12

  But it was light up. It wasn't OLED like the touch bar on the Macs. But the problem is that I believe, let me just check right now. I believe it's, um, they had a last second price change on it. And I believe it's gonna be two thousand fifty for the starting price at first for the fourteen inch XPS.

• 1:28:29Ed Zitron?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:28:30Speaker 12

  And it's gonna, in February, there will be lower priced, much lower priced, under two thousand dollar versions. And they didn't say why this is. We can all assume one of two things.

• 1:28:39Ed Zitron?

  What is it?

• 1:28:40Speaker 12

  Tariffs or memory shortage.

• 1:28:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, the RAM thing is fucking everything up. I don't know if you've talked to anyone else at the show, but I've, I've been hearing from quite a few people, this is just fucking up everything now because of AI. That it's just smart for, Samsung mentioned they're gonna raise the price of phones because of, because of fucking AI and RAM. Kill me.

• 1:29:00Speaker 12

  People are saying that the iPhone eighteen not coming until next year supposedly is due to that because Apple wants to wait for the lowest costing phone. They want to wait a year to wait out this fricking memory shortage problem. Because that's the rumor at least. They're moving to a spring year cadence for the main phone. But like, it's laptops from here on out. We're, we're a little bit concerned about what, if there's gonna be a good amount of RAM or it's gonna be overpriced. Like it's

• 1:29:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:27Speaker 12

  I'm glad I have my M one fourteen inch MacBook Pro and that's gonna last me forever hopefully, but.

• 1:29:32Ed Zitron?

  It kind of feels like it's gonna price people out of electronics soon because tariffs already raised things and now RAM is gonna raise things also that we can generate sexier waifus, I guess, like it. It's very strange and I don't think, I've never seen anything like it in the history of tech. Like we've seen shortages around COVID and then post COVID. But I don't remember just like the, I remember the price of everything going up, the price, things becoming harder to get in general, but not like one thing within the computing world.

• 1:30:01Speaker 12

  Yeah. And, and to be fucking up a business that makes money in order to build a business that doesn't.

• 1:30:06Ed Zitron?

  Well, the RAM business is making tons of money now.

• 1:30:08Speaker 12

  Well, sure. Yeah.

• 1:30:09Ed Zitron?

  But every other business.

• 1:30:10Speaker 12

  That's what, that's what I'm saying. Like devices broadly are gonna take a hit because of.

• 1:30:13Ed Zitron?

  And PC sales are already down, I think.

• 1:30:16Speaker 12

  I did not keep track of that, thankfully.

• 1:30:19Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's just, it's, I just, ah, I keep coming to this show expecting the future, but it just kind of feels dystopian, but not in like the cyberpunk way, but just in a everything's more expensive and slowing down way.

• 1:30:32Speaker 12

  Yeah. Well, okay, this is the funniest part. Of all things I never expected to get faster, Amazon's revealed that the Fire TV interface is getting an update and it's getting faster.

• 1:30:43Ed Zitron?

  They're making new Fire TVs, Amazon's doing.

• 1:30:45Speaker 12

  Well, they're just updating the OS basically, and they've updated a couple of things recently, but they showed, I was watching it today, and it was loading smoothly and it looked a little cleaner.

• 1:30:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, if you've never used these TVs, they are, fuck it. It's like you, you hit the button, it takes like three seconds for the box to move across.

• 1:31:01Speaker 04

  I had one for five years that broke only because I was, uh, I had a bunch of people in my room and one of them rammed up into it because it was getting crowded, then it smashed into the floor, indestructible otherwise.

• 1:31:13Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you, you, what you mean is you were wearing your freezer costume for Halloween and the tail bumped it.

• 1:31:18Speaker 04

  And I may have been a little lit and then someone hit it, yeah. And then someone was my tail.

• 1:31:24Speaker 12

  And it gets worse if you just bought the Prime Day cheapest Fire TV stick. And who knows how low powered that is trying to run whatever, but they said every, the one they, they showed it off on a demo on a regular TV that was running their Fire OS. And I was just like watching going, I've been recommending Roku to my parents and for a lot of people for a while. It's simple, it's easy for them. People just want a grid of tiles. Like I, nobody can afford, not everybody can afford an Apple TV. I wish they could. And I think a lot of people think Google TV is content overload. And it's like, you're just getting, uh, Black Mirror episode two, I think.

• 1:32:02Ed Zitron?

  Is that, is there a Black Mirror tie-in with that or?

• 1:32:05Speaker 12

  No, just all the ads happen all at once. I have to remember it's the million credits episode and not.

• 1:32:10Ed Zitron?

  I've not seen any of it. Sorry, Charlie. Charlie does read my work. I'm sorry, Charlie.

• 1:32:15Speaker 12

  Um, but yeah, no, Amazon actually is answering the critic that I've been writing in for years. Like, why is this so, so, so slow and stuttery? And so I can't wait to update the Nike shoebox of streaming sticks I have at home because I've been reviewing the stuff for how many years now? I've collected everything just to make sure I can cross-reference and back-reference.

• 1:32:34Ed Zitron?

  Do you see anything you really like, though? Anything exciting? Anything good?

• 1:32:37Speaker 12

  Okay, I don't have the space for it in my home, but if you're a projector nerd for watching stuff, Samsung's Freestyle Plus that keeps auto-adjusting to whatever space you put it on, it projected against curtains and it-

• 1:32:48Ed Zitron?

  Was it clear?

• 1:32:49Speaker 12

  It was clear, first of all, but it took a second. You saw it like ripple and then it auto-corrected around to a rectangle on top of the curtain.

• 1:32:56Ed Zitron?

  That's actually fucking cool. That is cool.

• 1:32:58Speaker 12

  But it gets better because they had two different sized projector screens that it was on. And if you moved it from one to the other, it recognized the black outline of the projection screen and it really automa- like it automatically resized.

• 1:33:13Ed Zitron?

  I like that.

• 1:33:14Speaker 12

  And then they did it on a three-corner corner of a wall and it resized like I, I would go to Samsung's Villa of its ever first look every year.

• 1:33:21Ed Zitron?

  Samsung Villa.

• 1:33:22Speaker 12

  It's like they have a minor city almost. If you think Caesars is a state, this is Vegas. This is a minor city and like the Freestyle Plus projector is the thing that I was like, whoa.

• 1:33:31Ed Zitron?

  Again, how much though?

