CES 2026: Part Five (Wednesday)

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 Wednesday’s second episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Karissa Bell of Engadget, Jared Newman of the Advisorator newsletter, standup comedian and host of the Factually Podcast Adam Conover, Ed Ongweso Jr. of the Tech Bubble Newsletter, Robert Evans of Behind The Bastards and standup comedian and actor Chloe Radcliffe to talk about very slow laundry robots, the return of the pebble watch (and their new ring), robotic assistive technology products, the sloppification of CES, and asking “who cares?” to every single booth. 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/ Karissa Bell https://www.engadget.com/about/editors/karissa-bell/ Jared Newman: https://advisorator.com/members/signup/ https://cordcutterweekly.com/ Chloe Radcliffe: https://www.instagram.com/chloebadcliffe/?hl=en https://punchup.live/chloeradcliffe Robert Evans: https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?l=en-GB Adam Conover: https://www.instagram.com/adamconover/?hl=en www.adamconover.net/tourdates https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates Donate in Sean-Paul’s honor: https://www.perc-epilepsy.org/ https://www.perc-epilepsy.org/ --- 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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• 0:34Speaker 01

  My name is Jessa. One of the things I love the most about working for United Healthcare is that everybody matters. Every moment matters. There's a person behind every problem. I care because it's what I was put on this earth to do.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  I'm Ben and I work at United Healthcare. I am just one piece of a larger puzzle, but every piece matters. It's more than just work. We want to make the healthcare system better for everyone. I care because I want to make a difference. That's what committed to care means to me.

• 1:09Ed Zitron?

  I've crossed oceans of time to bring you this podcast. This is Better Offline's coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show, and I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 1:28Ed Zitron?

  We're back here in the Palazzo in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, bringing you yet another episode covering CES with an incredible core of even more incredible guests. And yes, I wrote it like that. We've got an open bar, tacos, and places to sit down for members of the media, whether they join us on the microphone or not. Those joining me here at Swaggage Claim are the incredible Karissa Bell of Engadget.

• 1:48Speaker 04

  Hello, hello.

• 1:48Ed Zitron?

  And we've, of course, got the impeccable Jared Newman of the Advisorator Newsletter.

• 1:53Speaker 04

  Hey.

• 1:54Ed Zitron?

  Returning guest for several years now. Well, I mean, one year. It's only been one. It just feels like many. And of course, the incredible actress and stand-up comedian Chloe Radcliffe.

• 2:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, fresh off the elliptical in your hotel suite.

• 2:06Ed Zitron?

  One of us is fucking using that. I've been, I've been doing podcasting. So, Karissa, we're going to start with you because you saw something I could not see moving every time I went by. The LG Cloyde Laundry Folding Robot. How was that? You said it here that it folded laundry and served food very slowly. Give me an idea of how slowly.

• 2:27Speaker 04

  Well, there's a TikTok in that story that you can see. And one of the top comments was, it'll take three weeks to do your laundry at this pace.

• 2:34Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  And I don't know if it was slow because for the demo purposes, they're trying to draw it out, make it more dramatic. But it started off with it was at a washing machine and it's trying to pull something out of a hamper, load it into the washing machine. It's, and it just is doing it so slow, but it takes its time kind of picking it up.

• 2:54Ed Zitron?

  Does it have any trouble?

• 2:55Speaker 04

  It doesn't have trouble picking it up, really. It's just, it's not like clear why it takes so long. It's just like, I think the arms are just kind of calculating, maybe like each little movement, slowly puts it in, slowly closes the washing machine door, slowly rolls over to a table where there's like a pile of washcloths, slowly picks one up, slowly starts folding it, like just excruciating.

• 3:19Ed Zitron?

  I love it.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  And then it picks up the folded thing and then it messes up a little bit. Did it fix the mess up? Uh, no, but there was like an LG person, I just saw an arm reach out and they.

• 3:29Ed Zitron?

  But when it, when you say mess it up, how so?

• 3:31Speaker 04

  Like it was folded, like if you imagine something that's very symmetrically folded, and then when it, its robot hand picks it up, like the top corner kind of comes unaligned. Awesome.

• 3:44Ed Zitron?

  How much is this robot? Did they say anything like that?

• 3:47Speaker 04

  Oh, I don't think they're gonna sell it.

• 3:49Ed Zitron?

  Okay. That's always what happens with laundry folding. Yeah, yeah. No, that's like the. There's a rich history of CES and laundry folding. Laundry mate here. Oh, they all went. We love Laundry Mate. Laundry Mate, I think I've been coming to CES 2011. Are they dead finally? They're dead. Yeah. All the, all the 2010s ones are dead. That's, that's, look what they took from us. Um, so yeah, you also said it served food. I'm guessing it also did that weirdly.

• 4:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, walked, uh, roll, sorry, rolled over because it did not have legs. It has like a wheeled kind of robot vacuum. Is it humanoid at all? It has arms and like a head unit.

• 4:22Ed Zitron?

  Take a look at that. Look at that piece of shit.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  A head unit? Yeah, that's what they called it.

• 4:27Speaker 04

  You know, the, the, they're kind of selling this as it works with all of LG's appliances. So when it rolls over to the fridge, the fridge opens, it pulls out your milk, rolls over to the table, sets it down.

• 4:38Ed Zitron?

  That's so bad. And like, I'm guessing it would only be compatible with the LG stuff? Is this just a concept?

• 4:46Speaker 04

  Yes, it is a concept. So, I mean, the whole presentation, it kind of felt like watching something at Disneyland.

• 4:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  It was like very high production value. They had this very charismatic presenter, clearly memorizes very tight 15 minute.

• 4:58Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Script that included a video that was playing and they invented this story about this family and how this, how Cloyd is going to help the dad find his keys and help.

• 5:08Ed Zitron?

  Really slowly.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, make the breakfast and you're watching it and you're kind of like, okay, like that's, seems cool that the robot can do this. But then if you read the.

• 5:18Ed Zitron?

  But can it?

• 5:19Speaker 04

  Well, if you read the press release, what they say is, well, you know, we're really interested in moving more into robotics technology, but they don't say anything about actually making Cloyd, selling it. The only thing that they mentioned is robotic sized appliances, like fridge doors that open automatically or oven doors. So I feel like they're selling us the robot, but what they're actually going to sell is just like a fridge that can open by itself.

• 5:41Speaker 05

  Like a fridge with a trunk off of a new SUV.

• 5:45Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  Click the button on it.

• 5:46Ed Zitron?

  But no, no, you have to get like the $7,000 LG one that you can kick to open.

• 5:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's that, these things are, I just want the coldest possible Diet Coke. Is that too much to ask?

• 5:57Speaker 04

  Also, is its name Cloyd?

• 5:59Ed Zitron?

  C L O I D, but the I is small for some reason. I just, it's so strange to do this thing. And it got all the headlines and everyone's going, robot, this is the year of robotics at CES. And the most famous one is not being released.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  No.

• 6:14Ed Zitron?

  And if you, it's great. You can have breakfast ready if you started at 1 a.m. Like just like this incredibly, like Henry Casey kind of put it as like the sloth from Zootopia. Just fucking, yeah, yeah. It's so strange. What a strange thing to do. Cause if that worked much faster, it would be kind of cool. And that's the yes. Um, but it's like, it's just not being released. They just, why show it?

• 6:39Speaker 04

  I mean, I think you said it. They got all the headlines. It looks cool. I think they're trying to show off that, you know, you said everyone's saying that this is the year of a lot of robots who are trying to, we're finally seeing that some of them are capable of kind of doing these tasks, but these companies aren't yet ready or able or willing to actually make this into real products. Like, I think it's probably just not feasible. This thing is huge.

• 7:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. How big was it?

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Um, I would say it's, I didn't get close to it because it was sort of behind like a rope line and you could line up for like a selfie, but I booked it out of the booth before that. I think it's taller than I am.

• 7:16Speaker 05

  I'm realizing, I actually think I saw, I don't think I saw the laundry demo, or I saw, I saw some portion of the demo because what I noticed about it, and now this is the different perspectives that we come at it from, I was like, wow, all of these robotics companies and, and, you know, electronics companies just wind up hiring these very hot actors who are very charming to run the demo.

• 7:41Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 7:41Speaker 05

  Because the guy, I don't know if the guy who was, I don't know if there was a person helping with the laundry and food demo, but there was a guy who was like doing this demo as I walked by very quick and he's this fucking gorgeous man.

• 7:51Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  Being like, hey, Cloyd, do you, anything else that you can do to help me make my life easier? And it's like, yeah, of, I guess, I guess.

• 8:00Ed Zitron?

  Cloyd, shrink my shirt.

• 8:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, truly, it's like, Cloyd, do you want to come over here and touch my pecs? It's like, and you really sort of do watch it and you're like, I guess I want to fuck the humans, so maybe I will buy the robot. It seems to sort of be the vibe of these demos.

• 8:16Ed Zitron?

  You cannot do either.

• 8:17Speaker 05

  No, can't do either.

• 8:18Ed Zitron?

  Oh, you might be able to.

• 8:19Speaker 05

  But yeah, it is, it's a big robot.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that's why I said it's kind of like being at Disneyland.

• 8:25Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Where like they have this like very nice, very carefully orchestrated demo that they set up and it's like watching a little movie of what they are trying to say is going to be the future, I guess. And when you're watching it, you're like, oh, that's, that's pretty neat. Like all that look works together. The robot rolled over there. Look, it found its, that guy's keys. But then you like, think about it for a second and you realize that. No, they're not actually going to have that.

• 8:50Ed Zitron?

  It's like a very clean house, which is traditionally not where you lose your keys.

• 8:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:55Ed Zitron?

  It's not like you lose it in an empty room and you're like, oh, it's in the corner, not underneath something.

• 9:00Speaker 05

  And also, if the way that the robot is going to be able to find the keys is by having something like an air tag on the keys that the robot is connecting to, we have that.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  And also, the robot doesn't have legs. So if your keys are upstairs, it can't help you.

• 9:15Speaker 05

  It's very mall cop on a Segway coated where you can just get up onto a curb and obey it.

• 9:21Ed Zitron?

  Like a dolly. So you also saw this switch bot, switch bot, which also.

• 9:27Speaker 06

  They have a laundry folding robot.

• 9:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. How's that? Have you seen?

• 9:29Speaker 06

  I saw that one too.

• 9:30Ed Zitron?

  What happened?

• 9:31Speaker 06

  Well, I didn't see it fold laundry. So they, cause they, they had it out and they had a, like a bench with a few like rumpled pieces of clothes on. I was like, great. I'm going to see it fold laundry. This is what I came here for. And it stood there for like five minutes doing nothing. And then, and then it very slowly rolled over to one piece of laundry. And I was like, great. It's going to fold the laundry. It very slowly picked up the piece of laundry and then very slowly moved over to the, to the washing machine. And put the garment in the washing machine very slowly and then very slowly closed the door and then waited another five minutes. And then went over to another garment and did the exact same thing, one at a time, each individual piece of laundry. It went to put in the laundry machine.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  And didn't fold any of them. So I don't know.

• 10:19Ed Zitron?

  You know, this is like a heavily prepped demo. They've had to go through a lot, like the Boston Dynamics videos where they like show the robot working, 100 takes. 100 takes where the robot just like rolls on its back somehow like explodes. I love this. I love that they're trying to pretend. It's just like fraud. Like there's, there's something very fraudulent about this. Like the robots are here. Yes, they're here. But are they able to do anything? Yes, kind of. If I needed someone to very slowly put laundry in my washing machine and eventually do it.

• 10:52Speaker 05

  Like.

• 10:52Ed Zitron?

  I would be myself.

• 10:53Speaker 05

  I was gonna say, I stand first five minutes completely still resisting folding laundry and then slowly move one shirt.

• 10:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Yeah. Does the robot look at its phone and scroll Instagram for like 17 minutes before it puts in one T-shirt? And does it, can you program it to leave the washing in the washing machine and forget to do?

• 11:11Speaker 06

  It has to do like a visibly heavy sigh before it starts.

• 11:17Speaker 05

  This is the most drama that folding laundry has ever been the recipient of.

• 11:21Ed Zitron?

  Other than in like a deteriorating relationship.

• 11:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there it's like a symbol of drama. This you're you're like, I this is the one thing I came here to see.

• 11:31Ed Zitron?

  And I it was torn because I was like, how long can I wait to see if it actually it was was it gonna run the laundry? And then I had to wait for it to come out. So. Just looking at this video, it's also like got a very strange, long body with like, I got like with the arms. That is cute, but it's also like, if I saw this in my home, it would chill me every day. I'd never get used to seeing this like Slenderman robot. Yeah, it looks a little dead behind the eyes. If you'd seen that. Yeah, it has like these weird like the the chows from Sonic Adventure. There we are. There's all 18 people who got that.

• 12:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's just.

• 12:04Speaker 04

  To their credit, they did tell me that they are planning to sell it.

• 12:06Ed Zitron?

  Wow.

• 12:07Speaker 04

  Towards the end of 2026.

• 12:08Speaker 05

  Wait, Cloyd or that one?

• 12:10Speaker 04

  That one, Switchbot, the Thunderman.

• 12:11Ed Zitron?

  Cloyd will never leave the LG, the LG prison. They put it in. Ah, did you see any working robots either of you? One? I saw the fighting robot. Right. And I saw that guy's dog shit form when he was fighting it, just like no, didn't plant his feet at all. Pathetic. Yeah. Well, what was the purpose of that? Are you meant to fight it? Is it like a boxing robot? It was it also danced and I think it was just like one of those general like, look at all these things that this robot can do. It feels like what they sell on Black Friday. Like, is that the one that I see in like various Instagram videos where it's just like running into a wall? There was a sign that said $5,000, so I guess you could just buy it.

• 12:52Speaker 05

  And honestly, that feels like you can haggle.

• 12:55Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. It's one of those at CES like things.

• 13:00Ed Zitron?

  I'll give you $35. Like, like, you can take a tax loss. I will take this, whatever this is. I'm beating the fuck out of it regardless. The weirdest category of stuff at CES is the things that you can buy at CES. Like the massage chairs, like the wonderful massage chair. I actually did see on the way through CES to get back here, I found a chair, a massage chair company called Dr. Boss. And it just says, so do you have any problems with your spine? And spine is in blue bold letters. And then there were like three or four spaces with a question mark. I love them. I love the weird massage chair companies. I was mentioning earlier episode, they scam you. They're like, yeah, I got a special CES deal. It's like, you don't. Yeah. You, you have like 7,000% margins on this. You're just like, everyone is defrauded. Yeah.

• 13:45Ed Zitron?

  Any working robots of any kind? Cause even last year, I thought I saw working ones.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  There was a TikTok dancing robot.

• 13:53Speaker 06

  There was one that does a rock, paper, scissors against you and it wins every time.

• 13:57Speaker 05

  Cause it can detect right as you're about to do it.

• 14:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was actually like, it was like a cheating robot. Cause it was like a second behind your gesture. Yeah. It just looked at what you're doing. And that was like, all right, I'm going to do the other thing.

• 14:08Speaker 05

  Oh, stop blows.

• 14:11Ed Zitron?

  What the fuck is the point? I'm sorry, I've been trying this whole week to find good stuff. And every time I'm like, it's the year of the robots. Let's look at the robots. You can't.

• 14:19Speaker 05

  How many other years has it been the year of robotics?

• 14:23Ed Zitron?

  I actually don't know.

• 14:24Speaker 06

  That's a great question.

• 14:25Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I don't think.

• 14:25Speaker 05

  Like, that feels like a headline that has happened before, right?

• 14:28Speaker 06

  I feel like I probably wrote that headline at one point.

• 14:30Ed Zitron?

  I feel like they play with the, they play with the idea occasionally, but it's, there's just something very bizarre about this. I guess it's like, well, we can't claim LLMs do anything. So why don't we lie about something else?

• 14:40Speaker 06

  Okay. Hey, we have robot vacuums. All right.

• 14:42Ed Zitron?

  And the robot vacuums are fine, other than picking up dust in my apartment, apparently. And yeah, I just, I'm very confused. And we discussed this earlier as well, like the robot, they had arms last year and now the robots have legs, like the robot vacuums.

• 14:55Speaker 06

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 14:56Ed Zitron?

  And yeah, I don't know. It's just, it's so weird. It's really weird. Like, I feel like I'm going a little crazy because everyone, I've read tons of articles about like robots, robots. But it sounds like the practical experience is they don't work. They don't do the things or you, and/or you can't buy them.

• 15:10Speaker 06

  It is a very hard problem to solve, like anything involving like limbs and all that. That's why laundry, bro, like I wrote about another laundry folding robot last year. It was one that like their, their idea was like, it was like limp. Lamps and then the lamps are actually robot arms that turn into And they released this like very flashy concept video and a bunch of people pre-ordered it based on just this rendered video that is not actually the robot. And they would not show like a prototype of it actually working.

• 15:42Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 15:42Speaker 06

  And it is, it's just like, uh, there's all these edge cases of any kind of garment you have to pick up and deal with, like getting a, uh, having all the training to deal with all that takes forever and nobody's figured that out yet.

• 15:55Speaker 05

  If, would any of this be solvable if we weren't so committed to having the robots look humanoid?

• 16:00Ed Zitron?

  No.

• 16:01Speaker 05

  Like, like if there was like a big tube, all right, here comes my idea.

• 16:06Speaker 06

  You've cracked the code, it's a big tube.

• 16:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm having an idea right now as a stand-up comedian that no one else here at CES has had. But like, if there was like a big tube and you dumped your clothes in and then somehow there was like a, a vacuum space. Okay, no, that, I don't know. There was somehow a way to like stretch the clothes flat. Like create tension in the fabric, no matter what the shape is. Suspended in the tube. You guys writing this down? Yes, suspended in the tube. Okay, you're with me. I like this. This is good. I've got buy-in so far. And then somehow there could be like a wire that like bisects that and then it at least folds in half. And then like does the same, you know, but like, it's not, it's not a humanoid, it's a machine. It's not a, it's not a.

• 16:47Ed Zitron?

  I just.

• 16:47Speaker 05

  My buddy.

• 16:48Speaker 06

  You even have to identify though, like where the edges of the clothes are and that itself is not easy to do.

• 16:54Ed Zitron?

  It's just lasers. You're describing, it's like, what do we need a robot to do? I could make food for me. Ah, not really. Laundry? Eh, not really. It can do a tic-tac. You wanna be, you wanna see something cheat at rock, paper, scissors? Cause I'm constantly annoyed that I can't find a better person at that, as a rock, paper, scissors champion. I, I have never been able to be defeated by anyone. It's just so fucking weird, but you know what? Changing subjects. Did you find anything you actually liked? Either of you?

• 17:27Speaker 06

  I can go.

• 17:28Ed Zitron?

  Please.

• 17:29Speaker 06

  Pebble.

• 17:30Ed Zitron?

  Okay, okay. I've heard Pebble get mentioned a few times. What was Pebble up to this?

• 17:34Speaker 06

  Uh, well, so they, you know, they're, they're doing new watches. They're back. And it's, you know, it's one of those things that is just like a passion project, which, you know, I feel like,

• 17:43Ed Zitron?

  And I can accept that.