• 1:33:34Speaker 12

  I don't even know if they have announced pricing because a lot of these stuff, they don't announce pricing. But the other weird thing from Samsung, and I'm still trying to get to the bottom of it, in the corner of their experience, there's a S95H OLED TV that they're claiming is, can be an art TV and a regular, but they had one static image on it for the entire multiple hours I was there. And I was like, asking everybody, did you guys beat Burnin'? What is going on here? How is this happening? I haven't gotten an answer yet. I don't know if it was just for the show of it all, like showing it can do it. But if they've somehow done it and they were quietly not explaining it, I have more questions for their PR team in that process and I do their technical team.

• 1:34:14Ed Zitron?

  Good luck on those though, because they don't, from what I hear of that PR team, they're not particularly helpful with answers to questions.

• 1:34:20Speaker 12

  They're responsive to email. They're, they're a nice group of people.

• 1:34:22Ed Zitron?

  Okay, okay. Maybe they've changed over the years.

• 1:34:25Speaker 12

  But no, everybody's had trouble with different PR, different outlets. It's not, that's, it all depends on who's, what your history of who-

• 1:34:31Ed Zitron?

  But that's the thing, though, with these art TVs, they're always a lovely idea, but it's like, I don't fucking know. If I want some art on my wall, I just put up art. And even I saw one of these E Ink things as well. I'm gonna show you. There was like an entire hall of E Ink things that just broke.

• 1:34:47Speaker 06

  It's just, it's very artistic, actually.

• 1:34:50Ed Zitron?

  It's like, the E Ink.

• 1:34:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:34:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's just, it's like a nice idea, but you're like, okay, but again, practically.

• 1:34:57Speaker 06

  I think I saw those at the club last night.

• 1:34:58Ed Zitron?

  At the club? Yeah, that was ju- just too late for you. No, it's really, it's frustrating as well because some of these ideas are like, all right, that's a nice one. How much? Oh, just out of the range of most people. Oh, an E Ink screen. Okay, I guess, but how much? Hundreds of dollars, fucking. I just, they should have a cheap section. They should literally have a cheap section of this show, like a below three hundred bucks.

• 1:35:19Speaker 06

  I looked up the, that projector, the, I think they typically have cost around nine hundred bucks.

• 1:35:23Ed Zitron?

  Oh, that's.

• 1:35:24Speaker 06

  They haven't announced this particular one, but.

• 1:35:25Ed Zitron?

  Worst I've heard.

• 1:35:27Speaker 06

  And for a projector.

• 1:35:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I mean, like the Nebula X one Pro, the tall things, like five grand, and the X one little box is like two.

• 1:35:35Speaker 06

  And this is like a small tube, like, like.

• 1:35:38Ed Zitron?

  That's kind of very.

• 1:35:39Speaker 06

  It is a cute looking, I want, I want to call it Pixar-esque, but like, it is a nicely designed. I was like, this is fun to use. I, I would just have, I have a TV and I don't care that it's a black rectangle sometimes. I'm not the audience for the art TV. I'm not really a projector audience, but while we were watching this freestyle plus and doing this thing, I was like, okay, this is cool. This is the article headline. This is like the actual.

• 1:36:02Ed Zitron?

  But also that's something you could use in an apartment, potentially because it adapts to any surface. Finally, something that sounds useful.

• 1:36:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, I think also it's like a, I think a little bit of a premium thing too. It feels like screens, TVs have gotten so cheap and so big.

• 1:36:16Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:16Speaker 06

  And it's like having your TV, like having it be either like disguised as art or like hidden as a projector, like this sort of like a, I'm too good to even have a TV. TVs are for like, you know, the plebs. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:28Ed Zitron?

  I did see like the most limp store. It was like Amazon's used TVs have rounded corners. I'm just like, at this, at this point, mate, just, just don't, you don't need to post about it, mate. Who cares? It's got rounded corners. It gives.

• 1:36:38Speaker 06

  You're nice.

• 1:36:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's just like, and also I went and looked, they looked pointy. They looked, they looked actually pointy.

• 1:36:44Speaker 06

  Why not a circular TV?

• 1:36:46Speaker 04

  They're rounded.

• 1:36:46Ed Zitron?

  Give me a circular TV. Yeah, I want a rounder. I want, I want a

• 1:36:50Speaker 04

  Beam it into my skull.

• 1:36:51Ed Zitron?

  A rumboid television.

• 1:36:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, everything has to be filmed at the Fish Islands.

• 1:36:55Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I just, though, if you want to do something weird, great, send it my way. Don't pretend like it's for everyone. If you just want, this is for perverts. The pervert section, they, that's just-

• 1:37:04Speaker 04

  Pervert TV.

• 1:37:05Ed Zitron?

  Pervert TV. I think we have that. I think we have pervert.

• 1:37:08Speaker 04

  DePalma is like, you know-

• 1:37:10Speaker 06

  Ed Zitron is. It's television pervert.

• 1:37:12Ed Zitron?

  It's new from YouTube.

• 1:37:16Speaker 04

  My name's Ryan DePalma. I've been watching Pervert TV for the past forty years. I'm proud to introduce it to CES.

• 1:37:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I was gonna make a liquid television joke, but that could get gross real quick. Well, we're gonna wrap up this thirty minutes and-

• 1:37:29Speaker 04

  Made by Siemens.

• 1:37:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, there we go. Siemens AI Television Pervert Television.

• 1:37:33Speaker 04

  It's physical.

• 1:37:34Ed Zitron?

  Coming up next, an ad from Pervert Television, the new streaming service by perverts for perverts. And if you're the advertiser that comes next, I am very sorry. I am very sorry. And if this is one of the ones where it's my voice recorded, that's even better. I'm not, I'm not running Pervert TV, I swear.

• 1:37:58Speaker 00

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• 1:38:28Ed Zitron?

  All right, everyone, I'm back talking about Quince, one of my favorite clothing brands. And as we speak, I'm currently wearing one of their excellent cotton knit overshirts. I wear like a jacket, nice prefall piece to wear as things cool off a bit. I've also been eyeballing one of their heritage water-resistant Harrington jackets too for later in the year to pair with their Mongolian cashmere sweaters I bought. And I have several of them and I really can't recommend Quince's stuff enough. I love Quince because they focus on high-quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials, jackets, pants, fitted tees and polos, activewear and even travel gear. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands and because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, you're getting more for less. Find the four pieces you'll reach for most at Quince.

• 1:39:11Ed Zitron?

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• 1:39:27Speaker 07

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• 1:39:59Speaker 08

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

• 1:40:14Speaker 09

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

• 1:40:25Speaker 08

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

• 1:40:29Speaker 10

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

• 1:40:36Speaker 08

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

• 1:41:00Ed Zitron?

  And we're back. We're back with an incredible group of people. Edward Anguoso Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter, Ed Niedemeyer of the Autonocast, and Henry Casey of CNN underscored. And we've just been looking at fake stuff for a few minutes. Because I wanted to talk briefly about this thing called the pickle. Now, the pickle, the pickle is yet more fucking smart glass bullshit. But what it is, is it, they call it a soul computer. And I think just, I think we can start at this point. If you call anything a soul computer.

• 1:41:29Speaker 06

  Straight to jail.

• 1:41:29Ed Zitron?

  Straight to jail. Fucking right. Down you go. But what's great is this thing is this, is these glasses that project images across the, across the glasses, the transparent OLEDs. And then it has some mystical AI in it that remembers everything. I'm just gonna read this. "For a better life in every dimension, we need an intelligence that sees with you, remembers your life, and learns to understand you." And you saw, and you saw, it talks to you, it can teach you like guitar stuff. And it claims it has like memories of stuff you've seen before. Now, this has caused some sort of scandal online. First of all, because it's blatantly fucking fake. And there's Matt Dowd, I think, has gone completely nuts about it. It's just like, this fucking fake.

• 1:42:11Ed Zitron?

  And now the CEO of Pickle is now arguing with him. I love that. I just got to say the CEO of Pickle.

• 1:42:16Speaker 04

  Why is the company called Pickle?

• 1:42:17Ed Zitron?

  I don't fuck it. To be extra special annoying. And Alex Heath was like, it's completely fake, it's stupid, it's wrong. But wouldn't it be cool if it was real?

• 1:42:25Speaker 06

  What if your soul was a pickle?

• 1:42:26Ed Zitron?

  What if you was, what if you, well, first of all, if you make a company called Pickle with a fake device, you probably don't have a soul.

• 1:42:32Speaker 04

  I have such a negative association with pickles because I had a roommate who would buy so many pickles and not touch them that they would fill up the fridge and it broke all the shelves.

• 1:42:42Ed Zitron?

  Just the, just the, the compound weight of pickles?

• 1:42:46Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:42:46Speaker 06

  Like open the door and it's like an avalanche of pickles.

• 1:42:48Speaker 04

  Literally, and then glass also, and pickle juice.

• 1:42:51Ed Zitron?

  What was the justification for purchasing so many of them?

• 1:42:53Speaker 04

  I like pickles, but would get so fucking high they'd forget that all the pickles in the fridge were.

• 1:42:58Ed Zitron?

  How do you forget?

• 1:42:59Speaker 04

  Well, you smoke a lot of weed and then you go into our basement, very spacious basement.

• 1:43:03Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:43:04Speaker 04

  And you smoke more weed and you just.

• 1:43:05Ed Zitron?

  But you get to the pickle dispensary, your fridge.

• 1:43:09Speaker 04

  I got roommates, one of them got the pickles.

• 1:43:11Ed Zitron?

  Resplend, no, not you, but the person in question.

• 1:43:14Speaker 04

  His mind was like, at least I want to their pickle.

• 1:43:16Speaker 06

  The answer is he didn't have a smart device.

• 1:43:18Ed Zitron?

  He remembered his leaves. You don't need to buy more pickles. You have more pickles than you can ever desire.

• 1:43:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:25Ed Zitron?

  But this is now a scandal because basically everyone's saying this is fake bullshit. And the guy is just on X, the everything app, just fucking going to town with people. It's so cool. I I'm fine with that, that this existing, but he has to post.

• 1:43:38Speaker 06

  Is it? Is it sort of like a people are trying to do like a Marcus Brownlee with what was the the device that he sort of like?

• 1:43:43Ed Zitron?

  Oh, the humane pin.

• 1:43:44Speaker 06

  The humane pin. Yeah.

• 1:43:45Ed Zitron?

  I, the reason I bring this up though, is I like that every, you know, the last two CES is we've had. Oh, no, maybe it was twenty twenty four. We had the rabbit R one.

• 1:43:53Speaker 06

  That was twenty four. Yeah, twenty four rabbit.

• 1:43:55Speaker 04

  That was there for that.

• 1:43:56Ed Zitron?

  That was no, it was before better offline. I was a much larger set of person, so I didn't really have as much fun as I could with it. But that was the one where like everyone fell for it because it was kind of real. And it's just like that company is still rolling around in its own filth.

• 1:44:11Speaker 06

  Didn't it get acquired by like HP or somebody?

• 1:44:14Ed Zitron?

  Oh my, no, that was the humane pin.

• 1:44:16Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:16Ed Zitron?

  HP bought another company to put with the Palm Pre, I guess, like, like it it's just really, I think every year we need a fake thing. We need that. We need something that's like aggressively just.

• 1:44:29Speaker 04

  I got handed a bunch of.

• 1:44:30Ed Zitron?

  You got handed fake stuff that. What what what you got there?

• 1:44:33Speaker 04

  There, uh.

• 1:44:34Ed Zitron?

  They just look like boxes.

• 1:44:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're boxes. There's whole things that remind me now that you said they look like the the rabbit. There's supposed to be AI agents that can.

• 1:44:42Ed Zitron?

  The AI agents, but they're in cardboard.

• 1:44:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're cardboard boxes that look like fridge magnets.

• 1:44:48Ed Zitron?

  Let's see what you got in there because I'm quite curious to know what's in this box. And if there's an AI agent in there.

• 1:44:54Speaker 04

  Looks like a toy.

• 1:44:54Speaker 06

  Podcasting is a visual medium.

• 1:44:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:56Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:44:56Speaker 04

  It's like a children's toy.

• 1:44:57Ed Zitron?

  I see some paper.

• 1:44:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:58Ed Zitron?

  I see, I see a.

• 1:44:59Speaker 04

  There's two boxes and I'm opening one right now.

• 1:45:02Ed Zitron?

  This is, it's like a little green box.

• 1:45:04Speaker 04

  Little green magnet. I said, what is the, it's agentic AI. I said, what's the agent part? He's like, oh, you know, if you want a girlfriend.

• 1:45:10Ed Zitron?

  Can I see this?

• 1:45:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:11Ed Zitron?

  Can I see this? Thank you.

• 1:45:13Speaker 04

  AI Pi.

• 1:45:14Ed Zitron?

  Okay, this is just a box with a connector on it.

• 1:45:16Speaker 04

  That's a TF2 memory.

• 1:45:18Ed Zitron?

  The other box.

• 1:45:19Speaker 04

  We're about to see.

• 1:45:20Ed Zitron?

  This is just a battery, man. I'm gonna be honest.

• 1:45:22Speaker 04

  No, it is.

• 1:45:23Ed Zitron?