• 17:44Speaker 06

  It's kind of like authentic. It's the same thing with like clicks, you know, it's like these people that, yeah, they know it's not for everybody. They just want this thing to exist and they put it into existence and.

• 17:55Ed Zitron?

  We've got Michael coming on Friday to talk about that.

• 17:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I respect that kind of thing. I think the Pebble watches are great.

• 18:01Ed Zitron?

  So it's just, it's the watches or is there a ring as well?

• 18:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. So, so they're starting with the, the watches and now they have a thing called the index, I believe it's called. Yeah. And you wear it on your index finger and it's basically just a button that you can push to take a note. Uh, and then.

• 18:16Ed Zitron?

  Like a voice note?

• 18:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:17Ed Zitron?

  Do you have to speak into the ring?

• 18:18Speaker 05

  That's cool.

• 18:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:20Ed Zitron?

  Do you have to speak into the ring?

• 18:21Speaker 06

  I think you can, no, I think you can just.

• 18:22Speaker 05

  There's a little microphone in it?

• 18:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 05

  Does it make a noise or can you record people secretly?

• 18:26Speaker 06

  It's not persistent. It's like a push to talk kind of thing.

• 18:29Speaker 05

  Can, but you can break state law.

• 18:31Speaker 06

  Think.

• 18:32Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I think you can break. Not in Nevada, it's a one party state.

• 18:35Speaker 05

  Interesting. In New York, it's a two party consent.

• 18:36Ed Zitron?

  I thought New York was a one party.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  No, I believe in New York because I break it all the time.

• 18:42Ed Zitron?

  It's an NSA Chloe.

• 18:43Speaker 05

  I shouldn't just A admit that on a podcast and then B do an evil laugh after.

• 18:48Ed Zitron?

  Uh, she meant parody. She meant Sidward parody of. But so it's just a record. It doesn't do any health stuff.

• 18:54Speaker 06

  No, there's no health stuff. There's no any of that. And then I think there's like a secondary function where maybe you can like, program some stuff if you wanted to do something else.

• 19:01Ed Zitron?

  How much is it?

• 19:02Speaker 06

  Uh, oh, you're putting me in a spot here. Something like a hundred dollars, seventy five dollars, something like that.

• 19:08Speaker 05

  Is it ugly?

• 19:10Ed Zitron?

  I mean.

• 19:11Speaker 06

  It's presentable. I think. There's a, there's a button on it. So I guess how do you feel about the button?

• 19:16Ed Zitron?

  Thing is, I can see the use for that. Like, I don't like voice notes at all. Like, I don't like hearing myself speak.

• 19:22Speaker 06

  Well, I think it will transcribe the note.

• 19:23Ed Zitron?

  I've never listened to a, a single episode of this show, which everyone listening to this who works at I heart is going to love. And it's like, I can't hear myself speak, but if I could do transcription, I might actually buy it. That'd be the first thing I've seen at CBS where I'm like, I would purchase that.

• 19:37Speaker 06

  Yeah. I think more broadly that, you know, they're just things, their mantras is sort of not even a mantra, but just like, it's this dude. He's done all right for himself in tech and he just like wants to make cool gadgets that he doesn't see in the market and whatever.

• 19:51Ed Zitron?

  I, you know what? I like that.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  I'm reporting, reporting live on the Pebble index ring. It really looks like a ring that somebody is using to record you.

• 19:59Ed Zitron?

  Let me see, let me see. A sketchy ring. Turn this towards me. Oh, yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 05

  Like, it really looks like, no, no, I don't have a microphone in my ring.

• 20:08Ed Zitron?

  It's like, like the hat that Homer Simpson wore with the camera in it, but a ring, like, just like, yeah, I'm just clicking this nondescript giant black button. What are you doing? Nothing.

• 20:20Speaker 05

  It's an awesome idea.

• 20:20Ed Zitron?

  Now say all the crimes you committed. Tell me all your secrets. No, I can't move my thumb. I can't move my thumb at all. I now actually know I'm now gonna start critiquing this. So you have to, is it one you can click once and it'll record? Because if you have to hold it the whole fucking time, that might be. I cannot recall. That's fine. It's, you know what, I mean, even the benefit of the doubt, they wouldn't do something so fucking stupid. Yeah. We're gonna, the fucking stupid.

• 20:43Speaker 05

  It's fun to watch Ed changes.

• 20:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we're like, oh, I like that. No.

• 20:47Speaker 05

  Trashing everything, then hearing something, then like becoming an optimist and then immediately being like, no, no, no, no, no, fuck that.

• 20:53Ed Zitron?

  No, I hate it. That's a good instinct to have, though. No, also, we've got plenty of people who won't. We've got plenty. We've got, we've got fucking sell-side analysts here as well. Karissa, anything you've been enjoying?

• 21:05Speaker 04

  I saw some robotic sneakers that were kind of cool.

• 21:07Ed Zitron?

  Tell me more. What do you mean?

• 21:08Speaker 04

  So they're sneakers that attach to a kind of exoskeleton.

• 21:13Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  And they're meant for people who can't like walk long distances or wanna be able to walk more.

• 21:21Ed Zitron?

  Robert Evans has been using like an exoskeleton, I saw, please tell me more.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, these ones are different because they attach, they attach to a special shoe. And they're battery powered and then you can kind of, it learns your gait the first 20 steps or so. And then as you're walking, it just kind of like pushes you up a little bit. It's a very strange sensation for somebody who doesn't really have, doesn't really have trouble walking. But like three hours later, I was, my feet were hurting so bad after being on them for four or five hours. And I was thinking like, maybe that would like feel kind of good right now.

• 21:51Ed Zitron?

  No, I've got, I've got an ankle injury. That sounds great. I did see another one. And every time I see them, like my hater instinct kicks in. And I'm like, no, actually, this is what technology should do.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:00Ed Zitron?

  That it can help you if you've been walking too much or if you have serious mobility issues.

• 22:05Speaker 04

  The downside is it costs forty five hundred dollars.

• 22:07Ed Zitron?

  That actually doesn't surprise me.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:10Ed Zitron?

  Like that if if I hear that and I'm like, okay, it literally helps people who can't walk much walk. Forty five hundred. I'm like, that's actually reasonable. I did see a few of them, and I'm actually kind of excited.

• 22:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:20Ed Zitron?

  To see that because, I don't know, like, I realize it just went from being a huge hater, but like, I have tons, like several family members with mobility issues, my mom, like, I myself, my ankle, when it gets bad, really gets fucked up and I can't walk, like, literally two weeks ago, I was having problems with my feet. It's quite lovely.

• 22:36Speaker 05

  Well, you are consistent in what you, in what you like and don't like.

• 22:40Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 22:41Speaker 05

  And that is, is there a tangible, describable problem that this is solving?

• 22:47Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 22:48Speaker 05

  And I think the more physical, not necessarily like corporeal, but the more physical a problem, the more you are going to be inclined to like the tech presentation of a solution.

• 22:58Ed Zitron?

  Exactly. And it's like, I think I also, I don't know, I think that's what technology is meant to do. It's meant to allow you to do things you can't do, to streamline things, to to make things easier. That's cool. And there were quite a few of them. I want more of this shit. Like, let those who can't walk. That's if, is there anything more technological than that?

• 23:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, the accessibility stuff is actually kind of interesting. I'm always looking out for that.

• 23:21Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  I was writing about it this year, and so many times it's hard to find anything like that because so much of it is just, yeah, cramming tech into products that don't need it, or, you know, all the the crap that we're used to seeing here, smart belts and just weird stuff. So whenever they're

• 23:36Ed Zitron?

  Belts?

• 23:37Speaker 04

  Do you remember Bellty from like years ago?

• 23:39Speaker 06

  I do kind of remember that, yeah.

• 23:40Ed Zitron?

  Bellty?

• 23:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's called Bellty.

• 23:42Ed Zitron?

  What is Bellty?

• 23:43Speaker 04

  Oh, man, this is from probably like ten years ago. It was a smart belt. Do you remember that year at CES when, like, Internet of Things was kind of just

• 23:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 23:52Speaker 04

  And like, everything was just like a flower pot that's connected to the Internet of this. And it was a belt that I think could automatically adjust, like, as like, maybe you ate more or something?

• 24:03Ed Zitron?

  Oh, God. Okay, that's like, well, sorry, I'm

• 24:08Ed Zitron?

  I have my fifth piece of chicken. Well, actually, we're gonna go back to shit robots, though, because everyone has kind of mentioned AGI Bot or Aggy Bot or however the fuck he says it. And this is the TikTok robot you saw. What was that?

• 24:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there is two, they have two different humanoids. One is a smaller one. That was the dancy one. It has like these bright yellow shoes. They have a larger one that's about About five feet, like my, my height, maybe. Um, and they are humanoid robots. They can walk around. Um, the little one can dance. They have some kind of like AI uh functionality in them. So they're meant like the large one, what they explained to me is that it's meant for kind of like either for businesses, hospitality use cases, like maybe you put one in a museum and it can like welcome guests and kind of like show them where to go.

• 24:58Ed Zitron?

  Can it do that though?

• 24:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. So what's interesting is this is a Chinese company that's making them.

• 25:02Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  And they already have sold several thousand these in China. We went, we went to another robotics company booth. And the whole spiel of this booth was that the booth is run entirely by robots. And there's like a human guy there who's kind of like can answer a question for you if you want, but the booth is just these two robots and they were the, the Ajibot robots. And so the larger one was there and it was, had a little microphone and you could talk to it and you could have this like interaction with it. So I came up and I was like, okay, roast me.

• 25:33Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  And it actually, like, you know, it started off kind of tame. It was.

• 25:37Speaker 05

  But then it got pretty mean.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, then I said, I was like, actually, I was like, can you be meaner? Like, can you do more?

• 25:42Ed Zitron?

  How mean did it get?

• 25:43Speaker 04

  Uh, not too bad. I made fun of what I was wearing and um.

• 25:47Speaker 05

  Could it see what you were wearing?

• 25:48Speaker 04

  It could. Yeah, it could. And then at the end I was like, okay, well, you know, all good. Let's have a fist bump. And it was like, great. And it, it actually did it.

• 25:55Speaker 05

  What did, what did it say about what you were wearing? I, I, I want to judge this from a joke writing standpoint.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  Uh, honestly, I don't remember exactly. It was just kind of was like, oh, and you're wearing that. Like I, like you're making fun of me, but like you're like, it was, it was kind of generic, but.

• 26:07Speaker 05

  Okay. Then you wanted it to turn into the boxing robot. So you.

• 26:10Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. I, I wanted it to be ruder. I want to find this thing and.

• 26:14Speaker 04

  But you were, you were able to have like a back and forth. There's a slight delay when you say something, maybe two, three seconds for it to come up with a response, but you can actually, and its voice actually sounded pretty natural in a way that most robot voices.

• 26:27Ed Zitron?

  Models was it? Like, was it using a model? Was it like, did they explain any of that?

• 26:31Speaker 04

  It is. I'm not sure. I, I imagine that that company, it was called Intobot. That was the booth that um had these like customized versions.

• 26:38Ed Zitron?

  And that wasn't Agi, was that Agibot?

• 26:40Speaker 04

  Yes. It was an Ajibot robot, but the company that was showing them off was Intobot. And I guess they had customized, they had bought these robots and somehow customized them for their.

• 26:48Speaker 05

  But the, what you're chatting with, it's not just chat GPT.

• 26:53Speaker 04

  No.

• 26:54Speaker 05

  Or. OpenAI or whatever.

• 26:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's a combination of things. I think they probably use several different models. And then they also have like cameras and sensors. So they know, you know,

• 27:02Ed Zitron?

  I want to go back and ask it about Tiananmen Square. I'm sorry. I want to, I want to be like, what do you think of Winnie the Pooh? And it just goes, death, death. Cause like just looks at me personally goes, you look fat. I'm like, ah, fuck. No, I, I'm actually going to say, it sounds like it worked, which is unusual. That's genuinely unusual.

• 27:20Speaker 05

  The nicest thing I've ever heard you say about a robot.

• 27:23Ed Zitron?

  It works, kind of. But what was the, what's the? What was the purpose? Yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  For Intbot?

• 27:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  I'm actually not sure because we just went because we wanted to like,

• 27:36Speaker 04

  because their whole,

• 27:36Ed Zitron?

  Fucking show, god fuck.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  Their whole premise is that our booth is just run by robots. So we're like, well, we gotta go check that out. And then we just, we talked to it and made a TikTok and I, I didn't find out what they're trying to do with them, but.

• 27:47Speaker 06

  You should have asked it like, can you grab me some press materials and hand them to me? And it would like fail.

• 27:52Ed Zitron?

  It starts trying to fold them. Oh my God. I love it. We get to a thing. It's like, yeah, it works. What's, why though? And they're like, oh, fuck. We just did this for the yucks. I get, it could introduce you to a museum.

• 28:05Speaker 05

  So off, okay, on the broader theme of why though?

• 28:10Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 28:10Speaker 05

  I was walking around today at the convention center and wondering, what is the, not what is the point of CES, but pretty close. Like, how effective is CES? And in what way for the majority of people who are here?

• 28:32Ed Zitron?

  Effective at what?

• 28:33Speaker 05

  Well, that, that's sort of, I'm asking as a complete naive user, you know, like, but it's like, are people, I understand that like, there were buyers from Sam's Club walking around being like, we're looking for a new, I don't know what the fuck they're looking for, but like, I understand that if you like, there's, you know, some small proportion of buyers who are looking for some small proportion of specific tech. But like, a lot of people, it seems like they're just sort of in booths, showing off stuff that like largely already exists. Maybe with like a slightly new extra spice, but like, for the most part, it's not blowing anybody's minds. And then a lot of people are walking by, picking it up, going, oh, setting it down and continuing walking. And it's like, what effect?

• 29:15Speaker 05

  Beyond just like a trip to Vegas that is justifiable via work.

• 29:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 05

  What effect is this having in most people's business?

• 29:27Speaker 06

  As somebody who's, I'm not super pessimistic about CES despite how ridiculous it is.

• 29:32Ed Zitron?

  You've been here longer than I have.

• 29:34Speaker 06

  I don't know. I guess, I guess for me, and maybe this is the point too.

• 29:38Ed Zitron?

  You love leaflets.

• 29:39Speaker 06

  I love leaflets. No, I just, you know, there's probably some value in just getting a bunch of people into one place.

• 29:44Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 29:45Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 05

  That I could.

• 29:46Speaker 06

  We don't have a lot of that anymore, you know?

• 29:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna rotate our hours. We're gonna go to an ad break. Coming up now, an advertisement for Chumlee, the robot that's based on Chumlee from P A W N stars, a word I cannot say, because people think I am talking about pornography.

• 30:12Speaker 00

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• 30:43Ed Zitron?

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• 31:26Ed Zitron?

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• 32:14Speaker 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.

• 32:29Speaker 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.

• 32:40Speaker 08

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

• 32:45Speaker 10

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

• 32:51Speaker 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.

• 33:18Ed Zitron?

  And we're back in the room and once again, we're joined by Carissa Bella Van Gadget.

• 33:22Speaker 05

  Hello.

• 33:23Ed Zitron?

  Jared Newman of the Advisorate Newsletter. Yo. I nearly said newsletter wrong. And of course, Chloe Radcliffe, actress of Is This Thing On?

• 33:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:31Ed Zitron?

  And the stand-up comedian.

• 33:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:32Ed Zitron?

  And we're back and we're just talking about how and why people do CES. And I'm getting this prevailing, just feeling about conferences, conferences in general, Jesus Christ. They are just there to give people something to do. Like they put people in a room. Yeah, there's to an extent like, I'm going to admit, I don't go to conferences in general. I never have run PR firms since 2012. Like, I've just not gone. It's never affected. Every time I've gone to a conference other than CES, I've just been like, why? And it's like, oh, we got to meet salespeople from this. And it's like, okay. But, but why though? And there's so much stuff here. If this year feels like a landmark year for just shit that don't exist.

• 34:14Ed Zitron?

  And I say that remembering the Web three metaverse year, even that one, they seem to be like, we have a new thinner TV. That's also wet for some reason. Like, they were trying new things with TVs and soundbars. And I guess we've got some of that, but it feels dominated by just vaporware, vaporware. Like, maybe it was worse during the Indiegogo boom. You remember the 2014, 2015 Indiegogo boom when that was just like- Down in the bowels of the Venetian. The Eureka Hall where it was just like the most insane shit. Like, it's a cooler that's also a razor blade to kill people. I want to donate to that. No, that's the thing. The Indiegogo fraud generation was fucking cool. Cause it was just shit that was impossible to make. And we've raised $500,000.

• 34:59Ed Zitron?

  The money laundering operations that go through Indiegogo funded this. And I will deliver it in 10 years and then the company will shut down in three. Like that, I found kind of like honest- Laundry folding robots. Laundry made, RIP and piss. Like they, the most obvious fake one. I respect, they got like, it was like a tower laundry maker. It was like this weird tower and it was never clear how it worked. And every year they were like, next year this is hitting consumers and then they just died.

• 35:27Speaker 05

  The only laundering that Indiegogo can do and robots can do is financing.

• 35:33Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but I feel like this is like a legendary year because they're trying to pretend robots work. They try, because the reason you can't do robots mass for mass consuming, yeah, mass consumer audiences is because training for edge cases is fucking difficult.

• 35:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 35:47Ed Zitron?

  I don't know. It's it's a shame because I'd love a robot. I'd love like a.

• 35:51Speaker 06

  Well, I think I think a laundry folding robot is like a billion dollar idea if it actually works.

• 35:56Ed Zitron?

  But it.

• 35:57Speaker 05

  I have this tube idea.

• 36:00Ed Zitron?

  Fund the tube.

• 36:01Speaker 05

  Have you heard of Indiegogo?

• 36:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, the the tube bud is a little real for Indiegogo. We've got to do like a movie that never gets made or like a card game made by like a a disgraced sub stacker like or a board game by a guy with an allegations section on Wikipedia. Like, that's all we do on here. It's just weird because I say this with a little sadness because like I may seem like a cynic but I'm broken hearted romantic. If we had like an actual laundry folding robot, that's cool.

• 36:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:31Ed Zitron?

  That'd be cool. I'd love that.

• 36:33Speaker 06

  Did you? Did you? You were on the show floor.

• 36:35Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 36:36Speaker 06

  So what did you see? What did you like?

• 36:38Ed Zitron?

  That's a fucking long question. I walked around.

• 36:41Speaker 05

  Don't ask me that.

• 36:41Ed Zitron?

  I walked. I walked around Eureka Park today and I walked around, um, I was about to say Kentyah Hall. Those of us who've been to E3.

• 36:48Speaker 06

  That's a whole other.

• 36:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, the Scott, that Kentyah Hall, if you don't know, is so E3 is the former games journalism. They're the games equivalent of this show and Kentyah Hall was like the scariest place to go with a media badge. You'd go down there, every head would snap to your media badge, stop citizen like Morrowind, like you'd stolen a piece of bread from a shopkeep. And they'd be like.

• 37:08Speaker 05

  Because they want to talk.

• 37:09Ed Zitron?

  Because they want to talk to you because games is just games, right about the game.

• 37:12Speaker 06

  This was all the very small like developers that had nothing going on. And so like, not like, you know, like they're not like Activision. Yeah. This is it for them. Yeah.

• 37:21Ed Zitron?

  And I went to Eureka Park and everything I saw was a chat GPT wrapper. And I I went upstairs and I was like, fuck me up, show me something. And I saw a wifi barbecue. I feel like I see one of them every fucking year. And I wanted to see, I didn't even see anything funny.

• 37:37Speaker 06

  I was, I was trying to noodle on this idea, uh, like, I don't think this is the right term, but like, AI slop product. Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 37:46Ed Zitron?

  No, no, there's a real slop nature to it. It was just like, what is it? How you wanna document analysis?

• 37:51Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, also like, uh, well, like an example I'm thinking of is like, uh, I think it was HighSense, like they had a oven and then the oven had like a very small display on it, smaller than a phone. Um, and they were showing like, you could be like, I'm in the mood for pizza. And then it would like, generate a pizza recipe for you. You know what I mean? So it's like, the recipe itself is slop, but then also like the implementation of AI is slop. Do you know what I mean?

• 38:18Ed Zitron?

  You're just looking at this tiny little screen. It's like, roll out the dough.

• 38:22Speaker 05

  And, and again, and I've made this point before on this very podcast earlier today and yesterday. But just to reiterate, if you are going to look up a pizza recipe, you're gonna look it up on your phone, which is a small screen.

• 38:36Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 38:36Speaker 05

  And then if you look it up on your smart oven, you are also looking it up on a small screen. It is not eliminating any step in the process or any screen in the.

• 38:45Speaker 06

  Oh, it will, it will turn the oven on for you.

• 38:47Speaker 05

  Oh, fuck. Fuck, it'll turn the oven on? Fuck.

• 38:51Ed Zitron?

  Has this ever happened to you and just bashing your hand on different parts of the oven?

• 38:55Speaker 05

  How I turn oven on? I am woman. I know this instinctive, but I do not make happen.

• 39:01Ed Zitron?

  It's like a Tim Robinson bit. What do I do? What do I do? And then the screen goes, turn on oven. Finally.

• 39:08Speaker 05

  Turn the oven on?

• 39:09Ed Zitron?

  It's like, the thing I keep coming back to that I actually liked was just a fifteen hundred dollar TV with a built in soundbar, with like micro LED. I was just like, fuck, yeah.

• 39:17Speaker 06

  Great.

• 39:17Ed Zitron?

  Awesome. TVs are getting thinner and they're getting soundbars in them. And that's why everything has AI in it, because it's very clear that it's becoming really cheap to make thin and big, good looking televisions. That the actual difference between like a fancy fucking LG one and a combination of different letters you can buy on Amazon, that most people can't fucking tell. I'm sorry.

• 39:40Speaker 06

  It's, it's, that is, that's a whole other thing. But yeah, there's like, micro LED and now. My micro RGB. I don't know.

• 39:49Ed Zitron?

  I don't.

• 39:50Speaker 06

  Uh, both of them, if you stand in front of them, it looks like you're like looking into the eye of God. Uh, but like, they're kind of the same.

• 39:56Ed Zitron?

  But I kind of, I love it. I genuinely, genuinely love the fact that like a good looking TV is easy to get now and you can get them everywhere and they're really like really good. Like even the kind of cheap, cheap ones are pretty good. Like,

• 40:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:08Ed Zitron?

  I can notice the difference because I stare at screens all the time, but I think most people would be really happy. Otherwise I'm just like, so I wanna like some, I genuinely, I would love to, I would love to be taken by the magic of CES. It doesn't, the magic's got like,

• 40:24Speaker 05

  What do you think would, other than a laundry folding robot, what do you think would, like, what would take you? What would?

• 40:32Ed Zitron?

  So I think there are like magical ideas. They've had like wireless power though. If Phil hears me talking about, who come and fucking kill me. But like wireless power, Bluetooth that works perhaps. Unbreakable Bluetooth would be very popular at CES where Bluetooth, my fucking headphones cut out constantly, like something like that. Might be kind of a boring demo, but it's like, I don't know. A wifi router that doesn't stop working after six months. Like every problem is just like shit sucks.

• 40:59Speaker 06

  TP link has a router with a AI agent now that you can talk to.

• 41:03Ed Zitron?

  That's cool. I got a TP deck, TP link deco I had to throw away. It was so fucking shit.

• 41:08Speaker 06

  I won't work, but you can like yell at it and it'll do therapy for you.

• 41:11Ed Zitron?

  You're from TP link. You listen to this. The deco fucking sucks. It blows. You suck. I spent so much money on that. I can't even fucking sell them on eBay. God damn.

• 41:20Speaker 04

  Did you see the IKEA, uh, smart home stuff?

• 41:22Ed Zitron?

  No, tell me, tell me about that.

• 41:23Speaker 04

  So that was one that we thought was, uh, pretty cool. A couple of my colleagues saw it. It was, they have a whole new line of like smart plugs, smart light bulbs, like,

• 41:31Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 41:31Speaker 04

  Connected home stuff. Very like kind of boring, but the stuff that you want from IKEA, like cheap connected light bulbs and smart plugs that will actually work and like work with real. IoT standards that you want and not, you know, I don't know if anyone here has tried to install smart bulbs in their homes and they're, they're extremely expensive or they're like really cheap, like off brand ones from Amazon that never end up working or like the app breaks or the company goes under and like, you kind of want a company that's used to making 40 million of everything to do this kind of thing. Cause then you just know it's always

• 42:05Ed Zitron?

  Like an industrial

• 42:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  It's gonna work and it will, they, they can do it at scale i- in a way that makes us be able to pay a reasonable price.

• 42:12Speaker 06

  We have, we have four light bulbs in our bedroom. And so I will be like, Alexa, turn off the lights. And about, about like 10% of the time, one of the lights will stay on of the four.

• 42:22Ed Zitron?

  I have, I have Lutron in my house and one day the box just stopped connecting. So I just have to use the fucking light switch and I'm so spiteful that I just refuse. But wait, it sounds like these things work though, Karissa.

• 42:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I haven't tried them, but I mean, it's Ikea. So I feel like we have, I have, I have decent amount of confidence that they can do this.

• 42:42Ed Zitron?

  I hope so.

• 42:43Speaker 04

  I mean, I have some smart light bulbs in my home and they're like an off brand Chinese one. And we, they're the kind you can change color and we set them to specific colors for the specific rooms, but we can never change them back. And then like every few months, like the app breaks and then they like the totally wrong color. And then we just can't use those lights until we fix it. It's so frustrating.

• 43:04Ed Zitron?

  It's like the product I want from CES is shit that just works and they don't care. It's, that's a shame as well, because I actually like the smart home stuff. I love the Roseanne Clapper, except you use your voice. It's, it's fun. It's good. But again, one thing breaks. It's like wifi that works. I don't think that'd make a good CES demo. But I was looking through your Engadget coverage and I, I want to talk about the, the dreamy robot vacuum with the legs.

• 43:29Speaker 06

  Oh, I saw that too.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  Just the CyberX.

• 43:31Ed Zitron?

  Yes. What are these legs? Tell me, how do they, do they protrude? Do they crawl like?

• 43:36Speaker 04

  So the promotional image they sent me at first had it kind of like standing upright, like a spider on these legs. But they're sort of like more like treads, they're like legs that kind of have these like rubber treads. And so when I saw it move, it moves more like a tank. It kind of rolls. Up the stairs and down the stairs. Um, what?

• 43:56Ed Zitron?

  They look like little chainsaws. It's like chainsaw man.

• 43:59Speaker 04

  It's terrifying. What was not clear though is that that whole unit with the legs is actually just like a little like docking station for the actual um, robot vacuum.

• 44:07Ed Zitron?

  Oh, it's like a vehicle.

• 44:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the actual robot vacuum like, like zooms in there and like parks itself and then the thing goes up the stairs and then it can send out the robot to actually do the vacuuming. What this means though is that it can't actually clean the stairs themselves. Apparently robot rocks can climb and vacuum the stairs. This one, which is just a concept, uh, can just like move up.

• 44:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I'm showing everyone just for the listeners at home. I'm showing everyone a video which works really well. Yeah, it's a concept. So I'm giving them some affordance for how slow this is. I find this kind of cool. I kind of like, like it, you know what? When it comes to robot vacuums, I'm oddly like generous, especially because this is just like very fun to watch. It's like kind of shoving its crotch into the stairs and it slides up.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then when it makes that bend and it starts to go down, it's kind of funny because it's sort of like half of it goes up. I, I, it's really.

• 45:01Speaker 06

  I think that's cool.

• 45:01Ed Zitron?

  I think it's cool. Yeah.

• 45:02Speaker 06

  Like people have asked for years for a, a robot vacuum that can do like multiple floors.

• 45:07Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 45:08Speaker 06

  Without having to pick it up and whatever.

• 45:09Ed Zitron?

  I like them. I just find the robot rock that I have doesn't clean dust sometimes, which is a classic exhibit of the floor.

• 45:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:19Ed Zitron?

  But you know what? The robot, I feel like robot vacuums are like the state, like they're the like, um, block and tackle of CES. You see, I've been seeing robot vacuums here for years. It's like watch, watching them keep going. Like watch it.

• 45:32Speaker 05

  Say, hey, little buddy.

• 45:33Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you're doing. Oh, you got a fucking arm now. Nice.

• 45:36Speaker 05

  I feel so, uh, biased against robot vacuums because I, I think I've like lived with a roommate who had one and it never worked.

• 45:45Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 45:46Speaker 05

  That was like one experience a long time ago, but. Uh, just like less than a month ago, I shot a whole production piece in Denver and our whole small crew was staying in one big Airbnb in, in like this big, big fancy house in Denver. And they had, uh, robot vacuums on every floor because for, for this exact reason. So I bet these people would love robot vacuums that can climb stairs, but they didn't turn off. I don't know fucking why, whatever it was, all of these robot vacuums were programmed to turn on at midnight. And they were so loud and so scary and you had no idea what was going on.

• 46:25Speaker 05

  And so we like, my boyfriend and I were sleeping in a bed here functionally and just, we were us asleep. And then from that far away, you just hear this horrible like

• 46:40Speaker 05

  and then downstairs, uh, what my, one of our crew who was staying in the basement, her robot vacuum actually pushed her door open, came into her room in the middle of the night. And she was like, I genuinely thought I had an invader, like a home invader.

• 46:57Ed Zitron?

  I would have destroyed it.

• 46:59Speaker 05

  To be assaulted and it's just a Roomba.

• 47:03Ed Zitron?

  What a horrifying.

• 47:05Speaker 05

  I would never have one. Have a personal vendetta against robot vacuums.

• 47:09Ed Zitron?

  It's also just like, the problem is, is that like every robot thing, it's the edge cases. It's the shit between the corners. That's actually the problem when it comes to sweeping the floor. That's pretty easy. If you have a perfectly flat surface, it's good. It's just like, we all want it to work. I, have you tried any of the wet, dry ones? You seen those?

• 47:26Speaker 06

  I'm intrigued by them, but I've never.

• 47:28Ed Zitron?

  Just the idea of like having a little robot that can just spooch on my floor feels like, like I don't, they already seem to do pretty bad with the brushes. I don't want them to have the ability to like, uh, sorry, ejaculate.

• 47:42Ed Zitron?

  It's like an egg wood. God. Yeah, I'm sorry. All right.

• 47:47Speaker 05

  Oh, buddy, you got excited.

• 47:49Ed Zitron?

  Calm down, mate.

• 47:52Speaker 06

  I think that's kind of, you know, that's the core disconnect of CS, right? Like, you just want stuff that works a little better.

• 47:57Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 47:58Speaker 06

  And that's not something that you can have a CES booth about. Like, it finally works.

• 48:02Ed Zitron?

  Did more, but didn't work.

• 48:05Speaker 06

  That's often what it is, though.

• 48:07Ed Zitron?

  That's another CES tagline. It does more.

• 48:10Speaker 05

  It does more.

• 48:12Speaker 04

  The dreamy vacuum with the arm, it can change out the arm. It has a little cubby in its station, and it can change out the little claw thing for like a vacuum nozzle.

• 48:22Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  And like, reach that arm up and like suck. Well, it's not that long, but it can, it's like, go into corners or little spots that.

• 48:29Speaker 05

  But can it see? How can it tell where it needs to go?

• 48:32Ed Zitron?

  It's got radar?

• 48:33Speaker 04

  I don't know. I asked them at their booth, because they were demonstrating the kind of claw arm, just sort of picking up balls and putting them in a basket. And I asked them if they could show me it going to fetch its little attachments. And they said no.

• 48:45Ed Zitron?

  They do not work. That just means they don't work. That doesn't happen.

• 48:50Speaker 04

  They looked very alarmed that I asked, like.

• 48:52Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah, no one's asked. That's, I love these moments, though, where you can see nobody. Like, there's like 2,000 members of the media here, and none of them's being like, can you show me it do that?

• 49:03Speaker 05

  I keep asking, but who cares? When they tell me something.

• 49:12Speaker 05

  Because I just have so little repercussions for being.

• 49:18Ed Zitron?

  This is why I asked you to be here. Did anyone have an answer?

• 49:22Speaker 05

  Uh, it usually takes them like a couple, it takes people a couple tries. And then I would say probably two thirds of people have got, have been able to answer the but who cares question. But it's just so, it's so clear that like, nobody's prepared. And I understand that I'm being like incredibly brusque about it. But I'm also like, I don't know, man, you should have an answer for that.

• 49:41Ed Zitron?

  I feel like you should, yeah.

• 49:42Speaker 05

  I, I like, there was one like cable stand that where it's like, it looks really fancy. And he's telling me all about it. And I was like, as far as I could glean, the only thing special about the cable was you can make it extra long. It wasn't, I was like, oh, are you saying like? You can change out the heads of the cable and you can whatever, what they were like all these little pieces. And then he was like, no, no, it's all the same head. You can't change it out. It's only USB C. But you can connect them. And I was like, so it's just really long.

• 50:16Ed Zitron?

  Connect what?

• 50:17Speaker 05

  Uh, two USB C cables to each other to make a long USB C cable. And I wound and I was like, but who cares? Like, why not just buy a lot? I sure, I guess. I, I.

• 50:29Ed Zitron?

  No, I get it. Like.

• 50:30Speaker 05

  There, it's just this kind of stuff where it's like, I just wanna know the answer to.

• 50:35Ed Zitron?

  Is.

• 50:36Speaker 05

  So what?

• 50:36Ed Zitron?

  It's kind of alarming that everyone doesn't have that answer.

• 50:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's the thing. It's I, I, yeah, I, I understand that I am being annoying in, in your face and.

• 50:47Ed Zitron?

  I, I get that you're saying that and you're being nice, but also this feels like you, you should just be able to explain. Real, real easy.

• 50:56Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 50:57Ed Zitron?

  Because otherwise you paid like twenty five thousand dollars a day to be in like the South Hall to show off. The Gubis Microwave with AI or whatever it's called.

• 51:08Speaker 06

  There's often, there is often that question when you're looking at something is like, well, why couldn't I just do this? And then, I don't know.

• 51:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:14Ed Zitron?

  That neither do they.

• 51:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:16Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, like, like I was at Lenovo's booth today and they have their own.

• 51:19Ed Zitron?

  What are they doing?

• 51:21Speaker 06

  They, I, I think I talked about this last year too. Like they got cool hardware stuff.

• 51:25Ed Zitron?

  Okay, I wanna hear. Please, that sounds fun.

• 51:27Speaker 06

  They have a gaming laptop. It's a concept, of course, but some to their credit, some of those concept things they.

• 51:33Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, Henry Casey was mentioning the turning screen they actually made.

• 51:36Speaker 06

  Yes. And then they have a gaming laptop that goes from like regular sixteen by nine into like ultra wide.

• 51:41Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah.

• 51:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:43Ed Zitron?

  I fucking love that shit. I, I know. I love that shit.

• 51:46Speaker 06

  Great.

• 51:46Ed Zitron?

  It's like probably insanely expensive, but so what I'm guessing is it like you pull out the.

• 51:50Speaker 06

  It's a rollable display. If you just press a button and it.

• 51:53Ed Zitron?

  Yes, let's fucking go.

• 51:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:55Ed Zitron?

  We're at the Consumer Electronics Show. Show me some weird shit.

• 51:59Speaker 06

  Great. But that was like in the back and then they have a, an AI chatbot for Windows.

• 52:05Ed Zitron?

  And what, what is the reason they claim that is?

• 52:08Speaker 06

  I could not get an answer.

• 52:10Ed Zitron?

  What did he?

• 52:11Speaker 06

  About that. Uh, usual AI stuff like you have a document, you have a document. Yeah, it's like you have a document and then you ask about the document and it tells you about the document and summarizes your notification. And it was like, it was like, well, why wouldn't I just use, you know, Copilot or ChatGPT? And there wasn't really a clear. Get him out of here. Get him out of here now. Just fuck it. You'll, you'll leave.

• 52:34Speaker 06

  Guards, guards. Yeah, I, that's. They also had people telling me that it was on-device language models. And then like the product manager was like, oh no, that's, that's incorrect.

• 52:46Speaker 05

  Wait, what's the?

• 52:48Ed Zitron?

  So large language models traditionally are run in the cloud. So you have to have a persistent internet connection. There are on-device language models. They require a shit ton of RAM to run because large language models are extremely RAM dependent.

• 53:00Speaker 05

  Are you, are, have you downloaded the functionally, I don't, I'm asking the stupidest question. Have you downloaded a file that is the size of the large language model? Like, do you, are you holding the whole?

• 53:13Ed Zitron?

  No, no, they, not in this case. They, the product manager.

• 53:16Speaker 06

  Yes, in this case they were not. In, in theory, yeah, you would have to have this like, pretty powerful computer and a lot of space and whatever. And it still wouldn't work as well as like ChatGPT.

• 53:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we take.

• 53:28Speaker 06

  But then, and then you would, and, but yeah, yeah, I was asking about it because you're dealing with like, they were taking screenshots of what you were doing so that they could summarize. And it's like, I don't really want that data going up who knows where. And so.

• 53:39Ed Zitron?

  It's like, finally you can tell me what I'm looking at.

• 53:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:42Ed Zitron?

  How else would I know? I'm not looking at, that's such a shit because Lenovo makes some reliable shit. And that was the Legion Go, their handheld gaming PC is pretty fucking cool. Did they have anything like that?

• 53:54Speaker 06

  Uh, no new gaming handheld stuff this year.

• 53:58Ed Zitron?

  Well, thank God we're using all the world's high bandwidth RAM to generate various wife tubes. Like it's, it's just such a shame. Now, Chris, I'm going to change the weird company to choose for something that is actually kind of interesting. Meta's doing some stuff with this armband, right? And you, I was nearly ready to make fun of it as an artist myself, but this one that can see facial gestures, can you, or like emotions and such? Has it, for, for the blind though?

• 54:24Speaker 04

  Yes. So this is actually a, a startup that is, so the startup is independent from Meta, but they made this wrist-based like wearable device that's supposed to work in conjunction with Meta's smart glasses. So the idea is that you're wearing Meta's smart glasses. They have these kind of like um real time AI capabilities. So I'm talking to you, the video is on. That's going back to an app that's run by the startup.

• 54:51Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 54:52Speaker 04

  Uh, the app can detect, they have these models to uh to detect kind of like facial expressions, gestures. There's a whole bunch of stuff you can customize.