  There's no agent in there. Like, well, I'm disappointed.

• 1:45:26Speaker 04

  Looking hard enough.

• 1:45:27Ed Zitron?

  Down. Now, the Rabbit R1 was an NFT project that I wrote like a huge piece about because they're fucking fake NFT thing. But I like that we have, we should have, you want, if you want to do fake, you have to go all the way. Because this is, Pickle has the most glossy website. It's like the most like sheen filled website. It looks so professional.

• 1:45:46Speaker 06

  On mobile, it just keeps going.

• 1:45:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's an endless fucking. And they're just like, yeah, it'll do everything now. I feel you fucking pig. But it's, it just made me look at it. You look at that and you're like, wow, this looks very, is it just?

• 1:45:58Speaker 04

  This is another battery.

• 1:45:59Ed Zitron?

  Opening the box again and there's just.

• 1:46:02Speaker 04

  There's something on.

• 1:46:03Ed Zitron?

  There's, it looks like another battery, but it's blue.

• 1:46:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. But it's blue. It's got a screen, a tiny little Tamagotchi screen.

• 1:46:10Speaker 06

  Now we're cooking.

• 1:46:11Ed Zitron?

  Okay, so this thing is, I'm just going to describe this to you. It says X, X Origin, Z Origin.

• 1:46:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:46:16Ed Zitron?

  Z Origin. They're calling it Z Origin. It's Z Origin.

• 1:46:21Speaker 04

  Not to be confused with Huawei.

• 1:46:22Ed Zitron?

  Okay, I hit the button and it's like flashing blue. And it is doing nothing else.

• 1:46:27Speaker 04

  You have to, you have, you gotta put them together.

• 1:46:30Ed Zitron?

  I put them together.

• 1:46:31Speaker 04

  Okay, you put them together and then when API, AI PI, when the AI Pi.

• 1:46:37Ed Zitron?

  AI Pi.

• 1:46:37Speaker 04

  Connected only to the battery module, press the power button briefly.

• 1:46:41Ed Zitron?

  Okay, I pressed the power button briefly and it went blue.

• 1:46:43Speaker 04

  After the white light turns on.

• 1:46:45Ed Zitron?

  Oh, the white light turns on. Okay, so this is great for a audio media, I realize. The thing is about this is it's like, this is just too.

• 1:46:54Speaker 04

  It looks like we're playing with smart Legos. Yeah. Which is a thing of the earth.

• 1:46:58Speaker 06

  Yes. It's really hard to describe how underwhelming.

• 1:47:01Ed Zitron?

  It is just like a tiny box. It's just, it's the crap show now because, but when you read about the Pickle, it's funny, especially after a day of looking at actual smart glasses where everything is just blurry. And the guy was like, oh, what are you seeing? And it was, I, I, I think, what were those ones? Was that the TCL booth? I think I saw them. Is that one was, it was like $1,200 and it didn't really work very well. And you had to control it by, these people don't use products, I think, because it's like, yeah, you just like. Rub your finger across the top right part of it. And it was like a picture of Leonardo da Vinci and it was like photos. And you could take video with it. And I had to walk away because all I could think of the back of my head was I just want to ask him what the fucking point of any of this is.

• 1:47:46Ed Zitron?

  But I think I would have turned into Werner Herzog. You make me put this device on my face and it takes me away from humanity and then you steal my money for it. But I was just decided not to do the bit there. It's just, I'm, I'm really this whole time have been trying to rack my brains of why I would ever want. Because I like the idea of a heads up display. I think the idea of walking around, being able to pull one up. But all of these things seem to run into the same thing, which is they want to be constantly on.

• 1:48:11Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:48:12Ed Zitron?

  They don't want to, they don't seem to want to be like things you briefly look at. They want to absorb your attention fully. And it just doesn't feel like any device does that other than the phone. And the phone doing it doesn't seem to be for good reasons either.

• 1:48:25Speaker 12

  Or with good results.

• 1:48:26Ed Zitron?

  Or with good results, yeah.

• 1:48:27Speaker 12

  Yeah. So I've been using the X Real one S, I believe.

• 1:48:31Ed Zitron?

  Okay, what's that like?

• 1:48:32Speaker 12

  It's the newest and it's good. It's what I like about it is it will meet you where your posture is, especially if your posture is like, let's say I'm in my hotel and I might want to play a video game on my like whatever portable. Uh, the Legion Go S, Steam OS, but I don't want to hold this thing. I was just on a flight for a while.

• 1:48:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:48:49Speaker 12

  I'm tired, but I put these glasses on, I had the.

• 1:48:52Ed Zitron?

  And it's just a TV screen effectively?

• 1:48:53Speaker 12

  It basically puts the screen above you and you can move it and you can just have the controller in your hands. And sure, I feel like I'm in Wally's origin stories.

• 1:49:02Ed Zitron?

  Right, right.

• 1:49:02Speaker 12

  At some point, but in that case, and if I had managed to pack it correctly on the airplane, which I couldn't because everybody goes to CS over packs. It's the problem, but like, no, I think X Real is one of these companies and they're doing a bunch of different partnerships. They're working with seemingly everybody possible, which you sort of want if like you want cross compatibility, right?

• 1:49:22Ed Zitron?

  I wouldn't, but I went to the X Real booth and I was, I was kind of excited to go over there because I thought these are just going to be glasses that are little TVs in your eyes. And I'm like way less, they're way more offensive things on the show. And I get there and there's just a fucking thing that says vibe agent. And I try and they're like, you could book a demo. I'm like, you don't wanna see, you don't wanna put me in a box with this fucking thing. Only one of us is leaving.

• 1:49:43Speaker 12

  Who is a vibe agent?

• 1:49:44Ed Zitron?

  I don't know. I don't know. It's a Vivance. Vivance agent. It's a Vivance agent. I, I take methylphenidate. It's, it's fine. I'm trying to find this thing because it was so bizarre to me. That they're just putting these words to, it's like vibe description at this point, like AI agent glasses, fucking, fucking.

• 1:50:03Speaker 12

  Slop.

• 1:50:04Ed Zitron?

  And then I.

• 1:50:04Speaker 12

  They should just say slop.

• 1:50:06Ed Zitron?

  It's just text slop. And I saw a guy, one of the demo guys, very overly eager fella, was like, yeah, I call these my Tony Stark glasses. And I tried to use them as like, sir, there's a line and there was like a 25 person line. I'm just like. This is just, I don't, lining up for anything feels deranged here.

• 1:50:23Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:50:23Ed Zitron?