• 55:00Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 55:01Speaker 04

  And then this wristband, it'll send a signal to the wristband and it vibrates in different patterns. Based on like, if you do a thumbs up, it might vibrate like in a certain way. If you do a thumbs down or you frown or you, you know.

• 55:13Ed Zitron?

  For someone who's visually impaired, that actually sounds quite useful.

• 55:17Speaker 05

  If somebody is talking to a blind person and they give a thumbs up, that person is evil.

• 55:23Ed Zitron?

  That's a good point. That's a good point.

• 55:25Speaker 05

  Anybody who thinks that they can communicate with a blind person via hand gestures should be walked off.

• 55:31Ed Zitron?

  You are doing the jack off gesture at me. My armband's fucking telling me you are just doing this with your hand.

• 55:38Speaker 04

  Well, I just can do more subtle ones too. And I think it's also, they said that, you know, there's people who, you know, they're talking to their kids and they're like, oh, I never get that feedback from my kids of like, knowing how their, their expressions.

• 55:49Speaker 05

  Get back in line.

• 55:51Speaker 04

  No, no, they did say that, yeah, they think that perhaps there's a use case for people who are neurodivergent, who just like could see a facial expression, but just like, don't know what it means. But.

• 56:00Ed Zitron?

  I say this as someone with autism. If I heard someone say that to me, they might be blind by the end of the conversation. I will say this, if you're a visually impaired listener to the show, I would actually love easyitbetteroffline.com, please email me because I'm, I can see, like, I don't experience your life. I'm actually genuinely curious if these things happen. Cause I know last year there was this Kane that talked and we kind of like, like, like we made fun of it, but it was like, people were like, no, this is actually really useful. And I want to know because I don't want to give people shit for something that's actually useful. The fact they're mentioning the neurodivergent thing really fucking pisses me off though. Cause that is like the experience of someone who does not have autism or anything related to that.

• 56:39Ed Zitron?

  Cause it's just like, that's not how it fucking works. We're not sitting there like with, what is the, um, the bloke from Lie to Me? Where he's just looking for micro expressions? Nobody saw that show. Okay.

• 56:50Speaker 04

  I saw it.

• 56:50Ed Zitron?

  Okay. Yeah. It's just mostly, it's just uh Tim Roth going, you're lying, mate. And then like uh every scene is cut between like, like a picture of like Colin Powell and Bill Clinton like frowning at someone is like frowning. If they should have to lie to me, bloke at CS. You know what? I'm it's weird. Meta seems to have like oddly interesting accessibility stuff, though. Look, I have a mate who works over there. It's like, they seem to be trying something there. And then there's all the other stuff that Meta does, like 10% of their revenue being from fraud in 2024, which is real.

• 57:22Speaker 05

  Does that mean that, like, somebody high up in some pyramid at Meta is actually well-intentioned?

• 57:28Ed Zitron?

  Yes. I mean, like, I must be clear. I think Meta is a deeply evil organization run by a scumbag. And when when Mark Zuckerberg, I assume from natural causes, passes from this world, I'll throw a fucking party for that piece of shit. That being said, um, there are people at Meta I'm familiar with, in accessibility in particular, who actually give a shit.

• 57:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:50Ed Zitron?

  It's just they're not running the company. And I think it might be sadly like an after effect of the larger product. But at the same time, if there's some fucking good for me, it's just.

• 58:00Speaker 06

  It's hard to get excited about something from.

• 58:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, exactly. It's like, especially because like my, the only meta product I unashamedly loved was the portal.

• 58:08Speaker 05

  The portal was great.

• 58:09Ed Zitron?

  It was because it like, it was a very, it's weirdly hard to find a thing to call someone from a TV. And like on Christmas, my kid and I, I call my parents and it's like, it's easy for my dad and my mom to work and they just click and it works. And they, of course, discontinued this product because.

• 58:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't even know what the portal is.

• 58:25Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, Meta's not about connecting you to people. It's about showing you either like dogs barking or like dog whistles, mostly.

• 58:34Speaker 06

  AI dogs barking at this point.

• 58:36Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, like the worst AI.

• 58:38Speaker 06

  AI generated like sprouts another head and then that that head starts barking.

• 58:42Ed Zitron?

  So I'm like being like reverse gang stalked by Meta, though, because I don't get any AI slop.

• 58:47Speaker 06

  Oh, really?

• 58:47Ed Zitron?

  I've never been shown any.

• 58:49Speaker 05

  I I don't know that I get shown AI stuff.

• 58:53Ed Zitron?

  I've seen other people's feeds and they are just like.

• 58:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:56Speaker 06

  I have a friend who's it's exclusively.

• 58:59Ed Zitron?

  AI. I get like, I get Gen Z people being like showing a clearly homeless person pictures of like brain rot and this person in distress, just being like, why am I being harassed by a man with broccoli hair and eight cameras? And it's like, oh God, but luckily I've trained my thing. So all I get is like Silk and Wind howls now. Like shout out to Chloe and Abby and all those wonderful dogs. Everyone knows what I'm talking about, just moving on. But yeah, like I've had to train my feed, but it's a shame because it's like, I guess at some scale with a company like that, you do eventually do a good thing. Just most of the other things are bad. Do they still support the portal? Does it work? It works for now.

• 59:40Speaker 05

  What is the portal?

• 59:41Ed Zitron?

  It's like literally, it's just an HDMI camera you connect to your TV and you can connect to someone else. It worked. It worked really well.

• 59:47Speaker 05

  And you're looking at it on, yeah, and it's a FaceTime call for your TV.

• 59:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And it follows you like very quite well as well. It's like, it was a cool product, which is why they stopped it because we can't have that.

• 59:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:56Ed Zitron?

  We can't be having you connect to people on Facebook.

• 59:58Speaker 05

  No, no, because you know what that does? It takes you off of Facebook.

• 1:00:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you can't be shown the feed, but it's like, it's interesting to see them try shit. It's just, there's all the other stuff. Also, it's kind of rare to see a hyperscaler here. Cause like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they don't really, Amazon will have like a side thingy. I remember last year when I had a picture of the smiling man on my badge and I went into the Amazon thing. A woman stopped me and went, wow. She's, I mean, there are no good reactions to that picture and everyone knows it. But yeah, it's, it's, they usually don't have a presence. So Meta trying to do stuff is good. Like, right? Like, yeah, I'm like, try, I guess. Everyone is looking quite pained.

• 1:00:41Speaker 04

  I mean, the smart glasses are interesting. They, you know, I've written a lot about this. I have very mixed feelings about them because they're genuinely good products. You roast me every time I post on my Instagram.

• 1:00:53Ed Zitron?

  I don't roast you. I don't roast you. I'm nice to you. When did I last roast you? Come on.

• 1:00:58Speaker 04

  No, you don't roast me. I did one time post a poll of like, do these look good on me? And you were like, and you were the first person instantly was like, no, absolutely not.

• 1:01:06Ed Zitron?

  It's the Royal Orbison glasses. But anyway, you have complex feelings about them.

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  It's true, because they are actually a good product. If you use them, they work really well. The AI, some of the AI stuff, you're gonna hate this, is cool. The translation features, I've used them on vacation.

• 1:01:20Ed Zitron?

  Consistently, that's the only feature where like everyone's kind of like that and dictation and stuff is kind of works.

• 1:01:25Speaker 04

  They're good. The display glasses, they look unfortunate.

• 1:01:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  But.

• 1:01:30Ed Zitron?

  No, I've used one. I used one on the show. They're kind of cool.

• 1:01:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're cool. They're, you know, I tried today. They they just launched a handwriting, the handwriting feature.

• 1:01:39Ed Zitron?

  What's that?

• 1:01:40Speaker 04

  So, you know, they use this neural band that you can control gesture. So if you.

• 1:01:45Ed Zitron?

  So the glasses, you put them on and you control it with the wristband, just for glory's sake.

• 1:01:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, you kind of do little swipes and that's how you control the interface.

• 1:01:52Ed Zitron?

  It works pretty well.

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  And it does. And so up to now, if you get like a WhatsApp message and you want to reply, basically, you have to like use your voice to like dictate a reply. So now what they're gonna do is they have a feature called handwriting, where you can basically just trace letters with your hand, like on any, like on your leg, on a table, you know, just cool, like just do the letters and then that will appear on the screen. And I tried to say it was actually like, it worked really well. It did not work with cursive, although I'm the only old person who probably would even try that.

• 1:02:22Ed Zitron?

  Uh huh. Well, I mean, that's, I cannot, like, this is practically a physical, physical disability where like writing is one of the worst things. It's like eventually painful. I kind of want to go and hunt this down just to be like, yeah, let's fucking go, mate. I have a disability. Let's go. But actually, you know, maybe it works. But wait, so it's how you write them. Do you do it by letter? Like?

• 1:02:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. So you just do it letter by letter. And then when you want to do a space, you do like a left to right. When you want to delete something, you can go right to left.

• 1:02:51Ed Zitron?

  I'm oddly like intrigued by this because there's when they brought swipe, I don't even remember swipe. It's like when you just drag the, it's now fairly common, but it like, that works pretty well.

• 1:03:00Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. I love that.

• 1:03:01Ed Zitron?

  I'm kind of like, all right, Meta, if you want to do.

• 1:03:04Speaker 05

  You want a whole booth for swipe at CES?

• 1:03:05Ed Zitron?

  No, they did one year. Swipe, I think, actually had like a small booth. I swear to God, this happened. Yeah, it sounds like something plausible and I just Mandela affected it into the world. It's just like YouTube videos popping up. No, it's, I, I can't believe like Meta, fucking Meta is the company that brought something that worked to CES. Oh, God, it's like, it's like a three-headed dog being born. Disgusting.

• 1:03:32Speaker 04

  I mean, I think what you were.

• 1:03:35Speaker 05

  What you were saying earlier about, basically, the trend is the most pragmatic things are the things that actually will help the world and that consumers actually want and actually need, but they just are the least shiny and they get the least positive feedback and they hit the fewest headlines.

• 1:03:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:54Speaker 05

  And

• 1:03:57Speaker 05

  if you allow me to tell a brief story.

• 1:03:59Ed Zitron?

  Please, please, close out this.

• 1:04:01Speaker 05

  This is, okay, here we go. I think you, I think you're, for the first minute of this, you're gonna go, why are you telling this story? And then I think you will understand. For my wonderful boyfriend's birthday earlier this year, I had a couple grand plans. I have this like very vivid memory of him having, when we first started dating a couple of years ago, having this like plug by his bed that had multi cords coming out of it, like a little octopus setup kind of thing. And he would move it from next to his bed to his office and then from his office to wherever we were going. And I, two years ago, I was like, it would be awesome to get him a second one of those so that he didn't have to move it around. And then he also thinks that the M and M's store in Times Square is very funny.

• 1:04:45Speaker 05

  And so I was like, I also will get him some M and M's store branded merchandise.

• 1:04:50Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:04:50Speaker 05

  And then I think I had a third idea.

• 1:04:52Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:04:53Speaker 05

  That I don't remember now. And then it was the day before, my boyfriend lives in London. It was the day before I was, it was the day, I think it was the day that I was flying to London.

• 1:05:02Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:05:03Speaker 05

  Had not purchased any of this, went to the Times Square store in London. The M and M's, I'm sorry, the M and M's store in Times Square. Uh, couldn't find anything that he would want, got him a pair of boxer shorts that I knew he wouldn't like. It's not the type that he wears, but I was like, I, at this point, I really have backed myself into a corner. Landed in London, went immediately to a multiple department stores looking for this type of cable, whatever. None of them had the setup that I wanted. I wound up buying, what's the fancy, it's

• 1:05:33Ed Zitron?

  Parrots.

• 1:05:33Speaker 05

  Like Macy's. No, it's like a step down from that. It's a two word, two name, John Waters.

• 1:05:38Ed Zitron?

  Lewis.

• 1:05:39Speaker 05

  John Lewis.

• 1:05:43Ed Zitron?

  I fucking wish.

• 1:05:46Speaker 05

  It's yeah.

• 1:05:46Ed Zitron?

  So he went to John Waters.

• 1:05:47Speaker 05

  Went to John Waters, went to John Lewis, bought him a plug and two cables that all were sold separately, couldn't figure out what the third, like couldn't find the third thing, whatever. I wound up for his birthday, and just for context, the year before he had turned 40 and I had gotten him a vintage Tottenham Hotspur, which is the soccer team that he supports, warm-up jacket from the year that he became a fan, 1993, like went, hunted on eBay, found the exact, it was this incredible gift. And this year I brought him M&M's boxers and a plug and two cords. And he was like, you are the idiot husband and I am the long suffering wife. And fair point, but the entire point of this story is, out of all of the

• 1:06:32Speaker 05

  presents I have gotten him over the last two years, you want to know what he fucking uses every fucking day?

• 1:06:37Ed Zitron?

  The plug.

• 1:06:38Speaker 05

  The cable. And the cables. And I'm like, see, it wasn't a bad present.

• 1:06:43Ed Zitron?

  And you're still the fucking husband.

• 1:06:45Speaker 05

  I'm still the husband.

• 1:06:46Ed Zitron?

  You're still the husband. You're still the husband who got the gift. They go, look, it's good, it's good.

• 1:06:51Speaker 05

  You used it, it's working.

• 1:06:53Ed Zitron?

  You're happy.

• 1:06:54Speaker 05

  And it was expensive.

• 1:06:55Ed Zitron?

  Stop muttering under your breath when I mention Christmas. All right, we're going to rotate to our next guest. The next advertisement is brought to you by Blort, the sun cream for dogs.

• 1:07:13Speaker 11

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• 1:07:44Ed 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.

• 1:08:27Ed 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.

• 1:08:43Speaker 07

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• 1:09:15Speaker 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.

• 1:09:30Speaker 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.

• 1:09:41Speaker 08

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

• 1:09:46Speaker 10

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

• 1:09:52Speaker 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.

• 1:10:19Ed Zitron?

  Welcome back to the show. I'm Ed Zitron. I'm joined by Carissa Bell of Endgadget.

• 1:10:23Speaker 04

  Hello, hello.

• 1:10:24Ed Zitron?

  Jared Newman of the Advisorate Newsletter.

• 1:10:26Speaker 12

  Hey.

• 1:10:27Ed Zitron?

  And Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards.

• 1:10:29Speaker 12

  I am loving the drive time radio DJ version of Ed Zitron.

• 1:10:32Ed Zitron?

  I'm really enjoying, I'm loving this.

• 1:10:34Speaker 12

  You've been doing this all day?

• 1:10:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I really, I'm gonna be everyone.

• 1:10:36Speaker 12

  Has it gotten old yet?

• 1:10:38Ed Zitron?

  Not for me.

• 1:10:39Speaker 06

  Have you taken reader questions?

• 1:10:41Ed Zitron?

  I would love them. If you want it easier, betteroffline.com, I'll answer all your questions.

• 1:10:45Speaker 06

  You should do it live.

• 1:10:46Ed Zitron?

  No, I've been, Daniel Goodman, my producer, sorry, my producer is Matt Salsky, but Daniel produces in person. It's not a, and Bahid as well. Nevertheless, we've been working on it, but I think the idea of like a drive time show with me is a really, you don't need to, you don't want to have that unholy force come out of the world. But Robert, you've, you've got a stack of paper in your crusade against trees.

• 1:11:07Speaker 12

  I do, I do. I hate trees. I love printed advertisements for products that are going to destroy the company releasing them. Yes, and I've been collecting quite a few. These are just the ones that I managed to grab out of my bag quickly.

• 1:11:22Ed Zitron?

  Nice, but talk to me about some of the things you've seen today.

• 1:11:25Speaker 12

  Well, I mean, easily the most impressive product that's at the show today. And there's a wide variety of stuff. There's like apparently some sort of like magnetically fired net gun for taking out drones.

• 1:11:36Ed Zitron?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:11:38Speaker 12

  You know, there's, there's all sorts of incredible, like different, like in smart vehicle prod or products, like different kind of electric engines and like all sorts of crazy new battery and solar technology. But it's the AI that's really set off the convention this year. Everyone's talking about AI. And there's no AI product that people are talking about more than AI Moon, the world's first Zodiac AI fairy.

• 1:12:03Ed Zitron?

  Oh, my fucking.

• 1:12:04Speaker 12

  I mean, obviously, like, look at the, I mean, I would describe them as like if a furry.

• 1:12:12Speaker 12

  That's not a nice joke.

• 1:12:15Speaker 12

  If a furry had fetal alcohol syndrome, right? Like, that's, that's kind of like how these look to me. I, I don't mean that like negative. It's just a description. Um, yeah, and these are, these are to replace your astrologer. You know, they're trying to get rid of astrologers.

• 1:12:34Ed Zitron?

  They're coming after our scam artists.

• 1:12:36Speaker 12

  They're coming after the scam artists today.

• 1:12:38Ed Zitron?

  The newspapers are gonna shut down. They already talked classifieds away.

• 1:12:42Speaker 12

  And I, for one thing, I cannot tell how much is AI generated of the pictures of people in this brochure. Everything looks a little wrong to me.

• 1:12:49Ed Zitron?

  Can I?

• 1:12:50Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah. They brag that they have a proprietary astrology engine with a birth horoscope and a composite chart analysis, a long-term memory system, so it gets to know you better with every chat, and a personalized personality that's customizable based on user data. They're good as friends, as emotional comfort. They brag that it can help you cure certain problems that you might have.

• 1:13:15Ed Zitron?

  So I'm gonna say-

• 1:13:16Speaker 12

  Pull up the other ad thing I've got.

• 1:13:17Ed Zitron?

  Yes. I'm gonna say, Jesus Christ. First of all, I don't think the audience could possibly know how low resolution these images are.

• 1:13:25Speaker 12

  It's a badly made brochure.

• 1:13:27Ed Zitron?

  And you've got some, yeah, here's the thing. Cause there's like astrology where it's like based on like when you were born and what times and like there's also like thoughts. This is not that. This is like various photos that I, okay, this is like, did they Photoshop this thing in?

• 1:13:42Speaker 12

  That's what, they, they don't quite look right. And I can't tell if that's just because they used AI photos or if there's just like a deep well of madness at the center of this product cycle.

• 1:13:51Ed Zitron?

  Are these physical objects?

• 1:13:53Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, they're little Furbie sized objects that give you, are like horoscope chatbots that are supposed to like learn and evolve the more they work with you. And they're also supposed to like counsel you and be like quasi therapists. So they, they had like four different archetypes of these robots that they were advising. One is the relationship advisor. Filter out toxic, filter out the toxic, making the ones you love, making the, sorry, making the ones you love cherish you even more, which is a weird sentence. First off, like, okay. Sure. And this one is sharp tongued, emotionally rich, sharp intuition, strong empathy and sensible.

• 1:14:35Speaker 12

  And obviously it's a Scorpio. And then the Capricorn one is your career lucky charm. It cures overthinking, which might be a violation of FDA rules about advertising. Cures inaction, masters hustling and career building.

• 1:14:50Ed Zitron?

  I want to know how it cures inaction, just by, it's so horrifying, you make it.