  And I always think the same thing, which is if you had double the amounts of these, you would be fine. Maybe they're trying to do, like they're trying to make it so that scarcity is the, like, oh, why is everyone lining up for this? Maybe they're just trying to put friction between people and the products. They, they just don't fucking work that well. Is there, there must be AI shit in this. It said agents.

• 1:50:43Speaker 12

  No, no, I, I wonder was the, were there, was, where was this? Cause like, were there two booths?

• 1:50:49Ed Zitron?

  It was in the, um, it was in the, uh, what's it called? The South Hall, I believe.

• 1:50:54Speaker 12

  Cause I've been going, cause I've been.

• 1:50:56Ed Zitron?

  Maybe it was an X-ray.

• 1:50:58Speaker 12

  They are, I, I will say the words AI slop as many times as I feel like it. And I don't think I've seen that much AI, if any.

• 1:51:06Ed Zitron?

  Ready, Reddit thread here.

• 1:51:08Speaker 12

  Okay.

• 1:51:08Ed Zitron?

  Saying the instant translation, visual assistant, object recognition, productivity boost, quickly access charts reminders or instructions while you do something else.

• 1:51:18Speaker 12

  Yeah. And it's, and it's an X-ray product.

• 1:51:19Ed Zitron?

  Here we go. Project Aura. It feels like tomorrow. Jesus fucking Christ. It's on Android XR, hands-free control. Feels like tomorrow.

• 1:51:29Speaker 12

  Oh yeah, I see it. Yeah. It's um, an unlocked early access. Yeah, this is not something I have gotten my hands on yet.

• 1:51:36Speaker 04

  Why didn't they say it looks like tomorrow?

• 1:51:39Ed Zitron?

  I, I don't know.

• 1:51:40Speaker 04

  Wouldn't that be better?

• 1:51:41Speaker 12

  Because feel is something you feel.

• 1:51:43Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I see.

• 1:51:45Speaker 12

  Looks can be deceiving.

• 1:51:47Speaker 04

  Yes, it might not look like tomorrow.

• 1:51:49Speaker 12

  Also, look is the signature weasel word when you're not really able to commit to anything yet.

• 1:51:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:54Speaker 12

  It looks like, OpenAI looks like it could be a company that isn't lying to us.

• 1:51:58Speaker 04

  But then why doesn't feel get that?

• 1:52:01Ed Zitron?

  It's just like, I keep seeing this thing of like, this, they have this imaginary person who is just looking around going, what's that? What's that? What's that? What's that dude? What's that? What's that object? What's that?

• 1:52:11Speaker 04

  But then you come here and you do see that person, that, but the person is on the floor.

• 1:52:15Speaker 06

  Or hordes of them. That photo that Ed posted of, of just like the horde trying to like break in at 10 a.m.

• 1:52:22Speaker 04

  Oh my God. Yeah. Did I, did I send you guys a picture like that?

• 1:52:26Speaker 06

  You posted the photo of the people like trying to break into the, the show floor.

• 1:52:30Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I had the same thing. I was like, is it always like this?

• 1:52:34Ed Zitron?

  No, I, and I said out loud, I'm like, what are you so excited about?

• 1:52:37Speaker 04

  I saw a crowd, the largest crowd I've seen yet in any CS around a Roomba, a new Roomba device. That wasn't a Roomba, but like a Roomba.

• 1:52:47Ed Zitron?

  Roomba-esque.

• 1:52:48Speaker 04

  And I was like, what?

• 1:52:50Speaker 12

  At least that's a proven product category.

• 1:52:52Speaker 04

  Like you said, you know, that is something that works.

• 1:52:55Ed Zitron?

  Every year, and like last year, they, I didn't check out the robot vacuums this year, but I remember last year they were like, we've got little arms that can pick stuff up. I did, that actually led me to one of the funniest things. I'm sure that this was for like legitimate reasons. There was a robot vacuum company where you could pick up a cleaning struggle. It said, one, pick your struggle. Two, drop your coin. Three, get your magna.

• 1:53:15Speaker 04

  You are now entering the cleaning struggles.

• 1:53:17Ed Zitron?

  And, and then it just said, A, dust always hides under low furniture. Hair always gets tangled in the brush. Too busy, no time to clean. Cleaning requires too much disassembly. I, there are times when I want to know more and there are times when I just read something. I'm like, yeah, that's all I need.

• 1:53:31Speaker 06

  You know, but like, this is, the issue is that you can fully automate a task, but like the robot will need to be maintained.

• 1:53:36Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:36Speaker 06

  Like, do you want to, you're sort of trading one thing for the other. And again, with like consumers, people will buy the thing because they're like, oh, I'm lazy. I don't want to, I don't want to, you know, I to- totally get that, but they don't think that what they're doing is they're trading like the occasional sweep or vacuum of their floor for like, you know, maintaining this complex machine with like lidar and like.

• 1:53:56Ed Zitron?

  I have a fucking robo rock. If you're listening from RoboRock, your shit sucks.

• 1:54:01Speaker 04

  That's what it was. It was RoboRock. It was big, giant, black and red pavilion.

• 1:54:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a quite expensive RoboRock and the dust that that shit doesn't pick up. I don't do that shit with a fucking swear. The fact I have to clean up after my robot. At this point, just make it do little turds. Make it a game.

• 1:54:18Speaker 04

  It's on AI lawnmower.

• 1:54:20Ed Zitron?

  An AI lawnmower.

• 1:54:21Speaker 04

  Isn't that interesting?

• 1:54:23Ed Zitron?

  See, that's one where I'm like, I could almost imagine the industrial applications if you just take AI away because robotics has been doing AI for a while.

• 1:54:32Speaker 04

  Another one of the things where it's like, you know, what might be an interesting innovation that I could be sold into or pitched? They glom AI onto it and then I'm like, I don't know.

• 1:54:41Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I don't want to touch it. Even though it was already out, because you've already had like iRobot doing like gutter cleaners and shit.

• 1:54:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, any, anything like that, whether it's a, like the lawnmowers or like pool cleaners is another class of like actually useful robots. That, that, that work. I mean, that's, that was AI before.

• 1:55:00Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:55:00Speaker 06

  They just didn't have to call it AI.

• 1:55:03Ed Zitron?

  They didn't have to say world models.

• 1:55:05Speaker 04

  I saw hearing aids that were just, they were literally just hearing aids and they made some improvements. And they are throwing AI, but then you ask them about it and it's like the technology that like you said, last generation, they're already using. You know, algorithmic systems to try to improve your ability to hear things at distance.

• 1:55:21Ed Zitron?

  It's just like, I'm now thinking you just chop the word AI off and it would be fine. But did you see any robot vacuums or I'm gonna have to chase these fuckers down myself?