• 1:14:54Speaker 12

  Yeah, I need to get up and leave my house to get away from the doll. Yeah. And then there's the joyful protector. Cap wants to ditch the mental overload. Stay upbeat and carefree 24/7. And I really wanted to try these out, but they did not seem to be functioning. At least the demo I got, I couldn't really hear it and it connected, it just like wasn't connecting, I guess. Like, that's been an issue because I've tried a bunch of different, we slapped, we gave access to Jim and I, or to fucking ChatGPT, to a ring or to a pencil or something like that. And most of the ones, when I'd ask like, can I try it? They're like, well, the signal's not really working right now.

• 1:15:36Ed Zitron?

  Like, that's been a lot though, because the wifi doesn't work and all of these things are off device.

• 1:15:40Speaker 12

  Yeah. Well, and that's one of the products that I did really like was from, I initially just discovered the company because I saw their name and I was like, that can't be an American company because they would not have picked this name. And it's for, they do translation based AI products and the company's name is Trans AI.

• 1:15:57Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I saw that.

• 1:15:58Speaker 12

  So I just looked, I just kind of like, that got me looking, but then their products were actually really, were really neat. They had a device that's like a transcription tool. It's about the size of a smartphone. It's got the screen, it looks nice. It's got a swiveling camera that has like a little engine on it. And so you can just set it down when you're doing an interview and it'll transcribe that. But it also, it acts as a translator. It's got like 150 languages, like you can have translate concrete, which a bunch of products do.

• 1:16:23Ed Zitron?

  Actually sounds.

• 1:16:23Speaker 12

  A ton of people. And this was on, I remember them saying this was all on device. And it's on device. That's what I really liked because a lot of people are offering this as a translator, but it's in the cloud. And or it's, it's, you're literally like ChatGPT is on it too. And like, so you want me to have? Have like interviews that might be sensitive and then throw that shit back to chat GPT or else we're on the no, I want it on device.

• 1:16:45Ed Zitron?

  And especially with these cheap companies, you know, they're not paying the extra to keep it. So it's not being used as training data.

• 1:16:51Speaker 12

  Yeah. And that will be trans AI is going to have this out there. If you just Google trans AI Kickstarter, um, they've got a Kickstarter going to fund this device, which I I didn't get to test it fully. I did get to like, hold and look at it. It seemed at least physically well made like it's a good, good industrial design. I can't. Well, I I did. I mean, there's only so much you can try standing around. They did give me though, a set of wireless earbuds that are automatic translators. That are supposed to. So I I am going to get to try to try that out.

• 1:17:21Ed Zitron?

  I like that.

• 1:17:21Speaker 12

  So we'll see how well it works.

• 1:17:23Ed Zitron?

  Will the earbuds on device as well?

• 1:17:24Speaker 12

  No, no, no, no. Those are, those are because they're just little earbuds, right?

• 1:17:30Speaker 12

  But I I it may, it may just be though, that it downloads enough onto your phone. I I'm not, I haven't gotten to try that yet, but.

• 1:17:36Ed Zitron?

  Feel like in a few years, anything that's left of the air bubble will all be on device, just because nobody trusts this shit.

• 1:17:43Speaker 12

  Right. Well, and just, yeah. And nobody wants to pay for it. No, wants to pay for it. And for stuff that's really crucial, like being able, like if you're trying to sell, like you can have conversations when you're traveling around the world, maybe in like weird off grid locations. I don't want to have to have like 5G.

• 1:17:58Ed Zitron?

  No, we were just saying earlier, it's like if you're in somewhere where you desperately need the translation, there's no English speakers around. It's probably also not a wifi rich environment.

• 1:18:08Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:18:08Ed Zitron?

  And you, you have more experience of this, I think, than anyone.

• 1:18:12Speaker 12

  Well, and you'd always prefer to have a person, but that's not always super feasible.

• 1:18:15Ed Zitron?

  Always. So what else you got in your pile of papers?

• 1:18:18Speaker 12

  Okay, let's see. What else do I have in my? Well, I've, I've got this book that I can't wait to read, Patterns for Building AI Agents by Sam Bogwatt, who is the co-founder and. That's a great name. I think it's, it's just a normal name.

• 1:18:31Ed Zitron?

  Sam Bogwatt is some.

• 1:18:33Speaker 12

  CEO of something called Master AI. I don't know what it is, but 11 of these were sitting out at a bus stop on the way to the convention center. So I just went ahead and grabbed one.

• 1:18:42Ed Zitron?

  It's like when you're walking around Brooklyn, you find a Scientology thing.

• 1:18:44Speaker 12

  Yeah. Yeah, it might be a cult. I I have not confirmed it's not a cult.

• 1:18:49Ed Zitron?

  Okay, so, okay, this guy, the patents for building it, Sam, what go on? Um, yeah, I, I don't know. I'll, I'll look at this later and I'll tear it.

• 1:18:56Speaker 12

  Oh, yeah, this is.

• 1:18:57Ed Zitron?

  Oh, actually, I can't read this. It's the sequel to Principles of Building AI Agents. So.

• 1:19:02Speaker 12

  Oh, okay. You gotta read the first one.

• 1:19:03Ed Zitron?

  You can't watch The Empire Strikes Back first.

• 1:19:06Speaker 12

  Sorry, I found the name. This is the device I was talking about, the AI, the on, the world's first on-device AI meeting note taker, the Trans AI Note. You can like, see, it's like a nice looking gadget.

• 1:19:17Speaker 06

  By the way, there was another device called Trans AI or Trans, it's something with Trans and AI in the name, and it was, uh, voice cloning. It was a translator that, translator that tried to make your voice sound like it was in the other language.

• 1:19:30Speaker 12

  Oh, that's kind of cool.

• 1:19:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was a little unsettling.

• 1:19:32Speaker 12

  That's, that's really good for fraud. Like, that really is gonna.

• 1:19:35Speaker 06

  It's great for fraud.

• 1:19:36Speaker 12

  So I've been really wanting to take advantage of a lot of French people at scale, and it's just hard to do right now.

• 1:19:43Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I'm just reading this agent book, example coding agents. Raplet agent feeds errors back into context and kicks off an automate feedback loop. Based on everything I've ever read about that company, that is wrong. Just like.

• 1:19:55Speaker 12

  It may be.

• 1:19:56Ed Zitron?

  Just the fraud masters.

• 1:19:59Speaker 12

  There was, oh, there was the Cybo Pal, which is, it was one of those products where like, I can see the cool in this, but it doesn't work very well. Where it's supposed to be a sight tracking intelligent monitor that moves on its own with your head.

• 1:20:14Ed Zitron?

  I can, I can see the value.

• 1:20:15Speaker 12

  As you, as you like move it. Now, obviously, you don't want it to just physically move whenever you move your head, because that would be a nightmare. That would like literally be hell. Like, if this gadget is just constant, as you're like, I gotta like move over, take a hit of a vape pen or something. But, so they had to figure out, like, how can you, what is like an easy, seamless, unobtrusive way for you to tell this thing to move? And they settled on a complex series of different hand gestures that you have to use what, like, you have to go aim at one of two different sensors. And first, the lady who was like the PR representative that was supposed to show it off tried to, and about one out of every four times, it did what she asked it to. And then the guy who I think was one of the inventors.

• 1:20:58Speaker 12

  It was definitely her boss. There's a language bear. So it was a little hard to tell their exact roles in the company. Sat down and he did a lot better. It responded to what he asked it about 70% of the time. But it's still a lot.

• 1:21:11Ed Zitron?

  Six panther.

• 1:21:12Speaker 12

  Both of them, a lot of the time are just like doing this, like repeating the same like two finger gesture, whatever, over and over at a camera. To get it to move. And when it, because periodically for like 40 seconds, it would do like five or six. Gestures in a row would move. And I was like, oh, that's kind of neat.

• 1:21:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, if it worked, it would be great. CES 2026.

• 1:21:31Speaker 12

  Yeah, exactly. And it's just one of these, it's another like AI product where for one thing, that's not AI. I'm sorry, guys. Like, we're using it for every, it's the same thing like.

• 1:21:41Ed Zitron?

  They have that company that Apple bought like in 2011 that was like they had a cat. It was like a bar. It was like a wee bar. You're attached to a monitor and you could like do gestures. And that barely fucking worked. Hell, yeah.

• 1:21:54Speaker 06

  Lenovo actually had a tilting, a swiveling screen laptop that follows your head when you're on.

• 1:22:00Ed Zitron?

  Did it work?

• 1:22:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, it worked.

• 1:22:02Ed Zitron?

  These people are fucked then. So are you gonna say something?

• 1:22:05Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, we had that. Didn't Xbox have that technology like 10 years ago?

• 1:22:08Ed Zitron?

  Well, connect, but it couldn't see black people. That was like, it's like, it's like a better off Ted joke.

• 1:22:13Speaker 12

  That keeps happening too. That's not the first, nor will it be the last time.

• 1:22:17Ed Zitron?

  The law doesn't seem to do that either.

• 1:22:19Speaker 12

  Well, sometimes.

• 1:22:20Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Speaker 12

  But yeah, I mean, and that, that, the whole frustration of like things labeled it, because there's, there's a mix of like shit labeled as AI that under no circumstance does anyone real reasonable consider like. A robot that responds to a gesture by moving a screen and that's all it does. It's not an intelligence.

• 1:22:38Ed Zitron?

  And also just, do you have fucking hands and have you met people with other hands?

• 1:22:42Speaker 12

  Like, we've been, and we've been doing that for forever. Like, machines that you can like do something into a camera and it recognizes a simple command.

• 1:22:49Ed Zitron?

  It's computer vision. It's just basic, like, you get that on device now.

• 1:22:53Speaker 12

  And likewise, like I keep seeing, like, I liked this AI, this meeting note taker. I don't, is it AI? I guess it's more AI to recognize and like transcribe a conversation. But the appeal is not that it's a thing that you can communicate with. The appeal is that it can do a task.

• 1:23:11Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:23:11Speaker 12

  It's this, they, they, there's a bunch of different AI pens and AI glasses. And the ones I hated all had chat integration into it, to where you can communicate with it. And the ones that were cool were like, yeah, it's a pen that can listen to a conversation and transcribe it for you.

• 1:23:27Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:23:28Speaker 12

  Right. And I was like, well, yeah, that's, that might be useful, you know?

• 1:23:32Ed Zitron?

  It's just like, it, it all gets back to the classic thing of like, yeah, I want this to do a task. And they're like, oh, no, no, sorry, AI doesn't do that.

• 1:23:40Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40Ed Zitron?

  Like it's, it's not able to do that. And it's, I feel like this is just the logical endpoint of where this is CES has been going for 10 years, which is slowly distancing itself from reality.

• 1:23:52Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:23:52Ed Zitron?

  And promise to just this point when 97% of the stuff is just like, if it works, wouldn't it be kind of useful sort of?

• 1:23:59Speaker 06

  Well, it's like, uh, you know, I was talking about like AI slop products earlier, uh, you know? And it's the kind of thing where like, okay, uh, you can talk to your router and the router will tell you what's wrong, whatever. But it's like, you could just design a UI that just like told you that, that just gave you that information in a visually appealing way.

• 1:24:16Ed Zitron?

  Router that works.

• 1:24:17Speaker 06

  People don't look as a print journalist, like people don't want to read a block of texts. Unfortunately, they just want visual and yet we're reverting into this thing where like, the technology communicates with you via a block of text that was generated by AI.

• 1:24:32Ed Zitron?

  I also love that with routers as well, because I think for like every CES I've ever been to, there was a router company that said, yeah, we'll just fix your network problems for it. Everyone's lying. Every single one of them is lying. It's wrong every time. It's never worked. TP-Link Deco, fuck you TP-Link. I'm sorry, that shit don't work. It's busted and fuck that. Hundreds of dollars wasted.

• 1:24:52Speaker 12

  Yeah. And it's the most I've, the most product category type I have seen at CES is.

• 1:24:59Speaker 12

  Some form of digital assistant and or new chatbot or like companion, right? Like I, there's a huge booth for a company called Tuya, T U Y A. That was like, they've got this holistic, it does everything digital companion. You can like, there's a health version of it. So you can like feed this thing, your health data. Like it, you can give it access to your wearables and it, it'll not just like tell you, well, it's my heart rate at how much, you know, many calories did I burn, but it'll tell you like, uh, it'll like make workout plans for you and like recommend diets and, and stuff for you, which like, I guess, I'm sure there are people who want that. I have the concern I always have was like, with like, okay, so you're feeding all of your biometric data into this machine

• 1:25:44Speaker 12

  that you're feeding all of your communications to it has access to your email. It has access to your notes. It's, you've got a wearable device and it's listening to you. There's a mobile version running through your house. How secure are you? How, how, how much do you trust this company's data safety?

• 1:26:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:01Speaker 12

  Data retention.

• 1:26:02Ed Zitron?

  Considering big companies have breaches all the time. I will also add, if you get the wrong workout plan, you can actually really hurt yourself. I say this as someone who's done it to myself. It's just like, that feels, I feel people are very cavalier about that as well. Where it's just like, oh yeah, I'll just take the workout from the air and you fuck your leg up. You fuck your arms up, all things I've done.

• 1:26:22Speaker 12

  Yep.

• 1:26:23Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 1:26:23Speaker 12

  And there's a, so they, they have a, an AI pet robot for Tuya that can live in your house. It's got, it looks like a big white donut with wheels. And I think the hole in the middle is meant, at least based on the crudely photo or the crudely photoshopped cat sitting in it to be like, your pet can sit inside the AI robot companion. See, it's part of your family.

• 1:26:46Ed Zitron?

  I've always, a pet for my pet?

• 1:26:49Speaker 04

  Is it kidnapping your cat?

• 1:26:50Speaker 12

  And it's telling that they couldn't get a real cat in that thing. They had to Photoshop a cat crudely into that thing. Because no cat is getting inside a wheeled robot.

• 1:27:00Ed Zitron?

  Baba was killing that shit. Baba was fucking running across the house to like, yeah, donkey kick that shit.

• 1:27:06Speaker 12

  They describe again, it just looks like a donut with wheels. Galactic design, harmonious coexistence, sleek sci-fi aesthetics for pets and people.

• 1:27:17Speaker 12

  Yeah, it's

• 1:27:22Speaker 06

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:27:23Speaker 12

  It's just

• 1:27:24Speaker 06

  When am I gonna meet somebody who buys one of these?

• 1:27:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I wanna meet some. I actually wanna study the brain of someone who goes there is like, yes.

• 1:27:32Speaker 12

  Yes.

• 1:27:32Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 1:27:33Speaker 12

  It was a big booth, so clearly there's money.

• 1:27:36Ed Zitron?

  One hundred thousand dollars.

• 1:27:37Speaker 12

  This is, uh, yeah, I'm not sure where the company is based out of. I haven't looked into it enough yet. There was a panel going on, uh, to ya X, uh, to to ya and Google Cloud from AI first to AI everywhere, which was the same as half of the other panels I've heard. It was just a bunch of platitudes about

• 1:27:57Ed Zitron?

  Tie someone to a chair.

• 1:27:58Speaker 12

  How the AIs, AIs just getting better. It's coming to everything. Don't you love your digital assistant? I don't go anywhere without my digital assistant.

• 1:28:07Ed Zitron?

  You said the last year, this is the worst it'll ever be. It actually seems to have got worse.

• 1:28:11Speaker 12

  It's at least not any better. And yeah, they've they've got the the health management thing. It's got a fitness coast, coach. It does sleep analysis. And again, I just keep thinking like, uh, okay, so you're just handing literally your entire life's data.

• 1:28:24Ed Zitron?

  And this is the donut thing, right?

• 1:28:26Speaker 12

  This is, they do the donut thing and they have the companion app that can also, one of the things they bragged about is that if you just, uh, oh, it it can run your smart home, uh, so you can plug your security system into this. In addition to your biometric data.

• 1:28:41Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:28:41Speaker 12

  It's a security guardian, 24 seven protection for peace of mind. And it can run your your smart power system. It can run your smart home. And it's also just a companion. And one of the things they advertise this companion can do is if you just tell it a topic, it'll automatically generate a podcast for you. Aren't we all, you know, we're in danger now, Ed.

• 1:29:04Ed Zitron?

  It takes a little more skill than that.

• 1:29:06Speaker 12

  Yeah, no, no, chat chat with hey to ya. By the way, it's hey to ya. Sounds a lot too much like ha, twa.

• 1:29:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. I'm also just thinking like, everything's like sleep analysis. So as a chat GPT wrapper, you feed the sleep data into health analysis. It's just chat. They released chat GPT for health today.

• 1:29:23Speaker 12

  AI podcast, say a topic and listen to what you love.

• 1:29:26Ed Zitron?

  Alex Heath of sources says that chat GPT health is gonna be big. I think that that's irresponsible.

• 1:29:31Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:29:31Ed Zitron?

  And also bullshit. Not like a a massive numpty would use chat GPT health. It's like, what's it gonna fuck? And it also, it's great. It's like, use it for this, this, but it's not for health advice.

• 1:29:42Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:29:43Ed Zitron?

  So why the?

• 1:29:43Speaker 12

  No, he said that we can't advertise that right now. Jesus, the liability.

• 1:29:47Ed Zitron?

  But also, what the fuck is it for then?

• 1:29:49Speaker 12

  It's for giving you health advice.

• 1:29:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's like, it's for health. Here's the other thing, though, like if we buy, and this is an if, but like if we buy the idea that generative AI agents like ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever, are like the operating systems of the future.

• 1:30:06Ed Zitron?

  Which I of course do.

• 1:30:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, I know you believe that, but like you, now you have all these other products like that, which is like its own AI kind of agent. And so, and there's like a million of them on the show floor. So like, are you gonna have that and then another device that has its own AI thing and another device has its own AI thing and you really would rather just use ChatGPT or whatever?

• 1:30:29Ed Zitron?

  That's the thing. It's like, what happens to all these companies when OpenAI copies all of them?

• 1:30:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:30:35Ed Zitron?

  Or dies? What if OpenAI raises their prices? Do the margins make sense?

• 1:30:42Speaker 12

  And these products are literally just a thing that like the, a computer that we slapped into a ring or something and gave it wireless at like gave it like access to to ChatGPT, right? That's all it is. What if you can't afford that anymore?

• 1:30:56Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. What if they raise the prices by 10%? Because that doesn't sound like much if you're like paying 20 bucks a month. But if you're doing, I don't know, thousands of dollars, tens, hundreds of you wipe them out immediately. If your margins are 10% and like most of your business is spent on ChatGPT, it's just, it's inevitable, but also so easily clonable.

• 1:31:19Speaker 06

  I'm looking forward to the ChatGPT furry astrologer.

• 1:31:23Speaker 12

  Sure. No, that, that's a responsible use. That's ethical AI and that, that really seems like ethical AI to me.

• 1:31:32Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, very worrying.

• 1:31:33Speaker 12

  There was a good one on mental health and AI that was by a

• 1:31:37Ed Zitron?

  What panel?

• 1:31:37Speaker 12

  The, yeah, I mean, it wasn't so much a panel as like a speech by like a clinical therapist.

• 1:31:42Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:31:43Speaker 12

  Who, I've got this written down in my notes. I'm spacing her name right now. But she was taking very much the, the reasonable tact of like, okay, what has already happened is that a shitload of people are using chatbots as therapists. That is happening. That is a thing that is going on. There are harms we are starting to document and we'll continue to document with that. But it's a thing that's happening. What would a healthy like like and the other thing she was saying that I don't fully agree with, but I think it's an arguable point is the because lack of access to mental health resources is such an endemic problem in the United States and the world, there

• 1:32:26Speaker 12

  is an opportunity, if you can make ethically a clinical like AI therapy, like an AI therapist, right? Or something that can do counseling or whatnot to reach people who couldn't otherwise. Now, I don't agree with that, but I it's a for the purpose of like listening to the speech, I can I can follow with like, okay, how would you I want to hear your pitch on like what an ethical version of this would be. And what I appreciated is that she doesn't really didn't really come to a conclusion like she was like, these are the things you would need to do. I don't know if it can be done. That was kind of the three line is like, I'm not sure that this is actually possible. Here's what it would need to be if it was if you were going to try to do this. Here's what you couldn't have it doing. Here's the things you'd have to keep in mind. And like, one of the things she brought up,

• 1:33:11Speaker 12

  which I think is why this is a fundamentally impossible thing is she said, okay, one of the major problems with chatbots, especially because people are using them as therapists, is that they are designed to keep you on and to keep you using them.

• 1:33:23Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:33:24Speaker 12

  And they like will will gas you up. They'll they'll lie. They'll say whatever to keep you using them. And that's bad for like, therapy.

• 1:33:32Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you need pushback.

• 1:33:33Speaker 12

  Right. You need pushback. You need critical analysis of what you're doing. Sometimes you don't need a machine that is trying to keep you happy so you that you continue to use it. That's not therapy. And she was like, so any responsible version of this technology turned towards therapy would have to not do that. And so I came up to her afterwards. I was like, well, the problem to me then is people will always have access to the robots that are really dangerous and terrible therapists that make them feel good and want to talk to them. Why would anyone use and pay money for presumably more expensive therapeutic bot? That doesn't make them feel good. And she was like, well, yeah, I think that's probably like an insurmountable problem. Basically, like that was the, that wasn't her word, but

• 1:34:18Speaker 12

  her words were essentially like, yeah, I'm, I have the same concern. I'm not sure it's possible to do this.

• 1:34:23Ed Zitron?

  So what frustrates me, and she's right, sure. But what frustrates me about that is like, I'm tired of people saying, if it did this, it would be great. If it's just not possible, if it's just like, most of CES this year is like, if it worked, it would be good.

• 1:34:36Speaker 12

  Hers was more people are using chatbots for therapy. Is it, what would you need to see for this to not be irresponsible?

• 1:34:42Ed Zitron?

  That's, and I, I think that's reasonable. I just, I think it's just people, what, she's right. It's a good thing, but it's like,

• 1:34:50Speaker 12

  It's not a good, I think the conclusion was you can't do it.

• 1:34:52Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And it's also people will conflate that by saying, and if we just buy more GPUs, then therapy bot will exist. And it's also just people misunderstand what therapy is. It's, it's, it's good that someone said what would be required. But the moment you think about what would be required, you realize it's impossible.

• 1:35:12Speaker 12

  Well, it's, it's the same. Last year, we talked to a guy who made an AI enabled device that was like for, as a companion for old people. Primarily, it's like this, like head shaped kind of robot, but didn't have like a face that had cameras on it and could like move a little bit and engage with you that you would like keep in a kitchen or something like an appliance. And you could use basic stuff with it. It'll tell you like the weather outside. It can look up stuff for you. And it also,

• 1:35:42Ed Zitron?

  Like Alexa, basically.

• 1:35:42Speaker 12

  Like Alexa, but it also, it's programmed to engage you and kind of ask you to like, hey, do you want to record a story for your grandkids? Like you can build an archive. Hey, you have these friends who also have this device. Why don't I call one of them? I, I

• 1:35:57Ed Zitron?

  That seems reasonable.

• 1:35:58Speaker 12

  To try and keep them active, to try to keep them engaged with their family, to make sure the, and talking to the inventor of it, he was incredibly concerned both about privacy, but also about this is a medical device. And this is a device that would give people better access to their doctors, better access to their families, give their families a better idea of what's going on with them. And so I don't think it's going to work as a product. I'm sure the company's already failed to be entirely honest because I don't think anyone's going to buy this thing. But I appreciate like, okay, you can't you you you had a good impulse coming in here. This is not a cash grab for you. You were attempting to make something that would solve a problem.

• 1:36:36Ed Zitron?

  And be a good a good business as a result of that.

• 1:36:39Speaker 12

  Right. And this year I came across a company that this is the company I showed you the horror. Um, uh, zero with that had the, the

• 1:36:47Speaker 04

  The Wally robot.

• 1:36:48Speaker 12

  The they have the Wally robot that they say they're working with Disney to do a licensed version of, but they have these tiny robots that look like rock them sock them robots that are like companions for the elderly, even though they look like a toy a kid would have played with in the 1990s.

• 1:37:01Ed Zitron?

  AI me or something like that?

• 1:37:02Speaker 12

  No, no, it's zero with is the company. But it can like walk or I can hobble around. And the thing when I asked like, what does it do? She said, well, it'll tell your it'll tell like an, an, oh, an elderly person's family member if they're not doing well, if they like seem to be less social or like stressed or anxious. And I was like, well, based on what? And he said, well, if you look, you can see like we've got this, you can see like how the machine sees through the cameras and it looks like the Terminator and it'll zero in on faces and it'll notice like micro expressions that show you that somebody's like hiding sad and I'm like, you're number one, you don't know any of this.

• 1:37:37Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you're making this up.

• 1:37:38Speaker 12

  Number two, telling me that you're like elder care device looks at people the way the Terminator does doesn't give me a lot of confidence. Um, and just the, the difference in like this man who this was a very personal invention to him and he at every step was thinking about what will actually be best to the people I want to help versus this marketer being like, yeah, it's like a fucking Terminator. I'll tell you if your grandma's dying, fucking ruins.

• 1:38:01Ed Zitron?

  What are you meant to do with that?

• 1:38:03Speaker 12

  And it's tiny. It's like 18 inches tall. Grandma's gonna have this walking around. It's good. She's gonna trip on it.

• 1:38:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, like

• 1:38:09Speaker 12

  Like what the fuck?

• 1:38:09Ed Zitron?

  Like the classic thing that old people do is trip on stuff and it's like, we need another one of them.

• 1:38:14Speaker 12

  What grandma needs is a tiny robot that looks like a toy. That her 40 year old grandson now would have played with as a kid and like, why, why does she want this in her house?

• 1:38:23Ed Zitron?

  You get it between like TMO notifications and Instagram notification, grandma dead.

• 1:38:28Speaker 12

  Grandma dead. Details later.

• 1:38:30Ed Zitron?

  Grandma dead or like the, like your cat's pissed, like you get the note. It really is notification. If you bought even seven of these devices, your entire life is just a nightmare of just like ping.

• 1:38:41Speaker 12

  Just spend the rest of your life trying to scroll through one day's notifications.

• 1:38:45Ed Zitron?

  I mean, my fucking phone is already like that. It's insane. You install a new app that's like, oh, it's the, it's the Selfridges app. And it's like, did you know you can buy pants? And it's like, I'm familiar. Thank you. Selfridges.

• 1:38:59Speaker 06

  But I think it kind of gets back to like, you know, what I was saying before about like Pebble and clicks. It's like, you know, it is so in short supply at CES to find like authenticity, somebody who is like really passionate about like this thing.

• 1:39:11Ed Zitron?

  A thing, a problem.

• 1:39:13Speaker 12

  I want to solve a problem, so I made a thing.

• 1:39:14Speaker 06

  When you find it, it's very exciting, you know?

• 1:39:17Speaker 12

  Yeah. Like the guy who made the, the, the mug that has a fan on it. For when you're at like, you're drinking at the, at the stadium or something during like a summer game and you want both a fan and you want your, your beer, your Gatorade, whatever you put in there, you know?

• 1:39:32Ed Zitron?

  As seen on TV show. Well.

• 1:39:33Speaker 12

  It's stupid. I don't want one. It barely counts as consumer electronics, but at least a man had a dream, you know?

• 1:39:40Ed Zitron?

  So we're going to rotate again and the next ad is whatever it is, it's perfect. You have to buy it immediately.

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• 1:42:59Ed Zitron?

  Diane, I'm once again in front of a microphone in the Palazzo in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm drinking my 11th Diet Coke. I'm surrounded by the warmth and love of friendship and camaraderie. Joining me is Chloe Radcliffe, the wonderful stand-up comedian and actress from Is This Thing On? Who? What? Where? It's you, Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards.

• 1:43:18Speaker 12

  Yes.

• 1:43:21Ed Zitron?

  Correct. I'm going. I'm just a stand-up comedian, Adam Conover, and also the host of the Factually Podcast.

• 1:43:27Speaker 13

  Hello.

• 1:43:28Ed Zitron?

  And of course, Edwin Anguoso Jr., who writes the Tech Bubble Newsletter. Hello. And we're back. We're back for the final bit of this, of Wednesday's CES episode. I'm on, this is what, 12 and a half hours. It's great. I've got so many more. I fucking love doing it. I'm not even complaining. I love doing this. But everyone else appears, everyone else is tired. And I'm so sorry, everyone, for dragging you into this. But yeah, so we've got two people who've never been to CES before. Oh. Chloe, Adam.

• 1:43:56Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 1:43:57Ed Zitron?

  How'd you feel? What do you think?

• 1:43:59Speaker 12

  Welcome to the jungle.

• 1:44:00Speaker 13

  I mean, it makes me wanna, like, go see someone play an acoustic guitar with no amplification.

• 1:44:10Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:11Speaker 13

  You know what I mean?

• 1:44:12Ed Zitron?

  Oh, tell me more, yeah.

• 1:44:13Speaker 13

  It makes me wanna, like, walk by a playground, like, you know, it's recess and the children are just sort of like running around.

• 1:44:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, it makes me wanna build a fire and dig a hole with my bare hands. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:26Speaker 13

  Yeah, it makes me wanna, like, have a basic, a basic pleasure of life. And I'm having trouble, like, you know, putting the two worlds together, you know?

• 1:44:36Ed Zitron?

  How do you mean? Like, what are the two worlds in this case?

• 1:44:38Speaker 13

  Well, it's just, you know, like, this is, it's the center of, you know, the tech industry in many ways, or at least a certain piece of it, right? It's like all sort of coalescing around this, you know, moment. It's like a little black hole.

• 1:44:53Speaker 12

  I'm like the bowels of the tech industry, right? It's not ready to, like, shit all this stuff out yet. So we're kind of watching it as it...

• 1:45:01Speaker 13

  And it's like

• 1:45:01Speaker 05

  We're in the intestines.

• 1:45:02Speaker 13

  Yeah, exactly. It's supposedly the most, the most important, you know, industry in America. That sets the tone for the year as well, because it's in January. Drives the economy. These are the people who are like creating the future and, and so much of it could not be more distant from most people's lives, or horrifying to their lives. Did you see anything new today that horrified you? Yeah, there were, uh, three different kiosks, uh, that were selling, um, body trackers that would track you while you're driving a car. Sorry. It, it's not for you, the driver, though. It's for your employer to track you while you're driving the car.

• 1:45:42Speaker 13

  Like, like if, you know, to track UPS drivers or Uber drivers or other people who are driving a fleet. And it, it can, you sit there and it has, you know, draws a little skeleton over your body and your face to track you. And then it has a little icon. Oh, we can tell you're yawning. Uh, a little voice will say, put on your seatbelt. Like it's, uh, it, it's, it's human monitoring to, you know, mechanize people. I guess if you're a logistics company that can't afford Waymos, which are also all over the place, you, this is a way of sort of putting your drivers into a little virtual prison.

• 1:46:16Speaker 05

  That feels so much more invasive than, you know, hey, we do have an alarm on the car door. So we know every time you get in and out of the vehicle and we, and we have GPS in the car and we know, you know, we know when you're stopped.

• 1:46:27Speaker 13

  Yeah, we have like a governor, so it can't go above a certain speed.

• 1:46:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:31Speaker 13

  And, uh, you know, it was kind of fun to play with because they have a camera set up and you'll watch it track your body. And me and Edward were playing with it. And then, and I was like waving at it. And then I kind of pretended I was in a car crash. And then I kind of like yanked the equipment around and it wasn't put, and then a German man came over and he was like, you, you must leave. That has been enough fun. You must. I was like, I'm sorry. Yes, you must leave.

• 1:46:59Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 1:47:00Speaker 14

  Each time you said, each time Adam said, I'm sorry, he's like, oh, yes, yes, you have to go.

• 1:47:09Speaker 13

  By the way, I was, I was like pretty stoned for the entire two hours that we were there.

• 1:47:13Speaker 12

  Yeah, I, I love getting in trouble at booths. Like my second or third CES, I used to have this thing where I would go, I would seek out all of the rugged products. Cause this was right when they were starting to make a bunch of Bluetooth speakers, 15 years ago, starting to make a bunch of like, like power banks and stuff. So like rugged electronics was coming into like its own as a field. And so I would always, I, I would track down like where they had, and there was, there was one year where one of the companies selling them had a bunch of like these big boxy rugged speakers and like logs that like you could sit on or that they were stacking them on. They just brought the logs as decorations.

• 1:47:47Speaker 13

  Right.

• 1:47:47Speaker 12

  But they were like stump sized logs. And I asked them like, hey, so it's like drop resistant, crush proof. And they were like walking me through the stats and I was like, can I try just dropping one of these logs on top of it? And they were like, yeah. And so I fucking hit it as hard as I could and I cracked the son of a bitch in half.

• 1:48:04Speaker 13

  Hell, yeah. And a German man said, you must leave. You must put the lockdown.

• 1:48:10Speaker 12

  She apologized to me. Cause she said, I asked, I didn't do, I didn't assault the, the device. Well, you assaulted the device, but with express consent. With consent.

• 1:48:21Speaker 13

  But this was also a device you were meant to assault.

• 1:48:23Speaker 12

  Yes. Well, that, and that's what my very first CES, they had an indestructible cell phone, not a smartphone, a cell phone. And they took a bunch of journalists out to, I think we were in front of Caesar's, maybe it was the Venetian. But they had like a, a, a car that had like company branding on it and they would, each journalist could go and set the phone down and they would drive over it with like an SUV.

• 1:48:44Speaker 13

  Right.

• 1:48:45Speaker 12

  To show you how tough it is. And everyone did the exact same thing and took a video while it was driving over it. And I did the same thing as everyone else. I put the phone down flat. They drove over. I was like, yep, that's a tough phone. And one guy stacked it on its side and they drove over it and it popped it. Wide open because it hit a seam and that is one of the most influential like moments in my career as a journalist where it's like that's that's how you do.

• 1:49:10Ed Zitron?

  I feel like this is this is the CES thing. It's like, we have got one thing this does and most people are not going to ask. Because this is not for people to use. It's for people to sell.

• 1:49:20Speaker 12

  Right.

• 1:49:21Ed Zitron?

  And it's like, oh, yeah, yeah. Well, what if it does this? Wait, what? Yeah. Does it work? Ah, mm. Chloe, I feel like you were talking about something earlier, Chloe. It was just like, you asked one question. My brain just seizing up in real time.

• 1:49:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm trying to remember which specific. I just have so many products that I've been like.

• 1:49:38Ed Zitron?

  No, you've been asked.

• 1:49:38Speaker 05

  But what's the point?

• 1:49:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that's the question. It's like, what's the point?

• 1:49:41Speaker 05

  And they're like, why?

• 1:49:42Ed Zitron?

  Fuck.

• 1:49:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:49:43Ed Zitron?

  Wait, wait. No one's ever asked us that before.

• 1:49:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:49:46Ed Zitron?

  You you got any dregs left, Chloe? Things to declare?

• 1:49:49Speaker 05

  Um, I saw, this is not a pro. Well, I actually don't know what product this was associated with. It must be a product.

• 1:49:55Ed Zitron?

  Probably for the best.

• 1:49:55Speaker 05

  But there was a like, test how strong your your punch is.

• 1:50:00Speaker 12

  Oh, yeah, they they have a section.

• 1:50:02Speaker 05

  And I stood for a couple of minutes and just watched. With the greatest respect. The dweeby-est, loser-iest, sweet little dorks, some young, many old, walk up and just like try and rail this thing. And and like, you know, everybody punched it, but watching, watching dudes in just like weirdly fitting suits. Whose faces move a little strange, be like, it is my turn to punch now. I was like, this is incredible. This is beautiful. And I was like, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna take a video of this. I'm not gonna take it. This is not, I'm not trying to like, I'm not trying to be mean. I'm not trying to make this a sideshow, but this is cinema.

• 1:50:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I saw also like there was one where you could throw footballs at Target. And I was just, I watched this old man just walk up and he just fucking lamping the footballs there. And then he just, and his like wife was like, like videoing him do it. And they just walked off and you could see the people at the booth be like, wait, you're not gonna talk to us about the TV? And they just walked off. That guy fucking rocks. I love that.

• 1:51:09Speaker 12

  That's beautiful.

• 1:51:09Ed Zitron?

  I want to throw the fucking football and I don't want to go. I'm done here. I don't need to talk to you, you and your like gooby TV or whatever it was. It was like one of the weird off-brand television companies that spends way too much at this show. Yeah, it it your first CES and you're now really I feel like this is an I don't want to say atypical year, but it's one of the sadder ones. Like I'm having a great time.

• 1:51:31Speaker 12

  There's not a lot of new ideas.

• 1:51:33Speaker 14

  One thing I maybe the only thing I liked actually was I saw this massive John Deere tractor. Didn't know they could be this fucking big. Massive.

• 1:51:42Speaker 12

  A two story house.

• 1:51:43Speaker 14

  Yeah, literally. I climbed stairs to get up there. Crazy hydraulic. I've I I had a vision of of just uh not doing any of this shit. And farming with the with the big ass tractor.

• 1:51:57Speaker 12

  Really industrial farming.

• 1:51:58Speaker 14

  Yeah, with the industrial farming, you know, I come from a long line of farmers. I feel like that that felt right for a second. And then I had intrusive thoughts about running over all the tech.

• 1:52:06Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:52:07Speaker 13

  And that would be ideal.

• 1:52:08Speaker 14

  That felt more right. That felt more right.

• 1:52:11Speaker 13

  When I climbed up there, I started, you know, because it's you climb into this thing and you're thirty feet above the ground and it's like the bridge of like the Starship Enterprise. It's like a hydraulic chair and like a giant thing. And you're looking at the it's the rest of the show floor and you're just like, oh, if I had a missile launcher on this, I could blow it all up. And the front of it looks like weaponry because it's like twenty like imagine a cone, the shape of a traffic cone, but as tall as a person.

• 1:52:40Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:52:40Speaker 13

  And then on its end, like with the sharp part pointed out, like twenty of those lined up. That's what you're driving.

• 1:52:46Ed Zitron?

  Tractor though?

• 1:52:47Speaker 13

  It is, I believe it's picking corn, um like off the cobs and putting it into a giant like dump truck looking thing that that that goes along in sync with it. Which is another part of the the gap between the stuff at this show and reality because it's like this is so far from what most people think of it as a farm. You know, this looks like.