• 1:55:30Speaker 12

  I am not the one covering the robo vacuum on the team. I just saw the dancing AGI robot.

• 1:55:37Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, okay. Talk to me about this goddamn thing.

• 1:55:39Speaker 12

  It danced like me at my, the first wedding I ever went to when I was 10 years old. And it was unfortunately named AGI bot. And I'm like, no, this isn't actually, this is doing a pre rehearsed routine. Like, why are we? Words have meaning, or at least they should. So it's like, I.

• 1:55:55Ed Zitron?

  I will kick that thing so hard it flies.

• 1:55:58Speaker 12

  There were two of them, so they might try to come at you from both sides.

• 1:56:00Ed Zitron?

  I've been boxing for years. I'll take those fuckers out, no problem.

• 1:56:04Speaker 04

  And we have weapons.

• 1:56:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:06Speaker 04

  Robots don't have weapons.

• 1:56:07Ed Zitron?

  Robots don't have weapons and they don't have friends.

• 1:56:10Speaker 06

  They don't have dance moves, apparently.

• 1:56:11Speaker 12

  But the Boston Dynamics people have made people afraid, which is the whole thing where this, that's

• 1:56:16Ed Zitron?

  They made some people afraid.

• 1:56:18Speaker 12

  Well, no, that's the thing where most people engage with the idea of like the robot that will do anything is one social video, they solve a Boston Dynamics thing three years ago.

• 1:56:26Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:56:26Speaker 12

  And then that's informed them to think, oh, shit, I gotta be careful about everything from now on.

• 1:56:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:31Speaker 12

  But when you look at it, it's like, oh, it's trying to serve a press demo.

• 1:56:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, those are all highly rehearsed as well.

• 1:56:36Ed Zitron?

  What's it a demo for? What is the purpose of the dancing robot?

• 1:56:41Speaker 12

  To disarm you. Impressing you and getting your money to invest in it.

• 1:56:45Speaker 06

  So the very first chatbot was created in the, in the sixties and

• 1:56:49Ed Zitron?

  Eliza?

• 1:56:49Speaker 06

  Eliza, yeah. And so this Eliza effect, I think so much of what we see here is driven by sort of different versions of that, which is where you show people something, doing a task that they've only ever seen a human do before.

• 1:57:02Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:57:03Speaker 06

  Dancing or mowing a lawn or whatever else. And because like our only metaphor for intelligence is humans, we automatically leap to this must be a human level of intelligence.

• 1:57:14Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:57:14Speaker 06

  This is what, this is what has fueled Tesla's autopilot.

• 1:57:17Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that makes sense that, yeah, it's like, if we make it seem human adjacent, they'll just fill in the gaps. That's what they've done with LLMs.

• 1:57:23Speaker 06

  And, and exactly right. And, and what this does is this, it locks you into this mode. Again, we've seen 10 years of this with Tesla autopilot where it's like, it's getting better, it's getting better, it's getting better, it's getting better, it's getting better. But like, what's getting better is the illusion.

• 1:57:36Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 1:57:37Speaker 06

  And, and what, what the is completely like left out of this entire framework for engaging with, with any kind of automation technology is the, is the fact that at some point it becomes actually useful. There's actually real value. And with autonomous vehicles, it's really simple when that point is, it's when the company says, we take legal responsibility for this system.

• 1:57:57Ed Zitron?

  And they never will.

• 1:57:58Speaker 06

  Uh, well, Waymo does. Zooks does.

• 1:58:00Speaker 12

  Do they actually take?

• 1:58:00Speaker 06

  Of course. There's no, yeah, there's no, there's no, there's no human in them. I mean, the Zookses that are running around the strip and the, and the Waymos that are all over the bay. There's no, there's no human in them to take responsibility. It's, it's all.

• 1:58:12Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I suppose that's right. Yeah. I mean, what about the robot taxis in, in Austin? Oh, they still got people in them?

• 1:58:18Speaker 06

  Those have someone in the, in the passenger seat. But no, I mean, in Texas, like, those are technically considered to be autonomous vehicles.

• 1:58:24Ed Zitron?

  By, by Texan autonomy laws.

• 1:58:27Speaker 06

  I mean, yeah, which are essentially non-existent.

• 1:58:29Ed Zitron?

  Nice. That's good. That's, that's really.

• 1:58:31Speaker 06

  It's funny, when you actually pull up the Tesla robot taxi app, it says, if your ride is in Texas, it's autonomous. If your ride is in California, it's not.

• 1:58:40Ed Zitron?

  And it's the same experience.

• 1:58:41Speaker 06

  I mean, it's the same thing. Yeah.

• 1:58:42Ed Zitron?

  Very fucking cool. Have you used, have you used Zooks yet here?

• 1:58:46Speaker 06

  So I had to ride with Zooks a year ago at CES.

• 1:58:49Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:58:49Speaker 06

  Um, so I haven't, so that was cool, but I was, you know, I was with the, with the CTO. It was like sort of a whole thing. Uh, and to be perfectly honest, like at the time I was like, this, it's a very, it's, it's the only product that you can kind of ride in right now that is designed from the ground up to not just be a car.

• 1:59:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Cause it's like an empty room with wheels.

• 1:59:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. And so.

• 1:59:06Ed Zitron?

  That's good. That's kind of cool. So the Docklands Light Railway.

• 1:59:08Speaker 06

  And it's perfect for the strip. And like, for a long time, the AV space was like, AV companies were like, ah, we can't like market on the novelty of this because it's like such a serious thing. We're going to conquer the world. And, and like, one of the cool things that's happened is that there's been so much like struggle to get this stuff to market that now it's sort of like, well, fuck, it is, it is novelty, right? Like this is just a cooler way to ride down the strip to the club or to the, you know, casino or to this, that.

• 1:59:32Ed Zitron?

  To the gun shop.

• 1:59:33Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, and like, I think that's fine. I don't know. I don't know how they're making money doing it. And I don't know.

• 1:59:38Ed Zitron?

  That's actually a, are any of these companies making any money?

• 1:59:41Speaker 06

  No, the robot taxi companies are not yet making money.

• 1:59:43Ed Zitron?

  Why are they bleeding so much?

• 1:59:45Speaker 06

  Well, because it's extremely expensive. I mean, each one of these, well, so each one of the vehicles, so like, you know, we, we work with estimates. Uh, but you know, best estimates for like a Waymo is, you know, two to $300,000 a vehicle.

• 1:59:56Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:59:57Speaker 06

  Uh, and then the operating costs are very high. We don't, we know very little about, um, like how many, how many miles can they go, right? Because they're, they're these electric vehicles.