• 1:53:07Speaker 12

  But isn't that what farming? But that's how most farming is.

• 1:53:10Speaker 13

  Oh, I know, but it's it's just the gap between. It looks like if you were playing like a video game and you were like terraforming Mars. Like this is what this thing looks like.

• 1:53:22Ed Zitron?

  I I just like the idea of a giant tractor and just turning the fucking thing on, driving forward until I'm out this convention center. Drive away, leave this all by me.

• 1:53:30Speaker 12

  Just head for the hills.

• 1:53:32Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, just to just go.

• 1:53:33Speaker 12

  Stop till you hit red rock.

• 1:53:34Ed Zitron?

  Go out to area 51, me and the boys.

• 1:53:36Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:53:36Speaker 14

  Yeah, that's a, that's a, our dear president, that's one of his bits, right? You remember when he was, he had that truck and he was like, you know, I could.

• 1:53:43Speaker 12

  Happy in that truck.

• 1:53:44Speaker 14

  Just drive away, they won't let me, but I could just go off into the sunset, you know?

• 1:53:48Speaker 12

  Let them.

• 1:53:48Speaker 14

  You could, you could do that with the tractor, you know, if you hop, maybe if you're hotwired, I don't know if it actually has an engine in there.

• 1:53:54Speaker 05

  Imagine you could, imagine a tractor that you are describing is the size of a spaceship, but if you just know exactly where to cut and you can just make red wire, done, blue wire and turn this thing on.

• 1:54:06Ed Zitron?

  The CES massacre.

• 1:54:08Speaker 05

  Mow over CES.

• 1:54:09Ed Zitron?

  The Las Vegas tractor massacre.

• 1:54:12Speaker 05

  Blasting big green tractor out of the speakers.

• 1:54:15Speaker 13

  There were, I do want to say, behind us in line for the tractor, there was like a bunch of, uh, uh, folks from Japan and they were like vibrating with excitement to get in the tractor, cause I can only imagine just the Americanness of a John Deere tractor and the size of it. It was like, they were, they like shoved me out of the way to get in.

• 1:54:34Ed Zitron?

  I'm, I will also say, this is a unique thing that Americans can't understand how small some other countries are. Like when I got to America and I saw my first cruise ship, I kind of freaked the fuck out. I say it's just so large, so much, it looks like the size of London.

• 1:54:47Speaker 12

  They're visually upsetting.

• 1:54:48Speaker 14

  I still freak out over them, they're massive.

• 1:54:51Ed Zitron?

  They're huge and they're terrifying. They look horrifying and like, if I go on this big tractor, I would either feel overwhelmed with power or like, just like, I wouldn't want that to exist. But I also like that they had a big tractor at CES, that, that makes me.

• 1:55:05Speaker 12

  Yeah. I feel like the big tractor is like the ring of power and that no matter whether or not you like hate it before you get behind the wheel, as soon as you start driving it, it changes you.

• 1:55:14Ed Zitron?

  You just hear Dracula in your head.

• 1:55:16Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:55:19Speaker 13

  It was pretty clear, it was pretty clear, you don't even drive this thing, you supervise it.

• 1:55:24Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:55:24Ed Zitron?

  You sit there and you. This would be my Green Goblin mask.

• 1:55:27Speaker 12

  You've got Mr. Wolf behind you on the weapons table. Rikers at a. Alex Heath is here. Sorry, Alex.

• 1:55:37Ed Zitron?

  Sorry, Alex. I don't mean it. I'm not gonna run you over with track.

• 1:55:40Speaker 13

  I do love that. Every now and then you'll name drop someone. You're like, I wish I could do bodily harm.

• 1:55:45Ed Zitron?

  Just kidding. I'm also would not do bodily harm to Alex Heath. I apologize, Alex.

• 1:55:50Speaker 12

  I apologize. That's not what the poster that you made and put on the wall behind you says. I wasn't gonna comment on it. It's weird.

• 1:55:57Ed Zitron?

  Just the fucking signal chat from last year was just like an actionable threat against an executive. I was like, and it was the second I got here as well. It was like Sam Altman, we're going to, and I'm not gonna fucking repeat it.

• 1:56:09Speaker 12

  Yeah, it's not illegal to make actionable threats against people.

• 1:56:14Speaker 13

  It's not.

• 1:56:16Speaker 12

  It depends on what, uh, who you voted for.

• 1:56:18Ed Zitron?

  That's my boss, folks. Um, yeah, it's, I,

• 1:56:22Speaker 12

  These are jokes. These are bits. These are yucks.

• 1:56:24Ed Zitron?

  We're doing bits. We're having a laugh. We're having a laugh. It's, it's bants. It's, we're bant maxing.

• 1:56:30Speaker 12

  We're bantering, yeah.

• 1:56:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that's, that's how it works. So Adam, this is your last day, though. Uh, did you see anything you liked? So you're on an edibles?

• 1:56:37Speaker 13

  Yeah. No, no, I know. I was vaping. I have a dry herb vape, which is the best way to consume weed.

• 1:56:43Ed Zitron?

  I actually am curious. What does that mean?

• 1:56:45Speaker 13

  Okay, so what it mean, I love explaining this. What it means is you, you know, Robert, you know what this is?

• 1:56:49Speaker 12

  Yeah, it's just like a vape that, yeah, I mean,

• 1:56:51Speaker 13

  You put plant material in it. Most vapes that people think of are oil that have like chemically extracted the THC and suspended it in like an oil.

• 1:56:58Speaker 12

  It's how all of the vapes used to work. The volcanoes and stuff when we were kids.

• 1:57:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, the ones with the bag.

• 1:57:03Speaker 13

  This is you put plant material in it. It heats it to a precise temperature where it does not burn. It just vaporizes the THC and other essential oils. And one of the great things about it is it makes almost no vapor. So you, I use this thing at the fucking airport. Like, nobody noticed, you know, no one's looking at you. No one is gonna notice you using this thing. So it is great for this kind of environment.

• 1:57:24Speaker 05

  But it doesn't taste like strawberry melon.

• 1:57:29Speaker 05

  I guess weed babes maybe never do. Wow, spoken like a person who really knows her drugs.

• 1:57:35Speaker 13

  Uh, I did see something that I, I really did pop for, which was, um, and, and Ed was there too. The, uh, uh, it was a, uh, oh, okay. So imagine like a white van, like a normal van and on top of it is sort of a couple of blue tubes that go up and down and rotate. Kind of like a, like if you built like a Lego version of an anti-aircraft. That looks like, that looks like a home anti-aircraft weapon. And it turns out that's what it was. Cause it shoots a net at drones.

• 1:58:05Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:58:05Speaker 13

  Um, using not gunpowder, it uses some kind of electromagnet.

• 1:58:09Speaker 12

  Yeah. It's like a, like almost a railgun type.

• 1:58:12Speaker 13

  I asked the guy, was this a railgun? And he was like, kinda, you know?

• 1:58:15Speaker 05

  What's a railgun?

• 1:58:16Speaker 13

  Uh.

• 1:58:16Speaker 12

  Uses magnets to propel around.

• 1:58:18Speaker 14

  Nothing much works railgun with you. Sorry.

• 1:58:21Speaker 13

  It, it's like a, it's like a, yeah, like a sci-fi torpedo.

• 1:58:24Speaker 05

  Can we, can we cut that out of the podcast?

• 1:58:27Speaker 13

  Uh, but yeah, so it shoots a, it shoots a net at the drone and then it catches the drone. And then there's a little parachute. So the drone like falls down to earth. So you can, it was like super fucking, just like Metal Gear Solid V.

• 1:58:39Speaker 14

  Yeah. It's interesting because it's like, uh, he was like, there's a legal gray area where it's like, you know, you see a drone that you don't know. And you're like, whose drone is this? And you want to shoot it, but you can't. You know, you might get in trouble.

• 1:58:51Speaker 12

  Shoot any drone that flies over your.

• 1:58:53Speaker 14

  Yeah. So he says, so you're not destroying it. You can just, you can give it back to the owner after you retrieve it.

• 1:59:00Speaker 12

  I'm mounting that shit on the back of my truck like a technical. And I'm just hanging in the park.

• 1:59:05Speaker 14

  Driving in your, your pickup truck with a bunch of drones in the back.

• 1:59:09Speaker 05

  What we think Mad Max is going to look like is like old gas trucks. It's actually going to just be semi trucks with drone trophies.

• 1:59:16Speaker 14

  Yeah. After the revolution.

• 1:59:17Speaker 05

  Nailed.

• 1:59:17Speaker 13

  Cause the drones are going to have countermeasures eventually where they're going to.

• 1:59:21Speaker 12

  That's all they are.

• 1:59:21Speaker 13

  Chaff or they're going to dodge, you know?

• 1:59:24Speaker 12

  They've already, I mean, that's, yeah, that is the nature of drone. Like that's what we're seeing in Ukraine right now, which is like it's, it's this, it's gotten to this insane escalation of countermeasure. Where if you go to a lot of frontline villages, they're covered in miles of fiber optic cable. It looks like the whole village is covered. And spider webs.

• 1:59:38Ed Zitron?

  Stupid question, why?

• 1:59:40Speaker 12

  Because you ha- almost have to have all of the drones be wired because jamming is so prevalent, right? So if that you can't jam jam one that's got like a wire on it. So they're basically taking off with these long spools and flying around and it leaves because they're getting shot down constantly. Drones don't have a long lifespan in the field. So you just wind up with these villages that are, it looks like a giant spider.

• 2:00:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, full of cables.

• 2:00:04Speaker 12

  Webbed the whole town.

• 2:00:05Speaker 05

  That like hangs on the trees.

• 2:00:06Ed Zitron?

  I have no idea about that.

• 2:00:08Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, that's drone warfare's nuts. Uh, I hate it. That's the thing that came closest to killing me overseas was a fucking drone. But yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's all this like Red Queen measure counter measure shit. Like everyone's been sprinting as fast as possible to stay more or less in place for the last four years.

• 2:00:26Speaker 13

  That's what I liked about this company was I was like, is this for the military? And he was like, I mean, we're pitching the military, but like, I do, you know, mate, we talked to them, but like, we think you could use it, you know, to like guard a private, you know, like a, a power plant or like, I was like, use it at Coachella or whatever. I mean, I, uh, once on, there was an episode of Adam ruins everything where we couldn't shoot for like 90 minutes because some dumbass was flying a drone over the shoot. And we could, we had to find the guy to stop because it was fucking like, he could have used it that day.

• 2:00:56Speaker 12

  You had to break his legs. I remember that episode.

• 2:00:59Ed Zitron?

  Adam ruins this man's life.

• 2:01:04Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that's, I love, I do love, I honestly, every time I hear about this, I just want to play with one. I just want to fucking shoot a, a guy.

• 2:01:12Speaker 12

  Like duck hunt, like you're playing duck hunt.

• 2:01:13Speaker 12

  Guy, Jesus Christ.

• 2:01:16Speaker 05

  No, a guy in the sky.

• 2:01:17Speaker 12

  Okay, okay.

• 2:01:18Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:19Speaker 05

  If you see a guy in your airspace, we all want to shoot down aircraft.

• 2:01:21Ed Zitron?

  That's exactly what I mean.

• 2:01:24Speaker 12

  Exactly.

• 2:01:25Ed Zitron?

  That's what I mean.

• 2:01:26Speaker 05

  Every time the Blue Angels fly over.

• 2:01:28Ed Zitron?

  Not a, not a guy I'm just looking at in the street.

• 2:01:32Speaker 12

  No.

• 2:01:33Ed Zitron?

  My, in capturing my nets.

• 2:01:35Speaker 05

  He's got to be high enough that the, that the, the, your man guns have to be able to aim at them.

• 2:01:39Speaker 12

  I mean, the last time I saw the Blue Angels at Fleet during Fleet Week in San Francisco, I couldn't stop myself from thinking like, I could take them. I could take them.

• 2:01:48Speaker 05

  I feel like I could.

• 2:01:49Ed Zitron?

  The Blue Angels?

• 2:01:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Take them. Why not?

• 2:01:51Ed Zitron?

  Take them with what?

• 2:01:52Speaker 12

  Well, they're flying real close to each other. I feel like it's not hard to fuck that up.

• 2:01:56Ed Zitron?

  Oh, you're just giving them a shove?

• 2:01:57Speaker 12

  Yeah, exactly. Just a little shove.

• 2:01:59Ed Zitron?

  Just like a rock or something?

• 2:02:00Speaker 12

  A little shove ski.

• 2:02:00Ed Zitron?

  Cause they're in a plane.

• 2:02:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, rock. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, wait, wait. No, we do actually want to know what, how, take them how with?

• 2:02:08Speaker 12

  Okay, so they're flying pretty low.

• 2:02:10Speaker 05

  If I ever need to take the Blue Angels, I would like these.

• 2:02:12Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:02:13Speaker 05

  Okay, flying pretty low. Like, how low? Like, are we talking 150 feet low?

• 2:02:16Speaker 12

  If you get on top of the Salesforce Tower, when they're doing some of those, like, really low flights, and you get like a potato gun, you could get one of those lodged right into one of the air intake things.

• 2:02:25Speaker 05

  Oh, sure.

• 2:02:25Speaker 12

  And they're probably, like, they're, they're going so fast, I feel like any little mistake would be catastrophic.

• 2:02:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:31Speaker 05

  He is.

• 2:02:31Ed Zitron?

  And don't get him started on how we'd fuck up the Harlem Globetrotters, okay? Kill those motherfuckers.

• 2:02:37Speaker 13

  What that manhunt look like, you know? You're like posted up on the Salesforce Tower, you used a potato gun.

• 2:02:44Speaker 05

  Parody.

• 2:02:44Speaker 13

  Yeah, parody.

• 2:02:45Speaker 12

  It was a joke. It was a bit.

• 2:02:46Ed Zitron?

  He's doing, he's doing bands. His bands, bands were bands, bands.

• 2:02:49Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:02:50Ed Zitron?

  Bands. But yeah, um, it's so, it is quite funny watching people like, I'm gonna call you too normal. I think that that's fair.

• 2:02:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:02:59Ed Zitron?

  Watching.

• 2:02:59Speaker 05

  A lot of my exes would disagree, for sure.

• 2:03:01Ed Zitron?

  And, I don't know, but normal, you've seen this show, and it's funny watching regular people just be like, yeah, so most of it's useless, most of it doesn't work, some of it, most of it will never exist.

• 2:03:14Speaker 05

  I mean, I asked the question in the last episode with none, none of these guys here. I basically said, uh, what does, what is the point of CES? I was like, what does anybody walk away from CES with? The people who are involved in it.

• 2:03:27Speaker 13

  Yeah. Well, I was asking Edward, and maybe someone here knows the answer. Who's the customer? Like, I went to Toy Fair once, and at Toy Fair, there's, there's buyers from retail chains walking around going like, yes, I'll take 10,000 sticky hands or whatever.

• 2:03:41Ed Zitron?

  Which makes sense.

• 2:03:42Speaker 13

  Who, here it's not custom, like, who's?

• 2:03:46Speaker 05

  There are. So there's.

• 2:03:47Speaker 12

  CES is really a couple of different events, right?

• 2:03:50Speaker 13

  Right.

• 2:03:50Speaker 12

  A huge number of the booths here, particularly when you get to the areas where all of the company, all the booths are small and all of the companies have like different like Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean or Taiwanese names, right? When you get to like that chunk of the of the of the show, most of the people who are walking around those booths, it's not like journalists, because in a lot of cases, a bunch of the booths have the same products that are just like slightly different, like the same battery, but a different case. Because whose advertising there are like OEMs. It's like factories and like manufacturers of different like things that are advertising, we make this, we make this. And you can like buy this part to make or to sell like as part of other tech gear, right?

• 2:04:30Speaker 12

  And there are buyers and there are representatives of companies that are like looking to contract with manufacturers and whatnot, who may can do business here. That's like a chunk of the event that we don't have really any, because that's not, journalists aren't interested in that.

• 2:04:44Ed Zitron?

  And that's a lot of Eureka.

• 2:04:46Speaker 12

  Most of that.

• 2:04:46Ed Zitron?

  Eureka Park is kind of full of these. I was mentioning earlier, like photonic sensors and weird things that are just for like one group.

• 2:04:53Speaker 12

  I went past like 20 booths that were all just selling different pieces of solar panels. I was like, yeah, that's not for me.

• 2:04:58Ed Zitron?

  And very valid.

• 2:04:59Speaker 12

  Right. And that's fine. And that, so that's like a big chunk of the event. And then another chunk of the event is consumer electronics, which is where most of the bullshit is, right? Because it's like 80%, well, this, no one will ever buy this. This is a terrible idea. And 20% ranging from, okay, there's probably a customer for this to like, oh, that's actually really cool. And then the third chunk of the event, which journalists are also involved in, is like, this is not a product yet, but it will be. Or these are ways in which we are looking to integrate technology into like things that are above the consumer level, like all of the smart city stuff, all of like the the smart vehicle stuff, right? Where journalists are interested in that, consumers are interested in that, but you as a consumer aren't going to go buy a smart street light, right?

• 2:05:43Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 2:05:44Speaker 12

  So that, and so I kind of look at it as like, those are the three events that CES is.

• 2:05:49Speaker 13

  Okay, that's clarifying. Thank you.

• 2:05:51Ed Zitron?

  I think like the majority of this year just feels like chat GPT wrappers.

• 2:05:54Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, that's most of what I've, most of what I've seen is some form of AI chatbot integration or glasses that have chatbots.

• 2:06:02Speaker 13

  I saw one interesting, uh, we, we, we talked to one vendor that was like an AI thing that actually seemed to kind of do something. Okay. Which was they, okay, if you have an autonomous driving system and it goes on a drive and the drive doesn't go well, this will simulate a slight version of the, like, they can take a real drive, turn it into a simulation and then have the agent or whatever it is, the Waymo, do it again, like in its head to, to, to like make it do it better the next time. I'm like, okay, that, that seems like

• 2:06:38Speaker 12

  Sure.

• 2:06:38Speaker 13

  A, a company, an AI company that a different one of these companies might contract. That's a specific service.

• 2:06:43Speaker 12

  What I like about that is that that's a company, I don't know how well this product will work, but that's a company that's thinking about solving a problem.

• 2:06:49Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 2:06:49Speaker 12

  I always gravitate towards like, someone identified a problem and they made a thing. Maybe it doesn't work.

• 2:06:56Ed Zitron?

  That's a fucking invention. As opposed to the ones just making up a problem.

• 2:07:00Speaker 12

  Right.

• 2:07:00Ed Zitron?

  And then failing to solve it.

• 2:07:01Speaker 12

  You know how your kid doesn't have a robot hallucinating horoscopes for it? Well, we've solved that issue.

• 2:07:08Ed Zitron?

  What does your, does your, does, where does, does your kid think that, uh, Taiwan is Taiwan or China?

• 2:07:14Speaker 12

  Right.

• 2:07:15Ed Zitron?

  Well, this, this, this toy is going to tell your child that it has offended it terribly. Do not mention Winnie the Pooh, the AI bot. You will get fucking drunk, you little shit. Claude, don't talk about Tiananmen Square.

• 2:07:32Speaker 12

  Is your four-year-old having too much trouble finding which under the sink chemicals are most caustic? This new teddy bear will make sure they know and teach them how to open all your pill bottles.

• 2:07:42Ed Zitron?

  This adorable rabbit will teach your five-year-old about BDSM. And what's funny is we are sounding like we're making jokes, but this is what is happening today. This is a thing happening today. Welcome, welcome, because you may be thinking, well, also doesn't it do all the assistant stuff? And you'll be surprised to hear it does not. None of this, every fucking, I am like, I would actually love to be elated. I would love to see something. I'd love to, I brought in so many people, spoken so many hours and I swear to fucking God, I'm trying.

• 2:08:11Speaker 12

  There's some, like, there was, okay, a cool thing I saw today is this company that is advertising, like, paper batteries, right?

• 2:08:19Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 2:08:19Speaker 12

  And the actual battery isn't, isn't paper, but like, the, the battery, like, the core of the battery is made out of cellulose. And so the only other, and that decomposes. And so basically, instead of dealing with batteries the way you do now, with batteries like this, you throw them into compost, you compost them, and then you filter the metal bits out, and you can recycle the metal bits separately, and then the compost is usable compost, right?

• 2:08:42Ed Zitron?

  That's useful.

• 2:08:42Speaker 12

  That sounds great. Potentially, again, I have not looked into this company and done, like, third-party reporting.

• 2:08:47Ed Zitron?

  I also hear.

• 2:08:48Speaker 12

  This is how they are claiming it works. I don't know if it works, but it's at least an idea.

• 2:08:51Ed Zitron?

  And if we establish, by here, filter the metals, I'm like, uh, but you know what?

• 2:08:55Speaker 12

  Again, and I'm also like, yeah, who's gonna be doing that?

• 2:08:57Ed Zitron?

  But also, that has great ramifications for, for disposable things, but that's for vapes.

• 2:09:02Speaker 12

  Someone's trying.

• 2:09:03Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 2:09:04Speaker 12

  To take humanity a step forward, and at least that's good.

• 2:09:07Ed Zitron?

  As opposed to, like, the 18th different vacuous autonomous driving company.

• 2:09:11Speaker 12

  As opposed to what I saw next to that booth.

• 2:09:13Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:09:14Speaker 12

  Mameet, which the company name is just M-M-E-E-T-T, don't know what that means. And it's, uh, it's, they have an AI business card. They actually have two different card products. One is, it's the size of a business card, if a business card was way thicker and couldn't actually fit in your wallet, and would be super easy to break, even if it wasn't your wallet.

• 2:09:31Ed Zitron?

  Okay, sick.

• 2:09:32Speaker 12

  Um, but you tap it to someone's phone, and if their phone has an NFT reader, like, or not NFT, um.

• 2:09:37Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, NFC.

• 2:09:38Speaker 12

  NFC, sorry.

• 2:09:39Ed Zitron?

  No, I couldn't.

• 2:09:40Speaker 12

  If your phone has an NFC reader, it'll pop, populate automatically with their, like, business card info.

• 2:09:46Ed Zitron?

  One quick problem.

• 2:09:47Speaker 12

  Sure.

• 2:09:47Ed Zitron?

  If you bump most phones together, it will do this without you having, like, an easily breakable piece of electronics.

• 2:09:53Speaker 12

  Interesting. What if I told you it also, as long as you have an internet connection, is, can translate things?

• 2:10:01Speaker 12

  Cause they can just stick that on whatever now.

• 2:10:03Ed Zitron?

  I would.

• 2:10:04Speaker 12

  Using a shitty speaker, I assume.

• 2:10:06Ed Zitron?

  Oh, well, I'm sold. I, I just fucking.

• 2:10:09Speaker 12

  And the other product they had was a thicker card that they bragged was as thin as three millimeters, houses four AI assistants, all the chatbots. They don't actually live in the product. Again, it's connecting.

• 2:10:21Speaker 05

  Why do you need four?

• 2:10:22Ed Zitron?

  And what is, okay, but just really simple. What is for? What is for? Is that just different? That's just prompt engineering. These motherfuckers are claiming there's like 11 AIs.

• 2:10:32Speaker 12

  Ah, no, no, you're being unfair. They've got the AI meeting assistant. Turn conversations anywhere into summaries, insights, and action items to boost productivity.

• 2:10:43Speaker 12

  They've got an AI translation assistant. Break language barriers across 145 languages.

• 2:10:48Speaker 05

  So there's not four AIs?

• 2:10:50Speaker 12

  No, it's just four different things the AI does.

• 2:10:52Ed Zitron?

  It's just prompt engineering.

• 2:10:53Speaker 12

  I do think they were lying. Yes, you're right.

• 2:10:55Speaker 05

  Cause it's like all using chat GPT.

• 2:10:57Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. So to explain.

• 2:10:58Speaker 12

  They've got a sales assistant.

• 2:10:59Ed Zitron?

  Which is, so prompt engineering is literally just every single AI product you have ever seen on this floor is just prompts. It's prompts for the API and telling it, you are a sales assistant. You are a meeting assistant. That's all it is. It's just text. It's just, it's all text. Every single one of these is just text. I am.

• 2:11:17Speaker 12

  Yep.

• 2:11:17Speaker 05

  Well, what about the AI?

• 2:11:19Ed Zitron?

  Pixels.

• 2:11:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:11:20Ed Zitron?

  Sometimes it's pixels.

• 2:11:21Speaker 12

  Yes.

• 2:11:22Ed Zitron?

  It's multimodal and multimodal.

• 2:11:23Speaker 12

  Inspiration assistant. Capture fleeting ideas and develop them into future possibilities.

• 2:11:28Speaker 05

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

• 2:11:32Speaker 13

  You could use that. You're a writer. You could use that.

• 2:11:34Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 2:11:35Speaker 12

  I want to think. People say that.

• 2:11:37Speaker 05

  What do you mean, capture fleeting ideas? Do you mean have an idea, focus on it in, I've got to be clear, your own brain?

• 2:11:46Ed Zitron?

  No.

• 2:11:49Speaker 05

  Then you can't, an AI can't, if it's fleeting, it leaves your brain faster than you can type it into your business card?

• 2:12:01Speaker 12

  I'm thinking about like, cause I keep a notebook and sometimes I like jot down ideas in it. I'm thinking about like that time I woke up after blacking out and just written on a page in the notebook was Hitler with abs? Question mark?

• 2:12:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. That's good. That's good.

• 2:12:16Speaker 12

  The AI could have really helped me. That could have been something, you know? Hitler with abs could have been the next Google.

• 2:12:21Speaker 13

  Wow, Robert. Hitler with abs sure is an invigorating and original idea.

• 2:12:26Speaker 14

  You're not just coming up with an idea. You're. Touching into something that everyone else is feeling.

• 2:12:32Speaker 13

  What if he had abs? What if he had abs, right?

• 2:12:35Ed Zitron?

  So I'm, as we wrap up-

• 2:12:36Speaker 13

  It's not just an idea, it's a revolution.

• 2:12:40Speaker 13

  That's, that's another great- Let me Hitler with abs that, real quick.

• 2:12:43Ed Zitron?

  It's like another one of those tweets about AI where it's like every AI thing is like, it's not just big, it's huge.

• 2:12:49Speaker 13

  That has literally become to me in the last month, that has, if I, whenever I see, it's not X, it's Y, I'm like, that's LLM text.

• 2:12:57Ed Zitron?

  So I, as we wrap up and Adam is finally released into the, into the wild again, is that, I'm just gonna tell you the worst name I saw on the show floor and I fucking looked-

• 2:13:06Speaker 13

  Oh, good.

• 2:13:07Ed Zitron?

  And it would be Junkie Cream.

• 2:13:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I caught Junkie Cream.

• 2:13:10Speaker 13

  Yeah, that's our debate.

• 2:13:11Ed Zitron?

  Junkie Cream, we love Junkie- And it is just an AI slop company, it was just like, it would just, I, I don't want to talk about what they did because they couldn't work it out and also it was very obvious they were trying to be like, cause it just-

• 2:13:24Speaker 13

  Is it not a cream?

• 2:13:24Speaker 05

  You know what's funny? That's, so that's exactly, no, no, no, it's like an, it's like an illustration, it's like an, it's like semi-animation producing, whatever, whatever.

• 2:13:32Ed Zitron?

  It's very clearly meant to make you go, oh, Junkie Cream.

• 2:13:34Speaker 05

  Right, and that's actually exactly why I-

• 2:13:37Ed Zitron?

  It looks like cum.

• 2:13:38Speaker 05

  I haven't brought it up because I, I saw it yesterday and I was like, Junkie Cream, that's crazy. And then as soon as you walk over, it's, the whole vibe is, isn't this crazy?

• 2:13:47Speaker 13

  We named it Junkie Cream.

• 2:13:49Speaker 05

  That ruins it, like, that's not, it's not, it's not funny anymore.

• 2:13:52Speaker 13

  There's a couple of those, we were talking about yesterday, the jerk off machine.

• 2:13:54Ed Zitron?

  The handy, no, and I saw the, I saw that today-

• 2:13:57Speaker 13

  Yeah, I love the handy.

• 2:13:58Ed Zitron?

  I get exactly what you mean though, it's like a, you can look.

• 2:14:04Ed Zitron?

  It's not, it's not your grandma's jackoff machine, it's like a very sad thing.

• 2:14:10Speaker 05

  It's only funny when it's, when the product is in earnest, like-

• 2:14:14Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 2:14:14Speaker 05

  The, okay, I think, Edward, I think you were talking about toilet cams, but I then saw, I think, a different toilet cam than you did, and when the guy was explaining it to me, he was, first of all, the, the words, camera in your toilet are at least-

• 2:14:31Speaker 13

  Bad idea.

• 2:14:31Speaker 05

  To a woman, the scariest-

• 2:14:33Ed Zitron?

  Camera, camera in a toilet.

• 2:14:35Speaker 05

  Four words that you can string together.

• 2:14:37Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 2:14:37Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:37Speaker 05

  And so then when he was explaining it, he was like, yeah, and so then the camera, so you put the cam, you put the thing in-

• 2:14:42Speaker 13

  Already fucked up.

• 2:14:43Speaker 05

  And he put, you, you put the camera in your toilet and, and he goes, and, and I said, I was like, and it's facing down, right? And he goes, yeah. Uh, uh, or he goes, he goes, obviously it's facing down. And I was like, and then he paused and he goes, or maybe it wasn't obvious. And I was like, yeah, honestly, it was not obvious. You're talking about putting a toilet in a, or a camera in a toilet. Everything's on the table from you. I don't know what you might do. Yeah. And what happens to those photos? Yeah. And what, what, what fucked up person?

• 2:15:14Ed Zitron?

  They are used to drain the toilet.

• 2:15:16Speaker 05

  Why is the camera, what is this product supposed to do? It's looking at your shit and going, hey, you gotta drink more water. That's the way it does it. It's insane. With a permanent cam.

• 2:15:24Ed Zitron?

  No, I forget who posted it, but it's like, yeah, I, I know it's cause my piss is like, looks like a high vis vest.

• 2:15:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:15:31Speaker 13

  Yeah. Like the consistency of your poop is already, you know it when it's happening.

• 2:15:35Speaker 05

  Yeah. If you're wondering if something's wrong. Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:15:38Speaker 13

  I don't need the AI to tell me I have diarrhea.

• 2:15:41Speaker 05

  I also asked them, and this little machine has so many pieces to it. Like it's probably, you know, like as you're holding it, it feels like it's probably like four separate housings that have been attached together to like, make it all work. Right. And I say that it looks, it looks fine. I just say that to say, there's a lot of seams in the thing.

• 2:16:00Ed Zitron?

  Sure. And a lot of pictures of piss and

• 2:16:03Speaker 05

  Presumably.

• 2:16:04Ed Zitron?

  Where that comes from.

• 2:16:05Speaker 05

  No, that's in the cloud. That's for anybody to access.

• 2:16:06Ed Zitron?

  Oh, good. I'm sure that won't be breached.

• 2:16:08Speaker 05

  But I, I said, I was like, how do you clean the toilet cam? And he said, Great question. Oh, you clean it in the same way that you would clean your toilet. And I was like, well, first of all, yeah, really weird answer. Yeah. Like

• 2:16:21Ed Zitron?

  How does he clean his toilet?

• 2:16:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. How does he clean his toilet? That's the follow up question. How often? Also, this is sitting on the rim. I like, I'm happy to use the scrub brush, but it is once a year at best that I really like getting there with elbow grease around the rim. And then this thing has so many.

• 2:16:38Ed Zitron?

  Once a year.

• 2:16:39Speaker 05

  Once a year?

• 2:16:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you gotta do it.

• 2:16:40Speaker 05

  I guess that's exactly how I clean my toilet cam.

• 2:16:42Speaker 13

  I pay a lady.

• 2:16:44Speaker 05

  To clean your toilet cam?

• 2:16:45Speaker 13

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To clean my toilet cam.

• 2:16:47Speaker 05

  And then to look through the photo history.

• 2:16:50Speaker 05

  Also, I have a camera on my toilet. It is called my cellphone, which I bring with me every time I use the toilet.

• 2:16:57Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 2:16:58Ed Zitron?

  Also, just if you, I'm just gonna, as we wrap the episode, I think the statement I wanna make is, if you are thinking, I'm gonna put a camera in a toilet, you're a fucking scumbag. I'm sorry. I'm like, it just.

• 2:17:08Speaker 05

  I, I mean, the guy, I met the guy who, who founded the company and he seemed sweet and like he just had bad shits.

• 2:17:13Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:14Speaker 05

  It is like, I don't know, buddy. It ca- a camera can't be the answer.

• 2:17:18Ed Zitron?

  But I think the, go on, Robert.

• 2:17:19Speaker 12

  I mean, it's just, I, cause you're right that this is something that is going to be more immediately like, uh, more women are going to immediately respond negatively to this idea than men. Because there's a, a chunk of men, I'm sure there's a smaller number of women too, but there's a chunk of men who have absolutely no interest in their own privacy, have absolutely no concerns about privacy, and are shocked and kind of scared when they realize other people are, have a sense of privacy. And most of those guys work in the tech industry.

• 2:17:52Speaker 05

  Feel a sense of threat.

• 2:17:53Speaker 12

  Right, exactly.

• 2:17:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:17:54Speaker 12

  Who are like, what, you don't want a camera on you at all time? You don't want a camera on you like when you're, when you're having sex? That's weird.

• 2:18:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, you wouldn't want to know data.

• 2:18:03Speaker 12

  Yeah, do you want data?

• 2:18:04Speaker 13

  You would be upset if I had a camera in a public space trained on you?

• 2:18:08Speaker 12

  You don't post about how many erections a robot said you have every night?

• 2:18:13Ed Zitron?

  Oh my God, I bet that's it. All right, we're gonna wrap up. I'm gonna read my favorite name from the, the, the show floor. Shenzhen City Wan Zida Motor Manufacturer Co. Limited. That's a fucking name. Shenzhen Pan Brain Technology Co. Limited.

• 2:18:27Speaker 12

  Hand brain. These are like brain brain, like in a head?

• 2:18:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's like, it's actually a really worrying photo. I don't know if I can really say it. It's just like, like a guy sitting there, full of sleep foster, and it looks like a sleep act near a mask, but it just looks like a horrifying thing.

• 2:18:42Speaker 12

  Yeah. It kind of. It looks like something that people use in kink.

• 2:18:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:46Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:18:47Ed Zitron?

  Looks like how the guy in Manhunter was, like, towards the, anyway.

• 2:18:50Speaker 13

  Can I tell one more story?

• 2:18:52Ed Zitron?

  Please, please, please.

• 2:18:52Speaker 13

  Okay, just, this is the most useful thing that I'm gonna leave with. And Albert was there, so you can jump into the story if you want. We went to the Waymo booth.

• 2:18:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:18:59Speaker 13

  Which was mostly just, Waymo is here. You know, Waymo, here it is. But they had a little line, and if you scanned your badge and you push a button, it would dispense a little, a little goodie for you. And first of all, very clearly, there's just a person in there.

• 2:19:16Ed Zitron?

  And they get very upset if you suggest otherwise.

• 2:19:19Speaker 05

  Really?

• 2:19:20Speaker 13

  If you suggest that they are, but like sometimes you'd scan your thing and then sometimes it would take like four or five seconds and like the little pin would like come out at an irregular angle. You're like, this is a guy back there. And like, that's much cheaper than any other mechanism. And then you take the little pin and they go, oh, you're a winner. Everybody was a winner. But like, oh, you're a winner. And then you go to a different guy and they give you a Waymo hat and a little beanie. And tomorrow I'm flying to Madison, Wisconsin. It's gonna be cold. I didn't bring a hat. So that's Waymo has made my life better.

• 2:19:48Speaker 05

  So you've become a corporate shill.

• 2:19:51Speaker 13

  Well, you know what?

• 2:19:52Speaker 05

  You're gonna advertise for Waymo.

• 2:19:53Speaker 13

  I think it's gonna be pretty clear. It's ironic. Okay. If my hat says Waymo.

• 2:19:57Ed Zitron?

  Adam, we know how that's gone in the past.

• 2:19:59Speaker 13

  Oh, my God.

• 2:20:00Ed Zitron?

  I'm sorry.

• 2:20:01Speaker 05

  You should make the hat say.

• 2:20:02Ed Zitron?

  I'm so sorry.

• 2:20:04Speaker 12

  I'm a little, I'm a little tipsy. So for a second, it was unclear to me. I thought you were saying that Waymo had given you a ticket to Madison, Wisconsin?

• 2:20:13Speaker 12

  It was like, what an incredible advertising platform.

• 2:20:15Ed Zitron?

  The bossing stand up comedian.

• 2:20:17Speaker 13

  We're flying half a CES to Madison. Get in there.

• 2:20:20Speaker 05

  In a self-driving airplane. Yeah.

• 2:20:22Ed Zitron?

  All right. As we wrap this up and Adam has to, he has to go. Adam, plug your stuff. Plug your shit.

• 2:20:28Speaker 13

  Okay, I'll be, well, this is the factually podcast, which I do sometimes. But I'm gonna be in Madison, Wisconsin, do a set this weekend at Comedy on State. Next week, I'll be Fort Wayne. Some at Comedy Club. After that, Louisville, Houston, Texas, and finally taping a special on, at the Punch Line in San Francisco from February 19th through 21st.

• 2:20:48Ed Zitron?

  Lovely. Chloe, why aren't you? Because you do this too.

• 2:20:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I do this too. This weekend, I'll be in Cincinnati. Next weekend, I'll be in Washington, DC. And the week after that, not the weekend, I will be doing my solo show called Cheat in Philadelphia, January 20, 21, and 22. And then at the end of January, I'll be in Vermont, and then Fort Collins, and then Fargo. Going to Fargo.

• 2:21:13Speaker 13

  Oh, okay. That's cool. That's gonna be colder than Madison.

• 2:21:15Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 2:21:17Ed Zitron?

  And as we wrap, of course, in honor of Sean Paul Adams, friend of the show, passed last year, please dedicate this to and donate to the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium. Sean Paul's son is epileptic and his family would deeply appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening for another day of Better Offline. We'll be back tomorrow and Friday, a little bit on Saturday. I love you all. Thank you so much.

• 2:21:48Ed 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 betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 2:22:20Speaker 15

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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