• 2:00:05Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:00:06Speaker 06

  And they're powered by, you know, they're powering not just the, the drive, but also all this lidar and radar and compute and all those other things. So like the utilization, how many rides can it give before it has to go back and, and charge? Well, I mean, we, I, apparently they're, they're burning somewhere on the order of $2 billion a year.

• 2:00:22Ed Zitron?

  Jesus fucking Christ. Is that from, but is that from purchasing more of them?

• 2:00:27Speaker 06

  That is, they're scaling very aggressively.

• 2:00:29Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:00:30Speaker 06

  And, and they're also, they're continuing to use most of the, so, so they were ready to, to sort of start bringing in this vehicle from China, which was using fewer sensors. Uh, and so really bringing the cost down. And then of course tariffs screwed that up.

• 2:00:41Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:00:42Speaker 06

  I think they've got that back on track based on my conversations here. So, you know, I think they're, I, look, I, I think Waymo will get to a point where, where they will, you know, have a viable business. I think they're raising, I've heard 15 billion dollars right now to, to get to IPO.

• 2:00:55Ed Zitron?

  We're running out of money. We're running out of money. I swear to fucking god, we're gonna, we're gonna run out of money.

• 2:00:59Speaker 06

  Liquidity in 2026 is gonna be wild because, yeah, the, Waymo is not the only company that needs to, to raise money. There's huge IPO, oh, is SpaceX, OpenAI.

• 2:01:08Ed Zitron?

  OpenAI is not gonna fucking IPO.

• 2:01:10Speaker 06

  I don't know any of them. I don't think SpaceX is gonna IPO next year.

• 2:01:13Ed Zitron?

  I think SpaceX could.

• 2:01:15Speaker 06

  I'm a, I'm pretty, I'm pretty, I mean, we'll see.

• 2:01:17Ed Zitron?

  You'd know better than I would.

• 2:01:19Speaker 06

  Prove me wrong. I mean, look, uh, you know, I think, I think SpaceX, like Tesla, has the kernel of a real business there with the, with the, the Falcon nine launch program. It's the most cost effective way to get into orbit.

• 2:01:29Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:01:30Speaker 06

  The basic critique that I have, and again, like, you know, make the numbers public. I go, I hope they go public because we'll see the numbers.

• 2:01:36Ed Zitron?

  Now, I, that's, yeah, this is why I wanna, I want Anthropic and OpenAI to go public so bad. No, to just file. Let me look. I just know, let me look under the hood. Yeah. Let me, let me see how much you're burning because I bet it's a lot. I mean, I was talking to you about this off, off air, but there's two Chinese AI companies that are going public, ZUG and Minimax, I think they're called, forget, saw someone on the email and Sam wrong on that one. But they, um, I think one of them makes like 35 million dollars in revenue a month and spends 200 billion, uh, 200 million even, sorry. You got it. Yeah. And that you gotta spend money to lose money, I guess. But I, I think that, you know what? If this is the year when we finally get some clarity over that, I'd be really happy.

• 2:02:17Speaker 06

  Well, and and I mean, just in terms of Elon Musk, I mean, like, uh, XAI burned, what, like 14 billion, 13 billion?

• 2:02:23Ed Zitron?

  Did they?

• 2:02:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, and and like, he's made this whole, his whole thing work for a long time by, you know, he's really good at raising money, but then also.

• 2:02:31Speaker 04

  They just raised a round today.

• 2:02:32Ed Zitron?

  Did they?

• 2:02:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:02:34Ed Zitron?

  That's nice.

• 2:02:34Speaker 04

  It's easy, I think.

• 2:02:35Speaker 06

  The the level of burn has that that XAI itself, which has no profitable business to it, uh, is like dramatically higher. Tesla's always lost, or not always, but almost always lost money.

• 2:02:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:49Speaker 06

  But like, they they could mitigate that loss, and they could kind of string it along and go a couple of years between fundraising rounds. But this is, yeah, 10 plus billion dollars a year. Um, Elon's empire is is really fragile, even without that kind of cash burn. And so I think 2026 is.

• 2:03:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, they they raised 20 billion dollars.

• 2:03:07Speaker 04

  Suzie.

• 2:03:08Ed Zitron?

  Vela Equity Partners steps, yeah. Uh, fidelity, fidelity management, fell for it again award.

• 2:03:14Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 2:03:14Ed Zitron?

  Um, uh, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and Baron Capital Group, among other key partners. Investors in the round include Nvidia and Cisco. We're doing the doc, we're doing the dot com boom again. Folks, we love the dot com boom.

• 2:03:30Speaker 06

  Okay, well, so they they got.

• 2:03:31Ed Zitron?

  We love raising money.

• 2:03:32Speaker 06

  They got a couple of years of burn now.

• 2:03:33Ed Zitron?

  And guess what? Uh, tw- do they?

• 2:03:35Speaker 06

  Well, maybe a year.

• 2:03:36Ed Zitron?

  20 billion dollars, uh, data centers. XAI continues to expand its decisive compute advantage. World's largest AI supercomputer is at Colossus One, barely built, and Colossus Two, not built at all, ending the year with over 1 million H100 GPU equivalents. Now, for the non-technical audience, that's just a lot of GPUs so they can generate CSAM, I guess. But my favorite part of this is, um, Grok 4 Series, our frontier language models are built on the best-in-class training infrastructure powered by Colossus. They've pushed reinforcement learning training to unprecedented levels, re- refining Grok's intelligence reasoning and agency using pre-training scale compute. What'd you train on? You've been generating child porn.

• 2:04:13Speaker 06

  I mean.

• 2:04:14Ed Zitron?

  No, that's the.

• 2:04:15Speaker 04

  A large data set.

• 2:04:16Speaker 06

  But what's the product too? Like, what's the, what's the revenue?

• 2:04:19Ed Zitron?

  Oh, sorry. They don't have that here. They don't have that. They, they will say though, our reach spans approximately 600 million monthly active users across the X and Croc apps. Bull fucking shit.

• 2:04:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. Getting scales easy when it's free.

• 2:04:31Ed Zitron?

  Also, Twitter doesn't fucking have that many users.

• 2:04:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:04:34Ed Zitron?

  Like, I genuinely don't think they've, they've done that.

• 2:04:37Speaker 06

  Are you suggesting that Elon Musk might be lying?

• 2:04:39Ed Zitron?

  I know, Ed. I know. You're a big Elon Musk fan.

• 2:04:42Speaker 06

  I mean, it's hurtful. It's hurtful to have his credibility question this way.

• 2:04:46Speaker 04

  Charting a path that will spread the light of civilization beyond our planet.

• 2:04:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:53Speaker 04

  I wish every, I wish the listener could see everyone's faces when I said that, even in the.

• 2:04:58Ed Zitron?

  Took a drink when you said that? No, it's, it is, I, I just feel like this is a year of reckonings. I think that that's the thing because sure, they've got $20 billion, but he needs to build fucking Colossus and Colossus 2.

• 2:05:10Speaker 04

  I mean, it's either that or we're gonna get, getting blitzed and in December being like, it's all fucking fraud.

• 2:05:17Ed Zitron?

  But the thing is, but as I've been saying, we're running out of money.

• 2:05:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:05:21Ed Zitron?

  Like, we're running out. $20 billion, whatever.

• 2:05:23Speaker 06

  He wouldn't be talking about a SpaceX IPO if he wasn't desperate.

• 2:05:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, he's.

• 2:05:26Speaker 06

  The value, Elon always has to have. The thing that he dangles out in the deep future and like the Mars, he said so many times, it's like a really important part of the fanboy orthodoxy that like, the mission to Mars is so important that we cannot compromise it by allowing, you know, shareholder value to become an issue with it.

• 2:05:47Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:47Speaker 06

  And, and as long as Elon's the richest guy in the world, like that was totally like, that worked. The moment he started, it is fascinating because the, the vibe has been getting wrecked in the, in the Tesla subreddits for like years now.

• 2:05:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:59Speaker 06

  For a number of reasons. The SpaceX ones really fell this, this last year and the IPO, they were, they were crumbling already, just the number of, of times Starship was exploding and things like that. But the IPO news was the thing that really, I saw these forums start to like actually melt down because. The whole point of all of this is now like Elon can't guarantee it, right? Like if he turns SpaceX over to shareholders, there's no guarantee that the mission happens.

• 2:06:24Ed Zitron?

  I mean, because it was

• 2:06:25Speaker 04

  I wonder how they react also because, you know, didn't he? He said they weren't also doing a series E fundraising round.

• 2:06:32Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, he said that this isn't happening.

• 2:06:33Speaker 04

  But it's also an upside.

• 2:06:34Ed Zitron?

  Fake news.

• 2:06:35Speaker 04

  Round now. It's like, you know, it's even bigger than before. So.

• 2:06:38Ed Zitron?

  What happened to that big Nvidia data center deal, though? The SPV, but that was going to do a special purpose vehicle.

• 2:06:43Speaker 04

  We don't talk about.

• 2:06:44Ed Zitron?

  We don't talk about that SPV shit.

• 2:06:46Speaker 04

  Talk about previous deals.

• 2:06:48Ed Zitron?

  We don't need to.

• 2:06:48Speaker 06

  The valor, the valor.

• 2:06:49Ed Zitron?

  The valor, yeah, it was the, no, it was the $20 billion, $2 billion from Nvidia.

• 2:06:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, Valor was the middleman or they're doing the leaseback or something. But it's all private. So you don't know, like.

• 2:06:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but they, they, did it close?

• 2:07:01Speaker 06

  I think, I think so.

• 2:07:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but that's the thing, like this, or now just getting back into my regular bullshit. There's a $38 billion deal that Oracle has been talking about doing for months. That's disappeared off the thing. I just think the banks are running out of money.

• 2:07:14Speaker 04

  It's so sick also that that deal was talked about so loudly is like, is it? This is going to be a cornerstone of the coming overbuild for compute. This is going to allow us to be able to put ourselves in the lead and ahead of any other competitor.

• 2:07:27Speaker 06

  When I remember people from, from banks saying after the Twitter deal that like that dead debt that they weren't able to get off the books was really starting to impact their ability to fund like, like new deals. And it was really starting to sound like the, especially with banks that have been historically very close. I won't name any names, but, but with Elon, it sounded like the, the magic was, was sort of over. But then AI. It seems like they're, yeah, they're still.

• 2:07:51Ed Zitron?

  No, it's data, it's data centers bullshit. Like it really, it's just the, everyone's so goo goo for data centers these days that they're just like, what if he builds more? The funny, it's also so funny to close this the same week as the fucking CSAM thing. You're like, like, I don't know. If I'm a business journalist and I have any chance of asking anything, I'm like, hey. Fidelity, are you investing in the data centers?

• 2:08:17Speaker 04

  No comment.

• 2:08:18Ed Zitron?

  Or the child porn data? Because that's the thing. It's like, I'm not even being like, I'm not trying to be crass. It's a fucking question.

• 2:08:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:08:24Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Like Bryce Elder, legend from the FT, did a great piece today where it was like, oh, it's like the pornography generator connected to a social network. And it was just a list of all the staff at X, but with clown makeup on.

• 2:08:38Speaker 06

  So good. The FT.

• 2:08:39Ed Zitron?

  Bryce Elder, Alphaville legends. No, it's, it's very funny watching this. And I, he doesn't usually do anything at CES.

• 2:08:48Speaker 06

  No, never.

• 2:08:49Ed Zitron?

  I wish he did. I wish the big companies would fuck this place up a little bit more, just to make it more chaotic.

• 2:08:54Speaker 04

  Listen, one year, you're gonna notice that there's gonna be a South Africa section. And you're gonna see all your favorite, all the stars, Peter Thiel.

• 2:09:04Ed Zitron?

  All the, all the famous South Africans.

• 2:09:06Speaker 04

  Marc Andreessen.

• 2:09:07Ed Zitron?

  Marc Andreessen is not South African.

• 2:09:09Speaker 04

  Oh, right. It's, uh, it's the other motherfucker that I, oh my God, the other bald motherfucker. I always forget.

• 2:09:15Ed Zitron?

  I don't know.

• 2:09:16Speaker 04

  His name will come to me.

• 2:09:16Ed Zitron?

  I'm sure, well, I'm sure the listeners can fill in the gaps. Grumpelshilts, that's his name. I'm calling him that.

• 2:09:23Speaker 04

  But I'm gonna look him up now. It's gonna bother me.

• 2:09:25Ed Zitron?

  All right. I think we're gonna wrap it there, though. Now we've talked about Elon Musk a little bit. This has been such a lovely episode. Thank you all for listening. Ed Ongreso Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter, Ed Niedermeyer of the Autonocast, and of course, Henry Casey of CNN underscored. And as ever, please donate to the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium in honor of Sean Paul Adams, who is a wonderful friend of the suite. Sean Paul's son is epileptic and is family deeply appreciate it. Thanks so much, everyone, for listening. We will be back in a few hours.

• 2:10:02Ed 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.

• 2:10:35Speaker 13

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